Quicksilver: The Life and Loss of Karen Wetterhahn

Descripción

Quicksilver: The Life and Loss of Karen Wetterhahn Hello friends, and welcome to episode #8. Today we have another riveting but tragic story for you. If you haven't listened to episode 7 yet, it isn't absolutely necessary, but it would do you well to hear the stories of early nuclear pioneers like Louis Sloten, Cecil Kelly, and Harry Daghlian, and the dangers that ended their lives. I think this is going to be an intriguing episode, with a fascinating scientist that most won't be familiar with. Today is not so much in my wheelhouse - Nuclear history, toxic chemical history, safety history, and high velocity subatomic history. I'm not a scientist, and I didn't stay recently at a Holiday Inn, but I am certainly a science hobbyist, and keep up with science news daily, and the fact that the last few topics are out of my milieu, so to speak, means I've had to research them more thoroughly, fact-check my assumptions, look up terms, and generally do the due-dilligance to get things right. I may miss something here or there, but I am trying hard to get it right. Just let me know where I whiff, and I can tell the DJ to fix it in the mix. You know the podcast things. Sharing the show, telling people about it, posting about it, and leaving Apple Podcast reviews all help…a lot. I appreciate those of you who do that. Thank you! Some stories make you hold your breath. Some make you check your gloves. Today we'll do both, and hopefully, when we do - we'll be all the better for it. We begin with the story of Dr. Karen Elizabeth Wetterhahn, chemist, teacher, builder of programs, and teacher of people, and of one "tiny glistening drop" that rewrote laboratory safety across the world . It's a story I want to tell with reverence and a little warmth, because we are talking about a person who balanced world-class science with backyard pool parties and baby rabbits. We're also going to talk frankly about a super-toxic compound, because Karen would have insisted that we learn everything we can. And I know what you might think when you hear the word Karen, but let's be fair. Karen Wetterhahn was anything but, and the Karens I've known have all been lovely. Don't judge people by their name - they had no say in it. Karen Wetterhahn was born October 16, 1948, in Plattsburgh, New York. She grew into a scholar of the highest order. "She earned her bachelor's degree from St. Lawrence University in 1970 and her doctorate from Columbia University in 1975," and joined Dartmouth in 1976, publishing "more than 85 research papers" (Wikipedia). Dartmouth later remembered her as "the founding director of Dartmouth's Toxic Metals Superfund Research Program," an "expert in the mechanisms of metal toxicity," and a scholar with "expertise in biochemistry and molecular toxicology" (Dartmouth Tribute). She rose to become Dartmouth's Albert Bradley Third Century Professor in the Sciences (Dartmouth Tribute) and in 1990 helped establish the Women in Science Project, which "helped to raise the share of women science majors from 13 to 25 percent" … and has become a national model for recruiting more ladies into STEM careers. She didn't just research metals; she organized people. She "played an integral role in the administration of the sciences at Dartmouth," serving as Dean of Graduate Studies, Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Sciences, and Acting Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (Dartmouth Tribute). She "trained 14 postdoctoral research associates, 20 graduate students and over 50 undergraduate research students" (Dartmouth Tribute). And she did this while building programs that actively welcomed women into the lab. She was "co-founder of Dartmouth's Women in Science Project … and was active in the Women in Cancer Research group" (Dartmouth Tribute). Now bring in the home front—because Karen's life was never just pipettes and publications. Neighbors remembered that "we never knew she was a world-famous scientist," because, in Lyme, New Hampshire, "she was just Char and Leon's mom" (The Tennessean/AP). She loved "rock music—heavy metal was her favorite," she "tended her garden," and she hosted some great neighborhood pool parties. (The Tennessean/AP). This is the paradox and the beauty: the same person who would lecture in Norway and Hawaii would also her drag family to the golf course and cheer at Ashley's hockey game (The Tennessean/AP). A life in balance. On a summer day in 1996, the story turns. Karen was "studying the way mercury ions interact with DNA repair proteins" and also investigating cadmium (Wikipedia). She was using an incredibly dangerous substance that we really don't mess with much anymore called dimethylmercury—Hg(CH₃)₂ She did what a careful chemist does. She wore "safety glasses and latex gloves," worked "in a fume cupboard," handled "very small quantities behind the fume cupboard sash," and the sample arrived in a "sealed glass vial" cooled in ice water to reduce volatility (Bristol "Dimethylmercury"). On August 14th, she transferred liquid and, by her own later recollection, "spilled several drops of dimethylmercury from the tip of a pipette onto her latex-gloved hand" (Wikipedia; NEJM). "Not believing herself in any immediate danger, as she was taking all recommended precautions," she cleaned up before removing the gloves (Wikipedia). That detail—the glove—matters. Tests later showed dimethylmercury "can, in fact, rapidly permeate several kinds of latex gloves and enter the skin within about 15 seconds" (Wikipedia; Bristol "Dimethylmercury"). In other words, the glove was no barrier, but rather provided a false sense of security, like many other modern protective measures. The Tennessean would capture the image like this: "It was just a drop of liquid, just a tiny glistening drop. It glided over her glove like a jewel" (The Tennessean/AP). There's poetry in that line, and tragedy too. The article adds: "She washed her hands, cleaned her instruments and went home. It was just a drop of liquid, just a tiny glistening drop" (The Tennessean/AP). Dimethylmercury is slow, stealthy, and cumulative. It is the very definition of insidious and more perfidious than Agatha Harkness. It is "one of the most potent neurotoxins known," crosses the blood-brain barrier, and "is a cumulative poison, being very slowly excreted from the body, and by the time its effects are noted it is too late to do anything about it" (Bristol "Dimethylmercury"). What an awful, awful sentence. Like the Blue Flash of a supercritical reaction that we discussed in our last episode, once that Dimethylmercury hits you, it's too late…even if it takes you much slower than Gamma or neutron radiation does. For months, there were no obvious signs. Then her body started sending signals. Roughly "three months after the initial accident," there were "brief episodes of abdominal discomfort" and "significant weight loss." "The more distinctive neurological symptoms … including loss of balance and slurred speech, appeared in January 1997, five months after the accident" (Wikipedia). The NEJM case report—the clinical, careful voice of medicine—notes that she presented with "a five-day history of progressive deterioration in balance, gait, and speech," after losing "6.8 kg (15 lb) over a period of two months," with episodes of "nausea, diarrhea, and abdominal discomfort" (NEJM). How many of us would know what caused such symptoms when they didn't begin until 3 months after exposure?? Her own memory solved the riddle: "in August 1996 … she spilled several drops … onto the dorsum of her gloved hand" (NEJM). Hair analysis would later show a "dramatic jump in mercury levels 17 days after the initial accident, peaking at 39 days," then a slow decline (Wikipedia). In the hospital, the numbers were grim: "whole-blood mercury, 4000 μg per liter (normal range, 1 to 8; toxic level, >200); urinary mercury, 234 μg per liter (normal range, 1 to 5; toxic level, >50)" (NEJM). That's a lot, an awful lot of dimethyl mercury. Clinicians tried everything they reasonably could: chelation, and Vitamin E was added "as a potentially protective antioxidant" (NEJM). They even attempted exchange transfusion, and it had partial impacts, as her "mean whole-blood mercury concentration" dipped from 2230 to 1630 μg/L two hours after, only to re-equilibrate to 2070 μg/L by 16 hours (NEJM). How does that happen? I know a microgram is a tiny, tiny amount of material - 1 millionth of a gram, but that is wild to me that the mercury concentration would seemingly reduce, then come back. For reference, one sand grain weighs around 12 milligrams, or 12000 micrograms, so maybe the measurements in the 1990s weren't the most precise, or maybe mercury levels can fluctuate. Dimethyl mercury is extremely toxic, and .1 milliliters is enough to kill you, I repeat, POINT 1 milliliters. One milliliter of water weighs one gram, and is about 1 cubic centimeter, or 10 cubic millimeters in size. .1 milliliters would be 10 percent of that size, or more like 1 cubic millimeter in size. That is small, considering a flea can be about 3 milimeters in size, and a regular black garden ant - the small kind - can grow to well over 4 milimeters long…but we're not done yet, because dimethyl mercury is almost three times denser than water, so a drop of it big enough to kill you would be about a third the size of water of comparative mass. This means a drop of dimethly mercury large enough to kill you would be a good bit less than 1 cubic milimeter in size, provided my math is correct…a somewhat dodgy caveat. How big is that? The average size of a drop of water from an eyedropper is .05 mililiters, so - factoring in the density of dimethyl mercury, the amount that's needed to kill you would be smaller than the drop of water from an eyedropper. Would you even notice such a small amount hitting your glove?? I probably wouldn't. We've done some math there - hopefully, let's do some chemistry now. Dimethylmercury is a liquid "with a faint sweet smell (but don't smell it, for Heaven's sake!)," It boils at 92°C/197.6 F (density 2.96 g/cm³ ). It's "supertoxic," and it "readily crosses the blood-brain barrier," likely via "a methylmercury-cysteine complex," has "a high affinity for sulphur" and attacks "the thiol groups of enzymes," inhibiting neurotransmission (Bristol "Dimethylmercury"). Clinically, symptoms include "ataxia (lack of muscle coordination), sensory disturbance and changes in mental state," with "delayed but ultimately fatal neurotoxic effects" (Bristol "Dimethylmercury"; NEJM). The hair-mercury curve in Karen's case soared to "almost 1100 ng per milligram," then declined with a half-life of "74.6 days" (NEJM). Those kinetics tell a story of a toxin that builds silently and leaves reluctantly. Dr. Wetterhahn's brain, in particular the visual and auditory cortices and the cerebellum, was profoundly injured by the mercury exposure. The mercury content in the frontal lobe and her visual cortex averaged "3.1 μg per gram (3100 ppb)," with high levels also in the liver and kidney cortex (NEJM). Outside the lab, values and scans, family and colleagues were living a vigil. The Tennessean's account is devastating and tender. Karen—who "had never been sick, never stopped working, never complained"—now found "words … getting stuck in her throat," "her hands tingled," and her "whole body was moving in slow motion" (The Tennessean/AP). Friends rushed her to the hospital. After the diagnosis, "Karen beamed when she heard the news. Finally, something she understood. … Science would cure her," she thought (The Tennessean/AP). But dimethylmercury had other plans. "Doctors didn't know it could break down the body over the course of a few months, slowly, insidiously, irreversibly." (The Tennessean/AP). Like in the case with radiation accidents and Slotin and Daghlian, we learned a lot about dimethylmercury poisoning from Karen's case. The hospital room became a command center of love and science. "E-mails flew around campus, and around the country. Students emptied libraries of books on mercury … seizing on any sliver of information" (The Tennessean/AP). Thomas Clarkson, who had studied mercury disasters, confessed: "I felt such a sense of helplessness. 'Here was one of the world's most distinguished scientists, and I was looking at this woman dying, realizing there is nothing the scientific or medical communities can do'" (The Tennessean/AP). A colleague remembered Karen's husband seeing "tears rolling down her face." When asked if she was in pain, "The doctors said it didn't appear that her brain could even register pain" (Wikipedia). On February 6, "22 days after the first neurologic symptoms," she "became unresponsive to all visual, verbal, and light-touch stimuli" (NEJM). The newspaper captures the family's promise: in the ambulance, Karen pointed to letters"N" and "H"and "Leon nodded. He promised that, whatever the outcome, he would take her home, to New Hampshire" (The Tennessean/AP). He did. On June 8, 1997—"ten months after her initial exposure"—Karen died (Wikipedia; NEJM). Like with Daghlian and Slotin, Karen Wetterhahn's case revealed that the safety culture around "super-toxic" chemicals needed to change, and change rapidly. "The case proved that the standard precautions at the time, all of which Wetterhahn had carefully followed, were inadequate for 'hyper-toxic' chemicals like dimethylmercury" (Wikipedia). Wetterhahn was not careless; she was not dramatic; she didn't display the understandable wartime bravado of Slotin - she was doing her job soberly, with the best understanding of safety and protective gear that they had in the mid-1990s, and it just wasn't enough. She taught us that, and probably saved many lives in the process. Back in the lab, her colleagues got empirical. They "tested various safety gloves against dimethylmercury and found that the small, apolar molecule diffuses through most of them in seconds" (Wikipedia). The Bristol write-up is direct: "it is now accepted that the only safe precaution … is to wear highly resistant laminated gloves underneath a pair of long-cuffed neoprene (or other heavy duty) gloves" (Bristol "Dimethylmercury"). In short: double up, laminate first. Her accident had a broad scientific ripple. Dimethylmercury had been "the common calibration standard for 199Hg (199 Mercury)NMR spectroscopy" What is 199 Mercury NMR Spectroscopy? I totally know off the top of my head, and if you'll give me a second to Google it - I mean, uh, look it up, I'll tell you. Of course, 199Hg NMR spectroscopy is a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance technique that uses the 199Hg isotope of mercury to study the structure, dynamics, and binding of mercury-containing compounds, particularly inorganic and biological complexes. And if you don't understand that, then you probably aren't a high-level chemist, and, uh, I can't explain it to you. Nah, I'm just kidding. I don't really understand precisely how they were using that isotope of 199 Mercury in NMRs either. That's the thing about brilliant people who know their field comprehensively. The most brilliant ones can explain things so clearly that non-experts can grasp it, and I simply can't do that, because I am not anywhere close to brilliant in this field. After Karen's death, "the use of dimethylmercury for any purpose has been highly discouraged" (Wikipedia). The NEJM paper was blunt about the substance itself: "Dimethylmercury may be even more dangerous than methylmercury compounds," permitting "transdermal absorption" and providing toxic exposure via inhalation; "lethal at a dose of approximately 400 mg … a few drops" (NEJM). Their conclusion: this "case illustrates the potent toxicity of dimethylmercury and the need for additional safety precautions if it is to be used in any scientific research" (NEJM). And there was legacy in people and programs. Dartmouth established "The Karen E. Wetterhahn Graduate Fellowship in Chemistry" to encourage other women in science, "whenever possible, a woman is preferred for the award" (Wikipedia). The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences created the "Karen Wetterhahn Memorial Award," given annually (Wikipedia). Her broader legacy, Dartmouth College notes, is in the community she built: as "founding director" of the Toxic Metals Superfund Research Program and as a dean who "helped guide the growth and development of the science division and its graduate programs" (Dartmouth Tribute). Her death "prompted consideration of using an alternative reference material for mercury NMR spectroscopy experiments" (Wikipedia). Her life prompted many to become scientists and engage in their own brave, knowledge-expanding experimentation. If after this you need a laboratory proverb to tape above your hood, try this: the only thing that should pass through your glove in fifteen seconds is regret. Everything else needs SilverShield under neoprene. As the University of Bristol writes up on Dr. Wetterhan, "Doing chemistry is safe, much safer than driving a car," but "it is only by ceaseless vigilance and attention to safety that it remains so." Pioneers like Wetterahn, Slotin, and Daghlian have made science safer by their sacrifice. (Bristol "Dimethylmercury"). Ceaseless vigilance is just another way of saying: love your people enough to over-protect your hands. There's a sentence late in the AP story that won't leave me: "In many ways, Karen Wetterhahn's death was as important as her life" (The Tennessean/AP). That shouldn't diminish her life, but it's to honor her wish. "While she could still speak, she urged doctors to learn everything they could from her accident. And they did" (The Tennessean/AP). Out of that courage came data, papers, safety circulars, and—most importantly—policies that mean other scientists go home after their experiments. Her colleagues' early ignorance of dimethylmercury's glove permeation wasn't negligence; it was a gap that Karen's tragedy closed. "Wetterhahn's accidental exposure occurred despite her having taken all measures required at that time. … her colleagues tested various safety gloves … [and] as a result, it is now recommended by OSHA to wear Silver Shield laminate gloves … while handling dimethylmercury" (Wikipedia). The NEJM article adds the sober medical coda: they could find "only three previously reported cases of poisoning with dimethylmercury, all of which were fatal" (NEJM). This is a chemical for which there is no margin. And yet, this is also a story about love—the way her husband Leon promised "New Hampshire" with two letters; the way friends filled hospital walls with photos; the way students "stayed up all night to translate obscure research papers," riding waves of "elation … then crying" (The Tennessean/AP). It's about a scientist who could still crack a line with the hospital psychologist. Asked if she was depressed, she smiled: "'Wouldn't you be?'" I appreciate the Ph.D level gallows humor there, and her bravery in the face of the unknown terrors ahead. Karen's death galvanized institutions. OSHA guidance changed. NMR standards were reconsidered (Wikipedia). Dartmouth and NIEHS named awards in her memory (Wikipedia). Her Superfund program continued, drawing "scientists from Dartmouth College and the Geisel School of Medicine," with collaborators from other institutions (Dartmouth Tribute). The woman who built bridges in life kept building them after, helping others cross safely. The AP article leaves us with her husband's ongoing ache: "He still wakes in the middle of the night and wonders if it's true. He still half expects her to come striding through the door with her laptop and her notes and her smile" (The Tennessean/AP). And then there's the photo in that article that Leon held: "Karen working in her lab, a study of intensity in her goggles and gloves, staring at her test-tubes and vials. 'She loved her work,' he says. 'It made her happy'" (The Tennessean/AP). So what do we do with this story, so sad and poignant? First, we say her name with gratitude: Dr. Karen E. Wetterhahn. Second, we adopt her final lesson like a lab oath: super-toxic chemicals demand super-protective habits. And third, we remember that safety is love in practice—because someone is waiting at home who thinks of you as more than a scientist. They think of you as Mom, or Dad, or friend, or mentor. They don't care how elegant your NMR spectrum is if the glove fails. Maybe you aren't a chemist, but you'd still be missed if you were gone, so be vigilant. Thank you, Dr. Karen Elizabeth Wetterhahn, teacher, builder, scientist, for teaching us to give careful thought to our ways. Next episode, we meet Dr. Anatoli Bugorski, the Soviet scientist who survived - somehow - a direct hit to the face from a particle beam fired by a giant particle accelerator. Tell your people about the show - give us some reviews or shares on social media, yeah, yeah. You know the drill. Until next time…keep digging! Quoted Sources * Wikipedia (Wikipedia: Karen Wetterhahn). * Dartmouth Tribute: Biographical and institutional roles, Superfund program, administrative leadership, mentoring, and program-building (Dartmouth College: A Tribute to Karen Wetterhahn). * Bristol College (Chemistry, Molecule of the Month) Narrative of the lab procedures and spill, glove permeability "within 15 seconds," physical properties, toxicology, neurotoxicity, and safety admonition ("Doing chemistry is safe … only by ceaseless vigilance …") (University of Bristol: The Karen Wetterhahn Story / Dimethylmercury). * New England Journal of Medicine(1998 Case Report) Clinical course, dates, mercury levels, chelation and exchange transfusion details, hair kinetics, half-lives, autopsy findings, and "supertoxic" dose characterization (Nierenberg et al., "Delayed Cerebellar Disease and Death after Accidental Exposure to Dimethylmercury," New England Journal of Medicine, 1998). The Tennessean / Associated Press (Sept. 20, 1997) Human-angle reporting: "tiny glistening drop," family vignettes, Leon's promise ("N" and "H"), student and colleague efforts, Clarkson's quote, OSHA note, and closing reflections (Helen O'Neill, AP, The Tennessean).

Lawnchair Larry, the Floating Hero-Priest and Backyard Aeronauts Take Flight. (History of Flight #3)

Interesting Pod #5 - LawnChair Larry and Backyard Aeronauts Take Flight. Today we finally get to the inspiration for this set of episodes: Lawnchair Larry himself - the man who tied a bunch of balloons to his lawnchair and flew off into history. A great, great story - and a cautionary tale. But before we get to that, let me do the typical podcast host drivel for a moment. As an Indie show not hosted by a celebrity, the Interesting Pod relies on word of mouth. Please tell folks about us, and share episodes on social media. Our growth depends, in large part, on you guys. Leaving a review on Apple Podcasts would be helpful as well. I've been podcasting since 2005, and believe in the medium as an excellent way to communicate. From about 2005 to 2015, podcasting was a ground-leveling way for normal people to reach lots of people with all kinds of fascinating topics, but now the podcasting world is flooded and saturated with celebrities. That's fine, I suppose, but I hope there's still a place for indie shows and little podcasts like this one, and when you tell people about it, you help little efforts like this carve a niche. Thank you! On our last episode, we introduced you to the real Wonder Twins - The scientists, aeronauts and deep sea exploring Piccard Twins, likely the inspiration behind Starfleet Captain Jean Luc Picard. Before the Piccard twins inspired the creation of Captain Picard, however, they inspired another luminary, this one much more like Dr. Zefram Cochrane than Picard. A high-strung - in more ways than one - truck driver and aeronaut named Larry Walters. He dreamed of becoming an ace pilot in the USAF, but poor eyesight and maybe other factors grounded him. At least, it grounded him temporarily, but not permanently! I'm Chase, and today we're telling the story of Lawnchair Larry—the man who lashed helium-filled weather balloons to a lawn chair, rose to an altitude that Isaiah might call "mounting up with wings like eagles," and drifted his way into American folklore, aviation case studies, and even a blackout in Long Beach. This is a story about ingenuity and longing, the thin line between gumption and folly, bravery and recklessness, and some of the depressing factors of life after kissing the sky. It's July 2, 1982, and Los Angeles is doing what Los Angeles does best, sunshine, smog, and improbable dreams. The front page of the LA Times for that day discussed the benefits and dangers of radio therapists - around 11 years before Frasier appeared on the airwaves. Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization were, unsurprisingly, going at it, and Ronald Reagan weighed in on the insanity plea of his would-be assassin John Hinkley. The weather that day called for a high of 78 and a low of 59, a bit cold for LA at that time of year. In the backyard of a San Pedro home, a Sears aluminum lawn chair is tethered to dozens of weather balloons like a suburban version of Jules Verne. A rope slips loose earlier than planned, and our hero, Larry Walters, truck driver and thwarted Air Force hopeful, shoots into the relatively cool Southern California sky. Not metaphorically. Literally. Up, up, and away…straight toward controlled airspace. A Delta pilot gawks. A TWA pilot confirms. And somewhere on a CB radio, Larry calmly informs the REACT volunteers: "Ah, the difficulty is, ah, this was an unauthorized balloon launch." You don't say, Larry. Long before he tangled with those power lines, Larry tangled with a different kind of line: the Air Force's vision requirements. He wanted to fly, but his eyesight grounded the dream. Like many of us who don't get Plan A, he did what you do, he settled. Truck driver by trade; dreamer by nature. And that dream, according to Larry, started early. At 13, he walked into a military surplus store, looks up at a ceiling of weather balloons, and thinks: there's a way to get airborne without a fighter jet. The seed is planted. Fast forward to 1982. Ronald Reagan's in the White House, E.T. is in theaters, and Larry, now in his early thirties, decides to cash in the dream. The plan is simple in a Rube Goldberg kind of way: attach roughly 42 (sometimes Larry said 43) eight-foot weather balloons to a lawn chair, fill them with helium, lift off gently, drift over the Mojave, and, this is the key, shoot a few balloons with a pellet gun when it's time to descend. What could go wrong besides literally everything? Oh yeah, about that lawn chair. It was reportedly a Sears special, about $109 at the time… Pause - $109 for a lawnchair in the early 1980s?? That's like 350 today. On the one hand, if you are going to take your lawnchair up to the edge of space, then I get wanting to have the absolute best lawnchair possible. On the other hand, that's a LOT of money for a lawnchair! This is the American tinker spirit with a dash of…creative paperwork, because Larry and his longtime girlfriend, Carol Van Deusen, bought 45 balloons and helium, using some forged documents and fudged reasonings. The launch site? The backyard at 1633 West 7th Street, San Pedro, which turned out to be Carol's mom's house. Equipment list for this manned aerostat included: parachute, CB radio, sandwiches, Coca-Cola - that's regular Coca Cola before the New Coke debacle - a pellet gun, and a camera he would later be too awestruck (read: busy not dying) to use. Let's talk about that backyard at 1633 West 7th Street. If you aren't from Cali, you may not know this, but if you are a californian not named Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerburg, you probably live in a house with a surprisingly small backyard. I come from Alabama, where giant backyards are owned by even lower middle class folks, and in Cali, even upper middle class and some rich folks have comparatively small backyards. Carol's mom's house fits this bill. I've never been there, but I'm looking at it on satellite view right now, and it is TINY. Like so small it could only fit a few lawnchairs. But I guess it really only had to fit that one! Then, the critical moment: Larry's sitting in his chair, hovering a bit, and hoping for a SOFT launch. He's attached balloons to his chair, and it is held to the ground by a seemingly strong tether. Unfortunately, that tether snaps earlier than planned. No gentle 30-foot float; instead, Larry rockets skyward to something like 16,000 feet—three miles up—right into controlled airspace near Long Beach Airport. I ride roller coasters, but I get nervous as they go up steep hills - especially huge roller coasters like Six Flag's Goliath. One time in Atlanta, I looked at my friend Sam as we rode up together, and simply asked him - "What are we doing? This is insane." I can only imagine that Larry had similar thoughts as he rocketed from 10 feet to 16,000 feet IN A LAWN CHAIR. And somewhere on the ground, a handful of friends are staring upward at a little aluminum throne sailing the firmament, wondering if this is still technically a backyard barbecue. Unfortunately, as Plane and Pilot reports, Larry got too high, too fast: I can almost hear the power-chords and wails from Dokken as Larry goes up, Too high to fly, but you should've seen him there (Yeah) The sun shines down on his face, but he did feel a thing, sadly. Larry didn't need to look at his altimeter to know he went much higher than he had intended. He began to feel cold and dizzy from the thin air and feared that if he shot out any of the balloons that the balance of his chair would become unstable, causing him to fall. Which is the kind of thing he might should have considered earlier. He used his CB radio to call REACT, a citizens' band radio monitoring organization. REACT: "What information do you wish me to tell [the airport] at this time as to your location and your difficulty??" Larry: "Ah, the difficulty is… this was an unauthorized balloon launch… I'm sure my ground crew has alerted the proper authority… just tell them I'm okay." This transcript is real, recorded by REACT—the volunteer radio monitors who found themselves dealing with perhaps the most unique mayday in SoCal history. After about 45 minutes in the air, he finally found the courage to shoot out some of the balloons, starting with those in the outer ring, but accidentally dropped his gun in the process. He poured out ballast to control the descent from there. Let me repeat what you just heard…Larry eventually starts carefully shooting balloons to descend…and then drops the pellet gun. That seems like one of the more significant fumbles in history. A small, gravity-obedient mistake, but by then he'd punctured enough balloons to begin coming down—slowly, and then not so slowly, but - grace upon grace - Larry and his makeshift gondola snagged some power lines in Long Beach. Bummer for the neighborhood though, because Lights flicker and die across a broad swath of the community. Twenty minutes of blackout, so nobody lost their steaks or anything. Larry, by grace and plastic tethers, avoids electrocution, clambers off the chair, and steps back onto the earth. Unharmed. Score one for improbable Providence—and maybe for water-jug ballast. Sadly for Larry, but unsurprisingly for everyone else, The Long Beach Police Department is waiting. Larry is promptly arrested, a bewildered slow and confused, "what do we even charge this guy with?" kind of arrest. An FAA regional safety inspector, Neal Savoy, says the line that belongs in a museum of deadpan regulation: We know he broke some part of the Federal Aviation Act, and as soon as we decide which part it is, some type of charge will be filed. That right there is a stereotypical bureaucrat speaking. This looks and feels wrong, but we don't know why it's wrong until we pore over the standards and regulations. I don't disagree with Neil, but that's definitely hall of fame level bureaucrat thinking there. If Larry had a pilot's license, they'd suspend it. He did not. It's hard to revoke a license from a man who just flew a lawn chair. Initially, Larry gets slapped with a $4,000 fine (in early-80s dollars - that's not quite $15,000 today, not chump change) for multiple regulatory sins: entering an airport traffic area without proper two-way radio contact, creating a hazard, and operating what the FAA first treated like a civil aircraft. On appeal, the FAA eventually drops the airworthiness-certificate angle, and reduces the fine to $1,500. Even the feds, it seems, recognize the difference between malice and misadventure. But hey, $5000 bucks is $5000 bucks! I wouldn't want to get hit by a fine like that, and I'm a very wealthy podcaster! Well, I'm a podcaster anyway. Larry's public comments, though, are not the swagger of a daredevil. They sound more like a pilgrim. "It was something I had to do. I had this dream for twenty years, and if I hadn't done it, I think I would have ended up in the funny farm." In another line, he credits God: "Since I was 13 years old, I've dreamed of going up into the clear blue sky in a weather balloon… By the grace of God, I fulfilled my dream." Those aren't victory-laps; they're testimony. He did the thing he'd longed to do, and he knew it wasn't exactly prudent, but I imagine it was quite fulfilling. The world, predictably, goes bonkers for Lawnchair Larry. Ten days after the flight, he's on Late Night with David Letterman. He does Johnny Carson. He gives speeches for a bit, even snags a Timex print ad years later. Yes, you heard that right - Timex featured "Lawnchair" Larry Walters in a series of ads for their watches in 1992, focusing on his ambitious flight and adventurous spirit. The ad specifically highlighted that Larry was wearing a Timex "moon dial" watch while he was in his lawn chair. Someone dubs his craft Inspiration I, a name as earnest and backyard-poetic as the flight itself. Meanwhile, the great sorting hat of modern folklore places him in the orbit of the Darwin Awards, where he's labeled an "At-Risk Survivor" (in other words, spectacularly lucky) in 1993. The cultural verdict lands somewhere between admiration for chutzpah and a universal parental eye-roll. And the chair? What became of that amazing and ridiculously expensive lawn chair? (Maybe I shouldn't be so critical - it did survive and keep Larry safe.) Well, that aluminum recliner becomes an artifact. Larry gave it away to a neighborhood kid, Jerry Fleck, in a move he later regretted when institutions started calling. Eventually, Jerry surfaces years later, the chair still in his garage with some original ballast jugs attached, and loans it to the San Diego Air & Space Museum. It is later donated to the Smithsonian, displayed at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, and today it's part of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.—a place that houses the Wright Flyer, the Apollo command module, and…a surprisingly expensive, but sturdy aluminum patio chair that once blacked out Long Beach. God bless America! Fifteen years after the flight, in 1997, the early Internet rediscovered Larry, and the story ballooned again. A widely shared post claimed all sorts of specifics, painting a dramatic scene involving LAX, helicopters, offshore rescues, and one very quotable line as he's led away in cuffs: "A man can't just sit around." It's sensational, cinematic…and, as Snopes.com pointed out, full of embellishments. The core is true—Larry really did fly, and he really did hit 16,000 feet, and there really was a blackout—but many details from the 1997 viral version were just that: viral. Consider this a friendly reminder that folklore accumulates barnacles, especially online. Legends, like toenails, tend to grow. Larry's flight also inspired imitators—most notably Kevin Walsh in 1984, who ascended under 57 balloons from a Massachusetts airfield, hit 9,000 feet in minutes, and parachuted down, promptly earning his own FAA paperwork. Think about that - parachuting out of a lawnchair at almost two miles high! Larry had become a genre and an inspiration to many, many others. And then there's the pop-culture wake: the Australian film Danny Deckchair, a stage musical (The Flight of the Lawn Chair Man), and countless magazine features. That movie gets a fairly decent 6.7 IMDB rating, and stars two guys named Rhys - spell it - which is something. Actually, it's kind of weird, because Danny Deckchair is an Aussie film, and Rhys is a Welsh name. Oh well, we live in a strange world. I watched the trailer for that 2003 film. It looks…odd, but maybe decent. Spoiler alert - I guess, I only watched the trailer - but this Larry, or Danny - doesn't land in powerlines, but his balloons get blown up by a fireworks show, and he plummets out of the sky, landing in a backyard tree where a woman nurses him to health and - it appears - falls in love with him, even though he uses her leg shaving razor to shave his face. Which is gross on two different accounts. Lawnchair Larry lives on to this day - every now and then a new batch of people discover his story on websites like Reddit and Tik Tok as recent listicles and social news aggregation sites keep rediscovering and retelling, some faithfully, some fancifully, the day a lawn chair shared airspace with airliners. The fact-checked bottom line, though, is stranger and better than fiction: a backyard dream rode a thermal right into the history books. Let's talk meaning. Why does Lawnchair Larry endure when so many stunts fade? Part of it is the quintessentially American cocktail: restraint-defying ingenuity, Home Depot aesthetics, and a stubborn refusal to accept that flying requires permission. Larry is a folk saint of the DIY imagination—equal parts Huck Finn and Apollo 11. Another part is the sheer audacity of earnestness. He wasn't trying to sell a sneaker or set a sponsored content record. He was chasing a twenty-year prayer with a parachute and a pellet gun. And, man - he did it - he climbed up over 3 miles high where the airplanes go with just stuff you can buy at Home Depot! At this point a pastor's brain can't help but surface. The Bible is not short on sky metaphors or cautionary tales about vertical ambition. The Tower of Babel warns us about building up in our own name (Genesis 11), and Ecclesiastes has strong words for "chasing the wind." But Scripture also gives us Isaiah 40—"those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles"—and Peter, who actually stepped out onto water when Jesus said "come." Faith can look like audacious obedience; folly can look like audacious self-promotion. The difference is motive, wisdom, and maybe just a sprinkle of wise counsel. With Larry, I don't read arrogance but antsiness, unease, maybe even ADHD, but also a lot of good old fashioned earnestness, and it's important to be earnest, right Oscar? "By the grace of God, I fulfilled my dream." said Larry, afterwards. Maybe that's not exactly Babel; but more like Pilgrim's Progress with helium. Maybe that's too generous. Wisdom might have thought better of this excercise: romantic visions don't absolve us from neighbor-love or hazard mitigation. Larry's flight cut power to a community for twenty minutes. There's a balance between holy daring and humble diligence. In pastoral counseling, I often see this tension: God-given desires that, if pursued without wisdom, planning or restraint, create collateral damage. The call isn't to stop desiring; it's to apprentice desire to faith and patience. Larry's story is at once beautiful and complicated: a dream realized, a community briefly blacked out, a nation delighted, and a bureaucracy perplexed. It is in so many ways a quintessential human story. I can't throw stones, because it sounds like the kind of thing I would have done in my 20s. The next day, Larry Walters was famous, and plastered across the front page news of the Los Angeles Times. I'm looking at the paper as I type this. Two headlines frame a picture - not a very good picture, sadly - of Larry on his lawnchair. If you're thinking these are helium party balloons that lofted him three miles high, then think again. These balloons are big - as in, each balloon appears to be way bigger than Larry and his lawnchair, and there were over 40 of them. Let's read the article! (READ THE PAPER) That's a big deal - I've never done anything to make the frontpage of the newspaper, and the closest I've come is making the front page of the Birmingham Grotto of the National Speleological Society's newsletter in 1991 because I got myself stuck in a cave and rescued by the cave rescue team. Another story for another day. Larry was famous, but Fame is fickle. He did the talk shows, hit the circuit, and then, people turned their attention to other things and real life resumed. Unfortunately, Walters didn't realize fame is fleeting, and he retired from his main job to become a motivational speaker, a decision that appears to not have gone very well. Over the years, He hiked the San Gabriel Mountains, volunteered with the U.S. Forest Service and did some odd-job security work. He broke up with his girlfriend of 15 years - ouch, that's a long time to date and not marry - and had to deal with real life, jobs, bills and the dogged reality that the mountaintop—literal, in his case—isn't where we live most days. And then, in October 1993, at age 44, Larry walked into one of his favorite hiking places and died by suicide in the Angeles National Forest. News reports were matter of fact, somber, restrained, and sad. The man whose flight made millions laugh and gasp had been carrying more weight than any balloons could lift. All of us feel that way some of the time. Even many of the great saints in the Bible - Moses, Job, Elijah, dealt with depression and fought suicidal thoughts. If you're listening to this and you are fighting that struggle, allow me to encourage you to NOT fight alone. Reach out. More people care than you realize, and if you can't find somebody in your local context, then call 988 and you will find help. Life is hard, and it's not meant to be lived alone. Larry's death complicates his legend in the way real endings often do. The Tik-Tok video wants an uncomplicated hero or a punchline. The truth gives us a warty person, someone who sought wonder and brushed the heavens and then struggled in the valley. If anything, his story invites gentleness, and should cause us to ponder what those around us are grappling with. Ecclesiastes again: "There is a time to laugh" and a time to weep. We can do both. What can we learn from our guy Larry? First, dreams need craft. Larry didn't just wish; he planned, he sourced, he calculated lift (not perfectly, but he tried), he strapped on a parachute, and he brought redundancy—well, until the pellet gun plummeted. Aspiration without preparation is a recipe for blackouts. For all of his foibles, Larry reached the heavens and returned. That's really impressive. Second, wisdom is communal. Larry's story reminds me of an old Solomnic proverb, "Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety." Had an FAA-style mind been in the backyard that morning, some hazards might have been avoided. In an abundance of counselors, there is safety—and probably fewer neighborhood outages. But you know what? I get it - put an FAA-style mind in that backyard, and Larry probably never takes off. That balance between prudence and daring-do is so hard to navigate. The prudent rarely, if ever, touch the heavens in lawnchairs, but neither do they end up at the bottom of Strids in Bolton either. Third, the afterlife of artifacts tells a story. That chair's journey—from a San Pedro yard to a kid's garage to the Smithsonian—says a lot about what we value. America keeps odd company under glass: lunar landers and lawn furniture, Kitty Hawk and cul-de-sacs. There's something delightfully patriotic about that. The next time I go to the Smithsonian, I'm making a bee line to that lawnchair, and want to see it up close more than almost anything else in that museum. Fourth, folklore is fun, but facts matter. The Internet's 1997 myth-saturated, turbo-charged version gave Larry a Hollywood makeover he never needed. The truth is interesting enough: a lawn chair entered controlled airspace and made airline pilots do double-takes. That story is so beautiful it needs not makeup or implants or lies or embellishments. Larry's launch wasn't policy-compliant. But it was sincere, and it was impressive. He looked up at a big sky, and rather than merely envy the pilots who used it, he gave himself thirty minutes in that expanse, trusting a pellet gun, some water jugs, and grace. He made us laugh, made the FAA frown, made the lights flicker, and made history. If you're dreaming today—about scholarship, a deeper calling, a story to write, a song to compose—tie your balloons thoughtfully. Invite wiser friends to look over your ropes. Surround yourself with a mixture of dreamers and unstifled bureaucrats…you'll need 'em both. File the metaphorical flight plan. And when you finally rise, do so in boldness and prudence, wisdom and adventure. You may not cause a blackout or capture the attention of airline pilots, but you'll make an impact, and likely live to tell about it to your grandkids. This has been the story—and the aftermath—of Lawnchair Larry Walters: the backyard aviator who drifted into controlled airspace and cultural memory. For the record: do not try this at home, at church, or really anywhere. If Larry got a slap on the wrist in 1982, you can bet they'd put you under the jail in 2025. These are different times! Larry spawned a lot of copycats, as such events often do. I could talk about many of them, but I will focus a little bit on the most impressive and maybe the saddest. We need to talk about Adelir Antônio de Carli. Initially, de Carli had humble beginnings, born in Brazil, but lived for much of his childhood in Paraguay until his mom died of cancer. As a teen, he worked as a tire repairman and later as a gas station attendant at his uncle's gas station, while also painting tablecloths as a side job. He was described as a quiet and humble person, and was an excellent student. In other news, I don't know what painting tablecloths means, but I guess that is a job. In his early 30s, de Carli went to seminary, and was ordained in 2003 as a Catholic priest. He was a man of deep compassion, advocating for the homeless before it was cool to do so, and he also created the Pastoral Rodoviária, a rest area for truckers. Fuelled by a "necessity to spread God's message", he conceived the project with the intent of assisting and evangelizing the truck drivers who would pass by the port - creating a rest space for them, where he offered pastoral care. It was this ministry that would lead to him reaching higher than any other amateur chair-cluster balloonist, and would also lead to his tragic death. In April 20, 2008, shortly after leading Mass, de Carli planned a record-breaking balloon flight to raise awareness for his truck stop ministry. He was not unprepared, having attended paragliding classes (where he was unfortunately expelled, but also taking jungle-survival and mountain-climbing courses. This wasn't his first attempt to fly. On January 13, 2008, in Ampére, Brazil, he rose beneath 600 helium giant party balloons, climbing to about 5,300 meters (17,400 ft). He drifted across borders and landed safely in Argentina. Impressive. Very impressive. Three months later, he tried again. Lifting off from Paranaguá, de Carli aimed to travel roughly (450 mi) inland to Dourados. This time he used a chair slung under 1,000 balloons, climbing to about 6,100 meters (20,000 ft). But he hadn't checked the forecast. A storm swept in. Though he carried a GPS, he didn't know how to operate it. About eight hours after liftoff, his final radio call reported he'd drifted off the coast, approaching water, unable to give his position. The transcript reads: "I need to get in touch with the staff so they can teach me how to operate this GPS here to give the latitude and longitude coordinates, which is the only way anyone on the ground can know where I am. The satellite cell phone keeps going out of range and furthermore the battery is getting low." Unfortunately, storms caught him and He crashed into the Atlantic. Weeks later, on July 4, 2008, the Brazilian Navy recovered his remains near an offshore oil platform. A daring heart, a pastoral calling, a passion for evangelism and careteaking. What a guy, what a unit. This is a good place to end today's episode. May his memory call us to courage—and to wisdom—before we loose the ropes and trust the wind. Our next episode - out this week, Lord willing and the creek don't wise - looks at the amazing Balloon boy story, and also the mysterious JPG - Jet Pack Guy AKA Ironman. Share the show, and stay tuned!

3 de sep de 202545 min

The Space Race Begins: The Real Wonder Twins, First Female in Space, First Female Astronaut, and other Flight Adventures.

Interesting Pod #4 - The Space Race Begins: The Real Wonder Twins, First Female in Space, First Female Astronaut, and other Flight Adventures. Last week we put on our wingsuit, or aired up our balloon, which is probably safer, and took a look at the history of humans engaging in flight, and a few early aeronautical pioneers like the Montgolfier Brothers and Franz Reichelt, and also a few early aviation disasters like the Hindenburg explosion. Flying is risky, and today's episode chronicles some of the riskiest - and bravest - attempts by amateur flyers to ascend to the Heavens. Some, like Icarus, had a bad ending to their airspirations, but others accomplished some really impressive feats of flying with readily available technology. And some, just plane pulled our leg with tales of children flying off into the ether. Welcome to the Interesting Pod. Our goal on this show is to tell stories that have two characteristics. One is in the name - Interesting. We want to be INTERESTING. But not only that - I'm a historian, working on finishing up a Ph.D in history, and not only do we want to be interesting, but we also want to have accuracy based on historical rigor - good research - without being tedious or dry, pedantic, or condescending. Interesting means that we will seek to tell stories that are fascinating and moving. Some episodes might be inspiring, some wacky, some unnerving, some downright scary, but all should be - hopefully - interesting. But we want to be ACCURATE too. Practically, what that looks like is that this week, we had a seemingly good source that said that Tacitus, the first-century Roman historian, had accused Livia, the first-century wife of Caesar Augustus, of using aphrodisiacs to help control the Roman court and have her way. This was reported by a fairly reputable book, but it didn't have a direct source or quotation from Tacitus, so I spent some extra time combing through Tacitus' Annals to try and find that story, and failed. It might be there, but this podcast isn't a dissertation, and it was a minutely important facet of the story, so I didn't want to spend all day on it. So when we talk about it, you'll know that the story is possibly apocryphal. Thus, we aim for interesting, and we do our due diligence. That doesn't mean the show will be infallible, but we'll try! Today we're going to look at the wild balloon rides of the Catholic priest Adelir de Carli, who attached 1,000 helium-filled party balloons to a chair, rose to over 20,000 feet, and got caught in a terrible storm over the Atlantic Ocean. We will also find out about Jonathan Trappe, who crossed the English Channel over the White Cliffs of Dover, the Piccard twins, who pioneered balloon flights to the edge of space AND the bottom of the ocean, and the magician David Blaine, who may have outflown them all, reaching nearly 25,000 feet via hand-held balloons. So this episode is fun for anybody who is interested in the history of flight, OR those who dream of insane adventures that launch from your own backyard. You are NOT alone. And you may not survive. Our ultimate focus today is on Lawnchair Larry, the backyard pilot who strapped balloons to his - lawnchair - and flew over three miles high - but before we get to our guy Larry, we're going to go back in time a little bit. All the way to Jean Piccard. No, actually, not that Jean Piccard, but possibly the guy he's named after. Actually, not just Jean Piccard, but also his brother Auguste Piccard, and not just them, but also Jean's wife Jeanette, who may have been the best balloon pilot of them all. So let's talk about the amazing Piccard family. Jules Piccard, born in 1840, was a Swiss chemist and the father of the Piccard twins Jean and Auguste. His mentor at the University of Heidelberg was Robert Bunsen, and yes! That's the same guy who invented the Bunsen burner that you used in high school chemistry class. Jules studied a bunch of weird chemicals, including Dinitro-ortho-cresol, which is a poison that kills people and bugs, and also cantharidan, which is interesting enough to talk about for 60 seconds or so. Cantharidan is odorless and colorless, but extremely dangerous. Some people know it as Spanish Fly, and it is said that the first-century Roman historian Tacitus discusses cantharidan as an aphrodisiac, and notes that Livia, the wife of Augustus Caesar, supposedly used it as part of her nefarious scheming, but I couldn't find that in any primary sources. Regardless, does it work? Maybe…but more importantly than that - it kills. Cantharidan is an extreme poison, and as little as 10 milligrams - which is about the weight of a large grain of sand or salt - can kill a person. So, no thank you! The archives of Mcgill University also tell me that Jules Piccard did research into the chemical weight of Rubidium, which I've nver heard of, but melts at 102.7 degrees and looks a lot like Mercury. So yeah - rabbit trails - Jules was the father of Jean and Auguste, who were really quite remarkable. Jean followed in his father's steps as a chemist, and Auguste bucked the trend and became a physicist, but both brothers were aeronauts and balloon pioneers, and one of the brothers was ALSO a hydronaut - a deep sea pioneer! Who should we talk about first - they are both so interesting! I guess let's start with Auguste, who was born in January of 1884 in Basel, Switzerland. Auguste was a big science kid, and he went to the prestigious Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and ultimately became a physics professor at the University of Brussels, Belgium the same year his son Jacques Piccard was born. Auguste was very interested in flight and ballooning, and in 1930 he designed an aluminum pressurized gondola that would be attached to a balloon and allow somebody to ascend to unheard of heights into the atmosphere without dying. Two things in that sentence should pique your interest. First - a gondola, second the part about ascending without dying. If you're like me, and you hear the word 'gondola', you might be thinking of a flat bottomed boat piloted by an oarsman in Venice that travels around the canals there. That is indeed a gondola. If you live near the mountains - particularly mountains that have skiing - when you hear gondola, you might be thinking of an enclosed cabin-style ski-lift, suspended from a cable, that can carry groups of people up into the mountains. That is also a gondola. OR, in this case, a gondola is the basket or enclosed capsule like thing that is suspended below a balloon, and it usually has room for passengers, equipment, and maybe even instruments. So a gondola is all three things - an enclosed people carrier on a ski lift, a flat-bottom boat dating back to the 1000s primarily used in Venice's canals, and the basket or capsule below a balloon. By the way - rabbit trail alert - a gondelier is what they call the pilot of a gondola in Venice. This is a licensed position by the city, there are about 400 licenses given per year, and it takes 400 hours of intense training over a period of six months to become a gondolier…which pays around $150,000/year in US equivalent salary, so it's a pretty decent job! Anyway, back to my sentence with two interest-piquing facts. Auguste Piccard designed the first pressurized, enclosed gondola, and the reason he designed it is because of the second interesting thing in that sentence, the part about ascending the heights without dying. What's that all about? Well, to answer that question, we need to go back a few years to the mid 1920s, and there we will meet a heroic captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps - no Air Force yet - named Hawthorne Charles Gray. Captain Gray was an aeronaut and a brave man. He was born in Pasco, Washington to a prominent steamboat captain, who outlived his son by a few years, always a tragedy. In 1921, young Gray, then a second Lieutenant, began piloting balloons with the US Army Air Service, and showed a remarkable ability as a balloonist. March 9, 1927, Captain Gray climbed to previously unreached heights in his balloon launched from Scott field near Belleville, Illinois, climbing to 28,510 feet. On that trip, in what would be a portend of the future, Gray passed out from lack of oxygen in such thin air, and barely regained consciousness in time to drop the ballast he needed to slow his balloon down before it landed. May 4, Gray set another unofficial record for highest altitude reached by a human being, becoming the first man to climb above 42,000 feet above the earth. This time, his balloon was coming down too fast yet again, so Gray parachuted out of it at 8,000 feet, landing safely. His November 4, 1937 flight would not go so well. On ascent, Gray, who was using oxygen to survive, threw one of his empty tanks out of the gondola and it broke his radio antenna, which cut off contact between him and the ground. One wonders about that oxygen tank…I hope it didn't land on anybody! Can you imagine? That would be quite a mystery for a Hercule Poirot or what's an American detective active in the 1920s….maybe an Ellery Queen or Continental Op. They come upon a dead body who has been smashed over the head with an oxygen tank, laying nearby. Quite a mystery to solve unless you read the newspapers! So - Captain Gray is ascending, heading up to 40,000 feet. He kept a journal of the flight, and his last entry says, "Sky deep blue, sun very bright, sand all gone." Somewhere around 40,000 feet, Gray loses consciousness again, but the balloon rises a bit more, reaching somewhere over 43,000 feet and under 44,000 feet. Eventually, it begins to drop without Gray … and it rapidly descends. This time, Captain Gray doesn't wake up, and he either died due to crash landing, or due to hypoxia, or possibly even organ rupture/failure due to the extreme low pressure up that high, because atmospheric pressure reduces with height. Let's all salute Captain Gray - one time holder of the highest height by a human record. These and other deaths inspired our guy Auguste Piccard to design that pressurized gondola so that aeronauts could ascend without fear. Well, that's probably not at all true. So they could ascend with LESS fear. So Auguste invented a spherical and pressurized dome that would allow our pioneering aeronauts to go to the edge of space without wearing a pressure suit and without passing out in the low-pressure, low-oxygen, low-heat atmosphere. And you know what? It worked! May of 1931, less than four years after Captain Gray's 43,000 foot ascent and death, Auguste Piccard and Paul Kipfer used the Piccard Gondola to great effect, reaching a record altitude of 51,775 feet, which essentially makes them - arguably - the first humans in space, because they were the first humans to enter the stratosphere. While they were up there, they used their instruments to gather data on the upper atmosphere and make measurements on cosmic rays. The August 1931 edition of Popular Science focused on Piccard's record breaking journey into the edge of space, writing, ""A huge yellow balloon soared skyward, a few weeks ago, from Augsberg, Germany. Instead of a basket, it trailed an air-thin black-and-silver aluminum ball. Within the contraption, Prof. Auguste Piccard, physicist, and Charles Kipfer aimed to explore the air 50,000 feet up. Seventeen hours later, after being given up for dead, they returned safely from an estimated height of more than 52,000 feet, almost ten miles, shattering every aircraft altitude record." Popular Science, August 1931. This ascent, as well as many others, really began the space race between the USSR and the USA - way before president Kennedy's announcement of his intentions to put a man on the moon, and before the first flight of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. For years in the 1930s and 1940s, the Russians and Americans went back and forth seeking supremacy in the skies. In September of 1934, the Soviets launched a large balloon with three russian Aeronauts on board that became the first to go above 60,000 feet, beating Auguste Piccard's record by nearly 10,000 feet. Interestingly, FAI - Federation Aeronatique Internationale - the sort of Guinness Book of World Records for aviation at the time - did NOT recognize the Russian record for highest humans, because Russia wasn't a member of the FAI at the time. Which, honestly, seems kind of petty. That gave Thomas "Tex"Settle and Chester L. Fordney - American aeronauts the opportunity to claim the highest human record, and they did so in November of 1933, reaching the incredible height of 61,237 feet, and landing in a marsh in New Jersey that proved difficult to get out of. Though Settle and Fordney's flight was about 1000 feet lower than the Russian one, they had the official record for a while, because they were part of the FAI. This flight did, however, impress the Russians, and as the U.S. Naval Institute website notes, the American Pilots received a telegram: "From Maxim Litvinoff, Foreign Commissar of the Soviet Union, came this message: HEARTY CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR GREAT ACHIEVEMENT. I AM SURE THAT YOUR COLLEAGUES IN THE SOVIET UNION HAVE WATCHED WITH GREATEST INTEREST YOUR FLIGHT. MAY BOTH OUR COUNTRIES CONTINUE TO CONTEST THE HEIGHTS IN EVERY SPHERE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNIQUE. "Contest the heights"—these were the words that Litvinoff used. The Soviet intent to compete with American technology had been declared, the challenge given, the race towards space begun. Russia's response to the new American record came only two months after the Settle Fordney flight. The Osoaviakhim, with a crew of three, Fedossejenko, Vassenko, and Oussyskine, climbed to a height of 72,182 feet on 30 January 1934. During descent, however, the balloon fell, out of control, killing all on board. The Soviets said that the crew, in their enthusiasm, had simply over-expended their ballast, failing to keep enough to control their descent. American balloonists, quick to doubt that their Russian counterparts would make such a fundamental error, were more inclined to believe that the Osoaviakhim, or Sirius as it was also known, had iced up during its descent through the clouds. One factor was unclear—why the flight had been attempted at such an unfavorable time of year. Later, newspaper sources would provide an interesting, perhaps accurate, answer. That week in January was the week when the 17th All-Union Communist Party Congress was meeting in Moscow. Stalin, so the story went, anxious that a spectacular Soviet achievement take place while the Congress was in session, let it be known that he expected the Osoaviakhim to provide that achievement. When adverse mid-winter weather threatened to cancel the operation, he allegedly sent word direct: "You go ... or else!" Perhaps, then, with good reason, Fedossejenko had leaned from the hatch at take-off to cry "Long Live the 17th Party Congress! Long Live the World Revolution!" Source: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1963/august/when-race-space-began [https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1963/august/when-race-space-began] After all of this, Auguste Piccard's interests seem to have had a big, big shift. He realized that his idea of a pressurized gondola of sorts could not only allow exploration into space, but ALSO into the DEPTHS of the ocean! So he applied his pressurized gondola principles to the construction of a bathyscaphe, which is like a deep-sea submersible that is suspended by a tether below a float. After a few designs and redesigns of his model, Auguste and his son Jacques built an improved version of his bathyscaphe and in 1953, they set the all time human DEPTH record into the sea at over 10,335 feet deep. Jacques would later go on to be one of the greatest undersea explorers of all time. In January of 1960, Jacques Piccard and his friend the American oceanographer Lieutenant Don Walsh boarded the Trieste - a bathyscaphe of Jacques Piccard's design - and went to the floor of the Mariana Trench, the literal deepest place in the world. They got down to 35,797 feet in a descent that took over four hours. So not only was Auguste's son Jacques an amazing balloonist and undersea pioneer, but his grandson (and Jacque's son) Bertrand Piccard is ALSO a pretty amazing guy. As a youngster, he was - shockingly - afraid of heights, but he overcame that fear and took up hang-gliding as a 16 year old. His degree - he's still alive at 67 - is in psychiatry, but like his dad and granddad, he is also an adventurer, and is a record setter in his own right! In 1999, Bertrand and his friend Brian Jones completed the first non-stop balloon world circumnavigation in LESS THAN 20 days. NON STOP! And in less than 80 days! Think about that. This ONE guy - Auguste - a nerdy academic - at least to look at him - at one point held the all time human record for highest height ascended and deepest depth ascended, and had an equally impressive son and grandson. That's crazy fascinating, and yet not one in a hundred college students today could probably tell you much of anything about Auguste Piccard. Or, his twin brother Jean. Jean was born in 1884 in Switzerland and in 1931 moved to the US where he taught chemistry at the University of Chicago. While teaching there, he met Jeannette Ridlon, a graduate student, and they eventually got married. Jean was also an aeronaut, and a chemist like his father, but also an inventor like his brother. He invented a frost-free window that one could use in the gondola to look out and see the surroundings at extreme altitudes, and also a liquid oxygen converter that could convert liquid o2 to breathable air at high and cold altitudes. He also taught and inspired Robert R. Gilruth, who would go on to become the first director of NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center. In addition to ALL of that, he was also a pioneer in the invention of the plastic balloon AND the inventor of cluster ballooning, which refers to the use of multiple balloons in flight. This is going to be important soon when we finally get to our guy Lawnchair Larry, the inspiration for this series. Jean wasn't just an inventor, he was also a doer, and so was his wife. Jeanette obtained a doctoral degree in education in 1942, and also graduated from seminary in 1973. Jeanette and Jean both became flight pioneers in October of 1934 when they lifted off from From Airport in Dearborn, Michigan with Henry Ford and Orville Wright both watching. Jeanette was the pilot of the Piccard Gondola, Jean was in charge of scientific instruments and testing, and their pet turtle, Fleur de Lys, was in charge of security. Though they did not break the world HUMAN altitude record, two important records were broken that day. Jeanette became the first human in space - having reached the stratosphere - and also became the highest female human in history. As well, presumably, Fleur de Lys set the all time turtle altitude record, which is pretty significant for reptiles. Jeanette's highest female ever record lasted for almost 30 years until in 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first female astronaut/cosmonaut. Speaking of - here is a fascinating woman that most people have ALSO never heard of. Tereshkova, born in 1937 in the former USSR, was trained in engineering and skydiving at an early age. In 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in OUTER space, completing an orbit of earth aboard the Vostok 1 space capsule. Gagarin reached a maximum altitude of 203 miles - way beyond the capability of balloons. Russia had won the first leg of the space race. But, they were monitoring American/NASA progress, and noted that female pilots were training to be astronauts in the U.S. as part of the Mercury 13 program. This caused Nikolai Kamanin, the USSR director of Cosmonaut training, to contend, ""We cannot allow that the first woman in space will be American. This would be an insult to the patriotic feelings of Soviet women." And, true to his word, that's exactly what happened. Valentina Tereshkova, along with a group of prospective Russian female cosmonauts, went through a rigorous training and selection period, which culminated in Tereshkova being selected to be the first woman in space. On a June morning in 1963, barely two years after Gagarin's historic flight, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova climbed into a metal marble called Vostok 6, took the call sign "Chaika" ("Seagull"), and became the first woman to ride a controlled explosion into orbit. For just under three days, about 71 hours, she circled our planet 48 times, a tour count that would make Phileas Fogg jealous and most stomachs mutiny. starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov [https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/whos_who_level2/tereshkova.html] Context first: the Soviets staged Vostok 6 as a duet with Vostok 5, flown by Valery Bykovsky. They drifted to within a few miles, chattered on the radio, and gave the world a celestial his-and-hers photo-op that also happened to be serious science: how would a woman's body handle spaceflight? (Short answer: quite well, though the PR gloss was thicker than a Moscow winter.) During the flight, Tereshkova even beamed live TV back to Earth, which, in 1963, felt like sorcery with wires. She also had a "Kremlin-to-cosmos" chat with Premier Nikita Khrushchev—imagine your boss phoning you at 17,000 mph to ask how your day is going. Space [https://www.space.com/21571-valentina-tereshkova.html]European Space Agency [https://www.esa.int/About_Us/50_years_of_ESA/50_years_of_humans_in_space/First_woman_in_space_Valentina?utm_source=chatgpt.com] Some people - men and women, get carsick just driving to the store. And one can only imagine that a drive through space is stunning; but space food, especially early space food, less so. Tereshkova later reported that while attempting to eat, she vomited, chalk it up to the cuisine, not the cosmos,and then carried on with her checklist. That detail survived the censors and post-flight euphemisms and comes straight from technical reconstructions of the mission. It's the kind of gritty, unfussy note that makes the achievement feel human: this was pioneering science done in a tin ball with a menu that fought back. She was pretty cagey in reporting this incident to mission control until she was back on terra firma. russianspaceweb.com [https://www.russianspaceweb.com/vostok6_flight.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com] Her kit list also included a small lesson in logistics. Years later, Tereshkova dryly revealed that ground crews packed food, water, and toothpaste… but no toothbrush. Soviet engineering could put a "Seagull" in orbit; Soviet packing could still forget the bristles. Not having a toothbrush after barfing is a pretty big bummer, considering she was in space for 2 days, 22 hours and 50 minutes. She improvised; history moved on. (And yes, she also disclosed a far more serious glitch: the capsule's guidance was initially set to climb, not descend—later corrected from the ground. But that's another tale.) The Guardian [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/17/first-woman-in-space-valentina-tereshkova] The work itself was real. Tereshkova kept medical logs, took photographs of Earth's horizon, which was useful for studying atmospheric layers, and reported on her condition in coded language if needed. ("Palm tree" would have meant she felt unwell; "rowan tree," that she'd vomited. She didn't rely on the euphemisms; she relied on grit.) In a program where image often outran information, her notes and photos added data points to a thin file about human adaptation to space. Smithsonian Magazine [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/valentina-tereshkovas-journal-sheds-new-light-on-her-historic-spaceflight-180947687/?utm_source=chatgpt.com] Then came the bit that makes Vostok flights sound like daredevilry wrapped in bureaucracy: reentry by ejection. The capsule plunged, Tereshkova blew the hatch around 20,000 feet, and parachuted to Earth like it was just another weekend at the aeroclub, because for her, it almost was. Touchdown was safe; and she immediately became a legend, though not a very well known legend outside of Red borders. She'd spent more time in orbit than all American astronauts combined to that date, and she did it solo. Space [https://www.space.com/21571-valentina-tereshkova.html] History later tried to sand down the edges. Official Soviet assessments called her performance "adequate," which is how bureaucracies spell "historic but imperfect." Yet the record is the record: first woman in space; 48 orbits; a tough flight in a cramped sphere with a stubborn menu and a missing toothbrush, capped by a parachute landing and a phone call from the Soviet premier. It's hard to imagine a neater encapsulation of the Khrushchev era: audacious, improvised, successful—and just a bit absurd. starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov [https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/whos_who_level2/tereshkova.html]European Space Agency [https://www.esa.int/About_Us/50_years_of_ESA/50_years_of_humans_in_space/First_woman_in_space_Valentina?utm_source=chatgpt.com] If you want a moral, here's mine: the barrier wasn't broken by a flawless robot; it was crossed by a human being who did the job, handled the mess, and came home. "Seagull" flew into history. Pretty impressive, if you ask me, as are pretty much all of our pioneering aeronauts and astronauts. Tereshkova is the first woman in outer space, the ONLY woman ever to be on a solo space mission, and the youngest woman to orbit the Earth. Amazingly, Tereshkova is STILL ALIVE TODAY! And you know what? That's a good place to end. Let me pull back the podcasting curtain a little bit, and give you a peak into the process. Initially, this episode, or - rather, the last episode was supposed to be all about Lawnchair Larry and the history of wacky human flights like his - crazy guys who donned wingsuits too early for the technology to have matured, or people who attached balloons to their chairs and floated off into the ether. But, the more I researched, the more fascinating and surprising stories I found from the history of aviation, so the last episode ended, and we hadn't got to Lawnchair Larry. No problem, I thought, I guess we will lead episode #2 with him. And, yeah. So - here we are at episode two, and we haven't even gotten to the inspiration for this mini-series…which is just insane to me, but I hope you have enjoyed learning about the Montgolfier brothers and Franz Reichelt from last week's episode, and the Wonder Twins - Pierre and Auguste Piccard plus Valentina Tereshkova, from this week's episode. There's so much more to the history of flight than I had realized, and that's what I love so much about history. It's as deep as humanity. There's literally billions of untold interesting stories out there, and I hope to at least get to tell you about a few of them. Tell a friend about the show, share it on social media, whatever. A podcast like this survives by word of mouth and social media shares, so however much of that you do, I surely appreciate it! Like last week, we will close this week's episode with a song all about the first human-powered flight, a failed jump off of the Eiffel Tower, the Hindenburg Disaster and Lawnchair Larry's amazing trip across the West coast floating at 16,000 feet in his lawnchair. This song was commissioned by our Dayton, Ohio band friends Four for Flying out of the Kayfabe Municipal Airport there. Thanks for listening!

23 de ago de 202545 min

Quicksilver: The Life and Loss of Karen Wetterhahn

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