Hello! Welcome back to Foolkiller Friday, the ongoing Cohost series where we go over what we know (and, mostly, what we don’t know) about the International Automatic Lifeboat, exhibited as the “Foolkiller” in 1916.
Probably.
This is going to be a little bit more meta of a post—in two ways!—and also a shorter one. It’s shorter because I’m traveling, and also because of the first way that it’s a meta-post, which is that it is safe to say we are closer to the end of Foolkiller Fridays than the beginning.
That is, while I’m still turning up new information—and writing these posts has helped—that new information is rarely earthshattering. So I think this is going to turn into maybe a twice- or once-a-month series, instead of every week.
(All entries in this series as of October 27th, 2023):
- Introduction
- “The Recovery” (geolocating the location of the 1915 salvage)
- “The Find; or, The Theory of the Case” (fixing the date and circumstances of the salvage)
- “What If It Was Round?” (a history of the cylindrical lifeboat phenomenon)
- “Everything You Wanted to Know About the International Automatic Lifeboat (But Were Afraid to Ask)” (…)
- “The Man from the East” (covering Harry Fisher and his lifeboat)
- “The Summer of 1907” (fixing the dates of photographs of the lifeboat)
- “Step Right Up” (tracking the relationship between “the Foolkiller” and C.W. Parker’s carnival)
- “The Prestige” (Samuel Winternitz, Waterdrome, and the Foolkiller’s true owner)
- “Postcard Mania” (this one!)
- “Blow Yourself Up” (all about William “Frenchy” Deneau)
- “Conclusion [citation needed]” (reviewing open questions)
- “The Experiment” (lessons from a model I built of the lifeboat)
- “Back from the Dead” (David B. Marks, and an update on the salvage)
Which, it turns out, has already happened. For that, I apologize—I was traveling last weekend, and between that and work I didn’t have a chance to finalize this post. There shouldn’t be a delay between this week and next week, but after that I am going to reevaluate the topics I have been planning.
But we’ll see!
Anyway, that was the “meta” in the sense of this being a post about Foolkiller Fridays. The second one is that this is going to be a “look at the evidence” post. I think—hope!—that you will learn something from it! But there are not going to be any mysteries solved here, and I am going to end in a request for assistance ;)
Anyway, are we all on the same page? Good, let’s talk about postcards.
Back on Foolkiller Friday, Part 6 I said that there were three photos of the International Automatic Lifeboat tied up near the Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railroad Bridge. Two of them were probably taken by Hans Behm for the Detroit Publishing Company, and we concluded that they were taken in the early afternoon on July 30th, 1907. The third is a postcard.
Or, well… Maybe it’s a postcard? Here’s an example:
A non-colorized version is available from the CARLI Digital Collections of the University of Illinois and also linked from the Constant Podcast’s Foolkiller page. It’s attributed to Copelin Commercial Photographers.
I’m still not entirely sure what to make of this. The scan is at a higher resolution than any of the colorized photographs, although it’s not clear to me that the level of detail is any greater—that any perception otherwise might not be an artifact of the scanning process, or even simply how my brain perceives data in monochrome.
Now, as I also mentioned back in Part 6, David Sadowski, over at the Trolley Dodger, found another version of the scene, and this is definitely much clearer. It plausibly seems, indeed, to be taken from whatever photograph is the original source of all three—it is clearly not a draw-over.
I say “clearly” in part because it is so much crisper and more detailed than the postcard. But also because, while they’re both black and white, they’re not the same image:
At this point, if you are furrowing your brow and looking for differences between the UIC photo and the colorized postcard, let me reassure you: yes, those are also different. The UIC photo is cropped ever so slightly differently, with a little bit more on the right and significantly less on the left—in particular, the black and white version shows almost none of the gangplank leading down to the lifeboat.
That said, these two seem otherwise to be similar—the typeface on the label is a pixel-exact match. There are also a few flecks of dust or some other flaw, visible in the same place (below the ‘a’ in ‘Jackknife’ and in the water). These aren’t visible in the Sadowski Photo—at least, not that I can tell.
Copelin, the notional source of the image in the UIC archives, was founded in 1856 and took a lot of photos in Chicago during the 19th and 20th centuries. I’m not sure how they ended up with the credit for this one. The back of the colorized photograph identifies it as No. 171 of the Franklin Post Card company, and I can’t find any evidence that Copelin and Franklin were otherwise affiliated.
I also don’t know when the Copelin photo dates from. The earliest colorized version of this postcard I’ve found so far has a postmark dated April 13th, 1910; the latest example is postmarked August 13th, 1915. So it was in circulation for at least half a decade, although most examples come from the early 1910s.
Oh, right. Most examples of that version. Because, although it’s somewhat rarer, there’s also this:
Which can be distinguished by having a funny capital ‘E,’ and by being the widest crop out of any of these—extending left to incorporate nearly all of the IAL’s gangplank, and right to include a significant amount of brick on the far side of the skyscraper’s windows.
Also by being available two years earlier—postmarked October 1st, 1908, in the earliest example I’ve found—and, oddly, by being made in Germany? The October, 1908 example says “No. 171. Publ. by Franklin Post Card Co., Chicago, Ill. Made in Germany.” One postmarked in 1909 says, more simply: “No. 171. Made in Germany.”
So let’s call that postcard type A. Postcard type B—the slightly narrower crop—is labeled variously:
- No. 171.
- No. 171 (no full stop after the number)
- 171
- No. 171. Publ. by Franklin Post Card Co., Chicago, Ill.
So we are dealing here with, it would seem, at least six different print runs of the postcard over a period of several years. The earliest examples were made in Germany, but sold and mailed in the United States.
What’s going on with that? Last time, I linked an article from a German paper. In Part 6, the leading image is a much earlier postcard of the bridge, written in German. And now this? Was the IAL a U-Boat after all?
I think it’s a red herring. Chicago had a significant German population through the early 20th century—in 1900 the largest ethnic group was those of German descent. But, also, German printer quality was world-class at the time. Indeed, the shift from German to American printers during and before World War One—and the concurrent degradation in print quality—was what ended what the Smithsonian calls the “golden age of postcards”.
Franklin apparently moved their print operations domestic before that point, though—or, at least, they stopped including a “made in Germany” mark as of Type B of the postcard.
So, to summarize, we have four different versions of the “postcard,” with four different crops. Here they are, superimposed:
The Sadowski Photo is the one that remains the most enigmatic to me. It’s the one that is most clearly different: the typeface is distinct, the quality is much better, and it appears to be—rather than a colorized image—an example of the phenomenon of “real photo postcards.”
You see, this time period contains two overlapping trends, one of which would stick around and one of which would not.*
* Okay. Three overlapping trends, if you count “repeatedly trying to Make Cylindrical Lifeboats Happen.” But step outside that for a moment.
The first is postcards. As I already mentioned, the German postcard market was top-tier at the time. It was also, however, a German invention—the first postcards were sent from Austria in 1869, and adopted in Bavaria, Wurttemburg and Baden the next year.
Early postcards generally did not contain much information—often, they were simply a way of sharing an image of a place with no further message. Still, high-quality printing made them irresistible, particularly with a growing interest (and accessibility) of travel.
At its high point—a period referred to as “postcard mania”—companies might put out hundreds of lovingly reproduced paintings, which represented a great diversity of interests. That is, they were not just tourist trap or the conventionally beautiful.
Sometimes they were just depictions of historic or striking buildings, or representations of the industrial life of the city. This is how the Polly “L” bridge came to be depicted at least half a dozen completely separate times between 1900 and 1915, with at least another half-dozen reprints and different variants (including the four known 1907 ones with the IAL in them).
A combination of anti-German sentiment, greater availability of proper telecommunications, and rising postage rates killed off the contemporary postcard boom. It had ended by the time the Great War began, and never really returned.
That is to say: postcards continued to be sent, and collected, but not with the same singular purpose as they were in the early 1900s, when they were apparently something like trading cards with a built-in way to send them to your friends.
The second trend was the explosive growth of photography as a DIY medium. Kodak had introduced the Brownie in 1900, and by this point cameras were increasingly in the hands of everyday people (the Vsauce Youtube channel put out a good video on this about six months ago).
In 1903, Kodak began selling a camera that took photo-sized postcards, and in 1907 they introduced a service that let people turn any photo into postcards. This led to a florescence of really cool “postcards” that are just scenes of everyday life, or local landscapes, or something that someone thought would be interesting.
I’ve included an example at the top of this post. It’s nothing special, so far as I know—just some pleasant spot someone felt compelled to document. “Dear Auntie and Uncle. This is the place to rest. Wish you could spend a [something?] week here. With love,” etc. I find something terribly charming in the degree of intimacy this exposes.
On the other hand, because they’re not tied down to a publisher, it can be very difficult to tell where they came from. I would love to find a higher-resolution version of Sadowski’s postcard, but the very real possibility exists that his is the only copy, and it’s pure good fortune that it turned up at all.
Except for the complication that we know it wasn’t just some rando’s medium-format picture that they turned into a postcard for fun. It was associated with—which is not to say taken by—the Franklin postcards.
Where does it sit, datewise? That’s hard to say. The postcard was never mailed. Mr. Sadowski helpfully sent me a scan of the postcard’s back:
There is no note about publishers or anything else. All we can conclusively say is that it postdates March, 1907, when modern-style postcards—ones where you can write on the left side of the image—became legal. But we already know that it’s from 1907, so…
The text and typeface are a pretty close match to what’s listed here simply as an unknown manufacturer. On the other hand, they’re also a very close match to the sailboat style postcards like this:
Which that same site identifies as dating from 1905 to 1908. So, conceivably, it’s from that time. Indeed, I have found a few other examples of postcards with this exact back, and:
- They were all mailed between 1907 and 1909 (mostly 1907), and
- Curiously, all of them so far were stamped in Chicago.
Stitching this all together, I think the implication is that what Sadowski found was created at the same time as—and quite possibly earlier than—the Franklin postcards. It can’t be the source of the colorized postcards, because it’s the smallest crop of any of them.
So who made it?
I don’t know. It’s like the Sadowski card has been designed to offer as few clues as possible about its origins. It doesn’t seem to have the same regular imperfections as in the other images, but who knows what scanner artifacts might have introduced or removed? So maybe it was produced before Franklin got their mitts on it?
Because, also, it doesn’t have the Franklin writing on it the way the Type A/B and CARLI cards do. But then, that wouldn’t make any difference: it’s cropped in such a way that if those had been etched on the negative used to produce the Sadowski card, the original writing would be outside the frame.
Was that deliberate? I mean, probably not, right?
A similar ambiguity attaches to the CARLI card. It’s almost a Type B Franklin, and must be related. But, while there are plenty of Type A and Type B postcards around, the CARLI one appears to exist only in the UIC archives.;
It could be that this was a postcard in its own right—but if so, why have no other examples turned up? Was it introduced as a non-colorized version of the earlier Franklin cards to appear like a real-photo postcard?
Or perhaps it’s not a postcard on its own, but a scan of a Type B card that was, for some reason, saved in the UIC archives only in black and white. That would explain why there are no examples in circulation. But if that’s the case, then why is it cropped differently from the Type B card it otherwise resembles?
On the heels of the last Foolkiller Friday, I am going to grant that this is probably a disappointing post, because I have absolutely nothing but questions. Here, though, is where I turn this over to you. Next time you’re at an antique store, see what you can turn up?
Here are the stamp dates for all the postmarked postcards I have come across thus far:
| Type A or B | Postmark | From |
|---|---|---|
| A | Oct. 1, 1908 | Chi. & Went. Ave Street RPO |
| A | Oct. 14, 1908 | Chicago Ill. |
| A | Aug. 17, 1909 | Chicago Ill. |
| A | Sep. 7, 1909 | Chicago Ill. |
| B | Apr. 13, 1910 | Chi. & N. Clark St RPO Chi. Ill. |
| B | Sep. 13, 1910 | Chi. & Went. Ave Street RPO |
| B | Aug. 16, 1911 | Chicago Ill. |
| B | Nov. 3, 1911 | Chicago Ill. |
| B | May 3, 1913 | Chicago Ill. |
| B | Aug. 13, 1915 | Cleveland, Ohio |
The Franklin postcards all have unique numbers, which as far as I can tell weren’t reused. Here are the ones I’ve found so far:
A list of postcard numbers, for weirdos like me.
35. Congress and Auditorium Hotels, Looking North on Michigan Avenue, Chicago79. Boathouse and Landing, Jackson Park
84. Jackson Park, Chicago. Largest South Side park area 539 acres. Rest House and Beach on Lake Michigan
91. Garfield Park, General View of Fountains and Flower Beds, Chicago. One of the West Side Parks; Area 187 Acres
136. Bush Temple, Chicago N. Clark and Chicago Ave
144. Douglas Park, Natatorium, Chicago
171. Elevated R.R. Jackknife Bridge over Chicago River, Chicago
227. University of Chicago, Law School
237. Lake Michigan, Breakwater on North Shore, Chicago
264. Lincoln Park, Chicago, Academy of Sciences, Largest Park on the Northside. Area 317 acres.
292. Church of Our Lady of Sorrows, Chicago. Jackson Boulevard and Albany Ave.
343. Jackson Park, New Life Saving Station. Largest South Side Park, Area 540 Acres,
347. Windsor Bathing Beach, Lake Michigan, Chicago. View from 75th Street.
361. White City Amusement Park, 63rd and South Park Ave, Dance Pavilion and Electric Tower, Chicago
364. Forest Park Entrance and Ballroom
475. Normal School, Steward Ave. & 68th St
517. Harper Memorial Library, U of C. Midway, Chicago
For which I indulge the faint hope that collecting more of these might help precisely narrow down the date at which the Franklin postcards started circulating, and therefore where the other two examples might’ve appeared.
Sorry, did I say two? I meant three, because there is also apparently this thing:
Which I have found only two examples of, and which is a collection of other Franklin postcards—I think. It is black and white, like the CARLI example, but it’s not the CARLI photo. It doesn’t crop the right side of the skyscraper like that one, so it’s another example of a monochrome version of the Franklin Type B.
Needless to say there is no date. “1911” is written on the back of that example, but it has no stamp so I don’t know whether that was written down contemporaneously, or whether it was added by a helpful later archivist. The only other example I’ve found so far has no date whatsoever.
(It does ask for a 1-cent stamp, so it either predates the November, 1917 rate increase to 2 cents or postdates the July, 1919 decision by Congress to revert to the 1-cent rate. So I guess there’s that)
And this is where I’m at with the postcards. I have to here extend my sincere thanks to David Sadowski for his help with the postcard he found, and to all of you for continuing to support this mad endeavor. And for putting up with a week’s delay only to have me end on a blank stare and a shrug.
Don’t worry, though! Next week, we’ll get back to talking about the Foolkiller. Or, at least, its most emblematic fool. See ya then!