Creative History

  “I believe the Frost was greater (if not more universal also) than any other within the modern memory of man.”  The words of Anglican clergyman William Derham when describing the winter of 1709 as he witnessed it in London. William Derham was both a minister and a natural scientist who lived in a suburb of London over three hundred years ago at a time when religion and science weren’t necessarily constantly at war with one another.  Today, Derham is best remembered as the person who first came up with an accurate way to measure the speed of sound, but while he was alive, in addition to giving thundering sermons from the church pulpit, Derham was also an enthusiastic meteorologist who kept detailed records of weather conditions and who beginning in 1697 and stretching all the way to 1735 religiously recorded the temperature several times a day--no pun intended. One such day when William Derham recorded the temperature was January 5, 1709, and on that day, he recorded...

  Despite being referred to as “The Flying Tailor” by many French newspapers in somewhat mocking reference to his day job, Austro-Hungarian born inventor and naturalized French citizen Franz Reichelt, who also often went by the more Francophied named of Henri Francois Reichelt, was considered a pioneer in the burgeoning field of parachute technology and development during the first decade of the twentieth century. Over the years Reichelt had experimented with winged parachute-suits that he believed would help a man to glide safely to the ground after being forced to jump out of a flaming dirigible or a stalled airplane that was about to come crashing down to earth. As of the year 1912 all the tests on the prototypes of  his winged parachute suits had been little short of abject failures.  Some in the media wondered if any of Reichelt’s winged parachute-suits were ever intended to work in the first place, or if the whole thing--leaping off of low rooftops and throwing ...

  It began on May 23, 1901 when the Paris Attorney General received an anonymous letter.  To this day, though there has been much speculation over the past 12o years, no one knows for certain who wrote that letter. The note stated: “Monsieur Attorney General I have the honor to inform you of an exceptionally serious occurrence.  I speak of a spinster who is locked up in Madame Monnier’s house, half-starved and lying on a putrid litter for the last twenty-five years--in a word--in her own filth.” The letter spoke of a once beautiful and captivating young woman, a socialite who had stolen the hearts of many a potential young suitor named Blanche Monnier from the central French city of Poitiers. Blanche, born on March 1, 1849 was the daughter of strict Catholic bourgeois parents Charles and Louise Monnier.  Her family name in central France was one of long-standing nobility and she was by birth a member of the French aristocracy. As a young woman Blanche was renowne...

            Completely devastated.  Damage to properties 100%.  Damage to agriculture 100%.  Impossible to clean.  Human life impossible. This is how the French government originally defined what it called Zone Rouge (the Red Zone) at the end of the First World War over one-hundred years ago in 1919.   Zone Rouge encompassed over 450 square miles of French countryside along the trench lines and no man’s land that had once made up the Western Front. At the end of the war areas within what the French government had defined as Zone Rouge were considered absolutely unfit for human habitation.  The Red Zone remained littered with hundreds of thousands of tons of unexploded artillery shells, countless human and animal remains and fetid toxic soil that was the result of chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas bombardments. Farming, forestry and human habitation were all banned within Zone Rouge.  Many of these res...