Breakfast Links: Week of August 5, 2013

It may be the dog days of summer, but we still have only the freshest Breakfast Links for you - our weekly round of fav links to other web sites, blogs, articles, videos, and images, gathered from around the Twitterverse.
• The lost world of the 17th-18th c. London coffee houses.
• Five hundred old fairy tales discovered in Germany.
• A revolution for the young: exactly how old were the founding fathers (& mothers) in 1776?
• Medieval fertility and pregnancy tests.
• One-time commercial rivalries now recreated for glorious sport: 41st Annual Swale Sailing Barge Match.
• Doesn't that dress look familiar? How many times a single lavish costume appears in different films.
• "Please to remember the grotto": London's Oyster Day, important to Georgian & Victorian Londoners.
• The ladies' cabin, 1889: "The first thing an American woman requires to commence a journey is a suitable male escort."
• If I die young: a brief history of funeral invitations.
• The mansion in the shadow: an eccentric 19th c. NYC socialite builds a mansion behind her gargantuan Madison Avenue chateau where it sits vacant for 20 years.
• Twenty-two delightfully geeky facts about the Thames.
• How well do you know Jane Austen? Take the Janeiac quiz!
• An unexpected detail of Victorian streets: urine reflectors.
• An 18th c. "recipe" for knitting children's shoes.
• "Calligraffiti", inspired by work of medieval scribes.
• America's forgotten pin-up girl, the zaftig Hilda.
• Short video exploring 1919 Art Deco garment by Paul Poiret.
• This medieval reader is so engrossed in his book that he doesn't realize he's turning into a lion.
• Mrs. Astor is snubbed by the ghost of Anne Boleyn, 1916.
• Fascinating history of clowns & our fear of them, including Joseph Grimaldi, Charles Dickens, & Pierrot.
• The 70-year-old virgin, 1738.
• Included in Miss Leslie's 1864 advice to ladies: Never say slump, stoop, or mayhap.
• After the American Revolutin, a patriot edits his hymnal accordingly.
• Double vision? 18th c. sheet music with a printer's "slur."
• Working with worm-eaten mushrooms: an 18th c. recipe for ketchup, and nary a tomato in sight.
• Early Quakers wished to "wait together upon the Lord in Pure Silence," yet were associated with "roarings, yellings, howlings" and sexuality.
• "Ciao" was originally a way of politely decclaring "I am your slave" - more words with Italian origins.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.

Casual Friday: English vs. French Method of Directing Traffic

Loretta reports:

Some of the world's more entertaining traffic police have been filmed for TV.  Some are as graceful as dancers, some quite comical.

Here, Jacques Tati offers an interesting view of cultural differences in directing traffic. 

Illustration:  "Traffic squad police," showing a New York City officer in 1911 stopping a wagon to allow three women to cross the street, is courtesy  Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Go Fly a Kite (or a Carriage): The Charvolant, 1827

Isabella reporting,

Long before the Wright Brothers, the earliest pioneers of aviation relied on the wind to carry them into the air, whether in the gondolas of hot-air balloons, or, in a few disastrous examples, through feather-and-canvas wings. But one English visionary imagined an entirely different kind of wind-blown travel.

George Pocock (1774-1843), a schoolteacher, evangelist, and inventor from Bristol, was fascinated by kites as a way of harnessing the power of the wind. His experiments - one involved a kite-propelled chair that lifted his daughter over 270 feet into the air! – led him to design the "Charvolant"(flying or kite-carriage), lower right. Patented in 1826, the Charvolant was the first true horseless carriage. Relying on a pair of large kites on long lines for power, the Charvolant could carry six passengers at speeds of up to 25 mph. In his 1827 book, The Aeropleustic Art, or Navigation in the Air by the Use of Kites, or Bouyant Sails, Pocock recorded that on a straight road, the Charvolant could cover a mile in under three minutes. Pocock's prose certainly flies along, too:

This mode of travelling is of all others the most pleasant: privleged with harnessing the invincible winds, our celestial tandem playfully transpierces the clouds, and our mystic moving car swiftly glides along the surface of the scarcely indented earth; while beholders, snatching a glance at the rapid but noiseless expedition, are led to regard the novel scene rather as a vision than a reality.

Pocock and his Charvolants became popular sensations, and on one run between Bristol and Marlborough, a Charvolant passed the famously fast royal mail coach. But such break-neck speed could also lead to social disaster. One racing Charvolant showed abominable bad manners by passing the elegant horse-drawn coach of the Duke of Gloucester, a breach of etiquette that required the Charvolant's driver to come to a hasty, contrite stop to let the Duke pass.

Alas, the Charvolants had considerable drawbacks. They were difficult to control, and even a carefully-trained driver could find them challenging and unpredictable.  Despite Pocock's best efforts, they never developed into a practical method of transportation.  But in the idealized drawing from his book, above, showing a balmy landscape with fashionable passengers, Charvolants seem to be the perfect way to travel.

Above: Charvolants travelling in various directions with the same Wind
Below: Patent Kite and Charvolant
Both plates from The Aeropleustic Art, or Navigation in the Air by the Use of Kites, or Bouyant Sails, London, 1827
If you're interested in reading more - there's a slightly later edition of the book available to read for free on Google Books here.

Madam, Control Your Temper

Loretta reports:

So the question is, Does this make your blood boil?

~~~

Female Temper

It is particularly necessary for girls to acquire command of their temper, because much of the effect of their powers of reasoning and of their wit, when they grow up, depend upon the gentleness and good humor with which they conduct themselves. A woman who would attempt to thunder with her tongue, would not find her eloquence increase her domestic happiness. We do not wish that women should implicitly yield their better judgment to their fathers and husbands, but let them support the cause of reason with all the graces of female gentleness.

A man, in a furious passion, is terrible to his enemies; but a woman, in a passion, is disgusting to her friends ; she loses all that respect due to her sex, and she has not masculine strength and courage to enforce any other kind of respect. These circumstances should be considered by those who advise that no difference should he made in the education of the two sexes.

The happiness and influence of woman, both as wives and mothers, and indeed, in every relation, so much depends on the temper, that it ought to he most carefully cultivated. We should not suffer girls to imagine that they can balance ill humor by some good quality or accomplishment; because, in fact, there is none which can supply the want of tenderness in the female sex.


—The Ladies' Companion, Volumes 3-4, 1835

What Every Girl Should Know About Wearing Hoopskirts, 1938

Isabella reporting,

Fashion repeats itself, and supporting skirts from beneath - whether by a farthingale, hoops, or a crinoline, depending on the century - is a style that keeps coming back. We've featured it here on the blog many times, including here and here.

But until I came across a tearsheet from a 1938 Fall Fashion issue of Life Magazine, I'd no idea that hoops had also had a brief resurgence for evening wear in the late 1930s, an era that I'd always thought was defined by slinky, body-conscious bias-cut gowns. (This tearsheet was part of an amazing exhibition, RetroSpective, currently on display at the Museum at FIT, New York - I'll be writing more about this exhibition next week.)

The editorial copy in Life describing this "new" fashion in dance frocks, above left, is amazingly snarky, even for fashion reporting, including this gem: "American women, notoriously hippy, are expected to pounce upon the bell-shaped silhouette. The nipped-in waist, the wide-spreading skirt, are perfect camouflage for excess pounds below the waist...." And this was from a mainstream American magazine!

I also loved how these small, sarcastic cartoons, (as always, click on the image to enlarge) that illustrate the perils of wearing a hoopskirt in the 1930s were so similar to the challenges facing the Victorian ladies in their crinolines, as well as this poor 18th c. lady betrayed by her hoops. It made me think of what a 2013 fashionista would face if the cycle of fashion brings back hoops again: imagine wrestling the things through a modern airport security check, or onto a stool at Starbucks. But you never know....

Click here to read the entire feature on Fall Fashion, available online courtesy of GoogleBooks - including what must have been a pretty racy photoshoot of a model in a revealing black hoop petticoat and corset.

Top: "A hoop hangs under this black taffeta dress with blue ruchings", photo from Life Magazine, Sept. 5, 1938.
Below: "What Every Girl Should Know About Wearing Hoopskirts", illustrations from Life Magazine, Sept. 5, 1938.