“Above the Senior Wrangler”

31 October 201127 November 2019 / Mike Dash / 23 Comments

Philippa Fawcett. When she placed first in the Cambridge mathematical tripos in 1890, she forced a reassessment of nineteenth-century belief in the inferiority of the “weaker sex.”

To be a woman in the Victorian age was to be weak: the connection was that definite. To be female was also to be fragile, dependent, prone to nerves and—not least—possessed of a mind that was several degrees inferior to a man’s. For much of the 19th century, women were not expected to shine either academically or athletically, and those who attempted to do so were cautioned that they were taking an appalling risk. Mainstream medicine was clear on this point: to dream of studying at the university level was to chance madness or sterility, if not both.

It took generations to transform this received opinion; that, a long series of scientific studies, and the determination and hard work of many thousands of women. For all that, though, it is still possible to point to one single achievement, and one single day, and say: this is when everything began to change. That day was June 7, 1890, when—for the first and only time—a woman ranked first in the mathematical examinations held at the University of Cambridge. It was the day that Philippa Fawcett placed “above the Senior Wrangler.”

To understand why one woman’s achievement so shook the prejudices of the Victorian age—and why newspapers from the New York Times to the Times of India thought it worthwhile to devote thousands of words to an exam that today means little to anybody but the students themselves—it is necessary to understand why Cambridge mathematics mattered in the 19th century. Continue reading →

An ice cream war

20 October 201130 December 2014 / Mike Dash / 9 Comments

The Turkish flag flown, and rifles used, by Mullah Abdullah and Gool Mohammed in their two-man war against the British empire launched at Broken Hill, New South Wales, on 1 January 1915

The war seemed a very long way away to the citizens of Broken Hill that January 1.

It was the height of the southern summer, and the Australian silver-mining town baked in the outback desert heat, 720 miles from Sydney and half a world away from the mud and blood of the Western Front. The First World War was less than five months old, and only a fool would have accused the hardened miners of Broken Hill of lacking patriotism, but on that first day of 1915 they wanted nothing more than to enjoy a rare holiday with their families and forget about their troubles—not just the war, which Australia had joined alongside Britain on the day it was declared, but also the grim economic times that were closing mines and putting miners out of work.

More than 1,200 men, women and children clambered aboard the makeshift train that would take them a few miles up the line to Silverton for the annual town picnic. But for Broken Hill that New Year’s Day, war was not 12,000 miles away; it was just over a ridge a mile or two along the track, where a couple of Afghans had raised the Turkish flag over an ice cream cart and were preparing to launch a two-man war. Continue reading →

The wizard of Mauritius

13 October 201111 April 2016 / Mike Dash / 20 Comments

Port Louis, Mauritius, in the first half of the nineteenth century

Port Louis, Mauritius, August 1782. The French Indian Ocean colony—highly vulnerable to British attack at the height of the American Revolutionary War—is in a state of alert. The governor, Viscomte François de Souillac, has been warned that a flotilla of 11 ships is approaching his island. Fearing that this is the long-awaited invasion fleet, De Souillac orders a sloop-of-war out to reconnoiter. But before the vessel can report, the panic ends. De Souillac is informed that the fleet has altered course and is now steering away from Mauritius. A few days later, when the sloop returns, the governor gets confirmation: the ships were actually East Indiamen, British merchant vessels making for Fort William in India.

All this is remarkable chiefly for the source of De Souillac’s intelligence. The governor had his information not from signals made by ships sailing far offshore, nor from land-based lookouts armed with high-powered telescopes, but from a minor member of the local engineering corps, one Étienne Bottineau. And Bottineau was chiefly renowned in Mauritius (or “Île de France,” to give it its contemporary French name) as a man who won a lot of bets in waterfront taverns thanks to his uncanny ability to foresee the arrival of ships that were anywhere from 350 to 700 miles from the island when he announced their approach.

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In search of Queen Victoria’s voice

6 October 20114 June 2017 / Mike Dash / 11 Comments

“Greetings, Britons and everybody.” Queen Victoria in 1887, at about the time she made her Graphophone recording.

It is a woman’s voice, but it sounds as though it comes drifting toward us across some vast and unbridgeable distance. It is all but drowned out by the snaps and the crackles and pops of what is by any standard a primitive recording. And yet—listened to over and over again—the voice does begin to sound refined. Perhaps even a little bit imperious.

The words that the woman speaks are muffled, but it is possible to make at least a few of them out. Some people have sworn that they can hear “tomatoes,” for example, blurted out toward the end of the track. But what about the very first syllables preserved on the recording—a 20-second audio segment believed to have been made more than 130 years ago, late in 1888, in the earliest days of the recording industry? Is that really the voice of Her Imperial Majesty Queen Victoria? And, if it is, can she really be welcoming her listeners with the words: “Greetings, Britons and everybody”?

There is no real doubt that Britain’s longest-reigning monarch allowed her voice to be recorded in that long-ago fall. The man who made the recording freely discussed it and it is recalled in a letter in the Royal Archives, dated 1907; the incident also rates a passing mention (without a source attribution) in Elizabeth Longford’s exhaustive biography of the Queen, Victoria R.I. The question is what happened to the recording after it was made—and, in a broader sense, why it matters whether it still exists. The search for the recording takes us from the New Jersey laboratories of Thomas Edison to the Highlands of Scotland, and from the archives of the Rolls-Royce motor company to the vaults beneath London’s Science Museum. Before we set of on that trail, though, we first need to understand why anyone should be interested in a few utterly unimportant phrases spoken by a long-dead queen. Continue reading →