Thursday afternoon. Since the clocks changed, every recurring meeting with Brisbane is an hour out and nobody has raised it.

Daylight saving was invented by a postal clerk who wanted more time for bugs.

• George Hudson joined the Wellington Post Office as a cadet in 1883, but the thing he really cared about was collecting insects.
• He did that after his shift, so what he wanted most was more daylight at the end of the working day.
• In 1895 he proposed exactly that to the Wellington Philosophical Society: move every clock two hours forward for the summer.
• The members ridiculed him, and one called his suggestions “wholly unscientific and impracticable”, but New Zealand adopted summer time in 1927 and most of you have just changed your clocks.

Nautilus →

The Australian dollar was nearly called the royal.

• When Australia went decimal, the public was asked to name the new currency and sent in about 1,000 suggestions, including the boomer, the kanga, the dinkum and the ming, after the Prime Minister’s nickname.
• Menzies passed over all of them, and in June 1963 his Treasurer, Harold Holt, announced that Australians would be paid in royals.
• That set off three months of outrage, so the government looked again at the austral, until Holt reportedly pointed out that “fourteen australs” sounds a lot like “forty nostrils”.
• So in September they gave up and called it the dollar.

Museum of Australian Democracy →

The Olympic closing ceremony was a 17-year-old’s idea.

• Until 1956, athletes marched into the closing ceremony the way they marched into the opening one, in teams behind their flags.
• Shortly before the Melbourne Games ended, the head of the organising committee got an anonymous letter suggesting that this time everyone walk in together, mixed up, so that “there will be only one nation”.
• The organisers agreed to it the day before the ceremony, and the Games have closed that way ever since.
• The letter was from John Ian Wing, an apprentice carpenter in Melbourne, and nobody tracked him down until 1986.

Olympics.com →

The longer one

The baronet from Wagga Wagga

In April 1854 a ship called the Bella left Rio de Janeiro and was never seen again. One of the passengers was Roger Tichborne, 25, heir to a baronetcy and a Hampshire estate. He was very thin, had been raised in Paris and spoke fluent French.

His mother refused to believe he was dead. A clairvoyant had told her he was alive, so she placed advertisements in newspapers around the world, offering a handsome reward for news of him.

In 1865 word reached Wagga Wagga, then a town of about a thousand people, where a butcher known as Tom Castro was going broke. During his bankruptcy he let slip that he had once survived a shipwreck, and he smoked a pipe carved with the initials R.C.T. Pressed by his solicitor, he admitted it: he was the missing baronet. He also weighed about 18 stone, spoke no French, and in a will he drew up he got his own mother’s name wrong.

It didn’t matter. He sailed for Europe, and in Paris Lady Tichborne accepted him at once. “He looks like his father,” she said, “and his ears look like his uncle’s.” She gave him £1,000 a year.

The rest of the family was less sure, and when she died in 1868 he had to go to court for the estate. The civil case ran 102 days and collapsed. The Crown then tried him for perjury, which took another 188 days, at the time the longest trial in English legal history. The jury needed half an hour. He was Arthur Orton, a butcher’s son from Wapping who had jumped ship in South America, and he got fourteen years.

He served ten, toured the music halls, sold a confession to a newspaper and then took it back. He died broke on April Fools’ Day 1898. The Tichbornes allowed him one last thing. The plate on his coffin reads Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne.

He failed every check they ran. He just had the right sponsor.

Museum of the Riverina →

Course materials

That’s it. Go home.

Professional Development  ·  sent Thursdays, when it stops mattering
Issue 09