The usual suspects

Artist's rendition of events

About 50 or so of Pittsburgh’s leading capitalists – bankers, businessmen, past and future members of Congress – including such notables as Henry Frick, Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, were in need of recreation.  They liked their privacy, so they gladly signed up when Frick talked them into forming the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club in the mountains about fifty miles east of Pittsburgh.

The location featured a scenic reservoir, a dilapidated dam and plenty of room to build cottages on the shore or back in the surrounding woods. A fish trap on the spillway to keep the lake from losing stock improved the sport and it was no problem lowering and widening the top of the dam to accommodate a road.  It was the perfect retreat for a weary millionaire.

Everything was peachy until the last day of May in 1889.  That was the day after an unusually heavy rainstorm had arrived from the midwest and it rained all night.  The manager of the club awoke to find the reservoir swollen, the water nearly cresting the dam.  He quickly collected a crew to clear the now-broken fish trap – full of debris – from the spillway and another group to dig a new spillway at the other end of the dam.  He also sent a messenger to the nearest telegraph office to alert officials in the town below the dam.

Later, when all his efforts proved useless, he sent someone again to the telegraph office to dictate an even more urgent message to the town.  But in both cases, those on the receiving end decided it was another false alarm – there was often worry about the dam, but nothing had ever happened.

Photo taken a day later

At 3:10 in the afternoon, the dam broke.  20 million gallons of water from Lake Conemaugh Reservoir drained in 40 minutes and coursed down the Little Conemaugh River headed for the city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

On the way it destroyed a village of some 30 houses, leaving only a single rock standing. It paused at a train viaduct, took about seven minutes to destroy it and proceeded with renewed fury.

By then, the torrent was so full of debris that the water was barely visible. A witness said it looked like ‘a huge hill rolling over and over.’

A train engineer saw it coming and raced toward the town with the whistle tied down to warn residents and some were able to get to high ground.  The engineer survived after the flood picked up the locomotive and tossed it aside, but 25 passengers died.

There are more terrifying details about the Johnston Flood here, but in the end 2,209 people died, making it the worst loss of civilian life in the history of the country.  It is now third, after the Galveston Hurricane and 9/11.

An attempt to recover compensation from the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club failed, the courts deciding that the club as a whole could not be sued and the individual members not negligent.  It was, as usual, an act of God.

The Incline

But a little-known precedent from British common law began to get some attention and gradually states adopted legislation based on Rylands v. Fletcher, in which the courts had held that a non-negligent defendant could be held responsible for damage caused by unnatural use of land – it was the beginning of the field of liability law.

Johnstown has had floods since then, the most recent in 1976.  Their solution is the Incline, which hauls everybody to the top of a hill.

Larger than life

Right after Abraham Lincoln died, the planning for  his memorial began.

Photo by Raul654

But what with one thing and another – the ebb and flow of interest mostly – it wasn’t started until 1914 and took eight years to complete.

On May 30, 1922, President Warren G. Harding dedicated it on behalf of the American people and it has been one of Washington’s most beloved sites ever since.  Almost 7 million people visit every year.

Some interesting things about the memorial include the fact that its little temple is made of Yule marble, which is a Colorado marble named for mining engineer George Yule, who discovered it and realized it was one of the purest marbles in the world – it is 99.5% calcite.

Lincoln himself is made out of Georgia marble and sits on a base of Tennessee marble.

Right hand - L?

Two urban legends still persist:  the first is that the back of Lincoln’s head is a profile of Robert E. Lee, who thus is facing south.  The National Park Service swears this is not true.

But the other legend is harder to dismiss.  There  have been theories over the years that Lincoln is forming the letter A with one hand and the letter L with the other in sign language and that the gestures were made deliberately by sculptor Daniel Chester French as homage to his deaf son, or possibly in recognition of the legislation Lincoln signed during the Civil War that created Gallaudet College. One of French’s earliest commissions was the statue of Theodore Gallaudet now on the campus.

Left hand - A?

The theory was easily dismissed because the shapes created are not those found in American Sign Language, but recently experts have suggested that they do resemble the shapes used by an older form of sign language and would have been appropriate to Lincoln’s time. More about the theory here.

Lincoln was meant to be 10 feet tall, but when French saw the size of the temple, he decided that the figure should be bigger, so he increased it to 19 feet.

If Lincoln were to stand up, he would be three stories tall. That seems just right.

***

Albania became independent of the Ottoman Empire on this date in 1913, had a monarchy for a while and then disappeared behind the Iron Curtain until about 2o years ago.  It’s a small, poor country of about 3 million people and is struggling to develop a modern economy.

Eurasian lynx, photo by Bernard Landgraf

Interestingly, the fact that Albania remained undeveloped during most of the 20th century has resulted in something unusual in modern Europe.  About one-third of the country is heavily forested, much of it is mountainous, and it retains a rich ecology. There are more than 3200 species of flora – about 30% of the European total – and the mountains still harbor significant numbers of bears, wolves, wild boar and chamois.

Albania is also home to the Balkan lynx, a member of the endangered Eurasian lynx family. Let’s hope they save it.

* * *

Finally, a number of notable birthdays today, but just for the eye candy we’ll recognize Carl Fabergé, many of whose fabulous Easter eggs wound up in the West, but which have now found their way back to Russia.  The one shown was a gift from Nicholas to Alexandra in 1897 and features a perfect miniature of the coronation coach.

Untrammeled

Amelia Jenks Bloomer didn’t invent bloomers – if they’d been named for their creator, they’d be called millers.

Amelia Jenks Bloomer

But Bloomer (born this date in 1818) published a biweekly  newspaper and through it, she made famous an outfit designed by Libby Miller, cousin of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Bloomer’s newspaper – The Lily – began as a way for her to campaign for temperance, her chief interest, but it quickly expanded to include women’s suffrage issues and since she lived where she lived, when she lived, she soon became part of the suffragette inner circle.

After she met and married Dexter Bloomer in 1840, he encouraged her to write for his newspaper, the Seneca Falls (NY) County Courier.  Eventually she began to publish her own small newsletter twice a week.

Seneca Falls, of course, was the epicenter of women’s issues of all kinds.  It was there she encountered Stanton.  One day when Stanton came to visit, she was wearing a costume designed by Miller. It consisted of loose trousers gathered at the ankle and topped by a short dress and vest and was strongly reminiscent of the native costume of Middle Eastern and Asian women.

Bloomer loved it and adopted it just as enthusiastically as Stanton.  She had already advocated for less restrictive clothing for women:

The costume of women should be suited to her wants and necessities. It should conduce at once to her health, comfort, and usefulness; and, while it should not fail also to conduce to her personal adornment, it should make that end of secondary importance.

The public animosity and ridicule that wearers of ‘the bloomer suit’ were subjected to, however, was extreme and Bloomer herself gave up wearing the outfit by 1851.

But bloomers reappeared a generation later, when women adopted the ‘freedom machine’ – i.e., the bicycle.

Susan B. Anthony once said in an interview,  “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”

With the bicycle craze came the rational dress movement and with that, bloomers were back to stay.

* * *

This is also the birth date of Tony Hillerman, who not only wrote great mystery stories, but made the Southwest live and breathe for the rest of us.  Born in 1925, he grew up during the Depression, served in WWII and came home with a Silver Star and Purple Heart. He worked as a journalist for years, then went back to school at the age of 40, got a degree from the University of New Mexico and started teaching. His first book – The Blessing Way – was published when he was 45, but soon after he was writing full time, mostly about Navajo policemen Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn.  When he died, he was the 22d richest man in New Mexico, but he always said what pleased him  most was being named a Special Friend of the Dineh.

Plucked from the burning

John Wesley by Romney

There were two really important days in John Wesley’s life.  The first occurred when he was about five years old and the Wesley home caught fire. John was rescued from the burning building and ever after, he later wrote, felt that he had been saved for a special purpose, ‘a brand plucked from the burning.’

The second was on May 24, 1738.  Wesley by then was 35 years old and having a tough time. He and his brother Charles had just returned from Georgia, to which they had been invited by Gov. James Oglethorpe who asked them to take charge of the Savannah parish.

On the trip over, Wesley had been impressed by a group of Moravians on board – they had ridden out a terrible storm with great courage and much prayer.  He had apparently also been impressed by a certain Sophia Hopkey, in whose company he spent rather a lot of time until he decided to break it off.

Susanna Annesley, mother of John Wesley

Sophia wasn’t pleased – swearing that Wesley had promised to marry her, she sued him for breach of promise.  Even though she eventually married, she continued her suit against Wesley in Savannah and finally, John and Charles snuck out of town and went back to England.

The whole debacle left Wesley very depressed and one evening he wandered into a Moravian service in a hall on Adersgate Street in London.  During the service he experienced the epiphany that led him to begin his open-air preaching and organizing of the Methodist church.

So for Methodists, today is Aldersgate Day.

Here is a completely irrelevant but utterly enthralling fact about Wesley: he was the eleventh of 15 children born to Samuel Wesley and Susanna Annesley and Susanna herself was the youngest of – ready? – twenty-five!

* * *

Photo by Alberto Cabello

Today is Bob Dylan’s birthday, so let us wish Minnesota’s greatest gift to the world many happy returns. I’d post a video, but they all seem to be extremely commercial – some even have actual commercials.  This of course is indescribably ironic.  So instead, here is a picture of Dylan disguised as a senior citizen:

Read any good books lately?

Two  birthdays of note today – first, the New York Public Library is celebrating its centennial year and second, this is the birthdate of the fabulous Alicia de Larrocha.

Library under construction, 1908.

The library has an interesting genesis.  There were lots of libraries in New York City during the 19th century, but every one of them was private, subscription only.  Very good way to keep the riffraff out and everybody that wasn’t rich was riffraff.

But Boston led the way with the first public library so NYC had to keep up.  A former governor of New York and one-time presidential candidate – Samuel J. Tilden – very kindly left a two and a half million dollar bequest to the city for a public library and it only took about ten years for them to figure out where to put it.

There just happened to be a big hole in the ground at 42d street and Fifth – where a reservoir had been – which would nicely accommodate a library.  Another five years and there it was, the NYPL.

President william Taft cut the ribbon on May 23, 1911, and it wasn’t long before the reading room looked like this:

Panorama of the Reading Room, 2006, photo by Diliff.

(Click on photo to get the full effect.)

You don’t have to live in New York to use the library – their famous reference desk answers questions 24/7 (call 917-ASK-NYPL) or you can go to their website and get answers online via chat – with one proviso: they don’t do homework.

They also have a great digital library – just looking around a bit, I came across this nice Berenice Abbott photo called ‘The Blossom Restaurant’:

[Image ID: 482799]

And now for a little of the wonderful Alicia de Larrocha (1923-2009) to start the day:

Oh, rapture

If you are reading this, the world has probably not ended. (We’re likely to see that statement quite a lot today.)

End times are not going to happen until after September of 2016 – check this chart out. Now you have something real to worry about.

In the meantime, Andrew Sullivan is once again the source for a nice video – have a great day:

Two of the best

Johns Hopkins and George Peabody were both born in 1795. Both got enormously rich and both gave most of their money away.

Johns Hopkins

Peabody, in fact, has been described as the father of American philanthropy, setting an example for Carnegie and Rockefeller.  He made his money in banking and left at his death about $8 million in charitable bequests, including a fund to house the poor in London.  Also benefitting were the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, the Peabody Museum in Boston and just about anything in New England with the name Peabody on it.

Hopkins wasn’t quite as well off, but his $7 million bequest to Baltimore for a college, nursing school, medical school and orphanage went a very long way.

They were, in short, the Buffett and Gates of their time.

Hopkins was a Quaker – named, btw, for his grandfather Johns Hopkins, who had been given his mother’s maiden name as a first name – and he was born into a comfortable existence on a 500-acre farm in Maryland.  But when he was 12, his family emancipated their slaves in accordance with the policy of the Society of Friends.

Part of that policy was to free the able-bodied, but to continue to provide a home and care for the aged and infirm, who could not be expected to support themselves.

Johns Hopkins

That put a strain on the family finances, so Johns, who was the second of 11 Hopkins children, moved to Baltimore at the age of 17 to work for his uncle in the wholesale grocery business.  Fast forward  25 years: Uncle Hopkins has retired, Johns has brought in two of his brothers as partners, the business has flourished, as have his investments and Johns retires from the business.

He remains active in banking  and in the business he invested in, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Always a big supporter of the B&O, he was its third largest shareholder, just after the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore. Eventually, he was chairman of the board.

In fact, most of his estate consisted of B&O shares, which went towards the founding of one of America’s great universities.

Hopkins reportedly once said to his gardener,  ”Like the man in the parable, I have had many talents given to me and I feel they are in trust. I shall not bury them but give them to the lads who long for a wider education.”

The Peabody Institute,  incidentally, is now part of Johns Hopkins University.

* * *

Many happy returns to  Cher – here she is wearing all the hair available in the ’80s:

Just for the record

To be very clear, Dan Quayle didn’t really think Murphy Brown was an actual person.

But the media cling to their myths, so that was the impression they made every effort to give when reporting on Quayle’s speech to the Commonwealth Club in L.A. on May 19,1992.

You remember Dan Quayle, right – 41′s veep?  The guy who – in their first and only debate – brought  courteous and dignified  Lloyd Bensen to the point of spitting nails? (“I knew Jack Kennedy and Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy!”)

That Dan Quayle.  And he never suggested that Murphy Brown was a real person – he said plainly – more or less – that things had come to a pretty pass when a television program featured a character who has a child out of wedlock and plans to raise it, to be a single mother. He was talking about the L.A. riots, blaming them on America’s moral decay as exemplified by Murphy Brown’s situation, which mocked “the importance of the father” and so on.

But the story that Dan Quayle thought Murphy was a real person became the meme, no matter how often contradicted.

What’s ironic is that the speech was quite coherent, a real departure from the usual Quayle style.  This, after all, was the man who mentioned the motto of the United Negro College Fund (“A mind is a terrible thing to waste’) by saying, “You take the UNCF model that what a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”

Who once said  ”I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.” Who couldn’t spell potato. So the media clung to the image of dazed and confused.

Time then, to give him a pass on the Murphy Brown thing.  And to let him know that there are no canals on Mars, as he apparently believes, so there isn’t anything filled  with water. “If there  is water, that means there is oxygen.  If oxygen, that means we can breathe.”

* * *

Many happy returns to Nora Ephron and Peter Townsend.  It is also the anniversary of the birth of Johns Hopkins in 1795. Hopkins was yet another wonderful Quaker who gave much to this country when it was young.  So much, in fact, that he will have a blog of his own tomorrow. I’m finding out a lot about the contributions of the Quakers in building the U.S. – it seems like there’s only ever been one that went astray.

Och – sorry, Craig!

Craig Ferguson was not 51 yesterday, but 49.  Apologies for the fuzzy math…I won’t even attempt the calculation for Saturday’s anniversary of the birth in 1844 of Henri Rousseau, a man of limited opportunities but unlimited aspirations.  An employee of the Paris Municipal Toll Service, he dreamed of art, of painting, of joining the ranks of the working artists of his Montparnasse neighborhood.

Initially, very few people took him seriously – he was the ultimate outsider – but as a new generation of artists appeared, he garnered more attention. Matisse, Braque, Picasso became admirers, Brancusi wrote his epitaph.  There is a very nice little essay at the Princeton website which corrects a lot of misinformation.  And here is a good collection of his work.

His jungles, btw, were based on studies in the Botanical Gardens of Paris, and the animals were the products of taxidermy.

The Flamingoes

Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised)

Lost arts

Some time around the turn of the last century, sponge divers in the Aegean were forced to take shelter in a harbor to wait out a storm.  They did some diving to pass the time and one of them, going down almost 200 feet in his canvas suit and copper helmet, returned with a statue fragment, a bronze arm.

Antikythera Mechanism, photo courtesy of NAMA

That was the discovery of the Antikythera wreck, a 1st or 2d century ship that sank off the island of Antikythera, possibly en route to Rome with loot for Julius Caesar, much of it fine art that is now housed at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

Among those helping to sort, clean and identify the objects retrieved was archeologist Valerios Stais.  On May 17, 1902, he noticed what appeared to be a gear wheel buried in a piece of rock. Stais had just discovered the world’s first analog computer.

It is called the Antikythera Mechanism, it is thought to be from about 100 BCE, and it is usually described as a mechanism of a complexity not seen again until the 19th century, in a Swiss watch.

Reconstructed AM, photo courtesy of NAMA

Prof. Michael Edmunds, a fan of the AM, says of it: “This device is just extraordinary, the only thing of its kind. The design is beautiful, the astronomy is exactly right. The way the mechanics are designed just makes your jaw drop. Whoever has done this has done it extremely carefully … in terms of historic and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as being more valuable than than the Mona Lisa.”

For a long time no one could figure out what it was or what it was used for.  Finally, in the 1950s. science historian Derek deSolla Price studied it for a while, decided its purpose was to calculate the motion of stars and planets and published an article in Scientific American called ‘An Ancient Greek Computer.’  He published several articles on the AM and in one suggested a reconstruction.

Reconstructions were successfully constructed eventually and somel are in computer museums and one in the Children’s Museum in Manhattan.

Several institutions got together to create the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, which has confirmed the gizmo’s use as an astronomical calculator.  It probably had a few more gears, but 30 have survived and it not only tracks celestial bodies, but can be used to predict eclipses.

The AM is thought to be one of several such machines known to the Greeks, so the fact that one sank in the Aegean doesn’t explain the loss of such sophisticated technology for so many centuries.

* * *

Many happy returns to Craig Ferguson, 51, who can be very silly, but who will forever be remembered for his father’s eulogy – which unfortunately isn’t on YouTube .  Well, the drums aren’t. But here’s a nice bit with Stephen Fry: