Improbable: Historical Notes

There’s a lot of real history in IMPROBABLE, and as those of you who have read my other series may recall, I like to add a few notes at the end to sort out the history from the fiction. I have a few general notes at the beginning, and then they’re sorted by book and chapter.

The weekly newspaper that Miriam works for, The Woman's Advocate, is fictional, but it's based on several real papers of its kind that were published in the era. They include The Revolution, mentioned in the story. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's newspaper, published in New York from 1870-1873, focused primarily on political topics, with an emphasis on women's rights and labor issues. (Editions are available online if you do a Google search.) Unfortunately, their paper never really took off. The Woman's Journal, published in Boston by suffrage leader Lucy Stone, addressed similar topics, but mixed them with articles more typically covered by women's magazines of the era. It survived until 1931, suggesting that Charlotte's point about mixing reform "in small doses with their daily pudding" may have been a more successful strategy.
CHRONOS readers may remember Tennessee Claflin and her older sister, Victoria Woodhull from Time’s Divide. Victoria is the better known—she was a third-party candidate for president in 1872, running on a "free love" platform, and she blackmailed one of America's most famous preachers who was having an affair with a member of his congregation. But Tennessee (who went by the name Tennie) was Victoria's partner in the first female-run stock brokerage and helped run their short-lived newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly. She never married "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, although she was his mistress and personal psychic. In 1877, following Vanderbilt's death, Vanderbilt’s heirs shipped both Tennie and Victoria off to London, concerned that they might be a problem in an upcoming legal fight over the will. In the IMPROBABLE series, however, Vanderbilt marries Tennie (something she claimed he promised to do in real life), and he survives another twelve years before Miriam encounters his body at the beginning of our tale.
New York is one of my very favorite cities to visit, partly because of the history. The building where Miriam lives with Aunt Charlotte, the Dakota, is still standing today. In its time, the Dakota was one of the few upscale apartment houses in New York. It offered many modern amenities, a stunning view of Central Park and, in 1889, was considered to be the suburbs. The Dakota has been home to a number of celebrities over the past century, including John Lennon, who was assassinated outside the front entrance. (There's now a memorial to him near the spot where Miriam was standing when she spotted Alva Vanderbilt’s carriage.) Purchasing an apartment at the Dakota today could set you back a cool twenty million--assuming they let you in. The co-op board is notoriously selective, and refused the applications of Cher, Billy Joel, and Madonna.
Alva Vanderbilt, who plays a peripheral role in this series, was an odd character, to say the least, but also very much a product of her times. Born to a wealthy merchant family in Mobile, Alabama before the Civil War, Alva Erskine lived in Europe and later in New York. Her marriage to one of Cornelius Vanderbilt's primary heirs in 1875 eventually made her one of the most influential players in New York society, but she grew tired of her husband's philandering and did something almost unheard of in 1895--she divorced him and took a sizable chunk of his money with her. Alva was a domineering and reportedly abusive mother, who ordered her daughter Consuelo to marry a British duke Consuelo deeply disliked. That marriage ended badly. Alva herself later remarried, and as Alva Belmont, went on to become a major player in the US suffrage movement.

Chapter Four: A Study in Scarlet was the first Sherlock Holmes novel, published in Great Britain as part of Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887. The second Holmes book, The Sign of the Four, debuted in 1890. Later in this series, we will be meeting the author of those books, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, when he visits the New York Society for Psychical Research.

While Sherlock Holmes may have dealt strictly in fact and logical deduction, Doyle (like Cornelius Vanderbilt and many others during this period) consulted mediums and was a firm believer in spiritualism.

Chapter Six: Something as simple as a bouquet of flowers could be laden with hidden meanings in the Victorian era. If a man gave a woman a red carnation, it signified his love and passion for her. If she sent him back the same, the feeling was mutual. A pale pink carnation might indicate that she merely wished to be friends, while a striped carnation was a sign of refusal. It was even worse if she sent back a yellow carnation, since that indicated her disdain or disgust. Certain flowers were connected to fickleness or pride, and the side that the bow was on determined whether that label referred to the sender or the recipient. Some messages were downright confusing. If you received a hydrangea, it could mean either "thank you for understanding" or "you're frigid and heartless." Can you imagine the confusion if someone sent a mixed bouquet?

Chapter Seven: Violet's uncle is one of many historical characters in this book. George Griffin was born into slavery, served with the Union Army in the Civil War, and afterward, worked for seventeen years as the Clemens family's butler. Based on Twain's writings, he considered Griffin a dear friend. Some Twain scholars have suggested that George Griffin was the basis for the character of Jim in Twain's book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Chapter Eight: The Paige Compositor mentioned by Violet was an early competitor of the Linotype machine, designed to do the work of dozens of human typesetters. Twain sank not only the profits from his books, but also his wife's inheritance into the project, which became a massive money pit. To put it in 1980s terms, Twain invested everything in Betamax instead of VHS.

By the time it became clear that the Paige Compositor was a failure, Twain was broke. He traveled the globe in 1896 giving lectures to pay off his creditors. While the rest of the family was with him on this trip, his daughter Susy, only twenty-four, contracted meningitis and died. Twain's writing became far more bitter after her death, although Susy (who wanted him to be known as a serious writer, not a humorist) would probably have viewed it as some of his more meaningful work.

Chapter Nine: One of the challenging things about writing stories set in the past is catching anachronisms. So many of the words, phrases, and customs that we use currently are relatively recent inventions. Others that seem modern often have roots going back centuries. So, after I write each chapter, I go back through and double check any words that seem too modern so that I can find an era-appropriate substitute. (The time-specific search function on Google Books is my very good friend.) I was fairly certain I'd need to find something to replace the pinky swear...perhaps girls in the 1870s pricked their fingers with a needle and made a blood vow? To my surprise, however, I found a variant of the "Pinky, Pinky, Bow-Bell" rhyme in a book from 1846: "Pinky, pinky, bow-bell, Whoever tells a lie will go down to the bad place and never rise again." Given that Gwen was asking them to make a most solemn vow, I decided the Birdcage's residents would be less prissy than the editors of the book and go with "hell" as the very obvious intended rhyme for "bell." :)

Chapter Ten: Mark Twain got his start in the newspaper business, but his view of journalists changed rather dramatically once he became the subject of the stories rather than their author. One advantage of building his house at Nook Farm was that his family fit in quite well--there were several equally famous authors in the neighborhood. If you're ever in Hartford, the Mark Twain House is now a museum, restored to its original appearance when the Clemens family lived there in the late 1800s. A virtual tour is also available online.

Chapter Twelve: The story that Violet told about Clara Clemens being seriously injured in a sledding accident was true. And while her parents (to the best of my knowledge) didn't receive advance warning through someone's psychic vision, Twain was racked with guilt because he'd brought the toboggan home for the girls as a gift. Clara often joked that she was the most accident prone of the family, but she was the only one of Mark Twain's daughters to outlive him. Both Susy and Jean died in their twenties. Clara went on to become a concert singer. She had one daughter, who died without children, so there are no living descendants of Mark Twain.

Chapter Sixteen: The Whitechapel Murders were front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic. There were rumors that the Ripper had indeed left London and, as we'll see in an upcoming chapter, the authorities had good reason to suspect that this might have been true.

Chapter Eighteen: I've taken a few liberties in terms of timing with the romance of Susy Clemens and Louise Brownell, but it is very much based on history. The letters from Louise to Susy were not preserved by the Clemens family after Susy's death at age 24, but there are ardent, passionate letters from Susy in the papers of Louise Brownell Saunders, who eventually earned a Ph.D. and was a college administrator. Some Twain biographers speculate that Susy's short tenure at Bryn Mawr (she left after only one semester) was because either her family or the administration was concerned about the relationship. But romantic "crushes" or "smashes" at girls' schools were generally considered to be a normal part of development in the nineteenth century as long as the girls understood that school would end and they would be expected to take their place in society as wives and mothers...as Louise Brownell eventually did.

Chapter Nineteen: The letter purported to be from Jack the Ripper is from the New York Times, January 20, 1889. This was a fun bit of serendipity. I'd already written the sections where Miriam is suspicious of Blackwood. I decided to look up some additional information on the Ripper and stumbled upon this article with someone claiming to be the Ripper announcing his arrival in New York. What surprised me most was that the letter was submitted to the police the very same day as Miriam and Elias's deadly encounter in Central Park.

Chapter Twenty: Pigs in Clover was the 1889 equivalent of Pokemon Go. The handheld game, invented by toymaker Charles Martin Crandall, took the country by storm within months of its release in January of 1889. Production was rapid, with the factory cranking out over eight thousand a day in early 1889. The New York Tribune reported in March of that year that five US Senators had been found in a cloakroom playing the game. More recently, the game was featured in the HBO series, Westworld.

Chapter Twenty-One: This is the first, indirect appearance of Inspector Byrnes, the legendary and very divisive head detective of New York. We will be seeing more of him in the weeks to come. Many residents of the city in the late 1800s admired the efficiency of his department, but corruption and his heavy-handed methods of interrogation (he invented the term "the third degree") would eventually force his resignation during the period in the mid-1890s that Theodore Roosevelt was police superintendent.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Jacob Riis, who will play a minor role in an upcoming chapter, went on to considerable fame as a photographer with his book, How the Other Half Lives, which included haunting photographs of the tenements in which the poor lived in the New York City around the turn of the nineteenth century. Theodore Roosevelt (who served a term as NYC police commissioner before going on to the presidency) would credit Riis for helping to draw attention to the dire conditions in the slums, which roused public support for much-needed reforms in housing and improved laws on wages, maximum work hours, and child labor.

Chapter Twenty-Three: The Players Club still exists in New York. It's private, but various historical societies sometimes offer tours. Samuel Clemens and Edwin Booth were two of the founding members, and Nikola Tesla joined a few years later. Booth's rooms have been preserved as they were when he died, including the skull he used as Hamlet, one of his most famous roles. Twain's cue still hangs on the wall in The Grill.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Erich Weisz, who would later be known as Harry Houdini, along with his friend and former track coach Joseph Rinn, were avid debunkers of those who claimed to commune with the spirits. Rinn was apparently a true skeptic, but Houdini truly wanted to believe there was something beyond this world. He just never found a spiritualist that he wasn't able to expose as a fraud. His efforts in this regard cost him the friendship of one devout spiritualist, Arthur Conan Doyle. Houdini also made a pact with his wife, Bess, agreeing that whichever one of them died first, they'd do everything in their power to contact the other from the spirit realm with a message only they knew. Houdini was the first to die, on Halloween in 1926. For ten years, Bess held a seance each Halloween, waiting for him to give her the message they'd agreed upon. He never contacted here, but groups of Houdini fans continue to hold seances each Halloween in his memory.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Mark Twain's friendship with Tesla is well-documented. Tesla was an admirer of Twain's writing, noting that he'd read his books when he was recovering from an illness that very nearly killed him in the 1870s. And Twain was notoriously fascinated with gadgets and gizmos. He praised Tesla's induction motor as the most important invention since the telephone, and had his money not been tied up (at least in our version of history) with the Paige Compositor, it's a safe bet that he'd have invested in Tesla's inventions. He would also not have needed to tour the world to support his family, and he and Tesla would most likely have become acquainted by 1889 when this story is set.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: History buffs (or Oklahoma natives) may note an apparent discrepancy in the term "Boomers." The common perception is that the Boomers were the ones who waited for permission to go into the territory during the land rush. Those who went in sooner are generally called "Sooners," for obvious reasons. That was indeed the case after the land rush officially began in March of 1889. During these early months, however, the term "Boomers" was applied to all of them, including the ones that the territorial militia had to keep rounding up and escorting to the border.

Chapter Thirty-Five: Tennessee Claflin was nearly as famous during the mid-1800s as her sister, Victoria Woodhull. Nearly fifty years before women were even allowed to vote in most states, Victoria was the first woman to run for president (in 1872, as the nominee of the Equal Rights Party). But her sister, who generally styled her name as Tennie C. Claflin, ran for a seat in the US Congress a year earlier. The next year, she applied to be colonel of the Ninety-Fifth Regiment. Where her election was a joke or a sincere appreciation of her positions on equality for women and people of color is subject to some debate, but it is undeniable that both sisters created a great deal of havoc in New York society and within reform circles.

Chapter Thirty-Six: Keep an eye on the Kodak that Alva Vanderbilt gave Miriam. It's going to play a significant role in upcoming chapters. A historical note: The Kodak debuted in 1888 and was an instant success, despite the fairly high price tag. The camera came preloaded with film for 100 photographs at a price of $25 (around $730 today, if you adjust for inflation.) When you'd taken all 100 pictures, you returned the entire camera to the shop (by mail if you were outside a major city) along with $10 ($300 today). They'd send you back your 100 developed photographs and the camera, reloaded with film for 100 more. Even at the higher price, however, sales were fairly brisk. By 1896, George Eastman had sold 100,000 cameras and people were complaining about "Kodak fiends"--young (mostly female) photographers who walked around taking photos of people. By 1900, Eastman had gotten the price down to $1 for a smaller model called the Brownie and "Kodak fiends" were everywhere.

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Haymarket was one of the better known venues in the Tenderloin during the last quarter of the 1800s, memorialized later in a 1907 painting by John Sloan and a silent film "A Night at the Haymarket" that debuted in 1903. The club's owner, Edward Corey, was somewhat successful in passing the business off as a legitimate theater and dance hall, no doubt through the generous graft payments that most business owners in New York (especially in the Tenderloin and Five Points districts) viewed simply as a regular cost of running a business.

SLIPSTREAM (Book Two)

Chapter One: While modern audiences think of Count Dracula as the quintessential vampire, bloodsucking fiends captured the public imagination long before Bram Stoker published his book in 1897. Perhaps the best known was Lord Ruthven from the short story “The Vampyre,” by John William Polidori. The story was based on the tale that Lord Byron told at the famous lake-house gathering where several famous writers engaged in a contest over who could come up with the best horror story. Mary Shelley’s entry in that competition would eventually become the basis for her novel, Frankenstein. Polidori’s work gained even wider acclaim when it was adapted as a popular opera, Der Vampyr.

Chapter Three: The story of Ann O’Delia Diss Debar (aka Editha Montez and half a dozen other pseudonyms) is real, as is the Beecher-Tilton trial. The trial was followed by people around the nation, even though the crime Beecher was accused of — adultery — would be considered a private matter today. Beecher was acquitted, but it cast a pall over the rest of his career.

Chapter Five: Susy Clemens died in 1896 at age twenty-four of spinal meningitis. Her mother and sister had gone along with her father on the world tour, in which he hoped to (and did) earn enough to pay off their creditors and provide additional income. Whether the cause of the meningitis was bacterial or viral, had she gone on the trip with them she would almost certainly not have contracted the disease. Susy died at their Nook Farm home after several days of delirium, under the care of their family maid. Livy left Europe when she got word that Susy was ill. Sam received a telegram saying their daughter had died while Livy, Clara, and Jean were on the ship back to the States. The poem on her gravestone, an excerpt from “Annette” by Australian poet Robert Richardson, was believed to have been written by Sam for years, so he had someone add the poet’s name to the bottom of the headstone. Susy’s death devastated the family, especially her father. Hopefully, in this alternate timeline, Miriam and Violet can find a way to save her.

Chapter Nine: For those who may be wondering whether I’m attributing modern sensibilities to Samuel Clemens when he comments on Columbus and the discovery of America, I would point toward Mark Twain’s writings on imperialism. Most of those works are a few years removed from 1889, but his contempt for the colonial mindset was strongly held and, I would argue, unlikely to have developed overnight. You can see replicas of the copper-egg experiment online … just google Tesla’s Egg of Columbus.

Chapter Ten: Tesla used several labs in New York City, including one on 5th Avenue that burned down in 1895. But that was in our version of reality. Those who are familiar with Tesla’s work will likely recognize the Tesla coils. They actually do emit musical tones under the right circumstances. To hear some examples of them being used as musical instruments, just search YouTube for musical Tesla coils.

Chapter Eleven: Tesla was, as Sam noted, a stickler for his schedule. While he dined with others on rare occasions, his regular routine was to arrive at Delmonico’s shortly before eight o’clock. He was to be seated at the same table and his plate was to be placed in front of him at exactly eight. Then, he walked back to his lab and continued working for several hours.

Chapter Thirteen: “Jenny June” Croly was one of the best-known women journalists of the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike later female reporters, she wrote almost exclusively about the “woman’s sphere” — homemaking, fashion, and motherhood — and yet she frequently pushed back at the restrictions placed on women in her industry. She is considered the “mother of women’s clubs,” which played a vital role in convincing women of this era that they needed to demand the right to vote in order to fully protect their homes and families.

Chapter Fourteen: Early Kodak images were printed as round (about three inches in diameter) in order to hide the distortions that occurred around the edge of the photographs. And the driver was right that the pictures Miriam took would have been “little black circles.” The first portable flash for a camera wasn’t invented until the late 1890s, and even then, it was large, bulky, and tended to get soot all over the photographer. Flashbulbs were invented in 1927, but they were good for one shot only, broke easily, and were too hot to remove for several minutes after the picture was taken. The flashcube, invented in the late 1960s, was a major innovation because it allowed you to take an astounding four pictures before changing.

Chapter Fifteen: The Pinkerton Agency’s rather violent role in breaking strikes is well-documented. The story of the Molly Maguires and James McParland’s undercover assignment is worth looking up, as is Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Valley of Fear,” in which Sherlock Holmes meets McParland.

Chapter Sixteen: Edwin Booth’s apartment on the top floor of the Players’ building has been maintained as it was when he died. If you’re lucky enough to take a tour (or search for it on YouTube) you’ll see the bronze cast of his hand holding that of his young daughter, Edwina, and the skull of Edwin Booth’s biggest fan, which Booth did indeed use on stage in Hamlet’s Soliloquy.

Chapter Seventeen: Annie Hindle’s story is true, and while I don’t know if the Clemenses attended the show, she did perform at the American Theater in Hartford in December of 1881. Hindle’s relationship with Anna Ryan was a short one, but records show that she married two other women later in her life, again dressed as a man. Samuel Clemens’s views on gender and sexual identity were complex. He had close friends who were gay, including Charles Warren Stoddard. Some biographers have also suggested that Clemens may himself have been bisexual. He was Stoddard’s roommate when he lived in San Francisco and Stoddard traveled with him as his assistant during his 1873 lecture tour in Great Britain. Sam’s comments in this episode about Annie Hindle wishing she’d been born a man echo lines from his final, unfinished novel, Hellfire Hotchkiss, and his views on the problems caused by America’s puritanical streak run throughout his writing career, especially in his later works.

Chapter Eighteen: Ira Davenport toured the world for several decades as one half of the Davenport Brothers, claiming that their “spirit cabinet” and other illusions were the work of supernatural forces. They were exposed as frauds on many occasions, including in the book Humbugs of the World by P. T. Barnum, but continued to draw large audiences and had staunch supporters. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an ardent spiritualist, was by far their best-known defender. In the early 1900s, the Davenports’ act would be a source of considerable contention between Doyle and his friend Harry Houdini (aka Erich Weisz, whom we met in Improbable.) Even after Houdini convinced Davenport to admit his act was based on stage trickery, Doyle continued to insist that there were spiritual forces at work in the Davenport Brothers’ spirit cabinet.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Readers who are familiar with Hartford may be thinking that while Bushnell Park does surround the state capitol building, there’s nothing called Park River. There was in the 1880s, however. Park River was a tributary of the Connecticut River several blocks over. It was also known by the locals as Hog River because of the stench in the summer. That, along with the fact that it tended to overflow its banks and deluge the downtown area, led the Army Corps of Engineers to fill in the river beginning in the late 1930s as part of the city’s flood-control plan. So, a river no longer runs through it … but that’s probably for the best.

Chapter Twenty-Three: Mark Twain’s only non-comedic novel, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, was not written until 1895, the year before Susy’s death, but he had been obsessed with the story since his own youth. He stated that his model for the personality of Joan was Susy at the same age, so his daughters had undoubtedly heard many stories of the Maid of Orleans.

Chapter Twenty-Five: While the character of Mendo is fictional, Napoleon Sarony and José María Mora were two of the most prestigious photographers of the late 19th century. Mora was contracted to photograph the actual Vanderbilt Ball (1883) and other major society events. By 1888, Mora’s business was suffering a downturn, however, apparently due to an emotional breakdown triggered in part by legal troubles. There are dozens of Mora’s photographs online (Sarony’s as well), complete with elaborate backdrops and massive stuffed animals as props.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Strikes among streetcar workers were fairly common in this era and they often turned violent or even deadly. This one actually occurred in the last week of January 1889, just as it does in the story, and the issue was a dispute over the management’s rather lax interpretation of the recently won ten-hour-law restriction. There was a provision for voluntary paid overtime in the law, and Deacon Richardson found a way to exploit it that not only forced workers to put in more than ten hours a day but also lowered the amount they were earning. Instead of paying by the hour, as he had in the past, he shifted to paying for each trip that the drivers made, requiring them to put in more trips than they could manage in a ten-hour shift in order to continue making the same amount. In the end, the strike was broken, and workers returned with the same rate of pay and poor working conditions as before.

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Chief Inspector Thomas Byrnes was never implicated in the death of Henry Adams, and I have no evidence that he was personally involved in any way … but there is strong reason to suspect that someone in government put their thumb on the scales of justice. Several men were arrested, but the coroner quickly ruled the death an accident. One newspaper account noted, without directly accusing anyone, that this was a very, very quick decision for the coroner and that there was reason to suspect that it wasn’t, in fact, an accident. The odds that the Knights of Labor had the pull in New York City government to get a murder pushed under the carpet are far smaller than the odds that Richardson would have that sort of influence … and the death played right into his hands. The strikers were quickly branded as violent and out of control by the press, and the strike ended with no concessions to the workers only a few days later.

Chapter Thirty-Two: There is a wide range of opinion as to exactly how much of the violence in the Pennsylvania mines in the mid-1870s was due to criminal conduct of the Ancient Order of Hibernians—the union that became known as the Molly Maguires—and how much was a frame-up by owners in conjunction with the local police and James McParland, a Pinkerton agent who was undercover with the group. Miriam is very much the author’s voice here, because my reading of the history leads me to the conclusion that Pinkerton’s men caused far more violence in the region than they prevented in their efforts to keep the owners from losing the money they’d have to expend to increase wages and improve the truly appalling working conditions. Based on McParland’s letters, however, it is clear that he was furious to learn that information he provided to Pinkerton led to the death of the wife of one of the miners, a Mrs. McAllister.

Chapter Thirty-Three: Tennessee Claflin’s views on the issue of prostitution were unconventional for the late 1800s, which is perhaps unsurprising given that she was reportedly Vanderbilt’s mistress for a number of years. Her primary concern, based on her speeches on the subject and columns in the short-lived paper Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, was ensuring safety for the women involved. She held that prostitution was inevitable and that it should be licensed. A “boarding house” like the one run by the late Frankie Barton, where the workers were protected (at least according to Elias’s description), would have met with her approval. In our reality, where Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1876, the Vanderbilt family “convinced” Tennie and Victoria to move to London the next year. Both sisters prospered in Great Britain, marrying into wealthy families. Tennie married a baronet, and as Lady Cook, returned to the U.S. in the early 1900s to speak on behalf of women’s suffrage and the presidential campaign of William Jennings Bryan. And, unfortunately, eugenics. Much like her sister, Tennie’s character was a study in shades of gray … which makes her interesting to write as a fictional character.

Chapter Thirty-Four: Taxidermized (yes, that’s a word!) animals on hats were indeed all the rage in the last half of the 19th century. They ranged from hats with bird wings to hats with entire birds and even hats with small animals like squirrels and rabbits. The “cat hat” was a bit extreme, however, even for its era. Miriam and Violet will be encountering the owner, Kate Fearing Strong (known as ‘Puss’ to family and friends), at the Vanderbilt ball in an upcoming chapter.

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Miriam had enough on her plate without being trailed by a rival reporter, but there’s no way that all of this would have been going on in New York without Nellie Bly at least attempting to investigate. I’ll have more about Bly in the next chapter's notes, but here are a few historical tidbits from this chapter:

The strict social norms for mourning were beginning to relax in the 1800s, but most widows in the upper and middle classes still followed the Victorian-era practices that dictated a full two-year mourning period, the last six months of which were “half-mourning,” where you gradually incorporated small amounts of color into the wardrobe.
The Evacuation Day mentioned was a celebration on November 25 marking the day the British left New York after the Revolutionary War.
The death of Austrian Crown Prince Rudolph would eventually be revealed as a murder-suicide pact between him and one of his mistresses (often referred to as the Meyerling Affair), but at this point, there was a lot of confusion in the news reports as to what had actually happened.

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Most of you are probably familiar with Nellie Bly, the pen name of journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, who was the first and most famous of the late 19th century’s female “stunt reporters,” as they were known. Many of her stories are online, including her exposé of the asylum on Blackwell’s Island (Ten Days in a Mad-House) and her trip circumnavigating the globe (Around the World in 72 Days). Bly did interview Inspector Byrnes in June 1889 and asked him if he’d ever hire a female detective. His answer was an unequivocal no because he believed women incapable of keeping secrets. He added that this feminine trait had helped him solve a number of crimes, however, because it was easy to trick the women involved with criminals into giving up their whereabouts. Bly generally took feminist positions in her writing, but the piece on Byrnes casts him as a virtual saint and doesn’t question his misogynistic take on women. One clue that this might have been an editorial decision rather than her own is a sly aside that many people think they could solve the Ripper murders in a day—the very thing Byrnes himself boasted about in an earlier interview.

Chapter Thirty-Nine: William Edward Burghardt (aka W. E. B.) Du Bois was a student of William James in 1889. He would go on to be the first Black man to earn a Ph.D. (in sociology) from Harvard University. While there’s no record of him meeting Samuel Clemens while he was a student, Du Bois (who was an early leader of the NAACP and the editor of The Crisis) and other African-American writers of the era wrote glowingly of Mark Twain’s most famous book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That book is frequently banned by schools today for its use of racial epithets and admittedly would probably cause more problems than it would be worth as an assigned classroom reading in our modern era. In its day, however, Twain’s work was lauded as groundbreaking and progressive.

Chapter Forty: William James’s academic background made him a skeptic by nature. But like many scientists, then and now, he was deeply interested in the spirit realm both on a personal and a professional level. After his young son died in 1884, James and his wife consulted a Boston medium, Leonora Piper, who impressed both of them with the depth of her knowledge about their private lives. She made a believer of the professor. As James stated, “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, it is enough if you prove that one crow is white. My white crow is Mrs. Piper.” Later scholars have noted that the famed medium’s maid was friendly with a maid in the James household, which might explain how his “white crow” knew so much. Samuel Clemens had a conflicted relationship with spiritualism, especially after Susy’s death. For the most part, however, he viewed it as “poppycock,” saying he refused to believe in anything so fanciful, but he claimed to have had an experience himself that he couldn’t rationalize away, which might explain his deep interest in the subject.

Split Infinities (Book Three)

Chapter One: I always knew the Kodak photos would show what happened in reverse, but it only occurred to me later how very unusual this would have seemed to Violet and Miriam. Those of us who have grown up with instant replays and rewinding through shows on TV are accustomed to seeing things move in reverse, but in this era (just) before moving pictures began, seeing things move in reverse would have been almost as bizarre as the other things they’d seen as a result of the pendant. The one thing I could think of that might come close was a forerunner of motion pictures, known as Magic Lantern shows. We’ll learn more about this in an upcoming chapter, as they were frequently used by mediums to show the “spirit world” to their clients.

Chapter Two: Those familiar with Boston Common may note that I have placed Brewer Fountain much closer to Beacon Street than it currently sits. The fountain once sat just inside the park across from 30 Beacon Street, which was the address of Gardner Brewer, the man who commissioned the fountain and gifted it to the city. It was moved in 1917 to its current location near Park and Tremont, possibly to make way for monuments in the planned Liberty Mall, which was eventually dedicated to soldiers who died in World War I.

Chapter Three: The Massachusetts Spiritualist Society is a fictitious name, to the best of my knowledge, but the town of Onset, Massachusetts, was originally established in the 1880s by spiritualist groups in the state as a community where locals and visitors could gather to see mediums commune with the dead. In 1895, the community followed guidance from area Native American shamans while constructing the On-I-Set Wigwam, which is still standing and open to visitors.

Chapter Eight: The actual Vanderbilt Ball happened in 1883, a few years after the death of Commodore Vanderbilt and the lawsuits surrounding his will were settled. In our alternate timeline, he survives that brush with death, which pushes the construction of Alva’s Petit Chateau back several years. There was, however, a lavish costume ball in New York on the date I’ve used here (February 5, 1889), and I have combined a few of the details from the two events. I’ve also added Alva’s growing fixation with European titles — in the 1890s, her determination that her daughter Consuelo marry royalty nearly destroyed both their lives. Finally, those of you who have watched HBO’s The Gilded Age (which has a storyline based on this event) may be surprised to learn that the actual ball was far grander and larger in scale than the TV version. Alva’s housewarming party cost an estimated $250,000 in 1883, which would be around $6 million today. If you’re interested in more details and photographs of the costumes, simply Google “what they wore to the Vanderbilt ball.” There are dozens of Señor Mora’s images online.

Chapter Nine: In our timeline, Tennie and Victoria had already moved to Europe before the Vanderbilt Ball — not that Alva would have invited either of them. The Lilith costume is based on the 1887 painting that Elias mentions. Both that painting and the Thomas Nast cartoon can be found online. The information about the New York Subway system is factual. An early attempt in 1870 was abandoned for decades, largely due to the economic Panic of 1873, but city leaders started debating plans for an underground train again after the blizzard of 1888. Construction would eventually begin in 1897, with the first sections opening in 1904.

Chapter Ten:

The stained glass window of the Field of the Cloth of Gold (by Eugène Oudinot) was auctioned off when Petit Chateau was demolished in 1927. It was apparently purchased by a private collector, or perhaps destroyed, because the only picture of it that I’ve been able to locate was a black-and-white illustration in an old book.
The relationship between Alva Vanderbilt and her daughter was tumultuous, primarily due to Alva’s determination that her daughter would marry royalty. Consuelo — named after her godmother, Consuelo Yznaga, Lady Mandeville — was forced into a marriage much like that of her godmother, and she was miserable. Years later, after Alva divorced Vanderbilt, she testified that she forced her daughter to marry the Duke of Marlborough (which was true), and the marriage was annulled despite the fact that the couple had two sons. Had the Duke never married and had a son, Winston Churchill would have become the 10th Duke of Marlborough, which would mean he never served as British Prime Minister. He didn’t seem to hold a grudge over the lost title, however — Winston Churchill and Consuelo Vanderbilt remained close friends throughout their lives.

Chapter Sixteen: Bloomingdale Asylum was built as a private hospital for the insane in 1821. By the 1880s, however, the land on which it was built was valuable enough that the proprietors decided to build a new asylum farther out in White Plains. For a while, the land was considered as part of New York’s failed bid to host the 1892 World’s Fair — readers of my CHRONOS series will know which city won — but eventually the land was portioned out to a number of buyers. A large section of the property, including several of the asylum’s buildings, was purchased by Columbia University, including Buell Hall, which still stands today.

Chapter Eighteen: Columbia University, which occupies the land where Bloomingdale Asylum was prior to 1890, has an extensive network of underground tunnels that run between the buildings. They’re mostly for maintenance, but some of the tunnels predate the university and were apparently constructed so that patients could be ferried between buildings at the asylum. And here’s a not-so-historical note: while researching this chapter, I learned that you can make a candle out of butter and a single square of toilet paper. I pass this along as one more thing to file away in your storehouse of trivia that you’ll almost certainly never use.

Chapter Nineteen: The Ramble Cave in Central Park (once called the Indian Cave because some claimed there were Native markings inside) was discovered when the park was under construction in the 1850s. The cave was open for many years, with several generations of kids exploring the inside. Over time, however, it began to be used for less savory purposes. There were numerous trysts in the cave, along with two suicides, and one runaway girl holed up there for about a month in 1897. In 1934, the Parks Department decided it was best to simply brick over the entrance. You can still see a stairway in the Ramble, however, which leads into the brick wall where the entrance used to be.

Chapter Twenty-Four: History buffs may recognize Henry Frick from the Homestead Strike at Carnegie Steel a few years after Improbable takes place. Frick merged his business with Andrew Carnegie’s and was responsible for oversight of the Homestead facility. Frick was fervently anti-union, and when workers attempted to organize, he called in Pinkerton guards. Violence erupted, with at least a dozen people killed on both sides, and the governor of Pennsylvania eventually had to call in the National Guard to end the strike. The story about Frick’s daughter swallowing a sewing pin is, sadly, based in fact, aside from the fact that the nurse who discovered the reason for the girl’s illness had no magical powers and the poor child died in 1891, less than a year before the strike.

There is an odd twist to the story, however. A few weeks after the militia was called in to end the strike, anarchists Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman plotted to kill Frick in retaliation for the union lives lost. Berkman shot Frick multiple times, and one of those shots might well have been fatal, but Frick claimed his daughter appeared as a “blinding apparition” causing the shot to go astray.

Chapter Twenty-Six: The strange quirks that Sam notes are based on numerous accounts of Tesla’s personal habits and may be evidence that Tesla had some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Oddly enough, even though Tesla and José María Mora do not appear to have known each other, they shared their unusual obsession with pigeons. Both men died alone in apartments where pigeons were frequent and honored guests, this in spite of the fact that Tesla was a renowned germaphobe. Tesla even claimed to share a spiritual bond with one particular white pigeon, stating, “I loved her as a man loves a woman and she loved me.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven:

Tesla was very much a person with what most of us would consider a shaky moral compass. I’m comfortable stating that he’d have made the moral calculus I suggest in this chapter given his strong support for eugenics.
Charles Strong Jr. is a fictional character, but his father and sister are not. The elder Mr. Strong was on the board of governors for the Bloomingdale Asylum. I stumbled upon his name during the very early stages of research and picked him at random from the list, only finding out recently (and very much accidentally) that he was from a family on Mrs. Astor’s famed list of 400 and the father of another named historical character in this book, Kate Fearing Strong — the young woman who wore the infamous cat costume to the Vanderbilt Ball. It hadn’t even occurred to me that they might be related because it’s a fairly common last name. It was, as Violet said in this episode, just another odd coincidence. :)

Chapter Twenty-Nine: The story about Tennessee Claflin and her father is true. They ran a healing business in various cities, sometimes along with Victoria Woodhull and one of their brothers. Since their primary product (“Miss Tennessee’s Magnetic Life Elixir for Beautifying the Complexion and Cleansing the Blood”) was mostly alcohol, they were frequently forced to move to avoid landing in jail. In Ottawa, Illinois, the charges included killing a woman named Rebecca Howe. (If the name sounds familiar, as it did to me, it’s not because the victim was famous — it’s just the same name as Kirstie Alley’s character on the sitcom Cheers.)

Chapter Thirty-One: Violet’s jab about the best books being published in London would have hit home with Samuel Clemens, as he’d made several transatlantic ocean voyages for that very reason. In the 19th century, the laws of Great Britain and Canada allowed publishers to print books from other countries without paying the author any royalty. The only way around this in Great Britain was to ensure that the book was published in London first, and Clemens had to make repeated trips abroad to make certain those editions came out before the book was published in the U.S. He had to take similar precautions in Canada, where they printed bootleg versions of his books and sneaked them across the border into the U.S. This is why you’ll often see 19th-century books by American authors printed in England before they debuted in the U.S. Clemens lobbied repeatedly in the U.S. and abroad for international copyright laws, seeking to protect works for the life of the author plus fifty years. The law finally passed in the U.S. in 1909, one year before his death.

Chapter Thirty-Three: I’ve played around a bit with the dates of the Johnstown Flood, but only by a few months. The flood was largely due to negligence on the part of the owners of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, who failed to take proper care of the dam on their property, lowering it by several feet at one point and adding screens that kept the black bass they imported from Lake Erie from escaping downstream. Colonel E. J. Unger, the second president of the club, was onsite when the dam failed on June 1, 1889, and had a team of workers trying to repair the breach, but it was too late. Over two thousand people were killed in the actual event, but I’m hoping that Violet’s vision will save at least some of those lives in this reality.

Chapter Thirty-Four: The South Fork Dam failed twice before 1889, once in 1847 before construction was complete and once in 1862, which resulted in a flood of around two feet in Johnstown, fourteen miles away. This did lead to some complacency on the part of the town when men like Daniel Morrell warned them that the dam was likely to have a catastrophic failure, since it had failed before with only minor damage. (Morrell is not mentioned by name here, but he’s the local resident Sam says joined the South Fork club so he could investigate and died before anyone would listen to him.) The key differences between the earlier failures and the 1889 disaster were the facts that the reservoir was now much larger than it had been before—nearly three miles long and a mile wide—and the club (as we will see in the next chapter) made several changes that weakened the dam further.

Chapter Thirty-Five:

Alterations to the South Fork Dam (such as lowering it to a point that was wide enough for carriages to drive across and adding screens to keep the stocked fish in the lake) were largely to blame for its failure. Many of the members did contribute to a relief fund for Johnstown victims, but attorneys for the club managed to keep them from being held legally and financially liable for the disaster.
John Worrell Keely lived in fine style for several decades by convincing investors, including wealthy widow Clara Jessup Bloomfield Moore, that various gadgets (including his "vaporic gun") were powered by "ethereal force" rather than the canisters of compressed air that were found secreted around his lab upon his death. Mrs. Moore invested much of her own wealth and convinced influential friends to join her, including John Jacob Astor. She believed that the force Keely had discovered was inherently feminine and spiritual, and wrote an entire book defending him. You can still find people online today who believe Keely was the real deal and claim Sympathetic Vibratory Physics will one day change the world.

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt were bitter rivals in the mid-1800s. With the help of two other railroad tycoons, Gould concocted a plan (known to historians as the Erie War) in which they watered down the stock of the Erie Railway Company. The scheme cost the Commodore nearly seven million dollars--which, adjusted for inflation, would be more like $145 million today. Gould was known to be every bit as ruthless in business as Vanderbilt, if not more, but unlike the Commodore, he was a devoted family man who by all accounts doted on his wife and children. His wife Helen, who was fifty years old, suffered a series of strokes beginning in November of 1888, and in our timeline where she had no access to a pendant-powered healer, died in January 1889.

Chapter Thirty-Eight: The ear trumpet that Elias mentions using to spy on Tennie and her family is a horn-shaped amplification device that was used as a hearing aid during the 19th century. The first electric hearing aid, called the Akouphone, was developed in 1898.

Chapter Thirty-Nine: The electric chair that Miriam alludes to was first used in the execution of William Kemmler, a convicted axe murderer, in August of 1890. Development of the device in the 1880s was caught up in the so-called "war of the currents" between Thomas Edison (champion of direct current or DC) and George Westinghouse (friend and neighbor of Henry Frick, employer of Nikola Tesla, and champion of alternating current or AC). While Edison was usually eager for any and all contracts and had been present for experiments where a similar device was used to execute a horse, he conspired to ensure that a Westinghouse generator would be the one to power the first execution by electric chair. It was a good call on his part, as the death was far from humane and Westinghouse himself, who was there as an observer, noted that it would, in fact, have been kinder to follow Kemmler's lead and use an axe.

Chapter Forty: People often assume that the Swiss Army knife, which was popularized in the 1890s, was the first utility knife. There's evidence of folding multitools going back considerable farther, however, all the way to ancient Rome. More modern versions were manufactured in the British city of Sheffield. Knives from Sheffield were mentioned by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales (published in the late 14th century). And those who read Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) carefully may have noted his reference to a "Sheffield contrivance" with the exterior of a "slightly swelled" pocketknife which hid "not only blades of various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nailfilers, countersinkers."

Chapter Forty-Two:

Tennessee Claflin's father marketed her as The Wonderful Child and later, as the Magnetic Doctress. They were run out of numerous towns and faced lawsuits on several occasions, including one widely publicized prosecution for "humbuggery" in Pittsburgh. Buck Claflin sold Cornelius Vanderbilt on his daughter's abilities in 1868. In our reality, she was generally assumed to be his mistress at least through the early 1870s, and by some accounts, up until his death.
Guano (aka bat poop) was a key ingredient in gunpowder and in fertilizer. In the mid 1800's the US claimed approximately 100 islands that were rich in this resource. Ten of those islands are still claimed by the US.

Chapter Forty-Three: Tennie's comment about that "little toad Comstock" is a reference to Anthony Comstock, who was the reason that she and Victoria wound up in jail after publishing the expose on Henry Ward Beecher in their newspaper in November of 1872. Comstock (who was with the New York YMCA's Committee on the Suppression of Vice), pushed for their arrest on obscenity charges because of what he considered the prurient nature of the Beecher allegations and because another article in that edition used the word "virginity." When Woodhull & Claflin were acquitted on a technicality, Comstock pushed for tougher regulations on newspapers and other materials sent through the mail, eventually resulting in Federal laws (Comstock laws) that prevented any materials that mentioned birth control and even anatomy textbooks from being sent through the US mail.

Chapter Forty-Five (Epilogue):

The information about the monument is mostly true. Sam did know King Kalakaua and helped publish his memoir. I'm not sure if any of his friends teased him about the timing of the memorial to Captain Cook, but given how wildly popular Twain's lectures on the islands were, I doubt I'm the only one who noticed the timing.
The locals *probably* didn't eat Cook. But they did boil him down and preserve his bones, in keeping with their customs. Some bones were returned later to the British.
Punahou School in Honolulu was also known as Oahu College in 1889 and offered two years of college education. Punahou is still around today. Barack Obama is one famous alumnus.
Most pre-colonial Polynesian cultures accepted same-sex relationships and many, including the Hawaiians, recognized more than two genders.
Sam's (somewhat) openly gay friend who traveled with him in Hawaii (1866) and in London (1873) was author Charles Warren Stoddard.

In addition to the historical notes for the epilogue, I’d like to offer an apology. I'm not a native Hawaiian speaker and there are few historical sources for this era. I almost certainly mangled many things, both in terms of the language and culture.