Saturday 30 January 2016

Men of Yore: Charles Goodyear

This is another in a series of posts about men from history who have either achieved great things in one form or another by pushing boundaries: either in themselves or in society or science or exploration of some form. Boundary pushing and growth is what men do, it's their nature: to grow and push outwards. We, as men, are the frontiers men, the first to discover/uncover new territory, in a metaphysical sense (i.e. including both material and the immaterial) that is later colonised and 'civilised' by the rest of humanity.


Charles Goodyear (Source)

Charles Goodyear,  (born Dec. 29, 1800, New Haven, Conn., U.S.—died July 1, 1860, New York City), American inventor of the vulcanization process that made possible the commercial use of rubber. 
Goodyear began his career as a partner in his father’s hardware business, which went bankrupt in 1830. He then became interested in discovering a method of treating india rubber so that it would lose its adhesiveness and susceptibility to extremes of heat and cold. He developed a nitric acid treatment and in 1837 contracted for the manufacture by this process of mailbags for the U.S. government, but the rubber fabric proved useless at high temperatures. 
For the next few years he worked with Nathaniel M. Hayward (1808–65), a former employee of a rubber factory in Roxbury, Mass., who had discovered that rubber treated with sulfur was not sticky. Goodyear bought Hayward’s process. In 1839 he accidentally dropped some India rubber mixed with sulfur on a hot stove and so discovered vulcanization. He was granted his first patent in 1844 but had to fight numerous infringements in court; the decisive victory did not come until 1852. That year he went to England, where articles made under his patents had been displayed at the International Exhibition of 1851; while there he unsuccessfully attempted to establish factories. He also lost his patent rights there and in France because of technical and legal problems. In France a company that manufactured vulcanized rubber by his process failed, and in December 1855 Goodyear was imprisoned for debt in Paris. Meanwhile, in the United States, his patents continued to be infringed upon. Although his invention made millions for others, at his death he left debts of some $200,000. He wrote an account of his discovery entitled Gum-Elastic and Its Varieties (2 vol.; 1853–55). 
(Source: http://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Goodyear)  

Men don't always get rich for contributing to the betterment of the world, but more often than not they enjoy the contributions that they've made.  For some men, like Gregor Mendel (the monk who discovered Mendelian inheritance), Josef Bazellgete (who designed Londons sewerage system), and Charles Godyear that's often enough, because the work that they do gives them more satisfaction than the wealth they earn from it.  And at the end of the day, isn't that all that really matters?  Getting contentment from doing.


[End.]

Friday 22 January 2016

Men of Yore: Christopher Sholes

This is another in a series of posts about men from history who have either achieved great things in one form or another by pushing boundaries: either in themselves or in society or science or exploration of some form. Boundary pushing and growth is what men do, it's their nature: to grow and push outwards. We, as men, are the frontiers men, the first to discover/uncover new territory, in a metaphysical sense (i.e. including both material and the immaterial) that is later colonised and 'civilised' by the rest of humanity.


Christopher Sholes

Christopher Latham Sholes (1819-1890) has been called the "Father of the Typewriter." Although he did not invent it, he did develop the first practical commercial machine. Sholes also developed the Qwerty keyboard that is still in use today.
Sholes was born on February 14, 1819, near Mooresburg Pennsylvania. On his mother's side, his ancestry could be traced back to John and Priscilla Alden, the famous Pilgrims. His paternal grandfather had commanded a gunboat during the Revolutionary War. Sholes' father, Orrin, served in the War of 1812 and was rewarded for his service with a gift of land in Pennsylvania. In 1823, when Sholes was four, Orrin moved his family to Danville, Pennsylvania, were he ultimately apprenticed all four of his sons to become printers.

At the age of eighteen, Sholes went to Green Bay, Wisconsin to work for his brothers Henry and Charles, publishers of the Wisconsin Democrat. Two years later, when Charles bought a share of the Wisconsin Enquirer, Christopher Sholes moved to Madison to assume the post of editor. The next year, at the age of 21 and at his brother's bidding, he moved to Southport, Wisconsin, and founded the Southport Telegraph, a weekly newspaper. Southport was a new town on the Lake Michigan shoreline south of Madison, (incorporated as the city of Kenosha in 1850.) Sholes soon became owner and publisher of the Telegraph.

Sholes the Newspaperman
Settling in Southport, Sholes married Mary Jane McKinney in 1840. He and his family lived there until 1857. Sholes published his paper and became involved in politics, both reflecting his drive for social reform. The Telegraph took stands against capital punishment and war, and supported the growing movement for women's rights. A fight between two members of the territorial government in Wisconsin resulted in one member being killed in the council chamber. Sholes was an eyewitness and reported the incident in his paper. His article was reprinted across the country and Charles Dickens related the tale in his American Notes as an example of law making in the United States.
Sholes was a firm believer in mass communication. He felt that people could not reach their full potential until they could be brought closer together in thought. Sholes approved of every new way of communicating that came along. The Telegraph would give free ad space to any itinerant teacher of handwriting-shorthand or longhand-that came to Kenosha.
Politically, Sholes was a good Democrat. He supported the platform of his party, which included the condemnation of the anti-slavery abolitionists. He was rewarded with an appointment to local postmaster. In 1848, Sholes was elected to the first senate of the newly admitted state of Wisconsin. He then served as city clerk in Kenosha, and returned to Madison as an assemblyman.
In January 1853, Sholes met James Densmore, an editor from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Where Sholes was mild-mannered and poetic, Densmore was aggressive and possessed a temper. He did not make a good first impression on Sholes. Yet the two men shared many political views and quickly formed a partnership.
The first collaboration of the two men was the Kenosha Daily Telegraph. By using the wire news services of the Associated Press, they would have enough content to fill a paper every day. In the first year of their publication, they had taken on new causes. Sholes had undergone a change of heart and now supported the work of the abolitionists and the congressional candidate of the newly formed Republican Party.
Sholes traveled to Kansas, where a struggle had broken out after the United States Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It was determined that the residents of new territories would decide the question of slavery. Sholes returned to Wisconsin and the newspaper business. This time, he worked at Republican papers, the Milwaukee Free Democrat and then the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel and News. He visited the Wisconsin soldiers in the Union Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. In this capacity, Sholes represented the governor of Wisconsin, but paid his own expenses. He supported the Republican Party and President Abraham Lincoln throughout the war. As a reward, Sholes was given a federal post, serving as collector of customs for the Port of Milwaukee in 1863.

Sholes the Inventor
Despite his long career in journalism and politics, Sholes was an inventor at heart. Tired of addressing newspapers to subscribers with pen and ink, he invented a machine that would do the task using preset type and a treadle, variations of which were in use until the advent of computers. While living in Milwaukee, Sholes would often spend time at C.F. Kleinsteuber's machine shop, which was a meeting-place and workshop for amateur inventors. Working with another printer, he developed a machine that consecutively numbered railway tickets and bank notes. Sholes was trying to adapt it to automatically number the pages of books. Another amateur inventor in the workshop, lawyer Carlos Glidden, was working on a mechanical plow. Both Sholes and Glidden were interested in the work others were doing on typing machines. As an outgrowth of Sholes' page-numbering device, the two began work on a typing machine of their own.
The idea of a machine that would help people communicate with clarity must have appealed to Sholes. Many typing machines had come before. William Burt created the first typing machine in 1830. Fifty more people invented or re-invented machines before Sholes began his work in 1867. A plan for a machine in Scientific American inspired Sholes, but it seemed to be unnecessarily complex. The design called for a cast plate containing all the type. The plate would be adjusted to bring the desired letter into position and a hammer would force paper against the plate.
It took Sholes only a week to determine the basic premise of his typing machine. A single letter of type, carved onto a short metal bar could be made to strike upward against a glass plate. The first model came out with the help of Glidden and Samuel Soule, a draftsman and civil engineer. It only typed the letter "W", but its basic design would become the trio's first typing machine.
 

His First Typewriter
The three men set to work to make a complete machine. After much trial-and-error, a workable prototype was built by the fall of 1867. The design required that the paper be placed between the type and the inked ribbon, so only tissue paper could be used. After selling their first one, Sholes, Glidden, and Soule tried to raise enough capital to mass-produce the machine. Sholes typed a letter to his old partner James Densmore, who recognized the possibilities of their invention. He bought into the group and began promoting the machine. Densmore requested that the design be simplified so that it would be cheaper to produce.
Densmore spent a thousand dollars to manufacture a handful of machines before deciding that it was unworkable. The concept was good, but the execution, which had been largely in the hands of Soule, was faulty. He decided to try again, but with Sholes alone. Densmore requested that the machine be able to accommodate thicker, higher-quality paper. This led Sholes to develop a moving cylindrical carriage to hold the paper, and the inked belt, or ribbon, that would be located between the type and the paper.
Despite these changes, Sholes maintained his original concept of the type striking upward against the carriage. This differed from the front striking machines that would later become the standard. The great benefit of the front-striking typewriter was that the operator could see the type as is was being printed, with no delay.
Aside from his efforts to develop a machine that the public would accept, Sholes was also responsible for designing a typewriter keyboard. The earliest typing machines used many different styles of keyboards: circular or in rows with separate keys for upper-and lower-case letters. Almost all arranged the letters in alphabetical order, from a-to-z. As Sholes experimented with his new machine, he found that placing the keys in alphabetical order caused his machine to jam too often.
 
 

The Qwerty Keyboard
Many legends surround Sholes' development of the keyboard. It is not laid out based on the frequency of use of certain letters, nor are the most used letters placed under the strongest fingers. The most frequently quoted story, that it is based on the arrangement of the letters in the printers' type-case-in the days when every printed page was set individual letter and symbol by hand-is false. Most likely Sholes changed the order of the keys as he created prototype after prototype of his machine, trying to eliminate the most frequently occurring jams, when two nearby keys would meet. The layout kept frequently combined letters separated mechanically, which limited the number of possible collisions between type bars. It probably also slowed the rate a good typist could reach, further eliminating possible jams.
Ultimately, Densmore sold the machine to Philo Remington, American manufacturer of arms, sewing machines and farm implements. Even after Sholes' hours of experimentation, the engineers and mechanics at Remington were able to improve on the machine. They solidified the layout of the keyboard into something very close to what is still used on all alpha-numeric keyboards in most English-speaking countries today.
This has come to be known as the Qwerty keyboard, after the first six letters at the upper left on the keyboard. A comparison of keyboards from around the world shows that most countries using the Roman alphabet (A, B, C, etc.) or some variation of it use basically the same layout of keys. Over time, typewriters advanced technologically. The mechanical aspects were supplemented first by electric assistance and finally by electronic devices. It was no longer necessary to use the key positions to keep the machines from jamming. Many people have developed more efficient keyboards, both easier to remember and better able to divide the work between the right and left hands. However, these have all been commercial failures. The public has refused to adopt them, preferring the Qwerty design instead.
Sholes finally agreed to sell his rights to Yost and Densmore in 1880. History does not record the price, but it was not very high. Sholes was tired of the machine, and was ready to invent something else. He took advantage whenever possible to turn his rights into ready cash, believing until almost the end of his life that the typewriter would never be a success.
When sales of the Remington typewriter increased, Sholes accused Densmore of cheating him. Densmore replied that Sholes had probably made more money than he did. Once Sholes totaled his receipts from the typewriter for the period of 1872 to 1882, it came to more than $25,000. Densmore had not realized that much in that period, although he was to make much more in the coming years.
Sholes was quite proud of one social consequence of the typewriter—it opened office careers to women. Previously, business schools only trained men as secretaries. Since men were reluctant to give up communicating and corresponding in elegant handwriting, it became common for typewriter manufacturers to train women as typists. They frequently offered both machine and operator as a package to prospective clients. Women, who had been locked out of the office, suddenly had their foot in the door.
Sholes spent the end of his life in ever-increasing obscurity. He continued to tinker with various inventions, but none saw the light of day. Even as he neared his death in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on February 17, 1890, his bed was often crowded with models of inventions.
Because he had not associated his name with either the machine or its producers, he was forgotten. Whenever articles were written about the history of the typewriter, Sholes was only mentioned in passing. Often his innovations were judged to be unoriginal or hindrances. Yet he must be credited with contributing to the design of the typewriter. Even now, as typewriters fall into disuse, his legacy lives on. Remember him the next time you wonder "Who designed this stupid keyboard?"


Well I bet you never knew that the first typewriters were manufactured by a gunsmith.  I bet that they must've been quick off the draw!  [tumbleweed blows by]  Yeah ok.. I'll get my coat.

The typewriter is yet another example of the American spirit of enterprise.  Europeans may be good at inventing things, but Americans definitely excel at advertising them and mass-producing them.  Millions knows about Samuel Colt's revolver because he was an excellent showman and self-publiciser, and millions know about the Linus Yale's locks, because they were good publicisers and showmen.  It's no good having a great invention if there's only a handful of them in existence.  And it's no good having a world-beating idea if you don't bellow it to the world and let them know about it.  If you have a good product then make it known to all 'and' make it available for all.  These are two of the keys to American success: mass-publicity and mass-production.


[End.]

Monday 4 January 2016

Alternative Lyrics to Well Known Songs 43 - Just Give Me Mince Pies

(Based on Alex Party 'Don't Give Me Your Lies')

This song is the lament of a working class pie lover; a pie lover who shops at a bakery that turned it's back on the traditions of it's home country, and (shock horror) started baking foreign foodstuffs!  [grumbling of disapproval]  "Boo!  Give us back our pies!  We love our pies!  Pies, chips, mushy peas, cold tea!  We want pies!  #Eng-er-land, Eng-er-land, Eng-er-land... #"

Alas elevating foreign things over indigenous things is something that frequently happens in England amongst the snobby element of the middle-classes who think themselves a cut above the working man.  Oh yes, in 21st century England snobbery is alive and well, it didn't die out with the Victorians, it just.. evolved..

It's evident in the most fundamental of foodstuffs: the daily bread.  In the Medieval period bread was divided into two types: brown and white.  Brown, unrefined bread was for the peasants, and white refined bread for the middle and upper classes.  During the industrial era the price of bread went down and working class people could afford to buy white bread, formerly the privilege of the middle class.  So what did the Middle-class do in response?  They started eating brown and wholemeal bread!  They started proclaiming the virtues of bran, and fibre, and roughage where formerly they loved the purity of the white loaf.  Why?  Because of snobbery!  The poor working class man had stepped in onto their home turf.  They'd interluded onto the holiest of hollies, they'd despoiled the sacred flower of.. um.. flour!  And as a result of middle-class snobbery they felt compelled to relocate to pastures new, or in this case breads a-new.  Brown loafs became their daily bread.  And it's why there is such a profusion of brown breads: artisan bread, seeded breads, bread with sun dried tomatoes, wholemeal bread with omega-3 fantastico-enriched olive oil from le pretencioso valley in Southern Italy, in supermarkets instead of bog-standard 'bread'.  The multitude of brown breads that we see in our supermarkets is there because of snobbery.

Bread is not the only working class food that's looked down on by the middle-classes.  The entire diet of Northern Europe is given the "Urgh!  How revolting!" treatment.  In the UK it's vogue to trump the Mediterranean diet because it is supposedly exceedingly nutritious, more so than any Northern European diet.  But this is twaddle.  A load of baloney you could say!  One only need to compare the Mediterranean diet with Northern European foods to see that they are pretty much identical, and have been for the past millenia.  The Hanseatic League trading community was based on the trade of oily fish (herring) from Scania, Beer from Northern Germany, and grain from Eastern Europe, all foods that are in the lauded 'Mediterranean diet'.

Mediterranean diet    Northern European Diet
Oily fish                       Oily fish (herring was a favourite in Netherlands and East Anglia)
Pasta                           Bread (bread and pasta are both made from wheat)
Wine                            Beer (both are alcoholic)
Fresh vegetables        Fresh vegetables (greens are greens wherever they are grown)
Olive oil                       Butter (recent studies have shown butter & lard to be very healthy)


So one is then forced to ask "Why do the middle-classes choose a foreign diet over their indigenous one if they are practically identical?"  To which the only proper answer is: "Snobbery my dear fellow."
 
Real men however are not affected by such vanities as snobbery, because they can respect difference, be it horizontal difference (like in the caste system), or vertical difference (like in natural hierarchies).  Men they respect difference.  They don't engage in disdain of others, or ostentatious advertisement of self.  If there's a hierarchy then it's not a hierarchy that looks down.  It's a hierarchy that simply is.  Stephen Hawking's smarter than me.  I'm never gonna win a Nobel prize, (not even for sarcasm!) and that's fine.  Some people are better than others at certain things.  That's just the way it is.
 
To start looking down one's nose at others is snobbery, in simple words: it's just not the done thing.  So we'll leave the snobbery to the foolish element of the middle classes who want to elevate/distance themselves from the working class.  The working classes who live beside them, who breathe their same air, who grow their food, who build their houses, who share their same haplogroup.  Instead of being snobs we'll enjoy what we do, eating pies, mushy peas, white bread or whatever that may be.  Condescension, as they say, is beneath us.
 
Now that's over, we'll move onto this weeks 'Alternative Lyrics..' song.  It is a light-hearted and seasonal (but late) song about a pie lover who shops at a bakery that turned it's back on the traditions of it's home country, and started baking foreign foods.
 
I'll probably re-post this later in the year, BEFORE Christmas.  You know, IN SEASON.  Like any SENSIBLE person would.  (Sotto Voce: God.. I'm such a numpty some times...)


Play the music video above and sing along using the alternative lyrics given below.


# Just Give me Mince Pies #
You make me so mad, oh what can I say?
You used to-bake for England, but then you turned away.
I tried so hard to carry on, but I just need some, need some short-crust love.
Now you're trying to say "come eat my brulee."
But don't you know, I just need, I just need mince pies.

 
Just give me mince pies, mince pies, give me mince pies.
Just give me mince pies, mince pies, give me mince pies.
Just give me mince pies, mince pies, give me mince pies.
Just give me mince pies, mince pies, give me mince pies.

 
Pies don't mean nothing to you.
(Nothing to you.)
Filo puff pastry, is all you think to do.
I tried so hard to carry on, but I just need some, need some short-crust love.
Now you're trying to say "come eat my brulee."
But don't you know, I just need, I just need mince pies.

 
Just give me mince pies, mince pies, give me mince pies.
Just give me mince pies, mince pies, give me mince pies.
Just give me mince pies, mince pies, give me mince pies.
Just give me mince pies, mince pies, give me mince pies.

 
Just give me, just give me, just give me.
Just give me, just give me mince pies.
Just give me, just give me, just give me.
Just give me, just give me mince pies, oh yeah.

I tried so hard to carry on, but I just need some, need some short-crust love.
Now you're trying to say "come eat my brulee."
But don't you know, I just need, I just need mince pies.

 
Just give me mince pies, mince pies, give me mince pies.
Just give me mince pies, mince pies, give me mince pies.
Just give me mince pies, mince pies, give me mince pies.
Just give me mince pies, mince pies, give me mince pies.



[End of lyrics.]