In the late 1800s, a man named James Wide worked as a railway signalman for Cape Town’s Port Elizabeth Railway Station. He was known fondly as “Jumper” because he had the habit of jumping between railcars even when the trains were moving. One day he took an inaccurate jump, which cuased him to fall beneath a moving train. Although he survived the accident, both of his legs were completely crushed. He needed to hire someone to assist him in his job. So, he hired an assistant who was anything but an ordinary employee. He was a baboon.
Image Source: 14th February 1959: A league of trainspotters young and old crowd the number 10 platform at London's King's Cross Station. (Photo by Harry Todd/Fox Photos/Getty Images)
Jack the Chacma baboon served the railways under Wide in South Africa for nine years. And on top of that, he never made a single mistake. Wide had first come across Jack at a local market in 1881, where he spotted the baboon leading an oxen cart. And there one the spot, he made up his mind. Wide reached out to the animal’s owner and discovered that Jack was trained to obey many basic commands such as pushing or pulling weights. So, Wide bought Jack to train him as his assistant.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Felix T bone
Wide trained him for several tasks of varying levels of difficulty—from pushing his wheelchair between his home and the signal box to grabbing a key from a locked box and delivering it to the train drivers. Jack quickly grasped it all. He also learned the audio signals that the train drivers gave with their whistles and toots.
However, after one person filed a complaint about a baboon operating the railway service, Jack and Wide were fired from the job. With the support of some of his colleagues, Wide appealed to the department to give him and his assistant a chance to prove their capabilities.
Image Source: A British Railway's Standard 4 Class 4-6-0, one of several allocated to Tebay for banking duties, on the 1 in 75 climb up Shap Fell. Scout Green signal box is in the background. Wednesday 27th September 1967. (Photo by Rail Photo/Construction Photography/Avalon/Getty Images)
After observing Jack’s abilities, the railways decided to officially employ the baboon. He was offered a salary of twenty cents a day, with a weekend bonus of half a bottle of beer along with a supply of snacks each week. Soon, Jack gained celebrity status among tourists and commuters. Sometimes, he could even be seen doing the gardening work at the station.
In 1890, the primate took his last breath as he passed away from tuberculosis. At present, his skull is displayed in the collection of the Albany Museum in Grahamstown. Jack’s story was originally published in the Nature Journal’s July 24, 1890 issue, per the Vintage News. This amazing story has also resurfaced on the internet.
It has been re-shared on various social media platforms, including a subreddit titled r/todayilearned. People shared some hilarious takes on this story, wondering over the scenario of a baboon working in railways. Many joked about what he did with his money; and how many paychecks he received at the end of his job. u/Lilpu55yberekt69 commented, “I feel there are a great many jobs that could realistically be replaced by a well-trained monkey. Why is everyone working on AI when we could just hire monkeys?” A song has also been composed based on the story of the baboon and the signalman.
Image Source: Reddit | u/Indefinite_forest_
Ladder leads out of darkness.Photo credit 
Woman's reflection in shadow.Photo credit 
Young woman frazzled.Photo credit 
Robin Williams performs for military men and women as part of a United Service Organization (USO) show on board Camp Phoenix in December 2007
Gif of Robin Williams via
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.