Tag: 1900s

There’s a method* in his madness

ADOXOBLOG

* J. Karwowski’s Method of Preserving the Dead

PreservingTheDead1

Found on an old hard drive. In 1903 a gentleman named Joseph Karwowski (“a subject of the Czar of Russia, residing at Herkimer”, New York) took out a patent on “certain new and useful Improvements in Methods of Preserving the Dead”, to wit encasing them in cubes of glass. He claimed that excluding the air would preserve them “for an indefinite period in a perfect and life-like condition.” The process would involve encasing the body in a layer of sodium silicate which was dry heated to solidify it, then further surrounded by a cube or cylinder of molten glass. Evidently a man of thrifty instincts, he also allowed for the cheaper and less labour-intensive possibility of preserving just the head “if preferred”, Futurama style.

Not that I or anybody else in their right mind is considering actually carrying out this operation, but…

View original post 374 more words

“MUST I write?”

“MUST I write?”

ADOXOBLOG

Some good advice for aspiring writers from successful writers, who are usually far better sources of such guidance than all the writing gurus who write nothing but books about how to write. These are all extracted from Shaun Usher’s splendid and beautiful Letters of Note book, based upon the always interesting and inspiring site of the same name in which the famous are humanised and the unknown are honoured.

Ernest Hemingway, 1939 Ernest Hemingway: “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit.”

Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1934:

“You can study Clausewitz in the field and economics and psychology and nothing else will do you any bloody good once you are writing. We are like lousy damned acrobats but we make some mighty fine jumps, bo, and they have all these other acrobats that won’t jump.

For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will…

View original post 624 more words

The Devilphone

The Devilphone

ADOXOBLOG

Devilphone

Newspaper clipping from 1903, reporting that the entire village of Saint-Etienne des Gres regarded the telephone as Satanic and refused to have anything to do with it. “… the inhabitants determined to oppose its entry and resolved to arm themselves with their agricultural implements and to make a fight for it.” Hollywood style villagers with pitchforks, for real!

And this is how angry they were before any of them could possibly have needed to phone an Indian call centre. Those really are the work of the Evil One.

View original post

Hello sailor

Hello sailor

ADOXOBLOG

Illustrations from the Jno. J Mitchell Publishing Company’s The Sartorial Art Journal, intended to assist tailors in their consultations with clients about bespoke menswear. I’m assuming they weren’t intended to be but these look rather homoerotic to me, in their own splendidly buttoned-up fin de siécle kind of way. Check out this little cruise:

View original post 30 more words