On this day...

21st December, 1898

 Huband-and-wife team The Curies discover radium. This was at a time of huge excitement over radiation - certain elements were discovered to be emitting more energy than existing scientific ideas could account for - but nobody knew that radiation was actually bad for you. It wasn't just radium (named after how radioactive it was) they discovered, Polonium (named after Poland, Maries home) was one they discovered just before.
 These were exciting times; Becquerel had shown that uranium could give x-rays, not getting the energy from somewhere else, but actually getting the energy from the uranium itself. Marie showed that the energy was coming from the atoms of the uranium. As this went against everything known about energy transfer at the time, Marie was understnadably cautious that no-one would take her seriously, but at the same time was determined to get it out there as quickly as possible so that no other scientist would get the credit (and the race was on - interest in this field was, excuse the pun, hot).
 Marie was instrumental in inventing a technique that made it easier to seperate the radium from radioactive residues, to pursue possible healing properties. Both the curies worked completely exposed to radium innocent to radiation poisoning, so they had no idea they were damaging their health. This probably had no significant effect on Pierre, who was killed on the 19th April 1906 in a street accident - he was run over by a horse, and fractured his skull. They had been co-rewarded the 1903 nobel prize, and Pierre had been given a proffesorship at the Sorbonne, but unfortunately he hadn't had long to enjoy it.
Marie was devastated, but she continued her work, suffering depression and kidney failure, because she felt that her work was important. In 1910, she finally succeeded in isolating pure radium. However, the radium choloride she and pierre first made together was used as a primitive cancer therapy, which is why she spent her life advocating radium and roadioactivity.
 Back at the turn of the 20th century, radiation was almost magical, but scientifically proven, so people trusted it to have magical properties. It could cure cancer, depression, all kinds of problems; radium 'health' spas popped up. Water impregnated with radium sold by the expensive bottle. An American playboy, Ebers Myers, was advised by his doctor to drink radium water. There were plenty of frauds out there who sold normal water and just kidded on it was radium water, but Ebers was so rich that he could get hold of the real stuff. He died from jaw cancer. Radiation is deeply dangerous stuff. Because it glows in the dark (it produces its own light), radium in the form of paint was used on watches; women in the factories would lick the paintbrush to get a fine line, exposing themselves to radiation. Most of them died from various cancers, but - caught up in litigation - the manufacturers insisted they had syphilis. However, in the investigation it was found that management had taken the precautionary principle and protected themselves from exposure to radon.
However, at no point did Marie ever find out that her lifes work was damaging her. All that stuff was still in the future. She died from aplastic anaemia in 1934, almost certainly brought on by the decades of radiation exposure.She had carried test tubes containing radioactive isotopes in her pocket and stored them in her desk drawer, remarking on the pretty light that the substances gave off in the dark. In fact, her notebooks are still so highly radioactive they are too dangerous for naked hands to handle, and portective clothing must be worn if you want to take them out of the lead-lined boxes.
 Radon is a highly dangerous radioactive material. It has caused suffering. But Maries work was important. Radon was used to treat cancer, and who knows how long otherwise it might have taken for cancer therapies to go down that road, where they would almost certainly have used radon as well. To understand why atoms emit their own radiation spontaneously was an important step in understanding how our universe works. Her discoveries helped build a framework for other discoveries to be made in this field, and others, a faltering and clumsy perpetual drift of science towards the truth.

Chaplin, the Keystone years

Chaplin was a 1992 bio-pic about, well, Charie Chaplin. I watched it back in the early 90s and, although I liked the film, it did seem to reinforce the prejudice I had that he wasn't really that funny. Then a few years ago, I saw a great series of programmes on the BBC by Paul Merton on the silent comedians, and I realised how wrong I was. And how wrong this film was for not really explaining why he was as funny as he was.

The film did make some effort to explain the politicised nature of his films, but it gave the impression that this was an internal thought of Chaplins, rather than what everyone knew and commented on at the time and earned Chaplin acclaim from his peers - and, more importantly for an artist, the paying audience - which is a shame because unless you understand that his films were popular and funny because they had a political and social edge to them, then it all just becomes a mess of pratfalls and tumbling.

The film uses a fairly hackneyed approach to autobiographies, the dramatic flashbacks, as Chaplin discussed his biography with a fictional book publisher (played by Anthony Hopkins). Robert Downey Junior as Chaplin makes the film on its own very watchable, and there's an excellent supporting cast.

The movie gets stuff mostly right, it's just that it doesn't explain enough for them to be put into a context where the viewer can understand their significances. He was sent to the workhouse and seperated from his older brother, Sidney, his mother did have to be committed, he did fall in love with a 16-year old dancer, and he did go to perform in America.

Mabel Normand

Also, of course, he did get an offer to work at Sennets Keystone (of the Keystone cops) studios. He started in 1914 and leaving a year later with 34 shorts and one feature under his belt. He was directed by Mabel Normand, which he hated (he hated being directed in general and, well, this was 1914 and he almost certainly was annoyed at being directed by a woman). One thing about Mabel should be noted; in the movie she's portrayed as a spoilt brat who is Mack Sennett's mistress, and she hated Chaplin.In reality, while she was in a relationship with Mack, she was an accomplished comedy actress from a stage-performing family who probably was the one who convinced Sennett to keep Chaplin on when he initially regretted hiring him and wanted to sack him. She seems to have been an intelligent woman who died at an absurdly early age due to alcohol abuse, at 37 (she didn't seem to be able to cope with the murder of a close friend in the 1920s).

 Movies weren't anything like what we would recognise today. For one thing, actors weren't billed in the credits or adverts, so when an actor/character became popular, cinema managers couldn't ask for more stuff with the famous guy in it, because they didn't have their name. So, instead, they had to use descriptions of what they looked like (no talkies back then).

Although Keystone was an experimental playground in slapstick, that's to underestimate its relevance to Chaplin and to cinema. Another thing they got right in the film was how short and how cheap these movies were, but by getting the slapstick into the one frame it developed a trend for spectacle to be packed into the frame as much as possiblem, which is something that's been with hollywood ever since.

He invented the costume whilst casting about in wardrobe for Mabels Strange predicament (so the movie got that right), and it was the Keystone films where his career in social and political commentary began. Whilst being directed, he had bits where he got to make authority figures look foolish, where he learned how to play this contempt to a movie audience, but when he started to direct is where he bloomed. The movie got that right, too. It's a shame they couldn't have gone into more detail on this, as those movies are what got audiences amused by him into audiences that made him into a cultural icon.

The corn laws and Peterloo

In 1813, a House of Commons Committee recommended excluding foreign-grown corn until domestically grown corn reached £4 per quarter. What this was was protectionism, a way to force the British public to buy British corn, and it was passed as law in 1815.

The date is no coincidence. The war with France had ended in 1814, Waterloo was in June 1815, and the concern was that imported corn would drive down the cost of British corn, producing less money for farmers (and, of course, for the land-owning gentry who taxed the farmers).

Peterloo massacre, Manchester, 1819

This was very much in the zeitgeist. In 1812, wheat had risen to 126s, mirroring the widespread economic distress of that year, the Luddites had just started machine-wrecking (made a capital offence in 1812), and PM Spencer Perceval was assassinated (replaced by Lord Liverpool, who made history by being the first fatal casualty of a train crash). No wonder the government were periodically obsessed that the Great British Public were going out of their heads in a mob mentality. The public were suffering because financial interests were doing everything they could to get more money out of them, and these financial interests were the politicians! Back then, gentry became MPs because, well, they were the only ones who could afford it – the system didn't pay a wage to become an MP, so you needed your own private income (as well as paying for your election campaign). And it was thought (by the gentry) that landowners had a higher stake in their constituency than your common man, they would work harder for its interests. It's this same mentality that required you to be a landowner of wealth to be an officer (which is why the sale of ranks was so profitable in the Victorian era that financial organisations existed to transact the sale of military ranks to anyone who wanted to impress the ladies with a military rank, and was minted. It wasn't like he would be putting his life in much danger - the Victorian era was a period with relatively few wars. Plenty of conflicts, rebellions, mutinies, sieges, though, but statistically speaking he was probably going to be alright).

Anyway, the public were paying higher prices for bread, so it was hated by the majority. In a lot of cases, bread had become unaffordable. This all came to a head in 1819 when, after protests in Birmingham, Leeds, and London, there was another one in Manchester. 60,000 people attended a lawful protest - general members of the public. The speaker, Orator Hunt, was arrested, and the yeomanry charged at the crowd to get them to disperse (instigated by a panicked Tory magistracy). About a dozen people were killed, and it was then sardonically labelled 'Peterloo' by the radical writers of the time. There's quite a good website about it here.

The protests had been about a lot of things – parliamentary reform, the corn laws, being the two most popular – but by calling it 'Peterloo' the implication was that this was a war against the poor by a corrupt, repressive authority. That Peterloo still exists as a word in contemporary culture shows that those early 19^th century radical writers were probably onto something. Also that politics never really changes, it just does and says slightly different things, sometimes it's like politicians just get reincarnated into newer generations of politicians.

The 25th of October

 On this day, the British attacked the Russian guns in Balaclava on what would inspire the poem 'the charge of the light brigade' byTennyson, a poem that simultaneously praises the brigade whilst mourning the futility of the charge, whilst also criticising the leaders (but in that Victorian way of not naming names).
 The Crimean war was one that had a lasting effect on the British public. This was the war that made a name of Florence Nightingale, the nurse and writer and statistician who ran a reform campaign to improve the conditions of sanitation in hosptials.

 Curiously, for an event that was so influential on the media of the time, and has remained in our collective memory as a result, I was only able to find two films about it (both called The charge of the light brigade). Apparently the 1936 version is much more historically innacurate than the 1968 version, but that was the intention of the screenwriter as it had based it on research done into the battle,and he had aimed to be realistic. And Britain in the 60s had a strange kind of fascination with the Victorian (and Edwardian) era,probably because it felt quite far away in time but still also quite close - the Empire might have ended in the 50s, but Britain would still be living with the legacy of empire for decades to come; not just in terms of international relations, but also re-defining what Britain was. In the 1960s, it was obvious that the sun had set, but it was still a part of culture, and I think this confusion can be seen in the pop culture of the 60s - interest in the past, but also a reinvention of British icons as something that definitely didn't represent an empire.

Apologies.

 For the last week, I have been having technical problems with my blog. For some reason, it was having a problem with the guest blog byDavid Siwik (below). Initially, it wouldn't load up the pictures, and then only some of them, and then it missed out the first line that introduced the author. I've got it fixed now, to what it should have been originally, so hopefully it won't go weird on me again.

 Just found an advert in an old Coatbridge and Airdrie advertisier, 1910:

J. LIzars' cinematograph
 An entertainment unsurpassed. New subjects - Humorous, Scenic,, Sensational, and Moral Pictures - suitable for consorts, soirees, childrens parties.

LIZARS OPTICAL LANTERNS
Are optically and Mechanically first-class Throughout. Full-sized instruments from 25s. Slides 6d per dozen.
101 Buchanan street, Glasgow.

 A cinematograph was a film camera that also acted as a movie projector and a developer. This advert is a little window into the life of Coatbridge in 1910 - there was no local fleapit for the masses to go and watch silent reels yet, so the relatively well off hired them out. Remember, 25 shillings was worth £110 in todays money, back at a time when miners were earning around 30 shillings a week, so this advert is very much an indicator of the class divide in Coatbridge at the time.

Guestblog

A guest post by David Siwik, MA History:

GLASGOW ARCHITECTURE – “THE SECOND CITY” OF THE EMPIRE

A few years ago, someone told me “the reason why Glasgow’s architecture is so varied and in many ways experimental is because Edinburgh is like a giant museum only forty miles away. This is why Glasgow has been repeatedly ruined architecturally…we still have that giant museum to architecture a few miles away. So, who cares if Glasgow has been laid waste to a bunch of concrete blocks and ugly, incoherent glass structures?” I did not at the time, nor do I agree now, that looking across the city, it has been ruined architecturally. Yes, there are the monstrous council estates that dot the city. And, I will admit, the first time I arrived in Glasgow, looking out the window of the plane as it was on its three mile final, I was dismayed at the preponderance of tall concrete blocks. Yet, to say that Glasgow has been ruined, to say that the concrete block is all that defines Glasgow architecture, and to suggest the city cannot hold its own when it comes to architectural history if it is compared with Edinburgh are all equally inaccurate statements.

Thus, I present to you a visual walkthrough of the important historical structures that, in my opinion, make Glasgow architecture interesting, historical, and significant. Being a historian, I like chronology, so these entries will be chronological, beginning with the Middle Ages and going through the nicer examples (yes, there are plenty) of twentieth-century Glasgow architecture. This visual walkthrough will be presented over several entries, beginning with the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. By the end, we will get to some of the more recent buildings in the city. 

MEDIEVAL/EARLY MODERN GLASGOW

Not a lot of Medieval or early-Modern era architecture in Glasgow remains, this is true. But it is also true that no city in Britain remains entirely as it was during the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were a long time ago, and most British cities, like Glasgow, experienced their greatest growth from the mid-eighteenth through the nineteenth century. Yet, you do not have to labor to find what does remain of Glasgow’s medieval architecture. And, as it turns out, what remains is really, really…well, old.

Glasgow Cathedral, built ca. late-1100s through mid-1200s with substantial modifications lasting to 1600

Glasgow Cathedral: One of the finest, and few fully in-tact, surviving Gothic cathedrals or churches in Scotland. This church was built between the late-twelfth century and the mid-thirteenth century, with substantial modifications in the centuries that followed. Glasgow Cathedral, like any building that has survived for 800 years and is still used for the same basic purpose it was built, as been modified somewhat. Yet, the transept, nave and exterior stonework are classic European Gothic architecture, and offer the visitor to this fine edifice a true walk back in time. The cathedral was built (and thus still stands) one of the taller hills in the city. While the area around it was built up substantially beginning in the mid-1700s, the Cathedral itself, as well as the Cathedral Close remain one of the few areas of the city that have remained more or less in tact since the Middle Ages. While the view of the River Clyde one would have enjoyed from the cathedral close 800 years ago has long since been obscured by buildings, climb the tall hill behind the cathedral in the necropolis, and you can imagine what the view must have been like when the church was built (minus the 20 storey council towers in the background).

Tron Kirk Steeple – Trongate, 1631

Tron Kirk – The steeple is all that remains of a church originally built in the 1500s. The steeple was incorporated into a newer church built on the same site as the old one in the 1700s. This is located not far from what remains of Glasgow Cross, and is one of the oldest structures in the city. The pastel colours, especially the blue clock, and the incorporation into the early-modern streetscape would have been typical of the narrow streets of Glasgow of the 1600s. Now a days, the Trongate is one of the wide, and busy shopping streets in the Merchant City area of Glasgow’s city centre. And, as you can see in the above photo, the kirk steeple makes for a convenient way of getting out of the drizzle on a gloomy afternoon.

Glasgow Cross – Tollbooth Steeple

The original city centre, if you will, of Glasgow was where what remains of the city’s cross. This is located where High Street and Trongate meet in the Merchant City. The tall structure at the centre of this picture is the Tollbooth Steeple. It was built 1625-1627 and designed by John Boyd. In Glasgow, like other European cities, the town cross was the centre of the action, if you will. Here once stood a debtors prison, the city’s main tollbooth, and this was the location of the many public executions that at one time served as a means of both punishment and entertainment. A fire destroyed most of the building that this steeple was once attached to. With its blue clock and seven stories, it not only matches the Tron Kirk Steeple, but it also provides a most unique parking island in the middle of a busy city.

 Cathcart Castle

Edinburgh and Stirling aren’t the only Scottish cities with a medieval castle. Although not as palace like as the Edinburgh or Stirling Castles, Glasgow’s Cathcart Castle has its own unique history. Perhaps it is Its location in a residential neighbourhood on the southwest side of the city that makes this one of the city’s least known about historical sites. Regardless, it is an historic and important structure worth making the effort to get to. This castle was initially constructed in the 1400s by the Cathcart family and was transferred to the Semple family in the mid-1500s. Supposedly, Mary Queen of Scots stayed in the castle before the Battle of Langside in 1568. What remains of the castle are essentially the foundations, as many of the ruins were torn down years ago by Glasgow City Council. However, as the pictures show, there is still much to see.

This concludes a very brief overview of three of the more interesting buildings in Glasgow. These four are of the handful from the Middle Ages and Early Modern period that survive. My next entry will contain pictures of Glasgow from the early industrial period…stay tuned.

A scottish murder - part 2

Earlier, I write a post about a book that makes the case that Madeline Smith did not murder her lover, but I didn't really go into details about the case itself.

Scene of Emiles death, 1st floor up above the door

In the original case, Madeline was found 'Not Proved', a Scottish verdict that lets someone go free due to a lack of a concrete conviction. It's probably the reason why this case hasn't been forgotten yet. Although, given how scandalising the story was, it was unlikely to have been forgotten until the twentieth century anyway, and on the surface of it the story is interesting - young socialite slowly posions her lover by feeding him it via hot chocolate outside her bedroom window.

 Anyway, here is the case for the prosecution:
 - L'Anglier definitely was blackmailing her.
 - Madeline has the motive to poison L'Angelier. Madeline repeatedly bought arsenic in this period.
 - L'Angelier dies of arsenic poisoning.
 - L'Angelier frequently mentions suspicions that Madeline is poisoning him.



Case for the defence:

Madelines house, 3 years later

- L'Angelier frequently mentions suspicions that Madeline is poisoning him. Why would you accept anything from someone if you thought that?
- L'Angelier was an arsenic eater, which he consumed because he believed it gave him health benefits. It is possible that he consumed it as part of his blackmail attempt, believing himself to be more immune to its poison than your average person.
- At the autopsy, L'Angeliers stomach was found to contain 87 grains of arsenic. That's way too much for him to have swallowed and not to have been aware.



Case for ambiguity:
- When the arsenic was autopsied from his stomach, the coroner did not check the colour of the arsenic, he only checked for the presence of arsenic. If he had checked for colour, this would have indicated the source of the arsenic poisoning (it would certainly have confirmed or denied the case for the prosecution, that it was fed to him through hot chocolate).

 Again, I have no idea if Madeline Smith did it. She had a lot to lose socially, and she did buy a lot of arsenic. On the other hand, Emile's behaviour was downright odd in the weeks and months leading up to his death. But then, this is what makes it one of those mysteries that'll never go away.

A Scottish Murder, part 1.

 I've been reading a book on the Madeleine Smith story (the title of this blog), and in it the author (Jimmy Powdrell Campbell) makes the interesting claim that she was actually innocent. I have no idea if this is true, but he does make some good points, which I'll post, as I continue to read the book.
 In case anyone isn't familiar with the story, a young Glasgow Victorian socialite has an affair with an older Frenchman (Emile L'Angelier), she jilts him, he threatens to tell her family, and she poisons him with arsenic. That she was guilty is the prevailing consensus, because she did act oddly - the houseboy reported her as wanting arsenic as soon as she got the blackmail letters. She claimed it was for cosmetic purposes, but she did get rather a lot of arsenic in the period Emile was dying, and the claim that she did really use it for cosmetic was disputed in court as being quite unusual.
But...
 In the murder trial, it turned out Emile was an 'arsenic eater', someone who consumed small amounts of arsenic in the belief that this promoted good health. And when Madeleine went to buy arsenic, she would go with a friend, and use her real name in the poisons register (a book that you had to sign if you bought poison), indicating that either a) she was careless, or b) not intending to use it for poison.
I will post more on this as I read more of the book! Because it is fascinating - Glasgow in the Victorian period is an amazing time in the city's history. Glasgow in the 19th century was undergoing massive expansion and refinement as a result of empire, world-class education, and of civic pride. There were protests and disorder, terrible poverty and a feeling that things had to get better. On top of this, there was an absurdly-respectable upper class, effectively living in another world. And when this case happened, the world did pay attention - this repeatedly made the international news when it came to court. The book makes a good effort to describe what's happening beyond the particulars of the case, which fleshes out the world that these real people lived in.

Excuse me, where's the Burrell?

 The Burrell collection opened in 1983 in Glasgow, as referenced by Rab C. Nesbitt in the episode 'culture'.
 The collection itself was donated by Sir William Burrell, a philanthropist shipping merchant, born slap-bang in the middle of the Victorian era when Glasgow was undergoing huge architectural and economic change. He became rich by ordering ships when the economy was going bad, and then using them when times were good - buy cheap and sell dear is the limit of my knowledge of business stuff, so that sounds plausible enough.
 Anyway, he was a lifelong collector who bequethed his enormous collection to Glasgow in 1944, with the condition that it be housed somewhere rural, with very specific ToC's. Glasgow is the dear green place, but this was a problem for the post-war Glasgow council, until it acquired Pollock county park (below):

.
 So, that's pretty rural. This was another bequeth, given in 1967.
  But even this wasn't quite good enough for the terms and conditions! So, the trustees waived some of the rules to allow it to be used (what with it being perfect an' all). There was then a competition in 1971 to design a building, which was then opened by the queen in 1983.
 The Burrell collection holds a vast amount of art, but that isn't all of the actual Burrell collection. Burrell collected so much that one building isn't enough to store it! It's a vast collection of international art, furniture, medieval weapons, ancient Egyptian artifiacts, and sculputres.

Coatbridge in the past.

 Glasgow is awesome. I say that as a Glaswegian, and as a historian. Glasgow has had a decades-long belief in council-funded museums and arts, so that entrance is free. Now, I know that Coatbridge isn't Glasgow, but it's about five miles outside of Glasgow, and it has an excellent free museum.

 It's the Summerlee Heritage Musuem. I used to go there as a kid, and what's astonishing that - despite cosmetic changes - a lot of the original exhibits from the 1980s are still there! Coatbridge is an ex-mining and steel-making town, that contributed significantly to empire, and in the 19th century saw a massive influx of immigrants looking for work in the mines and steel-mills. It's one of those places where you just know it did a lot of mining - everywhere seems to be built on a hill. Coatbridge suffered heavily from the loss of mining, and the twentieth century saw Coatbridge go into serious decline. But, there are still marks and memorials to its robust past, and this museum is one that's been going for decades.


This is next to the tram stop. Yes, trams! They are so cool. This was taken during a beautiful summer day, when they have the double-decker 1930s tram out. As you can see, it's not 100% authentic - there isn't a smog so bad that you can't see 10 feet in front of you. But it's like a gentrified vrsion of being in the past.








 There are a row of houses, each one showing what a working-class house was like at different periods in history. This is Scotland in the 1960s. The TV is showing an old b/w advert for a washing spin-drier. It was intensely patronising to all women everywhere!





 Scotland in the 1940s. The radio was playing the songs that would've been on in the 1940s, some Judy Garland and Sing Sing Sing, when I was there. No Kenneth Horne, I'm afraid.









 I really like this kind of history, it's a history that is as remote as the famous stuff that happened in the same period, but it feels connected and approachable. It's the history of people who would've laughed that their way of life was of any interest to the people of the future, and it's this lack of inhibition about having an eye on the future that makes their lives and their motivations all the more fascinating. Also, these two houses were from the 1940s and the 1960s, two decades that the British have mythologised, which is why we find things like this quite charming.

 Oh, and two more things about Coatbridge..Madeline Smith's lover Emile L'Angelier spent his last day having a pub lunch in Coatbridge, in an area of Coatbridge called Whifflet. And, in Drumpellier, remains of stone-age settlements were found.

This day in history, 27th Spetember 1938.

 The RMS Queen Elizabeth launches from Glasgow, where it was built at Clydebank (John Brown and Company), named after the queen consort (later to become the Queen Mother). It had an interesting life, serving as a troop carrier during WWII, but really it's an excuse for bringing up the shipping industry of Glasgow. Glasgow built ships for the British empire, profited mightily from the trading opportunities that empire gave, and that's why in the post-war period Glasgow felt the loss of empire sharply. When ship-building was decimated in Glasgow, and not really replaced with anything, that was quite a blow to Glasgow and the west of Scotland, as well as to ship-building - generations of expertise lost.

Isaac Newton - the introduction

 Isaac Newton was born in 1642.
 I've always been in two minds about Newton. He was a brilliant scientist, but he was - by any standards - a loner, eccentric, and at times clearly suffering from a mental disorder. He was, for two centuries, the leading figure of physics, but he could also be ruthless in a way that would surely indicate psychopathology today. He was a historically fascinating man, but someone I definitely would not like to meet.
  This postng is really just a basic cover of the life of Newton - I will be posting more in-depth articles on his life, as there is just way too much to cover in a few paragraphs. He was a brilliant mathematician, a brilliant early physicisist, and he managed to get the problem with forgery in the English economy down at a time when it was threatening to destablise the economy.
 He was born into a time when science was just starting to flourish (Novum organum being published in 1620), Copernicus and Vesalius a century earlier, and these early scientists were getting used to what contemporary scientists take for granted as the scientific method - experimental observation, and using mathematical methods where possible to make a reasoned argument.
 And Newton was a brilliant mathematician - calculus (invented independently by Liebnitz) both differential and integral, infinite series, binomial theorem. His work on gravity and light means that, due to the importance of gravity and light in science, he was regarded as the definitive physicist until Einstein. Principia Mathematica, despite being impenetrable to a contemporary physicist, was pivotal - it gave the first precise deinfitions to mass, weight, force, the laws of motion, and of gravity.
 He was also a rampant egotist. His fight with Robert Hooke is infamous. He hated to tell the world about his results, but also felt the strong urge to get the results out there before someone else took credit for the work. He savaged Liebnitz for having the temerity to invent calculus at the same time. He got rich, became the head of the Royal Society, and was an insane alchemist who did not apply scientific principles to whatever nonsense he read. I mean really insane - some of the instructions for making lead into gold sound like a confused flu-ridden dream. Like Arthur Conan-Doyle, a brilliant man can believe in nonsense and shun the evidence AND be perfectly comfortable with this cognitive dissonance. And was it really cognitive dissonance? To us now, yes, but Newton was dealing with invisible, real forces in his professional life that he could measure. Without knowing that the stuff he was doing with alchemy was most likely impossible, his mind could make the slight leap to other equally invisible stuff - just that the evidence was maddingly elusive.
 Anyway, more on Newton later.

Today in 1580

 Sir Francis Drake completes his circumnavigation of the Earth, in his ship The Golden Hind (initially called The Pelican). It started off as a mission, a fleet of five ships, to raid Spanish holdings on the pacific coast of America, but he lost four ships (two were destroyed on purpose by Drake, as he was worried that they might get seperated from each other, the Marigold was lost with all hands, and the Elizabeth went home early)- he nevertheless carried on, raiding Spanish ships for treasure (which was clearly piracy), as Spanish ships were known to be laden with silver.
 He then sailed the Indian ocean, rounded the cape of good hope, apparently never having watched that episode of Blackadder II where they accidentally do the same, returned to the Atlantic, and then back to England. This took three years, which must have been a relief for a crew that would not have been expecting the mission they ended up doing. In 1581, Queen Elizabeth visited his ship and after dinner knighted him, which frankly must have been odd - the crew not being able to do any work because the court was temporarily having a party in the tiny confines of an Elizabethan boat (and these ships were tiny by todays standards).
 It was a pivotal moment for a fledgling empire. It allowed England to have a more accurate geographic knowledge of the world, which helped bolster it's maritime activities, giving it an advantage over Spain. It also allowed cartogrophers to draw more accurate maps, showing that the American continent was not attached to a Southern continent, and it opened up new previously undiscovered routes.

greed is good - part 1

"Cities obeyed the impersonal law of progress..cities expanded relentlessly year by year; fortunes grew larger; more and more automobiles appeared in the streets; people were wiser and better read than their ancestors – eventually, by automatic stages, we should reach an intolerable utopia of dull citizens, without crime or suffering or drama." - Malcolm Cowley.

In America in the 1920s, there was the illusion of prosperity. Everyone was getting in on it, and there was the very real feeling of having to keep up, or you were a total loser. It didn't help that there were success stories seemingly everywhere. When Ladies Home Journal prints the article 'Everybody ought to be rich", by Jakob Ruskob (in January 1929, just when everybody still in the game was about to lose all their money), you know that the greed has gotten to everybody. No wonder it was called the great depression – for a decade, everyone's hopes were risen, and then brought crashing down. For many, they must have taken it as a sign of personal failure.

Back in the '80s, there was minor obsession with stocks and shares, but this was nothing compared to the 1920s, when it became incredibly fashionable; shares have always been seen as easy money, and never more so than in the '20s. Really bad songs were lapped up (gramaphones, a sign of the times), lucky investors were watched like hawks by the public. The crooked ones weren't, they were too busy manipulating the prices from behind the scenes. A few rich guys got absurdly rich, everything collapsed, people starved, there was global social unrest, and some of the key figures played a huge role in dealing with the economic aftermath.

 I know that it's a cliche that should be avoided at all costs, but history really does repeat itself. On the one hand, this is very depressing. On the other hand, a good historian can see through the mania that's happening around them.

John Anderson - episode IV, a new folk

 John Anderson, founder of my university. Well, alright, he founded Andersons instition (which he never saw, as he bequethed it post-mortem), which then became the Royal Technical College, which then became the University of Strathclyde. And we had John Logie Baird as a pupil..when it was a college. He (John Anderson) is very much under-appreciated as a historical character in the history of Glasgow.
  He was friends with James Watt, and encouraged him in the development of steam power. He knew Benjamin Franklin, and from that worked on his own on electricity at a time when 'working on electricity' was akin to working with uranium in the early twentieth century - nobody really knew what the hell they were doing, but something scientifically interesting was clearly going on. He funded and built a better cannon, tried to sell it to the British - who weren't interested - and ended up selling it to the French!
On that last one, he was a radical, and supported the French revolution. He was radical in other ways too; as a believer in 'useful education' he ran classes for artisans in the evenings, and - and this is the unusual part, for the times - allowed women entry too! At the time, this must've seemed a wee bit mad, so I have nothing but respect for a man who was clearly ahead of the curve in that area.
 Anyway, interesting man in interesting times, with that type of egalitarianism that only really seems to have been fashionable in the 18th century - all humans are equal, should be given every chance to compete equally, and as a result there's no excuse not to make something of yourself. And 18th century Glasgow was cool (not as cool as 19th century Glasgow, though).