1700's medical illustrators be like "hey boss can I put a rhinoceros behind this anotomically correct sketch of the human skeleton" and the boss be like "only for the books being published in these specific european countries" and then they high-five and go out for drinks
yoooo that’s Clara the rhinoceros - she was towed around Europe so much in the mid 18thc. as an exotic attraction that she became like a fad and all sorts of artists drew, painted, and sculpted her (and also randomly stuck her in the bkgds of anatomical drawings)
lol, for everyone asking about the ‘void face’ woman - she’s wearing a mask called a ‘vizard’ or ‘moretta’. they originally show up in late 16thc upper class European ladies fashion. They were worn while traveling to maintain a fashionably pale complexion, but they evolved over time to become a popular component of masquerades.
In Venice in particular, the style lingered and became popular to wear during Carnival, or as a way for upper class women to disguise their identity so they could engage in activities that might otherwise be considered improper (gambling, flirting, or just like... going about the city without a proper chaperone)
an interesting construction note - these masks weren’t tied on. They were made with a bead or button attached inside the mask which was held between the teeth. If a wearer wanted to speak, she would have to remove the mask.
New personal work: Victorian Girlfriends, or: The New Colors of 1858
I love to read about fashion history. In 1856 a young chemist
accidentally discovered aniline dyes, which could produce more vibrant
purples&pinks more cheaply than ever before. Those colors became
fashion hits.
Painted with Photoshop & Wacom Intuos tablet
(I might be turning this into a regular blog for my illustrations I guess…)
this image of Mongolia's best known paleontologist standing in between the fossilized arms of Deinocherius is undeniably the most powerful image in paleontological history
Maria Clara Eimmart, Ten Depictions of Heavenly Phenomena, (late 17th century)
Immart was the daughter of the history painter, portraitist and amateur astronomer Georg Christoph Eimmart, with whom she collaborated. Her father was director of the Malerakademie in Nürnberg but also established a private observatory. She was given a broad education in the fine arts, and specialized in botanical and astronomical illustrations. She made a series of some 350 drawings of lunar phases, observed by telescope, and captured on distinctive blue paper. Twelve of these were given to conte Marsili, a scientific collaborator with her father, of those twelve, ten survive in Bologna. She shortly thereafter married her father’s pupil and successor, the astronomer Johann Heinrich Müller and died in childbirth.
The komusō (literally “priest of nothingness” or “monk of emptiness”) were a group of Zen Buddhist mendicant monks who wandered the roads of Edo period Japan. They would play elaborate tunes on their bamboo flutes as they begged for alms, their faces (and thus, their ego) completely concealed by a distinctive hood woven from straws or reeds. Unsurprisingly, many were recruited as spies or were actually ninja or ronin in disguise, and eventually their temples and their schools were abolished for meddling in material affairs instead of spiritual ones.
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
“And even as he watched the rescue unfolding that morning, he would have understood that for the living, everything which could have been done had been done: not a single survivor was lost or injured being brought aboard the Carpathia. For those who had gone down with the Titanic, save for reverencing their memory at the service later that day, there was nothing more that he or anyone could do. Rostron’s duty now was as he always saw it: to the living.”
I looked up a bit about this because the post is so movingly written that when I read it aloud to my husband and mother they both wept like babies, and something else really struck me about this story.
So Carpathia was not a top-end luxury liner. Her reputation was for being Jolly Comfortable - she was very broad in her proportions, and not super-duper fast, and the result was that she didn’t rock so much on the waves and you couldn’t particularly hear/feel the engines. She was solid and dependable, and lots of people liked using her, but she therefore occupied a lesser niche than Titanic or Olympian or whatever - and crucially, as a result of that, she only had one radio operator on board. This means she only had radio ops for a certain window in the day, unlike Titanic, which had 24 hour radio ops.
So on that night, when Titanic went down, Carpathia’s wireless operator - one Harold Cottam - clocked off his shift at midnight, and went to bed. While he was getting ready for bed, though, he left the transmitter on for the hell of it, and therefore picked up a transmission from Cape Race in Newfoundland, the closest transmitting tower sending messages to the ships. They told him that they had a backlog of private traffic for Titanic that wasn’t getting through. So, even though his shift was over, and it was now 11 minutes past bloody midnight, and he just wanted to go to bed, Harold Cottam decided that nonetheless, he’d be helpful, and let the Titanic know they had messages waiting.
And that’s how he received the Titanic’s distress signal. In spite of no longer being on shift to receive it, and therefore in order to send Carpathia galloping to Titanic’s rescue, and thus saving 705 people.
All because Harold Cottam decided one night to be kind.
Cottam also ended up staying awake for something like 48 hours straight trying to send survivors messages and a list of survivors home, but due to Carpathia’s limited radio frequency range and with no other ships to act as a relay, this was rather patchy. However, he tried his damn best to make sure the survivor’s messages got home, and was also bombarded with incoming messages of bribes to spill the details of the disaster to the press.
Rostrum had ordered that no messages to the press be sent out of respect to the survivors, for they would have their privacy destroyed as soon as they reached New York. Cottam respected this order, even under extreme duress of fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that in some cases the bribes were almost three times his annual salary.
He eventually went to bed but not before working with one of the rescued Titanic’s radio operators, Harold Bride, to transmit as many messages as possible. Bride was injured (his feet had been crushed in a lifeboat) and had just passed the body of the second of Titanic’s radio operators aboard (Jack Phillips), so neither of them were really in the best shape to keep working, but they did.
In the face of extreme adversity, both men refused to do anything but their duty (and exceeding their duty) not just because Rostrum had ordered it, but because it was the right thing to do. They could have profited considerably from the disaster and they refused for the dignity of the survivors.
This is hopepunk. This is what we can be, what we are, when instinct takes over. This is what we are when we choose to care about each other. We’re not profit machines or units of production or lone fierce wolves in a bitter wilderness. We are people, and we care about people.
I wrote a post a couple of years ago, wondering why there hadn’t been a documentary or docu-drama about the ‘Carpathia’ rescue run.
There are probably sound reasons why not, one of which is probably that getting yet another ‘Titanic’ project greenlit is far easier - name recognition, pre-sold property, multiple conspiracy theories to play with (all discredited, but when did that stop the “History” Channel?)
Here are a couple of stories about ‘Carpathia’:
As @mylordshesacactus has already said, her boilers and engines were rated for no more than 14 knots and, when she managed 17.5 for the only time in her life it’s said (I hate the phrase but I have to use it) that the Chief Engineer hung his hat over the main pressure gauge so no-one - including himself - could see how far its needle was into the red.
Captain Rostron, a religious man, was seen on several occasions standing privately on the exposed bridge wing with his own hat raised and his mouth moving in silent prayer, and when daylight revealed the extent of the ice-field his ship had passed without harm, he only said “There must have been another Hand on the wheel than mine…”
There’s another problem-of-sorts about a screenplay set aboard ‘Carpathia’ - an astonishing lack of that easy dramatic tool, conflict. Captain Rostron decided he was going to the ‘Titanic’s assistance, and that was that. AFAIK not a single passenger or crewman - not one - questioned the wisdom of his decision either then or afterwards, even when…
…‘Carpathia’ headed at more than full speed, in the dark, through dangerous waters where an iceberg had apparently just sunk an “unsinkable” ship.
It’s easier to write - and sell - a story about pride, arrogance, stupidity, rich against poor and lives lost through hubris, than it is to write one about people who rallied round and did the right thing at the right time, not for reward but because it was the right thing to do.
Ahhhhhhh!!! Go read it! Go read it!! The cording was plied by Neanderthals!!! The article talks about how we can’t keep thinking about them as being stupid it’s so delightful! In these trying times, let’s read about some joyful anthropological and archaeological discoveries!!!
Read it! The fact that it’s plied is so exciting! For plied cord, you first spin your fibers in one direction (they did it clockwise) and then take that collection of singles and twist them in the opposite direction (in this case counterclockwise). So it’s a process that requires planning and experience. You spin your first bit, you set it aside, you spin your second and third, you ply them. You can’t do it all in one go. And unless this piece happens to be the work of the very first person to spin fibers, and that person was a super genius who not only invented the idea of spinning but the technique for plying, it shows that the Neanderthals were communicating technological skills amongst each other. Which I mean isn’t news in and of itself, but this is just one more piece of evidence.
Holy shit this is incredible! The puts textile technology at 40,000 - 50,000 years old; the earliest previous evidence we had was 20,000 - 25,000 years.
And also, like the poster above said, this is evidence of *planning*. I was going into the article thinking “hmmm, extremely cool but probably thigh-spun two ply which is a single stage process…?” but no! This is three ply cord! I guess it might be possible to do thigh-spun three ply (be bloody tricky though which would be evidence of skill in itself), but more likely this was a highly skilled multi-stage process.
the-real-numbers
janey-jane
project-fandom-leap
kristinagehrmann
irisharchaeology
salparadisewasright
fruitpilled-peachcel
rudygodinez
occultbleed
thejollywriter
girlwithakiwi
becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys
armoured-escort
duckbunny
deadcatwithaflamethrower
mother-entropy
petermorwood
joasakura
femchef
needsmoreresearch
systlin
spin-measure-cut
