Oligodynamic action

In 1878 a young black man named Osbourn Dorsey (who was, as near as anyone can tell, 16 at the time) applied for and was granted the first known patent worldwide for..... the doorknob. Not much is known about Osbourn, except for his patent application. Which is a shame. I want to know more about him. I mean, look at that face.

Is this the Osbourn Dorsey who invented the doorknob? I hope so.

Doorknobs have traditionally been constructed of brass or bronze. Both of these metals have a high copper component (brass=tin+copper; bronze=zinc+copper). The oligodynamic properties of copper were once dismissed as folklore. More and more research papers point out the antiseptic properties of copper. Unfortunately, many people had to fall sick before this was figured out. 

In 1976, a plague of sorts plowed through the American Legion hotel in Philadelphia. A virulent flu bacterium got into a proliferated in the airconditioning vents, spreading to hundreds and killing 34 people. Now known as Legionnaire's Disease, the outbreak caused building practices to be reformed via laws that aim to establish cleaner air and water. Copper filters and pipes are now the norms in most hospitals and other public buildings.

As bacteria ooze across these surfaces, they absorb copper molecules which disrupt their working metabolism, causing death in about an hour. Doorknobs made of brass or bronze are, therefore, self-sterilizing. This oligodynamic action is the ability of small amounts of heavy metals to exert a lethal effect on bacterial cells. This is good since one germ covered doorknob can infect half of your office in a single hour. Further studies have even shown that older, tarnished doorknobs are even more effective at eliminating Staphylococcus bacteria and even the Influenza virus. Use of brass or bronze doorknobs and push plates in public places are a simple way of reducing the spread of infection.

References

Kean, Sam (2011) The Disappearing Spoon. New York: Little Brown & Company

Michels, H., W. Moran, and J. Michel, (2008) "ANTIMICROBIAL PROPERTIES OF COPPER ALLOY SURFACES,  WITH A FOCUS ON HOSPITAL-ACQUIRED INFECTIONS" International Journal of  Metalcasting 

Noyce, O. et al. (2006) "Potential Use of Copper Surfaces to Reduce Survival of Epidemic Metacillan-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus in the Healthcare Environment" Journal of Hospital Infection.

Kajigaya, Naoko et al. (2015) "Assessment of contamination using an ATP bioluminescence assay on doorknobs in a university-affiliated hospital in Japan" BMC Research Notes.

Shimoda, Tomoko et al. (2015) "ATP bioluminescence values are significantly different depending upon material surface properties of the sampling location in hospitals" BMC Research Notes.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/one-germy-doorknob-can-infect-half-your-office-within-hours/
http://www.handsomehandles.co.uk/blog/6/the-invention-and-history-of-door-knobs

https://www.tbks.co.uk/blog/ask-the-expert/the-history-of-door-knobs/

https://www.reference.com/history/o-dorsey-c2356d21b129dfc1

Dorsey's patent application

Hippopotamuslessness

sketch of a hippo I did at the zoo in Portland around 5/2012

you can call it cynicism or you can call it realism, but it's the attitude that's given us a hundred years of hippopotamuslessness.
                                                            -Jon Mooallen-

In the 1890s, the United States ran into trouble, meat-wise. There was unfettered European immigration driving the population up. There was poor land management, leading to massive cattle die-offs during the blizzard of 1897. Upton Sinclair published his book, The Jungle, in 1904 about slaughterhouses. Newspapers across the nation debated the Meat Question.

Bridges of Eggs from Peru to SF

Puente de Piedra, Lima, Peru. photo from creative commons.

In 1608, the architect Juan del Corral designed and built a bridge over the Rio Rimac, connecting Lima to the district of San Lazaro. The bridge is still standing today. This is cool just based on time itself. Cool that a bridge can be built of stone and still be standing, still be being traveled upon over 400 years later. What is even cooler is that the mortar for the bridge was mixed not with water, but with an estimated 10,000 egg whites. Not chicken eggs, sea bird eggs. People went out on cliffs and to islands, harvested ten thousand sea bird eggs with the intent of mixing mortar for a bridge. Though officially the Bridge of Stones (Puente de Piedra) it is sometimes referred to as the Bridge of Eggs.

In the 1840s & 50s, a man named Doc Robinson decided that the Farallones Islands, located 27 miles off of the coast of San Francisco, were the perfect spot to harvest bird eggs. San Francisco grew in leaps and bounds during the Gold Rush years - years in which eggs were scarce. Folks got to the golden coast either by taking a boat all of the way around South America, or overland. In both cases, any chickens would be eaten long before San Francisco showed on the horizon. Shortages lead to high prices. One chicken egg sold for $1 each - the equivalent of thirty dollars in 2019 money.

Doc Robinson and his hired men would take a small (less than 20 ft) boat across the choppy, shark-infested waters, to the Farallones. There are no beaches on all but one of the jagged rocks, just smaller rocks to haul the boat up on to. Then they would scale the cliffs to pull eggs from the nests of Common Murres, Urea aalge.

my quick sketch of Common Murres, both in and out of the water.

Goofy-looking, penguin-shaped birds, the Common Murre always seems to need to run across the surface of the water before their small wings achieve enough lift to pull them from the ocean waves. Their eggs are blue with yolks twice the size of chicken eggs - and also fiery red in color. The bird numbered in the hundreds of thousands before Robinson's enterprise led to the near-mythic San Francisco Egg Wars. Italian eggers headed out to the "Islands of the Dead" to cash in on the Egg Rush. Robinson's hired men held them off of the beach with guns. Men died, fortunes were made, and the legends became the stuff of comic books (literally - check out this out: https://sfnhs.com/2011/08/31/eggs-and-more/)

a pile of stolen eggs waiting to be loaded on the boat. Despite the fact that the rough seas caused the eggers to lose as much as half of their plunder during every trip back to the mainland, they kept at it.  Photo by Arthur Bolten.

It was not uncommon for eggers to fall to their death from the cliffs. Common Murre populations plummeted to less than 30K. The western faction of the Audubon Society was founded to help these sea footballs, pushing through a government mandate in 1881 prohibiting further egging on the islands. It still happened for years after. The Nature Conservancy estimates that murre populations only really began to recover in the last decades of the 20th century.

I keep trying to picture going to the equivalent of a diner in Gold Rush San Francisco and being served a plate of pink scrambled eggs. If Clark Gable & Jeanette MacDonald's 1936 film San Francisco (set during 1906) had been filmed in color, would anyone have gotten the egg color detail correct? A pink Hangtown Omelet* anyone? (*eggs, bacon & oysters).

References:
Bridge of Eggs https://hruk.biz/bridge-of-eggs-in-peru/
http://www.augnet.org/en/history/places/4205-ecuador-quito/
Gold Rush Satirist https://www.sfchronicle.com/chronicle_vault/article/Gold-Rush-satirist-impresario-and-Farallones-13509804.php 
High Egg Prices http://time.com/4149595/farallon-egg-wars/
Girabaldi and the Farallon Egg War http://faralloneggwar.blogspot.com/
San Francisco's Egg Basket http://faralloneggwar.blogspot.com/

Lower Lake County

In 1876, Stephan Nicolai, a stonemason, built the Lower Lake County stone jail. The stone was quarried locally and reinforced with iron. It may be the smallest jail in the United States - only one room. It is currently registered as California Historical Landmark #429. 

The cooler part of this building's story comes from the workers Nicolai hired to help with the building. Theodore and John Copsey lived in the quicksilver mining town of Lower Lake. Once the jail was done and they got paid, they went into town to celebrate at the saloons. They got drunk and rowdy, were arrested and became the first to be interred in the jail they helped build. As they sobered up, they remembered that they had not finished the roof properly. They literally raised the roof and became the first to break out of the jail. Not a bad record.

References

http://www.donaldlaird.com/landmarks/counties/400-499/429.html

https://noehill.com/lake/cal0429.asp

https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/51108

Folks I Admire, post #1

From 1962 (or 1966, depending on the source) to 1980 the only black female licensed architect in California was Norma Sklarek. She was born in New York, educated at Barnard College and Columbia. In 1954 she took the entire seven-part architecture exam in 4 days and passed on the first try. She worked for the Dept. of Public Works, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, moved to LA to work at Gruen & Assoc. She worked there for 20 years, becoming their first female and first black director. In 1985 she was elected a fellow of the AIA and she co-founded the first all-female architect firm - Siegel, Sklarek & Diamond. She retired in 1992 and was appointed to the California Architects Board where, among other things, she was a juror for the CA Architect Exam.

Today there are only about 400 black women architects.  This is such a tiny fraction of the industry, it is sad. Detroit's Tiffany Brown wants to change this through recruitment and mentoring. Check out her Urban Arts Collective, and Hip-Hop Architecture camps! Having grown up just outside of Detroit with a dad who taught Urban Planning, I heartily support Brown's approach to recruiting change-makers and architectural designers from the people who live there.

Resources

Biography.com editors (2014) "Norma Sklarek Biography

https://www.biography.com/people/norma-sklarek-7326

Morton, Patricia "Pioneering Women of American Architecture"

https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/norma-merrick-sklarek/

NCARB (2018) "The Distinguished Career of Norma Sklarek
https://www.ncarb.org/blog/the-distinguished-career-of-norma-sklarek

Sisson, Patrick (2017) "400 Forward wants to train the next generation of black women architects" Curbed. https://www.curbed.com/2017/10/26/16551576/architecture-diversity-400-forward-tiffany-brown

Library Fun Fact #5

This weekend marks the 10th anniversary of the removal of the Berkeley Tree sitters. For 21 months, the longest urban tree-sit, a group of concerned citizens literally took to the trees. A grove of coast live oak, pine, and other trees were slated for demolition to make room for an expansion of the University of California, Berkeley athletic stadium. I remember driving underneath them, past the police cars and the shouting. I remember the road getting narrower as first one fence, and then a second was erected around the grove. In this case, fences did not make good neighbors.

According to Berkeley City law, it is unlawful to remove coast live oaks. The University, however, is state-owned land and a judicial exception was made. Most of the tree-sitters either tied themselves to the trunk of the tree they were in or lived on a 6'x6' platform nailed to branches. Food and other necessities were provided by the ground help and transported by buckets. This, to me, is no way to live in a tree. 

Charlie Greenwood would agree. A retired Silicon Valley engineer,  Greenwood revolutionized treehouse building with his invention of the GL bolt. A 6" long, nearly 2" thick bolt sticks out of the tree like a new limb and is strong enough to hold 9,000 pounds. This allows for treehouses to be built in the space between two or more trees, dividing the weight more evenly. He has even gone so far as to write up building code specifications for treehouses. 

Spend your next vacation reliving your childhood dream of escaping into the trees:  http://treehouses.com/joomla/index.php/treesort/accommodations 

References

Dalton, Melissa (2016) "The Architects of the Treehouse Movement" 1859 Oregon's Magazine  https://1859oregonmagazine.com/think-oregon/art-culture/architects-avant-garde-tree-house-movement/

Jolin, Amy (2008?) All About Treehouses https://www.mondopub.com/Pages/articles/Days_9-12_All_About_Treehouses_p14-23.pdf

Nelson, Pete (2004) Treehouses of the World New York: Abrams.

Peacemaker Treehouses (2008) So You Want to Install a Garnier Limb?  https://peacemakertreehouses.wordpress.com/tag/greenwood/

treehouseengineering.com - Greenwood's website, complete with proposed treehouse building code.

Wikipedia links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Berkeley_oak_grove_controversy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treehouse_attachment_bolt

Library Fun Fact #4

The heat of summer can lead one to think about popsicles and iced desserts. I know I do. I have even gone so far as to have a popsicle "machine" in my freezer year round. The Zoku Quick Pop maker has a casing that must contain some sort of coolant in it. It is probably hazardous to one's health, but it sure does make great popsicles!! I can take oranges from the tree in my yard, squeeze the juice out of them and have popsicles in less than 20 minutes. Cold coffee pops can be made with just the 2 oz. left in the bottom of the pot. Or I can make "adult" popsicles with liquor in them. The whole set up is super fun for experiments.
My grandmother used to refer to the refrigerator as the "icebox," from, I am guessing, when the pre-electric design involved putting a large block of ice inside an upright ice chest to keep things cold. The opening of the Disney movie, Frozen, shows strapping Scandinavians singing and harvesting ice to sell. Which always makes me wonder which country makes the most money selling ice?

It came as a total surprise to me that by 1000 b.c.e., the leader of the Mediterranean ice trade was Persia - modern day Iran. How did these desert dwellers dish out dessert? Using a fun architectural structure known as a yakhchal, or ice pit.

An extremely rough sketch that helped me visualize this amazing structural type.

They varied in size, but most were domed structures up to 60ft in diameter. There would be an air vent at the top. Inside a square subterranean pit would be dug and lined with sarooj. Sarooj is a traditional mortar made from clay, sand, ash, limes, egg whites and goat hair. This particular combination of ingredients conducts no heat, keeping the desert fire from the dessert ice. Often large walls were built around the east, south & north sides of the yakhchal to block out ambient heat from the sun. On the north side, thin channels would be lined with the sarooj. In the winter months when desert nights are freezing, the channels would be filled with water. When ice formed, it would be chopped up and placed inside the yakhchal as seed ice.
If the location of the yakhchal was lucky, there would be a qanat running underneath it. Not only is qanat a great Scrabble word, it is an underground irrigation trench. From this mini man-made river, columns would be opened up to the inside of the yakhchal. The cold air from the flow of water would be pushed up through the column, continuing to cool the interior year-round.

I found some cool online recipes for Persian Iced Delights that have likely been in use since 400 b.c.e. Frozen noodles anyone? I also found articles like this one with recipes and the knowledge that ice cream came to America from Europe, who got it from Persia in the 8th Century! Make your own and be a part of history.

References

Hosseini, Bahareh, and Ali Namazian.(2012) "An overview of Iranian ice repositories, an example of traditional indigenous architecture" METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture, 29(2)  http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A318999369/AONE?u=msu_main&sid=AONE&xid=3cf7630f. Accessed 23 Aug. 2018.

Library Fun Fact #3

Stanley Hart White sketch

In 1938 E.B. White (author of Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, One Man's Meat, and co-author of my favorite, The Elements of Style) wrote in a letter, "I guess everyone has crazy brothers and sisters. I know I have. Stan, by the way, has taken out a patent on an invention of his called Botanical Bricks." Stanley Hart White taught landscape architecture at the University of Illinois. His bricks were described in the patent application as, "a method for producing an architectonic structure of any buildable size shape or height, whose visible or exposed surfaces may present a permanently growing cover of vegetation.”

From the creative commons

This idea of a green wall or vertical garden was intended for use in civic areas and world's fair type situations. Beginning in the late 1990s, it was brought back into fashion by the French botanist, Patrick Blanc. Blanc's work on tropical rainforests brought a new perspective to an older idea. By employing a wider variety of plants, integrating more bromeliads and tillandsias (who can capture their moisture from the air), plants that grow in caves, and other botanical treasures, Blanc designs vertical gardens that can survive in the concrete canyons of modern cities.

A photo I took of a vertical garden in Baltimore, MD.

References

Blanc, Patrick (2008) The Vertical Garden. NewYork: Norton & Co.

Hindle, Robert (2012) "A vertical garden: origins of the Vegetation-Bearing Architectonic Structure and System (1938)" The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign papers. 

Hindle, Robert (2013) "Stanley Hart White and the question of ‘What is Modern?’" in Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 33:3, 170-177.

Library Fun Fact #2

In 1774, the Scottish physician, James Lind, then an officer in the British navy, conducted the first systematic study that proved that vitamin C cures scurvy. The navy then made barrels of lemon juice a mandatory item on all ships. By 1880, they placed 1.6 billion barrels on board. 

All of these lemons had to come from somewhere. Citrus is native to southeast Asia. It traveled trade routes, being cultivated in the Mediterranean climate. Lemons, which are a cultivar cross (citron x sour orange) were mostly grown on the island of Sicily in the late 1700's. Far enough from mainland Italy, Sicily was not directly affected by Italy's war with Napolean. Instead, they fell into political turmoil of their own, being mostly run by families in a feudal-type arrangement. 

Lemon growers often fell victim to neighboring families, who would sneak into their orchards at night and strip the trees. Growers built walls around their trees. They increased the height of the walls. They added rocks or glass shards on top of the walls. They had guard dogs. Even if they got this far, shipments to the warehouses were often robbed. Guards were hired. 

Then the family guards began to extort the farmers to provide lemon crop protection. If you didn't pay, your crop would disappear and you would be left with nothing. And *that* is where the Sicilian mafia began. Really.

When life gives you lemons, create your own mafia.

References

Dimico, Arcangelo, Alessia Isopi & Ola Olsson. (2017) Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: The Market for Lemons. Journal of Economic History, v.77(4).

Stone, Daniel. (2017) The Citrus Family Tree. National Geographic magazine, accessed online https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/02/explore-food-citrus-genetics/

Library Fun Fact #1

Lately, at my job, I've been doing a segment at office meetings called the Library Fun Fact. Mostly, they are architectural (because of where I work). This is the first I've remembered to blog about. Enjoy!

Today's Library Fun Fact involves the Columbian Ground Squirrel, Urocitellus columbianus. These one pound rodents are found in alpine and sub-alpine meadows of the Rocky Mountains. They live in large colonies of 60+ individuals, eating flowers, seeds, fruits, and bulbs. They are often food for brown bears, coyotes, badgers, martens, pumas, and hawks. Due to the extremes in temperature of their home base, they often hibernate 70% of the calendar year.
The San Luis Valley of Colorado was first settled in the 1800's (before it was Colorado, back when it was still Mexico, and sandwiched between Louisiana and California). Architects and builders in the group wanted to make adobe walls with the optimum thickness to keep the people cool in the summer and warm in the winter. They measured the depth of the hibernaculum of the abundant ground squirrel colonies. The average depth of the rodent homes was then used as the optimum width of the walls of peoples homes.
How cool is that?

References: Animal Diversity Web, accessed 6/19/18. http://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Spermophilus_columbianus/

Beynus, Janine (2008) A Good Place to Settle, in Biophilic Design, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons.