Calendar: December 31

Year: Day to Day Men: December 31

Half-Filled Tub

On December 31st of 1759, Arthur Guinness signed a nine-thousand year lease on an abandoned property and became a prominent figure within the Dublin brewery scene.

In September of1755, Arthur Guinness purchased his first brewery, a three-story building located on the confluence of the River Liffey in Leixlip, County Kildare. The river provided power and water for brewing; the hops were brought from Dublin along the Dublin-Galway road. The origin of the yeast used by Guinness is unknown, but is speculated to have come from Kildare. In September of 1756, Guinness leased several more properties to extend his business.

Leaving his Leixlip brewery in the care of his brother Richard, Guinness moved to Dublin, an area of affordable property due to a recent number of economic upsets and bank collapses. He was particularly interested in acquiring a brewery at St. James Gate that had sat abandoned for nine years. A large site of four acres, 1.6 hectares, it contained a gristmill, two malt houses, a brewhouse and stables. The property’s location near St. James Gate would be served by a terminus of the newly built Grand Canal.

The current owner of the Dublin property was the Rainsford family. It was originally owned by Sir Mark Rainsford, the Lord Mayor of Dublin and a manufacturer of beer and fine ales. The business was passed on to his son, also named Mark, who leased the business in 1715 to a Captain Paul Espinasse. In 1750, the Rainsford family resumed ownership of the business and the site. On the thirty-first of December in 1759, Arthur Guinness leased the site from Sir Mark Rainsford’s grandson, Mark Rainsford III. Under the agreement, Guinness made a £100 down-payment and agreed to pay an additional £45 annually for nine-thousand years.

The terms of the lease involving the water usage became a major problem between Arthur Guinness and the Dublin Corporation, the city’s administrator. By 1773, the Corporation claimed his brewery was using more water than that specified by his lease, a claim disputed by Guinness. However in April of 1775, the Corporation discovered that Guinness had made alterations to the pipe system that allowed him to draw more water than he was allowed. Both sides eventually settled the matter in court in 1785; Guinness agreed to lease water from the City of Dublin for an annual charge of £10.

While popular in Dublin, Guinness did not immediately achieve dominance among the regional brewers; his sales were far below those of such brewers as Taylor, Phepoe and Thwaites. Dublin brewers were not as successful as English brewers whose imported porter was the dominant drink in the city. In 1778, Guinness added porter to his ale-heavy brewery and, by 1783, it dominated his business. By 1796, porter production at the St. James Gate Brewery was five times the ale output; ale brewing at the site ended on the 22nd of April in 1799,

Although he limited his brewery to dark beer, Arthur Guinness experimented with different forms of porter. His concept of a West India Porter, with greater hops and alcohol content, later became the basis for Guinness Foreign Extra Stout. In 1777, the British House of Commons formally changed the tax code regarding domestic Irish porter; this allowed the creation of a market for the importation of Irish porter into England, which led to beer exportation as a staple of the Irish economy.

Calendar: December 25

Year: Day to Day Men: December 25

Christmas Morning’s Present

The 25th of December in 1921 marks the last major Potlatch led by the Kwakwaka’wakw Chief Daniel Cranmer in British Columbia, Canada.

A potlatch is a gift-giving ceremonial feast by Indigenous peoples of the Pacific northwest coast of Canada and the United States. Among such cultures as the Heiltsuk, Haida, Tlingit, Kwakwaka’wakw and Coast Salish, it is traditionally their primary governmental institution, legislative body and economic system. The potlatch demonstrated a leader’s wealth and position through the giving away or destruction of wealth or valuable items.

The Potlatch focused on the reaffirmation of family, clan and international ties as well as the human connection to the spiritual world. It was also strict system of resource management, a time when coastal peoples negotiated and affirmed rights to and use of specific resources and territories. The recitation of oral histories and the honoring of the supernatural forces were an integral part of the ceremony; music, dances, singing, storytelling and speeches were also involved.

The Kwakwaka’wakw are one of the indigenous peoples residing on the Pacific Northwest Coast. Their traditional territory encompassed northern Vancouver Island, the nearby smaller islands including the Discovery Islands, and the adjacent British Columbia mainland. The Kwakwaka’wakw are organized politically into thirteen First Nation bands, a basic unit of government with a council chaired by either an elected or hereditary chief.

Born April of 1885 in Knight Inlet, Chief Daniel Cranmer carried the Nimpkish (‘Namgis) hereditary name Pal’nakwala Wakas. He was at the center of one of the most significant Nimpkish cultural events of the early 20th century. Cranmer held a notable potlatch on Village Island (ʼMimkwa̱mlis) from December 21st to the 25th in 1921. It is significant as it was one of the largest public First Nations’ potlatches in defiance of the Indian Act legislation, Section 149, that prohibited an ill-defined collection of aboriginal ceremonies under the general description of potlatch.

Indian Agent W.M. Halliday presided over the trial held at the Albert Bay Day School, which for the duration of the trial also served as the jail. In April of 1922, the arrests and trial resulted in fifty-eight verdicts of which there were nine dismissals and 49 convictions. Twenty-six of those convicted were brought by boat to Vancouver and then to the Oakalla Prison in Bumaby; twenty-two of the convicted were sentenced to two months imprisonment and four received six months imprisonment.

Twenty-three of those convicted received suspended sentences after agreeing to turn over their ceremonial regalia to Indian Agent Halliday and promising to abandon potlatches. The confiscated ceremonial regalia came to be commonly known as the “Potlatch Collection”. These artifacts were dispersed to public cultural institutions in the United States, England, and Canada as well as private collectors. Efforts to repatriate the collection began in the late 1950s

The government of Canada had criminalized potlatches from 1885 to 1951. However, potlatches persisted underground despite the risk of governmental reprisals which included mandatory jail sentences of a least two months. Since the ceremony was decriminalized in 1951, the potlatch has made a resurgence in some communities. In many of the Indigenous nations, the potlatch is still the basis of Indigenous governance; most notable is the Haida Nation whose democracy is firmly rooted in potlatch law.

Note: The word “potlatch” is derived from the Chinook Wawa, a language which originated as a pidgin trade language in the Pacific Northwest. A mixture of the Chinook, French, English and other language systems, Chinook Wawa spread during the nineteenth-century through British Columbia, Alaska, Northern California, Idaho and Montana. Potlatch, meaning to give away or a gift, originated from the Nuu-chah-nulth word ‘paɬaˑč’, meaning to make a ceremonial gift in a potlatch.

A history of the Potlatch Collection can be found at the U’mista Cultural Center site located at: https://www.umista.ca/pages/collection-history

Calendar: December 22

Year: Day to Day Men: December 22

Filtered Light

On the 22nd of December in 1885, Itō Hirobumi, a samurai, became the first Prime Minister of Japan during the Meiji era. The Meiji era, which extended from October of 1868 to July of 1912, was the first half of the Empire of Japan. It was a period of movement from an isolated feudal society at risk of colonization to a modern, industrialized nation state influenced by Western scientific, technological, political, legal and aesthetic ideas.

Itō Hirobumi was the son of a modest samurai family in the Chōshū domain of western Japan. He grew up at a time of convulsive political conditions during the decline of the Tokugawa shogunate which had governed Japan since 1603. Itō was sent to England in 1863 by the leaders of Chōshū to study naval science. He played a minor role in the events leading to the 1868 Meiji Restoration, a movement which overthrew the shogunate and reestablished the formal authority of the Emperor.

Itō’s role in the Meiji Restoration brought him into contact with Kido Takayoshi who became one of the great leaders of early Meiji Japan and an important mentor to Itō. His connections with Kido and Ōkubo Toshimichi, one of the leaders of the Restoration, enabled him to perform government assignments to the United States and the Iwakura Mission to Europe as well as study matters such as taxation, treaty revision, and budgetary systems.

When Ōkubo was assassinated in 1878, Itō Hirobumi succeeded him as Minister of Home Affairs. This advancement brought him into conflict with the ambitious statesman Ōkuma Shigenobu. Itō forced Ōkuma out of the government in 1881 and persuaded the government to adopt a constitution. The Emperor proclaimed the constitution in 1889 and, in the next year, the National Diet was established. The National Diet is the legislature of Japan consisting of the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors, both elected and responsible for nominating the Prime Minister.

At this time, Itō was the most important person in the Meiji government. Serious about establishing a constitutional government, he and other officials had spent one and a half years in Europe studying under constitutional scholars. This writing of basic rights and the establishment of the Diet was a very progressive act given Japan’s samurai background and its tense domestic and foreign problems.

Itō Hirobumi remained a prominent figure in the 1890s and achieved two important successes. The first was an agreement with Great Britain that did away with extraterritoriality thus subjecting British nationals in Japan to Japanese law. The second was Japan’s 1895 victory over China in the First Sino-Japanese War, primarily a conflict over influence in Korea. The war demonstrated the failure of China’s Qing dynasty’s attempts to modernize its military and shifted the regional dominance from China to Japan.

In 1905, following the Russo-Japanese War, Itō was sent to Korea to negotiate a treaty that turned Korea into a Japanese protectorate. He returned to Korea as resident general in 1906 and pursued a gradual policy of economic and bureaucratic reform. Itō sought to suppress Korean nationalism and even engineered King Kojong’s abdication; however, he could not prevent the move favored by Japanese leaders to annex Korean. In October of 1909, Itō Hirobumi was assassinated in the city of Harbin, North China, by An Chung-gŭn, a member of the Korean Independence movement.

Itō Hirobumi was the one Japanese leader who advocated a moderate and sympathetic approach to Japan’s Korean policy; his assassination ultimately became a factor to Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910.

Calendar: December 16

A Year: Day to Day Men: 16th of December

Observing the Street Below

The sixteenth of December marks the beginning of the 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a conical Italian volcano built up by many layers of hardened lava and unconsolidated material. The eruption, marked by columns of volcanic debris, ash and hot gases, buried many villages under the resulting lava flows. It is estimated that four-thousand people were killed by the eruption, which was so intense that it lowered the summit of Vesuvius by four hundred and fifty meters.

Located on the Gulf of Naples in Campania, Mount Vesuvius has a long historic and literary tradition. At the time of the 79 AD eruption, the volcano was considered a divinity of nature. The Roman cities surrounding the volcano regarded Mount Vesuvius as being devoted to Hercules. This was particularly true for the city of Herculaneum ,which was named after its mythical founder. Frescoes depicting Vesuvius as a serpent decorated many of the household shrines in Pompeii; inscriptions on walls linked the power of the god Jupiter to the volcano, IOVI VESVVIO, or Jupiter Vesuvius.

Mount Vesuvius has erupted multiple times with varying grades of severity. All of its eruptions included explosive outbursts named Plinian after the Roman writer Pliny the Younger, who published a detailed account of the 79 AD eruption that killed his uncle. That eruption was largest and most destructive of all Vesuvius eruptions. Its cloud of super-heated gases and particles reached a height of thirty-three kilometers. The molten rock, pumice and hot ash ejecta reached sped at a rate of one and a half million tons per second. This volcanic event destroyed several Roman towns and completely obliterated Pompeii and Herculaneum under massive pyroclastic surges and ash fall deposits.

Today, Mount Vesuvius is considered the world’s most dangerous volcano. This is due to two main factors: it has erupted violently and frequently through the years and the large number of people living in its vicinity. The area surrounding Mount Vesuvius is the most densely populated volcanic region in the world. Three million people live near enough to be affected by an eruption, with at least six-hundred thousand in the danger zone. Mount Vesuvius is among the most closely monitored volcanoes in the world. The network consists of a number of fixed seismic stations on the surface of the earth with sensors that detect the motion of the soil, changes in the gravimetric field and indicative shifts in the magnetic masses in the subsurface.

Calendar: December 14

A Year: Day to Day Men: 14th of December

Crouching in Socks and Sneakers

On the fourteenth of December in 1782, the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne, performed the first test-flight of an unmanned hot air balloon in France.

The Montgolfier brothers were born into a family of paper manufacturers. Joseph-Michel was the twelfth child of Pierre Montgolfier and Anne Duret; Jacques-Étienne was the fifteenth child and was later sent to Paris to train as an architect. After the death of the eldest son who was his father’s business successor, Étienne was recalled from Paris to long the family’s paper manufacturing business.

Both Joseph-Michel and Étienne were talented innovators and inventors. Joseph-Michel invented the self-acting hydraulic ram in 1796 and Étienne founded the first paper-making vocational school in France. For their business, the brothers together invented a process to manufacture transparent paper vellum, suitable for use in situations where tracing was required. As avid balloonists, they invented the Montgolfière-style hot air balloon, a globe aèrostatique, with which Jacques Étienne made the first piloted ascent by humans in 1783.

Interested in aeronautics, Joseph-Michel had built parachutes as early as 1775. Watching the embers rising from a fire, he wondered is the same force could be used for a military air assault. Joseph-Michel believed that the smoke was the buoyant force which lifted the embers; from that assumption he preferred to use smoldering fuel for his experiments. He built a test structure of a very thin wood box with a light-weight taffeta cloth lid. After lighting crumbled paper in the box, the structure lifted off the stand and touched the ceiling.

After recruiting Étienne through an urgent message, the brothers built a similar structure but three times the size with a volume twenty-seven times greater. On December 14th of 1782, they ignited the wood and hay in the fire box; the lifting force was more than expected and they lost control of the craft. The device floated nearly two kilometers but was destroyed after landing by a passing citizen.

Calendar: December 13

A Year: Day to Day Men; 13th of December

Black Leather Sofa with Pillow

On the thirteenth of December in 1577, the English explorer and privateer Francis Drake set sail from England on a mission to circumnavigate the world aboard the “Pelican”.

Born in Tavistock, Devon, Francis Drake was the eldest of twelve sons of Edmund Drake and Mary Mylwaye. As his birth date was not formally recorded, the date of 1540-1541 derives from two portraits painted in his later life. Drake was placed at an early age into the household of sea-captain William Hawkins and began his life as an apprentice sailor on Hawkins’s boats. A purser by the age of eighteen, Drake was given a position with the owner and master of a small trading vessel along the coast of England, France and the Low Countries. Satisfied with Drake’s conduct, the ship’s master, at his death, bequeathed the vessel to Drake.

Beginning in 1562, Drake became involved with the West African slave trade. There is some anecdotal evidence to support his sailing on several slaving voyages with Sir John Hawkins, considered the first English merchant to profit from the Triangle Trade which sailed enslaved people from Africa to the Spanish colonies in the West Indies during the sixteenth-century. It is known that he sailed on a slave voyage under John Lovell’s command, sponsored by Hawkins, in 1566 and, in 1567, accompanied Hawkins on his last voyage around Cape Verde; the voyage was considered unsuccessful as more than ninety enslaved Africans were released without payment. Although not a member of the consortium of investors, Drake was in his twenties and a member of the crew which shared in the ship’s profits, thus being culpable for his participation in the slaving enterprise.

In the period from 1572 to 1573, Francis Drake attacked the Spanish colonies as a privateer under English authority. After a failed attempt in July of 1572 to capture the Spanish town of Nombre de Dios, the storage point for the gold and silver treasure of Peru, Drake raided Spanish galleons along the coast of Panama. He also looted the mule trains that transported the gold, silver and trade goods from Panama City. Drake eventually captured the Spanish silver train at Nombre de Dios in April of 1573 which made him both rich and famous. From the heavily laden mule train, they had captured approximately twenty tons of silver and gold. It was during this expedition that Drake and his lieutenant John Oxenham became the first Englishmen to see the Pacific Ocean from the central mountains of the Isthmus of Panama.

Queen Elizabeth I likely invested in Drake’s 1577 voyage to South America but never issued him a formal commission. This was the first circumnavigation in fifty-eight years, the last one being Garcia Jofre de Loaisa’s Spanish expedition 1525 to1536. Drake and his fleet set out from Plymouth on the fifteenth of November but were forced by bad weather and repairs to return to Plymouth. Drake set sail again on the thirteenth of December aboard the Pelican with four other ships and one hundred sixty-four men.

On the twenty-sixth of September in 1580, the “Golden Hind”, formerly the Pelican, sailed into Plymouth with Drake and a crew of fifty-nine men, along with a rich cargo of spices and captured Spanish treasure. The queen’s half-share of the cargo surpassed the rest of the crown’s income for that entire year. Drake was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the Earth; his voyage was also the second to arrive back home with at least one intact ship. All written records of the voyage were to be become the queen’s secrets of the Realm; Drake and other participants were sworn to secrecy on pain of death. Elizabeth I wanted the voyage kept hidden from Spain, England’s rival.

Calendar: December 8

A Year: Day to Day Men: 8th of December

Saturday Morning After Shower

On the eighth of December in 1881, Vienna’s Ring Theater was destroyed by a gaslight fire that killed three hundred and eighty-four people.

The popular Ring Theater in Vienna, Austria was built between 1872 and 1874 by architect Heinrich von Förster from plans drawn by Emil Ritter. Opening in January of 1874 under the direction of operatic tenor and actor Albin Swoboda Sr, it was originally the Opéra Comique. In September of 1878, it changed its name to the Ring Theater and its focus to spoken plays and variety presentations as well as German and Italian operas.

As the footprint of the theater was small and it was intended for an audience of seventeen hundred, the architect designed the theater with four levels. On the eight of December in 1881, a fire began shortly before a performance of “Les Contes Fantastiques d’Hoffmann”, a French libretto written by composer Jacques Offenbach. The theater’s entire interior was engulfed in flames and collapsed; three hundred and eight-four people perished. In 1882, new regulations for theaters were passed regarding public safety provisions, including outward-opening doors, safety curtains and the fireproofing of the theater sets.

The Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary Franz Joseph used his private funds to build an apartment building on the site of the demolished Ring Theater. Although a private residence, it supported worthy public causes. This building also suffered a fire in 1945 with heavy damages and eventually collapsed in 1951.

Between the years 1969 and 1974, an office building occupied the site and served as the federal headquarters for the Vienna police and federal security guards: a plaque commemorating the fire is installed on the police headquarters. The original Attic-styled statues from the Ring Theater are now in Vienna’s Pötzleinsdorfer Schlosspark, a sprawling natural preserve with statues, wildlife areas and a small farm.

Calendar: December 7

A Year: Day to Day Men: 7th of December

Doffed Pants of Purple Hue

On December 7th in 1995, the unmanned Galileo spacecraft arrived at the planet Jupiter on its mission to study the planet and its moons. It had been launched six years earlier by the Space Shuttle Atlantis on October 18th of 1989.

The Galileo was an American robotic space probe which consisted of an orbiter and an entry probe. It was named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. Called the father of observational astronomy, Galilei studied speed, velocity, gravity and free fall, inertia, projectile motion and the principle of relativity. He also improved military compasses and the telescope that he used to observe the four largest satellites of Jupiter.

The U. S. Jet Propulsion Laboratory built the Galileo spacecraft and managed the Galileo program for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA. Its propulsion unit was supplied by West Germany’s aerospace manufacturer Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm. The Ames Research Center of NASA managed the atmospheric probe that was built by the Hughes Aircraft company. The combined mass of the orbiter and probe was 2,562 kilograms and had a height of 6.15 meters.

The nuclear powered Galileo orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. After ten months of operating and sending information to Earth, the Galileo was intentionally destroyed in Jupiter’s atmosphere on the 21st of September in 2003. Its successor, Juno, part of the New Frontiers program, entered the polar orbit of Jupiter on the 5th of July in 2016. The Juno is powered by three solar panels, the largest ever deployed on a planetary probe at the time of its launching.

Calendar: December 4

A Year: Day to Day Men: 4th of December

Lost in Thought

On the fourth day of December in 1872, the American-registered merchant brigantine, Mary Celeste, was discovered adrift and deserted in the Atlantic Ocean off the Azores Islands.

The Mary Celeste was built in Spencer’s Island, Nova Scotia, and launched in 1861 under British registration as the “Amazon”. Seven years later, she was transferred to American ownership and renamed the “Mary Celeste”. She was a brigantine, a two-masted sailing vessel with a fully square-rigged foremast and at least two sails on her main mast: a square topsail and a gaff sail behind the mast. The Mary Celeste had a single deck, tonnage of 198.42 gross tons and a length of 30.3 meters. After her salvage in 1872, the Mary Celeste was rebuilt with a second deck and additional depth; her tonnage was increased to 282.28 gross tons.

In October of 1867, the “Amazon” was driven ashore during a storm and was so badly damaged that her owners abandoned her as a wreck. She was eventually acquired by a New York mariner Richard Haines who restored her and registered with the Collector of the Port of New York as an American vessel named “Mary Celeste”. The ship was seized by Haines’s creditors and sold to a consortium headed by James H. Winchester. Early in 1872, the Mary Celeste underwent a major refit which enlarged her considerably.

In October of 1872, Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs took command of the Mary Celeste for her first voyage following her extensive refit. As the voyage was to Genoa, Italy, Briggs arranged for his wife and infant daughter to accompany him, but left his school-aged son in the care of his grandmother. Satisfied with his ship and crew, the Mary Celeste was loaded on the twentieth of October with a cargo of seventeen-hundred barrels of alcohol. On November 5th, the ship left the pier with Briggs, his wife and daughter and seven crew members.

On November 15th in 1872, the Canadian brigantine “Dei Gratia” left New York harbor with a cargo destined for Genoa, Italy. She followed the same general route as the Mary Celeste, only eight days behind. On December 4th at a point midway between the Azores and the coast of Portugal, the helmsman of the Dei Gratia reported a vessel with an odd set to her sails heading erratically towards their ship. Seeing no one on deck and receiving no replies to their signals, Captain Morehouse sent the first and second mates to investigate. The ship was deserted, the sails poorly set with some missing, and much of the rigging was damaged.

While the main hatch was secure, the other hatches of the Mary Celeste were open with the covers on deck. The ship’s single lifeboat was gone and the glass cover of the ship’s compass was shattered. There was a meter of water in the hold but that was not an alarming amount for the size of the vessel. The last entry in the daily log was November 25th, nine days earlier. While personal items in Captain Brigg’s cabin was scattered, gallery equipment was neatly stowed and there were ample provisions in the stores. With no signs of fire or violence, the missing lifeboat indicated an orderly departure from the ship.

Captain Morehouse divided his crew of eight men to sail the Mary Celeste and the Dei Gratia to Gibraltar. The weather was calm but the progress, being under-crewed, was slow. A series of hearings were held at the Salvage Court in Gibraltar beginning in the middle of December. Various theories, based on testimonies from the Dei Gratia crew, were presented from mutiny and murder to conspiracy of fraud, due to the fact that the Mary Celeste was heavily over-insured. Fact and fiction became entwined over the decades with no determination as to the cause of the missing crew. At Spenser’s Island, the site of Mary Celeste’s original construction, a commemorative monument for her lost crew was erected as well as a memorial outdoor cinema theater.

Calendar: March 31

Year: Day to Day Men: March 31

Changing His Tunes

The thirty-first of March in 1889 marks the official opening date of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The wrought-iron lattice tower was constructed as the centerpiece for the 1889 Paris Exposition, and as a memorial to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the French Revolution.

Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, two senior engineers employed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel’s company Compagnie des Établissements Eiffel, produced a sketch of a great metal pylon, narrowed as it rose, for the centerpiece of the Paris Exposition. With the assistance of Stephen Sauvestre, the company’s head architect, the men refined the design with the addition of decorative arches at the base of the tower and a glass pavilion on the first level. Gustave Eiffel approved the design and bought the patent rights for their design. This design for the Eiffel Tower was on display at the 1884 Exhibition of Decorative Arts under the company’s name.

On the thirtieth of March in 1885, Gustave Eiffel presented his plans to the Society of Civil Engineers at which time he discussed the technical difficulties and emphasized both the practical and symbolic aspects of the structure. Little progress on a decision was made until Édouard Lockroy was appointed Minister of Trade in 1886. A budget for the Paris Exposition was passed and requirements for the competition being held for the exposition’s centerpiece were altered. All entries were now required to include a study for a three-hundred meter, four-sided tower on the Champ de Mars. A judging commission set up on the twelfth of May found all proposals, except Eiffel’s design, either impractical or lacking in details.

Gustave Eiffel signed the January 1887 contract in his own capacity rather than as a representative of the company. The contract granted him 1.5 million francs toward the construction cost, less than a quarter of the expected cost. Eiffel was to receive all income from the commercial exploitation of the structure during the Paris Exposition and for the following twenty years. To manage the construction, he established a separate company for which he provided half the necessary capital.

The French bank, Crédit Industriel et Commercial, CIC, helped finance the Eiffel Tower’s construction through acquiring funds from predatory loans to the National Bank of Haiti. As a result, the Haitian government was sending nearly half of all taxes collected on its exports to finance the construction of the tower. While the tower was being built as a symbol of France’s freedom, the newly independent Haiti’s economy was hindered in its ability to start schools, hospitals and other basic establishments necessary for an established country.

Work on the Eiffel Tower’s foundations began at the end of January in 1887 with the formation of the four concrete slabs for the legs of the tower. While the east and south legs were easily done; the west and north legs, being closer to the Seine River, needed pilings twenty-two meters deep to support their concrete slabs. All four slabs supported blocks of inclined limestone for the ironwork’s supporting shoes. The foundation structures of the Eiffel Tower were completed at the end of June.

An enormous amount of preparatory work was done for the assemblage of the ironwork. Seventeen hundred general drawings and over thirty-six hundred detailed drawings of the eighteen thousand separate parts were needed. The task of drawing the components was complicate by the complex angles in the design and the degree of precision required; the position of the rivet holes were specified to within one millimeter. No drilling or shaping was done on site; all finished components, some already partially assembled, arrived on horse-drawn carts from the factory. If any part did not fit, it was sent back to the factory. The entire structure was composed of over eighteen thousand pieces joined with two and a half million rivets.

The main structure of the Eiffel Tower was completed at the end of March in 1889. On the thirty-first of March, Gustave Eiffel led a group of government officials and members of the press to the top of the tower. As the lifts were not yet in operation, the ascent by foot took over an hour; most of the party chose to stay at the lower levels. Gustav Eiffel, Émile Nouguier, the head of construction, Jean Compagnon, the City Council president, and the reporters from “Le Figaro” and “Le Monde Illustré” completed the ascent. Eiffel hoisted a large Ticolor flag as a twenty-five gun salute was fired at the first level.

The Eiffel Tower was not opened to the public until the fifteenth of May, nine days after the opening of the Paris Exposition. The lifts, however, were still not completed. Nearly thirty-thousand visitors climbed the seventeen thousand steps to the top before the lifts opened on the twenty-sixth of May. Notable visitors to the tower included inventor Thomas Edison, Edward VII the Prince of Wales, stage actress Sarah Bernhardt and “Buffalo Bill” Cody whose Wild West show was part of the Exposition.

Calendar: March 3

Year: Day to Day Men: March 3

Warmth of the Sun

The third of March in 1585 marks the inauguration of the Teatro Olimpico designed by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. Since 1994, the Olympic Theater, along with other Palladian-styled buildings in and around the city of Vicenza, have been listed together as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site.

Born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola in Padua, Republic of Venice in November of 1508, Andrea Palladio was influenced by Roman and Greek architecture and is considered one of those individuals who most influenced the history of architecture. He trained under noted sculptor Bartolomeo Cavazza de Sossano as an apprentice stonecutter for six years. When his contract was finished, Palladio permanently relocated to Vicenza where his career was unexceptional until 1538.

Between 1538 and 1539, Palladio rebuilt the Villa Trissino, the Cricoli residence of poet and scholar Gian Giorgio Trissino who was engaged in a lifetime study of ancient Roman architecture. Due to his work, Palladio received the formal title of architect in 1541. He took several trips, accompanied by Gian Trissino, between 1541 and 1547 to study classical monuments in Rome, Tivoli, Paletrina, and Albano. As a mentor, Trissino introduced Palladio to the history and arts of Rome as well as bestowed on him the name ‘Palladio’ which means the Wise One.

Throughout his career in Vicenza, Andrea Palladio designed many villas and governmental palaces. His first construction project involving a large town house was the Palazzo Thiene in Vicenza. After the death of its architect Giulio Romano, Palladio finished its construction. He used Romano’s design for the villa’s windows but altered the facade to express a new lightness and grace. Among the villas attributed to Palladio’s architectural designs are the Villa Pisani, his first patrician villa for a Venetian family, and Villa Cornaro, a villa at Piombino Dese that was a mixture of villa rusticate (country house) and suburban villa with a grand salon designed for entertaining.

In 1550, Palladio began construction on the Palazzo del Chiericati, an urban palace built on a city square near Vicenza’s port. It was designed with a two-story facade with a double loggia divided by rows of Doric columns. Paladio’s Palazzo del Capitaniato, the offices of the regional Venetian governor, was a contrasting design of red brick and white stone. The four brick half-columns of its facade formed a strong vertical element that balanced the horizontal balustrades and projecting cornice at the top. Designed in 1565, the Palazzo del Capitaniato was built between 1571 and 1572.

Ranked among his highest masterworks, the Teatro Olimpico was Palladio’s final architectural design and was not completed until after his death. In 1579, the Olympic Academy obtained the rights to build a permanent theater in the old fortress, Castello del Territorio, which had been both a prison and storage depot for gun powder before falling in disuse. Asked to produce a design, Palladio used the space to recreate an academic reconstruction of the Roman theaters he had closely studied. In order to fit a stage and seating area into the building’s wide and shallow space, Palladio had to flatten the semicircular seating area of a Roman theater into an ellipse.

Andrea Palladio died in August of 1580, only six months after the construction on the theater had started. His sketches and drawings were used as a guide; Palladio’s yongest son, Silla Palladio, and Vicenza architect Vincenzo Scamozzi oversaw the final construction work. Scamozzi contributed several rooms to the design and built the rusticated entrance archway that was fitted into the rough, well-worn walls. As Palladio had not left any plans for the onstage scenery, Scamozzi created trompe l’oeil scenery with oil-lamp lighting to give the appearance of long streets receding into the distance. The full Roman-style wood and stucco backscreen is the oldest surviving stage set still in existence.

The Teatro Olimpico was inaugurated on the third of March in 1585 by a production of Sophocles’s “Oedipus Rex” with music by composer and organist Andrea Gabrieli. After only a few productions, the theater was essentially abandoned. The scenes created for the production were never removed and still exist in place. The original lighting system of glass oil lamps has been used only a few times over the years due to the risk of fire; they were lit in 1997 for a production of “Oedipus Rex”.

Due to conservation issues, current performances in the Teatro Olimpico are limited to four hundred attendees. As heating and air conditioning could damage the delicate wooden structure of the stage sets, performances are held only in the spring and autumn. The theater was a film location for the 1979 film “Don Giovanni” and the 2005 “Casanova”.

Calendar: February 29

Year: Day to Day Men: February 29

Mediterranean Adventure

The twenty-ninth day of February in 1912 marks the falling of the Piedra Movediza, a balancing rock that was located near the city of Tandil in the Buenos Aires Province of Argentina. A balancing rock, or precarious boulder, is a naturally occurring geological formation that features a large rock of substantial size which is resting on other rocks, glacial fill, or bedrock. No single scientific term for the phenomenon exists.

There are several types of geological features that are included under the term balancing rock: glacial erratic that are transported and deposited by glaciers or ice rafts to their resting place; perched blocks deposited due to glaciers, avalanches or landslides often on a slope or hillside; erosional remnants that are carved from local bedrock through extensive wind, water, or chemical erosion; and pedestal rock, a single continuous rock form with a very small base and a much larger crown. Although not a true balancing rock, a pedestal rock has the appearance of one. These rocks are now believed to have been formed through years of wind and chemical weathering of its base.

The Piedra Movediza was most likely a deposited boulder; it was situated balanced at the edge of a formation of bedrock. Its weight was approximately three-hundred tons, or 272.2 metric tons, and its pedestal was so thin that the boulder was balanced with the wind. The boulder rocked, imperceptible to the eye, from morning to evening in a extremely slow fashion. Visitors to the site would place bottles under the bottom of the rock only to see them broken later in the day.

The Piedra Movediza fell and broke on the twenty-ninth of February in 1912, some time between five o’clock and six o’clock in the evening. There were no witnesses to the event so the true time and cause of the fall are unknown. Several theories regarding its fall were presented among which were vibrations from a nearby quarry blast, people rocking the stone during the day, and disgruntled quarrymen weary of the tourists. No official reason for the fall, however, was ever issued.

Proposals were made to move the three segments of the broken boulder back to its original site on the hill and cement them into position; however nothing was done, most likely due to the mass of each segment. In 2007, a replica of the Piedra Movediza was placed in the original site, now considered a historical symbol of the city of Tandil. The replica does not move as it is securely fastened to the supporting bedrock. This original bouder site is now named Parque Litico La Movediza (La Movediza Lithic Park).

Balancing rocks are found world-wide on all continents. Among these are Finland’s seven-meter long Kummakivi in Ruokolahti, Zimbawe’s Balancing Rocks, a large-scale formation of igneous rocks perfectly balanced; the nine-meter tall Pinnacle Balanced Rock at the Chiricahua National Monument in Arizona, United States; and the Pena do Equilibrio, a giant granite balancing rock in Ponteareas, Spain.

Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “The Piedra Movediza”, circa 1890, Vintage Print

Calendar: February 26

Year: Day to Day Men: February 26

Moment of Rest

The twenty-sixth of February in 1870 marks the opening day of New York City’s Beach Pneumatic Transit, the first attempt to build an underground public transit system in the city. This system was a prototype developed by Alfred Ely Beach in 1869 to demonstrate a subway line running on air pressure.

At New York’s 1867 American Institute Exhibition, inventor and patent lawyer Alfred Ely Beach demonstrated a basic subway model in which air pressure pushed cars through a tubular tunnel. After a successful demonstration, Beach founded the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company in 1869 for the construction of a pneumatically powered subway line beneath Broadway, one of the main commercial arteries in New York City. He financed the full-scale test project himself in the amount of three hundred-fifty thousand dollars.

Alfred Beach, however had no political support for the project as William Magear Tweed, the political boss of Tammany Hall and third largest land owner in New York City, refused to give his approval. In order to start the project, Beach claimed he was building a postal tube system. This was a pneumatic system, already established in London and Paris, that quickly transported tubular cylinders containing small packages, mail, paperwork, and currency. Beach was granted an initial permit to install a pair of postal tubes beneath Broadway; it was later amended by Tweed to allow a single large tunnel in which a system of tubes would reside.

Construction on the Beach tunnel was completed in fifty-eight days. It extended for approximately three-hundred feet from the intersection of Warren Street and Broadway, directly across from City Hall, and ended at Murray Street and Broadway. Built through the use of a tunneling shield, a temporary structure that shields workers from falling materials or cave-ins, the subway opened to the public on the twenty-sixth of February in 1870 and operated as a demonstration until 1873.

The Beach Pneumatic Transit ran only a single car on its track from the Warren Street to Murray Street, the distance of one city block. Riders paid a fare of twenty-five cents for the experience, with proceeds given to the Union Home and School for Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Orphans. The Warren Street station was elaborately designed with frescoes on the walls lit by zirconia lamps; the interior held statues and a goldfish pond to view while passengers waited for the car. The ride was controlled by a forty-four short-ton (39,915 kilogram) generator built by Roots Patent Force Rotary Blowers. The air pressure would propel the car forward and, by reversing the baffles on the blower system, the car would return to the original station. The public approved of the system with over four-hundred thousand rides in its operation.

Alfred Beach had problems in getting official permission to expand the system. In 1873, he succeeded in getting permission to expand the system to Central Park, a distance of five miles. However; both public and financial support had waned, mainly from a stock market crash that became known as the Panic of 1873. With the project shut down, the tunnel entrance was sealed and the station reclaimed for other uses. Although the Beach Pneumatic Transit only existed for three years, the project inspired the New York pneumatic tube postal system that Beach had previously, albeit falsely, suggested to William Tweed. Opening in October of 1897, the pneumatic postal system operated continuously in New York City until 1953, except for a suspension of service during World War I to conserve funding for the war effort.

Calendar: February 17

Year: Day to Day Men: February 17

Attention Caught

The seventeenth of February in 1674 marks the date of the Ambon earthquake in the Maluku Islands, the first detailed documentation of a tsunami in Indonesia and the largest ever recorded in that country.

The geological area of the Indonesian North Maluku Islands is located in the zone of convergence between the Eurasian, Indo-Australian and Pacific tectonic plates. This area is dominated by a complex mixture of tectonic elements, including collision, subduction and vertical fractures which shift horizontally. In the search for the cause of the Ambon earthquake, immediate to deep-focus earthquakes with a depth of sixty kilometers or more were ruled out as the source.

Known historical events of that type did not generate the scale of tsunami that struck the islands. The 1938 Banda Sea earthquake, which had a magnitude of 8.5 and Rossi-Forel intensity of VII (very strong tremors), generated a minor tsunami of only 1.5 meters (5 feet). Researchers ruled out faulting as a source because the Ambon earthquake had an extreme run-up height of at least 100 meters on the northern shore of Ambon,

The likely source of the tsunami appears to have been an earthquake generated undersea-landslide. Although never confirmed, two faults are seen as likely sources of that landslide; the South Seram Thrust and an unnamed fault found on the island of Ambon. Published research journals have not assigned a magnitude to the event; however, from collected databases, it has been estimated as an earthquake with the magnitude of 6.8 at a depth of 40 kilometers (25 miles).

A German botanist employed by the Dutch East India Company in 1652, Georg Eberhard Rumphius was assigned in 1654 to the Ambon archipelago. Accompanied by his wife and two daughters, he assumed the position of merchant in 1662 and, on his own time, undertook a study of the Spice Islands’ flora and fauna. Rumphius and his family were present on the island at the time of the 1674 earthquake; his account of the earthquake is the first detailed documentation of a tsunami in Indonesia.

The Ambon earthquake occurred on Saturday evening, between 19:30 and 20:00 Eastern Indonesian Time, when the island inhabitants were celebrating the Chinese Lunar New Year. The shaking earth rang the large bells on the local Victoria Castle and knocked people off their feet.

The collapse of seventy-five stone buildings killed eighty-four people and injured another thirty-five. Water spurted into the air from wells and the ground, some upwards to 6 meters (20 feet). Clay and sand also erupted from the ground. Among the dead from the earthquake were Rumphius’s wife and two daughters, killed by a collapsing stone wall.

Immediately after the earthquake, a mega-tsunami swept through the coastal areas of Ambon Island. The earthquake produced a tsunami which reached heights as much as 100 meters (330 feet) and nearly crested the coastal hill areas. This tsunami resulted in the additional deaths of over two thousand individuals.

Notes: The translated summary notes of Georg Everhard Rumphius on the 1674 Ambon and Seram earthquake are recorded in the files of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. These notes are located at: https://iotic.ioc-unesco.org/1950-ambon-tsunami/1674-tsunami-in-ambon-and-seram/

Calendar: February 16

Year: Day to Day Men: February 16

A Daydream Moment

The sixteenth of February in 1923 marks the opening of the sealed door to the burial chamber of the Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaoh, Tutankhamun. During his reign of ten years, Tutankhamun restored the traditional polytheistic form of the ancient Egyptian religion from the religious-political changes enacted by the former pharaoh Akhenaten.

Born in May of 1874, British archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter was from an early age interested in Egyptian artifacts; he would often visit and draw illustrations of specimens in the collection owned by the Amherst family. Impressed by his skills, Lady Amherst made arrangements for seventeen year-old Carter to assist British Egyptologist Percy Newberry in an excavation at Middle Kingdom tombs on the Lower Nile River.

After training under Egyptologists Flinders Petrie and Édouard Naville, Carter was appointed in 1899 as Inspector of Monuments for Upper Egypt by the Egyptian Antiquities Service. Based at Luxor, he oversaw excavations at nearby Thebes and supervised American archaeologist Theodore Davis’s systematic exploration of the Valley of the Kings. During his service, Carter improved the protection and accessibility to existing excavations and developed a grid-block system for tomb searching.

In 1907, Carter began his employment with George Edward Herbert, 5th Lord of Carnarvon, a financial backer for Egyptian antiquities research. Lord Carnarvon received in 1914 the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings. Carter led a systematic search for any tombs that were missed in previous expeditions, including that of Tutankhamun. The search was halted during the years of the First World War and resumed in 1917. After five years with no major finds, Carnarvon became dissatisfied with the project; howver, after a discussion with Carter, he agreed to fund one more season of work in the Valley of the Kings.

On the fourth of November in 1922, a water boy discovered a buried flight of stairs cut into the bedrock. After partially digging out the steps, a mud-plastered doorway was found stamped with indistinct cartouches. Howard Carter had the staircase refilled and notified Lord Carnarvon of the find by telegram. On November twenty-third, Carnarvon arrived accompanied by his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert. The full extent of the stairway was cleared on the next day; it revealed Tutankhamun’s cartouche on the outer doorway. The doorway was removed and the corridor behind it was cleared of rubble.

With Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn and Carter’s assistant Arthur Callender present, Howard Carter opened a tiny breach in the door of the tomb and was able to see the many gold and ebony treasures within. Carter had in fact discovered the burial tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The site was secured until the morning of the twenty-seventh of November, at which time the tomb was officially opened in the presence of a member of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities.

Tutankhamun’s tomb was virtually intact with all its furnishings and shrines, in spite of previous ancient break-ins. Two life-sized statues of Tutankhamun guarded the sealed doorway to the inner burial chamber. Assisted by staff members of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art which included archeologist Arthur Mace and photographer Harry Burton, Howard Carter over the next several months catalogued and preserved the contents of the chambers.

On the sixteenth of February in 1923, Howard Carter opened the sealed inner doorway and confirmed it led to a burial chamber that contained the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. His tomb was considered the best preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings. Carter’s meticulous assessing and cataloguing the thousands of objects in the tomb took nearly ten years; the final work was completed in February of 1932.

Despite the significance of the find, Howard Carter received no honors from the British government. In 1926, he received the Order of the Nile, third class, from Egypt’s King Fuad I. Carter was also award an honorary Doctor of Science from Yale University and a honorary membership in Madrid’s Real Academia de la Historia.