The Paperclip Profile picture
Feb 13, 2022 9 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Just hours away from America’s biggest game of the year, the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams will square off in Super Bowl LVI. A thread on its exquisite Indian connection. (1/9) Image
When Paul Brown, an American football coach from Ohio, was fired by his previous employer, he founded his new franchise Cincinnati Bengals. (2/9) Image
Brown, named the franchise after another Cincinnati football team named Cincinnati Bengals who played between 1937 and 1942 and was forced to close down due to World War II. (3/9)
Benzoo, the Royal Bengal Tiger from West Bengal, a unique specimen of Cincinnati Zoo, was chosen as the mascot for the Bengals. Benzoo proudly enjoyed her Sunday outings to the stadium in front of 50,000 fans in the 70s. (4/9) Image
Now, the original Bengal team that played in the 1930s had a fascinating story behind their naming. When Hal Pennington, the founder of the newly formed Cincinnati Bengal, sat in his mother’s kitchen one late summer day in 1937, he observed a stove. (5/9)
The logo of the stove caught his attention - it was a mighty roaring Bengal Tiger. The stove line, manufactured between 1870 and 1940 by Floyd-Wells, was named Bengal Stoves. (6/9) Image
It is this Bengal Stove line that influenced the name of the franchise playing the Super Bowl LVI today. While why ‘Bengal Stove’ was named after a Bengal Tiger is not clearly understood, many believe it was due to the owner’s fascination with safaris. (7/9) Image
It is rumoured that the president once went on a safari to hunt the Bengal tigers, and he was enchanted with the beast leading to the name of his stove line. Note to remember: it was common for Americans in that era to visit India for Tiger ‘shikar’. (8/9)
This Government-issued advertisement in the "Field & Stream" magazine, USA in 1956 luring Americans to contact the local office (at NYC & SFO) for Tiger hunting information, is a testimony to the above. (9/9) Image

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with The Paperclip

The Paperclip Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @Paperclip_In

Oct 4
The Cathedral of the Sacred Heart near Connaught Place in New Delhi is one of the city's oldest Christian establishments which have a strange connection with your favorite coffee drink, the Cappuccino.

Read on. 1/17 Image
Who would have thought while sipping Cappuccino at a café in Connaught Place that their cup of coffee would have a strange bond with a church just a few miles away at the junction of Bhai Vir Singh Marg Road and Bangla Sahib Road. 2/17
Built in the early 1930s in an Italian style, the cathedral of the Sacred Heart was envisioned by Father Luke, a member of the Franciscan first order founded by the followers of the poor man of Assisi, Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone. 3/17 Image
Read 18 tweets
Sep 30
What connects the American Civil War to Durga Puja in Bengal?

It's the nostalgic toy cap guns. The story of the cap gun is stranger than it looks.

Thread. 1/14 Image
If you didn’t grow up in Kolkata, you might have missed it — the streets during Durga Puja once alive with kids firing toy cap guns, little puffs of smoke and crackles everywhere. A vivid pre-social media ritual of childhood, with a fascinating origin story.
2/14
The Civil War (1861–65) was the first truly industrial war. Soldiers of both the Union and the Confederacy moved away from old flintlock muskets and embraced the percussion cap - a tiny copper or brass cup holding a shock-sensitive explosive. 3/14
Read 14 tweets
Aug 28
Four years ago in Kerala, sixteen strangers walked into the Russian House in Thiruvananthapuram. They were from different districts, different walks of life. But they all carried one name that bound them together.

Gagarin. Yes, Gagarin.
So, What brought them together? 1/16 Image
Image
The name needs no introduction, or does it?

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey into space. For the world, it was history. For a section of Kerala’s left-leaning families, it was inspiration strong enough to echo in their children’s names. 2/16 Image
Take P.D. Gagarin from Cherthala.

According to reports in Hindu and New Indian Express, he was born on that very day in 1961, when the Soviet cosmonaut made his historic flight. His father, a communist and space enthusiast, named him Yuri Gagarin. 3/16
Read 16 tweets
Aug 26
Long before she was a global icon, Mother Teresa walked the streets of Kolkata, and when she had nowhere to go, the city’s iconic Kali Temple opened its doors. On her birthday, we remember the unlikely home that started a journey of compassion that changed the world. Thread 1/19 Image
When Mother Teresa began her work in Calcutta in 1948, she had almost nothing of her own. She wore a plain white cotton sari with a blue border and carried little more than conviction. 2/19 Image
Her belief was simple yet radical: that the poor who lay unwanted on the pavements, the sick abandoned in the streets, and the dying left in filth deserved dignity in their final days. 3/19
Read 19 tweets
Aug 23
Why does sugarcane taste so sweet in India today? India’s sugarcane wasn’t always this sweet. The reason it tastes the way it does today goes back to the stubborn brilliance of one woman who fought prejudice, doubt, and even war. Thread.

1/19 Image
Janaki Ammal was born in 1897 in Kerala. At a time when most girls were expected to marry early, she chose science.

Botany became her world.

2/19 Image
Janaki grew up in a large family with 19 siblings. Her father was not a scientist, but he loved tending gardens and writing about nature. From him, Janaki absorbed a way of looking at plants not just as crops, but as living wonders.

3/19
Read 20 tweets
Aug 18
Open a Crayola box today and you’ll find hundreds of shades. But if you grew up in the 80s or 90s using Crayola art supplies, you might remember a crayon called Indian Red. And then, one day, it just disappeared. What exactly happened?
1/14 Image
To answer that, you have to travel way beyond the Crayola factory in Pennsylvania…
all the way to a small town in Kerala, India.
In 1807, a Scottish man named Francis Buchanan was surveying the region for the East India Company.
2/14
So, who was Buchanan-Hamilton? think of him as a one-man research institute on foot: surgeon, botanist, surveyor. after Tipu Sultan’s fall, he was tasked to map and describe the south.
3/14 Image
Read 16 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(