On December 22, 1860, the Vincennes Gazette, an Indiana weekly paper, ran the following anecdote:
A lady who had read of the extensive manufacture of odometers, to tell how far a carriage had been run, said she wished some Connecticut genius would invent an instrument to tell how far husbands had been in the evening when they "just stepped down to the post office" or "went out to attend a caucus."
The Indiana woman seemed not to know that such devices were already available, used by land surveyors and others to measure distances. But one Boston woman managed to perform exactly the kind of surveillance she described. According to a report in the October 7, 1879, Hartford Daily Courant, "A Boston wife softly attached a pedometer to her husband when, after supper, he started to 'go down to the office and balance the books.' On his return, 15 miles of walking were recorded. He had been stepping around a billiard table all evening."
(Score: 4, Disagree) by Frosty Piss on Friday November 22, @03:10PM
...treacherous women, these shrews wonder why their man cheats on them.
(Score: 2, Funny) by DannyB on Friday November 22, @03:20PM (5 children)
Speedometer . . . measures speed.
Thermometer . . . measures therms.
Volt-o-meter . . . measures, um . . . somethings.
Pedometer . . . measures . . . pedos? Would the measurement be over some unit of time, or a simple count of events regardless (or irregardless?) of time.
Satin worshipers are obsessed with high thread counts because they have so many daemons.
(Score: 3, Touché) by hendrikboom on Friday November 22, @04:08PM
Presumably, it measures feet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22, @06:31PM
Considering it's a wife and husband I think we can rule out that he was molested in the candy-van by stranger danger.
The important issue at hand is if Celsius pedos better or worse then Farenheit or Kelvin pedoes?
(Score: 4, Funny) by pTamok on Friday November 22, @06:41PM (2 children)
And odometers [wikipedia.org] measure odos, hygrometers [wikipedia.org] measure hygros, sphygmomanometers [wikipedia.org] sphygmomanos, and, if you are right-pondian, gasometers [wikipedia.org] measure each ga.
Furthermore, a tacheometer [wikipedia.org] measures tacheos, a tachymeter [wikipedia.org]measures tachys, and a tachometer [wikipedia.org] measures how many tachos [wikipedia.org] you've eaten.
Bathymeters [wikipedia.org] measure how clean you are, and hydrometers [wikipedia.org] measure how much water you used to get clean.
And, of course, a taximeter [wikipedia.org] measures how much you have used a taxi. A ballistic galvanometer [wikipedia.org] would be needed to see how much you had been charged. It could be shocking. If you were to travel by 'copter, you'd need an heliometer [wikipedia.org] to measure that.
To deal with arithmos and comptos, you'd obviously need an arithmometer [wikipedia.org] and a comptometer [wikipedia.org].
...well, I enjoyed writing it, even if you don't enjoy reading it.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Reziac on Saturday November 23, @02:13AM
And here I thought an odometer was how far you could stretch an Odo....
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Funny) by driverless on Saturday November 23, @05:28AM
Almost right. Gasometers are used to measure the efficacy of burritos.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by sneftel on Friday November 22, @03:21PM (4 children)
Hm. Assuming the perimeter of the walk around the billiards table is about forty feet (undoubtedly an overestimate, but maybe he was standing way back), that's about two thousand laps around the thing. *Nobody* spends that much energy lining up their shots.
"But the pedometer is measuring steps, not distance!" If the pedometer is assuming an average stride length, fifteen miles is about thirty thousand steps. If the guy was gone for six hours (those books must be seriously unbalanced), that means constantly pacing in place, at a fairly energetic clip, the whole freaking time.
Bottom line: I have serious concerns about the Hartford Daily Courant's fact checking.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mhajicek on Friday November 22, @11:39PM
Indeed. Perhaps he was dancing with someone, and came up with the billiards explanation as a lesser offense.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by owl on Saturday November 23, @03:38AM (2 children)
Considering the time period, this was likely when it was more typical to walk from ones home to "the office" or "the pool hall". If office or hall were 4 miles from home, eight of those 15 recorded miles would have been recorded in the walk to the hall and the walk back home. Granted, that does still leave seven "miles" accumulated on the pedometer to account for.
But as the pedometer does not actually measure distance, it measures steps (or more accurately, the impact from taking a step) and infers 'mileage' by assuming some standard stride length, it is possible it did measure enough "step impacts" around the billiards table to account for an 'inferred' seven additional miles. Plus this was turn of last century mechanical pedometers. they were likely not overly accurate, so "seven miles" (or fifteen) could have easily been off by 20-25% (so could mean anywhere from 5.25 miles to 8.75 or 11.25 to 18.75).
So it is not totally outside the realm of possibility, given a likely 'walk' to/from the pool hall, and possible accuracy range of the device, to potentially have the device measure "15 miles" total. Actual 'mileage' may have been some other quantity entirely.
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Saturday November 23, @05:32AM (1 child)
Alternatively, how many back-and-forth hip thrusts would measure as 15 miles?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23, @03:03PM
So your tip for cheating is letting her be on top?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday November 22, @05:45PM (5 children)
A great pity that more understanding was not reached back then! And that such understanding had lasted so we could still benefit from it today!
My S. O. has several dictates she holds with neurotic intensity about such details as footwear and going barefoot, all because she has a unreasonable fear of germs and foot fungus. I refuse to obey them. She wants everyone to have their own bathroom, doesn't want any gross and disgusting men using her potty! I have pointed out that if I obeyed that one, sometimes I would have had to do my business on the floor somewhere, or dig a latrine outside, or beg a neighbor to let me use their bathroom, or journey to a public restroom. I have not yet had to hold the bathroom door shut by main force while sitting on the can, to prevent her from busting in and trying to throw me out, but some days it gets almost that bad.
She also restricts my diet, for my own good, supposedly, but that is another one I disobey when she's not looking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22, @05:48PM (4 children)
I’m really sorry to hear all that. Have you considered couples counseling?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday November 22, @09:21PM (3 children)
Yes, and you're not the 1st to suggest that. I have learned a few things. First, keep plugging away at tasks. If I stopped to give her rants my full attention, the home would be even messier and more broken down than it is. When I have done her the courtesy of giving that stuff my full attention, in addition to going on and on, she adds to her complaints the accusation that I'm "just standing there". It's a specialty of some, to interpret a good thing as actually a bad thing, such as turning the virtue of being politely attentive into the vice of being lazy. Second, and in the same vein as the first point, can just ignore the crazier stuff. What is she going to do, divorce me? She'll be much worse off if she pulls that trigger, and she fully realizes that. She knows she can't bluff me with that. And third, above all, don't let her provoke you into physical violence. If she takes a hatchet to my computers, I will stand back and let her destroy them. I won't try to physically restrain her from such vandalism, because then she could accuse me of assaulting her. If things ever come to that pass, I shall endeavor to catch it on video, and I would divorce her. I have not explicitly told her so, but I can see that she realizes that's a line she must not cross. Accordingly, I have become more careful about keeping backups of my data, just in case. She too has learned. Learned that such threats and goads do not work, and do risk the marriage.
I still chuckle to myself about the time my copy of the car keys went missing for a month. She was all over me, like dirty diapers on a baby's bottom, for having lost them, wouldn't hear that it might've been her, and started accusing me of losing my memory and telling me I needed to take more vitamins to fight my early onset Alzheimer's she was sure I'd just shown must afflict me. And she demanded that I get pants with deeper pockets, and search my office from wall to wall. If I couldn't find the keys, pony up $100+ for a new key, thanks to fobs being that expensive. More than a month later, having ignored her demands to take more vitamins and buy a new key fob and all that, while busying myself cleaning the bedroom while she talked my ears off, I found my keys in a pocket of her pants she'd left lying on the floor, buried ever deeper under more of her clutter. She had indeed borrowed them just like I said, and was red faced with embarrassment, and apologized. So you see, she's not impossibly unreasonable. She's been more restrained since that embarrassment. I did gently needle her that maybe it was her who should take more vitamins and worry about early onset Alzheimer's, and she accepted the jabs. I didn't belabor it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22, @09:41PM (2 children)
Jesus. You two are genuinely awful. (Well, you are. I only have your word to go on for how awful she is.) I still think counseling is a good idea, but mostly because neither of you should be in the dating pool.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday November 22, @10:48PM (1 child)
You think I and that is awful? What do you think marriage is? Maybe you have romantic notions that marriage is much sweeter and more harmonious than is actually the case. Maybe you are in such a marriage, and if so, congratulations. Nevertheless, you won't agree on everything. Yet we do genuinely love one another. Yes, really!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23, @01:43AM
I agree. When you are with a spouse for a very long time, you each have your own kind of crazy that you both put up with, and perhaps even complain about from time to time, but it doesn't mean that you don't love each other and that you want/need to break up.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Saturday November 23, @12:47AM (4 children)
There's probably a correlation between women who are controlling of their husbands, and men who feel like they need to lie to go out for some billiards to relax from the stress of being with said women.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday November 23, @04:03PM (3 children)
Don't worry, you'll never know one way or another :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Sunday November 24, @10:20PM (2 children)
The whole incel thing is getting a bit tired. Time to find a new insult.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday November 25, @12:36AM (1 child)
Like Angelica Pickles says, if the shoe hurts, wear it :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday November 25, @02:25PM
Missionaries want to heal us and save our souls.
Shoe salesmen want to heel us and save our soles.
Satin worshipers are obsessed with high thread counts because they have so many daemons.