1542 Portuguese under Christovão da Gama occupied Bacento in northern Ethiopia. He was the son of Vasco de Game, himself an explorer and adventurer. I did not realise the Portuguese had gone inland at the Horn of Africa. The image below of Christovão da Game is on the monument to Portuguese explorers at Belem. Been there.
1653 New Amsterdam was incorporated as a city and a wall built to keep the English out. In 1674 the English took over. It became Wall Street. Been there. New York City, that is.
1709 Alexander Selkirk was rescued after being marooned on an island for five years. His story inspired “Robinson Crusoe.” Daniel DeFoe’s novel is full of ideas that have been drained from every film version I have seen. Read that.
1899 The Australian Premiers’ Conference in Melbourne decided to locate Australia’s capital in a brown field. Rivalries and jealousies being to the fore, all agreed it could not be located in any existing city. Ergo a new city would be built for the new country in Canberra. Been there many times. The lore is that Jervis Bay on the coast was the preferred choice for access to the sea. However, that was also considered too vulnerable to attack from the sea. Some of that area is now a national park with its long white sand beaches. Been there, too.
1922 James Joyce published ‘Ulysses’ in Paris in a print run of 1,000. I have read it and listened to scores of Frank Delany’s podcasts, some while Dr Painless was drilling my teeth. There is an entry on this book elsewhere on the blog. Get clicking. One of these Parisian editions today would sell for $USD 75,000.
1 February
1884 The first fascicle of the Oxford English Dictionary went on sale. It was ‘A-Ant.’ Work had started in 1857. A ‘fascicle’ is an unbound sheaf of pages tied together. Only in 1895 was the name ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ used. The final volume containing ‘Z’ appeared in 1928. Pictured below is editing an entry on a main frame computer. We have consulted it many times in the Complete, the Shorter, the Concise editions, and now online. The copy of the Complete came with a magnifying glass to read the five-point type in the two hefty volumes.
1896 Giacomo Puccini’s ‘La bohème’ was performed for the very first time at the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy. We saw it recently at the Sydney Opera House and once again were lifted by the music.
1915 Opals were unearthed in Coober Pedy about five hundred miles north of Adelaide. We have known a few. It is the red centre, where the summer temperatures run to 47C and in mid-winter never below 30C. Ugh. No photograph captures the fire in opals.
1920 The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Gendarmerie royale du Canada [GRC]) was inaugurated by combining the North West Territory Mounted Police with the Dominion constabulary. It required much negotiation with the provinces to divide jurisdictions. The Dominion plod got to wear the red coats. As a tweenager I sent in enough boxtops to buy a square inch of the Yukon where snow, ice, and tundra were discovered.
1981 Trevor Chappell bowled the last ball of the last match of the World Cricket Finals underarm to Brian McKechnie at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The decision by captain Chappell to do this deprived New Zealand of a sporting chance to win. The incident still figures in the popular culture, especially, I am told, in New Zealand where it is evidence of …. [figure it out].
31 January
1851 Technology, Texas: Gail Borden developed condensed milk, which meant that milk could be kept without refrigeration for the first time. He used a vacuum pump and established the “Dairyman’s Ten Commandments” to ensure hygiene. He worked in Texas but returned to Connecticut to raise money to develop the invention. A few years later Borden’s milk was a substantial part of Union army rations in the Civil War.
1901 Literature, Moscow: Medical doctor Anton Chekhov’s play ‘Three Sisters” opened at the Moscow Art Theater. Chekhov observed and listened to his patients and they inspired his imagination.
1961 Cinema, New York City: ‘The Misfits’ premiered, directed by John Huston from a screenplay by Arthur Miller. The taming of the mustangs for domesticity seems a metaphor for it three screen stars who were too big, too wild, too other worldly, too old, too vulnerable, too much of the past to live today. It was a doomed production in that it’s three stars died within a year. In hindsight, it has the inevitability of a Greek tragedy.
1983 Politics, London: To reduce deaths in traffic accidents, England required drivers and front-seat passengers to wear seatbelts. Red Queen Barbara Castle had long campaigned for mandatory seatbelts for a generation and had forced manufactures to include them when she was a minister of the crown. A biography of herself is to be found elsewhere on this blog.
1990 Commerce, Moscow: The first McDonalds in Russia opened in Moscow; ti was and still is the world’s biggest McDonalds. More than 30,000 people lined up in deep winter for Big Macs. The emphasis was placed on courteous and considerate customer service and experience which was virtually unknown in Russia at the time. This Moscow McDonalds was a joint venture between McDonalds Canada and the Soviet government. It was a great success and we saw more than one on our Russian sojourn, but none from the inside.
30 January
1815 President James Madison assented to an act of Congress which appropriated $23,950 to purchase Thomas Jefferson’s library of 6,487 volumes. The original collection had perished when the British burned Washington. Jefferson’s collection would later burn in an accidental fire. Jefferson reluctantly sold the books to finance his retirement. My experiences at this temple of knowledge are discussed in posts on this blog. Have a look.
1873 Jules Verne published ‘Around the World in Eighty Days.’ Read that and been to some of the places on the route.
1933 With the stirring notes of the William Tell Overture and a shout of “Hi-yo, Silver! Away!” The Lone Ranger started on Detroit’s radio WXYZ radio. It was the creation of station-owner George Trendle and writer Fran Striker. They were inspired by Zorro comic books. John Reid, modest, soft spoken, just, clean-living, speaking in grammatically correct and complete sentences, respectful to women, mocked no one, kindly to children, and helpful of the weak. No future for anyone like that in President Tiny’s world.
1958 House of Lords rescinded the Sex Disqualification Act which had barred women peers from its seats. A few women had won election to the House of Commons since the 1920s. Sociologist Barbara Wootton, Baroness Wootton of Abinger, was the first woman to be appointed a Life Peer. The clipping below makes light of the exclusion of women. So little changes with journalism.
1975 Ernő Rubik applied to patent a “Magic Cube,” aka ‘Rubik’s Cube.’ He had devised a number of games and puzzles to attract youngsters to mathematics, science, and engineering. It was a good way to waste time before the smart phone filled that niche.
29 January
1840 History, NZ: Captain William Hobson landed in the Bay of Islands to become the First Governor of New Zealand; he co-authored of the Treaty of Waitangi.
1845 Literature, NYC: Edgar Allan Poe published The Raven ‘on a midnight dreary.’ I did a Poe tour of sorts in Baltimore once upon a daytime weary.
1891 Politics, Honolulu: Liliuokalani became the monarch of the Hawaiian Islands. She was the last. We have visited many sites related to her in Honolulu and on Oahu. Her autobiography is discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clickin’.
1957 Architecture, Sydney: Danish architect Jörn Utzon won the competition to design the Sydney Opera House. It took nearly twenty more years and many careers to complete the project. Two points: it was built with slide rules and hands and it ran over budget by 1300% even with the design compromises and unfinished interior. Not only was it was almost impossible to build but build it they did, it was quite impossible to estimate the cost of building something that had never been done before or since. Kate has graced the boards there many a time. I have haunted the stage door there now and again.
1989 History: Aviation: A United Airlines 747 (Special Performance) set the around-the-world air speed record of 36 hours, 54 minutes, and 15 seconds. This special flight raised $500,000 for children’s charities. That would be more than a million today. Tickets cost a minimum of $5,000, and special guest passengers included astronaut Neil Armstrong. Flown many a United mile and several times with an around-the-world ticket. though not this route.
28 January
1807 The first public street lighting with gas was demonstrated on the Pall Mall, London.
1908 Author and activist Julia Ward Howe, famous for her composition, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was an abolitionist and advocated women’s rights, prison reform, and sex education throughout her long life.
1916 President Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. He had pioneered the eponymous Brandeis Brief which documented with social science data the effect of laws on the society. In Boston he worked largely pro bono on cases involving labor. He was subjected to a long and acrimonious Senate hearing. His Jewish heritage was much maligned along with everything else. I have spent time at Brandeis University.
1935 Iceland made abortion legal. At the time it was a sovereign country in personal association through the king with Denmark. It was the first country to do so.
1958 The Lego brick was patented. Lego has since produced 500 billion bricks, enough for ten lego towers from the Earth to the Moon. Seen plenty of Lego displays, including some in Copenhagen where it started.
27 January
1820 Russian Antarctic expedition discovered the continent of Antarctica. Previous efforts to verify a continent had failed because of pack ice.
1888 Thirty-three men met in Washington D.C. Among the number were teachers, philanthropists, soldiers, lawyers, financiers, cartographers, adventurers, geographers, geologists, and more. They founded the National Geographic society for “the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge.” The first magazine was published nine months later. When we passed the building in D.C. we were worried it would sink into the earth under the weight of all those magazines.
1924 The cadaver of Lenin was placed in Mausoleum in Red Square, Moscow. the story goes that Stalin was impressed by all the crowds that came to see the body, and so extended the viewing to a permanent exhibition. We have seen Vlady in the wax. Stalin was long gone when we visited.
1926 Scottish Inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated his televisor in a London laboratory, showing two dummies’ heads moving. Programming is pretty much the same now: dummies.
1983 The Seikan Tunnel opened, the longest underwater tunnel (53.90 km), between the Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido. Such a link had been contemplated for decades. In design and technology it influence the Chunnel.
26 January
66 The fifth recorded perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet. The reference is from the Talmud to “a star which appears once in seventy years that makes the captains of the ships err.”
1500 Spaniard Vicente Yáñez Pinzón becomes the first European to set foot in Brazil. He had earlier sailed with Columbus to the West Indies. However, Spain made no claim to the area, leaving it to the Portuguese by treaty.
1788 Today is Australia Day, commemorating the arrival of the First Fleet at Port Jackson, New South Wales. To see ‘Babakiueria’ is to understand much.
1808 Governor William Bligh was overthrown in the “Rum Rebellion.” It had little or nothing to do with rum though there was plenty of it about. In my early antipodean days I read H. V. Evatt, ‘Rum Rebellion: A Study of the Overthrow of Governor Bligh by John MacArthur and The New South Wales Corps (1943), which found all the parties at fault. There was plenty of that to go around, too.
1918 Herbert Hoover, US Food Administrator, called for “wheatless” and “meatless” days for the war effort. We were mightily impressed by Herbert Everywhere when we visited his presidential library in Iowa, which includes his boyhood home as shown below. Hoover is discussed on several posts on this blog. He was a whirlwind and a humanitarian who admired Democratic President Woodrow Wilson.
‘The Nobel Prize’ (2001) by Burton Feldman.
GoodReads meta-data is 489 pages, rated 3.3 by 43 litizens
Genre: Non-Fiction
Verdict: Journalism.
N.B. I listened to it in an Audible reading. On that more later.
‘The Nobel Prize.’ Words that command respect far and wide. There are many prizes in many fields, then there is the Nobel Prize. Its origin and history is as interesting as its many recipients. More than 700 Nobel Prizes have been awarded since 1901.
Father Nobel was a Russian tinker, mechanic, and inventor who moved west, first to Finland, and then to Sweden. He took the name ‘Nobel’ in reference to the village in Russia from which he came. Father moved around a lot and experimented with explosives, which made him unpopular with many a landlord.
Alfred (1833 -1896) learned technical skills from his father, and he also learned the relevance of different jurisdictions for patents and copyrights. His two brothers went back to Russia and made enormous fortunes in oil. They were styled the Russian Rockefellers until the Reds came.
Alfred followed in his father’s footsteps literally and figuratively. He experimented with explosives and he traveled to and fro in Western Europe. He was polyglot from an early age, starting with Swedish and Russian, and later French and English.
His breakthrough was to control nitroglycerin which had been developed a generation before but had proven too volatile to be used. By trial and [kaboom] error he learned to soak it into a substance like sawdust and pack it into sticks. There followed the detonator.
He was careful to copyright and patent everything in every jurisdiction. He set up factories to produce his wares which far exceeded gunpowder in both explosive power and the capacity to be controlled in small doses. Typically he worked with local partners and was often content with the return from the intellectual property and a minority interest of 25-40%. He left management to these others.
Without TNT, let’s call it for short, the Suez Canal, the Brenner Pass, the Panama Canal, the great excavations for city subways might not have been possible. Nor would mining have unleashed copper, iron, and minerals as readily.
A given quantity of TNT had twenty times the explosive power of a like amount of gunpowder and it was also quickly converted into a weapon of war, and even in his lifetime Nobel was denounced as a merchant of death. That bothered and bedevilled him.
Nobel moved around, though he spent most of his time in France and seldom returned to Sweden after nine years of age. He never married and there is little hint of romance, sex, or marriage. He had a touch of the gloomy manner of a Swedish stereotype and became preoccupied with his will at a relatively young age.
In the last three drafts of his will he proposed prizes to recognize, honour, and reward those who had recently benefited idealistically humanity. Each of those adjectives became the subject of interpretation He added and subtracted prizes over the drafts.
The Peace Prize came late and is attributed to the influence of a woman friend. The terms ‘Peace’ came into being later. He referred to it as a prize to someone who done the most to avert and eliminate war.
The will named executors whom he had not consulted and who barely knew him. They were surprised and bewildered by the task. The will made no allowance for the expenses necessary to set up and establish the prizes funded by the interest from the bequest. Moreover, the will was disputed.
Distant relatives — cousins, nieces, nephews — all challenged the will. Nobel had written his will out in a letter without consulting a lawyer and so it was vague and devoid of legal formalities which encouraged challenges.
In addition, the sum of money was so great that the Academie Française argued that Nobel was French by residence and that the bequest should be established in France to be managed by …. [go on guess].
Only when the Swedish government intervened did the matter resolve itself, some five years after Nobel’s death. Even so there was little support for the wherewithal to create a permanent organisation and the Swedish government only slowly funded that. However, by insuring that the huge Nobel fortune was invested mainly in Sweden, stimulated the government to pay the upkeep for an office, heating for the rooms, postal charges, salaries for clerks and hotel bills for experts to make selections.
Nobel had also left instructions, albeit vague, about how the money was to be invested to produce an income for the prizes, and this, too, was challenged. The sum was so great that its investment in Sweden did much to boast Sweden into industrial competition with Germany, England, and France, despite being so much smaller. Those famous Swedish industrial names were in some part seeded by Nobel funds, i.e., Asko, Bophors, Electrolux, Ericsson, Kockums, Saab, Skanska, Volvo, and others.
Managing such a fund also gave the Bank of Sweden an international profile and experience that contributed later to its role in administering the Marshall Plan, which in turn gave Sweden a disproportionate role in post World War II diplomacy; an example is Dag Hammarskjold, a one time employee of that bank and administrator in the Marshall Plan. A biography of Hammarskjold is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
The impact of the Nobel Prize on Sweden was manifold. varied, and enduring. It also put Swedish scientists in the main stream of current research, and served as an entree into world scientific establishments. While scientists in comparable countries like Norway, Spain, or Italy were ignored, the Swedes were feted, and still are.
However the author is more interested in muckraking over the choice of recipients than in these long term financial, economic, social, and political dimensions.
The first substantial chapter concerns the literature prize. This was close to Nobel’s heart for he wrote plays and poetry in English and was an avaricious reader in several languages. The author points out some of the second-rate recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature, especially in the early years when the process was inchoate, and that giants overlooked.
But the author makes no argument that these greats could have been selected. ‘Should have,’ yes. But ‘could have?’ There is only one prize a year, and even eliminating the second-raters, there would not be enough prizes for all the those omissions recited by the author. Indeed much of the book is lists of names that seems like a telephone book when listening.
While once I made it a point to read something by Nobelist in literature, no more. To this casual observer of late the Nobel Prize in Literature invariably goes to writers I have never heard of and do not want to do so. No doubt that attitude condemns me in the eyes of some. But criteria that are implicit in some the author’s fulminating are extent and durability. And I suspect many of the recipients in the last generation will not pass either test despite the lustre of the Nobel Prize.
The author also criticises the Nobel for not comprehensively covering all the literatures in all the languages in the world. This tirade is carried on and on. This auditor began to think even unpublished works would have to be canvassed to satisfy the divine criterion the author applied.
Perhaps the world’s greatest poet, composed poems on pages, which were then kept under a rock and never read by another, let alone published. The author seems to think that omitting such works undermines the prestige of the Nobel.
I blandly used the term ‘second-raters’ above to move the discussion along but reading the comments on novels on Good Reads leads me to conclude that any ostensible second-rater would have many ardent defenders. On Good Reads I have seen some of the most inane and pathetic novels stoutly defended by self-appointed champions, some of whom can spell.
Nobel specified that the Peace Prize be given by the Norwegian parliament in the recently independent Norway. This, too, was contested. Swedes had (still have but are less vocal about it) a low opinion of those truculent Norwegians, and regarded Oslo as the Nordic equivalent of a banana republic. Efforts were made to rescind that provision but international pressure and the distractions of the rest of the bequest preoccupied the Swedes and they let the Norwegians off the hook.
The author blandly assumes that identifying great works in the sciences is easier than in literature. He repeats that comment at the end of the book but when reviewing the science prizes he notes the faked results, cronyism, blinding ambition, citation clubs, organised national efforts to corral a prize. He notes the unintended consequences of science Nobel awards in distorting research agendas, either to get a Nobel or to follow in the wake of one. On this point I wished for more.
The author certainly makes clear that Nobel Prizes have became a major industry in Stockholm. It involves many committees, institutions, institutes, translators, evaluators, nominators, assessors, advisors, diplomats, clerks, managers, administrators, tech heads, and more. The activity is continuous and involves, offices, telephones, email, computer systems, a massive archive to be made digital, postage, travel, hotels, and more. All of this is done in absolute secrecy and so there is no way to estimate the cost in a year.
Secrecy is the order of the day for Nobels and it has been kept surprisingly well. I say surprisingly because leaks are the order of most days anywhere else. I would have liked some consideration given to why the rule of secrecy has been so successful there, when it is so seldom successful say for cabinet meetings, corporate boards, and examiner’s committees. For these latter meetings the secret results are usually broadcast before the written record is completed. Casual visitors to most Western European capital cities will be told state secrets within hours. The business pages spill the beans on secret corporate board meetings every Friday it seems.
I heard nothing about the origin of the Economics prize though the author spends some time in disparaging its recipients. As a layman, it seems he knows the worth of the work involved. He would not have ventured such remarks about physiology, I suspect. By the way, when I was Associate Dean in the Faculty of Economics I received a nominating form each year. I did not do so. But that fact indicates the massive mailing done.
Likewise I missed the chapter on the Peace Prize. Ergo I can give free rein to my spleen that Al Gore got one for being an insider and Barack Obama who got one for not being George Bush. Maybe he should not get another for not being President Tiny.
After years of Nobel Watching (think Kremlin Watching) the Nobel Foundation released the archives for the first fifty years. The author has great fun trolling through those for example of idiocy which can be found. While he acknowledges the daring on the part of the Nobel officials, say in making an award to William Faulkner in 1949 when his books were out of print and he was dismissed by such arbiters of opinion as the ‘New York Times’ as a village idiot. He does not go into the details of such selections but concentrates on omissions, like that of Joseph Conrad. Yes, Conrad was a great writer equal to any Nobel Prize winner, I agree.
However to get back to the view from my high horse, I also find that the author makes few, very few references to the acceptance speeches. Yet some of these in literature are even more remarkable than the works that secured the Prize. Faulkner’s ‘De Profundis’ is diamond bright.
Many questioned John Steinbeck’s stature, yet his acceptance speech burns with celestial fire. That the citation written by the Committee that selected him includes some inanities hardly diminishes Steinbeck’s work, though the author makes a meal of them. My point is not that an acceptance speech justifies post hoc an award, but rather than the acceptance speeches are part of the whole process of the Nobel and have a place in its history.
Many questions remain. How many people does the Nobel Foundation employ, full or part time? What role does the Swedish diplomatic corps play in facilitating the process? These remain known unknowns. How has the process changed with chaining technology? What kind of lobbying for prizes goes on? No single work could comprehend the whole, and perhaps there are others that have considered these questions waiting for me.
Above I noted that I had not heard this or that. Listening to it while walking or at the gym means some things get by me, and perhaps that in handling the device there are skips. This is hard to check without a table to contents with chapter titles.
The reading was staccato and grew ever more irritating. The prose was continuous but the reader imposed a staccato rhythm to it that made it sound like a breathless reporter from the rooftop. That made me reluctant at times to continue. No doubt on the Audible web site, there will be fans who loved that Hemingway drill delivery. Not me.
25 January
41 I, Claudius became Roman emperor. We know the Robert Graves account.
1755 Moscow University was established by Elizabeth II of Russia. Not the one in Idaho. Been by it on the tourist bus.
1858 Felix Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” was played, at wedding of Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Victoria, to crown prince of Prussia who became Kaiser. It had only been used once before at a wedding and when Queen Victoria chose it that made it a hit.
1915 Alexander Graham Bell in New York and Thomas Watson in San Francisco made a transcontinental telephone transmission.
1924 The International Week of Winter Sports (Winter Olympics) opened at Chamonix, France, at the foot of Mount Blanc. The Canadian ice hockey team wins a gold medal, The team included a fifteen year old figure skater, Cecil Smith, the first woman on a Canadian Olympic team. This was test of concept a Winter Olympiad and it was so successful that the Olympic Committee instituted it as a regular event from 1928.
