July 26, 2004
Lost worlds
Some people cruise to Vancouver to watch whales; some people cruise to the Bahamas to get tan; some people, equipped with $20,000 and a complete disregard for scientific opinion, will cruise to 84.4 N, 141 E abord a chartered Russian icebreaker in search of the entrance to the hollow earth (link via Les Orchard). The idea of mysterious underground civilizations reached via a hole at the North Pole dates to John Cleve Symmes 1818 declaration that "the earth is hollow and habitable within, containing a number of solid, concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees"; it wouldn't be much fun to just take a cruise to a hole, however, so passengers and crew of Voyage Hollow Earth are probably hoping to discover something more exciting -- perhaps a "lush green hole", a hidden piece of jungle within the earth in the Arctic Circle. With any luck, this savage land will not contain bare-chested Tarzan clones. But the idea of a lost world filled with prehistoric creatures wasn't original to Stan Lee; he cribbed it quite neatly from Arthur Conan Doyle's well-titled book about a mysterious plateau in South America. Part of a series of scientific romances by Doyle, the book was a reasonable depiction of state-of-the-art Victorian paleontology. If the Yanomami people of the Amazon could live isolated, without the wheel, steel tools, or a counting system that went beyond "more than two", why couldn't the lost valley of Shangri-La exist? (It did, almost; it was part mountain kingdom of Tibet, not opened to the outside world until the Great Game of struggle for Central Asia ran straight into it, part Hunza, that secluded valley of green-eyed Pakistanis in the Hindu Kush.) If Australia could be home to oddities like the Tasmanian tiger -- which some insist did not die out sixy years ago -- why should it be so odd for the coelacanth to turn up off the coast of Africa in 1938, calmly swimming as though it were 400 million years ago? In 1933 and 1934, the quiet tens along the Great Glen Fault were overrun by newspapermen looking for a dinosaur-like creature in Loch Ness. The creature might have existed, once, but the surgeon's photo that fascinated cryptozoologists for decades was, alas, a fake. It would be a clever wee creature to survive thousands of years in a populous area without anyone knowing, but the idea sold newspapers and when reporters squinted just right, it seemed possible. And so when Arthur Conan Doyle showed what seemed to be newsreel footage of dinosaurs at play, the New York Times admitted that it had no idea what to think. Revolutionary discovery? Spiritualist message from beyond? Clever hoax? It was none of them; it was the work of a genius named Willis O'Brien, and they called it The Lost World.
July 23, 2004
The moon seven times
"I believe the moon is rich in gold!" That's how the great Fritz Lang's script to his tension-packed 1929 silent film Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon). As is traditional when crackpot visionaries make bold pronouncements in science fiction movies, the philistines in the staid scientific community jeered, jeered, but Professor Manfeldt proved them wrong by constructing an atomic rocket ship and voyaging to the moon (with his chief engineer, a rugged German pilot, a cunning American financier, his daughter, and a young stowaway, neatly rounding out the standard spaceship travelling pack). Lang's movie is surprisingly technically plausible for 1929 (including use of a recognizable countdown to liftoff), thanks to his technical consultant, rocket scientist Hermann Oberth. Oberth was, in fact, a crackpot visionary jeered at by philistines; his doctoral thesis had been rejected, the idea of rockets in space being too ludicrous to satisfy his committee. But Oberth's young assistant, Werner von Braun (who would create both Hitler's storied V-2 and NASA's Saturn V booster rocket) would live to see the professor's critics proved wrong when man landed on the moon. There was no breathable atmosphere, unlike Lang's script, but there were no Selenites, either. The Selenites were the beings that lived on the moon in H.G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon (in which the moon is reached using the motive power of an anti-gravity sphere); the term is more generally applicable to any race of moondwellers, such as the terrifying Kalkars, the savage race of moon people warring with the civilized U-ga and promoting disquieting racial stereotypes in Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Moon Maid; the earthlings in this one reached the moon via a rocket ship, the Barsoom, but the aliens all live in the moon's interior. Cyrano de Bergerac travelled to the moon in a much more civilized fashion, using a sort of homemade glass balloon; Baron Munchausen's was simpler yet, involving simply being blown off course by a monstrous gale. Munchausen's moon was a remarkable place, with fleas the size of sheep and deadly radishes. When the Eagle landed in the wonderfully named (thanks to selenographer Giovanni Battista Riccioli) Tranquility Base, fulfilling Kennedy's promise to land a man on the moon before the decade was out and sparing Nixon the need to announce the astronomer's deaths, they, of course, found no such thing. They found a lot of rocks and dust. Is it any wonder that conspiracy theorists, Hollywood screenwriters, and the Fox network are so eager to assert that the Apollo landings were faked? Unless Buzz Aldrin bounced around in a sound studio somewhere (a touchy subject for him at this point), Charles Fort was wrong, and astronaut's footprints will be the only transitory lunar phenomenon and the only man in the moon is the one we tell ourselves we see.
July 20, 2004
Murder mysteries
We may never know who killed union boss Jimmy Hoffa and where his body ended up (Giants Stadium is a more romantic option than a gravel pit in Michigan). The Monster of Florence may remain forever anonymous, despite tantalizing hints of wealthy libertine occultists getting their kicks through ritual murder. And despite the role it played in fanning the "Popish Plot" hysteria's flames in Carolingian England, leading to the martyrdom of Saint John Wall, and the attention of no less a scholar of mysteries than John Dickson Carr, the people who killed Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey probably got clean away. On the other hand, history has no doubt who killed Captain James Cook. He died at the hands of angry Hawaiians, bludgeoned to death while his boat was Kealakekua Bay in February, 1779. He was one of the most celebrated and travelled men in the world, and his death was recorded by his crew; the question they couldn't answer is why he died.
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July 15, 2004
Wide open spaces
Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series has delighted generations of readers; Wilder, the daughter of homesteaders, a prairie girl and a schoolteacher of fifteen, was a heck of a storyteller, even if (as many suspect), the books were largely ghostwritten by her daughter, journalist and novelist Rose Wilder Lane. What the television show never quite communicated was that Ingalls Wilder's story was largely one of privation; during the winter of 1880, shortly after the term "blizzard" was first applied to massive snowstorms, a breathtaking 132 inches of snow fell in the Dakotas (and Minnesota didn't have it much better, although perhaps some of them took it as a point of pride). It was, without a doubt, damn cold in Laura Ingalls' little town of Desmet during that long winter. Life on the prairie was rough. Easterners travelling to California didn't call the plains states the Great American Desert for nothing. Food was scarce. With wood foreign to the Great Plains, the pioneers built sod houses (and other buildings), but the wind howled constantly, sometimes literally driving people insane. While some pioneers sang "Home on the Range", others sang "Dakota Land":
O Dakota Land, sweet Dakota land.
As on the fiery soil I stand.
I look across the plains.
And wonder why it never rains,
Til Gabriel blows his trumpet sound
And says the rain's just gone around.
We do not live, we only stay;
We are too poor to get away.
Still, immigrants came anyway, pulled in by Homestead Act land grants and the possibility of a better life. A hundred and forty years later, America is a rich country and the homesteading land is gone. Even if it weren't, the possibility of a few acres of land in Wyoming, Nebraska, or the Dakotas in exchange for years of backbreaking work and the ever-present threat of starvation no longer sounds so appealing; the grandchildren of the pioneers want good-paying jobs, and the rural towns of the Great Plains aren't where they're finding them, so they drift to the cities or to the south or to the west. And so the wide open spaces of America's frontier revert, slowly, to prarie grass and buffalo commons.
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July 13, 2004
Hic sunt dracones
Looking at early maps of North America can be disconcerting; in the sixteenth century, only the bare outlines of the shape of the continent were known. But the explorers of the New World knew what they would find: dragons. Not actual dragons, necessarily; only one map that ever read Hic sunt dracones, and dragons were more more properly situated in Asia. But they would find strange and unusual things that nonetheless were strange and unusual things they had a context for. Maps of the world at the time of Columbus' journey were far more detailed than those of the days of Herodotus, the Greek "father of history"; European exploration had mapped out much of the Atlantic coast of Africa, for instance. Francis Bacon's dictum that empirical evidence should be believed before received wisdom had yet to take hold, however, so the leading minds of Europe strenuously tried to fit the new continents into classical knowledge. As one book on the conflict between the power of tradition and the shock of discovery. John of Plano Carpini, the Papal ambassador to the Mongol court, had written of his voyages and the wonders he had seen, but when Marco Polo, the Italian merchant, had described fanciful nonsense like furry chickens and nuts in Sumatra as big as a man's head that were filled with a clear liquor, few believed him. Herodotus had described the flying snakes of Arabia and gold-digging ants of India. Ptolemy had told of the Mountains of the Moon. But those were ancient times.
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July 12, 2004
His mouthes all seven cleane
Ovid didn't even have a guess; when his Metamorphosis told the story of story of Phaeton, the son of Helios, and his fateful joyride in his father's blazing chariot, he gives details about the sun's descent and the effect it had on the rivers of the ancient world:
The big-swoln Ganges and the Danube rise
In thick'ning fumes, and darken half the skies.
In flames Ismenos and the Phasis roul'd,
And Tagus floating in his melted gold.
The swans, that on Cayster often try'd
Their tuneful songs, now sung their last and dy'd.
The frighted Nile ran off, and under ground
Conceal'd his head, nor can it yet be found...
The mystery of the head of the Nile -- the source for the longest river in the Old World (and the longest in the world, depending on how one measures) -- was to remain unsolved for almost two thousand years. Greek and especially Roman iconography depicted the Nile god, seven-channeled Neilos, but no one could figure out where he came from. Ptolemy stated that the headwaters of the Nile could be found in the "Mountains of the Moon", but most people shrugged that off as nonsense. Ovid's claim that the head of the Nile was underground and unfindable was myth, but the idea of snow-capped mountains in equatorial Africa was simply nonsense. And that was that.
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July 08, 2004
Pirates, vamps, and clowns
Samuel Slater disguised himself when he came to Rhode Island because leaving the country meant breaking the law, becoming an intellectual property pirate; the crown, seeking to protect English industrial supremacy, restricted the ability of skilled craftsmen like Slater to leave the country. The patent system was originally designed to help people make money from an idea without forcing them to keep it secret like the formula for Coke or the blueprints for the eighteenth century spinning mill. But patents were designed for actual mechanical devices and chemical formulae; simple ideas were never supposed to have the same level of protection. Ideas are a dime a dozen; if the great Theda Bara had been allowed to sue Myrna Loy for stealing her trailblazing "vamp" persona, Loy's career might never have gotten off the ground (and today almost all of Bara's hugely popular films, including her Cleopatra, are lost). If Moxie had been able to tie up the idea of sweet, fizzy drinks, the soft drink ecologoy would never have flourished in the New World. And if one person -- even if that person was a litigation-prone mercenary looking for trouble in Afghanistan -- could have exclusive rights to stories about nuclear terrorists being thwarted by cocky Green Berets who never played by the rules, late-night cable would be a lot more barren. But millions of dollars can be made from ideas, so it's not surprising that people try to cash in. Small software developers who feel (rightly or wrongly) that Apple Computer, which arguably stole the rudiments of modern mouse-and-windows computers from Xerox, has bullied into their territory, often wonder what can be done about it; can their breathtakingly clever idea be patented? It shouldn't be, but ever since the Lotus "look and feel" case, which established that copyright alone couldn't protect the way a piece of software operated, companies have been trying. The gates were unlocked when the Supreme Court ruled that business methods could be patented, it's been open season. Crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and using a laser pointer to entertain your cat are now patented with the full weight and majesty of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Is there a better way? A small band of entertainers in England came up with one in the 1940s; to ensure that they didn't violate anyone else's intellectual property, they created a voluntary central repository that newcomers to the industry could search and which could settle disputes over precedent. The Clown Repository paints portraits on goose eggs to ensure that no two clowns look alike. Details of the Repository's enforcement mechanisms are sketchy, but surely restraining orders and million-dollar lawsuits are as nothing compared to the threat of a pie in the face and the tears of a clown.