Lesser-Known Facts in US History, Part 3 Quiz

Answer: Power conversion, turning AC into DC, which was important for the Allied war effort

The room known as M42 is located ten stories underneath the railway station, but it does not appear on maps or blueprints. Machinery in the room were multiple rotary power converters (working 24/7) that converted alternating current electricity to direct current electricity. That DC powered 80% of the railway traffic the Allies were relying on to transport equipment and troops across the northeastern US. Armed guards on the catwalks had "shoot-to-kill" orders for anyone deemed suspicions, since the converters could have been stopped by simply pouring a bag of sand into the bearings. A workman simply carrying a bucket of sand for the fire extinguishers was in serious danger! The name "Manhattan Project" was the code name used for the top-secret American project (with significant British and Canadian help) to develop the atomic bomb.

Historical note:
German spies George Dasch and three others left from Lorient, France by submarine on May 26, 1942. They landed on Long Island, NY shortly after midnight on June 12 (a similar group of four landed on Ponte Vedra Beach, near Jacksonville, FL on June 16). Their goal was to sabotage the US war effort, including the machinery in room M42 (Operation Pastorius). Fortunately, George Dasch decided he hated the Nazis and defected to the US. He and fellow saboteur Ernst Burger turned in all eight spies (including themselves). They were tried by a military tribunal and all were found guilty and sentenced to death. President Franklin Roosevelt commuted Dasch and Burger's sentences to prison terms. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman granted executive clemency to Dasch and Burger and ordered they be deported to the American Zone of occupied Germany.

Answer: Discounted postal reply coupons

Although Charles Ponzi was not the first con artist to promise investors big returns, and then pay off early investors with the investments of later investors, his name became associated with this type of scheme. The purpose of the International Reply Coupon (IRC) is to allow a person in a foreign country to send someone in another country a coupon that can be exchanged for the cost of postage for a reply (they serve the same function as a self-addressed stamped envelope if both the sender and addressee are in the same country). Ponzi realized profit could be made from the differing postal rates in different countries by buying IRCs cheaply in one country and exchanging them for stamps of a higher value in another country.

Historical notes:
Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 Federal felonies in 2009 and was sentenced to 150 years in prison, the maximum allowed. His two sons had unknowingly assisted their father in his scheme. Mark Madoff hanged himself at age 46 in 2010. In an interview from prison, Bernie Madoff said he'll be forever haunted by the suicide of his oldest son. Andrew Madoff died of cancer in 2014 at age 48. His wife Ruth has been vilified and shunned by many of her former friends. The tulip bulb craze was a famous Dutch example around 1600 of a speculative bubble driven by unrealistic and excessive demand. At its peak, one tulip bulb could be traded for an entire estate!

Answer: Elisha Gray

Determining the true inventor of the telephone proved to be a pretty murky investigation the more I researched this question. According to the book "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret" by Seth Shulman (science journalist and writer-in-residence at MIT), Bell paid $100 to patent examiner Zenas Fisk Wilber to copy some key elements of Gray's patent caveat (similar to today's provisional patent applications used in the US Patent and Trademark Office). Wilber admitted that he was an alcoholic who owed money to his longtime friend Marcellus Bailey, who was Bell's patent lawyer. Ten years after Bell's patent was issued, an affidavit was signed by Wilber (presently in the archives at Oberlin College), who admits that he illegally showed Elisha Gray's filing to Bell. However, historian Robert Bruce believes that Wilber, who at the time was ill and destitute, was "probably liquored up or bribed, or both." Further complicating this issue were the earlier telephone inventions of Johann Philipp Reis, a self-taught German scientist and inventor, and Antonio Meucci, an Italian immigrant. Although Bell faced more than 600 lawsuits over his telephone patent, in the end it stood and he became rich. Elisha Gray went on to become a co-founder of the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. I still use one of their telephones, a heavy-weight beauty! An interesting note: AGB originally suggested the word "ahoy" be adopted as the standard greeting when answering a telephone call, before "hello" (suggested by Thomas Edison) became commonly used.

Historical note:
Bell also invented one of the first metal detectors in an attempt to save the life of assassinated US President James Garfield (20th US president). In the weeks that followed the 2 July 1881 shooting of Garfield, his condition worsened as doctors were unsuccessful in finding the location of one of the bullets that had struck him. Bell developed an electromagnetic machine that he tested on US Civil War veterans who still had bullets lodged in their bodies, but his "induction balance" wand failed to locate Garfield's bullet, probably due to interference caused by steel wires holding the bed mattress and the president's chief physician only permitting a search of the right side of the president's body (where he was convinced the bullet was lodged). After Garfield's death on 19 September 1881, the bullet was found to be on his left side.

Answer: A pair of black Aces and a pair of black 8s

Hickok usually sat with his back to a wall so he could see the entrance when playing poker, but on this day the only seat available when he joined the game was a chair facing away from the door. Miner Jack McCall entered the saloon, walked up behind Hickok, drew his revolver and shouted, "Damn you! Take that!" His motive apparently was a perceived insult when Hickok gave him money for breakfast the previous day. Reports of the cards in Hickok's hand have varied over the years, but the generally-accepted version since the 1926 book "Wild Bill Hickok: The Prince of Pistoleers" is a pair of black Aces, a pair of black eights and an unknown fifth card.

Historical note:
Assassin miner Jack McCall was caught and tried by a miners' court and was found not guilty (he claimed his actions were in retribution for Hickok having previously killed his brother). After bragging about killing Hickok, McCall was re-arrested. The second trial was not considered double jeopardy because of the irregular jury in the first trial. In this trial he was found guilty and was hanged on 1 March 1877. When the cemetery he was buried in was moved in 1881 and his body was exhumed, the hangman's noose was found still around his neck.

Answer: The Gadsden Purchase

Planning for this railroad took place against the backdrop of the years leading up to the US Civil War. Southern leaders realized they needed a transcontinental railroad with a southern route (it eventually became the Southern Pacific Railroad). US President Franklin Pierce (14th US president), at the urging of his Secretary of War Jefferson Davis (later to become president of the southern seceding Confederate States), sent Davis' friend James Gadsden to Mexico to negotiate the purchase. The agreed on price was $10 million (which was roughly equivalent to $300 million in 2017 dollars).

Historical note:
The three wrong answers were three of the four members of "The Big Four," the name popularly given to the California businessmen who built the Central Pacific Railroad (the first transcontinental railroad). They were Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker. The transcontinental railroad they built was in the center of the country, with a golden spike (later retrieved) being driven in a 10 May 1869 ceremony in Promontory Summit, Utah Territory to unite the eastern and western legs. After the Civil War ended, Collis Huntington was a driving force in completing the Southern Pacific Railroad from Los Angeles east through desert country to El Paso, San Antonio and New Orleans in the 1870s and 1880s.

Answer: FDR was not hit but one man was fatally wounded

FDR was not hit, but Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, was fatally wounded. He had been near FDR at the time the shots were fired. A Secret Service agent had a bullet graze the back of his right hand and two other bystanders were also injured (some sources say four bystanders were wounded). The assassin was an anarchist named Giuseppe "Joe" Zangara, who hated all authority figures. A bystander immediately grabbed Zangara's arm and moved it as soon as he drew his gun, interrupting his aim. After he was captured, tried and found guilty, Zangara was executed on 20 March 1933 in "Old Sparky" (Florida's electric chair).

Historical notes:
The election of 1932 took place against the backdrop of the Great Depression, which is usually considered to have started when the US stock market crashed in 1929. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 is also thought to have been a major factor. FDR's basket of attempted fixes included creation of an "alphabet soup" of programs such as the WPA, CCC, NRA, EBA, FCA, SSA and many others. Things really weren't fixed until the economy was helped by the manufacturing required during World War II.

Answer: John Adams (2nd US president)

Although John Adams was technically the first, his single term was mostly over before he moved into the not-completely finished Executive Mansion. Adams spent almost the entire four years of his one term living in the President's House in Philadelphia, PA. He moved to the not-completely-finished Executive Mansion on Saturday, 1 November 1800, and then lost his reelection bid to Thomas Jefferson shortly thereafter!

Historical note:
The Executive Mansion has been referred to informally as the "White House" since at least 1811 (because of the color of the exterior sandstone), but it wasn't until the presidency of Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt (26th US president) that the name became the official name for the president's house. Roosevelt started the practice (in 1901) of having that name printed on the White House stationery. An untrue myth is that the name White House originated after the mansion was painted with white paint to mask the burn damage it had suffered in the War of 1812.

Answer: Identified Midway Island as the target of a Japanese attack

In the months after the Pearl Harbor attack, the American team had partially broken the JN-25 code, enough so that they could realize some big attack was being planned. However, the intended target was identified only as "AF," with a diversionary raid off the Aleutian Islands (near the mainland of Alaska). It was Joseph Rochefort, head of the American code-breaking team, who proposed a ruse to determine what AF stood for. He suspected the target might be Midway Island, so he arranged for America forces on the island to send out an uncoded radio message saying that they were running short of fresh water. Then the team waited with fingers crossed. Japan took the bait, and a Japanese message coded in JN-25 was intercepted that read, "AF is running short of fresh water." Armed with this advance knowledge of the main target, US Admirals Chester Nimitz, Frank Fletcher and Ray Spruance were ready. On 4 June 1942, after a fierce three-day battle, US carrier pilots sank all four Japanese aircraft carriers in the attacking task force, effectively turning the tide of war in the Pacific.

Historical note:
Another significant result of breaking JN-25 was identifying the timing of an inspection tour of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (the main architect of the Pearl Harbor attack). He was inspecting the Japanese naval base on Bougainville in the Solomon Islands on 18 April 1943. That allowed American fighters to arrive at Bougainville just as Yamamoto's plane was arriving. The admiral was killed in the attack, depriving Japan of its most experienced and accomplished admiral and sapping Japanese morale. To maintain the illusion that the fighters had arrived by chance, other patrols were flown in the area, both before and after the attack. The Japanese did not change JN-25, and for the remainder of the war, US intelligence intercepted and read thousands of Japanese messages.

Answer: Progressive Party

Teddy Roosevelt took national office as vice president of the US in March 1901 after William McKinley was reelected the US president in the election of 1900. Following McKinley's assassination that September, TR became the 26th US president at age 42, with William Howard Taft selected as TR's vice president. In the election of 1904, TR was elected president in own right. In the election of 1908, TR declined to run again, reasoning he had already served seven years (although technically he could have run). WHT was elected president in that election, setting up the TR run again in 1912 as a third-party candidate. TR was dissatisfied with WHT's actions on the progressive agenda TR had worked so hard for, and he tried to secure the Republican Party nomination as their presidential candidate. When that failed, TR accepted the nomination of the Progressive Party, which was led by a group of Republicans dissatisfied with the renomination of President Taft. TR got the nickname "the Bull Moose candidate" as a result of his response to a reporter's question about his health. TR replied he felt as "fit as a bull moose"!

Historical note:
All the wrong answers are (or were) actual third parties in the US.

Answer: Rita Hayworth

Rita Hayworth made numerous movies during her Hollywood career, but it was her sultry performance in the 1946 film "Gilda" that made her an international sex symbol. That caught the eye of playboy Prince Aly Khan of Pakistan, and they wed in 1949. Unlike Grace Kelly's marriage, Rita's didn't last. They divorced in 1953. She was married five times, but all five were for five years or less. Commenting on her unsuccessful love life she said, "Men go to bed with Gilda, but they wake up with me" The famous picture of Rita by photographer Bob Landry made her the number two soldier pin-up of World War II (after Betty Grable).

Historical note:
The 1994 movie "The Shawshank Redemption" was adapted from a short story by Stephen King titled "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" (there is no "The" in Stephen King's short-story title). In the movie, a poster of Raquel Welch rather than Rita Hayworth was used by Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) to conceal an escape tunnel he dug. In the 1995 Academy Awards "The Shawshank Redemption" was nominated for Best Picture (but that Oscar was won by "Forrest Gump").