Cliff Diving or What I got from watching New Moon last night

Parade

Altadena, California Entry to the Tournament of Roses Parade, 1908. A 35-foot Airship.

News Reel (end of video at 7:20 is Rose Parade Coverage)

The ticker tape parade for moon men Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. heads down La Salle Street. August 13, 1969.(Photo by Bill Mares.) Images © Chicago Sun-Times

Baby parade on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City, 1-Jul-15

Ballooning

Wikkimedia Commons Picture of the day:
(You can subscribe to to their RSS and see them everyday if you don't already)


Early Flight: 10 chromolithograph cards. Paris, between 1890 and 1900.

And in a continuing Balloon flight theme:



Bilingual leaflet commemorating Jean-Pierre Blanchard’s flight with a hot air balloon above the Sternschanze in Hamburg, Germany, on the 23th of august of 1786.


Emile Friant, Voyage a l'Infini, 1899


Technical illustration shows early balloon designs: "Lana's aeronautic machine," "Montgolfiers' balloon," "Blanchard's balloon," "Garnerin ascending [and] descending" in his parachute, the "Charles & Roberts' balloon" being inflated, the "form of the wings employed by Lunardi," and the "form of the wings employed by Blanchard." April 1818, by Rest Fenner, Paternoster Row

Elephants are silly creatures, part II

Giant Elephant Hotel, Coney Island, built in 1882


Terrific Flights Over Ponderous Elephants


Exotic Elephant Pullalong Toy


“Wild Beasts and Their Ways” by Sir Samuel Baker. MacMillan & Co, 1890.


Howdah (saddle), parcel gilt silver, tiger-eye, wood and velvet, India, 60 inches long, 19th Century.


Sultan's Elephant, the Royal de Luxe company, 2006

Elephants are silly creatures Part 1

Yet another reason why I should have lived in the 19th Century

Leonid Meteor Shower, 1833 (http://dangthatscool.wordpress.com/)

Just once I would like to see a meteor shower that looked like this.
As it is, my mother and I went out Monday and Tuesday night to a nearby park to see the Leonid Meteor shower, which is an annual event caused by the Earth moving into the debris stream left by the Temple-Tuttle comet.

Both nights were very cold, and as we didn't drive out of town, we had some light pollution; also, the fact that we were too tired to stay up until Leo was high in our sky counted against us. However, we saw about one event every 5 minutes. All of the meteors were very bright and had long trails, which lasted longer than most meteors I'd seen in the past.


The 1998 Leonid meteor shower. Rates at 300 meteors per hour.

Yet, despite the brightness of the meteors, this shower was not as enjoyable as the Perseid shower, which we watched earlier this summer, because although the Perseid meteors was not as bright, they were much more frequent.

Raining Perseids. Fred Bruenjes August 20, 2004

The best shower I've ever seen was one summer night when we were camping at Pismo Beach. We sat on the sand dunes and watched a scene much like the photo above (although that image is a composite), and it looked like shooting stars were raining down right above us. Amazing.

Next time there is a big shower, camping in the desert might be in order.

On the Victorian collecting of Feminism

Yesterday my mom wrote in her blog about Victorian journalist/explorer Nellie Bly because, on that date in 1889, she began her famous trip around the world. Bly was inspired by Jules Verne's book Around the World in 80 Days, but she managed to do it in a mere 72, which was a world record.
Her fame was such that a set of collectible cards were produced with illustrations of Bly on her travels, accompanied by poems that have a decidedly feminist ring. These poems show Nellie Bly as a powerful woman who was equal to, and better than some of, her male peers.
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These trade cards, surely not the only of their kind (although these are the only ones I could find readily available on the Internet, there were other celebrity cards that manufactures produced as take-aways), show that it was beneficial for companies to sell their wares through the image of a strong woman. This was because, in the latter half of the 19th Century, there was a decidedly womanly view of shopping. The woman's place was in the home, but with that came control of all the shopping done for the family. There was even a male reaction to shopping as something too womanly to engage in. Therefore, advertisers focused their adds to appeal to a feminine aesthetic, as Commonwealth Clothing Co. is doing in these trade cards.


For more on the changes in shopping in the 19th Century:

Rappaport, Erika Diane. Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End. Princeton University Press, 2001.

Loeb, Lori Anne. Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women. Oxford University Press, 1994.

On visual education for the masses

Hawkins' Sydenham Studio. Illustrated London News of December 31 1853.

In 1854 Prince Albert suggested that life-sized reproductions of the then-known prehistoric animals be constructed on the grounds of the Crystal Palace when it was moved to Sydenham. Prince Albert was interested in the newly formed study of Dinosaurs and often attended lectures by the man who coined the name, Richard Owen, who in 1842 gave the three well known species of large fossils--Megaloasurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus--the term sub-order Dinosauria. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who was known by the prince and Owen, was commissioned to sculpt Owen's designs.




Sketch of the Sydenham park Sculptures. Creatures of Other Days, 1894

In an article in Prehistoric Times Magazine in 2003, David Goldman writes of Hawkins:
"Even though there was scant material to complete the conception, Hawkins, in his desire to provide Visual Education for the masses, didn't see that as a problem, simply going ahead and putting in a good guess where needed to finish the visualization. The "Masses" would get the idea that there were large strange beasts that once lived here a long time ago."



The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs. O. Baxter Proprietor and Pateratee, London. Oct. 7 1954.

This "informing the masses" despite the lack of accurate information is one of the reasons why there was a great concern for the value of knowledge and literacy during the Victorian period. While these sculptures were influential and based on what are now known to be mostly false assumptions, the guessing about prehistoric fossils is mostly an unavoidable step in paleontology. Some assumptions must always be made.

Yet the conflicting desire to present the lower and middle class with knowledge and art, while mostly understood to be in the name of progress of the nation, was sublimated by the idea that production for the lower classes needn't be of the same quality of that for the more educated class. The reduction of quality for the lower classes created a fear of the take over of "low" taste from "classic" taste. This kind of "dumbing down" is still a problem today, and often elitist pessimism creates more pessimism by assuming the apathy and stupidity of the rest of the world. Instead, we should assume that quality breeds quality and interest breads interest.


The sculptures today.

Sources:
The Unmuseum.
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and his New York City Paleozoic Museum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Waterhouse_Hawkins