Re: VMs: Re: Voynich's 1907 donation to the British Library...?

[JJJRLandau@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 3/13/2003 5:52:24 PM Eastern Standard Time, incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

> >I wonder who Lord Strathcona was?
>
> This looks like our man: rich guy, build a railway line across Canada, got 
> knighted, gave a lot of money away, died in 1914:-


Totally off-topic:  There was no such person as "Lord Strathcona".  The real person was Donald Alexander Smith (1820-1914), whose title was "1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal".  Why he chose such an unwieldy title of nobility I don't know.  He and his cousin George Stephens (who became Lord Mount Stephens, choosing the name of a mountain that in turn was named after him!) built the Canadian Pacific Railroad, which linked the original Canada (which did not go west of Ontario) with the Pacific.  Smith also settled the first Riel Rebellion and in general had as big a role in creating Canada as, say, Ben Franklin had in creating the US.

The story about Nathan Mayer Rothschild (correct spelling) and the Battle of Waterloo is a fiction.  First, Rothschild did not use carrier pigeons.  The Rothschild family had a staff of uniformed (human) couriers who carried messages among the  Rothschild banks in Hesse, Austria, Naples, France, and England.  Second, Nathan Rothschild placed his couriers at the disposal of the Duke of Wellington, and therefore had no news of the Waterloo campaign in advance of anyone else in England.

            - James A. Landau

         - James A. Landau