Two newly acquired U.S. first day covers on earthquakes

I recently purchased two covers with themes of U.S. earthquakes, so I thought I'd highlight them today.

Yesterday there was a significant (magnitude 6.9) earthquake in Croatia, near the capital of Zagreb. I used to teach about earthquakes and seismology in my geophysics courses at Franklin &  Marshall College. I set up and was in charge of an earthquake seismograph, which in recent years has evolved into a station managed by the Lamont-Doherty Seismographic Network. In the early years of cooperation with Lamont, I started and maintained a blog about earthquakes and seismology, The Shaking Earth (still up, but inactive). 

Cover commemorating the 1964 Great Alaskan Earthquake

One cover I bought was prepared by the Anchorage Philatelic Society  after the Easter Sunday Alaska earthquake of March 27, 1964, which occurred less than two months before the Anchorage Stamp Show (APEX). The magnitude 9.2 Anchorage earthquake remains the most powerful earthquake recorded in North American history, and the second most powerful earthquake recorded in world history (after the 1960 Chilean temblor). The cover features the Red Cross Centenary issue stamp (Scott #1239), an Anchorage cancel, and the Apex cachet.

The second souvenir cover has a cachet of the Loma Prieta earthquake and a pictorial cancellation of the flag stamp (Scott #2280). The quake of Oct. 17, 1989, with an epicenter near Santa Cruz, California, ironically occurred immediately before a scheduled World Series game between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's. The magnitude of 6.9 was about 1000 times less energetic than the Alaskan earthquake, but caused significant damage ($5 billion worth) in the major metropolitan Bay Area. It was the second costliest earthquake in U.S. history, behind only the 1994 San Fernando earthquake ($30 billion of damage) in the Los Angeles area.

Cover commemorating the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake

It turns out that no U.S. postage stamps have commemorated earthquakes. Other countries have done so, including the issuance of so-called semipostals, where a surcharge was added to the sales price of the stamp to raise money for relief efforts. There was a short article on Seismological stamp collecting, by Carl A. Von Hake, Earthquakes and Volcanoes, 4(5), 1972, p. 14-19. It lists postage stamps issued by various countries for the following earthquakes: Jamaica (1907), Nicaragua (1931), Argentina (1944), Greece (1953), Yugoslavia (1963). Additional earthquakes commemorated by stamps listed in Seismic Philately (2007) by David J. Leeds are Mexico (400th anniversary of 1542 event), Jamaica (300th anniversary of 1692 event), New Zealand (75th anniversary of 1931 quake), Nepal (1934), Iceland (1947), Algeria (1954), Lebanon (1956), Chile (1960, 1985), Morocco (1960), Iran (1962), Indonesia (1963), South Africa (1969), and Guatemala (1976).

For more information on these and other earthquakes, the U.S. Geological Survey hosts a number of informative web pages.

Recall that number 12 on the list of the 14 special areas of IGY inquiry was seismology, which includes the study of earthquakes. More on seismology and the IGY in posts to come.

Happy Holidays

My collection includes a Season's Greetings card from Antarctica, from the days of the IGY. At least when "wintering over" in Antarctica (according to the Northern hemisphere winter season, that is, which just began two days ago), it is summertime in Antarctica. The typical average daily temperature in Antarctica during the December season is just about freezing (32°F), although this past February, Antarctica recorded its highest ever temperature of 65°F. Coughs, global warming.

Front and back of the greeting card

In case you can not decode the seal, there is a map of Antarctica, a Seabee exhaling and carrying some tools, a penguin, a naval insignia, and the texts "U.S. Naval Mobile Construction Battalion (Special),"  "Deep Freeze II," "IGY 1957-58," and "Detachment Bravo."  Deep Freeze II was actually in 1956-57 (see my earlier blog post). United States Naval Construction Battalions are better known as the Navy Seabees; the term Seabee is a riff on the first letters "C B" from the words Construction Battalion.  According to the Seabee Combat Handbook, volume 1, chapter 1, "one large group of Seabees, called Naval Construction Battalions, Special, functioned as stevedores, loading and off-loading cargo ships." Such battalions were critical in setting up the Antarctic IGY stations.

Inside left and right of the greeting card

Stationary letterhead

And finally, a  personal message for my readers (reader?):

My holiday greeting to you (scribbling is digitally added to the original)

IGY-themed Hanukkah gifts

Hanukkah has already ended. It's is always nice to have my holiday season mostly over before the Xmas brouhaha.

I was quite pleased that my wife picked up on my blog hint and bought a print of the 1956 IGY cartoon from Punch (Nov. 17 post). It looks the same as the copy I finally bought in the magazine, but at 12" x 18" it is suitable for framing (it's really rectangular, my photo just has a perspective crookedness), so it will go up on the walls of my study:

1956 cartoon from Punch, imagining British, American, and Russian Antarctic IGY bases

Then, I could not resist buying for myself a CCCP Sputnik watch. A nice eBay purchase. Although the Soviet Union has an interesting history of watchmaking, this is a recent watch from a Hong-Kong based company, CCCP.

Front of watch. CCCP is a transliteration of Cyrillic USSR, equivalent to Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in English, and 1957 was the launch year for Sputnik

I like the red translucent back of the watch, showing the movement. "Спутник 1" is just Russian for Sputnik 1, the first of three Sputniks launched during the IGY. 

The launching of Sputnik, Earth's first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957, was a hallmark event of the IGY. Both the Soviet Union and the U.S. had planned satellite launches for the IGY. The Soviet Union just "beat us to it," and shocked Americans by this manifestation of its technical prowess during the Cold War and the intercontinental ballistic missile arms race.

I also got two bottle of whiskey from countries that participated in the IGY (ha ha, that's a pretty tenuous connection):

German peated malt Eifel Whiskey and Indian Amrut fusion single malt whisky

They go well with latkes!

Finally (coughs), although I may have said I was done with the NY Times crossword references ... 

The Dec. 16 puzzle had the clue, "Part of a philatelist's collection." The answer, of course: "Stamp."

And for the geophysicists, the Dec. 17 minipuzzle contained the clue, "Crust, mantle, or core," answered with [Earth] "layer."

The crossword connections to my blog are downright eerie!

The Creation of Kabaddi, postal rates, and geophysics

A few odds (oddball you say?) and ends today. Yesterday I was browsing the Hotstar app that I used to watch the Indian Premier League cricket season. I learned there was a new professional sport in the Indian subcontinent called kabaddi. It is kind of a combination of tag, dodgeball, and rugby. The YouTube channel People Make Games has an informative and entertaining introduction to this game. Since touching opposing players gets you points, the "divine" significance of the touch is portrayed in the video thusly:

A frame capture from It's Time You Knew About Kabaddi: The Ancient Game That's Gone Pro

Ha ha, it's a riff on The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel (see my last post if you missed that), with Quintin Smith replacing Adam. It's almost the image on the U.S. IGY stamp!

If you want to learn more about the game, you can watch the entire YouTube video:

Anyway, I received my first comment for my blog after the previous post. Thanks, Anonymous! One part of the comment was: "Would be interesting to see a graph of how postage rates have changed over time; does it scale with inflation?" Wikipedia provides a great graph, in which the dark purple is the actual issued price of the stamp and the light purple is the price adjusted for inflation and shown in 2019 U.S. cents:

Actual and inflation-adjusted first-class postage rates in the U.S. (Wikipedia)

You can see that increases in stamp prices themselves have an effect. When the first class postal rate went up from 3¢ to 4¢ in 1958 during the IGY, that was a 25% increase in the inflation-adjusted value. But you can also see the effective decrease in postage costs during periods of inflation in the 1920s and post-WWII.

Speaking of postal rates, some are proposed to increase in the U.S. in 2021:

Product                                   Current Prices    Planned Prices

Letters additional ounce(s)            15¢                     20¢

Letters (metered 1 oz.)                   50¢                     51¢

Domestic Postcards                        35¢                    36¢

Letters (1 oz.)                                55¢             55¢ (no change)

Flats (1 oz.)                                     $1                $1 (no change)

That announcement goes on to say: "The Postal Service has some of the lowest letter-mail postage rates in the industrialized world." That's true, as this graphic from an article by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones magazine shows:

Postal rates in some western countries (Mother Jones)

And Drum explains what we saw in the Wikipedia graph above: "federal law allows the price of first class stamps to rise only at the rate of inflation." He argues that, in these times of competition, that's not sustainable.

I was going to retire the NY Times crossword puzzle thing, but sorry ... today clue for 42A  of "Prefix to political or physics" was answered by "geo", i.e. GEOPHYSICS! 

NY Times crossword for Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2020

Design of the U.S. IGY stamp - Michelangelo and the sun

I've already posted about the release of the U.S. IGY stamp. Today I want to talk a little more about its design, in particular the imagery.

Again, here is the stamp:

U.S. IGY stamp, Scott #1107, 1958, 1.5" x 1"

There are two main elements in the graphical subject, the outreached hands, and the solar surface.

The nearly touching hands are excerpted from The Creation of Adam, a fresco painted ca. 1510 by Michelangelo as part of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in The Vatican. It illustrates the Biblical creation narrative from the Book of Genesis in which God gives life to Adam.

The postcard from my collection shown below contains an image of The Creation of Adam. The IGY stamp on the card has the cancellation date and place for the FDOI of the stamp, but does not bear the First Day of Issue slogan. The back of the card is stamped with "First Day Cancellation."

Postcard FDOI front, with Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, 5 3/4" x 4 1/8"

Postcard FDOI back, 5 3/4" x 4 1/8"

Just a tad has been written about The Creation of Adam fresco. Paul Barolsky comments that

God gave form to Adam out of the earth; next we read that he breathed into Adam the breath of life. The temporal implication of this textual sequence is clearly that first God shaped Adam's body and then filled it with spirit. [The genius of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam and the blindness of art history; Notes in the History of Art, 33(1), Fall 2013, pp. 21-24.]

As for the image of the solar surface in the stamp, recall that in my Nov. 21 post, of the fourteen scientific goals for the IGY, #6 was the study of solar activity. The Postal Bulletin dated April 24, 1958, volume 79, issue 20080, states that

The design of the stamp is based on a photograph of the sun and depicts an area of intense solar activity such as occurs periodically and is among the phenomena being studied during the 18-month long period of the International Geophysical Year.

Ervine Metzl [more on him another time], the designer of the stamp, explained that 'In the small confines of a postage stamp we have endeavored to picture a man's wonder at the unknown together with his determination to understand it and his need for spiritual inspiration to further his knowledge [gender usage as in the original].'

The small poster below comes from an album produced by the Postal Commemorative Society, The Complete Collection of U.S. Stamps Honoring America's Space Achievements, by Drew Windler. The image reminds us of the significance of solar surface activity to the IGY by using the IGY stamp to commemorate the launching of the first solar probe, Pioneer V, on March 11, 1960. This was just two years after the IGY, during which the first artificial satellites were launched. Pioneer V was the first space probe to study the sun from solar orbit. The album containing this and other space philately posters came out years later, with the 29¢ flag stamp canceled on March 11, 1992, thirty-two years after the launch of Pioneer V. First class postage had gone up almost ten-fold since 1958.

Solar probe poster, 13" x 10"

In my last blog, I showed a couple of stamps displaying the Auroras Borealis and Australis. Today's NY Times minipuzzle included "aurora" as an answer. Maybe editor Joel Fagliano read my blog?

NY Times minipuzzle for Dec. 12, 2020, with "aurora" as an answer

Polar opposites - double FDOI IGY covers

I was going to post next on the design of the U.S. IGY stamp, but I decided to delay that to again take my prompt from today's New York Times crossword. The revealer at the center of the puzzle was "polar opposite", as clued by "One totally unlike another ... or what each answer on the edge of this puzzle has".

This reminded me of three first day covers I have that involve polar opposites, if you'll give me some liberty with that term. 

The first cover comprises two first day cancellations of the IGY stamps from two countries, the U.S. and Canada. The stamps and their cancellations are in "polar opposite" catty-corner positions of the cover. Both countries do have geographic areas north of the Arctic Circle. So, polar opposites? I'll return to the Canada stamp at some point. Its issue date of March 5, 1958, predates the U.S. stamp by almost three months. I like the bilingual FDOI slogan.  If you look at the back of the envelope, Canada is right-side up.

Two FDOI cancellations on the same cover, for U.S. and Canada IGY Stamps

The second cover has two U.S. stamps, the IGY stamp from 1958 (with a cachet) and the Antarctic Treaty stamp from 1961. The Antarctic Treaty partly grew out of cooperation that occurred on that continent during the IGY, another topic for the future. Two main areas of scientific interest during the IGY were solar physics and polar science. Hot and cold, up above and down under - polar opposites?

Two FDOI cancellations of the U.S. IGY and Antarctic treaty stamps

The third cover again contains the 1958 U.S. IGY stamp, but also two stamps issued during  the 2007-08  Fourth International Polar Year, 50 years after the IGY. The IGY itself was also the Third International Polar Year. Not only do the stamps from the two eras show the solar and ionospheric environments, respectively, but the two IPY auroral stamps are for both the Northern (boreal) and Southern (austral) lights, polar opposites you might (?) say. The cancellations are much clearer than for some of my covers. The logos for the IGY and IPY are the de facto cachets on this cover.

A cover showing FDOI cancellations for the U.S. 1958 IGY stamp and two 2007 84¢ IPY stamps

Back of cover, showing remainder of souvenir sheet for the IPY stamps

The excellent book, Topical Adventures: A Guide to Topical and Thematic Stamp Collecting (Jack R. Congrove, Dawn R. Hammer, and Martin Kent Miller, eds.; American Topical Association, Handbook #168, 2020, 190 p.), says on p. 72:

Covers, mostly philatelically contrived but sometimes not, used on a stamp's first day of issue are highly collectible, especially when accompanied by a colorful cachet.

From a philatelic standpoint, you could say these covers with double FDOI cancellations are indeed contrived, or at least my interpretations of them are, but I like them!

First Day of Issue of the U.S. IGY stamp, May 31, 1958

According to the American First Day Cover Society,

Although most U.S. stamps are released nationwide on the first day, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) will designate a single city as the "official" first day city. (Sometimes multiple cities are designated as “official.”) The location is usually appropriate to the subject of the stamp, and will be the only place where the “First Day of Issue” postmark is used. A specific day is selected for release of the new stamp, one which may be significant to the subject. Generally a First Day Of Issue (FDOI) ceremony is sponsored by the Postal Service or an organization associated with the new stamp.

The U.S. IGY stamp was issued on May 31, 1958, during Compex 1958. The Combined Philatelic Exhibition of Chicagoland (Compex), is organized by six  stamp clubs in the Chicago area. I haven't figured out any particular reason for the location or timing of this. The date was one year into the 18-month IGY. The Compex web site is currently down. Linn's Stamp News posted an announcement for this year's 63rd show. That would have made the 1958 show COMPEX's first one, so nabbing the ceremony was a bit of a coup. 

Below are scans of my copy of the FDOI Ceremony program for the U.S. IGY stamp. The front page of the program includes the basic information about Compex, an image of the stamp, and a copy of the stamp itself with the first day cancellation, including the pictorial cancellation showing the IGY logo.

Front cover, with first day of issue cancellation

The inside shows the program. Dignitaries present include Arthur Summerfield, Postmaster General from 1953-1961, tied for second in longevity of Postmasters General. Another participant was Franklin Bruns, a noted stamp collector who at that time was the first director of philately for the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee. I would like to know who the scientists representing the U.S. IGY program were, but no luck on that yet.

Inside pages - program

Back cover

I also have first day covers with cachets representing the Compex expo, and also for the venue, the historic LaSalle Hotel.

FDC with cachet for Compex, 1958

FDC with cachet for the LaSalle Hotel venue for Compex, 1958

Deltiology, picture postcard collecting, is a field unto itself. I have two picture postcards with Chicago imagery, that include first day cancellations of the IGY stamp. I guess the government made money on these, since the postcard rate was only 2¢. Well, neither were the cards sent, so more savings there.

FDOI cancellation of postcard illustrating an aerial view of Chicago

Back of card

Front of postcard with views of Chicago and Midway Airport

FDOI cancellation on back of card

The U.S. IGY stamp

The centerpiece of my IGY collection is the U.S. commemorative postage stamp issued during the IGY. I'll introduce the stamp in today's post. In future entries, I'll discuss in more detail various aspects of the stamp, and look at a number of covers (envelopes for postal use) that contain it. And as part of our IGY journey, we'll also look at IGY stamps and covers from other countries.

Most stamp collectors prefer mint (not postally used) stamps, such as shown by the scan of my IGY stamp below. The condition of the back of the stamp is also a concern. More value is attached to fully gummed and unhinged stamps. I know, some of my entries may cause you to think I am unhinged, but in this context it means stamps that were not fixed into albums by using adhesive hinges, which remove some of a stamp's gum and decrease its value. The whole issue of stamp "value" can also be complex, since the personal value attached to a stamp according to the goals of the collector may be separate from its monetary value.

One of my U.S. IGY stamps (1957), Scott #1107, 1.5" x 1"

The Scott stamp catalog is the bible for U.S. collectors. I was fortunate to acquire a full set of six volumes from the bookstore at the American Philatelic Center in Bellefonte, PA, during a visit. It was a few years old, from 2008, but that year gets me through the 50th anniversary of the IGY. Below is a scan of the basic info on the U.S. IGY stamp:

Scan from my Scott 2008 Specialized Catalogue of United States Stamps and Covers

The key information contained in a Scott catalog listing is described in this tutorial from the catalog: Understanding the Listings .

The information for the IGY stamp is this as follows:

1. Scott catalog USA stamp number - 1107

2. Illustration number - A554 (illustration caption is 'Solar Disc and Hands from Michelangelo's Creation of Adam" '. A later post will have more to say about the design of this stamp.

3. Listing styles - here just a Major listing of 1107

4. Denomination - 3¢

5. Basic information on stamp
        GEOPHYSICAL YEAR ISSUE 
        International Geophysical Year 1957-58
        Designed by Ervine Metzl
        GIORI Press Printing
        Plates of 200 subjects in four panes of 50
        Perf. 11 (perforations are the little holes that allow stamps 
            to be separated, in this case 11 per 2 cm)

6. Color - black & red orange

7. Date of issue - May 31, 1958

8. Catalog values
        Unused - 20¢
        Used - 20¢
        Plate block (P#) of 4, unused - 40¢

A few items of interest about this stamp:

1. It was issued one day after my 8th birthday.

2. This was the fourth U.S. stamp (after Scott #1094 Old Glory, #1096 Magsaysay, and #1098 whooping cranes) printed using the engravure/intaglio method by the Giori Press, which allowed for simultaneous application of two or three differently colored inks. 

3. It was one of the last three U.S. stamps issued with a 3¢ denomination. The rate for first-class postage had been unchanged since 1932, but went to 4¢ on August 1, 1958. The Scott catalog also includes a history of postage rates, showing that this 26-year period was the longest in U.S. postal history with no rate change.

4. The Scott catalog also lists elsewhere the quantity of each commemorative stamp issued. Over 125,000,000 subjects of the IGY stamp were printed, for a U.S. population in 1958 of 175 million people. This was a typical run for that era. Up until then, the largest quantity printing had been 2.9 billion for #1008, the NATO issue (1952), followed by 2 billion for #732, the National Recovery Act issue (1933). For comparison, the biggest seller in U.S. postal history was the Elvis Presley stamp (#2721, 1993) at 517 million copies.

Addendum (Dec. 5, 2020): The relationship between stamps printed, sold and saved seems a bit complicated. The number of stamps printed is shown, for example, in the Scott catalogs. As a 2001 report from the USPS Office of Inspector General describes, stamps from local post offices can be returned and destroyed, perhaps on the order of one billion per year. Of course, some stamps that are bought are never used, and can be channeled to collectors like us. This random-ish post says that the popularity of stamps is assessed by the number of stamps saved, determined via an annual survey by the U.S. Postal Service of 10,000 households. I have not found a verification of that, which seems to be different from the USPS Household Diary Study.

What started as an homage to Diana Rigg became a commentary on "filthy stamp collectors" and popular culture

I was going to post a couple of more legitimate commentaries on IGY philately before this one, but a chronological synchronicity convinced me to move this to the top of the queue.

After Diana Rigg passed away recently, I went back to look at some old episodes of The Avengers (not the contemporary movies of the same name), but the spy-fi series starring Patrick Macnee as John Steed. I chose Series 4 from 1965, the year that Ms. Rigg playing Mrs. Emma Peel replaced Honor Blackman (who was on her way to playing Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, and who also died this year) as Steed's colleague. I watched this show as a teen, and was, how should I say, rather impressed at the time by Ms. Rigg's élan. The stories were a bit fantastical, silly even, but tongue-in-cheek. People did suffer and die, but the violence was not graphically gruesome like in detective shows of today. Steed and Mrs. Peel might have had a relationship, or not, but they were always collegial, successful, breezy, and completely free of the angst that plagues contemporary tv detectives (such as Jasper Teerlinck, in a recent favorite PBS show of mine, Professor T.).

The episode I watched this week was #9 from this series, The Hour That Never Was. While I was playing with this post yesterday, I saw in the thorough description of this episode in Wikipedia that it had been first aired on Nov. 27, 1965, 55 years ago to the day! Can't remember if I saw it back then, but that meaningful (?) coincidence moved this post to the top of my queue. (And apologies for difficulties with image captions.)

Episode title, The Avengers, series 4, episode 9 (1965)

Our intrepid investigators, Mrs. Peel and Steed

The philatelic commentary of interest appears while Steed is exploring an old RAF base, and runs into a dumpster diver, Benedict Napoleon Hickey (played by Roy Kinnear). Their exchange inexplicably veers into some nasty invective about stamp collectors. Beneath is a video clip, and a similar series of screenshots:

Hickey: " ... "I detest was or violence ..."

Hickey: "... or stamp collectors."

Steed: "Stamp collectors?"

Hickey: "Filthy habit, collecting stamps."

Hickey: "All that old saliva."

Hickey: "More diseases get spread that way."

Hickey: "Generations of old saliva."

Hickey: "Foreign saliva, too"

Ha ha, that's pretty funny. My experience with stamp collectors is that they are really a rather fastidious lot.

It is interesting to note how philately is treated in popular culture. A recent American Philately Society talk by Howard Summers, who has also written a book on this topic, focuses on Stamp Collecting in Popular Culture:

My own recent encounters with such intersections come from:

1. watching the movie Charade (1963), where Audrey Hepburn finally realizes (spoiler alert!) the money her dead husband left to her was in the form of valuable postage stamps on an envelope;

2. reading the alternate history novel The Plot Against America (2004), by Philip Roth, in which the pre-WWII protagonist, young Philip, is an avid stamp collector, and an admirer of the First Collector, President Franklin Roosevelt; and 

3. reading another alternate history novel, The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick, in which a collector of Americana in a post-WWII occupied America comments on analogies to stamp collecting, and how collectibles are authenticated and acquire their value:   " 'I am a collector,' Major Humo had explained. ... It was on the order of coin or stamp collecting; no rational explanation [for the addiction to collecting] could ever be given."

First stamp scan with my new scanner - and happy Thanksgiving

Yesterday I bought an Epson V600 scanner. It got high marks in reviews. As I continue to catalog and blog about my stamp collection, I plan to do many more scans of stamps and covers. Plus, I have thousands of personal prints, slides, and negative film to start scanning for a digital archive, and one nice thing about this scanner is that it will do all three of those media. I was debating whether to wait to see whether a better price became available during the holiday shopping season, but by asking a customer rep online I was able to get a 10% discount, so I bought it while it was in stock at my local office supplies store.

Here is my first scan of a stamp and its souvenir sheet, the same Moldovan stamp that was on the maxicard from my last blog. I used a black backing paper to better show the perforations. I am very satisfied with the result!

Moldova 2016 stamp and souvenir sheet - Struve Geodetic Arc

I did not note in my last blog the rich content on this stamp and sheet. The inscription on the stamp itself indicates the country, year of issue, and denomination (there are currently about 17 lei to the U.S. dollar, so this stamp is equivalent to about 35¢). The vignette (image) on the stamp shows the triangulation survey through Moldova, the capital Chișinău and the Rudi Geodetic Point from the survey. There is an image of World Heritage Site memorial obelisk, and its latitude and longitude (although by my calculation those coordinates are 4 km off from the location shown on Google maps).

On the remainder of the souvenir sheet, you can also see: the meridian at 26°43' east longitude; the full survey transect which nearly followed this meridian; an image of the intrepid surveyor Struve; vintage theodolite and transit level surveying equipment; the names of the ten countries transected; and the UNESCO World Heritage Site icon. Nicely done!

To those celebrating, Happy Thanksgiving. Here is my wild turkey Wildlife Conservation stamp (1956, Scott 1077), heavily cancelled, from my childhood collection.  Gobble gobble!

Wild turkey portrayed on one of three U.S. wildlife conservation stamps, 1956

Crosswords, geodesists, goals of the IGY, the Struve Geodetic Arc, Moldova, my dad ... my stream of consciousness for today

For the past six years or so, crosswording has been one my hobbies. After starting with the easy ones in the local newspaper, I moved on to those in the NY Times. The NYT puzzles, edited by the noted enigmatologist and table tennis player Will Shortz, get more difficult during the week. For a few years I only did Monday and Tuesday, then added Wednesday, and gradually the rest of the week. Ok, I seek a little help (cheat) sometimes, just like in golf, but I've now solved over 1000 NYT puzzles, including the last 250 in a row.

Friday's puzzle had a clue that probably was difficult for some, but with one or two letters already filled on crosses, I immediately realized that for the clue at 16-across, "Experts in determining the exact size and shape of the earth," the answer was "geodesists."

NY Times crossword of 11/20/20, including the 16-across clue for the answer "geodesists"

I took this as a sign compelling me to write today's entry, and to briefly describe the scientific scope of the IGY. There were 14 designated areas for scientific pursuits during the IGY. One source where the list is enumerated and described is in the book IGY: Year of Discovery, by Sydney Chapman (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1959, 111 p.). 

My copy of IGY: Year of Discovery, by Sydney Chapman

In the chapter on The International Geophysical Year, Chapman, who was president of CSAGI (French acronym for the Special  Committee of the IGY), lists these areas as:

1. World Days and communications
2. meteorology
3. geomagnetism
4. aurora and airglow
5. ionosphere
6. solar activity
7. cosmic rays
8. longitudes and latitudes
9. glaciology
10. oceanography
11. rockets and satellites
12. seismology
13. gravity
14. nuclear radiation

Of these, both #8 and #13 are used to determine the size and shape of the Earth, which comprises the field of geodesy. Until the IGY, few geodetic measurements had been made on Antarctica. During the IGY, new measurements there and elsewhere around the world refined our knowledge of the dimensions of our planet, which were soon detailed even further after the launch of satellites that orbited the Earth in accordance with its gravitational field. 

Recently I bought a maxicard because of its relationship to geodesy, and also to my father. In philately, a maximum card (maxicard) is a postcard with a postage stamp on the back of the card where the stamp and card thematically match. The cancellation or postmark is usually related to the image on the front of the card and the stamp. Collecting such cards is the object of maximaphily, and also a specialty area of postcard collecting. This card bears a stamp in the form of a souvenir sheet, and a first day cancellation from Moldova, honoring the bicentennial of the initiation of the Struve Geodetic Arc survey. The terminus of the survey line in Moldova, marked by the monument shown on the stamp and on the maxicard, is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Front and back of my Moldovan maxicard on the Struve Geodetic Art

The maxicard's topic is the Struve Geodetic Arc. I hadn't previously known about this milestone achievement until I stumbled upon this card and stamp. The Struve Arc was a chain of survey triangulations stretching from Norway and then through 10 countries and over 2,800 km. It ends on the Black Sea after traversing what today is the country of Moldova. The survey, carried out between 1816 and 1855 by the astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve, represented the first accurate measuring of a long segment of a line of longitude. This helped to establish the exact size and shape of the planet and marked an important step in the development of Earth sciences and topographic mapping. It is an extraordinary example of scientific collaboration among scientists from different countries, and of collaboration between monarchs for a scientific cause. Thus, it presages the IGY-era study of the dimensions of the Earth as well as the international cooperation that was a hallmark of the IGY.

My father Morris Sternberg was born in Besserabia in 1906, later emigrating to the U.S. in 1927. At that time, Besserabia was in Romania. Not long before, it had been part of the Ottoman Empire, and not long after it became part of the Soviet Union. After the dissolution of the USSR, Besserabia became part of the country of Moldova in 1991. If I ever visit my father's birth region, I'll now hope to also visit the monument honoring the Struve Geodetic Arc.

Thanks to my cousin Mary Ann, who provided the photo of my father with her parents.

My dad Morris (left), his brother Aaron (right), Aaron's wife Pauline (center), ca. 1941