July 24, 2020 • 10 mins
The Eastland Disaster occurred in Chicago on this day in 1915. / On this day in 1889, cryptanalyst Agnes Meyer Driscoll was born.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, y'all, Eve's here. We're doubling up today with two
events in history, one from me and one from former
host Tracy V. Wilson on with the show. Welcome to
this day in History Class. It's July today. In nift
the S S. Eastland capsized in Chicago and it killed
(00:21):
more than eight hundred people. Here's the story. The Eastland
was built in n two and it was meant to
be a fast ship. Had nicknames like the speed Queen
of the Great Lakes and the Greyhound of the Lakes.
Its purpose originally was to carry passengers from Chicago across
Lake Michigan and then come back to Chicago with produce
(00:42):
to sell. It could carry about two thousand people, with
sleeping accommodations for about five people. And it was a
fast ship, like I said earlier, but not quite fast
enough to do two round trips a day, which is
what its owners wanted to do to be able to
make enough money off of it. So it underwent some
retro fit in both to make it faster and to
provide more passenger capacity. It hadn't really been reported to
(01:05):
have problems before the retro fit, but afterward it had
some issues with stability. On July four it almost capsized
with almost three thousand people on board. It also developed
a serious list to one side on August five of
that year. The Joseph Chicago Steamship Company bought it in
nineteen fourteen, and at that point it had a reputation
(01:27):
for being somewhat less than stable. It was not about
people really trusted at that point. Then, in nineteen fifteen,
President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation known as the Siemens Act.
This Act had a lot of provisions that affected lots
of different aspects of marine work. A lot of it
was the result of lobbying by the International Siemens Union
(01:47):
of America. It had to do with things like workplace
conditions and working hours and that sort of a thing.
But another huge influence on this legislation was the sinking
of the Titanic and the perception the a lot more
people would have survived if only there had been enough lifeboats.
This is actually a much more complicated question, but even so,
(02:10):
the general public was demanding that boats and ships have
more lifeboats and more life rafts and more ways to
get people safely off of a sinking ship. So the
Siemens Act mandated that there had to be lifeboats for
seventy five percent of people aboard the ships. Now, people
who worked with lake vessels like the Eastland that were
(02:32):
meant to go across relatively shallow, stable bodies of water
like lakes, we're worried about this legislation. They were afraid
all of this extra life saving equipment was going to
make ships that already had a little bit of a
tendency to be unstable a lot more top heavy. It
was gonna make them a lot more dangerous. But in
the end those concerns weren't really factored into the final legislation.
(02:53):
On July two of nineteen fifteen, the Eastland got its
new supply of lifeboats and equipment, and on July twenty fourth,
nineteen fifteen, it was scheduled to make its first fully
loaded trip with all of that new equipment installed. It
was one of five vessels that were chartered by Western
Electric to take employees to a picnic at Washington Park
in Michigan City, Indiana, across the other side of the
(03:16):
lake from Chicago, but it never left the dock on
the Chicago River. It started to tilt as people were boarding,
and the crew was not able to compensate by changing
the ballast tanks and the levels of water in them.
The boat reached capacity at seven ten in the morning,
and then, after alarmingly swaying back and forth several times
(03:37):
over the next eighteen minutes, it rolled completely onto its
side at seven None of the life jackets or life
rafts that had been added to the boat had been deployed.
There had been no time for any of that. Some
people were able to jump onto the dock from the boat,
or to scramble up the side as that side was
exposed from the water, but a lot of people who
(03:57):
were thrown into the river didn't know how to whim
and drowned. Almost everybody who was below decks when the
cap size happened wasn't able to make it out alive.
Most of the at least eight hundred forty four people
who died were factory workers. Twenty two entire families were killed.
The second Regiment Armory had to be used as a
(04:18):
temporary morgue, and there were so many people killed that
almost seven hundred funerals took place on the same day,
which was July. The American Red Cross Churches Civic organizations
all gave aid the scene, and they helped families make
funeral arrangements. There are also court proceedings that went on
for years afterwards, but none of them led to any convictions.
(04:42):
A civil suit dragged on until nineteen thirty three, but
its terms limited the payout to the salvage value of
the Eastland minus the cost to raise it up from
the river, so the families of the deceased wound up
receiving almost no compensation for this disaster. The u US
Navy purchased and salvaged the Eastland and then it operated
(05:03):
as the U S s. Willamette until You can learn
more about this tragedy in the June episode of Stuffy
miss and History Class, and you can subscribe to This
Day in History Class on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts and
whatever else you get your podcasts. Next time you will
have a nineteenth century invasion during the Spanish American War. Hello,
(05:33):
welcome to this Day in History class, where we dusked
off a little piece of history every day. The day
was July nine. Agnes Meyer Driskell was born in Genesio, Illinois.
(05:55):
Discal a cryptanalyst who broke code during World War two
is No as the first Lady of Naval Cryptology from
nineteen o seven to nineteen o nine. Agnes attended Otterban
College in Columbus, Ohio, but she transferred to Ohio State University,
where she studied math, physics, music, and foreign languages. She
(06:16):
graduated in nineteen eleven with Bachelor of Arts degrees in
math and physics. Agnes was proficient in English, French, German, Latin,
and Japanese. Once she graduated, she moved to Armarillo, Texas,
where she worked as the director of music at the
Lowry Phillips Military Academy. She was also the head of
the math and music departments at two high schools while
(06:37):
she was in Armarillo. In nineteen eighteen, one year after
the US declared war on Germany, Agnes enlisted in the U. S.
Navy and was given the rank of Chief Yeoman. She
was assigned to the Postal and Cable Censorship Office in Washington,
d C. Then transferred to the Code and Signal Section
of the Director of Naval Communications, where she remained throughout
(07:00):
World War One. The section was responsible for protecting naval
communications by encoding America's messages. Agnes got her start developing
codes here. She even co developed one of the Navy's
cipher machines, the Communications Machine, or c M. Once the
First World War ended, Agnes stayed with the code in
(07:20):
Signal section as a civilian. In nineteen she worked in
the Department of Cipher's at Riverbank Laboratories in Illinois, which
hosted a team of people who deciphered code. She also
solved a supposedly unbreakable cipher that was advertised by rotor
machine inventor Edward Heaven in a magazine. Heaven hired her
(07:40):
to the Heathern Electric Code Company to help develop an
improved rotor driven cipher device for the Navy, but his
company ended up failing. Agnes also worked in New York
at Herbert O. Yard Least Cipher Bureau, an agency that
broke diplomatic codes. In she married a lawyer named Michael Driscoll.
That same year, she joined the Navy's Cryptographic Research Desk
(08:04):
later renamed O P twenty G. As a crypt analyst
under Lawrence Stafford, Agnes wrote code from the Japanese Navy's
main operational code book, nicknamed the Red Book. She figured
out that the Japanese were encoding their messages using a
method called columnar transposition. She also broke the Japanese Blue Book,
(08:24):
which also contained super encipherments, or a method that contains
code and cipher. In cryptography, a code takes a whole
word or phrase and replaces it with another word, series
of letters, or string of numbers, while a cipher takes
a single letter or number and replaces it with another
single letter or number. As the Japanese continued to come
(08:47):
up with new coding systems, Driscoll successfully cracked them and
helped the Navy get insight on Japanese fuel supplies, ship accidents,
naval maneuvers, and other secret critical Japanese naval communication. She
solved the cipher component of the Japanese fleet's operational code
J and a FEAT that helped provide warning of Japan's
(09:09):
attack on Midway Island. The U. S. Navy was able
to fully exploit the code after the attack on Pearl
Harbor and for the rest of the Pacific War. Though
she was assigned to the task of breaking Germany's naval codes,
specifically working on the Enigma device, her team was not
able to solve the problem. Over the years, Driscoll also
(09:30):
mentored other naval cryptologists and intelligence officers, including Thomas Dyer
and edwin Leyden. She got in a car accident in
nineteen thirty seven in which she sustained injuries that she
never fully recovered from. Driscoll was a principal cryptanalyst for
the Navy until the end of nineteen fifty. After that,
she worked for the Armed Forces Security Agency, later to
(09:53):
become the National Security Agency. She retired from active federal
service in nineteen fifty nine. She died in and was
buried in Arlington National Cemetery. I'm Eve jeffco and hopefully
you know a little more about history today than you
did yesterday. If you have any burning questions or comments
(10:14):
to tell us, you can find us on Twitter, Instagram,
and Facebook at t d i h C podcast. Thanks
again for listening, and I hope you come back tomorrow
for more delicious morsels of history. For more podcasts from
(10:41):
I Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, y'all, Eve's here. We're doubling up today with two
events in history, one from me and one from former
host Tracy V. Wilson on with the show. Welcome to
this day in History Class. It's July today. In nift
the S S. Eastland capsized in Chicago and it killed
(00:21):
more than eight hundred people. Here's the story. The Eastland
was built in n two and it was meant to
be a fast ship. Had nicknames like the speed Queen
of the Great Lakes and the Greyhound of the Lakes.
Its purpose originally was to carry passengers from Chicago across
Lake Michigan and then come back to Chicago with produce
(00:42):
to sell. It could carry about two thousand people, with
sleeping accommodations for about five people. And it was a
fast ship, like I said earlier, but not quite fast
enough to do two round trips a day, which is
what its owners wanted to do to be able to
make enough money off of it. So it underwent some
retro fit in both to make it faster and to
provide more passenger capacity. It hadn't really been reported to
(01:05):
have problems before the retro fit, but afterward it had
some issues with stability. On July four it almost capsized
with almost three thousand people on board. It also developed
a serious list to one side on August five of
that year. The Joseph Chicago Steamship Company bought it in
nineteen fourteen, and at that point it had a reputation
(01:27):
for being somewhat less than stable. It was not about
people really trusted at that point. Then, in nineteen fifteen,
President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation known as the Siemens Act.
This Act had a lot of provisions that affected lots
of different aspects of marine work. A lot of it
was the result of lobbying by the International Siemens Union
(01:47):
of America. It had to do with things like workplace
conditions and working hours and that sort of a thing.
But another huge influence on this legislation was the sinking
of the Titanic and the perception the a lot more
people would have survived if only there had been enough lifeboats.
This is actually a much more complicated question, but even so,
(02:10):
the general public was demanding that boats and ships have
more lifeboats and more life rafts and more ways to
get people safely off of a sinking ship. So the
Siemens Act mandated that there had to be lifeboats for
seventy five percent of people aboard the ships. Now, people
who worked with lake vessels like the Eastland that were
(02:32):
meant to go across relatively shallow, stable bodies of water
like lakes, we're worried about this legislation. They were afraid
all of this extra life saving equipment was going to
make ships that already had a little bit of a
tendency to be unstable a lot more top heavy. It
was gonna make them a lot more dangerous. But in
the end those concerns weren't really factored into the final legislation.
(02:53):
On July two of nineteen fifteen, the Eastland got its
new supply of lifeboats and equipment, and on July twenty fourth,
nineteen fifteen, it was scheduled to make its first fully
loaded trip with all of that new equipment installed. It
was one of five vessels that were chartered by Western
Electric to take employees to a picnic at Washington Park
in Michigan City, Indiana, across the other side of the
(03:16):
lake from Chicago, but it never left the dock on
the Chicago River. It started to tilt as people were boarding,
and the crew was not able to compensate by changing
the ballast tanks and the levels of water in them.
The boat reached capacity at seven ten in the morning,
and then, after alarmingly swaying back and forth several times
(03:37):
over the next eighteen minutes, it rolled completely onto its
side at seven None of the life jackets or life
rafts that had been added to the boat had been deployed.
There had been no time for any of that. Some
people were able to jump onto the dock from the boat,
or to scramble up the side as that side was
exposed from the water, but a lot of people who
(03:57):
were thrown into the river didn't know how to whim
and drowned. Almost everybody who was below decks when the
cap size happened wasn't able to make it out alive.
Most of the at least eight hundred forty four people
who died were factory workers. Twenty two entire families were killed.
The second Regiment Armory had to be used as a
(04:18):
temporary morgue, and there were so many people killed that
almost seven hundred funerals took place on the same day,
which was July. The American Red Cross Churches Civic organizations
all gave aid the scene, and they helped families make
funeral arrangements. There are also court proceedings that went on
for years afterwards, but none of them led to any convictions.
(04:42):
A civil suit dragged on until nineteen thirty three, but
its terms limited the payout to the salvage value of
the Eastland minus the cost to raise it up from
the river, so the families of the deceased wound up
receiving almost no compensation for this disaster. The u US
Navy purchased and salvaged the Eastland and then it operated
(05:03):
as the U S s. Willamette until You can learn
more about this tragedy in the June episode of Stuffy
miss and History Class, and you can subscribe to This
Day in History Class on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts and
whatever else you get your podcasts. Next time you will
have a nineteenth century invasion during the Spanish American War. Hello,
(05:33):
welcome to this Day in History class, where we dusked
off a little piece of history every day. The day
was July nine. Agnes Meyer Driskell was born in Genesio, Illinois.
(05:55):
Discal a cryptanalyst who broke code during World War two
is No as the first Lady of Naval Cryptology from
nineteen o seven to nineteen o nine. Agnes attended Otterban
College in Columbus, Ohio, but she transferred to Ohio State University,
where she studied math, physics, music, and foreign languages. She
(06:16):
graduated in nineteen eleven with Bachelor of Arts degrees in
math and physics. Agnes was proficient in English, French, German, Latin,
and Japanese. Once she graduated, she moved to Armarillo, Texas,
where she worked as the director of music at the
Lowry Phillips Military Academy. She was also the head of
the math and music departments at two high schools while
(06:37):
she was in Armarillo. In nineteen eighteen, one year after
the US declared war on Germany, Agnes enlisted in the U. S.
Navy and was given the rank of Chief Yeoman. She
was assigned to the Postal and Cable Censorship Office in Washington,
d C. Then transferred to the Code and Signal Section
of the Director of Naval Communications, where she remained throughout
(07:00):
World War One. The section was responsible for protecting naval
communications by encoding America's messages. Agnes got her start developing
codes here. She even co developed one of the Navy's
cipher machines, the Communications Machine, or c M. Once the
First World War ended, Agnes stayed with the code in
(07:20):
Signal section as a civilian. In nineteen she worked in
the Department of Cipher's at Riverbank Laboratories in Illinois, which
hosted a team of people who deciphered code. She also
solved a supposedly unbreakable cipher that was advertised by rotor
machine inventor Edward Heaven in a magazine. Heaven hired her
(07:40):
to the Heathern Electric Code Company to help develop an
improved rotor driven cipher device for the Navy, but his
company ended up failing. Agnes also worked in New York
at Herbert O. Yard Least Cipher Bureau, an agency that
broke diplomatic codes. In she married a lawyer named Michael Driscoll.
That same year, she joined the Navy's Cryptographic Research Desk
(08:04):
later renamed O P twenty G. As a crypt analyst
under Lawrence Stafford, Agnes wrote code from the Japanese Navy's
main operational code book, nicknamed the Red Book. She figured
out that the Japanese were encoding their messages using a
method called columnar transposition. She also broke the Japanese Blue Book,
(08:24):
which also contained super encipherments, or a method that contains
code and cipher. In cryptography, a code takes a whole
word or phrase and replaces it with another word, series
of letters, or string of numbers, while a cipher takes
a single letter or number and replaces it with another
single letter or number. As the Japanese continued to come
(08:47):
up with new coding systems, Driscoll successfully cracked them and
helped the Navy get insight on Japanese fuel supplies, ship accidents,
naval maneuvers, and other secret critical Japanese naval communication. She
solved the cipher component of the Japanese fleet's operational code
J and a FEAT that helped provide warning of Japan's
(09:09):
attack on Midway Island. The U. S. Navy was able
to fully exploit the code after the attack on Pearl
Harbor and for the rest of the Pacific War. Though
she was assigned to the task of breaking Germany's naval codes,
specifically working on the Enigma device, her team was not
able to solve the problem. Over the years, Driscoll also
(09:30):
mentored other naval cryptologists and intelligence officers, including Thomas Dyer
and edwin Leyden. She got in a car accident in
nineteen thirty seven in which she sustained injuries that she
never fully recovered from. Driscoll was a principal cryptanalyst for
the Navy until the end of nineteen fifty. After that,
she worked for the Armed Forces Security Agency, later to
(09:53):
become the National Security Agency. She retired from active federal
service in nineteen fifty nine. She died in and was
buried in Arlington National Cemetery. I'm Eve jeffco and hopefully
you know a little more about history today than you
did yesterday. If you have any burning questions or comments
(10:14):
to tell us, you can find us on Twitter, Instagram,
and Facebook at t d i h C podcast. Thanks
again for listening, and I hope you come back tomorrow
for more delicious morsels of history. For more podcasts from
(10:41):
I Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
This Day in History Class News
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