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Lucy

Historical Figure

Lucy

1863–1935

British fashion designer and Titanic survivor (1863–1935)

Victorian Era

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Biography

Lucy Christiana, Lady Duff-Gordon was a leading British fashion designer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who worked under the professional name Lucile.

Read more on Wikipedia

In Their Own Words (5)

I AM EVERYWHERE

Statement after reaching 100% of her neural capacities.

If you're asking me what to do with all this knowledge you're accumulating, I say, pass it on … just like any simple cell, going through time.

To Lucy

I can start to control other peoples' bodies. Also I can control magnetic and electric waves, and — not all of them, just the most basic — television, telephone, radio. … I don't feel pain, fear, desire. It's like all things that make us human are fading away. It's like the less human I feel, all this knowledge about everything, quantum physics, applied mathematics, the infinite capacity of the cell's nucleus, they're all exploding inside my brain. All this knowledge. I don't know what to do with it.

Explaining to Professor Norman some of her abilities as she reaches 28% of her neural capacities.

For the moment it's just hypothesis, I confess. But if you think about it, it's troubling to realize that the Greeks, the Egyptians and the Indians had notion of cells centuries before the invention of the microscope. And what's to say about Darwin whom everyone took for a fool when he put forth his theory of evolution? It's up to us to push the rules and laws, and go from evolution, to revolution.

Lecturing on his newly published research

I feel everything. Space, the air, the vibrations, the people, I can feel the gravity, I can feel the rotation of the Earth, the heat leaving my body, the blood in my veins. I can feel my brain. The deepest parts of my memory.i wish you can feel the same.

Speaking to her mother on a phone, as she has a doctor operate to remove the drug packet from her body.

Timeline

The story of Lucy, told in moments.

1886 Event

Her husband Albert Parsons is among the anarchists arrested after the Haymarket bombing in Chicago. She organizes his defense, speaks at rallies, fundraises. It doesn't work. Albert is hanged on November 11, 1887.

1905 Event

Helps found the Industrial Workers of the World alongside Eugene Debs and Big Bill Haywood. She's the only woman on the stage at the founding convention. The Chicago police consider her "more dangerous than a thousand rioters."

1935 Death

Dies in a house fire in Chicago at about 84. Police arrive before firefighters and confiscate her personal library of over 1,500 books and papers. The FBI had been monitoring her for decades. The papers were never returned.

More from the Victorian Era

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