Figure 1 – Margaret Neves (1792-1903). In the public domain in the United States because of its age.

In his landmark, and I think very profound, book “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” Daniel Dennett tells us of a coin toss contest. The premise is this, suppose I were to tell you that I can show you a person who has one 100 coin tosses in a row. You would probably say: “No way!” But point of fact, it can be done with 100 % certainty. All you need to do is get 2¹⁰⁰ people pair them off randomly. Take the winners, pair them off randomly, and continue the process one hundred times. Now a few points, first, that’s 1,267,650,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000  people, which is not only a lot but a lot more than the number of people living on the Earth.  But hey, this is science fiction. Right? Or at the very least it is a Gedanken Experiment.  But the point is that while the winner was/is/will be chosen totally by the laws of random chance, and who said that God does not roll dice with the universe, he/she is certain to feel specially endowed by the Creator.

A similar logic applied to the three remaining members of the club, or is it tontine, of people alive today who were born in the nineteenth century, which was the subject of Tuesday’s blog. Actually, it’s not the same thing, because people who live long tend to have family members who also live longer. So genetics does play a factor. Anyway, Tuesday’s blog got me wondering about the eighteenth century. Who was the last person born in the eighteenth century to live into the twentieth century? I know, I know, who really cares? But bear with me.  The interest in that question is that photography was invented in 1838, so the person in question, the winner of the coin toss as it were, was most likely to have been photographed.

The problem with all of this is that record keeping in the eighteenth century was not what it was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, you wind up with an answer to the question of who was best documented to have accomplished the feat, not necessarily who actually lasted the longest. Anyway, a lot of people’s money is on Margaret Ann Neve (18 May 1792 – 4 April 1903) of St. Peter Port, Guernsey, English Channel, who is shown in Figure 1. She was the first documented woman supercentenarian, that’s someone who lives to be older than 110.

We know very little about her. She remembered the turmoil brought to Guernsey by the French Revolution. She married John Neve in England in 1823 but returned to Guernsey in 1849 after his death. Thus, she survived him by 54 years. Neve frequently traveled with her sister with her sister, who lived to be 98. Note that her mother lived to be 99. Their last trip was to Crakow on 1872. travelled abroad to various countries with her sister, who died aged 98. Their last trip was in 1872, when they visited Cracow (then in Austria-Hungary, now in Poland). Margaret Neve died peacefully on 4 April 1903 at age 110 years 321 days. At the time she was believed to be the oldest living person.

As I said, it is really hard to tell whether Ms. Neve was really “the one.” In 2012 a photograph sold on Ebay of a native American Ka-Nah-Be-Owey Wence, aka John Smith, lit a controversy by claiming that he was 129 years old at the time of his death in 1920. This would have places him as born in the same year as Margaret Neve and out living her by seventeen years. It would also make him the oldest person that ever lived topping Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at age 122. However, his age appears to be not accurate, and it serves as a lesson of how such ages could be assessed where there are no written records.  According to John Smith’s Wikipedia site :Federal Commissioner of Indian Enrollment Ransom J. Powell argued that it was disease and not age that gave him such a wrinkled and ancient looking face and remarked that according to records he was only 88 years old. Paul Buffalo who, when a small boy, had met John Smith, said he had repeatedly heard the old man state that he was “seven or eight”, “eight or nine” and “ten years old” when the “stars fell”. The stars falling refers to the Leonid meteor shower of November 13, 1833, about which Carl Zapffe writes: “Birthdates of Indians of the 19th Century had generally been determined by the Government in relation to the awe-inspiring shower of meteorites that burned through the American skies just before dawn on 13 November 1833, scaring the daylights out of civilized and uncivilized [sic] peoples alike. Obviously it was the end of the world…” This puts the age of John Smith at just under 100 years old at the time of his death, and leaves Ms. Neves secure in her dominance or at least her longevity. The old photographs of John Smith are however wonderful!

Before leaving this subject there is another question to consider and that is “Of all the people who have ever been photographed, who had the earliest birthday.” Photography was invented in 1838; so again the person had to have been born in the eighteenth century. Hmm! A while back I posted a blog about an 1842 photograph of Mozarts wife Constanza (1762 – 1842). Probably not, right? Because she was a mere 80 years old at the time.

As it turns out, the answer relates to something else that we spoke about  “The Last Muster Project” and book by a similar name, by photo-detective Maureen Taylor.  In 1864 the Rev. Elias Brewster Hillard a congregationalist minister from Connecticut set out desperately to document these “Last Men,” the last surviving veterans of the American Revolutionary War before they died out.  He published his photographs and stories in “The Last Men of the Revolution (1864).”  The date is important, because at the time the nation was embroiled in a civil war that put at jeopardy what these men set out to accomplish..  Indeed, I would argue that the American Civil War as a fight for liberty was the American Revolution, part II. This book was reprinted by Barre Publishers in 1968.  Hillard recognized the importance of this task of preservation.  Ms. Taylor, using modern techniques set out with her Last Muster Project to discover more of these memorable men and women.  Her book documents the lives of seventy of these individuals.

So who mustered last. Figure 2 is from a daguerreotype in the Collection of the Maine Historical Society that was taken c1852 and shows Conrad Hayer (1749-1856), sometimes spelled Heyer. Hayer was born in 1849 and the photograph was taken in 1852. It seems likely that he was the person with the earliest birthday ever photographed alive. I put the alive part in there so that people don’t through King Tut and the like at me.

In the end we cannot really be sure of either Neve’s or Hayer’s claims to photographic history. Indeed, I hope that readers can find and inform us of earlier people.

Conrad Hayer (1852) probably the person with the earliest birthday ever photograhed. In the Maine Historical Society and in the public domain because of its age.

Figure 1 – Hoop-skirt by Napoleon Sarony c 1893. From the Wikimedia Commons, original in the US Library of Congress and in the public domain because of its age.

Our discussion this past Saturday about crinolines, crinolettes, and bustles left unanswered the two most critical questions of all: first how do you get into one, and second how do you sit in one. Fortunately, there is an army of historical dress makers and re-enactors preserving this heritage ofr us. As a result these questions can be answered.

First, of all there is a famous pair of Sarony Studios photographs from 1893 in the United States Library of Congress that show or reveal a woman’s crinoline cage. Even this it must be realized is pretty late from an historical perspective. I have reproduced them here as Figure 1.

It also turns out, perhaps not so surprisingly that there are lots of instructional videos on the web that span the subject matter from how to make to how to put on and wear these dresses. Oh yes they also answer the perhaps more critical question of how to take them off. I say perhaps because you can approach that question in much the same way you answer people worried about a cat stuck in a tree. “Ever seen a cat skeleton in a tree.” Kitties have a way of getting down, although it might be inelegant.

Anyway just a few suggestions regarding videos to watch. Historical sewing has an excellent video of how to sit in a hoop-skirt, and you can go from there an make your own.

And if you want to see how a woman got dressed in the 1860’s I recommend Nevada Culture’ website. This is significant in that it demonstrates that it could be done without staff; so even if you were more strapped than Lady Cora, it could be done.

Figure 1 – Napoleon Sarony Portrait of a Young Woman in a Crinolette, c 1875. Digitized albumen print.  In the public domain because of its age.

A few weeks back, I posted a photograph from the 1870’s by Napoleon Sarony of a beautiful woman in an equally beautiful hooped skirt. I recently purchased on Ebay another Sarony photograph (Figure 1) from the same period showing an equally beautiful young lady in an even bigger hooped skirt. And note how Sarony extends the size of the dress by placing a fabric over the posing chairs which the lady holds. What is, or was, going on here? Certainly the hooped skirt is an alien feature, which we cannot quite relate to, that projects a sort of mysterious exoticism into mid-nineteenth century portraits. I mean, the men’s clothing is not so bizarre or different from ours, with the exception perhaps of the ties – and truth to tell, so few men wear ties today anyway.

Figure 2 – Steel wired crinoline cage c 1865 from the Wikipedia original from This file is in the public domain because it has been released by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art www.lacma.org with its “Public Domain High Resolution Image Available” mark.

An interesting side point, is that women’s dresses grew to monstrous proportions at precisely the same time that nineteenth century paleontologists pondered the evolutionary etiology and advantages of greater size among dinosaurs. In reality however, hooped skirts provided no such evolutionary advantage with thousands of women killed each years when such dresses caught on fire or were caught up by wagon wheels on bustling streets. Indeed, there was a public campaign against them. But these pleas fell on the deaf ears of slaves to fashion. And slaves they were indeed. I went several years ago to visit the National Historic Site at Seneca Falls New York, the Museum of the Suffrage Movement. It was pointed out by a guide that, by necessity, the first step in the emancipation of women in the United States and Europe was to free them from the bonds of their clothing.

Initially the hooped skirt was devised as a modest-mechanism to separate the long dress from the legs. Arguably, in warmer climates it offered a solution of how to stay cool while wearing a long dress with due modesty. In Tudor times, it was referred to as a ‘farthingale’. Structurally, hooped skirts consisted of a stiff-fabric petticoat sewn with channels designed to hold stiff semi-flexible materials like rope, osiers, whalebone, steel, or rubber. And as Tchaikovsky so elegantly proved with his “Mother Ginger” character in the ballet “Nutcracker,” you can hide a lot under all those hopes including a troupe of small children.

One material that was popular in the production of stiff petticoats was crinoline made of horsehair (“crin”) and cotton or linen. However, by the mid 1850’s the word “crinoline” came to refer to the “fashionable” silhouette provided by horsehair petticoats, and to the underskirts made using steel, cane, whalebone or rubber hoops. How times and fashions of aestheticism change. Today, arguably, these once striven for body shapes as more reminiscent of the back sides of hippopotamuses than shapely young ladies. These hoops came to be known as crinoline cages. that replaced them in the mid-1850s. Figure 2 shows a typical crinoline cage of the day. Despite widespread criticism, crinolines became the height of women’s fashion in the United States and Europe from the 1850s to the 1870s.

In the early 1870’s crinolines were replaced by crinolettes and bustles. Again we may turn to paleontology and speak of transitional forms. The crinolette was fashionable from 1867 through to the mid-1870s, and I believe that is really what we are looking at in Figure 1, and indeed enables more accurate dating of the photograph to the mid 1870’s. The crinolette was typically composed of half-hoops, sometimes with internal lacing or ties designed to allow adjustment of fullness and shape. The key design point was that the hoop was confined to the rear.

The transition from the crinoline cage dresses to the crinolette posed a problem for Victorian ladies, what to do with out of fashion dresses. Anyone who saved their youthful bell-bottomed jeans of the 1960’s realizes that even when items come back into fashion, they are always different enough to fuel a profit thirty fashion industry.  Indeed, the crinoline and other hoops still make their way to the Paris runway of 2015. But there is always just enough difference …  The British humor magazine Punch offered a thrifty suggestion to the question of what to do with all those crinolines taking up excessive spaces in ladies’ closets,  that they could be used to protect plants against the rigors of the winter months.