On July 2, 2006 -- 49 years and 1 day after the start of the IGY -- I bought a complete bound set of the IGY Bulletins. I happened to print out and save a paper copy of this transaction (eBay only saves your purchase history for 3 years), since at $400 it is my most expensive IGY purchase to date.
Most of the time these Bulletins just sit in my IGY bookcase.
This was a monthly bulletin, published by the National Academy of Sciences from the first issue at the beginning of the IGY in July, 1957, through June, 1965, a total of 96 issues. They are typically 16 to 24 pages in length. Although my resolve remains to be tested, I thought I would start reporting every month on a successive issue of the Bulletin here, learning more about the science of the IGY along the way. I'm starting late, but since this is the last day of July, at least I am getting started under the wire.
I have not yet found these Bulletins to be digitally available (although I'll check with a couple of librarians on this), so part of my endeavor will to be scan and post each Bulletin. In some cases, I may not be able to scan text close to the inside of the spine, but I think you'll probably be able to interpolate any missing text. Then I'll plan throughout the anniversary month to summarize the articles in that issue. Here is the scan of IGY Bulletin issue #1, June 1957.
The articles in this issue are:
Introduction
Antarctic Program
Arctic Drift Ice Station Program
The Earth Satellite Program
Status Report: Seismology, Gravity and Longitude & Latitude
Reports from Other Countries
The Introduction was written by Hugh Odishaw, who was executive director of the U.S. National Committee for the International Geophysical Year. He states that the purpose of the Bulletin is to present current information on the IGY program of interest to geophysicists. The contents will include brief reports on projects in the U.S. program, and news of activities in other countries. He credits the two agencies that especially made the U.S. IGY program possible: the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense. This is indicative of the overlapping interests of both civilian scientists and military strategists for the knowledge gleaned.
More on the other articles very soon, even as we move into August.
Cover #060 in my IGY checklist is signed by Hugh Odishaw (1916-1984). He was Dean of the College of Earth Sciences from 1972-1984, during which time I was a graduate student at the University of Arizona for my M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. Dr. Odishaw and I exchanged pleasantries now and then, but I wish I had gotten to know him better, and learned more about his experiences with the IGY.
A minor planet was named after Odishaw. The citation was written by noted comet researcher Elizabeth Roemer, from whom I took a course in comets at the University of Arizona.
Since my last post showed IGY stamps from 19 different countries, I thought I'd take a look at what countries participated in the IGY.
Of course, the countries of the world were different during the IGY era than now. This map (you can zoom in on it) shows countries of the world in 1957, and divides them into four blocs: western alliances; communist states; Arab-Muslim lands; and other lands.
John Bartholomew, World Powers 1957, Houghton Mifflin Co.,
Boston, 1958
According to the Annals of the IGY, volume IX, 67 of these countries had national committees for the IGY, hence were official participants. I have tabulated these countries in a spreadsheet that you can find here.
Today, this world political map (also zoomable) contains a somewhat different constellation of countries. (My criterion for being up to date is that the map shows South Sudan.)
I've also compiled all 195 countries in today's geopolitical world in the spreadsheet above, from this source. Then, through the magic of spreadsheet commands, I searched for countries that participated in the IGY which have either changed names since then, or don't exist any more as such. They are as follows:
The spreadsheet also shows which present-day countries participated (or not) in the IGY, so you can look at the spreadsheet to check that out. My fault if I got any of the geopolitics wrong.
My current count for countries of the world I have visited is at 33, I think. I'm hoping to see some of England's cricket tour of the West Indies early next year, so maybe I'll add a couple of new ones then.
Philatelic exhibiting is a way of formally presenting part of one's collection at stamp expos that is akin to poster presentations at academic meetings. There are different types of exhibits, which are judged at larger philatelic expositions according to rather detailed and sometimes arcane guidelines.
A few years ago I even took a summer seminar on exhibiting at the American Philatelic Society just up the road in Bellefonte, PA. I realized I probably had the stuff, potential themes, and the ability for exhibiting, but I wasn't that keen on the formality, competitiveness, and judging vagaries of the process. I decided in the end on this blog as a different and less rule-bound way to present some of my collection and my related and sometimes unrelated thoughts.
Nonetheless, I decided to submit a short exhibit for the American Topical Association's one-page exhibit show. I mean, it was just one page, online, and unjudged, so it is a rather low stakes way to get some sense of the exhibiting experience. And sure enough, coming up with a theme gave me another way to look at my collection. I delved into my international IGY stamps more than I have so far in this blog. I knew that many countries that participated in the IGY never issued IGY stamps; that some countries that came out with rather attractive stamps were not necessarily the most active IGY participants; and that not all of the IGY stamps were actually issued during the IGY itself. So my result is this pdf, also shown below. I opted to show at least one stamp from each of the 19 countries I counted that actually issued one or more IGY stamps during the IGY period (not later, or on anniversaries), and noting the themes of the stamps. It was hard to cram 19 stamps onto one 8.5"x11" page, so the font is small, the margins are wide, and elements are crowded. So although the design is not ideal, I made it work in two days of off-and-on work. This will help me think about my collection in some different ways.
I'll have more to say about IGY countries another time.
This was chronologically the 431st oldest article out of exactly 1500 hits as of today in the New York Times ProQuest database when searching on the term "International Geophysical Year!" I'll have to explore what more "the newspaper of record" has had to say about our favorite scientific enterprise.
The full text reads as follows:
Geophysical Year Starts as World Studies Sun Storm
Scientists of 64 Countries Turn to Instruments for 18 Months of Research
Men Stand By at Poles
Whole-Earth Focus of Joint Effort - U.S. and Soviet to Launch Satellites
By Walter Sullivan
Special to The New York Times
Washington, June 30, 1957
As if to start the International Geophysical Year with a bang, the sun showered the earth with electron particles today, causing severe disturbances in this planet's upper air and magnetic field.
Radio communications on many long-range circuits were at a standstill,
The "year," which will last eighteen months, began at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, which as midnight Greenwich Mean Time.
President Eisenhower called it today "one of the great scientific adventures of our time."
Scientists the world over -- in sixty-four nations in the East and West -- turned on or checked recording instruments in the eleven sciences on which the effort is focused. These are the fields of study concerned with the earth as a whole.
In anticipation of this day Americans had been placed in the remote corners of the earth -- in specially constructed camps at the South Pole and on drifting ice in the Arctic Ocean.
Men on Mountain Peaks
Men of other nations worked in huts perched on mountain peaks while their instruments recorded the influx of cosmic rays, radio star impulses or other phenomena affected by the current magnetic storm.
They were on summits from Stalin Peak in Bulgaria to Mount Eva Perón in Argentina (neither name has been changed, at least in the I.G.Y. literature).
They were at Tungchwan in the mountains of southwest China, on Mount Norikura in Japan. American scientists were on Sacramento Peak at Sunspot, N.M.
The most dramatic events of the I.G.Y. will probably be the launching of earth satellites by the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States launching is not expected before next spring. The Russians have set no date for their first shot.
Todays upheavals in the earth's atmosphere were the consequence of a solar flare that occurred at 3 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time Friday. It was seen by the observatory at Krasnaya Pakhra twenty miles south of Moscow and reported to the World Warning Center at Fort Belvoir, Va.
A solar flare is an eruption in the chromosphere -- the atmosphere of the sun. It is usually followed, a day or two later, by severe magnetic storms on the earth. The World Warning Center issued an alert at noon Friday and a day later called a Special World Interval.
This was flashed to thousands of scientists around the world and called for the intensified observations in the sciences affected by such solar eruptions. These are concerned with the earth's magnetism, the ionized regions above the atmosphere whose layers normally reflect radio waves, cosmic rays, aurora and even weather.
Early today the deluge of electron particles from the sun reached the outer atmosphere.
The I.G.Y. was timed to coincide with a period of intense sunspot activity, but there has been evidence that the peak of the eleven-year spot cycle has already been reached.
Today's storm may prove to be the most severe of the I.G.Y. The eighteen-month length of the "year" was designed to carry it well beyond the peak of the cycle, to provide contrasting information from a period when the sun is quiet.
President Eisenhower pointed to the international cooperation that has made possible this scientific enterprise, regarded by many as the greatest in history.
He said that, in his view, "the most important result of the International Geophysical Year is the demonstration of the ability of peoples of all nations to work together harmoniously for the common good."
"I hope," he said, "this can become common practice in other fields of human endeavor."
A basic precept of the I.G.Y. is that all information be exchanged. For this purpose three groups of World Data Centers have been established to collect and duplicate the mountains of information collected in the various sciences. The centers are in the United States, the Soviet Union and in Western Europe, with subcenters in Australia and Japan.
While many of the earth sciences are affected by events on the sun, others are more concerned with what takes place on or inside the earth. To study fluctuations in gravity American scientists have set up instruments in an unused tunnel near Dalton Canyon, California; Germans are in a potash mine and Italians are at work in a grotto near Trieste.
I'll make two comments on the contents of this article.
First is the statement that "The most dramatic events of the I.G.Y. will probably be the launching of earth satellites by the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States launching is not expected before next spring. The Russians have set no date for their first shot." Yes, these launches were keynote events of the IGY. Note that both the U.S. and the USSR were expected to launch satellites. Those cagey Russians got Sputnik successfully into orbit without announcing the launch beforehand; the U.S. only got Explorer 1 into space four months later. Other than bragging rights (i.e., propaganda), this is a de facto tie. As I will write about another time, there was a big brouhaha that the Russians "beat us," but the intention and ability of the Soviets to potentially get into space first should have surprised no one who was paying attention.
Second is the statement "Today's storm may prove to be the most severe of the I.G.Y." There are models that predict how a solar cycle will play out, but I wonder how good they were back then. It seems a bit presumptuous to have made this "prediction," and looking back, we can see from solar activity graphs in a previous post that the sun became more active in solar cycle 19 after July, 1957. This compendium of significant historical solar storms does not list the July 1957 event, but it does include five other significant space weather storms that occurred later during the IGY.
Anyway, on this 64th "birthday" of the IGY, let's listen to the relevant Beatles song:
According to Wikipedia, this was one of the first songs Paul McCartney wrote, when he was 14, a year before the start of the IGY. It was finally released on the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967 (to mark the 10th anniversary of the IGY?), which I have as a CD (scan is below, top). I have seven Beatles albums on vinyl, including what I think is my oldest record, Meet the Beatles! (scan is below, bottom), the second album released by the band in the U.S., in 1964. What can I say, one of my favorite bands ever.
I played When I'm 64 recently for my editor, who was born 11 days before the beginning of the IGY. Not quite an IGY baby. But she's a spring chicken -- we celebrated my 70th birthday, one year delayed, six weeks ago with a family reunion in the Washington, D.C., suburbs not far from where I grew up.
