This week I learned that miners during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896-99 (aka the Yukon Gold Rush) valued potatoes so highly for their scurvy-fighting powers that they paid for them in gold. Naturally that little tidbit made me wonder if that was how the Yukon Gold potato got its name. Eh, not exactly. At least, not directly.
As we learned last week, miners during the Klondike Gold Rush in 1896-1899 valued the scurvy-fighting power of the humble potato so highly they were willing to pay $25 per bushel for them. When I told my husband about it, he calmly pointed out that the cure for scurvy would have been known for almost a century by that time. “Wouldn’t the folks in the California Gold Rush of 1848-55 also have known to eat potatoes to prevent it?”
I am the sort of mother who adores stocking my child’s mind with interesting tidbits about the world around her. Every once in a while, it seems important to make certain that those interesting tidbits are actually accurate. Currently I’m obsessed with figuring out why the price of the humble potato soared during the Klondike Gold Rush.
About two years ago, I slipped a note into The Nine-Year-Old’s lunch box. It was one of those preprinted affairs with a sweet little message on the front and a bit of trivia on the back that read: “Did you know? Potatoes were once so valued for their Vitamin C content that miners traded them for gold.” I know the exact wording because it seemed so plausible and unlikely that I took a picture of the card so I could look it up one day. Two years later, today’s the day. Were potatoes ever so valuable that miners paid for them in gold?
As you may remember from my original post on the oddities of tennis scoring, Billie Jean King believes that the reason tennis is scored Love-15-30-40 may have been because the clock hanging over the indoor tennis court was the handiest tool available for keeping score. When I shared this theory with my husband, he immediately shot it to bits. “Did medieval clocks even have minute hands?”
That tennis post I did last week keeps generating questions. One reader noted that it seemed weird that the 6 sets in medieval tennis contained only 4 60-degree games each, especially if tennis scores were meant to represent the 360 degrees in a circle. Mathematically speaking, it would make more sense to have each set contain 6 games. Which raised the question, why 4? Was the number 4 significant in some way for medieval tennis players?
The other day while driving past a neighborhood tennis court, the subject of scoring naturally came up. Everyone in the car agreed that the standard Love-15-30-40 scoring system used in tennis was pretty bizarre. Oddly specific, too, in that way that hints at an interesting story. So I looked it up. Why is tennis scoring so weird anyway?
This week, while swapping out the cloth-bound electrical writing in our new bathroom for something a bit newer, my contractor paused just long enough to show me the piping for the even older gaslights that used to illuminate the master bathroom.
This week, my nine-year-old daughter and I went to see the Terracotta Warriors at the Field Museum in Chicago.
One of the side effects of The Nine-Year-Old’s computer classes at school has been that suddenly I have competition for the computer in the office. The Nine-Year-Old…
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