Sir Humphry Davy and the Miner’s Lamp (Part 2)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm tra
c Ev Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is part
two of our accidental two parter on chemist Sir Humphrey Davy.

(00:22):
In part one, we talked about how he became medical
superintendent at the Pneumatic Institute and did a bunch of
experiments involving nitrous oxside and then wrote a five hundred
and eighty page book about it. He was only nineteen
when he got that job. He did not have a
lot of formal education. When I started envisioning this episode,

(00:44):
I sort of thought that was going to be the episode.
But he also had a whole career after that point,
and that is what we are talking about today. So
last time, our discussion of Humphrey Davies's work was mainly
about gases and specifically nitrous oxide, but that's not the
only thing that he was working on. He published his
first paper in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions in eighteen

(01:07):
oh one, and that paper was on the voltaic pile,
an early electrical battery invented by Alessandro volta in a
voltaic pile, Alternating discs of two different medals, such as
copper and zinc, are stacked together, along with fabric discs
that are soaked in something like saltwater or vinegar. Initially,

(01:27):
it was believed that the current in a voltaic pile
was caused by the voltage difference between the two alternating medals.
Davy's paper argued correctly that it was really the result
of a chemical reaction. In March of eighteen oh one,
Davy was offered a position at the Royal Institution, which
had been founded in seventeen ninety nine to teach the

(01:49):
general public about science. He was assistant lecturer in chemistry,
director of the laboratory, and assistant editor of the institution's journals.
Adition to his salary, this position came with a room
call and candles so charming. We have discussed about how

(02:10):
most of Davey's education was self directed, and this was
not all that unusual for someone of his social class,
especially in a field like chemistry, which was basically brand new.
This was also the age of the so called gentleman's scientist,
although there were also women like Mary Anning and Caroline Herschel.
A lot of scientists pursued their work independently, often without

(02:32):
any kind of backing from a formal institution or a
lot of formal education, and the field had not been professionalized.
But even in that context, Davy's appointment to this position
was pretty remarkable. It wasn't just that he didn't have
formal education in chemistry. He didn't have much formal education
at all, and he was only twenty two, already well

(02:55):
published when he was offered this position. His work with
nitrous oxide it didn't entirely end when he left the
Pneumatic Institute. On June twentieth, eighteen oh one, he gave
a public lecture at the Royal Institution. This lecture was
on respiration, and he told the audience that anybody who
wanted to could experience this gas afterward. In the words

(03:19):
of a nineteen thirty write up on Davy in Science
Progress in the twentieth Century, quote, the spectators were amused
by the antics of the experimenters, and one subject at
least enjoyed paradise. For mister Underwood was so transported and
so reluctant to leave Heaven for Earth that the breathing

(03:40):
bag had to be snatched forcibly from him. As a
side note, the Pneumatic Institute didn't keep his focus on
gases as a curative forever. In eighteen oh four it
became the Preventive Medical Institution for the Sick and Drooping Poor, which,
as its name suggests, was a hospital for the poor
focused primarily on the treatment of tuberculosis. Its founder, Thomas Beddows,

(04:05):
died four years later. Some of Davies's other lectures that
the Royal Institution were on tanning. He tried to figure
out how tanning worked as at a chemical level, I'm
talking about the tanning of animal hides, not going out
for a suntan, so he was figuring out how that
worked and whether there were improvements that could be made

(04:26):
to the process. He concluded that workers at England's best
tanneries had already developed pretty good methods for their work,
so he didn't try to come in and revolutionize the
whole process. But he did look for substitutes for some
of the more expensive and harder to source materials that
were used in tanning. In particular, he found a substitute

(04:49):
for oak bark, which was in short supply, but that
substitute was katachew, which was an extract from acacia trees
which grew in India. So of course that gets into
a whole tangle of British imperialism and colonialism. He also
worked in agriculture, including testing the quality of the soil
and developing recommendations for different types of fertilizer. This followed

(05:13):
the same basic pattern as his tannery work. He was
figuring out the chemical processes involved and making recommendations for
adjustments when necessary, but generally he thought what Britain's farmers
were already doing was working pretty well, and he did
not try to totally re envision things. He published Elements
of Agricultural Chemistry based on this work in eighteen thirteen.

(05:35):
Davy also gave lots of public lectures on chemistry more generally,
and soon he was really in high demand as both
a speaker and a dinner guest. He was charismatic and
used a lot of showmanship in his lectures, and he
tended to attract a lot of women in the audience
and around town. There are some sort of comedic illustrations

(05:57):
of him doing lecturing in which like audiences overwhelmingly women.
There are also stories about him working in his lab
until the absolute last second, and then putting a clean
shirt on on top of what he already had on
as he walked out the door to go to some
dinner engagement. Davy became a fellow of the Royal Society

(06:19):
in eighteen oh four, and he was awarded the Society's
Copley Medal in eighteen oh five. The Copley Medal is
an award for outstanding achievement. It is one of the oldest,
if not the oldest, scientific awards in the world. In
eighteen oh seven, Davy was elected as one of two
secretaries of the Royal Society, and he was also awarded
the Napoleon Prize from the Institute de France, although England

(06:42):
and France were at war and a naval blockade meant
that there was no way for him to even be
informed that he had won this prize. That's going to
come up again later though. Also in eighteen oh seven,
Davey started working on isolating and identifying different elements using electrolysis.
This was connected to his earlier work with the voltaic pile.

(07:05):
He had concluded that if a chemical reaction could generate
an electrical current, then you could maybe basically do the opposite.
An electrical current could also be used to initiate a
chemical reaction, so he used electricity to isolate pure sodium
from caustic soda and potassium from caustic potash. Apparently he

(07:27):
wanted the word potassium to start with pt, like the
word pterodactyl, but a transcriber misspelled it in the first
manuscript on the subject as that was being prepared, and
this like incorrect in Davy's mind. Spelling stuck, Let's just
go with this. Yeah. Also, a lot of these elements
are like very reactive when they are isolated on their own,

(07:50):
so this probably involved some very dramatic moments in the lab.
Davy isolated more elements in eighteen oh eight, including boron
from boricap acid and calcium, which that process involved electrolyzing
lime and mercuric oxide together. By this point, Humphrey was
incredibly well respected and he was influential as a scientist.

(08:13):
He was also trying to put his work into use
out in the world. At one point, he visited Newgate
Prison to evaluate its ventilation system, and while there he
contracted typhus, also known as jail fever. In eighteen ten.
Some of Davies's work focused on acidity. We mentioned back
in Part one that Antoine Laurent la Foisier had believed

(08:36):
that oxygen was present in all acids, and he had
coined the name for oxygen based on that idea. At
the time, hydrochloric acid was known as muriatic acid, which
was the term some people still use today. Lavoisier had
believed that removing the hydrogen from muriatic acid resulted in

(08:58):
oxy muratic acid, and that that contained oxygen, But Davy
concluded that this did not contain oxygen, and that in fact,
it was not a compound at all. Instead, he said
this was its own element, chlorine, which he named for
its green color. Davy didn't actually discover chlorine, that's usually

(09:19):
attributed to Karl Wilhelmschill in seventeen seventy four, but Davy
was the one who determined that it was an element.
Davy was awarded an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin
in eighteen eleven. On April eighth, eighteen twelve, he was knighted,
and three days after that he married Jane, a priest
who he had proposed to about a month before. She

(09:42):
was a wealthy widow and a socialite and an intellectual,
sometimes described as a bluestocking, and she had hosted her
own salon. Jane had inherited money from her late husband
and from her father, who was a merchant whose business
had been primarily out of Antigua, where he dealt in
both goods and enslaved people. Also, in eighteen twelve, Davy

(10:03):
published a book titled Elements of Chemical Philosophy, which was
dedicated to his wife, and that same year he was
injured in a lab accident while working with nitrogen trichloride,
which is highly explosive. While he was recovering from this accident,
he needed an assistance, especially to help with things like
record keeping, so he hired twenty one year old Michael Faraday.

(10:28):
Faraday continued working with Davy for years. Sometimes his role
was more like a valet or a personal secretary, which
she seems to have found pretty degrading. Sometimes he was
more like a lab assistant or an apprentice. Davey recovered
from his injuries in eighteen thirteen, and that year he
also left his position at the Royal Institution. Thanks to

(10:49):
his marriage, he no longer needed the job. But in
spite of their common intellectual ground, Humphrey and Jane don't
seem to have been very well matched. There was just
a lot of friction between the two of them, and
a lot of public bickering in the later years of
their marriage. Sometimes they spent long stretches of time apart,
each of them pursuing their own interests, but they also

(11:12):
did travel together at some points, including taking a trip
to France in October of eighteen thirteen to collect that
medal that Davy had been awarded back in eighteen oh seven.
It is a weird trip. England and France were still
at war with each other. The Davies apparently made this
trip along with Michael Faraday, with Napoleon's permission, but even

(11:37):
with that permission they were still arrested and detained after
they got to France. Once they were released, they went
to Paris. They met Napoleon's second wife, Marie Luise. They
did not meet Napoleon himself. Davy seems to have butted
heads with a lot of people on this trip, making
no secret about his antipathy for the French. This was

(11:59):
about politics and the ongoing wars between England and France,
and it was also about science. We have already talked
about his criticisms of some of the work of French
chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. He also had a huge rivalry
with French chemist and physicist Joseph Luis guille Lussac, with
the two of them arguing over who should get credit

(12:20):
for the identification of iodine as an element, which was
connected to the work Davey carried out while in Paris.
Bernard Courtois had first described iodine in eighteen eleven, and
then in eighteen thirteen, Gui le Sac and Davy had
written work identifying it as an element. About a week apart.
This is a trip where I was like, hey, a friend,

(12:40):
you didn't have to go to France and laker with
everyone that you were angry at and your nation was
at war with it. He wanted that award. Some of
the descriptions of it just make him sound like a
big jerk to me. After leaving France, the party would
on to Italy. Eventually, as we know, Napoleon was forced

(13:04):
to abdicate as Emperor of the French and he was
exiled to Elba. The party decided they should go back
to Britain after they heard of Napoleon's return from exile
in eighteen fifteen. After returning to Britain, Davy was asked
to work on the problem of coal mine explosions, and
we're going to talk about that after we pause for
a sponsor break. Humphrey Davy was living at a time

(13:37):
when demand for coal was skyrocketing in Britain and in
other parts of the world due to the Industrial Revolution.
In the mid eighteenth century, Britain had been producing about
five million tons of coal per year. By the mid
nineteenth century, that number had increased more than tenfold. As

(13:57):
railroads and factories burned coal to drive steam engines. Miners
had to work faster and dig deeper, and that made
a job that was already difficult and dirty, increasingly unsafe
in the face of mine collapses and explosions of flammable gas,
which at the time were known as fire damp. One

(14:18):
of Britain's worst mine explosions happened on May twenty fifth,
eighteen twelve, at the Felling Colliery. This was an enormous
explosion that was heard for miles and it killed ninety
two men and boys who had been working in the mine.
When crews attempted to reopen the mine, it took days
for the flammable gases inside to become diluted enough for

(14:38):
anyone to try to enter. The Society for Preventing Accidents
in Mines was established a following year, and they contacted
Humphrey Davy for help. Davy's first step was to collect
samples of gas from the mine and analyze them, and
he concluded that firedamp was primarily methane. This was not

(15:00):
new discovery. Other researchers had already said this is methane,
but he confirmed that earlier work, and then he started
experimenting with it, collecting it and testing it in things
like jars and tubes and other vessels to figure out
exactly in which conditions it would explode. He eventually concluded
that firedamp only exploded when exposed to very high temperatures,

(15:24):
which is not really surprising, but the methods to light
the mines involved an open flame, so this meant that
the risk of explosion was just constant. So to solve
this problem, he set out to create a safer lamp,
and Davy's first design enclosed the flame in a glass
chimney with tubes to allow air into the lantern and

(15:46):
exhaust out of it. This limited the amount of methane
that could come into contact with the flame, and it
also gave the gases time to cool as they moved
into and out of the tubes. It wasn't possible for
large amounts of methane to move through these tubes, so
exposure to fire damp could cause the flame to burn
a bit brighter, but not explode, and the outside of

(16:08):
the lamp did not get hot enough to cause anything
to ignite. Soon, Davy modified this design, replacing the glass
chimney with a mesh screen after determining exactly how fine
the mesh had to be to prevent explosions. While it
was possible for methane to make its way through this
screen and burn inside of the lamp, that flame could

(16:32):
not pass outside of the screen and cause an explosion.
This lamp could also help miners detect whether there were
build ups of dangerous gases in the area based on
the height and the color of the flame. Davy started
publishing papers on this research within a couple of weeks
of starting work in eighteen fifteen, and by eighteen sixteen,

(16:53):
lamps he had made were being successfully tested in mines.
When a friend said that he should patent his invent,
he said, quote, I never thought of such a thing.
My sole object was to serve the cause of humanity,
and if I have succeeded, I am amply rewarded in
the gratifying reflection of having done so. More wealth could
not increase either my fame or my happiness. It might

(17:16):
undoubtedly enable me to put four horses to my carriage,
but what would it avail me to have it said
that Sir Humphrey drives his carriage in four I love that.
In March of eighteen seventeen, Davy was thanked for his
service to miners at a general meeting of mine owners
that was held in Newcastle. He was also awarded the
Royal Society's Rumford Medal and made a baronet. But Humphrey

(17:41):
Davy was not the only person to develop a miner's
safety lamp. Around this time, George Stevenson call your Engineer,
at Killingworth Colliery in Northumberland, had also developed a safety lamp,
pretty much by trial and error. This lamp was known
as the Jordi and it was popular in the area
near where he lived. Like Davey's initial design used a

(18:05):
long glass chimney as well as a series of tubes
to allow air end to fuel the flame. The chimney
was also protected by a metal tube that had holes
through it. Stevenson contended that Davy had stolen his design,
while Davy called Stevenson a pirate and a thief, so
that went great. Eventually, a committee was convened in Newcastle

(18:27):
in November of eighteen seventeen, with Royal Society President Joseph
Banks presiding. They cleared Davy of all suspicion of having
stolen the design of the lamp. But to be clear,
these were also Davy's friends and scientific associates. Yeah, and
the you know, Stevenson was not regarded as a scientist.
He was a mine engineer. A third contender for the

(18:50):
inventor of the minor safety lamp was William Reid Clanny,
doctor from Ireland. Davy had examined one of Clanny's lamps
in October of eighteen fifteen, so this lamp definitely existed
before any of Davey's were being tested in the mines.
But Clanne's lamp was also a lot different from Davy's
or Stevenson's. It was airtight and the air was supplied

(19:14):
to the interior of the lamp through bellows. This meant
that using this lamp required the mine to hire a
boid to pump the bellows while the lamp was being used.
All three of these designs were in use in different
parts of Britain and Ireland in the early nineteenth century,
with different designs being popular in different regions, but they

(19:36):
did not totally eliminate mine explosions. Each type of lamp
worked as long as it was used correctly and as
long as it was in good repair, but there was
a lot that could go wrong. The designs that used
glass chimneys meant that those chimneys were breakable, so if
a lamp was dropped and broken, flammable gas around it
could still explode. The wire mesh used in Davy's lamp

(20:00):
could also corrode over time, leaving holes large enough for
flames to pass through. Sometimes miners opened the cover or
bypassed the safety to do something like light a pipe,
and some didn't want to use them at all because
they were more cumbersome and unwieldy than other light sources.
Davy's refusal to patent his lamp, which we read earlier,

(20:21):
makes them sound pretty noble. But he was also vocally
critical of these other two lamps and the men who
had developed them, and he was really self righteous when
it came to his descriptions of his own work. He
was really angry about the fact that there were people
who thought the other lamps were better, or that he
did not deserve any credit for the one that he

(20:42):
had developed. I read a paper that argued that, according
to his behavior in this whole incident, he was a narcissist.
Some of Davy's critics on this, though, were also very vocal.
There were people who favored the Stevenson or Clanny lamps
who called Davy's lamp the murder lamp. Oh bless him.

(21:04):
It just sounds like a lot of people mad that
they they're not getting lauded. Davy went on another trip
to Europe after finishing his work on a minor safety lamp,
and while there he tried and failed to find a
way to unroll and read a scroll that had been
retrieved from herculaneum. Was also involved chemistry. He didn't just
try to open it up, but the fact that this

(21:26):
came up recently on Unearthed. I know how excited would
he be to see the stuff that people have developed today?
He might be mad? Uh. In eighteen eighteen, Mary Shelley
published her book Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, and in
this book, Professor Waldman is a chemist who delivers a

(21:47):
lecture that's attended by Victor Frankenstein, and this chemist inspires
Victor Frankenstein's later work. Sometimes Humphrey Davy is cited as
an inspiration for this character, while other people cite a
similarity to various other British scientists from the early nineteenth century.
Mary Shelley definitely went to some of Davy's lectures, and

(22:09):
of course she was also influenced by the work of
the Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor, Coleridge Shoe we talked
about in Part one, who were part of Davy's social circle. Yeah,
they had a lot of the Venn diagram of their
social groups. Has Humphrey Davies's career as a chemist had
been groundbreaking and influential, but that is not the note

(22:32):
that he went out on, and we'll talk about that
after a sponsor break. In eighteen twenty, Joseph Banks, president
of the Royal Society died. Banks had been president of

(22:52):
the Royal Society for forty two years. His interim successor
was William Hyde Wallaston, who served until an election could
be held, and then Humphrey Davy was elected in November
of eighteen twenty. Davy's tenure as President of the Royal
Society really did not go well. Under Banks's four plus

(23:13):
decades of leadership, the Royal Society had become part social
club for gentlemen and part scientific institution. Some of its
members were Banks's personal friends who didn't necessarily have any
interest or aptitude in science. Davy wanted to reform the
Royal Society into a bona fide scientific institution, and of
course that raised the ire of people who liked it

(23:37):
the way it was. Divisions developed between the people who
wanted reform and the ones who wanted to keep things
the way they were, the way that Banks had done it. Yeah,
this is also connected to the whole process of professionalizing
and formalizing scientific fields. His presidency also threw a wrench

(23:57):
and to his relationship with Michael Faraday. Faraday had worked
with Davy for eight years at this point, and he'd
gone from basically being Davy's scribe and assistant to a
respected scientist in his own right. He could no longer
be described as anything like an apprentice, and he didn't
need Davy's supervision. But the Royal Society also had its

(24:19):
own internal politics that Faraday kind of ran a foul of.
Like William Hyde, Wallaston was doing a lot of work
with electromagnetism, and he seemed to think that Faraday's work
on the same subject was horning in on his own territory.
And then Faraday felt like Davy did not give him
enough support in this dispute. Things became even more contentious

(24:43):
when Faraday did an experiment that produced liquefied chlorine. It
was an experiment that Davy had suggested he do, but
producing liquid chlorine was not part of the expected outcome.
Davy thought Faraday should have credited him when he reported
the results of this experiment. Faraday did not. Then, in

(25:03):
eighteen twenty three, Faraday applied to be a fellow of
the Royal Society, so taken on his owns, probably would
not have been very controversial. Like we said, he had
developed his own reputation by this point, but there had
been so much nepotism in the Royal Society under Joseph Banks.
Davey felt like if he supported Faraday's application, it would

(25:25):
look like he was just doing the same thing, so
he told Faraday to withdraw his application. Faraday refused, and
ultimately did become a Royal Society fellow. A number of
sources that I read when I was working on this
episode characterized Davy's behavior here as really arrogant and petty,

(25:47):
and suggest that he was suffering from kind of an
overinflated ego after his earlier years of such tremendous success.
My first thought is, okay, just recuse yourself from that process, dude.
I don't know what the bylaws were like, but it
does seem like there would have been other options. Yeah. Uh.
Davy also had some setbacks in his professional work. In

(26:10):
eighteen twenty three, he was asked to find a solution
for the corrosion that was degrading the copper sheeting used
on the hulls of warships. This was part of an
effort to scale back on naval spending, since at that
point Britain wasn't at war with another maritime power. Britain
was at war with the Ashanti Empire, but that did
not involve ships beyond transporting troops to what is now Ghana.

(26:33):
Davy's solution was based on the idea of cathodic protection.
Soldering another type of metal to the copper gave it
a negative electrical charge which stopped the corrosion, and after
testing this in a lab, Davy had Faraday try this
on three ships in a dockyard, and that seemed to work. However,
it turned out that the copper was what had been

(26:54):
keeping barnacles and other sea life from adhering to the hulls,
and this solution prevented that from happening. It had been
sort of leeching stuff into the water that was keeping
the barnacles from making their homes on the hull of
the ship. So instead of hulls that were covered and

(27:15):
corroded copper that needed to be replaced, the hulls were
instead covered in copper that was covered in barnacles, and
eventually enough barnacles would affect the ship's performance. This is
another moment that some sources interpret as coming from arrogance,
because those miners' lamps had worked in the field the

(27:37):
same as they had in the lab. And Davy seems
to have just assumed that the same would be true
of the ship protectors. In eighteen twenty four, Davey founded
the s and Am Club along with Secretary of the
Admiralty John Wilson, in part to try to cut down
on some of the divisions that were plaguing the Royal
Society by giving people who had ties to the Admiralty

(28:00):
another outlet. Davy served as the club's first chair and
Faraday was its first secretary. Two years later, Davy and
Stamford Raffles founded the Zoological Society of London, which helps
at the stage for the establishment of the London Zoo.
In September of eighteen twenty six, Davey's mother died, and
he attributed some of his own increasing health problems to

(28:23):
her passing. He was reelected as President of the Royal
Society in November of that year, but at that point
he was obviously unwell. A month later, he had a
stroke at the age of forty eight, while his father
also died at a really young age. There is some
speculation that Davy's years of self experimentation may have been

(28:46):
a factor in this early shift in his health. Humphrey's
brother John took him to Italy to try to recover,
and although his condition did improve, he wrote to his
wife and to Davy's Gilbert to say he planned to
resign as pre president of the Royal Society. He did
resign on November sixth, eighteen twenty seven, and he was
replaced by Davies Gilbert. He also worked on a book

(29:09):
on phishing called Salmonia or Days of fly Fishing. Humphrey
asked his wife to come join him in Italy, but
she couldn't, so he returned to England for a time
before heading back to the continent, this time accompanied by
a medical student named James Tobin. It occurs to me
I should have looked up whether Tobin was related to

(29:30):
his godfather. I don't actually know. Maybe Tobin took dictation
for another book of Davies, and that was a set
of memoirs and dialogues called Consolations in Travel or The
Last Days of a Philosopher, and that was published posthumously.
Humphrey had another stroke in February of eighteen twenty nine,

(29:52):
and his wife and brother were sent for Humphrey Davy
died on May twenty eighth, eighteen twenty nine, at the
age of fifty in Geneva, Switzerland. He had a fear
of being buried alive, and he had asked for his
burial to be delayed to make sure he really was deceased,
but the laws in Geneva did not allow for that
to happen. He was buried in Geneva, and his wife Jane,

(30:14):
later had a memorial tablet placed in Westminster Abbey. Davy
had been incredibly well known and well respected during his lifetime.
I mean we talked about him discovering a bunch of
different elements and inventing the miner's safety lamp, although there
were other people who did the same, but he was
soon really overshadowed by Michael Faraday. Sometimes Faraday is described

(30:37):
as Davy's greatest discovery. As a side note, when Faraday
was offered the presidency of the Royal Society on two
different occasions, he said no thanks. There is some presumption
that his experience watching Davy go through that made him like,
I don't want any part of that. Hard pass. Also,
in two thousand and eight, after the Royal Society of

(30:59):
Chemist asked for help in finding the medal that had
been awarded to him by the French. Family members reported
that at some point after Humphrey's death, Jane threw that
French medal right into the sea. She said that it
brought up bad memories. He didn't like France. Let's get
rid of him. That was the worst trip of our lives. Yeah, anyway,

(31:24):
Humphrey Davies kind of a journey. That's where I have
landed after all of this. We'll talk about him some
more on Friday and the behind the scenes. I have
an email from Phil Phil Route and said, I just
listened to your show on etiquette. It took me back
to memories of my childhood. We had a family friend

(31:46):
that was a socialite. We would often see her picture
in the society section of the paper. She was often
attending the best events throughout town, charities and other big events.
She would often try to teach us proper etiquette. I
have a feeling she wasn't sure we were getting proper
education in these areas from our parents. I grew up
in a family of four boys. So she gave us

(32:06):
a gift one year. The gift was a book published
in nineteen sixty nine, Stand Up, Shake hands, and say,
how do you do. I remember looking through it as
a kid, but the sections on attending someone's debutante ball
not sure if that's what they were called in the
book seemed so foreign to me. A few years ago,
we were cleaning out my mom's stuff after she'd died.

(32:27):
My brothers and I had a great weekend of telling stories.
As we went through all of the items and divided them,
we came across this book. My brothers are all a
few years older than I am. They told stories about
how strange the book was to them when they got it,
and the only thing they really used it for was
to learn how to tie a tie. I felt better
about my thoughts about the book because that was the

(32:48):
only thing I used it for as well. My dad
moved out of our house when I was about nine,
so I didn't have that around teach me that. I
always thought the book was a little pretentious and stuffy
for our lifestyle, but it brought great memories of our
dear family. Friend. What of my brothers has the book
at his house, so I can't refer back to it
or confirm exactly what is in the book. Your podcast
stirred that memory for me. Thanks for your show. I

(33:11):
am including a picture of Willow, our saint shepherd. She
is a goofy dog, but we love her. Phil. Thank
you so much, Phil for this email. I love this
whole story. I did you. I think that's a great
use for that book. It gave you one life skill.
That's all you need out of a book for it
to be valuable. Yeah, and also reminds me a little

(33:31):
bit of my spouse, who's not the youngest but is
also one of four boys who lost his dad at
a young age, so also raised by a mom. And
I'm like, did they have any etiquette books to try
to teach them things at their house? Most of the
stories I hear about their growing up involve my spouse

(33:53):
being put into dangerous situations by his older brother. Oh yeah. Also,
will Hell is such a sweet looking talk I mean,
and is cute standing in some snow. Cuteness cuteness beyond
all reckoning. Yes, So, thank you so much Phil for
this email. If you'd like to send us a note,
we're at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and uh

(34:17):
you can subscribe to the show wherever you'd like to
get podcasts, including the iHeartRadio app, any number of other
podcast apps, and on Friday, we'll talk about our own
behind the scenes thoughts on this episode. Stuff You Missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more

(34:39):
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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