Morning, Clunkers!
On this day in 1857, Sheffield FC became the world’s first association football club. Well, you never know. 🤷🏼♀️ It might come up as a pub quiz tie-breaker one day. Just don’t confuse it with Sheffield United or you’ll upset Sean Bean.
Some days, it’s hard to trace the steps of those amazing women whose stories are buried away in dusty footnotes. Other days like today, two come along at once - as well as 90% of the women of Iceland - but let’s just mention quickly that on this day in 1911, Orville Wright managed to stay in the air for nine minutes and 45 seconds in a glider at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, before we move on.
Alice Perry was born on this day in 1885 in Galway. She was a poet, an engineer, a feminist, and the first woman in Europe to graduate with a degree in engineering. Even after all this time, she remains the only woman to have been a County Surveyor (County Engineer) in Ireland. The Alice Perry Engineering Building, a university department, is in Galway.
In 1901, Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
Annie was widowed and desperate for money so she used a a custom-made barrel for her trip, constructed of oak and iron and padded with a mattress. At first, no one would help her because they didn’t want to be party to a potential suicide but two days before, she sent a domestic cat over the Falls as a test pilot. The cat survived with a bleeding head so Annie went over on 24 October 1901, her 63rd birthday, with her lucky heart-shaped pillow for comfort. Friends used a bicycle pump to compress the air in the barrel and then screwed the lid shut.
Annie’s barrel was launched from the American shore and the strong currents carried it over the Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side, the largest of the Falls and the highest at 167 feet. Twenty minutes later, the barrel was retrieved. It took quite some time before her friends could get the lid off but Annie emerged alive and relatively uninjured, except for a small gash on her head.
She did it because she needed the money but her manager scarpered with the barrel, and most of her savings were used towards hiring private detectives to find it. It was eventually located in Chicago but disappeared for good some time later.
Honestly, you couldn’t make this up, could you? There’s a TV script in there somewhere.
Annie, known henceforth as the Queen of the Mist, said “If it was with my dying breath, I would caution anyone against attempting the feat ... I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces than make another trip over the Falls”. She died at the age of 82, in New York. What a woman.
It’s almost an anti-climax to tell you that 90% of Icelandic women took part in a national strike in 1975 to protest at sex inequality, but they did.
Kvennafrídagurinn or Women's Day Off, led by women’s organisations, meant that they did not go to their paid jobs and did not do any housework or child-rearing for the whole day. Iceland's parliament passed a law guaranteeing equal pay the following year. Smart move.
Oh, and in 2003, Concorde made its last commercial flight.
So here’s to you, women of Iceland, and to you, Alice and Annie 🥂(and the poor cat, also female🐟)