Category: People’s History of Science

“A Talk on the World” by Clyde Lewis

In April 1967, Clyde Lewis delivered a 3-minute history of the world to a group of maybe one or two dozen spectators gathered in the parking lot of the Union Grove Fiddler’s Convention at Union Grove, North Carolina. Mike Seeger was there with his Nagra portable tape recorder to capture the talk, which is now available on Close To Home, an invaluable selection of Seeger’s field recordings.

The atmosphere of the parking lot is intense in the 38-year-old recording. Seeger writes that the Fiddler’s Convention,

was getting huge and more than a little wild in the late 1960s. It was quite a scene. As I recall, Bessie Jones stayed in the car, probably a wise decision for an elderly Black woman … People were playing fiddles, banjos, and guitars all over the place, some drinking, others undoubtedly taking other substances … somebody came and got me, saying “There’s somebody over here you need to hear.”

Lewis’ Talk on the World needs no commentary, but after several years of frequent listening, some exorcism would do me good. It’s mesmerizing, in part because my father would have loved this recording more than any other I own. In the late sixties, he was delivering very similar speaches to Knights of Columbus audiences across Illinois.

Lewis begins (I should add that there are no typos in what follows):

My subject for this evening am entitled, “Whyfore, Wherefore, and How Come.” But before I starts to commence to begin, there am some mighty important trifles that must be took into sideration before the main subject of the discourse am discoursed on this here elevated platform.

The character Lewis is playing stepped right out of a medicine show, like an overstuffed small-town mayor, a holiness preacher, a snake-oil salesman, or Shakespeare’s Polonius. Lewis mainly lampoons the high-falutin’ ways of the excessively educated and their obsession, especially at the time, with the idea of progress.

The main target for the Talk on the World is celestial navigation, long the branch of astronomy most useful to navies and corporations. Europe’s global empires were built on it.

The world were always round like an apple. This epileptyc shape on account on of the axil what done perperates through the middle of the center in congestion with the latitude of the horizontal. Now then, when the solar plexus of the sun’s violet rays congregate on the middle of the bisection, there am set in motion the magnetic conundrum …

I can’t help but be reminded that Lewis and his Appalachian audience — their world so deeply and brutally defined by the mining industry — know very well that the benefits of science and technology are not always evenly shared:

And in the year fourteen and ninety-two AD (AD, understand, mean After Dark), they discovered Columbus, Ohio. That’s where the dark ages of history done stopped. Christmas [Columbus] done leave all his men in Ohio, he scoots back to the Queen of Spain, she done tapped him on the head with a sword and made him a knight. The men what stayed in Ohio got tapped on the head with swords and was made angels.

Lewis even reminds the attendees of this Fiddler’s Convention of the dubious benefits of modern media technology:

And did you ever stop to think what a great invention the raido am to the chromonology and the welfare of the universe? Sure am a coppious invention. All you got to did am sit right at home and revolvitate the dials and the music am preambilated through the atmosphere and comes right down the chimbley onto your Aunt Emma.

It’s clear from the editing of the piece that Seeger has more of Lewis and that day in Union Grove than he’s provided on Close To Home, and I rack my brains trying to think of a way to get at those tapes.

Pop, Skip, Hiss and Forget the Lyrics

I’ve been wondering (here and there) why the records of the 1920’s have been returned to generation after generation, seeming to never quit revolutionizing the way their listeners see (and hear) the world. I may never fully figure it out, but a few of the reasons are surprisingly simple.

My favorite of the old recordings might still be Charlie Poole’s “White House Blues.” Its effect on me is always overwhelming, but uncanny, mysterious. Let’s just say it’s a stunning record.

More strange still is that Charlie Poole screws up the lyrics on a dozen occasions in the short span of the record’s 3 minutes. I’m even not sure what a lot of the lyrics are, they’re such a mess. But this is the cut that I’d pick as The Best Song Ever.

There’s a live recording of the New Lost City Ramblers from 1978, I guess, where Tracy Schwarz introduces the next song saying,

Here’s a song that Henry Whitter and G. B. Grayson gave to the world, like delivering a million, million, million dollars worth of GOLD all on one side of a 78 rpm record. “I’ve Always Been a Rambler.” As far as I’m concerned, that’s about the best song they ever put out. When I first heard that, I think I’d of DIED if I couldn’t have gotten at it. And here it is, “I’ve Always Been a Rambler.”

And with that, they strike up their obsessively precise imitation of the cut on the 78. What’s most surprising is that Schwarz intentionally slurs the lyrics, making them hard to understand — sometimes I wonder if even he knows what the lyrics are supposed to be. Mind you, this is the song Schwarz feels is the greatest artifact in the history of mankind.

It’s clear to me that those gaps are a big part of why Schwarz and I listen to these old scratched records, which were almost always cut in one single take and then released “warts and all.” Maybelle Carter used to insist on doing multiple takes until she got it perfect, and then was usually frustrated to find that record executive Ralph Peer had chosen one of the takes with a mistake on it. Peer felt that mistakes caused the listeners to lean in closer and concentrate on the record. He was right.

The effort invested by the listener counts for something toward the listener’s enjoyment, and the “gaps” in the records are spaces through which the listener’s imagination can insinuate itself into the aesthetic experience. In this sense, the old records act the way modern poetry, painting, dance, and other arts do — they seek to force collaboration between artist and audience by leaving open evocative gaps in their meaning. A lot of people these days think that Bob Dylan figured out a way to turn pop music into modern art after spending years straining to understand the old 78 rpm records from the 1920’s.

Terri Schiavo and Science in the News

At some point during the Terri Schiavo fiasco, I saw a right-wing spokesmodel on CNN say something like, “I was in a coma once and I’m sure glad they didn’t kill ME!” So, the neurologist she was debating pointed out that she didn’t have the same condition that Schiavo had. CNN’s host didn’t bother to get this little confusion sorted out during the segment — not even close. But the science did matter, desperately.

Although the science of neurology was the core of the case, all the thousands of hours of coverage did not add up to America’s education about the brain. That was a lost opportunity. A great thumbnail discussion of the science behind the Schiavo case was on NPR’s Talk of the Nation’s Science Friday, but I’m not sure Americans listen to NPR a heck of a lot …

To my ears, the great unspoken core of the story was the anxiety most people seem to feel around the idea of the brain as the organ of awareness. I find most people dislike the idea that your awareness, wakefulness, personality, emotions, identity, spirituality, consciousness, and soul are all artifacts generated by the meat inside your skull. When the meat goes bad, there’s no more “you.” As neurology advances, I bet we’re going to face increasingly counter-intuitive brain conditions and even more vexing medical and moral decisions. We better get ready, in part by facing the facts.

None of this is to say that the main conflict was between science and religion — after all, Americans of faith were mostly on science’s side on this one. As I watched Shiavo’s parents fight to keep Terry hanging around, I kept hearing the Carter Family sing “Don’t you want to go to heaven? Don’t you want God’s bosom to be your pillow when the world’s on fire?” Perhaps Pete Seeger’s re-writing of a passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes might have been more persuasive, but I didn’t think of it until recently.

The Train to Adler Planetarium


Photo from Carl Zeiss AG Germany

Beginning when I was about 10 years old, I suppose, I would occasionally take the train to Chicago to see the Adler Planetarium.

I grew up in Palatine, one of the dozens of small towns that grew up into suburbs along the railroad tracks running northwest from Chicago out to McHenry and Johnsburg and Harvard, Illinois. I used to lie in bed late at night in the summertime and listen to the train whistle blow in the distance, never imagining it might be a very tired old cliche. Ah, such innocent times …

I remember my anxiety about asking the train station clerk for the ticket, even though going downtown to the end of the line was the easiest ticket to explain. My mother must’ve given me the cash for the trip. (Someday, I will write at great length about the countless ways she encouraged my interest in astronomy.)

My eyes never stopped studying the view from the train, which passed through the oldest parts of every town along its route, because, as I say, the towns were born along the tracks. We stopped at their turn-of-the-century depots, which apparently never got around to becoming obsolete. As a result, the picture in my mind’s eye of Mount Prospect, Des Plaines, and Park Ridge is rather more charming than those towns probably are. I still don’t know for sure to this day.

The end of the line was the Union Station, which was one of the old vaulted, vaunted cathedrals built when trains were the fastest, proudest vehicles on Earth. I remember walking through the station with my face turned upward, staggering slowly across the marble floor, no doubt obstructing businesspeople late for work.

The Adler Planetarium was truly hallowed ground to me then. Its exhibits stayed pretty much the same throughout my entire childhood, so visiting them was more ritual than education for me. That’s what I was looking for anyway, a place that understood and affirmed my view of the world, one that only Adler and I could see. There was no secret to it — it was simply ignored by most people. It seemed they had some sort of defect that left them blinded to it.

I was the youngest of seven children, growing up in a crowded house in a claustrophobic suburb. The train to the Adler made me feel adult and free, as if I owned my whole self, not just the inside of my head. I don’t think I felt much like that again until I left home for Tucson, to study astronomy.

Dark Was The Night: Sleep

For about 10 years, I’ve wanted to write — or at least read — a good nonfiction book about Night. According to a review in the New Yorker (which seems to take all my best ideas), it looks like I’ve got my chance — “At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past” by A. Roger Ekirch has just been published by Norton.

As I’ve written before, for most of human history, Night was dark. On a moonless night, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face or where your feet were stepping. In the largest capital cities in the world, the buildings around you appeared as little more than silhouettes against the stars of the Milky Way. (That is, Night in the past is something you need to research if you want to understand it.) If and when I read Ekirch’s book, I’ll tell you more, but the New Yorker focuses on Ekirch’s discussion of the “first and second sleeps,” mentioned by writers from Plutarch and Virgil all the way through John Locke.

Through artificial lighting, we’ve expanded Day to encroach on Night as far as we possibly can. When we finally turn off the light and go to sleep, we insist on sleeping continuously right through to the alarm.

But people — or at the very least, Western Europeans of a certain class — used to find themselves quite in the dark as soon as the sun went down. Any light had to come from an open flame of some sort. So they would go to bed, enjoying several hours of good, deep, REM sleep, and then they’d wake up around midnight or so. This was the first sleep. After one to several hours, they’d experience the second sleep, which would take them to the rooster’s crow. Between the first and second sleeps, they’d get up and do chores, or talk, study, pray, reflect, or, one supposes, have sex.

The National Institute of Mental Health recently did a study in which it deprived subjects of artificial lighting for up to 14 hours for several weeks at a time. They found the subjects naturally gravitated toward a first and second sleep. The period between possessed “an endocrinology all its own,” with elevated levels of prolactin, best known for stimulating lactation in nursing mothers. The period between sleeps was peaceful, restful, and reflective — and the first sleep’s dreams still lingered at the edges of consciousness.

Ekirch writes, “By turning night into day, modern technology has helped to obstruct our oldest path to the human psyche.”

Science Bass Ackwards

Science in the U.S. is taught backwards.

You generally start with biology, perhaps the most complex of all the sciences and the one that depends on every other science if it’s to be understood.

You then proceed to chemistry, which is little more than memorization and explosions without a good knowledge of physics.

If you keep taking science classes, you may get to take some physics, which is the basis for all other physical sciences — certainly, biology and chemistry make little sense without physics.

Why is it like this? I don’t really know, but I gather that the arrangement was codified in the U.S. immediately after World War Two, when physics enjoyed an unchallenged status among the sciences. Physics in the first half of the century had triumphed in the terms that science itself values most — in its predictive capacity and its ability to sort out basic questions about existence — but American culture also saw physics as triumphant militarily and politically, and as the basis for atomic power and atomic weapons.

As a result, the attitude was that little tykes were not yet fit for the revelation of such a Great Secret. And teaching little children had (and still has) a low social status. Teachers trained in physics could just as well do other high-status jobs, unlike those with training in biology who would otherwise be doing various “helping professions” (women’s work, you might say). So physicists taught the young adults, and biologists dealt with the children.

Again, this is the story I’ve gathered. In any case, an “historical” or cultural explanation of this sort has got to be the right explanation. No more rational, functional explanation is likely, given that the current arrangement makes so little sense and its results are so damaging.

Families of Trees

After five years of working for a professional society of plant biologists, I am starting to get clearer notions about plants. My mother-in-law gave me The Golden Field Guide to Trees of North America. It is an excellent book, and I’ve spent many hours staring at the 1950’s-era color drawings of trees, leaves, fruits, bark, etc.

I’m struck by the “families” of trees. You may know about the classification systems for living things — the basic level being species, such as the Oregon crab apple (Malus fusca) or the Biltmore crab apple (Malus glabrata). The next highest level is genus, such as apple (Malus), ash (Sorbus), and hawthorn (Crataegus) — each having various species within them. Genus and species has always made sense to me.

The next level up (that is, the first of the “higher taxa”), the families, has always been something of a mystery to me — although I’ve heard of some families and I’ve even seen them mentioned in articles I’ve worked on for a living, it hasn’t mattered to me what family a living thing belongs to. Now I get it, thanks to a very small amount of study.

When you say a tree belongs to the family Rosaceae, you mean it’s part of a sprawling, dizzyingly varied, historically pivotal family of plants that includes more than 3,000 species and dozens of genera, including the roses we get on Valentines Day, all apples, cherries, plums, pears, almonds, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, ashes, hawthorns, and more.

When you say a tree belongs to the family Platanaceae, you mean it’s a sycamore, also known as a plane tree. The family contains only one genus (Platanus) and about six species.

Now I understand that when one biologist says that such-and-such is in this-or-that family, this may be hugely significant information to an informed listener. This confirms the assertion (of the movie Animal House) that “Knowledge is Good.”

What You’re Not Interested In

“It’s amazing, the human capacity to not notice things that you’re not interested in,” Bram Gunther said. He’s New York City’s deputy director of forestry and horticulture and recently gave reporter Andy Young a tour of NYC’s urban forest for an article in the May 23 New Yorker.

The city of New York has five million trees, a half million of which are “street trees” not associated with parks or yards. There are fowering cherry, honey locust, silver linden, pin oak, ginkgo, Japanese zelkova and pagoda, London plane, Kentucky coffeetree, dawn redwood — seventy species in all.

Beginning in June, more than 1,000 volunteer “tree stewards” — tree geeks, the article calls them — will take the first census of NYC trees in a decade. Driving along one block, Gunther points out to his reporter some of the reasons the tree population turns over so quickly: “Subway! Grate! Bus stop! Garage! Canopy! Grates! Vaults! Driveway! Awning! Light pole! Again with the canopy!” Along the way, they find injuries due to bikes chained to trunks, dog urine, lovers carving their initials, and Asian long-horned beetles.

Over the last few months, and after more than five years of working for an organization of plant scientists, I’ve finally begun learning to identify trees (so that’s what a maple leaf looks like!). If my eye for the various species ever develops, I know it’ll be one of those experiences that makes the world come alive for me all over again, much like when I learned about atmospheric optics.

I suppose learning about the urban forest has that same character that draws amateur folklorists, conspiracy cranks, poets in American, amateur scientists, certain varieties of bloggers. It’s a way of turning your back on cable news, American Idol, the runaway bride, publicly-funded stadiums, Clear Channel, and inventing your own culture, your own way of seeing the world. (“There are 8 million stories in the naked city …”) It often seems that simply controlling your own attention and finding your own stories to tell is, increasingly, an act of civil disobedience.

Billboards in Space

Advertising in Earth Orbit

The idea of creating very large advertisements and placing them into Earth obit has been very seriously considered. Such “space billboards,” it’s usually estimated, would be about the size and brightness of the full moon and would be visible for hours on end to something like a quarter or half the world’s population at a time. Potentially, no sky on Earth would lack an ad for something.

Current technology is more than enough to do the trick, and actual companies have offered the service (for example, Space Marketing, Inc. of Roswell, Georgia, proposed space advertising for the 1996 Summer Olympics).

It seems that the only obstacles to actual space billboards are:

(1) Public opposition. Any company making use of such advertising would probably (or hopefully) be subject to intense and widespread public criticism. Indeed, I myself can think of few other causes for which I would be willing to go to war.

(2) National laws. At least in the U.S., a law prohibits the deployment of space advertising. Whether, and for how long, the law would stand up to challenges brought to the World Trade Organization, as well as domestic First Amendment challenges, I can’t say. In any case, last week, the FAA asked Congress for the authority to enforce those existing U.S. laws (see CNN.com’s story in their “funny news” section). I believe this is happening now because private space ventures are making rapid progress in the U.S., and the FAA — not NASA — enforces laws relating to private space travel.

Around 1998, I toyed with the idea of writing a screenplay about an underground quasi-terrorist group that sabotage a mission to install some space advertising. They were not the bad guys, either …

1969 and the Moon Landing Part 2: Alice’s Restaurant

Alice’s Restaurant is a long, rambling, very funny song about a lot of things — particularly the absurd way that its author, Arlo Guthrie, got out of the draft.

A film version of the song was rushed to the theaters soon after the song became a hit. In Arlo Guthrie’s fascinating audio commentary for the “special features” of the film’s DVD, Arlo describes the writing of the song, and then its first public performance:

I went to the Newport Folk Festival in 1967, and they said, “Oh, Arlo Guthrie, you know, aren’t you Woody’s kid?” And they put me out in this field — you know, I was just 18 or 19 years old, I was a real young guy — and I remember playing Alice’s Restaurant standing on a box in a field with about 300 people.

They got such a response that they put me on some other program later on that afternoon with, you know, about a thousand people and that got such a respsonse that they put me on at the very end of the festival, and that evening there were probably about twenty, thirty thousand people in the audience.

They were afraid to put an unknown person like me at the end of a big festival. It’d be really chancy, I mean, what if I was terrible? What if it was horrible? …

And so Judy Collins came out, Joan Baez came out and then other people came out, and Pete Seeger came out. And by the end of the evening, all the performers were onstage singing Alice’s Restaurant.

And that was the day that Man first walked on the Moon. I remember being onstage and telling everybody, you know, “There’s people walking around up there.” And looking at the moon. And it was a big day. Big day for me, big day for everybody. The next day, I started getting the phone calls from all the record companies and the execs and stuff.

It’s true that the song made its public premier at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1967. But “Man first walked on the Moon” two years later, in July 1969. There were no astronauts in space during the 1967 festival.

Part of what fascinates me about the film, and Arlo’s commentary, is that they are both constantly haunted by endless coincidences, misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and mysteries — some of which Arlo points out, and some of which he seems to miss. The moon landing the night of his great triumph at Newport, for example, happened only in Arlo’s memory.

The timing of the song and the film interests me. Hollywood in the mid-60s was in pretty bad shape and the studios were desperate to get people into theaters. Bonnie and Clyde (produced by 28-year-old Warren Beatty and directed by Arthur Penn) was a surprise success and helped encourage bolder movies by sometimes by younger artists, oriented toward younger audiences.

Alice’s Restaurant was Arthur Penn’s next directing job after Bonnie and Clyde, and has a disorienting strangeness that seems to come from being a weird hybrid of countercultural documentary and studio pandering. So, Alice’s Restaurant feels like it catches Hollywood in mid-morph, trying to figure out how to do a new thing. The movie is one key to understanding Hollywood at that moment.

But I want to understand the year 1969 and how the The Moon Landing fit into it. One lesson of Arlo’s mistaken timeline is that the recollections of the major players — whether astronauts or folksingers — are 36 year old, and are bound to be cloudy.

Certainly, any drugs used at the time are unlikely to help, but they’re not the only thing that can make things “run together” — young people in 1969 had a lot on their minds, what with a draft, a war, assassinations, Nixon, and such. I often remind myself that between 1965 and 1970, there were … well, just five years.

But the main lesson of Arlo’s mistake is that it wasn’t some other mistake — it was about the Moon Landing. It is testimony to the importance of the landing not just as a technological feat, but as a reflection and contributor to the headiness of the times.

The 1967 Newport Folk Festival was certainly one of the most important events in Arlo Guthrie’s life. It changed everything for him, and it was inextricably wrapped up in momentous national events (just listen to the song). It really was a big day for everybody — every day seemed to be.

So, it makes sense that memories would get pegged to Apollo 11 as a way of expressing their own intensity and, especially, to express the way those memories were shaped by various dramatic displays of American power.

Part 1