Piecing together the library’s display of quilts

The quilts are back! The won­der­fully tal­ented mem­bers of the Delaware Piece­mak­ers Quilt Guild have once again gra­ciously lent their quilts to the Delaware County Dis­trict Library for a month-long dis­play at the Delaware Main Library, 84 E. Win­ter St., to cel­e­brate Nation Quilt Month. The quilts, draped artis­ti­cally from the rail­ing on the mez­za­nine enhance the Library with color, cre­ativ­ity and warmth.

The exhibit includes mod­ern, tra­di­tional and antique quilts in a vari­ety of famil­iar and inno­v­a­tive pat­terns and in a rain­bow of col­ors. The quil­ters are from all over cen­tral Ohio, with many of them Delaware res­i­dents. As in past quilt shows, the Piece­mak­ers have pro­vided a num­bered key to the quilts, detail­ing the pat­tern, date of cre­ation and other inter­est­ing facts about each one.

You will have the oppor­tu­nity to admire the hand­i­work of the Piece­mak­ers through the month of March, so plan on drop­ping by the library soon. This dis­play is a peren­nial favorite at the Delaware County Dis­trict Library, and we are pleased to be able to pro­vide an ideal venue to show­case these beau­ti­ful quilts for our community.

Who was Har­riet Quimby?

I started my search for this answer with an old stan­dard, The World Book Ency­clo­pe­dia. Har­riet Quimby was an avi­a­tor and jour­nal­ist. Born in Arroyo Grande, Calif., she became the first woman to earn her pilot’s license in 1911, eight years after the first flight of the Wright Broth­ers. She was also the first woman to fly across the Eng­lish Chan­nel on April, 16, 1912. Her accom­plish­ment received lit­tle media atten­tion, how­ever, as the sink­ing of the RMS Titanic on April 15 con­sumed the inter­est of the pub­lic and filled news­pa­pers. On July 1, 1912, Quimby flew at the Third Annual Boston Avi­a­tion Meet near Quincy, Mass. Dur­ing a flight with the meet’s orga­nizer, William A. P. Willard, in her brand new two-seat Ble­riot mono­plane at an alti­tude of 1,500 feet, the air­craft unex­pect­edly pitched for­ward for rea­sons still unknown. Both Willard and Quimby were ejected from their seats and fell to their deaths, while the plane glided down and lodged itself in the mud.

Why are uniden­ti­fied peo­ple named “John Doe?”

The John Doe cus­tom was born out of a strange and long since van­ished British legal process called an action of eject­ment. Accord­ing to West’s Ency­clo­pe­dia of Amer­i­can Law, under old Eng­lish com­mon law, the actions landown­ers could take against squat­ters or default­ing ten­ants in court were often too tech­ni­cal and dif­fi­cult to be of any use. So land­lords would instead bring an action of eject­ment on behalf of a fic­ti­tious ten­ant against another fic­ti­tious per­son who had allegedly evicted or ousted him. In order to fig­ure out what rights to the prop­erty the made-up per­sons had, the courts first had to estab­lish that the land­lord really was the owner of the prop­erty, which set­tled his real rea­son for action with­out him hav­ing to jump through too many legal hoops. Fre­quently, land­lords named the fic­ti­tious par­ties in their actions John Doe (the plain­tiff) and Richard Roe (the defen­dant), though no one has been able to find the case where these names were first used or fig­ure out why they were picked.

Why do we mea­sure engine power in horsepower?

Early 18th-century steam engine entre­pre­neurs needed a way to express how pow­er­ful their machines were, and the indus­tri­ous James Watt hit on a funny idea for com­par­ing engines to horses. As noted in His­tor­i­cal Inven­tions on File, Watt stud­ied horses and found that the aver­age har­nessed equine worker could lift 550 pounds at a clip of roughly one foot per sec­ond, which equated to 33,000-foot-pounds of work per minute. The stan­dard for mea­sur­ing mechan­i­cal horse­power, also known as impe­r­ial horse­power, of exactly 550-foot-pounds per sec­ond is approx­i­mately equiv­a­lent to 745.7 watts.

If you have a ques­tion that you would like to see answered in this col­umn, mail it to Mary Jane San­tos, Delaware County Dis­trict Library, 84 E. Win­ter St., Delaware, OH 43015, or call 740–362-3861. You can also email your ques­tions by vis­it­ing delawarelibrary.org or directly to Mary Jane at mjsantos@delawarelibrary.org. No mat­ter how you con­tact us, we’re always glad you asked.

Posted by Mary Santos on Mar 17 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.