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Forgotten History


Again, if you read the article it tells you:

In the days before death benefits, pensions and social security, an aging widow had to fend for herself, even one who was a trained, experienced professional. Self-sufficiency or destitution. Sink or swim.

That’s how it was for Annie Edson Taylor, a schoolteacher from Auburn, N.Y. Her only child died in infancy; her husband died in the Civil War. In the ensuing decades, she moved from place to place, teaching school, giving dancing lessons, Texas, New York City, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Michigan, working incessantly to stave off poverty. By 1901 she was 62 years old, her prospects for continued employment diminished by advancing age in a world with no safety net.

So she hit upon a desperate idea – go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. If she lived, she could make a good living with a lecture tour, addressing big crowds eager to hear her describe her impossible achievement. If she died, well, that was another way to avoid the poorhouse.

Alas

At first, Taylor made some cash off her spectacular exploit. She received $200 for appearing at the Pan Am and another $200 making store appearances in Michigan and Ohio with her cat and barrel. But no lecture tour ever materialized, and she soon went broke. Another manager absconded with the barrel and started touring it with a much younger woman masquerading as the Heroine of Niagara. Within a couple of years Taylor was a fixture outside a restaurant on the American side, sitting alongside a replica barrel, selling postcards and her autobiography to tourists making their way to the Falls.

Taylor scraped by for several more years, an elderly widow on her own. In 1921, at 82, she entered the Niagara County poorhouse at Lockport, where she died, penniless. She was buried in the daredevils section of Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls, her grave and tombstone paid for by friends and admirers.
 
She sent her cat over first, technically making it the first to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel ...

It's not clear whether the cat was Annie's own or just a conveniently available feline. The point of the trial voyage with the cat was to see if Annie's custom-constructed barrel could survive the plunge.

Here's a photo of Ms. Taylor with the cat, taken minutes after fishing the cat and barrel out of the water. The cat had a bleeding wound on its head, and this may have prompted Taylor to wear padding around her own head (as illustrated in the previous photo).

AnnieTaylor&Cat.jpg

Annie Taylor was originally a schoolteacher who went on to live an interesting life prior to her Niagara stunt. In her later years she lived near the falls, signing autographs and hawking souvenirs in addition to working as a clairvoyant and performing magnetic therapy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Edson_Taylor
 
Whichever way you look at it, going over Niagara Falls in a barrel at 63 takes a huge amount of bottle. Or desperation.
 
It's not clear whether the cat was Annie's own or just a conveniently available feline. The point of the trial voyage with the cat was to see if Annie's custom-constructed barrel could survive the plunge.

Here's a photo of Ms. Taylor with the cat, taken minutes after fishing the cat and barrel out of the water. The cat had a bleeding wound on its head, and this may have prompted Taylor to wear padding around her own head (as illustrated in the previous photo).

Annie Taylor was originally a schoolteacher who went on to live an interesting life prior to her Niagara stunt. In her later years she lived near the falls, signing autographs and hawking souvenirs in addition to working as a clairvoyant and performing magnetic therapy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Edson_Taylor
I wasn't there (obviously) but the link in my above post claims the cat was hers and that it was Annie who later received a scratch on her head after her descent and not the cat.
 
I wasn't there (obviously) but the link in my above post claims the cat was hers and that it was Annie who later received a scratch on her head after her descent and not the cat.
Both of them received injuries.
Contrary to rumors at the time, the cat survived the plunge and seventeen minutes later, after she was found with a bleeding head, posed with Taylor in photographs.
Taylor was discovered to be alive and relatively uninjured, except for a small gash on her head.
 
Jeez, folks ... Has 2020 dulled your Fortean instincts? ... :roll:

I'm surprised no one's yet mentioned the cellphone in Annie's right hand (cf. the photo with the cat).
 
The cat looks very calm or is that a `before` photo?

I repeat ...

Here's a photo of Ms. Taylor with the cat, taken minutes after fishing the cat and barrel out of the water.
 
In 1920 a man named Charles Stephens went over the falls in a barrel. For stabilisation he had strapped his arms to the inside of the barrel, and placed an anvil at his feet.
When they found the barrel downstream, he wasn't in it anymore. Just his arms.
 
The Cat is saying "thank you for rescuing me from the washing machine, -and here I was thinking it was a good comfy place to sleep..."
 
Annie Taylor designed her barrel with an anvil attached at one end to help keep it upright, but she didn't attach the weight to herself.

As I understand it Stephens' barrel hit rocks and was broken during the initial fall, then became trapped in the underwater eddies behind the falls.
 
I like Hamblin's work. But this? For MW? :dunno::dunno::dunno:
 
Probably later [than 1920 to 50s] rather than earlier going by the fact it has FROZEN FOODS on it
I would have thought that, but I've just done some reading:

The very first working refrigerating machine, working on different principles from a modern one, was invented in 1755. Like most useful things, it was invented by a Scotsman: William Cullen. It did not find a practical application, but it worked.

The modern technique of using a compressor and refrigerant was proposed in 1805 and a working model was made by 1834, although it was not a commercial proposition. The first commercial ice making machine was produced in 1854.

The modern domestic refrigerator was developed before the first world war. By 1927, a model was introduced that went on to sell a million units.

So an estimate of 1920s - 50s for the brass shopping list gadget is not unreasonable. The sort of person who had a brass shopping list gadget (rather than a simple handwritten list) would probably be fairly wealthy and what we now call an "early adopter" so it is entirely reasonable that someone in the 20s–50s would have used the device shown.
 
I would have thought that, but I've just done some reading:

The very first working refrigerating machine, working on different principles from a modern one, was invented in 1755. Like most useful things, it was invented by a Scotsman: William Cullen. It did not find a practical application, but it worked.

The modern technique of using a compressor and refrigerant was proposed in 1805 and a working model was made by 1834, although it was not a commercial proposition. The first commercial ice making machine was produced in 1854.

The modern domestic refrigerator was developed before the first world war. By 1927, a model was introduced that went on to sell a million units.

So an estimate of 1920s - 50s for the brass shopping list gadget is not unreasonable. The sort of person who had a brass shopping list gadget (rather than a simple handwritten list) would probably be fairly wealthy and what we now call an "early adopter" so it is entirely reasonable that someone in the 20s–50s would have used the device shown.
Here's a couple more ..

ashoppinglist2.jpg


ashoppinglist3.jpg
 
An interest subject and some victorian examples are intriguing:

View attachment 31762

The one item I was surprised to see listed is curry!
I looked it up and the first mass produced home freezers came on the market just after WW2. I bet there's someone who collects these metal shopping lists.

I've just had to look up Hominy and Sago. I didn't know margarine has been around for so long, I'd always assumed it was a '70's invention what with the 'is this butter or margarine?' TV adverts in the '70's.
 
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The one item I was surprised to see listed is curry!
This is a tangent which I wanted to follow up and came across the following:

Dripping, apples and milk: Making curry the Victorian way
By Lauren Potts
BBC News
17 January, 2015

A Victorian curry recipe featuring sour apples and dripping has surfaced in East Yorkshire. It is one of the more extreme examples of how Indian cuisine has evolved in British hands.

On page 77 of a notebook belonging to a domestic servant from East Yorkshire, there is a recipe for curry.

Eleanor Grantham's Victorian version of Indian cuisine combines half a pound of meat, two sour apples and a cup of milk with unspecified amounts of dripping, onions and curry powder.

But while its ingredients are unlikely to get mouths watering in the way a modern Madras might, it was good enough to grace the dinner table of Manor House in Willerby in 1890.

"The earliest British recipe for curry was 1747, which is a lot earlier than this recipe, but as far as the region is concerned, it's the earliest recipe we've found," said Sam Bartle, collections officer at the East Riding Archive where the recipe was discovered.

"I'm told the Victorians were quite keen on curry - it was the height of the British Empire so there were interactions with places like India, so it's not surprising."

[...]

"Curry powder is probably an English product, because we didn't have all those spices in those days, because they were expensive of course.

[...]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-30718727
 
I bet there's someone who collects these metal shopping lists.
Most certainly, they are eminently collectable I would have thought. I know there is a large collectors market for antique jelly moulds and butter presses, etc.

Lovely things and surprised I have never seen one on Bargain Hunt or its many subsequent derivatives.
 
The one item I was surprised to see listed is curry!
I noted that also included therein is 'BOVRIL, OXO'.

Sufficiently intrigued, I have looked into the history of both and they are extraordinary stories, especially the latter.

If of interest and trusting on topic:

A brief history of Bovril
Source: BBC - Stoke and Staffordshire
Date: 19 October, 2096

http://www.bbc.co.uk/stoke/content/... invented by a,known as Johnston's Fluid Beef)

Taking stock - The OXO story
Source: Kent Life
Date: 19 July, 2010

https://www.kent-life.co.uk/people/taking-stock-the-oxo-story-1-1639171
 

Bovril was invented...in the 1870s.

The name Bovril comes from a name found in a book by the inventor
.”

Quality, in-depth research there.

The book was The Coming Race, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. lt was published in 1871, and uses the idea of a mystic form of energy known as vril.

bovril-cows.jpg


“Scientific execution” to obtain a scientific drink

Helena Blavatsky read between its lines, and thought that Bulwer-Lytton was describing lightly-fictionalised history. She ran with that ball, and the keen Fortean can follow it all over the park, from George Bernard Shaw to German WW2 missile technology...

maximus otter
 
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