Swimming in the Cesspool of Worthless Knowledge

Here's a few Fun Facts that, hopefully, will entertain you on a snowy and dreary Spring day!

The term 3rd Degree was coined by Thomas Byrnes, considered one of the greatest investigators of the NYPD. In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the population of most US cities were exploding. Along with this growth came, expectantly, a surge in crime; murders, robberies, and the like. Something needed to be done, and Byrnes was just the man to do it. A big, burly, tough, Irishman, Byrnes instituted a new technique to combat crime. It involved 3 steps or degrees of increasing persuasion used to elicit information from suspects:

1. Investigation

2. Intimidation

3. Pain

So, if you got the 3rd Degree, you were in for a pretty good going over by Byrnes' associates. It worked, as crime was radically reduced in NYC and other cities that employed Byrnes' methods. By the way, Byrnes also invented the mug shot, which is still being used today, over 125 years after it was first employed.

Jacob Riis, a Dutch immigrant and crime reporter/photographer in NYC at the turn of the 20th Century, was the first to use a new invention regularly in his photography; the flash. With his camera and flash, he was able to "invade" the dark back alleys and tenements of NY's lower east side (then the most densely populated place on earth) and photograph the deplorable conditions of the people living there. When the rest of NY and the world saw the photos that he made, they were appalled! The reaction was so visceral that it spurred the city's leaders to create seismic social change in the way the poor lived.

Thomas Edison, working feverishly in his Menlo Park, NJ laboratories, experimented with over 6,000 filaments to be used in his new invention, the electric light bulb, before he found one that worked: a thread of carbonized cardboard. It burned for over 300 hours.

And the rest is history! :)

photo: F LoBuono