Falling and Not Falling

More about misusing dominoes

A stray comment in my last post seems to have created some interest. Since you don’t all get notifications about other people’s comments I thought I would briefly share the new stuff here. It isn’t life or death … or even paperfolding … but …

I foolishly wrote ‘there appears to be little (if any) evidence for its (ie domino toppling’s) existence prior to 1976’. This was, of course, an invitation to be corrected, and my friend David Raynor quickly jumped on it. He pointed out that according to the Wikipedia article about ‘Domino Theory’, U.S. President Eisenhower said during a news conference on April 7, 1954, that ‘you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.’

Equally quickly, he did further research and found references going back as far as 8th August 1899 when page 8 of the London paper, ‘The Morning Leader’ stated that ‘the cowardly crowd fell back like dominoes’.

I don’t usually research anything except paperfolding history, but this piqued my interest and I wondered how much further back we could take it. I have found that historical research of this kind is all about knowing the right words to search for. Searching for ‘toppling dominoes’ produced nothing. Searching for ‘falling dominoes’ on the other hand produced results, though I could only take things back a mere eight years further.

Here’s what I found. It comes from a letter from Mr Charles Lunn and was quoted in the August 1891 issue of the New York journal ‘The Microcosm’.

(If you are of a scientific disposition, and sufficiently interested in 19th century arguments about the wave theory of sound, the full article can be read here.)

Dominoes it appears can not only be toppled but also stacked and leaned. Another good friend, Edwin Corrie, pointed me towards some wonderful engravings in the book ‘Kolumbus-Eier’, which was published in around 1899. I wonder if there is yet a world record for the most other dominoes balanced on top of a single domino like this? If not, there surely should be …

The second engraving shows the opposite of domino toppling. Leaned on each other in this way, none of them can fall. The domino in repose.