The Breezer - the joyride for a curious mind: A weekly newsletter from me, Steve Winduss, at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me discovering historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming week. Add to that updates relating to the podcast, a touch of humour and a dash of "lots more". - 5th January 2025.

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Happy New Year!

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I hope you have enjoyed the festive break and are raring to launch into 2025.
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It was a sad moment last week to hear of the passing of former US President Jimmy Carter. He was the first US President I remember watching on television as a ten-year old (with fleeting memories of Gerald Ford).
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Despite losing out to Ronald Reagan after one term in 1980, Carter’s reputation and stature have grown in the proceeding 45 years for his tireless humanitarian work across the globe. His Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 in recognition of this work seemed thoroughly deserved.
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In an age bereft of genuine statesmen, Jimmy Carter’s death is a genuine loss. I’ve seen him dubbed ‘America’s greatest ex-president’. What do you think?
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Out of curiosity...​
If Jimmy Carter could remember his first US President at the age of ten, it would be Calvin Coolidge, in office between 1923-29, flanked by Warren Harding and Herbert Hoover.

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Jimmy Carter had a reputation as a speed reader. He followed speed reading pioneer Evelyn Wood’s Reading Dynamics method.
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This speed reading process incorporates various elements; use of the hand to guide the eyes along a page, reading words in groups rather than in isolation and widening peripheral vision to ‘see’ more text in advance of reading it.
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​Subvocalisation, another key aspect of speed reading, remains a controversial topic among experts. It is the practice of calling the words out in your head as you read them. By learning to reduce subvocalisation, you can read faster.

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However, critics suggest that subvocalisation plays a key role in comprehending what is being read. In other words, true understanding of what we are reading isn’t just a case of how quickly our eyes can move across a page.
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Jimmy Carter learned to read up to 2,000 words per minute with 95% comprehension. The average human reading speed is about 250 words per minute. Howard Stephen Berg has held the Guinness Speed Reading World Record since 1990, with a reading rate of 25,000 words per minute.
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Evelyn Nielsen Wood was born 116 years ago this Wednesday, on 8 January 1909.
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Thirty years ago, in the ‘90s, I ran a microbrewery in Hampshire, one of a growing cluster of small breweries producing craft ales.
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These ales, produced locally, undergo a secondary fermentation in the cask. This creates natural carbon dioxide rather than relying on CO2 tanks to pump up the fizz, as is the case for most lagers.
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These ‘real ales’ are delivered from a cellar at 12 degrees centigrade, probably 14 degrees by the time they have worked through the pipes to the hand pump at the bar. Lagers would typically be served at nearer 6 degrees centigrade.
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Visitors to the UK are often drawn to our public houses to try locally brewed real ale. Almost as often, the feedback on the experience is ‘warm’, ‘flat’ or both.
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If United States Founding Father Benjamin Franklin really said, “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” he clearly hadn’t tried English real ales.
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On one late-summer day towards the end of the ‘90s, we received a call from one of our pub customers, The Mill Arms at Dunbridge in the heart of Hampshire.
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They requested a special delivery of our flagship real ale, King Alfred’s Hampshire Bitter. They said that a guest arriving the following evening would like to sample some fine local beer.
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That guest turned out to be former President of the United States Jimmy Carter. When the chorus of sardonic belly laughs died down in the brewery office, followed by an awkward few moments of silence at the other end of the line, we realised that Jimmy Carter really was visiting the Mill Arms.
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A cask of our finest King Alfred’s was duly delivered.
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It turns out that Mr Carter was an avid fly fisherman. The Mill Arms is situated within a stone’s throw of the River Test, a stretch of water renowned for its fly-fishing in the UK. Say no more.
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I never found out if President Carter found our beer warm and flat. If he had, I am sure he would have been too much of a gentleman to say so.

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Out of curiosity...​
US President George H.W. Bush, another keen fly fisherman, also fished the River Test on more than one occasion. Perhaps he was tipped off by Mr Carter.

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New podcast episode coming...

Episode 49. Beyond Gravity

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This Thursday marks the 35th anniversary of the first flight into space of astronaut Jim Wetherbee, 9 January 1990.
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Jim is one of NASA’s most distinguished servants, commanding his remaining five space shuttle missions between 1992 and 2002, a unique accomplishment.
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I was thrilled to talk with Jim recently about that first flight on the space shuttle Columbia. It was poignant to note that one of his last roles before leaving NASA was to lead the effort to recover the human remains across East Texas of the crew of the stricken Columbia in 2003.
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I’ll tell you more next Sunday, but if you can’t wait, the episode goes live on Thursday. You can listen on the show notes page and/or find links to your favourite podcast player at www.battingthebreeze.com after the episode goes live.

No second prizes

You may not have heard of Simon Marius. He was the early 17th-century German astronomer who discovered three of the four largest moons of Jupiter 415 years ago this Wednesday, on 8 January 1610.
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Unfortunately for Marius, the legendary astronomer Galileo Galilei had discovered the same three moons of Jupiter the day before.
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​Io, Europa, and Ganymede were discovered on 7 January 1610, and four days later, Galileo discovered the fourth moon, Callisto.

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Marius failed to publish his findings immediately, and his independent discovery only came to light four years later, in 1614.
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It might seem beyond coincidence that the moons were discovered independently within a day of each other. However, in January 1610, Jupiter was in opposition, i.e. the Earth sat between Jupiter and the Sun.
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It was a great time to observe the magnificent planet at night. As such, it was receiving the attention of many of the world’s great astronomers during this period.

Out of curiosity.. ​
To my eternal embarrassment, when introducing my children to the world of astronomy some fifteen years ago, I first realised that you can see most of the planets with the naked eye. I was 45 years old.
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Imagine my astonishment when I bought a relatively cheap telescope and we observed Jupiter and its four largest moons in wonderful clarity.
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If you haven’t yet tried, I recommend begging, stealing or borrowing a basic telescope and looking for yourself.

Galileo had labelled the moons with Roman numerals. They remained known as I, II, III and IV for the next three hundred years.
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However, in his publication, Mundus Jovialis, Marius had named the moons according to suggestions made by fellow astronomer and mathematician Johannes Keppler, i.e. Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
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As naming conventions evolved over time, the Keppler/Marius names for the moons of Jupiter were adopted, and they remain in place today.
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Galileo would be turning in his grave.

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Out of curiosity...​
Stephen Hawking, the renowned English theoretical physicist, was born on 8 January 1942, the 300th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s death. Hawking passed away on 14 March 2018, coinciding with Albert Einstein’s birthday anniversary.

Dates with History

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Today…
The Palais Garnier in Paris was inaugurated 150 years ago today, on 5 January 1875. Emperor Napoleon III commissioned the project shortly before construction started in 1861.
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The Palais Garnier would become the new Paris Opera House in replacement of a succession of previous opera houses in Paris.

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During construction, an underground lake was discovered under the Palais Garnier. In 1896, a hapless concierge was crushed to death when part of the seven-ton chandelier broke away and landed on him.
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Knowledge of the lake and the chandelier incident inspired novelist Gaston Leroux’s work, “The Phantom Of the Opera”, in 1909.
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In 1984, Andrew Lloyd Webber stumbled across a copy of Gaston’s novel in a New York bookstore. He read it and immediately began composing his hit musical of the same name.
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Today, Box 5 at the Palais Garnier is kept empty in honour of the Phantom of the Opera.

Out of curiosity...​
Phantom of the Opera became Broadway’s longest-running show 19 years ago this Thursday, on 9 January 2006. The musical closed on Broadway in 2023, clocking up just under 14,000 performances since 1988.

Friday…
The peace agreement that effectively ended World War I, the Treaty of Versailles, came into force 105 years ago this Friday, on 10 January 1920.
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The terms of the treaty were primarily authored by Lloyd George (Britain), Georges Clemenceau (France) and Woodrow Wilson (United States). Thirty-two countries signed the treaty in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles in June 1919.
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The treaty’s terms proved excessively punitive for a demoralised Germany, creating further resentment among the population. This humiliation paved the way for extreme ideologies to take hold, leading to Hitler’s Nazi Germany and World War II.

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In parallel with the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations also came into force on 10 January 1920. Its primary role was to maintain world peace. No pressure then.
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This brief proved too great for a body without direct access to a standing army. Further, the United States had not joined, preferring to draw back from European affairs. The League was all but finished when Germany, Japan, and Italy left in the 1930s.
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The League of Nations limped on through World War II, finally handing over the keys to a new body, the United Nations, in 1946.

By the Way

Former Japanese marine engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi died 15 years ago yesterday, on 4 January 2010. He was born 93 years earlier in Nagasaki, a port city at the southwestern end of Japan.
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In August 1945, Yamaguchi was working for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries on secondment to one of their sites at the docks in Hiroshima. He was a draftsman, supporting the design of a new oil tanker.

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On the last day of his three-month placement, he paid one final visit to the docks before departing. He arrived just after 08:00 on August 6, 1945.
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At the same time, Paul Tibbets of the American Air Force was flying his Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber over the city. It had been a six-hour flight from Tinian, one of the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific.
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At 08:15, Tibbets’ bombardier, Major Thomas Ferebee, released Little Boy, a three-metre long, 4,400-kilogram bomb containing 64 kilograms of uranium.
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Forty-five seconds later, the world’s first atomic bomb used in war detonated, by design, approximately 600 meters above the city.

Out of curiosity...​
The B-29 Superfortress bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was named Enola Gay by pilot Paul Tibbets after his mother - Enola Gay Tibbets.

Yamaguchi was three kilometres from the epicentre of the explosion. His eardrums ruptured and he suffered serious radiation burns over much of his body.
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Nonetheless, he was able to travel back to Nagasaki the following day for treatment. Despite heavy bandaging, he went back to work three days later.
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At 11:01 on the same day that Tsutomu returned to work, 9 August 1945, Fat Man, a second atomic bomb, was released from Bockscar, the sister B-29 to Enola Gay, over Nagasaki.
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Forty-seven seconds later, Fat Man detonated. Again, Yamaguchi was three kilometres from the epicentre. Again, he survived.

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Despite his extraordinary experiences, Tsutomu managed to lead a relatively healthy life until closer to his death at the age of 93.
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He had suffered continuous vomiting in the first week and thereafter suffered from loss of hearing and temporary baldness. Towards the end of his life, radiation-related illness took control.
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Tsutomu Yamaguchi is the only formally recognised survivor of both atomic bombings on Japan in August 1945.

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Question of the Week

Elvis Presley was born 90 Years ago this Wednesday, 8 January 1935. His twin, Jesse, was born 35 minutes earlier but didn’t survive the birth.
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The King of Rock and Roll died far too young, at the age of 42. Even so, he recorded well over 650 songs and starred in 31 feature films in that short time.
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Elvis the Pelvis introduced himself to the world with the first of those recordings, That’s All Right, in 1954.
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The recording was successful, though restricted to the Memphis region and the southern states. However, it provided the foundation for launching his mega-star singing and acting career.
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What was Elvis’ last recorded single?

And Finally…

The American ornithologist, Jim Bond, was born 125 years ago yesterday, 4 January 1900. Bond spent the latter part of his childhood in England with his father and attended Cambridge University.
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He career in banking was cut short by his passion for natural history. He swapped the pin-striped suit for practical jungle attire and travelled to the Amazon to collect biological samples.
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​Collecting bird specimens became his focus, particularly relating to birds of the Caribbean. He would become a leading expert in this field.
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Now, while you may not be familiar with James’ definitive book Birds of the West Indies, it turns out that the author Ian Fleming was.
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Fleming was a keen ornithologist himself and had read Birds of the West Indies. It was a constant companion while bird-watching at his estate, Goldeneye, in Jamaica.
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In 1953, he had written Casino Royale and was looking for a name for his main character. The name should be British and understated.
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As Fleming flicked through his extensive bookshelf, his eye glanced at Birds of the West Indies. That sealed it.
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Fleming’s character became James Bond. The expert in birds of the Caribbean would gain global recognition not for his ornithological prowess but for inspiring the name of the world’s most famous fictional spy.
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Fleming hadn’t approached Bond for permission. James, the ornithologist, remained blissfully unaware of the association for a few years. In 1961, Fleming confessed to the origin of the name of his revered spy character.

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By 1964, Fleming had become aware that the Bonds were receiving unsolicited attention from fans. He wrote to apologise and invited them to join him at Goldeneye in Jamaica.
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The Bonds appeared at the Jamaican estate soon after unannounced to be greeted by Fleming who proclaimed, “The real James Bond has arrived”.
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At the end of their visit, Ian Fleming signed a first edition of his latest James Bond thriller, “You Only Live Twice,” and presented it to the Bonds.
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On the inside cover, he wrote;
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Thank you for joining me. Have a great week!

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Steve

HOST & CHIEF STORY HUNTER

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P:S: Incidentally, I am always keen to receive your feedback to help me continuously improve this newsletter and the podcast. Just hit reply to this email and...... let it rip! I respond to every email that I receive.

Question of the week... Answer

Elvis Presley’s last recorded single was Way Down, released in June 1977, a couple of months before his death. Elvis recorded the song at his home, Graceland, in October 1976.
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Way Down was Presley’s 17th No. 1 hit in the UK, a feat only matched by The Beatles. The week prior to his death, the single stood at no. 42 in the charts.

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