Why Do Some Shirts Have Collars?

I wondered - in my curiosity - if shirts always had collars. 

It seems obvious that they didn't. So, why do some shirts have collars? What purpose do they serve, and when did they first appear? 

Even today, most of us own a shirt with a collar, along with other tops such as a T-shirt, which have no collar at all. 

Let's start our search with the medieval clergy. That tells us that before the 15th century, there were no shirt collars at all.

Back then, shirts were simple undergarments with open, round, or scoop necklines, and long sleeves made of linen or hemp. 

Collars first appeared in the Western world sometime during the mid-to-late 15th century as simple standing bands of fabric around the neckline. I might have guessed that collars were a style of the wealthy. Wrong. 

Members of the clergy often wore stiff tunics with high necks, and adding a collar to the shirt worn beneath the scratchy tunic helped prevent the tunic’s stiff neck from aggravating the skin. Among the clergy, these collars became the only visible part of the shirt.

MacLeod and his collar

Though they originated for practical reasons and became symbols of humility and purity, the clerical collar you would recognize didn't appear until the 19th century, when Scottish Reverend Donald McLeod invented and popularized the clerical collar (informally known as a dog collar) worn by ministers today.

And there have been many collar styles and fashions in the past 700 years.

Time Travel Trivia and Some Spoilers

I love all things about time travel. I'd love to know it's possible to go back or forward in time, but science rarely points to either possibility. 

Science meets pop culture on StarTalk! with host astrophysicist & Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson, his comic co-hosts, guest celebrities & scientists discuss astronomy, physics, and everything else about life. 

The video embedded here hits on the type of time travel used in A Christmas Carol and whether Ebenezer Scrooge gets pulled through a wormhole.

How about considering how people thought about time travel before Einstein, and how the special theory of relativity changed how we think about time? 

Discover time dilation and how speed and gravity affect an object’s passage of time. And what about those pesky paradoxes of traveling and meddling with the past? 

So many questions!

Is there one immutable timeline or many timelines in a multiverse? Do we have free will? What is time to a photon traveling at the speed of light? How would we police time travel if it were possible? Will we even have time travel in the future? If time travel gets invented, why are we not overrun by tourists from the future? 

Which films depict time travel best? 

How are cells affected by time travel? 

Could we theoretically travel to before the Big Bang, because is there even a place to travel to before the Big Bang? 

The Why of Ridged Coins

Articles on this blog are often about the why of things. For example, I was sorting coins that I had gathered in a jar and wondered why of the four coins that are in wide circulation in the United States today, the dime and the quarter have a ridged edge, and the penny and nickel are smooth. 

According to the U.S. Mint, those ridges are technically called a reeded edge. Is this a decorative or practical difference? But is the reeded edge purely decorative, or does it serve a purpose? 

As a kid, I'm sure someone told me is was so that blind people could distinguish coins, but I found no evidence of that being a reason, though it certainly might be a use for the ridges.

When the U.S. Mint opened in Philadelphia in 1793, the coins it produced were made of copper, silver, and gold, in accordance with the Coinage Act of 1792. Because coins of this era were made of precious metal, they were vulnerable to a practice known as clipping, which involved cutting off a small portion around the circumference of the coins. A skilled clipper would shave off enough from the coins to eventually amass a quantity of scrap metal worth cashing in, while also ensuring that the coins weren’t conspicuously reduced in size or weight, allowing the altered coins to still be spent.

Clipping had been common in 17th-century Europe, and it was so prevalent in England that by the end of that century, almost half of the silver content was absent from circulating English coins. This resulted in the metal composition of the coins being lower than their face value, a discrepancy that threatened to create a financial crisis throughout the continent, as well as in the European colonies. In order to combat the practice, England began minting coins with ridged edges; a smooth edge on any part of a coin would then be a telltale sign of clipping. When the United States was founded as an independent nation, the U.S. Mint followed suit by designing its higher denomination coins with reeded edges right from the beginning.

Since today's coins are not made with precious metals, the practice is a vestige of a past practice. Today’s U.S. circulating coins are mostly “clad” coins — a copper core sandwiched between other metal layers — except for the nickel. The Mint switched to clad coins as silver and gold got too expensive. The 1970 half dollar was the last circulating coin with silver. There are collector versions of dimes, quarters, and half dollars that are still made in 99% silver, but those aren’t for everyday use. On the edge of a quarter or dime, if you see a reddish line, it is the copper core peeking out. The nickel is the oddball since it is a solid alloy with no layers.

Clink Glasses - Cheers!

I wrote recently on my origins blog about why "toast" is not only that heated bread but also what we do when we drink to the health or in honor of (someone or something) by raising one's glass together with others. As a corollary to that, I wondered why we also might clink glasses together after a toast before we take a sip.

The toasting of someone’s health is an ancient ritual, rooted in Greek and Roman drinking culture and quite likely long before. These ancient civilizations may have also knocked their mugs and cups together and the more delicate clink likely became fashionable in the 17th century. Here are 3 origin stories.

The most common origin story I found seems unlikely. In medieval times, clinking cups or glasses hard enough would cause liquid to slosh and spill from one vessel into another, so if your drinking companion had poisoned your cup, they’d be consuming poison too. This seems like a petty weak way of preventing drinks from being spiked. Yes, belladonna, hemlock, arsenic, mercury, or any other common toxin were popular ways of eliminating one’s rivals in the Middle Ages, especially among the nobility, but that origin is very doubtful.

An alternative theory, of no precise origin, suggests that clinking glasses was meant to frighten away evil spirits. In medieval Europe, there was a superstitious belief that evil spirits lurked in alcohol or hovered around celebrations. The high-pitched sound of touching glasses, according to the theory, would chase them away. This sounds possible, but I found no evidence to support it being the sole, or even partial, origin of this toast ritual. 

How about another theory that suggests the practice was a way to complete the sensory experience of drinking? Sipping wine and toasting already involved sight, touch, smell, and taste — and the clink added sound, the last of the five senses. Historian Margaret Visser argues that clinking grew in popularity during the 17th century, when Venetian glassmakers perfected the art of clear, resonant crystal. For the first time, drinking vessels produced a beautiful ringing tone when struck together, and that sensory pleasure became part of the ritual.