40th Anniversary of the Launch of Apollo 17

Launch, 12:33 AM, December 7, 1972

Today (December 7, 2012),  marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of the Apollo 17 Lunar Mission. It was the last mission  in which a crew of astronauts left low-earth orbit and spent time on another celestial body. The crew of Apollo 17 - Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmidt - took perhaps the most famous image of the earth, nicknamed later The Blue Marble.

Earth from Apollo 17

It seems odd that you would have to be almost 50 years old to remember the last trip to the moon.  We have in no way given up on space missions - witness the latest unmanned robotic explorers of Mars and Mercury (where ice has been discovered at the poles of the latter). The International Space Station is still in orbit and actively manned by astronauts from a host of countries. But space exploration seems to have aged rather poorly compared to those dynamic days of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. The Space Shuttles are now in museums where they join the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 17 on its last mission to the moon. The U.S. is pinning its hopes for future space access on commercial vehicles to replace the retired Shuttle fleet. 

While many Americans will remember December 7th for a far sadder event in 1941, I would rather remember it as the day we again reached towards the stars.

Post Script: Apollo 17 was the last mission for my fledgling aerospace engineering career. I had worked on the lunar experiments for the Apollo 12 to 17 missions. I returned to grad school and changed fields to bioengineering where opportunities seemed a little better. Sadly, I think I was right. 

How To Build a Steam Locomotive

It seems that manufacturing and craftsmanship are reported in some quarters to be disappearing from the the scene. It is true that many manufacturing jobs have been automated.  But beyond automation, some crafts and some products seem to be just plain extinct. The steam locomotive falls into this category.  There are certainly a few old locomotives puffing around railroad museums and there are even a few Class A steam locomotives, like the Union Pacific's No. 844 , still operational enough to remind us of why past generations had a love affair with the steam locomotive.

But how do you build such a machine? Virtually every locomotive was a custom made machine.  It took many skilled engineers and craftsman to create the design and fabricate the components. Parts were made in foundries or forges from molten iron and steel. Holes and surfaces were shaped to exacting tolerances on vertical mills, shapers, and lathes. Assembly was done in giant erection shops with huge overhead cranes. It was an impressive operation.

I recently came across a film clip on YouTube that shows what went into building a steam locomotive in 1937. The setting is England but the operations were the same everywhere.  In the video, you can see a very interesting combination of controlled force and high craftsmanship. In every step you see skilled people working together to build a complex machine. I don't want to read too much into this but I would hazard a guess that they also felt considerable pride in their work.

But this is not the end of the story. In the early 2000s, a group of railroad buffs decided to build the first steam locomotive to be crafted in England in fifty years. The locomotive, a Peppercorn Class A1 (named for the designer), was rolled out of the Darlington Locomotive Works on August 1, 2008.

I find it encouraging that the skills needed to build this magnificent machine have not disappeared completely. I think the men who worked on Number 6207 seventy years earlier would have been pleased to see their work carried forward.

This is, after all, the very definition of craft - a skill learned through apprenticing to a master. When the chain is broken, that craft is in danger of disappearing. Sometimes, it can be resurrected by relearning the old ways. As an example, I think of another video I saw recently of a man in Wilmington, North Carolina who painstakingly relearned how to make tintype photographs.

Why resurrect old skills and crafts in the digital age? I think we need them to connect us to our heritage. We need to feel a part of a continuity of technology that spans more than our hyper-connected, online world.  While all things digital now dominate our consciousness, the undeniable presence of our physical technology provides an anchor to the real world. And, ironically, the descriptions for how to build a locomotive or create a tintype are most likely to be archived in digital formats somewhere on the World Wide Web. And so it goes.

Credits:

I found the video for A Study in Steel on The Old Motor.

Floating Palaces

 [Note to readers: with this post, I am now offering images that can be enlarged by clicking on them. Often, the detail in the enlarged image greatly enhances the beauty of the picture. If the image can be enlarged, the mouse arrow will change to a hand when hovered over the image.]

Floating Palace: you don't hear the term much anymore but at one time it was the supreme compliment for a passenger-carrying ship.  Rich paneling, gilded fixtures, lush carpeting, detailed Corinthian columns supporting a dome or skylight, grand staircases - a Floating Palace had all of these and more.   Often (but not always), the words were used to describe an ocean liner. The steamboats which plied America's lakes and rivers in the 19th century also cultivated business by offering sumptuous furnishings and decor.

Scanning the fascinating photographs in the Library of Congress archives, I came across this photo which seemed filled with a melancholy for the past. The image was entitled, "Old Boats Beached to Rot Away, New York City."

Old Boats Beached to Rot Away

This photo is part of the Detroit Publishing Company archive at the LOC.  The date could only be determined to be sometime between 1900 and 1910.  The large steamboat in the left background can be easily seen to be the the Drew in this enlargement of a segment of the picture below:

 

Steamer Drew

 The poignancy of the image captured my imagination and I wanted to know more.  I did a little googling and learned that the Steamer Drew was built in 1865-66 for the People's Line, a company that operated steamboats on the Hudson River between New York City and Albany.  The line specialized in so-called "night boats", steamboats with sleeping cabins to accommodate overnight trips. The Drew might have been named for Daniel Drew, one of the shrewdest steamboat operators and Wall Street investors of the 19th century but I couldn't find documentation for this and there was already an earlier steamboat named the Daniel Drew sailing the Hudson.

The Drew cost $800,000 to build, an enormous sum in the closing days of the Civil War, and was equipped to handle the tastes of even the wealthiest of clients. The ship was almost 400 feet in length and had 284 staterooms on three tiers of decks.  The ship was powered by a vertical walking-beam engine having an 81 inch cylinder with a 14 foot stroke.  That is a massive single-piston engine!  Steam to feed the engine was supplied by two boilers mounted out on the external edges of the ship behind the paddlewheels.  In the photo above, the boilers and side-mounted paddlewheels have already been stripped off the old ship.

Ad from 1900 magazine

The Drew sailed without incident for over 30 years with its sister ship, the Dean Richmond. In the fall of 1896,  the new steamboat, Adirondack, was added to the People's Line. The Drew continued to carry passengers for a few more years but was finally retired in August of 1901.  The ship was sold to J.H. Gregory of Perth Amboy, New Jersey to be scrapped.  Unfortunately, the retired steamship burned to the waterline from a fire of undetermined origins on July 2, 1902.  The picture above must date from sometime between August 1901 and July 1902. If you look closely at the image, you can see some men in the wreckage near the bow of the ship.  Were these workmen or were they vagrants looking for something to plunder and were perhaps the source of the fire?

Further searching of the Library of Congress archives turned up a beautiful Currier and Ives print of the Drew that was published in 1876 at the height of her glory.

 The external boiler is clearly visible on the near side of the ship behind the paddlewheel.  In fact, the semi-circular box that enclosed the upper half of the paddlewheel was a work of art in its own right.  As you can see in the magnified view below, the paddlebox was painted to mimic the interior ceiling of the Pantheon in Rome, complete with painted sculptures on either end of the arc.

  The Drew was only one of hundreds of steamboats that sailed the Hudson in the century following Robert Fulton's steamboat, North River (often called the Claremont), which first sailed in 1807.  Many of these ships, including the Drew, became legends in their own time.  We have nothing like them today except perhaps the ever-bigger oceangoing cruise ships that have become small cities on water. They, too, are Floating Palaces but somehow they seem to lack the grace of the old steamboats of the Hudson.  The real Queens of the Waters are gone forever.

Of Photos and History

I love old photographs.  They show the technologies of the past in ways that words often fail to convey. My last post described the Shorpy website which features a variety of images, mostly beautifully cleaned up images, from the Library of Congress Archives.  I wanted to highlight two other websites I came across recently that are mashups of Google Maps and historical photos.

The first website is historypin.  This recent entry out of the UK provides a unique way to combine old historical views (worldwide) of street scenes with the more recent Street Views available in Google Maps.  The historical images can be switched on and off to allow you to see them superimposed on the way the street looks like today.  The site encourages users to upload their own images although in the current beta release version uploads are limited to five per user. There is also a place to annotate the photos under what the site calls Stories. The site has a little over 29,000 photos "pinned" at this point and is definitely worth a look.  There is a map view that lets you enter an address to see if there are any photos in locations that interest you.  Your best bet at this point is to look at the larger cities.

The second website, similar in concept, is SepiaTown.  This site also encourages you to upload your own images and shows the historical image in a side-by-side comparison with the current Google Street View of that location.  The website allows viewers to leave comments or share the photos through various social networking sites.  SepiaTown is also a relatively new entry and I haven't seen much in the way of posted comments but the photos are interesting and seem distinct from those on historypin.

All of these site are getting at a new way of social networking historical images. If they can get enough users, the power of the network will allow all of us to benefit with the accumulated knowledge that is in our collective heads.  I hope they live long and prosper.  But I think these sites are just the beginning experiments in how to plumb the depths of our knowledge about the more recent past. The pictures are interesting but they lack so many other ways in which they could be made even better.  For example, how about building links to Wikipedia articles or automating a simple Google search of keywords.  Which brings up another point: none of these sites allow tagging the images which would help to build out a set of images.  Other connections could include the vast libraries of online images in Flickr, Picasa, or any number of other photo sharing websites.  Online databases of historical newspaper articles could supplement the images in some cases. Just some thoughts.

If you know of any other websites like these or have any other suggestions on how sites like these could be improved, I would appreciate hearing about them.  Drop me a comment!

Shorpy: Crowd-Sourced History

New Amsterdam Theater, New York City,
circa 1905, from www.shorpy.com
http://www.shorpy.com/node/9430

A couple of days ago, I had the pleasure of coming across the website Shorpy.com.  I'll let you read on the site where the name came from.  The webmaster (Dave - not Shorpy) has restored hundreds of old photos from the Library of Congress, particularly the Detroit Publishing Company collections.

The Detroit Publishing Company's major business was photochromic post cards.  These were colorized versions of black-and-white images that were produced before color film became commercially viable.  Post cards became the rage in the early years of the 20th century because Congress had passed the Private Mailing Card Act in 1898 which allowed post cards to be mailed for a penny (as compared to the standard rate of two cents for letters).  The post card collecting frenzy lasted through World War I but had run its course by the early '20s.  The Detroit Publishing Company declared bankruptcy in 1924 and was liquidated in 1932.  The good news was that through the generous donations of the Edison Institute and the Colorado Historical Society, tens of thousands of the company's original 8x10 glass-plate negatives ended up at the Library of Congress where they have been digitized and put online.

Dave (aka, Shorpy) spends hours cleaning up the scanned high-resolution, glass plate negatives using Photoshop and publishes the "hi-def" images on his website for your viewing pleasure.  And indeed, it is a pleasure. The clarity of these restored images is breathtaking.  It is hard to overstate the impact of the clarity of the photographs.  If you are so inclined, you can even purchase prints of your favorite images from the website.

Like everyone who comes to this website, the first thing that caught my attention was the clarity and size of the images.  But the website - in a stroke of "social networking" genius - allows viewers to post comments about the images.  As you might expect, quite a few comments simply express appreciation.  But more than a few offer great followup detail on the images, identifying buildings, automobiles, clothing styles, business history, and personal details.  The site essentially crowd-sources history.  The fact that viewers take the trouble to go out and find these details is itself quite amazing.

Shorpy is, of course, not the only website that allows crowd-sourced history.  The Internet Archives is another great place to see and comment on old films, books, and images.  Google Books lets users post reviews of out-of-print volumes. These sites (and others) seem to me to be a new way to teach history in a very interactive format. Think of what might happen if kids were given assignments to link to these images and research and post additional details.  The Library of Congress itself is missing out on a significant opportunity by not providing a place for comments as Shorpy and others have done.

This all works, of course, where there is something visual to share (even if that visual material is original text).  Photography was invented just before the Civil War hence photo archives of older events are just not possible.  But there are thousands of high-quality engravings in old books accessible through Google Books and the other websites and many old documents still exist and could be easily scanned.  The web offers a truly unique opportunity to mine our collective knowledge base and invites the all-important aspect of deeper engagement by sharing.

My hat is off to Shorpy.  What a great way to build and share enthusiasm for the past.

Post script:  The images from the Detroit Publishing Company are free for use at the Library of Congress website.  The LOC's original high-resolution scanned images are often faded and have blemishes and hence need the kind of treatment that Shorpy provides to achieve the same visual impact.

The Last Roll of Kodachrome

NPR has a very interesting story up on their website about the last roll of Kodachrome ever made.  Kodak ended production of its iconic color slide film last year and gave the very last roll to National Geographic Photographer, Steve McCurry, to shoot and process.  The results are going to be shown as part of an upcoming Nat Geo special.

Another iconic technology passes.

Of Stereroscopic Vintage Photos and Rock Bands

Image via Wikipedia

I am too old to have paid much attention to Rock-and-Roll music beyond the mid-70's.  All the good stuff happened before then anyway.  But I was interested to read an article in the Arts Section of the New York Times about Brian May (the link is at the bottom of this post).  I could never have told you this, but Brian May was the lead guitarist in the mega-Rock-and-Roll band, Queen.  I also could never have told you that he is one of the premier collectors of vintage stereoscopic viewing cards.

You've seen these old cards: two dusty images that look identical, printed on cardboard.  They were the earliest version of the Viewmaster or now, 3D movies and television.  These cards were immensely popular with the middle-class both in America and in Europe during the latter half of the 19th Century.  For the first time, people got a sense of the reality of the photograph. Oliver Wendell Holmes was quoted as saying:

The first effect of looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced.  The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture.  The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out as if they would scratch our eyes out.  The elbow of a figure stands forth so as to make us almost uncomfortable.  Then there is such a frightful amount of detail, that we have the same sense of infinite complexity which Nature gives us.  A painter shows us masses; the stereoscopic figure spares us nothing...

Brian May has written the first of three planned books on one of the photographic subjects that he collects.  The book is entitled, "A Village Lost and Found".  The village referred to is Hinton Waldrist, in Oxfordshire, west of London.  The village was photographed stereoscopically over the years by an early practioner of the art, T.R. Williams.  Nobody could identify the place in these old photos until May posted one online.  Within 36 hours, someone identified the location for him.  He has visited it many times since then, comparing current views to the originals in the old images.

The Library of Congress has a collection of over 52,000 stereographic images on a wide range of subjects. Maybe ten percent of these are online. 

But there was yet more to impress with regards to Mr. May.  After the band broke up, Mr. May eventually returned to the university to complete his studies.  He got his Ph.D. in astrophysics in 2008.  His thesis was entitled, "A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud".  So now, it is Doctor May, Rock Star, to you...

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