Spoiled Stupid Rich Girl

In 1974, Patty Hearst was just your average college aged white girl, attending a west coast school and getting into all sorts of hijinks involving revolting against her parents and their staunchly conservative belief system.  Oh yeah, she was also the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, who had created the largest media empire in the world in his time, which is probably why she got kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).

The SLA was a far left group of violent radicals which originally started as a small college group, entirely made up of middle class white kids, with the much less radical mission of tutoring black prison inmates.  However, things kind of went off the rails when one of the inmates being tutored, a man named Donald DeFreeze, escaped prison, by literally just casually walking off, and took refuge with a few of his study buddies.  DeFreeze, apparently being a charming son of a bitch, soon after took control of the group, shifting it from an extracurricular activity to an urban guerilla group/sex cult.  At first, this group, which for some reason went with the name Symbionese Liberation Army, spent its time writing manifestos, training in firearms, and the usual wanton free love that goes with such things; all of this might sound weird, but remember, it was the 1970’s.  However, it didn’t take long for them to kick things up a notch.  The dozen or so members of the SLA wanted to create a racially equal communist utopia.  For whatever reason, it was decided the best way to go about this was to murder a man named Marcus Foster, the first black superintendent of the Oakland school district.  While the SLA had a lot of heart, they really didn’t have a lot of smarts.  This was probably why the assassination didn’t go quite so well.  On the one hand, they did manage to murder an innocent man for being unsupportive of the idea of introducing student IDs, which was the same stance held by the SLA.  On the other, the assassination didn’t go so well, resulting in two SLA members getting arrested.

Not wanting to leave their chums in prison, the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst in February of 1974 with the hope of using her as a bargaining chip.  She was chosen because she lived nearby.  Apparently overestimating Patty’s importance, the SLA members than completely forgot about their imprisoned members and instead demanded that the Hearst family give $70 of free food to every needy person in California.  The Hearst family was less than willing to do this, probably because it would have cost around $400 million, which was quite a bit more money than they had.  Instead, as a show of good faith, the family did take out a $2 million loan to give food to the needy in just the Bay Area, but this went badly with fights breaking out at the distribution centers. 

While all of these shenanigans were going on, Patty was kept in a dark closet with just a flashlight and SLA reading materials to keep herself entertained.  After only about three or four weeks of this, she denounced her former life and joined the SLA as a full fledged member.  She then participated in a bank robbery with the group, waving around an automatic rifle and screaming like a madwoman, which of course made the national news because holy shit.  Patty then helped with a couple of carjackings in order to enable the group to flee south to Los Angeles.  Things just got worse from there.  In Los Angeles, a shoplifting incident gone bad resulted in Patty shooting up the front of the store with a machine gun.  Soon after, a two hour standoff with police ended with a burnt down house and six dead SLA members, including DeFreeze.   

The surviving members of the group, including Patty, then fled back north to the Bay Area to lay low and try and recruit new members.  After a year of failing to do this, they decided to rob a bank, which ended with a mother of four being shot.  Not being good at pattern recognition, they then tried to bomb two police cars, but it turned out they were too inept to make bombs that actually worked.  It wasn’t long after, in September of 1975, that the majority of the remaining group, including Patty, were arrested.  During the trial, Patty claimed she had been brainwashed.  Not buying it, the jury convicted her to seven years in prison.  However, her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and she received a full pardon from President Bill Clinton in 2001.  After her release, Patty married a policeman and became prominent in the East Coast society and charitable fundraising scene.    

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patty_Hearst-_Hibernia_bank_robbery.jpg

Guillotine

Executions in the late eighteenth century were not a pretty sight.  If you were a noble convicted of a crime, you got you head lopped off by an axe, which usually took several good whacks.  If you were a commoner, you got the breaking wheel, which was basically just getting strapped to a wagon wheel and bludgeoned to death by some creep who probably took far too much enjoyment in the creativity allowed to them by their chosen profession.

Such was the case in 1789, when the people of France revolted, hanged a shit ton of nobles, and forced King Louis XVI to form a democratically elected National Assembly to help him rule.  It was a heady time for lovers of freedom in France, who set themselves to making reforms to better the lives of those not lucky enough to be born into the nobility.  One of these men was Dr. Joseph Guillotin, a well to do doctor who staunchly opposed the death penalty.  However, when the good doctor proposed to the Assembly that the death penalty be abolished because it was excessively cruel, his fellow delegates only heard the parts about it being cruel.  Not wanting to be cruel, or at least not as cruel as the nobility, they decided it would be best to design a better way to execute people.

Enter into the picture Antoine Louis, a doctor with notably less scruples than Guillotin, who agreed to design this better way with the help of some creepy German guy named Tobias Schmidt.  How do we know he was creepy?   Well, when it was asked if anyone wanted to help design a new execution device, he was the first to raise his hand.  Anyways, Dr. Louis had some experience with an English device called a gibbet, which dropped a heavy axe on the neck of a strapped down victim.  However, this mostly resulted in the neck getting crushed rather than cut.  To improve upon the device, the pair decided to replace the axe with a super sharp blade.  At first the blade was straight, until King Louis XVI, apparently not having much to do since the National Assembly took over running the country, suggested using an angled blade in order to allow for various neck sizes.  In what must have been a pretty sick burn for the time, Dr. Louis named his new killing machine the guillotine to honor Dr. Guillotin, who you might remember hated the death penalty.

The first execution by guillotine took place in 1792, luckily right before the Reign of Terror began in France.  With more radical elements taking control in the Assembly, it was decided that France didn't really need a noble class at all, resulting in thousands being rounded up to have their heads lopped off, most notably King Louis XVI and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette.  Reportedly the guillotine had no problem dealing with their differently sized necks.  The French people thought the whole spectacle of the guillotine was just great fun, and huge crowds would show up to every execution, cheering and jostling for the chance to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood of the accused, followed by parading the severed heads about town.  The idea of the guillotine was so popular that people began buying small ones to cut vegetables and toy ones for the kids.  Unfortunately, as happens, things began to get out of control once they ran out of nobles.  Various political groups began jockeying for power, which of course involved a lot of guillotining of those not deemed radical enough, and then of those deemed too radical.  In total, around 16,000 people were guillotined over the course of a year.

As a result of all this mayhem, France fell under the control of a dictator named Napoleon Bonaparte, you might have heard of him, who allowed the surviving nobility to return and reclaim their place in French society.  These re-established nobles, strangely proud of their executed relatives, took to wearing red scarves, cutting their hair short in the back, and doing dances full of jerking motions similar to those made by a body right after a head gets lopped off.  It was probably the most brazen and ridiculous declaration of “fuck you” in human history.  Instead of being disgusted by such behavior, other people began to copy it, though in a much more flamboyant manner to make sure everyone who saw them knew they were only doing it ironically.  This is pretty much how hipsters got their start.  Anyways, though France had six other types of government following the fall of Napoleon, the guillotine remained the primary method of execution for all of them.  The last public execution in France by guillotine was in 1939, after which they did it privately with only a few lucky people getting to watch.  The last execution by guillotine was in 1977, after which it was finally outlawed in 1981.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ex%C3%A9cution_de_Marie_Antoinette_le_16_octobre_1793.jpg

Tesla Was a Jackass

Nikola Tesla has been making quite a comeback over the past decade.  Famed for his inventions, which pretty much make up the modern power grid, he has become an untouchable golden boy of all we expect a scientist to be.  However, as always, the truth is a little more complicated.

It goes without saying that Tesla was a genius, for god’s sake, the man could do complicated calculus in his head.  However, being a genius doesn't always mean as much as you think.  Tesla started his life as a Serbian immigrant who was brought to the U.S. by the Thomas Edison Company, an organization he had worked for previously in Europe, installing electric lights.  Tesla only worked for Edison for six months before quitting over, as he claimed, unpaid bonuses, which seems a little strange given that the amount he claimed Edison had cheated him out of was more than the company had.  Anyways, soon after, Tesla began toying around with generating electricity via AC generators, rather than the commonly used DC generators of the day (the difference is not really important to this story).  This work led to numerous patents which Tesla licensed to the Westinghouse Electric Company, kicking off what became known as the War of the Currents; where Westinghouse and Edison vied over who's preferred method, AC or DC, would power the world.  During the course of this battle royale, Edison electrocuted a bunch of animals to prove some kind of point, which apparently wasn’t a very good one because Westinghouse’s AC eventually became the dominant method of power production.  However, as far as Tesla was concerned, none of this really mattered aside from the fact that it made him a shit ton of money.

Suddenly independently wealthy, Tesla built himself a large laboratory and began living a very lavish lifestyle.  It was the height of his career.  Rich men threw money at him to fund his ideas and he was considered a media darling.  He was the perfect quirky scientist, an extravagant celibate showman who claimed to only sleep two hours a night.  At first Tesla's work concentrated on further development of AC power, which while boring, ensured a steady stream of capital.  However, over time he increasingly got involved in other random areas of interest; including x-rays and radio remote control, neither of which led to much actual inventing other than a remote control boat.  These side interests eventually gave way to an obsession over the idea of wireless power transmission, a compulsion that would end up driving Tesla to his ruin.

Tesla's obsession with wireless power began with his invention of the Tesla Coil, a device that created lightning, but little else, and some cute demonstrations of how he could light a lightbulb without any wires.  Thanks to these early somewhat successes, Tesla became convinced that he could use either the Earth itself or the atmosphere's ionosphere to transmit electricity and communications around the world.  All he needed was a generator big enough. Using millions of dollars from rich investors he built giant towers, first in Colorado and then in New York, to conduct his experiments, which mostly involved bigger and bigger Tesla Coils.  Not one of the experiments worked, probably because his theories on the subject were complete garbage, and before long his investors abandoned him.  It was at this point that Tesla's financial difficulties began.

As it often the case with such things, Tesla’s turn of fortune resulted in him having a complete and total nervous breakdown.  A situation that was not helped by the fact that he was severely sleep deprived.  Despite his financial difficulties, he refused to stop living his lavish lifestyle, one that became harder to continue as his various patents began to expire.  With what few inventions he did create failing to catch on, a desperate Tesla sued the inventor of the radio, Guglielmo Marconi, for patent infringement, claiming that the invention of a radio controlled boat was exactly the same thing as inventing a device that transmits sound.  However, the case ended up going nowhere.  Almost completely broke, Tesla spent the remainder of his life getting kicked out of numerous hotels for not paying his bills.  His one source of solace was walking to the park every day to feed the pigeons, one of which he was convinced was in love with him.  During this period, he made many claims of possible inventions, some of which would later prove to be correct; such as radar and an airplane that could take off vertically; and others that were not correct at all; such as wiring classrooms to stimulate children's minds with electricity.  As he got older, his claims became wilder with little to no proof to back them up; such as his invention of a deathray, earthquake machine, an entirely new theory of physics, and a thought camera. He died alone, nuttier than a fruitcake.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nikola_Tesla,_with_his_equipment_Wellcome_M0014782_-_restoration2.jpg