Happy Birthday to two towering figures. . .

the following snippet is from "Who was more important, Lincoln or Darwin?" by Malcolm Jones, Newsweek, July 2008.

As soon as you do start comparing this odd couple, you discover there is more to this birthday coincidence than the same astrological chart (as Aquarians, they should both be stubborn, visionary, tolerant, free-spirited, rebellious, genial but remote and detached—hmmm, so far so good). Two recent books give them double billing: historian David R. Contosta's "Rebel Giants" and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik's "Angels and Ages." Contosta's joint biography doesn't turn up anything new, but the biographical parallels he sets forth are enough to make us see each man afresh. Both lost their mothers in early childhood. Both suffered from depression (Darwin also suffered from a variety of crippling stomach ailments and chronic headaches), and both wrestled with religious doubt. Each had a strained relationship with his father, and each of them lost children to early death. Both spent the better part of their 20s trying to settle on a career, and neither man gave much evidence of his future greatness until well into middle age: Darwin published "The Origin of Species" when he was 50, and Lincoln won the presidency a year later. Both men were private and guarded. Most of Darwin's friendships were conducted through the mail, and after his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle as a young man, he rarely left his home in the English countryside. Lincoln, though a much more public man, carefully cultivated a bumpkin persona that encouraged both friends and enemies to underestimate his considerable, almost Machiavellian skill as a politician.

Time Travel? or feverish hallucination. . . THE NADIR OF LINCOLN STATUARY

Excerpt: Brian Lamb talks with Andrew Ferguson, author of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America (2007). Read the full May 20, 2007 transcript here.
 

LAMB: What did you see in Gettysburg itself?

FERGUSON: Gettysburg is a very odd place, you know and I figured that it’s got a kind of—sort of a wasted feel to it. It doesn’t, you know, you’d think that they would have done all kinds of things to capitalize—they have two million visitors a year or more and—but there are no sort of like yuppie restaurants, no high-end gift shops … 

LAMB: Put that into perspective that’s twice as many as visitors as the Supreme Court has a year.

FERGUSON: Yes, sure. Yes. Of course, they don’t have any yuppie restaurants at the Supreme Court either but that’s—they’ll get it sooner or later. But you know and I—it comes from the odd nature of the place. This is a place where several hundred thousand men got together for three days trying to kill each other and 11,000 of them succeeded and to try and turn a place like this into a vacation spot, you’re going to get a kind of a cognitive dissonance there.

LAMB: What’s the Perry Como statue?

FERGUSON: Right underneath the window of the house where Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg address or touched up the Gettysburg address, the night before he delivered it, on the Gettysburg Square, is a statue of Lincoln with Perry Como or so it said. Actually, what it is, is it’s Lincoln life-size next to sort of every man tourist.

LAMB: By the way, for those who might not remember who it was.

FERGUSON: People have forgotten Perry Como, this is awful to say the least. He was a crooner, a sort of a Frank Sinatra without the overtones of danger and sexuality but anyway, so he just looks like every man, which was Perry Como’s appeal and he’s in a cable neck sweater and Lincoln is talking to him. One of the things I do, in the book and I’ve tried to, as a theme to weave in, is everywhere I went I found a new Lincoln statue. Lincoln statuary is a fascinating subject in and of itself. It reflects this—our own changing view of Lincoln. The opening chapter’s about the statue that was put in at Richmond, which is a very small, life-size statue. The last chapter is about Lincoln Memorial, which of course, is a huge Lincoln statue and there’s a lot to learn about how we’ve seen Lincoln and what we think of him now by the kind of statues we put up and the one in Gettysburg is incredibly banal and sort of cartoonish and silly and it’s considered by most Lincoln buffs to be the low point of Lincoln iconography.

Buoying Vessels over Shoals

To this day, Abraham Lincoln remains the only president to get a patent—no. 6, 469, dated May 22, 1849—on one of his inventions. When he was president, Lincoln made a trip to the United States Patent Office to get another look at the scale model that had accompanied his patent application. The original drawing of his invention was rediscovered in 1997, missing the president's signature.

Smithsonian Magazine published a brief article on the president's invention back in October 2006, wondering whether Lincoln built the scale model himself, or hired someone to do it for him.

The precise source of the model of the flotation device is unclear, though there's no doubt that the ingenuity behind it was Lincoln's. Herndon wrote about Lincoln bringing the wooden boat model into the law office, "and while whittling on it would descant on its merits and the revolution it was destined to work in steamboat navigation." A Springfield mechanic, Walter Davis, was said to have helped with the model, which was just over two feet long. But Johnston thinks it's possible that the detailed miniature Lincoln submitted may have been made by a model maker in Washington who specialized in aiding inventors. "The name engraved on top of the piece is 'Abram Lincoln,'" Johnston says. "It doesn't seem likely that if Lincoln had actually made this model, he'd have misspelled his own first name." Johnston says that the answer—yet undetermined—may lie in whether the misspelled name is also engraved under the original varnish, indicating the model to be a commission.

Would it have worked? You'll have to build it and find some shoals if you want to find out. The Smithsonian article continued:

Since no one ever tried to put the invention to use, we can't know for sure if it would have led to the revolution in steamboat navigation that Lincoln predicted. But "it likely would not have been practical," says Johnston, "because you need a lot of force to get the buoyant chambers even two feet down into the water. My gut feeling is that it might have been made to work, but Lincoln's considerable talents lay elsewhere."

Above, a detail from an illustration in Popular Mechanics
magazine, October 1924: see the article here, check out the fascinating Modern
Mechanix blog here. Below, specifications for patent 6,469 (click to enlarge).

Attorney at Law, Bigfoot Wrestler

I stumbled upon a "huge depository of Unusual Links about Abraham Lincoln" here at the always engaging Grow-a-brain blog (there's a nice list on Nixon as well). It's a grab bag sure to cause you to lose more precious time—some of it is obscure and riveting, like the photo of Abraham Lincoln's business card above. Click on the image to read the small print, which makes mention of Abe's difficulty in "crossing the stream." The Library of Congress source link says this was "probably printed by the Democratic Committee in 1864."

Much of it is irreverent, like the once heavily circulated Gettysburg Address Powerpoint Presentation. For those of us who spend much time in company conference rooms, this Powerpoint parody still retains its power. Or this attractive T-Shirt: Bigfoot versus Abe Lincoln. For this and other unique apparel, visit the fine folks at Glarkware. I love the sales copy. We're accustomed to researching historic figures and discovering all their flaws. "But wouldn't it be great if scholars peered into the lives of your most beloved historic figures and discovered that they were even cooler than you thought?" Like the time Abe came to blows with a Sasquatch.

Below is a Lincoln photomosaic using contact prints or just very small Civil War photographs. I bought a copy of this in the gift shop at the Library of Congress many years ago—I imagine they still sell it. It's a pretty remarkable effect. Click on it for a larger view—you may be surprised at how many of these miniature images are instantly familiar.