May 24th
On May 24, 1883, after fourteen years of construction, more than two dozen deaths, and a price tag that had ballooned past any sane estimate, the Brooklyn Bridge officially opened. It was the longest suspension bridge in the world, the first to be hung from steel cables, and a genuine wonder — a roadway in the sky connecting two of the largest cities in America across the East River. Crowds cheered, cannons fired, President Chester Arthur walked across it, and fireworks lit up the harbor that night. By all accounts it was a triumph.
And then New Yorkers were quietly terrified of it. Suspension bridges had a bad reputation for swaying, buckling, and dropping into rivers, and people simply did not trust that something so big could hold itself up. Six days after the grand opening, on Memorial Day, an enormous crowd packed onto the bridge — and on a narrow staircase near the New York side, a woman tripped. Someone screamed. The crowd surged. In the crush that followed, twelve people were trampled to death. The disaster confirmed every fear the public already had: the bridge was a death trap.
The solution came, as solutions sometimes did in the 1880s, from a circus. Showman P.T. Barnum had been angling for a publicity stunt anyway, and in May 1884 he marched a procession of twenty-one elephants and seventeen camels across the Brooklyn Bridge — with Jumbo, the most famous elephant on Earth, bringing up the rear. Thousands watched several tons of pachyderm stroll calmly over the river without the structure so much as shivering. It was equal parts marketing gimmick and engineering demonstration, and it worked. If the bridge could carry twenty-one elephants, it could carry you. New Yorkers stopped being afraid. The bridge is still standing today, 143 years later, having been reassured by elephants.
Also On This Day…
1607 — The Ashmolean opens… well, the colony does May 24, 1607, is the day English settlers established Jamestown in Virginia, the first permanent English colony in North America. “Permanent” was doing heavy lifting in that sentence — the settlers picked a swampy peninsula, the water was brackish, disease was everywhere, and within months most of them were dead. But enough hung on. Jamestown survived, which means the entire English-speaking story of America traces back to a few hundred desperate, hungry people who landed on a bad piece of marsh on this date.
1844 — Four words traveled 38 miles in an instant On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sat in the chamber of the U.S. Capitol and tapped out the first long-distance telegraph message over a wire strung all the way to Baltimore. The message — “What hath God wrought” — was chosen from the Bible by Annie Ellsworth, the young daughter of the patent commissioner. Moments later the same words came clicking back from Baltimore. For the first time in human history, a message had outrun a horse. Information could now move faster than the fastest thing carrying it. The world quietly changed in that room.
1861 — The first Union officer to fall was a friend of Lincoln’s On May 24, 1861, just weeks into the Civil War, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth led troops into Alexandria, Virginia, and spotted a large Confederate flag flying from a hotel — a flag so big it could reportedly be seen with a spyglass from the White House. Ellsworth climbed up and cut it down. On the way back down the stairs, the hotel’s owner shot and killed him. He was the first Union officer to die in the war, and he happened to be a close personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, who wept openly and had the young colonel’s body lie in honor at the White House. “Remember Ellsworth” became a Union rallying cry.
1883 — The bridge (see above) — but also the museum While New Yorkers were nervously eyeing their new bridge, it’s worth noting May 24 is also the day, two centuries earlier in 1683, that the Ashmolean Museum opened in Oxford, England — the world’s first university museum and arguably the first modern public museum anywhere. A man named Elias Ashmole had donated his sprawling collection of curiosities, and the idea that ordinary people could simply walk in and look at remarkable things was, at the time, genuinely novel.
1935 — The president turned on the lights from 500 miles away On May 24, 1935, Major League Baseball played its first official night game, at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. The grand finale: President Franklin Roosevelt, sitting in the White House, pressed a Western Union telegraph key, and an electric pulse raced 500 miles over copper wire to the ballpark — where 632 lamps blazed on and turned night into day. The Reds beat the Phillies 2-1 in front of more than 20,000 fans. Baseball under the lights, which now feels as natural as the game itself, started with a button push from Washington.
1956 — Europe held its first big sing-off On May 24, 1956, seven countries gathered in Lugano, Switzerland, for the very first Eurovision Song Contest. Host nation Switzerland won with a song called “Refrain,” performed by Lys Assia. It was a modest affair — a few nations, one evening, a postwar attempt to get European countries to do something together that wasn’t a war. It has since grown into one of the most-watched broadcasts on the planet, and it all started quietly on this date.
1962 — The astronaut who landed 250 miles from anyone expecting him On May 24, 1962, astronaut Scott Carpenter became the second American to orbit the Earth, circling the planet three times aboard Aurora 7. Then reentry went wrong. A targeting error and a late retrorocket firing sent the capsule splashing down 250 miles off course, and for a long, awful stretch, Mission Control had no idea whether Carpenter was alive. The nation held its breath. He had, in fact, splashed down just fine and was sitting calmly in his life raft. It took searchers about 40 minutes to find him, and over an hour to pull him out — the most nerve-racking lost-and-found in American history.
It’s a fitting roster for one date — a message that outran a horse, a president flipping on stadium lights from 500 miles away, an astronaut bobbing alone in the Atlantic — but the best story is still the bridge nobody trusted, saved by twenty-one elephants and a showman who knew exactly what he was doing.
