12/11/23
Newsletter #528
The Crack of Dawn
I’ll finish the previous topic off because I started it. The third time I ended up in the nuthouse was for just talking about suicide to my sister and her then-husband. They didn’t take me seriously, but they still called the cops on me. Thus, I finally learned the lesson that you are not allowed to talk about suicide if you don’t mean it. You are in fact simply asking for help in code. If you actually mean to commit suicide, you do it, you don’t talk about it.
Upon my arrival in at 6 West, once again, nurses, techs and doctors said to me, “Mr. Becker, are you back? I honestly thought you wouldn’t be.” It was heartening to hear that they had believed in me, even if they were wrong. But no, it took me three outings (innings?), all in the summer of 2011. I did an 11-day stretch, a 12-day stretch, then a 13-day stretch, equaling 36-days. With two or three weeks in between stays, that ate up the entire summer.
I kept a meticulous journal throughout. Soon after I got home I wrote what I thought was a sequel to my memoir, Going Hollywood, which I cleverly entitled, Going Crazy. I worked on the book kind of hard for a while, but finally I had to drop it. Perhaps someday I’ll publish it, but not soon.
Moving on.
Here’s the kind of story that I find fascinating. Although I don’t own any guns, I am intrigued by their history, their mechanics, and their impact on other inventions. For instance, “Brown Bess:”
The British military rifle known as the “Brown Bess,” or Baker rifle, Bess was a flintlock or musket, like they used in the Revolutionary War – one shot at a time – was in service from 1800 to 1838, and they produced 22,000 of them. OK, what’s so special about that? So that these rifles could be fixed any time it was necessary, anywhere in the world, all of the parts had to be interchangeable. The Baker Rifle Company couldn’t make any part of the weapon individually by hand; every part had to be exactly uniform so they could be interchangeable. All of the parts had to be machined, which was done individually, but some of the parts were put together on an “assembly line” – where the parts moved past the workman who quickly assembled them.
This is where Henry Ford got the idea to build his cars, with an assembly line. From 1878, when Karl Benz patented the first internal combustion automobile (with three wheels), until Ford introduced the Model T in 1908 – that’s 30-years – every part of every car was made individually, then assembled one part at a time. That’s why cars did not proliferate for so long – they were insanely expensive, and they didn’t have interchangeable parts. If your carburetor broke, they had to machine a new one from a lump of iron.
Well, that’s interesting, but wait. . . There’s more.
The British military replaced the Brown Bess rifle with the Enfield Rifle in 1853, which was mechanically a big step forward, and much easier to load and fire. But here’s the thing: to get the paper cartridge that contained the gunpowder and the musket ball to go down the barrel (even with a rod pushing it) it still needed to be lubricated. The cheapest and easiest lubricants to procure in England at that time were beef and pig fat, which is what they used.
The jewel in the British crown (or empire) was India, which the British had controlled for a hundred years when the new Endfield rifle was introduced. As it happened, India was populated by Hindus, who venerated cows; and Muslims, who detested pigs. Among many other reasons – like the native people didn’t like being colonialized – was when the native population heard about the beef and pig fat being used in the rifle cartridges, they took it has a direct insult aimed at them – both Hindu and Muslim – and thus followed the Indian Rebellion of 1857. As I said, there were hundreds of reasons for this rebellion, which is also known as the Sepoy Mutiny, the Indian Mutiny, the Great Rebellion, the Revolt of 1857, the Indian Insurrection, and the First War of Independence.
But when the native Sepoy division of the British military were given these new Enfield weapons and cartridges, they’d had enough — that was their breaking point. The rebellion or mutiny was put down by 1858, but the fight for independence had just begun.
And one thoughtless decision in a rifle factory in England set it off.
And that’s all there is.
You have read an enormous number of newsletters. Very impressive. Now you know more about me than me.
I'm so glad you're back ! :) I hope you're doing great. Take care.