TOWER OF BABBEL - ONE

 

I offer proof here that there is no such thing as useless information, as illustrated by the fate of the 600 elite German paratroopers who floated down or thudded in rough glider landings on a dirt air field on the island of Crete, at about eight on the Tuesday morning of 20 May, 1941. 

Six short hours later 400 of them were dead, killed by poorly armed, badly disorganized and under strength New Zealand infantry. And what largely killed those confident well trained, well armed Teutonic warriors was, in part,  information uncovered forty years earlier and sixty miles to the east, written 4,000 years before men could fly.

The second imperial palace built at Knossos (above) on bronze age Crete was so large visitors got lost in its labyrinthine corridors. It had been built for King Minos, and was occupied for over 400 years. It had hot showers, and flush toilets, and gardens. 

Its walls were adorned with colorful frescoes of sacred bulls, graceful women, and brave men. Its gold came 300 miles from Egypt, its olive oil 100 miles from Greece, its ceder throne, 400 miles from Lebanon. And then about 1375 B.C., this kingdom simply disappeared. Time eventually even wiped out its memory. For most of human history, people had no idea the acrobats of Crete were cartwheeling over the horns of bulls before Moses challenged Pharaoh. Then a British archaeologist went looking for a new meaning in his life.

Little Arthur Evans (above)  - he stood just five feet two inches tall - had always been fascinated with ancient history, but only ancient history. He almost failed his final exams at Oxford because he knew nothing which had happened after Richard the Lion Heart died in 1199 A.D. Evans spent half his life as a dilettante archaeologist, digging about the edges of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. 

When his wife Margaret (above, left) died in the spring of 1893, the heartbroken 43 year old Evans (above, right) went digging with a new purpose. He used his inheritance to buy land already identified as a palace three miles south of the port of Heraklion on Crete.

Beginning in the year 1900, Evans spent six years unearthing the great palace at Knossos. Its murals were so exuberant, its architecture so confident, its wealth so obvious, that Evans was certain it had been the center of a great empire which rose and fell while the ancient Greeks were still barbarians. 

The record of its achievements and soul were right at hand, in the thousand or so mostly broken clay tablets scattered about the palace. But they were written in what seemed to be two unknown languages, younger by a millennium than the cuneiform tablets of Sumer and Babylon, but older by a century than the oldest Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Evans labeled the languages Linear A and B. His obvious choice was to attack Linear B (above) first, since the majority of the tablets were in that language. But the best brains in England, working at Evan's behest,  were unable to read the words. After more than a decade of study the only thing Evans was certain of, was that neither one was Greek. 

After World War One more tablets with the same mysterious pictographic languages were unearthed in the palaces at Pylos, Thebes, Corinth and Mycenae, on mainland Greece. As the number of uncovered tablet shards approached 3,000, the best brains in the world were still unable to read them. How could you decipher an unknown language, once the authors and speakers, and everyone who ever read or spoke the language, was long dead?

For 1,500 years the most insightful method to decipher coded messages and unknown languages was the one invented by the Syrian mathematician Al-Kindi - frequency analysis.  You had to trust this guy. He wrote 262 books. And his method for decoding unknown writing was to reduce it a math problem, by first figuring out what was the most common letter in the language. In English that is "E", and then filling in the blanks. 

 But none of the symbols used in Linear B appeared in any statistically significant variation. The diligent mathematicians Evan's hired simply did not have the resources to crack the puzzle of Linear B. But the effort did provide a good testing ground for new theories, just in time to deal with an ambitious electrical engineer who came up with a great way to get very rich.

His name was Arthur Scherbius, and in 1918 he marketed his new mechanical rotor device under the name “Enigma”. Pushing the letter “e” on Scherbius's keyboard turned a mechanical rotor (above) one spot forward.  There were twenty-six spots on each rotor, so when you entered any letter into the rotor,  the letter produced by that  rotor would be a  totally random letter from the one input, determined only by the original position of that rotor, before you started pushing any buttons at all,

Putting the rotors in sequence (originally three, each translating the input from the rotor before ) would make the code practically impossible to break, unless you knew the starting setting for each rotor. And those could be changed either randomly or according to a schedule.  In 1926 Scherbius sold his machine to the German Navy, and the following year to the German Army, who thought the Enigma codes would be unbreakable.

And they might have been, but in 1928 a minor bureaucrat on the Army General Staff did something stupid. Instead of sending their new Enigma machine (above) to their embassy in Warsaw, Poland in a diplomatic pouch, he sent it by regular mail. When it failed to promptly arrive, the ranking German officer in Warsaw panicked, and asked the Poles to please look for the package. Intrigued, the Polish postal workers searched for, found and opened the box, and got their first look at the new Enigma machine. Polish intelligence service spent a long weekend disassembling it and building a duplicate machine. Then they carefully repackaged the original and delivered it to the relived German embassy staff.

The Germans had little reason to worry even if they had known. With eight rotors wired in sequence, Scherbius had figured it would take 1,000 technicians using frequency analysis, 900 million years to try every possible combination of keys and rotor settings just to read a single message. And he was right. The Polish code breakers struggled with the machine for a decade, but came up with nothing. Finally in 1939, facing an impending German invasion, the Poles shared their duplicate Enigma machine with British Intelligence. And in 1941, a brilliant English mathematician named Arthur Turing, built his own electro-mechanical machine (above) which could try each of the millions of possible mechanical rotor settings on Enigma in a matter of hours. With that, it became possible to break the unbreakable German codes.

The first use of this British “Ultra Secret” was on 28 April 1941, when their commander on Crete was given details of the coming German invasion. General Freyberg was not certain he could trust this new source, and divided his troops between the sea coast and the air bases, where Ultra said the attack would come. 

But enough men were guarding Maleme airfield on 20 May 1941 to slaughter the German units as they landed. British Prime Minster Winston Churchill pointed out that “"At no moment in the war was our intelligence so truly and precisely informed.” 

In the end it did not save Crete, because the German air force prevented General Freyberg from bringing reinforcements back from the coast. Eventually German air dropped reinforcements swamped the New Zealanders and forced the British to evacuate the island.. The battle cost the British 3,990 dead and 17,000 captured. But it cost the Germans 6,698 dead, and 370 aircraft destroyed. Their decimated parachute battalions never made another large combat drop during the last four years of World War Two.

A little over two months before the fall of Crete, little Arthur Evans (above) died in England, still convinced that Linear B was an as yet unknown language. And through the multiplying effect of tenure and graduate students, he was able to reach out from beyond the grave to influence the effort to decode his tablets for another generation. 

The solution, it turned out, had been first been offered by the 13^th century Franciscan monk and philosopher Roger Bacon, from his study atop Folly Bridge (above). It was in that small room where Bacon had written,  “Prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae”, or “Half the answer is asking the right question.”

                    - 30 - 

APRIL FOOL'S DAY

 

I don’t approve of practical jokes. I seen nothing humorous in having your shoes set afire while you are wearing them. And dribble glasses are not only not practical they are also not funny - especially on “April Fools Day”, when every glass is a dribble glass and every shoe is a potential combustion chamber.

And it turns out that this celebration of sociopathic behavior was invented by the French, a nation without humorous inclinations since Moliere slipped on a banana peel in 1673. But the story of April Fool’s Day began over a century before that comedic-tragic event, when in 1564 King Charles IX (above)  decided to follow Pope Gregory’s suggestion and begin the calendar on January rather than April. I know why the French originally celebrated New Years Day on April First, but I'm not going to tell you.

Now, in the 16th century, France had only one road. It came out of Paris, turned left, looped all the way around the city and re-entered on the other side of town. This tragic design error,(the world’s first Traffic Circle) made communication with the majority of the nation difficult (and introduced the phrase “Out-of-the-Loop”), and when combined with the French telephone system - which was in no better shape in the 16th century than it is today - meant that a lot of peasants never got the King’s memo concerning the calendar adjustment.

So as they had every year, thousands of these ill-informed peasants journeyed to Paris during the last week of March and on what they thought was New Year’s Eve, gathered in Bastille Square to say bonjour to 1565 and watch the guillotine drop on 1566. In unison they gleefully chanted, “Cing, quartre, trios, deux, un” and…No guillotine. No satisfying plop of a head into the basket. No Campaign corks popping. No le Anderson Cooper.

 Instead of cheers and shouts of glee, mass ennui broke out among the masses. Now anyone who has experienced the Parisian version of “good manners” can imagine what came next; the locals mocked the bewildered peasants and made them feel like complete Americans,…ah, I mean, fools. But the way they did it makes the word “odd” seem inadequate.

For reasons beyond understanding the Parisians snuck up behind their confused country cousins, surreptitiously stuck a paper fish to the bumpkin’s backs and then shouted in a loud voice, “Poisson d’Avril!”, which translates as “April Fish!”, and then collapsed in raucous laughter and shouts of “tres bien.”

Why would they shout “April Fish!”? I have no idea. But, perhaps the first Parisian to label his victim an "April Fool” immediately received a mouth full of fist, while calling the victim an "April Fish” confused him just long enough so that the prankster could escape.

I have long thought that this uncharacteristic outbreak of French “humor” was actually inspired by Charles’ Italian Queen, Catherine de Medici, who was already famous throughout Europe for her gastronomical gags,  such as her duck a la cyanide with a hemlock sauce. Only a Medici could see the humor in humiliating the people who handled your food.

But however it started, the Parisians knew a good time when they saw it and they sent peasants on “fool’s errands”, and tricked peasants with “fool’s tales”, until every April 1st, France reverberated with gales of laughter and shouts of “Poisson d’Avril!” Good times. 

But eventually the Parisian bullies grew bored with taunting the unresponsive peasants and in 1572 they shifted their attentions to the Huguenots. But by then the tradition of humiliating people for your own amusement on the first day of April had become popular. And like Disco music and Special Federal Prosecutors, once invented some institutions have proven impossible to stop.

This holiday for the humor-impaired spread around the globe with the new calendar like a fungus, infecting and evolving a little in each afflicted nation. The Germans added the “Kick Me” sign, and a second day which they call “Taily Day”, to further enjoy the frivolity of bruised buttocks. Ahh, funny  Germans.

In Portugal, today’s innocent victim is hit with flour, sometimes while it is still in the bag - the flour, not the victim. In Scotland the target is humiliatingly referred to as an “April Gawk” (?!), in England as a “Noodle” and in Canada as an “American.” I would have expected mental health professionals to call for a stop to this public insanity but evidently they are too busy setting their patients’ shoes on fire.

Not even a world war could snap the world out of this cruel insanity. In what may have been the first time a practical joke qualified as a war crime, when, on April 1, 1915.  a French pilot buzzed the German trenches and dropped a huge bomb, which bounced.  It was a rubber bomb.

Four years later the citizens of Venice awoke on April 1, to discover their sidewalks littered with cow manure, the "gag" of a visiting Englishman, Horace de Vere Cole, with too much time on his hands and too much money in his pockets. But then what can you expect from a man who would honeymoon on April Fool's day? 

Bad humor moved into the electronic age in 1957 when BBC Television News broadcast a report about the successful and bountiful Swiss harvest of spaghetti.  

On April Fool's Day in 1992, National Public Radio in the United States, broadcast the announcement that Richard Nixon was coming out of retirement to run again for President, under the slogan, "I didn't do anything wrong and I won't do it again."

In 1975  the Australian Broadcasting Company carried a report that the nation was about to switch to "Metric Time".  The next morning would begin at midnight but each minute would be made up of 100 mili-days and each day would consist of 20 deca-days.  It is alleged that the following morning nobody in Australia showed up for work on time, but it is unclear if that was because of the April Fool's joke or merely because, being Australia, they were all still hung over, mate.

Admit it; there is no defense against April Fool tomfoolery, except a preemptive strike. So button up your top button, zip up your pants, tie your shoes and look out for that cat. Load up your water gun, inflate your fart cushion and repeat after me; “Poison d’Avril, sucker!”

- 30 -

BLOODY JACK Chapter Eight

 

I can name the year the dream of a British Empire was set in concrete - 1825. While England was still paying off the debts incurred during the Napoleonic Wars, the British government created the public/private corporations that built and operated the London Docks – in the shadow of the Tower of London.  In Wapping there was St. Katherne's Docks, which specialized in the import and export of 19^th Century luxury items - wine, wool, ivory, rubber, china, sugar, marble, spices, perfume, hops, indigo, coal and tea.

Further east, across Nightingale Lane, there were the London Docks, and on the Isle of Dogs, the Albert, the Victoria and the East India Docks, all covering some 800 acres. 

The initial cost of the smaller St. Katherine's Docks alone was over £1,000,000. But the return was an economic engine that supercharged the industrial revolution, and insured a British empire, and private British fortunes for the next one hundred years.

In 1827- 28, 1,250 houses and tenements covering 24 acres in Wapping were bought and torn down. In their place was built an artificial harbor with 4 miles of quays which could load or unload 26 ships at once, directly into or from 6 story warehouses. 

The unloading time for ship was cut from 3 days to just 12 hours. 

And by the late 1880's the Blackwell railroad sped the dispersal of cargoes to and from every town in England, Wales and Scotland. 

But as is usual in capitalism, profits proved addictive. By 1887, even as the warehouse space leased by private companies bulged with cargoes and their profits soared, the St. Katherine Dock corporation itself was almost bankrupt. Maintenance and staff levels were cut, and salaries for the 1,700 day laborers remained stagnant. What happened next was predictable. 

Shortly before 9:00 p.m. on the chilly rainy Thursday, 30 August, 1888, a fire broke out in the huge South Quay warehouse of the East India docks - 6 floors high, 150 yards long by 75 yards wide - with cotton stored on the upper floors, kegs of gin and brandy below.

The rainstorm did nothing to slow the flames because they were fed from inside the building. Alarms called in 12 steam powered water pumps and over 70 firemen, but they could only contain the flames to that single structure. A verbose reporter described the conflagration as, “lurid flames of gigantic volume, rising high against a canopy of fantastic clouds and throwing the tapering masts into clear relief until they and their rigging looked like fairy cobwebs, illuminated by a strange, unearthly light. The effect was grand...” Not until midnight did the flames begin to die down.

And just as the South Quay fire finally seemed to be dying, another fire broke out at the Ratcliff Dry dock, where the 843 ton, 191 foot long Steam Ship Cornavia was under construction. The ship was saved, but the flames quickly spread to the 2 story Gowland warehouse filled with 800 tons of coal. By 2:00 a.m. this conflagration was being fought by 14 pumps, two firefighting boats and over 100 firemen. In classic British understatement, the “Chemical Trade Journal” predicted, “The loss will be enormous.”

It seems strange that on such a rainy night, two such serious fires should break out in the London docks, one right after the other but so separated in space. Perhaps they were ignited by lightning strikes. or sparked by fires lit to keep workers warm. Or perhaps they were an act of sabotage, by owners seeking insurance settlements to save their fortunes. Or perhaps they were desperate angry acts by workers, paid little better than starvation wages. But whatever the cause, a large crowd had gathered at the gates to the docks to enjoy the free show. And those masses attracted street hawkers selling food and gin and beer, and prostitutes and pickpockets.

Among the crowd enjoying the show was Emily “Nelly” Holland, described as “an elderly woman with a naturally pale face.” She was, in fact, only about 50 years old. After 2:00  that morning of Friday, 31 August, 1888,  40 year old Emily – aka Jane Oram - was returning to the room she shared with four other women in a private doss, the Wilmont Lodging House, at 18 Thrall Street (above) . It was a street so crowded with rundown slum rooming houses it was sometimes called “doss street”. There, said a contemporary writer, “...robberies and scenes of violence are of common occurrence... Thieves, loose women, and bad characters abound... (a place even) a constable will avoid...unless accompanied by a brother officer.” But it was refuge of reasonable safety to Emily Holland - a roof, a shared kitchen and a shared bed.

Leaving the dock fire, Emily came up Whitechapel Road, passing the "White Chapel" of St. Mary's, and crossing Osborn Street (above). There she saw a friend, a woman she had first met in the Lambeth Workhouse. 

Of the perhaps 6,000 prostitutes – young and old, full and part time – in all of London, there were only 150 infirmary beds set aside for women in poverty suffering from venereal diseases. Lambeth was the borough located just across the Thames. And it was in the Lambeth Workhouse where Emily Holland first met the woman she knew as Polly Nichols, and Polly Nichols had been transferred for treatment to Lambert three separate times.

The two alcoholics were friendly, and for three weeks Polly even shared a bed with Emily at the Wilmont Lodging House. Emily liked Polly, and considered her "a very clean woman who always seemed to keep to herself",  the perfect friend for another alcoholic.  But a week ago Polly had abruptly  moved to the White House doss at 56 Flower and Dean Street (above), where men and women were permitted to share beds for the night - meaning a woman without the full 4 pence for a bed could exchange the use of her body for a few moments, for a place to sleep for the entire night. Emily never explained Polly's sudden decent another step down the social ladder. But seeing the diminutive Polly this damp chilly morning, “very much the worse for drink, falling against a wall” Emily clearly felt sympathy.

Polly was leaning against the wall of a grocery store just down from the corner,  on Osborne street,

and she greeted Emily cheerfully. She explained she had just been tossed out of the White House doss because she did not have the half price - 2 pence - required to share a man's bed. Emily urged Polly to come spend the night with her at Thrall Street, but Polly refused, insisting she had already earned her doss three times that evening. But she had either spent it on gin, or the gangs which infested Whitechapel had stolen the money from her.  She would easily earn it again, she insisted. And Emily could have had no doubt that she could. 

Then their conversation came to an abrupt halt while the bell of St. Mary's Matfellon Church (above) on the south side of Whitechapel Road tolled the 2 o'clock half hour.

There was something about Polly Nichols (above) which inspired people to want to to protect her. She was small - just 5 foot tall - and pretty in life, despite a childhood fall had left a scar across her forehead 

That was true even after delivering 5 children, and a decades long addiction to alcohol (above) which reduced her to sleeping on the pavement of Trafalgar Square for months at a time.  Still she retained a cheerful and positive personality, sneering at the obstacles she threw up for herself. But like all alcoholics, Polly seemed to be harboring a secret, that she would share with no one.  In truth there probably was no secret. Alcoholism is an addiction, not a romantic moral failing, not something tragedy inspired. It is a physical condition like diabetes, or asthma. And offering to protect Polly, merely drove her to run away faster.

Once St. Mary's bell stopped, Polly was anxious to be on her way, despite their having talked with Emily for only six or seven minutes. In a line she often used to smooth her exits, she assured Emily that her new bonnet would attract a customer. And as she staggered off up Whitechapel Road, she told Emily, "It won't be long before I'm back."

Polly Nichols was wrong. She would be dead on her back in Buck's Row within an hour, her throat cut twice and then disemboweled and left abandoned like a bit of trash, to be discovered first by two self absorbed lorry drivers, and then by a 33 year old Metropolitan Police Constable from County Cork, Ireland, and assigned to the Bethel Green “J” Division.  But Police Constable 97J, John Neil, would luckily be spared the worst of the horrors of his discovery.

                                - 30 -