Tom McMahon

Isaac Newton, Investor in the South Sea Company Bubble of 1720

From Alex J. Pollock's article It’s Easier to Be Brilliant than Right:

Isaac Newton was possibly the most brilliant mind ever. But when it came to the financial bubble of his day, the South Sea Company bubble of 1720, he displayed Ed Bottum’s rule. He was an early investor in South Sea stock, doubled his money, and sold out. The stock went on up, and Newton bought back in, only to suffer large losses when the bubble collapsed. He wrote disgustedly, “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”

Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 1789-1945, Written by Michael Burns, Who As A Child Actor Played Blueboy in the Famous Dragnet Episode

Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 1789-1945, Written by Michael Burns, Who As A Child Actor Played Blueboy in the Famous Dragnet Episode

From imdb:

Michael Burns is a former child actor who went on to a distinguished career as a historian, writer, and college professor. He is now retired and raising thoroughbred horses in Kentucky. He was familiar to television audiences of the early 1960s as the teenage character Barnaby West on the popular "Wagon Train" series. After other TV and films credits in his late teens and early 20s, Burns left acting to pursue his interest in history, graduating from the University of California. He earned a Ph. D. from Yale University in 1977 and wrote an acclaimed history book, "Dreyfus", about the Dreyfus Affair. Between 1980-2002, Burns was a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

Michael Burns as Blueboy

The Suffrage and the Switch: A General Electric Advertisement, Circa 1920

The Suffrage and the Switch: A General Electric Advertisement, Circa 1920

The text:

Woman suffrage made the American woman the political equal of her man. The little switch which commands the great servant Electricity is making her workshop the equal of her man's.

No woman should be required to perform by hand domestic tasks which can be done by small electric motors which operate household devices.

The General Electric Company is working side by side with your local electric light and power company to help lift drudgery from the shoulders of women as well as men.

CAPTION: Millions of American women voted for President in 1920 and are finding time to take active interest in civic affairs

The Myth of Rosa Parks

From The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds by Tammy Bruce:

Most Americans believe that the civil-rights struggle was full of serendipity. that it was a spontaneous grassroots movement of average people who wanted to make a difference and improve their lives. Rosa Parks, for example, has been portrayed as an Everywoman who happened to take the bus one day in 1955 and somehow crashed through the barriers of her ordinary, run-of-the-mill life by deciding not to relinquish her seat to a white man.

In truth, the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the NAACP had been looking for months for a test case to challenge bus segregation. For this, they needed a bus rider to be arrested so their challenge could move through the courts but it had to be the right sort of bus rider. In fact, Parks wasn’t the first black to refuse to relinquish a seat to a white person. The first to personally challenge bus segregation earlier in 1955 had been 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, followed by another teenager named Mary Louise Smith. The NAACP leaders, however, didn’t think that either of the girls would cut the right kind of figure in court.

Parks was a veteran activist and an officer of the Montgomery NAACP. In actuality, she wielded great power in the chapter; she was the one who had noticed Martin Luther King Jr. and asked him to join the executive committee. She was at the meeting where the Montgomery NAACP leaders considered the possibility of using Colvin or Smith as the test case.

In December of 1955, six weeks after the NAACP’s rejection of the teenagers, Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Parks told Time magazine, “I did not get on the bus to get anested. I got on the bus to go home” That may have been true for Colvin and Smith but certainly not for Parks, Rosa Parks was a “bus rider" the way Betty Friedan was a “housewife".

Elevated Rooftop Inner-City Circular Airport 1919

Elevated Rooftop Inner-City Circular Airport 1919

On July 17, 1981, Two 32-Ton Skywalks At The Hyatt Regency In Kansas City Collapsed Into The Hotel Lobby Killing 114 People. It Was The Deadliest Structural Collapse In U.S. History

While Milwaukee is abuzz about the collapse of a concrete panel at the O’Donnell Park parking structure and its resulting fatality, with the passage of time many people have forgotten -- or have never heard of -- the deadliest structural engineering failure in US history.

Before The Disaster: The Tea Dance

From the Engineering Ethics class at Texas A&M University:

On July 17, 1981, the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, held a videotaped tea-dance party in their atrium lobby. With many party-goers standing and dancing on the suspended walkways, connections supporting the ceiling rods that held up the second and fourth-floor walkways across the atrium failed, and both walkways collapsed onto the crowded first-floor atrium below. The fourth-floor walkway collapsed onto the second-floor walkway, while the offset third-floor walkway remained intact. As the United States' most devastating structural failure, in terms of loss of life and injuries, the Kansas City Hyatt Regency walkways collapse left 114 dead and in excess of 200 injured. In addition, millions of dollars in costs resulted from the collapse, and thousands of lives were adversely affected. The hotel had only been in operation for approximately one year at the time of the walkways collapse.

From the AP:

Sally Firestone went to the Friday night tea dance with three friends after work. She was all dolled up, standing on a suspended walkway at the Hyatt Regency downtown, enjoying a dance contest in the hotel lobby below. The last thing she remembers is hearing a loud "crack." ...

At 7:04 p.m., the band started playing Duke Ellington's "Satin Doll" as a dance contest got under way. About a minute later, the fourth-floor walkway split in two places near the center, falling down onto the second-story walkway, which also collapsed.

The Fourth Floor Walkway Was Suspended Directly Over The Second Floor Walkway, With The Third Floor Walkway Offset To The Side Several Meters

From the AP:

Rescue workers spent the next 14 hours pulling victims, dead and alive, from the tangle of steel and concrete. Cranes and forklifts moved heavy slabs of concrete so emergency crews could reach the injured. A firefighter performed an on-the-spot amputation with a chain saw to free one victim. City buses lined up outside to cart the walking wounded to hospitals. Sally Firestone lay unconscious and trapped for hours under the debris. The most severely injured of the survivors, she was left a quadriplegic with no feeling below her shoulders

Woman Victim Under The Rubble

From frostburg.edu:

The failure of the Hyatt Regency walkway was a combination of things. The most important cause was the design in the walkways. Due to disputes between G.C.E. and Havens, the design changed from a single to a double hanger rod, simply because Havens did not want to thread the entire rod in order to install the washer and nut. Due to the addition of another rod, the load on the nut connecting the fourth floor segment was increased. The original load for each hangar rod was to be 90kN, but the alteration increased the load to 181kN. The box beams were welded horizontally and therefore could not hold the weight of two walkways. During the collapse, the box beam split and the bottom rod pulled through the box beam resulting in the collapse.

Left: Proposed Design    Right: Actual Design

Both designs of the walkways were well below the required safety stress required by the Kansas City Building Code. Take a look at the beam for the third-floor walkway, which did not collapse.

Deformation of the Third-Floor Beam

From Wikipedia:

The Hyatt tragedy remains a classic model for the study of engineering ethics and errors. Gillum's chief engineer continues to share his experiences with others, in the hope that the mistakes which led to the Hyatt disaster will not be repeated. After the disaster, the lobby was reconstructed with only one crossing on the second floor. Unlike the previous walkways, the new bridge is supported by several columns underneath it rather than being suspended from the ceiling. As a result, some floors of the hotel now have disconnected sections on opposite sides of the atrium, so it is necessary to go to the second floor to get to the other side. The hotel later reopened, and has been renamed Hyatt Regency Crown Center. It has since been renovated and now serves as one of the city's most luxurious hotels.

The New Walkway

You can watch Seconds From Disaster - Skywalk Collapse on YouTube.

The largest settlement -- about $12 million of the estimated $140 million total -- went to Sally Firestone. Her thoughts:

"I'm not really bitter. I'm just amazed that no one discovered the problems with the building," said Firestone, who lives in a retirement home in south Kansas City and requires around-the-clock care. "So many things happened along the way that should have been caught."

Sally Firestone Today

I knew Sally Firestone a long time ago, so her reaction does not surprise me. Her father, Rev. Jesse Firestone (a good man, I might add) was the pastor at the First United Methodist Church in my old hometown of Belvidere, Illinois. Although she would be the last one to ask, you might want to keep her in your thoughts and prayers, OK?

July 7, 1910: Jack Johnson Defeats James Jeffries in the Fight of the Century. Rioters Rampant. Fighting Starts In Many Cities. Negroes Try To Celebrate Johnson's Victory and Are Attacked

July 7, 1910: Jack Johnson Defeats James Jeffries in the Fight of the Century. Rioters Rampant. Fighting Starts In Many Cities. Negroes Try To Celebrate Johnson's Victory and Are Attacked

via Mike Lynch

The USS Maine: No One Can Tell What Caused The Explosion. I Don’t Believe The Spanish Had Anything To Do With It

The USS Maine: No One Can Tell What Caused The Explosion. I Don’t Believe The Spanish Had Anything To Do With It

From The Bald Heretic:

On February 15, 1898, a mysterious explosion destroyed the American battleship Maine in Havana Harbor and helped propel the United States into a war with Spain. My great grandfather, Lt. John J. Blandin was the officer of the watch when the Maine blew up. The Spanish were blamed and we went to war. In actuality the explosion was a malfunction. My great grandfather was the highest ranking officer to die as a result of that explosion and, as a result, has his name on the Maine memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. He died on July 9, 1898…about 5 months after the explosion. ...

Interestingly enough, the US NAVY convened a tribunal annually for 100 years to discuss the disaster. On the 100th anniversary my aunt sent them the letter my great grandfather sent to his wife right after the explosion. They had never seen it. It caused quite a stir.

This is what it said…note the PS and PPS:

SS City of Washington
Havana, Cuba, 1898
February 16

My darling,

You have read of our wreck, and I suppose Dr. Greer has informed you that I am all right. I was on watch when the explosion took place. A more complete and sudden wreck one can’t imagine. All of us left alive climbed onto the poop, and then looked around to see in anything could be done. We pulled out the wounded where we could. The wreck sunk and rested on the bottom, and was soon burning fiercely. When the Captain saw that nothing more could be done, he gave the order to abandon ship. We had two boats left that would float, and the Spanish man-of-war sent 5 boats, the steamer Washington sent 2 boats, and we got all who were alive into them, 80 men and officers were saved, out of 340. So we lost 260 men, or near that. About half of those saved are badly injured, and some will die. We all went to the American Steamship “City of Washington”, of the Ward Line, and were treated with every courtesy. I have just learned that we are to go to Key West this afternoon, and suppose I will get home soon.

Two officers were lost, Jenkins and Merritt, both good friends of mine and fine fellows.

As for myself, I am uninjured. I lost everything except the clothes I have on. Tell Jack that I had a letter to him finished, but it was lost in the wreck.

Thank God, my darling that my life was spared again. Lots of love to my darlings from you own

Jack

P.S No one can tell what caused the explosion. I don’t believe the Spanish had anything to do with it.

Jack

P.P.S Don’t publish this letter.

I've Had About Enough of This

I've Had About Enough of This

Of Course, The Press No Longer Plays This Role

From a 1997 review of Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot by Jacob Weisberg:

Hersh is much better on the way in which the press protected Kennedy. Trusted reporters were at his beck and call, ready to advise on policy and bury indiscretions. In a 1960 letter Hersh found in the Kennedy Library, Ben Bradlee--then of Newsweek and later the editor of the Washington Post--advises Kennedy not to pick the unmannered rube LBJ as his running mate. Bradlee also helped out in 1962 when Kennedy needed to put rumors about his secret marriage to rest. In cases where a reporter wouldn't play ball, Bobby Kennedy could easily pick up the phone and get editors to kill a story. Of course, the press no longer plays this role on behalf of the Kennedys or any other politicians. But something of the old dynamic may persist in the hostile reaction to Sy Hersh's book.

Italics mine. Funny.