April 2018 – The Intelligent Collector Magazine

Bell’s Influence on National Geographic Society Often Overlooked

An archive of documents from the early days of Bell Telephone Company – including correspondence by Gardiner G. Hubbard, Alexander Graham Bell’s father-in-law – sold for $10,157 at an October 2012 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

In 2013, Nancy and I took a cruise from New York City to Montreal. On Sept. 23, we had the great pleasure of touring the Alexander Graham Bell museum in Baddeck, Nova Scotia. We were struck by its unusual design, which is based on the tetrahedron form used in his many flight experiments with kites. There were also numerous original artifacts, photographs and exhibits of his groundbreaking scientific accomplishments.

Bell (1847-1922) was awarded patent #174465 just four days after his 29th birthday for the first practical telephone – “the most valuable single patent ever issued” in any country. Our guide informed us that Bell would not allow a telephone in his study or laboratory since he considered it a distraction to his reading and experiments. I was aware that both his mother and wife were deaf and this had a profound effect on his passion for working on sound, speech and hearing. What surprised me was the breadth of his scientific achievements. He was awarded 18 patents and collaborated on another 12 in medicine, aeronautics, genetics, electricity, sound and marine engineering.

Another surprise was that his wife Mabel was the daughter of Gardiner Greene Hubbard, founder and first president of the National Geographic Society (founded in 1888) and also the first president of Bell Telephone Company (later AT&T). Although AGB (he got a middle name only after constantly nagging his father) was not a founder of National Geographic, he was its second president, following his father-in-law. This was organizational incest on a scale that rivaled the British monarchy.

But the result was an organization that has given several generations a certain sense of where we are and where we want to go. Commanders-in-chief, explorers, schoolchildren and even daydreamers have put their full trust in the splendid maps of the National Geographic Society and their brilliant cartographers. The elegant and clearly legible typefaces for place names, one source of the map’s mystique, were designed by the magazine’s staff in the 1930s.

It was founded in Washington, D.C., at the Cosmos Club, another venerable organization founded in 1878 and boasting of membership by three presidents, two vice presidents, 12 Supreme Court justices, and 36 Nobel and 61 Pulitzer Prize winners (they don’t bother with ordinary U.S. senators).

During World War II, National Geographic maps were at the epicenter of the action, thanks in part to a U.S. president who was deeply interested in geography. The society had furnished Franklin D. Roosevelt with a cabinet that was mounted on the wall behind the desk in his private White House study. Maps of continents and oceans could be pulled down by the president like window shades; they were in constant use throughout the war.

In the early winter of 1942, President Roosevelt urged the American people to have a world map available for his next fireside chat, scheduled for the evening of Feb. 23. FDR told his aides, “I’m going to speak about strange places that many have never heard of – places that are now the battleground for civilization. … I want to explain to the people something about geography – what our problem is and what the overall strategy of the war has to be. I want to tell it to them in simple terms of ABC so that they will understand what is going on and how each battle fits into the picture. … If they understand the problem and what we are driving at, I am sure that they can take any kind of news on the chin.”

There was an unprecedented run on maps and atlases. The audience, more than 80 percent of the country’s adult population, was the largest for any geography lesson in history.

The National Geographic Society went on, expanding the scope of its focus – with maps for the amazing Mount Everest to outer space and the ocean floor. As the Society’s former chief cartographer put it: “I like to think that National Geographic maps are the crown jewels of the mapping world.”

He was right, until Google maps created a new technology in need of its own headware.

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

Since the Days of the Pony Express, It’s Been All About Speed

Walter Martin Baumhofer’s oil on board titled *The Pony Express, St. Joseph*, sold for $10,000 at a March 2012 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

On Nov. 19, 2007, I watched Charlie Rose interview Jeff Bezos about the new Kindle that debuted that day and sold out in 5½ hours. Books had been the last bastion of analog holdouts, although there were lots of Ebooks for sale.

The Kindle was something new.

It was a light (10 ounces) device that didn’t require a computer and would store up to 200 books in a library. One hundred and one of the 112 New York Times bestsellers were already available for $9.99, in addition to all major newspapers and magazines. You could order it from Amazon.com for $399 and when it arrived, it automatically recognized the user. Plus, there were lots of other cool features like a 250,000-word dictionary, access to Wikipedia and its 400 million pages, and you could read the first chapter of any book for free before deciding to buy it.

I immediately ordered mine and there was already a two-month waiting time. It is still around somewhere gathering dust, but my new Kindle is on my iPad (with an audio feature).

I guess we have always been an impatient culture with the “need for speed” in our DNA. Until the spring of 1860, it took 20 days for mail to get from St. Joseph, Mo., to Sacramento … far too long for most merchants and businessmen. Stagecoaches were just too slow until one of them – Russell, Majors and Waddell of Leavenworth, Kan. – came up with an idea to cut the delivery time by 50 percent.

For a fee of $2 to $10 per ounce, depending on the distance, you could use their new innovative mail service: the Pony Express. Starting on April 3, 1860, every Wednesday and Saturday one rider on horseback would leave at noon from Sacramento heading east, and another at 8 a.m. from St. Joseph heading west. Averaging about 8 miles an hour, every 10 miles or so, they would change horses at a relay station and continue at breakneck speed.

The typical payload of 20 pounds of letters was tucked into a Mexican mochila (knapsack) with four cantinas (locked pockets) for the oiled silk-wrapped letters that kept them dry when the rider inevitably had to cross streams or rivers. The mochila was designed to slip over the saddle horn and the rider sat on it until the next change of horses. Every 75 to 80 miles was a “home station,” where the incoming rider would pass the mochila to a fresh rider and then bunk down until the mail arrived from the opposite direction. Then, somewhat rested, he was off again, back the way he came.

The young hell-bent for leather riders intrigued the nation and their dedication became a staple for many bedtime stories. Some children heard the tale about 19-year-old Jack Keetley, who rode 340 miles in 31 hours non-stop until taken from the saddle … sound asleep. Fifteen-year-old William Frederick Cody was one of the daring young riders who would later become famous as Buffalo Bill with his own traveling Wild West show.

Still, speed was what mattered and the formal record for the central route’s 1,966 miles is 7 days and 17 hours. This was of special significance since it allowed California newspapers to publish President Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address. The Pony Express was, in every way, about speed. Even its history went by in a flash— 19 months, 2 weeks, 3 days and kaput! The bold experiment was finished, partially because it was costing about $30 a letter, but it was really just another victim of a new technology.

The ride lasted from April 3, 1860, to Nov. 20, 1861 … 596,501 miles, 30,700 pieces of mail and only one lost mochila! The Pony Express and its 80 dedicated riders, 400 horses and 190 relay stations all became irrelevant on Oct. 21, 1861, with the completion of the transcontinental telegraph line. That pattern of one innovation, one technology, giving way to another seems to be accelerating as our impatience and expectations continue to grow.

I just ordered four C batteries from Amazon and discovered they won’t be here until tomorrow (bummer!).

Maybe a Simple Theory Explains Nature’s Mysteries

A Charles Darwin signature is among a set of autographs by famed scientists that sold for $4,750 at a January 2017 auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Cosmologists generally agree the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and Earth 4.6 billion years old. They also agree the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, and is creating new space in the process. It is already so immense that even by traveling at the speed of light, you would simply end up back where you started due to the curvature of space. This eliminates one of my lifelong desires to poke my head thru and “see what’s out there.” The answer is nothing, a hard concept to grasp … at least for me.

What no one seems to know is where, when or how life on Earth began. Or, for that matter, if life (as we know it) exists anywhere other than on our small tiny orb tucked in a remote part of our modest galaxy, at the precise distance from the Sun to permit our existence.

Author Bill Bryson writes about the work of a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Stanley Miller, who in 1953 tried to synthesize life in a chemistry lab. He hooked up two flasks, one containing water and the other a mixture of methane, ammonia and hydrogen gases. By adding electrical sparks to simulate atmospheric lightning, he was able to convert this concoction to a green and yellow broth of amino acids, fatty acids and other organic compounds. His euphoric professor – Nobel laureate Harold Urey – exclaimed, “If God didn’t do it this way, he missed a good bet!” Since it was subsequently pointed out that Earth never had such noxious conditions, we are no closer to creating life today, 65 years later.

Others have speculated that life on Earth arrived when a meteorite crashed into the planet in a process known as panspermia. The problem with this theory is that it still doesn’t explain how life BEGAN and just moves the problem to some other remote place.

Since modern man dates back 200,000 years to Africa, I’m more curious as to why it took us so long to fly. It was only rather recently, on Dec. 17, 1903, that two brothers from Dayton, Ohio – Orville and Wilbur Wright – rose into the air in Kitty Hawk, N.C., and descended 120 feet further than the take-off point. Wilbur had tried first and stalled, but Orville took the controls and set off into a strong wind with Wilbur steadying the wingtip running alongside.

They made three more flights that morning, with the longest covering 852 feet. When a wind gust broke the airframe, they just packed all the parts and went back to Dayton. What makes this achievement even more remarkable is that neither had any formal academic education in physics, although both were high school graduates. Today, the “Flyer” hangs proudly above the entrance at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington under a long inscription that ends “…Taught Men to Fly and Opened the Era of Aviation.”

Of course, flying in the true sense has mostly been restricted to birds, as Charles Darwin theorized. In his travels aboard the Beagle survey ship, he noted that finch beaks on different islands in the Galapagos varied to exploit local resources. He speculated the birds had not been originally created this way, but had adapted themselves to gain a strategic advantage to acquire scarce resources. They had indeed, but it should be noted that Darwin did not coin the phrase “survival of the fittest” and even the word “evolution” didn’t appear until the sixth printing of On the Origin of Species. And even this book was delayed for many years since his editor urged him to write about pigeons. “Everyone is interested in pigeons.”

A lot has been written about “locomotion,” with the flight of birds being the most interesting … and the Pterosaur from 100 million years ago especially so. With a wingspan of 16 feet and weighing a mere 22 pounds, it was able to dominate eastern England by staying aloft for extended periods on rising warm-air currents … presumably as a hovering predator.

Once again, we face the same questions. How it developed is a mystery, as is its anatomy, since it couldn’t manage take-off via traditional wing flapping. Perhaps it relied on gravity and thermals to become airborne. But this would have required plunging into the air from seaside cliffs, like modern frigate birds.

My theory to cover all these mysterious questions is more simplistic: Evolution is just “one damned thing after another.”

It’s a Long Way from Hot Air Balloons to Lethal Drones

An 1887 complete set of 25 Lone Jack “Inventors and Inventions” cards, featuring Michael Faraday, sold for $3,107 at a November 2011 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Wars fought from the air can be traced back to the creation of rubber balloons first made by Professor Michael Faraday in 1824 for use in his experiments with hydrogen at the Royal Institution in London (where he would later become the first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry). However, it was his work with electricity and magnetism that earned him greater fame. Virtually all electricity produced today is based on Faraday’s principles, whether it is coal, oil, gas, nuclear, hydro or wind.

Faraday (1791-1867) declined an offer of knighthood since he believed the Bible forbade earthly accumulations of wealth or honor and stated that he “preferred to be plain Mr. Faraday to the end.” He also declined to assist the British government with the production of chemical weapons, on ethical grounds, for the Crimean War (1853-1856) … a position the current government now apparently agrees with given recent activities in Syria.

I can attest to the many honorific symbols in greater London today and Albert Einstein kept a picture of Faraday on a wall next to Isaac Newton to acknowledge their enormous contributions to the extension of electromagnetism in space. Not bad for “plain” Mr. Faraday.

His work on balloons was preceded by the French Montgolfier brothers in 1783 while perched on a hillside watching a bonfire:

“I wonder what makes the smoke go up.”

“Perhaps warm air is lighter and the cold air pushes it up.”

“Then if we filled a bag with hot air, it would fly!”

Aeronautics was born.

Then on June 18, 1861, a stunned audience in Washington watched a giant balloon, the Enterprise, rise 500 feet. A man in it sent a telegraph to President Lincoln … “Sir: From this point of observation we command an area of nearly 50 miles in diameter. I have the pleasure of sending you this first telegram ever dispatched from an aerial station… T.S.C. Lowe”

This was a prelude to the short-lived formal use of aerial observations by the Armed Forces. The first balloon bought for the American military was an $850 model of raw India silk built by John Wise of Lancaster, Pa. Both sides in the Civil War were basically incapable of utilizing balloons for little more than observation of troop positions since any kind of armament was simply too heavy to be carried aloft. Aerial photography service was offered but never acted on. After viewing the First Battle of Bull Run, Lowe and other balloonists formed the Union Army Balloon Corps, but disbanded in August 1863. Confederate efforts were even more modest and legend has it that (sadly) the very last silk dress in the entire Confederacy was used to try and make a balloon.

Then a man by the name of Billy Mitchell enlisted as a private in the Spanish-American War, where he became a member of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Subsequently, he served in France during World War I and ultimately became regarded as the father of the U.S. Air Force. It was his stubborn insistence that “the day has passed when armies or navies on the sea can be the arbiter of a nation’s destiny in war. The main power of defense and the power of initiative against an enemy has passed to the air” (November 1918).

That and a statement accusing senior leaders in the Army and Navy of incompetence and “almost treasonable administration of national defense” got him court-martialed. The court, which included Major General Douglas MacArthur as one of the judges, found him guilty on Dec. 17, 1925, and suspended him for five years. Ironically, MacArthur suffered a similar fate decades later for challenging conventional military wisdom.

We are now in the era where wars are fought using lethally armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) piloted from remote locations, and cruise missiles launched from ships up to 1,500 miles away. I was hoping we had the cyber-technology to destroy an enemy’s power infrastructure, disable their communications and simply render their offensive and defensive capabilities useless.

Maybe that’s only feasible for presidential elections using Facebook.

Hollywood Westerns Embody Essential History of the United States

This original movie poster for 1953’s *Shane* sold for $5,676.25 at a November 2008 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Inexplicably, there was a 60-year gap between the first Western to win an Academy Award for Best Picture and the next one. Cimarron (1931), starring Richard Dix and Irene Dunne, was based on the 1929 novel by Edna Ferber that told the tales of the Oklahoma land rushes of 1889 and 1893. The next winner was Dances With Wolves, the 1990 Kevin Costner film that won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.

This was despite the fact that there were a number of notable Western films in the intervening decades: High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), to name a few. My favorite remains Red River (1948), directed by Howard Hawks and introducing Montgomery Clift, the brilliant actor who was Elizabeth Taylor’s close friend and who died too young after a car accident led him to too many pain-killers (that did as advertised).

These were laconic men with a code to live by: Don’t run, stand up and don’t rely on anyone but yourself. Men who liked simple stories that seemed almost incidental to the action. In 1966, Hawks called Robert Mitchum for a role in El Dorado.

“You available, Bob?”

“Sure, Howard. Uh, what’s the story?”

“Oh, you know, Bob. There’s no story.”

Peter Bogdanovich, the director and writer, has six personal favorites and all were directed by either John Ford or Howard Hawks. His nucleus of favorites underscores the Western’s focus: clarity between right and wrong. “Certainly,” Bogdanovich wrote, “the Western is one of the most pervasive icons of Americana; a symbol of frontiers challenged and tamed; a series of morality tales of good and evil that contain within them the essential history of the United States.”

Director John Ford was reputedly prickly and fearless. From his early efforts until his last Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), his films helped hype the myth of the West and the men and women who belonged there. “When the legend becomes fact, sir, print the legend,” a young reporter tells Jimmy Stewart, playing a U.S. Senator in Liberty Valance. That is advice Ford gave and followed.

The mythic Western theme is pervasive, thanks in part to the movies and television. It was how the rest of the world saw us for a long time. We’re all cowboys, gunslingers operating under some unwritten rules way out in the open spaces. Ford’s stories were simply about the individual as the last line of defense. A man takes a stand, no matter what the price, refusing to ask for help. (He had no regard for High Noon, because “No real Western sheriff would ever ask for help.”)

Then it almost seems like television was made for the Western and in the 1950s, we had plenty to choose from on every network. Even popular radio Westerns found it easy to make the transition. The best example may be Gunsmoke, which had established itself as a Saturday night special on radio with William Conrad in the venerable role of Marshal Matt Dillon. The rotund Conrad didn’t fit the visual image, so CBS tried to lure an ex-Glendale High School football star who had lost his USC scholarship due to a surfing accident. His name was Marion Morrison.

We know him as John Wayne, who Ford had molded into a superstar in Western movies. Wayne declined the offer, but agreed to introduce the first episode in 1955 with James Arness (the elder brother of Peter Graves) in the Matt Dillon role. Not surprisingly, it became the longest-running American prime-time TV drama – 639 episodes from 1955 to 1975 and still running in syndication today, a mere 63 years later!

Personally, I’m quite happy that Wayne kept making movies, because in my opinion, he was the Western. But why? Maybe no one summed it up better than director Raoul Walsh when he said, “Dammit, the son of a bitch looked like a man.” Perhaps that’s it. He did look and act like a man, and we never read or heard anything to make us doubt it. Journalist and writer Joan Didion in a profile spoke for a lot of us when she said, “When John Wayne rode through my childhood, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.”

I miss John Wayne and all the things he stood for.

New York Times Reflects One of Our Greatest Freedoms

Bruce Braithwaite’s oil on canvas *The New York Times*, 2014, went to auction in November 2016.

By Jim O’Neal

Ah, freedom of speech, of religion, of assembly – things we all associate with the centrality of our democracy. For me, freedom of the press is the key to an open mind and an open market, the twin foundations of a truly free society. In political philosophical terms and in government, it has been a distinctly American idea since the founding of our great nation.

Others have made claims of a similar nature, but rarely endure. The classic example is the Soviet Constitution of 1936 (the Stalin Constitution), which stressed the inclusion of “freedom of the press,” but the words were cheap imitations since the press was the handmaiden of the ruling Communist Party and merely echoed the party line with absolute fidelity. It was hailed at the time as a paragon of virtue unequalled in history but, ironically, on the very eve of the reign of brutality that started the following year.

Adolph Ochs bought the bankrupt New York Times for $75,000 in 1896 when he was 38 years old. The newspaper had $300,000 in unpaid bills and was losing on average a $1,000 a day. Ochs had a humble beginning, starting as a floor sweeper at 14 with the Knoxville Chronicle. He was a typesetter and reporter with the Louisville Courier Journal at age 18 and by 20 became the owner of the declining Chattanooga Times. He had plunked down $250 of the total sale of $5,750.

The New-York Daily Times had been founded by Henry Jarvis Raymond (1820-1869), who was also credited with being the “Godfather of the GOP” after his political actions in the elections of 1856 and 1860.

Moving quickly after his purchase of the NYT, Ochs repeated what he did with the Chattanooga publication – making it into a newspaper and not a gazette of opinion, or a showcase for star writers. He avoided being a champion for the underdog or top dog or a crusader for political or social reform. Ochs had something to sell – news – and he intended to sell it dispassionately and with the guarantee that it was reliable, verifiable and not deviously insipid.

He eliminated installments of romantic fiction that earlier management believed would lure readers and eschewed scandalous stories based on gossip. Instead, he expanded coverage of financial news, business trends, real estate transactions, and the official activities of government that other newspapers had long ignored. He wanted a paper of record, one that each day would publish a record of every fire in NYC, the arrival of every mail ship, the names of every official visitor to the White House, the precise moment the sun set and the moon rose. His unbending objective was to be impartial and complete – and “not soil the breakfast linen.”

Throughout his publishing career, he made brilliant business decisions – his genius had not only been in the type of newspaper he created, but that he had made such a newspaper profitable. And on the occasion of his 75th birthday in 1933, he issued an optimistic public statement in the midst of the Great Depression in which he asserted that “we are sobering up and painfully getting our house in order. The tragic experience we are having will result in educating the people that care, caution and conservatism are as necessary in economics as in physical health and that the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount cannot be ignored, nor forgotten. They should continue to be our guide to a philosophy of life.”

The New York Times motto of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” has been reviewed for relevance several times and always decided in the affirmative. It’s proudly printed on the upper left-hand section of the front page every day. I wonder if anyone is still aware of its existence?

Steve Jobs Admired Our Greatest Industrial Designers – and It Shows

A 15-piece “Manhattan” Chrome-Plated Brass Cocktail Set, designed by Norman Bel Geddes and manufactured circa 1937, sold for $9,000 at a December 2008 auction.

By Jim O’Neal

In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, he devotes a chapter (12) to the evolution of Job’s lifelong obsession with design after listening to his father’s habit of describing the styling intricacies of various cars. It includes brief periods of infatuation with Sony, flirting with the aesthetically sublime Zen Buddhism, Porsche (not Ferrari), rectangles with rounded edges (which drove the Apple team crazy), and, finally, the power of sleek (not slick), thin, clean and (above all) SIMPLE.

Jobs bemoaned the fact that there were no towering figures energizing the world of industrial design the way that Raymond Loewy (1893-1986) and Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) – the last living member of Bauhaus – had done. Especially not in Silicon Valley.

This was certainly not true in September 1935, when a New York Times critic wrote about a stage play in New Haven: “Meeting the scenic requirements of the play called for ingenuity, inspiration and a superior sense of the practical.” This stage designer did not foresee that his design sense would have a far more pervasive effect on everyday American life than he ever could have had as a stage designer. What the critic recognized was a “superior sense of the practical” – that would be obvious throughout the rest of this designer’s career.

His name was Henry Dreyfuss (1904-72), one of the pivotal figures in the emergence of industrial design.

Dreyfuss would move to center stage in the comparatively new discipline of industrial design, where participants were energized by the belief that anything could be improved by design … with the possible exception (perhaps) of the common egg. They would bring this supremely confident attitude to improving the design of a typical door handle as they would the interior of Air Force One.

Shape, color, utility, tactility, materials, even whimsy. All could be brought to bear as needed.

Dreyfuss’ work would influence everything from airplanes to alarm clocks, from locomotives to telephones (personally, I thought his “Princess” phone was a clumsy, unstable pink dud), and thermostats to John Deere tractors. Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) – a stage designer himself and one of the seminal figures of industrial design – was an early lasting influence on Dreyfuss. One of his precepts held that “the value of form lies in its ability to express significance clearly.”

I’m not exactly sure what that means, but others use the Honeywell thermostat as an example. While its presence became invisible because it became basic to our lives, I think the Honeywell-type thermostat’s longevity has more to do with the fact that it plays its role so well.

I’m more familiar with Loewy, another giant of industrial design who made a statement whose truth seems indisputable: “The most difficult things to design are the simplest. To improve the design of a threshing machine is easy, particularly compared to, say, a scalpel or needle.” Perhaps the complexity of redesigning the simplest things derived from these items already being so close to the essence of their purpose.

Industrial design, at its best, sends powerful signals of speed, of desirability, of sleekness, of sensuality. Much of the energy in industrial designs defining decades was directed toward streamlining or, more accurately, to use Dreyfuss’ word, “cleanlining.” Loewy summed it up: “Industrial design amounts to the shaping of everyday life”… the most inspired of those designs shape it for the better.

Steve Jobs must have embraced this to the fullest since all the Apple products I use seem to have a uniquely superior combination of form and function that I find addictive.