Another timely piece from the past. I noticed that today August 19, is the birthday of Seth Thomas. And. Julius Lothar Meyer, Charles E. Hires, as well as Orville Wright, All have connections in my life, sort of. I think, if we look hard enough, we can find connections almost anywhere. There’s always that six degrees of separation bit.
The first is Seth Thomas, born on this date in 1785 in Wolcott, Connecticut (d. 1859). He was a manufacturer and pioneer in the mass production of clocks. I know this to be true because I own one of his clocks. I’ve had it for a long time. It was my grandparent’s clock. When I happened upon it, the thing was in our garage on Bruce Avenue. It had been painted over in black paint and no longer had hands on its face. Its innards were twisty and broken.
Recently, I found a local man who repairs clocks. He had it a long time, almost to the point of me forgetting about it. However, when it was returned, he noted that someone had written a name inside (my grandfather’s). Also, the clock came back in beautiful working condition, all except for the sound it makes when it gongs on the hour. It groans as if it’s injured. Regardless, the Seth Thomas clocks must have been cheap. I say this because I remember my grandfather well.
Seth was a handy young fellow and worked as an apprentice for a clockmaker named Eli Terry in 1807. By 1810, Thomas bought Terry’s clocks and made them his own. The company finally went out of business, sadly, in 2009. The clock at Grand Central Station is a Seth Thomas clock. And now I have that in common too.
The next person on the list is Julius Lothar Meyer, born in 1830. He is the German chemist who developed the first periodic table of chemical elements. This was independent of the table created by Dimitri Mendeleev, the one we are most familiar with. Meyer was born in Varel, Oldenburg, and died in 1895. The connection is slim, but there is one. I was a chemistry major.
Next, we have Charles E. Hires. This gentleman was an American pharmacist. He was also the inventor and manufacturer of the Hires Root Beer beverage. Hires was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1851 and stayed just shy of a century, dying in 1947. The connection, of course, is Root Beer. I don’t like it one bit. Just the smell of the stuff turns me away, and for good reason.
In 1973, my oldest sister was married. She wasn’t the first in our family to have a wedding, but she had a good one! She married a wonderful man named Tom, and his family was from Poland and Lithuania. At the wedding reception, there were more homemade Polish and Lithuanian cookies than there ever have been on the face of the earth, all at one time and in the same location. I ate most of them and washed them down with little bottles of root beer. It wasn’t long before I was in the bathroom, sicker than a Lithuanian dog. I still blame this, all of this, on the root beer. And Charles E. Hires.
Finally, in 1871, we saw the birth of Orville Wright. Of course, we all know him as one of the pioneers of aviation. He was born in Dayton, Ohio. I was born in Dayton, Ohio. He built his planes in my hometown. I’ve flown on planes from the airport in my hometown. The connections are uncanny.
This brings me back, once again, to our connection with others.
We are all fastened together here on this planet. There’s only one way off, and that is not a preferable option to most. We go, as the planet goes. In this way, our connections are physical.
But we are also spiritually connected. Our energy goes forth. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It moves from place to place, going where it must. And the energy we release does just the same.
We should always remember this. Connected.
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“Coincidences mean you’re on the right path.”
― Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories
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“Invisible threads are the strongest ties.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
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“Coincidences are spiritual puns.”
― G.K. Chesterton
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Connections from root beer to broken clocks
