![]() Whipped by tornado-force winds, the wildfire consumed the tinderbox of a village, along with a vast swath of drought-stricken wilderness. As Denise Gess and William Lutz chronicle in Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History, it took a little more than an hour for a five-mile-wide wall of flames to reduce the rural logging town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, to ashes. Although the Great Chicago Fire passed into American history books as the country’s most famous conflagration, a far deadlier inferno struck 250 miles to the north on the same exact day. Before it was extinguished, the blaze killed an estimated 300 people and destroyed thousands of buildings, not to mention the reputation of Mrs. On October 8, 1871, a fire ignited near Patrick and Catherine O’Leary’s barn on the southwest side of Chicago. Here are five such little-known moments in history that are the subjects of riveting reads. In fact, you could fill a library with books that tell amazing stories from the past that you never learned in your history classes. If you have never heard of the Fenian Raids before, you’re hardly alone. In fact, the self-proclaimed Irish Republican Army attacked Canada from the United States not just once, but five times between 18 in what are collectively known as the Fenian Raids. It may sound like a bunch of blarney, but it’s a true story. ![]() For more on this story, listen to our full interview with Nicole Sharp.A little over a year after the end of the Civil War, a private army of Irish-Americans marched into battle to undertake one of the most fantastical missions in military history-to kidnap Canada and ransom it for Ireland’s independence. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. One of them survived for a couple of hours and then he couldn't continue fighting the molasses anymore and he ended up drowning. CO: And how many of those men survived that? NS: All but one of them survived. I believe they were on the first floor and they were trapped there for hours waiting for people to be able to rescue them because they were all pinned in place. Then the upper floors of the firehouse crashed down on them. The initial wave smashed against the firehouse and pushed it almost entirely off its foundation. That was a group of men who were in a firehouse a short ways away from the molasses tank. I think the group of men who were having lunch is one of the more striking stories. only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was." People, horses, everything just struggled to survive and died. (Wikipedia) CO: A Boston Post report at the time described it as "molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage. Report from The Boston PostĪn elevated train structure was damaged by shrapnel in the disaster. only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was. Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage. It's totally in line with what the historical record says. I realized that because the molasses is one and a half times denser than water and there was so much of it in this tank, in fact, fluid dynamics and the physics equations predict that it would move at speeds that are about 15 to 17 metres per second. Initially, I actually thought, "How in the world could it really have moved that fast?" and sort of surprised myself when I started doing the calculations. How quickly was the molasses travelling, as far as your calculations show? NS: According to historical accounts, the molasses moved at a speed of 35 miles per hour, which is about 15.5 metres per second, which is really quite fast. CO: So let's talk about this wave of molasses that left the tank that day in 1919. It turns out that saying can be wrong, if you have close to 9,000 cubic metres of molasses. Sharp, do we need to rethink that old saying "slow as molasses in January"? Nicole Sharp: Well, if you have enough molasses, then yes. ![]() She recently presented her findings on the Molasses Flood at a conference in Portland, Ore. She's a science communicator and a fluid dynamics researcher in Cambridge, Mass. (Nicole Sharp) Nicole Sharp has attempted to crack the mystery wide open. Nicole Sharp is an engineer, writer and science communicator specializing in fluid dynamics.
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