John Astor
Jean-Baptiste Fourier
Beethoven
Du Pont
Joseph Fraunhofer
Cornelius Vanderbilt
Charles Lyell
Joseph Smith
Fryderyk Chopin
David Thoreau
John Astor (1763 – 1848 )
John Astor was an American businessman, merchant, real estate mogul and investor who mainly made his fortune in fur trade and by investing in real estate in and around New York City. He moved to the United States after the American Revolutionary War. He entered the fur trade and built a monopoly, managing a business empire that extended to the Great Lakes region and Canada, and later expanded into the American West and Pacific coast. Seeing the decline of demand, he got out of the fur trade in 1830, diversifying by investing in New York City real estate and later becoming a famed patron of the arts. He was the first prominent member of the Astor family and the first multi-millionaire in the United States.
John Astor was born near Heidelberg in Germany. His father was a butcher. When he was 16 years old he moved to London to join his brother George in working for an uncle's piano and flute fabric. When he was 20 years old, he immigrated to New York City, just following the end of the American Revolution, He rented a room from a widow and began a flirtation with her daughter, who he married 2 years later The couple had 8 children. He became a Freemason, and served as Master of a Lodge in New York City when he was 25 years old.
His intent was to join his brother Henry, who had established a butcher shop there, but a chance meeting with a fur trader on his voyage inspired him to join the North American fur trade. After working at his brother's shop for a time he began to purchase raw hides from Native Americans, prepare them himself, and then resell them in London and elsewhere at great profit. He opened his own fur goods shop in New York in the late 1780s.
Astor took advantage of the treaty between Great Britain and the United States in 1794, which opened new markets in Canada and the Great Lakes region. In London, Astor at once made a contract with the North West Company, who from Montreal rivaled the trade interests of the Hudson's Bay Company, then based in London. Astor imported furs from Montreal to New York and shipped them to Europe. By 1800, he had amassed almost a quarter of a million dollars, and had become one of the leading figures in the fur trade. His agents worked throughout the western areas and were ruthless in competition. In 1800, following the example of the Empress of China, the first American trading vessel to China, Astor traded furs, teas, and sandalwood with Canton in China, and greatly benefited from it. There was a great demand for sandalwood because of its special fragrance that kept moths far away.
The U.S. Embargo Act in 1807, however, disrupted Astor's import/export business because it closed off trade with Canada. With the permission of President Thomas Jefferson, Astor established the American Fur Company in 1808. He later formed subsidiaries: the Pacific Fur Company, and the Southwest Fur Company in order to control fur trading in the Great Lakes areas and Columbia River region. His Columbia River trading post at Fort Astoria established in 1811 was the first United States community on the Pacific coast. He financed the overland Astor Expedition in 1810–12 to reach the outpost. Members of the expedition were to discover South Pass, through which hundreds of thousands of settlers on the Oregon, Mormon, and California trails passed through the Rocky Mountains.
Astor's fur trading ventures were disrupted during the War of 1812, a 3 year military conflict that USA fought against Canada, a British colony. Britain wanted to stop USA from expanding northwest into territories that they wanted reserved for Canada. Britain also wanted to block USA trading with France who they were fighting in the Napoleonic Wars in Europe.
In 1816, Astor's business suffered a down turn and he joined the Chinese opium-smuggling trade. He purchased 10 tons of Turkish opium and shipped it to Canton. Opium was used for medicinal purposes during the 7th century. In the 17th century the practice of mixing opium with tobacco for smoking spread from Southeast Asia, creating a far greater demand.
In 1729 when the first anti-opium edict was promulgated by the Chinese Emperor, imports of opium into China stood at 12,000 kg annually. By the time Chinese authorities reissued the prohibition in starker terms in 1800, the figure had leaped to almost 300,000 kg. By 1838, just before the First Opium War, it had climbed to 2,500,000 kg. The First Opium War lasted 3 years and was fought between the United Kingdom and the Qing dynasty over their conflicting viewpoints on diplomatic relations, trade, and the administration of justice for foreign nationals in China, especially in regards to the illegal opium trading.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the demand for Chinese goods, particularly silk, porcelain, and tea in the European market created a trade imbalance because the market for Western goods in China was virtually non-existent. Chinese goods were traded for silver. China was largely self-sufficient and Europeans were not allowed access to China's interior. European silver flowed into China when the Canton System, instituted in the mid-17th century, confined the sea trade to Canton and to 13 Chinese merchants and from the British East India Company who had a monopoly of British trade. The British East India Company began to auction opium grown on its plantations in India to independent foreign traders in China in exchange for silver. The opium was then transported to the Chinese coast and sold to local middlemen who retailed the drug inside China. This reverse flow of silver and the increasing numbers of opium addicts alarmed Chinese officials.
In 1839, the Chinese Emperor, rejecting proposals to legalize and tax opium, solved the problem by abolishing the trade and confiscated around 1,200,000 kg without offering compensation. It blockaded trade and confined foreign merchants to their quarters. The British government, although not officially denying China's right to control imports of the drug, objected to this unexpected seizure and used its much superior naval and gunnery power to inflict a quick and decisive defeat. It forced China to open 5 ports for trade and took over the island of Hong Kong. The rise in the amount of opium traded continued on after the First Opium War and by 1858 annual imports had risen to almost 10,000,000 kg.
During this time China suffered a devastating civil war referred to as the Taiping Rebellion. It started in 1850 and lasted 16 years. It was fought between the established Manchu-led Qing dynasty who had ruled China since 1644 and the millenarian movement supporting the overthrow of the Qing. The movement called the Heavenly Kingdom of Peace was expecting a major transformation of society, after which all things would be changed. Their leader was a self-proclaimed convert to Christianity, Hong Xiuquan who led an army that controlled a significant part of southern China, with about 30 million people. The rebel kingdom announced social reforms and the replacement of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Chinese folk religion by his form of Christianity. He claimed that he was the second son of God and the younger brother of Jesus. The Taiping areas were besieged by Qing forces throughout most of the rebellion. The Qing government defeated the rebellion with the eventual aid of French and British forces. The war was the largest in China since the Qing conquest in 1644, and ranks as one of the bloodiest wars in human history with up to 100 million war casualties and millions of people displaced.
The failure to satisfy British goals of improved trade and diplomatic relations led to the Second Opium War 14 years later lasting 4 years. It was fought by the British Empire and the French Empire against the Qing dynasty of China to attain the British objectives to legalize the opium trade, to expand coolie trade, a form of a slave trade for cheap labor, to open all of China to British merchants, and to exempt foreign imports from internal transit duties.
The United States and Russia sent envoys to Hong Kong to offer help to the British and French, and the Chinese were eventually defeated. Britain and France demanded that China agree to allow Britain, France, Russia, and the U.S. to establish diplomatic embassies in Peking which was a closed city at that time and to accept the agreement that 10 more Chinese ports were to be opened for foreign trade, that all foreign vessels including commercial ships had the right to navigate freely on the Yangtze River, that the ban on foreigners to travel in the internal regions of China was to be lifted, and that China had to pay an indemnity of 160,000 kg of silver to Britain and 80,000 kg of silver to France. China initially refused to sign the agreement treaty and the war continued. Additional points were added to the original treaty such as opening of additional ports for trading, the loss of additional Chinese territories, the accepting freedom of religion and the freedom of Chinese to travel to America, the additional payment of 160,000 kg of silver to both Britain and France and the legalization of the opium trade. China eventually was forced to sign the treaty.
By the late 19th century Chinese domestic opium production challenged and then surpassed imports. The 20th century opened with effective campaigns to suppress domestic farming, and in 1907 the British government signed a treaty to eliminate opium imports. The fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, however, led to resurgence in domestic production. By the 1930s the Nationalist Government, provincial governments, the revolutionary bases of the Communist Party of China, and the British colonial government of Hong Kong all depended on opium taxes as major sources of revenue, as did the Japanese occupation governments during the Second Sino-Japanese War between 1937 and 1945. After 1949 the respective governments of the People's Republic of China on the mainland and of the Republic of China on Taiwan successfully suppressed the widespread growth and use of opium.
By 1817, Astor's business rebounded after the U.S. Congress passed a protectionist law that barred foreign fur traders from U.S. territories. The American Fur Company came to dominate trading in the area around the Great Lakes. Astor began buying land in New York in 1799 and acquired sizable holdings along the waterfront. After the start of the 19th century, flush with China trade profits, he became more systematic, ambitious, and calculating by investing in New York real estate. In the 1830s, Astor foresaw that the next big boom would be the build-up of New York, which would soon emerge as one of the world's greatest cities. Astor withdrew from the American Fur Company, as well as all his other ventures, and used the money to buy and develop large tracts of Manhattan real estate. Astor correctly predicted New York's rapid growth northward on Manhattan Island, and he purchased more and more land beyond the then-existing city limits. Astor rarely built on his land, but leased it to others for rent and their use. After retiring from his business, Astor spent the rest of his life as a patron of culture.
At the time of his death, Astor was the wealthiest person in the United States, leaving an estate estimated to be worth at least $20 million. His estimated net worth, if calculated as a fraction of the U.S. gross domestic product at the time, would have been equivalent to $110.1 billion in 2006 U.S. dollars, making him the fifth-richest person in American history.
Jean-Baptiste Fourier (1768 – 1830)
Jean-Baptiste Fourier became a French mathematician and physicist best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations. He was also credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.
Fourier was born in France. His father was a tailor and died when Fourier was 9. He was educated in a Benedictine Convent. The commissions in the scientific corps of the army were reserved for those of good birth, and being thus ineligible, he accepted a military lectureship on mathematics. He took a prominent part in his own district in promoting the French Revolution, serving on the local Revolutionary Committee.
Fourier accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte on his Egyptian expedition in 1798, as scientific adviser. Cut off from France by the English fleet, he organized the workshops on which the French army had to rely for their munitions of war. He also contributed several mathematical papers to the Egyptian Institute which Napoleon founded at Cairo, with a view of weakening English influence in the East.
In 1801 Fourier returned to France and Napoleon appointed him Governor of Grenoble where he oversaw road construction and other projects. It was while at Grenoble that he began to experiment on the propagation of heat. In 1807, he presented his paper “On the Propagation of Heat in Solid Bodies” to the Paris Institute. In 1816, Fourier moved to England but returned to France to take on various sciences academic administrative posts.
In the 1820s Fourier calculated that an object the size of the Earth, and at its distance from the Sun, should be considerably colder than the planet actually is if warmed by only the effects of incoming solar radiation. He examined various possible sources of the additional observed heat. While he ultimately suggested that interstellar radiation might be responsible for a large portion of the additional warmth, Fourier's consideration of the possibility that the Earth's atmosphere might act as an insulator of some kind is widely recognized as the first proposal of what is now known as the greenhouse effect.
In his articles, Fourier referred to an experiment in which a device was made from several panes of transparent glass, separated by intervals of air. It was observed that the temperature became more elevated in the more interior compartments of this device. Fourier concluded that gases in the atmosphere could form a stable barrier like the glass panes.
In 1822 Fourier published his work on heat flow in “The Analytic Theory of Heat” in which he based his reasoning on Newton's law of cooling, namely, that the flow of heat between 2 adjacent molecules is proportional to the extremely small difference of their temperatures. In this work, Fourier claimed that any function of a variable, whether continuous or discontinuous, can be expanded in a series of sines of multiples of the variable. Fourier's observation that some discontinuous functions are the sum of infinite series was a breakthrough. That meant that any one composite wave like the audio wave emitted by all the instruments playing in the orchestra could be transformed into many individual frequencies all with different strengths. The number of individual frequencies that are used determines the accuracy of the transformation.
In 1822 Fourier published his work on heat flow in “The Analytic Theory of Heat” in which he based his reasoning on Newton's law of cooling, namely, that the flow of heat between 2 adjacent molecules is proportional to the extremely small difference of their temperatures. In this work, Fourier claimed that any function of a variable, whether continuous or discontinuous, can be expanded in a series of sines of multiples of the variable. Fourier's observation that some discontinuous functions are the sum of infinite series was a breakthrough. That meant that any one composite wave like the audio wave emitted by all the instruments playing in the orchestra could be transformed into many individual frequencies all with different strengths. The number of individual frequencies that are used determines the accuracy of the transformation.
In 1830, his diminished health began to take its toll and he died of a fever in his bed at the age of 62.
Beethoven (1770-1827)
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Classical music, he remains one of the most recognized and influential of all composers.
Born in Bonn, Beethoven displayed his musical talents at an early age and was taught by his father. Of the 7 children born to Johann van Beethoven, only Ludwig, the second-born, and 2 younger brothers survived infancy. Beethoven's first music teacher was his father. He later had other local teachers. At the age of 21 he moved to Vienna, where he began studying composition with Joseph Haydn and gained a reputation as a virtuoso pianist. He lived in Vienna until his death. By his late 20s his hearing began to deteriorate, and by the time he was 40, his life he was almost completely deaf. In 1811 he gave up conducting and performing in public but continued to compose; many of his most admired works come from these last 15 years of his life.
From the outset his tuition regime, which began in his fifth year, was harsh and intensive, often reducing him to tears. There were irregular late-night sessions with the young Beethoven being dragged from his bed to the keyboard. His musical talent was obvious at a young age. Johann, aware of Leopold Mozart's successes in this area with his son Wolfgang, attempted to promote his son as a child prodigy, claiming that Beethoven was only 6 when actually he was 7 on the posters for his first public performance in 1778.
Maximilian Frederick noticed his talent early, and subsidized and encouraged the young man's musical studies. Maximilian Frederick's successor as the Elector of Bonn was Maximilian Francis, the youngest son of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, and he brought notable changes to Bonn. Echoing changes made in Vienna by his brother Joseph, he introduced reforms based on Enlightenment philosophy, with increased support for education and the arts. The teenage Beethoven was almost certainly influenced by these changes. He may also have been influenced at this time by ideas prominent in freemasonry, as others around Beethoven were members of the local chapter of the Order of the Illuminati.
In 1786 Beethoven, then only 16, traveled to Vienna, at his employer's expense, for the first time, apparently in the hope of studying with Mozart. Having learned that his mother was ill, Beethoven returned quickly to Bonn. His mother died shortly thereafter, and his father lapsed deeper into alcoholism. As a result, he became responsible for the care of his 2 younger brothers, and spent the next 5 years in Bonn. He was introduced in these years to several people who became important in his life.
In 1789 Beethoven obtained a legal order by which half of his father's salary was paid directly to him for support of the family. He also contributed further to the family's income by playing viola in the court orchestra. This familiarized him with a variety of operas, including 3 by Mozart that were performed at court in this period.
From 1790 to 1792, he composed a significant number of works. Beethoven received his first commissions; the municipal leaders in Bonn had commissioned cantatas to mark the occasion of the death in 1790 of Franz Joseph II and the subsequent accession of Leopold II as Holy Roman Emperor.
He was first introduced to Joseph Haydn in 1790, when the latter was traveling to London and stopped in Bonn. A year and a half later, they met in Bonn on Haydn's return trip from London to Vienna, and arrangements were made for Beethoven to study with the old master.
He left Bonn for Vienna in 1792, amid rumors of war spilling out of France. He learned shortly after his arrival that his father had died. Mozart had also recently died. Over the next few years, Beethoven responded to the widespread feeling that he was a successor to the recently deceased Mozart by studying that master's work and writing works with a distinctly Mozart flavor.
Beethoven did not immediately set out to establish himself as a composer, but rather devoted himself to study and performance. Working under Haydn's direction, he sought to master counterpoint. He also studied violin. With Haydn's departure for England in 1794, Beethoven was expected to return home. He chose instead to remain in Vienna, continuing his instruction in counterpoint. A number of Viennese noblemen had already recognized his ability and offered him financial support.
By 1793, he had established a reputation as an improviser in the salons of the nobility. He had established a reputation in Vienna as a piano virtuoso, but he apparently withheld works from publication so that their publication in 1795 would have greater impact. His first public performance in Vienna was in 1795, a concert in which he first performed one of his piano concertos. Shortly after this performance, he arranged for the publication of the first of his compositions. These works were a financial success and Beethoven's profits were nearly sufficient to cover his living expenses for a year.
He became regarded as one of the most important of a generation of young composers following Haydn and Mozart. He also continued to write in other forms, turning out widely known piano sonatas which were described as "surpassing in strength of character, depth of emotion, level of originality, and ingenuity of motivic and tonal manipulation."
By the end of 1800, Beethoven and his music were already much in demand from patrons and publishers. He also had. Czerny studied with Beethoven from 1801 to 1803. He became a renowned music teacher himself, instructing Franz Liszt.
Beethoven dated his hearing loss from a fit he suffered in 1798 induced by a rage at the interruption of his work. Having fallen over, he got up to find himself deaf. His hearing only ever partially recovered and, during its gradual decline, was impeded by a severe form of tinnitus. As early as 1801, he wrote to friends describing his symptoms and the difficulties they caused in both professional and social settings.
A letter to his brothers records his thoughts of suicide due to his growing deafness and records his resolution to continue living for and through his art. Over time, his hearing loss became profound. His hearing loss did not prevent him from composing music, but it made playing at concerts—a lucrative source of income—increasingly difficult. Around 1814 however, by the age of 44, he was almost totally deaf.
As a result of Beethoven's hearing loss, his conversation books are an unusually rich written resource. Used primarily in the last ten or so years of his life, his friends wrote in these books so that he could know what they were saying, and he then responded either orally or in the book. The books contain discussions about music and other matters, and give insights into his thinking; they are a source for investigations into how he intended his music should be performed, and also his perception of his relationship to art.
Beethoven is acknowledged to be one of the giants of classical music. Together with Bach and Johannes Brahms, he is referred to as one of the "three Bs" who epitomize that tradition. He was a pivotal figure in the transition from the 18th century musical classicism to 19th century romanticism, and his influence on subsequent generations of composers was profound.
Beethoven's life was troubled by his encroaching loss of hearing and chronic abdominal pain since his twenties. He contemplated suicide. He had a close and devoted circle of friends all his life, thought to have been attracted by his strength of personality. Towards the end of his life, his friends competed in their efforts to help him cope with his in-capacities.
Sources show Beethoven's disdain for authority and for social rank. He stopped performing at the piano if the audience chatted among themselves, or afforded him less than their full attention. At soirées, he refused to perform if suddenly called upon to do so. Eventually, after many confrontations, the Archduke Rudolph decreed that the usual rules of court etiquette did not apply to Beethoven.
Beethoven was bedridden for many months and many friends came to visit. He died at the age of 56 during a thunderstorm. He suffered significant liver damage due to heavy alcohol consumption. He was accidentally poisoned to death by excessive doses of lead-based treatments administered under instruction from his doctor.
Du Pont (1771-1834)
Du Pont, was a French-American chemist and industrialist who founded the gunpowder manufacturer E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. His descendants, the Du Pont family, have been one of America's richest and most prominent families since the 19th century, with generations of influential businessmen, politicians and philanthropists.
Du Pont was born in Paris. His father was a political economist who had been elevated to the nobility in 1784 by King Louis XVI. Growing up on his father's estate, young du Pont was enthusiastic about his studies in most subjects, and showed particular interest in explosives. Du Pont married in 1791, and they had 8 children.
In 1785, when he was 14, du Pont entered the Collège Royal in Paris. Two years later, he was accepted by the friend of his father and noted chemist Antoine Lavoisier as a student in the government agency responsible for the manufacture of gunpowder. It was from Lavoisier that he gained his expertise in nitrate extraction and manufacture. He studied "advanced explosives production techniques"
After a brief apprenticeship, he took a position at the government powder works in Essones but quit after Lavoisier left. In 1791, du Pont began to help his father manage their small publishing house in Paris, where they published a republican newspaper in support of governmental reforms in France. Despite being a soft-spoken chemist, he also had a strong sense of social order. Du Pont was a member of the pro-Revolution national guard and supported the Jacobins. In 1792, both du Pont and his father participated in protecting the escape of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette when the Tuileries Palace was stormed. His father riled up fellow revolutionaries by refusing to go along with the guillotine execution of Louis XVI, and the 2 men's moderate political views proved to be a liability in revolutionary France.
His father was arrested in 1794, only avoiding execution because of the end of the Reign of Terror. In 1797, du Pont and his father spent a night in prison while their home and presses were ransacked. These events led his father to lose hope in the political situation in France, and so he began making plans to move their family to America and aspired to create a model community of French émigrés. In 1799, the du Pont family sold their publishing house and set sail for the United States. They reached Rhode Island in 1800 and began to settle in the home the eldest du Pont had secured in New Jersey.
They soon set up an office in New York City to decide what their new line of business would be. Du Pont soon begin to realize the possibilities that his childhood apprenticeship with Lavoisier would allow him and his family to prosper in America. Du Pont brought with him an expertise in chemistry and gunpowder making, during a time when the quality of American-made gunpowder was very poor.
At his request, The arranged a tour of an American powder plant. He quickly deduced that the saltpeter being used was of good enough quality, however, the American refining process was poor and inefficient compared with the techniques he had learned in France. He began to think that he could use his experience from France to manufacture gunpowder of a higher quality in the United States and reform the current industry standard for refinery. With his father's blessing, he began to assemble capital for the construction of the first powder mills, and returned to France in the beginning of 1801 to procure the necessary financing and equipment.
The act of association was signed in 1801, and the company was christened E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company since it was its namesake's ingenuity that had created this venture. He purchased a site with several small buildings and a dam with foundations for a cotton-spinning mill which had been destroyed by fire. The first gunpowder was produced in 1804.
Du Pont died at the age of 63 of a heart attack.
The company he founded would become one of the largest and most successful American corporations. By the mid-19th century it was the largest supplier of gunpowder to the U.S. military, and supplied as much as 40 percent of the powder used by the Union Army forces during the Civil War.
Joseph Fraunhofer (1787 – 1826)
Joseph Fraunhofer was a German optician. He is known for discovering the dark absorption lines in the Sun's spectrum, and for making excellent optical glass and achromatic telescope objectives.
Joseph Fraunhofer was born in Bavaria. His father and mother died when he was 11 years old. He started working as an apprentice to a glass-maker. 3 years after that, the workshop in which he was working collapsed and he was buried in the rubble. He was rescued by Prince-Elector Maximilian Joseph, a member of the electoral college of the Holy Roman Empire that ratified the successors to the emperors when they died. The prince took a liking to Joseph, providing him with books and forcing his employer to allow the young Fraunhofer time to study at a secularized Benedictine monastery devoted to glass making in Bavaria.
There he discovered how to make the world's finest optical glass and invented incredibly precise methods for measuring dispersion, the phenomenon in which the phase velocity of a wave depends on its frequency. The phase velocity is the speed at which the phase of any one frequency component of the wave travels. Due to the fine optical instruments he had developed, Bavaria overtook England as the center of the optics industry. Even the likes of Michael Faraday were unable to produce glass that could rival Fraunhofer's.
One of the most difficult operations of practical optics was to polish the spherical surfaces of large object glasses accurately. Object glasses gathered light from the object being observed and focused the light rays to produce a real image. Objectives could be a single lens, a mirror, or a combination of several optical elements. Glass was formed into a lens to capture light and bend it in such a way that very large and very far away objects could be seen as if they were close - as done in telescopes and very close and very small objects could be magnified in size - as done in microscopes.
In a telescope the objective was the lens at the front end of a refractor or the image-forming primary mirror of a reflecting telescope. A telescope's light-gathering power and angular resolution were both directly related to the diameter or "aperture" of its objective lens or mirror. The larger the objective, the dimmer the object it was able to view and the more detail it was able to resolve.
In refracting telescopes, the objective lens was used to gather more light than the human eye was able to collect on its own and to focus it to a virtual image for the viewer to see.
The reflecting telescope was invented as an alternative to the refracting telescope which suffered from severe chromatic distortion, an effect resulting from dispersion in which the lens failed to focus all colors to the same convergence point. A reflecting telescope allowed for very large diameter objective. It used a single or combination of curved mirrors that reflected light and formed an image.
In a microscope, which is basically tiny telescope, the objective lens is at the bottom near the sample. At its simplest, it is a very high-powered magnifying glass, with very short focal length. This was placed very close to the specimen being examined so as to collect the maximum amount of light from the specimen and to focus it inside the microscope tube.
Fraunhofer invented grinding and polishing machines which rendered the surface of the glass more accurately than traditional grinding. He introduced many improvements into the manufacture of the different kinds of glass used for optical instruments.
In 1811 he constructed a new kind of furnace, and on the second occasion when he melted a large quantity found that he could produce flint glass which had a relatively high refractive index to be able to bend light and low dispersion, parameters that made good lenses. Flint glass was so named because flint nodules were a source of high purity silica.
The angle of refraction could not be accurately measured when grinding lenses was because the light was not monochromatic but contained colors that transitioned from one color to another gradually. To obviate this, Fraunhofer made a series of experiments for the purpose of producing monochromatic light of a highly pure color. He did so by means of lamps and prisms. Thus in 1814, Fraunhofer invented the spectroscope - an instrument used to measure properties of light over a specific portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, typically used in spectroscopic analysis to identify materials.
In the course of his experiments he discovered the bright fixed line which appears in the orange color of the spectrum when it is produced by the light of fire. Experiments to ascertain whether the solar spectrum contained the same bright line in the orange as that produced by the light of fire led him to the discovery of 574 dark fixed lines in the solar spectrum. These dark fixed lines were later shown to be atomic absorption lines and elements in samples of material were able to be detected by the spectral lines they emitted.
His most valuable glass making recipes went to the grave with him. The colors of glass are commonly produced by the inclusion of heavy metals. The high reflectivity of some heavy metals is important in the construction of mirrors, including precision astronomical instruments. Like many glass makers of his era who were poisoned by heavy metal vapors, Fraunhofer died young, at the age of 39.
Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794 – 1877)
Cornelius was an American business magnate and philanthropist who built his wealth in railroads and shipping. Born poor and having but a mediocre education, he used perseverance, intelligence and luck to work into leadership positions in the inland water trade, and invest in the rapidly growing railroad industry. As one of the richest Americans in history. Vanderbilt was the patriarch of a wealthy, influential family. Contemporaries often hated or feared Vanderbilt or at least considered him a rude brute. While Vanderbilt could be a rascal, combative and cunning, he was much more a builder than a wrecker, being honorable, shrewd, and hard-working. Cornelius Vanderbilt's great-great-grandfather was a Dutch farmer from the Netherlands, who immigrated to New York as an indentured servant bound by a contract to work for his employer in 1650.
Cornelius Vanderbilt was born in New York. He began working on his father's ferry in New York Harbor as a boy, quitting school at the age of 11. At the age of 16, Vanderbilt decided to start his own ferry service. He borrowed $100 from his mother to purchase a shallow draft, two-masted sailing vessel. He began his business by ferrying freight and passengers between Staten Island and Manhattan. At age 19 Vanderbilt married his first cousin and the couple had 13 children.
When Vanderbilt was 23, in addition to running his ferry, he bought his brother-in-law's schooner and traded in food and merchandise in partnership with his father and others. A ferry entrepreneur named Thomas Gibbons asked him to captain his steamboat between New Jersey and New York. Although Vanderbilt kept his own businesses running, he became Gibbon's business manager. When Vanderbilt entered his new position, Gibbons was fighting against a steamboat monopoly in New York waters he hoped to drive into bankruptcy by undercutting prices and also bringing a landmark legal case to the Supreme Court to overturn the monopoly. Working for Gibbons, Vanderbilt learned to operate a large and complicated business. He moved with his family to New Jersey, a stop on Gibbons' line between New York and Philadelphia. There, his wife Sophia operated a very profitable inn, using the proceeds to feed, clothe and educate their children. The court ruled in Gibbons' favor, saying that states had no power to interfere with interstate commerce. 200 years later, the case continued to be considered a landmark ruling. The protection of competitive interstate commerce was considered the basis for much of the prosperity which the United States generated.
When Gibbons died 9 years later, Vanderbilt started to work entirely for himself. Step by step, he started lines between New York and the surrounding region. First he took over Gibbons' ferry to New Jersey, then he switched to western Long Island Sound. At age 37, he took over his brother Jacob's line on the lower Hudson River. That year he faced opposition by a steamboat operated by Daniel Drew. Vanderbilt became a secret partner with Drew for the next 30 years, so that the 2 men would have an incentive to avoid competing with each other.
Vanderbilt competed on the Hudson River against a steamboat monopoly between New York City and Albany. Using the name "The People's Line," he used the populist language associated with Democratic president Andrew Jackson to get popular support for his business. The monopoly paid him a large amount to stop competing, and he switched his operations to Long Island Sound.
During the 1830s, textile mills were built in large numbers in New England as the United States developed its manufacturing base. They processed cotton from the Deep South, so were directly tied to the slave societies. Some of the first railroads in the United States were built from Boston to Long Island Sound, to connect with steamboats that ran to New York. By the end of the decade, Vanderbilt dominated the steamboat business on the Sound, and began to take over management of the connecting railroads. In the 1840s, he launched a campaign to take over the most attractive of these lines, the New York, Providence and Boston Railroad. During these years, Vanderbilt also operated many other businesses. He bought large amounts of real estate in Manhattan and Staten Island, and took over the Staten Island Ferry.
When the California gold rush began in 1849, Vanderbilt switched from regional steamboat lines to ocean-going steamships. Many of the migrants to California, and almost all of the gold returning to the East Coast, went by steamship to Panama, where mule trains and canoes provided transportation across the isthmus. The California Gold Rush started when gold was found in California. The first to hear confirmed information of the gold rush were the people in Oregon, the Sandwich Islands later to be named Hawaii, and Latin America, and they were the first to start flocking to the state in late 1848. All in all, the news of gold brought some 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. Of the 300,000, approximately half arrived by sea and half came overland on the California Trail and the Gila River trail. The California Trail was an emigrant trail of about 4,800km across the western half of the North American continent from Missouri River towns to what is now the state of California. The Gila River is 1,044km of the Colorado River flowing through New Mexico and Arizona.
The gold-seekers, called "forty-niners" often faced substantial hardships on the trip. While most of the newly arrived were Americans, the Gold Rush attracted tens of thousands from Latin America, Europe, Australia, and China. At first, the prospectors retrieved the gold from streams and riverbeds using simple techniques, such as panning. More sophisticated methods of gold recovery were developed and later adopted around the world. At its peak, technological advances reached a point where significant financing was required, increasing the proportion of gold companies to individual miners. Gold worth tens of billions of today's dollars was recovered, which led to great wealth for a few. However, many returned home with little more than they had started with. The effects of the Gold Rush were substantial. San Francisco grew from a small settlement of about 200 residents in 1846 to a boom-town of about 36,000 by 1852. Roads, churches, schools and other towns were built throughout California. New methods of transportation developed as steamships came into regular service.
By 1869 railroads were built across the country from California to the eastern United States. Agriculture and ranching expanded throughout the state to meet the needs of the settlers. At the beginning of the Gold Rush, there was no law regarding property rights in the goldfields and a system of "staking claims" was developed. The Gold Rush also had negative effects: Native Americans were attacked and pushed off their lands and the mining caused environmental harm. An estimated 100,000 California Indians died between 1848 and 1868 as a result of American immigration. The Panama Railroad was soon built to provide a faster crossing.
Cornelius Vanderbilt died when he was 83 years old. The immediate cause of his death was exhaustion, brought on by long suffering from a complication of chronic disorders.
At the time of his death, Vanderbilt had a fortune estimated at $100 million. In his will, he left 95% of his $100 million estate to his son William (Billy) and to William's four sons as he believed William was the only heir capable of maintaining the business empire. He was the third wealthiest person in United States history, after Standard Oil co-founder John Davison Rockefeller and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Three of his daughters and his other son contested the will on the grounds that their father was of unsound mind and under the influence of his son Billy and of spiritualists whom he consulted on a regular basis. The court battle lasted more than a year and was ultimately won outright by Billy, who increased the bequests to his siblings and paid their legal fees. A surviving descendant is his great-great-granddaughter Gloria Vanderbilt, a renowned fashion designer. Her youngest son is Anderson Cooper, a television news anchor for CNN. All of the Vanderbilt multimillionaires descend through the oldest son Billy and his wife.
Billy Vanderbilt was the eldest son of Cornelius Vanderbilt, an heir to his fortune and a prominent member of the Vanderbilt family. He was the richest American after he took over his father's fortune in 1877 until his own death in 1885, passing on a substantial part of the fortune to his wife and children. Billy was born in New Jersey in 1821. He inherited nearly $100 million from his father, railroad mogul and family patriarch Cornelius Vanderbilt. The fortune had doubled when Billy died less than 9 years later. His father Cornelius frequently berated and criticized him, calling him a "blockhead". Billy never dared stand up to his fearsome father. A major turning point in their relationship occurred on the family trip to Europe in 1860, after which, the two became very close and Billy was given a greater role in business matters.
In 1841, Billy married and the couple had 8 children. Billy was an active philanthropist, giving extensively to a number of philanthropic causes including the YMCA, funding to help establish the Metropolitan Opera and an endowment for Columbia University. In 1880, he provided the money for Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He was an avid art enthusiast; his collection included some of the most valuable works of the Old Masters, and over his lifetime he acquired more than 200 paintings, which he housed in his lavish mansion.
Billy died when he was 64 years old.
Charles Lyell (1797 – 1875)
Charles Lyell was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularized concepts that the Earth was shaped by the same processes still in operation today. Principles of Geology also challenged theories which were the most accepted and circulated ideas about geology in England at the time.
His scientific contributions included an explanation of earthquakes, the theory of gradual "backed up-building" of volcanoes, and in stratigraphy, how layers in the earth mark epochs in time. He incorrectly conjectured that icebergs and not glaciers were the main cause of erratic rocks that are not native to the location they are found in. He also falsely thought that silty loess deposits covering about 10% of the Earth's surface settled out of flood waters and not from silt-sized sediments formed by the accumulation of wind-blown dust.
Lyell favored an indefinitely long age for the earth, despite geological evidence suggesting an old but finite age. He was a close friend of Charles Darwin, and contributed significantly to Darwin's thinking on the processes involved in evolution. He helped to arrange the simultaneous publication in 1858 of papers by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace on natural selection, despite his personal religious qualms about the theory. He later published evidence from geology of the time man had existed on Earth.
Lyell was born in Scotland. He was the eldest of 10 children. Lyell's father was a lawyer and botanist of minor repute. He was the first to expose his son to the study of nature. The house he was brought up in was close to mountains in the highlands. Lyell entered College when he was 19 and gained his diploma 5 years later. After graduation he took up law as a profession.
He completed a circuit through rural England, where he could observe geological phenomena and was elected joint secretary of the Geological Society. His eyesight began to deteriorate and he gave up his law profession for a geology career and fame. By the time he was 33 years old, his books provided both income and fame. Each of his 3 major books was a work continually in progress. All 3 went through multiple editions during his lifetime. Lyell used each edition to incorporate additional material, rearrange existing material, and revisit old conclusions in light of new evidence. When he was 35, Lyell married. and the couple spent their honeymoon in Switzerland and Italy on a geological tour of the area. 5 years later, Lyell traveled to the United States and Canada, and wrote 2 popular travel-and-geology books: After the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, Lyell was one of the first to donate books to help found the Chicago Public Library.
Lyell's wife died in 1873, and 2 years later Lyell died as he was revising the twelfth edition of Principles.
Lyell noted the economic advantages of geological surveys that map and exhibit the natural resources within the country. Before the work of Lyell, phenomena such as earthquakes were understood by the destruction that they brought. One of the contributions that Lyell made in Principles was to explain the cause of earthquakes. Lyell focused on recent earthquakes evidenced by surface irregularities such as faults, fissures, stratigraphic displacements and depressions. Lyell's work on volcanoes concluded for gradual building of volcanoes as opposed to the upheaval argument supported by other geologists. Lyell's most important specific work was in the field of stratigraphy. He concluded that the recent strata rock layers could be categorized according to the number and proportion of marine shells encased within. His observational methods and general analytical framework remain in use today as foundational principles in geology.
Joseph Smith (1805 – 1844)
Joseph Smith was an American religious leader and founder of Mormonism and the Latter Day Saint movement. When he was 24, Smith published the “Book of Mormon”. By the time of his death 14 years later, he had attracted tens of thousands of followers and founded a religious culture. He experienced a series of visions, including one in which he saw God the Father and Jesus Christ the son and others in which an angel directed him to a buried book of golden plates inscribed with a Judeo-Christian history of an ancient American civilization. In 1830, he published an English translation of these plates. The same year he organized the “Church of Christ”, calling it a restoration of the early Christian church. Members of the church were later called "Latter Day Saints", or "Mormons".
In 1831, at the age of 25, Smith and his followers moved west, planning to build a communalistic American Zion. They first gathered in Kirtland, Ohio, and established an outpost in Missouri, which was intended to be Zion's center place. During the 1830s, he sent out missionaries, published revelations, and supervised construction of a very expensive Temple. Violent skirmishes with non-Mormon Missourians caused him and his followers to establish a new settlement in Illinois, where he became a spiritual and political leader. In 1844, he angered non-Mormons by causing the shut down of a newspaper that had criticized his power and practice of polygamy. He published many revelations and other texts that his followers regard as scripture. His teachings include unique views about the nature of God, cosmology, family structures, political organization, and religious collectivism. His followers regard him as a prophet comparable to Moses and Elijah.
Joseph Smith was born to a father who was a merchant and farmer. After suffering a crippling bone infection when he was 7, he used crutches for 3 years. The region was a hotbed of religious enthusiasm. He became interested in religion at the age of 12. He participated in church classes and read the Bible. Both his parents and his maternal grandfather reportedly had visions or dreams that they believed communicated messages from God. He said that although he had become concerned about the welfare of his soul, he was confused by the claims of competing religious denominations.
In 1820 when he was 15 years old, Smith received a vision that resolved his religious confusion. While praying in a wooded area near his home, God, in a vision, had told him his sins were forgiven and that all contemporary churches had "turned aside from the gospel." 3 years later while praying one night for forgiveness from his sins, he was visited by an angel named Moroni who revealed the location of a buried book made of golden plates, which had been hidden in a hill near his home. He attempted to remove the plates but was unsuccessful because the angel prevented him. He reported that during the next 4 years, he made annual visits to the hill to get the plates, but each time returned empty handed.
Family members supplemented their meager farm income by hiring out for odd jobs and working as treasure seekers, a type of magical supernaturalism common during the period. Smith was said to have an ability to locate lost items by looking into a seer stone, which he also used in treasure hunting, including several unsuccessful attempts to find buried treasure sponsored by a wealthy farmer. In 1826, Smith was brought before a Chenango County court for "glass-looking", or pretending to find lost treasure.
Smith began courting Emma and proposed marriage. Emma's father objected because Smith was a stranger who had no means of supporting his daughter other than money digging and looking for treasures. Smith and Emma eloped and married after which the couple began boarding with Smith's parents. Later that year, when he promised to abandon treasure seeking, Emma`s father offered to let the couple live on his property and help Smith get started in business.
Smith made his last annual visit to the hill with Emma and retrieved the plates and put them in a locked chest. He said the angel commanded him not to show the plates to anyone else but to publish their translation, reputed to be the religious record of indigenous Americans. The plates were engraved in an unknown language that he was miraculously capable of reading and translating. Smith lost the plates. At the same time Emma, gave birth to a son, Alvin, who died the same day. Smith took his son's death as punishment for losing the plates and revoked his ability to translate them. He said that the angel eventually returned the plates to him and he resumed translation.
The narrative described an institutional church and a requirement for baptism so Smith and his scribe founded a church and baptized each other. Although Smith had previously refused to show the plates to anyone, he told 3 men that they would be allowed to see them. These men, known collectively as the 3 witnesses, to whom an angel showed the plates and the voice of God confirmed their truth,—along with a later group of 8 witnesses composed of male members of the Smith families to whom he showed the plates. The angel Moroni took back the plates once Smith finished using them.
The completed work, the “Book of Mormon”, was published in 1830, and financed by mortgaging their farms to finance it. Soon after, Smith and his followers formally organized the Church of Christ. The “Book of Mormon” brought Smith regional notoriety and opposition from those who remembered his 1826 treasure - digging trial.
The “Book of Mormon” is the longest and most complex of Smith's revelations. It is organized as a compilation of smaller books, each named after its main named narrator or a prominent leader. It tells the story of the rise and fall of a religious civilization beginning around 600 BC and ending in 421 AD. The story begins with a family that leaves Jerusalem, just before the Babylonian captivity. They eventually construct a ship and sail to a "promised land" in the Western Hemisphere. There, they are divided into 2 factions: Nephites and Lamanites. The Nephites become a righteous people who build a temple and live the law of Moses, though their prophets teach a Christian gospel. The Lamanites, the forefathers of the native American Indians began as wicked rivals to the more righteous Nephites, but when the Nephite civilization became decadent it lost divine favor and was destroyed by the Lamanites. Lamanites are described as having received a "skin of blackness" as means of distinguishing themselves from the Nephites. This "change" in skin color is often mentioned in conjunction with God's curse on the descendants of Laman for their wickedness and corruption. The book explains itself to be largely the work of Mormon, a Nephite prophet and military figure. The book closes when Mormon's son, Moroni finishes engraving and buries the records written on the golden plates.
Christian themes permeate the work. Nephite prophets teach of Christ's coming, and talk of the star that will appear at his birth. After the crucifixion and resurrection in Jerusalem, Jesus appears in the Americas, repeats the Sermon on the Mount, blesses children, and appoints 12 disciples. Mormons understood the “Book of Mormon” to be a religious history of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and as a companion to the Bible and an additional witness of Christ.
The Mormons received threats of mob violence and Smith was arrested and brought to trial for inciting disorder. He was acquitted, but he and his scribe had to flee to escape the mob. During his flight, he claimed that the apostles Peter, James, and John appeared and ordained them to a higher priesthood. Smith's authority was undermined when other church members also claimed to receive revelations. In response, Smith dictated a revelation which clarified himself as a prophet and an apostle and which declared that only he held "the keys of the mysteries, and the revelations" with the ability to inscribe scripture for the church. Smith then dispatched members on a mission to convert Native Americans and to find a site of the New Jerusalem. With growing opposition in New York, Smith gave forth as revelation that Kirtland, Ohio was the eastern boundary of the New Jerusalem and that his followers must gather there. When Smith moved to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1831, he encountered a religious culture that included enthusiastic demonstrations of spiritual gifts, including fits and trances, rolling on the ground, and speaking in tongues. Smith tamed these outbursts by producing 2 revelations that brought the Kirtland congregation under his own authority.
A revelation designated him as the only prophet allowed to issue commandments. This religious authority encompassed economic and political as well as spiritual matters. In the early 1830s, he temporarily instituted a form of religious communism, called the United Order that required Latter Day Saints to give all their property to the church, which was divided among the faithful. Smith promised church elders that in Kirtland they would receive an endowment of heavenly power, and in 1831 he introduced the greater authority of a High Priesthood to the church hierarchy. Converts poured into Kirtland. By 1835, there were 2,000 Mormons in the vicinity, many expecting Smith to lead them shortly to the Millennial kingdom. The mission to convert the Indians had been a failure because the missionaries were expelled by a government Indian agent.
Cowdery, the scribe reported that he had found the site of the New Jerusalem in Missouri. Smith agreed. One of the early leaders of the church disapproved, and for most of the 1830s the church remained divided between Ohio and Missouri. Smith continued to live in Ohio, but visited Missouri again in early 1832 in order to prevent a rebellion of prominent church members, including Cowdery, who believed the church in Missouri was being neglected. Smith's trip was hastened by a mob of Ohio residents who were incensed over Smith's political power. The mob beat Smith and his assistant unconscious, tarred and feathered them, and left them for dead. Missouri residents resented the Mormon newcomers for both political and religious reasons. Tension increased until 1833, when non-Mormons forcibly evicted the Mormons and destroyed their property. After armed bands exchanged fire and one Mormon and 2 non-Mormons were killed, the old settlers brutally expelled the Mormons.
In 1833, Smith delivered a revelation called the "Word of Wisdom," which counseled a diet of wholesome herbs, fruits, grains, a sparing use of meat, and recommended that Latter Day Saints avoid strong alcoholic drinks, tobacco, and "hot drinks" later interpreted to mean tea and coffee.
Smith taught that all existence was material, including a world of "spirit matter" so fine that it was invisible to all but the purest mortal eyes. Matter, in Smith's view, could neither be created nor destroyed; the creation involved only the reorganization of existing matter. Like matter, Smith saw "intelligence" as co-eternal with God, and taught that human spirits had been drawn from a pre-existent pool of eternal intelligences. Smith claimed that spirits could not experience a "fullness of joy" unless joined with corporeal bodies. The work and glory of God, then, was to create worlds across the cosmos on planets where inferior intelligences could be embodied.
Smith believed that both God the Father and Jesus the son were distinct beings with physical bodies, but the Holy Spirit was a "personage of Spirit". He believed that with the gradual acquisition of knowledge, those who worshiped could eventually become like God. These teachings implied a vast hierarchy of gods, with God himself having a father. In Smith's cosmology, those who worship and became gods would reign, unified in purpose and will, leading spirits of lesser capacity to share immortality and eternal life. All who have ever lived, whether wicked or disbelieving, would be given a chance to achieve a degree of glory in the afterlife.
Smith was teaching a polygamy doctrine as early as 1831 teaching that the highest level of exaltation could be achieved through polygamy. When the church publicly repudiated polygamy 6 years later, there was a rift between Smith and Cowdery over the issue. Smith had engaged in a relationship with his serving girl, insisting that it was not adulterous, because he had taken her as a plural wife. He married or was sealed to about 30 additional women. Ten were already married to other men. Some of these polyandrous marriages were done with the consent of the first husbands. 10 of Smith's plural wives were between the ages of 14 and 20 while others were over 50. The practice of polygamy was kept secret from both non-Mormons and most members of the church during Smith's lifetime.
Smith ended the communitarian experiment and changed the name of the church to the "Church of Latter Day Saints" before leading a small paramilitary expedition to aid the Missouri Mormons. As a military endeavor, the expedition was a failure; the men were outnumbered and suffered from dissension and a cholera outbreak. Many future church leaders came from among the participants. Smith established 5 governing bodies in the church, all originally of equal authority to check one another. Among these 5 groups were 12 apostles. Smith gave a revelation saying that to redeem Zion, his followers would have to receive an endowment or a heavenly gift, from the Kirtland Temple. In 1836, at the temple's dedication, many participants in the promised endowment saw visions of angels, spoke in tongues, and prophesied.
In 1837, a series of internal disputes led to the collapse of the Kirtland Mormon community. Smith was blamed for having promoted a church-sponsored bank that failed and accused of engaging in a sexual relationship with his serving girl. Building the temple had left the church deeply in debt, and Smith was hounded by creditors. Having heard of a large sum of money supposedly hidden in Salem, Massachusetts, he traveled there and received a revelation that God had "much treasure in this city". But after a month, he returned to Kirtland empty-handed. Smith and other church leaders created a joint stock company to act as a quasi-bank. The company issued bank notes capitalized in part by real estate. Smith encouraged the Latter Day Saints to buy the notes, and he invested heavily in them himself, but the bank failed within a month. As a result, the Latter Day Saints in Kirtland suffered intense pressure from debt collectors and severe price volatility. Smith was held responsible for the failure, and there were widespread defections from the church, including many of Smith's closest advisers. After a warrant was issued for his arrest on a charge of banking fraud, he and his assistant Rigdon fled Kirtland for Missouri.
By 1838, Smith had abandoned plans to redeem Zion, and after Smith and Rigdon arrived in Missouri, the town of Far West became the new "Zion". In Missouri, the church also took the name "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints", and construction began on a new temple. In the weeks and months after Smith and Rigdon arrived at Far West, thousands of Latter Day Saints followed them from Kirtland. Smith encouraged the settlement of land. Political and religious differences between old Missourians and newly-arriving Mormon settlers provoked tensions between the 2 groups, much as they had years earlier. By this time, Smith's experiences with mob violence led him to believe that his faith's survival required greater militancy against anti-Mormons. During this time, a church council expelled many of the oldest and most prominent leaders of the church, calling them collectively the "dissenters". A covert organization called the Danites was formed to intimidate Mormon dissenters and oppose anti-Mormon militia units. After Rigdon delivered a sermon that implied dissenters had no place in the Mormon community, the Danites forcibly expelled them from the county. Rigdon declared that Mormons would no longer tolerate persecution by the Missourians and spoke of a "war of extermination" if Mormons were attacked. Smith implicitly endorsed this speech, and many non-Mormons understood it to be a thinly-veiled threat. They unleashed a flood of anti-Mormon rhetoric in newspapers.
In 1838, non-Mormons tried to prevent Mormons from voting, and the election-day scuffles initiated the 1838 Mormon War. Non-Mormon vigilantes raided and burned Mormon farms, and Danites and other Mormons pillaged non-Mormon towns. During this period Smith's heated rhetoric encouraged some of his followers to take aggressive measures. Under the impression that an approaching group of armed men were a band of vigilantes, Mormons attacked the Missouri state militia. The Governor ordered that the Mormons be "exterminated or driven from the state". A party of Missourians surprised and killed 17 Mormons. The following day, the Latter Day Saints surrendered to 2,500 state troops and agreed to forfeit their property and leave the state. Smith was immediately brought before a military court, accused of treason, and sentenced to be executed the next morning. Smith's former attorney and a brigadier general in the Missouri militia, refused to carry out the order. Smith was then sent to a state court for a preliminary hearing, where several of his former allies testified against him. Smith and 5 others, including Rigdon, were charged with "overt acts of treason", and imprisoned to await trial.
Smith's months in prison with an ill and whining Rigdon strained their relationship. Meanwhile Brigham Young, then-president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, rose to prominence among the Mormon faithful when he organized the move of about 14,000 Saints as the members were called, to Illinois and eastern Iowa. Smith bore his imprisonment stoically. Understanding that he was effectively on trial before his own people, many of whom considered him a fallen prophet, he wrote a personal defense and an apology for the activities of the Danites. He directed his followers to collect and publish their stories of persecution, and urged them to moderate their antagonism toward non-Mormons. After a grand jury hearing, Smith and his companions escaped custody with the connivance of the sheriff and guards.
Many American newspapers criticized Missouri for the massacre of the 17 Mormons and the state's expulsion of the Latter Day Saints, and Illinois accepted Mormon refugees who gathered along the banks of the Mississippi River, where Smith purchased high-priced, swampy woodland. Smith attempted to portray the Latter Day Saints as an oppressed minority and unsuccessfully petitioned the federal government for help in obtaining reparations. During the summer of 1839, while Latter Day Saints in Nauvoo suffered from a malaria epidemic, Smith sent Brigham Young and other apostles to missions in Europe, where they made numerous converts, many of them poor factory workers.
Smith also attracted a few wealthy and influential converts among them Bennett who had with connections in the Illinois legislature and obtained an unusually liberal charter for the new Mormon city, which Smith named "Nauvoo". The charter granted the city virtual autonomy, authorized a university, and granted Nauvoo habeas corpus or imprisonment without a trial powers. This allowed Smith to fend off extradition to Missouri. Though Mormon authorities controlled Nauvoo's civil government, the city promised an unusually liberal guarantee of religious freedom. The charter also authorized the Nauvoo Legion, an autonomous militia whose actions were limited only by state and federal constitutions. Smith became its commander controlling by far the largest body of armed men in Illinois. Smith made Bennett Assistant President of the church, and Bennett was elected Nauvoo's first mayor.
In 1841, Smith began revealing the doctrine of plural marriage to a few of his closest male associates, including Bennett, who used it as an excuse to seduce numerous women wed and unwed. When embarrassing rumors of "spiritual wifery" got abroad, Smith forced Bennett's resignation as Nauvoo mayor. In retaliation, Bennett wrote lurid exposés of life in Nauvoo. The early Nauvoo years were a period of doctrinal innovation. In 1840, Smith introduced baptism for the dead. A year later, construction began on the Nauvoo Temple as a place for recovering lost ancient knowledge. A revelation promised the restoration of the "fullness of the priesthood"; and a year later, Smith inaugurated a revised endowment or "first anointing". The endowment resembled rites of freemasonry that Smith had observed 2 months earlier when he had been initiated into the Nauvoo Masonic lodge. At first, the endowment was open only to men, who were initiated into the Anointed Quorum. For women, Smith introduced the Relief Society, a service club and sorority within which Smith predicted women would receive "the keys of the kingdom". Smith also elaborated on his plan for a millennial kingdom. No longer envisioning the building of Zion in Nauvoo, Smith viewed Zion as encompassing all of North and South America, with Mormon settlements being "stakes" of Zion's metaphorical tent. Zion also became less a refuge from an impending tribulation than a great building project. Smith revealed a plan to establish the millennial Kingdom of God, which would eventually establish theocratic rule over the whole earth.
By 1842, popular opinion had turned against the Mormons. After an unknown assailant shot and wounded Missouri governor, anti-Mormons circulated rumors that Smith's bodyguard was the shooter and the Governor ordered Smith's extradition. Certain he would be killed if he ever returned to Missouri, he went into hiding twice during the next 5 months before the U.S. district attorney for Illinois argued that his extradition to Missouri would be unconstitutional. A year later, enemies of Smith convinced a reluctant Illinois Governor to extradite Smith to Missouri on the old charge of treason. Two law officers arrested Smith, but were intercepted by a party of Mormons before they could reach Missouri. Smith was then released on a writ of habeas corpus from the Nauvoo municipal court. While this ended the Missourians' attempts at extradition, it caused significant political fallout in Illinois.
Smith petitioned Congress to make Nauvoo an independent territory with the right to call out federal troops in its defense. He then wrote to the leading presidential candidates and asked them what they would do to protect the Mormons. After receiving noncommittal or negative responses, he announced his own independent candidacy for President of the United States, suspended regular proselytizing, and sent out the Quorum of the Twelve and hundreds of other political missionaries. A year later, following a dispute with a federal bureaucrat, Smith organized the secret Council of Fifty with authority to decide which national or state laws Mormons should obey. The Council was also to select a site for a large Mormon settlement in Texas, California, or Oregon, where Mormons could live under theocratic law beyond other governmental control.
A rift developed between Smith and a half dozen of his closest associates. Smith's trusted counselor, and a general of the Nauvoo Legion, disagreed with him about how to manage Nauvoo's economy. Both also said that Smith had proposed marriage to their wives. Believing the dissidents were plotting against his life, Smith excommunicated them. These dissidents formed a competing church and the following month, they procured indictments against Smith for perjury and polygamy. The dissidents published the first and only issue of a newspaper calling for reform within the church and appealing to the political views of the county's anti-Mormons. The paper decried Smith's new "doctrines of many Gods", alluded to Smith's theocratic aspirations, and called for a repeal of the Nauvoo city charter. It also attacked Smith's practice of polygamy, implying that he was using religion as a pretext to draw unassuming women to Nauvoo in order to seduce and marry them. Fearing the newspaper would bring the countryside down on the Mormons, the Nauvoo city council declared the Expositor a public nuisance and ordered the Nauvoo Legion to destroy the press. Smith, who feared another mob attack, supported the action, not realizing that destroying a newspaper was more likely to incite an attack than any libel. Destruction of the newspaper provoked a strident call to arms. Fearing an uprising, Smith mobilized the Nauvoo Legion on and declared martial law. Officials responded by mobilizing their small detachment of the state militia. Smith fled across the Mississippi River, but shortly returned and surrendered.
Smith and his brother were initially charged for inciting a riot, but once they were in custody, the charges were increased to treason. In 1844, an armed mob with blackened faces stormed the jail where the Smiths were being held. 5 men were later tried for Smith's murder but were all acquitted. Throughout his life Smith had been sharply criticized by newspaper editors, and after his death newspapers were almost unanimous in portraying Smith as a religious fanatic. Within Mormonism, Smith was memorialized first and foremost as a prophet, martyred to seal the testimony of his faith.
Mormons and ex-Mormons have produced a large amount of scholarly work about Smith, and to a large extent the result has been 2 discordant pictures of very different people: a man of God on the one hand, and on the other, a fraud preying on the ignorance of his followers. Believers tend to focus on his achievements and religious teachings, deemphasizing his personal defects, while detractors focus on his mistakes, legal troubles, and controversial doctrines
Smith's death resulted in a succession crisis. Smith had proposed several ways to choose his successor, but had never clarified his preference. Smith's brother had he survived, would have had the strongest claim, followed by Smith's other brother who died mysteriously a month after they both were killed. Another brother was unable to attract a sufficient following. Smith's sons also had claims, but one was too young and the other was yet unborn. The Council of Fifty had a theoretical claim to succession, but it was a secret organization. Some of Smith's chosen successors had left the church. In a church-wide conference, most of the Latter Day Saints elected Brigham Young, who led them to the Utah Territory as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The single feature of Smith's life was his sense of being guided by revelation. Instead of presenting ideas with logical arguments, Smith dictated authoritative revelations and let people decide whether to believe. Smith's teachings came primarily through his revelations, which read like scripture: oracular and open to interpretation. Smith and his followers viewed his revelations as being above teachings or opinions. Smith dictated revelations orally, and they were recorded by a scribe without revisions or corrections. Revelations were immediately copied, and then circulated among church members. Smith's revelations often came in response to specific questions. He described the revelations as having "pure Intelligence" flowing into him.
While campaigning for President of the United States in 1844, Smith had opportunity to take political positions on issues of the day. Smith considered the U.S. Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights, to be inspired by God. He believed a strong central government was crucial to the nation's well-being and also taught that a theocratic monarchy was the ideal form of government. Smith favored a strong central bank and high tariffs to protect American business and agriculture. He disfavored imprisonment of convicts except for murder, preferring efforts to reform criminals through labor. He also opposed courts-martial for military deserters. He supported capital punishment but opposed hanging, preferring execution by firing squad or beheading.
In the 1830s when the Mormons were settling in Missouri, a slave state, Smith cautiously justified slavery. During his presidential campaign of 1844, he proposed ending slavery by 1850 and compensating slaveholders for their loss. Smith said that blacks were not inherently inferior to whites, and he welcomed slaves into the church. However, he opposed baptizing them without permission of their masters, and he opposed interracial marriage.
Smith declared that he would be one of the instruments in fulfilling Nebuchadnezzar's statue vision in the Book of Daniel: that secular government would be destroyed without "sword or gun", and would be replaced with a "theo-democratic" Kingdom of God. He also taught that which is wrong under one circumstance, may be and often is, right under another. God said thou shalt not kill—at another time he said thou shalt utterly destroy. This is the principle on which the government of heaven is conducted by revelation adapted to the circumstances in which the elders of the kingdom are placed. Whatever God requires is right... even things which may be considered abominable to all those who do not understand the order of heaven.
Beginning in the mid-1830s and into the 1840s, as the Mormon people became involved in conflicts with the Missouri and Illinois state governments, Smith taught that "Congress has no power to make a law that would abridge the rights of my religion," and that they were not under the obligation to follow laws they deemed as being contrary to their "religious privilege". Smith may have thus felt justified in promoting polygamy despite its violation of some traditional ethical standards.
Smith attracted thousands of devoted followers before his death in 1844 and millions in the century that followed. Among Mormons, he is regarded as a prophet on par with Moses and Elijah.
Like Jesus 2000 years before, Smith added a new testament to the scripture he was raised to follow and believe. Like Jesus, he was regarded by most a con man and was killed by popular force because of that and later turned into a martyr. Like Jesus, he claimed spiritual powers that attracted a few devoted followers who converted people to believe his message of salvation. They were hardened by persecution grew in numbers and survived.
Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849)
Fryderyk Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era who wrote primarily for solo piano. He has maintained worldwide renown as a leading musician of his era, one whose "poetic genius was based on a professional technique that was without equal in his generation."
Chopin grew up in Warsaw, which in 1815 became part of Poland. A child prodigy, he completed his musical education and composed his earlier works in Warsaw before leaving Poland at the age of 20, less than a month before the outbreak of the 1830 Uprising. At 21, he settled in Paris. Thereafter,in the last 18 years of his life, he gave only 30 public performances, preferring the more intimate atmosphere of the salon. He supported himself by selling his compositions and by giving piano lessons, for which he was in high demand. Chopin formed a friendship with Franz Liszt and was admired by many of his other musical contemporaries including Robert Schumann. In 1835, Chopin obtained French citizenship. Chopin was educated in the tradition of Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Clementi. He used Clementi's piano method with his own students.
All of Chopin's compositions include the piano. Most are for solo piano. Among the influences on his style of composition were Polish folk music, the classical tradition of J. S. Bach, Mozart, and Schubert, and the atmosphere of the Paris salons of which he was a frequent guest. His innovations in style, harmony, and musical form, and his association of music with nationalism, were influential throughout and after the late Romantic period. Chopin's music, his status as one of music's earliest superstars, his association with political insurrection, his often tumultuous love-life, and his early death have made him a leading symbol of the Romantic era.
Chopin's father was a Frenchman from Lorraine who had emigrated to Poland in 1787 at the age of 16. Chopin's mother tutored children of the Polish aristocracy, and in 1806 married a poor relative of one of the families for whom she worked for. Chopin was the couple's second child and only son. Six months after Chopin`s birth, the family moved to Warsaw, where his father acquired a post teaching French in the Saxon Palace. Chopin lived with his family in the Palace grounds. The father played the flute and violin. The mother played the piano and gave lessons to boys in the boarding house that the he kept. He was of slight build, and even in early childhood was prone to illnesses.
It quickly became apparent that he was a child prodigy. By the age of 7 Chopin had begun giving public concerts and composed two polonaises. From the age of 13-16, Chopin received organ lessons. Throughout this period he continued to compose and to give recitals in concerts and salons in Warsaw. He was engaged by the inventors of a mechanical organ, the "eolomelodicon", and on this instrument in 1825 he performed his own improvisation. The success of this concert led to an invitation to give a similar recital on the instrument before Tsar Alexander I, who was visiting Warsaw.
Chopin's successes as a composer and performer opened the door to western Europe for him, and in 1830, when he was 20, he set out, into the wide world, with no very clearly defined aim. He headed for Austria intending to go on to Italy. Chopin arrived in Paris in 1831, never again to return to Poland. He became one of many expatriates of the Polish Great Emigration. In France he used the French versions of his given names, and after receiving French citizenship in 1835, he traveled on a French passport. However, Chopin remained close to his fellow Poles in exile as friends and confidants and he never felt fully comfortable speaking French.
Chopin was introduced to the wealthy Rothschild banking family, whose patronage also opened doors for him to other private salons with social gatherings of the aristocracy and artistic and literary elite. By the end of 1832 Chopin had established himself among the Parisian musical elite, and had earned the respect of his peers. He no longer depended financially upon his father, and in the winter of 1832 he began earning a handsome income from publishing his works and teaching piano to affluent students from all over Europe. This freed him from the strains of public concert-giving, which he disliked.
From 1842 onward, Chopin showed signs of serious illness. With his health further deteriorating, Chopin desired to have a family member with him and he died at the age of 39.
David Thoreau (1817-1862)
David Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.
Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist. Though "Civil Disobedience" seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government. “I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government."
David Thoreau was born into the modest New England family of a pencil maker. He studied at Harvard College between 1833 and 1837. He took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. The traditional professions open to college graduates - law, the church, business, medicine - did not interest Thoreau, so in 1835 he took a leave of absence from Harvard, during which he taught school. Thoreau contracted tuberculosis and suffered from it sporadically afterwards.
After he graduated in 1837, he joined the faculty of the Concord public school, but he resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment. He and his brother John then opened the Concord Academy, a grammar school in Concord, in 1838. They introduced several progressive concepts, including nature walks and visits to local shops and businesses. The school closed when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving.
Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he met Emerson through a mutual friend. Emerson, who was 14 years his senior, took a paternal and at times patronizing interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers. Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical and lobbied the editor to publish those writings.
Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years he followed Transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson. They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. In their view, Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts.
In 1841 Thoreau moved into the Emerson house where from 1841-1844 he served as the children's tutor as well as an editorial assistant, repairman and gardener.
When Thoreau returned to Concord, he worked in his family's pencil factory, which he would continue to do alongside his writing and other work for most of his adult life. He rediscovered the process of making good pencils with inferior graphite by using clay as the binder. This invention allowed profitable use of a graphite source the family owned. Then he moved to Walden Park.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion”.
Thoreau left Walden Pond in 1847. At Emerson's request, he immediately moved back to the Emerson house to help Emerson's wife manage the household while her husband was on an extended trip to Europe. Over several years, as he worked to pay off his debts, he continuously revised the manuscript of what he eventually published as Walden, or Life in the Woods in 1854, recounting the 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days he had spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of the 4 seasons to symbolize human development.
Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden at first won few admirers, but later critics have regarded it as a classic American work that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.
In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and narratives of travel and expedition. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal. He admired Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. He kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to "anticipate" the seasons of nature, in his word. He became a land surveyor and continued to write increasingly detailed observations on the natural history of the town.
After John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, many prominent voices in the abolitionist movement distanced themselves from Brown or damned him with faint praise. John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry was an effort by armed abolitionist John Brown to initiate an armed slave revolt in 1859 by taking over a United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown's party of 22 was defeated by a company of U.S. Marines.
Thoreau was disgusted by this, and he composed a key speech, which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his actions. Thoreau's speech proved persuasive: the abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North were literally singing Brown's praises.
In 1860, following a late-night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rainstorm, he became ill with bronchitis. His health declined, with brief periods of remission, and he eventually became bedridden. Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works.
Until the 1970s, literary critics dismissed Thoreau's late pursuits as amateur science and philosophy. With the rise of environmental history and ecocriticism as academic disciplines, Thoreau began to emerge as both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots. For instance he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through the dispersal of seeds by winds or animals.
Astonishing amounts of reading fed his endless curiosity about the peoples, cultures, religions and natural history of the world and left its traces as commentaries in his voluminous journals. He processed everything he read, in the local laboratory of his Concord experience. Among his famous aphorisms is his advice to "live at home like a traveler."
He wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and were fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded, "I did not know we had ever quarreled."
He died at age 44.
“Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but are also positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
He was not a strict vegetarian, though he said he preferred that diet and advocated it as a means of self-improvement. He wrote in Walden,
"The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth."
Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor fully embraced wilderness. Instead he sought a middle ground, the pastoral realm that integrates nature and culture. His philosophy required that he be a didactic arbitrator between the wilderness he based so much on and the spreading mass of humanity in North America. Thoreau never married and was childless.
Thoreau was fervently against slavery and actively supported the abolitionist movement. He participated in the Underground Railroad, delivered lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law, and in opposition to the popular opinion of the time, supported radical abolitionist militia leader John Brown and his party. Two weeks after the ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry and in the weeks leading up to Brown's execution, Thoreau regularly delivered a speech to the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts in which he compared the American government to Pontius Pilate and likened Brown's execution to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Thoreau deemed the evolution from absolute monarchy to limited monarchy to democracy as "a progress toward true respect for the individual" and theorized about further improvements "towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man." Echoing this belief, he went on to write:
"There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."
He regarded pacifist nonresistance as temptation to passivity, writing: "Let not our Peace be proclaimed by the rust on our swords, or our inability to draw them from their scabbards; but let her at least have so much work on her hands as to keep those swords bright and sharp."
Likewise, his condemnation of the Mexican–American War did not stem from pacifism, but rather because he considered Mexico "unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army" as a means to expand the slave territory.
Thoreau was ambivalent towards industrialization and capitalism. On one hand he regarded commerce as "unexpectedly confident and serene, adventurous, and unwearied" and expressed admiration for its associated cosmopolitanism, writing: “I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer.”
On the other hand, he wrote disparagingly of the factory system: “I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched.”
Thoreau also favored bio-regionalism, the protection of animals and wild areas, free trade, and taxation for schools and highways. He disapproved of the subjugation of Native Americans, slavery, technological utopianism, consumerism, mass entertainment, and frivolous applications of technology.
Thoreau was influenced by Indian spiritual thought. In Walden, there are many overt references to the sacred texts of India. A century later, Martin Luther King's first encounter with the idea of nonviolent resistance was reading Thoreau`s "On Civil Disobedience."
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Gregor Mendel, Alfred Russel Wallace, Joseph Lister, Leo Tolstoy, Dmitri Mendeleev, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, John Davison Rockefeller, Mark Twain
https://andrewvecseythinkers.blogspot.com/2020/03/1835-small.html
"There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."
He regarded pacifist nonresistance as temptation to passivity, writing: "Let not our Peace be proclaimed by the rust on our swords, or our inability to draw them from their scabbards; but let her at least have so much work on her hands as to keep those swords bright and sharp."
Likewise, his condemnation of the Mexican–American War did not stem from pacifism, but rather because he considered Mexico "unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army" as a means to expand the slave territory.
Thoreau was ambivalent towards industrialization and capitalism. On one hand he regarded commerce as "unexpectedly confident and serene, adventurous, and unwearied" and expressed admiration for its associated cosmopolitanism, writing: “I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer.”
On the other hand, he wrote disparagingly of the factory system: “I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched.”
Thoreau also favored bio-regionalism, the protection of animals and wild areas, free trade, and taxation for schools and highways. He disapproved of the subjugation of Native Americans, slavery, technological utopianism, consumerism, mass entertainment, and frivolous applications of technology.
Thoreau was influenced by Indian spiritual thought. In Walden, there are many overt references to the sacred texts of India. A century later, Martin Luther King's first encounter with the idea of nonviolent resistance was reading Thoreau`s "On Civil Disobedience."
Back to INDEX
NEXT:->1835 (9)
Gregor Mendel, Alfred Russel Wallace, Joseph Lister, Leo Tolstoy, Dmitri Mendeleev, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, John Davison Rockefeller, Mark Twain
https://andrewvecseythinkers.blogspot.com/2020/03/1835-small.html
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