Pill to put you in the pink
QUESTION
What were Dr Williams’ Pink Pills For Pale People?
Tuberculosis was a devastating illness before the development of antibiotics in the 20th century, and desperate patients were willing to try any promise of a respite or cure.
Dr Williams’ Pink Pills For Pale People were marketed as a cure for Tb and subsequently as a panacea for most ills.
The pills were patented in 1886 by ontario physician Dr William Frederick Jackson. However, they only became famous after canadian entrepreneur and senator George Taylor Fulford bought the patent shortly before the 1891/2 flu epidemic. His marketing skills saw the pink pills sold around the world, including in New York, london, Paris, sydney, cape Town, bombay and rio de Janeiro.
by the turn of the century, he was selling the pills in 82 countries. in britain, he used voting lists to target customers and employed 1,000 women to address and post his advertising pamphlets.
He often disguised his ads as sensational news stories with lurid headlines such as: ‘Night Was A Time of Terror To This Man so Nervous Was He Through Debility Following on Malaria’ and ‘From Physical Wreck To rink Master: Victim To Digestive Disorders And Nervous Debility in shanghai Tells How He Was restored by Dr Williams’ Pink Pills’.
He filled his pamphlets and articles with testimonials: ‘Another teenage case is Miss Davis, who says she was so weakened by the disease that “you could see the light through her hand”. Kept alive by brandy and milk alone, she began to rally after taking the Pink Pills — “it was like raising her out of the grave”.’
The pills were roundly condemned in George selkirk Jones’s 1897 exposures of Quackery. He determined that they contained merely ‘extract of barbados aloes enclosed in a thin coating of sugar, coloured pink with carmine’.
The company’s claims drew complaints from consumers and professional associations. by the 1910s, the pills had gained a reputation as the archetypal quack cure. However, they continued to be sold through the 20th century. They were popular in china and indonesia in the
Forties and Fifties, and were still available in britain until the seventies.
When Fulford died at the age of 53 in a car accident in Massachusetts in 1905, his pink pill empire was worth £5million — around £620 million in today’s money.
Charles Hansen, Ipswich, Suffolk.
QUESTION
In The Beatles’ Get Back, who was Loretta?
GET back began life as a satirical look at attitudes in britain in the sixties towards immigrants in britain, especially those of Tory MP enoch Powell. The song parodied a call for immigrants to return, or ‘get back’, to former colonies.
it once included the line: ‘Don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all people’s jobs.’ This was considered too easy to be misconstrued, so Paul Mccartney changed the lyrics to be more of a commentary on the counter-culture of the day.
originally, Mccartney’s characters were called Theresa and Joe, but morphed into pot-smoking Jojo and sweet loretta Martin, an enigmatic drag queen: ‘sweet loretta Martin thought she was a woman/ but she was another man.’
There has been much speculation as to whether they were based on real people. one theory is that loretta was John lennon’s wife Yoko ono, and the refrain ‘Get back’ was directed at her.
A paranoid lennon said: ‘i think there’s some underlying thing about Yoko. You know: “Get back to where you once belonged.”’ every time he [Mccartney] sang the line in the studio, he’d look at
Yoko. Another theory is that it was a nod to a friend of the band lauretta Feldman, wife of swivel-eyed comedian Marty Feldman — a combination of lauretta and Marty makes loretta Martin.
The truth is more prosaic. When asked about it, Mccartney said: ‘Many people have since claimed to be the Jojo and they’re not, let me put that straight!
‘i had no particular person in mind, again it was a fictional character, halfman, half-woman, all very ambiguous. i often left things ambiguous. i like doing that in my songs.’
This suggests that Jojo and loretta are the same fictional person.
Delia Austin, Truro, Cornwall.
QUESTION
What is the record for the longest glider flight?
IN THEORY, there is no limit to the distance a glider can be flown. As someone who flies gliders, i am often asked: ‘What do you do when the wind stops blowing?’, which always raises a smile. in most cases, the wind has no bearing on the ability to stay in the air.
There are three types of flight: thermal, ridge or mountain lift and wave lift.
in thermal flight, the pilot takes advantage of rising currents of warm air, often to be found under clouds or above dark features on the landscape, such as forests or even buildings.
With ridge or mountain lift, the pilot seeks out rising currents of air created by winds blowing on slopes, facing the direction of the prevailing wind.
in wave flight, the pilot must find enough lift to get to higher altitudes, typically above 15,000ft, where the air currents form long waves, often indicated by extensive swathes of cloud. At these altitudes, the air moves at high speed and the glider pilot can take advantage of this to fly at more than 150 mph.
The real limit as to how far a glider can fly is more basic. Gliders don’t generally have any form of power, other than batteries for instrumentation.
This means they don’t have lights, so are not allowed to fly in the dark. Therefore, the limit on flight length is the number of daylight hours.
The longest free-distance glider flight took place in the Andes on January 21, 2003. German pilot Klaus ohlmann, set off from chapelco Airport at san Martin de los Andes in Argentina and achieved just under 1,870 miles in a schemppHirth Nimbus 4 DM.
The british record, by John Williams in 2007, was 689 miles.
Brian Collins, Mold, Flintshire.