I love the story of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz and their historic duel over who invented calculus. They both, independently, developed the fundamental concepts of calculus: infinitesimals, integration, and derivatives.

Isaac Newton indisputably invented it first. But, he was a weird dude. He hoarded knowledge like a dragon hordes gold. He didn't share his contributions for two reasons. First, he wanted to keep his sacred knowledge to himself. Two, he was cripplingly afraid of receiving criticism, so he tended to keep things close until years and, sometimes decades, of refinement.

Leibniz, on the other hand, went out of his way to promote his candidacy for father of calculus. He published his framework of calculus before Newton. In fact, it was only after Leibniz published his work and might have made a name for himself as the discoverer of calculus that Newton came forward with his own notes, proofs, and documents showing he, in fact, discovered it first.

Thus set off a feud of epic proportions between these two giants of mathematics. It got so bad that Leibniz appealed to the Royal Society to declare in his favor once and for all. But the Royal Society, which was headed by Newton, declared in Newton's favor!

It should be noted, and history has come to view it as such, that Leibniz did at least as much for calculus as Newton. His was the one that took off and was popularized. The concepts and framework of calculus we learn in school and use daily as scientists and engineers come from Leibniz's formulation, not Newton's. And it was he, not Newton, that published it as such and popularized it so that others could build off of it. Newton, an indisputable genius, possibly the smartest man to have ever existed, did it in his typically Newton way, comprehensible only to his unique mind.

If you are interested in this in more depth and to Isaac Newton more generally (a ridiculously fascinating man), I cannot recommend enough Edward Dolnick's "The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World"

Indo-European mythology is positively replete with the "sacred twin" trope. It is seen in Romulus and Remus and Tacitus makes not of Germanic worship of two twin deities that he compares to Castor and Pollux. These figures are also often commonly associated with horses, see J.P. Mallory's In Search of the Indo-Europeans.

In Anglo-Saxon England, there are the famous figures of Horsa and Hengist (meaning roughly Horse and Stallion) who were supposedly the leaders of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, according to Bede. These two brothers were supposedly the ring leaders of the Anglo-Saxon migration to England. Where once having reached the island they eventually set about carving out their own realms in Britain. Hengist and Horsa were both credited with having founded the Kingdom of Kent in south eastern England.

Interestingly, they are also found in other sources besides just Bede. Hengist is mentioned in Beowulf as a leader of the Frisians iirc, though his counter part is absent.

While these figures are unlikely to have ever actually existed as war band leaders, and the whole debate around the Anglo-Saxon migration to England is very fraught with debate, these two figures are one of the many iconic duos of the Middle Ages.

One duo I love from fashion history is quite obscure: the Boué sisters (Boué Soeurs), Sylvie Montegut and Jeanne d’Etreillis. Their trademark was the use of light and airy fabrics, particularly sheer chiffons, mousselines de soie, and lace, and embellishment with ribbons and silk flowers. While they were active from 1899 to the 1930s, hardly anyone has heard of them today. (Few extant garments from their early years survive, so the two are associated more strongly with the 1920s.) They attempted to reopen after World War II, but closed in the early 1950s.

I have never been able to find out much about them in either primary or secondary sources. In an article she wrote for Arts & Decoration in 1922, Jeanne stated that the sisters had begun to sew clothing for their dolls at a young age, and then progressed to making dresses for themselves. They opened their house at 9 Rue de la Paix when they were about eighteen, and by 1902 they could be listed alongside established greats such as Worth, Doeuillet, Redfern, and Lacroix. Most of their extant pieces, however, date to after 1914, when they opened a branch at 13 W56th St. in New York. According to Jeanne, they met immediately with success there - despite a mild scandal in 1915, in which the sisters illegally imported some of their French workers, who in turn illegally brought over couture gowns and declared them at customs as their own property. A year later, they brought their own case to court, prosecuting Hickson Incorporated, who bought one of their outfits and was promising to sell copies of it: a common problem for couture houses at the time. Apart from this, I've found a number of their pieces in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and some fashion plates in French publications, but there has been very little research done on them as a business. (You can see some examples of each on my blog here, which I've cribbed from shamelessly for this post.)

Duos are hard to talk about in the context of the later Qing Dynasty. In an autocratic state with clearly stratified bureaucratic hierarchies, well-recorded instances of outright equal partnership are hard to come by. In the Taiping period, for example, neither Li Xiucheng and Chen Yucheng (Taiping) nor Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang (loyalist) cooperated very actively; perhaps it would usually be better to talk of dualities as opposed to partners in crime - Hong Xiuquan and the Xianfeng Emperor, Charles Elliot and Lin Zexu (and later Kishan), etc.

Oh wait. There is one particularly infamous duo we can talk about, and that's because they were neither Chinese nor officials. William Jardine and James Matheson. The first of those names should sound familiar to anyone who's spent more than 24 hours on Hong Kong Island, with sites like Jardine House, Jardine's Lookout, Jardine's Bazaar etc. named after him. Matheson, sadly, has got the short end of the stick, although there is a Matheson Street in Causeway Bay.

Jardine Matheson and Co. ended up being the largest Western trading firm in southern China by a long shot, and their involvement in the opium trade in particular is, well, shall we say... well-documented. Both Scotsmen, Jardine had been a doctor before changing careers, Matheson was a trader all along, and the two began a partnership in the 'country trade' between India and China in 1820 after a chance meeting in Mumbai. Eternal agitators in the 'free trade' camp, they were part of the general move to abolish the East India Company's monopoly on trade with China in 1833, and as fellow Scotsmen were able to gain the ear of Lord Napier, the first Superintendent of Trade, and get him to take a hardline stance towards the Chinese authorities in Guangdong the next year. This backfired, of course, but few consequences were suffered. 1838 saw Jardine retire back to the UK, whilst Matheson stayed behind. This proved most fortuitous in 1838, when Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu was dispatched to suppress the opium trade at Canton and threatened the leading opium smuggler with arrest. As Jardine Matheson and Co. was colloquially only known by the first part of its name, Matheson avoided any serious consequence and it would be the proprietor of the #2 firm in the opium business, one Lancelot Dent, who would be taken in for questioning.

With Matheson in China, Jardine was one of the main lobbyists for war back in Britain, and, just as he had gained the ear of Lord Napier, he also got into favour with the foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston. Jardine's suggestions about the viability of war and the potential aims thereof are eerily echoed in the actual activities of both Lord Melbourne's Whig government and Sir Robert Peel's Tory cabinet regarding China in the conflict that ensued. One interesting note is that Jardine successfully convinced Palmerston that Britain should not make the forced legalisation of opium in China one of its war aims. The position in favour of such action was already quite an unpopular one; and moreover Jardine and Matheson had so streamlined the process of smuggling opium that their existing infrastructure and business model were optimised for it, and so a transition to legitimate trade might have been a serious threat to their competitive edge.

Ultimately, Britain did win the war. Jardine Matheson set up shop in Hong Kong, and their presence can still be felt in many places on the island. The current HQ at Jardine House, with its distinctive circular windows, was once the tallest building on the waterfront. A company employee operates the Noonday Gun at the Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter, which fires a single blank every day at 12 p.m. To say anything of the history of Hong Kong without accounting for the firm that this duo set up is virtually impossible. Is this necessarily a good thing? Well...

Whilst there are histories of Jardine Matheson and Co. as a whole, for an accessible book which covers their pre-Opium War activities see Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight (2018).

Additionally, a couple of other bits of trivia relevant to Jardine and Matheson but not so much to duos (unless you count two people doing the same sort of thing or even just interacting as a duo):

• At the time of the General Election of 1832 (the first after the passing of the Great Reform Act), UK constituencies generally returned two MPs to the Commons. Lord Palmerston would end up being elected MP for Hampshire South alongside the younger George Leonard Staunton, the former taipan for the East India Company at Canton (and hence in direct opposition to Jardine and Matheson). As a boy, Staunton had learned Chinese, presumably Mandarin, while accompanying his father on the ill-fated Macartney mission, one of the few real highlights of which was his briefly conversing with the Qianlong Emperor during the audience at Jehol.

• Lord Melbourne's cabinet did not consist only of himself and Lord Palmerston. The Secretary at War during the Whig phase of the Opium War was a certain Thomas Babington Macaulay (better known as the author of The History of England and probably one of the most notable popular historians ever to write in the English language).

Zoroastrianism, as is probably familliar, was probably founded by the prophet Zarathustra, some time in the 1300:s BC or so. The only records that survive from this time are the Gathas, the seventeen great hymns of Zarathustra. They are incredibly obscure and difficult to read, but within them we find a few mentions of perhaps the second most significant character in the early history of the tradition - Zarathustra's great patron Vishtaspa. Yasna 12, a creed with its roots probably in the time immediately following Zarathustra's death, obliges the convert to recite, among other things:

As the belief of the waters, the belief of the plants, the belief of the well-made (Original) Cow; as the belief of Ahura Mazda who created the cow and the Asha-endowed Man; as the belief of Zarathushtra, the belief of Kavi Vishtaspa,

Indeed, Zarathustra's lament in Yasna 46 takes a turn in verse 14:

1. To what land shall I go to flee, whither to flee? From nobles and from my peers they sever me, nor are the people pleased with me [......], nor the Liar rulers of the land. How am I to please thee, Mazda Ahura?

...

14. O Zarathushtra, what righteous man is thy friend for the great covenant? Who wills to have good fame? It is the Kava Vishtaspa at the consummation. Those whom thou wilt unite in one house with thee, these will I call with words of Good Thought.

But Vishtaspa is a terribly obscure character in the early material, mentioned only three or four times. "Kava" or "Kavi" is a title that according to Boyce suggests training in the mantric tradition (hence, a cleric of some sort); others suggest a translation along the lines of "prince". Later tradition holds that he was a king; it appears by Yasna 46 that Vishtaspa must have been a nobleman, chieftain or in some other position of tribal power to protect Zarathustra; this need not be exclusive with being a cleric, of course. Later references to him as "king" reflects perhaps shifting social structures and understandings of the roles of priests, warriors and kings.

The most extensive treatment of Vishtaspa in Avestan is found in the Vistasp Yasht (Hymn to Vishtaspa). It begins with a long series of blessings given by Zarathustra to Vishtaspa that go on for some dozen verses along the lines of:

'Give him strength and victory! Give him welfare in cattle and bread!' thus said Zarathushtra to the young king Vishtaspa! 'Give him a great number of male children, praisers [of God] and chiefs in assemblies, who smite and are not smitten, who smite at one stroke their enemies, who smite at one stroke their foes, ever in joy and ready to help.

The middle portion presents Zarathustra as the mentor of young Vishtaspa, teaching him the ways of spirituality:

Zarathushtra said: 'O young king Vishtaspa! Invoke Ahura Mazda, who is full of Glory, Ahura Mazda, and the sovereign Heaven, the boundless Time, and Vayu who works highly. 'Invoke the powerful Wind, made by Mazda, and Fate. 'Repeat thou those words, that the god invoked may give thee the boon wished for; that thou, strong, and belonging to the creation of the good Spirit, mayest smite and take away the Druj and watch with full success those who hate thee; smite down thy foes, and destroy at one stroke thy adversaries, thy enemies, and those who hate thee.

And alludes to Vishtaspa as an ideal ruler to be emulated (the difficulty of translating even younger Avestan texts is evident in the first line):

'He wields his power according to the wish of Ahura Mazda, the Good Spirit, and for the destruction of the Evil Spirit, whichever of two men goes quicker to perform a sacrifice (to Ahura); but if he chooses to perform the sacrifice and prayer to us not in the right way, he does not wield the right power, he will not reign.

'He will receive bad treatment in the next world, though he has been the sovereign of a country, with good horses to ride and good chariots to drive. Give royalty to that man, O Zarathushtra! who gives royalty unto thee with good will.

There is a classic moral to the story here, of course - one may be wealthy on Earth, but poor in spirit, and that will be reflected in the world after death. Indeed, even a king is obliged to perform the correct rites to maintain purity and keep away the forces of evil. It seems to end on a rhetorical note:

Spitama Zarathushtra said to the young king Vishtaspa: "To what land shall I turn, O Ahura Mazda? To whom shall I go with praying?'

However, its 60-odd verses are not an easy or very coherent read, and it appears that various fragments and words of wisdom that are only tangentially related have been inserted at the end, with the above-quoted line inserted to tie it all together.

While generally taken to have been a historical person, there is not much we can learn about Vishtaspa. The later Avestan material almost seems to invert the relationship between the duo, where Zarathustra's teaching of Vishtaspa takes precedence over Vishtaspa's protection of Zarathustra. The young king comes to take on several roles - one as a role-model for rulers, and another as a pious man who listened to the teachings of the clergy. Vishtaspa sometimes almost functions like the narrative device of an audience substitute - while a prince, he is someone to whom the average Zoroastrian could put themselves in the shoes of, the first who received the education in the Good Religion that would be passed on through the priesthood and (at least in theory) taught to lay members.

In this way, he plays an invaluable role in the tradition, in bringing the incredibly exalted Zarathustra closer to the believer.

Sources and further reading:

Encyclopedia Iranica entry

Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices by Mary Boyce (1979)

Vishtasp Yasht

Various chapters in Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism (2015)

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An Englishman and a Boy

In 1693 there was an account published by a ship's mate named Robert Lyde explaining in extraordinarily graphic detail how after being captured by French privateers in 1692, he, along with a 16-year-old junior sailor, retook the ship through mutiny, killing two of their 7 captors with a crowbar, a marlin-spike and a knife, and badly wounding two others who later died, before taking the rest prisoner.

Robert Lyde was 23 years old in 1692 and this took place during the Nine Years' War (1688-1697) between England and France. Three years earlier, in 1689, Lyde had been captured by French privateers and taken as a prisoner to France where he was held at the port of Dinan for four months as a POW with other English sailors, during which time he says he endured extreme deprivation and starvation that he compares to slavery by the "Turks" in North Africa. He says most of his shipmates died from disease or malnutrition and only 200 of 600 prisoners were eventually exchanged. Lyde says it took him 14 weeks or three and a half months to recover basic strength after returning to England. While held in these terrible conditions, the English prisoners were offered the chance to enlist in French service as privateers against England which Lyde says he saw 17 of them agree to do and they were kept in a separate room. Lyde was not one of these and his account displays extreme English nationalism and Protestantism that might explain it. His time as a POW seems to have made a big impact on him and throughout his account he refers back to it bitterly (in one place entertaining a revenge fantasy that he would like to do to French prisoners what they did to him). After returning to England, he resolved never be held prisoner in France again.

In September 1691, after having fully recovered, Lyde signed on as a mate for a small trading voyage to Oporto in Portugal. While returning to England on February 29, 1692, they sighted a much larger French privateer and had no choice but to surrender since they only had 8 crew. Throughout the voyage Lyde had told the captain that if they were captured by the French he would try to retake the ship so as not to be a prisoner in France again. As the French privateer now approached, Lyde got a blunderbuss and hid it in the hold by some wine barrels. His captain was understandably very pessimistic that this would work and told Lyde it was an "impossible thing to be done." Lyde allegedly replied: "Although it seems to you to be so; yet nothing is impossible to be effected by God, in whom I put my trust."

The French privateers then searched the ship and the captain gave them his money purse. The privateers then took 6 of the Englishmen including the captain into their ship and put 7 of their own men on the English ship along with Lyde and a 16-year-old boy named John Wright. After the French ship had gone out of sight, Lyde offered to bring up a barrel of wine in hopes of getting the Frenchmen drunk. He did this but none of them ever drank much. For the next several days Lyde brooded about how to retake the ship and tried repeatedly to convince the boy to help him, telling him what terrible things awaited as a prisoner in France, but the boy was scared at being so badly outnumbered and refused. Lyde and the boy were often told by the Frenchmen to help man the ship and especially to help pump water out of the hold because the ship was leaky, but Lyde says he usually refused unless he felt like it. Lyde's plans to retake the ship with his hidden blunderbuss didn't work out as the Frenchmen found it and kept it in the cabin. On March 4, Lyde tried again to convince the boy to join him in mutinying while two of the Frenchmen were working the pumps but the boy still refused. Then Lyde began sharpening his knife and said he wouldn’t use it again until he had cut the Frenchmen's throats which scared the boy so that he went away:

Then I took a brick and whetted my knife upon it; and told the boy, "I would not use my knife, upon any account, till I was carried into France; except it were to cut the throats of the Frenchmen."

At which words, the boy startled as if his own throat had been cutting; and then left me, and went up on deck.

By this time the ship was close to the French coast and the crew fired a blank shot as a signal for another ship to come guide them. When Lyde came on deck after this he found the Frenchmen "as joyful as I was melancholy." Then he was overcome with something like a PTSD flashback and remembered his former time as a POW:

Then considering the inhuman usage I had formerly had in France, and how near I was to it again; it struck me with such terror that I could stay no longer upon deck: but went down betwixt decks, and prayed to God for a southerly wind, to prevent her going into that harbour; ...

The wind did turn south and ship was not able to enter the harbor. That night and the next morning (March 5) the wind drew them further from France and the French port. At noon, Lyde was called up to man the pumps (which he had often refused), but they yelled at him several times and he finally went up only to tell them he had been a prisoner in France already and if he was taken there again "I should serve three years." The French captain sarcastically replied "That is bien" and Lyde then said he had nothing to lose and if they tried to force him instead of manning the pumps then the ship would sink.

That night Lyde didn't sleep much as he stayed up trying to persuade the boy to join him in retaking the ship which the boy still refused. When he did sleep a little, Lyde says he dreamed that he was attacking the Frenchmen, "For sleeping or waking, my mind ran still upon the attacking of them." At 7:00 AM the next morning (March 6), Lyde sent the boy up on deck to check the direction of the wind and he reported it was still in the direction of England. Lyde then continued unsuccessfully trying to convince the boy the join him in attacking the Frenchmen before deciding to do it himself if he had to. At 8:00 AM he took a drink of wine and went on deck where he saw the Frenchmen eating breakfast around the cabin table and they invited him to join them. Lyde accepted but immediately became very nervous from adrenaline and made an excuse to go back below saying he was sick:

At eight in the morning, all the Frenchmen sat round the cabin table at breakfast, and they called me to eat with them. Accordingly I accepted their invitation, but the sight of the Frenchmen did immediately take away my stomach and made me sweat as if I had been in a stove, and was ready to faint with eagerness to encounter them. Which the Master perceiving, and seeing me in that condition, asked me in French, "If I was sick?" and because he should not mistrust anything, I answered "Yes." But could stay no longer in sight of them, and so immediately went down betwixt decks, to the boy; ...

Lyde then tried again to convince the reluctant boy to help him attack the Frenchmen while they ate breakfast and detailed a plan of attack, but the boy still refused and Lyde had second thoughts about attempting it himself. Soon the Frenchmen finished breakfast and Lyde berated the boy for not agreeing to help him, saying by this time they would have had the ship under their control, but the boy replied that actually they would have both been killed. At 8:30 AM two of the Frenchmen went on deck to pump water (they had a man keeping time with an hour glass and every half hour they had to pump water from the leaky ship). Lyde checked that the wind was still toward England and then again tried to convince the boy to join him, telling him again of his miserable conditions as a prisoner in France. The boy at last said that if it was really so bad in France then he would join the French as a privateer, which made Lyde quite angry:

These words of his struck me to the heart, which made me say, "You dog! what! will you go with them against your King, and country, and father and mother? Sirrah! I was in France, a prisoner four months, and my tongue cannot express what I endured there; yet I would not turn a Papist and go with them! Yet they came daily persuading me and others to go out; and, the time I was there, I think 17 turned Papists, and were kept in a room by themselves; but God was pleased to make an example of them; for I think 12 of them died while I was there. And if thou dost turn Papist, thou mayest fare as they did! and if thou, or any of them that be turned, be ever taken again, you will certainly be hanged in England by the law! But I had the command of a Privateer, and should take my brother in a French Privateer, after he had willingly sailed with them, I would hang him immediately!"