NATHANIEL JARVIS WYETH

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

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January 29, Friday: Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth was born.

John James Beckley was named as the initial Librarian of the US federal Congress. He would receive for these duties $2 per day.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

1802

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Winter: Because the winter was exceptionally mild and ice was not forming in adequate supply on the lakes and ponds of New England, Frederic Tudor sent men with picks to Labrador to get ice from icebergs. Evidently, the cooling dust from the explosion of Mount Tambora in 1815 had gotten out of this planet’s atmosphere by this date. Normally, Tudor was able to use the ice from Fresh Pond near Cambridge, Massachusetts, owned by Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, where Jarvis had been developing ice cutting machines with iron runners and saw teeth which cut the ice into such neat blocks that they could be stored and shipped tight up against each other, thus reducing melting. At the suggestion of Wyeth, the ships used to transport ice, and the Tudor ice warehouses in Havana, Cuba, Charleston, and the West Indies, would begin to use cheap sawdust, an industrial waste product from Maine, in the 1820s to gradually reduce losses due to melting below the figure of 8%.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

1818

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At the suggestion of Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, the ships used to transport ice, and Frederic Tudor’s ice warehouses in Havana, Cuba, Charleston, South Carolina, and the West Indies, would begin to use cheap sawdust, an industrial waste product from Maine, during the 1820s to gradually reduce losses due to melting below the figure of 8%.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1820

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Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, who owned Fresh Pond near Cambridge, Massachusetts and had been running the Fresh Pond Hotel, became the manager of Frederic Tudor’s ice factory there.

A Brighton brewer, John Vallance, took out two patents for an apparatus which improved to some degree upon the invention of Sir John Leslie of 1804 for absorbent cooling, that is, for the production of artificial ice in all climates.

1824

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Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth developed an ice plow to cut blocks of ice from the surface of New England’s winter ponds. The blocks in Massachusetts were conventionally 22'' X 44'', except that some blocks for export were cut double, into 44'' X 44'' size. This plow came in 6'', 7'', 8'', 9'', 10'' and 12'' sizes to cope with different thicknesses of ice, and had between 5 and 8 teeth. It could cut a groove two inches deeper with each pass of the plow, and repeated passes of the plow were necessary until the groove was down to about 2/3ds of the thickness of the ice. There was a runner which ran in the parallel cut to the right, which held the plow exactly parallel to and 22'' or 44'' away from the earlier cut. There was also a scraper known as a planer, to hold the blocks of ice to a standard thickness and flatness, for it was very important to minimize the air space between the blocks while they were stored: one of the primary causes of loss of product was air passing between the blocks in the stack as they sat in storage during the summer.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

1825

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Winter: Frederick Douglass’s mother, the field slave Harriet Bailey, died. Free at last.1

1. I don’t know what the weather was like in the United States of America during this winter or whether Harriet Bailey would have as a field slave suffered from exposure, but in Europe this is known to have been a particularly long and intense winter, with the laboring classes suffering. Ireland and Germany were being particularly hard hit. By this period, the mid-1820s, Frederic Tudor and Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth were obtaining 1,000 tons of ice per acre of surface from such places as Fresh Pond near Cambridge, Massachusetts, harvesting this surface at the rate of an acre a day. Some of New England’s white coolness was making its way to countries such as Persia. Newspapers were describing the pantry’s “ice box” as an appliance which had become an “article of necessity,” like unto having a carpet in one’s drawing room. The iceman, muscular and virile, cometh up your back porch steps with a wet burlap sack on his shoulder and a huge pair of tongs. Hey, I remember, it was still this way when I was a child, the weekly arrival of the iceman was something to be looked for because it meant that the restrictions on the opening and closing of the lid of the ice box could be expected to be eased for the next few days. And ice, on a hot Indiana day it was like candy.

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May: The capital of British India, the city of Calcutta, witnessed the arrival of an American “discovery ship,” the Tuscany, which had carried a cargo of 40 tons of crystal-clear, high quality lake ice as ballast all the 16,000 tropical miles from Boston. The ship also brought as its primary cargo Boston’s Baldwin apples, butter, and cheese. This ice ballast was in blocks weighing as much as two Bengal maunds, or 160 pounds, each, and its high visual and taste qualities were quite as attractive as the concept that this was a high-cost remainder which had survived four months at sea and two crossings of the equator. The voyage had required 4 months and 7 days and 2/3ds of the ice were still in existence upon arrival for use by the nabobs of the East India Company. This shipment of New England’s heavy winter coolness placed Frederic Tudor and Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth of Fresh Pond in Cambridge in head-on competition with local ice being produced by ordinary ancient night evaporation methods in shallow pans along the Hoogly River.2

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1833

2. The brig Tuscany would on its return voyage carry a cargo of monkeys destined as expensive exotic house pets for the New Englanders (who by this point were not being allowed to have human slaves).

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August 31, Sunday: From the Rhode Island diary of John Hamlin Cady (1838-1914): “Heard Lucretia Mott the Quakeress at Dr. Hedges’ church in the evening.”3

Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth died.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

1856

3. Since in this year the Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge, who had been since 1850 the Unitarian minister in Providence, Rhode Island, was being called to minister in Brookline MA, we should not take this to mean, necessarily, that the Reverend Hedge was present when Friend Lucretia Mott spoke.

(One marvels when one learns that when Friend Lucretia came to Providence, she wound up speaking at the Unitarian church, until one becomes aware that as a known Hicksite Quaker, one in favor of racial integration rather than of racial apartheid, she would have been turned away from the local Quaker meetinghouse at its door.)

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Pleasecontact the project at <Kouroo@kouroo.info>.

Prepared: March 3, 2014

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested thatwe pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of theshoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What thesechronological lists are: they are research reports compiled byARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term theKouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such arequest for information we merely push a button.

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obviousdeficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored inthe contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then weneed to punch that button again and recompile the chronology —but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary“writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of thisoriginating contexture improve, and as the programming improves,and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whateverhas been needed in the creation of this facility, the entireoperation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminishedneed to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expectto achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring roboticresearch librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place requests with <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. Arrgh.