I Remember When

Jewish Press ^ | 8/11/2004 | Arnold Fine

[SJackson]

One of my first memories in grade school is learning about Christopher Columbus. He really fired my imagination! I had already decided to be a world famous explorer by the time I reached second grade. My mother squelched my career by not letting cross the street by myself.

Columbus: Little Known Facts

Remember how our teachers recited this poem: “Columbus sailed the ocean blue, in fourteen hundred and ninety two!”

I failed every history test because I kept putting down that he discovered America in 1493. Why? Because I kept mixing up the words and came up with this poem, “Columbus sailed the deep blue sea, in fourteen hundred and ninety three!”

One of the biggest disappointments in my life was finding out that our teachers had lied to us. Can you believe it!? They told us that Columbus was the first to believe the world was round and he hoped to prove it by sailing across the Atlantic. He was going to find a new route to the East by sailing West. Remember that?

The truth is that Columbus was hardly alone in his belief that the earth was round. This was a generally accepted fact in those years. As a matter of fact, that was the popular belief for more than 200 years before Columbus was even born.

Remember how our teachers told us that it was generally accepted that if a ship sailed beyond the horizon it would fall off the edge of the earth? After hearing that, I was even afraid to go row boating in Bronx Park Lake!

Columbus’ ancestry and early life were cloaked in mystery. Although he claimed to have been born in Italy, there is some evidence that he was originally of Spanish descent, and moved to Italy as a child. Some believe he was Jewish, and that his name, “Colon,” stemmed from the name “Cohen”. If that is true, then he may have been a Marrano, someone who converted to Christianity to escape the fires of the Inquisition.

Here are some more disappointments of my childhood. When we went to school, we were taught that Queen Isabella had pawned her jewels to pay for Columbus’ first voyage. As a matter of fact, no royal family funds were used for his trip. Financing for the venture was arranged by the Treasurer of the Royal Household, Luis Santangel (a Marrano), who even used some of his own personal funds. Santangel asked Columbus to take his wife and children out of Spain to escape the Inquisition.

The King and Queen of Spain agreed to send Columbus on his journey because he represented their best hope for beating Portugal to the riches of the East. Although Spain’s Queen Elizabeth and King Ferdinand agreed to some of Columbus’ demands for titles and compensation, they really had no intention of honoring any of them.

Our teachers told us that Columbus and his three vessels (Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria) encountered terrible storms on that first trip. In fact, Columbus did not encounter great storms on that famous voyage. According to historic sea logs, the seas were calm and the crossing was rather uneventful until the final days before he reached Watling Island in the West Indies.

Did you know that Columbus was not happy with the ships Santangel had purchased for him? The two little ships, the Nina and the Pinta, needed certain modifications for such a long trip. They started to make the modifications in Spain but the Queen was growing impatient and was breathing down Columbus’ back. He realized he had to leave immediately.

Columbus decided the modifications would be made on the Island of Palos. When certain repairs still needed to be made, he pulled into the Canary Islands and spent a month making the repairs and further modifications before crossing the Atlantic. The crossing actually took one month, and not two, as many history books record. Good grief, and you wonder why we look the way we do!

At one point toward the end of his journey, Columbus and the Pinzon brothers (who captained the two other ships) met to discuss whether they should turn back. They decided to continue and reassess the situation and wait a few more days.

And another thing, Columbus did not die penniless as we were told in school. Thanks to the dissemination of his journals and the development of the printing press which made copies of the maps of the New World, he became a famous personality.

Although not exceedingly wealthy, he was financially comfortable at the time of his death. His son inherited his funds and titles.

Columbus spent his final years bent by arthritis and was bitter at the royal family for real and imagined wrongs. He died in 1506, just fourteen years after his first voyage.

Ya wanna hear something? The irony of Columbus’ quest to find a water route to the East is that his voyage was not even necessary for finding an ocean route to India. Why? Because even before Columbus sailed, a Portuguese sailor named Bartholemew Dias had rounded the tip of Africa! Then, in 1498, Vasco Da Gama reached India by sailing around Africa. In the final analysis, that was a far more practical route than the one sought by Columbus.

But then, if not for Columbus, they might still be looking for Manhattan. So you see, something good came out of it after all!

Violins, Bagpipes, And Pencils

As long as we’re on education, I’d like to share some important facts with you that I’m sure you teachers didn’t even touch on! See, and for this education we pay taxes!

I wonder how many people know that the most famous violins in the world were made of wood with little holes in it. The Stradivarius violin sounds better than most other violins because the wood that was used was stored in the sea in Venice. The water made tiny holes in the wood. In addition, the varnish that makes the wood shiny also enhances the sound.

Here’s a difficult one to believe. Did you know that bagpipes are not a Scottish invention? According to historic sources, the Romans were playing bagpipes of sheepskin or a cow’s stomach with a few hollow stalks as the pipes. Some of the original pipes were made of animal bones.

Now to more incredible things we were never taught, while they bored us with trigonometry! The world’s tallest animal is the giraffe, The tallest man in the world was Robert Pershing Wadlow. He was 8 feet 11 inches tall. Today, the world’s tallest woman is Sandy Allen. She is 7 feet 7 inches tall.

I’ll bet you don’t know the name of the man who thought of putting erasers on pencil tips! The original pencil consisted a few graphite sticks held together by a piece of string. Then, someone got the idea that it would be a better idea to push the graphite sticks into a hollow wooden stick. Voila! The pencil was born.

Then, along came Joseph Rechendorfer. He had the brilliant idea of putting a piece of rubber at the tip of the pencil to facilitate erasing mistakes. Now if they taught us this in school, I would have passed in flying colors!

Now for a real eye opener. This will interest you people out there from the 60’s generation. The peace symbol was created in 1958 as a nuclear disarmament symbol by the Direct Action Committee and was first shown that year at a peace march in England. The symbol is a composite of the semaphore signals “N” and “D,” representing nuclear disarmament.

Do you know which ship was the first to use distress signals? It was the doomed Titanic. This signal was adopted as the international signal for distress in 1912, and the Titanic struck the iceberg in April of that year.

Did you know that the USSR set off the largest nuclear explosion in history, detonating a 50 bomb megaton bomb in an atmospheric test over the Novaya Zemla Islands on October 30, 1961. This was the equivalent of 2600 Hiroshima bombs.

And now a historic must-know: the very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo! No wonder it took so long to win the war!

Here’s a riddle for you history buffs. What was the original color of the White House? Believe it or not, it was originally gray! During the War of 1812, it was burned by Canadian troops. The outside walls were painted white to hide the smoke stains. So voila, the White House was born!

Now another one: Do you know which was the first state to allow women to vote? Answer: Wyoming.

What It Was Like To Live In America in 1904

The average life expectancy in 1904 was 47 years.

Only 14 percent of the homes in the U.S. had a bathtub!

Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.

A three minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.

There were only 8,000 cars in the U.S. and only 144 miles of paved roads in 1904.

The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.

Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California. With a mere 1.5 million residents, California was only the 21st most populous state in the Union.

The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower.

The average wage in the U.S was 22 cents an hour.

The average U.S. worker earned $200 - $400 a year.

A competent accountant could expect to earn $2,000 a year, a dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1,400 and $4,000 a year, and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.

More than 95% of all births took place at home.

Ninety percent of all U.S. physicians had no college education. Instead, they attended medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press and the government as substandard.

Sugar cost four cents a pound. Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.

Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.

Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo!

The five leading causes of death in the U.S. were Pneumonia and Flu, Tuberculosis, Diarrhea, Heart Disease, Stroke.

In 1904, the American flag had 45 stars. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Alaska had not yet been admitted into the Union.

Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea had not yet been invented.

There was no Mother’s Day of Father’s Day in 1904.

Two of ten U.S. adults couldn’t read or write in 1904. Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated high school.

Eighteen percent of households in the U.S. had at least one full time servant or domestic.

There were only about 230 reported murders in the entire U.S. in 1904.

So, do you still think you were born a century too late?

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

And a ping for those on Alouette's list, she's away from her computor.

[sionnsar]

Here’s a difficult one to believe. Did you know that bagpipes are not a Scottish invention? According to historic sources, the Romans were playing bagpipes of sheepskin or a cow’s stomach with a few hollow stalks as the pipes. Some of the original pipes were made of animal bones

But that's only the beginning. The bagpipe (defined as a bladder air reservoir with one or more reed pipes) first appeared about the time of Christ in the Middle East.

"Native" forms of the bagpipe are found from India to Ireland -- some blown by mouth, some by bellows. I have seen and have known players of: Irish pipes, Scottish pipes (Highland and parlour), border pipes (Scotland & England, several flavours), English pipes (well, Northumbrian), Swedish, Polish, Macedonian (at least a couple varieties),, and have seen Lancastershire, French (several varieties), Belgian, Spanish, Italian, and some Middle-eastern ones I don't know much about. Have yet to encounter a volynka (Russian pipe).

The first known piper (I have read, can't confirm it) is Nero. Apparently known as a musician, there is a record of some promise he made to the gods, that if [X] took place he would perform for the public on a pipe and some other instrument. (Can't confirm this.) Makes you wonder, though... in Nero's time the fiddle was hundreds of years still in the future...

[SpaceBar]

Columbus exacted a Spanish tribute system on island populations. Noncompliance resulted in hands and feet being cut off. A historical low-point of Catholic imperialistic expansionism. No comfy chairs.

[xJones]

Let us go further. Ferdinand and Isabella's daughter, Catherine of Aragon, married Prince Arthur of England (who promptly died) and then his little brother who became Henry VIII.

Yes, amen, and because Catherine didn't give him a son, their divorce set off the Church of England. It also led to the beheading of two of Henry's later wives and gave us the history of the most 'colorful' English monarch. And now I think I'm getting lost in trivia, it was something about Columbus.....

[SJackson]

Two millenia to perfect them and they still sound like bagpipes. Go figure :>)

I like them, but a noise like that is just asking to be made fun of.

[SJackson]

Lot of interesting trivia from those days.

[xJones]

Lot of interesting trivia from those days.

How true, for instance nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition, least of all the loyal Spanish Jews. One can understand that Ferdinand and Isabella rejoiced to finally kick out the Moors, but they went overboard in their 'house cleaning' big time.

[SJackson]

I remember reading one of Morrison's bios of Columbus. He went through the contributions of cartographers, mathematicians, and astronomers, often noting those who were Jews. Later, he noted the delay Columbus was caused by the necessity of outfitting ships carrying Jews fleeing Spain. Columbus had his ships, but not priority. A favorite quote, attributed to Bayazid II of Turkey

...the Catholic monarch Ferdinand was wrongly considered as wise, since he impoverished Spain by the expulsion of the Jews, and enriched Turkey

[Mrs Zip]

ping

[GATOR NAVY]

Then, in 1498, Vasco Da Gama reached India by sailing around Africa. In the final analysis, that was a far more practical route than the one sought by Columbus.

Hindsight is 20/20. Nobody knew this when Columbus left, so what he trying wasn't pointless.

[sionnsar]

Two millenia to perfect them and they still sound like bagpipes. Go figure :>)

LOL. But there have been improvements. For example, we now have plastic drone reeds that don't drift though they sound worse than cane. *\;-)

Accordion: a bagpipe with pleats

[HIDEK6]

Two of ten U.S. adults couldn’t read or write in 1904.

I'd be very interested in hearing what the count is today.

Bet it's worse.