Category Archives: History

A Not-So-Fine Mess

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Faster Than Molasses in January

Boston Molasses Disaster

Spilt

On January 15, 1919, a storage tank in Boston broke, releasing 2.3 million gallons of molasses. The resulting wave of molasses rolled through the streets at about 35 miles per hour. In all, 21 people died and 150 were injured.

The actual failure can be traced to stress failures in the huge cylindrical tank. The steel was only about half as thick as it should have been and completely lacked manganese, which would have made it less brittle.

The company that owned it skipped basic safety tests, like filling the tank with water before use to check for leaks.

Compounding all of this was a rapid increase in temperature over the course of the day (almost 40 degrees), which contributed toward weakening the storage tank, resulting in the massive failure.

Rescue efforts were badly hampered by the fact that the molasses didn't clear away quickly. It remained clumped up in knee-high pools, and the search for victims took more than four days.

Workers finally used a fireboat to pump salt water from the harbor over the molasses, eventually clearing it away. Cleanup workers tracked molasses all over. Much of the city was perpetually sticky for weeks and months afterward, and the molasses stained the harbor brown until the summer.

More than a century before, on October 17, 1814, a vat containing more than 162,000 gallons of porter ruptured in London, causing multiple other vats in the same building to collapse as well. All told, almost 388,000 gallons of beer were released into the streets.

Only eight people died, due to the much smaller quantity of fluid than the Boston molasses disaster, less-crowded streets, and the lower viscosity of beer compared to molasses.

The torrent of beer demolished two houses, severely damaged a nearby pub, and flooded a nearby wake.

Otherwise, quite a few people sustained injuries when they ran outside to collect beer, making sure it didn't go to waste.

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Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy: my blog-relevant quotations continue…

“Welcome those big, sticky, complicated problems. In them are your most powerful opportunities.”

— Ralph Marston

The World is Still Round

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But Kansas is Still Flatter Than a Pancake

 

Quick quiz: When did humanity discover that the Earth is round?

hand holding the earthIf you answered Copernicus or Galileo, you're off by a millennia or two. The Ancient Greeks actually discovered this.

To prove the theory, they created an experiment using two dry wells, hundreds of miles apart. Then, at noon on the same day, the Greeks measured the shadows at the bottom of the well to see if they were at the same angle. When they weren't, they used the difference in angle to figure out the actual size of the Earth…with remarkable accuracy.

(Trigonometry is important, kids. If you don't believe me, just ask Jeff over at The Yard Ramp Guy.)

Okay, another quick quiz: When did humanity forget that the world was round?

I bet the most specific thing you can think of is the Dark Ages or the Fall of Rome, right? Well, both are incorrect: We never forgot. To quote the brilliant Stephen Jay Gould, "There never was a period of 'flat Earth darkness' among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology."

FlammarionIn fact, we can trace the popularization of the idea that people thought the Earth was flat back to specific historians in the 1800s.

Sadly, this is pretty common stuff when we think about history. People are swift to assume that their distant ancestors (or at least other people's distant ancestors) were dumber than people today.

It really doesn't take that much effort to realize that idea is wrong, but most people won't even try to put in the effort.

(Really don't believe me? Then let's see you design an aqueduct with pen and paper.)

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Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy: what goes around comes around:

"’I'll follow him to the ends of the earth,' she sobbed. Yes, darling. But the earth doesn't have any ends. Columbus fixed that."

— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

Mysteries of the Earth

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Terra Preta as Terra Firma

For being one of the most verdant and lush places in the world, the Amazon rainforest has some of the worst soil on the planet. It's highly infertile. In fact, sand from the Sahara desert, blowing across the Atlantic Ocean, supplies many of the nutrients it needs.

When sand becomes a source of nutrition, I’d call that a mystery.

There are large patches of dark earth—known as terra preta—scattered all over the Amazon Basin that are inexplicably fertile. In fact, terra preta contains some of the richest soils on the planet.

For years, settlers were not sure where it came from. One common idea was that terra preta was the result of volcanic ashfalls originating in the Andes mountains. Eventually, though, we figured out where that soil came from: it was man-made.

The native peoples of the region had spent centuries managing the soil carefully. To make it fertile, they added a mixture of charcoal, bone, and manure to the soil.

You've heard of slash-and-burn, right? Well, the natives used slash-and-char, which involves turning the cut down plants and trees into charcoal (hence the name) instead of just burning it. The charcoal is then mixed with the bone and manure, and then buried within the soil.

The creation of terra preta isn't just an interesting type of fertilization, either. That soil stays immensely fertile for thousands of years. Charcoal is the most important ingredient: it lowers soil acidity, can absorb and then slowly release nutrients over time, and provides habitat to important soil microbes with its porous surface.

The other ingredients are important as well…though much of this remains a mystery. Scientists still do not fully understand terra preta. They are working quite persistently at it, though. I’d say that mastering the creation of terra preta would be a vital tool in regenerating damaged soils around the world.

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Quotable

Yes, the Quote-Off with that other Yard Ramp Guy. En garde:

“There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.”

— Charles Dickens

A New Old-School Castle

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Or: Undraining the Moat

gueldonThere's a castle under construction in France. Not a Disney-style castle at a theme park. An actual castle using medieval designs, materials, and construction methods.

Guédelon Castle started construction in 1997 and won't be completed until sometime in the 2020s. The designers aim to create an authentic 13th century-style medieval castle.

Oh, and when they say authentic, they mean authentic:

  • They only use local materials.
  • The site for the castle was chosen very carefully, located near an old stone quarry, a pond, and right in the middle of a forest.
  • All of the materials are gathered and hauled to the site using only medieval methods, including horse drawn carts.
  • The construction workers all wear period-appropriate garb, use period-appropriate tools, and use period-appropriate construction methods.
  • They have on-site blacksmiths, stone masons, carpenters, etc.
  • No modern tools are used anywhere. Not even ramps; sorry, Yard Ramp Guy.

The project has created 55 jobs and attracted more than 200 volunteers. On-site professional training is provided to disadvantaged youth, some of whom have earned stone-masonry and other certifications. More than 300,000 tourists a year visit the project, and it is open to schools for educational purposes. The construction has definitely proven itself worthwhile in those regards, but none of those were the original intention.

This is all part of experimental archaeology, which reconstructs and uses ancient tools, structures, and artifacts and allows archaeologists to actually study which methods work best and produce results most like the actual artifacts.

One way they do that is by looking for construction quirks (not the actual scientific term they use). Anyone who uses a lot of tools knows that you'll end up with certain quirks in your project, depending on which tools you use. For example: the same cut will be slightly different with different saws. When you're using tools that aren't mass-produced like ours, those little quirks get magnified even more.

During experimental archaeology, you can look to see if the methods you are using produce quirks like the historical ones.

Experimental archaeologists have produced Iron Age farmsteads and Greek triremes, hauled Stonehenge sized stones, sailed from Peru to Polynesia on a raft (Kon-Tiki), and, of course, built Guédelon Castle. (For a longer list, check out THIS. It's an incredibly productive line of research. And a heck of a lot of fun.

Guédelon Castle is proving to be one of the most productive of these lines of research. We've learned tremendously about castle construction from it. There was actually a companion castle being built in America: the Ozark Medieval Fortress. It ran out of funding and is currently on hiatus. We still need that European vacation to see a castle under construction. With any luck, though, that will change.

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Photo By Ronny Siegel (Château Guedelon) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Go Jump in a Lake

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Or: Good Luck Getting There

The most interesting lake in the world is completely inaccessible.

Well, maybe not completely, but close enough for government work. Which, come to think of it, usually isn't that close.

Lake Vostok is located in Antarctica. Bit of a strange place for a lake, I know, but this gets even weirder. Its surface is 500 feet below sea level. Lake Vostok is believed to have species of bacteria that are present nowhere else on the planet. It's also the largest lake in Antarctica, at more than 160 miles long and 30 miles wide.

lvAnd just to make all this interesting, there's a magnetic anomaly in one end of the lake.

Vostok Station, the nearby research facility, recorded the coldest known temperature ever on our planet. The lake has a single island, which no one has ever set foot on. It's also in complete darkness, even during the part of the year when Antarctica gets sunlight. That, of course, is because it's buried under 13,000 feet of ice.

As in: Lake Vostok is buried under a two and a half mile-high glacier.

Clearly impossible, right? Normally, yes, but in this case, the massive weight and compression created by the glacier caused its lowest layer to heat up, melting the ice and forming Lake Vostok. There are more than 500 of these subglacial lakes in Antarctic.

The hunt for life in Lake Vostok has become a major point of interest. Any creepy-crawly thing there would likely have been sealed off for the lake’s entire 15 million-year lifespan. The warm, oxygen rich, and pitch black waters would have created an ecosystem unlike anything else on the planet.

lv1Unfortunately, there are concerns that the antifreeze used to maintain the boreholes through the glacier might contaminate the lake, so scientists are proceeding with extreme caution. While the overwhelming majority of species they have found could quite likely just be contaminants from the surface, they have found at least one previously unknown species that might very well have come from the lake itself.

Mission to Mars? Sure. But Vacation in Vostok: now we’re talking…even though Maggie won’t hear of it.