Today is the 159th anniversary of the first time a yacht owned by some really rich guy beat a yacht owned by another really rich guy in a race to win the America’s Cup. Except they didn’t really win the America’s Cup, because at the time it was called the “R.Y.S. One Hundred Sovereign Cup.” “RYS” stands for the “Royal Yacht Squadron,” which was the club that staged the race around the Isle of Wight in the English Channel.
The winning yacht came from a club too; the New York Yacht Club. In fact, ever since, all the boats that enter the race have to be entered by a “club” The trophy, which isn’t a cup at all, but more of a misshapen pitcher (it’s pretty ugly), was renamed the “America’s Cup” after the first winner, the yacht “America.”
The yacht America was built to cross the Atlantic and show off US shipbuilding capabilities — and also to make money by winning yacht races. The amount of cash they could win must have been pretty substantial to justify building the boat, which was 100 feet long. It even had three pretty big cannons on board (it was, after all, the 1850s).
After its famous race, the America was resold quite a few times before the Civil War, and finally sold to the Confederate States, which renamed it “Memphis” and used it as a navy ship. The ship was sunk on purpose when the Union drove the Confederacy out of Jacksonville, Florida in 1862, but the US Navy raised it, restored the name America, and put it back into service. After the war the Navy entered it in the 1870 America’s Cup race, and it came in fourth. The ship’s mast is still in use — it’s the flag pole at the NY Yacht Club’s summer headquarters in Newport, RI.
The America’s Cup isn’t the only weirdly ugly trophy with an interesting history that changed hands on August 22. In 1934, Bill Woodfull was the first cricket captain in history to win “The Ashes” twice. There’s a cricket series played between Australia and England — “Test cricket” technically; there are different forms of the sport but that one is supposed to be the best — and the winner gets a terracotta urn that’s almost as ugly as the America’s Cup.
England was the perennial winner of The Ashes until 1882, and the “Sporting Times,” a British newspaper, put it on their front page and opined that “English cricket has died, and the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.” Since the trophy was already an urn, the myth (if it is a myth) arose that the ashes of a cricket ball were inside. The trophy has been called “The Ashes” ever since. If anybody has actually looked inside to see what’s there, they’ve never said so.
Oddly enough, the name “The Ashes” got pretty popular, and at this point there’s also the “Women’s Ashes,” which is the cricket match between England and Australis for women’s teams, another “The Ashes” for rugby between the same countries, and the “Soccer Ashes,” between Australia and New Zealand. The soccer version only had the name from the 1920s to the 50s though.
You expect to see a big pile of ashes when there’s a plane crash caused by an engine fire, but you don’t expect the result of the one on August 22, 1985. It was a Boeing 737 (probably best to avoid those planes), and it had an engine fire trying to take off from Manchester Airport in England. The takeoff was safely averted and the plane stopped, still on the runway, to be evacuated. No problem, right? Wrong — they botched the evacuation so badly that 55 people were killed — not from a crash, and not even directly from the fire — they died from smoke inhalation.
It’s hard to believe, but before that incident, airliners didn’t have exit rows, floor lighting along the aisles, and the materials used for the interiors weren’t fire resistant. And it was 1985! For some reason, safety features that seem obvious are hardly ever put in place until the pressure cooker of an actual disaster.
And not to make light of disasters (or pressure cookers), but August 22 is also the birthday of Denis Papin, in 1647. He was a French physicist, and invented the pressure cooker. He called it a “steam digester.”
Machines like the steam digester were hard to make back in those days, because the whole idea of building things like molds, jigs, and tools for precision manufacturing didn’t exist yet. There wasn’t even such a thing as a standard screw or a bolt. Those didn’t become possible until Henry Maudlsay, a British inventor also born on August 22 (1771), invented the metal lathe around 1800, and created the whole idea of standardized size screws. He also invented the micrometer, a standard tool still used by machinists.
When Cadillac (the car company) was founded on August 22, 1902, they were focused on using standardized parts and precision manufacturing (measured by Maudslay micrometers) to produce high-quality cars. They won a reliability test in the UK in 1908 mostly due to their interchangeable parts, and after that adopted the slogan “Standard of the World.” It was a bit of a pun, but hardly anybody realized it at the time.
Cadillac was also a little bit unique because it wasn’t named after any of the people involved — “Oldsmobile” was named after Ransom Olds (so was REO, which represented his initials), “Ford” was named after Henry, and so on. But “Cadillac” was named (by Henry Leland, who went on to found General Motors) after the founder of Detroit, Antoine Cadillac. And by the way, Leland didn’t found the company — Henry Ford did. It was originally called the Henry Ford Company, but Ford left in a dispute with the financial backers. It was the Ford Motor Company (which Henry founded next) that became his successful venture. And made it necessary to rename his first company.
The Ford Motor Company made Henry Ford super rich, and like many super rich people, he decided he really needed a yacht. He bought the “Sialia” in 1917. It was even bigger than the “America,” but it never competed for the America’s Cup. For one thing, Henry Ford never joined a yacht club. Besides, you wouldn’t expect the guy behind the Ford Motor Company to use a sailboat, would you? The Sialia had an engine.
