The Invention of Air

I have been thinking that it might be fun to take interesting tidbits from some of the books I've read recently and post them.  I don't want to write  book reviews; rather, just note a few of the things that caught my attention. (I have an ulterior motive--to aid in my memory.) I'm starting with a book I just finished today: The Invention of Air, by Steven Johnson.  It's a terrific book about Joseph Priestly, one of the seminal thinkers of the late 18th and early 19th century and a leading scientist of the Enlightenment.

• Ben Franklin (a great friend and mentor to Priestly) was the first to map the path of the Gulf Stream across the Atlantic, which was very beneficial to the shipping industry in accelerating the east-bound transatlantic voyages.
• In the 18th century, science was referred to as "natural philosophy."
• Franklin was really a significant figure in the early development of the science of electricity. I'd always thought he was just a dabbler, and that his kite experiment was on the fringe of the science. Actually, Franklin coined the terms "charged," "battery" and "conductor."
• In the early days of electricity in the mid-1700's the primary application was parlor tricks.  Here's a drawing of a boy hanging from a silk rope that transfers static electricity to a young girl by touch. Volunteers would be called from the audience to experience the voltage first-hand.  Those that practiced this magic for entertainment were known as ... electricians.
  
• Samuel Boswell, speaking wryly on politicians: "I said that, as it seemed to be agreed that all members of Parliament became corrupted, it was better to chuse (sic) men that were already bad, and so save good men."
• European men in the 18th century were two inches shorter than in the 21st century. Five-foot-eight-inches was considered tall.
• Marx correctly identified three new macro processes that would drive change in the coming centuries: Class struggle, the evolution of capital and technological innovation. 
• Most great inventors in history have been blessed with the gift of leisure time.
• Priestly was the first to make carbonated beverages, but incorrectly believed drinking them would prevent scurvy.  
• As Johnson has written elsewhere, the emergence of coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries played a major role in the development of thought and innovation.  One reason was that coffeehouses became hubs of cross-disciplinary interaction.  Another was that, prior to the introduction of coffee into Europe, the most popular beverages were beer and wine, because the fermentation made them a much safer drink than water.  It was not unusual for men to drink beer for breakfast and throughout the day. As most college students can attest, caffeine is a more effective intellectual catalyst than beer. 
• One of the highly debated areas of 18th-century science was why things burned up. One popular (but famously incorrect) theory was that all things that could burn contained a substance call phlogiston, which was used up in the burning process.
• Giantism was a defining characteristic of the Carboniferous Age, between 350 million and 300 million years ago, before the earliest dinosaurs. The fossil record reveals giant dragonflies, ferns the size of oak trees, flies as big as birds and 50-foot tall grasses.  By 250 million B.C. the scale of things was restored to what we see on Earth today.  This phenomenon was the result of an unusually high level of oxygen in the air--35% vs. the current 20%.  
• One of the keys to the eventual success of the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War was Franklin negotiating the purchase of 200 tons of a superior French gunpowder, which gave the Americans a superior firing range vs. the British.
• Priestly's book "History of the Corruptions of Christianity" got him chased out of England. A Unitarian minister, Priestly believed that the magic and mysticism of Christianity, including the concept of the Trinity, were all added long after Christ had died. His view was highly controversial and incendiary, but was embraced by his good friend Thomas Jefferson, as it reconciled science with a new form of Christianity.  Jefferson once wrote "I am a sect by myself, as far as I know."
• Priestly was the first scientist who sought exile in America.  He settled in North Central Pennsylvania, not far from Williamsport.
• The early definitions of the term "innovation" were essentially negative, i.e. a new development that threatened the existing order in a detrimental way.
• Both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on July 4, 1926, 50 years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Dinwiddie and Dylan

Last night I was listening to some obscure music from 1902--the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet, which specialized in black jubilee music and toured as part of a vaudeville revue.  Suddenly, I hear something that sounds unmistakenly like Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Free," from his The Freewheeling Bob Dylan album.  I listen again, and sure enough, Dylan borrowed the tune from the recording of "The Poor Mourner."

You can listen to both on Spotify or Rdio.

A lot of rock 'n roll songs trace their roots from blues classics, including Statesboro Blues, Midnight Special, CC Rider, Whole Lotta Love, Rock Me Baby, Midnight Hour, Smokestack Lightning and more.  But this one--from the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet in 1902--struck me as the most surprising.

Robert Wilkins

Last night I discovered Robert Wilkins, a somewhat obscure blues singer and guitarist, born in 1896 in Hernando, Mississippi, just south of Memphis.  It was midnight and I was winding down, chilling to his light-fingered Piedmont-style guitar, crisp vocals and thoughtful lyrics, when this line from Falling Down Blues caught my attention:

I'll certainly treat you just like you was white.
I'll certainly treat you just like you was white.
If that don't satisfy you, girl I'll take your life.

All sorts of things crossed my mind.  First, how politically incorrect!  And then, how much things have changed, only to come back.  In a different context, it almost sounds like a contemporary rap lyric.

Robert Wilkins has an interesting story. In 1928 he recorded the song Rolling Stone, for Victor Records.  He only did a few other blues recording sessions, the last one in 1935, and his body of recorded work is limited.  Blues was a rough and rowdy scene in those days. with musicians playing bawdy songs in juke joints, parties and travelling medicine shows, with plenty of home-made liquor and a surprisingly abundant supply of drugs.


The story is that Wilkins' wife became very ill and he prayed at her bedside that if God would let her live he would give up the blues and devote himself to religion. His wife did recover and Wilkins stayed true to his word and became a minister, often playing guitar and singing as part of his service. But he abandoned the old blues lyrics, often replacing them with religious ones.

His most famous song started as a blues tune--That's No Way to Get Along, which was later covered by Eric Clapton, Guy Davis and others. Wilkins rewrote the lyrics and in 1964, at the age of 72, recorded the new version as The Prodigal Son, (by The Reverend Robert Wilkins--Memphis Gospel Singer).  In 1968, a modestly altered version of Prodigal Son appeared on the Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet album, but listed Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as writers/composers. When the song was identified as a Wilkins original, the Stones had to re-release the album with the proper credits. Copies of the original Beggars Banquet album with the misappropriated credits are a rare collectors' item.

Robert Wilkins died in 1987 in Memphis, Tennessee, at the age of 92.

New York State of Mind

Rebecca and I were in New York City last week, something we hadn't done together in many years.  I had a long list of things I'd like to do, but as I look back, most of our time was spent riding subways, walking to subways, looking for subways, turning around at the wrong entrances and walking from subways to some mystifying address.

Of course, this wasn't all that we did.  We also spent quite a bit of time deciphering subway maps. And being technologically savvy, we frequently gazed in confusion at Google Maps on our cell phones or iPad. Sometimes, for a change of pace, we turned on the audible walking directions. But since the decibel level on a Manhattan sidewalk is only slightly less than a Deep Purple concert I went to in high school, we couldn't hear a thing.  (By the way, if you reply "What?" or "Huh?" to the Google Maps Navigation, it just ignores you. Very rude.)

And sometimes we just walked around and looked at things, or at people, which there are a lot of in Manhattan.

Lest anyone think our trip was uneventful, that's far from true. We also stepped out and tried something new--using the fast-growing Uber transportation service.  Uber-driving seems to be a very popular new career for Eastern European emigrants. One of the benefits of Uber over taxis is that now the driver and I have each other's cell phone numbers, in case we want to get together for some stroganov and pickled herring.

We did some other stuff, too, but I don't recall what it was.

What the App?

I just received this from a friend who has developed an app, addressed to his "Friends and Family."  An excerpt from the email:

Apple relies very heavily on Ratings of apps to rank you in the App store and so we really need help boosting our number of 5 star ratings.  Could you please take a quick minute and give us a rating in the App Store.  Please also ask your kids or anyone with an iPhone to take a quick minute as well.

And it strikes me that asking friends and their kids to rate an app that they haven't used is less than admirable, both in a personal and business context.  Ask me to try, great.  Ask me to forward something, no problem.  Or to follow, share, etc.  But to say a product is great when I haven't used it ...

I've always been a little suspect about ratings, but now even more so, knowing someone who is a good person seemed quite comfortable with this practice.

Bio-Powers

Our language can be mischievous at times.

Today I read about a baseball player.  "He may be the smartest person in baseball," the article claimed. The only support for this speculation was that the player majored at Yale in biochemistry and biophysics.

Which got me to thinking that his credentials would not be nearly as impressive if he had merely majored in the more commonplace "chemistry" and "physics." Now I'm sure even these disciplines, particularly at Yale, are not for the intellectually feeble.  But adding the enigmatic prefix "bio-" elevates the fields to an entirely new level of imagined academic rigor and scientific elitism.

The applications abound.  "Mass" is a fairly pedestrian word, but "biomass" suggests the need for precision instruments.   Similarly, a "sphere" might be a child's toy, or a plastic model, but a "biosphere" is the stuff of major motion pictures, evoking images of scientists lumbering around in Hazmat suits while extras scurry about in color-coordinated one-piece coveralls with special patches.

The list goes on: Biotechnology, bioengineering, biofuels, biomedicine, biohazards, even the categorically distinct "biopic," all sound much more intriguing and sophisticated than their prefix-less selves. I even recall reading the opinions of a "bioethicist."  I have no idea how his particular field of moral analytics differs from Aristotle's or Kant's, but I was too intimidated by his title to even for a moment question his credentials.

Bio- adds credibility even in the vernacular. "I need a break," sounds wimpy, like you can't handle the rigors of the task  But if you need a "bio-break," well, when you gotta go, you gotta go.

I won't pretend to know exactly what "bio" means or how it modifies the definition of a word. Something to do with cells or organisms, I suppose, if my 9th-grade biology class is any indication.  (I remember reading about "zygotes," but the rest is sort of hazy.)  But the details don't matter.  Now that I've discovered the secret powers of the Bio, I can't resist using them.

Bill
Bioblogger, Bioconsultant, Biofather and Bioman