Interesting Random Facts

To the modern American, the sweet gelatin dessert known as Jell-O is an institution. Just tear open the wrapper, pour boiling water over the powder, and refrigerate in a bowl or mold. Jell-O’s a lot easier to make than pie.

Sure, we take Jell-O for granted, until we realize what our forefathers, or foremothers, had to go through to serve a bowlful of the shimmering dessert.

Before the turn of the century, gelatin was a functional food item rather than a treat. Jellies and aspics had been used since the days of ancient Greece to bind, glaze, and preserve other foods. Just think of the canned hams packed in aspic you buy today.

We think of gelatin basically as a dessert; but in former times, cooks flavored their gelatins with vinegar, wine, almond extract, and other items that produced a tart rather than sweet product. Those cooks hardly had need of a sweet jelly, since the items they glazed were more often meats than sweets.

As long ago as the Renaissance, chefs took pride in constructing elaborate gelatin molds, and no dinner party was complete without at least one jelly construction worthy of the best modern-day wedding cake baker. In the nineteenth century, the most popular mold designs were castles and fortresses complete with doors, windows, and crenellated turrets.

Before this century, the glue needed for gelatin, called collagen, had to be laboriously extracted from meat bones. In the Middle Ages, deer antlers were a popular source of the glue; and later, calves’ feet and knuckles. Housewives in the nineteenth century used isinglass, made from the membranes of fish bladders.

Gelatin-making was a daylong affair, requiring the tedious scraping of hair from the feet, hours of boiling and simmering with egg whites to degrease and clarify the broth, and careful filtering through jelly bags or “filtering stools.” The transparent finished product was then dried into sheets, leaves, or rounds.

Not the easiest process in the world, you’ll agree. Charles B. Knox thought so, too. In 1890, the Jamestown, New York man was watching his wife make calves’ foot jelly when he decided that a prepackaged, easy to use gelatin mix was just what the housewife needed. Knox set out to develop, manufacture, and distribute the granulated gelatin, while his wife invented recipes for the new kitchen staple.

A few years later, a Le Roy, New York woman named May Wait didn’t wait for Knox to flavor his gelatin, and concocted a mix of sugar, powdered gelatin, and artificial fruit flavors that she christened Jell-O. Actually, a powdered gelatin dessert had been invented fifty years earlier by the same Peter Cooper credited with the invention of the “Tom Thumb” locomotive. But it wasn’t until the development of the icebox at the end of the century that America was ready for gelatin desserts.

Wait’s product found its way to few American tables before it was bought by the food tycoon Frank Woodward, who was already marketing a coffee and tea substitute named Grain-O. A genius in packaging, mass marketing, and advertising, within a few years Woodward turned Jell-O into a household word. The 10 cent carton advertised a “delicious dessert” that was “delicate, delightful, and dainty,” and the Jell-O trademark of a young girl with carton and kettle in hand soon appeared on store displays, dishes, spoons, and other promotional articles.

To show the housewife how versatile the product was, Woodward’s company distributed free booklets with Jell-O recipes. One booklet alone ran to a printing of 15 million copies!

By 1925, Jell-O was a big-money industry. In that year Jell-O joined Postum to form General Foods, today one of the largest corporations in America. Talk about humble beginnings!

By the 1930′s, Jell-O had become a way of life. In the Midwest, no Sunday dinner was complete without a concoction known as Golden Glow salad, Jell-O laced with grated carrot and canned pineapple and served with gobs of mayonnaise.

Knox Gelatine tried to discourage the rush toward Jell-O with ads warning shoppers to spurn “sissy-sweet salads” that were “85 percent sugar.” While Knox stressed the purity of their odorless, tasteless, sugarless gelatin, Jell-O highlighted their product’s versatility.

As for the belief that gelatin is good for the hair and nails, the only claim made by either Jell-O or Knox is that their product “may” do some good for “some people’s” hair and nails.

Today, you’d be hard put to find a beanery that didn’t offer at least one flavor of the fruity dessert. Gelatin is very popular among dieters, especially the sugarless D-Zerta variety, and many restaurants serve elaborate specials of jell-o, fruit, and cottage cheese. In modern health conscious America, Jell-O has become the highly touted alternative to “junk food” desserts.

There is no truth to the notion that frankfurters are unavailable today in Germany, the land of their birth. Stop by a roadside eatery or pop into a quick lunch restaurant in Germany and you’ll have little trouble finding a frankfurter of some dimensions, complete with bread, mustard, and sauerkraut.

But there is one difference between the German frank and the hot dog you’ll find at an American stand: in Germany, you’ll be served your frank piecemeal, with a sausage, a pile of sauerkraut, and a piece of bread on a plate. The frank on a bun, like its cousin, the hamburger on a bun, is a product of American ingenuity.

The frankfurter and hamburger are both medieval inventions, but the sausage itself predates recorded history. The word comes to us from the Latin salsus, salted or preserved. The word salami was mentioned often in the pre-Christian period, perhaps associated with the Greek city of Salamis on Cyprus.

Since meat preservation was a problem before the invention of refrigeration, preserved meat was always popular. In the Middle Ages, sausage makers developed individual formulas for seasoning their products, which frequently took the name of the city where they originated. From Frankfurt, of course, came the frankfurter; from Bologna well, need we say more?

The southern European preferred dry, heavily salted sausage, such as genoa salami from Genoa; in northern Europe, cooks preferred fresh and cooked sausage such as head cheese, blood sausage, and bratwurst.

The frankfurter was brought to the United States by German immigrants. Like the hamburger, it first became popular in the Cincinnati area. As to why the frank became more popular than any other sausage, well, who’s to account for tastes?

Today, frankfurter meat is cured with various combinations of chemicals, such as sodium chloride and sodium nitrite or nitrate, along with sugar. The pork or beef is chopped, seasoned, stuffed into its collagen or intestine skin, and then smoked and cooked. In some frankfurter manufacturing plants, computers select raw materials daily and feed them into a continuous hot-dog processing machine, untouched by human hands. Frankfurter production that formerly required nine hours now takes as little as forty-five minutes.

There are over 200 varieties of sausage made in this country, by some 3,000 individual processors. The frankfurter is by far the most popular. Americans gobble up close to sixteen billion wieners each year, about eighty per person!

Franks with beans were popular on the American frontier, since both would remain fresh for long periods of time. Though refreshment stands at early baseball parks sold such items as tripe, planked onions, and cherry pie, the hot dog eventually became the overwhelming favorite of the bleachers. In fact, the term hot dog was coined in 1919 at the Polo Grounds, a major-league ballpark in New York City. Today, a baseball park without hot dogs would be an affront to the sport.

Once, Babe Ruth devoured so many hot dogs at a depot stand that he had to be rushed to a hospital emergency room.

Though the frankfurter remains popular, it certainly is no longer fashionable, except perhaps for the tiny frank and bun concoction known as pigs in a blanket that are de rigeur at so many cocktail parties. And some frankfurter makers now adulterate their product with, your grandparents would shudder, chicken)

We have no idea of the contents of the 20 two-ounce franks that Jimmy Davenport of Kentucky wolfed down in just three and a half minutes in 1976, setting the world’s record for hot dog consumption. But we know that a mammoth weiner exhibited by a California hotel to celebrate the American Bicentennial in 1976 consisted of forty pounds of pork and beef, and measured 148 inches in length. To our knowledge, no patriot volunteered to single-handedly devour the dog.

During the 1977 power blackout in New York City, the business and commercial life of the world’s busiest metropolis came to a complete halt for an entire day. Though buses were still running to take people to work and many offices had sufficient natural lighting to make some work possible, the blackout shut off one electrical device without which the modern city is completely helpless: the elevator.

With thousands of offices vacant for the lack of a means of reaching them and hundreds of thousands of people stranded in high-rise apartment buildings, the importance of the elevator in today’s city was drawn sharply into focus. There can be no doubt that the invention of the elevator has had a great deal to do with shaping our urban geography. But the question arises, did the need for taller buildings spur the invention of the elevator, or did the invention of the elevator produce higher office and apartment buildings?

No one can prove that the paucity of high buildings before the modern era was due solely to the lack of a means to reach the upper floors. It could more easily be argued that the demands for utilizing urban space were never so great as to make the high-rise a necessity and that once the demand was there, human ingenuity rose to the job of inventing an efficient elevator. But one thing is certain: the idea of vertical transportation, if not the means, has been with us for well over 2,000 years. Which brings us to the History of Elevators.

Ruins from a number of ancient civilizations contain shafts; some archaeologists believe that these shafts were actually hoist ways in which goods and perhaps people were lifted. But no mention of an elevator-like device appears in any ancient writings until the first century B.C. when the Roman architect engineer Vitruvius described lifting platforms that utilized pulleys and human, animal, or water power. The Roman Coliseum, built in 80 A.D., used crude lifting platforms to raise gladiators and wild animals to the arena level.

Many medieval monasteries were built atop steep cliffs or surrounded by high walls, and some of the more unsociable cloisters depended upon a device known as the basket elevator for entry and exit. A basket elevator was just that, a basket in which the passenger was lifted or lowered by rope along the outside of the monastery walls. Not the most gracious entry, perhaps, but unwanted guests certainly posed little problem.

In 17th century France, a device known as the “flying chair” occasionally brought passengers to the upper floors of higher buildings. Similar to hoists used by stablemen to lift bales of hay to a loft, the flying chair was operated by a rope running around a wheel at the top of the building exterior. One end of the rope was attached to the chair, the other end to a counterweight. To rise, a passenger threw off a sandbag attached to the chair, the counterweight would then descend and the much lighter chair and passenger would rise. Not a very pleasant ride, as you might imagine. Even so, at the end of the upward journey, the passenger had to climb in through the window.

In a sense the flying chair was similar in operation to the dumb waiter, a pulley and counterweight device used chiefly to lift food from kitchen to dining room. An apocryphal story credits Thomas Jefferson with the invention of the dumbwaiter; we do know that Jefferson used one of the world’s first dumbwaiters in his Virginia home to deliver food from a basement kitchen to the dining room. The dumbwaiter was later used in this country to deliver garbage to the basement of many apartment buildings.

In the early 19th century, the hydraulic elevator became popular for moving goods in factories and warehouses. The platform of a hydraulic elevator was mounted atop a plunger that rose or fell in a hollow cylinder according to the amount of water in the cylinder. A steam engine pumped water into the cylinder to lift the plunger; valves released the water to lower the plunger and car. But the hydraulic elevator had one serious disadvantage: since the length of the plunger had to be equivalent to the height of the shaft, the cylinder in which the plunger sank had to be buried to a depth equal to the height of the shaft. Thus the heights to which an elevator could go were severely limited.

The problem was partially solved by an American, Cyrus Baldwin, who designed a new kind of hydraulic elevator, in which a much shorter plunger turned wheels at the top of the shaft. Ropes wrapped around the wheels actually raised and lowered the platform. These later models did away with the need for extensive excavation for the cylinder, and allowed some platforms to attain the blinding speed of 600 feet per minute, about seven miles an hour. The hydraulic elevator is still used in some warehouses and parking garages where speed is less important than strength.

The first successful non-hydraulic elevator was built by Henry Waterman in New York City in 1850, and was installed in a Manhattan warehouse to hoist barrels to the upper floor. Waterman’s elevator was a crude platform lifted by a cable that wound around a cylindrical drum known as the windlass. The windlass was turned by steam power in one direction to lift the platform; then turned in the other direction to lower it. But these devices also limited the height of an elevator shaft, since the drum afforded only so much room to safely accept the winding rope.

Like the hydraulic elevator, windlass elevators were used only for hauling freight. Why not passengers as well? Well, for one thing, few people at the time were ready to trust their lives to the hemp ropes then used as cables.

Then, along came Elisha Graves Otis. Though Otis is often called the inventor of the elevator, he initially contributed only one major innovation to elevator design. But that innovation was significant enough to make him, in effect, the father of the passenger elevator.

Vermont-born Otis was working in a furniture factory when he was asked to design a machine for lifting lumber and other materials from floor to floor. Otis’s invention made its debut at the 1853 Crystal Palace Exposition in New York, where it was billed as “An elevator, or machine for hoisting goods.”

Otis’s elevator was a simple platform that moved between two guide rails, with a steam-powered windlass at the top of the shaft to raise or lower the cable. The innovation was a safety device that could stop the fall of the elevator in the event the cable broke. The simple device consisted of two metal hooks and a spring, attached to the cable where it met the platform. If tension in the hoist rope was relaxed, in the event of a cable break, for instance, the hooks immediately sprang to a horizontal position, where their ends would catch in teeth cut into the guide rails and stop the elevator’s descent. Sounds a bit shaky? Well, it’s basically the safety device modern elevators rely on today, and it’s totally reliable.

According to some accounts Otis demonstrated the safety of his invention by holding regular cable-breaking exhibitions at the exposition. Spectators would watch in amazement as Otis climbed on the platform, rose to the top of the shaft, and then cut the cable! His expected fall would be checked by the safety hooks.

By 1857, Otis had installed the world’s first commercial passenger elevator in the Haughwout Department Store in New York. A steam driven lift, the elevator rose five stories at a speed of forty feet per minute, barely faster than a stairway. At first, shoppers were reluctant to risk their lives on the newfangled device, but as more and more people took the, plunge, it soon became clear that the passenger elevator was here to stay.

Early steam-driven elevators required a large space for the steam engine, and often spewed thick smoke into the shaft. The next step was obvious: an electric elevator. In 1880, a German named Werner Siemens built a crude electric elevator, with a motor under the platform turning cogwheels that fit into notches in the guide rails.
In 1887, William Baxter built an unsuccessful electric machine in Baltimore. The world’s first successful electric elevator was installed two years later by the Otis Elevator Company in the Demarest Building in New York, and was in continual use until the building was demolished in 1920.

The Demarest Building elevator’s 30 year life span pales next to the endurance record of the world’s oldest operating elevators, three hydraulic machines installed in a Grammercy Park, Manhattan apartment building in 1883, and still operating after more than ninety years of service.

In 1895, the Englishmen Frost and Strutt invented a device called the teagle that offered a marked improvement over the windlass. Instead of a drum at the top of the shaft, the teagle employed a pulley wheel and counterweight; with the cable pressed so tightly against the wheel that it turned with the pulley. The teagle eliminated the cable-length limitations of the earlier windlass elevators, now buildings could rise toward the sky.

By the turn of the century, the problems of speed, safety, and height limitation had been successfully challenged. There remained only improvements in convenience and economy. The push-button elevator, introduced in 1894, was both more reliable and cheaper to operate than the hand-operated manned elevator you can still find in the moldiest of city buildings. Automatic leveling, which brings the car to rest precisely at floor level, made its debut in 1915, but the cry of “watch your step” will live on forever. By the middle of this century, automation had rendered the elevator operator nearly extinct.

The Otis Elevator Company, the world’s largest manufacturer of elevators, now installs from 20,000 to 25,000 new elevators and escalators each year, and services an estimated 400,000 Otis elevators functioning around the world. Otis was exporting elevator equipment to thirty-one countries as early as the 1890′s. Nowadays, Otis operates twenty-nine plants worldwide, with over 44,000 employees.

Modern elevators are “gearless traction” machines. An electric motor turns a wheel, called the traction sheave, at the top of the shaft. The cable runs over the traction sheave, around a smaller wheel below the traction sheave, back around the traction sheave, and down the shaft. One end of the cable is attached to the car, the other to the counterweight. Another cable, called the compensating cable, stretches from the bottom of the car to the bottom of the counterweight, after first passing over an idler wheel at the bottom of the shaft. The compensating cable is needed to, yep, compensate for the unequal distribution of cable weight when the car is near the top or bottom of the shaft.

The earliest electric elevators with push-button controls simply carried a passenger from point A to point B without stops, no matter how many people on intermediate floors impatiently watched the car glide by. A modern elevator answers all calls in one direction, then responds to calls waiting in the other direction. Large office buildings with many elevators use group control systems, which keep the cars correctly spaced and send only the closest elevator to answer a call.

Thanks to Otis, elevators are now almost 100 percent, five times safer than a staircase, according to the elevator industry. Cable failure is extremely rare, for each of a modern machine’s eight woven steel cables can support a load eight times the capacity of the car. Safety devices similar to Otis’s assure that even if the cable does break, the car won’t fall very far in the shaft. And a device at the bottom of the shaft, called the buffer, will break the fall of an errant elevator in the unlikely event the car does plummet.

An airplane once crashed into a New York office building and struck directly into the elevator shaft, destroying the cables. The car plunged 17 floors, but the buffer saved the life of the elevator’s lone passenger!
Modern elevators travel at many times the speed of the earliest machines, with express elevators in some taller buildings speeding along at 1,200 feet per minute, fast enough to -require machinery to adjust changing air pressures in the car. And newer elevators, such as those in the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Building in Chicago, travel at speeds of up to 1,800 feet per minute!

One of the largest elevators in the world, a hydraulic model, raises, lowers, and revolves the stage at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. But the largest commercial elevator on record was constructed to raise and lower a full swimming pool on the stage of the Hippodrome Theater in New York. The device had a capacity of 250,000 pounds, that’s equal in weight to 35 hippopotami, and moved at a speed of 12 feet per minute, slower than the most sluggish hippopotamus!

A second means of vertical transportation, the escalator, was developed while the electric elevator was still in its infancy. A patent for an escalator was issued in 1859, but the first working escalator, a stepless conveyor belt with cleats for traction, was installed by Jesse Reno in 1896 on a pier in Coney Island, New York. About the same time, Charles Seeburger constructed a similar conveyor with horizontal steps. Seeburger coined the word “escalator” for his invention, combining the Latin Scala (“steps”) with the first letter and ending of “elevator.” Seeburger’s device forced riders to step on and off to one side, at their own risk. The Otis Elevator Company acquired both inventions. By 1921, Otis had developed the kind of horizontal-step escalator in use today.

Escalators eliminated both the need for an elevator operator and, more important, long waits for an elevator car. Escalators were installed extensively in deep subway stations, transporting a steady stream of riders and thereby eliminating bottlenecks at elevator doors. In fact, the longest escalator in the world can be found in the Leningrad subway, with a vertical rise of 195 feet.

The steps of an escalator are moved by an endless chain powered by electricity, usually at speeds of about 100 feet per minute. The underside of each step is triangular in shape, and mounted on four wheels running in tracks under the steps. When the step begins its ascent, the rear wheels rise to keep the top of the step horizontal.

As anyone who’s had to climb to the 8th floor of a department store via seven escalators is well aware, the escalator will never replace the elevator for long distances. As buildings rise higher and increase in floor area, engineers have had to keep pace with constant innovation. The major problem faced by the engineers is how to minimize the space taken up by elevator shafts when many elevators are needed for a building. One answer is the dual elevator, two cars running in one shaft. The first dual elevator was placed in service in Pittsburgh in 1931, with the upper car running as an express, the lower car as a local. Another development, the double-deck car, was introduced in 1932, with two attached cars that stop one floor above the other.

The designers of the 110-story World Trade Center in New York arrived at another solution for minimizing elevator shaft space. In each of the two towers, express elevators speed passengers to “sky lobbies” on the 44th and 78th floors. Local elevators run only between one lobby and another. Thus three local cars can run in the same shaft, each serving one-third of the tower, and the amount of floor space occupied by elevator shafts is cut by almost two-thirds!

Round elevator cars serve a Johnson Wax Company building in Racine, Wisconsin, designed by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Another Wright creation, the Price Tower in Oklahoma, is served by hexagonally shaped elevator cars.

And who says an elevator can go only straight up? The Eiffel Tower boasts elevators that move along dizzily inclined tracks, as does the George Washington Masonic Monument in Virginia. And the outdoor elevator is now coming into vogue, as demonstrated by the new Hyatt Regency Hotel in Atlanta, served by glass-cab elevators running in rails on the outside of the building.

Beats a flying chair, doesn’t it?

The eggplant is neither oval in shape nor white, and certainly bears no relation to the egg in taste or in usage. “Eggplant,” then, is a misnomer? Well, almost.

The first eggplants to reach Europe during the Middle Ages were actually a rare white species, with oval fruits that closely resemble a hen’s egg. The name eggplant was a natural, and stuck to the plant even when the more common purple varieties made their appearance in Europe.

The eggplant was once known as the “love apple” in England because it was thought to possess aphrodisiac properties. Botanists in northern Europe dubbed the eggplant mala insana, or “mad apple,” because they thought that eating the fruit could result in insanity. Curiously, the French call the eggplant aubergine, related to the word auberge, or “inn.”

Fruit? Yes, the eggplant is botanically a fruit, although the plant is used almost exclusively as a vegetable. The eggplant is, to be exact, the Solanum melongena, a member of the nightshade family closely related to the tomato and potato. Specimens range in size from the large fruit eaten in America to tiny Near Eastern varieties which happen to be more strongly flavored than the eggplants we customarily enjoy.

In addition to the familiar purple variety, there are white and yellow varieties, and a dwarf species whose fruits grow only three or four inches long. A peculiar variety called the snake eggplant produces narrow, elongated fruits up to a foot in length with their ends curled up like a serpent’s tongue.

The eggplant originated in India and eastern Asia, and has been cultivated since remotest history. One of the oldest references to the fruit appears in a fifth-century Chinese book, which describes how fashionable Oriental ladies used a black dye made from eggplants to stain and polish their teeth. The “mad apple” has been a particular favorite in the Near East since Biblical times. The ancient Persians stuffed eggplants, and the Arabs scorched them over charcoal and crushed the flesh into a puree.

During the early Middle Ages, the Arabs brought the eggplant to Spain and Greece. The fruit was first mentioned in northern Europe by Albert of Cologne in the thirteenth century, but it was not well known there until the sixteenth century. The first eggplants began appearing on English dinner plates around 1587. Initially, the English called the fruit “Guinea squash,” since it was brought to London by traders in West Africa. The Spaniards brought the eggplant to America during the seventeenth century. But most of the eggplants grown here until this century, were used exclusively for ornament. The eggplant, incidentally, is one of the few items of produce grown in the United States that also thrives in the tropics.

Eggplants are now extensively cultivated in east and southern Asia, as well as in Africa, South America, southern Europe, and the United States. Requiring strong, steady sunshine, the plant is rarely grown outdoors in England or northern Europe.

Most American eggplants come from Florida, Texas, and New Jersey. About a million and a half bushels of eggplants are produced here each year, and smaller quantities are imported, chiefly from Mexico. But the average American, by and large, shuns the eggplant, consuming but four ounces of the fruit per year.

Eggplants are edible from the time they are one-third grown, and are usually picked before they reach maturity. Plants are often started in protected beds, then transplanted to the garden or field. Ripe eggplants are eaten raw, pickled, or cooked. The cooked fruit is favored for its similarity in texture to meat, and many dishes, the Italian Eggplant Parmigiana, for instance, are prepared like meat dishes, with cheese, sauce, and spices.

The versatile eggplant can be baked, broiled, scalloped, fried, sauteed, stuffed, or marinated. Italy, Greece, France, and several eastern countries all have their favorite eggplant dishes. In the Near East, large eggplants are stuffed with meat, or pureed into a dip, or diced and mixed with onions, tomatoes, and garlic.

The Italians like to slice the fruit and saute it in olive oil, with plenty of tomato sauce. A Sicilian specialty is melanza caponata.

The French enjoy ratatouille, a baked vegetable casserole with tomatoes, peppers, onions, and zucchini.

Many Japanese dishes call for eggplant. In fact, the eggplant is the fourth most important “vegetable” in Japan, after the sweet potato, radish, and Chinese cabbage.
The popular Greek dish moussaka, made from eggplant, lamb, onions, and spices, originated in the early Middle Ages.

Another eggplant dish, Imam Bayaldi, owes its name to sixteenth century Ottoman Turks. Acccording to a legend, a holy man, or Imam, was served a particular eggplant dish by a beautiful woman. When she bent over to present the dish, her veil slipped from her face for a moment. The holy man, captivated by this brief glimpse of her beauty, and overwhelmed by the aroma of the succulent food, simply passed out. The dish Imam Bayaldi was then christened “the priest has fainted.”

When you shop for eggplants, look for firm fruits of uniform color. The best eggplants are heavy in relation to their size. Avoid wilted or soft eggplants, or fruits marked with brown spots which may indicate decay.

“Mad apples” are also excellent plants for a kitchen garden, so you might test your purple thumb with a small crop. Experts advise that you start the seeds indoors and transplant them to the garden only when the daily temperatures reach the seventy-degree range. They say you can serve eggplants with any dish. How about eggplant and eggs?

“He cannot be a gentleman that loveth not a dog,” reads an old proverb, and there can be no doubt that the American loveth all things canine. There are now about 1.1 million pedigreed dogs registered in this country, about one pedigreed pooch for every 200 Americans. The number of mongrels extant is anybody’s guess. One knowledgeable estimate puts the total number of dogs in the United States as over 40 million!

Americans will spend some 1.5 billion dollars this year on pet food, close to four times the sum spent on baby food! And there are at present over 400 pet cemeteries in this country!

When did this long and happy relationship between man and dog begin? Far too long ago to estimate a date, for man had domesticated the dog well before recorded history began. The bond between man and his best friend was, and still is a symbiotic relationship, with both parties benefitting from the alliance. The History of Dogs is indeed, an interesting one.

The word dog originally referred to a particular English breed of canine, but is now used generally to refer to all members of the Canus famillaris. Other species in the Canus genus are the aureus (the jackal) and the lupus (the wolf). Anthropologists aren’t quite sure which species was the first to join forces with his upright fellow hunters.

Most likely jackals and primitive dogs, originally independent hunters and scavengers, found it advantageous to follow nomadic human hunters for the bones and food scraps left behind when they broke camp. Gradually, prehistoric man came to realize that the presence of these beasts surrounding the camp at night could benefit him as well, since the howling canines would warn of the approach of deadly predators. The more the hunter went out of his way to feed his watchguards, the more dependent upon him they became.

Slowly, dog and man began to join forces in hunting, the dog contributing his scent to flushing out game, and man returning the favor by providing the dog with a steady diet of meat. We know that aborigines of Ireland, Switzerland, and the Baltic lands used dogs for hunting, and occasionally partook of dog flesh, long before farming was introduced in Europe. Cave paintings 50,000 years old depict hunters with dogs at their side.

The original domesticated canines, wolf, dog, and jackal, were probably interbred to evolve the modern familiaris species. Subsequent breeding by man gradually produced distinct breeds. The oldest records of Mesopotamia and Egypt show that distinct breeds of domesticated dogs had been developed by the year 3000 B.C., including animals much like the modern greyhound and terrier. The ancient Greeks and Romans kept dogs. The breed classifications of the Romans were quite like our own, distinguishing between scent-hunting and sight-hunting dogs, and between Canes villatici (housedogs), and pastorales (sheep or herding dogs).

In the fourteenth century, attack dogs with spears and buckets of fire harnessed to their backs were used to upset cavalry horses. But for the most part, throughout the Middle Ages, dogs were used for hunting and herding. Yet over the centuries, man has come to rely on the dog more for companionship than for anything else. By the seventeenth century, the dog was a ranking member of the household as a note by Samuel Pepys might suggest: At night my wife and I did fall out about the dog’s being put down in the cellar . . . because of his fouling the house . . . and so we went to bed and lay all night in a quarrel. Today, the dog is valued as a guard, a shepherd, a guide, a hunter, a retriever, a soldier, a policeman, and a friend.

Dogs skilled at sniffing out caches of concealed drugs are becoming increasingly popular among many police forces. Recently, a Florida policeman demonstrated his dog’s sleuthing talents to a group of students. He hid packets of drugs around the room, and then loosed his keen-nosed sidekick to find them. The policeman hid ten packets; the dog brought back eleven.
At last glance, there were 163 recognized dog breeds in the United States. All canines can be broken down into six main groups according to their original use by man.

The Sporting Group includes dogs that hunt by air scent, such as the pointer, the retriever, the Labrador, the Irish setter, the Weimaraner, and the cocker spaniel. These dogs serve primarily as hunters’ assistants, finding and retrieving small game.

Originally from Spain, the spaniel was used by the Irish in the first century for hunting. On the other hand, the pointer (or “bird dog,”) is of a more recent origin, first appearing in Britain some time during the seventeenth century. The development of pointing breeds paralleled the increasing use of sporting firearms.

The Hound Group is made up of those dogs that hunt by ground scent. This group includes the Afghan, the beagle, the basset hound, the bloodhound, the dachshund, the foxhound, the saluki, and the greyhound. Dogs similar to the dachshund can be found in Egyptian carvings dated around the fifteenth century B.C. Most English hound breeds are thought to be descendants of hounds brought from Normandy during the invasion of William the Conqueror. The bloodhound probably owns the keenest sense of smell of all dogs.

But the most spectacular canine tracking feat on record was not the work of a bloodhound. In 1925, a Doberman pinscher named “Sauer” tracked a thief 100 miles across the Great Karoo, an arid plateau in South Africa, by scent alone. And a fox terrier lost by a truck driver in Hayes Creek, Australia, rejoined his master eight months later in Mambray Creek, a distance of 1,700 barren miles from Hayes Creek!

The Working Group includes dogs that serve primarily as guides, guards, and herders, such as the Doberman pinscher, German shepherd, the collie, the great Dane, the Newfoundland, the St. Bernard, the Shetland sheep dog, and the Siberian husky. These dogs probably constitute the most useful group of canines. Eskimos use them for draught animals. In this country, they’re valuable as “seeing-eye” and ‘police” dogs, a term not restricted to German shepherds. The Newfoundland has been used to rescue swimmers, while for centuries the St. Bernard has served as a rescue dog for the monks of the Alpine Hospice of St. Bernard.

The Terrier Group, dogs that hunt by digging and flushing out burrowing animals, includes, not surprisingly, most terriers, along with the schnauzer. The word “terrier” comes from the Latin terra, “earth.” Most terrier breeds were developed in the British Isles. The Airedale terrier, for instance, was first bred in the Aire valley of England.

The Toy Group consists of dogs that serve primarily as human companions, and includes such favorites as the Pekinese, the Maltese, the Chihuahua, the toy poodle, the Yorkshire terrier, the pug, and the pomeranian. Most toys are miniature versions of older larger breeds. The Pekinese has existed in China for over 5,000 years.

The smallest dog on earth, the Chihuahua, usually weighs in somewhere between two and four pounds, although some specimens have tipped the scales at a mere sixteen ounces.

Small toy dogs became popular in the British Isles when laws were enacted to control poaching pooches. The eleventh-century King Canute, for instance, decreed that all dogs kept within ten miles of the king’s forest preserve must have their knee joints cut to hinder them from chasing his game. But exceptions were made for any dog that could fit through a “dog gauge,” a ring seven inches wide and five inches high.

The sixth group of dogs is known as the Non-sporting Group, a miscellaneous class consisting chiefly of dogs with muscular necks and strong jaws. The bulldog, the Boston terrier, the chowchow, the Dalmatian, and the poodle are listed among this group. The chowchow is most likely the oldest member, dating at least from 150 B.C. in China. The Boston terrier is one of the few breeds originating in the United States. It was developed by a Bostonian named Robert Hooper in the mid-nineteenth century. Despite its modern association with the French, the poodle is probably of German origin.

Which breed of dog is most favored by Americans? Beagle? Collie? German shepherd? Surprisingly, it’s the poodle. With some 200,000 registered dogs, there are more than twice as many poodles as there are German shepherds, the second most popular breed. In fact, almost one in every five pedigreed dogs registered in the United States is a poodle!

A list of registered dogs by breed offers a few other surprises. The large numbers of registered dachshunds, Labrador retrievers, and St. Bernards would startle those who consider these breeds to be mere curiosity pieces. Yet such supposedly populous breeds as the bulldog and bloodhound rank pitifully low in actual registration.

Today, the most popular up-and-coming dog breed in America is the Yorkshire terrier. The Yorky led all breeds in new registrations in 1975, with 14,640. At the other end of the scale, the Chinese fighting dog is now the rarest dog breed on earth, with only twenty-three specimens known to exist in 1976, all of them, oddly enough, in California. And if you are the proud owner of a Belgian Malinois, you own almost 10 percent of all the Malinois in this country.

Only eight breeds of purebred dogs originated in the United States: the American foxhound, the American water spaniel, the Boston terrier, the Chesapeake Bay retriever, the coonhound, the Amertoy, the spitz, and the Staffordshire terrier.

The British Isles holds the pedigreed pooch title: Of the world’s 163 recognized breeds, 47 originated in Great Britain.

Few dogs today perform any service aside from friendship, though originally the canine was valuable to man because his senses were strongest where man’s were weakest. The dog’s sense of smell is among the keenest in the animal kingdom. A trained dog can select an item touched only by his master’s finger from among dozens of other objects; a bloodhound can pick up one scent from among hundreds. Some dogs can reputedly pick up a scent that is ten days old!

The canine’s sense of hearing is likewise extremely acute. Dogs have responded from seventy-five feet to orders unintelligible to men only ten feet away. The range of sound a dog can hear is much wider than man’s: “dog whistles”, too high-pitched to be heard by the human ear, can be picked up by dogs 100 yards away.

Most dogs, alas, have poor vision. As a rule, they’re nearsighted, yet they can be particularly sensitive to movement. All dogs are colorblind, their visual world is a drab panorama of black, white, and gray. On the other hand, dogs have “eyeshine,” and like cats, can see quite well in the dark.

But it is not the dog’s keen smell or hearing that has endeared him to modern man, it’s his uncomplaining readiness to obey and lavish affection on his human friends. “To his dog,” an old saying goes, “every man is Napoleon, hence the popularity of dogs.” A dog is loyal, loving, and lovable, even if his master can boast none of these qualities. The Prussian monarch Frederick the Great hit it on the head: “The more I see of men, the better I like my dog.”

Another saying, reportedly a Turkish proverb, has it that “if dogs’ prayers were answered, bones would rain from the sky.” But most American canines enjoy a diet considerably better than bones–considerably better than the diet of many impoverished peoples, in fact. Many dog owners will argue as to the correct amount of food a dog requires each day, but most authorities agree that dogs over six months of age should be fed one large meal daily, with perhaps one smaller snack. A half-pound of food will suffice for a toy dog, a pound of chow for a dog weighing from ten to twenty pounds, and two to four pounds for a dog weighing above fifty pounds.

Speaking of heavier members of the canine set, the largest dog on record tipped the scales at a colossal 295 pounds. And larger unverified claims have been heard.

The largest litter ever born consisted of 23 pups. It was thrown by a foxhound in Pennsylvania in 1944.

The most prolific dog on record, a greyhound in London, sired an amazing 2,414 registered puppies, along with at least 600 other unregistered whelps.

Like baseball fans, dog lovers have been known to argue over obscure items of canine trivia. To clear up a few disputes: the country dog does not live longer than the city dog. The city dog may get less exercise, but as a rule he’s more pampered, and survives on the average three years longer than his country cousin. Of course, these urban figures don’t take into account stray mongrels roaming the streets.

Municipal licensing of dogs, by the way, was instituted in England in 1735 to reduce the number of strays. The first dog licensing in the United States began in New York State in 1894.

To dispel another myth, the mongrel is not generally any smarter than the purebred dog. Individual dogs differ in intellectual capacity and disposition much the same as individual human beings differ: there are smart as well as stupid dogs in both classes. And finally, the dog does not sweat through his tongue, the dog’s most important sweat glands are actually on the soles of his feet!

There are many words and phrases based on the name of man’s best friend. Dog-eared, dogleg, and doggone are among them, but dogma is not.

The expression “raining cats and dogs” has many reputed origins. The most gruesome holds that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, a heavy cloudburst would fill the gutters with a torrent of refuse not unlikely to include a number of dead dogs and cats. A poem by Jonathan Swift describing a city rainstorm ends with the lines:

Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud, Dead cats and Turnep-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.

Our word cynic actually comes from kynos, the Greek word for dog, and owes its use either to a former dog kennel that served as the first school of the Greek Cynics, or from the uncouth, belligerent manners adopted by adherents of that philosophy. The word cynosure, in Greek, literally means “dog’s tail!”

As Robert Benchley wrote, “There is no doubt that every healthy, normal boy . . . should own a dog at some time in his life, preferably between the ages of forty-five and fifty.”

“Everything that coruscates with effulgence is not ipso facto aurous” is a rather highfalutin way of saying “All that glitters is not gold,” but without a dictionary you’d never guess it.

“Look it up in the dictionary” is a piece of advice foreign to few ears, but did you realize that until the eighteenth century speakers of English had no lexicographic authority to consult for the meaning of the thousands of English words now nestled between aardvark and zymurgy?

The first English work to bear the title “dictionary” (in its Latin form, dictionarius, from dictis, “saying” or “word” and dicere, “to say”) appeared around the year 1225. But that first manuscript actually listed Latin words to be learned by rote by students, with only a few English words inserted, here and there, for explanation. Words were not grouped alphabetically, but were arranged according to subject.

English words began to appear regularly in fifteenth-century dictionaries, but still served only as aids to the study of Latin. One noted dictionary of this era was the charmingly titled Storehouse for the Little Ones, or Promptorium Parvulorum, brought out around 1440 by a Dominican friar aptly named Galfridus GrammaticusGeoffrey the Grammarian. The work contained about 12,000 English words and their Latin equivalents. It did not appear in print until 1499 for one rather compelling reason, the printing press hadn’t yet been invented.

The Storehouse was not the only 15th and 16th century dictionary with a colorful title, metaphoric titles were the custom for many years. A work dating from 1500 was dubbed Ortus Vocabulorum, The Garden of Words, and a 1573 student’s dictionary was somewhat presumptuously named Alvearie, or “Beehive.”

The first real English dictionary was the Abcedarium AnglicoLatinum pro Tyrunculis, a Latin-English work completed by Richard Huloet in 1552. This compendium contained some 26,000 words with their Latin translations. Each word was defined in English. Thus, the Abcedarium, though designed as a Latin aid, can be considered a bona fide English dictionary.

The Abcedarium was popular in its time, but relatively expensive. So in 1570, a physician named Peter Levins brought out what was basically a cheaper version of Huloet’s work, entitled Manipulus Vocabulorum, A Handful of Words. The entries were arranged, not alphabetically, but according to the spelling of their final syllables, making the book, in effect, the first rhyming dictionary in the English language.

Early dictionaries made no attempt to include all English or Latin words, only those that were considered troublesome to students. The title of a 1604 work by Robert Cawdrey explains it best: A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing and understanding of hard usual! English wordes . . . gathered for the benefit and helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskillful persons. As for the difference between “Ladies” and “Gentlewomen,” you’ll have to consult a dictionary.

The more tersely titled The English Dictionarie appeared in 1623, compiled by Henry Cockeram, but based to a great extent on Cawdrey’s work. Cockeram’s dictionary was hardly the last word in lexicographic precision, as is readily apparent in a definition such as “Hyena: A subtil beast, conterfeiting the voice of a man . . . He is sometimes male and sometimes female.”

In 1702, John Kersey, alias “J. K. Philobibl.” issued a wordbook entitled New English Dictionary that was the first volume to define words in everyday usage. And in 1721, a schoolteacher named Nathaniel Bailey published the Universal Etymological English Dictionary, containing “more words than any English Dictionary before extant.”

Another of Bailey’s works, Dictionarium Britannicum, appeared in 1730, displaying “not only the Words, and their Explications, but the Etymologies.” Bailey was also among the first to indicate the pronunciation of words along with their definitions.
In 1791 came the Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositer of the English Language, compiled by an elderly actor named John Walker. Walker’s book is still considered valuable for its treatment of pronunciation.

The phonetician, Isaac Pitman, based his popular shorthand system on Walker’s principles.

Perhaps the most remarkable dictionary of the eighteenth century was the accomplishment of the legendary Samuel Johnson. Johnson’s prodigious work, which was completed single handedly, was brought out in 1755 as A Dictionary of the English Language. As Johnson’s renowned biographer James Boswell noted: “The world contemplated with wonder so stupendous a work achieved by one man, while other countries had thought such undertakings fit only for whole academies.”

Most earlier lexicographers sought to lay down rules for usage and spelling, but Johnson sought more to reflect current usage, to reflect rather than dictate the accepted meaning, explaining in his Preface that no scholar “can embalm his language and secure it from corruption.”

Said Johnson: “No dictionary of a living tongue can ever be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication some words are budding, and some falling away.”

Today’s dictionaries, likewise, make little attempt to dictate, only to reflect the ever-changing meaning of words.

Johnson was the first to use illustrations of word usage gleaned from “the best writers,” as do many modern lexicographers. Because of the extensive research involved in gathering the illustrations, Johnson’s work, planned to take three years, eventually required eight.

After his long years of toil, Johnson was piqued by an article written by Lord Chesterfield, the statesman and author, in which the Earl claimed undue credit as the patron of Johnson’s dictionary. (Chesterfield had actually sent Johnson a ten pound subscription for the dictionary in 1747.) “I have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain,” Johnson wrote in his now-famous letter to Chesterfield, “and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one wit of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour . . . Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?”

Although English dictionaries had been published in America as early as 1788, the first English dictionary compiled by an American was A School Dictionary, brought out in 1798 by a Connecticut teacher named, appropriately enough, Samuel Johnson, Jr.

In 1806, another Connecticut resident, Noah Webster of New Haven, issued A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language with some 40,000 words. But the most important milestone in American lexicography came in 1828, when Webster published his masterpiece, An American Dictionary of the English Language, with about 70,000 entries. Webster’s work was the first American dictionary to gain wide acceptance in both the United States and England.

You may be confused by the plethora of dictionaries on the market bearing the name “Webster’s.” The fact is none of these books, or at least, very few, are directly derived from the work of Noah Webster. The word “Webster’s” has become merely an identifying title, like the word “dictionary” itself, and cannot be copyrighted. Anyone at all can publish a book and call it “Webster’s Dictionary,” although the G&C Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, claims that their dictionaries are the legitimate successors to Webster’s works.

Many stories have been told about the famed American lexicographer, most of them apocryphal. Witness, for example, this droll tale:

One day Mrs. Webster entered the parlor to find her husband locked in an embrace with the maidservant. “Noah!” she sputtered, “I am surprised!”

Noah disentangled himself and quickly regained his professional composure. “No, my dear,” he told his wife, “It is I who am surprised. You are merely astonished.”

Many other dictionaries have come and gone since the days of Webster and Johnson, but the greatest English dictionary on either side of the Atlantic remains the Oxford English Dictionary, conceived in the mid-nineteenth century but not completed until 1928. The Oxford lists all recorded English words, and their varying usages from the seventh century through the twentieth. Thus, a simple word such as “place,” due to its many uses and its long history of change, might occupy twenty or twenty-five small print pages. Compiled with the aid of hundreds of research assistants in both England and America, the Oxford remains the largest dictionary in the world. Its twelve volumes contain about 415,000 words, almost two million illustrative quotations, and close to 228 million letters and figures!

A glance at a card catalogue in any large library will suggest the tremendous range of dictionaries now available, covering almost every specialized vocabulary imaginable. Witness, for example, A Dictionary of the Stitches Used in Art Needlework, or Dictionary of the Underworld: the vocabulary of crooks, criminals, racketeers, beggars and tramps, convicts, the commercial underworld, the drug traffic, and the white slave traffic.

And then there’s the Dictionary of Waste Disposal and Public Cleansing, published, natiirlich in Germany.

The number of dictionaries in existence today is difficult to calculate, but in English, there is a dictionary for most of the 5,000 foreign languages spoken throughout the world today.

By the way, the first Bohemian-English dictionary-626 pages long, was brought out in 1876, and the long-awaited Mongolian-English dictionary was published in 1953.

How many words are there in the dictionary? First of all, no English dictionary but the Oxford claims to include anywhere near all the words in the language.

The word “unabridged” in a dictionary title does not mean the work contains all the words in the language, but merely that the book includes all entries appearing in earlier editions of the work.

English, the second most commonly spoken language in the world after Mandarin Chinese, contains the largest vocabulary of any language on earth, an estimated 800,000 words, of which the average person uses only about 60,000. Webster’s Third International Dictionary contains about 450,000 entries.

You’ll find more dictionary entries under the letter T than under any other, for T is the most common initial letter in our language. The most common letter in English is E, and the most common words are the, of, and, and to, in that order.

Schoolboy wisdom holds that antidisestablishmentarianism (28 letters) is the longest word in the language, but the Oxford English Dictionary includes the word floccipaucinihilipilification (29 letters). The word means “the action of estimating as worthless.”

Webster’s Third International Dictionary, meanwhile, lists pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis a lung disease common to miners.

The longest word in common use is generally thought to be dispro portionableness (21 letters). And the longest chemical term ever used, the name of an amino acid compound, contains some 3,600 letters.

However, as any lexicographer with a sense of humor will point out, the longest word in our language is actually smiles, because there’s a mile between the first and the last letters!

Incidentally, excluding proper names, the oldest word in the English language still in use in a comparable form is land, derived from the Old Celtic landa, “heath.” This word is thought to have been in use on the European continent well before the beginning of the Roman Empire.

The dictionary is easily the most useful reference work ever created, competing perhaps with the Yellow Pages. But there are a number of languages in existence today that are not likely to be recorded in a new dictionary. Why? Well, there are now about twenty languages in which no one can converse, for the simple reason that there is only one speaker of the tongue still alive. Eyak, an Alaskan Indian language, is certainly one of the most moribund “living” languages on earth, spoken only by two aged sisters when they chance to meet!

ZOWIE! SOCK0 GLuG! WHAP! Pow! Place those words before an American of any age and, without fail, the reaction will be: comics!

In terms of longevity, complexity, and influence, those innocent little cartoon panels certainly are no joke. In fact, the comic strip and comic book together form perhaps the largest and most influential iconographic field in the history of man.

The newspaper comic strip is a relatively new development, of course, but its forerunners are ancient. In the first century B.C., Romans chuckled over tablets with satiric inscriptions sold in the market places of the Eternal City. Chances are, they weren’t much different from the editorial cartoons we enjoy today.

Before the invention of the printing press, German artists produced woodcuts arranged in panel form like the comic strip, dealing chiefly with religious history and current politics. After the printing press came into use, the illustrations took the form of small images printed together on one piece of paper, or a series of several sheets that could be hung on the wall to form a narrative frieze.

In the seventeenth century, the Protestant Reformation and the consequent religious wars led to propagandist strips based on political events. A limner by the name of Romeyn de Hooghe was the first artist to devote himself consistently to the narrative strip, producing pictorial indictments of the persecution of the Huguenots under Louis XIV, and accounts of the accession of William III to power in Holland and England.

Today, detective-comic buffs might be amused to learn that German artists began producing crime strips as early as the sixteenth century. Most strips illustrated heinous crimes and the punishment the perpetrators could expect to receive, in gory detail.

The father of the modern comic strip was Rodolphe Topffer, a Swiss illustrator and schoolmaster. Topffer observed that more people can read pictures than can read words-hardly a deduction worthy of Dick Tracy. He went on to produce picture-story books and collections of small drawings that were the forerunners of the modern newspaper strip. Topffer also put out collections of his drawings in oblong albums of about 100 pages. These were the precursors of the comic book.

The dominant comic illustrator in the nineteenth century was the German Wilhelm Busch. Beginning with comic illustrations which he drew for a variety of periodicals, Busch was the first truly professional comic-strip artist. His tales of naughty children and pesky animals wouldn’t be out of place on today’s funny pages. Two infant pranksters named Max and Moritz, his most memorable characters, were to form the models for the later Katzenjammer Kids. Busch’s use of oscillations to suggest movement and his use of conventional signs to suggest emotions provided a vocabulary for the comic strip artist that is still in use today.

The newspaper comic strip in this country was born out of the rivalry between two giants of the American press. In 1893, the New York World published the first full-color comic page in the nation, depicting a set of humorous characters under the title Hogan’s Alley. Soon afterward, publisher William Randolph Hearst countered with the first weekly full-color comic supplement, eight pages in the Morning Journal.

Hearst’s supplement featured Yellow Kid, a strip by Richard Outcault, whom Hearst had lured away from the World. Yellow Kid was the first continuous comic character in the United States, and standardized the use of speech balloons for comic strip dialogue. Incidentally, the Italian word for comic strip is fumetto, “little puff of smoke,” so-named after the speech balloon.

Later, Hearst put out Rudolph Dirks’s Katzenjammer Kids, the first strip fully developed in form and the most durable comic strip in history. Dirks’s strip used speech balloons and a continuous cast of characters, and was divided into panels, unlike Yellow Kid, which employed full panoramic scenes.

With the advent of newspaper syndication, comic strips spread rapidly. In 1904, the first daily black and white strip, A. Piker Clerk, appeared in the Chicago American. Actually, the strip was a horse race tip sheet, as was M.A. Mutt, later Mutt and Jeff, which eventually dropped its racing connections and developed into a general interest strip.

The period between 1907 and 1920 was the golden age for comics. This era saw the birth of dozens of long-running strips and the development of the genres that predominate today. There was the gag strip, Bringing Up Father, in 1913, the first American strip to gain international renown; the family saga strip, Gasoline Alley, in 1919; the career girl strip, Winnie Winkle, was started in 1920; the fantasy and parody strips, Krazy Kat came into being in 1911 and Popeye was inaugurated in 1919. Krazy Kat was the first newspaper strip aimed at the intelligent adult.

In the late 20′s and 30′s, adventure, detective, and sci-fi strips became popular. Tarzan began in 1929, followed by Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon. Nineteen-thirty saw the birth of Blondie, perhaps the most successful strip of all time. The comic strips that have since become household words in American life are too numerous to name.

The first true comic book was marketed in 1933 as an advertising giveaway. The size, glossy cover, and panel format of that first comic book have remained the same right up to today.

At first, comic books were basically reprints of newspaper strips. In 1938, Action Comics appeared; Superman and the other superheroes were not long to follow. By 1943, comics accounted for one-third of all domestic magazine sales. Superman alone had a circulation of 1,500,000 copies per month! By the way, the first issue of Action Comics now sells among collectors for close to $5,000!

Early comic books were for the most part brutal, sadistic, blood and guts affairs that most parents tried to keep out of the hands of their children. In 1951 and again in 1954, Congress investigated the comic-book industry and, simplistically enough, blamed the rise of juvenile delinquency on sadistic comic books. The industry was forced to adopt a code of self-censorship that still exists. But comics continued to suffer criticism, especially for their racist, militarist, and fascist values.

Partly as a rebellion against this type of politically Neanderthal comic, Steve Canyon, for example, a number of newspaper strips appeared in the late 50′s that were heavy with sociological and philosophical overtones. Most took their cue from the earlier Pogo (1946) and Peanuts (1950). Today, the funnies page is a conglomeration of science fiction, fantasy, adventure, slapstick, and subtle humor, something for every taste.

Without doubt, the comic is the dominant graphic mythology of the twentieth century. It’s the comic strip, not film nor television, that reaches one-third of humanity each day. In the last seventy years, an estimated 8 to 12 million comic strip pictures have been produced throughout the world.

Today, over 100 million Americans, virtually half the population, read one or more comic strips regularly. About 300 strips are presently published in American newspapers. Blondie alone can be found in 1,200 papers across the country, and Dick Tracy reaches 50 million readers daily in 500 papers. When Chic Young asked for suggestions for a name for Blondie’s second baby, he received 400,000 replies. Al Capp’s offer of a prize for the “most gruesome face” for a new Lir Abner character generated over a million replies!

American comics are now read worldwide. Peanuts, incidentally, is called Radishes in Denmark. In England, a large chain of hamburger stands, the Wimpy Bar, owes its name to a Popeye character with a weakness for the burger. Not to be outdone, Texans in a spinach-growing area in the eastern part of the state have erected a statue of Popeye in tribute to his appetite for the vegetable.

Surprisingly enough, studies have shown that the more educated a person is, the more likely he is to follow a comic strip. The peak age for Sunday comic strip readers is-no, you’d never guess-thirty to thirty-nine years old!

By the time any American has learned to read, he’s likely to have his favorite strips. According to a 1960′s survey, the most popular strips countrywide, are in order, Blondie, Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Peanuts, and Rex Morgan, M.D .

Little Orphan Annie began a run as a successful Broadway show (“Annie”) in 1977. Bringing Up Father has been made into a movie eleven times!

Today, most syndicated strips are the work of an entire staff of writers, calligraphers, artists, and editors. In no other art form is the creator so much the prisoner of his creation, for the characters he invents frequently assume lives independent of their creator, and continue to live on, even after the artist’s death!

It would be hard to think of a place in which different periods of history are so intermingled as on the funny page. You’ll find Moon Mullins, Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley, and other ancient works side by side with new strips like B.C. and Doonesbury. But they all have a few things in common: ZowIE! SocKol Gum! WHAP! Pow!

Ever wondered about the History of Alcohol? Here’s Part 2 in the series.

Most liquor bottlers identify the alcoholic content of their product by “proof.” The term dates back to the earliest days of liquor distilling when dealers would test the strength of an alcoholic product by soaking gunpowder in the beverage, and then igniting it. Spirits with enough alcohol to permit the ignition of gunpowder were considered to be 100 proof-the idea being that the gunpowder test was “proof” that the juice was strong.

In England, 100 proof was established as eleven parts of alcohol by volume to ten parts of water. In the United States, the proof figure was set as double the alcoholic percentage. Thus, 86 proof whiskey is 43 percent alcohol, and pure alcohol is 200 proof.

Just as nations have their favored beverage, most have a favored toast as well. The term originated in the custom of dunking a slice of toast in a glass of wine, for reasons unknown. Englishmen like to toast with Cheerio, Cheers, or Down the hatch. Scandinavians say Skoal. Prosit is a German favorite, though the word is Latin. Italians clink glasses to the tune of Cin cin. The Spanish favors Salud, and the French Culs secs. Americans have coined the likes of Bottoms up, Here’s mud in your eye, and Here’s looking at you-as well as some more indelicate expressions from the frontier West.

While we’re on the subject of word origins: the word booze does sot, as widely believed, come from a liquor bottler named E.C. &oz. The word is quite old, originating perhaps in the Dutch word buyzen, to tipple, or the Middle English bouse, to drink deep.

America has nevertheless contributed quite a number of terms to the barfly’s dictionary. In the Old West, rotgut whiskey was referred to by such affectionate terms as old pine top, skull varnish, tarantula juice, Taos lightning, snake water, bug juice, and red-aye.

Today, the names of popular cocktails are somewhat more flattering. The origins of some are obvious; others, lost in history. The Mickey, for example, is said to be named after a certain Colonel Ric-key. The word Julep comes from the Arabic julab. The Black Russian is named for its primary ingredient, vodka. (It’s not black, but it’s certainly Russian.) The Grasshopper, consisting of green creme de menthe, with creme de cacao, and cream, owes its name to its green color. The Martini, Tom Collins, and Alexander are named after individuals. The origins of the Fizz, Sour, and Stinger shouldn’ be hard to imagine. As for the Zombie, you won’t need three gues ses-the talk is that three Zombies will turn you into one.

But the names of modern cocktails are certainly not lacking in color. Witness the Red Devil, Sitz Mark, Bourbon Fog, Hurricane, Barbed Wire Fence, Rhett Butler, Cable Car, Sombrero, Tequila Sunrise, Pink Lady, Pink Elephant, Godfather, Harvey Wallbanger, and a warm wine-and-brandy concoction billed as the Instant Cold Cure.

Among the less exotic-and more popular-cocktails we find the Old Fashioned, a mixture of whiskey, sugar, bitters, and club soda. The Screwdriver combines vodka and orange juice; the Bloody Mary, vodka and tomato juice. A Daiquiri includes rum, lime juice, and sugar. A Mint Julep usually includes bourbon, mint leaves, sugar, and water. A Margarita combines tequila, salt, lime juice, and Triple Sec. A Manhattan is made with whiskey, vermouth, and bitters. And the ever popular Martini includes gin, a dash of vermouth, and an olive.

For those who are all thumbs when it comes to cocktail craftsmanship, the Schenley company offers 6.8-ounce bottles of premixed drinks called “Cocktails for Two.” The sixteen cocktails now available include the Black Russian, Apricot Sour, Strawberry Margarita, and Extra Dry Martini.

Speaking of the Martini, there’s the tale about the South Seas explorer whose friend gave him a bon voyage packet containing bottles of gin and vermouth and a jar of olives. A tag attached to the gift said, for insurance against loneliness. When on the high seas, the explorer opened the present. Inside the package, a card contained the following: “I have never yet seen anyone start to make a Martini without someone else coming along and telling him how to do it.”

And then there’s the one about the man who ordered a Martini in a bar, drank down the cocktail in one gulp, and then began biting the glass. When he’d nibbled the glass down to the top of the stem, he left it on the counter and walked off.

“Did you see that?,” a man who had been standing next to the Martini drinker exclaimed aghast to the bartender. “He’s nuts!”

“Yeah, he must be,” the bartender responded. “He left the best part!”

The production of alcoholic beverages in the United States now stands at over 100 million proof gallons per year, with an estimated half-billion proof gallons in stock. Not bad for a nation in which about one-third of the population are teetotalers.

Today, about 77-percent of adult men and 60 percent of women are regular consumers of alcoholic beverages. Studies have shown that the wealthy and better educated are more likely to be numbered among the drinkers. But in France, where there are few abstainers, those who do swear off the grape are more likely to come from the well-educated, monied classes.

France is the nation with the highest per capita consumption of alcohol: 22.66 liters of pure juice per year, more than twice the American figure. Italians are the highest per capita consumers of wine, downing on the average 153 liters to the American’s mere 8. West Germans are the number one swillers of hard spirits-barely beating out the Americans in that category. The Germans are also far and away the leading drinkers of beer and ale, with the average German consuming 182 liters of brew per year. There is a claim, however, that the residents of Australia’s Northern Territory far outpace the Germans.

We have no reliable figures for the communist nations, but vodka consumption in the Soviet Union is thought to be extremely high, and Czechoslovakia is said by some to surpass all nations in per capita beer consumption. At the other end of the scale, the citizens of Iceland and Israel rank as the smallest consumers of alcohol.

The above figures may surprise those who think that “light wine” countries such as France and Italy consume less alcohol than “hard liquor” nations like Great Britain and the United States. Great Britain, famous for its whiskies, is often thought to be high on the list of alcohol imbibers, but Britons actually consume less alcohol per capita than the citizens of any country in the West.

That hasn’t stopped jokesters from commenting on the soft spot the Scotch have for their famous export. Perhaps you’ve heard the one about the elderly Scotsman who, while carrying a bottle of whiskey on his hip, slipped and fell on a path of ice. Climbing to his feet and feeling something wet trickling down his leg, he murmured: “I hope it’s blood.”
Dewar’s, incidentally, is the best-selling non-premium scotch in America, Chivas Regal the best-selling premium. In Scotland, Bell’s is the most popular domestic scotch whiskey.

With all that drinking going on, it’s no surprise that alcoholism is a major problem in many societies. In the United States, an estimated five million people are alcoholics, and perhaps another four million are problem drinkers. In France, estimates of alcoholism put the figure as high as 9 to 15 percent of the total population!

Religious proscription has done little to thin the ranks of the dipsomaniacs. The Koran forbids alcohol use. Devout Buddhists and Hindu Brahmins also spurn the grape. And many Christian sects have forbidden drinking-with mixed results.

As for legal prohibition, the longest on record is a wee twenty-six years, in Iceland, from 1908 to 1934. Russia tried to illegalize the grape early in this century, but the attempt lasted a mere ten years. Our own “noble experiment” lasted only thirteen years-much too long in the many minds of many people.

For our point of view regarding man’s oldest and most popular intoxicant, we may turn to the Bible. The Good Book mentions two drinks: “wine which gladdeneth the heart of man, and water, which quencheth the thirst of jackasses ” (Psalm 104).

Ever wondered about the History of Alcohol? The ancient Greeks had a cocktail hour in the late afternoon or evening, complete with hors d’oeuvres.

A recent joke has it that a man strolled into a crowded bar, examined the array of aperitifs, liquors, cordials, and mixers on the shelves, glanced up and down the bar at the rickeys, fizzes, gimlets, tonics, sours, and slings the patrons held in hand, then leaned forward and told the bartender: “I’ve got a tough one for you: ever heard of a whiskey?”

Hardly the funniest joke in the world, but it does make a point. Walk into any American bar today and you’ll find dozens of different kinds of spirits lining the shelves. You’ll also notice that very few of the patrons are imbibing their favored spirit straight from the bottle. To Americans, the mixed drink may seem quite a universal, time-worn tradition-but the fact is, the cocktail as such is an American invention, and a fairly recent one at that.

In America, the word “cocktail” may mean either a mixed drink, as opposed to straight spirits, or any alcoholic beverage sipped before lunch or dinner. In the second sense, the cocktail has been with us for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks had a cocktail hour in the late afternoon or evening, complete with hors d’oeuvres. An Athenian gentleman would drop by a neighbor’s house during the “happy hour” with a goatskin of wine, and expect to be treated to an outlay of appetizers-the Greeks called them “provocatives to drinking”, that might include caviar, oysters, nuts, olives, shrimp, and pate. Compare that spread to today’s bar-fare of peanuts, cheese, and crackers and you’ll agree that in some ways we haven’t come very far in the last 2,500 years.

The cocktail in the sense of a mixed drink is a much more recent invention. In the past, not only wine and beer but hard liquor, too, was usually drunk straight, or at most diluted with water. As for tomato juice, tonic water, ginger ale, club soda, orange juice, and other mixers, few of these had yet made the trip from the grocery store to the barroom as recently as 200 years ago.

Alcohol itself, of course, has been with us since well before recorded history began. Alcohol still ranks as the oldest and most widely used drug on earth. Primitive man probably discovered the first alcoholic drinks by accident, since any sugar-containing mishmash left exposed to warm air will eventually ferment. Studies of alcohol use among various preliterate societies suggest that alcohol was used by prehistoric man primarily in conjunction with war, religious worship, and various rites of passage-births, marriages, funerals, and feasts.

The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, dating around 1750 B.C., set down regulations for drinking houses. Egyptian doctors frequently prescribed alcohol as a medicine. By studying the remains of the Egyptian and Babylonian cultures, we can conclude that alcoholism has been a problem for well over 4,000 years.

The Chinese have been distilling an alcoholic beverage from rice since at least 800 B.c., and the Arabs have swilled alcohol from palm sap for many, many centuries. The earliest alcoholic beverage in the West was wine, brewed either from grapes or honey. Mead, a sweet wine made from honey, was widely enjoyed in Poland as recently as the nineteenth century.

The Greeks made their wine from grapes, but usually drank it diluted with water. Thus, the wine Athenians quaffed during their cocktail hour was probably less than 8 percent alcohol, a weak beverage by modern standards. In fact, most of the wine the Greeks and Romans enjoyed would probably taste rather crude to the modern palate. After all, we live in an age when an avid oenologist paid over $14,000 for a single bottle of 1806 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild!

Hard liquor is a newer arrival in the West. Around the year 300, the Irish brewed up usquebaugh from oat and barley beer. Tenth-century Italians began distilling brandy from wine, and sixteenth-century Scots first made whiskey from malted barley. The first cognac was distilled by the French around 1750. But it wasn’t until Louis Pasteur’s research in the 1850′s into the action of yeasts and molds that Western man developed the controlled fermentation that makes for a consistently good alcoholic product.

Over the years, there were probably scattered incidents of man mixing hard liquor with a sweet beverage, but the cocktail did not become a popular drink until early in the nineteenth century. The origin of the word cocktail is uncertain. One claim maintains that it comes from a French drink served in New Orleans in the 1800′s, called a coquetier, named for the tiny egg-cup in which the drink was usually served to women.

There are, however, dozens of other theories. According to some, the first cocktail in this country was served in a tavern in Elmsford, New York, where cockfights were often held. The story has it that Betsy Flanagan, a barmaid, decorated the bar with the tail feathers of some of the deceased combatants, and inserted one in a mixed drink when an inebriate requested “one of those cocktails.” Another story tells us that as a publicity stunt, the proprietor of the tavern regularly inserted the tail feathers of fighting cocks in his mixed drinks, the feathers to be used as swizzle sticks.

Still another claim traces the name of the beverage to England, where in the Yorkshire dialect the word “cocktail” referred to foam spilling over a glass of ale. By the way, another word for beer froth was “barm,” which gave us the term “barmy” (in America, “balmy”) for tipsy or feeble-minded.

Washington Irving maintained that the cocktail was a Dutch drink popular in New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century.
An etymologist with a sense of humor proposed that the word came to us from Mexico, taken from the inventor of the drink, a daughter of King Axolotl VIII whose name was Xochitl or Coctel!

In any case, the first mention of the cocktail in print appeared in an 1809 issue of the Hudson, New York, Balance, which described the concoction as a “stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.”

Speaking of bitters, angostura, the most popular modern variety, have been with us since 1824, when a German doctor living in Venezuela prepared them as a tonic for his ailing wife. He reportedly learned the recipe from sailors, who frequently added bitters to rum as a cure for seasickness. When angostura bitters became part of the Manhattan cocktail, their place behind the bar was established forevermore.

The cocktail party is thought to have originated as an outgrowth of the aperitif hour before dinner. As the “hour” gradually lengthened, a buffet of some kind became necessary to allay the appetites of the imbibers. Psychologists attribute the popularity of the cocktail party, and the before-dinner cocktail itself, to their function as a separation between the working day and the evening relaxation. In recent years, many other countries have followed the American example and have adopted both the cocktail hour and the cocktail party.

In the United States, a well-stocked cocktail bar must include dozens of different spirits to provide for the varying tastes of American drinkers. But as a rule, tipplers in most other countries prefer a beverage produced from a native product-in effect, the “national drink” of that nation. For instance vodka, an unaged spirit obtained from potatoes or grain and filtered through vegetable charcoal, is the overwhelming favorite in Poland and the Soviet Union, where the raw materials are plentiful. Vodka, by the way, has recently replaced bourbon as the most popular liquor in America.

Bourbon, America’s contribution to the whiskey world, accounted for about one-fourth of all distilled spirits consumed in this country during the 1960′s. But that figure has now decreased to about 15 percent, while vodka consumption has doubled over the same period. Vodka drinking now accounts for about 20 percent of the total American alcohol intake. Consumption of scotch whiskey, meanwhile, has held steady at about 12 percent.

Named after the county in Kentucky which may have been its birthplace, bourbon is distilled from a mash that by law must contain at least 51 percent corn. But Jack Daniel’s whiskey, which many people consider bourbon, is technically a sour mash whiskey, or a Tennessee whiskey, and not a bourbon at all. Jack Daniel’s, produced for over a century in the small Tennessee town of Lynchburg, is filtered through ten feet of sugar maple charcoal to remove some of the harsh esters. The Federal government decided that this filtering process changed the whiskey’s character so much that the drink could not be called bourbon.

Whiskey is usually distilled from the fermented mash of grain usually oats, barley, rye, or corn. Whiskey is produced primarily in Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and the United States. Rum is obtained from fermented sugar cane or molasses, and produced primarily in the Caribbean.

Brandy is distilled from wine or the fermented mash of fruit-grapes, cherries, apples, plums, apricots, peaches, blackberries, or whatever. Tequila is distilled from the sap of an agave plant indigenous to Mexico, not from the mescal cactus, as so many people believe. Flavored spirits like gin, aquavit, and absinthe are produced by redistilling alcohol with a flavoring agent. Juniper is used to flavor gin; caraway seeds to flavor aquavit.

In the Orient, millet and rice are most commonly used for distilling spirits. “Ng ka py” is how you order a shot in Peking. It’s made from millet, with various aromatics added. Sake, a beverage made from rice, is the favorite in Japan.

Spirits differ greatly in alcoholic content. Most wines contain from 8 to 12 percent alcohol, with certain aperitif and dessert wines, like vermouth and sherry, as high as 18 percent. The strength of beer ranges from a weak 2 percent brew produced in Scandinavia to about 8 percent. Four or 5 percent is the average in the United States. Most hard liquors contain from 40 to 50 percent alcohol, with cognac as high as 70 percent. Cordials and liqueurs contain from 25 to 40 percent alcohol.

The strongest spirits that can be produced are raw rum and certain vodkas, which contain up to 97 percent alcohol. Polish White Spirit Vodka is the strongest liquor sold commercially, packing a wallop of 80 percent alcohol.

No one could fail to notice that most Christmas Cards today have nothing whatsoever to do with Christ or Christianity. But did you know that Yuletide greeting cards were secular from their inception? Sanctimonious individuals may annually decry the deluge of cards and bewail the “loss of religious spirit” but the fact is that few of the customs we now associate with Christmas have anything at all to do with religious commemoration, and some of these customs are a good deal older than Christianity itself!

The date of Christ’s birth is purely conjectural, there is no historical evidence that Christ was born on December 25. Mention of a December 25 celebration of Christ’s birth first appeared around the year 353, but it wasn’t until 440, more than four centuries after his actual birth, that the Church proclaimed that day as the official date for the festival. Conveniently, December 25 already marked a holiday among many Europeans, the celebratory rite of the winter solstice, marking the beginning of lengthening days and the expectation of spring and rebirth. Due to changes in the calendar, Christmas no longer falls exactly on the solstice.

As the celebration of a midwinter Christmas spread with Christianity, people in various cultures retained many of their pagan solstice customs and incorporated them in the Christmas rite. At that time of year, the ancient Romans had exchanged gifts to mark the feast of Saturnalia. Celtic and Teutonic tribes kept many customs of their 12 day Yule celebration. Mistletoe, for instance, was prominent in midwinter Druid rites, and holly was similarly used by the Anglo-Saxons. The evergreen tree had long been regarded as a symbol of survival by Scandinavian peoples, though the Christmas tree proper did not find its way to England until 1840, introduced by Queen Victoria’s German born husband, Albert.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Christmas was being observed throughout the Christian world very much as it is today, with the notable absence of the Christmas Card. The idea, if not the custom, of pictorial representations of seasonal greetings dates back to the Middle Ages. An engraving by one “Master E.S.” depicting the infant Christ stepping from a flower has been dated to around 1466, and is thought to be a copy of an even earlier design. Similar works from the fifteenth century refer to both Christmas and New Year. Calendars in the 17th and 18th centuries often carried Yuletide greetings, with domestic winter scenes, sailing ships, and red cheeked goddesses among the favored motifs.

Which brings us to the History of Christmas Cards. As to the first legitimate “Christmas Card,” there is some controversy. According to many accounts, the.idea of a Christmas greeting card sprang from the fertile brain of Sir Henry Cole, the first director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 1843, Cole commissioned John Collcott Horsley, a fashionable artist of the time, to design his first card. Horsley was well known not only for his artwork, but for leadership of a campaign against the use of nude models by artists-work that earned him the nickname “Clothes-Horsley”

The artist’s first card consisted of one unfolded sheet, oblong in shape, with a rustic bower forming a frame for three illustrations. The central scene depicted a typical middle-class Victorian family gathered around a sumptuously laden table, drinking to the health of an absent friend-the card’s recipient. The card also showed a moralistic scene depicting a charitable soul feeding the hungry at Christmas. The card also contained a representation of another good Samaritan clothing the naked-though Horsley, true to form, depicted the naked indigent as fully clothed. Above the tableau, appeared the word “To” followed by a space for an inscription; on the bottom of the card, the word “From” followed by a picture of an artist with a palette and the date “Xmasse 1843.” A banner stretching across the bottom of the central scene carried the greeting “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you.” Christmas Cards haven’t changed much, have they?

Horsley became the world’s first Christmas Card sender when he presented Cole with a signed copy of his original design, bearing the brilliantly original inscription:

“To his good friend Cole
Who’s a merry young soul
And a merry young soul is he:
And may he be for many years to come! Hooray!”

Cole had a thousand copies of the original card printed and issued by Summerby’s Home Treasury Office. Only a dozen are known to exist today. Two of these can be found in the 70,000-card Hallmark Historical Collection, the largest and most representative museum of greeting card art in existence.

Other accounts credit 16 year-old William Maw Egley with engraving the maiden Christmas Card one year before Cole and Horsley’s collaboration. Egley’s card, which still exists, was remarkably similar to Horsley’s, depicting a Christmas dinner party, skaters, dancers, and a moralistic scene showing the poor receiving Christmas gifts. Egley’s message was “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you.”

Initial reaction to the distribution of Christmas Cards was hardly favorable. Some- critics claimed Horsley’s card was too secular, and accused him of encouraging intemperance and alcoholism. Others criticized the idea of cards as a foolish extravagance. In fact, certain Protestant sects refused to condone the Christmas Card until the turn of the century.

But Yuletide cards caught on quickly among the general population, and within twenty years were well entrenched in Victorian Christmas celebrations. At first, cards were generally not mailed or signed, but delivered by messenger with a calling card. The penny post, introduced in England in 1840, did much to popularize Yuletide greetings by mail; and by the 1850′s, Christmas Cards began to appear on the European continent as well.

Victorian Christmas Cards were considerably more elaborate than today’s, often adorned with layers of lace, silk fringes, tassels, ribbons, dried flowers, satin, or mother of pearl. Some were glass frosted. One surviving Victorian card consisted of 750 pieces of material stitched together.

The favored motifs were, from the very beginning, secular. Dolls and little girls were popular; so were courting couples, feasts, animals, flowers, winter scenes, and moralistic drawings, with an occasional angel thrown in for a bit of religious spice. In a sense, many cards were actually collages, for a drawing of a girl, for instance, a piece of satin might serve as a dress. And the inscriptions were no less banal than most of the modern ilk. Witness, for example, this gem: “When snow lies at Christmas and Grandpa shivers-the children are bright; they look forward to feeding the chickens in spring.”

The Christmas Card first appeared in the United States in 1874, brought out by Bavarian-born Boston lithographer Louis Prang. Prang’s card was designed by Mrs. O.E. Whitney, and based on an English card signed Charles Dickens that Prang had brought back from Europe. At first, the cards were produced for export to England, since the custom of sending greeting cards at Christmas had yet to appear in America. But Prang’s cards, among the first to depict religious scenes, went on sale here the following year. Christmas Card fever soon became a permanent American ailment.

Through the years, Christmas Card design has often changed to reflect the feeling of the times. During the Depression, many cards spoofed poverty to make light of temporary hard times. Santas carrying flags were popular during World War II, as were inscriptions such as “Missing You” and “Across the Miles.” The Cold War years saw an increased demand for humorous cards.

Today, Christmas Cards are a multi million dollar industry in most English-speaking countries. Hallmark Cards, the largest American greeting card company, boasts annual sales of $400 million. In 1954, Americans sent about 2 billion Christmas cards; now, the yearly figure stands at close to 4 billion, for an average of twenty cards per person.

Of course, many Americans send considerably more than twenty cards. One Werner Erhard of San Francisco sent 62,824 cards in a single year. This is believed to be the largest outpouring of Christmas Card generosity in history.

Critics continue to lay the blame for an outlandish waste of time, money, and paper at the feet of overzealous Christmas Card senders.

The English magazine Punch hit it on the head when, in a 1900 editorial, it declared: “We deprecate the absurd habit of Christmas Cards and presents. I refer, of course, to those we have to give!”