Holy Shit, Dracula!

When you get one of the most infamous monsters in all of storytelling named after you, you know you've done something right. Or wrong. Depends on how you respond to the whole "No such thing as bad publicity" adage. Posthumously. Very posthumously.

ANYWAY.

I shouldn't be getting off track this early.

Vlad III "Motherfucking" Țepeș was a Voivode (warlord) of Wallachia back around the time when the Byzantine Empire finally had enough with being the legacy of old Rome and rebelled via being utterly vanquished by the Ottomans. Wallachia, being a nearby neighbor of Constantinople, had its own problems with potential Ottoman invasion. Vlad's father, Vlad II, dealt with this threat pragmatically.

That is to say, he allied himself with Ottoman Empire, paid them tribute, sent his sons to them as hostages, and in return was installed as Voivode of Wallachia.This is after he joined a chivalric order called The Order of the Dragon, which was dedicated to fighting the "enemies of Christianity" -- chief among which were the Turks themselves.

The best defense is a good mewling surrender.

As an aside: the Romanian word for "Dragon" is "Drac." Vlad II's association with The Order of the Dragon earned him the name "Vlad Dracul," or "Vlad the Dragon." I think you know where this is headed. Adding an "-a" to the end of a name makes it patronymic in this context. So Vlad III was also known as "Son of the Dragon," or "Dracula."

Vlad III's younger brother Radu got along famously with the Ottomans, and ended up converting to Islam. Vlad...not so much. He was constantly at odds with his captors, which meant he was constantly punished. This did nothing to improve the relationship. Eventually, his father and older brother were both killed, and Wallachia was taken over by a rival faction. The Ottomans' solution to this little problem was to install Dracula as Voivode.

Which went thusly.

This didn't work out so well. First, because he was immediately overthrown. Then he came back and described to the usurpers all the vicious fantasies he had about just...straight up destroying Turks. And that pleased them enough to make him Voivode again. When Sultan Mehmed II sent envoys to his childhood playmate, Dracula responded by saying, "Hey, envoys, you didn't tip your hats to me when you came in. You must really like those turbans." Then he had their turbans nailed into their heads.

The Sultan was understandably a bit miffed by this turn of events. He sent an army under Hamza Bey to "make peace" with Wallachia and "remove" Vlad III if necessary. Vlad apparently caught Bey sleepin', though, and launched a surprise attack that killed or captured almost every single man under Hamza Bey's command. Then Vlad went to work earning the epithet Țepeș, or "the Impaler."

And boy howdy, did he ever work hard to earn it. The more squeamish readers might want to go ahead and stop here. It's about to get graphic up in this blog.

See, impalement is one of those execution methods that isn't meant to just kill you. It's meant to keep you alive until you really, really want to die. They'd grease a stake, stick you on it (and I'm gonna let you use your imagination as to where exactly they put you), and try to avoid rupturing any of your internal organs. In that way, you could live up to eight excruciating days in blinding, horrific pain before you finally died.

Vlad did this to about 1,000 of Hamza Bey's men, and to Hamza Bey himself. Then he brought small bands with him and, using the fluent Turkish language and customs he learned in his youth, waltzed into various Ottoman camps and put everyone within them to the sword. Or the stake.

While Vlad treated himself to the steak.

Mehmed was displeased. He sent an army of almost 100,000 men in retribution, which Vlad the Impaler proceeded to dismantle and impale little by little over a series of stunning victories. Finally, it became too much. He was out of money, his mercenaries abandoned him, and he fled to Hungary where a rival imprisoned him.

For about a dozen years. Then he went back to Wallachia and took over again. Can't keep Dracula down. Or rather, you can. You just have to finally defeat him in battle to do it. Which is what happened about two months into his reign. The Turks brought his head back to Constantinople and everyone in the Ottoman empire changed their underpants and hoped no one like that would rise to power in the Balkans again.

Several hundred years later, an old writer named Bram Stoker was working on a vampire novel and came upon a tome that detailed some of the nastier figures in history. Vlad III Dracula turned out to be a perfect fit for the main villain, and the rest is pop culture history.

He's missing some of that Wallachian charm.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Phineas Gage!

Phineas Gage had an especially rough day at work. It was 1848 and he was a foreman on a railway construction project in Vermont. There was a big outcropping of rock in the way, so naturally Phineas decided to blow it to hell with blasting powder. It's possible that he neglected to add sand to his magic explosion powder, and as a result his day worsened significantly.

As he was packing the explosives into place with a tamping iron, the iron made a spark. If you've ever been around gunpowder and sparks, you can probably guess what the result was. It was an explosion. It drove the iron, with terrific force, back out of the hole and into Phineas Gage's face, where it created a brand new hole of its own.

It was a way less meticulously dug hole, too.

The effect of this (what surgical journals would later refer to as, I shit you not) abrupt and intrusive visitor was to literally destroy both his left eye and his left frontal lobe. Of his brain. The thing that tells the rest of your body what to do all the time. In most instances, this sort of injury is accompanied by almost instantaneous death. Not for Phineas Gage, though. He survived and even sat up on his own after a few minutes.

In fact, while the injury ultimately did lead to his death, it would take about another twelve years to get around to it. In that time, Phineas Gage became a marvel of the psychological and neurological science communities. When the tamping iron took out a chunk of his brain, it appeared to have taken most of his "how to not be an asshole" knowledge with it, so naturally Gage turned into kind of an asshole for a while.

Like this but smaller and less feline.

Which was a huge deal. It seemed to confirm suspicions that our actions are, in a way, preordained by the contents of our brains. This played right into the hands of phrenologists, a large group of charlatans who managed to convince much of the scientific community that our personality types are dictated largely by where our heads are bumpiest. The fact that Gage had a dramatic swing in his behavior after part of his brain was destroyed was pretty compelling.

Part of the "White People are Just the Greatest" branch of pseudo-science

However, a recently discovered report seems to indicate that Phineas Gage got back to his old self by the time he died of a massive seizure in 1860. Either he re-learned the social conventions that had been literally blown out the top of his head, or there was a fundamental problem with the model of phrenology. Which there obviously was, since it's been thoroughly debunked anyway.

Maybe it was just an enormous amount of stress that had caused the change. I mean, he had suffered quite a bit of trauma. That much trauma is bound to cause some disorder in his life involving stress.

HEY WAIT A SECOND WE HAVE A NAME FOR THAT KIND OF THING!

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Greek Fire!

The popular interpretation of the Roman Empire falling around the middle of the Fifth Century is pretty wrong in a pretty big way. At that point, the Empire was divided into two major administrative regions. One was based in Ravenna (not even Rome!) and was down for the count by 476.

The other, based in Constantinople (not Istanbul) stuck around for another thousand years. It's known as the Byzantine Empire, and one of the reasons for its longevity was a little substance called Greek Fire, which was basically -- and maybe literally -- napalm.

You're familiar with that stuff.

Greek Fire was invented just in time to be used spectacularly in the First Arab Siege of Constantinople (not Istanbul). The city was surrounded, and the Umayyad Caliphate was feeling pretty confident that they were going to add a new member to their conquest club. For years, skirmishes were almost a daily occurrence. The Arab fleet sat in the Bosporus defying the Byzantines to come see what would happen if they tried to break out.

The Byzantine fleet started behaving strangely. In a time when naval warfare was all about smashing ships into each other as hard as you could, they were appearing in the harbor with strange siphons attached. When the two fleets finally met in a pitched battle in late 677 or early 678, the purpose of the siphons became devastatingly clear. 

This honestly looks like something I would have doodled in middle school

The Arabs got very literally hosed. With fire. Liquid fire. Liquid fire that burned with the fury of Achilles even on the surface of the ocean. The whole experience really put a damper on Umayyads' trip to Constantinople (not Istanbul), and they promptly left to write an unfavorable Yelp review.

"There were no mints on the pillow. In fact, there were no pillows. And they set fire to my person."

Forty years later, the Umayyad Caliphate returned to prove they hadn't learned their lesson. In what historians call one of the most important and decisive battles in history...the same thing happened again. The Second Arab Siege of Constantinople was routed by Greek Fire.

Greek Fire continued to give a ludicrously unfair advantage to the Byzantine navy until around the 13th Century. At that point, they may have lost access to the areas where ingredients for the substance could be found. We're not sure, because it was such a closely guarded secret that we don't really know what the hell Greek Fire was. The general consensus among scholars is that it was probably made with a form of petroleum and was sort of like napalm.

And that it would make for a bitchin' battle scene in a fantasy series.

What we do know is that Greek Fire was so powerful that it is credited with stopping the Arab conquest of Eastern Europe dead in its tracks.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Phossy Jaw!

Did you know that lighters were invented before matches?

It's true! It makes sense when you think about it. Lighters are really no more than an advanced form of flint and tinder with a bit of flammable liquid added to the mix. Matches, on the other hand, are a fairly novel idea. They use a phosphorous coating and frictional heat to create a reaction that produces fire. Pretty neat, huh?

Nowadays, matches are usually tipped with either phosphorus sesquisulfide or red phosphorous. Back in the 19th Century, they used something else. Something called White Phosphorous. Does that name sound familiar? Well, brace your stomach, because here's why:

(I'M NOT JOKING, TURN BACK NOW IF YOU'RE SQUEAMISH)

Oh, so it's like a bomb or...

Oh, that does look pretty terrifying, but...

HOLY JESUS GOD, WHY?

White Phosphorous is known for it's use as a smoke-producing and incendiary weapon. Meaning it burns shit like hellfire. And it has a nasty tendency to cling stubbornly to human flesh. It can catch just about anything on fire, and being anywhere near it when it burns is guaranteed to ruin your whole goddamn day. It is nasty, it is violent, and it is a clear message from the gods to run in the opposite direction whenever you see it.

Jesus. Okay, Here's a couple of pictures to take our minds off of that gruesome display above:

Happy thoughts.

Happy Thoughts!

HAPPY THOUGHTS!

That feels better. Okay, so back to matches. White Phosphorus, in addition to being a key ingredient in the hellfire of Satan's own arsenal, produces a nasty vapor that you really shouldn't breathe in over a long period of time. When you do, as people in matchmaking factories were wont to do in the latter half of the 19th Century, you develop a condition known as Phossy Jaw.

[I considered putting another picture here, but I decided that I've put you through enough gore this week.]

Phossy jaw is also known as "Phosphorus necrosis of the jaw," and is pretty much exactly what it says on the package. For their service in the factories, Victorian-era matchmakers were rewarded with their very own glow-in-the-dark jaw bones! Pretty cool, sure, but said jaw bones were also malformed, abscessed, and smelled very literally like death. 

Loyal employees were also granted unending anguish as their jaws slowly decomposed on their living faces. Finally, they were given the option of either paying a fee they usually couldn't afford to have a Victorian-era doctor (yikes) remove parts of their jaw (double yikes), or they just plain died of organ failure.

In 1888, a big group of matchgirls collectively bargained their way into saying, "Fuck this shit," and went on strike. For their trouble, they got some awareness. That's it. Nothing concrete, people just started to openly acknowledge the fact that they were willfully imposing a horrifying disease upon thousands of people because they wanted a stick that could light itself on fire.

Which, admittedly, is a little bit neat.

Three years later, the Salvation Army, to their credit, became the first match company to use the slightly less efficient (but infinitely safer) red phosphorous in their matchmaking process, and they paid better wages to boot.

The next few decades saw various countries banning the use of white phosphorus in match production and, in the case of the United States, placing a punitive tax on it that made it impractical. An international ban was put in place by Berne Convention in 1906. 

In 1898, Albright and Wilson patented a method of safely producing phosphorus sesquisulfide for the manufacture of matches. They sold the patent to the Diamond Match Company, to whom President William Howard Taft personally wrote a public letter begging them, for the good of humanity, to release the patent. They did, and match production became relatively safe for workers from that point on.

No, really. That happened.

Next time you light a match, consider all the abscessed, necrotic, excruciatingly painful jaws that litter the history of that flammable little wooden stick you hold.

Holy shit.