Beanie Babies: Class of '99 and Class of '00

Today is graduation day for the current senior class at my old alma mater, Evergreen Park Community High School. I myself was Class of 2005, and I remember the occasion as bittersweet, as all fond goodbyes are.

Still, I figured that now's as good a time as any to give a shout-out to the classes of 1999 and 2000 with these two Beanie Babies, which I picked up at our annual "Memories to Go Village Garage Sale."

This ugly-cute duo represents the last class of the old century and the first class of the new century. In that way, they're perfect bookends. Also, their coloring is noteworthy: Class of '99 is a funereal dark gray, as if closing out the century with a knowing, slightly grim smile. Class of '00, on the other hand, is a vibrant light brown, like a sunrise that's full of possibilities.

One final observation: Class of '99's mortarboard shows off its year in a stately Brush Script MT Bold, whereas Class of '00 gets stuck with...Comic Sans MS. Points off for a new millennium.

"Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death"

Today is May 21st, 2015, and later on this evening, the UK charity Comic Relief will make its debut in America as NBC hosts the first "Red Nose Day."

Comic Relief began on Christmas Day in 1985, as a response to musician Bob Geldof's hugely successful Live Aid charity concerts, which raised at least £150million for famine relief in Ethiopia1 . Since then, Comic Relief has raised millions through its Red Nose Day and Sport Relief events.

Ever since that first telethon, Red Nose Day has displayed top talent year after year in sketches which lovingly poke fun at British TV shows, movies, and celebrity gossip. One of the better Red Nose Day sketches was 1999's entry, Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death, which starred Jonathan Pryce as The Master; Julia Sawalha as Emma, the Doctor's companion; Roy Skelton as the voice of the Daleks; and (takes a deep breath) Rowan Atkinson; Richard E. Grant; Jim Broadbent; Hugh Grant; and Joanna Lumley as the Doctor.

Curse aired in March of 1999, which means that it's technically a Millennium thing, but somehow I think there's a better way to look at it. I list it on my blog not as history, but as a guide to the future.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is The Curse of Fatal Death, hosted by Comic Relief's official YouTube channel:

ANALYSIS

CAUTION: HIGH-LEVEL GEEKINESS AHEAD--BE YE WARNED

It had been barely three years since the 1996 TV Movie premiered. Thousands of fans had pinned their hopes onto it...but it was a false start. Doctor Who was simply not ready to come back full-time as a TV series, and this Comic Relief sketch looked like the best we'd ever get to new Who on TV.

As I said, though, it's a window into the future: Curse has quite a few things to its name. First off, it's The Mill's first special-effects project, and this little charity sketch led to The Mill doing most if not all of the new Doctor Who's special effects work from 2005 to about 2010 or so.

Second, it's present-day showrunner Steven Moffat's first professional writing credit for Doctor Who. He and his predecessor, Russell T. Davies, made their bones in writing for, creating, and producing shows that had next to nothing to do with Doctor Who, and in this way they perfected their craft and learned what makes for good TV in general. They got a good handle on narrative flow, dialogue, character arcs, and sustaining a 45-minute episode, all of which served to bring Who back with a bang in 2005.

Going back to 1999 for a moment, The Curse of Fatal Death is unusual as far as Doctor Who spoofs are concerned. Earlier parodies, such as those seen on The Victoria Wood Show and The Lenny Henry Show, used cheap jokes about the show's low budget, poor effects, and ludicrous dialogue, and they were mostly predicated around "Oh, God, isn't this just the stupidest thing you've ever seen?!" As a result, those earlier attempts had a nasty, mean-spirited edge.

Curse's parody, on the other hand, is much more affectionate. It's constructed as a Doctor Who story first and foremost, but it's a story that happens to be full of jokes. The whole cast works together to give the story a weight that normal spoofs wouldn't have. (It's a little bit like Airplane! in that the actors are all absolutely serious, but everything around them is absurd.)

The same goes for the sketch's impressive production values. The sets, filmed on Pinewood Studios' 007 stage, are as solid as anything you'd see on the current run of Who. (Interesting side note: The TARDIS Console Room set and the Dalek props derive from a fan-film called Devious, notable for being Jon Pertwee's final filmed performance as the Third Doctor. BBC Video saw fit to include parts of Devious onto the DVD release of "The War Games" many years later.)

There's more here than just the story's affection to the classic series, though. In many ways, Curse eerily foreshadows things that would happen in the revived series. Right off the bat, we're faced with the Doctor wanting to settle down and get married. Within the context of the Classic Series, this would have been controversial to say the least, but the New Series has done it with the Tenth Doctor and Rose's love-story, which did not have a happy ending.

Next up is the "Spikes of Doom" sequence, which involves death-traps and multilayered time-travel gambits. While it's played for eye-rolling laughs here, complex time-based stories would later appear in the episode "Blink" and throughout River Song's story arc, which was a love story told out of sequence. (In her first story, she died, but not before leaving enough room for adventures that we would see in the future, but which had already happened from her perspective.)

Third, in the sketch's funniest set-piece, the Doctor burns through his remaining lives even faster than he normally would. Rowan (Mr. Bean) Atkinson plays the Ninth Doctor; Richard E. Grant, the Tenth; Jim Broadbent, the Eleventh; and Hugh Grant, the Twelfth. And then the Twelfth Doctor dies, but comes back as Joanna Lumley, who then falls for the Master!!

The first thing we're looking at is the idea of the Doctor breaking the "thirteen regenerations limit," which was introduced fairly late in the classic run, but became part of the accepted ruleset all the same. THIS HAS HAPPENED FOR REAL in the 2013 Christmas special, "The Time of the Doctor."
The second thing we're looking at is the idea of the Doctor coming back as a woman, which was reused as the Master coming back as "Missy" in Series 8 (short for "Mistress").
===============================================================
Forward-thinking aside, I have to put Curse back into its context. At the time, Doctor Who was all but dead and buried as a pop-culture institution. At best, it was a fondly-remembered piece of nostalgia from more innocent days; at worst, it was the prime example of just how much better TV is today, and how hokey it was back then.

That a Comic Relief sketch was seen as "the best we're ever going to get to new Doctor Who" demonstrates just how far a once-revered institution had fallen by 1999. Certainly, the BBC novels, Doctor Who Magazine, and several specials on Blue Peter kept it going, but it just wasn't enough. Those six years, from 1999 to 2005, were a long and lonely vigil...

I suppose I could say that, just as 1999 bridged the gap between one millennium to the next, this little sketch bridges the gap between two eras of a series that I have loved and held on to for nineteen years...twenty next May. It's slightly alarming how fast time can go by...




1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Aid#Raising_money

The Life Millennium, part 5

Here we come to a milestone: the halfway point in the Life Millennium series!

Before we move ahead any further, I should pause and point out why I'm covering each development in detail rather than just doing a simple list.

The simplest way to put a ranking like this together would have been to organize them chronologically, but the biggest problem with chronological order is that it implies an endpoint (or, more cynically, that the world and its people are on a downward slide). Another problem with this method is that it's just too broad: many things could have happened in a given year or decade, but nothing in the next year or decade!

Ranking the top one hundred developments from minor-impact to major-impact forces a historian to use his or her imagination and state a more convincing case as to why they are listing one thing but not another. Also, it implies that a story is unfolding across several different cultures, which gets you out of the Western world of development and into a much broader perspective.

The idea of a story unfolding is something I will get to once I review that other Millennium book, which is much more in-depth than this volume and contains some very surprising things.

Anyway....

59. "The First Newspaper, 1609."

Ah, the newspaper: Once a staple of Sunday morning, it has largely gone the way of digital media.

Digital or otherwise, the newspaper's story begins in Strassburg, Germany, where the Relation was first published in 1609. Its first headline read, "Signor Gallileo [sic]...found a rule and visual measure, by which one can...look at places 30 miles away, as if they were close by." (The description sounds like a telescope.)

I say "headline," but the Relation, which was printed on the earliest presses (this will come up much later), didn't have them. In fact, it didn't have advertisements or illustrations, for that matter. Really, it didn't look anything like what we think of when we see the word "newspaper." That would develop in fits and starts throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and wouldn't reach its final form until 1833, when the "penny press" could print massive amounts of papers. Still, everything had to have started somewhere.

58. "Rubber Baron, 1839."
In 1839, Charles Goodyear developed vulcanized rubber. Before his "vulcanization" process, natural rubber was a really unreliable material: It hardened in the winter and practically melted into a sticky goop in the summer. Anything made of rubber simply did not hold its shape!

You see the Goodyear name on tires everywhere, but the brand's namesake repeatedly drove himself into debt in his quest for a more stable form of rubber: "While in debtor's prison, he began combining raw rubber with everything from witch hazel to cream cheese...He accidentally spilled a drop of rubber mixed with sulfur on his hot stove."

From vulcanized rubber comes the boom of the car industry (rubber tires), and from that comes...well, most of modern life, really. What to do with all those old tires, though...?

57. "A Woman's Choice, 1914."
Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, published in 1914 a pamphlet called The Woman Rebel, which marked the beginning of the birth-control movement. Obviously, it wasn't exactly greeted with open arms at the time: The pamphlet ended up hitting her with an obscenity charge--brought upon her by male judges--and she left America for Europe for two years, but came back more determined than ever to make a serious impact.

Sanger opened up a birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, but within nine days the police raided it.

Then, in 1923, she set up the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, "the first doctor-staffed birth control clinic in the United States, where diaphragms and advice were dispensed."

She died in 1966, but her work lives on: Dr. Gregory Pincus dedicated his research, which led to the contraceptive Pill, to Sanger's legacy.

56. "The First Restaurant, 1120."
Taking us out of the real world, just for context...You know how, in The Lord of the Rings and other fantasy works, the heroes stop at an inn to rest for a night and convene in secret, where their enemies weren't looking? Those places had some basis in real life, but they also offered a place to bed down for a night, and I would put those in the "lodging" category first. The first actual restaurant, without an inn attached, can be traced back to 12th-century China. "The journal of 12th century Chinese bureaucrat Meng Yuanlao--arguably the first restaurant reviewer--offers a meticulous account of an emerging restaurant culture in Kaifeng, the capital during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1126)."

Besides offering good food, the restaurant served as a place where people could gather in a setting that was on one hand much more formal than the "inn" setting I mentioned, and on the other still fairly casual.

55. "Childhood Found, 1633."
Three centuries before Dr. Benjamin Spock published Baby and Child Care, a Moravian bishop named Johan Amos Comenius published The School of Infancy.

For context: In 1633, much of Europe was in the middle of the Thirty Years' War. I won't go into too much detail about it, but it devastated most of the continent. Besides the casualties of battle, famine and disease made life a short, miserable affair. "...Children worked hard and died young. But Comenius was a utopian who believed the pathway to an earthly Eden was education. If children were not loved, [and] not educated early and well, their souls could be lost."

Most of Comenius' writings were lost and forgotten when he died, but he planted a seed all the same. Much later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau echoed Comenius' sentiments, as did "Swiss reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi," who opened "the first infants' school."

I myself remember reading somewhere that the drive for compulsory education in England and in America came about when reformers saw children who worked in factories, and were unnerved at how they had already adopted all the bad traits of their adult counterparts...especially the jaded, "I-don't-care-anymore" attitude. Remember that, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, factory employees worked long hours in conditions that would either 1) gruesomely injure them; 2) kill them fast; or 3) kill them long-term from breathing in soot and other chemicals. That's bad enough for an adult, but imagine a child of nine or ten working in this way. Worse yet, imagine that they've made a new friend or two at work...and then had to watch their new friend get pulled into the machine, never to come out.

If there's one thing a child should never have to experience, it's that kind of indifferent despair. There's plenty of time for that in adulthood.

54. "Tobacco Catches Fire, 1535."
From the diary of French Explorer Jacques Cartier, who traveled among the Iroquois Indians in the early parts of the 16th Century: "When we tried to use the smoke, we found it bit our tongues like pepper." I can only assume that they had offered him a peace-pipe, but, in any case, Cartier described his first encounter with tobacco, which he took back to Europe with him. Initially, it was sold as a "cure-all" for various ailments, but it really found a foothold when it became the Jamestown settlement's first major cash crop. And then, mass-produced, pre-rolled cigarettes were introduced in the 1800s, and tobacco became a major industry.

Now, on the other hand, we're starting to shy away from cigarettes. The risks of cancer and emphysema are so well-known that to even start smoking is all but pointless!

53. "The Coolest Invention, 1834."
A long, long, long time ago, the human race developed agriculture. In this way, the first farms came into being, and successful farms made their owners wealthy enough that they could hire people to work the land for them. Those first homesteaders now had enough spare time to say to themselves, "Remember how dreadful it was to work in that summer heat? Now that we've got it made, why don't we try keeping ourselves cool when it gets too hot?"

Rich people imported snow and ice, and packed it tightly between the walls of their homes. It worked well enough for centuries, but, when snow and ice melt, restoring them from a liquid back into a solid is next to impossible.

Or at least it was until 1834, when an inventor named Jacob Perkins built and patented an early refrigerator. His invention used compressed liquid ether, which produced a cooling effect when evaporated; the ether was then re-condensed back into a liquid. Seventeen years later, his invention saw its first commercial use at an Australian brewery, and shortly after that, major shipping companies began to refrigerate, especially if their cargo could easily spoil.

"In 1902, Willis Carrier installed the first air conditioner in a Brooklyn printing plant--it not only cooled but also controlled humidity--and before long his machines were showing up in department stores and movie theaters. The first safe and quiet kitchen refrigerators appeared in the early 1930s. Fewer than 1 percent of the homes in America are now without one, and most contain frozen foods--thanks to a process developed in 1925 by Clarence Birdseye--another marvel of the Cool Age."

"52. Tick, Tock, 1656."
In 1656, a Dutch astronomer named Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock. Before Huygens, we relied first on sundials and water clocks, and then on mechanical deadweight-clocks. All of these were good enough for their time, but even the best mechanical clock regularly lost track of time.

Huygens' clock was the most precise timepiece of its day, and it saw widespread use in just about all quarters. Chemists and physicists could now keep better records for their experiment logs; shopkeepers could keep fixed hours; and workers could keep track of how long they worked.

"51. Liberty for All, 1865."
In 1865, the Civil War came to an end after four years of bloody combat. Millions of slaves found themselves liberated, and the South's plantation economy crumbled.

With that said, the end of the war was just the end of the fighting. The major turning point happened on New Year's Day, 1863, when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. (I very nearly said "delivered the Emancipation Proclamation," but that would have been confusing it with the Gettysburg Address.)

...So, you may ask, how did the Proclamation ensure a Union victory at the end of the war?

I'll tell you: It changed the premise of the war from a political imperative (rebuild the union) to a moral imperative (end slavery as a legitimate economic practice). As far as morale goes, restoring the Union is good for the first few rousing speeches, but it's an abstract goal, and the realities of war--the carnage, the death, the disease--conspire to dull an already fairly-weak mission statement.

"End slavery," on the other hand, is a moral goal. "For the nation's 3.5 million slaves, for its abolitionists and for some of its politicians, the crucible of civil war would allow the U.S. to live up to its best traditions, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, as a land of liberty and equality for all."

"50. A University Education, 1088."
In 1088, a group of law students from Bologna, Italy, founded the first university. They collected and researched Roman law, and then drew their own conclusions about how to apply it to the present day. It might not seem like much now, but their work built the legal foundations of European society.

Not only that, but those same scholars established the university as protected ground: "When Bolognese landlords threatened to raise scholars' rents, student protests led Emperor Frederick Barbarossa to award them protection from exploitation in 1158."

"Students also made professors sign contracts to deliver lectures on particular subjects--and promise to remain at the school until the end of the term. Soon professors needed a license to teach (the earliest academic degree), and a real university took shape."

Not bad for the 11th Century, huh?



SPECIAL BULLETIN: A list of things I want to cover in the near future

Hi, all!

I just wanted to take some time out of the Life Millennium schedule and simply make a list of topics I want to cover in the foreseeable future. Just a little something to get off my chest before I begin work on Millennium sometime in early/mid May. (I have been doing a lot of stuff, which means..schedule slip!)

1. The Matrix--I'm probably not going to go into Reloaded, Revolutions, and the Supplemental Material in any great detail. I want to focus on two things: first, The Matrix was, in a way, the first "cerebral" action movie (to my knowledge, at any rate) and also how it too The Blair Witch Project's use of the Internet as viral marketing a step further. I do know that message boards, AIM, etc. played a role in whipping up hype for The Matrix.

2. The shift from 2D to 3D gaming--More the way in which gaming's "Big Three" icons--Pac-Man, Mario, and Sonic the Hedgehog--ushered in the 3D era at the tail-end of the century. Pac-Man World and Sonic Adventure are definitely Millennium Artifacts.

3. The restored edition of Yellow Submarine--Absolutely important to the millennium, this was the first wave of a Beatles revival. As far as I can remember, it was more about raising awareness of the "restoration" movement than it was about the Beatles. Shortly after Submarine was re-released, The Beatles 1 came out: all their #1 hits, restored and sparkling, just in time for a new century. (Actually, the main draw of Yellow was that it now had the previously lost "Hey, Bulldog!" sequence. The song appeared on the original soundtrack but was left off the US cut of the movie...until 1999.)

4. Neon Genesis Evangelion--Broadcast in 1995, EVA takes place in 2015...this year, actually. It's mainly interesting because it continues the themes I'll get to in Millennium. Where Millennium's world concerns itself with the anxieties of a big change, in Evangelion's world those anxieties have putrefied, and everything's kind of hollow and atrophied. Still, more on that later...

Plus all the myriad books and articles I can get my hands on and review.

The Life Millennium, Part 4

Onward and upward...!



69. "The Anatomy Lesson, 1543."
"As a boy, Andreas Vesalius dissected cadavers of stray dogs and cats he found on the streets of Brussels." So begins the entry on the man who wrote a massive work of seven books, entitled On the Structure of the Human Body. As Vesalius grew from childhood to adulthood, he refused to "put away childish things," and carried his hobby and passion with him. In this way, he shaped anatomy, physiology, and medicine as we know it today. What's more, he disproved several old-fashioned theories, some of which dated back to Ancient Greece. For example, it was once thought that the human jaw was composed of two bones, but Vesalius proved that it was just one bone. (I can't quite wrap my head around that one: Where would the second bone be? Unless the Greeks thought it split at the chin or something...)

Today, our doctors take Vesalius' work for granted, but his work was downright controversial at the time. The work of Galen, a prominent physician of ancient Greece, was then considered sacrosanct in much of academia, and the Catholic Church probably thought he was robbing graves for his dissections. (The Church was not entirely wrong: I remember seeing Vesalius' name in one of my history books. It said that, while Vesalius did his work above-board, there were a few unscrupulous dealers who sold cadavers that they had taken from graves. Vesalius likely bought one not knowing where it came from, and while he was innocent, he got lumped in with the bad ones.)

Though newer volumes with more modern findings have superseded Vesalius' work, his findings were the trendsetter: Without him, the more modern stuff might not exist.

68. "Pentecostalism, 1906."
Pentecostalism's origins date back to 1901, "when Charles Fox Parham declared...that speaking in tongues was a sign of baptism in the Holy Spirit."

A young black preacher from Houston named William Joseph Seymour kept Parham's message alive when, in 1906, he left Houston for Los Angeles and set up a mission, and "within two years his multicultural ministry had sent missionaries to 25 countries."

To this day, Pentecostalism, "a religion of the heart," is still very much alive, perhaps because it can adapt to and be combined with other religions by virtue of placing as much emphasis on one's own experience of God as it does on the church's particular doctrine.

"Today about half a billion people call themselves Pentecostal or Charismatic, and Pentecostals alone outnumber Anglicans, Baptists, Lutherans and Presbyterians combined. The Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea, is now, at 700,000 strong, the largest Christian congregation on earth."

67. "A Stitch in Half the Time, 1851."
The idea that automation will make seasoned, well-practiced professionals obsolete has been around for quite a long time. In fact, French tailors found cause for alarm back in 1830, when a young man named Barthélemy Thimonnier invented and patented a prototype sewing machine. Eleven years later, "they ransacked Thimonnier's Paris shop."

This is why, ten years later, two others put their names in the book: Elias Howe, who invented a slightly-better version of Thimonnier's prototype; and Isaac Merritt Singer, who further improved upon Howe's design and introduced the "layaway plan" so that more people could buy his machines: "For five bucks down, one could take home a $125 machine and pay off the rest in monthly installments with interest."

In fact, far from making tailors' work obsolete, it improved their work: They could replicate the same stitch twice, and they could complete a job in less time than doing it completely by hand might take.

The sewing machine also made ready-to-wear clothing (and, by extension, the modern department store) a reality. No longer did you have to visit a tailor if you needed a new shirt--now, you could just buy a new, pre-made and -sized shirt!

All of that being said, there were some downsides. Like Eli Whitney's cotton gin, the sewing machine also opened the door to some unintended consequences: "...it enslaved immigrant women and children in sweatshops. Despite the formation in 1900 of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, clothing today is available thanks not only to Singer but to people around the world operating his machines for little pay." If you ask me, that's just people, not the sewing machine itself.

66. "The Splendor of Tenochtitlán, 1325."
The people that we now call "Aztecs" had been nomads for many, many years, but in 1325, they found themselves stuck "on a marshy island in Mexico's Lake Texcoco."

Less than a hundred years later, that apparently undesirable piece of real estate had become the wondrous city of Tenochtitlán, which housed more than 250,000 people at its height. "Built without the help of beasts of burden or the wheel, it boasted palaces, pyramids, grand plazas and a superb network of canals, dikes, and bridges."

Hernan Cortés wrote in 1519 of "the strange and marvelous things of this great city," when chronicling his account of arriving in Mexico. In his eyes, however, the city proved a stark contrast to the Aztecs' religion, which featured blood sacrifice as a major component. (The implication is that the conquistadors likely thought, "Surely these savages would not know how to engineer and build such a beautiful city!")

Today, Tenochtitlán is now known as Mexico City.

65. "A Fresh Point of View, 1413."
The visual arts have already been featured on this list, but that discussion emphasized a specific movement. This entry concerns the development of an artistic tool: perspective.

Medieval artwork did use perspective of a sort, but it lacked the sense of depth which characterizes perspective. This changed when Filippo Brunelleschi completed a painting in 1413 of the Baptistery in Florence. What he did sounds incredibly simple, but it's complex in practice: He rendered onto his canvas the way in which objects seem to get smaller as they get farther away.

In this way, the canvas ceases to be just a canvas; it becomes a window into another reality altogether. A highly-skilled artist can employ perspective to startling effect: A few street-artists around the world have done chalk-paintings on city streets in which, to give one example, a "hole" in the concrete appears to go down for miles. Granted, it only works from one angle in particular, but even then, the illusion requires considerable technical and artistic skill to pull off.

64. "The Long March, 1934."
"Fleeing the Kuomintang's forces in southern China in 1934, a young communist leader named Mao Zedong took 100,000 soldiers and headed north." Within the space of a year, they had marched for over six thousand miles, through mountain ranges and rivers. Along the way, the ever-dwindling troop stopped in small villages and "drew lessons in the dirt with twigs, exhorting peasants to organize against landlords." When all was said and done, Mao's charges had gone from 100,000 to 8,000, but those who survived remained at his side in 1949, when he became chairman of the People's Republic of China. "The triumph of peasants over centuries of imperial rule touched millions around the globe."

63. "Dynamite!, 1867."
In 1867, Alfred Nobel mixed "nitroglycerin...with an absorbent sand and [molded] it into sticks," and called the result "dynamite." Before the invention of dynamite, explosives more powerful than gunpowder were not widely used. Certainly, nitroglycerin existed (twenty years prior to dynamite, in fact), but it was a liquid, and an unstable one at that. Drop a flask of the stuff, and BOOM!

The liquid's volatility made shipping it impractical, but packing it into that absorbent sand stabilized it. Manufacturers could easily make, ship, and store it, but there was a caveat: Dynamite "sweats" with age and exposure to the elements (that is, the nitroglycerin separates from the sand), and becomes more and more unstable. For example, if a group of miners from the 1800s left a few sticks in whatever mine they were working in, those few sticks would pose a significant hazard two or three years down the line.

Some time later, Alfred Nobel realized that he didn't want to be known for creating dynamite, so he founded the Nobel Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize, and that's what he's better known for today. "Too late for comfort, though: He died sad and alone, taking nitroglycerin for an ailing heart."

62. "Bessemer's Blast, 1854."
Steel had been around for quite a while--Arabs and Swedes alike had been melting iron ore into gleaming steel for centuries. However, an English inventor named Henry Bessemer gets credited with "inventing" steel for three reasons. First, his process "used a blast of oxygen to burn off excess carbon in molten iron ore," thereby improving the steel's purity and strength. Second, his process could be scaled according to a project's particular needs. Third, he patented it first: "American William Kelly made the same discovery at roughly the same time but didn't hurry fast enough to the patent office."

Bessemer's steel, many times stronger than iron, opened the doors for the Transcontinental Railroad (steel rails that can withstand the weight and impact of huge trains), and allowed for the construction of ever-taller skyscrapers. Simply put, the modern world as we know it today would not have been possible without the invention of steel.

61. "Shadows Inside Us, 1895."
In 1895, Wilhelm Rontgen stumbled upon a phenomenon which he called "X-rays." "He placed a vacuum tube with a wire attached to either end inside a black box, switched off the lights in his lab and turned on the electrical current. A mysterious fluorescence began emanating--not from the tube in the box but from a cardboard screen nearby that had been treated with barium." Further tests showed him that these rays could penetrate blocks of wood, heavy books, and, eventually, his own hand.

His discovery proved a big step forward for medicine. Doctors used X-rays to see things like broken bones and, later, cancers. Early on, though, the rays were something of a "new toy," as they were used for measuring peoples' feet for shoes and other novelties. Soon, though, the dangers of too much X-ray exposure--hair loss, minor burns, and, in the worst cases, cancers--became apparent, requiring further research and newer, better equipment.

60. "A Royal Flush, 1596."
In 1596, a Briton named John Harington invented a prototype flush toilet, which was installed and proved a success at Richmond Palace. It took a little over 250 years for sewage systems to catch up to Harington's invention; by then, a gentleman named Thomas Crapper (I kid you not--that really is his name) had perfected the mass-market flush system.

The flush toilet did a lot for sanitation and public health: Less waste on the streets means the less chance of catching diseases like cholera and typhoid!

The Life Millennium, part 3

Go back to part two

Slowly but surely we're plowing through this, fellow readers!

79. "The Rise of the Welfare State, 1601."
In 1601, Queen Elizabeth I passed the first of England's Poor Laws, which required the government to help the country's poor. That being said, however, it wasn't free money: Anyone who was poor but able-bodied had to go to workhouses. Children took apprenticeships. "Those who did not work were whipped, imprisoned, and, in some cases, put to death. The meager earnings these institutional safety nets provided were not enough to pull people out of despair."

This is where much of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol--in fact, most of his work--comes from, especially Scrooge's "Are there no prisons...no workhouses?" line. I'd never jump to defend Ebenezer Scrooge, but I will explain him: back in 1843, practically everyone outside of landed gentry was but one calamity away from the workhouses, and he, an old man, desperately wanted to avoid the workhouse if he could.

Still, the seed of an idea was there. The Poor Laws indirectly inspired everything from Britain's public housing and National Health Service to our own Social Security Act.

78. "Coffee Brews in Yemen, 1450."
If I had my way, this would be number one on the list. Where would the Millennium Museum be without an endless supply of coffee to fuel its proprietor? ;)

Coffee became popular throughout the Muslim world when mystics realized that it could "keep them alert during nighttime worship. Out of their communal services, coffee drinking evolved as a group activity that carried over to the general Muslim population, which shunned alcohol."

From those evening services developed the first coffeehouses, places where friends could meet on a day off and have a nice little chat over a cup of joe. Artists, writers, and other creative types were a common sight; they used the drink to focus while they worked.

With creative thought also came political thought, which scared the powers-that-be enough to "ban coffee in Mecca in 1511." Outside of Mecca, though, the drink thrived, and it wasn't long before it reached Europe. "By 1700 there were 2,000 cafés in London, one of which, Lloyd's, became the giant insurance brokerage."

77. "Going Up, 1854."
Elevators had already been in use before Elisha Graves Otis introduced his, but Otis got his name in the books by making the overall design safer.

He demonstrated it with showmanship at a New York City fair: Imagine the rough outline of an elevator shaft, several feet high, with a platform at the bottom and a powered drum with heavy rope coiled around it at the top. Mr. Otis stood on this platform and went up, up, up, high above the crowd. At a certain point, he stopped the elevator and slashed the rope. The crowd below expected him to plummet to his death, but instead "the platform fell a few inches, then stopped."

What was so special about his design, anyway? For starters, he included in his design "a spring that set two iron teeth into notches in the guide rails when tension in the rope failed." In other words, he developed safety brakes so that the elevator wouldn't just keep falling.

Today, the name "Otis" is on almost every elevator, but we never take notice of it. The next time you find yourself in an elevator, why not take a close look around? If you see that name, do spare a thought for the engineer who made elevators safer more than a hundred years ago.

76. "The Double Helix, 1953."
In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the molecular structure of DNA.

There is an important distinction here: Before the work of Watson and Crick, a Swiss physician named Friedrich Miescher discovered the chemical called DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and its presence in the center of all living cells.

After Miescher's initial discovery, Martha Chase and Alfred Hershey stated in 1952 that DNA controlled heredity; before their conclusion, heredity was thought to be the work of proteins.

One year later, this first chapter reached its end with Watson and Crick, who "noticed the familiar shapes of the two complementary pairs of basic molecules that make up DNA, requiring two helices to wrap around its core, a revelation that also suggested how DNA might replicate itself."

The work of all of these scientists came to a head when the Human Genome Project began in 1990. The project's mission: "Decipher the three billion chemical 'letters' that form the alphabet of human DNA."

75. "Chartres, 1260."
No tour of France is complete without a visit to the Chartres, the most beautiful cathedral in all of France.

The world had seen so many architectural marvels before the cathedral--the Pyramids of Giza and the buildings of ancient Rome come to mind--but they're technically kind of rudimentary. The Pyramids derive their aura from their ability to withstand time and the elements, and ancient Rome derives its aura from sheer scale, but the cathedral...now that is something different. What I find most interesting in Chartres simply from looking at the picture on page 46 is how many different ideas were used in building it: Corinthian columns; vaulted ceilings; the curved altar at the end of the hall; the stained glass...and how neatly it all comes together. More than that, though, is the incredible size of it all: "The vaults are 116 feet high."

I confess, my interest is more in the logistics of Chartres than the art. To imagine that all of this was achieved with only man-powered, 13th Century equipment...now that really makes me lost for words.

Fun fact: In 2003, when I was a sophomore in high school, the choir would have traveled to France. With international tensions as high as they were, we went to Hawaii instead. (Much better decision, as it turns out: I've heard that France can be gray, rainy, swampy, and miserable in early springtime.)

The France tour would no doubt have had us singing the Hallelujah Chorus in Chartres. Instead, we sang it in the no less spectacular King Kamehameha Cathedral. I think that my biggest regret to this day is that I didn't quite appreciate it at the time. Then again, in my defense, 1) I didn't quite have the frame of mind to appreciate it, and 2) I don't think I was even in a position to appreciate it. At the time, it was "just a job to do:" Show as much respect as you can, perform the piece as well as you can, pose for pictures, and move on to the next thing on the itinerary.

I think that's why I maintain the Museum: Not only is it my attempt at charting and chronicling a mostly-forgotten period in recent history; it's also a way for me to forgive myself.

Anyway...

74. "El Libertador, 1819."
In 1799, a Venezuelan lad named Simon Bolivar went to Europe, perhaps to find himself, or just to broaden his horizons a bit. Remember that this was the era of the French and American revolutions, and also of the Age of Enlightenment, for this is very significant.

The time he spent in Europe gave him a mission: Overthrow the Spanish, who had ruled Venezuela--and much of South America--for three centuries. Bolivar went home again, and in 1810, he waged his war.

Bolivar liberated Argentina in 1816; Colombia in 1819; Venezuela in 1821; Brazil in 1822; and Peru in 1824, and, though he never got to see the fully-united South America he dreamed of (but not for lack of trying: He mostly succeeded, but Venezuela split from the unified nation in 1829 after a civil war), he set the template for Latin America's philosophy of freedom.

73. "Fashion Comes Forward, c.1350."
In the bleak, bleak days before 1350, "attire was a matter of national costume, consisting of creatively draped, baglike garments."

Soldiers coming home from the Crusades brought with them, among other treasures, garments that fastened with buttons, which opened the door for men's and women's fashion. Also, "the rise of mercantile capitalism allowed a new moneyed class to dress like nobility." My reading of that phrase makes me think, "Their clothes could look like those worn by nobility, but had to be made of lesser-quality materials." I read in a book about Elizabethan times that middle-class women who wanted to emulate Elizabeth I's beauty, but could not afford the high-quality makeup, instead used a less-expensive but more dangerous lead-based makeup, which eventually ended up killing them!

From then on, fashion advanced and changed at a frightening speed. The 1960 version of The Time Machine perfectly and humorously illustrates this with a department-store mannequin's clothes and styles being changed in triple-time. (While we're on the subject of time-travel, there's a school of thought within Doctor Who fandom: The Doctor mostly takes young women with him on his travels because women's fashion changes much more rapidly than men's fashion, and this is how he keeps track of where and when he's been, since trying to keep any other kind of timeline is meaningless.)

72. "Workers' Rights, 1838."
As history and current events remind us, employees and their employers have been very uneasy allies for a very long time (more "uneasy" than "allies"), and workers have fought tooth and nail for their rights--the eight-hour workday; an end to child labor; the minimum wage; the right to form and be in unions--for as long.

The first modern union, well after the craftsman's guilds in the Middle Ages (interesting side-note, by the by: The Freemasons started out as a stoneworkers' guild), was the London Working Men's Association, formed in 1838. As you might guess, the British Parliament initially vetoed its People's Charter, a condition of which was "voting rights for unlanded workers." Fortunately, Parliament eventually came around and passed several of its ideas.

People who fell under the Charter were called Chartists, and over time many of them came to America, including Samuel Gompers, who founded the American Federation of Labor.

71. "Angkor Wat, c.1150."
Angkor Wat, located in Cambodia, is a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu, and it's "the largest religious monument in the world." However, its marvel lies in the details of its construction: The book describes it as "a seamless edifice with stones weighing as much as 8,000 pounds apiece," and that it was "built without the use of bricks and mortar; it is held together by weight and friction."

Also, its towers are gigantic sculptures that depict Hindu and Khmer histories and legends...and all of this, from carving to construction, was done by hand, well before the Chartres cathedral. The centuries have not been kind at all to it, but the accumulated wear and tear lends it an almost alien mystique.

70. "Silent Spring, 1962."
Here's another event that really should have a more important place on the list.

Long ago, in the 40s and 50s, there was a pesticide called DDT. It worked very, very well, and Americans fell head over heels for it. It actually worked a little too well: People used it when they went outside to play and do their thing; at the end of the day, they washed it off. The chemicals got into the water supply, where fish ended up eating it, and then birds such as bald eagles got it into their systems when they ate the fish. Fish and birds alike suffered damage--in many cases, if it didn't kill the fish and birds outright, then it certainly hurt their offspring.

Then, a marine biologist named Rachel Carson discovered DDT's terrible effects. Horrified, she undertook considerable research and wrote Silent Spring, which arrived on bookshelves in 1962.

"Every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death."

Without her book, America's environmental movement might never have come to fruition, and without that, we would not have Earth Day, the Clean Air and Water Acts, or the Environmental Protection Agency, and DDT would likely still be in widespread use.

The Life Millennium, part 2

Link to Part One

89. "Across the Sahara, 1324."
In 1324, Emperor Mansa Musa of Mali undertook a pilgrimage to Mecca that has since become the stuff of legend.

He departed from Mali with "60,000 men, including 12,000 slaves...80 camels, each loaded with 300 pounds of gold, which he gave away so freely in Cairo that it took years for the price of gold to recover."

Yes, he spent it all, but he returned with architects, engineers, philosophers, scribes, and poets. In this way, he put Mali and its capital, Timbuktu, on the map, for better and for worse. After he reinvented his kingdom, Europe set its eyes on Africa...but that is a story for another day.

88. "Modern Art, 1880."
Up until the end of the 19th Century, artists strove to put their subjects on canvas as realistically as possible. That changed when Paul Cezanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire in 1880 (the first of over sixty different impressions). Instead of trying to capture every little detail--every house, every crevice in the limestone rock face--Cezanne reshaped the landscape into a whirling array of colors, shades, and contrasts. 

No longer was the canvas a representation of reality; in Cezanne's hands, the canvas became "a reality unto itself, one he saw as both classic and transcendent...As Pablo Picasso later observed, he was 'the father of us all.'"

87. "Japan Opens Its Doors, 1868."
In 1868, Emperor Mutsushito of Japan initiated the Meiji Restoration, effectively opening Japan's doors to Europe and the still relatively young United States. From then on, Japan waged imperial war with China (1894) and Russia (1905--a naval battle), annexed Korea (1910), and helped fight against Germany in World War I (1914).

After Japan's imperial might ceased in the aftermath of World War II, the nation still expanded; this time with business savvy and innumerable pop-culture exports, the biggest of which is Japanese animation, or anime.

86. "India's Independence, 1947."
The most important thing to remember about India is that Britain had considered it "the jewel in the crown" of the British Empire since 1857. In that year, "Indian soldiers led an unsuccessful revolt against the British East India Company, which had effectively controlled the country."

Things remained more or less constant until Gandhi and thousands of his followers walked 200 miles to the sea and "made salt in defiance of British tax laws." Gandhi's movement gradually gained momentum, but it took World War II to finally do the British Empire in as a world power and as an idea. In 1947, Britain relinquished control of India; so followed Palestine in 1948; Ghana, in 1957; and Hong Kong in 1997.

85. "Saving Aristotle, 1169."
I'm surprised this one is placed so early on! One would think that

In the 12th Century, a man by the name of Ibn Rushd lived in Cordoba, Spain. He was very much the Leonardo daVinci of the Muslim world. Scholar, philosopher, translator, polymath, scientist; he preserved most of Aristotle's work by translating it from Greek into Arabic and retaining it in Cordoba's vast library, which "contained 400,000 works--more, it is said, than all the other libraries of Europe combined."

Eventually, Rushd's translations received a further translation, this time into Latin, and Europe's scholars and intellectuals were able to appraise Aristotle for themselves.

84. "Checking Accounts, 1407."

In the bleak, bleak days before the Fifteenth Century, merchants usually plied their trade at fairs with what were basically IOUs, and wealthy families owned private banks that offered loans to kings. (If kings didn't pay off their loans, those families would be destitute--it was, after all, their own money.)
In 1407, the Casa di San Giorgio--the world's first "public" bank--opened for business. 

San Giorgio closed down less than forty years later, but it served as a template for everything from personal savings and checking accounts to credit cards. Gone were the IOUs of old; with a more centralized bank, accounts could be more readily maintained.

83. "The First Novel, 1008."
In Part One, I declared that Don Quixote de la Mancha was "the first modern novel of the Western world." This entry is the payoff: A much earlier work, Lady Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji has the distinction of being the first novel, period. I myself had to read it for a research paper when I went to Moraine Valley, and while it wasn't the most gripping read, it was good to transcend my boundaries and read something from an entirely different culture and time period.

The story concerns a handsome young prince named, obviously, Prince Genji, and the people he encounters throughout. It's a Heian-era political drama as well as a romance novel, and I'd venture to say that Lady Murasaki accidentally created the structure of the modern soap opera with The Tale of Genji.
 
"The novel's complex plot, its sympathy with the plight of women at court, its subtlety of language and its penetrating psychological insights--all were unprecedented...Any serious discussion of the structures, forms, and intentions of the novel--the most significant new literary genre of the millennium--must take into account Murasaki's stunning achievement."

82. "Selling the World a Coke, 1886."
In 1886, a pharmacist named John Pemberton created a tonic that would eventually be known as Coca-Cola, but the stuff itself is not as important as its impact on advertising and marketing. See, he advertised his alcohol-free drink as "The Great National Temperance Drink," and most people found that they liked how it tasted. 
Then, a little bit later, a man named Asa Candler bought Pemberton's company and focused much of its revenue on marketing and advertising. Later on, in 1926, Robert Woodruff took over and set up a foreign branch. During World War II, "the U.S. military footed much of the bill for the company's bottling plants at the front lines," and this is how Coke became an international entity.

Just think of how many signifiers Coke carries: There's the famous "contour bottle," the unique "Coca-Cola" logo, the "polar bears," the modern depiction of Santa Claus in a red suit, the song "I'd Like To Buy the World a Coke" (a refit of "I'd Like to Teach the World To Sing"), slogans such as "It's the Real Thing"...I could go on for hours, and that's a testament to Coke's influence.

81. "Silver Fever, 1545."  
A bit more than three hundred years before the Gold Rush sent hundreds packing to California and Alaska, someone discovered silver in the Andes Mountains. Almost immediately, Spanish entrepreneurs with dreams of vast wealth flocked to Peru and conscripted [read: enslaved] the natives to mine this valuable metal so that they could sell it to China for a huge profit.

Of course, the price of silver in China fell in the 1600s; as that fell, so too did the Ming dynasty and the Spanish Empire (the defeat of the Spanish Armada certainly didn't help).

80. "The Suez Canal, 1869."
Upon its completion, the Suez Canal allowed ships to go directly from England to India without having to sail around Africa. It shaved 6,000 miles--12,000 round-trip--from the average journey, and in the days before modern commerce, every mile counted. 

This architectural marvel required ten years and over one million workers to complete, and it was called "The Eighth Wonder of the World" when it finally opened. ========================================================================
SOURCE: Time, Inc. The Life Millennium: The 100 Most Important People and Events of the Last 1,000 Years. New York: 1998, Time, Inc., Book.