Today in History: 1877 - First human cannonball act performed at the Royal Aquarium in London
Westminster can claim many ‘firsts’, from the world’s first traffic lights to the first television. But who knew that the first human cannonball was fired into the air just across the road from the Houses of Parliament?
The unenviable pioneer was a 14-year-old girl called Rossa Matilda Richter, stage name Zazel.
On 2 April 1877, the teen made ballistic history when fired from a spring-operated cannon at the Royal Aquarium. The device propelled her a little over six-metres (20 feet) across the auditorium and into a net. Pow!
Those flames look impressive, but it’s all pyrotechnic trickery. The cannon used a rubber-spring, known as a vampire trap, to launch Zazel — no gunpowder needed.
The faux-mortar was developed by William Leonard Hunt, AKA ‘The Great Farini’. Hunt was a well-known tightrope walker who would later become the first to cross the Kalahari desert on foot.
His patented cannon quickly became a sensation in Westminster, while Zazel took on celebrity status. Newspapers fell over themselves to report on her beauty and bravery. The Illustrated Police News placed her act in prime position, at the top of its front page:
Zazel’s cannonball act toured the country. She was eventually poached by circus king PT Barnum, and headed over the Atlantic to impress an American audience.
Sadly, Zazel’s career in death defiance came to a premature end in 1891. While performing a ‘leap for life’ in Las Vegas, her safety wire snapped. She fell 50 feet to the ground, breaking her back. Zazel survived, but never performed again. She died in 1937.
Her tale is one of the many forgotten wonders of the Royal Aquarium. This grand building once stood opposite Westminster Abbey, and is now the location of Methodist Central Hall. Strange to think that the bongs of Big Ben were once syncopated by the boom of a novelty cannon.
Read more here: The Human Cannonball Of Westminster | Londonist
Also on this day:
1513 Explorer Juan Ponce de León claims Florida for Spain as the first known European to reach Florida
1595 Cornelis de Houtman’s ships depart Holland for Asia via the Cape of Good Hope on the 1st Dutch Expedition to the East Indies (Indonesia)
1755 Commodore William James captures the pirate fortress of Suvarnadurg on west coast of India
1792 The Coinage Act is passed establishing the United States Mint and authorizing the $10 Eagle, $5 half-Eagle & 2.50 quarter-Eagle gold coins & silver dollar, ½ dollar, quarter, dime & half-dime
1827 US inventor Joseph Dixon of Salem, Massachusetts, begins manufacturing lead pencils
1845 H L Fizeau & Leon Foucault take 1st photo of the Sun
1866 US President Andrew Johnson ends civil war in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee & Virginia
1912 RMS Titanic undergoes sea trials under its own power
1917 US President Woodrow Wilson asks Congress to declare war against Germany
1921 Albert Einstein lectures in New York City on his new “Theory of Relativity”
1931 17-year old girl Jackie Mitchell strikes out New York Yankees stars Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition baseball game at Engel Stadium in Chattanooga, Tennessee
1932 Charles Lindbergh turns over $50,000 as ransom for his kidnapped son
1935 Scottish physicist Robert Watson-Watt receives a British patent for RADAR
1968 “2001 A Space Odyssey” directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, premieres at the Uptown Theatre in Washington, D.C.
1982 Several thousand Argentine troops invade and seize the Falkland Islands from the United Kingdom
2023 Footage of deepest living fish ever recorded, the snailfish, released caught on camera at depth of 27,349 feet (8,336 meters) in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench, south of Japan
2023 Lake Tulare, once the largest body of water west of the Mississippi, re-emerges after a series of storms in California’s Central Valley to cover 160 square miles
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1977 Michael Fassbender - Irish-German actor (Shame: X-Men), born in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg
1975 Pedro Pascal - Chilean-American actor (Game of Thrones; Narcos; The Mandalorian), born in Santiago, Chile
1914 Sir Alec Guinness - British actor (The Ladykillers, The Bridge on the River Kwai), born in London, England (d. 2000)
1840 Émile Zola - French novelist and critic (J’accuse - I Accuse), born in Paris, France (d. 1902)
1805 Hans Christian Andersen - Danish author of 150 fairy tales (The Ugly Duckling, The Snow Queen), born in Odense, Denmark (d. 1875)
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2020 Eddie Large [McGinnis] - British comedian (Little and Large), dies of heart issues and COVID-19 complications at 78
2005 Pope John Paul II - 264th Roman Catholic Pope (1978-2005), dies of heart failure at 84
2003 Edwin Starr [Hatcher] - American soul and R&B singer (“War”; “Twenty Five Miles”), dies of a heart attack at 61
1987 Buddy Rich - American jazz drummer and bandleader (Buddy Rich Band - “Away We Go”), dies at 69
1872 Samuel Morse - American painter and inventor of the electric telegraph and Morse Code, dies at 80
Holidays on this day
Childhelp National Day of Hope (First Wednesday in April)
Global Day of the Engineer (First Wednesday in April)
International Children’s Book Day
International Fact-Checking Day
National Day of Hope (First Wednesday in April)
National Ferret Day
National Love Your Produce Manager Day
National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day
National Walking Day (First Wednesday in April)
Paraprofessional Appreciation Day (First Wednesday in April)
Pascua Florida Day (Usually on April 2nd) (Local Observance in Florida State)
Reconciliation Day
World Autism Awareness Day
The Funnies:
Interesting (not necessarily extinct) animal of the day:
The earliest naturalists, palaeontologists, and artists were trying to understand these extinct Felids, the Family that all cats belong to. The group we call Sabre-toothed Cats, the Machairodontinae, is a subfamily of the Felidae that went extinct by the end of the Pleistocene. Tigers (Panthera tigris) belong to the subfamily Pantherinae, which includes all the true big cats such as lions, leopards, jaguars, and snow leopards.
Many of the common names we use for cats have broad associations such as “panther” “wild cat” or “leopard” (such as “snow leopard” and “clouded leopard”) and these names do not indicate close relationships but instead are more descriptive of what the animal looks like. When fossils of Sabre-toothed Cats were discovered, scientists attempted to compare them with animals that they were more familiar with. Tigers are amongst the oldest of the big cats, they are the largest cats alive today, and have the biggest teeth.
The first Sabre-toothed Cat fossils were found in places like Turkey, Brazil, and North America. Some of these fossils were misidentified as other carnivores at first such as hyenas and bears, and mistaken identities became a recurring theme with these strange felines. Early scientists called them Machairodus, a “wastebasket taxon” that most Sabre-toothed Cats were lumped into. When a Smilodon tooth was discovered at the Hancock Asphalt Quarry at Rancho La Brea in 1875, it was first identified as a “species of Machairodus” by geologist William Denton.
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, an early naturalist who depicted dinosaurs and other extinct animals in sculpture at an exhibition at the Crystal Palace, also made his attempt to depict these foreign-looking felines in the mid-19th century. His lithograph “Struggles of Life Among the British Animals of Primeval Times” from 1853 depicts two Sabre-toothed Cats attacking an extinct hippopotamus, and a third being swung around by the trunk of a mammoth. These were labelled “Scimitar-toothed Lions” and nearby a “cave tiger” stalks an extinct ox. So the labels of “Sabre-toothed Tiger” and “cave lion” in some of these early images are reversed.
Late 19th and early 20th century artists began depicting extinct Sabre-toothed Cats as tigers, crouching and stalking prey because some of them were assumed to be ambush predators as well. These scientists were basing their assumptions on what modern animals they had to compare them to. For example, the Thylacine sometimes called a “Tasmanian tiger” with its stripes and large jaw gape. Even though it was a marsupial, and was still alive at the time of many of these earliest works of paleoart, they still were assigned the label of “tiger” because of their stripes, even though they had no close genetic relationship.
The European naturalists, scientists, and artists of the 19th century were part of imperialist systems that collected specimens from around the globe. World powers of the day like the British Empire collected tigers from hunting expeditions, and taxidermists of the time gave these animals a distinctive crouching posture that mimicked the political cartoons of the era. These cartoons were rife with colonial imagery and subtext, but they associated tigers with a primordial or primitive nature which they also associated with their colonial subjects. European scientists were studying these animals and putting them into Linnaean classifications just as they were with fossils, trying to piece together clues to understand their relationships with other animals. The artists that accompanied these scientists may have based their paleoart on the interpretations of these crouched, taxidermied tigers and filled their depictions with their cultural biases.
These early images of Sabre-toothed Cats became more standardized in the early 20th century, cementing the association of Sabre-toothed Cats and tigers for many years. One of the main reasons for this is that it is easier and more pleasing to say “Sabre-toothed Tiger” because of the alliteration and it becomes a recognizable mnemonic device. Images and sounds can reinforce these ideas, and species recognition plays a prominent role. Tigers are the most recognizable cats visually, and as a result the association helps us recognize and distinguish this unique cat from the past. Media in the form of books, movies, television, and video games can perpetuate this stereotype, or allow for creative license for artists to interpret them in new ways.
La Brea Tar Pits have long been depicting Smilodon with fur that is neutral. No mane, colour, or coat pattern was used in early images besides a tawny colour similar to a lion or cougar. More recent depictions from the 1970s and onward tend to favour a spotted coat, which is more common in the world of cats for ambush hunters. Smilodon has long been a symbol of the Tar Pits campus because that’s where the fossils had been displayed for decades until the then-new Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries was opened in 1977, where the Smilodon became an icon for a new era of Tar Pits exploration.
Today, the term sticks, much like the sticky tar where over 2,500 Smilodon have been uncovered from the asphaltic deposits at La Brea Tar Pits. People continue to use terms like “Sabre-toothed Tiger’’ because it’s easy and fun to say, and they are an easily recognizable animal from the Ice Age, just like tigers are easy to spot in the media today.
Source: The Species That Went Extinct Twice
Quote of the Day:
“Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.”
-Professor Stephen Hawking
Video of the Day:
Happy birthday to Marvin Gaye (1939):
and to Greg Camp (1967):
and in memory of Edwin Starr (2003)
Comic of the Day:
Credit: #1040; In which Theo does not Like – Wondermark
Inspirobot Always Controversial, Occasionally Inspirational Quote of the Day:
Read @Vikingmichael’s foolish Spark! from https://community.spiceworks.com/t/spark-pro-series-1st-april-2025
Don’t forget to leave some spice right here ↓
