Captain Boyton and His Rubber Suit

Adventurer and amusement park owner Paul Boyton was born on this day in 1848 in either Dublin, Ireland or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Boyton gained world-wide renown for his ocean exploits performed while wearing a floating, air-tight rubber suit, designed with the help of C.S. Merriman. In 1874, notably, he jumped overboard into heavy seas from a transatlantic ship wearing the suit, a day's sail away from Ireland, and paddled himself -- feet first, kayak style -- back to Cork. His navigation of the Mississippi River in a similar fashion made headlines in the U.S.

As a paid mercenary, he swam in the service of the Peruvian government in 1885, attaching explosives to a Chilean man-of-war in the dead of night; the grateful Peruvians awarded him the rank of "Captain." Upon his return to the U.S., he helped to organize the United States Life-Saving Service, a precursor to the Coast Guard, and briefly served as captain of the Atlantic City ocean life-savers. In 1892, he published a popular memoir of his exploits in the water, The Story of Paul Boyton.

After his arrival in New York City in 1895, he bought 16 acres behind the Elephant Hotel in Coney Island, and opened Sea Lion Park, the first outdoor amusement park in the world. The park was best known for its Shoot-the-Chutes ride, in which flat-bottomed toboggan boats slid down a steep slide into a broad lagoon. Boyton also entertained guests with his 40 trained sea lions, a la Sea World, and with demonstrations of his famous rubber suit. The park enjoyed a modest success for a few years, overshadowed by George Tilyou's gigantic Steeplechase Park.

After a dismal rainy summer season left him financially hobbled in 1902, he sold the business and lived the rest of his years quietly (and mostly on dry land), and died April 19, 1924 in Brooklyn, New York.

Nauscopy

Etienne Bottineau (born on this day in 1738 in Champtoceaux, France) was a career-seaman -- first in the merchant marine, then briefly in the service of Louis XV's Royal Navy. Passing his time shipboard by making observations of navigation techniques, he began to develop a question which became the catalyst for his mysterious life's work: shouldn't a vessel approaching land produce a visible effect on the atmosphere which could be seen by the practiced eye and used to predict the arrival of a ship before it would be visible on the horizon?

His shipmates all thought the question itself was far-fetched and that Bottineau was nuts, but he left the Navy to stay in Mauritius (then I'le de France) and to work on his crazy hypothesis. With a clear sky and few vessels coming to visit (making for fewer possibilities for error), in 6 months Bottineau succeeded in developing a technique for "seeing beyond the horizon" -- watching the atmosphere on the horizon and predicting the arrival of ships three days before they could become visible on the horizon.

At first, he used his new technique, which he called nauscopy, to win bets around the docks. Between 1778 and 1782 he correctly predicted the arrival of 575 ships to Mauritius, many as much as 4 days before they could be sighted, and the local government took notice. In 1782, the governor of Mauritius began to record Bottineau's predictions, and at the end of 2 years, Bottineau had such an outlandish record of accuracy (from land and at sea) that the local French government offered Bottineau a lump sum of 10,000 livres and an annual pension of 1,200 livres if he would reveal his secret to the government. He declined the offer; he was convinced that he had made an important scientific discovery, and instead he wanted to go to France to bestow this gift on the nation of his birth and be the great teacher of the new science of nauscopy.

In Paris, however, Bottineau's offers met with indifference in the royal bureaucracy of Louis XVI, and opinion-leader Abbe Fontenay, the editor of the Mercure de France, sneered at Bottineau's offer without studying it. Humiliated and disgusted, Bottineau disappeared without revealing his secret technique. A Scottish journal reported his death in Pondicherry, India just before the French Revolution (1789), and Jean-Paul Marat, the occasional scientist himself, considered Bottineau notable enough to mention his death in a letter to a friend.

Several people later claimed to have mastered nauscopy, but Bottineau's technique has never been documented. The invention of practical radar by Robert Watson-Watt in 1935 no doubt rendered Bottineau's science of nauscopy a mysterious irreproducible result of the quaint and distant nautical past, or perhaps a good seacoast sun-parlor trick.

Novus Mundus

Amerigo Vespucci -- explorer, geographer and merchant, the first to call the Americas "the New World" and the incidental inspiration for the naming of those continents -- was born on this day in 1451 in Florence.

Vespucci has long taken the rap for being a fraud who had never sailed anywhere special and who had misappropriated the naming rights to the continent discovered by his rough acquaintance, Christopher Columbus. As is usually the case, the real story is a little more interesting than that. Born of a noble family, the classically-educated Vespucci, who grew up with a love of literature, astronomy and geography, ingratiated himself with the powerful Medici family (who were easily impressed by intellectual types) and got himself hired as a sort of purchasing agent and sales rep for their ship-outfitting business in Spain.

A welcome visitor at the court of Isabella and Ferdinand, he watched Columbus' first 2 voyages with interest, and furrowed his brow each time Columbus returned to declare that he had discovered a Western sea route to India. He decided to get to know Columbus a little better, and through his salesmanship became Columbus' key supplier for his third voyage across the ocean in 1497.

Hearing nothing with his skeptical ears that suggested that the coarse Genoan had actually found India, Vespucci decided, as a scientist, that he needed to go and see for himself, so in 1499 he outfitted his own voyage West and set sail under the Spanish flag. Arriving at the northern coast of what would eventually be called South America, he explored the Amazon and promptly fell into the same trap that had snagged Columbus, in that Vespucci initially insisted on calling the Amazon "the Ganges." However, with his superior skills as an astronomer, he did develop a method for determining longitude which became the standard for 300 years, and was able to estimate the circumference of the Earth to within 50 miles.

On his second trip in 1501 (this time on behalf of Portugal rather than Spain), Vespucci made his breakthrough: tracing the coast of the continent down to within 400 miles of Tierra del Fuego, he charted his progress and came to the realization that the land was not India at all, but an entirely "New World" previously unheard of in the courts of Western Europe. With that also came the revolutionary realization that there were 2 great oceans rather than one separating Europe from Asia to the West -- one greater than the one that Columbus had crossed and which Columbus had never even reached because of the big continents that stood between them. Vespucci reported his findings to the Medicis in 2 brief but erudite letters, the first called Novus Mundus (or "New World"), which when published shortly thereafter caused a sensation. He died on February 22, 1512 in Seville, Spain.

Meanwhile, Vespucci himself never presumed to name the new continent for himself; the name came from a map published by a German preacher named Martin Waldseemuller in 1507, who mistakenly declared Vespucci the discoverer of the continent, and upon that claim quite naturally decided it should be named for him. Columbus, for his part, never gave up believing that he had found the route to India, and though he continues to get all the credit for having discovered the New World, it was Vespucci who figured out that it was "New."