Volcabulum; or, The Rogue’s Lexicon

I am enjoying Lyndsay Faye’s The Gods of Gotham, a detective thriller set in New York City in the year 1845. One of the characters is George Washington Matsell, who was in fact the chief of the New York City Police Department that had been recently created.

In 1859 Chief Matsell (by then no longer chief) published Volcabulum; or, The Rogue’s Lexicon, a dictionary of the argot used by the criminal element in the city to speak openly with one another with reduced danger that they would be understood. (The Gods of Gotham refers to the lexicon as a work in progress and makes extensive use of its contents.) A similar language spoken by thieves in London was called Patter Flash. The American version included nonsense terms, random substitutions, archaic and foreign words, rhyming substitutions, and sly allusions. “Acteon” (whom Artemis turned into a stag with horns) meant a cuckold (horns signified a cuckold); “star-gazers” were prostitutes; “daisyville” and “grassville” meant the country; “cows and kisses” meant misses or ladies; and “mushroom-fakers” were umbrella hawkers. Some of the terms have entered common speech, like “tip” (information), “snitch” (informer) and “kicked the bucket” (dead) – or they might have been there already.

In addition to the main glossary of rogue flash, Vocabulum included annexes with the specialized language used by gamblers, billiard players, pugilists and stock brokers (which is itself an interesting litany).

Chief Matsell provided the following example of the patter:

Tim Sullivan buzzed a bloke and a shakester of a reader. His jomer stalled. Johnny Miller, who was to have his regulars, called out, "cop-bung," for as you see a fly-cop was marking. Jack speeled to the crib, when he found Johnny Doyle had been pulling down sawney for grub. He cracked a casa last night and fenced the swag. He told Jack as how Bill had flimped a yack, and pinched a swell of a spark-fawney, and had sent the yack to church, and got half a century and a finniff for the fawney.

Chief Matsell translated the passage as follows:

Tim Sullivan nicked the pockets of a gentleman and lady of a pocket-book and purse. Tim's fancy-girl stood near him and screened him from observation. Johnny Miller, who was to have a share of the plunder, called out to him: "Hand over the stolen property – a detective is observing your manoeuvres." Sullivan ran immediately to his house, when he found Johnny Doyle had provided something to eat, by stealing some bacon from a store-door. Doyle committed a burglary last night, and disposed of the property plundered. He told Sullivan that Bill had hustled a person, and obtained a watch, and also robbed a well-dressed gentleman of a diamond ring. The watch he sent to have the works taken out and put into another case, or the maker's name erased and another inserted; the ring realized him fifty-five dollars.

Some of the lengthier definitions have a morality lesson embedded in them. The “confidence man” was an example of “the rogue tribe … most liberally supplied with subjects” because “He knows his subject is only a knave wrongside out” who wants to seize the opportunity to take advantage of the man who is about to take advantage of him. Similarly, a “ghoul” was someone who followed women from houses of assignation to their homes and threatened to expose them to their husbands, relatives or friends unless they gave him not only money but also “the use of their bodies.”

Communal Life Experiments and Experience

The growth of industry through the early nineteenth century and the vagaries of the business cycle reduced many factory workers, especially in Britain and France, to a perpetual state of near poverty. Large populations permitted factory owners to keep wages low, and when demand for their products diminished, the owners shut their factories and turned out the workers. These conditions prompted Robert Owen, a compassionate factory owner in Wales, and Charles Fourier, a social philosopher in France, to propose, independently of one another, placing the ownership and control of the enterprise into the hands of the workers. They believed that these arrangements would eliminate poverty and lead to prosperity and world peace. In 1825 Mr. Owen came to the United States to promote his ideas. He addressed Congress, President James Monroe and President Elect John Quincy Adams. He spoke before audiences in various cities, and the newspapers reported his ideas. Between 1825 and 1827 reform minded enthusiasts founded 19 communities based upon Mr. Owen's idea of communal ownership, included one at New Harmony, Indiana for which Mr. Owen provided economic sponsorship. By 1828 they all has ceased operations or were about to end.

Mr. Fourier's ideas were brought to the United States by Albert Brisbane, who published a book in 1840 that explained how they could be adapted to conditions in America. As a result of the interest of Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, these ideas received much publicity in the Tribune, which had a national circulation. Within 10 years more than 40 communities ­– called Phalanxes – had been formed. Most failed within a year, and some endured for several years. The North American Phalanx, located in Monmouth County, New Jersey, operated for nearly 12 years. The communities based upon Mr. Fourier's ideas, unlike those based upon Mr. Owen's, believed in private property but communal ownership of the enterprise. The North American Phalanx was organized as a joint stock company. Members of the community bought stock, although shares were sold to others as well. The members of the community received wages for the labor they performed, and they paid for food and lodging. The company paid dividend of between 4 and 6 percent per annum on the shares. About ten years into the life of the North American Phalanx, the utopian enthusiasm of the community members seems to have waned. A visitor wrote that the community appeared very prosperous but complained that the members lacked religious enthusiasm, spent much of their earnings on worldly pleasures and were not educating their children. In 1854 a fire destroyed the community's flour and grist mills, saw mill, blacksmith shop, tin shop and business office. About 75 percent of the stock was owned by persons who were not members of the community, and they decided not to invest more money to rebuild. The company was dissolved in 1855.

Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, a communal project formulated by a group of New England intellectuals apparently independent of the ideas of Mr. Fourier, was organized 1841 as a venture through which the proceeds of each individual's labor would be used to enrich the intellectual life of all the members of the community. Its economic arrangements were similar to those employed at the North American Phalanx, and after operating for several it adopted Mr. Fourier's ideas. Brook Farm also suffered loss from a fire, and it closed in 1847 after six years of operations. The author Nathaniel Hawthorne was a member of the community, and his experience at Brook Farm informed his 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance.

The communities organized around the ideas of Mr. Owen and Mr. Fourier were largely agricultural. During the 1840s and 1850s several industrial ventures were organized based on ownership by the workers, but they did not have the capital to survive when competing businesses lowered the prices of their products below cost.

Several religious organizations gathered their members into communities and supported themselves by enterprises that benefitted the community as a whole. Although organized to fulfill religious purposes, these communities were economic collectives that supported themselves by the labors of their members, just like the communities formed according to the ideas of Mr. Owen and Mr. Fourier. The Shakers had a number of such communities. A German religious group under the leadership of Johann Conrad Beissel established the Ephrata Cloister in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in 1732. The community included both celibate members and married members. Brother Beissel's charisma sustained the community and attracted new members, and upon his death in 1762 membership declined. The celibate membership eventually died off, but the community continued and remained in existence in 1860.

Chicago Vistas

Many visitors to the United States left descriptions of New York, but Chicago attracted attention as well, not in the least because of the pace at which it was growing. In 1850 it had a population of 29,960, and in 1860 it had a population of 109,260. One English visitor to the United States in the mid-1850s left a particularly vivid description:

Chicago is connected with the western rivers by a sloop canal – one of the most magnificent works ever undertaken. It is also connected with the Mississippi at several points by railroad. It is regularly laid out with wide airy streets, much more cleanly than those of Cincinnati. The wooden houses are fast giving place to lofty substantial structures of brick, or a stone similar in appearance to white marble, and are often six stories high. These houses, as in all business streets in the American cities, are disfigured, up to the third story, by large glaring sign-boards containing the names and occupations of their residents. The side walks are of wood, and, wherever they are made of this unsubstantial material, one frequently finds oneself stepping into a hole, or upon the end of a board which tilts up under one's feet. The houses are always let in flats, so that there are generally three stores one above another. These stores are very handsome, those of the outfitters particularly so, though the quantity of goods displayed in the streets gives them rather a barbaric appearance. The side walks are literally encumbered with bales of scarlet flannel, and every other article of an emigrant's outfit. At the outfitters' stores you can buy anything, from a cart-nail to a revolver; from a suit of oilskin to a paper of needles. The streets present an extraordinary spectacle. Everything reminds that one is standing on the very verge of western civilisation.

The roads are crowded to an inconvenient extent with carriages of curious construction, waggons, carts, and men on horseback, and the side-walks with eager foot-passengers. By the side of a carriage drawn by two or three handsome horses, a creaking waggon with a white tilt, drawn by four heavy oxen, may be seen – Mexicans and hunters dash down the crowded streets at full gallop on mettlesome steeds, with bits so powerful as to throw their horses on their haunches when they meet with any obstacle. They ride animals that look too proud to touch the earth, on high-peaked saddles, with pistols in the holsters, short stirrups, and long, cruel-looking Spanish spurs. They wear scarlet caps or palmetto hats, and high jack-boots. Knives are stuck into their belts, and light rifles are slung behind them. These picturesque beings – the bullock-waggons setting out for the Far West – the medley of different nations and costumes in the streets – make the city a spectacle of great interest.

The deep hollow roar of the locomotive, and the shrill scream from the steamboat, are heard here all day; a continuous stream of life ever bustles through the city, and, standing as it does. on the very verge of western civilisation, Chicago is a vast emporium of the trade of the districts east and west of the Mississippi.

Steam Engine - Part 4

The other sources of power used for transportation and industry in 1860 were wind and water, but steam had advantages over these that were transforming various aspects of daily life. Wind provided the means by which large cargoes could be transported along the coast and across the ocean at relatively little cost. Indeed, until the advent of steam vessels provided an alternative and faster means of transportation afloat, the wind, the weather and the tide largely determined the duration of the voyage. Steam made the voyage more expensive, so most cargoes continued to travel under sail when speed was not required. Inland, the current could make sailing up a river a slow and difficult task, but steam turned rivers into inland highways. Wind was used only for limited industrial applications on land because its variability made it unreliable and its limited strength restricted the number of tasks it could perform.

Water generally was a more constant source of power than wind and was capable of doing more work. Sites suitable for providing water power, however, were limited -- one needed a source of flowing water and adjacent land that could be developed with a millrace and other improvement to convert the water’s flow into mechanical power. Needless to say, water is a stationary source of power that is tied to a fixed point on the map where nature provided the water and man provided the means to exploit it. Thus, in an era dominated by waterpower, one brought the factory to where the power was. And while water might power the movement of vehicles in its immediate vicinity, a self-propelled vehicle was impossible.

The effects of steam power on production were twofold. Steam power meant that the factory could be built anywhere, not just where water power was available, and steam dramatically reduced the cost of transportation inland and overland, which opened up more of the country to diverse industrial economic production. Any land might be valuable as the potential site of a factory, not just land adjacent to a river or stream. Moreover, although the steam engine -- necessarily including its boiler and the fuel required to produce steam -- might be large, it generated enough power to propel itself as well as additional cargo, either on the water or in a wheeled vehicle set on rails. Ultimately the cost to transport goods upriver by steamboat or overland by railroad fell sharply in contrast to other available means of transportation. With the cost of overland transportation reduced, the cheap and bulky raw materials could be brought from a distance to the factory, and finished goods could be produced at a cost low enough so that they could sell at a price that recouped all the costs and made a profit.

Steam power had a profound effect not only upon the course of industrial and economic development but also on how people worked and lived.

Steam Engine - Part 3

At the engine, the steam goes first into a slide valve, which is like a flexible hose that feeds the steam first into one end of the cylinder, and then into the other. Within the cylinder, the steam pushes a piston back and forth. A rod attached to the piston and extending out through one end of the cylinder, transfers the back and forth motion of the piston to a crank that changes the back and forth motion into a rotary motion.

The crank, in turn, is attached to a device called an eccentric that changes the rotary motion of the crank into a back and forth motion. A rod attached to the eccentric transfers its motion to the slide valve, to drive it back and forth so that it feeds steam first into one end of the cylinder and then the other.

The crank is also attached to a large wheel called a flywheel. It is about five feet in diameter, over a foot wide and made out of cast iron; it weighs about 1,800 pounds. One of Newton’s laws of motion is that a body in motion tends to stay in motion, and that is what the flywheel contributes to the operation of the steam engine. The flywheel helps the piston change direction at the end of each stroke when the steam has stopped pushing in one direction and before the steam has begun pushing the piston in the other direction, and the flywheel smooths out any jerkiness of the piston’s motion.

A wide leather belt connects the flywheel with some pulleys and another leather belt to transfer the motion of the flywheel to the line shaft that formerly carried the motion generated by the steam engine 70 feet up the hill to the pack house.

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Pictures of the steam engine at Hagley are posted on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/gil.hahn.3/media_set?set=a.627985140634731.1073741830.100002697535785&type=3

Steam Engine - Part 2

The boiler starts each day with about 300 gallons of water. The fire in the firebox heats the water adjacent to it, and the smoke and hot gas from the fire pass through the water in the boiler through 54 pipes called fire tubes. The idea behind the fire tubes is that they increase the surface area where the heat from the fire can transfer to the water in the boiler. The fire tubes empty into a chamber called a smoke box at the other end of the boiler from the fire box, and the smoke exits into the smoke box and goes up and out the smokestack.

The firebox is the hottest part of the boiler. The smokebox end is warm but noticeably less hot, much of the heat having been transferred to the water inside the boiler.

The smokestack provides a column through which the smoke and heated gas from the fire can rise and accelerate unimpeded by the cooler air of the atmosphere, and as it does so it creates a draft that draws fresh air into the fire box and helps the fire to burn hotter.

Depending upon the temperature of the water and the air, it generally takes about 40 minutes to get that much water to a boil. It starts as the sound of an occasional bubble erupting in water and increases in volume and rapidity until it becomes constant in a furious boil. After the boiling starts, and it generally takes another 40 minutes to generate enough steam to run the engine. About 12 pounds of steam engine is enough to start the engine and keep it running without a load, so more pressure would be needed for it to perform work. The noise of the boiler drops off as the pressure increases to the point where it became a barely audible hiss.

Water heated in an open pan on a stove will rise in temperature until it boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit (or 100 degrees Celsius). More heat applied to the pot will increase the rate at which the water boils, but it will not raise the temperature of the water remaining in the pot. In a closed vessel, like a boiler, the increasing pressure raises the temperature at which water boils -- the boiling continues, but the application of additional heat also raises the temperature of the water above 212 degrees Fahrenheit (or 100 degrees Celsius).

As the water boils, steam is generated, and the steam rises and collects in the steam dome, a hump on top of the boiler. Steam is a clear gas. The cloudy vapor you see coming from the mouth of a steam kettle is a mixture of clear and droplets of water. The steam dome permits the steam to rise above the water and become dry ridding itself of the droplets. The steam that powers the steam engine is taken from the steam dome. Using dry steam improves the efficiency of the engine.

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Photos of the steam engine at Hagley are posted on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/gil.hahn.3/media_set?set=a.627985140634731.1073741830.100002697535785&type=3

Steam Engine - Part 1

I have three offices. One is where I hold down my day job. The second is my home office where I do much of my reading and writing. And the third is at the Hagley Museum where I work a couple of weekend days each month operating a nineteenth century steam engine.

The Hagley Museum, located not far from downtown Wilmington, Delaware, preserves the remains of the original DuPont gunpowder factory that started business in 1802. The factory is located on the Brandywine Creek, and for about four decades it relied solely upon waterpower to run the equipment.

In the 1850s the DuPont Company began investing in steam engines as a supplemental source of power. Steam engines had been around since the early 1700s, but the reluctance to bring a steam engine into a gunpowder factory is understandable -- gunpowder is an explosive that is detonated by fire and sparks, and steam engines use fire (which generates sparks) to convert chemical energy (fuel) into motion through the medium of steam. The steam engine house where I work used to provide power to a building, called the “pack house”, where finished gunpowder was sifted (to remove the dust) and packed into containers for storage and shipment. To reduce the risk of explosion, the pack house stood 70 feet away from the engine house, and an iron line shaft transferred the power between them.

The day’s work begins by checking to see that there is enough water in the boiler and that the ash and cinders have been removed from grate in the firebox. Then I build a fire in the firebox with newspaper, kindling and logs -- we burn coal to keep the boiler hot, but we start the fire with wood because it is easier to ignite. Once the fire gets hot, I spread the burning logs across the whole surface of the grate and sprinkle on a thin layer of coal. The coal ignites, and the coal and wood continue to burn until the wood burns away. I add more coal from time to time and make certain that amount is sufficient and that the layer is thin and even -- too little coal and the fire will burn itself out, too much and the coal with smother the fire.

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Photos of the steam engine at Hagley are posted on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/gil.hahn.3/media_set?set=a.627985140634731.1073741830.100002697535785&type=3

Pony Express

Where the telegraph line ended in 1860, older methods of communications prevailed. The Pony Express was a delivery system that used a relay chain of riders and horses to carry the mail between St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California. Service began on April 3, 1860 and continued until October 1861. Initially the stations were set 25 miles apart, with a fresh horse supplied at each station and a fresh rider after three stations, or about 75 miles. Later, intermediate stations were established in between with the nature of the terrain determining the distance to be covered, in some cases as little as ten miles. The schedule was originally set for 10 days and later was cut to 8 days. The system eventually consisted of 190 stations, 200 station keepers, 200 assistant station keepers, 80 riders and 400 to 500 horses. The revenues generated by the Pony Express did not recoup the expense of establishing and operating the system.

Anticipations of the Future

One of the more curious oddities of the year 1860 was the publication of a novel entitled Anticipations of the Future: To Serve as Lessons for the Present Time. Although his name was omitted from the volume, the author was Edmund Ruffin, a Virginia planter who was a noted fire eater, the political activists who favored southern independence.

Anticipation of the Future is composed excerpts of letters written by an Englishman in the United States for publication in the Times of London over the years 1864 to 1870. As the book opens, William H. Seward has just been elected as the seventeenth president of the United States to succeed Abraham Lincoln, who was elected in 1860. President Lincoln was credited generally with a wise and just administration of the nation’s government, although the narrator ascribes this to the president’s advisers rather than the president himself.

The Republican majority in Congress passed a homestead act that gave to all comers the ownership of 160 acres of land in the territories. This encouraged a flood of immigrants, and their numbers justified the admission of new states to the union that further swelled the Republican majority.

With the inauguration of President Seward, several trends that started under President Lincoln became more pronounced. Federal appointments went to Republican abolitionists, and non-southerners were appointed to federal offices in southern states. The pay of federal officers was increased, and spending for improving transportation – often prevented in the past by Democratic majorities and presidential vetoes – rose to new heights and was directed to northern states. The narrator notes that such activities were hard to criticize because of precedents established by previous Democratic administrations.

Southern officers were purged from the army and the navy. Federal officers became active proponents of abolition and encouraging slaves to abandon their owners, and federal facilities, such as army posts, became places of refuge for fugitive slaves.

The southerners, powerless in the national government, argued about the wisdom of secession but resolved to wait for an “overt act” that would justify their actions. In 1867 the legislatures of several large or populous northern states went into secret session and then simultaneously announced that they were dividing themselves into two separate states – increasing the number of northern states to the point where, once they were admitted to the union, they could amend the Constitution at will.

By early January 1868 six states in the deep south had seceded and formed their own national government. Other slave states such as Virginia remained in the union but assumed an attitude of armed neutrality – specifically, Virginia passed a law that prohibited the passage of armed forces across its territories. When the federal government surreptitiously attempted to evade this prohibition, hostilities broke out, and the invaders were driven out by the Virginia patriots. Ultimately all the slave states joined the southern confederation.

The federal government imposed a blockade that proved ineffective; invading federal armies were repulsed with heavy losses; and John Brown-like armies of abolitionists (including William Lloyd Garrison) sent to incite servile rebellion in the south were captured and hanged.

The economic dislocation caused by secession disrupted business in the north and led to widespread unemployment in northern cities, and the prolonged destitution sparked urban riots – New York City was substantially destroyed by the fires that broke out during the riots there. The loss of revenues from the tariff, combined with the profligate spending of the Republican Congress, bankrupted the federal government.

Eventually the combatants declared a truce. By 1870 the truce remained in place, and although the terms of an amicable peace treaty had not been worked out, commercial relations between the two American nations were being restored.

The principal difficulties for an author projecting a future history are two. Seen from the vantage point of the present, projections of the future, however logical and grounded in fact, often seem fanciful. Then again, when the passage of time turns the future into the past, the course of actual events is often far more outlandish than anything the author might have imagined.

Mr. Ruffin committed suicide shortly after the end of the Civil War.

Candles Part 3 - Natural Philosophy

Over the winter of 1860-1861, as the secession crisis was tearing the American Republic into pieces, Michael Faraday, one of the most renowned scientists of the day, delivered a series of six lectures on science at the Royal Institute to audiences consisting principally of children. The Royal Institute had offered such lectures during the Christmas holidays since 1825, and Mr. Faraday delivered 19 of the lectures series between 1829 and 1860.

Mr. Faraday’s lectures were accompanied by demonstrations that illustrated the phenomena he described. The 1860 lectures, published under the title The Chemical History of a Candle, did not deal with cutting edge discoveries but rather explained some of the basic knowledge about the makeup of the physical world that science had obtained and conveyed some of the wonders to be found in so commonplace an object as a candle.

Mr. Faraday was himself a wonder. Born to a family of limited means in 1791, he had a scant formal education and was apprenticed to a bookbinder, where he took the opportunity to read widely and gained an interest in science. Upon the completion of his apprenticeship in 1812, he attended a series of lectures on science given by Sir Humphry Davy, an eminent scientist of the day. Mr. Faraday sent Sir Humphry a handwritten book based upon the notes from his lectures, which was well-received. When an opening for a chemical assistant occurred at the Royal Institute, Sir Humphry hired Mr. Faraday, which opened to him a career of experimentation and analysis. In 1832 Oxford University awarded Mr. Faraday an honorary doctorate. Although Sir Humphry made a number of significant discoveries, it has been said that his most important contribution to science was Michael Faraday.

In the first lecture given in the 1860 series, Mr. Faraday showed that the heat of the flame melted the nearest portion of the candle and that the melted wax (spermaceti, stearin, tallow) was held in a little cup formed in the top of the candle.

You see, then, in the first instance, that a beautiful cup is formed. As the air comes to the candle, it moves upward by the force of the current which the heat of the candle produces, and it so cools all the sides of the wax, tallow, or fuel as to keep the edge much cooler than the part within; the part within melts by the flame that runs down the wick as far as it can go before it is extinguished, but the part on the outside does not melt.

If a current of air moved horizontally across the candle, a side of the cup would melt and the candle would gutter.

The liquid wax in the cup did not burn -- indeed, inverting the candle extinguished it because the candle could not make the wax hot enough to ignite it. The molten wax, however, moved up the wick through “capillary action”. Mr. Faraday demonstrated this by pouring colored water into a dish from which rode a column of salt -- the colored water could be seen rising through the salt. As the wax, rising through the wick approached the flame, it vaporized, and as a vapor, it ignited.

In the midst of his lecture, Mr. Faraday observed:

Now the greatest mistakes and faults with regard to candles, as in many other things, often bring with them instruction which we should not receive if they had not occurred. We come here to be philosophers, and I hope you will always remember that whenever a result happens, especially if it be new, you should say, “What is the cause? Why does it occur?” and you will, in the course of time, find out the reason.

The first lecture made further observations about the structure and brightness of the flame, and subsequent lectures dealt with the nature of combustion, the facts that water is a product of combustion in a candle’s flame, that hydrogen is a component of candles, that oxygen in the atmosphere is necessary for combustion and that carbon is also a component of candles, and they concluded with observations about respiration and an analogy of respiration to the burning of a candle.

Even in wartime, even in a country at war (which England was not in 1860), the life goes on with its commonplace obligations, its entertainments and, hopefully, its learning.