Reading 3 of 7 free1776 Club · all 7 storiesThursday, October 22
From the desk
Start with 1777: six hundred Rhode Islanders behind a hastily rebuilt river wall at Fort Mercer, facing 1,200 Hessians sent to clear the Delaware. Gunboats raked the attackers' flanks, Colonel von Donop fell wounded and was left on the field, and his survivors retreated ten miles to Haddonfield. Worth a longer look: 1962, when Kennedy went on television and used the word "quarantine" instead of "blockade" because one meant war and the other didn't. Edison's thirteen and a half hours of lamplight rounds out a day that turned on how carefully people chose their words and their defenses.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1777Featured · This day in history
Six hundred defenders at Fort Mercer turn back 1,200 Hessians
With Philadelphia in British hands and the Delaware River blocked by two American forts, General Howe sent Colonel Carl von Donop to clear Fort Mercer on October 22, 1777. Von Donop landed with 2,000 Hessian troops and split off 1,200 for the assault. Colonel Christopher Greene held the earthen fort with only 600 men, mostly Rhode Islanders, behind a river-side wall rebuilt by French engineer Thomas Duplessis. The Hessians attacked in two columns; Continental and Pennsylvania navy gunboats raked their flanks from the river. Von Donop fell wounded and was left on the field as his force retreated to Haddonfield, ten miles away.
Red Bank proved that hired European regulars could be stopped by a small garrison and a well-placed wall, a welcome result for Washington's army, still reeling from the loss of Philadelphia. The victory bought weeks for the Continental Army to regroup north of the city, and it fed the American argument, made to European observers, that the rebellion could win battles against professional troops.
Did you know
QHow many men did Fort Mercer actually have to defend it?
The fort was built to hold 1,500 troops, but Colonel Christopher Greene had only 600 available on the day of the attack, most of them Rhode Island Continentals. The Hessian force sent against them numbered 1,200, outnumbering the defenders two to one. A separate outer redoubt north of the main walls was never garrisoned at all, and it was left ungarrisoned.
QWhat were the actual casualty numbers from the battle?
Hessian reports listed 377 killed and wounded with another 20 missing or captured, nearly a third of the 1,200-man assault force. American losses were 14 killed and 27 wounded. The lopsided ratio, roughly one Hessian casualty for every man in the garrison, stood out even among the war's costlier assaults.
QWho gave Fort Mercer the wall that stopped the Hessian advance?
A French officer named Thomas Duplessis had modified Fort Mercer shortly before the attack, building an additional wall along the river side of the works. That alteration changed the fort's actual perimeter from what von Donop's scouts had mapped, so the Hessians advanced expecting one layout and met another. The French officer's uncredited fix played as large a role in breaking the assault as the Rhode Islanders' muskets did.
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1962military
Kennedy goes on television: Soviet missiles sit in Cuba, and the Navy will stop every ship
For six days, Kennedy had known what the cameras on a U-2 spy plane had found: medium- and long-range missile sites under construction ninety miles from Florida. On the evening of October 22, 1962, he went on national television and told Americans the Soviet Union had placed nuclear weapons in Cuba. He ordered a naval "quarantine" to stop further shipments and demanded Khrushchev dismantle and remove what was already there. The word "quarantine" was deliberate, since a blockade is an act of war and Kennedy needed room to maneuver.
The quarantine speech modeled a pattern later presidents would reuse: a televised address, a measured military signal short of war, and a demand with room for the other side to back down without humiliation. It also exposed the cost of basing American Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy, where American Jupiter missiles had sat since 1961, close enough to Moscow that Khrushchev considered Kennedy's outrage hypocritical.
Did you know
QWhy were Soviet troops in Cuba issued winter gear for a tropical island?
The Soviet deployment, codenamed Operation Anadyr, ran on an elaborate deception plan the Soviets called maskirovka, meaning camouflage or disguise. Troops bound for Cuba were told they were headed somewhere cold and handed skis, felt boots, and sheepskin coats before boarding ship, only to find themselves sweating in the Caribbean. Once there, the misdirection caused real logistical pain: equipment designed for Russian winters suffered fuse failures, heavy corrosion, and generator blackouts in the humidity, while fuel consumption ran far above what planners had budgeted.
QWho publicly accused the Kennedy administration of hiding the missile buildup before Kennedy's speech?
Senator Kenneth Keating of New York stood on the Senate floor on August 31, 1962, nearly two months before Kennedy's address, and said it was in all probability that the Soviet Union was building a missile base in Cuba. He went further, accusing the administration of concealing the threat from the public. Keating never revealed his source, and for decades afterward the senator's information pipeline into Cuba remained unknown.
QDid Fidel Castro actually want Soviet missiles on his island?
According to historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Castro did not particularly want the missiles at all. He worried they would turn Cuba into an obvious target and preferred a more conventional defense arrangement. Khrushchev pressed the case anyway, framing the missiles as protection against another American invasion attempt, and Castro ultimately agreed to host weapons he had not asked for.
1879innovation
Edison's thread-filament bulb glows for thirteen and a half hours before it dies
Gas lamps still lit most American homes and streets in the fall of 1879, and Edison had spent a year hunting for a filament that would not burn out in minutes. On October 22, at his Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey, he sealed a thread of carbonized cotton inside a glass bulb and switched on the current. It glowed for thirteen and a half hours before failing, longer than any of the cardboard, grass, or cane filaments he'd tried before it. Thirteen and a half hours told Edison he was finally close to something that would last.
Edison's thread-filament test was the breakthrough that let his lab chase a commercially viable bulb, and that bulb helped launch the race toward a national electric grid, built almost entirely by American capital and American patents over the following decade. The lighting system he patented that November gave General Electric and the utility industry their working template that electrified American homes, factories, and cities well into the twentieth century.
Did you know
QWhat exact wording did Edison use in his patent filing to describe the filament materials?
Edison's patent application, filed November 4, 1879, described a carbon filament made from "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways." That phrase shows Edison's patent listed multiple fiber sources rather than locking in on cotton alone. The patent covered the broader method of coiling and carbonizing a strip or filament and connecting it to platina contact wires, not just the cotton thread used in the October test. By writing the claim broadly, Edison protected the underlying process even as his lab kept swapping in new materials, giving him legal cover while the search for a longer-lasting fiber continued.
QWhat problem had other inventors already solved decades before Edison's October test?
Generating light from a heated filament was old news by 1879. Inventors had been producing incandescent glow from current-heated materials since the 1840s, decades before Edison ever touched a carbonized thread. What none of them had cracked was durability: a filament that could survive hours of current without melting or turning to ash, built thin enough to run on a practical amount of power. Incandescence itself wasn't new in 1879. His contribution was engineering a filament and vacuum-sealing process that turned a known phenomenon into something a household could actually use night after night.
QWhat specific flaws plagued incandescent bulbs before Edison's lab got involved?
Early incandescent designs suffered from two compounding defects: filaments that burned out almost immediately and power requirements too high to make the technology practical for everyday use. A bulb that demanded enormous current to glow even briefly was useless for lighting a home or street, no matter how bright it burned in a lab. Edison's year of testing cardboard, grasses, and cane was aimed squarely at solving both problems simultaneously, not just finding something that wouldn't melt. A filament had to be thin enough to run on manageable current and tough enough to last. Solving durability alone, without addressing power draw, would have produced just another lab curiosity.
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Quote of the day
“Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls — the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.”
