Nuculus the Stoic

Nuculus the Stoic made virtually no contribution to stoic philosophy; today he is known as one of the earliest challengers to Democritus’ atomic theory. Physics, such as it was in the Hellenistic era of the late 3rd century BC, acknowledged the possibility that there was a small indivisible unit of matter referred to as an ‘Atom’, derived from a greek term meaning ‘cannot be cut’. Nuculus, however, held to the view that there was no such lower limit on the size of matter, believing instead that the universe could smoothly be cut, down to an infinitesimal level. In an assertion that had more to do with intuition than real knowledge or experimentation, he suggested that cutting at a very fine level would release large amounts of energy.

While quantum mechanics, developed in the first half of the twentieth century, has demonstrated to a very high level of accuracy that Nuculus was wrong about the nature of the universe, his theories still dog us today, not in the domain of physics, but in the world of linguistics. When Rutherford discovered that the atom was mostly empty space, and that its mass was almost all concentrated in a small packet at the centre, he referred to this as the atom’s ‘nucleus’, using a latin term meaning ‘kernel’ or ‘nut’. A better physicist than classicist, Rutherford thus trod roughshod on the stoic’s much earlier assertions.

From this has arisen one of the more common debates in pronunciation, one that has purists on both sides up in arms. The classical model, that of Nuculus, was known for centuries as ‘nucular physics’, the ‘nucular theory’, and the energy Nuculus supposed would be released was called ‘nucular energy’. Rutherford’s discoveries earnt him the title of ‘The Father of Nuclear Physics’. The confusion between ‘nuclear’ and ‘nucular’ continues to this day, in the mouths of schoolboys and U.S. presidents alike. Had Rutherford known of the work of the stoic, he may, perhaps, have chosen a different name for his discovery.

Dick Pane

Every so often, an invention is named after a corporation, and the inventor is unjustly given scant recognition. Not so with Dick Pane, born on October 5th, 1968. Justifiably, he decided that his name should never be associated with any contribution to human endeavour, and it is for this reason that the display bus he invented in 1999 while a member of the Digital Display Working Group bears the name of an elderly neighbour, Donald Vine.

Pane was born in Glendale, California, at the time a relatively quiet town, separated from Los Angeles proper, and still untouched by the horrors of the Hillside Strangler for which it became known in the 1970s. Pane had an idyllic childhood, playing baseball with his friends after school, or hiking with his father up in the nearby Verdugo mountains, and playing cribbage with the old man who he would remember years later when naming his elegant digital serial connector.

Pane was part of a generation who were too young to have been seized with the excitement of the atomic space age, but who were just the right age to make their way in the explosion of high-tech industry in the pre-internet age. This was as much about developing innovative hardware solutions that could cope with higher and higher specifications as it was about the design of the software that would make a billionaire of Bill Gates, who had already established Microsoft by the time Pane reached the age of seven.

After graduating from CalTech, Pane went on to work at Xerox PARC for much of the 90s, before being headhunted to collaborate on the Digital Display Working Group. It was there that his reliable, durable 24-pin digital bus, a long-awaited replacement for VGA, was devised. Comparing it in his head to the cribbage board of his neighbour, and sure that naming it after himself would bring him only derision, the D(onald) V(ine) I(nterface) was born.

Not long after, Pane went missing while hiking in the Sierra Nevada, and never lived to see the invention, just three years later, of the HDMI, a bus that would replace his standard almost immediately.

Nomplos of Lesbos

Of the birth of Nomplos, there is no record; of his life, records are scant. He is believed to have been born on the islet of Aspronesia, in the first century BC. The earliest account of his life has him rescuing a herd of goats from a hillside during a wildfire. Though he attempted to take the goats down a well-established path, he found his way blocked by fire. Turning, he led the goats back up the mountain, and down a more circuitous route. Not a single goat perished in the flames.

Nomplos became leader of his local area, and shortly afterward, de facto ruler of the whole island. Legend remembers Nomplos’ rule as a time of peace and prosperity, during which the people of the island were twice besieged. On both occasions, Nomplos showed great steadiness and an immediate preparedness to act.

Nomplos would, perhaps have died in obscurity, were it not for the fact that in 79 BC, the island was acquired by Rome. The orator and writer Cicero visited the island on his tour of Greece, and met with Nomplos, recording that they sat in conversation for many days. Cicero particularly noted the character of Nomplos as one which could not be bought, could not be persuaded, and could not be riled. It has been suggested that Cicero’s imperturbable manner in the fluctuations of fortune that struck him over the course of his life were down to the constancy of temperament that he learned from Nomplos.

When Cicero became consul in 63 BC, he was often heard to insist that the senate behave in a way more like Nomplos, or, in the Latinised version of the name, Nonplusius. As Cicero fell from favour, the term became a pejorative, hurled at anyone who displayed opposite characteristics, such as confusion or indecision. It is from this that we inherit the participle adjective ‘nonplussed’.

Nomplos, meanwhile, died suddenly in 75 BC from an unknown cause. The annals of his reign record, with a simplicity and dignity that are a tribute to the spirit of the man, ‘In this year, on [October 3rd], we lost Nomplos.’

Isaiah Bock

Isaiah Bock was born on this day in 1900, the third son of jewish shopkeeping parents in north London. While his brothers continued the family trade, Isaiah had entrepreneurial bent. At 16, he had established a courier firm in Golders Green, principally taking letters and messages between businesses in the area, and occasionally ferrying items into central London. By 1920, this had grown to a parcel delivery and removals company.

Finding the latter service more lucrative, Bock soon turned over the entire business to domestic and commercial removals. Key to Bock’s success was the innovative use of materials that saved time and money for his removers. Hitherto, removals had been a time-consuming business, in which removers would pack, transport, and unpack the belongings of a household in an end-to-end service that could take days. Bock happened upon an invention of scotsman Robert Gair, the pre-cut paperboard container, made of a material that we now call corrugated cardboard. These containers were produced in vast quantities, and were so cheap that Bock soon found it paid simply to leave the containers with the moving households.

He began to offer an economy service, in which his business supplied the containers in advance. His workers would then arrive on an arranged date, transport the belongings to the new address, and leave without unpacking. This transformed the fortunes of the company and allowed him to expand well beyond the jewish community of north London.

Capitalising on movements of population following the First World War and increasing urbanisation of the British population, Bock’s removal company was soon expanded as a franchise, supplying vehicles, packing media and recruitment to removals firms all over the South East of England. His brand, Bock’s, was instantly recognisable, emblazoned on the side of his vehicles, and later, the corrugated cardboard containers that now bear his name.

Richard Parker

George, Charles and Edward Parker are famous today as the Parker Brothers, producers of multi-million selling board games Monopoly, Cluedo, and even the Ouija board. Less famous is the youngest Parker brother, Richard.

Richard was born on September 28th, 1876, to parents George and Sarah (née Hegeman) after an unexpected pregnancy when Sarah was already in her forties. While Richard was still a boy, his brother George, senior by ten years, had already established a board game company which he ran first on his own, and subsequently with the two other Parker Brothers, Charles and Edward. They would test the puzzles and board games they produced by playing them as a family, and young Richard became the standard by which all the Parker Brothers games were tested.

During these board game sessions, Richard would often improvise rules that subsequently became adopted when the games reached publication, a practice that his brothers, playing on the family surname, would refer to as ‘Parking’. When Monopoly was created in 1935, the second corner square, where no rent is payable, was named as a nod to this family tradition.

Richard Parker, meanwhile, did not show much flair for the board games business. He took a job at a state automotive PAC, representing a fledgling lobby of car drivers who had nowhere to leave their vehicles other than the side of the roadway. Accidents were commonplace, and as motorists became an increasingly vocal minority, so liability for damage became an increasingly serious financial problem for city authorities. Parker headed a subcommittee that demanded certain areas in cities be given over to stationary motor vehicles. Remembering his childhood, he referred to these in internal communications as Parking zones. The influence of the PAC grew over the course of the 1920s and 30s, and though Parker himself died in 1932, the term he created survived.

The origin of the term, though, in the name of a relatively junior policy lobbying clerk, was soon forgotten. Post-war houses were advertised as having ‘Off-Street Parking’, and the stationary gear in automatic cars was abbreviated to ‘Park’. Today, Richard’s contribution to the world of motoring is only recalled in the addition of a stylised image of a car to that famous Monopoly corner square.

Alvin Paul Sirius

Alvin Paul Sirius, born 26th September 1895, was a prolific bank robber on the East Coast of America during the 1920s and 30s. Arrested in 1944, he remained in jail until his death from injuries sustained during a riot at Joliet Prison in 1951.

Sirius’ criminal career is largely overlooked in the popular history of the period when Italian-American and Irish mobs rose to prominence and built legends around figures like Al Capone and Salvatore “Lucky Luciano” Lucania. By comparison, Sirius was restrained, modest, and prosaic in his sheer professionalism. He prided himself on the fact that, in over seventy bank jobs and vault crackings, there was not a single casualty, and only one injury - a teller who sprained his wrist in his haste to open a safe.

This reputation for professionalism and decorousness in the execution of his trade was in many ways his making. Police would often give Sirius the benefit of the doubt when investigating cases, preferring that a gentleman thief prosper over the violent Chicago mobs. One prosecutor in Philadelphia was fired for telling a journalist that he had deliberately diverted resources away from the pursuit of evidence against Sirius.

But in the end, it was Sirius’ relationship with law enforcement that spelt his downfall. Jealous of Sirius’ great success, Frank Nitti, one of the top henchmen to Al Capone, compiled a vast dossier of evidence, including details of his personal life, preferred background of his cracksmen, modus operandi - in short, a full profile that put to shame all the investigators that had given Sirius an easy ride throughout the 20s and 30s. After Nitti’s suicide in 1943, the file was discovered by the FBI, and used to convict Sirius. Following the trend of police word formation that has allowed the lazy creation of verbs such as ‘mirandize’, any criminal caught as a result of meticulous profiling came to be known as a ‘Sirial criminal’.

It is a sad tribute to such a masterful craftsman that the term Sirial, now usually spelled ‘serial’, is used today to describe a criminal who acts irresistibly, a prey to their impulses, rather than an elegant schemer like Sirius, the last of the true gentleman thieves.

Franceso Giambattista Tastiere

Francesco Giambattista Tastiere was baptised on 24th September, 1313, in the village of Lete, near Bologna, Italy. His father was a vellum merchant who prospered from the explosion of scholarly activity in Tuscany during the period known as the Italian Trecento. Tastiere grew up on the road with his father, travelling between cattle farms, parchment producers and the great university towns of Bologna, Siena, and the then newcomer, Florence. They would also travel to numerous monastic scriptoria, and it was in one of these that Tastiere’s father decided to leave his son, at the age of just eleven, to complete his education.

Tastiere had a good fist for letters, and by the age of eighteen, he had been inducted into the scriptorium at Vallombrosa, to the east of Florence, where he worked as a scribe copying texts principally in Latin, but also in the vernacular as the Italian language grew in prestige. With the invention mechanical printing some decades away, demand for this kind of work was high, and scribes like Tastiere were under constant pressure. In this environment, mistakes were time consuming and costly. Scribes had two alternatives. One was to underline the error with a dotted line, a process called ‘subpunction’. The other was to take a scalpel and scrape the surface of the parchment until the error was removed - this was known as ‘erasure’. Tastiere favoured the latter approach, as it left a cleaner manuscript, but was constantly frustrated by the precision needed to scrape parchment without the sheet ripping. To this end, he experimented with narrow blades that would erase just the surface of the parchment, cutting only a fixed depth into the sheet. Eventually he produced a device not unlike a modern safety razor that could perform this operation reliably and quickly.

The invention of printing at the end of the fourteenth century rapidly made Tastiere’s invention obsolete. The process, however, of rapidly erasing a mistake, still bears his name. Like many intellectuals of the Italian Renaissance, Tastiere was known not by his surname but by his town of origin, Lete. Di Letione or Di Lezione was rendered by contemporaneous English scribes as deletion, and from this, we inherit the verb ‘delete’.

Leonore Flag Housman

Leonore Charlotte Alexandra Flag Housman was a prominent member of the Women’s Freedom League, a suffragette organisation that broke away from the more famous Women’s Social and Political Union led by Christabel Pankhurst. Housman was distantly related to the poet and classicist of the same name through her father, Howard, a provincial judge. Her danish mother, Åse Flæg, had attended the university of Copenhagen, a relatively liberal institution, where she had become interested in the struggle for women’s suffrage. Flæg moved to England and married, but the Housman home was one in which progressive politics were often discussed, and Howard took pride in his wife’s involvement.

Leonore was born on the 21st September 1894. She attended St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, alma mater of Emily Davison, who threw herself in front of the king’s horse at the Derby in 1913. The death of an alumna in such circumstances galvanised many of the students to action on the streets of Oxford and subsequently London.

After leaving university, with the full support of her parents, Housman became an active member of a number of women’s suffrage groups. It was under her mother’s name that she campaigned, seeing this as a further means of demonstrating her commitment to women’s liberation. Her activities were the subject of derision in the press, particularly the Daily Mail. Housman was a zealous carrier of banners, and developed the habit of carrying two at once, each supported by a single pole. The technique caught on, particularly in the General Strike of 1926. Since the Mail had satirised this as ‘Flag marching’ and ‘Flag waving’ in reports on Housman’s earlier protests, the noun ‘flag’ was backformed and came to be used as the term for any such banner.

Housman herself remained politically active, campaigning for better working conditions for female munitions workers during the Second World War, and was made an honorary fellow of her old college in 1949. She died in 1960, and was buried in St. Cross Cemetery, Oxford, where her grave remains a site of pilgrimage for feminist undergraduates.

Comte de Tissault

Pierre Claude Justin Cleines was a French aristocrat, womaniser and bon vivant in the court of the Louis XIV. Over the course of fifteen years during which he was in favour at the court of the Sun King, he is said to have engaged in approximately eight thousand romantic liaisons - amounting to an average of about one every day and a half. He is credited with both the invention and the naming of the paper tissue, a word which is a corruption of his title, Comte de Tissault. It has also been suggested that his surname, Cleines, is the source of the brand name Kleenex.

As a young man, he would arrange his trysts by sending a silk handkerchief embroidered with a ‘T’ for ‘Tissault’. As he rose to prominence, and his conjugations rose in frequency, so too did the extravagance of these tokens. He exchanged silk for cloth of gold, picked out with silver-thread monograms. These lavish gifts were colloquially known as ‘Tissaults’. Such largesse did not come cheap, however, and by 1690, the Cleines estates at Tissault and elsewhere were heavily mortgaged.

Though Cleines maintained the outward appearance of wealth, the liaisons that he delighted in were becoming increasingly squalid. A list of inamorata that had once included a teenage courtesan who would go on to become the Marquise de Montespan now consisted of an impoverished procession of social climbers keen to enter the court circles by any means possible. Matching this decline was a decline in the tokens that Cleines distributed. Unable to afford gold or silk Tissaults, Cleines resorted first to linen and finally to paper, with a ‘T’ scrawled in ink. It is a testimony to the volume of these squalid love-notes that more than fifty survive in the museum collection at Versailles to this day.

Cleines’ end was predictable. Challenged to a duel by a jealous lover, the middle-aged and gouty Cleines’ swordsmanship was easily bested. He received a wound to the inner thigh, and died some days later, of infection or blood loss. His star had fallen so far that his burial place is not even known.

The Four Andrews of the Marsh

17th September marks the feast of the Four Andrews of the Marsh, celebrated in secret during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, by those loyal to the memory of the eponymous martyrs of London put to death by William the Conqueror’s troops in the years following the Norman invasion of 1066.

The Four Andrews (in Anglo Norman ‘les quatres andres de mareis’) belong to a tradition of holy fools that traces its origins to Diogenes the Cynic and Socrates in fifth and fourth century BC Greece, through Simeon Stylites in fourth century AD Syria, to the hermits of northern Europe in the middle ages. The only near-contemporary record, the Anglo-Norman Geste des Andres tells of how the early attempts by the Norman conquerors to bring London and its surrounds under administrative control was repeatedly thwarted by an old mystic named Andrew, who held them in check with elaborate conundrums delivered in the form of prayers. Eventually, William I ordered his arrest, only to discover another, nearly identical Andrew persisted with the same exploits. Only once four arrests had been made were William’s men able to go about their business unchecked. By this time, however, the Andrews had become local folk heroes, and the Andrews, now incarcerated in the newly-built Tower of London, were the subject of popular riots.

William may have felt backed into a corner by his administrators on the one hand and the public on the other. It may have simply been a lone soldier seeking promotion. One morning in 1082, the jailer of the Tower found all four Andrews murdered in their cells, each in an attitude of prayer. Fearing further public outcry, William had their bodies dumped in the Thames estuary. But the story was not over. For many years, sightings of the revenant Andrews were reported in London, always connected with the thwarting of bureaucratic interference in the lives of londoners.

Though the Four Andrews of the Marsh never achieved canonical status, they are recalled today in the French name of the city that was their charge. Maps made by Norman bureaucrats keen to warn their colleagues often mark the area ‘Les Andres’, and as the Norman tongue - and memory of the Andrews - faded in successive centuries, this often came to be written as L’Andres or L’Ondres. To this day, the French still know London by this name.

Santo Chain

Santangelo (Santo) Chain was an Italian-American New York municipal engineer. His name is probably an Ellis Island corruption of the Italian surname ‘Cena’. Born in the West Side of Manhattan on September 14th, 1928 to fervently religious parents, he grew up in an environment in which public service and personal piety were inseparable. Though he was sufficiently well-educated to be admitted, in 1946, to Brooklyn College as an undergraduate, after completing his studies he returned home to assist his parents with their lettings business and compassionate housing charity.

When both his parents died, barely five years later, from chest infections complicated by the polluted air of Manhattan, Chain sold the family business, investing the proceeds in the charity, and took a job working for the municipality, aiming to reduce delinquency by architectural modifications, as well as providing meaningful pastimes for the city’s growing youth population.

One of Chain’s innovations was the development of a series of basketball courts, taking over derelict sites across Manhattan. Initially it was decided that these should not be walled, in order to deter any covert criminal activity that could be concealed from police officers on foot. Rapidly, and following a spate of accidental window breakings that coincided with the opening of each court, pressure mounted to enclose the courts. Chain, loth to build solid walls for his original ideological reasons as well as the extraordinary cost in both materials and time, devised a system of interlinked galvanised wire supported on steel uprights that could be erected fifteen feet high with minimal effort and cost.

The patent was filed by Chain’s office as the Chain link-fence, alluding to the way in which the vertical wires of the fence connected with one another. Out of gratitude, the municipality handed the rights in their entirety to Chain, who in turn passed all proceeds directly into the charity established by his parents. By the time Chain died in 2010, his invention had become a ubiquitous feature of urban and rural landscapes internationally.

Ernst Friedrich Wahlpap

Ernst Friedrich Wahlpap was born on September 12, 1770 in Saxony, the youngest of five children, to Klaus and Hilde Wahlpap. He is credited with making the greatest innovation to interior design since the development of colourfast wall paint pigments.

The Wahlpaps had been a successful milling family in the small town of Müglitzal for at least four generations. As a teenager, Wahlpap is said to have been a troublesome child, both to his parents and to his teacher, an enlightened local churchman who educated the Wahlpap children in the rudiments of literature and theology, and who is the sole source for the early life of Wahlpap.

As young as sixteen, Wahlpap took to experimenting with the properties of flour in water, and before long, he had developed a workable flour and water paste with a working time of more than an hour. Initially used to seal cracks, it was when repairing a parchment skylight that Wahlpap realised the potential of his paste as connective medium.

Cheaper than pigmented paints, and more reliable than whitewash, Wahlpap found that paper adhered to walls also provided an absorbent surface to prevent the buildup of condensation on walls, and could be replaced easily by simply applying another layer of paper. Wahlpap’s innovation was spotted by a local aristocrat, who asked Wahlpap to coat a drawing room in his Schloss in plain paper. The aristocrat then employed an artist to decorate the paper, in a shortlived decorative style known as Papierfresko. Soon afterwards, however, manufacturers began to produce rolls of decorative paper.

Wahlpap, whose rudimentary education nevertheless put him head and shoulders above other manual labourers, was able to remain very close to his invention, and personally oversaw the decoration of a whole wing of Frederick Augustus I’s palace at the age of just 35. His fame spread to England, to the extravagant regency court, where he became a favourite decorator to the fops of the English elite. It was around this time that misunderstandings led to his name becoming confused with his invention, and it is of course as 'Wallpaper' that his simple miller's name lives on to this day.

Charles Allen

Born on September 10th 1879, Col. Charles George Peterkin de Vere Allen is remembered today mainly for his military work in the Canal Zone of Egypt following the 1922 unilateral declaration of independence. With Egypt under the premiership of Sarwat Pasha, Allen was promoted to the rank of colonel and commanded his regiment, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, until he was recalled to England in the mid-1930s to advise the admiralty on its Suez policy.

His name, however, like ‘laser’, ‘radar’ and more recently ‘taser’, has slipped into the vernacular by stealth as the word ‘cat’. Allen first became fascinated by felids while working in Egypt in the 1920s and 30s. Though he had grown up with family pets, he had never shown much affection for them. It was while browsing Egyptian antiquities with Howard Carter, a close personal friend of his, that he grew to think of the predatory mammals as superior to dogs, and wondered that they had ever lost the deific status that they had enjoyed under the pharaohs.

He gradually developed a collection of the animals, which would follow him into meetings on regimental inspections, and would travel with him if he were ever away from his home even for a single night. Military communiques from the time record this eccentricity, abbreviating for expediency’s sake what the staff had taken to calling ‘Charles Allen Tetrapods’. A typical example from June 1932 addressed to a reception committee arranged by Reza Shah, then Persian head of state, read ‘Expect Col Allen nineteen h STOP eight CATs also STOP’. This shows that by the mid-30s, the term was sufficiently well known to have spread to non-military English speakers.

Upon his death in 1950, Allen made provision for his taxidermied cats to be donated to the Ox and Bucks regimental museum. He also made provision for his six living cats to be cared for by officer cadets at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst for the remainder of their natural lives. The last died in 1957 at the age of 14.

Clarabella Bridle

Born on September 3, 1790, Clarabella Bridle belongs to a departed golden age of true British eccentrics. Much mocked during her lifetime, she was remembered with such affection that her hometown changed its name to permanently memorialise a cherished daughter.

Born to an affluent family on the North sea coast of Yorkshire, Bridle was expected to grow up and marry well. These hopes were dashed in early adolescence, when Bridle developed scoliosis that left her essentially unmarriageable. A remarkable physician from York recommended that she take regular exercise in order to minimise the impact of the deformity on her quality of life. In order to strengthen her back and mitigate the worst effects of the condition that would not be curable by surgery for more than a century, Bridle took to swimming in the sea off Flamborough head.

Swimming at the time was virtually unheard of as a recreational pursuit. The North Sea, particularly in winter, makes the undertaking daunting even in the era of neoprene wetsuits. Nevertheless, from the age of fourteen until her death at the age of 50, Bridle would take to the waters every day, except when ill-health or adverse weather made it impossible, and swim great distances, sometimes covering as much as four miles at a time. Since swimwear in a recognisable form would not be available for some decades, Bridle would perform this feat fully clothed. She became something of a curiosity, with locals gathering on Flamborough head to watch and cheer, not always in the best spirit.

As time went on, she attracted imitators, who, either for sport or their own health, joined her on her daily swim. The activity became known as ‘Bridling’, and her hometown became so well known for this diversion the people would travel from larger resorts like Scarborough and Filey in order to participate. After her death, the local mayor took the decision to rename the town ‘Bridlington’, a name it retains to this day.

Sir Arthur Butterman

Like many terms we use today - sandwich, for example - Sir Arthur Butterman has nothing to do with the invention of butter itself. Nevertheless, Butterman, born on this day in 1810, was responsible for bringing butter out of rural obscurity and onto the crumpets of the metropolitan elite.

The first Butterman to prosper was Sir Arthur’s father. The Buttermans had long been greengrocers in Tottenham Hale, serving the poor community of timber workers in the area. Henry Butterman took the decision to relocate his family to central London, where his shop, on the north bank of the Thames at Blackfriars, became a financial success selling to the households of the growing numbers of comparatively wealthy clerks and administrators of the city’s financial district. Arthur Butterman grew up the eldest of four sons, and upon coming of age, Henry purchased a new lease for each of them. Having begun as simple greengrocers, the Buttermans were now a chain.

Arthur’s brothers sold their shops to him over the course of the 1850s, and by 1857, he was the sole proprietor of four shops in the city of London and controlled distribution to shops as far west as the Strand. Among his best-selling products was a dairy alternative to lard, preferred for its light flavour and smooth spreading at relatively low temperatures. Marketed initially as ‘Butterman’s Dairy Lard’ and subsequently as ‘Butterman’s Spread’, it rapidly came to be known simply as ‘Butter’.

It is unclear how a portion of Butterman’s Spread made its way to Windsor, but by 1870, Butterman could include the royal seal packets of his spread, proudly proclaiming that he was a supplier by royal appointment. He was knighted for services to commerce shortly before his death from apoplexy in 1891.

Laars van Muskijt

Today marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of Laars van Muskijt, the Dutch collector and taxonomist credited with the discovery of the mosquito, an insect which still bears his name to this day. Van Muskijt was born into a diplomatic family living in Castile, and it is to this geographical rather than national pedigree that the mosquito owes the distinctly Spanish character of its name.

As a young man, van Muskijt trained as a physician. He was financially well supported and spent many years travelling to the top centres for medical research at the time, including Heidelberg, Bologna and the Sorbonne in Paris. At the time, malaria was an endemic disease in many parts of Europe, as far north as the marshes around London. He became increasingly interested in the aetiology of the disease, and spent a great deal of time in the marshy environments in which the disease was most prevalent.

Curiously, until this time, the itchy, red welts had not been linked to the insects’ bites, perhaps owing to the fact that rich, well-educated people simply did not overlap with the breeding environment of the mosquito. Van Muskijt was immediately lauded for his discovery, although he failed to connect it to the primary subject of his research: the role of mosquitoes as a vector for disease was not understood until the end of the 19th century.