Frank Beacham's Journal

Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic on this day 105 years ago

On this day in 1916 — 105 years ago — a nurse opened a small storefront office in Brownsville, Brooklyn. She and her assistants handed out fliers in English, Yiddish and Italian reading, “Mothers, do not kill, do not take life, but prevent.”

The nurse was Margaret Sanger. The office, at 46 Amboy Street, was the nation’s first birth-control clinic. It served more than a hundred women on opening day.

In those days, spreading contraceptive information was a crime. Ten days later, the police raided the office, confiscated condoms and pessaries, and arrested Ms. Sanger.

She eventually served 30 days in jail, but her case paved the way for rulings that loosened restrictions on contraception.

Thanks New York Times!

In 1895 — 126 years ago today — the New York Times reported a sighting of a giant sea serpent off the shore at Spring Lake, New Jersey

In 1895 — 126 years ago today — the New York Times reported a sighting of a giant sea serpent off the shore at Spring Lake, New Jersey.

There were other sightings too in the New York City area, including several at the Brooklyn Bridge.

Phillip N. Jackson, vice president of the Newark Electric Light and Power Co., said he saw the creature — which traveled through the water at great speed and was about 100 feet long.

A number of folds in the creature’s body were plainly seen as it rose and fell, Jackson said.

Another witness told Scientific American that the body of the long creature was as large around as a flour barrel. “The nose and mouth resembled those of an alligator, but there were no tentacles to be seen. The body was smooth and round and of dark color,” the witness, Willard P. Shaw of 41 Wall Street, said.

Shaw also said the creature was about 100 feet long and travelled about 50 miles an hour and jumped from the water several times.

The image above of the serpent was created by Currier & Ives.

Rube Goldberg was born 138 years ago

Rube Goldberg was born 138 years ago.

A cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer and inventor, Goldberg is best known for a series of popular cartoons depicting complicated gadgets that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways.

Goldberg received many honors in his lifetime, including a Pulitzer Prize for his political cartooning in 1948 and the Banshees' Silver Lady Award in 1959. He was a founding member and the first president of the National Cartoonists Society, and he is the namesake of the Reuben Award, which the organization awards to the Cartoonist of the Year.

He is the inspiration for various international competitions, known as Rube Goldberg Machine Contests, which challenge participants to make a complicated machine to perform a simple task.

Here’s a video of a Rube Goldberg contraption

The most famous UFO sighting happened in Roswell, New Mexico 74 years ago

U.F.O. sightings have been reported around the world, but arguably none are more famous than one 74 years ago.

In June, 1947, W. W. Brazel, a rancher in New Mexico, came across some odd debris. A few days later, he whispered “kinda confidential-like” to the local sheriff that it might have been remnants of a “flying disk.”

A local military base, the Roswell Army Air Field, issued a news release about the debris, prompting a newspaper article with the headline “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer.”

Officials changed their story the next day, saying the debris came from a weather balloon, but Roswell has since been nearly synonymous with tales of alien visitations.

Almost 20 years ago, the Air Force tried to end the speculation. In “The Roswell Report: Case Closed,” officials wrote that any “aliens” spotted in the desert “were actually anthropomorphic test dummies” carried aloft by high-altitude Air Force balloons.

As for Mr. Brazel, he didn’t believe the debris was a weather balloon, but he regretted setting off the furor. In the future, he said, “If I find anything else besides a bomb, they are going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it.”

Thanks, New York Times!

On this day in 1633, Galileo renounced what we now accept as fact: that the Earth orbits the sun. He was tried for challenging the status quo

The story of Galileo Galilei demonstrates many things, not least that science keeps evolving.

It was on this day in 1633 that the Italian scholar renounced what we now accept as fact: that the Earth orbits the sun, not the other way around.

Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s larger moons in 1610 made him question the prevailing assumption that the Earth was at the universe’s center. His advocacy of the heliocentric theory earned him mockery, censure and — in 1633 — a trial in Rome, at which he was forced to recant before a jury of cardinals. He vowed that he would “abjure, curse and detest” his findings.

The declaration saved him from being burned at the stake, but led to house arrest for the rest of his life. It took the Roman Catholic Church more than 350 years to acknowledge that Galileo had been wronged — though astronomers now tell us that the sun is not immobile, but orbits within the galaxy, pulling the planets along with it.

Today, Galileo’s discoveries seem obvious. But all things are easy to understand once they have been discovered, he wrote. “The point is in being able to discover them.”

Tell that to the deniers of climate change.

Thanks New York Times!

A bust of Galileo at a museum dedicated to him in Florence, Italy.

Photo by Kathryn Cook

Jacques Cousteau was born 111 years ago today

Jacques Cousteau was born 111 years ago today.

Cousteau was a French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water. He co-developed the Aqua-Lung, pioneered marine conservation and was a member of the Académie française.

After an automobile accident cut short his career in naval aviation, Cousteau indulged his interest in the sea. In Toulon, where he was serving on the Condorcet, Cousteau carried out his first underwater experiments, thanks to his friend Philippe Tailliez who in 1936 lent him some Fernez underwater goggles — predecessors of modern swimming goggles.

His two sons, Jean-Michel (born 1938) and Philippe (1940–1979), took part in the adventures of the Calypso. In 1975, John Denver released the tribute song, "Calypso," on his album "Windsong," and on the B-side of his hit song, "I'm Sorry."

"Calypso" became a hit on its own and was later considered the new A-side, reaching #2 on the charts. Cousteau's legacy includes more than 120 television documentaries, more than 50 books and an environmental protection foundation with 300,000 members. He liked to call himself an "oceanographic technician."

Cousteau was, in reality, a sophisticated showman, teacher and lover of nature. His work permitted many people to explore the resources of the oceans. His work also created a new kind of scientific communication, criticized at the time by some academics.

The so-called "divulgationism," a simple way of sharing scientific concepts, was soon employed in other disciplines and became one of the most important characteristics of modern television broadcasting.

Cousteau died on June 25, 1997 at age 87.

Here is a short film on Cousteau’s work

On Cousteau’s birthday, here’s a personal remembrance of shooting video for his television show onboard the Calypso.

Cousteau had long recorded his documentaries and television programs on film, but in the mid-1970s he began using video.

While based in Miami, I formed one of the first small format video production companies. I got a call to shoot video for Jacques Cousteau and his son, Philippe, on the Calypso for The Cousteau Society.

Over a few months, we shot several segments with Jacques Cousteau on the Calypso. The main producer on the shoots was Philippe, who worked closely with his father on his film and video production.

On June 28, 1979, while the Calypso was on an expedition to Portugal, Philippe — Cousteau’s preferred and designated successor and with whom he had co-produced all his films since 1969 — died in a PBY Catalina flying boat crash in the Tagus river near Lisbon.

Jacques Cousteau was deeply affected by Philippe’s death and it was the last I worked with him. He then called his eldest son, the architect Jean-Michel Cousteau, to be at his side. Their collaboration lasted 14 years.

In the photos are Philippe Cousteau with his Eclair 16mm camera and Cousteau with his diving saucer.

The 1964 World’s Fair opened 57 years ago today

When the 1964 World’s Fair opened 57 years ago today, the architectural star of the show was Philip Johnson’s soaring, futuristic New York State Pavilion.

“A sophisticated frivolity,” The Times’s architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable raved, “seriously and beautifully constructed. This is ‘carnival’ with class.”

Standing inside the pavilion’s Tent of Tomorrow, a multicolored canopy supported by 100-foot concrete towers, was like looking up at a spacecraft taking off. For years, the pavilion has been shuttered and in disrepair, slowly crumbling. The pavilion was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.

In the fall of 2013, New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation announced plans to restore the pavilion with new landscaped paths and event spaces at an estimated cost of $73 million, as opposed to the $14 million cost to demolish the structure.

Renewed interest was shown in the pavilion's restoration in early 2014, the 50th anniversary of its opening.

In July, 2014, the pavilion received about $5.8 million for restoration. The New York Mets also donated some money for the preservation effort. However, the pavilion was damaged the same month by arsonists.

In May, 2015, the New York Structural Steel Painting Contractors Association, in conjunction with the New York City Parks department and members of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (District Council 9, Local 806), announced a project to repaint the rusty steel framework of the Tent of Tomorrow.

After testing paint chips, the color "American Cheese Yellow" was selected as the best match for the original color. The majority of the labor was done by union trainees, and materials were supplied by the contractors, constituting a $3 million donation. All work was completed by August 15th, 2015.

The Pavilion is the subject of a documentary film titled, Modern Ruin: A World's Fair Pavilion, produced by filmmaker and teacher Matthew Silva. The documentary premiered on May 22, 2015 in the Queens Theatre which was formerly the theaterama, the third component of the New York State Pavilion.

In March, 2016, People For the Pavilion and the National Trust for Historic preservation launched an international ideas competition to allow the public to reimagine possibilities for what is possible for the pavilion.

Two proposed designs for the New York State Pavilion's restoration won New York City's 2018 Annual Awards for Excellence in Design. As of June 2018, the New York City government planned to award contracts for the pavilion's restoration, set to be worth $14.25 million. The restoration was planned to take one and a half years but was delayed due to construction and pandemic issues. It is uncertain when it will be finished.

Below, Observatory Towers of the New York State Pavilion, 1964 World's Fair

Photo by Erik S. Lieber

Fifty-seven years ago today, folk singer Oscar Brand provided the music for this "film poem," a day in the life of the 1964 World's Fair in Queens, New York.

All major areas of the fair are represented — international, industrial, federal and states, transportation and amusements. The narration form gives the film its title — Oscar Brand sings the "Ballad." The song was specially written for the film.

Some of the construction leading up to opening day is contrasted to the finished appearance of the grounds later in the film. Many pavilions and the Unisphere are shown, but the Bell Pavilion is the main focus.

The "Floating Wing" pavilion of the Bell System is given a quick tour, as people ride the 17-minute moving, Disney-style slow ride through telecommunications history (with music by Morton Gould), and visit such exhibits as The Vocoder, Patterns of your Voice, Electronic Switching and the Picturephone.

The film closes with the fireworks and water show that was produced nightly in front of the Bell Pavilion at the Pool of Industry.

While the Unisphere still exists on the Queens fairgrounds (now the Flushing Meadows park), most buildings were torn down or removed following the Fair. The giant tire ferris wheel for Royal Tire is a landmark along I-94 west of Detroit, Michigan. The Skyway tower structures and gondolas were moved to Six Flags Great Adventure (at that time called Great Adventure) in New Jersey. "It's a Small World" was transferred to Disneyland.

Nothing remains of the Bell Pavilion. But many of the ideas in this pavilion about communications and the future were later transferred to the "Spaceship Earth" building at Epcot Center, which opened in 1982 sponsored by Bell, then sponsored by AT&T from 1984 to 2004.

William Gibson is 73 years old today

William Gibson is 73 years old today.

An American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and essayist who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk sub-genre, Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982) and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984).

In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson created an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality television and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as video games and the World Wide Web.

Having changed residence frequently with his family as a child, Gibson became a shy, ungainly teenager who often read science fiction. After spending his adolescence at a private boarding school in Arizona, Gibson evaded the draft during the Vietnam War by emigrating to Canada in 1968, where he became immersed in the counterculture.

After settling in Vancouver he eventually became a full-time writer. He retains dual citizenship.

Gibson's early works are bleak, noir near-future stories about the effect of cybernetics and computer networks on humans — a "combination of lowlife and high tech." The short stories were published in popular science fiction magazines.

The themes, settings and characters developed in these stories culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer, which garnered critical and commercial success, effectively initiating the cyberpunk literary genre.

Although much of Gibson's reputation has remained associated with Neuromancer, his work has continued to evolve.

After expanding on Neuromancer with two more novels to complete the Sprawl trilogy, Gibson became an important author of another science fiction sub-genre — steampunk — with the 1990 alternate history novel The Difference Engine, written with Bruce Sterling.

Gibson has written more than twenty short stories and ten critically acclaimed novels (one in collaboration), and has contributed articles to several major publications and collaborated extensively with performance artists, filmmakers and musicians.

His thought has been cited as an influence on science fiction authors, design, academia, cyberculture and technology.

On March 14, 1879 — 142 years ago today — Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany

On March 14, 1879 — 142 years ago today — Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany.

Einstein's theories of special and general relativity drastically altered man's view of the universe, and his work in particle and energy theory helped make possible quantum mechanics and, ultimately, the atomic bomb.

After a childhood in Germany and Italy, Einstein studied physics and mathematics at the Federal Polytechnic Academy in Zurich, Switzerland. He became a Swiss citizen and in 1905 was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich while working at the Swiss patent office in Bern.

That year, which historians of Einstein's career call the annus mirabilis — the "miracle year" — he published five theoretical papers that were to have a profound effect on the development of modern physics.

In the first of these, titled "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light," Einstein theorized that light is made up of individual quanta (photons) that demonstrate particle-like properties while collectively behaving like a wave.

The hypothesis, an important step in the development of quantum theory, was arrived at through Einstein's examination of the photoelectric effect, a phenomenon in which some solids emit electrically charged particles when struck by light. This work would later earn him the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In the second paper, he devised a new method of counting and determining the size of the atoms and molecules in a given space, and in the third he offered a mathematical explanation for the constant erratic movement of particles suspended in a fluid, known as Brownian motion. These two papers provided indisputable evidence of the existence of atoms, which at the time was still disputed by a few scientists.

Einstein's fourth groundbreaking scientific work of 1905 addressed what he termed his special theory of relativity. In special relativity, time and space are not absolute, but relative to the motion of the observer.

Thus, two observers traveling at great speeds in regard to each other would not necessarily observe simultaneous events in time at the same moment, nor necessarily agree in their measurements of space. In Einstein's theory, the speed of light, which is the limiting speed of any body having mass, is constant in all frames of reference.

In the fifth paper that year, an exploration of the mathematics of special relativity, Einstein announced that mass and energy were equivalent and could be calculated with an equation, E=mc2.

Although the public was not quick to embrace his revolutionary science, Einstein was welcomed into the circle of Europe's most eminent physicists and given professorships in Zýrich, Prague and Berlin. In 1916, he published "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity," which proposed that gravity, as well as motion, can affect the intervals of time and of space.

According to Einstein, gravitation is not a force, as Isaac Newton had argued, but a curved field in the space-time continuum, created by the presence of mass. An object of very large gravitational mass, such as the sun, would therefore appear to warp space and time around it, which could be demonstrated by observing starlight as it skirted the sun on its way to earth.

In 1919, astronomers studying a solar eclipse verified predictions Einstein made in the general theory of relativity, and he became an overnight celebrity. Later, other predictions of general relativity, such as a shift in the orbit of the planet Mercury and the probable existence of black holes, were confirmed by scientists.

During the next decade, Einstein made continued contributions to quantum theory and began work on a unified field theory, which he hoped would encompass quantum mechanics and his own relativity theory as a grand explanation of the workings of the universe. As a world-renowned public figure, he became increasingly political, taking up the cause of Zionism and speaking out against militarism and rearmament.

In his native Germany, this made him an unpopular figure. After Nazi leader Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, Einstein renounced his German citizenship and left the country. He later settled in the United States, where he accepted a post at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

He would remain there for the rest of his life, working on his unified field theory and relaxing by sailing on a local lake or playing his violin. He became an American citizen in 1940.

In 1939, despite his lifelong pacifist beliefs, he agreed to write to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on behalf of a group of scientists who were concerned with American inaction in the field of atomic-weapons research. Like the other scientists, he feared sole German possession of such a weapon. He played no role, however, in the subsequent Manhattan Project and later deplored the use of atomic bombs against Japan.

After the war, he called for the establishment of a world government that would control nuclear technology and prevent future armed conflict.

In 1950, he published his unified field theory, which was quietly criticized as a failure. A unified explanation of gravitation, subatomic phenomena and electromagnetism remains elusive today.

Albert Einstein, one of the most creative minds in human history, died in Princeton in 1955.

Thanks History.com

The 30th Anniversary of Apple's Macintosh

The 30th anniversary of the Macintosh computer probably means little to most young people today. But to me, it was a pivotal moment in my working life—one that allowed me to ditch the office job forever and truly operate independently as a productive freelancer.

I bought the first 128K Macintosh right after seeing IBM pummeled in that famous Apple Super Bowl commercial in 1984. I was angry with computers in general at the time and that commercial hit the right spot. Before that day, I owned a Xerox 820. It was a truly awful machine.

The Xerox was an 8-bit clunker that cost me about $4,000 plus the freelance consultant it took to set it up to do anything of value. It used what was known as a CP/M operating system with an unintuitive word processor called Wordstar. It had big eight-inch disks to store data. The operating manuals (there were several) took up an entire bookshelf. It was definitely BIG IRON.

The Macintosh changed all that forever. First, the money-grubbing consultant was shown the door. I had all the software I needed and it was easy to use. The mouse was pure genius. I could write documents, work with numbers and even manipulate pictures with ease.

The Mac was small, light and simple to understand and that room full of arcane documents was replaced with a very basic manual written in language “for the rest of us.” Apple had hit a chord with me.

I once thanked Steve Jobs in person for the Mac. I told him it enabled me to do what I wanted to do. He responded that’s exactly what it was designed to do. Since 1984, I’ve been through dozens of Macs and never once has a Mac let me down. It has been one hell of a run.

When I first bought my Mac, I had a professional video edit suite in Los Angeles that was valued at more than $1 million. Today, with iMovie and Final Cut Pro, my Macintosh does far more than that edit facility ever did in 1984. You just can’t beat that.

This is why the 30th anniversary of the Mac matters to me. The Mac set me free and there are few other things you can compare to it in today’s world.