George Eastman in glorious 1914 color
There is a beautiful set of early Kodachrome color pictures in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, including a portrait of George Eastman himself that was taken by photographer Joseph D’Anunzio in 1914 but looks like it could have been taken yesterday.
Impressive isn’t it? The flesh tones are particularly accurate. That was probably the strongest part of Kodak’s early experiments with the Kodachrome process, which entailed taking two glass plate photographs through green and orange-red filters, then dying the developed images and sandwiching them together with the emulsion sides in the middle. The process resulted in beautifully life-like skin and decent greens and reds, but could not produce a full spectrum of color.
The Eastman Kodak Company was trying with these Kodachrome experiments to create a color process that amateur photographers could master easily with limited equipment. The first attempts at color photography in the late 19th century required that three cameras with different color filters be used to record the identical subject. The three images would then be superimposed upon each other to produce a final picture.
In 1903, French inventors Auguste and Louis Lumière patented the Autochrome process which reduced the number of cameras to one, but it was far from amateur-friendly. Autochrome pictures were created using three batches of potato starch each dyed red-orange, violet or green. The starch was then applied to a newly varnished glass plate which was pressed through steel rollers to embed the colored starch particles into the surface. The gaps were filled with carbon black, the plate varnished again and brushed with a silver bromide emulsion. Once that was done, the photographer could put the plate in the camera and take a color picture. The subject had to sit completely still for 60 seconds, thus ensuring that the subjects were mainly landscapes, architecture and still lives.
Despite its complexity, Autochrome appealed to photographers for the beautiful color and painterly look of the finished product. There are some gorgeous examples in the Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History. See some otherworldly views of the 1915 San Francisco Panama Pacific International Exposition here. Some of the Kodachrome portraits were on display at that same exposition.
Despite its facility with portraiture and the lack of dyed potato starch, the Kodachrome process with its limited color range couldn’t really compete with the full spectrum Autochrome. Eastman Kodak abandoned the process but kept working to find a new way to bring color to the photographic masses. In 1935 they succeeded, introducing the color Kodachrome film we analog old-timers remember well.
Speaking of groundbreaking old-timey photography, a Leica 0-Series camera, one of only 12 surviving 1923 prototypes of the Leica A, the first commercially successful camera to use 35mm film, sold at auction last Saturday at WestLicht Photographica in Vienna for a world record €2.16 million ($2.75 million).
Invented by optical engineer Oskar Barnack who worked in Leica’s microscope division, the Leica 0-series was the product of 15 years of trial and error. Barnack, an asthmatic and avid amateur photographer, wanted a lightweight camera with a collapsible lens that was easy to wield and could utilize 35mm film. Leica made 25 of them for testing and even though the feedback they got from photographers wasn’t entirely positive, in 1925 they took the plunge and built a first run of 1,000 Leica A cameras. By 1932, there were 90,000 of them sold.
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Thousands watch as 19th c. shipwreck found in Gulf of Mexico
Scientists with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) used remote-operated submersibles to discover a 19th century shipwreck in the northern Gulf of Mexico before an enthralled audience of 2000 watching via online streaming video. The wood of the hull had long since rotted away, but the high definition cameras captured gorgeous images of the surviving copper cladding that once protected the hull under the waterline. Cameras also revealed the anchor and a vast number of artifacts including cannons, boxes of muskets, glass bottles, ceramics and a rare ship’s stove that is one of very few surviving examples worldwide and only the second one ever found in the Gulf of Mexico.
The ship’s name was not discovered, but the ceramic plates with a green pattern around the edges were popular between 1800 and 1830, and the copper sheathing suggests the ship dates to the first half of the 19th century, a busy time in the region. The War of 1812, the Mexican War for Independence, the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-American War all saw copious naval action in the Gulf during that period. The presence of muskets and cannons on board indicate that the ship was involved in wartime activities.
One of the things that make this find so spectacularly photogenic is that the artifacts are perched on the sea floor, exposed to submersible view. The shipwreck site is deeper than 4,000 feet; it’s also 200 miles off the United States Gulf coast and the mouth of the Mississippi which is constantly depositing sediment into the Gulf. That not only makes for crisp images and exposed artifacts, but also allows researchers to figure out from the placement of the artifacts how the ship was used.
Until recently, the area has been relatively unexplored. The wreck first pinged in 2011 when the Shell Oil Company surveyed the area for sources of oil and gas. The sonar information was vague, but was of sufficient interest for Shell to alert the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) of something worth exploring. The BOEM asked NOAA to investigate this site and others during its mapping and diving missions this spring.
The NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer set out for a 56-day mission in March of this year. They used multi-beam mapping sonar and a remotely operated submersible named “Little Hercules” to explore four potential shipwreck sites in the Gulf of Mexico. Little Hercules made a total of 29 dives, recording the wrecks and a great variety of underwater life, including some corals that the scientists watching on board and online had never seen before. This shipwreck was the last of the four and the most historically significant.
Now the BOEM has to decide whether to give Shell a permit for oil and gas exploration/extraction that will disturb the seafloor. Here’s hoping the natural and historical wealth documented by Little Hercules will remain unmolested.
Below is some of the footage the live viewers witnessed on Little Hercules’ April 26th dive, including the discovery of the anchor. For some truly jaw-dropping HD images of marine biodiversity captured during the mission, see NOAA’s photo and video log page. They are not to be missed, seriously.
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Walk Through Shelbyville History Tour
Students from the Shelby Saddlebred chapter have made a unique history tour through the downtown area. The walking tour of the historic locations combines technology with the past by using QR codes or “Quick Read” codes, which resemble bar codes. When these QR codes are scanned with your smart phone, an audio file as well as an image file is available. The audio files are recordings prepared by Shelby County Public School students of all ages from all of the different schools. The students on the audio files are describing the historical background of the specific location scanned. The scripts read by the students were written and provided by Duanne Puckett. The image files are photographs taken by the Shelby Saddlebred Kentucky Junior Historical Society members. Upon completion of the project the chapter will have covered over 45 sites. The QR codes are displayed on the kiosk just outside the Shelby County Historical Society’s welcome center.
The community project was unveiled at Science Hill during the annual membership meeting. A display board describing the project, in addition to a projection of the Shelbyville Historical Society’s website was presented to members wanting to know more about the plan. A demonstration on how to scan the QR codes took place and those with smart phones had the opportunity to try it out for themselves and listen to the audio file.
Though still a work in progress partial tours are available. The tours are expected to be finished before summer break. When the project is completed there will be a total of three separate tours available.
By: Adrienne Holtzworth, 2012-2013 Kentucky Junior Historical Society President.
Pretty Renaissance censorship
Two books by Renaissance humanist par excellence Desiderius Erasmus at the University of Toronto provide drastically different and unusual examples of censorship, one of them crude, the other artistic, even beautiful.
Erasmus was a scholar and Roman Catholic priest born in Holland around 1466. Although he was critical of clerical excesses, he considered himself a committed Catholic and aimed to reform the institution from the inside using reason and scholarship. Nonetheless, his work had a powerful influence on the Protestant Reformation. His 1519 edition of the New Testament in Greek was used by Martin Luther for his seminal German translation, and Erasmus had a lively, warm correspondence with Luther for years until Erasmus’ rejection of some of Luther’s arguments and vocal support for doctrines like Church tradition as a source of revelation and the virginity of Mary enraged the choleric cleric.
Erasmus died of dysentery in 1536. His books remained popular with Catholics and Protestants alike, but the ecclesiastical authorities were less enamored of them, especially once the Counter-Reformation of the Church took root after the Council of Trent began in 1545. In 1559, Pope Paul IV took a moment between forcing Jews into ghettos and dying to put all of Erasmus’ books on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The censors sharpened their tools and got to work.
Said tools were mainly the simple black pen. The 1541 edition of the Adagiorum (meaning “proverbs”), a collection of Greek and Latin proverbs with annotations by Erasmus cataloged just this month in the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Library, is replete with crossed-out passages. 
The censor also appears to have written on the title page: “O Erasmus, you were the first to write the praise of folly, indicating the foolishness of your own nature.” That’s a wicked iceburn, you see, because Erasmus’ most famous book is In Praise of Folly, a satire of Church corruption among other follies. (We don’t know for certain that the same person did the censoring and the iceburning, but the ink does match.)
The censor didn’t stop there, though. He also tore out some pages and glued two other pages together. It was quality glue, too, because hundreds of years later those pages are still stuck together.
Another censor took an entirely different approach to silencing Erasmus. A 1538 edition of Erasmus’ annotated works of Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, in the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at the University of Toronto, blots out the offending notes with beautiful blocks of watercolor paint decorated along the edges with scrollwork and even a putto, a little boy cherub.
Perhaps this censor was a book lover who didn’t want to mar the work with ugly scribbles and missing pages. Perhaps he was more artist than prig. Perhaps he took more care because the book contains the religious writings of a Church father instead of a collection of pagan sayings. Whatever his reasons, he produced something quite lovely, almost making an illuminated manuscript out of a printed text. If censorship is inevitable, at least we can lie back and enjoy it.
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‘Beau Sancy’ diamond sells for $9.7 million
To nobody’s surprise, the beautiful and historic “Beau Sancy” diamond has sold for more than double the high pre-sale estimate at Sotheby’s Geneva Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels sale. The 35-carat modified pear double rose cut gemstone, which since the early 17th century has successively been part of the crown jewels of France, Holland, England, Prussia and the German Empire, was purchased by an anonymous telephone bidder for $9.7 million including buyer’s premium.
The diamond first entered the historical record in 1570 when it was purchased in Constantinople by diplomat, financier and jewel expert Nicolas de Harlay, Lord of Sancy. It was purchased by Henri IV of France for his wife Marie de Medici in 1604. From then until now, the “Beau Sancy” has never been in non-royal hands (as long as you consider the sellers, the House of Hohenzollern, still royal, even though their last scion to sit on a throne was Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany).
Five bidders from North America, Europe and Asia vied for the “Beau Sancy” and one of them won. Sotheby’s won’t disclose any more information than that, so sadly this probably means a stone that has been at the center of European royal history for more than 400 years has now been sucked into the black hole of private collections never to be seen again until the next public sale.
Perhaps we’ll get lucky and the buyer will loan it to the Louvre so it can be put on display in the Apollo Gallery along with its cousin the “Sancy” diamond, a 53-carat pale yellow shield-shaped modified brilliant cut that was once the center stone of the fleur-de-lis on top of Louis XV’s coronation crown. The “Sancy” was replaced by a replica in 1729 at the king’s command, and the Revolution and later French Republics looted, dispersed and sold the originals. After many vicissitudes, including decades of being hidden away in anonymous private collections, the “Sancy” found its way back home again when William Waldorf Astor, 4th Viscount Astor, sold it to the Louvre for one million dollars in 1978. So there’s hope that like its cousin, the “Beau Sancy” might end up in a museum, even though it could take a few centuries.
See the catalogue notes on Sotheby’s website for more details about the fascinating history of the “Beau Sancy” diamond. I found the information about the connection between the light-giving symbolism of royalty and the newly-invented cut particularly interesting:
The fact that the Beau Sancy was first worn by Marie de Medici in 1610 as the principle [sic] stone and centrepiece of her coronation crown indicates very clearly the importance of the diamond at this time as the supreme emblem of Royalty. On a symbolic level, diamonds are associated with the sun, our “Daystar”, the dynamic centre of our cosmos and thus the source of all life and light. What better stone therefore could be used to illustrate the parallel with the position and central role of the Monarch within his Kingdom? Indeed, later the same century, King Louis XIV would go a step further and call himself “Le Roi Soleil”.
The Beau Sancy, which was cut and polished towards the end of the 16th century, exhibits the first attempts to liberate the ‘fire’ inherent in the stone – a property of diamond so familiar and so admired today, but which, due to the absolute hardness of the crystal which rendered cutting so difficult, had only just begun to be exploited. By the use of the newly-developed ‘rose’ style of cutting, which employed a myriad of triangular facets covering the entire surface of the crystal, the light which entered the stone was reflected and dispersed, broken up on the way into the colours of the rainbow. This was totally new.
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Ancient Peruvian skulls found under Florida pool
In January, a plumber installing pump pipes for an in-ground pool in the backyard of a one-year-old house in Winter Garden, Florida found a piece of bone in the sand. He reported it to the police who brought the fragment to Orange-Osceola County Medical Examiner Dr. Jan Garavaglia. She determined that the bone had come from the face of a child of around 10 years. There was some mummified tissue still attached to the bone, which concerned her because most archaeological remains are devoid of any tissue. She informed police that there might be a recently dead child illegally buried on the work site.
University of Central Florida archaeologist Dr. John Schultz worked with the forensic specialists to ensure the site was handled as an archaeological dig instead of just as a pure crime scene. They didn’t find the remains of a murdered child, but they did find two crania, a dozen shards of pottery, bits of newspaper from 1978, textiles including an embroidered purse still carrying woven slings and a netted bag with a strap made out of non-human hair. When Dr. Garavaglia X-rayed the skulls, she and Dr. Schultz were able to confirm that they were at least hundreds of years old.
The skulls belonged to an adult male and a child, and they both had “Inca bones,” a triangular interparietal bone that sometimes develops where the posterior fontanelle used to be. It’s not exclusive to them, but it is highly characteristic of Peruvian mummies, particularly Andean Inca tribes between 1200 and 1597 A.D. Researchers identified the style of the pottery and textiles as coming from the Chancay culture of coastal Peru. Their dates are in keeping with the Inca bone period, between 1200 and 1470 A.D.
At this point it became clear that the Winter Garden swimming pool was a secondary burial site. Someone had placed these artifacts in the ground after March 16, 1978 (the date of the newspaper), but who and exactly when remains a mystery. We do know that the land which is now a subdivision used to be a camp for migrant orange pickers. For thirty years until the mid-1980s, migrants from all over Central America and the Caribbean lived in wooden barracks in the area. It’s possible that the remains and artifacts could have been buried by one of those migrant workers, perhaps as part of a religious ritual, perhaps for safekeeping. It’s also possible that tourists brought them back from a trip to South America, although the purchase and removal of archaeological artifacts has been illegal in Peru since the early 20th century.
Developers bought the land and built it into a subdivision four years ago. They had to grade it extensively in order to build the orderly houses and streets, so it’s an incredible stroke of luck that they missed the spot that happened to contain ancient human remains and incredibly delicate textiles. Then the house was built on the property just a year ago, and they fortuitously missed the spot too.
The bones and artifacts will remain at the Medical Examiner’s office for now. Dr. Schultz intends to study them extensively with an eye to publishing the results so they can be used as examples for future crime scene/archaeological finds. The ultimate goal, however, is to return the pieces to Peru.
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Seventh-graders find 900-year-old pot on a field trip
A group of seventh graders from Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque made the discovery of a lifetime on a field trip to the El Malpais National Conservation Area near Grants, New Mexico. They were exploring the lava tube caves as part of the school’s Outdoor Leadership Program when students spotted a pot underneath a pile of rocks. They didn’t touch it or disturb it, but they could see that it was a cream-colored pot with a complex pattern of black zigzags and dashes all around.
One of the parents was knowledgeable about the laws regarding Native American artifacts, so the group left the pot in place and reported it to the U.S. National Park Service who in turn alerted the New Mexico Bureau of Land Management which protects and manages the 13 million acre conservation zone.
BLM archaeologists removed the pot this week. It is 18 inches high and 14 to 16 inches wide, and was discovered almost intact. Because of this stroke of good luck, archaeologists were able to determine from its size, shape and decoration that the pot is between 800 and 1,000 years old, possibly the work of the Mogollon culture which inhabited the area from 150 to 1400 A.D. It is a major find and the first significant piece discovered on New Mexico Bureau of Land Management land in ten years.
Donna Hummel of the BLM said the find could be unique and the students may not fully understand its importance. “This is very significant. We hope they appreciate that this could be a once in a lifetime discovery,” said Humme.
When told that the pot could be around 900-years-old, students expressed amazement.
“That’s crazy. I think we were probably some of the first people to see so that’s really cool,” seventh-grader Cole Schoepke said.
The Bureau has yet to release any photographs of the pot because they want to consult with the surrounding pueblos first, but there’s a charming interview with some of the students who made the discovery in this TV news story.
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Rare medieval trepanned skulls found in Spain
Two skulls from the 13th and 14th centuries have been unearthed in a cemetery in Soria, north-central Spain. The skulls each have a hole in them from trepanation, the oldest surgical procedure known.
Trepanation involves the removal of a piece of skull by scraping or cutting with a sharp tool and has been practiced at least since the early Neolithic 10,000 years ago. It was common in prehistoric and ancient Europe, but there’s considerably less evidence for it in the Middle Ages, possibly due to a philosophical rejection of surgery in favor of “pure medicine” like leeches sucking the bad humours out of people along with their blood. In some parts of Europe, for example modern Hungary, the practice almost entirely disappears from the historical record after the onset of Christianity.
Thus researchers from the Universities of Oviedo and Leon were surprised when they found two trepanned skulls in the medieval San Miguel hermitage cemetery. They were even more surprised when they found that one of the skulls belonged to a woman. Even when trepanation was widely performed, most of the patients were men.
The two skulls found in the cemetery in Soria belong to a male between 50 and 55 years and a woman between 45 and 50 years. The expert points out that “another interesting aspect of this finding is that trepanation in women is considered rare throughout all periods in history. In Spain, only 10% of those trepanned skulls found belonged to women.”
The trepanation technique differs in each of the skulls. The skull of the male has been grooved with a sharp object and it is unknown whether trepanation occurred before or after his death. López Martínez confirms that “if the procedure took place whilst still alive, there is no sign of regeneration and the subject did not survive.”
In the woman, a scraping technique was used while she was still alive. According to the researchers, she survived for a “relatively long” amount of time afterwards given that the wound scarring is advanced.
Trepanation was performed to repair skull fractures by removing the fragmented section, and has a solid record of effectiveness as emergency surgery on head wounds. (It is still used today, in fact, to clear bone pieces and relieve subdural hematoma.) It was perhaps less effective as a remedy for a variety of other conditions like seizure disorders and mental illness.
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Oldest Maya calendar found in Guatemala
Archaeologists mapping the Classic period (200 to 900 A.D.) Maya city of Xultun in northeast Guatemala have discovered a room painted with murals including hundreds of numbers and astronomical tables that are the oldest Maya calendar calculations ever found. The calendar dates to 813 or 814 A.D., which we know so precisely because the inscribers generously dated their work. Before this discovery, the earliest calendrical calculations known to survive the bonfires of the post-Columbian missionaries were in the 11th-12th century Dresden Codex. There is enough overlap with the calendar texts in the Dresden Codex that it’s likely they both relied on earlier texts that have not survived, or at least not been found yet.
The hieroglyphs include columns of numbers reflecting the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars. Tables track the phases of the moon, and some calculations appear to be attempts to reconcile the lunar and solar calendars. In a touching link to educators 1200 years later, there are numbers painted in red that correct the calculations painted in black next to them.
The real headline-grabber is that the calendar counts through 17 Bak’tuns. That’s a total of 7,000 years and takes us far past our current 13th Bak’tun cycle which is scheduled to end on December 23rd of this year in the fiery apocalypse that will destroy us all. How convenient that “scholars” and “experts” who have always claimed that the Maya 2012 apocalypse notion is a ludicrous misinterpretation of Maya calendar cycles find four more cycles JUST IN THE NICK OF TIME.
The calendar is not the only uniquely important aspect of this find. The murals are painted on the walls and ceiling of a small dwelling. It’s a room about six and a half feet wide, six feet long and 10 feet tall. This is the first time murals have been found somewhere that is not a temple or palace. Also, the room was filled in an unusual way, from the inside backing out through the doorway. Usually the Maya just flattened the roof of a building when they were done with it, and then built on top of that. The peculiar filling approach taken with this room ensured that the paintings on three of the four walls plus the ceiling were preserved.
The archaeologists working on the site never expected that. Boston University undergraduate Maxwell Chamberlain was looking into an old looting trench during his lunch break when he saw some faded paint on the wall. BU archaeologist and team leader William Saturno figured it was worth exploring the chamber in case there was any paint left, but he assumed there’d be only traces at best so they’d just map the room and perhaps be able to figure out its dimensions at the time the murals were painted.
Instead they pulled a Howard Carter and found an archaeological treasure trove (minus the gold). In addition to the calendar hieroglyphs on the east and north walls, they found several unusual murals. On the north wall:
An off-center niche in the wall features a painting of a seated king, wearing blue feathers. A long rod made of bone mounted on the wall allowed a curtain to be pulled across the king’s portrait, hiding it and revealing a well-preserved painting of a man whose image is wrapped around the wall; he is depicted in vibrant orange and holds a pen. Maya glyphs near his face call him “Younger Brother Obsidian,” a curious title seldom seen in Maya text. Based on other Maya sites, Saturno theorizes he could be the son or younger brother of the king and possibly the artist-scribe who lived in the house. “The portrait of the king implies a relationship between whoever lived in this space and the royal family,” Saturno said.
On the west wall:
Three male figures loom on this wall, all of them seated and painted in black, wearing only white loincloths, medallions around their necks and identical single-feathered, miter-style head dresses. “We haven’t seen uniform head dresses like that anywhere before,” Saturno said. “It’s clearly a costume of some kind.” One of the figures is particularly burly, “like a sumo wrestler,” and he is labeled “Older Brother Obsidian.” Another is labeled as a youth.
Saturno thinks the room was a writing room, a study for Maya scribes. The figure holding a pen indicates a connection to scribes and the repetition of hieroglyphs on the east wall complete with corrections in red suggests that the calculations could have been practice for later work in the formal halls of religious and political power.
The discovery has been published in the May issue of the journal Science (subscription only). There’s a fascinating interview with Saturno in the latest Science podcast which I’m embedding below.
Pictures are courtesy of National Geographic which sponsored the expedition. Their website has an awesome gigapixel zoomable image of the mural here, and a video of the find here:
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WWII fighter plane found preserved in the Sahara
A Kittyhawk P-40 that crashed in the Sahara desert on June 28, 1942 has been found in remarkably good condition by Polish oil company employee Jakub Perka. Perka was exploring the desert west of the Nile 200 miles from the nearest city when he found the downed plane. It was damaged from the crash landing and bears scars from flak encounters, but other than that, the single-seater fighter plane appears to have been frozen in time by the desert heat.
The identification plates were undamaged, so military historians were able to identify it as a Royal Air Force plane piloted by Flight Sergeant Dennis Copping. Copping was part of the RAF’s 260 Squadron fighting German General Erwin Rommel’s forces’ advance towards Egypt. On June 28th, Copping was ordered to fly a damaged but functioning Kittyhawk to another airbase in Egypt for repairs. He went off course and was neither seen nor heard from again.
Military historians are confident the Kittyhawk found in the desert was the one flown by Ft Sgt Copping, based on identification numbers and letters on the plane.
It was documented at the time that there was a fault with its front landing gear which would not retract and the photographic evidence suggests the aircraft had its front wheel down when it crashed.
According to experts, a plane making a controlled crash landing in the desert wouldn’t have its landing gear down and would belly-flop on the sand.
There is also flak damage in the fuselage, which is also consistent with documented evidence of Ft Sgt Copping’s plane.
No human remains were discovered at the crash site. There is evidence that the pilot survived and tried to make a shelter from the baking sun out of his parachute. The radio and battery were also removed from the airplane, suggesting the pilot tried to get it in working order so he could send out an SOS. Had he died in the crash or while working nearby, his body would have been found, so he probably starting walking as a last resort. 
His remains could be anywhere within a 20 mile radius. The British Ministry of Defense plans to search the area, but the odds of finding Flight Sergeant Copping are very slim.
Meanwhile, after 70 years of untouched rest, the wreck itself is now in danger. The Egyptian military has removed all the weapons and bullets for safety reasons, but the real danger is locals peeling parts off to sell as scrap. The wreck is close to a smuggling route between Sudan and Libya, and now that the word is out that the plane is there, some people have taken detours to strip pieces of it.
The Ministry of Defense is working with the RAF Museum to recover the plane. Because of the location of the wreck, the search and recovery teams will need to be escorted by the Egyptian army. Coordination is a challenge, to say the least, and the clock is ticking.
For more pictures, see the Telegraph’s photo gallery and Jakub Perka’s Picasa album.
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