To the Moon!

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy, the youngest elected American president and the first (and only) Catholic president, gave a speech that made many people think that he was completely out of his mind. Addressing the students and faculty of Rice University, he demanded that the US land an astronaut on the moon before the decade was out. Here is a clip from that famous speech.

At the time, this idea seems completely ridiculous to many people. Before Kennedy’s presidency, all the US had managed to do so far was to send a few unmanned devices up in the general direction of other planets, or to orbit the Earth and then crash down into the sea to be obliterated. Eisenhower managed to start turning things around by creating NASA and initiating the National Defense Education Act, and in 1961 we managed to get Alan Shepard and John Glenn up into space and safely down again, but was more than that really attainable? You can imagine why people were reluctant to put their faith in this new program with its nebulous goals. (Imagine how much more nervous they would have been had they know about the Nedelin catastrophe in the USSR in 1960! Over a hundred people died at a failed missile launch, and Khrushchev responded with so much censorship that the world didn’t find out about the event until decades later. Here is a reenactment of the event for a Spanish documentary.)

And what was the point of it? What did the US gain by shooting people off the planet into nothingness? The biggest counterargument to that is – it isn’t nothingness. Space is SOMETHING, even though at the time we didn’t know what that something was. Would there be minerals we could mine? Would there be beings we could communicate with? Who knows until we check it out? We moved into the stars for the same reason that European settlers moved from the Eastern seaboard into the “wilderness” of the western US.

But the main reason, as Kennedy points out, is simply because this was a challenge. Just striving to land an astronaut on the moon would cause American engineers to challenge themselves intellectually and creatively. If at the end of the decade we had not made it to the moon, that exotic goal would still have motivated us to achieve far more than we would have if we had made more sensible goals.

Forty years ago, Kennedy’s goal was realized, although he was no longer around to see it. Here is an beautiful display of the Apollo 11 craft. It is a real time simulation, so as I write this it is stage six of the voyage, and it will be a few days before they actually make it to the moon. Listen in to the actual radio transitions of the astronauts, and think about what frontiers challenge nations today.

Happy Birthday Nicoli Tesla!

Who was the most important American inventor of the 19th century? Most people would say Thomas Edison, right? After all, he did invent the first light bulb, record player, movie camera, etc. However, Nicoli Tesla, born on July 10 in 1856, beat Thomas Edison to many of his discoveries.

Tesla was a short, very intense Croatian immigrant, who was fascinated by motors and electricity from an early age. When he immigrated to the US in 1884, he went to work for Thomas Edison’s laboratory and patented many successful inventions for Edison. However, when he asked for the $50,000 he had been promised (over $1 milllion in today’s money), Edison said that he had been just kidding and Tesla would only be paid $18 an hour. (Thomas Edison had a very mean sense of humor. He also liked to catch stray cats and dogs and toss them into electric fields, so he could study how they died.) Tesla said no thanks to Edison and left to start his own company.

This started a war between Tesla and Edison, as both companies developed a different way of sending electric current through wires. Edison promoted direct current (DC), but Tesla promoted alternating current (AC), which is more complicated but also more efficient. Tesla won the war, and AC current is what we use today.

Personally, Tesla was a very quirky and mysterious guy. He was very OCD, insisting on absolutely cleanliness and certain numbers or colors would make him extremely angry. Tesla got into a lot of trouble with his experiments. He burned himself in an x-ray experiment, caused fires, and supposedly created an earthquake in NYC along 5th Avenue. Oops! He picked up radio waves from space, invented radar, send electric currents over hundreds of miles with NO wires, and created a particle beam death ray for shooting down airplanes. As you can see, Tesla was no ordinary scientist, which is why he pops up in so many scifi books and movies, most recently in the movie The Prestige.

History Blog Round-up

There are a lot of good blogs out there that discuss social studies issues. I read as many as I can but there are always so many that I can’t get to! Since I am rather pressed for time tonight, here are a few samples of interesting blog articles I recommend:

• This article from Progressive Historians is reviewing a new book called The Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day.The book seems to be about how, contrary to the common belief that people are poor because of their own bad choices, most poor people are able to survive only because they make really good choices on a regular basis. It also explains the most efficient ways to help people get out of poverty.
• The Virtual Dime Museum has a fun article about a mechanical talking head that was made in the 1840s. P. T. Barnum featured it in his exhibitions.
• At USHistoryBlog.com, they post a letter from a teacher in Hawaii who is looking for a US History textbook that does not portray the US annexation of Hawaii as inevitable. Although this event is a controversial issue, most textbook editors downplay the controversy as much as possible.

These are just a few articles that have caught my eye recently. What about you – have you noticed any interesting history stories in the news recently?