September 29, coincidentally, is the date of some surprising coincidences. Some of them have been purposeful, at least sort of. It was this date in 1990, for example, that the Washington National Cathedral was completed. It took a while to finish — the cornerstone was laid on exactly the same date, but in 1907. That’s right, the cathedral was finally finished 83 years to the day after it was begun. In reality, it took longer, though. The final structural piece was placed in 1990, but decorative work continued for at least another 20 years.
One might well ask what a nation with “separation of church and state” as one of its founding principles, and also lacking a state religion, is doing with a National Cathedral in its capital. Part of the answer is that it’s not really the Washington National Cathedral; it’s the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in the City and Diocese of Washington. Everybody just calls it the National Cathedral — which, not exactly coincidentally, was the plan all along. The other not-quite coincidence about the place is that the core of what became the US was originally settled, in part, by groups of people trying to get away from England because it did have a state religion, the Anglican church. In the US, the Anglican Church goes by a different name: Episcopal. And the National Cathedral that isn’t really national is just that; an Episcopal church.
I don’t mean to criticize; it’s quite a lovely building if you like that sort of thing. Entirely phony, in a way; it’s designed to “look” exactly like the kind of Gothic structure you don’t find in North America because when cathedrals were really built that way, no Europeans knew North America even existed. But it can’t “be” like one of those cathedrals because the structural and construction limitations that dictated that form don’t exist any more.
But back to September 29 coincidences. The strange event that happened in 1940 in Australia was definitely not planned. There was a military flying school there, and student pilots were flying two Avro Ansons — large planes for the time, with a crew of four — in formation. It was just a practice run. But during a banked turn, one plane came down on top of the other. Nothing exploded, and the planes didn’t fly apart in pieces. They just got locked together, one on top of the other. The engines of the plane on the bottom were even still working. The pilot of the bottom plane had been injured (not too badly) when spinning propellers started slicing through parts of the planes. The pilot of the upper plane, though, discovered he could still use most of his controls (other than the engines), and actually fly the…well, planes? The multiplane? Everybody else bailed out safely, and the pilot of the upper plane, Graham Fuller — and remember, he was a student pilot, and only 22 at the time — actually landed the assemblage safely and walked away unhurt. The airplanes were even repaired.
Fuller was reprimanded and confined to barracks for two weeks after the incident. But not for the crash. He was disciplined for talking about it. But he, along with everybody else involved in the incident, graduated from flight school and flew in Europe during WWII. Fuller flew in the Middle East and Europe, and earned a Distinguished Flying Medal from the RAF. Then he was transferred back to Australia to be a flight trainer, where, in 1944, he was hit by a bus and killed. Not making this up.
September 29 was the day in 1954 that CERN, the European nuclear research agency, was formed. Exactly three years later, the Kyshtym disaster happened. It’s still one of the three worst nuclear accidents in history. only the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters have been worse. The Kyshtym accident was caused by an explosion (not nuclear) in a plutonium processing plant in the Soviet Union. Somewhat like Chernobyl, the proximate cause was the failure of a cooling system; a buildup of pressure blew the lid off a tank containing 80 tons of liquid radioactive waste. It doesn’t sound all that impressive until you find out that the “lid” was a 160-ton slab of concrete. The waste contaminated the Techa River and Lake Karachy, and an airborne plume of radiation blew hundreds of miles to the east.
But that’s not the last nuclear event coincidentally falling on September 29. This one’s not a disaster. The first commercial nuclear power station in the world was Calder Hall, in England. They were building it at the same time the Kyshtym accident happened, but continued on undeterred. Actually, with east-west relations being a bit less than cordial in those days, they might not even have known about the disaster. But Calder Hall was completed and connected to the electrical grid in 1956. And on September 29, 2007, it was demolished. You might argue that a commercial nuclear plant and a plutonium processing plant are not exactly the same, and you’d be right. But somewhat secretly, Calder Hall was a joint operation with the military, and in addition to producing electricity, it was busily producing weapons-grade plutonium as well.
Weird coincidences aside, September 29 is a good day to remember that somebody had to build the machines involved in all these events. They remember it in Russia, at least, where today is the Day of Machine-Building Industry Workers. It’s an official professional holiday — in Russia they have days celebrating quite a few professions, from Customs Workers to Programmers to Social Workers to Medical Workers. Seems like a nice tradition, even though they don’t (yet) have a Trivia Article Writers day. Of course, we could just go ahead and try to start one here, I suppose. Some projects take more than 83 years to get done, but you have to start somewhere.
