LOUIS RIGOLLY, THE 1ST TO BREAK THE 100 MPH BARRIER

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Louis Rigolly, the first man who drove a Gobron-Brillié racing car at over 100 miles per hour, on a day like today in 1904.

Louis Rigolly (1876–1958), a Frenchman, was the first man to drive a car at over 100 miles per hour (160 km/h).

He set a record of 103.561 mph (166.665 km/h) on a beach at Ostend in Belgium on 21 July 1904, driving a 13.5 litre Gobron-Brillié racing car. He covered a 1 kilometre course in 21.6 seconds, beating Belgian Pierre de Caters mark of 97.25 mph (156.51 km/h), set the previous May over the same 1 kilometre course in Ostend. The record stood for just three months. Rigolly also participated in early Grand Prix motor racing, winning the Light car class of the inaugural Circuit des Ardennes in 1902, driving a Gobron-Brillié.

Gobron-Brillié was an early French automobile manufactured from 1898 to 1930. 

The original company, Societé des Moteurs Gobron-Brillié, was founded by the French engineer, Eugène Brillié, and industrialist, Gustave Gobron, at 13, quai de Boulogne, Boulogne-sur-Seine, near Paris, in 1898.

Eugène Brillié studied at the École centrale des arts et manufactures, and then went on to work, from 1887 to 1898, at the Compagnie des chemins de fer de l'Ouest. Meanwhile, Gustave Gobron (15 June 1846 to 27 September 1911) started as director of Godillot, a supply company to the military, but took up politics, and was elected to the National Assembly, from 1885 to 1889, at which point he created a car manufacturing company, under his own name. The two men went into partnership, creating the Société des Moteurs Gobron-Brillié.

Brillié had developed an unusual type of internal-combustion engine, with two opposed pistons within each cylinder. The compression stroke involved the two pistons approaching each other, and then the ignition was subsequently triggered between them. The inlet and exhaust valves were also placed at this point of closest-approach between the pistons.

Mounted vertically, the lower piston in each cylinder was connected by a conventional connecting rod to the crankshaft, while the upper pistons were connected to an overhung yoke, with two long connecting rods back down to the crankshaft, one on each side.

Instead of a carburettor, a revolving petrol distributor was developed, with the quantity of fuel being regulated by a drip-feed. One advantage of this device was that a wide variety of fuels could be used.

The engine was mounted at the rear, on a triangulated tubular chassis, with chain-drive to the wheels.

By 1899 they were registered at 17 rue Philippe de Girard, Paris.

By 1900, the company was producing about 150 cars per year. The cars were also built, under licence, in France as La Nanceene, and in Belgium as the Gobron-Nagant, and Botwoods of Ipswich sold them in England as Teras.

When Brillié left the company, at the end of 1903, the design was changed to use a more conventional pressed-steel ladder-frame chassis, the engine was moved to the front, and the fuel-distributor was replaced by a carburettor, but they still kept the opposed-piston engine design.

After the First World War, the company changed name to Automobiles Gobron, and moved to new premises at Levallois-Perret. The design continued to use opposed-piston engines, until 1922 (a 25 hp model).

In 1922, the design was changed to using a more conventional 1.5-litre Chapuis-Dornier engine, and was additionally marketed under the name of Stabilia, but it sold badly. By 1927, the company was producing about 250 vehicles a year, but by 1930 it was down to two, and the company was forced to file for bankruptcy.

Brillié had left the company at the end of 1903, to join the Ateliers Schneider at Le Havre (formerly the Ateliers d’artillerie des Forges et Chantiers de la Méditerranée, which had been bought by Schneider in 1897). There, he built touring cars and commercial vehicles of more conventional design.

Schneider progressively took more control of the company, and abandoned the fabrication touring cars, preferring to develop the utility vehicles market.

In 1906, the Brillié company delivered its first Paris buses. The installations at Le Havre were not well adapted, and the works were moved to other factories in Chalon and Champagne-sur-Seine. In March 1914, Schneider took his automobile activity to the Société d’outillage mécanique et d’usinage d’artillerie.

During the First World War, in December 1915, a meeting between Colonel Estienne and Brillié took place to elaborate a tank project. At the start of January 1916, Joffre gave the go-ahead for the project and, on 31 January, put in for a purchase of 400 of what he called terrestrial battleships, armed with a 75 mm cannon . This was the first French tank, the Schneider CA1.

More information: Unique Cars and Parts

Move fast. 
Speed is one of your main advantages 
over large competitors.

Sam Altman

THE ARROYO SECO, THE FIRST CALIFORNIAN FREEWAY

Today, The Grandma has been reading about the Arroyo Seco Parkway, one of the oldest freeways in the United States, that was opened on a day like today in 1940.

The Arroyo Seco Parkway, also known as the Pasadena Freeway, is one of the oldest freeways in the United States. 

It connects Los Angeles with Pasadena alongside the Arroyo Seco seasonal river. Mostly opened in 1940, it represents the transitional phase between early parkways and later freeways. It conformed to modern standards when it was built, but is now regarded as a narrow, outdated roadway.

A 1953 extension brought the south end to the Four Level Interchange in downtown Los Angeles and a connection with the rest of the freeway system.

The road remains largely as it was on opening day, though the plants in its median have given way to a steel guard rail, and most recently to concrete barriers, and it now carries the designation State Route 110, not historic U.S. Route 66. Between 1954 and 2010, it was designated the Pasadena Freeway. 

In 2010, as part of plans to revitalize its scenic value and improve safety, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) restored the roadway's original name.

All of its original bridges remain, including four that predate the parkway itself, built across the Arroyo Seco before the 1930s. The road has a crash rate roughly twice the rate of other freeways, largely due to an outdated design lacking in acceleration and deceleration lanes.

The Arroyo Seco Parkway is designated a State Scenic Highway, National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, and National Scenic Byway. It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2011.

The Arroyo Seco is an intermittent stream that carries rainfall from the San Gabriel Mountains southerly through western Pasadena into the Los Angeles River near downtown Los Angeles. During the dry season, it served as a faster wagon connection between the two cities than the all-weather road on the present Huntington Drive.

The first known survey for a permanent roadway through the Arroyo was made by T. D. Allen of Pasadena in 1895, and in 1897 two more proposals were made, one for a scenic parkway and the other for a commuter cycleway. The latter was partially constructed and opened by Horace Dobbins, who incorporated the California Cycleway Company and bought 10 km right-of-way from downtown Pasadena to Avenue 54 in Highland Park, Los Angeles.

Construction began in 1899, and about 2.0 km of the elevated wooden bikeway were opened on January 1, 1900, starting near Pasadena's Hotel Green and ending near the Raymond Hotel. The majority of its route is now Edmondson Alley; a toll booth was located near the north end, in the present Central Park.

Due to the end of the bicycle craze of the 1890s and the existing Pacific Electric Railway lines connecting Pasadena to Los Angeles, the cycleway did not and was not expected to turn a profit, and never extended beyond the Raymond Hotel into the Arroyo Seco. Sometime before 1910, the structure was dismantled, and the wood sold for lumber, and the Pasadena Rapid Transit Company, a failed venture headed by Dobbins to construct a streetcar line, acquired the right-of-way.

Due to the rise of the automobile, most subsequent plans for the Arroyo Seco included a roadway, though they differed as to the purpose: some, influenced by the City Beautiful movement, concentrated on the park, while others, particularly those backed by the Automobile Club of Southern California (ACSC), had as their primary purpose a fast road connecting the two cities. The first plan that left the Arroyo Seco in South Pasadena to better serve downtown Pasadena was drawn up by Pasadena City Engineer Harvey W.

Hincks in 1916 and supported by the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce and ACSC. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Harland Bartholomew's 1924 Major Street Traffic Plan for Los Angeles, while concentrating on traffic relief, and noting that the Arroyo Seco Parkway would be a major highway, suggested that it be built as a parkway, giving motorists a great deal of incidental recreation and pleasure. By the mid-1930s, plans for a primarily recreational parkway had been overshadowed by the need to carry large numbers of commuters.

Debates continued on the exact location of the parkway, in particular whether it would bypass downtown Pasadena. In the late 1920s, Los Angeles acquired properties between San Fernando Road and Pasadena Avenue, and City Engineer Lloyd Aldrich began grading between Avenues 60 and 66 in the early 1930s.

By June 1932, residents of Highland Park and Garvanza, who had paid special assessments to finance improvement of the park, became suspicious of what appeared to be a road, then graded along the Arroyo Seco's west side between Via Marisol (then Hermon Avenue) and Princess Drive. Merchants on North Figueroa Street (then Pasadena Avenue) also objected, due to the loss of business they would suffer from a bypass. Work stopped while the interested parties could work out the details, although, in late 1932 and early 1933, Aldrich was authorized to grade a cheaper route along the east side between Avenue 35 and Hermon Avenue. 

To the north, Pasadena and South Pasadena endorsed in 1934 what was essentially Hincks's 1916 plan, but lacked the money to build it. A bill was introduced in 1935 to add the route to the state highway system, and after some debate a new Route 205 was created as a swap for the Palmdale-Wrightwood Route 186, as the legislature had just greatly expanded the system in 1933, and the California Highway Commission opposed a further increase.

6.0 km section opened on July 20, 1940, connecting Orange Grove Avenue in South Pasadena with Avenue 40 in Los Angeles.

More information: PBS Socal

The story of 'Highway' is completely about travel. 
It is about the fascination of travel to an extent 
that I don't want to even reach the destination 
and also being away from society gives you 
a certain view of the society, 
so that was the intention of the film.

Imtiaz Ali

1903, MAURICE GARIN WINS THE FIRST TOUR DE FRANCE

Today afternoon, The Grandma has been watching Le Tour de France. She likes cyclism and she is a great follower of this amazing event. She has remembered Maurice Garin, who won the first Tour on a day like today in 1903.

Maurice-François Garin (3 March 1871-19 February 1957) was an Italian-French road bicycle racer best known for winning the inaugural Tour de France in 1903, and for being stripped of his title in the second Tour in 1904 along with eight others, for cheating. He was of Italian origin but adopted French nationality on 21 December 1901.

Garin was born the son of Maurice-Clément Garin and Maria Teresa Ozello in Arvier, in the French-speaking Aosta Valley in north-west Italy, close to the French border. The name Garin was the most common in the native village of Maurice, called Chez-les-Garin, belonging to five of the seven families. They had four daughters and five sons, of whom Maurice was the first son.

In 1885 the family left Arvier to work on the other side of the Alps, almost to the Belgian border.

Garin worked as a chimney sweep. He later moved to France. By the age of 15, he was living in Reims as a chimney sweep. He moved to Charleroi in Belgium but by 1889 he was back in France, at Maubeuge.

Garin's younger brother, Joseph-Isidore, died in 1889. The father died shortly afterwards in Arvier. Garin's brothers François and César stayed in northern France and, with Maurice, opened a cycle shop in the lower end of the boulevard de Paris in Roubaix in 1895. Brothers César and Ambroise also competed as professional cyclists.

Garin moved to Lens, Pas-de-Calais in 1902 and lived there the rest of his life. He bought his first bicycle for 405 francs, twice what a forge worker would earn in a week of 12-hour days, in 1889. Racing did not interest him but he did ride round the town fast enough to be called a madman -le fou.

Until 2004, it was said that Garin had taken French nationality when he was 21, in 1892 but in 2004, the reporter Franco Cuaz found the naturalizing act and Garin took French nationality 21 December 1901.

He began racing in northern France in the same year when the secretary of the cycling club at Maubeuge persuaded him to enter a regional race, Maubeuge-Hirson-Maubeuge, over 200 km.

Garin became a professional by chance. He planned to ride a race at Avesnes-sur-Helpes, 25 km from where he lived. He arrived to find it was only for professionals. Not allowed to compete, he waited until the riders had left, raced after them and passed them all. He fell off twice but finished ahead of the racers. The crowd was enthusiastic but the organisers less so. They refused to pay him the 150 francs due to the real winner, so spectators raised 300 francs among themselves. Garin became a professional.

His first true professional win was in a 24-hour race in Paris in 1893. It was held on the Champ de Mars, site of the Eiffel Tower. The riders competed, as was the custom, behind a succession of pacers. The event took place in February and the cold drove out riders one after the other. Garin rode 701 km in 24 hours, beating the only other rider to finish by 49 km.

The first Paris–Roubaix was in 1896; Garin came third, 15 minutes behind Josef Fischer.

The Tour de France began to promote a new daily sports newspaper, L'Auto ahead of the largest paper in France, Le Vélo, which sold 80,000 copies a day. Some of Le Vélo's advertisers had disagreed with the paper's support for Alfred Dreyfus, a soldier found guilty on trumped up charges of selling secrets to the Germans but eventually acquitted after being sent to Devil's Island. The Tour was to promote their new rival paper, L'Auto.

The editor, Henri Desgrange, planned a five-week race from 31 May to 5 July. This proved too daunting and only 15 entered. Desgrange cut the length to 19 days and offered a daily allowance.

The race began at the Au Reveil Matin café at a crossroads in Montgeron, south of Paris, and ended in Ville-d'Avray, another suburb, having circuited France in six days of racing over 2,428 km. One stage, between Nantes and Paris, was 471 km. Sixty riders started at an entry fee of 10 francs and 21 finished. Garin won 3,000 francs for finishing first in 94h 33m 14s, or 6,125 francs in all with his other prizes. Lucien Pothier was second and Fernand Augereau third.

Garin retired from cycling and ran his garage in Lens until his death. The garage is still there, although wholly changed from Garin's era.

More information: Cyclist

Successful change leaders exemplify excellence, 
visionary planning, adaptive leadership, a
nd active engagement to navigate challenges a
nd inspire their team towards sustainable organisational evolution.

Maurice Garin

INTEL IS FOUNDED IN MOUNTAIN VIEW (CA) IN 1968

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Intel, the American multinational corporation that was founded in Mountain View, California, on a day like today in 1968.

Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware.

Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer components such as central processing units (CPUs) and related products for business and consumer markets. It was the world's third-largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue in 2024 and has been included in the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue since 2007. It was one of the first companies listed on Nasdaq.

Intel supplies microprocessors for most manufacturers of computer systems, and is one of the developers of the x86 series of instruction sets found in most personal computers (PCs). It also manufactures chipsets, network interface controllers, flash memory, graphics processing units (GPUs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and other devices related to communications and computing.

Intel has a strong presence in the high-performance general-purpose and gaming PC market with its Intel Core line of CPUs, whose high-end models are among the fastest consumer CPUs, as well as its Intel Arc series of GPUs.

Intel was founded on July 18, 1968, by semiconductor pioneers Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, along with investor Arthur Rock, and is associated with the executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove.

The company was a key component of the rise of Silicon Valley as a high-tech center, as well as being an early developer of static (SRAM) and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips, which represented the majority of its business until 1981. Although Intel created the world's first commercial microprocessor chip -the Intel 4004- in 1971, it was not until the success of the PC in the early 1990s that this became its primary business.

During the 1990s, the partnership between Microsoft Windows and Intel, known as Wintel, became instrumental in shaping the PC landscape, and solidified Intel's position on the market. As a result, Intel invested heavily in new microprocessor designs in the mid to late 1990s, fostering the rapid growth of the computer industry. During this period, it became the dominant supplier of PC microprocessors, with a market share of 90%, and was known for aggressive and anti-competitive tactics in defense of its market position, particularly against AMD, as well as a struggle with Microsoft for control over the direction of the PC industry.

Since the 2000s and especially since the late 2010s, Intel has faced increasing competition from AMD, which has led to a decline in its dominance and market share in the PC market. Nevertheless, with a 68.4% market share as of 2023, Intel still leads the x86 market by a wide margin.

More information: Intel

 Intel has been my second family. 
It is an amazing company that has changed 
the way people live their lives, 
and I am proud to have contributed to 
that in a meaningful way.

Renee James

WILLIS CARRIER CREATES THE FIRST AIR CONDITIONER

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Willis Carrier, the American engineer who created the first air conditioning on a day like today in 1902.

Willis Haviland Carrier (November 26, 1876-October 7, 1950) was an American engineer, best known for inventing modern air conditioning, inventing the first electrical air conditioning unit in 1902.

In 1915, he founded Carrier Corporation, a company specializing in the manufacture and distribution of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems.

Willis Haviland Carrier was born on November 26, 1876, in Angola, New York, the son of Duane Williams Carrier (1836-1908) and Elizabeth R. Haviland (1845-1888). He graduated from Angola Academy in 1894 and from the Buffalo High School in 1897.

He studied at Cornell University starting in 1897 and graduated in 1901 with a Master of Engineering degree.

After graduating, Carrier joined the Buffalo Forge Company as a research engineer.
In Buffalo, New York, on July 17, 1902, in response to an air quality problem experienced at the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company of Brooklyn, New York, Willis Carrier submitted drawings for what became recognized as the world's first modern air conditioning system. It was so humid in summer that the paper grew and shrank, which resulted in poor quality images, because the color printing process involved running the same piece of paper up to four times, each with a different color ink.

The 1902 installation marked the birth of air conditioning because of the addition of humidity control, which led to the recognition by authorities in the field that A/C must perform four basic functions:

-control temperature

-control humidity

-control air circulation and ventilation

-cleanse the air

After several more years of refinement and field testing, on January 2, 1906, Carrier was granted U.S. patent 808,897 for an Apparatus for Treating Air, the world's first spray-type air conditioning equipment. It was designed to humidify or dehumidify air, heating water for the first function and cooling it for the second.

In 1906, Carrier discovered that constant dew-point depression provided practically constant relative humidity, which later became known among air conditioning engineers as the law of constant dew-point depression. On this discovery he based the design of an automatic control system, for which he filed a patent claim on May 17, 1907. U.S. patent 1,085,971 was issued on February 3, 1914.

In 1908, the Carrier Air Conditioner Company of America was created as a subsidiary of the Buffalo Forge Company, with Willis Carrier as its vice president.

On December 3, 1911, Carrier presented what is perhaps the most significant document ever prepared on air conditioning -Rational Psychrometric Formulae- at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It became known as the Magna Carta of Psychrometrics.

This document tied together the concepts of relative humidity, absolute humidity, and dew-point temperature, thus making it possible to design air-conditioning systems to precisely fit the requirements at hand.

With the onset of World War I in late 1914, the Buffalo Forge Company, where Carrier had been employed for 12 years, decided to confine its activities entirely to manufacturing. The result was that seven young engineers pooled together their life savings of $32,600 to form the Carrier Engineering Corporation in New York on June 26, 1915. The seven were Carrier, J. Irvine Lyle, Edward T. Murphy, L. Logan Lewis, Ernest T. Lyle, Frank Sanna, Alfred E. Stacey Jr., and Edmund P. Heckel. The company eventually settled on Frelinghuysen Avenue in Newark, New Jersey.

In 1930, Carrier started Toyo Carrier and Samsung Applications in Japan and Korea. South Korea is now the largest producer for air conditioning in the world. 

The Carrier Corporation pioneered the design and manufacture of refrigeration machines to cool large spaces. By increasing industrial production in the summer months, air conditioning revolutionized American life. The company became a subsidiary of United Technologies Corporation in 1980, and remained so until 2020, when it was spun off again as an independent publicly traded company.

The Carrier Corporation remains a world leader in commercial and residential HVAC and refrigeration.

In 2018, the Carrier Corporation had sales of $18.6 billion and employed 53,000 people.

The Willis H. Carrier Total Indoor Environmental Quality Lab at the Syracuse University's Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems is named in his honour. The lab was established in 2010 with a donation from the Carrier Corp.

More information: Willis Carrier

My family lived off the land and summer evening meals 
featured baked stuffed tomatoes, potato salad, corn on the cob, 
fresh shelled peas and homemade ice cream 
with strawberries from our garden. 
With no air conditioning in those days, 
the cool porch was the center of our universe after the scorching days.

David Mixner

'SE PÅ DEG DU DANSER VIDERE I LIVET' BY HKEEM

Se på deg du danser videre i livet
Jeg er fortsatt på det samme kapitlet

De sier tid leger alle sår
Men jeg tro'kke det gjelder for meg
Det er like klart som det var i går
Da vi kjørte i, kjørte i

Bilen min, late night talking
Dine øyne holdt meg våken
De sier tid leger alle sår
Men det føles ikke sånn nå
Det føles ikke sånn nå

Se på deg du danser videre i livet
Jeg er fortsatt på det samme kapitlet
Ååå, du bare viska meg ut
Mens jeg skrev deg med penn
Ååå, du danser videre i livet

Jeg hadde aldri trodd det skulle ende sånn her, nei
For du sa vi var for alltid og jeg trodde på deg (deg)
Det er for sent, men jeg vil tilbake
Du sa du kun ville ha distanse
Tiden leger sår, men det går sakte for meg
(Jeg husker fortsatt)

Bilen min, late night talking
Dine øyne holdt meg våken
De sier tid leger alle sår (tid leger alle sår)
Men det føles ikke sånn nå (føles ikke sånn nå)
Det føles ikke sånn nå (nei, det føles ikke sånn nå)

Se på deg du danser videre i livet (danser videre)
Jeg er fortsatt på det samme kapitlet (samme kapitlet)
Ååå, du bare viska meg ut
Mens jeg skrev deg med penn
Ååå, du danser videre i livet (danser, danser videre)

Se på deg du danser videre i livet (danser videre)
Jeg er fortsatt på det samme kapitlet (samme kapitlet)
Ååå, du bare viska meg ut
Mens jeg skrev deg med penn
Ååå, du danser videre i livet

I livet
Kapitlet

Se på deg du danser videre i livet
Jeg er fortsatt på det samme kapitlet
Ååå, du bare viska meg ut
Mens jeg skrev deg med penn
Ååå, du danser videre i livet

Hkeem

EMIL KRAEPELIN GIVES A NAME TO ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Emil Kraepelin, the German psychiatrist who gave a name to Alzheimer's disease in his book Clinical Psychiatry on a day like today in 1910.

Emil Wilhelm Georg Magnus Kraepelin (15 February 1856-7 October 1926) was a German psychiatrist. H. J. Eysenck's Encyclopedia of Psychology identifies him as the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, psychopharmacology and psychiatric genetics.

Kraepelin believed the chief origin of psychiatric disease to be biological and genetic malfunction. His theories dominated psychiatry at the start of the 20th century and, despite the later psychodynamic influence of Sigmund Freud and his disciples, enjoyed a revival at century's end. While he proclaimed his own high clinical standards of gathering information by means of expert analysis of individual cases, he also drew on reported observations of officials not trained in psychiatry.

His textbooks do not contain detailed case histories of individuals but mosaic-like compilations of typical statements and behaviors from patients with a specific diagnosis. He has been described as a scientific manager and a political operator, who developed a large-scale, clinically oriented, epidemiological research programme. He developed racist psychiatric theories.

Kraepelin postulated that there is a specific brain or other biological pathology underlying each of the major psychiatric disorders. As a colleague of Alois Alzheimer, he was a co-discoverer of Alzheimer's disease, and his laboratory discovered its pathological basis. 

Kraepelin was confident that it would someday be possible to identify the pathological basis of each of the major psychiatric disorders.

More information: Estonian Academy Publishers

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease and the cause of 60-70% of cases of dementia. The most common early symptom is difficulty in remembering recent events. As the disease advances, symptoms can include problems with language, disorientation (including easily getting lost), mood swings, loss of motivation, self-neglect, and behavioral issues. As a person's condition declines, they often withdraw from family and society. Gradually, bodily functions are lost, ultimately leading to death. Although the speed of progression can vary, the average life expectancy following diagnosis is three to twelve years.

The causes of Alzheimer's disease remain poorly understood. There are many environmental and genetic risk factors associated with its development. The strongest genetic risk factor is from an allele of apolipoprotein E. Other risk factors include a history of head injury, clinical depression, and high blood pressure. The progression of the disease is largely characterised by the accumulation of malformed protein deposits in the cerebral cortex, called amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. These misfolded protein aggregates interfere with normal cell function, and over time lead to irreversible degeneration of neurons and loss of synaptic connections in the brain. A probable diagnosis is based on the history of the illness and cognitive testing, with medical imaging and blood tests to rule out other possible causes. Initial symptoms are often mistaken for normal brain aging. Examination of brain tissue is needed for a definite diagnosis, but this can only take place after death.

No treatments can stop or reverse its progression, though some may temporarily improve symptoms. A healthy diet, physical activity, and social engagement are generally beneficial in aging, and may help in reducing the risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's. Affected people become increasingly reliant on others for assistance, often placing a burden on caregivers. The pressures can include social, psychological, physical, and economic elements. Exercise programs may be beneficial with respect to activities of daily living and can potentially improve outcomes. Behavioral problems or psychosis due to dementia are sometimes treated with antipsychotics, but this has an increased risk of early death.

As of 2020, there were approximately 50 million people worldwide with Alzheimer's disease. It most often begins in people over 65 years of age, although up to 10% of cases are early-onset impacting those in their 30s to mid-60s. It affects about 6% of people 65 years and older, and women more often than men.  

The disease is named after German psychiatrist and pathologist Alois Alzheimer, who first described it in 1906. 

More information: Alzheimer's Association

Caring for an Alzheimer's patient is a situation
that can utterly consume the lives and well-being 
of the people giving care, 
just as the disorder consumes its victims.

Leeza Gibbons

'LA LIBERTE GUIDANT LE PEUPLE' BY EUGÈNE DELACROIX

Today, The Grandma has been remembering last time she visited Le Louvre in Paris, and she could admire Liberty Leading the People, the painting by the French artist Eugène Delacroix.

Liberty Leading the People, in French La Liberté guidant le peuple is a painting of the Romantic era by the French artist Eugène Delacroix, commemorating the July Revolution of 1830 that toppled King Charles X (r. 1824-1830).

A bare-breasted woman of the people with a Phrygian cap personifying the concept and Goddess of Liberty, accompanied by a young boy brandishing a pistol in each hand, leads a group of various people forward over a barricade and the bodies of the fallen while holding aloft the flag of the French Revolution -the tricolour, which again became France's national flag after these events- in one hand, and brandishing a bayonetted musket with the other. The figure of Liberty is also viewed as a symbol of France and the French Republic known as Marianne. The painting is sometimes wrongly thought to depict the French Revolution of 1789.

Liberty Leading the People is exhibited in the Louvre in Paris.

By the time Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People, he was already the acknowledged driving force of the Romantic school in French painting. Delacroix, who was born as the Age of Enlightenment was giving way to the ideas and style of romanticism, rejected the emphasis on precise drawing that characterised the academic art of his time, and instead gave a new prominence to freely brushed colour.

Delacroix painted this work in the autumn of 1830. In a letter to his brother dated 21 October, he wrote: My bad mood is vanishing thanks to hard work. I've embarked on a modern subject -a barricade. And if I haven't fought for my country at least I'll paint for her. The painting was first exhibited at the official Paris Salon of 1831.

Delacroix depicted Liberty as both an allegorical goddess-figure and a robust woman of the people. The mound of corpses and wreckage acts as a kind of pedestal from which Liberty strides, barefoot and bare-breasted, out of the canvas and into the space of the viewer. The Phrygian cap she wears had come to symbolize liberty during the first French Revolution of 1789. The painting has been seen as a marker to the end of the Age of Enlightenment, as many scholars see the end of the French Revolution as the start of the Romantic era.

The fighters are from a mixture of social classes, ranging from the bourgeoisie represented by the young man in a top hat, a student from the prestigious École Polytechnique wearing the traditional bicorne, to the revolutionary urban worker, as exemplified by the boy holding pistols. What they have in common is the fierceness and determination in their eyes. Aside from the flag held by Liberty, a second, minute tricolore can be discerned in the distance flying from the towers of Notre-Dame.

The identity of the man in the top hat has been widely debated. The suggestion that it was a self-portrait by Delacroix has been discounted by modern art historians. In the late 19th century, it was suggested the model was the theatre director Étienne Arago; others have suggested the future curator of the Louvre, Frédéric Villot; but there is no firm consensus on this point.

Several of the figures are probably borrowed from a print by popular artist Nicolas Charlet, a prolific illustrator who Delacroix believed captured, more than anyone else, the peculiar energy of the Parisians.

Although Delacroix was not the first artist to depict Liberty in a Phrygian cap, his painting may be the best known early version of the figure commonly known as Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic and of France in general.

The painting may have influenced Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables. In particular, the character of Gavroche is widely believed to have been inspired by the figure of the pistols-wielding boy running over the barricade. The novel describes the events of the June Rebellion two years after the revolution celebrated in the painting, the same rebellion that led to its being removed from public view.

More information: Pictorial Composition

The artist who aims at perfection 

in everything achieves it in nothing.

Eugene Delacroix

NADINE GORDIMER, WRITER & ANTI-APARTHEID ACTIVIST

Today, The Grandma continues reading. She has chosen Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer and political activist who died on a day like today in 2014.

Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923-13 July 2014) was a South African writer and political activist. 

She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognised as a writer who through her magnificent epic writing has... been of very great benefit to humanity.

Gordimer was one of the most honoured female writers of her generation. She received the Booker Prize for The Conservationist (1974), and the Central News Agency Literary Award for The Conservationist, Burger's Daughter (1979) and July's People (1981).

Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger's Daughter were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organisation was banned, and gave Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 defence speech at the trial which led to his conviction for life. She later became active in HIV/AIDS causes.

Gordimer was born to Jewish parents near Springs, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. She was the second daughter of Isidore Gordimer (1887-1962), a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant watchmaker from Žagarė in Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire), and Hannah "Nan" (née Myers) Gordimer (1897-1973), a British Jewish immigrant from London.

Gordimer's early interest in racial and economic inequality in South Africa was shaped in part by her parents. Her father's experience as a refugee from Tsarist Russia helped form Gordimer's political identity, but he was neither an activist nor particularly sympathetic toward the experiences of black people under apartheid. Conversely, Gordimer saw activism by her mother, whose concern about the poverty and discrimination faced by black people in South Africa led her to found a crèche for black children. Gordimer also witnessed government repression first-hand as a teenager; the police raided her family home, confiscating letters and diaries from a servant's room.

Gordimer was educated at a Catholic convent school, but was largely home-bound as a child because her mother, for strange reasons of her own, did not put her into school (apparently, she feared that Gordimer had a weak heart).

Home-bound and often isolated, she began writing at an early age, and published her first stories in 1937 at the age of 13. Her first published work was a short story for children, The Quest for Seen Gold, which appeared in the Children's Sunday Express in 1937; Come Again Tomorrow, another children's story, appeared in Forum around the same time. At the age of 16, she had her first adult fiction published.

Gordimer studied for a year at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she mixed for the first time with fellow professionals across the colour bar. She also became involved in the Sophiatown renaissance. She did not complete her degree, but moved to Johannesburg in 1948, where she lived thereafter. While taking classes in Johannesburg, she continued to write, publishing mostly in local South African magazines. She collected many of these early stories in Face to Face, published in 1949.

In 1951, The New Yorker accepted Gordimer's story A Watcher of the Dead, beginning a long relationship, and bringing Gordimer's work to a much larger public. Gordimer, who said she believed the short story was the literary form for our age, continued to publish short stories in The New Yorker and other prominent literary journals. Her first publisher, Lulu Friedman, was the wife of the Parliamentarian Bernard Friedman, and it was at their house, Tall Trees in First Avenue, Lower Houghton, Johannesburg, that Gordimer met other anti-apartheid writers. Gordimer's first novel, The Lying Days, was published in 1953.

The arrest of her best friend, Bettie du Toit, in 1960 and the Sharpeville massacre spurred Gordimer's entry into the anti-apartheid movement. Thereafter, she quickly became active in South African politics, and was close friends with Nelson Mandela's defence attorneys (Bram Fischer and George Bizos) during his 1962 trial. She also helped Mandela edit his famous speech I Am Prepared to Die, given from the defendant's dock at the trial. When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, she was one of the first people he wanted to see.

During the 1960s and 1970s, she continued to live in Johannesburg, although she occasionally left for short periods of time to teach at several universities in the United States. She had begun to achieve international literary recognition, receiving her first major literary award, the W. H. Smith Commonwealth Literary Award, in 1961. Throughout this time, Gordimer continued to demand through both her writing and her activism that South Africa re-examine and replace its long-held policy of apartheid.

More information: The Guardian 

In 1973, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Artur Lundkvist of the Swedish Academy's Nobel committee.

During this time, the South African government banned several of her works, two for lengthy periods of time. The Late Bourgeois World was Gordimer's first personal experience with censorship; it was banned in 1976 for a decade by the South African government. A World of Strangers was banned for twelve years.

Other works were censored for lesser amounts of time. Burger's Daughter, published in June 1979, was banned one month later. The Publications Committee's Appeal Board reversed the censorship of Burger's Daughter three months later, determining that the book was too one-sided to be subversive.

Gordimer responded to this decision in Essential Gesture (1988), pointing out that the board banned two books by black authors at the same time it unbanned her own work. Gordimer's subsequent novels escaped censorship under apartheid.

In 2001, a provincial education department temporarily removed July's People from the school reading list, along with works by other anti-apartheid writers, describing July's People as deeply racist, superior and patronising -a characterisation that Gordimer took as a grave insult, and that many literary and political figures protested.

In South Africa, she joined the African National Congress when it was still listed as an illegal organisation by the South African government. While never blindly loyal to any organisation, Gordimer saw the ANC as the best hope for reversing South Africa's treatment of black citizens. Rather than simply criticising the organisation for its perceived flaws, she advocated joining it to address them. She hid ANC leaders in her own home to aid their escape from arrest by the government, and she said that the proudest day of her life was when she testified at the 1986 Delmas Treason Trial on behalf of 22 South African anti-apartheid activists.

Her works began achieving literary recognition early in her career, with her first international recognition in 1961, followed by numerous literary awards throughout the ensuing decades. Literary recognition for her accomplishments culminated with the Nobel Prize for Literature on 3 October 1991, which noted that Gordimer through her magnificent epic writing has -in the words of Alfred Nobel- been of very great benefit to humanity.

Gordimer's activism was not limited to the struggle against apartheid. She resisted censorship and state control of information, and fostered the literary arts. She refused to let her work be aired by the South African Broadcasting Corporation because it was controlled by the apartheid government.

Gordimer also served on the steering committee of South Africa's Anti-Censorship Action Group. A founding member of the Congress of South African Writers, Gordimer was also active in South African letters and international literary organisations. She was Vice President of International PEN.

Gordimer died in her sleep at her Johannesburg home on 13 July 2014 at the age of 90.

Gordimer achieved lasting international recognition for her works, most of which deal with political issues, as well as the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. Virtually all of Gordimer's works deal with themes of love and politics, particularly concerning race in South Africa. 

Always questioning power relations and truth, Gordimer tells stories of ordinary people, revealing moral ambiguities and choices. Her characterisation is nuanced, revealed more through the choices her characters make than through their claimed identities and beliefs. She also weaves in subtle details within the characters' names.

More information: Universidad de Zaragoza

The creative act is not pure. 
History evidences it. 
Sociology extracts it. 
The writer loses Eden, writes to be read 
and comes to realize that he is answerable.

Nadine Gordimer

MAX JACOB, FRENCH POET & PABLO PICASSO’S FRIEND

Today, The Grandma has been reading poetry. She likes Max Jacob's works a lot. He was born on a day like today in 1876.  

Max Jacob (12 July 1876-5 March 1944) was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.

After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career. He was one of the first friends Pablo Picasso made in Paris. They met in the summer of 1901, and it was Jacob who helped the young artist learn French. Later, on the Boulevard Voltaire, he shared a room with Picasso, who remained a lifelong friend (and was represented as the monk in his painting Three Musicians, which Picasso painted in 1921).

Jacob introduced him to Guillaume Apollinaire, who in turn introduced Picasso to Georges Braque. He would become close friends with Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Christopher Wood and Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait in 1916. He also befriended and encouraged the artist Romanin, otherwise known as French politician, and future Resistance leader Jean Moulin. Moulin's famous nom de guerre Max is presumed to be selected in honor of Jacob.

Jacob, who was Jewish, claimed to have had a vision of Christ in 1909, and converted to Catholicism. He was hopeful that this conversion would alleviate his homosexual tendencies.

Max Jacob is regarded as an important link between the symbolists and the surrealists, as can be seen in his prose poems Le cornet à dés (The Dice Box, 1917-the 1948 Gallimard edition was illustrated by Jean Hugo) and in his paintings, exhibitions of which were held in New York City in 1930 and 1938.

His writings include the novel Saint Matorel (1911), the free verses Le laboratoire central (1921), and La défense de Tartuffe (1919), which expounds his philosophical and religious attitudes.

The famous psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan attributed the quote The truth is always new to Jacob.

Having moved outside Paris in May 1936, to settle in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, Loiret, Max Jacob was arrested on 24 February 1944 by the Gestapo, and interned at Orléans prison (prisoner #15872).

Jewish by birth, Jacob's brother Gaston had been previously arrested in January 1944, and deported to the concentration camp Auschwitz along with their sister Myrthe-Lea; her husband was also deported by the Nazis at this time. A cousin, Andrée Jacob, survived by living under an assumed name and worked in the Resistance movement Noyautage des administrations publiques.

Following his incarceration at Orléans, Max was then transferred to Drancy internment camp from where he was to be transported in the next convoy to Auschwitz. However, said to be suffering from bronchial pneumonia, Max Jacob died on 5 March in the infirmary of La Cité de la Muette, a former housing block which served as the internment camp known as Drancy.

First interred in Ivry after the war ended, his remains were transferred in 1949 by his artist friends Jean Cassou and René Iché (who sculpted the tomb of the poet) to the cemetery at Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire in the Loiret département.

More information: Poetry Foundation

 What is called a sincere work is one that is endowed 
with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

Max Jacob

1914, BABE RUTH DEBUTS IN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL

Today, The Grandma has ben reading about Babe Ruth, the American professional baseball player, who made his debut in Major League Baseball on a day like today in 1914.

George Herman "Babe" Ruth (February 6, 1895-August 16, 1948) was an American professional baseball player whose career in Major League Baseball (MLB) spanned 22 seasons, from 1914 through 1935.

Nicknamed the Bambino and the Sultan of Swat, he began his MLB career as a star left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, but achieved his greatest fame as a slugging outfielder for the New York Yankees.

Ruth is regarded as one of the greatest sports heroes in American culture and is considered by many to be the greatest baseball player of all time. 

In 1936, Ruth was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame as one of its first five inaugural members.

At age seven, Ruth was sent to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, a reformatory where he was mentored by Brother Matthias Boutlier of the Xaverian Brothers, the school's disciplinarian and a capable baseball player.

In 1914, Ruth was signed to play Minor League baseball for the Baltimore Orioles but was soon sold to the Red Sox. 

By 1916, he had built a reputation as an outstanding pitcher who sometimes hit long home runs, a feat unusual for any player in the dead-ball era. Although Ruth twice won 23 games in a season as a pitcher and was a member of three World Series championship teams with the Red Sox, he wanted to play every day and was allowed to convert to an outfielder. With regular playing time, he broke the MLB single-season home run record in 1919 with 29.

After that season, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Ruth to the Yankees amid controversy. The trade fueled Boston's subsequent 86-year championship drought and popularized the Curse of the Bambino superstition. In his 15 years with the Yankees, Ruth helped the team win seven American League (AL) pennants and four World Series championships. His big swing led to escalating home run totals that not only drew fans to the ballpark and boosted the sport's popularity but also helped usher in baseball's live-ball era, which evolved from a low-scoring game of strategy to a sport where the home run was a major factor. As part of the Yankees' vaunted Murderers' Row lineup of 1927, Ruth hit 60 home runs, which extended his own MLB single-season record by a single home run.

Ruth's last season with the Yankees was 1934, and he retired after a short stint with the Boston Braves the following year. In his career, he led the AL in home runs twelve times.

During Ruth's career, he was the target of intense press and public attention for his baseball exploits and off-field penchants for drinking and womanizing. After his retirement as a player, he was denied the opportunity to manage a major league club, most likely because of poor behavior during parts of his playing career. In his final years, Ruth made many public appearances, especially in support of American efforts in World War II.

In 1946, he became ill with nasopharyngeal cancer and died from the disease two years later. Ruth remains a major figure in American culture.

George Herman Ruth Jr. was born on February 6, 1895, at 216 Emory Street in the Pigtown neighbourhood of Baltimore, in a house which belonged to his maternal grandfather Pius Schamberger, a German immigrant and trade unionist.

On July 11, 1914, Ruth arrived in Boston and made his debut in Major League Baseball. He is considered the greatest baseball player of all time.

More information: Babe Ruth

You just can't beat the person who never gives up. 

Babe Ruth

TELSTAR, THE WORLD'S 1ST COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Telstar, the communication satellite that was launched on a day like today in 1962.

Telstar refers to a series of communications satellites. The first two, Telstar 1 and Telstar 2, were experimental and nearly identical. 

Telstar 1 launched atop of a Thor-Delta rocket on July 10, 1962, successfully relayed the first television pictures, telephone calls, and telegraph images through space. It also provided the first live transatlantic television feed. Telstar 2 was launched May 7, 1963. Telstar 1 and 2 -though no longer functional- still orbit the Earth.

Belonging to AT&T, the original Telstar was part of a multi-national agreement among AT&T (USA), Bell Telephone Laboratories (USA), NASA (USA), GPO (United Kingdom) and the direction générale des Télécommunications (France) to develop experimental satellite communications over the Atlantic Ocean. Bell Labs held a contract with NASA, paying the agency for each launch, independent of success.

Six ground stations were built to communicate with Telstar, one each in the US, France, the UK, Canada, West Germany and Italy. The American ground station -built by Bell Labs- was Andover Earth Station, in Andover, Maine. The main British ground station was at Goonhilly Downs, Cornwall.

The BBC, as international coordinator, used this location. The standards 525/405 conversion equipment (filling a large room) was researched and developed by the BBC and located in the BBC Television Centre, London. The French ground station was at Pleumeur-Bodou. The Canadian ground station was at Charleston, Nova Scotia. The German ground station was at Raisting in Bavaria. The Italian ground station (Fucino Space Centre) was at Fucino, near Avezzano, in Abruzzo.

The satellite was built by a team at Bell Telephone Laboratories that included John Robinson Pierce, who created the project; Rudy Kompfner, who invented the traveling-wave tube transponder that the satellite used; and James M. Early, who designed its transistors and solar panels. 

The satellite is roughly spherical, measures 880 mm in length, and weighs about 77 kg. Its dimensions were limited by what would fit on one of NASA's Delta rockets. Telstar was spin-stabilized, and its outer surface was covered with solar cells capable of generating 14 watts of electrical power.

The original Telstar had a single innovative transponder that could relay data, a single television channel, or multiplexed telephone circuits. Since the spacecraft spun, it required an array of antennas around its equator for uninterrupted microwave communication with Earth. An omnidirectional array of small cavity antenna elements around the satellite's equator received 6 GHz microwave signals to relay back to ground stations. The transponder converted the frequency to 4 GHz, amplified the signals in a traveling-wave tube, and retransmitted them omnidirectionally via the adjacent array of larger box-shaped cavities. The prominent helical antenna received telecommands from a ground station.

Launched by NASA aboard a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral on July 10, 1962, Telstar 1 was the first privately sponsored space launch. A medium-altitude satellite, Telstar was placed into an elliptical orbit completed once every 2 hours and 37 minutes, inclined at an angle of approximately 45 degrees to the equator, with perigee about 952 km from Earth and apogee about 5,933 km from Earth.  This is in contrast to the 1965 Early Bird Intelsat and subsequent satellites that travel in circular geostationary orbits.

Due to its non-geosynchronous orbit, similar to a Molniya orbit, availability of Telstar 1 for transatlantic signals was limited to the 30 minutes in each 2.5-hour orbit when the satellite passed over the Atlantic Ocean. Ground antennas had to track the satellite with a pointing error of less than 0.06 degrees as it moved across the sky at up to 1.5 degrees per second.

Since the transmitters and receivers on Telstar were not powerful, ground antennas had to be 27 m tall. Bell Laboratory engineers designed a large horizontal conical horn antenna with a parabolic reflector at its mouth that re-directed the beam. This particular design had very low sidelobes, and thus made very low receiving system noise temperatures possible. The aperture of the antennas was 330 m2. The antennas were 54 m long and weighed 340,000 kg.

Morimi Iwama and Jan Norton of Bell Laboratories were in charge of designing and building the electrical portions of the azimuth-elevation system that steered the antennas. The antennas were housed in radomes the size of a 14-story office building. Two of these antennas were used, one in Andover, Maine, and the other in France at Pleumeur-Bodou. The GPO antenna at Goonhilly Downs in Great Britain was a conventional 26-meter-diameter paraboloid.

More information: Space Center Houston

Satellite broadcasting makes it possible 
for information-hungry residents of many closed societies 
to bypass state-controlled television channels.

Rupert Murdoch

STARFISH PRIME, A NUCLEAR EXPLOSION OUTER SPACE

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Starfish Prime, the high-altitude nuclear test conducted by the United States, that took place on this day in 1962.

It is tragic to think how these countries, like the USA, have used other territories to conduct nuclear tests without taking into account the autonomy of these countries or the consequences that these tests could have on the population and the natural environment.

Starfish Prime was a high-altitude nuclear test conducted by the United States, a joint effort of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Defense Atomic Support Agency. It was launched from Johnston Atoll on July 9, 1962, and was the largest nuclear test conducted in outer space, and one of five conducted by the US in space.

A Thor rocket carrying a W49 thermonuclear warhead (designed at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) and a Mk. 2 reentry vehicle was launched from Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, about 1,450 km west-southwest of Hawaii. The explosion took place at an altitude of 400 km, above a point 31 km southwest of Johnston Atoll. It had a yield of 5.9 PJ. The explosion was about 10° above the horizon as seen from Hawaii, at 11 pm Hawaii time.

The Starfish test was one of five high-altitude tests grouped together as Operation Fishbowl within the larger Operation Dominic, a series of tests in 1962 begun in response to the Soviet announcement on August 30, 1961, that they would end a three-year moratorium on testing.

The Starfish test was originally planned as the second in the Fishbowl series, but the first launch (Bluegill) was lost by the radar tracking equipment and had to be destroyed in flight.

The initial Starfish launch attempt on June 20 was also aborted in flight, this time due to failure of the Thor launch vehicle. The Thor missile flew a normal trajectory for 59 seconds; then the rocket engine stopped, and the missile began to break apart. The range safety officer ordered the destruction of the missile and warhead. The missile was between 30,000 and 9,100 and 10,700 m in altitude when it was destroyed. Parts of the missile and some radioactive contamination fell upon Johnston Atoll, nearby Sand Island, and the surrounding ocean.

On July 9, 1962, at 09:00:09 Coordinated Universal Time (11:00:09 pm on July 8, 1962, Honolulu time), the Starfish Prime test was detonated at an altitude of 400 km. The coordinates of the detonation were 16°28′N 169°38′W. The actual weapon yield came very close to the design yield, which various sources have set at different values in the range of 5.9 to 6.1 PJ. The nuclear warhead detonated 13 minutes 41 seconds after liftoff of the Thor missile from Johnston Atoll.

Starfish Prime caused an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that was far larger than expected, so much larger that it drove much of the instrumentation off scale, causing great difficulty in getting accurate measurements. The Starfish Prime electromagnetic pulse also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 1,450 km away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights,  setting off numerous burglar alarms, and damaging a telephone company microwave link. The EMP damage to the microwave link shut down telephone calls from Kauai to the other Hawaiian Islands.

A total of 27 small rockets were launched from Johnston Atoll to obtain experimental data from the Starfish Prime detonation. In addition, a large number of rocket-borne instruments were launched from Barking Sands, Kauai, in the Hawaiian Islands.

A large number of United States military ships and aircraft were operating in support of Starfish Prime in the Johnston Atoll area and across the nearby North Pacific region.

A few military ships and aircraft were also positioned in the region of the South Pacific Ocean near the Samoan Islands. This location was at the southern end of the magnetic field line of the Earth's magnetic field from the position of the nuclear detonation, an area known as the southern conjugate region for the test. An uninvited scientific expeditionary ship from the Soviet Union was stationed near Johnston Atoll for the test, and another Soviet scientific expeditionary ship was in the southern conjugate region near the Samoan Islands.

At the time of the Starfish Prime explosion, the physics department of the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, was operating an airglow photometer at a field station near Rolleston, twenty miles southeast of Christchurch. The photometer was designed and calibrated by Dr. I. Filosofo and others at the Illinois Institute of technology.

The airglow observation program was part of upper atmosphere research directed by Dr. C. Ellyett.

On July 9, 1962, Samuel Neff and his wife Ruth Neff were at the Rolleston field station to operate the photometer and record any observations. Photometric results were published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Letters. Christchurch is on approximately the same longitude as Johnston Island, but is much further from the equator, consequently, the earth’s magnetic lines of force entering the atmosphere near Christchurch were assumed to be too far above Johnston Island for there to be much linkage between Christchurch and the explosion. This assumption proved to be false.

The Starfish bomb contained 109Cd as a tracer, which helped work out the seasonal mixing rate of polar and tropical air masses.

Accurate determination of the decay constant for the 1D state of the ground configuration of the oxygen atom.

More information: MIRA Safety

 Hiroshima has become a metaphor not just for nuclear war 
but for war and destruction and violence toward civilians. 
It's not just the idea we should not use nuclear arms. 
We should not start another war because it's madness.

Max von Sydow