Today is April 1, 2024, and according to my calendar it's April Fool's Day! I am going to avoid the temptation to post something that is completely untrue and follow it up with the phrase "April Fool's!" Instead, I wanted to give you my own "Leadership Reverie" version of "Ripley's Believe It or Not" (a popular show from my adolescence that was hosted by legendary actor Jack Palance) and "Strange But True Stories" (a popular series of books from my childhood). All of these stories have something (even if fairly tangential) to do with leadership (or leaders)!
Winston Churchill was once prescribed "alcoholic spirits" by a physician.
I think I've written about this story in the past (see "Broken like an egg shell or squashed like a gooseberry"), but it's interesting enough to write about it again! The famous leader was traveling in the United States in order to deliver a series of lectures on the "Pathway of the English-Speaking Peoples" in December of 1931. He was apparently attempting to generate some additional money to offset some of his financial losses in the stock market, and he was scheduled to deliver one of these lectures at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City on December 14th. He hailed a cab to go on the night before his lecture to meet a friend. Both Churchill and his taxi cab driver were confused about the building numbers, and Churchill exited the cab on the wrong side of the street. He tried to cross the street against the light and was hit by a car traveling at a speed of 30 mph. The car dragged Churchill several yards before flinging him into the street. He was quickly taken to a local hospital, where he would spend the next several days. Churchill's physician, a Dr. Otto Pickhardt, wrote a note for him (see below) prescribing alcoholic beverages "for medicinal purposes only" (remember that the U.S. still had not legalized the sale of alcohol following the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1919, which wasn't repealed until passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933). Believe it or not...
David Rice Atchison, U.S. President for a day?
Here's a story that I actually first heard about on "Ripley's Believe It or Not", and I've been interested in the story ever since. After we heard the story, I remember that my father and I researched this story and figured it all out in the days before the Internet! David Rice Atchison was a Missouri Democrat who served in the U.S. Senate from 1843 to 1855. He was popular amongst his colleagues in the Senate, who elected him as president pro tempore (often shortened to president pro tem) on 13 separate occasions. The president pro tempore of the Senate is the second highest ranking official in the U.S. Senate, after the Vice President of the United States (in case you don't believe, check out Article One, Section Three of the United States Constitution), and presides over the Senate in the Vice President's absence.
On March 2, 1849, Vice President George M. Dallas (during the James Polk Presidential administration) took leave of the Senate for the remainder of the session and the Senate elected Atchison as president pro tempore. Until the adoption of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933, presidential and congressional terms began and ended at noon on March 4. During the year 1849, March 4th fell on a Sunday. So, in accordance with the Constitution, President Polk signed the last of the legislation passed by Congress during that session on the morning of March 4th and recorded in his diary, "Thus closed my official term as President." The Senate, having been in session all night, adjourned shortly thereafter. President-elect Zachary Taylor preferred not to conduct his inauguration on a Sunday, in observance of the Christian Sabbath, so he was not officially sworn in as the 12th U.S. President until the following day, a Monday.
If Polk ended his Presidency on March 4th and Taylor didn't begin until March 5th, who was the acting President during that interval of time? Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1792, the Senate president pro tempore immediately followed the vice president in the line of presidential succession. So, was David Rice Atchison the actual U.S. President during that short period of time? Most historians and law experts say no, but it is a popular myth that is frequently retold (see a picture below of a plaque in Plattsburg, Missouri recognizing Atchison's one day presidency). Atchison himself wrote after the fact, "I never for a moment acted as President of the United States."
While this particular issue with the timing of presidential inauguration is unusual, it's not the only time in history that it's happened. Inauguration day similarly had fallen on a Sunday in 1821, the day on which President James Monroe was to take the oath for a second term. Monroe also chose to delay his oath until March 5th, leading John Quincy Adams to write in his diary that the delay created "a sort of interregnum during which there was no qualified person to act as President." Similarly, after the mild confusion about when Taylor became U.S. President, President Elect Rutherford B. Hayes decided to avoid the confusion altogether and took the oath of office in a private ceremony at the White House on Saturday, March 3, 1877, two days before his public inaugural ceremony. Technically then, if outgoing president Ulysses S. Grant’s term did not end until March 4, did the United States have two presidents at the same time for one day? Believe it or not...
Benjamin Franklin lost a chess match to a computer.
A couple of centuries before IBM's Deep Blue (a computer) beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a game of chess and before artificial intelligence was even a thing, both Napoleon and Ben Franklin were defeated in a game of chess by a computer known as the "Mechanical Turk". The "Mechanical Turk", also known as the Automaton Chess Player, was built by Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1770 to impress Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. The machine consisted of a life-size model of a human head and torso, with a black beard and grey eyes and dressed in Ottoman robes and wearing a turban. Its left arm held a long smoking pipe, while its right hand lay on the top of a large cabinet, on which appeared a chessboard. The machine made its debut at Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna in 1770, and it would appear in several exhibition chess matches across Europe for nearly 84 years, famously defeating both Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin.
Here's the twist - it was all a fraud! Inside the cabinet sat a real person who was actually the one playing chess. The machine actually consisted of several intricate parts that allowed the person to see his opponent's moves and to work the "robot" to move the different chess pieces into position. That alone is still impressive, but everything else associated with the "Mechanical Turk" was an elaborate fraud. Believe it or not...
There was a "Schindler's List" in China too.
The 1993 film Schindler's List was outstanding (so was the book)! It tells the story of how the German industrialist Oskar Schindler saved more than a thousand mostly Polish–Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories during World War II. Steven Spielberg's movie certainly helped popularize the story, but what is not as well known is the story of the Chinese diplomat Feng-Shan Ho. Feng-Shan Ho worked in Vienna as consul-general during World War II, and during his tenure against orders and at the risk of his own life, issued "perhaps tens of thousands" of visas to Jewish refugees, allowing them to escape Nazi Germany. It was only after he died in 1997 at the age of 96 years that his story came out, and he was honored by the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous in 2000 with the honor, "Designation of the Righteous Among Nations".
The World of Warcraft has been used to model real pandemics, including the most recent one.
The "Corrupted Blood Incident" (also known as the World of Warcraft Pandemic) took place in 2005. Apparently, game developers for the World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game developed by Blizzard Entertainment, accidentally introduced an extremely virulent and highly contagious disease into the game, which spread quickly throughout the game universe and caused a virtual pandemic. The introduced disease, called "Corrupted Blood", was supposed to be confined to a particular area of the virtual world to be used by the dungeon "boss" Hakkar the Soulflayer as an additional challenge to players. Once players attacked Hakkar, they were "infected" by the spell, which would slowly decrease their life energy over time. Surprisingly (at least to the game developers), players unknowingly transmitted the infection to their animal companions, who in turn spread the infection to other players in the game.
Once the spell became known to players, they traveled great distances (virtually, of course) in order to find a safe haven. Unfortunately, this only caused further spread of the "disease". Some players tried to help their friends, only to become infected as a result. Finally, some players intentionally spread the "disease" to other players. There was a virtual pandemic which very nearly wiped out the entire game!
The response by the game developers will sound familiar. They instituted quarantine zones and enacted social distancing measures to try to contain the spread of the infection. Unfortunately, many players resisted and managed to bypass the quarantine measures, causing further spread. Eventually, Blizzard Entertainment had to institute a hard reset to restore the state of the game to just before the introduction of the "Corrupted Blood".
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention heard about the incident and asked Blizzard Entertainment if they could use the data from the game to learn more about pandemic epidemiology. There have been a number of research publications using the "Corrupted Blood Incident" as a model for disease spread and containment, some of which were used to help public health officials with the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Believe it or not...
There is an offshore platform that claims to be its own country.
The Principality of Sealand claims to be its own country (although no one else recognizes its independence) and is located on a World War II era offshore platform (technically what is called a Maunsell Fort) called Roughs Tower located 12 kilometers off the coast of Suffolk, England (see picture below). The family and associates of Paddy Roy Bates occupied and claimed the decommissioned Roughs Tower in 1967. Bates had apparently seized Roughs Tower from a group of pirate radio broadcasters that same year with the intention of setting up his own station there. They repelled incursions from several rival pirate radio stations, as well as the British Royal Navy. While they still occupy the platform and claim to be their own sovereign nation (and have their own flag (see below) - one of which was placed on the summit of Mount Everest by mountaineer Kenton Cool, seal, website, monarch, and sports teams), since 1987, when the United Kingdom extended its territorial waters to 12 nautical miles, the platform has been in British territory. Believe it or not...
The oldest "closed" terrarium may outlive its owner.
In 1960, David Latimer decided to grow a sealed glass bottle terrarium. He placed a quarter pint of compost and water inside a ten-gallon glass bottle, added some spiderwort seeds, sealed the top of the bottle shut, and placed the now "closed" terrarium in a corner of one of the rooms in his house where it would receive sufficient sunlight. He last watered the terrarium in 1972, and the terrarium hasn't been opened since! The ecosystem inside the terrarium is perfectly balanced. Believe it or not...
The Republic of Vermont?
If I asked you to name the original Thirteen Colonies from early American history, could you do so without cheating? Vermont was one of the original colonies, correct? Actually - nope. Vermont was the 14th stated to be admitted into the Union and the first state that wasn't a colony. Vermont actually was an independent republic prior to becoming the 14th state, called simply the Vermont Republic, which existed from January 15, 1777 to March 4, 1791. Notably, the Vermont Republic, similar to the Principality of Sealand above (but for completely different reasons) was never formally recognized by any country, including the United States of America. The history of Vermont was obviously closely tied with that of the Thirteen Colonies and the early United States, and in fact, several Vermonters fought for the Americans in the Revolutionary War, most notably Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys. Believe it or not...
The CEO of Segway Inc. died while riding a Segway.
Several years ago, our family took a tour around the city on a Segway. I was surprised to find out how hard they were to ride, but once I got the hang of it, it was a lot of fun. In one of the incredible twists of irony, Jimi Heselden, an English entrepreneur who purchased Segway Inc in 2009, died while riding his Segway near a cliff in 2010. It's just another reminder about the need to always think about safety! Believe it or not...
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