Figure 1 – Augustus Sherman Guadeloupean woman. In the public domain in the United States because of its age and that it was taken by an employee of the federal government..

A friend and reader has brought to my attention a remarkable article in The Washington Post showing the faces of “the old country.” It has been estimated that approximately 40% of the population of the United States can trace its ancestry back to the 12 million people who entered  America through Ellis Island in New York Harbor. It raises the old cliche that we are a nation of immigrants. But the true story is much more than one of numbers, As rich as America has been in natural resources, its greatest asset has been, and continues to be, it immigrants. These people came and come to the United States to build a future and their future is the future of the country.

These photos were taken by Augustus Sherman, who was both an amateur photographer and the chief registry clerk on Ellis Island from 1892 until 1925. He photographed people coming through in their native costumes, while they were the greenest of “green horns.” The photographs were published in National Geographic in 1907 and for many years they hung in the federal Immigration Service headquarters in Manhattan. They are now archived in the the New York Public Library.

There are several points to be made about the images themselves. There was a certain seriousness to the picture process, or was it fear of rejection. The pride of the sitters rings through. And in composite they are a definitive monument to America’s diversity.It is hard to pick a favorite among these images. But I have chosen as Figure 1 this stunningly expressive photograph of a beautiful Guadeloupean woman in native dress. All of the elements are there: pride and just a hint of a smile

I think it highly significant that today is the fortieth anniversary of the day (October 24, 1975), when the women of Iceland staged a massive twenty-four hour strike called “Women’s Day Off, to demonstrate pay inequities (wait that sounds familiar) and to prove just how essential they were for the economy of the country. Only five years later Vigdís Finnbogadóttir became Iceland’s and Europe’s first female president.  According to Vigdis that day was the first step for women’s emancipation in Iceland: “It completely paralyzed the country and opened the eyes of many men.”

It is believed that 90 % of Icelandic women participated in the strike. Many just left their homes early in the morning leaving their husbands and children to fend for themselves.  The tales of quiet desperation are profound. Banks, factories, schools, nurseries, and many shops were forced to close. For the men of Iceland it was a baptism of fire, which led to the other name that the day goes by “the Long Friday.” There are some wonderful black and white news photographs in the Iceland’s Women’s History Archive of that day, including this one showing the 25,000 women (~20% of Icelands 1975 female population) gathered in solidarity in Reykjavik on that day.

As is always the key point with such events, they highlight two significant points: first, is how much remains to be accomplished, and second is the size of the shoulders upon which we stand.

Figure v1 – First photograph of the sun taken April 2, 1845. In the public domain in the United States because of its age.

My discussion about Mars yesterday got me looking for the first photograph ever taken of Mars, meaning from an Earth-based telescope, and so far I have been unable to find it. I did however, find the first photograph extant of someone “flipping the bird.” I also found the first photograph ever taken of the sun, shown in Figure 1. In the Geek Zone this daguerreotype is likely to bring shivers because of who took the photograph. It was taken on Apron 2 1845 by legendary, French physicists Louis Fizeau and Leon Foucault made the first successful photographs of the sun on April 2, 1845. The original image, taken with an exposure of 1/60th of a second, was about 4.7 inches (12 centimeters) in diameter. Not only does it capture several sunspots but you can see their structure and also the rice-like texture of the solar surface, when seen through a moderate sized telescope.

Figure 1 – water streaks on Mars, from NASA and in the public domain.

The big news yesterday was NASA’s announcement of water on Mars. I would have preferred an ancient Martian trilobite fossil, but hey, this is pretty exciting for us science geeks. What struck me most when I looked over the press coverage of this event this morning was the characteristic American exuberant hyperbole contrasted with the English understatement.  NBC news had the headline “H2 Whoa! Mars shows strong signs of flowing water,” while the BBC was more staid with “Mars satellite hints at liquid water.” I mean think of it in biblical terms. It’s  “MANKIND EXPELLED!” vs. “Adam and Eve change address.”

Anyway I’ve spent some time thinking which photograph released yesterday I believe will define this historic moment of discovery and I am going to have to go with Figure 1 which shows dark narrow streaks, called “recurring slope lineae,” believed to be rivulets, emanating from the walls of Garni Crater on Mars. The images is a constructed views from observations by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Figure 1 – Margaret Neves (1792-1903). In the public domain in the United States because of its age.

In his landmark, and I think very profound, book “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” Daniel Dennett tells us of a coin toss contest. The premise is this, suppose I were to tell you that I can show you a person who has one 100 coin tosses in a row. You would probably say: “No way!” But point of fact, it can be done with 100 % certainty. All you need to do is get 2¹⁰⁰ people pair them off randomly. Take the winners, pair them off randomly, and continue the process one hundred times. Now a few points, first, that’s 1,267,650,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000  people, which is not only a lot but a lot more than the number of people living on the Earth.  But hey, this is science fiction. Right? Or at the very least it is a Gedanken Experiment.  But the point is that while the winner was/is/will be chosen totally by the laws of random chance, and who said that God does not roll dice with the universe, he/she is certain to feel specially endowed by the Creator.

A similar logic applied to the three remaining members of the club, or is it tontine, of people alive today who were born in the nineteenth century, which was the subject of Tuesday’s blog. Actually, it’s not the same thing, because people who live long tend to have family members who also live longer. So genetics does play a factor. Anyway, Tuesday’s blog got me wondering about the eighteenth century. Who was the last person born in the eighteenth century to live into the twentieth century? I know, I know, who really cares? But bear with me.  The interest in that question is that photography was invented in 1838, so the person in question, the winner of the coin toss as it were, was most likely to have been photographed.

The problem with all of this is that record keeping in the eighteenth century was not what it was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, you wind up with an answer to the question of who was best documented to have accomplished the feat, not necessarily who actually lasted the longest. Anyway, a lot of people’s money is on Margaret Ann Neve (18 May 1792 – 4 April 1903) of St. Peter Port, Guernsey, English Channel, who is shown in Figure 1. She was the first documented woman supercentenarian, that’s someone who lives to be older than 110.

We know very little about her. She remembered the turmoil brought to Guernsey by the French Revolution. She married John Neve in England in 1823 but returned to Guernsey in 1849 after his death. Thus, she survived him by 54 years. Neve frequently traveled with her sister with her sister, who lived to be 98. Note that her mother lived to be 99. Their last trip was to Crakow on 1872. travelled abroad to various countries with her sister, who died aged 98. Their last trip was in 1872, when they visited Cracow (then in Austria-Hungary, now in Poland). Margaret Neve died peacefully on 4 April 1903 at age 110 years 321 days. At the time she was believed to be the oldest living person.

As I said, it is really hard to tell whether Ms. Neve was really “the one.” In 2012 a photograph sold on Ebay of a native American Ka-Nah-Be-Owey Wence, aka John Smith, lit a controversy by claiming that he was 129 years old at the time of his death in 1920. This would have places him as born in the same year as Margaret Neve and out living her by seventeen years. It would also make him the oldest person that ever lived topping Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at age 122. However, his age appears to be not accurate, and it serves as a lesson of how such ages could be assessed where there are no written records.  According to John Smith’s Wikipedia site :Federal Commissioner of Indian Enrollment Ransom J. Powell argued that it was disease and not age that gave him such a wrinkled and ancient looking face and remarked that according to records he was only 88 years old. Paul Buffalo who, when a small boy, had met John Smith, said he had repeatedly heard the old man state that he was “seven or eight”, “eight or nine” and “ten years old” when the “stars fell”. The stars falling refers to the Leonid meteor shower of November 13, 1833, about which Carl Zapffe writes: “Birthdates of Indians of the 19th Century had generally been determined by the Government in relation to the awe-inspiring shower of meteorites that burned through the American skies just before dawn on 13 November 1833, scaring the daylights out of civilized and uncivilized [sic] peoples alike. Obviously it was the end of the world…” This puts the age of John Smith at just under 100 years old at the time of his death, and leaves Ms. Neves secure in her dominance or at least her longevity. The old photographs of John Smith are however wonderful!

Before leaving this subject there is another question to consider and that is “Of all the people who have ever been photographed, who had the earliest birthday.” Photography was invented in 1838; so again the person had to have been born in the eighteenth century. Hmm! A while back I posted a blog about an 1842 photograph of Mozarts wife Constanza (1762 – 1842). Probably not, right? Because she was a mere 80 years old at the time.

As it turns out, the answer relates to something else that we spoke about  “The Last Muster Project” and book by a similar name, by photo-detective Maureen Taylor.  In 1864 the Rev. Elias Brewster Hillard a congregationalist minister from Connecticut set out desperately to document these “Last Men,” the last surviving veterans of the American Revolutionary War before they died out.  He published his photographs and stories in “The Last Men of the Revolution (1864).”  The date is important, because at the time the nation was embroiled in a civil war that put at jeopardy what these men set out to accomplish..  Indeed, I would argue that the American Civil War as a fight for liberty was the American Revolution, part II. This book was reprinted by Barre Publishers in 1968.  Hillard recognized the importance of this task of preservation.  Ms. Taylor, using modern techniques set out with her Last Muster Project to discover more of these memorable men and women.  Her book documents the lives of seventy of these individuals.

So who mustered last. Figure 2 is from a daguerreotype in the Collection of the Maine Historical Society that was taken c1852 and shows Conrad Hayer (1749-1856), sometimes spelled Heyer. Hayer was born in 1849 and the photograph was taken in 1852. It seems likely that he was the person with the earliest birthday ever photographed alive. I put the alive part in there so that people don’t through King Tut and the like at me.

In the end we cannot really be sure of either Neve’s or Hayer’s claims to photographic history. Indeed, I hope that readers can find and inform us of earlier people.

Conrad Hayer (1852) probably the person with the earliest birthday ever photograhed. In the Maine Historical Society and in the public domain because of its age.

Figure 1 – Hoop-skirt by Napoleon Sarony c 1893. From the Wikimedia Commons, original in the US Library of Congress and in the public domain because of its age.

Our discussion this past Saturday about crinolines, crinolettes, and bustles left unanswered the two most critical questions of all: first how do you get into one, and second how do you sit in one. Fortunately, there is an army of historical dress makers and re-enactors preserving this heritage ofr us. As a result these questions can be answered.

First, of all there is a famous pair of Sarony Studios photographs from 1893 in the United States Library of Congress that show or reveal a woman’s crinoline cage. Even this it must be realized is pretty late from an historical perspective. I have reproduced them here as Figure 1.

It also turns out, perhaps not so surprisingly that there are lots of instructional videos on the web that span the subject matter from how to make to how to put on and wear these dresses. Oh yes they also answer the perhaps more critical question of how to take them off. I say perhaps because you can approach that question in much the same way you answer people worried about a cat stuck in a tree. “Ever seen a cat skeleton in a tree.” Kitties have a way of getting down, although it might be inelegant.

Anyway just a few suggestions regarding videos to watch. Historical sewing has an excellent video of how to sit in a hoop-skirt, and you can go from there an make your own.

And if you want to see how a woman got dressed in the 1860’s I recommend Nevada Culture’ website. This is significant in that it demonstrates that it could be done without staff; so even if you were more strapped than Lady Cora, it could be done.