James Fisk Times Four: Senator, Financier, Explorer and Physicist

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This episode reads a single Wikipedia disambiguation page for the name James Fisk and treats its four short entries as a timeline of American history. The first James Fisk, born in 1763 and died in 1844, is listed only as a U.S. Senator from Vermont. Born a British subject, he lived through the Revolution, the Constitution, the War of 1812 and the expansion of the 1840s, and reached 81 in an era before antibiotics. The page then shows two men of the mid-1800s: James Fisk the financier, 1835 to 1872, who was dead at 37, and James L. Fisk, about 1845 to 1902, a Union Army officer who led four expeditions to Montana.

The fourth entry is James Brown Fisk, a physicist born in 1910 and died in 1981, whose lifetime ran from before World War I to the dawn of personal computing. The hosts compare the sequence to a strategy game's tech tree: law and government first, then capital and exploration, then advanced science. They also look at the page's own plumbing, from the Parsoid engine that turns volunteer wikitext into HTML to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license that keeps the content free to reuse. The page exists in English, German, Swedish and Low German, and was last edited on November 30, 2020.

The senator's single descriptor covers 81 years that began under British rule.
The page gives no cause of death for the financier who died at 37 in 1872.
James L. Fisk's Montana expeditions crossed country without reliable railroads.
The four men together span 218 years, from 1763 to 1981.
The share-alike clause requires any remix of the page to carry the same free license.

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