November 12 marked a significant event in the life of Warren Harding. No, not that Warren Harding. I’m talking about Warren Harding the rock climber who was the first to climb El Capitan in Yosemite by the “Nose ascent” that at one time was considered impossible. He finished the climb on November 12, 1958. Harding was nicknamed “Batso,” partly because he liked to spend days in the middle of vertical rock faces, suspended in “bat tents.”
He embraced his nickname though, and invented a number of devices for rock climbing that he called “BAT” products. Except that BAT in that case was an acronym (at least so he said) standing for “Basically Absurd Technology.”
That’s not a bad term for some things. For instance, if you have a train with no wheels that can go over 300mph, as the Shanghai Transrapid train did on November 12, 2003, you could make a good case. It doesn’t have any wheels because it’s a “maglev” train that uses magnetic levitation. It was built partly as an investment by the German companies Siemens and ThyssenKrupp, because they assumed that once they had a commercial system demonstrating how great it was to have a train with no wheels that could go over 300mph, every major urban area would want one. So far, though, they haven’t sold any.
Some Basically Absurd Technologies don’t have any aspirations of commercial success. On November 12, 1970, a military veteran on the Oregon coast was a first-hand witness to one such technology. It seemed that a 45-foot-long whale carcass had washed up on the beach, and the highway department had to figure out what to do to get rid of it. They thought that if only the carcass was in small pieces, sea birds and other scavengers would clean it all up by. themselves. The chief highway engineer was away on a hunting trip, so one of his crew, George Thorton, got the job of figuring out what to do.
Dynamite, he thought, would do it, blasting the whale into bite-sized sea bird pieces. But how much to use? He decided on half a short ton — 450 kg (this is a lot of dynamite). Meanwhile, the military veteran, who lived nearby, was keeping track of the whole situation, and took advantage of the “whale of a deal” campaign run by a local auto dealer to buy himself a new car. When he heard about Thorton’s plan, he tried to explain that in his experience (which included explosives work), all they needed was about 20 sticks of dynamite. When nobody listened to him, he wasn’t too bothered, and just went to the beach in his new car to watch. From a safe distance, of course.
Thorton, as it happened, was not very good at estimating how much dynamite was needed blow up whales. The “exploding whale incident,” as it’s still known, rained blubber and blood everywhere. The idea that the whale would become a mass of “bite sized pieces” for the birds wasn’t right either; a massive slab of blubber flattened the veteran’s new car. Meanwhile, the birds, who are said to dislike sudden loud noises, had departed the area and didn’t clean up anything.
There may have been a seed of good luck (buried very deeply) in the veteran having his car smashed by a flying chunk of whale. He would have had a newer and hopefully more fuel-efficient car by November 12, 1979. There was a hostage crisis occurring in Iran at the time, and in an effort to pressure the country to end the crisis, the US government banned all Iranian oil from the US. Basically Absurd Technology always has unintended consequences, and the 1979 Oil Crisis in the US followed.
A few years later, in 1990, November 12 was the day Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal for building the “WorldWideWeb.” He estimated it would take three months to develop a read-only version, and another three to enable it as a read-write system. He wasn’t starting from scratch; HTML and HTTP were already in development, and he was already almost done with the first web server.
Berners-Lee’s proposal wasn’t the first of its kind. There was already a system in use at CERN (where Berners-Lee worked) called “Dynatext.” It had been developed at Brown University, and CERN licensed it from “Electronic Book Technology,” which was spun out of Brown’s research institute.
Dynatext was an SGML reader and publishing tool, and was primarily used for e-books. It had all the features the “WorldWideWeb” would have years later, and more. But it had one fatal flaw; you had to get a license to use it, and pay each time you accessed a document or changed one. The physics community CERN was part of just couldn’t afford it. Electronic Book Technology lasted until 1996, when it was sold off to the “Inso” corporation, which itself folded in 2002. Legalities like licensing can be Basically Absurd Technology, too.
Warren Harding never charged licensing fees for his BAT inventions. Although he was the first to climb quite a few famous cliffs and mountains, his climbing skills were often criticized, even by him. Just doggedly (maybe absurdly) keeping at it was his thing. In his book “Downward Bound: A Mad! Guide To Rock Climbing,” he wrote “I was climbing with some hotshot Brit in Yosemite once, and he said, ‘My God, Harding, you can’t do anything!’ I said, ‘I know, but I can do it forever.’”
