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June 26 - July 11, 2019
I tell Mike that I’d recently been browsing through my old high school U.S. history textbook to see if Philo Farnsworth was mentioned. He wasn’t. Nor was fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin (from the Civil Rights Movement) or nineteen-year-old Ridgely Whiteman, who discovered the Clovis archaeological site. “It’s amazing when you think of how many young people have had an impact on history,” I say to Mike, “and yet in textbooks meant for the very same age group, they’re ignored.”
We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some—perhaps many—may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: “This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our
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“In the history of rocketry, Dr. Robert H. Goddard has no peers,” von Braun remarked. He was first. He was ahead of everyone in the design, construction, and launching of liquid-fuel rockets which eventually paved the way into space. When Dr. Goddard did his greatest work, all of us who were to come later in the rocket and space business were still in knee pants.
In 1912 he taught physics at Princeton while spending his nights theorizing about rocket propulsion. His teaching came to an abrupt halt a year later when Goddard came home after catching tuberculosis. His doctors predicted he’d be dead within two weeks. Instead, during his convalescence he completed the two patents (1,102,653 and 1,103,603) for liquid-fueled, multistage rockets that would revolutionize space travel and influence rocket design to this day.
In November 1918, Robert Goddard himself demonstrated to top Army brass at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland a shoulder-held “rocket-powered recoilless weapon” that would enable an individual soldier to blow up a tank or blast through bunker walls. World War I ended days after Goddard’s presentation, so the military shelved his invention. (Twenty-three years later, a talented young engineer named Lieutenant Edward Uhl was tasked by a special ordnance unit to revive the idea. After troops finally got ahold of the M1 rocket launcher, as it was officially called, they nicknamed it “the
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“When I speak at schools, I make a point of telling the students how much their lives are influenced by Goddard,” she says. “Along with his more than two hundred patents, you have all of the spin-offs from the space program.” These include everything from conveniences like scratch-resistant lenses, the DustBuster, and Tempur-Pedic foam mattresses, to more critical innovations such as GPS, self-righting life rafts, and flame-retardant fabrics.
“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace,” President Nixon would have told a grieving world in this chilling alternate scenario. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding. They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the
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On the morning of July 21, 1969, a note was found on Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery that read simply: “Mr. President. The Eagle has landed.”
Goddard did receive a long-overdue public vindication the day after Apollo 11 sailed into space. Under the headline A CORRECTION, the New York Times ran a three-paragraph editorial that owned up to its January 1920 comments mocking Goddard’s intellect and belief that a rocket could reach the moon. The paper amended its earlier criticisms and humbly concluded: “It is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”
Webster was the first American convicted of murder based on forensic science. In this case, odontological evidence.
President Bill Clinton offered a formal apology on October 3, 1995, for the government’s radiation experiments after a Department of Energy report laid bare the agency’s earlier transgressions. Both his statement and the DOE exposé on its past actions were unprecedented, and they would have been major news if both the media and the American public hadn’t been distracted by a more pressing story that broke just hours later: football legend O. J. Simpson was found not guilty following an eight-month murder trial.
although Fleming was indeed responsible for the initial find, it was a team of American scientists in Illinois who transformed penicillin into a wonder drug that has since saved millions of lives.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” but “That’s funny.… ” —Author and former biochemistry professor Isaac Asimov
While studying a particular strain of cholera in 1879, he and his assistant Charles Chamberland forgot to infect a brood of lab chickens with the disease before they headed out on vacation (Pasteur and Chamberland, not the chickens). Upon returning to Paris weeks later, Pasteur injected the birds with the now weakened culture and found that instead of dying, they became immunized. From this research Pasteur invented several lifesaving vaccines.
NCAUR and its three sister labs in Louisiana, California, and Pennsylvania. They were all built during the Depression to devise new ways of putting surplus crops to good use, and their accomplishments are both impressive and eclectic. They’ve created frozen concentrated orange juice, lactose-free milk, dehydrated potato flakes, biodegradable plastics, and a silicone emulsion that preserves antique books. Peoria, specifically, came up with the idea of using infrared lamps to make french fries crispy, designed an ingenious method of cleaning Navy warplanes by air blasting them with ground
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After working seventy-hour weeks sifting through a malodorous array of decaying fruits, old cheeses, breads, meats, and clumps of dirt contributed by U.S. aircrews and scientists from around the globe, Raper had finally isolated the “super” mold he’d been searching for. Approximately fifty times more potent than anything previously tested, the strain eventually became the primogenitor for almost all of the world’s penicillin. And it was found, by chance, on an overripe cantaloupe purchased at a Peoria grocery store.
Then he mentions the word dextran and I realize he’s describing the blood plasma substitute I’d read about in the lobby. Originally intended for U.S. troops fighting on the front lines in Korea, it’s commonly used in hospitals today and has prevented countless patients from bleeding to death. The lifesaving blood extender was created out of a “slimy bacterium,” Clete tells me, that wasn’t exactly drawn from the lab’s official collection of microbes. Another NCAUR scientist had shown the mold to Dr. Jeanes after spotting it inside a half-empty bottle of old root beer that someone, fortuitously,
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If I had to name a person who has done more for the benefit of human health, with less recognition than anyone else, it would be Maurice Hilleman. —Dr. Robert Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology and the codiscoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)
The skinny, perpetually broke young student who had to get by on one meal a day made medical history at Chicago with his doctoral thesis. Hilleman discovered that chlamydia—which infects several million Americans a year and can make women infertile—wasn’t a virus, as most scientists believed, but a unique bacterium, and his research enabled doctors to treat the disease more effectively.
When Hilleman reached Merck’s mandatory retirement age of sixty-five in 1984, he refused to stop working. For him, Merck made an exception. By the time he died in April 2005, Hilleman had helped to develop more than forty vaccines, including for chicken pox; Haemophilus influenzae type b, or “Hib,” a bacterium that can lead to meningitis and paralysis; hepatitis A; and hepatitis B (with crucial assistance from Baruch Blumberg and Irving Millman), thereby cutting liver disease by 99 percent in some countries. His measles vaccine alone is estimated to have saved, at a minimum, more than 100
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President Woodrow Wilson’s administration, like its European counterparts, refused to acknowledge the mounting health crisis lest it dampen the country’s wartime morale. Early proposals to quarantine troops were rejected, and massive patriotic gatherings went on as planned, despite evidence that the disease was highly transmissible. On September 28, 1918, some 200,000 people came together for a Liberty Loan rally in Philadelphia. Within three days, every hospital bed in the city was full.
October 1918 was the epidemic’s deadliest month. October 1918, in fact, remains the deadliest month in American history. Influenza killed two hundred thousand men, women, and children in thirty days, and the population in 1918 was a mere third of what it is today. Never before had the United States confronted so many dead and dying in such a short period.
No war or disaster has killed as many Americans, and yet the pandemic’s imprint on our national psyche is so faint as to be nearly imperceptible. College and high school history textbooks give it short shrift, at best tacking on a sentence or two about it at the end of their chapters on World War I, and relatively few works of literature have focused on it either. This is especially remarkable considering how many extraordinary writers—William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, Robert Frost, Eugene O’Neill, Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams (the doctor/poet who treated flu victims), F. Scott
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Planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker one-upped them all when some of his ashes were sent to the moon aboard NASA’s unmanned Lunar Prospector probe. Sixty-nine years old when he died in a car crash, Shoemaker was a beloved figure in the space community for having helped train the Apollo astronauts. He is, to date, the only person whose remains are on the moon.
The often repeated saying that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them has a lot of truth in it. But what are “the lessons of history”? The very attempt at definition furnishes ground for new conflicts. History is not a recipe book; past events are never replicated in the present in quite the same way. Historical events are infinitely variable and their interpretations are a constantly shifting process. There are no certainties to be found in the past. —Historian Gerda Lerner
Presley O’Bannon, the young Marine lieutenant who was the first American to raise a U.S. flag on captured foreign soil. This happened during the April 1805 Battle of Derne at Tripoli and inspired the lyrics in the Marines’ Hymn: From the halls of Montezuma, To the shores of Tripoli; We fight our country’s battles In the air, on land, and sea.
Since there’s no chance of ever retrieving the remains of Leo Baker, who was dumped in an unmarked mass grave, or of Shamburger and Gray, the two airmen lost at sea, Pete Ray is the only American killed at the Bay of Pigs whose body has been recovered, or ever will be.
During the last year of the War, I became aware from letters received from various parts of the country, that a very large number of our soldiers had disappeared from view without leaving behind them any visible trace or record.… The heart-broken friends appealed to me for help, and by the aid of surviving comrades, I gained intelligence of the fate of nearly one half the number of [80,000] soldiers.… [These were men] who fell in the stern path of duty on the lonely picket line, perhaps, or [were] wounded, and left in some tangled ravine to perish alone, under the waters in some dark night,
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Hart Island, the 101-acre cemetery where New York disposes of its unclaimed dead.
The DOC estimates that there are approximately 850,000 bodies interred on Hart Island, each one of them unclaimed or unwanted. The island’s ledger is a catalog of forgotten lives and tragic deaths. Suicide victims pulled from the Hudson River. Homebound elderly found dead of starvation or heatstroke in their apartments. Stillborn infants whose parents couldn’t afford to bury them. Teenage runaways beaten to death. Homeless addicts who overdosed in condemned buildings. New York is where they all happened to die, but they came from across this country and around the world. Although owned and
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Madison Square Garden, the New York Public Library, Washington Square Park, and the luxurious Waldorf-Astoria hotel were all built over “paupers’ burial grounds,” as they were also called.
Now exhibited inside the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library, this is the only Dunlap broadside—and therefore one of the oldest existing copies of the Declaration anywhere in the world—freely displayed to the public on a permanent, year-round basis. Contrary to popular perception, the elegantly handwritten Declaration of Independence showcased inside the National Archives rotunda is not the Declaration finalized on July 4. Called “the engrossed copy,” this version was commissioned by Congress in mid-July 1776 and signed by most of the representatives on August 2. The actual document that Congress
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Among the most vociferously debated passages was Jefferson’s denunciation of the slave trade. “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself,” Jefferson wrote accusingly of King George III, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be
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What did surprise me, prior to coming here, was learning how many iconic American landmarks—including Congress Hall, the President’s House, Monticello, Fraunces Tavern, and Ford’s Theatre—have either been slated for destruction in the interest of commercial development or come irreparably close to utter ruin due to apathy and neglect. The President’s House actually was torn down, and the other buildings would have been razed or condemned if preservationists hadn’t jumped to their defense.
(Between 1837 and 1855, Santa Anna became president of—and was exiled from—Mexico three times. He temporarily retired to Staten Island, New York, where he imported a sweet, sticky substance from the Mexican sapodilla tree that inventor Thomas Adams turned into a popular confection called Chiclets. Before dying in 1876, Santa Anna, conqueror of the Alamo, helped introduce chewing gum to America.)
overall she’d have to be pleased by the Alamo’s popularity. It is the most visited historic landmark in Texas and one of the top tourist destinations in America. Two and a half million people stream through here each year, which is more than twice the number of visitors who see the Charters of Freedom at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you’d think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. —From The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974) by the scientist and etymologist Dr. Lewis Thomas
More than twenty-five thousand Navy and Army Air Corps troops were killed within the United States during World War II, mostly while testing new aircraft, training other airmen, or flying coastal patrols. These stateside losses represent one out of every sixteen U.S. fatalities in the war, and yet they’re hardly ever acknowledged.
Reed—one of the individuals most responsible for crowning the U.S. Capitol with the Statue of Freedom—was a slave.
At its best, history nurtures within us humility and gratitude. It encourages respect and empathy. It fosters creativity and stimulates the imagination. It inspires resilience. And it does so by illuminating the simple truth that, whether due to some cosmic fluke or divine providence, it’s an absolute miracle that any one of us is alive today, walking around on this tiny sphere surrounded by an ocean of space, and that we are, above everything else, all in this together.
As to that night, I slept in that room in the corner away from the fireplace. One comfort was over me, one comfort and pillow between me and the dark floor.… There was every reason to infer that the pillow and comfort came from my [hosts’ own] bed. They slept far away, in some mysterious part of the empty house. I hoped they were not cold. I looked into the rejoicing fire. I said: “This is what I came out into the wilderness to see. This man had nothing, and gave me half of it, and we both had abundance.” —From A Handy Guide for Beggars, Especially Those of the Poetic Fraternity (1919) by
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I’d also like to thank Dear Abby, who, in 1998, helped me launch the Legacy Project (a national effort to preserve American war letters), and, ultimately, further deepened my love for history. The Legacy Project’s letters are being donated to Chapman University and will become the foundation of the newly created Center for American War Letters.
Sandra Cano, who was the “Mary Doe” in the influential—but overlooked—January 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case Doe v. Bolton. This decision was announced the same day as Roe v. Wade and was, in fact, pivotal in changing abortion laws throughout the country. Sandra has mostly stayed out of the media spotlight and was incredibly generous with her time in telling me the behind-the-scenes account of her case, which I think could be a book in itself.
Martin Cooper, “the father of the mobile phone.” Somewhere around Sixth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan on April 4, 1973, Marty (he said it was okay for me to call him that) made the first public cell phone call in history.
Marty also told me, “If you look at when the telephone was invented, it was around the time Nikola Tesla was experimenting with radio waves, so there’s no reason mobile phones couldn’t have come first. We could have skipped landlines entirely.”
Hermanas, New Mexico. The town no longer exists, but it’s where, in July 1917, approximately 1,300 striking mine workers were dumped without food or water after being forced on a train at gunpoint in Bisbee, Arizona. The “Bisbee Deportation,” as it became known, was the largest mass kidnapping in U.S. history.
Ed Furman, in Palestine, Texas, who assisted me in locating the field near his home where a part of Ilan Ramon’s diary was found; Ramon was an astronaut aboard the Columbia space shuttle, which exploded over Texas on February 1, 2003, and, incredibly, pages of Ramon’s diary survived the blast and almost forty-mile descent to earth.
Susan Johnston, who let me visit her home in Dover, Delaware, which is where the famed astronomer Annie Jump Cannon was raised. (The house is actually owned by Wesley College and is the school’s president’s home; Susan’s husband is Dr. William Johnston, president of Wesley.) Cannon used to go on the roof when she was a little girl and gaze at the stars. Later, while working at the Harvard Observatory, Cannon discovered 300 variable stars and, in the early 1900s, came up with the stellar classification system that is used to this day to categorize all stars. She became the first woman to
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