Well hello, all!
I promised back in June (eep) that I would have a piece about some new information on Robert Brown. I’m kind of blocked on that (or, at least, I’m blocked on the part that I had wanted to write about). However, Foolkiller stuff does not ever truly leave my head, so I figured what I’d do is catch you up on a couple of things. I posted yesterday about some more minor discoveries that weren’t enough for a full episode.
In the first draft, I said this would be a “shorter update, and one where I’ll focus on my research process instead of the pure facts in the case.” I had, at the time, found another thread I wanted to pull on. As it turns out, this is split between a mildly significant update that does cover pure facts, and a less significant one about research process. There is also another thread that should, I hope, lead to the next episode being more substantive. I can’t guarantee that it will happen next week.
And, as a reminder, here are other entries in the series:
- 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” (trying to find out when the last bridge photo was taken)
- “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” (this one!)
But in the meantime, on this not-actually-Halloween-themed Part 13 of Foolkiller Fridays, I figured I’d take you on a bit of a journey through my head. And, while we’re getting things started, I do have some intriguing new data, which brings with it a good chance to tell you what an idiot I am :P
In the very first one of these posts, I said that the earliest reporting comes from the Chicago Tribune. I also, later in that post, identified the date of the salvage as December 20th, and was not clear about where the photos came from.
Where the photos came from is known. They were taken by the Chicago Daily News, a paper which ran from 1875 to 1978 and seems to have been, in the main, attempting something like actual journalism.
For example, the earliest reporting does not come from November 24th, in the Tribune and the Examiner. It comes from the 23rd, in the Daily News, which says only:
DIVER FINDS SUBSEA MODEL
Miniature Submarine Buried Years in Bottom of the River
William M. Deneau, a diver, reported to-day that he had found an antique submarine in the bed of the river at Wells street bridge, buried under the debris of fifteen years. It was recalled by ‘old timers’ that a model made by a naval architect sank at that spot during experiments years ago.
This confirms to me that there was never any serious confusion about where the Foolkiller was found. It was both found and recovered at Wells Street, and the Tribune messed it up by identifying it as Rush Street.
There’s also nothing here about laying cables for Commonwealth Edison or about Peter Nissen or about foolkillers. It is, indeed, sober enough that one could take the entire thing more or less at face value. Someone could have remembered a submarine model being tested, or they could have remembered seeing the ungainly lifeboat at drydock once, “years ago.”
Also, though, having found access to the Daily News online, we can find even more contemporary reporting about the salvage, complete with a well-known photograph.
CHICAGO’S “NAVY” AT SURFACE.
“Foolkiller No. 1,” Early Submarine, Comes to View At Last
CHICAGO’S “NAVY” AT SURFACE.
“Foolkiller No. 1,” Early Submarine, Comes to View At Last
“Foolkiller No.1,” Chicago’s subsea navy, was brought to light to-day in a third attempt to raise it from its bed of mud and slime, where it has lain for twenty years in the north channel of the Chicago river at Wells street. Two attempts to bring the boat to the surface yesterday failed when the cables proved too weak and the third trial was made at 1:30 this afternoon when William (“Frenchy”) Deneau, a professional diver, descended to the river’s bottom to attach fresh cables to the bow of the boat. The second effort to lift the diver left its stern lashed to the scow bearing the derrick used by the Paschen Bros., contractors, but with its bow back in the depths.
It is planned to land the boat at the yard of the Illinois Stone company, a short distance below the spot where it lies, and prepare it for exhibition purposes.
”Foolkiller No. 1” was built of sheet steel. A large hole in the stern, where a freighter’s keel is believed to have struck at some time, gives it the likeness of a war relic, for it appears to have been torpedoed. It is about thirty feet long and has a beam of five feet. Portholes fore and aft and a manhole in the top show the trend of submarine ideas of its time.
A few notes about this, too:
-
The final salvage definitely took place on the 17th. I will say this with certainty because there is reporting from that day, from someone actually on the scene, confirming it. The Daily News also says there were three attempts; other reports say two, but they appear to be referring to an abortive attempt on the 16th.
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I have not looked extensively, but I can’t find any contemporary reporting from the 16th in the Daily News or the other Chicago papers I have access to, so that’s still a venue for reporting.
-
They identify a destination for the boat: chiefly, the Illinois Stone Company. As far as I can tell the Illinois Stone Company had two locations in Chicago at this point, one on the South Branch at Lock and Fuller, and one on the north branch at Elston and Bradley.
Bradley doesn’t exist anymore; here is that location, with the property boundaries from the 1906 Sanborn map, compared to the location of the Wells Street bridge (lower right):
The Chicago Tribune reported in January that, on being raised, the Foolkiller was towed to the “Fullerton Avenue bridge.” That would be about the same distance again further north. I don’t really know why the Illinois Stone Company would’ve been involved, but then I don’t know what was at Fullerton Avenue, either. -
The Daily News also identifies the recovery as having been performed by Paschen Brothers, not Great Lakes Dredge and Dock, whose derrick is being used. Frank and Henry Paschen ran a general contracting company that built bridges and did work for the city on regular basis before collapsing in scandal in the 1990s.
They were doing work along the river anyway in 1915, having been contracted to build retaining walls for what would eventually become the Pennsylvania Freight terminal between Polk and Taylor. Their name hasn’t come up before, as far as I know, and I don’t know what kind of role they might’ve played.
(Of course, it’s also possible that the Daily News has this detail wrong. I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt here because they were there and taking pictures, given that both Paschen and GLDD were big names I assume the reporter probably noticed that GLDD was written on the side of the derrick) -
It gives the dimensions of the vessel as 5 feet by 30 feet. This is… interesting. At the moment, the model I’ve built has a width of 40 feet, which gives it a beam of about 6 feet, 8 inches. If you scale that model to a beam of 5 feet, you get a length of: just about exactly 30 feet.
If you do that, though, the rear hatch of the lifeboat—the hatch through which entry was originally designed—is only a foot and a half across, and the ladder rungs are only eight inches wide. That’s certainly possible, but I think in the pictures it generally looks to be at least as tall as an average man. -
It is the first and only source, I think, to say what I had already assumed, which is that the stern of the boat was badly damaged. The Daily News describes “a large hole in the stern,” which it attributes to the boat having been damaged by “a freighter’s keel.”
That last part is speculative, although probably also accurate. It does bear noting, though, that there are no clear pictures of the entire port side of the vessel above water, and the drawing shown in the ad for its exhibition on State Street is also unclear.
It is possible that the boat was torn open just aft of the passenger compartment (the rearmost hatch appears to be intact) with what would have been the engine room stove in, badly damaged, or otherwise unrecognizable.
If that’s the case, it’s also possible that the Daily News took their measurements from an early recovery where only (or principally) the first side was visible, since from the nose to the damaged area would be about 30 feet. I don’t know.
So. In some sense, more questions than answers. In another, though, I am inclined to trust the Daily News more than the Tribune, and that brings us to what this piece was originally supposed to be about.
Like I said, I’d like to talk about how one does historical research. @garak asked about that a few months ago, but the last bit of digging has played this out live, so… let’s take a step back about a year. When he reopened the Foolkiller case, one of the items Constant podcast’s Mark Chrisler found about Robert Brown was this article, from the Chicago Tribune on March 5th, 1909:
BOOZE WRECKS LIFE BOAT.
BOOZE WRECKS LIFE BOAT.
Promoter Finds Germans Drink Wine and Highballs.
SUES INVENTOR FOR EXPENSE
Case Reported Sent to Chief Justice Olson as Joke.
“Booze”—not plain, ordinary beer and such beverages—was the principal factor which entered into the promotion of the “International Life Boat” company in Hamburg and Berlin, according to testimony given yesterday in a suit before Chief Justice Olson in the Municipal court.
While the company is said to be incorporated for $200,000 and the life boat in question is “the most wonderful of its kind ever invented in the history of the world,” the inventor, Robert A. Brown, is being sued by David B. Marks for $75.
Marks testified that he spent most of the $75 on “booze” for Hamburg and Berlin capitalists, whom he was attempting to interest in the life boat. He said he had business of his own in Europe and that Brown had contracted to give him $75 for general expenses if he would promote the “International Life Boat” company. Further, he was to receive 10 per cent of whatever capital he raised among German financiers.Beer Spurned for Wine.
“Far be it from me to be critical,” sald Mr. Marks, “but all the time I spent in Hamburg and Berlin, I didn't see a single German drinking beer. I got hold of a couple of capitalists in Berlin and took them to a saloon.
“‘What will you have, gentlemen?’ I asked.
“‘Nix on beer.’ they said. ‘We never drink anything but wine in Germany.’
“I see I am stung, and I order wine. When they consumed several dollars' worth—I took ginger ale—I paid the check and tipped the waiter 30 cents. He looked at me kind of sorrowful and handed the money back.
“‘Keep it,’ said he, ‘you need it more than I do.’Capitalists Drink Highballs.
“I took other capitalists out for refreshments and they drank highballs. I tried to suggest beer, but nobody would hear me. I couldn't get out of a saloon without buying.”
But Marks cold not itemize his bill for more than $5. The model of the “lifeboat” was examined by Judge Olson and the jury. Mr. Marks said the German capitalists refused to become interested in the project.
Previous to the “$75 case” a jury in Judge Olson's court returned a verdict in another case for $3,500. It was intimated that one of the other judges “handed” the “lifeboat” case to the chief justice as a joke.
The testimony will be resumed today.
In a sense, this was my entrypoint into the Foolkiller saga as a researcher as opposed to a consumer. As I’ve mentioned, there were pictures of the lifeboat tied up to a bridge, and by searching for permutations of that location and the word “dock” I was able to turn up a payment by the International Automatic Life Boat Company to the Chicago water authorities.
What I was not able to do was to find out anything more about David B. Marks, including whether or not he won his suit, because there is zero followup in the Tribune. From a “historical research” perspective, there are a couple of options we need to consider.
Option one: What if this was just made up? I mean, the odds are against it, because this describes at least two people we know exist (Chief Justice Harry Olson and Robert A. Brown). But the article’s writer clearly thinks this is a joke, and it’s written as a joke, and that’s why there’s nothing more about David B. Marks.
Option two: What if—shocking, I know—the Tribune was just being extremely sloppy in their reporting? I think it’s probably fairly safe to assume that there wasn’t a reporter from the paper hanging out in the courtroom, taking meticulous notes on Marks’s testimony. But, even more fundamentally than that, we know they definitely got the name of the company wrong.
So, what can we do?
Let’s start with some assumptions. First: something like David Marks existed, but his name is probably not “David B. Marks.” Second: if David Marks existed, he lived in Chicago or nearby, because that’s where the suit was filed. Third: if David Marks existed and lived in Chicago, then he must have traveled to Germany. Fourth: if David Marks traveled from Germany to Chicago, he must’ve done so at some time between 1905 (when the International Automatic Lifeboat Company was incorporated) and early 1909 (when the suit was reported on).
Which means we can hop on over to a genealogy site, and try a different tactic. Instead of looking for census records, let’s look at immigration records. Those are often incomplete, of course, but we do find one (1) intriguing hit, and that’s that a merchant („Kaufmann”) “B.D. Marks,” who gives his residence as Chicago, left Hamburg on the SS Blücher in December, 1907:
Okay. The initials are the wrong way around, but… it’s something, right? And that gives his age as 68, so he must’ve been born sometime in the late 1830s. Which means now we’re looking for someone with the initials “B.D.” or possibly “D.B.” (not that one) who lived in Chicago and was born in (probably) 1839.
The 1900 census records someone named “B.D. Marks,” born in Ohio to German parents, living in Chicago. It gives their birthday as October, 1838 and their spouse as someone named Caroline, born in July, 1843. And then findagrave.com helpfully fills in the rest of the gaps with a picture of a headstone, with two names:
- BENNETT D. MARKS, OCT. 29. 1839 – AUG. 29. 1909.
- CAROLINE D. MARKS, JULY 20. 1843 – MAR. 29. 1902.
And: hey! Now we’re cooking with gas! It seems safe to assume that the Blücher’s B.D. Marks is Bennett D. Marks, who would presumably have gotten on just fine in Germany thanks to his parentage. What this doesn’t tell us is whether or not B.D. Marks is the Tribune’s David B. Marks, of course. But now we have a person that we know existed.
And, finally, a person who has left some fingerprints.
For example, Bennett D. Marks filed a patent for a “reciprocating propeller” in 1908. That’s kind of interesting, right? I mean, at least he was into boats? That said, the patent does say, uh:
In constructing propellers of this type it has been the common practice to make the blades in a plurality of hinged sections so that during the return stroke of the plunger the sections are permitted to fold inwardly in order to reduce the resistance offered to their passage through the water to the greatest possible extent.
When I first wrote this paragraph, it began like this:
I have: absolutely no freaking clue what he’s talking about.
Having spent some more time with it, I now know what he’s talking about, but not why. Do you want a digression into maritime history? You know what to do, my lovelies.
Early marine propulsion was a bit muddied, and there was a lengthy period of time in which it was not really clear what form they should take—today we think of them as propellers, but there were designs of “screws” that looked very much like threaded screws. Propellers are significantly more efficient and useful than paddleboats, but they do have a couple of problems.
One problem is with cavitation. Like aircraft propellers, screw power entails a tradeoff between efficiency and speed. That is to say, in general, the faster a propeller turns, the more effort it exerts on the fluid it is moving through. However, that movement also generates turbulence within the fluid. For aircraft, tip mach is a limiting factor—you do not want the tip of the blade to be traveling faster than the speed of sound, unless of course you are the Soviets.
For water aircraft, or whatever you call them, a more important limiting factor is cavitation, i.e. when the speed change imparted by the propeller blade causes the water pressure to drop enough that it spontaneously turns into a vapor. Not only does this lower the propeller efficiency, but the collapse of the resultant void is destructive. Early reciprocating steam engines did not encounter this much. Steam turbine engines (and internal combustion engines) turn much faster, though, fast enough that directly driving a screw of reasonable size would naturally lead to cavitation. Attempting to find ways around this led to some propulsive designs with multiple propellers along the same shaft before the more practical solution of reduction gearing solved it.
A second and somewhat more complex and intractable problem, though, is one of slip. A formal explanation of this would involve at least some Greek letters and probably that funny ʃ that they use in Old English and also calculus. Since nobody who studies propeller theory is going to read this, though: imagine one complete section of an actual screw (that is, one full twist of its thread) that you are driving into a piece of wood.
When you turn the screw a full revolution, a point on the leading edge of the screw travels a given distance around the circumference of the screw, right, right? If you follow, as it makes that revolution, each point along the thread is exerting some amount of effort on the wood, which pulls the screw into the material. The relationship how far it travels into the material in one rotation is what we define as screw pitch.
Ships, though, are not traveling through solid material (see also: “Titanic, the”). The screw is moving through a fluid medium, which means that any point along the thread (in this case, the leading edge of the propeller blade) is traveling some shorter linear distance along the rotational axis. The difference between the distance implied by the pitch in a solid and the actual pitch is “slip.”
Slip is not “bad,” although it sounds like it. The different volume through which the leading edge moves also generates thrust; slip is necessary for the ship to move, and a propeller with zero slip also definitionally has zero angle of attack and therefore produces no impulse. It does, however, mean that the relationship between screw RPM and the vessel’s forward speed is not obvious and is governed by slip at various forward velocities and RPM.
(Today, I’m sure, you can do this through computational fluid dynamics. In the Old Days, the relationship between shaft RPM, screw slip, and speed made good was determined observationally. White Star Line called this a “slip table,” on RMS Titanic. In the story where it appeared I referred to it as a “shaft-screw-knots computer,” because I am a goddamned child :P)
In the 21st century, reducing cavitation and optimizing screw slip is done through innovative screw design, variable-pitch propellers, and that kind of thing. In 1908, Bennett Marks proposed to solve this by having the propeller rotate, but also to derive its power by pumping back and forth, effectively plunging the water rather than imparting thrust to it through a screw.
He was not the only person to have come up with this idea; another inventor anticipated something closer to an actual pumpjet, and in 1909 Michael Flynn patented another design under the belief, it seems, that propellers expend most of their energy in flinging water out at right angles to the blades.
Nobody I have spoken to about this had ever heard of such a thing, and none of them are under the impression that a single non-experimental boat was ever propelled in this way, let alone that it was “common practice” that required innovations in. As far as I can tell, this was a stupid idea then and a stupid idea now. Given that the phenomenon of cylindrical lifeboats escaped notice for a century, I guess it’s possible this is another interesting fad to pursue. But not now. That is not the takeaway I want you to have.
The takeaway is that there is nothing in the patent that implies he knew what he was talking about, or even serious about boats. Bennett Marks had other patents, though, including one for the useful and exciting process of transferring a wood grain pattern to a printing press so that, presumably, it could be stamped onto something else. This I judge by the fact that the application is filed by the “MARKS AUTOMATIC WOOD REPRODUCING CO.”
This is about to be significant in two ways. The first is that it gives us another company to look into. The second, and more immediate one, is that a clever chap would file patents in more than one place. And, specifically, in July, 1907, a patent for a „Walzendruckmaschine zum Uebertragen von Holzmaserung und anderen Wustern” (Rolling printer machine for the transference of wood grain and other details) was filed in Berlin.
By Bennett David Marks, of Chicago.
So what we can consider, I would say, unimpeachable at this point is that there was a Bennett David Marks, who lived in Chicago, considered himself an inventor and merchant, and who traveled to Germany in the early 1900s. Anyway, let’s see if there’s more about Bennett than there is about ol’ David B, no?
Boy, howdy.
In 1882, Bennett D. Marks sued Charles W. Conrad for $5,000 in damages for “breach of contract.” I can’t find how this case was disposed of, if it was disposed of at all. Conrad was a brewer whose business was hit hard by blue laws and apparently the loss of some inventory in a storm. He went bankrupt, and in early 1883 his assets were acquired by Charles C. Reuss, manager of the “Anheuser Busch Brewing Association.”
In 1886, Bennett D Marks sued George Wolf, “the well-known jeweler and Alderman from the Eighth ward” in Lousville, Kentucky (Marks was born in Cincinnati, but married Caroline in Kentucky, filed his 1863 draft form there, and resided in Louisville as of 1880) on behalf of his son Arthur:
Arthur M. Marks, by his next friend, Bennett D. Marks, brought suit against George Wolf, the well-known jeweler and Alderman from the Eighth ward, asking $10,000 damages for an assault and battery alleged to have been committed on the plaintiff Wednesday afternoon. Prior to the action at law, Mr. Wolf was arrested under a warrant for assault, and promptly gave bond for his appearance in the City Court at 10 o’clock this morning.
The trouble came about from the setting of a ring, originally purchased from Mr. Wolf, which Mark declares was to be reset without charge when necessary. Some work upon it was done Wednesday for which Mr. Wolf charged fifty cents. In the dispute which followed the boy claims that Mr. Wolf struck him. This Mr. Wolf denies.
The Kentucky Courier-Journal, reporting on July 10th, 1886, was not having any of that shit:
A KENTUCKY COLONEL.
A KENTUCKY COLONEL.
Col. George Wolf, the well-known jeweler, the Alderman from the Eighth ward and one of the most gallant members of the Governor’s staff, was before the City Court yesterday morning on a warrant sworn out by young Arthur Marks charging him with assault and battery. Marks had had a ring, previously purchased from Col. Wolf, reset, and, putting it upon his finger, declared that he would not pay for the resetting. The evidence conduced to show that the Colonel did not assault the boy, but put his hand upon his collar and stopped him as he turned to leave the store. The Colonel was discharged.
His family then moved to Minnesota, where he was listed as a “railroad ticket broker” in the 1887 Minneapolis city directory. Oh, also the year before he was sued by Annie and Charles Hegenmeyer (or possibly Thegenmeyer, or possibly Hegernger. Love them old papers) in a real-estate swindle where Marks, through a confederate, valued the Hegenmeyer property at $1,000 and then sold it for $3,000. The judge, from a Dec. 25, 1886 Saint Paul Daily Globe article:
finds for the plaintiffs, and orders that the costs of the action be paid by the defendant. He further says that the transaction was exceedingly questionable throughout on the part of Marks and [A.J. Creigh], who acted as the agent in the sale.
On September 17th, 1887, he sued C.W. Field for $500. On December 22nd, he sued Field again, this time for $450. In between, he lost a case brought by Henry Bagley over the real estate scam. Apparently tiring of the Twin Cities (must’ve been the cold), the Marks then headed south to Chicago.
In 1891, he was savagely beaten and relieved of a valuable diamond pin by Harry C. Clark, the son of a local doctor who apparently had quite a bit of property. At least, uh… at least, that is Marks’s version. Harry C. Clark’s version is that he was at at wedding, and witnesses confirming this alibi saw Clark acquitted in 1893. Marks sued him instead, and when Clark failed to appear he was awarded $20,000 in damages. I do not know if he collected.
Anyway. In 1907, Bennett Marks was being sued by one Harry Lea Dodson, stemming from that Marks Automatic Wood Reproducing Company thing. According to Dodson, Marks hired him as a patent attorney but also offered him stock in the company. There was, as far as I can tell, no actual company to offer stock in—the Marks Automatic Wood Reproducing Company went nowhere. It was, in so many words, another swindle.
Dobson lost, appealed the verdict, and the case was remanded based on an error given in jury instruction, and it worked its way through the courts after Marks’s death in 1909; it seems, in the end, to have been decided in favor of the Marks’ estate.
My point in all this, though, is that Bennett was in and out of the courts so often that he probably had a reserved parking space. I’ve left off the time he was sued for $27 in 1897 (and lost), the time in 1891 he sued John F. Carey (no idea where that went), and the time he was jailed in 1899 for scalping railroad tickets.
I have said before that everyone in this whole affair is some kind of capital-c Character, so of course it should come as no surprise that Bennett Marks would be yet one more. He does not seem to have been a particularly savory man.
This might pose to us the question of what it means that Robert Brown was willing to associate with him. Throughout this series, you will have, perhaps, noted my rather… cool… attitude towards Robert Brown and the International Automatic Lifeboat. Some discoveries over the last couple of weeks have changed my opinion a bit, and now I’m not quite so sure.
I think perhaps in Bennett Marks we have our first actual con man. Frenchy Deneau was an opportunist and occasionally a liar, but he was a real diver who really worked on the Eastland salvage. Henry Fisher may have had some bizarre ideas, but he at least tried to build them. Samuel Winternitz and C.W. Parker were both inveterate showmen, yes, but it’s not like Winternitz auctioned goods under false pretenses or like Parker’s Greatest Shows was any more of a swindle than any other carnival.
By 1907, things must’ve been pretty desperate at IAL. There was no real interest in the design, any more than there had been Mayo’s Rescue Lifeboat. As I said in the last episode, the photographic evidence makes a fairly compelling case to me that the boat moored at Van Buren Street was more or less stripped; there are no more classified ads talking about showing the boat in the harbor, or the Browns trying to hire more salesmen.
Things were, one assumes, not great for Marks either, given that he was being accused of defrauding his patent lawyer. This case, as I said, was settled in favor of the Marks estate for lack of evidence. But also, one party to the lawsuit was a well-respected and well-established patent lawyer, as far as I can tell, and the other tried to get $10,000 out of the jeweler who laid a hand on his son after the younger Marks refused to pay him for his work.
So. Was Marks brought on to IAL as the result of the 1906 classifieds? Or did he approach Brown separately, luring him with the promise of riches in Europe? Brown had filed patents for his boat in Germany, after all, and the lifeboat prize was being hosted in France. I don’t know. The purpose of this post is largely to put some more information out there for indexing so that anyone else looking into this knows who “David B. Marks” really was.
Oh, right! Right, and to talk a bit about my research methods.
See, I’ve talked a lot about Bennett Marks. I think that I’ve made a pretty good case for the Tribune messing up in their reporting. That was sort of going to be the angle I took in this episode, originally—you and I, together, reading between the lines. One of the things that keeps me interested in historical mysteries where there are those lines to read through is when things start to become clear—a breathless, muttered “Jesus Christ” as you realize what you’re looking at.
I was trying to find more pieces of information—maybe Marks and Brown shared a patent attorney, or a witness. Maybe they lived in the same neighborhood? Something like that, something I could use to absolutely convince you in the absence of actual proof—it wasn’t like I was going to find a correction in the Tribune, and the case was so unimportant it’s not like anyone else would’ve covered it.
Right about the point where I was reading about Marks suing Cyrus Field, though, I figured I’d give newspaperarchive.com another shot. Compared to other sites like the Library of Congress or newspapers.com, their search is atrocious, their OCR is useless, and their interface is extremely obnoxious. So I hate using it, and although they do have some unique papers I avoid the site except as a last resort. But, whatever. I put “Bennett D Marks” into the search, boxed to Chicago between 1900 and 1910, and I did turn up one result:
…Jesus Christ.
Anyway, next time we are going to cover yet another figure in this story—this time, a more famous one, and someone I definitely shouldn’t have been leaving off so long.