London Evening Advertiser
- MOTHER RISKS LIFE TO SAVE BABE FROM FLAMES
- Insanity Is Not Hereditary, Teachers Are Told
- Skywriters Use Old Motor Oil
This partial reading of the London Evening Advertiser for October 29, 1926, covers three reports. A local story told how Mrs. Percy Sherritt of 58 Gunn Street ran back into her burning frame cottage and carried out her sleeping 2-month-old daughter a moment before the bed caught fire; a defective chimney was blamed, and the mother was left suffering from shock. A lecture report described a State University speaker telling teachers that insanity and dispositions are not inherited, only a nervous system liable to break under strain, so that proper self-care could prevent insanity. A New York item quoted an oil company president saying skywriters made their smoke by dribbling old crank-case oil into hot exhaust pipes, and that garages had begun burning such waste oil for heat.
This reading covers three excerpts from a partly legible page. The OCR was heavily garbled, so the text was transcribed from the page images. Some columns are cut at the edges between image tiles, and the lower right of the page is torn. The lecture report begins mid-sentence, so the speaker's name is lost and only "State University" survives. The skywriting item's speaker appears as McTarnahan in the transcription, although the transcription note gives the hyphen-split name as McFarnahan. The commentary does not cover chimney safety rules for frame cottages in London, Ontario, because no supporting source was available.
Translation
MOTHER RISKS LIFE TO SAVE BABE FROM FLAMES
Risking serious injury from the flames which were sweeping the interior of her dwelling, Mrs. Percy Sherritt, 58 Gunn street, this morning saved her baby girl, 2-months-old, from death as the inside of the Sherritt home was gutted by fire shortly after 11 o'clock. The baby was unharmed, but Mrs. Sherritt is now at the home of her husband's parents, suffering considerably from shock. The interior of the home, a one-story frame cottage, was badly damaged and most of the furniture destroyed. A defective chimney is blamed for the fire. Mrs. Sherritt lit a fire in the kitchen stove. After doing so she went into the yard to hang up some clothes which she had just washed. Turning around to go in the house she saw smoke issuing from the windows and doors. When she reached the house the walls were nearly all aflame. The baby was in a bedroom fast asleep. Acting impulsively Mrs. Sherritt, without regard for her own safety, rushed into the burning house and brought the baby out of the bedroom. A moment or so after the bed on which the baby had been sleeping took fire.
Insanity Is Not Hereditary, Teachers Are Told
[?] State University, advanced theories which must have come as a shock to many of his hearers, so contradictory were they to popular conceptions. Among other things he expressed the belief that children do not inherit their dispositions; that insanity is not inherited, and that nobody need worry if their whole ancestry were inmates of lunatic asylums and died there. All that the descendants of such people inherit, he claimed, is a nervous system which is liable to break under strain, but if the individual took proper care of himself there was no reason why he should ever go insane.
Skywriters Use Old Motor Oil
New York, Oct. 29. - "Airplane skywriters are using old automobile, crank-case oil for their ink, dribbling it into red-hot exhaust pipe to make a dense white smoke." according to William C. McTarnahan, president of the Petroleum Heat and Power Company. "Garages have long tried to purify old crank-case oil for refuse, but without success. A general use for this old automobile oil, however, has been discovered recently. There has been developed a special type of oil burner which burns this oil and many garage owners are now heating their plants with it, thereby converting a former nuisance into a profitable article."
Context
Goddard's Kallikak study had treated sanity as inherited
The surviving text of the lecture report has lost the speaker's name and keeps only the words "State University." Henry H. Goddard fits that clue, since he had been a professor in the Department of Abnormal and Clinical Psychology at Ohio State University since 1922. If he was the speaker, the views reported here ran against the book that made his name. In The Kallikak Family (1912), Goddard traced two family lines back to one ancestor and concluded that intelligence, sanity and morality were hereditary. The book's category of "feeble-mindedness" lumped together intellectual disability, learning disabilities and mental illness. Goddard drew a eugenic program from his conclusion and recommended segregating the "feeble-minded" in institutions so that they would not have children. A speaker who told teachers in 1926 that a family history of deaths in lunatic asylums need worry nobody was therefore rejecting the central assumption of that earlier work.
Goddard had begun retreating from his heredity claims in the 1920s
Goddard's methods drew criticism soon after The Kallikak Family appeared, and within ten years he himself came to agree with the critics and stopped endorsing his conclusions. By the 1920s he believed he had made numerous errors in his early research and regarded the book as obsolete. He spent the later part of his career on improving education, reforming environmental influences in childhood and publicizing better child-rearing practices. The Embryo Project's biography dates his self-questioning to the end of the 1920s and notes that he revised his view of the "feebleminded" as dangerous, observing that they seemed able to function in society. The two accounts differ slightly on timing; if the 1926 lecture was his, it would be an early public sign of the shift. The lecture's claim that a person who "took proper care of himself" need never go insane matches this turn toward environment and personal care, even though the speaker still granted that a vulnerable nervous system could be inherited.
In 1926 the inheritance of mental disease was still disputed in print and in court
The lecture reached teachers while the question was far from settled. Journalist Walter Lippmann had publicly doubted the premise of The Kallikak Family in 1922, and in 1926, the year of this report, psychiatrist Abraham Myerson published The Inheritance of Mental Disease, which criticized Goddard's work. The hereditarian side kept its influence all the same. Testimony at the Amherst County Courthouse in Virginia cited The Kallikak Family, and that case led to the 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell, which held constitutional a Virginia law allowing the forced sterilization of women deemed feebleminded. The lecture's claim that the descendants of asylum inmates inherited only a fragile nervous system thus belonged to a live dispute with legal consequences, and the following year the Supreme Court sided with compulsory sterilization.
In 1926 skywriting advertising was a novelty only about 4 years old
The first recorded use of skywriting for advertising came over the Derby at Epsom Downs in England in May 1922, and the first American skywritten advertisement followed on November 28, 1922, over Times Square in New York. The maker of Lucky Strike cigarettes became the first major corporate sponsor of skywriting. The medium took a while to become an important commercial advertising tool, yet by the mid-1920s city-dwellers would rush to a window at the mere sound of an airplane. In June 1923 a New York Times essay complained about skywriting's spread, and in 1926 a letter to the same paper disputed the origins of skywriting. By October 1926, then, skywriters were familiar enough that a New York oil executive could use their "ink" as a passing illustration in remarks about finding a use for old crank-case oil.
Skywriting smoke came from oil injected into hot exhaust, but the recipe was guarded
McTarnahan's description of oil dribbled into a red-hot exhaust pipe to make dense white smoke matches how skywriting planes worked from the start. Cyril Turner modified a wartime S.E.5a fighter for skywriting, installing a smoke-oil tank and valve to inject the liquid into the exhaust. Skywriting today still relies on the same principle: oil injected into the hot exhaust manifold vaporizes into a huge volume of dense white smoke. Skywriting firms kept the exact recipe for their smoke secret. By the late 1930s the Skywriting Corporation of America dominated the American business, and The New Yorker described its method as injecting a chemical into some kind of oil, with the exact ingredients kept secret. The skywriting histories do not confirm that waste crank-case oil was the usual ink in 1926; that statement rests on McTarnahan's word, and he offered it as part of a pitch for burning used oil as fuel.
Original
MOTHER RISKS LIFE TO SAVE BABE FROM FLAMES
Risking serious injury from the flames which were sweeping the interior of her dwelling, Mrs. Percy Sherritt, 58 Gunn street, this morning saved her baby girl, 2-months-old, from death as the inside of the Sherritt home was gutted by fire shortly after 11 o'clock. The baby was unharmed, but Mrs. Sherritt is now at the home of her husband's parents, suffering considerably from shock. The interior of the home, a one-story frame cottage, was badly damaged and most of the furniture destroyed. A defective chimney is blamed for the fire. Mrs. Sherritt lit a fire in the kitchen stove. After doing so she went into the yard to hang up some clothes which she had just washed. Turning around to go in the house she saw smoke issuing from the windows and doors. When she reached the house the walls were nearly all aflame. The baby was in a bedroom fast asleep. Acting impulsively Mrs. Sherritt, without regard for her own safety, rushed into the burning house and brought the baby out of the bedroom. A moment or so after the bed on which the baby had been sleeping took fire.
Insanity Is Not Hereditary, Teachers Are Told
[?] State University, advanced theories which must have come as a shock to many of his hearers, so contradictory were they to popular conceptions. Among other things he expressed the belief that children do not inherit their dispositions; that insanity is not inherited, and that nobody need worry if their whole ancestry were inmates of lunatic asylums and died there. All that the descendants of such people inherit, he claimed, is a nervous system which is liable to break under strain, but if the individual took proper care of himself there was no reason why he should ever go insane.
Skywriters Use Old Motor Oil
New York, Oct. 29. - " Airplane skywriters are using old automobile, crank-case oil for their ink, dribbling it into red-hot exhaust pipe to make a dense white smoke. " according to William C. McTarnahan, president of the Petroleum Heat and Power Company. " Garages have long tried to purify old crank-case oil for refuse, but without success. A general use for this old automobile oil, however, has been discovered recently. There has been developed a special type of oil burner which burns this oil and many garage owners are now heating their plants with it, thereby converting a former nuisance into a profitable article. "
Source: Holding institution