Good morning, Whitewater.

Monday in the Whippet City will bring a one-third chance of thunderstorms and a high of eighty-nine.

UW-Whitewater Chancellor Richard Telfer is scheduled to deliver a state of the university speech today at 10:30 AM.  This evening, the Whitewater Unified School District governance committee meets at 6:30 PM, with a regular meeting following at 7 PM.

On this day in 1835, the Great Moon Hoax begins:

“The Great Moon Hoax” refers to a series of six articles that were published in The Sun, a New York newspaper, beginning on August 25, 1835, about the supposed discovery of life and even civilization on the Moon. The discoveries were falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel, perhaps the best-known astronomer of his time.^[opinion]

The story was advertised on August 21, 1835, as an upcoming feature allegedly reprinted from The Edinburgh Courant.^[1] The first in a series of six was published four days later on August 25….

“GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIESLATELY MADEBY SIR JOHN HERSCHEL, L.L.D. F.R.S. &c.At the Cape of Good Hope[From Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science]”

The articles described fantastic animals on the Moon, including bison, goats, unicorns, bipedal tail-less beavers and bat-like winged humanoids (“Vespertilio-homo“) who built temples. There were trees, oceans and beaches. These discoveries were supposedly made with “an immense telescope of an entirely new principle.”

The author of the narrative was ostensibly Dr. Andrew Grant, the travelling companion and amanuensis of Sir John Herschel, but Grant was fictitious.

Eventually, the authors announced that the observations had been terminated by the destruction of the telescope, by means of the Sun causing the lens to act as a “burning glass,” setting fire to the observatory.^[2]

Google-a-Day asks a question about geography:

What group of islands in the Pacific are part of the same volcanic zone and was named from the Greek words meaning “small” and “island”?

Good morning, Whitewater.

Sunday in the city will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 6:11 AM and sunset 7:43 PM. The moon is a waning crescent with only one-percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Americans have been to the moon six times, but that hasn’t stopped crackpots from claiming that we’ve never been there. Here’s a video that explains, in just two minutes, evidence that humans have landed and explored the surface of Earth’s only natural satellite:

On this day in AD 79, Vesuvius erupts:

In AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted in one of the most catastrophic and infamous eruptions in European history. Historians have learned about the eruption from the eyewitness account of Pliny the Younger, a Roman administrator and poet.^[1]

Mount Vesuvius spewed a deadly cloud of volcanic gas, stones, ash and fumes to a height of 33 km (20.5 miles), ejecting molten rock and pulverized pumice at the rate of 1.5 million tons per second, ultimately releasing a hundred thousand times the thermal energy of the Hiroshima bombing.^[2] The towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum were obliterated and buried underneath massive pyroclastic surges and ashfall deposits.^[1][2] An estimated 16,000 people died in the eruption.

One thousand, nine-hundred thirty-four years later, in February 2014, Sony Pictures distributed, Pompeii, a poorly-received box office failure about the natural disaster.

On this day in 1857, Wisconsin panics:

1857 – Panic of 1857

On this date the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company failed, launching the Panic of 1857. Stocks plunged; banks and businesses across the nation, including many Wisconsin-based ventures, collapsed. The Panic of 1857 led to a depression that lasted three years until the beginning of the Civil War. [Source: American Memory Today in History]

Good morning, Whitewater.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy, with a high of eighty-five, and a one-third chance of afternoon thundershowers.

Yesterday’s FW poll asked if, as is now lawful in California, patrons should be allowed to bring dogs onto restaurant patios. Just over 77% of respondents answered affirmatively, in favor of dogs’ dining out.

Cookbook author Fannie Farmer opened a cooking school on this day in 1902:

Fannie published her best-known work, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, in 1896. Her cookbook introduced the concept of using standardized measuring spoons and cups, as well as level measurement. A follow-up to an earlier version called Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book, published by Mary J. Lincoln in 1884, the book under Farmer’s direction eventually contained 1,850 recipes, from milk toast to Zigaras à la Russe. Farmer also included essays on housekeeping, cleaning, canning and drying fruits and vegetables, and nutritional information

The book’s publisher (Little, Brown & Company) did not predict good sales and limited the first edition to 3,000 copies, published at the author’s expense.[1][2] The book was so popular in America, so thorough, and so comprehensive that cooks would refer to later editions simply as the “Fannie Farmer cookbook”, and it is still available in print over 100 years later.

Farmer provided scientific explanations of the chemical processes that occur in food during cooking, and also helped to standardize the system of measurements used in cooking in the USA. Before the Cookbook’s publication, other American recipes frequently called for amounts such as “a piece of butter the size of an egg” or “a teacup of milk.” Farmer’s systematic discussion of measurement — “A cupful is measured level … A tablespoonful is measured level. A teaspoonful is measured level.” — led to her being named “the mother of level measurements.”

Farmer left the Boston Cooking School in 1902 and created Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery.[3] She began by teaching gentlewomen and housewives the rudiments of plain and fancy cooking, but her interests eventually led her to develop a complete work of diet and nutrition for the ill, titled Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent. Farmer was invited to lecture at Harvard Medical School and began teaching convalescent diet and nutrition to doctors and nurses. She felt so strongly about the significance of proper food for the sick that she believed she would be remembered chiefly by her work in that field, as opposed to her work in household and fancy cookery. Farmer understood perhaps better than anyone else at the time the value of appearance, taste, and presentation of sickroom food to ill and wasted people with poor appetites; she ranked these qualities over cost and nutritional value in importance.

Good morning, Whitewater.

Friday in town will be cloudy with a high of about eighty-five.

On this day in 1776, the British arrive in New York:

…the British arrive at Long Island, between Gravesend and New Utrecht, with “near twenty four thousand men ready to land in a moment,” according to one observer.

General William Howe’s large army came to Long Island hoping to capture New York City and gain control of the Hudson River, a victory that would divide the rebellious colonies in half. Five days later, on August 27, the Redcoats marched against the Patriot position at Brooklyn Heights, overcoming the Americans at Gowanus Pass and then outflanking the entire Continental Army. The Americans suffered 1,000 casualties to the British loss of only 400 men during the fighting. Howe chose not to follow the advice of his subordinates, however, and did not storm the Patriot redoubts at Brooklyn Heights, where he could have taken the Patriots’ military leadership prisoner and ended the rebellion.

General Washington ordered a retreat to Manhattan by boat. The British could easily have prevented this retreat and captured most of the Patriot officer corps, including Washington. However, General William and Admiral Richard Howe still hoped to convince the Americans to rejoin the British empire in the wake of the humiliating defeat, instead of forcing the former colonies into submission after executing Washington and his officers as traitors. On September 11, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and other congressional representatives reopened negotiations with the Howe brothers on Staten Island. The negotiations fell through when the British refused to accept American independence.

The British captured New York City on September 15; it would remain in British hands until the end of the war.

Google-a-Day asks a history question:

For whom was the ship, on which the man who served as governor for 12 of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s first 20 years sailed to the New World, named?