Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about the Empress of Ireland this week, a particularly sad shipwreck story of It's a dark week for stuff you missed in History Class. This dark dark week, we just minutes ago recorded the behind the scenes for our other gruesome murder episode of the week. And when I knew this was a sad shipwreck, something about it just being everyone drowned in the cold in the dark, I was like, this is extra sad, and that is one reason why I did not put a sad cat story. There's two reasons why I did not include the sad cat story in this episode. One is I found it in one source and I was like, is this real? And the other was it just was too sad. So I'm going to give the sad cat story, okay, but then I'm gonna follow it with a funny cat story that sounds great. So sad cat story is that in this one account that I read, the ship's cat was named Emmy, and Emmy jumped off the boat in Quebec City, and somebody found Emmy and brought her back, and Emmy left again but left her kittens on board and right, and the ship left without her. And later people were like, this was a terrible omen does seem that way? And I was like, that is so sad on this already very sad episode. And also I found like this I couldn't find confirmation of it. I mean, if there are lots and lots of survivor testimonies that you can read, like first hand accounts, stories that people have submitted of like their relatives who were on board, things like that, I just I wasn't able to confirm that. So the sadness plus not being able to confirm it here is the funny cat story. My cats don't get on the keyboard that much. But in this case, Opel has a contribution to this episode that I am going to read to everyone. The Empress of Ireland left Liverpool for a routine trip across the Atlantic on May fifteenth, nineteen one hoo. For that is what Opel would like everyone to now. Yeah, also likes to add a little now and again to episodes, and I try to correct them, but sometimes letters that I don't think I even did it entirely just this. It stretches the whole width of my screen. Another thing, As I was putting together Saturday Classics for upcoming episodes of Saturday Classics, I realize we have another episode we have already done on the ss Arctic. That episode came out January fifteenth, twenty fourteen, so that may sound familiar to longtime listeners of the show or people who've been working their way through the whole back catalog. Holly, I think he wrote that episode. I had no recollection of it existing. It is very similar in terms of ship's colliding and a lot of people then not surviving the wreck, but it was not a case where the ship sank so quickly. It wasn't. That was a case where the ship took a while to think, but the evacuation was chaos. And I did not pick that as a Saturday Classic because I was like, no, this is too much, too much sad to have another to follow, right to follow this with a separate sad thing about the same general topic. I'm really glad you did not include the cat story because I think we all know I'm not emotionally tall enough to ride that ride. Yeah, had we actually had to talk about it in depth. I don't really remember much about that other episode either. I mean I didn't. I didn't remember it at all. I literally was going through the list of old episodes and was kind of like, ss Arctic, what was that about? Is that something we should run as? And then I read the synopsis and I was like, did I write this? And then I listened to the first five seconds. I think we've said this little inside baseball moment before. Whoever talks first in the episode wrote it? Yeah, I can't think of any exceptions we've had to that. I don't think so, but yeah, you talk first on that. One says like, I guess I didn't write that, this thing that I have no recollection of from almost a decade ago. Yeah, it's a long time. And we have said this before too, like we don't retain everything. No, we really don't. And I whole episodes. I have sometimes felt bad when someone, like in a live show or an event, will ask a question about an episode that's like five years old, and I'm like, I don't know. I'm not from your country, I don't know your ways, and I just kind of run away and hide. Yeah, I I the brain something stick forever. Yeah, some fly away into the night. And like Tracy, I think we've both had that moment of like, did I write them? I wrote this? I don't remember, yes at all. I've definitely had whole episodes that I wrote and I don't remember. And I for a long time I thought this was just the nature of our jobs, that you know, we are writing a new episode every week and and like we have to mentally move on to the next thing. That's the only way that it works. But for some reason, the TikTok algorithm has decided that what I want to see when I look at TikTok is clips from old episodes of Grey's Anatomy. I think I watched one of these once and TikTok was like, all right, this is what you want for the rest of your life. And it has showed me so many clips of Grey's Anatomy that I have absolutely no recollection of at all. Oh, I thought you were gonna say the opposite. Uh uh, Well, I mean sometimes it's stuff that I do remember vividly, but like so much stuff that I have no recollection of at all whatsoever. And I've seen every episode of that show so it's like, I know I saw this episode, but I don't remember that there was one about a person with toxic blood and everybody passed out in the or this totally forgot had did not ring any kind of bell. I think I might sadly be the opposite. One of my friends offhandedly mentioned while we were at dinner the other night an episode, an older episode of Bob's Burgers, and I was just like, right, because then this and this happened. I could see where that And she was just like, when was the last time you watched this episode. I'm like, I don't know, but you've seen it more than once I have. I also have fly paper in my brain. If it relates to like Bob's Burger's, older episodes of the Simpsons, you know certain I mean Star Wars, obviously, certain Disney things like there are definitely things where I'm like, I have no no valid reason to have retained this information for so long yet I don't know where my keys are or how old my father is. Like, yes, so anyway, that's everyone's update about our memories. Uh yeah, this episode was very sad, as many of the shipwrecks, but not all of them are Hey, sorry that we started out dark, but then we got to talk about Mary Summerville, who I think is a delight Yeah. We often but not all the time. We record two episodes a week, and those are the two episodes that come out on a week together. Yeah, this is not the case. That was not the case this time, and we had recorded a recording session that was just sadness all the way through, and those episodes did not come out in the same week Monday and Wednesday. But like we were sort of talking about how there needed to be something a little lighter. Yeah, yeah, And I actually had not intended for Mary to be that thing. M M. But I was kind of bottoming out on the other thing I wanted to do because I felt like I need more time for that one, because there's a book I want to order and like, you know, all of that stuff. And then I stumbled across Mary, not on my primary list but on another one that I had hand scribbled in a book while I was looking for other stuff, and I was like, wait, let me revisit this, and I was like, I love her, so she's perfect. Her memoir is a really, really delightful read. It is notated a lot with her daughter Martha's work where her she won't talk like she doesn't talk, as we said in the episode, that much about her husband's death. But then Martha notes like, of course my mother was bereft, and like it's more evident when you see the letters that other people wrote her, saying like I know your world has just fallen apart. Essentially, yeah, please know we all love you and we're thinking of you. But she I mean it came up also when she mentioned the passing of their other daughter, that she didn't ever seem to hover on that stuff. She would just say it and be done and move on. And I think that was probably part of how she mentally compartmentalized that while she was doing other things. Sure, I'm not going to wallow in this moment. I'm going to acknowledge it and move to the next thing. Her writing, she mentioned in her writing towards the end that she didn't like to sleep by herself ever, and this is something that she wrote about in various points during her life, and she wrote about it so poignantly from the point of view of childhood. That's the first time she remembered really being upset by the idea. And I want to read this passage because it's really like the best description of what that feels like when you're a scared kid in a not scary way, because it has distance on it. So I'm going to read this passage, which is quote, children suffer much misery by being left alone in the dark. When I was very young, I was sent to bed at eight or nine o'clock, and the maid who slept in the room went away as soon as I was in bed, leaving me in the dark till she came to bed herself. All that time I was in an agony of fear of something indefinite. I could not tell what. The joy the relief when the maid came back were such that I instantly fell asleep. Now that I am a widow and old, although I always have a night lamp, such is the power of early impressions that I rejoice when daylight comes, which is just such a I'm like, oh, I know this, I know all of this. Like I'm that kid that had night terror. So I'm like, I have the same thing, like when I can't sleep, daylight breaks and I conquered out. I'm one of those people. I'm like, Mary, I feel you. I really love the idea that she was. We mentioned on an episode we did recently that there are autodidacts who become experts in their field, and she is such a strong example of that, where she's said, oh, no, I get it, I figured it all out. I love It's easy to think, in our hubris of the modern era that one, like people doing science in the past were much simpler in their understanding than we are. And it's one of the reasons that I wanted to include that longish excerpt from her paper about how she did her needle magnetism experiment, because she's so clear about everything she's doing and it is not simple stuff, even though it's like the components of it are simple, but her like talking about no, we managed, like with the prism, to continually move the needles so that the end only stayed in the violet light. And that's like, I love all of it. I love the way she talks about science. She's like the precursor to Bill Nye and demystifying science. She's amazing well, and like being a science communicator is a specific set of skills that has overlapped with being a scientist. But like not all, not all scientists are great science communicators for sure. Uh So, Yeah, I don't know if we have ever talked about somebody on the show that like I would have categorized specifically as a science communicator. Yeah, which I love because there are some science communicators in my life who are dear to me that I love what they do and how they do it. And so having this sort of historical counterpart going back earlier than a time that I think I've really thought about science communicators, it's great. Speaking of which there is a thing that I have seen people bickering about in various corners of the Internet where sometimes she will see a little factoid about her that says she is the reason the word scientist was coined, which isn't entirely accurate. It gets misconstrued a little bit because it was coined in a review of her work that included some other stuff that was written by William wool who we talked about briefly, where he's kind of it's it's prompted by her work, but it's a lot of people are like because you know, there was no gender neutral way to talk about somebody who did science, and that's that would sound great and it's a cool thing to think about, but that's not really what happened. And so it's kind of a false description of what was actually going on because he was really like, we don't have He wasn't so much separating it as like by sexes. He was like, we just don't have a good word for a person who does science. You know, we know what a mathematician is, and we know what a chemist is, and we know what a a naturalist is, and we know what an artist is, but we just we need we need a word. And so that's the first reference in writing the word scientist that we know of. But it's not quite the feminist effort that sometimes people want to make it. It's still very cool, but just not quite accurate. So we only touched on a few of the people that she knew, but she knew everybody. She knew the Brownings. She tells a very funny story in her book about the first time she met Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning kind of ignored her, and then she meets them later again in Italy and she's like, she's a completely different person. I love her now, look's I don't know what was going on at that earlier event, but now she's great funny. She also knew Joanna Bailey, who we talked about recently on the show, for her writing and the confusion about her initial anonymous work. She knew everybody everywhere she traveled. She met the scientists in that area. Everybody wanted to meet her. Everyone wanted to know her. She sounds like she was a very good hostess. People loved to drop by her house, and she and William were, uncharacteristically for the time, casual about people just stopping by. You did not have to send notice ahead of time. You could just pop in and they would be like, all right, let's put out a spread and we'll talk about science and have some cognak or whatever. I don't know that they had cognak. I'm just throwing that in. But her life sounds so great, like the way she lived her life. I mean, the good fortune to have a pension that basically sets you up for life based on your pretty early work, and to be able to cultivate that life that you want. The one thing that I kept thinking while reading her memoir, though, the thing that I would struggle with in her life is the constant bouncing around. Yeah, like I need a nest. I need a nest feathered with my weird stuff. I need my sewing room, I need my perhaps an indicator of my own problems. But they would just live in a different place every couple of months, And that sort of nomadic lifestyle to me sounds like I would feel weird. But I think her home was in books, so she didn't care. She could carry them. But yeah, it's just it's always like And then we moved to Florence for a minute, and then we were back in Rome, and then we decided we'd go to Sweden and hang out for a while and then and they had two daughters with them through most of that, which is extra wild, but that seemed to be the way their family worked, and they all seemed very happy and close. So yeah, yeah, could not could not fathom it. I now that I have done this research, I really want there to be a movie about her, like a good one, though you don't. You don't need to make it dramatic anymore so than it is. You just make it a cool movie about a lady doing cool things, hanging out till she's ninety two. She's still doing her science Yeah. I love everything about that. I love it. I love the idea that she's like, well, you know, I read. I read math in bed for four hours when I wake up, and then I go do my writing elsewhere, and then I walk around the town and then I have supper. Great. That does sound great living the dream Mary Summerville. So I'm very glad we got to talk about her this week. I hope that if this is your weekend coming up, where you have actual time off, maybe you sit in bed for four hours doing whatever you want, watching TV, reading books, you like, petting a cat or a dog, just hanging out being happy if you can. If you don't have time off and you don't have the luxury of several hours to sit in bed, I hope that you still have a great time this weekend. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic and then on Monday with a brand new episode. If you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about the Empress of Ireland this week, a particularly sad shipwreck story of It's a dark week for stuff you missed in History Class. This dark dark week, we just minutes ago recorded the behind the scenes for our other gruesome murder episode of the week. And when I knew this was a sad shipwreck, something about it just being everyone drowned in the cold in the dark, I was like, this is extra sad, and that is one reason why I did not put a sad cat story. There's two reasons why I did not include the sad cat story in this episode. One is I found it in one source and I was like, is this real? And the other was it just was too sad. So I'm going to give the sad cat story, okay, but then I'm gonna follow it with a funny cat story that sounds great. So sad cat story is that in this one account that I read, the ship's cat was named Emmy, and Emmy jumped off the boat in Quebec City, and somebody found Emmy and brought her back, and Emmy left again but left her kittens on board and right, and the ship left without her. And later people were like, this was a terrible omen does seem that way? And I was like, that is so sad on this already very sad episode. And also I found like this I couldn't find confirmation of it. I mean, if there are lots and lots of survivor testimonies that you can read, like first hand accounts, stories that people have submitted of like their relatives who were on board, things like that, I just I wasn't able to confirm that. So the sadness plus not being able to confirm it here is the funny cat story. My cats don't get on the keyboard that much. But in this case, Opel has a contribution to this episode that I am going to read to everyone. The Empress of Ireland left Liverpool for a routine trip across the Atlantic on May fifteenth, nineteen one hoo. For that is what Opel would like everyone to now. Yeah, also likes to add a little now and again to episodes, and I try to correct them, but sometimes letters that I don't think I even did it entirely just this. It stretches the whole width of my screen. Another thing, As I was putting together Saturday Classics for upcoming episodes of Saturday Classics, I realize we have another episode we have already done on the ss Arctic. That episode came out January fifteenth, twenty fourteen, so that may sound familiar to longtime listeners of the show or people who've been working their way through the whole back catalog. Holly, I think he wrote that episode. I had no recollection of it existing. It is very similar in terms of ship's colliding and a lot of people then not surviving the wreck, but it was not a case where the ship sank so quickly. It wasn't. That was a case where the ship took a while to think, but the evacuation was chaos. And I did not pick that as a Saturday Classic because I was like, no, this is too much, too much sad to have another to follow, right to follow this with a separate sad thing about the same general topic. I'm really glad you did not include the cat story because I think we all know I'm not emotionally tall enough to ride that ride. Yeah, had we actually had to talk about it in depth. I don't really remember much about that other episode either. I mean I didn't. I didn't remember it at all. I literally was going through the list of old episodes and was kind of like, ss Arctic, what was that about? Is that something we should run as? And then I read the synopsis and I was like, did I write this? And then I listened to the first five seconds. I think we've said this little inside baseball moment before. Whoever talks first in the episode wrote it? Yeah, I can't think of any exceptions we've had to that. I don't think so, but yeah, you talk first on that. One says like, I guess I didn't write that, this thing that I have no recollection of from almost a decade ago. Yeah, it's a long time. And we have said this before too, like we don't retain everything. No, we really don't. And I whole episodes. I have sometimes felt bad when someone, like in a live show or an event, will ask a question about an episode that's like five years old, and I'm like, I don't know. I'm not from your country, I don't know your ways, and I just kind of run away and hide. Yeah, I I the brain something stick forever. Yeah, some fly away into the night. And like Tracy, I think we've both had that moment of like, did I write them? I wrote this? I don't remember, yes at all. I've definitely had whole episodes that I wrote and I don't remember. And I for a long time I thought this was just the nature of our jobs, that you know, we are writing a new episode every week and and like we have to mentally move on to the next thing. That's the only way that it works. But for some reason, the TikTok algorithm has decided that what I want to see when I look at TikTok is clips from old episodes of Grey's Anatomy. I think I watched one of these once and TikTok was like, all right, this is what you want for the rest of your life. And it has showed me so many clips of Grey's Anatomy that I have absolutely no recollection of at all. Oh, I thought you were gonna say the opposite. Uh uh, Well, I mean sometimes it's stuff that I do remember vividly, but like so much stuff that I have no recollection of at all whatsoever. And I've seen every episode of that show so it's like, I know I saw this episode, but I don't remember that there was one about a person with toxic blood and everybody passed out in the or this totally forgot had did not ring any kind of bell. I think I might sadly be the opposite. One of my friends offhandedly mentioned while we were at dinner the other night an episode, an older episode of Bob's Burgers, and I was just like, right, because then this and this happened. I could see where that And she was just like, when was the last time you watched this episode. I'm like, I don't know, but you've seen it more than once I have. I also have fly paper in my brain. If it relates to like Bob's Burger's, older episodes of the Simpsons, you know certain I mean Star Wars, obviously, certain Disney things like there are definitely things where I'm like, I have no no valid reason to have retained this information for so long yet I don't know where my keys are or how old my father is. Like, yes, so anyway, that's everyone's update about our memories. Uh yeah, this episode was very sad, as many of the shipwrecks, but not all of them are Hey, sorry that we started out dark, but then we got to talk about Mary Summerville, who I think is a delight Yeah. We often but not all the time. We record two episodes a week, and those are the two episodes that come out on a week together. Yeah, this is not the case. That was not the case this time, and we had recorded a recording session that was just sadness all the way through, and those episodes did not come out in the same week Monday and Wednesday. But like we were sort of talking about how there needed to be something a little lighter. Yeah, yeah, And I actually had not intended for Mary to be that thing. M M. But I was kind of bottoming out on the other thing I wanted to do because I felt like I need more time for that one, because there's a book I want to order and like, you know, all of that stuff. And then I stumbled across Mary, not on my primary list but on another one that I had hand scribbled in a book while I was looking for other stuff, and I was like, wait, let me revisit this, and I was like, I love her, so she's perfect. Her memoir is a really, really delightful read. It is notated a lot with her daughter Martha's work where her she won't talk like she doesn't talk, as we said in the episode, that much about her husband's death. But then Martha notes like, of course my mother was bereft, and like it's more evident when you see the letters that other people wrote her, saying like I know your world has just fallen apart. Essentially, yeah, please know we all love you and we're thinking of you. But she I mean it came up also when she mentioned the passing of their other daughter, that she didn't ever seem to hover on that stuff. She would just say it and be done and move on. And I think that was probably part of how she mentally compartmentalized that while she was doing other things. Sure, I'm not going to wallow in this moment. I'm going to acknowledge it and move to the next thing. Her writing, she mentioned in her writing towards the end that she didn't like to sleep by herself ever, and this is something that she wrote about in various points during her life, and she wrote about it so poignantly from the point of view of childhood. That's the first time she remembered really being upset by the idea. And I want to read this passage because it's really like the best description of what that feels like when you're a scared kid in a not scary way, because it has distance on it. So I'm going to read this passage, which is quote, children suffer much misery by being left alone in the dark. When I was very young, I was sent to bed at eight or nine o'clock, and the maid who slept in the room went away as soon as I was in bed, leaving me in the dark till she came to bed herself. All that time I was in an agony of fear of something indefinite. I could not tell what. The joy the relief when the maid came back were such that I instantly fell asleep. Now that I am a widow and old, although I always have a night lamp, such is the power of early impressions that I rejoice when daylight comes, which is just such a I'm like, oh, I know this, I know all of this. Like I'm that kid that had night terror. So I'm like, I have the same thing, like when I can't sleep, daylight breaks and I conquered out. I'm one of those people. I'm like, Mary, I feel you. I really love the idea that she was. We mentioned on an episode we did recently that there are autodidacts who become experts in their field, and she is such a strong example of that, where she's said, oh, no, I get it, I figured it all out. I love It's easy to think, in our hubris of the modern era that one, like people doing science in the past were much simpler in their understanding than we are. And it's one of the reasons that I wanted to include that longish excerpt from her paper about how she did her needle magnetism experiment, because she's so clear about everything she's doing and it is not simple stuff, even though it's like the components of it are simple, but her like talking about no, we managed, like with the prism, to continually move the needles so that the end only stayed in the violet light. And that's like, I love all of it. I love the way she talks about science. She's like the precursor to Bill Nye and demystifying science. She's amazing well, and like being a science communicator is a specific set of skills that has overlapped with being a scientist. But like not all, not all scientists are great science communicators for sure. Uh So, Yeah, I don't know if we have ever talked about somebody on the show that like I would have categorized specifically as a science communicator. Yeah, which I love because there are some science communicators in my life who are dear to me that I love what they do and how they do it. And so having this sort of historical counterpart going back earlier than a time that I think I've really thought about science communicators, it's great. Speaking of which there is a thing that I have seen people bickering about in various corners of the Internet where sometimes she will see a little factoid about her that says she is the reason the word scientist was coined, which isn't entirely accurate. It gets misconstrued a little bit because it was coined in a review of her work that included some other stuff that was written by William wool who we talked about briefly, where he's kind of it's it's prompted by her work, but it's a lot of people are like because you know, there was no gender neutral way to talk about somebody who did science, and that's that would sound great and it's a cool thing to think about, but that's not really what happened. And so it's kind of a false description of what was actually going on because he was really like, we don't have He wasn't so much separating it as like by sexes. He was like, we just don't have a good word for a person who does science. You know, we know what a mathematician is, and we know what a chemist is, and we know what a a naturalist is, and we know what an artist is, but we just we need we need a word. And so that's the first reference in writing the word scientist that we know of. But it's not quite the feminist effort that sometimes people want to make it. It's still very cool, but just not quite accurate. So we only touched on a few of the people that she knew, but she knew everybody. She knew the Brownings. She tells a very funny story in her book about the first time she met Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning kind of ignored her, and then she meets them later again in Italy and she's like, she's a completely different person. I love her now, look's I don't know what was going on at that earlier event, but now she's great funny. She also knew Joanna Bailey, who we talked about recently on the show, for her writing and the confusion about her initial anonymous work. She knew everybody everywhere she traveled. She met the scientists in that area. Everybody wanted to meet her. Everyone wanted to know her. She sounds like she was a very good hostess. People loved to drop by her house, and she and William were, uncharacteristically for the time, casual about people just stopping by. You did not have to send notice ahead of time. You could just pop in and they would be like, all right, let's put out a spread and we'll talk about science and have some cognak or whatever. I don't know that they had cognak. I'm just throwing that in. But her life sounds so great, like the way she lived her life. I mean, the good fortune to have a pension that basically sets you up for life based on your pretty early work, and to be able to cultivate that life that you want. The one thing that I kept thinking while reading her memoir, though, the thing that I would struggle with in her life is the constant bouncing around. Yeah, like I need a nest. I need a nest feathered with my weird stuff. I need my sewing room, I need my perhaps an indicator of my own problems. But they would just live in a different place every couple of months, And that sort of nomadic lifestyle to me sounds like I would feel weird. But I think her home was in books, so she didn't care. She could carry them. But yeah, it's just it's always like And then we moved to Florence for a minute, and then we were back in Rome, and then we decided we'd go to Sweden and hang out for a while and then and they had two daughters with them through most of that, which is extra wild, but that seemed to be the way their family worked, and they all seemed very happy and close. So yeah, yeah, could not could not fathom it. I now that I have done this research, I really want there to be a movie about her, like a good one, though you don't. You don't need to make it dramatic anymore so than it is. You just make it a cool movie about a lady doing cool things, hanging out till she's ninety two. She's still doing her science Yeah. I love everything about that. I love it. I love the idea that she's like, well, you know, I read. I read math in bed for four hours when I wake up, and then I go do my writing elsewhere, and then I walk around the town and then I have supper. Great. That does sound great living the dream Mary Summerville. So I'm very glad we got to talk about her this week. I hope that if this is your weekend coming up, where you have actual time off, maybe you sit in bed for four hours doing whatever you want, watching TV, reading books, you like, petting a cat or a dog, just hanging out being happy if you can. If you don't have time off and you don't have the luxury of several hours to sit in bed, I hope that you still have a great time this weekend. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic and then on Monday with a brand new episode. If you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.