Author: mystoryorhistory

“May Day! May Day!”

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8hoursday_banner_1856

For most Americans an eight-hour work day is something we take for granted.  It is hard to believe that at one time in our history people labored on factory floors for 10 to 16 hours a day or picked cotton from sun up to sun down six days-a-week. Unlike those sweat-shop workers of yesteryear, today’s worker is more concerned with having their job off-shored or being replaced by a robot. Technology has replaced workers on the assembly line as well as on the bank teller line.
cotton pickers

It was after the Civil War, the first real industrial strength war that the industrial revolution started to crank it up into high gear. Workers had to kick it up a notch as they raced with machines to keep up with production. It was the Gilded Age when a buck earned was a tax free buck, which is appealing in any Age.

The industrialist of this time had few, if any, labor laws or regulations to slow production down. Any hint of a child labor law or a minimum wage was at worst anarchy or at least some form of creeping socialism that had to be eradicated.

On May 4, 1886 in Chicago’s Haymarket Square a protest over workers’ rights turned deadly when somebody (an archaist) chucked a bomb at police sent to disperse the rally. The ensuing riot killed seven policemen and at least four civilians. Police rounded up eight local anarchists. In the ensuing trial for conspiracy seven of the eight were sentenced to hang and one was given a 15 year prison sentence.

http://www.chicagohistory.org/hadc/intro.html

HACAT_V46

 

However, a 40 hour work week as not as far fetched as it seemed. Forty years later on May 1st Henry Ford would be one of the first industrialists to bring the eight-hour-a-day, 40 hour-a-week work schedule to the factory floor.  In 1914 Ford began paying his workers a minimum wage of $5 a day for an eight hour day.  This was a raise from $2.34 for nine hours-a-day.

http://www.history.com/topics/haymarket-riot

To put some perspective on this the Federal Minimum Wage in 1977 was $2.30 an-hour. The current rate is $7.50 an-hour and may vary from state to state. In many cities there is a push for a $15 an-hour minimum wage. Economists and politicians debate the impact that these wage hikes will have on the price of hamburger.  One thing is certain: The economy did not collapse when Henry Ford put in the 40 hour week and Americans did not become communists.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-factory-workers-get-40-hour-week

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonhard-widrich/the-origin-of-the-8-hour-_b_4524488.html

 

 

Space, still the Final Frontier

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Rendering_of_Orion_Exploration_Flight_Test_1

Last month the Orion Crew Module was flown to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The Orion space craft is designed to take four astronauts beyond low Earth orbit and on to Mars. But before any deeper voyages into space the Orion is scheduled to take a test spin around the  moon sometime in 2018.

http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/orion/index.html

Ironically  it is the near, disastrous flight of  Apollo 13 that holds the record for the farthest voyage from earth: 248,655 miles.  The Orion will go just a bit farther from Earth. The distance to Mars may vary depending on the position of the two planets.  It could be as close as 34 million miles or as far away as 250 million miles. In any case it will be more than a small step or giant leap to get there.

http://www.space.com/24701-how-long-does-it-take-to-get-to-mars.html

Apollo 13’s record setting distance was the unintended consequences of a slight malfunction in an oxygen tank giving us that famous saying: “Houston we have a problem.” The tank exploded due to a frayed wire forcing the crew to shut down the command module and abort a lunar landing. In order to return to earth Apollo 13 looped around the moon in a free return trajectory sending it beyond the low elliptical lunar orbit of 70 to 200 miles as planned.

After 56 hours of surviving in 30 degree temperatures in the Lunar Modul, Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert splashed down on April 17, 1970 proving any landing you can walk away from, or in this case float away from, is a good one.

apollo13

April is a first for other maned space flights. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin in Vostok I became the first human in space. Yuri’s one lap around the Earth at an altitude of 187 miles took all of  108 minutes.  On May 5 twenty-three days later Alan Shepard’s 15 minute canon ball shot in Mercury 7 boosted him 116 miles into space before he splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean. A year later President John F. Kennedy dropped the starting flag for the race to the moon.

Twenty years after Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth John Young and Robert Crippen were the first astronauts to take the Space Shuttle Columbia out for a spin.  Young had flown in the Gemini and Apollo programs. Young, like Lovell had flown to the moon twice.  Young, however, as commander of Apollo 16 got his chance to walk on the moon.

Space_Shuttle_Columbia_lands_following_STS-28_in_1989

 

Young and Crippen pushed The Columbia for close to 55 hours and 37 orbits at an altitude of 168 miles above the Earth. It was the first of 27 successful flights for The Columbia.  It’s 22 year career would end when it disintegrate on reentry on February 1, 2003.

There is no race to Mars, as of now. The Orion missions will, however, take space flight from out of the shallow end of space to at least somewhere on the way to the deep end.

The Big Bang and the Expansion of Everything

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It was like any Sunday morning at 5 am. I was showing up for my shift on the university’s public radio station. I was the board operator for Classics at Sunrise. The operator before me was finishing up Night Flight, a progressive jazz show with less programing restrictions. He was playing Return to Forever a jazz fusion group that started in the ‘70s. Pianist Chick Corea founded the group that featured a variety of jazz players like Stanley Clarke, Al di Meola and Airto Moreira. I, on the other hand, had music picked for me to play by the station’s music director.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppUpj90YAFU

640px-Return_to_Forever_1976

As he was wrapping up Return to Forever I was getting a Bach organ fugue set up on the turntable. My friend saw what I was queuing up and said “Bach.”  He then said something that has stayed with me for more than 30 years. “We are just about to take a 300 year step back in time.”  I do not recall the particular fugue I was going to play. It could have been Bach’s – Fugue in G minor BWV 578; a rocking number for the 1750s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhRa3REdozw

Bach

The radio station’s format was one of seamless programing. In other words there was no break between programs.  We went from Corea to Bach in the spin of the turntable. I was never sure how many people were actually listening at that time in the morning.  I imagine some traveler heading down I-75 through the misty fog of the early morning thinking he had just entered the Twilight Zone.

All of this brought me to another tune–the theme to The Big Bang Theory: The History of Everything. The concept that “14 billion years ago expansion started” is hard to contemplate. What is even harder to contemplate is, according to Space.com, this expansion occurred in less than a burst of light. That’s pretty dang quick since nothing has outrun light since.

The universe “experienced an incredible burst of expansion known as inflation, in which space itself expanded faster than the speed of light. During this period, the universe doubled in size at least 90 times, going from subatomic-sized to golf-ball-sized almost instantaneously.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hc70xg9tHw

An established walnut tree, which we may assume comes from a walnut,  is about the same size as a golf ball. It only grows about 12 to 24 inches annually. A seedling may jump 36 to 48 inches in its first two growing seasons. It takes close to 50 years for a walnut tree to get to the point where it’s wood is good for flooring, cabinets or gun stocks. The tree might live for 130 years getting close to 100 feet – an ever expanding feat.

http://www.gardenguides.com/131861-growth-rate-walnut-trees.html

Expansion can come in many forms and more Earthly forms move much slower. Take the Geologic Time Scale, for instance where time is not measured in seconds or minutes but “Events” where plants and animal life may have lived and then become extinct or in Eons which can be 100 million years.  The Phanerozoic Eon, the current eon, started 500 million years ago give or take a million.

800px-Emigrants_Crossing_the_Plains,_or_The_Oregon_Trail_(Albert_Bierstadt),_1869

http://geology.com/time.htm

It has taken man awhile but we have picked up the pace a bit.  It took some time to go from foot to horseback but that is what made the US Westward Expansion possible. In the 1840s people moved along the Oregon Trail as fast a team of oxen could pull a wagon – generally as fast a sore-footed Neolithic man could walk. It was not until the steam engine train came along did we ratchet the speed up to more than 20 miles per hour expanding the distance we could travel. And it seems ever since then expansion has quickened exponentially. I have no formula for this expansion but according to Vocabulary.com “the root of exponentially is the French verb exponere, meaning ‘to put out.’ Think of a factory that puts out so many products its creations seem to increase exponentially.”

Sir Isaac Newton

It has been said that Aristotle was the last man to know everything. This would be incredible, if such a claim is even possible. Information and knowledge in the ancient world moved as fast as scribe could  chisel cuneiform or hieroglyphics. And then only a handful of people could read it let alone understand what was put into stone. But this all changed with the printing press. Information became portable and privy to the masses. Men like Thomas Jefferson collected knowledge in books accumulated  in libraries.  Jefferson would probably be stunned to see how information has exploded since Al Gore invented the internet.  Never in human kind have people had so much information.  It is hard to believe a 12 year-old middle-schooler with a smart phone has more “instantaneous” information at the touch of fingertip then Isaac Newton had in all of England.

voyager1

We have been riding that Big Bang wave of expansion from that first flash of subatomic particles. Today we just try to keep up with expansion from horseless carriages to Voyager 1 leaving the solar system. It is hard to imagine a time when large numbers of people had no idea of an expanding universe. I think it would look something like when the first Spanish Conquistador waded the last steps up onto a sandy beach in the New World. Was it a step back in time 300 or 400 years; or was it a leap forward? I guess it depends on which way one is looking.  For certain, it was the universe expanding.

 

Wyatt Earp and Hollywood

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Wyatt Earp, one of the Old West’s most notorious gunman, would be 168 years old this month. Actually he lived to be 80 dying in 1929. It is said that the victor usually gets toearp write the history but in Earp’s case it might simply be that Hollywood  got the chance. But prior to Hollywood’s make over, Earp suffered a lot of what we would call today “misinformation” or simply bad publicity.

“I am tired of seeing so many articles published concerning me which are untrue,” wrote Earp. In order to correct the “record” and set the untruths right about his life Earp and John H. Ford went to work on Earp’s autobiography. Their attempts to peddle his autobiography were futile.

http://www.historynet.com/john-flood-and-wyatt-earp.htm

Cowboys for the most part had reputations as being a rambunctious crowd prone to drinking, gambling and shooting up saloons. This reputation, however, was slowly beginning to change with end of the 19th Century and the beginning of  the 20th Century. The cowboy was changing from a rowdy individual to the much admired rugged individual portrayed in the paintings of Fredrick Remington and novels like Owen Wister’s The Virginian.

It was in this shifting image that Earp tried to peddle his autobiography off on to silent film star William S. Hart. Hart was a popular Western movie star of the 1910s “and the most revered Western movie actor of the silent era.”

http://www.nytimes.com/movies/person/93608/William-S-Hart/biography

According to IMBd Hart was “A storybook hero, the original screen cowboy, ever forthright and honest, even when (as was often the case) he played a villain.” However, Hart did not buy into the Earp autobiography.

Although things did begin to change. Not too long after Earp died in Los Angles in 1929 Stuart Lake published Earp’s biography: Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. This 1931 publication turned the saloon owner, gun-fighting gambler into Hollywood folk hero.

But soon Hollywood buys into Earp as the stand up lawman needed to tame the West  In 1939 Randolph Scott played Earp in Frontier Marshall. That same year Errol Flynn portrays Earp in Dodge City. Other leading greats like Jimmy Stuart, Henry Fonda and Burt Lancaster also  portrayed Earp. Even Bret Maverick, James Garner, played Earp in The Hour of the Gun.

hour-of-the-gun
Jason Robards and James Garner as Doc Holiday and Wyatt Earp

And of course there are the two 1990 revisions of Earp and his brothers in Kevin Costner’s epic film Wyatt Earp, which followed a year after Kurt Russell in the 1993 release: Tombstone.

http://www.criminaleement.com/blogs/2014/05/all-my-earps-the-many-filmed-faces-of-wyatt-earp-edward-a-grainger-film-westerns

But Earp’s story was not just for the big screen.  In September of 1955 Earp made it to TV when ABC aired The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp staring Hugh O’Brian. The show ran until 1961 before going off after 229 episodes. The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp premiered four days before Gunsmoke, which ran for 20 seasons going off the air after 635 shows in 1975.

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Hugh O’Brian

There have been a plethora of Westerns on TV from Wagon Train to Little House on the Prairie  as well as Epic movies like Dances with Wolves on the big screen. These shows and movies have given the world a shifting image of American history.

The Old West has been open to many  interpretations and misinformation. The Western Genre in literature and movies has found a place in American culture regardless of the man and the legend.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/shootout-at-the-ok-corral

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNHLkcRcazQ

 

Go, go Google and leave the driving to us

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In the 1960s it was Hertz Rental car that wanted to put you in the driver’s seat. In the 2020s Google will be taking you  out of the driver’s seat.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says they agree with Google that a self driving vehicle “will not have a driver in the traditional sense.”  In other words we can all move to the back seat.

google_self_driving_car_driverless_video

A car without a steering wheel or brake pedal really frees the human driver to do everything a driver has always wanted to do but was afraid to while driveing: like put on make up or shave in the visor mirror on the way to work. Or send that all important message to a coworker to save you a doughnut from the break room because you are running late. Soon we will be able to text and not worry if we actually see the brake lights up ahead.  There will be no more slamming on the brakes and spilling  coffee all down your lap.

According to the NHTSA “If no human occupant of the vehicle can actually drive the vehicle, it is more reasonable to identify the driver as whatever (as opposed to whoever) is doing the driving.” This is kind of like if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it does it make a sound.  If no “person” is driving does this mean we no longer need a good neighbor or some lizard to sell us auto insurance or does the car get insurance?

A driverless car kills the mystique of the big block Hemi, the muscle car, the tight steering sports car racing up the winding road where man and machine become one.  And what about Hollywood and those fantastic chase scenes. Who can forget the classic car chase in the movie “Bullit.” Steve McQueen horsing a 1968 Ford Mustang GT through the streets of San Francisco chasing a supped up Dodge Charger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31JgMAHVeg0

Driverless cars will end road rage between people  but will it introduce us to a new form of rage. There is a lot to be said in turning the driving over to Google. But are we handing over more than the keys to the family  car.   As in the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey when Dave tries to get the ship’s computer Hal to open the pod bay  doors.  In this case it would be “Google open the garage door.”

“Sorry Dave I am afraid I a can’t do that.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W5Am-a_xWw

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sgt Peppers

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02BEATLES5-articleLarge

It was twenty years ago today
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play
They’ve been going in and out of style
But they’re guaranteed to raise a smile
So may I introduce to you
The act you’ve known for all these years
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…

abbeyroad

Actually it was February 7th 52 years ago that the Beatles landed at JFK airport and the British Invasion was on. By the end of the decade The Beatles would be a collection of individuals.  But before they broke up they set a new course for pop music.  They also left behind some mysteries like was the Walrus really Paul? And what was their last album?

According to a 2013 Rolling Stone  article:

“Abbey Road was the last (album) they recorded, but Let It Be was the last they released. So did the greatest band ever bid farewell with “Her Majesty” or “Get Back”? Does the story end with Paul saying, “Someday I’m gonna make her mine,” or John saying, “I hope we passed the audition”?”

let it be

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/hey-its-friday-wanna-argue-about-the-beatles-last-album-20130614

http://www.biography.com/people/groups/the-beatles

Hoaxters

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Sarah Palin has boldly proclaimed that Donald Trump is “ballsy enough to get out there” and put the “issues on the table.” Seeing Donald Trump and Sarah Palin on the same stage, for some, could be a once in a decade event similar to the aligning of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in the morning sky.  This is the first time in a decade that these planets have formed a cosmic conga line.

The lining up of Trump and Palin is a cosmic combination of promoters not seen since P.T. Barnum merged his circdownloadus with James Bailey and James L. Hutchinson in 1881 to form “P.T Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth.”

Barnum knew “every crowd had a silver lining” and had no shame pulling a sham on the American public. Barnum once said, “The bigger the humbug the better people will like it.” He gave an eager public an aging slave that proclaimed she was George Washington’s nurse. Never mind the fact that this would have made her 161 years old. This show’s silver lining netted Barnum $1,000 a week way back in 1835. He later promoted General Tom Thumb the 25 inch, 15 pound singer dancer to the courts of Europe.

One of his greatest hoaxes was the “Feejee” mermaid. In 1842, a supposed, British naturalist arrives in New York with a mermaid.  A believing public clamored to see the bare-breasted mermaid. Advertisements were circulating showing “the mermaid to have the body of young beautiful woman.”  In reality, “it had the withered body of a monkey and the dried tail of a fish.” A sight one writer of the times said shattered any illusion of “wooing” a mermaid “for the Feejee lady is the very incantation of ugliness.”

feejee

 

Barnum himself styled the mermaid as “an ugly dried-up, black-looking, and diminutive specimen… its arms thrown up, giving it the appearance of having died in great agony.”

Americans have always loved tall tales starting with Rip Van Winkle all the way to Big Foot.  It is hard to tell when the next fish story will wash up. But as long as politicians get free play it is always sure to be a whopper.