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Ernest Shackleton

5/27/2020

Bo Zaunders
Wandering Journalist

The Endurance was sinking. As the crew of twenty-eight men watched in numb resignation from a nearby ice floe, ten million tons of ice slowly crushed her. Like a dying animal, the ship screeched and moaned as the pressure mounted. Finally her frames and planking broke with a sound that ripped like artillery fire through the frozen wilderness. It was October 27, 1915.

Ernest Shackleton’s Trans-Antarctic Expedition had set out to be the first to make an overland crossing of the Antarctic continent. Now, before they even reached land, they were stranded, with lifeboats, seventy dogs, and food for a few months. They were locked in a jigsaw of ice floes, a thousand miles from civilization, with no means of calling for help.
Shackleton called all hands together. They must haul the lifeboats to the open sea, and get to South Georgia, the nearest inhabited island. It was imperative that they carry a minimum of weight. To make his point, he threw out a gold cigarette case, and a handful of gold sovereigns, then took the bible the queen had given him and laid it on the snow. A two-pound limit was set. An exception was made for meteorologist Hussey’s banjo - a little music is good for morale.

The sleds sank into the slush and refused to move. A long wait lay ahead. Penguins became their daily diet. Months passed. Ocean Camp was renamed Patience Camp. On January 26th, Shackleton wrote across an entire page in his diary: “Waiting Waiting Waiting.”

Finally, in April, the ice floe had melted to the size of a football field. Shackleton ordered the boats launched.

After seven days on the open sea, the snowcapped peaks of Elephant Island loomed before them. Camp was made on a tiny stretch of beach. Two small boats were made into huts. Shackleton decided to take the largest lifeboat and, with a small crew, try to reach South Georgia.

Ahead lay the treacherous Drake Passage. Sixteen days of hurricane-level winds and fifty-foot waves, and they washed up on the uninhabited side of South Georgia.
A climb across steep mountains followed. On May 20th they stumbled into the island’s whaling factory.

It took three months for Shackleton to rescue the crew on Elephant Island.

All the men were there, waving at him.

The expedition may have failed, but the inspired leadership of Ernest Shackleton had triumphed.

The Endurance crushed and sinking into the Antarctic Sea. Art: Roxie Munro

Shackleton on his way to rescue the crew left on Elephant Island. Art: Roxie Munro

Shackleton and his men at Ocean Camp. Art: Roxie Munro

The men on Elephant Island waving at Shackleton. Art: Roxie Munro

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Memorial Day Weekend

5/25/2020

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Here's a reminder for our day off on Monday to observe Memorial Day. Take a moment to think about those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. The posts for the rest of the week follow.

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Laika the Space Dog

5/20/2020

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Sarah Towle
Putting the Story back in History

On November 3, 1957, a tiny capsule rocketed into space. Inside was a diminutive, 14-pound, black and white dog named Laika. And when her spaceship pierced the Earth’s atmosphere, she became the first creature in history to make it to outer space. No small feat for a stray that only days before had been fighting for scraps on the streets of Moscow!

Laika’s unlikely journey was borne out of the race to prove that human spaceflight was possible. Just a month earlier, on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union—Cold War nemesis of the United States—launched into orbit history’s first satellite, Sputnik 1. That’s when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev insisted that his scientists perform a second test—this time to determine if a living being could survive the journey to the stars.

The mission was too dangerous to risk a human life, so the Soviets decided to train a stray dog to be Russia’s first cosmonaut. Nine days before the scheduled launch, they chose Laika for her gentle disposition and natural beauty. If she was to make history, they reasoned, she would need to be photogenic.

Laika did make history. Monitors followed the sound of her tiny beating heart all the way into Earth’s orbit. But there was a problem: the Soviets had not worked out how to get Laika back. She perished, circling the earth, most likely from the profound heat created by the capsule’s firing rockets.

Laika’s journey sparked not one but two historic advances: the era of human space exploration, and the animal rights movement, particularly in scientific testing. She became a global folk hero. Her sacrifice inspired poems and novels. She was featured on stamps and coins, and memorialized in a Moscow statue. Her fame ensured that going forward efforts would be made to protect the lives of canine cosmonauts.

Sure enough, on August 19, 1960, two more Moscow strays, Belka and Strelka, became the first living creatures to make the round trip to space.

Laika the Soviet Space Dog will always be remembered as the first living being to boldly go where no one had gone before. Laika was a pioneer for humanity.

Laika was launched into orbit with one meal and a seven-day oxygen supply. Wikimedia Commons

Shown here in her space harness, Laika was launched into orbit with one meal and a seven-day oxygen supply. Wikimedia Commons

The story of Laika (above, in a postage stamp from the Emirate of Ajman, now part of the UAE) lives on today in websites, YouTube videos, poems, and children’s books.

Starting in 1957, Soviet allies, such as Hungary (right), Romania (above), Albania, Poland and North Korea, issued Laika postage stamps. Other countries soon joined them. (Wikimedia Commons )

Sarah Towle is an award-winning digital storyteller of immersive tales for educational tourism. With her latest project for secondary school students—the History Hero BLAST—she puts the Story back in History, bringing a fictional flair to factual tales of inspirational figures from around the world and throughout time. A blog and future podcast, the HHBLAST welcomes the participation of published and aspiring authors, including young writers. Click here to find out more about how to bring the HHBLAST—and Sarah—to your school!

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Thomas Edison: Cutthroat Businessman

5/18/2020

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Jim Whiting
The Running Encyclopedia

Nearly everyone is familiar with Thomas Edison, born [February 11] day in 1847.

When Thomas started school, his teacher called him “addled,” and he soon dropped out. His mother home-schooled him for several years. He began his entrepreneurial career when he was 12, publishing his own newspaper and selling it on the train. A few years later, he became a telegrapher and started tinkering in his spare time. He made many improvements to telegraphy and eventually turned to inventing full-time in his New Jersey workshop.

He was amazingly persistent. He explained that “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work,” and “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” As a result of his persistence, he received more than 2,000 patents worldwide. These patents included the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and the movie camera. He became one of the most famous Americans of his era. When he died in 1931, light bulbs around the world were briefly dimmed or turned off.

There’s another, lesser-known side of Edison however. He was a ruthless businessman. One of the most notable examples involved the movie camera. Soon after inventing it, he established a company called Edison Studios in New Jersey. The building was set on rollers to follow the sun’s path across the sky. In 1894, his 5-second film “Fred Ott’s Sneeze” became the first-ever copyrighted motion picture. Audiences loved this new technology and flocked to theatres. To meet the demand, many other small moviemaking companies sprang up.

Edison hated the competition. In 1898, he began filing lawsuits to force them out of business. When that didn’t work, he organized the Motion Picture Patents Company, a group of 10 film companies headed by Edison Studios. The Patents Company continued the court battles. Presumably with Edison’s approval, it sometimes hired thugs who broke into rival studios and ransacked them.

Not surprisingly, many of Edison’s victims wanted to get as far away as they could. They headed for southern California, on the other side of the country. Side benefits were generally better weather that allowed year-round filming, a variety of terrain features, and cheap land and labor. Many of the newcomers established their offices in a tiny village near Los Angeles called Hollywood—the name now synonymous with the movie industry.

Thomas Alva Edison. Library of Congress

Thomas A. Edison in his laboratory in New Jersey, 1901 Credit: Underwood & Underwood, publishers. . Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Click! The lights come on, and it seems like the most natural thing in the world. But without science, you’d be left in the dark. Jim Whiting's The Science of Lighting a City takes a closer look at the amazing places that Edison's invention of the light bulb has led.

Whiting, Jim. "Thomas Edison: Cutthroat Businessman." Nonfiction Minute, iNK
Think Tank, 21 May 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/
Thomas-Edison-Cutthroat-Businessman.

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Ernest Shackleton

Memorial Day Weekend

Laika the Space Dog

Thomas Edison: Cutthroat Businessman

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