December 24, 2003
A right jolly old elf
It is a common complaint -- although not a universal one -- that Christmas is too commercial. For anyone who's waded through crowds in the weekend before Christmas, looking for the perfect gift, the idea that the modern image of Santa Claus was invented by Coca-Cola has a certain satisfactory ring to it. After all, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was created as a holiday promotion for Montgomery Ward; in a Christmas miracle, the department store allowed the creator, Robert L. May, to have the copyright back several years later, and it made him and his brother-in-law, songwriter Johnny Marks, quite wealthy. But Santa-with-Coke advertising, memorable as it was, had very little to do with the modern conception of Santa Claus. St. Nicholas (the patron saint of thieves, pawnbrokers, and children) was a traditional German Christmas figure, of course; he gave good boys and girls presents, and was accompanied by a figure who punished bad children. There was much regional variation; in northern, Protestant Germany, the Santa figure was "Kriss Kringle" (that is, "Christ Child"), and whether the naughty were given whatfor by Black Peter or Krampus (link via Drew McDermott) seems to have depended on where in Europe you lived. Three men were responsible for the modern figure. Thomas Nast, the political cartoonist who created the donkey and elephant symbols, drew him as a gift-giving elven figure and placed his workshop at the North Pole. Louis Prang, a Boston engraver and inventor of the Christmas card, nailed down his costume. And Clement Moore, the Bible professor and son of the former president of Columbia University, invented the eight tiny reindeer and all the rest when he wrote "A Visit from St. Nicholas" on Christmas Eve, 1823. The problem is that Moore apparently did no such thing; the poem was published anonymously in 1824, and like many things anonymous, its authorship was in some doubt. Moore included it in a book of his collected verse in the 1840s, and that seemed to settle the matter for everyone except the descendants of Henry Livingston, a New York farmer, politician, and amateur poet. A few years later, two of them, Stephen Livingston Thomas and Mary Van Deusen managed to put samples of Livingston's later work in front of Vassar's Don Foster, America's most famous textual investigator. Foster concluded that there was no doubt that the poem was Livingstons, and comparing the two authors' poems on similar themes (and a Christmas poem that's unquestionably Moore's) certainly suggests that he was right. Livingston's name is slowly supplanting Moore's as the true author of the piece. Amazingly enough, 150 years later, an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel named Bruce Lovely apparently took credit for a soldider's retelling of "'Twas the Night Before Christmas". The poem, "Merry Christmas, My Friend", was by a Marine corporal, James Schmidt, who was probably less offended at the plaigarism (his authorship was easy to establish, as he'd published it in Leatherneck magazine two years before Lovely claimed to have written it) as by the fact that Lovely had stripped out Schmidt's references to the Marine Corps:
But half asleep he rolled over, and in a voice clean and pure,
Said "Carry on, Santa, it's Christmas Day, all secure."
One look at my watch and I knew he was right,
Merry Christmas my friend, Semper Fi and goodnight.
December 23, 2003
The kidnapping we prepared in years
Leopold and Loeb, the Chicago thrillkillers, killed because they thought of themselves as Nietzschean supermen; Clarence Darrow, whose bravura courtroom performance saved the pair from execution, took the case specifically because of the publicity it would attract -- he wanted a national soapbox from which to air his opinion about the death penalty. But for all of the twentieth century's famous trials -- O.J. Simpson's murder case launched a cable network -- only one was the "crime of the century": the Lindbergh kindapping. When a suspect, a German carpenter, petty criminal, and illegal alien named Bruno Hauptmann, was caught, sixty thousand people crowded into Flemington, New Jersey (current population: 4,200), to be closer to the case. And newspapers jumped on the story with both feet:
(more...)Against the backdrop of a country in dire economic straits, the newspapers were locked in a fierce circulation war, in which editors assumed the right to embellish and often invent news. On the day following the kidnapping, a member of the New Jersey Police arrived at the Lindbergh's home to find 400 journalists and photographers, including the entire staff of the International News Photo Service who had fitted two ambulances with developing equipment. No doubt their screaming sirens would ensure they made it to New York before anyone else.... People became even more desperate for news of the Lindberghs and circulation rose by 15-20%. On several occasions attempts to make contact with the kidnappers were wrecked when papers blew the story.... Journalists resorted to increasily dubious practices to steal a march on their competitors and their job was made easier by the fact that police were often on the payroll of a newspaper in return for inside information. Astonishingly, Tom Cassidy of the Daily News was given access to Hauptmann's apartment, where he scratched some incriminating phone numbers on the inside of a cupboard.
December 17, 2003
First in flight
In Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, on a clear December morning in 1903, the Wright Brothers flew. The world collectively yawned. The Wrights' secrecy -- they were engaged in negotiations with the American military and fiercely protective of their technology, which had not yet received its patents -- and their complete lack of interest in planning a public test didn't help. Just a week before, physicist and Smithsonian Institution director Samuel Langley's catapult-launched had, to widespread publicity, crashed on takeoff; the Wrights didn't ask anyone to witness their flight in 1903, and even two years later never formally invited reporters to attend their test flights. Initially, many thought they were hoaxers; the airship mania of the late 1890s was then a recent phenomenon. By the time the Wrights were willing to go public, the world had largely caught up with them. The two, still tinkering with their manufacturing processes and working rejected Earnest Archdeacon's direct invitation to participate in a 1907 air competition (with a fifty thousand franc prize). In 1908, they finally silenced critics with the longest sustained flight to date (and the greatest control over piloting; the Wrights were the first to understand roll, pitch, and yaw), then shrugged off the potential publicity of being the first to fly across the English Channel. The Wrights were not interested in showing off. Glenn Curtiss was an innovator -- his planes' ailerons may have been used because they avoided the Wrights' patents, but they were an improvement over the Wrights' system that are still used today -- but, more importantly, he understood the advantages being in the public eye. The Wrights had their "Flyer"; Curtiss had his "June Bug". His planes cost a fifth what the Wrights' did, and Curtiss used them to win speed trials throughout the country. By 1920, the Wrights were gone from the airplane business, although their named lived on in that of the Curtiss-Wright Corporation. Their claim to fame is not that they were the best, but that they were first. If it weren't for them, one of the other students of Octave Chanute might be celebrated today, France's Voisin brothers or the Franco-Brazillian Alberto Santos-Dumont (who killed himself when he saw that airplanes would be used as a weapon). But being first is no small thing, and the Wrights made important discoveries. More importantly, they flew. Even with all the advances since, that's nothing to take for granted.
December 15, 2003
Identity politics
The lost dauphin -- or part of him, at least -- has finally been laid to rest and so, perhaps, has the myth of the escaped Louis XVII. The boy prince was jailed during the Revolution by "the Shoemaker", Antoine Simon, a Communard who was eventually killed in the 9 Thermidor coup. Simon and his wife brutalized the young Louis, and his death from tuberculosis in 1795 must have been something of a surcease of pain. However, in the years after his death, more than two dozen claimants to the prince's title appeared. Most of them were obvious frauds (although American missionary Eleazer Williams influenced Huckleberry Finn and inspired an opera), but one, Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, convinced several people who knew the real Prince Louis and managed to get the Netherlands to acknowledge him as the rightful heir to the throne of France. Royalty who die under mysterious circumstances have a knack for showing back up. Henry VII had to deal with two pretenders: Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, and Lambert Simnel, who claimed to be Edward, Earl of Warwick. The two "false Dmitris" each briefly managed to grab the throne in early 17th century Russia, the time of Boris Godunov. Anna Anderson convinced some German relatives of the House of Romanov that she was the miraculously survived Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicholaevna, daughter of the last Czar of imperial Russia; Anderson failed DNA tests, but did eventually marry an amateur historian.
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December 12, 2003
Big numbers
Last week, a 26-year-old engineering grad student at the University of Michigan got back from a meeting, sat down at his computer, and discovered that he had earned his own footnote in the history of mathematics. Michael Shafer did a victory dance, then called his wife to let her know that he had found the largest known prime number Prime numbers are those, like 7 and 101, that have no divisors other than 1 and themselves. Although there are an infinite number of primes, it's impossible to predict precisely where they will show up. The prime number theorem gives a rough estimate of how many primes exist below a given number -- the degree of error in this estimate is intimately tied to the Riemann Hypothesis, the most important unsolved problem in number theory (and one worth a million bucks to the mathematician who solves it) -- but there's generally no easy way to tell if a given number is prime. The type of prime that Shafer discovered, mersenne primes, are an exception. Mersenne primes are primes of the form 2p - 1, where p is a prime (although not all primes will form Mersenne primes in this way), and these numbers have special properties that make them easier to find. The five largest known primes are all Mersenne primes, and Shafer's discovery is a whopper: over six million digits long.
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December 08, 2003
Worth what it used to be
In 1908, Henry Ford started selling the Model T, a workingman's car that cost $825. In In 1958, the Ford Edsel -- "Impressive, yes! Expensive, no!", the disatrous marketing campaign put it -- cost less than $4,000. Today, a snazzy Ford Thunderbird would set you back almost ten times as much; a nice, sensible Focus would still cost you thirteen thousand dollars. Reading a nice nineteenth-century comedy of economics can be slightly perplexing -- how rich was Mr. Darcy, anyhow? (Economist Brad DeLong came up with two different answers.) Science fiction writers, accustomed to setting storylines, have a related problem. In 1984, when William Gibson wrote Neuromancer, he gave his protagonist (on the run with few allies and less cash) one asset; Case just might be able to get a ticket out of town if he can find a buyer for his "three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi." Today's price for 32 megabytes of perfectly legitimate RAM is somewhere around $5. Dated technology is bad; dated prices are worse. Few things are as jarring in a story where passenger ships fly to the moon as a cup of coffee that costs a dime. Some writers create new currencies to avoid this problem. Who's to say how much a credit, work unit, New Dollar, or piece of gold-pressed latinum is worth? Robert Heinlein occasionally took this route, but more often, he kept his terms vague (a tourist's visit to the interstellar gates costs a few coins in Tunnel in the Sky; Johnnie simply spends all his money while on leave at Sanctuary in Starship Troopers). When he was specific, it can be hard to judge his meaning -- the half-million-dollar settlement in "The Man Who Sold the Moon" would be a lot for me, but for a billionaire of today, let alone the future, wouldn't it just be the price of doing business? Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash had a nice solution to the problem; his characters tossed around trillion dollar bills like they were twenties, acknowledging a universal truth: inflation always wins.
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December 04, 2003
The weather outside is frightful
December is here. The first real cold snap has arrived in Washington, and the first snow is just around the corner. New York has the Rockettes and skating at Rockefeller Center, but the District's major holiday tradition is the Pageant of Peace. Every President since Eisenhower has used the Pageant of Peace as an opportunity to light the National Christmas Tree. There's no room for a forty-foot spruce in my apartment, so I might just get a snowdome. Snowdomes are older than the National Christmas tree, dating to the late nineteenth century. They're wonderful pieces of chintzy Americana; I can see the appeal to collectors (1, 2). When I get sick of snow, I could switch to a more Western motif. Prisoners escape fromAlcatraz; hippies do their thing in San Francisco; hula dancers enjoy the Hawaiian beaches; people die in Texas. If the London Riot Reenactment Society sets up an American branch in Pennsylvania, they can enjoy a Whiskey Rebellion snowdome; if, on the other hand, a dimensional vortex is breached and angry slaad or shirokinukatsukami storm the mid-Atlantic region, perhaps a Frank Frazetta snowglobe will appease them. L.A. may suffer from poor air quality, but given how badly D.C. drivers handle the snow, I might prefer the smog -- I might even prefer a swarm of locusts to the inevitable SUV wipeouts and eight-car pileups that winter brings. And when winter has receded, I can spirit Marion Davies away on my yacht, lie back in bed, and let a snowglobe fall from my hand. Nothing says "spring" like a rosebud.
December 01, 2003
Over a fourth of the earth
(Today is World AIDS Day; this is a Link and Think post.)
The noun pandemic, meaning an epidemic that affects a widespread area, dates from 1853. That year, the third cholera pandemic was sweeping through Europe. The first cholera pandemic had ravaged Asia in the early nineteenth century; the seventh cholera pandemic began in Indonesia in 1961. It reached Latin America thirty years later, causing 4000 deaths the year of its arrival, and it's never left. Cholera can be treated with clean water and a mixture of sugar and salts that costs pennies. It still kills thousands every year. Combination retroviral therapy -- the drug cocktails that have dramatically prolonged the lifespans of people with AIDS who have access to advanced Western medicine -- can cost $12,000 a year. In Africa, AIDS kills thousands die every day.
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