BOB'S BITS

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BAGLADY

Every patent shall contain a short title or description of the invention... and a grant to the patentee... for the term of seventeen years, of the exclusive right to make, use and vend the said invention or discovery throughout the United States. From the US Patent Act, July 8, 1870.

This omnibus legislation (which also covered copyright) consolidated and rationalized previous laws. Inter alia, it also laid down rules for cases involving patent disputes, and it’s one reason the 1870s decade saw so many such cases. One of the earliest suits was brought (in September 1870) by Margaret Knight against Charles Annan, concerning Annan’s patent for a machine which made flat-bottomed paper bags. Knight claimed that Annan had stolen her idea, and she won the case. The invention was hers, US Patent #116482, and she underlined the victory by patenting an “improved” machine in 1879, US#220925. Those numbers are significant in themselves, but the language Annan used in his defense have also provoked interest. Did he argue that Knight could not have invented the machine because, so to speak, she was a she? On that question, the jury is still out. But if that was Annan’s argument, the judge decided that Miss Knight, undeniably a ‘she, her’. had the better of it. Margaret Eloise Knight was born in Maine on February 14, 1838. Hers was a poor family, made poorer still when the father died, and Margaret (and her two brothers) left school as soon as they could (at 12) to work in the mills. She’d already displayed an inventive streak, and early on, at the cotton mill, she invented a safety device after witnessing a personal injury accident. Exactly what that was is now lost to legend. Plagued by bad health, she worked a variety of jobs (including making daguerreotypes) before fetching up at a paper mill, which was where she invented her machine for making flat-bottomed, rectangular paper bags. After Margaret won the case against Charles (who was a machinist at the same factory), she won an award from no less a she than Queen Victoria. Then Margaret sold her patent. And that became her modus vivendi. Though endlessly inventive (she would take out 30 patents), the wolf was ever at her door. Still inventing, the wolf still at her door, Margaret Knight died in 1914. A local paper celebrated her as “a female Edison.” Margaret might have appreciated the irony. As she herself once put it, “I’m only sorry I couldn’t have had a good a chance as a boy.” ©

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STEINWAY

Build to a standard, not to a price. Henry Engelhard Steinway.

In percentage terms the 1850s decade saw the USA’s greatest influx of immigrants. Well over a million of them were Germans. It’s easy to see them as radicals fleeing the conservative reaction that followed the failure of the 1848 revolutions. Here in Missouri, in the winter of 1860-61, these “Forty-Eighters” led the St. Louis mob that forced the secessionist state legislature to abandon its plan to leave the union. They’d already seen a ‘jünker’ aristocracy in action in Germany, and would not succumb to another one in Missouri. One of them, General Franz Sigel (1824-1902) still stands mounted guard in Forest Park. Another, Carl Schurz (1829-1906) would in the US Senate be the conscience of Republican radicalism. But there was another German immigrant (in 1850, to New York City, whose politics are less easily defined. He came in as Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, but soon decided that “Henry Steinway” would be a better fit, for he came to America to do business. He was born in Germany on February 15, 1797. We see signs of radicalism in his early youth when, only 15, he joined the Schwarze Shar (“black flock”), an irregular unit formed under the duke of Brunswick to fight the Napoleonic invasion, but as an adult he would cultivate a different radicalism as an independent craftsman, impatient of the restrictive rules of the German guilds and frustrated by the tariffs that enriched German principalities but made paupers of the citizens. Of course, Henry Steinway made pianos. And his pianos were revolutionary in design and distinctive in tone, thanks largely to their iron frame. Steinway’s pianos acculturated well in his brave new world, a continental market free of tariffs. It was also populated with a rising middle class prosperous enough to include “parlors” in their new houses and ambitious enough to think music a perfect accompaniment to their rising status. Steinway left his oldest son, Christian Friedrich (possibly named after the Duke of Brunswick) to run the piano business in Germany, but founded a new company, Steinway & Sons, which set the gold standard of American piano manufacture. In 1871 Henry died. Soon his fourth son, William, took over. Like his father, William built great pianos and was involved in many other ventures, notably in public transport. William died in 1896, and it only remained for that old German radical, Senator Carl Schurz, to deliver his most famous funeral oration. In that, Schurz defined Steinway’s greatness as “blending in himself the best traits of the American character with the best of the German.” The funeral took place in New York’s Liederkranz Hall. For decades, St. Louis’s “circle of song” was located on South Grand Avenue. It has since been replaced by a supermarket, a very “American” destiny. But on North Grand, Steinway pianos still grace the stage of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. ©

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Melanchthon

We must seek the truth, love it, defend it, and hand it down uncorrupted to our posterity. Philipp Melanchthon. Loci communes (‘Commonplaces’). 1521.

If Martin Luther gave his name to the German Reformation, and was its spirit, Philipp Melanchthon was its codifier. In particular, Melanchthon was the principal author, certainly the editor, of the Augsburg Confession (1530 et seq). Philipp Melanchthon was born Philipp Schwartzherdt on February 16, 1497, in Bretten, in present-day Baden-Württemberg. His father was an armorer, by legend a very pious one, but the chief educational influence in Philipp’s life was Renaissance humanism, which he imbibed at Latin school and then at Heidelberg University. There he translated his German surname into the Greek Melanchthon, ‘black earth’ or ‘dark soil’. This was a common humanist practice, but there were plenty of humanist ‘reformers’ who stayed within the Catholic Church. It was at his first university appointment, at Wittenberg, that Melanchthon (named professor of Greek at only 21) fell outside the Catholic establishment. This owed to his close study of the Pauline letters and to his friendship with Wittenberg’s professor of theology, Martin Luther (1483-1546). Through their reading of scripture, particularly the Acts and Paul’s letters, the Catholic Church appeared to be full of untruths that had turned into corruptions. Luther’s Ninety-five Theses (1517) had already declared the issues when Melanchthon appeared at Wittenberg. Years of trouble ensued, not only debates among reformers but attacks from the orthodox and the threat of civil war. Melanchthon’s first published response was his book of ‘commonplaces’ (1521, quoted above). Nine years later came the Augsburg Confession, in which the 95 theses had been boiled down to 21 articles of faith and 7 “abuses” found in Catholic doctrine and practice. So in at least seven senses the Augsburg Confession was a militant document. But it’s also evidence that Melanchthon thought debate, discussion, perhaps compromise to be the essences of the quest for truth. Since he outlived Luther by 14 years, that idea has stuck. Philipp Melanchthon, in true humanist style, looked for agreement. Failing that, he sought agreements to disagree. Luther sometimes thought his colleague too ready to compromise, too irenic in his tone. There were, however, some essentials. Against the Catholic clerics and princes, Melanchthon would ever uphold the idea that salvation could come only through faith—from which good works might be expected to follow. And, like Luther (for that matter, like orthodox Catholics), Philip Melanchthon thought of anabaptists as “monsters,” fit only for overthrow or death, whichever came first or easiest. It’s interesting, then, that in distant England, Queen Elizabeth I learned by heart Melanchthon’s Loci communes and could recite them at will—in the original Latin, I imagine. ©.

[Stanley]

MARTYROLOGY

From the time of his promotion to the see of Canterbury, à Becket became an altered man. He cut his gay companions, discharged his chef de cuisine, discontinued his dealings with his West End tailor, and took to a kind of cheap blouse made of the coarsest sackcloth.

Thus England’s most revered saint, Thomas à Becket, is lampooned in The Comic History of England, an 1847 publication that would go through many editions and is today available online. I used Harvard University’s copy (an 1894 reprinting). In it, the Becket satire takes up only a few pages and is fundamentally accurate, including Thomas à Becket’s murder at Canterbury’s high altar by four knights and King Henry II’s hypocritical public penance for the crime. But a comic tone is maintained throughout. The Comic History names one of the murderers, Sir Reginald FitzUrse, as “the son of a bear”, and King Henry’s self-scourging is taken lightly, too, as “the Great Flogging Case” of English history. It’s interesting that the author of this massive (700-page) satire on English history was written by one Gilbert Abbott à Beckett, whose family claimed descent (collateral, of course) from the martyred saint. Indeed, they named their third son Gilbert à Beckett after St. Thomas’s father (a petty knight who’d come over from France soon after William the Conqueror). Today’s Gilbert Abbott à Beckett was born on February 17, 1811, in Hampstead, then outside of London. His father was a reform-minded lawyer, one with enough money to send all three of his sons to Westminster School. There the Beckett boys conspired together to produce a comic magazine, The Censor, which they (somehow) got printed. It satirized the school and its doings, not least the faculty’s overuse of flogging, and yet they got away with it. While two of the Beckett boys went off to do other things (the eldest brother, William, would become chief justice of Australia), Gilbert remained addicted to comedy and satire, perhaps the most popular humorous writer in early Victorian England, and certainly prolific. After Westminster, he founded and published several comic magazines, none of which survived long. Gilbert à Becket also wrote plays (comedies, mostly), and would become the mainstay of the magazine Punch. He wrote at a furious pace, could not stop, and along the way he produced full-scale parodies of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, both of whom rather enjoyed being satirized. Much of Gilbert à Beckett’s stuff reads heavily, these days. An era’s humor usually dies when the era passes. But The Comic History of England is still worth reading. As for Gilbert, he spent as furiously as he wrote. When he died (widely mourned, including by Dickens) in 1856, he left his wife and family deeply in the soup. In order to climb out, Gilbert’s son Abbott à Beckett took up his father’s trade, writing comic stuff. Abbott also republished many of Gilbert’s most successful books, including The Comic History of England. If you don’t like to read online, the UM-St. Louis Library has the 1864 edition. ©

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FERRARI

Racing is a great mania to which one must sacrifice everything, without reticence, without hesitation. Enzo Ferrari.

This quotation, possibly apocryphal, sums up Enzo Ferrari’s role in mid 20th-century Italian politics. Or, better, his roles, plural. He made deals with just about everybody. Enzo met Benito Mussolini, the ill-fated Il duce of Italian fascism, probably only once, and that was in 1924 when Mussolini had just gained power. And for most of this period Ferrari did work for Alfa Romeo, which Mussolini nationalized in 1933. Perhaps that is why, in 1934, Enzo Ferrari joined Mussolini’s political party and (at least once) donned the full fascist uniform for a public appearance. During the war, Ferrari supplied machine parts (notably, high-quality ball bearings) to the German army. So in the spring of 1945, with Mussolini assassinated and the Germans being finally pushed out of northern Italy, Enzo Ferrari had to dance quickly over to the winning side. But he knew the steps, for he had already made good connections there, with (for instance) the old Socialist party, and even with the “Partisans”, mostly extreme left wingers who harassed Mussolini (and the occupying Germans) in the war’s late stages. Enzo Ferrari was a survivor, one who would do what was necessary to save his racing cars (and his then infant company) from whatever threatened them. Afterwards, through the 1960s, Ferrari had a price on his head, placed there by Italian mobsters—and he is rumored to have paid some of it, too. The political chameleon and undoubted champion of auto racing, Enzo Ferrari, was born on February 18, 1898, in Modena, northern Italy. Enzo may have wanted to become an operatic tenor (he was burly enough), but with little schooling he went to work, alongside his elder brother Dino, in their father’s machine and carpentry workshop. They did all sorts of work, but Enzo was drawn to autos, not only tinkering with them but racing them to. After service in WWI (on the side of the western allies), Enzo went to work full time for Alfa Romeo. His team won some important grand prix races (including the German, in 1935), but he doubted Alfa’s commitment to racing and design, and formed his own “Ferrari” subsidiary in 1939. After the confusions of the second war, Ferrari struck out on his own (though at first under the Alfa Romeo marque). Then, in 1952, a “Ferrari” Ferrari won the world championship. But independence was costly, and to finance the race car operation Ferrari began to make expensive sports cars. For Enzo, the engines were the thing. The cars’ sleek, aerodynamic bodies were ego-dressings for those who could afford such fripperies. Ferrari went on, a dominant figure beset with controversy, until his death, aged 90, in 1988. Admirers called him “The Grand Old Man” of Formula 1 racing. The Vatican’s newspaper denounced him as a monomaniac who sacrificed everything to speed and trophies. You can take your pick. ©

[Stanley]

SAD BALLADS

When you’re sweet as a pickle

And clean as a pig –

I’ll give you a nickel

And dance you a jig.

Carson McCullers, 1964.

This, in its entirety, was the title poem in a book of children’s verse by Carson McCullers. On its face, it’s a rhyming jingle, mildly absurd, perfect stuff for kids. Read in the context of her life and work, it seems out of place. The book itself, Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig, was published only three years before her death, in 1967, when she was only 50 years old. McCullers fought illness for most of her adult life, the penance of rheumatic fever, several other ailments, and too much alcohol. Through all that, she wrote imperishable fictions, short stories and novels, and with plots and characters far removed from sweet pickles, clean pigs, and jigs. Carson McCullers was born Lulu Carson Smith on February 19, 1917, in Columbus, Georgia. Her father (a jeweler) and mother (an amateur pianist) named her after a beloved aunt, and thought her gifted. Indeed she did graduate from Columbus High School two years early, but that was kids’ stuff. Her genius lay elsewhere. Her mother hoped she might be a great musician, a pianist, and in 1934 Lulu went off to New York, by steamship, to study at the Juilliard. That did not work out, partly because a bout with rheumatic fever made her too frail to stand the rigors of training for a concert career. So she turned to writing. Her father had seen this talent, and given her a typewriter when she was only 15. While improving her talents at that tuneless keyboard, she met and married an aspiring writer she’d met on a military base near Columbus, Reeves McCullers. They made a pact to encourage each other’s writing, but Carson proved far the better writer with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, published in 1940. It’s still considered a classic of ‘southern gothic.” One contemporary critic, marveling at her age, wrote that “maturity does not cover the quality of her work. It is something beyond that, something more akin to the vocation of pain to which a great poet is born.” More literary successes followed, and much pain, too, so much of both that one must reconsider Carson McCullers’ 1964 pig poem. There is much oddity in clean pigs and sweet pickles. The other poems in this collection breathe the same uncertainty, or duality, of a great writer’s pained life. A giraffe, its tiny head far above the stink of a zoo, dreams of an African veldt “that she would never see again.” And in “Pandora”,

There was a little girl called Pandora

Who opened a magic box.

The magic box was a tragic box.

So look what happened to poor Pandora.

[Stanley]

ADAMS

Aesthetically, subjects possessing the least obvious color seem to come through best, not only in simulation of reality, but in sheer beauty of color in image. Ansel Adams, 1962.

This is a surpassingly odd statement in itself, the more so because Ansel Adams is best known for his mastery of black & white. He is known to have preserved some 3500 color negatives, a mere drop in a monochrome ocean. Many of these color photos were taken in the late 1940s and 1950s, when his friend Edwin Land was experimenting with polaroid and color, and in the 1990s, after Adams’s death, enterprising archivists kicked off an exhibition called “Ansel Adams in Color.” But Ansel Adams will be known forever as a master of monochrome. It is because of Adams that one thinks of black and white pictures as somehow more realistic than color photographs. This is especially the case in his pictorial renditions of natural landscapes, especially Yosemite, the high Sierras, and the western deserts. But in nature, in ‘real life’, these are places full of color. To ‘see’ them in black and white, one must wait until the dimmest twilight, and even then take only the briefest of glances. Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco on February 20, 1902, in comfortable cicumstances. He family fortunes weathered the 1906 earthquake, but not the financial panic of 1907. So little Ansel embarked on his education in what the family thought of as reduced circumstances. Still, they retained enough wealth to build a nice house overlooking the Pacific and with sweeping views of the still-unbridged Golden Gate and, beyond, the Marin headlands. Ansel was not an enthusiastic pupil, and his formal education ceased in 1915. But he liked to see things: the stars and planets through his father’s telescope, perhaps those sweeping views, and outings to Yosemite, already a National Park. It was at Yosemite in 1916 that Adams began his engagement with photography, with a Kodak “Brownie,” and perhaps more significantly with developing film and printing photos. Indeed, he would later insist that one did not takepictures. One made them. The process began in the photographer’s brain, proceeded through framing the shot, snapping the shutter, and then finished in the darkroom. And throughout Adams did make heavy use of color. Color filters (on the camera lens and/or in the darkroom) played with light, enhancing or subverting contrasts, altering the scene. So the best of Ansel Adams’s pictures are moments in time, stills in a cinematic sequence, arrested motions. To see the best of them is just like being there, at that moment. The viewer becomes part of the image. It’s not “real,” but it is realism at its best. One might as well ‘colorize’ the movie Casablanca as to add color to Adams’s B&W image of the Snake River. The river rises in shadow but then catches the light of the afternoon sun as it peeks over the shoulders of the Grand Tetons. It’s a still picture in which everything moves. ©.

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POPULARIZER

His brain seems to have been but a calculating machine; his eyes inlets of vision, not fountains of tears; his hands instruments of manipulation which never trembled with emotion . . . his heart only an anatomical organ, necessary for the circulation of blood. George Wilson, 1851, in Wilson’s The Life of the Honble Henry Cavendish.
Henry Cavendish (1731-1810) was the spawn of who knows how many dukes and earls of Devonshire. So he was almost as rich as King Croesus, but even odder. Modern scholars have diagnosed Cavendish as autistic, an idea which was not available to George Wilson in the mid-19th century. Wilson did not stumble at Cavendish’s eccentricities. The above is one of Wilson’s more moderate judgments of a man who wouldn’t even talk to his female servants. To Wilson, Henry Cavendish was a great scientist, a pioneer chemist, and the main task was to explain Cavendish’s discoveries and his greatest mistake. 175 years on, Wilson’s biography is still a standard source. That’s partly because Wilson himself was a good chemist. But he was also a great pioneer in science history and in the popularization of science. So George Wilson wanted readers to understand Cavendish as a human being, not ‘merely’ as a great scientist who might have discovered oxygen, but didn’t. George Wilson was born in Edinburgh on February 21, 1818. Both parents were of respectable, but Glaswegian, origin, and managed to create a happy, prosperous household despite frequent visitations of the angel death. Several of George’s siblings died in infancy, and his twin brother, always consumptive, died at 18. Through it all, the house was a beehive. The kids hiked around Edinburgh and its port city. Leith, and loved to climb Arthur’s Seat by the most difficult route. In 1828, the boys (George and an elder brother) formed the ‘Juvenile Society for the Advancement of Knowledge,’ and discussed such questions as whether camels were more useful to Arabs than reindeer were to Laplanders. The herrings and whales offloaded at Leith were subjected to similar criteria. Here George often asked his friends to consider also the value to humanity of poetry and philosophy, but it was useful science that won his attention, the more so when we went off to London to read chemistry with that same elder brother, Daniel. While Daniel (later Sir Daniel) Wilson became a famous archaeologist, George Wilson returned to Edinburgh to lecture in medicine, then chemistry, but also to spread the scientific gospel. Beside his landmark Cavendish, and to some extent because of it, he was appointed to Edinburgh’s new chair of technology in 1855 and, in the same year, became the first director of Scotland’s new Museum of Industry. As befit a lifelong popularizer, he kept active in Edinburgh’s Royal Society for the Arts. In 1858 he was offered the scentific honor of a chair in medicine, but he turned that one down on grounds of ill health. In 1859, aged only 41, George Wilson died, probably of pneumonia. ©.
Bob Bliss

[Stanley]

SEIDEL

On the Head [of the coffin] was another Inscription, Innocentia nusquam tuta . . . denoting that we are fallen into the most unhappy Times, when even Innocence itself is nowhere safe. From a news item in the Boston Gazette and Country Journal, March 5, 1770.

Thus the Gazette described the funeral of one Christopher Seider, 11 years old, who’d been shot on February 22, 1770 and died of his wounds later that same day, cradled (as per the Gazette) in the arms of his loving mother. The shooting was big news in Boston, then a port city of 16,000 and the seat of Massachusetts colonial government. Boston had been set on its ear by the arrival of 2,000 British troops, sent to ensure the rigorous enforcement of the laws (of Britain’s parliament) and orders (of the British king). For a galaxy of reasons, the laws, the orders, and the troops proved unpopular. But it was another local, a Bostonian named Ebenezer Richardson, who pulled the trigger. His bad local reputation (as a philanderer) was made worse by his occupation, for he was a customs snitch. Richardson had come to the aid of his neighbor, Theophilus Lillie, suspected of breaking Boston’s illegal boycott against English imports. A scuffle ensued. Stones were thrown at Richardson’s house. A window was broken. Enraged, Richardson grabbed his blunderbuss (a primitive shotgun) and fired into the crowd. Christopher Seider, who’d stooped down to pick up more stones to throw, caught most of the blast and thus became, some have said, the first martyr of the American Revolution. In fact it took five more years of conflict and confusion to bring a revolution, but in Boston there was already a Resistance. Civilians, mostly men and boys, followed the British soldiers though the streets, gathered outside customs officers’ homes, and generally harassed anyone thought guilty of upholding the established order. So when Christopher was killed, Boston was ready. The Resistance—in the form of the Sons of Liberty—organized a funeral; Christopher’s friends, ragamuffin boys all, carried his pall; there was a parade, there were speeches, and Christopher Seidel was buried as a hero. Well over 2000 Bostonians attended, further establishing the town’s reputation as the center and source of colonial unruliness. In distant London, Christopher would have been called a terrorist if the word had then been available. And it was decided that Ebenezer Richardson had acted in self defense. If he was to be tried, it should be elsewhere, for he could not get a “fair” trial in radical Boston. It’s ironic that the Gazette report should have hit the streets on March 5, 1770, for it helped to prime the unruly crowd that harassed British troops that night, thus setting the stage for the much more famous Boston Massacre—and five more martyrs. Or five more dead urban terrorists. It was not yet a revolution, but it was already an age in which innocence was nowhere safe. As for Christopher, he was a recent immigrant, German, but now an American hero. ©.

[Stanley]

PEPYS

My finding that [the mortality of] the City within the walls is encreased and likely to continue so . . . my meeting dead corps’s of the plague carried to be buried close to me . . . to see a person sick of the sores carried close by me . . . my finding the Angell tavern at the lower end of Tower-hill shut up . . . to hear that poor Payne my waterman hath buried a child and is dying himself -- to hear that a labourer that I sent but the other day to Dagenham . . . is dead of the plague and that one of my own watermen . . . is now dead of the plague . . . to hear that Mr. Lewes hath another daughter sick – and lastly that both my servants W. Hewers and Tom Edwards have lost their fathers of the plague this week – doth put me into great apprehensions of melancholy. . . But I put off the thoughts of sadness as much as I can, and the rather to keep my wife in good heart and my family also. Samuel Pepys, part of his diary entry for September 14, 1665.

All diaries are to an extent exercises in self-centeredness, but this one stands out for its humaneness. Written pretty faithfully over about 10 years (1660-1669) it pictures London life during a period that saw much “history”: the restoration of monarchy, the second Anglo-Dutch War, the Great Fire of London, and of course the terrible plague year of 1665. I dived into Pepys’s diary for several reasons, mainly because in the 1660s he was in the process of becoming an important figure at the Admiralty. He was not yet a “civil servant,” nor hardly a “bureaucrat”, but through Sam we can see the origins of the modern state. Of course Pepys retained many perquisites of traditional placeholders. We might call them corruptions: bribes, skimming the cream off contracts, and not a few pleasures of the flesh. But besides the diary, Pepys kept the books. He saw flaws and foibles in the Royal Navy. Indeed he was prosecuted for some of them. Yet he set himself to reform others, and was strikingly successful. Samuel Pepys was born in Fleet Street, London, on February 23, 1660. His father was a tailor, his mother a butcher’s daughter, so Sam wasn’t particularly well born, but he had good cousinly connections, he was a bright lad, and he was one of the few children in his family to survive to adulthood. He went to a good school in London, then Cambridge, and found a patron in George Downing (he of Downing Street), one of the greatest of political survivors of that (or any other) age. Well-educated, well versed in all the arts of finding and keeping a place in the pecking order, Pepys married in 1658 and, in the spring and summer of 1660, launched on his career as office holder, courtier, member of parliament, and (by the way) man about town. His diary, all in shorthand and some in code, gives us life in all these aspects, including its less-than-perfect ones like his many amours with servants, actresses, and ‘women of the town.’ Along the way, he shows courage, compassion, and a significant range of talents (including music and science). Some of it is self-boasting (sometimes “self-basting” might be the better term). But through it all, as in that plague entry, Pepys sees himself as a part of a social order, tied inextricably to his wife, to his servants (Samuel and Elizabeth had no children, so “family” meant the whole household), his neighbors, his patrons, and even to the many corpses he saw in that dread-full summer of 1665. ©

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VAUCANSON

Automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency . . . automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. Bill Gates.

In 1963, a glitch in Penn’s new registration system sent me, a mere Junior, into a PhD seminar. I tried to bail (the atmosphere was far too heady), but the visiting professor, L. H. Butler of St. Andrews, insisted that I stay as his ‘token undergraduate.’ So my life was changed by a clerical inefficiency as applied to an efficient IBM punch card. I’d signed up for History 550 and got History 750. Punch cards had a brief vogue in computerization, but soon gave way. Today you can buy “vintage” IBM punch cards at bargain basement prices, from Etsy ® (and wreak havoc at your leisure, I guess). Punch cards do have a surprisingly long history. One early application came in 1745, in France, where Jacques Vaucanson used a very heavy punch card to automate the looming of fine silk. It was part of a government project to catch up with the English weaving industry. He’d been assigned to it by Louis XV’s chief minister, Cardinal André Hercule de Fleury. The device (along with its attached loom) was demonstrated in Paris in 1746. It won Vaucanson election to the Académie des Sciences and enabled him to add the nobilliary “de” to his surname, so he’s known to history as Jacques de Vaucanson. It must have seemed a surprisingly good outcome for the tenth son of a humble glovemaker, born in Grenoble on February 24, 1709. But by 1745 he’d already achieved notoriety as the maker of automata. These included servant-machines for the mayor’s dining room at Les Minines, near La Rochelle. These had been declared dangerous and destroyed, But never mind. De Vaucanson was an inventive young man who’d tried quite a variety of trades and then survived them all by marrying a rich widow. So he continued to invent. One was a flute player, life size, with a repertoire of a dozen melodies. He won more fame with a robot duck that ate grain and then pooped duck-like excreta. No digesting was happening, but the illusion was the thing, and it won wide recognition even before Vaucanson’s election to the Académie. Then came the punch-card silk loom, the noble “de,” and several other inventions, notably an automated metal lathe. Besides fame and the “de,” de Vaucanson snagged a government appointment as inspector and a mention in Denis Diderot’s famed Encyclopédie. But not everyone loved him. De Vaucanson died in 1782, which was just as well. His other inventions were destroyed during the French Revolution, during which (had he survived long enough) his “de” might have won him the attention of a different Enlightenment invention, the guillotine. As for the automated loom, de Vaucanson’s idea was improved (and patented in 1805) by Joseph-Marie Jacquard, whose surname today (still without the ‘de’) is associated with fine silks. ©.

[Stanley]

VAUCANSON

Automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency . . . automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. Bill Gates.

In 1963, a glitch in Penn’s new registration system sent me, a mere Junior, into a PhD seminar. I tried to bail (the atmosphere was far too heady), but the visiting professor, L. H. Butler of St. Andrews, insisted that I stay as his ‘token undergraduate.’ So my life was changed by a clerical inefficiency as applied to an efficient IBM punch card. I’d signed up for History 550 and got History 750. Punch cards had a brief vogue in computerization, but soon gave way. Today you can buy “vintage” IBM punch cards at bargain basement prices, from Etsy ® (and wreak havoc at your leisure, I guess). Punch cards do have a surprisingly long history. One early application came in 1745, in France, where Jacques Vaucanson used a very heavy punch card to automate the looming of fine silk. It was part of a government project to catch up with the English weaving industry. He’d been assigned to it by Louis XV’s chief minister, Cardinal André Hercule de Fleury. The device (along with its attached loom) was demonstrated in Paris in 1746. It won Vaucanson election to the Académie des Sciences and enabled him to add the nobilliary “de” to his surname, so he’s known to history as Jacques de Vaucanson. It must have seemed a surprisingly good outcome for the tenth son of a humble glovemaker, born in Grenoble on February 24, 1709. But by 1745 he’d already achieved notoriety as the maker of automata. These included servant-machines for the mayor’s dining room at Les Minines, near La Rochelle. These had been declared dangerous and destroyed, But never mind. De Vaucanson was an inventive young man who’d tried quite a variety of trades and then survived them all by marrying a rich widow. So he continued to invent. One was a flute player, life size, with a repertoire of a dozen melodies. He won more fame with a robot duck that ate grain and then pooped duck-like excreta. No digesting was happening, but the illusion was the thing, and it won wide recognition even before Vaucanson’s election to the Académie. Then came the punch-card silk loom, the noble “de,” and several other inventions, notably an automated metal lathe. Besides fame and the “de,” de Vaucanson snagged a government appointment as inspector and a mention in Denis Diderot’s famed Encyclopédie. But not everyone loved him. De Vaucanson died in 1782, which was just as well. His other inventions were destroyed during the French Revolution, during which (had he survived long enough) his “de” might have won him the attention of a different Enlightenment invention, the guillotine. As for the automated loom, de Vaucanson’s idea was improved (and patented in 1805) by Joseph-Marie Jacquard, whose surname today (still without the ‘de’) is associated with fine silks. ©.

[Tizer]

That takes me back to my first job as a junior progress clerk at British Northrop in Blackburn in the early 1960s. Stacks of Hollerith punch cards charting the progress of assembly of the looms.

[Stanley]

NODDACK

Kinder, Küche, und Kirche. German saying: “Children, Kitchen, and Church.”

This slogan has a long history in German culture. It became popular as Germany faced the pressures of modernization. Emperor Wilhelm II, used it, as did his Empress, Augusta Victoria. In 1932, the minority Nazi Party (NSDAP) enthusiastically supported legislation aimed at removing married women from paid employment. Then, after the Nazis seized power, Kinder, Küche, und Kirche became state policy. But Germany (like Britain, the USA, and other modernizing societies) had its fair share of pioneer women, “female firsts” in all sorts of workplaces, even universities. So it was with Ida Noddack, born Ida Tacke in the northern Rhine region on February 25, 1896. Deciding that she did not want to be a school teacher (by then an acceptable ambition for a woman), Ida majored in chemistry at university, eventually (1921) earning a PhD at the Technical University of Berlin. She was not a “first”. In that year, German universities granted 20 PhDs to women students. But she was a rarity, and there remained the problem of how she might find paid employment. Ida had already solved that problem by working with Walter Noddack, another chemist, in what they called an Arbeitsgemeinschaft, or “working group,” a convenient fiction they maintained before and after they actually married, in 1926. She was, of course, the unpaid partner. But she may have been the brains behind the operation. Working together, they discovered the last of the pre-atomic elements, # 75, Rhenium, in 1925. In 1933, Ida alone produced a paper on Enrico Fermi’s experiments with element 92, Uranium. In it she criticized Fermi’s methods, but was the first to suggest the possibility of nuclear fission. Ida did not use the word ‘fission’ (that would be coined by Irène Curie’s working group in Paris), but she got the concept. For this and other very advanced work, Ida and Walter were nominated for the Nobel three times in the 1930s, but never won the prize. The prize that Ida and Walter did win, though, was to be appointed to paid professorships at Adolf Hitler’s showcase university, Strasbourg, in occupied France, in spite of Ida’s failure to conform to the Kinder, Küche, Kirche ideal of patriotic womanhood. There they worked on nuclear fission. Luckily, they were outrun by Fermi and his colleagues. Recent efforts to see Ida Noddack as an heroic feminist pioneer in science have run afoul of her collaborations at Strasbourg. Neither she nor Walter were members of the NSDAP, but they were complicit. And they must have been aware of the ghoulish experiments conducted on living and dead Jews by Strasbourg’s dean of medicine, August Hirt. He escaped being tried at Nuremburg by suicide. Ida and Walter underwent “denazification”, apparently successfully, but lived the rest of their lives under a cloud of suspicion. And there they remain. ©.

[Stanley]

DOW

Never promote a man who hasn’t’ made some bad mistakes, because you would be promoting someone who hasn’t done much. Herbert Henry Dow.

At 82, and long retired from the fiercely competitive academe, I find this comforting advice. That’s a surprise, for during my misspent youth, Herbert Dow’s company, Dow Chemical, was the very symbol of corporate greed and imperial cruelty. Dow made napalm, a jellied petroleum with sticking properties, that the US military used to win the hearts and minds of Vietnamese peasants. On that ground, in 1967, I joined a protest against Dow recruiters on my campus (in Madison, Wisconsin). It turned into a police riot and left a bad, burning taste in my mouth—though, luckily, no burns on my skin—about Dow Chemical and its works. It was a little unfair. Dow didn’t invent napalm and, in fact, had only gained its government contract to produce the stuff in 1965. And the company’s origin lay in fields far removed from burning children and destroying villages in order to save them. Dow’s founding genius, Herbert Henry Dow, was born in Ontario on January 26, 1866. His Connecticut Yankee parents soon moved back to the USA, and Herbert grew up mainly in Cleveland, Ohio, then something of a boom town. Perhaps inspired by the presence of J. D. Rockefeller and his fellows, more likely by his inventor-father, Herbert Dow went to Case Technical to study chemistry. While still an undergraduate, he got the idea that bromine might be extracted from the brines that oozed up from oil wells in northern Ohio and southern Michigan. In 1890, Herbert Dow took out a patent on “the Dow process,” which used electrolysis to extract bromine from those brines (which Rockefeller and others had viewed as mere pollutants). Bromine was not a luxury product, but there was a big demand for it, and Dow produced it very cheaply. Hey, Presto!! A fortune beckoned, and in 1897 Dow formed Dow Chemical to find that fortune. Then, in a series of brilliant maneuvers in the American and world bromine markets, Dow triumphed over the efforts of the German bromine cartel to drive him out of business. When the Bromkonvention flooded the USA with 15 cent bromine, Dow bought it up, repackaged it, exported it back to Europe, and made a killing. Dow also kept experimenting with Ohio and Michigan brines, discovering new products, and then made those products marketable. Old products came along too, a better indigo dye, chlorine, and, not least, a purer and cheaper sodium salt. Of course Dow made mistakes. But he learned from them. That’s the main point of experimentation. Perhaps his greatest error was in his laboratory activity. In 1930, Herbert Henry Dow died of cirrhosis. But, true to his Connecticut Yankee roots, he was a lifelong teetotaller. Like many pioneers in chemistry, Dow died of his chemicals. ©

[Stanley]

HAMILTON

When I talked about the strange silence on [workplace toxicology[ in American medical textbooks, I gained the impression that here was a subject tainted with Socialism or with feminine sentimentality for the poor. Alice Hamilton, in her autobiography (1943).

Alice Hamilton entitled her autobiography Exploring the Dangerous Trades. No surprise, given that her two most important previous publications were Industrial Poisons (1925) and Industrial Toxicology (1934). Alice Hamilton was one of the four Hamilton sisters who grew up in luxury’s lap in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on their grandfather’s local estate or at the family vacation redoubt on Mackinac Island in Lake Michigan. But while most of their cousins rested easily on inherited wealth, these Hamilton girls all decided to make waves. Edith (1867-1963) and Margaret (1871-1969) became noted classicists, and each in their turn headmistresses of the Bryn Mawr School, Baltimore. Norah (1873-1945) was a pioneer in art education and no mean painter in her own right. I’ve written about Edith and Margaret in these “anniversary notes,” but now it’s Alice’s turn. Alice Hamilton was born on February 27, 1869. Like her sisters, she was first educated at Miss Porter’s Finishing School for Young Ladies (in faraway Connecticut), but unlike them her education then took a practical turn, owing to a childhood ambition to be a medical missionary. After an MD at Michigan (1893), she studied bacteriology in Germany and at Johns Hopkins. All this expertise won her a professorial appointment at Northwestern’s Women’s Medical College. What really changed her life, though, was her involvement with Hull House in Chicago. There she became, in effect, chief medical officer, personal physician to Jane Addams but more importantly a health worker with the poor families at Hull House and in its neighborhoods. Ill health and early death were far too common to be explained by working-class improvidence, and through observation and experiment (for instance, analyzing sputum), Alice determined that a leading cause was pollution, both at home and in the workplace. An initial interest in lead poisoning expanded to include other workplace poisons (notably benzene, radium, and various sulfides) and many neighborhood pollutants (lead again, but also environmental issues that gave permanent lodgings to tuberculosis and typhoid). Alice’s many accomplishments began with state legislation in Illinois and Indiana. She gained national scope after her appointment (a first for a woman) at Harvard University’s medical school, her publications, congressional testimony and lobbying. In the end, she outlived all her sisters, but she did not live long enough to see the creation, a few months after her death in 1970, of the national Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). That agency is now being dismantled, gutted, by our current president, who thinks of “regulation” as nothing more than a pain in the profit margin. Over Alice Hamilton’s dead body, one might say. ©.

[Stanley]

MEDAWAR

Our Galileo was Peter Medawar. From Thomas Starzl. “Peter Brian Medawar: Father of Transplantation” (1992).

Starzl’s paper was first delivered—as the opening address—in Paris, at the international Transplantation Society Congress. By 1992, surgical transplantation was a well-established procedure, a technique, and the list of transplantable organs had grown from kidneys to include hearts, lungs, and livers, and it’s longer today. Like all revolutions, it is hard to date, but the most plausible case is that it began when Peter Brian Medawar, fresh out of Oxford, went to work on providing skin grafts to burn victims (RAF pilots, mainly, but also civilians). Rejection was a problem, even when the graft was taken from some other part of the victim’s body. Medawar worked with the problem, and around it, for several years before he and his research assistant, Frank Burnet, published ‘explosive’ papers on the technique (1951) and then the science (1953) of grafting foreign tissue into a host body. For their work, they were jointly awarded the 1960 Nobel in physiology. Nine years later, Medawar suffered the first of a series of strokes which progressively hampered his research activities. Instead of invaliding himself out, Medawar became a leading philosopher and historian of science (as both profession and procedure), an artist with words. In a surface sense, at least, such stories are metaphors of Medawar’s life. Transplantation is, because of the nature of the cell, a delicate balance. Is it GVHD or HVGD (graft vs. host disease or vice-versa)? Peter Medawar knew all about that, for he’d been born in Brazil, the son of a Lebanese father and an English mother, on February 28, 1915. When the family transplanted to England, he easily became naturalized as a Briton, but did not so readily integrate at Marlborough College, a public school where students and faculty shared a very tribal temperament. Later, as a promising research scholar at Oxford, Medawar fell in love with a Somerville student, Jean Taylor, whose family strongly disapproved, partly because of fears that any biological offspring might be black. Peter and Jean would prove that to be bad science and worse morality. Meanwhile, Peter’s research on grafts and transplants required him to move across disciplinary frontiers, poaching. One of his graduate mentors (Howard Florey, he of penicillin fame), thought his early work too philosophical. Indeed he was a philosopher (one of the first medical scientists to draw a clear distinction between mere “ageing” and actual “senescence”, and then to argue that senescence was an evolutionary necessity. So Peter Medawar was well tooled-up to tackle the complex scientific and ethical problems involved with introducing ‘foreign’ organs to ‘native’ bodies. And then he went ahead and did it. I applaud his accomplishment. ©.

[Stanley]

LALLY

My earliest recollection of acting was when I was about nine years old and insisted on performing Romeo and Juliet in the nursery window seat, with myself as Romeo and my brother as Juliet. Gwen Lally.

Thus Lally gave evidence of an early preference for playing the male. The internet is silent on what her parents thought of that, but clearly they did not want her to take to the stage. Gwen Lally was born London on March 1, 1882, and a few days later christened as Gwendolyn Rosalie Lally Tollendal Speck. Her father, a gentleman of some breeding, soon had an early midlife crisis, entered Oxford, graduated, and took holy orders as vicar of Wroxton. There, in rural Oxfordshire, Gwen Lally (as eldest child) engineered nursery productions—for instance Romeo and Juliet—but was otherwise educated (privately, of course) to become a young and presumably marriageable lady. That never happened. Her first stage role came in 1906. She did play female roles, but increasingly her tall stature, her manner, and her mellow voice brought her male roles, sometimes starring. Along the way Gwen made close friendships with the like of impresarios Lillian Bayliss and Herbert Beerbohm Tree. She also wrote poetry and plays, and early showed an ambition to produce or direct, teaching young actresses like Peggy Ashcroft and Sybil Thorndike how best to tread the boards. Come World War I, with male actors of heroic age becoming rarities, men’s roles became more available, and Gwen Lally became known as a very fine actor who could convincingly play the man. And she could demonstrate a sharp sense of humor. Her own production, ‘Hims’ Ancient and Modern (1916) was more than just a wickedly good pun. During this period Gwen took up a lifelong domestic relationship with a female actress. But it wouldn’t do to see Gwen as a pioneer of queer culture, far less of queer rights. She became best known as a wildly successful entrepreneur in England’s history business, a producer of pageants, ‘masques for the masses’ celebrating England’s glorious heritage. In the 1920s Gwen began modestly, working with local branches of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes to produce mass stagings of Shakespeare’s history plays (starring local ladies, often in male roles). Soon Gwen graduated to bigger things, notably the “Pageant of Runnymede” (1934) with a cast of 5,000 and then the “Pageant of Birmingham” (1938) played by 8,000 and seen by many more. Dressed flamboyantly in men’s clothing (often a cream-colored suit), long hair streaming, Gwen oversaw these spectacles from a high gantry, microphone and speakers cleverly arranged so the players could hear her, but not the audiences. Thus what had been an entertainment for the royal court became, its critics might say, pap for the masses. And thus Gwen Lally earned fame, a modest fortune, and an OBE for public services rendered. She was a drag artist with a difference. ©

[Stanley]

ISHBEL

If I were a man, I would rather be Lord Mayor of London than Prime Minister of England. Ishbel MacDonald, as quoted in an English newspaper, December 1927.

Surely that is a misquotation. There can be few young women who looked as Scottish as Ishbel MacDonald, so she must have said ‘Prime Minister of Great Britain.’ That had, after all, been her father’s high office for a few months in 1924, when Ishbel MacDonald first took on the position as official hostess at 10 Downing Street. She was only Ramsay MacDonald’s daughter, but he was a widower, his wife Margaret (Ishbel’s mother) having died in 1911. He never remarried. Ishbel MacDonald was born in the family flat at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on March 2, 1903. Lincoln’s Inn was an odd address for one of the founders of the Labour Party, but it helps to explain why, later, at only 21, Ishbel MacDonald could cooly meet the challenges of being official hostess at both 10 Downing Street and Chequers. Ramsay MacDonald waa born the bastard son of a Scottish farm laborer, but he pulled himself up, and by 1896 he’d smoothed his edges enough to marry Margaret Gladstone. Margaret, Ishbel’s mother-to-be, was not one of the Gladstones, but her father was an eminent professor (of chemistry), and her stepmother was the niece of the famous Lord Kelvin. So Margaret knew her way around town, and so it was that all the MacDonald children learned how to mix with both well-born radicals (Margaret herself was a suffragist and a pioneering trades unionist) and working-class Labour politicians. So when Ramsay MacDonald, widower, stumbled into Downing Street in 1924, Ishbel was as well-trained as anyone to take over his social calendar. By the time he returned to office (1931-1935), she returned to the task, but by then she was 28, and representing the very working-class Poplar district on the London County Council. When the depression and the 1931 elections forced Ramsay to invent a national coalition government, Ishbel stuck with him and became, possibly, the most popular member of the MacDonald family. When Ramsay fell from power in 1935, Ishbel might have taken the political road to become Lord Mayor of London, or even Prime Minister. Neither was beyond her skill. Instead, she ‘retired’ to the village of Speen, near Chequers, as owner and landlady of The Old Plow Public House. Now hostess in her own right, she married first the captain of the pub’s dart team and then Speen’s resident pharmacist. In 1952, twice widowed and still childless, Ishbel MacDonald moved back ‘home’ to Lossiemouth, Morayshire. There she died in June 1982. Her ashes were scattered (along with those of her parents and siblings) at Lairig Ghru, a high pass in the Cairngorms. A flat stone monument marks the place. A better memorial, perhaps, is Mount Ishbel, on the front range of the Canadian Rockies. Canada’s prime minister named the mountain for Ishbel during her father’s state visit to North America. A large monument to her mother was raised in Lincoln’s Inn in 1914. ©