There’s a very handy tool for anybody who needs to reach things like the top of a high wall, the high ceiling of a house, branches of trees that are out of reach. It’s been around for millennia: the ladder. But to use a ladder, you have to have something sturdy to lean it against and solid ground (or floor) so it doesn’t slip out from under you. Sometimes that just doesn’t work. For those situations there are “step ladders” that fold in two: one side has the steps and the other side is a built-in support.
It just so happens that in a place called Connellsville in Pennsylvania in the US, there used to be an official job in addition to things like the mayor and sheriff: they had an official Keeper of Ladders. The office was established in 1825.
Why did Connellsville need a Keeper of Ladders? There’s really nothing about the geography of that area that suggests a special reverence for ladders. The main industry of the place had nothing to do with climbing — they mostly produced coke by heating coal in “beehive ovens” — in fact, back in the 1800s, Connellsville was known as the “Coke Capital of the World.”
Carl Jung, the analytical psychologist, introduced the concept of synchronicity in the early 20th Century. It’s the idea that events can be connected in some way, even though there’s no causal link. It has a lot to do with perceptions; if you notice a coincidence, or something that seems to you like a coincidence, it can be very meaningful. Maybe you’re passing the house where a beloved relative used to live at the very moment that a song that was their favorite plays on the radio. It doesn’t apparently mean anything in the objective world, but it might be important to you. Anyway, Jung thought that synchronicity was an important thing to the human mind. Specifically, he developed techniques to explore synchronicity with his patients, and many of them reported that it was very helpful.
Jung worked with physicist Wolfgang Pauli in the 1940s and 50s, and together they expanded the idea of synchronicity to include connections with the concepts, from quantum physics, of complementarity, nonlocality, and the observer effect. Broadly speaking, those concepts have to do with the fundamental weirdness of a lot of quantum theory, like the well-supported fact that if you set up an experiment to measure, for example, the position of an electron, that’s what the electron will show you. But it’s impossible to know that electron’s momentum. And vice versa; if you measure the momentum, the position is absent, like it doesn’t exist. I told you it was weird.
Jung and Pauli collaborated on the Pauli-Jung Conjecture, which suggests there’s some sort of connection — not causal, but synchronistic — between quantum physics and human minds. It’s not a conscious sort of effect, at least it not normally. But in retrospect, just like analyzing the results of a physics experiment, you might notice coincidences in the real world that have meaning for you.
Maybe something like that happened in Connellsville, Pennsylvania around 1825. For reasons that weren’t recorded, they created the very unusual office of Keeper of Ladders. They did that just two years after a baby was born in town, on May 29, 1823. That baby was John H. Balsley, who grew up to be a master carpenter and inventor. Among other things, he was awarded two patents, in 1862 and 1870, for improved models of step ladders. They were pretty good improvements, and made him a wealthy man.
