The Straight Dope 17/15/2005

The Straight Dope -- By Cecil Adams
http://www.straightdope.com

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THE STRAIGHT DOPE 17/15/2005

Dear Cecil:

While attending a Nancy Drew conference this weekend, I
heard the strangest story. In discussing the influence of
orientalism on early Nancy Drew cover art (really), one
speaker related an anecdote the cover artist used to
tell. Apparently a group of Eskimos were brought to a New
York City museum in the 1930s. They were cruelly put on
display so that visitors could feed them raw fish for a
small charge. It gets worse. Apparently said Eskimos died
(I'm not clear on how), and the proprietors had them
stuffed and put back on display. Relatives in Alaska,
wondering what had happened, made the journey to New York
to find their family members taxidermed. Naturally, in
true Nancy Drew fashion, members of the audience were
skeptical and asked for evidence, but the speaker
insisted that it was so and said he'd read editorials
from the New York papers at the time expressing outrage.
Is there--could there possibly be--any truth to this
story? --Stefan Petrucha, via e-mail

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Cecil replies:

On first reading your letter I thought: That's one Nancy
Drew conference speaker who could stand to get a clue.
However, my steadfast assistant Bibliophage, whom I rely
on to keep me abreast of developments in world
literature, called my attention to Kenn Harper's Give Me
My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo
(1986, republished 2000). Long story (277 pages) short,
the account you heard was garbled--the Eskimos, or more
properly the Inuit, were from Greenland, not Alaska, and
the year was 1897, not anytime in the 1930s. But in its
grim essentials the story is true.

For more, see:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/050715.html

STAFF REPORT

Dear Straight Dope:

There is a question on the table that I would like to be
able to answer before my friend can so that I can seem
like the smart guy: What is the difference between an
engine's horsepower and torque? Apparently, this is a
question that neither reference manuals or mechanics can
give a satisfactory answer to. If any genius in the world
can get this straight, you can. --Name withheld, Chicago

Dear Straight Dope:

I was looking to buy my first car and had an interesting
question come to mind. What is "Horse Power"? How is it
measured? I'm sure it has something to do with how much a
horse could pull, not how many horses could be pulled.
But what horse breed do they use, and what's it pulling?
--Name withheld, Charleston, South Carolina   

SDSTAFF Una replies: 

Measures of engine performance such as torque and
horsepower are relatively simple, yet are often badly
misunderstood by the public. Some of this
misunderstanding is due to automobile advertising, some
to people having just enough knowledge to be dangerous,
and some to the continuing death-spiral of science
education in America. I'll begin by explaining power vs.
horsepower, then torque and how it is related to power.
Finally I'll give examples of why knowing something about
these concepts is important when comparing automobile
engines.

First, let's note that horsepower is a unit of
measurement for power, just as the foot is a unit of
measurement for length. Horsepower actually measures the
same thing that watts (W) does--the power that a device
can create or consume. Just as a rating on a light bulb
tells you how much power it will use, an automobile
engine specification tells you how much power the engine
can produce. 

For more, see: 
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mhorsepower.html

STRAIGHT DOPE CLASSIC - 10/24/1986

Dear Cecil: 

Did the French queen, Marie Antoinette, ever actually
utter the phrase, "Let them eat cake"? I have a friend
who claims that Crazy Marie actually said something in
French that, in phonetic spelling, merely sounded like
"Let them eat cake." Is the line in a class with Humphrey
Bogart's "Play it again, Sam"--i.e., bogus? --Willie H.,
Chicago

Dear Willie:  

I have a dream that someday one of these alleged facts
of history is actually going to pan out. However, today is
not the day. While Marie Antoinette was certainly
enough of a bubblehead to have said the phrase in
question, there is no evidence that she actually did so,
and in any case she did not originate it. The 
peasants-have-no-bread story was in common currency
at least since the 1760s as an illustration of the decadence
of the aristocracy. The political philosopher Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau mentions it in his Confessions in connection with
an incident that occurred in 1740. (He stole wine while working
as a tutor in Lyons and then had problems trying to scrounge up
something to eat along with it.) He concludes thusly:
"Finally I remembered the way out suggested by a great
princess when told that the peasants had no bread: 'Well,
let them eat cake.'"   

Now, J.-J. may have been embroidering this yarn with a line he
had really heard many years later. But even so, at the time he was
writing--early 1766--Marie Antoinette was only ten years
old and still four years away from her marriage to the
future Louis XVI. Writer Alphonse Karr in 1843 claimed
that the line originated with a certain Duchess of
Tuscany in 1760 or earlier, and that it was attributed to
Marie Antoinette in 1789 by radical agitators who were
trying to turn the populace against her.  

For more, see:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_334.html

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