Happy 66th birthday, IGY

Today marks the 66th anniversary of the beginning of the IGY. 

An earlier post discussed the role of President Eisenhower in the IGY, including a video of his speech for its opening,

The Eisenhower Library lists a number of online docuuments about the IGY. That web page also excerpts a quote from President Eisenhower's speech in a video from the post above, that "the most important result of the International Geophysical Year is that demonstration of the ability of peoples of all nations to work together harmoniously for the common good. I hope this can become common practice in other fields of human endeavor."

Apropos of the international aspect of the IGY, I recently bought  my first IGY-related cover with United Nations stamps.

Cover IN245 in my collection

The stamps are United Nations (New York) 49 and 50 in the Scott catalog, representing weather satellites launched by the World Meteorological Organization. The role of the WMO in the IGY was mentioned in a previous post .

The postmark was from the USS Wyandot, dated during the IGY, and the cachet lauds its roll during Operation Deep Freeze, which provided critical infrastructure in support of the IGY program in Antarctica.

As Eisenhower hoped, if only that IGY and United Nations spirit of international cooperation in the name of scientific advances for the good of humanity were more widespread today!

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.

Two stamps from the Ukraine

I was away for a week in Florida (I'll include some photos in a couple of posts). And this week I have been busy with other things. But before I return to the IGY proper, today I am thinking of Ukraine.

So I bought two stamps to give some philatelic tie-in to my unhappiness at what is going on there. The first is a souvenir sheet (with simulated perforations) commemorating Independence Day of Ukraine, showing a map of Ukraine against the background of the globe, a rainbow of national colors and viburnum bushes in the form of a festive fireworks. Just like the collaborators during the IGY, Ukraine is one country among many in the world. 

Scott #194, issued Sept. 3, 1994 (colnect.com)

 

The current form of the Ukrainian Independence Day holiday was first celebrated in 1991, as the first anniversary of the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine passed by Ukraine's parliament in 1990.

In Ukraine, the flowering plant Viburnum opulus is an important element of its traditional folk cultures, and is seen as a national symbol. 

On the other stamp I bought, Ukraine honored the World Meteorological Organization, about which I recently posted. This stamp commemorated the 50th anniversary of the founding of the WMO. The work of this organization was very connected to the meteorological studies of the IGY.

Scott #378, issued March 10, 2000 (colnect.com )

Solidarity with the people of the sovereign nation of Ukraine.

Cheerios, the U.S. biological warfare program, the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, and the Congressional IGY report

I will suggest some (tenuous?) relationships between all those topics.

One of the four cereals we keep on hand for breakfast (along with generic corn flakes, generic raisin bran, and homemade granola) is General Mills Cheerios. My editor likes to mix Cheerios with the granola, and won't abide by a generic oat cereal (that I could go with).

Scan of actual Cheerios box at right. Note that this is a General Mills product.

Recently, I read the book Baseless, by Nicholson Baker. I had read some of his fiction in the past. 

According to the dust jacket blurb:

Baker assembles what he learns, piece by piece, about Project Baseless, a crash Pentagon program begun in the early [19] fifties that aimed to achieve "an Air Force-wide combat capability in biological and chemical warfare at the earliest possible date." Along the way,  he unearths stories of balloons carrying crop disease...

The book is presented as a daily journal of sorts, covering just over two months of entries in 2019, describing Baker's quest, thoughts, findings, fears, and his attempts to use the CIA CREST database and the Freedom of Information Act requests to learn about his topic. Those inquiries are sometimes answered, albeit often with redactions, but responses are commonly unduly delayed or the questions mothballed and ignored. This censoring and burial of information that should belong to we-the-people is the flip side of the open archives mentioned in my past post.

A review of this book from The Nation describes Baker's hypotheses as plausible narratives, although not fully confirmed by the publicly available information.

You can also watch a video of an interesting conversation about the book with Baker at the Harvest Book Store.

So, connection #1: In his entry for May 2, 2019, Baker writes:

After the war [World War II] General Mills's president, Harry Bullis [emphasis mine], a friend of Allen Dulles, began a balloon program, General Mills Aeronautical Research Laboratory. Abbott Washburn [emphasis mine], General Mills's head of public relations, became director of an ostensibly private undertaking, the Crusade for Freedom, which used CIA funds channeled through the National Committee for Free Enterprise to launch thousands of leaflet-bearing balloons into Czechoslovakia and other countries of Eastern Europe.

These General Mills balloons

fed into the covert plan to destroy Communist food sources, using high-altitude "balloon disseminators" filled with heated containers of wheat stem rust and hog cholera.  

Not only did General Mills have the research know-how to make cereal crops thrive, but also to poison and destroy them via germ warfare.

Connection #2: That name, Abbott Washburn, rang a bell in my head, different from the ringing I otherwise hear there. In my post of March 10, on the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee (CSAC) which was established in the IGY year 1957, I wrote that Washburn was:

head of public relations for General Mills Inc. in Minneapolis, and then executive vice chairman of Crusade for Freedom, which raised money for Radio Free Europe. He was deputy director of the U.S. Information Agency from 1953-1961, acting as liaison between the broadcast agency and the White House and National Security Council during a peak period of the Cold War. He served on the Citizens' Advisory Committee in this capacity.

I went on to wonder:

why, you might ask, was a representative of the USIA on the Citizens' Advisory Committee? The USIA was an agency responsible for American "public diplomacy" (emphasis mine; read public diplomacy as propaganda, maybe?), especially during the Cold War. It was the largest public relations organization in the world, with an annual budget over $1 billion in the years directly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It presided over U.S. government communications to over 150 international populations. So yes, you could say those Liberty Series stamps carried an "agenda" around the world. 

I find it interesting that Washburn honed his PR skills with a food company that engaged in activities related to biological warfare, moved to the USIA, and then served on the CSAC, presumably as a point person who helped guide stamp design selection to signal our country's national interests.

Connection #3: Note the mention of Harry A. Bullis (1890-1963) in the Baker book entry above. He was President and then Chairman of the Board if General Mills during the IGY. And last post, the author of the 1973 document, The Political Legacy of the Inertnational Geophysical year, was Harold Bullis, This was another case where I thought these two men were the same. The biographical details don't quite match up. The foreword to the IGY report states that

The author of this study, the 11th in the series on “Science, Technology, and American Diplomacy,” is Mr. Harold Bullis, Analyst in Science and Technology with the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress. Mr. Bullis holds baccalaureate and masters degrees in physics from the University of Minnesota and Ohio State University as well as a masters degree in public administration from American University. Prior to joining the Library of Congress he served as physicist with the Wright Air Development Center and the Harry Diamond Laboratories.

This must be this L. Harold Bullis, who was "a specialist in science and technology and head of the Geosciences, Materials, and Industrial Technology Section of the Science Policy Research Division of the Congressional Research Service [my emphasis]." I assume he is also the same as this LHB (1927-2015).

Connection #4: Although I haven't been able via obituaries or other online documentation to link these two Harold Bullises with complete certainty, I assume they are father and son, consistent with their ages, and also with a common Minneapolis (General Mills and University of Minnesota) component in their bios. Growing up in the Washington, DC, area, I had a cousin Bernie (connection #5?) who also worked at the Harry Diamond Laboratories, which among other things developed fuzes for munitions such as bombs, rockets and mortar shells. Both Bullises had associations with companies that made devices useful for warfare. (My first real job in the DC area from 1972-74 with Fairchild Space and Electronics Company involved subcontracts for satellite projects of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.)

Make of these connections what you will, and chew them over with your next bowl of Cheerios.

Three U.S. government reports for my IGY archive

I've recently obtained three useful government documents pertaining to the IGY. I have not yet read any of them all the way through, so I won't comment on their contents in any detail, although I hope to draw on them in future posts. 

The first is titled Proposed United States Program for the International Geophysical Year 1957-58.  It was put together by the United States National Committee and published in August 1956, 109 pages. It gives a clear overview of the expected IGY work in each of the major areas of research. It is available for download from the National Academies Press. Until recently, this was the only one of these three documents that was readily available for download as a complete document.

A some point in years past I picked up a hard copy of this report (see scan of the cover).

Second, I kept running into references to National Academy of Sciences 1965 Report on the U.S. Program for the International Geophysical Year: July 1, 1957 - December 31, 1958 , but I was surprised not to be able to find a downloadable copy. Because of the great help of the National Academies, this document was tracked down, posted, and can now be downloaded here. It is 906 pages, and again is organized according to the areas of study of the IGY. What a valuable resource! The title page is shown to the right. Note that this is IGY General Report Number 21; I guess I will now have to figure out what and where those preceding 20 reports are.

Third and last is this report: Bullis, H., 1973; The Political Legacy of the International Geophysical Year; Library of Congress, Science Policy Research Division., United States House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific Developments; Washington, D.C.; U.S. Government Printing Office, 64 p. It can be viewed at the web site of the Hathi Trust, a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world, Not being at a partner institution, I could only download or print this document one page at a time. So I downloaded each page, collated it into a single document, which you can access from my server.  Again, the title page is shown at right.

My college librarian assures me that posting this is ok for a government document. I'll also say here, in response to a question (complaint?) I received, that I do not guarantee any consistency in citation styles sources I refer to in my posts. And, I'll have more to say about the author of this report, Harold Bullis, in my next post.

The Foreword of this document starts with some hopeful words in the midst of the Cold War:

This study examines in detail a specific example of how the world scientific community has worked together in cooperation and good will toward resolving international problems. Its subject is the International Geophysical Year (IGY), the largest and most complex international scientific undertaking ever attempted.

In keeping with the objectives of the series of which it is one part, this study analyzes the contributions made by the IGY in overcoming ideological differences as a means of building bridges between science and diplomacy. More specifically, it attempts to identify and explain the attitudes, behavior patterns, and procedures followed in the IGY as a step toward détente.

Only time will tell of course whether the laudable example set by the IGY represents the major turning point in history claimed by some. Of importance here and now is the message conveyed in this study that indeed international cooperation in science and technology is possible. What remains is for that example to be emulated and extended.

Being able to access government documents online is a pretty amazing capability (although I anticipate making some comments in the next post on documents that are harder to come by).  

Of course, there is a National Archives stamp! Below is the stamp (Scott #2081, 1984) commemorating the founding of the U.S. National Archives. I don't own it, so this image is thanks to Mystic Stamps. I'm not very keen on this stamp design. Why George Washington and Abe Lincoln (with that exaggerated stovepipe hat) profiles? Aren't Washington and Lincoln on enough other stamps? Honor the archivists and the librarians more directly somehow.

Philatelic societies, Battle of Gettysburg stamp, Van Al(l)en, and synchronicity

I've joined several philatelic societies in the past year to learn more about philately, to avail myself of their resources and services, and to support the work that they do. I have joined my local Philatelic Society of Lancaster County, the American Philatelic Society, the American Topical Association, the American First Day Cover Society, and most recently, the United States Stamp Society. Rod Juell, executive secretary of the latter, kindly welcomed me to the group, and promised me a gift. It arrived yesterday, and it was the First Day of Issue program for the 1963 U.S. Civil War Centennial: Battle of Gettysburg stamp, Scott #1180. This is the second FDOI program I have, after the one for the IGY stamp, shown in an earlier post. The 20-page program is very nicely designed. The cover includes the stamp and the FDOI cancelation.

Cover of my FDOI program for the Battle of Gettysburg stamp, showing the first day cancellation

Committee for the Centennial program (p. 2 of the program)

I do have that stamp on an extras page in my childhood stamp album:

Heavily canceled Battle of Gettysburg stamp outlined in gray

President Eisenhower, who was living in Gettysburg after his presidency, spoke as part of the ceremonies, somberly commemorating the battle and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

This gift from the USSS was especially appropriate, as the battlefield is only an hour from my house. I last visited with my nephew Matthias and his wife Filiz in the summer of 2017. 

Gettysburg Battlefield, August, 2017

Interestingly, on that day we ran into a news team that was doing a story on the presence of Confederate memorials in the Park, as the controversy over whom we should honor with monuments was rising in prominence.

A poem in the FDOI program, Pickett's Charge, was written by James "Jimmy" Van Alen (no, not Van Halen), perhaps best known as the founder of the National Lawn Tennis Hall of Fame in his hometown of Newport, Rhode Island, and as deviser of the now commonly used tie-break scoring system in tennis.

I have been joking with my wife and with my readers about various coincidences that I have latched onto as I have written my posts (which is why this post does not deal at all with the IGY). I thought it rather interesting that I received this gift with the poem by James Van Alen the day after my last post, which partly dealt with physicist James Van Allen. I mean, there is just one letter "l" separating these two men! This made me think about psychiatrist Carl Jung's concept of synchronicity. According to Benjamin Radford, Jung's concept of synchronicity is essentially describing "meaningful coincidences." I prefer Radford's explanation that synchronicity is really a manifestation of simple coincidence and the human desire to create connections through confirmation bias (which in these times of information bubbles we should all be wary of), as opposed to Jung's suggestion of synchronicity being due to some sort of meaningful universal connection, even if not directly causal.

Hmm, it is probably a coincidence that just last week I watched the movie A Dangerous Method (2011), directed by David Cronenberg, about the complex relationships between Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (initially a patient of Jung and later one of the first female psychoanalysts).

Savage Chickens - "The future looks bright." The Jetsons were already there.

I haven't been reading the funnies in the newspaper ever since looking at them started giving me excessive eye strain. But lately I have subscribed to getting a daily email of the Savage Chickens cartoon by Doug Savage.

Today's is appropriate on a couple of levels.

The future looks bright

Recall that the caption shown above, from the original cartoon, is a lyric from Donald Fagen's I.G.Y. song. Just a reminder of the opening lines:

Standing tough under stars and stripe
We can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright

Besides whatever political inferences you might draw from this cartoon, about one Donald or another, the retro-futuristic reference to jetpacks is consistent with the lyrics of I.G.Y., and some of the techno-optimism of the 1950s.

Speaking of techno-optimism, The Jetsons was an animated sitcom produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions which I watched on tv when it aired from September, 1962, until March, 1963 (short run!). This family of the imagined future not only wore the spandex jackets mentioned in the I.G.Y. song, but they also had their jetpacks:

I bought a DVD set of The Jetsons a few years back, covering 14 of the original 24 episodes. (The names of son Elroy and dog Astro show up occasionally as NY Times crossword puzzle answers.)

The cover of my DVD set of The Jetsons first season

For additional imaginings about the future, I sometimes look at the subreddit for "retro-futurism." A subreddit is an online community for posts on a particular topic as part of the larger universe of the social media Reddit website. The Retrofuturism subreddit "focuses on the futurist visions of eras past," that is, a look backwards to people who were looking ahead. Go check it out. The future looked bright!

The IGY and Me

I was born in 1950, the same year as the idea for the IGY was hatched, and just a few miles from the house where that occurred.

My education was shaped by the science mania that followed the launching of Sputnik. I received a B.S. in engineering geophysics at Cornell University. My first job afterward was with Fairchild Space & Electronics Co., working on the power subsystems for communications satellites. Summer

I eventually received my graduate degrees in geophysics in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arizona, which included two luminaries of the IGY. My research was on radiocarbon geophysics, and archaeomagnetism. Summer jobs included the USDA's Soil Conservation Service, NOAA's National Weather Service, Newmont Mining, and Amoco Oil.

I continued research on the application of geophysics to archaeology and taught as a professor of geophysics at Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA.

In the early 2000s, I decided to start collecting items related to the IGY in anticipation of its semicentennial in 2007-08. My collection consists of hundreds of philatelic items (stamps, covers, etc.), technical and popular books, and miscellaneous memorabilia.

I recently watched the movie Julie and Julia (2009), contrasting the early years of Julia Childs' culinary career with the life of Julie Powell, who aspired to cook all 524 recipes in Child's cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) in 365 days, a challenge she described in her blog. I thought afterwards that a blog of my own could be a good way to present some of my thoughts about the IGY and my collection.

If I do one entry a week (and stay with it!!), I can get 524 blog entries done before the diamond (75th) anniversary of the IGY in 2032-33!