The moon is nearly full at the moment (it’s a very bright “waning Gibbous” moon to be precise) — it’s a nice coincidence that Ansel Adams made his most famous photo, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” on November 1, 1941. At the time, Adams said “I think of it as a rather normal photograph of a typical New Mexican landscape.”
The photo become incredibly popular. Adams made over 1,300 prints of it himself, not to mention all the other reproductions there were, and during Adams’ lifetime one of them sold for $71,500, which was an astonishing price for a photograph. The photo’s fame and importance may have influenced his recollection, because years later he said that he yelled at his traveling companions (his son Michael and his friend Cedric Wright) “Get this! Get that, for God’s sake! We don’t have much time!” and everyone rushed to set up the big tripod and view camera Adams used. In his first recounting, Adams had used his exposure meter to figure out the shutter speed, but in his later story he couldn’t find it, and had to do the calculation himself because “I suddenly realized that I knew the luminance of the Moon.”
Adams wouldn’t have been able to make his photo at all if he’d been a character in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” — even if there had been cameras in the 1600s. “The Tempest,” as you probably know, takes place on board a ship in a storm, and then on an island that isn’t big enough to have a mountain range in the background. But you might not know that today is the anniversary of its very first performance. November 1 was evidently a good day for theater openings, because “Othello” had been performed for the first time on the same day one year earlier.
One of the complications in “Othello” is, in a way, political, enmeshed in the government and military of Venice. It might be a tribute to the anniversary of the play that the British colony of New York was divided into 12 counties on November 1, 1683. Okay, that’s admittedly a bit of a stretch. But in that case how would you explain away all the other political boundaries that have been set or changed on November 1 in various years? In 1918, that was the day Western Ukraine was detached from Austria-Hungary. Then in 1956 in India, the states Mysore, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala were created. On the same day, Hungary withdrew from the Warsaw Pact. Then, back in India, Mysore was renamed Karnataka on November 1, 1973.
But that’s not the end of it. The nation of Antigua and Barbuda gained independence from the United Kingdom on November 1 in 1981, and the Maastricht Treaty took effect on the same day in 1993, forming the European Union. Explain to me how it can be a complete coincidence that all of that political restructuring happened on the anniversary of the opening of Othello. Not to mention The Tempest, of course.
But maybe it has to do with Adam’s famous photo instead. At least some other November 1 events are probably related. Imagine an astronomer sometime in the late 1950s admiring the Moon in the photo and thinking “you know, if we could just build the world’s biggest radio telescope, we could see things in the sky so much farther away…” And sure enough, in 1963, the Arecibo Observatory was opened in Puerto Rico. It was the world’s biggest telescope of any kind for about the next five decades.
But the Arecibo Observatory wasn’t just used for astronomy; it was also used in studying the atmosphere. You know, the place where all the weather happens that we’re not that good at predicting. We’re better than we used to be though; partly because of November 1, 1870. that’s the day the US Weather Bureau issued its first forecast. It was originally a department of the Army, because in creating the agency, Congress stated “military discipline would probably secure the greatest promptness, regularity, and accuracy in the required observations.” That evidently didn’t pan out quite the way they expected, because in 1890 the Bureau was shifted to the Department of Agriculture. That didn’t last either; it later became part of the Department of Commerce, then the Environmental Science Services Administration, and eventually the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1970, where it still is — now called the National Weather Service.
Throughout all the reorganizations and name changes, though, the Weather Bureau kept issuing forecasts. For a while they weren’t allowed to use the word “tornado” for fear people would panic. Forecasts started to improve in the 1960s when radar started to be used to track storms. A local reporter in Texas in 1961 convinced a radar station in Galveston to let him broadcast from their office when Hurricane Carla was approaching. He had an outline of the Gulf of Mexico on a transparent sheet of plastic, and when he broadcast an image of the outline held over one of the radar displays, it convinced 350,000 people to evacuate the area. It also made the reporter a national celebrity in the news business; maybe you’ve heard of Dan Rather.
When Dan Rather was working his way up in national TV news, he was well known for his big toothy grin. He’d certainly recommend that you pay attention to one of today’s official holidays: it’s Brush Day, as in toothbrush! Which he clearly uses regularly, including this morning, when he might have still had some remnants of yesterday’s birthday cake still hanging around. It might have been a cake made without eggs or milk, too, because today is also World Vegan Day. Remember to eat your spinach!
