Welcome to the online studio of Francisco Mattos, built w/ printed pieces, experiments, souvenirs, personal projects.
-| August 2022|-
2022 Retrogrades
❝... dig that hole forget the sun. ❞ – Pink Floyd
Station to Station
Ancients, in their belief that Earth was flat, imagined the Sky reaching down to her every night, and relinquishing heaven to Night.
Into this world astronomy was born, by using Earth as a beginning point to draw the Ecliptic, a celestial belt to help reference movements of the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mar, Jupiter, Saturn -- the original seven Planets, by pining them to a 20° wide latitude.
Taking notes, astronomers observed Planets crossing from west to east and, sometimes, east to west. This ability to change directions at first perplexed astronomers, because their orbital durations remained constant. This ability to orbit backwards and forwards, massaging Time, challenged astrologers to derive probabilities for horoscope forecasting in zigzaggy Space.
Medicine-god
Asclepius, who does not retrograde, convened this year’s annual gathering of the Celestial Court, held at the House of Hestia, where he served as head physician. The most controversal item on the calendar was the ongoing debate of the origin of Kuiper belt object Eris: twin-sister to Mars -- or daughter to Night.
Everyone was updated on the brewing multimachia breaking out for supremacy between the uni-gods and the binary-beings, joined by the trinities, siding with neither side. There were two announcements. The first was apollo-asteroid Nereus, flying uncomfortably near to Earth in December of last year. Egg-shaped, made of nickel, iron and cobalt, the ancient fish-tailed marine-god is the latest threat to life on Earth. The second was about the numerous hives of centaur-asteroids, and whether they can redraw the map of heaven as it currently exists, balanced on the Ecliptic, and usher in Astrology 3.0.
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Hygiea Rx + Panacea Rx The medicine-goddess sisters both relapse, one following the other, mid-spring into late summer.
Apr-Jun :Sco +Jun-Aug :Cap
Better news comes in the autumn from their father, medicine-god Asclepius, who is prograde all year, and seasoning his eyes on the prize. Hygiea stepped out of the Main belt in 1849, spherical and intact. Panacea is only ten miles wide.
Mercury Rx
The grandson to Atlas
performs three retrogrades, 95% of the time in Earth signs. Mercury might then, being the ‘shepherd of men’, use blunt wording to corral his charges. The first quickens an ongoing debate that the ‘patron of thieves’ has been waging w/ stupidity.
Jan.14-Feb.3 :Cap
The second retrograde can see the boundary-god symbolically part the Red Sea.
May.10-Jun.2 :Tau-Gem
The third sees the complex-one giving over-explanations and in danger of being tangled up in words.
Sep.10-Oct.1 :Vir-Lib
Questions on whether the ‘conductor of souls’ is, at this moment, retrograde or not, can be answered at Is Mercury Retrograde?.
Venus Rx
‘Foam-born’ only
retrogrades during the first twenty-eight days. NYD to Jan.28 :Cap The ‘bringer of peace’ had been dutiful and now pliability returns. First catching up on personal business, the love-goddess will, come September, resume her social calendar.
Typhon Rx
When the ‘supreme serpent’
exits retrograde is when extreme high-fire season will begin.
Feb-Jul :Sco Before that can happen, an act of cowardice lashes a five-month period as the ‘largest monster ever born’ slowly dissembles for want of decision-making, pausing the woes he brings as gifts. Even if so, the spawn to Tartarus and Earth is far from harmless. Typhon is an air-deity, is the wind, and takes over 200 years to race around the gravity :throne.
Persephone Rx
The infernal-goddess cannot make headway during a year-long retrograde,
2022 :Gem
ignoring duties ‘she who destroys the light’ was tasked to dispense, and might result in upending domesticity come 2023. The ‘empress of the Underworld’ likes to chitchat, and anyone talking back could end up becoming a blabber-mouth.
Pluto Rx
Letting go the reins of his golden chariot while in retrograde, the ‘king of shadows’ is allowing his four black horses to go where they will, thereby ending up at the field of paranoia by the brook of betrayal.
Apr.29-Oct.7 :Cap Afterwards ‘the rich one’ will continue his leveling of the playing field. Pluto was deemed a planet when he was discovered. Now the ‘king of the Underworld’ is better known as the shadow harbinger of several pantheons paying heed to the Sun.
Pallas Rx
Dreams drown and camaraderie can curdle during December, when the ‘goddess w/ many names’ goes retrograde, and becomes diminished under grim light.
Nov.30-Dec.31 :Can
These days, the daughter to Jupiter & Metis is a triple-asteroid goddess who arrived in 1802, the second Main belt object to be become known to astrologers. Pallas’ roman-fragment showed up 65 years later, and the triad created when greco-shards arrived in 1917.
Phaëthon Rx
‘Radiant’’s year-long retrograde breeds a hopeless tug-of-war between what is actual and what is made-up, leaving a trail 12 million miles long and 60,000 miles wide.
2022 :Tau
Only three-and-a-half mile wide, the son to the Sun hurtles close by Earth, reincarnated as an apollo-asteroid, a posse of potentially hazardous space rocks also threatening Mars, Venus and Mercury.
Eris Rx
2022 :Ari
Shackled to just one degree of the Zodiac, the dissonance-goddess stays put while in retrograde all of 2022; in effect a stationary trans-Neptune object.
Expect Eris to be in a snit the first two weeks. Later on, the risk-goddess livens up the holiday season with games of truth-or-dare. Most importantly, the twin-sis to Mars could lay waste to pseudo-science during May. While the 21th century was still young, the military-goddess stepped out of the Scattered disc, 1444-miles in diameter and fully formed. Eris is sheathed in white-white methane ice, shedding miasmas.
Mars Rx
The military-god
occupies the last eight weeks of 2022 in retrograde. Oct.30-Dec.31 :Gem During the first week of November, the twin-bro to Eris just might posit a definitive argument for climate solutions in the U.S. infrastructure plan. Otherwise, the son to Juno & Jupiter, having taken off his rose-tinted helmet, intervenes in a deceptive divorce case, and during the holiday season dresses up his dining table with teeth and a billyclub.
Salacia Rx
The marine-goddess strives for stillness during her retrograde. Aug-Nov :Ari The ‘goddess-queen of the sea’ will be a recluse, soaking in a restless bathtub filled with a case of the blues. Salacia had birthed a moon back in 2006.
Now sea-nymph Actaea is her social secretary, keeping track of serial dance duets with three beaus: her primary and ‘king of kings’ Jupiter; gas giant Uranus; and her mother’s consort Neptune, all while performing a 274-year lap around the gravity :throne.
Neptune Rx
The liquid liege can
resort to addictions while retrograding for five months. Jun.28-Dec.3 :Pis This can ruin his health, yet the god of water is unperturbed by his visage in the looking glass. The worst might come on the last day in October. Alternatively, the ‘lord of all marine-deities’ might instead take a break from partying, dwell on ideal regimens. The best opportunity to redeem his health might begin come the last day in November.
Neptune had chosen the date of his resurfacing into history by sending a dream, in 1846, to a sleeping mathematician. The woke mortal returned to the New Berlin Observatory, entered a set of coordinates, and located the premier sea-god sitting on his trident :throne.
Hekate Rx
A plunge into domestic adventuring is averted at the end of 2022,
Nov-Dec :Can
when the premier infernal-goddess retrogrades, ushering the ‘crone of the Underworld’ into 2023. Until that can be, the concerns for the daughter to titans Perses ‘destroyer’ and Asteria ‘starry one’ are over matters of mind, heart, and family.
Hephaistos Rx
The ancient fire-god is heartbroken while retrograde all year long, as the hard-earned labor of the son to Jupiter & Juno gets stuck in oblivion.
2022 :Tau
During January, Hephaistos could encounter push-back. For three weeks in May the ‘god of ceremonies’ assesses the damage, and come September presents an outline to engineer a truce.
Vesta Rx
Expectations can turn out unrealizable during the retrograde of the original hearth-goddess. Jul.7-Oct.5 :Pis-Aqu Instead, the eldest Olympian attends to a fraught social season, mined with responsible respect, and absence of safety zones during its lowest phase. As the ‘guardian to the first flame’ exits retrograde, she has a brief rendezvous with Juno, who is roiling in turbulent waters, to give her sails a gentle nudge. The resultant glow reveals the venerable fire-goddess to be bean-shaped, and wearing a cape of cooled lava stitched by a nickel needle using basalt thread. The whole studded with spears of achondrites tipped in three meteorites: diogenite, eucrite and howardite.
Chiron Rx
Chiron has low-esteem during his retrograde. Jul.19-Dec.22 :Ari The student to Apollo is an astrologer, so can be somewhat fatalistic, shunning mirrors, and presenting as shy rather than as modest. The offspring to Saturn & okeanide Phylyra is the first of his kind: collectives of centaur-asteroids with comet tails patrolling the Celestial Court, who are mostly beholden to Saturn and Uranus. On November 22, this ‘wisest and justest of all the centaurs’ will fly nearest to Jupiter, and start becoming again a binary-being possessed of twofold strength.
Ceres Rx
The agricultural-goddess spends the first thirteen days of the year in retrograde, concluding fence-mending and other chores. NYD to Jan.13 :Tau (Unfinished business she will hand over to Mercury, whose retrograde begins.) The mother to Persephone will spend the rest of the days undecided between patience and rebellion, and ends 2022 by taking one baby step. Ceres is the premier asteroid goddess, stepping into view at the Observatory of Palermo on the first day of 1801. The ‘good goddess’ is spherical, wearing a pockmarked swimsuit threaded with salted pearls and slathered in organic building blocks. She is doing laps in a water world.
Jupiter Rx
The ‘chief of heaven’ could let it all
hang out while retrograding in 2022. Jul.28-Nov.22 :Ari-Pis
Jupiter can turn presumptions on its head, can even be a show-off. Privately the ‘father of light’ suffers self-doubt, cannot relate, while undergoing punishing dreams. Babylonian sky watchers paid close attention to the largest planet and his twelve-year journey to return, using this span of Time as a 7th-cBCE structure to describe the Zodiac, pin the constellations, and begin the map for a hypothetical heaven.
Juno Rx
A barbed incident precipitates
the marriage-goddess’s retrograde. Jul.25-Oct.22 :Pis Someone who once bailed on her now crosses paths with
Juno. In a four-months long voyage, the ‘queen of the gods’ is adrift in a signed-on-the-dotted-line squall, equipped with an oar resembling a sharp tongue. Finding harbor for the youngest daughter to Saturn & Cybele is not an option. Help comes from Iris and Pallas; both also being in retrograde. The seventh wife to Jupiter finds she can now navigate, receiving direction from one and ballast from the other. Brought up by the Four Seasons, Juno is naturally prone to distractions. And this was before news came that her greco-half lives just sixty-four asteroids away.
Saturn Rx
Boundaries shift,
and could end up rearranging real estate, during elder-god Saturn’s 170-day retrograde.
Jun.4-Oct.22 :Aqu A decision is sidelined followed by some disruption. What once was routine is now oppressive to the god of duty. How this feels will depend on what he can accomplish the other 195 days. Be aware of the thick hide and loose talk of this son to Sky and Earth, scattering wisdom and misanthropy.
Early sky watchers observed an unusual planet with a sickle surrounding it, and so named it after Saturn, usurper of heaven 1.0. The ‘king of the titans’ is never warmer than minus 240 degrees, and his many moons and rings continually send to his surface organic building blocks in frozen packaging.
Diana Rx
Someone might, out in public, become a spectacle, as the fertility-goddess retrogrades in 2022.
Aug-Nov :Pis
Diana fell into ennui when the year began, sitting listlessly by the window sill, eyeing the quiver while playing with the matchbook. An unavoidable decision, a generational thing, and which might very well be good fortune in disguise, has to be faced as Thanksgiving approaches.
Diana also hosts a crater on the Moon, and is mentored by Phoebe, a ring-moon from the House of Saturn. In 1863, the complex satellite-goddess dashed into reality, dark and primitive.
Orcus Rx
The etruscan infernal-god will retrograde twice in 2022. Jan-May, Dec :Vir
Orcus is still worming his way out of hell, and getting ready to surface several years hence. To find his current location, contact his goddess-moon Vanth, ‘guide to the etruscan Underworld’.
The ‘punisher of broken oaths’ first surfaced in 2004, oblique in a cape of faint tholins, appliqued with iced crystalline water with a high collar shooting out what looks like dew drops of ammonia.
Iris Rx
The rainbow-goddess retrogrades all year,
2022 :Can
juggling conundrums of heart or head. The daughter to Pontos & Earth is hurting, and under the able ministrations of her sisters, the Harpies.
Uranus Rx
The primordial
sky-god will also retrograde twice.
During the first seventeen days, NYD to Jan.17
when something goes missing. During the last four months,
Aug.24-Dec.31 :Tau as he picks up the trail of the missing article; it is something non-tech. Expect tight-fisted run-ins with ‘the personification of heaven’; these encounters involve transactions that have lost value. Uranus is siblings with love, hell, and mother Earth. He is also spherical, blue-green and attacked by solar winds, because the avatar to the zodiacal Wheel is flat on his back, wrapped in iced waters stained with dark organics, all the while exhaling stupendous fumes.
Chaos Rx
The “dark majesty and mystery of creation incarnate”
stirs up a hum, using many lips, while twice performing the retrograde rite,
bookending 2022, as she solidifies in relationship to a domicile issue.
Jan-Mar, Nov-Dec :Gem-Can
Both retrogrades receive a light drizzle from the occult, this is when the ‘original goddess’ becomes visible, doing so by separating the physical from the psychological. Around the holidays, the mother to Tartarus, Eros and Earth allows a glimpse of what homelife for “a shapeless, unwrought mass of disconnected elements all heaped together in anarchic disarray” can look like.
Gunplay is common, but a scream is rare on TV’s The Untouchables.
Font Lab
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PORTFOLIO
VIP Pass for 2013 SF Central Market Walking Tour.
NOOKS OF CALIFORNIA
± Sacramento River
Originating on mystic Mount Shasta, where a gravity anomaly exists, the Sacramento River is then augmented by the San Joaquin River to empty into the San Francisco Bay, a journey spanning 447 miles. The 1849 California Gold Rush then brought prospectors, following the longest and largest river in California, to the gold fields; they mapped out the Siskiyou and California Trails. Hamlets and towns were strung along the river, and the city of Sacramento became its most important home.
± Sea Ranch
Wicker-work dwelling of the Pomo people. + 2019 photo. +
Architects of Sea Ranch returned in 1991, Richard Whitaker, Donlyn Lyndon, Charles Moore, William Turnbull, and posed with Condominium One, which was placed, fourteen years later, on the National Register of Historic Places.
Along the Sonoma coast of California, some 1300 residents live on unincorporated land known as Sea Ranch. This community of timber-framed buildings was, in the early 1900s, a sheep ranch. Before that it was home to the Pomo people.
± Monterey Bay
Painting of the Engineer’s Cottage, built by architect Julia Morgan and where she stayed in while designing a summer conference on coastal property for the Young Women’s Christian Association. These buildings can still handle multi-day large retreats, offers more intimate weekend stays, and is the hospitality component of the Asilomar State Marine Reserve.
Located at Monterey Bay and part of a conservation effort to study the sea, including a large kelp forest near the shore. An ocean-health program from Pigeon Point to Point Conception along the California coast, Asilomar is overseen by the California Department of Parks and Recreation.
± Hollywood
Designated a historic cultural monument in 1968, built in the mid-1920s by Sidney Grauman as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
The Cathay-themed façade is full of height, amalgating several domestic fantasies and featuring spotlight-friendly intimate nooks. The grand entrance was sometimes guarded by lions and other times by palm-tree pillars. A waterfall feature and a pond below. An impressive scholar’s rock looks over the foreshortened forecourt to a hermit’s hut, which is actually the ticket booth.
When Norma Talmadge inadvertently stepped on wet cement, the imprint became a must for early onsite filmstars to leave as a memento.
In May 1927, the curtains parted for the first time, dimming lights and subduing the audience as Cecil B. DeMille premiered ‘The King of Kings’.
Brush Script MT Copperplate Papyrus Courier New Courier MS Monaco Lucida Console Helvetica Avant Garde Century Gothic Lucida Grande Arial Narrow Segoe UI Tahoma Geneva Verdana Palatino Garamond Bookman Impact Didot Perpetua Baskerville Century Schoolbook Palatino Linotype Book Antiqua Times New Roman Big Caslon Lucida Bright Bodoni MT Hoefler Text Trebuchet MS
HELLO
Welcome to the online studio of Francisco Mattos, built w/ printed pieces, experiments, personal projects.
THE FINISHED PROTOTYPE, with a driver’s cab at either end, appeared on the California Street Line in 1899. Trams “... were decorated using scrollwork and gold trim, with ornate glass transoms and, for paint, maroon and cream.”
How San Francisco’s cable car came to be built will require more than one stop on its telling, wending this way and that, and passing landmarks of wealth and waste.
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Before the cable car, the task for getting to Nob Hill was relegated to paying for a ride in a horse-drawn cab. On October 11, 1869, this necessary yet wanton civic cruelty of using animals as beasts of burden changed for the good. The San Francisco Chronicle had a front page article on the death of a wretch. It took place when a horse finally lost it on California Street and, throttled, dragged down to its death.
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When Andrew Hallidie read this, he paused and paced his inner office, reflecting on what if anything he could learn from this. Hallidie was already prosperous, although not yet famous. He had inherited a company from his father. The senior Hallidie had invented and then patented a Steel Cable: strands of wire lined up and braided into a rope that was super strong, and proved indispensable in the gold fields and gold mines.
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Hallidie took on a failed concern: to build a conveyance capable of conquering the city‘s hills. He bought the Clay Street Hill Railway Co., and by May 1873 had built tracks and a cable assembly up Clay from Portsmouth Square to Nob Hill, a vertical climb of seven blocks.
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Early on August 2 1873, a prototype was in place and, lantern-lit, Hallidie stepped on board. Activating a grip lever onto a moving cable, he ascended on that peril-prone maiden voyage. Few were awake to witness, yet by opening day on September 1, the service was in demand. In 1880 over one million tickets were sold.
The first cable cars were tiny trams powered by a patented grip that alternately holds, and releases, a continuously moving steel cable running under the street. Power is supplied by huge drums housed at nearby power stations along the route.
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The tram operator is stationed forward of the tram. He employs the grip grabs and holds on to the moving cable, the tram also moves. When grip is released, tram stops, even on a hill, using a gear invention preventing slippage. Besides the tram operator (gripman) is the conductor.
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Andrew Smith Hallidie was born on March 17, 1837 in London, to Andrew Smith (b.1798 Dumfrieshire, Scotland) and Julia Johnstone (Lockerbie). He died April 24 1900, in San Francisco. Six years later his cable car system would survive the 1906 Earthquake.
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Cable cars then sprouted worldwide, from New York to Hong Kong. Naples crowned its opening by commissioning a song, “Funiculi, Funicula.” + +
In 1917, Andrew Smith Hallidie had an innovative building named for him. The Hallidie Building (by Willis Polk) has a facade rising eight stories and sheathed in glass.
When news of the discovery of gold in California traveled back east, the brawn and brains of a young nation came westward, where notions of Freedom waltzed hand-in-glove w/ greatness as well as greed.
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Accordingly, access from the gold mines to San Francisco were surveyed. Roads, bridges and tracks were built wherever gold was found, w/ waystations established for respite and recreation. The mining methods these men brought w/ them quickly evolved to meet the challenges posed by the Comstock Lode and its tributaries.
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The Industrial Revolution created tools used in scientific precisioning, allowing innovated models to be tested and profitably manufactured. Among these ideas was the ingenuous “square set” created by german engineer Philipp Deidesheimer. Grey Brechin picks up the umbilical cord:
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The Square Set introduced methods of construction. Deidesheimer’s gift went from constructing safety zones to conduct the backbreaking business of mining into other uses, including the ability of a grid of steel beams and columns to allow support for more height.
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❛Skyscraper❜ came into usage in the 1880s; America had fifteen. These buildings usually came w/ modern plumbing, electrical outlets in every room, a telephone line in every unit, central heating, and an elevator.
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❛ … NASA took a fresh look at the steel cable in light of a super material, carbon nanotube ... uber-strong, light and flexible. “Space Elevators: An Advanced Earth-Space Infrastructure for the New Millenium” is the feasibility paper of this new science, to erect a track running on cables, from here to the Moon, a journey of some 62,000 miles.❜
Philipp & Mrs Deidesheimer
CABLE CAR NOTES
| Based on San Francisco’s Golden Era by Lucius Beebe and Charles Clego (1060); Cable Car Days in San Francisco by Edgar Myron Kahn (1940); The Headlight, March 1947, Western Pacific Club; Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin by Gray Brechin (1999); and online articles by Mary Bellis (“The History of Skyscrapers”), Karen Barss (“Manhattan’s Golden Age of Skyscrapers”), and Meghan Neal (“Space Elevators Are Totally Possible”)
| A 1959 episode of TV series Bonanza features a Philipp Deidesheimer plot point.
| Thank you Taryn Edwards, MLIS, Mechanics’ Institute.
| Thank you Penelope Houston, SF Public Library.
Illustrated w/ collages, drawings, maps, paintings, photographs, prints and quotes
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Out west, when 1848 was only twenty-four days old, mechanic James Marshall was making a routine inspection on the grounds of a sawmill he managed for his employer. That was when the New Jersey native noticed some odd-looking ore in a water channel of the South Fork of the American River. It was “... bright, yet malleable. I then tried it between two rocks, and found that it could be beaten into a different shape, but not broken.”
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Nine days after Marshall emerged from the waters w/ his find, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, transferring a large tract of Mexico to the United States.
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These concurrent events together precipitated the California Gold Rush of 1849, when folks came from all over, bringing dreams while praying to the god and goddess of wealth for a show of “colour”
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The first came from Monterey, San Francisco, San Jose and Sonoma: when clerks, doctors, laborers, lawyers, mechanics, rancheros left their jobs. Sailors deserted their ships. Soldiers deserted the Mexican War. As word spread more came from Hawai‘i, Mexico and Oregon.
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Gold seekers showing up near the sawmill of John August Sutter, where gold was first discovered, had no need for milled lumber, and his business went into decline. All the while, a new settlement grew across the American River to become Coloma, the first gold rush town. Nearby stands a monument, by the Native Sons of the Golden West, to mark the grave of James Wilson Marshall, the “discoverer of gold.”
One can cross Panama to get to California rather than sail around Cape Horn. Up Chagres river to the town of Culebra; then donkeys to Gulf of Panama, eleven miles away.
Maps were consulted and what became the California Trial began w/ existing routes. Emigrants showed up along the Missouri river and towns in Illinois or Iowa. Wagon trains hitched, they headed out, crossing landapes of grasslands, prairies, steppes, valleys and rivers to Wyoming and Fort Laramie.
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The only way to cross the Rockies was a corridor beyond Fort Laramie, level and broad. South Pass afforded several routes passage to California. At a fork in the road soon after, the Oregon Trail veers right while the Mormon Trail turns south toward Fort Bridger.
|⁋| Overland travelers chose routes dependent on starting point and final destination. Other factors were the condition of their wagons, livestock, and the availability of water.
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From California, one can get to Oregon on the Applegate Trail (1846), an alternative to the hazardous last leg of the Oregon Trail.
|⁋| The Oregon Trail begins in Missouri and leaves either Fort Leavenworth, Independence or Saint Joseph for a two thousand mile trek to the Oregon Territory. Past the Great Plains, then the Rockies, heading west northwest to the Snake river, Fort Boise, Witman Mission, The Dales, Fort Vancouver, the Columbia river, and the coast.
The Santa Fe Trail starts off in Missouri, rolls through Kansas and a corner of Colorado. Crossing the Arkansas river before dropping to New Mexico, the trail loses its identity somewhat in Santa Fe, where it is braided to the Gila Trail, a local 16th-c. commerce and travel high road, bringing trade from inland to the coast.
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The Mormon Trail, gathers in Illinois and wends by Iowa and Nebraska before joining established trails in Wyoming. Together they cross the Rockies, then the Mormon Trail continues south southwest to Utah Territory to end up in Los Angeles. Besides the overlanders there were also seafarers.
|⁋| An eight-month sea route from New York to San Francisco would involve a hazardous rounding of Cape Horn.
A 49er carries pickaxe, shovel and pan. Can add a rocker and a hopper; some also conduct hydraulic experiments. A water wheel would be jim-dandy, to pick up individual quantities of gold-bearing gravel and sand.
Personal gear: pair of blankets, frying-pan, flour, salt pork, brandy (or other sanctifying spirit). Field gear must-haves: pickaxe, shovel and pan. Some procure a mule.
|⁋| Gold miners w/ no financial backing learn to congregate along mountain roads and wait for supply wagons passing through, bringing food and tools and carrying out gold dust. Saturday nights were for salooning and carousing. Sunday is a holiday – laundry, tool repair, swapping stories, writing letters, napping.
|⁋| A twelve inch shallow sheet-iron pan to rinse soil w/ water and locate the gold.
|⁋| A rocker is a rectangular wooden box mounted on two rockers and set at a downward angle.
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The hopper is a box sitting on top of the rocker, lined w/ a sheet of perforated iron. Beneath is an area called the “riddle-box.”
|⁋| The long tom is an improved rocker plus hopper, reaching to twenty feet in length. A long sheet of perforated iron lines the bottom and beneath that iw the riddle-box.
|⁋| Women too had gold fever, coming from Mexico, Chile, Peru, England, France, New York and New Orleans.
|⁋| Depicted in history as adventuress, courtesan, harlot, pickpocket, prostitute and the demimonde, these women were also bookkeepers, cooks, laundresses, shop-keepers, maids, wives. When mountain roads improved sufficiently to make travel between towns feasible, they set forth as performers.
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Mrs Clappe came west in 1851 w/ her husband. In her letters home she gives an account of the era, about geology and a visit to a rural doctor’s rude office of pine shingles and cotton cloth.
Yerba Buena was a hamlet on the San Francisco peninsula w/ an excellent harbor. The Spaniards established a maritime trading post and built the Mission of San Francisco de Asis. Ships docking in its cove discharged seafarers to a Spanish-style plaza known as Portsmouth Square.
|⁋| On arrival gold seekers rented lodgings in shanties and tent towns, and stayed long enough to buy tools and provisions before heading out.
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Brought over from Australia to perform labor, English convicts deserted en masse and instead formed a gang. Soon a frontier patch of lawlessness, Sydney Town, sprouted at the base of Telegraph Hill. The Sydney Ducks preyed on people and property, augmented by a gang of lady pickpockets, and willingly committed murder to survive.
|⁋| The embers of Sydney Town rekindled and gave birth to the Barbary Coast, chock-a-block w/ bars, saloons, brothels, concert halls, dance halls; where “getting shanghaied” was first rehearsed. Survived the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, by 1917 the red-light district was no more.
Sutter’s Mill on the South Fork of the American River.
Coloma, next to Sutter’s Mill, was the first gold mining town. A post office and jail were added in 1852 – both proved popular. Gold mining also took place north at Bidwell’s Bar, Cut Eye Foster’s Bar, Downieville, Dutch Flat, Goodyear’s Bar, Grass Valley, Helltown, Illinoistown, Iowa Hill, Kanaka Flat, Lousy Level, Marysville, Murderers Bar, Nevada City, Plumas City, Poker Flat, Rough and Ready, Washington, Whiskey Flat, Wisconsin Hill, and You Bet.
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South at Angels Camp, Chinese Camp, Dogtown, Fair Play, Hornitos, Jackson, Mokelumme Hill, Mormon Bar, Rawhide, Rich Gulch, Shaw’s Flat, Sonora, Volcano.
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Gold was found along tributaries to the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers. At Auburn, Diamond Springs, Grizzly Flats, Missouri Flat, Placerville.
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Home to Native Americans incl. the Miwok, the Sierra Nevada was rudely affected by the Gold Rush. In 1849 an incident occurred along the Middle Fork of the American River when some 49ers died and some indigenes killed. An uneasy truce obtained when Native Americans were hired on as laborers and paid in tin, but by 1900 their population had declined to only ±16,000.
|⁋| Before James Cagney was the Frisco Kid and Edward G.
Robinson dramatized life in the Barbary Coast era, there was a 1913 feature, The Last Night of the Barbary Coast, now a lost film.
The 1849 state census counted 42,000 overlanders and 35,000 seafarers caught up by gold fever; together w/ 3,000 sailors who had deserted ships.
Like all who seek a better tomorrow, the Chinese too came to the California Gold Rush, formed a fraternity in Coloma, squatted spent claims and worked as a team over the “tailings” left behind. In 1880 this gold-mining Chinatown was lost to fire.
Ancients, in their belief that Earth was flat, imagined the Sky reaching down to her every night, and relinquishing heaven to Night.
Into this world astronomy was born, by using Earth as a beginning point to draw the Ecliptic, a celestial belt to help reference movements of the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mar, Jupiter, Saturn -- the original seven Planets, by pinning them to a 20° wide latitude.
Taking notes, astronomers observed Planets crossing from west to east and, sometimes, east to west. This ability to change directions at first perplexed astronomers, because their orbital durations remained constant. This ability to orbit backwards and forwards, massaging Time, challenged astrologers to derive probabilities for horoscope forecasting in sentient Space.
Medicine-god
Asclepius, who does not retrograde, convened this year’s annual gathering of the Celestial Court, held at the House of Hestia, where he served as head physician. The most controversal item on the calendar was the ongoing debate of the origin of Kuiper belt object Eris: twin-sister to Mars -- or daughter to Night.
Everyone was updated on the brewing multimachia breaking out for supremacy between the uni-gods and the binary-beings, joined by the trinities, siding with neither side. There were two announcements. The first was apollo-asteroid Nereus, flying uncomfortably near to Earth in December of last year. Egg-shaped, made of nickel, iron and cobalt, the ancient fish-tailed marine-god is the latest threat to life on Earth. The second was about the numerous hives of centaur-asteroids, and whether they can redraw the map of heaven as it currently exists, balanced on the Ecliptic, and usher in Astrology 3.0.
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Hygiea Rx + Panacea Rx Sisters and medicine-goddesses relapse, one following the other, mid-spring into late summer. Expect an uptick in bad grooming habits.
Apr-Jun :Sco +Jun-Aug :Cap
Hygiea stepped out of the Main belt in 1849, spherical and intact. Panacea is only ten miles wide.
Mercury Rx
The grandson to Atlas
performs three retrogrades, 95% of the time in Earth signs. Mercury might then, being the ‘shepherd of men’, use blunt wording to corral his charges. The first quickens an ongoing debate that the ‘patron of thieves’ has been waging w/ stupidity.
Jan.14-Feb.3 :Cap
The second retrograde can see the boundary-god symbolically part the Red Sea.
May.10-Jun.2 :Tau-Gem
The third sees the complex-one giving over-explanations and in danger of being tangled up in words.
Sep.10-Oct.1 :Vir-Lib
Questions on whether the ‘conductor of souls’ is, at this moment, retrograde or not, can be answered at Is Mercury Retrograde?.
Venus Rx
‘Foam-born’ only
retrogrades during the first twenty-eight days. NYD to Jan.28 :Cap The ‘bringer of peace’ had been dutiful and now pliability returns. First catching up on personal business, the love-goddess will, come September, resume her social calendar.
Typhon Rx
When the ‘supreme serpent’
exits retrograde is when extreme high-fire season will begin.
Feb-Jul :Sco Before that can happen, an act of cowardice lashes a five-month period as the ‘largest monster ever born’ slowly dissembles for want of decision-making, pausing the woes he brings as gifts. Even if so, the spawn to Tartarus and Earth is far from harmless. Typhon is an air-deity, is the wind, and takes over 200 years to race around the gravity :throne.
Persephone Rx
The infernal-goddess cannot make headway during a year-long retrograde,
2022 :Gem
ignoring duties ‘she who destroys the light’ was tasked to dispense, and might result in upending domesticity come 2023. The ‘empress of the Underworld’ likes to chitchat, and anyone talking back could end up becoming a blabber-mouth.
Pluto Rx
Letting go the reins of his golden chariot while in retrograde,
Apr.29-Oct.7 :Cap
the ‘king of shadows’ is allowing his four black horses to go where they will, thereby ending up at the field of paranoia by the brook of betrayal. Afterwards ‘the rich one’ will continue his leveling of the playing field. Pluto was deemed a planet when he was discovered. Now the ‘king of the Underworld’ is better known as the shadow harbinger of several pantheons paying heed to the Sun.
Pallas Rx
Dreams drown and camaraderie can curdle during December, when the ‘goddess w/ many names’ goes retrograde, and becomes diminished under grim light.
Nov.30-Dec.31 :Can
These days, the daughter to Jupiter & Metis is a triple-asteroid goddess who arrived in 1802, the second Main belt object to be become known to astrologers. Pallas’ roman-fragment showed up 65 years later, and the triad created when greco-shards arrived in 1917.
Phaëthon Rx
‘Radiant’’s year-long retrograde breeds a hopeless tug-of-war between what is actual and what is made-up, leaving a trail 12 million miles long and 60,000 miles wide.
2022 :Tau
Only three-and-a-half mile wide, the son to the Sun hurtles close by Earth, reincarnated as an apollo-asteroid, a posse of potentially hazardous space rocks also threatening Mars, Venus and Mercury.
Eris Rx
2022 :Ari
Shackled to just one degree of the Zodiac, the dissonance-goddess stays put while in retrograde all of 2022; in effect a stationary trans-Neptune object.
Expect Eris to be in a snit the first two weeks. Later on, the risk-goddess livens up the holiday season with games of truth-or-dare. Most importantly, the twin-sis to Mars could lay waste to pseudo-science during May. While the 21th century was still young, the military-goddess stepped out of the Scattered disc, 1444-miles in diameter and fully formed. Eris is sheathed in white-white methane ice, shedding miasmas.
Mars Rx
The military-god
occupies the last eight weeks of 2022 in retrograde. Oct.30-Dec.31 :Gem During the first week of November, the twin-bro to Eris just might posit a definitive argument for climate solutions in the U.S. infrastructure plan. Otherwise, the son to Juno & Jupiter, having taken off his rose-tinted helmet, intervenes in a deceptive divorce case, and during the holiday season dresses up his dining table with teeth and a billyclub.
Salacia Rx
The marine-goddess strives for stillness during her retrograde. Aug-Nov :Ari The ‘goddess-queen of the sea’ will be a recluse, soaking in a restless bathtub filled with a case of the blues. Salacia had birthed a moon back in 2006.
Now sea-nymph Actaea is her social secretary, keeping track of serial dance duets with three beaus: her primary and ‘king of kings’ Jupiter; gas giant Uranus; and her mother’s consort Neptune, all while performing a 274-year lap around the gravity :throne.
Neptune Rx
The liquid liege can
resort to addictions while retrograding for five months. Jun.28-Dec.3 :Pis This can ruin his health, yet the god of water is unperturbed by his visage in the looking glass. The worst might come on the last day in October. Alternatively, the ‘lord of all marine-deities’ might instead take a break from partying, dwell on ideal regimens. The best opportunity to redeem his health might begin come the last day in November.
Neptune had chosen the date of his resurfacing into history by sending a dream, in 1846, to a sleeping mathematician. The woke mortal returned to the New Berlin Observatory, entered a set of coordinates, and located the premier sea-god sitting on his trident :throne.
Hekate Rx
A plunge into domestic adventuring is averted at the end of 2022,
Nov-Dec :Can
when the premier infernal-goddess retrogrades, ushering the ‘crone of the Underworld’ into 2023. Until that can be, the concerns for the daughter to titans Perses ‘destroyer’ and Asteria ‘starry one’ are over matters of mind, heart, and family.
Hephaistos Rx
The ancient fire-god is heartbroken while retrograde all year long, as the hard-earned labor of the son to Jupiter & Juno gets stuck in oblivion.
2022 :Tau
During January, Hephaistos could encounter push-back. For three weeks in May the ‘god of ceremonies’ assesses the damage, and come September presents an outline to engineer a truce.
Vesta Rx
Expectations can turn out unrealizable during the retrograde of the original hearth-goddess. Jul.7-Oct.5 :Pis-Aqu Instead, the eldest Olympian attends to a fraught social season, mined with responsible respect, and absence of safety zones during its lowest phase. As the ‘guardian to the first flame’ exits retrograde, she has a brief rendezvous with Juno, who is roiling in turbulent waters, to give her sails a gentle nudge. The resultant glow reveals the venerable fire-goddess to be bean-shaped, and wearing a cape of cooled lava stitched by a nickel needle using basalt thread. The whole studded with spears of achondrites tipped in three meteorites: diogenite, eucrite and howardite.
Chiron Rx
Chiron has low-esteem during his retrograde. Jul.19-Dec.22 :Ari The student to Apollo is an astrologer, so can be somewhat fatalistic, shunning mirrors, and presenting as shy rather than as modest. The offspring to Saturn & okeanide Phylyra is the first of his kind: collectives of centaur-asteroids with comet tails patrolling the Celestial Court, who are mostly beholden to Saturn and Uranus. On November 22, this ‘wisest and justest of all the centaurs’ will fly nearest to Jupiter, and start becoming again a binary-being possessed of twofold strength.
Ceres Rx
The agricultural-goddess spends the first thirteen days of the year in retrograde, concluding fence-mending and other chores. NYD to Jan.13 :Tau (Unfinished business she will hand over to Mercury, whose retrograde begins.) The mother to Persephone will spend the rest of the days undecided between patience and rebellion, and ends 2022 by taking one baby step. Ceres is the premier asteroid goddess, stepping into view at the Observatory of Palermo on the first day of 1801. The ‘good goddess’ is spherical, wearing a pockmarked swimsuit threaded with salted pearls and slathered in organic building blocks. She is doing laps in a water world.
Jupiter Rx
The ‘chief of heaven’ could let it all
hang out while retrograding in 2022. Jul.28-Nov.22 :Ari-Pis
Jupiter can turn presumptions on its head, can even be a show-off. Privately the ‘father of light’ suffers self-doubt, cannot relate, while undergoing punishing dreams. Babylonian sky watchers paid close attention to the largest planet and his twelve-year journey to return, using this span of Time as a 7th-cBCE structure to describe the Zodiac, pin the constellations, and begin the map for a hypothetical heaven.
Juno Rx
A barbed incident precipitates
the marriage-goddess’s retrograde. Jul.25-Oct.22 :Pis Someone who once bailed on her now crosses paths with
Juno. In a four-months long voyage, the ‘queen of the gods’ is adrift in a signed-on-the-dotted-line squall, equipped with an oar resembling a sharp tongue. Finding harbor for the youngest daughter to Saturn & Cybele is not an option. Help comes from Iris and Pallas; both also being in retrograde. The seventh wife to Jupiter finds she can now navigate, receiving direction from one and ballast from the other. Brought up by the Four Seasons, Juno is naturally prone to distractions. And this was before news came that her greco-half lives just sixty-four asteroids away.
Saturn Rx
Boundaries shift,
and could end up rearranging real estate, during elder-god Saturn’s 170-day retrograde.
Jun.4-Oct.22 :Aqu A decision is sidelined followed by some disruption. What once was routine is now oppressive to the god of duty. How this feels will depend on what he can accomplish the other 195 days. Be aware of the thick hide and loose talk of this son to Sky and Earth, scattering wisdom and misanthropy.
Early sky watchers observed an unusual planet with a sickle surrounding it, and so named it after Saturn, usurper of heaven 1.0. The ‘king of the titans’ is never warmer than minus 240 degrees, and his many moons and rings continually send to his surface organic building blocks in frozen packaging.
Diana Rx
Someone might, out in public, become a spectacle, as the fertility-goddess retrogrades in 2022.
Aug-Nov :Pis
Diana fell into ennui when the year began, sitting listlessly by the window sill, eyeing the quiver while playing with the matchbook. An unavoidable decision, a generational thing, and which might very well be good fortune in disguise, has to be faced as Thanksgiving approaches.
Diana also hosts a crater on the Moon, and is mentored by Phoebe, a ring-moon from the House of Saturn. In 1863, the complex satellite-goddess dashed into reality, dark and primitive.
Orcus Rx
The etruscan infernal-god will retrograde twice in 2022. Jan-May, Dec :Vir
Orcus is still worming his way out of hell, and getting ready to surface several years hence. To find his current location, contact his goddess-moon Vanth, ‘guide to the etruscan Underworld’.
The ‘punisher of broken oaths’ first surfaced in 2004, oblique in a cape of faint tholins, appliqued with iced crystalline water with a high collar shooting out what looks like dew drops of ammonia.
Iris Rx
The rainbow-goddess retrogrades all year,
2022 :Can
juggling conundrums of heart or head. The daughter to Pontos & Earth is hurting, and under the able ministrations of her sisters, the Harpies.
Uranus Rx
The primordial
sky-god will also retrograde twice.
During the first seventeen days, NYD to Jan.17
when something goes missing. During the last four months,
Aug.24-Dec.31 :Tau as he picks up the trail of the missing article; it is something non-tech. Expect tight-fisted run-ins with ‘the personification of heaven’; these encounters involve transactions that have lost value. Uranus is siblings with love, hell, and mother Earth. He is also spherical, blue-green and attacked by solar winds, because the avatar to the zodiacal Wheel is flat on his back, wrapped in iced waters stained with dark organics, all the while exhaling stupendous fumes.
Chaos Rx
The “dark majesty and mystery of creation incarnate”
stirs up a hum, using many lips, while twice performing the retrograde rite,
bookending 2022, as she solidifies in relationship to a domicile issue.
Jan-Mar, Nov-Dec :Gem-Can
Both retrogrades receive a light drizzle from the occult, this is when the ‘original goddess’ becomes visible, doing so by separating the physical from the psychological. Around the holidays, the mother to Tartarus, Eros and Earth allows a glimpse of what homelife for “a shapeless, unwrought mass of disconnected elements all heaped together in anarchic disarray” can look like.
THE FINISHED PROTOTYPE, with a driver’s cab at either end, appeared on the California Street Line in 1899. Trams “... were decorated using scrollwork and gold trim, with ornate glass transoms and, for paint, maroon and cream.”
How San Francisco’s cable car came to be built will require more than one stop on its telling, wending this way and that, and passing landmarks of wealth and waste.
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Before the cable car, the task for getting to Nob Hill was relegated to paying for a ride in a horse-drawn cab. On October 11, 1869, this necessary yet wanton civic cruelty of using animals as beasts of burden changed for the good. The San Francisco Chronicle had a front page article on the death of a wretch. It took place when a horse finally lost it on California Street and, throttled, dragged down to its death.
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When Andrew Hallidie read this, he paused and paced his inner office, reflecting on what if anything he could learn from this. Hallidie was already prosperous, although not yet famous. He had inherited a company from his father. The senior Hallidie had invented and then patented a Steel Cable: strands of wire lined up and braided into a rope that was super strong, and proved indispensable in the gold fields and gold mines.
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Hallidie took on a failed concern: to build a conveyance capable of conquering the city‘s hills. He bought the Clay Street Hill Railway Co., and by May 1873 had built tracks and a cable assembly up Clay from Portsmouth Square to Nob Hill, a vertical climb of seven blocks.
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Early on August 2 1873, a prototype was in place and, lantern-lit, Hallidie stepped on board. Activating a grip lever onto a moving cable, he ascended on that peril-prone maiden voyage. Few were awake to witness, yet by opening day on September 1, the service was in demand. In 1880 over one million tickets were sold.
The first cable cars were tiny trams powered by a patented grip that alternately holds, and releases, a continuously moving steel cable running under the street. Power is supplied by huge drums housed at nearby power stations along the route.
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The tram operator is stationed forward of the tram. He employs the grip grabs and holds on to the moving cable, the tram also moves. When grip is released, tram stops, even on a hill, using a gear invention preventing slippage. Besides the tram operator (gripman) is the conductor.
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Andrew Smith Hallidie was born on March 17, 1837 in London, to Andrew Smith (b.1798 Dumfrieshire, Scotland) and Julia Johnstone (Lockerbie). He died April 24 1900, in San Francisco. Six years later his cable car system would survive the 1906 Earthquake.
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Cable cars then sprouted worldwide, from New York to Hong Kong. Naples crowned its opening by commissioning a song, “Funiculi, Funicula.” + +
In 1917, Andrew Smith Hallidie had an innovative building named for him. The Hallidie Building (by Willis Polk) has a facade rising eight stories and sheathed in glass.
When news of the discovery of gold in California traveled back east, the brawn and brains of a young nation came westward, where notions of Freedom waltzed hand-in-glove w/ greatness as well as greed.
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Accordingly, access from the gold mines to San Francisco were surveyed. Roads, bridges and tracks were built wherever gold was found, w/ waystations established for respite and recreation. The mining methods these men brought w/ them quickly evolved to meet the challenges posed by the Comstock Lode and its tributaries.
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The Industrial Revolution created tools used in scientific precisioning, allowing innovated models to be tested and profitably manufactured. Among these ideas was the ingenuous “square set” created by german engineer Philipp Deidesheimer. Grey Brechin picks up the umbilical cord:
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The Square Set introduced methods of construction. Deidesheimer’s gift went from constructing safety zones to conduct the backbreaking business of mining into other uses, including the ability of a grid of steel beams and columns to allow support for more height.
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❛Skyscraper❜ came into usage in the 1880s; America had fifteen. These buildings usually came w/ modern plumbing, electrical outlets in every room, a telephone line in every unit, central heating, and an elevator.
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❛ … NASA took a fresh look at the steel cable in light of a super material, carbon nanotube ... uber-strong, light and flexible. “Space Elevators: An Advanced Earth-Space Infrastructure for the New Millenium” is the feasibility paper of this new science, to erect a track running on cables, from here to the Moon, a journey of some 62,000 miles.❜
Philipp & Mrs Deidesheimer
CABLE CAR NOTES
| Based on San Francisco’s Golden Era by Lucius Beebe and Charles Clego (1060); Cable Car Days in San Francisco by Edgar Myron Kahn (1940); The Headlight, March 1947, Western Pacific Club; Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin by Gray Brechin (1999); and online articles by Mary Bellis (“The History of Skyscrapers”), Karen Barss (“Manhattan’s Golden Age of Skyscrapers”), and Meghan Neal (“Space Elevators Are Totally Possible”)
| A 1959 episode of TV series Bonanza features a Philipp Deidesheimer plot point.
| Thank you Taryn Edwards, MLIS, Mechanics’ Institute.
| Thank you Penelope Houston, SF Public Library.
Starting point for a journey across the Sahara, taking in “ports of call” to Timbuktu, Ghat, then Ghadames, and finally Tripoli, on the shores of the Mediterranean.
Seat of a Tuareg sultanate which was established in 1449. Occupied by the French since the early 1900s, and known of rebellion ever since. The Tuareg people are the original Canaanites from the Bible, inhabiting ancient Palestine and Phoenicia, and its lingua franca is the Hausa language, a subgroup of the Chadic languages group, and therefore a part of the Afroasiatic language family.
Started in the 1400s to serve as the south gateway into the Sahara, the Historic Centre of Agadez in Niger is now a Historic Center Recipient and a 2013 UNESCO World Heritage Site. This desert town was founded to become a center of commerce for the trans-Saharan trade, and by the 1500s the populace was 30,000.
In 1976, area mining for uranium allowed the local economy to established a school, the Ecole des Mines de l’Air.
The 2011 census counted a total of 124,324 people living in Agadez and the European language they speak is French. There is an international airport named after a Tuareg leader, Mano Dayak, but due to the ongoing Tuareg rebellion in the region, Agadez is unsafe for travel.
“Our last arrow! We’ll fire it to stop the getaway car – then end our careers as Green Arrow and Speedy!” “Yes, with our secret identities exposed, we’re uselss against criminals!”
Immortal Dane Whitman brought his time-tested skills as the Black Knight to the early days of filmmaking, creating a phantasmagorical chariot race for Fritz Lang’s 1929 silent scifi Woman in the Moon. These days, he still does stunts for Hollywood.
Although he owns a Legion flight ring from the 30th century, when not in a hurry to get somewhere Michael Jon Carter prefers to drive. He comes from the future, sheathed in a super-suit boasting futuristic tech, but the feel of rubber on road gives Booster Gold a jolt unlike any other.
Little is known about this shapeshifting foe of Batman Beyond. Her fluid body allows Inque to seep into and out of her liquid limo.
Jimon Kwan’s car is parked behind the world’s first eco-fire station. She’s there to give a demonstration – in her capacity as Silver of China Force – on her mutant ability to drain heat and then convert it into light.
Before he went to war as the Fighting American, Nelson Flagg’s father gave him a 1915 Ford Speedster – it later crashed and burned. The original is also shown, fresh off the assembly line.
It takes two of Jamie Madrox, the Multiple Man, to control this wide jeep because it’s sure-as-hell gonna be a bumpy ride.
The grandfather and great-grandfather of James Jesse were from the world of vaudeville, which is why their spawn continued their forays into self-powered locomotion and built a portable air-cooled engine, hooked up to an accelerator switch, an engine cut-off switch, and single-horsepowered roller skates, and later tormenting the Flash w/ weaponized toys as the Trickster.
An inside-out refrigerated truck driven by Leonard Snart, commiting crime as Captain Cold using an experimental gun based on stolen science and shooting absolute-zero blasts that solidify as ice.
H.G. Wells jumped at the chance to take a spin in an experimental contraption that his American friend and fellow futurist, the head of Stark Industries, brought over to London. The author of The Invisible Man is photographed sitting in the back seat as the self-driving car crosses Tower Bridge.
This tasty USSR-era Trabant was on display in a Belgrade art gallery when Harlequin, the “merry menace”, happened by, took one look, and promptly brought it home.
This rarely seen Bugatti Type 57 Atlantic belongs to Arthur Curry (Aquaman) and is nicknamed the Drop because he almost never has need for it.
Even super-heroes driving sports cars have to stop and pay toll, as the Thing heckles Johnny Storm’s tossing chops. “Let’s get going, Torchy! Hey! Ya missed the coin bucket!” “But I threw it okay! It wasn’t my fault! The bucket moved!”
After punching Hitler in his debut, the city of Manhattan awarded Steve Rogers w/ a spanking red 1937 Ford, and he promptly took off to drive cross-country. Then he made up for lost years w/ a Corvette. These days, his ride is a 1960 Chevrolet, always parked on the street; repeatedly stolen then returned because it was a badge of honor to leave the keys in the ignition.
Before his life was imbued w/ Bahdnisian powers and he took control of the human thunderbolt, Johnny Thunder was in Europe, having won a music scholarship while in high school. With some of his prize money he bought a second-hand Minor Morris convertible.
Bentley Wittman, narrowly escaping the Human Torch, is chauffeured back to his mansion on Long Island and his life as the Wizard. “Fire is a powerful weapon! But I possess the greatest weapon of all – the world’s greatest brain!”
No way is the mysterious Dolphin a landlubber, so whenever adventures take her ashore she always rides in her 1962 Shark roadster, w/ its aquarium pod and other aquatic must-haves allowing her safe passage.
Retiring as the Sorcerer Supreme, Steven Strange’s mentor, the Ancient One, master of mystic arts, drove home to Kamar-Taj in Tibet, crossing rivers w/ the aid of local villagers, ever grateful for deliverance from the evil Kaluu.
Suddenly, the hovering air-car is jolted by a fantastic wave of force … and that is when Nick Fury sees an awesome figure who stands waiting to confront the dynamic director of SHIELD …
A surreal episode of the Knights of the Galaxy is just starting. “For King Arthur and Britain.” (Mystery In Space #8 (June-July 1952))
To have a bit of fun while Superman is recovering from their latest encounter, Mr Mxyzptlk, the imp from elsewhere, uses fifth-dimensional science to rearrange this car and proceeds to demonstrate how to operate it.
Vic Sage blends into his camouflage car, ephemeral behind a pseudoderm mask, during the time he joined Blue Beetle, Captain Atom and Nightshade as the Question in the original Sentinels of Justice.
When insect-female hybrid Queen Zazzala of planet Korll returned for a rematch w/ the Justic League, she went first to the Citroen museum in Aulnay-sous-Bois near Paris, and took possession of an experimental 1940s light-weight hovercar which she used as a beehive-nest. Badly damaged and abandoned, it still oscillates when touched, awaiting new instructions from the Queen Bee.
The nomadic Roy Harper, leaving behind his Speedy persona, took to the road in an oft-vandalized therefore oft-disguised van. When he landed in England, the former battling bowman persuaded Banksy to let him take the famous SWAT van for an extended spin as Arsenal.
Random page from the mid-century portfolio of billionaire industrialist Tony Stark: 1958 Nucleon, Norman Bel Geddes prototype, 1949 Tabot Iago, 1959 Firebird.
Sue Richards fetched Agatha Harkness, her boy Franklin’s new governess, in a custom-built Hispano-Suiza, previously owned by an heir to the Dubonnet fortune. It was a regal ride befitting the lead-witch of New Salem, who has brought along a mystical rocking seahorse as a baby present.
An early electric car prototype from the morbid mind of Oswald Hubert Loomis, aka the Prankster.
When her mom asked if her new car was safe, Jennifer Walters sent this blurry pix of her unusual find while in college. It proved ideal for camping, and that was when she got into an accident, needed a blood transfusion from her cousin Bruce, and began a new existence as the ravishing rough She-Hulk.
In 1923, Tony Stark’s dad visited the Fiat Factory in Turin and openly admired their roof treatment. When what later became the Avengers Mansion was built, he put a race-car track on the roof.
Besides lending his occult skills to combat evil, Giovanni Zatara performs as a stage magician, and is the reason he drives a 1959 Lincoln, which has a sturdy trunk to fit all his stage props.
Tony Stark awarded his executive assistant Pepper Potts w/ this pink 1954 Ford in recognition for her aid in their first caper together, battling “The Mad Pharaoh”.
Kent Allard’s elusive 1957 Lincoln Premiere, which he drove as the Shadow, caught on a U.S. postage stamp.
Blackhawk’s 1949 Hudson, later owned by Jack Kerouac when he was doing a lot of driving. Restored and no longer driven.
Carter Hall was so smitten when Hal Jordan drove up in a Phantom Corsair that the test-pilot promptly gifted this one-off automobile to the extraterrestrial detective, known to Earth as the Hawkman, for a planet-warming present.
Although a haunted horse accompanies his cursed existence, the ghost of highwayman James Craddock also owns a train, breaking the law as the Gentleman Ghost, and traveling the world w/ out a home.
Long after the owner of Gotham Broadcasting Co. Alan Welling Scott, was visited by the Green Flame of Life (“Three times shall I flame green! First to bring death! Second to bring life! Third to bring power!”) and fought evildoers as the Green Lantern, he would continue to tool around in his trusted 1939 Chevrolet clunker.
Prof. X’s band of super-human teenagers are driven to the airport in a specially-built Rolls Royce w/ dark-tinted windows. “Boy! It musta taken a heap of green stamps to buy a chariot like this!” “No joking, please! Concentrate on your mission! Review your powers! Our foe is certain to be highly dangerous!”
Brainiac 5 retooled an antique and created the “frisbee”, armed w/ repel-rays, as a combat suit for Chuck Taine, the Bouncing Boy.
Hooking up to his Plymouth Barracuda’s batteries to recharge his pyro-costume, Garfield Lynns unleashes a color crimewave based on rainbow rays as the Human Firefly.
Ted Grant’s ride when he’s fighting crime as Wildcat, immortalized on a U.S. postage stamp.
Brainiac 5 constructed this bi-cycle for Luornu Durgo Taine (Duo Damsel) to augment her super-power.
With wealth to spare, socialite Wesley Dodds had a taste for danger and cars. Which is why he could imperil his 1935 Bugatti Aerolithe by taking it out to strike terror among wrongdoers as the Sandman, declaring “There is no land beyond the law, where tyrants rule w/ unshakable power! It’s but a dream from which the evil wake to face their fate … their terrifying hour!”
A gift from Brainiac 5, this experimental bike allowed Lana Lang to apply 30th-century technology to her 20th-century life. While fiddling around w/ the teleportation button during a ride in the countryside, she managed to trade bodies w/ all the insects in a nearby field, becoming for a spell the Insect Queen.
Socialite Kathy Kane, in her first appearance as a masked crimefighter, leading the Batmobile into the fray on her Bat Bike. “Hurry, Batman – the Batwoman is beating us on this mission!” (Detective Comics #233 July 1956)
The keys to this experimental car from Stark Industries were handed to Matt Murdock, giving added comfort to his forays as Daredevil into existential evil.
Samuel Joseph Scudder drove this solar laboratory on wheels in his first appearance in Flash #105, “The Master of Mirrors”.
This innocuous van offers storage for Rory Regan’s collection of mystical rags, allowing Ragman, the tatterdemalion of justice, to find respite after a jolt of electricity ran into his body and which by all accounts hasn’t exited yet.
The second Shield, Lancelot Strong, drove a 1970 AMC Rebel for a short period until its color scheme gave him away to every bad actor on every city block.
Model kit from Aurora for Britt Reid’s special-built 1965 Chrysler, featuring a 413 engine. Bruce Lee as Kato drove the Black Beauty to fight crime w/ the Green Hornet, ever ready to deploy a pair of hood-mounted machine guns, a flame thrower, and stinger missles.
Sowing feline felony in Gotham City w/ her Cat Mobile, Selina Kyle leads a lawless life as the Catwoman.
Winslow Schott, the terrible Toyman, had his fully functional dwarf Cadillac surrounded by indignant townfolk hoping to save Doll Man and Doll Girl from a threat they were not yet aware of.
The seldom driven Joker Mobile is deployed to track down a double-crossing mobster. “The whole job – the safe-cracking, the getaway - all bear the stamp of Dink Devers! The cops think he died – but he’s right here in town, at the Blake Hotel! Ha-HA-HA!” “Gosh, Joker – I bet you’re right!”
A proficiency in auto mechanics as well as miniaturization landed Ray Palmer a plum position as a team member rehabilitating a Ferrari 375 Plus. Palmer kept tinkering some more on the racing car, giving it a capability of being shrunk, and constitutes the first step in his quest, as the Atom, to jump into, then out of, the quantum realm at will.
While parked on a cloud, the Ghost Patrol are actively bored ... “Ho Hum! Another quiet day. Nothing doing on our sector of earth lately.” “Strange! This is usually the most troublesome of the planets!” “What’s that ahead? Why – it’s a horse!”
King T’challa of Wakanda’s elusive jeep parked in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, where he was on a secret mission as the Black Panther.
This “fire” truck, designed by Stark Industries, later patented by General Motors as the Futurliner, was used to house JIm Hammond, an android spawned in the mind of Prof. Phineas T. Horton. This lab-on wheels is remotely controlled, insulated inside to withstand the intense fire generated by the golden age Human Torch.