I Did Not Write This But I Sure Enjoyed Reading What Mr. John Steele Gordon Wrote

This article appeared in the August 31, 2018, print edition of the Wall Street Journal.

Things That Make You Go Hmmmm

Odds are these historical coincidences will strike you as unlikely.

By

John Steele Gordon

Aug. 30, 2018

Sen. John McCain died Aug. 25 of a brain tumor, a glioblastoma. Sen. Ted Kennedy died of the same disease, also on Aug. 25, nine years earlier.

That’s quite a coincidence. But in a world as wide as this one, extremely unlikely things happen every day. Last spring a friend of mine had a straight flush in a hand of five-card draw poker. There are 2,598,960 possible hands in five-card draw, only 36 of which beat the lowest straight flush. So the odds of losing while holding a straight flush are about 1 in 72,000. He lost anyway.

History provides endless examples of odds even longer than that...

Ø Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were the only signers of the Declaration of Independence to become president. They are also the only two presidents to have died on the same day. That day was July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing. Jefferson’s last words were, “Is it the fourth?” Adams’s last words were, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” He was wrong; Jefferson had died a few hours before. President James Monroe also died on July 4, in 1831.

Ø Of the dozen or so most significant men of the 19th century, two, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, were born on the same day, Feb. 12, 1809. Lincoln was born in a dirt-floored one-room log cabin 3 miles south of Hodgenville, Ky., Darwin in upper-middle-class comfort in Shrewsbury, England.

Ø In the 1940s, the president of General Motors and the president of General Electric were each named Charles E. Wilson. They weren’t related. They were known as Engine Charlie and Electric Charlie to keep them straight.

Ø Chief Justice Earl Warren was succeeded on the Supreme Court by Chief Justice Warren Earl Burger.

Ø The town of Codell, Kan., founded in 1888, had never been struck by a tornado until it was hit on May 20, 1916. It was struck again on May 20, 1917, and yet again, this time severely, on May 20, 1918. It has never been hit since.

Ø In his only novel, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,” published in 1838, Edgar Allan Poe tells a story of a shipwreck where the starving survivors draw lots to see who will be killed so that the others can survive by eating his flesh. The man who lost was named Richard Parker. In 1884, a British yacht named Mignonette was lost in the South Atlantic. The survivors decided to sacrifice one so that the others could live. The man killed was named Richard Parker.

Ø The number of documented cases of meteorites striking a house is extremely small. Only three are known to have occurred in the U.S. in the 20th century. But two of those houses are in the town of Wethersfield, Conn., 13.1 square miles in size. They were struck only 11 years apart, in 1971 and 1982. There were no injuries in either case.

Ø On Aug. 18, 1913, a roulette wheel in Monte Carlo came up black 26 times in a row. The odds against that happening are approximately 136,823,183 to 1.

Ø A total of 112 men died in the course of building Hoover Dam. The first person killed was J.C. Tierney, who drowned on Dec. 20, 1922, as he was surveying for a location for the dam in the treacherous waters of the Colorado River. The last man lost died on Dec. 20, 1935, exactly 13 years later. He was Patrick Tierney, J.C.’s son, who fell off an intake tower shortly before construction was completed.

Ø The RMS Titanic had two far less famous sister ships, the older Olympic and the younger Britannic. They were a hard-luck class. On Sept. 20, 1911, when the HMS Hawke collided with the Olympic, both ships were badly damaged but no lives were lost. On April 14, 1912, the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank in mid-Atlantic with the loss of 1,500 lives. On Nov. 21, 1916, the Britannic, which had been converted into a hospital ship after World War I broke out, was hit by a mine in the Aegean Sea and sank with the loss of 30 lives. On board all three ships at the times of their respective misfortunes were Violet Jessop, a nurse, and Arthur John Priest, a stoker.

Ø The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, set off World War I. He and his wife were riding in a car that bore the license plate A111 118. The war ended four years later when the armistice came into effect on 11/11/18.

Mr. Gordon is author of “An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power.”

 

Would Mr. John Steele Gordon kid us?

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