Mark Twain, we noted in “Twain, the Patent Poet” (June/July, 1978), dabbled in the mysteries of invention from time to time, even going so far as to take out several patents. The only one of these that ever came to much was his self-pasting scrapbook, a gimmick patented in 1873, manufactured by the Slote & Woodman Company, and advertised as a sovereign remedy for the “usual and well-known annoyances of paste, mucilage, and sticky fingers, with all their accompanying evils.…” Twain himself was not above doing a little huckstering for the product, though a close reading of the “letter” in the advertising leaflet shown here will reveal that his sales pitch was at least as raucous as it was persuasive.
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In 1855 a Worcester, Massachusetts, man named Joshua C. Stoddard, secure in his era’s faith in the boundless possibilities of steam, patented a steam-powered organ. It was known as a “steam piano,” but Stoddard, finding this too leaden a title for his entirely new musical instrument, christened it after the chief of the nine muses, Calliope, “the beautiful voiced.” Showmen immediately recognized the calliope’s potential; the strident, piercing noise could pull people across town for a circus parade, or herald the approach of a showboat from five miles upriver. Nixon and Kemp’s Great Eastern show bought one as early as 1857, and Spaulding and Rogers put one on their Floating Circus Palace the next year. Stoddard founded the American Steam Music Company and produced the huge-lunged machines until the Civil War.
by Kevin Brownlow
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 608 pages,
350 photographs, $25.00
This lively, anecdotal book describes what happened when early silent-film makers, beginning in about 1905, ventured from their studios into the outdoors to make films about the wilderness, and historical war movies and Westerns. Sometimes a movie was shot so close on the heels of the actual event it depicted that real participants were hired to participate again. Such was the case in a movie about the Sioux that Buffalo Bill Cody made with the cooperation of the War and Interior departments. Officers who had once fought Indians and three troops of cavalry were borrowed for the picture. Its final scene, the “battle” at Wounded Knee, was tactlessly shot exactly where it all had happened, which so infuriated the hundreds of Sioux in the cast that it looked as though actual fighting might erupt again. Yet apparently the government found the movie too hard on the Army. For it was banned, and the only print “decomposed”—or so they said.
by Robert C. Alberts When Benjamin West, the revered painter and teacher of painters, died in 1820, he seemed assured of a secure place in history. Yet less than fifty years after his death, his canvases were bringing “only furniture prices,” and a prominent critic referred to him as “the monarch of mediocrity … this old pig-headed painter. …” In fact, Alberts says, “the critics slew him over and over again.” Only since the 1930’s has a calmer appraisal rescued his reputation.
Houghton Mifflin Co., 525 pages,
75 illustrations (mostly photographs of paintings), $20.00
by Robert Goldthwaite Carter University of Texas Press 537 pages, $15.00