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Hey – who’s up for a road trip?  Most years when I was growing up, my dad would get itchy feet and decide he wanted to take a few days off and drive…somewhere; in retrospect for him I think it was less about the destination than just getting away from his often hard physical work in the local paper products factory.  So around his birthday in August, my parents would pack up me and the station wagon and we’d aim for some local attraction in upstate New York like Corning or Cooperstown or the like.  Dad would drive, my mom would be in charge of figuring out the route and finding us places to stay, and I loved poring over those AAA tour books printed on that thin paper, listing motels and restaurants and sights to see along the way.  We never did get to the Petrified Creatures off Route 20, though, sigh.

That took some planning, naturally, but other than “no vacancy” signs or the occasional thunderstorm we didn’t have much to be concerned about.  Generations earlier, for other travelers, those trips would have been very different if they’d happened at all – until they were made somewhat easier by a little book with a big impact that provided a guide to worlds unimaginable.

A document that changed the world

The Negro Motorist Green Book, compiled and edited by Victor Hugo Green and first published in New York City, 1936

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School and yep, unlike the Federal Reserve’s “beige book” or the Kelley Blue Book guide to used car prices and numerous other colorful examples, while the “Green Book” is in fact green, it got its name from the author, not the color of the book.  But color does play a part here, in fact it’s the entire point.  In the early 20^th century, as Jim Crow laws held sway in many parts of the United States, if you were a person of color, especially Black, life was a whole lot more complicated, and dangerous, in many if not most aspects of daily life, not least in travel.  Segregated trains, buses, trolleys, restaurants, hotels, even drinking fountains and bathrooms, made the logistics of getting from point A to point B, with any modicum of dignity, a challenge to say the least. Hence, the appeal of the automobile, for the growing Black middle class who could afford it. In 1920 there were a little over 8 million cars in use in the US; by 1930 there were 23 million and while production slowed during the Depression, there were about 30 million by 1941, with a post-war boom up to 40 million by 1950.  So the road was calling – but if and how you answered still depended in no small part on the color of your skin.

If you were Black, pulling out of the driveway was akin to stepping out into a minefield, in often unfamiliar territory.  Where would you – could you? - eat, sleep, get gas or your car repaired, even go to the bathroom?  At times, the “whites only” signs would make it obvious, but often the discrimination was more subtle – businesses associated with the Klan might have 3 K’s in their names, so keep driving – and more humiliating, being ignored by waitstaff when seated at the same table with whites, petty crap like that.  It could also be a lot less subtle; in the ‘60s, there were an estimated 10,000 “sundown towns” where, if you were Black and it was sundown, you should get the hell out of town or risk expulsion, violence, or worse. And if you’re imagining backwater Podunk places, sure, but the restaurant incident happened in Chicago in 1945, half the incorporated towns in Illinois were sundown towns, and in 1956 only 3 motels in New Hampshire would accommodate African Americans.

This was largely a matter of not knowing what you didn’t know, so people did what they do, and found workarounds:  pack your own meals, carry extra gas, bring a portable toilet or a bucket, arrange to stay with friends of friends or sleep in the car or a hayloft.  And yet they went; a magazine writer in 1933 said, “it’s mighty good to be the skipper for a change…We feel like Vikings…it’s good for the spirit to just give the old railroad Jim Crow the laugh.” 

Enter Victor Hugo Green, born in Manhattan, named for the French 19^th century author, who started a career with the US Post Office in 1913 in New Jersey before marrying Alma Duke and moving to Harlem, then serving in a supply unit in France during World War I.  Well aware of the perils of the road trip, he conceives of a guide, inspired in part by the existing “Jewish Vacation Guide,” to list hospitable places for Black travelers; the first 16-page edition covered just New York City, but quickly expanded nationwide the next year with help from a federal government agency, the US Travel Bureau, eventually extending to Canada, Mexico and Bermuda.  Initially he drew on his own knowledge and that of his co-workers, but it grew due to, effectively, crowdsourcing; he paid readers, and fellow postal workers “asking around,” for useful listings.  His aim was to “give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trip more enjoyable.”  Understatements indeed.

The book itself is pretty small; the 1940 edition is only 48 pages, with a green cover, naturally, roughly 5 x 7”. Listings are alphabetical by state, at least those states that had listings, ahem, and then by city, categorized, with basic listings of names and addresses, primarily for lodging and food though also some nightclubs, beauty parlors, barbershops, tailors, and other services.  A few businesses paid for bold-faced listings, or bought small display ads like the Little Belmont, a “first class tourist home” at 2514 Pine St. in Niagara Falls, run by Mrs. M. Bell.  Small spaces got filled up with encouragements to advertise, requests for listings, and a little sardonic folk wisdom, under the heading “How to Keep From Growing Old”: “Always lock your brakes when skidding.  It makes the job more artistic.”  Over the years, they added short pieces on sights and monuments of historical interest to African-Americans.

It was published annually, in April, about 15,000 copies a year, starting at a quarter and rising to $1.25 by 1957, and distributed by mail order, and through churches, businesses and, surprisingly, Esso gas stations, a precursor to today’s Exxon/Mobil; a third of whose franchisees were Black, and which had a specifically focused marketing division. There was an earlier guide in 1930, the Hotel and Apartment Guide for Colored Travelers, and another more upscale effort published for a decade from 1947 rather pointedly but aptly called the Travelguide:  Vacation and Recreation without Humiliation. Nonetheless, most Black motorists heeded the motto on the cover:  “Carry your Green Book with you – you might need it.”  Green set up his own printing business in Harlem, and in 1947, opened a travel bureau, as the book continued to expand.  Alma helped with editing in later years and took over publication when Victor died in 1960, and both were inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2022. 

Travel guides, predictably, are old; from the ancient Greek periplus listing landmarks along seacoasts to the Roman itinerarium for road stops, medieval European pilgrimage guides, Arabic guides to treasure and artifacts, travel narratives in Song Dynasty China, through to the Grand Tour literature of the 19^th century, Baedeker guides, Michelin guides, reams of travel books of all shapes and sizes including for specialized audiences: the Jewish Vacation Guide started in 1916, the Spartacus guide for gay travelers in 1970, and on and on, usually mirroring the times and purposes for travel. Then followed short subject travelogue movies, television shows, and now online; if Victor Green was around today, this would be a subreddit – in fact, there is one, amid a great many other specialized online sites for Black travelers, which is either great or sad, or perhaps both.

Beyond the obvious individual and family impacts, the Green Books also promoted Black-owned and women-owned businesses, encouraging businesses in 1951 to raise their standards, and helped to facilitate the flow of money in and around the community, as well as introducing financial pressure on white-owned businesses to open their doors more widely for an emerging market.  The reach even extended to Senate hearings on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 where it was described as providing “dramatic testimony to the difficulties” of Black travelers and impediments on interstate travel and commerce – and also to the Supreme Court.  In their decision upholding Title II of the Act in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, the Court said the mere existence of the Green Book demonstrated that discrimination “had become so acute as to require the listing of available lodging…in a special guidebook.” 

Ultimately, the civil rights movement and legislation largely spelled the end of the need for the Green Book, and it ceased publication in 1967.  Green himself foresaw and even wanted that; in 1948 he wrote, “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published… when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment.” 

Roads are everywhere, likely beginning with people following animal pathways, and some are evocative indeed:  the Appian Way, the Silk Road, the Autobahn, Route 66. The road trip and the “open road” are important parts of the American psyche and mythos – get in the car and go, an enticing idea, if you don’t have to pack your own food, use a bucket and sleep in the car.  The Green Book was a guide not only to restaurants and lodging – desperately needed though that was – it was a guide to a way of travel, a way of thinking about a way of life, previously unavailable and inconceivable; in a sense, almost a parallel universe where doors and hearts were open and ready to receive.  I couldn’t help but think of another specialized travel book, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which, though much less thoroughly vetted, did famously feature on its cover, in “large, friendly letters” two words: Don’t Panic.  That kind of reassurance, even on a less-than-cosmic scale, must have been treasured by folks who just wanted to get out and drive the “open road” to see where it would lead and hope for a better day tomorrow.

References

» Victor Green | Automotive Hall of Fame. . Accessed 25 Jul. 2025.

An Atlas of Self-Reliance: The Negro Motorist’s Green Book (1937-1964). 29 Jul. 2015, .

Foster, Mark S. “In the Face of ‘Jim Crow’: Prosperous Blacks and Vacations, Travel and Outdoor Leisure, 1890-1945.” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 84, no. 2, Apr. 1999, pp. 130–49. journals.uchicago.edu (Atypon), .

“Guide Book.” Wikipedia, 30 Jun. 2025. Wikipedia, .

“History’s Oldest Roads Shaped Civilizations Since 4000 B.C.” Discover Magazine, . Accessed 25 Jul. 2025.

Homepage - Negro Motorist Green Book. . Accessed 25 Jul. 2025.

Monahan, Meagan K. “The Green Book: Safely Navigating Jim Crow America.” The Green Bag, vol. 20, Autumn 2016, pp. 43–49.

The Green Book - NYPL Digital Collections. . Accessed 25 Jul. 2025.

“The Green Book:  The Forgotten Story of One Carrier’s Legacy Helping Others Navigate Jim Crow’s Highways.” The Postal Record (National Association of Letter Carriers), Sep. 2013, pp. 22–25.

“The Negro Motorist Green Book.” Wikipedia, 18 Jul. 2025. Wikipedia, .

Travelguide: Vacation and Recreation Without Humiliation | National Trust for Historic Preservation. . Accessed 25 Jul. 2025.

“United States: Motor Vehicles in Use 1900-1988.” Statista, . Accessed 25 Jul. 2025.

“Victor Hugo Green.” Wikipedia, 8 Jun. 2025. Wikipedia, .

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I say - have you ever wondered what the fastest flying species of bird is?  We’ve all wondered that, haven’t we, though perhaps not while out grouse hunting. Back in Ye Olden Days, this might have led to silent musing, conversation with like-minded friends, or perhaps the more diligent types would make the effort to try to look it up…somewhere. But where?  Or – in most cases – dropped the matter altogether because where in the world would you find such an obscure factoid, and … who really cares?

In Ye Less Olden Days, as you likely know, there was – is – a singular repository of just this sort of thing, with stories of its own to tell, satisfying a world of wonderers, even in an age of instant search and there’s no excuse to be ignorant, begging a number of questions about the nature of superlatives, leaving a record of achievements and bests and mosts and fastests, no matter how trivial they might seem. 

A document that changed the world: The Guinness Book of Records, now styled as Guinness World Records and available online, compiled by Norris and Ross McWhirter and published in London, 1955.

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School and I want to thank my student Brooks Scheibler, who researched and collaborated on this episode.  The bird question was really how this whole thing started.  In November 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver and his party, back at Castleford House after a day’s shooting in the North Slob by the River Slaney in Ireland whatever that is, were in disagreement as to whether the golden plover, of which they had missed several during the day, was in fact Europe’s fastest bird.  Reference books they consulted failed to deliver a conclusive answer.  Today, wisdom of a sort is a few clicks away.  A Google search on “fastest bird Europe” produces, well, we’ll just leave that as an exercise to the listener, not to mention what you might get from a voice assistant or AI or whatever else comes down the pike in the years to come.

For most people, in 1951, the matter would have ended there, with someone remarking “I guess we’ll never know….” before turning once more to the sherry decanter.  Sir Hugh, however, wasn’t just any knight of the British realm.  He happened to be the managing director of a certain brewing company and it occurred to him that these kinds of disagreements must arise all the time in the 80,000 or so pubs his company owned up and down Britain and Ireland.  Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to have a book that would resolve these kinds of discussions? (And, although nobody comes out and admits it, that forestalls bar brawls?)

Indeed it would.  Twin brothers, Ross and Norris McWhirter, who borrowed each others’ passports, read newspapers and almanacs as kids, and who later separately ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in different constituencies getting almost the same number of votes, were running a fact-finding agency in London.  They were engaged in 1954 to compile such a book, after having been recommended by a record-breaking athlete whose first job was with the brewery and who knew the twins as sprinters at Oxford.  Since nothing like this existed at the time, one of their first challenges was how to do it, so working over the course of three jampacked months, they sent out letters to experts in various fields, and rather than asking direct questions about superlatives, they would write with something they thought was close and ask about that; they’d discovered over the years that experts might be cagey with their own knowledge but loved correcting somebody else’s mistake.  Genius.

Thus was born in August of 1955 the first 198 page version of the Guinness Book of Records; sources differ a bit on its early success, perhaps 1,000 were printed initially as a promotional giveaway, or maybe the first run was 50,000 and started slowly but in any event by Christmas 1955 was #1 on the UK bestsellers list and became a regular resident there and elsewhere for years to come.  In the decades that followed, more than 150 million copies have been sold, in 40 languages and there are more than 50,000 “records” in their database.  It spawned television shows, museums starting with one in the Empire State Building in 1976, a board game, video games, and inevitably a web site; at time of recording there is still a print version aimed primarily at a youth audience.

They also employ a staff of “adjudicators” who, well, adjudicate whether or not a record has been set or broken – for a price. Nominally, anybody can apply to set or break a record for $5, with a wait time of several weeks; however, if you’re willing and able to pony up for “priority review” or “consultancy” for your corporate branding strategy, ranging anywhere from a few hundred dollars to half a million or more, go to the head of the line.  Which means in many ways they are seen as much an advertising or publicity agency as a repository of facts, including accusations of burnishing and whitewashing the reputations of authoritarian regimes with hundreds of “new” and entirely contrived records from the UAE, Egypt, Russia, Turkmenistan, and so on.

They set the rules and the terms of record attempts, so more or less by dint of having been doing this for decades, they have become, more or less, “the” authority. One special case: they rely on the work of the Gerontology Research Group, which since 1990 has undertaken the somewhat macabre task of compiling ever-changing lists for the world’s oldest people.  They are not, however, the only game in town; the “World Record Academy” boasts a very colorful website claiming to have faster service, more categories and requirements for polygraph and drug testing.

There are limits; over the years, Guinness (spun off from the brewers when they were bought out in 2001)  have “closed” or discontinued categories that are now deemed too dangerous or unsavory or just plain gross to discourage “bad behavior”: those involving alcohol consumption or gluttony including eating things like bicycles and trees, heaviest pets, fastest driving around the world, or potentially environmentally dangerous activities like releasing balloons or paper lanterns.  They also won’t take things they can’t objectively measure such as beauty.  Also, for the record (sorry, couldn’t resist) – no more entries for most prolific serial killer, fasts or hunger strikes, longest kiss, longest time buried alive, fastest violinist, or the largest audience for camel wrestling (ok, 20,000 in Turkey in 1994 because I know you were dying to know.)

Let’s step back for a moment to consider “world records” – the question of who is the fastest or the strongest or the smartest or whatever must be as old as humanity; the International Olympic Committee lists several “Best of the Best” ancient athletes, but without sophisticated and reliable timekeeping or measurement methods, comparing across the generations is impossible, and if you want a world record, then you sorta have to have knowledge of, and communication with, the “world” in some meaningful fashion. The first citations of the phrase in the OED are from the 1880s and 1890s in the contexts of horse racing and sports, which aligns with the organization and codification of many sports and on the cusp of telegraphy and faster and more global communication methods.  It’s likely an old concept that could only be realized in modern times.  The first officially-recognized world record in the 100m dash is from 1912 for men and 1923 for women; for swimming 100m freestyle it’s 1905 and 1908, and in some timed or measured sports, financial bonuses from sports federations or sponsors can be on the table for world records.

Almost nobody ever needs to know a world record, like the tallest person or the smallest book or the fastest bird in England (finally revealed in the 36^th edition as the red grouse).  The continuing popularity of the Guinness Book and now its web site tells us, though, that lots of people care enough to find out or just be fascinated by what people will go through to get themselves a world record, not to mention the people who are fascinated enough with the work itself to produce a very thorough and well-maintained web site devoted entirely to collectors of the published books. 

I’ll admit to a marginal personal connection; as the nerdy, facty kid I was, there was usually a Guinness Book in the house when I was growing up, and I remember being deeply freaked out by the photograph of the man with the longest fingernails as I just read through the book for the heck of it.  And at the American Library Association conference in 1982, the very first professional meeting I ever went to, I won a free copy at their booth. 

So we come down to “who cares?”; if it’s not you or someone you know who’s trying to break a record then so what?  Without going too far overboard, this gets at the roots of human curiosity:  I wonder…what’s the tallest building, the highest waterfall, the largest cowboy boot sculpture?    Yet world records, ridiculous as they might often be, can also at times be among the highest achievements of humanity. 

�ҳܾ��ԲԱ����’ tag line is “Officially Amazing,” in that kind of punny, slogany way.  It’s easy to dismiss all this as “trivia” or “trivial” which now connotes things of little worth.  The word “trivia” enters English around 1900 by way of 16^th century “trivial”, originally meaning “commonplace” morphing into “unimportant” and deriving from the Latin “trivium”, the place where 3 roads meet, and also the term for one of the foundations of medieval university studies, the disciplines of rhetoric, grammar, and logic.  In an ever-more-automated world of “facts” true and otherwise, some people still value knowing them; witness the thousands of people, including your genial host, trying every year to get on Jeopardy!  (Helloooooo!)

Somehow, a world where getting facts right, and making them – and logic while we’re at it – commonplace seems amazing indeed.

References

“About Us | World Record Academy.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. .

Gerontology Research Group – Dr. Coles’ Supercentenarian Institute | Gerontology Research Group. n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. .

“Guinness Book History 1950 - Present.” 2006. May 13. .

“Guinness Record Book Collecting.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. .

Guinness World Records. 2015. “60 Years on, the Categories That Guinness World Records No Longer Monitors.” August 26. .

Guinness World Records. 2022. “Why Was the Guinness World Records Book First Published?” September 16. .

Guinness World Records. n.d. “Guinness World Records Archive.” Accessed July 16, 2025. .

“Guinness World Records Accused of Whitewashing Repressive Regimes.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. .

Martin, Douglas. 2000. “David Boehm, 86, Record-Keeper to the World.” Arts. The New York Times, February 10. .

Saakashvili, Eduard. 2017. “Episode 795: Is Record Breaking Broken?” Planet Money. NPR, September 20. .

“The All-Time Greats of the Ancient Olympic Games.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. .

“Trivial, Adj. & n. Meanings, Etymology and More | Oxford English Dictionary.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. .

Wikipedia. 2025. “Men’s 100 metres world record progression.” June 26. .

Wikipedia. 2025. “Women’s 100 metres world record progression.” July 3. .

Wikipedia. 2025. “Guinness World Records.” July 4. .

Wikipedia. 2025. “World record progression 100 metres freestyle.” July 5. .

“World’s Record, n. Meanings, Etymology and More | Oxford English Dictionary.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. .

Who doesn’t love a good Hollywood story?  In the 1930s and '40s, there was a vogue for biopics about scientists and inventors:  Don Ameche played Alexander Graham Bell, Paul Muni won an Oscar for playing Louis Pasteur, Greer Garson was Marie Curie, even Edward G. Robinson got into the act as the Nobel-winning immunologist Dr. Paul Ehrlich, and Spencer Tracy starred in 1940 in Edison, the Man. Diligent workers all, long hours over many years, many obstacles and setbacks, only to win through in the final reel to success and notoriety forever as the score swells over the closing credits.  Stirring stuff.

While this isn’t a story about Hollywood, it’s among the first stories about motion pictures – the origin story, if you will – how it all got started and while there are no spoilers here, I can tell you that it does indeed have a classic Hollywood ending – though maybe not quite the one you know or expect.

A document that changed the world: Patent #423, granted to Louis Le Prince by the British Patent Office, 1888

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and I’m joined here by my student Ellianna Thayne, who researched, wrote and produced this episode.

Picture a mahogany box with applewood feet and brass fittings, weighing in at some forty pounds; something you might mistake for an odd side table, if it wasn’t for two lenses peeking out at the front and a reel of film in the back, set on two spools to capture passing images held for exposure behind a brass plate, which is your main indication that this is the first motion picture camera. On the fourteenth of October, 1888, this camera recorded the very first known film in the Roundhay suburb of Leeds, England, featuring the inventor’s son, in-laws, and good friend walking around a garden. The surviving frames – now available on YouTube, of course, constitute a two-second film that stands today as proof that, yes, Louis Le Prince, is indeed the original inventor of the motion picture camera.  To which you are likely now saying, “What, who?”

In late 1886, Le Prince files a patent application, US #376,247, titled “Method of and apparatus for producing animated pictures of natural scenery and life”, for a 16-lens system meant, as many early attempts at motion pictures did, to capture photographs in rapid sequence. It also marked the end of his time in New York, where he’d been living with his wife and children; shortly after, Le Prince moved to Leeds – where he’d be closer to benefactors – and on January 10^th, 1888, he would submit another patent application,  this one in Britain, #423, which claimed: “Improvement in the method of and apparatus for producing animated photographic pictures and that he is the true and first inventor thereof”. This patent was actually written for the 16-lens camera and projection system – but right before he sent it off to the British Patent Office, Le Prince tacked on a provision for his newly-developed single-lense camera and projection system. 

The distinction between a 16- and single-lense system gets to the heart of the definition of “film”: Film, as we all know, isn’t just a bunch of pictures taken really fast, it’s a continuous recording from a single point of view, a feat Le Prince achieved after many years of experimentation at his workshop in Leeds. 

It’s likely that this interest in cinematography actually began in his childhood; his father was good friends with Louis Daguerre, the inventor of the Daguerreotype, who taught Le Prince about chemistry, art, and photography at his studio. By the time he began submitting patents for his own inventions, Le Prince had completely dedicated his life to discovering the mechanisms that could record and reproduce moving life. 

The British patent office accepted Le Prince’s application on the 16th of November, 1888, a month after Edison began work on his own motion-picture device, and, coincidentally we hope, a week after the last of what’s known as the “canonical five” murders of Jack the Ripper. Depositions given to the US consulate, concerning Le Prince’s American patent application, further corroborated his inventorship. James Longley, a mechanic who assisted Le Prince in his workshop, told the consul he’d constructed “an improved camera of one lens for taking Photographs at a great number per minute. I also partly made the delivering machine for throwing the Pictures at the Same rate as taken in the Camera, onto a large white Screen”. Engineer John William Vine confirmed he’d seen this projection device in action in 1889. A friend named Henry Woolf claimed he’d witnessed “exhibited on a screen a moving figure of a man, which gave the impression of life-like movement” back in 1886. Patent secured, Le Prince was ready to share his invention with the world. His wife, Lizzie, organized a public film showing back in Manhattan. On September 16th, 1890, Le Prince said goodbye to his brother before boarding a train from Dijon to Paris, his second-to-last stop before setting off for New York. He was never seen again. 

Le Prince’s disappearance baffles still today. Despite the efforts of his friends and family, no evidence has ever been found to indicate whatever fate befell him: no eyewitnesses (despite the fact that he was a striking 6’4” with a distinctive mustache), no body, no deathbed confessions. Sensational theories abound, of course, though none hold water. However, here’s something tangible to chew on: Thomas Edison submitted a “caveat” to the US patent office for a motion-picture camera undeniably similar to Le Prince’s single-lens, mere weeks after he, dare we say, “cinematically” vanished off the face of the earth. 

Edison was infamous for his use of caveats to keep his foot in the door of multiple evolving industries. Here’s how it worked: he would file a caveat with a vague description of some new groundbreaking technology. When competitors sent in their full patent applications for the same, or similar, inventions, the patent office would notify Edison, giving him three months to submit his patent application. When he did so, the caveat would establish precedence, and Edison would be declared the original inventor. If that sounds like cheating to you, you’d be right – the United States outlawed the caveat in 1910 under the very same logic. 

The most damning part? Edison’s previous designs hadn’t even been close to the mechanism that powered Le Prince’s single-lens. In 1888, when he assigned the work of inventing a motion-picture device to his assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, Edison insisted that a glass cylinder be used as the photographic base for the camera, and that a peephole device be implemented for viewing. By the time his motion-picture “invention” was announced to the public, however, the camera – coined the “Kinetograph” – utilized not a glass cylinder but a roll of celluloid film, and instead of a peephole device he’d created the “Kinetoscope”, a projector. Remember Henry Woolf? When he saw that announcement in The Sun, he reached out to Lizze Le Prince, outraged: this was “an infringement on Le Prince’s machine,” he declared. The United States patent office agreed. They rejected Edison’s first two attempts to patent the Kinetograph, stating: “The claims are anticipated by patents to Le Prince 376247, Jan. 10, 1888”. 

Even when the patent was finally accepted in 1893, the fight wasn’t over. William Dickson, the assistant who developed the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope – and unsurprisingly got none of the credit – left Edison’s employment and founded the American Mutoscope Company, a competing enterprise. As you can imagine, that didn’t go over well. Before long the rival companies were engaged in a bitter court case: Equity 6928: Thomas A. Edison vs American Mutoscope Company, with the intention of determining whether “Thomas A. Edison was the original, first and sole inventor or discoverer” of cinematography. 

In 1898, a year after Le Prince was legally declared dead, his family became involved in the case. His son Adolphe – who’d featured in the Roundhay Garden Scene as a child – jumped on the opportunity to bring a public spotlight to his father’s inceptive inventorship. The Le Prince family had been trying to advocate on behalf of Louis since his disappearance, but in the mandatory waiting period following his disappearance before he could be declared deceased, they couldn’t take legal action against Edison, nor did they possess the financial or technical abilities to publicize his films. By the time they could take legal management of Le Prince’s patents, Edison and other film pioneers had already dominated the emerging cinema industry. When Adolphe arrived in court, he brought with him his father’s cameras as physical proof and further testimony to support the record of antecedency. Perhaps the most timeline-affirming piece of evidence was the Roundhay Garden Scene, confirmed as predating Edison’s caveat by two years because it featured Le Prince’s sister in-law – who died a matter of days after she was filmed. American Mutoscope, however, walked a fine line. They only wanted to disprove Edison’s claim to originality; if they were to prove Le Prince’s inventorship, they would have to pay his family royalties.

The first motion-picture camera sat just outside the doors of the courtroom as American Mutoscope’s lawyers cunningly manipulated Adolphe’s testimony to their own ends. The case did not end in the reestablishment of Le Prince’s primacy. The resolution, reached in 1901, declared Edison the first and sole inventor of motion picture camera. A court of appeals overturned that ruling in 1902, but Adolphe didn’t live to see it. Regardless, the overturning did nothing to rescue the acclaim his father deserved, nor did it halt Edison’s supremacy over cinematography. Patents, as the Le Prince family tragically discovered, do not decide inventorship, contra their purpose. Even the courts that handle patenting disputes cannot rule on legacy – only those with the influence to sway the court of public opinion can do that. The names we remember today are cemented by foundations of publicity, not patent files gathering dust on the shelves of history. Yet, the people of Leeds, where Le Prince’s workshop once flickered with the future of film, never forgot him. In 1930, the Lord Mayor erected a bronze memorial plate in his honor. It reads: “Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince had a workshop on this site where he made a one-lens camera and with it photographed animated pictures. He also made a projecting machine and this initiated the art of kinemetography.” 

Doesn’t this feel like a movie?  The inventor going missing, the dead sister-in-law, the courtroom battle with the camera just outside the door, powerful forces depriving the plucky true creator of his due, even Jack the Ripper as a cameo, all very appropriately cinematic; it’d be a great part for Bradley Cooper, Greta Gerwig could direct.  In reality, this isn’t a story about one document, it’s 2, no wait, 3 – hang on, 4: the camera, the patent, the first film, and the caveat, which eventually won through.  And there’s your Hollywood ending:  not the vindication of the hero, but rather the triumph of money and power – and name recognition – winning through as it so often seems to do.

References

“Blog | Life, Mystery and Legacy of Louis Le Prince.” n.d. Accessed July 21, 2025. .

Casey, Kieron. 2013. “The Mystery of Louis Le Prince | National Science and Media Museum.” National Science and Media Museum Blog, August 29. .

Greenblatt, Leah. 2022. “He Created the First Known Movie. Then He Vanished.” Books. The New York Times, April 14. .

Howells, Richard. 2006. “Louis Le Prince: The Body of Evidence.” Screen 47 (2): 179–200. .

“How far did you say it was again?  A couple of blocks, more or less?”  Picture us, wandering the streets of Paris, looking for a stone shelf set into a wall, across from the Luxembourg Gardens, 36 rue Vaugirard to be exact, on a warm summer’s afternoon several years ago.  I’d read about it and it seemed like one of those quirky things one does on vacation when you can’t stand Yet Another Cathedral. So my dutiful husband follows me around – love may not always be blind, though it is patient – and eventually we find it, and thus the picture of me standing next to the last remaining original mètre étalon, a standard meter installed in 1796 to enable citizens to calibrate their own measuring devices.

Now after a couple of centuries of wear and tear, that meter is pretty rough now, and while it sufficed, it was never terribly precise, and certainly not as precise as the standard meter that came after that, or the one after that, or the one after that, or the one after that. This is a not-terribly-long story about a not-terribly-short stick that took about a century to have implications far and wide, once almost everybody agreed on it.

A document that changed the world: The Mètre des Archives, a bar of solid platinum, forged and officially adopted by the Convention in Paris, 1799

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and if you’re the sort of person who thinks that “I love you, a bushel and a peck” is insufficiently specific, you’ve come to the right place.  Bushels and pecks are but 2 of the hundreds and thousands of units of measurement invented since time immemorial.  Linear and area measurements likely came first; one book on metrology lists 63 historical examples in its index, acres, cords, fathoms, furlongs, rods, thumbs, yards, 8 different kinds of cubit, a whole bunch you’ve never heard of, and of course feet, which are obvious because, well, most of us have them and there they are, and much the same could be said for lots of early measurements based on the proportions of the human body.  But – which body, or more to the point, whose?  Egyptian “standard” cubits, used for reference in building, were based on the length of the pharaoh’s arm from elbow to tip of middle finger, plus the span of his hand; the yard derived from the length of King Henry I’s arm; his great-grandson Henry III established the weight of a penny to be 32 grains of wheat, taken from the middle of the ear, and an ounce to be 20 pennies, and 12 ounces make the London pound.  Got it?  Many of these standards were established by edict or decree and some were “published” in a sense:  We have Egyptian royal cubits made of wood, and a Roman foot made of bronze, there was a set of metal weights established by Charlemagne. Some emerged from everyday, often local, practice; areas were often measured in terms of how much land could be plowed and by a man with an ox in a given day, and thus might be different in size for different crops and in different places.

As you might have guessed, our story takes us back to France, in this case Revolutionary France which was, um, revolutionary – and not exclusively in political terms, but we’ll get there shortly. July 14 of 1789 the Bastille falls; 3 weeks later, on the 4^th of August, the new National Assembly abolishes the feudal system, which meant that the collection of over 700 units of measurement often used for fraud and abuse effectively went with it, so yay for liberty but what do we do now?   No less a figure than Talleyrand, the notorious side-switcher, then a bishop who had supported the appropriation of church property, eventually to lead the French delegation to the Congress of Vienna, was asked to propose a complete overhaul, meant to unite the world in sweeping away all traditional measures, based first on the period of the swing of a pendulum. 

That didn’t fly, but the Assembly did eventually settle on a decimal system – very much in vogue as they also implemented a new calendar with new months, weeks of 10 days of 10 hours of 100 minutes of 100 seconds, for real – defining a “meter” (from the Greek for “measure”) as 1/10,000,000^th of the meridian distance through Paris from the North Pole to the Equator, perhaps because that was roughly half the size of the existing medieval toise, the span of a man’s 2 arms. A standard iron toise was embedded in the wall of the Grand Chatelet by the 14^th century and the refined Toise of Peru – really – was made official in 1766.

Louis XVI, still alive and sort of reigning, though in prison, approves this plan in June of 1791, his last free official act, the day before his ill-fated attempt to flee the country with Marie-Antoinette. Many twists and turns follow, first among which is how in the heck do you determine that meridional distance? Answer: send out 2 surveyors in 1792 with a complex plan to measure from Dunkirk to Barcelona, starting in Paris and headed in opposite directions.  Which was a breeze, except for the imprisonments, the technical problems, the mountains, the political upheaval, the accidents and near-fatal injuries, the battlefronts, and the fact that one of them made meticulous and scrupulous notes and measurements and the other one didn’t, which meant that errors were baked into his numbers from the word go and he knew it but didn’t know how or why and didn’t want to admit it until his wife came along to help sort it out, kind of. Oops.

1793, the Terror grips Paris; Louis is executed in January, many scientists and thinkers follow for being insufficiently “revolutionary”. Bread riots break out in April of 1795 and within the week, the Convention formally adopts and mandates the metric system in the law of 18 Germinal, year III, with a motto no less: “For all times. For all peoples.” Very noble – though they acted not so much out of a sense of rationality, order and universality as desperately trying to control hyperinflation and save their own skins.  Which didn’t work – they were overrun by new food riots within the month, but the deed was done.  Bear in mind – the survey was still going on, and would continue for another 3 years, so they made a guess with a provisional version which got plonked on the wall we found.

Many more complications later, they finally defined something official based on the survey (which used 2-toise measuring sticks, by the way), in the form of a bar of pure platinum, which was forged by a formal royal goldsmith coaxed back from hiding to be the standard and placed in the National Archives – hence the name – in 1799, mimicking that familiar centuries-old physical toise standard.  It’s 25mm wide and 4 mm deep and is – or was - exactly 1 meter in length, by definition, meaning that, that particular thing, was “the meter” and everything else needed to be gauged to that object, not because it meant or represented anything inherently, but because it was made for that purpose; it’s the idea of the thing and the actuality of the thing itself that establishes what the “standard” is.

It’s not, any more, partially because physical objects change no matter how carefully they’re kept, and finally fixing the errors in the original calculations required adding .2mm to the definition, approved in 1872 by the International Metre Commission, in Paris of course, and further meetings of almost entirely Western national representatives led to the Treaty of the Metre in 1875 (Paris again) and the establishment of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, guardians of the system to this very day.  New prototypes were fabricated in 1889; the US got number 27 in a lottery, and that was the official American standard until 1960, now sitting in a museum at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland.

All fixed, yes?  No.  “The people” did not embrace this wonder of rationality for the reasons people don’t like change – these newfangled things are unfamiliar, we don’t understand it, why are we doing this, and it takes work, many other processes and functions have to change too.  They didn’t like the new measures or the new names.  So the meter gets new-old names to make adoption easier in 1800, which failed, even Napoleon gave up on them in 1809, permitting the use of older and more familiar measures; Louis XVIII bans the metric units outright in 1816, Louis-Phillippe reverses that in 1837 and in 1840, finally, finally, the meter is the meter, whatever it is.  Except – it isn’t; it’s since been re-re-defined, in terms of the wavelength of krypton-86, and now, now – at time of recording - 1/299,792,458^th of the distance traveled by light in a vacuum.  A clumsy, decidedly unlovable definition, still for all times, for all people as the motto remains, even though removed from all human experience or reference. 

Now, they tell us, it’s all settled, one nice tidy package, the Système international, integrated, seamless, you’re welcome, the metre and its cousins the second, the kilogram, the ampere, the kelvin, and mole and candela, and so many of our processes, devices, and lives are bound up by increasingly precise measurement that it’s hard to imagine any dramatic revolutionary – heh – overhaul, and yet the drive for precision goes on, no matter how minuscule or seemingly meaningless the refinement may seen.

The meter as we have it is the result of untold mistakes, errors, political intrusions and intrigues, and misadventures, which matter, but really don’t because no matter how you get there, there you are – the meter is the meter because everybody says, so and more or less agrees and it looks more or less like half of a centuries-old French rod and that is that.

Creating and articulating a standard, of anything, is relatively easy; communicating it is harder, and getting people to agree, and use it, and give up the old ways, is harder still, which is Americans have 2 liter soda bottles and grams of sodium on nutritional labels and used to have 35mm photographic film and that’s about it, although, even our old ones have succumbed; the yard for instance is now officially 0.9144m.  So it goes.

The metric system was meant to be divorced from any particular culture and based solely on rationality and Nature, capital N. But you can’t remove the meter, or any measure, from its social and historical context, and the only way for a measure to be universal is if you do or at least pretend to.  The meter is what it is because it emerged from Revolutionary France; if some other system had been invented, adopted, promulgated somewhere, somewhen else – it’d be different, but the net effect would be effectively nothing, because the standard is the standard…more or less.

References

Alder, Ken. The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World. New York: Free Press, 2002.

—�Ĕ�Ĕ. The Measure of the World. Dibner Library Lecture. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Libraries, 2003.

Atlas Obscura. “The Last Original Standard Metre.” Accessed July 4, 2024. .

BIPM. “Metre.” Accessed July 4, 2024. .

BIPM. “Welcome.” Accessed July 4, 2024. .

“History of the Metre.” In Wikipedia, May 15, 2024. .

“How France Created the Metric System.” Accessed July 4, 2024. .

“International System of Units.” In Wikipedia, June 30, 2024. .

McDonald, Daniel McLean. The Origins of Metrology: Collected Papers of Dr. Daniel McLean McDonald. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1992.

—�Ĕ�Ĕ. The Origins of Metrology: Collected Papers of Dr. Daniel McLean McDonald. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1992.

“M��ٱ��.” NIST, May 9, 2019. .

Williams, Jeffrey H. Defining and Measuring Nature: The Make of All Things. IOP Concise Physics. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2014.

Winchester, Simon. “Galileo, Krypton, and How the True and Accurate Meter Came to Be.” Wired. Accessed July 4, 2024. .

World in the Balance : The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement - University of Washington. Accessed July 4, 2024. .

Can we please just stop and ask for directions?  I know, it’s a cliché, and less relevant in our modern world with sophisticated GPS, digital mapping tools and apps, and so on, but it wasn’t so long ago that road maps and atlases and helpful gas station attendants were vital parts of making your way in new or unfamiliar territory.  And guides of all sorts, from books to websites to word of mouth on social media, can also help to clue travelers in to local customs and lingo.

There’s one journey, though, that everybody takes sooner or later, but nobody comes back to tell us how it’s going; the ultimate journey, to “[t]he undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveler returns” as Hamlet has it.  The desire to know, and be ready for, what awaits us there, and moreover how to get there safely, has occupied a great deal of human thought and also yielded a work of exacting detail, surprising flexibility, and just the right word at just the right time.

A document that changed the world: “The Book of Going Forth by Day”, known more commonly today as “The Book of the Dead”, a set of spells and images from Egyptian funerary equipment, by about 1600 BCE.

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School.  The Book of the Dead was having something of a cultural moment in the late ‘70s when I was growing up, occupying much the same territory as horoscopes, crystals, amulets, tarot cards, auras, seances and the like.  I think it’s the name, which you gotta admit is really cool, even if it’s made-up 19^th century German.  The culture, religion and mystique of ancient Egypt has fascinated for millennia from the Romans to today with TV shows still trying to figure out who or what killed King Tut, umpteen mummy movies back to 1899, Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra (may Isis forgive us), “Walk Like an Egyptian” and even the staggeringly awful Gods of Egypt movie.  There’s something compelling, dare we say spellbinding, about their civilization, art, and mythology.  Think about it – why is the Washington Monument an obelisk of all things?

What we now know as the “Book of the Dead” is many things, but it’s not a book in any contemporary sense of the word.  It’s better described as a corpus, a repertoire of about 200 spells meant to assist the newly departed soul in its perilous travels to get to an afterlife of comfort and plenty.  It’s part of a genre called “mortuary literature” and has its origins in earlier forms, starting with Pyramid Texts as far back as 2300 BCE actually written on the walls of royal pyramids, sometimes with intentionally mutilated characters to prevent harm; these evolved into Coffin Texts, so named because they were written on the insides of coffins. 

Around 1700 BCE, sarcophagi changed from rectangular to more human shapes, which might have left less room for interior writing, and that might have led to the adoption of papyrus, a writing material already in use for over a millennium, yielding the plentiful examples we now know of.  Over time, these too evolved, from the hieroglyphic writing we associate with Ancient Egypt to the more readable hieratic script and the increasing addition of images which were equally potent in achieving the desired effects.  These papyri survived in large part because the dry desert climate helped to preserve them, though there are examples stained with, um, fluids from the mummified remains they were buried with, often placed in direct contact with the bodies, presumably for easy access.

The Egyptians believed that the only way to Duat, the underworld, was through the tomb, and that rituals both in life and in death were necessary to get there.  The newly-deceased would have to make a perilous journey, passing through a series of gateways or portals guarded by fearsome beasts, demons, and gods, and facing a number of challenges and questions along the way, requiring precise and correct answers at each stage, which the spells were meant to provide, so having them at the ready was critical in making it through successfully.  Spells could protect you against dangerous animals, allow you to breathe or drink, or transform your physical form as necessary, reflecting their belief in magic, the power of both the written and spoken word.

After employing dozens of these preparatory and protective spells, providing detailed intel on the specific names of gates and their guardians, the deceased would arrive for the Declaration of Innocence at the Hall of Two Truths, facing a panel of 42 judges presided over by Osiris, god of the underworld.  Here Spell 125 would have you covered, so you could correctly name each of the assessors and perform the Negative Confession, swearing your innocence to a long list of possible sins and crimes, including murder, blasphemy, cruelty, profiteering, adultery, impatience, tampering with weights or slaying sacred cattle.  At this point, your heart, which they saw as the essence of a person and the seat of mind and intellect, which would remember what you did in life, would be weighed against a feather representing truth; one of the most-discussed spells, number 30, directs the heart not to rat you out, literally not to make your name stink, which could come in quite handy indeed for many of us.  Failure at any stage meant an eternity of isolation, dishonor and degradation, including the eating of excrement (ewww), perpetual thirst, or being thrown into a lake of fire or devoured by wild beasts.  Passing the test on the other hand led to paradise, a bountiful and successful afterlife, filled with eating, drinking, sex – and work, though burial figures known as ushabti would handily come to life to do that for you.

Now, here’s the thing that gets me.  This has got to be the highest stakes journey you could imagine, one wrong move or word and it’s the dunghill for dinner forever.  And there’s lots of redundancy in the system, in addition to spells on the walls and insides of sarcophagi, there are examples on leather, stelae, even on the mummifying linen bandages themselves so the deceased would literally be wrapped in the spells; others are intended to be inscribed on scarabs or magical bricks.  But – and this is a pretty monumental but – of all the many examples which have been studied, no two appear to be identical. 

There is, apparently, no canonical or definitive version; each person – and let’s be clear that this is an elite and exclusive practice reserved for people who could afford it all, maybe 10% of the population at best – got to pick their own from an evolving corpus of options and possibilities.  There are commonalities and patterns, to be sure, but there is great variation in content and length, ranging from scraps with a handful of spells to scrolls up to 40m in length.  The choices of which spells to include and in what order appear to be purposeful and carefully considered, rather than merely random, though it’s unclear by which criteria these decisions were made, economic perhaps, or personal preference?  I have to say, for something this important in a culture so fixated on a successful afterlife as well as the peace of mind of the living, it’s astonishing that some of these practices seem idiosyncratic and apparently that was not only ok, but more or less the norm. 

Scrolls were probably created in temple scriptoria by teams of professionals, some of whom focused on images, others on text, not entirely unlike some modern comic books or graphic novels; scholars estimate a good quality version could be produced in a week or two, though the quicker option for your dearly beloved on the go is a more or less off-the-rack version, with spaces left for names to be written in, including some instances where the characters needed to be stretched out or squeezed in to fit and even some with the names still blank which might have caused some red faces in front of Osiris.  A “decorated” one might cost you the equivalent of a half year of a workman’s wage, or the price of 3 donkeys. 

A typical scroll often has a blank papyrus sheaf attached to the outside for protection, is 20-40cm wide, and highly structured, primarily using black ink, with red for headings, openings, and names of dangerous animals; there are regular margins, framing lines, and fields for images which were increasingly prevalent over the centuries, so we know that great care was taken with these though little evidence of practice or training versions has been uncovered, and master copies are quite rare.  The practice continued through several periods and dynasties, eventually starting to fade out by the turn of the Common Era as the Greeks and Romans entered the scene.

We owe that super cool name to Karl Richard Lepsius, described as the founder of German Egyptology, who apparently named it “Tötenbuch”, perhaps from the Arabic term used by villagers to describe tomb papyri.  I won’t attempt the name by which the Egyptians knew it,  translating roughly into “The Book of Going Forth by Day,” reinforcing that the soul isn’t trapped in the tomb, can move, and go into the daylight as they so fervently hoped.  Lepsius published the first translation with the still-used numbering system in 1842, followed by  comparative edition by the Swiss scholar Edouard Naville, who crafted a more or less “complete” version of each of the many dozens of spells, with variations.  This work took nearly 10 years, supplemented by vignettes drawn by his wife Marguerite [Naville].  At first, spells would have been drawn or transcribed for publication by hand, using tracing paper; then a metal movable type set was created.  Now, as you’d expect, there are digital fonts, and hieroglyphic characters have their own Unicode points, created in 2009, nestling right between Cypro-Minoan cuneiform and Anatolian hieroglyphs.  Research continues; the most recent complete version, the first in a century, was found in 2022 at the Saqqara necropolis near Cairo.

It is possible – that they had it right, and those who survived the beasts and labyrinths and judgment are enjoying the fruits of the bountiful and eternal afterlife they anticipated.  We tend to think of ancient Egypt as unchanging, stable, as rigid as the poses in their paintings and as monolithic as the pyramids and obelisks, and, let’s be fair, the pharaonic period endured more than 10 times as long as the United States has.  Yet not only did this practice evolve over a couple of millennia, they were remarkably flexible about the specific form. 

Many writers compare the Book to a travel guide, which is fine, though I would also suggest it’s an odd hybrid – not unlike a crocodile-headed god, with a password manager or better still those little post-it notes you’re not supposed to have next to your computer that remind you of what codes you need to access what, equally valuable in navigating the traps and pitfalls of the modern world.

When your time comes, I might suggest you could do worse than start with Spell 9:  “I have opened up every path which is in the sky and on earth, for I am the well-beloved son of my father Osiris. I am noble, I am a spirit, I am equipped; O all you gods and all you spirits, prepare a path for me.”

Resources

• ARCE. “Book of the Dead: A Guidebook to the Afterlife.” Accessed August 21, 2023. .
• Book of the Dead: Becoming God in Ancient Egypt / ILL TN 2182983, n.d.
• Buck, Adriaan de, Alan H. Gardiner, and James P. Allen. “The Egyptian Coffin Texts.” The University of Chicago Oriental Institute Publications ; v. 34, 49, 64, 67, 73, 81, 87, 132. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1935.
• Ikram, Salima. “The Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the Dead for Eternity.” New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998.
• “In Our Time - The Egyptian Book of the Dead - BBC Sounds.” Accessed May 19, 2023. .
• @NatGeoUK. “The Book of the Dead Was Egyptians’ Inside Guide To The Underworld.” National Geographic, February 10, 2019. .
• O’Rourke, Paul F. An Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Sobekmose. London] : New York, NY, United States: Thames & Hudson, 2016.
• Ouellette, Jennifer. “Archaeologists Discovered a New Papyrus of Egyptian Book of the Dead.” Ars Technica, January 21, 2023. .
• Taylor, John H. Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: Journey through the Afterlife. London: British Museum, 2010.
• The British Museum. “What Is a Book of the Dead?” Accessed August 21, 2023. .
• TlMES, Special Correspondence Thb New York. “Part of a Splendid Copy on Papyrus of the ‘Book of the Dead.’” The New York Times, December 11, 1910.
• “UAX #44: Unicode Character Database.” Accessed August 21, 2023. .
• “What Is the Egyptian Book of the Dead?” Accessed August 21, 2023. .

Oh dear, which fork am I supposed to use?  It seems have forever been concocting rules about what to do and not to do in social situations, and thinking badly of others for breaking or not knowing those rules which aren’t written down but everybody else seems to know, and which are either engraved in stone or change by the day, and often wind up becoming exclusive: if you know, you’re in and if you don’t, you’re not.  So many forks.

If only we had some sort of guide, a gracious hand gently chaperoning us through the minefield of social customs and mores, leavened with common sense, egalitarianism, and just a soupçon of dry wit, helping us all to be at our best and at our ease in any situation, better company, and better versions of ourselves and our societies.

A document that changed the world: “Etiquette in Society, in Business, and at Home”, written by Mrs. Emily Post, 1922.

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and when you think of “etiquette” – the word comes directly from the French for “ticket” – you likely think of other words like “manners” or “decorum” or “civility” (living in a city), a code of appropriate, proper, correct, polite behavior and deportment, the “right way” to do things; in short, the rules.  It might also bring to mind situations where you felt awkward or out of place, uncertain or unaware of what to do and afraid of making a mistake; in short, a clod.  And forks, somehow forks always come up.

As ever, guides to such things go way back:  Confucius wrote about social relationships, Renaissance books of courtesies (how to behave at a royal court), even a 3^rd millennium BCE Egyptian work stressing the importance of virtues like kindness, truthfulness, not speaking down to others, and laugh at the boss’ jokes, really.  Table manners come up in Eccleasticus, don’t wolf your food and don’t reach for anything first.  Manners and behavior have been studied from sociological, anthropological, hygienic and even evolutionary perspectives, and consider for just a moment the various situations and places where a particular kind of etiquette can be involved:  going to a movie or concert or religious service, while driving or walking, at work, even on an escalator, or in sports; winning a point in tennis with a ball that hits the net cord and bounces funny should prompt a brief wave/fauxpology, which nobody believes but if you don’t do it people get tetchy.  And for those of you who’ve not experienced a men’s restroom, if there’s only one person in there and you take the urinal next to them, it’s weird.

So, it’s everywhere; lucky we are then to have had a guide, in the personage of Emily Post, whose name became synonymous with etiquette for most of the 20^th century as the phrase “according to Emily Post” took hold.  She had exactly the kind of upbringing you would expect from an etiquette maven.  Born in Baltimore likely in October of 1872, to an architect who designed luxury communities and the daughter of a coal baron, educated first at home and then at Miss Graham’s finishing school; married at 20 to a stockbroker she met on the night of her debut in society, living in Washington Square with a country home.  Idyllic.  Until, that is, she dumped and divorced him in 1905 because he was being blackmailed for affairs with chorus girls.  These things happen in the best of families.

She took to writing once her sons went off to boarding schools; newspaper and magazine articles, a few novels and a travel book about a road trip to San Francisco.  Over her lifetime, the story of how she came to write The Book of Etiquette grew grander, that she had to have her arm twisted by the editor of Vanity Fair repeatedly after he casually suggested it at a dinner party; she said she thought the topic was boring and beneath her.  That’s a great story, though not entirely true as we know from a letter to her literary agent 9 years earlier asking him to get her a gig writing a column on the subject, which she got.

A little context is important here; this dinner party takes place in early 1920:  World War I and the flu pandemic have just ended, Prohibition has just started, women are on the cusp of earning hard-fought voting rights, and many groups of people are searching for the right ways to find their way in the world:  recent immigrants, returned soldiers and their wives looking to further their careers and family situations, and the nouveaux riches who wanted to look a little less nouveaux.  The then-current standby book is a fusty and musty two-volume tome that presupposed wealth and status and was filled with lots of piddly rules and details, and books of etiquette had been pouring out and very popular for decades.  Writing something new and fresh would be a public service, Emily, how about it?

Though her sons tried to talk her out of it, she did.  Writing in longhand at her father’s drafting table, she drew on examples and experiences from her own life, reaching out to friends and even strangers for their perspectives, working every day except Sundays, organizing and categorizing, and eventually delivering a quarter-million word manuscript in early 1922, yielding a 627 page book, bound in royal blue, and selling for a rather grand $4 (upwards of $50 today); word of mouth cut through the glut of competitors and it sold far beyond the publisher’s modest first print run of 5,000 copies, getting to 50,000 and a second printing within 6 months, along with syndication rights.  By the time she died in 1960 it had gone through 89 printings in 10 revised editions.

In form, it’s often described as a “manual” which is sorta right – that connotes a kind of reference with rules, or instructions like for a car or appliance, not necessarily meant to be read straight through.  There are “rules” here, though not laid out as for a sport or game, these are the kind that are enforced by withering stares or whispers leading to social ruin, literally “unspoken” but nonetheless expected to be known. 

Emily throws open the French doors and lets everybody in on the secrets, and for my money, her book was a hit resulting from two sources of genius:  she made it accessible and she made it fun.  Her fiction background came in handy, as the book is populated with a wide cast of characters from the snooty Gildings to the understanding Kindharts, grandiose Mrs. Worldly and the Richan Vulgars, among others. The juicy dedication adds a little guessing-game fun too: “To you my friends whose identity in these pages is veiled in fictional disguise it is but fitting that I dedicate this book”.  

There’s tons of advice and warnings and guidance and whatnot on dozens of matters many familiar today: introductions, social occasions and invitations, weddings, funerals, writing letters, as well as the arcana of debutante balls, paying calls, chaperons, afternoon teas and summer homes.  However, a lot of it boils down to a couple of simple basics:  Make the other person comfortable, put them at their ease. She had no patience for put-on airs, rudeness, pretention, and what she termed “the omniscience of the very rich”. 

 One of her central concepts was “Best Society” which sounds very la-di-da but she casts it egalitarian tones:  “Best Society is not a fellowship of the wealthy, nor does it seek to exclude those who are not of exalted birth; but it is an association of gentle-folk, of which… charm of manner… and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members”

Ever seeking broader audiences – her daughter-in-law once remarked she always sought to be the center of attention – Emily became a radio star, appearing on multiple programs and networks several times a week throughout the 1930’s.  Pearl Harbor knocked Emily and many others off the radio, understandably, though her column continued to thrive with 5 million readers and she produced a “War-Time Supplement” for a 1942 edition, highlighting necessary and sensible changes to conventions and behavior, reinforcing that “etiquette is not a fixed subject”:  approving of women writing anonymous letters to soldiers, managing rushed weddings and honeymoons, hospitality without waste with smaller portions at mealtime, and carrying your own saccharin with you in time of sugar rationing.

More poignantly, don’t pepper returning veterans with questions about the war, getting a job, being home – let them raise the topics themselves when they’re ready.  And in a special section on espionage, she warns against unfounded or hasty suspicions or accusations of foreigners, advice that sadly fell on too many deaf ears.  A later postwar revision urges consideration for disabled veterans in a section called, typically frankly, “How to Treat Them”:  “What are we going to do and say when they leave the hospitals and take their places in the world for which they have given so much?…don’t stare, don’t point, don’t make personal remarks”.  It all worked, thousands of copies sold weekly during and after the war, and it was one of the most requested books for USO clubs.

Life magazine twice named her one of the most important Americans of the 20^th century, another put her second to Eleanor Roosevelt as most the powerful woman in America in 1950, she was on a postage stamp in 1998, heck, she was in a Jeopardy! clue last night, and though I have to officially frown on this, Etiquette was reportedly second only to the Bible as the most stolen book from public libraries.

Etiquette is, a century on, in its 19^th edition, now overseen by two of her great-great-grandchildren, and the Emily Post Institute continues her tradition of adapting and translating for the times, dispensing wisdom on unfriending, how to celebrate major Jewish and Islamic holidays, online gaming (trash talking is ok in the spirit of fun), “please” and “thank you” in sign language, social social distancing, and, God help us, Zoom meetings.  Their podcast “Awesome Etiquette” is worth a listen.

We must now return to the most pressing matter:  forks.  Emily’s New York Times obituary has you covered:  “If you picked up the wrong fork, there was a possibility that your hostess was wrong in having too many forks.”  Ever gracious, ever trying to put everyone at their ease, she would have loved that. 

Resources

• Aresty, Esther B. “The Best Behavior; the Course of Good Manners - from Antiquity to the Present - as Seen through Courtesy and Etiquette Books.” New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.
• Claridge, Laura P. Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 2008.
• “Definition of ETIQUETTE,” June 8, 2023. .
• “Emily Post.” In Wikipedia, March 27, 2023. .
• Emily Post. “Emilypost.Com.” Accessed June 7, 2023. .
• “Etiquette.” In Wikipedia, May 23, 2023. .
• Gioia, Ted. “What I Learned from Emily Post’s ‘Etiquette’ (1922).” Substack newsletter. The Honest Broker (blog), March 5, 2023. .
• Literary  Hub. “The Pulse of American Life: On Emily Post’s Evolving Legacy,” October 5, 2022. .
• Miller, Laura. “To the Manners Born.” Slate, April 19, 2017. .
• Retroette. “1940s Wartime Etiquette,” September 9, 2014. .
• Sherwood, M. E. W. “Manners and Social Usages.” New York: Harper & Brothers, 1884.
• The New York Times. “Emily Post Is Dead Here at 86.” September 27, 1960.
• “The Rules of Etiquette: Emily Post | National Postal Museum.” Accessed July 22, 2023. .
• Time. “The Surprising Lesson About American History Hidden in Emily Post’s ‘Etiquette,’” October 25, 2019. .