“The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around”*…
Your correspondent will on the road for the next several days, so (R)D will be on hiatus until on or around September 3. Meantime, a seasonally-appropriate post…
Writing for Texas Monthly, Lauren Larson visits Reddy Ice, the largest producer of packaged ice in North America and it’s CEO, Lonny Warner, to explore a billion-dollar industry that’s essential to us all, but that few of us stop to ponder…
… Warner joins a long procession of icemen who have bemoaned the lack of interest in their trade. “We are so familiar with water in its liquid and its solid form, that we seldom think of it as a mineral, and still less as a mineral product of any considerable industrial importance,” wrote W. P. Blake, an American geologist and mining consultant, in an 1883 report on the country’s ice trade. And yet, he wrote, “the industry is peculiarly American, and in no other country has the business of cutting and storing ice been so well systematized and perfected.”
By the time of Blake’s findings, people had been experimenting with making and keeping ice for centuries. In India, possibly as early as three thousand years ago, people used clay pots to cool water: The water’s evaporation through the clay removed heat, leaving chilled water or even ice under the right conditions. The technique is still used, especially as the country experiences record heat waves.
Americans in the nineteenth century, the dawn of the modern ice industry, had it easier. “The natural supply of ice in the United States is almost beyond calculation,” wrote a U.S. census agent named Henry Hall in a report submitted in 1883. Since at least 1805 so-called natural ice had been harvested from northern lakes, rivers, and ponds in a process accurately and musically depicted in the opening scene of Frozen, a rare cinematic nod to the ice industry. (In Eugene O’Neill’s 1946 play, The Iceman Cometh, a salesman has told his alcoholic friends that his wife is at home with the iceman. The iceman in question is meant to evoke death—the woman has been killed—but anxieties around swole deliverymen entering homes and seducing wives seem to have been prevalent in the twentieth century.) Using long handsaws and a variety of improvised plows, Northerners would cut grids in the ice and remove blocks, which were then stored or sent to warmer locales by ship or rail in insulated containers.
Thanks to a man named Frederic Tudor, some of these destinations were quite far-flung. Tudor was a merchant from Boston, more mutton chop than man in his later years. He would ship natural ice from Thoreau’s Walden Pond, which is startlingly Whole Foods–y branding for the nineteenth century.
Tudor envisioned a global ice industry. Perhaps he was motivated by the limited market for his Gläce-priced ice blocks in the U.S. or by the prevalence elsewhere of tropical fevers such as yellow fever, as the symptoms of these were often soothed by cold water. (In 1851 a doctor named John Gorrie experimented with creating a cold sickroom for malaria patients’ high fevers, effectively inventing air-conditioning.) In 1806, Tudor attempted to ship blocks of ice to the island of Martinique, a speculation that is detailed by Jonathan Rees, a history professor at Colorado State University Pueblo, in Refrigeration Nation, one of three books he’s written about refrigeration. First, the owner of a boat Tudor had chartered got cold feet, convinced, as many shipowners were, that the ice would melt and sink the ship. Tudor chartered another ship and successfully delivered his wares to the island, but Martinique had no icehouse in which to store it, and it began to melt, as ice does. Customers also had no idea how to transport it from his hold to their homes or keep it cold once they did; Tudor advised them to wrap their purchases in cloth. “He still got complaints, since it melted anyway,” writes Rees.
Tudor could very well have gone down in history as the father of the modern Potemkin start-up rather than the father of the modern ice industry, but he persevered. He saw that in order to create the worldwide ice trade he envisioned, he would have to build a global network of icehouses. Eventually his empire grew vast, and historians call Tudor by the absolutely sick moniker the Ice King…
… By the mid to late nineteenth century, artificial ice makers were being invented across the globe. Texans—perhaps shaken by the Civil War, which hindered the shipment of ice, and also likely motivated by the state’s growing beef industry—were aggressive in the ice race. By 1867, notes Rees, when the United States had only eight ice plants, three existed in San Antonio. Some early refrigeration machines used compressed ammonia, which is still widely used as a coolant. In the coming decades, ice plants bloomed across the state like frost on a window.
In the late 1920s, Southland Ice Company had eight plants and 21 retail locations in Texas, from which it provided ice for the iceboxes of residents in surrounding areas. (Widespread adoption of refrigerators was still several decades away and was driven, Rees tells me, by the lure of ice in the home. “The argument was always, ‘Get rid of the iceman. Buy a refrigerator.’ ”) Southland eventually became Southland Ice Corporation, and its icehouses, which had grown into convenience stores called Tote’ms, were rechristened 7-Elevens. In 1972, as 7-Eleven was growing into the brand that would stain the lips of countless middle schoolers with its neon Slurpees, Southland rebranded its large ice operation, calling it Reddy Ice Division.
Reddy was not yet the acquisitive ice empire it is today. For most of the twentieth century, regional producers thrived. But then, in the early nineties, the packaged-ice industry encountered an innovation: the in-store bagger. Refrigerator ice makers already existed but were not a particularly virile threat, as it would take a long time for a refrigerator-door ice maker to fill a cooler. In-store ice baggers were a different story.
The machines had been perfected by a young man named Jim Stuart, a former accountant who had consulted for a company called Automatic Ice Machine, or A.I.M. Inspired by that work, he began selling what he called the Ice Factory, a machine that automatically made and packaged ice at grocery stores and other retailers that had previously bought their ice from local businesses. Stuart began acquiring these flailing producers. His Houston-based company, Packaged Ice, quickly achieved ice supremacy, and in 1998, Stuart bought Reddy. (It still makes the Ice Factory.) A 2001 New Yorker profile christened Stuart the Emperor of Ice…
[Larson reviews the uses to which we put ice– the social (American’s prefer their beverages chilled), but also the more industral: ice is critical to everything from construction (e.g., in high temps it’s used to keep concrete from setting too quickly and becoming brittle) to medical treatment and research…]
… Not far from Reddy’s headquarters is a storage facility with twelve thousand pounds of ice that’s kept on reserve—kept on ice!—for emergencies. When natural disasters level our critical systems, as ritually occurs in Texas, ice is suddenly even more crucial. “When a hurricane hits and power goes out, we’re a lifeline,” Warner says. “It’s not for drinks at that point. It’s ‘how do I keep my food cold?’ ” In the event of a crisis, Reddy works with H-E-B, Walmart, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to distribute ice, often thousands of pounds of it. He vividly remembers when Hurricane Beryl tore through Houston soon after the Fourth of July in 2024. Celebrations had cleared out Reddy and its distributors’ reserves, leading them to scramble to get ice from across the country to Houston. “We had H-E-B calling us for ice, and we were just trying to get it anywhere we could,” Horton, of Polar Ice, recalls.
The moments when ice is needed but unavailable are as irritating and unsettling to us as the breakdown of any utility, even in much lower-stakes contexts than a hurricane’s aftermath. “Ice is actually a very high-passion business,” says Juan Estrada, who directs Reddy plants in the Metroplex and across the state. Customers might stop at a convenience store on the way to a party, gather some snacks, and then ask for a bag of ice at the checkout. If there is no ice available, Estrada says, they’ll likely abandon all their other purchases and walk out. For most of us, these small but searing disappointments are the only times we think about the role of ice in our lives.
But for many Texans, ice can be the only thing keeping us from succumbing to our surroundings. In 2024, Harris County Public Health reported that heat-related illnesses had increased by 329 percent between 2019 and 2023. Texans who are exposed to heat as part of their work in industries including agriculture, construction, and delivery—as is the case for more than 35 percent of Americans—are disproportionately vulnerable, as are older adults and children.
Those of us outside those groups are not immune. As early as March of this year, a ranger at Big Bend National Park tells me, she and her colleagues were responding to between four and six heat-related incidents each week. Rangers bring ice on almost every medical response; it’s crucial for stabilizing patients during what can be an hours-long journey from the park to a hospital. In the summer, says San Antonio Fire Department medic Ashley Long, everyone is vulnerable to the heat, even those who have been hydrating all day. Much like the ice distributors, Long responds to ten times as many emergencies when it’s hot. “The hospitals are just slammed. Every single bed is taken,” she says. “Every disease and debilitation that people have is magnified by the heat.”
Perhaps we don’t think much about ice because doing so requires us to consider how implausible it is that we’re able to live comfortably in such heat. How lucky we are to enjoy a snow cone on a one-hundred-degree day.
An invisible essential: “Inside the Billion-Dollar Industry That’s Keeping Your Beer Cold—and Saving Lives,” from @lonlozzin.bsky.social in @texasmonthly.bsky.social.
For a look at the even larger, even more infrastructurally-central, but equally opaque– ‘cold chain’: “Food is simply sunlight in cold storage.”
* Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
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As we stay cool, we might note that there’s still time to check in on World Water Week; today is its final day. While its in-person events are happening in Stockholm, much of the program is available online.
Why we should care (UK-centered, but all-too-relevant across the globe).
“Whatever the world is, today, good and bad together, that is what Gutenberg’s invention has made it”*…
Before he became the renowned author we know, Samuel Clemens– Mark Twain– worked (among other things) as a printer. He knew both the painstaking (and sometimes painful) labor of hand-setting type and the extraordinary cultural power of the mass-printed (by Twain’s time, on steam-powered presses) products that it enabled.
As Jeff Jarvis explains in an excerpt from Hot Type- The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad, Twain lived through the transition from hand setting to the Linotype, and through the intertwined transition of the society of which the transition was a part…
In the history of the invention of the typesetting machine and the consequent birth of mass media, Mark Twain is the Zelig of our tale, returning frequently as a typesetter in his brother’s ratty newspaper; as a tramp printer witnessing an explosion of progress in printing technology; as the bankrupted investor in the failed Paige Compositor, a competitor to the successful Linotype; as an early best-selling author and cultural celebrity; and as a publisher trying to invent a business model for books as an industry.
Now that their machinery could produce volume, publishers needed ways to sell at scale, to build the modern phenomenon of the best-seller. The problem: In 1859, only 1,090 bookstores dotted America. By 1914, there were still only 3,501. So if readers couldn’t find books, books had to find their readers. For certain authors and publishers, including Twain, that was accomplished through subscription publishing, with door-to-door canvassers taking orders for books before they were printed. Until the end of the nineteenth century, three quarters of books in the U.S. were sold this way.
In 1874, the New York Tribune estimated that 50,000 agents were employed by subscription publishers. What a wonderful fictional character it would be to imagine the itinerant peddler pitching not pots or patent medicines but literature and literacy, foot in door after door, blurbing Twain with a few dozen sample pages and illustrations to whet curiosity and demand.
Subscription publishing brought advantages. By collecting orders for books before printing, publishers knew how many copies to produce. Publishers could use customers’ capital to finance production—not unlike a content producer today raising money via Kickstarter or Patreon. Subscription publishing’s cross to bear was snobbery. William Dean Howells dismissed subscription books, carving out a caveat only for his friend Twain: “No book of literary quality was made to go by subscription except Mr. Clemens’s books, and I think these went because the subscription public never knew what good literature they were.”
The regular trade carped that subscription publishers “flood the country with worthless books, poorly written, poorly printed and bound, containing a small amount of matter in large type and with wide margins to the page, for a large price.” Elisha Bliss, Twain’s publisher, defended the trade to the Tribune: “Instead of injuring the regular book business I think we create a thirst for knowledge and thus increase the sale of all kinds of books. In the little town where there are no bookstores the book agent induces people to buy.”
Twain valued these readers as they valued him. They freed him from the expectations of high culture and its critics. And he was certain they’d make him rich. “Harper publishes very high-class books,” he wrote to a friend, “and they go to people who are accustomed to read. That class are surfeited. But there is a vast class that isn’t—the factory hands and the farmers. They never go to a bookstore; they have to be hunted down by the canvasser.”
Twain knew that a new, mass audience had to be corralled, one door knocked after another. As he wrote to London critic Andrew Lang: “The thin top crust of humanity—the cultivated—are worth pacifying, worth pleasing, worth coddling, worth nourishing and preserving with dainties and delicacies, it is true; but to cater to that little faction is of no very dignified or valuable occupation, it seems to me; it is merely feeding the over-fed, and there must be small satisfaction in that.” He sought instead to entertain “the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are underneath….I have never tried in even one single instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for that, either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game—the masses.”
In 1866, Twain nabbed the assignment of a dream: sailing to the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) to send back reports to the Sacramento Union. Upon his return to San Francisco, he launched a side gig as a lecturer, amusing ever-larger audiences with his travel tales and humor. “He wouldn’t be a cloistered writer so much as a showman, a public personality, a professional crowd-pleaser. In short, a celebrity,” wrote Ron Chernow. Next, Twain reported for the Alta California about a journey Back East. Then he issued his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, which debuted to good reviews and established Twain’s reputation as a wry humorist. The book was published by Twain’s friend Charles Henry Webb, whom he soon dumped, complaining—as would become his habit—about sales.
Next came another enviable gig and a reputation-setting assignment from Alta California, to report from a five-month cruise to the Holy Land on the Quaker City. His letters ran in the paper and were picked up in others across the country. He returned home to a letter from Elisha Bliss of Hartford’s American Publishing Company, soliciting a book on the adventure, which became The Innocents Abroad.
Twain received negotiating advice from famed minister Henry Ward Beecher, who had inspired the Holy Land trip but didn’t go along. In Twain’s telling, Beecher offered a prophetic warning: “Now here—you are one of the talented men of the age—nobody is going to deny that—but in matters of business, I don’t suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains.” Twain reported to his family, “I listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with illustrations….But I had my mind made up to one thing—I wasn’t going to touch a book unless there was money in it, and a good deal of it.” He soon complained this was a bad deal.
Subscription books were fancy and rich in illustration, not so much elegant as tarted up. Buyers had the choice of various bindings as upgrades. The average price of Innocents was $4 (almost $100 today). Readers bought them to display their erudition to visitors: every book a coffee-table book. The Innocents Abroad was received well, favorably reviewed in The Atlantic Monthly by Howells, who noted its length—“in compliance with one of the main conditions of a subscription book’s success, bigness namely”; praised its drollery five times, its irony three times, and its impudence twice; applauded the “amount of pure human nature in the book, that rarely gets into literature”; and counted Twain among America’s humorists, “quite worthy of the company of the best.” Twain’s head swelled sufficiently to accept the praise: “It was quite generally conceded that I was a valuable asset to the American nation and to the great ranks of literature.”
In a year and a half, Innocents sold 82,524 copies, nowhere near Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s 300,000 in its first year, but a success nonetheless. Twain had negotiated well, for he rejected a $10,000 flat payment from Bliss in favor of the 5-percent royalty, which added up to $16,504—about $400,000 today. During his lifetime, no book of Twain’s sold as well as quickly, fueling his chronic grievances with publishers.
Twain wrote a next book for Bliss, about his life Out West, this time demanding half of the profits after manufacturing costs, equaling a royalty of 7.5 percent. Twain told Bliss, “We shall sell 90,000 copies in the first 12 months. I haven’t even a shadow of doubt of that.” Published in 1872, it sold 65,000 in the first year—again, respectable.
Twain and Warren joined to write The Gilded Age, published by Bliss for a 10-percent royalty. The book sold 50,000 copies in its first year. Twain thought he would be a better publisher. He would soon try.
He released The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, selling only 23,600 copies in its first year. He blamed Bliss for mistiming its release. He next published A Tramp Abroad in 1880. Walter A. Friedman provided an accounting: American Publishing sold 62,000 copies in the first year at $3.50 each for a total of $218,000. Just over half of that went to sales agents, who paid their canvassers. The company kept $106,000, out of which it spent $41,540 on printing, leaving a profit of $64,460, of which Twain received $32,000—nearly $1 million today.
As Twain was writing The Prince and the Pauper, Bliss died. He shifted publication of The Prince to his friend James Osgood. This time, Twain funded the book’s publication—complaining that he was out $65,000 before the first copy was printed. Instead of receiving a royalty, he paid Osgood 7.5 percent of sales. Neither was experienced in subscription sales, and of a first printing of 25,000, 5,000 remained in their warehouses after two years. He repeated the mistake with the publication of Life on the Mississippi, which lured only 30,000 orders, far from the 100,000 Twain hoped for. Osgood’s company ended in bankruptcy in 1885. This might have discouraged a sensible man from deciding to become a publisher. Not Twain.
Twain established his own publishing house, giving it the name of his general manager and dogsbody, Charles L. Webster & Co. The aim was to publish only Twain’s books. The first was his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, in 1885. Infamously, an engraver subverted the publication by endowing Uncle Silas Phelps with an erect penis, necessitating the scissoring of the offending image from thousands of copies and delaying publication past prime Christmas season. Nonetheless, the Webster Company’s agents sold 60,000 copies, rewarding the author with a check for $54,000. “Once more I experienced a new birth,” Twain wrote. “I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna, I suppose.”
Huck’s success emboldened Twain and Webster to expand as a full-fledged publishing house. Twain worked diligently to solicit the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Twain offered Grant an astounding 70 percent of profits. He told Webster to hire veterans as canvassers, have them wear their Grand Army regalia, and deliver his script: “I presume it is simply a question with you of your choice of bindings, as no American will want to have it said that he has not read General Grant’s book, a work that will descend to your children and will increase in value with every generation.” The memoirs were a stupendous best-seller, 10,000 door-to-door canvassers selling 325,000 two-volume sets in 1886, earning the general’s widow and children as much as $15 million in today’s dollars.
It was downhill from there for Twain and Webster, their record studded with poor choices of books by a half-dozen Civil War generals or their widows, the king of Hawaii, and Pope Leo XIII (“’Twas kind of a fizzle,” recalled Twain’s maid Katy Leary). Twain signed Henry Ward Beecher to write his memoirs, but the minister died before setting pen to paper. Twain was inspired to publish the ambitious Library of American Literature with 1,700 selections by 500 authors in eleven volumes, but failed to grasp the perilous economics of selling such a gargantuan series by subscription. Readers paid a three-dollar down-payment, but Webster & Co. would not collect the rest of its thirty-three-dollar price until after paying the printers thirteen dollars, on top of twelve dollars to sales agents, with Twain carrying that debt in the meantime. The company needed capital to tide itself over, but where was Twain’s—and his wife’s—money? Sunk into the Paige Compositor. [see here] The business analysis was not complicated. His maid understood it: “Mr. Clemens was all deep in the typesetting machine, and he was putting all his money in that so he didn’t have much left to help out the publishing company. That was the beginning of the end of that venture.”
Even without their bad business decisions, Twain’s venture was likely doomed, along with the subscription publishing industry, for books were getting radically cheaper, with ever-more competition. The number of titles published in the U.S. more than doubled, from 4,559 in 1890 to 12,010 in 1914. In 1895, The Bookman began publishing the first lists of most-popular books according to store sales. The term “best-seller” came into general use around 1910, according to historian of publishing Frank Luther Mott, who set the bar for “best-seller” at “one percent of the total population of continental United States for the decade in which the book was published.” To meet Mott’s benchmark, books today would need to sell 3.4 million copies. For comparison, Kristen McLean, a lead industry analyst at NPD BookScan, reported that in 2022, of 45,571 titles released by just the top ten publishers, only 163 books or 0.36 percent sold more than 100,000 copies in a year.
In our age of mass media, we have developed a skewed definition of big—a presumption that many means most. To sell 100,000 books—and congratulations if you do!—is to speak to 0.03 percent of the nation, hardly a resounding expression of the cultural zeitgeist. The blockbuster economics of media—in film, television, music, and books—depends on a few best-sellers to make up for the vast number of lesser bets. But that eternal quest for blockbusters gives the impression that anything called a best-seller is widely influential, while all else is dismissed. Whether selling entertainment to an audience or an audience to advertisers, the mechanization and industrialization of media—begun with the steam-powered press and culminating with the Linotype—spawned a business and cultural obsession with scale…
The rise and fall of subscription book publishing and the birth of mass media: “Mark Twain, America’s First Celebrity Author and Publisher” from @jeffjarvis.bsky.social via @literaryhub.bsky.social.
* Mark Twain, in an April, 1900 letter contributed to the celebration of the opening of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz
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As we roll the presses, we might send illuminating birthday greetings to Lee de Forrest; he was born on this date in 1873. An electrical engineer and inventor, he ultimately held 300 patents on a variety of inventions crucial to electronic communications, and co-founded the forerunner organization to the IEEE, De Forest is probably best remembered as the inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, which made possible live radio broadcasting (which he also pioneered) and became the key component of all radio, telephone, radar, television, and computer systems before the invention of the transistor in 1947.
Unwittingly then had I discovered an Invisible Empire of the Air, intangible, yet solid as granite, whose structure shall persist while man inhabits the planet.
– Father of Radio: The Autobiography of Lee De Forest (1950), p. 4
Coincidentally, today is also the anniversary of the award in 1930 of Philo Farnsworth‘s first patent: a television system (U.S. 1,773,980), with a description of his image dissector tube, which was his most important contribution to the development of television.
“All progress is experimental”*…
An excerpt from Stuart Firestein‘s new book, It Could Be Otherwise- Science in the Age of Uncertainty…
Progress is a precursor to, perhaps even a prerequisite for, optimism. Not the psychological optimism of cheery moods, but the scientific optimism that is the main subject of this book. Psychological optimism, as I have suggested, is more like resignation—making the best of what you have, finding silver linings. Scientific optimism is forward-looking, even obsessed with a future of possibilities.
Progress, too, is future-oriented. While that may sound trivial to modern ears—of course, progress requires a future—it has not always been so. Even today, progress is a controversial subject. We’re all quite happy to have anesthesia. Less happy for sure about The Bomb. Both are the result of scientific progress.
How do we parse this and many other examples of technologies that are used for good or ill, or many times both? Scientific progress is littered with genies we might rather not have let out of the bottle. Nonetheless, I think that most people would agree that the benefits are undeniable and, by most measures, outweigh the harms. Arguments over progress fill books and journals and podcasts and many other media, most of which rely themselves on some technological progress. Progress is a fraught subject.
Let us try avoiding this complicated morass by separating the idea of progress from the products of progress. This is not just a semantic trick, but a way to see aspects of progress that have shaped human society and attitudes, no matter how you feel about the particular results of that progress. It’s not that I think discussions about the values of progress are not important, but for our purposes here, it is not any particular progress that matters. It is the idea of progress and having that idea as a regular part of our mental lives—as a shared outlook, as an expectation, as commonplace—that have so radically changed us and our social constitution in the last few centuries.
This idea of progress is something that gets much less attention than the products and values of progress, perhaps because it has become so habitual in our thinking that we are all sure we know what it means. Not so. There are many layers of meaning and many aspects to the concept that are worth examining, especially in light of our attempts to redefine optimism, which depends in many ways, and in many not-so-obvious ways, on the idea of progress. So, let’s complicate the idea of progress. That will require us to let go of some familiar associations attached to the word and consider some perhaps unexpected ones.
First, we should disabuse ourselves of the notion that progress as an idea is something innate to human beings, that it has been around since people were painting pictures on cave walls. There is no strong evidence that Paleolithic cave artists were expressing an explicit optimism for the future in the way we think of that sentiment today. Most scholars interpret early cave art as tied to immediate concerns—rituals, communication, or sympathetic magic—rather than a conscious projection of hope into an abstract future. There is a lack of explicit progress iconography—of a past or present, a before and after, or a change over time. Indeed, the paintings may just as easily have been a depiction of a recently successful hunt, with no thought of the future.
Several things are required for an idea such as progress to gain a footing, and it was not until the Scientific Revolution that all of those were met. This is not to say that some notion of change did not exist before the late sixteenth century, but with very few exceptions, it seems that change was either not highly regarded or simply occurred so slowly as to go largely unnoticed.
It may seem remarkable, but the Athenian Greeks, so admired for providing the foundations of philosophy and democratic ideals of governance and even an early devotion to something we could sort of call science, had no single word for progress. There were words that could loosely be translated as progress but they were more like “change” or “increase” or some vague property that we might now associate with progress. To the extent that progress was considered, it was typically thought to be undesirable. Progress and the change associated with it were a source of dissolution and decay, a further loss of the innocence of the Golden Age of the ancestors. They were the opposite of stability and dependability. Consider the mythic fates of Icarus, Prometheus, Hercules—all were punished rather severely for trying to expand knowledge, to make progress.
The Platonic ideal of transcendent forms that exist in eternity is another block to progress, because, strictly speaking, there is no open future and no such thing as invention. As E.R. Dodds put it in his famous essay, “The Ancient Concept of Progress,” “What the ancients call invention is but recollection of a reality which is already there—nothing entirely new can ever come into being.” There is nothing new under the sun, only perhaps approaches to more perfect versions that already exist in some transcendent place.
Yes, the Greeks made remarkable advances in mathematics, but mostly in geometry, which is about solid, stable objects and uses a strict hierarchy of axioms, rules, and procedures—very Platonic. I doubt the Greeks could have imagined calculus, the mathematics of change. Indeed, no one would until nearly two thousand years after Euclid. What progress was made in some technological areas—navigation, shipbuilding—was seen as the pinnacle of achievement. There was little motivation to go further.
There were exceptions, but they were outliers. Archimedes wrote, “I apprehend that some either of my contemporaries or of my successors will be enabled to discover other theorems in addition, which have not as yet occurred to me.” In the second century BCE, the astronomer Hipparchus compiled a list of the fixed stars so that future astronomers might compare his observations to their own and discover what might have changed.
But these ideas, it seems, did not percolate into the society of philosophers, politicians, and the average man, and were not taken up by the Roman civilization that supplanted the Athenian and Alexandrian Greeks. Roman science consisted mainly of improving technologies in civil engineering (water and road systems) and warfare, compiling medical knowledge, and developing tools for specialized uses. There was little of discovery and interest beyond this sort of technology development.
Progress fared only slightly better in the long period from the fall of Rome (c. 475 CE) to the Renaissance (in the fourteenth century)—one thousand years during which change was so slow that for nearly forty generations, most people saw little or no change in technology during their lifetimes (except perhaps in warfare). You would likely do what your parents did and your children would do as you did. Options were limited. It’s not that there was no progress, but that within a single generation, so little changed as to be imperceptible.
Think of the stirrup, sometimes credited as being one of the three most important inventions in the course of history. (The plow and gunpowder are the other two, or the printing press, depending on your perspective.) The stirrup probably originated in the Far East in the first century CE and was introduced in Europe around the seventh century. It remained of critical importance from then until about one hundred years ago, when horsemanship quite suddenly was no longer a required skill. That’s thirteen hundred years of the same individual transportation technology. Julius Caesar and Thomas Jefferson both traveled around their lands by horse.
Robert Merton, the renowned sociologist of science, has made the case that in spite of the occasional bright star or beacon of discovery in the earlier periods (e.g., Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon), they were not enough to support a scientific infrastructure, or the social requirements of a scientific community. To remain viable, science must be widespread and continuous, able to spread and connect with other ideas and other minds.
The Renaissance brings a spark of life to more worldly intellectual pursuits, and the very beginnings of science can be seen toward the end of that period and the start of what may be termed the early modern period (the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries). The Renaissance, as the name implies, was a rebirth of interest in classical (i.e., Greek and Roman) culture, and so was a look back as much as forward. Nonetheless, the Renaissance provided a kind of onramp to the Scientific Revolution and the much speedier pace of progress associated with it.
This faster pace was a key element that allowed progress to become an idea, a viewpoint, a mental and social state. For that to happen, progress must be experienced within a generation, within a single lifetime. That means it must be rapid. I would go a step further and propose that for the idea of progress to become manifest, it must not only be rapid, but it must also accelerate. It is not enough for progress to be fast; the very rate of progress must increase. Then, and only then, will the idea, as much as its products, take hold of a society. It is a kind of cognitive bias that results from the way our sensory systems interact with the world that we are more aware of acceleration than of speed. Like flying in a plane, you don’t really notice the speed when it is constant, only when there is acceleration.
Four critical prerequisites are necessary for the idea of progress to develop and become a driving force in society. Each of these arose separately over the course of time from Athenian Greece, but they came together in the Scientific Revolution and its immediate aftermath. They are what produced the idea of progress.
First is a transition from a circular to a linear view of time and history. Circular philosophies of recurrence, common in many cultures and religious systems, are not as susceptible to progress, since they conceive of the world as repeating history in an endless cycle. For the Greeks, the circle was the perfect shape because this reflected their worldview of recurrence. Most ancient calendars are in the form of a circle, based on recurring astronomical events and repeating seasons.
Even today, astrological calendars supposedly reflecting ancient views arrange the zodiacal months in a circle. The linear calendar we live and work with now is effectively infinite; you just keep adding days. (On the Calendar app provided with my Apple computer, I was able to scroll one hundred years into the future to 2125, and there seemed to be no end in sight.) This calendar takes for granted that time will proceed without end and therefore that unending progress is also possible. Although the short biblical history and prophecy of a coming apocalypse truncate the literal religious timescale, it was the Judeo-Christian adoption of a linear calendar that provided, if unintentionally, the ground for an open-ended view of continued progress. As J. B. Bury put it in his book The Idea of Progress, “You have not got the idea of progress until you go on to conceive that it is destined to advance indefinitely into the future.”
A considerable body of scholarship exists on the shift from circular to linear time and its effects on philosophy, society, and culture. Much of it is also wrapped up in the invention of mechanical clocks, in particular the mechanical clocks of medieval Europe. that progressed indefinitely—the second, the minute, and the hour. Today, we argue about the merits of daylight saving time, but until the advent of clocks, hours were simply split into equal portions of day and night. During the summer, daytime hours were longer—twelve of them needed to cover the day. Likewise, nighttime hours were shorter since there had to be twelve of them packed into the shorter night. In the winter, this was reversed. Time was thus malleable and very local.
Keeping time in constant units allowed advances in navigation and in communication and collaboration over distances—time units were now the same everywhere. Time could be parceled into measurable packets, but it was also continuous and unending. There was now a distinct past, present, and future. Calendars possessed an infinite timeline. Once a future existed, there could be progress…
Technology, science, time– and the fraught subject of progress: “What Does ‘Progress’ Mean, Anyway?” via @literaryhub.bsky.social.
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As we parse progression, we might spare a thought for Peter Cooper Hewitt; he died on this date in 1921. An electrical engineer, he studied the production of light using electrical discharges (while Thomas Edison was still developing incandescent filaments) and, in 1901, invented the first mercury-vapor lamp, an important forerunner of fluorescent lamps.
Hewitt also developed the mercury arc rectifier, the first rectifier that could convert alternating current power to direct current without mechanical means. It was widely used in electric railways, industry, electroplating, and high-voltage direct current (HVDC) power transmission. Although it was largely replaced by power semiconductor devices in the 1970s and 1980s, it is still used in some high power applications.
“Nature alone is antique; and the oldest art, a mushroom”*…
Every August, Telluride hosts the Telluride Mushroom Festival—an event that brings fungal science, conservation, foraging, cultivation, psychedelic research, art, and community together in the Colorado mountains. Tamara MC reports…
… Nestled in the Colorado mountains, Telluride has long been a town of festivals: Bluegrass, Film, Mountainfilm, and Jazz. But for more than four decades, the Telluride Mushroom Festival has carved out its own niche as the largest gathering of its kind in North America.
The festival began as the Aspen Mushroom Conference before moving to Telluride in 1981. Its early circle included Dr. Emanuel “Manny” Salzman, a Denver radiologist and one of its founders, and his wife, Joanne Salzman, along with Gary Lincoff, author of The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms; Dr. Andrew Weil, the integrative medicine pioneer; Paul Stamets, the mycologist and entrepreneur who founded Fungi Perfecti; and Goodtimes himself. Furci credits Goodtimes with helping bring the gathering from Aspen to Telluride. Today, the festival operates as a program of the Telluride Institute.
What began as a relatively intimate gathering focused on psychedelics and fungal science has grown considerably. More than 700 people attended in 2019; by 2025, [Guiliana] Furci [here] says, attendance had reached about 1,500. The growth accelerated in the pandemic years, when mushroom foraging and other outdoor pursuits drew new interest, part of what Furci calls “the mushroom hype.” Roughly 70 percent of recent attendees, she says, were experiencing the festival for the first time. Yet despite the influx of newcomers, the gathering retains what Furci describes as a “tribe or family feeling,” with regulars returning year after year and considering one another family…
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… Without fungi, everyday life would look radically different: no beer, wine, chocolate, coffee, or bread. No penicillin. Fungi decompose organic matter and return nutrients to ecosystems, while fungal partnerships with plants helped make life on land possible and remain essential to much of terrestrial plant life.
“They are a life form that is different than plants and animals,” Furci explains. “They are neither plant nor animal nor bacteria. They can live on land, in the air, in water, both oceans and fresh waters.”
The fungal kingdom is astonishingly diverse, encompassing yeasts, molds, and mushroom-forming fungi, including everything from morels and chanterelles to conks and puffballs. Fungi also form the structural basis of lichens. When Furci mentions that morels and chanterelles are both fungi, she quickly puts the distance between them in perspective: “They are as closely related as a whale and a flea.”
Both whales and fleas belong to the animal kingdom, she notes, yet occupy profoundly different branches of it. The same is true within the fungal kingdom. “There are more ways to be a fungus than there are ways to be an animal,” Furci says.
Some of those differences challenge familiar ideas about reproduction. Schizophyllum commune, a widespread wood-decaying fungus, has more than 23,000 mating types—a genetic system far removed from a simple male-female binary.
Are fungi gendered? “No,” Furci says flatly. But she cannot bring herself to call them “it,” either. “They’re definitely not things, so I can’t talk about them as things. And they definitely don’t have a he vibe.”
For Furci, the problem is partly one of language. Calling a living organism “it” can reduce it to an object, while “he” or “she” imposes a gender fungi do not have. That attention to words extends well beyond pronouns.
Furci is one of the driving forces behind the “3F proposal”: Fauna, Flora, and Funga. For generations, “flora and fauna” has served as shorthand for the living world while leaving fungi linguistically—and often institutionally—out of the picture. In 2018, Furci and mycologists Francisco Kuhar, Elisandro Ricardo Drechsler-Santos, and Donald Pfister published a paper formally delimiting “funga” as the fungal equivalent of fauna and flora: the diversity of fungi within a particular place or region.
The idea has traveled far beyond the original paper. The Fauna Flora Funga Initiative now counts more than 2,500 signatories across 77 countries and documents adoption or use of mycologically inclusive language by conservation groups, universities, museums, and government agencies around the world. In 2021, the IUCN Species Survival Commission and Re:wild formally embraced the three-F framework, calling for fungi to be recognized alongside fauna and flora in conservation language…
Much more: “The Telluride Mushroom Festival: Where Fungal Love Runs Wild,” from @tamaramc.bsky.social
Still, we’d do well to remember (Sir) Terry Pratchett‘s wise reminder: “All Fungi are edible. Some fungi are only edible once.”
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As we celebrate shrooms, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965, on their second day off during their tour of North America, that The Beatles rented a house owned by Zsa Zsa Gabor in Beverly Hills. There, they were visited by Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds as well as English actress Eleanor Bron, who’d appeared in their film, Help. While young girls stood outside the gates, John Lennon and George Harrison had their second experience with LSD, and Ringo his first. (Paul did not partake.) It was here that McGuinn introduced Harrison to Indian music, particularly that of Ravi Shankar.
Actor Peter Fonda was also present, and helped comfort Harrison as he grew unsettled after taking LSD and thought he was dying. According to Fonda, Lennon overheard him saying to George, “I know what it’s like to be dead,” recalling a childhood incident in which his heart stopped beating several times due to blood loss after accidentally shooting himself in the stomach. Lennon then told Fonda “You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born,” words that were later included in the Revolver track “She Said She Said.”
“Every river seems to come with a purpose”*…
The Yukon Delta in Alaska formed where the Yukon River flows into the Bering Sea
A simple scaling law brings order to the chaos of flowing water, rock, and sediment. As Natalie Wolchover reports, new findings have extended the law even further…
A river has my heart. It’s not the austere, black Thames winding through London, where I was born, but a lazy green one 5,000 miles away, where I spent my adolescence: the Blanco River in Texas. My maternal ancestors have dipped into its waters for generations, as I have on countless summer days.
The Blanco is a tributary of the San Marcos, which flows into the Guadalupe, and on into the Gulf of Mexico. You can probably picture how this looks on a map because all river networks look similar, creeping through the landscape, merging into ever wider and longer channels, downhill to the sea. The pattern resembles twigs on branches that connect to trunks of trees (and the branching of their root systems, too), and it likewise resembles the veins of plant leaves, our own systems of blood vessels, and train and highway networks that feed into cities.
There’s something appealing about this ubiquitous pattern, so appealing to me personally that I have it tattooed on my forearm: the silhouette of a tree, with leafless branches reaching upward and roots burrowing downward, almost in mirror image. “The shapes of rivers and leaf vasculature and so on — branching networks — you can just about grasp the pattern, but it’s still chaotic, so there’s something fascinating with that,” said Chris Paola, a river scientist at the University of Minnesota.
Systems that branch in this way are “transport networks”: They transport some fluid substance (water, blood, traffic) from every place to a single place (the sea, a heart, a city center). Of the various examples, rivers are especially revealing, I think, since they arise from neither biological evolution nor urban planning, but rather chaotic Earth processes. Yet they obey simple, universal laws…
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… In 1957, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist named John Hack discovered the most important law of river networks. In rivers and streams in Virginia and Maryland, Hack measured the length of each stream and the area of the land that slopes toward that stream and therefore drains into it, called its basin or drainage area. What he discovered is now known as Hack’s law: Any stream, from the littlest brook to the mightiest river, has a length that’s proportional to its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6. (In symbolic form: L ~ A0.6.) There’s a bit of variance around that 0.6 value — Earth is, after all, a complicated place — but “the general regularity of the relation is nevertheless remarkable,” Hack wrote. “Stream lengths tend to increase proportionally to the 0.6 power of the drainage area, regardless of the geological or structural characteristics of the area.”
As more and better data has accrued, especially from satellite imagery, Hack’s law has held worldwide. Why this is the case is the essential mystery geomorphologists have grappled with ever since. “Hack’s law is still the big question,” said Hansjörg Seybold, a geomorphologist at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
It’s not so surprising that the bigger the land area of the basin, the longer the stream that drains it. But in a purely mathematical sense, one might expect that stream length would follow a slightly different power law. Imagine a square patch of land. You might guess that regardless of slope or size, in idealized form, the land would drain into a stream that’s the length of one of its sides — a vertical line down the middle, for example. That length is the square root of the area — or A to the power of 0.5.
Under that circumstance, big river basins would have the same proportions as the small river basins that feed the tributaries within them. Their structure would be the same, regardless of size. But that’s not what Hack’s law reveals.
Instead, as a drainage areas get larger, the length of their streams increases faster. “A nice way to phrase it would be that small basins are short and squat, and large basins are long and thin,” said Daniel Rothman, a geophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We unknowingly pick up on this pattern when we look at a network of tributaries on a map; a perfectly self-similar, fractal river network wouldn’t look quite right. Basins and streams become elongated at larger scales, so that river networks have an inherent directionality that stretches toward the sea. One result of that elongation is that neighboring river networks must lie closer together than they would with a 0.5 power law…
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… Rivers do shift their layouts all the time. In the 1990s, in parallel with the work on optimal channel networks, geomorphologists developed powerful landscape evolution models to capture this constant adjustment and show the mechanism by which Hack’s law etches itself on the landscape. These computer simulations start with water flowing downhill, eroding rock as it goes. Tiny, random irregularities in the topography cause some channels to capture more runoff than others. Those channels in turn erode faster and deepen, which causes them to attract still more water. One streambed might grow toward its neighbor, and thereby intercept some of its runoff. The victorious stream grows longer and carries more water, while the losing stream shrinks or disappears. These sorts of local adjustments like these route water along ever more efficient paths. As the entire drainage network gradually reorganizes over thousands of years or more, it attains and then continues to tweak a configuration that transports water downhill with minimal energy dissipation.
Gravity and friction are the driving forces of this process. Gravity supplies potential energy to flowing water. Friction, the cause of erosion, dissipates that energy. A channel configuration that wastes energy by forcing water along inefficient routes tends to erode rapidly and change. A configuration that routes water more effectively is stabler and therefore more persistent. The network becomes optimal through this dynamic evolution, eventually arriving at a form that adheres to Hack’s law.
That explanation of river network geometry hangs together for me, though geomorphologists still have many questions. Some study rivers that deviate from Hack’s law. Others organize transport networks that follow Hack’s law into one class of optimal transport networks, among a whole family of them. Trees, which branch in three dimensions instead of two, would be in a different class from rivers and follow different optimal scaling laws, for instance.
Now, geomorphologists have a new finding to explain. In April 2026, Tian Dong of the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley and co-authors made the cover of Science for discovering that Hack’s law holds not only for rivers’ tributary networks, but also for their deltas, the fanlike structures that form where a river meets the sea.
Rivers essentially hit a brick wall when they reach the (nonflowing) ocean. The sudden deceleration of the water causes it to drop the sediments it carries. These pile up to form new land. In the process, the river’s water splits into a different kind of network of channels, which shift locations constantly as sediments build up and wash away.
Scientists told me that they’ve long wondered about the organization of channels in river deltas, but they are hard to study. Unlike the upstream river network, where slope and elevation differences make it easy to calculate the area of land that drains into any given tributary, deltas are flat and especially dynamic. But through a sophisticated analysis of satellite data that allowed them to distinguish land from water, Dong and his collaborators determined that the length of a channel in a river delta scales with the size of its nourishment area — the area that it supplies with sediments — raised to the power of 0.6. Rivers’ tributary networks and distributary networks are opposites — sediments are transported away from one end and deposited at the other — yet they abide by the same math. Geomorphologists are now considering why Hack’s law should apply in this inverse context.
Reflecting on my own question, I think it’s the coexistence of simplicity and determinism with chaos and randomness that makes the optimal structure of rivers so captivating. Natural efficiency is, perhaps, innately appealing to us…
The order in seeming chaos: “Why Are Rivers So Mathematical?” from @nattyover.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.org.
* Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
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As we go with the flow, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Moritz Cantor; he was born on this date in 1829. A historian of mathematics, he is best remembered for the four volume work Vorlesungen über Geschichte der Mathematik (“Lectures on the History of Mathematics”) which traces the history of mathematics up to 1799, the year of Gauss‘s doctoral thesis. Modern historians credit Moritz with introducing a new discipline to a field, the history of mathematics, that had hitherto lacked the sound, conscientious, and critical methods of other fields of history.
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