Today -100: October 6, 1914: Of eyes and dyes, underwear, searchlights, and moltkes

Britain is running out of glass eyes – the best ones came from Germany.  Another opportunity for American business.

American textile firms, however, are being hurt by the German ban on the export of chemicals, which includes dyes.

While Woodrow Wilson wants presidential primaries to be held in every state on the same day, he admits there won’t be time enough to put this into effect for 1916.

Headline of the Day -100:  “TAKES OVER ALL UNDERWEAR.; War Office Forbids Leicester Makers to Sell Goods Privately.”  So to speak.

For some reason, British royal proclamations about the war, which at first described the war as being with the German and Austrian empires, now talk about a war with the German and Austrian emperors.

I think I mentioned notices going up in London saying don’t shoot at the airships, they’re ours.  We now know that what was going on was experiments in detecting airships.  It seems that searchlights can illuminate them even in the heaviest London fog.

Kaiser Wilhelm fires Helmuth von Moltke as chief of the army general staff because of some combination of incompetence, a nervous breakdown, and lack of sufficient obsequiousness to the kaiser (or as the NYT puts it, “the Kaiser wished to subordinate sound strategy to his spiteful desire to attack England”).  He will be replaced by Erich von Falkenhayn, the Prussian Minister of War.

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