People have always had to relieve themselves whether it was the Roman use of running water to carry off waste or the Middle Age use of chamber pots that would be emptied out a window in the morning. Sir John Harrington invented a type of flushing toilet for his Godmother, Queen Elizabeth I, in 1596 as a way to get back in her good graces after a falling out. It took the 1832 epidemic of cholera in Europe which killed millions to make people realize that poor sanitation was responsible for the spread of disease. It led to sewers being cleaned and rebuilt in France and the British passing of laws that required houses to have some sort of flushing toilet. 
In 1872 British plumber Thomas Crapper developed a flushing toilet but his main achievement was the refinement of the tank that held the water and made flushing quieter. American soldiers returning from England during World War I referred the toilet as the Crapper. The toilet was a status symbol for Victorian age and was frequently decorated with hand paintings or sculpture.
Isaiah Rogers designed Boston’s Tremont Hotel in 1829 which was the first hotel to have indoor plumbing and boasted 8 toilets on the first floor. By the decade of the 1860s many flushing toilets had been imported from England by wealthy Americans. These units had tanks mounted well above the bowl and were operated by pulling a chain. The water tank moved closer to the bowls and by about 1920 the tank and bowl became a single unit and took on the design of the toilets we are familiar with today.
Forty years after the decline and fall of a publishing empire that once sold millions of magazines each month for more than three decades, former Popular Publications, Inc. President Henry Steeger reflected:
“Pulps were the principal entertainment vehicle for millions of Americans. They were an un-flickering, uncolored TV screen upon which the reader could spread the most glorious imagination he possessed…on dull, no-gloss paper that was kind to the eyes.”
Counting British “penny dreadful” novels and the popular successes of early 20th century adventure authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London and Upton Sinclair as inspiration, the concept of the “pulp fiction magazine” – or “pulps” to the layman – is a uniquely American phenomenon that be accredited directly to one man: Frank A. Munsey. The former telegraph operator from Maine was able to utilize a method of high-speed printing on cheap pulp paper (hence the name) that allowed him to take his magazines to turn-of-the-century newsstands with a price tag of 10 cents, at a time when copies of more highbrow fare, printed on glossy paper, went for a quarter.
By the 1920s, dozens of imitators and competitors had picked up on that highly lucrative business model, creating magazines like Black Mask, Amazing Stories, Marvel Tales (the forbearer of Marvel Comics) and, most importantly, Weird Tales, in the process. Though the content of the pulps covered every genre imaginable - adventure, western, fantasy, crime, mystery, war, aviation and more – the stories featured in Weird Tales introduced pre-Word War II America to literary titans whose work is still admired (and imitated) today: Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan and Solomon Kane), Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 151, The Martian Chronicles), Isaac Asimov (I, Robot), Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) and Robert Bloch (Psycho), to name but a few of their innumerable contributors.
According to Bloch, the fictional worlds produced by that formidable stable of talent was “the work of writers inspired by the opportunity to create stories on a more literate level than was commonly accepted of the period and transcend the taboos and challenge the smugness of a Norman Rockwell view of America.” And, in truth, the secret cults, blood wielding maniacs and far-flung cosmic utopias of the best pulp stories were most definitely some of the most subversive material available during FDR-era (barring the underground pornography pamphlets known as “Tijuana Bibles,” that is).
While such esteemed writers struggled away for pennies a page with aspirations of one day seeing print in the Saturday Evening Post or Cosmopolitan, other publishers, most notably Street and Smith Publications, created solo “hero pulps” that featured the monthly, novel-length exploits of characters like William Gibson’s The Shadow and Lester Dent’s Doc Savage, among many, many others. It was these “super-heroes” that later gave birth to the pulps’ would-be successors: the comic book.
| By the early 1950s, all but a few of the original pulps had been forgotten in lieu of the fully-illustrated – though far less risqué - adventures of the likes of Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and the rest of their cape-clad ilk. But the influence of those pulp progenitors on some of America’s most valuable intellectual properties can still be felt today. For instance, Doc Savage’s oft-mentioned Arctic retreat, the Fortress of Solitude, was later “borrowed” by DC Comics’ writers to stand in as Superman’s secret citadel. Whether such maneuvers were a loving tribute or outright theft, the thinking behind them was undoubtedly thus: “Who’ll remember those cheap pulps anyway?” |
Tags: 1920s, 1950s, Amazing Stories, batman, Black Mask, Captain Marvel, Casey Crime Photographer Old Time Radio MP3 Collection on DVD, Conan, Cosmopolitan, Dick Tracy Old Time Radio MP3 Collection on DVD, Doc Savage, Dragnet Old Time Radio MP3 Collection on DVD, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Fahrenheit 151, Fortress of Solitude, Frank A. Munsey, Henry Steeger, hero pulps, History DVDs & History CDs, I, I Am Legend, Isaac Asimov, Jack London, Lester Dent, Literary History, Marvel Tales, Norman Rockwell view of America, penny dreadful novels, Psycho, pulp entertainment, pulp fiction, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, Robot, Solomon Kane, subversive art, super-heroes, superman, The Martian Chronicles, The Saturday Evening Post, The Shadow Old Time Radio MP3 Collection on DVD, Tijuana Bibles, Upton Sinclair, Weird Tales
Most of us are familiar with the Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans with parades, floats, beads, and drunken revelers in the streets. Mardi Gras is kind of a last fling before the observance of Lent which starts on Ash Wednesday and ends 40 days later on Easter. The history of the Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) celebration dates back long before Europeans brought it to America. In fact, during the middle of February the Romans celebrated Lupercalia which is a festival similar the Mardi Gras we know. After Rome embraced Christianity the church decided to incorporate some of the pagan customs so the new adherents would not see all their rituals abolished. The season of Carnival became the wild abandon before the penance of Lent so it was given a Christian interpretation of the custom. The word carnival comes from Latin for “Meat Leaving” and the season of lent is marked by a fasting from meat. Lent is not mentioned in the Bible but it has been a tradition in the Christianity since the 4th century and it parallels the fasting Jesus went through in the wilderness after his baptism.
Mardi Gras came to America in 1699 when French adventurer Pierre Le Moyne Iberville explored the Mississippi River after sailing in the Gulf of Mexico. Mardi Gras had been a part of Paris culture since the Middle Ages and he set up camp about 60 miles from New Orleans on the day it was being celebrated in France. Iberville named the location Point du Mardi Gras as his way of honoring the day. The celebrations were common into the late 1700s in New Orleans until it came under Spanish rule when it was banned. America took control in 1803 but the celebrations were still banned until the Creole people convinced the governor to allow masked parties in 1823. Street parties were allowed starting in 1827.
