The storm was caused by a cold front blowing in from the Atlantic that collided with unseasonably warm air over the land.  A huge rain and windstorm developed and it continued to gain strength as it moved inland.  Ancient trees were uprooted, church spires snapped like twigs and thousands of thatched roofs disintegrated in the storm’s fury.

The timing of the storm coincided with the Feast of the Epiphany, which in Irish folklore is when Judgement Day will come, so it’s not surprising that many of the storm’s victims believed it was the end of the world.  Many homes burned to the ground as the powerful winds came blasting down their chimneys, scattering embers and setting everything ablaze.

The aftermath of the storm brought even more misery.  Important food supplies had been destroyed or scattered, causing widespread starvation in livestock.  In an age before disaster relief programs, the victims of the storm were on their own to rebuild their lives.

70 years later, when the government started issuing pensions to the elderly they faced a challenge due to scarce or non-existent public records.  To validate the ages of the potential pensioners, the officials devised a simple question.  “Do you remember the Big Wind?”

King grew up in a home filled with gadgets invented by his father.  His mother experimented in the kitchen with innovative recipes.  In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed his family’s business, a hardware store.  The Gillettes moved to New York City where his father went to work as a patent agent, and King began a long and miserable stretch as a traveling salesman.

In 1887, King’s mother became famous with the publication of her now-legendary White House Cookbook.  Bitter with his own lack of success, King tried his hand at writing and penned an anti-capitalist novel, The Human Drift, in which he proposed a socialist utopia, free from the evils of competition.  The centerpiece was a three-level Metropolis built atop Niagara Falls.  Self-sustained by the endless hydro-electric power – this would be the ONLY city needed on the North American continent – and the rest of the country would return to its natural state.  The book succeeded in achieving some notoriety, but King’s vision for the city of the future was never seriously entertained.

At age 40, King was back to being a salesman.  His boss, William Painter, was the inventor of the cork-lined bottle cap, and he recommended that King try to invent something that people could use once, then throw away.  A few days later, King had his eureka moment while shaving before work.  It bothered him that his straight razor had gone dull and was so worn out that it wouldn’t sharpen.  Besides being hard to maintain, straight razors were notoriously dangerous.  As a traveling salesman, King was familiar with tales of men accidentally slashing their own throats while shaving on bumpy trains.  He had his idea!

King realized that what the world needed was a razor that was sharp enough to give you a good shave, but not big enough to slice open your jugular.  Better even, these razors would be disposable, so when they went dull you’d simply replace it with a new one.

It took five years for King to turn his concept into reality.   He teamed up with fellow inventor William Emery Nickerson and together they started the American Safety Razor Company.  They opened for business in 1901.

In the beginning, the cost of making the razors was greater than the selling price, but the plan was always to make money in the long-run as customers returned time and again to purchase replacement blades.  King even came up with the novel idea of giving away the razors for free, knowing that if someone tried them, they’d soon be coming back for more.  In his first year, he sold 51 razors and 168 blades.  In his second year he sold 90,884 razors and 123,648 blades!

In 1904 he patented the double-edged razor, and he renamed his company the Gillette Safety Razor Company.  By 1915 blade sales exceeded 70 million units.   King was now rich beyond his wildest dreams, and he used his money to travel all around the world.  He was recognized almost everywhere he went, thanks to his picture being on every box of razors he sold.

But it wouldn’t last forever.  King lost most of his fortune in the Great Depression.  He also spent lavishly on huge real estate projects.  He became a bit of a nutter in his old age.  In Palm Springs he was often seen wandering around the Desert Inn in a tattered old robe.  He was almost broke when he died in 1932.

Over the decades, his company continued to thrive and expand.  The Gillette Company would grow to include brands like Braun, Duracell and Oral-B.  In 2005 it was sold to Procter & Gamble for 57 billion dollars.

Surgical Tools from the 1880s

Dr. Grant knew he had to try something, so he administered anesthesia and cut into Mary’s side.  He located the infected appendix and removed it.  Mary made a full recovery.

For most of medical history, the appendix was called a vestigial organ with no apparent value to the body.  It doesn’t merit much attention unless it became inflamed, and then it’s usually a routine procedure to snip and remove the little worm-like appendage.   At long last researchers now believe the appendix has a very important role to play and it isn’t just along for the ride.

Turns out that the appendix is like a reserve tank filled with all kinds of good bacteria that the digestive system needs to keep things on track.  Normally our guts are teeming with these beneficial germs, but once in a blue moon a case of cholera or dysentery can roll through and wipe out all the good bacteria.  That’s when the appendix kicks into high gear and reboots the digestive system with its stockpile of germs.

It’s still recommended that the appendix be removed if it becomes inflamed, but now we know a little more about what we’re losing.

Marvin Stone's Patent Sketch

Stone figured the ideal length was 8.5 inches and he engineered the diameter of the straw to be small enough that lemon seeds wouldn’t get sucked into them.  The machine he invented to mass-produce the straws used a spiral-winding process that was soon adopted by other industries to create tubing.  4 decades later, electrical engineers would use spiral-wound tubes in the first mass-produced radios.

The same process that Marvin Stone pioneered is still used today to create electric motors, transformers and even medical devices that surgeons use to repair the human heart.

Did you know that sipping a soft drink through a straw can dramatically reduce cavities?

He grew up in New Jersey, the oldest son of a wine merchant.  At 16 he entered Princeton to study for the Ministry.  It was there he befriended future-President James Madison.  In his junior year he co-authored with Hugh Henry Brackenridge the satirical work, Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca, which some argue is the first American novel.

Philip Freneau

After college he bounced around as a teacher, theologist and sea captain.  By 1776 he was living in the West Indies where he wrote about the beauty of nature, but as the Revolution heated up, Freneau returned to America.  He was captured by the British and nearly died as a prisoner of war.  He wrote about the ordeal in The British Prison Ship, and many more patriotic writings would follow over the course of the war years.

After the Revolution, Freneau was encouraged by his old friend James Madison to work as the editor of the National Gazette, a partisan newspaper that skewered the Federalists and earned the ire of powerful men like President George Washington and Alexander Hamilton.

In his later life, Freneau returned to writing about nature, and his poem The Wild Honey Suckle in 1786 is considered a harbinger of the Transcendentalist movement.

Freneau died in December of 1832.  He got lost in a snowstorm and froze to death at age 80.

Wovoka

In order to make this a reality, all the tribes would need to follow a righteous path of non-violence and perform a special Ghost Dance.  The news spread quickly and Wovoka’s vision was eagerly embraced, especially by battered and starving tribes like Sitting Bull’s Lakota.  By the following winter, a hotspot of the Ghost Dance movement was on the Pine Ridge Reservation where many of the Sioux tribes were relegated.  The Federal Agent in charge had outlawed the ritual for fear that it was a war dance.  When the Indians defied him and kept dancing,  he called in the military to break it up.  The 7th Cavalry arrived, the same regiment that Sitting Bull had obliterated in the Battle of the Little Bighorn 14 years prior.

Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill, 1885

A botched attempt to arrest Sitting Bull ended with a firefight, during which a show horse that had been presented to him by Buffalo Bill responded to the gunfire as it had been trained to do.  It sat back on its haunches and offered a hoof to shake hands.  When the smoke cleared, Sitting Bull and fourteen others were dead.

In the wake of their leader’s death, many members of the Lakota tribe fled the reservation.  The 7th Cavalry set out to round them up, and less than 2 weeks later  most of the refugees had surrendered peacefully.  But during a search for weapons at a camp along Wounded Knee Creek, a medicine man named Yellow Bird encouraged the other Indians to start dancing in a show of defiance to the soldiers.  A young warrior named Black Coyote refused to hand over his gun.  In some accounts it is said that he was deaf and couldn’t understand what the soldiers were asking.  Whatever the case, as the soldiers moved in to disarm him a shot rang out.  Then all hell broke loose.

What started as brutal hand-to-hand combat escalated quickly as the army unloaded 4 rapid fire Hotchkiss guns on the tipi camp where the women and children were seeking shelter.  The massacre lasted less than an hour.  When the smoke cleared 84 men, 44 women, and 18 children had been killed.  The army lost 25 men.

Burying the dead at Wounded Knee, South Dakota 1890

Despite the many innocent people who were killed, there were more Medals of Honor awarded for this incident than for any other battle in US Army history.

Wovoka slipped into obscurity.  He went back to using his white name, Jack Wilson.  He did the sideshow circuit at county fairs and appeared as an extra in silent movies.  He died in 1932.

His vision of a better world never came to pass and his important role in the tragic saga of the American Indian has been relegated to the footnotes of history.