Castanet

Castanets were developed from the ancient Roman crotalum, which consisted of two rounded hollows of ebony.

They are held in the palm and drummed together by the fingers to produce a rhythmic accompaniment to dance.

Castanets are traditionally made of hardwood although fibreglass is becoming increasingly popular.

In Andalusia they are usually referred to as palillos (little sticks) instead, and this is the name by which they are known in such Spanish dances as the flamenco.

Castanets are also referred to as clackers in the United States.

Orchestral castanets or ‘clappers’, mounted on a handle, were employed by silent-film effects musicians to imitate the sound of a galloping horse, hence the phrase ‘to run like the clappers.’

Source Hutchinson Encyclopedia © RM 2011. Helicon Publishing 

Butch Cassidy

Robert LeRoy Parker, later known as Butch Cassidy, was born on Friday, April 13, 1866, in Beaver, Utah. He was the first of 13 children born to Maximillian Parker and Ann Campbell Gillies. His parents were immigrants from England whose families had converted to Mormonism before settling in Utah.

According to genealogical research by Kerry Ross Boren, Butch Cassidy's great-grandfather served time in prison alongside Charles Dickens' father, John Dickens, and Cassidy's grandfather may have been a model for Oliver Twist. The claim has never been proven.

Parker left home as a teenager and, while working on a dairy ranch, fell under the influence of an older cattle rustler named Mike Cassidy, who taught him riding, roping, branding and shooting. During a brief stint as a butcher in Rock Springs, Wyoming, he acquired the nickname "Butch", to which he soon added the surname Cassidy in honor of his old mentor.

His first recorded offense came around 1880, when he found a clothier's shop closed, let himself in and took a pair of jeans and some pie, leaving an IOU promising to pay on his next visit. The shopkeeper pressed charges, but a jury acquitted him.

His first major crime was on June 24, 1889, when Cassidy, Matt Warner and two of the McCarty brothers robbed the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride, Colorado, stealing approximately $21,000.

The white building at right housed the San Miguel Valley Bank. Photo by Jerrye and Roy Klotz MD

In 1894 Cassidy was arrested at Lander, Wyoming, for stealing horses and possibly for running a protection racket among the local ranchers there. Imprisoned in the Wyoming State Prison in Laramie, he served 18 months of a two-year sentence and was released in January 1896.

Wyoming Governor William A. Richards pardoned Cassidy on January 19, 1896, after the trial judge, Jesse Knight, wrote that a pardon might make him a law-abiding citizen. Knight also warned that Cassidy was capable of leading "desperate men to desperate deeds."

Upon his release Cassidy gathered a loose band of rustlers and robbers that became known as the Wild Bunch. Its members included the Sundance Kid (Harry Longabaugh), Elzy Lay, Harvey "Kid Curry" Logan and Ben "The Tall Texan" Kilpatrick. Operating from hideouts such as Robbers Roost in Utah and Hole-in-the-Wall in Wyoming, the gang robbed banks, payrolls and trains across the Mountain West.

On April 21, 1897, Cassidy and Elzy Lay robbed the Pleasant Valley Coal Company payroll in broad daylight in the mining town of Castle Gate, Utah, then fled to Robbers Roost.

On June 2, 1899, the Wild Bunch flagged down a Union Pacific train near Wilcox, Wyoming, and forced the crew to uncouple the locomotive and drive it across a wooden bridge. The robbers then blew up the bridge with dynamite to stop the train's second section, and used more explosives to blow open the express car and its safe.

The robberies led the railroads to hire the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to hunt the gang down.

In late 1900, Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Will Carver, Harvey Logan and Ben Kilpatrick posed in new suits and bowler hats for photographer John Swartz in Fort Worth, Texas. Swartz displayed the "Fort Worth Five" photograph in his studio, where a detective recognized the outlaws, and the Pinkertons used it for wanted posters.

Butch Cassidy in the "Fort Worth Five" Wild Bunch group photo, Fort Worth, Texas, 1900

Cassidy's last confirmed robbery in the United States is usually dated to September 1900, when he, the Sundance Kid and Will Carver took more than $30,000 from the First National Bank in Winnemucca, Nevada. The Wild Bunch's final heist, a Great Northern train robbery near Wagner, Montana, on July 3, 1901, was carried out by Kid Curry's group after Cassidy had left the country.

The pressures of being pursued forced Cassidy to flee with the Sundance Kid and the latter's girlfriend, Etta Place. On February 20, 1901, the trio sailed from New York City to Buenos Aires aboard the British steamer Herminius.

In Argentina, Cassidy posed as James Ryan, Etta's supposed brother, and the three settled on a ranch near Cholila in Patagonia, at the foot of the Andes. In a 1902 letter Cassidy described their "little family of 3" living in a four-room house with 300 cattle, 1,500 sheep and 28 horses.

After a bank robbery at Villa Mercedes, Argentina, in December 1905, the outlaws escaped across the Andes to Chile. Cassidy later found honest work in Bolivia under the alias James "Santiago" Maxwell at the Concordia Tin Mine, where one of his main duties was guarding the company payroll.

On November 3, 1908, two masked American bandits held up a payroll courier for the Aramayo mining company near San Vicente in southern Bolivia. A mule bearing the Aramayo brand aroused the suspicion of their landlord, and on November 6 soldiers and local officials surrounded the house. After a gunfight that lasted into the night, two bodies were found the following morning, and the police report suggested Cassidy had shot the dying Sundance Kid before killing himself.

Whether the dead men really were Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has never been proven. In 1991 forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow searched the San Vicente cemetery but found no remains matching the DNA of the outlaws' living relatives. Cassidy's sister, Lula Parker Betenson, insisted he came home to Circleville, Utah, and ate blueberry pie with the family in 1925.

There is no documentation that Butch Cassidy ever killed anyone. He was played by Paul Newman, with Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid, in the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Sources Wikipedia, Utah History Encyclopedia, Wyoming State Archives, Utah State Archives, HistoryNet

Cassette

 A cassette, formally known as the Compact Cassette, is an analogue magnetic-tape format for recording and playing sound. Its tape and two reels are enclosed in a small plastic shell.

The tape runs from one reel to the other while a cassette recorder or player reads the magnetic information and turns it into sound. Compact Cassette tape is 3.81 millimetres (0.15 inches) wide and normally travels at 4.76 centimetres (1â…ž inches) per second.

A cassette normally has two sides, A and B. People could record music onto a blank cassette, buy a prerecorded album, or make a mixtape by copying each song from the radio or other records.

In 1958, after four years of development, RCA Victor introduced its reversible Sound Tape Cartridge. It enclosed quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape in a convenient cartridge, but players were slow to reach the market, few prerecorded titles appeared and the format disappeared from shops by 1964.

Dutch engineer Lou Ottens (June 21, 1926–March 6, 2021) led the Philips team that developed the Compact Cassette. Frustrated by bulky reel-to-reel machines, he wanted a recorder that was small enough to fit into a coat pocket.

Philips first presented the Compact Cassette and its EL 3300 recorder at the International Radio Exhibition in Berlin on August 28, 1963. The system had originally been intended mainly for speech and dictation rather than high-fidelity music.

The format reached the United States in November 1964, where the recorder was sold under the Norelco name as the Carry-Corder 150. More than 250,000 Compact Cassette recorders had been sold in the country by 1966.

Philips allowed other manufacturers to use the Compact Cassette system without paying a licence fee, provided that they followed its technical specifications. This helped establish one compatible worldwide standard.

Philips and PolyGram launched prerecorded "Musicassette" in March 1965. In 1966 the company put a cassette recorder into a portable radio, and the following year it introduced a car radio with a built-in cassette recorder.

A Philips EL 3302 portable cassette recorder (1968). Photograph by mib18 at German Wikipedia.

Dolby B noise reduction and chromium-dioxide tape greatly improved cassette sound during the 1970s. The Advent Model 201, introduced in 1971, combined both technologies and helped make the cassette a credible high-fidelity format.

Sony launched its first Walkman, the blue-and-silver TPS-L2, in Japan on July 1, 1979. The portable stereo player had two headphone sockets and helped turn the cassette into a mass-market personal listening format.

Philips later estimated that more than 100 billion cassette tapes were sold worldwide.

In the United States, cassette sales by value overtook LP sales in 1983. Research published in December 1986 found that prerecorded cassettes had outsold LPs by more than two to one in 1985, with sales of $1.17 billion compared with $519.5 million for LPs.

UK cassette-album sales peaked at 83 million in 1989. The rise of the compact disc and later digital formats caused a steep decline, and only about 900,000 cassette albums were sold in the UK in 2004.

The 2010 Lexus SC 430 is generally cited as the last new US-market car supplied with a cassette player as standard. Mercury continued to offer one as an option in the Grand Marquis until production ended in January 2011.

The 2011 print edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary dropped the term "cassette tape." It was the concise dictionary, not the full Oxford English Dictionary, that removed the entry.

In 2014 Sony demonstrated experimental magnetic-tape technology capable of storing more than 185 terabytes of computer data per cartridge. Despite some reports describing it as a cassette tape, it was high-density data-storage technology rather than a consumer audio cassette.

The cassette later enjoyed a small revival. United Kingdom sales rose by 53.8 per cent to 164,491 units in 2025, although the format remained a niche part of the recorded-music market.

Sources: Philips Museum: Soundtrack to People's Lives; Royal Philips: First Philips Cassette Recorder; Royal Philips: Lou Ottens; Sony: Walkman 20th Anniversary; Billboard, December 13, 1986; BBC News: Not Long Left for Cassette Tapes; BBC News: Why Police Still Used Cassettes; Sony: 185TB Magnetic-Tape Technology; Hagerty: The Last In-Car Cassette Decks; BBC News: UK Music Sales in 2025.

Casserole

 The word “casserole” entered English from French in the early eighteenth century. It originally denoted a pan or cooking vessel; today it can mean either an ovenproof dish in which food is cooked and served or the food prepared in it.

Casserole Pixabay

Early English casseroles were very different from their modern namesakes. Eighteenth-century recipes used cooked rice to form an edible case that was filled with a savoury mixture.

In the United States, economical one-dish casseroles became increasingly popular during the Great Depression and World War II. Their popularity peaked in the 1950s, when home cooks combined convenient canned meats, fish, vegetables and condensed soups.

Tuna-noodle casserole predates the 1950s craze. One of its earliest known printed recipes, “Noodles and Tuna Fish en Casserole,” appeared in Sunset magazine in 1930 and was submitted by a reader from Kennewick, Washington.

Heat-resistant glass transformed casserole cookware. Corning Glass Works introduced Pyrex ovenware in 1915, and covered casserole dishes were among its first twelve consumer products.

In Minnesota and parts of the Upper Midwest, a casserole is commonly called a “hotdish.” What is believed to be the first printed hotdish recipe appeared in a 1930 cookbook produced by the Grace Lutheran Ladies Aid of Mankato.

Campbell’s home economist Dorcas Reilly created green bean casserole in the company’s New Jersey test kitchen in 1955. Originally called “Green Bean Bake,” it combined six ingredients, including condensed cream of mushroom soup and fried onions.

Reilly donated the original green bean casserole recipe card to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002. A Campbell’s spokesperson said in 2015 that about 40 per cent of the company’s cream of mushroom soup sales went towards making the dish, now closely associated with Thanksgiving.

For the 1983 film Return of the Jedi, sound designer Ben Burtt augmented Jabba the Hutt’s voice and movements with wet, squelching noises made by working his hands through a bowl of his wife’s cheese casserole.

Sources Food For Thought by Ed Pearce; Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary; Oxford Reference; Library of Congress; TASTE; Smithsonian Magazine; CBS Minnesota; National Inventors Hall of Fame; Smithsonian Magazine; StarWars.com

Casino

The first legal casino opened in Baden-Baden, Germany in 1765.

Craps, a casino game of American origin, was adapted from the English dice game Hazard by Bernard de Marigny in New Orleans in 1813.

American gangster Bugsy Siegel opened The Flamingo Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas on December 26, 1946. It is the oldest casino still in operation on the Las Vegas Strip. 

The Flamingo has undergone several ownership changes and renovations throughout its long history, but its legacy as a pioneering venture in Las Vegas remains. It boasts an Art Deco exterior, lush gardens with flamingos (of course!), and a rich history that includes hosting notable entertainers like Bob Hope and Dean Martin.

The Flamingo in 1957 by David Lofink - https://www.flickr.com

Insomniac billionaire Howard Hughes once bought a casino for the sole purpose of moving its trademark neon silver slipper. Visible from Hughes' bedroom, it had apparently kept him awake at night.

Britain’s first legal casino of modern times opened at the Metropole in Brighton in 1962.

The Montreux Casino in Switzerland was set ablaze by someone wielding a flare gun during a Frank Zappa concert on December 4, 1971; Deep Purple was in the audience for the show and the incident inspired their song "Smoke on the Water".

The first legal casino outside of Nevada was opened in Atlantic City on May 26, 1978. Resorts Casino Hotel opened its doors at 10:00am, however initial gaming laws in New Jersey only allowed casinos to operate for 18 hours during the week and 20 hours during the weekends.

In 2010, a casino in Nevada was fined $250,000 for allowing a baccarat player to dance on a card table while the game was being played.

The citizens of Monaco are forbidden from entering the gaming rooms of the Monte Carlo Casino. The casino is for foreigners only.

According to Gaming Law, casinos have to stock enough cash to cover all the chips on the 'floor'.

There are no clocks or windows in any casino.

Many casinos try to avoid making you ever have to turn in a right angle by design, as such a hard turn forces people to call upon the decision-making parts of their brain; something that casinos naturally want to avoid.

The Stratosphere Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas is 1149 feet tall, making it the second tallest freestanding structure west of the Mississippi River behind the Kennecott Smokestack in Utah.

Casino operator Caesars World began as a hot dog stand in Miami Beach.

Despite it being common practice for casinos to ban card counters, a 1979 New Jersey Supreme Court decision banned all Atlantic City casinos from doing so, making them the only state in the USA where a casino is forbidden from throwing out skilled blackjack players.

If the croupier points to his ear in a casino at the gaming table you know someone is on a winning streak. It's a signal for help from other casino staff.

Cashew

Cashews are commonly called nuts, but botanically each edible kernel is the seed of the cashew tree's true fruit. The cashew, Anacardium occidentale, belongs to the same plant family as the mango, pistachio, poison ivy and poison oak.

The English word "cashew" ultimately derives from the Portuguese caju, itself borrowed from a Tupi name for the tree.

The cashew is native to tropical South America, including Brazil. Portuguese traders carried it to parts of Africa and India during the 16th century, and it subsequently spread through tropical Asia.

The kidney-shaped true fruit grows at the end of a fleshy, pear-shaped stalk called the cashew apple. The apple is an accessory fruit rather than a true fruit and may be red or yellow when ripe.

Cashew apples are juicy but highly perishable. Where the trees are grown, the apples are used to make juice, alcoholic drinks, jams and jellies; they contain considerably more vitamin C by weight than oranges.

Cashew trees generally begin bearing three to five years after planting. Depending on the variety and growing conditions, they may not reach full production until about eight to ten years after planting.

Côte d'Ivoire is the world's leading producer and exporter of raw, in-shell cashews, while Vietnam is the leading processor and exporter of shelled cashew kernels.

The world's largest cashew tree grows at Pirangi do Norte in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Norte. Guinness World Records gives its spread as about 8,500 square metres (2.1 acres), roughly the area occupied by 70 ordinary cashew trees.

The Pirangi tree's extraordinary spread is attributed to a genetic mutation. Four of its five main branches grow outwards and form new roots when they touch the ground, creating secondary trunks that remain connected to the original tree.

Cashews are sold without their shells because a caustic oily resin lies between the shell layers. It can blister human skin and must be removed by controlled heat treatment and careful processing.

Cashew nutshell liquid has industrial uses. Its derivatives are used in products including brake linings, resins, varnishes, lubricants and paints.

A 28-gram (one-ounce) serving of raw cashews contains about 157 calories and 5.2 grams of protein. It is especially rich in copper and also supplies magnesium, phosphorus, zinc and iron.

Informal food calendars in the United States mark November 23 as National Cashew Day, although it is not an official federal observance.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica; Kew Science: Plants of the World Online; Guinness World Records; Food and Agriculture Organization; World Bank; Observatory of Economic Complexity; USDA FoodData Central; Online Etymology Dictionary

Cash Register

A cash register is a mechanical or electronic device used in department stores and retail businesses to calculate and record sales transactions, hold banknotes and coins in a secure drawer, and print receipts for customers.

James J. Ritty, owner of a tavern in Dayton, Ohio, patented the cash register on November 4, 1879, as he’d grown tired of his staff stealing his money.

Ritty was inspired to invent the machine while travelling to Europe on a steamboat in 1878, after visiting the engine room and noticing a mechanical device that tracked the revolutions of the ship’s propeller.

The first registers were entirely mechanical, without receipts. The employee was required to ring up every transaction on the register, and when the total key was pushed, the drawer opened and a bell would ring, alerting the manager to a sale taking place.

Dubbed "Ritty's Incorruptible Cashier," his original 1879 patent did not feature a cash drawer at all; it functioned as a mechanical counter with a clock-like dial that displayed running sales totals.

Old National Cash Register at Mexico City's Museo de la Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público

John H. Patterson of the National Cash Register Company improved the cash register by adding a paper roll to record sales transactions, thereby creating the receipt.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, registers were often housed in elaborate, decorative brass, bronze, or cast-iron cases, leading NCR to run the world's largest brass foundry.

In 1906, inventor Charles F. Kettering designed the first cash register powered by electricity while working at NCR, creating a small motor that ran in brief bursts so clerks no longer needed to turn a hand crank.

The retail convention of pricing items at .99 or .95 cents was widely adopted to force the shop clerk to ring up the sale and open the till to hand back a coin in change, keeping cashiers honest.

The first commercial item ever scanned with a bar code at a retail checkout was a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum, scanned on an NCR register at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, on June 26, 1974.

Cashback at the till was introduced in the United Kingdom in 1990 by Tesco, allowing shoppers to withdraw cash while paying and reducing the fees supermarkets paid to deposit excess notes at the bank.

Cash register receipts are printed on thermal paper coated with chemical additives known as obesogens (such as bisphenol A and bisphenol S), which can be absorbed through the skin and disrupt metabolic hormones linked to gaining fat.

Cash Machine (or ATM)

A mechanical cash dispenser was developed and built by Luther George Simjian and installed in 1939 in New York City by the City Bank of New York. It was removed after six months due to the lack of customer acceptance.

Simjian suggested his invention's failure was because its only users were “prostitutes and gamblers who didn't want to deal with tellers face to face.”

The Americans created the bankograph, a wall-mounted machine allowing customers to pay bills without seeing a teller in 1960, but it didn't pump out cash.

A Scot, John Shepherd-Barron, invented the ATM. Managing director of a security printing firm, De La Rue Instruments, he was lying in the bath when the idea of a cash dispenser occurred to him.

Barclays Bank were impressed with Shepherd-Barron’s idea and the first DACS (De La Rue Automatic Cash System)  was fitted outside the bank's branch in Enfield, north London on June 27, 1967.

Fixed amounts of money were released when customers inserted rectangular tokens into the machine. Ironically given the ATM was designed to be more convenient than banks, customers first had to buy the tokens from their bank.

The first person to use the DACS cash-dispensing machine was Reg Varney, star of British sitcom On the Buses. (see below)

Why a four-digit pin mumber? John Shepherd-Barron originally came up with six-figure number, but decided to consult with his wife Caroline. As his wife could only remember four digits, it became the most commonly used length in many places.

In 1967, a bankers' conference was held in Miami with 2,000 members in attendance. Shepherd-Barron was invited to talk at the conference. As a result, six ATMs were installed at the First Pennsylvania Bank in Philadelphia, the first ever ATMs in America.

By 2004 there were 49,000 cash machines in the UK dispensing almost £150 billion a year.

The ATMs in the Vatican City are the only ones in the world to offer Latin as a language display option.

The world’s highest ATM counter Nathu-La is operated by Union Bank of India and is situated at 14, 300 ft in Kupup in the Himalayas. Primarily meant for the army personnel along the Sino-India border, the cash machine also provides services to tourists.

Antarctica's McMurdo Station, which is where the scientists conduct their research, is the site of a Wells Fargo ATM, one of two such machines operated on the continent. Only one of the ATMs works at a time. The reason for this is so if the working one breaks down, the other can be cannibalized for parts. A repairman also stops by every two years to perform routine maintenance.

Some Japanese cash machines heat banknotes to 200c for a split second to sanitise them before dispensing them.

The sound of cash being dispensed at an ATM is fake - it is produced by a speaker to give you the satisfaction of knowing your money is coming.

There is one ATM for every 2,500 people in the world. In regions like Western Europe, North America, and parts of East Asia, density is often 1 ATM per 1,000–1,500 adults. In lower-income developing regions, particularly across rural parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, density can drop to less than 1 ATM per 50,000 people.

Sources Sunday Times, Daily Mail  

Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash was born on February 26, 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas, one of seven children born to Ray Cash and Carrie Cloveree (née Rivers).

Johnny Cash was originally born J.R. Cash. The J.R. didn't stand for anything because his parents couldn't think of a name. He took on the first name John when he joined the Air Force because the military wouldn't accept a name with just initials. In 1955, after signing with Sun Records, he started going by Johnny Cash.

Cash's mother bought him his first guitar for his 10th birthday in 1942.

Johnny Cash's brother, Jack, died when he was 14 after getting mangled by a table saw after cutting wood. Johnny, who admired his brother a lot, was heartbroken. According to his sister, Johnny helped dig Jack's grave.

Johnny Cash took only three voice lessons in his childhood before his teacher, enthralled with Cash's unique singing style, advised him to stop taking lessons and to never deviate from his natural voice.

During his time serving in the Air Force, Cash was employed as a code breaker based in Germany, intercepting Morse Code transmissions from Russia.

In 1955, Cash made his first recordings at Sun Records, "Hey Porter" and "Cry! Cry! Cry!", which were released in late June and met with success on the country hit parade.

Publicity photo for Sun Records

Johnny Cash married his first wife Italian-American Vivian Liberto on August 7, 1954 at St. Ann's Roman Catholic Church in San Antonio. The ceremony was performed by her uncle, Vincent Liberto.

They had four daughters: Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy, and Tara.

Even though Vivian Liberto was Italian-American, black and white photos in the 1960s misled some people into believing that she was black, which led to protests, death threats, and cancelled shows.

Liberto filed for divorce in 1966 because of Cash's severe drug abuse and alcoholism, as well as constant touring, and his close relationship with June Carter.

Johnny Cash first met his wife June Carter Cash backstage at the Grand Ole Opry in 1956 while she was singing backup for Elvis Presley.

They were married on March 1, 1968, just one week after Cash proposed while they were performing together in London, Ontario. Merle Kilgore, who co-wrote Cash's "Ring of Fire," served as the best man for the nuptials.

Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash in 1969

In the late 1950s, Cash and his band bought 500 baby chickens while on tour and released them, 100 at a time, on each of the five floors of a hotel they were staying at in Omaha, Nebraska.

Johnny Cash played the first of his jailhouse shows when he performed at San Quentin prison in San Rafael, California on January 1, 1960. Among those in the captive audience was Merle Haggard, who was serving time for burglary.

Johnny Cash fought for the rights of Native Americans. In 1964, coming off the chart success of his previous album I Walk The Line, he recorded the LP Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian. Radio stations refused to play any of the album. In retaliation, Cash bought a full-page advert that appeared in the August 22, 1964 issue of Billboard magazine asking: "Where are your guts?"

In October 1965, Cash was arrested upon returning from Mexico when US Customs agents searched his luggage and found hundreds of illegal pills. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail and fined $1,000.

Johnny Cash performed in Folsom State Prison on January 13, 1968. By this time Cash had been performing at prisons for several years, after having his own run-ins with the law, mostly due to drugs. The recording of the concert went on to sell more than three million copies.

After Johnny Cash's guitar player died in 1968. Cash found himself at a show where the temporary replacement, Carl Perkins, couldn't make it. An audience member asked Cash if he could fill in for the night, and he said yes. Bob Wootton then became Cash's guitar player for the next 29 years.

Johnny Cash sold 6.5 million albums in 1969, reportedly more than any other individual artist had sold in a single year up to that time.

Cash starred in the 1974 "Swan Song" episode of Columbo as Tommy Brown, a homicidal country singer evading the clutches of the homicide detective.

On May 8, 1976, Johnny Cash received an honorary degree, a Doctorate of Humane Letters, from National University in San Diego, Californa. San Diego's mayor at the time, Mayor Frank Curran, also declared the day National Johnny Cash Day. The Man in Black had previously received a Doctor of Humanities degree in 1971 from Gardner-Webb University in North Carolina.

He traditionally started his concerts by saying, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash."

In his song "Man in Black," Cash explained that he wore predominately black clothing to honor and remind others of the suffering of the world's poor and oppressed.

Johnny Cash had long since kicked his drug habit, when, in a bizarre series of events in the early 1980s, he was attacked by a male Ostrich he had been keeping on his farm after he had threatened the huge bird. He was put onto pain killers to survive the critical injuries and quickly became an addict again. He checked himself into the Betty Ford Clinic, successfully quit pain killers, and made friends with Ozzy Osbourne while at the Clinic.

In 1985, Cash published Man In White, a novel about the life of Saint Paul the Apostle.

Cash was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on January 15, 1992. The Man in Black was also inducted into the Grand Ole Opry, the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame during his lifetime.

Johnny Cash guest stared in The Simpsons voicing a fox that Homer hallucinated after eating a spicy pepper.

Cash made his last ever live performance on July 5, 2003, when he appeared at the Carter Ranch.

Johnny Cash died on September 12, 2003 at Baptist Hospital in Nashville of complications from diabetes.

Cash's original grave (top) and the Cash/Carter memorial

Barry Gibb from The Bee Gees bought the Tennessee house Cash lived in from 1968 until his death. In 2007, while the home was being renovated for Gibb, it caught fire and burned to the ground.

In 2005, Johnny Cash's life was chronicled in the Oscar-winning film Walk the Line.

Here is a Songfacts entry detailing songs inspired by Johnny Cash.

Cash

Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest Americans ever, never carried any cash. He was once put off a London train because he did not have the fare.

President Kennedy never carried cash, borrowing from friends and often failing to pay them back. Despite his family's wealth, if you had a coffee and a doughnut with him, you would pick up the tab. He also donated his presidential salary to charities including the United Negro College Fund and the Boy and Girl Scouts.

According to Gaming Law, casinos have to stock enough cash to cover all the chips on the 'floor'.

About 10% of US households pay their bills in cash.

The Federal Reserve printed up an extra $50 billion in small bills just in case people started hoarding money prior to the year 2000. Since nowhere near that much cash was needed, and there was a long-term storage problem, most of that money was recycled.

Martha Washington is the only woman to have been featured as the primary portrait on US paper currency (see below). Her image first appeared on the front of the $1 Silver Certificate in 1886, and she also appears alongside her husband George Washington on the back of the 1896 series.

A US one dollar bill isn't really paper at all: it is made from a blend of 75% cotton and 25% linen, which makes it far more durable and harder to counterfeit than ordinary paper.

The highest denomination of US currency ever printed was the $100,000 gold certificate, bearing a portrait of Woodrow Wilson. Issued during the Great Depression in 1934, it was never given to the public and was used only to move balances between Federal Reserve banks. It remains illegal for a private individual to own one.

The world's first cash machine opened at a Barclays branch in Enfield, north London, on 27 June 1967. There were no plastic cards; customers inserted a special paper voucher to withdraw a single £10 note, and the first withdrawal was made by On the Buses actor Reg Varney.

Cash wears out at very different rates depending on how often it changes hands. A well-used $1 bill lasts only around 21 months, whereas a $100 bill, handled far less, can survive for more than seven years.

The largest single banknote ever put into circulation was the Philippines' 100,000-peso note, created in 1998 to mark a century of independence from Spain.

Giacomo Casanova

Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was born in Venice on April 2, 1725. His mother, Zanetta Farussi, was an actress; her husband, Gaetano Casanova, was an actor and dancer.

At 17, Casanova graduated from the University of Padua with a degree in law. He had also studied medicine, mathematics and moral philosophy.

Over the course of his varied career, Casanova was an ecclesiastic, soldier, violinist, gambler, financier, spy, diplomat and writer. He joined the Freemasons in Lyon in 1750.

Casanova's name became synonymous with the adventurous lover, largely through his posthumously published memoir, Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life).

He discussed several forms of birth control in his memoirs, including animal-membrane condoms, which he called “English riding coats.” He and some of his partners also used squeezed lemon halves as makeshift cervical caps.

Portrait attributed to Francesco Narici, c. 1760

Casanova was a noted gourmet. His memoirs helped reinforce the association between oysters and seduction; he described eating dozens of them and using them in an erotic game. The often-repeated claim that he ate 50 oysters every morning should be treated as part of his self-created legend rather than an independently established routine.

His memoirs also record elaborate meals of truffles, game, fish and wine, and his insistence that hard-boiled eggs, anchovies and prepared vinegars be available for a salad.

In July 1755 Casanova was imprisoned without trial in the Piombi, the cells beneath the lead roof of the Doge’s Palace, after being accused of offences against religion and morals. Sentenced to five years, he escaped with another prisoner on October 31, 1756, and fled Venice.

In 1757 Casanova helped establish a state lottery to raise money for the École Royale Militaire in Paris. His involvement enhanced his financial reputation, but he did not invent either lotteries in general or the French scheme single-handedly.

During a visit to Switzerland in 1760, Casanova met Voltaire several times. Their lively literary discussions ended in disagreement.

Casanova arrived in London on June 13, 1763. He rented an expensive furnished house in Pall Mall under his adopted name, the Chevalier de Seingalt, employed a multilingual Black servant named Jarbe and later shared the house with a Portuguese woman he called Pauline.

In September 1785, not 1784, Casanova accepted Count Joseph Karl Emmanuel von Waldstein’s offer to become librarian at Dux Castle in Bohemia, now Duchcov in the Czech Republic. He remained based there for the rest of his life.

Casanova began writing Histoire de ma vie in French in 1789. The approximately 3,700-page manuscript remained incomplete when he died and the first uncensored edition based on the original text did not appear until 1960–62.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France acquired Casanova’s original manuscript in 2010. It is now classed as a French national treasure and has been digitised for public consultation.

Casanova died at Dux on June 4, 1798, aged 73. According to his friend the Prince de Ligne, his last words were: “I have lived as a philosopher, and I die as a Christian.”

Source: Food For Thought by Ed Pearce

Enrico Caruso

Enrico Caruso was born in Naples, Italy on February 25, 1873. He was the 18th of 21 children, only three of whom lived beyond infancy.

The family was poor. As a boy, Caruso worked in a machine shop and ironworks. Determined to be a singer, he sang in churches and on street corners to earn money for lessons. When he was called into the army, a high officer was so impressed by Caruso's powerful yet melodic voice that he released him to continue studying.

In 1894 Caruso made his formal debut in Naples in an unsuccessful opera, L'Amico Francesco.

National acclaim came in 1898 when Caruso created the role of Loris in Umberto Giordano's Fedora.

Caruso became one of the first great singers to make phonograph records, when in 1902 he was engaged by the Gramophone & Typewriter Company (G&T) to record ten arias in a Milan hotel room, for a fee of £100. These 10 discs swiftly became best-sellers and his fame spread across Europe and America.

Enrico Caruso first recorded the famous breakdown aria "Vesti la giubba" from Leoncavallo's Pagliacci in Milan in November 1902 for G&T. He re-recorded it in 1904 and again in 1907 for the Victor Talking Machine Company in the US. Driven mainly by that 1907 release (Victrola 88061), it became the first sound recording in history to sell a million copies.

What makes that milestone wild is the price tag: back then, buying Caruso's single-sided shellac disc cost around $3 - roughly double the price of a standard gallery ticket to see him sing live at the Metropolitan Opera.

It proved that recorded music wasn't just a gimmick, creating the template for the modern music industry and paving the way for landmark million-sellers like Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" four decades later.

In November 1906, Caruso was charged with an indecent act allegedly committed in the monkey house of New York's Central Park Zoo. The police accused him of pinching the bottom of a married woman. Caruso claimed a monkey did the bottom-pinching. He was found guilty as charged, however, and fined 10 dollars, although suspicions linger that he may have been entrapped by the victim and the arresting officer. The leaders of New York's opera-going high society were outraged initially by the incident, which received widespread newspaper coverage, but they soon forgot about it and continued to attend Caruso's Met performances.

Enrico Caruso, c. 1907

Caruso appeared in nearly every country of Europe and North and South America. He sang chiefly in French and Italian, but he also learned seven other languages.

The most famous of nearly 70 roles that Caruso sang were the clown in Leoncavallo's Pagliacci and Rodolfo in Puccini's La Boheme.

Caruso participated in the first public radio broadcast to be transmitted in the USA when he was heard live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1910.

Caruso practiced in the bath, while accompanied by a pianist in a nearby room. He took two baths a day.

Caruso and Roy Orbison were the only 20th century tenors capable of hitting e over high c.

He was talented at drawing caricatures and published many of them.

Caruso signing his autograph; he was obliging with fans

Caruso had four sons with the Italian soprano Ada Giochetti, of whom two lived.

Towards the end of the First World War, Italian tenor Enrico Caruso met and wooed a New York socialite, Dorothy Benjamin (1893-1955). In spite of the disapproval of Dorothy's patent lawyer father, the couple wed on August 18, 1918. They had one daughter, Gloria Caruso (1919 -1999).

Caruso was a heavy smoker of strong Egyptian cigarettes. This habit, combined with a lack of exercise and the punishing schedule of performances that Caruso willingly undertook season after season at the Met, may have contributed to the persistent ill-health which afflicted the last 12 months of his life.

Caruso died in Naples on August 2, 1921 of pleurisy. Following the loss of her husband, Dorothy wrote two biographies on Caruso, published in 1928 and 1945.

Sources: Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia © 1998 The Learning Company, Inc, Wikipedia;

Edmund Cartwright

The inventor of the power loom, Edmund Cartwright was born April 24, 1743 in Marnham in Nottinghamshire.

Edmund Cartwright by Allen & Ginter - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

He was the brother of Major John Cartwright, a political reformer and radical, and George Cartwright, explorer of Labrador.

He was educated at Wakefield grammar school and University College, Oxford, and was later elected a Fellow of Magdalen College. In 1779 he became rector of the parish of Goadby Marwood in Leicestershire.

Before turning to invention, Cartwright was a published poet. His verse tale Armine and Elvira (1771) was much admired, and his later poem The Prince of Peace (1779) deplored the war in America.

During a visit to the Matlock and Cromford area in 1784 Cartwright saw Richard Arkwright's cotton-spinning mills. These fascinated him, and he decided to construct a similar machine for weaving. The next year he created a rude contrivance, which with further improvements became the power-driven loom which was soon to replace its hand-operated forerunner.

Remarkably, Cartwright built his first loom without ever having watched an ordinary hand-loom in operation. He took out his patent on April 4, 1785, and completed a much-improved version by 1787.

In 1789 Cartwright patented a wool-combing machine. It lowered manufacturing costs, but he made little money from any of his inventions.

In 1790 Robert Grimshaw, of Gorton, Manchester, erected a weaving factory at Knott Mill which he intended to fill with 500 of Cartwright's power looms, but with only around two dozen in place the factory was burnt down in 1792, probably an act of arson inspired by the fears of hand-loom weavers.

Cartwright ran his own steam-powered weaving mill in Doncaster from 1787, but the venture failed and he assigned his patents to his brothers, giving up the works in 1793.

Cartwright also pioneered an engine run on alcohol, patented a rope-making machine (the "cordelier") in 1792, and devised notable improvements in agricultural implements.

In 1820 the tireless inventor produced a horse-free carriage called the "Centaur Carriage." Powered by two men working cranks, it was used to collect groceries and was said to manage 27 miles in a day on the level.

His power loom's real impact came abroad as well as at home: the first American power loom, based on Cartwright's principle, was built by Francis Cabot Lowell in Massachusetts in 1813.

Fifty Lancashire firms sent a special memorandum to the then Prime Minister which resulted in Cartwright being awarded, in 1809, a grant of £10,000. He used the money to purchase a farm in Kent

Inventing to the last, Edmund Cartwright died at Hastings, Sussex on October 30, 1823, aged 80, and was buried in the church at Battle.

Sources Europress Family Encyclopedia 1999, Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia © 1998 The Learning Company, Inc, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia

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