Professor Walter's History Lessons

Kittens are cute, so they play with string. Goats aren't cute so they are the string.

The durable cord called "catgut" is known throughout the world for its use in the finest musical instruments and sports equipment. Until nylon began to replace it in many applications, it was quite prevalent. But, despite its name, catgut is sorely lacking in any cat based materials.

The origins of the word are steeped in mystery. Some explanations are more plausible than others, though they are all conjecture. What is known is that, rather than felines, it is created from the intestines of sheep or goat and occasionally cows, hogs, horse, mules or donkeys.

So rest assured that next time you're batting around a birdie, you won't be doing it with parts of the household pet.

-Professor Walter

A brilliant career cut short by pain management

Ernst Fleischl von Marxow was studying anatomical pathology when he injured his finger while dissecting a cadaver. The injury became infected, necessitating the amputation of his thumb. As a result, he refocused on physiology, obtaining his doctoral degree in medicine in 1874. He spent the next six years unlocking the secrets of the human body's electrical system. In 1880 he became a full professor at the University of Vienna and expanded his studies into physiological optics, the mechanics of the eye.

Ten years younger, Sigmund Freud was impressed with Marxow and sought to build a friendship when they both worked at the same institute.

"A most distinguished man, for whom both nature and upbringing have done their best. Rich, trained in all physical exercises, with the stamp of genius in his energetic features, handsome, with fine feelings, gifted with all the talents, and able to form an original judgment on all matters, he has always been my ideal and I could not rest till we became friends and I could experience pure join in his ability and reputation."

The friendship would inadvertently be Marxow's downfall. Marxow had spent the intervening years coping with the pain that resulted from the amputation, using both morphine and heroin. Further infections impacted his life to such a degree that he contemplated suicide. To distract himself from his suffering, he solved every mathematical equation he could find and even learned sanskrit. The drugs helped him to manage the pain, but he ultimately became a functional addict. At the same time, his friend Freud was working with a new medical "miracle drug" known as cocaine. When he and a colleague found Marxow on the floor, delirious with pain, Freud suggested he try it, believing it could not only ease the pain, but it could also break Marxow's morphine addiction.

Initially the morphine use dropped and Freud was convinced his friend was cured. Unfortunately it was simply a matter of one affliction being replaced by another. The result was the transformation of a functional addict into a drug addled man who was hopelessly addicted to cocaine. The initial small doses rapidly increased to as much as a gram a day intravenously. Marxow became poisoned by the cocaine and was plagued with hallucinations. Freud worked to help his friend through the cocaine addiction but was unsuccessful. Marxow spent days convinced that snakes and bugs were crawling under his skin. Worse, unbeknownst to Freud, Marxow was back on morphine and addicted to that as well. Freud had inadvertently created the first cocaine addict. Marxow would live, in pain and drug addiction, for six more years until, on October 22, 1891, he passed away from an infection at the age of 45.

Freud would suffer from guilt for the rest of his life, always keeping a photo of his friend over his desk. In the fall of 1896, the day of his father's funeral, Freud ended all research and use of cocaine, deeply regretting his involvement in the promotion of the drug.

-Professor Walter

Those french fries are simply too thick

In 1853 American Indian George Crum was working as a chef at a resort, Moon Lake Lodge, in Saratoga Springs, New York. The menu included french fries which had been popularized by Thomas Jefferson who discovered them as ambassador to France and served them to guest at his home in Virginia, Monticello. On a summer day a picky customer sent back his french fries stating that they were too thick. Crum made a thinner batch which the customer again rejected. Crum was fed up with the customer and decided to make a point. He cut the potatoes as thin as possible and fried them until they were so crisp they would break if poked with a fork. His plan backfired when the customer loved the new dish and other customers began to request it.

The newly minted "Saratoga Chips" were a smash hit. They were packaged and sold locally, eventually Crum would open his own restaurant featuring the chips. In the 1920s Herman Lay would popularize the chips in the south while Bill and Sallie Utz would do the same in the mid-atlantic region.

Today the potato chip industry exceeds 6 billion dollars annually and employs over 65,000 people -- all because of one picky customer and a fed up chef.

-Professor Walter

Make it taste about like a boiled potato

As war erupted in Europe, the US Army began to take a serious look at what would be necessary to provide emergency rations for its troops should they be drawn into the conflict. In 1937 Captain Paul P. Logan of the US Army Quartermaster Corps made a visit to Hershey to meet with chief chemist Samuel Hinkle. Logan's request was for Hinkle to create a chocolate bar that would be used as a ration for the troops. It would need to have greater nutritional value than traditional chocolate bars but couldn't taste as good so that soldiers would save them for emergencies rather than consume them all at once. It would also need to have a higher melting point to survive the journey to the troops and weigh four ounces. When asked what the bar should taste like Logan replied, "Make it taste about like a boiled potato."

Hinkle achieved this by creating a bar out of oat flour, cocoa fat, skim milk, sugar and coloring. The bar never received marks for taste, with some soldiers declaring them "Hitler's Secret Weapon" for the effect on the soldiers intestinal tract. It was so hard that they had to be cut with a knife for people with poor dentition. Even those with good teeth found it was better to cut than bite.

The bar become the D Ration and would be used throughout the war. Over 40 million of them were made for distribution throughout the conflict. Many of these bars went to the hungry in Europe and our allies until they were discontinued a the end of the war. The tropical version saw a larger distribution and was used into the late '60s. 

-Professor Walter

 

Is it live, or is it Tupolev?

During WWII the United States utilized the Boeing B-29 Superfortress as its "go to" bombing vehicle. The massive plane had an impressive range and performed admirably, even carrying the only nuclear bombs ever used in a war theater. The Soviet Union had no plane that could match it and lobbied for them under the Lend-Lease Act. The Soviet Union saw how the large planes could fly from remote bases, bomb The Empire of Japan, and return. Stalin wanted the same abilities to level the playing field. The U.S., however, wasn't particularly keen on the notion of giving away the technology.

Thus the Soviets were quick to take advantage when three B-29s were forced to make emergency landings in the USSR after bombing runs over Japan. The Japanese-Soviet Nonaggression Pact prevented the USSR from returning the planes to the United States, so Stalin ordered Tupolev, one of the nation's large airplane designers, to duplicate the B-29 exactly. Those direct orders would lead to seemingly endless problems for Tupolev.

They immediatly encountered an issue with the skin of the plane, which was in US measurments. Soviet manufacturers only used Metric. Committee after committee reviewed the necessary changes and Tupelov lobbied high ranking military figures for approval. The same effort would be repeated many times over. The engineers even had to obtain approval to use Soviet parachutes rather than American versions.

At the Aviation Day Parade on August 2, 1947 at Tushino Airport in Moscow, the new Tu-4 made its first public appearance. Initially thought to be the captured B-29s, it became clear that they were Soviet made when a fourth flew overhead.

In all, 847 Tu-4s were built before production ended in 1952. The planes were phased out of service in the 1960s. Three are known to still exist.

-Professor Walter

The Ford Model T - A Hill Challenged Vehicle

Introduced in 1908, the Ford Model T was the car that changed the world. Quickly the affordable car spread through the United States and then abroad. As the first major success of the burgeoning auto industry the Model T became the test bed for design ideas that would later become standard or disappear completely. One of these areas where the Model T suffered was the gas tank.

The 10 gallon tank was mounted beneath the front seat feeding the carburetor via gravity. This placement worked well except with the tank ran low. When that occurred the car would lose its fuel supply when going up a hill. The solution, that was employed, was to back up the hills rather than go forward. This technique negated the design flaw. This technique had to be employed until 1926, 18 years after the first unit rolled off the assembly line,  when the fuel tank was moved on most models. The Model T would continue being produced until 1927 when the Model A replaced it.

-Professor Walter

16 2/3 RPM at 55 MPH

Peter Goldmark was an early pioneer in the field of communications, developing things such as a color television, the 33 1/3 record and a video cassette. As with all inventors some of his creations were more successful than others. The color television he developed was not compatible with the black and white sets of the day and as such was never adopted (although the camera technology was used for the moon landings) and his video cassette proved too expensive and was quickly replaced by Sony's video cassette. His 33 1/3 record was a smash hit and remains the record standard to this day.  One of his inventions did receive quick adoption before failure.

Derived from his 33 1/3 record success Goldmark created the "Highway Hi-Fi" a dashboard mounted record player for cars. The Hi-Fi units were only available as factory options in Chrysler's with Columbia the only distributor of the 7" 16 2/3 RPM disc, which were custom created for this application to reduce skipping at highway speeds along with a counter weighted arm. This new innovation hit the market in 1956 but support soon waned.

The player had some critical problems. There were only 40 records available and the system was prone to failures and skipping. The high cost of warranty repair combined with the limited interest caused Chrysler to re-think it's investment in the system and it began to disappear from their vehicles. In 1960 they reintroduced the Highway HiFi, this time made by RCA, with the ability to play standard 45 RPM records, but the skipping issue persisted and public interest never fully materialized. 1961 was the last year for this stage in auto audio technology. It would be seven more years before a driver could bring their music with them in the car, that was the year the 8-track made its debut appearance.

-Professor Walter

With special thanks from the #2 Pencil Association

Reynold B. Johnson was a Michigan physics teacher in the 1930s and he was tired. After another late night of grading tests by hand, he decided that there had to be a better way. Working nights in his basement he developed a machine that could read the answers selected by filling in circles. After testing the conductivity of the paper, he found that, when the circle was filled in by pencil, the graphite changed the readings. The machine could recognize which answer was selected, allowing the answer to be read as either correct or incorrect based on an answer key. In 1934 IBM learned of Johnson's invention and hired him on the spot. The real breakthrough came in 1939 when the SATs switched to the automated system and standardized tests would never be the same.

Johnson stayed with IBM, eventually becoming manager of the Advanced Systems Development Division laboratory in San Jose, CA. In the course of his work he helped develop the prototype for the half-inch videocassette tape that Sony used, as well as leading the team that created the world's first disk drive. In 1965 he was named an IBM fellow, the first of many personal achievements. He obtained more than 90 patents, received the National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Reagan in 1986, the IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award was established in 1991, and in 1996 he was awarded the Franklin Institute's Certificate of Merit. Even after retirement he continued to invent, creating the microphonograph used in Fisher Price Talk to Me books.

Johnson died of melanoma on September 15, 1998 at the age of 92.

-Professor Walter

If at first you don't succeed, fail, fail, again.

We've all been taught about the Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur, and their famous December 17, 1903 achievement of the first powered flight. The potential for sustainable flight was there, but their initial flight lasted less than a minute and achieved heights of roughly ten feet. While even this was ground breaking, it was not a viable machine for commercial or government use. It would not be until October 5, 1905, when Wilbur Wright flew the Flyer III 24 miles in 39 minutes and 23 seconds, that the full potential of powered flight was finally in sight. That single flight was longer than all flights in 1903 and 1904 combined. The Wright Brothers wrote to the US Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, offering to sell aircraft to the U.S. Military.

While the first flight rocked the world, it didn't really change anything other than proving powered flight was, in fact, possible. It would take two more years before practical flight was realistic. Over the next few years the Wright Brothers would travel the world, contracting with local firms to build their Flyers. On June 29, 1909, they finally demonstrated the first U.S. Military plane, the Military Flyer. That day Orville took the new plane up. And into a tree. After repairs the first successful demonstration occurred on July 27. And the rest, as they say, is history.

-Professor Walter

Excuse me Sir, do you have anything to declare?

On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 touched down on the surface of the Moon, realizing the dreams of millions throughout the ages. On that historic mission Neil Alden Armstrong, Micheal Collins, and Edwin "Buzz" E. Aldrin Jr. made history. During the short stay on the celestial body they collected rocks and dust samples which they brought back to Earth. On July 24, 1969, they splashed down in the Pacific with their cargo where they were promptly picked up by the USS Hornet and brought to Hawaii.

As with any international traveler they went through customs. It was a little joke at the time, but the three spacemen had to fill out the appropriate paperwork to re-enter the country listing Cape Kennedy as their departure point with a stopover on the Moon and finally to Honolulu. Their collected cargo was documented as well.

This exercise, to the best of my knowledge, was not repeated for subsequent missions. I suppose the customs office may have had a problem with the fact that the astronauts were unable to find an official on the Moon to get their passports stamped.

-Professor Walter