Post Christmas

Holiday card mailed in 1911 (1st image)
COMPARE TO THE 1ST COMMERCIALLY-PRODUCED CHRISTMAS CARD
Welsh builder Mark Hobbs was renovating a 3-story Victorian house in the Uplands, Swansea, when something fell through a hole in the ceiling and floated to his feet. Dated Dec. 21st, 1911, and signed by A. and G. Grobity, it was a holiday greeting inscribed, “Good Remembrance of your Friends.” Hobbs says, "I opened the card and was absolutely stunned....It must have been stuffed in a cavity under the floorboards for all that time. The card is a bit simpler than our jazzy cards of today and it makes you think about how Christmas was celebrated 100 years ago." Intrigued, the builder tried to trace any relations locally or nationally, but had no success. "I would be fascinated to find out some more about the card and who wrote it." He plans to hand over the card to the Swansea Museum along with other items found under the floorboards: a clothing tag from a local shop called Griffith & Son and a tin of Ogden's tobacco which still contained enough to fill a pipe.

Letter to Santa written in 1911 (2nd image)
COMPARE TO THE LETTERS OF TODAY
Dublin resident John Byrne was installing central heating at his home in Oaklands Terrace, Terenure, when he found a scorched and folded piece of paper inside the fireplace in the front bedroom. It was a letter written by brother and sister A. and H. Howard on Christmas Eve 1911 and deposited in the chimney so that Santa would find it on his way into the house. “I want a baby doll and a waterproof with a hood and a pair of gloves and a toffee apple and a gold penny and a silver sixpence and a long toffee,” reads the letter, which also contains drawings and messages of “Good Luck.” According to the 1911 census, "A" stands for 7-year-old Alfred and "H" for 10-year-old Hannah, whose sister 13-year-old Lily did not participate. Byrne discovered the letter in 1994 and retains it as a souvenir of another time and place.

Christmas card circulating since 1950 (3rd image)
COMPARE TO THIS YEAR'S STRANGEST CHRISTMAS CARD
An 89-year-old retired schoolteacher, Acker Hanks remembers that the tradition began as a joke. He met Lee Kelley, who worked for the U.S. Forestry Service, when they both lived in Waverly, Texas. “We were next-door neighbors and became very good friends,” he explains. Hanks mailed Kelley a Christmas card in 1950, and Kelley mailed the card back to him in 1951. From that year on, the card changed places each year, a total of 64 times. The dates and places are listed on the card along with brief updates about their lives. Hanks married and remained in Texas, but the card traveled to Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Washington, D.C., where Kelley was stationed, and then to Wisconsin, where he and his wife retired. After Kelley's death a dozen years ago, Hanks continued the card tradition with his widow - until now. The card is now at a standstill. It was returned undeliverable, which Hanks hopes means that Mrs. Kelley has moved to a nursing home. Hanks plans to frame the letter as a symbol of their bond and says, “It was just a close friendship. I always have looked forward to getting the card … I don't think it'll ever leave me now."

Bell speaks from the grave!

1st image) Alexander Graham Bell on the telephone calling Chicago from New York in 1892, 2nd image) Bell’s graphophone from the 1880s, 3rd image) The lid to a tin box deposited at the Smithsonian Institution on Oct. 19, 1881, by Volta Associates.

Something told me to check the weird news before blogging today and there it was: the voice of Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), the inventor of the telephone (which he patented in 1876), has been recovered from disks that had lain dormant at the Smithsonian Institution for 130 years. "Let's hear it," I said to myself, always curious about bringing history to life.* What I thought was a link to an audio file wasn't, so I checked the Washington Post (and found a silent slideshow) and the TV station I used to watch before I left Alexandria (nothing). I should have gone directly to the source - the Library of Congress, where a transcript and the sound files below are available:

“H.G. Rogers”
“It’s the eleventh day of March, eighteen hundred and eighty five”
“Trrrrr...”
“Mary had a little lamb…”
“Trrrr…Mary had a little lamb…”
“How is this for high? Trrrr…”

These and other phrases were recorded on green wax discs, copper negative discs, and cylinders in a series of experiments in the early 1880s by Volta Laboratory Associates, which consisted of Bell, his cousin Chichester Bell, and instrument-maker Charles Sumner Tainter. The earliest recordings of Bell's competitor Thomas Edison (1847-1931), who invented the phonograph in 1876, are thought to be lost. But more than 200 of Bell's were given to the Smithsonian for safekeeping, and are now being recovered thanks to a new technology that reads the sound from tiny grooves with light and a 3D camera. The process, developed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, creates a high-resolution digital map of the disc or cylinder which is then processed to remove scratches and skips and reproduced to create a standard digital sound file. At the press conference on Tuesday, the curator of the National Museum of American History Carlene Stephens said, "This stuff makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. It's the past speaking directly to us in a way we haven't heard before. These materials have been in a cupboard and virtually unknown for decades. The collection has been silent." Until now.

*See St. Paul stares back, Leonardo's lion, House sat empty, House 100 years later, Supper clubs and speakeasies, and Rediscovered Kitchen.

House sat empty

Queue up the Harry Belafonte before you read this. Here's the story of another house that sat unoccupied for decades. This time it's a 1950s time capsule located at 96 Cameron Road, Te Puke, in the Western Bay of Plenty region of New Zealand. A World War II navy veteran named Peter Welch built the home in 1959 for his mother and sister, but they never relocated from England. Welch lived in a small adjacent house, while the bigger house remained furnished but unoccupied for 50+ years - but for a single visit by his sister. "That one night was the only time someone has ever slept in the house, to my knowledge," said the trustee of the estate. The property was sold at auction after Welch died this year. The 3-bedroom residence (4th image) and all its contents were in pristine condition and feature the following:

• Spacious living room (5th image) with open fireplace and parquet flooring "as perfect as the day it was laid because it's never been walked on"
• Dining room with table and chair set (2nd image) and cabinet containing a radio, record player (1st image), and a dozen albums
• Kitchen (3rd image) with a wall oven, range, chip-heater, stainless steel counters, wooden drawers, and cabinets housing unused copper-bottomed pots
• Bedroom with 2 single beds (6th image), built-in dressing tables, and his and hers wardrobes
• Bathroom with shower and mosaic floor

"It is beautiful...and a bit like you've stepped back in time," said the new owner, who was giving her rental tenants a 3-month option to buy.

Maison Mantin

Let's have a look inside the house/museum that I added to Quigley's Cabinet in January. For a closer look at the restoration of the house and its furnishings, you may wish to seek out the 1hr documentary L'énigme de la maison Mantin, which was filmed in 2007 (9th image) and broadcast on French TV when the museum opened to the public in November 2010.

IMAGES: 1) One of the many mounted animal specimens that Louis Mantin collected. 2) The restored fireplace, considered "strange and eclectic," features - from top to bottom - a sculpture of a woman's head, 2 ceramics of dead animals, a mirror, and a woodcarving of a devil fighting a dragon. 3) The lounge, arranged with Louis XV and XVI furniture and Italian artwork, has a patriotic candelabra and a window (center) into the next room. 4 and 5) The Pink (or Four Seasons) bedroom belonged to Louise Alaire, a married woman with whom Mantin had a 20-year affair. The room was lined with silk in a pattern called Les amours, and decorated with furniture in the style of Louis XV. 6) Mantin's bedroom, with walls covered in 18th c. French gilded leather. To give it a golden hue, it was covered with silver leaf and coated with yellow varnish. 7) Mantin's restored canopy bed. 8) The study in which Mantin housed his collections of antiquities.

House 100 years later

Morbid Anatomy beat me to it (not that we are in competition, but blogger Joanna Ebenstein and I have many interests in common). The news yesterday was the opening of a life-size time capsule in France that dates back more than a century. The period piece in question is a mansion in Moulins, France, owned by Louis Mantin (1855-1905). La Maison Mantin (as it appeared in 1910, 1st image, and as it appears today, 2nd and 3rd images)
was closed up and fell into disrepair when the owner died, but Mantin directed that it be made a museum in 2005. After $47 million in renovations, the mansion has now opened to the public after 106 years. Visitors are immersed in the life of a cultured gentleman of his day, just as Mantin wished. All the amenities are intact - rich fin-de-siecle furnishings, electricity, and a flushing toilet - and all the collections on display - Egyptian relics, Neolithic oil-lamps, and prehistoric flints; medieval locks, Masonic paraphernalia, mounted birds, and other curios. The result is a remarkable time-capsule, says the BBC about what was his personal museum.

Born in Moulins in 1851, Louis Mantin was a civil servant, but at the age of 42 inherited a fortune from his father and thereafter enjoyed a life pursuing the arts and sciences. He built his mansion in his hometown, on the site of a former regal Bourbon palace. Mantin and imported tapestries, paintings, and porcelain, and commissioned sculptures and wood-carvings. Knowing that his death was approaching, Mantin only had a few years to indulge his aesthetic fantasies. To save his collections and indulge is obsession with death and the passage of time, he put his instructions in his will. Assistant curator Maud Leyoudec explains, "A bachelor with no children....It was his way of becoming eternal." Mantin's great-niece Isabelle de Chavagnac, who would otherwise have inherited the property, observes, "The house was gradually forgotten by the world. But not by the people of Moulins. It is odd how the collective memory of a place never dies."

Follow-ups

Good cove, bad cove 1/6/10 The Japanese are big tuna-eaters and that species is also facing extinction. A 512lb bluefin recently sold for $175,000 at a Tokyo fish market, although Japanophiles don't find that weird.

Follow-ups 12/22/09 In my last set of follow-ups, I linked to instances of birds wearing clothing, and up pops a story about members of a Welsh knitting circle who make sweaters for chickens.

Bob Waldmire 12/17/09 A follow-up about the "king of the road" in the Wall Street Journal.

Octopus achievement 12/15/09 Octopuses are inexplicably washing up dead on the beaches of Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal.

Toenails (or lack thereof) 11/7/09 A toenail has been put up for bid at a charity auction in New Zealand that is raising money for the local food bank!

Birds in fable and fact 10/22/09 British scientists have found that fish will punish other fish for bad manners.

Lizard lore 10/17/09 Someone has invented a way for humans to walk on water like the basilisk lizard - behold the Aqua Skipper. In other lizard news, it has been getting so cold here in Florida that the iguanas are falling out of the trees.

Birthing and hoarding bunnies 6/18/09 A man in Chelsea, Massachusetts, has been convicted of animal cruelty for having sex with his roommate's rabbit.

Stain 8/6/09 Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognized as a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings at the end of World War II, has died at age 93.

Capitol cornerstone 7/26/09 The opening of a 1952 time capsule in Virginia has been postponed indefinitely after it was found that the floor tiles surrounding it may contain asbestos.

Frogs, deformed and fanciful 6/26/09 A salmonella outbreak that affected 85 people across 31 states has been linked to the improper handling of frogs.

Skellies 4/29/09 Bone trophies from Yale University's mysterious Skull and Bones society - including a skull that was used as a ballot box - go on auction in New York this month.

Pirates 4/15/09 The state archaeologist of North Carolina has admitted that he did not follow proper procedure when he unearthed the remains of a man believed to be a member of Blackbeard’s pirate crew.

Footprints 2/28/09 Paleontologists have found footprints of the 1st marine creature to emerge from the ocean and walk on land - and they date back 20 million years earlier than previously thought.

Graduate weird news 2/5/09 The University of Victoria, Canada, will finally be allowed to evict a man from its dorms - 13 years after he graduated. Meanwhile, a proprosal by Regis College in Weston, Massachusetts, to build a senior citizen residential and educational complex - to be considered student housing - has been struck down.

Polydactyly 2/3/09 A 4-year-old Chines girl has 5 fingers on her left hand and 6 fingers on her right hand (pictured) - no thumbs.

Diagnosing the canvas 1/2/09 An Italian doctor sees signs of high cholesterol in the "Mona Lisa."

Ice swimmers 11/20/08 In contrast to ice swimmers and members of "polar bear" clubs, a man from Brookfield, Massachusetts, does his ice fishing through a hole in the floorboard of his cozy limousine.

Albinos 11/18/09 Aside from the threat to albinos in Burundi and Tanzania, there is a danger to children in Uganda, who are being snatched and sacrificed by witch-doctors.

Animal extinction 11/9/08 Here is a list of the top 10 most endangered species in the world, according to the World Wildlife Fund. On another note, researchers at Oregon State University have determined that during the Cold War, there was less species invasion.

Skulls & Skeletons 9/18/08 My very first post was about my favorite peace-loving musician John Butler, who plays a mean banjo (and looks and sounds cool doing it). This Denver man, on the other hand, used his banjo as a weapon and has been charged with second-degree assault.

Capitol cornerstone

On a wall in the U.S. Capitol is this mural painted by Allyn Cox (1896-1982) depicting the ceremonial laying of the building's first cornerstone. I learned about the 1793 event on the website of Oglethorpe University, (re)founded by Thornwell Jacobs (1877-1956), the "father of the modern time capsule." The custom of burying a time capsule owes its origins to the Masons, who held rituals to lay cornerstones, often after placing memorabilia inside for later recovery. During his presidency, George Washington (1732-1799) performed the Masonic ritual over the Capitol's cornerstone and read the inscription on a silver plate that was laid in place with it. Exactly 200 years later, Masons from the Grand Lodge of the District of Columbia reenacted the entire ceremony - except that the original cornerstone has never been located. The Capitol has undergone extensive expansion, remodeling, and reconstruction, but neither the stone nor the identifying plate have been found despite extensive searches beginning with the building's Centennial in 1893. As I was finishing my research for this post I learned that Dan Brown's new novel - being released in September - is called The Lost Symbol, and it has been speculated that the cornerstone in question figures in the plot!