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In the spring of 1897, Will and Jack's parents took a long-planned trip to Europe.

A transatlantic crossing in 1897 was a very different experience than it would be even five years later. The first Marconi wireless system was not installed on a ship until 1900 so, for Will's parents in 1897, this meant 7 to 10 days of complete communication blackout. A week or more on a 500ft boat in the middle of the Atlantic, with no way to call for help or contact your loved ones if something went wrong.

Living in an age where you can watch a family member's flight take off 5,000 miles away in real time on your handheld supercomputer - that sort of isolation is difficult to even fathom.

Needless to say, a message confirming to your loved ones that you had arrived safely would be a top priority for most people once you found yourself on solid ground again. And being that it could easily take another week or so for a letter to make its way back to the US (or 17 days in the case of the first letter Will's dad sent from Gibraltar), the ability to communicate almost instantly by wired telegraph was the obvious choice. However it came at a (literal) price.

International telegrams were expensive. Really, really expensive.

Telegraphers charged by the word and the cost varied significantly based on the destination of the message - as the rates below (from March 1897) show...

So sending the short message "Arrived safely. At Grand Plaza Hotel, Rome. Will write soon." back to the US would run you $3.80 ($147.18 adjusted for inflation). And Europe was on the lowest end of the cost spectrum...

Sending a telegram from the US to Brisbane, Australia in March 1897 was $2.62 per word (roughly $100 in 2025).

Fortunately there was a rather clever way to lower the cost of cable communication ...

On May 18th, 1897 (the travelers had departed on the 7th), Will's grandmother received the long awaited message from Will's parents in Europe. It consisted of a single word - misentry.

"A few minute before my arrival this telegram came from Mother.

"Cable received seven thirty. Misentry. All well here."

That mean that the cable came at 7:30 this morning & Misentry signifies "Arrived safely, pleasant passage. Alice ill part of the time." and we agreed that that should imply your father was not ill."

Will's family had sat down before his parents departed and created their own version of what was generally known as a "commercial code" - assigning individual words to convey a list of much longer pre-arranged messages.

The prohibitive cost of long-distance telegraphy was such an issue in the increasingly globalized world of the late-19th century, that pretty much every trade and industry soon developed their own complex system of one word codes.

Many period travel guides contain travel-specific codes in the back. This one is from Cassell's Complete Pocket-Guide to Europe, published in 1890 and included unclaimed words for travelers to assign their own meanings to.

Quite a few ambitious attempts were made to create a universal code for cable communication but, rather than one unified code coming out on top, this seems to have only resulted in multiple competing universal codes.

You can peruse some of these online, such as "the ABC Universal commercial code", originally designed for merchants and businessmen in the 1870s, on archive.org.

It contains almost 13,000 single word codes ranging from the very practical - "waybill - delayed by bad weather" - to the slightly less so - "apricot - captain arrested for smuggling".

Just in case you end up in any weird mercantile time-travel incidents or want to leave cryptic messages in the comment section.

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According to Know Your Meme, on August 18th, 2005, Erwin Beekveld brought forth this work into the world. HAPPY TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY, THEY’RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD.

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A selection of strange and cryptic personal ads from The New York Herald, 1850s-1870s. 18/?

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sparkly Astralyn print from a while back ✨💕

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I want you all to imagine with me, if you will, what I witnessed today.

McDonalds parking lot. teenage boy. giant polished white ford Tundra. windows down. blasting. I mean BLASTING. Beethoven's moonlight sonata. boy demolishing burger.

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You transcended The Hunt

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Half-human, Half-phantom, Half-swordsman

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this was supposed to be a funny doodle to celebrate pulling her and then i got carried away oops. thank you miyabi for carrying my ice teams

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(source: The Tennessean, August 9, 1925.)

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Lackadaisy ladies ✨

this took so long omg…

also to the person who requested Lacy, this is for you.. if you’re still here TwT

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While I’m still here: please can we dispel the myth that the Ancient Egyptians had absolutely perfect burials, did everything precisely, and never messed it up.

That’s so far from correct it’s laughable. We have legal documents from when embalmers gave a family the wrong body , ones from when the mummification was janky (tutankhamun is quite literally the jankiest mummification known to man), re-use of coffins, hasty reuse of funerary items if someone else died before whoever was supposed to use them, canopic jars very rarely have the right organs in, and so much more.

Every way you can think of to fuck up a burial, the ancient Egyptians were capable of and that should be recognised. They’re real people not a romanticised ideal.

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My casino has new top-of-the-line technology to stop heists: a montage detector. If those bastards want to break in and steal my money, they’re doing it as part of one, long take

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Made one for Marisa too. Mimi Mobile

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16 bunnies