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happy monday listeners for scientific american science quickly i'm rachel feltman you may have noticed we've been taking a bit of a break from our usual monday news roundup to make room for special episodes, including our bird flu series, as well as to accommodate some summer holidays and vacation plans for our small but mighty team.
We'll be back to the News Roundup format next week.
For today, I thought it would be fun to dip back into the Scientific American archives for a few minutes.
Let's check in on what SIAM was up to exactly one century ago, in July of 1925.
I'll start with the issue's cover story, which was contributed by the curator of marine life at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and seems to have been written, at least in large part, to introduce readers to the concept of tide pools.
These are indents in rocky coastal areas that during high tide get filled with water, which remains trapped inside once the tide goes back out.
The writer describes the abundant marine life that could be found in the high tide puddles of Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and other Massachusetts tidal zones, waxing poetic about barnacles and sea worms, which he compares to acrobats and goddesses of the sea, respectively.
100 years later, scientists and laypeople alike are still quite taken with tidepools.
They're really interesting environments.
During low tide, they're generally shallow enough that they can get quite warm, which can be challenging for the organisms living in them.
Other difficulties for these organisms include the fact that tidepools are easy for predators like birds and crabs to access.
On top of that, oxygen levels in the pool drop off between infusions of new seawater.
Plus, tidal pool residents often have to withstand crashing waves when the ocean reaches them again.
A lot has changed since 1925, but checking out tide pools is still a great pastime for anyone hanging around the coast. Depending on where you live, you can spot anemones, starfish, coral, and even octopi, among many other things.
the issue also features a somewhat scathing assessment of the u .s commercial aviation industry as it stood in 1925 according to scientific americans editors someone visiting from abroad asked them whether one could travel from new york to chicago by airplane he asked this question by the way by calling up the magazine's office life was hard before google the editors told him that he'd have to hire his own airplane to make such a trip which would be very expensive.
But that caught them thinking, would this request have been reasonable in the traveler's home country?
Thus began SIAM's investigation into the world of commercial flight.
RIP SIAM editors, you would have loved the rehearsal.
The resulting article points out that in the U .S. in 1925, commercial aviation was mainly used to get mail from one coast to the other.
Meanwhile, the article explains, countries in Europe were already in the midst of an aviation boom, using planes to move people and products all over the place.
According to the article, one could travel from London to Berlin for $40, which amounts to about $753 today.
That's not exactly bargain airfare, but it's not so far off from what a modern flyer might pay to travel in business class.
And one can imagine that most folks paying for the privilege of air travel in 1925 were either traveling for important business, flush with cash, or more likely, both.
It's clear that the Scientific American editors were dismayed to find the U .S. lagging so far behind, to say the least. In an inset titled, rather dramatically, Are We a Negligent People?, the magazine asks, what has become of American aviation?
We invented the airplane, neglected it, and left to Europe the task of putting it into widely extended commercial service, the section reads, probably in a transatlantic accent.
As a people, we are supposed to have a perfect genius for practicing rapid fire methods in our industrial activities.
We are supposed to have developed time -saving into an exact science and have shown the world how to practice it.
In the airplane, the Wrights gave us a time -saving machine which, if our businessmen had not been so possessed with the desire to make money and make it quickly, would today be one of our principal means of transportation for men, mail, and light freight.
Save for the fine work of the Army, the Navy, the Air Postal Service, and a few private firms, we have done practically nothing, leaving to Europe the developing of commercial transportation.
And that's not the only aviation tea in the July 1925 issue.
In the magazine's Our Point of View section, the editors reflect on Orville Wright's decision to send the first power -driven, person -carrying aircraft to the British National Museum.
If you're not familiar with this historical scandal, here's the gist. The Wright brothers are, of course, famous for making the first powered, controlled flight in 1903.
But for decades, the Smithsonian Institution tried to give that honor to Samuel Langley, its former secretary, whose own flying machine had crashed just days before the Wright's aircraft succeeded.
In 1914, the Smithsonian's director had Langley's aircraft retrofitted to prove it could have flown, if only it hadn't failed, and used that to award him the credit.
The museum displayed the aircraft with a placard to that effect, and Orville Wright was understandably displeased.
In Scientific American's July 1925 issue, the editors say that the museum display is misleading and that Langley definitely did not beat the Wright brothers.
The whole matter indeed may be regarded as very much of a tempest in a teapot, the editors wrote, and it could easily be set right if the Smithsonian institution would remove the objectionable placard and change it so so that there could be no possible misunderstanding.
That wouldn't actually happen until 1928, and the Smithsonian didn't get around to apologizing until 1942.
But hey, we tried. Though the U .S. was lagging behind in commercial flight, a graphic from the 1925 issue shows we were leading the charge in at least one technological arena, gabbing on the phone.
The infographic contends that 62 .9 % of the world's telephones in 1925 were located in the U .S. and that the country led the way in phones per capita as well.
We also came out ahead in terms of how often people got on the horn.
The average person in the United States apparently sent 182 messages via phone per year, with second place going to Denmark with 123.
And Russians, the editors noted, were content with four and a half calls each. Sure, we're talking a lot, but are we really saying anything?
thing. That's all for today's Archival Adventure.
We'll be back on Wednesday to talk about some of SIAM's hottest summer reading recommendations, and tune in next week for a return to our good old News Roundup.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, and Jeff Dalvisio.
This episode was edited by Alex Sagiara, Shana Poses, and Aaron Shattuck, Fact Check Art Show.
Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.
Subscribe to Scientific American for more up -to -date and in -depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman.
Have a great week.
