42 Page 7
On the June 30th 1997 a children’s book by JK Rowling called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published. On page 42 Harry Potter discovers he is a wizard. The idea caught and the seventh and final Harry Potter was completed on January 11th 2007 on the sixth floor (the seventh floor if you are a US citizen) of the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh. Later in the same year a copy of JK Rowling’s Beedle the Bard became the most expensive modern manuscript when it was bought at auction in London for £1.95 million. JK Rowling was 42.
Also on Page 42 *
Dracula,
Bram Stoker Jonathan Harker discovers he is imprisoned in his oddish host’s Transylvanian castle.
Frankenstein,
Mary Shelley
Victor Frankenstein reveals he is able to create life.
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe After leaving Hull in the early 17th century, about as late as one would want to sensibly leave it, his ship runs aground on a desert island during a hurricane. Last known latitude was in 12° 18’. So the island may have been Tobago, or Grenada, or Barbados, or none of them.
The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams Hero, Arthur Dent, discovers he is hitchhiking on a spacecraft of the Vogon Constructor Fleet. The BBC had turned down the idea of developing a book from the radio series.
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson Blind Pew checks out having been trampled by horses as recently as page 41
The Whale
In 2008 Frank Mundus spent a last night on the Cricket II at anchor in Lake Montauk, New York before flying home to Big Island, Hawai’i. He never reached home, dying from a heart attack in Honolulu airport. Until his death he had maintained that he and his forty-two foot boat had been the inspiration for Peter Benchley’s character Quint in the novel Jaws. It was true that Frank Mundus had harpooned a 4500lb-ish shark (never weighed) and that the Jaws author had been on his shark-fishing trips but it is Captain Ahab and the white whale, Moby Dick, that ring truer in any search for the origins of the lonely character of Quint and his never named nemesis and the original screenplay for Jaws had even planned to have the film open with Quint watching Moby Dick in the cinema but this required the permission of Gregory Peck who had been unhappy with his performance as Ahab and declined.
Much of Herman Melville’s inspiration for Moby-Dick was real life. Discourses dealing with everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-whaling-but-hadn’t-known-to-enquire came from time working on a New Bedford whaler. There was a very real Moby Dick; an issue of a New York magazine published two years before Melville joined the whaler in 1841 had a feature article about a notably aggressive white whale off the coast of Chile known well to the whaling crews who called the beast Mocha Dick. And the boatload of allegories that stemmed from a ship and her frail human crew abroad in an alien world being destroyed by the wild creature they were hunting came from Owen Chase, who had written a narrative of his experience in the shipwreck of the Essex, the Nantucket whaler sunk in 1820 by a large sperm whale. Only eight Essex men returned, having eaten seven shipmates to survive. (The aural adrenalin that is Mountain’s song Nantucket Sleighride (To Owen Coffin) is also partly about the Essex. A Nantucket sleighride was a metaphor used to describe the sensation of being in a small whaleboat as it was towed at speed by a harpooned whale, and Owen Coffin had been a seventeen-year-old on the Essex who, having survived the attack, was in a small boat when he drew the black spot to be killed and eaten by three others including his cousin…a family meal.) Moby-Dick took years to become a treasure of world literature, not selling its initial print run of books now worth $100,000 each and Herman Melville died unrecognised as a great writer, never to know that his choice and ordering of words had formed a Great American Novel.
There have been five films, nine if you include the Jaws family. When small I remember my parents taking me with my brother and sister aboard the Pequod to walk on the deck where Ahab, Starbuck, Ishmael and Queequeg had stood beside cauldrons of flensed blubber. This was the ship used in the 1956 film, making her final bow as a visitor attraction in Morecambe in North-west England and where—having slipped the attentions of a giant squid and an albino cetacean—fire did for in 1972.
Ein Augenblick later and we are with our own children on a different boat when suddenly and terrifyingly a Great White Shark rears from the water towards our craft. It is the Jaws ride at Universal Studios Florida where the excited screams show no-one’s getting bored anytime soon of Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Peter Benchley’s drawing on Herman Melville’s use of Owen Chase’s original telling of the real-life story of the Essex.
Audubon’s Birds
Aged 42 in 1827, JJ Audubon published Birds of America, the greatest picture book ever produced. Printed in Britain, the 435 39 inches by 26 inches hand-coloured prints cost $115,640 (estimated at over $2m in 2011) and had originally been sold by subscription, five plates at a time being delivered in 87 tinned cases. His working method comprised starting at 3am to spend the morning hunting specimens and working late into each evening painting. All the paintings are remarkable in being life-size—an eagle apparently taking 60 hours to paint. While in Edinburgh, Scotland the young Charles Darwin went to a lecture by Audubon about his methods.
119 complete copies of the Double Elephant Folio exist and the most recent one to change ownership was bought at auction in London for $11.5m in 2010. It had been owned by Baron Hesketh’s family and the price was the highest ever for a printed book. Plate 42 features the Orchard Oriole.
The Gutenberg Bible
B42 is the world’s most expensive book, valued at £20 million if a copy was sold it is also known as the 42-line bible from the 42 lines of type on each page, and the Gutenberg Bible because it was printed by Johannes Gutenburg. The book started the printing revolution by being the first to be known to be printed with moveable type. The press was known to be in operation in 1451 in the German city of Mainz, then a part of the Holy Roman Empire and where the university is named for their famous printer. The first print run of 150 incunable bibles (incunabula is your word for the day, being books and other printed material dated on or before 1500) was to sell out and Johannes Gutenberg is now widely regarded as one of the most influential people of the past 1000 years. ‘What the world is today, good and bad, we owe to Gutenberg’ wrote Mark Twain—for whom financial happiness did not follow literary triumph, losing a large part of his fortune investing in a new typesetting machine and some of the rest in attempting to become a publisher. Despite declaring bankruptcy to escape the debacle he embarked on a world lecture tour and successfully repaid his creditors.
For Gutenberg financial happiness did not follow technical triumph. He had borrowed to fund the work until the sets of printed pages (not bound) could be sold. With the Bible finished and selling, his lender then sued on what might well have been spurious grounds and won most of Gutenberg’s assets including the commercially magical printing press—which he immediately cranked up again to make very saleable printed books.
Over half a millennium on and Project Gutenberg represents a new print revolution, the free distribution of e-books out of copyright in the United States. In 2010 the top ten downloaded authors were:
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Mark Twain
Charles Dickens
Jane Austen
William Shakespeare
Sir Richard Francis Burton
Lewis Carroll
Vatsyayana (The Kama Sutra)
Jules Verne
H. G. Wells
The Genuine Goldfinger
The champion Canadian-bred wonder horse Nijinsky (Nijinsky II in the US) was 42 months old in 1970 when he became the last horse to win the three races called the English Triple Crown; the Derby, the 2000 Guineas and the St Leger. Sensationally at the time the nag and his jockey Lester Piggott then lost by a head in the French Arc de Triomphe, shortly afterwards being retired and syndicated to stud for a world record amount. Nijinsky’s fame and popular appeal resulted in a documentary film,
narrated by Orson Welles, being shown in UK cinemas. In 2000 Nijinsky was voted the horse of the millennium.
His owner was the sensationally wealthy Charles W. Englehardt Jr. on whom the Ian Fleming character of Goldfinger is almost certainly part-based. Engelhardt had been a friend of Ian Fleming since 1947 and was known as the ‘Platinum King’, also having legally exported gold from South Africa as objects of art to be turned back into ingots, a manoeuvre echoed in the novel.
Played by Gert Fröbe in the film, card-cheat Auric Goldfinger is a favourite Fleming villain and was given the precise age of 42 years old—exactly the same age as Charles W. Engelhardt Jr. when the first edition of Goldfinger came out in March 1959.
* Of the first editions
Excellent Science
Calling Elvis
12 hours before the death of Elvis Presley a large steel grid 500 miles away from Graceland and 1250 miles from Roswell detected the only signal ever to be considered a contender for having come from life elsewhere in the universe. Elvis reportedly lead a nocturnal life and bedtimes in the Presley household could be as early as six o’clock in the morning. On the morning of the August 16th 1977 Elvis hadn’t managed to nod off and so went to another room to read a new book he was interested in called A Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus.
The scientific search for extra-terrestrial life had started in the early sixties and tried to detect radio signals from space. One theory was that such a signal would be sent using the radio wavelength of the literally universal phenomenon know as the hydrogen line; a frequency of 1420 MHz which is the signature of the element hydrogen that makes up three-quarters of all the matter in the universe.
The chance of detecting a vanishingly faint radio transmission increases if you go super-size with your aerial. One of 34,000 square feet was constructed in 1963, in a moment of high drollery called Big Ear, and was set to work scanning all the sky that can be heard from Delaware, Ohio. The skyscan identified over 20,000 natural radio emitters including superstars of the universe—quasars equalling a trillion suns each. Very exciting but definitely not lifelike and nothing else was either. After 14 years of hoping, everyone had gone home leaving just the computer to watch over stuff on the night of the August 15th 1977, which was exactly when stuff happened—a clear signal at 1420 MHz that lasted 72 seconds, making a hill on a graph as the earth turned her giant lug towards, directly at, and then away from a radio source apparently somewhere in distant space.
This was to be the strongest signal of unexplained origin the radio telescope ever detected in 34 years. It was right on the 1420 MHz mark and it was purely on the 1420 MHz mark—natural radio sources generally have a mess of different frequencies. The signal ended and that was it. It reads 6-E-Q-U-J-5 but this was nothing sentient, being just six signal strength readings over a period of 72 seconds yet the six were so different to anything the guys in Ohio had ever seen that Dr Jerry Ehrman—the scientist checking the readout—wrote ‘Wow!’ in the margin alongside the signal.
The mystery status of the ‘Wow! Signal’ has never altered. It had appeared to come from an empty area of space alongside M55, a fuzzball of 20,000 plus stars located in the constellation of Sagittarius (one of the fire signs—compatible with Aries). But there is nothing there to hear or see—it’s just, space. Numerous attempts have been made to find another signal: none has succeeded. Elvis Presley never came back from the other room, he died there with his book within twelve hours of Big Ear picking up The Wow! Signal. Within a hundred days Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released. And Douglas Adams was in Stalbridge, Dorset, England writing The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy—to be broadcast as radio signals.
Big Ear didn’t ever hear a second signal and the land was eventually made over into a golf course. The next time a message from advanced life on another planet bridges the unimaginable voids of space it will reach a golfer.
One Small Fall
Shapes with three sides you will recall from school. The isosceles triangle had two sides identical, the scalene triangle hadn’t any identical sides, and the…sit up, please…the Bermuda Triangle is the one that changed shape every time a new book got written about it. Authors have even upped the number of sides in a triangle to as many as seven. This was the famous Bermuda Irregular Heptagon you may have missed reading about.
Locales to have made it into Bermuda ‘Triangles’ have included: Texas, Mexico, the whole Caribbean, Cuba, North Carolina, Barbados and from deep left Atlantic; the Azores archipelago, which might be in Europe but is sort of close to the sighting of the Mary Celeste and easily worth a chapter in any book.
A tale every bit as queer as that of the deserted Mary Celeste relates to the very illustration above. Needing to see the best scale to draw the map and lettering I wanted a book of just the right size to compare my triangle of Bermuda against—adding here that my books are not catalogued to Dewey decimal points of precision: any book could be in any toilet at any time, at night I sometimes think I can hear them moving about—and so with a draft triangle to hand I pulled a suitably dimensioned paperback from a shelf. It was an old book that I’d quite forgotten I possessed. The book was Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle. Eyes invariably widen every time I’m in Tesco’s and volunteer this true tale to a checkout operator in a forlorn attempt to fill the conversational vacuum that follows the revelation that I have, once again, left the home sans clubcard.
This book’s Bermuda Triangle joins the islands of Bermuda and Puerto Rico with Merritt Island, on which is NASA’s Launch Complex 39 and near to Cape Canaveral. After 24 successful launches from pad A, in January 1986 the shuttle Challenger set out on its tenth mission by being the first to travel the 4.2 miles from the shuttle assembly building to pad B, from where it launched but exploded seconds later. In 2003 pad A was used by the shuttle Columbia which was to disintegrate on returning to Earth. Pad A had also been used by Apollo 13 in 1970. The story of Apollo 13’s heroic return from a near fatal incident in space is well known, especially because of the excellent Tom Hanks’ film, but perhaps less familiar are details of the events that came so close to causing a horrible disaster.
Storing oxygen sufficient for three men over ten days in a small volume meant liquefying oxygen gas down into a slush that needed to be kept extremely cold (under minus two hundred degrees centigrade) in two spherical tanks. Inside each tank was an electric heater and stirrer fans used to warm and mix the slush back into breathable oxygen. This had all worked successfully on six previous manned Apollo missions but, as Richard Feynman was to write in his highly personal addendum to the later Challenger shuttle enquiry, assuming there was some kind of parity between previous non-failures and future safety should be considered seriously flawed thinking.
The Apollo mission’s meticulous enquiry discovered that one of the two tanks had been accidentally dropped, just two inches, a year earlier. The fall appeared to have damaged the internal pipe that was used to fill the tank and empty the tank during pre-flight testing. Before the mission a problem had arisen emptying one of the tanks. This was probably a result of the fall. The work-around to empty the tank was to switch on the heater which would evaporate off the remaining liquid. This alone would not have been a problem but for a second unfortunate occurrence.
The original electrics in each tank were designed for 28 volts of electricity to match the voltage of the Apollo spacecraft, but for flexibility during mission preparation they were retro-adapted to also function on the 65 volt Cape Canaveral system. An ‘oversight’ meant that the original 28 volt thermostats, there to prevent overheating by switching off the current at a set temperature, weren’t adapted and received 65 volts for eight hours. The result was that the thermostats became welded into their ‘on’ position. A temperature gauge on the tank had a maximum reading of 26°C so couldn’t register the extent of the problem but the thermostat failures were reckoned to have caused the temperature to have gone over 500°C. This amount of heat
melted electrical insulation on parts of the wiring to the stirrer fan. Because the thermostats were now always ‘on’ the heater would work whenever it was needed so no problem was detected before the mission.
The explosion-in-waiting happened on the third occasion that the tank’s stirrer fans were used during the mission. The bare stirrer fan wires sparked, setting plastic insulation alight in pure oxygen which increased the pressure and then exploded the oxygen tank causing almost catastrophic damage to surrounding equipment including the second oxygen tank. The astronauts felt a jolt and their electrics suddenly started to die: immediately it was a serious situation. A few seconds later forty-two year old mission commander, James Lovell, confirmed to Houston mission control that they’d ‘had’ a problem. A small fall for one component a year before had just caused a giant problem on a spacecraft 200,000 miles from Earth in the form of cascading vital system failures. Multiple simultaneous system failure had not been part of the astronauts’ many practice drills. It was considered too unlikely.
Warning: Triangles
The United States Coast Guard is frequently asked about the Bermuda Triangle. Their website makes everything clear: ‘The Coast Guard does not recognize the existence of the so-called Bermuda Triangle as a geographic area of specific hazard to ships or planes.’ So, official US Government advice is that ALL TRIANGLES are considered to be equally hazardous to navigation (my underlined, emboldened, sloping, capital letters, this is important). The last statement can be tested as scientifically as you like by comparing the Bermuda Triangle with other triangles. I will choose just one, The Roswell Triangle, but if you are even mildly sceptical you should run a similar comparison with your own favourite triangles.