Welcome back to A Little Wiser! Thanks for all the lovely feedback on last week's editions. And to everyone asking: yes, The Athenaeum is still on its way! We're just finalising one last partnership before the doors open. Today's wisdom explores:

The Great Emu War
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A Diamond Is Forever
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The 1904 Olympic Marathon

Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

In 1932, the young nation of Australia declared war on a bird and lost. The trouble began in the wheat belt of Western Australia. Veterans of the First World War had been settled onto farmland as a reward for their service, only to be crushed by the Great Depression and collapsing wheat prices. Then came the emus. Around 20,000 of the giant flightless birds, standing up to 1.8 meters tall and able to sprint at nearly 50 kilometers an hour, migrated from the dry interior toward the coast in search of food and water. They found the settlers' wheat fields laid out like a banquet. They flattened crops, devoured the grain, and smashed through fences, leaving gaps that let rabbits pour in to finish the destruction. Desperate, the farmers appealed to the Minister for Defence, Sir George Pearce, with an unusual request. Many were ex-soldiers who knew exactly what firepower could do.

Pearce agreed, possibly sensing a tidy public relations victory, and even arranged for a Fox Movietone cameraman to film the triumph. In November 1932, Major Gwynydd Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery arrived in the Campion district with two soldiers, two Lewis machine guns, and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. The men spotted a flock and had the locals try to herd them toward the guns, but the emus scattered into small, fast-moving bands that made hopeless targets. Two days later Meredith got perhaps a thousand birds within range near a dam. He waited, opened fire, and the gun jammed after a handful of kills as the survivors bolted. The emus proved almost supernaturally hard to kill, absorbing multiple bullets and running on regardless. They even seemed to post sentries, with a tall lookout bird standing guard to warn each group as the soldiers approached.

By 8 November the humiliation had reached Canberra, where the operation was mocked in Parliament and the press, and Pearce withdrew the troops. By then the soldiers had burned through a quarter of their ammunition to confirm only somewhere between 50 and a few hundred kills, roughly ten bullets for every dead bird. Meredith returned days later at the farmers' pleading and kept at it into December. The official tally rose to under 1,000 emus, but the campaign never came close to solving the problem. Meredith spoke of his foe with something like awe. If he had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds, he declared, it could face any army in the world, for the emus took machine gun fire with the invulnerability of tanks. The birds became a permanent national punchline, forever remembered as the animals that beat the Australian army.

Late one night in 1947, a copywriter named Frances Gerety was exhausted and about to go to bed when she realized she had forgotten to add a signature line to a diamond advertisement she was finishing. She scribbled a few words on a scrap of paper and went to sleep unconvinced. The next morning she presented the line to her colleagues at the Philadelphia agency N.W. Ayer, and even they were unimpressed, uneasy about its slightly awkward grammar. The four words were "A Diamond Is Forever." They would go on to be named the single greatest advertising slogan of the entire twentieth century. More than that, they would invent, almost from scratch, one of the most cherished romantic traditions in the modern world, convincing billions of people that love itself is properly expressed in compressed carbon.

In the 1930s, diamonds were not the default token of engagement at all, and rings often featured rubies, sapphires, pearls, or no stone whatsoever. De Beers, which controlled the vast majority of the world's diamond supply, was in trouble. Prices had collapsed during the Great Depression, and diamonds were widely seen as a frivolous luxury nobody needed. In 1938 the company hired N.W. Ayer with a bold and faintly cynical mission: not to sell a particular brand but to manufacture an emotion, welding the diamond permanently to the idea of romance in the public mind. The agency planted stories in magazines about celebrity engagements, arranged for Hollywood films to feature diamonds and for actresses to be draped in them on screen and off, and even sent lecturers into high schools to speak to teenage girls about the coming importance of the diamond ring. They also invented the informal "rule" that a man should spend a month's salary, later inflated to two, on the stone.

The results rank among the most successful acts of cultural engineering ever attempted. In 1939, only around 10 percent of American engagement rings featured a diamond. By 1990 that figure had climbed to roughly 80 percent, an entire civilization's courtship rituals rewritten inside two generations by a marketing department. By insisting a diamond was eternal and must never be resold, the campaign discouraged anyone from ever putting a stone back on the market. That protected De Beers from a flood of second-hand diamonds, which would have exposed how common the gems actually are. The scarcity, like the tradition, was largely an illusion, carefully maintained by stockpiling diamonds to keep supply tight and prices high. Frances Gerety wrote the De Beers slogan for every ad the company ran until she retired, and she died in 1999, the same year her line was crowned slogan of the century, having never married herself.

The most chaotic race in the history of sport was run on the afternoon of 30 August 1904, over dusty, hilly roads outside St. Louis. The organizer, James Sullivan, wanted to study the effects of "purposeful dehydration," so he provided just a single water station along the entire route. The course was a horror, choking with dust kicked up by the officials' cars driving ahead of the runners, and of the 32 men who started, only 14 would finish. The field itself was a parade of eccentrics. Two Tswana tribesmen from South Africa, in town for a World's Fair exhibit, became the first Black Africans to compete at a modern Olympics. And there was a Cuban mailman named Félix Carvajal. He had raised his fare by running laps of a Havana square, lost his money gambling in New Orleans, and arrived to run in street shoes, long trousers he cut off at the knee, and a beret.

The chaos multiplied with every mile. One of the South Africans, Len Taunyane, was chased nearly a mile off course by a pack of wild dogs. Carvajal, cheerful and chatting with spectators in broken English as he ran, grew hungry and stopped to pick apples from an orchard. The apples were rotten, and the stomach cramps that followed were so severe he had to lie down for a nap by the roadside, then got up and carried on to finish fourth. Another runner, William Garcia, collapsed from inhaling the road dust and was found with a hemorrhaging stomach lining. Meanwhile the American Fred Lorz crossed the line first to roaring cheers, and was being photographed with President Roosevelt's daughter as the champion when the truth emerged. Nine miles in, Lorz had dropped out with cramps and climbed into a car, riding eleven miles and waving at the crowd. When the car broke down near the stadium, he hopped out and jogged in. He claimed it had all been a joke, but he was banned on the spot.

That left the real winner, Thomas Hicks, and his victory is perhaps the grimmest in Olympic history. Around ten miles from the finish, Hicks begged to stop. His handlers refused him water and decided instead to keep him upright chemically. They fed him a dose of strychnine, the rat poison, mixed with egg whites, the first recorded use of performance-enhancing drugs in the modern Games. As he faltered again they gave him more, now laced with French brandy, until he was hallucinating, convinced the finish line was still twenty miles away, his legs moving only because his trainers were half-carrying him. He crossed the line shuffling his feet while two men held him aloft, then collapsed and had to be treated by four doctors, having very nearly killed himself to win. He never ran another marathon. The whole spectacle was so disastrous that officials called it indefensible and nearly abolished the marathon entirely, and it directly inspired the first Olympic anti-doping rule in 1908.

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The A Little Wiser Team