The Shortest War in History

Among the myriad of reasons for the first world war, the mounting problems of imperialism rank high on the list.  The Western powers had effectively divided up the developing countries like a pizza at a frat house party, and some of the bigger boys had grabbed more than their share.

This was particularly true of Great Britain and Germany, each of whom was intent on grabbing as much of Africa as possible.  (If you are wondering, France was still recovering from the end of its last period of monarchy—at least so far—with the ouster of Napoleon III.  And yes, I managed to sneak Napoleon into another blog post.  In a few more paragraphs, I’ll do it again.)

In the 1880’s, ministers from both Great Britain and Germany had meetings to divide the remaining “unclaimed” territories.  Maps were redrawn, a few geographical locations swapped, and treaties were signed.  It is noteworthy that no Africans were invited to attend these meetings, and none would have been admitted had they shown the temerity to show up.  As a result, as World War I began, the only independent country on the African continent was Liberia, the country the United States had founded with repatriated former slaves.  Naturally, these divisions brought on numerous wars, not only between colonizers and the colonized, but between the European powers themselves.  All of Africa would have been far more peaceful if the various heads of Europe had just played a couple of hands of poker using the various African territories as poker chips.

One of those private treaties signed far from Africa and almost as far from any Africans was the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty, which gave Germany a few islands in the North Sea and access to the Zambezi River in Africa (not to be confused with the gray-green, greasy Limpopo River, which was already jointly held by the British and the Elephant’s Child).  The British gained territory in Africa including Zanzibar and a ten-mile strip of coastal land in present day Kenya that was referred to as the Zanz.  The new transferal of title was to come as a shock to the Sultan who ruled the area.

The Sultan was not removed, of course:  Britain just established Zanz as a Protectorate, sending advisors from the colonial office, along with enough ships from the British Navy to ensure that the advisors were listened to.  If you are unsure exactly what a Protectorate is, British Prime Minister Salisbury defined it for us:

The condition of a protected dependency is more acceptable to the half civilized races, and more suitable for them than direct dominion. It is cheaper, simpler, less wounding to their self-esteem, gives them more career as public officials, and spares them unnecessary contact with white men.

Exactly who was really in power became transparent when Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini died on 25 August 1896.  Wisely listening to his viziers who had counted the number of guns on the British warships in the harbor, the sultan had been pro-British, at least publicly.  His successor, Sultan Khalid bin Barghash, hated the British and was absolutely not acceptable to the British Foreign Office.

The British waited two whole days, then ordered Khalid to step down so that a more agreeable Sultan could take the throne.  Khalid refused, gathered together his palace guard, and hastily began erecting barricades at the wooden palace which was unfortunately located way too close to the harbor.  Eventually, the defenders numbered 2,800, including Khalid’s slaves and servants.  These troops were poorly armed with an aging Gatling gun, two Maxim machine guns (a gift from Germany), two 12” field guns, and a 17th century bronze cannon.

The entire Zanzibar Navy was also present:  one aging royal yacht, the wooden hulled sloop, the HHS Glasgow.  She was armed with seven ancient 9-inch cannon and a Gatling gun that ironically had been a present to the previous sultan from Queen Victoria.  This ship had already been retired, but was brought back into service for the looming battle.

Note.  The HHS stood for ‘His Highness’ Ship’.  If the varying prefixes in front of the names of ships are confusing, I suggest you read this.

The British had a force that included three cruisers, two gunboats, 150 Marines and the official Zanzibar Army (a force of 900 locals under the command of a British general).  If you believe, as I do, the old military maxim that God is always on the side of the heaviest artillery, Sultan Khalid was screwed.  

The British gave Sultan Khalid until 9:00 AM on August 27, 1896 to surrender and vacate the palace.  Starting about an hour before the deadline, a series of messages went back and forth between the British and the Sultan, and while I could quote them exactly, the gist of the messages was the Sultan saying, “I don’t think you will really do it” with the British responding with “Yes, we will.”

When no surrender was received, the British fleet began firing at 9:02, with the first volley destroying much of the Zanzibar defending artillery.  Wooden barricades on a wooden building proved to be no match for the high explosive rounds fired by the British warships.

At 9:05, the HHS Glasgow fired on the British cruiser, the HMS St. George.  The cruiser returned fire, immediately holing the Glasgow below the waterline.  The Glasgow immediately raised a Union Jack as a sign of surrender as the old ship settled to the bottom, her jutting masts still visible.  Lifeboats from the five British ships that were literally surrounding the doomed vessel, rescued all of the ship’s crew.  (Part of the ship is still in the harbor, occasionally visited by sport divers.)

The British ships also began firing on the Palace and its defenders, knocking out all of the defending artillery within a few minutes.  The shelling from the British ships continued until 9:40, by which point there was little left to fire on.  The Palace was in ruins—even the Sultan’s flag had been shot away.  Unfortunately, the Sultan’s nearby harem was also destroyed. 

While the Sultan managed to escape out the back door of the palace, over 500 of the defenders had been killed during the bombardment.  On the British side, one sailor was wounded but recovered.  The British ships and crews had fired around 500 shells, 4,100 machine gun rounds and 1,000 rifle rounds during the engagement.  Depending on whether you believe the war started when the deadline ran out or when the ships began their barrage, what became known as the Anglo-Zanzibar War lasted either 38 or 40 minutes, easily the shortest war in history.

The territory of Zanz remained a protectorate until 1963.  And what happened to Khalid, the deposed Sultan?  The British captured him during World War I and for a time kept him prisoner on St. Helena, once the island where the British had kept Napoleon prisoner.  Eventually, Winston Churchill allowed Khalid to return home.

Where Are the Seaplanes?

It is a commonly understood maxim of war that conflict accelerates the rate of change and innovation.  Military historians usually concentrate on the rapid rate of technical innovation and how the use of new weaponry dramatically changes the way wars are fought.

These fascinating technological changes are easy to see.  Aviation in World War II, for example, began with the military still using cloth-covered biplanes, but by the time the war was over, both rocket and jet planes were being flown.  Unfortunately, nowhere does mankind show more creativity and innovation than when improving the ways we can kill each other.  

Almost forgotten—at least by military historians—are the ways that war changes society, too.  In the twentieth century, America’s wars helped end segregation, boosted the status of women, founded new cities, and improved health care by promoting the use of antibiotics and streamlining the ways that health care was delivered.  The HMO, for example, was developed to provide medical care to the workers who built Liberty Ships at the Kaiser Shipyards.  Today, Kaiser Permanente serves 12 million members.

Among the forgotten social changes brought on by that war is one that has affected almost everyone alive today.  During the decade before the war, the most common method of transcontinental air travel was by using a flying boat.  Huge lumbering seaplanes connected America with Europe, island-hopped across the Pacific, and made regular trips to Central and South America.  

The flying public—what little there was of it—liked the idea of flying boats.  If something should happen to the plane, it could safely land in the middle of the ocean and await rescue (perhaps done quickly by another flying boat).  And these huge flying boats were comfortable, with large roomy seats that could be converted to full bunks, as well as lounges where passengers could relax, eating their luxurious meals in a dining room crewed by chefs hired away from four-star hotels.  This kind of luxury was a necessity to satisfy wealthy passengers who were paying the equivalent of today's $15,000 for a nineteen-hour flight from New York to London.  These luxurious planes were obviously the wave of the future, according to anyone who knew about them. 

Planes like the Boeing Flying Clippers were the standard of luxury.  These planes were 106 feet long and carried a crew of 11 that tended to the 36 passengers as the plane cruised at less that 200 mph across the Atlantic.  The only flying boat larger than the Clippers was the Spruce Goose, (actually officially called the H4 Hercules)—a plane that was designed to carry 750 men over 3000 miles at the incredible speed of 250 mph.  (Though Howard Hughes designed, built, and piloted the plane on its only flight, it was actually Henry Kaiser, the man who built the Liberty Boats and started the first HMO, who came up with the idea for the plane.)

The safety record for land-based planes surviving a ditching at sea is poor, even today.  There are a few surprising stories of planes forced to land in the ocean without casualties (the miraculous story of Pan Am Flight 943 comes to mind), but the public preferred the idea of a safe flying boat.

Flying boats had another advantage over land-based aircraft:  In the decades before the war, few metropolitan areas either in America or abroad had the large amount of open land required to locate an airport and the few towns that did have an airfield usually had muddy, grass-covered runways that were too short for all but the smallest of planes.  Large bodies of water, however, could be found close to almost every large city anywhere in the world.

Even today, over a third of the world’s population lives within an hour’s drive of an ocean.  Add in large rivers and lakes, and the number of sites at which seaplanes could be used goes up to serve over half the population of the world.  Even here in New Mexico, I live within just a few miles of the mighty Rio Grande.  (And while that river has water in it only about six months a year, the entire state will have beach front property as soon as the ‘Big One’ hits California.)

Even in pre-war America, with a population just over a third the size of today’s, the cost of buying and clearing enough land to build runways a mile and half long in already urbanized areas was too cost prohibitive for most cities to even contemplate.  Then, the war started and airports, with new long and wide concrete runways became a military priority in every country.  Within just a few years, it would become hard to find a large city in either America or Europe that lacked a decent airport.

During the war, flying boats were used successfully for reconnaissance and rescue, but large, land-based aircraft were being built by the tens of thousands and each new generation of planes was larger and faster than the previous models.  While seaplanes were used during the war, they were smaller, hardier work horses like the PBY Catalina, not the flying luxurious flying boats that carried rich passengers.

Years ago, I knew a retired doctor who had served in World War II as a navigator aboard B-17’s flying over Europe.  After his plane reached 25 missions, almost a miracle at the time, the crew was sent home.  Eventually, he was redeployed as a navigator on a PBY in the South Pacific.  According to him, his actual job on the plane was to keep track of a rubber hammer and a bag of golf tees.  After every water landing, he would race around the bottom hull of the plane looking for popped rivets, promptly hammering in a golf tee to stop the leak before the plane sank.  While I didn’t swallow this story whole, I’m pretty sure it is somewhere near the truth.

Those old flying boats, like the Boeing Clippers, were too slow to fly in a war zone and were grounded for the rest of the war.  Not a single example would survive the next decade.  If you want to see one today, the closest you will come is a non-flying replica in a museum in Ireland.

With the war’s end, land-based aircraft were easier to produce, safer to fly, cheaper to operate, and were much easier for pilots to learn how to fly.  The day of the flying boat, except for a few limited special operations, was over.  One company thought otherwise and tried one last grand experiment to revive the transatlantic use of seaplanes.

In 1943, the British aircraft manufacturer began designing a new generation of luxury flying boats, including a plane large enough to carry a hundred passengers and crew over 5,000 miles at the amazing speed of 360 mph.  Naturally, since 1943 was in the middle of the war, the company had to wait a few years to actually build this marvel, but the SR.45 Princess, was finally built after the war, taking flight in 1951.  Unfortunately, that was also the first year for a jet-powered transport plane, the de Havilland Comet, to become operational.  Though the Princess was built and actually flew, no airlines were interested in trying to turn back the aviation clock, preferring to buy jet aircraft instead of flying boats.  After years in storage, the Princess was scrapped.  There are still seaplanes, but the days of grand flying boats ae over.

Today, none of those grand old flying boats remain and traveling on airlines today has all the class and comfort of spending the weekend in the county jail.  If the war had never occurred, perhaps we would still be flying on luxurious seaplanes, enjoying fine meals in spacious dining rooms.  This is all something to think about the next time you are crammed into a small seat designed for children, hoping to score a miniature bag of peanuts from an overworked flight attendant.  

Buried Napoleons and Other Nonsense

Today is the Ides of April and my thoughts keep spinning around the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of Lincoln, and (unfortunately) Napoleon.  I say “unfortunately” because every time I write about the little emperor, angry readers send email reminding me that I have written way, way too frequently about the diminutive Corsican whom the British monarchy referred to as the “Beast”.

I apologize in advance.  While many of the posts in this blog tell an orderly story, with a solid beginning, lots of details, and a solid conclusion…. too many others bounce along, jumping from topic to topic to topic, reminiscent of a ping-pong ball going down a long flight of stairs.  This is one of the latter.

Napoleon, of course, wrote his last will and testament on April 15, 1821, just three weeks before he died of stomach cancer,… or gallstones,… or pneumonia.  Or, maybe, he was assassinated by the British oligarchy, as Napoleon declared in his will.  Famously, the second line of his will states: “It is my wish that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French people, whom I have loved so well.”

The phrase “my ashes” has caused no end of confusion with historians for years.  Napoleon was not cremated nor did he wish to be, the word ashes refers to a French idiom, referring to the whole remains of deceased person, much like the phrase “dust to dust” in English.  The confusion also led to endless speculation that Napoleon was secretly smuggled off St. Helena to plan his triumphant return to Europe.  (Publicly, I can neither confirm nor deny that Napoleon is currently shacked up in a messy love triangle with Elvis and Amelia Earhart at Camp David.)

When the Emperor died in 1821, an autopsy was performed, discovering a stomach tumor that was attributed to gallstones.  His viscera were removed and placed in a large soup tureen until jars could be located.  The body, along with those jars, was placed in a tin coffin that was soldered shut, which in turn was placed in a mahogany coffin that was closed and fastened with screws.  This coffin was then placed inside a lead coffin with the seams soldered shut, then finally placed inside a larger mahogany enclosure, which was buried in a stone-lined crypt and covered with cement.  Evidently, the British were just a little afraid that the Beast might decide to wake up and raise another army.

Almost two decades later, King Louis Philippe of France decided that the emperor’s remains had to be brought back to Paris.  In the presence of both English and French officials who had been present at the 1821 funeral, the coffin was dug up, the outer wooden coffin demolished and the three inner coffins opened.  Napoleon was still recognizable to those present.  Then, the three coffins were resealed, with both the tin and lead coffins having their seams soldered shut again.  The body was then shipped to Paris and placed in the sarcophagus at Les Invalides where it still remains.  Despite the persistent rumors, there is no reason to believe that the coffins have been opened since 1840.

Which brings us back to Napoleon’s will.  The emperor had not only been generous, he was a little overly generous, leaving more bequests than his estate could handle.  Worse, he left sums of money to people that the authorities—including King Louis Philippe—didn’t really like.  All of this meant lawsuits and court cases that lasted until 1860.  A significant part of the problem was that Napoleon’s principle heir, his son Napoleon II, died in 1832 at the age of 22, long before the estate was finalized.

Young Napoleon II died of pneumonia in Vienna.  As his mother was a Hapsburg, the family followed the royal tradition and carefully removed his heart and viscera.  Following the long-established Hapsburg tradition, his heart was stored in Urn 42 in the Herzgruff (Heart Crypt) and his other assorted viscera are stored in Urn 76 a couple of blocks away at the Kaisergruft (Ducal Crypt).  The rest of him was buried.  Over a century later, Adolf Hitler moved the body to Paris and buried him underground in his father’s tomb, but left the squishy parts in their jars in Vienna.

While it has been fairly common knowledge that removing the internal organs will aid in the preservation of a body—that’s why the ancient Egyptians stored the organs of the deceased in canopic jars—this doesn’t seem to be the reason for why the monarchs of Austria believed in home canning.  Why did the Hapsburgs decide to pickle intestines?  Well, compared to what the other branch of the Hapsburg family does with their deceased, it’s almost normal.  When thinking about any part of the Hapsburg dynasty, it’s useful to remember that the family is so inbred that if common sense were leather, the collected brains of the whole family couldn’t shoe a flea.

Which brings us to Napoleon III, the first president of the French Republic who later seized the throne and became the second Emperor of France.  Louis Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was kind of a jack of all trades.  He was once a London constable, wrote a manual for artillery, was a friend of Charles Dickens, and after his abdication, spent his years in exile in England trying to develop an energy efficient stove.  Like his famous uncle, he developed gallstones and died from complications after the second surgery to correct the problem.

Napoleon III’s son, wasn’t officially Napoleon IV—though I’m going to call him that—he was Napoléon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph Bonaparte, The Prince Imperial or just plain Lou-Lou to his friends.  He did what every Napoleon before him had done:  he went to a military school and joined the army.  In Lou-Lou’s case, it was the Royal Military Academy and the Royal Artillery.  Unlikely as it seems, Napoleon IV was a Lieutenant in the British Army.  Equally weird, Queen Victoria was planning on marrying her youngest daughter, Beatrice to the young man as soon as his military unit returned from fighting the Zulus in Africa.  

Note:  The Queen had a plan to homestead all of Europe by marrying eight of her nine children off to the heads of European countries.  The idea was that if the head of every European nation were a member of the same family, this would prevent war, right?  During the First World War, the Russian Czar, the German Kaiser, and the King of England were all first cousins, and despite sharing a royal grandmother, they still took the world to war.  

Unfortunately, from the picture at right, you can see that Lou-Lou did not live long enough to fulfill his destiny and reestablish French Monarchy.  After dying in a skirmish with the Zulu, his body was returned to his mother, who buried both her son and her husband in the Imperial Crypt at St Michael's Abbey, Farnborough, Hampshire, England.  I cannot find evidence of any other monument in England honoring a Napoleon.

One last thing about Napoleon IV.  All of the history books say he was killed by an assegai spear.  If you actually read the official report, he had eighteen separate stab wounds, including the fatal one that punctured his left eye and pierced his brain.  These wounds, however, weren’t from an assegai spear.

The original assegai spear is slightly more than six and a half feet long, with a metal double edge tip.  Shaka Zulu, the legendary Zulu leader, modified the weapon, shortening the wooden handle to just two feet while lengthening the sharp blade to a full foot, this giving the warrior a weapon that could be thrown, or used in close combat as a combination sword and ax.  This weapon, called the iklwa or ixwa, was the weapon that killed Napoleon IV.

The strangely named weapon is pronounced as E-KWA, which according to the Zulu, is the sound the weapon makes when you pull it out of your victim.

How to Pick a Vice-President

When Porfirio Diaz seized the presidency of Mexico in 1876, the country had been almost bypassed by the social and industrial revolutions that had changed most of the modern world in the nineteenth century.  Mexico was blessed with abundant natural resources but had, in the three decades prior, suffered through a violent civil war and two foreign invasions that had caused both the loss of half her territory and the destruction of the economy.

Though Diaz ruled as a dictator, who crushed political rivals and allowed editors personal freedoms only when it benefitted himself, he did modernize the country.  Where his predecessor, Benito Juarez, had felt that “there should be a desert between the rich and the poor”, Diaz immediately encouraged trade with the United States, having compared the shape of his country to a cornucopia that poured out her riches into her northern neighbor—who was eager to buy what Mexico could export.

As President, Diaz prospered during the rapid modernization of Mexico.  Within the span of twenty years, Mexico paid off the national debt, balanced its budget, laid thousands of miles of railroad lines, expanded the mining industry, and made the ruling elite truly rich.  

While the favored few became prosperous, the lives of ordinary peasants were little changed and arguably worse off than when Cortez had conquered the Aztecs four centuries earlier.   What Diaz actually did was create two societies within a single country.  If you were rich, you rode electric street cars down well-lighted boulevards to the new opera house.  If you were poor, you lived in squalor and watched your wife die during childbirth in a dirt-floored hovel.  While Mexican government bonds were highly sought after as a safe form of investment in London and New York, agricultural workers in Mexican fields needed the written permission of their hacienda owners to move and seek employment elsewhere.

Diaz learned political survival skills rapidly, eventually holding onto his office so long that the people of Mexico began referring to him as Don Perpetuo—no mean feat in a country previously noted for its frequent revolutions.  (In the previous 55 years following Mexico’s separation from Spain, the Mexican head of state had changed more than eighty times and the list of rulers included two monarchs.  One man, Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana appears on the list seven times.)

Diaz had a talent for co-opting the positions of his political opponents before they could gain sufficient prominence to be serious rivals.  If an opponent complained that Diaz wasn’t doing enough to provide housing for the poor, for example, Diaz would agree, hire the opponent as his new Minister of Housing, provide him with a big salary and an office, and give him just enough authority to keep him busy.  Diaz learned that it was better to keep his enemies inside the tent pissing out than outside it pissing in.

Diaz knew the power of the press, and knew that it was all but impossible to keep Mexican newspapers from printing the obvious truth that he was ruling as a dictator, rigging elections, buying off the opponents who were greedy and utilizing assassins to handle those who weren’t.  So Diaz bought the more prominent newspapers and closed their competition.  Since Diaz was smart enough to know there are always underground newspapers, Diaz secretly owned them, too, firing the good writers and keeping those less skilled and ineffectual.

Truly skilled at political survival, Diaz had the record for being the longest surviving Latin American dictator until the new high-water mark was set by Fidel Castro (who had studied Porfirio Diaz).  Almost the only political flaw in Diaz’s political armor was his age.  Aged 46 when he seized control, by the turn of the century he was…. well, my age.  No longer quite as flexible as in his early years (even his collection of crony ministers was aging), and now,  Diaz faced new pressures.

One frequent request to the Mexican president was that he appoint a Vice-President, something that the wily Diaz had always avoided.  Now in his seventies, Diaz agreed and began searching for a suitable politician to share a small measure of power.  Eventually, he settled on Ramon Corral, the governor of the Mexico City Federal District.  (The Mexican Distrito Federal or D.F. is roughly analogous with our Washington D.C.—the location of the capitol but not part of any state.)

Corral got his start in Sonora, where the post revolution chaos offered plenty of economic opportunities for a politician ruthless enough to seize the property of Yaquis, widows or anyone who had been displaced by the violence of war.  When dealing with the local Indians, Ramon Corral had a reputation for being harsh and unforgiving, allowing him to quickly prosper.   It didn’t take long for the politician to outgrow the opportunities that Sonora had to offer, so he accepted the new job in Mexico City.

Porfirio Diaz, once a general famous for defeating the French Army, was now desperately trying to remake most of upper Mexican society to resemble Paris.  Men dressed in the latest French fashion, spoke French, and drank imported champagne.  Corral was put in charge of an urban renewal project that would transform the capitol into the new French style Diaz craved.  To create the new wide boulevards and parks, the homes of the poor were torn down.  Streets were torn up to install the new electric lines the streetcars required.  And Corral spent a fortune building new sidewalks and installing electric lights in the richest part of town.  For the poorer parts of town, Corral did almost nothing.

Of all the men that Porfirio Diaz could have picked to be his vice-president, Ramon Corral was a baffling choice to many Mexicans.  Not only was Corral universally despised by the people, but Diaz had ignored several other politicians who were far more popular.  General Reyes of the Mexican Army, for example, was widely respected and would have gained popular support from the citizens, whereas Corral had few friends and many enemies.

For those more familiar with President Diaz, however, the choice of a universally despised politician for his second in command made perfect sense.  Insiders joked that with Ramon Corral as vice-president, all of Mexico went to bed every night earnestly praying for the continued good health of President Diaz.

The Strategic Oil Reserve

It started with the 1973 oil crisis.  The Middle Eastern oil exporting nations, led by Saudi Arabia, were angry about losing to Israel in the Yom Kippur War.  Since Israel had been supported both economically and militarily by Western Europe and the United States, the Saudis and their allies responded with a new weapon: oil.

Declaring an embargo, these countries stopped exporting oil to the western allies of Israel, creating shortages of gasoline and sending the price of petroleum products through the roof.  Before the embargo was stopped six months later,  price of oil rose from $3 a barrel to $12 a barrel.  The twin shocks of rising prices and market shortages triggered a tidal wave of political actions in the United States, almost none of which were based on economic reality (or even on common sense).

Cheap foreign oil had shut down a lot of US domestic oil production, slowing exploration for new fields.  While many of those older oil fields could begin production again, the lag between drilling for oil and pumping refined gasoline into the tank of your car meant that there were bound to be shortages and rapidly rising prices.  All of America panicked and rushed those huge American land yachts to the nearest gas station to fill up the tanks.

At least, they tried to:  At any given time in the next year, about 20% of the nation’s gas stations were shut down, sold out of gasoline.  And this is when the federal government stepped in and started being stupid.  Gasoline sales were limited to a maximum of 10 gallons and motorists could only pump that limited amount on alternating days, assigned by the last digit of their license plates.  Odd-numbered plates could wait in line to buy gas only on odd numbered days, alternating with those with even-numbered plates, who lined up on even dates.  The level of cooperation required of the public was slightly beyond its reach, so violence between angry drivers waiting in line was frequent.

I remember that at a hotel where I was working during what became known as the ‘Middle East Oil Crisis’, about once a month we caught someone stealing gas in the parking lot with an ‘Oklahoma Gas Tank’.  For those of you not lucky enough to be from Texas, that’s about six feet of rubber hose.

This rationing system, like almost all rationing historically, was completely backwards.  Consumers, fearing the day when they would be unable to start the family car, waited in line as often as they were allowed, buying tiny amounts of gasoline to ‘top off’ a tank.  A more logical system would have mandated a 10-gallon minimum sale, and allowed people to purchase every day of the week.  Most of the panic among consumers was perpetuated by—if not caused by—illogical government mandates. 

President Nixon also imposed wage and price controls for the second time during his presidency.  (Why not?—they had already failed spectacularly the first time.)  Oil producers were allowed to raise prices on production from new wells, but not on that from existing wells, despite rising inflation that made operating the old wells increasingly costly.  Naturally, the oil producers simply shut down the old wells completely, worsening the oil shortage.  Since increased regulations and price restrictions discouraged new production, there was also little incentive for new exploration or energy innovation.  

Suddenly faced with the reality of sudden oil shortages, Congress created the Energy Policy and Conservation Agency in 1975, tasked with the responsibility of safely stockpiling an emergency supply of petroleum.  The kinds of emergencies envisioned ranged from war, to another embargo, to a major hurricane striking the Gulf Coast.   Up to a billion barrels of oil was to be stored underground in salt domes.  (And no—the risk of contamination of the water table is very low since the salt domes are far below the water table.)

While the emergency reserves have never actually been filled to capacity, under presidential authority, the stockpiles have been tapped successfully several times to offset temporary shortages and forestall impending price increases.  During the Arab Spring uprisings that disrupted exports and following the shutdown of Gulf Coast refineries from Hurricane Katrina, millions of barrels of oil were auctioned off to nearby refineries to stabilize production.  Such releases from the reserves have generally been successful, keeping employment relatively high and forestalling short term shortages of gasoline and heating oil.

Far less successful have been the times that presidents have ordered releases in an attempt to lower the market price of gasoline.  In total, the United States has the capacity to store slightly more than a billion barrels of oil, and has the theoretical ability to transfer that oil back to refineries at the rate of 4 million barrels of oil a day.  These numbers sound staggeringly high, but in reality, it is nowhere near the amount of oil the world uses daily.  Our entire reserves, if stocked to capacity, would supply the petroleum the world currently uses for about one day.  Technically, this is a flea fart in a hurricane.  And America has slightly more than half the reserves currently being stockpiled globally.  

Today, with rising inflation and skyrocketing energy prices, there are once again calls for governments to impose price controls.  Mexico is close to putting limits on the price of food, almost guaranteeing shortages and starvation.  Albania is drafting legislation to curb price hikes on oil and gas.  Some politicians in Washington are proposing that the price of heating oil and gasoline be determined by the Department of Energy.  And President Biden has just authorized the release of a million barrels of oil per day from the strategic reserves for the next six months in an attempt to lower the price of gas at the pump.

There are three big reasons why this is a bad idea.

First, there are currently only 585 million barrels of oil in the reserve (roughly half of the capacity of what those salt domes will hold).  If we release the oil as planned, there will be roughly 450 million barrels remaining as we enter hurricane season.  Should a major hurricane cripple production and refining along the Gulf Coast, we might see gas prices even higher than we have now.

Second, Congress is a bunch of cheap bastards and when it comes time to buy oil to fill those reserves, they always opt for the cheapest grades of petroleum on the market.  Our reserves are not filled with West Texas Intermediate.  No—our government fills those reserves with ‘sour’ crude, oil with very high sulfur content that is relatively more expensive to refine into gasoline.  While none of that oil has been purchased yet, it is far more likely that this dirty oil will be used to produce heating oil rather than gasoline.  And don’t forget that oil has to be replaced, so, when the government finally gets around to refilling the reserve, it will end up buying more crap oil but paying a higher price for it.

And third, price fixing by Washington never works.  America uses about 100 million barrels of oil a day and suddenly adding an extra 1% of dirty oil to the supply on the market.... will do nothing pricewise.  And I can prove it.  Do you remember how much the price of gasoline dropped last November when the government released 30 million barrels of oil to help lower prices?

No, and neither does anyone else.

A Very Fine Cat Indeed

There are great books that for reasons that escape me, people have simply stopped reading.  I am talking about classics that anyone with a liberal education always read a half century ago.  Books that were frequently discussed, referenced in magazine articles and movies….and then just stopped being read by all but a few academics specializing in a narrow field.  

The Education of Henry Adams, Don Quixote, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Flowers in the Attic, Oliver Twist, and on and on and on.  If you find someone who has actually read one of these books, the reader invariably sighs, “because we had to in school”, followed with the obligatory “hated it”.  (I could have added The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the list, but I refuse to believe that anyone who has not read Twain’s opus is either literate or an adult.)

Something is killing literacy in adults.  Can we blame movies?  Online media?  Processed cheese?  Rap Music?  I have no idea, but the trend seems to be both universal and irreversible.  How many people do you know who have bookshelves bigger than their television?  Or even a comfortable chair with a good lamp for reading?

The apparently forgotten book that prompted this rant is The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell—the book that set the standard for future biographies.   One of the great joys of owning this book is the opportunity to open to a random page and read a stirring passage.  Without fail, every time I leaf through the book, I end up reading several chapters.  And without a doubt, my favorite part of the book is Chapter 14, in which Boswell describes Johnson playing with his cats, Lily and Hodge.  Hodge, as Boswell infamously recorded, was “a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.”  (And if you want to read the book, you can find it for free here.)

Boswell admits to being far from an ailurophile (someone who completely understands the joys of befriending a harmless, necessary cat).  Still, he marveled that Dr. Johnson would venture out daily to buy fresh oysters for Hodge, afraid to give the task to his servants lest they begin to resent his favorite cat.  (And before you think this was an extravagant meal for a cat, oysters were so plentiful along the shores of Great Britain at that time that they were considered standard fare for the poor.)

The love affair between Dr. Johnson and his cats was so famous that it is fairly hard to find a reference to the famous writer and lexicographer that does not mention Hodge, his favorite feline.  Johnson himself referenced the cat frequently in his writings.  When Hodge passed away at home, lovingly cared for by Dr. Johnson, two different poets and friends of the famous writer, wrote elegies in the cat’s honor.

When Marion Chesney wrote the Agatha Raisin mystery books, she gifted her heroine with two cats, named Hodge and Boswell, without bothering to explain the origin of the names.  I guess the author believed anyone smart enough to read her books was probably well read enough not to need an explanation, which also explains why the television show with the same name did not originally include the felines in the cast.

Over the centuries, Hodge has become famous in his own right as writers have written poetry about him, have included him in stories, and in one case, featured him in a work of science fiction in which the cat is catnapped from 18th century London by a time traveler.  A google search for “bookstore and Hodge” shows that there are dozens of bookstores worldwide that have cats named in honor of Hodge.  Even the Church of England has been smitten:  the new mouser adopted by Southwark Cathedral in London has been christened Hodge. Supposedly, more visitors come to see the cat than the cathedral’s architecture.

As I have noted in the last couple of weeks, London has so many statues and monuments that it is not surprising that even Hodge has one.   In 1997, the Lord Mayor of London unveiled a bronze statue of Hodge in front of Gough House, the home that Dr. Johnson, Lily, and Hodge shared.  The cat is seen sitting atop a copy of Johnson’s dictionary, with a pile of empty oyster shells in front of him.  The statue’s inscription, of course, says “a very fine cat indeed”.

What the monument does not say, however, is that no one has a clue what the original Hodge looked like.  Boswell’s notes for his biography span 18 volumes, but he never wrote a single work describing the cat’s appearance.  And while Dr. Johnson had his own portrait painted several times, he was wise enough not to try to pose with Hodge in his lap.  (Boswell did record that Hodge preferred sitting on his shoulder.)

When the sculptor, Jon Bickley, created the work, he took a little artistic license.  Bickley used his own cat, Thomas Henry, as the model.  Still, no one can prove that the statue doesn’t look like Hodge.

The Needle

If we start at the very beginning, as historians are wont to do unless threatened with violence, we have to go back three thousand five hundred years to the quarry at Syené, famed for being the source of rose-colored granite.  Using an iron chisel to drill holes, the workmen pounded wooden wedges into the holes.  The wedges were soaked in water and slowly expanded, splitting off a long solid rectangle of seamless granite.  Though the unfinished stone weighed well over 250 tons, it will be moved by hand to the site where the artists will dress the stone and prepare it for display.

The stone was laboriously moved by ropes and wooden rollers to a tributary of the Nile River where a deep hole had been dug and a wooden barge had been built in the depression.  After the stone had been placed upon the barge, the sand between the pit and river was dug out, floating the barge that was then towed 600 miles to Heliopolis.  

Once the monolith reached the intended site, workmen began the lengthy job of cutting and polishing the stone.  Once prepared, a pit was dug under the base of the stone and thousands of men pulling with ropes were finally able to stand the 68-foot polished obelisk upright.  After it was firmly anchored, stone masons then carved hieroglyphs on two opposing sides honoring the pharaoh, Thutmose III.  I’d furnish a translation but it is mostly lots of lofty prose about how much Thutmose is the reincarnation of the sun god.  Rah! Rah! Ra!

While records of how long it took to finish cutting, polishing, and engraving the stone no longer exist, the records for similar monuments suggest that the process may have taken 20 years or more.  While this might seem like a excessive time, remember that all the work was done by hand and (so far) the work has lasted more than three and a half millennia.  Using the very best in modern machinery, my city has had to repave the street in from of my house roughly every eight years.

Two centuries later, Ramesses II took advantage of the two blank sides of the obelisk and added a little more prose about his own recent military victories.  Considering that it took two decades to erect your own obelisk, placing your ads on a billboard that was already standing is understandable.  Ramesses II did this to a lot of monuments, linking himself to respected, previous pharaohs, but electing to chisel out the references to other, less popular leaders.  

In 12 BC, the obelisk was one of two moved to Alexandria to decorate the Caesarium, designed by Cleopatra to honor both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, but this monument was not completed until after her death, during the reign of Caesar Augustus.  There, the two obelisks stood side by side for a long time.  No one is sure when our obelisk toppled over and was half buried by the blowing sands, but it was described as fallen by visitors repeatedly for centuries.  It was partially uncovered by the scientists who accompanied Napoleon after he conquered the fortified city on June 1, 1798.

Three years later, the obelisk was in view when Napoleon lost the Battle of Alexandria, ending the French occupation of Egypt.  In appreciation for that victory as well as Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile, Khedive Muhammad Ali Pasha gave the obelisk to the British Government in 1819.  Unfortunately, after decades of fighting the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Americans, and damn near everyone else on the planet, the British were just a little short of cash for shipping, so while grateful, they let the monolith just stay where it was.

As the blowing sands once again slowly covered the monument, all of Europe became increasingly fascinated with all things Egypt, in part fueled by all the great quantity of artifacts that Napoleon had stolen, only to have them liberated by England.  By liberating, I mean the British kept them safe in the British Museum in London.  

In 1877, Sir William James Erasmus Wilson, a London doctor, decided it was time for England to pick up its present.  Raising £10,000 (the equivalent of £1,000,000 in today’s money), Wilson began the arduous project of bringing the obelisk back to London.  Hoping for government support of the project, a more or less accurate wooden reproduction of the obelisk was erected in front of parliament, the location in which Wilson hoped to place the monument.

For the first time in almost two millennia, the stone was completely uncovered, and just in the nick of time, for the locals had forgotten the location of the obelisk and were in the process of building a house over it.  Working with railway engineers, the monument was enclosed in a watertight iron tube, 95 feet long and 16 feet in diameter.  The container, equipped with a keel, a rudder, and a platform for mounting sails, was constructed in London, shipped in pieces to Alexandria, and reassembled around the obelisk.  The resulting strange ship—technically a pontoon barge—was christened the Cleopatra, after the queen who probably never came anywhere near the stone in life.  This strange vessel was to be towed to England by the steamship Olga.

When the voyage was almost complete, a storm arose in the Bay of Biscay.  In the rough seas, the long tube began rolling uncontrollably despite the best efforts of the crew, six of whom lost their life in the attempt.  When the Cleopatra began taking on water, the Captain of the Olga cut loose the pontoon and reported the vessel as ”abandoned and sinking”.

Four days later, a Glasgow steamer discovered the abandoned Cleopatra, still afloat, and towed her to Spain, immediately filing a salvage claim against the vessel.  After settling the claim, a British steam-powered paddle tug finished the job of towing the Cleopatra to London, finally arriving on January 21, 1878.  By now, the obelisk was generally believed to be cursed, so Parliament declined the honor of having the monument erected nearby, and the obelisk was finally erected at the Victoria Wharf on the Thames River.  

To honor the obelisk, large brass sphinxes was placed on either side of it.  If the two brass statues are to honor the obelisk they are technically supposed to face away from the monument, but when Queen Victoria said they would look better the other way around, the works were quickly rotated. 

At the dedication, the obelisk was named Cleopatra’s Needle.  The irony of the name was not mentioned at the dedication ceremony, nor did any of the newspaper accounts mention that the sphinxes actually predate the obelisk by a thousand years.  If you go to see the monument today, note the damage to the plinths supporting the brass statues.  The damage was done by a German bomb during World War I.  (Though almost all of the guidebooks claim it happened during the Blitz of World War II.)

Less well remembered is that under Cleopatra’s Needle is a time capsule containing a rather odd assortment of everyday items such as a box of cigars and children’s toys.  Five thousand years from now, when future archaeologists discover the remains of the monument and the time capsule is opened, they will find enclosed a large painting of the queen.  When they transport the obelisk home and put the monolith on display, doubtlessly they will name it Victoria’s Needle.

By the way, the other obelisk from Alexandria, the one that never fell down, was given by the Pasha to the people of America and is now standing in Central Park in New York.  But that is a story for another day.

How the Murillos Came to Dallas

This week was spring break and I took the opportunity to visit the Meadows Art Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.  If anyone asks, however, I was actually visiting my grandkids and the art museum was just a side trip.  I’m probably safe in revealing this since neither What’s-His-Name nor The-Other-One regularly reads this blog.

The Meadows collects Spanish Art, which is a favorite of mine.  While I did not get to see its collection of Goya etchings, I was pleasantly surprised to discover there was a special exhibition of paintings by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, particularly the six-painting series telling the biblical story of the Prodigal Son.

Murillo is one of the artists from Spain’s Golden Age, and one of the very few who became famous during his lifetime.  By any measure, the years between 1580 and 1680 were remarkable for their artistic achievements.  Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, and artists such as Diego Velasquez, El Greco, and Murillo created their masterpieces.  These achievements were all the more remarkable because, politically, the wheels were coming off the wagon of the Spanish Empire.

Highly respected for his prodigious talents, Murillo became wealthy and respected, despite living in a world that was slowly collapsing around him.  While it is amazing that any of his paintings survive, today more than four hundred of his paintings do—more than twice as many as those of Velasquez and El Greco combined.  

Murillo was born just outside of Seville, and spent almost all of his productive life there.  Unfortunately, Seville, formerly the richest city in Spain, was in steep decline during the artist’s lifetime.   Early in the sixteenth century, the King of Spain had decreed that all ships traveling to and from the New World had to use the port of Seville, fifty-six miles up the River Guadalquivir from the coast.  The gold and silver that flowed into Seville made the city incredibly rich.  Unfortunately, by the seventeenth century, the river had started silting up, preventing the ever-larger sailing ships from making their way up the river, forcing them to offload their precious cargo at Cadiz.  This would be the modern equivalent if all of the theaters, banks, and financial institutions moved from New York to Philadelphia.

This happened during the last days of Spanish rule by the Hapsburgs (a royal family that is the personification of why inbreeding is a very bad idea).  The Spanish Empire was in increasingly bad shape, the result of political and financial policies that were outmoded.  Bound by tradition, Spain could not change even as the rest of Europe surpassed it in every measurable capacity.  Perhaps the Mexican historian Carlos Fuentes said it best:  “The wealth that made Spain rich made Spain poor.”

Worse yet, in the middle of the century, the plague struck Seville, killing the eldest children of Murillo.  This was followed by the death of his beloved wife in childbirth.  Of the artist’s ten children, only three survived.  What would have ruined some men, just made Murillo work harder, and after the only trip of his life to Madrid to meet with Velasquez and to study the king’s collection of works by Titian (collecting Italian art was just about the only thing that the Hapsburgs got right), the artist’s work matured, and Murillo painted the best works of his life.

The series of six paintings by Murillo tells the story of The Prodigal Son from the gospel of Luke, chapter fifteen.  A haughty son goes to his father and demands his share of the inheritance.  When the father agrees, the son, dressed in his finest, leaves his family and travels to the city where he quickly squanders his fortune indulging himself in wine and women.  Now penniless, his new acquaintances scorn him, and he is reduced to living in rags, working as a swine herder and barely earning enough to survive.  Realizing his folly, he decides to return to his father and beg for a job working for the family he had turned his back on.  When he arrives, the father welcomes his son back, telling his other son to kill the fatted calf in celebration.  When the faithful son demands to know why the father is making such a fuss for someone so foolish, the father answers that his son, once lost, has returned from the dead to his family.  

Paintings with religious subjects were very common at the time, as many of the residents of Seville hoped that an act of piety might appease God and return a measure of success both to them and to their city.  Surprisingly, most of the details of the early history of the paintings are unknown.  They are obviously by the artist and the style is unmistakably that of the artist after his trip to Madrid, but who commissioned them and exactly when they were produced is still a complete mystery.

The only clues we have are from the paintings, themselves. The story, as depicted by Murillo, is slightly different from the biblical account, as Luke does not mention the prodigal son’s mother or sisters, figures clearly included by Murillo.  And while the inclusion of women who were obviously prostitutes in art was unusual for Spain during the Inquisition, it was perfectly acceptable for people from Flanders.  The unknown patron might very well have been a Dutch resident of Spain, someone who wanted a painting that more closely resembled his own family.  X-rays of the paintings show that both pictures that include the prostitutes were at one time rolled up, so that the resulting cracks in the underlying paint indicate that (for a while) the two paintings that might have been troublesome to the Inquisition were “hidden”.  Though several names have been suggested, we are unlikely to ever know who actually commissioned Murillo to paint the series.  

Additionally, we know nothing about who owned the paintings or where they were for over a century and a half.  In the late 18th century King Charles III outlawed the exportation of the works of several Spanish artists, including those of Murillo, so the paintings probably stayed in Spain.   The paintings were also probably among those stolen by the French under Napoleon, most of which probably never left Spain, but exactly what happened will never be known.  

What is known is that a Marquis, a director of the Prado, purchased a large number of paintings from the Prado early in the 19th century, which included the Murillo series.  Fifty years later, his family sold one of the paintings (the one portraying the prodigal son’s return) to Queen Isabella, who gifted it to Pope Pius IX.  To this day, the back of that painting displays wax seals indicating that it was part of the Vatican collection.  The remaining 5 paintings were sold in 1856 to Jose de Salamanca.  (To show how times had changed, the paintings depicting the prostitutes commanded the highest prices.)

By 1867, the Earl of Dudley purchased the five paintings from Salamanca and began lobbying the Vatican to sell the remaining painting, to reassemble the series.  Eventually, the Vatican agreed, but demanded two equally valuable paintings and 2,000 gold Napoleon coins to part with its gift.  You would be correct in assuming that the Pope was a shrewd and somewhat mercenary negotiator.

In 1896, the Earl’s heirs sold the painting to Alfred Beit, the silent business partner of Cecil Rhodes and a governor of the De Beers diamond cartel.  Having made a fortune in the South African diamond fields, Beit could afford to surround himself with fantastic art.  Besides their other art, at one time the only people to personally own paintings by Vermeer were Beit and the King of England.  (Queen Elizabeth still has hers.)

Alfred Beit left his fortune, including the artwork, to his nephew, Alfred Beit, 2nd Baronet.  After becoming an honorary citizen of Ireland, Beit purchased the Russbourough House in County Wicklow, Ireland.  This is not exactly a country cottage:  the front of the castle is 690 feet long, and you could probably fit a bowling alley into the parlor.  Still, Beit needed a little room for all the art.

Unfortunately, this conspicuous lifestyle attracted the attention of an Irish Republican Army gang led by Rose Dugdale in 1974.  (Dugdale is the Irish equivalent of Patty Hearst, except while Hearst eventually saw the error of her ways and decided being rich was more fun than being an outlaw, Dugdale, now 81, is still a wild-eyed radical.)  Forcing their way into the castle, Dugdale pistol-whipped poor Beit and the gang made off with nineteen incredibly valuable paintings including a Goya, a Vermeer and a Gainsborough.  Fortunately, they decided the Murillos were too big and heavy and left them behind.

Though the paintings were eventually recovered, Beit decided to hang them all back up in the same castle, from which the IRA stole them again in 1986.  Once again, the Murillos were left behind because of their size.  Although all but two of the paintings were eventually recovered, Beit decided that he was tired of unannounced art patrons, and donated the majority of his collection, including the Murillos, to the National Gallery of Ireland in 1987.

I have no idea how the fine people of the Meadows Museum were able to convince the people of the National Gallery of Ireland to loan the paintings out for a while.  Maybe it was just to get them farther away from the IRA.

Death, the Father of Invention

In the news, there is a story about an enterprising young engineer working on a new design for a storage battery.  Unfortunately, the battery prototype exploded, killing the young man.  Truly a shame, not only for the young man and his family, but also because the choke point in our nation’s plan for alternative energy is the current lousy capability of storage batteries.

Unfortunately, such accidents with inventors and engineers are sort of the norm.  New technology has a history of biting its creators in the ass.  Perhaps this is nature’s feedback mechanism against an over-supply of mad scientists.

One of the earliest examples of this is Li Si, a Chinese philosopher, politician, and man of science during the Qin Dynasty (roughly 2200 years ago).  As a sort of Renaissance man before the Renaissance, Li Si was an enlightened advisor to the emperor.  Unfortunately, his enlightenment did not quite extend far enough to cover his inventions.  This was a time of harsh physical  punishments for crimes—some of which were known as the Five Pains, which included the amputation of hands, the cutting off of your nose, the amputation of all genital organs and finally—not to mention mercifully—the death of the unfortunate victim by decapitation or literally chopping the victim in half.

This gruesome process was as difficult as it was bloody, so Li Si developed a machine that would perform all the steps, one at a time, automating the torture and death of the prisoners.  After Li Si was convicted of treason, he was given the chance of observing the machine’s operation first hand (thankful, no doubt, for his machine’s smooth operating efficiency).

Being killed by your own invention happens more frequently than you might imagine, particularly in hazardous fields like aviation.   Frank Reichelt, a Parisian tailor, developed an overcoat that he believed could convert into a glider.  When he begged to be allowed to test his invention from the Eiffel Tower, skeptical authorities grudgingly granted permission, but required Reichelt to test the invention first on a life-sized dummy.  The inventor agreed, but once at the top of the tower, he decided that his hesitancy to test his invention himself might deter future investors.  In the end, Reichelt’s descent still discouraged future investors.  Permanently.  

Aviation has been rather hard on inventors.  Otto Lilienthal might have beat the Wright Brothers in developing powered flight had he not crashed his glider.  Henry Smolinkski tried to develop a flying car, but unfortunately chose a Ford Pinto as the base for his futuristic vehicle.   Sheikh Ismail hoped to develop a simple helicopter so inexpensive that it would available for the common man—sort of a flying Volkswagen.  Unfortunately, during a test flight, the inventor perished when a main rotor blade malfunctioned and struck him in the head.

The auto industry has been equally unkind to innovators.  Francis Stanley died when he drove one of his Stanley Steamers into a wood pile.  And Fred Duesenberg, the developer of a car so beautiful that it inspired the phrase, “That’s a doozey!”, died while racing one of his cars.   Perhaps the strangest automotive death happened to Sylvester Roper, the developer of the first true powered motorcycle.  In 1896, while test-driving his latest steam-powered velocipede, he reached a speed sufficiently fast enough—roughly 40 mph—to give the inventor a fatal heart attack.

Inventors have fairly regularly gone down with their ships.  Thomas Andrews went down with his Titanic, Horace Hunley developed three different submarines for the Confederate Navy, all of which sank, the last of which was the first true combat submarine and was lost with the inventor on board.  Cowper Phipps Coles developed an innovative turret ship that promptly sank on its maiden voyage, killing all 480 on board, including Captain Coles.

If you work in the chemical industry, deaths relating to you work are damn near a job requirement.  Madam Curie died of anemia caused by the radium she discovered, the first of many such deaths that occurred to scientists attempting to use the material in luminescent paint.   Countless scientists died during the 20th century while trying to perfect chemical and biological weapons of war, with other details of some of these deaths just now coming to light.  And, of course, we still don’t know the name of the Chinese chef who perished oCovid  while attempting to perfect the recipe for Bat Tartare.  

There is one truly dark prince of the invention world, Thomas Midgley.  Probably a very nice guy who took care of his mother and had lots of friends…but his inventions definitely left the world worse off than before.  First, he was the guy responsible for developing tetraethyl lead, thus putting lead in gasoline, and while this made internal combustion engines run better, it also put enough lead in the environment to cause significant health issues including a measurable drop of IQ among urban dwellers.  Personally, I’m convinced that if enough research were done, we would probably find that this increased lead in the environment was responsible for the rise in reality television shows and New Coke.

When damn near everyone who understood the dangers of plumbism objected, Midgley (then an employee of General Motors) held demonstrations in which he poured bottles of tetraethyl lead over his hands, held the bottle under his nose while he inhaled deeply for more than a minute at a time, generally demonstrated the overall safety of his product.  He stopped doing the demonstrations after he took a leave of absence from General Motors to be treated for severe lead poisoning.

If that wasn’t enough, Midgley then developed an improved gas for refrigeration units, chlorofluorocarbon, commercially known as Freon.  You remember Freon—the gas responsible for depleting the ozone layer until a giant hole appeared in it over South Pole.  For the life of me I can’t remember all the details about exactly why this was so bad (something about it let in so much ultraviolet that it created a herd of blind sheep in Patagonia).  There was more to it than that, but there have been so many imminent catastrophic climate disasters looming on the horizon that I can’t keep track of them between leaded gas and Freon, even as I write this, there are environmentalists somewhere throwing darts at photos of Midgley, but they really need not bother, because just like the other inventors mentioned, Midgley eventually died at the hands of his own creation.  

After contracting polio as an adult, he created a  motorized system of wires and pulleys that would lift him out of bed and help him sit up up and be comfortable.  In 1944, the system malfunctioned and strangled the inventor.  

I have no idea what happened to Midgley’s pet, a blind sheep.

The Usury Battle Continues

The New Mexico state legislature just finished its session with surprisingly good results.  Only a couple of the lawmakers were arrested to drunken driving, there were no reported fistfights, and no one filed any new lawsuits for sexual harassment against the governor.  Even more surprising, the state finally did something about the exorbitantly high interest rates charged in the state.

Usury, the unethical charging of an exorbitant amount of interest on a loan (long a hot topic of debate here in New Mexico) is finally changing.  About four thousand years after Hammurabi solved the problem, the lazy lawmakers up in Santa Fe finally got around to fixing the problem, too. 

If you were to measure the speed at which the legislature moves to solve problems, you’d be hard pressed to find a chronometer.  By comparison, lame Mississippi mud turtles and crippled hearse horses are streaks of lightning.  Eventually, you’d probably end up pacing these sluggish politicians against the formation of stalagmites or the erosions of canyons.  Naturally, you’d have to give the legislature a generous head start.

Supposedly, the argument against the prohibition of interest rates that would make a mafia loan shark blush was that capping the rates would deny the poor a source of credit during an emergency.  Using the same logic, we should allow arson to provide a source of heat during the winter.  It would be cynical of me to suggest that the opponents of such measures receive financial contributions from PACs supported by the loan industry.  

Loans are a necessary part of an expanding economy, and connecting those with money to lend with those who wish to borrow funds to build or expand a business is one of the primary purposes of a bank.  But, what is a fair interest rate to charge for this service?  Across history, there has been an active debate on where to draw the line between a fair rate and an interest rate that takes advantage of the desperation of the borrower.

In roughly 1790 BC, Hammurabi established his code containing a prohibition of interest rates above 33%, a fairly generous rate.  Obviously, the monarch would not have felt the need to establish a maximum rate had there not already been people willing to take an unethical advantage of the desperate need of the borrowers.  

By the time of the Roman Empire, while banking was a relatively small-scale activity for shopkeepers and the lower classes, loans were usually private affairs between rich men seeking to make a profit or to secure funds until harvest time.  While there were no restrictions on the amount of interest that could be charged, the rates usually were 4%, 12%, 24% or some other multiple of four, evidently because of the difficulty of doing math with Roman Numerals.  

After the Romans, the first usury laws were set by religions, the majority of which considered that any form of interest charged against a loan was a sin and thus prohibited, though several religions applied the prohibition only to other members of the same faith, allowing the lender to freely charge interest against non-believers.  

During the Crusades, first England, then many other European countries, used the charge of usury to expel the Jews (although though the Crown’s seizure all of the property of those expelled was probably the chief motive).  After the reformation and the concomitant slow growth of pawn shops, religious leaders relaxed their prohibitions against lending money.  This slow acceptance of loan making and charging interest on the loans was central to the plot of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

Slowly, most of the world’s religions either relaxed or completely dropped their prohibitions on lending money.  The Muslim faith still officially prohibits any form of usury, and the twisted logic—both legal and theological—to circumvent this prohibition would require far more space than this blog to explain.

In the United States, there are few federal laws regulating loans, leaving the matter of regulating interest rates up to each state.  The federal government outlaws the use of force to collect a debt and mandates both racial and sexual equality for applicants, but has no laws mandating how much interest can be gouged out of a borrower.  The matter has come up for debate in Congress repeatedly, and the Supreme Court has ruled that Washington has the authority to regulate such rates under the interstate commerce provision of the constitution, but so far Congress has failed to pass any meaningful regulations on the subject.

The states, free to do what they wished with the matter, quickly scattered like a herd of puppies, providing no consensus whatsoever.  Some states mandate a maximum rate on regular loans, but allow short term emergency loans, those Payday Loans marketed to the poor, to charge exorbitant rates.  It is fairly hard to find two neighboring states with the same interest rate.

Here in New Mexico, our legislature met that challenge by passing such impressive legislation as the official state question (“Red or Green?” A reference to your preferred chile.”)  We also built a train no one rides and a Spaceport for a loony Englishman, that has lost at least a quarter of a billion dollars, so far.  It is also still against the law in New Mexico for a woman to pump her own gas or change a flat tire.  It is a petty misdemeanor to play the national anthem “inappropriately”.  What do you expect from a state where the most commonly googled recipe is for Frito pie?

What the state legislature did not do was pass any meaningful measures to regulate the loan sharks that masquerade as Payday Lenders.  

Up until a few years ago, those payday lenders could charge rates up to 1000% in addition to various fees and surcharges:  Fees like the “I Want A Bass Boat Fee” or the “You Are My Bitch Fee”.  Four-digit interest rates were necessary, it was argued, to provide emergency funds for poor people with no established means of credit.  A few years ago, the legislature reached a compromise and lowered the rates to only 175%, and left the various handling fees in place.

Finally, just last week, the New Mexico state legislature got around to fixing a problem that was solved long ago by the Mesopotamian and Hittite civilizations:  they finally brought the maximum interest rate on emergency loans down to only 36%.  Even as I write this, astronomers are searching for a bright star in the east.

While I hope the governor signs the legislation, I would still like to point out that the new rate is still higher that what Hammurabi allowed 4000 years ago.