Pylimitics

"Simplicity" rearranged


December 14

Today, December 14th, is Monkey Day. It’s not an age-old holiday; it only dates from 2000 when it was created, almost accidentally, by two art students. They started with only the term Monkey Day, and possibly as a result, celebrations vary quite a bit among the (at least) 17 nations where it’s observed. In some locations it’s a “day when monkey business is encouraged;” elsewhere it’s a day “to learn something about these adorable and highly intelligent primates,” and in some cases “acting like a monkey” is the key. At the Lahore Zoo in Pakistan, children wear monkey masks and attend educational events about monkeys. The National Zoo in Australia works to raise awareness of endangered simian species, and to raise money for them. At the Indira Gandhi Zoo in India, people are encouraged to adopt monkeys. 

The two Monkey Day founders, Casey Sorrow and Eric Millikin, each continue to celebrate Monkey Day in their own ways. Millikin generally unveils a monkey-related art project annually, from mailing handmade Monkey Day cards to prominent recipients like Barack Obama, or a “3D Monkey Experience”. Sorrow maintains monkeyday.com, and for years published a compilation of “Monkeys in the News” on Monkey Day (it looks like he’s not doing that any more, so the job is open if anyone’s interested). The 2005 version of King Kong was released on Monkey Day, and in 2014 the producers of Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb used Monkey Day to post a short film starring Crystal the Monkey. 

In a couple of airborne examples of monkeying around, December 14, 1782 is the day the Montgolfier brothers tested their first hot air balloon in France. Their plan (which succeeded) was to ride in a balloon, and the December 14 unmanned test showed they were on the right track; the balloon floated for over a mile and descended slowly on its own. Then a mere 121 years later, the Wright brothers made their first attempts to get their flyer off the ground on December 14. It didn’t work, but the tests paved the way for their first successful flight three days later. 

Aviation eventually expanded worldwide travel, but even before that, December 14 featured some travel-related events. Roald Amundsen and his team were the first to reach the South Pole on December 14, 1911. He was interested in aviation too, and was the first to reach the North Pole by air (dirigible) in 1925. And on December 14, 1907, the Thomas W. Lawson — the biggest sailing ship ever built without any sort of auxiliary engine — ran aground. It was 475 feet long and had seven masts, and was built in 1901 (out of steel) to show that sailing ships could still compete with steamships. But it turned out to be so big that if they loaded it to capacity, it needed water deeper than most seaports had to offer, so it could only be loaded about halfway. Also, even seven masts worth of sails turned out to be too little area; crews trying to sail it called it a “bathtub” and a “beached whale”. It ran aground and broke up south of England in heavy seas. The message of the Thomas W. Lawson was that no, sailing ships couldn’t still compete with steamships.

Too much water was also a problem on December 14, 1287 in the Netherlands, when a sea wall collapsed, resulting in St. Lucia’s Flood. It’s still one of the largest floods ever recorded, even bigger than the enormous floods in Vargas, Venezuela on December 14, 1999. Flooding is exactly what the Three Gorges Dam in China is designed to stop, although it’s primarily a hydroelectric station. The biggest hydroelectric station in the world. Construction on the Three Gorges Dam began December 14, 1994, and the whole project wasn’t finished until 2015. 

If you don’t want to end up in the water on a sinking ship, and you don’t want to be flooded out, but you don’t want to spend over 20 years building a dam, maybe what you need is a bridge. That’s the approach they took in Millau, France, when the Millau Viaduct was inaugurated on December 14, 2004. As the tallest bridge in the world, it keeps you well away from the water almost 900 feet below. 

But in some cases, you have to embrace the water — or let it embrace you. Well, at least let it embrace your undersea telegraph cable, the way the Commercial Pacific Cable Company did when they started laying the first undersea cable in the Pacific ocean on December 14, 1902. The cable ran from San Francisco to Honolulu; nearly 7,000 miles. It was still operating on December 14, 1940, the day plutonium was first isolated in Berkeley, CA. They probably didn’t send a telegram to Honolulu, though; the plutonium project was about as secret as could be. 

Thomas Goldsmith and Estle Mann’s patent, which they received on December 14, 1948, turned out to be nearly as secret — but they may have wished otherwise. They patented a “cathode-ray tube amusement device” that was the world’s first video game. It was an artillery game; you’d use knobs to control the aim of a “blip” that arced from one side of the screen to the other, trying to hit a target. It stayed secret because DuMont Laboratories, where they worked, had no interest in “amusement devices”, so only the prototype was ever built. The whole thing was forgotten until 1974, when Magnavox located the patent during their search for evidence in a patent infringement lawsuit involving their Odyssey video game, which they had thought was groundbreaking, but turned out to be just a refinement of a system patented decades earlier. Descriptions of the game make it sound interesting and simple to play. Heck, monkeys would probably enjoy it. 



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About Me

I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.