The Illustrated Almanac of Science, Technology, and Invention: Facts, Figures, and the Fanciful

  • Raymond L. Francis
Plenum: 1997. Pp.376 £17.55, $28.95<

Did you know that in 1994 an okapi at Copenhagen Zoo died of an overdose of Wagner? So says Raymond L. Francis, who reports that the delicate animal preferred death to listening to local singers rehearsing Tannhaüser. It thus showed greater discrimination than Francis, who, as the report suggests, stuffs his almanac with bits as foreign to it as opera to an okapi.

Every day in the year has its own page, with a dozen or so entries from various years and, usually, an apt figure or cartoon. The death of the okapi appears on 5 August and, again, on the sixth — an achievement made possible, it must be assumed, by the author's unwillingness to read through his finished work, for which he can scarcely be blamed. Other double entries occur for J. J. Silvester and W. F. Libby, in each case including a full repetition of information and anecdotes. No doubt there are many more.

The want of method indicated by this repetition and irrelevance can be further illustrated. There are four entries on the McDonald's hamburger chain, two on singing telegrams, and one each on the abdication of the last Queen of Hawaii, the establishment of the Swiss Guard at the Vatican, the first scalping of an Indian by a white man, the beginning of the Pony Express and the foundation of the city of Rome. Also mentioned are the opening of the first hotel in the United States with indoor toilets, the thousandth known suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge, the highest high jump of a dog, and the sale of the skull of Emanuel Swedenborg.

The entries dealing with science and technology come largely from the most obvious sources: notices of scientists (mainly Nobel prizewinners) and engineers; accounts of discoveries, especially ones with several datable episodes (Galileo's career, the travels and writings of Darwin and Wallace, the discovery and follow-up of X-rays and Becquerel rays, the announcements of nuclear fission); patents; voyages, notably Columbus's and NASA's; and modern almanacs, conspicuously those for 1993 and 1994. In ransacking this material, Francis has given particular attention to conservation and the environment, which generated the most interesting and useful entries in his book.

One cannot cover so large and amorphous a field without making mistakes. A few may be signalled as indications of the level at which the entries are written and their occasional shortfalls. Heisenberg did not receive the Nobel prize for the uncertainty principle nor Blackett for “his (atom) smashing research”; Planck did not say in 1900 that radiant energy comes in quanta; Marat, murdered 13 July 1793, did not arrange for the execution of Lavoisier, guillotined 8 May 1794; the ‘feud’ between Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church was not about sunspots; and John Dee did not make the English translation of Euclid to which he contributed his famous preface.

Francis's jumble is worth dipping into for a moment's amusement. It may be useful to editors needing fillers for columns on “this day in history” and to seekers after odd coincidences, such as the almost simultaneous (modulo 365) cessation of the longest sneezing fit in history and the shooting of The Sneeze, the first film copyrighted in the United States. True anniversarialists will gain little from the almanac, however, because it has no listing by year (though a good index of names). Only by slogging through it can information relevant to centennials be gathered. What has been culled in this laborious manner for anniversaries due for celebration next year will appear in the first number of Nature for 1998.