Just Dandy

or ugly shaved dogs walking backwards. I'm sure you can recall a few from your own childhood, except the ones hurling the insults weren't children, No far from it. They were grown men fighting a war. During the Revolutionary War, both the Americans and the British troops disparaged each other with the most deprecating putdowns they could come up with. It was war, after all, But instead of mere taunts, both sides used ditties, simple songs with memorable, pointed lyrics.

You see, the American and British troops played fifes and drums to signal battle, wake up, performed chores, and boost the men's fighting morale. As they headed to battle, both sides saying a variety of verses mocking the other. Each had their favorite targets to Americans love to insult King George the Third and the British love to insult the Americans.

For the British Red Coats, the melody They've Chosen had been around for a couple hundred years or more, but it was a quick witted British army doctor who is credited with revising the lyrics from their soldiers came up with even more verses, and the more degrading the better. It became a kind of competition within their troops. The title alone was meant to be as insulting as possible Yankee, Doodle, dandy, and yes, we sing this as a patriotic song today,

despite the original meaning behind the words. During war, Yankee was British slang for being an American rebel, whether derived from a similar sounding Cherokee word meaning coward or a Dutch word meaning little Johnny. Yankee wasn't meant as a compliment.

A doodle was a bumbling, sloppy fool, which is how the primly dressed British Redcoats saw the Americans, and the word dandy was an alternate word for a man obsessed with clothing in the mid seventeen hundreds, The most flamboyant and eccentrically dressed of these men were called Macaronis, which had nothing to do with Italian pasta. Macaronis were part of the British subculture who wore the tiniest of hats upon the largest of wigs, loud and flashy waistcoats, bright hosiery,

and dainty shoes. In Britain, these men's suspected orientation was nothing shorts of scandalous. In the song the bumbling American road to Town on a pony instead of a real horse. Lacking social grace or status, he placed a feather in his hat and declared himself as fashionable as the Macaronies. The innuendo was that the inept Americans couldn't even manage to be a proper member of the gay community. In April of seventeen seventy five, the British play the tune

from Boston to Lexington and Conquered. The battle with the Americans didn't go in their favor, though, and as the Red Coats hastily retreated, the drums, fife and singing played back the perky tune once more, not from the British, though the Americans now mocked them with their own rendition. One officer condemned the act, claiming the Rebels had made them dance until they were tired, and it wouldn't be

the last time either. After defeating the British at Saratoga in seventeen seventy seven, the Americans repeatedly serenaded the Red Coats with the song, causing an English officer to say hearing the once degrading words sung back at them in their moment of defeat was pure agony. The America Prikins had turned the insult around, making the tune their victory song, minimizing the mockery and disparaging the words meant as weapons.

As schoolyard insults went, the Rebels did a pretty good job with that old I'm rubber and your glue technique. The Americans sang it again at Yorktown, much to the Red coats chagrin. The catchy Diddy became the state anthem for Connecticut. Before long, the British came to loathe the song they had written. It haunted them on every battlefield.

The Rebels even sang the song at Fort McHenry, while Francis Scott Key wrote America's second national anthem, yes I said second, because Yankee dood old Andy was America's first. It was seen as the ugliest structure in Paris when Gustav Eiffel's ought iron structure began construction in July of eighteen eighties seven, over three hundred artists, sculptures, and fellow architects petition the World's Fair Commission against the plan. It

looked like a giant black smokestack. They protested. The tower would be a monstrosity so hideous and loathed that even the commercially minded Americans wouldn't want it. Their complaints were ignored, though that same commissioner helped choose Eiffel's design from over one other entries in a contest for the chance to build the centerpiece for the eighteen eighty nine Paris World's Fair, and while the tower bears Gustav's name, it actually was

one of his employees who drew the original design. Guzdav rejected the engineer's first submission, asking him to go back and add more flourishes. At a thousand feet tall, the Eiffel Tower became the world's tallest building. Over eighteen thousand pieces of iron were used, each of the four corners oriented with the four points of the compass, and for opening day, the tower had been painted a reddish brown color. While visitors from around the world marveled at the structure

during the fair, most Parisians considered it an isore. Novelist guy du Mampasan reportedly ate his lunch at the tower's base, the only place he could find where he could look at the skyline and not see the tower. Since Eiffel had paid eighty percent of the construction costs himself, the city granted him twenty years to recoup his money before tearing the tower down for scrap metal. For a small fee, people could take an elevator to the third floor to

enjoy a view of the city. In the past, only the wealthy could see Paris from such heights, and only from a hot air balloon. Ten years after the World's Fair, the tower was painted yellow to match the ever popular style trends of the city. While the tower brought in modest funds from visitors looking to view the world's most romantic city, it wasn't enough to make the tower more useful, Eiffel had a meteorology lab installed on the third floor,

buying the tower a little more time. In nineteen ten, during World War One, the government granted Eiffel an extension. The French found that the structure was useful to transmit telegraphs to ships in the Atlantic Ocean. The tower was also used to relay zeppelin alerts to dispatch troops reinforcements. They found other uses for it too. In nineteen o nine, Eiffel installed a wind tunnel at the tower's base. Companies and inventors have run thousands of tests in that tunnel,

including the Wright Brothers airplanes. In nineteen eleven, a German scientist used the tower to detect radiation levels known today as cosmic rays. In fact, seventy two of the country's most acclaimed scientists have their names engraved on the first floor gallery. Daredevils have also taken to the tower, the first in nineteen twelve, where a tailor attempted to fly from the first floor tower using a spring loaded parachute.

He crashed, though he luckily survived. Fourteen years later, another pilot attempted to fly between the four corners and died when his plane became entangled in the aerial wire station and burst into flames between nineteen twenty five. At nineteen thirty six, the French automobile company Citron paid to use

the tower as a giant billboard. The lights on the one hundred foot tall letters burned so bright that Charles Lindbergh used the Eiffel Tower as a beacon to land in Paris during his transatlantic solo flight of nineteen twenty seven. In nineteen forty, the French cut the elevator cables to the tower. The Germans who occupied Paris were forced to climb the stairs to fly the Nazi flag from the top. Hitler later ordered the tower destroyed, but his own general

disobeyed him. By nineteen fifty seven, television transmitters were attached to the tower, and at last the tower was declared a national treasure in nineteen sixty four. But it was an event fifty years earlier in nineteen fourteen that helped solidify the tower as a permanent structure, and it all had to do with capturing a spy. That year, a radio message was intercepted from the tower between Germany and Spain. The details not only allowed the French to counter organize

an attack. They also captured and executed the notorious spy Mata Harri. It's ironic, really, and more than a little curious. Although millions visit the famous landmark every year for what they can see, it was something invisible that ultimately saved the Eiffel Tower from becoming scrap metal radio waves. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about

the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.