Jacob Davis was born Jacob Youphes in Riga, Latvia, in 1831. He emigrated to the United States, bounced between cities and trades, failed at a brewery in Reno, Nevada, and eventually opened a small tailor shop on Virginia Street. He made tents, horse blankets, and wagon covers for railroad workers. He bought his fabric from a dry goods merchant in San Francisco named Levi Strauss.

In 1870, a woman came into his shop. Her husband — a woodcutter known around Reno as Alkali Ike — kept destroying his pants, and she wanted a pair that would hold together. Davis had copper rivets on his workbench, left over from a horse blanket he’d been repairing. He put them at the stress points — the corners of the pockets, the base of the button fly. The pants held.

Word got around and Davis started getting more orders than he could handle. He knew he had something, and he knew he couldn’t afford the $68 patent filing fee. So in 1872, he wrote a letter to his fabric supplier in San Francisco — in the best English he could manage, which was not quite standard:

”The secrett of them Pants is the Rivits that I put in those Pockots and I found the demand so large that I cannot make them fast enough.

My nabors are getting yealouse of these success and unless I secure it by Patent Papers it will soon become to be a general thing everybody will make them up and thare will be no money in it.”

He proposed splitting the patent fee and sharing the rights. Levi Strauss wrote back immediately: Yes.

Let’s talk about Strauss. He’d been born Loeb Strauss in Buttenheim, Bavaria, in 1829. He came to New York at 18 after his father died, and in 1853 made his way to San Francisco — not to mine, but to sell to the people who were mining. By the time Davis’s letter arrived, he was prosperous, well-established, and a man who recognized a good idea when he saw one.

On May 20, 1873, 153 years ago this week, the U.S. Patent Office issued Patent No. 139,121 — officially for “an Improvement in Fastening Pocket Openings” — to Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss and Company. Davis moved to San Francisco to run the factory. He designed the double-arch stitching on the back pockets that became a registered trademark — the oldest apparel trademark still in use today. They called the pants “waist overalls.” Nobody called them jeans yet.

For the next 60 years, that’s essentially what they remained — workwear. Miners, cowboys, and railroad crews wore them. During the 1930s, jeans moved from the Sears catalogue onto the pages of Vogue. During World War II, soldiers wore them off-duty. A pair of Levi’s became one of the most coveted items American GIs could trade in occupied Europe.

Then Marlon Brando wore them in The Wild One in 1953. James Dean wore them in Rebel Without a Cause in 1955. Overnight, jeans became the unofficial uniform of juvenile delinquency — and high schools across America banned them. The ban made them irresistible. By 1958 a newspaper report estimated that 90 percent of American teenagers wore jeans everywhere except bed and church.

The civil rights movement claimed them too — not the hippies, though they came later, but the Black college students who rode south to organize protests, deliberately wearing denim as a symbol of solidarity with the Southern Black working class. By 1969, a trade publication noted: “What has happened to denim in the last decade is really a capsule of what happened to America. It has climbed the ladder of taste.”

Behind the Iron Curtain, they were contraband — a symbol of everything the Soviet state was not. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the young people dismantling the first bricks were photographed in blue jeans. When Russian citizens could finally buy Levi’s legally, one customer wrote to the company: “A man hasn’t very many happy minutes in his life, but every happy moment remains in his memory for a long time. The buying of Levi’s 501 jeans is one of such moments in my life.”

In 1995, Levi’s ran a television commercial set in Prague — black and white, no dialogue, a young man navigating city streets in a Trabant he’s clearly still getting used to, near-misses and all.

At the end he pulls up to a group of friends, gets out — he’s in his boxer shorts — and they all pile in and drive away. The announcer delivers the tagline: “Reason Number 007: In Prague, you can trade them for a car.”

It was a joke. Mostly.

(As a card-carrying member of Generation X, I remembered this commercial instantly when I realized the Levi’s anniversary this week.)

Jacob Davis worked at the factory until his death in 1908, his name largely forgotten for most of the following century.

Then in 1974 an archivist at the National Archives came across a transcript from a 100-year-old court case in which Davis testified to how it all happened. In 2006, a historical marker was placed at the site of his tailor shop on Virginia Street in Reno. Strauss, as far as anyone can tell, never set foot in the city.

Two immigrants. Between them they invented the most democratic garment in human history. The company does $6 billion in annual revenue, sells in more than 110 countries, and its name is on the stadium where the San Francisco 49ers play.

Not bad for a letter written in broken English by a tailor who couldn’t afford a filing fee.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 17: “If the red and green images had been as fully photographed as the blue, it would have been a truly-coloured image of the ribbon.” — James Clerk Maxwell, Scottish physicist, commenting on the imperfect but world-changing result of the first color photograph, demonstrated on this day in 1861 at the Royal Institution in London.

• May 18: “I’d get two chances — just two — to set my record because that’s all the fuel the plane could carry.” — Jacqueline Cochran, from her autobiography, recalling the morning of this day in 1953 when she climbed into a borrowed Canadian Air Force F-86 Sabre jet at Rogers Dry Lake, California, and became the first woman to break the sound barrier.

• May 19: “It has swept away forever the age-old barriers of time and distance.” — Juan Trippe, founder of Pan American World Airways, describing what transatlantic air service meant to the world — service he launched on this day in 1939 when the Boeing 314 Yankee Clipper departed Port Washington, New York, under Captain Arthur LaPorte on the first scheduled transatlantic airmail flight in history.

• May 20: “To afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” — Abraham Lincoln, from his message to Congress on July 4, 1861 — words he made concrete on this day in 1862 when he signed the Homestead Act, opening 160 acres of public land to any American citizen willing to farm it for five years and pay an $18 filing fee.

• May 21: “You must never think of anything except the need, and how to meet it.” — Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, which held its first official meeting on this day in 1881 at her apartment in Washington, D.C.

• May 22: “If we leave all the decisions to the bureaucrats, we will never achieve any progress.” — Richard Nixon, to Leonid Brezhnev at the opening of summit talks in Moscow on this day in 1972 — to which Brezhnev replied, with a laugh: “They would simply bury us in paper.” Nixon, who had built his career as America’s most fervent anti-communist, spent eight days negotiating with the Soviets and came home with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the first Strategic Arms Limitations agreement.

• May 23: “By this means, as I wear my spectacles constantly, I have only to move my eyes up or down, as I want to see distinctly far or near, the proper glasses being always ready.” — Benjamin Franklin, writing to his friend George Whatley on this day in 1785, describing what he called his “double spectacles,” or what we now think of as bifocals.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Lothar Hermann was born in 1901 in Quirnbach, a small town in the Westerwald region of Germany. He grew up, trained as a merchant, worked in finance, and in the 1930s began quietly smuggling currency across the border into France to support Jews trying to reach Palestine.

In 1935 the Gestapo caught him. They sent him to Dachau, where the beatings were severe enough that he lost the sight in one eye, and eventually the other.

When he was released, he emigrated to Argentina with his wife and his daughter Sylvia.

Years later, when Sylvia was a teenager when she met a German boy at a club in Buenos Aires named Klaus. They began seeing each other. One evening Klaus came to dinner and said, in front of Lothar, that it would have been better if the Germans had finished the job of extermination.

Lothar said nothing, but he remembered the name. Klaus Eichmann.

In 1957, when Sylvia was reading the newspaper aloud to her father — he was by then entirely blind — and came across a detailed account of Nazi war crimes trials in Germany.

The story described in detail the role of Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal architects of the Final Solution, last seen alive after the war, believed to be in hiding somewhere in South America.

Lothar did not think it was a coincidence. He wrote letters — too the Jewish community in Buenos Aires — no response.

To a prominent Nazi hunter — no meaningful follow-up.

To Fritz Bauer, the prosecutor-general of the German state of Hesse, a Jewish man himself who had survived the Nazi years and who did not trust his own colleagues not to tip Eichmann off if official channels were used.

Bauer took the letter seriously and passed it on to Israeli intelligence.

Mossad sent an operative to look at the house where Klaus and his father lived, but he came back skeptical. The house was too modest, too wretched — a small structure without running water or electricity on the outskirts of San Fernando, a working-class suburb north of Buenos Aires.

A man like Eichmann, who had organized the deportation of millions with the administrative power of the entire Nazi state behind him, wouldn’t be living like this. The case was effectively closed.

Bauer pushed again; Mossad sent an operative back — this time to meet Lothar and Sylvia in person. He believed them—but without proof, nothing happened.

Mossad asked the Hermanns to investigate further themselves, without support, without protection.

So Lothar and Sylvia boarded a train to Buenos Aires and started asking around for Klaus Eichmann’s address. Sylvia went to the door alone. Eichmann answered, saying he was Klaus’s uncle. Then Klaus came home and called him father.

Sylvia returned and told her father what she had seen. They were certain. But Mossad was still not convinced.

Then a second independent tip arrived — a German geologist named Gerhard Klammer, who had worked with Eichmann at a construction company, provided a photograph and an address, corroborating everything the Hermanns had said.

By early 1960, Mossad director Isser Harel had seen enough. He flew to Buenos Aires himself to oversee the operation.

The man living on Garibaldi Street in San Fernando had spent fifteen years becoming invisible. He was working on the assembly line at a Mercedes-Benz factory. He called himself Ricardo Klement.

He rode the same bus home every evening at roughly the same time. For weeks, Mossad agents watched him — noting his schedule, renting safe houses, building a cell in one of them where he would be held.

They photographed him from a distance with a camera hidden in a briefcase, and compared the shape of his ears to photographs in his SS file.

It was a match.

On the evening of May 11, 1960, seven agents waited for two hours near the bus stop on Garibaldi Street. When Eichmann finally stepped off the bus and began walking toward his house, agent Peter Malkin stepped forward.

“Momentito, señor.”

Eichmann panicked; Malkin grabbed him and forced him into the car. An agent told Eichmann: “If you move, you will be shot in the head.”

They held him in the safe house for nine days, and he offered aliases twice before admitting who he was. They flew him to Israel on an El Al plane, drugged, dressed in an El Al crew uniform, and boarded as a sick flight attendant.

The code word sent to Israel confirming the capture was: “The typewriter is okay.”

On May 23, 1960, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion stood before the Knesset and announced that Adolf Eichmann was in custody and would stand trial.

It was the first trial in history to be televised. More than 100 witnesses testified — Holocaust survivors, most of whom had never spoken publicly about what they had experienced.

Eichmann sat behind bulletproof glass and did not deny his role. He said he had been following orders.

He was found guilty on all 15 counts. On June 1, 1962, he was hanged — the only time Israel has ever carried out a death sentence. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea, so there would be no grave, no marker, no place for anyone to come.

Lothar Hermann, the blind man whose letter started all of it, died in 1974, largely unrecognized.

(The video above is from a somewhat fictionalized account of the capture: Operation Finale. But it’s worth a watch.)

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 10: “Done.” — The single word tapped in Morse code by the Western Union telegrapher at Promontory Summit, Utah, at 12:47 p.m. on this day in 1869, announcing to the nation that the Golden Spike had been driven and the first transcontinental railroad was complete.

• May 11: “The great thing about Python was that it was somewhere we could use all the material that everybody else had said was too silly.” — Terry Jones, recalling the evening of this day in 1969 when all six members of Monty Python met for the first time together at a Kashmir tandoori restaurant in Hampstead, London.

• May 12: “Strategically unimportant.” — The German government’s official verdict on the world’s first programmable, fully automatic digital computer, presented by engineer Konrad Zuse to a small audience of scientists at the German Laboratory for Aviation in Berlin on this day in 1941. The original Z3 was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1943. Zuse rebuilt it from memory.

• May 13: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” — Winston Churchill, from his first speech as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, delivered in the House of Commons on this day in 1940, three days after he had been called to replace Neville Chamberlain.

• May 14: “I selected a healthy boy, about eight years old, for the purpose of inoculation.” — Edward Jenner, from his own account of the experiment he conducted on this day in 1796 in Berkeley, England — scraping cowpox matter from the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes and introducing it into two small cuts on the arm of his gardener’s eight-year-old son, James Phipps. The experiment launched the science of vaccination.

• May 15: “The effect was electric.” — A contemporary account of the moment nylon stockings went on sale for the first time across the United States on this day in 1940; stores in New York sold out within hours.

• May 16: “I will never forget that moment. I had never heard anything like it.” — Jack Mullin, recalling when he first encountered a German Magnetophon — a broadcast-quality tape recorder in the waning days of World War II. Mullin, an Army Signal Corps engineer, dismantled two machines, shipped them home, and demonstrated them on this day in 1946 at an Institute of Radio Engineers show in San Francisco. Bing Crosby, who hated performing live, wrote a check for $50,000 on the spot.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Today’s story began on the seventh floor of a bombed-out department store in Tokyo, 80 years ago this week: May 7, 1946.

This was less than a year after the unconditional surrender of Japan to the Allied forces. The country’s economy was in ruins. An engineer named Masaru Ibuka borrowed about $500 to start a radio repair shop.

Seeking to branch out, his tiny company tried to manufacture and sell electric rice cookers to a starving nation.

The rice cookers didn’t work. Next up: tape recorders — enormous, rudimentary things. Ibuka and his small team eventually showed courts how the machines could replace stenographers, and showed schools what they could do for language learning. Slowly, they found customers.

The real turning point, in retrospect, may have been a short article in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper about the venture — because another engineer who had known Ibuka during the war read it and reached out.

They teamed up. What followed was success that most people can only dream of. But first, the two men:

• Masaru Ibuka: Born 1908 in Nikko, Japan. Lost his father at two, raised by his grandfather, became a solitary tinkering child who by 17 was operating a shortwave radio station connecting with strangers across oceans. Spent World War II as a defense contractor for the Imperial Navy, and when it ended found himself 37 years old in a ruined country with nothing but his tools and his ingenuity.

• Akio Morita: Born 1921 near Nagoya, the firstborn son of a sake-brewing dynasty that traced its lineage to 1665. His father began grooming him to be the fifteenth-generation heir before he could understand what that meant — but his mother owned one of Japan’s first RCA Victrola record players, and Morita spent his childhood taking it apart instead. He walked away from three centuries of family obligation to study physics, graduating in 1944 directly into the Imperial Navy.

They’d met on a wartime research committee. Ibuka was the civilian technical expert, 13 years older. Morita was a 23-year-old ensign who had walked away from 300 years of inheritance to study physics.

They were temperamentally opposite — Ibuka shy and introspective, Morita outgoing and restless — and became close friends almost immediately.

The war ended in August 1945. Ibuka set up his radio repair shop. He called it Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute.

On October 6, 1945, the newspaper article ran. Morita, preparing to join the faculty of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, read it. He went to Tokyo to find his old wartime colleague.

Their partnership flourished — but it was in 1952, when Ibuka visited the United States and learned that Bell Laboratories had licensed transistor technology, that things really changed. Ibuka saw a pocket-sized radio. He saw what consumer electronics could become.

Morita flew to New York the following year and completed the licensing deal.

In 1958, preparing to sell to the world, they renamed the company — combining the Latin word sonus with sonny, American slang for a bright young person. Sony. Four letters. Recognizable everywhere.

In 1961, Sony became the first Japanese company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1979 it gave the world the Walkman. In 1982, the compact disc. More cameras than we know what to do with.

The PlayStation followed.

Ibuka died in 1997. Morita died in 1999. In 1992, when both men suffered serious health crises at nearly the same time, they were placed in adjoining hospital rooms.

Ibuka’s son told reporters that the bond between them had been “more like love than friendship.”

They had met in a wartime committee room, building weapons for a losing war.

One of them was supposed to be a sake brewer. The other had lost his father at two years old.

Between them, starting from a city in ruins, they built a company that changed how the world listened to music, watched television, and came to see Japan in an entirely different way.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 3: “It seemed unthinkable. We were flying at nearly 500 miles an hour, at 35,000 feet, and the ride was as smooth and quiet as sitting in a drawing room.” — A passenger aboard the de Havilland Comet, as reported in contemporary press accounts of the world’s first scheduled jet passenger service, arriving in Johannesburg this day in 1952.

• May 4: “This is the most important decision in my life — to give up all if necessary for the Freedom Ride, that justice and freedom might come to the Deep South.” — John Lewis, 21 years old, one of 13 black and white activists who boarded buses in Washington D.C. on this day in 1961 and headed south to challenge segregation. In Alabama, one bus was firebombed and passengers were beaten with pipes and bats. The rides continued for six months and led directly to the federal desegregation of interstate travel facilities.

• May 5: “A new and useful improvement in weaving straw with silk or thread.” — The official description of the patent issued on this day in 1809 to Mary Kies of Killingly, Connecticut — the first patent granted to a woman in American history. Women could legally apply for patents under the Patent Act of 1790, but almost none did, because in most states they could not legally own property independent of their husbands. Kies died penniless in 1837, her patent file destroyed in a fire, fashion having moved on.

• May 6: “I felt suddenly and gloriously free from the burden of athletic ambition that I had been carrying for years.” — Roger Bannister, a 25-year-old medical student who on this day in 1954 ran a mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds at Oxford’s Iffley Road track, becoming the first person in history to break the four-minute mile — a barrier that experts had long declared the absolute limit of human capability.

• May 7: “Let the good times roll.” — The unofficial motto of New Orleans, the city founded on this day in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, a French-Canadian naval officer who had entered the French navy at age 12. He chose a crescent-shaped bend in the Mississippi River 100 miles from its mouth, believing it would be safe from hurricanes and tidal surges. He was not entirely right about that.

• May 8: “The world and all its peoples have won freedom from smallpox.” — The official declaration of the 33rd World Health Assembly, issued on this day in 1980 — the only time in human history that a disease has been completely eradicated. Smallpox had killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone, and had plagued humanity for at least 3,000 years.

• May 9: “A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world.” — Anna Jarvis, the West Virginia woman who spent years campaigning for a national Mother’s Day holiday, which President Woodrow Wilson officially proclaimed on this day in 1914, and then spent the rest of her life trying to undo it because she objected to the commercialism.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

You probably already know the name Tim Berners-Lee. If not: he’s the British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web. That’s what he’s famous for.

But I think he did something more important and laudable — he gave it away.

Berners-Lee was born in London on June 8, 1955. His parents were both mathematicians who had worked together on the Ferranti Mark 1, one of the first commercially sold computers in the world.

He studied physics at Oxford, graduated in 1976, and spent the next few years doing what a lot of technically gifted young people did in that era — bouncing between jobs, writing software, figuring out what to build.

In 1980 he took a six-month contract at CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research, whose name derives from its original French acronym, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.

It sits outside Geneva, straddling the French-Swiss border, and it is one of the strangest and most remarkable places on earth: a campus of particle accelerators and underground tunnels where thousands of physicists from dozens of countries come to smash subatomic particles together at nearly the speed of light, trying to understand what everything is made of.

They produce staggering amounts of data. In 1980, sharing that data between researchers was a genuine problem — different computers, different operating systems, different institutions, none of them talking to each other easily.

Information got lost, and when people left they basically took their knowledge with them. The institutional memory of one of the world’s great scientific organizations lived largely inside individual human heads.

Berners-Lee decided to do something about it. He wrote a small program for keeping track of the connections between people, projects, and documents — a personal tool, essentially, built on the concept of hypertext, which allowed documents to link to one another.

He called it ENQUIRE, after a Victorian household encyclopedia called *Enquire Within Upon Everything* that he remembered from childhood.

Then his contract ended and he left, and ENQUIRE stayed behind on a CERN computer for four years.

In 1984, Berners-Lee came back in a permanent role, and he found that the data problem was even worse — CERN was bigger, the data was more complex, the researchers were more dispersed.

He spent several years thinking about it, and in March 1989 he wrote a formal proposal: a system of linked documents that could live on multiple computers simultaneously, that anyone with the right software could navigate, that would be built on top of the internet infrastructure that already existed.

He called it a “mesh.” Later he called it the World Wide Web. His supervisor, Mike Sendall, read the idea and wrote four words in the margin: *”Vague, but exciting.”*

That was enough. By the end of 1990 he had built a working version — a web server, a browser, and the first website, all running on a NeXT computer on his desk at CERN.

Someone taped a note to the computer in red ink: *”This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN.”*

For the next two years it grew quietly. Other physicists started using it, and other institutions picked it up. The first web server outside Europe came online at Stanford in December 1991. By 1993 there were perhaps 50 websites in the entire world.

The internet existed, and had existed for decades — but it was complicated, technical, and forbidding to anyone without serious training. What Berners-Lee had built was a layer on top of it that made it navigable by ordinary people.

That meant he now had a decision to make.

Berners-Lee had built something that any reasonable person could see was going to be enormous, with staggering commercial possibilities.

A system that could eventually connect every computer on earth, carrying information, commerce, communication — and he held the patents! Or at least, he could have, structuring it so that every website, every browser, every web server owed him something.

On April 30, 1993, 33 years ago this week, CERN instead released the World Wide Web software into the public domain — no patents, no royalties, no licensing fees.

Free, forever, for every person and institution on earth to use, build on, and improve.

The decision to release it like this was Berners-Lee’s, and he’s been undramatic about it in the years since, framing it less as generosity than as logic.

“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control,” he said, “it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”

Maybe. But plenty of people have looked at something universal and tried to own it anyway.

Within two years of that April day there were 10,000 websites. Within five years, millions. Within a decade, it had become the largest communications system in human history — carrying more information, connecting more people, and generating more economic activity than anything ever built. There is almost no corner of modern life it has not touched.

Tim Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004. He is 70 years old and still working — currently focused on giving people back control over their own data, which he considers the web’s unfinished business. He has received every honor his field can offer.

But he has never collected a royalty.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• April 26: “Well, the people, I would say.” — Jonas Salk, when asked by journalist Edward R. Murrow who owned the patent on the polio vaccine, which began its first mass trial on this day in 1954 — with nearly two million American children, known as the Polio Pioneers, receiving shots.

• April 27: “Once more, we affirmed a truism of human history: that the people are their own liberators.” — Nelson Mandela, who on this day in 1994 voted in South Africa’s first fully democratic election, held over three days, which drew 22 million voters of all races. Mandela, then 75, was elected president.

• April 28: “The Kon-Tiki expedition opened my eyes to what the ocean really is. It is a conveyor and not an isolator.” — Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer who on this day in 1947 set sail from Callao, Peru, on a hand-built balsa wood raft with five companions and a parrot named Lorita, attempting to prove that ancient South Americans could have reached Polynesia by drifting with the wind and current.

• April 29: “The first institution found anywhere in the world to provide a higher education in the arts and sciences for male youth of African descent.” — Horace Mann Bond, class of 1923 and Lincoln University’s first Black president, describing the school he attended, which received its charter from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on this day in 1854 — making it the first degree-granting HBCU in the United States.

• April 30: “I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love.” — George Washington, from his first inaugural address, delivered on this day in 1789. A witness noted that even Washington trembled as he spoke. He had not wanted the job, but he had been recruited and elected unanimously.

• May 1: “It will never be finished.” — William Lamb, chief architect of the Empire State Building, which opened on this day in 1931, only 410 days after construction began. It was the tallest building in the world for 40 years. Lamb reportedly said that every time he looked at the building, he saw something he wished he’d done differently.

• May 2: “We are the ship. All else the sea.” — Andrew “Rube” Foster, the son of a Texas sharecropper who became one of the greatest pitchers of his era, and who on this day in 1920 launched the Negro National League’s first game — the first successful professional baseball league for Black Americans. Foster borrowed the motto from Frederick Douglass.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

William Dean Robertson was born on January 7, 1924, in Los Angeles, California. He was 21 years old and a second lieutenant in the United States Army on April 25, 1945.

Alexander Silvashko was born in 1923 or 1924 in the Cherkasy region of Ukraine. He was a lieutenant in the Soviet Red Army, fighting westward across the Eastern Front.

Neither man knew the other existed, but 81 years ago this week, they were joined forever in one of history’s most celebrated images, as the Allied armies linked up — one coming from the West, the other from the East — shortly before the surrender of Nazi Germany.

We have something unusual this week: Robertson’s account of what happened that day in his own words. In 1989, someone thought to interview him by telephone and record it. The audio is below, followed by part of the transcript:

There were hordes — hundreds and hundreds of refugees of all description. Released prisoners, escaped prisoners of war, German refugees, slave laborers — with their freedom, coming into the American lines.

I was an intelligence officer for our battalion, and it was my job to make plans for accommodating these refugees. … I went out one day to get a rough idea of how many hundreds were coming into our camp. I took a Jeep with three men and went up and down several roads outside of our town, counting refugees, counting surrendering German troops.

There were two Americans — one was an ensign from the Navy named Peck, and a sergeant. They had been in the OSS and had parachuted behind German lines and been captured. They joined our patrol. So now there were six of us.

We took a bedsheet and fashioned the United States flag. The Russians fired several times, then quit, then fired again. They didn’t believe the flag.

We finally encountered a Russian prisoner of war [and] we instructed him to tell his Russian colleagues on the other side of the Elbe that we were Americans and not Germans. He shouted across. The firing ceased.

I crawled across the girders of the bridge. I met — I think his name was Andreev, a sergeant in Silvashko’s rifle platoon — up on the girders of the bridge.

And then I crawled across to the east bank.

Within a few minutes there were probably 100 or 150 Russians there. We exchanged cap ornaments and wristwatches and mementos. We slapped each other on the back, shook hands. They produced some schnapps and we toasted each other and all our leaders.

And then someone in the Russian lines clearly spoke English, and we made arrangements for our leaders to meet the following day.

I remember it very well.

The following night, the U.S. Army distributed an official photograph of Robertson and Silvashko, arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning.

Robertson came home, went to medical school, completed his residency in neurosurgery at UCLA, raised four sons, and practiced medicine in Los Angeles until his death in 1999.

Silvashko returned to Ukraine to find his family and his village wiped out. He settled in a village in Belarus called Morach, became a schoolteacher and then a school principal.

The two men reunited in Moscow in 1975, then again in what was then East Germany for the 40th anniversary in 1985 — though the Cold War cast a shadow over the celebrations, and official relations between the two countries frequently made the reunions complicated.

Then Silvashko was largely forgotten until 2005, when U.S. Ambassador to Belarus George Krol read a small item in a local newspaper noting that the Soviet soldier in the famous photograph was still alive, and drove hours down dirt roads to find him.

They were not the only ones there that day.

First Lieutenant Albert Kotzebue reached the Soviet lines hours earlier, crossing the Elbe in a rowboat near Strehla and meeting a Soviet soldier on horseback — but there were no photographers.

And there was Joseph Polowsky, a Chicago taxi driver and rifleman on Kotzebue’s patrol, who was so moved by the experience that he spent the rest of his life campaigning for peace.

But Robertson and Silvashko became the symbols — two young men from opposite ends of the world, meeting in the rubble of a defeated country, with nothing in common except the fact that they had both survived long enough to be there.

“Governments can talk,” Robertson said, years later. “But people can do better.”

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• April 19: “This will probably be my last long race. Look at my feet — do you blame me for wanting to stop?” — John J. McDermott, a New York club runner who on this day in 1897 won the first Boston Marathon, covering 25 miles from Ashland to Boston in 2 hours, 55 minutes and 10 seconds.

• April 20: “We must not forget that when radium was discovered, no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science — and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become a benefit for humanity.” — Marie Curie, who on this day in 1902 completed the isolation of one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride from one full ton of pitchblende, after nearly four years of work.

• April 21: “All history proves the great path of the world’s commerce to be from East to West.” — Davenport Mayor James Grant, speaking at the grand opening celebration on this day in 1856 of the first railroad bridge across the Mississippi River.

• April 22: “It was truly an astonishing grassroots explosion. The objective was to get a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy.” — Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the founder of Earth Day, which was first observed on this day in 1970 by an estimated 20 million Americans on 2,000 college campuses and in hundreds of communities.

• April 23: “Honi soit qui mal y pense.” — King Edward III of England, which translates as “Shame on him who thinks evil of it” — words the king reportedly spoke on this day in 1348 after picking up a garter that had slipped from a noblewoman’s leg at a court ball, and tying it to his own leg to spare her embarrassment. The phrase became the motto of the Order of the Garter.

• April 24: “I cannot live without books.” — Thomas Jefferson, writing to John Adams in 1815 after selling his personal library of 6,487 volumes to Congress to rebuild the collection the British had burned the year before.

• April 25: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." — James Watson and Francis Crick, from their 900-word paper published in the journal Nature on this day in 1953, announcing the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

If you’ve ever been in a concert hall, a church, or honestly just a shopping mall in December, you’ve probably heard it — that surge of voices and brass, everyone suddenly standing. The Hallelujah chorus.

I suspect most people couldn’t tell you who wrote it, or why, or what the rest of the piece sounds like. They just know that when it hits, something happens.

I wonder if they’d be interested to know that the man who wrote it was 56 years old at the time, had recently recovered from a stroke that had partially paralyzed his right hand, and was seriously concerned that he might end up in debtors’ prison.

George Frideric Handel had been one of the most celebrated composers in Europe. He’d moved to London in 1712 and conquered it — writing and staging more than 40 Italian operas, accumulating royal pensions and aristocratic patrons, becoming so famous that a statue was erected in his honor in Vauxhall Gardens while he was still alive.

Then London’s taste changed, Italian opera fell out of fashion, his productions failed, and his finances collapsed.

Think of it like being a writer in 2026 who finds he’s suddenly being replaced by AI.

Things got worse: In April 1737 Handel suffered a stroke. He recovered, but the humiliation didn’t — his last opera, staged in early 1741, ran for three performances before closing. He gave what he believed was his final concert that April and essentially prepared to retire in defeat.

Then, Deus ex Machina:

First, a poet named Charles Jennens handed him a libretto — passages stitched together from the Bible, tracing the life of Jesus from prophecy to resurrection.

Then, a group of Dublin charities — the Irish had always been warmer to him than London — invited him to Ireland for a season of benefit concerts, offering him a commission to write something new.

On August 22, 1741, Handel locked himself in his London home and started composing, working in a state that people around him described as almost frightening — barely eating, barely sleeping, moving from one section to the next without stopping.

In 23 days he produced a 260-page oratorio, weeping — by some accounts — as he wrote the Hallelujah chorus. Whether or not that’s true, when he finished he reportedly said he felt he had seen God.

He traveled to Dublin that November, where he found enthusiastic audiences, no jadedness, no rival factions. The premiere was set for April 13, 1742, at the Great Music Hall on Fishamble Street — a venue built, almost poetically, to raise money for the release of imprisoned debtors.

More than 700 people crowded into a hall designed for 600. The management had taken out newspaper advertisements beforehand asking ladies not to wear hooped skirts, and gentlemen to leave their swords at home, so that more people could fit.

He owned the room, as we’d say today. The Dublin Journal, reviewing the premiere, wrote that words were insufficient to describe the delight it had given the audience — that the sublime, the grand, and the tender had combined to transport and charm every heart in the room.

When Handel was asked where the proceeds from the night should go, he replied: “I have myself been a very sick man, and am now cured. I was a prisoner and have been set free.”

The money raised that night freed 142 men from debtors’ prison.

I like this story because who doesn’t like Handel’s Messiah? Especially the Hallelujah chorus?

But also because when I heard this story I filed it immediately with other writers and creators who had to work fast to produce groundbreaking work — because their families would be in dire financial straits if they didn’t pull it off.

A hundred and forty years later, former President Ulysses Grant, diagnosed with terminal throat cancer in 1884 and nearly broke after a fraudulent investment scheme wiped him out, spent his final months writing his memoirs through excruciating pain — sometimes unable to speak, reduced to scribbling notes when his voice gave out entirely. He finished the manuscript days before he died. Mark Twain published it. The book is considered one of the finest military memoirs ever written, and it made his family the equivalent of roughly $15 million in today’s money.

Dostoevsky did something similar, under circumstances almost too strange to believe.

By 1866 he had gambled away nearly everything he had, and in desperation signed a contract with a predatory publisher: deliver a complete novel within 26 days, or forfeit the rights to every book he had ever written — and every book he would ever write — for the next nine years.

He hired a 20-year-old stenographer named Anna, dictated the entire novel to her, and submitted the manuscript two hours before the deadline. The novel was about a compulsive gambler, and he later married Anna; without her, by most accounts, we would never have gotten The Brothers Karamazov.

But back to Handel. His piece is 283 years old, and it has been performed every year since its premiere — through wars, revolutions, and the rise and fall of every musical fashion imaginable. Mozart reorchestrated it and said of Handel, “He knows better than any of us what will make an effect.”

Beethoven called Handel the greatest composer who ever lived. When the Hallelujah chorus was first performed in London, King George II stood up — nobody knows exactly why — and the tradition of standing has continued ever since.

Most people who stand have no idea they’re honoring a 56-year-old man who wrote the whole thing in 23 days, convinced his career was over, in a last desperate act of creation that turned out to be the most performed choral work in history.

Hallelujah.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• April 12: “I could have gone on flying through space forever.” — Yuri Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut, who on this day in 1961 became the first human being to leave Earth, orbiting the planet aboard Vostok 1 in 108 minutes. He was 27 years old.

• April 13: “Today, in the midst of a great war for freedom, we dedicate a shrine to freedom.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, dedicating the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., on this day in 1943 — Jefferson’s 200th birthday.

• April 14: “It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.” — Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, announcing on this day in 2003 the completion of the full sequencing of human DNA — a 13-year effort involving more than 1,000 scientists across six countries, finished two years ahead of schedule.

• April 15: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” — Jackie Robinson, who on this day in 1947 took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first African American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era.

• April 16: “I was annoyed from the start by the attitude of doubt on the part of the spectators that I would never really make the flight. This attitude made me more determined than ever to succeed.” — Harriet Quimby, American aviator and journalist, who on this day in 1912 became the first woman to fly solo across the English Channel, navigating by hand compass through heavy fog in an unfamiliar plane. Her achievement went almost entirely unnoticed — the Titanic had sunk the same night.

• April 17: “We don’t claim the Mustang can be all things to all people. But we do believe it will be more things to more people than any other automobile on the road.” — Lee Iacocca, Ford Division vice president, at the public debut of the Ford Mustang on this day in 1964 at the New York World’s Fair. Ford sold 22,000 Mustangs that opening weekend and more than 400,000 in the first year.

• April 18: “The regulars are coming out!” — Paul Revere, Boston silversmith and Son of Liberty, who on the night of this day in 1775 rode from Boston through the Massachusetts countryside to warn colonial militias that British troops were marching toward Lexington and Concord. The battles fought the next morning became the opening shots of the American Revolution.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, millions of tragedies resulted. Today we’re focusing on one person’s story.

Her name was Manya, and she was Jewish, age 13, living with her mother and father and siblings in a small city that the Germans turned into a ghetto. Her family took in other families for the first few years of the brutal occupation.

Eventually, the Nazis arrested her father, and then sent Manya, her mother, and her younger sister and brother to a labor camp called Strzelnica.

Obviously, this was a grim, terrifying experience. However, there was a small ray of light, in that in the midst of this, Manya met a boy named Moshe, and the two teens developed crushes on each other. As someone later said: They were kids, and they still found small ways to flirt and joke in the midst of horrible surroundings.

Over time, the Nazis began sending Jews from Strzelnica to even harsher concentration camps. Manya’s brother was sent away; they had no idea where. Then, Moshe disappeared as well. Then, in July 1944, Manya, her mother, and her sister were crowded into a filthy boxcar and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Manya’s mother is one of the real heroes in this story; with death and destruction all around, she somehow kept what remained of the family together. After six or seven months at Auschwitz, the three were sent to Bergen-Belsen, which is the camp in which Anne Frank and her sister Margot perished.

In telling this story, I worry that I might somehow underemphasize the unfathomable death, destruction and pain. So, let me quote two of the first British soldiers who liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, on what they saw immediately afterward:

• “You just couldn’t believe the numbers involved. ... The whole camp was so quiet and yet there were so many people there. ... Everything was just ghost-like and it was just unbelievable that there were literally people living still there. ... So much death ...”

• “We’d been trained for war wounded, we were used to terrible wounds ... [W]e hadn’t been trained for this ... It was so terrible and so different from anything we’d seen ... We’d seen distressed people about, people walking from town to town, but nothing like this.”

Miraculously, Manya, her mother, and her sister survived, and they lived for a while in a displaced persons camp nearby. Manya’s father had died, but she learned that her brother was alive in a hospital in Munich.

Then, another miracle: Moshe showed up.

He’d been through hell, left for dead, lost his own parents and most of his relatives. But, when he’d seen a list of survivors in another D.P. camp in Munich that included Manya’s name, he walked and hitchhiked more than 300 miles over three weeks to Bergen-Belsen to find her.

Mayna and Moishe were married while still in camp at Belsen, and they moved the next year to Canada, where Moshe’s sister had emigrated before the war.

Over the next year or so, they were able to sponsor Manya’s mother, brother, and sister (and her sister’s new husband, too).

Manya and Moshe anglicized their names to Morris and Mary when they reached Toronto. There, they had three children, including Geddy Lee, the lead singer of the rock group Rush.

Morris (Moshe) died in 1965. Manya took over the family store, and raised her kids. She also told them all about her experiences -- every detail she could remember. It seems she had two missions if I’m reading this right: Never forget, and keep her family together.

Maybe a third: Embrace the life she was blessed enough to survive to live.

As an example, Rush wasn’t exactly Mayna’s kind of music to begin with, and she wasn’t thrilled with her son’s long 1970s rock star hair. But she embraced it all and became the band’s biggest fan.

Geddy has a great story about walking onto the stage in one auditorium in the 1970s, and seeing his sister in the front row -- along with his middle-aged, suburban, Yiddish-speaking mother. She politely declined a marijuana joint from another audience member, but passed it to his sister.

Then, on April 15, 1995, Geddy took his mother and siblings back to Germany, for the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

“When I stood there, my proudest moment was that I’m here, with my three children, and Hitler didn’t get all of us,” Mayna told an interviewer from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The proudest moment in my life.”

If you’re interested, you can find Mayna’s entire testimony here.

Some of it is very hard to hear given the details and the subject, but the “Part 3” recording talks about life after the war.

Amusingly, even after Mayna mentions “my son the rock star” several times, the interviewer never thinks to ask if he was in a band he might have heard of.

I’m also going to add one more anecdote, which isn’t really chronological, but it’s such a great story. It has to do with Mayna’s son Geddy’s name.

In short, he was originally named “Gary” (middle name, “Lee”). But with her accent, some of his friends thought her “R’s” sounded like “D’s.” So, “Gary” became “Geddy,” which became his nickname. Ultimately “Gary” took it a step further and officially changed it.

Honestly, that’s why I started on this whole story: Is there a better way to say “I love you” to your mom than to legally change your name to the way she mispronounces it, so nobody can ever again say she says it wrong?

There are a lot of fantastic quotes from Geddy Lee about music and artistry and passion. Here’s one to tuck away:

“There will always be pressure on you to compromise, pressure to sell your dreams short, and there will always be people who want you to be something that you’re not. But none of those things can happen without your permission.”

But given the theme today, and the fact that this story is more about Mayna (who died in 2021 at age 95) than Geddy himself, let’s go with something a little more topical:

“I feel that we’re living in an era that seems to have forgotten what can and will happen when fascism rears its head. I think we all need reminding of it in the face of those who either deny the past or never knew about it in the first place.”

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday March 29: “It seemed unthinkable for me to leave the world forever before I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce.” — Ludwig van Beethoven, who on this day in 1795 walked onto a Vienna stage at age 24 and made his debut as a concert pianist.

• Monday March 30: “Henceforth we live in a new world, breathe a new atmosphere, have a new earth beneath and a new sky above us.” — Frederick Douglass, born into slavery, responding on this day in 1870 to the adoption of the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed citizens the right to vote regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

• Tuesday March 31: “I ought to be jealous of the tower. It is more famous than I am.” — Gustave Eiffel, whose iron tower opened on this day in 1889 as the tallest structure on earth.

• Wednesday April 1: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” — Steve Jobs, who on this day in 1976 co-founded Apple Inc. with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, with $1,300 in capital and no real idea what they were building toward.

• Thursday April 2: “I don’t see why [women] couldn’t play ball. I know I always wanted to.” — Jackie Mitchell, Chattanooga Lookouts pitcher, who at age 17 on this day in 1931 retired Babe Ruth on three pitches, and then struck out Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees. Baseball voided her contract shortly after, on the grounds that the professional game would be “too strenuous” for women.

• Friday April 3: “The most quickly adopted consumer technology in the history of the world.” — Martin Cooper, the Motorola engineer who on this day in 1973 stood on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk and made the first call ever placed from a handheld cellular phone.

• Saturday April 4: “We are not a war-making alliance. We are a peace-making alliance.” — NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, on the alliance founded on this day in 1949, when twelve nations signed a treaty committing to collective defense.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Roger Bushell spent most of his adult life doing three things: practicing law, skiing as fast as possible, and trying to escape from the Germans.

Born in South Africa in 1910, Bushell was sent to school in England at 13, went on to Cambridge, and by his late 20s was a London barrister who spoke nine languages and defended people who couldn’t afford to defend themselves.

He’d joined the RAF Auxiliary along the way, in 1932 — the kind of outfit where wealthy young men paid their way to fly on weekends. Assigned to defend RAF personnel in courts-martial, he was eventually banned from the job for winning too many cases.

Then war came, and Bushell was given command of a fighter squadron. They went into combat for the first time on May 23, 1940, flying Spitfires over the French coast to cover the retreat toward Dunkirk. Bushell damaged two Messerschmitts before being shot down and captured by a German motorcycle patrol.

He would spend the next four years behind wire. He didn’t take it quietly.

His first escape got him to within a few hundred yards of the Swiss border before a border guard caught him. His second was more audacious — he and a Czech officer jumped from a moving train, linked up with the Czech underground in Prague, and stayed hidden for eight months before a Nazi manhunt flushed them out. The Gestapo warned him a third attempt would mean execution, and transferred him to Stalag Luft III: their supposedly inescapable new camp deep in a German pine forest.

Bushell arrived at the camp more determined than ever to wage war from within. He took over the job of running the camp’s clandestine escape committee, with the codename Big X.

“Everyone here is living on borrowed time,” he told his fellow prisoners. “By rights we should all be dead. The only reason God allowed us this extra ration of life is so we can make life hell for the Hun.”

His plan: Build “three bloody deep, bloody long tunnels” out of the camp, on the theory that even if the German guards found one, at least one would eventually be complete.

Six hundred prisoners worked under Bushell’s direction, day and night for more than a year, digging three massive tunnels right under the guards’ noses. Starting from nothing, they scrounged and improvised — repurposing over 4,000 bed boards, hundreds of blankets, and 1,400 powdered milk tins into ventilation shafts and dirt containers. They built an underground railway, forged passports, fabricated civilian clothes and fake German uniforms, all hidden in plain sight beneath their captors’ feet.

Oh, and one detail worth noting: Bushell was claustrophobic. He did it anyway.

On the night of March 24, 1944 — 81 years ago this week — 76 allied prisoners of war crawled out through tunnel Harry and slipped into the darkness.

Only three made it to freedom. The rest were recaptured, and Hitler ordered 50 of them executed as a warning to every prisoner of war in Germany.

Roger Bushell was among those murdered. After the war, the RAF launched a criminal investigation — the only major war crime ever investigated by a single branch of any nation’s military, and in 1947, a tribunal found 18 Nazis guilty. Thirteen were executed.

Clearly there is tragedy here. But the men still in camp later said that the entire effort buoyed their spirits, and that even after learning of their fellow prisoners’ deaths, the act of forcing Germany to divert thousands of soldiers into a massive manhunt felt like a victory — a terrible, costly victory, but a victory nonetheless.

They had struck back, and that mattered, because people need more than survival. We need purpose — things to build, to work toward, and a sense that our efforts add up to something larger than ourselves.

For the ones who didn’t make it — including Bushell himself — there is something to be said for having spent those years not in resignation but in an audacious act of defiance.

Nobody lives forever, but knowing that you lived long enough to give other people hope and purpose can be enough.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, March 22: “I think this would be a good time for a beer.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, upon signing the Cullen-Harrison Act on this day in 1933, which legalized the sale of beer with up to 3.2% alcohol content, marking the beginning of the end of Prohibition.

• Monday, March 23: “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” — Patrick Henry, Virginia delegate who on this day in 1775 delivered his legendary speech to the Second Virginia Convention at St. John’s Church in Richmond.

• Tuesday, March 24: “If my efforts have led to greater success than usual, this is due, I believe, to the fact that during my wanderings … I have strayed onto paths where the gold was still lying by the wayside.” — Robert Koch, German scientist who on this day in 1882 announced the discovery of tuberculosis bacillus, the bacterium responsible for TB, which at the time killed one in seven people.

• Wednesday, March 25: “A common market is far more than an economic union. It is the practical manifestation of a common will to build a joint civilization.” — Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian Prime Minister on the Treaty of Rome signed on this day in 1957.

• Thursday, March 26: “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” — Jonas Salk, American virologist who on this day in 1953 announced that he had successfully tested a vaccine against poliomyelitis, responding to journalist Edward R. Murrow’s question about who owned the patent, choosing to maximize the vaccine’s global distribution rather than seek profit.

• Friday, March 27: “This definitive treaty of peace put an end to the war.” — Opening language from the Treaty of Amiens, signed on this day in 1802 achieving peace in Europe for 14 months during the Napoleonic Wars. This represented the only period between 1793 and 1814 when Britain and France were not at war.

• Saturday, March 28: “Such a power if developed would operate railroads, factories, mines, irrigation pumps, furnish heat and light in such measure that all in all it would be the most unique, the most interesting, and the most remarkable development of both irrigation and power in this age of industrial and scientific miracles.” — Rufus Woods, newspaper publisher who promoted the Grand Coulee Dam, on this day in 1941 when the dam began producing electricity, eventually becoming the largest capacity hydropower station in the United States.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Hugh Thompson Sr. was a World War II Navy veteran who worked as an electrician in Stone Mountain, Georgia. He raised his two sons—Hugh Jr. and Tommie—with strict discipline. If the boys did something wrong, their mother Wessie would punish them. Then Hugh Sr. would come home from work and punish them again.

Hugh Sr. and Wessie were working-class Episcopalians in 1950s Georgia who actively denounced racism and helped minority families in their community. They taught their boys three simple rules: don’t be a bully, help the underdog, and follow the golden rule.

Hugh Jr. graduated from Stone Mountain High School in 1961, served three years in the Navy with the Seabees, got his discharge, married, and became a funeral director. When his brother Tommie deployed to Vietnam with the Air Force, Hugh Jr. enlisted in the Army in 1966, learned to fly helicopters, and arrived in Vietnam in December 1967.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, Hugh Jr. and his crew—Glenn Andreotta, 20, and Lawrence Colburn, 18—lifted off for an operation in Quảng Ngãi Province.

What Hugh Jr. saw from his helicopter was death. Dozens of bodies in irrigation ditches. The village burning. U.S. Army soldiers moving through the village they called My Lai, killing everyone—old men, women, children, infants. No return fire. No Viet Cong. Just slaughter.

Hugh Jr. landed near an injured woman and radioed for medical evacuation. When he circled back, she’d been shot dead. Captain Ernest Medina was standing nearby. Hugh Jr. confronted him. Medina told him to get back in his helicopter. Hugh Jr. kept reporting what he was seeing. No one stopped it.

Then Hugh Jr. spotted about a dozen civilians running toward an earthen bunker with American soldiers chasing them.

This was the moment Hugh Sr. and Wessie had been preparing their son for without knowing it. Hugh Jr. put his helicopter down between the American soldiers and the bunker and told Andreotta and Colburn to train their M60 machine guns on the Americans. If the soldiers tried to harm the civilians, his crew was to open fire.

Hugh Jr. walked to the bunker. He spoke no Vietnamese. The people inside were terrified. He used hand signals. Finally nine or ten civilians emerged. Hugh Jr. radioed friends flying gunships overhead and they evacuated the civilians to safety.

In an irrigation ditch filled with nearly a hundred bodies, Andreotta spotted movement. He waded into the corpses and pulled out a boy covered in blood, clinging to his dead mother. Hugh Jr. flew him to the hospital.

By day’s end, between 347 and 504 Vietnamese civilians had been slaughtered. Hugh Jr. had saved perhaps a dozen lives. The Army investigated, concluded about 20 civilians had been accidentally killed. The division commander congratulated Charlie Company. Hugh Jr. received a Distinguished Flying Cross. He threw it away.

The next year, journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story. Hugh Jr. testified before Congress. Congressman Mendel Rivers called him a traitor. Twenty-six soldiers were charged. Most were acquitted. Lieutenant William Calley was convicted and sentenced to life. President Nixon commuted it to three years house arrest.

Hugh Jr. struggled with PTSD, alcoholism, divorce, nightmares. For nearly two decades he disappeared.

Thirty years later, the Army awarded Hugh Jr. the Soldier’s Medal. Days later, he and Colburn returned to Vietnam and met two women they’d saved. The women had families now—children and grandchildren who wouldn’t exist without that helicopter.

In 2001, they were reunited with the boy from the ditch. His name was Do Ba. He was 36, just out of prison for theft. Village officials called him “a walking casualty.” He’d been eight years old that day. He remembered everything.

Look, this might make a cleaner story if one of the women’s grandchildren grew up to discover a cure for cancer, or if Do Ba became a beloved teacher.

But you don’t save people because of what you think they’ll do for humanity. You save them because humanity is inherently worth saving.

A boy clinging to his dead mother deserved to live. The women deserved to live. The old man deserved to live.

At the reunion, a Vietnamese woman approached Hugh Jr. She wished the men who killed her neighbors could have come back too. Hugh Jr. looked confused. She finished: “So we could forgive them.”

“I’m not man enough to do that,” Hugh Jr. later told a reporter. “I’m sorry. I wish I was, but I won’t lie to anybody.”

Hugh Jr. died of cancer on January 6, 2006. He was 62. Lawrence Colburn was at his bedside.

I admit. I wondered a few times while writing this: Who would write a newsletter called Big Optimism, and feature the My Lai massacre?

I think it’s because you don’t have to save the world. You just have to save the very small part you can see.

On a terrible morning in March 1968, one man looked down at a nightmare and decided to do something about it.

Examples like that are as optimistic and inspiring as I can imagine.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday March 15: “I feel very honored to own the name.” — Aron Meystedt, current owner of the domain name symbolics.com, which on this day in 1985 was the first “.com” domain registered, by a computer company called Symbolics Inc.

• Monday March 16: "The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow." — Robert H. Goddard, American physicist who on this day in 1926 launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts, a 2.5-second flight that rose 41 feet and traveled 184 feet before crash-landing in a cabbage field.

• Tuesday March 17: “By all accounts there never existed a more miserable set of beings than these wretched creatures now are.” — George Washington, describing the evacuating British forces after 11,000 troops and Loyalists fled Boston by ship on this day in 1776, ending an eight-year occupation after American forces fortified Dorchester Heights with cannons dragged 300 miles through winter snow from Fort Ticonderoga.

• Wednesday March 18: "I gently pulled myself out and kicked off from the vessel. An inky black, stars everywhere and the sun so bright I could barely stand it." — Alexei Leonov, Soviet cosmonaut who on this day in 1965 became the first human to walk in space

• Thursday March 19: "It will become apparent that it is one of the most important conservation measures ever enacted by the Congress of the United States." — Senator William M. Calder of New York, sponsor of the Standard Time Act signed into law on this day in 1918

• Friday March 20: "I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak." — Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in book form on this day in 1852, selling 300,000 copies in its first year and becoming so influential that President Lincoln reportedly called her "the little lady who made this big war."

• Saturday March 21: May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth." — U.N. Secretary-General U Thant, in his Earth Day statement this day in 1971.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Almon Brown Strowger was born in 1839 in Penfield, New York, and he had a bit of a local pedigree: grandson of the town’s second settler and first miller.

He also had a penchant for invention. As a boy, whenever his mother assigned chores, young Almon and his brothers would spend their time devising machines to do the work for them.

(This is what is known as “foreshadowing.”)

Years went by: the 1840s, the 1850s. He taught school for a while. Then came the war.

In October 1861, Strowger enlisted in Company A of the 8th New York Volunteer Cavalry as a trumpeter, riding with the Union cavalry through some of the war’s bloodiest campaigns: Bull Run. Fredericksburg. Chancellorsville. Gettysburg.

He rose through the ranks to Sergeant, then Second Lieutenant. But by September 1864, his war was over.

Strowger was wounded in action at the Third Battle of Winchester in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. While Union forces routed the Confederates that day, Strowger was discharged.

He came home to a country hurtling into the future. The war had industrialized America. Railroads crisscrossed the continent, then telegraph lines followed, and then came Bell’s telephone.

As for Strowger, he was left behind for a bit. He taught school again, but then drifted west through Kansas before settling in Missouri, where he became an undertaker—the second-oldest profession, I guess.

This is where Strowger’s life experience and the technological revolution converged.

Patent No. 447,918

Bell’s telephone had arrived in Kansas City, but it was rudimentary, and every call had to go through a human operator who manually connected the lines.

You picked up the receiver, told the operator who you wanted to reach, and she plugged you in.

And if the operator happened to be, for example, the wife of a competing funeral home in your town—and if every time someone called needing an undertaker, even if they mentioned you by name, she routed them to her husband—well, that was a problem.

Strowger might have been in the dying business, but now his business was dying and he did not appreciate the irony. Armed with a theory about the rerouted calls, he did the legwork, tracing obituaries to figure out if the families of the various deceased should have been his customers.

He was not pleased with what he found. But, Strowger didn’t just complain; he decided the problem wasn’t the operator—the problem was that there was an operator at all. Why should a telephone company employee decide who got connected to whom? Subscribers should choose for themselves.

And so, back to his childhood penchant, he started tinkering, trying to build an automatic telephone operator.

His first model was built from a collar box and straight pins. He added magnets, then electromagnets. He worked out a system of rotary stepping switches that could automatically route calls based on electrical pulses.

Finally, Eureka! On March 10, 1891, 135 years ago this week, the U.S. Patent Office issued him Patent No. 447,918 for an “Automatic Telephone Exchange.”

(Although Strowger preferred to call it the “girl-less, cuss-less” telephone system.)

Lieut. A.B. Strowger

Patent in hand, Strowger brought in his nephew William and others who understood electricity and had money. They formed a company and went looking for customers, finding one with the local phone system in La Porte, Indiana.

In November 1892, the first automatic telephone exchange opened with 75 subscribers. It worked, and Strowger kept refining the technology.

Unfortunately — and double-unfortunately, because I really do try to emphasize optimism in these features — Strowger only had a little more than a decade to enjoy his success.

His health started to fail in the mid 1890s, and he sold his patents and his share of the company for a modest sum—enough to retire comfortably—and moved to St. Petersburg, Florida with his second wife, Susan.

He died in 1902 at age 63, and his grave is marked with a simple white military headstone: “Lieut. A.B. Strowger, Co. A, 8 NY Cav.”

Like so many others, however, Strowger cashed out just a bit too soon; his patents eventually sold to Bell Systems for $2.5 million, and his stepping switch became the backbone of telephone systems worldwide, remaining in use well into the 1970s.

He was largely forgotten, although in 2003, the Verizon Foundation—the charitable arm of the ultimate corporate successor to Bell, which really ought to celebrate him a bit—made an award to restore the cemetery where he’s buried along with two nearby Civil War memorials.

Funeral directors should probably remember him. Oh, and Ray Parker Jr., who wrote and performed the theme song to the 1984 movie, Ghostbusters.

Why? “Who you gonna call?”

If it weren’t for Almon Brown Strowger, generations of people might not have been able to decide for themselves.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• March 8: “We appear before you this morning to ask ... [to] prohibit the disfranchisement of citizens of the United States on account of sex.” — Susan B. Anthony, addressing the House Judiciary Committee on this day in 1884.

• March 9: “My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be.” — Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel, who debuted the Barbie doll at the American International Toy Fair in New York on this day in 1959.

• March 10: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” — Ulysses S. Grant. On this day in 1864, President Lincoln signed Grant’s commission as Lieutenant General, making him commander of all Union armies.

• March 11: “Lithuania is free! Latvia will be free! Estonia will be free!” — Members of Lithuania’s Supreme Council, chanting in the chamber at 10:44 p.m. on this day in 1990 after voting 124-0 (with 6 abstentions) to declare independence from the Soviet Union.

• March 12: “I want world sympathy in this battle of Right against Might.” — Mahatma Gandhi, near the end of the Salt March, which began on this day in 1930. Gandhi and 78 followers walked 240 miles to the Arabian Sea, where on April 6 he picked up salt from the beach, breaking British law. More than 60,000 Indians were jailed in the ensuing civil disobedience campaign.

• March 13: “Before the bishop blesses his people, I ask you to pray to the Lord that he will bless me: the prayer of the people asking the blessing for their Bishop.” — Pope Francis, from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on this day in 2013, moments after his election.

• March 14: “She was just incurable. It was like somebody today with COVID-19 who is going down the tubes.” — Historian Eric Lax, describing 33-year-old Anne Miller’s condition before she became the first American treated with penicillin on this day in 1942 at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Doctors gave her a tablespoon of the experimental drug—half the entire U.S. supply. Her fever broke within hours.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

John Lewis was 25 years old, and he thought he was going to die.

It was March 7, 1965. Lewis and 600 other marchers had walked six blocks from Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, heading for the Edmund Pettus Bridge, as a protest for the right to vote.

In Dallas County, Alabama, only 2 percent of Black citizens were registered voters. When they tried to register, they were asked to count the bubbles on a bar of soap, or the jellybeans in a jar. They were turned away because they spelled out their middle name instead of using an initial, or showed up on the wrong day, or because the registrar just didn’t feel like it.

So they marched.

At the crest of the bridge, Lewis—chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—and Hosea Williams stopped. On the other side, Alabama State Troopers waited in formation. Behind them, sheriff’s deputies on horseback.

Major John Cloud called out through a bullhorn. The march was unlawful. They had two minutes to disperse.

“Major, may I have a word?” Williams asked.

“There will be no word.”

One minute and five seconds later, Cloud ordered: “Troopers, advance.”

They came with billy clubs raised, bullwhips, and tear gas. They trampled marchers with horses. Lewis was clubbed in the head. He fell. As he tried to get up, the trooper hit him again. His skull fractured. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized and 58 were treated for injuries.

TV Changes Everything

What made Bloody Sunday different? America watched it happen.

That evening, ABC interrupted its broadcast of *Judgment at Nuremberg*—a film about Nazi war crimes—to show footage of American state troopers beating peaceful protesters. Within 48 hours, demonstrations erupted in 80 American cities.

Five days later, Lewis testified before a federal judge, his skull still fractured. He described the trooper’s nightstick, the tear gas, being knocked to the ground. Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. ruled that the demonstrators had a constitutional right to march.

”We Shall Overcome”

Eight days after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress.

LBJ was a Texan who had spent decades in Congress weakening civil rights bills. But he’d watched the footage from Selma. And he’d decided.

“At times,” he told Congress, “history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

Then he did something unprecedented. He borrowed the language of the movement itself.

“Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

The chamber erupted. Members of Congress—except for the Southerners—stood and cheered. Martin Luther King Jr., watching on television in Selma, reportedly cried.

Johnson told Congress about his first job teaching Mexican-American students in Cotulla, Texas. Kids who came to school hungry, who knew the pain of prejudice but didn’t know why.

“I often walked home late in the afternoon, wishing there was more that I could do,” he said. “But now I do have that chance. And I’ll let you in on a secret—I mean to use it.”

The Law

On March 21, under federal protection, 3,200 marchers set out from Selma. This time, they made it across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. John Lewis was at the front, a few feet from Martin Luther King Jr. They walked 54 miles over five days. By the time they reached Montgomery, 25,000 people had joined them.

Congress debated the Voting Rights Act through the spring and summer. The Senate passed it 77-19. The House passed it 333-85.

On August 6, 1965—five months after Bloody Sunday—President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, banning literacy tests and poll taxes, and establishing federal oversight of elections in areas with histories of discrimination.

The results were immediate. In Alabama, Black voter registration jumped from 23 percent in 1964 to 57 percent in 1968. In Mississippi, it went from 7 percent to 59 percent. The number of elected Black officials in the South exploded.

John Lewis kept one of the pens Johnson used to sign the law. It hung, framed, in his living room for the rest of his life.

Good Trouble

Lewis served in Congress for 33 years, representing Georgia’s 5th district. He called what happened in Selma “good trouble”—the kind of trouble that changes things.

Every year, on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Lewis walked back across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In 2015, President Obama walked with him. In 2020, sick with cancer but still fighting, Lewis crossed the bridge one last time. He died that July at age 80.

Within five months, America went from Bloody Sunday to the Voting Rights Act. The march worked. The testimony worked. The pressure worked. Democracy, battered and broken on a bridge in Alabama, bent toward justice.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• March 1: “[A] public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” — From the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, creating the world’s first national park this day in 1872. The act set aside 3,500 square miles of wilderness in Montana and Wyoming territories, launching the global national park movement.

• March 2: “I congratulate you, fellow-citizens.” — President Thomas Jefferson, who on this day in 1807 signe the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves. The law did not abolish slavery or stop the domestic slave trade, but it ended legal importation of enslaved people from abroad.

• March 3: “O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light” — Opening lines of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key, which Congress designated as the national anthem on this day in 1931 after a contentious 15-year campaign. The debate largely broke along regional lines: Northerners favored “America the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates, while Southerners championed Key’s composition.

• March 4: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, delivered this day in 1933. FDR took office at the height of the Great Depression, with 25% unemployment and 11,000 banks failed. This was the last presidential inauguration held in March; the 20th Amendment moved future inaugurations to January 20.

• March 5: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” — Winston Churchill, speaking at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, with President Truman on the platform, this day in 1946. The speech marked the beginning of the Cold War. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin denounced Churchill’s remarks as “war mongering.”

• March 6: “At long last, the battle has ended! And thus Ghana, your beloved country is free forever!” — Kwame Nkrumah, declaring Ghana’s independence from Britain this day in 1957. Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain independence from colonial rule, inspiring liberation movements across the continent. Martin Luther King Jr. attended the independence ceremony.

• March 7: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” — Alexander Graham Bell, speaking the first intelligible words over a telephone, after receiving Patent No. 174,465 for his method of “transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically...by causing electrical undulations” on this day in 1876. Bell had filed his patent application just hours before rival inventor Elisha Gray filed a similar claim.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Jack Hughes scored in overtime to defeat Canada 2-1 in Milan, ending a drought that included two painful losses to Canada in Olympic gold-medal games—in 2002 at Salt Lake City and Sidney Crosby’s famous overtime winner in 2010 at Vancouver.

Canada had also beaten the Americans just last year in the 4 Nations Face-Off final.

Yesterday’s win was enormous. Historic. But the 2026 team was stacked with NHL superstars playing at the highest level. It could have gone either way.

The real miracle happened in 1980, when a 42-year-old coach named Herb Brooks stood before a team of college kids and told them something that seemed absurd: “You were born to be here.”

What almost nobody remembers is that Brooks himself was born to be somewhere else entirely. (Some of this story was dramatized in the 2004 film Miracle, but the core facts are exactly as remarkable in real life.)

Twenty years earlier, he’d been the last player cut from the 1960 U.S. Olympic team—the team that went on to win gold at Squaw Valley.

Here’s the irony: Olympic rosters in 1960 were capped at 17 players. Today they carry 20. If modern roster rules had been in place, Brooks almost certainly would have made the team.

And the Miracle on Ice might never have happened.

6 months of torture

The rejection haunted Brooks. When he got the coaching job for 1980, he carried the memory of being cut like a wound. Every decision he made—every brutal practice, every psychological test, every impossible demand—was filtered through the lens of that failure. He wanted to rewrite history, one skate drill at a time.

When Brooks took over Team USA in 1979, he told the selection committee: “I don’t want the best players. I want the right ones.”

He backed it up.

Brooks shocked hockey observers with his roster choices. He deliberately mixed bitter college rivals—especially players from Minnesota and Boston University—and then positioned himself as the common enemy.

What followed was six months of systematic torture.

Brooks studied Soviet training methods but went further, borrowing ideas from track and swimming coaches—concepts that were foreign to American hockey. Then came the infamous “Herbies”: full-ice sprints repeated until players vomited and collapsed.

After a lackluster exhibition tie against Norway, Brooks forced the team back onto the ice for forty-five minutes of Herbies in the dark after arena staff turned off the lights. Forward Dave Silk later called it the turning point: “That moment probably had more to do with us gelling as a team, feeling like we were a group, a family.”

Brooks believed suffering together would forge the chemistry required to beat the Soviets.

He was right.

Do you believe in miracles?

To understand why, remember one crucial detail: in 1980, NHL players were not allowed in the Olympics. The Americans were true amateurs—college kids, mostly. The Soviets, meanwhile, were “amateurs” in name only: state-sponsored professionals who trained and played together year-round.

It wasn’t just David versus Goliath. It was David versus a full-time machine.

The Soviet team hadn’t lost an Olympic game in twelve years. Just thirteen days earlier, they had crushed these same Americans 10-3 in an exhibition at Madison Square Garden.

But on February 22, 1980, the impossible happened.

The Americans fell behind. Came back. Fell behind again. Came back again. With ten minutes left, Mark Pavelich fed Mike Eruzione, who beat legendary Soviet goalie Vladislav Tretiak.

4-3, United States.

ABC announcer Al Michaels delivered the call that still echoes today: “Do you believe in miracles? YES!”

Brooks didn’t celebrate. He slipped away to a bathroom and cried.

He knew what it felt like to be cut. Now he had given these kids what he never got.

The 18th player

Two days later, the Americans beat Finland to secure the gold medal.

After the Olympics, captain Mike Eruzione stunned everyone by retiring at twenty-five. NHL teams wanted him. He could have played professionally. But he walked away.

“How can you top that?” he said. “The last game I played, I won.”

Herb Brooks died in a car accident in 2003 at age sixty-six. All twenty members of the 1980 team served as his pallbearers.

Yesterday in Milan, when Hughes scored in overtime to give the United States its first Olympic gold in men’s hockey since 1980, Team USA players held up a jersey honoring Johnny Gaudreau, the late NHL star who likely would have been on the roster.

It was a beautiful moment. But back in 1980, nobody expected anything. Nobody believed.

Nobody thought a team of college kids could beat the best team in the world.

Nobody except the man who’d been cut.

The 18th player. The one who shouldn’t have been there.

The miracle was that Brooks convinced them they could—because he knew exactly what it felt like to be told you weren’t good enough.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, February 22: “Your handshake came over the vastest ocean in the world.”— Premier Zhou Enlai greeting President Richard Nixon at Beijing Airport, on the eve of Nixon becoming the first U.S. president to visit the People’s Republic of China since its founding in 1949.

• Monday, February 23: “All that has been written to me about that marvelous man seen at Frankfurt is true.— Future Pope Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini) describing Johannes Gutenberg’s revolutionary printed Bible, completed in Mainz, Germany around February 23, 1455.

• Tuesday, February 24: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”— Chief Justice John Marshall writing for a unanimous Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison, decided February 24, 1803. This landmark case established the principle of judicial review—the power of courts to strike down laws that violate the Constitution.

• Wednesday, February 25: “I shook up the world! I’m the greatest!”— Cassius Clay shouting to reporters after defeating heavyweight champion Sonny Liston at the Miami Beach Convention Hall on February 25, 1964. The 22-year-old Clay was an 8-to-1 underdog (43 of 46 sportswriters picked Liston to win).

• Thursday, February 26: “It is beyond comparison—beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world. Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity and loveliness.”**— President Theodore Roosevelt on the Grand Canyon, which on February 26, 1919 became protected from development under U.S. law.

• Friday, February 27: “This amendment is in character and phraseology precisely similar to the Fifteenth. For each the same method of adoption was pursued. One cannot be valid and the other invalid.” — Justice Louis Brandeis writing for a unanimous Supreme Court in *Leser v. Garnett*, decided February 27, 1922, ruling that the 19th Amendment enrosing the right of women to vote did not violate the rest of the Constitution.

• Saturday, February 28: “We have found the secret of life.”— Francis Crick announcing to patrons at The Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, on February 28, 1953 that Cambridge University scientists James Watson and Crick had determined the double-helix structure of DNA.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

It was March 1964, and the two men were walking across the parade ground at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Stanley was Dean of Arts there—a military historian who’d spent his career thinking about what held countries together and what tore them apart.

His friend, John Matheson, was a Liberal member of parliament with a problem. Canada was tearing itself apart over a flag.

Prime Minister Lester Pearson wanted a new flag—something distinctly Canadian, not the Red Ensign with its Union Jack.

But veterans who had fought under that flag felt betrayed. The Royal Canadian Legion had erupted at Pearson’s speech, and Opposition Leader John Diefenbaker thundered about abandoning Canada’s British heritage.

A parliamentary committee asked for ideas, and was now drowning in submissions: thousands of flags, with beavers, multiple maple leaves, the fleur-de-lis. Nothing was working.

Matheson walked with difficulty; a veteran himself, he’d been wounded at the Moro River during the war. As they crossed the parade ground, Stanley gestured toward the Mackenzie Building, where the college flag snapped in the wind.

Red-white-red. Two red bars flanking a white square with the college crest.

“There is your flag,” Stanley said.

It was almost offhand, but as a soldier and an historian, Stanley had been thinking about symbols his whole life.

Did you get the memo?

Two weeks later, March 23, 1964, Stanley sat down and wrote a four-page memo to Matheson explaining his ideas for a new Canadian flag. (Full memo here.)

The greatest symbols were simple, he wrote, and no flag could represent everything—that was everyone’s mistake.

“If the flag is to be a unifying symbol,” he wrote, “it must avoid the use of national or racial symbols that are of a divisive nature.”

So, it had to skip the Union Jack and the fleur-de-lis. It had to be so simple a child could draw it—highly distinctive and recognizable from a distance.

The RMC flag wasn’t the answer, but it was close, he wrote. Red and white had been Canada’s colors since 1921. What if you stripped away everything else?

At the bottom of page three, he sketched his design—a doodle, really. A single maple leaf, centered on white, flanked by two red bars.

The Great Flag Debate

The memo made its way to the committee room, where Stanley’s sketch was placed among hundreds of professionally rendered designs. The committee remained deadlocked through spring, summer, and into fall.

Prime Minister Pearson favored a different design—the “Pearson Pennant” with three maple leaves and blue bars, but on October 22, the committee chose Stanley’s design.

A graphic artist named Jacques Saint-Cyr had refined the maple leaf to eleven points for better visibility. Another designer adjusted the proportions. But the concept was Stanley’s.

Then came the “Great Flag Debate.” The House of Commons still had to vote, and the fight raged for six more weeks. Diefenbaker fought until the end, urging his party to vote for the red-and-white maple leaf design on the assumption that Liberals would vote for Pearson’s preferred pennant, and continue the stalemate.

But Liberals switched their vote, and on December 15 at 2 a.m., Parliament invoked closure. The vote for the new Maple Leaf flag was 163 to 78.

Stanley had long since left the capital. The official flag-raising ceremony was set for February 15, 1965, and Stanley received death threats for having come up with design, warning he’d be shot if he showed up.

But Stanley had been shot at before. So, he wore his colorful Hudson’s Bay coat to the ceremony anyway and watched as his design rose on the flagpole on Parliament Hill at noon in front of thousands of Canadians in the cold.

The newspapers credited Pearson, or Matheson, or called it a committee effort. And over time, Stanley’s role was nearly forgotten.

Stanley went on to become Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick and received the Order of Canada. He died in 2002 at 95.

But he’s the one who came up with the Canadian answer: subtraction instead of addition. A country as divided as Canada needed a symbol so simple it couldn’t belong to any faction.

---

P.S. — I thought as I was writing this: Was Stanley related to Lord Stanley, the British aristocrat who donated the Stanley Cup in 1892?

Nope. Different families, different centuries, same last name.

It’s a bit of a coincidence though that Canada’s two most famous Stanleys both gave the country its two most famous symbols.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, February 15: “I don’t think my name is likely to be worth much in the bear business, but you’re welcome to use it.” — President Theodore Roosevelt, reply to Morris Michtom, on this day in 1903, granting permission to name a stuffed toy “Teddy’s Bear.”

• Monday, February 16: “The first man-made organic textile fabric prepared entirely from new materials from the mineral kingdom.” — DuPont’s announcement in 1938 describing the invention of nylon, on this day in 1937.

• Tuesday, February 17: “Hello! This is New York calling.” — The opening words of Voice of America’s first Russian-language broadcast, this day in 1947. Programming included news, human-interest stories, and music—especially jazz.

• Wednesday, February 18: “Dr. Slipher, I have found your Planet X.” — Clyde Tombaugh, a 24-year-old self-taught astronomer from Kansas, to Lowell Observatory Director V.M. Slipher, on this day in 1930, after discovering Pluto.

• Thursday, February 19: “The phonograph will undoubtedly be liberally devoted to music.” — Thomas Edison, predicting the future of his invention, on this day in 1878, when he received U.S. Patent No. 200,521 for the phonograph. Edison developed the device while working on telegraph and telephone technology.

• Friday, February 20: “Godspeed, John Glenn.” — Astronaut Scott Carpenter’s farewell to John Glenn at launch, on this day in 1962, as Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth.

• Saturday, February 21: “An earthquake may shake its foundations...but the character which it commemorates and illustrates is secure.” — Robert Winthrop’s dedication speech for the Washington Monument, on this day in 1885. President Chester Arthur presided over the ceremony. The monument opened to the public in 1888 after elevators were installed.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

The spy had been born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1903, son of a Bolshevik revolutionary who’d fled Russia.

In 1921, his father returned to the Soviet Union, and the boy went with him. He learned radio operations in the Red Army and by 1927 was recruited into Soviet intelligence. Then in 1948, using a dead Lithuanian’s passport, he slipped into the United States and disappeared into Brooklyn.

For nine years he posed as an artist named Emil Goldfus, working from a studio across the street from an FBI office, running networks, coordinating atomic espionage. Nobody suspected.

The pilot was born in 1929 in Burdine, Kentucky, son of a coal miner who wanted him to be a doctor. Instead he learned to fly. He joined the Air Force, excelled at piloting jets, and in January 1956 the CIA recruited him for the U-2 program—ultra-secret reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union at altitudes above 70,000 feet.

By 1960 he’d flown dozens of missions his family thought were weather reconnaissance for NASA.

The lawyer had been born in the Bronx in 1916, represented insurance companies, and during World War II served as a Navy officer in the Office of Strategic Services. He arranged for concentration camps to be filmed as they were liberated, then served as assistant prosecutor at Nuremberg.

After the war he went back to insurance law in New York. In August 1957, the Brooklyn Bar Association came to him with a problem: the FBI had arrested a Soviet spy, and multiple prominent lawyers had refused the case.

Would he defend the accused? His wife told him not to. He took it anyway.

The spy was William Fisher, although he gave the name Rudolf Ivanovich Abel when he was arrested. Why? Because using the name of a deceased KGB colonel was a signal to Moscow that he’d been captured and wasn’t cooperating.

The lawyer? James Donovan, an American patriot who believed even a Soviet spy deserved a vigorous defense.

Abel was convicted in October 1957 on three counts of conspiracy to commit espionage. But Donovan had one argument left: don’t execute him. Someday, Donovan told the court, “an American of equivalent rank” might be captured by the Soviets, and Abel could be useful for an exchange.

The judge sentenced Abel to 30 years instead of death.

Enter the pilot: On May 1, 1960, while Fisher/Abel was serving his sentence in the Atlanta federal penitentiary, Francis Gary Powers was flying 1,300 miles inside Soviet airspace when a missile exploded nearby.

The blast tore off his U-2’s right wing. Powers parachuted to safety, but the Soviets captured him alive, recovered the spy cameras from his U2, and photographed the remains.

The U.S. government initially lied, claiming a “weather plane” had strayed off course, but when the Soviets revealed they had Powers and substantial wreckage, the cover story collapsed. Powers was interrogated, made a confession, and on his 31st birthday stood trial in Moscow. He received 10 years’ imprisonment.

The CIA contacted Donovan, and in late 1961, with President Kennedy’s authorization, Donovan traveled to East Berlin to negotiate the swap.

For 10 days he navigated Soviet and East German representatives. The East Germans tried various counteroffers. Donovan threatened to break off negotiations. Finally they agreed: Powers and Abel would be exchanged at the Glienicke Bridge spanning the Havel River between Potsdam and West Berlin.

February 10, 1962 — 64 years ago this week — was a bitterly cold in Berlin. At dawn, Donovan stood on the bridge with Abel. Twenty miles away, an American graduate student named Frederic Pryor crossed through Checkpoint Charlie to freedom. As soon as word came through that Pryor was clear, Donovan gave the signal.

Abel and Powers began walking toward each other across the center line of the bridge. Abel paused before crossing, extended his hand to Donovan.

“Goodbye, Jim,” he said. “Good luck, Rudolf,” Donovan replied.

Six months later Abel sent Donovan a thank-you gift: two 16th-century, vellum-bound editions of the Commentaries on the Justinian Code.

Powers returned to America to a complicated reception. Some criticized him for allowing himself to be captured, but declassified documents later showed he’d followed orders and refused to denounce his country.

His marriage fell apart. He remarried, worked as a test pilot for Lockheed, then as a traffic helicopter pilot for a Los Angeles news station. On August 1, 1977, his helicopter crashed while reporting on California wildfires. He was killed instantly at age 48.

Fisher—Abel—returned to Moscow as a hero, received the Order of Lenin, wrote memoirs, lectured at schools. But the KGB privately sidelined him. He died of lung cancer in 1971 at age 68. Only after his death was his true identity revealed.

Donovan continued negotiating. Months later, President Kennedy asked him to negotiate the release of over 1,100 prisoners from Cuba after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. He succeeded. He died of a heart attack in 1970 at age 53.

Post-script:

This entire story sat largely forgotten until 2015, when a British playwright named Matt Charman was reading a book about Kennedy and came across a footnote.

He researched and wrote the story—his first original screenplay—and made the rounds in Hollywood. When he got back to London, he got a voicemail: Steven Spielberg wanted to hear the pitch directly.

Nervous, overheated in his home, Charman stripped down to his boxer shorts and T-shirt. The phone rang. Halfway through his pitch, Charman heard only silence.

“Are you still there?” he asked.

“I’m rapt,” Spielberg said. “Keep going.”

Steven Spielberg directed Bridge of Spies, with Tom Hanks as Donovan and Mark Rylance as Abel. Rylance won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

And now we know the story.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, February 8: “It was an absolute miracle to be able to push a button and pull up on the screen everyone from all over the country.”—Gordon Macklin, recalling this day in 1971 when NASDAQ, the world’s first electronic stock market, began operations with 500 market makers trading nearly 2 billion shares.

• Monday, February 9: “Caramels are a fad; Chocolate is permanent. I am going to make chocolate,”—Milton Hershey, who on this day in 1894 established the Hershey Chocolate Company, beginning his mission to make chocolate affordable for everyone—not just the wealthy.

• Tuesday, February 10: “I think everyone listening in on the radio should know, Glenn, it actually is a recording of ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo.’ But it’s in gold, solid gold, and is really fine”—announcer Paul Douglas, to Glenn Miller on this day in 1942, presenting the world’s first gold record for selling 1.2 million copies.

• Wednesday, February 11: “Ladies and gentlemen, we … have detected …gravitational waves! We did it!”—David Reitze, LIGO’s executive director, announcing the first direct observation of ripples in spacetime that Einstein predicted a century earlier, on this day in 2016.

• Thursday, February 12: “We call upon all the believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty,”—”The Call” written by Oswald Garrison Villard, founding the NAACP on this day in 2016, the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.

• Friday, February 13: “Electronic Computer Flashes Answers, May Speed Engineering,”—New York Times headline on this day in 1946, announcing ENIAC’s public debut. The press hailed the 30-ton marvel as an “electronic brain” that could solve in seconds what took humans days, ushering in the computer age.

• Saturday, February 14: “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks, and that’s cool. And that’s pretty much all there is to say.”—Jawed Karim, in the first video ever posted to YouTube. On this day in 2005, Karim and two colleagues with whom he’d worked at PayPal employees—Chad Hurley and Steve Chen founded the platform, revolutionizing how the world shares and watches video.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

As a Black freshman at North Carolina A&T in the fall of 1959, he towered over most of his classmates. Despite his intimidating build, he was quiet—no athlete, no campus celebrity, just a kid who preferred the close companionship of friends.

Even as a child, however, McCain had tested the absurdity of segregation in his own small way.

He’d drink from both the “white” and “colored” water fountains to see if the taste was different. By the time he got to college, he later said, “I was angry with a system that led me on and betrayed me, and destroyed most of my faith in a lot of humankind.”

McCain lived in a dormitory with David Richmond and in the same building as Ezell Blair Jr. and Joseph McNeil, and the four Black students became close friends.

They’d gather in someone’s dorm room for conversations about racial inequality that would stretch so long they’d fall asleep right where they sat. They talked about Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance, about the Freedom Rides, about the murder of Emmett Till.

They read about the sit-ins that had already happened in other cities—Wichita in 1958, Oklahoma City that same year—protests that had worked.

“We finally felt hypocritical,” McCain said, for doing nothing.

They decided to sit at the whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro. It was McCain who gave the final call when his friends began to get cold feet.

Quiet McCain, who is remembered for asking: “Are you guys chicken or not?”

On the late afternoon of Monday, February 1, 1960, the four young men walked into the F.W. Woolworth at 132 South Elm Street. They bought toothpaste and other small items from a non-segregated counter, saving their receipts.

Then, dressed in their Sunday best, they sat down at the 66-seat L-shaped lunch counter and asked for coffee and donuts.

“We don’t serve Negroes here,” a white waitress told them.

Blair pointed out that he’d just been served two feet away. The waitress replied, “Negroes eat at the other end.”

They didn’t move.

A white police officer arrived with his billy club drawn and asked them to leave. They stayed.

The store manager asked them to leave. They stayed.

An older Black woman who worked behind the counter called them “stupid, ignorant, rabble-rousers, troublemakers.” They stayed.

McCain compared himself and the others to “Mack trucks” because there was no way anyone could move them from their seats. The longer they sat, the more McCain realized that no one was stopping them.

He thought: “Maybe they can’t do anything to us; maybe we can keep it up.”

The store closed at 5:30 p.m. They left.

None of them had been arrested. The police had declared they could do nothing because the four men were paying customers who had not taken any provocative actions. But local businessman Ralph Johns, who had helped the students plan the protest, had already alerted the media.

A photo of the Greensboro Four appeared in local newspapers.

The next day, they returned with more than 20 other students. By February 3, more than 60 students joined them, including women from Bennett College and students from Dudley High School.

By February 5, some 300 people had packed into Woolworth’s, filling virtually every seat at the lunch counter and spilling onto the sidewalk outside.

At one point, an older white woman who walked up behind him as he sat at the counter. She whispered in a calm voice: “Boys, I’m so proud of you.”

(McCain would later say: “What I learned from that little incident was don’t you ever, ever stereotype anybody in this life until you at least experience them and have the opportunity to talk to them.”)

Within a week, sit-ins had spread to 15 cities in five states. Within two months, 54 cities in nine states had protests of their own.

More than 70,000 people eventually participated in the sit-in movement.

Historian Howard Zinn wrote, “It is hard to overestimate the electrical effect of that first sit-in in Greensboro.” For the first time in American history, he argued, “a major social movement, shaking the nation to its bones, is being led by youngsters.”

The Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter quietly desegregated on July 25, 1960—six months after that first afternoon.

The first people served were four Black employees of the store: Geneva Tisdale, Susie Morrison, Anetha Jones, and Charles Best.

McCain graduated from A&T in 1964 with degrees in chemistry and biology. He married, had three sons, and spent more than three decades working as a chemist in Charlotte. Throughout his life, he remained proud of what happened that day. He said he never felt more powerful or confident than while protesting segregation.

“I felt clean,” he remembered about sitting at that lunch counter. “I had gained my manhood by that simple act.”

A portion of that Woolworth’s lunch counter—four stools where McCain and his friends sat—is now preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

The building itself has become the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. On the North Carolina A&T campus, a statue honors the four friends.

It’s called “February One.”

McCain died in 2014 at age 73, a chemist from Charlotte who once sat down in a five-and-dime store and helped change America.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, February 1: “The Grand Central Terminal is not only a station, it is a monument, a civic center, or, if one will, a city.”—The New York Times on this day in 1913 when the world’s largest train station opened in New York City after a decade of construction.

• Monday, February 2: “The civilisation of a people can be measured by their domestic and sanitary appliances.”—George Jennings. On this day in 1852, the first public flushing toilets opened at 95 Fleet Street in London, following the success of Jennings’ “Monkey Closets” at the 1851 Great Exhibition where over 800,000 visitors paid a penny to use them—coining the phrase “spend a penny.”

• Tuesday, February 3: “I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor’s remains,” Samuel Clemens later explained about adopting the pen name “Mark Twain” on this day in 1863 for his first signed article in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. The riverboat term meaning “two fathoms deep” became one of American literature’s most famous pseudonyms.

• Wednesday, February 4: “I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week,”—Mark Zuckerberg, before launching Facebook on this day in 2004. Within 24 hours, 1,200-1,500 Harvard students had signed up for what would become the world’s largest social network.

• Thursday, February 5: “Miles and miles and miles.”—astronaut Alan Shepard, after hitting a golf ball on the Moon on this day in 1971 during the Apollo 14 mission. Later analysis revealed the shot traveled 40 yards—still an impressive feat for a one-handed swing in a bulky spacesuit.

• Friday, February 6: “The High and Mighty Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary is now, by the death of our late Sovereign of happy memory, become Queen Elizabeth the Second.”—proclamation of the Accession Council on this day in 1952 after King George VI died in his sleep at Sandringham. Princess Elizabeth, just 25, learned of her father’s death while on safari in Kenya and immediately became Queen.

• Saturday, February 7: “This Treaty marks a new stage in the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe.”—Proclamation upon the signing of the the Maastricht Treaty this day in 1992, which established the European Union and laid the groundwork for the euro.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

• There was the glass razor—rust-resistant but prone to shattering.

• The pneumatic shoes stuffed with balloons that burst when you walked.

• And, there was the afternoon at university when he tried to create diamonds by heating graphite and shorted out Glasgow’s entire electricity supply.

Born in 1888 in Scotland, Baird suffered from chronic ill health—too sickly for military service in the Great War, too weak to finish his degree. In 1920, broke and unwell, he briefly operated a jam factory in Trinidad before returning to England with another string of failed inventions. Only a thermal sock had sold at all.

But Baird couldn’t let go of something he’d read as a teenager: a German book about the photoelectric properties of selenium.

What if you could transmit pictures through the air, the way radio transmitted sound? By 1923, he’d begun building the world’s first television from whatever he could scrounge: a hatbox, scissors, darning needles, bicycle lenses, a tea chest, sealing wax, cardboard.

(When he accidentally electrocuted himself with 1,000 volts in July 1924, his landlord asked him to leave.)

Baird moved to a cramped attic at 22 Frith Street in Soho and kept working. When he earlier visited the Daily Express to drum up publicity, the news editor was terrified. “For God’s sake, go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who’s down there,” he reportedly told his staff. “He says he’s got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him—he may have a razor on him.”

That began to change in March 1925, when Selfridges department store offered Baird £20 a week for three weeks to demonstrate his device to shoppers.

The images showed only silhouettes, but the public demonstrations generated enough press coverage and scientific curiosity that Baird was no longer dismissed as a lunatic. He’d proven the concept wasn’t fraud.

Baird spent months refining the apparatus. He’d perfected it enough to capture actual gradations of light and shade—the first person televised was William Edward Taynton, a 20-year-old office worker who happened to be nearby. But nobody was around to see it.

By 1926, he felt ready to show scientists what he’d accomplished. He invited members of the Royal Institution to witness his television on the evening of January 26—100 years ago today. Forty scientists in evening dress climbed the stairs to Baird’s laboratory to see what he now called television.

The equipment filled the cramped room. Baird demonstrated with Stooky Bill, then with a human face. Images measured just 3.5 by 2 inches.

A Times reporter wrote that they were “faint and often blurred, but substantiated a claim that through the ‘Televisor’... it is possible to transmit and reproduce instantly the details of movement, and such things as the play of expression on the face.”

That lukewarm assessment, buried two days later, was the only published response. None of the distinguished scientists wrote anything about what they’d witnessed. They had stood in that attic watching the future flicker on a tiny screen and hadn’t recognized it. When a businessman visited in April, hoping to invest, he concluded that putting the device on the market would be “an error of judgment.”

Within months, however, reports from other dignitaries grew more positive. By 1927, Baird transmitted television over 438 miles from London to Glasgow. In 1928, he sent it across the Atlantic. The BBC began experimental broadcasts using his system in 1929.

His mechanical system would eventually be superseded by electronic television. By 1937, the BBC adopted a superior system from Marconi-EMI. A fire destroyed Baird’s laboratories that year. He died in 1946 at age 58, nearly forgotten, after suffering a stroke.

But on that Tuesday evening in Soho, television had crossed from dream to reality. The scientists who climbed those stairs had no way of knowing they were witnessing one of the pivotal moments in human communication. They saw blurred images on a tiny screen, cobbled together by a man who’d failed at nearly everything he’d tried. They looked at the future and saw an error of judgment.

Historians would later mark that evening as the watershed when television became real—not because the technology was perfect, but because someone had proven it could exist at all.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, January 25: "I took off my cap and wanted to yell with the crowd, not because I had gone around the world in 72 days, but because I was home again."—Nellie Bly, who completed her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes, this day in 1890. She set out to beat the fictional Phileas Fogg's 80-day journey from Jules Verne's novel, traveling alone with just one small handbag.

• Monday, January 26: "I was so sick crossing the ocean that I kept praying the ship would sink. I wasn't even nervous the day of the race. Why would I be? I knew I couldn't win."—Charlie Jewtraw, who won the first Gold Medal in Winter Olympics history in the 500-meter speed skating event, this day in 1924.

• Tuesday, January 27: "I have not failed. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work."—Thomas Edison, who on this day in 1880 received Patent No. 223,898 for his incandescent electric lamp, paving the way for universal domestic use of electric light.

• Wednesday, January 28: "Check your egos at the door."—Sign posted by producer Quincy Jones at A&M Studios, where 46 music superstars gathered after the American Music Awards to record "We Are the World" for African famine relief, this day in 1985. The song raised over $63 million for humanitarian aid and sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.

• Thursday, January 29: "The operation of mainly light carriages for the conveyance of one to four passengers."—Karl Benz's patent application for the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, submitted this day in 1886. Patent No. 37435 is considered the birth certificate of the automobile.

• Friday, January 30: "I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we've passed the audition."—John Lennon's final words at the end of The Beatles' unannounced 42-minute rooftop concert at 3 Savile Row in London, this day in 1969.

• Saturday, January 31: “They had seen the future, and it works, at least as far as their digestive tract.”—A news reporter observing Russian customers lining up to pay the equivalent of several days’ wages for Big Macs at the Soviet Union’s first McDonald’s, which opened in Moscow this day in 1990. (Of course, it was closed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Not athletes—gentlemen. The kind of men who could afford to spend months training without pay, who had family money to cover travelm and who didn’t need a regular job because they had trust funds, estates, or comfortable positions waiting for them after they collected their medals and went home.

The International Olympic Committee, founded by French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin, built this idea into the modern Games from the start. Only amateurs could compete. If you had ever accepted money for playing sports—any sport, at any level—you were a professional. And professionals were banned.

Officially, it was about preserving the “purity” of competition. In reality, it kept poor people out.

Enter Jim Thorpe.

Thorpe didn’t come from money. He was born in 1887 in Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma, to parents of Sac and Fox descent. His Native name was Wa-Tho-Huk—“Bright Path.”

He was sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, one of the infamous boarding schools created to “civilize” Native children by stripping away their language and culture.

Carlisle did have a football program, though. And a track team. And a coach named Pop Warner.

And, Thorpe turned out to be unlike anything anyone had seen.

By 1911, he was being called the best college football player in America. On the track, he was even more. He could sprint, jump, throw, and endure. He didn’t just win events that required different skills; he made specialists look ordinary.

At the Stockholm Olympics in 1912, Thorpe didn’t just win. He overwhelmed the field.

In the pentathlon, he finished first in four of the five events. In the decathlon—ten different events over two days—he beat his nearest competitor by nearly 700 points, a margin so large it wouldn’t be matched for decades.

At one point, his shoes went missing. He found two mismatched shoes in a trash can. One was too big, so he wore an extra sock. He won anyway.

When King Gustav V of Sweden presented him with his medals, he said, “You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world.”

Thorpe, uncomfortable with ceremony, reportedly replied, “Thanks, King.”

Six months later, it was over.

In January 1913, the Worcester Telegram reported that Thorpe had once been paid to play minor-league baseball. The payments were trivial; the violation was technical. But the IOC enforced its rules without mercy.

Many college athletes played summer baseball under fake name, but Thorpe, raised in a school designed to erase his culture and remake him in white America’s image, hadn’t learned the unwritten rules.

The IOC stripped him of his medals and erased his records. The golds were reassigned to Hugo Wieslander of Sweden and Ferdinand Bie of Norway, both of whom publicly protested that Thorpe was the rightful champion.

It didn’t matter.

As for Thorpe, he went on to play professional football and baseball and became one of the first stars of what would become the NFL. But there were no endorsements, no pensions, no safety net. He worked odd jobs, and struggled with both money and alcohol.

Thrope died in 1953 at 64 years old, living in a trailer park in California. His widow had to ask for donations to pay for his funeral.

But, his family never stopped fighting.

In the early 1980s, two researchers, Robert Wheeler and Florence Ridlon, uncovered something the IOC had missed—or perhapsignored. Olympic rules required any protest about eligibility to be filed within 30 days of competition. Thorpe’s disqualification came six months later.

By the IOC’s own rulebook, it was invalid.

With that evidence and support from the U.S. Congress, they pressured the committee. And on January 19, 1983—seventy years after the medals were taken away—the IOC finally reversed course.

That day, IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch presented replica gold medals to Thorpe’s children at a ceremony in Los Angeles. The originals were long gone.

A full reckoning wouldn’t come until July 2022, 110 years after Stockholm, when the IOC finally declared Jim Thorpe the sole gold medalist.

Today’s Olympic and college athletes sign multi-million-dollar endorsement deals. The amateur rule that destroyed Thorpe’s career now looks less like a principle and more like a gate.

It preserved competition for people who didn’t need the money. It made sure the Carlisle student who played baseball for $2 a game could be punished for the same thing aristocrats quietly did all the time.

Jim Thorpe was the greatest athlete in the world in 1912. Everyone who saw him knew it. The king knew it. His competitors knew it.

On January 19, 1983, the Olympic Committee finally admitted it.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, January 18: "I honestly had no earthly idea that I was breaking hockey's color barrier. I was just there to play hockey." — Willie O'Ree, who this day in 1958 became the first Black player in the NHL, playing for the Boston Bruins.

• Monday, January 19: "How do you fly to a place that no one has been to? That's one of the most exciting things about this mission." — Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, launched this day in 2006 toward Pluto.

• Tuesday, January 20: “Passengers could be carried...over a series of descending and ascending longitudinal planes by the gravity momentum acquired by the car in its passage over the planes...thereby obviating all necessity for changing cars on the round trip.” — From L.A. Thompson’s patent for the “Roller Coasting Structure,” granted this day in 1885.

• Wednesday, January 21: "The principles advocated in the Daily News will be principles of progress and improvement; of education, civil and religious liberty, and equal legislation." — Charles Dickens, launching his newspaper this day in 1846.

• Thursday, January 22: "A proud day for all of us." — First Lady Pat Nixon, christening the first Pan Am 747 "Jumbo Jet" which began commercial service this day in 1970.

• Friday, January 23: "By the help of the Most High, it shall be the effort of my life to shed honor on this diploma." — Elizabeth Blackwell, receiving her medical degree this day in 1849, becoming the first woman to graduate from medical school in America. The students had voted to admit her as a joke.

• Saturday, January 24: "It's a natural." — American Can Company executive, on introducing the first canned beer this day in 1935, revolutionizing how Americans consumed their favorite beverage.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

The U.S. officially turns 250 this year.

There are a lot of things to like about America, but one we might take for granted is that we choose to celebrate the nation’s founding in the beginning of summer.

Result: parades, barbecues, fireworks, beach trips. No offense to February, for example, it wouldn’t be the same.

That isn’t to say we couldn’t have settled on another date. One might have considered March 4, 1789, when the U.S. Constitution went into effect, or October 19, 1781, when the British surrendered at Yorktown.

For your consideration, as they say during awards season, may I suggest another contender date—or perhaps we might call it an honorable mention.

January 14, 1784

That would be January 14, 1784—in which case we’d be celebrating America’s 242nd birthday this week.

The rationale is worth knowing even if you’re as partial to 4th of July cookouts as I am. It’s that while July 4 celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, January 14 was a big milestone on the way toward the rest of the world agreeing with that declaration.

The story goes like this:

The Revolutionary War effectively ended when General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, but a surrender doesn’t necessarily change the political reality. You need a peace treaty for that.

Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay spent months in Paris negotiating with British representatives to work out the terms. On September 3, 1783, they signed the Treaty of Paris:

• The Americans got almost everything they wanted.

• British recognition of independence.

• Withdrawal of all British troops.

• Territory extending from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River, from the Great Lakes to the northern border of Florida. Worth noting—that’s 890,000 square miles total, compared to the 360,000 square miles the original thirteen colonies occupied.

It was, by any measure, an extraordinary diplomatic achievement.

6 months or sooner

But then, the British added Article 10, which said that to become valid, the treaty had to be ratified and exchanged “in the Space of Six Months or sooner.”

So, calculate six months from September 3, 1783 and you get March 3, 1784. The treaty needed to get from Paris to wherever Congress was meeting—which turned out to be Annapolis, Maryland—and the Congress had to ratify it.

Then the ratified document had to get back across the Atlantic to Paris for the formal exchange.

In 1783, a ship crossing the Atlantic from Europe to America took about six to eight weeks in good weather. Longer in winter. And that was just the ocean crossing—you still needed time to get from a European port to Paris.

The British set that deadline deliberately, as a sort of challenge to see if this new “United States” could actually function as a nation. Could it get its act together enough to meet an international deadline with consequences?

Fair question.

Make it official

Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress needed representatives from nine of the thirteen states present to ratify a treaty. But as of early January 1784, Congress was having trouble getting enough delegates to show up. By January 12, only seven states had sent delegates to Annapolis.

Connecticut’s delegates arrived on January 13. That made eight.

But it still wasn’t enough.

Enter Richard Beresford of South Carolina who was sick in Philadelphia, about 90 miles away.

We wouldn’t normally have much good to say about Beresford. He was a wealthy planter who depended on enslaved people for his fortune. His participation in Congress was largely in defense of slavery and the interests of the planter class.

But on January 14, 1784, he left his sickbed, made the winter journey to Annapolis, and walked into the Maryland State House.

Nine states. Barely a quorum, but that same day, Congress voted unanimously to ratify the Treaty of Paris.

It made it official: The United States of America was no longer a collection of rebellious colonies fighting for recognition. We were a sovereign nation, recognized by the greatest empire on earth.

How about April? Or May?

The Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation was weak. It couldn’t tax. It couldn’t enforce laws. It couldn’t regulate commerce. Within a few years, the failures became so obvious that the nation scrapped the Articles entirely and wrote a new Constitution.

On this one day, though, the Continental Congress justified its existence.

The ratified treaty was carried back across the Atlantic. Two couriers left by ship later in January with copies for Franklin and King George III. Winter weather delayed their arrival, but the British accepted the explanation.

King George III ratified the treaty in April 1784. The formal exchange of ratified copies happened in Paris on May 12, 1784.

The Revolutionary War was officially, finally, legally over.

We celebrate July 4th, and we should. That’s when we declared independence. January 14, 1784 is the last thing Americans had to do to make it real.

It’s more fun to celebrate in the summer. But maybe grill a hot dog and raise a toast on Wednesday as well.

Happy 242nd, America.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, January 11: “The rationale was simple enough: These revolutionary semiconductors are made in a valley, from silicon. … How was I to know that the term would quickly be adopted industry-wide?” — Don Hoefler, who coined the term “Silicon Valley” in an Electronic News article this day in 1971. The region had previously been known as the “Valley of Heart’s Delight” due to its orchards.

• Monday, January 12: "We're gonna win the game. I guarantee it." — Joe Namath, this day in 1969 before leading the Jets to their stunning Super Bowl III victory.

• Tuesday, January 13: "It will soon be possible to distribute grand opera music to almost any dwelling in Greater New York." — Lee de Forest, this day in 1910 broadcasting the first public radio performance from the Metropolitan Opera.

• Wednesday, January 14: "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." — Michelangelo, who on this day in 1501 beginning work on the David.

• Thursday, January 15: "All the pieces had to come together. This group of strangers had to rise to the occasion." — Captain Chesley Sullenberger, reflecting on the successful water landing of U.S. Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River, this day in 2009 .

• Friday, January 16: “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” — Steve Jobs, this day in 2007 introducing the iPhone.

• Saturday, January 17: "May God bring lasting peace to us all over the world." — Paul Antonio, mechanic who built the first UN ballot box, this day in 1946 at the first Security Council meeting.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

The Federal Aviation Administration’s headquarters is at 800 Independence Avenue SW in Washington, D.C., directly across the street from the Smithsonian’s Hirschhorn Museum and the Air and Space Museum.

A marker on the sidewalk out front, erected in January 2017, explains what used to be there:

“An infamous slave pen, owned by W.H. Williams ...

A seemingly innocuous yellow house, set back from the street in a grove of trees, concealed from view a brick-walled yard, in which enslaved persons were held, awaiting transport to southern markets.

It was one of the most lucrative of the slave pens operating in Washington, DC in the years before the Civil War.”

The marker almost certainly would not be there if it not for the experience of one of the many people who were held in chains there. It continues:

In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free Black man and professional musician, was drugged, kidnapped, and sold as a slave while visiting Washington, DC ...

Eventually, Northup regained his freedom and documented the experience in his book, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup (1853).

Northup was 33 years old at the time that he was tricked, kidnapped, and sold into slavery.

He’d lived his entire life up until then in upstate New York, where he had a wife, Anne, and three children: Elizabeth, Margaret, and Alonzo. Northup made his living as a carpenter and a violinist, skilled enough that local hotels hired him for their dances. He owned property. He voted.

In March 1841, two men he met in Saratoga Springs offered him work playing the fiddle for their traveling circus. As Northup later wrote, they paid him well and worked to ensure he obtained papers showing his free status.

But then, he was drugged — in his book, Northup seems to be unsure whether it was the two men who’d convinced him to head South who had done so, or someone else—but regardless, he lost consciousness and woke up in chains in a cell in the Williams Slave Pen.

His money and documents were gone, and he was beaten brutally for hours until he stopped insisting the he was a free person from New York. Within days, Solomon Northup became “Platt”—a runaway slave from Georgia.

He was shipped to New Orleans, where he was auctioned for $1,000. What followed were twelve years on Louisiana cotton and sugar plantations.

Twelve years of whippings, forced labor, and the constant threat of violence.

Twelve years watching other enslaved people ripped from their families, children sold away from mothers, human beings treated as property.

Twelve years wondering if somewhere in New York, his wife and children had any idea if he was alive or dead.

Nearly 12 years, before deliverance came, largely in the form of a Canadian carpenter named Samuel Bass, who abhorred slavery, and in whom Northup confided.

Bass sent letters to Northup’s family and friends back home in Saratoga Springs; some of those friends mobilized support among prominent citizens and convinced New York Governor Washington Hunt to appoint a white friend of Northup’s with the same last name—Henry Northup—as an official state agent, and send him to Louisiana under an 1840 law designed to rescue kidnapped citizens.

Armed with affidavits and court documents, and accompanied by the local sheriff, Henry Northup located Solomon Northup and reached the plantation where he was held by a brutal plantation owner called Edwin Epps, on January 3, 1853.

The next day as Solomon Northup wrote:

Tuesday, the fourth of January, Epps and his counsel, the Hon. H. Taylor, [Henry] Northup, Waddill, the Judge and sheriff of Avoyelles, and myself, met in a room in the village of Marksville.

Mr. Northup stated the facts in regard to me, and presented his commission, and the affidavits accompanying it. The sheriff described the scene in the cotton field. I was also interrogated at great length.

Finally, Mr. Taylor assured his client that he was satisfied, and that litigation would not only be expensive, but utterly useless.

In accordance with his advice, a paper was drawn up and signed by the proper parties, wherein Epps acknowledged he was satisfied of my right to freedom, and formally surrendered me to the authorities of New-York.

Three weeks later, on January 21, Solomon reunited with his family. His daughters had married. He’d missed years of their lives.

They had known he had been enslaved, but had no idea where in the South he had been taken, or what name he was living under. One of his sons had spent the entire 12 years obsessed with the idea of earning and saving enough money to travel the South, find his father, and buy his freedom.

Within months, working with editor David Wilson, Northup published his memoir. Twelve Years a Slave was a bestseller, with 30,000 copies in three years.

More importantly, it became proof: a firsthand account by a man who’d lived as both free citizen and enslaved person, who could describe the mechanics of plantation slavery with the authority of lived experience.

I’ve pulled punches in describing what slavery was like for Solomon Northup and others above; frankly it’s very hard for me even to conceive what it was like.

But, the book did no such thing. It named names, places, dates, and offered evidence.

It galvanized Northern readers who might otherwise have remained indifferent—much like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, only presented as a true story.

Northup became an active abolitionist, giving speeches throughout the Northeast, staging plays based on his story, and it seems clear, helping others escape via the Underground Railroad.

Within five years afterward, however, Solomon Northup disappeared from the historical record. How he died, where he died—nobody knows.

His book disappeared too.

After several 19th-century printings, *Twelve Years a Slave* was forgotten for nearly 100 years, until 1968, when historians Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon discovered it and published an annotated edition.

In 2013, director Steve McQueen adapted the book into a film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

It’s hard to think of anything “optimistic” about Solomon Northup’s story, except how it ended, literally 172 years ago yesterday.

But had he not gone through his ordeal, people might not have known, and history might been a little bit different.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, January 4: “Let us reaffirm our commitment to work together for an inclusive and equitable world, where the rights of people with disabilities are fully realized.” — UN Secretary-General António Guterres, in an official message for the first World Braille Day, this day in 2019.

• Monday, January 5: “Now, what you hear is not a test, I’m rappin’ to the beat ...” opening line to “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang, which broke the Billboard Hot 100 Top 40 on January 5, 1980, reaching #36, the first rap song to do so.

• Tuesday, January 6: “A patient waiter is no loser.” — Samuel Morse, in one of the first demonstrated telegraph messages, on this day in 1838. The message was transmitted over two miles of wire in Morristown, N.J.

• Wednesday, January 7: “Hello? Is that Mr. Gifford? Well, good morning, Sir Evelyn.” — First lines from the first transatlantic telephone call (recorded and preserved at the Library of Congress), on this day in 1927 between the President of America’s AT&T company, Walter S. Gifford, and the head of the British General Post Office, Sir Evelyn P. Murray.

• Thursday, January 8: “Let us commemorate it as an event that gives us increased power as a nation ...”—a toast from President Andrew Jackson this day in 1835, marking the only time in U.S. history that the national debt has been reduced to zero.

• Friday, January 9: “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” — Steve Jobs, this day in 2007 introducing the iPhone.

• Saturday, January 10: “The excitement of the public to get places, and the running about of officials ... no doubt took up more than half the time which will be occupied by the stoppage of a train at each station on ordinary occasions.” — from a contemporary article in The Guardian, describing the opening of the London Underground on this day in 1863.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Before Ellis Island became a symbol of American promise, immigration to America was handled by individual states through a cramped facility called Castle Garden at Manhattan’s southern tip.

From 1855 to 1890, eight million immigrants squeezed through, without any standardized health inspections or federal oversight. It was clear the system had to change.

The federal government stepped in. President Benjamin Harrison designated a small island in New York Harbor—previously used by the Navy to store gunpowder—as America’s first federal immigration station.

They built a massive three-story wooden structure that would become the gateway through which 12 million people would pass over the next 62 years.

On New Year’s Eve 1891, a steamship called the Nevada sat anchored just off Manhattan. It had arrived too late for its passengers to be processed that day.

Among those passengers were three Irish siblings:

• 17-year-old Annie Moore and her two younger brothers —

• Anthony (15) and

• Philip (12).

They’d left Queenstown, County Cork on December 20, spending 12 days at sea—including Christmas—in the cramped conditions of steerage. They were coming to join their parents, who’d emigrated four years earlier and had been living at 32 Monroe Street in Manhattan.

As morning broke on January 1, 1892, bells rang across the harbor. Ships were decorated with red, white, and blue bunting. At 10:30 a.m., a flag on Ellis Island dipped three times—the signal to begin.

A barge ferried the first group of passengers from the Nevada to the dock. When the gangplank lowered, Annie Moore—brown-haired, rosy-cheeked—bounded down with her brothers in tow. She was the first to enter through the enormous double doors.

She climbed the main staircase, skipping two steps at a time, and was directed to one of 10 inspection aisles. An official greeted her, and to mark the historic occasion, presented her with a $10 gold piece. (That coin, according to romantic newspaper accounts, she would “never part with.” The reality was almost certainly different—her father was a longshoreman, and that $10 probably didn’t last the day.)

After passing her health inspection, Annie and her brothers were reunited with their parents. The New York Times headline the next day read: “OPENED BY PRESIDENT HARRISON: Rosy-Cheeked Irish Girl the First New Arrival.”

Her celebrity lasted about 24 hours.

Annie Moore lived out her life in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She married Joseph Schayer, a bakery clerk who was the son of German immigrants. They had 11 children. Six of them died young. She died of heart failure in 1924 at age 50 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Calvary Cemetery in Queens, alongside six of her children.

For decades, her grave sat unmarked. There was a case of mistaken identity—researchers in the 1990s thought they’d found her in Texas. That woman’s descendants were invited to ceremonies. Irish President Mary Robinson honored her memory.

It was all wrong.

In 2006, genealogist Megan Smolenyak tracked down the real Annie Moore’s great-nephew. The actual story was less glamorous. Annie never left the Lower East Side. She lived in tenement buildings near the Fulton Fish Market. Smolenyak called it “the typical hardscrabble immigrant life.”

In 2008, 84 years after her death, a ceremony was held at Calvary Cemetery. President Obama sent a message of remembrance. A Celtic cross made of Irish blue limestone was finally placed at her grave. Today, bronze statues of Annie Moore and her brothers stand at the quayside in Cobh, Ireland and on Ellis Island itself.

Smolenyak discovered something while researching the family tree. Within two generations, Annie’s descendants had married people from different backgrounds—Irish, German, Italian, Jewish.

“I liked that her family was typically American,” Smolenyak said. “Within just a couple generations, they climbed the socioeconomic ladder and they had married people with all sorts of different backgrounds.”

Forty percent of Americans today are descended from people who passed through Ellis Island. That’s roughly 130 million people who can trace their ancestry through that facility in New York Harbor.

Between 1900 and 1914—the peak years—an average of 1,900 people passed through every single day.

Annie Moore never returned to Ireland. She lived her entire American life within a few miles of where she first stepped off the Nevada. She raised children. She buried six of them. She died at 50.

Ellis Island closed in 1954. The original wooden structure that Annie Moore entered burned down in 1897. In 1990, it reopened as the country’s primary museum on immigration.

For 82 years after her death, nobody could find Annie Moore’s grave. Now there’s a Celtic cross in Calvary Cemetery, because a genealogist wouldn’t let the case go cold.

Every January 1st, there are plenty of things to commemorate. But I like the fact that Annie Moore’s American story—and ultimately, millions of other American stories—all started on the first day of one particular year.

Here’s to the firsts from today we’ll someday celebrate, too.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, December 28: "If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I'll do it myself!" — Josephine Cochrane, widowed socialite from Shelbyville, Illinois, who received U.S. Patent No. 355,139 for her dishwashing machine on December 28, 1886, after her servants kept chipping her heirloom china and she grew tired of washing the dishes herself.

• Monday, December 29: "Meet the young stranger as he enters our city, take him by the hand... and in every way throw around him good influences, so that he may feel that he is not a stranger." — Captain Thomas Valentine Sullivan, retired sea captain and founder of America's first YMCA, which opened in Boston on December 29, 1851, providing a "home away from home" for young sailors on shore leave.

• Tuesday, December 30: "The congestion of tramways can be neutralized only by the establishment of high-speed railways — namely, elevated railways or underground railways." — Noritsugu Hayakawa, businessman who brought Tokyo its first subway on December 30, 1927, after visiting London's Underground in 1914 and becoming convinced that Tokyo needed its own underground railway to become a world-class city.

• Wednesday, December 31: "From base to dome, the giant structure was alight — a torch to usher in the newborn, a funeral pyre for the old which pierced the very heavens." — The New York Times, describing the first-ever Times Square New Year's Eve celebration on December 31, 1904, when 200,000 people gathered to watch fireworks explode from atop the newspaper's new headquarters, displacing traditional celebrations that had been held at Trinity Church.

• Thursday, January 1: "The euro is your money, it is our money. It's our future. It is a piece of Europe in our hands." — Romano Prodi, European Commission President, as euro notes and coins became reality on January 1, 2002, for 300 million Europeans across 12 countries, with fireworks erupting from Berlin to Athens as people queued at ATMs to get the first pristine euros.

• Friday, January 2: “A gift free to the world.” — Louis Daguerre, describing the daguerreotype process when the French government purchased his patent and made it publicly available. On January 2, 1839, Daguerre used his process to capture the first photograph of the Moon, marking the moment astronomers could finally capture celestial images instead of relying on hand-drawn sketches.

• Saturday, January 3: "We came looking for carbonates. We have them. We're going to chase them." — Phil Christensen, scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, after Spirit landed on Mars on January 3, 2004 (January 4 UTC), bouncing 28 times before rolling to a stop in Gusev Crater and immediately spotting the first possible sign of water in the distance.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. Image: John Whipple, William Bond, and George Bond, The Moon, No. 37, 1851, daguerreotype made through Great Refractor Equatorial Mount Telescope, Harvard College Observatory, case size 4-½ x 3-¼ inches. The 1839 version I mentioned above was destroyed in a fire; this is the oldest existing photograph of the moon.