Pathei Mathos

I think the reason most people don't bother reading classical Greek literature is because it was all written thousands of years ago, and people probably think and act differently now than they did in those ancient stories. That's a mistaken idea about the past, though – – folks have always worried about their kids, listened to bad advice, made incredibly stupid decisions for the silliest of reasons, and suffered a lifetime of regrets.

Aesop is probably the best-known Greek writer to modern audiences. He's given us morals that spanned the gamut from "he who hesitates is lost," to "look before you leap." The take-away lessons we get from Aesop are as applicable now as they were in ancient Athens.

Aeschylus. Live 'n' Learn.

Although not as well-known as Aesop, the Greek tragedian Aeschylus also understood how bumbling and shortsighted people could be. One of Aeschylus's greatest insights into human nature comes from his play Agamemnon. Aeschylus wrote:

"A man crying triumph for Zeus
will meet with wisdom totally —
Zeus who put men on wisdom the road,
who gave 'SUFFER and LEARN' authority.
Misery from pain remembered drips;
instead of sleep before the heart;
good sense comes even to the unwilling."

Suffer and learn ("Pathei Mathos" in ancient Greek) - that seems to sum up all human knowledge. We stay on our toes and pay attention to new information when presented with agony, and the promise of more agony to come. November 28th is the anniversary of a night in Boston when many suffered, and many learned.


Not quite a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Boston in November of 1942 was a busy mix of military servicemen, civilian and civil service workers, and the usual crowd of collegiate students from the city's many universities. These varied groups shared a common interest on weekends: a chance to unwind and relax with friends in Boston's numerous bars and nightclubs.

One of the most popular destinations was the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, a sprawling collection of buildings centered around 17 Piedmont St., in the Bay Village section of Boston. Bay Village straddled the invisible line between the Back Bay and downtown Boston, attracting both the upper crust and the hoi polloi with live bands and a cheesy South Seas decor. The owner, Barney Welansky, supposedly had Mafia ties, lending an air of Prohibition-era intrigue to the goings-on,  and making The Grove that much more enticing to the young crowd it attracted.

Floor plan of the Cocoanut Grove. Click for full-size.

November 28, 1942 was the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The undefeated Boston College football team had scheduled a victory party at the Grove that night in anticipation of beating the rival Holy Cross team from Worcester, but after being trounced 55 – 12, Boston College canceled its reservation. Despite the cancellation, the crush of holiday partiers filled the Grove to more than 1000 people, in rooms rated for no more than 460 people. Customers shouldered past each other on narrow stairways, navigating between the downstairs Melody Lounge dance floor and the upstairs bar and ballroom. The place was packed like a box of matches.

16 year old busboy Stanley Tomaszewski was told to tighten a Christmas light-sized bulb in one of dim booths ringing the Melody Lounge dance floor. As Stanley grabbed the bulb, it slipped out of his hands and rolled under the table. Tomaszewski struck a match under the table, spotted the bulb, and retightened it in the light socket. As he did this, customers noticed a burst of flame leap up from beneath the table and ignite the crêpe paper and satin palm fronds draped across the walls and ceilings.

Nearby waiters grabbed empty champagne buckets and seltzer bottles and threw ice water on the decorations, but the fire outraced their feeble efforts. Flames licked up the stairwells, exploding into a fireball in the upstairs ballroom. In less than five minutes, every public room of the Grove had turned into a roiling inferno of smoke and flames.

What the bar looked like after they cleared out the hundreds of dead bodies.

Human nature being what it is, customers naturally headed to the only exit they knew: the revolving door entrance on the first floor where they had arrived. Unfortunately, the mad scramble for the same door simply filled the stairwells and corridors with the bodies of patrons who had become overcome by smoke inhalation. Bodies also clogged the single revolving door, making it not only impossible for customers to escape by that route, but also for rescuers to enter and render aid. Other escape routes had been blocked by the management: Barney Welansky had ordered the side doors locked so that customers couldn't skip out on their checks. The few exit doors that were not locked opened inwards, and were soon blocked by the crush of customers frantically trying to escape.

Two blocks away, firemen were dousing a car fire when they noticed smoke pouring out of the Cocoanut Grove. They were soon joined by 26 engine companies, three rescue companies, five ladder companies, and an eventual total of 187 firemen to fight the blaze.

The carnage was horrible. As officer Elmer Brooks later told the Boston Globe, when rescuers attempted to remove bodies stacked against the revolving doors, arms and legs came off in their hands.

Weather slowed the recovery efforts. After midnight, the temperature dropped to the mid-20s. Water froze on the cobblestone streets and fire hoses became difficult to bend. The sheer numbers of dead bodies stacked in the Grove made it difficult to attend to the living. The Motor Mart parking garage on nearby Charles St. was turned into a multistory makeshift morgue, where in the following days, survivors would come to try and identify their next of kin.

Almost half the losses of Pearl Harbor, all in just 15 minutes.

Possibly one of the most fortunate aspects of the fire was that it took place during wartime. Local hospitals, expecting German air raids, were stocked with bandages, blood plasma, oxygen bottles, and saline solution. Additionally, a citywide air raid drill the week before prepared civil defense workers on how to handle large-scale catastrophes.

Despite the preparedness of the medical and fire teams, the death toll was staggering. The final number of deaths reached 492. As to the cause, there was more than enough blame to spread around. Flammable decorations passed inspection by the fire department just a week before the fire. The nightclub's lighting system had been installed by an unlicensed electrician. Locked fire doors and boarded up windows trapped hundreds in the burning building. Management packed the club with almost twice the legal capacity of the building. 400 lawsuits were filed against the owners of the Grove, yielding only about $150 for each of the survivors and their families. The only person to be convicted of a crime in the Grove fire was owner Barney Welansky, who was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison. Stricken with terminal cancer, he served only four years of the sentence. His only words to the press when he was released in 1946 were, "I wish I died with the others in that fire."

Small miracles.

What about Aeschylus's "suffer and learn" lesson? It turns out there were many lessons learned from the suffering. Both Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston City Hospital discovered new ways of treating burns and smoke inhalation. The new miracle antibiotic, penicillin, was found to be effective in preventing staph infections during this first use in a non-laboratory environment. Decreased staph infections also meant that pioneering skin graft operations would be more effective in saving lives. The use of a blood bank, Boston's first, aided in preventing shock due to loss of bodily fluids. New psychiatric treatments dealing with loss and grief were established in hospitals after the fire, becoming some of the first research into post-traumatic stress disorders.

It's been 70 years since the Cocoanut Grove fire, and little physical evidence remains of the catastrophe. The Motor Mart parking garage is still there, but not even the outline of the Grove buildings remain. A small plaque about a half block away from the site of the tragedy has been left as a memorial to those lost in the fire, but unless you're looking for it, it's difficult to notice. The more important reminders are nationwide changes in fire safety codes. Revolving doors can no longer be installed in buildings unless they are book-ended with outward opening fire doors. Exits must be clearly marked with separately powered, lighted signs. All fire doors must be unlocked during business hours.

The Boston licensing board also ruled that no restaurant in Boston could name itself "The Cocoanut Grove."

Not just an empty lot: the streets were moved and that particular area is now buried under a Radisson Hotel.

Percival Lowell and the Blood Vessels of Venus

Percival Lowell, shown during the middle of the
longest unwitting eye exam in history

 Astronomer Percival Lowell died 96 years ago on November 12, 1916. Everything I've ever read about him lauds his enormous contributions to the field of astronomy, but I'm really not quite sure what those contributions were.

Lowell was a rich guy, descended from a family of rich guys who arrived in Massachusetts about 15 years behind the Mayflower. Let me just give you an idea of how rich the Lowell family was: Percival's brother Lawrence was the president of Harvard University, and his sister Amy had enough free time to become a professional poet.

Percival graduated Harvard University in 1876, with a degree in mathematics. For ten years, he traveled the Orient writing and publishing three books about the history, psychology, and culture of Japan. By 1893 he had grown bored of travel, and turned his interests to planetary astronomy.

Planetary astronomy was all the rage in the 1890s, especially terrestrial planets like Venus and Mars. Lowell was especially taken by the writings of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who believed he viewed lines of channels or canals on Mars. Lowell believed in these canals as well, and built an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona to confirm these sightings.

Lowell's Martian canals, 1896.

Percival Lowell cranked out three books about Mars, each volume loaded with dozens of sketches of the elaborate Mars canal system. He interpreted the canals as a last gasp construction of the dying Mars race, built to move dwindling water supplies from the polar ice caps to the parched equatorial regions. The whole idea seems maudlin and melodramatic, but after all, this was the Victorian age.

Lowell's observations of extraterrestrial canals weren't limited to the planet Mars. He also spotted a hub and spoke system constructed on the surface of Venus. Unlike Schiaparelli's Martian canals, Lowell was the only astronomer to note such features on Venus. In fact, Lowell only spotted these features when he narrowed the objective lens of his telescope to a mere half millimeter in front of his eye.

Not astronomy - - it's anatomy.

In 2003, retired optometrist Sherman Schultz figured out what Percival Lowell was actually seeing: the objective lens was reflecting shadows of blood vessels inside Lowell's eye. The map of Venus was in reality a map of the back of Percival Lowell's eyeball. It's quite likely that the canals of Mars were also a side effect of Percival Lowell's optical blood vessels. In any case, Mariner 4 eliminated the question of canals on Mars during its flyby of the Red Planet in 1965.

So, if Lowell's observation of canals on Mars was a bust, and the structures on Venus were a delusion, did he make any contribution in the field of planetary astronomy? An argument could be made that he helped in the discovery of the dwarf planet Pluto – – except, even in that adventure he was horribly mistaken on a planetary scale. Lowell, the mathematician, found a glaring gap in the gravity equations governing the motions of planets Uranus and Neptune. To account for the discrepancy, it seemed as though there was a third, more distant planet tugging on Neptune. This mysterious "Planet X" was Lowell's focus in the final decade of his life. Hundreds of photographic plates were made at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, searching for a tiny dot in the sky to resolve the equation. The search continued long after Lowell had passed away, ending finally with the discovery by Clyde Tombaugh of the dwarf planet Pluto in 1930. Revisiting earlier photography, Tombaugh noted that Pluto had been imaged previously during Lowell's lifetime in 1916, but the tiny speck of Pluto had been overlooked.

It turns out that the entire search for Pluto had been a mathematical mistake in the first place. Spacecraft Voyager 2 confirmed that the planet Neptune was much less massive than Lowell had estimated, making the search for an additional planet unnecessary. Although the data was erroneous, Lowell's mistake set in motion the process of discovery that allowed Tombaugh to find Pluto.

Percival wasn't the only person in the Lowell household to see things that weren't there. His wife, Constance Lowell, was sued by a neighbor for "false arrest and malicious prosecution" after she claimed the neighbor had stolen twelve chickens (and a chicken coop). The neighbor was acquitted, and I can't find a record of how the civil suit turned out.

 Even though Lowell's astronomical work didn't do much to advance the science of astronomy his romantic notions of Martian canals gave birth to the science fiction stories of H.G. Wells and Ray Bradbury. Bad astronomy makes for great science fiction.

Lowell's tomb is in the shape of an observatory.
John Carter would approve.

I Saw the Flags of Havoc Fly

I seem to write a lot about Bad Things in History when approaching an anniversary of a Bad Thing, so let's talk about a Really Bad Thing that happened in Boston on November 9th, 1872.

The green part is Boston, 1772.
The extra lines are filled-in Boston, 1880.

Most of Boston's geography is manufactured. Back in John Adams's time, the city (actually it was called the Town of Boston then) was a spit of land straddling two bays - - a peninsula (the Shawmut Peninsula) isolated by a salty tidal moat. To satisfy the loud demand for additional real estate, the town fathers shaved off the tops of Mount Vernon, Pemberton, and Beacon Hills and pushed all the gravel and soil into the harbor. The rearrangement of the hillsides created what's now Haymarket Square and the Atlantic Avenue harbor area.

Despite all these experiments with manufactured real estate,  building space remained at a premium. Stores and houses were pressed cheek-by-jowl in the downtown area, with buildings four and five floors tall cropping up in the densest part of town - the area closest to Atlantic Avenue. By the mid-1800's, real estate developers crammed almost three thousand new structures into the teeming city, using slap-dash methods to build the cheapest buildings as quickly as possible. Although the city government passed dozens of building codes to prevent fire and pestilence, there was no municipal inspection agency created to enforce such laws.

Adding to the city's woes, Boston's entire infrastructure was rapidly outstripped by the increasing demands for city services. A puny water distribution network, poor sewers, and understaffed volunteer fire departments made the city a health and safety time bomb. Fixes were haphazard, mostly band-aid solutions to solve immediate problems rather than implementing a structural redesign. Boston's Fire Chief, John Damrell, fought for new water mains in the densest part of the city, but was rebuffed by politicians seeking more vote-catching ways of spending city funds.

Arson was a huge problem. Insurance underwriting was in its infancy, and failing businesses could easily over-insure their properties, burn their edifices to the ground, and collect a hefty return on the ashes.

83-87 Summer St, where the fire began.
Note the steep, fire-friendly Mansard roof.

All these splintered, systemic troubles set the stage for the disaster that began on night of November 9th, 1872. Just after 7:20pm, a fire ignited in the basement of a warehouse at 83-87 Summer St. Within minutes, the flames engulfed the building and spread to nearby stores and warehouses. The fire spread across downtown rooftops due to an unfortunate combination of architecture and taxation: first, the roofs were tall wooden Mansard-style structures that acted as giant flues, lifting necessary oxygen into the flames; and second, the attics of these commercial buildings were filled with crates of hoop skirts, top hats, gloves, and linens, owing to a tax loophole where store inventories kept in attics were not taxed by the city. The necessary ingredients of heat, fuel, and oxygen made for a rapid spread of the flames through the middle of Boston's commercial district.

Other combinations of poor planning and simple bad luck made the fire uncontainable. A bout of horse flu crippled the draft livery of Boston's fire departments. Steam pump wagons were hauled through the cobblestone streets by teams of firemen, delaying any start to fighting the fire by almost an hour after the first alarm. The first alarms, by the way, were already delayed because the Boston Fire Department padlocked public fire alarms to prevent prank calls by the locals.

When the pumps were attached to the hydrants, a new difficulty arose: the ancient water mains were too narrow to provide enough water for the pumps to reach the upper floors of the downtown buildings. Although crews could soak the lower floors, the fires continued to spread through downtown Boston all evening.

Spectators clogged the streets as the fire continued to spread, blocking the efforts of the Boston firefighters. Reinforcements of firemen and equipment arrived by train throughout the night from as far away as Maine and Vermont. Unfortunately, the trains brought out-of-town spectators, too, which turned the blazing scene into an epic panorama of firefighting and looting. The out-of-state firemen discovered to their dismay that Boston's haphazard installation of hydrants made it almost impossible to find hoses that were compatible with the hydrant couplings. Connecticut pump units were parked along the harborside, unable to draw any water from Boston's mains.

1872 Boston looked like
1865 Richmond.

With the fire still beyond control of the Fire Department, residents petitioned the Mayor to take a gamble on stopping the fire with drastic measures: namely, blowing up a line of buildings on Washington St. to act as a firewall against the rest of the city.  Both the mayor and the Fire Chief objected to this course of action, suggesting that the demolitions would do little to stop the fire. Building owners tried the gunpowder approach anyway, with mixed results. Some buildings exploded to splinters and brick dust, others merely lost a few windows. Ultimately, the demolition of the buildings played no part in stopping the fire.

By the time the fire was contain the next morning, more than 65 acres of prime downtown Boston real estate had been destroyed. Seven hundred seventy six buildings were no more. The fire caused an estimated $75 million (in 1872 dollars) in loss and damages.

Thirty dead, 776 buildings gone.

Fire Chief Damrell, despite his campaign for better fire prevention policies, lost his job and was replaced by a Board of Fire Commissioners. In an ironic twist, Damrell was appointed head of the new Board of Building Inspectors.

Surveying the damage the morning after the fire, the poet (and Chief Anatomy Professor at Harvard Medical School) Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. was moved to write a few lines about the devastation he saw from his vantage point on Beacon Hill:

While far along the eastern sky
I saw the flags of Havoc fly,
As if his forces would assault
The sovereign of the starry vault
And hurl Him back the burning rain
That seared the cities of the plain,
I read as on a crimson page
The words of Israel's sceptred sage:--
"For riches make them wings, and they
Do as an eagle fly away."

The city rebuilt, although a few immediate changes to the downtown district. Some streets, such as Washington and federal Street, were made wider to reduce the chance of future building fires jumping intersections. Most of the replacement buildings, though, were built with few firewalls can remain pressed up against each other in the narrow streets of Boston. It would be nearly 25 years until downtown Boston was refitted with 36 inch water mains as a standard throughout the city.




Unfortunately for Boston, the city never really learned important lessons from its largest fire. More than 70 years later, Boston would suffer again from a calamitous fire, caused by both a lack of safety and a lack of foresight. But that's a story for another post.