A pyramid for London
QUESTION In the 19th century, was a giant pyramid proposed to hold five million dead Londoners?
FROM 1801 to 1851, the population of London grew from less than one million to 2.25 million. A key issue was the disposal of the dead at a time of high mortality and when cremation was regarded as a peculiar foreign custom.
Coffins were stacked in 20ft shafts. Bones were sometimes visible between tombstones and smashed coffins were sold to the poor for firewood.
Parliament looked for innovative solutions to this problem. In 1829, architect Thomas Willson prepared a blueprint of what would come to be called the Metropolitan Sepulchre.
He proposed a giant pyramid to be built on Primrose Hill, North London. Its base of 18 acres would be bigger than the Great Pyramid at Giza, which is 13 acres.
At 94 storeys high, it would tower nearly four times higher than St Paul’s Cathedral. The vast pyramid was to be constructed of brick with granite facing and would have a capacity for five million bodies.
The project was fully costed out. The Pyramid General Cemetery Company would sell shares to investors, realising a profit in the order of £11 million based on 40,000 bodies annually. It was never built.
Lawyer George Frederick Carden had a better idea. He proposed cemeteries modelled on the garden graveyards being created in France.
In 1832, Parliament passed a bill encouraging the establishment of private cemeteries outside London.
Over the next decade, seven were established: Kensal Green in 1832; West Norwood in 1836; Highgate in 1839; Abney Park, Nunhead and Brompton all in 1840; and Tower Hamlets in 1841.
While the pyramid scheme may seem fanciful, other countries faced with similar population and land constraints have constructed edifices to the dead.
Israel has started construction of 30 large burial buildings. Oslo is considering skyscraper sepulchres and Santos, Brazil, has been burying its citizens in a 32-storey cemetery for decades.
Norman Walker, Gravesend, Kent.
QUESTION Does Australia’s Weet-Bix breakfast cereal predate Weetabix?
WEET- BIX, a high- fibre, low- sugar breakfast cereal, was the brainchild of Bennison Osborne, a member of the Seventh Day Adventist church in Sydney, Australia.
As well as saving souls, the Church promoted a healthy lifestyle and diet, particularly for breakfast, with the American John Harvey Kellogg creating cornflakes in 1894.
In 1926, Osborne set out to make a product more palatable than Granose, a biscuit marketed by the Adventist Sanitarium Health Food Company.
Osborne’s company was financed by another church member, Arthur Shannon. He set up the company Grain Products Limited and a factory in Leichhardt, a suburb of Sydney, to manufacture Weet-Bix. Osborne was promised a financial stake in the business in return for the Australian rights to his product.
At the same time, Osborne and his friend Malcolm Macfarlane established a Weet-Bix factory in Christchurch, New Zealand, and two more in South Africa.
Weet-Bix proved so successful that it threatened sales of its rival Granose. The canny Shannon took the opportunity to sell Weet-Bix to the Sanitarium Health Foods Company.
Infuriated by this, Osborne made improvements to the recipe and renamed it Weetabix. He travelled to Britain and on April 29, 1932, the British & African Cereal Company was established, with Weetabix registered as a trademark.
In 1936, Osborne sold his shares to the directors of the company and moved with his family to Massachusetts, to set up the production of Weetabix through the American Cereal Food Corporation.
He joined the U.S. war effort in 1941, becoming supervisor of the Army Air Field in Zephyr Hills, Florida. He returned to Australia in 1946 and died in 1980.
Tom Davies, Sydney, Australia. THE Weet-Bix/Weetabix divide has long been an issue between the northern and southern hemispheres. When TV shows stage blind tastings, the winner is usually the one sold in that country.
Sanitarium jealously guards the status of Weet-Bix. In September, a New Zealand judge ordered that 108 boxes of Weetabix should be destroyed after the company took the owners of Christchurch grocers A Little Bit Of Britain to the country’s High Court, claiming the shop’s expat customers might mistake the British product for its own. Marion Willis, Cowbridge, Vale of Glamorgan.
QUESTION Why did French entomologist Antoine Magnan argue a bumblebee’s flight is aerodynamically impossible?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, the quote ‘according to the laws of aerodynamics, the bumblebee cannot fly, but nobody has told it so it continues to fly anyway’ was used post-war to comment on the shortcomings of scientific theory.
Attempts in the Thirties to model the flight of a bumblebee on the aerodynamics of a fixed-wing aeroplane failed because the insect is capable of hovering when its forward speed is zero, making it closer to a helicopter than a plane.
The high-speed back and forth beating of its wings, approximating the rotation of helicopter blades, generates sufficient lift for its flight. To analyse bumblebee flight, you need to know the speed of the wings, not the speed of the bee.
Mike Tate, Norwich.
IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London, W8 5TT; fax them to 01952 780111 or email them to charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.