The Young War Gamers Who Changed the Course of WWII

The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest single campaign of the Second World War. Lasting from the very first day of the war in Europe to the very last, the battle pit German U-boats against Allied merchant shipping in a struggle for control of the Atlantic sea lanes, essential to keeping the British Isles supplied with food, fuel, and other raw materials. So vital was this lifeline to Britain’s survival that Winston Churchill would later write:

“The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. I was even more anxious about this battle than I had been about the glorious air fight called The Battle of Britain.”

Throughout the conflict both sides suffered dramatic reversals of fortune, until late 1943 when the Allies finally wrested control of the Atlantic from the Germans. While this success is often attributed to the introduction of superior weaponry such as escort carriers, long-range patrol aircraft, and radar, the real key to victory was doctrinal, with the Allies learning through trial and error how best to use tactics and technology to counter and neutralize the U-boat menace. And pivotal to this learning process was a unique unit of young women who, for three years, spent nearly every day holed up in an attic in Liverpool playing out elaborate combat scenarios with model ships on the floor. They were the Western Approaches Tactical Unit, or WATU, the war gamers who helped win a real war.

Almost the moment war was declared on September 3, 1939, the German Navy or Kriegsmarine launched a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare against Allied merchant shipping in the Atlantic. Its goal was to starve Britain into submission and bring its leaders to the negotiating table, and early on it seemed as though the Germans might just succeed. Between July and October 1940 U-boats sank nearly 1.5 million tons of Allied shipping, and by 1941 had reduced Britain’s yearly imports from a pre-war total of 68 million tons to a mere 26 million tons. In 1942, Admiral Karl Dönitz, head of the U-boat arm, calculated that if he could inflict sustained losses of 700,000 tons per month, Germany would win the war.

What makes these losses even more staggering is the fact that unrestricted submarine warfare was nothing new, the Imperial German Navy having employed the exact same strategy some 20 years before. However, a number of factors resulted in the lessons of the Great War falling by the wayside. Among these was the British Admiralty’s inherent disdain for submarines, which First Sea Lord Sir Arthur Wilson had infamously dismissed as “underhanded, unfair, and damned un-English.” Consequently, Royal Navy doctrine in the interwar years barely mentioned submarines at all, and the strategy of grouping merchant shipping into convoys – which had proven so effective against U-boats during the First World War – had largely been abandoned by the start of the Second. Adding to the Admiralty’s woes was the loss of their naval bases in Ireland in April 1938 and the German occupation of France in May 1940, which simultaneously limited British access and increased German access to Britain’s vital Western Approaches.  It was also hamstrung by its rigid command structure wherein warship commanders were given very little individual initiative, leading to convoy escorts being lead on frequent wild goose chases on orders from shore.

But even after the Royal Navy managed to reorganize itself into a more effective anti-submarine force, it still faced the problem that although British naval doctrine had not moved on since 1918, German doctrine had. During the First World War, German U-boats had operated alone, with each commander seeking out and sinking targets on his own initiative. This approach, however, had been rendered ineffective by the introduction of the convoy, so between the wars the German Navy developed the rotte, or “wolf pack” tactic. In this system, U-boats patrolled in extended lines across known convoy routes. When a U-boat located a convoy, it would radio in its position to headquarters, which would then order the whole pack to converge on the convoy and attack as a group, overwhelming the escorts. While the Allies were aware of this overall strategy, they did not know exactly how U-boat wolf packs approached and attacked convoys. And aside from a few enterprising individuals like Frederic “Johnny” Walker and Clarence Howard-Johnson, few escort commanders possessed effective tactics for protecting their convoys and sinking U-boats when attacked.

To help solve this problem, in January 1942 Admiral Cecil Usborne formed the Western Approaches Tactical Unit or WATU, a dedicated war gaming and analysis organization under the command of Commander Gilbert Roberts. A career officer who had joined the Navy as a cadet at the age of 13, from 1935 to 1937 Roberts studied at the Portsmouth Tactical School where he became an avid practitioner of war games, especially those developed by Frederick T. Jane, founding editor of the famous Jane’s military reference guides. In 1937 Roberts was given command of the destroyer HMS Fearless, which was sent to patrol the Iberian coast during the Spanish Civil War. In October 1938, however, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, declared medically unfit to serve at sea, and forced to retire from the Navy.

Roberts’s posting to the WATU proved fortuitous. Not only was he an avid war gamer and a skilled communicator, but according to author Terence Robertson:

“It seemed that by design or accident all the misfits of the navy had congregated at Liverpool Among his brother officers were many of his own kind—“passed overs”— who at some stage or other had become red-tape rebels But the vast majority were officers of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, week-end sailors churned out by the recruiting machine often with inadequate training The Royal Naval Reserve, those independent merchant men who would become sore boils in big ship wardrooms, somehow fitted in here by providing their expert seamanship to balance the ignorance of the willing, but the lamentably “green.”

However, Roberts’s colleagues and staffers described him as a difficult man to work with – stubborn, demanding, and argumentative. But whatever his faults, his work with the WATU would prove decisive in securing Allied victory in the Atlantic.

Housed on the top floor of the Western Approaches Command Headquarters in Derby House, Liverpool, the WATU was mainly staffed by members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, or “Wrens,” many of whom were as young as 17 at the time of the unit’s founding. Some, Like Laura Howes and Janet Okell, were hired for their mathematical or tactical skills; others, like Nancy Wales, for their proficiency in team sports – in Wales’s case, hockey. 66 Wrens in total would serve in the unit between 1942 and 1945.

The WATU’s task was to play through both actual and hypothetical encounters between convoys and U-boat wolf packs in order to work out the tactics used by the Germans and develop potential countermeasures. This was done on a large playing surface laid out on the floor in the largest room in the building, which was divided into ten-inch squares each representing a nautical mile. Merchant ships, escorts, and U-boats were represented by small wooden models, each of which was given precise attributes based on their real-life counterparts, such as maximum speed, minimum turning radius, and sonar, radio, and weapons range. Wrens playing as escorts stood behind cloth screens and could only view the board through small peepholes, while those playing as U-boats were given an unrestricted view. To further complicate matters, lines representing the courses of U-boats were traced in green chalk, nearly invisible against the brown floor, while the courses of the merchantmen and escorts were traced in white. Each team was given two minutes to confer and issue their orders, which were conveyed using slips of paper to prevent the other team from overhearing. The Wrens quickly became ruthlessly efficient at their jobs, with 19-year-old Janet Okell defeating Western Approaches Commander and WWI submarine veteran Admiral Max Horton no less than five times in simulated combat.

One of the first problems solved by WATU was how U-boats were managing to sink merchantmen in the interior of convoys. At first, naval planners assumed that the U-boats were attacking from the outside of the convoy as they had during the First World War, but given that escorts operated up to five thousand yards out from the convoy and German torpedoes only had a range of 5,400 yards, this seemed unlikely. By replaying past convoy battles, WATU determined that the U-boats were actually attacking the convoy from within, approaching from behind while surfaced and using their superior speed and the cover of darkness to slip past the escorts unnoticed. In response, the WATU developed a counter-strategy known as Raspberry, whereby upon a ship being torpedoed, the escorts to the sides and rear of the convoy would fall astern into a line abreast and drive forward blasting their sonar, while the forward escorts would zig-zag ahead of the convoy. This would effectively trap the infiltrating U-boat, all but guaranteeing its destruction. The tactic’s name came from Wren Jean Laidlaw, who likened the maneuver to “blowing a raspberry at Hitler.”

Another tactic developed by WATU, code-named Pineapple, was intended for use against U-boats lying in wait ahead of the convoy. Upon detection of the U-boat, the escorts were to steam ahead at full speed for 15 minutes, blasting their sonar and firing star shells, before falling back into their regular positions. This would in theory scare off the U-boat and prevent it from observing and reporting other escort tactics like Raspberry. When this tactic was first demonstrated to a visiting Royal Canadian Navy officer, he pointed out that the diagram looked rather like a pineapple, and the name stuck.

Another tactic called Beta Search used the opposite approach. Once the U-boat was detected, one escort ship was to advance towards it without using its sonar, firing star shells, or dropping depth charges. If, as predicted, the U-boat submerged, the escort would sail over it, tricking the U-boat Captain into thinking he hadn’t been spotted. But a submerged U-boat was far slower than a surfaced one, making it vulnerable to the rest of the escorts, who, under the cover of the convoy, would advance and drop depth charges on the U-boat’s predicted position.

In late 1943, Roberts began receiving reports that U-boats had begun targeting the escorts themselves. These attacks, however, were highly unusual; though in every case the escort spotted the U-boat and turned towards it, they were somehow always torpedoed from behind. Roberts realized that the Germans had developed an acoustic torpedo, which homed in on the sound of a ship’s propellers. This torpedo, which the Germans called the T5 Zaunkönig the Allies the German Navy Acoustic Torpedo or GNAT, was first deployed in August 1943 and threatened to tip the balance of power in the Atlantic in favour of the U-boats. However, in an inspired bit of deduction Roberts predicted that the torpedo’s acoustic could only track targets inside a 60-degree cone directly ahead of it, and developed a tactic known as Step-Aside to exploit this weakness. Upon spotting a surfaced U-boat, an escort was to fire a star shell, announcing to the U-boat that it had been spotted and forcing it to submerge and fire its torpedo. The escort would then make a hard 150-degree turn and accelerate to full speed, placing it outside of the torpedo’s acoustic cone, before homing in on and attacking the submerged U-boat. Along with decoy noisemakers called Foxer and CAT which were towed behind escorts to deflect acoustic torpedoes, Step-Aside effectively negated any advantage granted by the new technology.

In addition to developing new antisubmarine tactics, the WATU also ran regular training courses to teach these tactics to naval officers. Starting in February 1942, these courses ran six days a week every week until July 1945. In total over 5000 personnel participated in these courses, including officers from RAF Coastal Command and allied nations such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, Poland, Norway, and Free France. WATU also compiled regular memos known as Atlantic Convoy Instructions which were distributed to every escort ship operating in the Atlantic. In this manner Western Approaches Command was able to keep pace with changes in German doctrine and stay one step ahead of the U-boats. The results were dramatic: from 120 ships sunk in October 1942, by December losses had fallen to only 76 and continued to decline steadily thereafter. The success of WACU inspired the creation of sister organizations in Londonderry and Belfast, Northern Ireland; Irwell and Osprey in Scotland; Halifax in Canada; Freetown in Sierra Leone; and Bombay in India. But perhaps the greatest testament to the unit’s effectiveness was the fact that in U-boat headquarters in Flensburg, Germany, Admiral Dönitz hung up a photograph of Commander Gilbert Roberts with the caption:

“This is your enemy, Captain Roberts, Director of Anti U-boat Tactics.”

By May 1943, a combination of new tactics, larger numbers of escort carriers and long-range patrol aircraft, radar and direction-finding technology, and the reading of German Naval Enigma traffic had made U-boat losses unsustainable, forcing Admiral Dönitz to largely withdraw his fleet from the North Atlantic. Though submarine operations would continue until the bitter end, the U-boat arm would never again be the formidable force it once was in the first three years of the war.

Following the end of major U-boat operations in the Atlantic, WATU switched to developing anti-submarine tactics in support of the D-day landings in June 1944. Once again they were highly successful, with relatively few Allied ships being sunk by U-boats in the English Channel before the end of the war in Europe in May 1945. The Western Approaches Tactical Unit officially ceased operations two months later, having played a pivotal role in keeping the Atlantic sea lanes open and the Allied war machine marching towards victory. In recognition of their efforts, in July 1945 Admiral Horton sent the following message:

“On the closing down of WATU I wish to express my gratitude and high appreciation of the magnificent work of Captain Roberts and his staff, which contributed in no small measure to the final defeat of Germany. You had a great deal to do in winning the war because if we hadn’t won the Battle of the Atlantic we should undoubtedly have lost the war!”

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

• The Crazy Story of the Biggest POW Camp Breakout of WWII
• The Original Dungeon Masters
• The Real “Doc” Holliday

Expand for References

Strong, Paul, Wargaming in the Atlantic War, MORS Wargaming, October 2017, https://paxsims.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/2017-12-10-watu-mors.pdf

 

Sloan, Geoffrey, The Royal Navy and Organizational Learning – The Western Approaches Tactical Unit and the Battle of the Atlantic, Naval War College Review, Autumn 2019, https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8066&context=nwc-review

 

Western Approaches Tactical Policy, April 1943, Juno Beach Centre, https://ift.tt/c7vu6Gh

The post The Young War Gamers Who Changed the Course of WWII appeared first on Today I Found Out.

from Today I Found Out
by Gilles Messier - December 10, 2022 at 08:09PM
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The One-Eyed Barnstormer Who Invented the Space Suit in the 1930s

The space suit has become synonymous with the astronaut, defining the occupation more than any other piece of equipment. Essentially flexible, one-person spacecraft, space suits protect astronauts from the harsh environment of outer space and have been key to countless spaceflight achievements, from walking on the moon to the building the International Space Station. But while humans first reached space in 1961, the technology behind space suits was pioneered some 30 years before in the depths of the Great Depression, by a maverick one-eyed aviator from Oklahoma named Wiley Post.

Wiley Post was an unlikely aviation pioneer. Born in Grand Saline, Texas in 1898 to a large family of farmers, Post moved to Oklahoma at the age of five. Though interested in machines from an early age, Post was not cut out for formal education and dropped out of school after the eighth grade, choosing instead to work on the family farm while teaching himself science and mathematics. Like many pilots of his generation, Post was became enthralled with aviation after seeing a flying demonstration at a local county fair. As he later recalled:

“To this day I have never seen a bit of machinery that has taken my breath away as did that old [Curtiss D] pusher. The old urge to fly came over me, and straightaway I embarked on my aviation career.”

Determined to one day own and fly his own aircraft, Post began studying automobile repair and radio operation in Kansas City, then set off to work as a roughneck during the Oklahoma oil boom of the early 1920s.This work proved less steady than he hoped, and Post briefly turned to armed robbery, serving a year in jail in 1922. Following his release, Post befriended a local barnstorming troupe, Burrell Tibbs and his Texas Topnotch Fliers, and learned that their parachute jumper had been injured and could no longer perform. Figuring that this was as good an entry into aviation as any, Post volunteered to take his place on the weekends, working in the oilfields during the week. Over the next two years Post would perform nearly 100 jumps, often earning $200 a jump (about $3000 today). Then, in 1926, an accident nearly ended Post’s aviation career before it had even begun. A fellow roughneck was pounding a bolt with a hammer when a small metal sliver flew out and embedded itself in Post’s left eye. The eye soon developed a serious infection which threatened to spread, so Post gave his doctor permission to remove the eye. Thereafter he often wore an eyepatch which would soon become his signature. With his depth perception ruined, however, Post had to completely relearn how to gauge distance and altitude while flying:

“I didn’t stay discouraged. I practiced gauging depth on hills and trees. Then I would step off the distance. At first, my mental calculations were far off, but by the end of two months I was a better judge of distance than I had ever been. If they ever changed the height of a phone pole or a two-storey building, Id be in trouble. That’s how I sight myself in.”

Yet what could have been a career-ending tragedy turned out to have a silver lining, as Post was awarded $1800 in workman’s compensation benefits for the accident. He immediately used this to buy an old Curtiss Jenny biplane and went into business as a freelance pilot, flying oilmen to inspect their wells during the week and barnstorming on weekends. In 1927 Post eloped with a Texas rancher’s daughter named Mae Laine, spiriting her away in his biplane. However, the engine failed shortly into their escape, forcing them down near the town of Graham where they convinced the local parson to marry them.

Shortly thereafter, Post head that wealthy Oil Tycoon F.C. Hall was looking for a personal pilot, and camped out outside Hall’s office in Chikasa, Oklahoma in order to land the job. As Hall and his family found flying in an open-cockpit biplane uncomfortable, he sent Post to Burbank to pick up a brand-new Lockheed Vega. Introduced in 1928, the Vega was a highly-advanced design for its day, with a lightweight but durable fuselage made of moulded plywood, a strong high-mounted cantilever wing, and a streamlined NACA cowling over its powerful 450 horsepower Wasp engine. Post immediately fell in love with the aircraft, which Hall named Winnie Mae after his daughter, and began dreaming of using her to break aviation records.

But it was not to be. After barely a year, Hall decided that Post’s salary and Winnie Mae’s upkeep was too expensive, and ordered Post to return the aircraft to the Lockheed factory in Burbank. For the next year Post worked a sales representative and test pilot for Lockheed, until on June 5, 1930, Hall unexpectedly called and asked Post to return along with Winnie Mae. When Post revealed the original aircraft had been sold to Nevada Airlines, Hall simply bought another one. With Hall’s blessing, Post upgraded the aircraft with a supercharger and a larger fuel tank in order to compete in the 1930 Men’s Air Derby, a prestigious air race between Los Angeles and Chicago. Amazingly, despite losing 40 minutes due to a compass error, Post won the race by over an hour. Hall was elated, and not only allowed Post to keep the $7500 prize money, but agreed to bankroll any future flight records he wanted to attempt. Thinking big, Post set his sights on a round-the-world flight. At the time, the record was held not by a heavier-than-air aircraft but the dirigible airship Graf Zeppelin, which had accomplished the feat in 1928 in 21 days. Post was determined to change that.

In the early morning hours of May 23, 1931, Post and Navigator Harold Gatty took off from Roosevelt Field in New York in the heavily-modified Winnie Mae and headed northeast towards Harbour Grace in Newfoundland. What followed was an epic 24,903 km journey that would take Post and Gatty across the Atlantic to Liverpool and Hanover, across the vast Russian steppe from Moscow to Khabarovsk, across the Pacific Ocean to Fairbanks Alaska, and back to New York via Edmonton and Cleveland. When  they landed back at Roosevelt Field, 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes after taking off, their reception rivalled that of Charles Lindbergh three years before, with Post and Gatty being honoured with lunch at the White House and a ticker tape parade through New York City.     

But all was not banquets and tributes. Though Post and Gatty had collaborated closely on planning the flight, the press painted Gatty as the real brains of the operation and Post as merely a hired pilot. Stung by this snub, Post decided to repeat his round-the-world flight – but this time flying solo. To accomplish this feat, Post needed two brand-new pieces of technology. The first was an autopilot, which would help reduce fatigue on the longer legs of the journey. Though none were commercially available at the time, Post convinced the Sperry Gyroscope Company to let him install their prototype in Winnie Mae. The second piece of equipment was an automatic radio direction finder that would allow Post to navigate  using civilian radio stations. This had been developed by the U.S. Army, who were more than happy to let Post to test it under actual flight conditions.

Post set off alone from Floyd Bennet Field, New York, on July 15, 1933. 26 hours later he landed at Tempelhof airport, becoming the first pilot to fly nonstop from New York to Berlin. Post had planned to make only four more refuelling stops at Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk, Fairbanks, and Edmonton, but mechanical trouble with the autopilot forced him to land in Moscow to have it repaired. Over the trackless wastes of Siberia  and the Pacific Ocean the autopilot proved invaluable, even allowing Post to lightly doze off. To prevent himself from falling asleep, Post tied a wrench to his finger with a string; if his grip loosened the wrench would fall out and jolt him awake. Yet despite this the flight was fraught with difficulties. On several occasions Winnie Mae became stuck in the Siberian mud and the locals had to drag her out, while just outside Fairbanks the engine failed, forcing Post to crash-land in the town of Flat, Alaska, and wait for mechanics to arrive. But when Post finally landed back at Floyd Bennet Field on July 22, his reception exceeded that of his previous flight, with 50,000 New Yorkers breaking through fences and gates to mob the famous aviator. Post’s solo journey had taken only 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes – smashing his previous record by almost an entire day.

But while Post had secured his place in the history books twice over, he was far from finished, and immediately began casting about for new challenges. The perfect opportunity came in 1934 when the Australian city of Melbourne organized an epic transcontinental air race to celebrate its 100th Anniversary. Sponsored by the MacRobertson Confectionary Company, the MacRobertson Air Race challenged pilots to fly from RAF Mildenhall in England to Flemington Race Course outside Melbourne – a distance of some 18,000 kilometres – with mandatory refuelling stops at Baghdad, Allahabad, Singapore, Darwin, and Charleville. The thrill of the race and the £15,000 prize money proved irresistible to Post, and he immediately began preparations to enter the race. Unfortunately, by this time Winnie Mae was beginning to show her age, and would be seriously outclassed by the advanced aircraft types flown by the other competitors. But Post had a plan: he would fly at an altitude of 9,000 metres, where the air was thinner and he could fly faster. Furthermore, his research indicated that there were powerful high-altitude winds at these altitudes that would help him on his way. Today these winds are known as Jet Streams.

But Post faced a major problem: how to breathe and remain conscious at such altitudes. The ability of the lungs to absorb oxygen from a gas mixture like air is dependent not on its proportion but rather its partial pressure – the contribution that the oxygen makes to the overall pressure of the mixture. As altitude increases, the proportion of oxygen in the air remains steady at around 21%, but its partial pressure decreases along with the overall air pressure, meaning that above 3,000 metres humans not acclimatized to high altitudes begin to suffer from hypoxia or oxygen starvation. But such altitudes are not inherently fatal, and over time the body acclimatizes by producing more oxygen-carrying hemoglobin in the blood. In this manner residents of mountainous regions like the Himalayas and the Andes are able function normally at altitudes up to 5,000 metres. But there is a limit to such acclimatization: above 8,000 metres – an altitude known to mountaineers as the death zone, sustaining life for any useful period becomes all but impossible.

Thankfully, this barrier is easily overcome by breathing pure oxygen. While the overall pressure of the oxygen remains low, the fact that its proportion in the gas mixture is now 100% brings its partial pressure up to breathable levels. Breathing oxygen is effective up to altitudes of around 12,000 metres, above which atmospheric pressure is so low that even pure oxygen has insufficient partial pressure to sustain life. While it is possible to breathe pressurized oxygen, this introduces a new problem: the difference in pressure between the outside atmosphere and the inside of the lungs makes it very difficult for a pilot to exhale. Fighter pilots are trained to exhale forcefully or “pressure breathe” at high altitudes, but this quickly becomes exhausting and is only used in emergencies for short periods to allow the pilot to descend to a safer altitude.

But hypoxia and difficulty exhaling are not the only dangers pilots face at high altitudes. Above 12,000 metres low pressure can cause nitrogen bubbles to escape from the tissues, leading to decompression sickness – AKA the Bends. Expansion of gas in the inner ear and digestive tract can also cause extreme pain and tissue damage. Above 19,000 m the pressure is so low that any exposed moisture – including that in the mouth and lungs – will start to boil away, destroying the lungs’ ability to absorb oxygen. This is known as the Armstrong Limit, after Major General Harry Armstrong, the U.S. Air Force flight surgeon who first described this phenomenon.

For these reasons, aircraft flying at altitudes above 3,000 metres typically feature pressurized cabins. To prevent unnecessary stress to the aircraft structure, most aircraft are pressurized not to sea level but a higher but tolerable altitude – typically 2,100 for most commercial airliners. Unfortunately, however, the Winnie Mae’s plywood fuselage could not be made airtight, and installing a pressurized capsule around the would have made the aircraft far too heavy. For Post, there was only one solution: he would pressurize his own body instead.

The idea of the pressure suit was not an entirely new one. In the late 1920s and early 1930s researchers like Oxford professor Dr. John Haldane and American adventurer Mark Ridge had experimented with modified diving suits to allow pilots to make high-altitude balloon flights. However, none of these early suits ever made it past the prototype stage. To help build his suit, Post partnered with engineer Russel S. Colley of the B.F. Goodrich Company. Together, Post and Colley constructed a serious of three prototype pressure suits, each more sophisticated than the last. The first was constructed from an airtight rubber bladder covered in a rubberized-canvas outer later to protect the bladder from damage and prevent it from ballooning under pressure. The suit was split into upper and lower halves connected and sealed by a metal clamp at the waist. This was topped with a cylindrical aluminium helmet with two bulges to accommodate headphones, a rectangular glass viewing port, and a small door over Post’s mouth to allow him to eat and drink. Unfortunately, this prototype ruptured while being pressure-tested at Wright Field in Ohio. The second prototype fared little better, as it proved so tight that Post could not get it off, forcing the suit to be cut away from his body.

The third prototype, however, would form the template for nearly every pressure suit to come. Like the previous two it was made of rubber covered in canvas, though it was constructed in one piece, with Post entering through the rubberized collar like a diving suit. Pigskin boots and gloves protected the hands and feet from damage, and the suit was topped by a cylindrical aluminium helmet with a circular viewport. The suit was pressurized using air bled off Winnie Mae’s engine supercharger and heated by a coil wrapped around the exhaust manifold, enriched from a portable bottle of liquid oxygen. The whole affair was custom-made for Post, the helmet’s viewport being offset to the right to align with Post’s good eye and the oxygen inlet positioned to vent the cold oxygen onto his eyepatch.

Though more advanced than any suit that had come before, Post and Colley’s creation suffered from a problem that has dogged pressure suit designers ever since: when the suit was inflated, the joints became stiff and immovable, limiting Post’s range of motion. The helmet also tended to ride up atop the suit, obscuring his vision. Though modern pressure address this issue using accordion-like convolutes at the joints and a system of restraining cables, the best solutions Post and Colley could come up with were aluminium hinges to help the knees and elbows bend and bandolier-like straps to hold the helmet down. The suit was also tailored to fit Post in the sitting position, which made walking to and from the aircraft extremely awkward.

Yet despite these problems, the suit worked. Following preliminary testing in an altitude chamber, on September 5, 1934, Post made the world’s first flight using a pressure suit, reaching an altitude of 12,800 metres over Chicago. Post reported that the suit was reasonably comfortable and did not interfere with his ability to pilot the aircraft. Later that year Post made eight flights over Bartlesville, Oklahoma in an attempt to break the world altitude record. Though he reported reaching an altitude of 15,200 metres (about 50,000 feet), on every attempt the official altitude recording equipment installed by the National Aeronautic Association and National Bureau of Standards failed, and Post was denied an official record. On the bright side, these flights did allow Post confirm the existence of the high-altitude winds he was so eager to exploit.

By this time, however, Post had missed out on competing in the MacRoberston Air Race due to a broken supercharger, and instead he turned his attention to breaking the transcontinental speed record between Los Angeles and New York. Once again his plan was to fly in the stratosphere, using the high-altitude jet stream to speed his progress. Sponsored by Phillips Petroleum and TWA Airlines, Post modified Winnie Mae for the attempt by fitting her with detachable landing gear that could be jettisoned after takeoff to reduce drag, and a wooden skid under the fuselage for landing. After making five flights over Burbank to test the aircraft and his pressure suit, on February 22, 1935, Post took off on his first transcontinental attempt. Unfortunately, his engine began leaking oil barely 30 minutes into the flight, forcing Post to land on Muroc Dry Lake Bed in the Mojave desert only 90 kilometres away. Unable to remove his pressure suit, Post walked to the nearest house for assistance, reportedly causing the occupant to faint at the sight of him. Later, Post’s mechanics determined that the leak was caused by emery powder poured into the engine; someone had deliberately tampered with the aircraft.

Undaunted, Post repaired his aircraft and on March 5 he tried again. This time he made it as far as Cleveland before his oxygen supply ran out. Encouragingly, his calculations revealed that flying in the jet stream had given him an average ground speed of 446 km/h – nearly 160 km/h faster than Winnie Mae’s regular top speed. Post tried again on April 14 and June 15, but was brought down by engine failure both times. Post decided that Winnie Mae was too old and tired for future attempts and sold her to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, where she remains on display to this day.

Wiley Post’s record-breaking days were also at an end. On August 15, 1935, Post and humorist Will Rogers had just taken off from Point Barrow, Alaska in a Lockheed Orion-Explorer floatplane when the engine suddenly failed, sending the aircraft plunging into the lake and killing both men. Post was only 36. But in his short time on earth, he left an indelible mark on the world of aviation and pioneered technologies that would help mankind explore beyond the confines of planet earth. Nearly every modern space suit – from the A7L suits the Apollo astronauts wore on the moon to the EMUs used by the crew of the International Space Stations – can trace their origins to a rubber-and-canvas contraption built by a one-eyed barnstormer from Oklahoma.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

• Where Does Outer Space Actually Begin?
• The Final Frontier Part 4: The U.S. Plan to Nuke the Moon, Why People Thought the Moon was Made of Cheese and Much More
• The Fascinating World of Apollo Astronaut Life Insurance Policies

Expand for References

Nevin, David, The Pathfinders, The Epic of Flight, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 1980

Young, Amanda, Spacesuits – The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum Collection, Powerhouse Books, New York, 2009

Jenkins, Dennis, Dressing for Altitude, NASA, Washington DC, 2012

The post The One-Eyed Barnstormer Who Invented the Space Suit in the 1930s appeared first on Today I Found Out.

from Today I Found Out
by Gilles Messier - December 09, 2022 at 06:14PM
Article provided by the producers of one of our Favorite YouTube Channels!
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Did People in Medieval Times Really Have Bad Teeth?

The Medieval Period (which began at the fall of Rome in the 5th century and is generally agreed to have ended in the 15th century, dovetailing into the early renaissance) is often portrayed by pop culture as being a time when peasants

walked around with mouths filled with blackened, rotted teeth, and bodies covered in excrement and muck from lack of proper bathing habits. But is any of this actually true?

Let’s start with teeth, shall we? On this one, our understanding of Medieval dental hygiene has been rather poorly informed up until relatively recently. As one representative of the British Dental Association noted in 2004, “Our ancestors were far more aware of the value of a good smile than we have previously given them credit for.”

In fact, it turns out that Medieval doctors, surgeons, and healers were well aware of a number of dental ailments including plaque, cavities and, naturally, bad breath. On top of that, they knew how to treat these conditions. Or, at least, treat them with the tools and medicine available at the time.

That said, given their limited tools, it is noted that by far the most common treatment for a tooth gone bad was simply to have it pulled, usually by a blacksmith or barber. However, Medieval surgeons did have the ability to create rudimentary fillings to save a tooth, using materials including beeswax, grease and arsenic, because why not? The price of such procedures sometimes put them out of the reach of most common folk, which, well, wasn’t really all that big of an issue seeing as it was mostly wealthy people with bad teeth…

As we mentioned in our article on why pineapples were considered the ultimate symbol of wealth for a brief, but hilarious period in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries- so much so that renting a pineapple by the hour to show off at parties was a thing- sugary food and sugar itself was for a significant period of history, only something the most wealthy could afford. Even fruit, which is rich in natural sugar, was rarely consumed by peasants, with their diet mostly consisting of grains, vegetables, and calcium rich foodstuffs. You know, the diet that almost perfectly mirrors the recommended diet by dentists today.

This means that, for the most part, the teeth of Medieval people were likely better than those of many today, particularly those who avoid dentists like we all avoid confronting the fact that not only are we all going to die, but everything we do, good or bad, will ultimately be forgotten, as will ourselves and all our descendants, and for that matter the entire human race and all of existence…Nothing matters, including you…

In fact, archaeological research has shown that “for much of the 2000-year period between the Iron Age and the end of the Medieval period”, less than 20% of teeth appear to show any evidence of tooth decay whatsoever. For comparison’s sake, similar, albeit more robust studies of the teeth of modern Americans show that this figure sits closer to 30%. As you’ve probably surmised, this figure is near universally agreed to be higher due to the abundance of sugar present in modern diets. It’s also worth noting that this figure is better than it was at the turn of the 20th century, when sugar was more readily available, but dental care was not, nor even when available nearly up to modern standards. Around this time some sources claim that anywhere upwards of 90% of teeth of adults showed evidence of decay in some western populations.

These figures, however, aren’t representative of wealthy people during the Medieval Period, who, despite having access to better dental care, often had worse teeth because of their sugar-rich diets. King Richard III, for example, who ruled during the latter half of the 15th century reportedly had terrible teeth based on an analysis of his skeletal remains, even having several teeth removed. As you might expect, it’s thought the sorry state of his teeth was almost certainly a byproduct of his wealth and privileged position which allowed him to endlessly indulge his sweet tooth.

In addition to being less at risk of cavities due to a diet naturally low in sugar, Medieval peasants are known to have routinely cleaned and maintained their teeth. Historical documents note that peasants would clean their teeth with rough linen or twigs similar to how we use toothbrushes today and would likewise chew on pleasant smelling herbs to freshen their breath as we would use toothpaste or mouthwash. This latter fact has led historians to conclude that clean teeth and fresh breath was just as desirable a trait during Medieval times as it is today because, shocker, people had noses back then too. There’s even an Medieval recipe for whitening teeth using a combination of sage, salt and the herb, elecampane, which has been used since ancient times to “fortify” teeth.  These remedies were all, of course, available to wealthy people, but the excess of sugar in their diets made them far less effective, meaning tooth decay was still more common with the rich and powerful.

Going back to chewing on twigs, the general method here was to chew one end of a twig for a time, then once it was properly mashed up, use that end as a sort of tooth brush. In fact, in some cases, while they didn’t know it at the time, the twigs or roots used actually contained antibacterial substances, perhaps why certain plants became so popular for this purpose as people observed the effects, even if they didn’t understand why they worked so well at cleaning the mouth and teeth. Turns out humans of any era we have historical record for, while they didn’t maybe have our understanding of things, were not stupid.

In addition to basic dental hygiene, peasants even had cures for ailments as serious as mouth cancer. Though these cures obviously were likely mostly ineffective, because, cancer. That said, they often made use of herbs such as sage and rosemary to mask the smell of gangrenous pus, again suggesting a particular stigma surrounding foul breath.

Speaking of bad breath, curiously enough, many early folk remedies from the Medieval period for bad breath made extensive use of mint. In fact, one folk remedy in particular tells readers that an effective cure for, as it calls it “stinking of the breath” is to gargle a mixture of mint, wine and birch before roughly scrubbing the teeth and gums. Just for a second, let the last part of that sentence soak in for a moment- peasants in Medieval times were aware of how important it is to clean your gums to keep your breath fresh. Keep in mind that dentists today still have to routinely tell patients not to forget to clean their gums when brushing their teeth.

So yeah, while we feel it is important to constantly remind people with their rose colored glasses that the past was just the worst and they sound like absolute ignorant fucking dumbasses who really should crack a history book once in a while when they say things like “I wish I lived in literally any time period but right now in history”… in this one rare case, I mean, while we’re not going to say it was better to live in the past, because we have some pretty awesome options for dental care that medieval people would have given their right molar’s for, and I think we can all agree a good Oreo Blizzard at Dairy Queen is worth the need for the occasional dentist checkup, the fact remains that Medieval peoples in the general case probably had better teeth than most of the people reading this. Just, you know, those sparkly medieval teeth had to be attached to bodies that lived in the past which was, say it with me- the worst.

Now, moving on from teeth to bathing and that side of hygiene, Medieval peoples had a rather fun way to do this that made your Saturday date night dinner with your partner look rather tame, which we’ll get into shortly. Yes, it turns out that, once again, humans during medieval times were just as keen as humans today to not stink, because, noses. Except for, of course, certain individuals… We’re looking at you Chris. Ya, take a bath dude.

First, let’s discuss washing hands, beyond doing so during a morning body scrub down from a basin (which by the way also seems to have include a good daily teeth scrub as mentioned), hands were also usually washed again before and after eating. Remember, this was a time before widespread use of utensils, and the fork at one point was actually viewed as sinful to use anyway for hilarious reasons we’ll get into in the Bonus Fact later.

Beyond eating with one’s hands, particularly those of lower classes also often ate and drank from the same containers as well. From this, it should come as no surprise that getting your hands clean before eating was considered good manners, and cleaning the fingers after was also something of a necessity to get remnants of food off.

Moving back to bathing, at least during medieval times, while some medical professionals did advise against doing it excessively, many others extolled the benefits of bathing regularly at keeping one healthy. For example, Italian physician Magninius Mediolanesis, who functioned as a court physician as well as for a time Regent master at the University of Paris, in the 14th century notes,

The bath cleans the external body parts of dirt left behind from exercise on the outside of the body… if any of the waste products of third digestion are left under the skin that were not resolved by exercise and massage, these will be resolved by the bath.

He also recommended bathing as a means to cure or ease discomfort, such as for the elderly and women who are pregnant.

Of course, when talking full body baths, only the reasonably well off at this point could actually afford to own a bath of some sort and to supply it with hot water, so most relied on bath houses, rivers, lakes, hot springs, etc. Thus, poorest of the poor who could not afford to go to a bath house are generally thought to have had extremely poor hygiene during the winter months, outside of washing using basins. But this wasn’t exactly by choice.

For the rest, bath houses were common, particularly after the 11th century when crusaders, who had become accustomed to such and the excellent hygiene habits of Muslim and Jewish peoples, popularized and regularly frequented these establishments not just for bathing purposes, but also to socialize and get spicy.

In fact, if we fast forward to the 15th century, bathing and eating at bath houses were often combined. As noted in the book: Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity, by Virginia Smith:

By the fifteenth-century, bath feasting in many town bathhouses seems to have been as common as going out to a restaurant was to become four centuries later. German bath etchings from the fifteenth century often feature the town bathhouse, with a long row of bathing couples eating a meal naked in bathtubs, often several to a tub, with other couples seen smiling in beds in the mid-distance.

While this might seem a little odd at first glance through a modern lens, consider that many people today enjoy soaking in a hot tub or pool with their friends while drinking alcoholic beverages, which is not too dissimilar to these former bath house practices, except now usually featuring skimpy bathing suits.

Going back to bath houses, given that many were connected to bakeries in order to use heat from their ovens to warm the water, let’s face it, there’s no way one could sit there in the water smelling freshly baked bread and not develop a voracious appetite.

And speaking of voracious appetites, given that many bath houses were not gender divided and featured naked, now clean people having a good time together, it should also come as no surprise that bath houses were known to be places to go to have a REALLY good time…

For those without a non-paid partner, these establishments were also frequently places to find or engage the services of exceptionally good smelling ladies of the night.

As you might have guessed from all this, many church groups looked down on bath houses for that reason. For example, consider this excerpt from an 11th century minister known as Burchard of Worms,

If thou, being a married man, hast shamed the nakedness of any woman, as, I say, her breasts and her shameful parts- if thou hast, thou shalt do penance for five days on bread and water. But if thou art not married, two days on bread and water.

Hast thou washed thyself in the bath with thy wife and other women and seen them nude, and they thee? If thou hast, thou shouldst fast for three days on bread and water.

However, contrary to popular belief, on the whole at this time, it doesn’t seem as if most church organizations had a big problem with the bathing itself, just the perceived immorality exhibited at many bath houses. For example, 6th century Pope Gregory I is known to have encouraged Christians to bathe regularly. And, as alluded to, Muslim and Jewish groups were likewise known to be even more fastidious than their Christian brethren about keeping clean.

As for the Christian church in Europe, to solve the issue of a whole lot of nakedness and lovin’ taking place at bath houses, it became relatively common for bath houses to be built by the various church groups themselves near monasteries. The difference between these bath houses and the other variety was that they were a whole lot less fun… Specifically, separating areas for men and women, instead of mixing them.

Further demonstrating that most church organizations did not really have anything against the act of bathing itself, many monasteries actually piped water into their own, sometimes elaborate baths, and even required the clergy to bathe before many events. For example, at Westminster Abbey, they required their monks to bathe for Christmas, Easter, at the end of June and at the end of September. This doesn’t mean, however, that the monks weren’t bathing elsewise, just that they were required to do so during these periods. In fact, evidence seems to indicate they bathed much more frequently than that, as they seem to have employed a bath-attendant year round at that Abbey.

So if people during medieval times actually did bathe reasonably frequently, where did the perception that they did not come from? This came about thanks to the latter end of this period and beyond where people really did start bathing less.

As to why, to begin with, around the mid-14th century about 60% of the European population died within about seven years or so- not too dissimilar to “The Snap”, but in this case because of the Black Death. This saw the former popular practice of people communing in bath houses together start to become decidedly less popular for a time, though it seems to have picked back up after.

Things went the other way again around the early 16th century when diseases like Syphilis were rearing their ugly heads in Europe. Around this same time, a popular notion arose in some regions of Europe that water could carry disease into the body through the pores in the skin, especially hot water.

It wasn’t just diseases from the water itself they were worried about. They also felt that with the pores widened after a bath, this resulted in infections of the air having easier access to the body. Hence, bathing, particularly at bathhouses, became connected with the spread of diseases.

Of course, given countless people were all bathing together in the same warm water, sharing food, and even sometimes having sex, this probably did genuinely invite the spread of disease at these establishments. Further, even in home baths water still was commonly shared with many people, as hauling it all in was no small task, and even much more work and cost if choosing to heat it up as well.

Thus, the popularity of bath houses began to significantly decline around when Syphilis was making the rounds. As noted by Dutch philosopher Erasmus in 1526,

Twenty-five years ago, nothing was more fashionable in Brabant than the public baths. Today there are none… the new plague has taught us to avoid them.

And to be fair, when choosing to be a little more stinky or getting the literal plague or syphilis without modern medicine available… Ya, solid choice ancestors. Checks out…

But, again, then, as now, people tended to still not like to stink if they could help it. Thus, without the bath houses around or as popular, many began mostly relying on the age old method of washing using a basin and the like as a primary means to keep clean, as well as, when weather permitted, taking dips in lakes and rivers.

To further get around the stink problem, people who could afford it took to frequently changing their linen undergarments, as well as rubbing themselves down with freshly clean linen or scented rags. Various perfumes were also used, as well as the practice of wearing small bags containing fragrant herbs. Herbs, such as salvia officinalis, bay leaves, and hyssop, were also commonly rubbed under the armpits and elsewhere for use as a deodorant.

That said, while most still bathed occasionally, just less frequently than before, it does appear that some, even among the nobility, really did forgo full body bathing at this point, or at least they’d claim such.

For example, one Russian ambassador to France noted, “His Majesty [Louis XIV] stunk like a wild animal.” Russians were not so finicky about bathing and tended to bathe regularly even after their European brethren had largely abandoned bath houses. King Louis XIV’s stench seems to have come from the fact that his physicians advised him to bathe as infrequently as possible to maintain good health. He also stated he found the act of bathing disturbing. Because of this, he is said to have only bathed in a bath twice in his lifetime.

Another in this “gruesome two-some” class among the aristocracy was Queen Isabel I of Spain who claimed that she had taken a full body bath only twice in her lifetime, when she was first born and when she got married. Of course, in both cases, they are perhaps forgetting many times servants perhaps bathed them as children. And given certain moral attitudes of the day, particularly in the case of Isabel, it may be that they were just saying they didn’t ever bathe, rather than this actually being the case.

Whatever the case, amazingly, these post-medieval time attitudes against regular full body bathing in certain pockets of Europe lingered among some groups until around the mid-19th century.

But to sum up, there doesn’t actually ever seem to be a time in recorded history that people are known to have ceased bathing in some form altogether, with the record for the least hygienic not going to our ultra distant ancestors like medieval peoples or those before, but to our more recent ones, with the abandoning of better hygiene by some groups around the 16th century and beyond thanks to widespread disease and the development of more prudish attitudes. And as for teeth? Ya, they probably had better teeth than you thanks to meticulous daily dental care, combined with diets more conducive to the health of teeth and gums than yours.

Bonus Fact:

Some of the earliest known table forks made their debut in Ancient Egypt. The Qijia culture (2400-1900 BC) that resided in part of present day China also are known to have used forks. A couple thousand years later, the fork’s popularity in the Western world spread via the Silk Road into Venice, with one of the earliest recorded instances of forks in Venice coming from an 11th century story of the wedding of a Byzantine princess, Theodora Anna Doukaina, to Domenico Selvo.She supposedly brought gold forks as part of her dowry. However, the God fearing Venetians saw these pronged monstrosities as a slight against The Lord himself who gave us perfectly good fingers to eat with. And if you’re now thinking we’re exaggerating, consider this quote from St. Peter Damian: “God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks – his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to Him to substitute artificial metallic forks for them when eating.”Of course, in the Book of I Samuel (2:13)- thought to have been composed around 640-540 BC- it states that Jewish priests’ assistants used forks: “And the priests’ custom with the people was, that, when any man offered sacrifice, the priest’s servant came, while the flesh was in seething, with a fleshhook of three teeth in his hand…”Such trivial mentions as usage in the Holy scriptures by none other than the priests’ servants themselves didn’t stop many religious elite from vilifying the fork and poor Theodora. (They also didn’t like that she used napkins, among other things.)When the princess died two years later of a mysterious degenerative disease, it was considered by some to be punishment for her pride and perceived excesses.Despite being mentioned as OK to use in the Hebrew Bible, forks in the Western world continued to carry this negative stigma due to their association with Eastern decadence and being perceived as an affront to God.

The fork’s popularity began to grow, however, during the 16th century due to the infamous historical trend setter Catherine de Medici. She helped popularize the fork with the French tables after her marriage to Henry II. At this time, anything Italian was in vogue thanks to the Renaissance.

The fork also became more popular as hygiene ideals began to change, particularly as people started bathing and washing less frequently around this time, as previously noted. Naturally, the fork began to seem increasingly attractive to those who preferred their food to be free of anything on their hands.

However, many men still rejected them as they were considered too feminine. This attitude began to alter when they began to be crafted with ruffled cuffs…. This might seem strange to us, but let’s not forget that high heels were originally invented for men, who also commonly wore tights…

On that note, when forks began gaining in popularity, this resulted in less of a need for a pointed knife during meal times. As such, in 1669, Louis XIV- the same guy who loved doing up his hair, wearing tights, and high heels as was the manly fashion at the time- made these overly sharp knives illegal at the table and replaced them with blunter / wider ones.

That said, it wouldn’t be until the Industrialization period that the lower and middle classes began commonly using forks, thanks to the reduction in price. When this happened, forks quickly surpassed knives as the most popular cutlery item.

Finally, any mention of the history of cutlery would not be complete without giving a nod to the fact that ancient spoons in China also sometimes featured a pointy end to be used as a one prong fork / knife… perhaps the first known instance of the spork or spnife, depending on how you want to look at it.

Expand for References

• WHAT WAS DENTAL HEALTH LIKE IN THE MIDDLE AGES?
• Middle Ages Hygiene
• Medieval Times and Dental Health
• Medieval teeth ‘better than Baldrick’s’
• Atlantic Monthly Company, 1945
• Oral Health and Frailty in the Medieval English Cemetery of St. Mary Graces
• Ancient Herbs
• King Richard III’s teeth and jaw reveal monarch’s anxious life and violent death

The post Did People in Medieval Times Really Have Bad Teeth? appeared first on Today I Found Out.

from Today I Found Out
by Karl Smallwood - December 09, 2022 at 02:05AM
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Review: Funday Food Salted Caramel Kettle Cooked Potato Chips

Salted caramel is a flavor that we've been seeing on all sorts of snacks in recent years, but it still hasn't made inroads into the potato chip business . ...

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by December 07, 2022 at 08:01PM

How Close Did the Nazis Actually Come to Building an Atomic Bomb?

On August 6, 1945, the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay flew over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and dropped a single, 4,000 kilogram uranium bomb called Little Boy. Seconds later the bomb detonated with the equivalent power of 15 thousand tons of TNT, destroying 8 square kilometres of the city and killing an estimated 90-140,000 people. Three days later the  B-29 Bock’s Car dropped the 5,000 kg Fat Man plutonium bomb on the city of Nagasaki, killing a further 39-80,000. The age of nuclear weapons, which would cast its shadow over the following century and beyond, had begun. But while the first atomic bombs have become inextricably linked with the war in the Pacific, they were initially intended for use not against Japan, but rather Germany. From its inception, the vast scientific and industrial undertaking known as the Manhattan Project was built around fear – fear that Nazi Germany would be the first to develop an atomic bomb, placing in the hands of Adolf Hitler the ultimate weapon of terror and mass destruction. But how close were the Germans to actually developing the bomb, and is it possible that the Second World War could have ended very, very differently?

The Allies had good reason to fear that Germany was far ahead in the race to build an atomic bomb. After all, over the course of the war German scientists would produce some of the most advanced weapons the world had ever seen, including the first jet fighters and ballistic missiles. It was also German scientists who first discovered the principle of nuclear fission. In December 1938, chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman bombarded a sample of Uranium with neutron particles, generating atoms of the much lighter element Barium. Suspecting that the neutrons had split or “fissioned” the Uranium nuclei into smaller pieces, Hahn contacted his former colleague Lise Meitner, who, as a Jew, had fled Germany for Sweden. Meitner, along with her nephew Otto Frisch, soon developed a theoretical explanation for fission and, in January 1939, conducted experiments confirming Hahn and Strassman’s results. Hahn and Strassman, however, had already submitted their findings to the scientific journal Naturwissenschaften.

The implications of this discovery were immediately obvious, and in April 1939 a secret meeting of German scientists was convened in Berlin to discuss the possible applications of nuclear energy. During this meeting the possibility was raised of building an atomic bomb, prompting chemist Paul Harteck wrote a memo to German War Office or Reichswehr stating that:

“…an explosive many orders of magnitude more powerful than the conventional ones [could give] that country which first makes use of it an unsurpassable advantage.” 

 The theoretical feasibility of such a weapon was further confirmed by physicist Hans Geiger, and the Reichswehr agreed to fund a formal nuclear research program. On September 1, 1939, the Second World War erupted as German forces stormed into Poland. At the end of that month a second meeting of scientists was convened by physicist Kurt Debner, attended by such luminaries as Abraham Esau, Walter Gerlach, Erich Schumann, Walter Bothe, Klaus Clusius, and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg – the most famous scientist in Germany at the time. By the end of the meeting the attendees agreed to focus their efforts on three main goals essential to the development of an atomic bomb: the construction of a functioning nuclear reactor or “uranium machine,” the separation of Uranium isotopes, and research into fast neutron fission. While officially designated the Uranprojekt or “Uranium Project,” the German nuclear program became known among its members by the less formal name of Uranverein or “Uranium Club.” And as German forces continued to storm across Europe, the Uranium Club steadily acquired the fruits of conquest: large stockpiles of Uranium from Belgium, a cyclotron particle accelerator from France, and a heavy-water production plant in Norway.

The various scientists who had fled Europe to escape Nazi persecution watched these developments with mounting apprehension. Among these were Albert Einstein and his Hungarian colleague Leo Szilard, who on August 2, 1939 – one month before the German invasion of Poland –  drafted a letter to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him of the grave danger posed by the German nuclear program:

“In the course of the last four months it has been made… possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.

 This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable – though much less certain – that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.”

 This letter, along with similar warnings from other scientists, ultimately convinced Roosevelt to approve in June 1942 what became known as the Manhattan Project, with Army Corps of Engineers General Leslie Groves and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as its administrative and scientific directors, respectively – and for more on Einstein and Szilard’s other, more unexpected collaboration, please check out our previous video That Time Albert Einstein Decided to Try to Revolutionize Keeping Food Cold.

 At the time of the Manhattan Project’s inception, many scientists despaired that the Allies were at least 1-2 years behind the Germans in nuclear research, with physicist Leona Marshall Libby recalling:

“I think everyone was terrified that we were wrong, and the Germans were ahead of us.… Germany led the civilized world of physics in every aspect, at the time war set in, when Hitler lowered the boom. It was a very frightening time.”

A lack of reliable intelligence sources, however, prevented the Allies from gauging the progress of the German atomic bomb project. The Manhattan Project thus became a blind race against an unseen enemy, whose actual capabilities could only guessed at. Over the next three years some $32 billion dollars and 500,000 personnel – nearly 1% of the entire U.S. labour force – would be poured into beating the Germans to the finish line. As General Groves later wrote:

“Unless and until we had positive knowledge to the contrary, we had to assume that the most competent German scientists and engineers were working on an atomic program with the full support of their government and with the full capacity of German industry at their disposal. Any other assumption would have been unsound and dangerous.”

Indeed, the few scraps of intelligence the Allies were able to gather proved less than encouraging. In September 1941, Werner Heisenberg paid a visit to Danish physicist Niels Bohr at his home in Copenhagen. The purpose of the visit is the subject of considerable debate, with some historians claiming Heisenberg wanted to recruit Bohr into the German atomic bomb project and others that he tried to convince the Allies via Bohr to abandon their own nuclear program. What is known is that a) Bohr angrily expelled Heisenberg from his home and never spoke to him again; and b) during their meeting Heisenberg sketched for Bohr a simple diagram of a nuclear reactor. When Bohr was later evacuated from Denmark by the British he handed over this sketch to Allied intelligence, who took it as evidence that the Germans were far ahead in their nuclear research.

It was not until after the D-day landings in June 1944 that Allied intelligence finally began to pull back the curtain on the German Uranprojekt. The year before, U.S. Army Intelligence launched the ALSOS mission under the command of Lt. Colonel Boris T. Pash. Armed with a handful of jeeps and light weapons, ALSOS’s mission was to drive deep behind enemy lines and gather whatever information it could on the German nuclear project. But no matter how far they penetrated into occupied Europe and Germany itself, Colonel Pash and his men could find no evidence of the industrial-scale uranium enrichment facilities needed to produce an atomic bomb, and the few nuclear research facilities they did find were small-scale affairs run by university physics and chemistry departments. Finally, however, the ALSOS mission seemed to hit the jackpot when they discovered a full-scale nuclear reactor hidden in a beer cellar in the southern German town of Haigerloch. But when the reactor itself was examined and the scientists involved in its construction interrogated, it became clear that the Germans had never succeeded in achieving a sustained nuclear chain reaction. As the war in Europe finally came to an end and the available evidence was gathered, the ALSOS mission came to a startling conclusion: the Germans never came close to developing a working atomic bomb. None of the Uranium Club’s research on nuclear fission ever made it past the small-scale experimental stage, and the whole project was ultimately scrapped when the German High Command realized it would never contribute to the final outcome of the war. In an instant, the spectre of a German atomic bomb – the bogeyman that had kickstarted and sustained the gargantuan Manhattan Project – seemed to evaporate into thin air.

So…what happened? Why, despite having a two year head start over the Allies, did the German atomic bomb project ultimately fizzle out? There were many contributing factors, all of which illustrate the stark contrast between how scientific and technical development was carried out in Nazi Germany and the Allied nations.

The first nail in the coffin for the German atomic bomb project was the ruthless politicization of German science under the Nazi regime. By the time the Second World War broke out, the Nazis had thoroughly purged Germany’s universities and research institutes of Jews, communists, and other political undesirables – some 1,145 people or 14% of all higher educational staff. These included such superstars as Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Hans Bethe, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Otto Frisch – many of whom emigrated to the United States and became key figures in the Manhattan Project. Not even Werner Heisenberg was immune from Nazi suspicion. In 1938, Heisenberg came under attack from Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, who denounced him as a “white Jew” for his work on quantum theory and suggested he should be “made to disappear.” His reputation and career were only saved via the intervention of his mother, who happened to be old family friends with the Himmlers. As a result of this intervention Himmler realized that Germany could ill afford to lose such a great scientist and wrote Heisenberg a letter warning him to keep his physics and his politics separate. Such purges, along with the Nazi belief that atomic theory, quantum theory, and other recent scientific developments constituted degenerate “Jewish physics,” ultimately left Germany with few specialists capable of directing a successful nuclear research project. Furthermore, many of the scientists who remained in Germany were drafted into the armed forces, further reducing the scientific and technical capital available to the nation.

Another factor which ultimately sank the German atomic program was the convoluted and inefficient manner in which technical and scientific development was managed in Nazi Germany. Unlike in Allied nations like the United States where the Government decided which weapons projects were worth pursuing and assigned contracts to the companies best suited to completing them, in Germany multiple private firms, government departments, and branches of the armed forces competed with each other for limited resources and contracts. This was a deliberate divide-and-conquer tactic on the part of Hitler and his cronies, as it encouraged different government and military branches to bicker among themselves instead of conspiring against the regime. This system was also the product of the Nazis trying to square a particularly troublesome ideological circle. While the Nazis understood the advantages of free-market capitalism, they considered this an undesirable Jewish-American system and developed a strange hybrid arrangement of free enterprise and government control in an attempt to reconcile this contradiction. In practice, however, this lead to the wasteful duplication of effort and the squandering of limiting resources. For example, by the end of the war there were 86 different rocket projects in development, few of which ever reached operational status. Had the most promising of these projects been combined and assigned to a single contractor as in the Allied model, development would likely have proceeded far more efficiently. Similarly, at one point there were no less than three separate and independent nuclear research programs split up among nine research institutes in Berlin, Leipzig, and Kassel. According to German historian Klaus Hentschel:

“Compared with the British and American war research efforts united in the Manhattan Project, to this day the prime example of “big science,” the Uranverein was only a loosely knit, decentralized network of researchers with quite different research agendas. Rather than teamwork as on the American end, on the German side we find cut-throat competition, personal rivalries, and fighting over the limited resources.”

But even if the German nuclear project had been amalgamated into a single coordinated effort, it would still have been doomed by a lack of official government interest and support. While the Reichswehr saw the military potential nuclear fission early on, by mid-1940 that interest was rapidly fading as Germany’s rapid conquest of Western Europe convinced many in the High Command that the war would be won by 1942. This, along with the slow technical progress being made by the Uranium Club, convinced the Reichswehr that nuclear research would not contribute to ending the war in the short term. The project was thus handed over to the Reich Research Council in January 1942 and assigned a low priority. The goals of the project were also simplified from building an atomic bomb to building a nuclear reactor for research, energy generation, and possibly naval propulsion. The situation was not helped by the fact that Adolf Hitler, who had no background in science and technology, neither understood nor appreciated the potential of nuclear energy and gravitated instead towards less abstract “wonder weapons” like giant railway guns and ballistic missiles. The upshot of all this was that compared to the Manhattan Project, the German Uranium Club was woefully underfunded and understaffed, receiving the equivalent of only $2 million in government funds and employing a maximum of 100 researchers. Its American equivalent, by contrast, employed 5000x more personnel and received 16,000x more funding. And as the war dragged on the Uranium Club would only get smaller, its Uranium stockpiles diverted to make armour-piercing ammunition and its scientists assigned to more pressing military projects.

But the single greatest factor which ultimately sank the German atomic bomb project was, ironically, a lack of German scientific expertise. Despite Allied fears that the Germans were years ahead in nuclear research, by the time the Manhattan Project got underway in early 1942, British and American scientists had already pulled far ahead of their German counterparts. This was largely due to the aforementioned political purge of the German intelligentsia, which left the country with a shortage of experts on nuclear physics. This, in turn, lead to German scientists making a number of key errors that doomed the whole undertaking from the start. For example, to build a working nuclear reactor one needs not only Uranium as fuel, but also a material called a moderator. The moderator slows down neutrons produced by nuclear fissions to the optimum energy needed to produce additional fissions, thus sustaining the chain reaction. The world’s first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile 1, used bricks of graphite, an ultra-pure form of carbon. However, this material was ruled out early in the German program when a calculation error led physicist Walther Bothe to conclude that it absorbed too many neutrons to be a practical moderator. This left only one choice: heavy water, a form of water  in which some of the hydrogen is replaced by the heavier isotope deuterium. At the time, there was only one source of heavy water in Europe: the Vermork Norsk Hydro plant in Telemark, Norway, where heavy water was generated as a byproduct of fertilizer production. The Germans invaded Norway in April 1940 and immediately began producing heavy water for their nuclear reactor project. The Allies, recognizing the strategic importance of the plant, launched a series of attacks including a February 1943 raid by Norwegian commandoes codenamed Operation Gunnerside, which succeeded in blowing up the heavy water production equipment. The Germans abandoned production and attempted to ship the remaining heavy water out of Norway, but were thwarted when the Norwegian resistance bombed and sank the ferry carrying the barrels across Lake Tinn.

As a result of this sabotage, German scientists working on reactors were left with a very limited quantity of poor-quality moderator, meaning that the original design of 664 3-inch Uranium cubes suspended on wires no longer had adequate critical mass to sustain a chain reaction. Then, in December 1942, shortly after Chicago Pile 1 first achieved criticality, air leaked into the German L-IV reactor in Leipzig and ignited the Uranium fuel, starting a fire that boiled the coolant and caused the reactor to explode. The entire facility was destroyed, forcing it to be abandoned.

There were other problems as well. Building a practical atomic bomb requires separating the rare fissile isotope Uranium-235 from the far more abundant but non-fissile isotope Uranium-238. This is a slow and highly energy-intensive process, so much so that the Manhattan Project, running three different enrichment processes simultaneously in some of the largest industrial facilities s ever constructed, only managed to enrich enough Uranium for a single bomb – and even then only after the war in Europe had ended. While the Germans experimented with various separation methods, they quickly realized that Germany simply lacked the resources and industrial might to enrich enough Uranium within a reasonable timeframe, with one scientist exclaiming upon learning of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

“It must have taken factories large as the United States to make that much uranium-235!”  

 The only other option for building a bomb was to breed the fissile isotope Plutonium-239 from Uranium-238 in a reactor, but the Germans seem to have been unaware of this process and in any case never managed to get even a simple reactor working. Furthermore, even the most knowledgeable German scientists like Werner Heisenberg were unfamiliar with the fast neutron fission physics fundamental to the functioning of an atomic bomb, and thus would likely have been unable to build a functioning weapon even if they had managed to enrich sufficient Uranium. In conclusion, the German project failed because, unlike the Manhattan Project, it had nowhere near enough manpower, resources, centralization, government support, and technical backing. In short, it never had a chance.

Over the years, a myth has arisen that the German nuclear program failed due to internal sabotage. According to this theory, leading project scientists like Werner Heisenberg were opposed to developing nuclear weapons on moral grounds and actively worked to stall the project and deny Hitler the bomb. However, this notion appears to have been fabricated by these scientists in order to rehabilitate their post-war reputations, with historian and author Richard Rhodes concluding that:

 “There was at least one speculation that one of the German scientists deliberately falsified the measurements in graphite, hoping to stop a German bomb program. I don’t think there’s really evidence to support that. It seems to have been a mistake in the course of developing these various components of the technology.”

In the end, the German atomic bomb which had so frightened the Allies turned out to be nothing but a mirage, a half-hearted attempt mortally hobbled by the bureaucracy, ineptitude, and ideological corruption of the Nazi regime. But despite the fact that Adolf Hitler never came close to possessing nuclear weapons, the German project nonetheless had a profound impact on the post-war world order. Had the Allies known the true extent of German nuclear research, they might not have poured such vast resources into the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb would not have been developed until years or even decades later, and the world as we know it would be a very different place.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

• A Bunch of ‘Wangers- The Nazi Unit Who Were so Awful, Even the Nazi SS Were Disgusted by Them
• That Time the Nazis Nearly Completed a Super-Cannon Capable of Hitting London from France
• That Time the US Military Made an Atomic Cannon
• A Less Horrific SAW- The Bizarre Tale of the Pizza Collar Bomber

Expand for References

 Kant, Horst, Werner Heisenberg and the German Uranium Project, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2002, https://ift.tt/xzSWife

 

Mangravite, Andrew, Magical Thinking: What Happened to Physics in Nazi Germany? Science History Institute, December 16, 2015, https://ift.tt/PSTFBu4

 

Easley, Matt, The Atomic Bomb That Never Was: Germany’s Atomic Bomb Project, https://ift.tt/9rLn5ik

 

Williams, Joseph, The Secret World War II Mission to Kidnap Hitler’s A-Bomb Scientists, History, June 4, 2020, https://ift.tt/SLeVbO1

 

Atomic Rivals and the ALSOS Mission, The Manhattan Project: an Interactive History, U.S. department of Energy, https://ift.tt/iO3EwBq

 

German Atomic Bomb Project, Atomic Heritage Foundation, October 18, 2016, https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/german-atomic-bomb-project

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by Gilles Messier - December 06, 2022 at 01:04PM
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Review: Muncheros Crunchy Peanuts

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The Curious Case of the Last Witch in Britain

In the late 16th and early 17th Centuries, Europe found itself gripped by witch mania. After centuries of denying the existence of witchcraft, Church leaders incredibly came to believe that misfortunes such as plagues and crop failures were causes not by God’s will but rather individuals acting in league with the Devil. The resulting hysteria, stoked by the political turmoil of the Protestant Reformation and European Wars of Religion, resulted in thousands of people – most of them women – being arrested, tortured, tried,  and executed for witchcraft. In Britain alone, between 1560 and 1700 513 people were put on trial for witchcraft, with 112 being convicted and executed. These convictions were based on a series of Witchcraft Acts passed by Parliament, the first being introduced in 1542 under King Henry VIII and the last in 1604 by King James I, himself a noted demonologist and witch-hunting enthusiast. But by the end of the 17th Century the hysteria had mostly died down, with the last execution for witchcraft taking place in Devon in 1685 and the last conviction in Leicester in 1717. In 1735, Parliament passed the last of the Witchcraft Acts, which rather than making witchcraft itself a crime, made it unlawful to:

“…pretend to exercise or use any kind of Witchcraft, Sorcery, Inchantment [sic], or Conjuration, or undertake to tell Fortunes, or pretend, from his or her Skill or Knowledge in any occult or crafty Science, to discover where or in what manner any Goods or Chattels, supposed to have been stolen or lost, may be found…”

This Act effectively brought the era of witch hunting in Britain to a close. However, like many outdated pieces of legislation, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 remained on the books for more than 200 years, obscure and forgotten, until 1941, when, in the dark depths of the Second World War, it suddenly reemerged into the public consciousness. This is the strange tale of Helen Duncan, the last person in the UK to be jailed for witchcraft.

Victoria Helen McCrae was born on November 25, 1897 in Callander, Scotland to Archibald McFarlane, a roof slater, and Isabella Rattray. From an early age Helen proved to be a strange and difficult child, her habit of getting into fistfights earning her the nickname “Hellish Nell”. She also became known for falling into hysterical trances, uttering prophecies, and claiming to see and hear spirits, much to the dismay of her strict Presbyterian parents. At age 16, Helen became pregnant out of wedlock and was forced to leave her family home. She moved to Dundee, where she worked for a time at a jute mill. In 1914, following the outbreak of the Great War she applied for munitions work, but was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanatorium to recover. Upon release she worked at a bleach factory and as an auxiliary at the Dundee Royal Infirmary, where in 1916 she met and married Henry Duncan, a cabinetmaker who had been invalided from the Front with rheumatic fever.

Life for the young couple was grim. Over the next 10 years Helen would become pregnant 12 times, from which only 6 children would survive. Henry soon became too ill to work, leaving Helen, racked with hypertension, diabetes, kidney trouble, and stomach pains, to provide for the family. But a potential solution to their problems soon emerged. Henry spent much of his time at home reading books on spiritualism, and eventually he convinced his wife to put her natural psychic abilities to the test. And so, in 1926, Helen Duncan set up shop as a spiritualist medium.

While individuals claiming the ability to speak to the dead have existed for all of human history, the modern spiritualist movement is a much more recent phenomenon, tracing its origins only as far back as 1848. In March of that year, two teenage sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox of Hydesville, New York State, claimed to be able to communicate with spirits via faint rapping sounds, heard in response to tapping or snapping their fingers. Connecting these rappings with letters of the alphabet, the Fox Sisters identified the spirit as belonging to one Charles B. Rosna, a travelling peddler who had been murdered by the house’s previous owner and hidden in the cellar. While a search of the cellar revealed no human remains, Margaret and Kate’s older sister, Leah, recognized the commercial potential of the girl’s abilities and became their manager, taking them on a nationwide tour financed by showman P.T. Barnum. Their act was a sensation, kickstarting a worldwide craze for psychic performances and seances. Famous mediums like Daniel Douglas Home [note: pronounced Hume] became wealthy superstars, while private seances became all the rage in parlours around the world. While in 1888 the Fox Sisters admitted that their abilities were a fraud – they had produced the rappings themselves by clicking their toe joints – it was already too late. Spiritualism had taken the world by storm, gaining such illustrious adherents as Emperor Napoleon III, H.G. Wells, T.E. Lawrence, and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Two major developments helped spur the worldwide fascination with Spiritualism, the first, ironically, being recent, seemingly miraculous developments in science and technologies. If mankind could peer into the human body with x-rays or communicate long distances via telephone or radio, the spiritualists reasoned, then why not communicate with the spirit world? The other major catalyst was the Great War and the subsequent Spanish Influenza pandemic, which combined killed more than 100 million people worldwide. Spiritualism, with its promise of direct, tangible communication with deceased loved ones, offered greater comfort to millions of the bereaved than the comparatively vague doctrines of traditional religion. The practice became especially popular amongst military personnel, to the degree that in 1941 the Royal Navy recognized spiritualism as a legitimate creed and allowed sailors to perform seances while at sea. Thus, when Helen Duncan began practicing in 1926, she found a ready audience.

Duncan’s seances were typical of the movement. Seated in a darkened room, tied to a chair or enclosed in a wooden cabinet, she would slip into a trance and manifest all manner of ghostly apparitions before her stunned onlookers, including rappings, disembodied voices, music, or even full-fledged figures of people – including her recurring spirit helpers, a grown man named Albert and a little girl named Peggy. Duncan’s particular speciality was the production of ectoplasm, a mysterious white substance said to be made of psychic energy that would emanate from the mouth, nose, or ears of certain mediums, sometimes forming itself into faces or other shapes. Charging 25 Pounds a seat – a considerable sum in those days – Helen and Henry quickly found their fortunes reversed, and were soon able to afford a house in a fashionable suburb of Edinburgh.

But this early success was not to last, for Duncan soon came under the scrutiny of debunkers and the local authorities. In 1928 photographer Harvey Metcalfe took photos at one of her seances which revealed the “ectoplasm” to be nothing but cheesecloth and newspaper, while in 1931 she came to the attention of Harry Price of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, who set out to expose her as a fraud. While the NLPR had been founded to promote Spiritualism and its members adhered to its core tenets, they believed that the practice had been overrun with quacks and fraudsters and sought to separate the genuine mediums from the false. On a number of occasions Price attended Duncan’s seances to collect samples of ectoplasm, which was invariably found to consist of cheesecloth, wood pulp, or egg whites. On another occasion Price convinced her to swallow blue dye to rule out that she was simply regurgitating her ectoplasm. According to some reports she subsequently failed to produce any ectoplasm, while according to others it came out white as before. But when Price tried to X-ray Duncan’s body to discover where she was hiding her emanations, she erupted into hysterics and had to be restrained by her husband. In his final report, Price concluded that Duncan was definitely a fraud, citing the testimony of a Miss Mary McGinlay, who had served as her maid in London:

“After a sance [sic], Mrs Duncan would get me to wash out a length of muslin. It had a rotten smell. She would give it to me just as she had used it and then it would be much stained and smelly.”

Despite this, demand for Duncan’s services continued to grow, though this increasing popularity brought with it even greater scrutiny. During a seance in Edinburgh on January 6, 1933, Duncan caused an apparition of Peggy, her spirit helper, to appear. Suddenly, a sitter named Esther Maule leapt up, grabbed the figure, and turned on the lights, revealing the apparition to be nothing more than a doll sewn from a stockinette vest. The police were called, and on May 11 Duncan was convicted of fraudulent mediumship by the Edinburgh Sheriff Court and fined 10 Pounds. But this would not be Helen Duncan’s last run-in with the law, as her curious profession would soon run afoul of wartime secrecy and paranoia.

During a seance in Portsmouth in late November 1941, Duncan manifested the figure of a young sailor, who claimed to have died aboard the battleship HMS Barham when she was sunk in the Mediterranean. This pronouncement stunned two naval officers in attendance, for HMS Barham had indeed been sunk just days before on November 25, torpedoed by German submarine U-331 with the loss of 861 men. But fearing that the news would damage civilian morale, the Admiralty had decided to only inform the crew’s immediate next of kin, and would not announce the sinking to the public until two months later. The two officers reported what they had seen, and an investigation was launched to determine how this middle-aged Scottish medium had come by such classified military information.

Over the next year Military Intelligence kept a close eye on Helen Duncan. Then, on January 19, 1944 police raided one of her seances in Portsmouth, with officers attempting to prevent ectoplasm issuing from her mouth before placing her and three attendees under arrest. Initially Duncan was charged under the 1824 Vagrancy Act, section IV of which states:

“And be it further enacted, That every Person committing any of the Offences herein-before mentioned, after having been convicted as an idle and disorderly Person; every Person pretending or professing to tell Fortunes, or using any subtle Craft, Mean, or Device, by Palmistry or otherwise, to deceive and impose on any of His Majesty’s Subjects.”

However, the authorities soon discovered the obscure 1735 Witchcraft act, and Duncan was duly charged with two counts of conspiracy to contravene the Act, two counts of obtaining money under false pretences, and 3 counts of public mischief. Also charged were Ernest and Elizabeth Homer, who ran the Portsmouth Psychic Centre, and Frances Brown, Duncan’s agent who arranged and managed her clients. The seven-day trial at London’s Old Bailey courthouse caused a minor media sensation, with several prominent spiritualist experts being called as witnesses for the defence. But in the end the Prosecution had little trouble convincing the jury of its case, which held that:

“…the whole performance was an elaborate pretence, a fraudulent performance, a mere imposition on human credulity…[and] a pretence that so-called materialisations, which were in fact produced by means of fraudulent devices and apparatus, were of a different nature altogether.”

Arthur Charles West, the Portsmouth Chief of Police, was even harsher in his evaluation:

“This is a case where not only has she attempted and succeeded in deluding confirmed believers in Spiritualism, but she has tricked, defrauded and preyed upon the minds of a certain credulous section of the public who have gone to these meetings in search of comfort of mind in their sorrow and grief. I can only describe this woman as an unmitigated humbug who can only be regarded as a pest to a certain section of society.”

When the jury returned with a guilty verdict on the first count, the judge dismissed them without hearing verdicts on the six others. Duncan was sentenced to 9 months and Frances Brown to four months in prison, while the Homers were Bound Over – a practice equivalent to being released on bail. Strangely, Duncan was denied the customary right to appeal to the House of Lords, leading her to cry out in court: “I have done nothing! Is there a God?”

The absurdity of the conviction was not lost on Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who following the trial wrote following memo to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison

 “Let me have a report on why the Witchcraft Act, 1735, was used in a modern Court of Justice. What was the cost of this trial to the State, observing that witnesses were brought from Portsmouth and maintained here in this crowded London, for a fortnight, and the Recorder kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery, to the detriment of necessary work in the Courts?”

Helen Duncan served her nine month sentence in London’s Holloway Prison, where fellow prisoners and staff reportedly lined up for seances. She was released on September 22, 1945, and despite promising the court to stop practicing spiritualism, soon resumed her old practice. In November 1956 police raided a seance in Nottingham and arrested her for fraud. While she was released soon after, five weeks later on December 6, 1956, Helen Duncan passed away at the age of 59.

To this day, controversy surrounds the reason for the courts’ decision to arrest and try Helen Duncan under the 1735 Act. What is known is that none of the authorities involved actually believed that Duncan had psychic powers. According to historian Graeme Donald, even her supposedly inexplicable knowledge of HMS Barham’s sinking was not as mysterious as it seems:

“The loss of HMS Barham… was indeed kept quiet for a while, but letters of condolence were sent out to families of the 861 dead, asking them to keep the secret until the official announcement. So, allowing for perhaps 10 people in each family, there were about 9,000 people who knew of the sinking; if each of them told only one other person, there were 20,000 people in the country aware of the sinking, and so on – hardly a closely guarded secret. In short, news of the sinking spread like wildfire; Duncan simply picked up the gossip and decided to turn it into profit.^”

Furthermore, upon her arrest in 1944 Duncan was found to have in her possession a naval hat band bearing the name of HMS Barham. However, after 1939 Royal Navy hat bands bore only the letters “HMS” and not the name of the ship, further indicating that Duncan had heard gossip of the sinking around Portsmouth and prepared props for her seance beforehand.

The likeliest motivation for Duncan’s arrest was the secrecy surrounding the impending D-Day landings, with military authorities fearing that if Duncan overheard any classified information she could reveal it in one of her seances. The 1735 Witchcraft Act was therefore simply the most expedient means of locking her up until after the landings had taken place. Consequently, there have been calls in recent years for Duncan’s conviction to be overturned, with the Parliament of Scotland receiving a 200-signature petition in February 2008 calling for her to be granted a full pardon. While the petition was eventually rejected, Duncan’s advocates continued to call for justice.

While Helen Duncan was the last person to be imprisoned under the Act, she was not the last to be convicted under it. That dubious honour belongs to Jane Yorke, who was arrested on the10th of July 1944 after claiming to have contacted the non-existent dead brother of an undercover police officer. Her prosecution was delayed until the verdict of Helen Duncan’s trial was heard, whereupon she was convicted but only Bound Over for three years on account of her advanced age of 72. Seven years later, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was finally  overturned by the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951. For the first time in more than 400 years, witchcraft was no longer a crime in the United Kingdom. In 1954, Pagan Witchcraft, better known as Wicca, was officially recognized as a religion by Parliament.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

• Where the Word “Witch” Came From
• No Witches Were Burned During the Salem Witch Trials
• What Does Rx Mean and Where Did It Come From?
• The Curious Practice of Execution By Golden Shower

Expand for References

Johnson, Ben, Helen Duncan, Scotland’s Last Witch, Historic UK, https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/Helen-Duncan-Scotlands-last-witch/

 

Sugar, Bert & The Amazing Randi, Houdini: His Life and Art, Grosset and Dunlap 1976

 

Witchcraft Act 1735, https://engole.info/witchcraft-act-of-1735-6/

 

Witchcraft, UK Parliament, https://ift.tt/Y1TUJgE

 

An Act for the Punishment of idle and disorderly Persons, and Rogues and Vagabonds, in that Part of Great Britain called England, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1824/83/pdfs/ukpga_18240083_en.pdf

 

Hellish Nell: Witch-hunt That Led to Capture of Fake Medium, The Scotsman, February 24, 2009, https://www.scotsman.com/news/hellish-nell-witch-hunt-led-capture-fake-medium-2444143

 

McSmith, Andy, Toil and Trouble: the Last Witch? The Independent, February 29, 2008, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/toil-and-trouble-the-last-witch-789353.html

 

Mantel, Hilary, Unhappy Medium, The Guardian, May 3, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/may/03/londonreviewofbooks

 

MacPherson, Hamish, The Truth About the UK’s Last Witch Helen Duncan, The National, May 8, 2018, https://ift.tt/QAxoKUq

The post The Curious Case of the Last Witch in Britain appeared first on Today I Found Out.

from Today I Found Out
by Gilles Messier - December 06, 2022 at 01:03AM
Article provided by the producers of one of our Favorite YouTube Channels!
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