AMERICA’S SWITZERLAND; THREE DAYS FROM NEW YORK: A Traveler’s Tale of the Beauties of the Canadian Rockies Where Comparatively Few Americans Go (PDF)

The Canadian Rockies remain a great place to go on vacation. I went last year, spending a week or so in and around Banff, Alberta. A Google Image Search for Banff will show you some of its beauty. There’s a lot of great hiking, it’s easy to reach, not very expensive, and not too crowded.

MARTIANS BUILD TWO IMMENSE CANALS IN TWO YEARS: Vast Engineering Works Accomplished in an Incredibly Short Time by Our Planetary Neighbors — Wonders of the September Sky. (PDF)

Percival Lowell was a smart astronomer. He was the first person to build his observatory in a remote location away from city lights, at the top of a high mountain. Lowell picked Flagstaff, Arizona as the location for his observatory. I lived in Flagstaff for four years in college and the observatory is one of Flagstaff’s really big claims to fame because Pluto was discovered there in 1930 (14 years after Lowell’s death).

Anyway, Lowell was a smart guy. He also believed there was life on Mars. He was convinced that lines on the planet’s surface were canals, and when he observed some changes in the appearance of these canals, he concluded that somehow the martians had quickly built these enormous canals 20 miles wide and a thousand miles long.

Mary Proctor wrote this article summarizing Lowell’s findings, and also describing some of the planets people might see in the sky in September.

I love that this stuff appeared in the New York Times Magazine.

PASTEUR EXPERT SOUNDS WARNING AGAINST PET DOGS: Woman and Children Especially in Danger of Possible Hydrophobia Through Carelessly Fondling Household Pets — Tuberculosis, Scarlet Feber, and Other Diseases May Be Transmitted. (PDF)

Well, that’s a pretty scary headline. Turns out that the expert is pretty much just concerned about rabies (referred to as “hydrophobia” because one symptom of rabies is a fear of water). He does mention those other diseases, but, well, just read it yourself:

“Almost any of the contagious diseases may be conveyed by either dogs or cats, although dogs, because of their peculiar habits and their tendency to caress with their affectionate tongues the persons whom they love are much more dangerous than cats. Tuberculosis, scarlet fever, measles, diphtheria — all of these and many more diseases may be conveyed from dogs to humans in this way. I don’t wish to go on record as pronouncing that they are, to any large extent, but I do say that such transfer is a possibility…”

The Centers for Disease Control has a list of diseases you can get from dogs. But they also point out that pet ownership has health benefits.

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A BLUE ROSE? A HORTICULTURAL PROBLEM: Many Varieties of the Queen of Flowers Created in a Century, but Blue Roses Still Elusive. (PDF)

This article gives a nice background on the history of roses as a coveted flower, and then gets into the matter of a blue rose.

A blue rose is held to be about the hardest thing in the flower-growing world to attain…

It can’t be done by any chemical process, of course. Any one rose can easily be made blue, but there is no known way of treating the soil in which a bush grows so as to change the color of all its flowers, and even if there were such a way the progeny of the roses would revert to the ancestral type. The blue rose is to be obtained — if it ever is attained — by combining roses of different colors and using the most promising as parents for a newer and bluer race.

There has been a pale lavenderish-blue rose produced by a German grower, but it is not by any means a true blue.

Well, that problem vexed growers for another 100 years until a Japanese company proclaimed that after twenty years of research and three billion yen, they genetically engineered a blue rose. Well, I guess it’s sort of blue. To me it looks like a pale lavenderish-blue, not by any means a true blue.

FOR THE SIGHTSEER IN NEW YORK: “THERE’S THE AQUARIUM”: Some Interesting Features, Human and Piscine, to Be Found at the Battery Park Establishment on a Sunday Afternoon. (PDF)

Amusing look at the personalities of people and animals that one can find at the city’s aquarium back when it was still in Battery Park.

THE AMERICAN STUDENT ACQUIRING A UNIFORM FACE: Mayor Gaynor’s Statement to That Effect Starts a Discussion — A Distinct American College Type Being Developed, Unlike the European University Man (PDF)

The two faces in the middle of the page are composites of 25 boys and 25 girls, to create the “typical” student face. In modern times, this has been done digitally to interesting effects. I wonder if this is the earliest known example of such a composite.

SEVENTEEN-YEAR LOCUSTS HERE; MOTHS EVEN WORSE: Cicada Army Not the Most Destructive of Our Pests — How, thanks to Ineffective Laws, We Yearly Import Creatures That Cost Us Millions — Despite All Efforts Moths Steadily Increase. (PDF)

I don’t have time to write more comments on this article because I’m a brand new dad and need to focus on that for a bit. But please feel free to read the article and make your own comments.

A GREAT SIXTY-INCH REFLECTOR WHICH PHOTOGRAPHS THE STARS: Wonderful Instrument Erectred by the Carnegie Institution at Mount Wilson, California. (PDF)

The rest of this post is unwritten because I’m a brand new dad and need to focus on that for a bit. But please feel free to read the article and make your own comments.

APES WHO ENTERTAIN AT THE ZOO (PDF)

MRS. BELMONT TRAINING GIRLS TO BE AGRICULTURISTS: Nine of Them in Overalls Learning ‘How to Become Farmers and Landscape Gardeners on Her Estate at Hempstead, and They Are Only the Advance Guard. (PDF)

CIVILIZATION CAME FROM AFRICA, NOT ASIA, SAYS MOSSO: In His Work on “The Dawn of Mediterranean Civilization” He Gives the Aryan Theory a Hard Blow. (PDF)

The poor old Aryan theory, which broughtu s up to believe that all we know came originally from the Orient, has just had another blow. It was so tottering before that it could hardly stand and now Angelo Mosso in a work on “The Dawn of Mediterranean Civilization” gives it another rap.

DR. WILLIAM HANNA THOMSON ON THE ORIGIN OF LIFE: Author of “Brain and Personality” Discusses the World’s Greatest Mystery, Which Has So Long Baffled Science. (PDF)

The last time we heard from Dr. Thomson, he was scolding Thomas Edison for not believing in a soul. So what does he say about the origin of life?

Well, nothing conclusive, of course, He mostly muses about how it’s an interesting question. He touches a little bit on the possibility of Intelligent Design, and marvels at how animals keep having offspring of the same species, but concludes that we really don’t know how it all works.

Every one of the millions of cells of [an elephant's] future body must develop from that first cell. They are all constructed on the elephant-cell pattern, and according to no other pattern. Each cell must contain an even, never an odd, number, in its nucleus of those little bodies called chromosemes, and upon which heredity depends, because finally that first cell contains something which determines that it will grow into an elephant and not into a frog, according to its hereditary descent from the first elephant.

As a result, the absolute absurdity of the supposition of the spontaneous generation of life appears when we consider that it is not a living substance or thing which we are invenstigating, but a thing which can be a dot and then an animal, and then a dot again for any number of times. It would be easier to imagine a watch spontaneously generating itself than for an oak to become an acorn and then an oak again, and so on through all the years of its geological period.

Reproduction of like from like by means of an inconceivably complex series of connected changes is a characteristic of life only. It has not a single analogue in the non-living kingdom. There is no such thing as hereditary fire, though it may spread, any more than a hereditary glacier, however it may grow by accumulating snow and ice.

His musings take him in directions touching on genetics, but it would be about 25 more years before DNA was understood to be a building block of life.

SOME BIRDS ARE COMPOSERS; OTHERS SING POPULAR SONGS: Studies of Their Music by a Government Official — Some Birds of a Species Better Musicans Than others — A Lark Which Plagiarized Handel. (PDF)

Just a few weeks earlier, the Sunday Magazine had run an article examining the claim that animal noises are musical. It concluded that they really aren’t. But we’ve all heard birds that imitate what they hear, so it makes a little more sense that they might imitate popular songs.

In recent years, there have been stories of birds imitating other sounds they hear, like car alarms and cell phones. Click through to see a clip of David Attenborough with a wild Lyre Bird that imitates manmade sounds it hears in the forest including cameras, car alarms, and even a chain saw.

NOISES OF THE ANIMAL WORLD ARE REALLY MUSICAL: Properly Analyzed, the Mooing of a Cow or the Barking of a Dog Accord with the Rules of Composers. (PDF)

In 1955, Don Charles put out a novelty album by The Singing Dogs. You’ve probably heard their still-popular barking rendition of Jingle Bells around the holidays.

But did you know, according to no cited source other than “a musical authority,” that “the mooing of a cow is set to a perfect fifth, octave or tenth; the barking of a dog to a fourth or fifth; the neighing of a horse is a descent on the chromatic scale; while the donkey brays in a perfect octave?”

Apparently, those little factoids were “going the rounds of the exchanges,” which today would probably mean you get an email from your mother with the subject “FW: FW: FW: FW: Kitty’s meow is actually music!!”

Fortunately, other equally unnamed authorities explained to the Times Magazine that while animals are certainly expressive and communicative in their sounds, they don’t follow any particular musical scales: “The mooing of a cow is set to whatever notes suits that particular cow’s fancy and voice.”

Now forward this on to ten friends in the next ten minutes, or you’ll have ten years of bad luck.

CAN SCIENCE HEREAFTER GROW GIANTS AT WILL? Recent Researches Seem to Point to the Pituitary Gland as Holding the Secret of the Size of Human Beings — Gigantism Is a Disease, Which May Be Artificially Produced. (PDF)

Science has at last figured out a way to promote desirable physical traits without eugenics: gland stimulation!

Fancy, for instance, the production to order of a regiment of soldiers each exactly seven feet tall; or, a group of eight-foot giants for the circus or museum. If the theory held by many is correct, this can readily be accomplished by stimulating the pituitary body to hyper-activity. On the other hand, b diminishing the activity of the gland we could arrest growth and produce a group of dwarfs. In other words, persons old enough to know just what height they wished to attain could have it regulated to order, or be “made to measure.”

The workings of the pituitary gland were still not understood. A prominent Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons in London surmised further:

Science, therefore, holds out the hope that people may not only be able to regulate their height, but beauty doctors may be able to work on strictly scientific principles.

“If a lady, for instance, did not think that her nose was symmetrical, a doctor could bring it to the shape required by means of a pituital sandwich. In fact, the plainest people might be made beautiful.”

WIND IN THE MOVING PICTURES (PDF)

Apparently, there was a lot of wind in early movies. Why were they all so windy?

The question is asked by almost every one who has been bitten by the bug of the moving picture show. It is a fact that in every scene where there’s half a chance of getting up a breeze it blows a tornado, or at least a brisk gale disports itself in the trees in the background and the skirts of the harassed heroine in the front.

A moving picture man solved the problem.

“That’s easy,” he replied in answer to a query. “If the pictures were taken when the air was perfectly still, then if the living characters happened to be still also the picture would be as dead looking at a 35-cent chromo of ‘Twilight.’ So a time is selected for photographing the scenes outside when the wind is playing old hob with things generally, trees swaying, and skirts fluttering and hair flying — haven’t you ever noticed how much more effective a woman is when her hair is streaming behind her like the burgee on a racing yacht?”

For a classic example of strong wind in silent film, jump to the 55 minute mark in Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr.(1928) and watch to the end.

CAN EASILY ADD FIFTEEN YEARS TO OUR AVERAGE LIFE: Prof. Irving Fisher, in a Comprehensive Report on National Vitality, Says What is Needed is a Little Care — Life Already Greatly Lengthened in Every Country Where Medical Science is Applied. (PDF)

First, the Magazine covered an article in which it was claimed that only three people ever lived to 100 years old. Then it ran an article saying that old age is a preventable disease. They continue this topic by now explaining how we can add 15 years to the average lifespan.

A then-recent report by the National Conservation Commission included a section on “National Vitality” which described how the average lifespan had significantly increased in the last 100 years. Expounding on that topic, economist Irving Fisher — who was also known for his ideas on health and longevity — here explains how we can increase the average lifespan yet another 15 years thanks to advances in science and medicine.

Fisher was a proponent of eugenics — the notion that we can improve our species through selective breeding, including sterilization of the mentally impaired — which was a much more popular movement before the Nazis used it as an excuse for mass slaughter. (Other eugenics proponents included John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of corn flakes.) Fisher wrote a book called How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science which became a bestseller, and can be read for free here.

The average lifespan for men in the United States at the time was 44 years, and 46 for women. Today the numbers have gone up far more than 15 years, with the average lifespans being 75 and 80 years for men and women respectively. Eugenics has long since fallen out of favor as a movement, but the topic of forced sterilization still comes up now and then. Just a couple weeks ago it was in the news when a woman asked the courts to let her sterilize her daughter who has the body of an 18 year old, but the mind of a child.

THE PASSING OF THE ONCE POPULAR SIDESHOW FREAK: No Longer an Attraction, These Once High-Salaried Exhibits Find It Hard to Earn a Living — What Has Become of Famous Favorites. (PDF)

The phenomenon of the sideshow freak is one of the most fascinating bits of popular culture history I can think of. On the one hand, forgetting for a moment that these are actual people with feelings to consider, there is just the natural curiosity about the different shapes and sizes people come in, and the interesting ways that maladies manifest themselves. But on the other hand, it’s sad to point and laugh at people’s misfortune and disfigurements. But then again, not all sideshow freaks were victims who didn’t know better. Many of them were intelligent people, making the best of the public’s fascination.

In this article, the Magazine explores how the public’s new fascination with music and movies affected the business prospects for the sideshow freak.

Mike the Midget notes, “I’m not blaming the public, only it’s hard on old-time freaks. It takes a top-notch freak now to be able to earn his living in the profession.” Here, the article describes the industry’s gradual decline:

One by one the freaks have been eliminated. The fat woman was the first to go. On every museum platform for years the fat woman sat; the smallest ones were first taken off, leaving only the big ones. Then the tattooed man and the tattooed lady had to seek other employment. In their wake followed the albinos, the living skeletons, and armless and legless wonders.

Those able to hold on longest were exceptional freaks such as two-headed boys, the woman with the horse’s mane growing between her shoulders, the elastic-skinned man, the three-legged boy, the elephant-footed man and the lion-faced boy.

[...]

Where once a good freak commanded $200 a week he can now scarcely get on at $30. It now takes a prodigy of more than passing novelty to draw more than $25 a week. The Tocci twins — boys with two heads, four arms, and two legs — drew $300 a week for years. A regular scale of prices now regulates the pay received by freaks. A living skeleton receives usually about $18 a week; a bearded lady, $12; a fat woman, $10; a fire-eater, $10; a tattooed woman, $8, and a Circassian beauty, $7.

In the cities they can no longer find profitable employment. Most of those who are still keeping up professional life are to be found under the show tent of the circus. The outer districts, where the picture show and the mechanical piano have not filled the entertainment wants of the public, are now the havens of refuge of the freaks.

The article does wonder whether the passing of the freak’s popularity might be a good thing:

Is it not a healthier sign of the public mind that it is no longer interested in the sad misfortunes of others? The plea of the museum proprietor that gazing at poor distorted souls was educative can not be defended. No good ever came of staring at the frog-boy, or of questioning the ossified man. In some countries public exhibition of freaks is prohibited. Nothing but morbid curiosity ever sent the public to the dime museum where on one platform could be seen human anomalies from all over the world. Much better is it that a clean moving picture hall where the entertainment is healthful and instructive should supplant the dime museum.

Of course, it wasn’t that much longer before freaks made their way to the movies. In 1932, director Tod Browning (who later directed Bela Lugosi in Dracula) cast several of the most popular sideshow performers of the day in his thriller Freaks, which is available to see in its entirety online at the Internet Archive.

There were still people making livings as sideshow freaks for several more decades, but as medical advances made these sorts of maladies less common, and people became more sensitive to their plights, the sideshow freaks retired. Many of them wound up in Gibsonton, Florida, which was a popular town for sideshow freaks to spend the off-season.

There’s a sad but interesting true crime story that takes place in Gibsonton. Grady “Lobster Boy” Styles, a second generation sideshow performer born with ectrodactyly (which makes the hands and feet look like lobster claws) was convicted of murder in 1978 for shooting his daughter’s fiancé. He eventually got out of jail, and remarried his former wife. But he was a heavy drinker who allegedly abused his family, and in 1992 his wife and son hired a hitman — another sideshow performer — to kill Grady Stiles.

Modern sideshows, like the Coney Island Sideshow by the Seashore are mainly tributes to the sideshows of yore. They feature performances in the tradition of the old sideshows — things like sword swallowing, contortionists, and the human blockhead — and fewer deformities or birth defects, if any.

There is at least one current performer out there I know of who does use his birth defect as a device for his performance art, and that is Mat Fraser, whose defect comes as a result of his mother taking thalidomide while she was pregnant. I first heard of Mat when I saw him at the Coney Island sideshow in the late 90s. He wasn’t there as a performer, but he was talking to some people there about a character he does called the Thalidomide Ninja, and I confess to eavesdropping. I later found out that he made a documentary for the BBC called Born Freak about his condition, and those like him who made their careers in the sideshow business. It doesn’t seem to be available online in is entirety, unfortunately.

ALCHEMY, LONG SCOFFED AT, TURNS OUT TO BE TRUE: Transmutation of Metals, the Principle of the Philosopher’s Stone, Accomplished in the Twentieth Century. (PDF)

I haven’t seen a headline this misleading since the last time I read the Huffington Post. This article isn’t about the popularly envisioned application of alchemy — turning lead into gold — and it really has nothing to do with anything scientists did, per se. It just describes the natural process of radioactive decay.

Every once in a while we read of a business man, or even a great scientist, who has been deceived by some one who claimed he could make gold or silver. Occasionally an item in the paper tells of the death of some one killed by fumes or by the explosion of a retort while experimenting in search for chemically made gold.

The odd thing is that after solemn men of weight in the world of learning have been for generations showing us what fools or knaves the alchemists were, modern science takes a sharp turn and shows that they were in their fundamental contention probably quite right. But — and this is a large but — they were wrong in thinking that the process by which one metal may turn into another can be hastened any more than it can be retarded. Science does not say that it would not be possible to do either of these things, but it does say most emphatically that the secret is still a long way off, and that the process that would turn lead to gold, or vice versa, would incidentally enable us to do so many other things that civilization would be changed upside down, and the mere gold that might be produced would sink into laughable insignifigance.

A generation or two ago the world was just beginning to make scientific discoveries, and naturally had come to the conclusion that it knew pretty nearly all there was to be known. But to-day the transmutation of one element into another is an accomplished scientific fact. It is proved that certain elements are perpetually changing into certain other elements, and it is more than suspected that what is known to be true of a few elements is true of all. These discoveries came about, of course, through radium. Every idea that is topsy-turvy has come about through the discovery of radium. We might have gone on for another century quite content with the old idea of the nature of matter if that baffling and contradictory thing had not been found one fateful day by the Curies.

As for the accuracy of the headline, the wikipedia entry on nuclear transmutation contains this nice anecdote:

[The phrase "nuclear transmutation"] was first consciously applied to modern physics by Frederick Soddy when he, along with Ernest Rutherford, discovered that radioactive thorium was converting itself into radium in 1901. At the moment of realization, Soddy later recalled, he shouted out: “Rutherford, this is transmutation!” Rutherford snapped back, “For Christ’s sake, Soddy, don’t call it transmutation. They’ll have our heads off as alchemists.”

FAMOUS AQUARIUM TO BE ENLARGED: Plans Ready for a Much Larger Structure Needed to Accommodate the Ever-Increasing Throngs of Visitors. (PDF)

A nearly identical story ran in local media last month, because here in 2011 the New York Aquarium is once again about to undergo a major face lift. But a lot has happened between now and then. Here’s a bit of history of the New York Aquarium:

1808: A fort is built on a small island just off lower Manhattan. Known as the West Battery, it was intended to protect New York from British forces in the years leading up to the war of 1812, but it ultimately never saw any action.

1815: The fort is renamed Castle Clinton after Mayor DeWitt Clinton.

1821: The Army stops using it as a fort and leases it to NYC.

1824: NYC reopens the fort an entertainment venue called Castle Garden.

1853: The marsh separating the island from Manhattan is filled in.

1855-1890: Castle Garden is repurposed as an immigrant processing facility. The interior was gutted by a fire in 1870, but the brick walls remained standing.

1896: Castle Garden is turned over to the Parks Department, which repurposes it as an aquarium.

1911: This article is published about the aquarium’s expansion to accommodate more visitors.

Over the next thirty years, hundreds of thousands of visitors came through the aquarium at Castle Garden, and it became one of New York City’s most popular attractions. And then Robert Moses came along.

1941: Robert Moses had a plan to build a tunnel from Battery Park to Brooklyn, and Castle Garden was in the way. So he planned to have it torn down. The first step was getting rid of those fish.

Time magazine reported:

When New York’s Park Commissioner Robert Moses decided that the Aquarium must go, protests poured in. But sardonic Bob Moses is not easily swayed. Said he: “In the new plan for Battery Park the Aquarium is an ugly wart on the main axis leading straight to the Statue of Liberty… There is… more honest-to-God romance any early morning in the Fulton Fish Market… than in the Aquarium in a month of Sundays…”

The fish were moved out. Some went to other aquariums. Most fish, and the Sea Lions, went to the Bronx Zoo temporarily until a new aquarium could be built at Coney Island.

1946: Castle Garden is designated as a National Monument, and it doesn’t get torn down. Today it houses the ticket office for the ferry to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

1957: The New York Aquarium opens in Coney Island.

2010: The aquarium plans a facelift and expansion for its current location. The overhaul is expected to be finished in 2015 and will add a shark exhibit, and access to the Coney Island boardwalk.

The Wildlife Conservation Society projects that after the overhaul, annual visitors will increase from 750,000 to a million.