Self-promotion for a presentation about my IGY collection and blog

A few years ago I joined my local stamp club, the Philatelic Society of Lancaster County. I finally made it to a live meeting just before the covid era, after which meetings were moved online. And there they still remain.

Meetings via Zoom have been held twice a month, agendas including business of the chapter, a keynote speaker, and sharing of items of interest by attendees. Although there are dues-paying memberships for the local chapter, anyone can drop in on these meetings.

At the meeting this coming Wednesday, I will be the keynote speaker. I'll be leading attendees through a powerpoint (using Google Slides presentation software, which I've been very pleased with) focusing on my IGY collections of philatelic and other materials, and on this blog. The Zoom meeting will begin at 6:30 pm (EDST), and my presentation will start after the business portion of the meeting has been completed. My guess is that I will speak for about 45 minutes. The meeting will be recorded. I hope to have a recording of my presentation that I can edit and make available, along with the presentation file. But in case you would like to attend live, here is the Zoom invitation:

Join the Zoom Meeting, Wednesday 27 April, 2022, 6:30 pm Eastern Daylight Savings Time:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83188544047?pwd=RlhoUDQ0ZkxaU3NGRHdFbmNzaWQ4QT09

The American Philatelic Society lists about 400 stamps clubs from around the world. Maybe there is one near you!

Happy Earth Day; the International Biological Program

Today is Earth Day, first celebrated in 1970, when I was an undergraduate. One might draw a line from the IGY, the most ambitious attempt ever to study the Earth as a planet, to Earth Day a dozen years later. The nationwide events surrounding the first Earth Day were spurred by the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 and the growing concern about the vulnerability of Earth's natural systems to human impact.

The American Philatelic Society has a nice web page for today, on Earth Day Stamps. I'll have to double check if that is changed daily or regularly, in which case I will add it to my blog list in the sidebar. Earth Day stamps would be a nice collecting topic, surely one that has been done. I think I own one such stamp somewhere, but I can't find it. Searching on the colnect web site yields 155 Earth Day stamps.

In writing my last post about biological studies during the IGY, I came across a nicely complementary article on the International Biological Program (IBP):"Big science and big data in biology: from the International Geophysical Year through the International Biological Program to the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network, 1957–Present"; Elena Aronova, Karen S. Baker and Naomi Oreskes; Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences , Vol. 40, No. 2, Spring 2010), pp. 183-224; available here if you have access to JSTOR. 

This very well written (so I will use direct quotes below) article was quite interesting in its discussion of "big science," the historical relationship between the IGY and the IBP, and the similarities and differences between these two programs. It states that 

"the Big Science of the IGY was distinguished by its emphasis on and the visibility of Big Data—a synoptic collection of observational data on a global geographic scale." 

It goes on to say that the 

"International Biological Program (IBP, 1964–1974), conceived shortly after the end of IGY, intended to emulate it by setting up a worldwide research initiative to accumulate a vast array of datasets on different living phenomena on a global scale, deploying standardized methods and interdisciplinary collaborations. The IBP is often referred to as one of the first realized Big Science projects in biology, and is often cited anecdotally as a biological version of the IGY."

As the Bulletin article covered in my last post also suggested, Aronova et al. state that 

"in contrast to the centralized worldwide coordination of the geophysical research initiatives during the IGY, the biological activities were without exception the result of individual initiative, with support coming from diverse sources." ... The "biological programs launched under the auspices of the IGY became the first testing ground for the planning of the IBP." 

The IBP came to focus on ecological studies whereby 

"the properties of the Earth were regarded as determined not only by the chemical and physical properties of the Earth but also by biological activities, which in turn were controlled, at least partially, by the physical properties of the environment." 

I like that systemic approach, including the feedback loops.

The IBP seems to have been less successful than the IGY. Not all biologists bought into the emphasis on ecology, a science which seemed more applied and "political" than other areas of biology. Programs were fragmented and idiosyncratic. Data were not centrally archived and shared as had happened for the IGY with the World Data Centers. And the hopes to construct synthetic models based on those data were unsuccessful. 

I was surprised to find that, in contrast to the IGY, only one stamp was issued for the International Biological Program. Maybe that is commensurate with the perceived lack of its success. 

I've just ordered a cover franked with that stamp:

International Biological Program first day cover with a block of Canada stamp 507 (1970)

The stamp shows a microscopic view of the inside of a leaf, not a great design in my opinion. The cachet on this cover showing the sun, soil, oceans, plants, land-based animals, and fish suggests the multifaceted nature of the Earth's biosphere, reminiscent of the interrelated Earth systems covered during the IGY. All these parts, in quasi-equilibrium, that people's actions have often thrown out of kilter. Let's be kind to Mother Earth.

IGY Bulletin, Number 9, March 1958 - Life sciences in the IGY

Research workers in the life sciences were encouraged to utilize access to remote regions during the IGY to pursue work in their own disciplines. Marine biology studies were conducted on all IGY oceanographic cruises. The nature of Antarctic and Arctic studies are very briefly summarized below.

Antarctic

    Dentistry. Polar expeditions had already shown dental disorders such as severe toothaches among participants (NY Times, 1956). The Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery requested Navy dentists stationed at Little America and McMurdo Sound to undertake investigations.

    Human physiology. Extreme cold and long stays posed various health challenges to Antarctic personnel. Physiological measurements were to be made, comparing people who worked outside, inside, and on traverse parties.

    Psychology. Stress, isolation, and deprivation were polar psychology (Nature, 1991) issues for Antarctic personnel (and perhaps scientists were thinking ahead a few years to what astronauts might experience in other extreme environments). Records of such feelings were to be recorded via written diaries and voice recordings from workers at four IGY Antarctic stations and analyzed by the Division of Neuropsychiatry, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery.

    Botany. The Arctic Institute of North America was to study the vegetation of Antarctica, specifically lichens.

    Animal physiology. Frozen whole specimens of Adelie and Emperor penguins were to be collected and studied for the anatomy of their respiratory systems.

    Animal migration. The annual migration of the skua is one of the animal kingdom's longest, with round-trip journeys up to 20,000 miles. It was studied by banding these birds during the IGY.

Arctic

    Sea ice studies. The physiology of frozen organisms such as bacteria, diatoms and protozoa were to be studied. Interestingly, millimeter-sized invertebrate tardigrades, or water bears, can freeze and survive, as well as be boiled alive; following the same link will tell you that frozen iguanas fall from trees but live on.

Tardigrade (World Atlas)

    Marine biology. Phytoplankton, zooplankton, and other organisms were to be sampled from drifting ice stations. Here is a video and its transcript I missed in my earlier posts about operations on top of Drift Station Alpha.

IGY Bulletin, Number 9, March 1958 - Phototrack

Back to the IGY Bulletin articles. Phototrack was the designation for the program utilizing volunteers to help track Earth satellites, as noted in a previous post.

Accuracy of these observations was deemed to be "quite high," limited by timing accuracy, which was 0.1 seconds.

Photographs were taken against a fixed starfield background which yielded satellite positions. Timed breaks were inserted in the image used to track the satellites. 

Image showing the tracking of Earth Satellite 1957β, i.e. Sputnik 2 (from the Bulletin article)

Times were determined with a Phototrack camera by photographing a clock three times per picture, leaving a time mark on the image of the starfield and satellite. The clock was synchronized to radio station WWV, run by the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology).

Photographing the clock for timing marks (from the Bulletin article)

Other specifications for the Phototrack system are given in the Bulletin article. 

There is a Wikipedia article that summarizes this Phototrack program. There is also a nice personal recollection of participation in the Phototrack program by John Sutherland. He started worked at the Phototrack 5007 tracking operation in Walpole, MA, that had been set up during the IGY by Warren Davis and others. I tried to email Sutherland, but that was bounced back. Sutherland reminds us that "all of this ‘space’ activity happened in the slide rule era – there were no computers to help with the calculations, in fact, there were not even any hand calculators. Everything was done manually and by knowing how to create and use formulas." One of the Wikipedia article citations is "Seven Place Cosines, Sines, and Tangents For Every Tenth Microturn." That sounds pretty brute force.

My antique slide room, vintage 1972

In my undergrad days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, all calculations were done with slide rules; tables of various mathematical functions were also very useful. At some point I lost my trusty K&E slide rule, which I used daily for four years. I still own the replacement shown at right, now gathering dust on my electronics museum shelf.

The history of the slide rule goes back to the early 17th century. There is not a single postage stamp honoring the slide rule, but I think there should be!

In my first real job at Fairchild after graduation, I used a desktop mechanical calculator, a wonderful machine. My father had used one at home to work on his accounts. In grad school I finally used digital calculators, followed by programmable calculators, and then mainframe computers with terminals in the lab where I worked. It wasn't until the very end of grad school that I saw my first Apple personal computer, and then used and bought an original IBM PC soon after I started my job at Franklin & Marshall College in 1983.

My first IBM PC from 1983-84 (right); a later iMac (left)

These older technologies make me think of the women calculators of NASA, and the book and movie Hidden Figures. Kudos to trailblazer Katherine Johnson and her colleagues!

Other International Years observed by the United Nations

Sorry about the greater than usual number of typos in the last post. I correct errors I find afterwards in the blog, but those edits are not forwarded to subscribers. I always thought that posts went out the next morning once the blog was published, but that one went out in the evening after my afternoon's work, before I came back to do another proofreading.

I've been a little blah on blogging lately, but I found a topic that tickled my fancy. I was cleaning up some piles of stamps from my childhood collection when I came across a couple of other "international year" stamps. That made me wonder about so-called international years.

This web page for the United Nations with a list of international years states:

The United Nations designates specific days, weeks, years and decades as occasions to mark particular events or topics in order to promote, through awareness and action, the objectives of the Organization. Usually, it is one or more Member States that propose these observances and the General Assembly establishes them with a resolution. On occasion, these celebrations are declared by the specialized agencies of the United Nations, such as UNESCO, UNICEF, FAO, etc., when they concern issues that fall within the scope of their competencies. Some of them may be later adopted by the General Assembly.

The list contains 88 international years from 1961 to 2024, with more than one for some calendar years.

The IGY in 1957-58 was not a UN designated international year, coming before such declarations began. In an earlier post, I explained that CSAGI (acronym for Comité Spécial de l'Anée Géophysique Internationale, French for The Special Committee for the International Geophysical Year) was formed by the International Council for Scientific Unions (ICSU), now the International Council for Science. The ICSU's mission was to strengthen international science for the benefit of society. It was one of the oldest non-governmental organizations in the world, its predecessor organizations dating back to the start of the 19th century. Thus, it far predates the United Nations, organized in 1945.

We have seen in an earlier post that the UN was involved in the IGY via the cooperation of the World Meteorological Organization (and perhaps in other ways I am not aware of).

I have put the list of UN International Years in tabular form, which you can see here. A number of these do have scientific or environmental themes. The six such years for which the U.S. issued postage stamps were:

I have the first two of these stamps in my childhood collection, and the last one in my IGY collection. This Fourth International Polar Year followed 50 years after the IGY, which was initially going to be the Third International Polar Year.

World Refugee Year, Scott 1149 (1960), canceled, from my childhood collection, mounted in Minkus' The New World Wide Postage Stamp Album.

World Refugee Year, Scott 1149 (1960), mint, more recently purchased. Designed by Ervine Metzl, who also designed the U.S. IGY stamp

International Cooperation Year, Scott 1266 (1965)

International Polar Year, Scott 4123 (2007)

News flash! I forgot I had ordered another U.S. philatelic item for a UN International Year, and it just arrived. It is an aerogram for the 1983 World Communications Year. I consider this IGY-related, since 1983 also happened to be the 25th anniversary of the first U.S. satellite put in orbit during the IGY. An aerogram  is "a sheet of paper with a strategically placed stamp-like indicium that prepays air mail postage. After the message and the name and address of the recipient are written, the sheet is folded, sealed, and mailed. No enclosures are permitted" (Encyclopedia of United States Stamps and Stamp Collecting glossary). My mother exchanged aerograms (the most economical way to write internationally) with overseas relatives when I was young;  I should have a trove of those sent to her somewhere. The U.S. issued a total of 25 aerograms from 1947 to 1999, when their production ceased due to the decline in postal communications (Wikipedia).

Air post stamped envelopes and air letter sheets (aerograms) have a special "back of the book" (items listed in different categories in the Scott catalogs following regular postage stamps) designation in the Scott catalogs, UC.

Front, World Communication Year themed U.S. aerogram, Scott UC56 (1983)

Back, World Communication Year themed U.S. aerogram, Scott UC56 (1983)

The indicium on the front shows a world map with the locations of satellite tracking stations. The cachet on the front of this first day cover shows a satellite and a tracking station. The satellite looks like a Tiros weather satellite, with panels of solar cells surrounding the body.

The image on the back of the aerogram shows another type of satellite and its partner tracking station. The satellite has solar cell arrays deployed on panels that could rotate to orient towards the sun.

Remember that my first non-summer job with Fairchild Space and Electronics Co. involved working on space power subsystems -- solar cell arrays and batteries -- for communications satellites.

Explorer 3 launch anniversary stamps

So far I have posted on each successful satellite launch during the IGY to note the launch anniversary dates, and separately posted more information when articles become available in the IGY Bulletin. Today I want to honor (belatedly) the March 26, 1958, launch of Explorer 3 (which was my father's 52nd birthday). 

I will save more technical information on this satellite until I get to the relevant article in the May 1958 issue of the IGY Bulletin.

Explorer 3 was the third successful U.S. satellite launch of the IGY, after Explorer 1 and Vanguard 1. According to JPL, "data from Explorer 3 - combined with earlier measurements from Explorer 1 - confirmed principal investigator James Van Allen's theory that radiation belts trapped by Earth's magnetic field exist around the planet." That discovery ranks as one of the most important of the IGY, becoming the basis of what we now call space weather. 

So, I tried to find a U.S. cover commemorating that mission. I found two on eBay with Explorer 3 cachets that were postmarked on the date of the launch. These each cost over $100, so I decided not to spring for those yet. You'll find nine U.S. covers with Explorer 3 themes listed in the wonderful database on satellite stamps compiled by Garry Toth and Don Hillger.

I did find a nice set of 2008 stamps from Antigua marking the 50th anniversary of the launch. According to the same database, these are the only postage stamps from any country specifically featuring Explorer 3. I've just bought them on eBay, so I show images (taken from Toth and Hillger) of them below, soon to become a part of my physical collection.

Miniature sheet, Scott catalog AG 3014; image from Toth and Hillger

Miniature sheet, Scott catalog AG 3016; image from Toth and Hillger

Miniature sheet, Scott catalog #3018; image from Toth and Hillger

When collecting philatelic items about American achievements during the IGY, I focus on collecting U.S. stamps and covers. I am not sure if the island of Antigua and Barbuda falls into this category, but there are smaller countries (and heck, even the U.S. with that Elvis stamp) that issue stamps on popular topics, like space and cute animals, fully expecting most stamps to be bought by collectors. These will never be used to mail anything and pay for postal services, meaning extra income for the country. Such stamps tend to be attractive, and of interest to topical collectors (Hayward, 2008). 

Listverse, a website of lists, in a piece on 10 Bizarre Ways That Tiny Countries Make Money, includes #5, The Islands Where Postage Stamps Are The Main Export. This piece highlights the islands of Ascension, Saint Helena, and Tristan da Cunha, together comprising a British Overseas Territory on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.  Ascension (current population of 1,000) issues five sets of stamps every year, for which 400 collectors maintain standing orders. The island itself is so small (34 square miles) that mail delivery is infrequent, and there is no national postal delivery service. Tristan da Cunha, the world’s most remote permanent settlement (population of 264, area 71 square miles) has been financially self-sufficient since 1980 thanks to a crayfish factory and the local post office, which sells its stamps around the world. 

One of my books, Stamp Collecting (1992), by Charles F. Adams, includes a section on Bhutan - The Kingdom of Fanciful Collecting (pp. 155-156). To quote: "When serious philatelists hear the mention of Bhutan, they instantly roll their eyes. No one really takes the stamps of Bhutan seriously, they say. Those aren't really stamps: they're junk, silly, ridiculous junk." Apparently some stamps are rather gimmicky, like miniature phonograph records, and "debate rages as to whether any of these 'stamps' have ever actually been postally used. But "even though they may be worthless, they sure are fun." And what could be wrong with having fun?