Historically Speaking: Awed by the Meteor Shower of the New Year’s Sky

Human beings have always marveled at displays like this weekend’s Quadrantids, but now we can understand them as well.

The Wall Street Journal

January 1, 2021

If you wish upon a star this week, you probably won’t get your heart’s desire. But if you’re lucky, you’ll be treated to an outstanding display of the Quadrantids, the annual New Year’s meteor shower that rivals the Perseids in intensity and quality of fireballs. The Quadrantids are exceptionally brief, however: The peak lasts only a few hours on January 2, and a cloudy sky or full moon can ruin the entire show.

A long-exposure photograph of the Draconid meteor shower in October 2018.
PHOTO: SMITYUK YURI/TASS/ZUMA PRESS

Meteor showers happen when the Earth encounters dust and rock sloughed off by a comet as it orbits the sun. The streaks of light we see are produced by this debris burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Human beings have been aware of the phenomenon since ancient times. Some Christian archaeologists have theorized that the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah was inspired by a massive meteor strike near the Dead Sea some 3,700 years ago, which wiped out the Bronze Age city of Tall el-Hammam in modern Jordan.

Aristotle believed that comets and meteors weren’t heavenly bodies but “exhalations” from the Earth that ignited in the sky. As a result, Western astronomers took little interest in them until the rise of modern science. By contrast, the Chinese began recording meteor events as early as 687 B.C. The Mayans were also fascinated by meteor showers: Studies of hieroglyphic records suggest that important occasions, such as royal coronations, were timed to coincide with the Eta Aquarid shower in the spring.

Even before telescopes were invented, it wasn’t hard to observe comets, meteors and meteor showers. The 11th-century Bayeux Tapestry contains a depiction of Halley’s comet, which appeared in 1066. But people couldn’t see meteors for what they really were. Medieval Christians referred to the annual Perseid shower as “the tears of St. Lawrence,” believing that the burning tears of the martyred saint lit up the sky on his feast day, August 10.

Things began to change in the 19th century, as astronomers noticed that some meteor showers recurred on a fixed cycle. In November 1799, the Leonid shower was recorded by Andrew Ellicott, an American surveyor on a mission to establish the boundary between the U.S. and the Spanish territory of Florida. Ellicott was on board a ship in the Florida Keys when he observed the Leonids, writing in his journal that “the whole heavens appeared as if illuminated with skyrockets, flying in an infinity of directions, and I was in constant expectation of some of them falling on the vessel.” When a similar spectacle lit up the skies in the eastern U.S. in 1833, astronomers realized that it was a recurrence of the same phenomenon and that the meteor storm must be linked to the orbit of a particular comet.

The origin of the Quadrantids was harder to locate. Astronomers kept looking for its parent comet until 2003, when NASA scientist Peter Jenniskens realized that they were on the wrong track: The shower is actually caused by a giant asteroid, designated 2003 EH1, which broke off from a comet 500 years ago. It is somehow fitting that a mystery of the New Year’s night sky yielded to the power of an open mind.

Historically Speaking: Whiskey Is the Original ‘Cup of Kindness’

The barley fields of Scotland and Ireland gave birth to a drink that became popular around the world

The Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2019

On New Year’s Eve, the song “Auld Lang Syne” urges us to “take a cup of kindness.” It’s an old Scottish saying, meaning to share a friendly tipple—presumably of single malt whiskey.

Nowadays there are whisky (Scottish, with no e), whiskey (Irish and North American), rye whiskey (North American) and bourbon (American), but no matter what the drink is called, the method for making it is essentially the same. Like beer, its ancient precursor, whiskey is made with water, grains and yeast. It’s the distillation process that leads to a higher alcohol content in whiskey. For that we must thank an Egyptian alchemist from around the 2nd century named Maria Hebraea (Mary the Jewess) of Alexandria, whose celebrated inventions include the distillation pot.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

In the boggy moors of Scotland and Ireland, where never a grape will grow but barley is plentiful, medieval monks learned how to make a whiskey fiery enough to take a man down if he wasn’t careful. The Annals of Clonmacnoise, a 15th-century chronicle of early Irish history, records that in 1405 the clan chieftain Richard MaGranell drank a “surfeit” of whiskey over Christmas and died.

From the 17th century onward, Scotch-Irish emigrants to the New World brought their distillation techniques with them. But it was an Englishman, the Jamestown colonist George Thorpe, who learned that whiskey could be made just as easily with Indian corn. Thorpe was killed in the 1622 Powhatan massacre, but his inventiveness helped to create the American love affair with bourbon, which is made from corn and aged in charred new oak barrels.

Back in the mother country, the punitive Malt Tax of 1725 drove the British whiskey industry underground. Scottish distilleries became secretive nighttime operations, which is how the nickname “moonshine” came to be. A similar whiskey tax levied by the U.S. government in 1791, to pay down the country’s Revolutionary War debt, met with fierce resistance, sparking the so-called Whiskey Rebellion among Pennsylvania farmers. Whiskey production was a lucrative business, so much so that in retirement George Washington turned his Mount Vernon plantation into the country’s largest distillery.

British visitors to the U.S. during the 19th century were delighted by the myriad ways that bourbon could be enjoyed. In 1842, Charles Dickens passed a night in Baltimore drinking mint juleps with Washington Irving; it was, he wrote, “among the most memorable of my life.” American tourists were equally impressed with British know-how around a single malt. In 1874, Mark Twain wrote to his wife Olivia, “Ever since I have been in London I have taken in a wine glass what is called a cock-tail.” The ingredients consisted of “a bottle of scotch whisky, a lemon, some crushed sugar, and a bottle of Angostura bitters.”

Whiskey’s reputation as the liquor of choice for Prohibition Era bootleggers and tortured geniuses like the novelist William Faulkner made it deeply unfashionable among the vodka-drinking MTV generation. But there’s a revival under way, aided by millennials’ love of cocktail culture. In October, a bottle of 1926 Macallan single malt whisky smashed all auction records for a wine or spirit, selling for $1.9 million. That’s $76,000 per ounce of kindness, my dear, or $158,333 a cocktail.

WSJ Historically Speaking: The Long and Winding Road to New Year’s

 

The hour, date and kind of celebration have changed century to century

With its loud TV hosts, drunken parties and awful singing, New Year’s Eve might seem to have been around forever. Yet when it comes to the timing and treatment of the  holiday, our version of New Year’s—the eve and day itself—is a relatively recent tradition.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

The Babylonians celebrated New Year’s in March, when the vernal equinox—a day of equal light and darkness—takes place. To them, New Year’s was a time of pious reckoning rather than raucous partying. The Egyptians got the big parties going: Their celebration fell in line with the annual flooding of the Nile River. It was a chance to get roaring drunk for a few weeks rather just for a few hours. The holiday’s timing, though, was the opposite of ours, in July.

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WSJ Historically Speaking: A History of Dubious Hangover Cures

On Dec. 31, 1947, a celebrant at a New York nightclub overindulged. PHOTO: BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

New Year’s Eve partygoers know three things: Somewhere fireworks are going off, somewhere a better party is going on, and somewhere there’s another serving of alcohol. After that, there’s the inevitable crashing headache in the morning. Dorothy Parker, one of the great tipplers of the 20th century, had it right: “A hangover is the wrath of grapes.”

The aforesaid grapes appear to have been in a nonstop rage from at least 7000 B.C., when the Chinese were crushing them in a recipe that included fermented rice and honey. Since then, the world’s greatest minds, sober and not, have been searching for a hangover cure, or at the very least a negotiated truce. Continue reading…