Charles Lindbergh Research Articles

An Unexpected Partnership: Alexis Carrel, Charles Lindbergh, and Normothermic Machine Perfusion.

Organ transplantation is a triumph of modern medicine which represents a culmination of science and imagination, saving thousands of lives a year. However, transplantation is severely limited by suitable donor allografts. To expand the donor pool and make transplantation achievable for all, normothermic machine perfusion (NMP) is being employed more frequently. Normothermic machine perfusion involves the utilization of a device to approximate the physiology of the human body, preserve organs outside of the donor, and provide a dynamic assessment platform to determine organ suitability for transplantation. As NMP technology advances, it will soon be possible to genetically modify and actively repair these organs. Although its application to the field of transplantation is relatively new, the concept, foundation, and development of NMP can be traced back to the pioneering work of the surgeon-scientist, Alexis Carrel and the famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh in the 1930s. Their collaboration resulted in the Carrel-Lindbergh Perfusion device, an early perfusion device that was able to keep organs alive ex vivo for weeks and is most appropriately viewed as a precursor to modern machine perfusion technologies. As NMP technology becomes more advanced and refined, it is important to acknowledge the historical context in which these technologies emerged.

The Forgotten Children of Bath: Media and Memory of the Bath School Bombing of 1927 by Amie Marsh Jones

Reviewed by: The Forgotten Children of Bath: Media and Memory of the Bath School Bombing of 1927 by Amie Marsh Jones Arnie Bernstein Amie Marsh Jones. The Forgotten Children of Bath: Media and Memory of the Bath School Bombing of 1927. Self-published, 2021. Pp. 235. Bibliography. Notes. Photographs. Paperback: $24.99. The May 24, 2022, mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, unfolded on television in what is now a familiar pattern. The story was easy to cover, something that is both ironic and infuriating. Since the Columbine High School shooting of April 20, 1999, in Columbine, Colorado, a template has evolved for media outlets covering large-scale school murder—a configuration used for mass school killings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and so many others. Cable news and broadcast networks interrupt their regular programming using the requisite plan to cover the unfolding horror. The relied-upon elements include reporters on the scene telling what they know, repeated images of victims fleeing the school grounds, interviews with eyewitnesses and survivors, law enforcement officials giving press conferences, and ubiquitous graphics coupled with dramatic music. In recent years, social media has gained ground in this unblinking coverage, with people inside the schools posting cell phone videos on TikTok and Twitter. Viewers are thrust onto the violent front lines in real time. It wasn’t always like this. On May 18, 1927, in the small farming community of Bath, Michigan, about sixteen miles outside of Lansing, an explosion rocked the local consolidated school, demolishing the north wing of the building in a matter of seconds. Not far from the scene, a farmhouse owned by Andrew Kehoe, a school trustee, was ablaze. Kehoe drove to the school, where he blew himself up in his truck, killing others in the process. The next day, the remains of his wife, Nellie, were found burned beyond recognition at the smoldering remains of their home. Five hundred pounds of dynamite were discovered beneath the undamaged main portion the school building; it was later estimated that about one hundred pounds of dynamite went off beneath the ruined north wing. In total, thirty-eight children and four adults were murdered, in addition to the deaths of Kehoe and Nellie. A sign found on the edge of Kehoe’s farm read “Killers Are Made, Not Born.” The Forgotten Children of Bath: Media and Memory of the Bath School Bombing of 1927 by Amie M. Jones is a thoughtful consideration of how America’s first mass school killing was reported by contemporary news sources. Just as today, people of the time wanted to know the basics of the massacre. Like modern audiences, they turned to the media for information. But in 1927 news reporting was mostly limited to newspapers. To a lesser extent, movie newsreels also got the word out. Radio, still struggling to find its voice, was not much of a factor. [End Page 120] There is an axiom, attributed to many sources, that newspapers are first rough draft of history. This adage provides a baseline that threads throughout the book, as Jones digs into the many tabloid stories by the reporters who headed to Bath in the wake the crime. In addition to Michigan papers, The New York Times and the Chicago Daily Tribune sent reporters to the scene. The Bath School bombing required a vocabulary necessary to match the terror of its sole perpetrator. The word “fiend” was often used to describe Kehoe. A common theme within the reportage was Kehoe’s terrorism contrasted to the town of Bath as a bucolic victim. This juxtaposition further emphasized the devastation, both physical and psychological, one man rendered upon his neighbors. The Bath School bombing was an incredible story, but it was wiped from front pages just a few days later when Charles Lindbergh took off from New York on his daring flight solo flight to Paris. The country—indeed, the world— was mad for “Lucky Lindy.” The media frenzy in Bath dissipated, which was probably the best thing that could have happened. A town bonded in collective mourning was no longer the hot story. Though repercussions of...

Transplantation Medicine: An Historical Perspective

In the 68 years between the first human solid organ transplant and the present, the number of these transplanted organs has reached one million, tracking at about 40,000 more annually. Looking ahead are the prospects for growing transplantable organs outside the body. The arc of this story extends from Alexis Carrell and Charles Lindbergh’s experiments with tissue culture, to Joseph Murray and Thomas Starzl’s surgical trials, to Jean Dausset and Peter Medawar’s discoveries about immune tolerance and rejection, and pushing into the future of regenerative medicine, to bioengineers Shinya Yamanaka, James Thomson, Anthony Atala, and Toshiro Sato– highlighting a few among many.

Charles Lindbergh: A Religious Biography of America's Most Infamous Pilot. By Christopher Gehrz. Library of Religious Biography. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021. xi + 265 pp. $28.00 cloth.

Charles Lindbergh: A Religious Biography of America's Most Infamous Pilot. By Christopher Gehrz. Library of Religious Biography. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021. xi + 265 pp. $28.00 cloth. - Volume 91 Issue 1

Organ Machine perfusion beginng with Alexis Carrel and Charles Lindbergh

Mechanical organ perfusion technology, in which organs are perfused outside the body, is attracting worldwide attention as a technology that supports transplant medicine. This technology can reliably preserve transplanted organs, recover their functions, and evaluate them, and it holds great promise for future in-vitro therapies, organ culture, and even food production. This report introduces the history of organ mechanical perfusion technology, starting from the extracorporeal perfusion device developed by Alexille Carrel, a Nobel Prize-winning surgeon for vascular anastomosis, and Charles Lindberg, an engineer famous for his non-stop crossing.

News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle by Joseph Clark

Reviewed by: News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle by Joseph Clark Jonathan Dentler (bio) News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle by Joseph Clark. University of Minnesota Press. 2020. 280 pages. $108.00 hardcover; $27.00 paper; also available in e-book. As many tens of thousands of hours of newsreel footage are digitized and made available on platforms such as YouTube, what are historians and the public to make of this immense but disjointed collection of moving images? In News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle, Joseph Clark argues persuasively that however tempting it might be to think of them as transparent windows into the past, in order to be properly understood, news-reels must be contextualized within the system in which they were produced and received. News Parade is a thoroughly researched account of this under-studied media form, which sets it in the historical context of its production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. Using this approach, Clark shows that American newsreels forged a new kind of realism that structured an increasingly visual public sphere during the 1930s and 1940s. News Parade not only updates extant research on the newsreel—as Clark points out, the most recent volume dedicated to it dates from the 1970s— but also contributes an original argument about the newsreel, realism, and the public sphere to the field of cinema and media studies. Using evidence from the trade and popular press, memoirs, newsreel production company archives, and representations of the newsreel in other popular media, such as comic books and film, Clark demonstrates that the newsreel did not simply document the world but shaped how the public related to it. It did so [End Page 202] not only by way of filmic indexicality but also, and more precisely, through its system of production, distribution, and exhibition, which shaped its mode of representation and presented the world as a “passing pageant.”1 Clark refers to this whole system of production, representation, and reception as the “news parade.” Using well-chosen case studies, the book moves through two initial chapters that sketch this production system’s contours and clarify its mode of address. In the 1920s, the major Hollywood studios absorbed most news-reel companies, consolidating production. Yet even under studio ownership, newsreel production remained centered in New York City and structured by editorial departments that resembled newspaper offices or wire services. Distribution occurred largely through the vertically integrated studio system. The “news parade” depended on what Clark calls a “processional mode.”2 Due to its serial appearance, it relied on events for which shooting could be easily planned for in advance—such as beauty pageants, sports, and especially parades. Consequently, it ordered the world as a passing procession of unrelated events. In chapter 2, Clark delves further into the newsreel’s mode of address. The newsreel produced a reality effect by representing events in which the sharing of news itself was a crucial aspect of the story. It constantly referenced the power of its own production system as an argument for its realism, privileging “the experience of watching the news over the news itself.”3 Using the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping of celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh’s infant child as a case study, Clark further argues that the newsreel benefited from a tension between “display” and “evidence.”4 The newsreel not only exploited film’s indexicality to offer evidence about world events but also reveled in its ability to display this evidence, to make it visible for the spectator. It thus allowed viewers to feel that they could judge the visual evidence themselves. Clark writes convincingly on interwar debates about realism and how the newsreel related to them. Especially after the advent of sound and voice-over narration, many in the press faulted the news-reel for misrepresenting reality and adding bias to its filmic representation of the real. Others meanwhile (prominently the documentarian John Grierson) faulted the newsreel for the opposite reason, questioning its refusal to create an artistic or narrative structure that would penetrate beneath the surface of appearances to illuminate social totality. Clark argues that the newsreel was neither a...

The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh by Candace Fleming

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh by Candace Fleming Elizabeth Bush Fleming, Candace The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh. Schwartz & Wade, 2020 [384p] illus. with photographs Library ed. ISBN 978-0-525-64655-6 $21.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-525-64654-9 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-525-64656-3 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 7-12 The shining, sympathetic legend of Charles Lindbergh has a tenacious grip in public imagination: the handsome boy-next-door aviator whose 1927 New York to Paris solo flight established the United States as an aeronautic force to be reckoned with; the grieving father whose toddler son was kidnapped from his bed and later found dead. These threads continue to dominate the Lindbergh saga, but contemporaries witnessed a darker side as well, as the all-American hero openly sympathized with Nazism, became something of an unwitting dupe in a German disinformation campaign, and rallied a rabid fan base of America First isolationists drawn as much from white supremacy as pacifist movements. In this smoothly written, even-handed biography, Fleming deftly conveys how Lindbergh's interest in aviation overlapped with an interest in medical technology and efforts to extend life through organ life support, which in turn connected him with eugenicist Alexis Carrel. Under Carrel's influence, Lindbergh's own philosophy of human perfectibility burgeoned, and it wasn't much of a leap for him to articulate hope for a future in which "superior" Aryan whites (like himself) would exceed current life spans and rule the masses in a political system based on scientific reason (like Hitler's Germany purported to be). While never justifying Lindbergh's fascist leanings, Fleming contextualizes his rise and fall from public grace within a zeitgeist of technological promise, expanding media frenzy, economic depression, and global political upheaval that enabled a celebrity to become spokesperson for fringe causes. An extensive bibliography and source notes are included, as well as a section of period photographs. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The face of the journal: Photojournalism and l’affaire Lindbergh

On the front pages of two periodicals, published in different countries, we find a striking example of the international circulation of images employed to cover the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The first of these front pages is that of a conventional metropolitan broadsheet newspaper – the Montreal Daily Star for March 3, 1932 (Fig. 1). Under the headline “Mystery Surrounds Movement of Colonel Lindbergh”, three photographs cascade down the page. The image at greatest distance from the...

Lindbergh’s Engine: Hollywood’s Transition to Sound and the Aviation Film

This article examines the history of the aviation film in light of the genre’s contributions to the evolution of ‘the talkie.’ Starting with the first sound newsreel of Charles Lindbergh’s take-off, the aviation film became a crucial but understudied site for the testing and development of sound technologies, as well as for the teaching of sound film literacy. Through readings of three classic aviation films—Wings (1927), Hell’s Angels (1930) and Dawn Patrol (1930 and 1938), as well as one outlier—Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong (1933)—this article examines how the sound of flight was codified and argues that these films participated in what Miriam Hansen has termed Hollywood’s ‘vernacular modernism’ by popularising previously élite listening practices.

Newark Revisited: A Philip Roth for the Twenty-First Century

Newark RevisitedA Philip Roth for the Twenty-First Century Michael Kimmage (bio) Philip Roth died in the second year of the Trump presidency. He was a critic of the new president in sharper terms than he had been of George W. Bush or even Richard Nixon, whose shadow falls across a number of Roth's novels. Apart from Roth's opposition to the Vietnam War, to which he devoted a small portion of his literary celebrity—his name, as it were—Roth was never an overtly political writer or an overtly political man. He was an FDR Democrat, and in this he was his father's son. That made him, as he surely knew, somewhat uninteresting as an American writer. It would have been interesting if he had, like John Updike, come out in favor of the Vietnam War. It would have been interesting if he had been a Marxist or a Zionist or a neoconservative. There is no political destiny for an American writer less gripping intellectually and culturally than to be centrist Democrat. For this reason, Roth had a political profile that almost erased itself. As times goes by, his boring political profile is likely to be erased from the memory of his life and career. As Roth himself would have been the first to argue, he should be remembered for his literature, for his many books, and not for the political positions he took in public or in private. Yet it would be a mistake to place politics on one side of Roth's critical reception and literature on the other. It would be an even worse mistake to do so in the wake of the Trump presidency, which has altered the texture of American politics and which has issued from an alteration in the texture of American politics. To these alterations Roth's literature has much to say. Events can occasion the rediscovery or rethinking of an existing body of literature—the Nixon presidency, for example, that made Roth think he was living in Kafka's America (see his 1974 essay "Our Castle"); or the reappearance of Moby-Dick in the 1930s after decades of callous neglect, just in time for Captain Ahab to accompany the fascist dictators leading their respective Pequods into the abyss. The Plot Against America has proven itself [End Page 79] a major novel of the Trump era, from which it will be forever inseparable as gloss and as prophecy, despite having been published in 2004. At least as rich is Roth's so-called American Trilogy and through it his literature of place, of de-industrialization, of American decay—in a word, his literature of Newark, New Jersey. This was the anti-celebratory fiction Roth fashioned in a decade far more hospitable to self-celebration. Finally, Roth's sense of himself as a civic writer and his sense of his novels as civic in nature and effect bears directly on the fractures and divisions of the Trump era. Roth's books are a meditation on a nation's story conceived in the glow of World War II patriotism and carried a bit beyond the end of the twentieth century. This meditation is frozen in time. It ceased with Roth's death in May 2018, but because it took shape in literature and is alive with the life of its readers, Roth's meditation is also ongoing. It evolves every time his books are read in real time. ________ Upon publication, The Plot Against America was misread as an exposé of the Bush administration. The misreading assumed it to be a roman à clef in which the Charles Lindbergh who assumes the presidency in place of Franklin Roosevelt represented George W. Bush. Indeed, this could only have been a misreading of Roth's counter-factual novel. Charles Lindbergh was famously an isolationist. He was an anti-Semite, a harsh opponent of FDR, and an American who was partial to the National Socialists in Germany, who in turn regarded him as the beau ideal of the Aryan hero. (Hermann Goering owed his ascent within the Nazi movement to his celebrity status as a World War I pilot.) The historical Lindbergh and the one...

Rajeunir, c’est vieux comme le monde…

Legends and myths regarding eternal youth exist since Antiquity. Prior to the 19th century those wishing to rejuvenate used baths or blood injections, searching to the Fountain of Youth or calling for an alchemist claiming to have found the Elixir of Youth. In the 19th century, Charles Edouard Brown Séquard (1819-1894), after the discovery of the function of the endocrinal glands and testicular secretions, inject himself with an extract from guinea pigs and dogs. He found himself rejuvenated! In the beginning of the 20th century, several surgeons transplanted human testicles coming from death row prisoners inmates or voluntary donors. The transplantation of monkey testicles by Serge Voronoff (1866-1951) had a important aftermath and more than 300similar interventions took place. The simple ligation of the vas deferens (vasectomy) was recommended by Eugen Steinach (1866-1944). Sigmund Freud was one of the "beneficiaries". Steinach also advised the irradiation of the ovaries for female rejuvenation. In 1935, Alexis Carrel (1873-1944) and Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974) built a pump to feed and regenerate targeted organs. The discovery of pluripotent stem cells and senolytic molecules are building up new hopes on the matter.

Galaxy Love by Gerald Stern

Reviewed by: Galaxy Love by Gerald Stern Bhisham Bherwani Gerald Stern. Galaxy Love. W. W. Norton, 2017 “Don’t ever think of Coney Island / where the rabbits once ran wild” Gerald Stern notes in “Blue Particles,” conjuring a part of New York City once supposedly populated by wild rabbits. Despite their rootedness in domestic places, the poems in Galaxy Love—like “the long and noisy ride through Brooklyn” to Manhattan that leads to “the Dutch freighter that delivered you to Antwerp / then the Gare du Nord”—straddle the America of the poet’s youth and the Europe of his formative years. Reading them, it turns out, is somewhat like riding the Cyclone in Luna Park, though at times more unsettling. In Galaxy Love Stern, now in his nineties, is, as he always has been, wistful and wild. His wisdom is thinly veiled in wit (which is often veiled, less thinly, in rage). This keeps the poems from turning didactic or—God forbid it—predictable. As avuncular as Stern’s conversational speaker might appear, there is in the lyrics made of his mind’s seemingly arbitrary meanderings some of Travis Bickle’s moralizing and some of Jake LaMotta’s stalking. One might pause at the reference to “Adolf Hitler’s good friend Charles Lindbergh” in “Space and Time” if he or she has not, a few pages earlier, read in the conclusion of “Bio VII,” Ritsos was burying his poems and swallowing his beautiful pencils. General Electric was producing tanks with low-lying cannon mostly for the knees just a friendly warning. The rhetorical mischief one has become accustomed to in Stern’s volumes is ever-present here. In the title poem, for instance, “I turn the light off with the right / hand and gather you in close with [End Page 65] the wrong” and in “Today It’s Easter,” “I’m no longer an / anarchist, I’m a liberal radical east coast / socialist prophet-adoring Debs-living Yid….” One senses from the book a poet who not only unequivocally enjoys composing but is also able, informed by a lifetime of experience, to readily distil into poems—in an idiom that is the colloquial unhinged— potent concoctions of recollections of encounters with people, art, and literature. Among many others, Ezra Pound (“Bio VIII,” “Bollingen Ezra Pound, 1949,” “Orson,” “Gelato”), Dylan Thomas (“Miami,” “Main Bridge,” “Orson”), Yiannis Ritsos (“Bio VII,” “Ritsos”), W. B. Yeats (“Les Fleurs,” “Mad Ireland Drove Him into Poetry”), William Empson (“Les Fleurs”), W. S. Merwin (“Merwin”), Robert Burns (“A Walk Back from the Restaurant”), Samuel Greenberg (“KGB, The Reading”), and Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael (both in “Skylark”) are all offhandedly summoned—and some (such as Pound) just as readily dismissed. Orson Welles (“my philosopher” and “the No. 1 saint of the sinners of old Hollywood” in “Orson”) appears three times. In “Visit from Mars,” Nostradamus, who “predicted the visit from Mars, orchestrated by Orson Welles in 1938 / in the town of Grover’s Mill, near Princeton,” leads—by way of the infamous radio broadcast, to which Stern recounts his parents listening while preparing for an outing—to a local Jewish émigré: Einstein himself was interviewed while walking the mulberry streets, especially the right-hand side of Great Road, going south, where the houses are windy and overpriced, and he was full of denial that anyone with a radio antenna sticking out of his head had been seen in any diner or hardware store, Einstein whose bushy face had rubbed many a pair of reddened lips, Einstein whose famous name they stole for bagels. Besides Stern’s perennial preoccupation with matters Jewish, which inform many of his poems here and elsewhere, other biographical undercur-rents present in earlier poems are also reinforced here. One, particularly significant, touches on the development of the artist. “Mad Ireland Drove Him into Poetry” begins by insinuating what makes a poet, what draws him or her to an exacting craft: It could just as well have been the Spanish Flu or the Potato Famine or maybe just boredom. For Roethke and Kunitz on old 611 it was the father—in one case, abandonment, the other, oppression. In my case—so I think— it...

Review: Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design, by Sonja Dümpelmann and Airport Urbanism: Infrastructure and Mobility in Asia, by Max Hirsh

Sonja Dumpelmann Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014, 304 pp., 91 b/w illus. $60 (cloth), ISBN 9780813935812 Max Hirsh Airport Urbanism: Infrastructure and Mobility in Asia Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016, 216 pp., 20 color and 76 b/w illus. $25 (paper), ISBN 9780816696109 For more than a decade, a burgeoning body of scholarship has focused on how the advent of powered flight in the early twentieth century inspired what could be called an “epistemological” shift arising from aerial perspectives and their effects on the ground. Unpacking the cultural and visual politics behind one of the most transformative technologies of the last century, these scholarly inquiries have raised a wide of range of questions concerning spectatorship, aesthetics, mobility, globalization, urbanization, and design. It is rather surprising that this research field has gained a collective momentum only fairly recently, even though aviation and modern art, architecture, and urbanism were contemporaneous developments in the twentieth century. From Kazimir Malevich to Robert Delaunay, modernist artists incorporated different metaphors of flight into their avant-gardist imaginations of the world of tomorrow. In the wake of Charles Lindbergh's maiden transatlantic flight in 1927, Le Corbusier embraced a theme of ascension and utilized the aviator's ability to see the world from the sky to articulate a morally charged program as the basis for redeveloping cities. Social and cultural histories of aviation, however, have long been undertaken. As early as 1946, William Fielding Ogburn, who served as the first president of the Society for the History of Technology, authored The Social Effects of Aviation .1 Later Joseph J. Corn's The Winged Gospel: America's Romance with Aviation, 1900–1950 (1983) and Robert Wohl's two-part cultural history of aviation, A Passion for Wings (1994) and The Spectacle of Flight (2005), among others, expanded the scope of aviation histories.2 What is fascinating about the current scholarship on “aerial epistemology” is how the notion of human flight prompts both philosophical and tactical inquiries that are, in turn, operationalized to reimagine and reshape the built environment. These studies reveal the ways in which aviation not only …

A Surprising Alliance: Two Giants of the 20th Century

Alexis Carrel and Charles Lindbergh were among the most famous international figures in the 20th century: Carrel, the surgeon-scientist who won a Nobel prize as a young surgeon, and Lindbergh, the aviator-engineer who pioneered aviation and promoted commercial flight throughout his life. Surprisingly, these two amazing individuals came together to collaborate on the early development of extracorporeal circulation. Their work was interrupted by the onset of World War II, which destroyed one of them and nearly destroyed the other.

The Arsenal of Democracy: fdr, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War by A. J. Baime

Reviewed by: The Arsenal of Democracy: fdr, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War by A. J. Baime Joe Fitzharris A. J. Baime, The Arsenal of Democracy: fdr, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2014. 364pp. $24.95. In Arsenal of Democracy, A. J. Baime makes a select part of the story—of mass producing the desperately needed b-24 “Liberator” heavy bombers—come alive. But his subtitle is misleading; in actuality, Henry and Edsel Ford, Charlie Sorenson, Harry Bennett, and Ford Motor Company (fmc) all are more central to Baime’s story than fdr. The story is framed between Franklin Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy” speech on December 29, 1940, and the return of the B-24s to Willow Run after victory in Europe. Most were built and scrapped there. Largely ignoring the Great Pacific War, Baime tells us how Edsel Ford, Charlie Sorenson, and fmc finally were able to produce B-24s like automobiles (which aviation moguls said could not be done). He makes a strong case that a pacifistic and increasingly irrational Henry Ford was an obstacle not an instigator of Ford’s war production. Henry’s cruel disdain for Edsel, and not admitting his son’s ill-health, is a noteworthy additional burden. Beset by Henry Morganthau’s treasury department sleuths investigating fmc ties to Ford of France and Germany-was fmc cooperating willfully with the Nazis?- and by the Truman committee, and the fbi (what were Henry Ford’s and test pilot-consultant Charles Lindbergh’s loyalties?), Edsel persevered to turn Henry’s farm camp for disadvantaged boys into the largest aircraft factory in the world—Willow Run. To please father, the plant was configured to stay within Washtenaw county which had voted Republican in 1940. As Henry’s favorite aviator, Lindbergh was hired as a test pilot. Since they were both prominent isolationists who received Nazi awards they were of interest to government investigators. Like other war factories built in rural areas, Willow Run had no housing and workers could not commute to work from Detroit. Perhaps because of the importance of the b-24, the government agreed to release materials to build housing—“Bomber City.” Needing ten thousand workers, fmc turned to recruiting and training southern whites and blacks—a hypergolic racial mix. They hired a very large number of women, again against social norms. Baime notes the presence of workers who were blind, handless, legless, and deaf—all doing needed work, and of dwarves, hired to work in fuselage sections too small for most people. In his dotage, Henry Ford’s narrowmindedness and vicious anti-Semitism combined with the criminal evil of Harry Bennett, head of fmc’s [End Page 113] security (the “Service”) department to allow Bennett to treat labor and management alike with a heavy hand, and union sympathizers with a heavy club. In response, a strike was called in 1941 and Bennett used blacks as strike breakers, intensifying racial tensions at Willow Run. Despite the 1943 riots in Detroit and societal bigotry, Edsel and fmc continued the extensive hiring, training, and promotion of black workers (and women) in an effort to create the needed labor force. In 1940, producing huge numbers of a highly complex machine (over 1.2 million parts) like Consolidated Aircraft Corporation’s b-24, was impossible. Consolidated did not mass produce bombers any more than the German aircraft industry did. Instead, both extensively used craft workers and many individually made or fitted parts while auto production used identical parts and lots of narrowly trained workers. fdr’s advisers thought his goal of (mass producing) fifty thousand bombers was impossible. Thus, Edsel’s determination to build bombers like Model Ts was improbable. Combining the genius of Charlie Sorenson and his people with the help of Charles Lindbergh, Edsel managed to achieve his goal of automobile-like mass production of the heavy bomber, although a bit later than he’d intended. Edsel’s death in 1943 precipitated a crisis of leadership at Ford. His son, Henry II, left the Navy to run the company. The grandfather, clearly incompetent, insisted on being president and Bennett...

Rockets and Revolution: A Cultural History of Early Spaceflight by Michael G. Smith

Reviewed by: Rockets and Revolution: A Cultural History of Early Spaceflight by Michael G. Smith Guillaume de Syon (bio) Rockets and Revolution: A Cultural History of Early Spaceflight. By Michael G. Smith. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Pp. 448. $34.95. In his intriguing prehistory of the space age, Michael Smith invites us to view rocket science as an infusion of cultural influences. In so doing, he suggests that rocketry can serve as an allegory of the human understanding of science, and also illustrate how a transnational flow of ideas can shape human knowledge. Smith’s emphasis centers on the Russian experience, but uses the metaphor of the parabola that brings ideas back to Russia or the Soviet Union. Purists may argue that a more accurate description would involve an ellipsis, but the parabola idea works if one accepts the linearity of history, a concept popular in the science fiction that also influenced early rocketry. [End Page 276] Starting in the nineteenth century, Smith surveys the popularizers of science and how their message helped popularize not only relativism, but also such concepts as cosmism as well as a notion of plurality of worlds. A notable quality of his study involves the drawing on writings not usually associated with flight. (Henri) Bergsonian philosophy’s argument that human intellect is bound up with space, for example, helps frame the diversity of thoughts that characterized the start of the twentieth century. Moving on to rocketry pioneers, notably Konstantin Tsiolkovskii’s and Robert Esnault-Pelterie’s works, Smith ably demonstrates how fantasy played an important role in clearing the way for rational explorations of rocket propulsion. This canvassing of a seamless web of knowledge, though successful, is done to show how the arc heads to Russia, whether through private correspondence (including Robert Goddard’s dealings with Russian rocket enthusiasts), through popular media, or through the writings of Tsiolkoskii (who freely incorporated foreign ideas into his own work.) Many elements of Smith’s canvas will be familiar to readers of Asif Siddiqi’s and Scott Palmer’s works on Russian aerospace, but Smith’s own combination of these sources provides a remarkable image of the fascination with space travel. Rocketry also served as a fulcrum to push the USSR toward a positive vision of technology, in stark contrast to the Western pessimism of Oswald Spengler and others. True, the Bauhaus and the likes of Joan Miró echoed technological fascination, but the Russian interpretation thereof emphasized ideology and revolutionary optimism reaching a form of escapism that carried interesting connotations of religiosity. This Russian, later Soviet, fascination with space extended beyond the obvious fascination with the “red planet.” Echoing cosmism, it emphasized the notion of immortality and thus served as a metaphor for ideological permanence. One could speak of worlds, rather than workers uniting. Any cultural history, even one as rich as Smith’s, overlooks certain chronological elements. Very little is discussed in relation to the technological pessimism following World War I, for example, and Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity was devised in 1915, not 1916. Also, some interpretations may surprise readers. When Smith compares Tsiolkovskii to Charles Lindbergh, for example, he does not do so on the basis of their achievements but their inspirational effects on others. (Tsiolkovskii after all kept his eye on the future, whereas Lindbergh became obsessed with the past.) On the other hand, the author offers an attractive interpretation of the stratonauts, an often overlooked realm of aeronautics at the intersection of ballooning, scientific inquiry, and treading on the edge of space. Western nations engaged in such “pre-space” races, but the place of stratonautics as an example of dialectical materialism fits nicely into the Soviet context: the balloon was revolutionary, the airplane matched Russian culture, and the rocket would be Soviet, with stratonauts acting as intermediate portents of [End Page 277] revolution. This element of Communist ideology paradoxically relied, through Friedrich Engels, on Newton’s third law of motion. As such, it confirms further the Soviet obsession with space flight, a fascination Stalin was only too happy to capitalize on even as his own actions sent the likes of rocket scientist Sergei Korolev to the Gulag during World...

Information and Communication Technology Trends in Telesurgery

In 2001 a woman underwent a cholecystectomy in Strasbourg, France. What was new? The surgical team who performed the operation was 14,000 km away, in New York [1]. It was the first case of remote robotic surgery. The operation had no complications and the patient had a decent postoperative follow-up. This epoch-making event was dedicated to Charles Lindbergh, the pioneering American aviator who flew across the Atlantic in 1927.

The Plot against France

The Plot against France Christian Moraru (bio) Submission Michel Houellebecq Lorin Stein, trans. Farrar, Straus, Giroux www.us.macmillan.com/books/9780374271572 256 Pages; Print, $25.00 Great literature has always played tag with history, and yet few writers have actually won. But then, do we really want them to win? “Tagging” history, catching up with it across the ontological divide of the famous Aristotelian distinction, is surely a dicey proposition, especially where fictional anticipations and prophecies are concerned. The modern dystopias (and a few utopias too) that have cut history off at the pass are a notorious case in point, from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921) to Michel Houellebecq’s no less disturbing The Possibility of an Island (2005). The international bestselling Submission, Houellebecq’s latest and most controversial book to date, does have a dystopian strain to it. However, “political fiction,” a phrase the author himself has proposed in an interview with The Paris Review’s Sylvain Bourmeau, is more apt if, admittedly, somewhat vague. This darkly and, some might argue, eerily visionary novel draws polemically from contemporary political reality and extends it into a most unsettling future barely ahead of us. Unlike the world of the 2005 book or even of Houellebecq’s previous novel, the Goncourt Prize-winning The Map and the Territory (2010), the picture of that future—the French presidential elections of 2022—hews closer to our moment. This makes Submission more realistic and, by the same token, more plausible, a “what if” kind of fictional enterprise both like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), where Charles Lindbergh becomes US president in 1940, and unlike it, less “counterfactual” history-wise insofar as what the French writer describes can still occur because it takes place in the future. Once more, this temporal juncture, the yet-to-come but imminent France Houellebecq gloomily conjures up in Submission, is, unsettlingly enough, just around the corner, which makes it both more verisimilar and more recognizable. To be sure, compared to 2015, not much has changed in the sociocultural mechanics of the French everyday, and yet everything has, or will before long, for the elections have been won by Mohammed Ben Abbes, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, backed up by the Socialists and the UMP, unlikely fellow travelers as Nicolas Sarkozy’s followers might seem to us right now. In a nutshell, France has “submitted.” Or, at least, its political superstructure has. As the symbolically named protagonist François perceptively suggests, culture (“values”) rather than economy is what the 2022 elections were all about. This explains why, during the negotiations with his center-left allies, Ben Abbes was so adamant about gaining control over the national education system. And so, as a result of the deal the traditional parties cut with him, post-2022 France is renouncing its laïcité (secularism), giving in to the Brotherhood’s demands that French society in general and education system in particular be Islamized. Here, as much as in the book’s title, the redundancy is quite transparent: “submission” is one of the meanings of the word “Islam,” and caving in boils down, accordingly, to yielding to Islam in any number of ways. Sure, not everybody gets with the new program, reasonable and “innocuous as it is still perceived by a media that has all but lost its capacity for analysis. But neither the sticks nor the carrots are in short supply, what with obscene financial backing by Gulf states zillionaires who, again, are keen on taking over (and sometimes buying up) French schools and universities, including Université Sorbonne Nouvelle—Paris III, where François, an authority on Joris-Karl Huysmans, teaches. Thus, while some professors, François included, have been fired, there are enticements for the not-so-true believers, as well as for unbelievers broadly, such as polygamist arrangements for lonely, scholarly, famous, and sexually frustrated university professors. Needless to say, the deal is unavailable to women academics in a France become quasi-officially hyper patriarchal overnight. But it is to François, who, like the rest, stumble, catatonically and resigned, toward the brink of complete, moral and political surrender. They are not quite there yet, and this matters...

Improving People’s Lives: The Grand Challenges for Engineering

President's column The first brief flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903 did not immediately make the Wright brothers famous; however, within 5 years, enthusiasm for the new technology began to spread around the world. Louis Blériot won a prize for flying over the English Channel in a heavier-than-air craft in 1909, and Charles Lindbergh won the USD 25,000 Orteig prize for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris in 1927. Multiple teams competed and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing the prize. Technical advances developed by the competitors led to multiple advances in aviation, revolutionizing the way the world works. Incentivizing Technological Innovation The concept of an inducement prize (as opposed to a recognition prize such as Nobel Prizes) is well established for the solution of a problem that is important to society. The British, Spanish, and Dutch governments all offered monetary prizes as early as 1567 for breakthroughs in determining the longitude of a ship at sea. Many scientists and engineers worked on this problem, resulting in substantial advances in timekeeping, telescopes, and other technologies. The French government offered a large prize during the Napoleonic wars for a way to safely and cheaply preserve large amounts of food, leading to pasteurization advances. The Ansari XPRIZE challenged teams to build a spaceship capable of carrying three people to 100 km above the Earth’s surface twice within two weeks. The USD 10-million prize was awarded in 2004 and has sparked other XPRIZES designed to encourage advances in oil spill cleanup, adult literacy, medicine, and various technologies. The concept is to specify an audacious goal that will benefit mankind if a significant breakthrough is made. SPE R&D Committee Identifies Grand Challenges The National Academy of Engineering incorporated input from leading technological minds to identify 14 “grand challenges” for engineering for the 21st century. Several of these dealt with energy, including making solar energy more commercial, providing energy from fusion, and carbon sequestration. The SPE Research and Development (R&D) Committee identified five grand challenges for the petroleum industry including: High-resolution subsurface imaging Challenges in reusing produced water In-situ molecular manipulation Increasing hydrocarbon recovery factors Carbon capture and sequestration An additional focus on the environment, including minimizing the footprint of oil and gas activities, and oil spill prevention and response were added, so these are often referred to as the “5+1” challenges.

The Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution

The Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution Matthew Hersch (bio) The bicentennial crowds that flocked to the grand opening of the Smithsonian Institution’s new National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., needed no label cards to identify the holy relics before them. Like the medieval travelers who clogged the streets of Reims to prostrate themselves in the great cathedral, the Air and Space pilgrims of July 1976 knew exactly what they were going to see and needed little help in understanding it. Inside the striking stone and glass temple’s Milestones of Flight entrance atrium lay such treasures as the Wright Flyer, the Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis (the airplane that carried Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic), and the diminutive Apollo 11 command module Columbia (its pilot, Michael Collins, loathed calling it a “capsule”) that, only seven years earlier, carried Commander Neil Armstrong, Collins, and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin to the moon and back. In a world abundant with dubious pieces of the One True Cross, these relics were undeniably real: irreplaceable flown artifacts lovingly restored, from Armstrong’s lunar vestments to the doubting finger of Edward White’s 1965 space suit glove. If that was not enough to satiate the appetite of the pious, Collins himself had stewarded the opening as the museum’s director. It was as if John the Baptist drove the bus on a Holy Land tour. I must confess: I was on that bus. Though too small to remember everything I saw, I was grandly amused by my first outing to what museum insiders call “NASM” shortly after it opened, as indeed, people of all ages continue to be when visiting a museum that was, until recently, the most trafficked in the world. Within a month of opening in 1976, the museum’s main building had received over a million visitors. A second large public [End Page 998] facility near Dulles Airport followed in 2003 as the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar Hazy-Center, presently home to space shuttle orbiter Discovery. In addition to displaying the technological heritage of the United States, though, NASM quickly emerged as the foremost center of scholarly research and public education in the history of aviation and spaceflight (as well as a prestigious site of research in earth and planetary sciences). Scarcely a single scholar in aerospace history has not benefited in some way from NASM’s generosity (myself included). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Visitors enjoy the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall on a hot July afternoon. At left, the flown Spirit of St. Louis is suspended over Project Apollo lunar module LM-2 (configured as Apollo 11’s Eagle). To its right, on the floor, are flown spacecraft Gemini IV and Mercury Friendship 7, followed by a Viking Mars lander. (Immediately above them hang Explorer 1 and Sputnik 1.) Hanging from the ceiling, from left to right, are Pioneer 10 and Mariner 2, the flown SpaceShipOne, and a flown X-15. Guests can touch an actual moon rock collected on the Apollo 17 mission at the kiosk on the bottom left. (Source: Photograph by author.) The decades have been kind to NASM’s main building on the mall but not, perhaps, to its famous physical edifice. Worn down by forty years and a total number of visitors roughly equal to the population of the United States, the main building is receiving an inside-out renovation that will replace (among other things) the structure’s famous marble façade and provide opportunities to re-curate galleries that, in some cases, date from the building’s opening in 1976. Chief among these is Milestones of Flight, [End Page 999] which houses some of the facility’s most famous artifacts spanning the history of flight, mounted and suspended from the ceiling like an airshow in a particularly amazing science fiction movie. In 2016, and with financial support from Boeing, Milestones reopened to visitors. This thoughtful and skillful refresh confronts directly the foremost challenge facing NASM in the twenty-first century: telling the history of explorations almost as remote...