May 20, Tribute to Emile Berliner and a discussion of "People and their Poop"

After a night of sleeping like a log for an indeterminate amount of time, I woke up from the deepest sleep imaginable, forced myself out of bed, made coffee, opened my laptop to Google's homepage and saw one of those decorative Google logos with a gramaphone for the G and records for the two Os.  Cool, what what this about, I thought, only to hover over the image to find the Alt tag said "160. Geburstag von Emil Berliner" (160th birthday for Emil Berliner).  Seeing as that is my self-declared "nickname" for this blog, I figured I had better read about the person!

 

Clearly I assumed this Emil Berliner(hereafter referred to as "EB") person had invented the gramaphone, which is, in fact, true.  A wikipedia article about him links to a Library of Congress website which has this biographical notes: EB is from Germany, immigrated to Washington DC in 1870 (soon after the Civil War), became a citizen in 1881, and worked a bunch of crappy jobs until he was inspired as a "cleanup-man at a  laboratory of Constantine Fahlberg, the discoverer of saccharine".  So inspired, he self-taught himself electricity and physics to file for a patent for an improved microphone, catching the eye of Thomas Watson and the American Bell Telephone Company, who bought his patent and employed him as a research assistant for the next seven years. After his employment at ABT Co, he became a private consultant and continued to sell his inventions to ABT.  This was the beginning of what would be a long career of steps towards improving sound recording, loom/weaving mass production, and in later years, early versions of helicopters.  His patents are all for microphones, gramaphones, telephones, and sound recording methods using electroplating.

How is Emile Berliner similar to BerlinerEm(me)?  Well not so much from the above text, but later in life, he became a philanthropist focused on sanitation, especially for children, when one of his own daughters became incredibly ill after eating some ill-prepared food or drink.  He was a proponent of milk pasteurization and general public health improvements, writing a book titled Muddy Jim, which was a collection of his own drawings and rhymes, distributed to Wash DC area schools. I can't say I'm a philanthropist since you have to have money to do so, but if you think of the time around the 1900s and their current public health predicament, it largely involved cities being dirty- streets made of dirt, horses pooping everywhere, tenement buildings 4 to 6 stories high with too many people in each one, and no indoor plumbing.  People threw their trash in the street (oh, wait, people STILL do that).

This eyewitness account reference in the above link then says that scientists and reformers stopped all that with sanitation laws - welcome people like Emile Berliner, and 100 years later BerlinerEm to be a part of the movement that tackles the public health problems of today!  Seems like all our infrastructure we DO have today solves the problem of (to quote my MS advisor Diemer*) "People and their Poop" collecting in cities in the 1900s and making everyone sick, yet our "solution" to pipe it all away has finally caught up with us and is now destroying our sources of water elsewhere.

Taking a step back and looking at the 150 year timeline of sanitation clearly shows the baby steps necessary to ameliorate our impact on the earth, and the pace at which public consensus and drastic improvements move.  Round one, early 1900s, people live in their poop in cities. Sanitation laws move in to pipe it all away.  Public health in cities improves.  People live longer and continue to breed in higher numbers.  Round 2, circa early 2000s, all this poop finally adds up in our streams and natural areas.  Responsible engineers and scientists are currently working to understand biological and physical processes that digest this sludge and we need the support of activists, reformers, and YOU as the public to get it into laws, because, the history of everyone's goal of "getting rich" dictates that few people are going to bother with innovations that are not required by law.  Keep in mind too, that sanitation in the United States and much of the European Union is leaps ahead of sanitation in developing countries, where people walk miles per day just to get clean water, and often in war-torn areas.

If you happen to be one of those mentally exhausted people feeling supremely guilty about overpopulation, and the human race's impact on earth (and its affinity to resembling ants devouring an abandoned picnic), I urge you to take a more optimistic view every once an a while.  Thanks to one of my thesis committee members, Dr. Allan, who impresses upon his students the importance of "mass balance" equations, think of a mass balance of "clean" vs. "poop", while considering the existence of the earth as a closed system.  You will realize that whatever amount of matter that exists on the earth now, or existed in the 1400s, in the year 0, or 5000 BC is essentially the same, save a few meteor impacts.  We have just moved that matter around, broken apart compounds, combined certain elements, raised matter like fossil fuels to the surface, and generally re-arranged the stuff of earth to the point at which it is spatially organized now.  It seems to me that science has the ability to re-organize the matter on earth to how we see fit, and can accommodate the production of "poop" by the spatial organization of those that produce it (us!). 

My optimistic side tells me that we NEED lots of people if we are ever going to populate the Moon, Mars, and beyond, and we NEED this future lot of people to understand, support, and improve scientific advances, otherwise the ants devouring a picnic paradigm will be the more likely scenario, and civilization will extinguish itself yet again (I of course cite the many civilizations that have collapsed internally thanks to their own greediness).  I have also held the opinion that those people who have more than two kids are just greedy... but that assumes the goal for humans to stay on the earth forever, and I know I read somewhere that the earth will only have a breathable atmosphere for another 500 million years.  Of course, if humans leave earth in large numbers then the whole "closed system" notion of earth has a slow leak of spaceships, carbon based life forms, oxygen tanks, and rocket fuel. 

Gosh, what I come up with when I ponder "sanitation"... I was hoping to gain some perspective while here in Berlin, where I have three months to reflect since most of what I'm doing here is entirely optional - and I don't have the ability to seriously apply for a job until we get back.  I think this post was the first larger thinking I've done in a while.  Success!  This is the second time this has happened to me; I think the first time I've had some time to reflect on myself and my long term goals was during a more depressing time in my life, during the time that I was unemployed (a few years ago).  I'm happy to say that this time, my reflective time is much more upbeat, optimistic, and exciting. 

If you are still reading, and feel so inclined to comment, I would ask you, what do YOU care about when the necessities of life don't get in the way? Have you ever HAD time to reflect, or have you been nonstop go-go-go like many americans?  Do you ever wish you could take some time to reflect?  How would you do it?

*Diemer's joke, like most of his jokes, are unintended byproducts of a love of rare geological features and a dry sense of humor. This particular comment stems from an Sedimentology field trip in which we were at the one of the largest Carolina Bays, a curious spattering of similarly aligned, ellipsoid depressions in the southeastern United States.  This particular Carolina Bay, Lake Waccamaw, was particularly large and filled in with water and, clearly, attracted waterfront development. Diemer was explaining typical characteristics of Carolina Bays to the class "before people and their poop moved in" to which my fellow grad student buddy Jen and I (who were volunteering to assist with crowd control on this trip) were struck with a funny stick by this comment and completely lost it, laughing for at least 10 minutes while Diemer continued his description, uninterrupted, but with a grin on his face.