Hunting for Chile's First Sub 1866
(See also "American Civil War submarine found" built in New York.)
Years ago I studied with Louis C. Faron at Stony Brook University, who was Julian H. Steward's "last graduate student", an American anthropologist who testified about the travel and settlement patterns of the Shoshone native Americans who ranged over a wide area of resources in different seasons. Louis C. Faron lived then in the Village of Stony Brook, which is also known for its museums and Stanford White designed church, and local zoning Ward Melville "American Philosophical Society" address on historic preservation of Stony Brook. Stanford White a famous architect in some of the public buildings of NYC, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, lived nearby on an estate in Nissequogue, (also the location start of home "interior decorating" by a woman). It had a very tall shingle covered windmill for pumping water (in Scientific American? 125 feet high? Vandals set it on-fire in the early 1960s, the iron stanchions or feet I've seen, cast in Baltimore, Maryland, as it was either bulldozed or fell over the embankment it had pumped water for the cistern at the "Squash Court". The "feet" are visible along a small path from a small public parking lot, shown to me by a Stony Brook engineering student. The large vane windmill was once a "landmark" and visible across the Long Island Sound, almost like a lighthouse, during daylight hours. I once helped put a new window in the artists studio in the Stanford White estate, though there to cleanup after the patio doors were put in the ceiling of the studio providing for ventilation also, where there had been many small panes.)
Louis C. Faron, whom I once visited for dinner I think, was an ethnographer of the Mapuche "Indians" native Chileans who were in the news recently suing Microsoft for taking their language and writing a version of Windows for it, without their input I suppose. There is quite a fight over "open source" versus Microsoft's software in South America, some countries have preferred Linux where they can see all the code they are using rather than the software code they don't know how is operating, e.g., ATM software has been known to embezzle banks by taking undisclosed amounts, sort like the fractional cents I once heard deposited elsewhere in some programmer's bank account. Another apocryphal story is the line of code that was supposed to have a "," instead a "." in Fortran and the rocket exploded because the proofreader of the code missed it.
Wonder how many other submarines there were in other countries. The Australian Navy says "The Turtle" built during the American Revolutionary War and used unsuccessfully in the New York City harbor against the British Navy was the first. A replica was on exhibit in Castle Clinton, put there by the "History Channel" which also promised a more refined model according to the "NY Daily News" in lower Manhattan the day before September 11, 2001. That day or somewhere around it, it also had a newsworthy item of "NY Bravest" disentangling a French photographer on a motorized parasail from the Statue of Liberty where he was trying to get the "bon photo" I suppose.
No comments:
Post a Comment