The Fence Telephone

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At the turn of the 20th century, rural cooperative associations found a way to install telephone networks without erecting poles: They simply connected their wires to the existing pasture fences.

“Fifteen or twenty farmers in Clay Township, Cass County, are enjoying the privileges of first-class telephone service without the annoyance of a monthly collector thrusting a bill for rental under their noses,” reported the Washington Post in 1903. “Their homes are connected by a system of wires, and the novelty of the plan lies in the fact that the barbed wire fences are utilized as a conveyor of neighborhood gossip. Just who conceived the idea that these strands of wire that for years had served only one purpose could be made to do a double duty is not known.”

Maude Smith Galloway and her husband arrived in Texas in 1906. “We talked to a few close neighbors over a telephone hooked to a barbed wire fence when we came to Llano,” she said, “and now we have the dial system and can talk to any of the rural districts in the country.”

Historian David B. Sicilia wrote, “Barbed wire unwittingly became part of the nation’s budding telephone network. What kept crops and animals apart helped bring people together.”

(Alan Krell, The Devil’s Rope, 2002.)

| Technology

Will Power

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare ‘It’s Greek to me’, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool’s paradise — why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then — to give the devil his due — if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then — by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! for goodness’ sake! what the dickens! but me no buts — it is all one to me for you are quoting Shakespeare.

— Bernard Levin, Enthusiasms, 1983

| Language · Literature

In a Word

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pathographesis
n. writing inspired by illness

After a shining start, Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel lost his patronage and his health, leaving him remembered largely for a private journal that became his only reality, the symptom and source of his illness. In the end it ran to 12 compulsively written volumes totaling 6 million words, a real-time description of its writer’s inner life:

  • “I can find no words for what I feel. My consciousness is withdrawn into itself; I hear my heart beating, and my life passing. It seems to me that I have become a statue on the banks of the river of time, that I am the spectator of some mystery, and shall issue from it old, or no longer capable of age.”
  • “Am I not more attached to the ennuis I know, than in love with pleasures unknown to me?”
  • “At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to this study.”

He was slowly suffocating as he wrote his final entries — the last, written on April 19, 1881, reads, “A terrible sense of oppression. My flesh and my heart fail me. Que vivre est difficile, ô mon coeur fatigué!”

“We think our protagonist was virtually unique in the degree to which he turned his diary into a fetishistic addiction, not so different from the substance addiction common in his culture,” write George S. Rousseau and Caroline Warman. “His diary was his fix. Boundaries between himself and his diary are nonexistent. And his larger definition of life, or living, was so firmly fused with the diary that he could not conceive of life, or living, apart from it.”

(George S. Rousseau and Caroline Warman, “Writing as Pathology, Poison, or Cure: Henri-Frédéric Amiel’s Journal intime,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 3:3 [2002], 229–262.)

| Literature

A Missed Train

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Is this art? It’s The Railway Station, painted by William Powell Frith in 1862. In his 1914 book Art, critic Clive Bell singled out Frith’s painting to claim that it wasn’t art at all. Why? Bell said it lacks “significant form,” which he defined as “lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms, and relations of forms, that stir our aesthetic emotions.” Frith’s painting, he said, provoked pleasant feelings in him but no aesthetic emotion:

Few pictures are better known or liked than Frith’s Paddington Station: certainly I should be the last to grudge it its popularity. Many a weary forty minutes have I whiled away disentangling its fascinating incidents and forging for each an imaginary past and an improbable future. But certain though it is that Frith’s masterpiece, or engravings of it, have provided thousands with half-hours of curious and fanciful pleasure, it is not less certain that no one has experienced before it one half-second of aesthetic rapture — and this although the picture contains several pretty passages of color, and is by no means badly painted. Paddington Station is not a work of art; it is an interesting and amusing document in which line and color are used to recount anecdotes, suggest ideas and indicate the manners and customs of an age: they are not used to provoke aesthetic emotion.

Was he right? Notably, in a 2012 survey of 105 art professionals, not one agreed with him: 97% of the respondents said they felt Frith’s painting was art, and the remaining 3% were unsure.

“Admittedly, these data do not prove that Bell’s theory is wrong,” the authors note. “The sensibilities required to detect significant form and experience the aesthetic emotion it provokes could be even rarer than Bell claimed.”

(Richard Kamber and Taylor Enoch, “Why Is That Art?”, in Florian Cova and Sébastien Réhault, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics, 2019.)

| Art

Summary

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A letter to the Daily Telegraph, Feb. 26, 1913:

Sir,

Everyone seems to agree upon the necessity of putting a stop to Suffragist outrages; but no one seems certain how to do so. There are two, and only two, ways in which this can be done. Both will be effectual.

1. Kill every woman in the United Kingdom.

2. Give women the vote.

Yours truly,

Bertha Brewster

| History · Society

RSS Quiz

The Royal Statistical Society has released its Christmas quiz for 2021, a set of 11 puzzles that require general knowledge, logic, lateral thinking, and searching skills, but no specialist mathematical knowledge.

Anyone may enter, individually or in teams of up to five. The top entry will receive £150 in Wiley book vouchers, second place £50 in book vouchers, and the next three entries a puzzle book or board game. And everyone who achieves a score of 50 percent or higher will win a donation to their favorite charity or good cause.

Entries must be received by 21:00 GMT on January 31. See the quiz web page for the rules and some tips for budding solvers.

| Puzzles

Zipf’s Law

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In any language, the most frequently used word occurs about twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, and so on.

In American English text, the word the occurs most frequently, accounting for nearly 7% of all word occurrences. The second most frequent word, of, accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words, and so on.

This pattern obtains even in non-natural languages like Esperanto. It’s named for American linguist George Kingsley Zipf, who popularized it.

12/24/2021 UPDATE: Apart from languages, the law is observed in measurements of the citations of scientific papers, web hits, copies of books sold, telephone calls, the magnitude of earthquakes, the diameter of moon craters, the intensity of solar flares, the intensity of wars, and the populations of cities. See this paper. (Thanks, Snehal.)

| Language

Windtowers

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Marco Polo noticed an interesting feature in the architecture of Hormuz: “The heat is tremendous, and on that account their houses are built with ventilators to catch the wind. These ventilators are placed on the side from which the wind comes, and they bring the wind down into the house to cool it. But for this the heat would be utterly unbearable.” This technique has been used for thousands of years, originally in ancient Iran and now throughout West Asia: By catching the prevailing wind and directing it through the interior of a house, the residents can greatly increase air circulation while avoiding the sun’s heat.

In 2005 tests using a wind tunnel, Vipac Engineering confirmed that windtowers are effective in reducing the impact of summer climate — and their passivity makes them valuable for energy conservation.

(Anne Coles and Peter Jackson, Windtower, 2007.)

| Technology

Simplest Terms

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English geographer Halford Mackinder’s 1914 paper “The Geographical Pivot of History” helped to found the study of geopolitics. In it, he described his Heartland Theory, in which the world’s land surface was divided into the “World-Island,” meaning Europe, Asia, and Africa; the “offshore islands,” including Britain and Japan; and the “outlying islands,” including the continents of North America, South America, and Australia. At the world’s center lies the Heartland, stretching from the Volga to the Yangtze and from the Himalayas to the Arctic.

In 1919 he reduced his theory to three startlingly stark statements:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland.

Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island.

Who rules the World Island commands the World.

He thought the “pivot area” was impregnable to attack by sea and thus capable of building a land power that could conquer the world.

“No mere academic theoretician, Mackinder injected his Heartland thesis into the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that followed World War I,” write Mark Monmonier and George Schnell in Map Appreciation. “He recommended buffer states in Eastern Europe to prevent any nation(s) from gaining control of the Heartland, especially through a German-Soviet alliance. The conference’s subsequent creation of independent states from territories that had been parts of Austria-Hungary, Germany, or Russia varied little from Mackinder’s proposal and included Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (along the Baltic Sea) and Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia (extending from the Baltic to the Adriatic).”

| History