(Roughly) Daily

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Most readers will know that Charlotte Bronte spent most of her daylight hours in service as a governess, and long-time (pre-blog) readers may remember that, in his capacity as Postal Surveyor, Anthony Trollope invented the iconic British “pillar box”…  but did one know that T.S. Eliot toiled as a bank clerk?  Or that Henry Fielding, the creator of the ribald Tom Jones, sat as a Magistrate?

Happy, Lapham’s Quarterly has provided a helpful chart:  Day Jobs.

As we turn again to that unfinished screenplay, we might recall that it was on this date in 1827 that John Walker, a chemist from Stockton-on-Tees, recorded the first ever sale of friction matches; Walker had accidentally created them the prior year by mixing potassium chlorate and antimony sulfide.  He recorded the first sales as “Sulphurata Hyper-Oxygenata Frict,” but by the second sale (five months later), he was getting the hang of naming: “friction lights.”

John Walker