
NYTimes November 11, 1911 - llambda
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser/1911/11/11/P1
======
bittermang
Page four features articles on both freight rates concerning interstate
commerce[1] and debate over banks allowing customers to overdraft on their
deposits[2].

In light of recent Internet tax/interstate commerce debates, and bank reform
as it concerns overdraft fees, it really rings true that the more things
change the more they stay the same.

[1]
[http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser/1911/11/11/104881907...](http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser/1911/11/11/104881907/article-
view)

[2]
[http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser/1911/11/11/104881909...](http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser/1911/11/11/104881909/article-
view)

~~~
adestefan
Just look at the front page and realize all of the articles that are similar
to things that are happening right now:

Government spending - Army Costs in the Philippines

Small celeb gosip - Some baron wanting to marry

Lynch mob over a case about harming a child in PA

------
adminonymous
"ST. LOUIS, Mo., Nov. 10. -- Mrs. Eugene Batten, whose first husband, David
Rothschild, died in Sing Sing Prison, where he was sent for wrecking the
Federal Bank of New York and the Globe Securities Company, to-day told where
was to be found $422,000 in currency which her husband secreted just before
his two institutions were closed. "

Ah, the good old days, when bankers were sent to Sing Sing for their crimes,
and their wives even returned the money. Hey, at least something has changed
in 100 years.

~~~
eCa
Also, in those days reporters weren't payed by the sentence...

------
leoh
I thought the most fascinating thing was the strong and effective language
regarding foreign affairs (i.e. the article about China): "The sun set upon a
scene of fire, rapine, desolation, and butchery unrecorded in modern history",
"Innocent Chinese are fleeing..."

The language these days about these sorts of things are much more deferent,
careful, more similar to the language used in articles about domestic affairs.
Really shows the issue of globalism.

Sounds like the article is in the context of the Xinhai revolution. Anyone
know of any interesting details or articles about that?

~~~
nhebb
What caught my eye about that story was the transpacific communications, since
the dateline was Nov. 10, 1911. Looking it up on Wikipedia, the first
transpacific cables were laid in 1902 (transatlantic in 1986), so getting a
cable from Nanking was still a recent development. I know 1911 wasn't the
stone age, but I have a healthy respect for what they were able to accomplish
with the technology they had at the time.

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telemachos
I don't understand the fascination with (merely) the number 11.

Wouldn't NY Times November 11, 1918 be more appropriate today?[1] Or maybe
Philip Larkin's MCMXIV.[2]

[1] <http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/world-war-i-ends>

[2] <http://net.lib.byu.edu/english/WWI/influence/MCMXIV.html>

~~~
suivix
Today will be 11/11/11 again. Just like in 1911.

~~~
telemachos
Right. But what I meant by "I don't understand" was more along the lines of
"So it's 11/11/11 again. Who cares? Oh, and by the way, _every_ 11/11 is
Veterans' Day..."

~~~
derleth
> every 11/11 is Veterans' Day

Veterans Day has only been held on 11/11 every year from 1954-1971 and 1978 to
today. This is older.

~~~
telemachos
First, Veterans' Day, by that name, was only recognized after WWII, as you
say, but 11/11 was a day of remembrance long before that under other names
(Armistice Day or Remembrance Day).[1]

Second, obviously a newspaper from 11/11/11 is earlier than a holiday on 11/11
precisely because the 11/11 dating comes from the end of World War I on
November 11th, 1918 (on "the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month").
I'm sorry if my point wasn't clear, but my original comment refers to World
War I, 1918 and a poem about the start of World War I.

My original point remains: Today is (in many countries, not only the US) a
national holiday in remembrance of the veterans of World War I or veterans
more generally. I find it depressing that people care more about a piece of
numerical trivia than that.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_Day>

~~~
ugh
“I find it depressing that people care more about a piece of numerical trivia
than that.”

You don’t know that. Unless you want everyone to care about nothing else
whatsoever. Don’t always assume zero sum games.

------
Achshar
am i the only one who is getting..

 _TimesMachine is available only to home delivery subscribers. Contact your
library for complimentary access to the complete archive of The New York Times
offered by ProQuest._

~~~
decadentcactus
I get it too. I'm in Australia if that's why it hates me

~~~
Achshar
From India here.. maybe it is some demographic limit. Strange no one else
brought it up until now.. Is almost everyone here from US?

~~~
efsavage
I get it from the US.

------
bgentry
Interesting that "Today" used to be spelled "To-day"

~~~
_delirium
According to the Corpus of Historical American English, 1911 was right in the
middle of the transition from _to-day_ to _today_ , with _to-day_ having 95%
market share in 1890, 80% in 1900, 70% in 1910, 30% in 1920, 20% in 1930, and
5% in 1940:
[http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/?c=coha&q=12896286](http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/?c=coha&q=12896286)

(Can't use Google n-grams on this one, because its punctuation-stripping makes
it impossible to distinguish _to-day_ from _to day_.)

------
m4rkuskk
I wonder if she ever married the Baron.

~~~
hugh3
I can't find any reference to a Baron Schlep having ever existed, leading me
to suspect (along with the fact that he only had twelve dollars, and what
sounds like a suspiciously made-up sort of name) that he may have been a fake
Baron all along.

~~~
_delirium
If you compare the letter to both the 'l' and the 'i' in 'Ellis' on the line
above, it looks like it might be an 'i'. The article can't decide whether it
goes before or after the 'e' though, which means that if I'm right, it's
either 'Schiep' or 'Scheip'. However, I can't find any info on anyone with
_those_ names either.

Edit: the NY Times of November 12 has an update, confirming he was deported
[pdf]: [http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-
free/pdf?res=9F02E6DD1E...](http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-
free/pdf?res=9F02E6DD1E31E233A25751C1A9679D946096D6CF)

> _Commissioner Williams said it was not because the man had only $12 in his
> possession, but because he was an undesirable alien. He was not a Baron, the
> Commissioner added._

~~~
Samuel_Michon
To further complicate matters: other newspapers covering the story back in the
day spelled the man's name as "Adolph Schopf", "Adolph Schuep" and "Adolph
Schüp".

He's described as "a real German baron, a graduate of three German
universities, one of which is the famous Heidelberg, the hero of five duels
and the suitor of a beautiful young widow who has been making her home in
Meriden during the past three months. His full name is Adolph Schopf, baron of
Bottleburg, New Weissensee, province of Kieden Barden, Prussia."[1]

[1]
[http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=Cg9JAAAAIBAJ&sjid=k...](http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=Cg9JAAAAIBAJ&sjid=kgINAAAAIBAJ&dq=olga%20stadia&pg=4576%2C4574644)

~~~
jarek
"Adolph Schuep" and "Adolph Schüp" are the same name, Schuep just has Schüp
re-spelled without the umlaut.

Schopf, Schiep, and Scheip are likely just phonetic respellings/typos.

Not only were people back in the day not that particular about exactly how a
foreigner's name was spelled, often times people wouldn't be sure or would
change how their own name is spelled.

------
jessedhillon
reCATPCHA supposedly uses scans of old NYT articles like this as the source
image for some of their challenges. The idea is to harness crowd intelligence
to digitize their archives. One half of the challenge is a word whose meaning
is known and the other is one that still needs human intelligence to
interpret.

So it's a little sad then that, when you click through to the actual article,
you get to read a blown up image.

~~~
smackfu
I wonder about that since I invariably get one legible word in reCAPTCHA, and
one junk word. Not just illegible or non-OCR-able, but actually nonsense
strings of letters, e.g. "umower", "dealiff", "etstcom". My theory is that the
source OCR is incorrectly breaking up words, so some words get split into
multiple parts. And reCAPTCHA is useless for that.

~~~
jessedhillon
The way it works is that the one legible word is the control string, and the
other one is the challenge string -- in cases like this it's obvious which is
which, but not always. The challenge string could be comprised of characters
from different scans, each of which had failed recognition by OCR software.

The control word is there to prove that you're a human, and the challenge word
is there for you to provide a small amount of work. In this case the work
could benefit different scans at one time.

------
ry0ohki
For some reason it makes me happy to see that it's not a new phenomenon to
make such a big deal about something so pointless and manmade.

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andrewfelix
It looks like The Verge website today (<http://www.theverge.com/>).

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DilipJ
amazing! I can just imagine someone reading this a hundred years ago, not
knowing all that was to transpire over the coming century. Who knows what the
world will be like in 2111?

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funkah
The first thing that struck me about this is how word-dense the page is
compared to current newspapers.

~~~
InclinedPlane
That's definitely due to the cost of printing. The whole paper was only 20-25
pages back then too.

~~~
wavephorm
Newspapers have a lot less than 25 pages of content these days, but a lot more
ads.

------
pan69
In Thailand it's the year 2554. Just a bunch of numbers, who cares.

