"History portrays everything as if it could not have come otherwise. History is on the side of what happened." - Elias Canetti
This Week in History presents summaries of a few selected historical events for each calendar week of the year.
September 28 - A heartfelt salute to a mass murderer (1928)
It was the single most prolific killer ever unleashed by humankind. Capable of ruthlessly slaughtering by the millions, if not billions, it was hailed as a miracle by those who wielded it against the enemy. Few understood how it worked but multitudes were grateful that it would protect them from death, or worse. The name of this weapon of mass destruction was penicillin.
It has been less than a century since mankind groveled in fear; fear of the tiniest of creatures, the microscopic germs that could turn a slight cut into a gangrenous limb or a ticklish cough into a lethal case of plague. From time immemorial, humans were susceptible to the ravages of the bacteria that surround us, live on us, and live inside us every single moment of our lives.
Penicillin changed that. It gave us mastery over our unseen world, the ability to destroy the minute invaders that had forever imperiled our health and well-being. It was not effective against every form of microscopic life but it was enough: it had a broad reach to treat the vast majority of our common infectious ailments.
There had been previous attempts at finding the magic bullet, a general antibiotic. The most successful, and most widely used since discovery in the 1930s, were the sulfa drugs derived from coal tar. They aided the body by inhibiting growth of some organisms but there were problems: sulfa was effective only against a limited range of organisms and many people had mild to severe allergic reactions to it.
Penicillin was an altogether different compound. Rather than being bacteriostatic (inhibiting growth or multiplication), it is bactericidal, an active killer that destroys the target bacteria. It works against the cell walls of bacteria, weakening them in a way that causes their death. Unlike sulfa, very few people (less than 1%) have adverse reactions to penicillin which allowed physicians to use it widely to combat infections.
Alexander Fleming in his laboratory
It was on this day in 1928 that a Scottish scientist in London discovered what would eventually become the world's wonder drug. Researching staphylococcus, Alexander Fleming saw that one of his samples had a curious ring in the petri dish, a zone where the staph bacteria were missing. He found that penicillium mold had accidentally contaminated his sample and somehow it was killing the surrounding staph germs.
Professor Fleming was intrigued and began work on isolating and understanding the active agent produced by the penicillium mold. It was slow going, especially without a trained chemist to assist him in processes of isolation and production of greater quantities of what he would eventually name penicillin. However, he did publish the results of research in the Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1929.
The world reacted to his stunning news about the antibiotic properties of pencillin with ... [crickets]. That first paper was fairly academic without any real-world applications. Over time, he continued his investigations, proving that penicillin was non-toxic in both animals and humans and improving the stability of his compound which would make it feasible to use as a medication.
Still, the scientific and medical community failed to grasp the significance of his findings. Fleming had not excited the world in a way that couldn't be ignored: he never conducted experiments on infected animals to prove that penicillin would be an effective cure rather than a mere curiosity in test tubes and petri dishes.
That breakthrough came in 1940, the work of a team of Oxford scientists led by Dr. Howard Florey. They proved the bactericidal effect of penicillin in mice and eventually moved on to successful tests with human patients. However, production was still a major challenge with very low yields; it could never be a useful weapon in the medical arsenal until a way was found to mass produce the drug in high concentrations.
With Europe torn by war, the researchers looked to the United States for facilities and partners in their efforts. They were welcomed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s research lab in Peoria, Illinois and assembled a new team of scientists and technicians. They developed techniques to improve yields by more than a thousand percent and discovered a different strain of pencillium mold on a not-so-fresh cantaloupe that was fifty times more potent than the original sample.
By the time of the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day in 1944, drug companies were churning out more than 100 billion units of penicillin per month, saving the lives and limbs of thousands of troops. Off the battlefield, penicillin became a lifesaver as well, giving physicians the most powerful pharmacological agent they had ever had to treat a wide spectrum of disease.
Having already been knighted by King George VI in 1944, Alexander Fleming, along with two of the Oxford-Peoria researchers, was awarded a Nobel prize in 1945 for his discovery of the miracle drug that effectively defined modern medicine. In his acceptance speech, he presciently warned us:
“There is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug, make them resistant.”
Today, with overprescription of antibiotics by doctors, incomplete regimens by patients, and mass use in the livestock and poultry industries, we are in danger of losing the war against bacteria as more and more microbes become resistant to all of our antibiotics. Sir Alexander gave us an incredible gift and we have failed to use it wisely.
Keep reading below the orange historical marker about more events during the first days of October.
October 1 - The jewel in America's crown (1890)
As the miles fall behind, you wend your way up State Route 41 through the hills, climbing ever higher into the dense canopy of soaring pine trees. As you reach some 4,000-odd feet, you enter a long dark tunnel through the stony heart of a great mountain. Anticipation builds as you travel nearly a mile inside solid granite. The light at the end draws nearer and when you finally burst through there is a collective gasp of astonishment at the majestic panorama of the jewel in the crown of America's national parks. You are in Yosemite.
El Capitan, Half Dome and Bridalveil Fall (click to embiggen)
To your left, El Capitan soars 3,573 feet above the floor of Yosemite Valley. To your right, Bridalveil Fall pours its waters into a drop of more than 600 feet. In the distant center, Half Dome towers 4,737 feet above the valley, haunting in its loneliness.
“It is by far the grandest of all the special temples of Nature I was ever permitted to enter.” - John Muir
Congress and President Lincoln enacted legislation in 1864 to create the Yosemite Grant, a predecessor model for Yellowstone National Park. The Grant had limited powers for conservation with concessions allowed for logging, grazing, and homesteading; it also ceded control of Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove (home of the giant redwoods) to the State of California.
Giant redwood trees
John Muir--explorer, naturalist, and co-founder of the Sierra Club--saw that sheep overgrazing, redwood logging, and other activities would soon destroy the pristine beauty. He and other early environmentalists labored tirelessly urging Congress to strengthen the protections for this national treasure.
On this day in 1890, Yosemite National Park was established by the federal government through an act of Congress, to preserve forever the spectacular wilderness. It was not a perfect solution, with some key areas still under control of the state, but it did eliminate grazing and logging and put the United States cavalry in place to enforce the law (the National Park Service was not formed until 1916).
Muir continued his campaign for conservation, enrolling the support of Teddy Roosevelt. In 1903, he took him camping at Glacier Point, which has a breathtaking vista of the entire valley, with the hope that Teddy would succumb to the park's enchantments. Apparently his strategy worked: just a few years later, in 1906, President Roosevelt signed a bill restoring control of the state lands to the federal government and placing them within the domain of Yosemite National Park.
The park today contains thousands of lakes and ponds, 1,600 miles of rivers and streams, and 800 miles of hiking trails within its 1,189 square miles (about the size of Rhode Island). The park service has continued its efforts to restore its natural condition, including measures to reduce traffic by offering free shuttles within the valley. Although some roads pass through the park, most areas of it are accessible only by hiking.
Mirror Lake (click to embiggen)
In 1984, Yosemite National Park was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Glacier Point (click to embiggen)
“Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.” - Ansel Adams
October 2 - A supreme champion of justice (1967)
He was the grandson of a slave. As a child, he was such a lazy speller that he changed his difficult first name to make it easier to write. As an adult, he was so industrious that he racked up the highest total of cases argued before the Supreme Court, as of that time, winning more 90% of them. His brilliant legal mind brought down the shameful house of cards known as segregation. He rose to become Solicitor General of the United States of America.
As if all that wasn't impressive enough, on this day in 1967, he was sworn into office as a Justice of the Supreme Court, the first black justice in the nation's history. His name was Thurgood Marshall.
Justice Thurgood Marshall
Justice Marshall started life as Thoroughgood, a thoroughly challenging word for any little boy to spell, much less needing to spell it day in and day out. So he wisely bucked the system and changed it to Thurgood. At even a tender age, Marshall showed the initiative and determination he would need as an adult to break down the barriers to racial equality .
A native of Baltimore, young Thurgood excelled in school, graduating from high school a year early. He set off for Lincoln University in Pennsylvania...and promptly fell off the tracks. He goofed off and indulged himself in pranks and mischief, a not uncommon occurrence with a young boy away from home and supervision for the first time. Eventually he settled into his studies and took life more seriously, even getting married at the age of 21. He graduated with honors from Lincoln and set his sights on studying law.
His preference would have been to study in his hometown at the University of Maryland. Maryland, however, was a segregated state and he was told his application would be rejected. Instead, he attended Howard University's law school in Washington, DC, where he graduated first in his class.
Shortly after opening his own law practice in 1934, Marshall embarked on the road that would ultimately lead him to become one of the nation's most respected civil rights leaders as well a member of the highest court in the land. He began working with the local branch of the NAACP and soon joined its national staff, becoming its chief legal counsel. The bright young lawyer started his long run of winning discrimination cases in court, including the final appeals to the Supreme Court.
His crowning achievement as a civil rights attorney came in the landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Asked by Justice Felix Frankfurther how he defined equality, Marshall replied:
"Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time, and in the same place."
The court agreed with Thurgood that the "separate but equal" doctrine was an unjust fiction, reversing its findings in
Plessy v. Ferguson from half a century before. The Supreme Court struck down racial segregation laws in public schools as a violation of the Constitution.
Marshall went on to win numerous other important civil rights cases before President Kennedy appointed him to the federal Court of Appeals in 1961. President Johnson pried him out of his judgeship in 1965. Why? Because Johnson valued Marshall so highly that he insisted he become his Solicitor General, the senior litigator before the Supreme Court on behalf of the government.
When a seat on the Supreme Court opened up in 1967, President Johnson knew who he wanted to fill it. He nominated Marshall, much to the consternation of the Dixiecrats in his own party. Johnson knew that Marshall's experience and temperament would bring a fresh perspective to the Court and that it would be worth the fight against the bigots in the Senate. He was confirmed 69-11 and took his seat, serving 24 years as an associate justice before retiring for reasons of health in 1991.
As the more liberal justices of the Burger court resigned or passed away, Justice Marshall became more often than not a dissenter on the Court. Opposing his more conservative colleagues, he passionately wrote dissents that urged protection for those most in need of it. He never forgot that the law is meant to serve people, not people to serve the law.
"None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody - a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns - bent down and helped us pick up our boots." - Justice Thurgood Marshall
October 3 - ... nothing else can save me, S. O. S. (1906)
In traditional telegraphy, transmitted via wires, operators used the letters CQ as a special prefix to announce a general call (as opposed to a specific message which would be routed and passed on only to stations on the path to its destination), with every station intended as recipients. A general call was used for announcements about system operations, signals for standard time, and so on.
Although it originated from French, the international standard language for telegraphy, CQ had one great advantage as a general call prefix for English speaking telegraphers. The particular combination of letters would almost never be found in normal English-language transmission so it is immediately distinguished as unusual and experienced telegraphers would snap to attention.
The Marconi room of the Titanic
In landline telegraphy, French also contributed
DE (which means "from") to follow the
CQ and indicate the source of the transmission. For example,
CQ DE HQ would mean "All stations, from headquarters" and operators would know who was authorizing the coming announcement.
The new medium of radio allowed ships to take telegraphy and Morse code to sea. Wireless telegraphy, pioneered by Guglielmo Marconi, enabled captains to maintain contact with shipping companies and provide status updates. Passengers could remain in touch with business and personal affairs; one could think of it as a very basic and primitive internet of its day.
Wireless largely eliminated the mysteries of tragedy at sea. For thousands of years, the only information about lost ships was no news: the vessel simply never arrived in port and no one ever knew what had happened to it. Telegraphy let captains notify the world of crises and at the same time broadcast an appeal for help from nearby ships and ports.
To facilitate this kind of emergency communication, the letter D was added to CQ to indicate "distress." For example, in 1912 as the Titanic began its doomed struggle to survive, its telegraph operator sent out the code CQD DE MGY (MGY being the call sign for the ship), in plain English meaning "Listen up everyone, distress, from the Titanic."
While this standard was good and useful, it was not practiced outside of the English-speaking countries; in fact, it wasn't even universal within the English-speaking world as Americans used NC as their own signal of distress. The maritime community needed a truly international standard to enhance safety worldwide.
Lifeboat 6 from the Titanic
At the second International Radiotelegraph Conference, participants addressed the issue, considering the various codes already in use as well as proposed new ideas. On this day in 1906 in Berlin, the conference adopted
SOS as the international code to be used everywhere. Transmitting
SOS would require that all other stations immediately stop broadcasting, freeing up the ether for use by the ship in trouble, and obligate those in proximity to send assistance when possible.
Popular belief is that SOS stands for "save our ship" or "save our souls." The reality is much simpler: the brief pattern is readily recognizable and easy for even amateurs to memorize and use. The sequence of 3 dots, 3 dashes and 3 dots (· · · – – – · · ·), without intervening breaks between letters as in normal Morse code, was adopted because it is easy and distinct. A pattern too simple, such as dash-dot-dash, might be lost in conditions where transmission or reception are dodgy; SOS's simple but recognizable pattern could be repeated quickly and immediately understood as a cry for help.
It took a few years for the telegraphic world to fully latch onto the change. That's why Titanic started out by issuing the old but familiar emergency CQD signal; later, the radio operators conferred and decided to alternate with the new SOS message as well. But SOS eventually became recognized everywhere, to the point that even those of us who have never touched a telegraph use SOS as popular shorthand for "help!"
And that's the news for this week in history. Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.