bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Astrophysics and Nucleosynthesis
Authors: Scerri Eric
Published: November 2020

Having now examined attempts to explain the nature of the elements and the periodic system in a theoretical manner, it is necessary to backtrack a little in order to pick up a number of important issues not yet addressed. As in the preceding chapters, several contributions from fields outside of chemistry are encountered, and the treatment proceeds historically. So far in this book, the elements have been treated as if they have always existed, fully formed. Nothing has yet been said about how the elements have evolved or about the relative abundance of the isotopes of the elements. These questions form the contents of this chapter. It also emerges that different isotopes show different stabilities, a feature that can be explained to a considerable extent by appeal to theories from nuclear physics. The study of nucleosynthesis, and especially the development of this field, is intimately connected to the development of the field of cosmology as a branch of physical science. In a number of instances, different cosmological theories have been judged according to the degree to which they could explain the observed universal abundances of the various elements. Perhaps the most controversial cosmological debate has been over the rival theories of the big bang and the steady-state models of the universe. The proponents of these theories frequently appealed to relative abundance data, and indeed, the eventual capitulation of the steady-state theorists, or at least some of them, was crucially dependent upon the observed ratio of hydrogen to helium in the universe. Chapters 2, 3, and 6 discussed Prout’s hypothesis, according to which all the elements are essentially made out of hydrogen. Although the hypothesis was initially rejected on the basis of accurate atomic weight determinations, it underwent a revival in the twentieth century. As mentioned in chapter 6, the discoveries of Anton van den Broek, Henry Moseley, and others showed that there is a sense in which all elements are indeed composites of hydrogen.
January: Of Rocks and Ice
Authors: Wohl Ellen
Published: November 2020

The beaver meadow is quiet in January. For many plants and animals, winter is a season of subdued activity, or of waiting. North St. Vrain Creek remains open along the main channel, the water flowing clear but tinted brown as pine bark between snowy banks. Densely growing thickets of willow closely line the banks. Each stem starts pale brown near the ground, then grades upward to shades of maroon or yellowish orange at the branch tips. In a bird’s-eye view, these startling colors make the meadow stand out distinctly from the dark green conifers that define the edges of the meadow. Spruce and fir trees grow sharply pointed as arrows; pines present a slightly more rounded outline. Snow falls silently in thick flakes from the low, gray sky. The upper edges of the valley walls fade into snow and clouds. The sun appears briefly as a small, pale spotlight behind the clouds to the south. Snow mounds on the patches of ice in the shallow channel. The water flowing beneath creates flickers through the translucent ice like a winter fire of subdued colors and no heat. Tussocks form humps of straw-colored grass above the dark, frozen soil. Rabbit tracks line the snowy bank, sets of four paw marks with a large gap between each set. Something small crossed the bank, leaping one to two feet at a bound, two paws with slight drag marks behind them. In places the powdery snow has drifted deeply, but mostly it is shallow over a frozen crust. Beaver-gnawed sticks and stumps poke up through the snow. A large flood came through four months ago, in mid-September, washing out dams that the beavers have not yet rebuilt. Chunks of wood deposited among the willow stems by the floodwaters stand far above the January flow of the creek. A dipper fishes the creek, wading rather than swimming, at home in the cold water. The slate-gray bird is the only visible animal, busily probing the bed with its short bill, then pausing to stand and bob up and down.
March: Water Superheroes
Authors: Wohl Ellen
Published: November 2020

By mid-March, daytime temperatures above freezing have left muddy puddles all over the unpaved road that runs above and beside the beaver meadow. This road extends to the national park trailhead farther upstream but is now closed for winter. I enter the beaver meadow on a lightly overcast day that is windy, as I expect March to be. Lack of recent snowfall and warm temperatures have caused the snowpack to shrink down, and I no longer break through into hidden pockets of air around the base of the bushy willows. I do break through the ice on my snowshoes, sinking in a slow motion that allows me to scramble and keep my feet dry . . . mostly. I sink in above the ankle at one point and the resulting icy ache makes me appreciate the ability of beavers to stay warm. The snow covering the higher peaks and the adjacent lateral moraines appears about the same, but numerous spots of bare ground have appeared along the creek banks. The remaining snow resembles a blanket draped over the undulating, grassy ground rather than an integral part of the landscape. I stand on the snowbank at the downstream end of one of the larger beaver ponds. The dam merges into a vegetated berm and appears to be intact, but I can hear water flowing swiftly somewhere beneath the snow. Most puzzling is that I can’t see where the water is going: the nearest downstream standing water has no apparent inflow or current. Mysterious, intricate plumbing surrounds me. The beaver meadow is on the move, flowing and changing, preparing for the season of birth and growth. Standing water is noticeably more abundant than a month ago. Interspersed among the ice and snow are big puddles and little ponds, some connected and draining, others isolated and still. The still pond waters have a shallow covering of meltwater underlain by ice with large, irregularly shaped air pockets trapped in the upper layer. These I can easily break with the tip of my ski pole. Thousands of tiny bubbles deeper in the ice look milky.
June: The Thin Green Line
Authors: Wohl Ellen
Published: November 2020

June, when the snows come hurrying from the hills and the bridges often go, in the words of Emily Dickinson. In the beaver meadow, the snows are indeed hurrying from the surrounding hills. Every one of the 32 square miles of terrain upslope from the beaver meadow received many inches of snow over the course of the winter. Some of the snow sublimated back into the atmosphere. Some melted and infiltrated into the soil and fractured bedrock, recharging the groundwater that moves slowly downslope and into the meadow. A lot of the snow sat on the slopes, compacted by the weight of overlying snow into a dense, water-rich mass that now melts rapidly and hurries down to the valley bottoms. North St. Vrain Creek overflows into the beaver meadow, the water spilling over the banks and into the willow thickets in a rush. I can hear the roar of water in the main channel well before I can see it through the partially emerged leaves of the willows. Overhead is the cloudless sky of a summer morning. A bit of snow lingers at the top of the moraines. Grass nearly to my knees hides the treacherous footing of this quivering world that is terra non-firma. I am surrounded by the new growth of early summer, yet the rich scents of decay rise every time I sink into the muck. I walk with care, staggering occasionally, in this patchy, complex world that the beavers have created. I abruptly sink to mid-thigh in a muck-bottomed hole, releasing the scent of rotten eggs, but less than a yard away a small pocket of upland plants is establishing a roothold in a drier patch. A seedling spruce rises above ground junipers shedding yellow pollen dust and the meticulously sorted, tiny pebbles of a harvester ant mound. I extract my leg with difficulty and continue walking. As I walk around the margin of another small pond, the water shakes. Sometimes the bottom is firm in these little ponds, sometimes it’s mucky—I can’t tell simply by looking through the water.
July: Of Fish and Frogs and Flying Things
Authors: Wohl Ellen
Published: November 2020

By mid-July, abundant water continues to move in all directions within the beaver meadow. Water flows noisily down the main channel, creating deep pools where it mixes with water entering from secondary channels. Deeper waters well up from beneath overhung banks and the willow stems along the banks remain partly submerged. Pieces of driftwood collect where the channel bends, floating in perpetual circles atop the shadowed water. The water is clear of suspended sediment but stained slightly brown. Flow is noticeably lower in the secondary channels, where algae and bacteria stain the cobbles reddish-brown. Shallow water runs down a beaver trail toward the main channel, and I can easily imagine the trail eroding into a small canal over a period of years. The fern-like stems of rust red that grew beneath the pond waters earlier in the season have now emerged and bloomed, revealing a row of pink flowers of elephant’s head. Diminutive white twinflowers bloom near the conifers at the edge of the meadow. Stalks of pink and white Pyrola flowers rise above their ground-hugging leaves, which have been green since April. Mountain bluebells form clusters of indigo among the green hues of the grasses and sedges. Broad white blossoms of cow parsnip create a canopy above the other herbaceous plants. Aptly named shooting stars resemble tiny bursts of yellow and white trailing spiraling pink petals as they lean over the ground. The songbirds are less vocal than in June now that they are busy tending to nestlings weak at flying, but I can still hear the notes of chickadees, sparrows, and warblers, underlain by the distant croaks of ravens. Hummingbirds continue their mating displays, diving toward the ground as though intent on suicide, only to pull up at the last moment. The red blazes on their throats flash like fragments of momentary flame amidst the thick greenery. Mosquitoes are more noticeable now, despite the damselflies and dragonflies busily hunting back and forth across the openings among the willows. Beds of matted grass lie dispersed across the meadow.
September: Alternate Realities
Authors: Wohl Ellen
Published: November 2020

The first week of September mostly feels like summer. The air on the dry terrace bordering the beaver meadow is richly scented with pine. Purple aster, blue harebells, and tall, yellow black-eyed Susan still bloom. Fungi are more abundant on the forest floor, and the tiny, purplish berries of kinnikinnick are sweet to the taste. The air is warm in the sunshine, but strong winds hurry rain showers through at intervals. Patches of last year’s snow linger on the surrounding peaks, even as the first light snows have already fallen in the high country. Down in the beaver meadow, the leaves of aspen, willow, birch, and alder are starting to assume their autumn colors. Here and there a small patch of yellow or orange appears among the green. Blades of grass have a pale orange tint and the strawberry leaves have gone scarlet, even as white asters, purple thistles, and a few other flowers continue to bloom. The creek is noticeably lower, its cobble bed slick with rust-brown algae. Exposed cobble and sandbars have grown wider as the water has shrunk back from the edge of the willows, and the main channel is easy to cross on foot. The clear water is chillingly cold in both the main channel and the side channels. The smaller side channels no longer flow, and a drape of mud mixed with bits of plants covers the cobbles. Wood deposited a year ago has weathered to pale gray. The older, marginal beaver ponds have shrunk noticeably, and the water is lower in the main ponds, where tall sedges now lie bent on the top of the declining water surface. The beavers remain active: following fresh moose tracks, I come on a newly built beaver dam on a small side channel. By the third week of September, autumn has clearly arrived in the mountains. The air remains quite warm during the day, but nights of frost are swiftly bringing out the autumn colors. Whole stands of willows and aspen now glow golden or pumpkin-orange.
Spelling
Authors: Selikowitz Mark
Published: November 2020

There are three kinds of difficulty that may cause a child’s written work to be incomprehensible. First, specific spelling difficulty, where some words may be so badly spelt that they are difficult to recognize. Secondly, specific writing difficulty, where the handwriting may be so untidy that it is illegible see Figure 7.3, p. 65). And, thirdly, language disorder, where the language used by the child may be so full of errors that it does not make sense. Specific spelling difficulty will be described in this chapter, specific writing difficulty in the next chapter, and language disorders will be described in Chapter 9. . . . What is specific spelling difficulty? . . . specific spelling difficulty can be defined as an unexplained, significant spelling difficulty. A significant difficulty is usually defined as a spelling age more than two standard deviations below the mean for the child’s age (see Chapter 1, p. 5 for the explanation of this term). Specific spelling difficulty is often associated with specific reading difficulty. In some children, specific spelling difficulty is an isolated problem. Although such children will have average reading ability, research studies suggest that subtle reading problems can be detected in such children on special testing. . . . How spelling is assessed . . . There are several standardized spelling tests in general use. These differ in the ways in which they test spelling. Some present the child with words that are part of his sight vocabulary, others present a wider range of words. Tests usually involve spelling from dictation. Some may also involve recognizing whether a printed word is correctly spelt or not. The psychologist will choose the test, or tests, that will provide information about the child’s spelling level, as well as about the nature of his difficulties. For example, a test that shows that a child has difficulties with spelling from dictation, but not with identifying words that are incorrectly spelt, may demonstrate particular problems with word memory. The psychologist will also try to differentiate between the different kinds of spelling errors, such as phonetic, visual, and sequential errors, which are described later in this chapter.
The poet and the poison
Authors: Emsley John
Published: November 2020

Mercury is not a particularly promising homicidal poison, but it is possible to dispose of someone by feeding them mercury(II) chloride provided you disguise its metallic taste. In the 1800s solutions of corrosive sublimate, as it was then called, were used as an antiseptic and as an insecticide against bedbugs, and its very availability resulted in thousands of poisonings being reported to the health authorities, although these were mainly accidents or as a result of its being taken deliberately in order to procure an abortion. Mercury was not a poison to feature in many murder cases because it was so easily detectable by the intended victims, especially if they started to vomit, which they almost always did. Then the metallic taste became particularly noticeable, and the presence of mercury could easily be confirmed by simple analytical tests. The poisoners who chose mercury had to use a large dose and this would kill within a day or two. Despite these inherent drawbacks, a few poisoners made use of it. Two of the murderers whose cases we are about to analyse opted for the large single dose approach, but the third murderer achieved her ends by targeting her victim with multiple doses. That murder became famous because of whom she killed and the political repercussions it caused. It was also notorious for the manner in which the final fatal dose of poison was administered. Mary Bateman was known as the Yorkshire Witch and she had a plan that she thought would lead her victims into taking a fatal single dose of mercury. Instead it led her to the gallows. At the time of her crime, Bateman lived in Leeds, Yorkshire, where she earned her living telling fortunes and swindling gullible clients out of their cash and possessions. She claimed to receive her supernatural information from a spirit medium, a Miss Blythe, into whose mouth she put the advice that always seemed to result in her clients handing over their money and saleable goods, with the promise that if they did as Miss Blythe said, then good luck would soon come their way, and they would be more than compensated.
Requiem for antimony
Authors: Emsley John
Published: November 2020

Antimony in a corpse persists indefinitely, and unless a body was cremated, which in former times it rarely was, a murderer using antimony could never be certain that he or she would not one day be brought to account. However, that was a small risk to set aside the potential benefits, which could be large. And there were other benefits in choosing antimony as the murder weapon, not least that it was itself widely used in medical treatment. Poisoners choosing antimony invariably selected tartar emetic (antimony potassium tartrate), and indeed its faint yellow crystals had two advantages. Firstly, they are very soluble in water and, while the solution has a faint metallic taste, this is easily masked by the presence of other flavours. Secondly, the compound was readily available, and all pharmacists stocked it and rarely queried its sale because it was widely used to treat sick animals. Moreover, tartar emetic was cheap; an ounce cost only 2d. in 1897 (around 50p or $1 today). Pharmacists ordered it by the pound, which gives some indication of the demand for it. In small doses of about 5 mg, antimony potassium tartrate acts as a diaphoretic, in other words it promotes sweating and will thereby lower the body’s temperature. In larger doses of around 50 mg it acts as an emetic. Vomiting begins within 15 minutes and most of the stomach contents are expelled. Thus the poison acts as its own antidote to a certain extent: witness the man who recovered from a dose of around 25 grams (25 000 mg), corresponding to two teaspoonfuls of the crystals, which were taken in mistake for sodium bicarbonate. On the other hand, some have died after swallowing as little as 120 mg, although such sensitivity to the poison is extremely rare and it would normally require a dose of twice this amount to cause death, assuming it was retained by the body long enough for it to be absorbed. Some individuals are particularly sensitive to antimony, as the ‘Balham Mystery’ will show, and this sensitivity may well explain the puzzling death of Mozart.
An ancient ozone catastrophe?
Authors: Beerling David
Published: November 2020

The University of Cambridge is one of the oldest seats of learning in the world and is, as befits such an august institution, steeped in tradition and history. One of the more curious traditions, which survived until 1909, was that of publicly ranking undergraduates who had taken the Mathematical Tripos, the oldest and most demanding examination of its kind. Candidates concluded 10 (now 9) semesters of intensive study by sitting a gruelling series of eight lengthy papers, each more difficult than the last, undertaken over a period of nine days. In rank order, the first 30–40 were called wranglers; the man gaining the highest marks of the year held the enviable position of Senior Wrangler. By tradition the positions were published in the London Times, with the accompanying list carrying pictures and short biographies of the top finishers; being a wrangler conveyed a certain degree of national honour and university distinction. Competition to become Senior Wrangler was intense. The examinations involved a test of knowledge, power of recall, concentration, and nerves, and a system of private coaching developed in response to the demands among the elite mathematicians to be Senior Wrangler. Coaches were often those who had previously placed well in the wrangler competition, with good ones able to teach essential mathematics and an ability to produce stock answers concisely so that as many problems as possible could be solved in the time available. The wrangler system evolved its own natural life cycle, ensuring its perpetuity, for a good coach could charge a tidy sum for seeing a student twice weekly over a year and usually had several candidates on his books. A certain William Hopkins was a superlative tutor who had, by 1849, coached 17 Senior Wranglers and 44 top three places. Wranglers in the top few places had the opportunity to take up a pleasant college fellowship or work as a coach fashioning a career to produce more wranglers. Women in the days of Victorian and Edwardian Cambridge were not awarded a degree but were, from 1870 onwards, permitted to sit the Tripos examination.
The flourishing forests of Antarctica
Authors: Beerling David
Published: November 2020

By arriving at the South Pole on 14 December 1911, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (1872–1928) reached his destination over a month ahead of the British effort led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912). As Scott’s party approached the South Pole on 17 January 1912, they were devastated to see from afar the Norwegian’s black flag. On arrival, they discovered the remains of his camp with ski and sledge tracks, and numerous dog footprints. Amundsen, it turned out, had used dogs and diversionary tactics to secure victory while the British team had man-hauled their sledges. These differences were not lost on The Times in London, which marked the achievement with muted praise, declaring it ‘not quite in accordance with the spirit of fair and open competition which hitherto marked Antarctic exploration’. Exhausted, Scott and his men spent time the following day making scientific observations around the Pole, erected ‘our poor slighted Union Jack’, and photographed themselves in front of it (Plate 11). Lieutenant Bowers took the picture by pulling a string to activate the shutter. It is perhaps the most well known, and at the same time the saddest picture, of the entire expedition—a poignant image of the doomed party, all of whom look utterly fed up as if somehow sensing the fate awaiting them. The cold weather, icy wind, and dismal circumstances led Scott to acerbically remark in his diary: ‘Great god! This is an awful place and terrible enough to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.’ By this time, the party had been hauling their sledges for weeks, and all the men were suffering from dehydration, owing to fatigue and altitude sickness from being on the Antarctic plateau that sits nearly 3000m above sea level. Three of them, Captain Oates, Seaman Evans, and Bowers, were badly afflicted with frostbitten noses and cheeks. Ahead lay the return leg, made all the more unbearable by the crippling psychological blow of knowing they had been second to the Pole. After a gruelling 21-day trek in bitterly cold summit winds, the team reached their first cache of food and fuel, covering the distance six days faster than it had taken them to do the leg in the other direction.
Through a glass darkly
Authors: Beerling David
Published: November 2020

Throughout this book we have encountered a varied cast of historical characters, who have pioneered the development of palaeobotanical thought over the past two centuries. Although the fascination of plant fossils has an exceptional pedigree, reaching back to at least the eleventh century, Edward Jacob (Chapter 7) was the earliest of these ‘searchers of scientific truth’ introduced here. Jacob’s eighteenth-century claim to fame lay in his descriptions of the fossilized remains of exotic subtropical floras and faunas in the crumbling sediments around the coastline of the Isle of Sheppey. Jacob was followed by the true palaeobotanical pioneers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who established the scientific basis for the anatomical and microscopic investigation of fossil plants. Through their synthesis of palaeontological knowledge, they established the study of fossils as technical and exacting, rather than a mere hobby. And a common thread linking us with this ‘golden age’ of discovery and description is the notion that the fossils record some aspects of Earth’s ancient climates. It’s a telling reminder that curiosity compels us to ask why certain fossils are where they are and to speculate on what it means. Albert Seward, who examined Scott of the Antarctic’s fossils (Chapter 6), codified this concept best with his celebrated and timely 1892 essay. Seward’s essay opened the eyes of devotees of fossil plants to possibilities beyond the traditional activities of description and classification. The argument of this book is that the emerging modern synthesis sees the dawning of a new era in the study of fossil plants. I am advocating that this modern synthesis arises out of the seamless integration of new knowledge concerning the physiological and ecological behaviour of living plants and ecosystems into the subject of palaeobotany. The promise of incorporating a powerful and exciting third strand, the science of the genetic pathways controlling the form of organisms—evolutionary developmental biology—into our thinking, is on the horizon. If this view is correct, then the study of living plants may be the driving force for unlocking greater riches from fossilized plant remains.
Introduction
Authors: Scholar Richard
Published: November 2020

On a quiet corner of the rue des Écoles, a street close to the Sorbonne in the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter, there stands today a statue of the sixteenth-century humanist, Michel de Montaigne, whose essays were read by Shakespeare and remain a landmark of European literature and thought. The statue is clearly intended to celebrate not only one of France’s great intellectuals, but also Paris itself, for beneath the seated figure of Montaigne are lines which read like a love-letter to the city: I do not want to forget this, that I never rebel so much against France as not to regard Paris with a friendly eye; she has had my heart since my childhood [. . .] I am a Frenchman only by this great city: great in population, great in the felicity of her situation, but above all great and incomparable in the variety and diversity of the good things of life; the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world. These lines, taken from Montaigne’s third book of Essays (first published in 1588), acquire a sense of visceral urgency when one reads them in their context. In the 1580s, the long-running conflict between Catholic and Protestant extremists was tearing France apart, and Paris, a focal point of the conflict, was a divided city. This Montaigne makes clear in the sentence which, while it does not appear among the lines inscribed on his statue in the rue des Écoles, directly follows them in the text: ‘May God’, he says, invoking the God worshipped by Catholics and Protestants alike, ‘drive our divisions far from her!’ The passage inscribed on Montaigne’s statue, when it is completed by the sentence just quoted, provides a fitting epigraph to this book. Divided cities are the stage upon which fundamental political concepts—such as those of citizenship, democracy, and human rights—both find their origins and encounter their limits. Cities are some of the noblest ornaments of the human world because they are made and remade by many people of different kinds gathering in one place to organize a collective existence free from arbitrary violence.
The German Tunny Machine
Authors: Copeland Jack
Published: November 2020

The Enigma cipher machine was slow and cumbersome to use. Sending a message was a complicated procedure requiring the participation of several operators (see photograph 24). The process started with the German plain-language, known as the ‘clear’ or the ‘plaintext’. Encrypting this produced the ‘ciphertext’. Typically, the plaintext or clear consisted of ordinary German words mixed with military abbreviations and jargon (such as WEWA for Wetter Warte, meaning ‘weather station’, and BINE, literally ‘bee’, meaning ‘very very urgent’). A cipher clerk typed the plaintext at the keyboard of an Enigma machine (see the diagram on page 17). Each time the clerk pressed a key, a letter on the lampboard would light. For example, typing HITLER might produce the letters FLKPIM. As the letters of the ciphertext appeared one by one at the lampboard, they were painstakingly noted down by an assistant. Various items of information were then added to the ciphertext, including the intended recipient’s radio call-sign, and a radio operator transmitted the complete message in Morse code. At the receiving end, the process had to be carried out in reverse. The radio operator turned the dit-dit-dahs of the Morse transmission back into letters of ciphertext and handed the result to the cipher clerk. The clerk typed the ciphertext at the keyboard of an Enigma, which had been set up identically to the sender’s machine. The letters of the plaintext lit up at the lampboard one by one and were recorded by the assistant. The Tunny system was much more sophisticated. The process of sending and receiving a message was largely automated. Encryption and decryption were entirely automatic. The transmitted ciphertext was never even seen by the German operators. At the sending end, a single operator typed plaintext at the keyboard of a teleprinter. At the receiving end, the plaintext was printed out automatically by another teleprinter. (A teleprinter is called a teletypewriter in the US.) The sender could switch his teleprinter equipment from ‘hand mode’ to ‘auto mode’. In auto mode, a pre-punched paper tape was fed into the equipment. The plaintext punched on the tape was encrypted and transmitted at high speed.
Living with Fish: Breaking Tunny in the Newmanry and the Testery
Authors: Hilton Peter
Published: November 2020

I should begin by explaining how I happened to find myself, on 12 January 1942, at the age of 18, awaiting permission to enter the gates of Bletchley Park, to undertake work, on behalf of the British Foreign Office, of whose nature I had essentially no knowledge. In October 1941, four very distinguished members of the Bletchley Park team (Alan Turing, Hugh Alexander, Stuart Milner-Barry, and Gordon Welchman) had written a letter to Churchill, drawing his attention to the importance of the work being done at BP on deciphering Enigma, and, therefore, the urgency of recruiting appropriately trained people (principally mathematicians), and of making funds available for building more of the high-speed Bombes needed to expedite the decoding process. Churchill, to his great credit, did not react like a bureaucrat appalled that the writers of the letter had not gone through the proper channels; he immediately saw the importance and good sense of the letter and minuted it ‘Action this day’ to his chief of staff, General Ismay. The result was the empanelling of an interviewing team which toured the universities looking for mathematicians with a knowledge of modern European languages. Such people, however, were not easy to find, since the British higher education system of the time, based as it was on the principle of premature specialisation, virtually guaranteed that no such people would exist. (Ironically there were many German Jewish refugee mathematicians in Britain at that time, but they were ‘enemy aliens’ and so not to be trusted!) The team came to Oxford and I was, I believe, the only person presenting himself for interview. I was not a mathematician, merely a second-year undergraduate specialising in mathematics, and my knowledge of German was very rudimentary, acquired by self-study. But the interviewing team snapped me up, and offered me a position in the Foreign Office, to carry out certain entirely unspecified duties, provided I was willing to start in January 1942. I suspect the interviewing team did not themselves know the nature of the work I would be doing.
From Hut 8 to the Newmanry
Authors: Good Irving John ( Jack)
Published: November 2020

During the Second World War the Germans used two kinds of high-grade cryptographic system: Enigma, and what we called ‘Fish’. There were two forms of Fish. The official name for one was the Schlüsselzusatz (cipher attachment) SZ40 and 42, made by Lorenz, and which we called ‘Tunny’. The other was the Siemens T52, which we called ‘Sturgeon’. I worked on Enigma and on Tunny. After the outbreak of war I had to wait more than a year before I obtained suitable war work. My personality is not that of an officer and a gentleman, rather that of a philosopher and a mathematician, so I was not expected to join the army, other than, later on, the Home Guard. (On my first day in the Home Guard I was taught how to throw a hand grenade, although in years of compulsory cricket I was never taught how to bowl!) Eventually I was interviewed by the twice British chess champion Hugh Alexander, and the Cambridge mathematician Gordon Welchman. I knew Alexander in the chess world. I had another job offer which, unknown to me, would probably have involved work on radar. I chose Bletchley Park which I thought would be somewhat romantic. A few weeks before I joined Bletchley Park, when I was playing in a chess match where the chess master Stuart Milner-Barry, later knighted, was playing, probably on the top board, I was tactless enough to ask him whether he was working on German ciphers. He replied, ‘No, my address is Room 47, Foreign Office.’ Shortly thereafter, when I joined BP, he was there, sure enough working on German ciphers! At first the official address at Bletchley Park was indeed Room 47, Foreign Office, Whitehall, London, but soon it became permissible to give one’s private Bletchley address. I joined BP on 27 May 1941, the day the Bismarck was sunk, and was met at Bletchley railway station by Hugh Alexander. As we walked across a field, on the way to the office, Hut 8, he told me the exciting news that we were just beginning to read the German naval cipher system (which used the Enigma). I shall never forget that sensational conversation.
Dollis Hill at War
Authors: Copeland Jack , Bolam David
Published: November 2020

The Dollis Hill building was erected in 1933 as the headquarters of the Post Office Engineering Department Research Station. Here T. H. Flowers pioneered digital electronics. The imposing brick building looks out from its hilltop site over the suburbs of North London (see photograph 41). It housed what was probably the most active telecommunications research centre in Europe. The building still stands today. Now converted into condominiums, it flanks a road named Flowers Close. Dollis Hill (DH) supplied much of the cryptanalytical machinery for Bletchley Park. Another of its roles was to provide an emergency alternative to the underground Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall. Early in the war a secret underground citadel was excavated at DH. A massive structure of reinforced concrete, the citadel extended three floors into the ground. It is said that Churchill took against the new bunker, and the War Cabinet met at DH only once. Gil Hayward joined the Post Office Research Station in 1934. He describes the ethos of the new research laboratory: I went to DH at the age of 16, straight from school. The Research Station had existed in permanent form for less than two years, having previously been accommodated in a series of wooden huts. ‘Research is the Door to Tomorrow’ was inscribed in stone above the main entrance to the new building. The atmosphere at DH was unique. Original thinking was encouraged and there was a substantial amount of freedom. Norman Thurlow entered the Engineering Department of the Post Office as a recruit some three years before the war. In 1942, he joined the Dollis Hill group and participated in Flowers’ engineering revolution. The Post Office included the post and telephone businesses. The Engineering Department served both operations for all engineering work, including R&D. The Research Branch at Dollis Hill consisted of several different groups. Among them were the telegraph, switching, and physics groups, headed by Frank Morrell, Tom Flowers, and Eric Speight, respectively. These three groups all became involved in some way with the Bletchley Park operation. The state of the art was defined by the telephone and telegraph systems.
The British Tunny Machine
Authors: Hayward Gil
Published: November 2020

Early in 1944 I returned to the UK from top-secret work in the Middle East. Two days after my arrival I received instructions to report to Tommy Flowers at Dollis Hill. I had joined DH in 1934 at the age of 16, straight from school, and had left in 1940 to carry out intelligence work overseas. Flowers introduced me to my new colleagues, Doc Coombs, Bill Chandler, and Sid Broadhurst, the last of whom I had met in 1938, during a course of training for the rank of probationary inspector—I had enjoyed his lectures on automatic telephony. The introductions over, an awkward silence fell. Here was an army captain in the intelligence corps who knew nothing about their project and who was still being vetted by the security services. This would preclude their discussing anything of a secret nature in my presence, probably for another two weeks, until my security clearance came through. On the third day of this ridiculous state of affairs, Broadhurst could stand it no longer. After lunch he said, to no one in particular, ‘Let’s tell him.’ The others agreed, and in less than an hour I had a fairly detailed outline of what our project was. By the end of the afternoon I was deeply immersed in the design of the wiring and layout of the rotary switches that would simulate the 12 wheels of the German Tunny machine. Broadhurst saved two precious weeks by taking the bull by the horns as he did. As it was, it was a near-run thing to get the equipment in operation by D-day. Our Tunny would be deciphering the encrypted teleprinter traffic after the cryptanalysts had determined the wheel patterns and wheel settings. The tedious hand-work required to produce the decrypts, once the settings were known, had not been able to keep pace once Colossus went into operation. This situation called for a copy of the Lorenz machine to produce decrypts. The Lorenz, one of which I was able to examine after the end of hostilities, was a beautifully made piece of mechanism, but it lacked the flexibility that our electromechanical copy possessed.
The “Youth” Problem
Authors: Nasaw David
Published: November 2020

In the 1830s, the European visitors had been appalled by the behavior of American children—and their parents. The children were undisciplined, ill-mannered, and impudent—and their parents seemed unconcerned. A half-century later the Europeans might still complain about the children of the New World (as one Frenchman visiting the U.S. in 1892 put it, “a composite photograph of American youth would reveal ‘le plus terrible de tous les enfants terribles’ “), but they could no longer complain about the adults’ lack of concern. The youthful disrespect and unruliness that had once been smiled on as typically American had come to be considered not only unfortunate but positively harmful to the future of the republic. The antebellum reformers, teachers, preachers, and other authorities, had been critical of the behavior of children other than their own, but they had especially focused their attention on the younger children. In their considered opinion it was the earliest years that were most crucial. This was the period in which the child’s character would be formed. The twentieth-century experts were not so certain. What troubled them most was not the youngest children, but their older brothers and sisters. Though they did not deny the importance of providing the younger ones with moral training, they emphasized repeatedly it was the last stage of youth that was the most crucial. Adolescence as a stage in human development was literally invented during the first decades of the twentieth century. Though, as we shall see, educators and youth workers, lawyers and judges, magazine writers and editors, muckrakers, progressives, and reformers—lay, clerical, and professional—all contributed to the conceptualization, it was the psychologists who gave the new developmental age the patina of scientific explanation it would need to survive. G. Stanley Hall, a student of William James, president of Clark University, and the first American to invite. Sigmund Freud to lecture in this country, introduced the adolescent to the scientific and lay community in 1905 in his massive twovolume work, appropriately entitled: Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education.
Between the World Wars: To School or to Work?
Authors: Nasaw David
Published: November 2020

An American schooling system was being built—piece by piece. By the second decade of the twentieth century, a second story had been added to the common school foundation constructed in the decades before the Civil War. An institutional path to adult life—from near infancy through adolescence—had been carefully laid out for young Americans to follow. In 1890 it made little economic sense to attend high school. There were more direct paths to fame and fortune. In the forty years after 1890 this changed. The establishment and growth of the national corporations led to technological improvements in the factory and the “scientific management” of the labor force. This, in turn, affected the composition of the working class. The final result—from the perspective of the public school system— was an increase in the economic value of the high school diploma. The degree became more valuable as an admission ticket into white-collar employment, and white-collar employment was replacing self-employment as the surest path to economic security. The independent artisan/craftsmen had been absorbed into the factory system in the first half of the nineteenth century. Small retailers and manufacturers were meeting the same fate in the first half of the twentieth century. They too found it difficult, if not impossible, to compete against the larger corporate units that were efficiently and profitably invading their local markets. As the Lynds reported from Middletown in the middle twenties: . . . A swarm of chain stores is pressing hard upon the small independent retailer, who had things far more his own way in the nineties; during an apparently characteristic ten months from April, 1924, through January, 1925, three Middletown clothing stores and one shoe store were taken over by selling agencies having at least one store in another city, and four new chains entered the city with one or more branches. . . . The small, independent farmers were as affected by the triumph of the corporation as their self-employed counterparts in town and city.
The Court Redeemed
Authors: Wilkinson J. Harvie
Published: November 2020

Everyone understands that Brown v. Board of Education helped deliver the Negro from over three centuries of legal bondage. But Brown acted to emancipate the white South and the Supreme Court as well. Not that the South immediately recognized Brown as a deliverance from economic stagnation, moral debility, and sectional isolation, a deliverance that would end with the installment of one of its own in the White House by 1977. And the Court only barely acknowledged in Brown the full weight of history from which it was itself redeemed. Indeed, the true story of the Court’s own past attitude toward the black man remains one of the deafening silences of the Brown opinion. For half a century after the Civil War, the Supreme Court had, in effect, told the Negro to seek solace not in the law of the land but, like Stephen Foster’s Old Black Joe, in cotton fields, mournful song, darkey friends, and the hereafter. It was President Lincoln who issued the Emancipation Proclamation and Congress that moved to secure Negro rights in the South with no fewer than three Constitutional amendments and four Civil Rights acts shortly after the Civil War. Throughout this period, the Court was eyed distrustfully. The Radical Republicans were “aware of the power the Court could exercise. They were for the most part bitterly aware of it, having long fought such decisions as the Dred Scott case.” Radicals such as Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania probably “had little hope that the Court would play a role in furthering their long range objectives.” What hopes they did have centered on those sections of the post-Civil War amendments permitting Congress to act through “appropriate legislation.” In 1865 the Radicals sensed a long-awaited opportunity. Many a proud southern planter was left to his ashes and rubble, to scorched earth and wistful dreams. “The Old South,” wrote one observer in 1870, “has gone ‘down among the dead men’. . . . For that vanished form of society there can be no resurrection. . . .”
“All Deliberate Speed”
Authors: Wilkinson J. Harvie
Published: November 2020

A Negro child—let us call her Mary Jones—entering first grade that fall of 1954 probably had her thoughts elsewhere than on Brown v. Board of Education. Whatever she might have heard about Brown was less absorbing than her new teacher and schoolmates and the novel environment of the school-yard. And it was just as well. This noisy crowd of children would be together for years to come, adding and subtracting, reading and writing, studying maps and pictures of faraway lands. Twelve years later, at graduation, some of Mary Jones’s first grade friends would still be standing beside her. Chances were, however, there would be no white faces among them. And chances were, too, that the best jobs or colleges did not await them. But they would scatter all the same, many for whatever labor the northern metropolises might hold. Because as Mary Jones and her friends would begin to sense more fully with each passing year, Brown v. Board of Education had scarcely mattered. A generation of black schoolchildren in the South—Mary Jones’s generation—had grown up and graduated after Brown in segregated schools. Where during this time, one might ask, was the United States Supreme Court? And the answer, not much exaggerated, is that from 1955 to 1968, the Court abandoned the field of public school desegregation. Its pronouncements were few, given the proportions of the problem. And its leadership was almost nonexistent. The question of history is whether the Court’s low profile can ever be adequately justified. The next two chapters discuss the Supreme Court’s approach to southern school integration in the years after Brown. It is not a conventional discussion, in part because the school cases were not conventional decisions. There did, of course, develop over time a set of constitutional principles concerning school desegregation. But the principles themselves were often creations of events beyond the courtroom: the South reacted to Court rulings, the Court, in turn, responded to the South. No set of cases, in fact, better illustrates the non-jurisprudential side of the Supreme Court’s job.