Book Notes on 'Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S Truman'

Book Notes and Review of 'The Patriots by Winston Groom'

## Impressions

*Mornings on Horseback* is an engrossing narrative about Theodore Roosevelt Jr., his family, and his parents. It reveals a lot about why Roosevelt did what he did later in life, and how his family upbringing, childhood, and young adult adventures shaped his philosophy on life and work.

## Notes

Theodore Roosevelt was actually Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. The son, just so happened to make the name more famous than the father, which was not easy to do. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., was a wealthy businessman and philanthropist who loved to travel. His brother, Robert, told Theodore the purpose of travel

> is not to see scenery, you can see finer at home. It is not to see places where great people lived and died, that is a stupidity. But it is to see men. To enlarge your mind, which will never be enlarged by looking at a large hill, but by conversing with, and seeing the bent of the minds of other people.

Yet, he was a simple man. "Best were the pleasures of a morning walk or his books or a good cigar or what he called the quiet luxury of home life," McCullough writes. I can't help but agree.

A simple man who believed in hard work. "Man was never intended to become an oyster," he remarked. "He hated idleness," writes McCullough. "Every hour must be accounted for and one must also enjoy everything one did." Also: "I always believe in showing affection by doing what will please the one we love, not by talking."

---

**Lead, don't drive, younger folks into learning**

Dr. Hillborne West, an uncle from Philadelphia, would recite poems to Teddy and his siblings under trees. "The very fact that he was not achieving a thousand worthwhile things, as was my father, the very fact that he was not busied with the practical care and thought for us, as were my mother and aunt, brought about between us that delightful relationship when the older person leads rather than drives the younger into paths of literature and learning," wrote Connie, Teddy's sister.

---

**Why you should journal**

Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., upon leaving Washington, regretted not keeping a diary.

> All those whom I have seen in social intercourse day by day will be characters in history, and it would be pleasant hereafter [to read] my own impressions of them and recall their utterly different views upon the policy which should be pursued by the government.

---
Two observations McCullough makes about a young Theodore Roosevelt demonstrate his demeanor well. On a ship, Mittie, Theodore's mom, had to "keep a weathered eye on Teedie, who alone of her four children refused to have anything to do with the the other children on board." When the boat finally arrived in Liverpool, Mittie notes the madness in her diary. Everyone was running amok, except Theodore who, "sat off to himself in the salon, reading a book," McCullough writes.

Teedie's knack for learning was demonstrated by someone else once again later during the trip. Ellie, who was suffering a bad throat, "took offense when told to ease up and miss part of one day's touring. 'I want to learn about things, too, like Teedie,' he insisted."

Later, McCullough continues: "Still, there remains a theme, a mounting refrain really, of the pleasure and pride in being the first to see or do something, and eagerness to set himself apart from the others, to distinguish himself, to get out ahead of them; or simply to be alone, absorbed in private thoughts."

---

Foreshadowing the sorrow death would bring him later in his life, during this trip he was informed that his Uncle Weir Roosevelt died. He wrote in his diary, "It is the third relation that has died in my short life. What will come?"

---

As a boy, Teedie's father instilled a sense of action, hard work, and exercise into all of his kids, especially Theodore Jr. The family doctor wrote something that would become the family creed: "Organs are made for action, not existence; they are made to work, not to be; and when they work well they can be well."

"Theodore, you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must *make* your own body," Theodore's dad admonished him. "It is a drudgery to make one's body, but I know you will do it."

"it was no good wishing to appear like the heroes he worshipped if he made no effort to *be* like them. Strength had to come first; one must be strong before everything else," McCullough writes.

---

"Asthma" in Greek means panting, something Theodore constantly struggled with as a kid. But these struggles made him stronger:

> Ailment other than asthma, any of the inevitable knocks and scrapes of childhood, or of later life, are often taken with notable stoicism. It is as if having experienced asthma, he finds other pains and discomforts mild by comparison.
> 
> He has learned at an early age what a precarious, unpredictable thing life is—and how very vulnerable *he* is. He must be prepared always for the worst.
> 
> But the chief lesson is that life is quite literally a battle. And the test is how he responds, in essence whether he sees himself as a helpless victim or decides to fight back, whether he becomes, as Teedie was to say of a particular variety of desert bird, "extremely tenacious of life."

[[Marcel Proust]] thought his asthma, like his homosexuality, was part of a price he had to pay for his creative gifts:

> We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy...Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly."

---

On his father's parenting style, Teedie once remarked that his father "used now and then to say that he hesitated whether to tell something favorable because he did not think a sugar diet was good for me."

I love that. [[Don't give people sugar diets.]]

---

Theodore Jr.'s father had the "power...of being focused." Louisa Schuyler said, "Without his power of concentration and great physical endurance such a life would have been impossible."

**If you want to do great things, you must cultivate the power of concentration.**

---

When Theodore Jr. went off in the train for Harvard, Theodore Sr. wrote, "As I saw the last of the train bearing you away...I realized what a luxury it was to have a boy in whom I could place perfect trust and confidence..."

I think that's a perfect goal as a parent to strive for in raising your kids: raise them so when they grow up, you have complete confidence and trust in who they are and what they'll do.

This feeling was reciprocated by the son. Theodore wrote his dad while he was in college: "I do not think there is a fellow in college who has a family that love him as much as you all do me, and I am *sure* that there is no one who has a father who is also his best and most intimate friend, as you are mine...I do not find it nearly so hard as I expected not to drink and smoke..."

After attending his father's funeral, he poured out his soul to his diary: He experienced "bitter agony when I kissed the dear, dead face and realized he would never again on this earth speak to me. He was the most wise and loving father that ever lived: I owe everything to him."

With his father now gone, nothing seemed to matter anymore. "Am working away pretty hard," he wrote in May; "but I do not care so much for my marks now; what I most valued them for was *his* pride in them."

---

On a gate to the entrance of Harvard Yard, William Roscoe Thayer had inscribed:

> Enter to grow in wisdom
> Depart better to serve thy country and they kind.

That's a good life motto.

---

After Harvard, Roosevelt attended Columbia Law School:

> "The law work is very interesting," he said in his diary; and again, "I like the law school work very much." Some afternoons, when not at the Astor Library, he read law in the offices of Uncle Robert...

---

Roosevelt wrote a book, *Naval War of 1812*, and his work habits are revealing about who he was and how he approached his calling:

> To write his *Naval War of 1812,* Theodore forced himself to master every nuance and technical term of seamanship—Theodore, who never particularly cared for sailing, who disliked long sea voyages. Theodore had plowed through everything in print on his subject, tracked down original documents to amass volumes of statistics on fighting ships, armaments, crews.

Sometimes, though, he felt as if he had taken on more than he could handle. He wrote, "I have plenty of information now, but I can't get it into words; I am afraid it is too big a task for me."

(I'm glad other people feel this. If I were to ever write a history book, I think this would be my problem. I'm amazed at authors like David McCullough or Ron Chernow who can not only do the research, but then shape that research into something that's very fun to read and actually coherent.)

---

When Roosevelt was in the State Legislature, he shared a house. His roommate would "always know when it was Theodore returning from a weekend, because Theodore would swing the front door open and be halfway up the stairs before the door swung shut with a bang."

This is telling: it reveals the energy and drive with which Theodore went about his day and conducted his business.

---

On the day that both his mother and wife died, February 14, 1884, Theodore wrote a big "X" on that day in his diary. Beneath it he wrote, "The light has gone out of my life."

---

**What someone does *for* you, they'll eventually do *to* you:**

> Once, seeing one of his ablest cowboys about to put the Maltese brand on an unbranded stray found on Gregor Lang's range, Theodore dismissed him on the spot. The cowboy could not understand. "A man who will steal *for* me will steal *from* me," Theodore said. "You're fired."

---

During his time in the West, Theodore Roosevelt came to embrace not only the lifestyle but the virtues of a "cowboy." He wrote in *Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail*:

> "Meanness, cowardice, and dishonestly are not tolerated," he observed. "There is a high regard for truthfulness and keeping one's word, intense contempt for any kind of hypocrisy, and a hearty dislike for a man who shirks his work." It was, of course, exactly the code he had been raised on. (Recalling his father years later, he would use very nearly the same words: "He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness.") The cowboy was bold, cared about his work; he was self-reliant and self-confident. Perhaps most important of all, the cowboy seemed to know how to deal with death, death in a dozen different forms being an everyday part of his life.

(That is probably one of my favorite passages I've ever read.)

---

I like wrote McCullough wrote of Theodore in the Afterword:

> A book was about the only thing that could make him sit still and his love of books lasted as long as he lived. He read everything and anything, sometimes two books in an evening, and his favorites—theIrish sagas, Bunyan, Scott, Cooper, the letter of Abraham Lincoln, *Huckleberry Finn*—he read many times over.

---

## Books mentioned
- *The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt* by William H. Harbaugh
- *The Pilgrams Progress*
- *My Brother Theodore Roosevelt*

Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. believed in hard work and knowledge. He remarked, “most things in this world, half their terrors vanish when you walk up and tackle them.” The anxious thoughts about what “might” happen were often worse than the actual situation. Once “you lay hold of the lion’s skin it comes off and the same old donkey is underneath.”

As he edged toward turning ninety, he wrote:

> My old formula is that a man should be an enthusiast in the front of his head and a sceptic in the back. Do his damndest without believing that the cosmos would collapse if he failed. One should have the same courage for failure that many have for death.

When Chief Justice Melville Fuller delayed in getting the cases assigned to Holmes over to him, Holmes wrote him a note:

> Will you let me know as soon as convenient the cases you assign to me. I worry until I know. Nil actum reputans dum quid superesset agendum.

The Latin was a quote from Lucanus’s poem about Caesar: “He believed nothing done, so long as anything remained undone.”

Holmes had an unbelievable work ethic. In total, he wrote 873 opinions, a Supreme Court record. “He brought that same zest for duty to everything,” Budiansky wrote. “In 1865, at age twenty-one, he began keeping a list of every book he read, noting them down in tiny handwriting in a small leather…book, known to his secretaries as the ‘Black Book.’ By the time of his death the list exceeded four thousand, which worked out to more than a book a week for seventy years. The range was extraordinary: law, philosophy, sociology, literature, religion, history, economics, murder mysteries, poetry, science.”

---

In his opinions, Holmes rarely used legal jargon. The quality of his prose demonstrated clear thinking. Learned Hand praised in Holmes’s opinions his “deadly eye” for “question-begging words” that disguised shallow thinking. “To Holmes, the act of writing was above all the act of thinking. Finding the right words was not rhetorical ornamentation: it was the very essence of his work of thinking though complex legal jargon.”

Note: What people mean by writing is thinking. It forces you to come up with words that describe what’s in your head. The mismatch between the words you use and the thoughts in your head is the actual process of your thinking being refined. You’re being forced to put a thought which contains many words and many meanings into a few words that each just have one meaning. That is thinking.

---

Boston in the 1800s was a town full of pompous, educated men and women seeking to make their mark on the world through their words and books. Pretty much everyone was Unitarian. “Unitarianisms’s fundamental tenet was that God had given man a rational nature and a moral conscience, and expected him to use them. Salvation was no longer to be found in outward conformity to rigid doctrine or unquestioning obedience to an unknowable God, but lay rather within each man’s own conscience.”

This philosophy “now channeled into a faith that made self-improvement, the cultivation of virtue, and social conscience the ultimate expression of God’s will.”

Edward Everett Hale put it best: “There was the real impression that the kingdom of heaven was to be brought in…if we only knew enough”

This was the culture Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was born into, and came to love.

---

From a young age, Holmes showed an act for words and conversing. His report card at age six said, “Talk’s too much.” His brother Edward explained, “Wendell ends every sentence with a ‘but’ so as to hold the floor till he can think of something else to say.”

---

Holmes understood the importance of focus. He wrote in a letter about his father:

> If he [his father] had the patience to concentrate all his energy on a single subject, which perhaps is saying if he had been a different man, he would have been less popular, but he might have produced a great work. I often am struck by his insight in things that he lightly touched. But, as I said, **it is the last five percent that makes the difference between the great and the clever**.

---

As a boy, Holmes had a “futile shrinking from new things” that kept him from learning to ride or drive a horse or ice skate. But this was not a “physical timidity; it was rather that he already had a sense of what it took to truly master a subject, and an inkling of the dissatisfactions of half-knowledge.”

---

Holmes did not value academics. In 1913, he warned Felix Frankfurter that academic life is…

> a withdrawl from the fight in order to utter smart things that cost you nothing except thinking them from a cloister…Business in the world is unhappy, often seems mean, and always challenges your power to idealize the brute fact but it hardens the fibre and I think is likely to make more of a man of one who turns it to success

---

For Holmes, the war taught him “early on to face with courage and calmness the inevitable hardships of life.” In 1917, he told Harold Laski “I am converting misfortune into a source of satisfaction.” The author explains, “His limitless capacity for work was undoubtedly an emotional escape but it was also a need that he shared with many who had been through the intense experiences of war: civilian life just did not seem that exciting by comparison.” “Repose,” Holmes wrote, “is not the destiny of man.” **“Life is a struggle,” the author observes, “and it is the struggle that gives it meaning. The only thing to do was to give one’s all, and leave the consequences to fate.”**

---

In a great quote about opportunity costs, Holmes said, “Remember, my friend, that every good costs something. Don’t forget that to have anything means to go without something else. Even to be a person, to be _this_ means to be _not that_.”

---

During his first year of law school, a professor said he “had never known of anyone in the law who studied anything like as hard as Wendell.” “From the start,” the author wrote, “he took heart in the belief that mastery of a subject, and thorough professional expertise, was the only way to accomplish anything significant in life. A year and a half after receiving his degree, and still thoroughly immersed in a now self-directed program of voluminous readings in the law, he wrote William James of his ‘ever increasing conviction that law as well as any other series of facts in this world may be approached in the interests of science and may be studied, yes, and practiced, with the preservation of one’s ideals. I should even say that they grew robust under the regimen.'”

Holmes’ father’s dilettantism worked out well for Holmes, because it showed him what _not_ to do. He wrote:

> Since I wrote in December I have worked at nothing but the law. Philosophy has hibernated in torpid slumber, and I have lain “slutishly soaking and gurgling in the devil’s pickle,” as Carlye says. It has been necessary,—if a man chooses a profession he cannot forever content himself in picking out the plums with fastidious dilettantism and give the rest of the loaf to the poor, but must easy his way manfully through crust and crumb—soft, unpleasant inner parts which, within one, swell, causing discomfort in the bowels.

---

Holmes became friends with both William and Henry James. William, while Holmes and he were close, was in a deep depression about the nature of the universe. In a world without a God, why did anything matter, James explained. Holmes, ever the realist, didn’t understand. He advised William (with words that a lot of us should take into account today re: politics and the “world” and everyone having an opinion on everything): “It seems to me that the only promising activity is to make _my_ universe coherent and livable, not to babble about _the_ universe.” This quote revealed Holmes’ philosophy about life: it doesn’t care about you, so get on with it and do your duty! (Or, rather, that’s my interpretation.)

---

One night after working late in the law library, Holmes and a younger lawyer, George Upham, walked home together. Recounting their conversation sixty years later, Upham said Holmes:

> told me he had a theory that anyone could accomplish anything he wished, if only he wished it hard enough, continuously, morning, noon, and night, and perhaps subconsciously while sleeping

A half century after that conversation, Holmes told John Wu that to achieve anything of importance “takes time, the capacity to want something fiercely and want it all the time, and sticking to the rugged course.”

Holmes followed his own advice.

While editing a new edition of Kent’s Commentaries, Holmes became utterly absorbed in the work. “I have as you know given up all my time to Kent’s Commentaries and during the past year especially have hardly touched any other business,” he wrote in July 1872.

He kept his manuscript in a green back, and he took it everywhere with him. After dining one night with Henry James’s mother, she wrote a letter to Henry:

> Wendell Holmes dined with us a few days ago. His whole life, soul and body, is utterly absorbed in his _last_ work upon his Kent. He carries about his manuscript in his green bag and never loses sight of it for a moment. He started to go to Will’s room to wash his hands, but came back for his bag, and when we went to dinner, Will said, “Don’t you want to take your bag with you?” He said, “Yes, I always do so at home.”

This “green bag” was so precious to him that, once a month, he conducted fire drills with the servants and staff of his house and ensured they knew their first mission if flames were to ensue: rescue the green bag.

Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes thought Holmes’ work on Kent is what allowed him to draft opinions faster than everyone else. The time Holmes spent in total immersion of the law “had given him an unusual and complete mastery of common law decisions and history. The effect of this in his habit as [a] judge was that, where others would be compelled to devote an enormous amount of time to the rediscovery of law, Holmes needed to make no re-examination—the law was at his fingertips.”

This is a great example of Dead Time and Alive Time.

The time in-between jobs he studied a ton, so that when he finally did get a court appointment, he was better prepared and smarter than everyone else. Such is how one should spend their days “waiting.” [[Notes/Active Patience|Active Patience]]

The author writes, “Success to Holmes above all meant accomplishing something original and of intellectual merit.” I relate to that strongly.

---

On the bench, Holmes had little patience for lawyers, remarking that they take 5 to ten minutes to say things that could easily be said in one. To pass the time, he wrote letters while lawyers were presenting their cases. This gave him the reputation of attentiveness, because, naturally, people thought he was taking notes on the case.

---

On writing, Holmes said, “One has to strike the jugular and let the rest go.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas

Every good story-at-sea has at least two of three elements: a shipwreck, murder, or mutiny. While this tale definitely had the second, the third is questionable, and the first doesn’t appear at all.

Richard Snow does his best to recount the complicated and mysterious story aboard the _Somers,_ which is magnificent.

In 1848, the _Somers_, a US brig-of-war, set out from New York Harbor on a journey south with young naval officers. Its mission was to deliver papers, but its real mission was to teach its young crew what sea-faring life was like. (The Naval Academy at Annapolis was yet to exist, and, as a result of what happened on this ship, would be created.)

![](https://evm.heg.mybluehost.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_2548-1-768x1024.jpg)

Phillip Spencer

Aboard the ship was Phillip Spencer, a “young punk” who just so happened to be the son of the Secretary of War for President John Tyler. Events ensued aboard the ship—a supposed mutiny led by Spencer—which caused Captain Alexander Mackenzie to hang Philip Spencer and two of his comrades.

The book’s first half explains the background of some of the crew and the events that lead to the eventual hanging. The second half covers the dramatic “inquiry” and court-martial into Captain Mackenzie’s behavior that sought to determine: 1. Was a mutiny _really_ going to happen? And 2. If so, was hanging the culprits necessary?

The drama rests in the fact that while Mackenzie claims a mutiny was coming, and Spencer admitted to talking about it, the actual likelihood of a mutiny happening was not great. So, the question was, did Mackenzie act too rashly? Some thought he did, others thought he acted valiantly. Maybe the fact that this was the only mutiny in US naval history gives us the answer.

At both the “inquiry”—a formal investigation simply to gather facts—and the subsequent court-martial, the captain’s behavior was deemed appropriate, and he faced no punishment. Philip Spencer’s father and the bride of another hanged were calling for Mackenzie’s prosecution for murder. They doubted a mutiny was really going to happen and thought Mackenzie’s punishment was overboard (no pun intended). Mackenzie’s log of whippings on board reveals he might be quick to punish. In total, he administered over 2,000 lashes to sailors who acted out of line, the youngest of which was a mere boy.

![](https://evm.heg.mybluehost.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_2549-1-768x1024.jpg)

Captain Alexander Mackenzie

And that’s the story. Dramatic and entertaining? Yes.

My one critique (which, as a professional, I am not) about the book was that the author relied too heavily on direct quotes. In a story like this, having primary sources is important, but at times, the frequent direct quotes stopped the flow of the story.

For example:

> On March 28, “the court met this day in pursuance of adjournment…And the court being cleared, the court proceeded to consider the charges and specifications, and to make their finding thereon.”

Why not just write, “On March 28, the court met to consider the arguments and determine a verdict.” I understand the appeal of quoting the direct source, but the quote is just cumbersome.

I also didn’t like how he referenced two modern-day inventions as an

Still, like with any part of history, there is much to learn. Mainly, one is left asking why Mackenzie risked his career to hang the Secretary of War’s son on mere _talk_ of mutiny and a picture of a ship with a black flag. Such is the lesson to take away from this. It’s hard to undo hanging someone, yet it seemed as if Captain Mackenzie was set on this method of discipline from the very beginning. Why?

It’s theorized in the book’s epilogue that his decision was intentional. In a time of peace, it would be hard for a ship captain to become famous, as many of his peers did in the Battle of 1812.

So, was the decision to hang the son of such a prominent figure Mckenzie’s way of being remembered? Perhaps. Here we are, two hundred years later, still talking about him.

Sailing the Graveyard Sea by Richard Snow


There are few things I love more than books.

The things I _do_ love more than books are often old, like [typewriters](https://x.com/dltnio/status/1675508695055335424?s=20), record players, pipes, and top hats.

But when you combine the two and get some _old books_ in my hands, oh man, it’s hard to contain myself.

Books—old or new—transport you back in time. You’re forced to enter someone else’s life and get an inside glimpse at what someone thought and did. That’s remarkable.

But there’s something even more special about old books because when you read them, you’re not just transported back in time to when the subject lived or what the author wrote, but also to the periods of time when someone else owned and touched the very book you now hold in your hands.

![](https://evm.heg.mybluehost.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_2543-1024x695.jpg)

Someone asked on Twitter what the oldest book you own was, so I thought I’d do a post showing the old books I have in my library.

![](https://evm.heg.mybluehost.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_2530-768x1024.jpg)

The oldest, and my favorite, is a first edition of U.S. Grant’s Memoirs (1885). I have no idea how my parents found this for sale, but I love it. The cover is a bit torn up, though. I’ve debated taking it to an old bookbinder by my house, but I want to keep it in its most original state possible, so I’m still thinking about that. The fragility of the binding makes it impossible to read, but it is still very cool.

![](https://evm.heg.mybluehost.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_2527-768x1024.jpg)

A friend gifted me this fun book after I shared the digital edition in my newsletter. It’s called How to Write Letters (1876) by J. Willis Westlake. It’s a compendium of advice on style, format, language, and more appropriate letter-writing etiquette from the late 1800s.

![](https://evm.heg.mybluehost.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_2533-768x1024.jpg)

From the preface:

> For convenience, the treatsie is divided into three parts:—
> 
> Part 1. Letters, Notes, and Cards.
> 
> Part II. Orthography and Punctuation.
> 
> Part III. Miscellaneous, containing Titles, Forms of Address and Salutation, Abbreviations, Foreign Words and Phrases, Postal information, and Business Forms.

![](https://evm.heg.mybluehost.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_2534-768x1024.jpg)

I have a two-volume set of [The Complete Sherlock Holmes](https://dltn.io/posts/how-to-learn-like-sherlock-holmes/) (1930, I think…). I picked these up for $2 in an antique store. Steal!

![](http://evm.heg.mybluehost.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_2537-scaled-e1708899409238-768x1024.jpg)

I have Winston Churchill’s memoirs from both world wars. The first, The World Crisis, was published in 1918. The second, [Memoirs of the Second World War](https://dltn.io/posts/book-notes-the-gathering-storm-winston-churchill/), was published in 1947. (It’s a six-volume set, but I’m currently reading Their Finest Hour, so it’s not pictured. The dust jacket is sitting on top of the books pictured below. I don’t like reading a book with the jacket on.)

![](https://evm.heg.mybluehost.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_2538-768x1024.jpg)

I also have Will and Ariel Durant’s 11-volume set of Story of Civilization, the first of which was published in 1954.

![](https://evm.heg.mybluehost.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_2539-1024x768.jpg)

Finally, I have a copy of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and a collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays that I bought at a used bookstore in either Kentucky or Indiana (it was on the border) for $8.

![](http://evm.heg.mybluehost.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_2542-768x1024.jpg)

![](http://evm.heg.mybluehost.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_2541-768x1024.jpg)

As the years go on, I’m looking forward to updating this post.

A love letter to old books

## Impressions

I was let down by this book, but only by a little.

I started reading it on July 4, thinking I would learn the history of the Declaration of Independence and the early days of America. Aside from a brief mention of the paper signed by Mr. John Hancock, it wasn't what I was expecting at all.

Instead of a grand narrative of the political battlefields of 1776, it's a grand narrative of the actual battlefields of 1776, mainly, the first year Washington's rebel army faced off against the lobster backs.

The mistake was mine and mine alone. I should have read the description more, and not just the title. Once I understood the premise of the book, I was delighted to learn about the Revolutionary War.

People parade George Washington around as one of the best generals ever, but the first half of this book tells a very different picture. Was he a great general? Yes. But he was also indecisive and let his emotions get the best of him; he was constantly on the retreat from the British, and was always fighting Congress for more money and men, since he could really perform only as good as the soldiers he had.

Still, it was a miracle the American Revolution was a success, and without George Washington, who knows what would have happened?

From the last chapter:

> Especially for those men who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning—how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities of strengths of individual character had made the difference—the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.

---
## Notes

**There’s great reward in being able to see things as they are, and not be fooled by optimism**

David McCullough on what made George Washington a great commander during the early days of the Continental Army:

"In truth, the situation was worse than they realized, and no one perceived this as clearly as Washington. Seeing things as they were, and not as he wished them to be, was one of his salient strengths."

Later, McCullough writes:

“Seeing things as they were, not as he wished they were, was known to be one of Washington’s salient strengths…”

Once, during the Siege of Boston, Washington replied to a message from someone complaining about the situation, saying, "...we must bear up against them, and make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish."

---

**In a position of power, respect is more valuable than likability or friendship**

Washington was “amiable” and “modest” during his time as commander, but he intentionally set himself above others. He advised his officers, “Be easy…but not too familiar, lest you subject yourself to a want of that respect, which is necessary to support a proper command.”

He wanted his soldiers to respect him more than like him; he was to be seen as their commanding officer, not a friend.

---

**Plan for the circumstances**

In the heat of battle in New York, Washington’s presence was requested in Philadelphia to consult with Congress. Meanwhile, arrangements were made “for fast horses to be held at ready intervals along the road, so that if necessary he could get back to New York with ‘utmost expedition.’”

---

**Appeal to the benefits (or fears) of winning (or losing) when trying to spurn action in someone**

Washington: “The hour is fast approaching, on which the honor and success of this army, and the safety of our bleeding country depend. Remember officers and soldiers that you are free men, fighting for the blessings of liberty—that slavery will be your portion, and that of your posterity, if you do no acquit yourselves like men.”

---

Sir George Otto Trevelyan wrote about the American Revolution: "It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world."

---

Abigail Adams: "Affliction is a good man's shining time."

---

David McCullough:

> He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgement. But experience had been his great teacher from boyhood, and in this his greatest test, he learned steadily from experience. Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.

---

## Books mentioned

- *Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company in Conversation*
- *The Journal of Major George Washington*
- *The Crisis*, Thomas Paine

1776

If, like me, you've long wondered how Germany—after the Treaty of Versailles—was able to amass a big enough army and enough weapons to invade Poland and France, and wage war on Britain, just a few short years later, this is how: 1. They ignored the treaty and 2. Hitler played Neville Chamberlain like a violin.

*The Gathering Storm* is Winston Churchill's account of those events, and these are my notes.

Churchill's rise to fame in pre-World War Two British government largely stems on the fact that, for years, he raised warnings about Germany's build up of arms and soldiers, France's diminishing arms and soldiers, and was trying to raise alarm bells. No one listened, until, of course, they had no choice but to.

This first volume covers from the end of World War One, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and what it was *supposed* to mean, Germany's eventual invasion of Poland, and Churchill's ascension to Prime Minister.

It is a very, very fun book to read. I'm quite looking forward to studying the next five volumes.
## Notes

**If you want to lead, you need the best information**

Churchill maintained relationships with people deep within the French and German governments. This "enabled me to form and maintain opinions which did not depend on what was published in the newspapers..."

---

In 1932, Churchill almost met Hitler in person. The meeting was cancelled after Churchill asked one of Hitler's confidants why he hated Jews. "How can any man help how he is born?" Writing about the cancellation, Churchill says, "Thus Hitler lost his only chance of meeting me."

Thought that was a cheeky way to write that.

---

**Disasters come fast. Though everything might look okay, decades can happen in minutes. Always be preparing; always be on the lookout.**

Churchill: "Wars come very suddenly"

---

Churchill had great faith in human's ability to do the impossible when circumstances demanded at. When the question was raised how Britain would defend against bombers, Churchill wrote:

> My experience is that in these matters, when the need is fully explained by military and political authorities, science is always able to provide something. We were told that it was impossible to grapple with submarines, but methods were found... Many things were adopted in the war which we were told were technically impossible, but **patience, perseverance, and, above all, the spur of necessity under war conditions, made men's brains act with greater vigour, and science responded to the demands...**

---

**Success isn't always about having the nicest equipment or fanciest tools, but rather using what you *do* have better than anyone else.**

Writing about the British radar system, Churchill admits the Germans "developed a technically efficient radar system which was in some respects ahead of our own." But also explains that the Germans were surprised by "the extent to which we had turned our discoveries into practical effect... **it was our operational efficiency rather than novelty of equipment that was the British achievement**."

---

**You never know when something seemingly bad will end up working out for your good.**

Churchill:

> How little can we foresee the consequences either of wise or unwise action, of virtue or of malice! Without this measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed... This was not the first time—or indeed the last—that I have received a blessing in what was at the time a very effective disguise.

That reflection came after Churchill's realization that not being formally connected to Chamberlain's administration was actually a good thing. When things needed to change, Parliament needed someone unattached and completely new to the government. Churchill was able to be this person.

At first, he was upset at not being picked to serve with Chamberlain, but then, as his reflection shows, it was a "blessing in...a very effective disguise."

---

**If you fight when you don't have to, you won't have to fight when you're forced to**

From the beginning, Churchill was an advocate of war. Not because he was a bloodthirsty scoundrel, but because he saw what was happening in Germany and how eerily similar it was to the first war. Churchill wanted to do whatever it took to prevent another full-fledged war.

Churchill reflects on the failure of the British government to act earlier:

> Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival.

That description fits lots of things in life.

If you wait to prioritize your marriage until it's on the brink of failure, it will be a much harder battle to fight than if you would've prioritized date nights and intentionally loved your spouse from the outset.

If you wait to get your finances in order until you're on the brink of bankruptcy, it will be a much more difficult challenge than if you started budgeting when you first began working.

If you wait to start working out and eating right until you have your first heart attack, getting healthy will be much more difficult than if you started doing it thirty years ago.

---

> Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions. These often settle themselves. It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.

Translation: No one is made great sitting on the sidelines, coasting along, making easy decisions. Great men and women are formed through difficult circumstances.

---

Churchill on Vyacheslav Molotov:

> I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot.

The Gathering Storm

JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century

<InlineImage src={https://res.cloudinary.com/dde1q4ekv/image/upload/v1690338124/mt_david_mccullough_inside_c4uapi.jpg} />

By far, David McCullough has had the strongest influence on my writing, reading, and life. His books are not just books; they are glimpses into a world long gone, glimpses that are near impossible to achieve anywhere else other than between the covers of his books. This makes sense when you look at his advice. Speaking about John Adams and writing his biography, he said, “You’ve got to marinate your head in their time and in their culture. You’ve got to become them in an effect.”

Therefore, I was thrilled to find a documentary on him, **********[David McCullough: Painting with Words](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210345/)**********. Here are some notes.

On the standards he sets for his books, he said:

> I’m starving to write a book that might qualify as literature. That’s the aspiration. I don’t want it just to be readable. I don’t want it just to be interesting. I want it to be something that moves the reader, that moves me.

On the ****one thing**** you should teach children, he said this:

> The great thing about the arts is that you can only learn to do it by doing it. If a child gets that idea, early, that that’s how you learn things, by doing it, that may be the most important thing you can give them. You can’t learn to play the piano by reading a book about how to play the piano. You can’t learn to paint without painting. You have to do it. And in doing it, you suddenly begin to see, “By God I can do this!” And then after awhile “I can not only do this, I’m getting better.
> 

If you were ever confused, McCullough is a ******writer******, not an historian:

> I don’t think of myself as an historian in the conventional understanding of the word. I’m a writer, who has chosen other days from our own - other times - as my field, that’s what I want to write about.
> 

Echoing this later, he said, “I love to tell a story. And I particularly love to tell a true story.”

About the misconceptions people have about history, he said:

> History is not about dates, and quotes, and obscure provisos; history is about life, about change, about consequences, about cause and effect, it’s about the mystery of human nature, the mystery of time. And it isn’t just about politics and the military and social issues - which is almost always the way it’s taught: it’s about music and poetry and drama and science and medicine and money and love.
> 

In the last year of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited John Adams. Emerson afterward wrote down much of what they discussed. He reports that John Adams said “I would to God there be more ambition in the country…” Then he paused and added, “By that I mean ambition of the lottable kind: to excel.” “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” McCullough says while telling this story, “If we could reinstate through what we do as parents, grandparents, as teachers, as legislators, that old noble ambition to excel.”

On success and rewards, McCullough echoes something Robert Oppenheimer understood as well: that the work is the reward.

> The fact that my books are still in print, I suppose I’m prouder of that than anything else. I’ve had a wonderful life, I’ve had a wonderful time, doing what I do. That’s the reward! The work is the reward, the kick of getting back to that typewriter and digging in for another project. That’s what I love. I won’t possibly live long enough to do all the books I want to writer. I have a list of possible books, I thing there’s 27 ideas on the list, so I guess I’ll just have to keep on working. Happily.
>

David McCullough on The Art of Writing, History, and Success

************************The Accidental President************************ is a unique biography. A couple of chapters are dedicated to Truman’s upbringing and his “political education,” but as the subtitle suggests, the book focuses on the dramatic four months between April and August 1945. Those four months contained more world-changing events than most centuries: the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April and the atomic bombings off Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. In between those two events, Harry S. Truman became the most powerful man in the world. Though he dealt with wars on multiple fronts – the Pacific and the East, yes, but also at home with his wife who did not approve of his newfound presidential status – he also took control of a country where most of the population knew no other President than FDR, and, who all asked the same question when he took the oath: ****Who is Harry Truman?****

## Notes

On the morning of April 12, Truman dictated a letter to his sister-in-law, May Wallace about her dog. “I imagine Spot is getting fatter and fatter. I have gained nine pounds myself.” In another letter to James Pendergast, Truman dictated something about the War Production Board. But this letter would not be sent yet. Later that night he added, “Since this was dictated I’m Pres. of the U.S…Pray for me with all you have.”

---

During the war, the federal government employed 3.4 million civilians, “with enough committees and organizations to fill seventeen pages in fine print in the **************************Congressional Directory.”**************************

---

“If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” – Harry Truman

---

The Veep’s job was “a graveyard of politicians.” “The Vice President has not much to do,” Truman said. When asked what he would do with this “spare time,” he answered: “Study history.”

---

During his eighty-two days as VP leading up to him becoming the president, Truman had visited FDR on official business just twice.

---

When Elenor Roosevelt told Truman about FDR’s death, Truman was astonished.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked her.

“Is there anything **we** can do for ***you***,” she replied. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

---

The night of FDR’s death, “Senators and statesmen sat with strong drinks distilling the world’s anxiety into the ink in their diaries,” Baime writes. I thought that was a beautiful piece of language.

---

Harry’s father raised he and his brother “to believe that honor is worth more than money. And that’s the reason we never got rich,” Harry said.

---

In the first grade, Harry got diphtheria. He couldn’t do anything but read, so that’s what he did. Here, Baime explains, “Harry had begun his political education without knowing it…In the stories of great men and women lay the answers to all the questions that were forming in the young boy’s mind, and as he learned, their triumphs and mistakes had shaped history’s path.”

**“In reading the lives of great men,” he wrote, “I found that the first victory they won was over themselves…Self-discipline with all of them came first.”**

In another entry he wrote:

> In other words, I began to see that the history of the world has moved in cycles and that very often we find ourselves in the midst of political circumstances which appear to be new but which might have existed in almost identical form at various times during the past six thousand years.
> 

The time spent on the farm in isolation helped him learn too. “I have memorized a whole book while plowing forty acres,” he wrote.

Later in the book, the author writes, “His lifetime’s reading had familiarized him with the triumphs and tragedies of innumerable worked leaders. Now he had become one of them.”

---

At thirty-three, Truman signed up for the draft. Though his eyesight was poor, he memorized the letters on the chart before he had to take his glasses off so he wouldn’t be deemed unfit for service.

Aboard the *****************George Washington*****************, Truman wrote, “There we were watching New York’s skyline diminish and wondering if we’d be heroes or corpses.

---

Tom Pendergast was the political kingpin of Kansas City. Here’s how he defined what his role, which I’ve found to be a pretty great description for all of politics:

> It’s a very simple thing when you come down to it. There’s people that need things, lots of ‘em, and I see to it that they get ‘em. I go to my office on South Main Street in Kansas City at seven o’clock in the morning and I stay there when I’m in town till about six o’clock at night and during that time I see maybe 200, maybe 300 people. One needs half a ton of coal. Another woman’s gotta get a job for her boy. I see to it that they got those things. That’s all there is to it.
> 

---

In politics, as much in life, things are rarely black and white, right or wrong. A lot of the time, you have to choose between lesser of two evils. This happened when Truman found out that one of the two judges working under him was collecting “kickback money in the road-building program. He was forced to look the other way in order to prevent more injurious crimes from occurring and to keep on the good side of Boss Pendergast, who had given him his career,” Baim explains.

---

When Truman became a Senator, he got a good piece of advice from J. Hamilton Lewis: “Don’t start out with an inferiority complex. For the first six months you’ll wonder how you got here, and after that, you’ll wonder how the rest of us got here.”

---

During his time in the Senate, Truman worked hard. “He routinely was up at five and arrived at his office at seven in the morning,” Baim writes. Edgar Faris, a secretary, recalled “That man was there earlier than everybody. I don’t care if he went to bed at 2 a.m., he was up at five and we was down at that office. That man really worked.”

---

At the Statler hotel, Truman outlined a philosophy and campaign that he and his staff would stick to until the end:

> • The Senator will not engage in personalities and asks his friends to do the same. Avoid mentioning the Senator’s opponents in any way.

• Avoid getting into controversial issues. Stick to Truman – his record as a judge, as a Senator, as a military man.

• While others discuss issues not involved in the primary, each worker will carefully avoid getting into those traps.

• The press is a function of our free institutions. If they are wrong in their attitude, try to make them see the true light, but under no circumstances attack them.

• Political parties are essential to our republic, our nation, and we must not attack them. What we’re doing is to show by our actions what we think our Party is destined to do: Provide basic laws for a more abundant life and the happiness and security of our people.
> 

Another one of Truman’s mottos was, “There is no substitute for a fact. When the facts are know, reasonable men do not disagree with respect to them.”

---

After FDR named Truman as his running mate, he and Bess smiled for the photographers, “the flash light newspaper picture boys,” is what Truman called them.

---

When Tom Pendergrast died, Truman attended his funeral, much to dismay of his political strategists. But they didn’t matter. Tom did a lot for Harry, and Harry knew that. Connely said, “I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to his funeral.” “That’s right,” Harry replied. That’s just the type of man he was. 

---

On the first day of Office, after addressing the staff, Admiral Leahy reminded behind to speak one on one with Truman. Leahy was the top military advisor to Roosevelt and had a special connection with the now late President. Leahy told Truman, “If I am to remain your Chief of Staff, it will be impossible for me to change. If I think you are in error I shall say so.”

”That,” Truman replied, “is exactly what I want you to do. I want you to tell me if you think I am making a mistake. Of course, I will make the decisions, and after a decision is made, I will expect you to be loyal.”

---

The candidness of Truman was refreshing to the press. “I don’t know if any of you fellows ever had a load of hay or a bull fall on you,” Truman told a group of reporters. “Last night the whole weight of the moon and stars fell on me…If newspapermen ever pray, pray for me.”

---

Truman’s new daily schedule was relentless. “Being President is like riding a tiger,” Truman wrote in one of his memoirs. “A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed.” Somewhere else he wrote, “It takes about 17 hours a day. And then you get as much sleep as you can, start over again and do it the next 17 hours as best you can. No man can do it as it should be done.”

The intense pace lead to extreme isolation. “It is the extraordinary isolation imposed upon the president by our system that makes the character and the opportunity of his office so extraordinary,” Woodrow Wilson once said.

During the summer, his wife and daughter went home to Independence and Truman stayed alone in the White House. He wrote Bess:

> I stay here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches, all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study.
> 

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote of him: “His family is gone, the house is bare and stiff and he’s the loneliest man I ever saw. He’s not accustomed to doing night work…and he doesn’t like it. He’s not at ease and no one else is. I am so sorry for him and he tries so hard.”

---

Truman was relentlessly efficient. Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew wrote, “When I saw him today, I had fourteen problems to take up with him and got through them in less than fifteen minutes with a clear directive on every one of them. You can imagine what a joy it is to deal with a man like that.”

At Postdam, he wanted the agenda for the next day’s discussions set before today’s were over. “I don’t want to just discuss,” he said. “I want to decide.”

---

Truman wasn’t the playboy Roosevelt and other men were. When at Potsdam, an army colonel whispered, “Listen, I know you’re alone over here [without your wife]…If you need anything, you know, I’ll be glad to arrange it for you.”

Truman was furious. “Hold it; don’t say anything more. I love my wife, and my wife is my sweetheart. I don’t want to do that kind of stuff…I don’t want you to ever say that again to me.”

The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

I spent the afternoon walking around the Hoover Institute at Stanford University today. My mission was to find and a piece of a lifeboat from the RMS **********Lusitania**********. While reading *******Dead Wake******* by Erik Larson, I learned it was there.

I was disappointed, though, because I had to come back with an appointment. Just to make sure I was in the right spot, I DMed Larson on Twitter. He confirmed that I was but yes, I did in fact need an appointment.

The first book of Larson’s I read was ***************************The Devil in the White City***************************, an extravagant tale of murder, mystery, and mayhem at the Chicago World’s Fair. I followed that up with *************************The Splendid and the Vile*************************, which easily became one of the best books I’ve ever read. Next came **********Dead Wake**********.

Larson writes a particular style of books called narrative non-fiction. Everything in the book is true, but it reads like a novel. His books opened my eyes to a new style of reading and writing, and are the reason I want to write narrative non-fiction myself. In fact, I’m currently pursuing a Masters degree in English and Creative Writing with a non-fiction emphasis, much to the prompting of his books.

[Larson believes](https://lithub.com/erik-larson-on-finding-a-new-angle-on-history/) there’s always a new way to tell an old story. At breakfast with the director of the International Churchill Society, Larson explains he was dubiously questioned about his motivations for adding yet another Churchill biography. “Well, look,” he said, “It’s all in the telling.

> I wanted to write about how the Churchill family and their close advisers—who were like family—how they actually got through the Blitz, day to day, in that first year of his prime ministry, which happened to coincide with the first year of, and most important year of, the German air campaign. I wanted to know how these guys did it on a day-to-day basis, and their families—what they had for dinner and all that.
>

The narrative began to take shape when Larson received access to Churchill’s daughter’s diary. Mary, who was 17-years-old at the time, Larson explained, “[L]iked to have fun. You know, she liked to go to dances with the RAF guys; a couple of times she mentions snogging in the hay loft. That was exactly what I was trying to get at, was, how did people actually do it, how did they cope?”

That was one thing I was most delighted to read in *************************The Splendid and the Vile*************************. The diary entires addressed the same timeless ideas of love and hate, things we all still journal about today.

Mary, who in the midst of the Blitz was being courted by a young soldier, opened her heart to her journal. After meeting him, she wrote, “Now–Mary–take a hold on yourself–my little plum.”

After getting a letter from him asking her out to dinner, she simply wrote: “Oh heaven.”

The following Sunday, he called her. They spoke for twenty minutes. “He is v. charming I think & has a very beautiful voice,” she wrote. “Oh dear–have I fallen, or have I?”

Through his writing, Larson helps the reader realize how normal and simple people acted, even in the midst of utter chaos. “I think one thing that guides me is that I often look for things that tie us, in the present, to people in the past,” he said. “Things that make us realize that, you know, we aren’t so different now in how we feel about things, and what we do, and the things that move us. Anything that ties us to the past, I think, is a good thing.”


Telling old stories in new ways

## Impressions

*******************American Prometheus******************* is a tale of a modern Galileo, “a scientist-hero martyred by the authorities in America’s anticommunist witch-hunt.” A sordid read full of science and sarcasm, dialogue and drama, love and war.

## Notes

“I was an unctuous, repulsively good little boy. My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.” – Oppie

---

While at a summer camp, Oppie made the mistake of telling his parents that the boys were teaching him “the facts of life.” This prompted a quick visit from his parents and soon, the counselor banned the telling of salacious stories. The boys knew Robert was responsible, so one night, “he was carried off to the camp icehouse, stripped and knocked about. As a final humiliation, the boys doused his buttocks and genitals with green paint. Robert was then left naked and locked inside the icehouse for the night.” Robert, amazingly, never said a word. He stuck it out the remaining weeks; “Robert suffered this gross degradation in stoic silence.” “I don’t know how Robert stuck out those remaining weeks,” a friend said. “Not many boys would have–or could have–but Robert did. It must have been hell for him.” The author writes, “Robert’s seemingly brittle and delicate shell actually disguised a stoic personality built of stubborn pride and determination, a characteristic that would reappear throughout his life.”

---

A teacher said Robert “received every new idea as perfectly beautiful.” I think that is a wonderful goal to aspire towards. This led him to be brilliant. When he was nine, the author writes, “he was once overheard telling an older girl cousin, ‘Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek.’”

---

Oppenheimer’s head tutor at Cambridge, Patrick Blackett, was a genius experimental physicist and Oppie sought his approval greatly, yet often failed to attain it. Blackett pushed Robert to do what he wasn’t good at: experiments. This irritated Oppenheimer. “Consumed by feelings of intense jealousy,” the author writes, Oppenheimer poisoned an apple on Blackett’s desk. Julius, Robert’s father, pleaded with the school not to press charges. Some months later, he would attack his friend. After the apple incident, Oppie went to see a psychiatrist, but that never ended well. Herbert Smith explained why, “The trouble is, you’ve got to have a psychiatrist who is abler than the person who is being analyzed. They don’t have anybody.”

---

Robert would declare, “The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.”

---

One day, when Oppenheimer sought to gift Paul Dirac some books, Dirac declined: “reading books interfered with thought.” Later, Dirac was perplexed by Oppenheimer’s intellectual range. “They tell me you write poetry as well as working at physics,” Dirac said to Oppie. “How can you do both? In physics, we try to tell people in such a way that they understand something that nobody knew before. In the case of poetry, it’s the exact opposite.” “Flattered,” the author writes, “Robert just laughed. He knew that for Dirac life was physics was nothing else; by contrast, his own interests were extravagantly catholic.

---

During the Spring of 1926, Oppenheimer was in the midst of working on his first major paper in theoretical physics. It was a hard, new type of work. One day, he walked into Ernest Rutherford’s office and saw Niels Bohr sitting in a chair. Rutherford introduced the two. “How’s it going?” Bohr asked. “I’m in difficulties,” Robert replied starkly. “Are the difficulties mathematical of physical?” “I don’t know,” Oppie said. Bohr: “That’s bad.” Years later, Oppie reflected on Bohr’s profound question, “I thought it put a rather useful glare on the extent to which I became embroiled in formal questions without stepping back to see what they really had to do with the physics of the problem.”

**************Lesson:************** Know what problem you’re dealing with.

---

Oppenheimer was smart, and he knew it. During lectures from Max Born at Gottingen, he constantly interrupted with questions and corrections, chalk in hand. He’d declare, “This can be done much better in the following manner…” Naturally, other students complained, but Robert was oblivious to the politeness of Born’s nudges. One day, Maria Göppert, a future Nobelist, “presented Born with a petition written on thick parchment and signed by her and most of the other members of the seminar: Unless the “child prodigy” was reined in, his fellow students would boycott the class. Still unwilling to confront Oppenheimer, Born decided to leave the document on his desk in a place where Robert could not help but see it when he next came to discuss his thesis. ‘To make this more certain,’ Born later wrote, ‘I arranged to be called out of the room for a few minutes. This plot worked. When I returned I found him rather pale and not so voluble as usual.’ Thereafter the interruptions ceased altogether.

---

Robert was also wealthy, and spent money casually on food and clothes. Edward Condon, who just earned a PhD didn’t understand this. Robert didn’t understand Edward’s familial responsibilities. One day, Robert invited Edward and his wife out for a walk, but Emilie explained she had to stay with the baby. Robert replied, “All right, we’ll leave you to your peasant tasks.” After seeing Karl Compton’s two-year-old daughter pretending to read a small red book, which on the topic of birth control. Robert looked at the very pregnant Mrs. Compton and quipped, “A little late.”

---

Becoming a scientist, Oppenheimer said, “is like climbing a mountain in a tunnel: you wouldn’t know whether you were coming out above the valley or whether you were ever coming out at all.”

---

Robert spent a lot of young adulthood in Los Almos. “After a particularly grueling day on horseback, Robert wrote a friend wistfully, ‘My two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It’s a pity they can’t be combined.”

---

Oppie to Frank: “The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in times of preparation that determine what you do in a pinch, and that it takes an error to father a sin.”

---

“The work is fine, not in the fruits but the doing..” Oppenheimer wrote to his brother Frank in the autumn of 1932. “Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women,” he also wrote to Frank in 1929, “and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women, any ore than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one’s living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.”

---

One night on a date in the San Fransisco Bay, Robert wrapped a blanket around his date and then said he was going for a walk. He came back shortly after and told said, “Melba, I think I’ll walk down to the house, why don’t you bring the car down?” But Melba had gone to sleep and didn’t hear him. Hours later, she woke up and waited for his return. Upon not coming, she flagged the police down. After searching the bushes for his body, Melba returned home with the police and they found a sleeping Oppie. Apoligizing, Oppie said he is awfully erratic and just “walked and walked–and I was home and went to bed.”

---

Since his emotional depression in 1926, Oppenheimer relied on discipline and work as his guiding principles. In the spring of 1932, those principles were elevated to a philosophy of life. He argued discipline “is good for the soul is more fundamental than any of the grounds given for its goodness. I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation…and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces. I believe that through discipline we learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable.”

---

Oppenheimer didn’t intend to create the hub of theoretical physics at Berkley when he started teaching there, it just kind of happened. “I didn’t start to make a school.” Oppenheimer later said, “I didn’t start to look for students. I started really as a propagator of the theory which I loved. about which I continued to learn more, and which was not well understood but which was very rich.”

**********************Lesson: The odds of you building something great are slim, by definition, they have got to be even more so if you approach that which you do with the intention to “build something great.” But if you follow what you’re curious about, and what you know, you never know who you might bring along with you.**********************

---

One day, Joseph Weinberg met with Oppenheimer to discuss his course of study. After Oppie asked what he had done, not expecting an answer, Weinberg told him he had been working on a theoretical problem. “You have this written up of course,” Oppie asked. He didn’t, but said he would. Two days later, Oppie returned the paper, impressed, and had the student present the paper in place of a seminar. Afterwards, Oppie said what he had presented was “kid stuff” and that there was a “grown-up way to do this kind of problem.” Weinberg spent the next three months working on a complicated calculation, but to no avail. “Now you have learned a lesson,” Oppie said. “Sometimes the elaborate, the learned method, the grown-up method is not as good as the simple and childishly naive method.”

---

Leslie Groves, the Army man who ran point on the Manhattan project, had picked Oppie for the lead man, but he faced a good deal of opposition. When he proposed his name to the Military Policy Committee, he said, “I asked each member to give me the name of a man who would be a better choice. In a few weeks it became clear that we were not going to find a better man.”

**************Lesson:************** When facing opposition to an idea, ask for a better solution, if there isn’t one, you win!

---

When Oppie first met Richard Feynman, he knew he wanted him at Los Almos. But his wife, Arline, had tuberculosis and Feynman wouldn’t leave without her. One day in the winter of 1943, Feynman received a call from Oppenheimer. Oppie let Feynman know he had located a tuberculosis sanatorium in Albuquerque. Feynamn was touched, and persuaded to move.

---

“Knowledge is itself the basis of civilization., any widening of the borders of our knowledge imposes and increased responsibility on individuals and nations through the possibilities it gives for shaping the conditions of human life.”

– Niels Bohr

---

Many scientists didn’t agree with the use of an atomic bomb. One group in Chicago organized an informal committee to discuss the social and political implications of using one. In June 1945, several members presented a 12-page reported that outline that, “It may be very difficult to persuade the world that a nation which was capable of secretly preparing and suddenly releasing a weapon as indiscriminate as the V2 rocket bomb and a million times more destructive, is to be trusted in its proclaimed desire of having such weapons abolished by international agreement.” For peace as the result of destruction was no peace at all.

---

Einstein described Oppie as an “unusually capable man of many-sided education.”

---

One day when Peter, Robert’s son, Kitty, Robert’s wife, helped him build an electrical toy, “a square box filled with various lights, buzzers, fuses, and switches.” He called this toy his “gimmick.” Two years later, David Lilienthal was visiting the Oppenheimers. While there, Kitty was trying to fix the “gimmick.” After fiddling with it for over an hour but to no avail, she had to stop to cook dinner. Robert took Kitty’s spot and began working on the “gimmick.” As Robert sat on the floor, the author writes, “Peter ran to the kitchen and whispered loudly to Kitty, ‘Mama, is it all right to let Daddy work with the gimmick?’ Everyone laughed at the notion that the man who directed the construction of the ultimate “gimmick” might not be qualified to fiddle with his child’s electrical toy.

**************Lesson:************** Your kids are not impressed, nor care, what you do.

---

Frank Oppenheimer said, “The whole point of the Exploratorium is to make it possible for people to believe they can understand the world around them. I think a lot of people have given up trying to comprehend things, and when they give up with the physical world, they give up with the social and political world as well. If we give up trying to understand things, I think we’ll all be sunk.”


Notes: American Prometheus by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

No one influenced the ideas and philosophies of Orville and Wilbur more than their father, the Bishop Milton Wright. He said, “It is assumed that young folks know best, and old folks are fogies. It may be so, but old folks may be as right about new fangles as young folks are about fogy ways. ********************************************************************Make business first, pleasure afterward, and that guarded. All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.”********************************************************************

---

A friend once told Orville that he and Wilbur would always stand as an example of how far Americans with no special advantages could advance in the world. Orville disagree: “But it isn’t true to say we had no special advantages…the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.”

---

In 1889, Orville started his own print shop. He and Wilbur began publishing ******************The West Side News******************, “devoted to the goings-on and interests of their part of Dayton on the west side of the river.”

On March 1, a first edition of four pages appeared with a list of local advertisements. You could subscribe for 45 cents a year or two weeks for ten cents.

It strikes me that almost all intellectual figures in the past worked for a newspaper, or started on. Ben Franklin being another prime example. Thoreau and a band of brothers started ************The Atlantic************. It today’s day and age, people start newsletters. Then, they started newspapers.

Occasionally, they would reprint items from other publications. I liked this one a lot. It’s from *****************Architect and Building News***************** and titled “Encourage Your Boy”

> Do not wait for the boy to grow up before you begin to treat him as an equal. A proper amount of confidence, and words of encouragement and advice…give him to understand that you trust him in many ways, helps to make a man of him long before he is a man in either stature or years…

If a boy finds he can make a few articles with his hands, it tends to make him rely on himself. And the planning that is necessary for the execution of the work is a discipline and an education of great value to him.
>

---

Wilbur didn’t have an act for business right away. He preferred “intellectual pursuits” instead, writing to his father, “I do not think I am specifically fitted for success in any commercial pursuit even if I had proper personal and business influences to assist me. I might make a living, but I doubt whether I would ever do much more than this. Intellectual effort is a pleasure to me and I think I would [be] better fitted for reasonable success in some of the professions than in business.”

Yet he evidently spent quite some time thinking about business. He wrote to his brother Lorin:

> **In business it is the aggressive man, who continually has his eye on his own interest, who succeeds. Business is merely a form of warfare in which each combatant strives to get the business away from his competitors and at the same time keep them from getting what he already has.** No man has ever been successful in business who was not aggressive, self-assertive and even a little bit selfish perhaps…I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are all lacking in determination and push. That is the very reason that none of us have been or will be more than ordinary businessmen. We have all done reasonably well, better in fact than the average man perhaps, but none of us has as yet made particular use of the talent in which he excels other men. That is why our success has been only moderate. We ought not to have been businessmen…

There is always a danger that a person of this disposition will, if left to depend upon himself, retire into the first corner he falls into a remain there all his life struggling for bare existence (unless some earthquake throws him out into a more favorable location), where if put on the right path with proper special equipment, he would advance far. **Many men are better fitted for improving chances offered them than in turning up chances themselves.**
>

---

During their third year in business as bicycle repair men, they started designing their own model of bike. It sold between $60 and $65; they called it the Van Cleve, in honor of their great-great-grandmother.

They had advertisements: “Van Cleves get there First.” I thought that was genius. They didn’t focus on the style or the new parts or any “features.” It was all about the benefits, “getting their first.”

---

Wilbur’s first first step to tackling the problem of flight was to deliberately study all that had been published, tried, and tested. On Tuesday, May 30, 1899, Wilbur sat down and wrote a letter addressed to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He writes, “I am about to begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work to which I expect to devote what time I can spare from my regular business. I wish to obtain such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject, and if possible a list of other works in print in the English language.”

---

*****Avion***** is a french word for aviation. It was named by a French electrical engineer, Clément Ader.

---

The problem with flight wasn’t getting in the air…it was staying there. At first, wind would help the brothers achieve this most. They had to find the windiest part of the country, so they asked. Wilbur wrote a letter to the United States Weather Bureau in Washington about prevailing winds around the country. In response, they sent extensive records of monthly wind velocities at more than a hundred Weather Bureau stations. This is where they first picked Kitty Hawk.

---

A poem under a chapter heading that I liked:

********************************************************************One ship drives east and another drives west
With the self-same winds that blow.
’Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales
Which tells us the way to go.********************************************************************

– Ella Wheeler Wilxox, “Winds of Fate”

---

“The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn anything positively must not take dangerous risks. Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.” – Wilbur, writing about his attitude towards testing flights at Kitty Hawk.

---

The stars were so bright at Kitty Hawk, “he could read his watch by them.” I ****love**** that metaphor.

---

The Wright Brothers didn’t make history without working hard. John T. Daniels, a Kitty Hawk residence who helped the brothers set up their operation there, said they were “two of the workingest boys” ever seen, “and when they worked, *they worked…*They had their whole heart and soul in what they were doing.”

They also had undoubted courage. Said later in the ************Aeronautical Journal************, ************“Never in the history of the world had men studied the problem with such scientific skill nor with such undaunted courage.”

Daniels later said of the boys achievement:

> It wasn’t luck that made them fly; it was hard work and common sense; they put their whole heart and soul and their energy into an idea and they had the faith.
>

They also never fixated on their past success. After thier first flight with a motor, Charlie Taylor, the mechanic, said there were no “jig steps” over what had been achieved:

> Of course they were pleased with the flight. But their first word with me, as I remember, was about the motor being damaged when the wind picked up the machine and turned it topsy turvy…They wanted a new one built right away…They were always thinking of the next thing to do; they didn’t waste much time worrying about the past.
>

---

A visitor to the site at Kitty Hawk, Mr. Huffaker, was amazed by the brothers mechanical ability. Wilbur writes about him:

> He is astonished at our mechanical facility, and as he has attributed his own failures to the lack of this, he thinks the problem solved when these difficulties…are overcome, while we expect to find further difficulties of a theoretic nature which must be met by new mechanical designs.
>

This is a key lesson the Wright brothers understood: just because they figured ***one thing*** out, didn’t mean they had the ************entire thing************ figured out. They realized that a solution usually leads to another problem, one they didn’t know they would have – **************couldn’t know************** they would have.

---

The brothers “stood on the shoulders of many giants” - Lilienthal, Langley, and Chanute – but what they found out was that their data, the tables and charts their heroes had published before them were all wrong. They didn’t work in reality.

**************Lesson:************** Theory rarely matches reality.

---

Again, the hard part about flight wasn’t getting in the air, it was staying there. To do so, the “pilot” had to learn how to fly the wind, and this was very hard to do. In a wonderful presentation, Wilbur delivered a great example. Taking a sheet of paper and dropping it, he pointed out how it would not settle steadily, “but it insists on contravening every recognized rule of decorum, turning over and darting hither and thither in the most erratic manner, much after the style of an untrained horse.”

Wilbur said you could learn to ride this horse in one of two ways:

> One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on the fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders.
>

He followed up that if one were looking for safety, he would do well to sit on the fence. “But if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.”

---

The first critique of a new technology, almost always, is what useful thing will it do? This happened with hot air balloons and Ben Franklin when someone asked him what useful purpose the balloons will be for, to which he quipped “What use are babies for?”

Simon Newcomb, an astronomer, wrote in ****************McClure Magazine****************, “The first successful flyer will be the handiwork of a watchmaker, and will carry nothing heavier than an insect.”

---

Talk about an MVP…before they had a motor, the brothers spent three years learning how to just ride and glide on the wind. Once they could soar, float, dive, rise, circle, glide and land…then they tried to add a motor.

---

The thing that stands out the most to me about the Wright brothers is that they never let fame or success make them cocky or live for money. Samuel Langley was their “competitor” for a brief period of time. After his dismal failure, they never made critical or belittling comments about him. They expressed gratitude and respect. McCullough writes, “Just knowing that the head of the Smothsonian, the most prominent scientific institution in America, believed in the possibility of human flight was one of the influences that led them to proceed with their work…”

Wilbur also said about him:

> He possessed mental and moral qualities of the kind that influence history. When scientists in general considered it discreditable to work in the field of aeronautics he possessed both the discernment to discover possibilities there and the moral courage to subject himself to the ridicule of the public and the apologies of his friends. He deserves more credit for this than he has yet received.
>

---

The first time Orville flew with a motor he was asked afterwards if he was scared. “Scared?” He replied. “There wasn’t time.”

---

Samuel Langley, the brothers’ “competition” for a time, had a massive failure with his project. In all, it cost $70,000! For the brothers, their total expenses for everything from 1900 to 1903, including materials and travel from Dayton to Kitty Hawk, was a little less than $1,000, all payed for with profits from their bike shop.

---

Root would say of the brothers, he had been “astonished” by the extent of their library and to find in conversation that “they were thoroughly versed not only in regard to our present knowledge, but everything that had been done in the past.”

---

****************************************“The best dividends on the labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.” – The Wright Brothers****************************************

---

While trying to negotiate the sale of their flyer, naturally, tensions were high, but Wilbur never rattled. McCullough writes, “He could be firm without being dictorial, disagree without causing offense.”

---

After the big successful flight at Le Mans, Léon Delagrange wrote of Wilbur:

> Wilbur Wright is the best example of strength of character that I have ever seen. In spite of the sarcastic remarks and the mockery, in spite of the traps set up from everywhere all these years, he has not faltered. He is sure of himself, of his genius, and he kept his secret. He had the desire to participate today to prove to the world he had not lied.
>

Another spectator said of Wilbur, “He went his way always in his own way, never showing off, never ever playing to the crowd. The impatience of a hundred thousand persons would not accelerate the rhythm of his stride.

---

With the increased attention came increased pressure to fly. People would come from all over to see the spectacle, but there was always a risk that conditions for flight weren’t favorable. Wilbur, in all his quiet confidence, never let that pressure get to him. Once, on the very first flight when the motor turned on, Wilbur didn’t like what he heard. He asked an associate if there was a last minute change to the motor. There was. Wilbur got out of the seat and walked over to the motor to ensure there was nothing out of sorts.

When Orville began test flights with the motor in the US while Wilbur is in Paris, he wrote him a letter

> Don’t go out even for all the officers of the government unless you would go equally if they were absent. Do not let yourself be forced into doing anything before you are ready…Do not let people talk to you all day and night. It will wear you out, before you are ready for any real business. Courtesy has limits. If necessary, appoint some hour in the daytime and refuse absolutely to receive visitors at any other time. Do not receive anyone after 8 o’clock at night.
>

Later, after they had much success and were back in Fort Meyer for trials, they experienced a 16mph gale, too strong to fly. With the pressure of thousands watching, they wheeled the plane back to the shed. A senator was overheard saying, “I’m damned if I don’t admire their independence. We don’t mean anything to them, and there are a whole lot of reasons why we shouldn’t.”

Lesson: Don’t let any one pressure you into doing something you’re not ready for.

---

Amazingly, in the nine years they were flying, they only had one major crash. It was Orville. His guest on the plane, died that day. Wilbur knew it too. He wrote his father it was, “the only time anything has broken on nay of our machines while in flight, in nine years experience.” His was the first death in the history of powered flight. Orville was much too lucky. But the crash did nothing to their reputation. “If Mr. Wright should never again enter an aeroplane,” Squier said, “his work last week at Fort Meyer will have secured him a lasting place in history as the man who showed the world that mechanical flight was an assured success.”

Wilbur blamed himself for the accident. He wrote a letter to Katherine:

> I do not mean that Orville was incompetent to do the work itself, but I realized that he would be surrounded by thousands of people who with the most friendly intentions in the world would consume his time, exhaust his strength, and keep him from having proper rest…If I had been there I could have held off the visitors while he worked or let him hold off while I worked…People think I am foolish because I do not like the men to do the least important work on the machine. They say I crawl under the machine when the men could do the thing well enough. I do it partly because it gives me opportunity to see if anything in the neighborhood is out of order.
>

Wilbur worked so much on the plane, the guys in Paris called him “The Oilcan.”

---

At a banquet for The Aéro-Club de France, Wilbur Wright and his machine were honored. His speech that night sums up his attitude and reflects his humility in all he had done:

> In the enthusiasm being shown around me, I see not merely an outburst intended to glorify a person, but a tribute to an idea that has always impassioned mankind.
>

Northcliffe would say about the Wrights, that he did not think the excitement over them and the intense interest produced by their extraordinary feats had any effect on them whatsoever.

---

In a mark of brilliance, the king of Spain, Alfonso XIII, witnessed the flights, but he wanted another demonstration. “I have seen what you [Wilbur] can do. I want to see what one of your pilots can do.”

---

The time in Europe had amounted to $200,000 in contracts for the family. Nice, but doesn’t seem huge honestly. Later, they signed a contract with the War Department for $30,000.

---

When the family returned to Dayton, they had a huge celebration put on in their honor. The night before, the Dayton Daily News ran an editorial

> There was beginning a great deal of talk about man’s no longer having the opportunities he once had of achieving greatness. Too many people were beginning to believe that all of the world’s problems had been solved…Money was beginning to tell in the affairs of men, and some were wondering whether a poor boy might work for himself a place in commerce or industry or science.

This celebrations throws all such idle talk to the winds. It crowns a new the efforts of mankind. It crushes for another hundred years the suspicion that all of the secrets of nature have been solved or that the avenues of hope have been closed to those who wold win new worlds.

It points out to the ambitious young man that he labors not in vain; that genius knows no class, no condition…

The modesty of the Wright brothers is a source of good deal of comment…But above all there is a sermon in their life of endeavor which cannot be preached too often.
>

---

“A man who works for the immediate present and its immediate rewards is nothing but a fool.” – Wilbur Wright


The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

The Splendid and the Vile

Working by Robert Caro

## Impressions

When one opens ************The Crack-Up************, they open a portal to a strange new world: the jazz and liquor-filled 1920s. Through a collection of miscellaneous pieces penned by F. Scott Fitzgerald and letters from literary greats such as Gertrude Stein, T.S. Elliot, and Thomas Wolfe, the life behind the words of ****************The Great Gatsby**************** are illuminated. Since a lot of the works are personal reflections, I found myself lost here and there, not understanding the references of the times. Though confusing, I enjoyed that. It makes the words seem timeless.

## Notes

### The best people aren’t interested in politics because it doesn’t pay much

“In the theatrical world extravagant productions were carried out by a few second-rate stars, and so on up the scale into politics, where it was difficult to interest good men in positions of the highest importance and responsibility, importance and responsibility far exceeding that of business executives but which paid only five or six thousand a year.”

### First-rate intelligence

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

## On early success

“But one was now a professional–and the new world couldn’t possibly be presented without bumping the old out of the way. One gradually developed a protective hardness against both praise and blame. Too often people liked your things for the wrong reasons or people liked them whose dislike would be a compliment. No decent career was ever founded on a public and one learned to go ahead without precedents and without fear…The dream had been early realized and the realization carried with it a certain bonus and a certain burden. Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to willpower–at its worst the Napoleonic delusion. **The man who arrives young believes that he exercise his will because his star is shining. The man who only asserts himself at thirty has a balanced idea of what will power and fate have each contributed, the one who gets there at forty is liable to put the emphasis on will alone.** This comes out when the storms strike your craft. **The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter.**”

### Egyptian Proverb

“The worst things:

To be in bed and sleep not,

To want for one who comes not.

To try to please and please not.”

### Some things overheard

“I’m giving a dinner tonight, some very fine and cultivated people. I want you to come. I sent a note to your cabin.” For God’s sake, Lew groaned, “I don’t want to meet any people. I know some people.”

---

“We can’t just let our worlds crash around us like dropped trays.”

---

“I like writers. If you speak to a writer, you often get an answer.”

---

“Learn young about hard work and good manners–and you’ll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.”

---

“You look to me like a very ordinary three-piece suit.”

### Epigrams, wise-cracks, and jokes

Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy

---

Optimism is the content of small men in high places

---

You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.

---

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There’s no other definition to it.

---

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

---

Fitzgerald: “The rich are different from us.”

Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money.”


The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Here are three lessons I learned from reading *The Devil in the White City,* a book on the construction of the Chicago World’s Fair (juxtaposed with a suave, murderous criminal), on human psychology and project management.

## 1. You will always be compared to what came before

Four short years before the Chicago World’s Fair, the French had their turn. At the Paris exhibition of 1889, they unveiled the Eiffel Tower–a majestic display of creativity and ingenuity.

America’s pride was hurt. Everyone in America thought they were the most creative and ingenious country. To be outshone by the French was an embarrassment. Chicago would help reignite its spirits.

But trying to “out Eiffel the Eiffel,” as the goal came be to known, would not be easy.

Chicago had to either beat the extravagance of the tower or be humiliated, bringing disgrace and shame upon America.

An interview in the *Chicago Tribune* captures the consensus at the time:

> The most marvelous exhibit of modern times or ancient times has now just closed successfully at Paris. Whatever you do is to be compared with that. If you equal it you have made a success. If you surpass it you have made a triumph.

If you fall below it you will be help responsibly by the whole America people for having assumed what you are not equal to.
>

**Lesson:** **If you try to imitate something that people have already experienced, you can’t just “build a taller tower.”** Your product, your offering, your service, has to be as new and unique as anything that came before, lest it just be compared to just trying to build a taller tower in a race to “out Eiffel the Eiffel.”

Chicago’s big unveiling was the Ferris Wheel. It was something so different and new that it captured people’s imagination in a unique way. The Eiffel Tower, though it was still an amazing feat of architecture, didn’t spin 2,000 people around in a circle. Chicago had successfully out Eiffled the Eiffel.

## 2. Simple and done well is better than extravagant and rushed

Rain was a menace to the fair. It would wash away the wet paint on buildings and ornate plants of the landscape that were already in the ground.

Frederick Olmstead, the chief architect of the fair, gave sound advice to his crew:

> Do not lay out to do anything in the way of decorative planting that you shall not be quite certain that you will have ample time and means to perfect of its kind. There be can little fault found with simple, neat turf. Do not be afraid of undecorated, smooth surfaces.
>

**Lesson: When a deadline is looming, do the best you can with the time you have, and don't overcommit.** There's nothing wrong with simple.

A good plan done well is better than a great plan done poorly.

## 3. When creating a scene or display, every detail matters

Olmstead, the landscape architect, insisted on not having steamboats on the fair’s waterways, even though they would be more efficient.

He wrote:

> Put in the waters unbecoming boats and the effect would be utterly disgusting, destroying the value of what would otherwise be the most valuable original feature of this Exposition.
>

**Lesson: Small details have a big impact. When they're done right, they create an extravagant scene. When ignored, they ruin it.**

Sometimes, you have to bite the bullet and spend more, or take the less efficient route, to create a great atmosphere or product.

Compliment this with my [book notes from ***********Devil in the White City](https://www.dltn.io/posts/devil-in-the-white-city)* or the founding President of Stanford’s [thoughts on education, politics, and life](https://www.dltn.io/posts/david-starr-jordan-on-life-education-and-politics).


3 Lessons on Human Psychology and Project Management

## Impressions

An enthralling tale of “murder and mayhem” at the Chicago World’s Fair. There are two storylines Larson traces in this book: that of the construction of the Chicago World Fair and that of a murderous villain who got away with killing multiple people in the heart of Chicago.

## Notes

The motivation behind the Chicago World’s Fair was one of pride. After France’s wonderful demonstration at the prior fair, and the unveiling of the Eiffel tower, America felt humiliated. 

---

John Root, one of the architects of the fair, was a modern-day polymath. “His conversational powers were extraordinary,” a friend said. No doubt caused by his incessant reading of art, philosophy, science, and just about everything else. “There seemed to be no subject which he had not investigated and in which he was not profoundly learned.”

---

### You will always be compared to what came before

A man of fame, speaking to the *******Tribune******* about what Chicago had to live up to said, “The most marvelous exhibit of modern times or ancient times has now just closed successfully at Paris. Whatever you do is to be compared with that. If you equal it you have made a success. If you surpass it you have made a triumph. If you fall below it you will be held responsible by the whole American people for having assumed what you are not equal to.”

If you’re trying to copy something that came before, your only options are to go above and beyond or to make something completely different and new that the two things become incomparable.

### Trying to ‘out Eiffel the Eiffel’ will not lead to a great product

Burnham, the fair’s chief architects, promised the Chicago fair would surpass that of Paris on every level, every level that is, “except one,” Larson writes. At 1,000 feet, the Eiffel tower was the tallest structure in the world. A phrase became popular: Chicago had to “out Eiffel the Eiffel.”

To try and do so, though, they opened up an opportunity to submit plans for something grand. Inventors and engineers from all over sent in designs. One proposal, sent in by someone with the initials R.T.E had the brilliant idea to attach a car to a two-thousand foot long piece of the “best rubber.” The car would be filled with people and pushed off a platform up in the air, It would descend into a free-fall and snap back with the rubber until it came to a complete stop. Larson writes that, “the engineer urged that as a precaution the ground ‘be covered with eight feet of feather bedding.’”

### There’s a balance between “safe enough” and “too safe”

Working at such a fast pace, Burnham was scrutinized that he was forcing the workers to work too fast, causing unsafe buildings. One criticism was that the buildings weren’t strong enough to withstand the wind. But one engineer thought the buildings were perfectly fine. After admitting to failing to calculate increased wind loads, the chief engineer of the project, Abraham Gottlieb resigned because Burnham wanted to make the buildings “too strong.” Burnham wanted to look at the last ten years of wind and calculate how strong the buildings should be. Gottlieb disagreed and thought they were fine as is. “This may be going to the extremes,” said Burnham, “but to me it seems wise and prudent, in view of the great interests involved.” In 1891, Burnham reported that the criticism now was that the structures were too strong!

### When creating a scene, every detail matters

Olmstead, the chief landscape architect of the fair, declared to not have steam boats on the fair’s waterways. “Put in the waters unbecoming boats and the effect would be utterly disgusting, destroying the value of what would otherwise be the most valuable original feature of this Exposition.”

Olmstead, though he had a natural concern, could become too fixated on an idea. The aesthetics were important, but would it really be all that bad to have steam boats? Especially if they shuttled passengers to and fro cheaply and quickly? Probably not. 

### Walt Disney’s dad worked at the fair

Larson writes that the ranks of employees included, “a carpenter and furniture-maker named Elias Disney, who in coming years would tell many stories about the construction of this magical real beside the lake. His son Walt would take note.”

I thought that was a neat paragraph.

### Simple and done well is better than extravagant and rushed

A problem for the fair’s landscape was the rain and wind. Rain would come, creating mud, and all the beautiful plants and displays would be washed away or crowded out. But Olmstead had a plan. He wrote his “boots on the ground guy”: “Do not lay out to do anything in the way of decorative planting that you shall not be quite certain that you will have ample time and means to perfect of its kind. There can be little fault found with simple, neat turf. Do not be afraid of undecorated, smooth surfaces.”

Larson continued, “it was far better, Olmstead lectured, to underdecorate than to overdecorate.” Olmstead explained, “Let us be though over-much plain and simple, even bare, rather than gaudy, flashy, cheap, and meretricious. Let us manifest the taste of gentleman.”

### Plan for the unplanned worst-case scenarios

Since the fair was to be a warm-weather affair, no one thought about designing the roofs to withhold the weight of the tons of snow that falls on Chicago every year. This became a problem when, during the winter before the fair opened with many buildings already built, hundreds of tons of snow laid upon the roofs of the buildings. Eventually, the roof of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts building, bearing the weight of all that snow, collapsed to the floor below.

### A lot of still-in-business brands debuted at the fair

“A box purporting to contain everything a cook would need to make pancakes, under the brand name Aunt Jemima’s”; Juicy Fruit; Cracker Jack; and Pabst Blue Ribbon won the exposition’s top beer award–it’s brewer calling it Pabst Blue Ribbon.

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

## Impressions

Though this book wasn’t the detailed account of the technical innovations required to get to space as I was hoping, I enjoyed it. I feel inspired reading about a time in America where a president had the ability to bring the nation together under one goal, even if some thought that goal was insane.

*****************American Moonshot***************** gives a unique peak behind the Cold War political curtain. I never realized how much of the space race was influenced ********because******** of the Cold War. Some reviewers, [including me](https://www.dltn.io/posts/book-review-american-Moonshot), have questioned whether Kennedy would have had such an audacious goal if there was no Soviet Union to race against. We’ll never know.

## Notes

- Robert Goddard was the first real rocketeer in America. His experiments began in the 1920s but didn’t gain much publicity. This was in part because he promised a moonshot and couldn’t quite deliver on that yet. After struggling to get someone to finance his research, Charles Lindbergh stepped up and convinced David Guggenheim to give him $100,000 over a four-year period. Ecstatic, Goddard moved to New Mexico. In one experiment, his rocket reached 9,000 feet in just 22 seconds.
- JFK’s father was a diplomat of sorts in Britain during Roosevelt’s presidency, appointed by POTUS himself. Though he struggled to bite his tongue and keep his strong opinions to a minimum. Eventually, FDR fired him.
- Upon Germany’s collapse and a couple failed evacuation attempts, Von Braun decided it was best to surrender to the US Army. One member of his team said:
    
    > We despise the French. We are mortally afraid of the Soviets; we do not believe the British can afford us; so that leaves the Americans.
    > 
- After his initial surrender, and with a map of where to go, American troops seized 14 tons of blueprints and designs from different Nazi facilities. They’d also have enough parts to make one hundred V-2s. And they had the guy who knew how to do just that. This did not make Stalin happy. He’s quoted saying, “This is absolutely intolerable. We defeated Nazi armies; we occupied Berlin and Peenemünde, but the Americans get the rocket engineers? What could be more revolting and more inexcusable?
- Was operation overcast the same as operation paperclip?
    - Yes it was. It was changed due to a security breach. The name was chosen by officers who would fasten paperclips to the folders of Nazi rocket experts they chose to hire.
- JIOA whitewashed von Braun and his teams of their Nazi history, sealed their files, and gave them full security clearance to begin work in America.
- According to the US Government’s own estimate, America had been at least eight years behind German rocket capability. With the new addition of von Braun and crew, that gapped vanished overnight.
- Jack Kennedy was a private man who preferred to keep to himself or spend time with friends. Pandering to voters wasn’t really his cup of tea. “With smiling ease, he could be full of good conversation while never completely connecting with anyone or revealing a thing.”
- After FDRs death (and his thirteen-year long presidency), the Democratic party had a hard time redefining itself without its leader…and Truman was not the person to fit that bill. The Republican Party grabbed the upper hand and took a very anti-Soviet, anti-communism position that became the defining attitude of the times.
- Stalin, in 1943, was **********The Times********** “Man of the Year”..lol what
- With the Red Scare in full effect in America, people became paranoid. “The murkiness of the line between reason and hysteria and the whisking away of serious deliberation bothered many New Deal Democrats. But any liberal candidates who attempted to have a nuanced discussion were attacked as being soft on communism.
- In 1946, the Army Signal Corps bounced radio waves off the moon and received them back on earth for the first time. This proved that radio waves would work in space and could be adapted to control manned and unmanned spacecraft.
- JFK was *****such***** a young senator
- RAND was developed by many people, including General H.H. “Hap” Arnold. His idea was that academia, industry, and the military had common goals and would benefit from cooperation during the transition from war to peace.
- Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in October 14, 1947. He launched out of the bomb bay of a Boeing Superfortress B-29. Why couldn’t he have just gel nods like normal?
- What exactly was the Berlin Air Lift?
- What was Atomic Energy Act of 1946?
    - “The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act) determined how the United States would control and manage the nuclear technology it had jointly developed with its World War II allies, the United Kingdom and Canada. Most significantly, the Act ruled that nuclear weapon development and nuclear power management would be under civilian, rather than military control, and established the United States Atomic Energy Commission for this purpose.”
- Due to the Americans strength in the air during the Korean war, Truman did not think it was necessary to spend money developing ICBMs at a level comparable to the Soviets. For comparison, in Truman’s last year, he spent $3 million on ballistic missile development. Eisenhower took that number to $161 million when he became president.
- Von Braun was a genius advertiser. He understood that in a democracy, where tax-payers were footing the bill of space exploration, he had to appeal to their patriotic pride. He juxtaposed spending on space exploration as a way to beat the Soviet’s and made sure that everyone knew that whoever was in space first…would eventually make the rules. “Advertising is everything in America,” he would tell a friend.
- For some reason, I can’t totally figure out why, Eisenhower was avoiding space, satellites, and rockets. He spent money on them, sure, but he didn’t want to actually launch anything. Was he afraid of failing?Am I missing something? Probably. That is until London B. Johnson gave a riveting speech to the people after *******Sputnik******* was launched. His speech is recognized by most as the tipping point in the Cold War to create a unified space program. p.134

- Von Braun became a hero in Cold War America due to his beliefs that they could beat the Soviet’s in most space exploration’s. He said he got 10 letters a day from people asking how to be a rocketeer. One lady, he said, wrote that God doesn’t want man to leave earth and that she’ll bet him $10 they never make it. **He wrote back saying, “as far as I know, the Bible said nothing about space flight, but it was clearly against gambling.”**
- 2 months after Sputnik, the Navy launched one of their Vanguard rockets with a test satellite. It rose 4 feet in the air and then exploded. There was no live coverage, but the event was called “Kaputnik” or “Stayputnik.” I thought that was funny lol.
- At the time, a Washington journalist, Drew Pearson, accused Kennedy of not actually writing Profiles in Courage and instead said the credit belongs to his speechwriter. Why did he say that? Is there any merit to it?
- After the Navy’s failed launch, von Braun, working with the Army, got word to build a modified Redstone rocket in 90 days. If he did it, he could launch. 90 days later, **********Explorer 1**********, the first US satellite to circle earth, was in orbit and carried by von Braun’s rocket. Feb. 1.
- Joe Walker, one of the astronauts picked as a contender to the be the first in space, was a test pilot. Though Chuck Yeager received world fame by breaking the sound barrier in 1947 in the X-15, Walker eventually flew higher and faster then Yeager. On his first flight, being surprised by the sheer force of the rockets, he yelled, “Oh my God!” into the radio. “Yes? You called?” The flight controller responded back comically.
- Watch *********************Shooting for the Moon*********************.
- JFK had an uncanny ability to master and brand words that defined his mission. He used “missile gap” to explain the vast difference between the Soviet Union’s missile tech and that of the United States. During his presidential bid, he used the term ************New Frontier************ to captivate the minds of Americans to think about what was next.
    - ************New Frontier************ would be a cool newsletter name
- JFK’s “missile gap” propaganda was a Cold War myth. The Soviet’s were a lot less armed than was thought of at the time. The problem was, no body knew that except high level officials in the CIA. Since this “gap” was one of Kennedy’s main talking points during his presidential campaigning, the CIA director, Allen Dulles, decided to let him and Nixon, his opponent, in on the secret: the Soviet’s are ***not*** stockpiling ICBMs. Kennedy didn’t change his strategy and kept alluding to the gap. Nixon knew he could destroy this play, because it was a strong one, but only by giving up their source and information, which he obviously couldn’t do. “I could expose that phony in minutes by displaying our high-altitude photographs and explaining the quality of information we are getting,” Nixon declared. “I can’t do that without destroying our source, and Kennedy, that bastard, knows I can’t.
- Explaining Tomorrow with the Space Agency - read this.

- A common anecdote JFK told on the campaign trail about Benjamin Franklin watching the first gas-filled balloons rising up in Paris. A skeptic asked Franklin what possible use the balloon was to mankind. Franklin answered, “What good is a baby?”

- “Everyone has oceans to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries? – Amelia Earhart
- Yuri Gagarian’s flight was soon followed by the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. These events acted as a one-two punch to knock Kennedy down.
- “Instead of cowboy hats and six shooters, the unshrinkable New Frontier heroes wore silvery fabric and rubbery space suits along with round helmets with wide visors.”
- One Mercury astronaut, Deke Slayton, commented that Kennedy’s “before the decade is out” goal was brilliant. “What Kennedy did was pick a goal people could relate to,” he said. “It has to be something under ten years; if you give people a thirty-year goal, they won’t waste time thinking about it, it’s too far away.”
- I like how Harvard professor Richard Neustadt defined presidential greatness, saying that it was the “power to persuade.” I think that’s just what makes a great leader. Can you get the people around you bought into your vision? I think that’s why D is having trouble with their ideas… too in the weeds. They need to be inspired.
- But not everyone agreed with JFK’s moon mission. Robert Boyd, a British physicist said, “This may in fact be the best political thing they can do in the circumstances in which they find themselves. But just taking humanity as a whole and the question of what we would do if we were all sane men, I think we wouldn’t be spending money sending man into space…Personally I am rather sorry that, frequently, science is dragged in as the justification for what I really regard as political exercise.”
- Dr. Hans Thirring said he didn’t think it would be possible for another 30 or 40 years!
- Another critique, that had merit, was what could be accomplished if the $20 billion being allocated for the moon landing would do if spent on a more humanitarian cause like curing cancer or building a high speed rail from coast to coast.
- How and why was Rice University tuition free? And why did they start charging tuition?
- Houston winning the bid for the new Manned Spacecraft Center was a lifeline to Houston; and all embraced it. I didn’t put this together, but the Astros and the Rockets are named after the space buzz of the 1960s.
- Gemini, the astronaut training program designed for two-man space flights, was named after the constellation that included twin stars Castor and Pollux, a sign of the zodiac controlled by Mercury.
- On Jan. 20, 1962, after a few scrapped launched for John Glenn, he was summoned to the White House. Im his words, Kennedy and he chatted “like one guy to another.” Kennedy wanted to be sure Glenn felt personally that everything had been done to keep him safe and make sure everything goes to plan. Glenn said when they first started the program, Space Task Group chief Robert Gilruth told each astronaut that they had complete veto power and if at “any time we, as experienced test pilots, saw something going on that we didn’t like or there was an area that we thought needed more testing or anything that we weren’t satisfied with, to let him know…the President thought that was an excellent way to conduct such a project.”
    - Interesting…I get the sentiment because they were test pilots, but where does the **********trust the expert********** motto come in here? Maybe there isn’t one because they are talking about a literal life or death scenario and not the copy on a website..lol.
- ************Friendship 7************, Glenn’s capsule, contained more than 7 miles of wiring and ten thousand components! It was built by McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis, which eventually became Boeing.
- Minutes before Glenn blasted off, he told his wife, “Remember don’t be scared. I’m just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum.”
- On reentry, Glenn’s capsule lost part of its heat shield. He was rescued sweating, dehydrated, and 5-pounds lighter than when he entered it.
- After the flight, Glenn and JFK became quite the friends. Aboard Air Force One, Jackie Kennedy brought her daughter, Caroline, to meet Glenn. After being introduced, five-year old Caroline looked confused. As tears started to swell up in her eyes, she asked, “But where’s the monkey?” Referring to Enos.
- I wonder, then, can ***law*** in general not exist without any means to enforce it? Could the Tragedy of the Commons be used as a description here? If there are many people in one area and someone doesn’t follow the rules but doesn’t get punished for it, is that why the Tragedy of the Commons happens?
- Gordon Cooper, the last and longest of the Mercury mission astronauts had a short circuit on reentry and had to do it manually. He splashed down ********Faith 7******** just 4.5 miles from the recovery ship. Unbelievable.

American Moonshot by Douglas Brinkley

“If someone can just tell me how to catch up [to the Soviets in the space race],” John F. Kennedy thundered to a room full of space advisors. “Let’s find somebody–anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there, if he knows.”

The tense meeting came after the Russian cosmonaut, [Yuri Gagarin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Gagarin), became the first person in history to orbit Earth. This latest accolade for the Soviet Union was another blow to America’s trepidatious attitude towards the space program. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the worst thing to happen that week. Five days later, the [disastrous Bay of Pigs](https://www.thenewsherald.com/2021/04/18/bay-of-pigs-was-jfks-responsibility/#:~:text=U.S.%20involvement%20in%20the%20Bay,Pigs%20and%20took%20complete%20blame) invasion kicked off. Though Eisenhower planned it, he was no longer in office and the nation needed someone to blame. Kennedy became that someone.

For Kennedy, the answer for America’s next greatest feat had always been to go up. Space was the end all be all of the Cold War. Whoever could get the furthest in space, the quickest, Kennedy believed, would win the Cold War.

After Gagarin became the first man to orbit earth, Kennedy and his administration changed their approach to conquering the eternal sky. No longer could America entertain a tit-for-tat pattern with the Soviet Union. Instead, as Kennedy wrote to a Princeton student, America needed to Leapfrog the Soviet Union. And leapfrog they would.

Spaceflight in America was still young at the time. Before the Second World War broke out, [Robert Goddard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard) became the first real rocketeer in America. His experiments with liquid-fueled rockets proved they were the way forward. Unfortunately, Goddard was one of many who passed on before they could witness their innovations come true.

Goddard’s research, however, influenced a young engineer in Germany who used Goddard’s work as a foundation to build the [V-2 rocket](https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/missile-surface-surface-v-2-4/nasm_A19600342000#:~:text=The%20V%2D2%20rocket%2C%20developed,fuel%20rockets%20and%20launch%20vehicles): the deadliest weapon used in WW2 against Britain. Unbeknownst to the engineer, Werner von Braun, his design for the V-2 would lay the groundwork for the eventual Saturn V, the rocket that landed two young astronauts on the moon in 1969.

Von Braun and a host of other brilliant German scientists and engineers were brought to America through [Operation Paperclip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip), a covert plan to bring the most intelligent German minds to America at the end of WW2. The operation, originally called Operation Overcast, changed its monicker to Operation Paperclip after a security breach. The name was derived from the paperclips military officers would fasten to the folders of the Nazi experts they chose to hire.

Werner von Braun and John F. Kennedy became two backbone figures of the Space Race. Their journey, along with all the drama and political woes of the early 1960s is chronicled in *[American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and The Great Space Race](https://www.amazon.com/American-Moonshot-Kennedy-Great-Space/dp/006265506X)* by Douglas Brinkley. In the words of a *Kirkus* review of the book:

> [This book is a] look back at the days when American presidents and politicians believed in and promoted science—days when there was a world to win, along with the heavens.
>

The first part of the book is a mini-biography of John F. Kennedy. Brinkley writes about JFK’s childhood, his family life, and his time spent in the Navy. Kennedy’s character is slowly transformed from a party boy to a diplomatic statesman (though the parties never stopped). Paralleled with Kennedy’s life is a brief account of the history of rockets and Werner von Braun’s journey from Nazi engineer to the head of a rocket lab in Huntsville, Alabama.

Once Kennedy gets elected, Brinkley does a magnificent job pulling conversations, reports, scientific facts, and the general consensus at the time all together to paint a full picture of what was going on in America and around the world.

It’s unclear if Kennedy would have put such emphasis on a literal moonshot were it not for the times. Kennedy loved space, yes, and he was enamored with it. But asking for $40 billion from the American people wasn’t something that happened often. Would he have been as brave as to do so without the pressure of the Cold War? Brinkley doesn’t state the answer explicitly, but it can be implied. He cared less about space and more about winning the Cold War and proving to the world that America was the best. This doesn’t diminish his efforts one bit but casts them in an interesting light.

There was one conversation with James Webb, the NASA administrator, that gives a peak behind Kennedy’s motives. In September of 1963, Kennedy and Webb had a private conversation in the White House and you can hear the trepidation and regret in Kennedy’s voice about making “the moonshot” his grand plan.

**Kennedy:** “Do you think the lunar, the manned landing on the moon, is a good idea?”

**Webb:** “Yes, sir, I do.”

…

**Kennedy:** “If I get reelected, I’m not–we’re not– go[ing] to the moon in my–in our period are we?”

**Webb:** “No.”

**Kennedy** (Brinkley notes that his voice is slightly sulky): “We’re not going…yeah.”

…

**Kennedy:** “Why should one spend that kind of dough to put a man on the moon?”

**Kennedy** (Answering his own question): But it seems to me…we’ve got to wrap around in this country, a military use for what we’re doing and spending in space. If we don’t it does look like a stunt.”

Though some in America saw Kennedy’s ambitions for space as a waste of money and time, such as the former president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who Brinkley wrote, “continued to snipe that ‘anybody who would spend $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts,” the majority were inspired by the grand ambition, even though everyone knew money would be required in hefty amounts. A phrase repeated throughout the book is “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.”

But aside from the Eisenhower administration's plans for incremental innovation and a small company named NASA that wasn’t quite sure who to listen to, Kennedy didn’t have much to go on when he took office. His presidency would be a continuous act of spinning plates between Kruschev and the Cold War, working with Lyndon B. Johnson to lobby congress for an ever-increasing pool of funds, and deciding just how ambitious America should be in trying to win the space race. The rewards were high, sure, but so were the risks, and no one let Kennedy forget that. Brinkley writes about the warning Eisenhower’s former science advisor spooked Kennedy with by saying “NASA wasn’t ready for manned space, and that if a Mercury astronaut were prematurely launched on a Redstone rocket, the attempted suborbital flight would be ‘the most expensive funeral man has ever had.’”

Thankfully, the warning didn’t deter Kennedy and the rest of America. JFK, his administration, NASA, James Webb, the Navy, and countless private companies worked together throughout a heyday of technical innovation, budgetary restrictions, and threats of war, to eventually put a man on the moon.

If you’re hoping to read a detailed account of the scientific and technical breakthroughs NASA achieved for the moonshot, this book is not the one. Though the beginning had interesting anecdotes about rockets, the majority of the book is about the political side of the space race and John F. Kennedy. Though interesting and I’m glad I read it, it lacks the technical bravado I was hoping for. That said, it’s a masterclass on power, influence, and Cold War politics.


Not Long Ago in a Galaxy Not Very Far

> The best political economy is the care and culture of men. – Emerson

For all the controversy they stir up today, colleges *used* to be beneficial. Having a college degree meant something. It meant you not only had an education, but you had a moral foundation of right and wrong, ethics, theology, and philosophy. The humanities were as important as engineering. Subjects communicated with each other in a lattice of back and forth to give the mind the ability to see the big picture that life was painting -- as much as a human can see that, at least.

But somewhere along the way, something changed. College is no longer thought of as the place to understand the inner workings of the world or how we got to now. Some of the most astute judgments of college (and education in general) attack the curriculum for *not* teaching anything useful. But it wasn't meant to be this way.

Reflecting on the words of David Starr Jordan (January 19, 1851 -- September 19, 1931), the founding president of Stanford University, we find a beautiful illustration of what college is meant to be. In a publication of his speeches, *Care and Culture of Men*, Jordan shares his vision for what higher education should mean, the relationship between the State and the school, and much more.

Speaking on the benefits of having a college degree and the attributes that should come with it, Jordan has much to say:

> So, if you learn to use it rightly, this the college can do for you: It will bring you in contact with the great minds of the past, the long roll of those who, through the ages, have borne a mission to young men and young women, from Plato to Emerson, from Homer to Euripides to Schiller and Browning. Your thought will be limited not by the narrow gossip of to-day, but the great men of all ages and all climes will become your brothers. You will learn to feel what the Greek called the "consolations of philosophy." To turn from the petty troubles of the day to the thoughts of the masters, is to go from the noise of the street through the door of a cathedral. If you learn to unlock these portals, no power on earth can take from you the key. The whole of your life must be spent in your own company, and only the educated man is good company for himself. The uneducated man looks out on life through the narrow windows, and thinks the world is small.

When Jordan refers here to the educated and uneducated man, he literally is referring to someone with a college degree and someone without a college degree. Today, I view it as someone who has a thirst for knowledge and someone who doesn't. Whether that education comes from YouTube, a trade, or higher education doesn't matter. What matters is that someone has an open mind to learn the vast mysteries the world still holds dear to its heart.

There were two important things an education taught young men and women in Jordan's mind: morality and history. It taught one how to approach life, how to think of themselves, and how to attain greatness. But an education also taught the importance of learning from those who once lived:

> The world's work, the world's experience does not begin with us. We must know what has been done before. We must know the paths our predecessors have trodden, if we would tread them further. We must stand upon their shoulders--dwarfs upon the shoulders of giants--if we would look farther into the future than they. Science, philosophy, statesmenship, can not for a moment let go of the past.

Morality, individuality, and striving for greatness, were popular themes throughout each of Jordan's speeches. Higher education was the path to learning about these things, but only to a certain degree. "A college cannot," Jordan says, "take the place of a parent. To claim that it does so, is a mere pretense. It can cure the boy of petty vices and childish trickery only by making him a man, by giving him higher ideals, more serious views of life."

What are those "more serious views of life"? Jordan explains:

> It is the noblest mission of all higher education, I believe, to fill the mind of the youth with these enthusiasms, with noble ideas of manhood, of work, of life. It should teach him to feel that life is indeed worth living; and no one who leads a worthy life has ever for a moment doubted this. It should help him to shape his own ambitions as to how a life my be made worthy. It should help him to believe that love, and friendship, and faith, and devotion are things that really exist, and are embodied in men and women. He should learn to know these men and women, whether of the present or the past, and his life will become insensibly fashioned after theirs. He should form plans of his own work for society, for science, for art, for religion. His life may fall far short of what he would make it; but a high ideal must preced any worthy achievement.

That last line echoed through most of Jordan's speeches. He took great care to encourage the younger generation to set their mind to something greater, and giving advice on how to achieve it, says to put their mind to something and let nothing get in the way:

> If you say to yourself, "I will be a naturalist, a traveler, an historian, a statesman, a scholar"; if you never unsay it; if you bend all your powers in that direction, and take advantage of all those aids that help toward your ends, and reject all that do not, you will some time reach your goal. *The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows whither he is going.*

Whether someone actually achieved the goal of becoming a naturalist, a traveler, a historian, or a scholar didn't matter. Instead, Jordan made sure to emphasize that it's not the achievements of one's life that make it great, but the aim one takes that does so:

> The value of life is measured by its aim rather than by its achievement. Loftiness of aim is essential to loftiness of spirit. Nothing that is really high can be reached in a short time nor by any easy route. Most men, as men go, aim at low things, and they reach the objects of their ambitions. They have only to move in straight lines to an end clearly visible. Not so with you. You are bound on a quest beyond the limit of your vision. There are mountains to climb, rivers to ford, deserts to cross on your search for the Holy Grail. The end is never in sight.

I slightly disagree with that sentiment. Someone can have the aim to be the first person on Mars but do nothing to achieve it. So as long as their aim is high enough, they can sit on the couch all day playing video games. Clearly, this isn't what Jordan meant when he said, "The value of life is measured by its aim rather than by its achievement," but some may take it to mean that. He reiterates this idea in a different speech saying, "Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for."

Shifting to politics, Jordan believed the changes that were required in the future lay within the people to whom he was speaking:

> In other words, the people will always have as good a government as their intelligence and patriotism deserve, and no better. In the long run, government can be made better only by the improvement of the public opinion on which it rests.

This point interests me greatly. Obviously, I wasn't alive during the 1900s, but it seems like the political actions were much loftier, grandiose, and impactful. Is that because the public of the 1900s *deserved *that type of government? That makes sense to me. If a culture is soft, the government is going to be soft, and vice versa.

One of the things I liked most about reading these speeches is that politics is addressed, but one party isn't favored over another. It was refreshing. In fact, he noticed that the arguments between parties were never about fundamental issues, so he needn't get involved at all.

He did, however, stress that it was the duty of the educated man to keep their respective political parties in check. Ensuring the main thing was kept the main thing was the educated person's responsibility. He often seemed worrisome about the blinders that people wear when they embrace a certain political party. "To be known as an apostle or as the devotee of some special idea", he says, "often prevents a man from learning or growing." This foreshadows something Einstein would say later in his life, which might be my favorite quote of his:

> How an intelligent man can subscribe to a party I find a complete mystery.\
> -- Einstein

Instead, Jordan encouraged his audience to become citizens of the world. "The good citizen," Jordan says, "is a citizen of the world; itself, as citizenship improves, becoming one vast community, the greatest of all republics." He also made a stark warning to disregard your party if they start to run astray:

> It is not your duty to join yourself to organizations which can take away any part of your freedom. It is not your duty to vote the ticket of my party, nor of your party, nor that of any one of the time-honored political organizations into which men naturally fall. For you and I know that the questions which divide the great parties of a free country are not, as a rule, questions of morals or good citizenship. The sheep are never all on one side, nor the goats on the other. Party divisions are based, for the most part, on hereditary tenden-cies, on present expediencies, and hopes of temporary gain, and too often on the distribution of power and plunder, of power to plunder.
>
> When your party is led by bad men, or when its course is headed in the wrong direction, your State expects you as educated men to know it.

Tolerance, for other people's ideas, worldviews, and opinions, Jordan believed, was one measure of a good civilization. "The degree of tolerance," he remarks, "which is shown by any people toward those whose opinions differ from their own is one of the best tests of civilization." Continuing, he adds how important it is that the degree of tolerance continues to grow:

> The growth of tolerance is one of the most important phases in the history of modern civilization. The right of freedom of the mind, the right of private interpretation, is a birthright of humanity. As the scholar has taken a noble part in the struggle which has won for us this freedom, so should he guard it in the future as one of his highest possessions. It is each man's right to sew his own pathway toward the truth. If there be in this country a town, North, South, East, West, on the banks of the Yazoo, or the Hudson, or the Sacramento, where an honest man cannot speak his honest mind without risk of violence or of social ostracism, in that town our freedom is but slavery still, and our civilization but a barbarism thinly disguised.

May we be people who join an open mind, heart, and ears with a closed mouth as we continue to rise each day and set out on this mysterious journey called life. May we be people who keep studying the lives of those who once lived and let them teach us how to live today, forever.

David Starr Jordan on Life, Education, and Politics

## Impressions
*Killers of the Flower Moon* opened my narrow mind to a new (for me) genre of writing: narrative non-fiction.

It tells the true story of the Osage murders and gives a unique insight into the early days of the FBI and, more importantly for me, J. Edgar Hoover's philosophy of running the Bureau. I finished it in two days becuase of how gripping the writing is. This story needs to be told more. On that note, I was excited to see a movie, directed by [Martin Scorsese](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000217/) is coming out in 2023.

Since this was a narrative, I didn't highlight much. I did, however, learn interesting facts about the early days of private detectives and forensic science.

## Notes
- The term "to detect" is derived from the Latin verb "to unroof." According to legend, the devil allowed his henchmen to peer into houses by removing their roofs, so at one point, detectives were known as "the devil's disciples." In 1850, Allan Pinkerton founded the first American provat detective agency and the company's logo was a large, Masonic-like eye, which is what sparked the moniker "private eye."
- Alphonse Bertillion, in 1879, created the first rigorous scientific method for catching repeat criminals. The process, known as Bertillionage, takes notes of body measurments, tattoos, scars, and other distinguishing features to easily identify and capture repeat criminals. Bertillion also created the mugshot.
- Shakespeare:
	- *Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough To mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, conspiracy: Hide it in smiles and affability.*
- Hoover, as commonly known, ran the FBI with an iron fist. After firing agents who were drinking on the job, he told White, "I believe that when a man becomes a part of the forces of this Bureau he must so conduct himself as to remove the slightest possibility of causing criticism or attack upon the Bureau."

> History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset.


Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

## Impressions
I bought this book five years ago because it was old and looked cool. That's essentially my filter when buying books in an antique store. I read a few essays from it at the time because I was in a big transcendentalist stage, but never revisisted after that.

Earlier this month, I saw it on my shelf and in a moment of boredom, decided to see who wrote it–David Starr Jordan. Huzzah! *The founding president of Stanford University*?! I was hooked. And enjoyed it. It turned out to be a beautiful illustration of what college is meant to be. It's a collection of his speeches and in it, he shares his vision for what higher education should mean, the relationship between the State and the school, and much more.

The following are direct quotes from the book. Italiziczed words are personal commentary unless otherwise stated.

## Notes

- So, if you learn to use it rightly, this the college can do for you: It will bring you in contact with the great minds of the past, the long roll of those who, through the ages, have bone a mission to young men and young women, from Plato to Emerson, from Homer to Euripides to Schiller and Browning. Your thought will be limited not by the narrow gossip of to-day, but the great men of all ages and all climes will become your brothers. You will learn to feel what the Greek called the “consolations of philosophy.” To turn from the petty troubles of the day to the thoughts of the masters, is to go from the noise of the street through the door of a catherdral. If you learn to unlock these portals, no power on earth can take from you the key. The whole of your life must be spent in your own company, and only the educated man is good company for himself. The uneducated man looks out on life through the narrow windows, and thinks the world is small.
- The world's work, the world's experience does not begin with us. We must know what has been done before. We must know the paths our predecessors have trodden, if we would tread them further. We must stand upon their shoulders–dwarfs upon the shoulders of giants–if we would look farther into the future than they. Science, philosophy, statesmenship, caanot for a moment let go of the past.
- The young man who is aiming at nothing and cares not to rise, is already dead.
- If you say to yourself, "I will be a naturalist, a traveler, an historian, a statesman, a scholar"; if you never unsay it; if you bend all your powers in that direction, and take advantage of all those aids that help toward your ends, and reject all that do not, you will some time reach your goal. *The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows whither he is going.* (Author's emphasis)
- A college cannot take the place of a parent. To claim that it does so, is a mere pretense. It can cure the boy of petty vices and childish trickery only by making him a man, by giving him higher ideals, more serious views of life.
- It is the noblest mission of all higher education, I believe, to fill the mind of the youth with these enthusiasms, with noble ideas of manhood, of work, of life. It should teach him to feel that life is indeed worth living; and no one who leads a worthy life has ever for a moment doubted this. It should help him to shape his own ambitions as to how a life my be made worthy. It should help him to believe that love, and friendship, and faith, and devotion are things that really exisit, and are embodied in men and women. He should lern to know these men and women, whether of the present or the past, and his life will become insensibly fashioned after theirs. He should form plans of his own work for society, for science, for art, for religion. His life may fall far short of what he would make it; but a high ideal must preced any worthy achievement.
- *Jordan believed the country wasn't supporting higher education properly. He thought the funds were going to plant more schools, instead of watering the ones that already exisisted. Naturally, this created a place where there weren't any great schools, just a lot of ok ones.*

  "The funds available [for higher education] have been used for planting, rather than watering–to found a multitude of weak schools, rather than to make a few schools strong."
- The best political economy, Emerson tells us, is the care and culture of men.
- The essence of manhood lies in the growth of the power of choice. In the varied relations of life the power to choose means the duty of choosing right. To choose the right, one must have the wit to know it and the will to demand it. In the long run, in small things as in large, wrong choice leads to death. It is not " punished by death," for nature knows nothing of rewards and punishments. Death is simply its inevitable result. No republic can live--no man can live in a republic in which wrong is the repeated choice either of the people or of the state.
- A Japanese writer, Uchimura, says this of education in old Japan: "We were not taught in classes then. The grouping of soul-bearing human beings into classes, as sheep upon Australian farms, was not known in our old schools. Our teachers believed, I think instinctively, that man (persona)is unclassifiable; that he must be dealt with personally -i.e. face to face, and soul to soul. So they schooled us one by one -each according to his idiosyn-crasies, physical, mental, and spiritual. They knew each one of us by his name. And as asses were never harnessed with horses, there was but little danger of the latter being beaten down into stupidity, or the former driven into valedictorians' graves. In this respect, therefore, our old-time teachers in Japan agreed with Socrates and Plato in their theory of education. So naturally the relation between teachers and students was the closest one possible. We never called our teachers by that unapproachable name, Professor. We called them Sensei, men born before, so named because of their prior birth, not only in respect of the time of their appearance in this world, which was not always the case, but also of their coming to the understanding of the truth.

  It was this, our idea of relationship between teacher and student, which made some of us to comprehend at once the intimate relation between the Master and the disciples which we found in the Christian Bible. When we found written therein that the disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord; or that the good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep, and other similar sayings, we took them almost instinctively as things known to us long before."

  Thus it was in old Japan. Thus should it be in new America.

  In such manner do the oldest ideas forever renew their youth, when these ideas are based not on tradition or convention, but in the nature of man.
- The best spent money of the present is that whichis used dfor the future.
- In other words, the people will always have as agood a government as their intelligence and patriotism deserve, and no better. In the long rungovernemtncan be made better only by the improvement of the public opinion on which it rests.
- It is not your duty to join yourself to organizations which can take away any part of your freedom. It is not your duty to vote the ticket of my party, nor of your party, nor that of any one of the time-honored political organizations into which men naturally fall. For you and I know that the questions which divide the great parties of a free country are not, as a rule, questions of morals or good citizenship. The sheep are never all on one side, nor the goats on the other. Party divisions are based, for the most part, on hereditary tenden-cies, on present expediencies, and hopes of temporary gain, and too often on the distribution of power and plunder, of power to plunder.

  When your party is led by bad men, or when its course is headed in the wrong direction, your State expects you as educated men to know it.
- That you stand aloof from the majority is no proof that you are right and they are wrong.
- The good citizen is a citizen of the world; itself, as citizenshipimproves, becoming one vast community, the greatest of all republics.
- The story of the decline and growth of empires is the stry of the growth of man.
- The degree of tolerance which is shown by any people toward those whose opinions differ from their own s one of the best tests of civiliization.
- The growth of tolerance is one of the most important phases in the hsitory of modern civilization. The right of freedom of the mind, the right of private interpretation, is a birthright of humanity. As the scholar has taken a noble part in the struggle which has won for us this freedom, so should he guard it in the future as one of his highest possessions. It is each man's right to hew his own pathway toward the truth. If there be in this country a town, North, South, East, West, on the banks of the Yazoo, or the Hudson, or the Sacramento, where an honest man cannot speak his honest mind without risk of violence or of social ostracism, in that town our freedom is but slavery still, and our civilization but a barbarism thinly disguised.
- The value of life is measured by its aim rather than by its achievement. Loftiness of aim is essential to loftiness of spirit. Nothing that is really high can be reached in a short time nor by any easy route. Most men, as men go, aim at low things, and they reach the objects of their ambitions. They have only to move in straight lines to an end clearly visible. Not so with you. You are bound on a quest beyond the limit of your vision. There are mountains to climb, rivers to ford, deserts to cross on your search for the Holy Grail. The end is never in sight.
-  What you have done thus far is little in itself.

	  You have reached but the threshold of learning. Your education is barely begun, and there is no one but you who can finish it. Your thoughts are but as the thoughts of children, your writings but trash from the world's waste-paper basket. Nothing that you know, or think, or do but has been better known or thought or done by others.

	  The work of your lives is barely begun. You must continue to grow as you are now growing before you can serve the world in any important way. But the promise of the future is with you.

	  You have the power and will of growth. The sunshine and rain of the next century will fall upon you. You will be stimulated by its breezes, you will be inspired by its spirit. It is not an easy thing to grow. Decay and decline is easier than growth-so the trees will tell you. Growth is slow, and hard, and wearisome. The lobster suffers the pangs of death every time he outgrows and sheds his shell; but each succeeding coat of armor is thicker, and stronger, and more roomy. So with you. You will find it easier not to develop. It will be pleasanter to adjust yourself to old circumstances and to let the moss grow on your back. The struggle for existence is hard; the struggle for improvement is harder; and some there are among you who sooner or later will cease struggling. Such will be the cases of arrested development-those who promised much and did little, those whose education did not bring effectiveness. Be never satisfied with what you have accomplished, the deeds you can do, the thoughts you can think. Such satisfaction is the sting of old age, the feeling that the best is behind us, and that the noble quest is over forever.
- To be known as an apostle or as the devotee of some special idea, often prevents a man from learning or from growing.
- Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.
- Sin is a man's failure to realize his highest possibilites.


The Care and Culture of Men by David Starr Jordan

Sitting around a campfire listening to stories passed on from generations brings with it a feeling of wonder and joy for the adventures told from long ago.

Each one of these stories is special on its own and they could never be told in a *bad* way.

But you reach another level of captivation when someone who is a great storyteller holds the talking stick and their vocal cords rumble.

Each word lingers in your mind as you anticipate the next set of syllables, waiting to laugh, to cry, and to love. It's a whole new experience.

This is how I felt reading [*What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OA6KIS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by Richard Feynman. I have a deep admiration for Feynman's beliefs on life, knowledge, and science, but that admiration went deeper still as I followed the stories of his life told by the man himself.

Feynman, You Sexist Pig!
------------------------

Shortly after giving lectures at CalTech, Feynman was accused of being anti-women because of two stories he told to illustrate different points in his *Feynman Lectures on Physics*. In response to the letter he received, Feynman wrote, "Don't bug me man!" and sent it off.

About a year later, he was in San Francisco receiving an award he was given from writing those books, but not all was well. A group of protesters were in front of the lecture hall giving out flyers with black, large letters titled, "FEYNMAN SEXIST PIG!"

As he started his talk, he addressed the protestor's:

> I'm sorry that my short answer to your letter brought you here unnecessarily. There are more serious places to direct one's attention towards improving the status of women in physics than these relatively trivial mistakes--if that's what you want to call them--in a textbook. But perhaps, after all, it's good that you came. For women do indeed suffer from prejudice and discrimination in physics, and your presence here today serves to remind us of these difficulties and the need to remedy them.
>
> Even though the American Association Physics Teachers has given me an award for teaching, I must confess I don't know how to teach. Therefore, I have nothing to say about teaching. Instead, I would like to talk about something that will be especially interesting to the women in the audience: I would like to talk about the structure of the proton.

Handled with grace and care.

Infinite numbers
----------------

Richard Feynman was an "uncle" to several of his physicist's kids. One such nephew was Henry Bethe, son of Hans Bethe who was a 1967 Nobel Prize winner. After the passing of Feynman, Henry sent a letter to Feynman's wife retelling a magnificent story that illustrates Feynman's playful attitude and ability to simplify the complex. Henry recalls:

Dick [Feynman] turned to me and said, "Did you know that there are twice as many numbers as numbers?"

"No there are not!" Henry quipped back.

But Feynman wouldn't give up, insisting that Henry name a number.

> "One million" A big number to start.
>
> "Two million."
>
> "Twenty-seven."
>
> "Fifty-four."
>
> I named about ten more numbers and each time Dick names the number twice as big. Light dawned.
>
> "I see; so there are three times as many numbers as numbers"
>
> "Prove it," said Uncle Dick. He named a number. I named one three times as big. He tried another. I did it again. Again. He named a number too complicated for me to multiply in my head. "Three times that," I said.
>
>


What Do You Care What Other People Think? By Richard Feynman

## Impressions
I had been eyeing this for about a month before I bought it because reading a 400+ page book about the history of the library seemed like a big undertaking. Much to my surprise, it was a fun read and flowed nicely. I expected it to be much more pedantic than it was.

I do wish the contents were organized in a more structured timeline. I don't get why authors who write biographies or histories on something specific try and be creative with the structure by organizing the book by topic, like this one was, or in reverse-chronological order like *[Edison](https://www.amazon.com/Edison-Edmund-Morris/dp/081299311X)* was. This book wasn't completely random and followed a rough outline, but did not advance year to year.

## Actionable Takeaways
1. A good description of a library could be: *making the genius of man public property.*
2. A good way to tell what's important to someone, or a group of people, is to look at where the store things in their home. If they have a special room for something, it's a good indication that whatever is in there means a lot. We can use this strategy to infer books and the process of writing was very important to monastic monks, because they had a dedicated room for this endeavor: the scriptorium.
3. The earlier Stages of libraries had chains connected to books to prevent thieves from stealing anything. Once universities started displaying their books on shelves, the got rid of the chains to make it easier for people to study, but this also meant they lost more books. By 1338, over 300 of the mere 2,000 books in the possession of the College of the Sorbonne had already disappeared.
4. Before the invention of the printing press, books were used as a display of wealth. But once they became cheaper to buy, this practice became less so. It's a good illustration of scarcity creating an appearance of wealth and also how, even hundreds of years ago, people still wanted to "show off."
5. Like with any technological advancement, the incumbents thought printed books were not as equal in value to books written by hand. Those critics were often those who were in the business of writing books by hand or who had an uptight taste. The everyday person didn't care whether it was written by hand or printed, they just wanted the value that could be found inside. This is a great illustration about how people don't care what technology is used to build something–they just want that thing.
6. Throughout history, libraries were always a big target during any war. People could steal books to sell them, sure. But what was of more value was changing the city's ideology, for what people read, they became. So if you want to influence a group of people, they realized one of the best places to do that was the library. So they got rid of any books that talked about "the old way" and replaced them with books that matched that attackers philosophy. We see this play out from the early 1000s even up to WW2.

## Notes
- [Pliny the Elder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Elder), when talking about [Asinius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Asinius_Pollio), the friend of Julius Cesear who would bring Ceser's plan for a library in Rome to fruition, said Asinius was "the first to make the genius of man public property." I quite like that description for a library.
- "A monk who works is troubled by only one devil, while a monk who is idle is troubled by many." This is similar to Newton's quote about resisting temptation by keeping busy with intellectual practices in *[The Clockwork Universe](https://www.daltonmabery.com/book-notes/the-clockwork-universe)*.
- After the fall of the Roman Empire disrupted the papyrus supply throughout the Mediterranean, parchment became the standard replacement. It was more expensive, but lasted longer and could be written on on both sides.
- The importance of books in the monastic life could be symbolized through the existence of the scriptorium or writing room. For no one ever dedicated a room to something that wasn't important.
- Around the twelfth century, monasteries lost their monopoly on book collections and creations and universities took the reins.
- The word *studio* is derived from the Latin *studium*, which describes a monk's cell.
- Eventually, in the rooms of those colleges, books began to be put on display for anyone to use, rather than locked away in chests like they were in monasteries. This was a positive, for it made knowledge-sharing much easier and people could reference books in a much faster way. This also meant it was easier to lose books. By 1338, over 300 of the mere 2,000 books in the possession of the College of the Sorbonne had already disappeared.
- After the invention of the printing press, owning and collecting books no longer became a status symbol because it was much cheaper to get a book. Before, when things were produced by hand, they were much more expensive and it was a fun thing to "flex" on. That was no longer the case after the invention of the printing press.
	- "Ownership of a library no longer marked a man out as a member of the European social and political elite."
	- Paris became the center of printing in Northern Europe; in the south, it was Venice.
- Though some tried to make an argument that printed books weren't as "worthy" of books that were written by hand, owners didn't seem to mind: "Those buyers who bought a book for its text do not seem to have minded whether it came from a press or a pen."
- Whether the press had any role on the value of books is up for debate, but it certainly had an impact on the creation of libraries. Before the press, wealthy people wanted to make libraries to show off their wealth, but they were open for other people to use. But since the press made it much easier for anyone to get a book, the ruling class, the only people building libraries at the time, weren't as inclined to donate their generous books and money.
- Fernando Colon was one of the first people to recognize building a library for what it is today: a place for all books on all subjects for all people in all languages. This was not the common attitude for most collector's of the day.
- We lost a lot of potential collections and libraries once the owner passed on. Though they had a plan and intention to pass it on to an heir, it was a common thread throughout history that the heir didn't want to bare the responsibility. It was much easier to just get a little pay day from the collections.
- The Reformation had a quite a lasting impact on libraries and it was the beginning of a common pattern that is still happening today. After the Protestant's rose up, a lot of the Catholic works were no longer accurate (which at that point, was a lot of Europe's book stock), so they got rid of the Catholic works in libraries and started to replace them with Protestant works. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 acknowledged King Henry as head of the Church of England. This granted him the power to dissolve monasteries and with it, a lot of their books. Later in 1550, another Act was passed that made owning of the former monastic books illegal, which only sped up the rate of destruction that was currently taking place. But it wasn't just Catholic works that were lost, because when you're in a frenzy of book burning, it's quite difficult to tell the difference between "secular manuscripts of historical importance and works of catholic theology."
- When Queen Mary took over, the reformed books act were reversed and everyone started stacking shelves with catholic works again. This wasn't as vicious of a process as before, but it did have an effect on Oxford and other colleges, for they were where those of the future were being taught. This was again reversed under Queen Elizabeth, which added space for more protestant works again. But to this day, "No Oxford colleges own any Protestant books acquired before the reign of Elizabeth." It makes sense though, for "Why would colleges spend money on books when the books might be confiscated or burned after the next reversal of royal policy?"
	- This pattern of one ideology ruling, burning the others books or trying to censor them, and someone else coming into power would be a running thread through history.
- Between 1550 and 1750, normal tradesmen such as doctors, lawyers, and merchants starting collecting more books. Essentially, they picked up where the monks left off.
- By the middle of the 17th century, the Dutch Republic had become the center of the international book market. Book auctions had been around since the 15th Century, but the Dutch Republic were the first to separate books out from the rest of the estate. They also provided a printed catalogue people could look through ahead of time and come ready to bid. This had an interesting second order effect. Because books were now making much more money posthumously than before, people were much more encouraged to invest in books throughout their life, because they knew it could be used as a sort of an investment for their family when they passed.
- Thomas Bodley restored the Oxford library to what it is today completely on his own dime. He may have been the first to incorporate, strictly, the "silence rule" in libraries. By 1711, this rule had been adopted more widely; where the user in Amsterdam was greeted with this severe warning:
	- "You learned sir, who enter among books, don't slam the door with your tumultuous hand...here it's the dead who speak to them who work." (147)
- Libraries were a popular target to destroy during wars because what people read, they become. So if you wanted to change the culture, starting at the libraries was a good thing to do.
- The success of early public libraries depended on the degree of access and excitement of the leaders to treat it as a genuine public good, not just an off-shoot of their personal collection. **When someone cares about something, they make it last.**
- Starting around 1720, older books became much more valued. Hitherto, a book was valued solely on the contents of it, not when it was published, by whom it was written, or how it was published. This started to change around 1720, as people started to value older manuscripts and earlier printed books as much more valuable as later ones.
- The Library Company of Philadelphia was the world's first subscription library. We can thank Benjamin Franklin for this beautiful addition to the library economy. It still flourishes to this day.
- Fiction became it's own industry around the 19th Century, even though it carried with it a sense of disrespectfulness and "childish" attitude.
- Carnegie, with his generous donation of libraries in the Americas and Europe, truly inaugurated the golden age of the public library.
- WW1 and WW2 destroyed many of Europe's great libraries and books.

## Quotes
- As with so many of the libraries we will meet in this book, neglect was a much more potent enemy than war or malice.
- Libraries were a private encyclopedia of the world's wisdom and follies.

<Subscribe />


The Library: A Fragile History

*You can purchase [the book here](https://www.amazon.com/Pieces-Action-Vannevar-Bush/dp/1953953204).*

I've been wondering lately how the process of scientific research has developed over the years and this book helped shed some light on a potential answer. As I understand, it was Bush who helped create the current funding structure between the government and universities, as he thought it was of great importance for the military to work with the best civillian researchers, all of whom held positions at a university.

[Vannevar Bush](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush) was an engineer, inventor, and administrator who headed the [U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Scientific_Research_and_Development) (OSRD) during WWII. Bush reported directly to President Roosevelt. Essentially all of the R&D of military equipment and operations were conducted through this department. This book is a culmination of those experiences distilled down to the lessons Bush learned about dealing with "tyros", going toe to toe with Churchill, his philosophy on organizational structure, what's wrong with the patent system, how engines work, an ode to teachers and colleges, and much more.

The foreword to this book, written by Ben Reinhardt, puts it well by saying:

> So dive in. Have fun with it. Be curious. Skip around. Go deep. **I went into this book with little more than a name and came out with the closest thing to a mentor someone you've never met can be.**

I echo that statement.

## Practical Takeaways
- Change depends on two things: someone to work in a new way and an effective organization to bring those changes around. One is not more important than the other.

- A leader's job is coordination. It requires a trust in the people doing the actual work (Bush did not appreciate how Churchill handled many scientific matters during the war), and it requires a clear line of communication with someone 100% responsible and able to make a drastic decision if that need be. Bush recounts times where there was confusion as to who could actually make a decision about going forward and this lead to more confusion and frustration.

- This country pays greater attention to those who yell and complain about how something works today, or how it once worked, and seems to ignore those who are quietly working away towards a solution–especially those trying to work towards a solution within the confines of the current "screwed up" system.

- The success of our democratic government is dependent on at least two things: 1) We must learn and impress upon ourselves the difference between the freedom to do what we please and the infringement upon the right's of others to do the same. 2) The nature and stability of the democratic system itself. Namely, the success and cooperation between the three branches of the government, and, whether when its forces get out of play, it has within itself the ability to restore itself to equilibrium.

- A key trait of great leaders and workers is not just that they can get the job done when everything is going well, but that they know what to do and how to do it when everything goes wrong.

- There are two primary ways to lose a battle (with all other things being equal): The first is by having confused lines of communication. The second is to have someone in charge with poor judgement.

- A program, product, or initiative is guaranteed to fail if the CEO, leader, or president does not actively seek to make it work. If they don't care about it or are indifferent to it, it will not succeed. It may be average, but it won't ever achieve greatness.

- The more complex something becomes, the more likely it is that just one thing can break or go wrong and cause throw the whole system into shambles. This is true of engineering and of relations and organizations.

- In any large organization, there has to be a system for tracking and maintaining innovations that arise outside a specific field that would be useful for it. If not, they will get tossed aside and thrown in the "not useful" pile when in reality it was very useful, just for a different department.

- In meetings where strategy is being discussed, there should be someone present who is a master of technical advancements that are just being put into use or will be put into use sometime in the near future.

- Any group working in isolation will not sufficiently make adequate technological advancements.

- In an industry that is standardized, where basically all companies are making profits, small changes can be introduced but nothing major will happen. There is no sense in disrupting something that seems to be working out okay, especially if the future is unknown.

- An invention by itself is usually useless. It must be paired with promotion, financing, development, engineering, and marketing if the inventor wants to actually make some money and go somewhere with it.

- There are two main ways to go about inventing something. One is to identify something the public needs and hurry to make something that fits that need. The other is to develop new knowledge in areas where there may be useful results and see where it leads.

- When giving a speech, or really any conversation for that matter, don't start talking unless you know the exact sentence you're going to say at the end. Also, look at someone in the back row. If they become restless, put more volume into your voice. If they are still restless, stop talking.

- When someone gets to the age where they start observing, understanding, and questioning how things in the world are done, they separate into three groups: The first is those who meekly conform to how things have always been and follow suit. The second, a smaller minority, attack the system and get really rebellious. A smaller third group, who is usually overlooked, propose to do something about what they don't like and propose to accomplish this by working within the system itself–repairing from the inside out.

- Great teachers can teach you a lot about pride, humility, accomplishment, and a great many other virtues without ever saying a specific word about any of those topics.

- For anyone working in a professional setting, understanding human relations and having sound social skills are just as important, if not more, than being a master of the actual facts of the field in which they operate.

## Notes
- Anybody who is serious about creating enduring change realizes that it's critical to understand the origins of the institutions that shape our world.

- This book, provides a perspective "on the modern innovation environment as an evolved system with simple origins."

- Ben Reinhardt in the foreword: "I went into this book with little more than a name and came out with the closest thing to a mentor someone you've never met can be."

- The development of the atomic bomb fell into two phases, as I imagine most big technical breakthroughs follow. The first was the actual underlying physics behind it. The second was how to actually use those physics for something beneficial. I think this pattern is common: first comes the idea/discovery/breakthrough and then comes the "Okay, so what can we actually do with it." That is all fine and well, but we must be careful not to ask the second question too soon, for if no use is discovered, the breakthrough might be tossed to the waste bin. We must be able to recognize the value of the idea and not just the use case for the idea.

- The tyro, as new recruits were called by the Romans, have contempt for channels of authority and ducks around them. They just butt into all sorts of levels and clash into the train of gears. A common type of tyro is the chap who assumes and flaunts his boss's authority, either without the boss's knowledge or simply because the boss does not realize the havoc being caused.

## Quotes
*The following are direct quotes from Bush's words in the book.*

- Youth has always been in rebellion and should be if society is not to become static.

- The study of history can aid in avoiding mistakes, provided it is recent history and accurate, that is, before it has degenerated into a myth.

- The essence of civilization is the transmission of the findings of each generation to the next.

- "Much of this book will be devoted to how we can keep our business rolling in the right direction."

- Apparently in this strange country, we just continue practices that injure our neighbors until enough people get mad and make us quit.

- For, after all, there is happiness in the world, in this cruel and confused world, if we but seek it, and welcome it when it appears.
- Little things become submerged when great things are dominant.

- There should never be, throughout an organization, any doubt as to where authority for making decisions resides, or any doubt that they will be promptly made.

- When he knows stumbling blocks may get in the way of a joint effort in which he is engaged, a man who is light on his feet tries to anticipate them, to figure out where they may arise and why, and how best to evade them...Planning strategies means taking into account the personal quirks of some individual who almost always is the source of the blockade, and devising ways to annul his blockade by disarming him, by avoiding him by and end run, or, if necessary and possible, by knocking him on the head–figuratively of course.

- As we subdivide fields of learning and render all of them more precise and more intricate, no man can be a master of all, but a man who sets his mind to it can become a valuable amateur in fields outside his mastership.

- A man of intelligence can become well acquainted with a subject in surprisingly short time if he puts his mind to it. This is not to master it, but to arrive at a point where he speaks the language and can judge whether a proposal before him has been thought through and is sound. If a man is a good judge of men, he can go far on that skill alone.

- A lot of invention appears merely because of curiosity and with little thought at the time of possible utility.
- I think any man who has a bit of ingenuity in his soul gets quite a lot of fun out of following around with things that do not amount to anything, for the reason that when he does so, he has no pressures.

- It would be well if people, youth in particular, recognized the debt society owes to the quiet workers whom we never hear of, especially those who are led on by their curiosity and their desire to explore, with very little thought about acclaim or fortune.

- The inventor who works alone, who is isolated from the current trend of thought, and who hence does not grasp where the real opportunities lie, seldom makes a worthwhile invention.

- The reward of a great teacher lies in the success in later life of his students.

- Teachers are a vital ingredient in the long and delicate process by which the young mind attains the ability to make informed wise choices between alternatives at any level of simplicity or sophistication. The teacher's task... is to guide the student mind in its search for knowledge–the gathering of information, the understanding of its implications and applications, the consequent growth of knowledge, and, it is to be hoped, the ultimate growth of wisdom.

- One learns about teaching by observing teachers, by being taught, by teaching, and by thinking about it. Above all, it depends upon the realization that teaching is an art, as elusive as the art of painting or sculpture, that it is an individual art, developed by each man for himself, that it must be genuine and not forced, and that its mastery can bring joy and satisfaction.

- He taught me pride of scholarly accomplishment. And he never said a word to me on that subject.

- If a college or university is permeated with a spirit of success, so will its students be, and one who expects success is well on the way to attaining it.

- For every professional man...an understanding of human relations, the acquisition of a sound and effective grasp and practice in regard to them, is fully as important as excellence in the knowledge of facts and principles applicable to the area in which he operates.

- The basic function of education is to ensure that the experience of one generation may be passed on to the next. It is the ability to make this transfer that distinguishes man from beast.

- As an actual fact, much of the failure of management is due to a mistreatment of simple elementary principles rather than to any lack of handling of complex affairs.

- Alongside the course of mathematics of electric circuits, we need a course in the history of ideas. And we need that balance whenever older minds seek to help younger minds on the way of life.

## Random Tidbits
- What work needs to be done to remove the constraints preventing today's impossibles from becoming tomorrow's amazing?

## Books/sources recommended
- Preparing Tomorrow's Business Leaders, Drucker
- Bush's Meet the Press interview in 1959
- Bush's article on the memex


Pieces of the Action

## Impressions
I’ve been wanting to read this book for quite some time now. The title got me hooked because one of the main questions I seek to answer in life is, “How did we get here?” And “Where are we going?” This book did a pretty good job of shedding some light on that topic, but not as much as I’d hoped it would. It talked a lot about the people who made discoveries and the drama between them more so than it did about actual information about “nearly everything.” The stories about the people who made certain discoveries were important and interesting, just not what I was expecting. It was also about 100 pages too long. Nonetheless, I learned some interesting things.

## Insights
- Before the universe began, there was nothing. There was no space outside the singularity, the really small dot of matter composed of material that was about to bang, and there was no time. So there was no "where" and there was no "before".
- The first remittance of the Big Bang was discovered, unknowingly, in 1965 by two scientists. At the time, they didn't know what they were hearing, but it was in fact light that had travelled across the universe and stretched so much it was now microwaves.
- Inflation Theory - Proposed by Alan Guth, this theory says moments after the Bang, the universe inflated from something you can hold in your hand to something that was the size of Earth today. This explains the ripples and eddies in our world.
- Most star systems are double-starred, which makes our single starred system (the sun) a slight oddity.
- If a supernova were to form within 10 light years of the earth, we'd be goners. But we don't have to worry about that happening. For a true supernova to form from a collapsed star, the star has to be ten to twenty times the size of the sun to begin with and the closest thing we have to that is 50 light years away, called Betelgeuse.
- Isaac Newton was wild. Very neurotic and kinda crazy, but he was brilliant. His masterwork, *Principia*, described the mathematical principles of natural philosophy and at the heart of it was his three laws of nature. This made Newton instantly famous. He was the first person to really create a universal law of sorts, that being gravity.
- By the late 18th Century, scientists knew the shape, size, and weight of the earth thanks to some precise measurements by a variety of scientists using a variety of techniques. They did not know, however, how old the earth was.
- How fast galaxies are moving away from us is called their recessional velocity.
- The word molecule comes from the Latin word for "little mass." Atoms make up everything, but most scientists talk about atoms in terms of molecules instead of atoms themselves. Molecules are two or more atoms working together in a stable way. If you have two Hydrogen atoms and then through on an Oxygen atom, you get a water molecule.
- Ernst Mach was the name behind the speed of sound - Mach 1.
- Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - An electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves. The uncertainty around the theory is that we can know the path an electron takes as it moves through a space or we can know where it is at a given instant but we cannot know both.
- Two forces keep atoms together - strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force. The strong force binds atoms together and allows the protons to stay in the nucleus. It's strong, but doesn't have a wide range of effect. This is why elements with big, crowded nuclei are so unstable. The force can't hold on to the protons in the nucleus, so some escape and then you get a new element.
- Hadrons, a collective term to describe protons, neutrons, and other particles governed by strong nuclear force are made up of quarks - rhymes with larks. Richard Feynman wanted to call these partons, but was overruled. Quarks are sub-divided into sub categories - up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom-which are refered to as their "flavors." These are even further divided into red, green, and blue.
- A Mars sized object slammed into Earth to create the Moon out of debris. This was very good for us, since the moon helps earth so much. But if it happened in 1986 or last Wednesday, we wouldn't be so pleased about it.
- The elements of chemistry are very strange... Oxygen and hydrogen are two of the most combustible elements in the world, but put them together and they make water. A similar thing happens with Sodium and Chlorine. Chlorine is a harsh chemical useful for cleaning and sodium is explosive. Smash them together and you get sodium chloride, or what most people call salt.
- When elements don't occur naturally on Earth, they become extremely toxic to us. Plutonium is a good example.
- Temperature is really just a measure of the activity of molecules.
- Storm clouds can contain enough energy for four days of power for the US. These clouds can contain updrafts and downdrafts and are often side by side, which is why pilots don't like to fly through them. The lighter particles tend to become positively charged, the heavier particles become negatively charged and stay at the base of the cloud. The negative particles want to race towards the positively charged earth - creating lightning.
- Overcast clouds are formed when moisture-bearing updrafts lack the oomph to break through a level of more stable air above, and instead spread out, like smoke hitting a ceiling.
- Darwin originally proposed that all organisms competed for resources, and the ones that had some innate advantage would prosper. That advantage would be passed on to the offspring. This is how species evolved. He first explained this is "Descent with modification."

## Quotes
- [One cannot] predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely.
- Every living thing is an elaboration on a single original plan. As humans, we are mere increments–each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptations, modifications, and providential tinkerings stretching back 3.8billion years.
- "Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, in often astonishingly large numbers.
- "It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously."
- "We really are at the beginning of it all [life.] The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks."

## Stories/Studies
- One of the most unlucky scientists, Guillaume Le Gentil (p. 54)
- Mary Anning found a strange 17 foot long sea monster fossil which is now known as ichtyosaurus embedded in the English Channel. For the next 35 years, she collected and sold fossils to tourists. It's long been held that she coined the original tongue twister, "She sells sea shells by the sea shore."
- Sometime in the 1950s, during the mass production phase of lead, a lot of studies were conducted to see the effects of lead. The problem was that most studies were funded by lead producers. In one such case, a doctor who had no training in chemical pathology conducted a study where they gave lead samples to volunteers in increasing doses. After, they tested their urine and feces for lead samples. But what the doctor didn't know was that lead isn't produced as a waste product. Rather it gets absorbed by the blood and bones - which is why it was so dangerous. It makes me think, shouldn't the fact that there was no lead being produced in waste send of a warning light?

# Questions
- If the earth formed from the Big Bang, where did the oceans come from - and how were the oceans already so deep compared to land?Was it just one big grand canyon like thing before someone turned the hose on and filled it with water?
	- “We have identified a vast reservoir of Earth-like water in the outer reaches of the solar system,” said Darek Lis, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, and lead author of the study. “Water was crucial for the development of life as we know it. We not only want to understand how Earth’s water was delivered, but also if this process could work in other planetary systems.”
	- https://www.nasa.gov/feature/comet-provides-new-clues-to-origins-of-earth-s-oceans
- What was the Reign of Terror in Paris and why was Marie Antoniette beheaded?
- If the universe is expanding, where is it expanding to? Or expanding in?


A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

In 1925, John von Neumann published one of the first papers introducing "game theory" into popular discourse. In it, he explained that most games are just a series of events. Some of those events depend entirely on chance–which von Neumann calls 'draws'– and others on the decision of a player–what von Neumann calls 'steps.'

Ultimately, he concluded a game, as *[The Man from the Future](https://www.amazon.com/Man-Future-Visionary-Life-Neumann/dp/1324003995)* explains, "could be represented simply as the choice by each player of a single strategy (effectively an amalgam of all the strategies they play in the game), followed by a calculation of their respective payouts that accounts for everyone's choices (and which factors in their luck)." 

But he couldn't get any further in his thinking with multi-player games, so he started thinking about games with two players whose payouts equal 0.

Since there are only two players, one *has* to win and the other *has* to lose. What one person wins is equal to what the other person loses. So if Player A wins $5, then Player B has to have lost $5 somehow. The two payouts, when added together equal 0 (5 + (-5) = 0). Therefore, these games were determined to be *zero-sum*: the sum equals zero.

## Why this matters
The terms "zero-sum" and "positive-sum" are popular in the online world I hang out in. The benefits of the world and the creator economy being "positive-sum" or touted and the mindset that the world is "zero-sum" is negative. I always understood what they meant, but didn't know the background behind them. It turns out, John von Neumann helped birth these terms into the world through his earlier work on game theory.

The paper in which he lays out these terms is the one where he describes his 'minimax' strategy. In our example above, Player B wants to minimize the maximum amount of money they can lose and Player A wants to maximize the minimum amount they can win (called the 'maximin' strategy).

People who are described as having a "zero-sum mindset" are those that don't think there can be multiple winners. They'll do anything they can to climb the ladder or make the sale. They are also usually very jealous of other people's success because in their world, if someone else is winning, that means they're losing.

Though that's not how the world really works, so the world can be described as "positive-sum." There is enough winnings for everyone. Thankfully this is the case, because we're a few million years late to the party.


Where the term 'zero-sum' comes from

If you're only preparing for the disaster you can imagine, you're going to be unprepared.

No one expected the economy to crash so hard during the Great Depression until it did.

No one expected (or maybe they did but didn't prepare) for a disease to put the entire world at a halt until it did. So, we had a lack of protection equipment for doctors, nurses, and other first responders. Hospital's had no idea how to handle the high capacity. Businesses had no idea how to sell to customers who couldn't come into their stores.

**No one prepares for the disasters they can't see.**

That idea stems from [something Morgan Housel said on _The Tim Ferris Show_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szQwdZDiVh4&t=4s) this week. They were talking about risk and how to not lose all your money when you're financially panicking. Housel explained it's important to have more savings than most people would think is necessary.

If cash returns 1% and stocks return 10%, that 9% difference your cash _could_ be earning will eat you up every day of the week. But if the cash on hand ensures you don't have to sell your stocks at a loss because you need the money during a financial crisis, that cash actually returned much more than just 1%.


Be prepared for the disasters you can't imagine

### Summary and Review
Phenomenal book. There are so many interesting lessons on creativity, innovation, and history that I've never read elsewhere. I will be coming back to this book constantly and excited to read more from Steven Johnson. There hasn't ever been a book I liked so much where I thought, "I wish I wrote this" other than this one. Really, really enjoyable.

### Why glass is transparent
> Most materials absorb the energy of light. On a subatomic level, electrons orbiting the atoms that made up the material effectively “swallow” the energy of the incoming photon of light, causing those electrons to gain energy. But electrons can gain or lose energy only in discrete steps, known as “quanta.” But the size of the steps varies from material to material. Silicon dioxide happens to have very large steps, which means that the energy from a single photon of light is not sufficient to bump up the electrons to the higher level of energy. Instead, the light passes through the material. (Most ultraviolet light, however, does have enough energy to be absorbed, which is why you can’t get a suntan through a glass window.) But light doesn’t simply pass through glass; it can also be bent and distorted or even broken up into its component wavelengths. Glass could be used to change the look of the world, by bending light in precise ways. This turned out to be even more revolutionary than simple transparency.

### What early glasses were called
> Those early spectacles were called *roidi da ogli*, meaning “disks for the eyes.” Thanks to their resemblance to lentil beans—lentes in Latin—the disks themselves came to be called “lenses.”

### The Hummingbird effect of Gutenberg's printing press and glasses
Hummingbird Effect - When an innovation in one field exposes a flaw in some other technology. In the case of the printing press, that "technology" was our anatomy.

> But Gutenberg's great breakthrough had another, less celebrated effect: it made a massive number of people aware, for the first time, that they were farsighted. And that revelation created a surge in demand for spectacles.
>
> What followed was one of the most extraordinary cases of the hummingbird effect in modern history. Gutenberg made printed books relatively cheap and portable, which triggered a rise in literacy, which exposed a flaw in the visual acuity of a sizable part of the population, which then created a new market for the manufacture of spectacles. Within a hundred years of Gutenberg’s invention, thousands of spectacle makers around Europe were thriving, and glasses became the first piece of advanced technology—since the invention of clothing in Neolithic times—that ordinary people would regularly wear on their bodies.

### The creation of fiber optics
> Scientists at Bell Labs then took fibers of this super-clear glass and shot laser beams down the length of them, fluctuating optical signals that corresponded to the zeroes and ones of binary code. This hybrid of two seemingly unrelated inventions—the concentrated, orderly light of lasers, and the hyper-clear glass fibers—came to be known as fiber optics. Using fiber-optic cables was vastly more efficient than sending electrical signals over copper cables, particularly for long distances: light allows much more bandwidth and is far less susceptible to noise and interference than is electrical energy.

### On the benefit on transporting commodities
> The history of global trade had clearly demonstrated that vast fortunes could be made by transporting a commodity that was ubiquitous in one environment to a place where it was scarce. To the young Tudor, ice seemed to fit the equation perfectly: nearly worthless in Boston, ice would be priceless in Havana.

### "Multiple Invention"
> Those patents rippling across the planet are an example of one of the great curiosities in the history of innovation: what scholars now call “multiple invention.” Inventions and scientific discoveries tend to come in clusters, where a handful of geographically dispersed investigators stumble independently onto the very same discovery.

This happened with the light bulb, relativity, ice, flight, and so much more.

### Breakthrough innovations are a collection of ideas repackaged in new ways

 > To imagine a world of flash-frozen food, Birdseye needed to experience the challenges of feeding a family in an arctic climate surrounded by brutal cold; he needed to spend time with the Inuit fishermen; he needed to inspect the foul containers of cod-fishing trawlers in New York harbors; he needed the scientific knowledge of how to produce temperatures well below freezing; he needed the industrial knowledge of how to build a production line. Like every big idea, Birdseye’s breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration.

 > Fifty-eight years in the making, his [Galileo] slow hunch about the pendulum’s “magical property” had finally begun to take shape. The idea lay at the intersection point of multiple disciplines and interests: Galileo’s memory of the altar lamp, his studies of motion and the moons of Jupiter, the rise of a global shipping industry, and its new demand for clocks that would be accurate to the second. Physics, astronomy, maritime navigation, and the daydreams of a college student: all these different strains converged in Galileo’s mind.

### The invention of Sears, Roebuck catalog
> With watches spiking in popularity across the country, a Minnesota railroad agent named Richard Warren Sears stumbled across a box of unwanted watches from a local jeweler, and turned a tidy profit selling them to other station agents. Inspired by his success, he partnered with a Chicago businessman named Alvah Roebuck, and together they launched a mail-order publication showcasing a range of watch designs: the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Those fifteen pounds of mail-order catalogs currently weighing down your mailbox? They all started with the must-have gadget of the late nineteenth century: the consumer-grade pocket watch.

### Why timezones zig-zag
> Allen designed the map so that the divisions between time zones zigzagged slightly to correspond to the points where the major railroad lines connected, instead of having the divisions run straight down meridian lines.

### How satellites triangulate your position
> Those satellites are sending out the most elemental of signals, again and again, in perpetuity: the time is 11:48:25.084738 . . . the time is 11:48:25.084739. . . . When your phone tries to figure out its location, it pulls down at least three of these time stamps from satellites, each reporting a slightly different time thanks to the duration it takes the signal to travel from satellite to the GPS receiver in your hand. A satellite reporting a later time is closer than one reporting an earlier time. Since the satellites have perfectly predictable locations, the phone can calculate its exact position by triangulating among the three different time stamps.

> Like the naval navigators of the eighteenth century, GPS determines your location by comparing clocks. This is in fact one of the recurring stories of the history of the clock: each new advance in timekeeping enables a corresponding advance in our mastery of geography—from ships, to railroads, to air traffic, to GPS. It’s an idea that Einstein would have appreciated: measuring time turns out to be key to measuring space.

### How our idea of innovation affects our policies
> If we think that innovation comes from a lone genius inventing a new technology from scratch, that model naturally steers us toward certain policy decisions, like stronger patent protection. But if we think that innovation comes out of collaborative networks, then we want to support different policies and organizational forms: less rigid patent laws, open standards, employee participation in stock plans, cross-disciplinary connections.

### Why it's important to learn about the past
> Learning from the patterns of innovation that shaped society in the past can only help us navigate the future more successfully, even if our explanations of that past are not falsifiable in quite the same way that a scientific theory is.

### The greatest innovator's were time travelers, making discoveries years before they were sometimes useful. This is how they did it:
> If there is a common thread to the time travelers, beyond the nonexplanation of genius, it is this: they worked at the margins of their official fields, or at the intersection point between very different disciplines.

> The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge.

### Real innovation comes when you get lost in your craft
>But if you want to be like Ada, if you want to have an “intuitive perception of hidden things”—well, in that case, you need to get a little lost.

>But those disciplinary boundaries can also serve as blinders, keeping you from the bigger idea that becomes visible only when you cross those borders.
