You’re Having A Laugh – Part Eight
Solar Armour
One of the keys to military success, I’m told, is to ensure that your forces arrive at the field of battle in optimal condition. When temperatures are at their height, it would be helpful if the soldiers had some apparel which cooled them down. An article, published on 2nd July 1874 in Nevada’s Territorial Enterprise, described the enterprise of a certain Jonathan Newhouse who had invented something which was known as solar armour, which seemed to be a solution to the problem of perspiring soldiers.
The armour consisted of a long, closely fitting jacket and a cap, both made of sponge about an inch thick. A rubber sack was fitted below the right armpit into which was poured cold water. There was a tube leading from the sack to the cap. Before setting out into the desert the soldier would saturate the sponge and then keep themselves moist by occasionally depressing the sack with their arm.
Having invented the thing, the intrepid Newhouse decided to put it through its paces, choosing the appropriately named Death Valley for the experiment. Alas, for Newhouse, his invention worked too well. An Indian tracker went to a nearby camp and indicated that the men should follow him. About twenty miles from the camp, they saw Newhouse sitting against a rock in his armour, frozen and dead. His beard was covered in frost and an icicle, a foot long, hung from his nose. It seemed that he had been unable to remove the straps to the mechanism and in time his invention had killed him.
The story was soon picked up by newspapers in San Francisco and New York and even crossed the pond where the paper with the largest circulation in the world at the time, the Daily Telegraph, deigned to give it some column inches. But something did not seem quite right about the extraordinary tale. Inventions were a bit Heath-Robinsonish at the time and, as readers of this blog will know, a number of inventors have fallen off this mortal coil at the hands of their invention. The Telegraph, in relating the tale took a rather neutral stance as regards its veracity. Whilst acknowledging the fact that when you ice a bottle of wine by wrapping a cloth around it, the moisture caused by the evaporation is very cold, it would not go as far as accepting the circumstances of poor Newhouse’s demise. Perhaps, it was troubled by the twelve inch icicle hanging from his nose. Instead, rather like Herodotus, it was “not prepared to disbelieve it wholly nor to credit without question.”
Still having got the story into so august an organ as the Telegraph, more details started to emerge of Newhouse’s strange death. A further account of an inquest appeared in the August 30th edition of the Territorial Enterprise, recounting the inquest. Bottles of strange chemicals were found in Newhouse’s backpack and the verdict was that “he fell victim to a rash experiment with chemicals with the nature of which he was imperfectly acquainted.”
Of course, it was all an elaborate hoax and the truth eventually came out. On the staff of the Territorial Enterprise at the time were Mark Twain and William Wright. The Solar Armour story was the work of Wright who was better known as Dan de Quille and who in the 1860s was tipped to achieve greater literary renown than his colleague. The Solar Armour story was the creation of his fevered imagination and an experiment in to how far a ludicrous story would run. Quite some distance, it would appear.
