An eyewitness to President Lincoln’s assassination appeared on television in 1956

In 1956 , on an instalment of then - popular plot show “ I ’ve catch a cloak-and-dagger , ” 96 - year - old Samuel J. Seymour teeter out on stage , baby-sit down gingerly beside the program ’s legion , and proceeded to blow the audience ’s mind . Over ninety class earlier , he had witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at Washington D.C. ’s Ford Theatre .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_iq5yzJ-Dk

It ’s an unbelievable thing to watch , and The Atlantic ’s Rebecca Rosen does a bully job of nailing down one of the reasons for why that is .

“ The America of Lincoln and the Civil War can feel like remote history,”she writes , “ but every now and then , through the appearance of whatJason Kottke has called a “ human wormhole,”we are face with the transience of a C and a half . ”

It ’s difficult to say , however , exactly who — or , rather , what — the wormhole is in this scenario . Yes , the terminus “ human wormhole ” is , as its very name implies , used to refer to keep persons who“bridge distant historic periods ” , and in that sense Seymour is certainly a wormhole ; but there are singular social and technical wormhole present here as well .

Truth or Consequences , the first game show to air on commercially licensed video , was first circulate in 1941 ( around the same time that boob tube because a mainstream phenomenon ) , just 15 years prior to the airing of this peculiar instalment of “ I ’ve Got a arcanum . ” We do n’t know when Seymour pop off , but it ’s likely secure to say that had television or the plot show format come around any later than they did , Seymour would have been dead and this program never would have aired .

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And when you get right down to it , are n’t wormholes — human or otherwise — really just about compounded coincidence ? to become a human wormhole , Seymour had to be born in the right earned run average , be physically present at Lincoln ’s assassination , and experience long enough to eventually shuffle his way out in front of a studio audience and a fistful of gameshow contestants .

Without that advent of television and the social phenomenon that is the biz show , Seymour would never have been a wormhole to as many people as he was when this program first aired . You also would n’t be watching this video . Granted , the gameshow format and the telecast dispersion of that data format ( not to advert the late - date popularization of the internet and digital spiritualist ) are n’t wormholes in and of themselves . But the fact that they could not only be experienced in the 1950s but easily continue — first on film and later on video , both of which are data format that are widely used to this Clarence Shepard Day Jr. — elevate all of them to a sort of nonhuman wormhole status . In this elbow room , these various technological and societal phenomena have become another wormhole in and of themselves , connecting you to the human wormhole that was Samuel J. Seymour , all through your computer ( or smart phone , or tablet ) screen .

Oh , and just to add another layer to all of this , here ’s the newspaper article — written by Seymour — that ’s mentioned in the video .

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