by Bill Fawcett
Now the first emperor of China was concerned with creating a permanent nation state with a sense of identity. He began his rule by conquering six other Chinese states, some centuries old. National projects and imposing buildings did help give the Chinese a new sense of being, well, Chinese. What they did not do was to give new Chinese any loyalty to their emperor. In 210 BC a general facing punishment chose to revolt. Many people resented the costs in lives and money squandered by Qin Shi Huangdi, who had just died, and joined the revolt. The Qin Dynasty quickly fell and the Han Dynasty took power. Over the centuries, China would again split into competing states on several occasions, but the sense of identity as Chinese remained.
So in this way the Great Wall, and Qin Shi Huangdi’s many other construction projects, were a success. But as a way to ensure China’s security against the nomadic tribes to the North, history was to show it a failure. A big, long, very expensive failure. The first problem was that even the dirt-packed Great Wall and its forts were expensive to maintain. This meant often they simply were not kept in repair or well manned. The second problem was that in 1234 the Mongols invaded. The Great Wall was designed to keep out the steppe tribes, but not when they appeared as a well-organized army in great numbers. The Mongols barely paused at the Wall before invading China. Eventually all of China, including the Great Wall, was controlled by the Mongols.
In 1368 the Chinese, under the rule of the Ming Dynasty, completed the wall that we know today. Three hundred years later another army of steppe barbarians, the Manchus, again waltzed right through the wall and took over. They, the descendants of the steppe barbarians, remained in control of China until 1911, when the Nationalist Chinese state emerged.
So the Great Wall of China was an engineering and architectural wonder, but it never really was much use in stopping the barbarians from taking over the country.
“Please help me, I’m falling….”
—Hank Locklin
The Tower of Pisa
Chris Power
The date is August 9, 1173. The place is Pisa, in Tuscany, Italy. By the twelfth century, the city was the heart of a rich maritime republic with a history that stretched back over a thousand years. It grew up around the joining of two rivers, the Arno and the now-vanished Auser and over the centuries its power and importance grew.
Inevitably, Pisa had rivals. Their main competitor was Florence, with Genoa a close second, and to say diplomatic relations were strained would be an understatement. They fought wars. They also indulged in bouts of one-upmanship on a grand scale.
In 1172 a rich widow named Berta di Bernardo died, and legend claims that in her will she left sixty coins of unspecified value to pay towards the construction of a campanile for Saint Mary’s Cathedral in the Piazza dei Miracoli. St. Mary’s already had a baptistery to match the splendid cathedral and it seemed like a really good idea to complete the set with a bell tower. In fact, the Pisans went the whole hog and decided to make it a belvedere, a tower you could walk up the outside of as well, where lucky citizens could watch the processions and celebrations that regularly took place in the piazza in front of the cathedral.
This tower would be a masterpiece of gleaming marble, raised for the glory of God and proclaiming the superiority of Pisa and its people to all. Especially to Florence.
Plans were made, the site in the Piazza dei Miracoli was chosen, and on that August day, work began.
First the foundations were dug. These consisted of a circular ditch approximately three meters deep. This was meant to be the base for a structure that would weigh more than 14,000 metric tons and stand 55 meters high. Maybe it would have worked—if the substrates had not been river clay and sand. Remember those two rivers?
Even before the first three levels were finished, the problems that would trouble the tower had begun. By 1178, as the weight distorted the foundations, it began to list to one side.
What the architect thought of this is not known. Indeed, no one knows for certain who he was. It may have been a case of whoever it was not wanting to have his name associated with the debacle, because there is no doubt that the building contractors had made a hash of it from the word go. Even in the twelfth century, most knew about bedrock and clay with what the difference could or couldn’t support in the way of structures.
So there they were, red faces all round, the Florentines laughing themselves sick, and the Pisans’ beloved status symbol about to fall over on them. Since they couldn’t stop the tower from leaning, upper floors were actually made with one wall higher than the other to give the illusion of the tower being straighter. Indeed, 1178 was a bad year, because as well as laughing, the Florentines also declared war on Pisa. All construction on the tower stopped, but not for long. Peace broke out for a while, but in 1185 Pisa and Florence clashed once more and work stopped again. This time the delay was longer. Much longer. Work didn’t recommence until 1272. Then there was another halt and a major sea battle with Genoa in 1284—which Pisa lost.
In 1319 the tower was finished at last, even though the full ring of bells weren’t installed until 1350, and that was that. Apart from the increasing list.
For centuries architects and builders tinkered with the tower, all to no avail. Once again common sense was ignored in favor of public aggrandizement when another bell, the largest yet, was added. It weighed in at 3.5 tons and increased the pressure on the beleaguered foundations.
By 1817, the tower had an incline in the region of five degrees. Some twenty years later a particularly bright spark named Alessandro della Gherardesca decided it would be a very clever idea to display the foundations to the general public. So he had a trench dug around the base of the tower. Remember the river? His trench cut below the water table and it flooded. To the extreme fascination of the aforementioned general public, Pisa’s tower attained an additional meter of list in the space of a few days.
Even so, it was not for another hundred years before serious attempts were made to prevent the tower falling. In 1934, holes were drilled in the foundations and a kind of grout was forced into them. This had a reverse effect and the result was another increase in the tilt. Furthermore, 1966 and 1985 saw other attempts, with a similar outcome. The tower’s incline was now so severe it seemed that its ultimate collapse was imminent. In 1990 the tower was officially closed to the public on safety grounds.
But no one was prepared to give up on the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In the latter end of the twentieth century, a more sophisticated technology was brought to bear on the problem. First a corset of steel was fixed around the base of the tower, then a series of concrete foundations and counterweights were set up to pull back some of the tilt. After a major miscalculation that nearly finished the whole project in a cloud of dust, the experts hit on the idea of undermining the north side of the tower and taking away the soil. Rather than building up the side that it was tilting to, they would simply encourage the tower to tilt back the other way. This actually worked. The incline was substantially reduced and, more important, stabilized. On December 15, 2001, the Leaning Tower of Pisa was opened to the public once again.
So there, at a dignified if slightly drunken angle, it stands. The Campanile of St. Mary’s Cathedral in the Piazza dei Miracoli, first commissioned by Berta di Bernardo in 1172. Against all logic it has survived trials and tribulations and the idiocy of experts, and is justifiably a major tourist magnet.
Yes, it looked good on paper, but the odds were stacked against it. Yet at the final reckoning the grand tower not only survived its initial design flaw, but also three disastrous fixes that made matters worse.
“In Georgia, the legend says / That you must close your windows / At night to keep it out of the house.”
—James Dickey, from “Kudzu”
Overwhelming Success
Bill Fawcett
For the first one hundred years there was no kudzu growing anywhere in the United States. This voracious plant first appeared at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, which was held in Ph
iladelphia. Many countries build large and extravagant exhibitions to honor the young nation’s centennial. Among these was Japan, whose hall was filled with beautiful and exotic plants. Among them was kudzu, which has large leaves and sweet-smelling blossoms. The plant was an instant hit among the gardeners who toured the Japanese Pavilion. By 1920 you could buy kudzu plants through the mail or at nurseries all over the South.
Today Kudzu covers seven million acres across the southern United States. What is worse, when it covers, it covers everything, even climbing and strangling the tallest trees for light. This vine is now considered to be a major menace to native plant life. Where kudzu rules, no other plant survives. But this didn’t just happen; we did it to ourselves.
During the Depression, one of the ways in which the members of the Civilian Conservation Corps worked was to plant kudzu to prevent erosion. After all, the kudzu plants grew quickly and covered the areas with roots. The CCC even paid an incentive of eight dollars per acre planted with kudzu. By 1946 almost three million acres had been “conserved” with kudzu planted by the government and the vine could be found all over the South. It was ideal for this use, unless you ever wanted to use that land, and later any adjacent land, and a bit later most of the nearby land for anything else. For a while kudzu was considered a miracle plant. Goats ate it, some medicines might be derived from it, the vines made great baskets, and the leaves were even marginally edible. There was a Kudzu Club with almost twenty thousand registered members. But soon kudzu had begun creeping across whole forests and fields, blocking out the sun from every competing plant and taking over anywhere it grew. And without any of the insects or other parts of the ecology, including hard frosts which limit the vine in its native Japan and keep it from spreading too far north in the United States, nothing slows its spread. Kudzu is one of the fastest-growing vines commonly found anywhere. It can spread at the amazing rate of a foot a day, and sixty feet a year is not unusual. And where it spreads, every other plant is gone, cut off from the sun and dead.
By 1953 even the government stopped advocating any further planting of kudzu. Research gradually changed from finding new uses for the rapidly spreading plant to finding ways to kill it or slow its growth. This has proven surprisingly difficult. Most herbicides don’t touch it and a few even make it grow faster. With the exception of flooding each field of kudzu with hundreds of goats who will literally eat it to the ground, nothing has been found that can harm the hardy plant. In 1972 the Department of Agriculture formally declared kudzu a weed.
The once subsidized and praised kudzu is now described using terms like “annoying,” “intruding,” and “menace.” Using the Japanese vine for erosion control looked good on paper, but too much of anything is just…too much. And they planted it on purpose.
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
—Napoleon Bonaparte
The Sword Pistol
Bill Fawcett
Around 1800, the pistol was a popular weapon, carried by police, merchants, and gentlemen. One problem with the flintlock pistols of the day was that they were finicky. They had a tendency to misfire, often. Since they were so unreliable, a unique hybrid weapon was briefly popular around the same time. This was the sword pistol. The combination was created by attaching a blade, often more than a foot long, to the side of flintlock pistol. This blade was hinged to fold back against the pistol until needed and then was clicked forward into place. The theory was that the user now had a small sword, often nearly three feet long, to use after firing or if there was not time to fire the flintlock pistol.
It seems likely that more than a few of those who carried this combination weapon discovered its shortcomings the hard way. If you did not fire before using the blade, the action of deploying the blade was likely to knock the powder from the primer pan and ensure the pistol part of the weapon was useless. But if you fired first there were more problems. These included weight, nearly three pounds that had to be balanced and aimed with one hand. Combined with the windage of the barrel in a pistol of that era, this nearly guaranteed a miss. The next problem was that, after firing, flipping the blade forward and locking it into place took time. Time you would not have in a close quarters melee. The next problem was that while you could stab with a pistol sword, the edge was only inches long, limiting its use as a sword. Then there was the heavy pistol part now doubling as the handle of a sword, but the pistol is gripped in a way that hardly makes for robust use of the blade or point. This same configuration made the sword pistol almost useless for blocking the attacks of your opponent, particularly if he had a simple knife or other nimbler weapon. Like all weapon systems that try to be too many things at once, the sword pistol was not effective either as a sword or a pistol. Perhaps the most positive thing that can be said about this weapon is that it was superior to the combination pistol, dagger, and brass knuckles (finger holes and all) known as the Apache pistol that was used in America by street gangs in the 1880s.
“Legend remains victorious in spite of history.”
—Sarah Bernhardt
The True Saga of the Pony Express
Douglas Niles and Donald Niles, Sr.
One of the cherished legends of the American West is the story of the Pony Express: brave horsemen who rode at a fast clip from Missouri to California, carrying mail to the rapidly growing population in that newly established Pacific coast state, stopping only to change horses, braving the weather, escaping hostile Indians and outlaws. It is a story based on truth, but it is an episode of history that actually lasted for only a few short months.
Of course, that might be considered particularly appropriate for this aspect of California history, since that state, especially in its early years, was a place where things happened very quickly indeed. In 1848, California was a lightly populated territory of the United States, having been claimed from Mexico as part of the settlement of the Mexican War. When gold was discovered—a discovery noted by President James Polk in his state of the union report in December of that year—a gold rush was unleashed that swelled the population and infrastructure in the San Francisco Bay area to the extent that California was granted statehood in 1850.
Almost immediately, the problem of communicating with this distant state took on an air of urgency. In 1848, it took some six months for a message from Washington to reach San Francisco. There were no good routes: the Oregon Trail and other land routes were plagued by hostile natives, grueling mountain and weather obstacles—it was thought that the trip was utterly impossible during the winter—and vast deserts. A message carried by ship needed to be carried around the stormy tip of South America at Tierra del Fuego, which was never an easy task. In fact, it was not unheard of for a sailing captain to give up the fight against the constant storms, and turn around to take the long way to California, crossing the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. Another alternate route meant sailing into the Caribbean Sea, carrying the message over the mosquito-infested mountains of Panama—with the attendant risks of malaria and yellow fever—and then another long sea voyage from Central America to Northern California.
As the population of California continued to grow, a rail connection to the west coast remained a pipe dream—the existing tracks didn’t extend beyond St. Joseph, Missouri, on the great river for which that frontier state had been named. The telegraph was still in its infancy, and for the time being, no one was considering linking the east and west coast with wires and telegraph poles. The written letter remained the standard form of remote communication, and a letter had to be physically carried from the sender to the recipient.
But where others saw obstacles and challenges, several directors of the Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Company firm saw only opportunity. Three men, William Russell, Alexander Majors, and William Waddell, were willing to invest some $700,000 to gain the answers to key questions. Was it possible to establish a route to the west coast that could be employed even during the winter? What if a n
etwork of stables could be created, extending from Missouri to California? What if bold riders could travel at a gallop, carrying little more than a mail bag and a revolver, trading horses every ten miles or so? How long would it take a letter to travel from the end of the railroad line, at St. Joseph, to a steamer landing on the Sacramento River, from which the mail could be carried by ship down to San Francisco?
The answers were yes, the trip was possible, the network of stations could be established, and in fact the route could be covered in a remarkable ten days.
The Pony Express was established in early 1860. It included a network of more than 150 stations spaced from five to twenty miles apart. About a hundred riders were hired for the good salary of $100 per month. All were male, with some as young as their early teens. The maximum weight allowed for a rider was a slight 125 pounds. The “help wanted” ad posted in California sought riders who were “skinny, wiry fellows” willing to face death on a daily basis, and even suggested that orphans were preferred. The mail would be carried at a gallop, with the horse changed about every ten miles, and each rider averaging about a hundred miles per shift. (The longest single leg was a buttocks-numbing 370 miles ridden by the legendary Pony Bob Haslan!)
