STUCK STOP REPLY AT SPEED OF LIGHT STOP…
In 1936, Isamu Noguchi was at work in Mexico on his first piece of public sculpture, a large work based in part on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It was a 72-foot wall, on a section of which the figure of an Indian boy would be gazing at Einstein’s famous formula… only Noguchi couldn’t recall the formula confidently enough to commit it to stone…
So he cabled his friend Buckminster Fuller… who replied– also by telegram:
(source)
There. That’s that, then.
As we practice the art of precis, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that the Mercury Theater broadcast the Halloween episode of their weekly series on the WABC Radio Network, Orson Welle’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. The first two-thirds of the show (which was uninterrupted by ads) was composed of simulated news bulletins… which suggested to many listeners that a real Martian invasion was underway. (While headlines like the one below suggest that there was widespread panic, research reveals that the fright was more subdued. Still there was an out-cry against the “phoney-news” format… and Welles was launched into the notoriety that would characterize his career ever after.)
