John Hetherington is an apocryphal English haberdasher. A frequently republished story from the late nineteenth century claims that in 1797 he invented the top hat and caused a riot by wearing it in public in London. However, top hats appeared in English fashion as early as the 1780s. [1]
In 1899 the quarterly London journal Notes and Queries published [2] a letter by a Richard H. Thornton of Portland, Oregon, quoting a "note from a recent number of the Hatters' Gazette [a] ". The note claims Hetherington as having decided to wear his invention of a "silk hat" in public on the 15th of January 1797 with the intention to "cause a sensation" only to be surrounded by a "howling mob".
The note claims to quote an unnamed gazette as having reported the following day that
John Hetherington... was arraigned before the Lord Mayor yesterday on a charge of breach of the peace and inciting to riot, and was required to give bonds in the sum of £500 [b] [for having] appeared upon the public highway wearing upon his head what he called a silk hat... a tall structure, having a shiny lustre, and calculated to frighten timid people.... several women fainted at the unusual sight, while children screamed, dogs yelped, and a young [boy] was thrown down by the crowd which had collected and had his right arm broken.
The note concludes by claiming to quote a comment in The Times published on 16 January 1797 approving of the hat and stating that it was "destined to work a revolution in headgear".
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington was an Anglo-Irish army officer and statesman who was one of the leading military and political figures in Britain during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, twice serving as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He is among the commanders who ended the Anglo-Mysore Wars when Tipu Sultan was killed in the fourth war in 1799 and among those who ended the Napoleonic Wars in a victory when the Seventh Coalition defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
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A top hat is a tall, flat-crowned hat traditionally associated with formal wear in Western dress codes, meaning white tie, morning dress, or frock coat. Traditionally made of black silk or sometimes grey, the top hat emerged in Western fashion by the end of the 18th century. Although it declined by the time of the counterculture of the 1960s, it remains a formal fashion accessory. A collapsible variant of a top hat, developed in the 19th century, is known as an opera hat.
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