Potatoes

Posted on September 12, 2013 by J L tagged.

There are four main food crops on the planet, rice, wheat, maize and potatoes. Two of these, maize and potatoes, were not known to Europeans until the 16th century.

The Inuit have twenty-six different words for snow, you have probably heard, and the Peruvians have even more different words for potatoes and for the condition of those potatoes.

Potatoes have a far richer diversity than the average supermarket shelf suggests. There are 5,000 varieties worldwide, though 3,000 are found only in the Andes where a single valley may contain 100 different types.

Only a handful of species were introduced to Europe in the 16th-century and from those, dedicated potato growers in the 19th and early 20th centuries bred many of the heritage gems that are again becoming popular.

The potato is a starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial Solanum tuberosum of the Nightshade family. The word may refer to the plant itself as well as the edible tuber. In the region of the Andes, there are some other closely related cultivated potato species. Potatoes were introduced outside the Andes region four centuries ago, and have become an integral part of much of the world’s cuisine.

Wild potato species occur throughout the Americas, from the United States to southern Chile. The potato was originally believed to have been domesticated independently in multiple locations, but later genetic testing of the wide variety of cultivars and wild species proved a single origin for potatoes in the area of present-day southern Peru and extreme northwestern Bolivia (from a species in the Solanum brevicaule complex), where they were domesticated 7,000–10,000 years ago.

Following centuries of selective breeding, there are now over a thousand different types of potatoes. Of these subspecies, a variety that at one point grew in the Chiloé Archipelago (the potato’s south-central Chilean sub-center of origin) left its germplasm on over 99% of the cultivated potatoes worldwide.

This is not such a good situation and the same holds true with maize (corn) which is even more restricted in variety than the potato. If something goes wrong with this one subspecies, there would be worldwide famine. It would be most beneficial to have more varieties of food crops in general use, as a kind of back up in case of catastrophic disease.

The annual diet of an average global citizen in the first decade of the 21st century included about 33 kg (73 lb) of potato.

However, the local importance of potato is extremely variable and rapidly changing. It remains an essential crop in Europe (especially eastern and central Europe), where per capita production is still the highest in the world, but the most rapid expansion over the past few decades has occurred in southern and eastern Asia. China is now the world’s largest potato-producing country, and nearly a third of the world’s potatoes are harvested in China and India.

The English word potato comes from Spanish patata (the name used in Spain, but not in South America). The Spanish Royal Academy says that the word patata is a compound of the Taino batata (sweet potato) and the Quechua papa (potato).

The French call them patates, although I seem to remember pommes de terre as being more common. The same idea holds true with tomates and pommes d’amour.

The name potato originally referred to a type of sweet potato rather than the other way around, although there is actually no close relationship between the two plants. The English confused the two plants. In many of the chronicles detailing agriculture and plants, no distinction is made between the two.

The 16th-century English herbalist John Gerard used the terms “bastard potatoes” and “Virginia potatoes” for this species, and referred to sweet potatoes as “common potatoes”. Gerard’s book, Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, was first published in 1597, and was the most widely circulated botany book in English in the 17th century.

Potatoes are occasionally referred to as “Irish potatoes” or “white potatoes” in the United States, to distinguish them from sweet potatoes.

The name spud for a small potato comes from the digging of soil (or a hole) prior to the planting of potatoes. The word has an unknown origin and was originally (circa 1440) used as a term for a short knife or dagger, probably related to Dutch spyd and/or the Latin “spad-” root meaning “sword”; cf. Spanish “espada”, English “spade” and “spadroon”.

The word spud traces back to the 16th century. It subsequently transferred over to a variety of digging tools. Around 1845 it transferred over to the tuber itself. The origin of the word spud has erroneously been attributed to a 19th-century activist group dedicated to keeping the potato out of Britain, calling itself The Society for the Prevention of an Unwholesome Diet.

It was Mario Pei’s 1949 The Story of Language that can be blamed for the false origin. Pei writes, “the potato, for its part, was in disrepute some centuries ago. Some Englishmen who did not fancy potatoes formed a Society for the Prevention of Unwholesome Diet. The initials of the main words in this title gave rise to spud.” Like most other pre-20th century acronymic theories of origin, this one is false.

Potato plants are herbaceous perennials that grow about 60 cm (24 in) high, depending on variety, the culms (stems) dying back after flowering. They bear white, pink, red, blue, or purple flowers with yellow stamens. In general, the tubers of varieties with white flowers have white skins, while those of varieties with colored flowers tend to have pinkish skins.

Potatoes are cross-pollinated mostly by insects, including bumblebees, which carry pollen from other potato plants, but a substantial amount of self-fertilizing occurs as well. Tubers form in response to decreasing day length, although this tendency has been minimized in commercial varieties.

After potato plants flower, some varieties produce small green fruits that resemble green cherry tomatoes, each containing up to 300 true seeds. Potato fruit contains large amounts of the toxic alkaloid solanine and is therefore unsuitable for consumption.

All new potato varieties are grown from seeds, also called “true seed” or “botanical seed” to distinguish it from seed tubers. By finely chopping the fruit and soaking it in water, the seeds separate from the flesh by sinking to the bottom after about a day (the remnants of the fruit float).

Any potato variety can also be propagated vegetatively by planting tubers, pieces of tubers, cut to include at least one or two eyes, or also by cuttings, a practice used in greenhouses for the production of healthy seed tubers. During the production and growing process, you may find that something like a greenhouse heating system could help to make all of the difference when it comes to your potatoes. You’d usually find this type of feature in commercial greenhouses, but you could probably find something similar for your own personal greenhouse too. Moreover, commercial greenhouses are often able to make use of opaque black and white poly film that can be used for either ground cover or as a reflective blackout curtain for photoperiod control. As you can see here in this interesting guide, black and white plastic sheeting is widely used in crop control management. Whereas the white side is highly reflective and used to direct light away, the black side is completely opaque and absorbs light, keeping heat and light away. Accordingly, black and white poly film is also used for waterproofing and temperature control.

Some commercial potato varieties do not produce seeds at all (they bear imperfect flowers) and are propagated only from tuber pieces. Confusingly, these tubers or tuber pieces are called “seed potatoes,” because the potato itself functions as “seed”.

There are about 5,000 potato varieties worldwide. Three thousand of them are found in the Andes alone, mainly in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, and Colombia. They belong to eight or nine species, depending on the system of taxonomy used.

A traditional Peruvian causa layers avocados and potatoes into a sort of casserole, which is sliced and served cold. Other layers might contain tuna, meat, or hard-boiled egg. Causa can also be like a cake or even a quiche made from golden potatoes, lemon, chicken, and mayonnaise.

Apart from the 5,000 cultivated varieties, there are about 200 wild species and subspecies, many of which can be cross-bred with cultivated varieties, which has been done repeatedly to transfer resistances to certain pests and diseases from the gene pool of wild species to the gene pool of cultivated potato species.

Genetically modified potato varieties have met public resistance in the United States and in the European Union.

Even McDonald’s has refused GMO potatoes.

This was a very wise decision, although they probably had some help with it.

No GMO potatoes in our bag!

The major species of potato grown worldwide is Solanum tuberosum (a tetraploid with 48 chromosomes), and modern varieties of this species are the most widely cultivated. There are two major subspecies of Solanum tuberosum: andigena, or Andean; and tuberosum, or Chilean. The Andean potato is adapted to the short-day conditions prevalent in the mountainous equatorial and tropical regions where it originated. The Chilean potato, native to the Chiloé Archipelago, is adapted to the long-day conditions prevalent in the higher latitude region of southern Chile.

The Centro Internacional de la Papa (International Potato Center CIP) based in Lima, Peru, holds an ISO-accredited collection of potato germplasm.

The international Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium announced in 2009 that they had achieved a draft sequence of the potato genome, which contains 12 chromosomes and 860 million base pairs making it a medium-sized plant genome.

Eat Dem Taters, a painting from 1975, substituted laughing black people for the pious Dutch peasants of van Gogh’s Potato Eaters to attack, in the words of the artist, Robert Colescott, “the myth of the happy darky.”

I remember the potato fields of Long Island in the 1960s. They stretched for miles and it seemed like you could smell potatoes all the way out to the Hamptons. Some of those fields are still there but many have since been turned into housing developments and vineyards.

Potatoes yield abundantly with little effort, and adapt readily to diverse climates as long as the climate is cool and moist enough for the plants to gather sufficient water from the soil to form the starchy tubers. Potatoes do not keep very well in storage and are vulnerable to molds that feed on the stored tubers, quickly turning them rotten. By contrast, grain can be stored for several years without much risk of rotting.

According to conservative estimates, the introduction of the potato was responsible for a quarter of the growth in Old World population and urbanization between 1700 and 1900. Following the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire, the Spanish introduced the potato to Europe in the second half of the 16th century. The staple was subsequently conveyed by European mariners to territories and ports throughout the world. The potato was slow to be adopted by distrustful European farmers, but soon enough it became an important food staple and field crop that played a major role in the European 19th century population boom.

However, lack of genetic diversity, due to the very limited number of varieties initially introduced, left the crop vulnerable to disease. In 1845, a plant disease known as late blight, caused by the fungus-like oomycete Phytophthora infestans, spread rapidly through the poorer communities of western Ireland, resulting in the crop failures that led to the Great Irish Famine, all due to the use of very few species of potatoes, a condition that still exists today with both potatoes and corn (maize).

Thousands of varieties still persist in the Andes however, where over 100 cultivars might be found in a valley, and a dozen or more might be maintained by a single agricultural household.

El poder de la papa nativa: “The power of the native potato.” The region around Lake Titicaca in southern Peru and northern Bolivia is particularly rich in genetic diversity, and the wild potatoes from here are valuable for their disease and pest resistance.

In Spain and Italy, they say “patata.”

In the American world, though, they say “papa,” which is the same as the word for “pope,” although the gender is different.

La papa is “the potato” in the Spanish of the new world, and the word probably came, as noted above, from the Quechua language. Il Papa, or el Papa, or Le Pape is the word for “pope” in the Latin languages. La papa = potato. El papa = the pope.

Every language is full of such ambiguities and interesting quirks. When the NRA sends you a note saying they’ve been “missing” you, you really have to wonder a bit what they have in mind.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the world production of potatoes in 2010 was about 324 million tons. (Fiat panis = let there be bread.)

Just over two thirds of the global production is eaten directly by humans with the rest being fed to animals or used to produce starch.

This means that the annual diet of an average global citizen in the first decade of the 21st century included about 33 kg (or 73 lb) of potato.

Or about the weight that this woman lost last year.

China is now the world’s largest potato-producing country, and nearly a third of the world’s potatoes are harvested in China and India.

The geographic shift of potato production has been away from wealthier countries toward lower-income areas of the world, although the degree of this trend is ambiguous.

In 2008, several international organizations highlighted the potato’s role in world food production, in the face of developing economic problems. They cited its potential derived from its status as a cheap and plentiful crop that grows in a wide variety of climates and locales.

Potatoes don’t travel well. Only about 5% of the world’s potato crop is traded internationally; its minimal presence in world financial markets contributed to its stable pricing during the 2007-2008 world food price crisis. Thus, the United Nations officially declared 2008 as the International Year of the Potato to raise its profile in developing nations, calling the crop a “hidden treasure”.

Palindrome.

The potato contains vitamins and minerals, as well as an assortment of phytochemicals, such as carotenoids and natural phenols. Chlorogenic acid constitutes up to 90% of the potato tuber natural phenols.

A medium-size 150 g (5.3 oz) potato with the skin provides 27 mg of vitamin C(45% of the Daily Value (DV)), 620 mg of potassium (18% of DV), 0.2 mg vitamin B6 (10% of DV) and trace amounts of thiamin, riboflavin, folate, niacin, magnesium, phosphorus, iron and zinc. The fiber content of a potato with skin (2 g) is equivalent to that of many whole grain breads, pastas, and cereals.

The potato is best known for its carbohydrate content (approximately 26 grams in a medium potato). The predominant form of this carbohydrate is starch. A small but significant portion of this starch is resistant to digestion by enzymes in the stomach and small intestines and so reaches the large intestine essentially intact.

This resistant starch is considered to have similar physiological effects and health benefits as fiber: It provides bulk, offers protection against colon cancer, improves glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity, lowers plasma cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations, increases satiety, and possibly even reduces fat storage.

The amount of resistant starch in potatoes depends much on preparation methods. Cooking and then cooling potatoes significantly increases resistant starch. For example, cooked potato starch contains about 7% resistant starch, which increases to about 13% upon cooling.

The cooking method used can significantly affect the nutrient availability of the potato.

Potatoes are often broadly classified as high on the glycemic index (GI) and so are often excluded from the diets of individuals trying to follow a low G-I diet. In fact, the GI of potatoes can vary considerably depending on type (such as red, russet, white, or Prince Edward), origin (where it was grown), preparation methods (i.e., cooking method, whether it is eaten hot or cold, whether it is mashed or cubed or consumed whole, etc.), and with what it is consumed (i.e., the addition of various high-fat or high-protein toppings).

Eating a healthy five portions of fruit and vegetables can cost less than 50 pence a day. In the United Kingdom, potatoes are not considered by the National Health Service as counting towards the five portions of fruit and vegetables diet.

Potatoes contain toxic compounds known as glycoalkaloids of which the most prevalent are solanine and chaconine. Solanine is also found in other plants in the family Solanaceae, which includes such plants as the deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna), henbane (Hyascyamos niger) and tobacco (Nicotiana) as well as the potato, eggplant, and tomato. This toxin affects the nervous system, causing weakness and confusion.

These compounds, which protect the plant from its predators, are, in general, concentrated in its leaves, stems, sprouts, and fruits. Exposure to light, physical damage, and age increase glycoalkaloid content within the tuber. The highest concentrations occur just underneath the skin.

Cooking at high temperatures -over 170 °C (340 °F)- partly destroys these. The concentration of glycoalkaloid in wild potatoes suffices to produce toxic effects in humans. Glycoalkaloids may cause headaches, diarrhea, cramps and in severe cases coma and death. Poisoning from potatoes occurs very rarely.

Light exposure causes greening from chlorophyll synthesis, thus giving a visual clue as to areas of the tuber that may have become more toxic. This does not, however, provide a definitive guide, as greening and glycoalkaloid accumulation can occur independently of each other. Some varieties of potato contain greater glycoalkaloid concentrations than others. When breeders develop new varieties, they test for this, and sometimes have to discard an otherwise promising cultivar.

The toxic fruits produced by mature potato plants.

Breeders try to keep solanine levels below 200 mg/kg (200 ppmw). However, when these commercial varieties turn green, even they can approach concentrations of solanine of 1000 mg/kg (1000 ppmw).

In normal potatoes, analysis has shown solanine levels may be as little as 3.5% of the breeders’ maximum, with 7–187 mg/kg being found. While a normal potato has 12–20 mg/kg of glycoalkaloid content, a green tuber contains 250–280 mg/kg, and green skin 1500–2200 mg/kg.

The U.S. National Toxicology Program suggests that the average American consume at most 12.5 mg/day of solanine from potatoes (the toxic dose is actually several times this, depending on body weight).

Douglas L. Holt, the State Extension Specialist for Food Safety at the University of Missouri notes that no reported cases of potato-source solanine poisoning have occurred in the U.S. in the last 50 years, and most cases involved eating green potatoes or drinking potato-leaf tea.

Potatoes grown in a tall bag are common in gardens as they increase potato yield and minimize the amount of digging required at harvest.

Potatoes are generally grown from seed potatoes – these are tubers specifically grown to be disease free and provide consistent and healthy plants. To be disease free, the areas where seed potatoes are grown are selected with care. In the USA this restricts production of seed potatoes to only 15 states out of the 50 states that grow potatoes.

These locations are selected for their cold hard winters that kill pests and long sunshine hours in the summer for optimum growth. Some people prefer to grow their own potatoes in their garden, regardless of which state they live in. The downside to this is that it doesn’t kill pests, but it attracts them instead. The increased risk of having pests in your garden is that they can harm your potatoes, and could also cause harm to you if they somehow manage to find a way into your home. If this happens, the best thing that you may want to do is to find pest control in your area, similar to this terminix NH company. They will be able to help get rid of this unwanted problem for good, and your potatoes should be unharmed. It may help if you live in one of those locations though.

In the UK, most seed potatoes originate in Scotland in areas where westerly winds prevent aphid attack and thus prevent spread of potato virus pathogens.

Potato growth has been divided into five phases.

During the first phase, sprouts emerge from the seed potatoes and root growth begins.

In the second phase, photosynthesis begins as the plant develops leaves and branches.

The third phase is when the stolons develop from lower leaf axils on the stem and grow downwards into the ground and on these stolons new tubers develop as swellings of the stolon. This phase is often (but not always) associated with flowering. Tuber formation halts when soil temperatures reach 27 °C (81 °F). Potatoes are considered a cool-season crop.

During the fourth phase, tuber bulking occurs when the plant begins investing the majority of its resources in its newly formed tubers. At this stage, several factors are critical to yield: optimal soil moisture and temperature, soil nutrient availability and balance, and resistance to pest attacks.

The fifth and final phase is maturation: The plant canopy dies back, the tuber skins harden, and their sugars convert to starches.

New tubers may arise at the soil surface. Since exposure to light leads to greening of the skins and the development of solanine, growers are interested in covering such tubers. Commercial growers usually address this problem by piling additional soil around the base of the plant as it grows (“hilling”, or in British English “earthing up”).

An alternative method used by home gardeners and smaller-scale growers involves covering the growing area with organic mulches such as straw or with plastic sheets.

Growing potatoes can be a difficult task in some circumstances. Good ground preparation, harrowing, plowing and rolling are always needed, along with a little grace from the weather and a good source of water.

Three successive plowings, with associated harrowing and rolling, are often needed before planting. Eliminating all root-weeds is desirable in potato cultivation.

Potatoes are generally grown from the eyes of another potato and not from seed.

Home gardeners often plant a piece of potato with two or three eyes in a hill of mounded soil. Commercial growers plant potatoes as a row crop using seed tubers, young plants or microtubers and may mound the entire row. Kartoffel is the German word for potato, and there is a very similar word in Russian.

Romanian cartof, Ukrainian ????????(kartóplja), Bulgarian ?????? (kartof) are all obviously connected as well to the German and Danish kartoffel. But even this word comes from the Italian word tartufuli , meaning ‘truffle-like thingy’.

The Polish name ziemniaki as well as the Slovak zemiak, which both come from the Slavic root ZEM meaning ‘earth’. Russian ?????, ‘earth/land.’ Like the French with pomme de terre ‘apple of the earth’, the Poles named it by where is was found.

Seed potato crops are ‘rogued’ in some countries to eliminate diseased plants or those of a different variety from the seed crop. This is where the farmer goes over the seed bed and pulls up the ‘rogues,’ inferior plants.

Potatoes are sensitive to heavy frosts, which damage them in the ground. Even cold weather makes potatoes more susceptible to bruising and possibly later rotting, which can quickly ruin a large stored crop.

At harvest time, gardeners usually dig up potatoes with a long-handled, three-prong “grape” (or graip) a spading fork or a potato hook, which is similar to the graip but with tines at a 90° angle to the handle.

In larger plots, the plow is the fastest implement for unearthing potatoes.

Commercial harvesting is typically done with large potato harvesters, which scoop up the plant and surrounding earth. This is transported up an apron chain consisting of steel links several feet wide, which separates some of the dirt. The chain deposits into an area where further separation occurs.

Different designs use different systems at this point. The most complex designs use vine choppers and shakers, along with a blower system or “Flying Willard” to separate the potatoes from the plant. The result is then usually run past workers who continue to sort out plant material, stones, and rotten potatoes before the potatoes are continuously delivered to a wagon or truck. Further inspection and separation occurs when the potatoes are unloaded from the field vehicles and put into storage.

Immature potatoes may be sold as “new potatoes” and are particularly valued for taste. These are often harvested by the home gardener or farmer by “grabbling”, pulling out the young tubers by hand while leaving the plant in place.

Potatoes are usually cured after harvest to improve skin-set. Skin-set is the process by which the skin of the potato becomes resistant to skinning damage. Potato tubers may be susceptible to skinning at harvest and suffer skinning damage during harvest and handling operations.

Curing allows the skin to fully set and any wounds to heal. Wound-healing prevents infection and water-loss from the tubers during storage. Curing is normally done at relatively warm temperatures 50 to 60 °C (122 to 140 °F) with high humidity and good gas-exchange if at all possible.

Storage facilities need to be carefully designed to keep the potatoes alive and slow the natural process of decomposition, which involves the breakdown of starch.

It is crucial that the storage area be dark, well ventilated and for long-term storage maintained at temperatures near 4 °C (39 °F). For short-term storage before cooking, temperatures of about 7 to 10 °C (45 to 50 °F) are preferred.

On the other hand, temperatures below 4 °C (39 °F) convert potatoes’ starch into sugar, which alters their taste and cooking qualities and leads to higher acrylamide levels in the cooked product, especially in deep-fried dishes-the discovery of acrylamides in starchy foods in 2002 has led to many international health concerns as they are believed to be possible carcinogens and their occurrence in cooked foods are currently under study as possible influences in potential health problems.

In commercial warehouses with very good conditions, potatoes can be stored for up to ten to twelve months.

When stored in homes, the shelf life is usually only a few weeks. If potatoes develop green areas or start to sprout, these areas should be trimmed before using. Trimming or peeling green areas are inadequate to remove copresent toxins, and such potatoes are no longer suitable as animal food.

Commercial storage of potatoes involves several phases: drying of surface moisture; a wound healing phase at 85% to 95% relative humidity and temperatures below 25 °C (77 °F); a staged cooling phase; a holding phase; and a reconditioning phase, during which the tubers are slowly warmed. Mechanical ventilation is used at various points during the process to prevent condensation and accumulation of carbon dioxide.

Potatoes were grown on 18.6 million hectares in 2010, each hectare yielding 17.4 tons of tubers. Farms in the United States were the most productive in 2010, with a nationwide average of 44.3 tons per hectare. The United Kingdom was a close second.

Farms in New Zealand have ranged between 60 to 80 tons per hectare, some reporting yields of 88 tons per hectare.

There is a big gap among various countries between high and low yields, even with the same variety of potato. Average potato yields in developed economies ranges between 38–44 tons per hectare. The two largest producers of potatoes, China and India which accounted for over a third of world’s production in 2010, had yields of 14.7 and 19.9 tons per hectare respectively.

The yield gap between farms in developing economies and developed economies represents an opportunity loss of over 400 million tons of potato, or an amount greater than 2010 world potato production. Potato crop yields are determined by factors such as the crop breed, seed age and quality, crop management practices and the plant environment. Improvements in one or more of these yield determinants, and a closure of the yield gap, can be a major boost to food supply and farmer incomes in the developing world.

While there are close to 4000 different varieties of potato, there are many standard or well-known varieties, each of which has particular agricultural or culinary attributes.

Varieties are categorized into a few main groups, such as russets, reds, whites, yellows (also called Yukons) and purples-based on common characteristics. Around 80 varieties are commercially available in the UK.

For culinary purposes, varieties are often differentiated by their waxiness. Floury, or mealy (baking) potatoes have more starch (20–22%) than waxy (boiling) potatoes (16–18%).

This painting is called Die Kartoffelschälerin, the Potato Peeler. As I mentioned Kartoffel is German for potato.

The Russian word is quite close, Kartophely, or something like that. It’s difficult to transcribe Russian.

The distinction between waxy and floury may also arise from variation in the comparative ratio of two potato starch compounds: amylose and amylopectin. Amylose, a long-chain molecule, diffuses from the starch granule when cooked in water, and lends itself to dishes where the potato is mashed. Varieties that contain a slightly higher amylopectin content, a highly branched molecule, help the potato retain its shape when boiled.

Peru still has some 2,800 varieties of potato, more than any other country.

The blue potato (or purple potato) originated in South America. It has purple skin and flesh, which becomes blue once cooked. It has a slight whitish scab that seems to be present in all samples. The variety, called “Cream of the Crop”, has been introduced into Ireland and has proved popular.

Genetic research has produced several genetically modified varieties. ‘New Leaf’, owned by Monsanto incorporates genes from Bacillus thuringiensis, which confers resistance to the Colorado potato beetle.

‘New Leaf Plus’ and ‘New Leaf Y’, approved by US regulatory agencies during the 1990s, also include resistance to viruses.McDonald’s, Burger King, Frito-Lay and Proctor & Gamble announced they would not use genetically modified potatoes, and Monsanto published its intent to discontinue the line in March 2001.

All blight-resistant potatoes must be replaced every three generations by fresh new strains from the Andes, as they lose their resistance very quickly.

Waxy potato varieties produce two main kinds of potato starch, amylose and amylopectin, the latter of which is most industrially useful. The German chemical company BASF created the Amflora potato, which has been modified to contain antisense against the enzyme that drives synthesis of amylose, namely granule bound starch synthase.

The resulting potato almost exclusively produces amylopectin, and thus is more useful for the starch industry. In 2010, the European Commission cleared the way for ‘Amflora’ to be grown in the European Union for industrial purposes only-not for food. Nevertheless, under EU rules, individual countries have the right to decide whether they will allow this potato to be grown on their territory. Commercial planting of ‘Amflora’ was expected in the Czech Republic and Germany in the spring of 2010, and Sweden and the Netherlands in subsequent years.

Another GM potato variety developed by BASF is ‘Fortuna’ which was made resistant to late blight by adding two resistance genes, blb1 and blb2, which originate from the Mexican wild potato Solanum bulbocastanum.

In October 2011 BASF requested cultivation and marketing approval as a feed and food from the EFSA. In 2012 GMO development in Europe was stopped by BASF.

In 2010, a team of Indian scientists announced they had developed a genetically modified potato with 35 to 60% more protein than non-modified potatoes. Protein content was boosted by adding the gene AmA1 from the grain amaranth. They also found 15 to 25% greater crop yields with these potatoes. The researchers expected that a key market for the GM potato would be the developing world, where more than a billion people are chronically undernourished.

The historically significant Phytophthora infestans (late blight) remains an ongoing problem in Europe and the United States.

Other potato diseases include Rhizoctonia, Sclerotinia, black leg, powdery mildew, powdery scab and leafroll virus.

Late blight is infamous as the cause of the Irish Potato Famine, an unforgettable period of Irish history in which four consecutive years of crop failure in the mid-1800s left millions of people starving or dead. And though these days most people think of the disease as a potato plague of the past, it remains a serious problem, threatening to wipe out potato crops in countries around the world every year.

Over the past several decades it has been occurring with increasing frequency in the United States, and this year, it has returned with a vengeance, causing an epidemic in tomatoes in New England, infecting potatoes on farms in Michigan and Indiana, and popping up in isolated cases in potatoes in Wisconsin.

Insects that commonly transmit potato diseases or damage the plants include the Colorado potato beetle, the potato tuber moth, the green peach aphid (Myzus persicae), the potato aphid, beetleafhoppers, thrips and mites.

The potato root nematode is a microscopic worm that thrives on the roots, thus causing the potato plants to wilt. Since its eggs can survive in the soil for several years, crop rotation is necessary to solve the problem.

During the crop year 2008, many of the certified organic potatoes produced in the United Kingdom and certified by the Soil Association as organic were sprayed with a copper pesticide to control potato blight (Phytophthora infestans). According to the Soil Association, the total copper that can be applied to organic land is 6 kg/ha/year.

According to an Environmental Working Group analysis of USDA and FDA pesticide residue tests performed from 2000 through 2008, 84% of the 2,216 tested potato samples contained detectable traces of at least one pesticide. A total of 36 unique pesticides were detected on potatoes over the 2,216 samples, though no individual sample contained more than 6 unique pesticide traces, and the average was 1.29 detectable unique pesticide traces per sample. The average quantity of all pesticide traces found in the 2,216 samples was 1.602 ppm. While this is a very low value of pesticide residue, it is the highest amongst the 50 vegetables analyzed.

Potatoes are used to brew alcoholic beverages such as vodka, potcheen and akvavit.
They are also used as food for domestic animals.
Potato starch is used in the food industry as, for example, thickeners and binders of soups and sauces, in the textile industry, as adhesives, and for the manufacturing of papers and boards.
Maine companies are exploring the possibilities of using waste potatoes to obtain polylactic acid for use in plastic products. Other research projects seek ways to use the starch as a base for biodegradable packaging.
Potato skins, along with honey, are a folk remedy for burns in India. Burn centers in India have experimented with the use of the thin outer skin layer to protect burns while healing.
Potatoes (mainly Russets) are commonly used in plant research. The consistent parenchyma tissue, the clonal nature of the plant and the low metabolic activity provide a very nice “model tissue” for experimentation. Wound-response studies are often done on potato tuber tissue, as are electron transport experiments. In this respect, potato tuber tissue is similar to Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans and Escherichia coli: they are all “standard” research organisms.

Potatoes are prepared in many ways: skin-on or peeled, whole or cut up, with seasonings or without. The only requirement involves cooking to swell the starch granules. Most potato dishes are served hot, but some are first cooked, then served cold (potato salad, potato chips).

Common dishes are: mashed potatoes, which are first boiled (usually peeled), and then mashed with milk or yogurt and butter; whole baked potatoes; boiled or steamed potatoes; French-fried potatoes or chips; cut into cubes and roasted; scalloped, diced, or sliced and fried (home fries); grated into small thin strips and fried (hash browns); grated and formed into dumplings, Rösti or potato pancakes.

Unlike many foods, potatoes can also be easily cooked in a microwave oven and still retain nearly all of their nutritional value, provided they are covered in ventilated plastic wrap to prevent moisture from escaping. This method produces a meal very similar to a steamed potato, while retaining the appearance of a conventionally baked potato. Potato chunks also commonly appear as a stew ingredient.

Potatoes are boiled between 10 and 25 minutes, depending on size and type, to become soft.

Peruvians naturally use the potato as a primary ingredient in many dishes, as around 3,000 varieties of this tuber are grown there. Some of the more notable dishes include boiled potato as a base for several dishes or with ají-based sauces such as the Papa a la Huancaína or ocopa, diced potato for its use in soups like in cau cau, or in Carapulca with dried potato (papa seca).

Smashed condimented potato is used in causa Limeña and papa rellena. French-fried potatoes are a typical ingredient in Peruvian stir-fries, including the classic dish lomo saltado.

Chuño is a freeze dried potato product traditionally made by Quechua and Aymara communities of Peru and Bolivia, and is known in various countries of South America, including Peru, Bolivia and Chile.

In Chile’s Chiloé Archipelago, potatoes are the main ingredient of many dishes, including milcaos, chapaleles, curanto and chochoca. In Ecuador, the potato, as well as being a staple with most dishes, is featured in the hearty locro de papas, a thick soup of potato, squash, and cheese.

In the UK, potatoes form part of the traditional staple fish and chips. Roast potatoes are commonly served with a Sunday roast and mashed potatoes form a major component of several other traditional dishes such as shepherd’s pie, bubble and squeak, and bangers and mash. New potatoes are often cooked with mint and served with a little melted butter.

The Tattie scone is a popular Scottish dish containing potatoes. Colcannon is a traditional Irish food made with mashed potato, shredded kale or cabbage, and onion. Champ is a similar dish.

Boxty pancakes are eaten throughout Ireland, although associated especially with the north, and in Irish diaspora communities; they are traditionally made with grated potatoes, soaked to loosen the starch and mixed with flour, buttermilk and baking powder. A variant eaten and sold in Lancashire,especially Liverpool, is made with cooked and mashed potatoes.

Bryvanzové halusky is the Slovakian national dish, made of a batter of flour and finely grated potatoes that is boiled to form dumplings. These are then mixed with regionally varying ingredients.

In Northern and Eastern Europe, especially in Scandinavia, Poland, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, newly harvested, early ripening varieties are considered a special delicacy. Boiled whole and served un-peeled with dill, these “new potatoes” are traditionally consumed with Baltic herring. Puddings made from grated potatoes (kugel, kugelis and potato babka) are popular items of Ashkenazi, Lithuanian and Belarussian cuisine.

In Western Europe, especially in Belgium, sliced potatoes are fried to create frieten, the original French fried potatoes. Stampot, a traditional Dutch meal, is based on mashed potatoes mixed with vegetables.

In France, the most notable potato dish is the Hachis Parmentier, named after Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, French pharmacist, nutritionist, and agronomist who, in the late 18th century, was instrumental in the acceptance of the potato as an edible crop in the country.

The pâté aux pommes de terre is a regional potato dish from the central Allier and Limousin regions.

In the north of Italy, in particular, in the Friuli region of the northeast, potatoes serve to make a type of pasta called gnocchi. Gnocchi with chicken essence, pancetta and fresh Périgord truffle.

Friuli is a lovely area of northeastern Italy with its own particular cultural and historical identity. The capital is Udine where we played on a hilltop one beautiful afternoon. In the Middle Ages this place was called the Patriarchate of Aquileia, which was the fourth largest city of Italy during Roman imperial times.

This is sign is written in standard Italian, top, and Friulian, bottom. The name Friuli comes from Forum Iulii. The area was important to the Romans because it was at the foot of the Alps, and Julius Caesar could intercept barbarian invasions here as well as wintering his troops. I wonder if they ate gnocchi then? The Roman soldiers lived on what they called frumentarium, which was basically wheat, Roman meal.

Yes, Rome conquered the known world on a vegetarian diet of wheat, barley, oats, spelt and rye. Roman soldiers ate meat but not very often, and never on their summer campaigns when meat would have spoiled. Anyway, they didn’t know any Peruvians yet, so gnocchi were unknown.

Cooked and mashed potatoes or potato flour can be used in the Knödel or dumpling eaten with or added to meat dishes all over central and Eastern Europe, but especially in Bavaria and Luxembourg.

Das Gulasch mit Knödel.

Potatoes form one of the main ingredients in many soups such as the vichyssoise and Albanian potato and cabbage soup. In western Norway, komle, spheres of grated potato, wheat flour, barley flour, and salt, is popular.

A traditional Canary Islands dish is wrinkly potatoes or papas arrugadas usually served with a pepper sauce called Mojo or as an accompaniment to meat dishes.

Tortilla de patatas (potato omelete) and patatas bravas (a dish of fried potatoes in a spicy tomato sauce) are near-universal constituent of Spanish tapas.

French fries and often hash browns are commonly found in typical American fast-food burger joints and cafeterias. One popular favorite involves a baked potato with cheddar cheese (or sour cream and chives) on top, and in New England “smashed potatoes” (a chunkier variation of mashed potatoes, retaining the peel) have great popularity.

Potato flakes are popular as an instant variety of mashed potatoes, which reconstitute into mashed potatoes by adding water, with butter or oil and salt to taste.

A regional dish of central New York, salt potatoes are bite-size new potatoes boiled in water saturated with salt then served with melted butter. This photograph is from the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Syracuse, where we played one happy night.

American Jews eat latkes (fried potato pancakes) during Hanukkah. Yum!

A traditional Acadian dish from New Brunswick is known as poutine râpée. The Acadian poutine is a ball of grated and mashed potato, salted, sometimes filled with pork in the center, and boiled. It is commonly eaten with salt and pepper or brown sugar, and is believed to have originated from the German Klöße, prepared by early German settlers who lived among the Acadians.

Everyone knows that many Acadians migrated from the Canary Islands and Canada to Louisiana where they became Cajuns, right?

Poutine is a hearty serving of French fries, fresh cheese curds and hot gravy, which originated in Québec in the 1950s, and became a widespread and popular dish throughout Canada.

In India, the most popular potato dishes are aloo ki sabzi, batata vada and samosa, which is spicy mashed potato mixed with a small amount of vegetable stuffed in conical dough, and deep fried. Potatoes are also a major ingredient as fast food items, such as aloo chaat, where they are deep fried and served with chutney. In Northern India, alu dum and alu paratha are a favorite part of the diet; the first is a spicy curry of boiled potato, the second is a type of stuffed chapati.

A dish called masala dosa from South India is common throughout India. It is a thin pancake of rice and pulse paste rolled over spicy smashed potato and eaten with sambhar and chutney. Poori in south India in particular in Tamil Nadu is almost always taken with smashed potato masal. Other favorite dishes are alu tikki and pakoda.

Vada pav is a popular vegetarian fast food dish in Mumbai and other regions in the Maharashtra in India.

Aloo posto (a curry with potatoes and poppy seeds) is immensely popular in East India, especially Bengal.

Although potatoes are not native to India, they have become a vital part of food all over the country especially North Indian food preparations. In Tamil Nadu this tuber acquired a name based on its appearance ‘urulai-k-kizhangu’ (??????? ???????) meaning cylindrical tuber.

In the southern part of East Asia, rice is by far the predominant starch crop, with potatoes a secondary crop, especially in China and Japan.

In northern China the main crop is wheat, and rice is not easily grown. A potato dish in the north is ????? (q?ng ji?o t? dòu s?), made with green pepper, vinegar and thin slices of potato.

Potatoes in Chinese cuisine are treated more like an ordinary vegetable than like a staple carb, and so it would not be unusual to see a potato-based dish served with rice. For the same reason, the potatoes tend to be somewhat undercooked to Western tastes.

More vegetable like and undercooked. Both of these characteristics apply to ??? – it’s a fresh, crisp stirfry of very finely shredded potatoes that have been soaked in water before cooking, to remove as much of the starch as possible.

In the winter, roadside sellers in northern China sell roasted potatoes.

The Moche culture from Northern Peru made ceramics from earth, water, and fire.

They made pottery into potatoes.

This pottery was a sacred substance, formed in significant shapes and used to represent important themes.

The Moche culture made their pottery into startlingly realistic scenes of everyday life and people.

The Moche didn’t seem to have any of the self censoring mechanisms that most cultures have.

It’s almost like having photographs of these pre Inca people.

This used to be a punishment in the American army, putting a soldier on KP (Kitchen Patrol). I bet no one peels potatos any more. They probably blast off the skins in nuclear microwave ovens. Really, the peelings should be eaten. They’re the best part.

Here’s how the Italians do it. They don’t call it a potato peeler, they call it a “peel potato.”

???????? means “potato” in a diminuitive, endearing sense. It would be like saying “papita” for papa in Spanish. Vod = water in Russian. Vodka = little water.

You can get a good kartoshka here.

Fully loaded.

A store in Barcelona.

Where it’s cold, people tend to eat root crops, turnips, beets, potatoes.

Chestnut and potato festival.

We’ll see you next week, I hope.

Sam Andrew

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The Snitty, Skint and Sequacious Pettifogger Snaffles a Shunpike.

Posted on September 6, 2013 by J L tagged.

Well, let’s see, “snitty” is shitty, being in a bad mood, cutting and evil tempered. Cutting is probably the origin of the word “snitty.” A cut is a Schnitt in German.

This is the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, where there was some incredible dancing being done. The place wasn’t segregated. Everybody came, and everybody had a good time. (1940s, 1950s)

“Skint” is the British version of “skinned,” poor, without a sou, no money, broke. Actually, no one has a sou in France anymore. Well, maybe coin collectors. This unit of money, which probably came from Latin solidus has not existed for a long time. But… it’s still an expression. “He didn’t have a sou.” He was, to put it bluntly and Britishly, skint.

“Sequacious” is probably the term one would like least to be applied to oneself. Sequacious is related to sequence. It means a follower, someone who has a tendency to fall in line, to follow, to be obSEQuious and without conSEQuence.

A Pettifogger sounds like a “little fucker” to me. Petit = little and fogger = fucker, but I could be wrong.

A pettifogger is a lawyer who does things on the cheap and the low down, not high ethically, nor any other way. That’s the initial meaning. Then “pettifogger” came to mean any petty practicioner. It stands for a mildly dishonest and mild person in every other way too, who thinks she is really getting over when she cheats you for a small sum of money. God bless these people, that is, if there is a god and she’s ready to put up with this sort of thing.

Snaffle. This word has so many meanings. It’s a special bit that you put on a horse. It’s a sound you make when you have a cold. Not quite the sniffles, bigger, like the snaffles.

Highwaymen in the 18th century liked to bill themselves as “snafflers.” Fielding uses that word for them, and I don’t remember any of them objecting. So “snaffle” can mean getting it on the sly, stealing.

Shunpike is the best word here. This is where you are trying to avoid paying the toll, so you pull over onto a side road that you, as a local, know will go around the toll and take you to your goal. You are shunning the pike.

The term shunpike in our new California freeway life has come to mean the motorist who cuts off the freeway into a local residential area to avoid traffic in one of those horrendous commutes that we all know and love.

Never put off until tomorrow what you can forget about entirely.

So, then, let us parse this title once again: ”The Snitty, Skint and Sequacious Pettifogger Snaffles a Shunpike” = The ill tempered, poor, and conformist petty practitioner steals a ride on the frontage road.

It’s a strange phrase, but there is a certain poetry to it.

Both sentences are more than a little idiotic, right? But not as idiotic as James Dean punching Rock Hudson in the, if you’ll pardon the expression, balls.

Why can’t a snorer hear herself snore?

The life of a drummer: How the bass player sees me. The singer sees me like this. The guitarist sees me like this. My sweetheart sees me like this. What I think I do. What I always do.

Hah! You think this is a joke, right? Being in a band? This is an understatement.

Beluga whales live in the ice, so what are they going to do? They’re going to have fun with ice, right? Looks like a lot of fun too.

Ben Nieves (Nieves means snows, by the way.) and Chealsea Dawn. I love this photograph. This is when we were at The Cutting Room, New York City. It was hot that night, in more ways than one. I almost passed out.

Oh, my father was the keeper of the Eddystone light, he slept with a mermaid one fine night. From this union there came three, A porpoise, and a porgy, and the other was me.

Now I’m at the place in life where I look just as good standing on my head as I do right side up.

Laura Dern was bullied at school because her father, Bruce Dern, was the only person to “kill” John Wayne in the movies. Janis Joplin called her publishing company Fantality, which she said meant fantasy and reality. People very easily confuse the two.

The fathers of Harry Houdini, Erich Segal, Jackie Mason, Isaac Asimov and my friend Amos who lives right here in the San Geronimo Valley were all rabbis, although Amos’ father was a rabbi in a funny place, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Well, it’s a funny place to me anyway

Probably not that funny to Amos. After all, Walter White lived in Albuquerque, and I attended Holy Ghost School there for the eighth grade. Hey, it was important to me, and I won the prize there for being the “most musical boy at Holy Ghost.” This was because I sang Palomita in Spanish. Sometimes it doesn’t take much.

Three stages in life: youth, middle age, and “Hey, you’re looking good.”

You can get a DUI (DWI) when you’re riding a horse. A horse is a vehicle.

This is a new cicada. They’re green when they’re new. Don’t it make my brown eyes blue?

This isn’t the new Christy minstrels, but it could be. That wouldn’t be a güiro there with the tambourine, would it?

Cocaine Bill and Morphine Sue, walking hand in hand down the avenue, Oh, honey won’t you have a little (sniff) on me, have a (sniff) on me.

Having children is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.

“Singapore” means City of the Lion. Many, many people in the Punjab have the surname Singh, and I think it means “lion” there too. And let’s not forget Singha Beer from Thailand.

The Golden Hinde, Sir Francis Drake’s famous three-master, was smaller than a modern tugboat.

Buy the worst home on the best street.

Hijinks is the only word in English with three dotted letters in a row.

We’re all in this alone.

The Romans had three different types of kiss: basium, the kiss on the lips; osculum, a friendly kiss on the cheek; and suavium, the kiss that the French say they invented.

A philematophobe is someone who hates to be kissed. So, someone who likes to be kissed is probably a philematophile, and someone who really likes to be kissed could be a philematophiliac.

Your left foot is probably just a tiny bit bigger than your right foot.

Judy Garland, Lenny Bruce and Elvis Presley died on the loo. George III died after falling off the loo.

“You must know that it is by the state of the lavatory that a family is judged.” (Pope John XXIII)

Eat anything you want. Just don’t swallow it.

More men feel comfortable doing “public speaking,” while more women feel comfortable doing “private speaking.”

Why attack god? She could be as miserable as we are.

Imagine the painting in a museum, the stupidities it hears day in and day out.

Monopoly: the person who makes the most deals wins.

For a short interval you can lift twice your weight. For a long distance you can carry half your weight uncomfortably or one fourth your weight comfortably.

What makes me happy at this time is the affection shared with the people who fill my life.

$frack$

We are an idealistic people and we’ll make any sacrifice for any cause that won’t cost us anything.

Sandy Gandhi.

Hoc erat in votis: modus agri non ita magnus, Hortus ubi et tecto vicinus iugis aquae fons Et paulum silvae super his foret.

This was in my prayers: a parcel of land not so very large, which would have a garden and ever flowing water near the house and a bit of woods added to this. (Horace wrote this long ago. We actually have these things and you can almost see them in this photograph.)

Shoes: the earliest Anglo-Saxon term was sceo, “to cover,” which eventually became in the plural schewis, then shooys, and finally shoes.

Barley cleans cholesterol from the blood.

Open marriage is nature’s way of telling you that you need a divorce.

You get a line and I’ll get a pole, We’ll go down to the crawdad hole, Honey, sugar baby mine.

To play in New York City bars, you need 45 minutes of original music, and, please, no ballads after midnight.

Some people are like hit songs. They only last for three minutes.

Every musician, however modest, keeps a most outrageous ego chained like a monster madman in the padded cell of his/her breast.

Nothing is more remarkable about this generation than its addiction to music.

“Rosary” meaning “wreath of roses” first appeared in fifteenth century Europe, but the practice of reciting prayers on a string of knots or beads goes back to the Indic priests of the Middle East before 500 BCE. The Sanskrit for rosary is the “remembrancer.”

A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.

I don’t understand this at all. Do you understand this?

Brutality to an animal is cruelty to us all.

Once upon a time there were no pockets. One convenient place for a man in the 1500s to carry his personal effects was in his codpiece, which was originally a opening, or fly, to his trousers. It was the fashion that the fastened flap be stuffed (à la Spinal Tap) and so it became an ideal place to carry keys and valuables wrapped in a cloth.

You may talk about your kings of Gideon, You may talk about your men of Saul, But there’s none like good old Joshua, At the battle of Jericho.

When nosing your car to a wall, turn on your high beams and look at the reflection on the wall as you slowly move closer. When the brightest part falls out of view, you are close enough.

Deer sleep only five minutes a day.

Ahhh, patriotism: Welcome to the city of Allen Capital of the Pera and of the PRETTIEST WOMEN IN THE WORLD.

Phyllis Schlafly speaks for all women who oppose equal rights for themselves.

Don’t be stupid, be a smartie, come and join the Nazi party.

The guy who said, “Two can live as cheaply as one,” has a lot of explaining to do.

Which doesn’t fit with the rest: AIDS, herpes, gonorrhea, condominiums. Gonorrhea. You can get rid of gonorrhea.

I am invariably and have been since adolescence inimical to the Republican mind which shows at the most inflated size the bad qualities of the bourgeoisie rather than the good qualities of the middle class which the Democrats call forth. Janet Flanner.

Rosario was a name that puzzled me at first. It sounds masculine but it is a name for women in the Hispanic culture. It means “rosary,” of course. Maybe Rocío (dew) is a woman’s name too.

If you need to locate a stud in a stick-framed wall, keep in mind that most electricians are right-handed. Find an outlet and tap the wall directly to its left to find the stud. You can measure away from it in 16-inch increments to find the others.

Oh, Lord, won’t you buy me this Mercedes Benz.

Hey, it’s Neut Gangrich!

Alessia Cianetti.

So, here’s to a glass of whiskey, Here’s to a good glass of beer, They’re not half as sweet as a maiden’s kiss, But a damn sight more sincere.

Life is too short to worry about what someone else thinks or says. So have fun and give them something to talk about. Their own lives are probably too boring.

Forks did not come into general use until quite recently, the eighteenth century. Up until then, the lower classes ate with five fingers and the upper classes ate with three. A little earlier than this a Venetian noblewoman had the effrontery to use a fork and she died ten days later. Some said it was because of the plague but the clergymen, holy and Christian as always, said it was because the woman used a fork.

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle, Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant, Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant, Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle.

When you are very old, in the evening, seated by the candle near the fire, winding and spinning, You will say, singing my verses and marveling, Ronsard celebrated me when I was beautiful.

Let’s make peace.

Oops, clothing catastrophe, wardrobe wackiness, peenie peeking.

I’d like to be as tired at night as I am in the morning.

A silk fiber is triangular. It reflects light in the same manner as a prism. That’s why silk cloth shines.

Beauty, real beauty, is a serious matter. If there is a god, she must be beautiful.

He sank beneath the icy waves, He sank down into the sea; No living thing wept a tear for him, Save that lonely willow tree.

Hi, I’m 40 years old, a politician and an honorable and upright person. Hi, Sweetheart. I’m a prostitute, 35 years old and still a virgin.

In the 1830s a popular patent medicine was “Dr. Miles’ Compound Extract of Tomato.” It was ketchup.

The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) was banned in Boron, California, in 1989 because of the word goddamn. This is probably the most famous work of fiction never to have been turned into a feature film.

Pedantry: stupidity that read a book.

Advice that is most likely rarely followed: To protect your eyes from strain, make sure the screen is just beyond arm’s length.

Shrouds don’t have pockets. Enjoy your money while you can.

Why are clams so secretive? They’re shellfish.

Cemetery. We’re headed in the right direction.

Heads or Tails Resuscitation: If the face is red, raise the head. If the face is pale, raise the tail.

Mount Rushless

Danish pastry, German measles, Brazil nuts, Mexican standoff, Dutch uncle, Russian roulette, Chinese fire drill, Swiss cheese, Hong Kong flu, Grecian urn, Singapore sling, Turkish baths, Indian food, French kisses, Maltese cross, Italian style, Panama hat, Spanish flu… ahhh, world music.

When I was apprenticed in London, I went to see my dear, The candles all were burning, the moon shone bright and clear, I knocked upon her window to ease her of her pain, She rose to let me in, then she barred the door again.

In a world where everyone wants to make you into something else, the greatest success is to be yourself.

Oysters are supposed to enhance your sexual prowess, but they don’t do much for me. Maybe I put them on too soon?

Come kiss me quick and make me whole, You’re good for my body, good for my soul.

Gladness, not madness.

We all laugh in the same language.

The animal that lives the longest, the giant turtle, eats no meat.

Cleveland was originally spelled Cleaveland, but a headline writer needed to cram the word in a one-column width, so that’s all she wrote.

She didn’t write against the piano, but she didn’t write for it either.

This is an interesting book. I’m not sure if it’s available in English. I did an interview in French for it at the Café des Deux Magots, once the trysting tipple for Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. Dante. In the middle of the road of our life.

Little Boy Blue, Come blow your horn, The sheep’s in the meadow, The cow’s in the corn… The boy blue was Cardinal Wolsey (Wolsey may have been originally woolsey) who, after a meteoric rise to power and wealth, was dashed down by Henry VIII after he failed to persuade Pope Clement VII to grant Henry an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Wolsey, as a boy in Ipswich, tended to his father’s sheep.

El Caballero de la Triste Figura. The Knight of the Doleful Countenance.

“Who Ate Napoleons with Josephine When Bonaparte Was Away?” Ahh, they just don’t write song titles like that anymore.

A finger ring was used for weddings in the Third Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, around 2800 BCE. To the Egyptians, a circle, having no beginning and no end, signified eternity.

Why are they sticking out their tongues? Am I making them drool? My Wolves, how I love them… live!

I’ll sing you a song, a good song of the sea, To me way, aye, blow the man down; And trust that you’ll join in the chorus with me, Give me some time to blow the man down.

Half of the amount of laundry detergent recommended by the manufacturer is plenty. This rule also applies to toothpaste.

Ich kenne mich auch nicht und Gott soll mich auch davor behüten. Goethe.

I do not know myself and god forbid that I should.

Canada’s east coast is closer to London than to Victoria, British Columbia.

Home is the place where my books are.

The bayonet was invented in Bayonne, France, early in the 17th century. Napoleon said you could do anything with a bayonet but sit on it.

Je veux qu’il n’y ait si pauvre paysan en mon royaume qu’il n’ait tous les dimanches sa poule au pot. Henri IV (1553-1610)

I want there to be no peasant in my kingdom so poor that he is unable to have a chicken in his pot every Sunday.

The world belongs to the passionate person who can keep calm.

If today were a fish, I’d throw it back in.

I know a woman who plays an excellent piano. It’s a Steinway.

Guns are not the real problem. The real problem is bullets.

Never let a computer know you’re in a hurry.

People become conservative when they lose their hair, their juice and make a little money. They’re tired and rich and they don’t want to take any more chances.

In an average lifetime one expands one’s vocabulary to 50,000 words, it says here. I say I have expanded mine far more than that, and so have many people I know. And that’s just in English. I have often wondered whether learning other languages counts as adding to one’s vocabulary. If it does, then that would change everything, because, my vocabulary in French is almost as large as it is in English. Of course this is considerably helped by the fact that many words in French and English are the same… particularly the long and “difficult” or scientific words.

Take gynécologie, for example. It wouldn’t take a genius to see what that means in English. But, if you take a small “practical,” common word like “wrench” (clef) or “tack” (semence), these are more difficult to learn, even if they are related somehow poetically to the English word.

What is important in learning languages is to see the relationship among words in every language. That relationship is almost always there waiting to be discovered. Zahn is “tooth” in German. It is the same word from the same parent as the DEN in dental. That’s the relationship. It takes a bit of study and thought to see that relationship, and many others like it, but the time spent is well worth it. Zahn = dent = diente = dónti (Greek). All these words come from the same Sanskrit mother.

Many complain of their looks, but few of their brains.

I’m going down the road feeling bad, I’m going down the road feeling bad, I’m going down the road feeling bad, Lord, Lord, And I ain’t gonna be treated this away.

Effortless prose takes about three or four rewrites. For me, more.

The British dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan told his son that he was cutting him out of his will and leaving him just a shilling. His son’s reaction was, “I’m sorry to hear that, sir. You don’t happen to have the shilling about you now, do you?”

Friday is named for Frigga, the free-spirited goddess of love and fertility, Teutonic counterpart of the Latin goddess Venus or Greek Aphrodite. When the Norse and Germanic tribes converted to Christianity, Frigga was banished in shame to a mountaintop and labeled a witch. It was believed that every Friday the spiteful goddess convened a meeting with eleven other witches, plus the Devil, a gathering of thirteen, and plotted evil turns of fate for the coming week. For many centuries in Scandinavia, Friday was called the “Witches Sabbath.”

Never wear a hat that has more character than you do.

Kathryn Grayson.

You ought to see my Cindy, She lives way down south; She’s so sweet the honey bees Swarm around her mouth. Get along home, Cindy, Cindy, Get along home, Cindy, Cindy, Get along home, Cindy, Cindy, I’ll marry you some day.

A titillomaniac is a person who is obsessed with scratching.

Ira furor brevis est. (Horace) Anger is a short madness.

If you are happy, you will be good.

An Arab is one who speaks Arabic, that’s all. Arabs are of numerous races, religions and nations.

Much surviving prehistoric art consists of small portable sculptures.

Take, for example, the group of female Venus figurines (Venus of Willendorf 24,000–22,000 BCE) found across central Europe.

The 30 centimeter tall Lion man of the Hohlenstein Stadel of about 30,000 BCE seems to be unique.

I made these heads in the Silicon Valley in the 1980s.

The Magdalenian horse head of about 15,000 BCE is one of the carvings of animals from the Upper Paleolithic. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?

I have salmon in my creek too.

But not sharks.

Christians have burnt each other, killed each other, cheated each other, lied to each other, thrown each other out of homes, out of marriages, out of families, quite convinced that Jesus would have done as they did. After they do these things, they like to lecture people about how to live their lives.

The world is a madhouse, so it’s only fitting that it is patrolled by armed imbeciles and governed by unprincipled administrators.

Flying? I’ve been to almost as many places as my guitar.

People didn’t really wear underwear until around the 1830s. They began wearing underwear in the way we think of underwear due to a. Victorian prudishness, b. the introduction of finer, lighter dress fabrics, and c. the medical profession’s growing awareness of germs.

When Italians graduate from, say, university, they don’t wear the cap and mortarboard as we do. They wear the laurel leaves (bay leaves), a plant sacred to Apollo, the god of learning. That’s why we say “She earned her laurels that day.” This is my friend Antea Salmaso. She has just earned her Laurea triennale (BA). Now she is studying for the Laurea magistrale (MA). After that, she will be an interpreter/translator, or she could choose to go for the PhD (Dottorato di Ricerca).

The first motion picture theatre, The Electric Theatre, which opened 2 April 1902 on Main Street in Los Angeles, charged a dime for admission.

Ecuador is Hummingbird Heaven. There are 163 species of hummingbird there.

Donald Duck had a middle name. It was Fauntleroy.

Lynn Asher and Elise Piliwale

Michel Bastian and James Gurley

Lisa Battle

Francesca Capasso

Kacee Clanton

Mary Bridget Davies

Halley DeVestern (with Tom Finch and Bernard Purdie)

Melissa Etheridge

Darby Gould and Cathy Richardson

Valerie Johnson

Janis Joplin

Kitto

Nina McCollum

Kathi McDonald

Lisa Mills

Jane Myrenget

Kristina Kopriva Rehling

Wendy Rich

Sophia Ramos and Ben Nieves

Kate Russo

Lana Spence

Maria Stanford

Geri Verdi

Fivepiece.

Thank you for being here.

Sam Andrew (baby # 5)

_________________________________________________

Change, Growth, Decay and Transformation

Posted on August 29, 2013 by J L tagged.

Change, Growth, Decay and Transformation. I learned this from Walter White.

Fermenting beer and wine was done very early in our history.

In fact, there is a whole school of historians who think that the beginnings of agriculture lay more in the need to drink beer than in the need to eat food.

Fermenting is a chemical art as are getting metals from ores, making pottery and glazes, rendering fat into soap, glassmaking, and putting tin and copper together to make bronze.

Alchemists who recorded changes and experiments with these processes were the pioneers and precursors of chemistry as we know it today.

It wasn’t until the seventeenth, maybe even eighteenth century that a clear difference was established between alchemy and chemistry

The first metals used by humans were those which could be found on the ground in their natural state, such as gold, silver, copper, tin and the iron that came from the sky in the form of meteorites.

People have found natural gold in Spanish caves dating from the Paleolithic (40,000 BCE).

Egyptians made weapons from meteoric iron and they called them “Daggers from Heaven.”

Chemistry is change and nothing effects change more dramatically than fire.

To see water boil, or wood transformed into black charcoal, to see sand turn to glass or metals melt… these must have seemed like magical processes at first and indeed they still seem magical.

Tin, copper and lead can be taken out of rock merely by heating the rock and this began to be done around 5,000, 6,000 BCE in Serbia (Majdanpek, Yarmovac, Plocnik).

At the Belovode site in Serbia, people seem to have done the first smelting of, for example, a copper axe head (5,500 BCE) from the Vin?a culture.

Archaeologists have found early metals from the third millennium BCE in Portugal, Spain and England (Stonehenge).

The making of perfume from plants, colors from plants and rocks, these are chemical operations.

Arsenic is brown, copper can be an intense, beautiful blue or an equally attractive green.

Tin can be silvery gray and iron is red brown as we see so often in the earth around us.

People began to adorn themselves with these colors very early on.

When it was discovered that copper and tin could be put together into a new better metal, a lot of things changed and this major change was called the Bronze Age (3,500 BCE).

Arsenic was an impurity that occurred in the smelting of bronze.

Iron was much more difficult to take out of its native ore than were gold, copper and tin.

There are substantive claims made for early, very early African iron making, but the traditional account is that Hittites began to work iron in 1,200 BCE and so began the Iron Age.

The Philistines who lived along the eastern Mediterranean coast and who gave their name to Palestine became a successful people because they learned to extract and work iron.

Iron Age metalworking (ferrous metallurgy) began to be done almost worldwide in such places as the Middle East, Near East, Far East, Iran, Egypt, Nubia (Sudan), Anatolia (Turkey), Carthage, Greece, Italy, United Kingdom, China, Japan. Of course, nowadays metal fabrication is done all over the world with sophisticated techniques using argon welding gas and a variety of tools to create some impressive metalwork.

As I have mentioned before, the Chinese invented the blast furnace, cast iron, water powered trip hammers and double acting piston bellows.

How do these metals exist in different forms and how do they change into other forms was a question that thoughtful people asked very early. These questions are the foundations of alchemy and chemistry.

What were the simplest, most fundamental elements?

Air, water, earth and fire seemed to be very basic, and then gold, silver, copper, tin.

There were even early philosphers who posited an atomic basis for everything.

How did they do this?

Did they intuit the presence of atoms?

Democritus and Leucippus in Greece and Kanada in India (in the Vaisheshika sutras) created a theory of atomism that wasn’t heard of again until John Dalton began postulating a similar idea in the eighteenth century of our time.

Where were the proofs for such an idea as atomism?

The Greeks in their philosophy and Kanada in his sutras talked about atoms, but there was no real clear evidence of atoms until the twentieth century.

This didn’t stop Epicurus in 300 BCE from claiming that there was a universe of tiny, indivisible parts (atoms = a tomos = un cut able).

Where was the empirical evidence for this?

Aristotle, just to name one thinker, denied the existence of atoms completely, and Hippocrates thought and said that the human body was composed of four humors, an idea that lasted well into modern times, almost to the Age of Enlightenment.

The four humors were blood, fire, earth and phlegm, and these created the termperaments.

Blood made for a sanguine temperament or mood.

Fire was choleric.

Water was phlegmatic and earth was melancholic.

It was quite an elaborate system and it held sway up into the eighteenth century of our time.

We still use these terms, of course, but don’t believe in them literally.

Sentences such as, She had a sanguine disposition.

He had a choleric nature.

So and so was so phlegmatic and in a melancholy mood that day.

Epicurus, on the other hand, not only said that we live in a world of atoms, but that it is incumbent upon us to lead balanced, harmonious lives.

How he went from one of these ideas to the other is very Greek, but it is not at all “epicurean” as we use the word today.

Quite the contrary, in fact.

Lucretius sought to explain the thinking of Epicurus to a Roman audience and so he wrote De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) in 50 BCE, where he explains the idea of atomism, what the mind and soul are, sensations, thought, the development of the physical world and many heavenly phenomena.

The self confidence of these early thinkers is staggering.

They were erecting whole worlds out of thin air.

They would never see an atom.

No one would for a long time, and yet they stated unequivocally that atoms were there and were the basis for everything.

Pliny the Elder took a more practical, concrete approach to all of this and described with accuracy many minerals and properties of earth.

A Persian who wrote in Arabic, Jabir ibn Hayyan studied Aristotle’s idea of air, earth, fire and water in addition to two philosophical elements: sulphur (combustability) and mercury (the metallic properties) and thus developed the elemental system used in medieval alchemy.

The three metallic principles: sulphur to flammability or combustion, mercury to volatility and stability, and salt to solidity became the tria prima of the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus who reasoned that Aristotle’s four element theory appeared in bodies as three principles.

Paracelsus saw these principles as fundamental and justified them by recourse to the description of how wood burns in fire.

Mercury was the cohesive principle, so that when it left in smoke the wood fell apart.

Smoke described the volatility (the mercurial principle), the heat-giving flames described flammability (sulphur), and the remnant ash described solidity (salt).

Alchemy is defined by the Hermetic quest for the philosopher’s stone, the study of which is steeped in symbolic mysticism, and which differs greatly from modern science.

Alchemists wanted to make transformations on an esoteric (spiritual) and/or exoteric (practical) level.

It was the exoteric aspects of alchemy that contributed heavily to the evolution of chemistry in Greco-Roman (Hellenistic) Egypt, in the Islamic golden age, and then in Europe.

Alchemy and chemistry share an interest in the composition and properties of matter, and prior to the eighteenth century were not separated into distinct disciplines.

The term chymistry has been used to describe the blend of alchemy and chemistry that existed before this time.

The earliest Western alchemists, who lived in the first centuries of the common era, invented chemical apparatus.

The bain-marie, or water bath is named for Mary the Jewess, whose work gives the first descriptions of the tribikos and kerotakis, types of stills.

Cleopatra the alchemist described furnaces and has been credited with the invention of the alembic, although there are several claimants for this title.

Jabir ibn Hayyan set the foundations for the experiments and their methodology which influenced alchemists in the Islamic, and, thus, later the European world in the twelfth century.

In the Renaissance, exoteric alchemy remained popular in the form of Paracelsian iatrochemistry (iatros = doctor, physician) while spiritual alchemy flourished in its Platonic, Hermetic, and Gnostic roots.

The quest for the philosopher’s stone, a legendary substance, allegedly capable of turning inexpensive metals into gold, was not outmoded by scientific advances, but was still the domain of respected scientists and doctors until the early eighteenth century.

Jan Baptist van Helmont, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton were all alchemists as well as chemists.

They still were searching for a formula that would transform base metals into gold, although Newton warned one colleague about advertising that fact.

The thing about alchemy was that there was no orderly, logical system for naming new compounds and the alchemical language was codified, secretive, esoteric and vague.

Different terms meant different things to different people.

Science demands openness and complete honesty.

There is no place in it for concealment and protection of sources.

From The Fontana History of Chemistry (Brock, 1992):

The language of alchemy soon developed an arcane and secretive technical vocabulary designed to conceal information from the uninitiated. To a large degree, this language is incomprehensible to us today, though it is apparent that readers of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale or audiences for Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist understood the alchemical language in these narratives well enough to laugh at it.

Chaucer’s tale exposed the more unethical, hypocritical, thieving side of alchemy, especially the manufacture of counterfeit gold from cheap substances.

Dante Alighieri banished all alchemists to the Inferno.

In 1317, the Avignon Pope John XXII ordered all alchemists to leave France because they were counterfeiting money.

A law was passed in England in 1403 which made the “multiplication of metals” punishable by death.

Yet royalty and privileged classes still sought to discover the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life for themselves.

Illusions do not die easily.

Potent is the lure of free money, as we still see today.

The goal of legitimate scientific inquiry was to make experiments reproducible, but one of the major aims of alchemists was to hide their methods, so there was a basic conflict here

There was a need for an honest scientific method where experiments could be repeated by others results reported in a clear language that laid out both what was known and unknown.

In the Islamic World, Muslims and Arabic speaking Persians were translating the works of the ancient Greeks and Egypticans they were experimenting with scientific ideas.

An early scientific method for chemistry began to emerge with the work of the 9th century chemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (known as “Geber” in Europe), who is considered as “the father of chemistry,” just as Antoine Lavolisier was centuries later.

Jabir ibn Hayyan introduced a systematic and experimental approach to scientific research based in the laboratory, in contrast to the ancient Greek and Egyptian alchemists who took a more “magical” approach to their discoveries and findings.

Hayyan invented and named the alembic (al-anbiq), chemically analyzed many chemical substances, composed lapidaries, distinguished between alkalis and acids, and manufactured hundreds of drugs.

Jabir ibn Hayyan proceeded systematically, refining the theory of five classical elements into the theory of seven alchemical elements and identifying mercury and sulfur as chemical elements.

Many chemists in the Persian Arabic world detected early the speciousness of alchemy, particularly the “transmutation of metals” aspect.

Such heroes of chemistry as Abu al-Rayhan al-Buruni, Avicenna (to use his European name), Al-kindi and al-Tusi who wrote about the conservation of mass, noting that a body of matter can, yes, change, but not disappear.

Or appear for that matter, appear out of nowhere.

Rhazes (????? ???? ?????? ???? Ab? Bakr Mu?ammad-e Zakariy?-ye R?z?) shined the bright light of reason on the Aristotle Hippocrates theory of the four humors and said, in effect, “Oh, come on, you can’t be serious.”

Rhazes went on to design and describe many chemical instruments which are still in use today, the crucible or retort, the alembic and different kinds of chemical stoves.

Paracelsus (1493–1541), a Swiss alchemist, also rejected the four humors theory and formed a hybrid of alchemy and science (iatrochemistry), where chemicals, whether made in the laboratory or found in plants, were used for healing.

Iatrós ( ?????? “healer”) is Greek for doctor. It is present in such words as pediatrics, psychiatrist, podiatrist.

Paracelsus was not perfect in making his experiments truly scientific.

For example, as an extension of his theory that new compounds could be made by combining mercury with sulfur, he once made what he thought was “oil of sulfur”.

This was actually dimethyl ether which contained neither mercury nor sulfur.

Georg Agricola (1494–1555), who published his great work De Re Metallica in 1556, wanted to improve the refining of ores and their extraction to smelt metals

Agricola’s work describes the highly developed and complex processes of mining metal ores, metal extraction and metallurgy of the time.

Agricola created a practical base upon which others could build by removing the alchemical mysticism from the proceedings.

De Re Metallica describes the many kinds of furnace used to smelt ore, and the book stimulated interest in minerals and their composition.

Agricola makes numerous references to the earlier author, Pliny the Elder.

In 1605, Sir Francis Bacon published The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, which is the first clear description of the scientific method.

In 1605, Michal Sedziwój published the alchemical treatise A New Light of Alchemy which proposed the existence of oxygen.

And in 1615 Jean Beguin published the Tyrocinium Chymicum, an early chemistry textbook,containing the first-ever chemical equation.

René Descartes published Discours de la Méthode (1637), which also outlines the scientific method.

The Dutch chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont’s Ortus medicinae is cited by some as a major transitional work between alchemy and chemistry, and it had an important influence on Robert Boyle.

There are numerous experiments in the book which established an early version of the law of conservation of mass.

Jan Baptist van Helmont, during the time just after Paracelsus and iatrochemistry, suggested that there are insubstantial substances other than air and coined a name for them, “gas” from the Greek word chaos, so think about that the next time you’re running on empty.

Van Helmont conducted several experiments involving gases.

He is also remembered today largely for his ideas on spontaneous generation and his 5-year tree experiment, as well as being considered the founder of pneumatic chemistry.

English chemist Robert Boyle (1627–1691) refined the modern scientific method for alchemy and separated chemistry further from alchemy.

Boyle is regarded today as the first modern chemist, and one of the founders of modern chemistry, a pioneer of the experimental scientific method.

He did not actually discover Boyle’s Law, but he presented and formalized it in 1662.

Boyle’s law describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, given a constant temperature within a closed system.

Boyle wrote The Sceptical Chymist in 1661, a cornerstone book in chemistry.

In The Sceptical Chymist Boyle posits that every phenomenon is the result of collisions of particles in motion.

Boyle asks for experimentation and he asserts that experiments show that the classic four humors or elements: earth, fire, air, and water are not enough to explain nature.

Boyle also pleads that chemistry cease to be subservient to medicine or to alchemy.

He is really pushing for a rigorous approach to scientific experimentation and he believed that all theories must be proved experimentally before being regarded as true.

The Sceptical Chymist contains some of the earliest modern ideas of atoms, molecules, and chemical reactions, and marks the beginning of the history of modern chemistry.

Boyle aimed for that classic scientific goal, reproducible results, and he needed purer chemicals for that.

He agreed with René Descartes in explaining and quantifying the physical properties and interactions of material substances.

Boyle was an atomist, but he preferred the term corpuscle over atoms, so that would make him a corpuscleist, which sounds a bit silly now.

“Atom” merely means uncuttable, and I suppose “corpuscle” would mean a little bodylike thing.

One thing is for sure.

The atom is very cuttable, so the name atom is not very descriptive now.

The atom has been split so many times now that even its parts have been split many times and there is no end in sight.

What is the name of the latest found particle of the atom? Found only within the last year? The Higgs Boson, is that it?

There’s a whole universe inside an atom, just as those science fiction writers in the 1950s promised us.

So Boyle thought that the most elemental level of matter was the corpuscle.

He performed numerous investigations with an air pump and noted that the mercury fell as air was pumped out.

He also observed that pumping the air out of a container would extinguish a flame and kill small animals placed inside, and well as causing the level of a barometer to drop.

Boyle was in the vanguard of the chemical revolution with his mechanical corpuscular philosophy.

He found time to repeat the tree experiment of van Helmont, and was the first to use indicators, those little slips of paper, which changed colors with acidity.

Here is van Helmont’s tree experiment in van Helmont’s own words:

I took an earthen pot and in it placed 200 pounds of earth which had been dried out in

an oven. This I moistened with rain water, and in it planted a shoot of willow which

weighed five pounds. When five years had passed the tree which grew from it weighed

169 pounds and about three ounces. The earthen pot was wetted whenever it was

necessary with rain or distilled water only. It was very large, and was sunk in the ground,

and had a tin plated iron lid with many holes punched in it, which covered the edge of

the pot to keep air-borne dust from mixing with the earth. I did not keep track of the

weight of the leaves which fell in each of the four autumns. Finally, I dried out the earth

in the pot once more, and found the same 200 pounds, less about 2 ounces. Thus, 164

pounds of wood, bark, and roots had arisen from water alone.”

So, really? 164 pounds of wood, bark and roots had arisen from 2 ounces of water alone? What is the main igredient, truly the principal ingredient that van Helmont is omitting here? Could it be… solar power?

Is van Helmont forgetting anything else?

It’s an interesting experiment, isn’t it?

In 1702, German chemist Georg Stahl coined the name “phlogiston” for the substance believed to be released in the process of burning, and thereby set off a couple of centuries of chemical mischief.

The phlogiston theory postulated a fire-like element called phlogiston, contained within combustible bodies, that is released during combustiuon.

The name comes from the Greek ????????? phlogistón (burning up), from ???? phlóx (flame).

The phlogiston theory was first stated in 1667 by Johann Joachim Becher.

The theory attempted to explain burning processes such as combustion and rusting which are now collectively known as oxidation.

When you buy foods that are rich in anti-oxidants you are trying to keep your insides from rusting and burning, aren’t you?

In general, substances that burned in air were said to be rich in phlogiston; the fact that combustion soon ceased in an enclosed space was taken as clear-cut evidence that air had the capacity to absorb only a finite amount of phlogiston. When air had become completely phlogisticated it would no longer serve to support combustion of any material, nor would a metal heated in it yield a calx; nor could phlogisticated air support life, for the role of air in respiration was to remove the phlogiston from the body.

Thus, Becher described phlogiston as a process that was basically the opposite of the role of oxygen in combustion.

Daniel Rutherford discovered nitrogen in 1772 and used the phlogiston theory to explain his results.

The residue of air left after burning, in fact a mixture of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, was sometimes referred to as phlogisticated air, having taken up all of the phlogiston.

Conversely, when oxygen was first discovered, it was thought to be dephlogisticated air, capable of combining with more phlogiston and thus supporting combustion for longer than ordinary air.

Amazing how an airy nothing of a theory can be so catastrophical to common sense. People believed in this absraction for a long time. They also believed in “ether.” Many serious scientists staked their reputations on the existence of phlogiston and ether.

Around 1735, Swedish chemist Georg Brandt analyzed a dark blue pigment found in copper ore, and demonstrated that the pigment contained a new element, later named cobalt.

In 1751, a Swedish chemist and pupil of Stahl’s named Axel Fredrik Cronstedt identified an impurity in copper ore as a separate metallic element, which he named nickel.

Cronstedt is one of the founders of modern mineralogy.

Cronstedt also discovered the mineral scheelite in 1751, which he named tungsten, meaning “heavy stone” in Swedish.

In 1754, Scottish chemist Joseph Black isolated carbon dioxide which he called “fixed air”.

In 1757, Louis Claude Cadet de Gassicourt, while investigating arsenic compounds, created Cadet’s fuming liquid, later discovered to be cacodyl oxide, considered to be the first synthetic organomettalic compound.

In 1758, Joseph Black formulated the concept of latent heat to explain the thermochemistry of phase changes.

In 1766, English chemist Henry Cavendish isolated hydrogen which he called “inflammable air”.

Cavendish discovered hydrogen as a colorless, odourless gas that burns and can form an explosive mixture with air, and published a paper on the production of water by burning inflammable air (that is, hydrogen) in dephlogisticated air (now known to be oxygen), the latter a constituent of atmospheric air (according to the phlogiston theory).

In 1773, Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered oxygen, which he called “fire air”, but did not immediately publish his findings.

In 1774, English chemist Joseph Priestly independently isolated oxygen in its gaseous state, calling it “dephlogisticated air”, and published his work before Scheele.

During his lifetime, Priestley’s considerable scientific reputation rested on his invention of soda water, his writings on electricity, and his discovery of several “airs” (gases), the most famous being what Priestley dubbed “dephlogisticated air” (oxygen).

However, Priestley’s determination to defend phlogiston theory and to reject what would become the chemical revoution eventually left him isolated within the scientific community.

In 1781, Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered that a new acid, tungsten acid could be made from Cronstedt’s scheelite (at the time named tungsten).

Scheele and Torbern Bergman suggested that it might be possible to obtain a new metal by reducing this acid.

In 1783, José and Fausto Elhuyar found an acid made from wolframite that was identical to tungstic acid.

Later that year, in Spain, the brothers succeeded in isolating the metal now known as tungsten by reduction of this acid with charcoal, and they are credited with the discovery of the element.

Oliver Sacks wrote an entire entertaining book Uncle Tungsten (Memories of a Chemical Boyhood) about his family and about this metal.

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier is celebrated as the father of modern chemistry.

Lavoisier demonstrated with careful measurements that transmutation of water to earth was not possible, but that the sediment observed from boiling water came from the container.

Lavoisier burnt phosphorus and sulfur in air, and proved that the products weighed more than the original materials.

Nevertheless, the weight gained was lost from the air.

Thus, in 1789, he established the Law of Conservation of Mass, which is also called “Lavoisier’s Law.”

The world’s first ice-calorimeter, was used in the winter of 1782-83, by Antoine Lavoisier and Pierre-Simon Laplace, to determine the heat involved in various chemical changes, calculations which were based on Joseph Black’s prior discovery of latent heat.

These experiments mark the foundation of thermochemistry.

Repeating the experiments of Priestley, he demonstrated that air is composed of two parts, one of which combines with metals to form calxes.

In Considérations Générales sur la Nature des Acides (1778), Lavoisier demonstrated that the “air” responsible for combustion was also the source of acidity.

The next year, he named this portion oxygen (Greek for acid-former), and the other azote (Greek for no life).

Lavoisier thus has a claim to the discovery of oxygen along with Preistley and Scheele.

He also discovered that the “inflammable air” discovered by Cavendish, which he termed hydrogen (Greek for water-former), combined with oxygen to produce a dew, as Priestley had reported, which appeared to be water.

In Reflexions sur le Phlogistique (1783), Lavoisier showed the phlogiston theory of combustion to be inconsistent.

Mikhail Lomonosov independently established a tradition of chemistry in Russia in the 18th century and he also rejected the phlogiston theory, and anticipated the kinetic theory of gases.

Lomonosov regarded heat as a form of motion, and stated the idea of conservation of matter.

Lavoisier worked with Claude Louis Berthollet and others to devise a system of chemical nomenclature which serves as the basis of the modern system of naming chemical compounds.

In his Methods of Chemical Nomenclature (1787), Lavoisier invented the system of naming and classification still largely in use today, including names such as sulfuric acid, sulfates and sulfites. Due to these classifications, we are able to ensure that workers who frequently use acidic chemicals are able to work safely. There are many safety protocols in place within companies that use highly dangerous chemicals, you can learn more by reading this Storemasta workplace safety blog.

In 1785, Berthollet was the first to introduce the use of chlorine gas as a commercial bleach.

In the same year he first determined the elemental composition of the gas ammonia.

Berthollet first produced a modern bleaching liquid in 1789 by passing chlorine gas through a solution of sodium carbonate.

The result was a weak solution of sodium hypochlorite.

Another strong chlorine oxidant and bleach which he investigated and was the first to produce, potassium chlorate(KClO₃), is known as Berthollet’s Salt.

Berthollet is also known for his scientific contributions to theory of chemical equilibria via the mechanism of reverse chemical reactions.

Lavoisier’s Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elementary Treatise of Chemistry, 1789) was the first modern chemical textbook, and presented a unified view of new theories of chemistry, contained a clear statement of the Law of Conservation of Mass, and denied the existence of phlogiston.

In addition, it contained a list of elements, or substances that could not be broken down further, which included oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, phosophorus, mercury, zinc and sulfur.

His list, however, also included light and caloric, which he believed to be material substances.

In the work, Lavoisier underscored the observational basis of his chemistry, stating “I have tried…to arrive at the truth by linking up facts; to suppress as much as possible the use of reasoning, which is often an unreliable instrument which deceives us, in order to follow as much as possible the torch of observation and of experiment.”

Nevertheless, he believed that the real existence of atoms was philosophically impossible.

Lavoisier demonstrated that organisms disassemble and reconstitute atmospheric air in the same manner as a burning body.

With Pierre-Simon Laplace, Lavoisier used a calorimeter to estimate the heat evolved per unit of carbon dioxide produced.

They found the same ratio for a flame and animals, indicating that animals produced energy by a type of combustion.

Lavoisier believed in the radical theory, believing that radicals, which function as a single group in a chemical reaction, would combine with oxygen in reactions.

He believed all acids contained oxygen.

Lavoisier also discovered that a diamond is a crystalline form of carbon.

Following Lavoisier’s work, chemistry acquired a strict quantitative nature, allowing reliable predictions to be made.

The revolution in chemistry which he brought about was a result of a conscious effort to fit all experiments into the framework of a single theory.

He established the consistent use of chemical balance, used oxygen to overthrow the phlogiston theory, and developed a new system of chemical nomenclature.

Italian physicist Alessandro Volta constructed a device for accumulating a large charge by a series of inductions and groundings.

Volta investigated the 1780s discovery “animal electricity” by Luigi Galvani and found that the electric current was generated from the contact of dissimilar metals, and that the frog leg was only acting as a detector.

Volta demonstrated in 1794 that when two metals and brine-soaked cloth or cardboard are arranged in a circuit they produce an electric current.

In 1800, Volta stacked several pairs of alternating copper (or silver) and zinc discs (electrodes) separated by cloth or cardboard soaked in vrine (electrolyte) to increase the electrolyte conductivity.

When the top and bottom contacts were connected by a wire, an electric current flowed through the voltaic pile and the connecting wire.

Thus, Volta constructed the first electrical battery to produce electricity.

Volta’s method of stacking round plates of copper and zinc separated by disks of cardboard moistened with salt solution was termed a voltaic pile.

Volta is considered to be the founder of the discipline of electrocheistry.

A Galvanic cell (or voltaic cell) is an electrochemical cell that derives electrical energy from spontaneous redox reaction taking place within the cell.

It generally consists of two different metals connected by a salt bridge, or individual half-cells separated by a porous membrane.

In 1802, French American chemist and industrialist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, who had learned manufacture of gunpowder and explosives from Antoine Lavoisier, established a gunpowder factory in Delaware known as E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company.

Wanting to make the best powder possible, du Pont was vigilant about the quality of the materials he used.

For 32 years, du Pont served as president of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, which eventually grew into one of the largest and most successful companies in America.

Throughout the 19th century, chemistry was divided between those who followed the atomic theory of John Dalton and those who did not, such as Wilhelm Ostwald and Ernst Mach.

Although such proponents of the atomic theory as Amedeo Avogadro and Ludewig Boltsmann made great advances in explaining the behavior of gases, this dispute was not finally settled until Jean Perrin’s experimental investigation of Einstein’s atomic explanation of Brownian motion in the first decade of the 20th century.

Well before the dispute had been settled, many had already applied the concept of atomism to chemistry.

A major example was the ion theory of Svante Arrhenius which anticipated ideas about atomic substructure that did not fully develop until the 20th century.

Michael Faraday was another early worker, whose major contribution to chemistry was electrochemistry, in which (among other things) a certain quantity of electricity during electrolysis or electrodeposition of metals was shown to be associated with certain quantities of chemical elements, and fixed quantities of the elements therefore with each other, in specific ratios.

These findings, like those of Dalton’s combining ratios, were early clues to the atomic nature of matter.

In 1803, English meteorologist and chemistJohn Dalton had proposed Dalton’s law, which describes relationship between the components in a mixture of gases and the relative pressure each contributes to that of the overall mixture.

This concept, which John Dalton formulated in 1802, is also known as Dalton’s law of partial pressures.

Dalton also proposed an atomic theory in 1803 which stated that all matter was composed of small indivisible particles termed atoms.

Atoms of a given element possess unique characteristics and weight, and three types of atoms exist: simple (elements), compound (simple molecules), and complex (complex molecules).

In 1808, Dalton first published New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808-1827), in which he outlined the first modern scientific description of the atomic theory.

This work identified chemical elements as a specific type of atom, therefore rejecting Newton’s theory of chemical affinities.

Instead, Dalton inferred proportions of elements in compounds by taking ratios of the weights of reactants, setting the atomic weight of hydrogen to be identically one.

Following Jeremias Benjamin Richer (who was known for introducing the term stoichiometry), John Dalton proposed that chemical elements combine in integral ratios.

This is known as the law of multiple proportions or Dalton’s law, and Dalton included a clear description of the law in his New System of Chemical Philosophy.

The law of multiple proportions is one of the basic laws of stoichiometry used to establish the atomic theory.

Despite the consideration of atoms as physically real entities and introduction of a system of chemical symbols, New System of Chemical Philosophy devoted almost as much space to the caloric theory as to atomism.

French chemist Joseph Proust proposed the law of definite proportions, which states that elements always combine in small, whole number ratios to form compounds, based on several experiments conducted between 1797 and 1804.

Along with the law of multiple proportions, the law of definite proportions forms the basis of stoichiometry.

The law of definite proportions and constant composition do not prove that atoms exist, but they are difficult to explain without assuming that chemical compounds are formed when atoms combine in constant proportions.

A Swedish chemist and disciple of Dalton, Jöns Jacob Berzelius embarked on a systematic program to try to make accurate and precise quantitative measurements and insure the purity of chemicals.

Along with Lavoisier, Boyle, and Dalton, Berzelius is known as one of the fathers of modern chemistry.

In 1828 he compiled a table of relative atomic weights, where oxygen was assigned the number 100, and which included all of the elements known at the time.

This work provided evidence in favor of Dalton’s atomic theory: that inorganic chemical compounds are composed of atoms combined in whole number amounts.

He determined the exact elementary constituents of large numbers of compounds.

The results strongly confirmed Proust’s Law of Definite Proportions.

In his weights, he used oxygen as a standard, setting its weight equal to exactly 100. He also measured the weights of 43 elements. In discovering that atomic weights are not integer multiples of the weight of hydrogen, Berzelius also disproved Prout’s hypothesis that elements are built up from atoms of hydrogen.

Motivated by his extensive atomic weight determinations and a desire to aid his experiments, Berzelius introduced the classical system of chemical symbols and notation with his 1808 publishing of Lärbok i Kemien, in which elements are abbreviated by one or two letters to make a distinct abbreviation from their Latin name.

This system of chemical notation-in which the elements were given simple written labels, such as O for oxygen, or Fe for iron, with proportions noted by numbers-is the same basic system used today. The only difference is that instead of the subscript number used today (e.g., H₂O), Berzelius used a superscript (H²O).

Berzelius is credited with identifying the chemical elements silicon, selenium, thorium and cerium. Students working in Berzelius’s laboratory also discovered lithium and vanadium.

Berzelius developed the radical theory of chemical combination, which holds that reactions occur as stable groups of atoms called radicals are exchanged between molecules.

He believed that salts are compounds of an acid and bases, and discovered that the anions in acids would be attracted to a positive electrode (the anode), whereas the cations in a base would be attracted to a negative electrode (the cathode).

Berzelius did not believe in the Vitalism Theory, but instead in a regulative force which produced organization of tissues in an organism.

Berzelius is also credited with originating the chemical terms catalysis, polymer, isomer and allotrope, although his original definitions differ dramatically from modern usage. For example, he coined the term “polymer” in 1833 to describe organic compounds which shared identical empirical formulas but which differed in overall molecular weight, the larger of the compounds being described as “polymers” of the smallest. By this long superseded, pre-structural definition, glucose (C₆H₁₂O₆) was viewed as a polymer of formaldehyde (CH₂O).

English chemist Humphry Davy was a pioneer in the field of electrolysis, using Alessandro Volta’s voltaic pile to split up common compounds and thus isolate a series of new elements. He went on to electrolyse molten salts and discovered several new metals, especially sodium and potassium, highly reactive elements known as the alkali metals.

You may remember a clerihew that I quoted about this man: Sir Humphry Davy abominated gravy, and deserved the odium of having discovered sodium.

Potassium, the first metal that was isolated by electrolysis, was discovered in 1807 by Davy, who derived it from caustic potash (KOH).

Before the 19th century, no distinction was made between potassium and sodium. Sodium was first isolated by Davy in the same year by passing an electric current through molten sodium hydroxide(NaOH).

When Davy heard that Berzelius and Pontin prepared calcium amalgam by electrolyzing lime in mercury, he tried it himself. Davy was successful, and discovered calcium in 1808 by electrolyzing a mixture of lime and mercuric oxide. He worked with electrolysis throughout his life and, in 1808, he isolated magnesium, strontium and barium.

Davy also experimented with gases by inhaling them. This experimental procedure nearly proved fatal on several occasions, but led to the discovery of the unusual effects of nitrous oxide which came to be known as laughing gas. He understood that nitrous oxide had anesthetic properties but didn’t emphasize this fact, and so it was a long time before this compound was used in surgical operations. It is saddening to think of all the needless suffering that happened in the interval between Davy’s discovery of nitrous oxide and its implementation in the medical field.

Chlorine was discovered in 1774 by Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who called it “dephlogisticated marine acid” and mistakenly thought it contained oxygen. Scheele observed several properties of chlorine gas, such as its bleaching effect on litmus, its deadly effect on insects, its yellow-green colour, and the similarity of its smell to that of aqua regia.

Scheele was unable to publish his findings at the time, and in 1810, chlorine was given its current name by Humphry Davy (derived from the Greek word for green), who insisted that chlorine was in fact an element.

Davy also showed that oxygen could not be obtained from the substance known as oxymuriatic acid (HCl solution). This discovery overturned Lavoisier’s definition of acids as compounds of oxygen.

French chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac shared the interest of Lavoisier and others in the quantitative study of the properties of gases.

From his first major program of research in 1801–1802, he concluded that equal volumes of all gases expand equally with the same increase in temperature: this conclusion is usually called Charles law (Gay-Lussac gave credit to Jacques Charles, who had arrived at nearly the same conclusion in the 1780s but had not published it).

Charles law was independently discovered by John Dalton in 1801, although Dalton’s description was less thorough than Gay-Lussac’s.

In 1804 Gay-Lussac made several daring ascents of over 7,000 meters above sea level in hydrogen-filled balloons-a feat not equaled for another 50 years-that allowed him to investigate other aspects of gases. Not only did he gather magnetic measurements at various altitudes, but he also took pressure, temperature, and humidity measurements and samples of air, which he later analyzed chemically.

In 1808 Gay-Lussac announced what was probably his single greatest achievement: from his own and others’ experiments he deduced that gases at constant temperature and pressure combine in simple numerical proportions by volume, and the resulting product or products-if gases-also bear a simple proportion by volume to the volumes of the reactants. In other words, gases under equal conditions of temperature and pressure react with one another in volume ratios of small whole numbers. This conclusion subsequently became known as Gay-Lussac’s law or the Law of Combining Volumes.

With his fellow professor at the École Polytechnique, Louis Jacques Thénard, Gay-Lussac also participated in early electrochemical research, investigating the elements discovered by its means. Among other achievements, they decomposed boric acid by using fused potassium, thus discovering the element boron.

The two also took part in contemporary debates that modified Lavoisier’s definition of acids and furthered his program of analyzing organic compounds for their oxygen and hydrogen content.

The element iodine was discovered by French chemist Bernard Courtois in 1811. Courtois gave samples to his friends,Charles Bernard Desormes (1777-1862) and Nicolas Clément (1779–1841), to continue research. He also gave some of the substance to Gay-Lussac and to physicist André-Marie Ampère.

On December 6, 1813, Gay-Lussac announced that the new substance was either an element or a compound of oxygen. It was Gay-Lussac who suggested the name “iode”, from the Greek word ????? (iodes) for violet (because of the color of iodine vapor).

Ampère had given some of his sample to Humphry Davy. Davy did some experiments on the substance and noted its similarity to chlorine. Davy sent a letter dated December 10 to the Royal Society of London stating that he had identified a new element. Arguments erupted between Davy and Gay-Lussac over who identified iodine first, but both scientists acknowledged Courtois as the first to isolate the element.

In 1815, Humphry Davy invented the Davy lamp, which allowed coal miners to work safely in the presence of flammable gases. There had been many mining explosions caused by firedamp or methane, often ignited by open flames of the lamps then used by miners. Davy thought of using an iron gauze to enclose a lamp’s flame, and so prevent the methane burning inside the lamp from passing out to the general atmosphere.

Although the idea of the safety lamp had already been demonstrated by William Reid Clanny and by the then unknown (but later very famous) engineer George Stephenson, Davy’s use of wire gauze to prevent the spread of flame was used by many other inventors in their later designs.

There was some discussion as to whether Davy would have discovered the principles behind his lamp without the help of the work of Smithson Tennant, but it was generally agreed that the work of both men had been independent. Davy refused to patent the lamp, and its invention led to his being awarded the Rumford medal in 1816.

After Dalton published his atomic theory in 1808, certain of his central ideas were soon adopted by most chemists. However, uncertainty persisted for half a century about how atomic theory was to be configured and applied to concrete situations. Chemists in different countries developed several different incompatible atomistic systems.

A paper that suggested a way out of this difficult situation was published as early as 1811 by the Italian physicist Amedeo Avogadro (1776-1856), who hypothesized that equal volumes of gases at the same temperature and pressure contain equal numbers of molecules, from which it followed that relative molecular weights of any two gases are the same as the ratio of the densities of the two gases under the same conditions of temperature and pressure.

Avogadro also reasoned that simple gases were not formed of solitary atoms but were instead compound molecules of two or more atoms. Thus Avogadro was able to overcome the difficulty that Dalton and others had encountered when Gay-Lussac reported that above 100 °C the volume of water vapor was twice the volume of the oxygen used to form it. According to Avogadro, the molecule of oxygen had split into two atoms in the course of forming water vapor.

Avogadro’s hypothesis was neglected for half a century after it was first published. Many reasons for this neglect have been cited, including some theoretical problems, such as Jöns Jacob Berzelius’s “dualism,” which asserted that compounds are held together by the attraction of positive and negative electrical charges, making it inconceivable that a molecule composed of two electrically similar atoms-as in oxygen-could exist.

An additional barrier to acceptance of Avogadro’s hypothesis was the fact that many chemists were reluctant to adopt physical methods (such as vapour-density determinations) to solve their problems. By mid-century, however, some leading figures had begun to view the chaotic multiplicity of competing systems of atomic weights and molecular formulas as intolerable. Moreover, purely chemical evidence began to mount that suggested Avogadro’s approach might be right after all.

During the 1850s, younger chemists, such as Alexander Williamson in England, Charles Gerhardt and Charles-Adolphe Wurtz in France, and August Kekulé in Germany, began to advocate reforming theoretical chemistry to make it consistent with Avogadrian theory.

In 1825, Friedrich Wöhler and Justus von Liebig performed the first confirmed discovery and explanation of isomers earlier named by Berzelius.

Working with cyanic acid and fulminic acid, they correctly deduced that isomerism was caused by differing arrangements of atoms within a molecular structure.

In 1827, William Prout classified biomolecules into their modern groupings: carbohydrates, proteins and lipids.

After the nature of combustion was settled, another dispute, this one concerning vitalism and the essential distinction between organic and inorganic substances, began. The vitalism question was revolutionized in 1828 when Friedrich Wöhler synthesized urea, thereby establishing that organic compounds could be produced from inorganic starting materials and disproving the theory of vitalism. Never before had an organic compound been synthesized from inorganic material.

This opened a new research field in chemistry, and by the end of the 19th century, scientists were able to synthesize hundreds of organic compounds, the most important among them being mauve, magenta and other synthetic dyes, as well as the widely used drug aspirin. You have probably heard it said of aspirin, that, were it invented today, you would need a prescription for it, since its uses are manifold.

The discovery of the artificial synthesis of urea contributed greatly to the theory of isomerism, as the empirical chemical formulas for urea and ammonium cyanate are identical.

In 1832, Friedrich Wöhler and Justus von Liebig discovered and explained functional groups and radicals in relation to organic chemistry, as well as first synthesizing benzaldehyde.

Liebig, a German chemist, made major contributions to agricultural and biological chemistry, and worked on the organization of organic chemistry, and he is considered the “father of the fertilizer industry” for his discovery of nitrogen as an essential plant nutrient, and his formulation of the Law of the Minimum which described the effect of individual nutrients on crops.

In 1840, Germain Hess proposed Hess’ law, an early statement of the law of conservation of energy, which establishes that energy changes in a chemical process depend only on the states of the starting and product materials and not on the specific pathway taken between the two states.

In 1847, Hermann Kolbe obtained acetic acid from completely inorganic sources, further disproving vitalism.

In 1848, William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (commonly known as Lord Kelvin), established the concept of absolute zero, the temperature at which all molecular motion ceases.

In 1849, Louis Pasteur discovered that the racemic form of tartaric acid is a mixture of the levorotatory and dextrotatory forms, thus clarifying the nature of optical rotation and advancing the field of stereochemistry.

In 1852, August Beer proposed Beer’s law, which explains the relationship between the composition of a mixture and the amount of light it will absorb. Based partly on earlier work by Pierre Bouguer and Johann Heinrich Lambert, Beer’s law established the analytical technique known as spectrophotometry.

In 1855, Benjaman Silliman, Jr. pioneered methods of petroleum cracking which made the entire modern petrochemical industry possible, so we love him, right?

Avogadro’s hypothesis was that that equal volumes of gases at the same temperature and pressure contain equal numbers of molecules, from which it followed that relative molecular weights of any two gases are the same as the ratio of the densities of the two gases under the same conditions of temperature and pressure.

This hypothesis began to gain broad appeal among chemists only after his compatriot and fellow scientist Stanislao Cannizzarro demonstrated its value in 1858, two years after Avogadro’s death.

Cannizzaro’s chemical interests had originally centered on natural products and on reactions of aromatic compounds

In 1853 he discovered that when benzaldehyde is treated with concentrated base, both benzoic acid and benzyl alcohol are produced, a phenomenon known today as the Cannizzaro reaction. In his 1858 pamphlet, Cannizzaro showed that a complete return to the ideas of Avogadro could be used to construct a consistent and robust theoretical structure that fit nearly all of the available empirical evidence. For instance, he pointed to evidence that suggested that not all elementary gases consist of two atoms per molecule-some were monoatomic, but most were diatomic, and a few were even more complex.

Another point of contention had been the formulas for compounds of the alkali metals(such as sodium) and the alkaline earth metals (such as calcium), which, in view of their striking chemical analogies, most chemists had wanted to assign to the same formula type.

Cannizzaro argued that placing these metals in different categories had the beneficial result of eliminating certain anomalies when using their physical properties to deduce atomic weights. Unfortunately, Cannizzaro’s pamphlet was published initially only in Italian and had little immediate impact.

The real breakthrough came with an international chemical congress held in the German town of Karlsruhe in September 1860, at which most of the leading European chemists were present. The Karlsruhe Congress had been arranged by Kékule, Wurtz, and a few others who shared Cannizzaro’s sense of the direction chemistry should go.

Speaking in French (as everyone there did), Cannizzaro made an indelible impression on the assembled body. Moreover, his friend Angelo Pavesi distributed Cannizzaro’s pamphlet to attendees at the end of the meeting; more than one chemist later wrote of the decisive impression the reading of this document provided.

For instance, Lothar Meyerlater wrote that on reading Cannizzaro’s paper, “The scales seemed to fall from my eyes.” Cannizzaro thus played a crucial role in winning the battle for reform. The system advocated by him, and soon thereafter adopted by most leading chemists, is substantially identical to what is still used today.

In 1856, Sir William Henry Perkin, age 18, given a challenge by his professor, August Wilhelm von Hofmann, sought to synthesize quinine, the anti-malaria drug from coal tar. In one attempt, Perkin oxidized aniline using potassium dichromate, whose toluidine impurities reacted with the aniline and yielded a black solid-suggesting a “failed” organic synthesis.

As he was cleaning the flask with alcohol, Perkin noticed purple portions of the solution: a byproduct of the attempt was the first synthetic dye, known as mauveine or Perkin’s mauve. Perkin’s discovery is the foundation of the dye synthesis industry, one of the earliest successful chemical industries.

German chemist August Kekulé von Stradonitz’s most important single contribution was his structural theory of organic composition, outlined in two articles published in 1857 and 1858 and treated in great detail in the pages of his extraordinarily popular Lehrbuch der organischen Chemie (“Textbook of Organic Chemistry”), the first installment of which appeared in 1859 and gradually extended to four volumes.

Kekulé argued that tetravalent carbon atoms, that is, carbon forming exactly four chemical bonds, could link together to form what he called a “carbon chain” or a “carbon skeleton,” to which other atoms with other valences (such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and chlorine) could join. He was convinced that it was possible for the chemist to specify this detailed molecular architecture for at least the simpler organic compounds known in his day.

Kekulé was not the only chemist to make such claims in this era. The Scottish chemist Archibald Scott Couper published a substantially similar theory nearly simultaneously, and the Russian chemist Aleksandr Butlerov did much to clarify and expand structure theory. However, it was predominantly Kekule’s ideas that prevailed in the chemical community.

British chemist and physicist William Crookes is noted for his cathode ray studies, fundamental in the development of atomic physics.

His researches on electrical discharges through a rarefied gas led him to observe the dark space around the cathode, now called the Crookes dark space. He demonstrated that cathode rays travel in straight lines and produce phosphorescence and heat when they strike certain materials.

A pioneer of vacuum tubes, Crookes invented the Crookes tube – an early experimental discharge tube, with partial vacuum with which he studied the behavior of cathode rays.

With the introduction of spectrum analysis by Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff (1859-1860), Crookes applied the new technique to the study of selenium compounds. Bunsen and Kirchoff had previously used spectroscopy as a means of chemical analysis to discover caesium and rubidium.

In 1861, Crookes used this process to discover thallium in some seleniferous deposits. He continued work on that new element, isolated it, studied its properties, and in 1873 determined its atomic weight. During his studies of thallium, Crookes discovered the principle of the Crookes radiometer a device that converts light radiation into rotary motion. The principle of this radiometer has found numerous applications in the development of sensitive measuring instruments.

In 1862,Alexander Parkes exhibited Parkesine, one of the earliest synthetic polymers, at the International Exhibition in London. This discovery formed the foundation of the modern plastics industry.

In 1864, Cato Maximilian Guldberg and Peter Waage, building on Claude Louis Berthollet’s ideas, proposed the law of mass action.

In 1865, Johann Josef Loschmidt determined the exact number of molecules in a mole, later named Avogadro’s number.

In 1865, August Kekulé, based partially on the work of Loschmidt and others, established the structure of benzene as a six carbon ring with alternating single and double bonds. Kekulé’s novel proposal for benzene’s cyclic structure was much contested but was never replaced by a superior theory. This theory provided the scientific basis for the dramatic expansion of the German chemical industry in the last third of the 19th century.

Today, the large majority of known organic compounds are aromatic, and all of them contain at least one hexagonal benzene ring of the sort that Kekulé advocated. Kekulé is also famous for having clarified the nature of aromatic compounds, which are compounds based on the benzene molecule.

In 1865, Adolf von Baeyer began work on indigo dye, a milestone in modern industrial organic chemistry which revolutionized the dye industry.

Swedish chemist and inventor Alfred Nobel found that when nitroglycerin was incorporated in an absorbent inert substance like kieselguhr (diatomaceous earth) it became safer and more convenient to handle, and this mixture he patented in 1867 as dynamite. Nobel later on combined nitroglycerin with various nitrocellulose compounds, similar to collodion, but settled on a more efficient recipe combining another nitrate explosive, and obtained a transparent, jelly-like substance, which was a more powerful explosive than dynamite.

Gelignite, or blasting gelatin, as it was named, was patented in 1876; and was followed by a host of similar combinations, modified by the addition of potassium nitrate and various other substances.

An important breakthrough in making sense of the list of known chemical elements (as well as in understanding the internal structure of atoms) was Dmitri Mendeleev’s development of the first modern periodic table, or the periodic classification of the elements.

Mendeleev, a Russian chemist, felt that there was some type of order to the elements and he spent more than thirteen years of his life collecting data and assembling the concept, initially with the idea of resolving some of the disorder in the field for his students. Mendeleev found that, when all the known chemical elements were arranged in order of increasing atomic weight, the resulting table displayed a recurring pattern, or periodicity, of properties within groups of elements.

Mendeleev’s law allowed him to build up a systematic periodic table of all the 66 elements then known based on atomic mass, which he published in Principles of Chemistry in 1869. His first Periodic Table was compiled on the basis of arranging the elements in ascending order of atomic weight and grouping them by similarity of properties.

Mendeleev had such faith in the validity of the periodic law that he proposed changes to the generally accepted values for the atomic weight of a few elements and, in his version of the periodic table of 1871, predicted the locations within the table of unknown elements together with their properties.

Mendeleev even predicted the likely properties of three yet-to-be-discovered elements, which he called ekaboron (Eb), ekaaluminium (Ea), and ekasilicon (Es), which proved to be good predictors of the properties of scandium, gallium and germanium, respectively, which each fill the spot in the periodic table assigned by Mendeleev.

At first the periodic system did not raise interest among chemists. However, with the discovery of the predicted elements, notably gallium in 1875, scandium in 1879, and germanium in 1886, it began to win wide acceptance. The subsequent proof of many of his predictions within his lifetime brought fame to Mendeleev as the founder of the periodic law.

This organizational system of Mendeleev’s surpassed earlier attempts at classification by Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois, who published the telluric helix, an early, three-dimensional version of the periodic table of the elements in 1862, by John Newlands, who proposed the law of octaves (a precursor to the periodic law) in 1864, and by Lothar Meyer, who developed an early version of the periodic table with 28 elements organized by valencein 1864.

Mendeleev’s table did not include any of the noble gases, however, which had not yet been discovered. Gradually the periodic law and table became the framework for a great part of chemical theory. By the time Mendeleyev died in 1907, he enjoyed international recognition and had received distinctions and awards from many countries.

In 1873, Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff and Joseph Achille Le Bel, working independently, developed a model of chemical bonding that explained the chirality experiments of Pasteur and provided a physical cause for optical activity in chiral compounds.

Van ‘t Hoff’s publication, called Voorstel tot Uitbreiding der Tegenwoordige in de Scheikunde gebruikte Structuurformules in de Ruimte (Proposal for the development of 3-dimensional chemical structural formulae) and consisting of twelve pages text and one page diagrams, gave the impetus to the development of stereochemistry.

The concept of the “asymmetrical carbon atom”, dealt with in this publication, supplied an explanation of the occurrence of numerous isomers, inexplicable by means of the then current structural formulae. At the same time he pointed out the existence of relationship between optical activity and the presence of an asymmetrical carbon atom.

American mathematical physicist J. Willard Gibb’s work on the applications of thermodynamics was instrumental in transforming physical chemistry into a rigorous deductive science. During the years from 1876 to 1878, Gibbs worked on the principles of thermodynamics, applying them to the complex processes involved in chemical reactions.

Gibbs discovered the concept of chemical potential, or the “fuel” that makes chemical reactions work. In 1876 he published his most famous contribution, On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, a compilation of his work on thermodynamics and physical chemistry which laid out the concept of free energy to explain the physical basis of chemical equilibria.

In these essays were the beginnings of Gibbs’ theories of phases of matter: he considered each state of matter a phase, and each substance a component. Gibbs took all of the variables involved in a chemical reaction – temperature, pressure, energy, volume, and entropy – and included them in one simple equation known as Gibbs’ phase rule.

Within this paper was perhaps his most outstanding contribution, the introduction of the concept free energy, now universally called Gibbs’ free energy in his honor. The Gibbs free energy relates the tendency of a physical or chemical system to simultaneously lower its energy and increase its disorder, or entropy, in a spontaneous natural process.

Gibbs’s approach allows a researcher to calculate the change in free energy in the process, such as in a chemical reaction, and how fast it will happen. Since virtually all chemical processes and many physical ones involve such changes, his work has significantly impacted both the theoretical and experiential aspects of these sciences.

In 1877, Ludwig Boltzmann established statistical derivations of many important physical and chemical concepts, including entropy, and distributions of molecular velocities in the gas phase. Together with Boltzmann and James Clerk Maxwell, Gibbs created a new branch of theoretical physics called statistical mechanics (a term that he coined), explaining the laws of thermodynamics as consequences of the statistical properties of large ensembles of particles.

Gibbs also worked on the application of Maxwell’s equations to problems in physical optics. Gibbs’s derivation of the phenomenological laws of thermodynamics from the statistical properties of systems with many particles was presented in his highly-influential textbook Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics, published in 1902, a year before his death.

In that work, Gibbs reviewed the relationship between the laws of thermodynamics and statistical theory of molecular motions. The overshooting of the original function by partial sums of Fourier series at points of discontinuity is known as the Gibbs phenomenon.

German engineer Carl von Linde’s invention of a continuous process of liquefying gases in large quantities formed a basis for the modern technology of refrigerationand provided both impetus and means for conducting scientific research at low temperatures and very high vacuums.

Von Linde developed a methyl ether refrigerator (1874) and an ammonia refrigerator (1876). Though other refrigeration units had been developed earlier, Linde’s were the first to be designed with the aim of precise calculations of efficiency.

In 1895 he set up a large-scale plant for the production of liquid air, and six years later he developed a method for separating pure liquid oxygen from liquid air that resulted in widespread industrial conversion to processes utilizing oxygen (e.g., in steel manufacture).

In 1883, Svante Arrhenius developed an ion theory to explain conductivity in electrolytes.

In 1884, Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff published Études de Dynamique chimique (Studies in Dynamic Chemisty), a seminal study on chemical kinetics. In this work, van ‘t Hoff entered for the first time the field of physical chemistry. Of great importance was his development of the general thermodynamic relationship between the heat of conversion and the displacement of the equilibrium as a result of temperature variation.

At constant volume, the equilibrium in a system will tend to shift in such a direction as to oppose the temperature change which is imposed upon the system.

Thus, lowering the temperature results in heat development while increasing the temperature results in heat absorption. This principle of mobile equilibrium was subsequently (1885) put in a general form by Henry Louis Le Chatelier, who extended the principle to include compensation, by change of volume, for imposed pressure changes.

The van ‘t Hoff-Le Chatelier principle, or simply Le Chatelier’s principle explains the response of dynamic chemical equilibria to external stresses.

In 1884,Hermann Emil Fischer proposed the structure of purine, a key structure in many biomolecules, which he later synthesized in 1898. He also began work on the chemistry of glucose and related sugars.

In 1885 Eugene Goldstein named the cathode ray, later discovered to be composed of electrons, and the canal ray later discovered to be positive hydrogen ions that had been stripped of their electrons in a cathode ray tube. These would later be named protons.

The year 1885 also saw the publishing of J. H. van ‘t Hoff’s L’Équilibre chimique dans les Systèmes gazeux ou dissous à I’État dilué (Chemical equilibria in gaseous systems or strongly diluted solutions), which dealt with this theory of dilute solutions. Here he demonstrated that the osmotic pressure in solutions which are sufficiently dilute is proportionate to the concentration and the absolute temperature so that this pressure can be represented by a formula which only deviates from the formula for gas pressure by a coefficient i.

Van’t Hoff also determined the value of i by various methods, for example by means of the vapor pressure and François-Marie Raoult’s results on the lowering of the freezing point. Thus van ‘t Hoff was able to prove that thermodynamic laws are not only valid for gases, but also for dilute solutions.

His pressure laws, given general validity by the electrolytic dissociation theory of Arrhenius (1884-1887), the first foreigner who came to work with him in Amsterdam (1888), are considered the most comprehensive and important in the realm of natural sciences.

In 1893, Alfred Werner discovered the octahedral structure of cobalt complexes, thus establishing the field of coordination chemistry.

The most celebrated discoveries of Scottish chemist William Ramsay were made in inorganic chemistry. Ramsay was intrigued by the British physicist John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh’s 1892 discovery that the atomic weight of nitrogen found in chemical compounds was lower than that of nitrogen found in the atmosphere. He ascribed this discrepancy to a light gas included in chemical compounds of nitrogen, while Ramsay suspected a hitherto undiscovered heavy gas in atmospheric nitrogen. Using two different methods to remove all known gases from air, Ramsay and Lord Rayleigh were able to announce in 1894 that they had found a monatomic, chemically inert gaseous element that constituted nearly 1 percent of the atmosphere; they named it argon.

The following year, Ramsay liberated another inert gas from a mineral called cleveite. This proved to be helium, previously known only in the solar spectrum. In his book The Gases of the Atmosphere (1896), Ramsay showed that the positions of helium and argon in the periodic table of elements indicated that at least three more noble gases might exist. In 1898 Ramsay and the British chemist Morris W. Travers isolated these elements, called neon, krypton and xenon, from air brought to a liquid state at low temperature and high pressure.

Sir William Ramsay worked with Frederick Soddy to demonstrate, in 1903, that alpha particles (helium nuclei) were continually produced during the radioactive decay of a sample of radium. Ramsay was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recognition of “services in the discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air, and his determination of their place in the periodic system.”

In 1897, J.J. Thomson discovered the electron using the cathode ray tube.

In 1898, Wilhelm Wien demonstrated that canal rays (streams of positive ions) can be deflected by magnetic fields, and that the amount of deflection is proportional to the mass-to-charge ratio. This discovery would lead to the analytical technique known as mass spectrometry.

Marie Sklodowska-Curie was a Polish-born French physicist and chemist who is famous for her pioneering research on radioactivity.

She and her husband Pierre are considered to have laid the cornerstone of the nuclear age with their research.

Marie was fascinated with the work of Henri Becquerel, a French physicist who discovered in 1896 that uranium casts off rays similar to the X-rays discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen.

Marie Curie began studying uranium in late 1897 and theorized, according to a 1904 article she wrote for Century magazine, “that the emission of rays by the compounds of uranium is a property of the metal itself-that it is an atomic property of the element uranium independent of its chemical or physical state.”

Curie took Becquerel’s work a few steps further, conducting her own experiments on uranium rays. She discovered that the rays remained constant, no matter the condition or form of the uranium. The rays, she theorized, came from the element’s atomic structure. This revolutionary idea created the field of atomic physics and the Curies coined the word radioactivity to describe the phenomena.

Pierre and Marie further explored radioactivity by working to separate the substances in uranium ores and then using the electrometer to make radiation measurements to ‘trace’ the minute amount of unknown radioactive element among the fractions that resulted. Working with the mineral pitchblende, the pair discovered a new radioactive element in 1898. They named the element polonium, after Marie’s native country of Poland.

On December 21, 1898, the Curies detected the presence of another radioactive material in the pitchblende. They presented this finding to the Académie des Sciences on December 26, proposing that the new element be called radium.

The Curies then went to work isolating polonium and radium from naturally occurring compounds to prove that they were new elements.

In 1902, the Curies announced that they had produced a decigram of pure radium, demonstrating its existence as a unique chemical element. While it took three years for them to isolate radium, they were never able to isolate polonium.

Along with the discovery of two new elements and finding techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, Marie Curie oversaw the world’s first studies into the treatment of neoplasms using radioactive isotopes.

Marie Curie was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics.

She was the sole winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and she is the only woman to win the award for work in two different fields.

While working with Marie to extract pure substances from ores, an undertaking that really required industrial resources but that they achieved in relatively primitive conditions, Pierre himself concentrated on the physical study (including luminous and chemical effects) of the new radiations.

Through the action of magnetic fields on the rays given out by the radium, Pierre Curie proved the existence of particles electrically positive, negative, and neutral.

Ernest Rutherford would later call these particles alpha, beta, and gamma rays.

Pierre Curie then studied these radiations by calorimetry and also observed the physiological effects of radium, thus opening the way to radium therapy.

Among Pierre Curie’s discoveries were that ferromagnetic substances exhibited a critical temperature transition, above which the substances lost their ferromagnetic behavior – this is known as the “Curie point” He was elected to the Academy of Sciences (1905), having in 1903 jointly with Marie received the Royal Society’s prestigious Davy Medal and jointly with her and Becquerel the Nobel Prize for Physics. He was run over by a carriage in the rue Dauphine in Paris in 1906 and died instantly. His complete works were published in 1908.

New Zealand-born chemist and physicist Ernest Rutherford is considered to be “the father of nuclear physics.” Rutherford is best known for devising the names alpha, beta and gamma to classify various forms of radioactive “rays” which were poorly understood at his time (alpha and beta rays are particle beams, while gamma rays are a form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation).

Rutherford deflected alpha rays with both electric and magnetic fields in 1903. Working with Frederick Soddy, Rutherford explained that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions.

He also observed that the intensity of radioactivity of a radioactive element decreases over a unique and regular amount of time until a point of stability, and he named the halving time the “half-life”

In 1901 and 1902 Rutherford worked with Frederick Soddy to prove that atoms of one radioactive element would spontaneously turn into another, by expelling a piece of the atom at high velocity.

In 1906 at the University of Manchester, Rutherford oversaw an experiment conducted by his students Hans Geiger (known for the Geiger counter and Ernest Marsden. In the Geiger-Marsden experiment, a beam of alpha particles, generated by the radioactive decay of radon was directed normally onto a sheet of very thin gold foil in an evacuated chamber.

The alpha particles should all have passed through the foil and hit the detector screen, or have been deflected by, at most, a few degrees.

However, the actual results surprised Rutherford. Although many of the alpha particles did pass through as expected, many others were deflected at small angles while others were reflected back to the alpha source. Geiger, Marsden and Rutherford observed that a very small percentage of particles were deflected through angles much larger than 90 degrees. The gold foil experiment showed large deflections for a small fraction of incident particles.

Rutherford realized that, because some of the alpha particles were deflected or reflected, the atom had a concentrated center of positive charge and of relatively large mass. Rutherford later termed this positive center the “atomic nucleus”.

The alpha particles had either hit the positive center directly or passed by it close enough to be affected by its positive charge. Since many other particles passed through the gold foil, the positive centre would have to be a relatively small size compared to the rest of the atom – meaning that the atom is mostly open space.

From these events and conclusions, Rutherford developed a model of the atom that was similar to the solar system, known as Rutherford model. Like planets, electrons orbited a central, sun-like nucleus. For his work with radiation and the atomic nucleus, Rutherford received the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

In 1903,Mikhail Tsvet invented chromatography, an important analytic technique.

In 1904,Hantaro Nagaoka proposed an early nuclear model of the atom, where electrons orbit a dense massive nucleus.

In 1905, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed the Haber process for making ammonia, a milestone in industrial chemistry with deep consequences for agriculture. The Haber process, or Haber-Bosch process, combined nitrogen and hydrogen to form ammonia in industrial quantities for production of fertilizer and munitions. The food production for half the world’s current population depends on this method for producing fertilizer.

Haber, along with Max Born proposed the Born-Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid. Haber has also been described as the “father of chemical warfare” for his work developing and deploying chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I.

In the early twentieth century (1905), Albert Einstein explained Brownian motion in a way that definitively proved atomic theory.

Leo Baekeland invnted bakelite one of the first commercially successful plastics.

In 1909, American physicist Robert Andrews Millikan, who had studied in Europe under Walther Nernst and Max Planck, measured the charge of individual electrons with unprecedented accuracy through the oil drop experiment in which he measured the electric charges on tiny falling water (and later oil) droplets. His study established that any particular droplet’s electrical charge is a multiple of a definite, fundamental value, the electron’s charge, and thus a confirmation that all electrons have the same charge and mass.

Beginning in 1912, Millikan spent several years investigating and finally proving Albert Einstein’s proposed linear relationship between energy and frequency, and providing the first direct photoelectric support for Planck’s constant. In 1923 Millikan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.

S.P.L. Sørensen invented the pH concept and developed methods for measuring acidity in 1909.

In 1911, Antonius Van den Broek proposed the idea that the elements on the periodic table are more properly organized by positive nuclear charge rather than atomic weight.

The first Solvay Conference (1911) was held in Brussels, bringing together most of the most prominent scientists of the day.

In 1912,William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg proposed Bragg’s law and established the field of X-ray crystallography, an important tool for elucidating the crystal structure of substances (1912).

Also in 1912, Peter Debye developed the concept of molecular dipolarity to describe asymmetric charge distribution in some molecules.

In 1913,Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, introduced the concepts of quantum mechanics to atomic structure by proposing what is now known as the Bohr model of the atom, where electrons exist only in strictly defined circular orbits around the nucleus similar to rungs on a ladder.

The Bohr Model is a planetary model in which the negatively-charged electrons orbit a small, positively-charged nucleus similar to the planets orbiting the sun (except that the orbits are not planar). The gravitational force of the solar system is mathematically akin to the attractive Coulomb (electrical) force between the positively-charged nucleus and the negatively-charged electrons.

In the Bohr model, however, electrons orbit the nucleus in orbits that have a set size and energy. The energy levels are said to be quantized, which means that only certain orbits with certain radii are allowed. Orbits in between simply don’t exist.

The energy of the orbit is related to its size – that is, the lowest energy is found in the smallest orbit.

Bohr also postulated that electromagnetic radiation is absorbed or emitted when an electron moves from one orbit to another. Because only certain electron orbits are permitted, the emission of light accompanying a jump of an electron from an excited energy state to ground state produces a unique emission spectrum for each element.

Neils Bohr also worked on the principle of complementarity which states that an electron can be interpreted in two mutually exclusive and valid ways. Electrons can be interpreted as wave or particle models. His hypothesis was that an incoming particle would strike the nucleus and create an excited compound nucleus. This formed the basis of his liquid drop model and later provided a theory base for the explanation of nuclear fission.

In 1913, Henry Mosely working from Van den Broek’s earlier idea, introduced the concept of atomic number to fix inadequacies in Mendeleev’s periodic table, which had been based on atomic weight.

The peak of Frederick Soddy’s career in radiochemistry was in 1913 with his formulation of the concept of isotopes, which stated that certain elements exist in two or more forms which have different atomic weights but which are indistinguishable chemically. He is remembered for proving the existence of isotopes of certain radioactive elements, and is also credited, along with others, with the discovery of the element protactinium in 1917.

In 1913, J. J. Thomson expanded on the work of Wien by showing that charged subatomic particles can be separated by their mass-to-charge ratio, a technique known as mass spectrometry.

American physical chemist Gilbert N. Lewis laid the foundation of valence bond theory. He was instrumental in developing a bonding theory based on the number of electrons in the outermost “valence” shell of the atom. In 1902, while Lewis was trying to explain valence to his students, he depicted atoms as constructed of a concentric series of cubes with electrons at each corner. This “cubic atom” explained the eight groups in the periodic table and represented his idea that chemical bonds are formed by electron transference to give each atom a complete set of eight outer electrons (an “octet”).

Lewis’s theory of chemical bonding continued to evolve and, in 1916, he published his seminal article “The Atom of the Molecule”, which suggested that a chemical bond is a pair of electrons shared by two atoms. Lewis’s model equated the classical chemical bond with the sharing of a pair of electrons between the two bonded atoms. Lewis introduced the “electron dot diagrams” in this paper to symbolize the electronic structures of atoms and molecules. Now known as Lewis structures they are discussed in virtually every introductory chemistry book.

Shortly after publication of his 1916 paper, Lewis became involved with military research. He did not return to the subject of chemical bonding until 1923, when he masterfully summarized his model in a short monograph entitled Valence and the Structure of Atoms and Molecules.

His renewal of interest in this subject was largely stimulated by the activities of the American chemist and General Electric researcher Irving Langmuir, who between 1919 and 1921 popularized and elaborated Lewis’s model. Langmuir subsequently introduced the term covalent bond.

In 1921, Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach established the concept of quantum mechanical spin in subatomic particles.

For cases where no sharing was involved, Lewis in 1923 developed the electron pair theory of acids and base.

Lewis redefined an acid as any atom or molecule with an incomplete octet that was thus capable of accepting electrons from another atom. Bases were, of course, electron donors. His theory is known as the concept of Lewis acids and bases.

In 1923, G. N. Lewis and Merle Randall published Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances, the first modern treatise on chemical thermodynamics.

The 1920s saw a rapid adoption and application of Lewis’s model of the electron-pair bond in the fields of organic and coordination chemistry. In organic chemistry, this was primarily due to the efforts of the British chemists Arthur Lapworth, Robert Robinson, Thomas Lowry and Christopher Ingold.

Lewis’s bonding model was promoted through the efforts of the American chemist Maurice Huggins and the British chemist Nevil Sidgwick.

In 1924, French quantum physicist Louis de Broglie published his thesis, in which he introduced a revolutionary theory of electron waves based on wave-particle duality in his thesis. In his time, the wave and particle interpretations of light and matter were seen as being at odds with one another, but de Broglie suggested that these seemingly different characteristics were instead the same behavior observed from different perspectives, that particles can behave like waves, and waves (radiation) can behave like particles.

De Broglie’s proposal offered an explanation of the restriction motion of electrons within the atom. The first publications of de Broglie’s idea of “matter waves” had drawn little attention from other physicists, but a copy of his doctoral thesis chanced to reach Einstein, whose response was enthusiastic. Einstein stressed the importance of de Broglie’s work both explicitly and by building further on it.

In 1925, Austrian-born physicist Wolfgang Pauli developed the Pauli exclusion principle, which states that no two electrons around a single nucleus in an atom can occupy the same quantum state simultaneously, as described by four quantum numbers.

Pauli made major contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, and he was awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of the Pauli exclusion principle, as well as for solid-state physics, and he successfully hypothesized the existence of the neutrino.

In addition to his original work, Wolfgang Pauli wrote masterful syntheses of several areas of physical theory that are considered classics of scientific literature.

In 1926 at the age of 39, Austrian theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger produced the papers that gave the foundations of quantum wave mechanics. In those papers he described his partial differential equation that is the basic equation of quantum mechanics and bears the same relation to the mechanics of the atom as Newton’s equations of motion bear to planetary astronomy.

Schrödinger adopted a proposal made by Louis de Broglie in 1924 that particles of matter have a dual nature and in some situations act like waves, and he (Schrödinger) introduced a theory describing the behavior of such a system by a wave equation that is now known as the Schrödinger equation.

The solutions to Schrödinger’s equation, unlike the solutions to Newton’s equations, are wave functions that can only be related to the probable occurrence of physical events. The readily visualized sequence of events of the planetary orbits of Newton is, in quantum mechanics, replaced by the more abstract notion of probability. (This aspect of the quantum theory made Schrödinger and several other physicists profoundly unhappy, and he devoted much of his later life to formulating philosophical objections to the generally accepted interpretation of the theory that he had done so much to create.)

German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg was one of the key creators of quantum mechanics. In 1925, Heisenberg discovered a way to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices. For that discovery, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1932.

In 1927 Heisenberg published his uncertainty principle, upon which he built his philosophy and for which he is best known. Heisenberg was able to demonstrate that if you were studying an electron in an atom you could say where it was (the electron’s location) or where it was going (the electron’s velocity), but it was impossible to express both at the same time.

I think of Heisenberg’s principle this way. The very act of observing a sub atomic particle changes that particle. It is impossible to observe a sub atomic particle as it “really” is, because the observing of it changes it.

Heisenberg also made important contributions to the theories of the hydrodynamics of turbulenty flows, the atomic nucleus, ferromagnetism, cosmic rays and subatomic particles.

He was instrumental in planning the first West German nuclear reactor at Karlsruhe, together with a research reactor in München (Munich) in 1957.

Considerable controversy surrounds Werner Heisenberg’s work on atomic research during World War II.

Some view the birth of quantum chemistry in the discovery of the Schrödinger equation and its application to the hydrogen atom in 1926. However, the 1927 article of Walter Heitler and Fritz Longon is often recognised as the first milestone in the history of quantum chemistry. This is the first application of quantum mechanics to the diatomic hydrogen molecule, and thus to the phenomenon of the chemical bond.

Werner von Braun was another figure of controversy for the same reason as was that other Werner… Heisenberg. Both men worked with people such as Edward Teller, Robert A. Millikan, Max Born, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Linus Pauling, Erich Hückel, Douglas Hartree and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Fock.

Skepticism remained as to the general power of quantum mechanics applied to complex chemical systems.

Hence the quantum mechanical methods developed in the 1930s and 1940s are often referred to as theoretical molecular or atomic physics to underline the fact that they were more the application of quantum mechanics to chemistry and spectroscopy than answers to chemically relevant questions.

In the 1940s many physicists turned from molecular or atomic physics to nuclear physics (J. Robert Oppenheimer or Edward Teller).

Clemens C.J. Roothaan wrote a seminal paper on Roothaan equations in 1951 that was a big step toward the solution of the self-consistent field equations for small molecules like hydrogen or nitrogen. Those computations were performed with the help of tables of integrals which were computed on the most advanced computers of the time.

By the mid 20th century, in principle, the integration of physics and chemistry was extensive, with chemical properties explained as the result of the electronic structure of the atom. Linus Pauling’s book on The Nature of the Chemical Bond used the principles of quantum mechanics to deduce bond angles in ever-more complicated molecules.

However, though some principles deduced from quantum mechanics were able to predict qualitatively some chemical features for biologically relevant molecules, they were, till the end of the 20th century, more a collection of rules, observations, and recipes than rigorous ab initio quantitative methods.

This heuristic approach triumphed in 1953 when James Watson and Francis Crick deduced the double helical structure of DNA by constructing models constrained by and informed by the knowledge of the chemistry of the constituent parts and the X-ray diffraction patterns obtained by Rosalind Franklin.

This discovery lead to an explosion of research into the biochemistry of life.

Rosalind Franklin was seriously taken advantage of in this research on DNA and her story is a sadly typical one. Added to the misogynistic tone of the proceedings, all too common in that era and that place, was a too familiar note of anti Semitism, common in the “upper” classes of that day.

Rosalind Franklin’s DNA work achieved the most fame because DNA plays an essential role in cell metabolism and genetics, and the discovery of its structure helped her co-workers understand how genetic information is passed from parents to their offspring.

These co-workers, Watson and Crick, were more than a little unethical in their treatment of Rosalind Franklin. This is very disappointing in people of science.

Her data were key to determining the structure for formulating Crick and Watson’s 1953 model of the structure of DNA.

Also in 1953, the Miller-Urey experiment demonstrated that basic constituents of protein, simple amino acids, could themselves be built up from simpler molecules in a simulation of primordial processes on earth. Though many questions remain about the true nature of the origin of life, this was the first attempt by chemists to study hypothetical processes in the laboratory under controlled conditions.

I remember being very excited when I heard of these experiments. I was at UC Berkeley in 1965 and a lot of that work was going on there. It seemed as if these scientists were creating the original earth’s atmosphere in a petri dish. I took LSD and thought about these experiments. It was all very dramatic and intensely interesting.

In 1983 Kary Mullis devised a method for the in-vitro amplification of DNA, known as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which revolutionized the chemical processes used in the laboratory to manipulate it. PCR could be used to synthesize specific pieces of DNA using things similar to a PCR tube (some PCR tubes are manufactured here) and made possible the sequencing of the DNA of organisms, which culminated in the huge human genome project.

An important piece in the double helix puzzle was solved by one of Pauling’s students Matthew Meselson and Frank Stahl, and the result of their collaboration (the Meselson-Stahl experiment has been called as “the most beautiful experiment in biology”.

They used a centrifugation technique that sorted molecules according to differences in weight. Because nitrogen atoms are a component of DNA, they were labelled and therefore tracked in replication in bacteria.

In 1970, John Pople developed the Gaussian program which simplified computational chemistry calculations.

Yves Chauvin offered an explanation of the reaction mechanism ofolefin metathesis reactions in 1973 and in 1975, Karl Barry Sharpless and his group discovered stereoselective oxidation reactions including the Sharpless epoxidation, Sharpless asymmetric dihydroxylation and the Sharpless oxyamination.

In 1985, Harold Kroto, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley discovered fullerenes.

Fullerenes are a class of large carbon molecules superficially resembling the geodesic dome designed by architect R. Buckminster Fuller.

Sumio Iijima used electron microscopy in 1991 to discover a type of cylindrical fullerene known as a carbon nanotube though earlier work had been done in the field as early as 1951.

This material is an important component in the field of nanotechnology.

In 1994, Robert A. Holton and his group achieved the first total synthesis of Taxol.

Isolated from the bark of the relatively rare and slow-growing pacific yew tree over twenty years ago, taxol is the most promising new antitumor agent for the treatment of ovarian and breast cancers.

Taxol has a unique mechanism of action, blocking cell division by binding and stabilizing microtubules, structures which comprise the cytoskeleton and the mitotic spindle.

A few years ago, Holton’s group developed an efficient semisynthesis of taxol which will provide the commercial supply, and this has made it unnecessary to destroy the environment through the harvest of yew trees.

The yew tree has long been recognized as a tree of strong medicine. Just today I read an account in Julius Caesar of the yew tree’s powers.

Catuvoleus, rex dimidiae partis Eburonum qui inierat consilium una cum Ambiorige, jam confectus aetate, quum posset non ferre laborem aut belli aut fugae, detestatus Ambiorigem omnibus precibus qui fuisset auctor ejus consilii, exanimavit se taxo (cujus est magna copia in Gallia que Germania). Liber VI De Bello Gallico

Catuvoleus, king of half of the Eburones, who had entered into counsel with Ambiorix, now worn out with age, since he could not bear the fatigue of either war or flight, cursed Ambiorix with all kinds of imprecations since he had been the author of this plan, and then killed himself by eating yew leaves (the yew grows in great abundance in Gaul and Germany). Book VI The Gallic War

All species of yew contain highly poisonous (and, paradoxically, highly beneficial) alkaloids known as taxanes, with some variation in the exact formula of the alkaloid between the species. All parts of the tree except the arils contain the alkaloid. The arils are edible and sweet, but the seed is dangerously poisonous. Unlike birds’ stomachs, the human stomach can break down the seed coat and release the taxanes into the body.

The yew is an amazing tree with a long history. The man found in the ice in Italy who died five thousand years ago, Ötzi, as he is called, carried a bow made of yew. Yew is also associated with Wales and England because of the longbow, an early weapon of war developed in northern Europe, and as the English longbow which was famously used at the battle of Agincourt.

Yew is the wood of choice for longbow making; the bows are constructed so that the heartwood of yew is on the inside of the bow while the sapwood is on the outside. This takes advantage of the natural properties of yew wood since the heartwood resists compression while the sapwood resists stretching.

The word yew is from Proto-Germanic. Baccata is Latin for bearing red berries. The word yew as it was originally used seems to refer to the color brown.

The yew (?????) was known to Theophrastus who noted its preference for mountain coolness and shade, its evergreen character and its slow growth.

Most romance languages kept a version of the Latin word taxus (Italian tasso, Corsican tassu, Occitan teis, Catalan teix, Gasconic tech, Spanish tejo, Portuguese teixo, Galician teixo and Romanian tis?) from the same root as toxic.

In Slavic languages, the same root (presumably borrowed from Romanian) is preserved: Russian tiss (???), Slovenian tisa, Serbiantisa (????). In Albanian it is named tis.

In 1995,Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman produced the first Bose-Einstein condensate, a substance that displays quantum mechanical properties on the macroscopic scale.

Before the 20th century, chemistry was defined as the science of the nature of matter and its transformations. It was therefore clearly distinct from physics which was not concerned with such dramatic transformation of matter.

Moreover, in contrast to physics, chemistry was not using much of mathematics. Some scientists, such as Auguste Comte were particularly reluctant to use mathematics within chemistry.

Every attempt to employ mathematical methods in the study of chemical questions must be considered profoundly irrational and contrary to the spirit of chemistry…. if mathematical analysis should ever hold a prominent place in chemistry – an aberration which is happily almost impossible – it would occasion a rapid and widespread degeneration of that science.

However, in the second part of the 19th century, the situation changed and August Kekulé wrote in 1867:

I rather expect that we shall someday find a mathematico-mechanical explanation for what we now call atoms which will render an account of their properties.

After the discovery by Rutherford and Bohr of the atomic structure in 1912, and by Marie and Pierre Curie of radioactivity, scientists had to change their viewpoint on the nature of matter.

The experience acquired by chemists was no longer pertinent to the study of the whole nature of matter but only to aspects related to the electron cloud surrounding the atomic nuclei and the movement of the latter in the electric field induced by the former.

The range of chemistry was thus restricted to the nature of matter around us in conditions which are not too far (or exceptionally far) from standard conditions for temperature and pressure and in cases where the exposure to radiation is not too different from the natural microwave, visible or UV radiations on Earth. Chemistry was therefore re-defined as the science of matter that deals with the composition, structure, and properties of substances and with the transformations that they undergo.

However the meaning of matter used here relates explicitly to substances made of atoms and molecules, disregarding the matter within the atomic nuclei and its nuclear reaction or matter within highly ionized plasmas.

This does not mean that chemistry is never involved with plasma or nuclear sciences or even bosonic fields nowadays.

Areas such as Quantum Chemistry and Nuclear Chemistry are currently well developed and formally recognized sub-fields of study under the Chemical sciences (Chemistry).

What is now formally recognized, however, as subject of study under the Chemistry category as a science is always based on the use of concepts that describe or explain phenomena either from matter or to matter in the atomic or molecular scale.

This includes the study of the behavior of many molecules as an aggregate or the study of the effects of a single proton on a single atom.

Physicists and not chemists deal with different (more “exotic”) types of matter (e.g. Bose-Einstein condensate, Higgs Boson, dark matter, naked singularity).

The field of chemistry is still, on our human scale, very broad and the claim that chemistry is everywhere is, of course, accurate.

The later part of the nineteenth century saw a huge increase in the exploitation of petroleum extracted from the earth for the production of a host of chemicals, which largely replaced the use of whale oil, coal tar and naval stores.

Large scale production and refinement of petroleum provided feedstocks for liquid fuels such asgasoline and diesel, solvents, lubricants, asphalt and waxes.

Refined petroleum is also the fundamental ingredient in many of the common materials of the modern world.

Materials such as synthetic fibers, plastics, paints, detergents, pharmaceuticals, adhesives and for ammonia as fertilizer.

Many of these required new catalysts to be used practically and this naturally involved chemistry.

In the mid-twentieth century, control of the electronic structure of semiconductor materials was made precise by the creation of large ingots of extremely pure single crystals of silicon and geranium.

Accurate control of their chemical composition by doping with other elements made the production of the solid state transistor in 1951.

Chemistry also made possible the production of the tiny integrated circuits in the machine that I am using to write this.

So, here is a salute to all the women and men who worked through all the ages to further the cause of chemistry.

See you next week?

Sam Andrew

_____________________________________

Grand Guignol

Posted on August 16, 2013 by J L tagged.

Guigner is French for wink, to steal a glance at,

to covet, to peep.

A guignol is one who does these things.

The word also means puppet and more specifically Punch as he is known in English (Policinello, Polichinelle in Italian and French).

The puppet « Guignol » was created by Laurent Mourguet in 1808 and is now the most recognized well known puppet in France.

Laurent Mourguet (1769-1844), was a silk worker in Lyon before the Revolution.

After the war, he decided to change his profession and became a dentist or rather an « arracheur de dents » (« puller of teeth »).

He set up a stall in the market.

In order to attract patients to his stall, he created a simple « castelet » (puppet theatre) and performed scenes using his own hand made « glove» puppets.

Monsieur Mourguet was the first person to pioneer this technique. Up until then, puppets had only been manipulated by strings.

The first characters to appear were Polichinelle and the Devil. At the beginning of the XIXth century he introduced « Gnafron » followed by «Guignol » in 1808.

In 1820, Laurent Mourguet created a traveling puppet troop which toured the Rhône, Loire and Isère.

By 1830, they had perfected their technique and the show became a triumph.

They eventually settled down in Lyon and opened their own Theatre « Le Caveau des Célestins ».

Almost a century later, Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (The Theatre of the Big Puppet) was founded in 1894 by Oscar Méténier who planned it as a space for naturalist performance.

With 293 seats, Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was the smallest venue in Paris and was located in Pigalle, 20 bis, rue Chaptal.

Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol owed its name to Guignol and to the Lyonnais Laurent Mourguet who had joined political satire with a puppet show.

From its opening in 1897 until its closing in 1962, Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol specialized in naturalistic horror shows.

The phrase grand guignol is often used as a general term for graphic, amoral horror entertainment, a genre popular from Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre (for instance Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Webster’s The White Devil) to today’s splatter and snuff films.

And then the term has expanded to describe generally any sensational and horrific event.

The theatre’s peak was between World War I and World War II.

It was often frequented by royalty and celebrities in evening dress.

A former chapel, the theatre’s previous life was evident in the boxes – which looked like confessionals – and in the “angels” over the orchestra.

Although the architecture created frustrating obstacles, this interior design that was initially a problem ultimately became a boon for the marketing of the theatre. The heavy furniture and gothic structures placed here and there on the walls of the building exuded a feeling of eeriness.

People came to this theatre not for a mere show, but for a whole experience and they weren’t disappointed.

The audience at Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol endured the terror of the shows because they wanted to feel strong emotions of real intensity.

There was definitely a sexual component to the drama.

Underneath the balcony were boxes (originally built for nuns to watch church services) that were available for theatre-goers to rent during performances for whatever purpose.

The audience members would carry on to such an extent in these boxes, that the actors would sometimes break character and yell “keep it down in there!”

On the other hand, there were audience members who could not physically handle the brutality of the actions taking place on stage and would sometimes faint and/or vomit during performances.

Oscar Méténier was the Grand Guignol’s founder and original director. Under his direction, the theater produced plays about a class of people who were not considered appropriate subjects in other venues: prostitutes, criminals, street urchins, and others at the lower end of the Parisian social echelon.

Max Maurey served as director from 1898 to 1914. Maurey shifted the theater’s emphasis to the horror plays it would become famous for and judged the success of a performance by the number of patrons who passed out from shock; the average was two faintings each evening.

Maurey discovered André de Lorde who would become the most important playwright for the theatre and was the theater’s principal playwright from 1901 to 1926. He wrote at least 100 plays for the Grand Guignol and collaborated with experimental psychologist Alfred Binet to create plays about insanity, one of the theater’s frequently recurring themes.

Camille Choisy served as director from 1914 to 1930. He contributed his expertise in special effects and scenery to the theater’s distinctive style.

Paula Maxa was one of the Grand Guignol’s best-known performers. From 1917 to the 1930s, she performed most frequently as a victim and was known as “the most assassinated woman in the world”. During her career at the Grand Guignol, Maxa’s characters were murdered more than 10,000 times in at least 60 different ways and raped at least 3,000 times.

Jack Jouvin served as director from 1930 to 1937. He shifted the theater’s subject matter, focusing performances not on gory horror but psychological drama. Under his leadership the theater’s popularity waned; and after World War II it was not well-attended.

Charles Nonon was the theater’s last director.

At the Grand Guignol, patrons would see five or six plays, all in a style that attempted to be brutally true to the theatre’s naturalistic ideals.

The plays were in a variety of styles, but the most popular and best known were the horror plays, featuring a distinctly bleak worldview as well as notably gory special effects in their notoriously bloody climaxes.

These plays often explored the altered states, like insanity, hypnosis, panic, under which uncontrolled horror could happen. Some of the horror came from the nature of the crimes shown, which often had very little reason behind them and in which the evildoers were rarely punished or defeated. To heighten the effect, the horror plays were often alternated with comedies in order to, if you will, cleanse the palate between courses.

Le Laboratoire des Hallucinations, by André de Lorde: When a doctor finds his wife’s lover in his operating room, he performs a graphic brain surgery rendering the adulterer a hallucinating semi-zombie. Now insane, the lover/patient hammers a chisel into the doctor’s brain.

Un Crime dans une Maison de Fous, by André de Lorde: Two jealous hags in an insane asylum use scissors to blind a young, pretty fellow inmate.

L’Horrible Passion, also by André de Lorde: A nanny strangles the children in her care.

Le Baiser dans la nuit by Maurice Level: A young woman visits the man whose face she horribly disfigured with acid, and he obtains his revenge.

Audiences waned in the years following World War II, and the Grand Guignol closed its doors in 1962, the year that I went to live in Paris. Management attributed the closure in part to the fact that the theater’s faux horrors had been eclipsed by the actual events of the Holocaust two decades earlier.

“We could never equal Buchenwald,” said its final director, Charles Nonon. “Before the war, everyone felt that what was happening onstage was impossible. Now we know that these things, and worse, are possible in reality.”

The Grand Guignol building still exists. It is occupied by International Visual Theatre, a company devoted to presenting plays in sign language.

Grand Guignol flourished briefly in London in the early 1920s under the direction of Jose Levy, where it attracted the talents of Sybil Thorndyke and Noël Coward.

A series of short English “Grand Guignol” films (using original screenplays, not play adaptations) was made at the same time, directed by Fred Paul.

The Grand Guignol was revived once again in London in 1945, under the direction of Frederick Witney, where it ran for two seasons at the Granville Theatre. These included premiers of Witney’s own work as well as adaptations of French originals.

In recent years, English director-writer, Richard Mazda, has re-introduced New York audiences to the Grand Guignol. His acting troupe, The Queens Players, have produced 6 mainstage productions of Grand Guignol plays, and Mazda is writing new plays in the classic Guignol style.

The sixth production, Theatre of Fear, included De Lorde’s famous adaptation of Poe’s Le Système du Dr Goudron et Pr Plume (The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather) as well as two original plays, Double Crossed and The Good Death with The Tell Tale Heart.

The 1963 mondo film Ecco includes a scene which may have been filmed at the Grand Guignol theatre during its final years.

American avant-garde composer John Zorn released an album called Grand Guignol by Naked City in 1992, a reference to “the darker side of our existence which has always been with us and always will be”.

The Washington, D.C.-based Molotov Theatre Group, established in 2007, is dedicated to preserving and exploring the aesthetic of the Grand Guignol. They have entered two plays into the Capital Fringe Festival in Washington, D.C. Their 2007 show, For Boston, won “Best Comedy”, and their second show, The Sticking Place, won “Best Overall” in 2008.

The Swiss theatre company, Compagnie Pied de Biche revisits the Grand Guignol genre in contemporary contexts since 2008.

The company staged in 2010 a diptych Impact & Dr. Incubis, based on original texts by Nicolas Yazgi and directed by Frédéric Ozier.

More than literal adaptations, the plays address violence, death, crime and fear in contemporary contexts, while revisiting many tropes of the original Grand Guignol corpus, often with humor.

La Compagnie Pied de Biche defends the idea that theatre is nowadays the best space for audiences to experience genuine fears. As movies have overdone their explorations of the representation of violence, the intimate space of a theatre where actors hurt themselves and each other, at times with extra help from the theatrical illusion, might become again the most genuine stage of fears.

The company also staged in 2011–12, Si seulement je pouvais avoir peur (If only I could be afraid) a production directed by Julie Burnier of a text by Nicolas Yazgi inspired by the Brothers Grimm. The play addresses the themes of death, rejection, fear and violence for youth audiences.

Set in a burlesque expressionist stage design, ghoulish puppets unveil the fate of a young boy who isn’t able to feel fear, because he hasn’t realized what death is.

The recently formed London-based Grand Guignol company Theatre of the Damned, brought their first production to the Camden Fringe in 2010 and produced the award nominated Grand Guignol in November of that year.

On May 2, 2011, they announced their new production “Revenge of the Grand Guignol”, which is to be staged in London from October 25 at the Courtyard Theatre, London, as part of the London Horror Festival.

Also based in London, Le Nouveau Guignol form the UK’s only permanent reperatory Grand Guignol company.

Plays within their current repertoire include French Guignol classics such as “The Final Kiss”, “Tics… Or Doing the Deed”, “The Lighthouse Keepers”, “Private Room Number Six” and “The Kiss of Blood”.

Le Nouveau Guignol also encourages new writing, staging several new plays in the Grand-Guignol style, including “Eating For Two”, “Penalty” and “Ways and Means”.

The Xoregos Performing Company presents Danse Macabre, a contemporary tribute to Grand Guignol at Theater for the New City in New York City. Danse Macabre is a program of four plays of psychological and physical terror and two humorous works, in keeping with Grand Guignol’s programming history.

The playwrights are Dave DeChristopher, Jack Feldstein, Dylan Guy, Pamela Scott and Joel Trinidad.

A dance to the famous orchestral score by Camille Saint-Saëns will be performed by the actors.

There will be six performances between August 18-30, 2013 in the Dream Up Festival at Theater for the New City, Manhattan.

The Japanese music group ALI Project created the song “Gesshoku Grand Guignol” as the opening for the Bee-Train anime Avenger, while British rock band Duels also named an instrumental track after the theatre.

While the original Grand Guignol attempted to present naturalistic horror, the performances would seem melodramatic and heightened to today’s audience. For this reason, the term is often applied to films and plays of a stylised nature with heightened acting, melodrama and theatrical effects such as

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

What Ever Happened To Aunt Alice?

What’s The Matter With Helen?

Night Watch

These films form a sub branch of the genre called Grande Dame Guignol because of its use of aging A-list women actors in sensational horror films. On the male side, Vincent Price was the king of grand guignol américain.

And now, a gallery of contemporary grand guignol themes:

Les Pantins du Vice Puppets of vice

Ce qu’on lit sur les routes.

La perception extérieure

Définition de la psychologie

Nouvelles recherches sur les mouvements graphiques

Instruction pour étudier la double conscience chez les hystériques

L’obsession ou les deux forces

Le Cerveau d’un Imbécile

Une Leçon à la Salpêtrière

L’Horrible expérience

I am an artist. That doesn’t mean that I work for free. I have bills to pay too. Thank you for understanding.

L’homme mystériux

Les Invisibles

La Maison de la mort

Crime dans une maison de fous

L’Homme étrange

Le grand mystère

Napoléon III

L’homme qui a tué la mort

Gott mit uns (god with us)

La Cathédrale Engloutie

Louange à l’éternité

Elle

La Dernière Torture

Gardiens de phare

La Veuve

Après coup

Sous la lumière rouge

Le baiser dans la nuit

Le Jardin des supplices

Le Baiser du sang

Le Laboratoire des hallucinations

Le Système du Dr Goudron et Pr Plume

Un Crime dans une maison de fous

Monsieur, Madame et… les autres

Une bonne farce

Dans la nuit

Madame Blanchard

Loreau est acquitté

Rêves d’un soir

L’Affaire Boreau

La Lettre

La Dormeuse

Doux espoirs

Hermence de la vertu

Au téléphone

La Jeune

Attaque nocturne

L’Idiot

Madame Hercule

La Nuit rouge

La Victime, ou l’Affaire de l’impasse des Trois-Poulets

Baratrie

À qui le tour?

Terre d’épouvante

Cordon sanitaire

Un concert chez les fous

L’Innocent

Sur la dalle

Bagnes d’enfants

Figure de cire

Le coeur de Floria

La Petite Roque

Sous les marroniers

L’Amour en cage

Ernestine est enragée.

Le Truc d’Adolphe

La Folie au Théâtre

La Maffia

La Visiteuse

Le Château de l’amour lente

La Bonne amie

L’Enfant mort

Napoléonette

Forfaiture

L’Homme de la nuit

Un beau tableau

Mon p’tit Tom

Le Cerceuil de chair

L’Homme aux chèques

Le Feu de joie

Mon curé chez les riches

Le Cabinet du Docteur Caliguri, ou bien Caligari, comme tu veux

L’Étrangleuse

Les Nuits rouges de la Tchéka

La Chambre ardente

Une nuit d’Edgar Poe

Mon curé chez les pauvres

Dans les dunes

Le Roman d’une femme de chambre

Jack l’éventreur

Magie noire

Pour jouer la comédie de salon

Cauchemars

Rosette, ou l’Amoureuse conspiration

Les Maîtres de la peur

L’Étrange amant du mal

La Galerie des monstres

Le Second crime de la dame en noir

Dernière conquète

Contes du Grand-Guignol

La Villa solitaire

La Courroie

À la prochaine…

Goodbye till next week, and thank you for reading.

Sam Andrew

___________________________________________

The Mismeasure of Almost Everything: an homage to the transience of human knowledge

Posted on August 3, 2013 by J L tagged.

36, rue de Vaugirard Paris

Metre Standard: The national Convention, in order to spread the use of the metric system, put sixteen marble metre standards in the most frequented places in Paris. These metres were installed between February 1796 and December 1797. Here is one of the last two that exist in Paris and it is the only one still in its original place.

The late eighteenth century was a time of revolution.

The preceding century was an age of science. The leisure classes had laboratories in their homes and did all manner of experiments and tests. The result was an air of skepticism and inquiry into all things.

After all of this examination of received notions, the nations of Europe and the Americas were ready for radical changes in their lives. People wanted to put their laws, traditions, religions, customs on a more rational, humane and logical basis.

On the back of the dollar bill and on the Great Seal of the United States is written Novus ordo seclorum, a line from the fourth Eclogue of Virgil, which means “a new order of the ages,” and so it was. Things were changing in radical ways, particularly in France, Great Britain and America.

So, in this “new order of the ages,” the first thing to be put on a rational basis was time. The Revolution was a new beginning in human history. The Gregorian Calendar was concerned chiefly with the holy days of saints long dead, and perhaps even non existent. I had this holy card when I was a child. It depicts St. Christopher (which, after all, means no more than “Christ bearer”) carrying a German child across a river, the Rhine? The Danube? Both of these rivers arise near Lake Constance in the Alps and are easily fordable there, even carrying a small, holy looking boy.

One of our recent Popes declared Saint Christopher to be nonexistent, which was very hard on the dashboard/icon sales people. Anyway, the point is that the Gregorian calendar was identified with the nobility and the clergy of the Ancien Régime, and it was time to put the calendar on a real and rational basis, because this is a Revolution and we have to redo everything, including a lot of things that were working just fine.

So, now the savants and philosophes are going to make a calendar that is rational and which will accurately describe what the different parts of the year actually feel like. The new calendar would have twelve months of thirty days each which would be called

vendémiaire month of the wine harvest September/October

brumaire month of fog October/November

frimaire month of frost November/December

nivôse month of snow December/January

pluviôse month of rain January/February

ventôse month of wind February/March

germinal month of germination March/April

floréal month of flowering April/May

prairal month of meadows May/June

messidor month of the harvest June/July

thermidor month of heat July/August

fructidor month of fruits August/September

Each month was divided into three ten-day weeks (décades) with a holiday in the middle of each week called quintidi. There would be a festival (sans-culottide) of five days, six in leap years, to ensure that each year begin anew on the autumnal equinox.

The Revolutionary calendar was born in October 1793 and began with the year II.

This calendar was abolished early in the year XIV in time to start 1806 on January I.

The initial big idea in the French Revolution was that the age of reason had arrived. It was time to look at all the old ideas, the nobility, the church, clergy, the status of women, slavery, the calendar, language, weights, measures, everything, and to make sense of these things, to make them reasonable, simpler, more scientific.

People took the idea of liberty, equality and fraternity seriously. Marie-Olympe de Gouges wrote: ”Why are Black people enslaved? The color of people’s skin only suggests a slight difference. There is no discord between day and night, the sun and the moon and between the stars and dark sky. All is varied; it is the beauty of nature. Why destroy nature’s work?“

There were those in the Assemblée Nationale who believed in rights for blacks and who worked for the abolition of slavery.

The savants (scientists) in the eighteenth century were also apalled by the lack of uniformity in the weights and measures of their societies. Everything was local and peculiar because it was under the local aristocrat’s control. Measures differed from nation to nation, yes, but also within nations and sometimes even from town to town there were different ideas about what a pint, an ell, a cubit, an inch, a yard was. This diversity made scientific communication very difficult but it was even more disastrous for commerce.

The savants noted that in the Ancien Régime there were eight hundred terms for measurement that covered an amazing 250,000 different units of weights and measures.

Thomas Jefferson urged Americans to adopt the decimal metric system in weights and measures and in money. We adopted the metric system for money (10 dimes = a dollar, and so on), but we kept the medieval inch, foot, yard, mile, bushel, peck, and all the rest. The result has been havoc ever since.

In 1999 a NASA investigation into the failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter showed that one team used “American” units (e.g., inches, feet and pounds) while the other used metric units for a key spacecraft operation. This information was critical to the maneuvers required to place the spacecraft in the proper Mars orbit. The result was a trajectory error of sixty miles. The savants during the French Revolution had created the metric system to avoid just this kind of scientific miscommunication.

Here are some French measure names from the Ancien Régime: arpent (acre), aune (ell), lieue ancienne (this is an old French league defined as 10,000, a myriad, feet and it was the official French league until 1674.), lieue de Paris (defined in 1674 as exactly 2000 toises. After 1737, it was also called the “league of bridges and roads” (des Ponts et des Chaussées), Lieue de postes (This league is 2200 toises. It was created in 1737.), ligne (line), perche d’arpent (a “rod,” roughly seven metres), pied du roi (foot), point (point), pouce (inch, “thumb”), toise (fathom, used in France, but not in England, as a measure on land as well as at sea, six feet).

The pas (step) had the same value that it had for Julius Caesar who reckoned miles as mille passus, a thousand steps. “Mile” comes from “mille.”

Lieue de 25 au degré (linked to the circumference of the Earth, with 25 lieues (leagues) making up one degree of a great circle. It was measured by Picard in 1669 to be 2282 toises).

Lieue tarifaire. This league is 2400 toises. It was created in 1737.

The perche du roi was the rod used in Québec and Louisiana.

The vergée was an area measurement of five perches on each side. This word “vergée” is not only the origin for “verge,” yard, but also for the origin of, “I am on the verge of loving you insanely.”

Before the Revolution French units of measurement were based on the Carolingian system, introduced by Charlemagne (800 – 814 CE) which in turn were based on ancient Roman measures.

Charlemagne brought a consistent system to measures across the entire empire. However, after his death the empire fragmented and many rulers introduced their own variants of the units of measure.

Some of Charlemagne’s units of measure, such as the pied du roi (the king’s foot) remained virtually unchanged for about a thousand years, while others, such as the aune (the ell, used to measure cloth) and the livre (pound) varied dramatically from locality to locality. By the time of the revolution, the number of units of measure had grown to the extent that it was almost impossible to keep track of them.

The aune (ell), mainly but not always, a cloth measure, varied often within the same town, and often depended on whether the item measured were wool or silk. Insane, but lucrative for wily merchants.

Flood levels at the pont Wilson at Tours in both metre and pied royal.

In England the Magna Carta decreed that “there shall be one unit of measure throughout the realm.” Charlemagne and successive kings had tried but failed to impose such a unified system of measurement in France.

Now came the juridical revolution of August 1789, when the French nobility were obliged to renounce all privileges, including the authority over weights and measures. This was the time of la Grande Peur, the great fear, and on the morning of the fifth of August, the Assembly abolished the feudal system eliminating many clerical and noble rights and privileges. The August decrees were finally completed a week later.

The first stipulation put forth by savants, legislators and pamphleteers was the expectation that the new weights and measures would apply equally throughout France.

In March 1790, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, perhaps with more than a little help from his friend, Condorcet, put forth the most thoughtful and cogent proposals for the new standards of measurement.

The legislature should derive its fundamental measure from nature, the common heritage of all humanity, which would transcend the interests of any single nation. The various units of the new measurement (length, area, capacity, weight, volume) should be derived from one source and have one system. A grave, as the gram was then called, would be one cubic centimeter of rainwater weighed in a vacuum at the melting point of ice. Everything, then, was to depend on the final answer: how long is the metre on which every other measure was to be based?

All the savants wanted the new measure to be decimal. Simon Stevin, the Flemish engineer, had “invented” the decimal point in the Renaissance. (The Chinese, Arabs and Indians might have a lot to say about this.) John Locke and Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban argued for the virtues of a decimal system.

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, who was soon to lose his head in the outrageous excesses of the Revolution, strongly advocated that decimal measurement be adopted. At the height of the French Revolution, he was accused by Jean-Paul Marat of selling adulterated tobacco and of other crimes, and was eventually guillotined a year after Marat’s death.

Sketch by Jacques-Louis David of Marie-Antoinette on her way to the guillotine. Stupid, crazy, ridiculous, out of control years. So, right in the middle of all this reason and logic comes one of the most irrational, illogical episodes. One is reminded of the Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.

The decimal system is natural, because, of course, we have ten digits on our hands, and ten more on our toes.

The only other numbering system which could rival decimal for naturalness would be the Celtic (and Mayan) vigesimal counting system based on 20. The French don’t say eighty, although they have a word for eighty from Lain (octante). They say quatre vingts (four twentys) because they still remember their Celtic ancestors who counted in twentys. To say 75 in French, you don’t say “septante-cinq” which would seem to be logical, you say soixante-quinze, which is sixty ( 3 twentys) fifteen, again because of the Celts.

When Abraham Lincoln said “four score and seven years ago,” which was archaic even when he spoke it, he was speaking vigesimally. Not long ago many of us counted in twenties.

The Mayans also had the vigesimal system for counting.

Many other systems were proposed… 12 for divisiblity, 11 because eleven is a prime number and can’t be divided Every number was considered, but the decimal system seemed the most logical because, well, every morning when you look down at your feet, there are ten toes.

The last big debate among the savants was the nomenclature of prefixes, what were these new measures to be called? In May 1790, citoyen Auguste-Savinien Leblond proposed the name “mètre,” “a name so expressive that I would almost say it was French.” One reason for the expressiveness might be that “mètre” sounds a lot like “maître” (master, expert, capable, basic).

The proposal for Greek and Latin prefixes (giga-, mega-, kilo-, hecto-, deca-, milli-, centi-) first appeared in a report by the Commission of Weights and Measures in May 1793.

Now the thing to do was find out how long the mètre actually was. What was one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator?

The savants knew that a measure of length taken from a quarter of a meridian divided by ten million would be close to the length of the aune of Paris, that is, about three feet, comfortably on a human scale and familiar to everyone. Indeed, this is what makes the meter easy for us Americans today. The meter is close to the yard which is close to one half the length of the human body.

The meter/yard is roughly the distance from your nose to the end of the finger on your outstretched hand.

It wouldn’t be necessary to measure the entire quarter of a meridian to find the length of a meter, but merely an arc, a part of it.

1. The selected arc would have to be as long as at least ten degrees of latitude so that there could be an accurate extrapolation to the whole quarter meridian.

2. The selected arc would have to be over the 45th parallel, halfway between the pole and the equator.

3. The two end points of the “sample,” the selected arc, would have to be located at sea level, and,

4. the meridian sample would have to cross a region already fairly well surveyed so that the measurement could proceed rapidly.

One meridian arc in the entire world met these requirements, the one that ran from Dunkerque (Dunkirk) to Barcelona through Paris.

In July of 1792 two astronomers left Paris to find the answer to how long the mètre was. Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre headed north from the capital to Dunkerque.

The cautious, scrupulous Pierre-François-André Méchain traveled to the south, destination Barcelona. The idea was nothing less than the making of a new measure, the meter, which would be one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. This meter was to be the “one unit of measure throughout the realm,” as the Magna Carta had put it. All other measurements would flow from the meter, centimeter, millimeter, kilometer, gram, kilogram, hectare and so on.

The two men, Delambre and Méchain, wanted to measure that part of the meridian arc which ran from Dunkerque through Paris to Barcelona.

The unit of measure that they thus obtained would be naural, from the earth itself, and would belong to the whole world, since it came from the world.

For seven years Delambre and Méchain measured along the meridian, trying to find out exactly what one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator would look like. In the meantime a “provisional metre” was used so that the metric system could be introduced in France and elsewhere. There was a vague idea that the eventual metre would be something like three feet (three pieds du roi).

This is geodesy or geodetic surveying, the theory and practice of determining the position of points on the earth’s surface and the dimensions of areas so large that the curvature of the earth must be taken into account. Geodetic surveying is distinguished from plane surveying, the operations of which are executed without regard to the earth’s curvature.

In geodetic surveying, two points, called stations, many miles apart are selected, and the latitude and longitude of each is determined by astronomical means. The line between these two points, the base line, is measured with a high degree of accuracy. The position of a third station is determined by the angle it makes with each end of the base line. This process, called triangulation, is continued until the whole area to be surveyed is mapped.

Where the curvature of the earth is great or where there are hills or high trees between stations, towers are built, or tall structures such as churches are used, so that one station may be seen from another. This geodetic station is on Mallorca.

Ken Alder, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University, has written a book The Measure of All Things about Delambre and Méchain and their trials and tribulations with measuring one ten-millionth of the distance from the north pole to the equator through Paris, and this “through Paris” is an important qualification because, as it turns out, not all meridians are created equal which is the crux of a very big problem.

In his research for this excellent book, Dr. Alder discovered, apparently for the first time, an error that Pierre-François-André Méchain made while doing his survey near Barcelona.

Méchain, despite his cautious, precise and almost overly exact approach to his work, made the error in the early years of the expedition and then covered it up, which was not like him at all. (There were extenuating circumstances. Spain was at war with revolutionary, godless France and Méchain was not allowed to reclimb Mont-Jouy near Barcelona harbor and recheck his work.)

From the Spanish wikipedia: En 1787 Méchain colaboró con J.D. Cassini y Legendre en la medida precisa de la longitud entre Paris y Greenwich Estos tres científicos visitaron en numerosas ocasiones a William Herschel en su observatório astrónico, Slough (Inglaterra) en el mismo año. Fue destinado a España, para precisar las medidas de este meridiano. Durante una breve estancia en Barcelona, notó un pequeño desvío de tres segundos en un arco del meridiano de Dunkerque-Barcelona. A su llegada a Castellón, se incorporó a un gabinete local liderado por Fausto Vallés encargado de fijar el meridiano 0 de la tierra, a partir del cual nacería al metro.

(In 1787 Méchain collaborated with J.D. Cassini and Adrien-Marie Legendre on the precise measurement of the longitude between Paris and Greenwich. These three savants (scientists) visited William Herschel, above, on numerous occasions at his astronomical observatory at Slough (England) in the same year. Méchain was headed for Spain to determine with precision the measurements of this meridian. During a brief stay at Barcelona, he noted a small deviation of three seconds in the arc of the meridian from Dunkerque to Barcelona. Upon his arrival in Castellón, he joined a local cabinet led by Fausto Vallés charged with fixing meridian 0 of the earth, from which was born the meter.)

When my brother Bill and I lived in Paris (1962-1964), one of the places we lived was on rue Legendre, named for Adrien-Marie Legendre, one of these scientists assigned to find the measurement of the longitude between London and Paris.

A year or two ago in a sentimental moment, I visited this street and took a photo of the nameplate which reads merely Adrien-Marie Legendre, mathématicien. This is how rue Legendre looked in great grandmother’s day.

And how it looks now. Bill and I lived there somewhere in between these two images. We lived there with some “putains allemandes” (German whores) as our landlady (évidemment une commère) so kindly called them. (They were simply two young women who visited us and we spoke about German etymology and dialects across France and the motherland.) I really loved Kristin, as one of them was called and I am sorry I have lost contact with her. She was very intelligent and good company.

We never spoke Kristin’s language or ours. All of our conversation was French. Later I visited Germany, and worked there for a while, and upon my return to Paris spoke to Kristin’s parents in German (“Ich bin in der Nähe von Kassel gewesen.” I was near Kassel.), and she said, “Unglaublich! Er hat vorher kein Wort gesprochen.” (Unbelievable, he didn’t know a single word before.) It was the first time either of us had heard the other speak our native language.

Our mutual friend Ulrich Roski, with whom I attended the Sorbonne, and who later became a television and music celebrity in Germany, talked about our relationship in a book he wrote published only in Germany.

Anyway, when I hear the name Legendre, this is what comes to mind. My brother Bill, Ulrich, Kristin and many other close friends. For years after I returned to the United States, Ulrich and I wrote to each other in Latin.

Ulrich was a better scholar than I, by far, and I wish I would have reconnected with him before he died in 2003.

Ulrich Roski with his daughter Sandra.

Pierre-François-André Méchain was of course obsessed with his geodetic surveying error and nearly driven mad by his knowledge that he had betrayed the noble cause of Science by a mistake the thickness of two pieces of paper. He died in an attempt to correct himself. If only he had known that there was no correction possible.

So, the meter, which was thought to be from and of the earth, is an error, an error that has been repeated with its every new redefinition,

including our modern view of the meter in terms of distance traveled by light in a fraction of a second.

But, so what? For one thing, the error is small, very small. For another, how can you really measure a quarter of a meridian anyway? And then derive one ten-millionth of it? And then who cares? Isn’t it enough that we have a convenient, user friendly measure that everyone agrees on? Isn’t that the main thing? So what if the meter is the mismeasure of almost everything.

I suspect that none of these considerations would matter at all to Pierre-François-André Méchain. He was a very emotional man, inclined to self doubt and agonies of indecision, and completely devoted to being precise.

How small is the error? Today’s satellite surveys show that the length of the meridian from the North Pole to the equator is 10,002,290 meters. This means that the meter calculated by Delambre and Méchain is about 0.2 millimeters short, roughly the thickness of two sheets of paper. These are two drill bits, each 0.2 millimeters thick.

And who says the satellite surveys are correct, for that matter? These are today’s measurements? What will tomorrow’s say? Precision is a non ending quest. Perfect for people with obsessive compulsive disorders.

By the way, in writing this I kept spelling Méchain “méchant,” which is French for “malicious, wicked, naughty.”

Do you suppose that this qualifies as a Freudian slip?

It’s not as if Méchain were the big, bad wolf

or anything like that.

To be a little more, pardon the expression, precise, Pierre-François-André Méchain maybe should have been a little more like a wolf. Instead he was so lamblike, real, exposed, passionate, giving that he could not forgive himself for an error that would not have bothered a man like, just to take one example, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre, who was much more, to use our idiom, “well adjusted,” and who was conducting his triangulations one after the other in the north, peacefully and productively, nearing his goal and waiting for Méchain to finish his work so that they could take their joint calculations to the Académie.

It seemed for a while as if Méchain had given up on his southern measurements entirely. He sailed to Livorno, which for some inexplicable reason, is known as “Leghorn” in English, and there in Genova (Genoa) made friends with Giuseppe Slop de Cadenburg, the director of the astronomical observatory in the nearby university town of Pisa, ten miles north in Toscano (Tuscany), who proved a sympathetic listener to Méchain’s tale of woe.

Perhaps a quote from Méchain will make clear his state of mind: ”Even I, who can claim some experience and competence in geodesy, who know a bit about what methods to use and when to take precautions, even I work in constant fear: I mistrust myself. I continually solicit the views and intelligence of my colleagues at the Academy and the Bureau of Longitudes, and nothing pains me more than when they respond that they rely entirely on me, and that no one is better placed than I to judge what must be done, to choose the right methods, and to carry them through. At such times I feel as if they are spitting in my face. Nothing comes easily, nothing is simple, when one seeks precision. All it takes to be convinced of this is to do a little observing of one’s own.”

On 20 September 1804, Pierre-François-André Méchain died of malaria, probably contracted while he was triangulating in the Albufera marshes near Valencia.

This man was his own worst enemy, tortured, honest, intellectual, precise to a fault, and that cliché never fit anyone more aptly.

Not all meridians are equal. The earth, as you may have suspected, is lumpy, not perfectly spherical at all, misshapen, a work in progress. Far from being a perfect sphere, the earth is not even an oblate spheroid. It is a piece of mud and rock, different in all places, an organic being, unfinished, very difficult to measure, and not at all the same in different places.

The meridian at Rome is not the same length as the meridian that runs through Paris. We know that now. They didn’t know that then and they assumed that all meridians were equal since the earth was a perfect sphere. They searched for perfect uniformity then, but now we know that perfect uniformity is an expensive illusion, as are so many other illusions.

Méchain did not know that the earth was not a perfect sphere. Neither did Delambre nor anyone else in the world at that time.

The very planet we live on is pimply and imperfect. Pierre-François-André Méchain did not know that. He was an atheist, a scientist, but he still had the faith that we live on a perfect planet with a uniformly perfect shape and that faith was his undoing. He never could understand why his measurements went wrong. They were wrong because the earth is “wrong.”

It wasn’t Méchain’s fault that his measurements were off. What was his fault was that he tried to cover up his “error.” He wasn’t honest about his findings.

Honesty in science is a sine qua non. Sine qua non = ”without which nothing.” Science, knowledge, cannot exist without honesty.

Méchain came from a humble family, but by dint of hard work and study, patient observation and fastidious calculation he had risen to the utmost pinnacle of astronomy in France. Méchain had discovered eleven comets mainly through a kind of obsinacy about being accurate.

Méchain was something of a martyr to the endless and fruitless quest for perfection, not out of a search for personal glory, but for the real aim of devotion to science, to the pure pursuit of knowledge. He was the real thing, the real scientist. It’s just that he was so emotional and tormented by self doubt that he carried his own self destruction around with him. It’s not an unfamiliar pattern, is it?

Méchain’s partner, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre, noted that Méchain sometimes seemed to be late on his mission, melancholy and a martyr to the endless quest for precision.

Delambre also said, “From this day forth, my most cherished occupation will be to extract from this archive everything that may contribute to the glory of a colleague with whom I was honorably bound in a long common labor. And if I have not succeeded today in painting a picture of the departed astronomer worthy of his merits and the feelings I have for him, I am at least certain that whatever I publish of his work will do far more for his memory than even the most eloquent oration.”

Thank you for reading.

See you next week.

___________________________________________

Birds At Our House

Posted on July 10, 2013 by J L tagged.

We live north of San Francisco in Marin County, where we have a house that is too small and too expensive on a hectare (two and a half acres) of beautiful California terrain. Henceforth this area shall be known as the Piliwale Andrew hectare.

I sit here writing this web log and look out the window at a railing where birds come to find the birdseed that Elise so kindly provides for them. I’m so glad that we decided to replace our windows, as if we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to see these beautiful birds that have decided to pay us a visit. My friend had told me about a company called, Graceland Windows (https://gracelandwindows.com/) that they used for their replacement windows and they had some great designs on there which would enable us to get a better view of the birds. Unfortunately, though we don’t live in the area so we had to use a company that was more local to our area. If we ever moved to Texas, we will definitely consider using this company. For the time being though, I’m going to enjoy looking at the birds through our windows. Also, I often see them in our outdoor home security cameras, pecking awaty at the lawn or drive. They’re relaxing to watch.

We get some good views of these fascinating and varied creatures.

There is a family of foxes who live on the Piliwale Andrew hectare, a lot of hungry deer, bobcats, skunks, a snake or two, racoons, coyotes, occasionally a mountain lion, but what we see and hear mostly are birds.

At night we often hear, but rarely see, the Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus). I love their lonesome sound.

This little valley where we are has been home to Turkey Vultures (Cathartes aura) probably for thousands of years. They stretch out their wings to dry and then circle lazily overhead, riding the thermals and living the good life.

The Turkey Vulture will not eat anything that is alive, and they are one of the few birds with a sense of smell.

The vultures are very comfortable here and perhaps twenty of them circle around and come to rest on various tree stumps near our house. This is their laughing place.

The Corvid family (crows, ravens, jays, magpies) is well represented. There must be forty crows who carry on and carouse in the pines, cawing and gossiping, squabbling and commenting loudly on anything that catches their attention. Crows can be taught to “talk” in captivity. They actually practice their vocalizations. You can hear them. They do this even in their sleep. Their ability to mimic is uncanny. They can mimic a squeaky door closing if they choose.

These birds are larger than you might think. Seeing the occasional one who lands on our railing reduces all of us (two humans, a dog and two cats) to a kind of reverential awe. Our crows are nearly the size of eagles.

Common Ravens (Corvus corax) are serious carnivores and their search for food leads them to live in more varied habitats than any other California bird. They eat road kill, any kind of meat they can find in dumps, crickets, grasshoppers and almost anything else.

The Steller’s Jay (Cyanocitta stelleri) is also an improbably large bird with a crest, comb, topknot, whatever you want to call it. They are raucous, noisy and thieving. They will eat other birds and they often imitate Red-tailed Hawks to frighten intruders.

You can see clearly with the jays that they are descended from dinosaurs. They have an otherworldly look and their behavior is aggressive and predatory. Ornithiscian dinosaurs, they will eat almost anything and rob eggs when they can.

Woody Woodpecker in the Warner Brothers films has a characteristic call that is based on bop rhythms, popular music in the 1940s when he was created, but the pileated woodpeckers around here have a call that is quite similar to Woody’s. You recognize it right away. “And, then I said Baby!” If you sing that very quickly on an ascending scale, you will hear the woodpecker cry.

Our woodpeckers bore hundreds of holes in the trees. They have an extra backward pointing toe for clutching the bark and they lean on their strong tails while working. Woodpeckers have a stiff extending tongue for insects and their eggs.

When you first hear them you think it is someone hammering a nail somewhere.

They knock busily against the tree trunks looking for insects and making nests. I hear them right now hard at work.

Pileated Woodpeckers (Dryocopus pileatus) like dead or dying trees and we have a lot of those.

The Downy Woodpecker (Picoides pubescens) often selects nest holes on the downward side of leaning trees, where gravity can hinder any tree climbing predators.

The Downy is a small woodpecker, the smallest in North America, and it likes to live around bay trees. It drums loudly on dead limbs.

In the spring we see Olive-Sided Flycatchers (Contopus borealis) who like our wooded canyon in the coastal lowland and so come here to breed.

Olive-Sided Flycatchers spend the winter in Central America. Lucky them. That’s a lot of flying, though.

Western Wood-Pewees (Contopus sordidulus) come see us in about mid-April to early June. They and the Flycatchers have a crest or comb which makes them look distinguished. We have an “ephemeral” stream running through the Piliwale Andrew hectare and the Pewees like that. That “stream” becomes a raging torrent in February. My friend Clark brought his metal detector here one day and found a 1900 dime in the water.

The towhees might be the bird we see most. This is the California Towhee. which resembles a large, good looking sparrow. The plumage is very even and smooth.

The towhee is a handsome bird with a patch under the tail, called the crissum. One of the subspecies of the towhee is called crissalis because of this patch.

Rufous-sided Towhees (Pipilo erythrothalmus) have regional accents. The ones in California talk like surfers. No, no, just kidding, but they do sound quite different from eastern towhees. Their call can sound like a buzz.

Towhees like to eat nuts, seeds and fruits.

Spotted Towhees (Pipilo maculatus) like to live near the ground but I see them on our railing pecking at nuts and seeds. They are also sparrowlike.

Males are gleaming black above (females are grayish), spotted and striped with brilliant white. This is a sparrow in overdrive.

Sometimes we see a Chestnut-backed Chickadee (Poecile rufescens) and think it is a towhee.

This is a handsome chickadee that matches the rich brown bark of the coastal trees that it inhabits.

The Chestnut-backed Chickadee is the species to look for up and down the West Coast and in the Pacific Northwest but especially on the Piliwale Andrew hectare. I saw one today in a tree out by the “river,” actually a trickle through the rocks at this point, though, I repeat, a raging torrent in February. Riparian pride is strong on the hectare.

Active, sociable, and noisy as any my little chickadee, these Chestnut-backed Chickadees move through tall conifers with titmice, nuthatches, and sometimes other chickadee species.

I have seen these birds in the shrubs in the heart of San Francisco. They seem at home everywhere.

Dark-eyed juncos are sparrows that nest on or near the ground in forests. In winter, they typically form flocks and often associate with other species. It’s fun to watch their beaks move as they “chew” their food. When they land, Juncos will fold their white feathers under, perhaps to escape detection by falcons and hawks.

When disturbed the entire Dark-eyed Junco flock suddenly flies up to a tree, usually perching in the open and calling in aggravation at the intrusion. I like to see animals talking back this way.

The House Wren (Troglodytes aedon) is a plain brown bird, very widely distributed. You probably see them everyday. They nest almost anywhere and will sing incessantly.

Bewick’s Wrens (Thryomanes bewickii) have a very long tail, tipped in white which they flick and jerk side to side. These hyperactive vocalists belt out a string of short whistles, warbles, burrs, and trills to attract mates and defend their territory, or scold visitors with raspy calls.

The Red-winged Blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) have scarlet-and-yellow shoulder patches they can puff up or hide depending on how confident they feel. Females are a subdued, streaky brown, almost like a large, dark sparrow. We always like to see them because they mean spring is coming, plus, they are a beautiful bird.

The hawks sit up high where they can see everything with their extremely acute vision. This is a Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii). They like canyons like ours with rivers or creeks running through them.

Accipiter striatus (Sharp-Shinned Hawks) like broken woodlands of coniferous, deciduous or mixed forest, so the Piliwale Andrew hectare is perfect for them. They are more common than the Cooper’s Hawk.

The Red-Shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) has its main San Francisco Bay population center in Sonoma and Marin Counties, so we see a lot of them.

The Red-Tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) is hunted as the “chicken hawk,” but this bird is far more valuable for rodent control than for its occasional taking of a chicken. We value this hawk and wish there were more of them on our hectare.

The Red-Tailed Hawk breeding season begins with a spectacular sequence of aerial acrobatics. Male and female fly in large circles and gain great height before the male plunges into a deep dive and subsequent steep climb back to circling height. Later, the birds grab hold of one another with their talons and fall spiraling towards earth. This has to be the origin of several ancient myths (Icarus comes to mind). Here is probably the origin of another myth: Red-Tailed Hawks are monogamous and they mate for life.

The American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) is the smallest falcon in North America and is the smallest American raptor. It will often hover over its prey, deciding before diving. We see them maybe more than any other falcon or hawk. This kestrel, the only kestrel in the Americas, has three basic vocalizations: the “klee” or “killy”, the “whine”, and the “chitter.” The “klee” is usually delivered as a rapid series – klee, klee, klee, klee when the kestrel is upset or excited. This call is used in a wide variety of situations and is heard from both sexes, but the larger females typically have lower-pitched voices than the males.

The Wild Turkey (Meleagris galloparvo) was very rare here in Marin after the great hunting slaughter of the 1870s, but since the 1960s, these turkeys have been reintroduced several times and are now a very successful species. You see them in any open field, often contending with the cattle on Flander’s Farm down the road on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. The males strut around and show themselves to the females. It’s all very educational.

Wild Turkeys look like the classic Thanksgiving Turkey, especially the males with their preening, overweening behaviors. The females mostly wander around ignoring such ostentation, but it is difficult to enter the mind of a turkey. She may have her own designs, unknown to us. They probably center around reproduction and the continuance of the species.

I always think of the turkey and the chicken as Indian birds, because, if you really look at them, it seems as if they recently arrived from the Subcontinent. They are too ornate, too exotic, too beautiful and too obviously related to the peacock to originate anywhere around here.

We on the Piliwale Andrew hectare are vegetarians, so we observe these feathered bipeds with great interest but not great hunger. We hear chickens in the morning, as we hear the Great Horned Owl at that time, but we are up long before they are, working, toiling, scratching for worms ourselves, indifferent to their carnal attractions, but always aware of their beauty.

How do California Quail survive? They are slow, they are stupid, their call is distinctive and they are very easy to see. Every predatory animal within reach must be intent on their immediate slaughter, and yet they live from year to year scampering along with little regard for safety. Our cats regard their comings and goings with great interest and yet the quail still live… how? They have large broods for one thing. They can run, walk, really, very fast, fast enough to get out of the way of an onrushing car. They will only fly as a last resort. They are like island birds that way.

Mountain Quail (Oreortyx pictus) walk upslope in the summer and downslope in the winter. Quail travel in flocks except when paired for breeding. They have a curious, guttural cry which some people interpret as “chi-ca-go,” which is as good a way to describe their vocal as any. That song is very low and in the back of the throat. Quail, pheasants, turkeys and chickens all eat grain and they are all related.

I usually hear hummingbirds before I see them. When I am gardening I hear a buzz and think it is a large fly, but turn to see the hummer. This is the Black-Chinned Hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri).

We leave our doors open a lot and we have a skylight, so hummingbirds will fly in and then try to escape upward to the skylight. Which reminds me, we are currently in the midst of a few home renovation projects and are actually thinking of replacing our skylight soon. We have been looking at DaLyte residential skylights for some inspiration. If hummingbirds buzz against the glass long enough, they die of exhaustion, so there is always a great rushing around for ladders and brooms to try to show them the way out. The trick is to catch them when they are really tired and then they will land on the broom and we can convey them outside. Easier said than done. Anna’s Hummingbird (Calypte anna) is a frequent visitor who is often seen flying backwards.

Allen’s Hummingbirds ( Sealasphorus sasin) visit us early, somewhere from January to March.

This is a Canada goose washing. When we leave the Piliwale Andrew hectare and drive anywhere we see these beautiful birds in ditches, streams and ponds. They breed here and in Canada. They nest on the ground, but sometimes build nests in trees too.

The goslings follow their parents and learn what to eat.

One of the oldest songs in the English language, maybe THE oldest song in the English language is The Cuckoo. Peter Albin and I did The Cuckoo long before there was a Big Brother and the Holding Company, and long after too.

The song finally became Oh, Sweet Mary, but The Cuckoo was long a staple in folk music days. Janis Joplin and James Gurley used to sing the lyrics, which went something like, “Oh, the Cuckoo, she’s a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies, she never hollers cuckoo, til the fourth day of July. Jack of Diamonds, Jack of Diamonds, I’ve known you from of old, you’ve robbed me of my silver, you’ve robbed me of my gold.”

The Cuckoo song is about treachery and betrayal and it is fitting because the cuckoo and her relatives are parasites and traitors, at least viewed from our Judaeo-Christian überconsciousness.

The cuckoo lays her egg(s) in someone else’s nest, the egg then hatches, and ejects the other eggs from the nest.

Now, there is probably no real evil (nor good, for that matter) in the universe, but, if there were, this throwing of the “real” young out of the nest might come close to some kind of evil. This is why the cuckoo became the symbol in ancient folklore for betrayal, treachery and infidelity. Some birds will actually build a new nest bottom over this false progeny and begin their nesting life anew, but most accept the new, huge, ungainly, false offspring, who has killed her “siblings.”

The Brown-headed Cowbird (Molothrus ater) is the California version of the Cuckoo. Cowbirds deposit their eggs in the nests of over 220 bird species. If the egg is accepted into the brood, the cowbird doesn’t disrupt the family further. But if the egg is rejected, cowbirds trash the nest, destroying the host’s eggs. This brutal behavior led ecologists to dub the species “mafia birds.” Cowbird eggs hatch earlier than host eggs, and although the parasitic hatchling rarely attacks other nestlings, it cries louder, demanding a greater share of the food-which it almost always gets.

This Cowbird behavior frequently leads to the starvation of host nestlings. Here is the problem of Good and Evil nakedly presented. Are we to blame the Cowbird for her behavior? She is acting on instinct. There is no thought, no consciousness here. No free will. Is she “wrong?” Is she “unethical?” Who would posit such a thing? And yet? And yet? If the Brown-headed Cowbird is not evil, then what is? Is “evil” an idea that won’t fit a situation like this? And then, if so, what area would “evil” fit? Adolph Hitler comes to mind. Other very sick people. Allow me to quote myself, “What used to be evil is now a disease.” Such are the lessons of observing nature.

The Western Kingbird (Tyrannus verticalis) has ashy gray and lemon-yellow plumage, and is a familiar summertime sight at our house. This large flycatcher sallies out to capture flying insects from conspicuous perches on trees or utility lines, flashing a black tail with white edges. Western Kingbirds are aggressive and will scold and chase intruders (including Red-tailed Hawks and American Kestrels) with a snapping bill and flared crimson feathers they normally keep hidden under their gray crowns.

Barn Swallows (Hirundo rustica) build their cup-shaped mud nests almost exclusively on human-made structures. This is a bird of open country which normally uses man-made structures to breed and consequently has spread with human expansion. It builds the nest from mud pellets in barns or similar structures and feeds on insects caught in flight. In England this bird is known simply as the swallow.

The American Goldfinches (Spinus tristis) are active and acrobatic little finches that cling to weeds and seed socks. Goldfinches fly around here with a bouncy, undulating pattern and often call in flight, drawing attention to themselves. I like the group name for finches, “clarity.” A clarity of finches. It sounds so Elizabethan. My friend Tom Finch and his family are a clarity of Finches. It seems such an appropriate name for them.

Lawrence’s Goldfinches (Carduelis lawrencei) are named after George Lawrence, a New York businessman and ornithologist. The bird was given this name by John Cassin in 1850. This goldfinch feeds on seeds and insects. Their plumage is very beautiful and subtly colored. The female lays 3-6 pale white or pale blue eggs which hatch in 11 to 13 days.

The Lesser Goldfinches (Carduelis psaltria) travel in swiftly moving packs and they like to be on warm south slopes where there is open fresh water.

Lesser Goldfinches will imitate and mimic songs of other birds.

House Finches (Haemorhous mexicanus) are small-bodied finches with fairly large beaks and somewhat long, flat heads. The wings are short, making the tail seem long by comparison.

Many finches have distinctly notched tails, but the House Finch has a relatively shallow notch in its tail.

White-crowned Sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys) are a large sparrow with a small bill and a long tail. The head can look distinctly peaked or smooth and flat, depending on the bird’s attitude. We see White-crowned Sparrows low at the edges of brushy habitat, hopping on the ground or on branches usually below waist level.

The Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum) is, to me, one of the most striking birds on the hectare. They arrive in the fall and winter. The Cedar Waxwing is a medium-sized, sleek bird with a large head, short neck, and short, wide bill. Waxwings have a crest that often lies flat and droops over the back of the head. The wings are broad and pointed, like a starling’s. The tail is fairly short and square-tipped. These birds are so smooth and sculpted that they don’t look quite real.

The Latin/Greek name for the Northern Mockingbird says it all. Mimus polyglottos. Mockingbirds are best known for the habit of some species mimicking the songs of other birds and the sounds of insects and amphibians often loudly and in rapid succession. They can put on displays of calls that they have learned that will rival any concert hall offering.

When I was a boy I was fascinated with these birds and tried to kill as many of them as I could with my BB gun. Such is the insane legacy of testosterone. There were hit songs about mockingbirds, musicians always being fascinated with a fellow songster. Says here (English Wikipedia) that Darwin studied mockingbirds when he was in the Galápagos and not finches. News to me. I would have bet on the finches. On his second voyage he used what he had heard about the tortoises varying from island to island with his data on mockingbirds to buttress his case for the mutability of species.

This is a photograph of a University of Florida student being mercilessly harassed by a mockingbird who is protecting her nest, but it reminds me of another species (were they Cedar Waxwings?) at San Francisco State University where I took a graduate course on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales one summer long ago.

When we walked across campus we would be divebombed by birds who had been eating more fermented berries than was strictly wise, and the drunken avians would fly down, tear at our hair, and then make their getaway. They seemed mightily proud of doing this.

This upclose and familiar encounter with the birds was actually most entertaining.

The American Robin (Turdus migratorius) must be the best known American bird, although what an oddly funny Latin name she has. The Robin lays three to five guess what color? eggs in a tree nest made of mud and grass.

This should be our national bird. She is a migratory songster, named after the European Robin because of her reddish-orange breast, though the two species are not closely related, since the European robin belongs to the flycatcher family. Do you find this somewhat disillusioning? I do, but am not sure why.

The American robin belongs to the thrush family.

Some people think that the American Robin ranks behind only the Red-winged Blackbird (and just ahead of the introduced European starling) as the most abundant, extant land bird in North America.

The American Robin is active mostly during the day and assembles in large flocks at night. Her diet consists of invertebrates (such as beetle grubs, earthworms and caterpillars), fruits and berries.

The American Robin is one of the earliest bird species to lay eggs, beginning to breed shortly after returning to its summer range from its winter range. Its nest consists of long coarse grass, twigs, paper, and feathers, and is smeared with mud and often cushioned with grass or other soft materials. It is among the first birds to sing at dawn, and its song consists of several discrete units that are repeated.

Hermit Thrushes (Catharus guttatus) have a chunky shape similar to an American Robin, but smaller. They stand upright, often with the slender, straight bill slightly raised. This is a winter bird.

I just saw an article about Swainson’s Thrush (Catharus ustulatus) this morning (8 June 2013) in the Marin Independent Journal.

“A local population of Swainson’s thrushes – a melodic songbird heard along trails and near streams – has had its 1,500-mile-plus migration tracked from Bolinas to Mexico with the use of small tags applied by researchers.”

“The findings could help better protect the habitat of the birds as their lifecycle and travels are better understood, according to Point Blue Conservation Science – formerly the Point Reyes Bird Observatory – which did the research.”

“Until now, all we knew was that these birds likely wintered in Mexico or Central America,” said Renée Cormier, an avian ecologist at Point Blue and lead author of the study. “We’re very excited to finally pinpoint where Swainson’s thrushes spend the winter.”

The Swainson’s Thrushes are distinguished from other spotted thrushes by their eyering and “buffy” face.

Bushtits (Psaltriparus minimus) weave a very unusual hanging nest, shaped like a soft pouch or sock, from moss, spider webs, and grasses. They are fairly plain brown-and-gray birds. Slightly darker above than below, they have brown-gray heads, gray wings, and tan-gray underparts.

The Western Bluebird (Sialia mexicana) is a beautiful, small thrush that often gathers in small flocks to feed on insects or berries, giving their quiet, chortling calls.

Western Bluebirds spread mistletoe seeds and they make us happy. The bluebird of happiness.

It’s always a bit of a shock to see a Mountain Bluebird (Sialia currucoides). They look as if they just flew out of a Disney cartoon because their coloring is so vivid. They will nest up under the eaves of the house or shed, like these lp smartside sheds, because they seem to like human built structures. Sheds are more popular for these birds as they’re not often disturbed, whereas there’s often people in the house. Additionally, if homeowners are keen gardeners and have worms in a compost heap or store birdfood, like suet, mealworms or peanuts in their sheds, the birds will love choose to nest and feast in the shed, compared to the house where they’ll still have to forage for their food.

The Black headed Grosbeak (Pheucticus melanocephalus) is one of the few birds able to eat Monarch butterflies, despite the noxious chemicals those insects contain from eating milkweeds in their larval stage.

These birds visit us most years and even when we can’t see them we hear the young ones who whine and whistle for food.

Western Tanagers (Piranga ludoviciana) are popular at our house because they eat wasps, ants, beetles and termites. They build their nests, usually in coniferous trees, at a fork in the horizontal branch well out from the trunk.

The Western Tanager’s plumage and vocalizations are similar to members of the cardinal family. They sing somewhat like American Robins, but more hoarse. The call sounds like “pit-er-ick.”

Golden-Crowned Kinglets (Regulus satrapa) weigh about as much as two pennies so they are one of the tiniest birds and rather elusive. In Marin County, they breed mostly in Douglas fir and redwoods.

They eat a lot of insects, gnats, caterpillars, aphids and spiders. The female lays a surprising 5 to 11 eggs, sometimes in double layers. The male feeds her while she sits on the nest during incubation.

Early Marin ornithologists weren’t even aware that the Golden-Crowned Kinglet bred here and the birds probably didn’t react well to early logging, but they returned with the regrowth of dense forests. Golden and ruby-crowned kinglets are the only members of their genus in North America, but they are astonishingly similar in appearance and behavior to their two Old World cousins – the goldcrest and firecrest.

We see the Yellow Warbler (Dendroica petechia) fairly often and they were once considered abundant in Marin.

Female Yellow Warblers sing sweet-sweet-sweeter-than-sweet or sweet-sweet-l’m-so-sweet, but males sing various other songs as well, one of them being mean-mean-meaner than mean or mean-machine-I’m so mean. It is rather difficult to write out a bird song even using music notation. Birds’ songs and calls are ineffable and so beautiful. This morning I heard three hawks talking to each other and the conversation was so interesting that I wanted to fly up there myself and say a thing or two about vole catching, an area where I feel they could use a little improvement.

The dreaded cowbird often lays her parasitic eggs in Yellow Warbler nests who thwart these “evil” birds by building a new floor over the cowbird eggs and laying a new clutch of their own. Persistent cowbirds have been known to return five times to lay more eggs in the nest, and the even more persistent warbler builds SIX layers of nest floors to cover up the cowbird eggs. This goes on all the time, whether we are there or not.

Have you ever heard that Latin saying, I think Horace wrote it? It goes Ars est celare artem, and it means it is art to hide art. Keep’em guessing, would be the American vernacular equivalent. Anyway, we now consider the Vermivora celata, the hidden wormeater, otherwise known as the Orange-Crowned Warbler.

Adult male: dusky olive green upperparts, grayer on crown and nape. Whitish or yellowish narrow broken eye ring, indistinct dusky eye line. Greenish yellow underparts with indistinct blurry streaks. Undertail coverts always brighter yellow than belly. Adult female: duller and grayer than male. Immature: duller, similar to adult female. So, where is the orange crown?

The most frequent call is a very distinctive, hard stick or tik. Flight call: a high, thin seet. Song: a high-pitched loose trill becoming louder and faster in the middle, weaker and slower at the end. Birds don’t drawl the way Americans do. An American pronounces “stick” with a bit of a twist. It’s almost like “styi ck,” it’s a lazy diphthong. Birds speak more as British or Continental people do. “Stick,” very short and bitten off to our ears. It’s fast and clipped, virtually without a vowel. “Stck.”

With a length of only 12cm/4.75in, the specific name pusilla (small) given to Wilson’s Warbler (Wilsonia pusilla) by Alexander Wilson in 1811 is appropriate.

Alexander Wilson moved from Scotland to Pennsylvania in 1794 at the age of 28, became interested in ornithology in 1801 and decided in 1802 to publish a book illustrating all the North America birds. This appeared as the nine volume American Ornithology between 1808 and 1814.

Wilson met John James Audubon in 1810 and probably inspired him to publish his own book of illustrations, even though Audubon’s reaction to Wilson is described as ‘decidedly ambiguous’. (He declined to subscribe to American Ornithology, felt his own illustrations were much better and, in 1820, decided to publish the ‘greatest bird book ever’.)

This bird is quite small and will fit in the palm of your hand with room to spare. Occasionally I see the females down by our creek in the underbrush, so little that I think at first that they are flies. How can you fit all that life into such a diminutive package?

The Violet-green Swallow (Tachycineta thalassina) is a truly beautiful bird and the only swallow that lives in the woodlands and forests of Marin County. The purple on the upper-tail coverts, often not seen, identifies this as a male. Green on the back can be bright in both sexes, male head usually relatively bright green; female head duller green to brownish. The extension of white above the eye is a mark that allows distinction of Violet-green from Tree Swallows in flight. The two species co-exist in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the Violet-green usually at higher altitudes and the Tree more often near bodies of water

These swallows will find old woodpecker holes or natural cavities in trees for nest sites, and they will also use nest boxes or crevices in buildings.

Swallows catch insects in flight. They have a short, wide bill that opens into a gaping mouth ideal for scooping up prey in mid-air.

The Violet-green Swallows are winter birds. They arrive sometimes as early as mid-January. They get along well with other swallows and add some much needed color in the cold months.

I see other birds here on the Piliwale Andrew hectare, but I don’t know what they are and need to take a good photograph for identification. Birds are singers and travelers, so we feel a lot of kinship with them. See you next week.

______________________________________

Polyonymously Perverse

Posted on July 7, 2013 by J L tagged.

Polyonymously Perverse

Polyonomous could mean having many names. Cicero was known in his time as Marcus Tullius Cicero. My name is Sam Houston Andrew III.

Where we lived at the Fur Peace Ranch.

Melina Riverblues has many names.

Stephen Bruton, Leah Hawk and Kris Kristofferson.

Jorma Kaukonen and Don Aters

Il diavolo si nasconde nei dettagli. The devil is hiding in the details.

My beautiful and wise friend Sally.

We were the Spice Boys.

The meeting and eating house at the Fur Peace Ranch near Darwin, Ohio.

I love to engage in repartee with people who are stupider than I am. Ann Coulter (how does she find any?)

La bottega dei sogni. The dream boutique.

If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. Ann Coulter.

The welcome kitty at Fur Peace Ranch.

I’ll play what you want or I won’t play at all.

All the world is a birthday cake, so take a little, but not too much.

Ahahahahhaah, ma che faccia ho! My god, what a face I have!

About fifteen minutes from Athens, Ohio.

I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote. Ann Coulter (noted cheater at the polls).

I wanted to be successful, not famous.

Gossip is the devil’s radio.

Jorma was so kind and generous to us. Everyone was. This was a wonderful stay.

Le ragazze del rock. The girls of rock.

Polls? Nah! They’re for strippers and cross country skiers. Sarah Palin.

I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

Music belongs to everyone. It’s only the music publishers who think that someone in particular owns it.

Don Aters took this photo of Levon Helm.

Interessante…. dove? come? partecipazione libera? Interesting… where? how? free participation?

I could possibly have beaten Senator McCain in the primary. Then I could have been the candidate who lost to Barack Obama. Mitt Romney.

President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and their team have failed the American people, and that is why their majority will soon be out the door. Mitt Romney.

Elise Wainani Piliwale at Fur Peace Ranch: 29 June 2013.

If someone thinks that “love and peace” is a cliché that must be left behind in the 1960s, that’s his problem. Love and peace are eternal.

Absolutely all the people I know are a little crazy.

Che presenza inquietante hai lì dietro di te! Con tanto di simil “funcia”! What a disquieting presence there behind you! And you can function with all of that!

As usual there is a great woman behind every idiot.

Hot Tuna à l’italiana.

When the President does it, that means it’s not illegal. Richard M. Nixon.

People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true. Richard M. Nixon.

Janis Joplin and Jorma Kaukonen sat in an apartment one day and recorded some songs while Jorma’s then wife Margareta typed a paper for her UC Berkeley class in the next room. This is the typewriter she used.

The clicking and clacking of the keys went straight onto the tape.

Ho perso tutte le foto di quella sera tranne la più bella. I have lost all the photos from that evening except for the most beautiful one.

It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody. Richard M. Nixon.

Solutions are not the answer. Richard M. Nixon.

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too. Richard M. Nixon.

Vanessa Kaukonen made us feel at home on the Fur Peace Ranch. She is Jorma’s wife now and a capable, intelligent woman.

Mi viene da piangere. Cosa mi sono persa? I’m about to cry. Oh, no, I missed it.

The press is the enemy. Richard M. Nixon.

Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren’t for the goddamned people. Richard M. Nixon.

John Hurlbut, a prince among men, the factotum at Fur Peace.

I let the American people down. Richard M. Nixon.

Ringrazia la sorellona che ti ha fatto questa foto. Thank the big sister who took this photo for you.

What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is. Dan Quayle.

Peter Albin and I did an interview with John Hurlbut and Jorma. John wrote questions like this one, and Jorma asked them.

I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican. Dan Quayle.

I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix. Dan Quayle.

Ma che figata!

Edd Hart. Elise’s mother Carla Piliwale is married to Edd. We had a beautiful drive through Ohio with these people.

Bank failures are caused by depositors who don’t deposit enough money to cover losses due to mismanagement. Dan Quayle.

People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history. Dan Quayle.

Bobby Knight told me this: ‘There is nothing that a good defense cannot beat a better offense.’ In other words a good offense wins. Dan Quayle.

Carla Piliwale.

Musica e rappoorti umani…camminano insieme. Music and human relationships…they go together.

Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It’s the other way around. They never vote for us. Dan Quayle.

I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy – but that could change. Dan Quayle.

For NASA, space is still a high priority. Dan Quayle.

We stayed in London, Ohio, for a couple of days and I haunted the library.

Volevo farti i complimenti perchè hai reso perfettamente l’idea di quello che, credo, ognuna di noi pensa. Complimenti! I wanted to give you my regards because you have rendered perfectly the idea that each of us, I believe, thinks. Congratulations!

The future will be better tomorrow. Dan Quayle.

I deserve respect for the things I did not do. Dan Quayle.

Nella vita e nelle feste non smettere mai di giocare!

Jim Wall, drummer extraordinaire and good friend.

It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it. Dan Quayle.

It’s wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago. Dan Quayle.

Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child. Dan Quayle.

Adorabile.

Peter Albin in the green room at Fur Peace.

If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check. Dan Quayle.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century. Dan Quayle.

A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls. Dan Quayle.

Minchia questa e fantasticaaaa!

I love this Kevin Morgan painting of Jorma.

This president is going to lead us out of this recovery. Dan Quayle.

The global importance of the Middle East is that it keeps the Far East and the Near East from encroaching on each other. Dan Quayle.

Every once in a while, you let a word or phrase out and you want to catch it and bring it back. You can’t do that. It’s gone, gone forever. Dan Quayle.

Grazie alla fotografa. Thanks to the photographer.

The loss of life will be irreplaceable. Dan Quayle.

We’re all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made. Dan Quayle.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future. Dan Quayle.

Che uomo fortunato che è Luca… What a lucky guy Luke is…

Vanessa, Jorma and John Hurlbut.

In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get – The Future! Dan Quayle.

It’s a question of whether we’re going forward into the future, or past to the back. Dan Quayle.

It’s time for the human race to enter the solar system. Dan Quayle.

Questa è la mia preferita. This one is my favorite.

Ben, Sam, Jim, Stefanie and Peter holding forth at the Fur Peace Ranch.

My friends, no matter how rough the road may be, we can and we will, never, never surrender to what is right. Dan Quayle.

One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice-president, and that one word is ‘to be prepared.’ Dan Quayle.

This election is about who’s going to be the next President of the United States! Dan Quayle.

Veramente bella questa foto. Truly beautiful this photo.

Jorma with lovely Nikon.

Unfortunately, the people of Louisiana are not racists. Dan Quayle.

Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is in the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here. Dan Quayle.

I do have a political agenda. It’s to have as few regulations as possible. Dan Quayle.

“Cosa sono questi occhi stupiti”, diceva una vecchia canzone italiana… “What are those amazing eyes,” said an old Italian song…

Jorma’s family.

I don’t watch it, but I know enough to comment on it. Dan Quayle.

I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made. Dan Quayle.

Che belle le rottoballe! What beautiful bales of hay!

Jorma on his way to Hawaii.

I was known as the chief grave robber of my state. Dan Quayle.

I want to be Robin to Bush’s Batman. Dan Quayle.

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there would be peace. John Lennon

If we don’t succeed we run the risk of failure. Dan Quayle.

Non ti facevo così mainstream. I didn’t think you were that mainstream.

Jack Nicholson has his eyebrows insured. Jack Casady should probably do the same.

I’ve never professed to be anything but an average student. Dan Quayle.

Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it. Dan Quayle.

People who bowl vote. Bowlers are not the cultural elite. Dan Quayle.

Se tutte le serate finissero cosi… If only all nights finished this way…

Don Aters

Reading is like kissing: with someone who doesn’t do it a lot, you notice it on their tongue.

It’s a very good historical book about history. Dan Quayle.

It’s rural America. It’s where I came from. We always refer to ourselves as real America. Rural America, real America, real, real, America. Dan Quayle.

..chi ci ha già rinunciato e ti ride alle spalle forse è ancora più pazzo di te.. …who has already refused and maybe laughs behind your back is even crazier than you..

Rabbits in the road at the Fur Peace Ranch.

Let me just be very clear that the Republican Party will select a nominee that will beat Bill Clinton. Dan Quayle.

Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children. Dan Quayle.

Space is almost infinite. As a matter of fact, we think it is infinite. Dan Quayle.

Sarebbe davvero bello rivedersi! It would be really wonderful to see each other again.

Driving into the Fur Peace Ranch in the early morning.

The more I see, the less I know for sure.

The American people would not want to know of any misquotes that Dan Quayle may or may not make. Dan Quayle.

Tobacco exports should be expanded aggressively because Americans are smoking less. Dan Quayle.

Sentivamo la tua mancanza. We felt your absence.

Brett at Fur Peace.

We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur. Dan Quayle.

The President is going to benefit from me reporting directly to him when I arrive. Dan Quayle.

We have a firm commitment to NATO, we are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a part of Europe. Dan Quayle.

Stupenda.

Don’s Nikon.

We should develop anti-satellite weapons because we could not have prevailed without them in ‘Red Storm Rising.’ Dan Quayle.

We’re going to have the best American educated people in the world. Dan Quayle.

What you guys want, I’m for. Dan Quayle.

Svegliarsi dalla notte e vedere certe sorprese.. To wake up in the night and see certain surprises..

Changing strings.

Welcome to President Bush, Mrs. Bush and my fellow astronauts. Dan Quayle.

The other day the President said, I know you’ve had some rough times, and I want to do something that will show the nation what faith that I have in you, in your maturity and sense of responsibility. He paused, then said, would you like a puppy? Dan Quayle.

I have a very good family. I’m very fortunate to have a very good family. I believe very strongly in the family. It’s one of the things we have in our platform, is to talk about it. Dan Quayle.

Due MITICI! Two MYTHS!

Hubert Sumlin. I love his guitar playing.

When I talked to him on the phone yesterday. I called him George rather than Mr. Vice President. But, in public, it’s Mr. Vice President, because that is who he is. Dan Quayle.

You do the policy. I’ll do the politics. Dan Quayle.

You all look like happy campers to me. Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been, and, as far as I am concerned, happy campers you will always be. Dan Quayle.

Guardali…bellissimi! Look at them…beautiful!

Janis!

We shouldn’t have to be burdened with all the technicalities that come up from time to time with shrewd, smart lawyers interpreting what the Constitution may or may not say. Dan Quayle.

El Salvador is a democracy so it’s not surprising that there are many voices to be heard there. Yet in my conversations with Salvadorans…I have heard a single voice. Dan Quayle.

I spend a great deal of time with the President. We have a very close, personal, loyal relationship. I’m not, as they say, a potted plant in these meetings. Dan Quayle.

Che belli che siete! How beautiful you are!

Warm, friendly people.

I’m going to be a vice president very much like George Bush was. He proved to be a very effective vice president, perhaps the most effective we’ve had in a couple of hundred years. Dan Quayle.

Japan is an important ally of ours. Japan and the United States of the Western industrialized capacity, 60 percent of the GNP, two countries. That’s a statement in and of itself. Dan Quayle.

The thing is, if you control the Senate meetings, you control the gavel. And the gavel is a very important instrument…an instrument of power. An instrument that establishes the agenda. Dan Quayle.

…scusate sono di fretta devo correre a Porcia…..la festa sta’ per iniziare….. Excuse me, I am in a hurry, I should run to Porcia…the party is about to begin….

Lenny Bruce and the Mothers. What a bill.

Votes are like trees, if you are trying to build a forest. If you have more trees than you have forests, then at that point the pollsters will probably say you will win. Dan Quayle.

To those of you who received honors and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States. George W. Bush.

When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $ 2 million missile at a $ 10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive. George W. Bush.

Non è vero, se non fosse stato per Samuele sarei caduta 8000 volte. It’s not true, if it weren’t for Sam I would have fallen 8,000 times.

It was fun driving through Ohio.

You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on. George W. Bush.

A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it. George W. Bush.

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace. George W. Bush.

Voto 10. I vote 10.

Educating myself in the London, Ohio pubic, I mean, public library.

I think we ought to raise the age at which juveniles can have a gun. George W. Bush.

It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it. George W. Bush.

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test. George W. Bush.

Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods. George W. Bush.

We got to put more food on our families. George W. Bush.

Bellissime le mie bimbe.. Most beautiful my bimbos.

The London, Ohio, city hall.

The legislature’s job is to write law. It’s the executive branch’s job to interpret law. George W. Bush.

Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction. George W. Bush.

No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do. George W. Bush.

Ma no te si neanca bona a girar le foto?

Don Aters captures life at the Fur Peace Station.

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first. Ronald Reagan.

A people free to choose will always choose peace. Ronald Reagan.

Ahhh, ecco! Contenta? Ah, there! Happy?

Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement. Ronald Reagan.

But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected I had my high school grades classified Top Secret. Ronald Reagan.

Polyonymous for sure…

Elise Wainani Piliwale and Sam Houston Andrew III

___________________________________

Ants

Posted on June 28, 2013 by J L tagged.

Ants

The word ant is derived from ante of Middle English which in turn is derived from æmette of Old English and is related to the Old High German ?meiza, hence the modern German Ameise.

Many of the shots below, particularly the better ones were taken by Dr. Alex Wild, whose work may be found at www.alexanderwild.com

Dr. Wild is a biologist at the University of Illinois where he studies the evolutionary history of various groups of insects. Alex conducts photography as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work. We highly recommend a visit to his site and note that all of his photographs are copyrighted.

All of these words come from West Germanic *amaitjo, and the original meaning of the word was “the biter” (from Proto-Germanic *ai-, “off, away” + *mait- “cut”).

The family name Formicidae is derived from the Latin form?ca (“ant”) from which the words in other Romance languages such as the Portuguese formiga, Italian formica, Spanish hormiga, Romanian furnic? and French fourmi are derived.

It has been hypothesized that a Proto Indo European word *morwi- was used (Sanskrit vamrah, Latin form?ca, Greek ?????? mýrm?x, Old Church Slavonic mraviji, Old Irish moirb, Old Norse maurr).

From the Greek ?????? mýrm?x, we get the scientific name for the study of ants, myrmecology. This is the Croatian version of the word.

For every human in the world there are one million ants and a human weighs a million times more than an ant, so that works out to the same presence on earth for humans and ants. Taken altogether, they weigh as much as we do taken altogether.

The ant’s sense of smell is as acute as the dog’s. Ants have survived on earth for more than 100 million years. Not many other animals can make that statement. There are more than 12,000 species of ants all over the world. An ant can lift twenty times her own body weight.

Ants have elbowed antennae, metapleural glands, and a constriction of their second abdominal segment into a node-like petiole. The head, mesosoma and metasoma are the three distinct body segments. The petiole forms a narrow waist between their mesosoma and gaster (metasoma).

Ants have an exoskeleton, an external covering that provides a protective casing around the body and a point of attachment for muscles, in contrast to the internal skeletons of humans.

Insects do not have lungs. Oxygen and other gases such as carbon dioxide pass through their exoskeleton via tiny valves called spiracles.

Insects also lack closed blood vessels; instead, they have a long, thin, perforated tube along the top of the body ( the “dorsal aorta”) that functions like a heart, and pumps hemolymph toward the head, thus driving the circulation of the internal fluids. The nervous system consists of a ventral nerve cords that runs the length of the body, with several ganglia and branches along the way.

An ant worker is less than one millionth the size of a human being, but if you weighed all of the ants in the world they would be about the same poundage as all of the human beings in the world. Ants feast on insects and spiders and they clean up ninety percent of their dead bodies dragging them back to their nests for food. Ants spread seeds around the world and they move more soil than earthworms. They live deep in the ground and high up in the trees. Whilst this is true, some homeowners may have seen some ants in their backyards. Ants can become a nuisance when there seems to be an infestation of them. They don’t cause a lot of damage, but they can distrupt the soil around plants. This can have an impact on the growth of the plant. If these ants seem to be causing some problems, homeowners could always visit https://www.lawncare.net/service-areas/michigan/ to see if they could remove this problem. Hopefully, that will keep plants safe. Ants, termites, stingless bees and polybiine wasps make up an astonishing eighty percent of the insect biomass. (Photo: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

Ants are as social as humans, which probably accounts for their success as a species. An ant colony is a superorganism, a social unit. As long as the queen lives, the gene pool is secure. The individual worker, warrior, caregiver is nonreproductive and completely expendable. The colony is immortal, churning out queens and males year after year. Solitary insects are pioneers. They can go to strange places and live for a long time. Ant colonies take time to grow and they move slowly but once they get going it is difficult to halt their progress.

An ant begins as an egg, which if fertilized will be female (diploid). If the egg isn’t fertilized, it will be male (haploid). There is a complete metamorphosis, larval and pupal stages before adulthood. The larva is largely immobile and is fed and cared for by workers. Food is given to the larvae by trophallaxis. The feeding ant regurgitates liquid food from her crop, the “social stomach.” Adults also share food this way. Larvae may also be fed solid food such as pieces of insects brought back to the nest.

The larvae molt several times and then begin the pupal development. Their appendages are free, unlike butterflies at the same stage. Whether the larva becomes a queen, a worker, and what caste she belongs to is determined in some species by what kind of food she is given. Larvae and pupae need to be kept at fairly constant temperatures to ensure proper development, and so often, are moved around among the various brood chambers within the colony.

A new worker spends her first few days of adult life caring for the queen and young. She then graduates to digging and other nest work, and later to defending the nest and foraging. These changes are sometimes fairly sudden, and define what are called temporal castes. An explanation for the sequence is suggested by the high casualties involved in foraging, making it an acceptable risk only for ants who are older and are likely to die soon of natural causes.

Ant species in general have a system in which only the queen and breeding females have the ability to mate. Colonies of these ants are called queen-right.

Some ant nests have multiple queens while others may exist without queens. Workers with the ability to reproduce are called “gamergates” and colonies that lack queens are then called gamergate colonies.

The winged male ants, called drones, emerge from pupae along with the breeding females and these males do nothing in life except eat and mate.

Most ants are univoltine, producing a new generation each year. During the species-specific breeding period, new reproductives, females and winged males leave the colony in what is called a nuptial flight. The males generally fly up into the heavens before the females.

Males then look around to find a common mating ground, for example, a landmark such as a pine tree to which other males in the area converge. Males secrete a mating pheromone that females follow. Females of some species mate with just one male, but in some others they may mate with as many as ten or more different males.

After they mate, females then seek a suitable place to begin a colony. They break off their wings and begin to lay and care for eggs. The females store the sperm they obtain during their nuptial flight to selectively fertilise future eggs.

The first workers to hatch are weak and smaller than later workers, but they begin to serve the colony immediately. They enlarge the nest, forage for food, and care for the other eggs.

Species that have multiple queens may have a queen leaving the nest along with some workers to found a colony at a new site, a process akin to swarming in honeybees.

Anthropomorphized ants have long been used in fables and children’s stories to represent industriousness and cooperative effort.

In the Book of Proverbs in the Bible, ants are held up as a good example for humans for their hard work and cooperation. Note Aesop’s version of this in his fable The Ant and the Grasshopper, a story that I think about quite frequently.

In the Qur’an, Sulayman (Arabic: ???????) is said to have heard and understood an ant warning other ants to return home to avoid being accidentally crushed by Sulayman and his marching army.

In parts of Africa, ants are considered to be the messengers of the deities.

In Hopi mythology, ants are considered as the very first animals.

Ant bites are often said to have curative properties. The sting of some species of Pseudomyrmex is claimed to give fever relief, and ant bites are used in the initiation ceremonies of some Amazon Indian cultures as a test of endurance. (This is an Alex Wild photograph, copyright, all rights reserved.)

Ants communicate with each other using pheromones, sounds, and touch. The use of pheromomes as chemical signals is more developed in ants than in other hymenoptera. Ants perceive smells with their long, thin, and mobile antennae. The paired antennae provide information about the direction and intensity of scents.

Most ants live on the ground, so they use the soil surface to leave pheromone trails that may be followed by other ants. In species that forage in groups, a forager that finds food marks a trail on the way back to the colony; this trail is followed by other ants, these ants then reinforce the trail when they head back with food to the colony. (Photo copyright: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

When the food source is gone, no new trails are marked by returning ants and the scent slowly dissipates. When an established path to a food source is blocked by an obstacle, the foragers leave the path to explore new routes. If an ant is successful, it leaves a new trail marking the shortest route on its return. Successful trails are followed by more ants, reinforcing better routes and gradually identifying the best path.

An injured or crushed ant emits an alarm pheromone that sends nearby ants into an attack frenzy and attracts more ants from farther away.

Some ant species use “propaganda pheromones” to confuse enemy ants and make them fight among themselves.

Pheromones are produced by Dufour’s glands, poison glands and glands on the hindgut, pygidium, rectum, sternum, and hind tibia. Pheromones also are exchanged, mixed with food, and passed by trophallaxis, transferring information within the colony.

Trophallaxis (regurgitation) allows other ants to detect what task group (foraging or nest maintenance, for example) to which other colony members belong. (Photo copyright: Dr. Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

In ant species with queen castes, when the dominant queen stops producing a specific pheromone, workers begin to raise new queens in the colony. The latest movement in myrmecology is the study of these pheromones using very delicate instruments.

Janis Joplin is stridulating here.

She is rubbing a comb over a ribbed guïro.

If she were doing this quicker and it were a higher pitch, it would sound like a grasshopper, a cricket, a cicada… all stridulating insects. It’s not unlike the most unwelcome of insectual pests, locusts, which are wholly unpleasant and often swarm in the thousands and even millions, as explained here – https://www.evolutiondarlington.com/what-are-locusts-and-why-do-they-swarm/.

Some ants produce sounds by stridulation, using the gaster segments and their mandibles. Sounds may be used to communicate with colony members or with other species. See how much like a guïro the ant’s sounding board looks?

You can just about hear ant stridulation in one or two species, although you can hear it very well in crickets and cicadas. I have always loved the sound which seems to be hypnotic in the way that chanting is.

Ants stridulate to communicate.

It’s a Ugandan jumping spider who has taken on the ant shape to confuse predators who won’t eat stinging ants. (Alex Wild took this photograph, which is copyrighted: www.alexanderwild.com)

Ants attack and defend themselves by biting and, in many species, by stinging, often injecting or spraying chemicals such as formic acid.

Bullet Ants (Paraponera) in Central and South America, are considered to have the most painful sting of any insect, although it is usually not fatal to humans. This sting is given the highest rating on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index.

The sting of Jack jumper ants (less than a centimeter long with bright orange pincers) can be fatal and an antivenom has been developed for it.

Fire Ants (Solenopsis) are unique in having a poison sac containing piperidine alkaloids. Their stings are painful and can be dangerous to hypersensitive people.

Trap-jaw ants of the genus Odontomachus are equipped with mandibles called trap-jaws, which snap shut faster than any other predatory appendages within the animal kingdom.

One study of Odontomachus bauri recorded peak speeds of between 126 and 230 km/h (78 – 143 mph), with the jaws closing within 130 microseconds on average.

The ants were also observed to use their jaws as a catapult to eject intruders or fling themselves backward to escape a threat.

Before striking, the ant opens its mandibles extremely widely and locks them in this position by an internal mechanism. Energy is stored in a thick band of muscle and explosively released when triggered by the stimulation of sensory organs resembling hairs on the inside of the mandibles. The mandibles also permit slow and fine movements for other tasks.

Trap-jaws also are seen in the following genera: Anochetus, Orectognathus, and Strumigenys, plus some members of the Dacetini tribe, which are viewed as examples of convergent evolution. (Photo: Alex Wild. All rights reserved.)

A Malaysian species of ant in the Camponotus cylindricus group has enlarged mandibular glands that extend into their gaster. When disturbed, workers rupture the membrane of the gaster, causing a burst of secretions containing acetophenones and other chemicals that immobilize small insect attackers. The worker subsequently dies.

Suicidal defences by workers are also noted in the Brazilian ant Forelius pusillus where a small group of ants leaves the security of the nest after sealing the entrance from the outside each evening.

In addition to defence against predators, ants need to protect their colonies from pathogens.

Some worker ants maintain the hygiene of the colony and their activities include necrophory (undertaking), the disposal of dead nest-mates.

Oleic acid has been identified as the compound released from dead ants that triggers necrophoric behavior in Atta mexicana while workers of Linepithema humile react to the absence of characteristic chemicals (dolichodial and iridomyrmecin) present on the cuticle of their living nestmates to trigger similar behavior.

Nests may be protected from physical threats such as flooding and overheating by elaborate nest architecture.

Workers of Cataulacus muticus, an arboreal species that lives in plant hollows, respond to flooding by drinking water inside the nest, and excreting it outside.

Camponotus anderseni, which nests in the cavities of wood in mangrove habitats, deals with submergence under water by switching to anerobic respiration.

Many animals can learn by imitation, but ants may be the only group besides mammals where interactive teaching has been observed. (Photo: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

An experienced forager of Temnothorax albipennis will lead a new nest-mate to freshly discovered food by the process of tandem running.

The leading tutor teaches the follower. The leader is acutely sensitive to the progress of the follower and slows down when the follower lags and speeds up when the follower gets too close.

Experiments with colonies of Cerapachys biroi suggest that an individual may choose nest roles based on her previous experience.

A generation of identical workers was divided into two groups whose outcome in food foraging was controlled. One group was continually rewarded with prey, while it was made certain that the other failed. As a result, members of the successful group intensified their foraging attempts while the unsuccessful group ventured out fewer and fewer times. A month later, the successful foragers continued in their role while the others had moved to brood care.

Ants generally build complex nests, but some species are nomadic and do not build permanent structures.

Ants may form underground nests or build them in trees. These nests may be found in the ground, under stones or logs, inside logs, hollow stems, or even acorns.

Materials used for construction include soil and plant matter, and ants carefully select their nest sites.

Temnothorax albipennis avoid sites with dead ants since these may indicate the presence of pests or disease. They are quick to abandon established nests at the first sign of threats.

The army ants of South America and the driver ants of Africa do not build permanent nests, but instead, alternate between nomadism and stages where the workers form a temporary nest from their own bodies, by holding each other together. This is called a bivouac. (Photo copyright: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

The weaver ants (Oecophylla) build nests in trees by attaching leaves together, first pulling them together with bridges of workers and then inducing their larvae to produce silk as they are moved along the leaf edges. Some species of Polyrhacis nest similarly.

Other ant species build nests in and on buildings. Interior spaces in walls, windows, and even electric appliances such as clocks, lamps, and radios in the interior of buildings may be used as sites for nests.

Ants are usually predators, scavengers, and indirect herbivores, but a few have evolved specialised ways of obtaining nutrition.

Leafcutter ants (Atta and Acromyrmex) feed exclusively on a fungus that grows only within their colonies. They collect leaves which are taken to the colony, cut into tiny pieces and placed in fungal gardens.

The largest of these ants cut stalks, smaller workers chew the leaves and the smallest tend the fungus. Leafcutter ants are sensitive enough to recognise the reaction of the fungus to different plant material, apparently detecting chemical signals from the fungus.

If a particular type of leaf is found to be toxic to the fungus, the colony will no longer collect it. The ants feed on structures produced by the fungi called gongylydia. The white clumps are gongylydia.

Symbiotic bacteria on the exterior surface of the ants produce antibiotics that kill bacteria introduced into the nest that may harm the fungi.

Ants when they forage for food travel distances of up to 200 metres (700 ft) from their nest and scent trails allow them to find their way back even in the dark.

Day-foraging ants in hot, dry places can easily die from the heat, so the ability to find the shortest route back is essential.

Diurnal desert ants of the genus Cataglyphis (Sahara desert ants, for example) navigate by keeping track of direction as well as distance travelled. Distances travelled are measured using an internal pedometer that keeps count of the steps taken and also by evaluating the movement of objects they see.

Ants measure direction by using the position of the sun.

They can also make use of visual landmarks when available as well as olfactory and tactile cues to navigate.

Some species of ant are able to use the earth’s magnetic field for navigation. The compound eyes of ants have cells that detect polarised light from the Sun, which is used to determine direction.

These polarization detectors are sensitive to the ultraviolet region of the light spectrum.

In some army ant species, a group of foragers who become separated from the main column sometimes may turn back on themselves and form a circular ant mill. The workers may then run around continuously until they die of exhaustion.

Such wheels have been observed in other ant species, notably when a group has fallen into or been overcome with water, whereby the group rotates in a partially submerged circle on the surface of the water, which might allow for survival of a brief flooding.

Worker ants do not have wings and reproductive females lose their wings after their mating flights. Therefore, unlike their wasp ancestors, most ants travel by walking.

Jerdon’s jumping ant (Harpegnathos saltator) is able to jump by synchronising the action of its mid and hind pairs of legs.

There are several species of gliding ant including Cephalotes atratus; this may be a common trait among most arboreal ants. Ants with this ability are able to control the direction of their descent while falling. (Photo copyright Alex Wild. www.alexanderwild.com)

Some ants can form chains to bridge gaps over water, underground, or through spaces in vegetation.

Some species, such as fire ants, also form floating rafts that help them survive floods. These rafts may also have a role in allowing ants to colonise islands.

Polyrhacis sokolova, a species of ant found in Australian mangrove swamps, can swim and live in underwater nests. Since they lack gills, they go to trapped pockets of air in the submerged nests to breathe.

Ants have different kinds of societies. Bulldog ants are among the biggest of ants. They are eusocial, that is very social, but their behavior is poorly developed compared to other species. Each individual hunts alone, using her large eyes instead of chemical senses to find prey. (Photo: Alex Wild, all rights reserved)

Species such as Tetramorium caespitum attack and take over neighboring ant colonies. Others invade colonies to steal eggs or larvae, which they either eat or raise as workers or slaves.

Amazon ants are incapable of feeding themselves and need captured workers to survive. Captured workers of the enslaved species Temnothorax have evolved a counter strategy, destroying just the female pupae of the slave-making Protomognathus americanus, but sparing the males (who don’t take part in slave-raiding as adults).

Ants know their relatives through their scent, which comes from hydrocarbon-laced secretions that coat their exoskeletons. If an ant is separated from its original colony, it will eventually lose the colony scent. Any ant that enters a colony without a matching scent will be attacked.

(Photo copyright: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

Ants attack each other even if they are of the same species because the genes responsible for pheromone production are different between them. The argentine ant, however, does not have this characteristic, due to lack of genetic diversity, and has become a global pest because of it.

Parasitic ant species enter the colonies of host ants and establish themselves as social parasites; species such as Strumigenys xenos are entirely parasitic and do not have workers, but instead, rely on the food gathered by their Strumigenys perplexa hosts.

This form of parasitism is seen across many ant genera, but the parasitic ant is usually a species that is closely related to its host. A variety of methods are employed to enter the nest of the host ant. A parasitic queen may enter the host nest before the first brood has hatched, establishing herself prior to development of a colony scent. Other species use pheromones to confuse the host ants or to trick them into carrying the parasitic queen into the nest. Some simply fight their way into the nest. (Photo: Alex Wild)

A conflict between the sexes of a species is seen in some species of ants with these reproductives apparently competing to produce offspring that are as closely related to them as possible.

The sperm of the male ant appears to be able to destroy the female DNA within a fertilized egg, giving birth to a male that is a clone of its father. Meanwhile the female queens make clones of themselves to carry on the royal female line.

An extreme of sexual conflict is seen in Wasmannia auropunctata where the queens produce diploid daughters by thelytokous parthenogenesis (giving virgin birth to female clones) and males produce clones by a process whereby a diploid egg loses its maternal contribution to produce haploid males who are clones of the father.

^{Ants are partners with many other beings including other ant species, other insects, plants, and fungi.}

^{Also, many other animals and even some plants prey upon them.}

^{There are arthropods who spend part of their lives within ant nests, either preying on them, their larvae, their eggs, consuming the food stores of the ants, or hiding from predators. These are inquilines and they may bear a close resemblance to ants. (Alex Wild, photographer, all rights reserved. www.alexanderwild.com)}

^{The nature of this mymyrmecomorphy, ant mimicing, varies, with some cases involving Batesian mimicry where the mimic reduces the risk of predation. (Alex Wild, copyright)}

^{Other cases show Wasmannian mimicry, normally seen only in inquilines. (www.alexanderwild.com copyright Alex Wild)}

Then, in a sense, ants prey on other animals, sometimes rather benignly. Aphids and other hemipteran insects secrete a sweet liquid called honeydew. The sugars in honeydew are a high-energy food source, which many ant species collect, almost as we collect milk from cows.

The aphids secrete the honeydew in response to ants tapping them with their antennae. The ants in turn keep predators away from the aphids and will move them from one feeding location to another. A human being can tap an aphid with a hair of the head and the same secretion will happen.

Many colonies will take the aphids with them when they move to a new area, thus ensuring a continued supply of honeydew.

Ants also tend mealybugs to harvest their honeydew which can allow mealybugs to become a serious pest of pineapples if ants are present to protect them from their natural enemies.

Ant loving (myrmecophilous) caterpillars of the butterfly family, Lycaenidae (blues, coppers, or hairstreaks) are herded by the ants, led to feeding areas in the daytime, and brought inside the ants’ nest at night.

The caterpillars have a gland which secretes honeydew when the ants massage them. Some caterpillars produce vibrations and sounds that are perceived by the ants.

Other caterpillars have evolved from ant-loving to ant-eating: these myrmecophagous caterpillars secrete a pheromone that makes the ants act as if the caterpillar is one of their own larvae. The caterpillar is then taken into the ant nest where it feeds on the ant larvae.

The tribe Attini, fungus growing ants, which includes leafcutters cultivates certain species of fungus in the Leucoagricus or Leucoprinus genera of the Agariceae family.

The ants and the fungus depend upon each other for survival.

The ant Allomerus decemarticulatus has evolved a three-way association with the host plant, Hirtella physophora (Chrysobalanaceae), and a sticky fungus which is used to trap their insect prey. Comme d’habitude dans les dossiers sur les espèces on s’attaque à celles qui ont quelque chose d’époustouflant voir d’extraordinaire et bien les Allomerus decemarticulatus sont extraordinaires dans le fait qu’elles construisent des pièges qui leur servent à attraper leurs proies. (As usual with species one is attracted to those who are somewhat bizarre or even extraordinary and Allomerus decemarticulatus are extraordinary in that they build traps for catching their prey.)

C’est une fourmi arboricole qui creuse des petits trous appelés “domaties” dans les branches d’une plante.
Les fourmis attendent à l’entrer de ces trous un insecte y mettant ses pattes … Et l’attrapent ! (Allomerus decemarticulatus is a tree ant who digs little holes called “domaties” in the branches of a plant, Hirtella physophora. The ants wait by the entry to these holes and when the insect puts its legs there… they catch it!).

Lemon ants make devil’s gardens by killing surrounding plants with their stings and leaving a pure patch of lemon ant trees, (Duroia hirsuta).

This modification of the forest provides the ants with more nesting sites inside the stems of the Duroia trees.

Although some ants obtain nectar from flowers, pollination by ants is somewhat rare. Some plants have special nectar exuding structures, extrafloral nectaries that provide food for ants, who in turn protect the plant from more damaging insects. (Photo: Alex Wild)

Species such as the bullhorn acacia (Acacia cornigera) in Central America have hollow thorns that house colonies of stinging ants (Pseudomyrmex ferruginea) who defend the tree against insects, browsing mammals, and epiphtic vines.

Studies suggest that plants also obtain nitrogen from the ants. In return, the ants obtain food from protein- and lipid-rich Beltian bodies. (Photo: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

Another example of this type of ectosymbiosis comes from the Macaranga tree, which has stems adapted to house colonies of Crematogaster ants.

Seed dispersal by ants (myrmecochory) is widespread and estimates suggest that nearly 9% of all plant species may have such ant associations. The ants are collecting a protein rich material attached to the seed. They do not eat the actual seed, which is later discarded in the ant midden. This makes a perfect seedbed. This symbiotic relationship is called myrmecochory.

Elaiosomes (Greek élaion “oil” and sóma “body”) are fleshy structures that are attached to the seeds of many plant species. The elaiosome is rich in lipids and proteins and may be variously shaped. Many plants have elaiosomes that attract ants, which take the seed to their nest and feed the elaiosome to their larvae. After the larvae have consumed the elaiosome, the ants take the seed to their waste disposal area, which is rich in nutrients from the ant frass and dead bodies, where the seeds germinate. (Photograph: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

Some plants in fire-prone grassland systems are particularly dependent on ants for their survival and dispersal because the seeds are transported to safety below the ground.

A convergence (mimicry?), is seen in the eggs of stick insects. They have an edible elaiosome-like structure and are taken into the ant nest where the young hatch.

Most ants are predatory and some prey on and obtain food from other social insects including other ants. Some species specialise in preying on termites (Megaponera and Termitopone) while a few Cerapachyinae prey on other ants. While no one is sad to see the demise of termites thanks to the ants, ants aren’t particularly welcome either and are both pests most people will want to rid their properties of – you can view website of specialist exterminators and get in touch with them to begin this process.

Some termites, including Nasutitermes corniger, form associations with certain ant species to keep away predatory ant species.

The tropical wasp Mischocyttarus drewseni coats the pedicel of its nest with an ant-repellant chemical. (The pedicel is the part at the top that attaches the nest to a tree or a building.) It is suggested that many tropical wasps may build their nests in trees and cover them to protect themselves from ants.

Stingless bees (Trigona and Melipona) use chemical defences against ants.

Stingless bees, sometimes called meliponines, are a large group of bees (approximately 500 species) belonging in the family Apidae, and are closely related to common honey bees, carpenter bees, orchid bees and bumblebees. Their name is slightly misleading as male bees and bees of other species, such as those in the family Andrenidae, can not sting. Meliponines have stingers, but they are highly reduced and cannot be used for defense.

Flies in the Old World genus Bengalia (Calliphoridae) prey on ants and are kleptoparasites, snatching prey or brood from the mandibles of adult ants.

Wingless and legless females of the Malaysian phorid fly (Vestigipoda longiseta) live in the nests of ants of the genus Aenictus and are cared for by the ants. Most of what you see in the lower of the two photoes above are larvae of army ants of the genus Aenictus. The odd one out is the whiter ‘larva’ in the centre-which is not a larva at all, but a fully adult female of the phorid fly Vestigipoda longiseta.

Fungi in the genera Cordyceps and Ophiocordyceps infect ants. Ants react to their infection by climbing up plants and sinking their mandibles into plant tissue. The fungus kills the ants, grows on their remains, and produces a fruiting body. It appears that the fungus alters the behaviour of the ant to help disperse its spores in a microhabitat that best suits the fungus. This behavior is induced when the fungus takes partial control over the ant’s brain. (Photo: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

Strepsipteran parasites also manipulate their ant host to climb grass stems, to help the parasite find mates.

A nematode (Myrmeconema neotropicum) that infects canopy ants (Cephalotes atratus) causes the black-coloured gasters of workers to turn red. The parasite also alters the behaviour of the ant, causing them to carry their gasters high. The conspicuous red gasters are mistaken by birds for ripe fruits such as Hyeronima alchorneoides and eaten. The droppings of the bird are collected by other ants and fed to their young, leading to further spread of the nematode. (Photo: Alex Wild)

South American poison dart frogs in the genus Dendrobates (tree climbers) feed mainly on ants, and the toxins in their skin may come from the ants.

This Central American species (Dendrobates) occurs from southeastern Nicaragua to northwestern Colombia. Though mostly distributed in humid lowlands and premontane rainforests from 0-800 m elevation, some montane morphs can be found up to 1200 m elevation. Type locality is the Pacific island of Taboga in the Bay of Panamá. In 1932, that morph was introduced to the Hawaiian Island of O’ahu.

Army ants forage in a wide roving column, attacking any animals in that path that are unable to escape. The name army ant (legionary ant, marabunta) applied to over 200 ant species, in different lineages, due to their aggressive predatory foraging groups, known as “raids”, in which huge numbers of ants forage simultaneously over a certain area, en masse.

Another shared feature is that, unlike most ant species, army ants do not construct permanent nests; an army ant colony moves almost incessantly over the time it exists. All species are members of the true ant family, but several groups have independently evolved the same basic behavioral and ecological syndrome. This syndrome is often referred to as “legionary behavior”, and is another example of convergent evolution. (Photo: Alex Wild www.alexanderwild.com)

In Central and South America, Eciton burchellii is the swarming ant most commonly attended by “ant-following” birds such as antbirds and woodcreepers. The objective of the army-ant-following birds is simple: to devour the grasshoppers, katydids, crickets and other insects that think they are escaping death by flying away from the swarm.

Birds indulge in a peculiar behaviour called anting that, as yet, is not fully understood. Here birds rest on ant nests, or pick and drop ants onto their wings and feathers; this may be a means to remove ectoparasites from the birds.

Anteaters, aardvarks, pangolins, echidnas, and numbats have special adaptations for living on a diet of ants. These adaptations include long, sticky tongues to capture ants and strong claws to break into ant nests.

Brown bears (Ursus arctos) have been found to feed on ants. About 12%, 16%, and 4% of their fecal volume in spring, summer, and autumn, respectively, is composed of ants.

The life of ants is as strange as anything in science fiction. They are fascinating animals. During the writing of this I have imagined myself as an ant being raised from an egg in a colony. I have dreamed that I became an ant.

Thank you and I’ll see you next week.

_______________________________

Delta Blues

Posted on June 16, 2013 by J L tagged.

During May and June of 1901 and 1902 I was engaged in excavating for the Peabody Museum of Harvard University a mound in Coahama County, northern Mississippi.

At these times we had some opportunity of observing the Negroes and their ways at close range, as we lived in tent or cabin very much as do the rest of the small farmers and laborers, white and black, of the district.

Busy archaeologically, we had not very much time left for folk-lore, in itself of not easy excavation, but willy-nilly our ears were beset with an abundance of ethnological material in song, words and music.

In spite of faulty memory and musical incompetency, what follows, collected by Mr. Farabee and myself, may perhaps be accepted as notes, suggestions for future study in classification, and incidents of interest in the recollecting, possibly in the telling.

The music of the Negroes we listened to may be put under three heads: the songs sung by our men when at work digging or wheeling on the mound, unaccompanied; the songs of these same men at quarters or on the march, with guitar accompaniment; and the songs, unaccompanied, of the indigenous Negroes, indigenous opposed to our men imported from Clarksdale, fifteen miles distant.

Most of the noise of the township was caused by our men, nine to fifteen in number, at their work.

On their beginning a trench at the surface the woods for a day would echo their yelling with faithfulness.

The next day or two these artists being, like the Bayreuth orchestra, sunk out of sight, there would arise from behind the dump heap a not unwholesome mugmós as of the quiescent Furies.

Of course this singing assisted the physical labor in the same way as that of sailors tugging ropes or soldiers invited to march by drum and band.

They tell, in fact, of a famous singer besought by his co-workers not to sing a particular song, for it made them work too hard, and a singer of good voice and endurance is sometimes hired for the very purpose of arousing and keeping up the energy of labor.

This singing in the trenches may be subdivided into melodic and rhythmic: the melodic into sacred and profane, the rhythmic into general and apposite.

Our men had equal penchants for hymns and “ragtime.”

The Methodist hymns sung on Sundays were repeated in unhappy strains, often lead by one as choragus, with a refrain in “tutti,” hymns of the most doleful import.

Rapid changes were made from these to “ragtime” melodies of which “Molly Brown” and “Goo-goo Eyes” were great favorites.

Undoubtedly picked up from passing theatrical troupes, the “ragtime” sung for us quite inverted the theory of its origin.

These syncopated melodies, sung or whistled, generally in strict tempo, kept up hour after hour a not ineffective rhythm, which we decidedly should have missed had it been absent.

More interesting humanly were the distichs and improvisations in rhythm more or less phrased sung to an intoning more or less approaching melody.

These ditties and distichs were either of a general application referring to manners, customs, and events of Negro life or of special appositeness improvised on the spur of the moment on a topic then interesting.

Improvising sometimes occurred in the general class, but it was more likely to be merely a variation of some one sentiment.

This tantalizing report was written by Charles Peabody, an archeologist at Harvard, and one can only wish that there would have been some followup studies at that time on the music in the Mississippi Delta.

Charles Peabody and his team may have heard the earliest forms of Delta blues.

My wfie Elise Wainani Piliwale studied at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. She tells me stories about Delta blues.

Twenty years before Elise, another person dear to me, Bill Ham, father of the modern light show, attended Delta State because, he said, it was the only school in his area to offer an art major.

The Delta is a flat, very flat alluvial plain and it must have been the real delta once, the place where the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, but the river has brought so much soil from the rest of the country down here that her mouth is now far to the south.

Frances (Fanny) Kemble wrote Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839. She is a sharp observer and her story is of great interest as a kind of prelude to the narrative of life in the Delta.

Dockery Plantation was wrested from the Mississippi mud around 1895 by Will Dockery. It had a post office, a commissary and a cotton gin. Many blues people spent time here, among them one of the first, Charley Patton, who mentored Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King and Muddy Waters.

Parchman Farm, the Mississippi state penitentiary for men, was part plantation, part prison. Booker (Bukka) White spent time here and wrote Parchman Farm Blues. Alan Lomax made many recordings here for the Library of Congress.

Although Blind Lemon Jefferson (1893-1929) was born south of Dallas near Wortham, Texas, and he has a distinct Texas sound in his voice, he spent much of his life in the Delta.

Howlin’ Wolf remembered seeing Blind Lemon in Mississippi in 1926, the same year he first saw Charley Patton.

Jefferson was very well liked in the Delta, where everyone tried to copy him.

Black Snake Moan shows Blind Lemon’s great voice and it was very popular in the Delta. The song is in C and the guitar playing is very good, fluid, in good time and most interesting.

Blind Lemon goes to an A (minor) before playing G, rather unusual in this style. It’s a twelve bar blues but he leaves in an extra measure here and there, so the form becomes a 14 bar frequently. The playing is very pentatonic.

A word here about keys. These recordings are almost a hundred years old now and tuning could be an arbitrary process, then and now.

Also the Delta blues people used different tunings such as DADFAD for the guitar low to high (Skip James) or open G, also called “Spanish” tuning DGDGBD (Charley Patton, Robert Johnson and many others).

And then some players would tune down a whole tone and put the capo on the second fret, so it’s not like we’re hearing a piano or a harmonica where the tuning is set. On the guitar as on all the stringed instruments the tuning can easily be wandering and imperfect.

Blind Lemon’s skillful guitar playing and impressive vocal range influenced Furry Lewis, Charlie Patton, Barbecue Bob and many other players up to the present time.

Ralph Lembo, a Sicilian-born dry goods salesman who owned a furniture store in Itta Bena, Mississippi, arranged for Jefferson to play in his store. Lembo charged customers 25¢ admission for a view of the artist, but after three hours of playing music Blind Lemon refused to continue because the money didn’t look good.

Another financial dispute marred his performance at Itta Bena’s Rolling Wall High School: ‘They had a big dance there and Lemon come in and play, and they was chargin’ 75¢ to come in,’ David Edwards recalled. ‘That was a lot of money then, and they couldn’t get him to play for that 75¢.’” Lembo’s attempt to pair Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton at a recording session also failed.

One Dime Blues is a fun tune to play on the guitar, but it’s difficult to play it as fast and fluid as Blind Lemon does.

See That My Grave Is Kept Clean is in E and everyone has done this song, including me. Lemon had a great voice, two octave range, and he sang in a clear, high style.

Charley Patton lived most of his life on Dockery Plantation. He was a small man, maybe five feet seven and weighing 135 pounds, but when he began to sing, his voice was strong and clear. Howlin’ Wolf said he had the voice of a lion. It was not only low, but wide and very clear. It was very strange to hear that big voice coming out of that little man.

Charley Patton had a large bag of showman’s tricks, theatrics, clowning, playing the guitar behind his back, between his legs. This is his youngest daughter Rosetta holding his portrait.

Charley Patton plays Spoonful Blues in the “Spanish” tuning DGDGBD with the capo on the second fret. He plays the guitar in his lap. The chord outline is very unusual and interesting. There is a little intro in E and then he goes to C# F# B E. Patton’s use of the bottleneck has a lot of vibrato and expression. He makes the guitar sound like a voice.

Charley Jordan plays Spoonful in G (so G E A D G) and does a good job. Mississippi John Hurt’s version is characteristically mellow, soft, kind. Comparing his version with Charley Patton’s tells you a lot about both men.

Patton’s Spoonful is about drug addiction and murder. Mississippi John Hurt’s is a love song. And they’re both singing the same song!

Howlin’ Wolf’s Spoonful, a different song entirely, is a love song too, come to think of it. That’s a regular sized guitar that Wolf’s playing. He was a giant, in more ways than one.

Charley Patton’s High Water Everywhere is the story of the 1927 Mississippi flood, a terrible event, that was a contributing factor in the Northern Migration (1920s) of black people to places like Detroit, Chicago, New York, Oakland where they started new lives and new blues styles.

High Water Everywhere is done in two parts and the guitar is tuned DGDGBD, open G tuning, “Spanish” tuning. A capo is put on the third fret so that it becomes an open Bb tuning.

He’s hitting the guitar, he’s stomping on the floor and he’s shouting and hollering. There is a very strong percussive feeling of tragedy and despair.

This was an area of land the size of New England, and it was flooded for five months.

This is a man who looked like this and sang like something else entirely.

Eddie James “Son” House, Jr. (1902-1988) sang Clarksdale Moan. He was a preacher and pastor for years, but at 25 he became a blues man.

In a short career interrupted by a spell in Parchman Farm penitentiary, Son House developed to the point that Charley Patton deigned to invite Son House to share engagements, and to accompany him to a 1930 recording session for Paramount Records.

Their records, issued with perfect blues timing at the beginning of the Depression, did not sell and did not lead to national recognition for either musician.

Son was popular, and in the 1930s, together with Willie Brown, he was the leading musician of Coahama County.

Son House had a big influence on a lot of people, including Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.

In 1941 and 1942, House and the members of his band were recorded by Alan Lomax and John W. Work for Yale and Fisk University. The following year, Son House left the Delta for Rochester, New York and gave up music.

In 1964, a group of young white record collectors (including the great harmonica player Al Wilson) discovered House, whom they knew of from his records issued by Paramount and by the Library of Congress.

With their encouragement, he relearned his style and repertoire and enjoyed a career as an entertainer to young white audiences in the coffee houses, folk festivals and concert tours of the American Folk Music Revival, so he was now a folk singer.

He still played with his old strength and wild abandon, especially with his right hand which flailed and thrashed across the guitar in such songs as Death Letter Blues which features a classic Delta riff beautifully played.

Son House recorded several albums, and some informally taped concerts have also been issued as albums. He died in 1988.

Tommy Johnson and Charley Patton were from Drew, Mississippi (so was Roebuck Staples). Patton was loud, strong and passionate, but Tommy Johnson was probably the better guitar player with a rock steady sense of rhythm.

Johnson recorded Canned Heat Blues in 1928, telling about his struggles with alcohol addiction.

Sterno was popular during the Great Depression in hobo camps, or “jungles”, when the Sterno would be squeezed through cheesecloth or a sock and the resulting liquid mixed with fruit juice to make “Jungle Juice” or “Squeeze”. I remember finding cans of this stuff near railroad tracks when I was a boy.

They didn’t use it for cooking; they used it for the methanol and ethanol it contained.

On Canned Heat Blues, Tommy Johnson plays a guitar part in D that every rock and roll player will recognize, a very steady boogie beat, and he sings in a voice that slips easily into falsetto, a beautiful blues that is very soulful, telling about his self destructive streak.

Tommy Johnson had much more talent than fame or riches. He was not the first nor the last to have that distinction.

Tommy Johnson was born around 1896 and he died 1956 in Crystal Springs, Mississippi.

He was the first Delta musician to claim that his talent had come from selling his soul to the devil.

Robert Johnson would later, and more famously, make the same claim. Playing and practicing a lot probably had something to do with these musicians’ prodigious development too. The devil was no joke in Mississippi in the 1920s, though.

Tommy Johnson had a stutter and a lisp. H.C. Speir who was recording him said he sounded like a snake, but when Johnson began to sing, as is so often the case with vocalists and their speech defects, the stutter and lisp disappeared immediately, and a strong, confident voice took over.

Cool Drink of Water Blues is in F and it shows Johnson as a master singer sliding up into a high yodel that Jimmie Rodgers must have heard. “I asked her for water and she gave me gasoline.” Great singing, great playing.

“People’d walk five or six or ten miles to hear him, if they heard he was gon’ be in town,” says Houston Stackhouse, a guitar player, “They’d say, ‘Tommy Johnson’s in town! Got to go hear Tommy’ Yeah, he’d draw a crowd, man….They’d block the streets.”

I love these Delta blues and always have since I knew what they were. People like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Son House, Tommy Johnson, Willie Brown, Ishmon Bracey, Kid Bailey, Arthur Crudup, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, they all play such great music.

Think of all the ones that we don’t know, because it is so hit and miss, so accidental the ones who survived on records for us to hear. Whom did we miss? So many, probably most of the great players have died unheard of and in oblivion.

My grandfather on my mother’s side was only one of many, many people who sat out in the dark playing after a hard day in the fields playing their beautiful pure music. Stomping, giving life to these songs, as old as life itself. I remember them all in vivid detail. Old songs from the olden time.

All of these songs stay with me, but two of them are particularly haunting, Geeshie Wiley’s Last Kind Words and Skip James’ Devil Got My Woman.

Geeshie Wiley was from Natchez, Mississippi, according to Ishmon Bracey.

She played guitar on Elvie Thomas’ Motherless Child Blues, an unusual 16 bar blues (the first line is sung three times).

Last Kind Words doesn’t have the usual 12 bar structure but it is a real blues in feeling, a very beautiful and even mystical song. The key is E but the first chord for the vocal is A minor and she sings the C in that chord. Her playing and singing are very relaxed. She doesn’t push. The music and words just seem to pour out slowly.

The last kind word I heard my daddy say, Lord, the last kind word I heard my daddy say, If I die, if I die in the German war, I want you to send my body, send it to my mother, Lord. If I get killed, if I get killed, please don’t bury my soul, I say just leave me out, let the buzzards eat me whole…

Skip James tuned his guitar to DADFAD or EBEGBE. It doesn’t matter really since they are both the same. It’s an open minor tuning and it depends on whether you use a capo at the second fret or not. If you tune it DADFAD and put a capo on the second fret, it’s going to be EBEGBE.

Most of the Delta people who used another tuning besides standard, tuned in the “Spanish” manner (open G), that is DGDGBD which has a major feeling, so James DADFAD tuning is minor and haunting already and then when his voice comes out, there is just nothing like it.

Skip James had married Oscella Robinson, a preacher’s daughter, educated and from a good family. He and Oscella moved to Texas, where she deserted him to be with a World War I veteran. James was grief stricken and he had thoughts of suicide and violent revenge. He didn’t remarry for twenty years. The result of this was one of the most amazing songs ever written, Devil Got My Woman.

I’d rather be the devil, to be that woman man. I’d rather be the devil, to be that woman man. Aw, nothin’ but the devil, changed my baby’s mind. Was nothin’ but the devil, changed my baby’s mind. I laid down last night, laid down last night. I laid down last night, tried to take my rest. My mind got to ramblin’, like wild geese from the west, from the west…

In Terry Zwigoff’s wonderful film, Ghost World, Enid (Thora Birch) asks the record collector (Steve Buscemi), “Where can I get other records like this?” He replies, “There are no other records like this,” which is exactly right.

On Devil Got My Woman, Skip James is playing in D minor (tuning DADFAD). After a short introduction he begins the tune in the dominant (A minor) in a high, eerie, lonesome voice. This is just not like any other singing that I know of. As with all great art, it scares you, it’s coming from somewhere else.

Robert Johnson (1911-1938) studied the music of Skip James and always returned to it as a source of inspiration.

Johnson played the harmonica, the jaw harp and the diddley bow long before he picked up a guitar. To make a diddley bow, you could drive two nails into a plank, tie some wire to them, broom wire, cotton baling wire. Then, for a bridge, you could shove a piece of wood or an empty can under the wire and then play the contraption with some kind of slide, a bottle neck, a piece of metal, anything that would slide along the strings.

If you reverse the words “diddley bow,” you get Bo Diddley. He played one, Howlin’ Wolf did, B.B. King did, many people played the diddley bow.

Probably every child experiments with some kind of arrangement like this at some time, even if it’s just rubber bands stretched across a box.

When Robert Johnson arrived in a new town, he would play for tips on street corners or in front of the local barbershop or a restaurant.

Johnny Shines and other musicians have noted that Johnson didn’t play his dark blues pieces in situations like these, but instead pleased audiences by performing more well-known pop standards of the day.

He could pick up tunes at first hearing and so had no trouble giving his audiences what they wanted, especially since he liked jazz and country music.

Robert Johnson could quickly establish a rapport with his audience. He made new friends easily and established ties to the local community that would serve him well when he passed through again a month or a year later.

To play Cross Road Blues, Robert Johnson tuned to an open G (Spanish tuning) DGDGBD.

Then he put a capo on the third fret, which gave him an open Bb.

Johnson recorded Terraplane Blues in San Antonio in 1936.

He did this one in Bb too. After playing these two tunes in Bb, it’s a real relief to go into standard tuning and do them in A, as Roy Rogers does.

Similarly, one way of looking at Love In Vain is to imagine Robert Johnson playing in the ordinary tuning for guitar EADGBE and doing the tune in A. If you’ve been playing in Bb for a while and trying to imitate an open G tuning in your regular tuning, you’ll feel like a genius when you play Love In Vain in A, standard tuning.

I like the way Robert Johnson sings this Love In Vain, so easy and relaxed, and the guitar playing is subtle and perfectly matched to the vocal.

Well, the train left the station, with two lights on behind. The blue light was my blues, and the red light was my mind.

Some people play Love In Vain with an open G tuning, capo on the first fret, and that sounds good too. It puts the song in Ab.

You could make a good case that that is the way Robert Johnson did the tune, but the A in standard tuning is very tempting also. Both ways are good. There’s James Joyce playing the guitar. I’m not sure what key he used for Love In Vain, but I notice he’s not using a capo.

Preaching Blues (Up Jumped The Devil) is in E and it shows the energetic, inspired Robert Johnson who played guitar marvelously well.

This is Henry Saint Clair Fredericks (Taj Mahal). I have heard him play several Robert Johnson tunes, including Preaching Blues.

Preaching Blues aside from featuring Robert Johnson’s strong singing is an encyclopedia of blues riffs for the guitar. He uses his thumb to hit the guitar top percussively between each chord that he plays with his three (not two) fingers. The main riff of the tune is E D G-E high to low.

Robert Johnson plays a lot of minor 2nds. That is, he strikes, for example, an F# note right next to an open G. This is a very strong sound on all the stringed instruments. On a violin, it’ll make your hair stand on end. It’s a good idea to look for these combinations all over your fingerboard.

Son House was often called a mentor to Robert Johnson but Son House didn’t see it that way. He saw Robert Johnson as a pesky interloper to be swatted as one would swat a mosquito. “Such another racket you never heard. It’d make people mad, you know. They’d come out and say, ‘Why don’t y’all go in there and get that guitar away from that boy! He’s running people crazy with it.’ I’d come back in and I’d scold him about it. ‘Don’t do that, Robert. You drive the people nuts. You can’t play nothing.’”

Some people quit when they hear things like this. Other people just grit their teeth, go ahead and keep playing. It’s a painful Darwinian process. I’ve had to live through it many times. It never gets easier.

When they show this learning process in films, it is always depicted as a momentary defeat and then comes a GLORIOUS TRIUMPH, but it doesn’t feel that way in real life. In real life, the defeat part can last a long time and the triumph part can seem very short lived, beside the point and inconsequential when it finally comes.

Musicians call this a turnaround, a short piece of material that goes between two verses. This is a typical Robert Johnson turnaround, although he more often began on the Bb (fourth string, 8th fret) while he was playing that top C, and then played Bb A Ab G (F F# G).

Robert Johnson plays Ramblin’ On My Mind in E and sometimes in D and his voice is so good on the tune. He sweeps up on the guitar often on the upbeat which makes for a strong rhythm. Roy Rogers, the master slide guitarist, not the cowboy, plays Ramblin’ in D and has a lot of illuminating things to say about Robert Johnson. That upbeat sweep across all six strings is the thing, though. Try that.

Something that may surprise people a great deal is that Ike Turner was a real live Delta blues musician. He was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and he knew how to play the blues in that Delta way, knew all the tricks in many styles.

Sam Cooke, another man who made the transition from Delta blues to pop stylings was also from Clarksdale.

Ike Turner was not only an accomplished guitarist in many different styles, but he also was, obviously, an entrepreneur and a person who made things happen for a lot of people.

Sam Cooke was a gospel singer, a very good gospel singer, and then he went to write a lot of songs in a distinctly pop style.

As I have noted elsewhere, there are two or three or four sides to every story, and I wish my life would have been blameless so far, but far, far from it. Anyway, we in Big Brother and the Holding Company knew Ike and Tina well and we did a recording session with them, Kathi McDonald singing. Let’s see, James passed out beneath my chair, so Dave the drummer got up and left the session. As usual, Peter and I kept playing. We finally got a drummer from Berkeley. I would like to find that guy today and ask him his impressions of that surreal afternoon in the studio, because that was a moment. It was definitely a moment.

Ike said, “Who these guys think they are, the fucking Beatles?” a not irrelevant question given our stellar performance in the studio that day. Tina was sitting there at the console, looking very regal and taking it all in. I would love to find the tapes of that session.

Anyway, Ike brought many people to fame and he helped them in substantive ways too. He booked their studio time and took his whole band into the studio to back them up and make them sound good.

Ike told Sam Phillips at Sun Records about Chester Burnett, thus doing Sam, Chester and all of us a big favor, since Chester Burnett (Howlin’ Wolf) would go on to make great music. I see Wolf is giving this guitar to Kerry Kearney.

Rocket 88 was credited to a local man, Jackie Brentson, but the man behind it all was Ike Turner, another Clarksdale transplant, who took a standard blues, put in a fat backbeat, added some fuzz, maybe from damage to the amp while driving down 61 to Memfus (Memphis), and, with all of that, came out with the number two rhythm and blues song in 1951.

Ike Turner alerted the Bihari brothers, owners of Modern Records, to the up and coming B.B. King, who was making a name in the Memphis area.

Ike Turner played piano and guitar on many of these “audition” tunes and did everything he could to help these newcomers.

Many of these recording sessions took place at The Memphis Recording Service (Sun Records) at 706 Union Avenue, a former radiator repair shop, that still looks more or less like a radiator repair shop.

Ike Turner had told Sam Phillips about Chester Burnett who walked into the studio in the summer of 1951, and Sam had heard Burnett’s voice on the radio, but he wasn’t ready for the man’s physical appearance. Howlin’ Wolf (Burnett’s stage name) was over six and a half feet tall and he stood on two of the biggest feet that Phillips had ever seen.

I had the same reaction to Wolf when I saw him sitting by a pool table playing his blues in Chicago 1966. Even sitting down he was a giant and he wore white socks which seemed further to exaggerate the size of his feet.

“I tell you, the greatest thing you could see to this day would be Chester Burnett doing one of those sessions in my studio. God, what it would be worth to see the fervor in that man’s face when he sang…How different, how good!” Sam Phillips said that Wolf was the most talented man who had ever walked through the doors of Sun Records. I believe that. It’s easy to believe.

Howlin’ Wolf was born two hundred miles south of Sun Records in White Station, Mississippi, two hundred miles and a universe away. His early life reads like a Dickens story, abject poverty, medieval working conditions, indifference and cruelty on all sides. How he kept his positive and even glowing attitude and his strength of spirit is one of the inspiring stories of the human condition.

He used to forage barefoot for scraps of food down by the railroad tracks where he hoped the workers might have left something behind. He couldn’t read nor write nor do the most basic figuring even by the time he reached Sun Records. He could run, run away from whippings and beatings, and yet he grew to be a man who went to night school, even at the height of his success, and who kept learning all his life, an eternal student.

His father was a sharecropper and his mother was a cook and a maid. He was born 10 June, 1910, which made him much older than Ike Turner, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker and others who had achieved success before him. Howlin’ Wolf was more like a contemporary of Charley Patton or Robert Johnson, and his voice seemed to come from long ago and far away. He was called Bigfoot, Foots, Buford, Bullcow and Wolf, from Little Red Riding Hood, Wolf to scare him.

His mother Gertrude Jones sang songs on the street and took her son to sing in the church choir. She abandoned her son when he was a young child because he was dark, he sang the blues, because he didn’t want to work in the fields for fifteen cents a day, because she had a new man who didn’t want a boy in the house, so he went to live with a mean uncle who whipped him with a plow line and made him take his meals apart from the family.

He was sad, but he could sing. He sang loudly when he plowed the fields, sang all day, made up songs. He had his instruments too, a tin bucket, a diddley bow that he made himself, pots and pans, a fifteen cent harmonica. In 1928 when he was seventeen, Wolf got his first guitar and Charley Patton helped him learn how to play it and showed him how to be a performer.

Wolf began playing at house parties, juke joints and street corners and even crossed the river to play in Arkansas at Pine Bluff, Brinkley or West Memphis, a rough wide open town. Johnny Shines who saw him at this time says, “I was afraid of Wolf. Just like you would be of some beast or something. It wasn’t his size. I mean, what he was doing, the way he was doing, I mean the sound he was giving off. That’s how great I thought he was.”

Sonny Boy Williamson II (Aleck Ford Rice Miller) finished Wolf’s schooling on the harmonica. Howlin’ Wolf traveled with Robert Johnson and played with Son House and Willie Brown. He also worked with Johnny Shines, Jimmy Rogers, Honeyboy Edwards, so his musical education was deep and varied.

When World War II came, Howlin’ Wolf went into my father’s outfit, the Signal Corps, where he was to learn radio communication as a Technician Fifth Grade, but this didn’t really work out for him.

He was hospitalized in Portland, Oregon, for dizziness and physical exhaustion and his violent outbursts resulted in an Honorable Discharge, on 3 November 1943.

Wolf moved to West Memphis and formed a band, the House Rockers: Willie Johnson, piano; M.T. Murphy, guitar; Junior Parker, harmonica and Willie Steele, drums. Sometimes James Cotton would join the group. Howlin’ Wolf bought his first electric guitar, and the House Rockers became the best electric blues band in the Delta.

The band was primal and they beat their instruments so that the physical sound became as important as the pitch of the notes. People said things about Wolf’s voice like “stronger than forty acres of crushed garlic” (Ronnie Hawkins) or “a runaway bucket of nails” (Newsweek).

KFFA in Helena, Arkansas, began broadcasting King Biscuit Time on 21 November 1941, which makes it the longest running daily radio show in the country.

Emulating KFFA, KWEM gave Wolf a twenty minute slot and he ran with it. “This here’s the Wolf comin’ at you, baby,” he would growl. Another Wolfman would make a whole career out of imitating this comeon.

The first song Howlin’ Wolf recorded for Sam Phillips was Moanin’ at Midnight, a magical mantra that began with Wolf howling a B-Bb and then guitarist Willie Johnson begins playing a pattern in E and Wolf starts singing an F#. The whole effect is eerie and elemental. When Big Brother and the Holding Company lived in Lagunitas, California, we tried for three days to learn this song. I always thought we couldn’t because we were young and inexperienced, but I tried the song again a couple of years ago and it still eluded me. It seems as if everyone in the band is playing backwards to each other, and as soon as they settle into one groove, they switch it up and accent another beat. Such a great song.

How Many More Years, probably with Ike Turner on piano, was from the same session. The song is a twelve bar blues in G and the thing that makes it remarkable aside from Wolf’s great voice, emotive delivery and harp playing is the guitar riff that goes G B EDE. A lot of people who copied this song didn’t do that simple figure and they missed a good thing. There are some guitar smears in the middle that illustrate the House Rockers’ pure sound approach to making music. They don’t make “sense,” but they are so cool. It’s rather as if you daubed a vivid color on an already good canvas and all of a sudden it made the painting twice as interesting.

Howlin’ Wolf made the big move to Chicago in 1954 and he did it in style, with his own car and a lot of money. Leonard Chess found him a place to stay… at Muddy Waters’ house.

Wolf recorded No Place To Go at his first Chess session in 1954. This tune hearkens back to the early Delta days when people did songs with no chord changes and the atmosphere was everything, and there was plenty of atmosphere here.

The B side was Rockin’ Daddy, a more conventional dance song. This record entered the charts in May and stayed there till July.

Howlin’ Wolf went back in the studio and recorded a Willie Dixon tune Evil Is Going On,” which stayed on the charts from July until November and sold well not only in Chicago, Memphis and Atlanta, but also in Nashville, Cleveland and Detroit.

Wolf put a Chicago band together with Jody Williams on guitar, Otis Spann and later Hosea Lee Kennard on piano, and the very stylish Hubert Sumlin, another diddley bow player, on guitar. This was a high powered band and Wolf gloried in it. He prowled the stage, he climbed the curtains, he put a coke bottle in his pants, shook it up, opened his zipper and sprayed it on the audience. He lay down on the floor and played the guitar. He played the real thing and he dressed it up in extreme showmanship.

Howlin’ Wolf, despite his background, was a happy man. He was born that way. He communicated his happiness and delight in life to everyone he met. The first thing he said to me was, “You got more soul than I have on my shoe.” Considering that it was a very big shoe (pace Ed Sullivan), I took this as a compliment, because it was the first time I ever heard the expression, and he was laughing and happy, pumping my hand to beat the band as he said it.

He had a microphone cord that must have been fifty yards long and Wolf prowled the environs. He would go out on the street corner and startle passersby, dancing, hollering, moaning. The police often had to take him back to his bandstand. When I played saxophone, I copied this routine from Wolf, of having a very long microphone cord and wandering out into traffic in Oakland blowing my brains out on the horn. It was a lot of fun.

I have to quote something here from Ted Gioa’s already classic study of the Delta Blues. It’s from Robert Palmer who says, “Wolf counted off a bone-crushing rocker, began singing rhythmically, feigned an exit, and suddenly made a flying leap for the curtain at the side of the stage. Holding the microphone under his beefy right arm and singing into it all the while, he began climbing up the curtain, going higher and higher until he was perched far above the stage, the curtain threatening to rip, the audience screaming with delight. Then he loosed his grip, and in a single easy motion, slid right back down the curtain, hit the stage, cut off the tune, and stalked away, to the most ecstatic cheers of the evening.”

We’re talking about a man who is fifty-five years old here. And through it all he was a real musician, everything served the song and the thread was never lost. Wolf had an innate sense of how to make his music better and more understandable, but he always kept it real.

So, Howlin’ Wolf became the most exciting performer in the country. Little Richard and James Brown came to study him and sit in with him. When he played the Apollo Theater, owner Frank Schiffman observed, “I haven’t seen anything like it in my thirty years with the Apollo.”

In January 1956 Howlin’ Wolf went into the studio and cut Smokestack Lightning in the key of E, although he had played it in D in the past. The guitar player does a two bar riff that hits the G on the third fret and that’s the tune, no other chord changes. Wolf puts the variety into the song with his mighty crackling voice. Ah-oh, smokestacklightning Shinin’ just like gold Why don’t ya hear me cryin’? Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo Whoo.

Chester Burnett died on 10 January 1976, after influencing several generations of musicians with his spirited playing and singing and his creative, joyful self.

When he was seventeen, Muddy Waters acquired his first guitar for $2.50. It was a Stella, a decent guitar then, but a byword for a cheap, difficult to tune and play guitar by the time I bought my Silvertone, another cheap guitar, in the mid 1950s.

McKinley Morganfield was born on 4 April 1913 in Jug’s Corner in Issaquena County, Mississippi. When he was three, his mother died and he moved to Clarksdale a hundred miles north to live with his grandmother Delia Grant in this cabin on the Stovall Plantation.

In the summer of 1941, Alan Lomax went to Stovall, Mississippi, on behalf of the Library of Congress to record country blues musicians. ”He brought his stuff down and recorded me right in my house, and when he played back the first song I sounded just like anybody’s records. Man, you don’t know how I felt that Saturday afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice. Later on he sent me two copies of the pressing and a check for twenty bucks, and I carried that record up to the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just played it and played it and said, ‘I can do it, I can do it.’” Every musician, every performer will recognize this magic moment.

They called him Muddy Water. McKinley Morganfield was a mouthfull. Later a typo, or an intuitive person, changed the last name to Waters.

He learned his singing from Son House and his guitar playing from Robert Johnson, but Muddy Waters was always an original.

In 1943, Muddy took his mojo to Chicago with the hope of becoming a full-time professional musician. He lived with a relative for a short period while driving a truck and working in a factory by day and performing at night.

Big Bill Broonzy, then one of the leading bluesmen in Chicago, helped Muddy break into a very competitive market by allowing him to open for his shows in the rowdy clubs.

In 1945, Muddy’s uncle, Joe Grant, gave him his first electric guitar, which enabled him to be heard above the noisy crowds.

In 1946, he recorded some tunes for Mayo Williams at Columbia but they were not released at the time.

Later that year he began recording for Aristocrat Records, a newly-formed label run by two brothers, Lejzor and Fiszel Czyz from Motele, Poland. The brothers changed their names to Leonard and Phil Chess. Their father had a business selling empty bottles which a member of Al Capone’s organization bought and filled with bootleg liquor. Leonard Chess then opened a liquor store and later the Mocamba Lounge where the brothers decided to sell records that they made themselves, first at Aristocrat and later at Chess.

In 1947, Muddy played guitar and Sunnyland Smith was on piano playing “Gypsy Woman” and “Little Anna Mae.” These were also shelved, but in 1948, “I Can’t Be Satisfied” and “I Feel Like Going Home” became big hits and Muddy Waters’ popularity in clubs began to take off.

The plantation system still existed, even in Chicago, and, in the beginning, the Chess brothers would not allow Muddy to use his own guitar in the recording studio, because the piano was the respectable instrument in those days.

Muddy was provided with a backing bass by Ernest “Big” Crawford, and by musicians assembled specifically for the recording session, including Leroy Foster and Johnny Jones.

Gradually Chess relented, and by September 1953, Muddy Waters was actually allowed to play his own guitar on recording sessions.

Muddy Waters was now recording with one of the most acclaimed blues groups in history: Little Walter Jacobs on harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on guitar, Elga Edmonds (a.k.a. Elgin Evans) on drums and Otis Spann on piano.

Soon after this, Aristocrat changed their label name to Chess Records and Muddy’s signature tune Rollin’ Stone became a hit. Muddy Waters’ songs were autobiographical and filled with mystical events: a gypsy woman is foretelling his uniqueness, seven doctors preside at the birth of this prophet born on the seventh hour of the seventh day of the seventh month. In the song Mannish Boy recorded in 1955 we are told that Muddy will be the greatest man alive and in I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man, the gypsy says that he will be a son of a gun. No other singer in any style dared to sing songs like this.

Willie Dixon, bass, who was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1915 wrote a lot of songs, I’m Your Hoochee Coochee Man, I Just Want To Make Love To You, I’m Ready, Little Red Rooster, Diddy Wah Diddy, Wang Dang Doodle, My Babe and Mellow Down Easy among many, many others.

Along with his former harmonica player Little Walter Jacobs and recent southern transplant Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy reigned over the early 1950s Chicago blues scene, his band becoming a proving ground for some of the city’s best blues talent. While Little Walter continued a collaborative relationship long after he left Muddy’s band in 1952, appearing on most of Muddy’s classic recordings throughout the 1950s, Muddy developed a long-running, generally good-natured rivalry with Wolf.

Otis Spann from Muddy’s band went on to have a solo career and many releases under his own name beginning in the mid-1950s. He was an intelligent, versatile player and he could be a bandleader himself

Muddy also did quite a bit of playing with an old friend of ours, Willie Mae Thornton.

Another Muddy Waters protégé was Buddy Guy, a thoroughly admirable character who had a great guitar style.

Buddy Guy is a loose, relaxed guy with nothing to prove. His guitar style is easy and casual while he does the most amazing things. And then there is his stage presence which is maniacal, loopy and inspired. Once I saw him when there was a lamp over his head suspended by a wire. As Buddy played, he reached up and swung the lamp around. He would play a run and then push the lamp around in ever increasing circles, making his own crazy light show and playing some great guitar at the same time.

Buddy Guy has a sweet, humble manner and yet he can be a savage on the guitar. He was born in 1936 in Lettsworth, Louisiana, and so is one of the last guitarists from our period. He was a guitar for hire at Chess Records and then went to Vanguard where he did some great work. In his early days, he listened a lot to people like T-Bone Walker and B.B. King. He even did an album of North Mississippi blues, few chord changes and drones in one tonality, like John Lee Hooker.

Muddy Waters died on 30 April 1983 of carcinoma of the lungs and cardiorespiratory arrest. Some of the people at his funeral, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Memphis Slim, Willie Dixon, Junior Wells, Johnny Winter and James Cotton went to Buddy Guy’s Checkerboard Lounge to jam and say one last goodbye to Muddy.

John Lee Hooker is in many ways the closest to me of all these Delta blues people and yet he is more mysterious than any of them both in his music and in the details of his life. There is much that is not known for sure about him, when he was born, how many were in his family and some really basic facts about him.

My friend Rich Kirch played with John Lee for years. Carlos Santana played with him. I’ve talked with him backstage several times. Canned Heat did an album with him. Pete Sears actually wrote and recorded a song with John Lee Hooker, and yet John Lee remains an international man of mystery.

I know his daughter Zakiya and have shared the stage with her several times, notably in Ko Samui, Thailand, where we played at a club called Cocos and also at a festival.

John Lee Hooker was the first of the Delta blues people that I heard, aside from Jimmy Reed, but even today he sounds mysterious to me, mainly because of his music which seems to come from the same mystic place as that of Geeshie Wiley and Skip James, a sacred place, non verbal, rich, religious, deep, ancient.

He was born just outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi, but where? When? Every time you asked him, he gave you a different answer. The courthouse burned down in 1927 so there are no records. None of the other Delta blues people talk about him when he was young. His family say he just left one day. He recorded under a different name almost every time he recorded. His blues sound earlier than the earliest blues.

Don’t look back, indeed. The first thirty years of his life are completely unknown. John Lee says his boogie came from his stepfather Will Moore, a sharecropper born in Shreveport, Louisiana, but nothing else is known about that man. His mother, née Minnie Ramsay, moved in with Will Moore, and John Lee came with her, but the other children stayed with their father, Reverend William Hooker, who allowed John Lee to have a guitar only if he kept it outside the house.

John Lee may have moved away from the Reverend William Hooker, but there is a strong church element in his blues, an instrospective, spiritual quality that he may have learned as a gospel singer in his father’s church.

John Lee’s beloved E7 chord. My friend Eugene Skuratowicz, who had much to do with John Lee’s career, gave me a beautiful CD called Jack O’Diamonds that was recorded 1949 in the kitchen of Gene Deitch who did Cat cartoons for Record Changer magazine in the 1940s, 1950s.

After dinner, John Lee performed right there at the dining room table. Deitch, using his studio’s DuKane tape recorder, captured the moment on tape. John Lee sang the songs in his set, and then went on to remember tunes from back then in the Delta, including some from his father’s church. The tape recorder picks up everything, including John Lee’s foot tappings which add much.

John Lee Hooker’s Jack O’Diamonds. I love playing along with it on the guitar. The keys for the first seven tracks are Ab, Db and then at track number eight, Jack O’Diamonds, John Lee gets his guitar in standard tuning and from there on out, the keys become C, D, G.

John Lee Hooker’s recording career began in 1948 when his agent placed a demo, made by Hooker, with the Bihari brothers, owners of the Modern Records label. The company initially released an up-tempo number, Boogie Chillen’,which became Hooker’s first hit single.

Though they were not songwriters, the Biharis often purchased or claimed co-authorship of songs that appeared on their labels, thus securing songwriting royalties for themselves, in addition to their own streams of income. This is not an isolated instance of this disreputable practice. Unscrupulous record company owners and producers signed their names to all kind of songs that they had nothing to do with writing.

The Bihari brothers, Jules, Lester and Saul, used a number of pseudonyms for songwriting credits: Jules was credited as Jules Taub; Joe as Joe Josea; and Sam as Sam Ling. One song by John Lee Hooker, Down Child, is solely credited to Taub, with Hooker receiving no credit at all. Another, Turn Over a New Leaf is credited to Hooker and Ling.

John Lee Hooker recorded over 100 albums. He lived the last years of his life in Long Beach, California. In 1997, he opened a nightclub in San Francisco’s Fillmore District called John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom Room, after one of his hits.

He fell ill just before a tour of Europe in 2001 and died on June 21 at the age of 83, two months before his 84th birthday.

If John Lee Hooker seemed the most remote Delta blues player from contemporary life, B. B. King seemed the closest, and once again it’s right there in the music. Riley B. King played a fluid single note style of guitar that influenced everyone and he learned it, not by following the Delta blues musicians, but by listening to records, just as we all learned from him by listening to his hits. “I believe I listened harder than anyone in the history of listening.”

B.B. King once had 30,000 records and he was a disc jockey. He acquired his first guitar when he was twelve; it was a cherry red Stella that he bought secondhand for fifteen dollars. King’s mother and Booker White’s mother were cousins, so the boy heard White when he visited twice a year, and he learned some music and philosophy from Reverend Archie Fair who taught him a few chords and explained that music could be something more than a sexual, physical thing, that it could express a higher power. It seems that every musician in the Delta struggled at some point between playing for the church and playing for the dancers.

He joined a group called The Famous St. John Gospel Singers, which was influenced by the Golden Gate Quartet and the Dixie Hummingbirds. but B., as his friends call him, found that he made the most money on the street corners when he played the blues.

One day King looked into a ten-cent vending machine that played a film clip of the most famous band at that time, Benny Goodman’s, and there in the middle of all that swing was a black guitar player, Charlie Christian, who was playing single note lines and beautiful harmonies. This was a significant moment in B.B. King’s perception of himself and his work.

King has developed one of the world’s most identifiable guitar styles. He borrowed from Blind Lemon Jefferson, T-Bone Walker and others, integrating his precise and complex vocal-like string bends and his left hand vibrato. The result of listening to those 30,000 records has been that B.B. King has mixed blues, jazz, swing, mainstream pop and jump into a unique sound. He says, “When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.”

King was born (16 September 1925) in a small cabin on a cotton plantation outside of Berclair, Mississippi, to Albert King and Nora Ella Farr on September 16, 1925. In 1930, when King was four years old, his father abandoned the family, and his mother married another man. Because Nora Ella was too poor to raise her son, King was raised by his maternal grandmother Elnora Farr in Kilmichael, Mississippi. He sang in the gospel choir at Elkhorn Baptist Church.

In 1948 B.B. King performed on Sonny Boy Williamson’s radio program on KWEM in West Memphis, where he began to develop a local audience for his sound. King’s appearances led to steady engagements at the Sixteenth Avenue Grill in West Memphis and later to a ten-minute spot on the legendary Memphis radio station WDIA. King’s Spot became so popular, it was expanded and became the Sepia Swing Club.

He worked at WDIA as a singer and disc jockey, gaining the nickname Beale Street Blues Boy, which was later shortened to Blues Boy and finally to B.B. It was there that he first met T-Bone Walker. ”Once I’d heard him for the first time, I knew I’d have to have an electric guitar myself. ‘Had’ to have one, short of stealing!”, he said.

In 1949, King began recording under contract with Los Angeles-based RPM Records. Many of his early recordings were produced by Sam Phillips who later founded Sun Records. ”My very first recordings [in 1949] were for a company out of Nashville called Bullet, the Bullet Record Transcription company,” King recalls. “I had horns that very first session. I had Phineas Newborn on piano; his father played drums, and his brother, Calvin, played guitar with me. I had Tuff Green on bass, Ben Branch, on tenor sax, his brother, Thomas Branch, on trumpet, and a lady trombone player. The Newborn family were the house band at the famous Plantation Inn in West Memphis.”

In the 1950s, B.B. King became one of the most important players in rhythm and blues music, with an impressive list of hits including 3 O’clock Blues, You Know Love You, Woke Up This Morning, Please Love Me, When My Heart Beats like a Hammer, Whole Lotta Love, You Upset Me Baby, Every Day I Have The Blues, Sneakin’ Around, Ten Long Years, Bad Luck, Sweet Little Angel, On My Word of Honor, and Please Accept My Love.

B.B. King made 342 appearances and 3 recording sessions in 1956 alone. In 1962, King signed to ABC-Paramount Records which was later absorbed into MCA Records and thence into his current label, Geffen Records. In November 1964, King recorded the Live At The Regal album at the Regal Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.

Big Brother and the Holding Company played on the same bill with B.B. King several times.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on 4 April 1968 and we all gathered at Jimi Hendrix’ Generation Club in New York on 7 April to hold a wake for Reverend King. Marci Hooper was there. Noel Redding or Mitch Mitchell was filming with a Super 8 camera. Buddy Guy and Paul Butterfield were there. So was Joni Mitchell. We did Down On Me, Catch Me Daddy, Piece of My Heart and some other tunes. Jimi was at the soundboard. There is a film of this on YouTube somewhere.

B.B. King sat backstage and talked about the tragedy in beautiful, moving terms and then went out to play his set. B’s music was always full of feeling but this night it was something else, sanctified and holy. The music really was serving a higher power that night. This was the most inspiring gig we ever played… by far. B.B. King was the perfect person to lead us through this time.

I’ve left out a lot of the great Delta blues musicians here. People like Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, Kid Bailey, Arthur Crudup, all great players and true blues people. The sound of the Mississippi Delta in the 1920s, 1930s is still with us today.

__________________________________________________

Sam Andrew

(San Antonio, Texas, 1955, When and where I first heard the music of T-Bone Walker and Charlie Christian.)

_________________________________________________

I Homologate This Message.

Posted on June 9, 2013 by J L tagged.

Homologate: agree with, approve, approbate, sanction, authorize, warrant, countenance, ratify, confirm, confess, acknowledge.

Janis homologated these images.

To render valid by some subsequent act.

A marriage contract, though defective in legal solemnities, is held to be homologated by the subsequent marriage of the parties.

Homologate is derived from the Greek homologeo (ὁμολογέω) for “I agree”, which is generally used in English to signify the granting of approval by an official.

The homologating body may be a court of law, a government department, or an academic or professional body, any of which would normally work from a set of strict rules or standards to determine whether such approval should be given.

The word may be considered very roughly synonymous with accreditation, and in fact in French and Spanish may be used with regard to academic degrees.

Certification is another possible synonym. To homologate is the infinitive.

Products must often be homologated by some public agency to assure that they meet standards for such things as safety and environmental impact.

A court action may also sometimes be homologated by a judicial authority before it can proceed, and the term has a precise legal meaning in the judicial codes of some countries, especially in Scotland.

The equivalent process of testing and certification for conformance to technical standards is usually known as Type Approval in English-language jurisdictions.

Another example of the use of homologate pertains to the biological sciences, where it may describe the similarities used to assign organisms to the same family or taxon, similarities they have jointly inherited from a common ancestor.

So, dear reader, what would this organization, Girls Together Outrageously (GTOs) have to do with the word “homologate?”

In racing, a vehicle must be homologated by the sanctioning body to race in a given league, such as World Superbikes, International Level Kart Racing or other sportscar racing series.

Where a racing class requires that the vehicles raced be production vehicles only slightly adapted for racing, manufacturers typically produce a limited run of such vehicles for public sale so that they can legitimately race them in the class.

These vehicles are commonly called “homologation specials.”

The term homologation is also applicable in the Olympic Games, in venue certifications, prior to the start of competition.

An issue was raised at Cesena Pariol—the bobsleigh, luge and skeleton track used for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino (Turin) —over its safety in luge.

This delayed homologation of the track from January 2005 to October 2005 in order to achieve safe runs during luge competitions.

A judge must homologate the plea bargain between the district attorney and the defense.

Gran Turismo Omologato is the origin of the acronym GTO.

“We’ve major issues which appear to be discussed in the press. Decisions are made and then we’re asked to homologate these decisions.”

“What was needed was a more streamlined street car to homologate for racing.”

Now the same amazing race technology is available in fully homologated form for use on the road by drivers who know what satisfaction means.

This protective front headlight grill for use off-road is not homologated for on-road use.

Homologation is the certification of a product or specification to indicate that it meets regulatory standards.

There are companies that specialize in helping manufacturers achieve regulatory compliance.

These homologating companies have services that might include the explanation and interpretation of standards and specifications.

There may be homologatory assistance in plant facility audit and approval, testing and certification of materials, product design consulting, and translation of manuals, legal mandates and other written material.

My friend Melina has a beautiful collection of black and white photographs of blues players and she has tacitly homologated my use of them from time to time, just as she may use any image that I have.

I don’t know why I did it, I don’t know why I enjoyed it, and I don’t know why I will do it again. What do you want? It’s a birthday.

Reason itself is fallible and this fallibility must find a place in our logic.

We started out as opportunistic renegades. By now, we’ve lasted long enough to become American Original Respectable Renegades.

I want it to go on, but I want us to go out on top. Well, so much for that. OK, then, go out on the bottom, yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket.

I don’t miss the rat race, but occasionally I miss the rats.

One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal, or even inability, to be compromised.

The element of surprise is what I look for when I am playing.

We all come into the world not knowing who we are.

Women get the work done, with lesser play of ego.

If anyone thinks I am wrong, I am inclined to agree with her.

You know what would be interesting to see? A film about an Al Qaeda follower from her own point of view, how she became that, what her ambitions are, her name, her family, her petty dislikes, her secret wishes. This would show us more than a thousand state documents.

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.

If you want to change your life, change your mind.

Don’t be afraid of failure. Be afraid of succeeding too early.

God limited the intelligence of humanity, but not the stupidity.

One sure way to please a tigress is to let her eat you.

The biggest risk in life is not taking any risks.

A bad temper is a sign of weakness.

They had several car crashes in that film, but none of them killed the right people.

When you see old photographs, it’s lovely to remember being young, but even better to know that you grew up.

Every now and then do something that you think you are really bad at.

Some white people hate black people, and some white people love black people, some black people hate white people, and some black people love white people. So you see it’s not an issue of black and white, it’s an issue of Lovers and Haters.

I like to do interviews where I see that the questioner is pondering his next line while I am answering his last… NOT!

I’m definitely not a shopper. I totally hate the process of researching and then haggling for the price. I wish I could just snap my fingers and it would be there. I would pay extra for that, actually, and, in fact, I suppose I do pay extra for that. Actually, I would pay extra for not having the thing at all.

My family were Democrats. In fact, if one of us children was acting up and being stubborn, my father would say, “Stop acting like a damned Republican.”

Music is irrational. The better it is, the madder it is.

Life is a song, so sing along. Life is a game, it’s never the same. Make it your goal to nourish your soul.

This looks totally posed. They’re probably his cousins.

On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Neither success nor failure is ever final.

The best command of the language is often shown by saying nothing.

To make your dream come true, you need to be wide awake.

Bad politicians are elected by good people who don’t vote.

Look up. When you’re flat on your back, look up.

Don’t worry about what is going to happen. It’s bad enough worrying about what is happening now.

Everybody doesn’t have to get every joke. People really appreciate not being condescended to.

If you have health, friends and enough money to pay the rent and eat, you have a lot.

Legends are all about the past and have nothing to do with the present.

You can’t think clearly when your fists are clenched.

I often play language learning CDs in my car, and I’ve noticed that when I become angry at another driver, I don’t learn anything at all from the CDs. I have to listen to that spot over again. This in itself is educational.

I’m the L word. Liberal.

It’s not so much the taxes we pay as it is the feeling that someone is picking our pockets without our knowing why.

As long as there is one pretty woman on stage, the theatre will live.

When you’re wrong, admit it. When you’re right, be quite. (Or quiet, whichever is best.)

A door is what a cat is always on the wrong side of.

Am I a late bloomer or an early rotter?

Most people would rather be right than be reasonable.

You cannot move others unless you too are moved.

Remorse or reminiscence?

The fruits of our private study should appear in our public behavior.

Sometimes I look at the stars for so long that they seem to move and dance in the sky.

My father seemed to me to know everything, all about the artists in the Renaissance, all about the carburetor under the hood, all about the rocks and how they came to be that way, all about the plants and their histories. If he couldn’t afford something, he would simply make it with his own hands.

Labels are for medicine bottles. Labels are for clothes. Labels aren’t for people.

Whoever said, “It’s not whether you win or lose that counts,” probably lost.

People want to matter. Help them to do that and show them that they do.

For the caterpillar it’s the end of the world. For the butterfly it’s her birthday.

My wife. She makes life come to life.

A professional musician is an amateur who didn’t stop.

If you want something in your life, act as if it’s already there.

Living to the highest standard you know leads to happiness.

A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the word you first thought of.

Learning when to leave is not a negligible part of one’s education.

I have been in the twilight of my career for longer than most people have had careers.

Actually, I’ve been in the twilight of my career for longer than many people have lived.

Music has given me soul.

Talented people are the easiest to get along with.

The simpler it is, the more beautiful it can become.

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

When you walk into a party, you don’t see someone’s brain right away, although it doesn’t take long to see her soul.

No matter what you do, you can’t live in the past.

I wake up at five every day, even if I went to bed at three. I’m blaming it on my cats.

The optimist says we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears that may be true.

Write the kind of song you would like to hear.

No lady is ever a gentleman.

You begin growing your wisdom teeth the first time you bite off more than you can chew.

People worry more about what they can’t see than what they can.

It is better to create than to learn.

Picture you upon my knee, just tea for two and two for tea.

My ambition is to do a good job. I never plan anything.

Life is accepting what is and working with that, or, as my mother put it, you work with what you got.

Everyone has a story that is worth telling and, if told right, it can be a beautiful song.

Self consciousness, shyness, timidity are all forms of egotism and that’s all right.

People believe quickly what they wish to be true.

You take the truth and you put a little curlicue on the end.

Every language has its own song.

James Gurley.

You can’t teach talent, but you can teach competence and confidence.

I used to be afraid of being normal even though nothing is normal.

Films have the power to change people’s minds. A film can make you a better person. In fact, a film should make you a better person.

Good old days? What good old days? People who wish for the old days have very selective memories.

Life is much shorter than it seemed at first.

For at least a hundred and fifty years, America’s best ambassador has been her music.

Being a musician is just a job, but it can be an interesting job.

I was always shy, timid, introverted, whatever you want to call it, and mortally afraid of going onstage. I bet that is true of many, many performers.

I wrote Flower in the Sun in a bathroom in Bernal Heights, San Francisco. It was the only place I could find any privacy.

I try to live by the Golden Rule. Most of the time that works.

We’re not disgruntled. We’re actually fairly gruntled and couth.

Anybody can succeed, anybody can play, but you’ve got to work hard to do it.

I’m a skilled professional musician. Whether or not I have any talent is beside the point. Main thing is to do the job well.

I read many, many books, but I am careful to to let anything I read influence me.

Many people who are brutally honest are more brutal than honest.

At 53 I got the girl! Now she’s almost 53.

Dying is easy, comedy is hard, as Edmund Kean observed on his deathbed.

Comedy is not only hard to act, but hard to write. As Michael Caine noted, you get one comedy script for every twenty dramas.

Comedy is underrepresented in every actor’s résumé because comedy is very difficult.

English is clipped in speech. Texan is clopped in speech.

Be like a duck, always oily calm on the surface and furiously paddling underneath.

I admire other musicians but I would never think of competing with them. What we do is so different. I compete with myself. I have had so many great guitarists play and sit in with Big Brother over the years. More guitar players have performed with Big Brother than musicians on any other instrument. Even singers, and that’s saying something.

The Jack Benny philosophy: I feel like 39. At 39 you’re old enough to know something and young enough to look forward to what you can do with that knowledge. So I’m staying at 39. It sounds so much better than 40, doesn’t it? It sounds better than 71 too, which is what I really am, and very happy to be 71 too.

Talk low, talk slow, and don’t talk much.

Count your money. I’m not going to retire, so I don’t have to worry about that part, but you always need about three times as much money as you think you are going to need.

The first star I saw was Lash La Rue, and I thought, that’s what I want to do, be Lash La Rue.

If you see money as the solution for every problem, then money is the problem.

You get paid the same for a bad gig as for a good one.

My fan mail is enormous. Everyone is under six.

To an engineer it’s “good enough for government work.” To an artist there’s no such thing as good enough.

There are as many ways of loving as there are people in the world.

I sang before I talked, before I had a memory. When my memory began, I was already singing.

I’m a huge shoe person. I only wear shoes that are truly enormous.

Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can – there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.

The fact is that great musical pieces take and hold the stage because they provide great emotional experiences.

Success is important only to the extent that it puts one in a position to do more things one likes to do but it’s even more important because it can allow you to help people who truly deserve help.

Music is a process which is successful only if it is achieved by people who love to collaborate.

If you approach a song as though it were something that always went a certain way, that’s what you get. Maybe best to approach a song as though you never heard it before.

We all make mistakes. Best to look at them closely, confront them honestly and learn from them.

Are we not all desperate in one way or another?

I have been the victim of heartless and, worse, pointless malice delivered by stupid people who truly believed that they had something to say.

Giving a phenomenon a name does not explain it.

Even the most malignant gods would not continue to inflict life upon humanity, time without end.

Don’t rush into adulthood. It is not really all that much fun.

The only real failure is one you don’t learn from.

The most important things in life aren’t things.

Promise a lot, and then give more.

Learning is an avenue to happiness, ever open to those who are deprived of honors or wealth.

The worst thing is to get involved with people who aren’t passionate about what they’re doing.

A little nonsense now and then is good for women and good for men.

I wish I could understand why the electoral college is necessary.

The greatest peril to the soul is an answered prayer.

I don’t have everything I want, but I have a lot that I am grateful for.

You can sell out if you want to, but just because you did doesn’t mean they’re going to keep their end of the bargain.

In film there’s just one chance to make something decent. In the theatre, you get to do it over and over.

Don’t worry about being modern. That’s something you can’t avoid.

A miracle can happen at any time.

Don’t be silly and don’t waste your time.

I appreciate the love and respect behind such an award, but I can’t help thinking about people like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James, Tommy Johnson, Willie Brown, Geeshie Wiley, Ishmon Bracey, Kid Bailey, Arthur Crudup, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt, Booker White, Furry Lewis, T-Bone Walker and Ike Turner, so I am going to write about them next week.

Thank you for being here.

________________________________________________

Potatoes

The Snitty, Skint and Sequacious Pettifogger Snaffles a Shunpike.

Change, Growth, Decay and Transformation

A Persian who wrote in Arabic, Jabir ibn Hayyan studied Aristotle’s idea of air, earth, fire and water in addition to two philosophical elements: sulphur (combustability) and mercury (the metallic properties) and thus developed the elemental system used in medieval alchemy.

Grand Guignol

The Mismeasure of Almost Everything: an homage to the transience of human knowledge

Birds At Our House

Polyonymously Perverse

I Homologate This Message.

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