The Ancient Secrets of Plastic Surgery

Nose jobs and other forms of plastic surgery are nothing new – people have been performing them for thousands of years.

With no anaesthesia except opium, and using pieces of straw for nostrils, Indian medicine men were carrying out nose jobs in ancient times. The demand came mostly from men mutilated by war or punishment.

Walking down the dusty streets of 18th-century Mysore, India, a British officer was startled by a local merchant with a scarred forehead and misshapen nose. Intrigued, he asked about the man’s appearance, and learned that he had been found guilty of adultery and had had his nose cut off as punishment. A vaidya – a Hindu holy man – had fashioned him a replacement using the man’s own skin. This chance meeting introduced the notion of plastic surgery to America and Europe.

Reconstructive surgery had been practised in India for more than 2000 years, but it was a medical feat unknown in the West. When an account of a grafting operation was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine of London in October 1794, it attracted much interest.

It has long been accepted that ancient civilisations possessed the ability to carry out basic surgical operations. An ancient Egyptian manuscript known as the ‘Edwin Smith Papyrus’ dating from about 3000 BC contains advice on how to treat fractured noses and jaws, and directions on stitching and cauterising (sealing wounds by burning). Skeletons excavated from a craftsmen’s village near the Valley of the Kings show that when these labourers sustained fractures their bones could be reset and splinted. But medical historians are still surprised by the discovery that plastic surgery involving extensive reconstruction was carried out centuries before the invention of anaesthesia.

The Tragic Obsessions of a Tycoon

The Tragic Obsessions of a Tycoon

Legendary aviator and movie mogul Howard Hughes could afford anything he wanted. Yet he spent the last quarter of his life as a recluse, addicted to drugs and teetering on the brink of insanity.

Born on December 24, 1905, in Houston, Texas, Howard Hughes learned from an early age that money talks. His millionaire father owned the Hughes Tool company, which manufactured equipment for the oil industry and he had a comfortable childhood.

Yet Hughes never graduated from high school and was only able to attend classes at the California Institute of Technology because his father gave a generous endowment to the Institute. Hughes returned to Texas and enrolled at the Rice Institute in Houston, but when he was 18 his father died – and he left without his degree.

His father’s will decreed that Hughes was to take over the Hughes Tool Company at the age of 21. But after having himself declared to be of legal majority, Hughes appointed former racing driver Noah Dietrich as the company’s head of finance. It was a stroke of genius; over the next few years, Dietrich was instrumental in driving the company’s prosperity.

Movies and women

Besotted by the burgeoning movie industry, in 1925 Hughes went to Hollywood. He produced three films, then turned to writing and directing. In his first film, Hell’s Angels, the largest private airforce in the world was used to re-create aerial dogfights from the First World War.

Two of his later films tested the limits of public morality. Scarface (1932) was censored because of its violence and Hughes had to sue to allow its release. The Outlaw (1941) was controversial for its sexually explicit advertising and content, featuring a sensational décolletage worn by its star Jane Russell. Hughes had used his engineering expertise to create the half-cup bra modelled by Russell.

In 1948 Hughes took over the RKO studio. During the McCarthy era, as Hollywood was investigated for its supposedly pro-communist leanings, he was staunchly anti-communist. The studio was closed for six months while the politics of his employees were investigated – and completed pictures were re-shot if Hughes felt that their anti-communist politics weren’t sufficiently clear.

Hughes’s affairs with women were legendary. Although married to Ella Rice, a Houston socialite, in 1925, from 1928 he was linked to a string of movie stars: Jean Harlow, Katherine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Terry Moore, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth and Janet Leigh. There were also rumours of gay liaisons with a number of actors. He divorced Rice in 1929. In 1957, he married actress Jean Peters, but they divorced in 1970.

Round the world in record time

Towards the end of the 1920s, Hughes acquired a fleet of aircraft. In 1932 he formed the Hughes Aircraft division of the Hughes Tool Company. The firm went on to pioneer many innovations in aerospace technology.

Hughes had acquired his pilot’s licence during the filming of Hell’s Angels. From then on, the most exhilarating hours of his life were spent in the air.

A childhood illness had left him with tinnitus and a continual ringing in his ears. He was too proud to wear a hearing aid, and only in the cockpit of a plane did the ringing cease.

Flying became an obsession. Hughes set a number of world records, often in aeroplanes designed by himself. In 1935 he reached a speed of 350 miles per hour in the H-1 Hughes Racer. In 1938, he flew round the world in 3 days, 19 hours, and 17 minutes.

But in 1946, Hughes was piloting an experimental US Air Force spy plane, the XF-11, when it developed an oil leak. Crash-landing to save the plane, he suffered numerous injuries included a crushed collar bone, six shattered ribs and third-degree burns. Only morphine made the pain bearable and Hughes became dependent on the drug for the rest of his life.

Who Invented the Light Bulb?

Who Invented the Light Bulb?

If you answered Thomas Edison, think again.

At the end of the Civil War in 1865, the reunited states of America entered a new era of commerce and entrepreneurship. Businessmen made their fortunes supplying the vast marketplace of the Midwest with the latest domestic appliances and tools. Lighting was one area in which huge technological strides were made. And with the development of electricity as a reliable power source, a race began in the late 1870s to patent an efficient form of electrical lighting. At the forefront of this contest were two American inventors, Thomas Alva Edison and Hiram Maxim.

Edison was already famous for his invention of the phonograph and various telegraph instruments. But he was at least as much a businessman as he was an inventor. Edison approached investors directly rather than submit himself to the industrialists and their specifications. His experience of developing prototypes of other inventions had made him familiar with the loopholes in patent laws. As a result Edison's usual practice was to patent every advance made by his research team, however small.

Hiram Maxim, on the other hand, was an archetypal inventor - ploughing away, busily working on ideas, but not giving a thought to their commercial potential until after the final "eureka" moment.

In his mid 20s he had invented the first sprinkler system in Boston, only to fail to impress investors of its worth. In 1878 he was hired by Hans Schuyler of the US Electric Lighting Company in New York. As a further incentive, over and beyond his wages of $10 a day, Maxim was due a quarter share in anything he produced for the company. Aware of the inventor's work on gas machine lighting in Massachusetts, Schuyler placed him in charge of operations to produce electric light. Within a year Maxim had installed the first electrical "arc" lighting system in the Equitable Insurance Company building in New York.

Out of the arc

Arc lights worked by building up charge on a carbon rod until an "arc" of electricity crossed to a second rod. With sustained charge build-up, the arc sparked continuously, producing light. Arc lights wasted a great deal of energy and could be dangerous. It became a question of who would be first to find a way to channel current through a filament and sustain it without burnout.

Edison witnessed demonstrations of an early version of an unstable arc light in 1877, and in an interview with the New York Tribune in 1878, announced his intentions to design an incandescent lamp. When asked about the financial rewards of being the first man to make such a product, he replied: "I don't so much care for fortune as I do for getting ahead of the other fellow." He revealed that his platinum wire filament kept melting, and said, "I want to find something better." To help him in this quest, he founded his own fully staffed laboratory, complete with skilled glass blowers.

For all his rhetoric Edison had a lot of ground to make up. By 1878 Hiram Maxim had built a working light bulb using a filament made of carbon inside a bulb filled with gasoline vapour. The bulb stayed lit and did not burn out. Maxim applied for a patent on October 4 "on the principle of preserving and building up carbons in an incandescent lamp". If his application had been successful he would now be recognised as the official inventor of the light bulb. But he was to run into a quagmire of bureaucracy, bitter lawsuits and deliberate obstruction.