Mr. Brewster’s Esperanto Party

E. V. Brewster
A real family man.
He had four of them.

When the New York Sun first wrote about the Esperanto party in Brooklyn, the newspaper stated that gathering would take place “at the home of Mrs. Brewster,” on April 29, 1905. But what about Mr. Brewster? And what about that plan to charge a penny for every failure to speak Esperanto after two hours of practice with an Esperanto grammar? How many pennies were expended in the cause? Happily, the Sun did a follow-up article on the Esperanto gathering.

The subsequent article makes it clear that Mr. Brewster was involved as well. It wasn’t just that it was happening “at the home of Mrs. Brewster,” but that it was Mr. Brewster’s home as well[1] and that Mr. Brewster seems to have been the actual instigator of the event, as he was president of the organization presenting the event. The article also makes it clear that this was not a gathering of Brooklyn esperantists, but instead a group that was curious about the new language. Brooklyn would later be home to plenty of Esperanto speakers, and at least one proponent of Ido.

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Omaha’s Esperanto Delegate

A booster for his own state

On April 22, 1911, the Omaha Daily Bee had an article about a wealthy traveler who volunteered to be the official representative of Los Angeles to Esperanto speakers. The Bee estimated that there were about two million Esperanto speakers throughout the world, which is the same number that is estimated today, a century later (and that’s on the high end).

On April 29, 1911, the Bee published a letter, signed “An Omaha Esperantist,” expanding on that article, and also talking about his own promotion of Omaha. Although the Bee does not identify the writer by name, a little sleuthing does, because he identifies himself as the delegate for Omaha. As often happens in these articles, the compositors for the Bee made some errors in the Esperanto, which I have quietly corrected.

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The Gunfighters — Blogging Doctor Who

What scarier than being
between a Dalek and a
Cyberman?
Having to watch this story.

I knew this one was coming and coming soon. I’m going to bet that just about any fan of the classic Doctor Who series would, if they could change history and get a serial back but they had to give up a serial we currently had, would happily trade “The Gunfighters.” Yet, with all that, it doesn’t stick in my mind as my least favorite Doctor Who serial. There is something I like less and dread rewatching more.

That (perhaps surprisingly) won’t come up for a long time. The serial in question (and I’m going to be coy and not reveal its name prematurely) fails in one respect where “The Gunfighters” succeeds. “The Gunfighters” has a coherent plot. It’s not a terribly interesting plot, but characters stay in character throughout the whole thing. How grateful we must be for small virtues.

There’s no point in talking about the virtues of the serial, since its sins loom too large. First and foremost is that damn song, “The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon,” which is dull and distracting at its introduction, and only serves to get more irritating. Worse, in addition to the voice-over, we also get to hear various characters sing it. It is the only song available in Tombstone? No wonder people are so ready to shoot someone dead.

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Unhappy Professor Simkins

Wow. Totally lurid headline.

As always, I have to note that not all of the people in the early twentieth century who used the honorific “professor” actually held academic positions. In the case of Myron Charles Simkins, the title seems to have been more aspirational than actual. It does seem that Myron Simkims never actually managed to hold any sort of teaching position. Instead, he had moved to Los Angeles with the hope of being hired to teach Esperanto.

On April 23, 1907, the Los Angeles Herald reported that his attempts had come to an end, and Simkins was in a bit of a bind with the rent. But the bulk of the article is a long letter in which he takes the heads of several institutions of learning to task for their shortsightedness in not employing him. The letter is too long to quote in full, but it can be found at the Chronicling America web site.

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Los Angeles’s Esperanto Press Agent

Iu reklamas la urbon.

Venu al Los Anĝeleso, la sunplena urbo proksima al la bela Pacifiko. Urbo de bluaj ĉieloj kaj agrabla vetero. Venu kaj trovu la bonan vivon en Los Anĝeleso.

That’s what we could imagine someone saying if they were doing civic boosterism for Los Angeles in Esperanto in 1911. According to the Omaha Daily Bee of April 22, 1911, someone did just that. Unfortunately, the Bee does not identify this intrepid Esperantist, nor his motivation for taking up the task. It clearly wasn’t cash, since the Bee notes that the individual in question “pays his own expenses,” but that seems okay, since he’s also described as “a man of means.” Who was this wealthy, well-traveled man who talked up Los Angeles in Esperanto?

The other question would be what the benefit was to Los Angeles? Were they making deals with companies in other lands? It’s not clear what the justification was. On the other hand, it didn’t seem to cost the city anything. The Bee gives us an early (and almost undoubtably inaccurate) estimate of the number of Esperanto speakers.

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America’s First Esperanto Congress?

What's the date for that?

In 1908, the organizers of the Esperanto Congress at Chautauqua, New York (which saw the birth of the Esperanto Association of North America, and the end of the American Esperanto Association) said that they were hosting the first Esperanto congress in the United States. Were they preceded by an envent at the Jamestown Exposition?

As early as 1906, word had gone out that the organizers of the Jamestown Exposition, celebrating the 300th anniversary of the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, had invited Esperantists to gather at the Exposition.

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Esperanto and Palmistry

Pearl J. Parker
Too bad she didn't look at
Dr. Zamenhof's palm

Mrs. Pearl J. Parker, the woman who introduced the Philadelphia Girl Scouts to the study of Esperanto, has proved elusive. Other than a few newspaper articles and some advertisements, there’s nothing definite (such as where she was from and what happened to her). All this, despite that the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger published an item by her and a photograph of her in their April 20, 1918 edition. (The item is described as an “editorial,” but that’s properly a piece written by an editor.)

Her essay contains little that any Esperantist wouldn’t know anyway, and contains a major error (that also any Esperantist would notice), though we might blame that one on the typesetters. She does bring forth the news that by 1918, Esperanto is beginning to get established in the scouting movement. For all this, Pearl J. Parker does not seem to have been any sort of major presence in the Esperanto movement. It seems likely that, like the somewhat earlier Winifred Sackville Stoner, Mrs. sought to use Esperanto to underscore her credentials as an education expert.

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The Work of the American Esperanto Association

Ni laboras por vi.

Sometimes when I’m reading old articles about Esperanto I realize that I’m missing something. The New-York Tribune printed a letter in their April 19, 1908 edition which referred to their “recent article about Esperanto.” The letter was dated April 7, 1908, so they clearly had hung on to it for a while, but even increasing my search to February 1, 1908 shows nothing to which John Fogg Twombly could have been responding. On March 2, they had written an article about Moresnet, the proposed Esperanto state (noting that the country would be tax-free for its residents as “the expenses of the state are to be borne by the subscriptions of Esperantists all the world over,” which would seem to be an inducement not to learn Esperanto, and so no wonder that the Esperanto movement rejected the idea) and on March 3 that Edmond Privat had visited the White House. There was also a children’s puzzle in which “Esperanto” was an answer. (During that same period, there are six citations of Esperanto in the New York Sun.)

With the “recent article” left a mystery, all we have left is Twombly’s letter. The letter itself is signed “A.E.A.,” but that’s the American Esperanto Association, of which Twombly was the secretary, though, unbeknownst to him, his time at that position was coming to a close. The AEA had sown the seeds of its own destruction by helping to organize the 1908 conference at Chautauqua, New York. Given that the creation of the new organization doesn’t seem to have bettered the fortunes of Esperanto in the United States, the expression “don’t switch horses in mid-stream” comes to mind. Obviously, we’ll never how how things would have played out had the American Esperanto Association continued.

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Mrs. Brewster’s Esperanto Party

Bring your pennies to Brooklyn

Esperanto has a verb, krokodili, literally “to crocodile,” but it means to speak one’s native language among Esperantists. According to some, it is only possible to krokodili in the presence of an Esperantist who does not share the native language of the other speakers, an American and a Brit dropping into English despite the presence of a French Esperantist. It’s not clear when the verb came into use (probably the 1920s), but from the beginning there was certainly the problem of those who supported the idea of Esperanto without bothering to learn the language, including the first two presidents of the Esperanto Association of North America, George Harvey and John Barrett.

But when Mrs. Brewster held her Esperanto gathering in Brooklyn, on [date], the EANA was a few years in the future, and the American Esperanto Association had been founded just a month before in Boston. One of its founders, Charles Matchett, was coming to Brooklyn to give a talk about Esperanto (in English) at the Brewster’s home. Oddly enough, records make it clear that the address, 131 Rutland Road, was their home only briefly. Was the party so dreadful that they felt they needed to move from a home they had only recently occupied?

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The Ark — Blogging Doctor Who

We're putting everyone
on an ark in space.

I want to like “The Ark” more than I did, but I don’t. It’s an inventive concept that really doesn’t get explored much in Doctor Who: what if you could see the results of your actions, long after they happened? Finally, in the twenty-third story, they do exactly that. The four episodes of “The Ark” break into a pair of mini stories. It might have been more effective if they had filmed it as four episodes, then put another story between the second and third episodes.

Even so, things are not as good as they should be. As often happens in science fiction, they fudge the physics and get the biology spectacularly wrong. Guess what: there are undoubtably many strains of the cold virus to which I have no natural immunity, since there really isn’t any such thing. It’s sort of a standard trope in science fiction that were we not occasionally suffering from the common cold, it would manifest in a more virulent fashion. I don’t buy it.

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Esperanto at the International Geographical Congress

Basic journalism, guys:
when, where, and who?

For the first couple decades of the twentieth century there seemed to be an expectation that Esperanto would become the international language of the scientific community, especially as this was promoted by such notable scientists as Wilhelm Ostwald and Sir William Ramsay (each of whom went on to receive Nobel Prizes in Chemistry). Ostwald later favored Ido, and later dropped the whole idea of an international language. I’m not sure about Ramsay, though at one point he moved to table a vote on Esperanto.

A new history of the use of language in the scientific community, Scientific Babel; How Science Was Done Before and after Global English, by Michael D. Gordin, has just been released by the University of Chicago Press. Gordin does look at early adoption of Esperanto by the scientific community, which never went quite so far as many predicted. One of the problems (from the point of view of advocates of Esperanto) is that just as the topic was getting off the ground, it morphed from “should Esperanto be the international language of science?” to “should Esperanto or Ido be the international language of science?” After the late 1907 introduction of Ido, the Ido-schism quickly made itself felt in every aspect of the Esperanto movement.

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Esperanto on Mars

A Martian.
Does he speak
Esperanto?

That’s the implication of a short item in the Washington Herald on April 15, 1908. It’s a little comic item, meant more to poke fun at (then) contemporary fashion foibles than to seriously make reference to Esperanto. In this case, Merry Widow hats are the subject at which fun is being poked. For those who don’t follow women’s fashion, the Merry Widow hat was a broad-brimmed women’s hat, often decorated, which was popular in the early twentieth century.

In the science fiction of the era, Mars was often depicted as a vastly older planet with the remnants of a once-glorious civilization, now in its dying days, but whose inhabitants (if they still existed) were intelligent and wise beyond the measure of man. (On the other hand, Edgar Rice Burroughs created a Mars of both futuristic science and a variety of fairly savage, feudal societies.) In the comic item in the Herald, we seem to have the wise survivor of the dying society, speaking a logical language, since in the quip, the Martian speaks Esperanto.

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An Esperanto Nightingale

The nightingale

She sang topical songs in Esperanto, but how did they know they were topical?

It’s just a short item in the San Francisco Call of April 14, 1906 under the title “Here Is a Quartet of the Most-Talked-Of Women in the Domain of the Czar.” The article makes brief comment on four women, only one of whom is referred to with a full name. The four women are Mlle Vera Delaroziere, Mlle Slavin, Mlle Tcherniaskaia, and Mlle Tamara. That’s not a lot to go on.

The first, Ms. Delaroziere (I’ll go for a more contemporary means of referring to these women), is said to have “announced her divorce from the stage of the Strelna Winter Gardens” after which she “proceeded to read the amorous letters she had received.” It’s probably a safe assumption that the letters weren’t from her soon-to-be-ex husband. Ms. Slavin was described as trying to get the “smart set” (presumably just the women) to adopt her style of elaborate head ornamentation she wore. The third was a dancer suing her doctor for a botched cosmetic surgery job (artificial knee dimples). Finally, Ms. Tamara sang topical songs in Esperanto.

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The Esperantist Physics Professor at Chicago

I wanted a picture of
Professor Mann. No luck.

In the early twentieth century, one of the major figures of the American Esperanto movement was Benjamin Pickman Mann (who typically went by B. Pickman Mann). He was an entomologist who worked at the Department of Agriculture (along with Karl Kellerman), and formed part of the group of Esperantists at the Department of Agriculture. His father was the prominent American educator, Horace Mann. But neither of them are related to the Professor Mann of the University of Chicago mentioned in the New-York Tribune on April 10, 1907. It’s a common name, and though Professor Mann’s ancestry does go back to New England, the lineages never seem to converge.

Professors in the Esperanto movement at the beginning of the twentieth century seemed to be pretty well divided between professors of language (which seems obvious) and professors of science (whose interest probably derived from having to slough through journals in a variety of languages—that was Wilhelm Ostwald’s claim). And so we’ve seen chemists, biologists, and now it’s time to add a physicist. Professor Mann was not a professor of languages, but was Charles Riborg Mann, who in 1907 was an associate professor of physics at the University of Chicago. As he was promoted to associate professor in that year, in April, he might have still been an assistant professor.

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An Alsatian Esperantist in New York

Esperanto: Not a jargon

The early Esperanto movement was fond of pointing to merchants who used Esperanto in their businesses as a sign of the success of Esperanto. Some of the early lists of people who had learned Esperanto also include merchants with whom you could correspond in Esperanto in this early phase of global commerce. For the most part, their inclusion on these lists is the sole indication of their involvement in Esperanto. We get no determination of how successful it was (clearly not sufficient, in that it didn’t become a standard business practice).

But we have at least one actual piece of testimony from someone whose business had made use of Esperanto. On April 3, 1920, the New York Times had published a letter from J. G. Fourman on Russian words that had entered English. Perhaps they had entered Mr. Fourman’s English, because although some words (Bolshevik, knout, pogrom, ukase), he also cites “mujik” (which did not appear in my dictionary) and “zemstvo” (which did, but is so specialized in meaning “a system of elected councils in tsarist Russia” that it can’t really be said to have entered English). Despite the claims made by H. E. Lempertz, he didn’t call Esperanto a “jargon.” That was his predicted future international language, derived from the “interchange of words among the chief European languages.”

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Homer in the Original Esperanto

Ĉu esti aŭ ne esti?

There was a joke made in the movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country that Shakespeare was best “in the original Klingon,” which was probably playing off of the claims made by German scholars that Shakespeare was better in German translation than it was in the original English, with the further claim that Shakespeare had a “German spirit.” I bring this up only because in a letter to the Sun on April 8, 1906, John Fogg Twombly, the secretary of the American Esperanto Association made the claim that the Iliad was better in Esperanto than it was in English.

After some hunting, I managed to find both the Esperanto translation of the Iliad and the Esperanto translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, which was also cited by Twombly. Twombly is bringing up great works of literature translated into Esperanto in response to a editorial which appear in the Sun on April 4, 1906. There, the future of Esperanto was described in terms of sophomores turning out translations of the poems of Tennyson and Browning.

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Photos, Places Wanted

Finally released.
But is it ready?

I have a sort of love/hate relationship with iPhoto. It can do some wonderful things. It you want to turn your photos into books, cards, or calendars, it’s a great thing. On the other hand, with the number of photos I’ve jammed into it, it’s incredibly slow. Leaving it open never seems to be a good idea. It’s also a real pain to open and close it. The problem is that, over the years, I have added tens to thousands of photos to it. My iPhoto library is, after I trimmed it down a bit, just a mere 215 GB.

I knew that someday Apple would come out with a successor to iPhoto, or at least a total reworking of the application (just as they did with the iWork apps, which have gone through this a couple times). I was anticipating Photos for OSX. I was delighted that it was included in the Yosemite Beta program. Every times there was an update to the beta of OS 10.10.3, the first thing I would do was to open Photos and see if the ability to geotag photos had appeared in this update. Now with the full release version, I know that I’m going to have to wait for a future release. Alas, that means that I’m going to be sticking with iPhoto for a while longer.

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The Time Meddler — Blogging Doctor Who

A space helmet for a cow?

The “Time Meddler” was something new in Doctor Who. Dennis Spooner previously gave us a series of historicals, in which the only science-fictional element was the appearance of the Doctor and his companions. The episodes with science-fictional elements were set on other planets or in the far future, and not in Earth’s past.. In the seventeenth Doctor Who serial, Dennis Spooner successfully merges the two elements and gives us the pseudohistorical. The Doctor and his companions go back to 1066 and meet another time traveler.

The serial is important also for being the first time, other than Susan, that we encounter someone from the Doctor’s (then-unnamed) home planet. The Meddling Monk is the series first adversarial Time Lord. It’s a spry little story too, kept to a manageable four episodes with plenty of surprises. We also get the humor in that Steven is aware that they have traveled in space (since they’re clearly no longer on Mechanus), but he’s unwilling to admit that they’ve traveled in time, especially as they keep encountering anachronistic items.

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Women Scientists Start Esperanto Group

Margaret Henderson
Bacteriologist.
Esperantist.

The April 5, 1906 San Francisco Call article on an Esperanto group at the University of California, Berkeley, says more the role of women in science in the early twentieth century than it intends to, and less about the Esperanto group than I’d prefer. The article tells us that the group included “a number of faculty people and others connected with the university,” but doesn’t give any hint as to how large that number is, or who the other people might be. It also gives short shrift to the accomplishments of one of the women involved.

The article also makes a whopper of an error, which I am leaving in place. Once, I’d call it a typographical error, and just quietly replace it, but as it occurs twice, it’s clear that it was the author’s intention, and so I’ll side with the writer for the Call, even though he or she is completely wrong. You’ll see.

The article is dwarfed by the picture of Margaret Henderson, which fills in between the headline and the text of the article. I wish they had had an image of Alice Robertson, since I was not able to find any images of her. She is somewhat overshadowed by a woman with nearly the same name, Alice Mary Robertson, who was born somewhat before our Esperantist and managed to outlive her. Alice Mary Robertson was the second woman to hold a seat in Congress (there are plenty of pictures of her). I’ll get to our Esperantist soon.

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What Did Professor Oswald Do?

Felix L. Oswald
Probably not an Esperantist.
Certainly not a professor.

Given the way that the Sun casually tosses in a reference to “Professor Felix Oswald of Vienna,” you would think he was some sort of well-known personage. Perhaps one of the early winners of the Nobel Prize or a similar sort of luminary. Or, perhaps, given his inclusion in an article on Esperanto, one of the leaders of the early Esperanto movement. If that is the case, then the correct Professor Oswald has not come to light.

There was an American writer of Belgium origin named Felix Leopold Oswald, who did on occasion style himself “Professor Oswald” (and at other times, the more accurate “Dr. Felix Oswald,” or “Felix L. Oswald, M.D.”). In the 1900 Census, his profession is listed as “author.” This is probably our man, but it still leaves vague just what the Sun was crediting to Oswald on April 4, 1906.

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The Natural Education of an Esperantist

Young Winifred teaching
children of wealthy parents

I’ve been delinquent. In reviewing the newspapers of the spring of 1915 that (ersatz British noblewoman) Winifred Sackville Stoner was in New York promoting her accomplishments as an educator. A year before (1914), she had published her book, Natural Education. Her daughter, the younger Winifred Stoner, was the test subject and embodiment of her mother’s educational theories. A quick glance at the book shows that Stoner referenced Esperanto about thirteen times in her book.

Her devotion to the Esperanto movement was rewarded. Despite that it’s neither in nor about Esperanto, Amerika Esperantisto gave a review of it (in English) in their September 1914 issue. It’s also clear that Mrs. Stoner pushed Esperanto as a vital part of early education, giving a bit of a promotion to the Esperanto movement. By twelve, little Winifred was set to teaching yet younger children, an activity that included instruction in Esperanto.

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The Chase — Blogging Doctor Who

Cue the chase music.

There are two or three good episodes in “The Chase.” Unfortunately, the entire serial is six episodes long. Further, it is the most episodic of serials, splitting into four stories, the middle two of which are farce. It was the script editor’s job to tell Terry Nation that a farcical Dalek story wouldn’t do at all. It’s a little early to reduce the Daleks to comic villains. But that’s exactly what they did.

The first and last stories are actually pretty good. Just one question though: is the Space/Time Visualizer Earth technology? It’s got the names of the planets in our system listed—in English—along the bottom. Does this mean that the Moroks of “The Space Museum” conquered Earth at some point? Are humans part of the subjugated population of the Morok Empire? After some cute bits (Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address; Shakespeare admitting the Falstaff is a parody of Sir John Oldcastle, agreeing to write The Merry Wives of Windsor, and rejecting the story of Prince Hamlet of Denmark) we find that Daleks have figured out that the Doctor and his companions are time travelers and they have created their own space/time travel device.

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