Handcuff Harry and Tailgunner Joe

 Sept 10, 2012

I knew this was coming up, but I'd forgotten that Saturday marked the exact day when Jimmy Carter bested Herbert Hoover as the president with the longest life after his presidency. As the Atlantic article points out, September 8, 2012, was President Carter's 11,544th day as former President Carter, or nearly 32 years. Here's hoping he has some more post-presidential days.

The History Museum at the Castle in Appleton, Wisconsin, started out as a Masonic Temple, but now focuses on local history. Such as the previously mentioned Harry Houdini, master of escape and self-promotion, who has a whole floor devoted to him and his illusions. How is it that the former Erik Weisz (Ehrich Weiss) called Appleton his hometown? "Houdini came to America as a four-year-old boy in 1878," the museum web site says. "His parents moved him and his brothers to Appleton because of a job opening. Houdini's father, Meyer Samuel Weiss, became the community's first rabbi."

But the young Ehrich Weiss left Appleton with his family when he was only seven, after his father lost his job, moving to New York. So "hometown" is a bit of a stretch, but apparently Houdini claimed the town as his own, even asserting that he'd been born there instead of Budapest. Still, Appleton's a good place for such an exhibit, and the museum does well with it, featuring photos of Houdini during his performances, but also more casual shots; handbills and posters; and plenty of Houdini equipment, such as handcuffs and shackles and confining spaces, like a milk can and a simulated Chinese water torture box.

Various exhibits discuss how some of the escapes were done, which apparently upset some current illusionists -- such as David Copperfield, who owns a lot of Houdini artifacts himself -- as if all the information was somehow not on the Internet. There was also an exhibit, complete with seance table, explaining how some of those tricks were done, just as spiritualist debunker Houdini did during his lifetime.

The museum isn't all Houdini. The lower floors feature exhibits about local history, including an assortment of machines made or used in the area. One was a genuine early 20th-century Linotype machine. Considering how ubiquitous they once were, it's odd how few of them I've run across. Maybe I'm not looking in the right museums.

Right at the foot of the stairs in the basement is a bronze bust in a clear display case. "People ask us why we keep a bust of Joseph McCarthy," our guide said, anticipating the question. "Like him or not, he's part of our history." Sounds reasonable; he was born in Grand Chute, near Appleton, and is buried at St. Mary's Parish Cemetery in Appleton, which wasn't on my press tour. No point in pretending he didn't exist.

Hearthstone Historic House Museum

 Sept. 5, 2012

The Hearthstone Historic House Museum in Appleton, Wisconsin, was once a well-designed, well-appointed late Victorian mansion, but that's not its signal distinction. Back in the early 1880s, one Henry James Rogers, manager of the Appleton Pulp and Paper Mill, had the house built in a bluff overlooking the Fox River and across from the paper mill that he managed. He was also overseeing the mills' electrification in the summer of '82, just as his new house was being built, so naturally he wanted electricity for the house too.

According to the Wisconsin Historic Society: "The first electricity offered for public sale flowed through wires in Appleton, Wisconsin, to light the paper mills and homes of that Fox River city. Henry J. Rogers... supplied the world's first commercial electrical power in the summer of 1882, in downtown Appleton -- before it was available in Boston, New York, Washington, or Chicago." Electric wires at Hearthstone ran through the pipes meant to carry gas for lighting.

There's a charming sign in the front parlor of the house that says: "This Room is Equipped With Edison Electric Light. Do not attempt to light with match. Simply turn key on wall by the door. The use of Electricity for lighting is in no way harmful to health, nor does it affect the soundness of sleep."

Of course, they were merely assuming that electric light wasn't harmful to health, but we can give them that. As for affecting the soundness of sleep, I think we can all report that electric light has affected our sleep at some point, especially when switched on unexpectedly. That's hindsight anyway. Apparently people came specifically to see the light bulbs in action when the house was new, since it was a marvel of the age.

Our guide said that the voltage was low -- good thing, since at first the current essentially traveled through uninsulated copper wire -- and so the lights would look dim to modern eyes. But for all I know, the new lights might have been every bit as illuminating as gas lights or kerosene lamps or candles were. Just how bright non-electric lights were is one of those familiarities of daily life lost to time and improved technologies, I think. Not even a highly accurate dramatization of the period could probably convey what it would be like to live day-to-day with pre-electric technologies as your source of light. (Though I suspect the damn things would be inconsistent.)

This is what one of the aforementioned "keys on the wall" looks like, because the Hearthstone Historic House Museum still has all of the ones that Edison's men came to town to install.

Our guide told us that they still work. But he didn't demonstrate, probably for good reason. Touch them too often and they might break, always a risk with tech, high or low. If they break, none of Edison's men are around any more to fix them.

The power was incredibly expensive at first. I forget the exact numbers, but in true Gilded Age style, Rogers spent more to light each of his bulbs every year than he would have paid one of his workers for the year, or some such. Unsurprisingly, Rogers died deep in debt in the late 1890s, though probably electricity was only one of his extravagances, and the Panic of 1893 compounded his losses. In any case, his heirs sold the house and most of the contents, so the museum's furnishings aren't Rogers'. But the modern curators have done a good job at finding 1880s period pieces, so besides the back story of electrification, the place has some charms as a house museum.

The Conveyor Belt Kingdom

As you enter the UPS Chicago Area Consolidated Hub -- which our guide called CACH -- at first it just seems like a really large industrial building, not too loud, with the ceiling and walls stretching off into the gray distance. But go up a flight of steel stairs and down a walkway and you're soon in awe of the awesome complexity of the place.

Below are conveyor belts coming from large doors, with three of them merging into one larger belt moving directly below you. Then you notice more groups of belts to the left and right, and then an entire floor of more belts below the one you're looking at. Turn around, and there are belts left, right and center. Most of them are moving. Packages of various sizes and descriptions are moving along. The place is an enormous 3D puzzle of belted motion.

A bit of data: CACH, not counting the parking lots, land, etc. measures about 1.5 million square feet. It handles 1.3 million to 1.5 million packages a day, and 2.5 million around the Christmas holidays (UPS adds workers then, though most of the time about 5,700 people work at CACH). If the buildings, which are mostly horizontal, were stacked vertically, the aggregate structure would be twice as tall as the Sears Tower. And my favorite stat: the place sports 65 miles of conveyor belts.

Our guide explained that when the packages were unloaded from the trucks to a particular conveyor belt, they went under a scanner that read the destination information. The the package would travel along the belt until flip, a device that looked exactly like the flipper on a pinball machine, only much larger, knocked the package off the side of the belt, into a shoot, where (I assume) it went downward to another belt that took it further toward where it needed to be. Flip, pause, flip, pause, pause, flip -- these flippers were moving at intermittent intervals all up and down the belts that we could see, and no doubt hundreds upon thousands of them were busy elsewhere pushing packages along, out of our sight.

We also saw another raft of conveyor belts devoted to moving around smaller packages. Instead of a pinball flipper-like device, each belt featured gizmos that somehow flipped the packages up, and then over, to waiting bags. Once the bags were full, employees would take them to where they needed to go (trucks, I assume: everything was organized by bar code-like data).

At truck bays, employees filled trucks with packages manually (over 70 lbs. and more than one worker is supposed to lift together). The packages aren't uniform, so it becomes a task of stacking them like Tetris pieces so that there's the least possible empty space. Hard because lifting is involved, but even harder because not everyone can stack so precisely. The guy we saw, who was handling three or four trucks at the same time, looked like he had a talent for it.

That might have been one of the harder jobs, but what's the best-paid non-executive position at UPS CACH? Our guide mentioned it: mechanics to keep the systems going. I believe it.

A marvel of our age, this place. Ingenuous in the extreme, but simply devoted to moving stuff from Point A to Point B.

Item From the Past: The UL Calorimeter

As an editorial staffer with Fire Chief magazine in the fall of 1996, I was invited to visit Underwriters Laboratories to look at the organization's new calorimeter. The thing impressed me enough that I hung on to the press release photo afterwards. The magazine ran a short article about the new UL large-scale fire testing facility in the November '96 issue of the magazine.

I might be mis-remembering, but I think they told me that it was the world's largest calorimeter, however that might be measured. On the back of the photo is the following: "Interior shot of the new large-scale fire test facility at Underwriters Laboratories Inc. in Northbrook, Ill. The calorimeter test cell is 25' in diameter, with an adjustable height hood."