Dublin Whiskey Fire

It's not a unit per se but an actual size of liquor casks, equivalent to two barrels (also a standard unit in England but is the generic term for casks in US) or fourth (1/4) of a tun (the largest liquor cask defined), although you can use them all as units.

Fun fact: hogsheads are abbreviated as hhds :)

My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it

Equivalent to 2500 butts.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_measurements

...and a hogwart is a subdivision of the hogshead (1728 hogwarts = 1 hogshead).

I am going to defend imperial (and other ancient) units of measurement.

The metric system is unintuitive but standardized.

The imperial system is intuitive but (traditionally) non-standardized.

A standardized but unintuitive system is useful in modern science and engineering, where reliability and precision are of utmost importance.

An intuitive but non-standardized system is useful for day-to-day communication and conceptualization, where a standard deviation away from the average of the unit's reference does not have a meaningful effect.

Before standardization, many old units of measurement could be immediately related to everyday things, making conceptualization simple and intuitive.

Examples:

Imperial pound of mass: A pound of wheat berries is more or less how many wheatberries I can fit in my hand. I deal with wheat berries and my hands every single day - I can quite concretely conceptualize a pound and more or less relate that pound (of wheat berries) to other things: a pound of meat, a pound of wool, etc.

Imperial acre: An acre is more or less the amount of land that a pair of oxen can plow in a day. In our old little village, oxen and farm fields are something we observe every single day, and so an acre is conceptually intuitive to us.

Ancient cubit: This is more or less the length of my forearm, which again serves as a very useful reference point for measuring and conceptualizing things. Say I go to build a cabinet. I may measure in cubits. Then, when I go to cut lumber, I just measure it with my forearm, cut, and that's it.

Imperial hogshead: I speculate this barrel size is more or less either the size of an ox's head, or can tightly fit one inside it. Again, this is an animal I might observe daily, making conceptualization simple.

Note that a standard deviation of the size of an average man's hand or forearm, or of the amount of land a given pair of oxen can plow on a given day, does not have a meaningful impact on how I use and relate these units of measurement to everyday life - I'm not precision engineering a space telescope here. I'm just buying wheat berries, plowing fields, and building cabinets.

Contrast these origins with metric's.

Metric meter: "one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator through Paris" - whoa get me outta here! I can't relate that to anything I encounter in my day-to-day life.

Metric gram: "the mass of one cubic centimeter of water", or "the mass of one cubic 'one hundredth of one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator through Paris' of water"

Of course we can still more or less relate these metric units to things in our day-to-day life for better conceptualization, but because they're arbitrary, they don't map 1:1, whereas imperial and ancient units were naturally emergent rather than arbitrary and they mapped one to one per their definitions.

This is why imperial is a more useful system for relaying measurements colloquially, for everyday life.

From the Gaelic word for Barrel 'tocsaid'.

I wonder if there's a definition of a non-water fluid in this context.

Would zero-calories lightly flavored seltzer count? Most people probably consider that water... But presumably hard seltzer would definitely count, as would Pepsi Max. So maybe it's a combination of factors like energy content, flavor, aroma, color, etc.

I'm Irish-American and a recovering alcoholic. I'm actually surprised only 13 people drank too much from a river of free whiskey and died.

> the idea of Irishmen drinking themselves to death in a whisky flood

If there's an actual flood of heated alcohol, then you might get poisoning just from inhaling? It's hard to avoid breathing, really.

> the idea of Irishmen drinking themselves to death in a whisky flood is... something my wee dram of Irish blood is not qualified to comment on, but it only killed a dozen people.

Kind of shocked by this. Why did the indulge like that? One could go to any college party in the US and find enough alcohol to kill themselves and yet it rarely happens. Were there that many people in Dublin that were hopeless alcoholics at the time?

You wouldn’t think 90cm would be deep enough to cause too much trouble initially.

But imagine the cleanup.

Curious where this was

> bounded by Flushing Avenue on the north, Park Avenue on the south, Waverley Avenue on the west and Washington Avenue on the east

Found it. It's by the Brooklyn Navy Yards: https://goo.gl/maps/uat3hq47dvV9tQaTA

in fact, the building still exists,

from wikipedia "Front of main plant, 1918": https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Industri...

it's on the Washington and Park corner: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6960688,-73.9674585,3a,75y,3...

I don't understand how that could happen in Brooklyn in 1919 without being photographed.

Yeah, maybe don’t. I’m Irish and I’m sick to death of the stereotype of Irish as jolly drunkards. I recently went to see “The Glass Menagerie” play and the biggest (maybe only) laugh of the night was when the mother expressed surprise that an individual was “Irish on both sides but not an alcoholic”. Ha fucking ha. If I could go to the theatre and not have my nationality be the butt of lazy racist jokes that would be great, thanks.

And this isn’t harmless. I’ve worked in tech all my life, mostly outside of Ireland, and the “jolly drunkard” is certainly not a helpful stereotype when you’re trying to be taken seriously and progress in your career, I’ve experienced the unpleasant labelling myself (despite I’m teetotal) and frequently seen it applied to other Irish people.

Looking at the cited source text for this quote, the Wikipedia rewrite seems to take some licence, and the original source itself cited "folk memory", likely itself coloured by stereotypes at the time (a time when Ireland was still under British rule & the population thereof still derided by most academics/ writers, who were by-and-large not Irish) and from an American perspective (the paper is a University of California Press/London publication) Irish immigration was at its highest (with all the accompanying societal prejudices that entails).

Needless to say, this probably happened, but I'd take the specific details of the events described with liberal handfuls of salt.

> Guess I found a brand new piece of trivia to share with my Irish friends and co-workers.

I really wouldn't. They'll probably laugh politely, we're very used to this. But this won't endear you.

For what it's worth I don't think an incident like that would have played out any differently if it had occurred in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester or London.

No, a grand total of 13 people out of an entire city population overdosed to death when given access to unlimited alcohol.

I doubt any other city would do better. London sure as hell wouldn't.

They most likely breathed in the vapor.

Saying a river of whiskey sounds interesting but it was more likely that they drank pure alcohol or it was simply contaminated from the journey through the city.

The big rocky candy mountain would be our downfall for sure.

If they didn't drink the whisky it would have burned down more houses those people are true Irish heros.

Agreed, "Dublin Whiskey Fire of 1875" or some such, would be fine.

From the article:

None of the fatalities suffered during the fire were due to smoke inhalation, burns, or any other form of direct contact with the fire itself; all of them were attributed to alcohol poisoning.

What a way to go.

Mexico is in North America

You know the best wikipedia articles start off like that, lol