Infinite Wisdom

"Every battle . . . fails to come off as those who planned it expected it to do."

La Triviata

• While a lieutenant in the Revolutionary Army serving in his native Corsica in 1792, Napoleone Buonaparte was imprisoned for ten days on suspicion of nationalist sympathies, and spent his time reading Justinian's Digest of Roman Law, and thus, as he put it, " . . . acquired my knowledge of the civil law" which became the basis of the Code Napoleon.
• Although it actually cost $12,000 to build, in 1937 boat designer Andrew Higgins sold the U.S.M.C. one of his innovative Eureka Boats -- forerunner of the famous landing craft of World War II -- for just $5,200, because that's all that Uncle Sam could spare.
• Downing Street, where the British prime minister resides, was named after an American, Sir George Downing (1623-1684), a Harvard grad (1642), who served as a diplomat during Oliver Cromwell's dictatorship and later under King Charles II.
• Of 31 men generally recognized as Roman Emperor between the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 and the accession of Diocletian in 284, at most five died of natural causes, one of them as a prisoner of war; one perished fighting the Goths, and the rest were either murdered, were killed in action against usurpers, or died by their own hand.
• During the American Revolution, Britain and France exchanged some 4,400 prisoners of war.
• The Japanese Naval Ministry in Tokyo and Naval Academy at Eta Jima were built in 1893, using bricks imported from England.
• Between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the onset of the Spanish-American War in 1898, just eight black men held commissions in the United States Army, of whom five were chaplains.
• When the Royal Navy stopped purchasing the famed short-barreled, muzzle loading "carronade" in 1852, the Carron Iron Works, which had manufactured the piece for some 75 years, switched to producing lamp-posts, grates, andirons, Britain's famous red post boxes, and other cast-iron items, rather than begin making breech loading guns, continuing in business until 1982.

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