A Library of Treasures in American History with Josh Levy

0:04 Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a global leader in science, technology, and innovation. My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center. Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors, scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between, sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics. Welcome to AMSEcast. In our ongoing discussion of 250 years of American innovation, I knew we needed to explore the rich collections of the Library of Congress.

0:45 However, those collections are so vast, I wasn’t quite sure how to start that conversation. So, I was very pleased thanks to help from Dr. Michelle [Krowl] to connect with Dr. Josh Levy, the historian of science and technology in the manuscript division at the Library of Congress. Then I was especially thrilled when Josh offered to help by selecting a few items pertaining to American innovation that will introduce us to their collections and shed light on some amazing innovators. I should note that Josh brings to this discussion years of experience with a PhD in History from the University of Illinois. Josh taught at high school and college levels, including stints at the University of South Florida, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and the College of Micronesia in the Federated States of Micronesia.

1:28 He joined the Library of Congress in 2020. Josh, thanks so much for joining us on AMSEcast. Happy to be here. Now, someday, I want to talk to you about Micronesia, not our topic today, but that sounds really fascinating [laugh] . So, the first item you sent—and again, thank you so much. You went above and beyond, really, to show us these phenomenal selections from your collections—the first item I’d like to discuss comes from the Samuel Morse papers at the Library of Congress. So, to kind of start and give us some groundwork on that, can you tell us what led Morse, who was a very accomplished painter, to work with a telegraph to help invent the telegraph? Well, he was an accomplished painter. He was a wonderful portrait painter, in fact, and one of his portraits of James Monroe hangs in the White House today, and tourists can see it when they visit.

2:13 Now, here’s Morse’s story of how he came to invent the telegraph. He was on a ship called the Sully, crossing the Atlantic Ocean in October of 1832. He’s returning to the United States from France, following three years of painting, and visiting artists' studios, and talking to important folks, and making notes, and traveling all over. You know, those voyages back then were long, and during the voyage, he says he happened to think up an idea for the electric telegraph. And then he was chatting about it with other passengers, and there’s some evidence that a version of this did happen because Morse drew a diagram of a telegraph-like device in the sketchbook that he kept during that voyage.

2:54 But we have to be a little bit skeptical of everybody’s version of that story because by the time Morse starts to spread it around, there’s a lot of money involved now, and there’s patents involved. And one of the passengers, for example, who he had written to ask for support for his version of the story, starts to push back and say that actually they had come up with the idea together. But Morse’s version is that it came to him like a bolt out of the blue while he was bored on this ship. So, did he have any technical background like that? Had he been engaged in that whatsoever, in that world of science, engineering, technology before this? He had played around with some inventions. He really was involved in a lot of different kinds of projects over the course of his life.

3:35 He was a pretty important figure in the early history of photography, for example. He was also involved in politics as a nativist politician, he ran two times for the mayoral position in New York, and lost both times. But no, his main focus was as an artist. He was very focused on trying to make it as an artist, and very frustrated that he was not as recognized or as celebrated or as well paid as he thought he should be. I think a lot of artists would say that, understandably [laugh] . So, can you describe for our listeners the document you selected from the Morse collection for today’s conversation? Sure, there’s a document and there’s kind of a sub-document here. The main one is Morse’s draft letter to Henry Ellsworth.

4:16 Ellsworth was the United States Commissioner of Patents at the time this letter was written. It was in 1837. It’s not actually a patent application. It’s an application for a caveat. That’s something that you would request if you wanted statutory protection for your claim of priority before your invention had matured enough to secure a patent. There was some urgency here because, in spite of Morse's description of his invention on the Sully, in fact, there were other folks that were working on telegraph systems, including one that had already been patented in England. So, he had to rush to get out his version of this system. So, despite Morse’s story about creating this invention by himself, out of the blue, on the Sully, there were other folks that had been working on telegraph systems at the same time, including one called the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph that had already been patented in England.

5:07 So, he’s writing to try to get some promise of future financial returns from this work that he had done. And the document is interesting, both because he is inserting himself into this patent fight even before the invention is really usable, and because he’s not just seeking to patent the device, the physical machinery, he’s also describing the code. So, we have this very early, interesting version of Morse code that is represented in this document. If you saw Morse’s telegraph in 1837 at the time this document was written, you would not recognize it. It was a machine that was built into the frame of a canvas stretcher. Remember, he’s an artist, a portrait painter, and it has a printer’s composing stick and a receiver attached to it.

5:51 And his idea, initially, is that you would send a series of numbers, and this machine would record those numbers in a sort of zigzag pattern on a piece of paper. And so, you would send, for example, number 375, and then number 12, and then number 17. And then a telegraph operator would get a big, hulking dictionary, and they would look up what is number 375, and it would be a word, like ‘mechanics’ or something like that. It was a cumbersome system. Morse knew it wasn’t great. He called his telegraphic dictionary, quote, “A most tedious, never-ending work.” But, you know, the code improved over time, and it really was an integral part of that invention. And over Morse lifetime, you know, that invention of the code, it starts to foreshadow things like modern data compression.

6:35 The dot-dash system, it was already a binary code like we recognize from computers today. But once that system became widespread, you know, people started to find ways to express the same ideas with fewer characters, maybe just to save money at the telegraph office. Or, you know, people, maybe in business, started to use ciphers as a code to communicate secrets over what was a public channel. We have this patent—this attempt at an early patent—for both the physical technology and really what’s the software. And even once that physical technology is sort of set and standardized, the code, the software of it, can continue to involve and innovate. Am I correct in that some element of this went to the Supreme Court in terms of the breadth of his claim with the patent?

7:16 It did. There was a Supreme Court case. He was partly happy and partly unhappy. It went most of the way that he wanted. Samuel Morse had a kind of bottomless desire for recognition, so no amount of victory or recognition or financial reward seemed to completely satisfy him. I know the feeling sometimes [laugh] . So, let’s turn to a couple of other really important figures in American innovation through the years, and that’s Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. We spoke with Curtis Gregory recently on AMSEcast, who’s a ranger at the George Washington Carver site in Missouri. Both those men loom large in education, American education, American innovation.

7:56 Could you perhaps just remind us of their stories and how those two became connected? Sure. Booker T. Washington, of course, is running the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. George Washington Carver was a young agricultural scientist trained in Iowa, so really a kind of Midwestern background, Midwestern training. In 1896 we see in our Booker T. Washington papers here at the library, some early correspondence between the two figures. Carver is, of course, looking for a job, and he’s hired to do agricultural teaching and experiments by Washington in Tuskegee. So, he moves down to Alabama, and he stays there for decades. The two have a close working relationship that’s also quite contentious at times.

8:37 But Carver is one of the you know, better known figures by the time his career there ends at Tuskegee. Internationally known. That’s something I learned more about. You Provided, for our conversation today, a letter from Carver that goes to John Washington, who was Washington’s brother, about how to fertilize crops and improve soil. So, what did that letter say to you about Carver’s work and about that relationship, perhaps, with the Washington family? Yeah, this letter is written in 1911, so it’s after Carver has already been at Tuskegee for quite a while, and it is part of an ongoing negotiation with Washington. Carver was arguing with him about a lot of different things.

9:18 And just to kind of quote a little bit from the letter here, we see Carver writing that his agricultural experiment station at Tuskegee, for the entire year, they had not used any commercial fertilizer at all—of course, these inputs are very important for an agriculture experiment station—and instead, he says they’ve been using, quote, “Barnyard manure and swamp muck.” He writes, quote, “I mentioned this to you simply to confirm what you tried to impress so thoroughly upon your brother some time ago, that our soils need barnyard manure, muck, et cetera, upon them more than they do commercial fertilizers. We cannot lay too much stress upon the getting in of leaves, hauling of muck, and the saving of our barnyard manure, as it is the only real way to permanently build up our soils.” So, about the relationship between Carver and Washington, of course we see here not only Carver arguing with Washington, but actually enlisting his brother as part of his arguments, and apparently they’re both leaning on him about this fertilizer question at the same time.

10:12 But we also see that Carver is well known—increasingly well known, after this letter—it was written for his work in scientific agriculture, and farmers education, and experiments on the peanut, but this is a moment where he also is an important antecedent to modern ecological agriculture. Commercial fertilizer was the big thing at the time, and it was such a big thing that in order to, you know, be part of the mainstream of scientific agriculture, you really had to engage with commercial fertilizer and promote it, and he’s going against the mainstream in a pretty serious way here. He’s turning his back on it in favor of local materials, after some extensive experiments and using it at Tuskegee.

10:55 Carver is concerned that cotton is exhausting the soil in Alabama. He’s concerned that commercial fertilizer can have short-term impacts on improving the soil, but eventually the soil will become exhausted again, and the farmers will actually be worse off. And he’s concerned that, you know, using these local materials, it’s practical, it’s sustainable, it’s cost effective. He primarily is speaking to an audience of, you know, he thinks, not very well-resourced small-holding African American farmers. And this is a solution that makes sense to that group. An impressive man all around. And I also love to see that human factor of how many of us have tried to use the sibling to get something we want, [laugh] so it’s fascinating that he reached out to the brother to make that point.

11:38 Now, of course, I knew some about George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington before this conversation, but you introduced me to someone I didn’t know at all, and that was Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge—if I’m saying that correctly—who was an early aviation pioneer. And also you introduced me to the flight of the Cygnet. Am I saying that correctly? Cygnet— I think so. —designed by none other than Alexander Graham Bell. So, we all know Bell, the creator of the telephone. What led to his interest in flight, and what exactly was the Cygnet? Yeah, the Alexander Graham Bell papers, it’s a wonderful collection that we have here. You can see, because he writes so much, everything that goes on in his head, it feels like.

12:19 And of course, Bell is known for the telephone, but you know, to return to the patent dispute question, just as important as his invention of the telephone is his defense of that invention in the patent system. It’s a landmark case, and it’s one that nets Bell an almost unlimited amount of money. So, with that huge amount of money, he can do whatever he wants. Now, he already came to the telephone from a kind of sideways direction. He was interested in telephone technology because he was concerned with the education of deaf people. That was his primary interest at the time. And he was an important figure in that arena, and actually one that’s still controversial because of his advocacy of spoken language over sign language.

13:00 But you know, the telephone was never Bell’s only project; he never saw himself as only a telephone inventor. So, after he becomes freed financially, he starts experimenting in all sorts of areas. He does play around with aviation. He also engages in these studies of animal and human genetics that put him in contact with leading figures in the eugenics movement. He and his wife engage in this kind of odd project to breed sheep that have extra nipples. Quite a range of activities. And Bell and his wife start this group called the Aerial Experiment Association, and it’s mostly centered around Bell’s property up in Nova Scotia. But the idea, of course, is to create devices that will advance aviation.

13:42 And a lot of those early experiments up at Nova Scotia involve these kites. Bell is really interested, as everybody is really in aviation at the time, in basic problems of just stability and control. Keep the plane in the air, don’t crash, don’t hurt anybody. And that’s, you know, at a moment when the Wright brothers are building these planes that are successful, but they still are very dangerous. I mean, they are essentially building these airplanes in the sky as they’re also learning to fly them. One of Bell’s kites is this kite called the Cygnet I. And the Cygnet I gets built on a principle that Bell really became an advocate for in those years, and the idea was to create a stable kite by building it out of tetrahedral cells.

14:26 A tetrahedron is a triangular pyramid. He believed, and did successfully, create these flights that could carry a human in a kite. So, the image that I sent over to you that listeners can see on your website, is an image of the Cygnet I. It’s a huge kite with a span of over 40 feet with 3000 tetrahedral cells in it, and in the middle you see Thomas Selfridge lying down piloting this on December 6th, 1907. In this case, it’s actually being pulled over 100 feet below, by a boat, but there were powered versions of these kites as well. Very brave to do that, Thomas Selfridge. Can you tell us a bit about him? Yeah. Selfridge was a US Army Lieutenant.

15:07 He was a graduate of West Point. He was a member of the Aeronautical Division at the US Army Signal Corps base in Fort Myers, which is just right next to Arlington Cemetery in Virginia. He was interested in aviation. The US Army also trained Selfridge as a dirigible pilot, and he ended up becoming kind of the Army’s representative within the aerial experiment Association. Selfridge was a pilot. He was also, you know, kind of an aviation pioneer. He designed a couple of flyers himself with Bell, not based on kites because after Bell did a couple of kite experiments, he ended up being the only one that was enthusiastic about them, so he was pursuing them on his own while the other members did things that are a little bit more familiar to people that have been in airplanes now.

15:50 But Selfridge ends up working with Bell, and then he also ends up working with the Wright Brothers because the Wright brothers have this, kind of, ongoing project to try to get militaries—hopefully the US military, although they offer their planes to European militaries as well—to give them a government contract, let them build planes for military use. And so, part of their contract, their deal with the US military, is that there will be a military official that is involved in these test flights that’s allowed to look around and see what they have, and that ends up being Selfridge. The Wrights are a little bit skeptical of Selfridge. They see him as kind of a spy. They don’t love that he’s asking all these questions, and poking around, and touching everything, but they fulfill the terms of the deal.

16:32 They let Selfridge fly around with them, and in one flight at Fort Myers, in a day that has been pretty successful so far, there’s a group that’s gathered, and people are starting to watch these Wright flyers go over the cemetery, and it’s majestic and it’s beautiful, but there’s a problem with the 1908 Wright Flyer that Orville Wright is piloting—Selfridge is in the other seat—and it goes into a nose dive, and it crashes in front of everyone. And Orville Wright breaks his leg, breaks his ribs, who gets pretty injured. Selfridge smacks his head into part of the plane, and it fractures a skull, and Selfridge later dies, which makes him the first person to die in the crash of a powered airplane.

17:13 So really, a story looking at the Cygnet of attempts at innovation that weren’t always successful as part of the process, with the Selfridge, the sacrifice that often comes with it, as well, being on that cutting edge. So, there’s someone I’m starting to learn a bit more about, and you’ve inspired me to learn more, and that’s Claude Shannon. Can you tell us a bit about who Claude Shannon was, and why he’s often called the Father of the Information Age? Sure, yeah. And this is jumping forward in time again, right? Claude Shannon was… he was a lot of things. He was a mathematician, he was a computer scientist, he was an inventor, he was an engineer, he was with Bell Labs. He was at MIT for a long time as a professor. He was a lover of games and of jokes, and not someone—someone that was really brilliant, but not necessarily as self-promoting and careerist as other folks with his talent might have been.

18:03 He’s an important figure in the history of machine learning and of artificial intelligence, and a lot of people say is a founder of this entire field of information theory. Bell had a number of innovations, but you could possibly boil some of them down to the idea that he is the first or one of the first people that is able to abstract information into something that is sort of separate from the contents of information. So, after Shannon, people start referring to information in bits. There have been binary code before, there has been pieces of information, of course, but the idea that information is something that we think of in the abstract, separately, that really comes from Shannon.

18:46 And you provide it today, from the Library of Congress collection, from the Shannon Collection at Library of Congress, something called Theseus. What is Theseus? Yeah, this is a schematic diagram of Theseus. And Theseus is a maze solving robot mouse. Shannon playfully named him after the Greek hero who goes into the labyrinth to slay the Minotaur because Theseus is also in a maze. And if you had seen Shannon demonstrate this device, what you would have seen is a kind of tabletop maze with a little wooden mouse inside with copper whiskers. The mouse bounces around in the maze, and then solves it. But the real drama of Theseus is the table itself.

19:27 So, all of that is a kind of distraction. The magic is kind of going on under the table. Shannon had filled it full of electromechanical relays and wired them together, and those relays would push the mouse along the surface. You would see the mouse bump into walls, and then finally, it would solve the maze. And then if you started the mouse again, it would remember what it had learned. So, it was the first, kind of, physical version of what people had been talking about theoretically before, that you could have such a thing as machine learning or as kind of early artificial intelligence. And not—relatively, at least—not that long ago. So, I think sometimes we lose sight of how quickly these innovations have happened, in our lifetimes, at least in my lifetime, and goodness knows what’s next [laugh] . Gladys West, another person you introduced me to.

20:14 Who was Gladys West, and where did she work? Yeah, Gladys West is still with us, in fact. She is a mathematician, and she was one of the first African American mathematicians to be hired at what is now known as the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division. That’s in Dahlgren, Virginia. It’s about 50 miles south of Washington, DC, right on the Potomac River. So, West was from a rural area of Virginia, just outside of Richmond, but really kind of not urban at all, just out in the middle of farms. And she was hired in 1956, a time when the job of computer programmer was really just being invented and defined.

20:54 And Dahlgren also happened to be this important site in the early history of naval computing in the United States. So, she did work as a mathematician there, but she also, like a lot of other folks in her field, other mathematicians with government agencies with access to huge, hulking mainframes, learned how to program those things as well. And she was at Dahlgren for over 40 years. She worked on a huge range of projects, from military weapons, to a project calculating the motion of Pluto, to her best known project, working on the, kind of, early version of the GPS system. You provided a workflow diagram today. What does that show about her work? And what kind of materials do you have from Gladys, I guess I should start with.

21:37 And then, what does this workflow show us? Yeah, it’s a small collection. It’s relatively new. We might add to it later on because she is still with us. The collection has a variety of things. I think it’s three or four boxes, something like that. But it does have some documents from her time at Dahlgren. Of course, things that are classified end up there, obviously. Some professional material, some material from her personal life, some material about her, sort of, later rediscovery by the public of the innovative work that she had done that was really not widely known until just a few years ago, and some things that are fun, like her middle school diploma is in there, some things from Virginia State University, that sort of thing.

22:18 So, you mentioned her connection with GPS. How did her work help prepare the ground for the GPS we all depend upon today? Yeah, it’s an interesting series of beats in the story because it doesn’t happen all at once. The GPS system is created through large collaborative initiatives across different parts of the government. So, in some ways, it kind of reaches back to those earlier stories about Morse and about Bell, about the idea that the 19th-century cult of the inventor, and then the patent system rewards people that can make a claim for having invented something all by themselves, out in the middle of nowhere, just from a bolt in the blue. But innovation often happens this way as well. So, West was involved in a couple of projects.

23:02 She was project leader for Dahlgren’s use of data from the CSAT satellite. CSAT was a satellite that was launched in 1978. It was one of the earliest Earth-observing satellites, and it was the first one designed specifically to study Earth’s oceans. So, between the 1970s and the 1980s, West produces a couple of technical reports that define a mathematical version of what’s called the geoid. And the geoid is the hypothetical shape of the earth. The shape of the Earth changes actually because of gravitational movement and because of the movement of the tides and that sort of thing, so there is no one shape of the earth because it’s always shifting around. But for the GPS system to operate, you have to have this, kind of, complex mathematical formula that shows you, kind of, what is the average, what is a general shape of the Earth that we can assume for just the purposes of practical use.

23:55 West does her job. She’s satisfied with the work. She leads this project team, she is able to get one of the teams that she works on to cut their processing time in half. She gets a commendation. She retires. Then it’s not until just a few years ago that she’s at a sorority event. She’s with the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, and one of her sorority sisters asks her, you know, “Can you tell me about your career?” And she says, “I worked on the GPS system.” And the sorority sister says that’s really interesting. I’ve never heard of that. And so, she looks into it and finds out, not only that West has never been, sort of, formally recognized in a more public way for her work, which she knows, of course, but actually this calculation that West did in the ’70s and the ’80s of the shape of the Earth, they still use that.

24:39 So, she was a hidden figure, not only to the public, but actually to herself. No one had ever told her that they hadn’t moved on to another calculation. Really impressive, and I’m so glad that you told us about Gladys West. And I want to make sure our listeners, we are indeed going to put some of these materials up on our website, and I will work with you on that, Josh, but how can they learn more about these materials and others we discussed today at the Library of Congress? Sure. They can always go to our website, that’s loc.gov. They can also look at the website for just the manuscript division. So, if you search ‘Manuscript Division Library of Congress,’ we have a site that lists our manuscript collections. We also have other special collections divisions, like the Prints & Photography Division, Geography & Maps, that will have other interesting special collections materials as well.

25:26 And then if they have more specific questions, they can go to ask.loc.gov/manuscripts, and we can point them in the right direction. Wonderful. Such a rich collection of materials at the Library of Congress. I’m always overwhelmed by it every time I talk to Josh or others. Thank you so much for joining us at AMSEcast. I’m happy to. Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSEcast. For more information on this topic or any others, you can always visit us at AMSE.org or find, like, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I invite you to visit the American Museum of Science and Energy and the K-25 History Center in person.

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