The Spoils of War: The Daiquiri - Cocktail History

In 1909 the USS Minnesota called at Guantanamo, Cuba. The skipper took the ship’s junior medical officer, Lt. Johnson, on a tour of Spanish American War battlefields. At the town of Daiquiri they met Jennings Cox, an American engineer, who treated them to a drink he had developed to temper the local rum. Cox called the drink a “daiquiri” in honor of the town.

On his return to the United States, Johnson immediately introduced the drink at the Army and Navy Club in Washington D.C. It was an immediate hit with officers who had served in the Spanish American War. When Johnson retired as a rear admiral he presented the Club with what is now one of its prized possessions, an account of how Jennings Cox made the drink: “He mixed in each glass a jigger of rum, the juice of half a lime, and a teaspoonful of sugar. He then filled the glass with a finely shaved ice and stirred it well. In that hot, humid weather the ice melted rapidly and the glass quickly became frosted.”
Link to: What Sherlock Holmes Drank


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The Martini is Born

The Martini is said to have originated in San Francisco just after the gold rush. It was invented by bartender Professor Jerry Thomas at the bar of the old Occidental Hotel in San Francisco. Thomas made the drink for a gold miner who was on his way to the town of Martinez, some forty miles to the east.

The citizens of Martinez deny this account. They say that around 1870 a miner from San Francisco stopped at a local saloon tended by one Julio Richelieu. The miner plunked a small sack of gold nuggets before the bartender, asked for a bottle of liquor, and as a bonus received an unusual drink in a small glass with an olive dropped into it. “What is it’, asked the miner. “That”, replied Richelieu, “is a Martinez cocktail”
Link to: What Sherlock Holmes Drank


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Historic Earthquakes: Washington D.C.

On March 9, 1828, an earthquake, centered in southwestern Virginia, attracted the attention of President John Quincy Adams as it rattled windows in Washington. President Adams reported the tremor felt like the heaving of a ship at sea. In March 1918, an earthquake emanating from the Shenandoah Valley broke windows in Washington and rippled over Northern Virginia. The tremor caused a terrifying noise and was commented upon by President Wilson at the White House. A White House staffer called a newspaper office to learn the cause of the terrifying noise.

Since 1977, Virginia has experienced some two hundred earthquakes, most of them small.Virginia is considered to be at moderate risk, with a ten to twenty percent chance of experiencing a 4.75 Richter scale quake. Quakes over 4.5 on the Richter scale topple buildings. Virginias’ most severe earthquake (5.8 on the Richter scale) occurred on May 31, 1897 in Pearisburg, the county seat of Giles County, in southwest Virginia. Closer to home, small earthquakes have startled local citizens. On September 29, 1997 a 2.5 Richter scale earthquake struck Manassas. One local resident reported he was "shaken, not stirred" after hearing what sounded like an unusually large sonic boom. On May 6, 2008 a so called “micro-earthquake” (magnitude 1.8) struck Annandale. Approximately one thousand micro-earthquakes occur everyday throughout the world and are only noticed if they hit high population density areas where they are most often noticed by people living in high rise buildings.



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Environmental Disasters: The Dust Bowl

The recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is not the first time that America has faced an environmental catastrophe of historic proportions. In the 1930s, Washington had to pay close attention to the disaster, however, because it arrived, literally, on Washington’s doorstep.

The most peculiar natural phenomena ever to hit Washington D.C. was a gigantic dust storm blowing in from the Great Plains. Years of environmental mismanagement on the Great Plains set the stage for a natural calamity. In 1931, a drought hit the Great Plains. Crops died and because the ground cover keeping the soil in place was gone, the naturally windy area began whipping up dust. Dust storms became problematic and continued to grow in intensity. In 1934 an enormous storm drove 350 tons of silt across the Great Plains as far as the East Coast. Ships three hundred miles off shore in the Atlantic reported collecting dust on their decks. In April 1935, a dust storm arrived in Washington from the Great Plains. A dusty gloom spread over the region and blotted out the sun. Meanwhile, in downtown Washington, conservationist Hugh Hammond Bennett was testifying before Congress about the need for soil conservation. Bennett explained, (pointing to the darkened skies over Washington) "This, gentlemen, is what I have been talking about." Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act the same year.



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A Nuclear Attack on Boston (Circa 1962)

Link to: Nuclear War 1962 (Alternate History)


In 1962 the New England Journal of Medicine published a paper describing the impact of a nuclear strike (20 megatons) on the Boston Metropolitan area.

Within 1/1000th of a second, a fireball envelops downtown Boston and reaches out for two miles in every direction from ground zero. Temperatures reach 20 million degrees Fahrenheit. People, buildings, cars, tress, everything within a two mile radius are vaporized. Winds in excess of 650 miles per hour roar outward to a distance of four miles, ripping apart and leveling everything. Ten miles from ground zero, the heat of the blast melts glass and sheet metal, and the 200 mile per hour winds flatten every house and business. The only things still standing are reinforced concrete buildings which are heavily damaged.

Sixteen miles from the center, the heat from the blast ignites houses, paper, clothes, leaves, gasoline, and heating fuel, starting hundreds of thousands of fires. The winds, still 100 miles per hour at this distance merge these fires into a giant firestorm thirty miles across that engulfs eight hundred square miles. The death rate is nearly one hundred percent. Thirty miles from ground zero the heat of the blast causes third degree burns on exposed skin. Even forty miles from the blast, anyone looking up at the sudden flash of light in the sky is instantly blinded. Ninety percent of the population would have been dead within one month of the attack.



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If the Nazis had Tactical Nuclear Weapons on D-Day

General Pliyev, the Soviet commander in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had twelve Luna Missiles in his arsenal. Each Luna had a range of 3l miles and a two-kiloton nuclear payload. Any tank or armored personnel carrier within 500 yards of the blast of one of these weapons would have been immediately destroyed. Un- protected soldiers 1,000 yards from the blast site would have died immediately. Those un-fortunate enough to survive the explosion and the winds would have suffered a painful death by radiation poisoning within two weeks. Had Luna Missiles been available to the Germans in World War II, the Nazis would have obliterated all five D-Day beachheads in 1944 with no more than ten of these weapons.




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American Nuclear Strategy (Circa 1960)

In the early 1960s both the size of nuclear stockpiles and available delivery systems, made decision makers think in terms of a “winnable” nuclear war. Nuclear war would have been horrible but survivable. It was not until the 1980s that “advances” in technology made the destruction of the entire human race one of the certainties of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.



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