Whisker Rebellion

want doesn't instill good feelings within us. It breeds resentment and anger, and it can make us act out in unbecoming ways. Roland Roly Fingers didn't know that he was jealous when he caught a glimpse of Reggie Jackson walking onto the field in two fingers in. Jackson played for the Oakland Athletics baseball team as pitcher and outfielder, respectively. Jackson had arrived at spring training that year sporting a brand new mustache, a blatant act of rebellion against the

unwritten policy that forbade players from growing facial hair. When it became clear that Jackson wanted to only stand out apart from the rest of the crowd, Fingers and a few other players thought that they'd play a little prank on him. He and his teammates, like Jim Catfish Hunter, grew their own mustaches too. Now, what they expected was that the A's manager, Dick Williams would tell everyone to

shave them off, including Jackson. Williams was a conservative man who, along with other managers, believed that players should be clean shaven at all times. Instead, team owner Charlie Finley got wind of what Fingers was doing. He thought the small rebellion would be a great way to draw crowds out to the stadium to see all those mustachioed men playing ball.

Finley even offered a three incentive for any player sporting a mustache or beard by opening day, which happily paid after Fingers ran to the mound wearing what would become his trademark look, an epic handlebar mustache, and just like that, the picture had become a member of the Oakland A's infamous mustache Gang. What Finley hadn't counted on was Fingers actually liking his facial hair. Raleigh, like many athletes, was

a superstitious fellow. From the first pitch that season, the A's started winning games, so there was no way the mustache was coming off, and as long as they were winning, Williams and Finley didn't care whether their players wore a pencil mustache, a goatee, or a big white beard like Santa Claus Heck. Finley even grew one himself. Fingers played for the A's for another four years, winning three World

Series championships and earning an m v P Award. Then he signed with the San Diego Padres, playing from nineteen seventy seven to nineteen eighty before moving to the Milwaukee Brewers. Sadly, a series of injuries and health setbacks kept Fingers out of his nineteen eighty three season with the Brewers, and he needed back surgery to remove a hernie aided disc the year after that, but he did eventually return to

the pitcher's mound almost as good as new. The Brewers released him in nineteen eighty five, when he was thirty nine years old. Now, for most players, that would have been the end of their professional careers, but Fingers still had some fight left in him. Cincinnati Red's manager Pete Rose saw that fight and tried to get him to sign on with him. There was just one catch, a rule that had come from the team's owner, Marge Shot,

which every player was forced to obey. Shots beloved St. Bernard SHOTSI was the only living thing allowed on the field to have hair anywhere but the top of its head. Any player working for her was required to shave their facial hair if they wanted to put on a Red's uniform. Raleigh Fingers didn't much care for shots rule. By two he'd become the first pitcher to reach three hundred saves, and he was just over six years away from being

inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Yet, despite his impressive career, many fans today remember him for just one decision that changed his entire life. Fingers was all set to join the Reds in six but the blanket policy about no facial hair just didn't sit well with him. He got on the phone with the general manager to work out a deal, but unfortunately Shot wouldn't budge, and if Fingers hoped to play ball, he had to follow the rule. The mustache had to go. Given no other option,

Fingers put his foot down for good. He chose his mustache over his career, officially retiring from professional baseball in just one family was responsible for all nineties. Seven lighthouses built along the coast of Scotland between seventeen ninety and ninety. Today those Scottish lighthouses are automated. The weather beaten lighthouse keepers were replaced with computers, Tungsten bulbs were swapped out

for l ed's. It was the process of change that comes for everything from the past as new minds experiment with past achievements. But it's still a story worth telling, in part because, like many ambitious and important projects, it all started with a tragedy. That's when Robert was just a boy and his father and uncle had died. They were merchants from Glasgow and they made their living shipping goods across the Atlantic on a trip to the island of St Kitts, though the two men got sick when

they died. They left Robert and his mother at home in Scotland to make do. Life was hard, but Robert eventually met the man who would marry his mother and light his way forward. He was a tinsmith, a skilled mechanic and crucially a lampmaker, and he had just been selected as the engineer for the new Northern Lighthouse Board. So young Robert became engineer's assistant. That meant he had a lot of learning to do, but he took to the rocky crags of the Scottish coast and the calculations

of stone and light like no one had expected. He was an excellent assistant, and in just a few short years he was on the job supervising the construction of lighthouses that his stepfather was designing. Engineering became his trade too. Maybe Robert thought about the death of his father when he stood on a cliff's edge and looked out over the ocean. The rocks and reefs off Scotland's coast had

taken thousands of lives. In one spot east of Dundee, about six ships were wrecked every winter on an underwater shelf of sandstone. It was known as Bell Rock, probably because in the hundreds a warning bell had been built, but it didn't last, and Robert knew that nothing protected ships in that spot. Now people were losing their lives and their livelihoods there every year. Generations of children were being orphaned by the sandstone hazards. So he got to

work building his most ambitious project. In fact, the project was so difficult and so expensive that at first the Northern Lighthouse Board thought it was impossible, but when the sixty four gun warship HMS Yorke went down on that spot and all four members of the crew were lost in the raging breakers that put the project into motion. They brought on one of the most esteemed engineers of the day, John Renny, to help with a design, while

Roberts and his building crew tackled the construction work. And it was a heroic challenge, not least because they could only work for a few hours each day at low tide before the waters swept in and reminded them that they were building their tower on a watery graveyard. But after four years the work was done. It's an incredible feat and it still stands today, the oldest sea washed tower in existence, built down into the partially submerged reef. It was a kind of wonder of the modern world.

It wasn't just lighthouses that Robert engineered, though over time he came to design and build bridges, roads and railways too, But it was his inventions of new kinds of lights for lighthouses that earned him the most respect. He even got a medal from the King of the Netherlands for that, and that set the tone for the family. Robert's three

us followed in his footsteps. They became a whole family of engineers, and in the years that followed, from seventeen ninety all the way up to nineteen forty eight, members of the family became engineers, experimented with new technologies, and built the nineties seven lighthouses that still like the North Sea and the Northern Atlantic. There are a few interesting things about that, though, not least that the family saw their work first and foremost as a duty to the nation.

Rather than taking on patents on their inventions, they offered them to the world, without expecting anything in return, without trying to turn their most helpful contributions into a new tide of wealth crashing into their personal coffers. But not everyone in the family was equally ready for the family business. One man who was named after that original Robert, found that it was the adventure on the high seas and the drama of life and death on the open ocean

that set him a light. And in fact, in the years that his family trained him to be an engineer, he learned something altogether different. What I gleaned I am sure I do not know, he said, but he had already determined to be something else. He loved the art of words, and he said that everything he learned from hardened sailors and genius technicians interested me only as properties for some possible romance, or as words to add to

my vocabulary. We can be grateful for all of that learning, though, the stormy seas and craggy rocks of the Scottish coast became the setting for some of Scottish literature's most beloved stories. When that Robert put his pen to paper, he set tales on scotland stormy coasts and engineered plots that would light the way for the coming generations of adventure seekers with a monumental achievement that rings down through the years,

like the lighthouse on Bell Rock. It was the second Roberts who put the family name in lights when he invented a crew of Wily Brigands in the wake of his father's journey to the Caribbean, and Robert Lewis Stevenson became known as the author of the most famous story of piracy and adventure in the English language, Jem Treasure Island. 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. Yeah,