The Oxford English Dictionary Was Partly Written by a Murderer in an Insane Asylum

 The Oxford English Dictionary is one of the most ambitious intellectual projects in human history.

The project began in 1857. The goal was to compile a complete record of every word in the English language with historical examples showing when and how each word was used going back to its earliest known appearance. Volunteers from around the world were invited to read books and send in quotations on slips of paper illustrating specific words in use.

It took 70 years to complete the first edition. The final volume was published in 1928.

One of the most prolific contributors over a 20 year stretch submitted nearly ten thousand entries. His citations were meticulous, detailed, and extraordinarily useful to the editors. He worked from an enormous personal library that he had assembled over years of dedicated reading.

His name was Dr. William Chester Minor. He was an American Civil War surgeon. And he was writing his entries from a cell in Broadmoor, Britain's most secure institution for the criminally insane, where he had been confined since 1872 after shooting and killing a man in London.

What Happened to Minor

Minor served as a Union Army surgeon during the Civil War and was exposed to battlefield horrors that left him severely mentally disturbed. He developed paranoid delusions that persisted for the rest of his life. He believed he was being pursued by Irish conspirators who broke into his room at night and tortured him.

In 1872 he shot and killed a man named George Merritt in London, believing in his delusional state that Merritt was one of his pursuers. He was tried for murder, found not guilty by reason of insanity, and committed to Broadmoor.

From inside Broadmoor he found purpose in the dictionary project. He wrote to the editors, received books, and spent his days reading and sending in carefully researched quotations. His contributions were so valuable that when the editor James Murray finally visited to meet the contributor he assumed had to be a distinguished scholar or professor, he was shocked to find himself in an asylum.

The two men became friends. Murray advocated for better treatment for Minor and eventually for his release. Minor was eventually repatriated to the United States in 1910 where he died in 1920.

Why This Story Matters

The story of William Minor is remarkable on its own terms. But it also illustrates something important about how knowledge gets built.

The Oxford English Dictionary was not constructed by a small group of experts working in a university. It was built from contributions by thousands of volunteers across decades. Vicars in country parishes. Schoolteachers. Retired professionals. And one deeply troubled man in a locked room in an asylum who found in the act of careful reading and cataloguing a purpose that kept him connected to the world outside his cell.

The dictionary contains his words. His citations are there. His labor is woven into the fabric of one of the greatest reference works in the English language.

What people are capable of even in the most constrained circumstances is one of the recurring lessons of history. Minor's story is one of its most extraordinary examples.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

How to Turn Your Old Home Videos Into a Family Archive That Lasts Forever

 Somewhere in your house or your parents house there is probably a box of old tapes.

VHS. Betamax. 8mm film. Hi8. MiniDV. Camcorder tapes from the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s when home video recording became affordable and families documented everything.

Birthdays. Holidays. First steps. School plays. Ordinary Saturdays. The kind of footage that feels mundane when you record it and becomes irreplaceable twenty years later.

Those tapes are dying.

The Problem With Old Tape Formats

Magnetic tape degrades over time. The magnetic particles that hold the video signal gradually separate from the tape backing. The image and sound quality deteriorates. Eventually the tape becomes unplayable.

Most consumer videotape from the 1970s through the 1990s has an estimated useful life of 15 to 30 years under normal storage conditions. Many of those tapes are already at or past that limit. Every year that passes without digitizing them makes the footage on them harder or impossible to recover.

The playback equipment is also disappearing. VHS players are no longer manufactured. Stores that repair them are increasingly rare. Finding a working VCR in good condition is already becoming difficult. Within another decade it may be nearly impossible.

This is not a distant problem. This is happening right now. The window to rescue what is on those tapes is closing.

What You Can Do

You have several options depending on your budget and how much of the work you want to do yourself.

The easiest option is to use a digitization service. Companies like Legacybox, ScanMyPhotos, and iMemories will accept your old tapes by mail and return digital files. These services typically cost between $10 and $30 per tape. You box up the tapes, send them in, and get back digital files you can store on a hard drive or in the cloud. If you have a lot of tapes this adds up but it requires no technical skill and no equipment.

If you want to do it yourself and you have access to the right playback equipment you can connect an old VCR or camcorder to a computer using a video capture device, an inexpensive piece of hardware that costs between $10 and $60, and record the output as a digital file. The quality depends on the condition of the tape and the playback equipment.

For 8mm film rather than tape, which many families have from the 1950s through the 1970s, professional digitization is usually the better choice. Film requires different equipment and the results from DIY attempts are often poor.

Where to Store What You Digitize

Once you have digital files treat them the way you would treat any important digital content.

Save copies in multiple places. Your computer and at least one external hard drive. A cloud backup service. Send copies to family members who can store them independently.

For permanent archiving upload copies to the Internet Archive at archive.org. Video uploads are accepted and preserved indefinitely for free. Your family's home videos will be accessible to your descendants a hundred years from now.

Label everything before you upload. The year, the occasion, the names of the people in the video. A video file called home_video_1994_robert_jr_first_birthday.mp4 will be found and understood by future generations. A file called tape003.avi will not.

Why This Matters

Home video is something that no previous generation in history had access to. Your great-grandparents left photographs if you were lucky. Your grandparents left photographs and maybe some 8mm film. You have the ability to leave moving pictures with sound that show exactly what your life looked like.

That is an extraordinary gift to give to future generations. But only if the tapes survive long enough to be digitized.

Start with the oldest tapes first. The ones from the 1980s are more at risk than the ones from 2005. Prioritize the tapes that show people who are no longer living. A video of a grandmother who passed away ten years ago is not replaceable by anything. Rescue that one first.

The box of tapes in the closet is waiting. The footage on those tapes is already decades old. Do not let it become any older before you act.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

Nellie Bly Faked Her Way Into an Asylum and Exposed Horrors That Shocked the Nation

 In 1887 a 23 year old journalist named Elizabeth Cochran walked into a New York boarding house, convinced the other residents that she was acting strangely, and got herself committed to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island in New York City.

She was not insane. She was a reporter working for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Her editor had given her a straightforward assignment. Get inside the asylum and report what you find.

What she found changed American mental health policy.

What She Did to Get In

Nellie Bly, the pen name she wrote under, spent days practicing a blank stare and erratic behavior in her mirror before presenting herself at the boarding house. She convinced the other residents and the doctor who examined her that she was genuinely disturbed. She was taken to court, examined by a judge, and committed.

Multiple doctors examined her before she was admitted to Blackwell's Island. None of them identified her as sane. The ease with which she moved through the system and ended up institutionalized against her will told its own story about how little it actually took to be locked away in 1887.

What She Found Inside

The conditions at Blackwell's Island were brutal. Patients were given rotten food, cold baths administered as punishment, and physical abuse from attendants. Women who entered the institution not mentally ill were driven toward genuine breakdown by the conditions they were subjected to.

Bly interviewed other patients and found women who had been committed for being too spirited, for speaking a foreign language, or simply for being poor and inconvenient to someone with the ability to have them removed.

She spent ten days inside before her editor arranged her release. She then wrote a series of articles for the World that were collected into a book called Ten Days in a Mad-House.

The public reaction was immediate and significant. A grand jury investigation was launched. The Department of Public Charities and Corrections increased its budget for the care of the insane by over a million dollars. Conditions at Blackwell's Island and other similar institutions were reviewed and reformed.

Nellie Bly's reporting did not fix the entire American mental health system. Problems persisted for decades. But her willingness to put herself inside the story and report what she experienced firsthand produced results that no amount of outside criticism had achieved.

She was 23 years old.

She went on to circle the globe in 72 days, beating the record set by the fictional Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's novel. She spent her career doing things women were told they could not do and reporting stories people in power preferred to keep quiet.

Her name belongs in the history of American journalism much more prominently than it currently occupies.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.