Harry Houdini
Pope Pius XII
Albert Einstein
Alexander Fleming
Ludwig von Mise
John Maynard Keynes
Harry Houdini (1874 – 1926)
Harry Houdini was an Austro-Hungarian-born American stage magician and stunt performer, noted for his sensational escape acts. Unlike the image of the classic magician, Houdini was short and stocky and typically appeared on stage in a long frock coat and tie. Houdini was also said to be slightly bow-legged, which aided in his ability to gain slack during his rope escapes.
Houdini was born in Budapest to a Jewish family. His father was a Rabbi. Houdini began his magic career in 1891 when he was 17 years old, but had little success. Houdini focused initially on traditional card tricks. At one point, he billed himself as the "King of Cards". Other professional magicians would come to regard Houdini as a competent but not particularly skilled sleight-of-hand artist, lacking the grace and finesse required to achieve excellence in that craft. He soon began experimenting with escape acts.
In 1893, while performing with his brother "Dash" as "The Brothers Houdini", Houdini met a fellow performer, Bess who was initially courted by Dash, but she and Houdini married in 1894, with Bess replacing Dash in the act, which became known as "The Houdinis". For the rest of Houdini's performing career, Bess worked as his stage assistant.
Houdini's big break came in 1899 when he was 26. He met a manager who was impressed by Houdini's handcuffs act. Within months, he was performing at the top vaudeville houses in the country. A year later, his manager arranged for Houdini to tour Europe. He gave a demonstration of escape from handcuffs at Scotland Yard and succeeded in baffling the police so effectively that he was hired for 6 months. His show was an immediate hit.
Houdini became widely known as "The Handcuff King." He toured England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Russia. In each city, Houdini challenged local police to restrain him with shackles and lock him in their jails. In many of these challenge escapes, he was first stripped nude and searched. In Moscow, he escaped from a Siberian prison transport van, claiming that, had he been unable to free himself, he would have had to travel to Siberia, where the only key was kept. He sued a police officer who alleged that he made his escapes via bribery. Houdini won the case when he opened the judge's safe. He later admitted that the judge had forgotten to lock it.
With his new-found wealth, Houdini purchased a dress said to have been made for Queen Victoria. He then arranged a grand reception where he presented his mother in the dress to all their relatives. Houdini said it was the happiest day of his life. In 1904, Houdini returned to the U.S. and purchased a house in Harlem, New York City.
From 1907 and throughout the 1910s, Houdini performed with great success in the United States. He freed himself from jails, handcuffs, chains, ropes, and straitjackets, often while hanging from a rope in sight of street audiences. Because of imitators, Houdini put his "handcuff act" behind him in 1908, and began escaping from a locked, water-filled milk can. The possibility of failure and death thrilled his audiences. Houdini also expanded his repertoire with his escape challenge act, in which he invited the public to devise contraptions to hold him. Many of these challenges were arranged with local merchants in one of the first uses of mass tie-in marketing. Houdini's advertisements showed him making his escapes via dematerializing, although Houdini himself never claimed to have supernatural powers.
During his career, Houdini explained some of his tricks in books written for the magic brotherhood. He revealed how many locks and handcuffs could be opened with properly applied force, others with shoestrings. Other times, he carried concealed lock picks or keys. When tied down in ropes or straitjackets, he gained wiggle room by enlarging his shoulders and chest, moving his arms slightly away from his body. For most of his career, Houdini was a headline act in vaudeville. For many years, he was the highest-paid performer in American vaudeville. One of Houdini's most notable non-escape stage illusions was performed at the New York Hippodrome, when he vanished a full-grown elephant from the stage. He had purchased this trick from the magician Charles Morritt. Houdini was magic's greatest visionary. He sought to create a large, unified national network of professional and amateur magicians. Wherever he traveled, he gave a lengthy formal address to the local magic club, made speeches, and usually threw a banquet for the members at his own expense.
In the 1920s, Houdini turned his energies toward debunking psychics and mediums, a pursuit that inspired and was followed by latter-day stage magicians. Houdini's training in magic allowed him to expose frauds who had successfully fooled many scientists and academics. He was a member of a Scientific American committee that offered a cash prize to any medium who could successfully demonstrate supernatural abilities. None was able to do so, and the prize was never collected.
The radio was a novelty at the time, and one of Houdini`s acts featured what Houdini said the radio would be like in 1950. Houdini began by introducing a large table with a tablecloth that fell halfway down the table's legs. Houdini walked around the table, lifting the tablecloth to show that there were no mirrors or anything else under the table. Then assistants placed on the table a giant radio approximately 2 meters long and 1 meter high and wide. The front of the radio had huge dials and double doors. Houdini opened the doors to show that there was nothing inside except coils, transformers, and vacuum tubes. He closed the doors. Houdini adjusted one of the dials until a radio station tuned in. The radio announcer said, "And now, Dorothy Young, doing the Charleston." The top of the radio flew off, and out popped a young assistant, who jumped down and danced the Charleston. The key to the illusion was the table. Called a "bellows" table, it had 2 table tops. The upper top had a trap door that opened upward. The lower top hung from the upper by springs that dropped under Ms. Young's weight without going below the skirt of the tablecloth.
Houdini performed the "Metamorphosis" illusion at the beginning of his career, when he and his wife Bessie took their act on the road in 1894. Houdini didn't invent the illusion. Houdini exchanged places with his wife. His version became a sensation. The illusion was fairly complicated. Houdini's hands were bound behind him, and he was placed in a sack that was knotted closed. The sack was placed inside a box, locked, and strapped closed. The box was placed in a cabinet with a curtain. Bessie stepped into the cabinet and drew the curtain closed. She then clapped 3 times. On the third clap, Houdini drew back the curtain, and Bessie was gone. She was found in the sack in the box, with all the locks and straps still in place and her hands bound behind her.
The secret of the illusion is surprisingly simple. Houdini was an expert on ropes and knots, and his hands were tied by a knot easily slipped. By the time the sack was pulled over his head, his hands were free. The sack had eyelets around the top edge that allowed the rope to feed inside and outside the bag. Houdini simply pulled on the rope from the inside to loosen it. After Houdini was placed in the box, he wiggled out of the sack while Bessie locked and strapped the box lid. Once Bessie drew the curtain closed, Houdini slipped out through a rear panel in the box and Bessie slipped in.
Houdini himself revealed how he escaped from straitjackets. The key was acquiring slack inside the jacket as it was strapped on. As the jacket slid onto his arms, Houdini made sure his arms were crossed, not folded, across his chest, his stronger right arm on top. As the jacket was brought around the back, Houdini pinched and pulled outward to loosen material around his chest. As the jacket was cinched and tightened, Houdini held on to this slacked material. As the jacket was buckled in the back, Houdini took a huge breath to expand his chest. Once the jacket was in place, Houdini had a fair amount of wiggle room in front.
Houdini had a spectator examine 50-100 needles and 18m of thread. The same spectator examined Houdini's mouth. The magician then swallowed the needles and thread all at once with a drink of water. A moment later, Houdini regurgitated them, feeding out the thread, the needles dangling from it. Houdini placed a packet of thread with needles already attached to it between his cheek and teeth. The needles were threaded with a knot before and after it to keep them from coming loose in Houdini's mouth. The knots were spaced to give the needles a natural play on the thread. The thread was then rolled into a flattened packet and inserted in the magician's mouth like a tobacco plug. Houdini then placed the loose needles and thread on his tongue and pretended to swallow them with a drink of water. In reality, Houdini spat the needles and thread into the water glass, leaving enough water in the glass so that the reflection obscured them. He'd take another drink of water and spooled out the packet of needles from his mouth.
Bricklayers erected a wall 3m high and 3.5m wide on the stage, perpendicular to the audience, so that the they could see both sides of it. The wall was built atop a large carpet of muslin, supposedly to prevent the use of a trap door. Houdini took position on one side of the wall, and a screen was wheeled in front of him. A second screen was wheeled to the opposite side of the wall. Seconds later, both screens were whisked away, revealing Houdini on the other side of the wall. The key was the rug. Instead of preventing the use of a trap door, it facilitated it. The trap was oblong and traversed both sides of the wall. Once it sprung, the carpet formed a V-shaped hammock so Houdini could crawl under the wall. Houdini performed a variation on this illusion. In one version, Houdini placed a solid plate of glass under the brick wall, which indeed made it impossible to use a trap door. The screen was wheeled in front of Houdini by several assistants dressed in nondescript work clothes.
After the screen obscured Houdini, he quickly changed into work clothes and joined the assistants as they walked around the back end of the wall to park the second screen on the other side. Behind the second screen, Houdini stayed and changed back into his stage clothes. Meanwhile, mechanical hands that were mounted behind the first screen waved to the audience, fooling them into thinking that Houdini was still behind it. A moment later, both screens were pulled away, revealing Houdini miraculously on the other side.
One of Houdini's earliest acts was for him to advertise that he could escape from any handcuffs the audience or the local police could provide. There was no single secret to Houdini's handcuff escapes. The illusionist studied locks all his life and had an encyclopedic knowledge of handcuffs. He looked at the cuffs and knew what kind of key he needed. He then concealed the needed key on his person. Later in his career, Houdini invented a belt made of flexible steel that rotated on ball bearings with the flick of his elbow. The belt had several compartments with a variety of keys and picks to use. Some cuffs didn't require a key. He revealed in 1902 that some cuffs opened by banging them against a hard surface. When he came to a town, he'd often research the cuffs used by the local police. He demonstrated that a loop of string could pull the screw out of a cuff's lock. Sometimes, Houdini had to free himself from so-called freak handcuffs, one-of-a-kind cuffs with only one key to open it. In that case, he insisted on testing the key first. While he fiddled with the cuffs, an assistant headed backstage and searched Houdini's huge collection of keys for one that looked similar to the freak key. The assistant handed the fake key to Houdini, who then returned the fake key to the owner while he palmed the real one.
Houdini told spectators to examine his milk can, allowing them to kick it to verify its sturdiness. The can stood about 1 meter tall, and the lid had 6 hasps that slipped over 6 eyelets attached to the can's collar. Houdini climbed into the milk can, excess water spilling out. When the lid was placed atop it, Houdini was forced to submerge his head. The 6 hasps were secured, and locks sometimes supplied by spectators were clasped on the eyelets. By then, Houdini had already been underwater for at least a minute. A screen was erected around the can. Two agonizing minutes later, Houdini emerged, wet and out of breath. The locks on the milk can's lid were still in place. A few years after his death, a friend of Houdini revealed the secret: The collar was not really riveted to the can. The simple construction of the milk can made it appear secure, but the collar rivets were fake. Because the collar was tapered and greased, anyone who examined the milk can could not pull the collar off or even budge it. But anyone inside could easily push the collar up and climb out without disturbing the locks.
Houdini led an elephant into a large cabinet. And then it disappeared. The lower part of the cabinet hid a roll of cloth identical to the rear curtains. At the appropriate moment, Houdini fired a gun, causing the audience to blink. As they blinked, the roller yanked the cloth up in front of the elephant, making it seem to disappear instantaneously.
After a show where he performed in great pain, he was unable to sleep and remained in constant pain for the next 2 days, but did not seek medical help. When he finally saw a doctor, he was found to have a high fever and an acute appendicitis, and was advised to have immediate surgery. He ignored the advice and decided to go on performing. During his last performance, he had a high fever and passed out during the show, but was revived and continued. Afterwards, he was hospitalized. Harry Houdini died of a ruptured appendix at age 52. In his final days, he optimistically held to a strong belief that he would recover, but his last words before dying were reportedly, "I'm tired of fighting."
Before Houdini died, he and his wife Bessie agreed that if Houdini found it possible to communicate after death, he would communicate the message "Rosabelle believe", a secret code which they agreed to use. "Rosabelle" was their favorite song. Bessie held yearly séances on Halloween for 10 years after Houdini's death. In 1936, after a last unsuccessful séance she put out the candle that she had kept burning beside a photograph of Houdini since his death saying that "ten years is long enough to wait for any man."
Pope Pius XII (1876 – 1958)
Pope Pius XII was head of the Catholic Church for 19 years from 1939 to his death. Before his election to the papacy he was Cardinal Secretary of State, in which capacity he worked to conclude treaties with European and Latin American nations, most notably with Nazi Germany. The treaties were to protect the Church in Germany while Adolf Hitler sought the destruction of "political Catholicism". A pre-war critic of Nazism, Pius lobbied world leaders to avoid war and reiterating Church teaching against racial persecution and calling for love, compassion and charity to prevail over war.
The Vatican was officially neutral during the war. Pope Pius`s leadership of the Catholic Church during WWII is criticized for its public silence and inaction about the fate of the Jews. After the war, Pius XII advocated peace and reconciliation, including lenient policies towards Axis and Axis-satellite nations.
Pius XII was a staunch opponent of Communism and of the Italian Communist Party. During his papacy, the Decree against Communism was issued by the church declaring that Catholics who profess Communist doctrine are to be excommunicated as apostates from the Christian faith. In turn, the Church experienced severe persecution and mass deportations of Catholic clergy in the Eastern Bloc.
The Holy See is an independent sovereign entity that serves as the central point of reference for the Catholic Church everywhere and is responsible for the governance of all Catholics. As an independent sovereign entity, holding the Vatican City enclave in Rome, it maintains diplomatic relations with other states. Diplomatically, the Holy See acts and speaks for the whole church. It is also recognized by other subjects of international law as a sovereign entity, headed by the Pope, with which diplomatic relations can be maintained.
Pius XII was born into a family with a history of ties to the papacy called the Black Nobility. They were Roman aristocratic families who sided with the Papacy under Pope Pius IX (1846-1878) after the Savoy family-led army of the Kingdom of Italy entered Rome in 1870, overthrew the Pope and the Papal States. Pius IX decreed papal infallibility. For the next 59 years, till 1929, all subsequent Popes confined themselves to Vatican City and claimed to be a prisoner in the Vatican to avoid the appearance of accepting the authority of the new Italian government and state. Pius XII`s brother, a lay lawyer for the Vatican and the legal adviser to Pope Pius XI, negotiated the Lateran Treaty in 1929 with Benito Mussolini, regarding the temporal power of the Popes as rulers of a civil territory.
Together with his brother and his 2 sisters, he grew up in the center of Rome. In 1891 his father sent him to the best Jesuit university in Rome. In 1894, aged 18, he began his theology studies at 4 different universities in Rome. At the end of the first academic year he dropped out of 2 of the universities blaming the bad food they were serving. 5 years later he completed his education and was ordained a priest. He began postgraduate studies in canon law and received his first assignment as a parish priest. He believed that the Church needed to be defended from the onslaughts of secularism and liberalism throughout Europe.
Pius worked also on diplomatic arrangements representing the Vatican. In 1929, he was made a Cardinal by Pope Pius XI, and within a few months, was appointed Cardinal Secretary of State, responsible for foreign policy and state relations throughout the world. He did not believe Hitler capable of moderation, and he fully supported the German bishops in their anti-Nazi stand. He informed Roosevelt that the Church regarded compromise with the Third Reich as "out of the question".
In 1938, he dissuaded Pope Pius XI from condemning the Kristallnacht. Kristallnacht was a pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany in 1938, carried out by paramilitary forces and German civilians. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The name comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed. Hundreds of Jewish people were murdered or committed suicide during the attacks and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked, as the attackers demolished buildings with sledge-hammers. Over 1,000 synagogues were burned and over 7,000 Jewish businesses were either destroyed or damaged. The events were widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from the foreign journalists working in Germany sent shock waves around the world.
Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933 and sought to gain international respectability and to remove internal opposition by representatives of the Church and the Catholic Center Party. He sent his vice chancellor, a Catholic nobleman and member of the Center Party, to Rome to offer negotiations about a settlement.
In 1937, Pius wrote a protest of Nazi violations and condemned the paganism of the National Socialism ideology. It was the first official denunciation of Nazism made by any major organization and resulted in persecution of the Church by the infuriated Nazis who took numerous vindictive measures against the Church. Pius lobbied world leaders to prevent the outbreak of WWII. He followed a strict public policy of Vatican neutrality for the duration of the conflict mirroring that of Pope Benedict XV during WWI, but preached against selfish nationalism. Through the use of diplomacy, sermons and radio broadcasts and the creation of the Vatican Information Service, Pius worked to ameliorate the suffering of the victims of the war. He permitted local churches to assess and formulate responses to the Nazis, and instructed them to provide discreet aid to Jews.
With Italy not yet an ally of Hitler in the war, Italians were called upon to remain faithful to the Church. Pius avoided explicit denunciations of Hitlerism or Stalinism, establishing the "impartial" public tone which would become controversial in later assessment of his pontificate. Unsuccessfully, Pius attempted to dissuade the Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini from joining Hitler in the war.
When Pope Pius XI died in 1939, the conclave to choose his successor faced a choice between a diplomatic or a spiritual candidate. They viewed Pius XII`s diplomatic experience, especially with Germany, as one of the deciding factors in his election on his 63rd birthday. Once selected as Pope, Pius XII slowly eroded the Italian monopoly on the Roman Curia by employing German and Dutch Jesuit advisers, and elevated an American Cardinal from a minor to a major role in the Church.
Pope Pius XII appointed more non-Italians than any Pope before him. For the first time, numerous young Europeans, Asians and Americans were trained in various congregations and secretariats within the Vatican for eventual service throughout the world.
In 1941, Pius was informed of Jewish deportations in Vienna. Pius responded that the church condemned antisemitism, but would not comment on specific rules. A year later, he ordered a formal protest against the inhuman mass deportations of Jews from France. But when a US delegate to the Vatican asked the Pope to condemn the atrocities against Jews, he replied that the Vatican wished to remain "neutral." Pius interpreted an encyclical of the previous Pope Pius XI, which forbade Catholics to help communists, as not applying to military assistance to the Soviet Union. A year later Pius XII established diplomatic relations with the Japanese Empire and with China.
The Pope employed the new technology of radio and a series of Christmas messages to preach against selfish nationalism and the evils of modern warfare and offer sympathy to the victims of the war. Pius's 1942 Christmas address via Vatican Radio voiced concern at human rights abuses and the murder of innocents based on race. In 1942, US Government memorandum to Pius outlined intelligence which said that Jews from across the Nazi Empire were being systematically "butchered". Pius advised German and Hungarian bishops to speak out against the massacres on the Eastern Front. Pius mentioned:
"Hundreds of thousands of persons who without any fault on their part and sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a progressive extinction".
The Nazis themselves responded to the speech by stating that it was "One long attack on everything we stand for....He is clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews....He is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals."
A year later, Pius declined to denounce publicly the Nazi discrimination against the Jews, following requests to do so from the president of the Polish government-in-exile, and from Bishop of Berlin.
Pius said: "Every word we address to the competent authority on this subject, and all our public utterances have to be carefully weighed and measured by us in the interests of the victims themselves, lest, contrary to our intentions, we make their situation worse and harder to bear".
Following the German occupation of northern Italy, Nazi officials gave Jewish leaders in Rome 36 hours to produce 50 kilograms of gold or the equivalent threatening to take 300 Jews as hostages. The Chief Rabbi of Rome went to the Vatican to seek help. The Vatican offered to loan 15 kilos. German diplomats in Rome were the initiators of the effort to save the city's Jews. Pius cooperated in this attempt at rescue, while agreeing that the Pope did not give orders for any Roman Catholic institution to hide Jews.
Pius wrote to the Bishop in Berlin to say: "We advise caution in our speeches. The Holy See has done whatever was in its power, with charitable, financial and moral assistance, to say nothing of the substantial sums which we spent for the fares of immigrants."
In 1945, a bishop who was a long-time critic of Pius's policies during WWII and an opponent of clerical celibacy and the use of Latin as language of the liturgy was excommunicated. As the war was approaching its end in 1945, the Pope advocated a lenient policy by the Allied leaders in an effort to prevent what he perceived to be the mistakes made at the end of WWI.
During WWII, after Nazi Germany commenced its mass executions of Jews in occupied Soviet territory, Pius employed diplomacy to aid victims of the Holocaust and directed the Church to provide discreet aid to Jews. The Pope was weak and vacillating in his approach to Nazism. The pope did little to challenge the progressing holocaust of the Jews out of fear of provoking the Nazis into invading Vatican City. When asked if Pius would issue a proclamation similar to the Allied declaration "German Policy of Extermination of the Jewish Race", the Vatican replied that it was unable to denounce publicly particular atrocities by the Nazis without at the same time mentioning the Bolsheviks. Pius never publicly condemned the Nazi massacre of nearly 2 million Roman Catholic Poles including nearly 3 thousand members of the Catholic clergy.
After WWII, Pope Pius focused on material aid to war-torn Europe, an internal internationalization of the Roman Catholic Church, and the development of its worldwide diplomatic relations. He was concerned about the potential spread of Communism in Western Europe and the Americas. As he sought to secure resources from abroad to aid post-war recovery, believing deprivation fueled political agitation, so he also sought to influence Italian politics.
The Pope secretly pleaded with Washington and London on behalf of notorious criminals and Nazi collaborators. The real heroes and heroines were the priests and nuns who refused to bow to Pius's officials and hand over the desperate people whom they were hiding. The main problem with writing about Pius's wartime is that in effect, he did nothing. Facing the murders of 6 million people, he remained silent. As Jews were taken away from the ghetto that sat right alongside St Peter's, he may have agonized, but he did not intervene.
When he did raise his voice with the German occupiers, it was either to ensure that the Vatican City state would not be compromised, that is to say he would be safe, or to emphasize his own neutrality in a conflict which, for many, became a battle between good and evil. His unrealistic hope was that the Catholic Church could emerge as the peacemaker across Europe. Instead, both the American and British leaderships regarded the papacy as tainted by its association with Nazism and irrelevant in the post-1945 reshaping of the continent. Both had urged Pius to speak up against the Holocaust and so drew their own conclusions about him. Far from being a saint, then, he was at best a fool, perhaps an anti-Semite and probably a coward. In 1949, Pius XII stated that the war against communism was a holy war and excommunicated members of the Communist Party.
In 1954, Pius XII began to suffer from ill health, which would continue for 4 years until his death.
Pius XII was labeled "Hitler's Pope" by those who accuse him of turning a blind eye to reports of the Holocaust. He did so, they claim, in the firm belief that it was better for the church to sup with a dictator who killed 6 million Jews than it was to condemn him and risk seeing him replaced by "godless" communists. Pius invoked papal infallibility in claiming that the dogma that “the Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was admitted into heavenly glory" was a divine revelation he received.
Pius was a very controversial Pope for his relative silence to oppose Hitler`s holocaust of the Jews during WWII. Many other Popes were also controversial.
His 19th-century predecessor Pius IX described Jews as "dogs who bark in the street".
Pope Urban II started the Crusades that lasted for 400 years.
Pope Urban II (1042-1099) was Pope for 11 years from 1088 to his death. He is best known for initiating the First Crusade between 1096-99 and setting up the modern-day Roman Curia in the manner of a royal ecclesiastical court to help run the Church. Pope Urban II was a native of France. He was a descendant of a noble family. He was prior of the abbey of Cluny. The abbey was notable for its stricter adherence to the Rule of St. Benedict, whereby Cluny started an expansion in building monasteries under the Cluny banner. The establishment of the Benedictine Order was a keystone to the stability of European society that was achieved in the 11th century.
Urban II issued the call that sent between 60,000-100,000 Christians to take back Jerusalem from the Muslims. "God wills it," he cried. Urban decreed a free card to get into heaven. Those who helped him forcibly eject Muslims from Jerusalem and much of the Middle East, were promised eternal salvation as their reward. “All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested."
Muslim jihadists claim the very same thing. So when the First Crusade reached Jerusalem in 1099, the entire population - Muslim and Jewish - was massacred. It took 1,000 years for the Vatican to officially apologize to Muslims for the Crusades and to the Jews for accusing them of crucifying Jesus, an accusation that had fueled 2,000 years of persecution by the church.
Pope Innocent IV (1195-1254) was Pope for 11 years from 1243 to his death. He signed off on the use of judicial torture during the Inquisition - the Church's investigation into heresy. For the accused to issue a "full" confession, they were expected to name other heretics. It was Innocent who told his Inquisitors they could torture their suspects if that led to a full confession. The Inquisition lasted a couple of centuries after the end of Innocent's reign. Innocent`s predecessor, Pope Gregory IX ordered all the bishops of France to confiscate and burn all Talmuds in the possession of the Jews. The holy Jewish books were placed in the custody of the Dominicans and the Franciscans. 24 cartloads of the Talmud were burned.
Innocent IV continued Gregory IX's policy of burning the Talmud. 7 years later, in 1247, Innocent reversed his stance on the Talmud, and wrote letters to the effect that the Talmud should be censored rather than burned. In 1252, Innocent IV issued the papal bull permitting the torture by the Inquisition for eliciting confessions from heretics.
Pope Alexander VI (1431-1503) was Pope for 11 years from 1492 until his death. He was known for his blatant corruption and cruelty. A member of the prominent and wealthy Borgia family, he bought his way into St. Peter's. Once there, he appointed family members to powerful positions, including his own sons and members of his mistress’s family. He had a taste for gold, violence, and his many mistresses, one of whom may have been his own daughter. He happily accepted bribes and frequently held orgies in his palace. He and his son were known to kill their enemies with swords or poison, and they'd welcome the rest of the family to watch the bloodshed. He made his daughter into a political pawn, marrying her off 3 times in the hope of securing alliances and power. Alexander VI did have one redeeming quality: his patronage of the arts. He commissioned Michelangelo to draw up plans for the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica, and embellish the Vatican palaces. In the wake of Columbus's landing in the New World, he granted rights to Spain with respect to the newly discovered lands in the Americas as well as power to enslave the natives to facilitate conversions to Christianity.
Pope Leo X (1475-1521) was Pope for 8 years from 1513 to his death. He had expensive tastes. A true Renaissance man, he built up the Vatican Library, accelerated the construction of St. Peter's Basilica and poured lavish funds into the arts. But his efforts to renew Rome's position as a cultural center took money. So much money, in fact, that within 2 years he had drained the papal treasury completely, as well as a great deal of his own fortune. To compensate, Leo X began selling off pieces of the Vatican palace - furniture, dishes, jewels and statues of the apostles. He granted indulgences for those who donated to reconstruct St. Peter's Basilica. This practice was challenged by Martin Luther. He did not take seriously the array of demands for church reform which quickly grew into the Protestant Reformation.
Leo was elected Pope in 1513, when he was 38 years old. A week later he was ordained priest. 2 day later he was consecrated as bishop and 2 days after that, he was crowned Pope. He was the last non-priest to be elected Pope. He was engrossed in idle and selfish amusements. He loved masquerades, buffoonery and hunting boar and other wild beasts. Leo hid a private life of moral irregularity.
He sold cardinals' hats. He sold membership in the "Knights of Peter". He borrowed large sums from bankers, princes and Jews. These sums, together with the considerable amounts accruing from indulgences, jubilees, and special fees, vanished as quickly as they were received. Then the pope resorted to pawning palace furniture, table plate, jewels, even statues of the apostles. Several banking firms and many individual creditors were ruined by the death of Leo.
Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist. He developed the general theory of relativity, one of the 2 pillars of modern physics alongside quantum mechanics. Einstein's work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. Einstein is best known in popular culture for his mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc2 which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his services to theoretical physics, in particular his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect, a pivotal step in the evolution of quantum theory.
The inconsistency of Newtonian mechanics with Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism and the lack of experimental confirmation for a hypothesized luminiferous aether led to the development of special relativity. It replaced the conventional notion of an absolute universal time with the notion of a time that is dependent on reference frame and spatial position. Space and time are combined in a 4 dimentional spacetime continuum. The theory is "special" in that it only applies in the special case where the spacetime is flat.
Special relativity is based on 2 postulates:
- The laws of motion are the same everywhere for objects at rest or moving in a straight line at a constant speed. Just like it is hard to tell if the train you are in is standing still or moving.
- The speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of the motion of the light source. Just like the speed of sound in air.
Special relativity predicts the equivalence of mass and energy, as expressed in E = mc2.
Einstein realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to accelerating or decelerating motions and to gravitational fields. With his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on general relativity.
General relativity is the geometric theory of gravitation. General relativity generalizes special relativity and Newton's law of universal gravitation, providing a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space and time, or spacetime. Because an aether making up the fabric of space could not be detected, Einstein substituted this physical fabric of space by a mathematical construct he called "spacetime". Stretching of this fabric and causing it to vibrate was substituted by curving the mathematical and theoretical spacetime. In particular, the curvature of spacetime is directly related to the energy and momentum of whatever matter and radiation are present.
Einstein's theory has important astrophysical implications. For example, it implies the existence of black holes, regions of space in which space and time are distorted in such a way that nothing, not even light, can escape, as an end-state for massive stars. The bending of light by gravity can lead to the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, in which multiple images of the same distant astronomical object are visible in the sky. General relativity also predicts the existence of gravitational waves. In addition, general relativity is the basis of current cosmological models of a consistently expanding universe.
However, unanswered questions remain, the most fundamental being how general relativity can be reconciled with the laws of quantum physics to produce a complete and self-consistent theory of quantum gravity.
Einstein continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the large-scale structure of the universe.
He was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and, being Jewish, did not go back to Germany, where he had been a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He settled in the U.S., becoming an American citizen in 1940. On the eve of WWII, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt alerting him to the potential development of extremely powerful bombs of a new type and recommending that the U.S. begin similar research. This eventually led to what would become the Manhattan Project. Einstein supported defending the Allied forces, but largely denounced the idea of using the newly discovered nuclear fission as a weapon.
Albert Einstein was born in Germany. His father was a salesman and engineer. In 1880, the family moved to Munich, where Einstein's father and his uncle Jakob founded a company that manufactured electrical equipment based on direct current. In 1894, Hermann and Jakob's company lost a bid to supply the city of Munich with electrical lighting because they lacked the capital to convert their equipment from the direct current (DC) standard to the more efficient alternating current (AC) standard. The loss forced the sale of the Munich factory. In search of business, the Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and a few months later to Pavia.
In 1895, at the age of 16, Einstein sat the entrance examinations for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zürich (ETH). He failed to reach the required standard in the general part of the examination. He attended a gymnasium in Aarau Switzerland in 1895–96 to complete his secondary schooling. While lodging with the family of his professor, he fell in love with the professor's daughter, Marie. He passed the Swiss Matura with mostly good grades, including the top grade in physics and mathematical subjects. Though only 17, he enrolled in the 4-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Zürich Polytechnic.
Einstein's future wife also enrolled at the Polytechnic that year. She was the only woman among the 6 students in the mathematics and physics section of the teaching diploma course. Over the next few years, Einstein and Marie's friendship developed into romance, and they read books together on extra-curricular physics in which Einstein was taking an increasing interest. In 1900, Einstein was awarded the Zürich Polytechnic teaching diploma, but Marie failed the examination with a poor grade in the mathematics component, theory of functions. Einstein and Marie married in 1903. In 1904, their first son was born in Bern, Switzerland. Their second son was born in Zürich in 1910. In 1919, Einstein divorced Marie and married his cousin Elsa having had a relationship with her for the past 7 years.
After graduating in 1900, Einstein spent almost 5 frustrating years searching for a teaching post. He acquired Swiss citizenship and secured a job in Bern at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property, the patent office, as an assistant examiner. He evaluated patent applications for a variety of devices including a gravel sorter and an electromechanical typewriter. In 1903, Einstein's position at the Swiss Patent Office became permanent.
Much of his work at the patent office related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time, 2 technical problems that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time.
In 1905, Einstein completed his thesis and was awarded a PhD by the University of Zürich, with his dissertation entitled, "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions." That same year, he published 4 groundbreaking papers, on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy, which were to bring him to the notice of the academic world, at the age of 26. The 4 papers were:
- “On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light” resolved an unsolved puzzle by suggesting that energy is exchanged only in discrete amounts called quanta. This idea was pivotal to the early development of quantum theory.
- “On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat” explained empirical evidence for the atomic theory, supporting the application of statistical physics.
- “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” reconciled Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism with the laws of mechanics by introducing major changes to mechanics close to the speed of light.
- “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?” dealt with the equivalence of matter and energy with the formula E = mc2.
These 4 works contributed substantially to the foundation of modern physicist and changed views on space, time, and matter.
By 1908, when he was 29, he was recognized as a leading scientist and was appointed lecturer at the University of Bern. The following year, after giving a lecture on electrodynamics and the relativity principle at the University of Zürich, Einstein was appointed associate professor. Einstein became a full professor at the German University in Prague 2 years later accepting Austrian citizenship in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to do so. During his Prague stay, Einstein wrote 11 scientific works, 5 of them on radiation mathematics and on the quantum theory of solids. The following year, he returned to his alma mater in Zürich.
Albert Einstein's 1905 paper on Brownian motion showed that Brownian movement can be construed as firm evidence that molecules exist. He articulated various principles that were vindicated to be truths. The principle of relativity specified that equations describing laws of physics must be the same in all frames of reference, in all places, at all times and to all observers. The principle of equivalence claimed for example that an observer in a windowless room cannot distinguish between being on the surface of the Earth, and being in a spaceship in deep space accelerating at 1g.
It was observed that the speed of light in a vacuum was the same for all observers, regardless of the motion of the light source - just like what was observed for the speed of sound. It was also observed that light showed the same interference patterns that sound showed. An effort was made to study the medium of the vacuum that allowed light waves to propagate thru it. In 1887, Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley compared the speed of light in perpendicular directions, in an attempt to detect the relative motion of matter through the stationary luminiferous aether which was assumed to permeate space and provide the medium that allowed light waves to propagate in a vacuum just like sound waves propagate in air.
It was a great shock to all when the results of this experiment could not detect the luminiferous aether. It seemed that light waves magically propagated thru the vacuum without a medium to let waves wave. In searching for this magic, Einstein found it in mathematics. He made the emptiness of space and combined it with “time” into a continuous stretchable space-time continuum and thus formulated what he called the “special theory of relativity” which made predictions that were verified. Scientists worldwide eventually adopted his theory unanimously.
Special theory of relativity was originally proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein in the paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies". The inconsistency of Newtonian mechanics with Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism and the lack of experimental confirmation for a hypothesized luminiferous aether led to the development of special relativity, which corrected mechanics to handle situations involving motions nearing the speed of light. Special relativity implied a wide range of consequences, which have been experimentally verified, including length contraction, time dilation, relativistic mass, mass–energy equivalence, a universal speed limit and relativity of simultaneity.
Space, time and mass for moving objects were no longer absolute, but relative to motion. The faster they moved, the more they were contracted, the slower time flowed for them and the greater their mass increased. Time and space were no longer defined separately from each other. Rather space and time became interwoven into a single stretchable continuum known as “spacetime”. Events that occurred at the same time for one observer occurred at different times for another. Rather than an invariant time interval between 2 events, there was an invariant spacetime interval. Combined with other laws of physics, the 2 postulates of special relativity predicted the equivalence of mass and energy, as expressed in the mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc2, where “c” is the speed of light in a vacuum.
The consequences of this theory was that the stretchable timespace frame contracted bodies moving thru it in the direction of motion and slowed down their measurement of time. The faster they moved, the more they got squished into a disk and the slower their time ticked. When they moved at the speed of light, they got squished into an infinitely thin disk and their measurement of time slowed down to a stop, they in effect disappeared from reality. This meant that nothing was allowed to travel at speeds faster than light - including light itself.
This new fabric of spacetime led Einstein to formulate between 1907-1915 a theory of gravity that he called the “general relativity theory”. The theory claimed that the observed gravitational attraction between masses resulted from the warping of this spacetime fabric by those masses, much like a heavy ball warps a trampoline by causing a depression to form on it. This general relativity theory predicted that heavy heavenly bodies would bend light waves much like the trajectory of a rolling ball was bent by a depression on the fabric it rolled on.
This was verified to be true and the theory was adopted by scientists worldwide unanimously. In 1919, that prediction was confirmed by the solar eclipse. Those observations were published in the international media, making Einstein world famous. The leading British newspaper “The Times” printed a banner headline that read: "Revolution in Science - New Theory of the Universe - Newtonian Ideas Overthrown". This theory led to the belief of black holes in the fabric of spacetime where gravitational attraction was infinite and sucked everything into it including light particles with zero masses and wormholes - tunnels outside of time that lead to the past or the future.
In his paper on mass-energy equivalence, Einstein produced E = mc2 from his special relativity equations. Mass as a particle and energy as a wave was seen as 2 names and 2 measurement units for the same underlying, conserved physical quantity. Just like humidity in air condensed into a drop of water, energy condensed into matter. Einstein claimed that matter did not need to move in order for it to have energy; it inherently contains energy just like a drop of water contains humidity.
It was observed that light had properties of a wave when it propagated showing interference patterns just like sound did. Einstein claimed that every elementary particle may be partly described in terms not only of particles, but also of waves. It expressed the inability of the classical concepts "particle" or "wave" to fully describe the behavior of quantum-scale objects.
He said: "It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do".
Einstein saw this wave-particle duality in radiation as concrete evidence for his conviction that physics needed a new, unified foundation.
Einstein postulated that light itself consisted of localized particles called quanta. Einstein proposed that each wave of frequency “f” was associated with a collection of photons with energy “hf” each, where “h” was Planck's constant. He did not say much more, because he was not sure how the particles were related to the wave. But he did predict certain experimental results, notably the photoelectric effect which predicted that hitting an atom with an electron can cause the atom to let out a photon, and hitting an atom with a photon causes the atom to let go an electron. This was verified in 1919 by detailed experiments, and universally accepted by scientists worldwide soon after.
Throughout the 1910s, quantum mechanics expanded in scope to cover many different systems. After Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus and proposed that electrons orbit like planets, Niels Bohr was able to show that the same quantum mechanical postulates introduced by Max Planck and developed by Einstein would explain the discrete motion of electrons in atoms, and the periodic table of the elements.
From 1912-1914, Einstein was professor of theoretical physics at the ETH Zurich, where he taught analytical mechanics and thermodynamics. He also researched continuum mechanics, the molecular theory of heat, and the problem of gravitation.
In 1916, Einstein predicted gravitational waves, ripples in the curvature of spacetime which propagate as waves, traveling outward from the source, transporting energy as gravitational radiation. The first, indirect, detection of gravitational waves came in the 1970s through observation of a pair of closely orbiting neutron stars. The explanation of the decay in their orbital period was that they were emitting gravitational waves. Einstein's prediction was confirmed in 2016, when researchers published the first observation of gravitational waves, on Earth, exactly 100 years after the prediction.
In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to the structure of the universe as a whole. He discovered that the general field equations predicted a universe that was dynamic, either contracting or expanding. As observational evidence for a dynamic universe was not known at the time, Einstein introduced a new term, the cosmological constant, to the field equations, in order to allow the theory to predict a static universe. The modified field equations predicted a static universe of closed curvature, in accordance with how the universe was understood at that time. Later, Einstein referred to the cosmological constant in later years as his biggest blunder.
Einstein was displeased with the statistical nature of quantum theory and quantum mechanics - the very theory he helped create, despite its acceptance by other physicists, stating that “God does not play dice”. Einstein continued to maintain his disbelief in the theory, and attempted unsuccessfully to disprove it the rest of his life. In 1917, at the height of his work on relativity, Einstein proposed the possibility of stimulated emission, the physical process that makes possible the laser, an acronym for "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation". The laser is a device that emits coherent light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. Coherent light is light having the same frequency transmitted with the same phase - having all of its peaks coincide and synchronized. This is achieved by causing resonance in the laser cavity just like causing a tuning fork to resonate.
In 1922, Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. While the general theory of relativity was still considered somewhat controversial, the citation did not treat the cited work as an explanation but merely as a discovery of the law. The idea of photons was considered outlandish and did not receive universal acceptance until 1924.
In 1930, Einstein visited America for the second time, originally intended as a 2 month working visit as a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology. During an address to Caltech's students, Einstein noted that science was often inclined to do more harm than good. This aversion to war also led Einstein to befriend author Upton Sinclair and film star Charlie Chaplin, both noted for their pacifism.
In 1939, a group of Hungarian scientists attempted to alert Washington to ongoing Nazi atomic bomb research. The group's warnings were discounted. They requested Einstein to write a letter to President Roosevelt to explain the possibility of atomic bombs, and to recommending the U.S. pay attention and engage in its own nuclear weapons research. A pacifist, he later admitted that he had never considered the dangers of nuclear weapons. Roosevelt could not take the risk of allowing Hitler to possess atomic bombs first. As a result of Einstein's letter and his meetings with Roosevelt, the U.S. entered the race to develop the bomb, drawing on its immense material, financial, and scientific resources to initiate the Manhattan Project. For Einstein, war was a disease and he called for resistance to war.
Einstein became an American citizen in 1940 when he was 61. He was a passionate, committed anti-racist and campaigned for the civil rights of African Americans. He considered racism America's worst disease, seeing it as handed down from one generation to the next. Einstein's political view was in favor of socialism and critical of capitalism. He strongly advocated the idea of a democratic global government that would check the power of nation-states in the framework of a world federation.
In 1955, when he was 76, Albert Einstein experienced internal bleeding. He took the draft of a speech he was preparing for a television appearance commemorating the State of Israel's seventh anniversary with him to the hospital, but he did not live long enough to complete it. He refused surgery, saying: "I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly." He died having continued to work until near the end.
In his lecture at Einstein's memorial, nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer summarized his impression of him as a person: "He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness... There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn."
Thru the eyes of a child and the brains of a genius, Einstein, like Picasso, painted a painting of this world, like he was able to imagine so that he could shared it with us in a timeless fashion so that we continue to be captivated and amazed by its depth and beauty and simplicity.
Alexander Fleming (1881 – 1955)
Alexander Fleming was a Scottish biologist, pharmacologist and botanist. His best-known discoveries are the enzyme lysozyme in 1923 and the world's first antibiotic substance benzyl penicillin from the mold Penicillium notatum in 1928, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945. He wrote many articles on bacteriology, immunology, and chemotherapy.
Born in Scotland, Alexander was the third of 4 children. His father and mother were both farmers. After working in a shipping office for 4 years, the 20 year old Fleming inherited some money from an uncle. His elder brother was already a physician and suggested to him that he should follow the same career, and so in 1903, Fleming enrolled at a medical school and graduated with distinction 3 years later.
Fleming became assistant bacteriologist to a pioneer in vaccine therapy and immunology. During WWI, Fleming witnessed the death of many soldiers from infected wounds. Antiseptics, which were used at the time to treat infected wounds, often worsened the injuries. Antiseptics killed the patients' immunological defenses more effectively than they killed the invading bacteria. In an article he submitted for publication during the war, Fleming described an ingenious experiment, which he was able to conduct as a result of his own glass blowing skills. He explained why antiseptics were killing more soldiers than infection itself during the war. Antiseptics worked well on the surface, but deep wounds tended to shelter anaerobic bacteria from the antiseptic agent, and antiseptics seemed to remove beneficial agents produced that protected the patients in these cases at least as well as they removed bacteria, and did nothing to remove the bacteria that were out of reach. Despite Fleming's findings, most army physicians over the course of the war continued to use antiseptics even in cases where this worsened the condition of the patients.
Fleming continued his investigations into antibacterial substances. Testing the nasal secretions from a patient with a heavy cold, he found that nasal mucus had an inhibitory effect on bacterial growth. This was the first recorded discovery of lysozyme, an enzyme present in many secretions including tears, saliva, skin, hair and nails as well as mucus. Although he was able to obtain larger amounts of lysozyme from egg whites, the enzyme was only effective against small counts of harmless bacteria, and therefore had little therapeutic potential. By the time he was 46, he had been investigating the properties of staphylococci. He was already well-known from his earlier work, and had developed a reputation as a brilliant researcher.
In 1928, Fleming took a holiday with his family. Before leaving, he had stacked all his cultures of staphylococci on a bench in a corner of his laboratory. On returning, Fleming noticed that one culture was contaminated with a fungus, and that the colonies of staphylococci immediately surrounding the fungus had been destroyed, whereas other staphylococci colonies farther away were normal. He showed the contaminated culture to his former assistant who reminded him that that was how he discovered lysozyme. Fleming grew the mold in a pure culture and found that it produced a substance that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria. He identified the mold as being from the Penicillium genus, and, after some months of calling it "mold juice", named the substance it released “penicillin”.
He investigated its positive anti-bacterial effect on many organisms, and noticed that it affected bacteria such as staphylococci and many other pathogens that cause scarlet fever, pneumonia, meningitis and diphtheria, but not typhoid fever or paratyphoid fever, for which he was seeking a cure at the time. It also affected Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which caused gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease. Fleming published his discovery a year later, but little attention was paid to his article. Fleming continued his investigations, but found that cultivating penicillium was quite difficult, and that after having grown the mold, it was even more difficult to isolate the antibiotic agent. Fleming's impression was that because of the problem of producing it in quantity, and because its action appeared to be rather slow, penicillin would not be important in treating infection. Fleming also became convinced that penicillin would not last long enough in the human body to kill bacteria effectively. Many clinical tests were inconclusive, probably because it had been used as a surface antiseptic. In the next 10 years, Fleming’s trials occasionally showed more promise, and he continued to try to interest a chemist skilled enough to further refine usable penicillin. Fleming finally abandoned penicillin, and not long after he did, others took up researching and mass-producing it.
They discovered how to isolate and concentrate penicillin. They transferred the active ingredient of penicillin back into water by changing its acidity. This produced enough of the drug to begin testing on animals. At one point the entire school where the research was carried out was involved in its production. After the team had developed a method of purifying penicillin to an effective first stable form in 1940, several clinical trials ensued, and their amazing success inspired the team to develop methods for mass production and mass distribution in 1945.
Fleming's accidental discovery and isolation of penicillin in 1928 marked the start of modern antibiotics. Before that, several scientists had published or pointed out that mold or penicillium sp. were able to inhibit bacterial growth, and even to cure bacterial infections in animals. Fleming was the first to push these studies further by isolating the penicillin and by being motivated enough to promote his discovery at a larger scale. Fleming also discovered very early that bacteria developed antibiotic resistance whenever too little penicillin was used or when it was used for too short a period. Fleming cautioned about the use of penicillin in his many speeches around the world. He cautioned not to use penicillin unless there was a properly diagnosed reason for it to be used, and that if it were used, never to use too little, or for too short a period, since these are the circumstances under which bacterial resistance to antibiotics develops.
In 1955, Fleming died at his home in London of a heart attack. He was 74 years old.
His discovery of penicillin had changed the world of modern medicine by introducing the age of useful antibiotics. Penicillin has saved, and is still saving, millions of people around the world. When it was finally recognized for what it was, the most efficacious life-saving drug in the world, penicillin would alter forever the treatment of bacterial infections. By the middle of the century, Fleming's discovery had spawned a huge pharmaceutical industry, churning out synthetic penicillin that would conquer some of mankind's most ancient scourges, including syphilis, gangrene and tuberculosis.
Ludwig von Mises (1881 - 1973)
Ludwig von Mises was an Austrian-American theoretical Austrian School economist. Mises wrote and lectured extensively on behalf of classical liberalism. He is best known for his work on praxeology - a study of human choice and action.
Mises emigrated from Austria to the United States in 1940. Since the mid-20th century, the libertarian movement in the United States has been strongly influenced by Mises's writings. Mises's student, Friedrich Hayek, viewed Mises as one of the major figures in the revival of liberalism in the post-war era. Mises's Austrian School was a leading group of economists. Many of its alumni emigrated from Austria to the United States and Great Britain.
Ludwig von Mises was born to Jewish parents in Ukraine. The family of his father had been elevated to the Austrian nobility in the 19th century. They had been involved in financing and constructing railroads. By the age of 12, Ludwig spoke fluent German, Polish and French, read Latin, and could understand Ukrainian. In 1900, Ludwig Von Mises attended the University of Vienna and was awarded his doctorate from the school of law in 1906 and began lecturing on economics. During WWI, Mises served as a front officer in the Austro-Hungarian artillery and as an economic adviser to the War Department. He became chief economist for the Austrian Chamber of Commerce. Later he was economic adviser to Otto von Hapsburg, the claimant to the throne of Austria which had been legally abolished in 1918 following WWI. In 1934, he left Austria for Geneva, Switzerland, where he was a professor until 1940.
In 1940 he and his wife fled the German advance in Europe and emigrated to New York City in the United States. He had come to the United States under a grant by the Rockefeller Foundation. Like many other classical liberal scholars who fled to the US, he received support to obtain a position in an American university. He retired from teaching at the age of 87 and died at the age of 92.
Mises praised the work of philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand and she generally looked on his work with favor. But the 2 had a volatile relationship, with strong disagreements, for example over the moral basis of capitalism.
The Austrian School is a school of economic thought based on the concept that social phenomena result from the motivations and actions of individuals. It originated in late-19th and early-20th century Vienna. The Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek were among the leading defenders of market economy against 20th century proponents of socialist planned economies. Among Mises's arguments were the problems of how to distribute resources rationally in an economy. The free market solution is the price mechanism, wherein people individually have the ability to decide how a good or service should be distributed based on their willingness to give money for it. The price conveys embedded information about the abundance of resources as well as their desirability which in turn allows, on the basis of individual consensual decisions, corrections that prevent shortages and surpluses.
Mises and Hayek argued that only market capitalism could manage a complex, modern economy. Austrian economics has been a major influence on some forms of libertarianism, in which laissez-faire capitalism is considered to be the ideal economic system. Mises and Hayek argued that this is the only possible solution, and that without the information provided by market prices, socialism lacks a method to rationally allocate resources. Mises argued that the pricing systems in socialist economies were necessarily deficient because if government owned or controlled the means of production, then no rational prices could be obtained for capital goods because they were merely internal transfers of goods in a socialist system. The system would be necessarily inefficient since the central planners would not know how to allocate the available resources efficiently.
This led Mises to declare that rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist state. Since a modern economy produces such a large array of distinct goods and services, and consists of such a large array of consumers and enterprises, the information problems facing any other form of economic organization other than market capitalism would exceed its capacity to handle information.
Market capitalism is based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. In a capitalist market economy, decision-making and investment are determined by the owners of the factories of production, whereas prices and the distribution of goods are mainly determined by competition in the market.
Thinkers within supply-side economics started to build on the work of the Austrian School, and particularly emphasize that "supply creates its own demand." Supply-side economics, also referred to as trickle-down economics, is a macroeconomic theory that argues economic growth can be most effectively created by lowering taxes and decreasing regulation. According to supply-side economics, consumers will then benefit from a greater supply of goods and services at lower prices, and employment will increase. It claims that lower tax rates will actually boost government revenue because of higher economic growth. Capitalism, to this school, is defined by lack of state influence on the decisions of producers. Austrian economists claim that Marx failed to make the distinction between capitalism and mercantilism. They argue that Marx merged the imperialistic, colonialistic, protectionist and interventionist doctrines of mercantilism with capitalism.
Mercantilism, a form of national capitalism was dominant in modernized parts of Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries, is a type of national economic policy designed to maximize the trade of a nation and especially to maximize the accumulation of gold and silver. It promoted governmental regulation of a nation's economy for the purpose of augmenting state power at the expense of rival national powers. Mercantilism includes a national economic policy aimed at accumulating monetary reserves through a positive balance-of-trade, especially of finished goods. Historically, such policies frequently led to war and also motivated colonial expansion. High tariffs, especially on manufactured goods, are an almost universal feature of mercantilist policy.
John Maynard Keynes (1883 – 1946)
John Maynard Keynes was a British economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and is one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. He is the founder of modern macroeconomics theory. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, social capitalism, social market economy and its various offshoots.
In the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neo-classical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. Keynes argued that the solution to a depression of the economy was to stimulate the country through some combination of 2 approaches - a reduction in interest rates and expansionary fiscal policy such as government investment in infrastructure.
Expansionary fiscal policy consists of increasing net public spending, which the government can affect by taxing less, spending more, or both. Investment and consumption by government raises demand for businesses' products and for employment. If desired spending exceeds revenue, the government finances the difference by borrowing from capital markets by issuing government bonds. This in effect is just printing more money.
Following the outbreak of WWII, the leading Western economies adopted Keynes's policy recommendations, and in the 2 decades following Keynes's death in 1946, almost all capitalist governments had done so. Keynes's influence waned in the 1970s, partly as a result of the stagflation of continuing high unemployment and high inflation that plagued the Anglo-American economies during that decade, and partly because of criticism of Keynesian policies by Milton Friedman and other monetarists who disputed the ability of government to regulate the business cycle favorably with fiscal policy.
The advent of the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 caused a resurgence in Keynesian thought. Keynesian economics provided the theoretical underpinning for economic policies undertaken in response to the crisis by President Obama of the US, Prime Minister Brown of the UK, and other heads of governments.
John Maynard Keynes was born in England, to an upper-middle-class family. His father was an economist and a lecturer in moral sciences and his mother was a local social reformer. Keynes was always confident he could find a solution to whatever problem he turned his attention to, and retained a lasting faith in the ability of government officials to do good.
In 1915, at the age of 32, Keynes took up an official government position at the Treasury. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war, and the acquisition of scarce currencies. Keynes's nerve and mastery became legendary because of his performance of these duties, as in the case where he managed to assemble, with difficulty a small supply of Spanish pesetas. The secretary of the Treasury was delighted to hear Keynes had amassed enough pesetas to provide a temporary solution for the British Government. But Keynes did not hand the pesetas over, choosing instead to sell them all to break the market. His boldness paid off, as pesetas then became much less scarce and less expensive.
The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 brought WWI to an end. Of the many provisions in the treaty, one of the most important and controversial required Germany to accept the responsibility for causing all the loss and damage during the war. The treaty forced Germany to disarm, make substantial territorial concessions, and pay reparations to certain countries that had formed the Entente powers. Keynes predicted that the treaty was too harsh. He claimed the reparations figure was excessive and counter-productive. He predicted long-term consequences so grave that “the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing”. His predictions of disaster were borne out when the German economy suffered the hyperinflation of 1923, and later by the outbreak of WWII.
During a period between 1918-1924, the German mark suffered hyperinflation. It caused considerable internal political instability in the country as well as misery for the general populace. Hyperinflation occurs when a country experiences very high and usually accelerating rates of inflation, rapidly eroding the real value of the local currency, and causing the population to minimize their holdings of local money. The population normally switches to holding relatively stable foreign currencies. Under such conditions, the general price level within an economy increases rapidly as the official currency quickly loses real value. The value of economic items remains relatively stable in terms of foreign currencies.
Hyperinflation sees a rapid and continuing increase in the supply of local money caused by large persistent government deficits financed primarily by money creation rather than by borrowing or by increasing taxation. As such, hyperinflation is often associated with some stress to the government budget, such as wars or their aftermath, sociopolitical upheavals, a collapse in export prices, or other crises that make it difficult for the government to collect tax revenue. A sharp decrease in real tax revenue coupled with a strong need to maintain government spending, together with an inability or unwillingness to borrow, can lead a country into hyperinflation. Coins, despite their denominations constantly increase in value because of their metallic content. They are eventually and illegally melted and sold for foreign currencies. Paper money, despite their denomination constantly lose value as more and more higher denomination notes are printed with more and more zeros, making the lower denominations worthless.
People lose confidence in the notes and use other commodities as barter for buying. When the space on the notes are too small to accommodate the increasing number of zeros, then a new name for the money is used and the zeros are dropped. If old coins from the old currency become legal tender, they take the value in new currency thus, effectively increasing their value in some cases by a trillion-fold. Eventually it is realized that this type of monetary policy of just creating money by printing it is not sustainable and the money printing presses are shut down.
The highest hyperinflation recorded in history was in Hungary during the first half of 1946. In 1944, the highest denomination was 1,000 pengő. By the end of 1945, it was 10,000,000 pengő. The highest denomination in mid 1946 was 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 pengő. When the pengő was replaced by the forint the total value of all Hungarian banknotes in circulation amounted to 1/1,000 of one US dollar. This is the most severe known incident of inflation recorded, peaking at 1.3 × 1016 % per month. Prices doubled as the money lost half its value every 15 hours.
The overall impact of hyperinflation was that in 1946, 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 400 octillion pengő became 1 forint.
Instead of imposing income tax to pay for the war, Germany funded the war entirely by borrowing and suspended the gold standard that allowed its currency to be converted to gold. Germany believed that it would be able to pay off the debt by winning the war, and it would be able to annex resource-rich industrial territory in the west and east. The strategy backfired when Germany lost the war. The new Weimar Republic was now saddled with a massive war debt that it could not afford. That was made even worse by the fact that it was printing money without the economic resources to back it up. By 1923, the US dollar was worth 4,210,500,000,000 German marks. The treaty demanded WWI reparations in gold or foreign currency to be paid in annual installments of 2 billion gold marks, plus 26% of the value of Germany's exports.
The first payment marked the beginning of an increasingly rapid devaluation of the mark, which fell in value to approximately 330 marks per dollar. Since reparations were required to be repaid in hard currency, not the rapidly depreciating paper mark, one strategy that Germany used was the mass printing of bank notes to buy foreign currency, which was then used to pay reparations.
By fall 1922, Germany found itself unable to make reparations payments since the price of gold was now well beyond what it could afford and the mark was by then practically worthless, making it impossible for Germany to buy foreign exchange or gold using paper marks. Instead, reparations were to be paid in goods such as coal. In 1923, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, the industrial region of Germany in the Ruhr valley, to ensure reparations payments. Inflation was exacerbated when workers in the Ruhr went on a general strike and the German government printed more money to continue paying for their passive resistance. Keynes called for a reduction of German reparations.
He attacked the post WWI deflation policies, a trenchant argument that countries should target stability of domestic prices, avoiding deflation even at the cost of allowing their currency to depreciate. Britain suffered from high unemployment through most of the 1920s, leading Keynes to recommend the depreciation of sterling to boost jobs by making British exports more affordable. From 1924 he was also advocating a fiscal response, where the government could create jobs by spending on public works. He called for an end to the gold standard so that governments could print money any time they needed to without having to back it up with gold reserves. He claimed that the gold standard could force countries to pursue deflationary policies at exactly the time when expansionary measures were called for to address rising unemployment.
Keynes had begun a theoretical work to examine the relationship between unemployment, money and prices back in the 1920s. A central idea was that if the amount of money being saved exceeds the amount being invested, which can happen if interest rates are too high, then unemployment will rise. This is in part a result of people not wanting to spend too high a proportion of what employers pay out, making it difficult, in aggregate, for employers to make a profit.
Keynes was deeply critical of the British government's austerity measures during the Great Depression. He believed that budget deficits were a good thing, a product of recessions. Keynesian-like policies were adopted by Sweden and Germany, but Sweden was seen as too small to command much attention, and Keynes was deliberately silent about the successful efforts of Germany as he was dismayed by their imperialist ambitions and their treatment of Jews. Apart from Great Britain, Keynes's attention was primarily focused on the United States. In 1931, he received considerable support for his views on counter-cyclical public spending in Chicago, then America's foremost center for economic views alternative to the mainstream. However, orthodox economic opinion remained generally hostile regarding fiscal intervention to mitigate the depression, until just before the outbreak of war. Keynes favored interventionist policies for tackling a recession. Economic interventions include targeted taxes, targeted tax credits,minimum wage legislation, union shop rules, direct subsidies to certain classes of producers, price supports, price caps, production quotas, import quotas, tariffs and money creation by printing money.
Keynes challenged the earlier neoclassical economic paradigm, which had held that provided it was unfettered by government interference, the market would naturally establish full employment equilibrium. Classical economists had believed that "supply creates its own demand", and that in a free market workers would always be willing to lower their wages to a level where employers could profitably offer them jobs. An innovation from Keynes was the concept of price stickiness -the recognition that in reality workers often refuse to lower their wage demands even in cases where a classical economist might argue it is rational for them to do so. Due in part to price stickiness, it was established that the interaction of "aggregate demand" - the total demand for final goods and services in an economy at a given time, and "aggregate supply" - the total amount of goods and services that firms are willing and able to sell at a given price level in an economy may lead to stable unemployment equilibria. In those cases, it is the state, not the market that economies must depend on for their salvation.
Keynes argued that demand, not supply, is the key variable governing the overall level of economic activity. Aggregate demand, which equals total un-hoarded income in a society, is defined by the sum of consumption and investment. In a state of unemployment and unused production capacity, one can only enhance employment and total income by first increasing expenditures for either consumption or investment. Without government intervention to increase expenditure, an economy can remain trapped in a low employment equilibrium. Keynes advocated activist economic policy by government to stimulate demand in times of high unemployment, for example by spending on public works.
"Let us be up and doing, using our idle resources to increase our wealth. With men and plants unemployed, it is ridiculous to say that we cannot afford these new developments. It is precisely with these plants and these men that we shall afford them."
After 1937, his professional energies were largely directed towards the practical side of economics – the problems of ensuring optimum allocation of resources for the war efforts, post-war negotiations with America, and the new international financial order that was presented at Bretton Woods for the regulation of the international monetary and financial order after the conclusion of WWII. This led to the establishment of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and later to the creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and eventually the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Although Keynes has been widely criticized for advocating irresponsible government spending financed by borrowing, in fact he was a firm believer in balanced budgets and regarded the proposals for programs of public works during the Great Depression as an exceptional measure to meet the needs of exceptional circumstances.
During WWII, Keynes argued that the war effort should not be financed by deficit spending or by printing money, but rather by higher taxation and by compulsory saving - essentially workers lending money to the government. Compulsory saving would act to dampen domestic demand, assist in channeling additional output towards the war efforts, and would have the advantage of helping to avoid a post war slump by boosting demand once workers were allowed to withdraw their savings.
As the Allied victory began to look certain, Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the mid 1944 negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. The Keynes-plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies. He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency he called “bancor” and new global institutions to manage an international trade and payments system with strong incentives for countries to avoid substantial trade deficits or surpluses.
Two new institutions, the World Bank and the IMF were founded but there were no incentives for states to avoid a large trade surplus where they sell and export more than they buy and import. Instead, the burden for correcting a trade imbalance continued to fall only on the deficit countries which buy and import more than they sell and export. Keynes had argued that deficit countries were least able to address the problem without inflicting economic hardship on their populations.
From the end of the Great Depression to the mid-1970s, Keynes provided the main inspiration for economic policy makers in Europe, America and much of the rest of the world. While economists and policy makers had become increasingly won over to Keynes's way of thinking in the mid and late 1930s, it was only after the outbreak of WWII that governments started to borrow money for spending on a scale sufficient to eliminate unemployment. According to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the rebound of the economy from wartime spending confirmed that Keynesian ideas really worked.
In the late 1930s and 1940s, economists attempted to interpret and formalize Keynes's ideas in terms of formal mathematical models. They combined Keynesian analysis with supply and demand economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics, which came to dominate mainstream macroeconomic thought for the next 40 years.
By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world. Similar measures for a mixed economy - market economies with strong regulatory oversight and governmental provision of public goods - were used by many developing nations. By then, Keynes's views on the economy had become mainstream in the world's universities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the developed and emerging free capitalist economies enjoyed exceptionally high growth and low unemployment. This period was later regarded a golden age of capitalism. Keynes showed that the modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by government intervention.
Keynesian economics were officially discarded by the British Government in 1979, but forces had begun to gather against Keynes's ideas over 30 years. "Big government" had appeared to be firmly entrenched in the 1950s, but the balance began to shift towards the power of private interests in the 1960s. Keynes had written against the folly of allowing "decadent and selfish" speculators and financiers the kind of influence they had enjoyed after WWI. For 20 years after WWII, the public opinion was strongly against private speculators like the secretive Swiss bankers. International speculation was severely restricted by the capital controls in place after Bretton Woods. 1968 was the pivotal year when power shifted in favor of private agents such as currency speculators. America eventually suspended the conversion of the dollar into gold and ended the Bretton Woods system.
Criticisms of Keynes's ideas had begun to gain significant acceptance by the early 1970s, as they were then able to make a credible case that Keynesian models no longer reflected economic reality. In 1968 Milton Friedman suggested that sustained Keynesian policies could lead to both unemployment and inflation rising at once – a phenomenon that soon became known as stagflation. In the early 1970s stagflation appeared in both the US and Britain just as Friedman had predicted, with economic conditions deteriorating further after the 1973 oil crisis. Aided by the prestige gained from his successful forecast, Friedman led increasingly successful criticisms against the Keynesian consensus, convincing not only academics and politicians but also much of the general public with his radio and television broadcasts. So successful were these criticisms that by 1980 economists would often take offense if described as Keynesians. Many claimed that the cause of the economic problems of the 1970s in America was the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of capital controls which allowed capital flight from regulated economies into unregulated economies and the refusal to raise taxes to finance the Vietnam War. Keynes was an opponent to these measures.
The global financial crisis of 2007-08 led to public skepticism about the free market consensus even from some on the economic right. A series of major bailouts were pursued during the financial crisis, starting with the nationalization of the 2 government-sponsored enterprises which oversaw most of the U.S. sub-prime mortgage market - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Plans for substantial fiscal stimulus to head off the worst effects of recession, in accordance with Keynesian economic thought were adopted by other governments worldwide.
Much of the post-crisis discussion reflected Keynes's advocacy of international coordination of fiscal or monetary stimulus, and of international economic institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, which many had argued should be reformed as a "new Bretton Woods". The IMF and United Nations economists advocated a coordinated international approach to fiscal stimulus. It was argued that in the absence of such an international approach, there would be a risk of worsening international relations and possibly even world war arising from economic factors similar to those present during the depression of the 1930s.
By the end of 2008, there was a sudden resurgence of Keynesian policy with claims that a return to Keynesian policy prescriptions was more relevant than ever. The People's Bank of China, came out in favor of Keynes's idea of a centrally managed global reserve currency and argued that part of the reason for the Bretton Woods system breaking down was the failure to adopt Keynes's bancor.
Keynes attracted considerable criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. In the 1920s, Keynes was seen as anti-establishment and was mainly attacked from the right. In the "red 1930s", many young economists favored Marxist views, and while Keynes was engaging principally with the right to try to persuade them of the merits of more progressive policy, the most vociferous criticism against him came from the left, who saw him as a supporter of capitalism. From the 1950s and onward, most of the attacks against Keynes have again been from the right. President Truman was skeptical of Keynesian theorizing: "Nobody can ever convince me that government can spend a dollar that it's not got."
Keynes has been characterized as being indifferent or even positive about mild inflation. He had indeed expressed a preference for inflation over deflation, saying that if one has to choose between the 2 evils, it is better to disappoint the well-to-do than to inflict pain on working class families. He also supported the German hyperinflation as a way to get free from reparations obligations. However, Keynes was also aware of the dangers of inflation.
“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose”.
Keynes proposed a global bank that would issue its own currency - the bancor - which was exchangeable with national currencies at fixed rates of exchange and would become the unit of account between nations, which means it would be used to measure a country's trade deficit or trade surplus. His view, supported by many economists and commentators at the time, was that creditor nations may be just as responsible as debtor nations for disequilibrium in exchanges and that both should be under an obligation to bring trade back into a state of balance. Keynes thought that the pursuit of money for its own sake was a pathological condition, and that the proper aim of work is to provide leisure. He wanted shorter working hours and longer holidays for all.
Keynes suffered a series of heart attacks, which ultimately proved fatal. He died childless at the age of 62. Just before his death, Keynes told of his hopes that Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' can help Britain out of the economic hole it is in.
"I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking 20 years ago."
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