Month: September 2014

19th c. vibrator: sold! 11th c. Viking sword: no takers

Medieval, Modern(ish)

The Christie’s Out of the Ordinary auction held in London on September 3rd offered an eclectic array of objects, to say the least. A pair of Victorian taxidermy red squirrels playing cards rubbed shoulders with an Enigma machine and a framed 1746 map of London 12’7″ wide.

The lead item in the sale was a late medieval broadsword with an illustrious history. The blade is of Viking manufacture. It was captured by the English at the Battle of Stamford Bridge on September 25th, 1066, three weeks before the Battle of Hastings. It’s not certain what road it took after that, but by the 13th century it was in the hands of the de Bohun family. Since the first Humphrey de Bohun in England was a Norman nobleman who fought by William the Conqueror’s side at the Battle of Hastings, it’s possible he acquired the Viking sword on the field at Hastings.

What’s certain is that a few centuries later, the Viking blade had been remounted with the de Bohum coat of arms in gold and enamel on the pommel. Sir Humphrey de Bohun, 4th Earl of Hereford and Essex, fought at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, this time on the losing side. His nephew was killed by King Robert’s own hand and Sir Humphrey was taken captive. He would be exchanged for King Robert’s wife. daughter and a handful of other important Scots. The sword probably wasn’t used on the field at Bannockburn as it wasn’t au courant for mounted combat, but it could have been with Sir Humphrey as a side arm in camp. The broadsword is mentioned in his will just five years later.

Expectations for this sword were high, with a pre-sale estimate of £80,000 – 120,000 ($129,584 – 194,376). Expectations were dashed when this historically significant weapon failed to sell.

A 19th century vibrator, on the other hand, exceeded expectations. Only slightly used — the condition report describes the exterior as having “some light wear, scuffing and scratches, consistent with age” — it sold above estimate at £1,625 ($2,675). It’s actually quite ingenious, made out of celluloid and white metal by Dr. Benjamin Y. Boyd who patented it in 1893 under the suitably vague title of “electrical instrument for medical purposes.”

He minces no words at all in the body of the patent application, however. The device is an “improved electrical, urethral, vaginal, and rectal vitalizer” and check out how it’s powered:

It is composed of alternate cylinders of zinc and celluloid or other insulating substance, and silver, copper or other metal, so connected with a fluid, either acid, alkaline or neutral, on the inside of the combined cylinder, and moisture or secretions from the mucous membranes from the body, on the outside of said cylinder, as to form a series of electric batteries, when introduced into a mucous cavity, thus forming or producing a voltaic current of electricity at each cell. Each of these cells consists of three cylinders, a negative and positive element A O, separated by an insulator B. The current passes from a cylinder of one element through the affected part, to the cylinder of the opposite element.

That’s a lot of progress since Dr. George Taylor invented his steam-powered Manipulator 24 years earlier. Dr. Boyd kept the improvements coming, to coin a phrase, receiving another patent in 1895 for two versions of the “electrical instrument for medical purposes,” one a version of the 1893 device, the other with a dedicated rectal function.

In 1909 he gave male genitalia their chance at an electrotherapeutic apparatus. It consists of two cups, one shaped to fit the scrotum and the other the penis, that were filled with plain or medicated water (God knows what kind of medication he had in mind) and had a current sent through them. This would treat varicoceles and “diminished vigor” by “contracting the varicose veins and dilating the dorsa and other veins of the penis, thus curing the varicocele and restoring the natural vigor simultaneously.”

I wasn’t able to discover much of anything about the dedicated Dr. Boyd, but there is this juicy tidbit in a 1909 issue of the Illinois Medical Journal:

It is reported that Mrs. Leopoldine Boyd has filed a bill for divorce against her husband, Dr. Benjamin Y. Boyd, a Chicago physician, alleging that he had deserted the complainant and was living with another woman.

Why Dr. Boyd, you dirty dog, you.

Ship from doomed 1845 Franklin Expedition found

Modern(ish)

One of two ships from British explorer Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated 1845 expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage has been discovered off King William Island in northern Canada. The ship appears to be in excellent condition. It’s standing straight up, with the bow five meters (16’4″) off the sea and the stern four meters (13’1″). The sonar image indicates that the deck is largely intact. Even some of its structures are visible, including the stumps of the masts that were sliced off by ice when the ship went down. With the deck still in place in the frigid Arctic waters, archaeologists are optimistic that there will be well-preserved artifacts still inside the ship.

It’s the sixth time since 2008 that Parks Canada has led a search of the Arctic seabed for the Franklin ships. This year the search area was the Victoria Strait, between Victoria Island and King William Island in the Nunavut territory. It was the largest search yet, a partnership between private and public organizations including Parks Canada, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the Arctic Research Foundation, the Canadian Coast Guard, the Royal Canadian Navy and the government of Nunavut. They also had new technology on their side. Parks Canada recently acquired a remotely operated underwater vehicle which played a key role in identifying and documenting the wreck.

A team of Government of Nunavut archaeologists surveying a small island southwest of King William as part of the expedition has also made significant discoveries: an iron davit (part of the boat-launching mechanism) from a Royal Navy ship and a wooden object that archaeologists believe could be a plug for a deck hawse (the pipe through which the chain cable was threaded). The davit bears the telltale “broad arrow” marks of the Royal Navy and the number 12. These artifacts were found on September 1st, six days before the sonar encountered the ship. The discovery reinforced that the marine search was in the right area.

It’s not clear at this point which of Franklin’s ships it is. Sir John and 128 crewmen set out on his fourth Arctic expedition with two ships, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. He was 59 years old and it had been 20 years since his last trip to the Arctic. The ships were provisioned with enough tinned foods to last three years (unfortunately the cans were poorly soldered and lead leached into the food) and outfitted with steam engines and iron cladding to help the ships break through the year-round ice.

European witnesses — crew from the whaler Prince of Wales — last spotted the ships moored to an iceberg off Baffin Island on July 26th, 1845. Historians believe Franklin wintered on Beechey Island only to become trapped by the ice off King William Island in September of 1846. The crew left the icebound ships and tried to make their way south on foot, but disease, starvation and lead poisoning ultimately claimed all of their lives.

Finding out what happened to Franklin and his crew became a cause célèbre. Thirty-nine expeditions were launched over the next 50 years to find some trace of Franklin’s expedition. The first clues were found in 1850 on Beechey Island, including the graves of three crewmen. A later expedition found a letter on King William Island noting that Franklin had died there on June 11th, 1847. In 1854, Inuit hunters told Scottish explorer Dr. John Rae that they had witnessed Franklin crewmen dying while walking on the ice and that the few survivors had resorted to cannibalism. Osteological analysis of remains found on King William Island in 1997 confirmed that they had indeed been cannibalized. Franklin’s body was never found.

The search for the ships has taken on new urgency in the past few years as melting ice has increasingly opened the Northwest Passage to shipping. The statement on the find from Prime Minister Stephen Harper emphasizes the significance of the find as the historical foundation of “Canada’s Arctic sovereignty.”

First Viking fortress in 60 years found in Denmark

Medieval

Archaeologists from Aarhus University and the Danish Castle Centre have discovered the remains of a huge circular Viking fortress on the Vallø Estate, about 30 miles south of Copenhagen on the Danish island of Zealand. Only seven of these ringed fortresses have ever been discovered, all of them in Denmark or the southern tip of Sweden, and the last one was found 60 years ago. Its design is in keeping with the Trelleborg-type fortresses built by King Harald Bluetooth in around 980 A.D.

Much of this discovery was done in the research phase. Archaeologists suspected there was another fortress on Zealand. The Vallø site was a likely candidate because it was in a place where old Viking roads met close to the Køge river valley which in Viking times was a navigable fjord with one of the island’s best natural harbors. This made it an ideal setting for large military installation.

The team did a detailed laser survey of the site, measuring the minute features of the landscape. They found that a mound that was barely visible to the naked eye had a distinct circular outline. To investigate further before attempting excavation, they called in Helen Goodchild, an archaeological geophysics expert from the University of York, to do a magnetic survey of the site. Geomagnetic data derived from measuring variations in the magnetic field of the soil identified the archaeological features of a circular fortress.

The image from the geomagnetic survey revealed a massive structure 475 feet in diameter, which makes it the third largest of the Trelleborg-type fortresses after Aggersborg (787 feet in diameter), in Limfjorden, Denmark, and Borgeby (492 feet in diameter) near Lund in Scania, Sweden. The inner ramparts are 35 feet wide and circular, surrounded by a spiked palisade. Four gates are placed at the cardinal points of the compass. This is the same plan as the other Trelleborg-type fortresses.

Armed with this key information, archaeologists chose to dig in the areas most likely to produce information about the fortress as quickly as possible. The first trenches were dug at the site of two of the four gates. Both of them were burned down at some point. Large charred oak timbers were found at the north gate, a precious find both because the sturdy timber gate is another feature of the Trelleborg fortresses and because they’ll give us a precise date for the fortress.

Nanna Holm underlines that the fortress was a genuine military facility, and probably the scene of fighting as well. She’s in no doubt that it dates back to the Viking Age.

“Fortresses built like this one were only built in the Viking Age, and the burnt timber in the gates enables us to fix the date using radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology. We’ve sent off samples for analysis, and the result should be available in a few weeks’ time. The date will be vital. If we can establish exactly when the fortress was built, it will help us to understand the historical events with which it was connected.” […]

“We can’t wait to find out whether the fortress dates back to the time of Harald Bluetooth, or whether it was built by a previous king. A military fortification from the Viking Age may shed more light on the links between Zealand, ancient Denmark and the Jelling dynasty – as well as teaching us more about the period during which Denmark became Denmark,” says Holm.

Roam 1930s and 40s America in 170,000 pictures

Modern(ish), Multimedia

In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Resettlement Administration (RA), a New Deal program that aimed to relocate hundreds of thousands of farmers on exhausted land and migrant laborers to viable land in planned communities purchased with low interest loans. FDR established the program by executive order and Congress wasn’t a fan, to say the least, so it was underfunded from the start.

In an attempt to get the support of the public, the head of the RA, Columbia University economics professor Rexford Tugwell, appointed Roy Stryker, a former economics student of his at Cornell and an accomplished photographer, to lead the Historical Section of the RA’s Information Division. Stryker set up a photographic program to document the hardships of the farmers and their successes with the RA. He enlisted a cadre of exceptional photographers, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano (no relation to FDR) and Gordon Parks among them.

The photographers traversed the country, capturing rural and suburban farmers, migrant workers, their families, equipment and stock in every state. When the goal of resettlement soon died on the vine, the RA shifted focus to the construction of relief camps in California for migrant workers fleeing the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Stryker made sure his team of artists were funded and that their photographs were published in the mainstream press. These early RA pictures established the reputations of photographers whose images would soon become enduring symbols of America in the Great Depression.

On January 1, 1937, the RA was subsumed under the Department of Agriculture and in September of 1937 it was transformed into the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The photography program continued under the FSA for another five years until it was transferred to the Office of War Information. The FSA was eliminated and all the photographs in its files were sent to the Library of Congress. The OWI photography program focused on documenting the country’s mobilization in World War II. Farms gave way to airplane factories and migrant laborers to soldiers. The OWI was dissolved in 1945.

By the end of the decade-long FSA-OWI photography programs, they had generated an extraordinary archive of almost 170,000 pictures, prints and negatives. The archive was kept at the Library of Congress, grouped together with the Office of Emergency Management-Office of War Information Collection, the American at War Collection and the Portrait of America Collection. Because the LoC is consistently awesome, the archives have been digitized and made available to the public. You can even surf the exceptional color photographs of the FSA-OSI collection on the LoC’s Flickr page.

To make perusing this record, following in the footsteps of the photographs as they crossed the country, easier, a team from Yale University with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities have created a web platform called Photogrammar. You can search the database by keyword, date, location or select the name of a photographer and browse all of his or her work. The best part, though, are the maps. There’s one organized by county (the darker the green the more photographs) and one where each photographer is represented by a dot of a different color. I especially love the dot map with the 1937 Vico Motor Oil Map feature turned on, because you can see the movements of the photographers on the street map. You can see all the photographers on the maps at once, or you can select one at a time from the dropdown menu.

Then there are the data experiments that are still works in progress. I like the Metadata Explorer which illustrates the distribution of photographers over time and subject matter in California.

It’s a brilliant way to collate a collection so large that it’s quite beyond human scale. It’s also a time sink of massive proportions, needless to say, especially if you want to explore the photographs in greater detail by clicking on the Library of Congress Call Number which opens the picture on the LoC site where you can view them in high resolution which of course I did religiously.

Hampton Court Palace chocolate kitchen and recipe

Modern(ish), Museums

Since the restored Hampton Court Palace royal Chocolate Kitchen reopened to the public on Valentine’s Day of this year, it has been very popular with visitors. The palace website now has a great section about the Chocolate Kitchens and have recently uploaded a couple of fascinating videos.

The first covers the kitchen’s history, its rediscovery and the intense work that went into recreating the Georgian environment.
It was William III who introduced chocolate drinking to England when he arrived from Holland in 1689. He installed the Hampton Court Palace chocolate kitchen. It’s the only royal chocolate kitchen surviving today, but documents record him building chocolate kitchens at Kensington Palace and Windsor Castle as well. Subsequent monarchs continued the practice, each retaining his own chocolate maker who would travel with the court from palace to palace. It ended with George III who hated Hampton Court Palace and refused to set foot in the place; his successors followed in his footsteps

The reason nobody knew where the Chocolate Kitchen was is that after it stopped being used to make chocolate for the monarch and queen, it was used as a kitchen for the Grace and Favour Apartments where other members of the royal family sometimes lived. By the Victorian era when the palace was opened to the public, the existence of the Chocolate Kitchen had become a legend like the stories of ghosts and scandals used to attract visitors. Besides, many buildings had been demolished since Georgian times and a devastating fire in 1986 had caused much damage.

Then, in 2013, curatorial intern Charlotte Barker found an 18th century inventory document written after the death of William III that recorded every room in the palace and their locations, including the Chocolate Kitchen. It was known simply as Door Eight to the curators. It had been used as storeroom for the annual Hampton Court summer flower show and was filled with racks, pots, vases, steel shelves.

They figured the room would have been bare bones, all the original chocolate-making accessories long gone. When they removed the clutter, however, they found the full Georgian chocolate kitchen, with original shelves on the wall, the fireplace with a smoke jack inside the chimney, a prep table that folded down from the wall, a cupboard, and the Georgian version of a stove top: a pair of charcoal braziers in a brick housing. Charcoal was placed under the grates and then copper pots placed on top to melt the chocolate with whatever liquids (water, milk, liquor) and spices for the beverage.

A smoke jack, also known as a turnspit, is a mechanism that uses hot air rising from the fireplace up the chimney to turn a fan which turns a pinion that turns wheels that turn a chain that turns a spit over the fire. The one in the the chocolate kitchen wasn’t used to roast pheasants and great joints of beef, but only for roasting the chocolate beans. An automated roasting device was extremely high tech for any kitchen, never mind one dedicated solely to the production of chocolate.

Once the beans were roasted, the nuts were shelled and the innermost bits, the cocoa nibs, were made into chocolate. The curved slab of granite used as a mortar to grind the cocoa nibs would be placed over the brazier to keep it warm during the grinding process. Once the grind was smooth, the chocolate would be formed into flat discs and stored for a month for the flavors to meld.

Just down the hall from the kitchen is the Chocolate Room. It too was being used for storage but unfortunately wasn’t kept in pristine condition underneath the clutter. The late 18th century fireplace and barred windows were all that was left of the original fittings. They were able to recreate the shelves from the marks on the walls indicating where they had once been and were also able to restore damaged fireplace iron tools.

The real trick was outfitting the Chocolate Room with all the gear — chocolate pots, wooden whisks called molinets that were threaded through holes in the lids of the serving pots to give the beverage a nice froth, china and delftware cups, frames the cups were placed in, glass sweetmeat vessels — that were needed to present the royals with their delicious and luxurious beverage. The palace curators enlisted craftsmen who use the traditional methods so everything is as historically accurate as possible. Pewterer David Williams used period antique bronze and lead molds to make replicas of Georgian chocolate pots in the Ashmolean and V&A Museums, only the new pieces were are out of pewter instead of the silver and gold of the royal court originals.

Chocolate was often served with breakfast or after dinner and sweetmeats would have been among the foods on offer. Glassmaker Mark Taylor made the replica sweetmeat jars. Hampton Court Palace archaeological collection includes fragments of original chocolate cups. They were used by potter John Hudson to reproduce the exact cups the Georgian royal family drank out of.

It’s fascinating to see the archivists, curators, craftsmen and food historian at work recreating the Chocolate Kitchen and Room.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/2QslIjfi_-I&w=430]

If you want to try your own hand a Georgian style chocolate beverage, food historian Marc Meltonville has a fabulous instructional video on how to make Chocolate Port. He’s working in the Hampton Court Palace chocolate kitchen using the reproduction period tools and the chocolate he roasted and ground from the whole pod. It’s so hardcore. For the rest of who are not so cool, we can follow along starting with store bought chocolate that’s 80% or more cocoa solids.

The recipe calls for a pint of port to one ounce of pure chocolate, so teetotalers be warned. I’m guessing this was more for the after supper chocolate service rather than the breakfast of champions.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/fTq_nbKjhU8&w=430]

Here’s a written version of the Chocolate Port recipe (pdf), plus a 1692 recipe for the pure chocolate discs (pdf) that were the basis of all the goodies, and a very yummy looking chocolate cream dessert (pdf) from George I’s 1716 royal cookbook