Shala K. Howell's Blog, page 22

50 States of Public Art: The Tree Spirits of St. Simons Island, Georgia

Public art is everywhere, and in some parts of the country you can even still go out and enjoy it. (Sorry, snow-packed Northerners, the public art portion of this blog is headed south for the winter.)  With that, let’s take a quick (virtual) trip to St. Simons Island in coastal Georgia. 

The Tree Spirits of St. Simons Island, Georgia
[image error] Tree Spirit carved into an oak tree somewhere in the beach town of St. Simons Island. (Artist: Keith Jennings. Photo via 365 Atlanta Traveler.)

Title: Tree Spirit

Artist: Keith Jennings

Location: St. Simons Island, Georgia

Photo Source: 365 Atlanta Traveler

Located on the southeast Georgia coast between Savannah and Jacksonville, St. Simons Island is a small seaside resort town with year-round residents, hard-packed sandy beaches, miles of bike trails, a rich and complicated history with deep ties to the U.S. Navy, and a unique crop of public art.

Before the Revolutionary War, the colonies’ sea-faring merchants sailed the seas under the protection of the British Navy. Merchants based in the colonies shipped their salted fish, wheat, tobacco, and grains around the world with relatively little trouble. Admittedly, 75% of the colonies’ exports were shipped to Britain as part of the first leg of the infamous Triangular Trade (the triangular trade route used to exchange raw materials, manufactured goods, and slaves among Europe, its colonies, and Africa), but it was a lucrative business.

Once the war was over and the United States had gained its independence, the situation changed dramatically. Britain withdraw its naval support for our merchants and cut its imports of American goods to a meager 10% of our exports. This rapid cutback triggered a depression in the former colonies.

The United States desperately needed to find new international markets for the exports that Britain was no longer buying. But without a well-respected navy of its own, America’s merchants became easy prey for pirates operating off the coasts of Africa. At first, the fledgling U.S. government paid the pirates for protection, but participating in this extortion scheme was an untenable long-term solution.

The United States Congress passed the Naval Act of 1794, which authorized the construction of six new frigates to protect our rights on the seas. The problem was, building ships was a costly business for a country with few funds. The newly formed United States needed to find a native source of timber to keep expenses in check.

Long-time readers will remember from one of my past public art posts that the builders tasked with building the U.S.S. Constitution in 1794 wanted to buy the massive Avery Oak tree in Dedham, MA for this purpose. The Avery family refused, and the Avery Oak tree remained undisturbed until a thunderstorm finally knocked it down in July, 1973.

Another team of government timber surveyors apparently went South to source pine from the Carolinas and live oak trees from Georgia’s barrier islands, including St. Simons. At the time, live oak was considered one of the best woods for building ships because it was an extremely dense wood that held up to salt water well. The branches of live oak trees were also naturally curved, which allowed builders to create the curved shape of ships without having to make quite so many joins.

The live oak forests on St. Simons and the nearby islands proved to be so dense, that in 1792, James Gould, a government timber surveyor from Granville, Massachusetts, decided to settle on St. Simons and set up his own lumber mill. Gould used local slave labor to harvest the trees, which he then shipped up the coast to the massive frigate-building shipyards in the North.

All of which is why when local artist Keith Jennings wanted to pay homage to the sailors who lost their lives at sea, he chose to carve his tree spirits into the live oak trees that remain on St. Simons Island.  Instead of clustering his sailors in one particular patch of the island, Jennings scattered his tree spirits on various trees around town. Look for the faces of his sailors in the nubs of long gone branches or breaks in the tree bark.

As you look, keep in mind that not all of the tree spirits are faces. Jennings also carved a magnificent full-length mermaid into the tree outside the Golden Isles CVB office at 529 Beachview Drive on St. Simons Island.

Want to see it yourself?

I wasn’t able to find a map of these tree spirits online. However, I’ve heard that the folks at the Golden Isles CVB office keep an informal list. They should be able to point you in the direction of at least a few.

One of the reasons there’s no official map may be that the census of tree spirits is constantly changing. Sometimes, it’s because the host tree itself has been removed or blown down by natural causes. But sometimes, as in the case of the tree spirit that used to live outside Murphy’s Tavern, it’s because someone has carted the tree spirit off and left the host tree behind.

Even though some of the older spirits have disappeared, local artists are still carving new ones, so keep your eyes open as you wander. I bet you’ll spot a few in some unexpected places. When you do, send us a picture here at Caterpickles. We’d love to see what you find.

Happy public art hunting!

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Related Links:

St Simons Island: An Insider’s Guide to Stay, Eat, and Play (365 Atlanta Traveler)
Your Guide to Finding the St. Simons Island Tree Spirits (365 Atlanta Traveler)
Timber for America’s Wooden Walls (U.S. Naval Institute)
Through the Lens of the Five-Year-Old: The Bunny at the Old Avery School (Caterpickles)

Why was Darwin so obsessed with pigeons?

[image error]While cleaning up the nonfiction 500 section of the middle school library after a particularly riotous set of future scientists, I came across David Quammen’s illustrated edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

In his introduction, David Quammen describes Darwin’s writing style as that of “a gentle uncle, clearing his throat politely, about to share a few curious observations and musings over tea.”

Of course, I had to read it.

I’m only a chapter in and already I’ve been astounded at least twice.

Astounding Fact #1: Darwin was an avid breeder of fancy pigeons

No, really. Breeding fancy pigeons was a thing respectable people did in the 1850s.

Darwin was nuts about it. He talks about his habit with his usual humility. On page 26, he writes:

“Believing that it is always best to study some special group, I have, after deliberation, taken up domestic pigeons.”

Read a little further and you quickly realize how much work the phrases “after deliberation” and “taken up domestic pigeons” are doing in that sentence. They make what was clearly an obsession of history-altering proportions sound like a modest gentlemanly pursuit.

Once Darwin launches into his multi-page discussion of the visual and skeletal differences between a dozen different fancy pigeon breeds, the façade of modest gentleman breeder falls away. He’s obviously read every fancy pigeon treatise he could get his hands on, including several ancient and presumably hard to find ones. He must have spent years measuring pigeon jaws, legs, toes, vertebrae, and furcula (the wishbone). He took extensive notes on the subject of oil glands (or the lack thereof), flight patterns, individual pigeon voices and dispositions, plumage development, and the various types of down on the hatchlings.

He belonged to not one, but two separate, and judging from his evident pleasure in being allowed to join them, quite exclusive, London Pigeon Clubs. He also went to pigeon breeding conferences, and built up an impressive network of contacts among the fancy pigeon breeding set. He thanks two of them, the Hon. W. Elliot of India and the Hon. C. Murray of Persia, in his book for sending him skins (bird specimens) to advance his studies.

[image error]Two of the types of fancy pigeons Darwin studied while developing his theories of natural and artificial selection. Above, a carrier pigeon. Below, a pouter pigeon. (Illustrations from David Quammen, ed. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species, Illustrated Edition, pages 26-27.)

[image error]

Why was Darwin so obsessed with pigeons? 

The short answer is that Darwin studied pigeons for the same reason geneticists study pigeons today: to better understand the general principles of evolution and how specific genetic traits are passed on from one generation to the next.

Of course, Darwin doesn’t use those exact words. As he himself points out on page 21, at the time he wrote his book, “The laws governing inheritance [were] quite unknown.” Gregor Mendel wouldn’t publish his work on what he called “invisible traits” and we call genes until 1866, seven years after Origins was first published.

Still, Darwin was able to use his pigeon breeding to demonstrate his theory of artificial selection — the idea that people have played an active role in shaping specific animal and plant species to be more useful (or attractive) to us.

Accept that artificial selection is possible and you’re most of the way there when it comes to accepting natural selection. After all, if humans can significantly reshape breeds in just a few hundred years of selective breeding, imagine the changes nature itself can make over millions of years.

But why pigeons, and not, say dogs? 

To better understand how the process of artificial selection worked, Darwin needed a species that:

Bred well in captivity, and reliably produced off-spring that were themselves fertile
Grew up relatively quickly and bred prolifically
Mated for life
Had proven capable of creating subspecies that varied greatly from breed to breed
Had an extensive network of breeders and a well-documented history of breeding stretching back centuries
Was believed by naturalists to have sprung from a single ancestral species, rather than from several different ones

Pigeons fit the bill in ways other domesticated plants and animals didn’t.

Pigeons bred well in captivity

“Nothing is more easy than to tame an animal, and few things more difficult than to get it to breed freely under confinement, even in the many cases where the male and female unite.” (Darwin, p. 16)

Pigeons had a track record of thriving and reproducing in captivity that stretched back centuries. Their young were themselves fertile, and grew up quickly, enabling Darwin to observe the effects of selective breeding choices over multiple generations relatively quickly.

Dogs reproduce well in captivity too. Pigeons, however, could be reliably mated for life. Darwin could keep several different pairs of pigeons of different breeds in the same aviary without risking the integrity of his experiments (a great cost-savings for any gentleman scholar).  Dogs are a bit freer, shall we say, when it comes to choosing mates, so would need closer supervision.

Pigeons varied greatly from breed to breed, and their physical appearance could be manipulated by breeders

If you are going to test how traits change over generations, you need a plant or animal that has been proven to be somewhat elastic in its appearance. Pigeon breeders boasted widely and often of their ability to breed birds with specific coloring or features in just a few generations. On page 35, Darwin quotes a fellow pigeon breeder, Sir John Sebright as saying that when it came to pigeons, “he could produce any given feather in three years, but it would take him six years to obtain head and beak.”

Even better, pigeon breeders kept extensive records on their flock, and shared information freely

Through his pigeon clubs and conferences, Darwin gained access to an extensive network of fellow pigeon breeders, many of whom freely shared their notes and even samples of their flock (live and dead) with Darwin to advance his studies.

Because pigeons have been bred in captivity for thousands of years all around the world, Darwin was also able to find some ancient treatises on pigeons. He used these sometimes centuries-old documents to compare the characteristics of his fancy pigeons with features documented in pigeons of the same breed more than a century earlier. In the case of the English carrier and short-faced tumbler, Darwin was able to construct an almost perfect series showing how the defining characteristics of these species had been enhanced through selective breeding over the centuries.

Finally, Darwin was reasonably sure that all of the various breeds of pigeons shared a common ancestor

By the time Darwin wrote Origins, it was commonly accepted among naturalists that despite their great variety in appearance, all domesticated pigeons were in fact descended from the wild rock-pigeon (Columba livia). This was important because it gave Darwin an original species to compare the changes in the various breeds against, allowing him to demonstrate how dramatic the impact of artificial selection could be over time.

On page 35, he writes (no doubt extremely controversially):

“We cannot suppose that all the breeds were suddenly produced as perfect and as useful as we now see them; indeed, in several cases, we know that this has not been their history. The key is man’s power of accumulative selection: nature gives successive variations; man adds them up in certain directions useful to him. In this sense he may be said to make for himself useful breeds.”

(What do you want to bet that this passage caused at least half of the religious furor stirred up by this book’s publication?)

And that leads me to my second surprise of the book so far… Darwin didn’t believe that the various breeds of dogs shared a common ancestor.

Naturally having realized the immense variation men could achieve in pigeons through artificial selection, Darwin would have known that it was at least possible for all domesticated dog breeds to share a common ancestor, right?

Nope.  And I quote:

“I do not believe, as we shall presently see, that all our dogs have descended from any one wild species; but, in the case of some other domestic races, there is presumptive, or even strong evidence in favour of this view.” (p. 24)

Darwin, you missed it by THIS MUCH.

As far as I can tell (and–necessary caveat–I haven’t finished reading the entire book yet, so I may be the one missing something), Darwin could easily imagine that the various breeds of fancy pigeons shared a common ancestor no matter which part of the world they hailed from because he could point to a contemporaneous species and say (essentially), “That’s the one. Fancy pigeons all evolved from that bird there.”

Even in 1850, the diversity among the breeds of dogs was so great that Darwin’s imagination simply failed him. Darwin wasn’t able to point to a single type of dog alive in the 1850s that exhibited all of the basic characteristics for the various breeds. Instead of concluding that this meant that the shared ancestor must have been some species of wild dog that has since gone extinct, Darwin decided it could just as easily mean that the different dog breeds had descended from seven or eight different species of wild dogs, not just one.

So, if Darwin isn’t the source for the idea that all domesticated dogs share a common ancestor, who is?

That, Gentle Reader, is a question for next time.

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Related Links:

Why study pigeons? (Learn.Genetics, University of Utah)
Darwin pigeon breeds (Darwin’s Pigeons)

“So, Mommyo, what are you going to do about Caterpickles, now that I’m in middle school?”

You may have noticed that posting has been uneven for quite a while now. Years ago when I first started this blog, I was posting daily. Of course, this used to be my only personal writing outlet, so that helped motivation-wise. My daughter was also much younger then and obliging me with daily naps, which helped time-wise.

It was also much easier to come up with blog-friendly, non-privacy-violating content. After all, neither my daughter or her friends were reading on their own. They were also never online, which gave me considerable freedom when it came to posting funny stuff my daughter said.  Our family read books by the dozen together, which made Friday book reviews a snap to put together.  And my daughter was constantly asking questions, mostly about stuff that I didn’t know but thought sounded pretty interesting. For me the easiest way to remain sane while dealing with the onslaught was to write the answers up for the blog.

[image error]Father-daughter photo shoot. Look how tiny she was. In other news, I just realized that we’ve been seeking out and taking pictures of public art for a really long time. This picture was taken at the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Gardens in Springfield, MA in 2013. (Photo: Shala Howell)

Now that The Eleven-Year-Old is in middle school, she’s reading on her own, researching her own questions, and the potential fallout from telling funny stories about her day is much greater. The Eleven-Year-Old follows Caterpickles, as do some of her friends (hi, guys!).

All of which tends to make a mother a bit nervous about what she types. The result has been fewer posts. But I’m not really happy with that.

So it’s time to rethink the blog a bit. I think it’s possible to take Caterpickles in a direction that is still interesting and entertaining for us curious types, without any of the elements that make it an increasingly tricky proposition for my ongoing relationship with my daughter.

This is where you come in.

WordPress has this wonderful little polling feature. Assuming I can figure out how to use it, you’ll start seeing a poll at the bottom of every post asking you whether you’d like to see more posts of this type on the blog.

For my part, I’m going to post on all kinds of topics over the next few months.

Vote early and often. And of course, if you have a moment, I would love it if you’d leave a comment letting me know what you’d like to see more of on the blog. Your input will help me figure out where to take Caterpickles next.

[image error]Onward! (Photo: Shala Howell)

Thanks for reading Caterpickles.

Take Our Poll

Related Links: 

Wordless Wednesday: Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Gardens in Springfield, MA (Caterpickles)
Wordless Wednesday: Huzzah! (Caterpickles)

Look what I learned to do this fall!

This fall I’ve been volunteering in my daughter’s middle school library. Mostly the job involves shelving books kids have already read and helping kids find the books they’d like to read next.

But a few weeks ago I was promoted to Apprentice Book Repair Person.

The students have read the library’s signed copy of Rebel Belle by Rachel Hawkins to pieces. Three of them to be precise — the front cover and spine, the back cover, and the block of pages in the middle.

[image error]Rebel Belle pre-repair. The back cover is sitting underneath the stack of inside pages, so you can’t see it in this photo.

It turns out the only thing holding the book together was that Mylar cover librarians put on books to protect their dust jackets.

[image error]All dressed up and ready for the next school dance.

Once I took the Mylar cover off, the inside pages promptly divorced themselves from the rest of the book.

The librarian handed me a sad little stack of book parts, a repair manual, a rebinding machine, a stash of repair supplies, and asked me to do my best.

Reader, I fixed it. 

I cannot in good conscience use the words “good as new,” but Rachel Hawkins’ Rebel Belle is ready to be loved again.

The sweetest thing?

The book needed to sit on the repair shelf for 24 hours before it could be re-introduced into the stacks. My librarian buddy saved it for me, and I got to return it to the stacks myself when I walked in last week.

Sniff. I love librarians.

Related Links: 

So I sat down today to do a bit of blogging and then this happened (Caterpickles)

 

50 States of Public Art: San Francisco buses power Ned Kahn’s Bus Jet Fountain

It’s election season and that means that I’ve been hearing a lot of press about all the things that are going wrong in Northern California. So it was a pleasant change to see this story in the New York Times yesterday about artist Ned Kahn’s plan to use San Francisco’s public transit system to create an interactive piece of public art.   

San Francisco buses power Ned Kahn’s Bus Jet Fountain 
[image error] Ned Kahn’s interactive art work, Bus Jet Fountain, spouts water when buses travel through the Transbay Transit Center below. (Photo: Peter DaSilva, via the San Francisco Chronicle)

Artist: Ned Kahn

Location: Transbay Transit Center, San Francisco

Photo Source: Peter DaSilva/San Francisco Chronicle

Associated Public Art Project:

San Francisco’s new $2.2 billion Transbay Transit Center spans almost three blocks between Beale and Second streets in San Francisco’s East Cut neighborhood. The transit center routes AC Transit, Golden Gate Transit, and MUNI buses below a 5.4 acre rooftop park.

The budget for the new transit center included $4.75 million for four public art installations in the terminal. One of these, Ned Kahn‘s Bus Jet Fountain, uses the buses themselves to trigger water fountains that spray out of a meandering granite stream bed that lines the public park above.

To create the interactive fountain, Kahn attached nozzles planted in the granite bed to sensors on the ceiling of the bus deck below. Buses traveling through the transit center trip a series of sensors, which in turn trigger the nozzles above to release individual sprays of water along the bus’s path.

Visitors in the park above the transit center can’t hear the buses themselves, but they can track their progress by watching the fountains. As many as 100 buses an hour pass through the center during rush hour, making for a lively and unpredictable water show.

Want to see Bus Jet Fountain for yourself?

You might have to wait a while. San Francisco’s Transbay Transit Center is temporarily closed, while workers repair a series of structurally significant cracks in the ceiling that appeared in late September.

If you’d like to see more of Ned Kahn’s work, however, you can stop by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission headquarters at 525 Golden Gate Avenue. Ned Kahn’s interactive work Firefly covers the north wall of this 13-story building. Kahn crafted Firefly out of tens of thousands of hinged five-inch square clear polycarbonate panels that move freely in the wind. Firefly shifts constantly depending on the sun, the wind, and your position, so take a few minutes to view it from a few different angles.

[image error] Ned Kahn’s Firefly covers the north wall of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission headquarters at 525 Golden Gate Avenue. (Photo Credit: Ned Kahn via Americans for the Arts.)

Happy public art hunting!

Related Links:

When Art Comes Along for the Ride (New York Times)
At Transbay Transit Center, buses coming up the ramp trigger geysers in the park (San Francisco Chronicle)
Transbay Transit Center closure: Here’s what we know (Curbed San Francisco)
Transbay Transit Center (TJPA)
Firefly by Ned Kahn (Americans for the Arts)

50 States of Public Art: Chicago’s quest to become America’s street art capital

I have no doubt that its thriving public art scene is one of the reasons Chicago, Illinois won top honors in Condé Nast Traveler’s Best Cities in the U.S.: 2018 Readers’ Choice Awards this past week. I mean, there’s a Picasso in Richard Daley Civic Center Plaza in downtown, for heaven’s sake. But Chicago isn’t resting on its public art laurels. Recently, Chicago-based reader Sharon M. emailed to tell me that Chicago has set its sights on becoming the street art capital of America as well.

Chicago’s quest to become America’s street art capital
[image error]Street mural by Hebru Brantley. An earlier version of this mural was one of several street art murals painted over by city workers who mistook them for graffiti. A proposed city ordinance would create a registry to help city workers distinguish between commissioned and/or sanctioned street art pieces and random acts of graffiti. (Photo source: Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune)

Artist: Hebru Brantley

Location: Wood Street and Milwaukee Avenue

Photo Source: Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune

Associated Public Art Project:

As part of its bid to attract Amazon’s second headquarters, Chicago instructed its city workers to clear the streets of graffiti. The problem? Workers misidentified several commissioned street art murals as graffiti and blasted them away too.

One of the accidentally destroyed art works was a mural Cards Against Humanity founder Max Temkin had commissioned from French street artist Blek le Rat. The destruction of a commissioned piece on his own building led Temkin to work with Chicago Alderman Brian Hopkins and Cultural Affairs Commissioner Mark Kelly to find a way to protect street art across the city.

The result is a proposal for a registry to distinguish street art from unwanted graffiti. In addition to registering their commissioned works with the city, building owners would place a physical marker next to the art on their building.

There would be a fee associated with the program of course.

Still, supporters of the proposed city ordinance hope that having an official registry will not only protect street art, but also make Chicago an attractive destination for people who want to experience a thriving street art community for themselves.

As far as I can tell, the proposed ordinance that would create the registry is still winding its way through Chicago’s city government.

Want to see Brantley’s mural for yourself?

You can find Hebru Brantley’s mural at Wood Street and Milwaukee Avenue in Wicker Park. According to Cultural Commissioner Mark Kelly, there are some 2,000 street murals painted around Chicago, so you know, there’s no reason to stop at just one.

Happy public art hunting!

Related Links:

Condé Nast Traveler‘s Best Cities in the U.S.: 2018 Readers’ Choice Awards (Conde Nast Traveler)
Cards Against Humanity backs plan to save murals, make Chicago America’s street art capital (Chicago Tribune)
Graffiti cleanup ‘blitz’ in advance of Amazon visit wipes out street art at Cards Against Humanities HQ (Chicago Tribune)
After “mistaking” murals for graffiti, Chicago considers public art registry (Repeating Islands)

“Do fish have tongues?”

I’ve been following Krista D. Ball (@kristadb1) on Twitter ever since I first read her book, What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank: A Fantasy Lover’s Food Guide, several years ago. It’s an outstanding book and is guaranteed to have you scoffing every time your questers pause to cook up a quick rabbit stew in the field. If you read or write fantasy, you really ought to pick up a copy.

At any rate, I kept following Krista on Twitter because every once in a while she lets her Newfoundland foodie self loose. I’ve always been fascinated by regional foods, and Newfoundland has some great ones.

On a recent trip to see her parents, Krista picked up what sounds like a metric truckload of cod tongues. She was super excited about it, but as you can see, I had some trouble wrapping my mind around the concept.

[image error]Our Twitter exchange… The other reason I love following Krista is the fact she always responds.

Despite Krista’s assurances, I still had trouble processing the concept of cod tongues. So I looked it up.

What exactly is tongue of cod?

I found an excellent article on Atlas Obscura on this very topic. You will be relieved to know that fried cod tongues are a real food. Apparently, they taste like scallops. People eat them lightly fried in batter and seasoned with salt, pepper, and little bits of pork. Sounds kind of tasty, actually.

But in a shocking twist, cod tongues aren’t exactly tongues. According to Atlas Obscura, cod tongues are really a small muscle extracted from the back of the fish. They are just called tongues because it’s more palatable for consumers that way. At least theoretically. (My daughter would like me to point out here that “cod tongue” lacks a certain universal appeal.)

Fried cod tongues became a delicacy after the cod fishing industry in the Labrador Sea collapsed. When cod were abundant, folks didn’t bother to scoop out that weird muscle and package it as food. But once cod themselves became a precious commodity, every edible bit of them became something to savor.

After learning that cod tongues aren’t actual tongues, I found myself wondering…

Do any fish have tongues?

After all, my husband has looked in the mouth of many a bass and there’s no tongue there. At least not one we’d recognize.

It turns out that some fish do have tongues, but they aren’t like ours.

According to Science Focus, the online home for BBC Focus Magazine, most fish have a bony structure on the bottom of their mouth called a basihyal. Basihyal don’t have taste buds, aren’t exactly muscular, and don’t have much range of motion, so we might not recognize them as tongues if we saw them. Scientists think these folds evolved to protect the ventral aorta (which is pretty close to a fish’s mouth) from being damaged by contact with super wiggly food.

Reader, it gets worse.

What’s really horrifying, though, is that some fish tongues come equipped with teeth for latching on to prey. Naturally, I discovered this courtesy of the Australian Museum. (Of the ten creatures that terrify me the most, nine of them live in Australia.) Until I wrote this blog post I had never realized that fish teeth were on my list of terrifying creature features, but there they are. Right above the entry for Mutant Chicken Teeth.

[image error] Mouth and tongue of a Cottonmouth Trevally. (Photo: Mark McGrouther (c) Australian Museum)
Related Links:

Fish FAQ: Do fish have tongues? (Australian Museum)
Do fish have tongues (Science Focus)
Do fish have tongues and other questions (Auckland Museum)
Fried cod tongues (Atlas Obscura)
Study of Chicken Teeth Sheds Light on Evolution (NPR)

So I sat down today to do a bit of blogging for the first time in almost a month…

And then this happened.

[image error]Someone has clearly forgotten how to share a lap. (Photo: Shala Howell)

Man, it’s hard to type this way.

[image error]That’s better. (Photo: Shala Howell)

But to bring you up quickly to date… blogging has been light in part because middle school parenthood has been busier than expected and I’ve been putting what little writing time I have during the week toward the next book rather than toward the blog.

I’ll be popping in and out as much as I can this fall, because feeding my curiosity is my happy place, and this blog is where I get to do it.

See you (occasionally, as often as possible, but probably not more than a few times a month, and mostly on weekends) around the pond.

If my cat allows it.

[image error]Well that didn’t last long. (Photo: Shala Howell)

Related Links:

More Canelo pics on Caterpickles

“Snow White was filmed in 1937? Did they even have TVs back then?”

[image error]The movie poster for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Image via IMDB.

One of the wonderful things about having both Netflix and a child is that you get to introduce her to all of your favorite childhood movies in the comfort of your own living room.

On a recent summer Popcorn + a Movie with Mommyo afternoon, we queued up Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. While we were waiting for the popcorn to finish, I booted up IMDb (the everything you ever wanted to know about movies website) and armed myself with a few fun facts to share with my daughter.

Snow White, I informed The Eleven-Year-Old as we salted the popcorn, was Walt Disney’s first full length feature production, filmed in 1937.

Interestingly, none of the actors who appeared in this film were credited. I guess credits hadn’t been invented yet in 1937.  Walt Disney simply wrote a short little note expressing his “sincere appreciation to the members of my staff whose loyalty and creative endeavor made possible this production.” (IMDB has a list though.)

“You know what else hadn’t been invented yet?” I asked The Eleven-Year-Old. “The habit of saying The End on screen at the end of the movie.”

I’m afraid The Eleven-Year-Old didn’t hear me. Her mind was still processing the date of the film. “Snow White was filmed in 1937? Did they even have TVs back then?”

After I had dealt with the false assumption in her question (Snow White was not originally released for TV), I found myself wondering.

When were TVs invented? Were they even around in 1937? 

Well, yes. They had been around for quite a while by then. Sort of.

If you define a TV as a machine capable of projecting a moving image onto a small screen, then the first object you could plausibly refer to as a TV popped up in the late 1800s. But it didn’t have all that much in common with the TVs we use today.

German engineer Paul Nipkow developed the mechanics behind the first TVs in 1884.

In 1884, German engineer Paul Nipkow invented a system for scanning the light intensities associated with an image and projecting them onto a screen. His system used a series of mechanical disks with holes in them.  With only 18 lines of resolution, Nipkow’s mechanical TVs were terrible at providing effortless entertainment. But then, Nipkow didn’t think of his invention as a television. He preferred to describe it as an electric telescope.

Inventor John Baird pretty clearly thought of his mechanical system as a TV, though.

In the 1920s, inventor John Baird extended Nipkow’s original disc system to create a mechanical TV capable of projecting 30-line images. Baird’s system was based on an idea he developed in conjunction with Clarence W. Hansell. Instead of using backlit silhouettes to create the images projected through Nipkow’s discs, Baird and Hansell developed an array of transparent rods to transmit images using reflected light.

[image error] John Baird’s own face projected through his system. (Photo from the Library of Congress, via ThoughtCo.)

The 30-line images created through Baird’s system were an improvement on Nipkow’s original 18-line images, but as you can see, the resolution still wasn’t nearly good enough to handle a seamlessly animated production like Snow White.

Still, Baird did his best to turn his mechanical TV concept into a commercial product. He even convinced the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) to start broadcasting on the Baird 30-line system in 1929. Unfortunately, very few people wanted one of Baird’s devices. Programming for the Baird system was extremely limited, the resolution poor, and the screens tiny.

Baird and other mechanical TV innovators continued to tweak their systems through 1931, but the days of mechanical TV were already numbered.

What killed the mechanical TV?

Back in 1907, Boris Rosing and A.A. Campbell-Swinton combined a mechanical scanning system with a cathode ray tube. Rosing’s images were still crude, but his cathode ray tubes would ultimately make an entirely new television system possible — one that would make Baird’s mechanical TVs hopelessly obsolete.

We have Philo Taylor Farnsworth to thank for jumpstarting the TV industry as we know it today.

Philo Taylor Farnsworth first demonstrated an electronic TV system based on cathode ray tubes in 1927. His system captured moving images using electrons, transformed those images into code, and transmitted the codes using radio waves. Farnsworth was only 21 years old at the time, and living right here in San Francisco. He had done the bulk of the work developing his system while he was still in high school.

It took only seven years for Farnsworth’s electronic TV system to take over the marketplace. By 1934, all TVs had been converted to the electronic system.

There were still significant limitations, however. Programming was limited to whatever could be captured on a single camera — black and white newscasts, baseball games, or single stage dramas. Early television shows sound like they were basically radio broadcasts, but had images to go along with the words.

WWII slowed the development of the new technology, as time, ingenuity, and resources were all turned toward the war effort.

Once the war was over, TVs spread across America pretty quickly.

In 1946, only a few thousand American households even owned a TV. In part, that was because there were few compelling reasons to watch it.

In 1947, full-scale commercial TV broadcasting began in earnest, and the number of shows available slowly increased. As the crop of broadcast TV stations and programming grew, TV sales began to take off. Although only 6,000 American homes had televisions in 1946, by 1951 TVs were in some 12 million homes. By 1955, half of all U.S. homes boasted a black and white TV.

The first color TVs didn’t become widespread until much later.

Broadcasting networks didn’t upgrade to provide the sort of color TV we’d need to watch something like Snow White or the 1965 Batman TV series until the mid-1960s. The viewing public were even slower to embrace color TV.

Only 48% of American households had switched to color TVs by July 1, 1971.

“Holy broadcast, Mommyo!” The Eleven-Year-Old said. “That means you’re almost as old as color TV!”

More importantly, that means that the majority of people watching the 1965 Batman TV series with its “Now in Technicolor!” ad would have been watching it in black and white. Which raises the question, did Batman highlight the fact that it was filmed in color at the start of every episode because the TV magnates wanted to encourage all those Americans watching Batman in black and white to upgrade their sets?

Sadly, that’s a question for another time.

Questions that spun off from this post: 

One of my favorite things about researching my daughter’s questions are all the other questions that pop up in the process. In this case, we found ourselves wondering:

Why didn’t Walt Disney credit his actors? Was there some sort of tiff, or was that just the way things were done at the time?
When did credits start appearing on films anyway?
When did movies start saying The End, and why?
Also, why don’t movies say The End anymore?
What would the 1965 Batman look like in black and white anyway?
What happens to the color when TV shows broadcast in color are shown on a black and white TV set?
Did the creators of the 1965 Batman use bold primary colors on their sets and costumes because they were the ones that showed up best on black and white screens?
Were all those “Now in Technicolor!” notices at the start of 1960s shows really an attempt to convince Americans to upgrade to color TVs?

Obviously I couldn’t deal with all of these questions in one post. But I’ll find out those answers eventually, and if they are interesting enough, I’ll write them up in a future Caterpickle.

Related: 

The History of the Television (Bebusinessed)
The mechanical TV debuted 90 years ago. Its inventor was nuts. (Vox)
Mechanical image acquisition with a Nipkow disc (Hackaday): Includes instructions for building your own Nipkow disc system
Mechanical television history and John Baird (ThoughtCo)
Television History – Paul Nipkow (ThoughtCo)
The Color Revolution: Television in the Sixties (Television Obscurities)

 

50 States of Public Art: ArtsCheyenne’s monthly Artwalk through downtown Cheyenne, Wyoming

Public art is everywhere, and this is the season for getting out and viewing it. This week I’ve been reading Michael Crichton’s Dragon Teeth.  The book is partially set in 1876 Wyoming — the Wild West at the height of the golden age of fossil hunting. So naturally, I was curious to see what the public art scene looked like in Cheyenne, Wyoming today. 

ArtsCheyenne’s monthly Artwalk through downtown Cheyenne, Wyoming
[image error] Wyoming Home by Susan Love. Featured in the August 2018 Artwalk through downtown Cheyenne. (Photo source: Arts Cheyenne website)

Title: Wyoming Home

Artist: Susan Love

Location: Featured in the August 2018 artwalk through downtown Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Photo Source: Cheyenne Artwalk website

Associated Public Art Project:

Every second Thursday from 5 – 8 p.m., Arts Cheyenne hosts an artwalk through downtown Cheyenne, Wyoming. The regional artists featured on the walk vary from month to month, but the venues remain fairly constant. Each art gallery, business, and restaurant who participates in the walk showcases a different local or regional artist. Most provide light food, beverages, and music to enliven the experience as well.

Want to see it yourself?

Participating in the walk is easy enough. Browse the list of participating venues on the Arts Cheyenne’s website and pick a starting spot. Or hop on the Visit Cheyenne trolley. The trolley stops at each location on the tour, making the artwalk accessible for guests of all ages.

The next artwalk is scheduled for September 13, 2018.

Happy public art hunting!

Related Links:

Cheyenne Artwalk (Arts Cheyenne)
Susan Love’s website