We’re not sure this is a good idea. And even if it is, the young woman in the canoe ought to be wearing a Coast Guard approved personal floatation device, or at least have one on board.

But a hundred years ago, there were a lot of surplus gas masks available, and the October 1924 issue of Science and Invention gave this idea for making use of them for diving.

You simply selected a garden hose, one sufficiently rigid so it wouldn’t collapse under the pressure, and attach it to the gas mask. It supplied your fresh air while diving, and you simply exhaled bubbles into the water. The magazine suggested adding lead shot to the canister of the mask to help weight it down, and recommended weights on your feet and belt to keep you under water. But the system was said to be good for depths of up to 20 feet. It looks like the girl is listening to the hose for continued sounds of breathing, which is probably a good idea.

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Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, which took place on Memorial Day, May 31, 1921.

Oklahoma was admitted to the Union in 1907. Its constitution did not call for strict racial segregation, because it was feared that Republican President Teddy Roosevelt would veto the document.

But as its first order of business, the Democratic dominated state legislature passed its Jim Crow laws. Despite the hostile political environment, an African-American community, including many veterans of World War I, thrived in the Greenwood district of Tulsa.  The community included several grocers, two newspapers, two movie theaters, nightclubs, and churches. Its citizens included doctors, dentists, lawyers, and clergy.  There’s no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect that a handful of residents owned a radio, as was normal in a thriving middle-class neighborhood.

All of this came to an end on May 30, 1921, when young Dick Rowland, black, was accused, probably falsely, of assaulting a white elevator operator. He was arrested, at at some point, a white mob showed up to lynch him. The sheriff did his best to protect the prisoner, including positioning officers in the stairway of the courthouse with orders to shoot to kill any intruders. At some point, a group of black men, some armed, showed up to help protect the courthouse. The sheriff convinced them that they were not needed, and they departed.

In the next 24 hours, Greenwood was destroyed by marauding rioters and aircraft dropping firebombs.  The exact number of deaths will never be known, but estimates range from 36 to 300.  Over 800 were injured, and most of the Greenwood district was destroyed.

Shown here 110 years ago this month in the March 1911 issue of Popular Electricity is an aerial searchlight system. According to the magazine, one of the most serious problems of naval warfare was lighting the enemy’s vessels sufficiently to make them good targets. A spotlight directly from the ship would be counter-productive, since it would provide a target for the enemy. One possibility was to mount the lights on smaller boats which were “harder to hit and not so costly if sunk,” but the problem was communicating with them, which would require either signal lights or wireless which could be detected by the enemy.

The solution was to mount the searchlight in a balloon powered by cables from the ship. The balloon would be carried by the wind and not switched on until it was sufficiently far away to avoid revealing the ship’s location. It could be controlled by magnets run from the ground.

The invention was actually the subject of a German patent by one L.J. Mayer. The magazine notes that the inventor was from “Metz, the warlike frontier town which Germany wrested from France in 1871.”

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Alexander, King of Greece, on October 25, 2020. Alexander assumed the throne in 1917 upon the exile of his father, King Constantine I.

Alexander’s short reign was not a happy one. His father, a supporter of Germany, even though ostensibly neutral, was deposed by the Prime Minister, along with his first son, the crown prince. Alexander was brought in, but basically imprisoned in the royal estate.

On October 2, 2020, he was out for a walk on the grounds of the estate. Somehow, his German Shepherd, Fritz, got into a fight with a monkey belonging to the steward of the palace grapevines (to be specific, a Barbary macaque monkey). The king managed to get the animals separated, but in the process was bit. The wounds were promptly attended to, and they were not believed to be serious. The king asked that the incident be kept quiet, and he returned to the palace.

Unfortunately, an infection set in, and the king developed a fever and sepsis. He died on October 25, 1920.