This week, Rebecca Onion’s always interesting blog on Slate features historical maps that illustrate the toll measles took on America before the advent of vaccines. The map above brings you back to 1890, when measles-related deaths were concentrated in the South and the Midwest. That year, according to the U.S. census, 8,666 people died from the disease. Fast forward to the period moving from 1912 to 1916, and you’ll find that there were 53,00 measles-related deaths in the US.
America continued to struggle with the disease, until 1962, when scientists mercifully invented a vaccine, and the rate of measles infections and deaths began to plummet. The authors of “Measles Elimination in the United States,” published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases (2004),note that “Since 1997, the reported annual incidence [of measles] has been <1 case/1 million population” — meaning that the disease had been pretty much eradicated in the US. But not elsewhere. The authors go on to warn, “Measles is the greatest vaccine-preventable killer of children in the world today and the eighth leading cause of death among persons of all ages worldwide.” It doesn’t take much to deduce that if we dismiss the science that has served us so well, we could see dreadfully colored maps all over again. Except this time the dark orange will likely be concentrated on the left coast.
A hundred years before Sigmund Freud used himself as a test subject for his experiments with cocaine, another scientist, Humphry Davy, English chemist and future president of the Royal Society, began “a very radical bout of self experimentation to determine the effects of” another drug—nitrous oxide, better known as “laughing gas.” Davy’s findings — Researches, Chemical and Philosophical Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide, or Diphlogisticated Nitrous Air, And Its Respiration By Humphry Davy—published in 1800, come to us via ThePublic Domain Review, who describe the 1799 experiments thus:
With his assistant Dr. Kinglake, he would heat crystals of ammonium nitrate, collect the gas released in a green oiled-silk bag, pass it through water vapour to remove impurities and then inhale it through a mouthpiece. The effects were superb. Of these first experiments he described giddiness, flushed cheeks, intense pleasure, and “sublime emotion connected with highly vivid ideas.”
Though we don’t typically think of nitrous oxide as an addictive substance, like Freud’s experiments, Davy’s progressed rapidly from curiosity to recreation: “He began to take the gas outside of laboratory conditions, returning alone for solitary sessions in the dark, inhaling huge amounts, ‘occupied only by an ideal existence,’ and also after drinking in the evening.” Fortunately for us, however, also like Freud, Davy “continued to be meticulous in his scientific records throughout.” Eventually, the twenty-year-old Davy constructed an “air-tight breathing box.” Sealing himself inside, writes Mike Jay, Davy had Dr. Kinglake “release twenty quarts of nitrous oxide every five minutes for as long as he could retain consciousness.”
Also, like Freud’s use of cocaine, Davy’s research briefly led to a faddish recreational use of the drug, well into the early part of the nineteenth century, as you can see in the caricatures at the top and below, from 1830 and 1829, respectively. But despite what these humorous images suggest, “laughing gas” became known not only as a party drug, but also as a means of achieving heightened states of consciousness conducive to philosophical reflection and poetic creation (hence the “Philosophical” reference in the title of Davy’s research). During his own experiences “under the influence of the largest does of nitrous oxide anyone had ever taken,” Davy “’lost all connection with external things,’ and entered a self-enveloping realm of the senses,” writes Jay, finding himself “‘in a world of newly connected and modified ideas,’ where he could theorise without limits and make new discoveries at will.”
The appeal of this state to a scientist may be obvious, and to a poet even more so. Davy’s friend Robert Southey, the future Poet Laureate, became “as effusive” as Davy after taking the gas, exclaiming, “the atmosphere of the highest of all possible heavens must be composed of this gas.” In addition to Southey, Davy’s “freewheeling program of consciousness expansion… co-opted some of the most remarkable figures of his day”—including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who is already well-known for finding some of his poetic inspiration under the influence of opium. Coleridge at the time had just published to great acclaim The Lyrical Ballads with William Wordsworth and had returned from a brief sojourn in Germany, where he had become heavily influenced by the German Idealist philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schelling.
Coleridge, who was “captivated by the young chemist” Davy, described his experience of taking nitrous oxide for the first time in very precise terms, avoiding the “extravagant metaphors” others tended to rely on. He recalled the sensations as resembling “that which I remember once to have experienced after returning from the snow into a warm room,” and, in a later trial, said he was “more violently acted upon” and that “towards the last I could not avoid, nor felt any wish to avoid, beating the ground with my feet; and after the mouthpiece was removed, I remained for a few seconds motionless, in great ecstacy.” Under the influence of both nitrous oxide and philosophical metaphysics, Coleridge had come to believe “the material world only an illusion projected by” the mind.
Davy, who fully endorsed this view, claiming “nothing exists but thoughts,” brought his “chaotic mélange of hedonism, heroism, poetry and philosophy” to heel in the “coherent and powerful” 580-page monograph above, which makes the case for laughing gas’s scientific and poetic worth. The report, writes Jay, combines “two mutually unintelligible languages—organic chemistry and subjective experience—to create a groundbreaking hybrid, a poetic science.” Like Freud’s use of cocaine or Timothy Leary’s experiments with LSD decades later, Davy’s experiments further demonstrate, perhaps, that the few times the sciences, philosophy, and poetry communicate with each other, it’s generally under the influence of mind-altering substances.
Let’s say you spend a considerable amount of money for a painting by a noted artist. Or maybe you get it for a steal. Either way, the painting hangs prominently in your home, where it is admired by guests and brings you pleasure every time you look at it, which is often. Years later, you accidentally discover that your painting is not the work of the artist whose signature graces the lower right hand corner of the canvas, but rather a heretofore anonymous forger. How do you react?
Do you laugh and say, “When I think of all the happiness that living with this beautiful image has brought me over the years, I feel I have gotten my money’s worth many times over. I don’t care who painted it!”
Or do you look as though you’ve just realized that evil exists in the world, which is how Hitler’s right hand man, Hermann Göring, reputedly looked when, as a prisoner at Nuremberg, he was informed that his beloved Vermeer, ”Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery” (below), was actually the work of the Dutch dealer who had sold it to him.
Göring’s reaction may have been the most human thing about him. According to Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, the pleasure we take in the things we love is deeply informed by their perceived origins. Forget monetary value. Forget bragging rights. We need to believe that our painting was not just painted by Vermeer, but handled by him, breathed upon him. If only that Vermeer of mine could talk…I bet it could settle once and for all the exact nature of his relationship with that little serving girl. Remember? The one with the pearl earring?
But that’s the sort of provenance we crave. The kind that comes with a story we can sink our teeth into.
The story must also fit the circumstances, as Bloom makes plain in his wonderfully entertaining TED talk on the Origins of Pleasure.
Unknowingly hopping in the sack with a blood relative or eating rat meat are intriguing narratives, provided they happen to someone else. Knowledge of such stories could deepen your connection to a particular piece of art.
(Can’t you feel the sexual anguish oozing out of my Vermeer? Did you know he had to choose between buying brushes and buying food?)
Not the sort of origin story you’d want to find at the bottom of your own personal soup bowl, however.
And when it comes to drink, we will willingly believe in the superior flavor of anything poured under the auspices of an acclaimed label. Scientific evidence confirms this.
(On a related note, I once hung on to a bottle after drinking the luxury vodka it once contained, thinking I’d refill it with a cheap liquor hack I had read about. The experiment ended when my husband complained that the water in our Brita pitcher tasted funny.)
Speaking of romantic partners, it turns out that beauty truly is not so much in the eye, but the brain of the beholder. And it’s probably not a bad idea to make sure you’ve got the facts regarding a potential lover’s age, gender, and bloodlines. Caveat emptor, as anyone who’s ever seen the Crying Game will attest.
“Clarke sm” by Amy Marash. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
When you want a vision of the future, I very much doubt you turn to Reader’s Digest for it. But Arthur C. Clarke did once appear in its small-format pages to provide just that, and when Arthur C. Clarke talks about the future, you’d do well to listen. Last year, we featured a 1964 BBC documentary in which the science-fiction luminary predicted the internet, 3D printers, and trained monkey servants. Today, we’d like to link you up to his Reader’s Digest predictions from the comparatively recent year of 2001 — one in which, for obvious reasons, Clarke made the media rounds — which you can read in full at arthurcclarke.net. Some highlights of his speculative timeline from 2001 to 2100:
By 2010, commercial nuclear devices, household quantum generators, and fully re-engineered automobile engines will have ended the Fossil Fuel Age. We’ll have seen the first acknowledged human clone and seen off the last human criminal.
By 2020, we’ll have discovered a 76-meter octopus, fly on “aerospace-planes” (one of which will carry Prince Harry), and trade in “mega-watt-hours” instead of any now-known currencies, and tsunamis caused by a meteor will wreck the coasts of Greenland and Canada (prompting the development of new meteor-detecting technologies).
By 2030, artificial intelligence will have reached human level, we’ll have landed on Mars, computer-generated DNA will make possible a real-life Jurassic Park, and the neurological “braincap” will allow us the direct sensory experience of anything at all.
By 2040, the “universal replicator” will allow us to create any object at all in the comfort of our own homes, resulting in the phase-out of work and a boom in arts, entertainment, and education.
By 2050, Buckminster Fuller-style self-contained mobile homes become a reality, and humans scattered as far as “Earth, the Moon, Mars, Europa, Ganymede and Titan, and in orbit around Venus, Neptune and Pluto” celebrate the centenary of Sputnik 1.
By 2090, Halley’s comet will have returned, and on it we’ll have found life forms that vindicate “Wickramasinghe and Hoyle’s century-old hypothesis that life exists through space.” We’ll also start burning fossil fuels again, both as a replacement for the carbon dioxide we’ve “mined” from the air and to forestall the next Ice Age by warming the globe back up a bit.
By 2100, we’ll have replaced rockets with a “space drive” that lets us travel close to the speed of light. And so, Clarke writes, “history begins…”
You’ll notice, of course, that we’re already behind Clarke’s vision, according to which many a still-improbable development also lies ahead in the near future. In any case, though, the end of crime, the beginning of private space travel, and the era of the Dymaxion home must come sooner or later, mustn’t they? And as Clarke himself admits, one plays a mug’s game when one predicts, even when one does it with uncommon astuteness. “In 1971 I predicted the first Mars Landing in 1994,” he remembers in the preamble to his list. “On the other hand, I thought I was being wildly optimistic in 1951 by suggesting a mission to the moon in 1978. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin beat me by almost a decade.”
But to this day, Clarke’s scorecard looks better than most of ours: “I take pride in the fact that communications satellites are placed exactly where I suggested in 1945, and the name “Clarke Orbit” is often used (if only because it’s easier to say than ‘geostationary orbit’).” Who knows what he could tell us to watch out for now if, as he predicted in 2001, he’d lived to see his hundredth birthday aboard the Hilton Orbiter Hotel?
When we envision the fruits of the research of the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (aka NASA), we tend to think of images. I think I exaggerate not at all when I say that the never-before-seen view of the Earth from space gave humanity a whole new perspective, no pun intended, on our very existence. But you don’t have to strain too hard to think of historically momentous NASA sounds, either: “Houston we’ve had a problem,” “One giant leap for mankind.”
If you can’t think of more than those two, why not spend some listening time with NASA’s new Soundcloud account, or alternatively perusing the NASA Sounds web site, which features a larger number of downloadable mp3s. “There are rocket sounds, the chirps of satellites and equipment, lightning on Jupiter, interstellar plasma and radio emissions,” writes Create Digital Music’s Peter Kirn. “And in one nod to humanity, and not just American humanity, there’s the Soviet satellite Sputnik (among many projects that are international in nature).” Better still, “you’re free to use all of these sounds as you wish, because NASA’s own audio isn’t copyrighted.”
Back in November, we brought you the BBC series of short animated videos, A History of Ideas. Produced in collaboration with the UK’s Open University and narrated by Harry Shearer, these fun introductions to such philosophers as Simone de Beauvoir and Edmund Burke, and such weighty philosophical topics as free will and the problem of evil, make challenging, abstract concepts accessible to non-philosophers. Now the series is back with a new chapter, “How Did Everything Begin?,” a survey of several theories of the origins of the universe, from Thomas Aquinas’ philosophical speculations, to Hindu cosmology; and from theologian William Paley’s design argument (below), and the theory of the Big Bang (above).
The two videos here present an interesting counterpoint between the origin theories of astrophysics and theology. Though current day intelligent design proponents deny it, there is still much of William Paley’s argument, at least in style, in their explanations of creation. First propounded in his 1802 work Natural Theology, the theologian’s famous watchmaker analogy—which he extended to the design of the eye, and everything else—gave Charles Darwin much to puzzle over, though David Hume had supposedly refuted Paley’s arguments 50 years earlier. The Big Bang theory—a term created by its foremost critic Fred Hoyle as a pejorative—offers an entirely naturalistic account of the universe’s origins, one that presupposes no inherent purpose or design.
As with the previous videos, these are scripted by former Open University professor and host of the Philosophy Bites podcast, Nigel Warburton. This time around the videos are narrated by Gillian Anderson, whose voice you may not immediately recognize. Rather than sounding like Dana Scully, her famous X‑Files character, Anderson speaks in a British accent, which she slips into easily, having lived in the UK for much of her childhood and now again as an adult. (You may have seen Anderson in many of the English period dramas she has appeared in, or in British crime drama The Fall or Michael Winterbottom’s uproarious adaptation of Tristram Shandy.)
These fascinating speculative theories—whether scientific or mythological—are sure to appeal to fans of the X‑Files, who can perhaps begin to believe again, or remain skeptical, thanks to news that Anderson may reteam with Chris Carter and David Duchovny for a reboot of the classic sci-fi series.
The Templeton Foundation asked some heavy-hitter thinkers to answer the question, “Does the Universe Have a Purpose”. Some said “Yes” and “Certainly.” Others concluded “Unlikely” and “No.” Neil deGrasse Tyson — astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popularizer of science — gave an answer that falls technically in the “Not Certain” camp.
Above, you can watch a video where Tyson reads his answer aloud, and the makers of Minute Physics provide the rudimentary animation. One thing astrophysicists have is a knack for putting things into a deeper context, often making “big” human questions look remarkably small (if not somewhat absurd). Carl Sagan did it remarkably well in his famous ‘The Pale Blue Dot’ speech. And Tyson picks up right where Sagan left off.
We still live in a world where, despite Copernicus, we think the world revolves essentially around us. And, to the extent that that’s true, some will find Tyson’s data points disorienting. Others might wonder whether we should angst so much about the questions we perennially ask in the first place. I guess I am kind of there today.
A joint operation of five participating countries and the European Space Agency, the International Space Station is an enormous achievement of human cooperation across ideological and national boundaries. Generations of people born in the nineties and beyond will have grown up with the ISS as a symbol of the triumph of STEM education and decades of space travel and research. What they will not have experienced is something that seems almost fundamental to the cultural and political landscape of the Boomers and Gen Xers—the Cold War space race. But it is worth noting that while Russia is one of the most prominent partners in ISS operations, current Communist republic China has virtually no presence on it at all.
But this does not mean that China has been absent from the space race—quite the contrary. While it seems to those of us who witnessed the exciting interstellar competition between superpowers that the only players were the big two, the Chinese entered the race in the 1960s and launched their first satellite in 1970. This craft, writes space history enthusiast Sven Grahn, “would lead to China being a major player in the commercial space field.”
Since its launch into orbit, the satellite has continuously broadcast a song called Dong Fang Hong, a eulogy for Mao Zedong (which “effectively replaced the National Anthem” during the Cultural Revolution—hear the broadcast here). The satellite, now referred to, after its song, as DFH‑1 (or CHINA‑1), marked a significant breakthrough for the Chinese space program, spearheaded by rocket engineer Qian Xuesen, who had been previously expelled from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena for suspected Communist sympathies.
Before DFH‑1, the national imagination was primed for the prospect of Chinese space flight by images like the poster just above, titled “Roaming outer space in an airship,” and designed by Zhang Ruiheng in 1962. This striking piece of work comes to us from Chinese Posters, a compendium of images of “propaganda, politics, history, art.” Images like this one and that of a Chinese taikonaut at the top—“Bringing his playmates to the stars”—from 1980, appropriate imagery from the traditional nianhua, or New Years picture.
This fanciful style, which “catered to the tastes and beliefs in the countryside,” became the “most important influence on the propaganda posters produced by the Chinese Communist Party,” who began using it in the 1940s. The poster above, “Little guests in the Moon Palace,” dates from the early 1970s, after the launch of DFH‑1 and its sister satellite SJ‑I (CHINA‑2).
As you can see from the 1989 poster above—“Heaven increases the years, man gets older”—the CCP continued to use the nianhua style well into the eighties, but in the following decades, they began to move away from it and toward more militaristic imagery, like that in the image below from 2002. With different colors and symbols, it would look right at home on the wall of an armed forces recruiting station in any small town, U.S.A.
Like many U.S. advocates for space travel and exploration, such as the increasingly visible Neil deGrasse Tyson, the CCP has used space as a means of promoting scientific literacy. In the poster below, “Uphold science, eradicate superstition,” space imagery is used to bring much-persecuted Falon Gong adherents “back into the fold” and to oppose science to religious superstition.
Although some of the imagery may suggest otherwise, the Chinese space program has developed along similar lines as the U.S.’s, and has been put to similar uses. These include the use of space exploration as a means of unifying nationalist sentiment, driving support for science and technology funding and research, and pushing a vision of scientific progress as the national ethos. In 2012, the same year that Sally Ride—first American woman in space—passed away, China began selecting its first female taikonaut, making their space program a venue for increasing gender equality as well.
It was only very recently that the Chinese space program successfully completed its first manned mission, sending its first taikonaut, Yang Liewei, abord the Shenzhou 5 in a low earth orbit mission. Although the achievement—as you can see in the poster above commemorating a visit of the taikonaut to Hong Kong—marked a moment of significant national pride, there was one encouraging sign for the future of international cooperation: though you cannot see it in the photo, Yang wore the flag of the United Nations in addition to that of the People’s Republic of China.
See more of these fascinating works of propaganda at Chinese Posters
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