telex

Via Weird Universe—striking us as rather incredulous as well that we’ve not blogged about this topic before though there are some corresponding posts (see here and here)—we are introduced to commercial code, a method adopted by companies to save on cablegram expenses when telegraph companies charged per word or character and thus elaborate and competing systems of encoding and decoding were developed and broadly used from the 1870s through the 1950s, both for general use and industry jargon. Secondarily a means of keeping communications private and confusing unless one had the right reference book, some systems used less common words as a cipher for a series of phrases on the same subject and sometimes included non-words, like HAUBARER for “charterers will allow the option of carrying horse for the ship’s benefit,” BYOXO for “are you trying to weasel out of our deal,” ENBET for the “captain has gone insane,” AZKHE for a clean bill of health and COSNOSCO as shorthand for “dining out this evening; send my dress clothes here.” More to explore at Weird Universe at the link up top including a good resource of scanned codebooks.

tachygraphy

First demonstrated to the public in Paris on this day in 1792, inventor and engineer Claude Chappe (*1763 - †1805) took the principles of flag signalling from the merchant navy and applied them for terrestrial use in a series of communication masts and towers within successive line-of-sight in a network that eventually covered all of France. Operators viewing their neighbouring link through a telescope could pass along the message to the next relay station (see also). Dubbed the télégraphe Chappe, alternately the inventor coined the neologism semaphore—from the Greek σῆμα + φορός, sign-carrying—and was the first practical means of telecommunication of the Industrial Age, in use until replaced by the electric telegraph in the 1850s.

1972-012a

While perhaps not as celebrated as its more charismatic follow-on missions of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, launched on this day in 1972, was the first space probe travel beyond the asteroid belt and went on to study Jupiter and became the first object to achieve escape velocity to leave the Solar System and wander the interstellar medium. As foundational as the mission was, the Pioneer programme is overshadowed by its successors partly as it went silent in 2003. Designed by Carl Sagan, Linda Salzman Sagan and Frank Drake, Pioneer and its sister probe bear the pictured plaque, should it ever be discovered by intelligent extra-terrestrials. If left undisturbed (canonical Star Trek has Klingons destroying it as target practise), Pioneer is on a trajectory to pass the star system Aldebaran in Taurus in about two million years, which is believed to host a super-Jupiter exoplanet.

bacchanal

Spelunking through the Atlas Obscura archives with Boing Boing (always an advisable pursuit) we discover the glorious albeit short-lived Italian broadcast satanic variety show Stryx from the autumn of 1978. Featuring performances by Amanda Lear, muse to both David Bowie and Salvador Dalí, Grace Jones and Patty Pravo, a diva whose signature look was an homage to the above Bowie, the show was a departure from the usual milquetoast affair that made up most TV variety hours hosted by the devil himself with goblins, mock torture and sacrificial rites, medieval tropes and gratuitous nudity. Stryx was cancelled with only six episodes broadcast with only a few music segments surviving. More clips are available at the links above.

casanea dentata

Previously we’ve written about the consequences of blight and efforts to reintroduce the American chestnut tree with generic engineering but failed to appreciate the devastating magnitude that the loss of a keystone species had for industry and ecosystem until acquainting ourselves with this extensive Sierra Club article, excerpted by Super Punch. Crucial as building and construction material, the westward expanse of Old World settlers would not have been possible with log cabins and later railroad ties made out of the durable, rot-resistant wood, to say nothing of its sheltering branches and bark, the food-chain of fauna it supported or its pharmacological merits. Cutting or coppicing the tree didn’t kill it and rather it re-sprouted and was ready again to be harvested in a couple of decades, leading to the strangest, tortured Promethean twist in this study: as the blight only damaged the surface part of the tree, extensive root systems still exist, an estimated half a billion individuals and every once and a while grow new saplings, though these too succumb to the fungal disease within a few years.

dewi sant

Patron of poets, vegetarians and the Welsh, Saint David (*500) is fêted on this day, the occasion of his death in 601 at an advanced age. David’s monastic rules prescribed that the monks had to plough their own plots of land without the aid, abuse of draught animals and adopt ascetic practises that avoided meat and beer—giving rise to his associated symbol, the leek. The saint’s other iconography includes a flag—sable a cross or—representing the nation the same way the crosses of George, Andrew and Patrick stand for England, Scotland and Ireland respectively though this alternate banner (engrailed rather than offset) is not as prevalent as the Red Dragon. Reminiscent of the admonition “Be kind to small things” it is reported that David’s last words were “Gwnewch y pethau bychain mewn bywyd”—“Do ye the little things in life,” a well-known saying in Wales.

pflanzenwissenschaft

Active at a pivotal time that marked the transition in field of nature studies from hobbyists to professionals and one of the first to adopt the classification system of Carl Linnaeus in the German-speaking community, Catharina Helena Dörrien was born this day in 1717 (†1795). A talented painter, Dörrien researched and catalogued native plants and fungi of the Principality of Orange-Nassau with over fourteen hundred watercolour botanical illustrations and many of her works are in the collections of the Wiesbaden Museum.

your daily demon: abraxas

An aspect of Christian godhood of Gnostic traditions, we have encountered this sixty-ninth spirit beforehand, who also goes by the name Decarabia, and was thought to govern three-hundred sixty-five skies with as many virtues. In demonology, Abraxas (ΑΒΡΑΞΑΣ and the related incantation abracadabra) is an infernal marquis who controls thirty legions and rules from today through the fifth of March and is considered, according to some sources including our sometimes illustrator Jacques-Albin-Simon Collin de Plancy, responsible for the figure of Jesus Christ, dispatching Him to Earth as a benevolent ghost and is described as an anguipede deity, that is a chimera with snakes for feet and the head of a king. Abraxas is opposed by the angel Rochel and has power over birds and herbs.