HALL OF MIRRORS

 

I think it a profound that all telescopes involve mirrors. In 1846 this idea was stumbled upon by the obsessive-compulsive painter Alvin Graham Clark, when he realized there was more money to be made in selling telescopes to rich people than in just painting portraits of rich people. Alvin then dropped his brush and took up the polishing rag. 

It was said this self taught optician could feel imperfections in the glass lenses through his thumb while polishing them. For over a half a century Alvin Clark and Sons ground magnificent telescopes for rich clients who saw funding observatories as grand monuments to their own intellectual beneficence. 

Five times Alvin Clark and Sons produced lenses for the largest refraction telescopes in the world. But it is another sad truth that making optical telescopes is an ephemeral art form, since in the eyes of the viewer all mirrors tell lies. Even a Clark

One of Alvin Clark's most enthusiastic customers was Mr. Percival Lowell, whose mommy gave him a 2 1/4 inch Clark on his fifteenth birthday. Astronomy was the kind of hobby mother and son could share atop their Brookline, Massachusetts mansion. At his father's insistence Percival went into business in Japan (above - the tall one without the hat). But he always returned to his first love; astronomy.  And as the end of the 19^th century approached, Percy was attracted by the approach of Mars. 

The more people looked at the red planet, the more it looked like earth. Kepler was the first to realize that Mars was a neighbor of ours. But it was the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens, who drew the first detailed maps of the distant planet's surface. 

Then in September of 1877, as the orbits of Earth and Mars converged, Giovanni Schiaparelli used a new and better telescope and saw what looked like mountain ranges and plains and long mysterious grooves which crisscrossed the planet. He described the grooves in Italian as “canalii”,  a word meaning a channel, or path.  It is sad to point out here, that although Percival Lowell spoke fluent Japanese, he did not speak Italian. 

In 1896, Percival retired from the business world and built his own world class observatory in the mountains, 7,180 feet above Flagstaff, Arizona, atop a peak he named Mars Hill.  Here, for $20,000 (half a million today) Percival installed a 24 inch Clark refracting telescope. Every summer night for the next 23 years, Percival Lowell (above) sat at the bottom of his telescope, observing Mars. During each day he slept in the 24 room mansion he also built on Mars Hill. Being rich has its advantages, and Percival would have been a fool if he had not taken advantage of his advantages.

And what he saw through the eyepiece of his expensive magical tube when he looked at Mars was amazing. He saw canals - real canals - more than 180 of them, some of them 4,000 miles long. And he wondered what sort of creatures had constructed such a massive, intricate irrigation system. “Quite possibly, “ he wrote, “such Martian folk are possessed of inventions of which we have not dreamed...Certainly what we see hints at the existence of beings who are in advance of, not behind us, in the journey of life.” 

Percival wrote three books, “Mars”, “Mars and its Canals”, and “Mars as the Abode of Life”. Each and every book became a best seller. He inspired H.G. Wells to write “War of the Worlds”, as well as inspiring Edgar Rice Burrows, who besides the “Tarzan” series, wrote 13 adventure books centering on life on Mars. 

By the year his third book was published, in 1907, Percival Lowell (above) was recognized as the world's expert on the planet Mars. And then, almost over night, Percival's magical red world was deflated by his doppelganger, Mr. George Hale.

George Hale also came from a rich Boston family. But where Percival's father had insisted he attend business school, George's father had sent him to MIT to become a professional astronomer. 

And in 1908 George opened the lens cap on his new 60” reflector telescope in a new observatory atop California's 5,700 foot high Mount Wilson (above).  And almost the first thing George peered at was Mars, where he found...no canals. Not a one. No matter how hard he looked. 

It has been alleged that George once saw an elf in his bedroom, but he saw no canals on Mars.

The photographic proof was conclusive. What Percival had seen as canals proved, when seen through a newer, bigger, telescope,  to be just an optical illusion...

...or maybe the blood vessels (above) in the back of Percival's own eye.  Percival had a nervous breakdown. And when he recovered he sought to re-establish his reputation. He took up the search for the the last great mystery in the night sky, the powerful conundrum of Planet X.

According to Percival's own mathematics, there was something very odd about the planets Neptune (named after the Roman god of the sea)  and Uranus (named after the Greek god of the sky - grandfather of the war god Mars). Both planets were too big. Neptune was spinning on its side and they both wobbled oddly.  

It looked to Percival as if there had to be another planet further out from the sun, tugging at Uranus and Neptune. 

He called his suspect "Planet X".  Percival even calculated Planet X's mass, and he knew exactly where it had to be in the sky, 40 times further out from the sun than the earth.

For ten years Percival and his assistants – okay, mostly his assistants – scoured photographs of the night sky, searching for the tell-tale movement in the star field that would herald the discovery of Planet X. 

Twice the camera on Percival's 12” Clark took pictures of the moving X.  But the humans who had to examine each of the thousands of photographs, failed to notice the one dot which had moved slightly. 

And then,  in 1916, at the age of sixty-one, Percival Lowell suffered a stroke and died. 

He was interned in a private mausoleum (above) next to his beloved 12” Clark atop Mars Hill.  But thanks to Percival's fortune, the search for Planet X continued.

In 1930 Clyde Tombaugh (above) found Planet X. And since he was being paid by Perciva Lowell's endowment, and still using Percival's 12” Clark telescope, Planet X was named using Percival Lowell's initials – PL - in it's name - Pluto (Greek god in charge of the underworld). 

And isn't it amazing that Planet X became the official IX planet in the solar system? You don't often get to use Roman Numerals in a joke. But, of course it was not bigger than the earth,, let alone Jupiter.

Ah, but things were about to get even more amazing. With the refinement of observations of the outer planets a number of new great mysteries appeared in the night sky, as they always do. The more you know the less you know, you know.  

The first thing astronomers realized they did not know was why two of those cold blobs of rock and ice - Neptune and Uranus -  circling so far out from the Sun. They were too massive to have been formed at the edge of the spinning disc which eventually became the solar system. Heavier (in proportion) rocky planets like the Earth, Venus, Mercury and Mars were near the center. Lighter gas giants should hgave formed toward the edge. In 2005 the mystery was solved (we think) at the University of Nice, in France.  Neptune and Uranus, said the French astronomers, had originally formed in the inner solar system.

Four billion years ago the newly formed gas giants Jupiter and Saturn had turned the inner solar system into pool table on the break -  with the still molten rocky planets slamming and careening into and off of each other. This gravitational pin ball game had pulled our moon into a collision with the Earth, and allowed its capture. It had ground up rocks trying to form a planet and spewed them into the asteroid belt. 

And it had flung rocky Uranus and Neptune out of their formation orbits and into their current positions, leaving behind a lot of oddities as they swerved out into the edge of our solar system.

And that left Pluto. And the more people looked at the guardian of the outer realms the odder it looked. Better telescopes, including one in earth orbit, have shown it to have less than two tenths of 1% of the mass of the Earth, and to be only about half the size of our moon. That is far too small to have perturbed the orbits of Neptune or Uranus. In fact it is even too small to be classified as a planet.

On 24 August, 2006 the International Astronomical Union struck Pluto from the list of planets and gave it the new title of "dwarf planet".  It seems that for all of Percival Lowell's careful calculations, and for all of Clyde Tombaugh's perseverance, and for all the sensitivity of Alvin Clark's thumb,  finding Planet X right where it was supposed to be was...just a coincidence.  It was the human mind which mistook blind luck for a deep cosmological insight. Just  as the swelling in the blood vessels behind Percival Lowell's eyes, which would eventually burst to create the stroke which killed him,  had built the canals of Mars in his mind's eye.

It makes me wonder how we can ever really be certain we are certain of anything. And it seems that no matter how big our telescopes become, or how far out in the sky we search, such as with the new James Webb telescope,  we are always looking into a mirror.

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THE AMAZING RANDOLPH

  

I agree with William Plummer’s 1803 assessment of John Randolph of Roanoke, Virginia; “I admire his ingenuity and address, but I dislike his politics.”  This amazing man represents the tap root of two great branches in American conservative politics, patrician conservatives and gay conservatives; because if John Randolph wasn’t gay, then neither was Roy Cohen.

Some biographies of Randolph insist that he suffered from a condition called “Klinefelter’s syndrome”, which occurs in only 1 out of every 500 males, or 0.02% of the general population, while homosexuality is a genetic variation that occurs in (conservatively speaking) about 5 – 6% of the population, making it far more likely that Randolph was gay. And in any case, both conditions are genetic variations, having nothing to do with sin, intelligence, choice or morality. So, from a purely practical standpoint, it is just simpler to concede that Randolph was gay and move on.

Randolph was a slave-owning elegantly dressed ‘fashionista’, described by one author as “The most notorious American political curmudgeon of his time”. That may be putting it kindly. John Randolph specialized in what the Romans called the “Argumentum Ad Hominem” or the ‘argument against the man’. As a verbal tool it allows the speaker to change the subject, to argue the man not the issue, and thus to tar a political position with the alleged sins of one of its advocates, thus forcing advocates to defend themselves, not what they stand for. And if that method of attack sounds familiar, it is confirmation of the connection between Randolph’s ideological bloodline and its present day Republican practitioners.

John Quincy Adams borrowed from Ovid to describe John Randolph; “His face is ashen, gaunt his whole body, His breath is green with gall; His tongue drips poison.” It is a fair description of the “…abusive eloquence which he possessed in such abundance” (ibid)..

It is a shame that both of those distinguished blood lines are now being excised from the Republican Party in preference to the Donald Trump template. The idea that a dumb, uneducated heterosexual conservative is preferable to a smart homosexual conservative is akin to abandoning a talking dog because you don’t like the way he pronounces “Béarnaise sauce”.  The Trumpanisters remind me of the words of British Prime Minster Lloyd George who said of one opponent; “He has a retail mind in a wholesale business.” Or, to paraphrase John Selden, ignorance of the law may be no excuse, but ignorance in general is inexcusable.

Randolph’s first biographer, Lemuel Sawyer, described him this way; “As an orator he was more splendid than solid; as a politician he (lacked) the profound views of a great statesman...he was too intolerant." But John Randolph admitted to enjoying “That most delicious of all privileges – spending other people’s money.”  Its hard to condemn a man who admits his own sins so gleefully.

Randolph was elected to congress at 26 years of age in 1799, and served off and on in both houses of the Federal Congress, as well as in the Virginia State legislature until his death. He never married, and admitted “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty, I hate equality." And in describing his chosen career Randolph observed that “If electioneering were allowed in heaven, it would corrupt the angels.”

As if to prove his point, in 1824 Randolph turned his cutting tongue loose in the defining speech of his life, on the floor of the U.S. Senate. It was described by one author as “rambling, sometimes incoherent, funny, insulting and devastating….filled with literary and classical allusions, among other odds and ends, and delivered with a delightful insouciance.”

Randolph attacked the Federalist position on the central issues of the day and said any compromise with Speaker of the House, Henry Clay of Kentucky, or with Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, would be anathema, as “…their friendship is a deadly distinction, their touch pollution”. And as to the very idea of a strong central Federal government, Randolph called it “That spirit...which sees in government nothing but a job, which is never so true to itself as when false to the nation.”

I’ve read that sentence at least ten times and each time it makes less sense to me than it did before. At the time, however, it had a great effect on its audience. I guess you had to be there.

Then Randolph got down to the most troublesome part of his attack. He described Henry Clay as “…so brilliant yet so corrupt, like a rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks.” Among southern aristocrats, being called a ‘stinking mackerel’ were fighting words. Henry Clay was willing to overlook the insult until, in 1826, the insult was repeated in print, in the newspaper "United States Telegraph". Clay could no longer pretend Randolph had not said the words, and after a properly stiff exchange of notes, Clay issued Randolph a challenge to what one witness described as the “…the last high-toned duel I ever saw”.

They met at about 4:30 p.m. on 8 April, 1826, just over the Little Falls Bridge from Georgetown, Virginia.  Randolph was resplendent in a bright yellow coat. Clay was coldly determined. The night before Thomas Hart Benton had pleaded with Randolph not to go through with the duel, saying Clay had a young son and wife who would be left destitute if Clay were killed or seriously injured. Randolph seemed unmoved, but he had replied to Benton, “I shall do nothing to disturb the sleep of that child or the repose of the mother.” But I don’t think anybody told Clay he had nothing to worry about.

The men paced off ten steps apart (about 30 feet), and then as the countdown began Randolph’s gun misfired. The gun was reloaded and the countdown began again; “Ready, aim, fire.” Clay’s shot hit the dirt in front of Randolph, whose shot struck a stump behind Clay. The men then reloaded and the insanity began again. This time Clay got off the first shot, sending a ball through the hem of Randolph’s expensive yellow coat. Randolph held his fire, and then dramatically fired his shot into the air.

Then Randolph strode forward with his hand extended. The opponents shook hands in the center of the “field of honor”, and Randolph dryly said, “You owe me a coat, Mr. Clay.”

I don’t think Clay ever paid for the coat, because when John Randolph died in May of 1833, his will instructed that after his slaves were transported to Ohio and freed, his body was to buried in Virginia and he was to be planted facing west, so he could keep an eye on Kentucky’s Henry Clay. Now that is going a long way for an insult.  By the way, like most such wills, Randolph's slaves were not freed. They had been used as collateral for loans, and were sold "down river".  

It could be said of John Randolph that he had opposed most if not all of the famous men and great causes of his time, that politically he gave as good as he got, and that he made the most of the talents that God gave him; not a bad legacy. Except, it must also be said that nothing he supported made the nation stronger, nor helped improve the lives of the the people, white, black or red,  of his state. A politician who chose the career of a speed bump cannot, in my opinion, be said to have used his talents for the public good.

Why he did not do so might be explained, at least in part, by a letter he wrote in the winter of 1833,  addressed "To the Honorable Waller Holladay, Esquire, of the county of Spotsylvania, of the State of Virginia, of the United States of America, of the Western Hemisphere, of the Globe." And amazingly, it was delivered.  Mister Randolph wrote,  "I am sure you will be surprised and pained to hear that I was honored last night by a visit from no less a personage than His Satanic Majesty. His Majesty assured me that my only hope of much longer continuance of my mortal existence depended upon my subsisting entirely upon the milk of your fine Medley mare, which would restore health to my worn out body. Under these melancholy circumstances, I have no choice but to throw myself upon your friendly mercies and I implore you to let me have the mare without delay...that her milk may save the life of your sincere but suffering friend. Randolph of Roanoke"

Mr. Holladay read the letter but did not dispatch the mare. Instead he immediately filed the missive away without answering it, in the hope he said later that "the aberration was but temporary". It was not.  Randolph died in May of 1833. And the letter concerning Mr. Randolph's visit from Satan, was thought to be  proof of his insanity.  Or perhaps the visit was real, a sort of courtesy call, from one sly and merciless liar upon another.  

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TO LIGHT ONE CANDLE, whale oil to rock oil

 

I wonder if you realize how dark the world has been for most of the last 10,000 years? To create light humans could burn wood. But firewood was not a quickly renewable resource and Emperors and Kings preferred to use wood to build ships and thrones,  rather than incinerate it.

And then some Etruscan genius in the eleventh century B.C. invented a thing you could carry in your pocket until you needed it, and which, when you lit it,  burned very slowly.  It was a great invention and was given the Sanskrit name “cand” meaning 'to give light'.  And whoever that Etruscan Thomas Edison was, I bet he got stinking rich. Around the Mediterranean Sea they were usually burned olive oil, which, like rock oil today, became the basis of the economy, the original renewable resource.

But up in northern Europe, and around the rest of the world, they were stuck using candles made out of  rancid animal fat, called tallow, and this tended to produce a powerful stench when it was heated. It is stunning to realize how much human effort over the next 3,000 years was devoted to inventing the stink-less candle. The guy who finally did it was a Jew who had escaped Seville just ahead of the Spanish Inquisition.

Jacob Rodriguez Rivera landed in Newport, Rhode Island in 1748 because eight years earlier the English were so desperate for people willing to settle in the wilds of America that King George II had rescinded the requirement that colonists must pledge their loyalty to "...the true faith of a Christian", i.e. The Church of England.  With the removal of those six little words America was endowed with all the brains, blood and brawn the rest of the world didn’t approve of on religious grounds. That is what made us what we are, which is not a Christian nation, but a multi-religious nation, the most consistently successful nation (over the last 200 years) in the world. Until Donald Trump.

Anyway, Jacob went into business with his brother-in-law, Moses Lopez, who was a candle maker. And while wandering the docks of Newport looking for supplies of animal fat, Jacob stumbled upon the slaughter of a sperm whale (above). Now, whale blubber had long been boiled down for the oil it contained, but burning whale fat stank even worse than cow or pig fat, and since whales were difficult to find, kill and slaughter, blubber was usually mixed with other fats to reduce the stench and stretch the more expensive stuff. But since the blubber was cheap, Jacob bought a couple of barrels to see what he could make of it, and while he was at it, he also bought some Spermaceti, because nobody knew what to make of that, either.

See, if you poke a hole in a Sperm Whale’s head (above), you will find gallons of the stuff. Maybe it helps the whales eco-locate their prey, and maybe it helps them dive so deep. No human is really sure. But it’s white and it's sticky and it looks like…well, you know what it looks like. That’s why they are called them Sperm Whales.

Within a few years Jacob developed the following process; each fall when the whaling fleets returned, the Spermaceti was off loaded from the whalers. They had collected it  in 42 gallon barrels. (The barrels were filled with water going out, and after the crew drank the water, the empty barrels were returned, filled with Spermaceti.) The stuff was boiled down and the residue was allowed to congeal into a spongy, sticky stinky mess. Yuck. Over the winter it froze, and it's molecules re-arranged themselves. Then, in the spring, the congealed stuff was shoveled into bags and pressed until the “winter –strained oil” was squeezed out. This oil,  was considered the creme-de-la-crème of whale oil and sold for the highest price.

After more processing and squeezing, Jacob was left with a cake that could be melted and molded into smokeless, stink-less candles, ready for shipment in the summer. When they burned, they actually smelled sweet and produced almost no smoke. And the light they made was such a pure white light that a “foot-candle”, the amount of light a Spermaceti candle produces at a distance of one foot, remains the standard for measuring pure white light to this very day. Jacob got un-stinking rich. His only problem was that within a couple of years several competitors had guessed or stolen his process.

So in 1761 Jacob and Moses helped to found the United Company of Spermaceti Chandlers, (i,e, candle makers)  and pushed for the formation of a cartel, a Spermaceti cartel. Jacob Rivera teamed up with Obediah Brown and Company, primarily a Quaker family business based in Providence, Rhode Island, and with other whalers all the way down the coast to Philadelphia. They were generally labeled 'The Spermaceti Trust’. The rules of The Trust set a top price of six pounds Sterling that its members would pay for a pound of Spermaceti, and set the bottom price its members would sell 100 finished candles at one pound and one shilling.  Everybody in the trust got very, very rich.

The hunt for the Sperm Whales was on. In five short years, beginning in 1770,  the Spermaceti Trust produced 45,000 barrels of sperm oil, compared to just 8,500 barrels a year of oil from all other types of whales.

After the War of 1812 The Trust became unofficially based on the Quaker power center of Nantucket Island, 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, where some 36 chandlers made the precious Spermaceti candles. So much money was made on Nantucket that the Brown family endowed an entire university with the profits. By 1846 the tiny harbor in Nantucket supported more than 700 whaling ships and more than 70,000 jobs, full and part time.

Then, just after 11:00 p.m. on 13 July of 1846 a faulty stovepipe led to a fire on Nantucket which was whipped by high winds. By morning it had destroyed 250 buildings, seven chandler factories, and tens of thousands of barrels of Spermacti oil stored in warehouses. Three of the town’s four wharves burned completely. Blacksmiths’ shops, rope-makers’ shops, and Sail-makers’ workshops were all consumed. Over 800 people were left homeless. 

The proud town was reduced to begging for “…provisions, clothing, bedding, money…” Help poured in but the golden age of the Spermaceti Trust was over. Nine years later the Trust was completely broken and the industry had been cut by half. By 1875 the island’s population had been reduced by two thirds, down to just 3,200 souls.

The reason for the breaking up of The Trust was not just the Nantucket fire, of course. That didn't help. And the wholesale slaughter of whales meant they were getting more difficult to find, that voyages to hunt the Sperm whales which had had once lasted six months, now took three years. But what really hurt was the discovery of gold in California. A ship owner could make as much in six months carrying miners and mining equipment to California, as he did on one three year voyage in search of Sperm whales.

In the forest of masts of abandoned ships floating in San Francisco Bay (above), left adrift when their crews went hunting for gold, at least half were the masts of ex-whaling ships. And The Trust was also doomed by the development of drilling for petroleum, or rock oil, in Canada and Pennsylvania. Kerosene lamps replaced Spermaceti lamps and candles because they were far cheaper and almost as odorless.  Their light had a yellow tint, but at those prices most people decided they could live in a yellow world.

The new baron of oil would be John D. Rockefeller, who called his company “Standard Oil” to sooth buyers used to variations produced from mixing oil from different species of whales. But he supplied his rock oil in the same 42 gallon barrels used to supply Spermaceti oil.  We still measure oil in terms of those 42 gallon barrels. John D. seemed to be reassuring his customers that nothing had changed in the oil business, except the names of the people who ran The Trust.  And thus America, and the world, entered the oil century.

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