Nursery rhymes, so-called because they were told by wet-nurses to young children who slept in the nurseries of large houses, are little sing-song rhymes that have been passed down over the centuries and which are still told to children today. They’re cheerful, funny little poems and rhymes, designed to delight children and teach them language in a way that they will enjoy and understand. But that’s all. After all…they’re just nonsense-verses…right?

Wrong.

Here are the real stories and origins behind some of the most common nursery rhymes that you and I grew up with in our childhoods.

Jack Be Nimble

Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick!
Jack, jump over the candlestick!

A cute little poem, isn’t it? About someone jumping over a candle. But what does it mean?

This poem dates back to the 1500s. In Tudor-era England (1485-1603), a common superstition held that one’s fortunes could be foretold by jumping over a burning candle. How did this play out in practice? Well, you lit a candle, placed it on the floor and jumped over it.

If the candlle stayed lit, it signalled good fortune and a bright future.

If the candle went out, it signalled bad fortune and dark times ahead.

Sing a Song of Sixpence

Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye!
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie!

When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing,
O, what a dainty dish,
To set before the king!

This nursery rhyme also dates back to the rule of the Tudors. In Medieval and Early-Modern high society dinners, it was common practice for chefs to create showpieces for the dinnertable. These dishes or centerpieces weren’t designed to be eaten, they were there as a display-piece to show off the chef’s skill.

It was a common trick-dish that chefs used to bake, that appears in this nursery rhyme. A pie-base and walls were baked in an oven. The lid of the pie was baked separately. Live birds (or frogs or mice or any other suitably small animal) were put into the empty pie-crust, and the pastry lid was placed on top. The whole thing was then served at the table.

It wasn’t there to be eaten. It was meant to be a practical joke. The first person to cut the pie open would get the shock of birds (or mice or frogs) jumping out of the pie and flying or running all over the dining-room.

…Pie, anyone?

Lucy Locket

Lucy Locket lost her pocket,
Kitty Fisher found it,
Not a penny was there in it!
Only a ribbon ’round it.

In medieval times, clothes did not come with pockets. If you had anything small that needed to be put away, to keep your hands free, you would put it into a small cloth pouch, purse or ‘pocket’ tied to your belt. If the ribbon or cord holding the pouch to your belt came loose, then you literally..lost a pocket.

This is also the origin of the term ‘cutpurse’ (meaning an early type of pickpocket-criminal), who would quite literally cut the cord of your pocket away from your belt with a knife, and then run off with it!

Pease Pudding

Pease Pudding Hot,
Pease Pudding Cold,
Pease Pudding in the pot,
Nine days old.

Pease Pudding (also called Pease Porridge or Pease Pottage) was a staple-food of the peasantry in medieval times. Made of little more than peas, water and grains, this cheap, filling food made up one of the cornerstones of the medieval peasant diet. In times of famine, food was so hard to come by, that people relied on this simple vegetable stew to sustain them through even the toughest times, eating it…hot…cold…or even rancid stale! Pease pudding remained a popular quick-and-easy meal well into the Victorian era (during which, it was sold by street-vendors as fast-food, along with sheeps’ trotters, baked potatoes and of course…fish and chips!).

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier…

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier,
Sailor, rich man, poor man,
Beggar-man, thief!

Almost everyone knows this rhyme. It goes all the way back to the late 1400s. It appeared in its present form in 1695.

This simple poem, just three lines long, is actually a remnant of a much larger poem, sung by girls in centuries past, in a similar manner to a jump-rope song. The girl would ask such questions as when she would marry, where she would live, what she would wear on her wedding-day, how she would get the dress (indicating financial status) and lastly, what kind of husband she would marry. The poem lists out all the possible occupations that her future husband might have.

Monday’s Child

Monday’s child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go,
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for a living,
But the child who is born on the Sabbath Day,
Is bonnie and blithe and good and gay.

If you ever wondered why Morticia and Gomez Addams’s daughter is named Wednesday Addams…that’s why.

This rhyme, from the 1830s, was supposed to predict a child’s future and temperment, dependent on the day on which he or she was born.

Pat-a-Cake, Pat-a-Cake

Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake,
Baker’s Man,
Bake me a cake as fast as you can,
Pat it, and prick it, and mark it with a ‘B’,
And put it in the oven for baby and me!

This rhyme dates to the 1690s. But what’s the whole thing about ‘mark it with a B’ for?

Believe it or not, but people didn’t always do their baking at home.

Before the invention of the first real household stoves (the cast-iron range-cooker in the early 1800s), most people did their cooking on open fires, in pans or pots or cauldrons.

This was fine for things like spit-roasting meat, or cooking things in a pot, like stew…or soup…or 2-minute noodles.

But what if you wanted to bake a cake? Or a pie? It simply couldn’t be done in the comfort of your own home, because  the domestic oven didn’t exist at the time.

So if you did make a pie or a cake, and wanted to bake it, but didn’t have an oven, what did you do?

More often than not, you took it down the street to the village bakery. Here, the local baker would put your pie or cake into his big commercial oven, and bake it for you (for a small consideration, of course).

Because this was a pretty common practice before the widespread use of the first modern range-stoves (which had their own, inbuilt ovens), bakers would mark the tops of their customers’ pies and cakes with their owners initials. This was to prevent mix-ups and confusions when the baked goods were removed from the ovens and laid on tables to cool, before customers came to pick up their finished goods. Hence the line ‘mark it with a ‘B”.

Yankee Doodle

Yankee Doodle,
Went to town,
A-riding on his pony,
Stuck a feather in his cap,
And called it ‘Macaroni’!

This popular song dates from the mid-1700s in the British North-American colonies.

What the hell is ‘Macaroni’?

Well…it’s…pasta.

But in the 1700s, pasta was new. Especially to the English. And English travellers encountering ‘macaroni pasta’ for the first time, found it unique, exciting and oh-so next-big-thing. So it was, that anything new, amazing, and eventually – over-the-top, exaggerated and excessively decorated, came to be known as ‘Macaroni’.

The song was invented by British soldiers living in Colonial America at the time of the French-and-Indian Wars (ca. 1750s). It was designed to poke fun at the fashionable aspirations of the American colonials and how they strived to put on airs and graces, and dress up in the latest European fads and fashions…and failed miserably. Basically, it’s the British teasing the Yanks about how they’re pathetic tryhards at imitating the latest European fashions.

…Looks like nothing much has changed in 250 years.

Anyway. What is ‘Macaroni’?

Macaroni was a crazy European fashion of the mid-1700s. The word was used to describe anything new, flashy, outlandish and ridiculously foppish and exaggerated. The Macaroni fashion and style was closely linked to 18th century foppishness – a fop being someone who paid far too much attention to his appearance…basically metrosexuality before it was cool. It was this exaggerated attention paid to one’s appearance…and the thought that one looked GOOD…that the British poked fun at their colonial counterparts in the song.

A discussion I had with some friends recently about names made me think of…well…names. But specifically, the origins and meanings of what are called ‘occupational surnames’. That is, the surnames that are derived from various historical occupations. The following posting is a list of some of the more common occupational surnames that have sprouted up over the centuries, and the origins of the names and the professions which they spring from. Maybe your surname’s in here somewhere?

Bowyer

As in: Thomas Bowyer (witness in the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders of 1888).

If your surname is Bowyer, chances are that centuries ago, one of your ancestors was active in the manufacture of the high-powered weapon of the Middle Ages. The longbow. When the longbow was in its prime, it was most often made of the wood of the Yew tree. Bowstrings would’ve been made from linen or in even older times, animal sinew. Not for nothing was it called the longbow, however. For maximum range, speed and penetrating force, longbows were made as big as possible, often being the same size as the person who shot it. So a bow could be anywhere from five to six feet in height.

Butler

As in: Rhett Butler (Character in ‘Gone with the Wind‘; of ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!’ fame).

The surname ‘Butler’ comes from the French word ‘Butuiller’, or ‘bottler’. The ‘Butler’ was therefore the guy who looked after bottles…of wine! It’s from the same root and the same word that we get the occupation of ‘Butler’ as a domestic servant. Although in popular culture, the Butler is the all-seeing, all-knowing, discreet and conniving head of the household servantry, the post actually started out as being the official custodian of the home’s wine-cellar where the bottles that gave him his title were stored.

Chandler

As in: Raymond Chandler (Famous American crime-fiction writer).

If your name’s Chandler or if your last name’s chandler, then once upon a time, quite possibly, a long time ago, your ancestors worked in the lighting industry. A ‘chandler’ was the name given to a maker of candles. From which we also get the word ‘Chandelier’. The chandler’s job was to manufacture candles using wicks and wax (either natural beeswax or cheaper tallow, a sort of waxy substance derived from…animal fat!). Candles were made in a variety of ways. Longer stick-candles were usually made by tying the wicks to wooden frames and suspending the frames over vats of molten wax. Dipping the candle-wicks into the hot wax over and over and raising them out after each dipping caused the wicks to be coated in wax. The wax then dried and the candles were dipped again…and again…and again.

This was a long, slow process but it produced nice, slender candles. The other method for candlemaking was to lower the wicks into the middle of a mold and to just pour the candle-wax into the mold around the wick. This was used to make larger candles, but pouring boiling hot liquid wax could be extremely dangerous. Anyone who’s ever had wax get onto their hands while trying to blow out those big fat ornamental pillar-candles will know how painful a wax-burn can be!

Collier

As in: Peter F. Collier (of ‘Collier’s Weekly‘ fame)

The title ‘Collier’ was given to any person who had anything to do with coal. Whether he mined it, sold it, dug it out of the ground or even made charcoal (by burning wood). The collier had an important job. Coal, in its various forms and varities, was needed for a lot of things. Blacksmiths required coal to fire their forges, manufacturers of gunpowder required specially-made ‘charcoal’ (crushed to a powder) to mix with potassium nitrate and sulphur to create old-fashioned gunpowder, and ordinary homes required tons of coal to fire stoves and fireplaces.

Cooper

As in: Merian Caldwell Cooper (American filmmaker who created the 1933 classic ‘King Kong’).

‘Cooper’ is another occupational name. In older times, the ‘cooper’ was the man who made barrels…you know, the stuff that wine’s stored in? The place he worked in was called the cooperage. The word ‘Cooper’ comes from the Dutch word ‘Kup‘, meaning ‘tub’.

Any settlement, village, city or town of significant size was likely to have at least one cooperage and at least one cooper. Barrels were required for a lot of things, and not just wine. In 1605, the Gunpowder Plotters stored eighteen hundredweight (nearly a ton!) of black gunpowder in barrels in the undercroft of the House of Lords in London, in their epic (but failed) assassination-attempt of James I of England. Two hundred years later in 1805, the cooper’s craft was used to store something else. When Lord Horatio Nelson was killed by a sniper’s bullet during the Battle of Trafalgar, his corpse was stuffed into a barrel and was preserved during the voyage home to England for his funeral, by being submerged in brandy!

Falconer/Faulkner

As in: William Faulkner (American writer).

If your surname is ‘Falconer’ or it’s variation, ‘Faulkner’, then it might be possible, once upon a time, a long time ago, that one of your ancestors might, just might, have had a very special job. Not a very comfortable job. But certainly one that was very special.

A falconer is a man who trains, looks after and handles a falcon. One of these things:

Isn’t he just the most adorable, cuddly, snuggly little birdie?

This is a falcon. The falcon is a bird of prey that attacks small game. Because of their speed (grown Falcons can dive at a speed of up to two hundred miles an hour!), strength and predatory nature, they were prized as hunting-birds by medieval royalty. Falcons were caught, tamed and then trained to hunt small game such as smaller birds and rabbits for their masters. The person who looked after the falcons was called the falconer. His job involved a large number of duties all related to this very prized bird. Duties which included housing the birds, feeding them, exercising them, carrying them around (such prized birds would never dare sully their royal wings by flapping through common air!) and of course, recovering any prey or quarry that the falcon had managed to capture. Given that only kings and queens were allowed to hunt with falcons, being a falconer meant that you were a servant of someone rich and powerful. Of course, failing to look after your master’s falcons could result in some nasty punishments. If the falcon went missing, you, as the falconer, had to go after it. And even if you found it, the falcon was then allowed to remove 6oz. (about a third of a pound) of flesh from your body as punishment! Ouch!

Fletcher

As in: Dustin Fletcher (Australian football player).

A fletcher is an arrowmaker. The name comes from the ‘fletching’ that the arrowmaker attaches to the ends of the arrow-shafts. Fletching being the nice, colourful bits of bird-feather which he sticks on the ends, to give the arrows the required aerodynamic properties to spin in the air and be as accurate as possible. Before the rise of firearms in the Early Modern period, the fletcher had the important job of creating the most advanced and lethal form of ammunition then in existence. Bowmen had to train every single weekend for hours at a time to ready themselves for battle. An arrow tipped with a steel point could be fired with enough force to pierce plate-armour, chainmail and penetrate flesh. In the Battle of Hastings, King Harold of the Anglo-Saxons was killed by an arrow to the eye. That is the fletcher’s craft at work.

Fuller

As in: Kurt Fuller (American actor).

‘Fuller’ is one of the less obvious occupational names that has survived through the centuries. A fuller was a cloth-worker. A worker who was occupied in the task of ‘fulling’. Fulling is the act of cleansing freshly-woven (but dirty) cloth, of impurities such as aminal-oils, dirt, grit or other gunk, and binding the fibres of the cloth together to make it thicker and stronger. Traditionally, the cloth was woven wool. And traditionally, people employed as fullers were given the privilege (probably) of being allowed as many urinary bathroom breaks as ever they could wish!

Why?

Because fulling used to be done by dumping the cloth into an open tub and then drenching it in gallons of stale piss! The chemicals in human urine (specifically, the ammonia, which gives it that delightful scent) help flush out the impurities in the fabric and binds the fibres of the cloth together to make it stronger. Fortunately, a cleaner method of fulling involving a type of earth (called ‘Fuller’s Clay’), replaced urinal fulling, which in turn, was replaced by a much, much cleaner fulling medium – soap!

Page

As in: Anita Page (American actress).

A ‘page’ is a knight in training. In medieval times, armies had footsoldiers, cavalry, archers and knights. Knights were the elite, specially-trained soldiers who fought on horseback. The training was gruelling to say the least. To become a knight, you went through three stages of training. Starting at age 7, you became a page, apprenticed to a full knight. You would be sent to live with the knight and with the local noble family. Obviously, to do this, your family had to be pretty rich, too.

Because you (or your family) paid for everything. That ‘everything’ included the chainmail, the sword, the shield, the horse and of course, the shining armour. For seven years, a page learnt reading, writing, music, languages, how to behave in a royal or noble court, and then he entered his formal training at the age of 14. From 14 to 21, he was a squire. As a squire, he learnt how to clean, repair, take off, put on, wear and move around in armour. He learnt how to fight on horseback and on foot. He would wear his armour as often as possible to get used to the weight. A suit of armour could weigh upwards of 100 pounds…not including the sword…scabbard…woolen undershirt…chainmail…and shield. If you had proven that you were brave, strong and intelligent enough, or had rendered a suitably courageous service, you would be knighted sometime after your 21st birthday.

Sandler

As in: Adam Sandler (American actor).

Derived from the Hebrew word “Sandlar” – “Sandal-maker” or “Shoemaker”. In times past, a shoemaker was a skilled and valued person. The manufacture of quality footwear was important in times when roads were little more than dirt tracks and most streets were rivers of filth and muck. Then, as now, most shoes were made of leather.

Sawyer

As in: Tom Sawyer (Fictional character created by Mark Twain).

In older times, a ‘sawyer’ was a woodworker. More precisely, he was a…sawyer. A man who worked with a wood-saw to cut long slats of wood (planks!) for people to use in building and the manufacture of furniture and other essential items made of wood (such as carts, gates, fences and so-on). The sawyer profession still exists today, but with the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of steam and water-powered sawmills with enormous automatic saws, it’s not as common as what it once was. Sawyers often worked in pairs because the logs they cut were so large and the massive saws that they used, so incredibly long and heavy.

To saw a plank, a prepared log was placed over a pit and was held in place by wooden beams called ‘dogs’. It’s from here that we get the expressions “top dog” and “underdog”. The ‘top dog’ was the sawyer who was ‘atop the dogs’ or outside the pit, holding the top end of the saw. The ‘underdog’ was the man down in the pit, holding the bottom half of the saw, quite literally ‘under the dogs’. It was the top dog’s job to guide the sawteeth. It was the underdog’s job to apply pressure on the downwards strokes, and to lift the saw on the upwards strokes. He was the underdog in more ways than one, though. All the sawdust that came from the constant abrasion of the sawteeth would fall into the pit and get all over the underdog. Not a pleasant job.

Slater

As in: Christian Slater (American actor).

Related to the thatcher and the tyler (or ’tiler’), the slater was the man who worked specifically with a type of rock…Slate…to tile the rooves of buildings. The characteristics of slate means that it can be split into thin sheets or plates. These plates or ‘shingles’ can then be hammered onto the roof in overlapping layers to create a leakproof roof.

Smith

As in: Dame Maggie Smith (British Actress).

Smith is one of the most common surnames in the world. But what is a ‘Smith’?

A smith was a metalworker. There are many kinds of smiths. Blacksmiths (who worked with iron and steel). Brownsmiths (who worked with copper). Tinsmiths. Silversmiths. Goldsmiths. Locksmiths. The list is almost endless. But almost without exception, a smith was a person who worked in some way with metal. The place where a smith worked, officially called a ‘forge’ was often nicknamed just the ‘Smithy’, as in ‘the village smithy’. The blacksmith is often considered the king of the Smiths…as well as the king of all artisans and workers. The blacksmith was the guy who made the stuff that everyone else used to make stuff with! He made the axes, the swords, the saws, hammers, nails, horseshoes, door-knockers, candleholders, knives, shovels…anything made of metal had to go through his hands first before someone else could use it!

A tinsmith (one of the varieties of smiths) was also called a ‘tinker’: Someone who fiddled around with small, metal household objects (such as pots, pans, ladles and other common household utensils).

But how does something like ‘Smith’ have anything to do with metal? The surname ‘Smith’ comes from the Old English word ‘Smite’. As in to ‘Smite them down!’. To ‘Smite’ someone or something literally meant to hit them. Since half a metalworker’s time is spent in beating the red hot metal to the correct shape before it cools (and becomes too hard to work), the word ‘Smite’ was applied to their professions, which eventually evolved to ‘Smith’, which is still used today.

A lot of our expressions today come from the humble village blacksmith. To ‘Strike while the Iron is Hot’. To go at something ‘Hammer and Tongs’.

Spencer

As in: Lady Diana Spencer (Princess Diana).

The surname ‘Spencer’ is originally of French origin. It comes from the occupation of the ‘Dispencier‘, or the dispenser of provisions. The surname ‘Spencer’ is unique in that it’s probably one of the few surnames that can be traced back to ONE person. That person being Robert d’Abbetot. d’Abbetot followed King William (William the Conquerer) to England during his conquest of the British Isles. His occupation was the royal dispenser (of provisions and materials for William’s armies). As such, his name was listed as “Robert le Dispencier’ (“Robert the Dispenser”). Robert eventually changed his name to that of Robert le Dispensier as opposed to Robert d’Abbetot. Over the following generations, le Dispensier became ‘Dispensier’, then ‘Spensier’ and eventually…’Spencer’.

Tanner

As in: Bill Tanner (Character in the James Bond universe).

A tanner was a processor of leather, the material produced from animal hides. The place in which he would have worked was the tannery. Being a tanner was a terrible and revolting job. For one, it involved stewing the cow-hides in vats of water and dog-droppings! The full tanning process went like this:

1. Stick cow-hides in vats of water and lime (the stuff you make old-style concrete out of, not the stuff that goes in your drink!) Let it soak. This loosens up all the hair on the hide.

2. Remove the hide after two weeks’ soaking. Place the hide on a sloped board while you shave off all the hair and fur with a massive knife.

3. Flip the hide over. Using another big, scary knife, slice and shave away all the fat on the inner-side of the hide.

4. Dunk the entire hide, free of hair, fur and fat, into a huge bath full of dog-doodies and water. Stew and simmer (literally. There would be a fire under the water-and-dog-poo pit to keep things nice and hot) for a few weeks. Let old Fido’s bowel-movements and the bacteria that they contained, work with the water to remove the lime (from Step 1) from the hide and soften up the skin until it’s nice and floppy. Then, remove the hide, hang it and leave it to dry.

All this made the leather nice and soft and pliable. And when you consider all the things that leather was used for back in the old days, this was a horrible, but very necessary job. You needed leather for…shoes, aprons, belts, book-covers, desktops, razor-strops, gloves, bags, boxes…all manner of things!

Tyler

As in: John Tyler (10th President of the United States of America).

The surname ‘Tyler’ comes from the occupation ‘tyler’. Or to be more precise…’Tiler’. As in the guy who installs tiles. In older times, the tyler was the man who repaired or installed rooves (roof-tiles) in villages or towns where rooves were more commonly made of slate shingles, clay tiles or wooden slats. In London, rooves used to be all made of dried grass which was stacked and bundled onto the roof creating a thatched roof. In 1666, the Great Fire burned damn near the entire center of town to ashes. When the city was being rebuilt, Charles II decreed that no buildings were to be built of flammable materials, and certainly not with thatched rooves. Tylers around London must’ve made sacks of gold fulfilling all their orders; over 13,000 buildings were burnt to the ground during the four days the fire lasted.

Webster

As in: John Webster (17th century English playwright).

A webster, webber or weaver was a person who worked with threads or cloth, weaving the strands and threads together to bond them and make fabric. The strips of cloth or fabric stretched across the frames of couches and chairs (which support the padded seat above) is still called ‘webbing’ today.

Wright

As in: Wilbur and Orville Wright (pioneer aviators).

A ‘wright’ was an Old English word for a woodworker. The word ‘wright’ was therefore applied to occupations that traditionally made things out of wood, such as a ‘shipwright’ or a ‘wheelwright’. A builder of boats and a manufacturer of cart and carriage-wheels.

You hear this argument all the time these days. Crap is made of plastic. It’s never built to last. It breaks when you sneeze on it or drop it once. We all like to think back to the days when things were tougher, better-built, longer-lasting and looked nicer. But while some products were made from wonderfully innocent and safe materials, there are some things that you’ll be glad to know, aren’t made ‘the good old-fashioned way’. Here’s a few of them…

Matchsticks

Matches. Around since the 1820s, matches are used for everything from lighting cigarettes, candles, campfires, your annoying sister’s favourite dress and burning up incriminating documents. But have you ever noticed that most matches today are all tipped red?

Why?

Back in the 19th century, when matches were made by hand, one of the main ingredients in the chemical coating on the match-head was a substance called white phosphorus. White phosphorus is used extensively in explosives and other pyrotecnics, and in the 1800s, it was also used in matchmaking. However, white phosphorus is a nasty substance. It gives off fumes which were inhaled by the ‘match-girls’, the girls and young women who worked in match-factories in the second half of the 1800s. The fumes caused a condition called ‘Phossy Jaw’. Phossy Jaw started with toothaches…then bone-damage…then decay…eventually, your teeth would drop out, your gums would rot away and your bones would start glowing a flourescent green! Mmm. Healthy.

Prolonged exposure to white phosphorus made the bone-damage even worse to the extent that the only way to make it stop was corrective surgery. Well, corrective surgery in 1870 is hardly what it is today, and it would leave the patient horribly scarred for life. And if that ain’t bad enough, Phossy Jaw also causes brain-damage.

Eventually, match-girls in England went on strike and the less poisonous red phosphorus (which is used today) was introduced. It wasn’t until the first decade or two of the 20th century that red phosphorus started replacing white phosphorus in any large quantities, however.

Hats

A hat, a proper hat, is a wonderful thing. Warm, stylish, fuzzy, smooth and made of the nicest and most wonderful material ever. Felt! But the way hats are made today is a lot different from how hats used to be made, and it’s that process that gave rise to the term ‘Mad as a Hatter’.

Why?

From the 1700s up until the 1940s, the hatmaking process was highly poisonous. This was because it involved an activity called ‘carroting’. What’s carroting? It’s the process of removing the fuzzy fur from the pelts of beavers and rabbits (the animal-furs and skins used in hatmaking) to give the characteristic smooth, fuzzy underlayer that is turned into felt. This process was carried out by rubbing the pelts with a chemical solution, then putting the pelts into an oven to dry, then stretching the pelts and then shaving off the excess fur to expose the soft felt underneath. Pretty easy huh?

The only problem was the very start of this process. The addition of chemicals. Or specifically, one chemical.

Mercury.

Mercury is added to the pelts at the start of the hatmaking process. As the pelts heat up and dry in the oven (and turn a bright orange, hence the name ‘carroting’), the mercury-fumes would leech off the hats and hover in the air. Hatmakers would inhale these fumes coming out of the ovens and get mercury all over their hands during the rest of the hatmaking process. Continued exposure to mercury causes severe brain-damage. It also causes more visible symptoms such as loss of teeth, fingernails, itching and skin-peeling. Mental damage includes insomnia and memory-loss. In the United States, the use of mercury in the hatmaking industry didn’t finally end until December of 1941.

Glow-in-the-Dark Watch-Dials

I remember when I was a kid, one of the coolest things ever was having a watch that glowed in the dark. I remember laying in bed watching the glowing dashes on the watch-face and the disembodied point of the seconds-hand ticking slooowly around in a…boring and mindnumbing circle that would eventually send me to sleep. Forget counting sheep. Buy a luminous watch and stare at in the dark until you drop off.

Glow-in-the-dark watches have been popular for decades. They were especially popular during wartime when pilots in dark airplane cockpits could read their watches more easily, or soldiers on pre-dawn attacks or night-time black-ops could check the time without having to expose a light. But how do they make watches glow in the dark?

Radium.

As the name suggests, radium is a radioactive chemical element. From the 1900s up to the 1960s, it was commonly used in radium paint which would cause anything that it coated to glow in the dark…specifically, watch-dials and hands. But watch-hands and dials are tiny. How do you paint them with glow-in-the-dark paint?

With really tiny paintbrushes. But to get the precise tips that the brushes required, factory-girls would have to lick the brush-heads to produce the needlpoint tips necessary to carry out such eye-bending work. Continual licking of the paintbrush-tips (and of course, the paint itself) caused radium poisoning.

‘Radium Girls’ working in a watch-factory; 1928

Attention about radium poisoning came about in 1917 when a group of girls working at a watch-factory took their employer to court, suing for damages caused by the radium paint (which they had been told was harmless). It took years of fighting, but eventually safety measures were brought in and precautions were introduced to make the practice of radium-dial painting much safer. Radium continued to be used until the 1960s when it was replaced with a safer alternative. Symptoms of radium poisoning or radiation sickness include anemia and lack of bone-density (and therefore, an increase in fractures).

Lead Crystal

If you’re an appreciator of fine alcohol or if grandma just gifted you the antique decanter-set that’s been in the family for five generations…you might want to stop reading now.

Lead crystal, that pretty, glassy material that sparkles in the light, has been around for centuries.It’s frequently used to make decorative glass objects such as bowls, drinking-glasses and alcohol decanters. The addition of lead to glass makes it more glittery and easier to mould and shape, however, the presence of lead in the glass, which makes lead crystal, also makes the glass poisonous.

Alcoholic beverages which are normally stored in lead crystal decanters can leech the lead out of the glass causing the wine or brandy that’s in contact with the crystal to become highly and dangerously impregnated with lead. Continued use over several decades can cause lead-poisoning to people who drink from these decanters.

Laxatives

Nothing like flushing it out to flush it away. Or at least, these days. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, man used something a bit more interesting than Ex-Lax to relieve blocked internal plumbing.

He used the fantastic, immortal, metallic and one-size-fits-all cure that was gauranteed to solve your constipation problems.

An everlasting pill.

The everlasting pill is just what it sounds like. It’s everlasting. You can use it over and over and over and over again. And when you’re done, your kids can use it over and over and over again. And when they’re done, your grandkids can carry on the proud tradition of…

…swallowing a pill of antimony, crapping it out, washing it and then putting it away for the next round of bowel-blockages in the family.

Antimony is a metal and it’s also a chemical element. Swallowing it causes…as you might guess…looseness of bowels, which made it a great laxative back in the old days. As you might also have guessed, antimony isn’t digested by the human body, so you can keep on using it. What’s the catch?

Antimony is toxic.

Although antimony as a solid is relatively safe, antimony dust that’s inhaled into the respiratory system can cause serious bodily damage. Symptoms of antimony poisoning include headaches, dizziness, liver and kidney failure and severe vomiting.

Paint

Everyone hates the smell of housepaint and once you’ve smelt it, you can never forget it. But you can be glad that these days, all we have to worry about are the smells. Back in the old days, as I’m sure countless of public health announcements have told you, commercially-available paint used to contain lead.

Why?

The addition of lead to paint has various benefits. To begin with, it makes the paint dry faster. It’s also used as a pigment (specifically lead carbonate, which is used to make brilliant, cloud-white paint) and causes the paint to last longer. On the downside, lead-poisoning is a serious problem.

Lead poisoning can affect almost the entire body. It causes insomnia, memory-loss, delirium, muscle-weakness, weight-loss, loss of appetite and constipation (for which the antimony pill might help!).

So the next time you go antiquing, you might want to do a bit more research about what you’re hoping to buy, and pay more attention to the fine print.

Useful information on poisons may be found in the book “The Elements of Murder (A History of Poison)” by John Emsley.

Good evening and welcome to another edition of ‘Back in the Day…’, where I’ll look at how life was lived in the days before we had all our modern conveniences. If you’re wondering where the first posting covering this subject is, you can find it here.

I’ve always been interested in social history. How ordinary people lived ordinary lives in ordinary times. How did they tackle common, everyday tasks that we do today with machines and electricity and which take an hour or two? What took a hundred years ago, perhaps a whole day or more to complete? Here, I’ll be looking at more aspects of ‘household history’…

Subject: Laundry
Today: Washing-Machine, laundry-powder
Yesterday: Washtubs, dollysticks, washboards, crystals and bluing

These days washing clothes is pretty easy. You seperate them. You chuck them in the washer, you toss in the powder, set the buttons, press the big fat knob that says ‘START’ and then go off to watch ‘Two and a Half Men’ while a big white machine churns away to clean all your clothes. It’s convenient. It’s fast. You have more free time and you don’t have to worry about all that extra work. But how was clothing washed back in the days before automatic washing-machines and modern whizzydowhippy soap-powders and stain-removers and whiteners and fabric-softeners? Admittedly this isn’t something we think of every day. But perhaps it’s something we do occasionally wonder about. And that’s what I like writing about.

Back in the old days, before all our modern detergents and soaps and powders, housewives and their children battled the wash with two things. Soda crystals and bluing.

Soda crystals, also called washing-soda or more scientifically as ‘Sodium Carbonate’, are white crystals used as a washing-detergent on clothes. You can still buy them today, but they’ve largely been made obsolete by more effective cleaning-agents. Soda-crystals were used to clean clothes that had stains or grease or oil on them and they were effective in this job, if rather rough. Because of the coarse nature of the crystals, they were rather harsh on clothes, to say nothing of being hard on the skin of your hands, and in those days, washing was a very hands-on process.

Bluing was another product used in washing clothes back in the old days. You might still use this stuff today, actually. It’s used to wash linen such as napkins, towels and bedsheets. Bluing is a dye that is added to the wash-water. What it does is tints the whites a very light blue to counteract any greying that appears in bedsheets and linen due to extended use, cleaning them and returning them to their original bright, white condition.

Although it was generally sold in solid blocks or powders to be diluted in water, you could also buy Mrs. Stewart’s Liquid Bluing instead. This product is still available today

Of course, adding aggressive cleaning agents to the water (which you had to boil yourself) wasn’t the only thing that you needed to do to clean clothes. Once the clothes were chucked into the pot and the water and chemicals had been added, you still needed to run the wash through the good, old-fashioned spin-cycle. And it was you who would be doing the spinning.

Using this:

No, this isn’t some sort of weird milking-stool or broom or butter-churn. This interestingly-shaped wooden device is called a dolly-stick. So called because it’s the stick with which you did all the dollying with. What’s dollying? It’s the agitation of the clothes and wash-water. Before modern spin-cycles in washing-machines, shoving this into the wash with the hot water, the clothes and the soda-crystals and working the T-shaped cross-handle at the top back and forth, created your own spin-cycle. It did the same thing – mixed up the cleaning agents, water and clothes, as well as working the soda crystals through the clothes and agitating the clothes to remove grease, dirt, stains and sweat – only now, you got a free workout at the same time. If clothes were particularly dirty and whacking them around with the dolly-stick didn’t beat out all the dirt, you might also have to use a good old-fashioned washboard to clean them up with. No, not your boyfriend’s chest. This thing:

Washboards such as this one provided the washer with a hard surface against which clothes could be scrubbed and brushed to remove stubborn dirt and grime that hadn’t come out from the furious beating given to them by the dolly-stick. Scrubbing against the board also worked the cleaning-agents through the clothes in order for them to be more effective.

Once the clothes had been run through the washtub with the dolly-stick, you took the clothes out, rinsed them, washed them again, dollied them again, rinsed them again and then ran them through the mangle, literally:

Mangles like these were used to wring out as much water from the clothing as possible before the clothes were eventually hung out to dry.

Once the clothes had been washed, rinsed, scrubbed and dried, it was time for ironing. Before the days of modern, electrically-powered irons, housewives and laundresses would use old-fashioned, solid metal flatirons such as this one:

Flatirons like these were filled with red hot coals from the kitchen stove and once the metal was hot enough, they’d be used to quite literally, iron out the wrinkles in your clothes. Of course, if you didn’t have the benefit of a coal-heated iron, you would have to make do with an even older technology, solid metal irons heated on the stove, like these:

Irons like these were placed on hearths next to open fires, or on the kitchen stove, to heat them up until they were scorching hot. Because the heat from the iron would eventually disappate, housewives would often have two, three or even four such irons on their stoves or fireplaces so that when one iron cooled down, they could put it back on the hearth and just pick up another one and continue with their work. It’s where the phrase “to have many irons in the fire” comes from, meaning that you always had something else to fall back on.

During the ironing process, it was common for the washer to add household laundry starch to the clothing. Starching was often done to collars, shirt-cuffs and women’s undergarments to help them stay stiff and keep their shapes. But starch also protected the clothes from stains and sweat. When clothes got dirty, the grime would stick to the starch, not the fabric and the starch and grime would wash off more easily when the clothes went through that exhaustive wash-cycle again.

Because washing clothes by hand was such an intense process, it wasn’t uncommon for people to send their laundry out to big, privately-run laundries which would do a household’s load and then send it back fresh and clean, once a week. For those people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t send their clothes out to be washed, all this was done at home in a special room which was known, not as the laundry, but as the scullery. The scullery was the forerunner of the modern laundry and it was the room allocated in a house for the purpose of cleaning clothes (and sometimes, dishes as well). In grand houses, the person who spent most of her time here (and it would’ve been a ‘her’) was the scullion, more commonly known as the scullery-maid.

After all that work, which could take a day or more of effort, you would probably have incredibly sore or amazingly strong arms. But still, thank God for companies like Miele.

Subject: Cooking
Today: Microwaves, electrical and gas stoves
Yesterday: Coal and wood-fired range stoves

Cooking these days is an easy thing to do around the house…provided you know how to cook, of course. You fire up the gas or you turn the knob on your electric cooktop, you chuck on the pot or pan and while it heats up, you start preparing ingredients. If the stove’s too hot, you move the pot or you lower the heat and then raise the heat again when you need a real sizzle. But have you ever tried cooking without some sort of controllable flame or heat source, or a heat-source that was as dangerous and as unpredictable as it was intense, hot and wonderful? Try cooking on a range.

These days, the majority of people have modern stoves with adjustable temperatures which can be turned on and off in a flash, which come with ovens which can have their temperatures adjusted minutely to bake that perfect cake or that amazing roast. And on top of it all, these stoves are easy to clean and easy to look after. It wasn’t always so simple.

This labled photo of a typical range-stove comes from an old magazine. B is the BOILER. C is the OVEN. Between them is G, the FIREBOX. Above the oven, firebox and boiler would be E, the BOILER RINGS (hotplates on a modern stove). A are the doors that open into the flue behind the stove for cleaning the chimney. F are the DAMPERS that would open and close, regulating airflow into the firebox. D is FUEL HATCH through which extra coal could be added to the fire. In smaller ranges, the boiler-ring directly over the firebox was removable and with the aid of a metal rod, you levered it up to add in extra coal to the fire.

Before modern gas and electric stoves, range-stoves like this that were fired by coal (such as this one) or wood, were the norm in thousands of houses around the world and were to be found in kitchens from the smallest terraced house to the grandest of millionaires’ mansions. Stoves such as these were invented in the 1700s, but they lasted well into the mid-20th century in some places and a hundred years ago, they were the standard cooking-appliance that would’ve been found in every home. They varied by size but they all operated the same way and performed the same functions.

Cooking on a range was a considerable challenge compared with cooking on a modern stove. To begin with, you were still battling an open fire which required constant tending. Ranges had to be swept, poked and refuelled every hour if they were to function properly throughout the day. Failure to do this resulted a weak fire which wouldn’t cook food fast enough and which wouldn’t heat water fast enough. In many houses, the kitchen range did double-duty as the water-boiler. Pipes running through the back of the stove would be heated up by the range-fire which would then heat up the water running through them from the home’s plumbing network. Ranges have no real temperature control, so using one for cooking, baking, boiling, roasting or any other form of cooking, requires considerable skill to know how to manage the fire effectively. Adding too much coal would cause the fire to be too strong. This would create too high a temperature which might ruin a cake or a roast. Not having enough coal would mean that food would take too long to cook. Knowing when to add more coal to the fire so that your cooking-temperatures could be adjusted was a fine art that required mastery of the fire and precision-timing.

Using a range had its own set of hazards as well as difficulties. The risk of fire, although not as great as it once was with open fireplaces, was still present and grills, doors, shutters, boiler-rings and hearths existed to prevent sparks and embers from exiting the stove. The bigger risk, however, was that of exploding boilers and water-pipes. If the fire was too strong, the extreme heat could cause a buildup of pressure in the boiler that could cause catastrophic damage if pipes ruptured or if safety-valves failed to work.

Ranges also required constant cleaning. Ash-trays had to be emptied daily to prevent buildups and to allow proper airflow around the fire. Because ranges were often the only source of central heating in a house, they were usually kept burning nonstop and maintenance was vital.

By the mid-20th century, ranges were on the way out. Gas started replacing older coal and wood-fired ranges as early as the 1910s and electric ranges came around fairly soon after, but in most places, coal or wood-fired ranges remained the norm until after the Second World War.

Subject: Lighting
Today: Electric Lighting
Yesterday: Gas Lighting

These days, domestic lighting is as easy as flipping a switch and watching the glow of an old-style incandescent globe or a modern LED or a hideous old flourescent tube. But a hundred years ago, domestic lighting was made up of something significantly more dangerous. Gas.

In older times, domestic lighting was made up of candles, fireplaces and oil-lamps of various styles and designs, but starting in the early 1800s, a new form of lighting started to replace the old. This new form of lighting was more powerful and much brighter than candles and it removed the worry of smoke and soot from the house. It was gas!

Gas lighting started in the 1790s and remained largely experimental until the early 1800s. Gas lighting was originally restricted to public street-lighting and the lighting of large public buildings such as office-buildings, theatres, hotels and railroad stations. By the 1820s and 1830s, gas-lighting was beginning to spread in England, where it was conceived, America and Europe and from there, steadily around the world. Gas technology improved as scientists experimented with different types of gas, trying to find the one that would burn bright, burn clean and not produce unnecessary heat.

In 1891, the incandescent gas-mantle was invented. Much like how a fireplace mantle stands over a fireplace, the gas-mantle was a special sleeve that stood around the gas-fixtures within private residences, which were beginning to benefit from widespread gas-lighting from the second half of the 19th century. The chemicals with which the mantle was impregnated glowed extremely brightly when exposed to heat, so the flame from the gas-fixture was significantly intensified.

Gas mantles varied by shape, size and design, but most were sold as flat-pack meshes like this, which you then opened up and fitted over the appropriate gas-fixture

Gas lighting was a fixture in society for a long time. For a period, almost everything was lit by gas. Domestic lights. Lights on trains. Lights on ships. Streetlights were gas-fired. Lights in large public buildings were powered by gas. Even the lights on the first automobiles were powered by gas!

Subject: Communications
Today: Telephone, internet
Yesterday: Speaking-tubes, pneumatic tubes

I won’t be covering telegrams, radio and the telegraph here because I’ve already written an article on them, which you can find here. But what I haven’t covered are the probably more obscure communications methods that were used a hundred years ago: Speaking-tubes and pneumatic tubes.

Also called voice-pipes, speaking-tubes were common communications devices on ships and in large buildings such as grand manor-houses or large office-buildings and department stores. Before the age of the telephone, they allowed quick communication between the different rooms of large structures and were relatively compact and easy to use. Although made largely obsolete by the arrival of the telephone, some ships still have speaking-tubes installed. In case of an emergency and a loss of electrical power, they still allow quick communications through the vessel when the telephone-system might be out of action.

This desk has the brackets for four flexible speaking-tubes attached to it, which you can see on the left side of this photo

Speaking-tubes or voice-pipes were also sometimes called ‘whistle-pipes’ since it was common practice to whistle down the pipe to the other end to indicate the start of a conversation (much like how a telephone bell rings to signal the presence of someone at the other end).

In the days before email, the fastest way to send information around a large complex such as a busy office-building was through the use of pneumatic tubes.

Pneumatic tubes, such as the ones in the picture above, were used to whizz cylinders around large buildings using air-pressure and suction. Important documents were rolled up and pressed into special cylinders or capsules which were then sealed and shoved into the appropriate tube to be sent on its way to the correct department within a busy building. Tube-systems such as these were handy in buildings and businesses which had to handle large amounts of paperwork in a hurry, such as post-offices, office-buildings, telegraph-offices and hospitals. In some places (such as hospitals) pneumatic tube-systems are still used today due to their effectiveness and speed.

Subject: Keeping Clean
Today: A shower every day or every other day.
Yesterday: A bath once a week.

Concepts of cleanliness are a lot different today than they were a hundred years ago. Although we like to look at photographs of smartly-dressed men and glamorous women in their suits and hats and long, flowing dresses and think that they were all squeaky clean, the truth is that washing on a daily (or near-daily) basis, is very much a 20th century thing. At the turn of the last century, bathing was often done probably once or twice a week or even more rarely. With the lack of hot running water, the weekly scrubdown took quite a while to prepare. Water was boiled on the range-stove in the kitchen and then that water was used to fill up an old hip-bath until it was full enough to accomadate bathing.

An old hip-bath

Once the bath was full of hot water and soap, the entire family would wash themselves in that one bath, hopping in and out, one after the other. Hot water was so precious and took so long to prepare that not a drop of it was wasted and the one bath would do for the whole family for the rest of the week. Your parents or grandparents might even have told you stories of the bath doing double-duty as the wash-tub and having to clean dishes in the tub!

If your house was lucky enough to have running water, you might run the pipes through the boiler that was backed up onto the range-stove downstairs. Although only moderately effective, this would allow you a certain amount of running hot water so that you could have a big, comfortable bath upstairs in your own bathroom.

Not only did people not bathe as often as they do today, but they also changed their clothes a lot less frequently than they do today. We might be used to wearing a typical business-shirt for a few days or a week before washing it. However, in Victorian and Edwardian times, it wasn’t uncommon for men to wear their shirts for one week, two weeks or even up to a month, before having them washed. Washing took so long (as explained above) that people wanted to get the most out of their clothes before they needed to be washed again. Often, the shirt-collars and cuffs would be removed and washed on a regular basis and fresh collars and cuffs (held-on with button-studs and cufflinks) would’ve replaced them, before the shirt itself was finally washed after several weeks.

Subject: Musical Entertainment
Today: MP3-players, Winamp, radio, CDs
Yesterday: Phonographs, pianos

These days, music is at our fingertips and we really don’t think of it. And it’s changing so fast too! I remember a time when the most high-tech musical playback device was a bloody walkman! But what was musical enjoyment like back a hundred years ago?

Although today we’re used to slipping a CD into the radio or turning on our iPods, opening Winamp or Windows Media Player or iTunes on our computers or twiddling with radio-knobs to get the tunes that we like to chill out, rock out, or jazz out to, a hundred years ago, the idea of portable and easily-accessible music was only just coming out of the novelty-stage.

In the 1870s, American inventor Thomas Edison created the world’s first practical audio-playback device. The cylinder phonograph. Before the days of iPod nanos, discmans, Walkmans and even radio, this was what mechanical musical enjoyment looked like:

To operate a machine like this, you slotted a wax recording-cylinder onto the metal bracket and locked it in place. You cranked up the machine and then put the needle and amplifying horn against the cylinder-record before flicking the release-switch that let the mainspring unwind which turned the cylinder and spun the record past the needle. Records of this length typically ran for two to three minutes. Sound-quality was mediocre at best, but by the 1880s, the cylinder-phonograph was becoming a popular item in homes around the world. Cylinder phonographs like this one were popular from the 1870s up to the 1920s. Even at this early date, the phonograph actually did double-duty, not only as a playback device, but also as a recording-device. If you purchased blank record-cylinders, you could slot them onto the machine, hit the ‘record’ button and record your own voice or music (which had to be directed at the amplifying horn) and then switch the gears around so that the cylinder spun in the opposite direction, playing back your own compositions. Home recording like this wouldn’t really become possible again until the invention of the Walkman and the audio cassette-tape nearly a hundred years later!

In the late 1880s and early 1890s, a new technology began to replace cylinder records, the more familiar disc-records that are still manufactured today. Disc-records were more popular than cylinders because they took up less space, they were easier to store and they ran more smoothly under the playback needle, producing crisper and more uniform sound.

Of course, not everyone could afford these newfangled ‘phonographs’. Although they were becoming more and more popular, the main form of musical instrument continued to be the piano. Up until the Great Depression, the United States had dozens and dozens of little piano-companies that were churning out thousands of instruments a year. The Wall Street Crash put all but the most established companies out of business. Some notable pianomakers include companies such as Chickering & Sons, Steinway & Sons, Baldwin, Richard Lipp & Sohn, Erard and J. Broadwood & Sons (which holds the record for being the oldest pianomaker still in business, dating back to the 1700s).

In modern times, the popularity of music is determined by CD sales, download-figures, viewing-statistics on YouTube or how many people shove an earphone-piece into one of those holes either side of your head and says “Hey dude, listen to this!” A hundred years ago, the popularity of music was determined by record-sales but also by the sale of sheet-music. Music-shops sold the sheet-music to individual songs for a few cents or pennies each, a bit like how websites today let you download a song for free, so long as you pay 99c first (somehow the definition of the word ‘free’ has changed in the 21st century…). Learning how to play the piano was a popular pasttime engaged in by both men and women of all ages and having a piano in the house was as common in the 1890s and 1900s as having a TV is today.

These days, we don’t think much of books, do we? They’re here, they’re there, they’re everywhere. Right in your own house, you probably have hundreds of them! They’re cheap, mass-produced volumes of information, education, joy and delight. They’re full of fancy typography, bright pictures, diagrams and indices. They have paperback covers with pretty, colourful designs on them. It’s hard to imagine the world without books, isn’t it?

And yet…this was a reality for thousands of people, once upon a time. Once upon a time, centuries ago, before a German goldsmith looked at a wine-press and got a brainwave so big, it swept into Rennaissance Europe like a tsunami and changed everything forever. That brainwave was the printing-press and the little German goldsmith was a fellow named Johannes Gutenberg. Gutenberg the goldsmith had, almost singlehandedly, revolutionised the world when he invented his newest and greatest machine…the printing-press.

Before books went to Press

Of course, books existed before Gutenberg had his big idea. They were all big, handsome, leatherbound volumes sitting on shelves or in bookcases in massive institutions such as monastries, churches, schools and universities. Some people were lucky enough to own books in their houses, usually massive castles or manor houses with their own private libraries. While books certainly were not new in Gutenberg’s time, one thing that made these books different from the books that he would create, was that nearly all pre-Gutenberg books were handwritten! They were created by scholars, monks, scribes and priests in universities, abbeys, monastries and churches all over Europe and they were frightfully expensive! To write out by hand, a copy of the Bible, in Latin, with a quill pen, took months, even years of dedicated, daily hard work, and the poor scribe couldn’t afford to make a single mistake! Not easy to do when you’re in a freezing cold scriptorium writing by candlelight.

Because books were so hard to reproduce in the Middle Ages, they were naturally extremely expensive. Few people knew how to read or write, which made this reproduction even harder, and even fewer people could afford to buy such pretty things as books! This was what the world was like when Gutenberg came into the world, ca. 1398, as a kicking, screaming baby named Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg!

The Birth of Gutenberg

Gutenberg’s date of birth is not precisely known. It could be 1395, 1398 or, to make it nice and tidy, even 1400! But nobody has ever figured it out for sure. What is known is that he was born in the city of Mainz in Germany, that his parents were Friele and Else Gensfleisch and that his original surname translates as “Goose meat” (or “Goose flesh”) in English! It would hardly do for a great inventor to have a name that sounded like a Christmas dinner, which is why it was later changed to the more acceptable ‘Gutenberg’, which was the name of his father’s ancestors.

Gutenberg came from a pretty well-to-do family which happened to be one of the wealthiest in Mainz. He grew up around the goldsmiths in Mainz and eventually, he became one himself, a profession that would prove invaluable to him in his later years. Gutenberg’s father died in 1419 and by the late 1430s, Gutenberg was making a living as a goldsmith.

The Birth of the Press

Growing up in (what is now) western Germany in the Rhineland, Gutenberg had probably seen the great successes of the German winemaking industry, which flourished in the rich valleys and soils of the region. It is thought that Gutenberg got the idea for his printing-press by examining the massive wine-presses then in operation at the enormous vineyards dotted throughout the countryside.

In the “old days”, wine was pressed by hand, with people climbing into big tubs of grapes and smashing them down with their feet to get out the grape-juice. In Gutenberg’s time, vinters were using the mechanical power of the threaded-shaft wine-press to crush the grapes to get out the juice. Machines like this were everywhere in the Rhineland and it’s not too hard to see where Gutenberg got the idea for his printing-press. In the mid-1400s, these were the modern equivalent of food-processors, taking something that previously took hours by hand (or, in the case of grape-crushing, foot) and speeding it up so that grapes could be crushed in great quantities in a matter of minutes, producing rich, concentrated and cleaner grape-juice.

A miniature model of a wine-press

Ideas were all well-and-good, but one big problem was that in order to create what was then a truly revolutionary machine, the printing-press, Johannes Gutenberg would need money. And lots of it. Even though Gutenberg’s family was wealthy, it wasn’t exactly swimming in gold. In the 1410s, the Gutenberg family (along with several other aristocratic Mainz families) were forced out of the city in an uprising and made to settle elsewhere. And at any rate, Mainz, once a bustling city, was no place for Gutenberg to try and start up a new business. It had been hit hard by the Black Death of the 1340s and 50s and it was now a shadow of its former self. In order to raise the money needed to create his new toy, Gutenberg would have to go to the city of Strasbourg, two days boat-ride down the Rhine from Mainz.

Over the next few years, Gutenberg met up with goldsmiths, carpenters and investors who were becoming interested in his idea. Of course, printing (of a sort) had existed before Gutenberg’s time, but such printing was woodcut block-printing; it wasn’t as versatile or as long-lasting as what Gutenberg had in mind. Wood-block printing could only be used to print copies of one specific thing, and since the printing-surface was made of wood, it didn’t last very long due to contact with water-based inks.

What Gutenberg had in mind was a proper printing-press with movable type. The stamps or more correctly, ‘type-pieces’, would be cast out of metal to make them long-lasting and they would be cast in individual letters so that the printer could rearrange them in any order and position that he desired, to create new words, new paragraphs and new pages, making it literally ‘movable type’.

The problems facing Gutenberg were numerous in number and considerable in their impediment of his progress. To get the money needed to build the press and mass-produce the hundreds of little metal letter-blocks needed to fill the press-bed and to get the vellum and the paper needed to print on, Gutenberg turned to a man named Johann Fust, a moneylender who loaned him 800 Guilders to help him on his way. Apart from all this, Gutenberg also had to get his hands on ink! Traditional handwriting ink, which was water-based, was too liquid to be used on the printing-press with its smooth metal type-pieces. Instead, Gutenberg had to create a whole new kind of oil-based ink which was thicker and which he could rub and work onto the type so that he could print pages reliably.

Making the metal type-pieces for his printing-press was one of the bigger challenges that Gutenberg faced. Although paper could be produced rather cheaply, for his printing-press to work, Gutenberg needed hundreds, possibly thousands of copies of the alphabet so that he could start printing. This involved extensive and tricky metalworking. To make one type-piece, he needed to engrave the letter into a block of metal, the engraved block was then used to strike a matrix, or a mould, which would be used to create the typeface. With the matrices and moulds created, Gutenberg was able to cast the hundreds of letters and punctuation marks that would be necessary to fill the press-bed and create a page of type.

By the 1440s, Gutenberg was ready to print. He had the press, the type, the paper and the ink. Now it was time to start working!

Going to Press

Gutenberg is most famous for printing the Bible, however, he didn’t start off with the Bible. Such a massive and important tome as that would have to wait until he had perfected his craft! Instead, he started by printing small pamphlets and leaflets, small religious documents and other test-pieces, to see how well his machine worked.

In the early 1450s, however, Gutenberg started with his grand dream: Printing the Bible!

When exactly Gutenberg started printing and therefore, how long it took him to finish the Bible, is unknown, but the first copies of Gutenberg Bibles became available in about 1455. The Gutenberg Bible was certainly a massive undertaking, and when you see what went into making just one bible, you’ll understand why Gutenberg practiced on smaller jobs first!

A modern replica of a Gutenberg Press

Gutenberg’s Bible (also called the ’42-Line Bible’ because each page had 42 lines of text) was not just a book, it was an elaborate artwork of illustrations, flourishes, colour-printing and typographical perfection. This amazing, illuminated manuscript was Gutenberg’s crowning achievement as a printer, something he must’ve felt very proud of.

A page of the famous Gutenberg Bible

Gutenberg experimented with a lot of things when he printed; by inking certain parts of the movable-type different colours, he was able to create colour-printing, with various parts of the text printed in red or blue ink, to make it stand out even more and make it more noticable.

Gutenberg’s press was a revolution. Although it would take a few years to catch on, Gutenberg had done what nobody else before had managed to do: make printing easier, more efficient and cheaper. It’s often believed that Gutenberg invented printing outright – this isn’t true. He merely improved on printing-methods of the day to produce something that would benefit mankind much more than any other system of mass-printing that had come before. By the 1500s, the press was spreading throughout Europe and for the first time in history, news, information and literature could be mass-produced cheaply and quickly and sent all around the continent.

The End of Gutenberg

Although Gutenberg had revolutionised the world of writing and printing in the same way that Henry Ford would eventually revolutionise the world of transport five hundred years later, unlike Ford, Gutenberg didn’t exactly live to see fame and fortune.

In 1455, Johann Fust, the moneylender who had loaned Gutenberg his much-needed start-up cash, demanded his loan be paid back. He took Gutenberg to court, claiming that the funds he had given to Gutenberg had not been used for the purpose that Gutenberg had borrowed them for. Fust’s determination and evidence caused the court to rule in his favour, leaving Gutenberg a broken and bankrupt man. It would be another ten years, in 1465, that Gutenberg finally got the credit he deserved, for the mark that he’d made upon technology. Gutenberg was rewarded by Adolph II of Nassau, Archbishop of Maintz with the title of ‘Gentleman of the Court’. This title came with a court outfit, a stipend and two tonnes of grain and wine, tax-free. Gutenberg, with the help of friends and relations, also eventually rebuilt his business as a printer, although he didn’t make the fortunes that he hoped he would, from his printing business. He died on the third of February, 1468, at the age of seventy.

Hello and welcome, to another edition of “Common English Phrases”, bringing you the origins of common English phrases and idioms from today and yesterday. Here’s another four phrases for this latest addition to our list…

“Red Carpet Treatment”

To be given the “Red Carpet Treatment” or to “Walk the Red Carpet” means to be pampered and treated like a celebrity. This phrase comes from the early 20th century in the United States. The famous express locomotive, the 20th Century Limited, ran a nightly rail service between New York City in New York, and Chicago in Illinois. To guide passengers of the express towards the train, porters and 20th Century Limited employees would quite literally…roll out the red carpet…so that passengers travelling on the exclusive train would know where to go.

Recieving the original “Red Carpet Treatment” on the 20th Century Limited

The Graveyard Shift

To work the ‘Graveyard Shift’ means to work late at night. This comes from the 19th century where police-officers would literally have to work an all-night shift in church graveyards to prevent people breaking into cemetaries to steal dead bodies for medical research.

“The Rule of Thumb”

The ‘Rule of Thumb’ is a rule or a consistency that never changes. The original ‘Rule of Thumb’ actually referred to wifebeating, which was common (and legal!) in several countries in the 19th century. Laws, such as those in England, stated that a man could beat his wife with a wooden stick, provided that the stick be no thicker than his own thumb, hence…the rule of thumb.

“Caught Red-Handed”

To be caught ‘red handed’ means to be caught in the act of committing a crime. This saying comes from the 19th century when modern policing was just being introduced. Without forensic sciences like what we have today, most of the time, the only way to catch murderers was to literally catch them in the act of murdering, with the blood of their victim/s on their hands…hence, to be caught red-handed.