Tag: History

  • Elektro

    It’s kind of hard to imagine what Elektro, the Oldest U.S. Robot looks like until you actually see it. What’s crazy is that it was created sometime during the ’30s…

    Back in 1939, Elektro was able to walk, talk, raise and lower his arms, turn his head and move his mouth as he spoke. It used a 78-rpm record player to simulate conversation and had a vocabulary of more than 700 words. Thousands of people enjoyed Elektro at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.

    I don’t know, but it kind of reminds me of the robot from “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Weird.

  • Susan B. Anthony; or, People Are Dumb

    I’m not sure if people are stupid, ignorant, lacking in a proper education or some combination of those, but the following example should illustrate my point. At work today I was talking with a co-worker about education (her son is in second grade and learning history) and the name Susan B. Anthony came up. I asked, “You know who she was, right?”

    “Uh, someone famous—I know she was on a coin,” was the reply.

    Pretty bad. I’m always highly disappointed when I run into this type of thing at work… I should know better by now.

    What’s worse, though, is when I asked another (female) co-worker the same question:

    “I know she’s on a coin.”

    Ug.

  • Bend Centennial

    Happy birthday to Bend! Today is the 100th anniversary of Bend, Oregon, marking the beginning of the year-long Bend Centennial celebration. Just a quick post while I’m thinking about it; I might have more to say later.

    Also, check out Bend.com’s article from November.

  • Oregon Trail Diaries

    Here’s a site containing links to the texts of diaries from the Oregon Trail. Interesting stuff; it would be worth collecting it and turning it into a Palm Reader ebook. (If I can find the time.)

  • Stumps

    The previous post got me thinking for some reason about the 2000 year-old tree stumps found just off the Oregon coast, in Neskowin. You haven’t heard about them? Judging by the amount of time searching to find any pointers or references to them, most of the Web hasn’t either.

    This is from KXL.com’s Coastal Tour Guide page:

    This downright spectacular oddity is almost a rare sight in Neskowin, but you may not know just how spectacular it is unless you know what it is you’re looking at.

     

    They look somewhat like old, ragged pilings leftover from something manmade – but they are, in fact, stumps of a 2,000-year-old forest. As many as 100 are sometimes visible in various shapes and sizes. It’s theorized that around 2,000 years ago a massive, cataclysmic earthquake abruptly dropped this forest as much as six feet. This wound up preserving them, rather then destroying and scattering them as natural erosion might’ve done.

    An article on these appeared in 1998, and I remember being awed and amazed that these artifacts from the era of Christ and the Roman Empire were being exposed right in my backyard, so to speak. Scouring around the Web, there’s only a couple of decent articles I was able to find on the subject: this Herald-Sun Newsbrief from March 18, 1998 and this archived Sunset article. Good to know I’m not completely crazy.

    Anyway, if you find yourself in or around Neskowin, Oregon, find your way down to the beach and check it out.

  • Lewis and Clark

    Today is (exactly) the 200th anniversary of the start of the Lewis and Clark expedition, on May 14, 1804. Did anyone realize this? I almost missed this entirely, but for Reuter’s Oddly Enough RSS feed: “Lewis and Clark’s List: Opium and ‘Portable Soup’” lists some of the provisions they took on their expedition, including opium, “portable soup” (“paste made of boiled-down beef and cow’s hooves, eggs and vegetables”), quills, inkstands, and 10 yards of linen.

    Wikipedia has a decent start on an article on Lewis and Clark, but it needs fleshed out more.

    Among other things, I seem to remember reading once that the Lewis and Clark expedition was one of the most successful such expeditions in history, because in a 28-month, cross-country trip they only lost one out of 33 members: Sergeant Charles Floyd died from acute appendicitis. Seems pretty good to me.

  • Library of Alexandria discovered

    This is big: Library of Alexandria discovered.

    Archaeologists have found what they believe to be the site of the Library of Alexandria, often described as the world’s first major seat of learning.

     

    A Polish-Egyptian team has excavated parts of the Bruchion region of the Mediterranean city and discovered what look like lecture halls or auditoria.

    One of the greatest losses of antiquity. For more background, Wikipedia has a really good entry on the Library of Alexandria.

  • Balance

    I found this passage from Frontier Doctor to be particularly interesting:

    When I came to eastern Oregon in 1905, all of the beautiful pine timber was an open park-like forest, without any underbrush, where game could be seen for a long distance. Each summer there were many forest fires, the vast majority of which were caused by lightning. As there was no underbrush, these fires consumed nothing but the dead pine needles, cones and twigs that had been blown to the ground by the winds. The little blaze, only a few inches high, crept slowly over the ground and cleaned the floor of the forest of all debris, killing the pine beetles on the ground, but did no damage whatever to the green trees. There were a few dead trees scattered through the forest that had been killed by the pine beetles. These dead trees almost invariable took fire and burned up and the beetles with them. It was these annual fires which had existed for centuries that had produced the beautiful open forests free from dangerous underbrush, and killed so many of the pine beetles that they were held in check. The tiny blaze of these fires was not hot enough to injure the pine seed. When the timber was cut off and the sun was allowed to strike the ground, these little pine seeds began to germinate and a new second growth of trees immediately sprang up.

     

    No one tried to put these annual fires out, as they were known to be a benefit to the timber. When the big lumber companies began to buy the timber, their representatives in the field saw to it that their holding were burned over every year. If the lightning did not start enough fires, the timber men started more of them.

    Nearly one hundred years later, I’ve never known these forests not to be thick with underbrush, and the “normal” forest fire is a raging inferno that destroys everything it touches.

    What happened? Ignorance. As usual.

  • Piri Reis Map

    Here’s a link to a good image of the Piri Reis map. For all you mystery-history buffs out there.

  • Historic house

    My drive home from work everyday takes me by an old brick house on Hawthorne Avenue, just out of downtown Bend on the entrance to the parkway. What’s notable about this house is that it’s obviously old—one of those old, pre-War homes that has ivy growing on it and just oozes atmosphere and looks like it should be on a register of historic places somewhere—and for a long time I’ve been meaning to look up its address online and see what pops up.

    Turns out it is a designated historic resource: the A.C. Lucas House, built in 1910, the first brick house in Bend. Cool.

    Here’s some of the links I dug up while researching the Lucas House:

    Okay, so not the most exciting of links. I can live with that.