After being shipwrecked, Robinson “Crusoe might be driven to make his own trousers on the island. But he was not driven to make his own legs on the island… You may regard the universe as a wreck; but at least you have saved something from the wreck.” G.K. Chesterton in “The Idea of Separation” quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #5 (March 2007)
My latest for The Rebel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsVyMvTdPgU
The audio-only version is available here: [podcast title="Rebel audio, August 18"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2016/August/160818Rebel.mp3[/podcast]
In my latest National Post column, I urge the makers of the forthcoming film The Silver Chair to do it faithfully in both senses.
In today's National Post Terry Glavin has another excellent piece on Canada's troubling relationship with China. He's not only very clear on the sinister nature of the government in Beijing and the aggressive style as well as content of its foreign policy. He's also one of the few commentators I know who understands that we are cozying up to an "increasingly decrepit" as well as "belligerent Chinese police state". It is remarkable how wrong the conventional wisdom is about the nature and dynamism of this regime. And Terry is much to be commended for seeing through it.
So how about that Pierre Janssen? What, you haven’t heard of him? Why, Pierre Jules César Janssen is the French astronomer who discovered helium, on August 18 1868.
OK, he discovered some other stuff too. He went to Peru to find the magnetic equator, observed a transit of Venus in Algeria, and he studied telluric absorption in the solar spectrum in Italy and Switzerland, which might seem odd since presumably “solar” means it was in the sun, but the sun is a bit hot for direct observation even by an adventurous man.
Which Janssen was. He went wherever you had to in order to study solar eclipses including Siam, as it then was, and Trani, which I don’t even know where it is, and Madras State in India, now Andhra Pradesh. And maybe he enjoyed it and maybe he didn’t. But during the Indian eclipse observations he noticed that the spectral lines (indicating chemical composition) from the sun’s prominences were so bright that they could be observed under ordinary daylight conditions. Which mattered because sometimes an eclipse just didn’t work out. Janssen actually escaped besieged Paris in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war, by hot air balloon, to observe an eclipse in Algeria and then it got all cloudy.
Janssen was a clever as well as bold and resourceful chap. For instance he also realized it would be good to put observatories in high places so you’d be looking through less atmosphere, which led him to lobby for one atop Mont Blanc and once it was built, at age 69, he climbed up there to make observations, including I suggest the observation that he was one fit guy. But back to helium.
In his results from that 1868 Madras State observation, there was a particular bright yellow line that was eventually determined to indicate a hitherto undiscovered chemical element, the first to be detected off the Earth before being found here (which it was in 1885), helium being of course very light and also extremely non-reactive and thus not hanging around waiting for a scientist to trip over it.
Another scientist, the Englishman Joseph Norman Lockyer, also observed this bright yellow line in the solar chromosphere’s emission spectrum, and he and others worked out that it must be some unknown element, which they named helium for the obvious reason that never struck me until I researched this bit, namely that the Greek word for sun is helios. And without his work, and Janssen’s, no kid would have the brilliant experience of a lighter-than-air balloon on a string or the heartbreak of discovering just what lighter than air means if you let go. (At Disney World they tie weights to the string, in the familiar Mickey Mouse logo shape, which is surely brilliant too.)
So yes, Lockyer gets a lot of credit for helium too. But I still think August 18 is a good date to take a deep breath of the stuff and utter a comically squeaky and high-pitched hip hip hooray for Pierre Janssen.
August 17 is a red-letter day in the annals of dubious achievements. For it was on this date in 1498 that for the first time ever a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church resigned his office.
Now you might be thinking, with Benedict XVI in mind, that it’s not an admirable rather than dubious achievement. Someone humbled by their incapacity to perform this exalted office, laying it aside instead of clinging to the pomp and prestige. (Or you might just hate the church and wish they’d all resign, but that’s a topic for another day.)
The problem is, the person who resigned back then was Cesare Borgia. Now clearly he should never have been a cardinal due to his enthusiastic embrace of murderous wickedness, not to mention that he was the illegitimate son of the Pope who made him a cardinal, Alexander VI. (OK, he was just Roderigo Cardinal Borgia when he had Cesare, and probably he didn’t poison people, at least not much, but still.) But Cesare only resigned the post in order to further his and his father’s ambitions by becoming Duke of Valentinois.
It didn’t work. After his father died in 1503, followed after only 26 days by his sympathetic successor Pius III, he was tricked into supporting a deadly family foe Giuliano Della Rovere for the papacy, as Julius II. Four years later Borgia fell into an ambush and was mortally wounded and stripped of everything but a red fig leaf, even the leather mask he wore apparently to hide the ravages of syphilis. Again not the ideal accoutrement for a cardinal.
Cesare Borgia’s career was, apparently, a significant inspiration for Machiavelli’s The Prince. Which might make you question Machiavelli’s judgement as well as his morals except for one point about his infamous book that has been almost universally overlooked lately. The Prince is supposedly the ultimate how-to guide to amoral realism, a kind of Achieving Brutally Cynical Power for Dummies. But in the 18th century it was generally seen, correctly in my view, as a satire, a thinly, even transparently veiled scathing denunciation of power-mad cynics.
If you really were a cynic and tutor to cruel dictators, you would not take as your role model someone whose nasty career ended with ignominious and degrading death in his early 30s. Even if he did at least vacate the cardinalship while vertical, for base motives.
