GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT

I think to truly understand the programmer's axiom, “garbage in, garbage out”, you have to go back to 1933, when two British chemists, Reginald Gibson and Eric Fawcett, were trying to do two things at the same time - get rich by inventing a substitute for rubber, and avoid blowing up their lab.

See, natural rubber comes from Pará rubber trees which grow in hot , humid places like Malaysia, Vietnam and Burma, which are also places that grow malaria infested mosquitoes, and which tended to be politically unstable, because of all the Europeans bribing locals who would then sell them the rubber for cheap.  Lots of chemists were looking to make a molecule that would act like rubber but avoid the bugs and the angry locals. But it was dangerous and expensive work

Dangerous because Gibson and Fawcett were working with a hydrocarbon, meaning it contained combinations of carbon and hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen makes all hydrocarbons flammable, and this particular one, ethylene, or C2H4, was made from either alcohol or petroleum, and was more flammable than most. But Gibson and Fawcett figured if they heated the ethylene in a pressure cooker, to prevent it from burning, that would break the bonds binding the ethylene atoms together, and when they cooled the atoms would recombine in a way that would imitate rubber.  

Most of the time, the experiments ended with an explosion, which is why it was expensive.  They had to keep rebuilding their lab.  But in 1933, somehow they avoided the boom and got, instead, what looked like a lump of coffee colored sugar but which behaved like rubber. So they tried it again, and this time got nothing – no explosion and no “lump”. Now they were confused. 

They wanted to try it a third time, but the Imperial Chemical Company, which employed them, decided it was too expensive, and even if it did work, it would never show a profit until long after the current executives had retired and cashed in their pensions. So they told Gibson and Fawcett to move on.

Well, Fawcett figured he was being cheated out of a Nobel Prize, and in 1935, this ambitious, bitter chemist started telling anybody who would listen what he and Gibson had done. Two other ICC chemists, Michael Perrin and John Paton, decided to duplicate the experiment without telling their bosses, and got the same rubber imitating lump.  

But in checking their data, Perin and Paton discovered their pressure cooker had leaked, which is what must have happened to Fawcett and Gibson. When they fixed the leak, Perrin and Paton got no “lump”.  So, figuring the missing element was the oxygen in the air that had leaked in, they added a drop of almond oil, or benzaldehyde, which has seven carbon atoms, six hydrogen atoms and a single oxygen atom. They heated up the ethylene and benzalheyde in the pressure cooker and they got the “lump”.  Which turned out to be the rubber like thing they were looking for.  They could now make artificial rubber anytime they wanted. They called their artificial rubber polyethylene, or PE for short.

Now, PE is better than rubber because it is a thermoplastic polymer, meaning it is a chain of chemically stable molecules, each exactly like the others, like rubber. But when PE is re-heated under normal pressure, it can be easily injected or extruded into molds. The first idea ICC had was to use PE to insulate underwater telegraph cables. They had been using the sap drained from Gutta-percha trees, native to northern Australia and many of the same unpleasant places (for Englishmen) that rubber came from. Now they had a way to avoid those places. 

So they built a plant on Wallerscote Island in the middle of the Weaver River, just upstream from the Liverpool docks. They planned to produce 100 tons of PE a year. But on the day the Wallerstcote plant opened, September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, setting off World War Two.  And nobody could think of anything to do with PE to aide the war effort, so they did nothing with it.  Flash forward five years and 85 million dead.

Britain won the Second World War, but they went $50 billion in debt doing it – the equivalent of one trillion dollars today. To repay that debt British corporations held industrial yard sales, including selling the formula for polyethylene (above) to the American company Dow Chemical. 

And this is where Harry Wasylyk comes into our story. He was born on the Canadian prairies of Manitoba to Ukrainian immigrants, and was just as ambitious as Eric Fawcettt.  

After the war Harry was living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and he knew the Winnipeg General Hospital (above) was facing a big problem. Their admissions had increased by 50% in the previous ten years, and the post war baby boom was promising even bigger growth in the near future. What were they going to do with their swelling medical wastes?. It was an increasingly important question, and an old one.

It is an evolutionary artifact that before humans came down from the trees, our thinking was strictly “out of sight out of mind”. Thanks to gravity, anything we dropped, from our hands or our butts, magically disappeared. And we continue to suffer from this elevated view.  In 1887, when the Prefect of Paris tried to require all citizens to use “sanitary” metal garbage cans, libertarian landlords justified blocking the measure not because of the expense, but - so they said - because their “right” to throw garbage in the street was being infringed upon. 

The argument that living surrounded by garbage was unhealthy did not impress this early Tea Party logic.  As John Ralston Saul pointed out in his 1993 book “Voltair's Bastards”, “The free market opposed sanitation. The rich opposed it...That is why it took a century to finish what could have been done in ten years”  In short, public hygiene remained stubbornly “out of sight” because that the rich and powerful did not think they should pay for it. 

Six years after Parisians had rejected metal garbage cans, the Boston Sanitary Commission reported, “The means resorted to by a large number of citizens to get rid of their garbage and avoid paying for its collection would be very amusing were it not such a menace to public health. Some burn it, while others wrap it up in paper and carry it on their way to work and drop it when unobserved, or throw it into vacant lots or into the river.” About the same time a visitor described New York City as a “nasal disaster, where some streets smell like bad eggs dissolved in ammonia.” City dumps were established to allow rag and bone men to simplify their jobs, and usually next to pig farms (below), as 75 pigs were able to dispose of a ton of human produced garbage a day.  None of this, of course, solved the problem of disease spreading flies, cockroaches, and mammals, all drawn to the aroma of rotting garbage produced by an average human household.

Only because of high insurance rates were the thousands of small smoky fires in the once ubiquitous backyard trash incinerators, finally extinguished  And as living space in cites shrank, so did room for compost kitchen waste. By the middle of the twentieth century, in most of the first world, trash and garbage were now lumped together and left at the curb to be removed by the modern day rag and bone men - now called garbage men.  Anyone who thought about public health, like the directors of the Winnipeg General Hospital, expected the post World War II population boom would lead to an explosion of plagues, brought on by garbage spilling out into the streets.

And that was where Harry Wasylyk came in. In 1949, in his Winnipeg kitchen, Harry melted pellets of polyethylene. He chose PE because it was cheap, available in large quantities, easy to work with, water proof and air tight. He squeezed it between rollers into thin twin sheets, cut and sealed it into bags, and in a stroke produced the world's first plastic garbage bag. The directors of Winnipeg General saw it as the hygienic solution to their growing waste problem, and it made garbage easy and safer to handle. The hospital eagerly signed a contract. 

By 1951 Henry Wasylyk had leased a warehouse, installed equipment, and was mass producing garbage bags for Winnipeg General, and a few other local industrial customers.

At about the same time, the Union Carbide PE plant in Montreal, Quebec, had a back log of pellets.

Larry Hanson, at the UC facility in Lindsay, Ontario, about 60 northwest of Toronto, was assigned to find something profitable to do with them. He quickly hit upon the same idea of making garbage bags, and they proved so popular with the janitorial staff, that management adopted the idea. Doing patent research Dow found out about Harry a thousand miles to the west, in far off Manitoba, and decided to buy his factory and his process. In the end, the patent for the plastic garbage bag is held jointly by two Canadians, Harry and Larry.

Every year humans produce 4 to 5 trillion polyethylene bags, mostly the flimsy supermarket shopping bags. And every year those discarded bags kill a billion seabirds, reptiles and sea mammals, making them one of the most toxic materials in the 4 billion year history of our planet. Less than 1% of 380 billion PE bags discarded each year in the United States are properly recycled. The obvious answer would be to ban the production of all PE bags. But, of course no problem is solved that simply

According to a 2011 study by the British Environmental Protection agency, the average cotton tote bag has a life span of 52 trips to and from the supermarket, and replaces less than 2% of the “fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity” of 350 PE bags. But PE bags themselves make up less than 1% of American landfills. What fills the landfills, is what's in the bags. Concern about the environmental impact of plastic garbage bags is a case of not being able to see the garbage for the garbage bags. They solved a problem, but not THE problem. As Beth Terry writes in her “My Plastic Free Life” web page ““The fact is, there is no magically perfect way to dispose of garbage since the whole concept of garbage itself is not Eco-friendly. The best option is to try and reduce the amount of waste we generate in the first place.”

Less garbage in, fewer garbage bags out. But the constant remains – garbage

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AMERICAN MURDER Part Eight

 

I said at the beginning that I don't believe Priscilla Grinder. She claims that about 3:00am  (or “the middle of the night”) she heard a shot. She heard a man call, “Oh, Lord”. Then she heard a second shot. Then, sometime later she heard a scratching at the door of the kitchen cabin, where she and her two little girls were sleeping. Then she heard her guest Meriwether Lewis pleading for water. She said she did not open the door, but she knew it was Lewis because she peeked through the open chinks in the wall and saw him wandering between the cabins.

According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, on the night of 10/11 October, 1809,  there was a new moon. This meant there was no light to illuminate Lewis for Priscilla Grinder to see him. Was Lewis carrying a candle or a lamp? If so Priscilla did not mention it. And any light inside the cabin would have blinded her to anyone moving around outside in the dark.

Worse was the improved version Priscilla told thirty years later, in 1839. This time, she said, "About dark two or three other men rode up and called for lodging. Mr. Lewis immediately drew a brace of pistols, stepped towards them and challenged them to fight a duel. They,. not liking this salutation, rode on to the next house, five miles." Now why would Lewis pick a fight when outnumbered? And why did neither servant in the barn cabin hear this confrontation? 

The only thing we know with any certainty  is that someone shot Governor Meriwether Lewis that night, allegedly once in the head and once in the side, and the pool of suspects is pretty shallow.

Major General Wilkinson might have dispatched agents to murder Governor Lewis. But why not waylay him while he was camped in the wilderness?  And how could they expect to recognize him in an age before photographs?  Also, remember, Grinder's Stand was suffering a loss of business because of the toll road by-pass. How would an assassin even know Lewis had stopped at Grinder's Stand?  

There were also  highwaymen men along The Trace - whites and Indians. They would have been interested in the five or six horses Lewis' party rode on - worth about $25 each - about $2,000 today.  But come the dawn, the none of the hobbled horses were missing.

If we eliminate, at least for the time being, these unlikely suspects, we are left with the four adults who were at Grinder's Stand that night - Priscilla Grinder, Lewis' servant John Pernier and James Neeley's servant, and Lewis himself. There was also Priscilla's husband Robert, but if he had been present why did neither John Prenier or Neeley's servant mention him, then or later? No, Robert Grinder also fails as a suspect. 

Now, John Pernier was described as a “free mulatto”, meaning he had “negro blood”. Given the racism of the age, and the elitism of Lewis' Virginia heritage, no one asked Pernier to write down his version of what happened that night.   

But Pernier did share his story of that night with Meriwether Lewis' mother Lucy Marks (above),  and her reaction was to accuse him of killing her son. And Pernier cannot be ruled out as the shooter. But he died just 5 months later, in April of 1810, of an apparent suicide through an overdose of Laudlum. But  he neither said nor left any indication he killed himself because of guilt about killing Lewis.  More likely he felt guilty because of his failure to save Louis.     

As to Jame's Neeley's servant, we don't know his name or age or his version of events. However I suspect that James Neeley's letter detailing Lewis' death to President Thomas Jefferson was based in part  on what this man or boy  told him about that night.  And it seems likely we can eliminate both servants as possible shooters because either one could have easily implicated the other, but neither did.

Priscilla Grinder must have had at least one weapon to defend herself and her daughters, else her husband would never have left her alone.  Her weapon was probably a blunderbuss (above), also called a “coach gun”,  a muzzle loading shotgun with a short barrel and relatively lite in weight. They were a superb weapon for intimidation and required no marksmanship. They fired a hand full of lead balls, but could also be loaded with whatever metal or stones were within reach. 

Priscilla was probably proficient as well with a musket or her own pistol. Self defense is one of the skills required for running a small business in a rough neighborhood. 

We know that Governor Lewis himself (above) had four weapons. He had a hunting knife and a smooth bore flintlock musket. The size of the long gun ( about 5') makes it impossible that Lewis shot himself in the head with this gun, then reloaded and shot himself a second time.

But Lewis also had a “brace” of pistols, meaning two. The ones he was most likely carrying were called “horse pistols” because they were too large (9 inches long) and too heavy (three pounds each) to wear in your belt. These fired the same .69 caliber lead ball as the long rifle, with a muzzle velocities of about 600 feet per second. If Governor Lewis shot himself, he used the horse pistols, which would account for the two shots Priscilla supposedly heard. Of all the possible assassins of Meriwether Lewis, the most likely was Meriwether Lewis.

According to modern multi-cultural studies, although suicide can affect anyone, those at the greatest risk are single white males from an affluent background who are moderate alcoholics and/or drug abusers, with few friends, and who are also dealing with a health problem while suffering from a diagnosable mental-health disorder such as depression. Emile Durkheim, the Frenchman who established the field of Sociology, described this condition as “excessive individuation”. Applying this description, Meriwether Lewis was the poster child for suicide.

I wish we had John Prenier's version of events that night. I wish experts could exhume Governor Lewis' body, to determine exactly what his wounds were. But honestly, I do not think either of those missing pieces of evidence are likely to ever be supplied. So we are left with the death of a man who was far from perfect even when judged by the standards of his own time, but who was still more than an American hero. Meriwether Lewis was an American Archetype, even in his mode of death - self murder.

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AMERICAN MURDER Part Seven

 

I must say the last two weeks of Meriwether Lewis' life were very hard. On Friday Morning, 6 October 1809, the Governor and Indian agent James Neeley, along with their two servants, left the primary Chickasaw village before dawn, heading north along the Natchez Trace. They reached Bear Creek that first day. On the next day they reached the Tennessee River, at Corbert's Ferry.

George Colbert was described by the whites who had to deal with him as both “shrewd, talented and wicked” and as an artful and a designing river pirate. This half-Scot, half-Chickasaw Indian had a monopoly on crossing the wide Tennessee River for fifty miles in either direction. And he charged for his ferry accordingly – usually fifty cents per man or horse, (a dollar for a man on a horse) and whenever possible, more.

His two story wood frame home (above), which stood above the ferry, was described as a “country palace” by travelers used to a hut or a lean-too. It was also known in the environs as the Buzzard's Roost. From this house, George oversaw the 100 slaves who worked his plantation. George Colbert explained his worldview this way, “Indians never know how to steal until white man learned them...We are free and we intend to keep so.”

The standard tale is that having paid their fees for a ten minute boat ride across the river, Lewis and Neeley (et al) stumbled on to camp that night along the Sweet Water Branch of Rock Creek. They awoke on Monday, 9 October and returned to the trail, described as a “snake-infested, mosquito-beset, robber-haunted, Indian-pestered forest path." At the end of the day they reached the attractively titled Dogwood Mud-hole and camped out for another chilly fall night. Sometime after midnight a rain storm rumbled through and the campers were soaked. 

When the men climbed out from under their wet blankets on the morning of Tuesday, 10 October, it was still raining and colder. And, they discovered,  said Neeley, that two of their horses had wandered off during the night. So while the servants and Neeley stayed behind to recapture the horses, Lewis continued up the trail alone. But I have a few questions about all of that.

If you believe what Neeley wrote later to Thomas Jefferson, he stayed behind on the morning of ten October  to help search for the missing horses. But both servants showed up later that day with the those horses, while Neeley was still unaccounted for.  And according to court records from Franklin, Tennessee, on 11 October, 1809, James Neely was in a courtroom, signing a promissory note to repay a loan. That courtroom was at least three days travel from Lewis' campsite on the morning of the tenth. The only conclusion I can come to, is that James Neeley was not with Governor Meriwether Lewis on that Tuesday morning.

It seems to me that the lex parsimonoae - AKA Occam's Razor - of the situation is that shortly after the party crossed the Tennessee River on the afternoon of Sunday, 8 October, James Neeley rode ahead on his own, racing to meet his court date, leaving his own servant behind to help Lewis. But I suspect that Neeley did not want President Thomas Jefferson to know that he was being sued over a debt, nor did he want the President to know he had abandoned the ailing Meriwether Lewis on the Trace, after assuring Captain Russell at Fort Pickering that he would keep a close watch over Lewis. This little scrap of dirty linen seems embarrassing enough to have inspired Neeley's lies about where he was on the night of the 10/11 October,  particularly considering future events.

This is a much simpler explanation than any of the convoluted conspiracy threads that some have weaved around the last 24 hours of Meriwether Lewis' life. This simple explanation requires only that people act like people you know, that they lie for small and petty reasons a lot more often than they lie for big complicated ones. And they disguise their small lies much more badly. But. of course, this explanation also leads us to a few more questions.

Sometime around 5:30 on the evening of 10 October, 1809 Priscilla Grinder saw a lone rider approaching the three split rail, un-chinked and un-plastered cabins of "Grinder's Stand".  She immediately sent her two daughters to the kitchen cabin, a few steps behind the others. And only then did she step outside to greet the traveler.

He was a tall and athletic man who wore a blue and white striped and faded “duster”, and he was accompanied by a dog. Their first meeting, as were most meetings along The Trace, was wary.  Each party inspected the other for mutilations, cropped ears, missing fingers or branded flesh. It was common practice at the time for suspected thieves to be so marked as a warning for potential future victims. But as far as we know, Priscilla bore no such marks. And we know Lewis did not. But both of them would have been armed.

Meriwether asked if he could receive an evening's lodging and a meal. Priscilla said yes, and asked if he were traveling alone. Lewis explained his servants would be arriving shortly. There was no mention of Neeley in her story. He dismounted and removed his saddle. He hobbled his horse, and carried the saddle inside the cabin. 

He asked for a drink, but did not seem interested in it after he was served. It is possible that the beverage, probably the same corn mash Priscilla's husband was selling to the Chickasaw, had little appeal for a man who had tasted wine at Thomas Jefferson's table.

A few minutes later two more men rode up. Lewis identified them as his servants, even though only one, John Pernier, actually was. The other was Neeley's man. Lewis asked Pernier to fetch some gunpowder, saying he had a canister of it somewhere in his luggage. Priscilla did not hear the reply, as she had to go out to the kitchen cabin to begin preparing the meal for the three men. Still, there is no indication that Lewis identified himself to his host.

After the meal had been served, Pernier and Neeley's man took the horses off to the other cabin, used as a barn. All three men would bed there for the night. Priscilla said later that as she gathered up the dishes, Lewis began to intensely pace up and down the room. According to her, “Sometimes he would seem as if he were walking up to me, and would suddenly wheel round, and walk back as fast as he could.” Then he stopped, produced his pipe and lighted it, pulled a chair close to the front door of the cabin and announced, “What a sweet evening it is.”

It smacks me as an unlikely comment from a man who had been soaked to the skin for the last twelve hours. But then as I said at the very beginning, I don't trust the stories this lady has to tell about the last night of Meriwether Lewis' life. 

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