Today -100: June 28, 1915: Of lamps, mazes of machinations, and boomeranging psyops

It’s the anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Inspired by his factory burning down six months ago, Thomas Edison invents a “fireman’s lamp,” a portable lamp with a two-pound battery that can see through smoke.

Former Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta and Gen. Pascual Orozco are arrested in New Mexico for violating US neutrality laws by planning military intervention in Mexico. Both are released on bond. Huerta claims he wasn’t about to cross into Mexico but is actually on a perfectly innocent visit to his daughter and then a vacation at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco, although curiously his ticket was only to El Paso.

Carranza applauds the US’s “act of justice” in disrupting Huerta’s “maze of machinations conducted in secrecy against the peace of Mexico by well-known reactionaries”.

Yes, he actually said “the peace of Mexico.”

The London Daily Mail claims that Austria, in talking up the idea of a separate peace with Serbia as a propaganda ploy to create difficulties between Serbia and Italy, nominal allies who both lust after the same territory, has unintentionally made the Italian public euphoric at a prospect of peace which is entirely unrealistic.

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