Category Archives: Exploration

LaSalle & Oglesby

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Lincoln Park is peppered with statues, some better known than others. Thousands of people drive by this fellow every day, since he overlooks the intersection of two large streets bordering the park, Clark and LaSalle.

Fittingly enough, it’s René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, perched over his namesake street. How many of the passersby know that? I wasn’t sure who it was until I read the plaque, which calls him “Robert Cavelier De La Salle.” Considering we’re talking about a 17th-century Frenchman, both styles are probably OK. The statue was made in Belgium, of all places, designed by one Jacques de La Laing, and was a gift to the city from Lambert Tree, a wealthy Chicagoan and second-tier Illinois politician of an earlier time (died 1910). His more important legacy is the Tree Studio Building.

In some alternate universe, in which Frenchmen took to the Midwest in greater numbers than they really did, and in which France prevailed in the Seven Years’ War, LaSalle might be revered as the forefather of a French-speaking nation stretching from the shores of the Great Lakes to the Mississippi Delta. A country that regularly chaffs against the English-speaking nation on the Eastern Seaboard and the Spanish-speaking one to the west (and Russians in the Pacific Northwest, just for fun), and which also has restive populations both English and Spanish within its borders.

In the world-as-it-is, LaSalle gets a fair amount of recognition anyway. I remember learning about him long ago in Texas History class, since he made it all the way to the future site of Texas before being offed by his own men. Also, a lot of things are named after him — or at least share the name — besides the street, and it’s worth noting that LaSalle St. is a metonym for the financial industry in Chicago.

Deeper into the park, on a small hill in fact – how did that get there? Must have been manmade – is a statue of Richard J. Oglesby, Union general, 14th Governor of Illinois, and U.S. Senator. He’s obscured to the west by a large tree and probably not that easy to see from Lake Shore Drive to the east, though I haven’t tested that assumption. I’m fairly sure obscure applies to him generally speaking, though I’ll have to ask someone who went to Illinois public schools back when such a thing as Illinois History was taught, and see if he was mentioned.

In any case, the statue is the work of sculptor Leonard Crunelle, a protégé of Lorado Taft, and was dedicated in 1919, when there were still people who remembered Oglesby (he died in 1899). In Decatur (Ill.), I understand, his home is a museum, and the town of Oglesby in LaSalle County, which is north-central Illinois, is named after him.

The Forgotten Cosmonaut

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Got a packet in the mail recently telling me about the Vanderbilt 2013 Reunion and Fundraising Opportunity. Actually, those last three words aren’t in the title of the event, but they’re more than implied. One of the “class goals” is fundraising to the tune of $1,000,000 “with 32 percent class participation.”

I don’t think 32 percent is necessary. Between the right four or five alumni of my class, that much could be raised right away. But the school might have to name something after them.

Anyway, in an effort to drum up some nostalgia for the early ’80s, the invite includes the following verbage: Motorola debuts mobile phones; Who’s at Exit/In tonight?; Sally Ride is 1st woman in space; Meat sticks at Rand; Campus computer use up 100%; Housing lottery equals stress.

Some of those are self-explanatory, and others are enigmatic if you didn’t attend VU, such as “meat sticks at Rand,” which I will leave to the readers’ imagination. But I kick into copy editor mode at that business about Sally Ride, first American woman into space.

Is it too much to ask someone with a Vanderbilt education know who the first woman in space was? Valentina Tereshkova, forgotten again here in North America. But I expect she’s honored enough at home, even without the Soviet Union. Remarkably — I just checked — she’s still alive, and not even that old (76). I guess spacefaring in the early days was a young woman’s game.

The Explorer Test

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Lilly told me the other day that she was going to take the EXPLORE test at school. I pretended to hear “explorer” test.

“It’s about time,” I said. “I can help you get ready. Here’s a question: how many men did Shackleton lose on the ill-fated voyage of the Endurance?”

“It’s not that kind of test,” she said.

“None. That’s really amazing, if you know anything about it.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“That’s why there need to be tests about explorers. Here’s another one. How many men did John Franklin lose looking for the Northwest Passage?”

“I don’t know who that is either.”

“The answer is all of them. They all died, including Franklin. That’s something you should learn in school.”

The pedestrian truth is that EXPLORE is some kind of ACT prep test. Without a single question about any great explorers, I bet.

Longitude John

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I’ve been reading Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel (1995), which is about John Harrison, solver of the Longitude Problem, and I came across this passage: “Sometime around 1720… Sir Charles Pelham hired [Harrison] to build a tower clock above his new stable at the manor house in Brocklesby Park.

“The clock tower that Harrison completed about 1722 still tells time in Brocklesby Park. It has been running continuously for more than 270 years, except for a brief period in 1884 when workers stopped it for refurbishing.”

Wow. I had to find out if that was still the case, and it seems that it is. That’s a clock tower I would go look at, if I were in the neighborhood. I saw the Harrison chronometers at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich before I had much inkling of what they were or what he did, but finding out things sometimes works that way.

Naturally, specialists are busy revising the legend of John Harrison, including this fellow, who asserts that the clockmaker might have farmed out some of his brass parts. Could well be, though I’m in no position to pass judgment on the matter. But even if it were true, that hardly takes away from Harrison’s achievement.

There’s even a song about John Harrison. That’s what we need more of, songs about generally obscure but remarkably important people, places or events.

Bang, Zoom! Straight to Pluto!

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Comet? What comet? Can’t see no stinkin’ comet. Of course, it’s been overcast for a while hereabouts, but maybe when things clear up, I’ll go look for it. Trouble is, suburban lights have a way of washing out the sky, including stray comets, unless they’re really bright. I was amazed to be able to see Hale-Bopp, but it managed to be visible even on the North Side of Chicago.

What’s up with that name, Pan-STARRS (which I’ve also seen as PANSTARRS)? I checked, and it was discovered using a telescope of that name. I was under the impression that comets are named after their discoverers, but perhaps an automated system uncovered this one, though you’d think whoever was directing the research would be honored with the name. Then again, if the scan were really automated, you could call the telescope a sort of discoverer.

Today’s odd bit of information (space related, because checking on Pan-STARRS took me on some tangents): the New Horizons spacecraft, now much closer to the planet Pluto than Earth — 6.76 AU v. 26 AU — carries a visible and infrared imager/spectrometer called Ralph, and an ultraviolent imaging spectrometer called Alice.

Tidbinbilla

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Christmas Eve 1991

A summer’s day. I bought sun block today. Along with Pete, his brother, and his brother’s enormously pregnant wife, we went to the Tidbinbilla Deep Space Tracking Station southwest of Canberra to take a look at the big dishes and the small museum, which emphasizes Australian, Japanese and European efforts to explore space.

Had a “Jupiter Dog” at the Moon Rock Café. You’d think there would be a Great Red Spot on it somehow, but it mainly featured onions and diced tomatoes (maybe one of those tomatoes counts as the spot). Returned to town the way we had come, winding through hilly bush and flatter farmland. Sometimes emu and kangaroos bounded across the road ahead of us.

Postscript 2012: The formal name of the place is the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, and it still functions as one of three stations operated by NASA to keep track of far, far away spacecraft, with the other two in California and Spain. “This strategic placement permits constant observation of spacecraft as the Earth rotates, and helps make the Deep Space Network the largest and most sensitive scientific telecommunications system in the world,” notes NASA.

Space: 2012 (and an Oddity from 2006)

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Well worth a look: NBC News, the Year in Pictures. Space edition, which includes the likes of Felix Baumgartner before one of his epic, insane jumps from the edge of space, the aurora australis as seen from orbit, an ethereal enhanced-color image of Saturn, nebulae, views of the Earth and more.

“One of the strangest satellites in the history of the space age is about to go into orbit,” noted a NASA press release. “Launch date: Feb. 3rd. [2006] That’s when astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) will hurl an empty spacesuit overboard.

“The spacesuit is the satellite — ‘SuitSat’ for short.

” ‘SuitSat is a Russian brainstorm,’ explains Frank Bauer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. ‘Some of our Russian partners in the ISS program, mainly a group led by Sergey Samburov, had an idea: Maybe we can turn old spacesuits into useful satellites.’ SuitSat is a first test of that idea.”

I understand that SuitSat broadcast its position for a couple of orbits and eventually burned up upon entering the atmosphere. The rest of the release is here.