Month: March 2017

The Great Chicago Fire

Awhile back, I stumbled across the 1976 TV movie Time Travelers.  Originally intended as a series pilot, it did not sell and was broadcast as a stand alone movie with a story developed by Rod Serling in what was one of his last writing credits.  The plot involved two scientists going back in time to 1871 on the eve of the Great Chicago Fire to track down a doctor who mysteriously had been able to cure a fatal disease.  For a TV sci-fi movie, it had a solid plot but as one would expect, the special effects do not hold up well after four decades.  Still, it got me thinking how different history could be taught now as compared to the pre-internet era when I originally saw the movie while I was in grade school.  Also, if sci-fi can inspire students to study science, why not history as well?

Back in the 1970’s, studying history was basically a static exercise reading a history book.  With the internet, many historical archives are at your fingertips and can make history a more interactive subject.  Going back to the movie, when the scientists arrive in 1871 Chicago, one mentions they must have arrived in the Summer and not in October as it was too hot.  His partner replies that Chicago endured a heat wave in October, 1871.  Is that right?  President Grant established the National Weather Service the same year, so daily records are a bit sparse, but the answer can be found online.

What you’ll discover is that the temperature in Chicago on the day of the fire soared to a summer-like 79 degrees with winds gusting from the Southwest at 22 mph.  Also, precipitation the month leading up to the fire had been sparse, making the conditions ripe for the disaster.  So, the movie was spot on about the weather conditions that day.  By delving into old newspaper archives, we can find out more.

Back in the day, if you wanted to look at historical newspaper accounts, you went to the library and headed towards the microfilm machines.  Today, many newspapers have digitized their archives.  In the case of the New York Times, the online archive goes back to 1851.  Looking into the Times account of the fire, I found a few surprises.

On October 7th, there had been a sizable six block fire in Chicago that served as a prelude to the main event.  That fire raged until the morning of October 8th and was reported in the Times as the worst fire in Chicago history up to that point.

Credit: New York Times

On October 8th came in a report of a second fire now raging in Chicago even greater than the first.  The progression of events in this article is not unlike the What’s Happened So Far features you now see in online formats today.

Credit: New York Times

October 10th would bring full front page coverage of the fire including a map of Chicago where the damaged occurred.  The graphic is very unusual for papers of that era.  The article, titled A City in Ruins, would go on to describe the damage as 12,000 buildings lost and 100,000 homeless, and remember, there was no FEMA back then.  The cause was still being investigated.  In fact, the Times made no mention of the infamous O’Leary cow until November 29th.  A Chicago reporter later admitted making up the story, saying it made better copy.  Unfortunately, fake news is nothing new.  When O’Leary died in 1895, the obituary in the Times still repeated the fake story.

Credit: New York Times

The Times even repeated the story for O’Leary’s son’s obituary in 1925.  This, despite the Times publishing an article four years earlier exonerating O’Leary’s cow, proving the stubborn power of a false myth.

Credit: New York Times

The fire did start near the O’Leary residence at 137 De Koven St.  You can locate this spot using Google Maps but you’ll need the current address of 558 W. De Koven St.  What you’ll find there is, not by coincidence, the Chicago Fire Training Academy.  Switching to 3-D gives this overview:

558 W. DeKoven St lower left. The Chicago river to the east failed to act as a fire break as hoped when flames moved across river bridges towards downtown. Credit: Google Maps.

As noted before, there was a strong wind from the SW the day of the fire and you can see from the image how that would have swept the flames into the heart of downtown Chicago inflicting maximum damage on the city’s residents.  The fire had economic effects beyond Chicago.  The price of stocks dropped 10% the days after the fire.  This was a prelude to the economic crisis of 1873 which prompted a depression lasting until 1879.  Chicago, then and now, is the United States’s largest railroad center and the fire had a disruptive effect throughout the nation.  And that is probably what led to my biggest surprise on this project.

The Chicago fire was not the most deadly fire in the United States that day.  The drought conditions that led to the Chicago fire sparked forest fires throughout the Upper Midwest.  The worst of which was north of Green Bay and engulfed the town of Pishtego, WI killing over 1,200, four times more than in Chicago.  The first and only article on this event appeared in the Times on October 15th and soon faded into obscurity.

Credit: New York Times

I hate to admit it, but this was the first time I had heard of the Pishtego fire.  It deserves a more prominent place in grade school history books and provides a greater understanding of the Chicago fire as part of an overall regional disaster.

I would be remiss in pointing out that as great as it is to have these internet resources at our fingertips, there are still some historical items not available online and it never hurts to check out your local library, especially the closed stacks, to see what might be there.  You’ll never know what surprises are in store.

Returning to the movie that started me on this topic, while travel back in time is allowed in general relativity, it is not remotely doable with current technology.  One solution is to have an infinitely long, rotating cylindrical tube that can drag and distort space-time to the point where you travel back in time.  Good luck finding one of those lying around.  Another solution allows for backward time travel but only until your time machine became operational.  In the case of the movie, you could only travel back in time to 1976, but not before.  However, the engineering involved would be much, much more advanced than what we now have at our disposal.  In fact, a civilization would require the ability to harness the energy of an entire galaxy to attempt this.

As long as you are careful to discern fact from fiction, time travel stories can be an entertaining way to explore history.  In the case of Time Travelers, other concepts besides the fire touched upon includes the traumatic impact of Civil War deaths on the civilian population, and the romantic idea of traveling to the past would be diminished greatly if you had to use the medical facilities at the time.  Unlike in 1976, when I first saw the movie, technical improvements today make it possible to examine historical documents of the Great Chicago Fire at home or in the classroom.  I must admit, I would jump at the opportunity to travel into the past, but I also realize there are lots of things about life in 2017 that are really great.

*Image atop post is a Currier & Ives lithograph of the Great Chicago Fire.

Equality and Space Exploration

As Apollo 11 sat on the launch pad, ready to complete what is arguably the most impressive technical achievement in history, a group of protesters marched towards Cape Kennedy.  Had he not been assassinated a year earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. would have led the march.  In his place was his best friend, Ralph Abernathy, who took over King’s role as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  As Abernathy put it, the protest was not against the Apollo program per se, but to “protest America’s inability to choose human priorities.” As we live in a democracy, proponents of space exploration should be prepared to answer the question, how does the space program benefit the poor and the general public?

Ralph Abernathy (far left) along with Martin Luther King, Jr lead Selma March for the Right to Vote, Abernathy’s children are front and center, 1965. Credit: Abernathy Family Photos/Wiki Commons

These thoughts came back to me while watching I Am Not Your Negro, the documentary on James Baldwin.  There is a tendency to think of the 1950’s and 60’s as when America was great.  Certainly, the economy was booming and middle class wages were rising, but as the documentary detailed, America was suffering from terrible social strife.  Progress was made legislatively on civil rights, but there were race riots in the cities claiming scores of lives along with a general spike in violent crime.  It was against this backdrop that the Apollo program existed.

Aftermath of 1968 Washington, DC riot. Warren K. Leffler/Library of Congress

There is the standard argument that the funds spent on the space program are minuscule compared to the overall federal budget.  And that is true, NASA’s spending is about 0.5% of the budget and peaked during the Apollo era at 5%.  Current spending on NASA comes out to $60 per person per year.  So is NASA just a highly publicized target for protest?  I think we have to look at the problem in a different light.  That being a policy of resource/education deprivation certain portions of the American population have endured in our history.

Resource deprivation is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.  If people are struggling to survive on a day-to-day basis, it makes it more difficult to sustain political resistance.  The history of African-Americans is certainly one of life under authoritarianism, from slavery to Jim Crow era lynchings and segregation.  And while significant improvements on that front have been made the past few decades, African-Americans continue to experience the impact of historical resource deprivation in terms of household wealth.

A key historical component of segregation was job discrimination.  During its early years, NASA ranked at the bottom of all federal agencies when it came to minority hiring.  While the book and subsequent movie, aptly named Hidden Figures, reveals crucial contributions to the Apollo program by African-Americans, the public face of NASA, the astronauts and mission control, were all white.  It was this facade that led Gil Scott-Heron to record Whitey on the Moon.  

Kennedy Space Center Launch Control, July 16, 1969. Credit: NASA.

So where do we go with this?  NASA has improved the diversity of its workforce greatly.  Kennedy Space Center employees are currently 27% minority.  While that helps those employed by NASA, what about Americans who live in poverty?  If one is segregated from the space program, you have no reason to support it, but that is true of any endeavor.  It’s no different than building a shopping mall without access to public transit, or a museum, or schools that are inaccessible to minorities.  The key to long-term sustainability is to integrate the benefits of the space program to all corners of society.

ISS Flight Control Team, Credit: NASA

The Apollo program lacked this sustainability.  Once the political aim of beating the Soviet Union to the Moon was achieved, the Apollo program was cancelled during the recession of the early 1970’s.  Lost was the science phase of the program – Apollo missions 18-20.  In fact, support for the Apollo program among the American public was tepid.  The only time more than half the public approved expenditures on Apollo was briefly in 1969 during the first Moon landing.  And even then, approval was only 53 percent.  The key to changing this is to turn space exploration from a “spectator sport” to one the public can actively participate in.

One obvious way of achieving this is integrating NASA research in K-12 education.  The amounts of data pouring in from NASA missions often require the efforts of citizen science to sort through it all.  Such an effort also requires educator training since many teachers, especially in high-need districts, teach outside their specialty.  And this effort should seek to aggressively reach out to the districts highest in need.  If successful, a public actively engaged in space exploration will tend to be more supportive of it.  Is exploring space worth this time and effort?

Perhaps the most important aspect of space exploration is understanding how the Earth fits in the universe.  Right now, there are no other planets where humanity can commence a mass migration.  Colonizing Mars, while feasible, is much more difficult than living in Antarctica, where only a few dozen scientists live at any given time.  We may discover Earth-like planets around other stars, but traveling to them as seen in Star Trek or Star Wars will not occur in our lifetimes, if at all.  Understanding this, and the fragile protections Earth offers humanity from a universe largely hostile to life, underscores the urgency in solving key environmental issues such as climate change.

Astronomy is among the most ubiquitous of the sciences.  Across all the continents and spanning throughout history, civilizations have sought out answers to what lies in the sky above them.  Nations that have been economically and socially healthy have been ones who have made the greatest advancements in astronomy.  Recently, the Trump administration has floated ambitious plans to return to the Moon by 2020.  By nature, space enthusiasts have jumped on the bandwagon.  However, as history has shown, if the United States also embarks on a program of resource deprivation such as repealing ACA, cutting Medicare, and turning education over to for-profit interests, public support for space exploration spending will not only be weak, but hostile.  The protest led by Ralph Abernathy in 1968 will look like a Sunday picnic by comparison.

During the Apollo program, it was often suggested that the management methods of the space program could be transferred towards solving poverty.  The space program cannot solve poverty, nor should it claim to be capable of that.  However, the space program can play a partnership role with the rest of the government and private entities toward that goal.  If we really want a sustained effort to go to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, it will have to be within an overall framework of a civilization that values inclusiveness and equality.  As Ralph Abernathy stated after watching the launch of Apollo 11:

“This is really holy ground.  And it will be more holy once we feed the hungry, care for the sick, and provide for those who do not have houses.”

*Image atop post is Apollo 11 on the launchpad during the early morning hours of July 16, 1969.  Credit:  NASA.