BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

FASHION

Taking a tip from the man on the job, the wise feminine shipbuilder wears working clothes for comfort and safety. She wears a man’s type shirt with a close fitting collar for protection. Her hair is up . . . she wears strong, serviceable jeans or overalls without cuffs, low-heeled work shoes and a closely fitting jacket for comfort. From “War Fashions for Feminine Safety,” ca. 1942.

This poster, originally put up at a shipbuilder’s yard in San Francisco Bay, was used to headline a 2014 National Archives exhibit on “How World War II Changed Women’s Fashion.” Such thinking achieved fashion apotheosis in the Harper’s Bazaar cover for March 1943. In it, a very cool girl waits patiently to donate her blood to the American Red Cross. Her auburn locks are not covered but tightly controlled by a white cloche hat and framed by her jacket’s high black collar. She carries a rough, reddish hold-all, and she’s determinedly on duty. The picture is headlined “SPRING FASHIONS”, and it was taken by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, by then an established figure in the American fashion trade. The fall of France, in June 1940, destroyed the publishing calendar of Harper’s Bazaar and other leading fashion publications. Their annual lead had always been the great shows of Paris designers. Would they now turn to London for inspiration? Hardly likely. Indeed it was Dahl-Wolfe who led the effort to find an American theme for American women’s fashion. And with more women in the work force (and, be it said, in the forces) American fashion would develop a new look. And Louise Dahl-Wolfe was ready for it. This all-American woman was born in San Francisco, of Norwegian immigrant parents, on November 19, 1895. They wanted all three of their daughters to prosper in this new world, and in Louise’s case they encouraged her artistic tendencies. She studied painting at the California School of Fine Arts, became “bored” with it, and transferred what she’d learned to photography and architecture. In 1927 she took up with a sculptor, Meyer Wolfe, married him in 1928 and (keeping her own surname) moved back to his home country to capture the feel, the taste, and the design of American life. Her first published photo was “Tennessee Mountain Woman,” aged and wrinkled, half in shadow, wearing a man’s black hat decorated with flowers, and sitting on a cabin porch. It brought Dahl-Wolfe back to New York, where she did commissions for Saks and Bonwit-Teller and covers for Harper’s Bazaar—and portraits of some remarkable Americans, including recent ones like Albert Einstein, exiles like Josephine Baker, and oddballs like Carson McCullers. Who better, then, than Louise Dahl-Wolfe to lead and to document a sea change in American fashion? It would give us Rosie the Riveter, and in that March 1943 Bazaar cover, Dahl-Wolfe gave us the 18-year old starlet, Betty Bacall. Renamed “Lauren,” Ms. Bacall would make her own contribution to the changing image of the new (stylish but defiantly American) woman of a new age. ©.

[Stanley]

FIREWORKER

The fireworks begin today. Each diploma is a lighted match. Each of you is a fuse. Ed Koch.

Thus Koch, then mayor of New York, inspired a class of high school graduates to do great, explosive things. Commencement speeches are too often like that, meaningless and awkward. And one hopes that in this instance some of the graduands knew that to light the fuse was, anywhere in New York, illegal, and had been since 1909. The statute heads up Chapter 270 in the state’s criminal code, which includes other ‘public nuisance’ offenses like refusing to yield a party line in cases of emergency. Since 1909, the fireworks regulations have been extended and clarified (to keep up with fireworks design) and in one case, in 2014, amended to allow the use of sparklers. The prohibition has, from time to time, been attacked, usually from the libertarian or nostalgic ‘fringe’, but a few years back a local historian lamented the effect of the 1909 statute on the businesses occupying ‘Firecracker Lane.’ That was the local name for a short stretch of Park Place between Broadway and Church Streets occupied almost exclusively by fireworks emporia. At #12, 4 stories in brownstone, was Pain’s Fireworks. It was the chief of them all, proudly announcing its trade every flat surface. And it wasn’t even ‘American.’ Its founder, James Charles Pain, was English, born in Lambeth, London, on November 20, 1836. He came from a long line of gunpowder and fireworks manufacturers, all of them Pains, the first having been licensed in 1670 to make and sell gunpowder, presumably for lethal purposes. But by the time James went into business for himself it was mainly used for entertainment. Indeed his father was listed in censuses as a “pyrotechnist.” James took over the business in 1860, and then after a fire (not a good thing in this trade) moved it to Brixton. Thus the fuse was lit, and his business exploded to include a large (200-acre) manufacturing site, with James traveling the world to find new markets for pyrotechnics (and, incidentally, a new line of marine safety flares). For his services to the Portuguese crown he was named a Knight of the Order of Christ. He established the Firecracker Lane shop in the 1870s and placed it under the supervision of his son Henry. New York’s 1909 statute blew the fuse on that operation, and forced New Yorkers to get their black market crackers from Pennsylvania and then, after the Quaker state’s ban, from Ontario. As for Pain’s Fireworks, it still thrives, but it’s main business is now the design and delivery of fireworks spectaculars. But you don’t light their fuses anymore. They’re set off by wireless signals, from a safe distance, and they cost the earth. ©.

[Stanley]

LEGO

hat basically happens is that when a company becomes great, and I’m being a bit rude here, people think they’re some kind of genius [and] we can move into all sorts of other businesses because the net bottom line is . . . we’re just geniuses. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp.

Here Jørgen Knudstorp diagnosed a a comorbidity which has often afflicted leading members of industrial and financial elites, and not only in Denmark. With a little geopolitical license, we can call it the Musk Syndrome. In Musk’s case, spectacular success in one field encouraged success in another, and another, and then, suddenly, Elon demanded a trillionaire’s salary and cavorted on the stage of populist politics with a chainsaw which, he declared, was emblematic of good government. At such points in the syndrome, modesty is perhaps the only cure, but (by definition) modesty has become the hardest to acquire of all the virtues. Hard, but not impossible, as Jørgen Vig Knudstorp demonstrated when, at the tender age of 32, in the year 2000, he was chosen as ‘director of strategic development’ at LEGO. The Danish company was then a world leader. Built on plastic bricks and the popular supposition that genius lurks in every child, it had expanded into adjacent fields (LEGO theme parks at home in Billund and then in several other countries; video and board games; retail stores.) But LEGO was a feeble giant, overconfident, overextended, and nearly bankrupt. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp thought it past time to be “a bit rude,” and in 2004 the Christiansen family brought him in as CEO. Born on November 21, 1968, Jørgen had a long and episodic education, interrupted by spells of school teaching and then capped by a PhD in economics. He’d also made a good marriage, to Vanessa, a Danish MD, and blessed with four kids (who, one imagines, played with LEGO bricks). Once installed as CEO, he rudely shed the company’s arrogance (in effect, selling off its debts) and set about rebuilding the company “brick by brick”, as the London Financial Times wittily put it in 2009 when, in the midst of the world financial crisis of that year, LEGO moved back into the black, where it has stayed ever since. It’s fitting: LEGO stems from the Danish leg godt, “play well” in English, and if one translates literally the company’s motto it is “the best isn’t excessively good.” But the company’s founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, preferred “only the best is good enough.” It’s important pointing out that, among Jørgen Vig Knudstorp’s achievements perhaps the most striking is that he preserved the Christiansen family’s ownership of LEGO. Still only the second non-Christiansen to head LEGO, Jørgen resigned as CEO in 2016, to universal plaudits. Visiting consultancies aside (wherein one presumes he preaches rudely about modesty), he still lives in Billund where today he, Vanessa and their four children will celebrate his 57th birthday. ©

[Stanley]

CLUTTERBUCK

It became necessary to destroy the town to save it. Unidentified US Army Major, commenting on the destruction of Ben Tre, February 1968.

No quotation better sums up the immorality of America’s war in Viet Nam, unless it is Air Force General Curtis LeMay’s blustering threat (in 1965) “to bomb them back into the Stone Age.” It was the moral problem that fueled campus protests in the 1960s, but there was another way to look at the problem, and that was to stress the disproportionality of the American escalation. This was the tack taken by a friendly critic, a British army officer named Richard Clutterbuck, who had led the successful campaign against a nationalist-communist insurgency in the Malay peninsula. There were those in the US military who wanted to listen. Clutterbuck was invited to teach his subject, which he called “counter-insurgency,” at the US Army Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, KS, in 1961-1963. His ideas had some effect, but not enough, and he returned to SE Asia to continue in his tactical approach. As he worked, so he wrote. Two books came out at the time, The Long Long War (1966) and Riot and Revolution in Singapore (1973) detailing British counter-insurgency in countryside and city. His were piecemeal operations. He left HQ and shed his rank badges (he was a colonel) to accompany small foot patrols. He talked to village elders and urban youths. He was more likely to recommend building roads than bombing jungle trails. He tinkered. One is tempted to stress his engineering degree (1937) at Cambridge in explaining all this, and indeed he was a problem-solver, not a theoretician. But in truth he was a military man, through and through. Richard Lewis Clutterbuck was born on November 22, 1917. Clutterbuck’s father was a career soldier (a major in the Royal Artillery), but he had a civilian education, at Radley College and then Cambridge. He was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant, Royal Engineers, in 1938, fought in France, then North Africa, then Germany. Now Captain Clutterbuck, his education in counter-terrorism began in Trieste, sorting out the warring factions in that ‘neutral’ city, and then continued in Palestine where he focused on Zionist terrorists. So he was prepared for his next big assignment, coordinating police with military in the Malay peninsula. His bravery, and successes, won him further promotion there. But he was also of an academic bent, and in 1968 he enrolled, part time, in a London University PhD. So when Major General Richard Lewis Clutterbuck retired from military service, in 1972, he joined the Politics department at Exeter University. There student radicals didn’t much like his politics, but they liked his openness and his eagerness to learn from and to listen to his students. Whatever his uniform, these were his habits. ©

[Stanley]

THESPIANS

Oh, the man who can drive a theatrical team,

With wheelers and leaders in order supreme,

Can govern and rule, with a wave of his fin,

The whole of the World with Olympus thrown in!

The Gods’ chorus from Thespis: or, the Gods Grown Old, 1871.

Thus the deal is done. A traveling company of players has stumbled upon, or up, Olympus, and found the gods unhappy there and disappointed by their human handiwork, below. The players will replace—play the parts of—the gods and goddesses. If they succeed, Jupiter knows what the rewards will be. But should they fail they will be known as tragedians, condemned forever to play to empty houses and wake to horrid reviews. That is the basic plot of Thespis, the first-ever Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera, which opened at the Gaiety Theatre, London, on December 28, 1871. First reviews were mixed, but the operetta grew on the London crowd and the London critics, and it ran into February. It was even attended by Victoria’s second son Albert, duke of Edinburgh, who is said to have enjoyed it. It first appeared as the second feature in a sort of Christmas pantomime, and so there was a lot of slapstick, even a custard pie thrown by a member of the actors’ company, Stupidas, into the face of another player, Preposterous. But the basic comedy is domestic, for once in place as pseudo-Olympians the actors and actresses discover that the unusual linkages among the gods and goddesses were difficult to carry off, in real life. But Gilbert & Sullivan operettas were never to be known as ‘realistic.’ Sadly, Sullivan’s music to Thespis has been lost, but Gilbert’s lyrics can be read online, including its anachronistic in-jokes, for instance about Victorian railway schedules. But the play does refer to a real event, and a real person, and to one of the few precise datings to come from the 6th century BCE. For it was on November 23, 534BCE, that the actor Thespis of Icaria made theatrical history by winning the first Athens “best tragedy” prize). A lot of the rest is legendary, but it is said that Thespis was the first actor to step out of the chorus and to speak his own lines as his own character. Pretty heroic when you think about it: and Thespis also invented, or pioneered, the use of masks to underline further the individuality of his ‘role.’ And Gilbert’s idea that Thespis and his company might have stumbled up Olympus to interrupt a parley of the gods is based on the legend that Thespis (though an Athenian) did trundle about in Greece with a company of thespians carrying their props (and presumably their masks) in a horse-drawn wagon. In short, Thespis was the very modern model of a modern actor-manager, and that is how he was portrayed by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan at panto-time, 1871. ©
Bob Bliss

[Stanley]

WILKINSON

Since it was impossible to paint a ship so that she could not be seen by a submarine, the extreme opposite was the answer. Norman Wilkinson.

Thus Wilkinson explained “dazzle camouflage,” not to hide ships from sight but to use broad stripes and zigzags, in contrasting colors, to make them painfully obvious. At the same time, such bold markings would make it difficult to gauge the ship’s course or speed. In 1917 the British Admiralty bought into the idea. By the end of the year, more than 5000 British ships, civilian and military, were camouflaged in plain sight, and in early 1918 the US navy followed suit. How well or even whether it worked remains disputed, but if you think about zebras avoiding lions on the African plains you’ll see the point. For all that, Norman Wilkinson got a £2,000 reward and two workshops in London staffed by model makers, naval officers, and a dozen ‘lady artists’ all devoted to making ships look like a cubist’s nightmare. In 1918 he married one of the lady artists, Evelyn Mackenzie, and in 1939 he returned to the task, this time helping the RAF to conceal its ground installations from the prying eyes of the Luftwaffe. But that is not how he’s remembered today. Norman Wilkinson, distinguished marine artist and poster designer, was born in Cambridge, England, on November 24, 1878. His childhood was disrupted when his father ran away from home, but he still got a good education and, at 16, decided to become an artist. He opened a studio in 1899, but his day job was making pen and ink drawings for the Illustrated London News. Many of these were of seascapes, harbors, and sailing vessels. These brought him his first big commissions (oils on canvas for the ill-fated RMS Titanic and it sister ship RMS Olympic, both of the White Star Line). On the side he did travel posters for White Star and several British railways. After his Admiralty interlude of 1917-1919, it was this latter line, advertising posters, that would make him famous. Wilkinson’s best commissions came from the London, Midland, and Scotland (LMS) and the London and North East (LNER) railways, and today his posters sell in a range from $2000 to $10000. The best ones are of harbor scenes (the LMS, especially, ran boat trains and connected with ferry routes), which reflected Wilkinson’s youthful love affair with boats and sailing, but they all have a distinctive quality, representational but reminding one of simple watercolors. Between the wars, Wilkinson became something of an elder statesman in the poster world, organizing big museum shows in London and New York. But in WWII he returned to duty as a painter with an official military rank, not only concealing RAF aerodromes but making a famous en plein air series on the D-Day landings. He did his original sketches, June 6, 1944, from on board the destroyer HMS Jervis, part of the invasion fleet. Not bad going, for a 65-year-old poster painter. ©

[Stanley]

KRUTCH

Being the inventor of sex would seem to be a sufficient distinction for a creature just barely large enough to be seen by the naked eye. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Great Chain of Life (1957), writing about the very ancient freshwater algae, Volvox.

When Joseph Wood Krutch’s grandparents fled Germany after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, they settled in Tennessee. It’s an accident of history, for most of their fellow German refugees settled in the northern and border states where they formed a liberal, even radical leaven, anti-slavery and pro-unionist. In Missouri, for instance, recent German immigrants played a vital role in keeping the state in the Union in 1860-61. In Knoxville, the Krutch grandparents became musicians and then sprinkled the city with artistic and scholarly offspring, perhaps a different yeast. Joseph’s father became a noted landscape artist, one of impressionistic tendencies (perfect for the Great Smokies), while his brother Charles developed into a remarkable photographer, famous for (among other things) documenting the great TVA project of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Today, in Knoxville, Charles’s bequest to the city, Krutch Park, still serves as a gathering point for progressive activists. Joseph Wood Krutch (pronounced, as it should be, “crewch) was born in Knoxville on November 25, 1893, But he did not stick around. After a science degree at the state university, he fled northwards to graduate studies in the humanities, and (with an MA and PhD from Columbia) launched himself on the stormy waters of Manhattan as a professor, critic, and prophet. In early 1929 his The Modern Temper appeared, a timely prophecy in which he worried that Americans’ love affair with technology and consumerism could never be truly fulfilling. That Fall’s stock market crash and the ensuing depression further convinced him. A string of books followed, almost one per year, along the same general line. His was a comprehensive attack, wittily expressed. Modern logic, he wrote in 1929, is “only the art of going wrong with confidence.” To change course humans needed to take better counsel from nature, both their own “human nature” and the nature they could easily find in the world around them—if they would stop befouling it, clear-cutting it, ploughing it under. As he aged Krutch grew mellower and presented to his reading public the image of a modern Henry David Thoreau. It’s a nice, attractive mix, and I am surprised that Joseph Wood Krutch is not better known today, for we badly need his prophetic voice and would be refreshed by his underlying faith in our abilities to retrieve a better world for ourselves. In his last two decades, he moved to his own sunny uplands, in the southwestern desert. He moved there for his health, on his doctors’ orders, taught at the University of Arizona, and (luckily for us) continued to write. ©

[Stanley]

Dr. WALKER

A woman reasons by telegraph, and [a man’s] stage-coach reasoning cannot keep pace. Mary Edwards Walker.

More than most, this quotation is firmly rooted in time, for in Mary Walker’s era the stage coach and the telegraph were at nearly opposite ends of the speed spectrum. Taken by itself, it does raise the question of whether Mary really believed in gender equality. And in some of her writings, notably her 1878 Unmasked: or, the Science of Immorality, she did lecture to “gentlemen” as if they represented a lower order of creation. It’s better, though, to take this striking comparison as evidence that she knew a good joke when she saw it. This talent owed much to her upbringing. Mary Edwards Walker was born near Oswego, New York, on November 26, 1832. This was the ‘burned over’ district of New York, but her parents (Alvah and Vesta) were not much moved by the evangelical fevers of their neighbors. Instead, one of the disciplines of the Walker farm was for Mary and her siblings to pick out and declaim upon the logical fallacies of revealed religion. Alvah and Vesta were ‘Freethinkers,’ dissenters of a radical bent. They were abolitionists, and (more importantly in Mary’s case) they didn’t conform to gendered stereotypes. Alvah shared in household duties. Vesta worked in the fields and did farmyard chores. Mary followed suit, literally, and learned that boys’ clothing was much more practical. She wore trousers before they became bloomers—albeit often under a shortened skirt. Thus encouraged to be her own self, Mary Edwards Walker would become the second woman MD in US history, graduating from Syracuse Medical College in 1855. While there, she married, but it didn’t stick, and it was as Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, surgeon, that she volunteered for service in the Union Army. The army turned her down, because she was a she, but she nursed the wounded at Bull Run. Eventually the Union took her on and, dressed comfortably and with her hair cut short, she served most of the war as a field surgeon. Bravely, and in battle. She tended all the wounded, blue and gray, and then when captured and imprisoned she was exchanged for a rebel surgeon (presumably male, for the South was the South). For all this she became the first (and, I think, still the only) female recipient of the Medal of Honor. That seems not to have slowed her down. Come the peace, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker continued to advocate for civil, social, and political equality for women. In her prose, she granted no quarter to the enemy, whom she defined as the hypocritical male, often outlining his hypocrisy in graphical, medical detail. Recently, predictably, she became a casualty of the Trump administration (a southern fort had been named after her, and now it’s been made Confederate again), but she can still be found on a woman’s quarter, newly minted just last year. She is worth more. ©.

[Stanley]

SHERRINGTON

That pleasure is not a good thing is admitted from the fact that certain pleasures are evil . . . if we choose some pleasures and shun others, it is not every pleasure that is a good thing. Similarly, the same rule holds with pains. St. Clement of Alexandria, circa 200AD.

The occasionally perverse relationship between pleasure and pain has long fascinated poets, playwrights, philosophers, and pornographers. It became even more puzzling when modern physiologists discovered that the human nervous system, objectively considered, made no obvious distinction between pain and pleasure. Physical stimuli travel along identical nerve paths, synapse by synapse, so to speak; the messages are delivered to the same region of the brain; the brain sorts them into pleasures and pains and adjusts accordingly. The physiologist most closely connected with these discoveries was Charles Scott Sherrington, who turns out to be a person of many interests. He was born in Islington, London, on November 27, 1857. But we do not know who his father was. Nor are we very sure of his mother. He was well cared for, though, by Caleb Rose and Anne Sherrington (who married in 1880). Their household was a light and lively one, and young Charles was brought up amongst art, artifacts, books, and physicians (for Caleb Rose was an eminent surgeon). Charles was well schooled, became an excellent athlete, and in 1886 graduated from Cambridge with the highest academic honors. Meanwhile, he had already apprenticed as a surgeon, and in 1881 declared an interest in the nervous system. Sherrington’s early experiments were with other animals than homo sapiens; removing this or that portion of the brain and observing the effects. Experiments continued through academic appointments at London (1886), Liverpool (1891), and Oxford (1913). In all these he distinguished himself as a superb mentor, eager to share what he knew (and, importantly, what he hoped to learn) with his students, several of whom would (as did Sherrington himself, in 1932) go on to win Nobel prizes. Sherrington’s award came in physiology, and was for a range of discoveries about how the nervous system recorded and then responded to external stimuli. Along the way, he fought for women to be admitted to Oxford’s medical program. When he became interested in nervous fatigue as a medical phenomenon, during WWI, he volunteered for long shifts in a munitions factory (80-hour weeks) in order to make a guinea pig of himself. I can just about picture this 60+-year-old professor toiling away at his work bench with high explosives. He blew no one up, and learned a lot. As for the odd distinctions we make between pleasure and pain, Sherrington had long since decided that these were not “learned” responses but evolved ones. It’s a conclusion I am content with. ©
Bob Bliss

[Stanley]

WEATHERVANE

. . . . . but see,

WEATHERVANE

The mist is now dispersing gloriously:

And language fails us in its vain endeavor—

The spirit mounts above, and lives forever.

“In Honor of Mr. Howard”, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1817.

Given the date, and Goethe’s known sympathies, one might guess that this poem was written to praise “Mr. Howard” for some signal role in ‘dispersing’ Napoléon Bonaparte’s imperial mists, perhaps at Waterloo. Not a bad guess, but unlikely. “Mr. Howard,” Luke Howard by name, was a Quaker, an upholder of that sect’s peace testimony, and was too old to be in Wellington’s army. He was born in London on November 28, 1772, the son of a wealthy maker of tin-plated metalwares. Luke was sent to a Quaker school at Burford, then apprenticed to a chemist-pharmacist in Stockport, even further north. At school, Howard learned to disapprove of flogging; but he prospered in pharmacy well enough to return to London, marry a Quaker, Mariabella Eliot, and then, in 1798, set up in partnership with another Friend, William Allen, at the Plough Court pharmacy. Luke Howard waxed wealthy as a pharmacist. He and Mariabella raised seven children (of eight live births) to prosperous adulthoods. While Mariabella wrote books on household management and child rearing, Luke wrote about pharmacy, but guardedly. Pharmacy was his business, an “art,” not a science. But its processes brought him into contact with scientists. Howard produced ether for John Dalton, who besides being a pioneer chemist was also a Quaker. And he developed his own interests in science, notably in geology and botany, in which he could freely exchange ideas with other pioneers. This brought election to scientific societies, but also an eagerness to apply his new learning, his ‘science,’ to other areas, including what we today call meteorology. Here his laboratory was London’s ever- changeable weather, and he would produce his landmark The Climate of London (2 vols., 1820 et seq). But Goethe’s poetic tribute dated from his discovery, in translation, of Howard’s earlier effort, 1803, On the modification of clouds, an on the principles of their production, suspension, and destruction. This was not ‘scientific.’ Rather, as Goethe may have suggested in 1817, it was a triumph of observation and of descriptive language, with a little art thrown in. Luke Howard had not remembered much Latin from that Quaker school in Burford, but it was he who gave us the Latinate cloud classifications we still use today: cirrus (fibrous);stratus (layered); cumulus (heaped); and nimbus (producing lightning). Along with, of course, their various compounds, as in the cumulonimbus clouds that still send Midwesterners into their cellars. As an observer (not as a physicist), Luke Howard got the details wrong. Poetically, he has been triumphant. ©.

[Stanley]

ONWARD AND UPWARD AT UPPINGHAM

I don’t want stars or rockets; I want every boy to have a chance of showing his little light to help the world. Edward Thring, Headmaster of Uppingham School.

To be fair to Thring, he would also advocate for girls’ education, so it’s best to get rid of the gendered language and say that, if you want to be a good teacher, you start with the student, the pupil, and not the curriculum. That perspective led Thring into many educational reforms, not least, from the 1850s, using the vernacular (in his case, English) to teach the mysteries and powers of grammar. Latin and Greek came later, as did all the other curricular impedimenta (mathematics, the sciences, other modern languages) that good teachers ought still to have in mind, for there was still a scale of values in education. Thring, whose writings overflowed with aphorisms and similes, accepted that bread was more important than verse. But that did not make the baker superior to the poet. The child was at the center of the enterprise, and “it is impossible to overate the importance of giving a child confidence.” In his most influential book, Theory and Practice of Teaching (1883 and many subsequent editions, including in the USA) he put it this way. Children haven’t got wings, so you start with legs in hopes that, one day, each might take flight. All this would seem to make Thring a radical, a rebel. He began conventionally, the son of a vicar who was also a country squire. Edward Thring was born on November 29, 1821, in rural Somerset. After some fairly brutal education in a private grammar school, he went off to Eton. His success there is implied in a tutor’s comment that he was “King of Boys”, a star in everything he tried. His record at Cambridge was as good. But then he went on to a cure of souls in Gloucester and a spell of teaching non-stars at a “national” school. Here the old ways didn’t work, and by the time he took over at Uppingham, in 1853, he was ready to make big changes. Uppingham was then a decaying local grammar school. By the time of his death, in 1887, Uppingham was a thriving “public” school and Thring was recognized internationally as a leading educational reformer. He did not democratize Uppingham. He was too much into “virtue” for that, but he did broaden the curriculum in order better to seek out each boy’s genius. Organized sports became part the “machinery” of education. But music too. Here his German-born wife, Marie Louise Koch, helped, and she also encouraged recruitment of German faculty to teach in other disciplines. The Thrings preferred married schoolmasters, the best of them running their ‘houses’ like families wherein new boys might feel “at home.” It was a successful experiment, but not too successful, for Edward Thring thought that 300 students were more than enough. He needed to know them all, for each pupil, individually, was the very matter of education. ©

[Stanley]

ZANJ

God is great, God is great, there is no God but God, and God is great; there is no arbitration except by God. Battle slogan of Ibn Ali Muhammed, leader of the Zanj Rebellion, 869CE.

The Zanj Rebellion was probably the largest, longest, and most successful slave rebellion in modern history. It began in 869 and its ‘official’ end came on November 30, 883, when Ibn Ali Muhammed’s head was exhibited in a great victory parade in Baghdad. At its height, in the mid 870s, the Zanj rebels controlled the swamplands and waterways around and to the south of Basra, had taken Basra itself and raised their own capital to the southwards. The Zanj collected taxes, printed their own currency, and attempted to systematize their justice system in line with Ibn Ali Muhammed’s idea that only God could arbitrate. This notion proved particularly attractive to the enslaved men who formed the bulk of the Zanj armies, and in one of the more dramatic early scenes of the rebellion masters had indeed been called to account, prostrated on the ground before their slaves, and subjected to 500 lashes each. “Zanj” itself was a word already in general use to describe the peoples of east Africa, the main source of the Arab slave trade. But the Zanj was not a rebellion against slavery as such. In their successful battles, the Zanj took slaves, and Ibn Ali Muhammed, who claimed descent from the Prophet, regarded slavery as justified by holy writ. On the other hand, “race” was certainly part of it. Most of the Zanj were indeed black east Africans, and their savagery in the wars became part of Arab folk lore. Ibn Ali Muhammed found most of his recruits, and a flashpoint for the rebellion, in the way slavery had evolved in the Basra marshlands. In the Baghdad Caliphate generally, slavery had been an urban institution, and some slaves (male and female) had achieved high status as merchants’ clerks, bodyguards, soldiers, and concubines. Some even won their way to freedom. But the promise of greater wealth that might come from draining the swamps, using enslaved labor, had produced a particularly bloody labor system. Brutal work, under dreadful conditions, seemed to require an especially brutal management. Ibn Ali Muhammed’s message that only God could decide causes and dispense justice proved liberating for an already converted enslaved population; and that staged morality play, the mass whipping of the masters, took place in the swamps. Probably, then, we should not be surprised, though we must be horrified, by the brutalities of the Zanj Rebellion, brutalities inflicted by both sides. The Zanj’s conquest of Basra itself was particularly bloody. But had the Zanj lost their fate might have been worse. At this distance, one moral to be drawn from the Zanj Rebellion is to keep religion and “race” at bay and certainly to keep both out of politics and warfare. ©

[Stanley]

THE PUDDING LADY

Every good cook or housekeeper is, in these days, a good patriot. By the wise choice of food and care in its preparation, she may do her part in utilizing to the uttermost the national resources. Florence Petty, The Pudding Lady’s Recipe Book, 1917.

In World War II, food rationing came in almost immediately (in early 1940), and it was ‘democratized.’ It quickly became the butt of national humor, and still is, even though some say that, under rationing, the British were better-nourished than ever before. . And before the war began, she was ready for the task. Florence PettyBritain, an island nation, was self-sufficient in only a few food items, dependent upon seaborne trade for the rest. So it comes as a mild surprise to learn that, in the very similar crisis of the First World War, which began in 1914, compulsory rationing did not come in until 1918, and then only piecemeal. But the necessity of restraint was obvious, and Florence Petty was one of necessity’s chief evangelists, the “Pudding Lady,” was born to the far north, in Forfarshire, Scotland, on December 1, 1870. Unmarried, she moved south circa 1900 to take up lodgings with an elder sister, a nurse, did some gardening, and became involved in charity work amongst the London poor. Florence was not really a ‘lady bountiful;’ her father was only a timber merchant’s clerk, but soon after her arrival in London she began to work with some women of that rarer breed in ‘The St. Pancras School for Mothers,’ an organization devoted to helping poor women cope better with poverty through better hygiene and improved diets. Visiting the poor in situ convinced her that more was needed than advice. Demonstrating the arts of poverty in poor homes required understanding, empathy, and a practical sense of how a poor woman could actually cook good food at home in the slums of London’s near north side. Florence Petty taught domestic science using the laboratory equipment of the poor household. And she wrote about it. She became known as the ‘pudding lady’ because, for sweets, she recommended suet puddings, suitably cheap, but her real line was in seasonal vegetables, the cheapest of meats, and not least economies in energy. Good food fueled the body, but preparing it required real fuel, costly stuff, so Florence recommended bringing foodstuffs to the boiling point, then putting them in an insulated “haybox” so they could, so to speak, stew in their own juice. Under the patronage of the bountiful Lady Meyer, Florence wrote, and traveled up and down the country (as far as Forfarshire!) to spread the message in person. In 1914 the war found Florence ready to continue, and now for patriotism as well as prudence. She continued after the war, becoming one the BBC’s first foodies in 1922, writing for newspapers and, yes, continuing to demonstrate her practical art of domestic science to those who, she thought, most needed it. ©.

[Stanley]

MS ROCHE



My hobby is humanity. Josephine Aspinwall Roche.

The Ludlow Massacre took place in the southern Colorado coal fields in April 1914. Oppressed by low wages (piecework), unsafe mining practices, and (in their camps) epidemic disease, the miners went on strike. It was a violent affair, a war, first between the miners and company guards. Anxious to support the companies (the leading owner was John D. Rockefeller), the state governor called in the National Guard (then called the “Colorado Rangers”) who joined with company guards to encircle the miners’ camp at Ludlow and install a machine gun in a commanding position. But fire was used, too, for Ludlow was a tent city. Thirteen of the dead were women and children, all of them by fire. The surnames of the victims suggest something of a culture war: Costa, Pedregone, Valdez, Petrucci, Rubino, Tikas. In the face of the evidence, the leaders of the Rangers received awards for bravery, and as a warning to others dead bodies were left exposed for days. But some were horrified, including Josephine Aspinwall Roche, the daughter of the President of one of the smaller mining companies. Born in Nebraska on December 2, 1886, she’d gone east to college (Vassar), majored in economics and the classics. She followed that with a Masters in social work at Columbia (1910) and some field work amongst the urban poor of New York City and Baltimore. Meanwhile, her banker father had moved to Denver and had invested in the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company. Josephine stayed out east until 1912, when she became Denver’s first policewoman, and a very unpopular one because of her crusade against prostitution. While her father supported the bloody suppression of the strike, and the miners’ union, Josephine took a different view. When she inherited his mining stock in 1927, she set a different course for the company’s coal mines. She recognized the United Mine Workers union, raised wages to the unheard of $7 per hour, introduced profit-sharing, and set about investing in welfare projects. With the coming of the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal, Josephine Roche capitalized on her old New York connections—notably, with Frances Perkins—to take agency posts in the new administration. There she helped to draft the legislation which birthed social security and set her sights on making health care a matter of right for the citizen and a matter of state for the government. And, withal, she maintained her close connections with the United Mine Workers, sometimes in an official capacity. Recently, Democratic administrations in Colorado have officially recognized her contribution to the state’s history of progressive reform. Along there has been an official ‘reconsideration’ of the causes and consequences of the Ludlow Massacre. ©.

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OEKOLOGY

As theology is the science of religious life, and biology the science of [physical] life … so let oekologie be henceforth the science of [our] normal lives … the worthiest of all the applied sciences, which teaches the principles on which to found a healthy … and happy life. Ellen Swallow Richards, 1892.

Ellen Swallow Richards has been remembered for many things, but in most of them she was a pioneer, the first woman to do this, that, and the other. She was born Ellen Henrietta Swallow on her family’s farm near Dunstable, MA, on December 3, 1842. Her moderately prosperous parents believed in educating all their children, girls included. They particularly encouraged Ellen’s interest in the workings of nature, on and around their farm. Then they sent Ellen to the Westfield Academy where she excelled in classical Greek, still thought by many to be beyond the capacities of the female mind. After Westfield, Ellen earned enough money as schoolteacher (in subjects around the curriculum) to enroll at Vassar, aged 26; granted advanced credit she graduated in just over a year. Then it was on to MIT as its first woman student. Despite MIT’s grudging admission decision (she, as a “she,” was to be an exception, not a precedent), it was an association that continued for the rest of her life. Among other firsts, she was the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry (a bachelor’s only, for MIT would not go so far as to award advanced degrees to a female). Ellen followed that up in 1875 by marrying Robert Hallowell Richards, MIT professor (of mining engineering). He was a good deal younger than she, and would become a distinguished metallurgist, MIT’s chair of mining engineering. Ellen helped him along by serving at MIT as his ‘volunteer’ tutor and lab instructor. Her skills and indomitable energy soon made that designation an absurd one, and from 1884 she held a variety of ‘official’ positions in MIT’s experimental laboratories. Already she’d hit upon her specialty, which today we’d call environmental chemistry, but it was as a scientist of sanitation that she made most of her many marks. Richards was particularly interested in the home, not only as the woman’s realm but also the natural environment of human beings, men, women and children. She called her interdisciplinary approach euthenia, a Greek coinage meaning ‘to be in a flourishing state.’ That didn’t stick for several reasons, so today Ellen Swallow Richards is celebrated as a founding mother of home economics, nutritional chemistry, public health, child studies, and of ecology which she (Greek scholar that she was) insisted on spelling as Oekology. We, less insistent on proper forms, call it ‘ecology.’ Richards got her MIT doctorate, honoris causa, in 1910. She died the next year. ©

[Stanley]

HEROES

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841).

Thomas Carlyle did not necessarily love heroes. He was too Scottish for that, certainly too insistent on taking an accurate measure of the men who qualified. Born in Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire on December 4, 1795, he attended Edinburgh University with the apparent aim of becoming a Presbyterian but got sidetracked into school teaching, then philosophy and a life in humane letters. Carlyle stuck it out in Dumfriesshire for some time, wrote enough to become famous himself, and then in 1834 moved to London where, for the next five decades he held court as Britain’s greatest living mind. But he was still in Scotland in 1832 when he met, played host to, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was not yet America’s greatest living mind, but he’d certainly discovered ambition, had quit the ministry, and was on his way to making himself outrageous, or at least the scourge of comfort and conformity. Emerson wanted to meet Carlyle, and went to some trouble to arrange the meeting, including a long train trip and then (the last 18 miles) by a one-horse gig. Something clicked almost immediately, for soon after Ralph’s arrival Carlyle suggested that he send the gig away and stay a while. There’s some evidence that each of them thought the other talked too much, and this did cause fleeting tensions in their first and then two subsequent meetings (in London, in 1848 and then 1872). But they were of the same liver, convinced that the human world was too full of sheep. So it’s interesting that Emerson’s most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” also appeared in 1841, and was also all about heroes and the heroic. Both men entertained with words, enjoyed using words to shock and to amuse as well as to instruct. In 1832, Emerson carried with him Carlyle’s Sartor Resortus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh (1831) and doubtless enjoyed Carlyle’s extended joke (part of it was a satire on Goethe’s life of Young Werther, in Swiftian style) and its pun (Teufelsdröckh = “devil’s dung”). Emerson’s heroes, however, rose up out of a democratic mix (“Self-Reliance” was first addressed to a workingmen’s meeting). He could not like some of Carlyle’s great men, and he couldn’t bear with Carlyle’s sympathies for slaveowners. But the friendship was a lasting one, partly entrepreneurial. Emerson helped Carlyle find an American publisher. So it was appropriate that when news of Carlyle’s death hit American shores, Scribner’s Monthly immediately published a sort of intellectual obituary by Emerson. But in 1881 Emerson’s mind was wandering. So, the magazine published his entirely affectionate remembrance, “Carlyle in 1848,” an 1857 recollection of the Sage of Concord’s second visit to the Sage of Chelsea. It’s available online, and is a good read if you would know what these singular heroes had in common. ©

[Stanley]

SEA NYMPH

That the stories have the sanction of Agassiz is warrant of their scientific accuracy, while the feminine grace with which they are told is a science to be learned of no professor. From a book review in The Atlantic Monthly, December 1859.

This entirely affectionate review of A First Lesson in Natural History doesn’t address the question of the author’s name, given on the title page as “ACTAEA.” The reviewer knew that the author was a “she”, but ‘Actaea’ itself is in the feminine gender, the scientific name of a plant family, prettily blossomed and plentiful along New England shores. The Atlantic, founded in 1857 by James Russell Lowell, had just been purchased by Ticknor & Fields, publishers, and Ticknor & Fields knew just about everybody in the intellectual circle that took in Boston and Cambridge, and their book review editor, E. L. Underwood, was in on the ‘secret’ that the author of A First Lesson was the wife of Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz, Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz. So why did she publish under a pen name? From its inception the magazine published female authors, not least Harriet Beecher Stowe, and under their own names. And Elizabeth Cabot Aggasiz was no shrinking violet. Born into an eminent family on December 5, 1822, she and her sister Mary moved easily in elite society, particularly around Harvard. She’d learned something of feminism from her tutor, Elizabeth Peabody, and from Lydia Maria Child, a published author. Elizabeth Cary’s sister, Mary, wed Harvard’s professor of Greek in 1846, and that’s how Elizabeth met Louis Aggasiz (1807-1873) when the famous Swiss geologist turned up at Harvard. When Louis’s first wife died, he became Cambridge’s most eligible widower. They married in April 1850, and Elizabeth took up as stepmother to Louis’s adult children and general manager of the household and of Louis’s scientific explorations. One guess is that she published as ACTAEA in 1859 because women were not thought capable of “science.” If that was so, she soon lost her modesty and went on to publish, in her own name, with her husband, her stepson Alexander Aggasiz, and in her own right as a scientist and traveler. After Louis’s death in 1873, she went on to publish her still-useful two volume Louis Aggasiz: His Life and Letters (1885). Even before that, she became (in 1879) one of the founders of the so-called “Harvard Annex.” In due course this became Radcliffe College, and since it offered nearly a full range of majors was in itself a significant broadening of female higher education. She was one of Radcliffe’s most effective fundraisers. Along the way, in 1869, Elizabeth Aggasiz became one of the first three women elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society. Perhaps Elizabeth Aggasiz chose to write as ACTAEA in 1859 because she liked the blossoms. Or, even better, the first Actaea was a sea nymph, most favored daughter of Nereus, the Old Man of the Sea, . ©

[Stanley]

BRUBECK

I’m beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20. Dave Brubeck, 2002.
Brubeck said this when he was 82, and since I have now reached that age myself, I think I know what he meant. But he was mistaken about himself, for at age 20 he still had a lot of understanding ahead of him. Had he stopped at 20, he might never have become a leading jazz musician. After all, Dave Brubeck had been born in rural Amador County, California, on December 6, 1920, where his father ranched several thousand acres (and owned a 1,200 acre ranch). Aiming to improve on his dad’s record, Dave entered college intending to major in veterinary science. But he didn’t prosper in vet school and instead fell back on his mother’s stock in trade, music, graduating in 1942. Brubeck wasn’t really great at that, either, not yet, and it was wartime. Soon, draftee Brubeck found himself in Europe in George Patton’s Third Army where his musical talents, such as they were, kept him away from the frontlines, playing much the same stuff he’d done as a teen performer in and around Amador County. Some of it was jazzy and, since he couldn’t yet read music, most of it was improvisational. Come the peace Brubeck decided to improve on that by pursuing graduate study in music composition. There, a professor urged Brubeck to make jazz part of his composition program. And it was as a jazz pianist, composer, and improvisationist that Brubeck launched himself on the southern California music market as the leader-pianist of small combos, first an octet, then more lastingly as The Dave Brubeck Quartet. It had a shifting membership, but its greatest successes came circa 1955-1965 with Paul Desmond (sazaphone), Joe Morello (drums), and several bassists, more or less in succession, but most notoriously (1958-1961) Eugene Wright. Wright was black, which caused some difficulties when the quartet toured the southern states, but Brubeck had already made clear his commitment to racial equality and the quartet rode along on a wave of popularity. And Brubeck remembered his compositional training. He composed for (and/or performed with) leading classical orchestras, made the cover of Time magazine in 1954, and made “jazz” (cool jazz, cerebral jazz) quite acceptable to college students of my generation. I still have some Brubeck albums from the period, not least his jazz gloss on Bach’s Brandenberg concertos. Dave Brubeck went on experimenting almost to his death in 2012. I remember attending a Brubeck Quartet concert, out of doors, at the Des Moines Art Center in the summer of 1961, But the Artificial Intelligence on board my computer tells me it never happened. I think today’s “AI” needs a little growth in self-understanding, just as Brubeck did when he was fresh off the ranch and studying large-animal medicine. . ©

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TEMPEST

The night of July 9th was marked by one of the major eruptions of Pelée, and we had the good fortune to be in St. Pierre that day . . . Tempest Anderson and John Flett, Report on the Eruptions of the Soufrière . . . and Montagne Pelée, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1903).

Tempest Anderson, born in the city of York on December 7, 1846, owed his baptismal name to his father’s connections with the storied Tempest family, branches of which had taken root in Yorkshire and County Durham in the 11th century. They’d come over with William the Conqueror in 1066, and they’d made the most of that circumstance. One estate, at Broughton Hall, Yorkshire, is still owned by a Tempest, nine centuries on, its 3000 acres devoted to “rewilding” the countryside and its manor house a center for meditation and spiritual regeneration. The Andersons, father and son, benefited from the Tempest connection. Both would, for instance, serve as High Sheriff of the West Riding, a post held by Tempests, on and off, from the 13th century. But the Andersons had resources of their own. Tempest’s father was a successful medical doctor, with a fashionable home address (and clinic) at 23 Stonegate, and after medical training Tempest continued there as a pioneer ophthalmologist, back in the days when eye surgery was no joke. He acquired several other Stonegate properties, hard by York Cathedral, and became a generous benefactor of many worthy causes. His heritage lingers on in the HQ of the York Medical Society (at 23 Stonegate) and the Tempest Anderson Hall. Another measure of his local eminence is that he had the first telephone in York. If you needed medical care, you asked the operator to connect you with “York 1.” Chances were good that he would make a house call, early on by horse and buggy and then, towards the end of his life, by bicycle—for he was as fit as the proverbial fiddle. He owed his fitness to the hobby for which, today, he remains famous, as an amateur volcanologist. He came into it gradually, as an extension of his love for mountain climbing. In 1885, aged 43, he extended his mountain holidays south from Switzerland to Etna and Stromboli, still active volcanoes, and Vesuvius, then napping. He took pictures and filed reports; and, once bitten, he couldn’t stop. Name an active volcanic region, and Dr. Tempest Anderson went there, camera equipment in tow, including Hawaii, Alaska, Africa, and the East and West Indies. The hobbyist became an expert. His reports, historical and observational, are marvels, and include “live” photographs of pyroclastic flows. They won him election to the Royal Society, an honorary doctorate, and a reputation for courage. Fittingly, Dr. Tempest Anderson died in 1913 while returning from a voyage during which he’d observed active volcanoes in the Philippines, Sumatra, and Java. His reports on these were published posthumously. Unmarried, he left no heirs but many beneficiaries. ©

[Stanley]

ROBINSON

I like to think of mathematicians as forming a nation of our own without distinctions of geographical origin, race, creed, sex, age, or even time , , , all dedicated to the most beautiful of the arts and sciences. Julia Robinson.

To which it must be added that mathematicians also speak in their own, distinctive language, impenetrable to me since my freshman year in college. Dr. Robinson’s career in mathematics was fascinating in several more understandable respects. Julia Robinson was born Julia Bowman in St Louis, Missouri, on December 8, 1919. Her childhood was marred by her mother’s death and then, after her father remarried, by his bankruptcy and suicide. Then came her long isolation brought on by serious illnesses (scarlet and then rheumatic fever) during which she lived alone, under a nurse’s care. Despite all that, possibly because of it, Julia Robinson became a leading mathematician, professor at California-Berkeley, the first female president of the American Mathematical Society, and one of the four mathematicians principally associated with the solution of what’s known as ‘Hilbert’s Tenth Problem.’ (There were 23 Hilbert problems in all, laid down in 1900 by the German mathematician David Hilbert. As at present, in 2025, only eight have been solved. Solutions have been suggested for another ten, but are not yet universally accepted. Five remain unsolved. So hers was a distinctive achievement. For, after all, she was the first woman president of the American Mathematical Society, elected in 1983, and it was an election she at first declined because she feared that she had been elected simply because she was a woman. So while she wanted to think her profession was one that did not discriminate by sex, she’d developed a doubt or two on that issue. And then there was that illness. She returned to formal schooling several years behind her age cohort, and then, at the University of California-San Diego chose a major known for its scarcity of women. She performed brilliantly, moved on to Berkeley for her baccalaureate (1940) where she earned her PhD in 1948. Even then her gender proved a bar, not least because she had married one of her professors. That disqualified her from advancing within the department until her husband’s retirement and her being elected to the National Academy of Sciences. But her work on Hilbert’s Tenth Problem, in which she collaborated with friends on another campus, in the RAND corporation, and, finally, with a young Russian genius convinced proved that a woman could, after all, tackle advanced problems in number theory. It’s interesting that her elder sister, Constance Bowman Reid, became a famous writer on mathematics, one of the first women to be a regular contributor to leading science journals. During and after her AMS presidency, Julia Robinson worked to increase the female population of the mathematics nation. ©.

[Stanley]

MRS ATTAWAY

These women came with Bibles in their hands, and went to a Tabe; the Lace-woman took her place at the upper end [and] began with making a speech to this purpose, That now those dayes were come . . . That God would poure of his Spirit upon the handmaidens, and they should prophecy. Thomas Edwards, Gangræna (3 vols., 1646), I, p. 85.

The lacemaker in question was a Mrs. Attaway, prophesying (with a “Sister”) on December 9, 1645, to a public gathering out of doors in the City of London. Edwards went on to summarize several of Mrs. Attaway’s prophecies. Inter alia, she preached universal salvation, the mortality of the soul, the legitimacy of divorce, the wrongness of infant baptism, and the immanence of the Second Coming of Christ. And, as one could tell from Edwards’s short title, Gangræna, all of this was horridly, rottenly heretical. I read Gangræna, all three volumes of it, in the 1980s while searching out information on Puritan radicalism during the English Civil Wars. But how seriously can we take information provided by a Puritan conservative like Thomas Edwards? Edwards was a ‘Puritan,’ no doubt about it, and one who’d suffered for his opposition to King Charles I and the bishops of the established church. But from his point of view everything had gone wrong. Once battle had been joined between King and Parliament, England exploded with radical heresies. Edwards, who was learning to call himself a Presbyterian, was horrified by “independent” congregations that recognized no external authority and spawned individual prophesiers like “Mrs. Attaway”. So Gangræna is a catalogue of horrors, and not all of them are direct reports from Edwards himself. Most of his reports on Mrs. Attaway came from friends: ‘gentlemen’ from the Inns of Court. If Edwards heard her speak, he doesn’t say so. It’s all hearsay. Indeed, it’s not entirely certain that Mrs. Attaway even existed. She appears in documents dating from 1645 and 1646, and then she disappears. But we can infer some things about her, and her ilk, that help us to understand the ways in which the Civil Wars ‘turned the world upside down.’ Mrs. Attaway was a skilled woman, poor but literate. She quoted from the Bible (and from John Milton). And she used her own native wit to justify her idea of universal salvation. Logically, it did God a disservice to argue that the all-good Creator would turn around and damn His own creatures to eternal punishment. Having worked out a truth for herself, Mrs. Attaway liberated herself from her husband (who was away in the Parliamentary army) and took up with another man. Not that she needed a man. She—if she existed—was freed by the Spirit to preach her own truths. If she existed, she was proof positive that the Civil Wars had indeed upset the world’s settled ways. And if Mrs. Attaway did not exist, Thomas Edwards could easily make her up. ©

[Stanley]

NOBELS

All of my remaining realisable assets are to be disbursed as follows: the capital, converted to safe securities by my executors, is to constitute a fund, the interest on which is to be distributed annually as prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The interest is to be divided into five equal parts and distributed as follows: one part to the person who made the most important discovery or invention in the field of physics; one part to the person who made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who, in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an ideal direction; and one part to the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses. The prizes for physics and chemistry are to be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiological or medical achievements by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm; and that for champions of peace by a committee of five persons to be selected by the Norwegian Storting. It is my express wish that when awarding the prizes, no consideration be given to nationality, but that the prize be awarded to the worthiest person, whether or not they are Scandinavian. Alfred Nobel, November, 1895.

Alfred Nobel had made at least five wills, but this one was his last. He died on December 10, 1896, and the first five “Nobels” were awarded exactly five years later, on December 10, 1901. The only awardee we are likely to remember today was Wilhelm Röntgen, the German inventor of the x-ray. The literature award (to the French poet Sully Prudhomme) was controversial at the time. But he was adjudged sufficiently ‘idealistic’, by which we may conclude the Alfred Nobel did not approve of what was happening to literature in his time and place, e.g. the gloomily realistic Scandinavian Ibsen. But on the whole the Nobels have survived quite well, and for that we must thank several people. His first trustees made the sensible decision to stay out of the business of prize selection and concentrate on the Nobel fund. They and their successors have done well enough to make the Nobel Foundation rich beyond Alfred’s imaginings, today something in advance of $600 million, enough to generate substantial prize moneys—and to guarantee the independence of the selectors, whether they be Swedish (Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, and Literature) or Norwegian (Peace). And we must also thank Alfred’s brothers Robert and Ludwig. Aware of Alfred’s wishes, they provided ready help in converting his partnerships into a more liquid form: especially from Asian oil into a more marketable portfolio of western stocks and bonds. And there the Nobel money remains, helped latterly by grants of tax-free status from the governments of Sweden and the USA. Then in 1968 the Swedish State Bank came along with the suggestion of a “Nobel” in economics. The trustees might have turned down the offer (several have been refused), but in this case the Sveriges Riksbank came up with sufficient capital to support the prize mechanism—not to mention financing the prize itself. So the whole “Nobel” thing has, from the first, been good business. And surely Alfred Nobel would have approved of that. Even though he fancied “idealistic” literature, he had a good nose for business. ©

[Stanley]

KOCH

The rapid growth of the Continental capitals, the movements of princely noodles and fat, vulgar duchesses, and the progress or receding of sundry royal gouts are given to the wings of lightening; a lumbering mail coach is swift enough for the news of one of the great scientific discoveries of the age. Similarly, the gifted gentlemen who daily sift out the for the American public the pith and kernel of the Old World’s news leave Dr KOCH and his bacilli to chance it in the ocean mails, while they challenge the admiration of every gambler and jockey in this Republic by the fullness and accuracy of their cable reports of horse races. Robert Koch, letter to the New York Times, May, 1882.

Give this paragraph a second read and you will see how mordantly funny Koch could be, even though he was both German and a scientist. Yet that age also holds up a mirror to our time, for the nouveaux riches of the late 19th century mesmerized the world with their obscenely lavish displays, their luxury sporting events, their speculations, and their scandals. Their heedless pursuit of money and power and publicity relegated news of real substance to the margins. In March 1882, Robert Koch had announced to the world his discovery of the tuberculosis bacterium. Given the number of tuberculosis victims (and the fame of many of them), the world should have stood back in awe. Instead it went on entertaining itself with princely scandals, stock market fevers, and ‘new’ sports. Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch was born in Lower Saxony, Germany, on December 11, 1846, He came of age while the German states were jockeying for supremacy but also establishing Germany’s educational leadership. A brilliant youth, he rode the wave’s crest to graduate maxima cum laude at Göttingen in 1866. Inspired by the work of Pasteur in France and his own tutors at Göttingen, and taking a position in the Prussian civil service, his first major discovery was of the life cycle of the Bacillus anthracis and thus of the dread disease Anthrax. Already organized on the merit system, the Prussian civil service was quick to promote him to the Imperial Health Office, where on March 24, 1882 he announced his discovery of the “etiology” of the bacillus that caused tuberculosis, a universal killer but especially lethal amongst the poor (including, of course, poor poets and poor painters). Along with these went other discoveries, notably of laboratory equipment suitable to the study of microorganisms, better microscopes, Petri dishes, and even cameras. None of this made him wealthy (the patents belonged to the Prussian agencies for which he worked), and he did make some mistakes, notably about the proper treatment of tuberculosis. He went on to work on tropical diseases for the expanding German empire (now itself dominated by Prussia), and made further landmark discoveries. In the 1890s other scientific communities, notably in Britain, recognized his brilliance, but the world at large didn’t get around to it until, in 1905, he was accorded the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine. But if money is our only measure of merit, he died without much of that; and he never did make the gossip columns. ©.

[Stanley]

SUN QUEEN

It is the things supposed to be impossible that interest me. I like to do things they say cannot be done. Mária Telkes, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, 1942.

Two years ago, in 2023, PBS did a documentary, “The Marvelously Inventive Life of Mária Telkes.” And hers, which began in Budapest on December 12, 1900, was an inventive life. During WWII, working on contract with the US Defense Department, she devised a life-saving kit for those lost at sea, a “solar still” that used the sun’s energy to convert sea water to fresh. Well, fresh enough to drink: and it is still standard issue in the US military. For this, someone dubbed her ‘The Sun Queen,’ which was appropriate, for Mária Telkes had been fascinated by the idea of solar energy since her PhD project (completed 1924) at the University of Budapest. Helped by a cousin, who was the Hungarian Consul in Cleveland, she emigrated to the USA in 1925. Working at the Cleveland Clinic, she devised a way to map the brain’s energy outputs ( ‘brain waves’), the basic principles of which are still used today. She then worked for Westinghouse, doing research on how well various metals and alloys work in transferring and/or storing energy, and became an American citizen in 1937. Along with that came a transfer to MIT where the ‘Sun Queen’ got involved in a well-funded project on using solar energy to heat, or perhaps even to cool, domestic housing. The project was funded by two Boston Brahmins (Godfrey Cabot, a petrochemical millionaire, and Amelia Peabody, sculptor and heiress), with whom Telkes ‘clicked.’ Perhaps they found her exotic mix attractive. Telkes’s Jewish grandfather had ‘Magyarized’ the family in the previous generation, and Maria herself had developed an all-embracing Unitarianism. No doubt they also liked her idealistic approach to science. Certainly that ‘can do anything’ attitude appealed to Vannevar Bush, appointed by FDR to head the new, interagency Office of Scientific Research and Development, who immediately appointed Dr. Telkes as one of his advisors (even before her “solar still”). It appealed less to Telkes’s MIT boss, who was more interested in immediate, practicable, and negotiable developments. While she remained at MIT Telkes did create two solar houses, but was forced out in 1953. She continued to work on the practical flaws in her earlier designs, for several years at NYU, then the University of Delaware, and then (again) for the US government. It was under the auspices of President Carter that she designed the “Carlisle House”, a fully solar powered domicile. Carter also liked Telkes’s $4 “solar stove”, designed to help the very poor (in Asia, Africa, and America) negotiate the energy demands of our time. In the 1990s Mária Telkes went back to Budapest, where she died in 1994. Had she waited until today she might have been seen as an undesirable immigrant by Viktor Orban’s true Magyars. ©.

[Stanley]

THE POPE

If you are an art historian, it is essential to free yourself from the fetters of your profession. The Sistine Ceiling is not more the property of art historians than the Ninth Symphony is the property of musicologists. John Pope-Hennessy, “Storm Over the Sistine Ceiling,” New York Review of Books, October 6, 1987.

In 1987 the restoration (or renovation) of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling frescoes was well underway, nearly finished. It had raised a good deal of controversy, not least about whether—or not—Michelangelo’s modifications of the originals should (or should not) be preserved. The issue is, in large part, technical and scholarly, and beyond my comprehension. And much of Pope-Hennessy’s long essay is, indeed, technical and scholarly. But what is most striking about his defense of the Vatican’s restorers is the magisterial and authoritative tone of Pope-Hennessy’s dismissal of all the carpers and complainers. That’s not too surprising, for already (during his tenures at the Victoria & Albert and then the British Library, 1967-1976), Sir John had become known as “the Pope.” He knew his stuff (art history) so very well that he expected his ex cathedra dictates to be followed as if they were holy writ. His manner changed not a whit when he moved to New York to take over the curatorship of European Art at the Metropolitan Museum. Not everyone liked his manner, but one could say that he’d been born to it. John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy was born in fashionable Belgravia, London, on December 13, 1913, his father a major-general and his mother the redoubtable Una (Birch) Pope-Hennessy whom John and his younger brother James called “Mummy Tiger.” From Una, both boys learned to be themselves. Some would say, later, that she also wanted both to be homosexuals. If that’s true she was successful, They also both learned how to be fine writers, like their mother, but it was John who inherited her typewriter and her respect for scholarship. At Oxford, his tastes turned towards art history, sharpened by a post-graduation grand tour of Europe when he studied the great works of the Renaissance one by one, and on his own. He would later think that was the essence of any great museum, or collection. You went in to a Pope-Hennessy collection to wander at will, and to learn on your own, aided by informative labels of course but the objects were the thing. Pope-Hennessy disdained—indeed ridiculed—the move towards seeing museums as places of entertainment—as the Victoria & Albert became after he was replaced there by Roy Strong. Like the Sistine Ceiling, they were there for your wonder, your self-education if you persisted. He was not the last of his breed. Thank goodness, St. Louis’s best museums maintain that ethos. His was a conservative, self-consciously aristocratic view. It works well if one is prepared to educate oneself. If one seeks entertainment, it’s best to go elsewhere. ©