The Keystone Arch

"The Romans were the first builders in Europe, perhaps the first in the world, fully to appreciate the advantages of the arch, the vault and the dome." This statement, attributed to D.S. Robertson, author of Greek and Roman Architecture, 2nd edn., Cambridge 1943, p.231, is cited in Wikipedia's entry entitled "Arch."

Note, in this quotation, the correct use of an un-split infinitive, "fully to appreciate." Colloquially we may say, "to fully appreciate," but, if we have old-school training ("never split an infinitive"), we remember, somewhere in the back of our mind, that this usage is often seen as incorrect.

So, moving on.

A post-and-beam span, that is, an opening framed by two posts with a beam across the top, supports itself by distributing the weight of gravity from the center of the beam to the two sides and down the posts.

The keystone arch cannot support itself until the keystone, the wedge-shaped puzzle piece at the apex, is put into place. The arch is first built on top of a framework, called a "centering." The centering is removed when the arch becomes a true compression form with the placement of the keystone.

The arch supports itself by distributing the weight of gravity from the wedge-shaped keystone to the next wedge-shaped voussoir and the next, on down to the springers at the spring line. The spring line is defined by the two points at the base of the arch and the theoretical center point, "drawn" from the two lower points of the keystone and crossing at the spring line. The springers have trapezoidal tops and level bottoms to continue spreading the weight of gravity down the posts.

We have an example of an early keystone arch in the northern gate, one of seven, in the walls encircling Perugia, the capitol city of Umbria. The walls were built of limestone block between 600 and 300 BCE to protect the city from the enemy, Rome, about a hundred miles away.

The original settlers of Perugia, or in Latin, Perusia, were the Umbri, an ancient--and perhaps the most ancient--tribe in Italy.  They spoke Umbrian, an Italic language related to Latin and Oscan. But their neighbors in Etruria, the Etruscans, spoke an unrelated language, which some scholars now believe may be a Tyrsenian language like the Raetic language of the Alps and the Lemnian language of Lemnos.

By the time the Roman general Fabius Maximus Rullianus led a successful expedition against Perugia in 310 or 309 BCE, the Umbrians had intermingled with the Etruscans and Perugia counted itself as one of the twelve cities of the Etruscan League. According to Livy, our source in this matter, the Perugians lost the battle and were accorded a thirty-year truce with Rome.

In a rebellious move, Perugia took part in the Second Samnite War against Rome in 295 BCE and had to renegotiate the treaty. By 216 and 205 BCE, the city found it prudent to help Rome in the Second Punic War.

Then the city fell a third time, when Mark Antony's younger brother and supporter Lucius sought refuge there in 40 BCE. Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, besieged the city and Lucius was compelled to surrender. The city was burned to the ground, but, based on archaeological evidence, rebuilding began almost immediately.

Soon thereafter, as part of a public-works program, Octavian repaired the wall and the ancient northern gate of Perugia, whose Umbrian or Etruscan name, as far as I can tell, we do not know. He rebuilt the keystone arch that the Perugians had originally built and this gate soon became known as the Augustan Gate, Porta d'Augusta.

So, as they often did, the Romans adopted the keystone arch from the people they conquered and used it widely in bridges and aqueducts, triumphal arches and gates, vaults and domes.

Keystone Cops (or Kops)

The Keystone Cops starred in silent movies made by Canadian-born and American-based director and actor Mack Sennett (1880-1960) between 1912 and 1917. Sennett's company in 1912 was called Keystone Pictures Studio; hence, "Keystone Cops."

Slapstick--humor involving someone who, by his or her own clumsiness or ineptitude, becomes the butt of the joke--is as old as comedy. Someone on stage or film slips on a banana peel or takes a custard pie in the face or gets a whack on the rear end and we laugh uproariously. If we have gone out of our way to refine our sensibilities, we laugh uproariously, but still feel bad about making fun of our hapless victim.

The term "slapstick" comes from the battachio of Italian Commedia dell'Arte, a wooden prop of two slats held together at one end so that when one player smacks another player, the battachio makes a loud noise that sounds like it hurts, but does not.

To show slapstick in movies, Sennett used some special effects. He filmed at slow speed so that the action looked faster than it was, and he had every fourth frame of film edited out so that the action looked jerky. I ran into a YouTube clip of a remastered Sennett film, which remastering in part involved fixing filming speed. But if these editors took out Sennett's special effects, I'm thinking that Sennett would not have wanted fixes like that.

In the Keystone-Cop version of slapstick, uniformed policemen chase a bad guy, but instead of calm thinking, quick action, and speedy resolution, they run off in all directions in disarray. The Keystone Cops first appeared in a comedy short, Hoffmeyer's Legacy, 1912 and became popular after their appearance in another short, the Bangville Police, 1913. Starting 1914, they no longer played starring roles, but became a background troupe for Charlie Chaplin and other silent-film stars.We know the names of the actors who played the first Keystone Cops, but the cast changed from movie to movie.

Here is the logo for Sennett's company in 1912:

As for the significance of the keystone in the logo, I will take that up in a later post. For now, let me just remark that Sennett probably chose "keystone" because it is a weighty term from classical architecture. The keystone is the final piece that allows a keystone arch to stand alone, without the scaffolding needed to construct it.

OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)

First, a joke, told by my friend Beth:

"I have CDO."

"What's that?"

"OCD with the letters in the right order."

The other day I was working on creating a bad-guy character for the thriller I'm writing. The story is set in 1952. I decided to make Del read every piece of writing that came his way, which is something I find myself doing. As if he, and I, could put together the meaning of the universe by assembling a complete book of these scraps.

For example, here is Del before he assassinates one of our heroes:

In the bathroom, he filled the hotel glass with tap water and dropped in two Alka-Seltzer tablets. “Keep tightly closed in a cool, dry place,” admonished the label on the bottle. When the drink had almost stopped fizzing, he chugged it down. Maybe that would take the edge off this hangover. 

He shaved, showered, parted and combed his hair, and put on a suit and tie.

Some breakfast couldn’t hurt either, he thought.

He went downstairs to the hotel restaurant and sat in a red leatherette booth at the window looking onto the street.

His waitress, “Dodie,” according to her nameplate, came over with the menu and the coffee pot. He turned over his coffee cup so that she could fill it for him. On the bottom of the cup, it said, “Buffalo China.”

Dodie poured his coffee. “What can I get for you, sir?” she said.

He looked at the menu. “I’ll have two eggs over easy, two pieces of buttered white toast, hash browns, sausage links.” He kept the menu so that he could read the whole thing while he ate.

Dodie brought his breakfast, kept his coffee cup full, and without a word replaced the heavy white napkin—embroidered in blue with the words “Colonial Inn”—that he had dropped.

And, after the assassination:

Now it was time to call Chaz and let him know that General Brink was dead, the fixers could clean up his office, and the Pentagon press staff could release their version of the story.

He dialed nine to get outside the hotel switchboard and then zero to get a telephone operator.

“I want to place a long-distance call to Saigon, the U.S. Embassy. I’m calling for Chaz Darnell.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll put you through.”

He lit a Lucky Strike. He listened to a succession of clicking noises as operators connected him from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Honolulu, Honolulu to Saigon. He picked up the first cigarette from the ashtray and lit another one from the first.

He idly read the package. “Lucky Strike—It’s Toasted—Cigarettes.” He always bought himself a couple of packs of Lucky Strikes when he visited the states. These cigarettes were so much milder than the cigarettes he could get in Saigon.

“Chaz Darnell here.”

“It’s Del.”

“Hail the conquering hero!”

“It’s done.”

“I’ll take care of everything else, then.”

Maybe I've reached a sort of pact with my own quirks and oddities. My new motto: make my own idiosyncrasies work for me.

Zero

Leonardo Bonacci (c. 1170 to c. 1250) also known as Fibonacci (or Filius--son of--Bonacci), was an Italian medieval mathematician. First, he introduced Arabic (originally Indian) numerals to the West. Second, he described the "Fibonacci number sequence," a beautiful and naturally-occurring spiral progression found in shells and flowers, even galaxies, and reproduced by artists from ancient Greek to post-modern as an ideal of proportion, the Golden Mean.

In 1202, Fibonacci published Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation), the first section of which introduces the Hindu–Arabic numeral system that he had encountered in the North African city, Bejaia. He tells us that the numerals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 come to us by way of India. The sign 0, he says, which "the Arabs call zephyr," صِفْر ‎(ṣifr, “nothing, cipher”), was originally śūnya in Sanskrit: शून्य.

Disclaimer: the first time I learned about the Fibonacci sequence was on February 25, 2005, when I watched the first season, sixth episode, "Sabotage" of a TV show called Numb3rs. Consider yourself  warned: I "understand" math, in a wordy sort of way, and I love the concepts, but I am not a mathematician. I hope you will check out this page about the Numb3rs episode, in which Charlie, the math-geek hero, explains more about the Fibonacci sequence.

If you had to learn to read and write Roman numerals, and, as a proponent of Western culture I really hope you did, you can imagine how difficult it would be to perform simple mathematical operations like addition and multiplication without the concept of zero or the idea of a numeral for a place-holder with no value of its own.

The first known English use of the word zero was in 1598, from French zéro, Italian zero (a contraction of zefiro), and Old Spanish cefr.

I promise nothing, but, in my research, I have run into a book by Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Viking, 2000) and a Scientific American article, "The Origin of Zero," by John Matson, August 21, 2009.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

The Greek historian Herodotus (484-425 BCE), the Alexandrian scholar Callimachus (ca. 305-240 BCE) and other classical writers list the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the great accomplishments and tourist attractions of known civilization at the time. All are within a 1000 x 1300 square-mile-area in the Eastern Mediterranean.

• The Great Pyramid of Giza
• The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
• The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
• The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
• The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
• The Colossus of Rhodes
• The Lighthouse of Alexandria

Although the pyramid of Giza is the only wonder still in existence today, we know the locations of all the wonders except the hanging gardens of Babylon. (I discuss the pyramid of Giza in two posts from August 2014.)

Dr. Stephanie Dalley, Research Fellow (retired) in Assyriology at the Oriental Institute at Oxford University, published the Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon (Oxford: Oxford University Press) in 2013 and wrote and hosted the TV show for the series, Secrets of the Dead, "The Lost Gardens of Babylon," in 2014. She has uncovered evidence that would place the hanging gardens not in Babylon, present-day Hillah in central Iraq, but a little over three hundred miles to the north in war-ravaged Mosul.

Ever one for the figurative properties of language, I learned that her deduction is based in part on the metaphorical use of a word in the Assyrian cuneiform writings of Sennacherib, king of Assyria (705-681 BCE). The word refers to the distinctive spiral markings of the date palm to describe Sennacherib's feat of engineering, the so-called Archimedean screw.

Along with a sophisticated system of canals and aqueducts, the screw, turned by men or animals, raised an estimated 300 tons of water a day from the Euphrates to the hanging gardens, which, like the city walls, were about forty feet above river level.

Until now, we had thought that Archimedes of Syracuse (ca. 287-212 BCE) discovered the screw, which makes it possible to lift water, grain, and the like mechanically and in quantity from lower to higher ground. Now, thanks to Dr. Dalley, we are thinking that a king from 400 years earlier dreamed up this machine by musing on the spiral pattern on the date trees growing in his garden.

Tempest in a Teapot

In my post of April 18, 2015, I leveled a criticism at Helena Hamerow for a footnote in her book, Rural Settlements and Society in Anglo-Saxon England, and another at myself, for inexact wording that did not fully explain the uses of the moldboard plow in agriculture. If we are going to understand our history, we need to be specific and exact about the technological advances that shaped it.

Well, Hamerow returns to the moldboard plow later on in her book. (And serves me right for writing a post on a book I hadn't finished yet.) She says, "The greater frequency of certain arable weeds indicates . . . that heavier soils were increasingly being brought under cultivation in the Mid to Late Saxon period, something which could not have been readily achieved without the use of heavy ploughs pulled by teams of oxen . . . This implies the use of mouldboards and strip fields . . . At Drayton (Oxfordshire), 'broad, parallel stripes of clayey material'--dated archaeomagnetically to the Late Saxon period--were recognized as representing furrows created by a moldboard plough, producing 'a very distinctive sandwich of inverted alluvial clay, gravel and redeposited soil.'"

Too boring for you? Sorry, but I needed to exonerate Hamerow and set the record straight.

The Ice Palace

My new heroine, Rosalie, readily told me several things about herself, and I think she could do that because she is "born," so to say, to live out the story I am creating for her. (My old heroine, Mrs. Shepard, would not even tell me her first name.)

Rosalie was born in Michigan, moved to Washington, D.C., with her parents and sister, and graduated from a good women's college nearby. In 1950, she applied for a job in the diplomatic corps and ended up working for Edmond A Gullion, the U.S. Chargé d'affaires at the American embassy in Saigon.

Soon after she moves to Saigon and finds an apartment near her office in Cholon, Saigon's Chinatown, Rosalie's parents are killed by a drunk driver in a head-on car crash in Washington, D.C. Rosalie returns home for the funerals and takes her sister Penelope, known as Pen, back to Saigon with her. Pen is only 19, not independent enough to live by herself in the states.

Do you hate it when fiction writers start talking about their characters as real people? Me, too. But I'm pretty sure it's an authentic experience, and in this case I'm going to take it as a good sign. Rosalie is going to help me tell her story.

Rosalie spent her early years in Michigan, where it was snowy and icy in winter and hot and muggy in summer. Now she lives in Saigon, where the summer monsoon season takes the weather to a whole new, tropical, level of hot and muggy.

In one scene I am thinking about, she feels especially hot and sticky, so she imagines an ice palace like the people in her home town in Charlevoix used to build in the winter. She thinks about dressing for the cold, stomping on the floor to pack it down, and putting the ice blocks into place for the foundation. Later, in her mind, she walks around inside the ice palace until she becomes deliciously chilled.

I looked up Ice Palace in Wikipedia and came up with this wonderful old bit of Russian history. In 1739 to 1740, during a particularly cold winter in St. Petersburg, the Empress Anna Ivanova (1693-1740) was celebrating Russia's victory over the Ottoman Empire. She called for an ice palace to be built. She ordered a prince, now widowed, who had angered her by marrying a woman of a different faith, to become one of her court jesters and an ugly maidservant to become the other; the two were married.

On the wedding night, the empress sealed the newlyweds up in a bedchamber in the ice palace. The couple would have died overnight of the cold, except that the bride had managed to trade her pearl necklace for a guard's sheepskin coat.

According to the Wikipedia article, we know that the architect was Pyotr Yeropkin and the construction manager was Georg Kraft, and we still have Kraft's detailed description of the ice palace (only in Russian, as far as I can see).

Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to tell the story in the book I am writing about Rosalie. So I am regaling you with it here.