Kim’s Ancestor?

Throughout history, there have been people, usually women, who have been famous for being famous.  Singularly lacking in personal accomplishments or achievements, their sole talent seems to be their ability to use looks to garner publicity to their own benefit, the public constantly wanting to know more about them.  An example would be just about anyone named Kardashian.

A few of the celebrities either married well or picked the right grandparents in order to inherit riches, but never actually seem to have used these advantages to build anything on their own (Think of Paris Hilton, Princess Diana, Nicole Richey, or Zsa Zsa Gabor).   In a generation or two, they are usually forgotten by everyone save for a few weird blogging historians.

I’ve written about a few of them.  There was Prinzessin zu Salm-Salm, who was a beautiful woman and a circus bareback rider, who then married a prince, traveled the world, met the crowned heads of Europe, and received an honorary rank of Captain in the Union Army from President Lincoln.  After her husband passed away….she was promptly forgotten. 

Then there was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the beautiful socialite who captivated the highest circles of Paris society…At least until John Singer Sargent painted her portrait—the one in which one shoulder strap of her gown was down, possibly indicating that she was either just taking her gown off or had just put it back on.  No one remembers her name anymore, but her likeness, the Portrait of Madame X, is on prominent display in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.  

A month ago, while writing about the curious history of lead white paint, I ran across another example of someone whom society simply could not hear enough about for a brief period, who then simply vanished.  She was famous for her beauty, then died because of it.

Maria Gunning was born in England, in 1732, and was one of six children of Irish aristocrats who lacked enough money to maintain an aristocratic lifestyle.  After the family returned to Ireland, Maria and her younger sister, Elizabeth, were encouraged by their mother to seek work as actresses in the Dublin theaters.  Being an actress was far from a respectable occupation at the time, since actresses were paid so little that they frequently supplemented their wages by being courtesans for the theater patrons.  At the time, this would have been a scandal equivalent to releasing a sex tape today.

When a prominent ball was held at Dublin Castle, the two sisters borrowed the costumes of Lady Macbeth and Juliet from the theatre, so they could attend the affair suitably dressed.  Effectively, this was their coming out party and they so impressed the members of high society that they were suddenly famous.  Lavished with gifts from the rich, the sisters returned to England and lived in high style, with both being presented at court to King George II.

Maria, who was notoriously tactless (which is a very polite way of saying that, while the young woman was beautiful, she was brainless) was asked by the King if there was anything she would like to see while in London.  She replied that she would like to see the pomp and grandeur of a royal funeral.  Luckily, the only person in the kingdom whose death would have provided the desired spectacle thought the answer hilarious.  

Within a year, both of the sisters had married well: Elizabeth snagged a duke and Maria married the 6th Earl of Coventry, to become the Countess of Coventry.  The new Countess remained socially very active: she was seen at all the most fashionable events and was rumored to have had an affair with the Duke of Grafton.  During her carefully orchestrated public walks through Hyde Park, the Countess was mobbed by the public, requiring a bodyguard to accompany her.  

Maria was a pale beauty who enhanced her looks by the liberal application of Venetian Ceruse makeup.   This makeup both whitened the skin and caused a pink glow that suggested both health and youth.  When a modern laboratory recently recreated the cosmetic using traditional materials, the women working in the laboratory all agreed that the cosmetic improved the appearance of the test subject.  Since Venetian Ceruse is made from lead carbonate, it’s a deadly poison, but, luckily—for humans, anyway—the test subject was a pig.  (You’re right now undoubtedly thinking of a joke about lipstick on a pig.)

The fashions at the time required women to wear low-cut gowns that revealed a lot of cleavage.  Since Maria did not want to show an obvious line where the makeup ended, she applied the cosmetic liberally.  Unfortunately, one of the side effects of the inevitable lead poisoning was skin blemishes and lesions, but these were easily covered with even more Venetian Ceruse.

Maria’s husband, the Earl of Coventry, did not like the makeup and frequently requested his wife to stop using it, but she refused.  In one infamous episode, the Earl chased her through a dinner party, attempting to wipe the makeup off her face with his handkerchief.  Shortly after this, the Earl began an infamous affair with the courtesan, Kitty Fisher, who was another young beauty who was famous for being famous.

Maria, now the Countess, had a public feud with Kitty Fisher.  When the two bumped into each other at a park, the Countess asked Kitty for the name of her dressmaker.  Kitty replied that the Countess would have to ask the Earl, since he had given her the dress.

Unfortunately, The Countess was becoming increasingly sick; her once alabaster skin was now deeply blemished, requiring ever more cosmetics to hide the condition.  Maria Coventry, the Countess of Coventry, died from lead poisoning at the age of 27.  She might have had some satisfaction that her rival, Kitty Fisher—who had also begun using liberal amounts of Venetian Ceruse—also died from lead poisoning just a few years later, at the age of 26.

Today, some historians question whether either woman actually died from lead poisoning, suggesting that a more likely cause of death might have been tuberculosis.  Since one of the side effects of lead poisoning is a diminished immune system, it probably doesn’t matter who is correct.

D.O.G.E.

Back in the sixties, there was a monthly contest at Lackland AFB, with a cash prize for anyone suggesting a helpful new way to improve base efficiency.  An enterprising airman won the contest two months in a row.  His first win was for suggesting that two existing forms be replaced with one new form.  The next month, the same airman won again, for suggesting eliminating the new form.  I don’t know where that airman is today, but he should be the patron saint of a controversial newly-minted government department.  

Government agencies and compost piles have a lot in common:  Besides having a high level of horse shit, both can benefit from periodic stirring up.  Rarely, however, does either benefit from having a hand grenade tossed into the mix.

Obviously, I’m thinking about the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, that has energized both the left and the right to run in circles and yell a lot.  Since Elon has yet to gore my ox, I alternately find this either appalling or hysterically funny.  No doubt I will become incredibly outraged as soon as Musk takes his fiscal chainsaw to one of the few federal entities that I care about (Like the Air and Space Museum, the Library of Congress, or the National Archives—Keep your hands off those, Elon!).

The chief complaint about Musk (besides his enormous wealth) seems to be that he is unelected.  I would point out that the agencies that are under review are chock full of unelected bureaucrats, who have been formulating regulations for decades.  Depending on which flavor of newspaper you read, the actions of D.O.G.E. are described as either draconian or brilliant.

While we are discussing unelected government employees, remind me again just how many primaries Kamala Harris won?  

The Constitution, Article II, Section I, allows the President to run the Executive Branch of the government, "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."  If President Trump wants to delegate that authority to someone else, he has the right to do it.

As I write this, D.O.G.E. seems to be shutting down the Department of Education but is obviously doing it wrong.  The correct method would be to weld the doors shut during one of the three or four daily working hours and then fumigate the building.  Since the Department claims that only a quarter of its staff works remotely, the fumigation would eliminate the majority of the rats.  Perhaps a bounty could be placed on the escapees.  (My experiences working at Enema U may have slightly influenced my opinions about the Department of Education.)

President Carter created the Department of Education (DofE) back in 1978, separating it from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) which changed its name to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).  It should be noted that within a few decades, the new HHS had as many employees as the old HEW plus all the new employees at the DofE.  This type of growth, splitting, and regrowth is typical of all government agencies, malignant cancer cells, and university committees.

This is where I suppose that I should list all the reasons why the Department of Education should be closed.  Centralized control is inefficient, local control is more responsive to a diverse population, state control would foster experimentation while being more adaptable to local conditions, and it would eliminate administrative duplication, and so forth and so on.  There is the uneasy alliance between the Department of Education and the National Education Alliance.  I could talk about the needless paperwork that I—and every other teacher in the country—had to fill out to satisfy the hair brained whim of some nameless bureaucrat in Washington.  There are a lot of reasons to close the Department, but most of them don’t really matter.

The real reason the Department of Education should be closed is that it simply has not worked.  Despite a cast of thousands, an annual budget of hundreds of billions of dollars, and endless studies—by every conceivable measure, education in the United States has grown steadily worse since the institution of the Department of Education.

The US spends as much or more per student (in some communities, much more) than every other developed nation.  We rank roughly in the middle of industrialized countries when it comes to teacher pay.  Our schools are modern, air-conditioned, well-lit, and clean, and they are equipped with the latest in technology.   For more than four decades they have been overseen by a Federal agency whose budget has gone up annually by more than the rate of inflation.  Yet, despite all of this—or perhaps because of it—student test scores are abysmal compared with the rest of the world.   Clearly, it is time to try something else.  Damn near anything else!

Maybe letting 50 different states try 50 different ideas will work.  Maybe creating a new and different Department of Education along a different model will work.  Perhaps we should just copy what some other country is doing.  I don’t know the correct answer to the problem of education, but one thing is certain:  neither does the current Department of Education.

While there is no doubt that President Trump is the constitutionally designated head of the Executive Branch, there is still some doubt whether he can close a department or lay off all the workers within a department without congressional approval—that will have to be decided in federal court and will probably take years.  

In the meantime, when Musk gets tired of D.O.G.E., I wonder if he would consider doing the same sort of job at Enema U?  I think it would be possible to cut the university budget by at least 20% with the changes going unnoticed by most of the faculty and any of the students.

The Uluburun Shipwreck

Frequent readers—and judging by my hate mail there are more than a few of you—know that I’m fascinated by shipwrecks.  The only individual topic that has appeared more frequently than Napoleon in the past seventeen years’ worth of blogs is the Titanic.  However, my favorite shipwreck (and the one that I have learned the most from), is the Steamboat Arabia.

The Arabia was a side-wheeler riverboat that sank rapidly in the Missouri River in 1856, after her bottom was ripped out by a tree stump.  Despite the rapid sinking, the only casualty was a mule that had been hitched to some sawmill equipment and was forgotten.  Within hours, the entire wreck sank in the mud, making salvage operations at that time impossible.

In 1987, Bob Hawley and his sons located the wreck in a field, now forty-five feet below the soil surface and half a mile from the river.  After being snubbed by numerous historical and archaeological groups, the Hawley family recovered the material themselves and, in the process, became the world’s experts in recovering and conserving this type of material.  When the Arabia sank she was carrying an incredible amount of cargo, including the entire starting inventory of a hardware store.

Due to the ground being perpetually near freezing, the material recovered is still in amazing shape.  Pickles in glass jars were still edible and the bottles of champagne were still drinkable.  For historians, this was like a time machine, that offered a view back at the material culture of the mid-nineteenth century.  The photo below is just a small fraction of what is on display in the museum, and the last I heard, the Hawley’s were still opening and conserving more contents from the ship.

I was a guest of the US Army at Fort Leavenworth—not the prison but the college, at which I was taking a two-week graduate course in military history.  With plenty of time on my hands, I started checking out the excellent   local history museums, of which Kansas City has more than her share.  I had never heard of the Arabia but visited anyway.  For the next week and a half, I spent every available free moment in the museum, taking notes and asking questions.  The recovered goods I saw changed the way I thought about what was then the frontier of America—including the kinds goods available and how quickly new merchandise reached the edges of settlement.

I’ll give two quick examples.  I had always heard that shoes for sale about the time of the Civil War came in only one pattern, and that left and right shoes were identical, not anatomically  specific.  There were thousands of shoes on the Arabia and nearly all of them came in pairs, with the right shoe the mirror of the left.  And I had been led to believe that wooden matches—also known as shack matches or Aggie flashlights—did not come into common use until the 1880’s.  The Arabia carried thousands of them.

While I am still grateful to the US Army for its generosity in letting me attend the prestigious school, to be honest, I learned far more at the Steamboat Arabia Museum than I did in the classroom.  If you travel or live anywhere near Kansas City, I highly recommend visiting it.

Which brings me to the Uluburun Wreck, which is the oldest shipwreck in the world.  The name comes from the site of the wreck, just off the coast of present-day Turkey, since we don’t know the name of the ship (or if she even had one).  The ship comes from the Bronze Age, in roughly the fourteenth century BC, when ships were not commonly named.  Nor are we certain where the ship came from or where it was heading, though it was probably going from somewhere near Cyprus to somewhere in Greece, along the Aegean.

The fifty-foot ship probably sank about 1320 BCE—give or take a couple of decades:  the exact date is a little fuzzy.  Radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology (dating by examining tree rings) overlap a little, but among the treasures found was a likeness of Nefertiti, so, the three dating methods together give us a pretty good idea.  Nor are we really certain exactly what the ship looked like, since 3000 years of seawater have played havoc with the ship’s timbers.

The wreck was discovered by sponge divers who reported the discovery of “metal biscuits with ears” on the sea floor.  These were copper “oxhide” ingots weighing about 60 pounds each.  To make them easier to carry, the copper was formed into rectangles with a protruding handle at each corner.  This report led to a recovery team making over 22,000 dives from 1984 to 1994.

What is important in the wreck—just as with the Arabia—is the nature of the  cargo that has been recovered.  The wreck’s cargo reveals an astonishing array of artifacts that reflects the extensive maritime trade networks of the Eastern Mediterranean.  Among the finds are raw materials such as copper and tin ingots (essential for bronze production), as well as luxury items including glass ingots, ivory, and precious gemstones.  The assortment also contains a variety of finished goods like pottery, tools, and weapons, which highlights the ship’s role in both commercial exchange and cultural interaction among ancient civilizations.

In addition to the utilitarian cargo, the shipwreck also has yielded culturally significant items that provide insight into the artistic and ceremonial practices of the time.  Artifacts of Mycenaean, Canaanite, and Egyptian origin were found aboard, including scarabs, ceremonial vessels, and intricately designed jewelry.  Some of the items had come from as far away as China, down the Silk Road.  These objects not only underscore the diverse origins of the ship’s cargo but also illustrate the interconnected nature of Bronze Age economies and societies.  Overall, the Uluburun shipwreck serves as a remarkable underwater time capsule, shedding light on the complexity and reach of ancient trade and the cultural exchanges that helped shape the ancient world (and our modern world, too).

The remarkable array of artistic objects in the Uluburun shipwreck has fascinated artists by the remarkable array of artistic objects.  Viewing the wreck’s contents is akin to an artist’s going shopping in a Bronze Age art supply store.  The ship contained 175 glass ingots of cobalt blue, turquoise, and lavender, along with ostrich eggshells, ivory of both elephant and hippopotamus, glass beads, and jars filled with resin for making turpentine.  The cargo also included intricately designed jewelry, finely crafted ceremonial vessels, and ornamental scarabs—each a testament to the sophisticated artistry of ancient cultures.  

These items, with their delicate engravings, elegant forms, and vibrant use of materials, showcased a blend of styles from Mycenaean, Canaanite, Egyptian, and other Mediterranean cultures.  This diversity not only highlighted the technical prowess of ancient artisans but also provided a tangible record of cross-cultural artistic exchange, making the wreck an invaluable source of inspiration and study for modern artists and historians alike.

I would really like to see the museum in Bodrun, Turkey that houses all the recovered artifacts.  If I argued a good enough case for it, do you suppose the Army would like to pick up the tab for a really great museum trip?

Gilded Manure

While I eagerly await the season three of Gilded Age, I recently rewatched the first two seasons.  I like the show, but I have a few picky little reservations.

First, I should admit that I am a big fan of Christine Baranski and would probably watch a lengthy miniseries that consisted of nothing but her snarky reading of the phone book.  And, I enjoy period dramas, if only to watch for the historical inaccuracies. 

I’m also a big fan of Gilded Age literature.  Who doesn’t enjoy reading Henry James, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris or Henry Adams?  Even the name for the period comes from a novel cowritten by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, though neither would live long enough to learn that historians used the title of the book for the name of the period of significant economic growth, industrialization, and social disparity in the United States from the 1870s to about 1900, that was characterized by ostentatious wealth for some and stark poverty for many.

Perhaps the biggest mistake is the television show have as its central theme the conflict between the old Mayflower settlers of New England and the New Money people who derived their wealth from the new industries.  There are actually two mistakes there:  first the true “Old New Yorkers” were Dutch, not English.  The Rockefellers, Stuyvesants, Van Rensselaers, and Schuylers and other families of Dutch origin (who were collectively known as the Knickerbockers) were the real power in New York high society.  The other mistake is the belief that the Old New Yorkers tried desperately to exclude the New Money people.  The high society of the Gilded Age loved ostentation and extravagant consumption far more than they cared who was picking up the check.

There are a few historical inaccuracies scattered around the show.  For many, the chief attraction to the show are the extravagant ball gowns of the ladies, but we have to overlook the fact that those gowns would not have had zippers—a device still a generation away.  Instead, gowns used intricate closures, often secured with small buttons, hooks and eyes, or lacings, all in such an inaccessible location that every woman had to have a ladies’ maid just to get dressed.  And that is not even counting the 30-40 additional buttons found on ladies’ formal ankle-length boots.

Not once in the show is a single elevated train visible, though these were already in use by 1882-–the time period represented in the show.  Though the show features a few horse-drawn streetcars, and plenty of horse-drawn cabs and carriages, the streets are far from the busy hectic traffic already common in New York.   The photo at left shows a New York street from 1890. 

There are other inaccuracies.  The show downplays racial tensions in the North, depicts none of the desperate poverty and dense overcrowding of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, and ignores the appalling lack of even basic sanitation for the majority of the city’s inhabitants.  I can forgive all this, since, if the show were truly accurate, no one would watch it.  If you want to know what the city was really like at the time, get hold of a copy of Jacob Riis’s excellent 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives.  

There is one historical inaccuracy that every historian who watches the show immediately comments on:  Why is there no horse manure on the streets?

The show takes place primarily in two houses that are located on opposite sides of street at the corner of 61st Street and 5th Avenue, very close to Central Park.  (This was the actual site of the Elbridge T. Gerry Mansion, built during the Gilded Age, but demolished in 1920.)  Several times during each episode, major characters cross the street, easily dodging the few horses and wagons proceeding down the pristine, dirt-paved street.

The reality, however, is that while most of the better neighborhoods in New York had just been connected to a sewage system in the 1880’s, there no drains in the dirt streets in even the best neighborhoods.  What did exist on those streets were thousands and thousands of work horses.  On any given day, there were an estimated 175,000 horses pulling wagons, cabs, and carriages through the crowded (and all too frequently, too narrow) streets.  

Not to be too indelicate, but the horses were neither trained to use a litter box nor were they wearing diapers—and they produced approximately four million pounds of horse manure every single day of the week.  Add to this a daily dose of 40,000 gallons of horse urine and the occasional rain, the contributions of an estimated 100,000 dogs… those muddy streets rarely dried out. And what wasn’t collected on any given day received a fresh layer the next day. When the streets did occasionally dry out, the drying manure turned to a thick dust that choked pedestrians, coated buildings, and infiltrated every home and business.

All of this made the streets—more accurately shown at left—all but impassable for pedestrians without the services of street-crossing sweepers. These sweepers were impoverished beggars who used a broom to clear a path across the muddy, manure-covered, (and otherwise filthy) streets in exchange for a small tip, usually a penny or two.  I doubt the television show will ever include them, however).

The city employed over two thousand people just to keep the streets clean, but this was  clearly inadequate.  

Seven or eight garbage scows carried the accumulated debris to Dead Horse Bay on Barren Island every day.  (As the name indicates, mixed into the garbage and offal the island received was an average of 36 dead horses every day.)

The sanitation workers could not clear the streets fast enough, so the collected manure was scraped and shoveled onto any available vacant lot, sometimes reaching heights of 40 to 60 feet before the city could arrange to cart it all off to Barren Island.  It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Barren Island eventually turned into a peninsula where the strangest things still occasionally wash ashore.

I won’t even attempt to describe the stench exuding from all of this!  Nor can I say much about the incredible number of flying insects that would descend upon (and FROM) a sixty-foot-high mountain of fresh manure.  These fly infestations were directly responsible for the deadly outbreaks of typhoid and “infant diarrheal diseases” that occurred frequently in the city.

I enjoy the Gilded Age.  I like reading the literature from Age.  And I’m damn glad I don’t live in that age.

White Lead Paint

I want to talk about lead paint, but since I’m not an artist but a historian, I have to start the story at the beginning.  The very beginning.

About 400,000 years ago, man learned how to create fire.  Early man had been using fire for about a million years but was forced to use naturally occurring fire.  Whether the first method of creating fire was by striking flint against pyrite to produce a spark or by using a “fire plow” (think of Tom Hanks in Castaway, where one piece of wood is rubbed against another to create friction and heat) is uncertain, but man had begun the long process of mastering fire.

About 40,000 years ago, some human learned to cover the leftover coals of a fire with dirt, keeping them to use the next day to start a new fire.  While removing the dirt, he noticed that some of the coals had turned a dark black and when these coals were ignited, the fire they produced was noticeably hotter than a wood fire.  The discovery of charcoal—how to make it and the realization that it burned both hotter and more efficiently—opened the way to the discovery of metallurgy.  

Some metals—like gold, copper, and silver—occur in nature in their metallic forms.  Finding these would have been an early introduction to metals.  Early humans would have noticed changes in some stones when those had been heated in campfires or in kilns to produce pottery.  For instance, copper nuggets might have been accidentally smelted from ores when naturally occurring copper minerals were exposed to fire.  By 5000 years ago, copper ore was being smelted to produce native copper.  This was the start of the Chalcolithic or Copper Age, a period that is usually skipped over in history classes because within a few years, these neolithic scientists had discovered that adding tin to copper produced bronze—a metal that is harder and more useful than copper.  

By now, you can imagine that early man got busy testing every strange looking rock he could find—which is probably how lead was discovered in Mesopotamia about 3500 years ago.  Lead was an extremely useful metal, too.  Though it takes about 1000°C to smelt the lead out of the ore, once its out, lead itself melts at 327.5°C and is wonderfully malleable.  The Egyptians made an amazing array of dishes and tools from the metal.

About 400 BC, the Egyptians noticed that lead that was exposed to vinegar and horse manure developed a white powder on its surface.  This powder could be mixed with water.  The white powder could also be mixed with honey and egg white and then used in cosmetics and paints.

The Romans loved using lead.  Besides the usual tools and dishes, they created lead pipes to bring water into their cities.  (The Latin word for lead, "plumbum," is where we get the term "plumbing.").  Lead was used for coinage, utensils, statues, roofing—hell, the Romans even created standardized bullets, called glandes, for their slings.  The Romans also had lots of horses and, since vinegar was a byproduct of winemaking, they were able to produce even more of that useful white powder.  Suspended over a fire of burning horse manure, the Romans heated a vat of boiling vinegar with a bar of lead suspended over it.  The white corrosion that formed on the lead bar could be scraped off, ground into a powder, and used in everything from paints to medicines.

Note.  Yes, this was all very toxic and deadly.  And the Romans actually knew this, but the convenience of using the lead outweighed the health concerns.   If this sounds like our society and a host of things we use and consume despite the fact that we know they aren’t good for us, well… Hail Caesar!

Now, let’s move forward to the 14th century, in which the Dutch improved on the Roman method.  In a process called the Dutch Stack lead process, a series of vinegar pots—each with a lead bar suspended over it—was buried under a pile of horse manure.  (Curiously, no other form of manure works.). The fumes from the vinegar corrode the lead, creating a layer of lead acetate, which reacts with the fumes from the carbolic acid from the horse manure to form lead carbonate.  The lead carbonate forms in layers, which can be scraped off and collected.

An artist, who until paint was commercially available in tubes in the nineteenth century, had to be an amateur chemist, would put the “white lead” on a flat stone and grind it into a fine powder, that would then be mixed with either egg and water to form a tempera paint, or with linseed oil or walnut oil to make an oil paint.  The artist had to go through this process every few days since the paint would not keep.

This lead white (also known as white flake or cremnitz) was a very good white paint.  It was highly valued by artists for centuries due to its exceptional qualities:  high opacity, (allowing for effective coverage with fewer layers) and a slow drying time (which was beneficial for blending and wet-on-wet techniques), a smooth, buttery texture (that facilitates easy application and impasto), and its flexibility that reduced the risk of cracking).  Lead white also provided a brilliant, pure white color, that was lightfast, ensuring the longevity of artworks.  It was also versatile for mixing with other pigments without altering their hues significantly and was often used for underpainting. 

Leonardo da Vinci used white lead mixed with walnut oil as an undercoat for both the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.  The layers of thick paint on The Starry Night by Van Gogh include white lead.  Paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, Vermeer, Botticelli, and Jan Van Eyck all contain white lead paint.

In the nineteenth century, artificial dyes made from coal tar replaced a lot of the pigments that had been used for centuries.  Toxic paints quickly disappeared, one by one, as good artificial pigments were created in the laboratory.

Besides being used in art, leaded paints were widely available for house paints.  The thick opacity meant that fewer coats were needed and the lead content made the paints waterproof and durable.  Ships, houses, barns and commercial buildings were routinely painted with lead-based paints.  As realization grew of the dangers of the toxicity of lead, there was a movement to ban the paints, which happened in the 1970’s.

It surprises people to learn that lead paint for artists is still available, and is still widely used by artists, for the benefits it has that are listed above.  Artists’ lead-based oil paint is a little more expensive and it comes with a lot of warning labels about toxicity, but it is still the best white oil paint on the market.

Modest Suggestions for Los Angeles

As I write this, the fires are—once again—burning in Los Angeles.  So far, an estimated 20,000 homes and businesses have been lost, the fires are still burning, and the weather forecast predicts the high winds, that so rapidly spread the conflagration early on, will return this weekend.

I have a few suggestions for California.

First, before the fires, consider that several communities were already experiencing a severe housing shortage, which has been now made much worse as close to a hundred thousand people have just been made homeless in three days.  The fastest method to help these people is to stimulate the private sector of the economy by dropping rent control.  While there has never been a sound economic reason to impose rent control, right now there is an obvious reason to end it.

In cities where rent control has been dropped, large numbers of previously unavailable rental units quickly enter the market when the owners are no longer worried about government control of their property.  When Buenos Aires dropped rent control, available housing increased by more than 175% in the first six months afterward.  A more modest increase in housing occurred when Cambridge, Massachusetts eliminated rent control.  There is no reason to believe that Los Angeles would not have a similar outcome.

Note.  While Los Angeles needs more housing right now, regardless of cost, it is worth noting that the increase in the number of housing units in Buenos Aires created competition and lowered the cost of housing.  Price controls, whether on goods or housing, always, always, always creates shortages at higher prices.

California will rebuild.  Though there are places where homes have repeatedly burnt down in the last half century, it’s a given that, human nature being what it is, reconstruction of those homes will probably start within weeks.  Perhaps the county might consider mandating the new homes be more fire-resistant.  I would suggest the following:

• Fire-Resistant Roofing: Using Class A, fire-rated materials like metal, concrete, or slate for roofing can dramatically decrease the likelihood of fires spreading.  Compared to the common composite shingles widely used, Class A roofing costs twice as much but the roofs last at least twice as long.  Much of the cost difference will be recouped through lower utility bills since Class A roofing keeps the house cooler in summer, thus requiring less air conditioning.  

• Landscaping and Design: Creating defensible spaces, using non-combustible materials like rock mulch, and ensuring proper ventilation can also prevent fire spread.  In neighborhoods with extensive loss, perhaps every other lot should remain vacant.  The replanting of pine or palm trees should be prohibited.  

• Exterior Materials: Materials like brick and fiber cement siding are inherently fire-resistant.  Brick walls, for instance, can withstand fire for one to four hours, depending on construction.  Insulated concrete form construction is already used in commercial buildings; the county should encourage its use in residences, too.  While roughly 5% more costly than stucco, the improved insulation will lower utility bills and quickly recoup the investment.

• Government should get out of the insurance business.  While government should continue the existing coverage for current homeowners, no new policies should be issued.  If private companies won’t offer insurance for a high-risk construction project, perhaps the building should not be built. 

• And keep the damn brush in the canyons cut.  Perhaps you could employ some of the homeless to do this.  If the land is privately owned, create stiff fines for the failure to keep the brush down.

One last comment:  We all saw the television coverage about fire hydrants not having enough water pressure to fight fires, and I’m sure that there will be long and heated discussions about how to correct this in the future.  But everyone should be aware of how little protection those neighborhood fire hydrants actually offer.  

That typical red fire hydrant in your neighborhood can deliver—at most—500 gallons per minute.  That may sound like a lot of water, but it is barely enough to fight a single-house fire.  Suppose we have a two-story home that’s fully ablaze. The amount of water required to extinguish a fully involved fire in a 2,000-square-foot, two-story house depends on several factors, such as the fire's intensity, the structural materials, and the fire department's strategies.  However, we can estimate water needs by using standard firefighting guidelines.

A common formula used in firefighting is the National Fire Academy (NFA) Fire Flow Formula:  The necessary water flow (in gallons per minute or GPM) = Square footage of the home divided by 3.  As a general guide, for a fully involved fire, add an additional 25%. So, for our arbitrary 2,000 square foot home, we need 667 gallons per minute, which is more than the typical neighborhood fire hydrant is capable of delivering.  If it is a fully-involved fire that we want to suppress before it spreads to neighboring structures, we would need 834 gallons per minute.

If several houses are burning at once, the typical neighborhood fire hydrant provides only a drop in the bucket (no pun intended).  Such a hydrant is better than nothing at all, but it is inadequate to handle the kind of disaster that is occurring in California.

Fire hydrants have a color code.  A red bonnet or cap on a fire hydrant means it delivers up to 500 gallons per minute.  An orange bonnet means it delivers twice that—up to 999 gallons per minute.  A green hydrant can deliver up to 1499 gallons per minute, while a blue hydrant can deliver between 1500 and 2000 gallons per minute.  

In those California canyons, where the dangers from Santa Ana winds are an annual occurrence, perhaps the city should think about either putting in higher capacity water lines and hydrants or limiting the number of homes that can be built there, as well as rewriting construction codes to bring them in line with current fire resistance technology.

The Tube of Paint

What do Stephen Perry, George McGill, Johan Vaaler, George de Mestral, Walter Hunt, and John Goffe Rand have in common?

Each of the men listed invented an everyday common item, that while modest as far as technology goes, had a profound impact on how we live.  The effect was so profound that they were all immeditately forgottein and chances are that you’ve never heard of any of them.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

Perry invented the rubber band, McGill gave us the stapler, Vaaler developed the paper clip, de Mestral invented Velcro, and Hunt invented the safety pin.  It is kind of hard to imagine life without any of those, and all have a fascinating story, but I want to focus on the seemingly modest contribution of John Rand.

Painters from the medieval period to the early Renaissance used tempera paints— made by mixing pigments with water adding an egg yolk or whole egg as a binder, sometimes with other additives like vinegar or wine to extend the drying time or alter the consistency.  Tempera paint dried quickly to a dull matte finish, so artists had to work on relatively small areas of the canvas and could not build up layers of paint.

Oil painting, which became popular in the 15th century, particularly through artists like Jan van Eyck, mixed pigments with linseed oil and offered advantages like slower drying time which allowed for blending and more nuanced color gradations, and was more forgiving on a variety of surfaces.   Gone was the dull matte finish, replaced by a finish that could vary from satin to glossy, with a a depth and luminosity due to the paint’s ability to be layered and blended while wet. This can create a sense of three-dimensionality and light within the painting that matte tempera does not naturally achieve

There was no doubt that oil paints in the hands of a skilled artist created a more satisfying painting, but the paints still had to be produced by the artists.  Artists prepared their own paints by grinding pigments (from minerals, plants, or other sources) and mixing them with a binder like linseed oil.  These mixtures were typically stored in animal bladders or glass jars.  However, these methods were inconvenient, messy, and poorly suited for travel or long-term storage, meaning that the artist was generally confined to working in his studio with a limited range of colors.  

This changed in 1841 when John Goffe Rand was issued U.S. Patent #2522 for an “Improvement in the Construction of Vessels or Apparatus for Preserving Paint.”  His apparatus was an airtight metal tube made of malleable tin for holding paint.  Originally Rand sold empty tubes to artists who could fill the tubes then crimp the open end using the brass cap to access their paints.  Within a year, art companies such as Winsor and Newton were selling paint tubes with preloaded paint.  (And they still sell both preloaded and empty tubes from their site here.)

This had several profound effects for artists.  No longer did an artist have to be a part time naturalist gathering pigments, then had to turn into a chemist trying to come up with the same shade of blue as the previous week to finish a painting.  And since the tubes would stay fresh for months or even years at a time, the artist could keep a variety of shades and tints and several colors.  The sale of such tubes even provided an incentive for art stores to begin experimenting with new synthetic colors such as cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, and emerald green.

For the first time, artists could leave their studios, packing up their brushes and art supplies and could paint outdoors.  This innovation was instrumental to movements like Impressionism, where artists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir embraced painting outdoors, or as they called it, en plein air.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's son, Jean Renoir, quoted his father as saying:

"Without colors in tubes, there would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no Sisley or Pissarro, nothing of what the journalists were to call Impressionism."

There was one more far-reaching change brought about by Rand’s little tin tubes.  In 1850, Lucius Sheffield was studying art in Paris.  When he returned home, his father, Dr. Washington Sheffield had just perfected a dental cream that he thought far superior to the existing tooth powders sold on the market.  His problem was how to package his new product.  When Lucius demonstrated the ease of applying paint from a tube, Dr. Sheffield knew he had found a solution to his problem.

It might surprise you that Dr. Sheffield’s original toothpaste in a tube is still on the market.  Amazon will sell you a tube in seven flavors, including chocolate.  (Yuck!). 

Dr. Sheffield’s company freely admits the idea for toothpaste in a tube came from the paint tubes for sale in in Paris, but John Rand is given no credit.   Not surprisingly, Rand was unable to protect his patent and received only small licensing fees for his invention.

The 14th Amendment is Alive and Well

The 14th Amendment is in the news.   Well, to be fair, it has been in the news constantly since it was ratified back in 1868.  It has been the basis of almost every major Supreme Court case in the last 150 years, influencing the court’s decisions on birth control, abortion, the right to own guns, same sex marriage, interracial marriages, school segregation, and whether the states can limit free speech.  If you have watched any television in the last 50 years, you can probably recite at least some of the “Miranda Rights” that are guaranteed to individuals during police interviews (the Court decided that the Amendment guaranteed those rights to everyone.

Currently, the 14th Amendment is being discussed in newspaper editorials in conjunction with whether the United State should continue the practice of birthright citizenship and if Article 3 of the Amendment prohibits Donald Trump from being eligible for the office of the presidency.  Perhaps this is a good time to review just why the 14th Amendment was written and what it says.

The 14th Amendment was initially written in 1866, during the period knows as “Reconstruction”, following the Civil War.  While the 13th Amendment had just months earlier eliminated slavery within the United States, it did not guarantee the freed slaves any rights—even those normally guaranteed by the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.  Were the freed slaves even citizens and if not, were non-citizens entitled to civil rights?  While this was being debated, most of the former Confederate states enacted "Black Codes," which severely restricted the rights of African Americans and attempted to maintain a harsh system of racial subjugation.  Northern states questioned why the war had been fought and why so many Americans had been slaughtered if slavery was to continue under a different name.

During the period following the war, when the former Confederate States were still not represented in Congress, Northern Republicans quickly passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which granted citizenship and equal rights to African Americans.  However, some feared that without a constitutional amendment, the Supreme Court or future Congresses could overturn the Act.  While the 14th Amendment was passed by Congress in the summer of 1866, it still required ratification by three-fourths of the states to become law.  Congress guaranteed the eventual ratification by requiring the former Confederate states to ratify the Amendment as a condition for their elected officials being readmitted to the Senate and the House of Representatives.  

Note.  Yes, congressional reinstatement hinging on ratification of an amendment was both coercive and ethically questionable—particularly when you remember that the South was militarily occupied by Northern troops at the time.  The Supreme Court, while not ruling specifically on the ratification of the 14th Amendment, has ruled several times that the process and details of how the states ratify an amendment is entirely up to Congress.  The rules may have been dishonest, but the rules are the rules.

It would be fair to say that the Amendment was a catch-all bill to address several concerns by the Republican Congress.  If Southern society was not permanently altered, why had the Civil War been waged?  Southern Democrats, including President Andrew Johnson, fought against the Amendment, but could not marshal sufficient support to block the passage.

The Amendment has several key provisions which:

• Declared that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens, effectively overturning the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision, which had denied citizenship to African Americans.
• Guaranteed that no state could "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the “equal protection of the laws."
• Prohibited states from depriving any person of "life, liberty, or property without due process of law."
• Declared that the federal government was not responsible for Confederate debts.
• Disqualified from holding office any person who had violated his prior oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Today, that first provision concerning citizenship is being questioned in the context of immigration.  Is citizenship automatically given to anyone born in the United States regardless of the citizenship of the parents?  This has been settled law for well over a century.  In United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the Supreme Court ruled that a child born in the United States to Chinese parents, who were not U.S. citizens, was nonetheless a U.S. citizen by birth.  This case firmly established the principle of birthright citizenship.  Short of a new amendment or a new ruling by the Supreme Court overturning the 1898 case, birthright citizenship will remain in place.

Note.  Birthright citizenship, or unrestricted jus soli is primarily established only in the Americas.  Most of the countries in both North and South America allow birthright citizenship while it is very rare in the rest of the world, where at least one of the parents must be a citizen for child to qualify.

The last provision, barring office for those engaged in rebellion, is currently in the news because several people claim that Congress could bar the presidency to Donald Trump due to his actions of January 6, 2021.  Here is the wording of Article 3 of the 14th Amendment.

"No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability."

During the Civil War, many officials in the federal and state governments—who had previously sworn allegiance to the U.S. Constitution—defected to the Confederacy.  Section 3 was designed to hold these individuals accountable by disqualifying them from holding public office unless Congress explicitly lifted the ban.  The drafters of the 14th Amendment wanted to ensure that those who had supported the Confederacy could not easily regain political power and undermine Reconstruction efforts.  This measure was also symbolic, emphasizing the need for loyalty to the Union.

Initially, Section 3 was enforced broadly to exclude many former Confederates from office.  Over time, as Reconstruction policies softened and efforts to reconcile with the South gained traction, Congress used its power to grant amnesty to most individuals affected by Section 3 in 1872, effectively ending the broad application of Section 3.  

Section 3 remains in the Constitution but is rarely invoked.  However, it has resurfaced in discussions concerning those who participated in the events of January 6, 2021, particularly regarding the actions of President Donald Trump.  It has been suggested that the January 2021 impeachment of Donald Trump, as well as the House investigation of the events of January 6, are sufficient grounds for Congress to refuse to certify the election, preventing Donald Trump from becoming president on January 20, 2025.  It should be remembered that the impeachment bill passing the house was the equivalent of an indictment, he was not convicted in the Senate.

Supporters of Trump have pointed out that Section 3 lists the offices specifically denied to insurrectionists but fails to include the office of the presidency.  On the other hand, the general language of the clause—prohibiting officeholders who have engaged in insurrection from holding "any office, civil or military, under the United States"—would have been interpreted to include the presidency, even though it was not named specifically.

The argument is unlikely to be settled by January 20, 2025–although I doubt that there will be any serious attempt to use the 14th Amendment to stop the inauguration of Trump.  In the eyes of American voters—particularly those who voted for Trump—such a maneuver would be seen as an act of insurrection in itself and their protests would almost certainly lead to violence.

Perhaps we should remember why Congress passed the Amendment in the first place:  It was trying to bind the country together, to heal the divisions caused by the war and to secure stability.  We should also particularly remember that, though it took over a century, Congress eventually pardoned even Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy.

UFOs and the Butt-Head Astronomer

It has been too many years, so I no longer remember why my brother and I were driving through San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park that night.  Since we were in a ‘57 MGA with the top down, it might have been just to enjoy the fun of riding around in a convertible on a warm summer night.  

Just as we passed the zoo, we saw it:  It was impossibly long, with red, white, and green lights in front and about a hundred yards farther back, it had a mass of flashing white lights, flying way too low over the park.  It was 1966 and just like about half of the country, we were seeing a UFO.  (No—I don’t really have a picture of it, since this happened decades before everyone carried a cell phone so they could take a picture of what they had for lunch.  The photo at left was generated by AI.)

Naturally, we chased it, trying to catch up with the UFO to get a better look at the mysterious object that didn’t seem to be moving very fast, but that seemed to make impossible turns, hovering at times, then speeding up.  I’m not sure about the statute of limitations but let me say that at one point, a white convertible may have driven across Olmos Basin Park in hot pursuit.  

Eventually, we managed to catch up with the tail end of our UFO, just close enough for that mass of flickering lights to spell out the message “GRAND OPENING SALE…”. About 100 feet in front of the flashing banner was the faint outline of a small Cessna.

We felt like idiots, of course!  I don’t remember us ever discussing the event again—we were too embarrassed to admit how foolish we had been.  It wasn’t really our fault, of course—we were preconditioned to expect to see a UFO.  All over the country, people went out every night looking for them and since they were looking for them, they found them.  Newspapers and television reported these sightings daily.

The UFO hysteria of the 1950s through the 1960s was a period marked by widespread fascination, fear, and speculation about UFOs, which were believed to be alien spacecraft. This phenomenon reached its height during the Cold War, as a combination of geopolitical tension, the rise of modern media, and the human inclination to explore the unknown coalesced into a weird cultural moment.  The hysteria was fueled by reports of strange sightings, government secrecy, and a growing fear of technological advances (particularly, the potential for extraterrestrial threats).

This period was also one of intense national and international paranoia, as Americans lived under the constant threat of nuclear war.  Our government, which needed to respond to this growing paranoia, first retreated behind a shield of silence or secrecy.  By the time the government finally did respond, there was widespread distrust of the government…a distrust fueled—in part by the Vietnam War.  The more the government said there were no UFOs, the more the public was convinced the government was lying.

Actually, there were Unidentified Flying Objects (with the emphasis on “unidentified”).  The fact that you can’t identify what someone saw doesn’t mean it was extraterrestrial—it just means the government doesn’t know what it was or if you saw it.

The media played a central role in amplifying the UFO hysteria of the 1950s.  Newspapers and magazines, eager to sell stories and appeal to public interest, sensationalized UFO sightings, creating a narrative that UFOs were an imminent threat or a mysterious puzzle to be solved. This coverage often lacked skepticism and led many readers to believe in the reality of extraterrestrial visitors.

Hollywood also capitalized on the UFO craze. Films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and War of the Worlds (1953) tapped into public anxieties about alien life, portraying extraterrestrials as both potential saviors and terrifying invaders. These movies reflected and reinforced the conflicting emotions of wonder and fear that characterized the era.  On one hand, UFOs represented the possibility of contact with advanced civilizations, and on the other, they symbolized the unknown dangers of space and technology.

Television, which became more widespread in the 1950s, also played a significant role in spreading the UFO phenomenon. Shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits tapped into the growing cultural interest in the supernatural and the unknown, contributing to the atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia that surrounded the UFO hysteria.

This was a period of profound social change, with the women’s liberation, the sexual revolution, civil rights protests, and the protests against the war all occurring simultaneously.  Psychologists suggest that UFO sightings may have been a projection of collective anxieties about the future, particularly the fear of nuclear war and the unknown possibilities of space exploration.  The idea of seeing actual extraterrestrial visitors may have provided a way for people to externalize their fears, making the feared unknown more “manageable” and less threatening.

As more and more sightings were reported, an ever-growing number of people began searching the sky for something they didn’t understand, and naturally, they found what they were looking for (or thought they did).  

Lots of scientists (like Carl Sagan) came out and tried to calm the public by stating that the events needed to be looked at calmly, with logic and common sense.  These scientists were generally ignored.  The ability to use common sense and logic is so rare in society that we need a law requiring the few people still capable of rational thought to wear capes in public so they can be identified and consulted during an emergency.

By the end of the 1960s, UFO sightings began to decline, and the hysteria surrounding them started to subside.  Several factors contributed to this shift.  As the U.S. government continued to deny the existence of extraterrestrial life and further studies revealed more mundane explanations for many UFO reports, public interest began to wane.  Eventually, even the hysterical calm down.

That calm recently ended with hundreds of reports of drones flying over New Jersey.   Every night, people went out looking for the mysterious drones…and found them!  It didn’t matter that every damn photo or video taken of the “mystery drones” showed the FAA-mandated aircraft lighting pattern—they just had to be drones!  Probably Chinese drones!  Somebody should shoot them down!

Between 5:00 PM and 9:00 PM on any given night in New Jersey, there are over 1600 scheduled airline flights passing overhead.  Add to this the number of light aircraft, helicopters, and military aircraft and you will realize that at any given time anywhere in New Jersey, and there are a lot things moving in the sky.  

It didn’t take long before drones were sighted in other states across the country.  Politicians briefly stopped looking down their noses at their constituents long enough to look up in the night sky and notice there were “things” moving up there!  The former governor of Maryland announced that he had taken a photo of a formation of drones hovering over his house.  (An examination of his photo revealed an amateur photo of Orion’s Belt.)

Every aspect of the current drone hysteria matches the earlier UFO mania.  The government is being criticized for not “solving” the mystery even as their explanations are being ridiculed.  This seems to be a time of social change challenging long held beliefs.  The press is reporting even the wildest claims without any investigation or review.  And the hysteria seems to be spreading.

There is however, one big difference between today’s drone hysteria and the earlier UFO mania.  My brother and I could not have launched our own UFO—we probably couldn’t have put anything bigger than a rubber band powered balsa wood toy into the air.  But today, any teenage boy can buy a $10 drone from Temu, tape a glow-stick to it, and try to terrify his neighbor.  

This drone nonsense will eventually run its course, and the press will move on to the next sensation.  In the meantime, remember:  Fantastic claims require fantastic proof.

Biphasic What?

One of the great insights I gleaned from studying history was the realization that everyone throughout history, no matter when or where they lived, was basically the same as us if you learned enough about them.  This is probably fairly basic for most people but came as a great surprise to a poor dumb ol’ country boy.

That doesn’t mean you can’t occasionally be surprised by some alarming differences, however.  I just discovered something about the people of medieval Europe that is so strange it makes you want to rethink that first paragraph.  Those weirdos.

While we take it for granted that a perfect night’s sleep is eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, until about the late seventeenth century, people engaged in something called biphasic or segmented sleep.  Depending slightly on the time of the year, people went to bed around 9:00 PM, slept until about 11:00, then woke up for two hours before going back to sleep until dawn.  

The two periods of rest were commonly called first and second sleep.  During those two waking hours, people might finish chores, talk with their family, or—if they listened to the urgings of the church—engage in prayer.  And I suppose for some people, that holy suggestion was actually true.  For most married couples the most obvious activity was engaging in sex, particularly since it was widely believed that the healthiest children were conceived after first sleep.

People worked hard and usually came home too exhausted to make love, so a brief nap first made sense.  It also explains the high birth rate of Medieval Europe.   (Thirty-five years ago, when I was doing research in Tegucigalpa, the city turned off the water supply for more than twenty hours a day.   The water was turned back on at 4:00 AM, the air escaping from the pipes created a moaning sound all over town.  Locals said this resulted in an incredibly high birth rate because it was too early to get up and too late to go back to sleep.)

This segmented sleep pattern was not just a social convention, it occurred naturally.  Long term experimental studies where people lived in environments without clocks and no access to natural lighting have been conducted.  The subjects slept or worked when they wanted to and were free to set their own schedules.  Over time, they developed a form of polyphasic schedule with some of the subjects developed a midday siesta and others developed the segmented schedule described above.  They also slowly evolved into a 25-hour day, a phenomenon for which I have no explanation.

While there are sufficient references to first and second sleep in medieval records for us to be certain about their sleeping patterns, whether this pattern extends to other cultures is still not clear.  When people set down to record the events of their daily lives, there is a tendency to only record the unique events, not the prosaic.  As an inveterate journal writer, I’ve filled countless Moleskin notebooks, but I doubt that I have ever described how I sleep at night.  We tend to only record the out of the ordinary, and nothing is more routine or boring than our bedtimes.

Pliny left us hints, so it is likely that the Romans had similar biphasic sleep patterns.  About the earlier Greeks—we don’t have a clue.  As for other cultures and times, it seems that some pattern of segmented sleep periods, such as divided nocturnal sleep or a daily siesta seems to be the norm.  Much more research is needed and I expect we will hear more about this in the years to come.

The biphasic sleep patterns of Medieval Europe came to end with the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of artificial lighting.  The invention and increasing availability of affordable candles, oil lamps, and later gas and electric lights allowed people to extend their evening activities, allowing people to stay up later and to slowly consolidate the first and second sleep periods into a single uninterrupted period.

Urbanization and industrial schedules required a more regimented approach to time, with fixed work hours making consolidated nighttime sleep more practical and necessary.  At the same time, the industrial revolution made clocks cheaper, which regimented daily routines further, eroding the natural segmented sleep habits.

The Industrial Revolution also changed society.  Evening activities such as theater, social gatherings, and reading gained popularity, leading people to stay awake later and skip the earlier phase of segmented sleep.  Over time, society came to believe that an interrupted eight-hour sleep period was the healthiest.  Even today, most people believe the single long period of sleep is the best choice, despite the lack of conclusive medical studies supporting that view.

This was all new information to me, and the evidence for biphasic sleeping during medieval times still seems to be making its way through the various academic disciplines.  This made me wonder if this relatively new information would made any changes in art history.  Have we interpreted medieval depictions of sleeping people correctly?  Should certain paintings be reinterpreted?

The painting at right is The Land of Cockaigne, by Pieter Bruegel, the Elder.  The painting shows a peasant, a soldier, and a clerk asleep under a tree.  I won’t bore you with all the competing—and totally contradictory—interpretations of the painting, but I can assure you that none of the competing theories take in the possibility that these are people in their first sleep period.  This was just the first medieval painting depicting sleep that occurred to me, there are countless others.

How will this realization change our interpretations of paintings like this?  How many paintings will need to be reexamined?  I’m looking forward to reading some new interpretations.

The Sinking of the San Telmo

A few weeks ago, I told half of the story about the loss of the Spanish ship San Telmo.  Now, I want to recount the other half of the story.

When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, it set off a chain reaction across Europe and the Americas.  The resulting Peninsular War lasted for six long years leading to the abdication of Napoleon and start of wars for independence for most of the Spanish colonies in the Americas.  Thought Spain would not formally admit the loss of their colonies for years, by the time the Spanish monarchy was restored to the throne, it was almost impossible for Spain to stop the revolutions in Venezuela, Argentina, and Mexico, but Spain was desperate to retain Peru and the silver mines that furnished a third of the royal Spanish income.

By 1819, the Spanish situation was critical.  In a desperate last-ditch effort to squash the revolutions in Chile and Peru, Spain sent a fleet of warships under Brigadier Rosendo Porlier to Peru with the mission of holding on to the mines and the important seaports in Chile and Peru.  While the flagship of the squadron was the San Fernando, among the ships of the convoy was the ill-fated San Telmo, a second-rate ship of the line.

This was the golden age of sailing ships, when warships were rated primarily by their size, how many gundecks, and the total number of cannons on those decks.  Large scale sea battles, like the Battle of Trafalgar were carried out by the largest ships, usually first and second rate ships of the line.  A first-rate ship of the line had three decks and might carry as many as 130 large cannons.  A second-rate ship of the line, the true workhorses of a navy, had two decks and carried 70-80 cannons.

If you are familiar with the movie Master and Commander, the ship used was the HMS Surprise, a frigate and 5th rate ship of the line.  If such a ship was to do battle with either a first- or second-rate ship, it would be roughly equivalent to a nine-year-old having a fist fight with the heavy weight champion of the world.  The child might be able to outmaneuver the boxer for a while, but the fight would be over as soon as soon as the boxer successfully landed his first blow.  Similarly, a single broadside from a second-rate ship of the line would destroy a smaller frigate.

Sailing southwestward from Spain, the ships had to sail around the southern tip of South America, the dreaded Drake Passage, where some of the most violent storms imaginable occur frequently, particularly in winter.  Even today, with modern steel ships and weather forecasts supplied by satellites, ships still suffer accidents in these water, though thankfully they are usually minor.

The San Telmo, a second-rate ship with 74 large guns on two decks was an older ship and was a poor choice to make the difficult voyage.  Launched in 1788, the San Telmo was reaching the end of her useful life.  While the ship had never been involved in a major fleet action, she had been sent several times to the ‘Spanish Main’, the Caribbean, where wooden ships quickly became damaged due to the warm humid climate and the sea worms that burrowed into the hull.  

The fleet arrived in the Drake Passage on September 1, just barely out of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.  In good weather, the San Telmo could have made it through the Drake Passage in nine days.  Unfortunately, the small fleet of ships found anything but good weather.  While ships of the early 19th century carried a weather glass (a crude form of barometer), they had no way of recording accurate weather conditions.  From the descriptions later given by sailors on the surviving ships, it is likely that the fleet sailed directly into full hurricane conditions.  

The San Telmo, fifty feet wide and two-thirds the length of a football field, carried a crew of 644 men.  On September 2, 1819, another ship in the convoy observed that a powerful wave had knocked out the tiller of the San Telmo, rendering the ship impossible to steer.   While the sails could have been set to compensate for the loss of the tiller in calmer seas, in the rough waters of the Drake Passage, the ship was doomed.  The ship was thus presumed to have sunk with her entire crew.

I asked AI to generate a picture of the San Telmo in the Drake Passage and the best I could get was the incorrect image at right.  (AI flatly refused to do any better, falsely claiming that to do so would violate community standards!). There are several things wrong with the image, particularly that no sailing ship in a storm would have this much canvas flying.  Not only would steering the ship be impossible, but the high winds would have destroyed both the rigging and the sails, probably demasting the ship in the process, leaving the ship helpless and doomed.

More likely, the ship would have hauled in her main sails and unfurled smaller triangular storm staysails.  These sails were just large enough to enable the ship to head into the crashing waves, reported by other ships to be as high as 65 feet.  If the ship couldn’t maneuver and turned sideways to the waves, the ship would quickly founder.  At left, is an image of a ship with storm staysails set.

Though explorers would later find evidence that a few survivors might have made their way to Livingston Island, there is no proof that any of crew survived the storm.  Even if a few of the crew managed to land on the island, they either eventually starved to death or died of exposure.

Meanwhile, in Peru, when word of loss of the ship reached Peru, the revolutionaries quickly took advantage of the situation.  Lord Thomas Cochrane, the daring British sailor who would become the model for the Horatio Hornblower series of books and movies as well as the Jack Aubrey novels, had left England to offer his services to the revolutionaries of Chile and Peru.  (Actually, Cochrane was in disgrace, falsely accused of crimes that he would later, in a typically courageous style, receive a pardon and return to England as a hero.)

Valdivia was one of the most fortified locations in South America, with a series of heavily armed forts guarding its approach by sea.  Known as the "Key to the Pacific," it was vital for Spain's control of the region.  The fortress was considered impregnable, with strong natural defenses and a heavily armed garrison.  The long-range guns of the fort were capable of destroying an approaching vessel long before an enemy ship could enter the harbor and turn to fire a broadside.  If troops were landed on shore, there were a series of small defensive forts surrounding the fortress.  Any attacking forces, denied a dock to unload, would only be able to land small cannons, no match for the powerful cannons in both the forts and the main fortress.

Cochrane, leading the newly formed Chilean Navy, devised a bold plan to surprise the Spanish defenders, one that relied on stealth, speed, and deception.  With only 300 marines aboard his flagship, the O'Higgins, and a small support vessel, he decided to use the loss of the San Telmo to his advantage.

Cochrane approached the port in darkness, using captured Spanish flags to disguise his ships as friendly.  Using signal flags, Cochrane claimed his ship contained reinforcements from the San Telmo.   Under cover of night, he landed his small force of marines far from the main fortress, marching them overland to launch a surprise assault on the least-defended positions.

Cochrane's men attacked the outermost forts one by one, moving swiftly to overwhelm the defenders.  Their element of surprise and disciplined aggression allowed Marines to capture each of the small forts before the Spanish could organize a counterattack.  Once all the outer defenses fell, Cochrane’s forces moved on the central fortress, which surrendered after realizing resistance was futile.

The loss of Valdivia was a major loss to the Spanish government and helped pave the way for Chilean Independence, after which the forces in Chile moved northward to help secure Peruvian Independence.  Linking up with the army of Simon Bolivar as he moved southward from Columbia and Venezuela, Spain eventually would lose Peru, too.

Like dominoes falling one by one, the loss of the San Telmo led to the loss of the Valdivia, which led to the loss of Chile and later Peru.  With the loss of the silver mines of South America, Spain, once the most powerful nation in Europe, was no longer even a second-rate power.  Though it would take another 80 years for the United States to deliver the final blow, the Spanish Empire was over.