OneGuyFromBarlick

I haven't heard anything from Robert since Wednesday. I have mailed him and will let you know as soon as I hear anything.

Still no word.... I've repeated my mail.
I'm beginning to wonder if the fault is with me but then I had mail from TalkTalk on Thursday and junk mail this morning......
If anyone cared enough to send me a test mail that would be useful.....

It's not me! Test mails are being received from the kids....

Still more test mails. We shall just have to be patient.

OZ

Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don’t you think? The Scarecrow, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published on May 17, 1900, 125 years ago today. The publisher, the Geo. M. Hill Company, hoped to sell 250,000 copies, which would have been pretty good for a fairy tale, but it may have been that Hill & Co. were just trying to reassure the author. Ever cautious, they planned at first to put out only 10,000 copies. Then Hill had to wait until L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) had given a copy to his sister. After other necessary details were seen to, the book hit the open market on September 1. It sold staggeringly well, and another 15,000 copies went out in October. It continues to sell well, partly because Hollywood made it so very famous in a Depression-era film, The Wizard of Oz, starring Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale, the lead human character. But you don’t have to be a Garland cultist. If you are a parent, or in some other way find that you have a child in your life, it’s good for both the reader and the read-to. There are some witty comments (like the one quoted above) that may lighten the reader’s mood, and every child of whatever age needs to learn what it means to be a good human person. And while Dorothy Gale struggles to find a way to get herself and her dog, Toto, back to her Uncle Henry, her Aunt Em, and their farm, her odd companions become her best friends and have their own journeys. The Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion, are good enough to begin with that they immediately love Dorothy, but each of them feels that he lacks something that might make him smarter, or happier, or braver, just like the very best people. So while Dorothy does get back to the farm (“There’s no place like home”), her companions discover, or uncover, their human goodnesses. Better yet, they really had all those qualities beforehand. During their journey with Dorothy, they learn how to use their humanity. So, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a moral tale. Not everyone has thought so. Some folks who claim to be brainy think the story too simpleminded. Others who believe themselves to be saints claim that the book is really about witches and that witches must be Satan’s sidekicks—when in fact some witches are wicked, others not so bad, and one in particular is an absolute heroine. But in today’s USA, Baum’s plot has striking relevance. At the last, Dorothy (and her wise, brave, and loving friends) discover that the mastermind behind the curtain, who thinks he rules all of Oz (that’s a pun, by the way) is just a Lilliput who got there via a lot of hot air and even more humbug. I think everyone should read it—including the humbugs amongst us. Failing that, try the movie just one more time. And take that child with you. ©

I've taxed Bob about Thursday and Friday....

It worked!.....

SQUEEGEE

Holy-stoning the decks is the worst description of nervous torture of which I ever heard, excepting perhaps, the infliction of the squee gee. Matilda Houstoun, Texas and the Gulf of Mexico: or, Yachting in the New World (London, 1844), vol. I, p. 39.

Matilda Houstoun (1811-1892) was a character: novelist, poet, women’s rights campaigner, and travel writer. On her voyage to Texas, she found slavery abhorrent, white Texans idle as sin, and tobacco chewing a vile habit. More to the point today, the above passage is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as the earliest recorded usage of “squee gee” or, as we know it, squeegee. It was thus a modern coinage. Other clues in the OED suggest that the word came from the world of jack tar, sailors in the Royal Navy or, in Houstoun’s case, the merchant marine, where the squeegee was used to top off the cleaning of the decks. So the word “squeegee” was available for use in the first patent application for a windshield wiper. Or, since the application came into the British patent office, the windscreen wiper. The application was made by Gladstone Adams, born in Newcastle upon Tyne on May 16, 1880. Gladstone’s father was a supporter of the Liberal Party (else why name your son after Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone?), but also a prosperous metal merchant in a shipbuilding city, and so young Gladstone was well educated. He also enjoyed gadgetry, and settled in Whitley Bay as a photographer and proprietor of the town’s only camera shop. He was also a pioneer motorist and a great fan of Newcastle’s football club. So when Newcastle United went to Wembley for the 1908 FA Cup final, young Gladstone Adams drove all the way to London in his Darracq motor car. Sadly, Crystal Palace won the cup, but on the way down it had snowed, heavily, and Adams had had to fold open the windscreen, snow beating on his face, to see where he was and where he was headed. So, being an inventive sort, he set about solving the problem, and three years later filed a patent application for a “moving squeegee” that would clean your windscreen of snow (or rain or mud) keeping clear your field of vision and (of course) allowing you to drive through bad weather with your windscreen shut. This first wiper was operated by pulleys and cables from within the automobile, but since it was “mechanical” it is today given pride of place over other early wipers, all of which were just “squeegees” operated by hand from within the vehicle, and with the windscreen open. The rest of young Adams’s life was no anticlimax. A pilot, Captain Adams served in the RAF during WWI, where he arranged the honorary funeral of the rival pilot Baron von Richthofen. Afterwards he served for many years on the Whitley Bay town council, and lived long enough to defend his claim to have invented the mechanical windshield wiper. He died in 1966, survived by his very patient wife Laura Annie, whom he had married at the outbreak of WWI. ©

VACCINATOR

The Small Pox so fatal and so general amongst us is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting (which is the term they give it), There is a set of old Women who make it their business to perform the operation, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Sarah Chiswell, April 1, 1717.

Lady Mary wrote from Constantinople, where she’d accompanied her husband on his diplomatic mission to the court of the Sultan, Ahmed III. Or we might say, where Edward Montagu accompanied his wife, for Lady Mary was a woman of substance. So she traveled a lot, and learned much about the Turks, especially the women, whom she found friendly and open and in several ways freer than their western counterparts, not least in the matter of their underclothing. But Lady Mary was most interested in the Ottoman practice of inoculating against smallpox, or as we might call it vaccination. Smallpox had killed her brother and left her face disfigured, and here were the Turks actually cutting smallpox pustules into the arms of healthy children! And, she reported in that same 1717 letter, they developed an immunity. There might be a bad reaction, but instead of disfigurement or death, they developed an immunity. So Lady Mary had her five year old son inoculated, carefully watching his progress and reporting on it to her husband. And when she returned to England she saw to the inoculation of her daughter, and then the Princess of Wales and her children. And the practice spread amongst the aristocracy and even to other European royal courts. Lady Mary faced considerable opposition, however, and one of her ‘experiments’ had to be carried out among condemned prisoners, offered freedom instead of hanging. They survived and went free (of the noose and of the pox). Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, born on May 15, 1689, is rightly remembered today as the pioneer of smallpox inoculation, and should be, but she was much more than that. Against her father’s prejudices about female education, she was the self-taught mistress of several languages, well versed in the classics and with a burgeoning interest in the ‘scientific revolution’ of her own day. She’d married young Wortley Montagu against her father’s wishes and, in some senses, against Montagu himself, warning him in advance about her spirit of independence. And she engaged herself as a writer, in the competitive world of scribblers dominated by the likes of Addison, Pope, and Swift. In that world she made some enemies, notably Alexander Pope himself, troubled enough to write her into his satirical (and often vicious) Dunciad. Through it all, she survived and prospered, traveled on her own, made a great marriage for her daughter, and died bravely back at home, in 1762. I recommend to our current Secretary of Health her Letters from Turkey. They offer instruction. He needs it. ©

RATIONING

We were served on gold and silver plates, but our bread was the same kind of war bread every other family had to eat. Eleanor Roosevelt, writing from London, 1942.

In 1942 the First Lady toured Britain to strengthen morale. Americans needed to know that the Brits, if battered, were still bulldoggish. The British were delighted that the Yanks really did mean to help. It was dangerous work, crossing the Atlantic in wartime, and Mrs. R. traveled under codename “Rover”. But a visit to Buckingham Palace was obligatory, and there Mrs. Roosevelt was impressed that lunch—though served on the very finest china—included the “National Loaf”. To the popular mind, the National Loaf was the worst item on the wartime menu, unless it were Woolton Pie (a vegetarian concoction derisively named after the Minister of Food), but the British love to complain. Mrs. R. thought it nutritious, a whole wheat loaf fortified with essential minerals and vitamins. When it was finally phased out, in 1958, a Conservative government saw to it that British bakers still had to include the supplements. But the National Loaf was already “historic” in 1942, a new incarnation of what had been called “War Bread,” the brainchild of Mary Ann Yates Corkling, born in Manchester on May 18, 1850. Mary Ann was encouraged to follow her talents, which at first were subsumed in painting. She learned well, and exhibited nationally. Meanwhile, she traveled, and in Sicily, while her father was establishing a factory there, Mary Ann noticed that even the poorest peasants thrived well on a diet that consisted mainly of vegetables and whole wheat bread. Already given over to social reform movements, Mary Ann Corkling became a food fanatic. Back home in England, in 1880, she sold her personal jewelry to help finance the Bread and Food Reform League. Prominent folk joined in, including the reforming peer Lord Shaftesbury. The League limped along, sustained partly by Ms. Corkling’s popular writings on food. She also developed her Welsh coalmining properties in order to subsidize her reforms, and gained further support, including from the then Royal Family. But it was World War I (and the German submarine blockade) that brought her brown bread, “War Bread” into the British national diet and the British national language. Like its WWII reincarnation, Miss Corklings’ “War Bread” didn’t survive the peace. And, apparently, neither bread was very toothsome. The main reason was NOT their whole-wheat basis. The problem was that both were, necessarily, 100% British. And for various reasons, British wheat is very low in gluten. So bread made entirely from British flour tends to an unpleasant texture. Some say it’s like eating glue. But in 1942, Eleanor Roosevelt did not complain about the National Loaf—at least, not in public. “Rover” knew her duty, and she did it. ©

STRUCTURES

Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral looking an object? Max Perutz, 1964

In the BBC docudrama Life Story, about the discovery of the DNA molecule, Max Perutz was portrayed as an oddball: prickly, witty, and kindly all at the same time. He’s the scientist at Cambridge’s Cavendish laboratories who saw that Francis Crick and Jim Watson were really on to something, and when they found it he appreciated its strange beauties. No slouch himself, Perutz copped the Nobel for Chemistry in 1962, the same year that Crick and Watson got their Nobel (in Physiology) for DNA. Ever the wit, Perutz made the aesthetic comparison between their elegant “double helix” DNA and his unseemly blobs of hemoglobin. But the Nobels in science are not about beauty, or for that matter profit. Yet there’s no doubt that both Nobels were richly deserved and have been richly beneficial. DNA unlocked life’s secrets. Better understanding of hemoglobin has prolonged many lives. Who’s to choose? For Max Perutz it was an unlikely outcome. He was born in Vienna on May 19, 1914, the son of Jewish parents who were keen to assimilate into polite Austrian society. So Max was baptized a Catholic, which gave him something in common with the Hapsburgs. But the royal family fell from power in 1918-19, while young Perutz soon decided that all religion was suspect. By a similar (or parallel) process, he abjured the legal career his parents wanted him to follow and majored instead in science. Max did well enough at the University of Vienna to attract the attention of the Cavendish labs, where he was recruited to study X-ray crystallography. Max knew nothing of it, but was ready enough to leave for Cambridge. At this point Adolf Hitler stepped in. So young Max, Jewish by “race”, had to flee to nearby Switzerland where he studied what came to hand, glaciers, and studied them so well that his paper on them was accepted by London’s Royal Society. World War II was another interruption, during which Max’s expertise on ice was set to work on the problems of sustaining a resistance movement on (or under) Norwegian glaciers. These odd detours amused Max Perutz; but it wasn’t until 1947 that he could get back to crystallography at the Cavendish. So while Crick and Watson (and others) were racing to ‘see’ DNA in three dimensions Perutz was doing the same thing with hemoglobin. It didn’t come out as prettily, but it was every bit as important. So we are all very fortunate that all these brilliant people were being brought together in a large, institutional setting, the Cavendish and Cambridge, and paid good money just to think about things. Max Perutz came to view his scientific life as a happy accident. If we in the USA continue to uproot the structures of our science, we will experience fewer happy accidents. ©.

Lets not forget Rosalind Franklin and her contribution.

HOMESTEADING

The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. Frederick Jackson Turner in his The Frontier in American History.

This is the idea that lay at the heart of Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,” first formally stated in 1890. From colonial times, the frontier provided a social laboratory within which westering Americans could continually reabsorb the chief American virtues of egalitarianism and democracy. It’s appropriate for today’s note for it was on May 20, 1862, that President Abraham Lincoln signed the federal Homestead Act. And it was no accident. Never mind Turner. It was something Lincoln believed in, as did almost all of his (new) Republican Party. Horace Greeley put the idea succinctly: Go West, Young Man, and Grow Up With the Country. And the act of May 20, 1862 recognized the right of women (not all of them young) to go west too, and grow. It is full of his/her provisions. Of course it didn’t quite work out. Even by the terms of the Act, the land was not “free.” Native Americans were not consulted about the selling price. And while a frontiers-man (or frontiers-woman) might preemptively “squat” on untitled land, he or she would have to pay up eventually to keep the title. In the end the act settled relatively few bona fide frontiers-people on relatively few acres. Most new westerners bought their new lands from speculators or through railway companies like the Union Pacific (which did, by the way, get it for free). But the Act was still of huge importance. The new Republican party wanted it from the start. But they’d been stopped by southern slaveowners, for whom “free” land was anathema. They wanted the land held as a soil bank for themselves and their human ‘properties’ to take up when they were ready to move cotton culture west. And as for northerners, cheap land policies characterized most northern state governments, so why not the territories as well? But the territories had to be free in another sense, too, free of slavery. A planter with his slaves needed way more than 160 acres, which would sustain homesteaders and their children, all working together to make the land sing corn and wheat. So the Homestead Act came as the seceding states’ legislators left Washington DC. Freedom and slavery were indeed unmixable. When my Bliss ancestor moved west from Vermont (from 1810 to 1845) he left six of his adult children on six freehold family farms, starting in upstate New York and finishing at Pleasantville, Iowa. So for his son Horace and thousands of others (including many ‘poor whites’ from the South), egalitarian democracy and opportunity did lie to the west. Just to clarify the point, young Horace went to war against slavery in 1861. And he succeeded. The 1862 Homestead Act did not make him volunteer. History did. ©.

RELIGION

We are told we must work and use our talents to create wealth. ‘If a man will not work he shall not eat’ wrote St. Paul to the Thessalonians. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, speaking to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland on May 21, 1988.

Margaret Thatcher was born and baptized a Methodist. At some point she ‘converted’ to the Church of England. No doubt her motives were quite sincere, but the policies she implemented as prime minister of the UK made her unpopular in the English national (established) church, which in several ways made it clear that her program (particularly as it had to do with domestic poverty and foreign wars) was unchristian. She was never officially labeled a heretic, far less a witch, but I vividly remember that, when she finally fell to an intraparty coup the students at Lancaster University formed a very long conga line and danced through the campus singing (from The Wizard of Oz) “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead.” But the C of E’s 1985 report, Faith in the City, did more than suggest that her politics were not full of faith. So in 1988 she took her anger north to speak of her Christian faith to the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly. It was a strange choice, for in 1988 Scotland was not Tory territory politically. Nor was the Scots’ national church. The assembly, made up in good Presbyterian style of lay and clerical members, reacted badly to Thatcher’s central proposition that “Christianity is about spiritual redemption, not social reform.” And the UK press corps, a notoriously secular army, immediately dubbed her speech “The Sermon on the Mound.” It was a lovely pun, for the Assembly meets in a building on Edinburgh’s “Mound,” an artificial berm. And of course the original “Sermon on the Mount,” delivered by a Jewish radical to a crowd of rather ordinary folk, can be read very differently from Mrs. Thatcher’s credo. And it should be needless to point out that the Christ had no objections to feeding the multitude with copious supplies of bread and fish—and did not require them to work for it, or to prove that they were seeking work, or to be native born citizens of the vicinage. They were hungry, and they were fed. Of course reading modern political policy out of ancient sermons must be a dubious business. And Thatcher’s position is one long held by people who call themselves Christian. The American Presbyterian Church split asunder on just this issue in the period before the Civil War. Slaveholding Christians in the South believed very deeply that faith was about conversion and belief, not about social reform. Indeed they had finally come round to the idea that their human properties, black slaves, could be Christians and stay enslaved, and they used the Bible to prove the point that the truth can make the slave as free as the master—but still enslaved. Just so, the truth can enrich the poor. QED. ©.

Bob's Bit was late yesterday because his apartment building had a direct hit from a tornado and lost power. He and Pauline are OK, no injuries and he eventually posted this at 18:30 last night......

TORNADO DELAY

The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession. Arthur Conan Doyle.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put these words into the mouth of his most famous creation, the detective Sherlock Holmes. Holmes utters them in a 1914 story, The Valley of Fear, in which Holmes foils the dastardly schemes of a minor villain, a wan version of the master villain Moriarty. Holmes’s brilliant detection does the job, of course, but in this story, as almost always, Holmes forms his theories on the basis of insufficient data. So was this a joke? Do as I do, not as I say? Doyle’s heroic detective can look at a man for a minute or so, often in a thick fog, and tell you that the man is a train driver with 13 children, a very unhappy wife, and is most likely the most wanted criminal in Dorking, Surrey. Talk about insufficient data! But the fact is that Doyle began his working life as a scientist. Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, into an already unhappy family, his father an alcoholic prone to serious depression. So young Doyle was taken in hand by richer and soberer uncles who seem to have wanted the boy to become a better Catholic than his father. So they sent him to one of the posher, and private, Catholic boarding schools, Stonyhurst. He didn’t like that much, but did pick up sufficient data to embark on his real career, medicine. Already he was of a scientific bent, not caring enough for the workaday business of doctoring the unhealthy. A failed practice partnership in England was punctuated by dabbling in science, notably botany. That was in London, but Doyle also did a Darwin, serving as surgeon on scientific voyages to the Arctic and then to the West Indies. He then studied ophthalmology in Vienna (then the world center in the discipline), but again with no very positive results. He did engage in some scientific writing, and in particular on the virtues of vaccination, where he found sufficient data to embrace a theory. But he had begun to write. Perhaps indicative of his future, his first medical publication, on Gelsemium as a poison, took a detour to speculate on a recent murder case. Some other unlikely detections followed, and then in 1886 Doyle hit his true stride with a short story featuring the unnaturally clever Sherlock Holmes and Holmes’s much slower, but very essential Watson—who was, of course, a medical doctor. So while Holmes took huge inductive leaps to solve crimes, poor Dr. Watson, more scientifically inclined, plodded along gathering data. It was as if Holmes saved Doyle from dullness. Doyle got £25 for that first story, and had to surrender copyright to get it published. But readers loved Sherlock for his leaps, and for his insufficient data. And Holmes became an industry, while Doyle became a knight. ©

PRINTERS INKS

The Harmony of Colouring is the Art of Mixing COLOURS . . . in order to represent naturally . . . the Colour of any other Object. . . . Jakob Cristoph le Blon, in his Coloritto, 1725.

The modern ink-jet printer is a technical marvel. But sooner or later, we all discover that it is really a diabolically clever vehicle for selling gallons of printers ink at vastly inflated prices. Then, if you do not use the ink fast enough, the inkjets themselves dry out, bringing further expense. It is yet another illustration of how brilliantly modern capitalism has escaped the Marxian trap of overproduction or, if you prefer, underconsumption. Today, in modern societies, we pay rent just to stay alive. But the story of four-color printing offers some comfort. It was a brilliant invention. More accurately, it was a fiendishly clever application of a new science, Isaac Newton’s science of light. Isaac Newton was a busy man. But while he was inventing the calculus and outlining modern physics, he took time off to demonstrate that sunlight (or if you prefer light itself) was not a unitary thing. Run light through a prism today, and your results will be the same. Light consists of all colors: all colors available to the human eye (and as others later demonstrated, a few more). This led Newton himself, and a legion of his followers, down several blind alleys, which have since been corrected by (among others) Albert Einstein, but Newton inspired Jakob Christoph le Blon to show how light’s very mixability could hugely simplify the technical problems involved with color printing. One might say he was born to it. He came from Huguenot stock, exiled from France, and born in Frankfurt where he was baptized on May 23, 1667. More to the point, his family was already chock full of printers, engravers, and painters, many of whom had long tussled with the problem of “making” colors. Indeed it can hardly be said that Le Blon “invented” color printing. No more, in fact, that you can say that Titian “invented” his trademark red. But Newton’s spectrum (all the colors mixing together to make white) encouraged Le Blon to mess about with the idea mixing one set of colors to make some other color. It was a trial and error process, but he finally proved that you could make almost any (“other”) color by mixing (or “subtracting”) only four primary colors. And if you’ve been burdened with an ink jet printer, you’ll already know that they are cyan, magenta, yellow and (rather oddly, to my primitive way of thinking) black. Le Blon published his ideas (in French and in English) in his Coloritto, and probably expected to grow rich on it. He did get a royal patent (from France’s Louis XV), and his publication is said to have helped painters and dyers. But as for printing itself, full exploitation awaited the invention of quicker and more diabolical machines, of which the inkjet printer is just the latest example. So pay up!! And feel better for it. ©.

Uncle Bob sends his apologies, his building was still without power and internet access yesterday. Hang in there!

Bob has sent apologies again, still no power or internet.....

BARNBURNER

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “Self-Reliance”.

In a half-century of teaching (mainly) early American history, I’ve used Emerson more than any other individual. I came to him very late in my own education, having (successfully) resisted my father’s repeated efforts to get me to read at least some Emerson. Even in graduate school I was put off by Emerson’s writings. But in teaching I found him essential, a perfect contrast to the first New England Puritans, those dour Calvinists of the 17th-century colonies. That contrast is seen most clearly not in Emerson’s famous “Divinity School Address” (1838) in which he told Harvard’s theology students that theirs was a doomed and derelict profession. It comes in “Self-Reliance,” an address written (it’s important to note) for an audience of workingmen. Waged laborers lived close to the bone, and they must have enjoyed Emerson’s gibes against “the education at college of fools.” And who but a “fool” could believe that his educable virtues deserved reward: a good position, material success, the admiration of fools like himself? Pah!! Emerson’s hero was the farm boy from Vermont who tried any work and learned many skills, and always, “like a cat,” landed on his feet. Odd indeed, for Ralph Waldo Emerson was himself a favored child of the elite, born a minister’s son on May 25, 1803. Like many other elite boys, he went off to Harvard at only 14, served his time there, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and in 1829 received the expected reward of ordination and a good pulpit to preach from. But somewhere along the way he’d begun to question it all. By the time of the Divinity School Address he was ready to call the whole thing a farce or, worse, a plot against nature. The word “miracle”, he said, had become “monster.” Then came “Self-Reliance.” It was, paragraph by paragraph, a counterblast to the recently rediscovered lay sermon (of 1630) by Governor John Winthrop, ‘Model of Christian Charity,’ and Emerson was having none of that. He wanted his hearers to make models of themselves, or miracles, which they could do only by vibrating to their own rhythms, rejecting past wisdoms and making their own, just as past geniuses had (a long list including Socrates, Jesus, and Shakespeare). In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson preached a religion of self-hood, nonconformity, and (it must be said) nonchalance—like small boys sure of their supper. It’s not a ‘consistent’ message. Indeed “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Emerson doesn’t make the grade as a philosopher, or a theologian (though he’s been called both). He was a barn burner, a genuine original. What I thought most useful, he was death on plagiarists. Goodness knows what ‘Waldo’ would have made of ChatGTP. Bonfires, probably. ©.

SQUEEGEE

Holy-stoning the decks is the worst description of nervous torture of which I ever heard, excepting perhaps, the infliction of the squee gee. Matilda Houstoun, Texas and the Gulf of Mexico: or, Yachting in the New World (London, 1844), vol. I, p. 39.

Matilda Houstoun (1811-1892) was a character: novelist, poet, women’s rights campaigner, and travel writer. On her voyage to Texas, she found slavery abhorrent, white Texans idle as sin, and tobacco chewing a vile habit. More to the point today, the above passage is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as the earliest recorded usage of “squee gee” or, as we know it, squeegee. It was thus a modern coinage. Other clues in the OED suggest that the word came from the world of jack tar, sailors in the Royal Navy or, in Houstoun’s case, the merchant marine, where the squeegee was used to top off the cleaning of the decks. So the word “squeegee” was available for use in the first patent application for a windshield wiper. Or, since the application came into the British patent office, the windscreen wiper. The application was made by Gladstone Adams, born in Newcastle upon Tyne on May 16, 1880. Gladstone’s father was a supporter of the Liberal Party (else why name your son after Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone?), but also a prosperous metal merchant in a shipbuilding city, and so young Gladstone was well educated. He also enjoyed gadgetry, and settled in Whitley Bay as a photographer and proprietor of the town’s only camera shop. He was also a pioneer motorist and a great fan of Newcastle’s football club. So when Newcastle United went to Wembley for the 1908 FA Cup final, young Gladstone Adams drove all the way to London in his Darracq motor car. Sadly, Crystal Palace won the cup, but on the way down it had snowed, heavily, and Adams had had to fold open the windscreen, snow beating on his face, to see where he was and where he was headed. So, being an inventive sort, he set about solving the problem, and three years later filed a patent application for a “moving squeegee” that would clean your windscreen of snow (or rain or mud) keeping clear your field of vision and (of course) allowing you to drive through bad weather with your windscreen shut. This first wiper was operated by pulleys and cables from within the automobile, but since it was “mechanical” it is today given pride of place over other early wipers, all of which were just “squeegees” operated by hand from within the vehicle, and with the windscreen open. The rest of young Adams’s life was no anticlimax. A pilot, Captain Adams served in the RAF during WWI, where he arranged the honorary funeral of the rival pilot Baron von Richthofen. Afterwards he served for many years on the Whitley Bay town council, and lived long enough to defend his claim to have invented the mechanical windshield wiper. He died in 1966, survived by his very patient wife Laura Annie, whom he had married at the outbreak of WWI. ©

VACCINATOR


The Small Pox so fatal and so general amongst us is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting (which is the term they give it), There is a set of old Women who make it their business to perform the operation, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Sarah Chiswell, April 1, 1717.
Lady Mary wrote from Constantinople, where she’d accompanied her husband on his diplomatic mission to the court of the Sultan, Ahmed III. Or we might say, where Edward Montagu accompanied his wife, for Lady Mary was a woman of substance. So she traveled a lot, and learned much about the Turks, especially the women, whom she found friendly and open and in several ways freer than their western counterparts, not least in the matter of their underclothing. But Lady Mary was most interested in the Ottoman practice of inoculating against smallpox, or as we might call it vaccination. Smallpox had killed her brother and left her face disfigured, and here were the Turks actually cutting smallpox pustules into the arms of healthy children! And, she reported in that same 1717 letter, they developed an immunity. There might be a bad reaction, but instead of disfigurement or death, they developed an immunity. So Lady Mary had her five year old son inoculated, carefully watching his progress and reporting on it to her husband. And when she returned to England she saw to the inoculation of her daughter, and then the Princess of Wales and her children. And the practice spread amongst the aristocracy and even to other European royal courts. Lady Mary faced considerable opposition, however, and one of her ‘experiments’ had to be carried out among condemned prisoners, offered freedom instead of hanging. They survived and went free (of the noose and of the pox). Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, born on May 15, 1689, is rightly remembered today as the pioneer of smallpox inoculation, and should be, but she was much more than that. Against her father’s prejudices about female education, she was the self-taught mistress of several languages, well versed in the classics and with a burgeoning interest in the ‘scientific revolution’ of her own day. She’d married young Wortley Montagu against her father’s wishes and, in some senses, against Montagu himself, warning him in advance about her spirit of independence. And she engaged herself as a writer, in the competitive world of scribblers dominated by the likes of Addison, Pope, and Swift. In that world she made some enemies, notably Alexander Pope himself, troubled enough to write her into his satirical (and often vicious) Dunciad. Through it all, she survived and prospered, traveled on her own, made a great marriage for her daughter, and died bravely back at home, in 1762. I recommend to our current Secretary of Health her Letters from Turkey. They offer instruction. He needs it. ©

I thought they sounded familiar! Bob sent me those two on the 17th of May. I shall mail him.

Bob has got back. A bit of a mix-up. I shall leave the posts as they are and post the new one....

CODWARS

Right lasses, we’re here to talk about what we are going to do after the losses of these trawlers. I don’t was any of you effin’ and blindin’. The press and TV are here. Lillian Bilocca, February 2, 1968.

It was midwinter, and two fishing trawlers—out of Hull, Yorkshire—had gone down, one off Norway, the other in Icelandic waters. Forty hands drowned, there were no survivors. Safety issues were governed or, more accurately, ignored by the 1894 Shipping Act. Neither trawler was equipped even with guard rails or safety lines. Any personal safety gear (e.g. life preservers) was at the crewmen’s discretion (and expense). The drowned men were silenced by death. But their wives had had enough. They gathered thousands of signatures demanding government action, and on February 2, 1968, more than 300 women crowded into a community hall to talk things over, no effin’ or blindin’ about it. A program of reform was agreed, and an action committee appointed to take it to London: Christine Smallbone, Yvonne Blenkinsop, Mary Denness, and Lillian Bilocca. Their sense of urgency deepened when, on February 4, the Ross Cleveland went down off Iceland with another 18 dead, including the skipper, Ms. Smallbone’s brother. Grieving, she stayed home while the other three traveled to London. There, and later, Lil Bilocca emerged as leader. She was articulate, loud, and fearless. And she was big. Indeed the press, not always sympathetic to loudmouth females, made much of her 240 pounds, in both prose and pictures. Lil Billoca became Hull fishing personified in female form. She was born May 26, 1929, into a trawlerman’s family. Her formal schooling stopped when she was 14. She went to work as a cod-stripper, then married a trawlerman (Charlie Bilocca, from Malta, changed from the merchant marine to fishing for cod). Add that her son, Ernie, was a trawlerman who had watched, helpless, as the Ross Cleveland sank. Lil Bilocca had had enough. In action at the Hull docks and at the owners’ HQs she proved hard to move. In meetings with government ministers she proved hard to silence. Her Hull accents and her weight made her the butt of some bad press. Some trawlermen thought she and her militant sisters should get back to being Hull wives and mothers. She was fired for being AWOL from her fishy job in Hull’s market hall. And she kept at it, full steam ahead. In mid-March, 1968, the Labour government conceded an official inquiry into trawler safety. It discovered that Lil and the other women had spoken truly. Almost all their demands were enacted into law in July 1969. When Charlie Bilocca went back to sea, he was safer. When he died, Lil married a landsman. And when Lil died, in 1988, the Hull city government erected a monument to her and the other women of the Hessle Road Action Group. They had set out to get something done—and then they did it. ©

THE COMMODORE

I for one will never go to law when I have got the power in my own hands to see myself right. Cornelius Vanderbilt, in testimony before the New York state legislature, 1867.

To which one can only say: ‘thank God Cornelius Vanderbilt was never elected president.’ It would be terrible, would it not, to have a chief executive with such contempt for the law, for the courts, for due process? Luckily, Cornelius Vanderbilt was only a “robber baron,” and one of the first men (in 1859) to be called such: inordinately wealthy, the uncrowned king of American transport, and the founder of the Vanderbilt dynasty. Way back, he had an ancestor so poor as to be without a name but was from the Netherlands village of Bilt. Thus ‘der Bilt.’ But by May 27, 1794, the day of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s birth, his father, also Cornelius, had the legal surname ‘van Derbilt,’ which young Cornelius quickly condensed into Vanderbilt. Consolidation was also the way Cornelius did business, starting with his dad’s ferry service (passengers, wagons, freight) between Staten Island, Manhattan, and the Jersey shore. He made it his own, buying out a brother and a brother-in-law and a couple of competitors. His combativeness led his rivals to nickname him “the Commodore;” intended as insult, Cornelius liked it well enough to keep it. He bought out some of those rivals, merged with others, and was prescient enough to convert from sail to steam. By 1853 he was rich enough to take his own family to Europe in his yacht North Star, but then he was already the biggest player in transporting people and their supplies to the California gold rush—either around the horn or by transfer across the Nicaraguan route. Cornelius was also, already, into the railroad business, and why not? He was familiar with steam technology; he was adept at winning favors (charters and subsidies) from state and local governments; and he had a lot of money on his own. To get more money, he sold all his steamships in 1864. He then applied tactics similar to those used in the shipping business to expand his first RR, the Staten Island, into the New York Central, a real monster with tentacles extending into Canada and, after 1865, the American South. Again, his operations were not of the nicest sort, legally speaking. But Cornelius and his second wife, a distant cousin with the odd name of Frank, thought it well to become nice. So Cornelius became a philanthropist. The chief beneficiaries were Vanderbilt University and the Episcopalian and Moravian churches. When he died, he chose his private beneficiaries oddly enough to make his will into a legal issue which took some time to sort out, ironically in courts of law. The children left out of the will proved good enough at law to create several Vanderbilt fortunes. They survive to this day, inheritances of the ‘golden age’ of American enterprise. ©.

ECLIPSE

A multitude of words is no proof of a prudent mind. Thales of Miletus.

Anyone listening with any care to the current president of these United States will know that this quotation contains good advice. But the idea is of general application. For instance, it has been used by some feminists to deride the phenomenon known as mansplaining. Its original author was, or may likely have been, the philosopher Thales of Miletus, whose dates are usually given as c. 625-c. 545 BCE. Miletus was an ancient Greek outpost in Asia Minor, and its classical remains can be visited and studied in person today, for they are in stone. Much less can be certainly known about Thales. His dates are circa, his parentage more so. But by the time of Aristotle Thales was a revered person, one of the ‘seven sages’ of ancient Greece, and of the seven he was the only one who focused on the explanation of phenomena: earthquakes, for instance, warfare, weather, even the true height of the Egyptian pyramids. Thales also acquired the reputation of having been the first philosopher whose explanations rested on observation and experience and not on the eccentricities (or for that matter the habits) of the Greek gods. For Thales, human history was made by humans; natural history was made by nature. His insistence on the latter point has led some, notably Isaac Asimov, to see Thales as the first “scientist.” But since that word did not come into general use for another 2400 years, Asimov may be jumping the gun. Indeed, there are today disputes about almost everything to do with Thales. Today it will be enough to focus on the likelihood that it was Thales who gave us the first date certain in history, May 28, 585 BCE. On that day there was a total eclipse of the sun, the Eclipse of Thales. The path of totality ran through Asia Minor. It stopped a great battle (though it did not bring peace). And, what is most amazing, it had been predicted by Thales the natural philosopher. Compared to Thales’ achievement, the battle itself is of only passing interest, mainly because one side, the Lydian army, was commanded by King Alyattes, and he was the father of King Croesus, whose legend tells us that it’s not a very good idea to be consumed by the pursuit of wealth, because you can’t eat gold. So be of good cheer. Put verbosity and greed in their place and celebrate, instead, the first known date in human history (and several calendars). Today is the anniversary of the first known anniversary. Thales also imported geometry into the Grecian world, speculated sensibly but mistakenly on the causes of earthquakes, and improved Miletus’ position in the very competitive trade in olive oil. He was, by several accounts, the cleverest of the Seven Sages. ©

JANE GRANT

Adjusting myself to their world is one of the things at which I have been rather competent. Jane Grant, “Confessions of a Feminist,” in The American Mercury (December 1943).

In 1943, Miss Grant was four years into her second (and last) marriage, and she was still Miss Grant. Her second husband, William Harris, was by then the editor of Fortune magazine, a pretty good job, but it was she who had financed their marriage (his second, also) and their move to a Connecticut farm where she established a prosperous nursery (selling trees and plants, not raising children). Working together, they built a considerable fortune, which kept on growing after Jane’s death in 1972. Harris (who considered himself an ardent feminist) then went looking for an institution willing to house Jane’s letters and papers. He found one in the University of Oregon, where (in 1981) Harris’s gift of $3.5 million founded the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. In itself that’s quite a story. But there is more to it. Jane Grant was born Jeanette Cole Grant in Joplin, Missouri, on May 29, 1892. Jeanette’s family was not rich, but it was ambitious for her, and especially for her precocious talent as a singer. Along with several moves (eventually to Colorado, via Kansas) the little girl was provided with the best voice training her mother could find. In 1908 this took her to New York City and, doubtless, fed high hopes back home. But Jeanette, now Jane, had already decided her voice, while “sweet,” was not strong enough for the opera. She’d also decided that she wanted to be herself, Jane Grant, and not Mrs. Anybody Else. She nursed a clerical job with the New York Times into a budding career as a society journalist, and then, in World War I, followed the troops and a couple of male friends to Europe, where she sang and danced and met another Coloradan, Harold Ross. He wanted to marry; she didn’t. Back in New York they both wrote (paid by the word) and nursed greater ambitions. And in 1920 they married, on two conditions. She would remain “Jane Grant.” They would be faithful to each other for at least six months. By 1929, when Ross and Grant finally did divorce, they had birthed and nursed into prosperity The New Yorker magazine, one of the more unlikely triumphs in US journalistic history. Which one was more responsible for that success remains disputed, but in the 1930s Jane left the magazine behind and freelanced, while still encouraging sister scribblers and continuing her association with the Lucy Stone League, known to some as the “Maiden Namers,” of which she was a co-founder. Then along came William Harris, already a self-avowed feminist. So it was easier for Miss Grant to adjust to his world, and he to hers. They seem to have lived happily ever after, which makes a satisfactory conclusion to the story of Jeanette from Joplin. ©

REVOLTING

When Adam delved and Eve spanned, who was then the gentleman? John Ball, 1381.

It’s a great question, and while Ball’s immediate audience was inspired by it, King Richard II thought it heresy, not to mention treachery. After a bit of dirty dealing from the ‘boy king’ (Richard was then only 14), Ball and other leaders of the so-called Peasants’ Revolt paid for their contumacy. Those not killed in battle were tortured, tried, and executed in the usual grisly ways. Maybe they ‘deserved’ it. When the rebels had their chance, they’d killed several of the king’s closest counselors, then displayed the severed heads on pikes, and they did not follow proper legal procedures. There were other complications. The Peasants’ Revolt is said to have begun on May 30, 1381, in the market town of Brentwood, Essex. There the immediate issue was the hated poll tax, but as the spirit of rebellion spread so did the list of grievances. And the rebellion, or at the very least, serious unrest, spread widely. Indeed some call the Peasants’ Revolt England’s first national experience. And in 1381, despite the contemporary poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, “England” hardly existed. Its monarchs and many of its aristocrats were French, and young Richard himself was “Richard of Bordeaux.” And even as king he would be deeply interested in protecting or expanding his dynastic claim to huge swatches of what we now call “France.” The costs in blood and taxes of the Hundred Years’ War, fought mainly in France, were among the many long range causes of the 1381 rebellion. The social tensions released by the great ‘Black Death’ of the 14th century added to the unrest. Labor became scarce. As it did, it became expensive. Landlords and employers did what they could to maintain traditional cost relationships between the ruling and the ruled. The poll tax, savagely regressive by its very nature, was part of a larger syndrome. So, led by John Ball and, more famously, by Wat Tyler, the Essex and Kentish rebels advanced on London itself, and once there they ran the place. They even took possession of the Tower. They also despoiled John of Gaunt’s opulent urban castle, showing their contempt for his wealth by burning his tapestries and throwing his precious artifacts into the Thames. Whether they could have succeeded is a disputed question in both history and political philosophy. As an early modernist, not a medievalist, I hesitate to judge. But I can tell you that the St. Louis suburb of Brentwood was not named in honor of John Ball or his rebellious followers. “Brentwood,” MO, founded in 1919, was a suburban secession movement aiming at establishing a tonier identity than it had under the municipal offices of Maplewood, MO. Even today, Brentwood houses relatively few John Balls. ©

IRON LADY

I knowe welle that I am as much bounden [to you as to] any creture lyvyng, for the grete and singular moderly love and affection that hit hath plesed you at all tymes to ber towards me. Henry VII to his mother, circa 1504.

Tudor sovereigns were prone to overstate things, but here the first of them, King Henry VII, had it right. Of course all depended on his victory over Richard III at Bosworth Field, 1485, but it was his mother who was principally responsible for keeping him alive and then, through all the later stages of the Wars of the Roses, for improving his claims to the throne. This remarkable story begins with Margaret Beaufort’s birth, on May 31, 1443, at Bletsoe Castle, Bedfordshire. But hers was not just any birth. As fate would have it, she became the only heir of the Duke of Somerset, and it was through him that she was a great-granddaughter of King Edward III, and thus the second cousin of three 15th-century kings, Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III. The genealogy is complicated, but sufficed to make Margaret valuable marriage property. Still in swaddling clothes, she was pledged to the heir of the Duke of Suffolk and then, when he died, to Edmund Tudor, Duke of Richmond. That marriage took place when Margaret was only 12, and it was soon consummated. For when Edmund died (in battle, in France) Margaret birthed a boy-child, Henry. For a 13 year old, it was a difficult birth. Margaret thought it a miracle and began her long task of making good her own royal pedigree by placing Henry Tudor on the throne. For much of this time, she scarcely knew the boy, who spent years in France, but she knew who he was and what his claim could lead to. Through all the challenges, personal and otherwise, of the War of the Roses, and through her own subsequent marriages, she remained chaste, never brought to bed with child, always concerned with Henry’s tattered Tudor claim. She could be ruthless about it. But she enjoyed such good luck that, in 1485, when Henry Tudor triumphed at Bosworth Field (and Richard III lay dead) Margaret became the leading lady of the new Tudor court, a ‘queen mother’ who clearly eclipsed Henry VII’s queen consort, Elizabeth of York. As her own reward, Margaret, Countess of Richmond, was made femme sole by Act of Parliament, and thus able to do business legally with the substantial properties she’d inherited from her father (and secured through surviving her second and third husbands). So it was that in good Tudor fashion she became one of the kingdom’s best institution builders (two Cambridge colleges, King’s and St. John’s) and most generous fountains of philanthropy. And of course she continued to have a care for dynastic considerations, which, almost from her birth, had been her leading concerns. This Margaret was indeed an Iron Lady of English politics. ©.