As oil gushes from the broken well in the Gulf, Americans ask why our technology cannot solve such a problem.Simply a matter of focus and will, say some. Always better to trust private enterprise for such solutions, say others.
At the Battle of the Somme, on July 1, 1916 at least 21,000 men died in the first hour and 60,000 on this day! The basic slaughtering tool of the war was an American invention, the machine gun. But poison gas ( perhaps the first weapon of mass destruction) was introduced by the Germans in April 1915. They insisted the French broke the Hague Declaration of 1899 against poison gas. Mustard gas was developed and used in July 1917 by the Germans. It trumped earlier gases and
the masks used to protect troops. That same month, the United States Army let research contracts for poison gas development. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Cornell received contracts and in November 1917 a vast war-gas arsenal began construction at Edgewood Maryland. The $35.5 million plant included 15 miles of roads, 36 miles of railroad track and 550 buildings for the manufacture of a variety of poison gases. It was completed in less than a year and staffed by 10,000 civilian and military workers. Had the war lasted, this would have been one of the most important contributions by America to the war. It signaled the country's ability to mobilize and manage new technologies in a war effort. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In 1857 Matthew Arnold was offered a position, which he accepted and held until 1867,
as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Arnold became the first professor to
lecture in English rather than Latin.
"for we are here on a
darkling plain, swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight, where
ignorant armies clash by night"
Dover Beach (suggested by John Milton '57)
Grades are no longer posted in the corridors of this place. But for some, it still evokes the material of bad dreams. Fifty four years later, we come together as scholars who only remember the 2+ from Art 309. Friends cannot fathom the archane system in which a 4 is bad and a 2 is very good.
