Tag Archives: World War 2

December 17, 2025 · 10:00 AM

History Undusted: The CB Radio

You know how your brain fires off random thoughts as you fall to sleep, or combines odds-bods into dreams forgotten as soon as you wake up? For some reason, 10-4 popped into my head in those moments last night. It sent me down the rabbit hole I now present: The history of the CB radio.

The often-forgotten or overlooked inventor of the Citizen’s Band (CB) radio system, along with inventions such as a patented version of the walkie-talkie (originally invented by the Englishman Donald Hings), the telephone pager, and the cordless telephone – all precursors to today’s cell phones, was Al Gross (1918-2000): Born in Toronto, Canada, he grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. The son of Romanian-Jewish immigrants, his love for electronics was sparked when, at the age of nine, he was travelling by steamboat on Lake Erie; he explored the ship and ended up in the radio transmissions room, where the operator let him listen in. Eventually, he turned the family’s basement into a radio station built from scraps. During his higher studies, he experimented with ways to use radio frequencies.

During World War 2, he had some involvement with developing a two-way VHF air-to-ground communications system for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, known as the Joan-Eleanor system, and after the war, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allocated a few frequencies for the Citizens’ Radio Service Frequency Band, in 1946. Gross saw the potential and founded the Gross Electronics Co. to produce two-way communications systems to make use of these frequencies; his firm was the first to receive FCC approval in 1948. For more about his other inventions, just follow the link on his name above. For now, let’s focus on the CB:

The CB radio became an international hit back before cell phones and computers became a thing (despite the prevalence of cell phones, CBs are still around; truckers still communicate about road conditions, etc. Its usage was also revived by the Covid lockdown, when people began reaching out to meet and talk to others outside of their own four walls). It was, and is, a way to communicate with others long-distance from home or on the go.

My dad was always interested in the latest technological gadgets; in the mid-70s, we got a laserdisc player, the precursor of CDs, and DVD/Blu-Ray players. I remember watching films like Logan’s Run and Heaven Can Wait on that format. Laserdiscs never really took off, and only about 2% of US households had one (it became more popular in Japan at the time). Around that time, we also got a CB radio in our VW van. My dad had a chart with all of the CB slang words and codes, and I memorised it, fascinated by the lingo. On long road trips, I would get on the CB and chat with truck drivers. My handle (nickname) was Spider-Fingers, as I liked spiders and had long fingers (long fingers has the connotation of thief, so I didn’t want to use that!). Here is just the tip of the iceberg, a smattering of the codes and slangs used by CB radio enthusiasts, truckers and handymen:

There were dozens of slang terms for law enforcement officers: Bear (police officer); bear trap (speed trap, radar trap) taking pictures, also called a Kojak With A Kodak; bear bait (an erratic or speeding driver); bear with ears (listening to CB traffic); bear in the air/flying doughnut/Spy in the sky (helicopter radar traps), baby bear (rookie), fox in the henhouse/Smokey in a plain wrapper (policemen in unmarked vehicles); honey bear, mamma bear or Miss Piggy (slangs for female police officers); Brush Your Teeth And Comb Your Hair (a law enforcement vehicle is radaring vehicles – as if preparing for an official photo). A Driving Award was a speeding ticket. To wish someone Shiny side up meant that you wished them safe travels (keeping the vehicle upright).

There were slang terms for objects or events, such as Bambi, meaning that there was wildlife near the road and to take precautions; a crotch rocket was a fast motorcycle; double-nickels was a 55-mph speed limit area; a fighter pilot was an erratic driver who switched lanes frequently, while a gear jammer was someone who sped up and slowed down frequently; Alabama chrome was duct tape; an alligator/gator was a piece of blown tire on the highway, as it looked in the distance like a gator sunbathing. Convoys had front doors and back doors – the front or back truck in the group that would keep an eye open for bear traps. Motion lotion was fuel; the hammer lane was the fast lane (hammer was the gas pedal, and to hammer down was to drive full-speed). Break/breaker: Informing other CB users that one wanted to start transmission on a channel; a handle might be introduced, or requested if someone was looking for a CB friend. “Breaker, this is Spider-Fingers, over.” Asking for a comeback meant that you couldn’t hear the last transmission or wanted the other driver to talk. Break check meant traffic congestion ahead, slow down. A Bumper Sticker/hitchhiker is a vehicle that is tailgating another vehicle.

Aside from hundreds of slang terms, there was a whole list of codes (I guess you could say that the codes were the precursors of emojis!):

10-4: Agreed, understood, acknowledged

4-10: The opposite – asking for agreement or if a transmission was received.

10-6: Busy, stand by

10-7: Signing off

10-10: Transmission completed, standing by (you’ll be listening)

10-20: Location – What’s your (10-)20? Home-20 was asking for a driver’s home location/base.

10-33: Emergency traffic, clear the channel. CB code for Mayday for trucks and police cars.

10-42: Accident on the road

3s and 8s: Well wishes to a fellow driver. Borrowed from amateur ham radio codes “73” (best regards) and “88” (hugs and kisses).

The lists go on and on! I love the dry sense of humour reflected in the slang, and I think our everyday language could be a bit livelier if we included a few phrases that looked at things from a different perspective. Everyone could do with more 3s and 8s, 4-10?

1 Comment

Filed under Articles, Etymology, Family History, History, History Undusted, Humanity Highlights, Humor, Liguistics, Linguistics, Links to External Articles, Military History, Science & Technology

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

August 27, 2025 · 10:00 AM

History Undusted: Code Talkers

Navajo code talkers, Cpl. Henry Blake Jr. and PFC George H Kirk, who served with the Marine Signal Unit.
Source: Public Domain

Code talkers were Native Americans from various tribes who were employed by the US military during World War 2 as radio operators; their native tongues were indecipherable to anyone listening in, and as a result, their transmissions of sensitive messages were invaluable in allied victories on every Pacific island, including Iwo Jima, as well as in Europe in decisive battles.

Codes were developed based on the languages of the Assiniboin, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Choctaw, Comanche, Cree, Crow, Fox, Hopi, Kiowa, Menominee, Navajo, Ojibwa, Oneida, Osage, Pawnee, Sauk, Seminole, and Sioux peoples. These men could transmit over open radio channels, knowing that the enemy would be unable to break their code. If a military term did not exist in their languages, a phrase was used in its place: A submarine became an iron fish; a fighter plane became a hummingbird; a squad became a black street. In all, throughout WW2, over 400 terms were developed and needed to be memorised by each code talker.

The code talkers continued to be used after the end of the war, which delayed their recognition by the wider public – until documentaries about their service finally began to emerge in the 1990s. In 2002, the U.S. Congress passed the Code Talkers Recognition Act, followed by a similar act in 2008 to honour the tribes who used their languages in the wartime service of the United States.

The use of code talkers was a socially complex one: The languages that were so invaluable to the US military were the very tools that the US government had been trying to eradicate in the name of cultural assimilation. Between 1880 and 1905, boarding schools were established, in which Native American children were taken from their families and educated; they were taught to reject their Native values, languages, traditions and anything to do with their native culture. They were punished, sometimes severely, for using their native tongues; they were forced to dress like the “white man”, and were not allowed to wear their native garments or have any vestiges of their tribes. Some 100,000 Native Americans were forced to attend such schools. Parents who resisted the kidnapping of their children were imprisoned; several from the Hopi tribe were even imprisoned on Alcatraz Island. Though most of these schools had been closed by the 1930s, the cultural and psychological damage had taken its toll on many native people groups, many of whom still struggle with their cultural identities today. At the time these young warriors were called into military service or chose to join after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, many were not even legal American citizens, yet they fought for their land and their families.

With that background in mind, the dedication and ingenuity of the code talkers are all the more astounding. They were often in the first wave of soldiers deployed as they were needed to pass on messages for the strategic planning and execution of driving back the Japanese from the Pacific islands. In addition to the Pacific arena, the European front also benefited from the code talkers’ ability to communicate directly with each other: Comanche code talkers were assigned to the 4th Infantry Division when it landed at Normandy in June 1944. In this context, some of the Comanche substitutes were turtle for tank, a pregnant bird for bomber, and crazy white man was their term for Adolf Hitler – a more insightful term has never been more aptly applied.

For a fascinating look into a history largely forgotten, please click on the following video recounting code talkers telling their stories firsthand as they return to the Pacific Islands with their families and find peace after decades of PTSD. The video is 1:10, but well worth the time when you can take it: Navajo Code Talkers of World War II (2018) | Documentary

Other sources:

https://eji.org/news/history-racial-injustice-cultural-genocide/

https://www.britannica.com/topic/code-talker

8 Comments

Filed under History, History Undusted, Humanity Highlights, Liguistics, Linguistics, Links to External Articles, Military History, Psychology Undusted, Snapshots in History, YouTube Link

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

June 4, 2025 · 10:00 AM

Who’s Who in Quotes: John Bertram Phillips

Deciding who to highlight here in this space sometimes comes down to a moral choice; some of the people I’ve investigated as a result of a quote from my collection have turned out to have lived lives that are, frankly, not worthy of my spending time and effort to share their history. One was a multi-billionaire who was a womanizer and a miser who loved tormenting people under his control. He lived a miserable life and died a lonely death. As Jesus said, “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:36). Others, while they may have lived lives worth remembering, made strings of unwise choices that led to scandals and/or dodgy associations with corrupt foreign powers. While a quote or two from such a person might hold a grain of truth or wit, I personally find it difficult to un-see the stains behind the curtain, as it were, and so I choose to highlight lives that have something worth learning from or from those people who’ve done something worthy of our respect.

The person I’d like to highlight today is John Bertram Philips (1906-1982), best known for his translation of the New Testament and part of the Old Testament into modern English. This work wasn’t done in a stuffy theologian’s office, but in the bomb shelters of the London Blitz of World War 2. During that war, he was the Anglican vicar of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Lee, London, and he realized that the young people in his church had difficulty relating to, or understanding, the Authorized Version of the Bible, aka the King James Bible, which was first published in 1611*. By the mid-1940s, English had changed fundamentally, and it has continued to grow and adapt; the older version of the biblical translation was and is (for most people) stuffy and unrelatable. [For those of you wondering which version of the Bible is most accurately translated from the original Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic texts, the NIV Bible adheres most closely to them; 2011 saw a major revision to the NIV translation, based on recently published critical editions from biblical scholars.]

[*The history of how The King James Bible came to be the king’s Bible is long and sordid, littered with spies, political intrigue and betrayal, ending in the gruesome martyrdom of William Tyndale, whose translation was basically appropriated after his death, which is ironic, as he was tried because his translation was illegal…”unauthorized” by the Holy Roman Empire political elite… but that’s another story.]

Encouraged by his friend, C.S. Lewis, Philips published the first section of the New Testament, starting with Paul’s letters to the churches, in 1947, with the Gospels following in 1952. The final compilation of the New Testament was published in 1958. In the 1960s, he translated and published parts of the Old Testament, though this was never finished within his lifetime.

As a minister and translator, a communicator at heart, it’s no wonder that there are numerous quotes taken from his writings, sermons, and letters written during his lifetime; in some ways, like Tyndale, he was ahead of his time in his understanding of God and our relationship with Him. As the saying goes, we today see further because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Whether or not you believe in God, if you live in any nation with Judeo-Christian foundations, you benefit from those shoulders in more ways than you know.

If you’d like to read more about the life of this complex man, who struggled with clinical depression most of his life and yet remained firm in his faith, please click on the link to an article titled, A Bruised Reed Firmly Planted.

Without further ado, here is a selection of quotes from John Bertram Phillips:

  • “The refusal to be committed and the attitude of indifference can, in fact, never be neutral.”
  • “Christianity is not a religion at all but a way of life, a falling in love with God, and through him a falling in love with our fellows (fellow man).”
  • “Christ is the aperture through which the immensity and magnificence of God can be seen.”
  • “God is not discoverable or demonstrable by purely scientific means, unfortunately for the scientifically minded. But that really proves nothing. It simply means that the wrong instruments are being used for the job.”
  • “All poetry and music, and art of every true sort, bears witness to man’s continual falling in love with beauty and his desperate attempt to induce beauty to live with him and enrich his common life.”
  • “It is refreshing and salutary to study the poise and quietness of Christ. His task and responsibility might well have driven a man out of his mind. But He was never in a hurry, never impressed by numbers, never a slave of the clock.”
  • “You can throw the whole weight of your anxieties upon him, for you are his personal concern.” (from his NT translation)
  • “There is… no easy answer to the evil and suffering problem and no easy road to its solution. But Christ tackled the matter radically and realistically by winning the allegiance of a few men and women to a new way of living…They were to be the spearhead of good against evil.”
  • “Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen.” (from his NT translation)

3 Comments

Filed under History, History Undusted, Links to External Articles, Military History, Quotes, Research, Snapshots in History

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

April 10, 2025 · 2:53 AM

The Fascinating History Behind the Fraktur Typeface

Last Sunday at church, a friend filled an entire room with her late father’s books, setting up an impromptu book shop. I chose several books, most of which are in Fraktur typeface, known to some people as “Gothic” or “Old German”. I enjoy reading such books because they offer a snapshot of a cultural way of thinking. The books I chose were printed between 1877 and 1940. The latter date is significant, as you’ll soon see.

First of all, let’s clarify a few terms: Though many people think of font and typeface as interchangeable, in fact, they refer to two different aspects of a writing style. Typeface refers to a particular style of lettering (e.g. Times New Roman), while font refers to the variations within that style, such as size and weight (CAPS, bold, italic, etc.). Another term we know but may not fully understand is Serif: This refers to the small stroke or line attached to the larger stroke of a letter; an example would be an A with “feet” at the bottom of each down-stroke. Sans Serif simply means “without Serif”.

The first moveable-type printing press, designed by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany around 1440, was based on the ancient Roman design of a screw press used to press wine or oil, which in turn went on to be used to press designs into cloths. He was likely familiar with intaglio printing and may have done some work himself in copper engraving.  These designs and uses likely fermented in his inventor’s mind into what became the revolutionary turning point of literacy. Gutenberg’s original typeface was called Donatus-Kalender; the metal type design was itself a form of Textura (more on that in a moment).

Donatus Kalender
Example of Blackletter (Source: Wikipedia)

This original family of typefaces was known as “Blackletter”, aka “Gothic scripts”, with the height of popularity peaking around the 14th to 15th centuries. The ancestor of the Blackletter was called the Carolingian minuscule, a calligraphic standard of handwriting widely used in the medieval period, when literacy began increasing and a need for books in a wide range of subjects began to be in demand. It is thought to have been developed in the mid-770s by Benedictine monks north of Paris in the Corbie Abbey, famous for its scriptorium and library. The minuscule itself was derived from Roman Uncial as well as Irish Insular script, which was developed in Irish monasteries and spread throughout Europe.

Carolingian Minuscule
Roman Uncial
From the Book of Kells, an example of the Irish Insular script

The family of Blackletter typefaces included Early Gothic, which was a transitional script between the Carolingian miniscule and Textura (the most calligraphic form of Blackletter); Schwabacher was a form popular in early German print typefaces (it became widely known with the spread of Luther Bibles from 1522), in use from the 15th century until it was eventually replaced by Fraktur around 1530, though it was still used alongside Fraktur for emphasis, much like we use bold or italic today.

Schwabacher Typeface
Textura Typeface

Another blackletter typeface developed between 1470 and 1600: Antiqua. This typeface’s letters were designed to look like the handwriting of ancient Roman documents, with the letters flowing together, strokes connecting them in a continuous line, whereas Fraktur was distinguished by having letters “fractured” – separate from one another. The Antiqua-Fraktur Dispute deserves its own article, so stay tuned!

Antiqua Typeface (Source: Wikipedia)
Fraktur Typeface (Source: Fonts in Use)

The Habsburg Emperor Maximillian I (1459-1519) was King of the Romans* from 1486 to 1519 [the title of king was used by the kings of East Francia, the territory later referred to as the Kingdom of Germany, from the time of Henry II (1002) to Joseph II (1764)]. The king commissioned the artist Albrecht Dürer to create a series of woodcut engravings of the Triumphal Arch [Though many are familiar with the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, it is only one example of this ancient Roman architectural feature used as a free-standing structure (rather than the Greek version, which was used within a structure such as a temple).]. These engravings would be used to create what we would recognize today as essentially wallpaper, though its purpose was more of a statement of power or propaganda (read personal marketing) commemorating his nobility, generosity, and military conquests – an incongruous combination, if you ask those conquered… The final composite of printed papers stood nearly 3 metres (12 feet) high and was only one part of a series of three enormous prints commissioned by the king.

Albrecht Dürer’s The Triumphal Arch, for Maximilian I

 The Fraktur typeface was designed in the 1530s by Hieronymus Andreae, a German woodblock cutter, printer, publisher, and typographer closely connected to Albrecht Dürer. The typeface was made to decorate the arch, telling the stories of the figures depicted throughout. The typeface became popular in Europe and was in use in the German-speaking world, as well as areas under its influence (Scandinavia, Central Europe, and some eastern European regions), into the 20th century. Specifically, Fraktur was in use in German until 1941, when it was actually banned (which places one of the books I purchased on Sunday within one year of the end of the era of Fraktur!). The atmosphere that led to that ban arose from the dispute mentioned above. Once the Nazis were defeated, the ban was lifted, but Fraktur never regained its widespread popularity after that, though you can still see it occasionally in pub signs or various forms of ads, like beer brands.

I just pulled two books from my library shelves: One is an English book originally printed in 1895, with my book being printed in 1915; the other is a German book printed in 1892. The typefaces are widely different: The English text likely used the French Oldstyle, while the German book uses Renaissance Fraktur for the text body, while the end pages act as indexes and use a variety of blackletter typefaces, such as Muenchner Fraktur, Antike Kanzlei, and Enge verzierte Altdeutsch. To see examples of the typefaces mentioned here, please click on the link for Fonts In Use.

I hope you enjoyed this jaunt through history! Nearly every name mentioned, every typeface, and every event deserves its own undusting. Next time, we’ll deep-dive into the dispute that lasted well over a century!

3 Comments

Filed under Articles, Etymology, History, History Undusted, Humanity Highlights, Images, Liguistics, Linguistics, Links to External Articles, Military History, Signs, Snapshots in History

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

February 12, 2025 · 10:00 AM

Etymology Undusted: Murphy’s Law

The adage “Murphy’s Law” refers to the idea that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. You forget your umbrella and it will be sure to rain; your computer crashes at the worst possible moment; your worst itch is always where you can least reach it, and so on.

Similar sentiments are centuries old: E.g. Augustus D. Morgan, a British mathematician, wrote in 1866: “Whatever can happen, will happen”; Alfred Holt, an engineer, wrote in 1877: “It is found that anything that can go wrong at sea generally does go wrong sooner or later.” British stage magician Nevil Maskelyne wrote in 1908, “Everything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

But who was Murphy? And why is it his law? I’d always assumed that Murphy was either a fictional black sheep created to blame everything on, or someone from a century or more ago, much like Hobson of the “Hobson’s Choice” idiom; but Murphy’s Law comes from the 1940s aerospace era.

The “law” was coined by and named after Edward A. Murphy Jr. (b.11 January 1918; d.17 July 1990):  Born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1918, he finished high school in New Jersey and eventually graduated from West Point in 1940, joining the Army Air Corps, serving in the Pacific Theatre of World War 2, and in the Korean War, reaching the rank of major. According to his obituary on findagrave.com, he is credited with design work on crew escape systems for some of the most famous experimental aircraft of the 20th century, including the F-4 Phantom, the SR-71 Blackbird, the X-15 rocket plane, and later the Apache helicopter. He also worked on safety and life support systems for NASA’s Apollo space missions. Although he was apparently chagrined by the namesake, he believed in the concept as a key to good defensive design – that one must always assume worst-case scenarios and work to counter them in thorough planning, engineering and execution of mechanical designs.

Around 1948, Murphy and his team were testing rocket sleds, which were used to test the acceleration of equipment deemed too hazardous to test in a piloted aircraft and also to test missile components without risking actual (more expensive) missiles in the testing. The saying arose when training his engineers to avoid designing missile components that could be confused one for another; he said, “If a part can be installed in more than one position, it will be incorrectly installed in the field.” Perhaps Murphy was familiar with the sentiment of those past engineers, given his background in engineering, but wherever it came from, his name was attached and, as they say, the rest is history.

Edward Aloysius Murphy Jr, in his West Point uniform

5 Comments

Filed under Etymology, History, History Undusted, Humanity Highlights, Military History, Science & Technology, Space, Astronomy

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

December 19, 2024 · 6:09 PM

Humanity Undusted: Paris Catacombs and the Les Ux Secret Society

This week’s adventurous tale is a proverbial rabbit hole; diving into it takes us past the problem of Paris’ 18th century dilemma of dealing with the “explosive” issue of overfilled cemeteries, which forced King Louis XVI to take action: Bury them deeper. Following this problem and its solution into the ground, so to speak, leads us into the massive (1.5 km long) ossuary (bone depository) of Paris. Once you reach the ossuary, which contains the artfully arranged skulls and bones of some six million residents (around three times more than the actual population of central Paris, which as of 2023 was 2.1 million…), you aren’t officially allowed to go any further – because above your head is the bustling city of street cafés, boutiques, and historical buildings. And when someone buys a house up there, they are actually also buying the land on which it stands – which includes their section of the underground maze of mining tunnels and caverns; venturing beyond the official section makes you an intruder on private property or breaking and entering an actual shop – but more on that in a moment. The message above the entrance to the ossuary reads, Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la Mort. (“Halt! This is the Empire of Death.”). That warning doesn’t stop it from being one of Paris’ most popular tourist attractions.

The tunnels, now known as The Catacombs, were originally dug far outside of the small 13th-century city when Lutetian limestone was mined as a local building material (any town or city with a distinctive architecture owes its appearance to whatever was available locally when it was founded – whether wood, stone, thatch or brick). Though no one knows with certainty, as the mining resources were eventually exhausted and the mines abandoned, an estimated 350 kilometres of tunnels undermined the city, which covers some 32 square kilometres beneath Paris… a city beneath a city, as it were.

And yes, buildings have occasionally been swallowed; in 1774, about 30 metres of a street disappeared into a cavern below. This led to the formation of the Générale des Carrières (IGC), an office created in 1777 by King Louis XVI to oversee the mapping and maintenance of the catacombs. During the French Revolution, many things got lost and fell out of collective memory, including the underground map.

Paris Catacombs Map – Inspection Générale des Carrières, 1857, Pulbic Domain

Throughout the years, the tunnels have been put to various purposes, aside from the macabre: Mushrooms were cultivated there; beer was brewed, wine aged, and Chartreuse liquors were distilled down there by monks in the 17th century. The city beneath the city had no prime real estate overhead for businesses, and many took advantage of the free space, making access for their customers through the various access points throughout Paris. It also served the French Resistance during world war 2, even though the Nazis also used a section of the tunnels. Now, let’s go back up out of the rabbit hole for a brief moment.

Remember that I wrote officially allowed? Well, a secret maze of tunnels is too much to resist for the adventurous, called cataphiles. But there is a secret society at large down there, too.

When you think of a secret society, you might think of the Luminati or something else sinister; but the Les Ux would be more akin to Robin Hood. The story goes that in 1981, a group of kids were talking after school, and one of them mentioned that he could break into any building in Paris; in fact, his next target was the Pantheon. They didn’t believe him, and so they all went down together – and found out just how easy it was to go wherever they wanted. The Pantheon, which was the tallest structure in Paris until the Eifel Tower was constructed, vacillated between being a church and a secular building several times over its history, depending on the political regime, and it finally became a secular structure in 1885 under the Third Republic. It now is a mausoleum, with famous residents like Marie Curie, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Voltaire; but it is also a museum, an art exhibition hall, hosts school events and lectures, and is linked to a section of the catacombs – which is where the group of school friends began their adventures.

During one of their nocturnal outings, the group stumbled upon a narrow passage full of electrical cables; following those, they found themselves in the basement of the Ministry of Communications. No security stopped them and they were able to explore at their leisure. In a drawer, they found the motherlode: A map of the entire catacomb structure. That changed the course of their lives, and they eventually became known as the Les Ux, short for “urban experiment”. These individuals, unknown to anyone but themselves, specialize in safeguarding Paris cultural goods – stepping in when the government can either not afford to or doesn’t care enough to preserve something of cultural or historical value. They seem to think that, unless it’s a big-ticket attraction like the Mona Lisa, things get neglected. For instance, the mission statement of one branch of Les Ux is to reclaim and transform disused city spaces for the creation of zones of expression for free and independent art.

The group, now a full-fledged underground movement, is divided up into teams with seemingly nonsensical names: The Mouse House (an all-female team of infiltrators), La Mexicaine De Perforation (in charge of clandestine artistic events and underground shows), and the Untergunther (specializing in restorations); they also have teams that specialize in things like running internal messaging systems and coded radio networks, a database team, and a team of photographers.

Some of their exploits include restoring a forgotten metro station, a 12th-century crypt, an old French bunker, and a World War 2 air raid shelter.  One member, likely from the Mouse House, wrote a detailed report about a particular museum’s security, telling them how many ways she could have broken in and stolen had she been so inclined. She then infiltrated the museum and left the report on the desk of the museum’s head of security. He went straight to the police to press charges. They refused to pursue the matter.

They built an entire cinema complex in the catacombs, complete with a bar and restaurant, where they are thought to have held film festivals for several months or even years before being discovered by the police in a random training exercise. When the police returned to remove the cinema, everything was gone except a note which read, “Don’t try to find us.”

Les Ux has held many events within the Pantheon over the years, including parties and art exhibitions – all vanishing, and leaving the place cleaner when they left, before the museum opened the next day. One night, a team member (from Untergunther) decided to take a closer look at the broken Wagner clock, which hangs over a prominent entrance within the building. Their most public restoration (that we know of so far) was, of course, an embarrassment to the management of the Pantheon: One of the members, Jean-Baptiste Viot, was a professional clockmaker; the team snuck in for nearly a year to restore the clock. They built a secret workshop (complete with armchairs, bookcase, and bar, which they nicknamed the Unter and Gunther Winter Kneipe – German for winter boozer!) high up in the dome of the pantheon, and carried out the clock work by night. Once it was done, they knew that the clock would need to be wound regularly to continue working – so they broke protocol and met with the museum director to tell him the good news. He promptly pressed charges… but there are no laws in France about repairing an expensive clock at their own expense, and the case was dismissed with the comment, “This was stupid!” The museum director hired someone to break the clock, presumably to avoid the hassle of winding it up regularly, and also out of spite for losing his case and his face; the person refused to damage the clock, simply deactivating the mechanism. Les Ux snuck back in to let the clock chime over the days around Christmas, then went back in and removed a component to prevent any further damage the next time spite struck. I’ve read that since that time, the clockmaker of Untergunther has actually been hired by the Pantheon to maintain the clocks.

We only know of a fraction of their activities, of course, because they don’t publicise their accomplishments or events. Below are a few links if you’d like to read more on this fascinating topic! I hope you enjoyed this little exploration as much as I did!

Here are a few links to articles, if you’re interested in learning more:

Meet Paris’ Secret Underground Society (Youtube video)

The Fight Between Cataphiles and Underground Police in the Paris Catacombs

Paris’s new slant on underground movies (with a member interview, explaining how they pulled off the cinema complex)

3 Comments

Filed under Articles, History Undusted, How It's Made, Humanity Highlights, Links to External Articles, Military History, YouTube Link

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

April 10, 2024 · 5:44 PM

History Undusted: The Folly of King Alfred the Great

Recently, my mother sent me a link on Facebook and asked me to write an article about it; it’s definitely an interesting topic – so thanks, Mom!

First of all, for those of you who don’t know what a folly is:

In architectural terms, a folly is a building that is either constructed as decoration which suggests another purpose or is a practical garden building that transcends its purpose with extravagant features. An example of the former term would be buildings that were designed from the outset to look like ancient ruins, such as Wimpole’s Folly in Cambridgeshire, England; an example of the latter would be buildings like the Dunmore Pineapple in Stirlingshire, Scotland (I’ve been to this site a few times and was once able to go inside the pineapple). Designed to look like a giant pineapple, it was actually a working hothouse; that’s perhaps another story to tell. As for today’s topic, the folly of King Alfred would fall into the former definition.

Second of all, who was King Alfred, and why does he bear the sobriquet Great?

Statue of Alfred the Great at Wantage, Oxfordshire

Born in 849 AD, Alfred the Great was King of the West Saxons from 871 to 886, and then King of the Anglo-Saxons from 886 to 899. He lived in a time when Viking invasions and warring tribes were common. Both of his parents died when he was young, and his three older brothers reigned before he eventually came to the throne. The battles, invasions and wars are too numerous to mention; to be a king meant to be at war. At the age of 21, he was already the King of the Wessex and a battle veteran. In early 878, the Danes struck like lightening, taking Chippenham (on the map below, you’ll see that it was in the heart of Alfred’s territories); inhabitants surrendered or fled, and it reduced Alfred and his men to hit and run means of getting provisions; they withdrew into the tidal marshes of Somerset (the area on the other side of the River Severn, just below Wales on the map below). Alfred reevaluated his strategy and learned from his enemy: He and his men began a guerilla war against the Danes, and by May, he’d defeated them in the Battle of Edington. Knowing that he would never be able to drive out such a powerful enemy, he made a treaty with them, establishing borders and what became known as the Danelaw territory; King Guthrum of the Danes converted to Christianity, with Alfred as his godfather and soon son-in-law as he sealed the treaty by marrying one of Guthrum’s daughters, Aethelflaed.

The Great comes from the fact that he united many of the disparate tribes; he recognized the deterioration in learning caused by years of disrupting wars and the Viking’s destruction of the monasteries, which were centres of learning and literacy. He recognized the fact that without widespread literacy, a king cannot rule – a people who were not united by a written language would be more vulnerable; but united through a common tongue, they would have a sense of loyalty and continuity in turbulent times. They would be able to adhere to laws, reach legal decisions, and be called to arms more readily if they could read a common language. He set out to make the English proud of being English and thus be prepared to fight for it.

By stopping the Viking advance against all odds, and consolidating his territories, he set the stage for future kings. His accomplishments in Wessex became the seed that eventually gave fruition to a united Anglo-Saxon England, which is why he alone among all kings or queens of England bears the sobriquet Great.

King Alfred’s Folly:

King Alfred’s Folly – Credit, Flickr, Andrew Bone

King Alfred’s Tower was built between 1769 and 1772. To put those dates into perspective, here are a few events from the year that construction began: 13-year-old Mozart, under his father’s control, was just finishing his third concert tour of Italy; James Watt improved his design for a steam engine that would spark the Industrial Revolution; King Charles III of Spain sent missionaries to California, founding San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Francisco and Monterey; Daniel Boone set out to explore what would become Kentucky; and finally, in August of that year, Napoleon Bonapart was born in Corsica.

The tower itself was built near the site of Egbert’s Stone, which is said to mark the mustering site for the troops of the Battle of Edington; the tower was intended to commemorate the end of the Seven Years’ War and the ascension of King George III to the throne of England. It was designed in the Palladian style (a European architectural style) by the architect Henry Flitcroft, at the commission of Banker Henry Hoare. While the reasons for commissioning the tower might be altruistic of Hoare, its site and magnificence might have had something to do with the fact that the tower was an eye-catcher for those touring the parks at his private estate, Stourhead.

Standing at over 40 metres high (131 feet) and a circumference of 51 metres (167 feet), it is completely hollow; it is a triangular structure with a round “tower” at each corner, though only one of them has a use – a spiral staircase of 205 steps, with no landing places along the dizzying ascent or descent. The only safety is a rope “railing” anchored occasionally along the central pillar of the staircase; passing others up or down can be a tight squeeze, and it is not a climb for the faint-hearted. Once reaching the top, you’ll find a crenelated parapet that surrounds a viewing platform offering a great view of the surrounding region; the centre of the platform is surrounded by a guard rail as it is a gaping hole straight down to the ground level; it’s covered with a mesh netting to prevent birds from using the tower as a dovecote.

In 1944, the tower was damaged when a Canadian single-engine plane crashed into it in the fog, killing all five aboard. In the 1980s, it finally underwent repairs and restoration; the statue of King Alfred above the main entrance was also repaired at that time, restoring a missing right forearm. A stone tablet (also in need of restoration) between the door and statue reads:

ALFRED THE GREAT
AD 879 on this Summit
Erected his Standard
Against Danish Invaders
To him We owe The Origin of Juries
The Establishment of a Militia
The Creation of a Naval Force
ALFRED The Light of a Benighted Age
Was a Philosopher and a Christian
The Father of his People
The Founder of the English
MONARCHY and LIBERTY

Leave a comment

Filed under Etymology, History, History Undusted, Humanity Highlights, Links to External Articles, Military History

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

February 1, 2022 · 2:27 PM

History Undusted: Forgotten Battles of the Aleutian Islands

I might be odd for a woman, but I love history; in particular the history of World War 2. But as much as I’ve read about it, and as many documentaries and films as I’ve watched on the topic, I had never heard about this episode until I read a comment from a YouTube video which told about how that person’s grandfather had served in the only US territory to be occupied by the Japanese during the war: The Aleutian Islands.

Anyone who knows a bit about World War 2 probably knows about Midway – a pivotal point in the Pacific arena. But at the same time Japan was targeting that US island base in the middle of the Pacific, they also had their sites set on the Bering Strait; specifically, the six island groups of the Aleutian Islands. In June 1942, they attacked and occupied the US territory islands of Kiska and Attu. Anyone would be excused for thinking that these inhospitable, frozen, volcanic mountains rising out of the sea were insignificant, but they were a strategic launching point for keeping the Japanese at bay in the Pacific, and as a gateway for supplies to the Allied troops. If the Japanese managed to maintain their hold on those islands, it would strengthen the defence of their northern territories, and it was also feared that they would use the islands as springboards from which to attack the US West coast or invade through Alaska and into Canada and the northwestern mainland territory of the US. The battles there are considered the “forgotten battles” because, although there was public outrage in the US at the time, they were soon largely overshadowed in the press by Midway and by the Guadalcanal campaigns. But the number of casualties there was comparable to that of Pearl Harbor, and the Attu battle was better known in Japan than in America: It was a major propaganda coup for the Imperial Army.

To watch a 1943 documentary about the Aleutian Islands and their strategic significance, called “Forgotten Battle of the Aleutian Islands“, just click on the link (~45 min.). It not only gives a glimpse into the geography and military aspect, but the human aspect, showing the soldiers in their daily off-duty activities and their duties; it gives you a sense of what they were like, where they came from, and what they did. For a shorter summary (~12 min), click here.

The Aleutian Islands, showing Russia to the west and Alaska to the east.

1 Comment

Filed under History, History Undusted, Military History, Snapshots in History, Videos, YouTube Link

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

January 13, 2022 · 5:06 PM

History Undusted: Bessie Coleman, Aviation Pioneer

I like to highlight, or “undust” figures or circumstances from history that few may have ever heard about, but that deserve to be remembered. Bessie Coleman is one such figure from history: In her life that was cut short, she made a difference by going against the norms and following her dreams, regardless of the limitations put on her by society because of her race and gender.

Bessie Coleman, 1923 – Photo Credit: George Rinhart, Corbis via Getty Images

Born in January 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, as the tenth of thirteen children in a sharecropper family, she worked in the cotton fields and attended a small, segregated school. She was not only African American but also had Cherokee heritage through her mixed-race father. Despite her humble beginnings, by 18 she’d managed to save enough money to attend one term of college at Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University (now Langston University) in Oklahoma, which was probably the closest university that would take a young black woman in the early 1900s. With no funds left, she moved back home, working and saving her money. At 23, she moved in with her brothers in Chicago, Illinois, and worked as a manicurist in a barbershop; there, she heard the tales of World War I pilots, and her dream was born.

Robert Sengstacke Abbot, Photo, Chicago Literary Hall of Fame

At the time, American aviation schools had no place for either African Americans or for women, but she was encouraged by Robert S. Abbott, founder and publisher of the Chicago Defender, to study abroad. He publicized her story in his newspaper, and she received the financial support to pursue her dream from a prominent African American banker, Jesse Binga, and from the Defender.

Jesse Binga, Credit: Wikipedia, John Schmidt

She took a French language course in Chicago, and in November 1920, she travelled to Paris to earn her pilot licence. On June 15, 1921, Coleman became the first African American woman as well as the first Native American to earn a pilot license and an international aviation license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. She then spent the next two months learning more from a French veteran pilot near Paris. In September 1921, she sailed back to America and became a media sensation.

With civilian commercial flights still a thing of the future, she would have to earn her money as a “barnstorming” stunt pilot. The skills needed to fly dangerous stunts were beyond her scope, and still out of her reach in America, so she again returned to Europe, where she trained in France. From there she went to the Netherlands to meet Anthony Fokker, one of the world’s most distinguished aircraft designers. At his company in Germany, she received further training from one of the company’s chief pilots. Returning once again to the US, she finally launched her career in exhibition flying.

“Queen Bess” was a popular draw for the next five years. She used public attention to engage audiences in promoting aviation and battling racism; she refused to take part in any aviation exhibitions that barred African Americans from attending. At one point, she was offered a role in a film, “Shadow and Sunshine.” She accepted, hoping that it would help her raise enough money to open her own aviation school. But when she learned that the first scene would portray her in ragged clothes, she walked off the set – her principles would not allow her to spread the disparaging image most whites had of most blacks.

Her goal was not just flying, but to make a difference in history; unfortunately, she did not live long enough to see just what a great influence she would have: On 30 April 1926, a faulty plane went into a dive and spin at 3,000 feet above ground; on the way down, Bess was thrown from the plane and killed on impact. Later, it was found that a wrench used to service the plane had been forgotten inside and had jammed the controls.

Posthumously, her name is honoured through the renaming of streets (including three in France), of roads near airports (including one at Frankfurt Germany’s international airport), a public library in Chicago, schools, aviation-related companies and wings of airports, scholarships, a US postage stamp (in 1995), a cartoon character, and she has been inducted into several halls of fame for both women as well as aviation; and last but certainly not least, she has a geological feature on the southern hemisphere of Pluto named in her honour, Coleman Mons.

William J. Powell, Pioneer aviator and civil rights activist

Lieutenant William J. Powell dedicated his book, Black Wings, to her. His sentiment is summed up well in a quote: “We have overcome that which was worse than racial barriers. We have overcome the barriers within ourselves and dared to dream.”  Powell founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in 1929. Mae Jemison, the first African-American female astronaut in space, carried a photo of Bessie Coleman with her on her first mission.

Mae Jemison, Photo credit: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

What I find most inspiring about her story is not only her unwavering determination to reach her goals, but that throughout her life, she found people willing and able to support her in accomplishing it: Without the idea encouraged by a publisher to look beyond the borders of America and promoted in his newspaper to raise support, without the teachers in Europe investing in her skills (how many inter-war pilots could say they’d been trained by top war ace pilots?), and without the financial support given at a time she needed it, her dreams might have remained unfulfilled, or too long in the making – those parameters needed to make her into a pilot who inspired future generations shifted drastically with the outbreak of the Second World War.

In Esther 4:14, Mordecai, the uncle of Queen Esther, tells her, “Who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” In the brief window of time that Bessie reached for the heavens, she may not have lived to see her legacy, but her life and death were not in vain.

4 Comments

Filed under Articles, History, History Undusted, Military History, Space, Astronomy

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

November 29, 2021 · 1:19 PM

History Undusted: Advent Calendars

This month has flown by! Last weekend was our church’s annual advent market, and I was present with tables full of crafts, as well as marble-iced cookies, Spitzbuben, cheese cookies & apple chips (dehydrated). Before it took off, I was preparing, baking, labelling, and doing all the little bits and bobs to get ready; it went off well, considering the limitations of Covid. I also got our own Advent calendar completed – I talk about that more in a previous post. But the whole topic of the market got me wondering where Advent calendars started, so I thought I’d share with you what I’ve discovered: As you probably know, advent calendars today can take any form you choose; the only common factor is that they usually cover 24 days and begin on 1 December (as opposed to following the 4 Advent Sundays – this year, the first Sunday fell on 28 November). The first calendars weren’t: In the early 1800s, German protestants began marking chalk lines on a wall or lighting a candle each day of the Advent season; they sometimes accompanied the act with a devotional reading or with an image centered around the advent, or coming, of Jesus (traditionally celebrated on 25 December, though that was hardly his birthday – but that’s another topic). The first actual calendars were made of cardboard in Germany, and appeared in the early 1900s; they often had either a poem or a picture behind each door, and were produced until World War 2, when the Nazis banned their use on the excuse that cardboard was scarce – and then, in 1943, they promptly sent out advent booklets to every mother in the land – but they seem to have missed the point: their versions had images of German soldiers blowing up Russian tanks and sinking allied ships!
The Nazi’s idea of Advent celebrations… the less said, the better!
After the war, Richard Sellmer, of Stuttgart, was able to get permission from the allied officials to begin printing cardboard Advent calendars once again, and his company still produces them today – click here to visit their website. After the war was over, the American soldiers took the idea back to the States; their popularity took off in the 1950s after a photo appeared in a newspaper of President Eisenhower’s grandchildren with a Sellmer calendar.
Image from the Sellmer website, showing President Eisenhower’s grandchildren opening a Sellmer calendar
I guess you could say that the rest is history! With Advent beginning, I hope yours is ready for Wednesday! And Christmas is coming soon! If you’re interested in knowing the history behind Santa’s red suit, just click here!

2 Comments

Filed under Articles, History, History Undusted, Links to External Articles, Military History

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,