BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

On May 23, 2013 we will talk weather, and not directly because of the events in Oklahoma, but in a non-linear way as today is the birth date of Edward Norton Lorenz who first theorized that weather ‘events’ had such complex causes as to require non-linear explanations and mathematical models. Edward Lorenz was born in Connecticut on this day in 1917 and went to Dartmouth where he majored in mathematics. During WWII, he used his talents to help the US Army predict the weather, and after the war he went to MIT to learn more, earning two graduate degrees in meteorology and joining the MIT faculty. In 1963, he published the article that would make him famous, “Deterministic Non-Periodic Flow,” a neat title that encapsulated his view that weather patterns were indeed deterministic (and therefore explicable) but not at all simple. In a phrase, he gave us chaos theory. It’s proved pretty useful in other areas, too, but in weather it’s known as the “butterfly effect,” a phrase Lorenz coined in 1969. In the 1963 article, the concept he used was the beat of a seagull’s wings which is less poetic but more believable. Butterfly or seagull, the basic notion is that in a complex and non-linear system, a small original cause can produce a huge ultimate effect. A gentle sort, Lorenz enjoyed going out into the weather and hiked, cycled, climbed and camped until very shortly before his death, aged 90, in 2008.

[Stanley]

On May 24, 2013, with the thermometer struggling to attain the seasonal average, who else could we celebrate than Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, born on this day (in 1686) in Danzig? Danzig was at that time an autonomous city, allied to the Hanseatic league, and Daniel Fahrenheit’s parents’ families were long time Hanse merchants and so reasonably well connected (his sister, Virginia, was to marry a Danzig nobleman). When the family moved to Amsterdam, Daniel’s mother and father died from eating poisonous mushrooms, and the boy was apprenticed to a merchant house. But he had become fascinated by science and by the time he was 30 he was already well known for for his accomplishments in chemistry but also (and here’s the point of most Fahrenheit stories) in making scientific instruments like barometers. He was an astonishingly skilled glassblower. So well known was this young man, indeed, that he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (London), in 1724, and was a correspondent of several internationally renowned scientists. And it was indeed in 1724 that Daniel Fahrenheit published the article that would establish the Fahrenheit scale, with its four “objective” reference points of 0, 32, 96 (then thought to be body temperature) and 212 degrees. Only 19 years later, Anders Celsius came along to spoil it all. But in the land of the free and the home of the brave, and Belize too, Fahrenheit still rules.

[Stanley]

May 25, 2013 might have been the 87th birthday of Miles Dewey Davis III, born on this day in 1926, in Alton, Illinois, into the family of an affluent dental surgeon. Young Miles’s affinity for the trumpet was not noticed until he was given one for his 13th birthday, but after local lessons with Elwood Buchanan his genius emerged and, aged 18, he was enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music. But by then he had already played, in St. Louis,with the likes of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and in New York by night he went uptown to Harlem, learned be-bop, and began to make a big name for himself. In the symphony, Miles said, he had to wait forever to play two notes and then keep still, so he left. Within a year he had recorded and by 1947 he led a quintet that included Charlie Parker. A period of drug addiction followed, but by the mid 50s he was clear of that and famous, recording for Columbia and in demand on the concert circuit. He was a pioneer, arrogantly tied up in himself, never happy staying in fashion or in a single style, even his albums producing tracks of great contrast one with another. Through it all, he made that trumpet come alive, as one obituary put it, “unmistakable, voicelike, nearly vibratoless . . . at times distant and melancholy, at others assertive yet luminous.” Beset by multiple health problems Miles Davis kept on performing until a few months before he died, in 1991, aged 65.

[Bodger]

To go with the above
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgu28Hqg8Vc

[Stanley]

Dorothea Lange’s most famous picture is “Migrant Mother”, which she took while working for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. 25 years later, Lange wrote “I approached the hungry and desperate mother as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence to her . . . but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer . . . I did not ask her name or her history. She told me whe was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birdsthat the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and she seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a kind of equality about it.” Dorothea Lange was born Dorothea Nutzhorn into a second-generation immigrant family in Hoboken, NJ, on May 26, 1895, 118 years ago today. Her childhood polio, which left her crippled in one leg, “formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me. I have never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it.” Somehow that sensibility shows in her depression-era photographs. For the story of Migrant Mother, and the pictures, see http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/128_migm.html

[Stanley]

Rachel Louise Carson was born on May 27, 1907, 106 years ago. She learned to love nature on a small farm in Pennsylvania, and learned to study nature at Pennsylvania College for Women and then the Johns Hopkins University, where she received her MA (Zoology) in 1932. She planned a PhD, but her father’s death and mother’s illness forced her to leave school, where her first job was to write radio scripts on science for the US Bureau of Fisheries. Her continued studies brought her promotion to full time as an aquatic biologist, but she would win fame as a nature writer, first in The Atlantic Monthly and then in her first book, Under the Sea Wind (1941). Ten years later, The Sea Around Us made her famous, was serialized in The New Yorker, and won the National Book Award for non-fiction. Her growing concerns about DDT and other chemical sprays led to a new research project and, ultimately, Silent Spring (vide Keats: “the sedge has withered from the lake, and no birds sing”) which she finished while in the late stages of cancer and which Houghton Mifflin published in 1962 despite legal threats from from Dupont and other chemical giants. Rachel lived to see her book published and praised, but she did not live to see the virtual resurrection of our bird populations which followed widespread limitations on the use of DDT. Enjoy the eagles and ospreys at Alton and think of Rachel Carson, scientist and writer, and ponder her challenge to our technological control of nature.
(LINK)

[Stanley]

May 28 2013 is exactly the centenary of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, Le sacre du printemps (The Rites of Spring), first performed on this day, in Paris, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Wikipedia says May 29th, Composers’ Datebook says May 28th, but online sources are notoriously unreliable so let’s not quibble. One day in 100 years is a small margin of error. And in any case the piece was a sensation, with choreography by Nijinsky and danced by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. There was a near riot on the night, as many in the audience didn’t like the atonal and at times arhythmic music and others thought the dances obscene or ugly, all of which reminds us that every piece of music was once new, and some are always newer than others. Stravinsky was a young man, too, and eager to make his name. He’d already made a splash with the Firebird (1910), so when Diaghilev asked him to write a piece especially for a Paris production he was ready to rock, and the result was the Rites with its opening frenzies and its climacteric Sacrificial Dance which has the Prima dancing herself to death. The first performance raised such strong feelings (pro as well as anti) that it was rested for a while, but by the late 1920s was a staple of leading companies in Europe and on its 100th birthday is one of the most performed pieces of music in the classical repertoire (with or without the dancers). Thus do radical departures become tap roots.

[Stanley]

On May 29, 2013 the nod goes to fashion, inventiveness, and the multiple effects of the machine age, for it’s the 187th anniversary of the birth (29 May 1826) of Ebenezer Butterick. Butterick’s father, a carpenter, was on the cutting edge of religious change in Massachusetts (Sterling), where he was a leader of the Unitarian-Universalists. Their belief in universal salvation did not keep young Eben from working, and after an apprenticeship in his brother’s store, he became a tailor who wisely married an expert seamstress (in 1850), Ellen Augusta Pollard. In little more than a decade, with perhaps Ebenezer taking the lead, the two had revolutionized domestic clothesmaking. Before the Buttericks, each clothes pattern came in one size, this one large, that one small, another medium. If you wanted to sew for someone of a different size, you figured it out as best you could. Or perhaps not. Working on a boy’s shirt pattern in 1863, Ebenezer created a graded sizing system, printed on the paper pattern, and the “Butterick Shirt Pattern” was born. It sold like hotcakes, at $10 for the first box, wholesale, and by the next Spring the firm had moved to larger quarters and way beyond childrens’ shirts to encompass men’s and women’s fashion. By 1869, Butterick & Co. was big business, with a factory and printshop in Brooklyn, a mass circulation magazine, sales agents all over North America, and spreading into Europe. The dress pattern was a good idea whose time had come. And Eben kept that $10 greenback all his life.

[Stanley]

Today is a super-multiple anniversary, of (among a thousand others) Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Pepé le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, and Jack Benny’s old Maxwell car, always desperately in need of a tune-up. And old film buffs will know I could only be talking about one man, “the voice”, Melvin Jerome Blank, born on this day, May 30th, 1908, in San Francisco, CA. By the time Mel dropped out of high school, in Portland, Oregon, he was already mildly (locally) famous for his voice impersonations, but his career could have gone in some other direction, for instance as band leader or radio producer (both of which he did in Portland), but his wife Estelle thought he should take his voice to Hollywood where, first, he did sounds for the Jack Benny radio program, including Jack’s Maxwell, Carmichael the polar bear, Sy the Mexican, and various other tormented characters. By now he was “voice characterizations by Mel Blanc,” and a move to Warner Bros’ dynamic cartoon factory was perhaps inevitable. There he stayed, biting carrots and spitting them out as Bugs Bunny (and many, many other characters) until 1960, when his exclusive Warner contract expired and he started free lancing, notably for Hanna-Barbera and Chuck Jones. He remained active until a few months before his death in 1989. His gravestone (at his request) reads “That’s all folks,” though without Porky’s stutter.

[Stanley]

Walt Whitman, our most exuberantly American poet, was born 194 years ago, May 31, 1819, on Long Island. Among his brothers were George Washington Whitman and Thomas Jefferson Whitman, so we may guess that, as well as being Quakers, his parents were patriots. Genteel poverty and many moves made his childhood unhappy, but he did remember being kissed by Lafayette on July 4, 1825. Walt apprenticed as a printer, and in that raffish crowd he began to write, attend the theatre, write, teach, write, work as a reporter, and write. But it was not until 1850 that he began Leaves of Grass, that immortal outpouring of (to quote from the poem itself) “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, nosentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.” He would return to Leaves again and again, revising, modifying, even retrieving previously trashed lines, truly a life’s work. Leaves of Grass impressed all the right people (Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, et al), but most reviewers thought it obscene and awful. So the next time you read something offensive, remember it might become something else, in god’s good time. After service as a medic in the Civil War (read his journal!!!) Whitman suffered a stroke in 1873 and lived the rest of his long life in some discomfort, cared for by neighbors, tenants, family, and friends, but always writing. He died in 1892.

[Stanley]

On June 1, 2013 we cannot do other than celebrate the birth of inventive twins, on this day 164 years ago (1849), in Cambridge, Mass., of Francis E. Stanley and Freelan O. Stanley. They were the brothers who devised (invented is not quite the right word, for all the ideas were in place) the Stanley Steamer Automobile, the first production model of which took to the dusty lanes of New England in 1897. They had actually made a steam-driven “car” much earlier, but their attention was then focused on another device, or rather process, dry-plate photography, at which (from 1883) they made quite a good living even though a little-known competitor, Eastman-Kodak, was already in the field. Our brothers invented a way of manufacturing the plates that put them in contention until 1905 when, already obsessed by the Stanley Steamer, they sold out to Kodak. From that point until 1927 (Francis died in 1918, Freelan in 1940), the Stanley Steamer proved a certain practicality on American roads and until 1910 was successful against gasoline-powered models in racing competitions. Indeed, from 1906 to 1909, Stanley Steamers held the speed record (127 mph!!!!) forautomobiles. Alas, the brothers are now but a footnote in automotive history, and now we see ads for a carpet cleaning franchise that can’t spell, Stanley Steemer. Sic transit, as they say.

[The term 'chauffeur' originates from the steam vehicles, French for 'he who heats', the stoker. Or as we call them in the North of England, the firebeater.]

[Stanley]

With generally good reason, American TV sitcoms are often dismissed as intellectual fluff, pap for the masses, at best as amusing entertainments that are not meant to be provocative. Fair enough, and that blancmange tradition probably has its roots in the American radio sitcom and, with that, the long-acknowledged power of advertisers to dictate boundaries if not themes and to make safety an artistic criterion. In that sense, June 2, 2013 is a great day to celebrate the leavening effect of British sitcoms on the American networks and in particular to note the 93rd anniversary of the birth, in Canning Town, London, of Johnny Speight. Speight first found his feet, as a writer, scripting for gagmen on BBC TV and radio and ITV. Among those who profited from his often acerbic one-liners were Eric Sykes, Morecambe & Wise, Frankie Howerd, and Spike Milligan. But Speight hit the jackpot with his very own series, Till Death Do Us Part, which first aired as a BBC pilot in 1965 and as a series from 1966 to 1975 mercilessly yet comically satirized racism in particular and working class attitudes in general. Speight often characterized this as uprooting his own roots. Imported into the USA as All In the Family, this “Alf Garnett” (or, if you prefer, Archie Bunker) series was the high point of Speight’s career, which (nevertheless) included several serious dramas as well as sitcoms and comedy shows.

[Stanley]

In St. Louis June 3, 2013 can’t pass without noting that it’s the 107th anniversary of Josephine Baker’s birth. Born Freda Josephine McDonald in our city in 1906, the daughter of Carrie McDonald, Josephine had a tough childhood, serving as a domestic and scrounging for foot at a tender age. Josephine escaped to vaudeville and Harlem, arriving with the right talents at the right time, the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. At 16, she had leading dance roles in Broadway revues like Shuffle Along, and before she was 21 she’d gone to France where she starred in La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées. Her arrival in Paris coincided with the new Art Deco style and movement and a renewal of interest in non-western cultures, and Josephine made the most of it, with spectacular dances (sometime accompanied by her pet cheetah and often nearly nude) and sultry singing. Her mystique grew, and she inspired writers like Hemingway, Hughes, and Fitzgerald and later emulators like Shirley Bassey. In 1937 she married a Frenchman and became a French citoyenne, and during the war played a role with the Résistance, for which she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, the Rosette de la Résistance, and the Legion d’honneur. She returned occasionally to her native soil but it was not hers. In 1976 Josephine Baker died in Paris where she was buried with full military honors out of the Church of the Madeleine.

[Stanley]

June 4, 2013 marks the 96th birthday of the Pulitzer prizes, first awarded on this day in 1917, and then in only four categories: biography, history, editorial writing, and reporting. Thanks in part to good investments and continued nurturing by the Pulitzer foundation, the number of categories has grown today to 21. Most (14) are still in journalism, six in letters, one in music, the balance reflecting the passions of the founder, Joseph Pulitzer, then publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World. Still, with prizes worth only $10,000 (the Man Booker Prize for fiction stands at $75,000), what counts about the Pulitzer is prestige. The prestige has been maintained partly by the Pulitzer board itself, partly by the juries the board selects, partly by the good choices the juries have usually made. Not always, of course, notably Janet Cooke’s 1981 Pulitzer for feature writing which should have been for fiction, but usually, normally, almost always the Pulitzer awards win wide endorsement from the chattering classes. So thanks, Joe. Your last will wrought well. And the first four winners, in 1917? Well, they included three women, co-authors of a biography of a woman (Julia Ward Howe), a St. Louis-born journalist (Herbert Swope), a Frenchman (Jean Jusserand) and the editorial board of Joe Pulitzer’s old nemesis, the New York Tribune.

[Stanley]

On June 5, 2013 it seems right to celebrate the birthday of a novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Or, Life Among the Lowly, which began its life, as many 19th-century novels did, as a serial in The National Era, an abolitionist newspaper, on June 5, 1851. It was also sold by subscription, in small bound sections, and the initially sympathetic picture its author drew of a Kentucky slaveholding family, the Shelbys, at first drew a mildly favorable response in the south. But Harriet Beecher Stowe was no friend of slavery, and her purpose was to showthat even “good” slaveholders like Arthur and Emily Shelby could not help being corrupted, and absolutely corrupted, by their absolute ownership of other human beings. And, indeed, financial reverses forced the Shelbys to sell their finest slave, old Uncle Tom, down the river, where his misadventures and tragedies gave Stowe further room to limn the evils of the peculiar institution. Once the first two installments were out, southerners knew Ms. Stowe had drawn her bead on them, and fired real bullets, and they howled in protest. The novel had an important impact in the north, too, although whether Stowe was“the little woman who wrote the book that caused this great war” is quite another question, as is the conundrum of whether Abraham Lincoln ever spoke those words.

[Stanley]

That theatre now represents a profession, indeed several professions, owes much to James Morrison Steele MacKaye, born on this day, June 6, in 1842. Steele MacKaye’s lawyer father was a militant abolitionist, and at 19 young Steele volunteered for the Union Army and rose to the rank of major. But he had already tasted art, at the École des beaux arts in Paris, and he returned there after the war, but this time to study drama and, in particular, a natural or realist style of acting. He was pretty good at it, and became the first American to play Hamlet in London (1873), but his passion was to bring this new, naturalistic theatre to America. This he would do as actor, playwright, producer, and teacher. Indeed, he would found the United States’ first acting school, now the American Academy of Dramatic Art, in New York City, where he lectured on acting and urged inventiveness in the theatre. And he practiced as he preached, establishing three theatres and responsible for over 100 patents in theatre design including indirect stage lighting, moving stages, folding seats, flame-proof curtains, a cloud-maker, and the disappearing orchestra pit. In his spare time, Steele modeled for the memorial statue to New York’s Seventh Regiment, which still stands in Central Park, and fathered six children including the forester Benton MacKaye who lived to be 96 and was the moving spirit behind the establishment of the Appalachian Trail.

[Stanley]

June 7, 2013 is the 351st anniversary of the birth of Celia Fiennes, born into an aristocratic family near Salisbury, Wiltshire on this day in 1662. Her grandfather, Viscount Saye and Sele, was a hero of the Puritan cause in parliament, and her father was a parliamentary colonel in the English civil wars, and it may be that she inherited her eccentricities from them. Financially secure (Puritans generally believed in partible inheritance), Celia never married and instead, in her early 20s, developed a nearly insatiable desire to travel. And not for her the security of travel by coach and four; Celia went sidesaddle, alone or with one or two servants or family members, and she went pretty much all over England. These travels began in the early 1680s and continued, off and on, until at least 1710. Her first motive was to “regain my health by variety and change of aire and exercise,” but soon she began to take notes, to survey the landscape, buildings, and people, what they did with their time and how they made their living. She appreciated industry, criticized idleness, and was amused by her own and others’ hypochondria. Her journals, intended for family reading, were rediscovered in the 19th century and published in their entirety in 1888 as Through England on a Side Saddle. Only just recently out of print, and available on line, Celia Fiennes’ journals are well worth a reader’s time.

[Stanley]

June 8, 2013 is the 387th anniversary of the birth, in Perinaldo, Italy, in 1625, of Giovanni Domenico Cassini. If you’ve been keeping up with science news, you will guess that Cassini was an astronomer, for NASA’s “Cassini-Huygens” mission arrived at Saturn in 2004 and since then has been telling us a very great deal about that spectacular, ringed planet. And indeed Giovanni Cassini did become an astronomer, and he did make many first discoveries about Saturn, including four of its moons and several of the major divisions in its rings. But our Cassini (the human one, not the robotic satellite) was born into the early decades of the Enlightenment, and like many clever people of the time, he turned his talents to many tricks, usually in the service of Louis XIV, the “Sun King” of France, but sometimes for the Pope and occasionally for Italian noblemen of various stripes (for patronage was an important element in Enlightenment science). Besides astronomy, in which Cassini made many more discoveries than those about Saturn, Cassini was a geographer (he began the first topographic map of any nation, France), a mathematician (he calculated the distance to Mars and learned to use Jupiter as a universal clock), an engineer who tamed the River Po, and a noted astrologer (until he decided it was not scientific enough). Cassini’s map of France was finished by his son Jacques, and his mapping of Saturn continues to this day with Cassini-Huygens.

[Stanley]

June 10, 2013 marks the 84th birthday of Edward Osborne Wilson, born in Birmingham, Alabama, moved over the place, but returned to his native state to take his first degrees, in biology, for he had already developed a profound interest in nature. Nature writ large or nature writ small, but a fishing accident left him temporarily blinded and then with an odd vision profile which meant that he could easily see the hairs on the bodies of small insects. And so, of course, nature writ small is what Edward Wilson did. Even before he entered the University of Alabama he’d begun a survey of the ants of Alabama, and that’s pretty much where he stayed, to become a Harvard PhD, myrmecologist extraordinaire, Professor Emeritus at Harvard, a two-time Pulitzer winner, and along the way a controversial sociobiologist and a gently militant atheist. Plus he’s become an interesting epistemologist, an evangelist about the scientific method, and his Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998) has been from time to time a required text in the Honors College’s First Year Experience seminars. With increasing understanding of genetics, and with his own discoveries that altruism is as “natural” as competitiveness, controversies over his sociobiology have died down, somewhat. In any case, we can all hope that Professor Wilson has an excellent, but not an ant-free, picnic on his 84th birthday.

[Stanley]

Inscriptions on memorial statues are not always accurate, but Jeannette Rankin’s (in the Montana capitol building) has it just right: “I cannot vote for war.” Indeed not. Rankin was one of 50 in congress who voted against war in April 1917, and hers was the sole vote against war in December 1941. In 1973, aged 93, she was preparing to run for congress again, in order to vote against the Viet Nam war, but death struck her down and left her with only the statue. Jeannette Rankin was born on this day, June 11, in 1880, on a high country ranch. The family included five girls and one boy, and Jeannette grew up thinking she could do whatever a man could do, whether to repair a thresher or pour concrete, stack hay or run for election to the US Congress. But it wasn’t until 1914 that Montana voters approved women’s suffrage. Jeannette, a BS in Biology who had also studied Philanthropy (!!!) at Columbia (New York), was ready—with her brother’s support—to run in 1916, and run she did, all over Montana, and won a handy upset victory as Montana’s at-large congressman (the new language of equal rights took a while to sink in). Jeannette Rankin was the first woman in Congress, and hoped to be remembered as the first woman who’d voted to give women the vote, but it was not to be. Congress didn’t get around to doing women justice until 1919, when Jeannette was back in Montana, raising hell I suspect.

[Stanley]

In the early 19th century, the USA attracted many European observers. After all, from a European perspective this was an odd place, a self-proclaimed democratic republic that had foresworn both aristocracy and an established church, a nation that proclaimed equality yet depended on slavery. Today, the best-known of these “foreign correspondents” is Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America rightly remains a classic. But among the sharpest wits to watch us was Harriet Martineau, born on this day, June 12, in 1802, in Norwich, East Anglia, into a manufacturing family of liberal religious views. Her childhood was made difficult by chronic illness, increasing deafness, and a mother who governed her children fitfully but not well, so young Harriet found solace in reading and writing. So much so that when her family suffered reverses, she stepped forward to earn its keep through writing. She wrote very well, brilliantly in fact, and gathered in as friends some of the leading minds of the age, including Malthus, Ricardo, Bentham and Mill, but also on the poetic side the Brownings and George Eliot. By 30 “a great Lion in London,” in 1834 Harriet embarked on an American voyage which produced what some call our first essays in sociology, Society in America (1837) and How to Observe Morals and Manners (1839). In us Harriet found much to lament, and that’s perhaps why her fine essays have never gained what might be called Tocqueville traction.

[See this LINK for de Tocqueville]

[Stanley]

Everybody knows of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, but relatively few have heard of James Clerk Maxwell, born 182 years ago today, on June 13, 1831, in Edinburgh. But a recent poll of physicists placed Maxwell third in a list of the “100 greatest physicists.” Maxwell himself would have scorned our obsession with lists and its underlying assumption of exact measurements. As he put it, famously, “the true logic of this world is the calculus of probabilities”, and the longer one lives the more force that statement has, even if by it Maxwell meant measurements of such things as Brownian motion and the speed of magnetic field energy. His parents, astonished by his inquisitiveness, encouraged it, finally enrolling him in the Edinburgh Academy, thence to Edinburgh University, and in both places Maxwell made discoveries well in advance of his age. Then it was on to Trinity College Cambridge where he was made a Fellow at the tender age of 25. He taught also at Aberdeen and London, and it was at London, in the 1860s, that he made his greatest discovery, in theoretical physics, positing that electricity, magnetism, and light are all manifestations of the electromagnetic field and then that all three travel through space in waves and at the same speed. Forty years later, in Switzerland, a young patent officer named Einstein took that insight a stage further, with a portrait of Maxwell hanging on his study wall.

[Stanley]

It’s a good idea, in a democratic, two-party system, to remember a few cautionary axioms. One usually votes for the lesser of two evils because the parties themselves are shifting coalitions. Just so, the parties change shape and stance. In the 19th century, the Democrats were the race baiters and race haters and champions of fiscal conservatism. Right now, it’s the Republicans who are changing, have been moving to the right for a century and may have reached the edge. No politician measures that shift better than Republican Robert M. “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, from 1901 to 1925 Wisconsin governor and senator, presidential candidate, and progressive hero. LaFollette was born (believe it or not) in a town called Primrose, in Wisconsin, on June 14, 1855. He attended the University of Wisconsin where he learned political morality from President John Bascom, a theologically inclined philosopher, and took that morality into the public arena. In his various offices, LaFollette would champion legislation protecting labor unions, controlling the railroads and banks, expanding the suffrage, establishing progressive taxation, regulating food and drugs production, protecting wilderness areas, creating workers’ compensation schemes, bringing in non-partisan election of judges, and (perish the thought) forging a close working alliance between government and universities, because, he believed, you should know about reality before you tried to change it.

[Stanley]

June 15, 2013 is the 111th anniversary of the “most famous train in the world,” New York Central’s 20th Century Limited, which on this day in 1902 began its first run from New York to Chicago at 6:00PM sharp from Grand Central Station and on a trip that the company claimed was “perfectly routine and ordinary” and “thoroughly practical” it arrived on time (a new record @ 60mph) in LaSalle Street Station, Chicago, at 9:00AM sharp. In its 65 year life it wouldn’t always be on time, but it always offered luxury service, a barbershop (but sorry, ladies, not a hairdresser), elegant dining, an iconic bar car at the end of the train, and two classes of sleeper accommodation, both “First”. In 1938, also on June 15, “The Limited” received its best-known treatment, with all new rolling stock in Art Deco inside and out and that famous streamlined steam locomotive, the Hudson. Since it was a daily train, both ways, this represented a considerable investment, and it was one that could not be sustained when the airplane came into its own. But like the Super Chief that took the movie stars on to Hollywood the train gave us an idea of luxury that sticks, not least because the “red carpet treatment” was a 20th Century Limited trademark, and entered our language because passengers walked to andfrom the train on a red carpet.

[Stanley]

June 16, 2013 is the 111th anniversary of the birth, in Hartford, CT, of Barbara McClintock, who in due course would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Biology for her theoretical and practical work in plant genetics. Born in 1902 into a physician’s family, Barbara’s difficult relationship with her mother almost prevented her from going to college, but she did and graduated from Cornell University BS, MS, and PhD in pretty short order. She later taught at Missouri (where she was unhappy at her treatment as a woman), Columbia University, and CalTech before returning to Cornell where she spent most of her career. She worked with corn (maize), a plant that gave her so much pleasure, she later said, that she didn’t think she should get a Nobel for it as well, and her practical experiments enabled her to visualize important features of the genome well before Crick and Watson got to work. By 1944, by “watch[ing] the plant all the way along,”she had worked out that individual genes could transfer from one section of the chromosome to another, an idea thought bizarre at the time but later proven by her own and others’ research as the actual, physical shape of the DNA molecule became known. In 1983, aged 81, Barbara McClintock became the first American woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize.