On this day in 1938, in a world seeing war on the horizon, Orson Welles’ realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth based on the H.G. Wells 1898 novel War Of The Worlds, but updated by Welles and his Mercury Theater group, was broadcast on the radio. (Here is a link to the History.com piece on the broadcast and here is a link to the Smithsonian story.)
Here are the first two paragraphs from Smithsonian:
“On Halloween morning, 1938, Orson Welles awoke to find himself the most talked about man in America. The night before, Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air had performed a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, converting the 40-year-old novel into fake news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey. Some listeners mistook those bulletins for the real thing, and their anxious phone calls to police, newspaper offices, and radio stations convinced many journalists that the show had caused nationwide hysteria. By the next morning, the 23-year-old Welles’s face and name were on the front pages of newspapers coast-to-coast, along with headlines about the mass panic his CBS broadcast had allegedly inspired.
Welles barely had time to glance at the papers, leaving him with only a horribly vague sense of what he had done to the country. He’d heard reports of mass stampedes, of suicides, and of angered listeners threatening to shoot him on sight. “If I’d planned to wreck my career,” he told several people at the time, “I couldn’t have gone about it better.” With his livelihood (and possibly even his freedom) on the line, Welles went before dozens of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen at a hastily arranged press conference in the CBS building. Each journalist asked him some variation of the same basic question: Had he intended, or did he at all anticipate, that War of the Worlds would throw its audience into panic?”
For some reason, the War Of The Worlds story reminds me that Gary Dahl, the man who “invented” the Pet Rock, became a millionaire from his “invention.” When people tell me that some TV show or some singer is popular, I often think of Gary Dahl and Orson Welles’ radio presentation of The War of the Worlds.
Mass delusion of any kind, like mass hysteria (now, apparently, known as mass psychogenic illness), is not as hard to find as mental health professionals might tell us, in my opinion. I believe that cult of personality and blind adherence to ideology, while not technically a mass delusion, are similar in nature being an inexplicable and intense manifestation of a non-physical cause.
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On this day in 1995 the Québécois, by a very small margin, voted to reject a referendum that, if passed, might very well have led to the Quebec province seceding from Canada. (Of course, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled–after the fact–that the unilateral secession contemplated in the referendum was illegal. This ex post facto and largely irrelevant, in my opinion, ruling was like that of the US Supreme Court in Texas v. White when it ruled in 1869–four years after the end of the US Civil War–the Constitution did not permit states to unilaterally secede from the United States. As I have written before, I believe that if a group of states decides it no longer wants to be a part of the US nothing short of armed conflict can stop it.)
Although any reclassification of the status of Alberta province is a long shot, in the 1970s a movement began in that province espousing a desire for Alberta to become an independent country. That desire has never completely disappeared. A current group called Alberta 51 advocates for Alberta to leave Canada and join the US as the 51st state. In his 2014 book, The Accidental Superpower, Peter Zeihan wrote that both Alberta and the US would benefit from such a move while stating, “The core issue is pretty simple. While the Québécois—and to a slightly lesser degree the rest of Canada—now need Alberta to maintain their standard of living, the Albertans now need not to be a part of Canada in order to maintain theirs.”
NOTHING lasts forever. Where is the Roman Empire? Where is the Third Reich? Where is the Ottoman Empire? Just because something has lasted a long time doesn’t mean it will continue to do so indefinitely.
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So, what happened on this day in automotive history? On this day in 1963 the Lamborghini 350GTV prototype debuted at the Turin Motor Show. Hopefully, the picture below shows that car.
The company’s first production model, the 350GT, was based on this prototype and built from 1964 to 1966. Only 120 to 140 units (sources vary; once again, the fallibility of human record keeping) were produced.
I wonder what Ferruccio Lamborghini would have thought of his company becoming part of the Volkswagen Group. Lamborghinis are not like unicorns in this part of the world and every time I see one I cannot divorce the car from its corporate owner.
#WarOfTheWorlds