Ever wondered who the oldest (that is, earliest born) person to have appeared in a motion picture might be? Well, I can’t be certain — there are so many uncredited parts in, say, early DW Griffith films — but I may have found the oldest person listed on IMDB: Sarah Whitley (born Sarah Robinson), who portrayed herself in “Roundhay Garden Scene”, an 1888 short documentary film.
She was born in 1816 in Wakefield, Yorkshire, England and died in 1888 — making her the first person who appeared in film to die.
To put this in perspective, this woman was born the year the Bonapartes were forever banished from France; the year Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” premiered in Rome; the year Lord Byron finished “Siege of Corinth”; the year the 2nd Bank of the US is chartered, and the year the first savings bank in the US opens; the year the Gas Light Company of Baltimore is founded; the year Indiana becomes a state; the year James Monroe is elected the fifth US President; and the year Lord Exmouth launches an assault Algiers, a refuge for Barbary pirates. Just four years before her birth, Francis Scott Key wrote “Defence of Fort McHenry” after witnessing the British Navy bombard Fort McHenry from the Chesapeake Bay in a battle of the War of 1812; that poem became “The Star-Spangled Banner” and was recognized for official use by the Navy in 1889, a year after Ms Whitley’s death.
The War of 1812 lasted until 1815, the year before Ms Whitley was born.
Hawthorne wouldn’t publish The Scarlet Letter until Whitley was in her mid thirties; Poe’s great detective, Auguste Dupin, wouldn’t make his first appearance until she was 25; and James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, would continue to live until Ms Whitley was 20.
I don’t know why, but I find this kind of thing fascinating. For what it’s worth.
****
update: Whitley was born 196 years ago; meaning that she was born closer to 1621 than she was to today — or, if you’d like, closer to the appointment of Miles Standish as 1st commander of Plymouth colony than to Obama’s re-election bid, or closer to Galileo’s inventing of the telescope than the premiere of the iPad 2.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1951)
“What the hell is a McNugget?” — Squid’s dad, 1983.
Sort of like James Burke’s Connections.
If your question is taken a different way then Jeanne Calment becomes the answer.
I also found the fact that some of John Tyler’s grandsons are still living to be endlessly interesting.
1816
1888
In a similar vein, interesting photos mixing past and present
http://www.retronaut.co/2011/10/rephotographing-st-petersburg/
I have had the pleasure of knowing a many oldsters throughout my lifetime and most of them were great story tellers. (A few of them were crotchety old sour pusses, but I digress.)
For instance, my former FIL was a young boy when Charles Lindbergh flew his airplane across the Atlantic to Paris and recalled listening to the broadcast on the radio. Pops drove a Model A when he was young and attending Widener University at Penn. Fast forward to the 60s with the space race and watching man walk on the moon, home computers, cell phones, hip replacements and the miracle of modern medicine that allowed him to live to be more than 90.
My maternal grandmother was a a beautiful girl who was a flapper in the 20’s, married and had 3 children before she was 21, and divorced her cheatin’ husband in the 30’s. Scandalous! She knew a bunch of bootleggers and criminals like the Barrow gang and Pretty Boy Floyd. I have pictures of her that I should make into a flip book of Peggy through the ages since she has her foot on the running board or up on the bumper of various shiny Fords from the 20s to the 60s. She dyed her hair flaming red when she was in her 70s, smoked Newports and would take all your money playing cards.
Connections and the Day the Universe Changed,
damn if those Brits don’t know how to make watchable tv history. That must be THC’s problem —not enough Brits.
updated: Whitley was born 196 years ago; meaning that she was born closer to 1621 than she was to today — or, if you’d like, closer to the appointment of Miles Standish as 1st commander of Plymouth colony than to Obama’s re-election bid, or closer to Galileo’s inventing of the telescope than the premiere of the iPad 2.
Locally, the 80/90 -something year old daughter of a Titanic survivor was a minor celebrity over the weekend. Sadly, her father never mentioned meeting either Leonardo or Kate.
Connections was produced in the late 70s or early 80s. It should go into syndication for the next generation.
Cool.
I didn’t even realize there were moving pictures that far back.
In the early 1960s, my family used to visit my great uncle who lived on a small farm in the backwaters of the Chesapeake Bay and who was in his 80s at the time. Besides a very few modern amenities, the farmhouse was a time capsule. But the thing that caused my historical epiphany was seeing the cane that had belonged to my great uncle’s father. He’d been shot in the foot at the Battle of Antietam Creek and field surgeons amputated his leg just below the knee.
Roundhay Garden Scene
You should link that series on NYC tenements again, sdferr. Great pics and only 100 years ago.
Connections and The Day the Universe Changed are on Youtube for downloading.
When I was a youngster, there was a hill not far from where I grew up that I would go to some evenings to think about the day and other things. It looked out over several other towns, and had on it a cemetery filled with old graves, many from revolutionary times. I would read the tombstones and wonder what their lives and world were like, and wonder what they would think if they could be standing there next to me, enjoying the view. Wondering if they would even recognize the view. I would often end my ruminations with the realization that not only were these people long gone, but everyone and everything they knew, indeed everyone on the planet who had lived in their time, were long gone. And although I stood on the same ground they had once walked on, we might as well been from different planets.
My grandma- mom’s mom- was born in 1902. She was a nurse, and brought me into the world at home, because I was in such a hurry that I couldn’t wait for the ambulance. I often wondered, and still do now and then, what she thought of all the changes and wonders in her lifetime, and the stories she would tell me about the world before my time.
As a young girl, she had seen bread for two cents a loaf; fresh milk and fruit delivered to her door by men on horse drawn carts, and the first cars taking hold on those same streets where once only horses moved. Men flying in the sky in new machines called airplanes. Gathered with her family for news from the first world war where two of her brothers fought in Europe. Refrigerators replacing the ice box. Struggling through the great depression; again gathered with her family to hear of the beginning of another great war, this time in her parents native Poland, and praying for family still called that land home. The day news came of a terrible new weapon called ‘atomic bombs’ that would end that war.
A thing called ‘television’, in which people and events from all over magically appeared on a box in her living room.
And I remember stealing glances at her as we all sat in our living room, watching men, our countrymen, actually land on the Moon.
I think that much of the wonder and magic is missing from the world today. How many watched the last shuttle liftoff, and how many appreciated the wonder and magic in such a thing.
So it’s not just you. Grandma passed in 1975, but she is in my thoughts everyday. I remember, and through her and other loved ones who have gone before me, I remember many things. Even things long gone before my time, and still feel the wonder and magic in it all.
TaiChiWawa —
I started out looking for this because I was watching some old silent Our Gang shorts and I kept wondering if any of the actors might have fought in the Civil War. I found one guy credited who was born in 1848, which got me looking to see how far back I could find a birth date on a credited film role.
The fact that she was born closer to the execution of Charles the First than to the death of Whitney Houston or Mike Wallace, well, that just blows my tiny mind.
so I post this to facebook and naturally somebody comes along to tell me she was only 72 and that older people have appeared in film.
I hate people.
Honestly.
I remember back in high school being struck by the idea that I could be breathing the same, albeit recycled, air as Da Vinci or Aristotle or Jesus.
I often have those moments, usually before I fall asleep, of time compressing or expanding and sort of kind of but not quite getting at what Einstein was trying to express mathmatically about time. Is it a continuum or a Mobius Band? My youngest son is a math wizard and was explaining the physics of time travel to me the other day. Thank god he wants to be an astronomer.
Unfriend them, Jeff. That’ll show ’em.
Wasn’t me, I swear.
Film as a physical medium for capturing images will soon become a thing of the past.
I don’t think so. All media deteriorates over time and there are vast film libraries dedicated to preserving old film. Much has been lost due to poor storage conditions already, however. Be careful about capturing all your photos on digital materials since they will degrade as well.
LA Weekly (April 12, 2012)
Thanks, TaiChiWawa. This has been shaping up to be a battle royale for a number of years. I hope that enough heavy hitters come down on the side of celluloid film. 3D may be teh awesome for some applications, but it isn’t for everything and I’m not certain that it won’t wane in popularity again.
Celluloid forces the production staff to be disciplined in a way that digital does not.
After we’ve completely digitized everything, we’ll be ready for the next Dark Age.
The problem with digital platforms is that they outpace themselves all the time. Who here is running Windows7? Who has tried the beta version of Windows8? I’ll save you the time: it sucks. Like most MS products, they toss it out there for the customer to debug for them.
We have at least two VHS players gathering dust. DVD players were fine until they went Blu-ray. All our tvs are HD now. My cell phone is about the size of a Zippo lighter since I don’t need an iPhone even though that would be supercool. 14 years ago I had a cellphone that looked like it belonged to Maxwell Smart, the old shoe phone. We have flatscreen monitors and trashed all the old CRTs because even the schools or the thrift stores didn’t want them. It was the same thing with our old school tvs. I gave them to the Church. They got rid of them.
We shouldn’t be in such a hurry for New! Desi Arnaz got rich as Midas because he filmed all the old I Love Lucy shows which are still in syndication.
Film as a physical medium for capturing images will soon become a thing of the past.
nah it will become a niche market. me i’m taking up b&w 35 mm photo again after a long hiatus( 20 yr).
” Jeff G. says April 16, 2012 at 11:50 am
so I post this to facebook and naturally somebody comes along to tell me she was only 72 and that older people have appeared in film.
I hate people.
Honestly.”
That’s what the unsubscribe and block functions are for! It’s only facebook. You’re the product not the customer. You are an eloi being fed ads by morlocks. Which is way better than them raising you for meat but still kind of creepy.
The lives of twenty 100 year old guys is all that separates us from Jesus. It’s like he just left!
I remember back in high school being struck by the idea that I could be breathing the same, albeit recycled, air as Da Vinci or Aristotle or Jesus.
That is almost a mathematical certainty (so many nines that the display locks up)…
It was some outrageously high number, but the math I remember showed that there are approximately the same number of air molecules per lungful as there are lungfuls in our atmosphere (in the hundreds of quadrillions, IIRC), so with the mixing and circulation over the centuries, it is almost a certainty that you are breathing a molecule of air from Julius Caesar’s dying gasp “Et tu, Brute?”
Sweet dreams :)
Regarding palaeomerus’ comment at 2:58;
Heh, don’t you feel better now, Jeff?
Drumwaster at 3:17;
Heh, you’re killing me.
That’s just what St. Iraneus thought when he was only slightly less removed from time Jesus walked the shores of Galilee with the Twelve than we are from the ratification of the Constitution.
Isn’t that awesome, Drumwaster?
I love going to old places (although I have yet to get out of the US, so I live vicariously through others travels) and thinking about all of the other people who have lived there. And museums! It’s so cool to see Egyptian antiquities and other artifacts, raffia baskets and the like.
I remember when I was pretty little, we were out hiking and found a cave that was full of sharks teeth, way up on a hill that must have been under the sea at one time. Pretty cool.
Another way to look at it is that there have only been 50 generations since Jesus walked the earth, maybe 230 generations since the pyramids were built, or perhaps 600 generations since the first recorded instance of agriculture.
When it comes to year zero stuff or just digesting refined carbohydrates, how fast does evolution work?
HAMLET: Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’ the earth?
HORATIO: E’en so.
HAMLET: And smelt so? pah!
HORATIO: E’en so, my lord.
HAMLET: To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?
HORATIO: ‘Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.
HAMLET: No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel? Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away: O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe, should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!
Abraham Lincoln was 7 when Sarah Whitley was born and when she did her film his Presidency was closer in the past to her than Reagan’s is to us.
Things that fascinate me – I really didn’t expect to live in historic times. OK, forget Korea, Bay of Pigs, Cold War, Vietnam, Kent State, Woodstock, Carter, Reagan, Disco, Clinton, Somalia, Iraq I, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq II, Bush, Obama, Great Recession, Obamacare, Tea Party, 2010, etc.
Really. I didn’t think it was all that historic. But demise of the Republic? That makes my list.
Oh, yeah. Somewhere in there I served, and I acquired a wife and son who all make it worthwhile.
And I’m pretty sure I breathed some of Michelangelo’s air.
It’s even more fun to contemplate that you’ve probably drank water molecules that they once pissed.
Man, what a buzzkill Pablo.
I didn’t think it was all that historic.
Walking on the moon!
Also, I think this new-fangled Internet thingie will come to be seen as an innovation that changed the world.
I remember back in high school being struck by the idea that I could be breathing the same,
pot smoke as my doobie brother
They don’t call it “high” school for nothing, nr.
Joey Hairplugs gets the Bad Lip Reading treatment. It’s not much different from what you’d expect him to say, which is to say it’s hilarious.
“Why are you people clapping?” BLR is the new JibJab!
I sat in a conference room near Washington, DC, about 15 years ago and heard a senior government representative say that she was going to wait for what came after the Internet to upgrade.
Yup, missed all things space and tech on that list.
leigh,
Pablo
didn’t harsh my mellow at all. After all, we are all stardust. CSN&Y told me so.