This is the day that George Eastman received his first patent on photographic film delivered in a roll. It was 1884, and photography at that point was very much a matter of an individual craftsman putting together a camera, an amateur chemist preparing “photographic plates,” usually on glass or metal, and a self-taught photographer putting the whole operation into action to produce (with a bit of luck) an image.
When you could purchase film in a roll, though, things got considerably easier. The next step was obviously a camera to use the film — Eastman invented that too, but oddly enough not for four more years. Then it took another few years for film and cameras to be made by others in the same sizes, so everything would work together.
Claude Grahame-White faced the same sort of situation in 1910. He was an early aviator from England who was touring the US, showing off his biplane and competing in the Aviation Cup Race in Long Island — which he won. On October 14 he was flying over Washington, DC, and needed a place to land. Conventional notions of where one does and doesn’t land one’s biplane hadn’t yet been established, so Grahame-White landed on an available road right in the city. It turned out to be Executive Avenue, right by the White House.
He thought he might be arrested, but instead found that everyone in the vicinity rushed over to applaud his landing — probably the first one many of them had ever seen. When the next day’s newspapers arrived, Grahame-White found himself even more famous.
He never repeated that landing, though, and neither did anybody else. Sets of rules were established about landing areas, distances from people, and even where airplanes could be flown. No more flying over the White House, for one thing, and no more landing on city streets. After all, there have got to be norms.
There were plenty of norms and conventions around Chuck Yeager’s achievement on October 14, 1947. That’s the day he broke the sound barrier for the first time. He was flying the Bell X-1, an experimental rocket plane — but not so experimental that it wasn’t built mostly out of regular, off-the-shelf parts. He named the airplane “Glamorous Glennis” after his wife. That was typical of Yeager; he named all of his airplanes after Glennis. It became just a normal part of his approach.
Moises Alou of the Chicago Cubs was approaching a fly ball in Wrigley Field on October 14, 2003 when the infamous Steve Bartman Incident occurred. It’s a norm in baseball that fans aren’t supposed to interfere with the players, but Bartman reached for the ball and accidentally deflected it. Alou missed the catch, and the Cubs went on to lose the game and the championship series they were playing. Bartman, for having broken the norm, had to be escorted from the stadium for his own safety. You break tacit rules at your peril, especially when it comes to baseball, a game with plenty of rules, conventions, and norms.
Baseball also has a lot of statistics — the most this, the only that, the longest hit, the shortest player, the loudest stadium…all that stuff has to be measured, after all. Just like the speed of sound, or the altitude of an airplane, or the time it takes to snap a photograph. How do we agree on all those measurements? How does everything fit together? Because today is World Standards Day, that’s how!
