Transcript

4.16.26 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye and today
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I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated April May
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twenty twenty six. As a reminder, RADIOI is a reading
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service intended for people who are blind or have other
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disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material. Please
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join me now for the first article, which is Part
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two of The Librea tar Pits have been sucking in
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visitors for millennia, Paleontologists are still finding out what lies
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within the ooze by Richard Konniff. In part one, we
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explored the Librea tar Pits as both a famous tourist
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attraction and one of the world's most important fossil sites,
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where natural asphalt has trapped and preserved animals for tens
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of thousands of years. Over roughly sixty thousand years, countless creatures,
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including mammoths, saber toothed cats, dire wolves, and smaller plants
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and insects, became stuck in the sticky seeps and were
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preserved in remarkable detail. Scientists value Librea because it offers
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an unusually rich and diverse snapshot of ice age life
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in North America, revealing a world once dominated by large
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predators and prey that vanished around thirteen thousand years ago.
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The site's fossils allow researchers to study entire ecosystems, from
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megafauna to microscopic remains, all preserved together. We also learned
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about modern scientific work at Librea, including how paleontologists and
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volunteers carefully excavate clean and catalog fossils while the public watches.
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Researchers increasingly focus on microfossils such as seeds, pollen, insects,
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and vital liths to reconstruct ancient environments and better understand
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why ice age species went extinct. Recent research suggests that
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climate change, human hunting, and the increased use of fire
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may together explain the rapid collapse of these ecosystems. By
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studying both large and tiny fossils, scientists hope Librea can
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offer lessons about environmental change that remain relevant as modern
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ecosystems face similar pressures today. Here now is part two.
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A graduate student at UCLA named Lisa Martinez had been
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assembling a detailed charcoal record from the critical time period
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using core samples from nearby Lake Elsinore. Her results were
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hidden at first behind an embargo of an important scientific paper,
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even from the paper's authors, including paleo but botanist Reagan Dunn,
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and then Dunn says, when I was finally able to
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see that thesis and I saw her charcoal record, I
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just nearly fell off my chair. Martinez quickly became a
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co author on the paper. What we saw by looking
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at her record is that there's hardly any fire in
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the system until about thirteen thousand, two hundred years ago,
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Dunn says, and I was like, Oh my god, it's humans.
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The resulting twenty twenty three study found no evidence for
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the over hunting theory. Instead, the researchers proposed what they
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called a more nuanced approach, a climate human synergy of
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humans and wild life adapting with a wide range of
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results to a climate that was rapidly changing around them.
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During previous periods of climate change, Emily Lindsay, a Librea palaeodcologist, says,
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animals were able to move freely to better habitats. If
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ice sheets were expanding over the northern regions of what
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is now the US, the animals could move south to
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greener pastures. But once humans began transforming the landscape, the
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animals faced new barriers. For Lindsay Dunn and their co authors,
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these findings reveal not just what happened thirteen thousand years ago,
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but also what seems to be happening now Over the
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past century. They noted southern California's climate has warmed ten
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times faster than it did at the time of the
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extinction recorded in such detail at Librea. Frequent, prolonged droughts
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and wildfires are common again as they were then. Ecosystem's
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failure to recover after fire suggests. They warned that critical
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thresholds for re establishment have already been crossed. Last year,
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wildfires driven by fierce Santa Ana winds raced through neighborhoods
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all around metropolitan Los Angeles over more than three weeks.
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The fires incinerated more than fifty eight square miles of
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habitat for humans and animals alike, destroyed more than sixteen thousand,
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two hundred homes, schools, and other structures, placed some too
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hundred thousand residents under evacuation orders, and killed thirty one people.
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Economists estimated the damage to the local economy at more
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than two hundred and fifty billion dollars. A Librea staff
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member was among the locals who lost their homes. Along
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with many other institutions, Librea's Page Museum shut down for
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two days. The site itself was unharmed, and as the
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city gradually came back to life, it was almost possible
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to go on as if nothing had changed. Soon after
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the fires, Let's imagine a screenwriter shows up at Librea.
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She opens her laptop to a script set at the
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tar pits, working title death Trap, Heart and Throat. Scenes
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of escape from catastrophe begin to fill the page, but
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then she starts to noodle around with a new plot point.
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What if a small band of determined researchers come out
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of Librea with the story powerful enough to save our world?
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And accompanying this article, did you know the Secrets of Librea?
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No dinosaur fossils have been found at Librea because the
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area was underwater at the time they roamed the earth,
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and the Chumash people used the area's asphalt for waterproofing
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baskets and sealing canoes long before the first Europeans arrived. Next,
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this massive collection of more than a million tools tells
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the striking history of jewelry making in America before computers.
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In Ai, beautiful trinkets were formed with a combination of hubs, dyes, finesse,
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and force. Kevin Potter has perhaps the world's largest assemblage
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of them. By Richard Grant. Look at this, says Kevin Potter,
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marveling at an intricate Art Deco butterfly design carved into
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an old, weathered block of steel. A guy made this
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with chisels and piles. It probably took him two weeks.
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This hub would have made gorgeous, top quality brooches. Potter
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fifty six, is a jewelry maker, but he also presides
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over the largest collection of artifacts from America's Golden Age
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of jewelry manufacturing, which he's packed into two big warehouses
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and a scruffy old Tucson neighborhood. Animated and loquacious with
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a sardonic edge, almost invariably clad in work overalls, Potter
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has preserved a part of American history which, even though
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it touched tens of millions of lives in intimate emotional ways,
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is now largely forgotten. People love jewelry, but most of
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them don't think about how it was made. Potter tells me,
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with an air of wistful indulgence. They don't think about
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the artistry involved, the craftsmanship, the techniques. They don't think
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about the tools and equipment. Potter's great collection is dominated
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by hubs and dyes, which are small blocks or pucks
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of steel with designs engraved on them. Back in the
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bygone era of industrial dye struck jewelry, factory workers would
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use powerful machines to press or strike these engraved designs
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into sheets of gold, silver, and other metals. The difference
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between hubs and dyes is usually described in terms of
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male and female. Hubs are male, the design is engraved
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in relief such that it protrudes from the surface. A
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dye is then made by pressing or striking a hub
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into a plank piece of steel, embedding a mirror image
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of the hub's design in a shallow cavity. Jewelry can
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be struck between the male hub and the female dye,
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or between the dye and the flat surface. Collectively, hubs
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and dyes are known as tools, and here in these
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extraordinary warehouses Potter has amassed, in estimates did one point
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two million hubs, far more than any one else in
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the world. In the front warehouse building tools are stacked
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on racks of shelving lining the walls and corridors. They
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fill up drawers and cabinets and invade bathrooms and office spaces. Potter,
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who began his career as a goldsmith, says every one
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of these tools took between forty and one hundred hours
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to make. You're looking at lifetimes of human labor and artistry,
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often multiple generations of the same families making these tools.
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Forty years ago, they would have been worth hundreds of
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millions of dollars, but that value evaporated when the technology changed.
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People sell them now as paper weights. The air inside
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the building has a metallic, oily industrial smell. The hubs
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and dies compete for space with antique engraving machines, screw presses,
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hulking drop hammer machines, old wooden tool boxes that belonged
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to master in ravers Rube Goldberg looking to contraptions for
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making fine delicate necklaces, hand forged anvils, including a French
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specimen dating to seventeen eighty nine, and a mind boggling
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array of other archaic machines and equipment. The sheer volume
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of unfamiliar visual information is overwhelming, and it's noisy too.
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Bang clang thud, whoosh. Because Potter and his twenty five
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employees are using the old machines to make jewelry and
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the old hubs to make new dyes. His company, Potter USA,
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founded in his garage in nineteen ninety seven, sells the
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dyes on the Internet to hobbyists, along with small hydraulic
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presses so that customers can use them to make their
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own jewelry. Those customers, he says, are predominantly older women.
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They number nearly fifteen thousand and live all over the world.
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I think it's the coolest thing, Potter says, a guy
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one hundred and fifty years ago may this tool. Now
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his design is being used again and thousands of people
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are falling in love with his art. It's like we're
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bringing him back to life. The profits from this business
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enable Potter to keep up his voracious collecting habit. He
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has bought up consignments of tools from defunct jewelry factories
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in New York City, Newark, Attleborough, Massachusetts, as well as Paris, Prague, Helsinki,
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and various German cities, but a major part of his
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collection comes from Providence, Rhode Island, once known as the
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jewelry capital of the world. By the late nineteenth century,
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jewelry makers and Providence were using hubs, dyes, drop hammers,
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and heavy presses to mass produce detailed jewelry from sheet
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gold and other metals. It was a major departure Before
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die striking, jewelry was made almost entirely by hand using
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metal work skills dating back thousands of years. Artistry and
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craftsmanship were still required to make the tools, but die
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striking was a shift from an artisanal era to an
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industrial one. Many of the Providence factories were family owned,
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and conflicts would often arise. Potter says that a cousin,
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usually a tool maker, would leave in a fit of
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spite and start his own factory. The companies kept multiplying
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over time, and the whole thing kept getting bigger and bigger,
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until you had these giant factories three hundred square feet,
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which is three home depots. He said. For most of
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the twentieth century, these factories produced millions of pieces of
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die struct jewelry a year, and they were being exported
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all over the world. Providence made good quality jewelry available
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to everybody for the first time in history. Potter says,
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rolled gold really put them on the map. It looks
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like solid gold, but it's a very thin layer of
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gold over brass, so it's affordable. At its peak, in
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nineteen seventy eight, the Providence jewelry industry employed thirty two
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thousand people and some three thousand production facilities, ranging from
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giant factories to front room mom and pop operations. Soon afterward,
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it fell into a calamitous decline. The business was decimated
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by companies in Asia, which undercut prices, using cheaper labor
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and inexpensive lost wax casting, in which molten metal is
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poured into a mold. Hundreds of US jewelry companies shut down,
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laid off their employees, and shuttered their factories around two
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thousand seven or two thousand eight. When Potter found out
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that bankrupt jewelry companies were melting down their hubs and
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dies into scrap, he was horrified. I couldn't stand to
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see all that history and artistry destroyed forever, so I
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started buying up tools to save them as many as
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I possibly could, And that's what I've been doing ever since.
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Pater de Christafaro, founder and curator of the Providence Jewelry
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Museum in Rhode Island recalls how in two thousand and eight,
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Kevin came to Providence like a tomb raider coming into
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the Valley of the Pharaohs. He bought three hundred million
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dollars worth of tools for pennies on the dollar. He
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mounted an enormous collection, and he got the best potter.
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USA is largely a family operation. Kevin works alongside his
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wife Danielle, who's in charge of the office and the finances.
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Their son, Vincent, is a jewelry maker who dresses in
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overalls and a newsboy cap. From his father and his
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own research, he has acquired a vast knowledge of the
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history of American jewelry making. Vincent helps his father with
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the collection and the tool business, and he runs his
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own company, Cranston Fancy Wire, which sells bracelets and engraved
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strips of copper, brass and silver. We have the tools
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organized by the companies who made them because it keeps
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a better historical record, says Vincent as he shows me
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around the collection, which includes pieces from seventy four companies.
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Opening a cabinet loaded with hubs and dies, he says,
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this is Gorum, a company founded in eighteen thirty one.
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They made high end silverware and trophyware in Providence and
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closed in nineteen eighty six. Lovingly, Vincent shows me a
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gold bracelet he spotted recently in a Tucson thrift store.
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It was made in the mid twentieth century with one
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of the dyes in the Potter collection. He bought the
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bracelet and says he's now reunited it with the very
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dye that struck it decades ago in Providence. As we
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moved through the collection over several hours, it becomes apparent
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that the Potters preside over a unique record of American
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life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and not just
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the changing fashions in men's and women's jewelry. The die
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striking process was also used used to make medals, silver
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Christmas ornaments, souvenir pins, law enforcement shields, and hood emblems
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for cars, to name just a few. Kevin shows me
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into one office that's devoted to military tools, including the
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dyes that struck the purple Heart, the Bronze Star, the
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Silver Star, and the Medal of Honor. Potter has a
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vintage hub for U. S. Army officer's belt buckles and
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one that made badges for the Space Program. In another room,
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displayed high on a wall, is the die that struck
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early badges for the Los Angeles Police Department. I've got
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the tools that made the pins and rings for the
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Skull and Bones Society at Yale, Kevin says. Moving into
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a different room, he rifles through a cabinet and pulls
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out the dyes that struck the World Series rings in
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nineteen forty two and nineteen forty six, and both the
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prize medals and the participation medals for the first Winter
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Olympics hosted by America at Lake Placid in nineteen thirty two.
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The actual metal sells for about ten thousand dollars. So
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what's this worth? He says? This is the die that
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made all those metals, the real original. Other than Kevin
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and Danielle, the employees at Potter USA are mostly in
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their twenties and thirties, and this is a deliberate strategy
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on Kevin's part. The techniques for making die struck jewelry
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weren't written down. You can't look them up in a book.
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It was all passed down by word of mouth. By
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showing the next generation how it was done. That's what
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I'm doing here. I don't want to see the knowledge
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die out. In the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, die
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striking from hand engraved hubs was supplanted by computer aided
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design CAD software and C and C computer numerical coat
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control machines that engrave texture and create models for the
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lost wax casting process. Now those technologies threatened by the
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advent of artificial intelligence three D model generators. You don't
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even have to draw anything, says Potter. Just tell it
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what you want and there it is, ready for three
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D printing. In the spirit of meet your destroyer. We
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tried it and it made a perfect die from a
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photograph of a piece of jewelry. He thinks Potter USA
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will survive because it caters to hobbyists who enjoy working
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with their hands. But Potter has no doubt that the
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jewelry industry will once again be transformed. You can't fight
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technological change that powerful, Potter says. The artisans who made
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jewelry by hand for centuries were put out of business
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by industrial diestruck jewelry. Now AI is uppending the business
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model again. That's just how it goes. And accompanying this article,
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did you know inside Rhode Island's by gone jewelry empire.
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Road Island's jewelry dominance began with the economic boom that
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followed the Civil War. In eighteen sixty five, forty five
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jewelry companies employed some seven hundred workers in Rhode Island.
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Ten years later, there were one hundred and thirty jewelry
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companies in the state, accounting for nearly two thousand, seven
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hundred workers. By eighteen eighty, Rhode Island produced more than
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a quarter of all jewelry made in the United States.
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At that time, the state was home to one hundred
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forty eight firms, one hundred forty two of which were
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based in the major hub of Providence. Next stamps of approval,
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A traveling salesman built an empire on savings and changed
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shopping forever. By Heather Hughes. The idea of rewarding loyal
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customers has existed for millennia. In Ancient Egypt, merchants offered
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their regulars tokens that could be redeemed for staples like
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bread or beer. In the late seventeen hundreds, one New
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England merchant gave customers copper tokens to exchange for merchandise,
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but the first large scale loyalty program didn't appear until
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the late nineteenth century. In eighteen ninety one, traveling salesman
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Thomas Sperry came upon an intriguing incentive program in a
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Milwaukee department store which issued stamps with each purchase that
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customers could later redeem for merchandise. Sperry saw a chance
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to make a business out of printing these stamps and
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selling them to retailers. With investor Shelley Byron Hutchinson, in
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eighteen ninety six, Sperry founded the Sperry and Hutchinson Company
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known as S and H, which issued its first green
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and white paper stamps at stores in Jackson, Michigan, near
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Hutchinson's hometown of Ippsilany. For every ten cents spent at
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participating stores, customers received a stamp worth ten points. Once
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you'd acquired enough stamps to fill an sn H Green
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Stamps booklet, you redeemed them at an S and H
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show room for anything from furniture to silverware. The program
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was a fast success with regional dry goods stores, and
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soon with department stores and grocers. By its second year,
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SNH had expanded to sixty seven cities, and Sperry and
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Hutchinson began opening more showrooms or redemption centers, where customers
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presented their stamps for merchandise. One book could get you
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a porcelain lamp, while six booklets could get you a bicycle.
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In the early nineteen hundreds, SNH launched its catalog, which
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became one of the most widely circulated publications in the country.
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By nineteen sixty four, S and H was distributing a
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reported thirty two million copies a year as customers redeemed
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more than a billion stamps weekly. That decade saw green
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stamps zenith. The United States had approximately eight hundred S
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and H redemption centers and more than ten thousand participating businesses.
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Andy Warhol immortalized the stamps and the nineteen sixty two
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silkscreen now in the collection at the Museum of Modern
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Art in New York. But in the mid nineteen seventies,
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as the U s economy stagnated, S and H began
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to declant decline. By the late nineteen eighties, fewer than
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one hundred retailers were still participating, and as many stores
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chose to cut out the middleman by offering their own
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rewards programs, s, and H Green stamps never quite recovered.
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In nineteen eighty one, the founding families sold SNH, but
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in nineteen ninety nine one of Sperry's great grandsons repurchased it.
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The stamps went digital the following year, rebranded as Green Points,
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but this and other rebrands failed to recapture the magic.
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SNH was op Thanks to the phenomenon it had recreated,
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many retailers now offer rewards programs which are bigger than ever.
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In twenty twenty four they accounted for twelve billion dollars
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in economic activity. Next, with Doonesbury, Gary Trudeau found a
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way to inform and entertain a generation of newspaper readers,
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one panel at a time. A new biography chronicles the
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history and evolution of the reserved artist who has always
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let his pen do the talking. By Brandon Tensley. It's
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a bit difficult today to imagine a comic strip wielding
23:40
serious political power, but Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury, which ran daily
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from nineteen seventy to twenty fourteen, got famous by helping
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millions of Americans make sense of the radical shifts in
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their country. So immense was Doonesberry's influence that President Gerald
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Ford quipped in nineteen seventy five, there are only three
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major vehicles to keep us informed as to what is
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going on in Washington, the electronic media, the print media,
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and Doonsbury. Not necessarily in that order, Trudeau has long
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managed to stay out of the public eye. In Trudeau
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and Doonsbury, The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art,
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the first major biography of the artist, journalist Joshua Kendall
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offers a definitive and inviting account of Trudeau's career based
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on archives and interviews, including with politicians who were on
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the receiving end of his barbs. Kendall takes us from
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Saranac Lake, the village in the Adirondack Mountains where Trudeau,
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as a precocious elementary school exactingly directed plays in his
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family's home. I was a little dictator, he jokes. To
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Yale University. There as an undergraduate around nineteen seventy, Trudeau
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first confronted war as the Vietnam draft lottery loomed over
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him and his classmates. A scarred upper digestive tract saved
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Trudeau from being conscripted. The social environment wasn't the only
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thing that was changing. Trudeau was too. He started drawing
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a strip called bull Tales, first published in the Yale
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Daily News on September thirtieth, nineteen sixty eight, which contained
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the seeds of Doonsbury. In those early days, Trudeau was
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per his editor at the Yale Daily News, a classic
25:29
male chauvinus pig. That changed when he fell for Annie
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her Boat, one of the first women to enroll as
25:36
a Yale undergraduate in nineteen sixty nine. At first, she
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described his work as a sexist piece of crap. Yet
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the two dated and Trudeau's time with Hurlbut made him
25:48
a lifelong feminist. Doonsbury debuted in twenty eight newspapers in
25:54
nineteen seventy, and Trudeau created bold women characters such as
25:58
Jonie Caucus and troduced to nineteen seventy two, who embodied
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a new liberation. By the new century, Doonsbury was appearing
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in around fourteen hundred newspapers. Trudeau also made innovations in
26:11
more recent years, creating the Amazon sitcom Alpha House twenty
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thirteen to fourteen, starring John Goodman. Goodman calls me the
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script Nazi. Trudeau told the New Yorker in twenty fourteen,
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which means I protect every period in comma. The little
26:27
dictator was still at work. Trudeau drew in readers by
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focusing on the often bizarre and confusing daily life faced
26:35
by baby boomers. Kindle rights and unlike the artist's role
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model Charles Schultz, the Peanuts creator, whose terrain is our
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often painful inner life, Kendall notes, Trudeau's is the absurd
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external reality that envelops us. Finally, ask Smithsonian, you've got questions,
26:56
we've got experts. Are there any planets in space that
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don't orbit around US star? The answer is from Jennifer
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c Ye, Observational Astronomer, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian.
27:12
As planetary systems form, it's theoretically possible that some planets
27:17
whose orbits haven't fully stabilized could be kicked out of
27:20
their star systems through close gravitational encounters with other planets
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or stars. In stellar nurseries where many new solar systems
27:28
are forming, The James Webb Space Telescope has detected hundreds
27:32
of isolated objects smaller than Jupiter. These might be planets
27:36
based on their small mass. However, they might be miniature
27:41
brown dwarfs, failed stars that are too small to fuse
27:44
hydrogen the way our Sun does. This concludes readings from
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the Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your reader has been Rebecca Shore.
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Thank you for listening, and have a great day.