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My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla
The Book in 3 Sentences
- I actually finished this book ten or fifteen years ago – I was looking through my highlights trying to find some bits about his prodigious imagination and ability to visualize objects and concepts. I did not find that, I guess I did not highlight it. The book is interesting throughout. I will probably reread it at some point in the future – putting this review into existens for the sake of completeness. A good, honest autobiography, as these things go. These days he would totally be diagnosed with several spectrum disorders, probably accurately. His descriptions of his imagination and visualization is what stands out. I will probably reread purely for that part. It’s always interesting to hear genius describe itself.
How I Discovered It
The Kindle auto discover feature.
Who Should Read It?
People interested in that era. I think the original impetus was hearing The Handsome Families “Tesla’s Hotel Room” from their “Last Days of Wonder” album. I’ve always found the phrase captivating – such a pleasant way to hint at a since of an earlier time of insight and beauty. To “bask in the light of an older heaven” as Stapledon would say.
How the Book Changed Me
I suppose the bits about Tesla’s imagination had an impact – some people really have “spikey” talents in some or fashion and that is why we hear about them a century later. It’s also odd – he was all engineering, no science.Highlights
Genius is its own passport, and has always been ready to change habitats until the natural one is found. Thus it is, perchance, that while some of our artists are impelled to set up their easels in Paris or Rome, many Europeans of mark in the fields of science and research are no less apt to adopt our nationality, of free choice. They are, indeed, Americans born in exile, and seek this country instinctively as their home, needing in reality no papers of naturalization.
give us, through ripening years, of many deep problems; but when a man springs from a people who have a hundred words for knife and only one for bread, it is a little unreasonable to urge him to be careful even of his own
Government Telegraph Engineering Department at BudaPest. His salary was small enough to please those who hold that the best endowment of genius is poverty,
Emerson has said that steam is half an Englishman; may we not, in view of what such men as Edison have done, add that electricity is half an American?
The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs.
Speaking for myself, I have already had more than my full measure of this exquisite enjoyment, so much that for many years my life was little short of continuous rapture. I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am,
for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers. Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.
Altho I must trace to my mother’s influence whatever inventiveness I possess, the training he gave me must have been helpful. It comprised all sorts of exercises–as, guessing one another’s thoughts, discovering the defects of some form or expression, repeating long sentences or performing mental calculations. These daily lessons were intended to strengthen memory and reason and especially to develop the critical sense, and were undoubtedly very beneficial.
and make it visible. Such an advance would revolutionize all human relations. I am convinced that this wonder can and will be accomplished in time to come; I may add that I have devoted much thought to the solution of the problem.
This I did constantly until I was about seventeen when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radically opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient. The moment one constructs a device to carry into practise a crude idea he finds himself unavoidably engrost with the details and defects of the apparatus. As he goes on improving and reconstructing, his force of concentration diminishes and he loses sight of the great underlying principle. Results
at the sacrifice of quality. My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever, the results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything.
During that period I contracted many strange likes, dislikes and habits, some of which I can trace to external impressions while others are unaccountable. I had a violent aversion against the earrings of women but other ornaments, as bracelets, pleased me more or less according to design. The sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit but I was fascinated with the glitter of crystals or objects with sharp edges and plane surfaces. I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver. I would get a fever by looking at a peach and if a piece of camphor was anywhere in the house it caused me the keenest discomfort. Even now I am not insensible to some of these upsetting impulses. When I drop little squares of paper in a dish filled with liquid, I always sense a peculiar and awful taste in my mouth. I counted the steps in my walks and calculated the cubical contents of soup plates, coffee cups and pieces of food—otherwise my meal was unenjoyable. All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three and if I mist I felt impelled to do it all over again, even if it took hours. Up to the age of eight years, my character
knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways. Most persons are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious to what is passing on within themselves.
taken in as whiskey or produced in the stomach from sugar. But it should not be overlooked that all these are great eliminators assisting Nature, as they do, in upholding her stern but just law of the survival of the fittest. Eager reformers should also be mindful of the eternal perversity of mankind which makes the indifferent “laissez-faire” by far preferable to enforced restraint.
me. I was fascinated by a description of Niagara Falls I had perused, and pictured in my imagination a big wheel run by the Falls. I told my uncle that I would go to America and carry out this scheme. Thirty years later I saw my ideas carried out at Niagara and marveled at the unfathomable mystery of the mind.
I had a veritable rnania for finishing whatever I began, which often got me into difficulties.
But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile.
When natural inclination develops into a passionate desire, one advances towards his goal in seven-league boots. In
less than two months I evolved virtually all the types of motors and modifications of the system which are now identified with my name. It
machines, I determined to try my fortunes in the Land of Golden Promise. But the chance was nearly mist. I liquefied my modest
“Is this America?” I asked myself in painful surprise. “It is a century behind Europe in civilization.” When I went abroad in 1889 – five years having elapsed since my arrival here – I became convinced that it was more than one hundred years AHEAD of Europe and nothing has happened to this day to change my opinion.
time. We crave for new sensations but soon become indifferent to them. The wonders of yesterday are today common occurrences. When
My project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time. But the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.
not less menacing than those born from want and suffering. If we were to release the energy of atoms or discover some other way of developing cheap and unlimited power at any point of the globe this accomplishment, instead of being a blessing, might bring disaster to mankind in giving rise to dissension and anarchy which would ultimately result in the enthronement of the hated regime of force. The greatest good will comes from technical improvements tending to unification and harmony, and my wireless transmitter is preeminently such.
because of the directional character of the circuit. This was perfectly self-evident, but came as a revelation to some simple-minded wireless folks whose experience was confined to forms of apparatus that could have been improved with an axe, and they have been disposing of the bear’s skin before killing him. If
This invention is a logical outcome of observations begun in my boyhood and continued thruout my life. When
Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment and merging of races, and we are still far from this blissful realization.
As I view the world of today, in the light of the gigantic struggle we have witnest, I am filled with conviction that the interests of humanity would be best served if the United States remained true to its traditions and kept out of “entangling alliances.” Situated as it is, geographically, remote from the theaters of impending conflicts, without incentive to territorial aggrandizement, with inexhaustible resources and immense population thoroly imbued with the spirit of liberty and right, this country is placed in a unique and privileged position. It is thus able to exert, independently, its colossal strength and moral force to the benefit of all, more judiciously and effectively, than as member of a league.
The proposed League is not a remedy but on the contrary, in the opinion of a number of competent men, may bring about results just the opposite. It is particularly regrettable that a punitive policy was adopted in framing the terms of peace, because a few years hence it will be possible for nations to fight without armies, ships or guns, by weapons far more terrible, to the destructive action and range of which there is virtually no limit.
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I like my Leibniz vs Hume debates
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I’ve leveled up
Claude/Fable now cites me as a source when it explains why I’m a a bit wrong on something!
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Papaw O’Dells in Cleveland TN is a magnificent guitar store
PaPaw O’Dells in Cleveland TN. Well worth the drive. They paid top dollar for trades, specialize in bluegrass instruments (mostly) and had a wonderful selection, including the (only three for sale in the US) guitar I was looking for at a reasonable price, which actually was less than what I was trading in. They also throw in the setup/final customization too, which most places charge for. Absolutely wonderful people too. I spent an hour or so just chatting with the owners. An impromptu jam developed while I was there on Saturday – apparently the local players just show up on Saturday afternoons.
If you’re ever in the market, or know someone who is then definitely check them out – highly recomended.
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Joan Baez: The Last Leaf by Elizabeth Thompson
The Book in 5 Sentences
- On the whole a pretty sub par biography in general. There were some details that were unknown to me at the time, but all of the important ones were largely covered in the Dylan biographies. On the whole I was unimpressed. It did not delve into her guitar work very much (she is a guitarist of some renown, why not?) and spent too much time on the mundane aspects of her life. The direct Pete Seeger influence was interesting, as well as the fact that she was a national figure in this (rapidly growing) niche at 19 and 20 was mentioned, but largely underdocumented.
Summary + Notes
At his death in 1951, The New York Times reported that he had been a professor of English and drama at Hunter College in Manhattan, and in 1933 established a fellowship center in Mount Kisco, New York State, “an educational project for the promotion of peace.”
Back home, his wife saw his anxiety and suggested they seek guidance from the Quaker community. They went as a family, the girls staying for twenty minutes before being dispatched next door with all the other kids to Quaker Sunday school. Not surprisingly, Joanie found it tiresome, as would any child forced to sit in silence, but the Baezes attended regularly from then on. Joanie has never entirely left the ritual of Quaker Meeting behind and it’s clear from her own lifelong commitment to pacifism and nonviolence that, young as she was, the experience was a formative one.
The protest cemented her friendship with Ira Sandperl, a self-taught Gandhian scholar and advocate of nonviolent social change whom she’d met at the Quaker Meeting her father insisted “the girls” continue to attend. By day he worked at Kepler’s, the radical and intellectual bookshop that was to Menlo Park what Cody’s was to Berkeley, and City Lights to San Francisco. A Stanford dropout, he was often on campus, talking about peace and disarmament, and Joanie found in him a mentor and friend. In 1965, they would co-found the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence.
And it took, and I loved the music and I discovered that this man did what my family, in a sense, had done for many years which was, having become Quakers, fused everything with their politics. This was music and politics in a way I’d never known it but it was so natural to me, his music and what he did with his life, and I understood that very quickly. There was Harry Belafonte, Odetta and Pete. I listened to Pete’s music endlessly and heard the stories about him, and learned the songs, and followed him.
how the Baez women felt about upping and moving yet again is unknown. The lifestyle probably took its toll on Albert and Joan’s marriage, for by the end of the 1970s they were living apart and would divorce, though they remade their vows some thirty years later because Albert wanted to die a married man. Free-spirited and creative, Joanie might have been less anxious and insecure if she’d been able to settle in one place and make lasting friends, but she has said she was eventually afraid to make friends because she knew they’d be lost in the next move. She appears to have had no idea why she was enrolled at Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Arts, only that no other school would take her.
Any drama was strictly personal, and pretty soon Joanie had flunked college.
Club 47, the coffeehouse with which Baez is forever associated, had opened its doors in January 1958, founded by Brandeis graduates Paula Kelly and Joyce Kalina and built from scratch, their aim to replicate a Paris café “where people would go listen to jazz, smoke cigarettes and talk a mile a minute,” explained Siggins.
What’s remarkable is just how fully formed the teenage Joan Baez was as a talent. Film footage discovered in a fridge during 36the making of the PBS documentary How Sweet the Sound captures a Club 47 performance from 1958. She is perched on a stool, ramrod-straight, half in shadow, her hair long and wavy, wearing a patterned dress and playing a mahogany Martin. She is singing the English ballad “Barbara Allen” exactly as it would appear on her second album three years later.
As with Bob Dylan, there are those who claim that she “stole” songs and made them her own to such an extent that it sounded as though other people were copying her. Such is the folk process, everyone learning from everyone else, yet there are some who claim that Baez stole not only Debbie Green’s songs but her identity. Green herself has firmly refuted this.
Kalina have recalled Joanie as being difficult to befriend, someone who could be “arrogant, rude, hysterical—she had stage fright half the time.” It would be decades before she attained a sense of inner peace, the result of “serious work,” and only in the second half of her career did she become truly comfortable onstage.
39Folksingers ’Round Harvard Square featured Baez with Bill Wood and Ted Alevizos, both of whom she has also cited as major influences. It was made in May 1959 at Fassett Recordings, located in a Beacon Hill brownstone.
Joanie descended the stage to “an exorbitant amount of fuss.” Wein thought her gift “immediately apparent. She was an exceedingly talented vocalist, the Sarah Vaughan of folk-singing,” he wrote in his memoir Myself Among Others. “Instantly she became not only the great discovery, but also the living symbol, of the first Newport Folk Festival.”
Grossman returned. He was just getting into artist management and he saw folk music as the next big thing, telling Shelton that “the American public is like Sleeping Beauty, waiting to be kissed awake by the prince of folk music,” a metaphor that Baez, whom Gibson thought “puritanical,” might not have appreciated.
Martin guitars, once available cheap in yard sales, were now much sought-after.
She was comfortable with Vanguard, who as it happened had the rights to record the Newport Folk Festival from its inception in 1959. Helped in large part by the success of Joan Baez, who at one point had three albums in the Top 10, the label would become pre-eminent in the field of what’s now called Americana.
Her decision made, Joanie returned home to Belmont, singing Tuesdays and Fridays at Club 47 for $25 a night, a princely sum in those days. By day she worked as a housemother in the kindergarten at Perkins School for the Blind, where Amelia Earhart had been a volunteer reader and Helen Keller a student.
Folksingers ’Round Harvard Square was released in January 1960 on Veritas Records.
The nineteen songs were laid down over three days, with “Mary Hamilton,” the long Scottish Child Ballad—from the nineteenth-century anthology of English and Scottish ballads identified by Francis James Child, a Boston-born polymath who became Harvard’s first Professor of English—that would become a staple of her repertoire, captured in one take.
Working with her was always delightful, on the road as well as in the studio or concert hall set-ups. Her voice, in all registers, was extremely microphone-friendly and did not require any electronic manipulations such as limiters or equalization. Joan required minimal editing, as most of her output was one-take versions.”
Joan Baez was released in time for Christmas 1960 and would spend sixty-four weeks on the Billboard chart, peaking at No. 20 and eventually being certified Gold. The singer was not yet twenty but her performance is remarkably assured.
But the folk revival was overwhelmingly white—and, despite a small group of high-profile older women, overwhelmingly male. As
There were more concerts with Pete Seeger, whose consummate ease as a performer was in stark contrast to her own anxieties.
Dylan’s first break came on April 11, 1961, when he was booked for his first professional gig, playing support to bluesman John 51Lee Hooker at Gerde’s. Baez had already heard his name which is presumably why she headed to West 4th Street that night. She noted that he carried “an undignified amount of baby fat,” wore a too-small jacket and seemed dwarfed by his guitar. His own songs were “original and refreshing if blunt and jagged” and she thought him “exceptional.” He finished his set and was brought to the table where she was seated with Michael. “The historic event of our meeting was under way,” she wrote a quarter-century later.
Nat Hentoff, who, writing in The Reporter of folk’s renaissance, suggested that, until Baez, “no one had appeared who could hold an audience by musical excellence alone.”
Scarcely four years had passed since her Club 47 debut, yet May 1962 found Baez giving a solo concert at Carnegie Hall.
The signing of the Civil Rights Act was two years away and Baez was one of the first major artists to embrace the black cause.
Time recommended three “other newcomers”: Bonnie Dobson, Judy Collins, and Carolyn Hester—all of them still active.
of detached madrigal singers performing calmly at court, and of saddened gypsies trying to charm death into leaving their Spanish caves.
was “uniquely and profoundly” her own. Yet for some traditionalists and their followers who’d been ploughing the folk furrow long before the 1960s revival, the Baez voice was too polished for folk music, which, in her hands, became something akin to art song.
Pete Seeger would not be invited to appear because of his left-wing views, even though a seven-year battle with the House Un-American Activities Committee had seen him vindicated. As a result, Baez refused to appear, as would The Greenbriar Boys, Tom Paxton, Barbara Dane, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Judy Collins and Theodore Bikel, having participated in earlier shows, refused future appearances.
“A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” a song written with fierce urgency the previous October as the world held its breath during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Baez’s
the Pacific Ocean just a short drive away in the Jaguar XK-E she’d bought on a whim with cash and which the IRS would later seize and sell to offset the taxes she was withholding in protest against Vietnam. (She has always said Dylan was a terrible driver, so he may not have been allowed behind the wheel of the silver sports car, of which neighbor Hunter S. Thompson was envious.)
She would open each concert and then introduce Dylan, who would play a half-dozen songs, and then they would sing together. It’s easy to forget that in the old analog world, few people would have known what was coming, and it’s fair to say that not every audience was ecstatic. Nevertheless, Baez—always loyal to a cause—persisted, enabling Dylan quickly to acquire an audience.
Thus, she was “no longer supporting my portion of the arms race” and was 69withholding the sixty percent of her income tax used for defense spending.
Dylan’s thoughts on the subject, if any, are unknown, though Baez had yet to understand he was not an activist.
In her memoir, Baez described Dylan as “turning out songs like ticker tape, and I was stealing them as fast as he wrote them.”
“the rich fruits of their singing collaborations. Joan always seemed, onstage, the earnest, worshipful one, overly so, in the presence of the Boy Genius, and Bob would sometimes lightly mock that earnestness, as he did between songs at the Philharmonic. But when singing together they were quite a pair, their harmony lines adding depth to the melodies, their sheer pleasure in each other’s company showing in their voices.”
Nat Hentoff, writing in The New Yorker, reported him as saying: “Those records I’ve already made, I’ll stand behind them, but some of that was jumping into the scene to be heard and a lot of it was because I didn’t see anybody else doing that kind of thing. Now a lot of people are doing finger-pointing songs. You know—pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know—be a spokesman.” Lest there be any doubt, he volunteered that he wasn’t going down South to hold any picket signs and, besides, “The NAACP is a bunch of old guys.”
The album is simultaneously milestone and stepping stone, for the tracks include folk songs (among them “The Wild Mountain Thyme,” often sung in duet with Dylan) and country (“A Satisfied Mind,” a song she helped put on the map), as well as Donovan’s “Colours.” (At Newport ’65, perhaps to irritate Dylan, she had invited Donovan to join her for a duet.)
Enrolling students were given an extensive reading list, prepared by Sandperl (Thoreau, Tolstoy, Huxley, Gandhi, Malcolm X all featured), and were required to learn meditation and the benefits of Quaker-style daily silence. Baez described them as “regular-looking, college-age people. Flower children, thank God, aren’t interested.”
According to Hudson, both Merton and the nurse shared an enthusiasm for Baez’s music, agreeing they would each listen to her recording of “Silver Dagger,” a song of unrequited love from her debut album, every day at 1.30am.
Within a few weeks, and on his wife’s twenty-first birthday, Fariña would die in a motorcycle spill in Carmel following the launch party for his novel. Would
Only when she was back home in California did she learn that the CIA had pressured the interpreter to mistranslate her political remarks. “If you don’t cooperate, you will have trouble in your work in the future,” The New York Times reported his being told.
On March 26, Baez and Harris married at New York’s St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, speaking Quaker wedding vows. The groom wore a dark three-piece suit and tie, walrus moustache, and whiskers, the bride a Grecian-style floor-length dress. Judy Collins sang.
I had no idea what to expect from motherhood. It’s a bit like getting old. You don’t know what it’s like until you get there.
At an intensely political event reflecting her recent trip to Hanoi, she publicized Amnesty from the stage and with leaflets.
Inspiration for the task arrived quite out of the blue—a phone call from “a booth in the Midwest.” As she recollected to Arthur Levy, Bob Dylan rang and read to her the entire text of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” a lengthy and surreal song that would appear a few months later on Blood on the Tracks, still 104regarded as among his finest albums.
Dylan tried to persuade her to stay, talking already about a sort of never-ending tour on which they could all bring their kids. She
They would appear on the same stage in January 2010, as the newly elected President Obama and Michelle celebrated the music of the civil rights era at the White House. Not a word was exchanged.
In Washington, President Jimmy Carter promised to send the Seventh Fleet to rescue Boat People at sea.
Extraordinarily, Baez was not invited to participate in the making of “We Are the World.” When it came to 1985’s Live Aid, promoter Bill Graham, with whom she’d often worked, surely realized it would be rude not to include her, even if there had been fallout over the abortive Dylan and Santana tour. But she was granted only the 9am Philadelphia opening spot and given six minutes to perform. Introduced by Jack Nicholson, she declared: “Good morning, Children of the Eighties! This is your 119Woodstock, and it’s long overdue,” before singing “Amazing Grace” and (somewhat ironically) a couple of verses of “We Are the World.”
By 1979, Baez, too, was trying not to think about Vietnam. However, confronted with the evidence and two refugees who came to a study group at her California home to ask what had happened to all the Americans who had marched in solidarity with the Vietnamese, she could no longer stand aside. Her campaign for the Boat People brought opprobrium from the left, who felt she was letting the country off the hook over the war, and praise from the right, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan applauding her stand and noting that she’d finally “seen the light.”
As a teenager she made friends with members of the American Friends Service Committee, working with it down the years. Though she may now call it meditation, Baez routinely “keeps silence,” alert to “the still small voice” of God, whatever she may call him.
He wished to remind his fellow countrymen “that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.” Sentiments with which Joan Baez has always concurred.
Belafonte bankrolled the 1964 freedom summer, the year of Mississippi Burning, when three young activists were ambushed, tortured, and killed by the Ku Klux Klan, and in August that year flew into Greenwood, Mississippi with $70,000 in cash to support the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Reactionary violence or revolutionary violence—a rubber-hose beating felt the same whoever administered it, she explained, 134not for the first time. “I believe in people, not systems.” To her, all life is sacred.
Less seriously, 32% of women admitted to having ironed their hair to get “the look.”
Only Joan Baez appeared to see protest, in whatever form, as a vocation.
Vanguard released a three-CD box set, Rare, Live & Classic, one third of the tracks previously unreleased. They included family tapes and tracks from the Grateful Dead sessions of spring 1982, the album planned and recorded at drummer Mickey Hart’s Novato ranch but never released.
The break between chest voice and head voice, a problem overcome with lessons and daily exercises, is evident. She can sing in one or the other or make a leap for a high note or two, but melodies that require her to proceed seamlessly across the range are becoming a problem. The slightest cold or sore throat will of course exacerbate it, as will tiredness, all enemies of the singer.
Bob Dylan talked of her “heart-stopping soprano” and a guitar style he tried and failed to master, saying she was “at the forefront of a new dynamic in American music.”
Technique improves stamina but, as with the rest of the body, the years take their toll: The vocal cord fibers thin and stiffen and the larynx cartilage hardens, with the result that the voice becomes less stable, the top notes less reliable.
Her guitar playing has been taken for granted but it has always been rather sophisticated, a self-contained combination of rhythm and lead, Baez often picking out lines that either harmonized with her voice or were in counterpoint to it, while bass notes supported a song’s harmonic architecture.
Baez made one of her first New York City appearances with Earl Scruggs, and on The Earl Scruggs Revue Anniversary Special (CBS, 1975) she duets with Johnny Cash on “Gospel Ship,” and is joined by Leonard Cohen and Buffy Sainte-Marie on “Passing Through” (when she sings a verse in Dylan’s voice).
By the 1970s, her confidence as a speaker, and her eloquence, are rather remarkable. Discussing Vietnam, human rights, and nonviolence, she gives the combative arch-conservative William F Buckley a run for his money on Firing Line (1979).
NO DIRECTION HOME: BOB DYLAN (Martin Scorsese, 2005) Mesmerizing documentary of Dylan’s Greenwich Village years, 1961-65. Baez talks and sings from her California kitchen.
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General Health Update – February 2026 Edition
So – after three and a half months of taking 5-10 mg of creatine per day I step on the scale and see I’ve gained ten pounds and have a higher body-fat percentage, along with a general feeling of being fatter. I’m discontinuing for now, starting yesterday, February 15, 2026.
I write these so I can search for them later.
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Two New Projects – PhilosophersTalk.com and AITalkerApp.com
In the past month I have released my two newest side projects into the wild – PhilosophersTalk.com and AITalkerApp.com.
I had the idea for AITalkerApp.com after speaking with a client about how to use all of their content. They had endless transcripts, but what to do with them? I had the idea of creating animated conversations with them – and lo – AITalkerApp.com was born. There is something magical about the way the conversational back and forth form that greatly appeals to me, and to many people.
So, after much research, and trial and error, I created AITalkerApp.com – you can take a picture, record your voice, paste in a script and have video creation in less than 5 minutes.
After that I needed a first client, and a test subject – I decided to become both by having ancient philosophers, mostly of the political theory persuasion, so far debate the issues of the day. So via various AI tools I have it read all of their published works, formulate debate positions and let them have it. It’s been very fun and informative so far – check it out!
You May Also Like
The Tree
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Physical Goals for 2026
Putting this on the public record
Physical Goals for the Year 2026
- Get down to 175 lbs (odds 50%)
- Run marathon (odds 25%)
- Achieve complicated double club flow (currently at uncomplicated single club flow – odds 60%)
- 500 Kettlebell swings at 100 lb per week (currently at 150 – odds 90%)
- Sit and rise – both sides very easily (currently at both sides with some difficulty – odds 95%)
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Nebula Maker by Olaf Stapledon
What It’s About
A precursor to Star Maker – it’s interesting, and entirely about the evolution of the cosmos at the nebula stage. Stapledon is the unrivaled master of slipping the reader into some sort of cosmic point of view in an entirely beautiful way.
After reading this book and a few others by him, I think I’ve discovered the method, to wit (and very roughly):
- Protagonist starts in an ordinary situation
- Protagonist is suddenly thrown into some very different situation, i.e. became one with a tree, or watching God at the moment of creation or the moment of the big bang
- Posits some multistep process of how that happened
- Explains the later steps in the process very well, so well in fact that you don’t notice he doesn’t explain the early steps at all.
Star Maker is much better, and if you can only read one, read that one. Nebula Maker was interesting though – essentially it is a small part of Star Maker – God creates the universe and the first step (after the big bang) is the formation of the nebulas who attain consciousness and awareness of each other. Religion, war and decay all follow – at some point decaying into stars, planets and people.
It introduced the concept of Glad Beholding as a religious goal which struck me as very deep in a way I can’t define yet.
How I Discovered It
The Amazon Kindle algorithm
What I Liked About It
Stapledon is just great in so many ways, he is able to write about big topics in a dramatic way like no other.
What I Didn’t Like About It
The organization left a bit to be desired, and the vocabulary was a bit much – without the Kindle word definitions I would have been very lost
Who Would Like It?
People who like Star Maker
Quotes and Highlights
By abstracting the personalities of the creatures Stapledon succeeds in making them appear stranger and more remote than could any detailed description, and the change in concept of the work required that many more recognizably “human” societies be pictured, societies with which a human reader can more easily identify. In addition, by creating a detailed history for these creatures, Stapledon originally made them appear almost human and accessible, a concept which he eventually abandoned. However, he did make use of some of the physical descriptions in the final plan.
The nebulae are devoid of senses familiar to human beings, suffer under no economic constraints, and have not been shaped by evolutionary pressures.
These personalities are Bright Heart and Fire Bolt. They represent, respectively, aspects of human personality Stapledon considered to be the most significant in human history, the Saint and the Revolutionary.
I have seen God creating the cosmos, watching its growth, and finally destroying it. Call me, if you will, a liar or a madman. Say I lack humor, say that my claim is sacrilegious and in the worst taste. Yet I have indeed seen God. I have seen him creating, watching, destroying.
The apparition, taken at its face value, violated the whole teaching of modern science. I know not whether I was more distressed at my derangement, or shocked at the devastatingly bad taste of the hallucination which confronted me, or tickled by the thought of the discomfiture which our scientists would suffer were it after all proved a true perception.
“It is God, it is God,” I said to myself. But I knew that if indeed there is a God he is no more visible than the theory of relativity.
Now at last I was to behold God’s latest creation. I was to attend the birth of that intricate and tragic cosmos, fashioned of nebulae and stars, in which mankind occurs.
Beneath God’s face the innumerable, shadowy, restless creative hands aimlessly fingered the pale glimmer which I knew was chaos, the formless potentiality of matter, the sleeping potentiality of mind. It seemed that in the dark spirit which is God there was not peace but restlessness, and the insistent need to create.
God gazed long upon his creature. And he smiled. And all his hands were still. Then God spoke to the dark and slumbering germ of the cosmos. And he said, “Let there be light.”
In answer to God’s command, the atom-cosmos had burgeoned not only with light but with a space and time peculiar to itself. And I, by some means or other, had gained a footing therein; but without ceasing to participate in the space and time peculiar to God.
There now came to me a vivid and terrifying realization that between me and the human world which was my true concern there lay aeon upon aeon of cosmical history, and nearly all of it inhuman. “Oh God,” I cried, “let me be again among my own kind. Blot out from my mind the memory of all this irrelevance. Let me play out my little past oblivious of the immensities. Let me take up once more the threads of a life distressed, bewildered, futile, but my own. Let me watch the spectacle of my own world. Futile it may be, tragic it is, but I am shaped for it. And in it there are little creatures like myself whose lives intertwine with mine.” Thus I prayed. But then I remembered the thing that God was, and I knew that it was useless to pray to him; useless, and also, in some manner which I could not comprehend, base. With a heavy heart I settled myself to the task of watching the bleak and intricate unfolding of the physical cosmos, not as yet feeling its perfection, not as yet realizing that some insight into these remote events was needed to prepare me for insight into the passionate themes which were to follow.
These undulations, these ubiquitous light rays, were actually visible to me. Seemingly they were for me illuminated by that other, swifter, more searching and more revealing light, which cast by the lucent person of God himself, pervades and drenches all things.
Each feathery ball, I noticed, was slowly shrinking. And as it shrank, it whirled more rapidly. And as it whirled, it was flattened. And as the flattening continued, there appeared in the center a bright and swollen core. The outer parts of the nebula were flung by their own movement far out into space; but seemingly the tugging core still kept a hold on them, so that they developed into an attenuated disc around the heart of the nebula, and were torn into streamers and spreading convolutions. So might a dancer, pirouetting, halo her bright head with far-flung, tangled whirls.
Could these lifelike creatures, I asked myself, be mere vortices of radiant gas? But I reminded myself that the briefest of the movements which I now witnessed must in fact occupy millions of terrestrial years, and that this impression of vital activity was an illusion. Age upon age must pass, I knew, before these clouds would condense into stars, and further ages before the rare meetings of stars should produce habitable worlds.
The living nebula has no need to gather energy from the world outside its own substance. Its font of power lies in the very matter which is its flesh. Its hunting ground and its prey are within its own intestines. It feeds upon its own secretion. For the primal beings within it provide by their myriadfold ejaculations a lavish source of power.
Since they have no need to seek food abroad or to avoid being preyed upon, none of the young nebulae save those significant few which grow up in enduring groups, develop organs of external sense. For the lone nebula, experience is entirely of events within its own body. But of those internal events it develops a very poignant and subtle awareness. It has an urgent need to be sensitive to the fluctuations of its internal energies, so that it may control and organize their expression and prevent them from damaging its tissues.
Since a nebula is so large that the cosmical light takes many thousands of years to travel across it, its nerve currents, though moving at the speed of light, are in a sense very sluggish. The whole tempo of nebular life is therefore, from the human point of view, fantastically slow. Passages of thought which a human brain would perform in a few seconds would take the huge nebular brain many years.
To understand the mentality of the nebulae, one must bear in mind three facts which make them differ through and through from human beings. They do not succeed one another in generations; they are not constrained by economic necessity; the great majority of them have reached maturity in ignorance of other minds. On Earth, the individuals of a race procreate and die, handing on the torch of evolution and of tradition to their successors. But with the nebulae there is no distinction between the growth of individuals and the evolution of the race. The life and memory of each nebula reaches back to the racial dawn. The race consists of the original host of individuals that condensed more or less contemporaneously after the explosion of the atom-cosmos. When the last of these dies, the race dies with it.
Another important consequence of the absence of generations is this. The nebulae are in a sense “nearer to God” than any man can ever be. The human child, in spite of our great poet, trails but dim and tattered clouds of glory. He embarks upon life, not fresh from God’s making fingers, but warped by the misfortunes and blunders of countless ancestors; and, no sooner is he born, than he entangles himself further by learning from the example of his elders. But the nebulae wake with the divine lust keen and unconfused within them, and they pursue it untrammeled either by errant instinct or by perverse tradition. Never need they suffer from mistakes not their own, or be led astray by the half-truths of teachers whose very obscurity lends them a baneful prestige. Thus the nebulae, at least in their youthful phase, have been able on the whole to follow the light within them with a steadier will than man, though with less diversity of expression.
Not till the last phase of the nebular drama did they discover the inexorable decay and annihilation which plays so great a part in all human experience.
As terrestrial animals delight in hunting and feasting and fighting, so the young nebulae delight to conquer and tame the fury of radiation within their dense cores.
Yet an extremely complex inner life has combined with freedom from economic servitude to foster in them a kind of self-consciousness peculiar to themselves. They had no opportunity of distinguishing between “I” and “you”; but they had constant need of distinguishing between “I” and the many opposed and often rebellious processes and cravings at work within them. Though normally they could never conceive the possibility of an “ego” or a “stream of consciousness” other than their own, they thoroughly grasped the difference between the lowly and the lofty within themselves.
But in the young nebula this sense of impending revelation was not fleeting and occasional but an enduring state that dominated the whole behavior.
By its veiled creative symbolism this art, as I have said, can raise the nebular spirit to the highest reaches of religious ecstasy. In the social nebulae the dance life is of course socialized and pregnant with all manner of social symbolism. In the solitary nebulae its aim is simply the perfection of self-expression.
For the lone nebulae, being exempt from external influences, attained a perfection of physical form which was ever a source of wonder to the social nebulae. The captured solitary would of course prove quite incapable even of realizing that the shocking distortions and agonies which now beset him were caused by the efforts of other minds to communicate with him. It would very soon appear to the social nebulae that, for all his physical perfection and symmetry, the foreigner was but an abject savage, unable to appreciate the beauties of group life, and incapable even of intelligent intercourse; in fact, that he was a mere brute, physically superb, but blind, deaf, and incredibly stupid. For to the excited and babbling observers he offered no hint of the strange solipsistic intelligence and will at work within him.
Very few groups attained this perfection. Most were either too closely or too loosely knit. In the former the individual spirit was stifled by the proximity of his neighbors. He was a mere herd member, with no inner being. And because society was composed of barren individuals, social life was barren also. The dance pattern of the group was, so to speak, geometrical and fatuous. In the too loosely knit groups, on the other hand, there was no willed community at all, but only a grudging contract by which all engaged to refrain from interference with their neighbors, so as to secure the maximum freedom of individual behavior.
In some groups I found two parties identical in disposition and policy in all respects save that each considered that itself should rule and the other be a subject race. In some others, one party, through long subjection, had lost the power of independent choice and had become inherently servile. In extreme cases the subject race was so debased that they were mere cattle under the control of the master race. And often the masters themselves were by now so modified in actual physical constitution that, had their slaves deserted them, they would have been undone; for little by little they had come to effect a style of athleticism and even a physiological habit which would have broken down completely if menial service had ceased to be available. Their dance measures were so difficult, their bodily constitution and mental operations so subtle and precarious, that they needed constant assistance from the simpler, tougher, and automatically loyal “cattle” attendant on them.
In most nebular societies, at one time or other in their career, conflict between opposed parties would flare up into actual warfare. One side would seek to overcome the other either by bombarding their most vulnerable organs with concentrated radiation, or by actually grappling with them and striving to tear them into fragments. It is difficult to give any idea of the horror with which I observed these battles. Superficially the spectacle was nothing but a confused tempest of whirling gas clouds in the depths of space; but to me, who had by now learned the emotional significance of all these changing shapes, to me who moreover could experience at first hand the agony of these torn tresses and shattered cores, the spectacle was no less nerve-racking than the sight of human bodies dismembered by shellfire.
The opposing forces would be precisely matched, each individual of one troop having a special opponent in the other. Though each warrior might on occasion fight any member of the enemy force, one particular enemy was his peculiar property, his “dear enemy.” In combat with this individual he not only rose to the extreme of fury or cold hate, but also he attained a unique exaltation which might almost as well be called love as hate, since it included, along with the lust to destroy, a chivalrous and passionate admiration of the foe. This strange movement of the spirit was accompanied at its height by a violent physical orgasm which ejaculated a murderous flood of radiation into the body of the enemy and reduced the subject himself to exhaustion.
The second respect in which nebular militarism differed from our own was this. The nebulae, since they could not propagate their kind, could not rely on an inexhaustible supply of the raw material of slaughter. The average group had only a few hundred members. It was impossible, therefore, not to regret the killing of an enemy, since, once killed, he could never be killed again. It was even regrettable that an enemy should ever be permanently maimed, since as a cripple he could never again be a worthy foe.
The martial groups were not typical of the social life of the nebulae. They were definitely freaks, whose strange perversion was due to peculiarities in their early history. But though rare, and seemingly doomed to self-destruction, these perverts were to play an important and a baleful part in nebular history.
But this rejoicing concluded only the first and local phase of the First Cosmical War.
It would be tedious and unnecessarily harrowing to describe in detail this darkest age of nebular history. Everywhere I “heard” familiar cries, though in nonhuman speech. “Civilization in danger! The war to end war! Wars will never end; you cannot change nebular nature. Reduction of armaments is impracticable. Peace, with security.”
Thus it was that the nebulae, though beings who were by nature exempt from economic necessity, were trapped into the lust of a power which was useless to them save for mutual destruction. Could anything, I asked myself, be more mad, more barren, more tragically incompetent than this trumped-up greed and mutual fear? But then I remembered my own world.
The struggle became desperate. The weaker was mangled into insanity. The stronger floated off in proud but guilty self-absorption, seeking in vain to return into solipsistic bliss. Eventually he was butchered for ammunition.
To this Bright Heart replied, “No one is past saving. The underlying principle of glad beholding is in each one of us, striving for expression. That great principle, that spirit which conceived the cosmos, demands that all shall participate.”
When he was at the point of death he cried out, “Look! Look! The great Maker who made all nebulae in his likeness watches us from outside the world. His heart is bright. His tresses can brace the cosmos.” I, myself, half expecting to see a divine eternal nebula beyond the hosts of mortal nebula, looked. It was a strange shock to me to see, peering through the veil of innumerable nebulae, the almost human face of God, remote, inscrutable, intent, kindled (as it seemed to me) to ecstasy by the creatures of his own artistry.
Moreover a strange “crumbling disease” was beginning to attack him, a disease increasingly common among the minute “satellite” nebulae, and by now not wholly unknown among the normal nebulae.
Fire Bolt, in fact, was growing old. He was beginning to pass over from being a nebula to being a globular cluster of stars, a minute galaxy. But inwardly he was still almost his old ardent self, though tired, utterly tired.
Surely it was a supreme duty to organize a worldwide mission to the lone nebulae, so as to emancipate them from their solipsistic prison cells, and kindle them with the gospel of community, and the holy zest of the cosmical dance.
The advocates of mechanical power argued that although a few lone nebulae might, with infinite trouble, be educated to take a humble part in the cosmical dance, the great majority were clearly too far gone in solipsism to appreciate the beauty of communal life.
Throughout the nebular era two slow but irresistible changes, independent but interacting, were setting a limit to the life of any possible cosmical community of nebulae, and to the lives of individual nebulae also. The first of these was the continued expansion of the cosmos, the second was the senescence of the individual nebulae.
For by now the “crumbling disease” which had destroyed Fire Bolt was a widespread plague, especially among the social nebulae, whose more active life seems to have worn them out more rapidly than the solitaries.
A strange passion of loneliness seized me. Like a prisoner I could have battered on the walls of the cosmos, had there been any walls. But I was imprisoned in a boundless finitude. Around me the dust of a dead world stagnated in the ether.
In addition to inspiring or influencing writers such as Brian Aldiss, Stephen Baxter, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanislaw Lem, Stapledon’s work gave the field such enduring tropes as hive minds, Dyson spheres, genetic engineering and terraforming. It is arguable that only H. G. Wells has made a more significant contribution to the field. Olaf Stapledon died in 1950.
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The Big Con by David Maurer and Luc Sante
The Book in 3 or More Sentences
An engaging look at the highly developed world of confidence men before 1940 and their criminal profession in general. The saying “You can’t cheat an honest man” is revealed to be apt, in emphatic terms and in a high degree of detail. A surprising amount of jargon has made it’s way into common language even in 2025. The book is a bit repetitive but quite readable nonetheless.
How I Discovered It
The good people of the Amazon Algorithm displayed it to me after I finished a similar book
Who Should Read It?
Anyone interested in that particular chunk of defunct Americana – or how good social engineering started.
Notes
Although the confidence man is sometimes classed with professional thieves, pickpockets, and gamblers, he is really not a thief at all because he does no actual stealing. The trusting victim literally thrusts a fat bank roll into his hands. It is a point of pride with him that he does not have to steal.
A confidence man prospers only because of the fundamental dishonesty of his victim. First, he inspires a firm belief in his own integrity. Second, he brings into play powerful and well-nigh irresistible forces to excite the cupidity of the mark. Then he allows the victim to make large sums of money by means of dealings which are explained to him as being dishonest—and hence a “sure thing.” As the lust for large and easy profits is fanned into a hot flame, the mark puts all his scruples behind him. He closes out his bank account, liquidates his property, borrows from his friends, embezzles from his employer or his clients. In the mad frenzy of cheating someone else, he is unaware of the fact that he is the real victim, carefully selected and fatted for the kill. Thus arises the trite but none the less sage maxim: “You can’t cheat an honest man.”
Their methods differ more in degree than in kind from those employed by more legitimate forms of business.
The three big-con games, the wire, the rag, and the pay-off, have in some forty years of their existence taken a staggering toll from a gullible public. No
In the big-con games the steps are these: 1. Locating and investigating a well-to-do victim. (Putting the mark up.) 2. Gaining the victim’s confidence. (Playing the con for him.) 3. Steering him to meet the insideman. (Roping the mark.) 4. Permitting the insideman to show him how he can make a large amount of money dishonestly. (Telling him the tale.) 5. Allowing the victim to make a substantial profit. (Giving him the convincer.) 6. Determining exactly how much he will invest. (Giving him the breakdown.) 7. Sending him home for this amount of money. (Putting him on the send.) 8. Playing him against a big store and fleecing him. (Taking off the touch.) 9. Getting him out of the way as quietly as possible. (Blowing him off.) 10. Forestalling action by the law. (Putting in the fix.)
Before 1900 crime had not become a big business. Confidence men did not realize that they were destined to become the aristocrats of crime.
The World War brought a crop of millionaires and sub-millionaires whose purses were swelled out of all proportion to their knowledge of investments.
As often as not these men had made their money slightly on the shady side and to them the rag and the pay-off appeared as very logical methods of taking profit.
With the increasing power and effectiveness of the Federal Government since 1930, the con men have had a hard time of it. Whenever a victim’s check passes through the mails the con men are laid open to possible prosecution and almost inevitable conviction, for once the government prepares a case thoroughly enough to bring it to trial, the fix is of little avail and it is almost a foregone conclusion that a federal jury will convict.
Why not a wire store? In other words, why not apply the tried and proved principles of confidence work to the rather clumsy touting efforts of the telegraph operators? If an unemployed telegrapher could get the mark’s confidence well enough to extort “expenses” from him, what could any expert insideman do? Once the mark was thoroughly convinced that the race results were being delayed for him, it was immaterial whether they really were or not—provided he was played against a fake bookmaker instead of a real one. And so a fake horse-poolroom which took bets was set up, shills were used in place of real betters, fake races were called with convincing fervor, and the results were all that could be desired. Thus the wire store was born. Now it only remained for smart confidence men to study the idea, correct its weakness, refine its strong points, and develop its potentialities.
the most enterprising have agents who locate prospective marks, investigate their financial standing, and compile a list from which the roper can select the fattest and juiciest. There is one restriction which, though it was formerly ignored especially in New York, is now rigidly observed: the mark must not be a resident of the city where he is to be trimmed.
He doesn’t know it, but he has been given the “shutout” or the “prat-out,” a clever method of stepping up the larceny in the veins of a mark when the manager feels that he is not entering into the play enthusiastically enough. It may be repeated several times so that the mark is fully impressed with what he has missed. The shills who surround the mark at the window usually play for more than the mark is being played for; if the mark is being played for $25,000, the air is full of $50,000 bets; thus the mark always feels like a piker instead of a plunger. Furthermore, ambitious marks must not be allowed to get too much of the store’s cash into their pockets.
Big-time confidence games are in reality only carefully rehearsed plays in which every member of the cast except the mark knows his part perfectly. The insideman is the star of the cast; while the minor participants are competent actors and can learn their lines perfectly, they must look to the insideman for their cues; he must be not only a fine actor, but a playwright extempore as well. And he must be able to retain the confidence of an intelligent man even after that man has been swindled at his hands.
But it should not be assumed that the victims of confidence games are all blockheads. Very much to the contrary, the higher a mark’s intelligence, the quicker he sees through the deal directly to his own advantage. To expect a mark to enter into a con game, take the bait, and then, by sheer reason, analyze the situation and see it as a swindle, is simply asking too much.
It is not intelligence but integrity which determines whether or not a man is a good mark.
Most marks come from the upper strata of society, which, in America, means that they have made, married, or inherited money. Because of this, they acquire status which in time they come to attribute to some inherent superiority, especially as regards matters of sound judgment in finance and investment. Friends and associates, themselves social climbers and sycophants, help to maintain this illusion of superiority. Eventually, the mark comes to regard himself as a person of vision and even of genius. Thus a Babbitt who has cleared half a million in a real-estate development easily forgets the part which luck and chicanery have played in his financial rise; he accepts his mantle of respectability without question; he naïvely attributes his success to sound business judgment. And any confidence man will testify that a real-estate man is the fattest and juiciest of suckers.
Con men feel that professional men as a class are notoriously gullible; they readily fancy themselves as adept at financial manipulation as they are in their own fields of specialization.
But he must also have what grifters term “larceny in his veins”—in other words, he must want something for nothing, or be willing to participate in an unscrupulous deal.
Many con men feel that marks have one characteristic in common—they are all liars. Whether this is true or not, I have no way of knowing first-hand, but we may assume that, if anyone is capable of giving expert testimony on this point, con men are, since lying is their profession.
If marks were not so anxious to impress strangers, they would keep their bank accounts intact much longer.
Perhaps it naturally follows that, if a mark has made money in a speculative business, his acquisitive instincts will lead him naturally into a confidence game; in the light of his past experience and his own philosophy of profit, it is a natural and normal way of increasing his wealth; to him, money is of value primarily for the purpose of making more.
Jews are difficult, but there is a con man’s proverb which says, “It takes ten Jews to trim one Greek.” And all con men agree that it is next to impossible to trim a Chinese. “I don’t know any grifter who would be dumb enough to try to trim a Chink,” said Little Chappie Lohr. “I’ve often seen them watching flat-joints down in China- town [San Francisco] that were playing for tourist suckers. They would look on for about five minutes, then walk on with a kindly grin. They’re a fly lot, those Chinks. They can smell a crooked joint.”
The outsideman travels on railways and steamship lines, usually on those lines leading into the city where the big store is located, and preferably those lines which extend far beyond the borders of the state within which the big store is situated; thus he avoids the “home guards” and “short riders” who might be able to cause trouble through political connections in their home state.
Hence ropers are just as essential to the prosperity of a big store as salesmen are to the success of a legitimate business.
You need what little sense you’ve got to trim him—and if you had any sense at all, you wouldn’t be a grifter.”
though Charley Gondorff at one time maintained an almost permanent boost for his New York store. At the height of the big-con games—1914–1925—New York was the center for much of the swindling activity which stripped thousands of marks of millions of dollars. At this time, the social and unofficial headquarters for big-con men was Dan the Dude’s saloon. “In New York City you could always get the best boost,” said John Henry Strosnider, who had a store there at that time. “All the con men hung out there.
So the tailer must be on the alert to see that no harm befalls the mark. He is really a sort of bodyguard and is usually the only man around the store who is armed.
Some hangouts specialize in one type of criminals, others cater to all types.
Confidence men are the elite of the underworld. They have reached the top in the grift*(which includes crimes depending upon lightness of touch and quickness of wit, as contrasted to the heavy-rackets which involve violence); they have arrived at the ultimate in success and achievement; they have gone as far as any professional thief can go.
Confidence men are not unaware of their social preeminence. The underworld is shot through with numerous class lines. It is stratified very much like the upperworld, each social level being bounded by rather rigid lines determined largely by three factors: professional standing, income, and personal integrity. While, as in the upperworld, income has much to do with social position, professional excellence and personal “rightness” appear to play an even greater part among con men than they do in the upperworld.
Pickpockets, because of the widespread reputation they bear as stool pigeons, are often shunned, though once a pickpocket has turned con man and established himself in that profession, he is accepted as a social equal provided he conducts himself according to the established code for con men. Small-time thieves, pimps, touts, traffickers in narcotics, hoodlums, some types of professional gamblers and all the numerous riffraff of the underworld are commonly excluded from the company of con men, who prefer association with their own kind, with higher-ups from the heavy-rackets, or with the political bigwigs, criminal lawyers and fixers who, in one way or another, derive revenue in return for protection.
When we think of cheese, it’s Wisconsin; when we speak of oil, it’s Pennsylvania; but with grifters, it’s Indiana. Many a first-rate con man has hailed from that state, and many, many more second- and third-raters.
Perhaps the fact that for many years it was customary for circuses to winter in Indiana may help to explain the number of grifters who come from that state. The American circus was a grifter’s paradise on wheels. Until very recently, most circuses carried grifters and confidence men as a matter of course, for the grift was a source of great profit—as
Although New York was for years—and still is—a center for all kinds of confidence men, few outstanding ones hail from that area, and relatively few from the East. The West appears to have produced more good grifters than the East, with Texas heading the list, while the Deep South, like the East, trails behind.
In olden times [around 1910–1915] in Dan the Dude’s place, you could see a hundred con men there at once, and not one of them would be a native New Yorker. Indiana, I think, has turned out more good grifters than any other state.”
It has been estimated by one informant that in Chicago alone in 1898 there were, to his personal knowledge, more than two hundred ropers working for five permanent and protected monte stores alone; there were hundreds more roping against unprotected stores which ran “on the sneak,” while the railroad lines running into Chicago were infested with mitt mobs. And similar conditions prevailed in New Orleans, San Francisco, New York City—in fact, in any city which was a railroad center.
The Yellow Kid, at the top of the list, was born a con man and never in his life had time for any other occupation.
With the increased use of narcotics among underworld folk, it is inevitable that some con men should become addicted, though most modern big-time criminals shun narcotics like poison. Some of the old-timers took up opium around 1900 when it was considered no more dangerous than smoking cigarettes—when many citizens on the West Coast placidly puffed the pipe on their own front porches, and an opium lay-out was standard equipment for most prostitutes whose Pekes and Pomeranians often acquired a “lamp habit” from breathing the smoke while their mistresses puffed. But the Harrison Act changed all that. As opium became more difficult to buy and to take, many addicts turned to morphine and heroin. However, confidence men have always felt that there was something disgraceful about addiction, the present generation being particularly sensitive about it. Consequently, once a con man becomes addicted, he carefully conceals the fact as well as he can and only his intimate associates are aware of his misfortune. How many of the more prominent grifters are addicted it is impossible to say, but it is rumored that Kid Duff, Jack Hardaway, Charley Dixon, Pretty Willy (better known as a thief), Kid Niles, the Yenshee Kid, Claude King, Kent Marshall, Red Lager (the Younger), Jimmy the Rooter, the Sanctimonious Kid and Jackie French are, or have been, addicted. There must be many others who have successfully concealed their addiction. As one goes down the social scale among grifters, addiction becomes increasingly common.
And Farmer Brown, king of the monte players, frequently and vociferously proclaimed in public that he was “married to the most beautiful woman who ever straddled a chamber-pot,” expert testimony to the contrary notwithstanding.
A good grifter never misses a chance to get something for nothing, which is one of the reasons why a good grifter is often also a good mark. Indiana Harry, the Hashhouse Kid, Scotty, and Hoosier Harry were returning to America on the Titanic when it sank. They were all saved. After the rescue, they all not only put in maximum claims for lost baggage, but collected the names of dead passengers for their friends, so that they too could put in claims.
On a police force there are two kinds of officers—“right” and “wrong.” A right copper is susceptible to the fix, whether it comes from above, or directly from a criminal. A right copper really has larceny in his blood and, in many respects, is an underworld character, a kind of racketeer who takes profits from crime because he has the authority of the law to back up his demands.
So, in a sense, the con man looks upon the right copper as a businessman who is smart enough to sell his wares at a price which the criminal can afford.
If the copper has damaging evidence to present, he will give it; if not, he will make no effort to frame the con men or give them a “bum rap.” Con men universally agree that the bum raps always come from right coppers and not from wrong ones. In other words, the maxim of the big con works both ways—if you can’t cheat an honest man, neither will an honest man cheat you.
The fix in Europe, however, seems to apply only to non-violent crimes; it is almost impossible to fix for crimes of violence as is done almost universally in this country.
The short-con games are, theoretically, any confidence games in which the mark is trimmed for only the amount he has with him at the time—in short, those games which do not employ the send. However, big-con operators do sometimes put the send into short-con games with excellent results, so, perhaps it is more accurate to say that, from the big-con man’s point of view, short-con games are any con games except the rag, the wire and the payoff.
“Mark it down and mark it well,” says a man who has taken off thousands with this game, “that a New Yorker is the best sucker that ever was born. He is made to order for anything. You can’t knock him. He loves to be taken because he’s wise.
The con man approaches a mark with the old story that he needs an honest man to finance a dishonest project.
But all professional criminals speak at least one argot or lingo fluently—the argot of their own profession. It is a mark of professional affiliation, a union card, so to speak, which requires several years to acquire and which is difficult to counterfeit.
Criminal narcotic addicts, in general shunned by other criminal groups, are extremely clannish and when they are together talk or jive incessantly in their own argot about the one subject which obsesses them—dope.
Grifters, and especially confidence men, like to talk and tell merry tales among themselves; in private they compensate for the fact that they must speak a conventional language while they are working by indulging in the excessive use of an argot which is very highly developed.
Bum rap. A conviction on a trumped-up charge.
Confidence game or con game. Any type of swindle in which the mark is allowed to profit by dishonest means, then is induced to make a large investment and is fleeced.
The gold brick. An obsolescent con game in which a sucker bought what appeared to be a genuine gold brick from a farmer or Indian.
Grift. 1. n. A racket or criminal profession. Often used where grifter would not be used in a strict sense. “I’ve been on the grift all my life.” 2. n. A group of criminal professions which employ skill rather than violence. “All those boys were on the grift.” 3. v. To work any profession included in the grift.
Grifter. In the strict sense, one who lives by his wits as contrasted to the heavy-men who use violence. For the professionals recognized as true grifters, see the chapter Birds of a Feather.
Gun moll. A thief-girl, especially a female pickpocket. The term has no connection with guns or with killings—as is sometimes suggested in the newspapers—but comes from Yiddish gonif, thief.
Heavy-gee. A professional on the heavy-rackets, usually a safeblower. Heavy-rackets. Those rackets involving violence or threat of violence as contrasted to the grift. See grift.
Joe Hep or Hep. Smart, or “wise” to what is happening. Probably ironically so called from one Joe Hep, the proprietor of a saloon in Chicago where grifters had their headquarters.
The pay-off. The most lucrative of all big-con games, with touches running from $10,000 up, with those of $100,000 being common. It operates on the principle that a wealthy mark is induced to believe that he has been taken into a deal whereby a large racing syndicate is to be swindled. At first he plays with money furnished him by the confidence men, then is put on the send for all the cash he can raise, fleeced, and blown off. The pay-off (invented in 1906) evolved from the short-pay at the track (q.v.) and was fully developed by 1910, when the big stores appeared in many of the larger cities. See
The rag. An intricate big-con game very similar to the pay-off, except that stocks are used instead of races. The insideman poses as an agent for a broker’s syndicate which is trying to break the bucket-shops. The mark profits on several investments, is sent for a large sum of money, and is fleeced.
Right. 1. As in right territory, territory protected by the fix. 2. As in right copper, one who will accept a bribe. 3. As in right guy, one who is trustworthy, especially one who is in sympathy with criminals.
Short con. As contrasted to the big con, those games which generally operate without the send. Also little con.
The wire. A big-con game in which the insideman (passing as a Western Union official) convinces the mark that he can delay the race results going to the bookmakers long enough for the mark to place a bet after the race is run. The roper makes a mistake and the mark loses. Cf. the rag, the pay-off.
The present European War is already affecting international stores. First, it has practically eliminated tourist traffic in Europe and also is hampering the free movement of con men abroad. Since the international con man preys, for the most part, on wealthy tourists, his only recourse is to follow the tourist trade to safer waters—namely, South America, the West Indies or Mexico. The problem of the fix is also becoming more difficult in the face of increasing military control over civilian life. This situation will probably force many confidence men to seek other hunting grounds for the duration of the War.
Recent federal legislation against securing passports under false names will probably seriously hamper the activities of confidence men and deep-sea gamblers who rope for the big con. For, once they reveal their true identity, they run the very grave danger of arrest by federal officials on an old charge or social ostracism on shipboard, for no con man can work effectively if a whole shipload of passengers is pointing him out as the notorious so-and-so. Neither of these obstacles is insurmountable, however; con men have overcome many more serious ones in the past.
Confidence men trade upon certain weaknesses in human nature. Hence until human nature changes perceptibly there is little possibility that there will be a shortage of marks for con games.
As long as the political boss, whether he be local, state or national, fosters a machine wherein graft and bribery are looked upon as a normal phase of government, as long as juries, judges and law enforcement officers can be had for a price, the confidence man will live and thrive in our society.
