Archive for May 2026
“Great inventions are never, and great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step of a progression. . It is not usually a creation, but a growth, as truly so as is the growth of the trees in the forest.”*…
Our old friend (and here and here) Brian Potter thinks deeply about scientific and technological advance. Here, he ponders the pace of progress…
In her book on the history of the laser, historian Joan Bromberg notes that the technological and scientific predecessors of the maser (which itself preceded the laser – two critical technologies whose developmental histories I sketched in this piece two months ago) were in place for decades before physicist Charles Townes had the insight to combine them…
… This sort of decades-long wait between when a technology first becomes possible, and when it actually appears, seems common, or at least seems like it might be common. I’ve previously written about why it took so long for wind power to be widely deployed after it became technologically possible, and people often idly speculate whether inventors in the Roman Empire could have built a steam engine, or why we waited so long to put wheels on luggage.
Knowing how long this gap between when an invention becomes possible, and when it actually appears, is useful, because it tells us something about the nature of technology and technological progress. What factors govern whether some new technology appears? How much does mere technical possibility matter, and how much do things like cross-pollination of knowledge, economic feasibility, and political factors contribute? Knowing more about how long it takes for an invention to appear once it becomes technically possible can help us answer these sorts of questions.
I wanted a better sense of how long it takes for some technology to appear once its necessary predecessors are in place. So I used AI to try and find out…
[Potter explains his method, then unpacks his results…]
We can clearly see a few trends on this graph. One is that for most inventions, the gap between when it could have been invented and when it was actually invented is not particularly large. Of the 166 inventions Claude estimated a date for, 107 of them (64%) had an “earliest plausible” date 50 years or less from the actual date, and 150 of them (90%) had an “earliest straightforward” date 50 years or less from the actual date. For more than half the inventions, the average earliest straightforward date of invention was 10 years or less from the actual date.
Conversely, there were a relatively small number of inventions where the gap between “could have been invented” and “was invented” was very large. 30 inventions (18%) had an average gap of more than 100 years between “earliest plausible” and actually invented, and eight inventions had a gap of more than 1000 years. You can see this clearly on a histogram, which shows a large bump of small time gaps, and a long tail of fewer, larger gaps.
The inventions with the longest period between “could have been invented” and “was invented” are below.
There’re a few interesting trends observable here. Many of the longest-delayed inventions — the hypodermic needle, general anaesthetic, stethoscope — are medical inventions. (You could argue the surgical mask could be in this category as well). For the hypodermic needle, this probably needed to wait until the existence of some substance that needed to be injected (such as morphine, first synthesized in 1804), but for other medical inventions this possibly also reflects folks’ reluctance to do inventive-tinkering in a medical context. For general anaesthetic, for instance, the trial and error of getting the dose right was incredibly dangerous, and the inventor Hanaoka Seishu “crippled his mother and blinded his wife perfecting the dose.”
Several of the longest-awaited inventions are ones where the version in the list is an early, impractical version of the one that actually solved a problem. So the “dandy horse” — a two-wheeled, wooden vehicle that was a predecessor of the bicycle — could have been built in antiquity, but the dandy horse wasn’t particularly practical as a means of transportation, and actually useful bicycles had to wait for the improved manufacturing technology of the later 19th century. Likewise, the version of the ballpoint pen that Claude thinks could have been invented much earlier is John Loud’s 1888 version, but Loud’s pen worked poorly and wasn’t successful. Actually useful ballpoint pens are surprisingly difficult to manufacture (China famously couldn’t manufacture them until very recently), and credit for the “useful ballpoint pen” is usually given to Lazlo Biro in 1938. (Claude correctly notes that “useful” versions of both these inventions would need to wait until much later.) Judson’s early zipper and de Martinsville’s early sound-recording device are also examples of early, not-particularly-useful inventions.
Other inventions on this list seem like they might be a case of the surrounding social or technological conditions needing to be right for the invention to appear. So Otis’ elevator safety brake needed to wait until elevators were in higher demand, which probably didn’t occur until steam engines or some other similar power source came along (though maybe you could have water-driven elevators much earlier). Barbed wire perhaps needed to wait until enclosing very large areas of land for grazing became something people needed to do.
And some inventions seem like they might have been genuinely useful had someone thought of them earlier, and simply nobody did. Blanchard’s pattern-tracing lathe, Neilson’s hot blast, and the safety pin all seem like they fall into this category, though perhaps there were good reasons these didn’t appear earlier.
Going back to the scatterplot, the other obvious trend on this chart is that the gap between when an invention becomes possible and when it appears has narrowed over time. If we graph the average and median gaps for inventions by 20-year time periods, we can see that they have fallen over time.
For the 60 post-1900 inventions, every one has a “straightforward” invention date of 50 years or less than the actual date, and 75% of them have a straightforward date of 10 years or less before the actual date. Of the 30 inventions with a gap of more than 100 years between when they could have been invented and when they actually appeared, 29 of them were invented before 1900. So the process for creating new inventions seems to be getting more and more efficient — opportunities are getting noticed and exploited sooner and sooner, up through 1970 at least (which is when the list of major inventions extends to).
We can also look at how wait times vary by type of technology. The chart below shows average wait times by different categories, for both inventions overall and for just post-1900 inventions. We can see that medical inventions have the longest wait, while electronic inventions have the shortest wait…
… We can also look at what types of factors tend to be bottlenecks. For some inventions, the bottleneck is primarily scientific: the limiting factor for the transistor is the band theory of quantum mechanics, and the limiting factor for the radio was Hertz’s demonstration of electromagnetic waves. But for other inventions, it’s primarily technological: the turbojet had to wait not for some new physical theory, but until compressor technology and high-temperature steels appeared; likewise the airplane had to wait not for some novel theory of aerodynamics but until a light enough engine appeared. The chart below shows how often “science” or “technology” was the limiting factor for a given invention, for both inventions overall and post-1900 inventions.
In both cases, technology is the bottleneck far more often than science (though of course if you removed enough technological bottlenecks eventually you’d hit a scientific one, and vice versa).
There is of course only so much you can learn from this sort of exercise: at the end of the day, this is based on an AI’s best guess, not a thorough analysis of the various controlling factors by experts. But while I wouldn’t swear to its accuracy, I think the answers are probably mostly pretty good, and enough for us to draw some general (if tentative) conclusions about the nature of technological progress.
My main takeaway is that we mostly don’t wait all that long for new inventions. Since 1800 most inventions have appeared within a few decades of when it was possible to build them, and since 1900 these gaps been even narrower. It also seems likely that medical inventions are more likely to have long wait times than other types of inventions, and that the limiting factor for how early some new technology could appear is most likely to be technological, rather than scientific.
On the (maybe suprisingly) quick– and quickening– pace of progress: “How Long Do We Wait for New Inventions?” from @constructionphysics.skystack.xyz
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As we analyze advance, we might send inventive birthday greetings to William Webster (W. W.) Hansen; he was born on this date in 1909. A physicist and one of the founders of the technology of microwave electronics, he had a central hand in the development of klystron technology (essential to high frequency amplification, thus central to microwave technology, radar, and UHF television transmission), and linear accelerators (he led the development of SLAC), and along with the Varian brothers and Edward Ginzton, co-founded Varian Associates (in 1948)–one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley.
“Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate”*…
Punched cards have a long history in machine control (dating back to Jacquard) and computing (starting with Babbage‘s Difference Engine), but it was Herman Hollerith who brought them into modern computation in the late 1880s… where punch cards remained for about 100 years. From the Smithsonian’s American History Museum…
In the late 1880s, American engineer Herman Hollerith saw a railroad punch card when he was trying to figure out new ways of compiling statistical information for the U.S. Census. His first punch card, like those used on railways, only had holes along the edges. The meaning of each hole was indicated on the card. By the time Hollerith tabulating equipment was used in the 1890 U.S. Census, holes were scattered across the cards, although their meaning was not indicated on it.
Hollerith and his employees at the Tabulating Machine Company in Washington, D.C. soon developed punched cards for use in compiling information for commercial enterprises such as railroads. They and staff of the U.S. Census Bureau prepared improved machines—these devices are shown in the object group on tabulating equipment. By the 1920s, the United States had two major manufacturers of punch card equipment, International Business Machines (the descendent of the Tabulating Machine Company) and Remington Rand (the descendent of Powers Accounting Machine Company established by Russian emigré and former Census Bureau employee James Powers). Each manufacturer developed a distinctive standard punch card. IBM cards had eighty columns of rectangular holes while those of Remington Rand had ninety columns of circular holes. Tabulating machines were widely used in both government and commerce, with cards designed to meet the needs of customers. For example, checks issued by the U.S. government often came on punch cards.
When IBM and Remington Rand began selling electronic computers in the years following World War II, punch cards became the preferred method of entering data and programs onto them. They also were used in later minicomputers and some early desktop calculators. Punch cards surviving in the Smithsonian collections reflect the widespread use of computers – they announced scores on standardized tests, served as a library cards, were part of the proof of mathematical theorems, and kept medical records. Some are printed with the names of users, from university computer centers and computer clubs to the Library of Congress to Bell Laboratories…
Browse the collection: “Punch Cards for Data Processing“
See also: here, here, and here.
* Ubiquitous warning on punch cards:
… in the 1950s, after the invention of the computer and its widespread business use, that everyone began to see punch cards. Companies sent punch cards out with bills: the telephone company, utility companies, and even department stores realized that they could save a step in their billing process, as well as making it easier for them to process the returned check, by using the cards themselves as the bills. By the 1960s, punch cards were familiar, everyday objects.
While company employees could be trusted to take care of the cards, the person in the street could not. Warnings were necessary. In the 1930s the University of Iowa used cards for student registration; on each card was printed “Do not fold or bend this card.” Cards reproduced in an IBM sales brochure of the 1930s read “Do not fold, tear, or mutilate this card” and “Do not fold tear or destroy.” I’m not sure when the canonical “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate” first appeared; it’s one of those traditions whose author and origin is lost in the mists of time. Let’s consider the words one at a time, stop and take them seriously…
– “A Cultural History of the Punch Card” (from 1991; eminently worth reading in full)
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As we contemplate chads (of which, punch cards produced a gracious plenty), we might spare a thought for Gerald Hawkins; he died on this date in 2003. An astronomer and author, he was best known for his work in archaeoastronomy— most of all, for his 1965 book, Stonehenge Decoded. In the early 1960s, Hawkins had used punch cards to load data modeling sun and moon movements onto magnetic tapes, then into an IBM 7090. The results led him to conclude, as the book argues, that the features at the monument were arranged in such a way as to predict a variety of astronomical events– that Stonehenge was a giant prehistoric observatory and computer. While some archaeologists are hesitant to accept Hawkins’ theories, many archaeoastronomers have built upon his work. More widely, scholars accept that the importance of astronomical alignment and large complexes being planned and constructed to fulfill cosmology has been demonstrated at other prehistoric sites, such as the Snake Mound and Cahokia in the U.S.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”*…
Particles are nature’s smallest constituents, but that doesn’t mean they’re fundamental. So of what, physicist Felix Flicker asks, does the Universe consist?…
What is the world made of? For centuries, people have believed that matter is constructed from tiny, indivisible parts. Some of the earliest known references come from the Greek philosopher Democritus, who taught that the Universe was composed of atoms the size of dust motes floating in sunlight. Theravada Buddhism developed the concept of kalapas, indivisible bundles of properties fleeting into and out of existence. Alchemy’s description of fundamental ‘corpuscles’, expounded by Isaac Newton and others, derived from translations of Aristotle by mediaeval Islamic scholars. And Hideki Yukawa, winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work developing the modern theory of elementary particles, took inspiration from a passage in the Zhuangzi, a Daoist text written during China’s warring states period, in which fast-moving entities puncture holes within formless chaos. Yukawa saw a parallel to particle collisions.
The concept of a particle, as we now refer to these indivisible parts, has therefore been repeatedly re-introduced in contradictory ways. The modern view continues this tradition. In late-19th-century physics, particles were tiny indivisible objects with well-defined positions and momenta. The advent of quantum mechanics led these clear waters to become muddied. But the basic idea persists: we are taught from a young age that matter is made of atoms, built from particles such as electrons, and electrons are not built from anything else. For this reason, these particles are sometimes said to be fundamental. But are they? Is the Universe really made from the smallest constituents, as a beach is made from sand?
The answer to this question, I will contest, is perhaps a surprising one: yes, the Universe is built from fundamental units – but fundamental need not mean smallest. This view is generally adopted by those physicists, such as myself, who work in the largest discipline within the subject: quantum matter. This is the study of quantum behaviours that manifest on everyday scales: the attraction of iron to a magnet, the flow of electricity along a wire, or the passage of sound through a crystal. In these settings, too, we find particles. But these particles are not elementary, like the electron: they are emergent.
The distinction can be pictured as follows. Imagine a lightbulb, its rays of light travelling to your eyes. We can ask what those rays are made of. Quantum mechanics has an answer: a ray of light is a stream of individual particles called photons. In turn, we can ask what the photons are made of. The answer this time is that they are not made of anything else: they are elementary. Now imagine that this lightbulb is of a vintage sort, and gives off a gentle hum. It emits waves of sound that travel to your ears. We can again ask what those waves are made of. And, once again, quantum mechanics has an answer: a wave of sound can be described by individual particles called phonons. Now, if you are familiar with the Standard Model of particle physics, you will know that it contains photons but not phonons. The reason is that phonons are not elementary. If you ask what a phonon is made of, there is an answer: it is a pattern of vibrations of the atoms in the air. In the study of quantum matter, however, we say it is an emergent particle.
So what are emergent particles? Are they as real as elementary particles? And, perhaps most importantly, can they tell us anything new about the nature of reality?…
[Flicker answers the first two of those questions, then turns to the third…]
… So, are elementary particles emergent? Even if we can ever answer this, we will be faced with the same question, whatever we find. In the end, whether you like the idea comes down to personal taste and, perhaps, a degree of cultural upbringing. The more widely publicised attempts at a ‘theory of everything’ always struck me as suspiciously similar to themes in the Old Testament: the Universe was once describable by a single mathematical formula, but that one, true quantum field spontaneously broke in a cataclysmic event that resulted in the messy collection of particles we find before us. I find that the quantum matter perspective, on the other hand, resonates with me in a similar manner to the Daoist texts such as the Zhuangzi. From this new perspective, it is our current world that is beautiful. It grew from a swamp of possible theories, each ugly in its arbitrariness: it doesn’t matter which way we followed, as they all lead here…
A physicist argues that our universe is more than the sum of its particles: “Reality Emerges,” from @aeon.co.
Resonant: “There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’,” from Carlo Rovelli
Also apposite (and fascinating): “Physicists just found a tiny flaw in time itself,” from ScienceDaily.
* Philip K. Dick
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As we muse on materialization, we might send insightful birthday greetings to Jack Steinberger; he was born on this date in 1921. An experimental physicist, he worked on sub-atomic particles– the “elementary” constituents of matter discussed above– at Columbia, UC Berkeley, and CERN. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz) for the discovery of the muon neutrino.
“It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form”*…
We Americans spend over $60 Billion a year on dietary supplements and herbal remedies; to the extent that the market is regulated here in the U.S. it is (essentially exclusively) by the FDA– which treats the category as “food,” not “medicine” and “oversees” the industry/market very lightly. Indeed, while the extent of fraud in the supplement/remedy market (ineffective, mislabeled, or dangerous products) is estimated to be in the billions of dollars per year, the introduction to the FDA’s data base of “Health Fraud Products” reads:
This list includes unapproved products that have been subject to FDA health fraud related violations. These products have been cited in warning letters, online advisory letters, recalls, public notifications, and press announcements for issues varying from products marketed as dietary supplements claiming to cure, mitigate, treat or prevent disease, to the use of undeclared ingredients or new dietary ingredients.
This list only includes a small fraction of the potentially hazardous products marketed to consumers online and in retail establishments. Even if a product is not included in this list, consumers should exercise caution before using certain products…
That said, over half of us make those choices based on health and wellness information from social media influencers or podcasts… and too often these days, even the ostensibly qualified pitch-people are being faked by AI.
As Matthew Wills reminds us, we’ve been here before…
Never more than seventeen thousand people, the Shakers are today best remembered for their handsome furniture. In their own time they were renowned for their homemade medicinal remedies. They might have had a dubious reputation for their outlandish dancing, celibacy, gender equality, and for believing that their founder, “Mother” Ann Lee, was a manifestation of Christ’s Second Coming, but their guarantee of purity in their botanical products was generally accepted as given.
So much so that as Shaker communities dwindled through the nineteenth century, others wanted the cachet of their name in the patent medicine world. Amid all the fakery and flimflam of the pre-regulated drug market, the Shaker brand was the best.
It was worth stealing, and defending.
The Shakers, or more properly the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, arrived in North America from England in 1774. They established their first communes in New York and New England, then farther into the continent as the European frontier expanded. Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Georgia, and Florida also boasted Shaker outposts, mostly shorter-lived than the original ones.
At first, Shakers funded their separation from the “world” by selling furniture and housewares to non-Shakers. But as the number of Shakers dwindled and America’s industrial capacity increased, Shakers typically turned to selling seeds, simples [here], and botanically-based remedies. These were easier to produce, and, imbued with the Shaker reputation for purity, were as good as gold.
Medical historian J. Worth Estes quotes an 1881 almanac advertising Shaker remedies on the basic principles of Shakerism:
innocence, temperance, virgin purity, love, peace, justice, holiness, goodness, and truth. The almanac further explained that Shakers are “just and honest in all [their] dealings with mankind,” and that they “eschew every species of falsehood: lying, deceit and hypocrisy.” Such statements helped “guarantee” the purity and high quality of Shaker-made drugs in the nineteenth century struggle for the American drug market.
Shakers provided ingredients for “worldly” producers, and, in some cases, they even provided start-up capital for non-Shaker manufacturers. The A.J. White company of New York, New York, made Shaker Extract of Roots and Mother Seigel’s Curative Syrup with Shaker-sourced botanicals and capital. This remedy was advertised as “a cure for impurities of the blood” and “a cure for dyspepsia and liver complaints.” A.J. White’s company successfully expanded overseas, and when he died in 1898, his English branch bought out his American branch; in various guises the company existed until 1957, when it was purchased by Smith, Kline & French, whose successor entity is today the world’s tenth largest pharmaceutical company.
In the 1880s, Smith Bros. & Co. of Montreal started producing a product called Shakers’ Blood Syrup. This had a label similar to A.J. White’s Shaker Extract, except it said “Cures completely scrofula, cancer, rheumatism, catarrh, ulcers & skin & blood diseases.” The Shakers of New Lebanon, New York, sued for patent infringement and Smith Bros. agreed to stop pirating the Shaker name.
Shakers also produced their own remedies on their communes. Corbett’s Syrup of Sarsaparilla, for instance, was made in Canterbury, New Hampshire for about half a century until 1896. In 1886, it was one of the few Shaker products to be awarded a U.S. patent. Promoted as “a blood purifier and therefore, by implication, as a panacea,” it was made of “an aqueous mixture of sarsaparilla root, pipsissewa, yellow dock root, dandelion, thoroughwort, black cohosh, elder flowers, Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate), juniper berries, blue gentian, pokeweed root, sugar and alcohol.” At some point potassium iodide was added to “ensure the remedy’s ‘purity.’”
Estes provides a checklist of some 80 other proprietary medicines made in Shaker communities. The names are marvelous: Brother Barnabas Hinckley’s Compound Concentrated Syrup of Bitter Bugle, Eclectic Live Pills, Larus Eye Water, Vegetable Family Pills, Young Shakers’ Grand Catholicon. As Estes notes, more than a few of these products had active ingredients that were cathartic or purgative, a fact rarely noted on labels. Cathartics are generally defined as working faster than laxatives.
After the Food and Drug Act of 1906, products like the 75% alcohol (sanitizer strength!) Norwood’s Tincture of Veratrum Viride, made by non-Shakers with Shaker-sourced botanical ingredients, had to be labeled “Poison” on their instructions for use. Patent medicines, and the Shakers, didn’t survive the twentieth century…
Amid the fraud and flimflam of early drug markets, Shakers stood for purity, creating a brand others were eager to exploit: “A Trusted Name in a Dubious Drug Market” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat
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As we hear history rhyme, we might recall that it was on this date in 1626 that Peter Minuit, the new director of “New Netherland” for the Dutch West India Company, in what we now know as Manhattan, “purchased” the island from the the Canarsee tribe of Native Americans for a parcel of goods worth 60 guilders: roughly $24 dollars at the time, now just over $1,000.
In the event, Native Americans in the area were unfamiliar with the European notions and definitions of ownership rights. As they understood it, water, air and land could not be traded. So scholars are convinced that both parties probably went home with totally different interpretations of the sales agreement. In any case, the Carnarsees were likely happy to take payment in any meaningful amount pertaining to land that was mostly controlled by their rivals, the Weckquaesgeeks.
1626 letter from Pieter Schaghen (a colleague of Minuit) reporting the purchase of Manhattan for 60 guilders [source]
“Turkey: A large bird whose flesh, when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude”*…
Your correspondent is hitting the road, so (Roughly) Daily will be in hiatus for ten days ro so. Regular service should resume on (or about) May 24…
Tal Lavin devotes the latest installment of The Sword and the Sandwich, the wonderful newsletter he co-authors with David Swanson, to the quintessentially-American fowl, the turkey…
There are very few occasions in life in which someone gets to choose their own name: confirmation, conversion, or, in my case, transition from female to male. Out of all the names in the world, I chose my own; I wanted to pick something that would allow me to present as my male self, that would erase confusion, that would say something essential about me. Choosing your own name is not to be taken lightly.
In the case of the turkey—that busty bird whose thinly-sliced meat is a ubiquitous filler for club sandos, Thanksgiving-leftover feasts and deli lunch-hour specials—the ability to choose its own name might have been a mercy, and avoided a tremendous amount of confusion. The etymological journey of why a turkey is called a turkey makes the fraught rite of transgender name-choosing seem like a cake walk (or bird strut).
The turkey, meleagris gallopavo, is a big galumphing bird indigenous to the Americas, famous for its huge breast, commanding carriage, and bland but abundant meat. In English, it is named after Turkey, which is a country across an entire ocean from its native stomping grounds. In Turkish, the language of Turkey, a turkey is called a hindi, which means “from India.” In Hindi, the language of India, a turkey is called a टर्की (Ṭarkī). In Slovak and Albanian, its name means “chicken from overseas.” In Scandinavian languages and Dutch, it’s named for Calicut, a major trading post along India’s Malabar Coast. In Welsh, it’s twrci. In Polish, Russian and Ukrainian, it’s indyuk, indyk or indeyka—Indian bird.
In other words, languages across the entire world are eager to praise (or blame) the wrong country for this entirely American bird. And they can’t even agree on what wrong country to attribute it to. Linguists and historians have put their heads together on why this is, and it seems to come down to a fowl case of mistaken identity.
What’s undoubtedly central to this geographical misunderstanding is the role the Ottoman Empire played in trade to Europe around the period of the Columbian Exchange…
Read on the rest of the fascinating story: “Turkey,” from @swordsjew.bsky.social.
* Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
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As we gobble, we might recall that it was on this date in 1607 that a group of 104 colonists from England arrived in what we now know as Virginia and established the first permanent English colony in America. They named the settlement Jamestown in honor of King James I.
We might also recall that we have this group (as it grew)– not the New England pilgrims– to thank for Thanksgiving.
The first documented English Thanksgiving in North America happened in Virginia in 1619, one year before the Pilgrims even arrived at Plymouth Rock. This first Thanksgiving lasted “10, 15 minutes,” according to Graham Woodlief, the president of the Virginia Thanksgiving Festival. No Native Americans were invited, no women were present, and there’s scant evidence of turkeys or yams.
We might also note that it was on this date in 1968 that Frank Zappa released his debut solo album, Lumpy Gravy on MGM’s Verve Records label (an early version of the album had been issued by Capitol Records on 4-track cartridge in August 1967).
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