Museums

Oceanographic Museum
Avenue Saint-Martin
MC 98000
Monaco
www.oceano.mc

His Serene Highness Albert I, Prince of Monaco, was surely one of the most useful royals of the past few centuries. Starting from the Grimaldi family's modest principality—the Rock and its surroundings cover less than a square mile of the Côte d'Azur—Albert found a novel way of expanding his domain: He became an oceanographer, one of the earliest. And on his Rock, flush with a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean, he built the Oceanographic Museum to house all the weird and wonderful specimens that he collected until his death in 1922, at 73. Today the museum attracts a million visitors a year.

For most visitors the main attraction is probably the modern and perfectly charming aquarium that occupies one of the lower floors. Its centerpiece is a two-story tank containing a living coral reef. Between the coral columns, reef sharks and shovel-nosed rays lie on the sandy bottom, seemingly oblivious to the shadows cast by the gaudier fish flitting about in the water above. The museum's real treasures, however, lie up the grand staircase on the second floor. There some of the prince's own artifacts and specimens are displayed in three magnificent rooms with 40-foot-high ceilings and giant windows looking out on the beckoning sea. "The thoughts of travel that have long tormented me make me take a greater interest in the sciences with each passing day," wrote 16-year-old Albert to his "dear Papa" in 1864, "and I cannot wait to surrender myself entirely to my nautical tastes. . . ." Thanks to the Grimaldi bank account, he was able to combine both passions on a series of four well-appointed yachts. The last, dubbed the Hirondelle II, was specifically designed for oceanography. At 273 feet the steamship was larger—and with its polished wood decks and cabins considerably more beautiful—than many research vessels today.

In the first of a fascinating series of Albert's own film clips, you can watch men in top hats at the launch of the Princesse Alice II; later reels show him and his crew, dressed only a little less formally, hauling wonders over the side of the ship. Yet Albert was far more than a gentleman critter collector. He commissioned the first crude global map of the seafloor, which plotted a scant 18,000 depth soundings from all over the planet. He set adrift in the eastern Atlantic hundreds of bottles and some watertight brass spheres holding return-to-sender letters and, by noting the source of the sent-back messages, established that the Atlantic is spanned by a spinning gyre of ocean currents. He and his engineers pioneered a slew of brass-and-steel gizmos for grabbing mud, water, and animals from the sea—a serious technical challenge, given the immense pressures of the deep and the need to grip your sample as you're hauling it up through thousands of feet of water. From the ceiling in one room hangs the trawl with which he caught Grimaldichthys profondissimus—"extremely deep Grimaldi fish"—from a depth of 19,800 feet off the Cape Verde Islands in 1901. That fishing-depth record held until after World War II.

The museum has hundreds of such specimens on display. In one case you can admire the front half of a large, unusual squid with scales, Lepidoteuthis grimaldii ("scaly Grimaldi squid"), which Albert dissected from the stomach of a sperm whale; watching another whale vomit up its dinner as it lay dying, he immediately pounced on this new (if somewhat noisome) way of seeking out deep-swimming species too nimble for his nets. Upstairs is a jar packed with leathery fetal sharks, whose mother was apparently not nimble enough when she encountered a mile-deep Monacan net. Another noteworthy tub contains a specimen of Grimalditeuthis bonplandi, an exquisite, transparent creature that Albert caught off the Azores on August 17, 1898. "You can see its brain," one of his colleagues later remarked to the French Academy of Sciences.

Peering at the prince's sailor caps, letters home, and home movies of his summer cruises, you start to feel the same thing about the man himself. "As for me, I have lent the forces of my brain, of my conscience, and my sovereignty to the extension of scientific truth," he said when he inaugurated the museum in 1910. Seeing one of Albert's animal truths crammed into a little jar, dead and bleached from decades in preservative, may be a paler experience than watching fish in an aquarium or on an IMAX screen. But it's a more evocative one: It calls to mind a thrilling moment when a gentle, mustachioed aristocrat, who could have led an idle life, laid human eyes and hands on an animal for the very first time—and perhaps got his linen suit all slimy in the process.

Photograph courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

Museums

Restoration

One of New York's favorite celebs has had a face-lift—and a tummy tuck. As part of a stunning $25 million renovation of its Hall of Ocean Life, the American Museum of Natural History has unveiled a new version of the 94-foot-long blue whale that has hung from the ceiling since 1969. The original 21,000-pound fiberglass-and-polyurethane model was based on photos of a female blue whale corpse whose eyes had begun to bulge. Relying on recent research, restorers shrank the eyes, slimmed down the tail, reshaped the blowhole, and added a belly button. The cosmetically enhanced cetacean also received a fresh coat of blue paint.

— Corey S. Powell



Books

Singe the Body Electric
Dead dogs and dirty tricks laid the foundation for a wired nation

By Joseph D'Agnese

Wings of Madness Empires of Light:
Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World
By Jill Jonnes,
Random House, $29.95

Thomas Edison, the quintessential American tinkerer, is often held up as a role model for schoolchildren. But the books that celebrate his inventions, which include the first lightbulb and the first phonograph, don't mention his unusual interest in the art of electrocuting dogs. In 1888 Edison and his cronies offered local children 25 cents for every mangy pooch they could drag into his labs in West Orange, New Jersey. One by one, the mutts were wired and zapped—first with direct current, an Edison invention, and then with alternating current, the darling of George Westinghouse. Because it took 1,000 volts of DC to fry the ill-fated dogs but only 300 volts of AC, this was proof—to Edison, at least—that AC was more hazardous. This was delicious news to Edison, since he was at the time locked in a battle with Westinghouse to wire the nation (and potentially the world) with electricity. At stake was the future of American industry: Each titan stood to gain millions of dollars, but only if his system proved the best.

Historian Jill Jonnes re-creates this venomous rivalry in a delightful book that may remind readers of E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime, in which real-life people pop up in fictional settings. But Empires of Light is no fiction; it's a meticulously researched narrative in which famous people go baying after an elusive goal: to power cities by harnessing a hidden force wrested from the atmosphere. Such a quest was once viewed as the work of the gods. But Jonnes's subjects—Edison, Westinghouse, and the eccentric Serbian-American genius Nikola Tesla—are all too mortal: brilliant men driven by passions as mercurial as the invisible ether they pursued.

Edison's macabre tableau of dead dogs—a parade that led to the creation of the nation's first AC-powered electric chair—was part of his plan to brand alternating current, in which the flow of electrons periodically reverses direction, as too dangerous. He favored a system that supplied power directly from a central station to consumers close by. Though safer, it lacked efficiency. Sometimes power ebbed, and the cost of erecting so many stations and copper-heavy grids made DC practical only for densely populated cities. Westinghouse, by contrast, had the technology to snake wires from remote power plants to cities hundreds of miles away, via transformers that could "step down" the high-voltage—and potentially lethal—AC power leaving the plant to a level safe for homes and businesses. The AC grids were also more efficient: One plant instead of a dozen meant that they required far less copper.

Although Edison plied his folksy wit to charm reporters and woo investors, it was Westinghouse's scientifically and economically superior platform that won out, in part due to the ingenuity of Nikola Tesla. Early electrical designs often faltered in their power output when poorly machined whirling parts scraped against each other. Tesla's solution was to position two separate magnetic fields on the same motor; when one waned, the other surged, producing a single stream of power from two alternating waves of current. Westinghouse licensed the technology and took AC to the masses. Meanwhile Tesla was relegated to oblivion. Fastidious, foppish, and phobic, he neglected his patents, sank into poverty, and spent his later life pursuing crackpot schemes, even claiming once that he had intercepted messages from Martians.

Jonnes has a remarkable knack for re-creating the sounds and smells of the late 19th century's cluttered labs. There are no massive university budgets here; just fat men with stogies bankrolling one dream after another. In the end, this world is a little like watching a primitive version of a cable TV finance news show: Money guys howling for profits; journalists fanning rumors that the science is going nowhere; and the geniuses at the center chasing a quarry that only their eyes can see.



Gizmos

Blurzz Rocket-powered Racer by Estes
$29.99, www.estesrockets.com

Unleash your inner road hog with the Blurzz rocket racer. Photograph by Jens Mortensen.

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Wanna drag? Clear a path for Blurzz, the racer propelled by a bang from its butt. This 12-inch-long rocket-powered car can reach a speed of 20 miles per hour; scale up to the length of a full-size drag racer and that's the equivalent of 500 miles per hour. Setup requires a 90-foot-long smooth track surface, such as an outdoor basketball court. Blurzz hooks onto a wire guide, which stretches from start to finish and keeps the car from careering off course. A pair of thin battery-powered wires inserted into the back of the disposable, 1 3/4-inch-long cylindrical engine ignites the solid gray potassium nitrate-based propellant, causing smoke and flames to shoot out the rear and forcing the mini dragster to blast forward. After traveling about 60 feet, Blurzz picks up a drag chute attached to the wire guide and then jolts to a stop on a plastic bumper. The explosive run is over in just five seconds, but insert a new engine and Blurzz is ready to go again. Unlike a flying rocket, it won't shoot out of sight—or get stuck in any surrounding trees.

— Fenella Saunders



Books

A Very Lonely Planet Guide
Martian microbes may greet intrepid sightseers to our sister world

By Tim Folger

A Traveler's Guide to Mars:
The Mysterious Landscapes of the Red Planet
William K. Hartmann
Workman, $18.95

You've been traveling in space for nearly a year, your bones and muscles withered by weightlessness. Earth is just a faint blue point more than 100 million miles away. At last Mars looms large and red, dead ahead. What mysteries await you on its surface?

Two years ago, former NASA chief Daniel Goldin predicted that we could land humans on Mars by 2020 if we set our minds to it. That's a big if, considering the daunting risks and expenses involved. The round trip would require about two years, not including any time spent on the planet itself, and would cost anywhere from $50 billion to $450 billion. In the meantime we'll have to make do with images from robotic missions and books like William K. Hartmann's A Traveler's Guide to Mars, an exhaustive summary of everything we now know about a world that has long haunted the dreams of writers and scientists alike.

Hartmann offers an evocative portrait of a planet that harbors spectacles unmatched by anything on Earth, including a 2,500-mile-long chasm that dwarfs the Grand Canyon; an 84,500-foot-high volcano, Olympus Mons, that is broader than the entire Himalayan range; and four-mile-high dust devils that swirl across vast deserts. A planetary scientist and author of more than a dozen books, Hartmann has immersed himself in Martian research for more than three decades, beginning when he joined the team that sent the Mariner 9 probe to Mars in 1971. He's now a member of NASA's Mars Global Surveyor mission, whose spacecraft has been orbiting and mapping the Red Planet in unparalleled detail since March 1999. Scientists have since learned more about that neighboring world than from all the previous missions combined.

When the first Mariner spacecraft sailed past Mars in 1965, Hartmann writes, no one knew what to expect. Would it see vegetation, or even the canals that American astronomer Percival Lowell claimed to have observed in the 1890s? But the patch of planet that Mariner revealed was a huge disappointment. It looked as dead as the moon: no canals, no plants, just a barren, crater-pocked surface. It turned out that this flyby mission had traversed one of the most desolate regions of Mars. A later spacecraft, Mariner 9, was the first to orbit Mars, and scientists were stunned when it sent back images of what appeared to be dry riverbeds. Apparently water had once flowed on the surface of Mars. And where there is water there might be life.

The Mars Global Surveyor has since confirmed the presence of those riverbeds, which last flowed with water about 1 billion years ago, when the planet was warmer and encased in a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and water vapor. Once these rivers may have emptied into lakes and oceans, but any water that still remains is now locked up as ice beneath the Martian surface. Yet as Mars Global Surveyor showed in June 2000, the planet might still have active aquifers and springs. The evidence appears in spectacular photographs from the survey that fill Hartmann's book, including close-ups of gullies on a cliff face that seem to have been recently eroded by running water.

Did life ever arise on Mars, and if so, are there any microbes still huddling in Martian soil, shielded from the ultraviolet rays that fry the planet's surface? Hartmann can't say. Answers will have to wait until we—or maybe our descendants—walk the sands of Mars at last.

— Maia Weinstock





Science Best-sellers

1.	Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 By Simon Winchester, HarperCollins
2.	A Short History of Nearly Everything By Bill Bryson, Broadway
3.	The Universe in a Nutshell/The Illustrated a Brief History of Time (boxed set) By Stephen Hawking, Bantam
4.	Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers By Mary Roach, W. W. Norton
5.	Backyard Ballistics By William Gurstelle, Chicago Review Press
6.	The Universe: 365 Days By Robert J. Nemiroff and Jerry T. Bonnell, Harry N. Abrams
7.	Isaac Newton By James Gleick, Pantheon Books
8.	Our Final Hour A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future in This Century— on Earth and Beyond By Martin Rees, Basic Books
9.	Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human By Matt Ridley, HarperCollins
10.	Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life By Leonard Mlodinow, Warner Books By Leonard Mlodinow, Warner Books
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"Museums." Take a virtual tour of the American Museum of Natural History's blue whale, along with the rest of the refurbished Hall of Ocean Life: www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent/ocean.

"Gizmos." Rocketry handbooks can be found at www.estesrockets.com.