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!

Recent 65th anniversary of the issuance of the U.S. IGY stamp

The U.S. IGY stamp was issued on May 31, 1958. Recently we saw the 65th anniversary of that date. Happy, birthday, 1107! Congratulations on becoming a senior citizen.

I recently bought a cover which contained 5 of these stamps. 

Cover IGY 254 (front) from my collection

Cover IGY 254 (back) from my collection

This cover has several notable characteristics:

1. It is franked with a block of  four IGY stamps (Scott 1107).
2. The block has a first day of issue (5-31-58) cancellation for this stamp.
3. A single additional IGY stamp on the cover was cancelled (using a barrel/football) with a postmark from Quaker Hill, CT, on 7-26-1958. The cover was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. L.C. Maples in Quaker Hill.
4. Typed on the cover: "Carried on USS Skate (SSN578) on first under-ice crossing under North Pole. Achieved 12 August 1958." 
5. The cover is signed by James F. Calvert, the distinguished commander of the Skate.
6. Typed on the cover: "Courtesy of F.G. Weigle", an acoustic physicist who sailed on the Skate. I'm not sure exactly what "courtesy of " means in this case; perhaps he typed on the text and secured the signature.
7. The front includes the Artmaster IGY cachet (Mellone 4).
8. On the back of the cover is a nice cachet noting the USS Skate's polar ice cap cruise during the IGY.

The USS Skate (SSN-578) was: the lead ship of the Skate class of nuclear submarines; the third nuclear submarine commissioned by the U.S. the second submarine to reach the North Pole (8-11-58 during this voyage, after the USS Nautilus had done so in 1957); the first to surface at the North Pole through the ice cap (in 1959); and the first to make a completely submerged trans-Atlantic crossing.

The history of this cover is not 100% clear to me. I assume the International Geophysical Year FDC was produced first. The cover was postmarked again on 7-26-1958 in CT, near the ship's home in Groton. This date was before the Skate departed for the North Pole  on July 30. But the text says the cover was carried on the USS Skate's voyage underneath the polar ice cap. So I don't understand how the dates mesh. Could it have been postmarked before the ship departed, traveled on the ship, and then delivered after the expedition without an additional franking? Or sent on the ship without a postal marking, managed by Weigle, and then mailed to Quaker Hill upon its return (I lean towards this interpretation)? Or could there be another explanation? It may be worth noting that the submarine base in New London, CT, the Skate's base, is only 4 miles from Quaker Hill. Thanks for any suggestions.

I appealed for help to better understand this cover to the Facebook group of the Universal Ship Cancellation Society, and although I got some appreciation of the item, no one completely answered my questions. If any of you, dear readers, can shed additional light, please let me  know.

Hungarian National Committee for the IGY, Sopron, and the Pan-European Picnic

I recently bought an interesting item on eBay, one for which I was the sole bidder, so it was not very expensive. It was a sheet signed by the members of the Hungarian National Committee for the IGY. Countries participating in the IGY had national committees to organize and guide the work done by scientists from that country.

Members and signatures of the Hungarian National Committee for the IGY

I am assuming the officers were the key figures on this committee. Prof. A. Tározy-Hornoch is listed as academician, president of the committee, and representing the field of geodesy (shape and gravitational field of the Earth). Prof. L. Egyed is listed as secretary of the committee, representing the field of seismology. I found a little more information online about these two scientists.

Prof. A. Tározy-Hornoch (1900-1986) was a university professor in Sopron and one of the most prominent figures in 20th century Hungarian geodesy. He is the eponym for Hungary's Tárczy-Hornoch Antal Geodetic Laboratory, used for the development and calibration of geodetic instruments and devices. 

According to Wikipedia, Prof. László  Egyed  (1914-1970) was a professor at the Geophysical Institute of the Eötvös-University in Budapest. He published over 100 scientific articles. He wrote the book Physics of the Solid Earth in 1956; I don't think a translation exists, but it would be interesting to read this book to survey the field of geophysics just prior to the IGY. 

Egyed was a supporter of the expanding Earth hypothesis, a suggested alternative to plate tectonics. According to this post from Scientific American, Egyed based his thinking on variations of the sea level in the geological past, concluding that today's continents are the remains of the ancient crust of a smaller planet, surrounded by younger rocks generated along fractures at the mid-ocean-ridges. Popular Mechanics had an article describing expanding Earth ideas in more detail.

This document is reminiscent of my last post, about my one-page exhibit which included covers featuring three key personnel of the U.S. National Committee for the IGY: Joseph Kaplan (chairperson), A. H. Shapley (vice chairperson), and Hugh Odishaw (executive secretary).

I could not easily find much information on Hungary's activities as part of the IGY, but it did establish the Nagycenk Geophysical Observatory in 1956-57, operated during the IGY and since by the Geodetic and Geophysical Institute of the Earth Science Center, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The observatory makes continuous records of Earth electrical currents, atmospheric electricity, ionospheric and meteorological observations.

In 2009, I was at a geophysics conference in Tározy-Hornoch's Sopron, the XIth International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy (IAGA) Scientific Assembly. I sent myself a postcard prepared for the event. It is franked with what seems to be a somewhat standardized Hungarian postage stamp, similar to Scott 3926a, showing a surveying compass and map of Hungary. The word Belföld means domestic (I think), so other stamps were added to make the international postage. Magyarország is Hungarian for Hungary. The non-standardized label on the stamp margin gives the date and place of the IAGA meeting. There is a corresponding IAGA 2009 cancellation of the stamps. Maybe Prof. Tározy-Hornoch himself walked the halls of the conference building in an earlier era.

Front of self-addressed postcard from IAGA 2009, Sopron

Back of postcard from IAGA 2009, Sopron

While I was in Sopron, I took a wonderful bike ride into the countryside, where I saw the impressive Fertőrákos limestone quarry (photo at right). The quarry was used as early as Roman times, but nowadays there are concerts in an amphitheater among the cavernous excavations. This was also the area of the so-called Pan-European Picnic two decades earlier in 1989, the first place where East Germans on holiday were allowed to cross the border unimpeded into Austria and the West. Soon afterwards the Berlin Wall fell (I stood on top of it in the week before Christmas, 1989), and then everything else! 

This exhibit in Sopron commemorated the 20th anniversary of the Pan-European picnic

Once I got to the Neusiedler See on my bike ride, a cold beer really hit the spot