Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. This podcast is brought to you by Audible dot com, the Internet's leading provider of audio books, with more than one hundred thousand downloadable titles across all types of literature. First Stuff you Missed in History Class listeners, Audible is offering a free audio book to give you a chance to try out their service. One audiobook to consider is four New Revelations of the America's Before Columbus by Charles c. Man. A favorite among How Stuff Works staff. This book rewrites the history of North America in a well researched and compelling way. That's New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles c. Man, available from Audible. To try Audible free today and to get a free audio book of your choice, go to Audible podcast dot com, slash History Stuff, That's Audible podcast dot com, slash his Street Stuff. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to bling a choker boarding and and with this episode, we're continuing on with our look into the life of William Chester Miner, an American man who became one of the most prolific contributors to the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, but from what we've seen of his life so far, he doesn't really seem to be headed in that direction at all. In Part one of this podcast, we took a look at Miner's early life, how he came from an aristocratic family, he got a good education, he studied medicine at Yale and joined the Union Army as an assistant surgeon during the Civil War, and his life and career at that point seemed really full of promise. But his mental health went downhill after the war, and we talked about how that downward spiral may have been triggered by an incident during the Battle of the Wilderness in which he was forced to brand an Irish deserter on the cheek. After spending about eighteen months in a hospital for the insane in d c, Minor decided to have cross the Pond to England, where he could hopefully rest, paint kind of calm his thoughts a bit, maybe earned back his reputation by connecting with the right people in London. But when we last saw Minor he had done nothing like that. No, it didn't go down that way at all. He had gotten off on the wrong foot by taking up residents in Lambeth, which was one of the seediest parts of London. And when we left off with part one of this story, he had just killed a man who he had never laid eyes on before. So we're going to pick up at that crime February eighteen seventy two, just as the constables were reaching the scene finding Minor standing there gun in hand. And we should mention before we get too far into this that one of the sources of information in this podcast is Simon Winchester's book The Professor and the Madman. One of our listeners actually mentioned on Facebook, so it reminded me that I need to bring it up and talk about a little bit. It's a really fascinating book. It takes a really in depth look at Minor, story of the other characters, prinitive work on his life. Yeah, it is a lot of articles about Minor used this as a source too, so even the other sources we used probably pulled from that to some extent. So moving on with the story. Though, the man that Minor had shot was bleeding all over the street. Two constables tried to get him to a nearby hospital, but it was too late. They identified the dead man as George Merritt, who had been a stoker at the Red Lion Brewery, which was something of a landmark in the area, even though the area wasn't that great, and he had been there for eight years, which meant that he pretty much he being a stokermant that he kept the fires over which the beer was made burning. Um. Obviously that wasn't a glamorous job. This guy brought home twenty four shillings a week, which wasn't a lot even back then. He was very poor, and he also had a wife and six kids and one more baby on the way. Yeah, so a lot of family relying on him. He was about thirty four years old and he did live in the area and when he ran into Minor, he had been on his way to work at the dawn shift to the brewery. So it's about two am heading out, runs into this guy on the street who ends up shooting him. So meanwhile, the constable who apprehended Miner, who was Constable Tarrant, had what was sort of a strange exchange with the suspect. He asked him, whom did you fire at? And Miner who Tarrant described as really cool and collected. Gave this bizarre response. He said, it was a man. You do not suppose I would be so cowardly as to shoot a woman. So not really the response he was probably expecting to get out of him. Um. Tarrant proceeded to take Minor down to the Tower Street police station. Asked some questions on the way, though, Miners started to say that the whole thing was an accident. Started to give a little more reason, maybe more of what Tarrant had been expecting in the first place. He was just saying he had shot the wrong man. He had been trying to defend himself from somebody broken into his room and he had made a mistake. He was also saying a lot of other weird stuff on the way to the police station two, so you could see how maybe the constable wouldn't quite believe him. He was asking the constable to search him. He was like, well, what if I have another gun? And the constable was like, well, please keep it in your pocket if you have another gun. I mean. It's really kind of an odd sort of interaction that they had. But when they got to the station, Miner was formally arrested and charged with murder. Because he was American, the U S. Minister in London had to be notified in the crime, which became known as the Lambeth tragedy, became an international incident, and Minor was thirty seven years old at this time. Just to give you kind of a reference point, Okay, So at this point Miner got put into the horsemonger Land jail and Scotland Yard got put on the case. So Minor himself wasn't really much of a help. I mean, this is no surprise. He wasn't much of a help with the investigation. He just continued to say, over and over it was an accident, you know, I I shot the wrong man. But when the trial started in early April, details about minors strange life started to surface through the help of various witnesses. His Lambeth landlady, for instance, came forward, Mrs Fisher, and she said that while he was a very good tenant, he was kind of a strange fellow. He was anxious. He had often demand to have the furniture in his room moved around and rearranged, and he was really really afraid that people might break into his place. In particular, she said that he was very afraid of the Irish. He would always ask if she had any Irish servants working in the house or if there were any Irish lodger staying there. In part one of this podcast, we mentioned Miner's delusions about irishman breaking into his room at night and how it was probably related to that branding incident during the Civil War when he had to brand the Irish desert or on the cheek, and we talked about how he'd already contacted Scotland Yard about this. During the trial, a Scotland Yard detective named Williamson, in fact came forward and testified that Miner had come to him three months earlier, complaining that men were trying to come into his room at night and poison him. Specifically, Minor believed the intruders were members of the Finnian Brotherhood, militant Irish nationalists, and he thought they were planning on murdering him and making it look like a suicide. And other people, you know, people who had met Minor and spoken to him before, did have a suspicion that something was off with him. Williamson, the guy who Minor went to, wrote in his notes from that time that Miner was clearly insane, but there was another aspect to Minor's delusions as well. Another man who testified at the trial was William Dennis, and he was an employee at London's Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane. We've talked about maybe doing a podcast on on that at some point, but his job was to watch Minor at night when he was in jail, and Dennis said that every morning when Minor would wake up, he would accuse Dennis of having been paid to moless Minor during the night while he was asleep, and minor step brother George Minor would later confirm these delusions about sexual abuty thing that for the time that Minor was home before he left for England, he would often accuse people of trying to break into his room and molest him at night. So it wasn't just the spear of somebody breaking in or the Irish trying to get him. There was this whole other aspect to it. Yeah, the sexual aspect of his delusions, and I think that's why some people relate sort of his mental illness, or maybe relate the beginning of his mental illness to um the lascivious thoughts that we mentioned in the first part of this podcast that he used to have about girls in Sri Lanka when he was growing up, that maybe that was an exactly maybe that was an early indication of mental illness, I should say so. Minor himself pretty much confirmed this aspect of his delusions when he was interrogated to he testified that on the night that he killed George Merritt, he woke up suddenly and saw a man standing at the foot of his bed. So he reached for his cult service revolver, which he kept under his pillow while he slept, And he said that and saw him reach for his gun and then took off and ran down the stairs and out of the house. Minor followed him and then saw a man running down the street, thought it was the intruder, fired four times and shot him. That's his side of the story anyways, really our poor brewery employee. But the final decision in the case was determined by the McNaughton rules, which were named for somebody who had shot a man and was acquitted on the grounds of being insane, and the jury in Miner's case determined that he was also of unfound mind when he had committed the crime, so the ruling was not guilty on the grounds of insanity, and the judge told him, quote you will be detained in safe custody, doctor Minor, until her Majesty's pleasure be known. So we already know where Minor was sent from the story at the beginning of our first episode. The detention was set to take place at Broadmoor Asylum for the criminally Insane, in the village of Crowthorne in the County of Berkshire, and he was known there officially as File number seven four to two and was expected to spend the rest of his life there as a quote certified criminal lunatic. But we need to describe what his life really was. There was more than just being a number and a quote certified criminal lunatic. Yeah, it's it was better than you might expect. He got to broad Moore on April seventeen, eighteen seventy two, and according to that account kept by the Berkshire Record Office that we mentioned in the first part of the podcast, he was described at the time as a thin, pale and sharp featured man with light colored sandy hair, deep set eyes, and prominent cheekbones. He was considered to be low risk, so he ended up in cell Block two, which was known unofficially I guess as the Swell Block. It was like that Swell block cell block. It was the lowest security cell block and it's where prisoners had the most privileges. And since Minor was well educated and a well to do you American, he got special treatment there, special freedoms and comforts that a lot of inmates probably didn't get. Almost as soon as he got there, the American consulate in London, for example, made sure that Minor was reunited with his possessions, including his own clothes, his art materials, and his diary. They didn't send him with his surgical instruments though they catch those. Don't send a venture of scalpels over to the guy in the sant asylum. But he also had some money coming in. He had a regular allowance from his family, which gave him the ability to buy stuff or have the hospital purchase things on his behalf. And that made his food a lot better. You know, he'd have poultry and gain steak, biscuits, coffee, sometimes even wine and spirits. But it also allowed him to keep his mind occupied. This was an intellectual man, and he was able to purchase newspapers, engineering papers. He might have used those to get some tips on this dirty building construction, because he was, of course still extremely troubled by these delusions of people breaking into his room at night. Um at one point he supposedly even had his bedroom floors covered with zinc to keep the demons from coming up through the floorboards while he was asleep. He would also get a lot of books, and we're going to talk about that a little bit more in a second, but many of these books he would have shipped from New Haven, Connecticut, or ordered from shops in London, and at some point during his stay there, probably pretty early on, from what we can tell, Minor was also given access to two cells a separate day room in addition to his bedroom, and he converted that day room into a kind of library lined with bookshelves. So overall he had this pretty comfortable existence at Broadmore, considering the circumstances, and he received visits from family and friends, and he had occasionally dine in the superintendent's home. According to Winchester's book, he even received visits from Eliza Merritt, who is none other than the widow of the man he'd shot. She'd supposedly forgiven him after minor Or settled some money on her and her children, but whether or not this actually happened is still up for debate. So Minor might have just been in this situation with his two cells, all of his books, his newspapers, engineering papers, spent the rest of his days. They're unknown, But one day around the summer of eighteen eighty, while he was reading some of that material, he came across this sort of press release and it was called an appeal to readers, and it was in a book that he'd ordered from a library in London. So it was basically this request for English speaking volunteer readers around the world to help out with a massive publication project that was going on at Oxford University, which at the time was going to be called the New English Dictionary, and it was intended to be the biggest, most thorough collection of English words yet so they needed, through soliciting, some help for their new dictionary they were writing. So it seems my Er immediately realized that he was kind of in the perfect position to contribute here, seeing as how he had tons of time on his hands, to read, and he could get new books pretty much whenever he wanted. So he wrote to James Murray, who had taken over as editor of the Dictionary project in eighteen seventy nine, and he's the one who had drafted that press release we just mentioned, and asked if he could help out. And as we mentioned in part one to this podcast, James Murray ended up being the Oxford English Dictionaries editor for forty years and was also its greatest and most famous editor. He's a really interesting character and probably deserves a podcast in his own right. Though he was around miners age, very intelligent and he loved learning, but he came from a poor family and had to quit school at fourteen, so he was basically self taught, which I think is pretty amazing considering all he accomplished. And I mean by self taught, you mean he knew lots of languages and astronomy, not just like he was an informed man. Yes, exactly. He was very highly regarded for his knowledge. But of course we're focusing on minor story here, so we'll just tell a little bit about the Dictionary so you'll understand exactly how Minor was helping out from his cell in broadmore so. This Grand Dictionary project actually started in eighteen fifty seven with three members of London's Philological Society, Richard Trench, Herbert Coleridge and Frederick Fernival, who saw some serious deficiencies in the dictionaries that have been published so far, including those by Webster, which we talked about a little bit in the previous podcast. Samuel Johnson and Charles Richardson. They had two main problems with these existing dictionaries. On one hand, they didn't think that they were comprehensive enough. For example, some just included very difficult words, so word if you would need to look up in the dictionary exactly, and they felt a dictionary should really include every word in the English language. They also felt that every word, along with a definition, should have an authoritative etymology, So quotations from literary passages that would illustrate every meaning of every single word include ing. And this was a key point. One meaning one quotation I should say that illustrated the words earliest known usage in English. I try to wrap your mind around that for a minute. I mean, I think that's important before we go on, imagine trying to find that earliest usage through every book printed in English and not have any sort of search engine capabilities. Of course, real people would have to go through these books reading and looking for the words. So of course, since there will be a lot of words included, and each word might need the support of several quotations, there was no practical way that a dictionary staff could handle all of that on their own. So the plan was to involve these unpaid volunteer readers, enthusiastic readers, I guess, from all over the English speaking world. And that was the announcement that Minor saw in the paper for the book. So in that article in the Nation by Joshua Kendall that we referenced in the previous episode, he compares it to quote what we now know of as the wiki model of creating and disseminating knowledge, which I think is a really cool way to think about it. It makes it all makes sense when you think about it like that. We do have this modern way to look to look at it, to compare it something, to compare it to yeah, wiki without the Internet exactly. So, for a number of reasons, real work on the dictionary didn't get going until Murray came on board in eighteen seventy nine, and even then it was really slow going. For example, it took until eighteen eighty four to publish the first volume, which was a to aunt, so very slow, very slow going. But still this wiki model of um collecting illustrative quotations was pretty successful. You know, they were getting a lot of real work done, and they ended up getting millions of contributions from volunteers in England, Ireland, Scotland and the United States, people who would send in quotations from books and magazines and newspapers, and like we mentioned, you know, they were trying to go for the earliest known youth. Some of these went back as far as the ninth century. And it was to this aspect of the dictionary that Minor was contributing. So he didn't really do any defining like he had done for Websters. But as we've mentioned several times, he did become one of Murray's best contributors. He'd send in these small cards with quotations on them. By the thousand and eventually more. His personal library contained a lot of rare sixteenth and seventeenth century books in particular, and he'd searched through these for appropriate quotes and he even went a step further and would sometimes ask the O E ed editors what word they were working on, and then find quotes to go with those specific words. And I mean, just thinking about that makes my head hurt. That you would get a list, maybe a short list, of a few words they were working on, and then go look through your entire library for that word. I just I can't imagine. So in eighteen, Ury said that Minor had sent in quote No. Less than twelve thousand quotes and added quote so enormous have been Dr Miner's contributions during the past seventeen or eighteen years that we could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations alone. So it's no wonder that Murray really wanted to meet Minor along the way, this guy who was contributing so much to the dictionary. But their first meeting probably didn't take place quite like that dramatic legend that I think I've compared it to Wilkie Collins. It sounded like a Wilkie Collins set up um that we related at the beginning of part one of this podcast um, the one that was published in The Strand in nineteen fifteen. That sensationalized account has the two meeting in eighteen ninety seven after Minor failed to attend the Great Dictionary Dinner, which sounds fun, thrown at Queen's College in Murray's honor to celebrate the dictionaries progress. And according to that ledge, and this was the first time Murray realized that his favorite contributor was actually an inmate in a mental asylum. But Winchester's research kind of turned up something different. Yeah. Both through his research and the discovery of a letter written by Dr Murray and the Broadmore archives, we can see that Murray, though we might have thought that Minor was just a retired doctor or doctor in the asylum at first, he probably was clued into Minor's actual situation by the late eighteen eighties and probably visited him as soon as eighteen ninety one rather than eighteen ninety seven. Murray was always really sensitive to minor situation, though apparently never letting him know that he knew that Minor was mentally ill, so the to form this kind of friendship that went beyond their working relationship. Murray even visited Minor on several occasions, though it's unclear according to the Broadmore records exactly how often that occurred. Murray would supposedly telegraph ahead, however, to find out what Miner's exact mood was before visiting, and he would avoid coming if Minor was especially angry at the time. But when he did visit, they have these very cozy experience is kind of like two well respected colleagues hanging out together. Mury and Minor would sit in minors day room and have some tea and have some cake in front of the fire, just like it was a normal kind of situation, just catching up friends hanging out. So you'd think that maybe this friendship and having a purpose in the form of his dictionary work would have been really good for Minor's mental state, but his paranoid delusions just continued to get worse. He'd think that he was being drugged at night with chloroform, or tortured with electricity, or kidnapped from the asylum at night to be abused, so that nightly sexual abuse was still a big part of it, and he'd even tried to barricade his room at night to protect himself and around the turn of the twentieth century, on December third, nineteen o two. To be exact, he experienced a major setback that morning. He actually mutilated his own genitals, and it seemed to be a desperate attempt to kind of put a stop to the indecent acts that he thought he was being forced to do every night. When asked why he did it, he said he did it quote an interests of morality. So after that he was kept in the infirmary for four months and then sent back to his rooms. But the delusions just persisted, and as the years went by, he continued to get worse mentally and work less and less, and also his health started to decline. So a lot of people, including Murray, began to petition for his release to his family, and at first these petitions were denied, but the government finally relented in nineteen ten and then granted Miners release and ordered that he be deported back to the States. So Murray, who had by that time been knighted for his work in the Dictionary, and his wife visited Miner one last time right before Miner left the country on April fifteenth, nineteen ten, and he brought along a court photographer to document this last his final meeting between two friends and two really influential contributors to what was going to be a famous dictionary. Murray was accompanied back to the States on a steamer by his brother Alfred, but it was really a long time before he actually made it home to Connecticut. He he immediately went back to that hospital for the Insane in d C. That he was at previously, which is now Sat Elizabeth's, and he spent almost ten years there, kind of in the same way that he had lived at Broadmore as a privileged in may who still had nightly outbursts. So his problems kind of continued to progress, and in between he would sort of spend his day's reading and painting and doing, you know, his activities that he enjoyed, but still in ill health. Yeah. So by nineteen nineteen though, he was finally allowed to go back to Connecticut to be near his family, and he died there March nineteen twenty um, you know, having been in prison the majority of his life by that point, or the hospital rather so, even though he lived the life of anonymity while he was locked away for so many years, his name is still pretty well known. It's still in the preface to the Oxford English Dictionary in fact, yeah, which ultimately that dictionary took seventy years to complete. It was completed in nineteen eight, which was a decade after Murray's death. And I think I found I saw this in that Nation article that we mentioned, give us some status, some stats to kind of boggle the mind. In the end, the first edition, not including the supplements that were published after, but that first edition, published in nineteen had four hundred and fourteen thousand, eight hundred twenty five headwords, so to speak, defined by one million, eight hundred twenty seven thousand, three hundred and six illustrative quotations over fifteen thousand, four hundred ninety pages. Pretty incredible, very incredible, And it sounds like Minor was a pretty significant part of all of that. So in recent years consequently, more people have taken an interest in his life. And of course there's Winchester's book that you mentioned in the beginning, and there's maybe even gonna be a movie. Do you have any more info on that. I don't have any more info on that. When you look it up, it just says that the movie The Professor and the Madman is in development. Apparently mel Gibson bought the rights to the movie in nine and they've gone through a couple of different directors I think, and they're working on it, but I don't know when it's supposed to come out, but I think that'll be an interesting one to see when it does. Yeah, it sounds like it would be a fantastic movie. Actually, I'm imagining the how you dramatize the dictionary writing scenes though, sort of like computer movies, they have to have scenes of like rapid typing, maybe page flipping through country book. Yeah, you'll have to really make looking upwards interesting. But I guess hopefully we'll get to see that down the road. And as I mentioned, somebody did bring up this book on Facebook, so we wouldn't just throw it out there again like we always do. If you guys have read any cool historical books or have any other ideas that you want us to podcast develop, please write us Where History Podcast at how Stuffworks dot com, or you can look us up on Facebook, of course, or at Twitter at mist in History. So I think I'm gonna head off and start maybe planning a great dictionary dinner because that sounds truly, it just sounds good. Yeah, you don't want to do the dictionary research. But you want to have a dictionary dinner. I think everybody could come as a word never know. That would be fun. Oh I like that? All right, I'll invite you to Blina. So if you're not going to go plan your own dictionary party, we do have an article written by Molly Edmonds called how Can You Tell if You're Mentally Ill? And you can find it by searching for that title on our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. This podcast is brought to you by Audible dot com, the Internet's leading provider of audio books, with more than one hundred thousand downloadable titles across all types of literature. First Stuff you Missed in History Class listeners, Audible is offering a free audio book to give you a chance to try out their service. One audiobook to consider is four New Revelations of the America's Before Columbus by Charles c. Man. A favorite among How Stuff Works staff. This book rewrites the history of North America in a well researched and compelling way. That's New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles c. Man, available from Audible. To try Audible free today and to get a free audio book of your choice, go to Audible podcast dot com, slash History Stuff, That's Audible podcast dot com, slash his Street Stuff. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to bling a choker boarding and and with this episode, we're continuing on with our look into the life of William Chester Miner, an American man who became one of the most prolific contributors to the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, but from what we've seen of his life so far, he doesn't really seem to be headed in that direction at all. In Part one of this podcast, we took a look at Miner's early life, how he came from an aristocratic family, he got a good education, he studied medicine at Yale and joined the Union Army as an assistant surgeon during the Civil War, and his life and career at that point seemed really full of promise. But his mental health went downhill after the war, and we talked about how that downward spiral may have been triggered by an incident during the Battle of the Wilderness in which he was forced to brand an Irish deserter on the cheek. After spending about eighteen months in a hospital for the insane in d c, Minor decided to have cross the Pond to England, where he could hopefully rest, paint kind of calm his thoughts a bit, maybe earned back his reputation by connecting with the right people in London. But when we last saw Minor he had done nothing like that. No, it didn't go down that way at all. He had gotten off on the wrong foot by taking up residents in Lambeth, which was one of the seediest parts of London. And when we left off with part one of this story, he had just killed a man who he had never laid eyes on before. So we're going to pick up at that crime February eighteen seventy two, just as the constables were reaching the scene finding Minor standing there gun in hand. And we should mention before we get too far into this that one of the sources of information in this podcast is Simon Winchester's book The Professor and the Madman. One of our listeners actually mentioned on Facebook, so it reminded me that I need to bring it up and talk about a little bit. It's a really fascinating book. It takes a really in depth look at Minor, story of the other characters, prinitive work on his life. Yeah, it is a lot of articles about Minor used this as a source too, so even the other sources we used probably pulled from that to some extent. So moving on with the story. Though, the man that Minor had shot was bleeding all over the street. Two constables tried to get him to a nearby hospital, but it was too late. They identified the dead man as George Merritt, who had been a stoker at the Red Lion Brewery, which was something of a landmark in the area, even though the area wasn't that great, and he had been there for eight years, which meant that he pretty much he being a stokermant that he kept the fires over which the beer was made burning. Um. Obviously that wasn't a glamorous job. This guy brought home twenty four shillings a week, which wasn't a lot even back then. He was very poor, and he also had a wife and six kids and one more baby on the way. Yeah, so a lot of family relying on him. He was about thirty four years old and he did live in the area and when he ran into Minor, he had been on his way to work at the dawn shift to the brewery. So it's about two am heading out, runs into this guy on the street who ends up shooting him. So meanwhile, the constable who apprehended Miner, who was Constable Tarrant, had what was sort of a strange exchange with the suspect. He asked him, whom did you fire at? And Miner who Tarrant described as really cool and collected. Gave this bizarre response. He said, it was a man. You do not suppose I would be so cowardly as to shoot a woman. So not really the response he was probably expecting to get out of him. Um. Tarrant proceeded to take Minor down to the Tower Street police station. Asked some questions on the way, though, Miners started to say that the whole thing was an accident. Started to give a little more reason, maybe more of what Tarrant had been expecting in the first place. He was just saying he had shot the wrong man. He had been trying to defend himself from somebody broken into his room and he had made a mistake. He was also saying a lot of other weird stuff on the way to the police station two, so you could see how maybe the constable wouldn't quite believe him. He was asking the constable to search him. He was like, well, what if I have another gun? And the constable was like, well, please keep it in your pocket if you have another gun. I mean. It's really kind of an odd sort of interaction that they had. But when they got to the station, Miner was formally arrested and charged with murder. Because he was American, the U S. Minister in London had to be notified in the crime, which became known as the Lambeth tragedy, became an international incident, and Minor was thirty seven years old at this time. Just to give you kind of a reference point, Okay, So at this point Miner got put into the horsemonger Land jail and Scotland Yard got put on the case. So Minor himself wasn't really much of a help. I mean, this is no surprise. He wasn't much of a help with the investigation. He just continued to say, over and over it was an accident, you know, I I shot the wrong man. But when the trial started in early April, details about minors strange life started to surface through the help of various witnesses. His Lambeth landlady, for instance, came forward, Mrs Fisher, and she said that while he was a very good tenant, he was kind of a strange fellow. He was anxious. He had often demand to have the furniture in his room moved around and rearranged, and he was really really afraid that people might break into his place. In particular, she said that he was very afraid of the Irish. He would always ask if she had any Irish servants working in the house or if there were any Irish lodger staying there. In part one of this podcast, we mentioned Miner's delusions about irishman breaking into his room at night and how it was probably related to that branding incident during the Civil War when he had to brand the Irish desert or on the cheek, and we talked about how he'd already contacted Scotland Yard about this. During the trial, a Scotland Yard detective named Williamson, in fact came forward and testified that Miner had come to him three months earlier, complaining that men were trying to come into his room at night and poison him. Specifically, Minor believed the intruders were members of the Finnian Brotherhood, militant Irish nationalists, and he thought they were planning on murdering him and making it look like a suicide. And other people, you know, people who had met Minor and spoken to him before, did have a suspicion that something was off with him. Williamson, the guy who Minor went to, wrote in his notes from that time that Miner was clearly insane, but there was another aspect to Minor's delusions as well. Another man who testified at the trial was William Dennis, and he was an employee at London's Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane. We've talked about maybe doing a podcast on on that at some point, but his job was to watch Minor at night when he was in jail, and Dennis said that every morning when Minor would wake up, he would accuse Dennis of having been paid to moless Minor during the night while he was asleep, and minor step brother George Minor would later confirm these delusions about sexual abuty thing that for the time that Minor was home before he left for England, he would often accuse people of trying to break into his room and molest him at night. So it wasn't just the spear of somebody breaking in or the Irish trying to get him. There was this whole other aspect to it. Yeah, the sexual aspect of his delusions, and I think that's why some people relate sort of his mental illness, or maybe relate the beginning of his mental illness to um the lascivious thoughts that we mentioned in the first part of this podcast that he used to have about girls in Sri Lanka when he was growing up, that maybe that was an exactly maybe that was an early indication of mental illness, I should say so. Minor himself pretty much confirmed this aspect of his delusions when he was interrogated to he testified that on the night that he killed George Merritt, he woke up suddenly and saw a man standing at the foot of his bed. So he reached for his cult service revolver, which he kept under his pillow while he slept, And he said that and saw him reach for his gun and then took off and ran down the stairs and out of the house. Minor followed him and then saw a man running down the street, thought it was the intruder, fired four times and shot him. That's his side of the story anyways, really our poor brewery employee. But the final decision in the case was determined by the McNaughton rules, which were named for somebody who had shot a man and was acquitted on the grounds of being insane, and the jury in Miner's case determined that he was also of unfound mind when he had committed the crime, so the ruling was not guilty on the grounds of insanity, and the judge told him, quote you will be detained in safe custody, doctor Minor, until her Majesty's pleasure be known. So we already know where Minor was sent from the story at the beginning of our first episode. The detention was set to take place at Broadmoor Asylum for the criminally Insane, in the village of Crowthorne in the County of Berkshire, and he was known there officially as File number seven four to two and was expected to spend the rest of his life there as a quote certified criminal lunatic. But we need to describe what his life really was. There was more than just being a number and a quote certified criminal lunatic. Yeah, it's it was better than you might expect. He got to broad Moore on April seventeen, eighteen seventy two, and according to that account kept by the Berkshire Record Office that we mentioned in the first part of the podcast, he was described at the time as a thin, pale and sharp featured man with light colored sandy hair, deep set eyes, and prominent cheekbones. He was considered to be low risk, so he ended up in cell Block two, which was known unofficially I guess as the Swell Block. It was like that Swell block cell block. It was the lowest security cell block and it's where prisoners had the most privileges. And since Minor was well educated and a well to do you American, he got special treatment there, special freedoms and comforts that a lot of inmates probably didn't get. Almost as soon as he got there, the American consulate in London, for example, made sure that Minor was reunited with his possessions, including his own clothes, his art materials, and his diary. They didn't send him with his surgical instruments though they catch those. Don't send a venture of scalpels over to the guy in the sant asylum. But he also had some money coming in. He had a regular allowance from his family, which gave him the ability to buy stuff or have the hospital purchase things on his behalf. And that made his food a lot better. You know, he'd have poultry and gain steak, biscuits, coffee, sometimes even wine and spirits. But it also allowed him to keep his mind occupied. This was an intellectual man, and he was able to purchase newspapers, engineering papers. He might have used those to get some tips on this dirty building construction, because he was, of course still extremely troubled by these delusions of people breaking into his room at night. Um at one point he supposedly even had his bedroom floors covered with zinc to keep the demons from coming up through the floorboards while he was asleep. He would also get a lot of books, and we're going to talk about that a little bit more in a second, but many of these books he would have shipped from New Haven, Connecticut, or ordered from shops in London, and at some point during his stay there, probably pretty early on, from what we can tell, Minor was also given access to two cells a separate day room in addition to his bedroom, and he converted that day room into a kind of library lined with bookshelves. So overall he had this pretty comfortable existence at Broadmore, considering the circumstances, and he received visits from family and friends, and he had occasionally dine in the superintendent's home. According to Winchester's book, he even received visits from Eliza Merritt, who is none other than the widow of the man he'd shot. She'd supposedly forgiven him after minor Or settled some money on her and her children, but whether or not this actually happened is still up for debate. So Minor might have just been in this situation with his two cells, all of his books, his newspapers, engineering papers, spent the rest of his days. They're unknown, But one day around the summer of eighteen eighty, while he was reading some of that material, he came across this sort of press release and it was called an appeal to readers, and it was in a book that he'd ordered from a library in London. So it was basically this request for English speaking volunteer readers around the world to help out with a massive publication project that was going on at Oxford University, which at the time was going to be called the New English Dictionary, and it was intended to be the biggest, most thorough collection of English words yet so they needed, through soliciting, some help for their new dictionary they were writing. So it seems my Er immediately realized that he was kind of in the perfect position to contribute here, seeing as how he had tons of time on his hands, to read, and he could get new books pretty much whenever he wanted. So he wrote to James Murray, who had taken over as editor of the Dictionary project in eighteen seventy nine, and he's the one who had drafted that press release we just mentioned, and asked if he could help out. And as we mentioned in part one to this podcast, James Murray ended up being the Oxford English Dictionaries editor for forty years and was also its greatest and most famous editor. He's a really interesting character and probably deserves a podcast in his own right. Though he was around miners age, very intelligent and he loved learning, but he came from a poor family and had to quit school at fourteen, so he was basically self taught, which I think is pretty amazing considering all he accomplished. And I mean by self taught, you mean he knew lots of languages and astronomy, not just like he was an informed man. Yes, exactly. He was very highly regarded for his knowledge. But of course we're focusing on minor story here, so we'll just tell a little bit about the Dictionary so you'll understand exactly how Minor was helping out from his cell in broadmore so. This Grand Dictionary project actually started in eighteen fifty seven with three members of London's Philological Society, Richard Trench, Herbert Coleridge and Frederick Fernival, who saw some serious deficiencies in the dictionaries that have been published so far, including those by Webster, which we talked about a little bit in the previous podcast. Samuel Johnson and Charles Richardson. They had two main problems with these existing dictionaries. On one hand, they didn't think that they were comprehensive enough. For example, some just included very difficult words, so word if you would need to look up in the dictionary exactly, and they felt a dictionary should really include every word in the English language. They also felt that every word, along with a definition, should have an authoritative etymology, So quotations from literary passages that would illustrate every meaning of every single word include ing. And this was a key point. One meaning one quotation I should say that illustrated the words earliest known usage in English. I try to wrap your mind around that for a minute. I mean, I think that's important before we go on, imagine trying to find that earliest usage through every book printed in English and not have any sort of search engine capabilities. Of course, real people would have to go through these books reading and looking for the words. So of course, since there will be a lot of words included, and each word might need the support of several quotations, there was no practical way that a dictionary staff could handle all of that on their own. So the plan was to involve these unpaid volunteer readers, enthusiastic readers, I guess, from all over the English speaking world. And that was the announcement that Minor saw in the paper for the book. So in that article in the Nation by Joshua Kendall that we referenced in the previous episode, he compares it to quote what we now know of as the wiki model of creating and disseminating knowledge, which I think is a really cool way to think about it. It makes it all makes sense when you think about it like that. We do have this modern way to look to look at it, to compare it something, to compare it to yeah, wiki without the Internet exactly. So, for a number of reasons, real work on the dictionary didn't get going until Murray came on board in eighteen seventy nine, and even then it was really slow going. For example, it took until eighteen eighty four to publish the first volume, which was a to aunt, so very slow, very slow going. But still this wiki model of um collecting illustrative quotations was pretty successful. You know, they were getting a lot of real work done, and they ended up getting millions of contributions from volunteers in England, Ireland, Scotland and the United States, people who would send in quotations from books and magazines and newspapers, and like we mentioned, you know, they were trying to go for the earliest known youth. Some of these went back as far as the ninth century. And it was to this aspect of the dictionary that Minor was contributing. So he didn't really do any defining like he had done for Websters. But as we've mentioned several times, he did become one of Murray's best contributors. He'd send in these small cards with quotations on them. By the thousand and eventually more. His personal library contained a lot of rare sixteenth and seventeenth century books in particular, and he'd searched through these for appropriate quotes and he even went a step further and would sometimes ask the O E ed editors what word they were working on, and then find quotes to go with those specific words. And I mean, just thinking about that makes my head hurt. That you would get a list, maybe a short list, of a few words they were working on, and then go look through your entire library for that word. I just I can't imagine. So in eighteen, Ury said that Minor had sent in quote No. Less than twelve thousand quotes and added quote so enormous have been Dr Miner's contributions during the past seventeen or eighteen years that we could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations alone. So it's no wonder that Murray really wanted to meet Minor along the way, this guy who was contributing so much to the dictionary. But their first meeting probably didn't take place quite like that dramatic legend that I think I've compared it to Wilkie Collins. It sounded like a Wilkie Collins set up um that we related at the beginning of part one of this podcast um, the one that was published in The Strand in nineteen fifteen. That sensationalized account has the two meeting in eighteen ninety seven after Minor failed to attend the Great Dictionary Dinner, which sounds fun, thrown at Queen's College in Murray's honor to celebrate the dictionaries progress. And according to that ledge, and this was the first time Murray realized that his favorite contributor was actually an inmate in a mental asylum. But Winchester's research kind of turned up something different. Yeah. Both through his research and the discovery of a letter written by Dr Murray and the Broadmore archives, we can see that Murray, though we might have thought that Minor was just a retired doctor or doctor in the asylum at first, he probably was clued into Minor's actual situation by the late eighteen eighties and probably visited him as soon as eighteen ninety one rather than eighteen ninety seven. Murray was always really sensitive to minor situation, though apparently never letting him know that he knew that Minor was mentally ill, so the to form this kind of friendship that went beyond their working relationship. Murray even visited Minor on several occasions, though it's unclear according to the Broadmore records exactly how often that occurred. Murray would supposedly telegraph ahead, however, to find out what Miner's exact mood was before visiting, and he would avoid coming if Minor was especially angry at the time. But when he did visit, they have these very cozy experience is kind of like two well respected colleagues hanging out together. Mury and Minor would sit in minors day room and have some tea and have some cake in front of the fire, just like it was a normal kind of situation, just catching up friends hanging out. So you'd think that maybe this friendship and having a purpose in the form of his dictionary work would have been really good for Minor's mental state, but his paranoid delusions just continued to get worse. He'd think that he was being drugged at night with chloroform, or tortured with electricity, or kidnapped from the asylum at night to be abused, so that nightly sexual abuse was still a big part of it, and he'd even tried to barricade his room at night to protect himself and around the turn of the twentieth century, on December third, nineteen o two. To be exact, he experienced a major setback that morning. He actually mutilated his own genitals, and it seemed to be a desperate attempt to kind of put a stop to the indecent acts that he thought he was being forced to do every night. When asked why he did it, he said he did it quote an interests of morality. So after that he was kept in the infirmary for four months and then sent back to his rooms. But the delusions just persisted, and as the years went by, he continued to get worse mentally and work less and less, and also his health started to decline. So a lot of people, including Murray, began to petition for his release to his family, and at first these petitions were denied, but the government finally relented in nineteen ten and then granted Miners release and ordered that he be deported back to the States. So Murray, who had by that time been knighted for his work in the Dictionary, and his wife visited Miner one last time right before Miner left the country on April fifteenth, nineteen ten, and he brought along a court photographer to document this last his final meeting between two friends and two really influential contributors to what was going to be a famous dictionary. Murray was accompanied back to the States on a steamer by his brother Alfred, but it was really a long time before he actually made it home to Connecticut. He he immediately went back to that hospital for the Insane in d C. That he was at previously, which is now Sat Elizabeth's, and he spent almost ten years there, kind of in the same way that he had lived at Broadmore as a privileged in may who still had nightly outbursts. So his problems kind of continued to progress, and in between he would sort of spend his day's reading and painting and doing, you know, his activities that he enjoyed, but still in ill health. Yeah. So by nineteen nineteen though, he was finally allowed to go back to Connecticut to be near his family, and he died there March nineteen twenty um, you know, having been in prison the majority of his life by that point, or the hospital rather so, even though he lived the life of anonymity while he was locked away for so many years, his name is still pretty well known. It's still in the preface to the Oxford English Dictionary in fact, yeah, which ultimately that dictionary took seventy years to complete. It was completed in nineteen eight, which was a decade after Murray's death. And I think I found I saw this in that Nation article that we mentioned, give us some status, some stats to kind of boggle the mind. In the end, the first edition, not including the supplements that were published after, but that first edition, published in nineteen had four hundred and fourteen thousand, eight hundred twenty five headwords, so to speak, defined by one million, eight hundred twenty seven thousand, three hundred and six illustrative quotations over fifteen thousand, four hundred ninety pages. Pretty incredible, very incredible, And it sounds like Minor was a pretty significant part of all of that. So in recent years consequently, more people have taken an interest in his life. And of course there's Winchester's book that you mentioned in the beginning, and there's maybe even gonna be a movie. Do you have any more info on that. I don't have any more info on that. When you look it up, it just says that the movie The Professor and the Madman is in development. Apparently mel Gibson bought the rights to the movie in nine and they've gone through a couple of different directors I think, and they're working on it, but I don't know when it's supposed to come out, but I think that'll be an interesting one to see when it does. Yeah, it sounds like it would be a fantastic movie. Actually, I'm imagining the how you dramatize the dictionary writing scenes though, sort of like computer movies, they have to have scenes of like rapid typing, maybe page flipping through country book. Yeah, you'll have to really make looking upwards interesting. But I guess hopefully we'll get to see that down the road. And as I mentioned, somebody did bring up this book on Facebook, so we wouldn't just throw it out there again like we always do. If you guys have read any cool historical books or have any other ideas that you want us to podcast develop, please write us Where History Podcast at how Stuffworks dot com, or you can look us up on Facebook, of course, or at Twitter at mist in History. So I think I'm gonna head off and start maybe planning a great dictionary dinner because that sounds truly, it just sounds good. Yeah, you don't want to do the dictionary research. But you want to have a dictionary dinner. I think everybody could come as a word never know. That would be fun. Oh I like that? All right, I'll invite you to Blina. So if you're not going to go plan your own dictionary party, we do have an article written by Molly Edmonds called how Can You Tell if You're Mentally Ill? And you can find it by searching for that title on our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com