Ypsilanti’s Quaker Inventor

15-year-old Orin followed his father John and his younger brother Charles into the white building on Tuttle Hill road. They headed for the dozen men and boys on the men’s side. On the other side of the center partition, Orin’s mother Mary was already seated, with Orin’s older sister Alice and his two younger sisters, 7-year-old Ettie and 4-year-old Lutie.

Orin’s neighbor Mr. Alban sat down next to him. He was one of the most successful farmers in Augusta Township. Orin’s father had a good farm too, one of the biggest, with a creek for the five children to play in. Maybe there would be time to help Charles build a dam tomorrow after chores. They could use the rocks from–Orin blinked, and stopped daydreaming.

There had been six children, but Orin’s brother William had died ten years ago, two years and eleven days after his birthday. His death certificate said he’d died of “congestion of the brain,” which may have been bacterial meningitis. Bacterial meningitis can live in an asymptomatic carrier. It can be transmitted when a mother gives her adorable toddler a kiss.

The men sat quietly. Dust motes drifted in the sunlight coming through the open window. Orin felt a breeze on his cheek and smelled the fragrance of the warm field outside. He heard a cough from the women’s side. Time passed. A cicada started its sawing trill, ending in a falling buzz.

Orin was still. But from his mind would come an invention for use in a noisy and dangerous world many decades after 1880.

One of the elders on the front platform stood up and shook hands with her neighbor. That was the signal: Quaker meeting was over. Occasionally no one felt like speaking or quoting the Bible. A silent meeting like today’s was still considered a good one. Orin stood up with the men. Now it was time for the big picnic outside, before evening services.

From the picnic tables, one could see the small white tombstones in the nearby Quaker cemetery. It held the deceased of the numerous Quaker families that had settled in northern Augusta and southern Ypsilanti townships.

Most folks in the area were Quaker farmers, as Orin and Charles became when they grew older and inherited their father’s 190 acres. Orin’s father died in 1909, and was buried in what was by then called Alban Cemetery. Orin’s mother had died of heart trouble, gastritis, and nephritis in 1902, and Lutie had died of pneumonia in 1907.

In 1913, when Orin was 48, his 66-year-old widowed aunt Elma Hewens died of bowel cancer. Her death certificate said that her father had been Orin’s grandfather, also named Orin Bemis, and that her mother was unknown.

Orin, a first son, was named for this paternal grandfather in a slight departure from Quaker tradition. As a loose rule, a couple’s first son was often named for his mother’s father, the second son for his father’s father, and the third son for his father. The first daughter was named for her father’s mother, the second daughter for her mother’s mother, and the third daughter for her mother. The custom showed the importance of the principle of equality to Quakers.

Charles signed Elma’s death certificate as kin. Elma was not buried in Alban Cemetery, but in Stony Creek Cemetery.

The Alban Cemetery’s Quaker farmers’ simple, dignified graves were usually inscribed with unadorned text. One grave, that of Abel Pasco who had died in 1871, was carved with a hand pointing upwards.

Orin watched the sky. He measured snowfall with a ruler, and maintained a rain gauge. By 1910 he was an official weather observer for the Michigan Central railroad. His observations were published, with those of other observers across Michigan, in the state weather bureau’s annual reports. He was 46 years old. He, Charles, and his sister Alice lived together on the old farm. None had married.

The farm was not electrified. After dinner cooked on the iron stove, kerosene lamps lit the evening reading and sewing. Outside was quiet and black. But the world was changing–fast–thanks to Henry Ford’s creations pouring off the assembly lines a few miles to the east.

Orin viewed automobiles as dangerous; he thought he could make them safer. In 1916, he was granted two patents for two turn signal inventions.

The gadgets were to be mounted on the back of a car. The first patent was a machine that when activated, displayed a sign that said “SLOW DOWN.” The user could also manipulate the device to expose a cutout of a pointing hand, signaling a left or right turn.

Orin immediately improved on this design with his second patent. A fan shaped segment with carefully spaced holes moved to expose either the letters “SLOW” or “STOP” from a background printed with “SSTLOOPW.” The driver could also activate a panel of joined hands to expose either half, showing a hand pointing left or right.

Orin proposed to operate this device with a foot pedal. The only drawback was that in the year of his patent, the most popular car on the road was the Model T. The Model T was operated with three foot pedals: the right one for the brake, the center one for reverse, and the left one for the gear lever. There was also a hand lever near the driver’s door for spark timing. Plus a lever on the steering column for the throttle. Orin was proposing to add a fourth foot pedal to what was already an acrobatic driving experience.

It never caught on. In the late 1930s, Orin, Alice, and Charles left the farm and moved together to 415 Pearl Street in Ypsilanti. Orin remained a weather observer until age 72. It wasn’t until the 1940s that turn signals, by other inventors, started to appear on cars. Orin died in 1942 at age 77, four months after his sister Alice and seven years before his brother Charles. He, Alice, and Charles died single.

Their legacy is Bemis road, named for Orin, Alice, and Charles’ onetime farm on the southeast corner of present-day Bemis and Stony Creek roads.

Orin’s elegant invention, an attempt to bring an iota of calm to the world, was never produced. Had it been, he could have seen that when his foot pedal was released, the hidden signal hands, like a benediction, pointed up.

Laura Bien is the author of “Tales of the Ypsilanti Archives,” is available in Ypsilanti at Mix boutique and in Ann Arbor at Nicola’s Books. You can reach Laura at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

The DIY Model T Ice Saw

Ypsilanti used to have horses that could walk on water. They pulled a plow over the surface of the Huron River. Men with long saws watched, waiting their turn to work.

From the late 19th century until the winter of 1922, the Michigan Central railroad maintained an ice-cutting station just northeast of Ypsilanti, behind today’s St. Joseph Hospital near an old gravel pit called Shanghai Pit.

In winter, the railroad hired men to cut ice from the river. Horses pulling a sort of plow scraped lines on the ice, which were then cut into blocks with hand-saws. The blocks were floated to shore, pushed by men with long pikes. Each 12 to 15-inch-thick block weighed well over a hundred pounds.

For decades, it was dangerous and exhausting work, until in 1920 Ypsilantian Charles McKie had an idea.

33-year-old McKie was a self-employed interior decorator. According to his WWI draft card, he was tall and slender, with blue eyes and brown hair. He painted and decorated the interiors of Ypsilanti offices. McKie owned a home at 213 Huron, where he lived with his wife Dee and his mother Martha. It was a nice neighborhood. One next door neighbor was Normal school music professor and violinist A. J. Whitmire. Nearby lived pastor Harvey Colburn, who would soon write the book for which he is remembered today, “The Story of Ypsilanti.”

McKie was friends with Lee Dawson, who with other family members ran the Martin Dawson Company, which dealt in hay, grain, seeds, coal, and building and painting supplies. Dawson had the contract for cutting ice for the MCRR.

McKie’s idea took him to the Wiedman auto dealership on Pearl Street, at the present-day bus station. He obtained four old Model Ts. The body of each car was cut off and the wheels removed, leaving just the gas engines and the drivetrains to the back axle. McKie mounted each engine on a wooden frame with sled runners. Where the rear wheels had been, McKie mounted two 48-inch-wide saw blades.

The Model Ts were now ice saws.

Transported to Shanghai Pit, they roared into life, with a racketing 4-cylinder, 20-horsepower engine and a swoosh of ice dust thrown up by the blade. They worked so well that although McKie had made four, the ice harvesters only needed one to get the work done. A wooden frame supporting what appears in a photo to be a leather screen was added where the windshield had been, to shield the operator from flying chips of ice.

Pushed to shore, the ice blocks traveled up a wooden ramp on a conveyor belt powered by a steam engine Dawson had rented. They were stored in the railroad’s Ypsilanti ice houses along the Huron and loaded onto boxcars for storage in the railroad’s ice-house in Detroit. Stored in sawdust for insulation, the blocks were used to cool boxcars. ‘The Michigan Central Railroad Company is filling its ice houses at Ypsilanti with fine ice from Shanghai Pond,” said the February 1910 issue of Cold Storage and Ice Trade Journal. “It is 15 inches thick.”

Some of the ice likely was used in Ypsilanti as well. Around the turn of the century, about half of American households had ice boxes. These small wooden cabinets lined with tin or zinc had a storage space for a block of ice and shelves on which to keep food cool. Ypsilantians who couldn’t afford an ice box and the regular home delivery of ice blocks about twice a week could store food in a cool cellar, or do without.

Although the MCRR’s ice harvesting site was upstream of the Peninsular Paper mill, another paper mill near modern-day Superior Road, and the factory waste and other waste that was drained into the river at Ypsilanti, there are hints that the Huron River ice was polluted. The MCRR claimed that it only used northern Michigan ice for consumption in its dining cars. It used Ypsi ice only to cool boxcars.

In 1919, train inspectors were alarmed to see the quality of Ypsilanti water. “[G]overnment inspectors of a train passing through Ypsilanti saw water running from a hose at the Michigan Central Gardens,” says the July 24 Daily Ypsilantian-Press. The men tested the water for purity. “The test was very bad and orders were immediately issued forbidding use of Ypsilanti [city] water.” Later, the inspectors found that the hose was not drawing city water, which came from a well, but polluted river water near a sewer outlet.

Demand for clean ice drove the creation of artificial ice-making factories. In 1906, Wyandotte’s Eureka Brewing Company began manufacturing artificial ice. In 1909, Ann Arbor founded the Artificial Ice Co. Detroit’s General Ice Delivery Co. and other Detroit companies began making ice. In 1918, the Wyandotte Ice Company followed. In 1919, the Ypsi Pure Ice Co. advertised in the Daily Ypsilantian-Press. The ad read, “Our new artificial ice plant is now in operation and we are prepared to supply ice to all consumers in Ypsilanti and vicinity.”

Artificial ice was clean, could be made in precise sizes, and could be made year-round without reliance on unpredictable weather. Except for isolated rural areas far from artificial ice plants, the age of ice harvesting was over.

Perhaps Charles might have made a business out of building and shipping his ice saw to Northern ice harvesting sites. Soon after the collapse of local ice harvesting, his own life took a downturn. He and Dee divorced. She remained in the Huron House, apparently alone: there is no census record of their having had children.

McKie eventually moved into Lee Dawson’s house at 214 South Hamilton. McKie no longer worked as an interior decorator, but at the less prestigious job of outdoor sign painter. His neighbors were laborers, domestics, and factory hands, including Harry Brothers, an auto striper in an auto factory, and foundry worker Newton Cary.

Although artificial ice factories made McKie’s invention obsolete, it would have happened eventually. A very few, expensive models of electric home refrigerators were produced in the 1930s, which became more widely available after WWII.

Today the only places to see iceboxes are antique shops and museums. The Ypsilanti Historical Museum has one in its kitchen. It’s just barely possible that its ice compartment once held a block of ice cut by a young man, gleeful at the controls of his loud, dangerous invention, all those years ago.

Laura Bien is a local history writer and is the author of “Tales of the Ypsilanti Archives.”

The 1926 Modem on North Huron Street

In the fall of 1925, Ypsilantians, and the nation, were transfixed by the romance of a onetime Lower East Side immigrant kid and a telegraph magnate’s daughter. Her wealthy father, Clarence, the son of Comstock Lode multimillionaire John Mackay, strongly disapproved of his Catholic daughter Ellin’s interest in a Jewish man with what he viewed as a disreputable occupation. Clarence refused to give Ellin his permission to marry. The couple waited in dismay for Clarence to change his mind.

Daily Ypsilantian-Press editor George Handy waited as well for the next tidbit of news—his readers loved the story.

When in January of 1926 that news came from New York, it was a bombshell. Ellin Mackay had eloped with and married Irving Berlin.

Handy needed a wedding photograph from New York—and fast—this story was too big to wait for the mail. He called New York.

Half an hour later he had a photograph, thanks to the only modem in Ypsilanti in 1926

That modem, half the size of a refrigerator, stood in the Press’s building at 101-105 North Huron. Called a “telephotography” machine, it could receive photographs from telegraph wires.

Telegraphy had a long history in Ypsilanti. The first telegraphic message sent in Michigan traveled from the Detroit telegraph office at Jefferson and Cass Avenues in Detroit to Ypsilanti’s railroad depot on November 29, 1847, through lines strung along the Michigan Central railroad tracks.

The first message sent by the “lightning slingers” (telegraph operators, especially railroad telegraphers) was not without a sense of playful glee.

Detroit sent first. “Detroit presents her compliments to her sister, Ypsilanti, who never promises more than she is willing and able to perform. Our connection by lightning is now complete, and the first flash in Michigan conveying intelligent messages has passed between us; may our ‘current’ never be broken, our ‘batteries’ always in order, and our ‘registers” ready at all times to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

Ypsilanti replied, “Ypsilanti [-.-- .--. ... .. .-.. .- -. - ..] reciprocates the kind wishes of our lovely sister, Detroit, and as we are now not only on speaking terms, but within speaking distance, she hopes that our intercourse by lightning may be pleasant and profitable to both. So mote it [so be it].”

Continuing from the telegraph station in Ypsilanti, this “Erie and Michigan” line reached Chicago in the winter of 1848. But it wouldn’t be until many years later that photographs began flying along the wires.

In the 1920s, “Telephotography” was not new. As early as 1895, the San Francisco Call newspaper received a simple line drawing, sent by telegraph, of a Los Angeles parade. The message consisted of an alphanumeric code indicating the coordinates of the drawing’s line segments (not unlike the game “Battleship.”) The telegrapher also cabled a text description of the parade. An artist at the Call used the description to sketch details onto the line drawing, creating a detailed picture. The next morning, the paper printed a timely image of the Los Angeles event.

Telephotography made newspapers more seem up-to-the-minute. The technology was also used in law enforcement. Criminals’ pictures could be circulated in minutes, before the lawbreakers traveled too far. Their fingerprints could also be sent by wire. In 1922, the New York Times called telephotography “That Nemesis of Malefactors.” The speed of information transmission was beginning its long, dramatic, and world-changing acceleration.

The modem at the Ypsi Press consisted of a cylindrical metal drum and a tiny pinpoint flashlight, within its cabinet. It was hooked up to a telegraph wire. So was another similar machine, a transmitter, in New York.

In New York, a worker wrapped a photograph around the transmitter cylinder. When the machine was turned on, a tiny beam of light shone on the photo as the cylinder rotated about 100 times per minute, slowly advancing along a threaded axis. The transmitter scanned the photo in one-hundredth-inch sections at 100 lines to the inch; each square inch had 10,000 bits of information.

As the beam of slight scanned a slow spiral down the moving cylinder, a receptor caught the reflection of either dark or light areas of the photo. A photosensitive component translated the “dark” and “light” reflections into differing pulses of electricity. This coded electrical signal was telegraphed to Ypsilanti. The New York transmitter could send, and the Ypsi receiver could receive, 1,800 bits of information per second. A 5 x 7 photo could be sent and received in about 7 minutes.

In Ypsilanti, the receiver machine, whose rotation was adjusted to exactly match that of the New York machine, decoded the electrical signal back into information indicating light and dark areas. The receiver shone light of corresponding strength onto a fresh piece of photographic film attached to the cylinder.

In this way, a photo negative was produced, which was developed and used in the Ypsi paper. The resulting photo had a more limited tonal range than the original. Also, someone had blocked out most of the background in white to highlight the couple. Nevertheless, the photo contained an astounding amount of data.

1,800 bits per second is faster than the first commercial modem, AT&T’s 1962 Bell 103, which transmitted at 300 bits per second (bps). At this time, 300 bits per second equaled 300 baud, the unit of modem speed. Later, computer scientists figured out how to pack more bits into each baud, and bps became a more descriptive term for modem speed.

As much as we associate modems with the term “baud,” the term actually comes from telegraphy. Named to honor the French inventor who created the first teleprinter, J. M. E. Baudot, one “baud” is a unit of telegraph speed consisting of one Morse code dot sent per second.

Since that day when the Press received its New York photo, time moved on. The telephotography machine became an obsolete clunker. Irving Berlin’s father-in-law eventually forgave him and accepted their marriage—a wise move, since Irving would stay married to Ellin for 62 years, until her death in 1988.

Berlin died the following year, shortly before the popularization of dial-up modems, like the one that had transmitted his happy wedding picture all those years ago.

Thanks to Isaac Eiland-Hall for research assistance.

Laura Bien is an Ypsilanti history writer. You can reach her at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

Reverend Tindall’s Tellurian

Eleven years into an exhausting workload for a big congregation, in 1874 Presbyterian minister George Tindall was tired. He maintained a grueling schedule of ministerial duties for one of Ypsilanti’s largest churches.

“The Presbyterian is the second church society in regard to age,” said the Ypsilanti Commercial in an 1874 article that summarized business and cultural institutions in town. “The present church building, situated on Washington Street, was dedicated in ’57. It is of brick, and is 55 x 96 feet, with a lecture room in the rear, 23 x 50 feet. The spire is one hundred sixty two feet high. The property belonging to the society is worth $30,000,” (today, over half a million dollars). “Rev. Geo. P. Tindall is pastor, having been called to the position in 1863. The present church membership is four hundred fifty.”

Ypsilanti’s population at the time was around 5,000, so Tindall’s flock represented almost ten percent of Ypsilanti residents. He was responsible for home visits to the afflicted, he officiated at weddings and funerals, and held private meetings to counsel parishioners, aside from three Sunday services for which he wrote sermons every week. He also was expected to attend numerous social functions, such as the annual Christmas celebration.

“The Sabbath school of the Presbyterian Church held a festival in their church on Christmas eve which was the finest affair of the kind ever witnessed in Ypsilanti,” said the January 5, 1867 Commercial. “The exercises were lengthy after the audience were seated but highly interesting to both old and young. . . Rev. Mr. Tindall and [his wife Louisa] were remembered with a magnificent tea set . . . ”

It was all getting to be too much. But for all his work with godly matters, Tindall still found time to analyze God’s creation with a scientific eye. His mind was on the motion of planets. He pondered the Earth’s multiple simultaneous vectors of rotational and orbital movement. One such vector was a phenomenon whereby the Earth, caught between the gravitational pull of the Sun on the Earth’s equator and the force of the Earth’s rotation, wobbles slightly, like a spinning top.

This wobble is called “the precession of the equinoxes,” and in June 6 of 1874 Tindall filed a patent for his tellurian. He had invented a model of the Earth’s rotation that demonstrated the precession of the equinoxes.

The precession of the equinoxes, says EMU physics and astronomy department assistant professor Patrick Koehn, is the slow wobble in the earth’s axis that over 26,000 years, traces an imaginary cone in the sky.

“Usually, when I’m talking to my astronomy students,” said Koehn in a personal email, “I pull out a bicycle wheel that has an extended axle–that is, I can hold onto this axle like a handle and get the wheel rotating fairly quickly. I then place it on the ground in the classroom, and we chat about it. The spinning wheel will eventually start to tip a bit, and the axis of rotation (the axle) will start to sweep out a cone. It looks like the axle is wobbling.”

Explaining that this wobble slowly shifts astronomical navigation points in the sky that are marked by the spring and autumn equinoxes, Koehn said that it “causes the rotational axis of Earth to sweep out a cone in the sky. Since the Pole Star (currently Polaris) is the star that the axis of the Earth points nearest to, if the axis moves, the Pole Star will change with time. It takes 26,000 years for the axis of the Earth to sweep all the way through the cone, so in 26,000 years, the Pole star will again be Polaris. When the Egyptians were building the pyramids, for example, the star called Thuban (in the constellation Draco) was the Pole Star.”

On a more terrestrial note, aside from his weightier duties George likely heard many petty parishioner complaints and dealt with difficult people. However, his imagination was not a small one confined by such quotidiana. His was a mind that ventured to explore subtle celestial motions occurring over vast expanses of space and time.

On October 27, 1874, Tindall’s patent was approved. Just as the patent concerned the Earth’s axis, this approval became a pivot that altered the course of his life. A little over a year later, Tindall submitted his resignation to the church. In it, he said that in October of 1874, he had a physical breakdown due to overwork. He also said that he was leaving the church to take an easier job in Flint. There was more to the story: rumors, origin unknown, said that his small salary had been decreased.

“The report that was circulated that the pastor’s salary was cut down is not correct,” said a December 25, 1875 Ypsilanti Commercial article that included both Tindall’s resignation and the church board’s response. “The facts are that [the church board] fixed the limits that it should not go under nor exceed given amounts.”

In his resignation, Tindall, wielding graceful and calculated language honed through years of sermons, said, “I have been persuaded that I have overworked, and must in some way gain relief. . . the way is open for me to withdraw to the field to which I am invited, where I may, under changed conditions, more nearly meet all the demands of the pastorate.” Tindall made what appears to be one opaque reference to salary when discussing his labors. “[W]ith a church membership of about 500 most of the time, and about 300 families or calling places, [this] has seemed to require all one’s time . . . These more than ordinary, and unremitted labors, year after year . . .”

Tindall left for Flint. It was to be the last pastorate he held before his retirement. He later went to California, and when he died there in 1894, he was remembered in Ypsilanti. Whatever squabbles may have contributed to his leaving Ypsi were not mentioned in the affectionate obituary printed here.

“Many of his parishioners of 30 or 40 years ago are still here,” said the September 21, 1894 Ypsilanti Commercial, “and all hold him in affectionate remembrance for his earnest and beautiful Christian character and the tender sympathy and faithfulness which characterized all of his pastoral and social duties.”

Tindall’s mortal remains were buried in California. His immortal soul—if humans have one–was now free to forever wander the universe, one he had contemplated in quiet moments in his home long ago in Ypsilanti.

Laura Bien is a local history writer. You are invited to visit her Ypsi history blog Dusty Diary and contact her at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

Predicting the Internet in 1885

“In a paper published every minute, I read that a Prof. Stoneborn had created quite a sensation at Icetown, at the North Pole, by his success in attracting the new comet by electricity . . .” That’s what 18-year-old Vee Cornwell imagined newspapers might be like in her talk “America in 1985,” given at an 1885 city youth talent show.

She described falling asleep while reading Jules Verne, and traveling to the future. Her “paper published every minute” prediction was only a handful of years off from the rise of online newspapers and blogs. Of the other predictions Vee made in her talk, the most interesting ones are those she got wrong; they expose the memes and culture of her day.

Vee Cornwell may have inherited a futuristic imagination from her father, Clark Cornwell, the son of Cornelius Cornwell, who founded the city’s first paper mill. An “early adopter” of technology (and mayor from 1886-1888), Clark was the first person in Ypsilanti to have a phone installed in his home, in 1878. It was linked to Clark’s paper mill at Lowell, northwest of the city, and to another at Geddes.

The phone created a sensation. Even Ypsilanti Commercial editor C. R. Pattison was impressed. “The other day we were in Cornwell & Co.’s paper office, in this city,” he said in the March 2, 1878 paper, “and witnessed the wondrous power of the telephone. Mr. Cornwell held a conversation with the mill at Lowell, giving his orders verbally and receiving immediate audible replies. Great is the telephone.”

Vee predicted another communication breakthrough, as reported in the “paper published every minute.” “I also read that the whole length of the lunar wire had been laid, and that a message from the moon was daily expected.” Her word choice seems odd: “laid” instead of “extended” or “raised.” But just 19 years earlier, the transatlantic cable had been laid. It seems likely Vee modeled her moon wire on the transatlantic cable.

Vee also posited devices that suggest television and radio. While walking in the world of 1985 with her companion, “I did not observe any theaters or churches, and inquired what part of the city they were in. ‘Oh!’ replied my friend, ‘theaters and churches are abolished now, only the stages of the theaters being retained, and by means of an electric dioscope all that takes place on the stage can be distinctly seen and heard by people in any part of the city. Sermons are read in the minister’s study and transmitted to houses by telephone.’”

Vee suggested two methods of high-speed aerial transport, neither of them airplanes. “At last we came to a wide river, and I was looking for a ferry, when my guide pointed to an immense metal sphere and said, ‘Step in’ . . . An authoritative voice now cried, ‘All right! Fire!’ A tremendous concussion followed, and when I regained my breath the door was opened and my fellow passengers were getting out. We had crossed the river.” Astonished, Vee asked a companion “‘I suppose you have railroads still?’ ‘No!’ she replied. ‘Short distances are traversed by bombshells, fired by a substance called chloro-nitrogen, which superceded dynamite thirty years ago. Electric balloons are used for longer distances. The mail balloon starts from New York and arrives in San Francisco one hour and forty-five minutes ahead of the sun.’”

Over a century before Vee’s talk, the Montgolfier brothers had flown over Paris in their balloon, the first men to experience a successful untethered flight in a man-made craft. And although theoretical designs for aircraft dated back for centuries, it would be 13 years after Vee’s talk before Augustus Herring made what is regarded as the first powered “airborne condition,” halfway between gliding and true flight.

Herring flew his compressed air-powered hang glider in St. Joseph, Michigan in October of 1898, several years before the Wright Brothers’ flight. Airplanes were not a reality to Vee, but balloons were, and it made perfect sense to her to add the then-novel power of electricity to create what seemed like futuristic science, the “electric balloon.”
Continuing the scientific theme, Vee took a poke at eccentric Ohio scientist John Cleves Symmes, who proposed in 1818 that the Earth was hollow, inhabitable, and accessible by a hole at the North Pole. “I also learned that an expedition to the north pole had found Symmes’ Hole, and had explored the inside of the earth and annexed it . . . to the United States.”

Vee’s talk also reflected the social movements of her time, which included the often overlapping causes of temperance and suffrage. These were combined into one when she and her companion stopped in a saloon for refreshment. “I rather hesitated, but as she seemed very well bred, I said nothing. We entered an elegantly furnished room, and were handed a bill of fare.” The menu offered water—89 different kinds-that included “Water Charcoal Filtered,” “Mineral Water,” and “Rain Water.” Vee asked her companion, “‘Do they not have any wine, beer, or champagne?’ ‘Hush!’ said my companion, ‘there is a fine of $5 for the mere mention of any of the old poisonous compounds. All intoxicating liquors were abolished when women were admitted to the house of representatives.’”

Towards the end of her talk, Vee discussed an antigravity machine. “Being tired with our long walk, I expressed my surprise that my companion seemed to feel no fatigue. ‘Why!’ said she, ‘I don’t believe you have a negative gravity machine.’ She then told me that this useful article” had been invented by Frank R. Stockton, a popular late 19th-century humorist, novelist, and writer of short stories, some of which were fantastical.

“‘No one ever gets tired walking now,’ said my companion. ‘Don’t you notice that we have no carriages or street cars? Let us go into this store and buy a machine for you.’ I chose one which consisted of a small battery enclosed in a watch charm. No sooner had it been adjusted to my weight than I hardly seemed to touch the ground.’”

Vee was fitting in nicely to the world of 1985 when tragedy struck, according to her talk’s conclusion. “I lost all sense of fatigue, and was stepping lightly along, when—-Crash! I awoke. My book had fallen from my lap.”

Laura Bien is a local history writer. Contact her at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

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