yeah, seems the cavalry given out smallpox story is made up. like most stories like this, someone thought "how horrible" and decided to go out and thoroughly document the details of the case, only to discover there was no such case.
a lot of research begins like this . the guinness book listed ed "strangler" lewis as the most successful wrestler of all time, having only lost 6 times in over 6,000 legitimate wrestling matches. everyone just accepts this as a fact. so some dude comes up with the idea that it would be cool to find those 6 matches. he finds hundreds. furthermore, he finds that almost none of the matches were legitimate. you have heard the expression "on the ball?" webb c ball had a jewelery shop on cleveland where the time was wired in from the US Naval Observatory and displayed in the window. webb ball and those who came by his shop in cleveland really were among the few in that age who could answer the question of whether anybody knows what time it is. webb really liked precision timekeepers. he'd buy very good movements from very solid makers and "hot rod" them in the shop. you could go into ball's shop and buy one of hte most accurate watches on the earth at the end of the 19th century. and then ball and his crew could keep it running like that for you indefinitely. ball's watches really, really good and priced accordingly. the average man in the street had neither the means to afford such a timepiece nor the need for one, as he could live happily with a 15 second a day watch and didn't need one that was tuned to 15 seconds a season. so what was ball to do? he went out telling eveyrone the story of how there was this terrible train crash caused by imprecise timekeeping and how a ball watch maintained at the ball shop was the way to solve this so it would never happen again. as it says in wikipedia: In 1891 there was a collision between Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railways at Kipton, Ohio <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipton%2C_Ohio> which occurred because an engineer <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer>'s watch had stopped. The railroad officials commissioned Webb C. Ball as their Chief Time Inspector, in order to establish precision standards and a reliable timepiece inspection system for Railroad chronometers<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_chronometers> . He established strict guidelines for the manufacturing of sturdy, reliable precision timepieces, including resistance to magnetism, reliability of time keeping in 5 positions, isochronism<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Isochronism&action=edit>, power reserve <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_reserve> and dial arrangement, accompanied with record keeping of the reliability of the watch on each regular inspection the legendary railroad watch is established and the ball watch is king of them all. only thing is, though, there never was such a crash. On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Mitch Haley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Gary Hurst wrote: > > > > one of the last straws with me and organized school was when the > "teacher" > > told the class how columbus put smallpox in blankets and gave them to > the > > indians. > > That would lead to a massive media attack if it happened near me. I'd tell > everybody who would listen how ignorant the teaching staff was, and demand > removal of the teacher, and if I didn't get it I'd be circulating recall > petitions for the school board. > > Columbus didn't want to kill off the "indians", he was the original > proponent of using the islanders (cubans/haitians/etc) for slaves. > Why didn't she tell the kiddies that? If the point was that europeans > are evil creatures who destroyed the western hemisphere, it seems like > the slavery and torture done under the Spanish flag would be far better > than some phony disease story. > > IIRC, the smallpox story was from the post civil war era. > What was that Jane Seymore show? Dr Dingbat? Oh, yes, "Dr Quinn, Medicine > Woman". They did an episode where the calvary distributed blankets from > dead typhoid patients to the indians IIRC. > > Mitch. > > _______________________________________ > http://www.okiebenz.com > For new parts see official list sponsor: http://www.buymbparts.com/ > For used parts email [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: > http://okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com > _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com For new parts see official list sponsor: http://www.buymbparts.com/ For used parts email [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
