Louis Daguerre and the Daguerreotype

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. You have probably noticed that there's a name that pops up pretty much anytime we're discussing photography in history, and that is Dgear. We have referenced him and his Dagara types and the invention of that many times on the show, and we often use it as a reference point for when other people are taking pictures and how far along they've come. We're probably going to reference it again because he really innovated and touched a lot of lives. But well before he figured out how to capture images through a camera obscura, he was an artist and an innovator and entertainment. So today we're going to talk about all of that because we've never covered him before, and of course we will also talk about his work in photography. Is one of those people that has come up so many times that we had to have the conversation about whether we had already done this episode. Yes, Tracy, are you sure we have a covered to get I just looked through the whole spreadsheet. Not in there, so He was born Louis Jacques Monde Dagure on November eighteenth seven, about a hundred and eighty kilometers west of Paris, in a town called the Family, especially to Get's father, who was named Louis. They were royalists in their politics, and Louis had a sister who even was named after Marie Antoinette. That sister was born in seventeen nine one. The senior Louis de Guer worked as a court crier before the revolution, and that was a civil service job, but as the French Revolution really heated up, that job, of course went away for a while. That meant that the family moved to Orleans, where Louis Senior found work as a clerk in an estate, and in seventeen nine d three, of course, Louis the sixteenth was guillotined and the Reign of Terror began. Degere's father was employed by Louis Philippe, the second Duke dor Leon, who sided with the revolution, but he was of course a cousin of the king, and he was eventually guillotined for his association with the House of Bourbon. And though Louis da Sr. Remained employed at the estate, this seems to have pretty much meant that life in Orleans was a little bit more somber than it had been when the family first arrived there. There are some holes in the story of de Gere's early life. Some of that is just because it would have been unusual for just a regular child's life to be well documented, but it's also because of the period in which he was born. So consider, for example, he would have still been basically a baby, not even two years old, when the Bastille was stormed in seventeen nine, so his whole childhood was happening at a time when the monarchy was falling, revolution was raging. That all would have been very difficult for his royalist father, and it also would have meant that a lot of just so called normal life was significantly disrupted. So we know that Louis Dag was enrolled in public school in Orleans, but due to those constantly shifting sands of the French government, there were stretches, long stretches sometimes where classes did not assemble, so Dag got something of a patchwork education. But he spent that ample free time that he was afforded by the gaps in school to develop his natural talent, which was drawing. While Louis de Gre's name is forever linked to photography, he really did not start out on a career path that would suggest that outcome. In eighteen hundred, Louis de ge drew a portrait of his parents. This was sort of an audition. The skill that he exhibited with this portrait led to him being offered an apprenticeship, not exactly with an artist, though it was with an architect. This was a stable career path for an artistic thirteen year old in a time when France really did not have that many stable career paths. So for three years he dutifully works at perfecting his ability to render the drawings of building structures. That's something he seems to have really enjoyed. He loved recreating true life detail in his drawing, and architectural drawings were to him just another iteration of that. Now, as a note, this is something that I stumbled across a lot while researching this episode. You will sometimes see it mentioned in biographical writeups of de Gere that he also worked as a revenue officer during this early period of his life, without much additional information about it, and it kind of seems like this might actually be the result of some confusion due to his name being the same as his father's, and since we know that his father did work as a clerk at an estate, that kind of seems like the most likely scenario. When the younger Louis de Gare finished his apprenticeship at the age of sixteen, he didn't take the next step into architecture. Instead, he went back to his love of art. He decided to move to Paris to study painting and to try to make a life as an artist. This was something that his parents found terrifying. They had supported his artistic tendencies, but there was just uncertainty and a lack of stability in an art career, and then, on top of that, they were also concerned that the young de Gere would fall into a life of debauchery in Paris. Finally, after a lot of discussion, they made an arrangement that was agreeable to the parents, and the son alike Louise father got him an apprenticeship in Paris with Ignacio Eugeno. Maria Degatti and Degatti was born and tour in Italy in seventeen fifty eight, and, like young Louis, de Gare. He showed artistic proclivity from a very young age, and he too had moved to Paris to pursue his art. Although he and so when he was in his thirties, and by the time his life met up with Digres, he had become a renowned theatrical designer and a painter for the Paris Opera, and de Gare moved in with him as part of this apprenticeship deal. That was something his parents insisted upon. This was a time in his life when Louis de Gare lived a pretty enviable existence. He was young, he was making connections in the Paris art scene, and he made the most of that. There are stories about how much fun he was at parties and how he would go into such gatherings walking on his hands. He loved Paris, and Paris loved him back. He was really beloved among his peers. At one point he even appeared on stage and a small role in the Paris Opera. Yeah, there was one section of a biography about him I was reading where it said that he knew how to walk a tight rope, and that he may have learned this when he was a young boy. Because festivals would come through the area where they lived, and I'm like, yes, but how did that come up while he's just hanging out with his friends, Like, oh, would you like to see me? What walk this tyrope that just happens to be here at present? That's a little less clear, but he had a lot of fun skills, it sounds like. And just as he had spent three years as an architect's apprentice, he spent three years under Degatti's tutelage before deciding that he wanted to move on. And this was a pretty natural progression because his next move was to take on an assistant ship with another artist, and this time it was Pierre Provost, famed panorama painter. Panoramas are enormous paintings. They were mounted in circular rooms and intended to be viewed from a central viewing platform. They had made their debut in London in and then Paris had quickly embraced this medium, and Provost really excelled at creating deeply detailed vistas that captured the attention of visitors. He didn't do all this on his own. He had a team of assistants who worked with him, and that is where Degare fit in In addition to being an apparently delightful party guest, Dgre was also a really hard worker. Yeah, he did not ever shirk his work, and moreover, he seemed to have an attitude of like I will learn everything I can from my mentors. Uh. And he really applied himself in every position he was in by all reports. In eighteen ten, while Degare was still working for a provost and he was twenty three at the time, he married the twenty year old Louise Georgina Aerosmith. Her name is English. That's because her parents were English, although she was born and raised in France, and these two were very much in love. This was a love match, and when Louise's brother had a child out of wedlock, the Digers raised her as their own daughter. Her name was Marguerite Felicita. After almost ten years working under Provost, Degre was offered and accepted a new job. That was chief painter at the Theatre de l'ambigue Comique, and that job to get elevated the production significantly. He didn't just create backdrops that were far superior to what the theater had before, he also introduced a new way to use them through lighting design. He devised systems of lighting effects to create convincing moonlight scenes, and when it came time to stage the eruption of Mount Etna in a play titled La Belvedere, the Gear created a sensation with his lighting design. This spurred ticket sales for the theater. He became so recognized as an asset for the theater that the Paris Opera wanted to hire him, so for a couple of years he was designing the scenery for both of those at the same time. Yeah, this is such a striking development because again, remember right like, they're doing all of this manually, and at a time when it was like night has fallen and all of the lights would be blown out or all of the windows closed. He was like, no, no, what if we find a way to do this subtly, which is a complete shift. So all of this and working for these two theater houses at the same time kept Louis very busy, but he still had time to think of new projects, and in eighteen twenty one he partnered with an old friend and colleague who had worked as an assistant to Pierre Prevost at the same time that the Gear had That was a man named Charles Marie Bouton and the two men had a plan to launch a new entertainment venture that built on their knowledge of panorama painting and incorporated the lighting expertise that the Gear had acquired through his theater work. The two men set up a limited stock company and they leased a plot of land and they sold shares to investors to fund their project. On July eleven, eight two, Bouton and the Gear opened the Paris Diorama. This scenographic entertainment was something completely new. That's who had to design a theater to house and display what they're working on. It had large scale images in common with the panorama, but it offered entirely new spectacles for audiences to witness. And we're going to talk more about what the diorama was and how it was received in just a moment, but first we'll pause for a quick sponsor break. So in the diorama, scenes like landscapes and architectural views were painted in large scale for audience viewing. But in this version they were painted on linen so they would be translucent. Then lighting effects were used to bring the painting seemingly to life before the viewers eyes. This was again, remember before electrical current was used in buildings by a number of decades, so Degare had designed the theater to make use of natural light. There were windows and skylights around the theater that had shutters which could be operated manually to great effect. To add to the illusion, there were sound effects. Sometimes there would be an actor to fill out the image in a three dimensional way. There wasn't any story in play for these scenes. It was just the magical illusion of feeling like you were sitting in a meadow by a mountain side, or standing near a brook, or looking out over the interior of Canterbury Cathedral from a high up gallery. These scenes would last for ten or fifteen minutes, and then a massive turntable would rotate the image away and bring a second one interview that would be similarly animated with light and other effects. Both the public and critics really raved over the diorama. Some were said to have been reluctant to except that they had been looking at a two dimensional image that whole time. Yeah, there was allegedly one woman who like asked to be led down the steps of the cathedral and they're like, they're not there. Uh. In less than a year, the business had made back the money that it had cost to open it and to operate it, and it started to turn a profit. The next obvious step was to open a second location, and that second one was in Regent's Park, London. Because this had been a proven success already in Paris, Bouton and de Geer had no trouble finding investors for their second theater, and when it opened it was covered extensively in the British press. On Septembree, the Morning Chronicle of London ran a story that was simply titled the Diorama. It read quote, the diorama, which has long been an object of wonder and delight at Paris, is at length established in this metropolis. A spacious building has been expressly constructed for this exhibition in that part of the new Road which adjoins Portland Place, at an expense which is said to have exceeded ten thousand pounds. And on Saturday a select number of visitors was admitted to a private inspection previous to it being opened to the public. On this day. There was also an assurance in the right up to potential visitors that this was death Aly, a very different thing than the panoramas, which had been popular in London for years. At that point, it read quote the diorama differs in this respect from the panorama that, instead of a circular view of the objects represented, the whole picture is seen at once in perspective. But it differs from it still more essentially in the extraordinary fidelity with which the objects are depicted, and in the completeness of the optical illusion. Later on, after describing pretty much every corner of the theater in detail, the journalist writes, quote, in the diorama, everything contributes to favor the illusion. The skill of the artist is the first thing which strikes us in the panorama and the last in the diorama. Both de Guerre and Bouton were made nights in the French Legion of Honor by Louis eighteenth. Many dioramas popped up in Europe and in North America after their success in Paris and in London. These were run by other operators who were hoping to cash in on the popularity of the medium, but the original partners kept developing shows in only their two theaters, and while the diorama business was still growing, De Gear had begun to conduct experiments in image capture. As early as eighteen twenty four, he had set up a lab in the basement of the Paris Diorama building so that he could pursue his fascination with the field of photography, although it was of course not called that yet. It didn't get that name until eighteen thirty nine. He just knew he was trying to capture light and use it to replicate the imagery of the world around him. He did not seem to know that a lot of other men had already been doing the same thing for quite a while with no real success. It makes sense that after creating the Diorama, the gear would feel driven to find a new level of realism to keep audiences buying tickets. Part of his drive was probably the realization that Bhutan wasn't really interested in staying with the diorama long term. To gar knew the success of the business was totally up to him. Additionally, the business had a lot of overhead. Every time a new scene was staged had to be created from scratch, and that was expensive. But if the gear didn't keep new images rotating in audiences would just stop coming. He eventually sold off his interest in the London location just to keep his finances afloat, and according to friends and acquaintances, none of whom were allowed to see what he was up to. He was completely obsessed with his secret project. His beloved wife Louise brought him food, but even she was not allowed into the lab. He sometimes, again according to friends, went for two to three days without leaving that lab, often foregoing sleep for unhealthy long stretches as he worked. He had been familiar with the camera obscura for a while. For a refresher, this is a dark chamber, either a room or a box, that has a tiny hole to allow light in. Through that hole, an image of whatever is outside of the chamber is projected onto the opposite wall inverted. Camera obscura, which means dark chamber in Latin, is a concept that's been around since antiquity, so this was not a new technology when Degare was alive. But he thought that somehow it could be used not just to project images, but also to capture the light somehow. Because Degare didn't really document what he was doing, but also he probably didn't really know what he was doing to be able to put it into words, we don't have a lot of information about how this whole thing played out for him. There were certainly experiments being done by other men using chemistry to try to create images with light, including the work of people like Jacques Charles, who figured out that you could capture a person's silhouette on paper by treating the paper with light sensitive chemicals and then projecting the person's shadow onto it. But even Charles's images were temporary. The entire paper would eventually darken because it had been treated. The use of chemical processes was also probably pretty challenging for de Gear thanks to his inconsistent education in his early years. He really just did not have a command of chemistry to start from. But he did have access to optics expertise and the associated equipment thanks to his friend Charles Chevalier. The Chevalier family business was in producing various scientific equipment, including lenses, so at least in that area the Gear had a very steady supply. It was through Chevalier that made a crucial connection that would finally give him a breakthrough. Nissa four Nips sent his cousin to Chevalier's shop to purchase a camera obscura. Nissa four Nips had been working on a process to create pictures using sunlight since the eighteen teens. He had used a camera to create a heliograph with bitumen on paper in eighteen six, but that had needed eight hours of exposure to work. Even with that eight hours, it was kind of gauzy and faded in appearance, so he was trying to improve on that. When he asked about a new camera Obscura, Charles Chevalier got NIPS address, gave it to Louis de Gere, who in turn reached out to NIPS via a letter. Both of these men were a bit cautious initially. De Gear did not want to risk any potential business interest by giving away what he had been working on, and the EPs was not entirely clear who the gear was or how he had gotten his address, and this letter out of the blue seemed kind of rude and suspicious to him. It was very forward. It would be like if a stranger called you, Tracy and went like, hey, can I have your research log ins at the following three place? And you would be like him, excuse considering my response when I get unsolicited PR pitches to a personal email address that I've never publicized, I totally get this reaction, so the reply that Nip sent was brief and it merely confirmed that, yes, he had been doing some experiments along the lines of what Digere was asking about. It took to Gere months to reply, but when he did, he once again offended Nips by asking for a sample of his experiments. Nips knew that de Gare was the man behind the popular diorama, so he started asking acquaintances in Paris if they knew him. He found that the Gair had a reputation in the art world for his talent and his work with light, but Nips still only wrote him a short reply without a sample. He said that he thought they were on different paths. He's so polite he wouldn't leave it unanswered, but he was kind of like, hey, go with God, but I'm doing something else, whether out of genuine interest or just desperation. Degare wrote him once more, and this time he actually sent along a sample of his own work, but he didn't know that Nieps had also reached sort of breaking point where the family money was running out. He had spent a lot on this effort, and he too was hitting a dead end and not progressing any farther. He still thought the Gear might not be trustworthy, but he did reach out with the suggestion that quote it should be of mutual interest to reciprocate our efforts to attain the goal, and he sent a sample which the gere sent him a pretty scathing critique of These two men finally had a meeting in Paris in eight Understandably, they remained pretty tentative with one another. Each was concerned that he was lagging behind the other, but Niepp's described having a pretty great time with the Gear, who had given him a tour of the diorama. There was another gap in their exchange due to the illness and death of Nippe's brother Claude, but eventually the two of them were writing to one another with regularity. It was not until autumn of eighteen nine that the two officially entered into a partnership, which had a ten year contract. So we're going to talk about some of the details of Nieps's progress in image capture after we first paused, and here from the sponsors to keep stuff he missed in history class going in his work, Niepp's had coated a paper with silver chloride to capture an image from his studio window of the landscape outside. This was what he called heliography. Eventually he made a more permanent image from that same window, this time on a pewter plate. He wanted to make a printable plate, and he had also managed to reproduce an engraved portrait with his process and make two prints from it. Degare traveled to visit Niep's and learned about how he had progressed, and he took all of the information he learned back to Paris so that he could do more experiments. But then in eighteen thirty everything got complicated. The diorama was in financial trouble, but Tom finally left the business entirely, and the July Revolution, in which Charles the tenth was deposed and King Louis Philippe took on the throne took the throne. That left France in a tense time when letters that talked about something like chemicals could easily be misconstrued as some kind of revolutionary correspondence, so Digere and Nip stopped communicating. Things were so financially tenuous that Digere wrote to the crown to ask for a promotion to officer in the Legion of honor. The thinking was that that would come with a financial payment that would help to keep him from his own financial ruin. But in the time that he had free from working on the diorama, to try to keep that going, the Gear learned Nipp's method of capturing images. He wanted to see if he had any ideas for how to move it forward. He and Nips were writing to each other in codes so they could keep collaborating. This was really a frantic time. Degre declared bankruptcy in March of eighteen thirty two, but he and Nips kept working. Yeah. Eventually they came up with a list to where they gave chemicals number assignments, and they each had it so they would just like use numbers in their letters, which to me would look like a suspicious code. So Nieves had used a bitumen coding that hardened when exposed to light for some of his experiments, and the Gear came up with a variation on that idea that used distilled lavender oil to improve on the heliograph. That lavender oil left a white residue in areas of the image where light had hit it, and that created an improved image than they had had before that, the duo called a fis autotype. This was an improvement, but it wasn't really a breakthrough, not at the level they needed, so they kept working. I like to think that the smelled really nice, I hope, so if nothing else, they could say the studio smelled beautiful. Yeah, so the Gear shifted his work back to using silver salts instead of a resin based image capture. There's an apocryphal story about how he got to his next breakthrough. In it, he had accidentally left a spoon on an iodized plate and then later realized that a perfect shadow of the spoon had been created on the plate when the light hit it. So he started to purposefully sensitize the silver on the plates that they were using. He did this with iodine fumes. The Gear is said to have shared this story verbally throughout his life, but he never wrote it down. We don't really know how accurate it is. Yeah, there's some questions about how much that story may have changed in the tellings. Initially, De Gear's work with iodine to sensitize plates did not really return results, but he never got to share his frustration about this with Niepps because Nissaford died suddenly in July three after having a stroke, and this left to Gear without the scientific expertise of his collaborator. But once again he was tenacious and he kept at the work, and an accident is again said to have given him the next advancement it. De Gere is said to have placed one of his polished silver coated plates into a cupboard after having exposed it in a camera obscura. The cupboard was a light proof chemical cupboard that was intended for storing exposed plates, but he noticed when he returned to the place roughly half an hour later, the image that he had exposed in the camera obscure had already developed. A thermometer had broken in the cupboard, and Louis de get realized that mercury vapor was speeding the development. Yeah, again, this is apocryphal, so in some versions of it you'll see that he left it overnight, frustrated that it had not initially developed. But regardless, this was a huge step forward. But the process was still not solid, and that is mostly because the images themselves were not. Permanence of those images remained a problem. Those plates would just keep developing over time, and the image would be lost, so they would just like keep having more details until they us became a big blob. Eventually, de Gere figured that problem out as well. It was merely a matter of stopping the developing process by removing the excess silver iodide from the plate. Geary used a salt solution of sodium thiosulfate to do this. So the system for making what would be called a de Gara type was one polish a silver coated copper plate to sensitize the plate with iodine fumes and place it in a light tight plate. Three, slide that plate into the camera obscura, and then slide the light tight covering open. Four exposed that for some number of minutes, and that was variable depending on the light and the camera obscura and the concentration of the chemicals were that were used. So this required some experience and know how of the person who was who was trying to make the image. Step five developed the image in mercury vapor, and step six stop the development process with a salt based solution. The first public mention of the Gear's work actually appeared in eighteen thirty five, several years before like the Big release about it. That wasn't an article in the Journal des Artiste that was about new shows at the Diorama. It wasn't about image capture at all. But at the end of the write up, which had no attribution as to its author and has even made some people question whether maybe Degare wrote this himself, there was the following paragraph quote he has discovered, we are told the means of collecting on a plate prepared by him, the image produced by a camera obscura in such a way that a portrait, a landscape, or any view projected on this plate by an ordinary camera obscura leaves its impression in light and shade, and this presents the most perfect of all drawings. A preparation applied to this image preserves it for an indefinite time. Physical science has perhaps never presented a wonder comparable to this one. This was a considerable announcement it, but nothing much seems to have been said about it for the entire year. But then architect Alphonse Eugene Hubert wrote a response that amounted to basically, I seriously doubt it. He had been trying to capture camera obscure images as well, but had not had any luck, so to him, it seemed highly unlikely that de Gare, who did not have a scientific background, could have managed it. By eight thirty seven, Degare had tested and replicated his process enough times that it was set he could always get consistent results. As with other aspects of his work that we don't really know what that process of testing and refinement was like. We have no idea, truly no idea the manner in which he arrived at realizing each step along the way was the correct one. We do know his process was different from all of the other photographic processes that were in development by other people that we're having problems. The Academy of Sciences heard a presentation that laid out exactly how Degere's process worked on January seventh, eighteen thirty nine. That lecture was not given by the gear but by Francois Arago. The get couldn't do it. He had felt ill, or at least he claimed he did. We don't know he at least he said he felt ill. He may have had nerves, and that is why an astronomer first explained photography at the Academy of Sciences. But to Gere had decided to name this process after himself, of course, and that was something that really bothered Nicephor Nieppe's son Isidor, who felt that his father should really be recognized. But to Get really thought that he had changed the approach so much from the heliograph work that Niepps had done that the name shift was warranted, and in a revised version of the contract that he had originally agreed to you with Nieppe's to Get offered his former partners family financial rights to half of the money made from de Gara typing and the promise that Niepps's name would always be included informal and nown sns is adorney Epps signed this new deal. In terms of making money from this work, Louis de get took an interesting approach. He knew from his experience with the diorama that imitators would pop up as soon as he filed for a patent, and in France at the time, there was really not much that could be done about it, so instead he sold it to the French government, and in turn, the French government released it free to the world as a gift on August nine, eighteen thirty nine. As part of the sale to the government, the Garret had arranged for annual payments to be made to both himself and Niepps's family. The Garret got six thousand francs a year and Nip's Air's got four thousand. The gear did manage to patent his process in England, Ireland and Scotland before the French government released it, so he maintained his rights there and in their colonies. Yeah, he did try for a while some other business sort of plans to try to make money off of this, but none of those were really working out, which is why he sold it to the government. As the dagaratype took on a life of its own and the field of photography continued to advance through other inventors improving upon it, degar retired again. He was financially set. A fire destroyed a lot of his early work in eighteen thirty nine and he did not rebuild his burnt studio after that. He did give some presentations and lessons on occasion, but according to most people, he was actually kind of shy, particularly about talking about his achievement, and all he really wanted to do was go back to painting, and he did a lot of that in his later years. During the eighteen forties, he painted a number of huge pieces for churches in Paris. Louis de Geer died of a heart attack on July tenth, eighteen fifty one, at his home in Risumron, just outside of Paris, and the time between the announcement of the Dagara type and his death, other innovators had come up with new ways to capture imagery with light. That included William Henry Fox Talbot, who patented a paper negative process, the calotype. In eighteen forty one, the Garatt type studios opened in Europe and the United States, and to photography journals were launched. In the US they were the Dagarian Art Journal and the Photographic Art Journal, and then, immediately before his death, starting in May of eighteen fifty one, a d Garo type exhibition had been mounted at the Great Exhibition of London, which is another thing that comes up a lot um. Also, Hey, surprise, this is the first of a sort of two parter that we're doing on early photography. Uh. They are standalone episodes, but their linked thematically. And on an upcoming episode we are going to discuss one of the people who took to gears new technology and kind of ran with it. Oh, do Gear, do you have some listener mail before we head out? I do. This is from our listener. I don't know if she pronounces it Andrea or Andrea, so either way, thank you who is writing about our Pranks episode? Right, it's good afternoon. I've been listening to the podcast since around and I was delighted to hear the Three Legendary Pranks podcast, especially the spaghetti Harvest prank. Normally, I am not a fan of pranks, since it seems most are mean spirited and make an unsuspecting person a butt of the joke. But I truly appreciate the pranks that are meant to amuse a person and brighten their day. I teach middle school math. Okay, sidebar, thank you for being an educator. That is a hard job already. Wow, what a time you've had, which she's going to talk about in the rest of her letter. She says, leading up to April Fool's Day, I saw some discourse in various teacher groups on Facebook about fun pranks to give a good laugh to students learning online and going through a traumatic global event. One teacher posted that she had played the marshmallow farming video for her students in the past, and they got a good laugh. This video is hilarious. It is very similar to the Spaghetti Trees, except it is a North Carolina farmer talking about how the wet climate has created a problem where the marshmallows have melted and fallen off the trees, and it is similarly given with complete seriousness. It's great. In my class online update for the day, on April fools Day twenty I posted an update telling my students they needed to watch the marshmallow farming video and that there would be an ungraded quiz to review into JR operations using the numbers in the video. When they actually clicked through to the quiz, I let students in on the joke and I asked them not to spoil the joke for their friends, and I wish them a joyful April Fools Day. The feedback I got was perfect. Some of them got the joke right away and loved it. Others I had going for a while, and yet others questioned my sanity until a friend told them it was a joke. This year, on April Fools Day, when I had all of my students again for the next year of math, we fondly reminisced and had another laugh. Uh. Shelsa writes. Also another brief story related to your Alistair Crowley episode. I learned of Alistair Crowley in my late teens when I became a huge fan of David Bowie. Bowie referred to the Golden Dawn and Crowley in his lyrics for quicksand I was excited to hear Bowie's name mentioned in the podcast. I am also including pictures of my black cat Natasha, my tricolor Tabby Millie, I rescued from a cat horder on the last day of school, in my meanest and favorite hen pecking at my toes, my dog Ziggy sitting on the picnic table in our backyard while I read, and my dog Daisy basking in the sun. I hope you both have a wonderful holiday season full of light and blessings. Cheers. Oh. I love this email. One. I love it because it gives the chance to thank educators too. That is a great way to pull prank that is fun and joyful. And three, that marshmallow video is funny. I haven't to do it later. It's very very funny, and I love love this collection of beautiful creatures, and I do understand loving the meanest animals the most. I don't know what it is, there's something in my heart I do the same thing. So thank you, thank you, because this was an absolutely oh and she says Andrea. Um, so yeah, that's Andrea. I said it wrong every time. I only just noticed the phonetics at the very end. I've done this exact same thing with reading listener mail before. Yes. Uh. The problem is that I read it from their email address at the top, and then when I scrolled down and see the thing, my brain goes, oh whoops. Yeah, well, and my apologies. I've read the whole email, including that note, but then I have recorded a whole podcast episode and the note is not in my mind anymore. That is precisely what has just taken place. So thank you Andrea for writing us that, because it was absolutely a delight. If you would like to write to us and give me the chance to mess up the pronunciation of your name, you can do that at History podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Please forgive me if I do it. You can also touch based on the podcast on social media at mist in History, and if you have not subscribed. You can do that on the I heart Radio app or anywhere you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H