Ecstasy and the Mathematically Inclined Scandalous Beauty

Thank her when you call for roadside assistance from somewhere in the middle of nowhere....

She'd been the wife of a rich and emotionally abusive man, a beautiful trophy paraded at parties held at the castle of a man more than a dozen years her senior.  Guests at these soirees included Benito Mussolini, the coarse and brutish dictator of Italy, and the genocidal Adolf Hitler who was determined to eradicate her people from the face of the earth.  Her husband was a powerful man who couldn't share his life with a woman.  He had to own her...

Hedy Lamarr, Publicity Photo

Friedrich Mandl forbade his lovely wife to make more movies after their marriage in August 1933.  Her last film, released a few months before they exchanged wedding vows, would be her last if the wealthy industrialist had any say in the matter...

Not only was she naked in the movie, but full frontally so.  The scene was distant and blurry and lasted only a few seconds but that didn't matter.  Her nudity now belonged to him.  What angered him the most about Ecstasy was that damnable, infuriating look of absolute carnal pleasure on Hedwig Keisler's face as she made cheap and frantic love to another man.  He vowed to buy and burn every print of the film in which his future wife flaunted her nakedness like a harlot...

Poster for Garden Theater, Lansing, Michigan

[Those who fancy themselves historians of the cinema of bare skin often cite Ecstasy as showcasing the first nude leading lady.  This honor may belong to Inspiration with Audrey Munson posing unclad for an artist.  Munson's role in 1915 required little acting on her part.  One of the leading figures models in her day, hers was the face and figure that Alexander Stirling Calder celebrated in sculptures made for the Pan-Pacific International Exhibition.  She made at least four films and strolled in the buff during three.  Censors wanted to ban her films.  But they never did.  Audrey's life became a tangled web of scandal after she and her mother lodged at the house of a doctor who committed murder and was sentenced to a date with the Chair of Applied Electricity.  Descending into madness, she died at the age of 104 after 65 years confinement in a psychiatric hospital.]

  

Audrey Munson as the Star Maiden

Hedwig's munitions tycoon husband had yet another mistress, one whom he loved passionately--  a political movement that controlled the Federal State of Austria from 1934 until its absorption by Germany in 1938.  This lover promoted right-wing nationalism fused with a highly politicized Catholicism.  It was one of many fascist political experiments taking noxious root in Europe in the wake of World War One.  A devastated economy tempts us into foolish solutions should we have minorities to blame and leftists hiding behind every trashcan.  Soon, the government formed by Mandl's other lover came under attack from National Socialists sympathetic to a more openly racist version of tyranny...          

Friedrich Mandl wanted to be sure his wife did not stray.  He forced her to accompany him to business meetings, unaware her beauty cloaked a mind that quite easily comprehended the technology and mathematics he discussed in the boardroom and the factory.  She disguised herself as a maid one night in 1937.  Drugging her husband and wearing a fortune in jewels, Hedwig Keisler made her way to Paris where she obtained a divorce.  Leaving the City of Lights, she traveled west to the City of Angels where movie mogul Louis B Mayer renamed her for the American film industry...

Now Hedy Lamarr and a famous American movie star, she became fiercely loyal to the United States and determined to help bring down the thugs and anti-Semites running Hitler's Third Reich.  At one fundraiser, she sold over $7,000,000 in War Bonds...

Moving in the rarified world available to celebrities, Lamarr eventually met composer George Antheil, a man of interests diverse and far beyond his work in music.  A very short list of his friends and acquaintances includes Igor Stravinsky, Ernest Hemingway, Alfred Stieglitz, and Ezra Pound.  Antheil's conversation with Lamarr started off with a discussion on a medical topic and moved to the subject of torpedoes...

In the course of their chit-chat, the actress (who'd learned how naval weapons worked from listening to the technocrats in her former husband's office) and the restless piano man (who'd developed mechanical ways of reproducing sound) realized there might be a way to use an 88 key piano roll to jump between frequencies and ensure America's radio-guided torpedoes hit Nazi targets...

Patent application, H Lamarr and G Antheil

For more details of an invention "that revolutionized weapons systems and helped create cellphones" by one of the few Hollywood stars to be the subject of an adoring Scientific American article:

 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hedy-lamarr-not-just-a-pr

Hedwig Keisler, Extase, 1933

Note:  All illustrations located through Google Images with no ownership, copyright, or source information except as noted in captions.

A Journey To The Desert's Edge, Part One

Note: this is the first in a series of occasionally appearing entries focusing on deserts in general and the drylands of West Texas in particular

To know where the desert's edge is means we must first define a desert...

Not an easy task when we realize that, although scientists use the term, it has no universally accepted definition.  Modern concepts of a desert can be traced back little farther than the late 19th century when climatologists turned their attention to understanding the dry regions of the earth... 

Defining a desert and creating a rough map of its location becomes important in places like the Concho Valley that spread across stretches of central and southwestern Texas larger than a combined Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  Economic consequences bedevil the dry country.  Limits on farming and ranching, even population size in the few cities and towns, boil down to how much water is to be had.  Undesirable personal consequences can travel to those who call a desert a desert.  In the 1920s, geographer Griffith Taylor became unemployable in his native Australia after business interests seeking foreign investors pressured politicians to ban his textbook from public schools.  Doc Taylor's mistake was to not realize he was mistaken when he wrote the better part of Oz was arid or semiarid desert...



4 L Ranch, North of San Angelo



Sometimes these prophets of reality are simply ignored.  Here, we present the case of Major John Wesley Powell for your consideration.  The Civil War veteran (and geologist and ethnologist) conducted explorations of the American West.  In 1879, he published his Report on the arid lands of the United States in which he argued that approximately 2% of the land west of the 100th meridian was suitable for farming if properly irrigated with water from nearby rivers.  The other 98% could sustain low-intensity grazing in many places, if carefully monitored, but should be treated as generally unsuitable for most economic activities unless valuable minerals were present... 

Powell's notions may have been based on very careful observations but they ran contrary to the interests of the railroad companies wishing to encourage settlement along their routes.  Congress sided with campaign donors.  Ultimately, the nation as a whole paid the terrible price of ignoring its second director of the US Geological Survey when poor farming practices in the Midwest triggered the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930s...

The railroads did have bad science on their side.  Lawyer turned preacher turned agricultural statistician Cyrus Thomas also dabbled in the new science of climatology at the same time Powell argued for limited land use in the dry western half of the country.  Appointed Chief Entomologist for the State of Illinois in 1879,  Thomas assured the railroad interests and settlers that science had proven "rain follows the plow."  In other words, increased population and cultivation of the Great Plains could only lead to increased precipitation and bumper crops.  In his incarnation as an archeologist, Thomas also hit the scientific bulls-eye when he proved the Native American mounds in the central and southern United States had been built after Columbus discovered the New World...

It didn't help matters that Thomas' theory was vigorously advocated by Horace Greeley, now famous to high school history students for advising young men to Go West.  The editor of the New York Tribune was then one of the most influential newsmen in the country and a fascinating character who championed agrarian reform, vegetarianism, and socialism.  He was also the only Presidential candidate to die between the national election and counting of the electoral votes...

Cyrus Tomas (arrow) during 1871 Hayden Expedition to Yellowstone area

Those Great Plains that Thomas envisioned as lush farmland extend south into the Lone Star State.  Prior to the Civil War, few settlers of European descent occupied the vast western half of Texas.  The Concho Valley hosted Spanish explorers in the 1500s and 1600s as they quested for gold, pearls, and a mystical woman in blue.  The United States Army sent expeditions in the 1840s to map routes from San Antonio to San Francisco.  A few years before the outbreak of hostilities between North and South, the Butterfield Overland Mail crossed the Concho and Pecos Rivers of southwestern Texas on the way to the treasures of California...

But it was the Civil War that changed barren desolation into opportunities for rebuilding lives.  Single men, married couples, entire families-- many from the broken Confederacy-- moved westward to recreate an agrarian lifestyle in a dry and hard land of few rivers and questionable value for plows or cows.  The military stationed soldiers, many of them black, to protect sturdy souls whose cattle overgrazed sparse desert grasslands near the Rios Pecos and Concho and whose tillers eviscerated a fragile ecological balance achieved after centuries of aridity.  Indians and buffalo disappeared...

Nature conspired with herself to confound settler and scientist alike with the country surrounding the town of Santa Angela, a den of thieves and cutthroats and gamblers and ladies of negotiable virtue, which had grown up around a frontier outpost called Fort Concho.  As the Texas Handbook Online notes, the future Tom Green County outside the city limits of the future city of San Angelo belongs to two distinct physiographic regions.  The central, eastern, and southeastern sections of the county are part of the Lower Osage Plains while the northern, western, and southwest belong to the Edwards Plateau...



West of Angelo



As with the geology of the area, Nature divided Tom Green County (which has an annual average county precipitation of 18.2") into two distinct rainfall regions best be described as agonizingly dry and hellishly dry.  East of San Angelo, fools who farm without irrigation see annual average rains approaching 22".  West of town, ranchers expect less...

Texas precipitation zones

Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary describes a desert as "arid barren land; esp. a tract incapable of supporting any considerable population without an artificial water supply."  As we shall see later in this series of essays about the dry country, most scientists see deserts as places where the potential for water loss through evaporation and plant transpiration almost always exceeds the actual amount of water available through rain or snow...  

Every morning brings another reminder of the dryness of this part of southwest Texas when I pick up the local newspaper.  A small bright red rooster crows on the front page, just to the right of the words "San Angelo Standard Times."  Sometimes he is five or six times his normal size, standing next to a little box with an "Area Rainfall Totals" headline...

General Rainz, a West Texas tradition since 1910

The rooster is named General Rainz.  He first appeared on the front page in 1910 after publisher J G Murphy's wife commented her husband made noises resembling those produced by a pugnacious rooster every time it rained.  Inspired by his lady love's casual remark, Murphy decided the noisy hen-chaser would grace Page One following any note-worthy local rainfalls... 

Neither Murphy nor his bird made much of a ruckus during the General's first year as a West Texas media darling.  1910 saw 10.24 inches of falling liquid...   

Note: Texas Precipitation Map developed by the Spatial Climate Analysis Service of the University of Oregon and is used here for non-commercial purposes.  Portrait of Cyrus Thomas during Hayden Expedition from archives of Southern Illinois University.  General Rainz illustration from February 14, 2012, edition of the San Angelo Standard Times, a Scripps-Howard publication.  All other images photographed and copyright by Louis R Nugent

Worlds in collision

In 1950, scientists did something that later shamed many in the isolated world of towering intellects...

The cause of this wickedness was a set of radical ideas developed by a Russian born psychiatrist who numbered Albert Einstein among his friends.  Immanuel Velikovsky, MD, was no specialist in the fields of astronomy and physics.  He was a doctor who sought to heal minds.  And he was also a man who labored mightily to reconcile his belief in the truth of legends of his ancestors as recorded in the Biblical book of Exodus with a lack of corroborating accounts in the records of the Egyptians who had enslaved those forbearers...

Velikovsky's solution to the problem was a new cosmology and a new chronology for the history of ancient Israel...

Prior to roughly 1500 years before the era common to Jews and Christians, Velikovsky postulated, the planet Venus did not exist.  Disturbances inside Jupiter caused the largest non-solar member of our solar system to eject a comet-like object that almost collided with our Earth.  This resulted in almost unimaginable havoc on our world, creating disasters that became part of the myths and legends of people around the world.  The comet that would become Venus passed by at the very moment Moses raised his staff on the shores of the Red Sea, causing the waters to part as if by the hand of God Himself.  Fifty two years later, still not settled into its future orbit, Venus careened past Earth again, in time to cause the Sun to apparently stand still as Joshua fought the battle of Jericho...



Worlds in Collision, a French edition



That Immanuel Velikovsky had done a tremendous amount of research was never doubted by his critics.  None disputed either his sincerity or willingness to work with the scientific establishment.  As early as four years before the publication of Worlds in Collision, the physician who dabbled in planetary physics had written to several of the world's leading astronomers, outlining his ideas and requesting their views... 

Unfortunately,  his notions ran afoul of basic laws of physics regarding the conservation of energy and angular momentum, a fact essentially relegating Velikovsky's cosmology to the sizeable realm of interesting but impossible hypotheses...

Velikovsky's theory would likely have faced opposition from other quarters in the scientific community even if astronomers and physicists hadn't had problems with it.  Essentially, the good doctor had proposed catastrophism.  This notion didn't set well with geologists in the late 1940s or early 1950s.  Prevailing doctrine had it the earth's landforms developed gradually, over millions of years.  Few would ally themselves with a non-specialist who explained the current lack of a continent called Atlantis as the result of a catastrophic event.  It didn't help matters when Velikovsky concluded the main flaw in Plato's account of the lost continent was the Greek philosopher misdating its destruction by 8100 years...




 

Advance publicity for Velikovsky's book hinted it would do well in stores.  Newsweek magazine discussed its ideas in a January 1950 article.  In March, Reader's Digest brought it to the attention of millions more...

None of this pleased Harlow Shapley, an astronomer at Harvard University, who led a campaign by America's scientific community urging the MacMillan publishing house to drop Worlds in Collision from its spring list.  The firm saw no good reason to do so and put Velikovsky's book in stores in March, 1950, including it in a list of "Science" titles.  At this point, Shapley and his followers announced plans to withdraw their own works from MacMillan's catalog and to boycott the publishing giant's textbooks, until its editors booted unscientific nonsense from the marketplace of ideas.  The financial pressure was too great for a firm heavily invested in the educational market.  Reluctantly, it transferred rights to Worlds in Collision to Doubleday, a mass market behemoth that neither depended on the good will of the intellectual elite nor cared one way or another about having it...

Worlds in Collision met Doubleday's expectations.  Rapidly rising to bestseller status, the book's success justified publication of subsequent titles by Velikovsky, including Ages in Chaos and Earth in Upheaval.  Here, as with his first book, the good doctor relied heavily on ancient manuscripts to develop a bold new timeline of human history, interpreting data as it proved useful to his cosmology.  For his comet theory to coincide with Biblical history, Velikovsky decided the Exodus of slaves from Egypt took place during the collapse of the Middle Kingdom.  This date, incidentally, solved the mystery of the Queen of Sheba-- Solomon's regal temptress could be none other than the female pharaoh Hatshepshut...

Immanuel Velikovsky, MD

In the end, Velikovsky suffered the ire of scientists and religious fundamentalists.  He managed to question the legitimacy of almost every scholarly endeavor, adding biologists to his critics when he used Earth in Upheaval to assault Darwin's theories of evolution.  For those who read the Bible literally, he had pitched camp with godless atheism by replacing Yahweh with a comet...    

Years later, many prominent scientists and science writers criticized the foolishness of an earlier generation.  Among them were astronomer Carl Sagan and polymath Isaac Asimov who felt uncomfortable with the idea of censoring a theory that failed to conform to current notions of scientific or historic truth.  Some of his original critics would lie and claim they had not been amongst those who pressured MacMillan to drop Worlds in Collision...




 

 

Among his contemporaries, perhaps the most courageous was Gordon Atwater, Director of the Hayden Planetarium and Chairman of the Astronomy Department for the Museum of Natural History.  Atwater publicly supported Velikovsky's right to pursue unorthodox ideas... 


Fired from his job and effectively blacklisted from academia for the rest of his life, the man who had been listed in Who's Who In America never regretted his support of intellectual freedom...

Solomon and Sheba

Note: Photographs of the French edition of Worlds in Collision and Immanuel Velikovsky and painting of Hatshepshut as the Queen of Sheba were obtained through Google Images without additional information regarding copyright or original source.  Black and white photographs of Torrey Yucca and California coastline are copyrighted by Louis R Nugent.

Wood, Water, Leaves, and Wings

Note: All photographs copyright, Louis R Nugent