The outline is 75% written … the character descriptions are mostly down … and I’ve written the first two pages. Mind you, I’ve had the first two pages written, in my head, for a loooong time. But it feels good to have it down.
The really nice thing is having the outline. This makes it glaringly obvious where the plot holes are (hoo boy, are there plot holes), where the “dead spots” are, and where I need to do more research. In this case, though, since it’s not historical fiction and it’s not treading any new technical areas, it’s more human / relationship research. Which I’ll be reaching out for over the next few weeks.
I watched the first 2 hours of Ken Burns’ “Benjamin Franklin” biopic (https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/benjamin-franklin/) , and I was honestly disappointed. I feel like Ken Burns tried to phone this one in: the imagery was lacking, too much use of anodyne stock photo and long camera dwells on it, and he skipped some of the really interesting attributes that make Ben Franklin’s story so intriguing. To me, at least. And, sorry, but using Mandy Patinkin as the voice-over for Ben Franklin was just offensive to me. Mandy’s voice is rough, gravelly, and loaded with vocal fry. There are thousands of better choices.
But rather than just complaining, I sat down and noted how I would have made it better. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting five specific attributes of Benjamin’s life that were NOT covered in the miniseries, but should have been.
Oh, and if you’re interested? Buy my book, Nothing Short of Magic, which – among many other things! – explores how Benjamin Franklin would have adapted to life today. https://amazon.com/author/enders
Ben invented Kite Surfing (sort of).
In his autobiography, Benjamin briefly describes the methodical way he taught himself to swim. And how he would challenge friends to races — and beat them. But in letters to friends, he also describes how he devised paddles for his hands and flippers for his feet, so he could go faster. And Franklin was probably the world’s first kitesurfer: he stripped down and gave his clothes to a friend. “Having then engaged another boy to carry my clothes round the pond, I began to cross the pond with my kite, which carried me quite over without the least fatigue and with the greatest pleasure imaginable.”
Franklin was about 10 when he invented this technique. This kind of ingenuity and creativity would be a hallmark of his life.
Formation of the Junto and their pledge.
The Junto, also known as the “Leather Apron Club,” was a huge part of Ben’s societal interaction while in Philadelphia, serving as the incubator for so many of his (and others’) creative ideas for making society in Philadelphia better. He started it in 1727, at the age of 21. The 12 original founding members of the Junto would all go on to be integral members in Colonial life. Ken Burns only mentioned it in passing in the documentary.
To qualify as a member, each person was also asked to stand up, and lay his hand on his breast, and answer the following questions:
1. Have you any particular disrespect to any present members? Answer. I have not.
2. Do you sincerely declare that you love mankind in general; of whatsoever profession or religion? Answer. I do.
3. Do you think any person ought to be harmed in his body, name or goods, for mere speculative opinions, or his external way of worship? Answer. No.
4. Do you love truth’s sake, and will you endeavour impartially to find and receive it yourself and communicate it to others? Answer. Yes.
Look, it’s trite, it’s campy, it’s perhaps overbearing, but I LOVE the intentional, explicit declaration of values and intent in this. Ken Burns mentioned it in the series, but he didn’t emphasize how much of an incubator this society was for Benjamin Franklin and his ideas.
Franklin had a list of 24 questions for consideration at each meeting (he LOVED lists) in case the “usual” discussion wasn’t up to par. One of the questions I love was, “What businesses or undertakings have failed in Philadelphia recently, and why did they fail?” It’s the targeted exploration of “what isn’t working around here, and what can we do to make it better?” that I like so much.
At 21, Franklin was the founder and the youngest member of the Junto. It lives on today, in what we know as the American Philosophical Society.
Buying cannons – the first “fire engines.”
In the 1750s there were occasional raids by French soldiers or Native Americans, particularly into what was then New England towns. Trying to be supportive, the Pennsylvania Assembly (of which Franklin was a member) desired to donate some money to the New England governments that could be used to purchase gunpowder. The Quakers in the Pennsylvania House were against it. However, they voted in favor of donating money for the purpose of “bread, flour, wheat, or other grain.”
The governor was initially advised against taking the money as it had too many strings attached and could upset the powerful Quakers. However, he replied, “I shall take the money, for I understand very well their meaning: other grain is gunpowder.” The Quakers did not object to his interpretation.
A few years later, the Philadelphia government sought to purchase some guns and cannons for defense of the city; Franklin immediately recognized the Quakers would object. “Let us move,” he said to a friend, “the purchase of a fire-engine with the money; the Quakers can have no objection to that; and then … we will buy a great gun, which is certainly a fire-engine.”
Shrewd, Ben. Very, very shrewd. Once again, the Quakers didn’t object.
While this particular example might cross the line a little bit, Benjamin really understood what made people tick, and angle through people’s peculiarities in just the right ways to get what he needed.
Killing a turkey with electricity and almost killing himself.
I can’t believe Ken Burns omitted this part. While the biography did mention, briefly, that Benjamin considered “birds killed in this manner eat uncommonly tender”, the biography didn’t mention the part where Benjamin almost killed himself. During a Christmas party with guests in 1750 in Philadelphia, Franklin had charged up a series of 48 huge Leyden jars (crude capacitors, an example is shown below) with electricity, that he would use to jolt and kill the turkey. But he got distracted and accidentally grabbed both of the wires as he was getting ready to hook up the turkey. His guests reported a bright flash and a bang like a gunshot went off. Franklin was stunned, badly, but never lost consciousness. He was sore for days.
About a year later, he published a book, “Experiments and Observations on Electricity.” It earned him unparalleled praise and admiration in both England and France; he was later bestowed with multiple honorary degrees from British universities as a result of this book. He invented the term “battery.” He came up with the idea of positive and negative charges of electricity. He invented the lightning rod. And that book earned him unparalleled praise and admiration in both England and France.
Maps.
There was an absolute dearth of maps in the biography. There was too much use of stock “nature” videography, when a map could have enabled a significantly richer storytelling experience. From French and Indian war plans to mapping the Gulf Stream (Benjamin discovered it on his trips to London and back!) to maps of Philadelphia showing how it had grown over the years, any one of these (or better, all of these) would have made the biography so much more engaging.
Below is one such map of Philadelphia from 1762, made by city surveyor Nicholas Scull. I spent hours poring over this map when writing “Nothing Short of Magic,” and it’s fascinating. So fascinating, it’s part of the book cover. I highlighted some areas that are neat: where Benjamin Franklin built his house (red circle), where the Man Full Of Trouble Tavern was (blue circle), and where Nina gave her final speech at the fledgling University of Pennsylvania (green circle). The map creator even made a handy legend in the upper right, highlighting the Quaker Meeting House, St. Pauls’ Church, the Hospital, and a bunch of other sites.
So, there you have it – a more rounded out impression of all the fascinating things Ben Franklin accomplished in his life.
It’s an epic tale, the merger of science and history: forcing technology like electrical motors and coffee-to-go onto society in 1763, and what happens if 2026 suddenly reverts about 200 years due to the total loss of electricity. It’s a tale of grit, perseverance, and the endless curiosity and optimism of Benjamin Franklin.
Learn about solar flares, Gravity Probe B, thyratrons, women’s rights (and the lack thereof) in Colonial America, and the indelible mark that Ben Franklin has left on the world.
A smidge over 100 years ago, from the 13th to the 15th of May 1921, Earth received its worst gut punch from the sun in the 20th century. Many people are familiar with the Carrington Event of 1859 – our first real interaction with solar storms and coronal mass ejections – but few know about the 1921 event, which is considered almost as severe. Places like the Stockholm Telephone Switchboard, pictured below, were on the receiving end of hundreds of volts of electricity as their telephone wires got a charge induced on them by Earth’s rapidly changing magnetic field.
The exchange in Karlstad, about 150 miles to the west, caught fire and had to be evacuated. Train service coming into and out of Grand Central Station in New York was disrupted, as the voltage on the railroad lines prevented communications with the signaling equipment. Trains had to be guided in manually.
The cause? A one-two-three ejection from the sun known as a “Coronal Mass Ejection”: the first and third were big punches, but the second one was enormous. The sun belched millions of tons of charged particles right at Earth, three times in a row. The huge influx of solar radiation bent, twisted, and tortured the Earth’s magnetic fields – and the rapidly changing magnetic field induced a voltage on anything long and metallic … like a telephone cable or a railroad track. Depending on the location, up to ten volts of electric potential were generated in every kilometer of ungrounded wire. Telephone switchboard operators could be sitting on the wrong end of a 600 volt line.
Today, such a storm would wreak havoc on our intricate network of electrical and phone wires; we have 100x more wires strewn around now than we did in 1921, and the Western World is faaaar more dependent on electricity than it was 100 years ago. The intensity of the storm was measured at -900 nanoTeslas; the solar storm of 1989 (the most significant one in ‘recent memory’) was only -589 nanoTeslas.
The Gravity Probe B satellite … probably the most precise measurement you’ve never heard of.
The gyro rotors and their housings. Image courtesy of Stanford
In 1918, 2 years after Einstein unveiled his theory of General Relativity, two Austrian physicists (Josef Lense and Hans Thirring) noticed an intriguing side effect: Einstein’s equations predicted that large, spinning bodies (like Earth) should actually drag spacetime with them as they spun. It wasn’t until GP-B came along, 86 years later and 44 years after the experiment was first proposed, that frame-dragging could actually be measured.
The frame dragging effect, even after spending a year in Earth orbit 400 miles up, is tiny: it’s like measuring the width of a human hair from a quarter mile away. How do you do that? With four of the roundest objects ever made by mankind: the superconducting niobium coated fused quartz spheres. Second to neutron stars, these are probably the roundest objects in the universe.
Spun at 4,000 RPMs, these things became the world’s best gyroscopes (a million times better than navigational systems) and Did. Not. Move. The satellite pointed itself at a faraway star, spun up the gyroscopes, and watched as spacetime stretched underneath it by the slightest of degrees as the gyroscopes stayed in their original orientation.
There was a problem, however. There were “hot spots” (my term) where some charge would build up on the spheres and on the sphere housing. These hot spots would randomly cause a torque that would jerk the sphere left or right – only by a tiny amount, but even that tiny amount was a hundred times greater than the effect they were looking for. The team spent a frenzied 18 months trying to analytically account for these random jumps of the spheres. They could never reduce all of them.
Why the “B” in Gravity Probe B? Because Gravity Probe A was launched in 1976, and measured how time goes slower close to a massive object like Earth. GP-A went about 6,200 miles straight up, and confirmed that up there, clocks run about 4 parts in 10 billion faster – just like Einstein said they would.
If you want to dive waaaay down the rabbit hole of information, there is a technical journal called “Classical and Quantum Gravity” that devoted an entire issue to Gravity Probe B. You can find a great summary and all of the technical papers on their website.
I’ve had these icons on my desktop for about three years now…
See the “Kindle Create” and the “calibre” icons? Kindle Create is Amazon’s tool for making ebook format files out of your Word document file. Calibre is the open source version of the same.
Although I did some fiddling around in Calibre, I ultimately chickened out and went with Kindle Create. Calibre offers a few more bells and whistles and more formatting choices, but I just saw those as a risk: the bells and whistles just made it more likely that I would get it WRONG and it wouldn’t work across ebook formats.
Formatting an ebook from a properly formatted Word file is pretty easy, once you know what to do (I learned that one the hard way with Skywriting in 2013). Formatting a book for print is an utter pain in the ass, but the advantage is that, after you’ve done all the typesetting, pagination, margin control, headers, and page numbers, you submit a PDF document to Amazon — so you know exactly what the book is going to look like. I find that reassuring.
The book is technically available for pre-order now, but I’m not fully advertising it yet because I’m still waiting for the cover art to come back. When I have THAT in hand, I’ll feel better about advertising and marketing … and revealing the title.
From the top left, going clockwise: Mercedes, Audi, BMW, and Skoda. All proving that the canonical station wagon (a.k.a., “Grocery Getter”, a.k.a., Swaggin Wagon) can still be attractive in a more aerodynamically friendly configuration than your typical Sport Utility Vehicle.
The 2019 Skoda Combi shown above gets 4.8 l / 100 km, or about 49 mpg, and has 1740 liters of cargo volume (61.4 ft^3).
For comparison, a 2019 Honda CR-V gets about 8 l / 100 km (29 mpg), but has a bigger cargo capacity of 2146 liters ((75.8 ft^3).
That’s 40% better fuel economy for 19% less cargo space. To be fair, I don’t think any of these cars (CR-V included) would seat more than 5 people, but I wish cars like the above were more popular — heck, even offered — in the US.
At the bottom of this post is a picture of THE conference room at the IAEA where Valery Legasov presented to the world his (then) version of the events of the Chernobyl disaster. A lot of people have asked me what I thought of the “Chernobyl” mini-series on HBO; this (longer) post is my response. Links to sources are at the bottom for any super-nerds who want to do more reading.
First of all, the series did a good job at portraying the fear, the uncertainty, and the confusion that surrounded the first few hours of the response. Most of the operators (except possibly Dyatlov, more on him later) were trained to believe the RBMK reactor was indestructible (“appeared to have succumbed to the hypnosis of excessive self-confidence, as they acted contrary to the laws of nuclear physics”, Ref [1]). When the reactor exploded, the notion that their RBMK reactor had actually exploded was so far outside anyone’s belief system that it took them hours to accept the reality at the site, and for those who could not see firsthand – it took days. This significantly stunted the response.
As bad as it seemed in the series, in my opinion the Soviet attempt to cover up or hide the accident was even worse in reality. There was a clear directive from the top (“Soviet reactor technology is the best in the world; we don’t have accidents”) and those caught in the middle were unwilling or unable to present information that countered that view. Those on the ground were unwilling to act without explicit direction from above; there was absolutely no sense of “Let’s get it done” or “Give those on the ground a modicum of autonomy to do what’s best.” The Politburo, based in Moscow, always knew best. This opinion of mine is based on countless interviews in Adam Higganbotham’s great book, “Midnight in Chernobyl” [Ref 2].
The series did an incredible job getting some of parlance of nuclear engineering into the mainstream: RBMK reactor, positive void coefficient, reactivity margin, xenon poisoning, and the concept of scram and the AZ-5 button. I mean, who could imagine that a concept as obscure as “positive void coefficient” would become commonplace? Unfortunately for me, I don’t think the series is going to inspire anyone to become a nuclear engineer, or to support nuclear power as a tool against climate change. The series did not do enough to distinguish between how bad the RBMK reactor design was and how robust modern designs are today; but then again, that wasn’t the purpose of the series.
Fun fact #1: There are 44 CANDU reactors operating today (a Canadian design, with variants operating in Romania, India, South Korea, and Argentina). All of them have positive void coefficients under certain circumstances, but the positive void coefficient doesn’t lead to runaway conditions like in the RBMK reactor.
Fun fact #2: According to INSAG-7 [Ref 3], the RBMK reactor design had as much as 5 dollars worth of positive reactivity for accident scenario of a total loss of coolant. In other words, it was 5 times as much reactivity as that needed to go prompt supercritical. That is an astonishingly bad condition; the reactor goes supercritical many times over in the case of a loss of coolant? Unbelievable.
Personally, I place the blame for the accident squarely at the feet of Anatoly Dyatlov. He was a bombastic, driven, recalcitrant physicist (not uncommon with brilliant physicists) with a damn-the-rules-they-don’t-apply-to-me attitude. He should have known better; he had already received a dose of 200 REM (2 Sieverts) during an accident at the Komsomolsk shipyard installing reactors into submarines [Ref 2]. What should have spooked him into being cautious only emboldened him. He wrote the procedure for the test they were performing on Reactor 4, and therefore he felt authorized to violate its procedures with autonomy. He published two articles in 2006 (“How It Was” [Ref 4] and “Why INSAG Has Still Got It Wrong” [Ref 5]) to defend himself, but to me, they ring hollow: he kept trying to place the blame on poor reactor design elements like reactivity margin and the degree of subcooling, but they overlook one thing. Things brings me to my next observation of the series:
The series didn’t accurately portray Just. How. Far. Outside. Normal. Operations. They. Were. Under normal conditions, arguably, the RBMK reactor worked acceptably. But there were far too many cases (Ignalina, even Reactor #1 at Chernobyl had a small core meltdown accident in 1982 due to a faulty coolant valve and operators not following procedures properly) before which showed just how razor-thin the margin was between “operating normally” and “fuel damage.” Table 4.1 (page 136) of the NRC Report [Ref 6] has the best, moment-by-moment breakdown I’ve seen. At Dyatlov’s insistence, they repeatedly turned off safety system after safety system, warning after warning. The RBMK design had 219 control rods; at the time of the accident, only 6 were in the core when there were supposed to be at least 15, and more like at least 32. “Midnight in Chernobyl” [Ref 2] does a good job at describing how harried the operators were and the crazy length they were going to just to keep the reactor from shutting itself down. It was even worse than what was shown in the series.
And lastly, Episode 5. Wow; what an awesome conclusion. The depiction of Legasov with the red and blue tiles was a great way to explain the technical aspects of what was going on. (Just like the character of Ulana Khomyuk was an amalgam of many other characters, Legasov had a bunch of other helpers.) The scene of the control room before and during the accident gives a visceral response to the viewer that’s impossible to elicit in boring technical documents and even in books. Episode 1 was tough for me to watch: like watching the movie Titanic, you know this isn’t going to end well. But Episode 5 was a great conclusion to a well-done series.
Here’s hoping we can all learn lessons beyond just, “Chernobyl was bad,” but other important lessons like, “Appropriate safety margins” and “The importance of proper management, especially during times of crisis.”
Richard Feynman famously said, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” It was true when he said it in 1986, and it’s just as true today.
