Nathaniel Cooke was the designer of a set of chess figures called the Staunton chess set which is now the standard set. [1] [2]
Nathaniel Cooke was the designer of a set of chess figures called the Staunton chess set which is now the standard set. [1] [2]
Cooke registered his design at the United Kingdom Patent Office on 1 March 1849 under the Ornamental Designs Act of 1842. Cooke was the editor of The Illustrated London News , the newspaper where Howard Staunton wrote a regular chess column. Cooke asked Staunton to advertise his chess set. Staunton did so in his column on 8 September 1849, and the set became famous under the name Staunton rather than Cooke. [1] [2]
In addition, Cooke was an ambitious London-based publisher who, as Ingram, Cooke & Co., produced many volumes of history, travel guides, and other works. Ingram and Cooke were the proprietors of the mid-Victorian National Illustrated Library that failed in 1854 due to carrying an excess amount of titles:
Herbert Ingram, Cooke's brother-in-law and publishing house partner, was the co-founder of The Illustrated London News . Herbert Ingram died in a maritime accident while traveling in the United States with his son. His steamer, the Lady Elgin , sank in Lake Superior when another passenger steamer, the Augusta, crashed into the Lady Elgin.
Of the Lady Elgin's 400 passengers, only 100 survived. The accident occurred near Winetka, Wisconsin, during an early September storm. [4]
Cooke's name was misspelled as "Cook" on the 1849 patent and the misspelling has propagated in chess literature since then. [1] [2] The correct spelling can be found in numerous documents, including his business listings in the London Directories (see top picture, right) as well as official announcements of the marriage of his daughter Harriet Ingram Cooke, to John Jaques II, son of John Jaques, the owner of the company that first manufactured the Staunton pieces in 1849 (see bottom picture, right).
The PS Lady Elgin was a wooden-hulled sidewheel steamship that sank in Lake Michigan off the fledgling town of Port Clinton, Illinois, whose geography is now divided between Highland Park and Highwood, Illinois, after she was rammed in a gale by the schooner Augusta in the early hours of September 8, 1860. The passenger manifest was lost with the collision, but the sinking of Lady Elgin resulted in the loss of about 300 lives in what was called "one of the greatest marine horrors on record". Four years after the disaster, a new rule required sailing vessels to carry running lights. The Lady Elgin disaster remains the greatest loss of life on open water in the history of the Great Lakes.
Chess or the King's Game is a book on chess. It was published in Leipzig in 1616 under the name of Gustavus Selenus, the pen name of Duke Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1579–1666). As a young prince, Augustus probably had learned of the game during his voyages to Italy and purchased numerous chess books from the Augsburg merchant and art collector Philipp Hainhofer. The first textbook on chess in the German language, the work is mainly based on the Libro de la invencion liberal y arte del juego del axedrez written in 1561 by the Spanish priest Ruy López de Segura, but also contains extensive philosophical and historical considerations.
The earliest known chess column appeared in the Lancet in 1823, but due to lack of popularity disappeared after less than a year.
Howard Staunton was an English chess master who is generally regarded as the world's strongest player from 1843 to 1851, largely as a result of his 1843 victory over Pierre Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant. He promoted a chess set of clearly distinguishable pieces of standardised shape – the Staunton pattern promulgated by Nathaniel Cooke – that is still the style required for competitions. He was the principal organiser of the first international chess tournament in 1851, which made England the world's leading chess centre and caused Adolf Anderssen to be recognised as the world's strongest player.
James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin and 12th Earl of Kincardine, was a British colonial administrator and diplomat. He served as Governor of Jamaica (1842–1846), Governor General of the Province of Canada (1847–1854), and Viceroy of India (1862–1863). In 1857, he was appointed High Commissioner and Plenipotentiary in China and the Far East to assist in the process of opening up China and Japan to Western trade. In 1860, during the Second Opium War in China, he ordered the destruction of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, an architectural wonder with immeasurable collections of artworks and historic antiques, inflicting incalculable loss of cultural heritage. Subsequently, he compelled the Qing dynasty to sign the Convention of Peking, adding Kowloon Peninsula to the British crown colony of Hong Kong.
Tassilo, Baron von Heydebrand und der Lasa was a German chess master, chess historian and theoretician of the nineteenth century, a member of the Berlin Chess Club and a founder of the Berlin Chess School.
The Illustrated London News, founded by Herbert Ingram and first published on Saturday 14 May 1842, was the world's first illustrated weekly news magazine. The magazine was published weekly for most of its existence, switched to a less frequent publication schedule in 1971, and eventually ceased publication in 2003. The company continues today as Illustrated London News Ltd, a publishing, content, and digital agency in London, which holds the publication and business archives of the magazine.
A chess set consists of a chessboard and white and black chess pieces for playing chess. There are sixteen pieces of each color: one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns. Extra pieces may be provided for use in promotion, most commonly one extra queen per color. Chess boxes, chess clocks, and chess tables are common pieces of chess equipment used alongside chess sets. Chess sets are made in a wide variety of styles, sometimes for ornamental rather than practical purposes. For tournament play, the Staunton chess set is preferred and, in some cases, required.
Jaques of London, formerly known as John Jaques of London and Jaques and Son of London is a long-established family company that manufactures sports and game equipment.
Ward, Lock & Co. was a publishing house in the United Kingdom that started as a partnership and developed until it was eventually absorbed into the publishing combine of Orion Publishing Group.
Events from the year 1849 in the United Kingdom.
The Staunton chess set is the standard style of chess pieces, recommended for use in competition by FIDE, the international chess governing body.
Herbert Ingram was a British journalist and politician. He is considered the father of pictorial journalism through his founding of The Illustrated London News, the first illustrated magazine. He was a Liberal politician who favoured social reform and represented Boston for four years until his early death in the shipwreck of the Lady Elgin.
The game of chess is commonly divided into three phases: the opening, middlegame, and endgame. There is a large body of theory regarding how the game should be played in each of these phases, especially the opening and endgame. Those who write about chess theory, who are often also eminent players, are referred to as "theorists" or "theoreticians".
The Staunton–Morphy controversy concerns the failure of negotiations in 1858 for a chess match between Howard Staunton and Paul Morphy and later interpretations of the actions of the two players. The details of the events are not universally agreed, and accounts and interpretations often show strong national bias.
Alexander Munro was a British sculptor of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. He concentrated on portraiture and statues, but is best known for his Rossetti-influenced figure-group Paolo and Francesca (1852), which has often been identified as the epitome of Pre-Raphaelite sculpture.
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Matilda Marian Pullan —also writing under the pen names Mrs. Pullan and Aiguillette— was a prolific and influential 19th century British writer on needlework who contributed columns to a wide selection of periodicals in the 1840s and 1850s. She was the author of numerous books on needlework, especially the decorative forms known as fancywork, and she wrote a comprehensive encyclopedia on the subject. She was also an extremely successful businesswoman who ran a needlework supply shop that expanded to become a mail order business. Towards the end of her life, she moved to America, where she opened a consulting business whose clients included the actor Laura Keene.
Simpkin & Marshall was a British bookseller, book wholesaler and book publisher. The firm was founded in 1819 and traded until the 1940s. For many decades the firm was Britain's largest book wholesaler and a respected family-owned company, but it was acquired by the media proprietor Robert Maxwell and went bankrupt in 1954, an event which, according to Lionel Leventhal, "sounded a warning to the book trade about Captain Robert Maxwell's way of doing business".
Charles Atherton was a British scientific engineer from Calne, Wiltshire. He was appointed as Chief Engineer and Inspector of Steam Machinery at Her Majesty's Woolwich Dockyard in 1847; and a second time between 1851 and 1862. He served in the same capacity at Her Majesty's Devonport Dockyard between 1848 and 1851.