“Don’t write so that you can be understood, write so that you can’t be misunderstood.”
— William Howard Taft
Mary Walton: The Woman Who Quieted New York’s Trains After Thomas Edison Couldn’t
When New York’s elevated trains became an unbearable neighborhood nuisance, boardinghouse owner Mary Walton fought back with sand, ingenuity, and a patent. She also developed an early approach to controlling industrial smoke. Thomas Edison had fame and laboratories. Walton had a basement, a mechanical mind, and very little patience for noisy trains.
Helen Duncan and the 1944 Witchcraft Trial: Because Fighting Hitler Wasn’t Keeping Britain Busy Enough
In 1944, while Britain prepared to invade Nazi-occupied France, Helen Duncan went to prison under a witchcraft law dating from 1735. Her extraordinary case involved suspicious ectoplasm, a sunken battleship, an outraged Winston Churchill, and a legal system that apparently hadn’t finished with the eighteenth century.
The Federal Tea Tasters: For 99 Years, the U.S. Government Paid People to Drink Tea—and It Took an Act of Congress to Make Them Stop
For nearly a century, the federal government employed professional tea tasters to determine whether imported tea was good enough for Americans. The program survived multiple presidents, inspired a Supreme Court decision, and required an act of Congress to abolish. Naturally, it took another 27 years to finish the paperwork.
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