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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Erik Larson
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October 27 - November 9, 2024
Capt. William Thomas Turner
Lusitania, after a Roman province on the Iberian Peninsula that occupied roughly the same ground as modern-day Portugal.
the name was foreshortened to “Lucy.”
the Lusitania had six thousand lamps.
as of the end of April 1915, had completed 201 crossings of the Atlantic.
coal—5,690 tons in all—into
The ship burned coal at all times. Even when docked it consumed 140 tons a day to keep furnaces hot and boilers primed and to provide electricity from the ship’s dynamo to power lights, elevators, and, very important, the Marconi transmitter, whose antenna stretched between its two masts.
Its 300 stokers, trimmers, and firemen, working 100 per shift, would shovel 1,000 tons of coal a day into its 192 furnaces to heat its 25 boilers and generate enough superheated s...
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The boilers occupied the bottom deck of the ship and were gigantic, like wheelless locomotives, each 22 feet long and 18 feet in diameter.
Cunard barred crew members from bringing their own matches on board and provided them instead with safety matches, which ignited only when scraped against a chemically treated surface on the outside of the box.
Later that August, Wilson managed to get away to a country home in Cornish, New Hampshire, called Harlakenden House, a large Georgian residence overlooking the Connecticut River
Edith Bolling Galt,
was the first woman in Washington to acquire a driver’s license.
onyx (and sardonyx, its red sister).
Knickerbocker suit,
U-boats in fact traveled underwater as little as possible, typically only in extreme weather or when attacking ships or dodging destroyers.
He also had two tattoos: crossed flags and a face on his left arm, a butterfly on his right. These were important details, should he be lost at sea and his body later recovered.
Collector of Customs Dudley Field Malone, whose office was empowered to search all ships. Malone was said to be a dead ringer for Winston Churchill, so much so that years later he would be cast as Churchill in a film, Mission to Moscow
On January 19, 1915, Germany launched its first-ever air raid against Britain, sending two giant zeppelins across the Channel—“zeps,” in newly coined British slang, progeny of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.
April 22, 1915.
over 160 tons of chlorine gas arrayed along a four-mile stretch of the front—the first ever use of lethal gas on a battlefield.
Elbert Hubbard,
the Roycrofters,
his inspirational book, A Message to Garcia
“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
asseverated
Quoits.
The passenger manifest listed ninety-five children and thirty-nine infants.
forty-eight-year-old woman from Farmington, Connecticut, by the name of Theodate Pope,
She was one of America’s few female architects of stature, designer of a revered house in Farmington, which she named Hill-Stead.
inanition.”
the Quaker principle of emphasizing the spiritual over the material.
Her parents sent her to a private school in Farmington, Miss Porter’s School for Young Ladies,
By 1910 she was a full-fledged architect, soon to become the first female architect licensed in Connecticut.
Arts and Crafts movement, then in full sway,
furniture of Gustav Stickley
simple, well-made homes of the so-called Craftsman style.
Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors.
They traded recollections of the old South, the hard days that followed the Civil War.
The author was a German infantryman of Austrian descent named Adolf Hitler.
another immobile front, this one on the Gallipoli Peninsula.
Turks had killed over fifty thousand Armenian men, women, and children in Van Province, in eastern Turkey. The head of the Armenian church sent a plea for help directly to Wilson; he demurred.
That Saturday—the day of the Lusitania’s departure—a German U-boat torpedoed an American oil tanker, the Gulflight, near the Isles of Scilly off England’s Cornish coast, killing two men and causing the death by heart attack of its captain.
A whist drive was a social event during which passengers grouped themselves in pairs and played game after game of whist until one team won.
Men served as ballast. In order to quickly level or “dress” his boat, or speed a dive, Schwieger would order crewmen to run to the bow or the stern.
Along the bottom of the hull lay the boat’s array of batteries, filled with sulfuric acid, which upon contact with seawater produced deadly chlorine gas.
President Wilson’s unhappiness at the fact that critics continued to take him to task for allowing the film The Clansman, by D. W. Griffith, to be screened at the White House.
the novel The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon, which was subtitled An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, the film described the purported evils of the Reconstruction era and painted the Klan as the heroic savior of newly oppressed white southerners.
critics, in particular the six-year-old National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, decried its content and held protests outside movie theaters, prompting Griffith to give the film a more palatable name, The Birth of a Nation
“cable’s length,” equivalent to a tenth of a nautical mile, or roughly 600 feet.
