Tag: Science

Thirty Days Hath September… Except When It Doesn’t (episode 309)

We all know the old mnemonic device, right?  Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November, but what if September suddenly had only nineteen days?  That’s exactly what Boston experienced in 1752, when the town went to bed on September 2nd and woke up on the 14th.  It sounds like something that would have a supernatural explanation, like a mass alien abduction, or maybe something contaminated the water supply to make the entire town go into a brief coma, but the explanation is more pedestrian.  Almost two centuries after most of Europe had switched to a new calendar system, the British Empire was following suit, including its overseas colonies like Massachusetts.  How did Bostonians adapt to the change?  Were they as confused as I would be if my calendar suddenly changed?  Did Bostonians riot, demanding their 11 days back?  How did the generation that lived through the change remember key dates like their birthdays after the switch?  Listen now!


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Seismic Boston (episode 300)

Did you feel an earthquake in Boston on April 5, 2024?  Depending on where you were at the time, you might have felt nothing or you might have noticed a mild tremor.  While we think of Boston earthquakes as a punchline and damaging quakes as a California problem, that hasn’t always been the case.  Imagine an earthquake that comes on with the sound of rolling thunder, one where the ground heaved like waves on an angry sea, throwing people to the ground, opening up fissures in the earth, and triggering a tsunami that affects distant shores.  This was the experience of Boston during the great Cape Ann earthquake of 1755, and the effects of a similar seismic shock in modern Boston could be simply catastrophic.


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Eclipse Fever (episode 298)

Eclipses happen when the moon passes between the sun and the earth during the daytime, briefly blocking the light of the sun from the face of the earth. Over the past few years, observers in the US have been treated to every flavor of solar eclipse: a partial in 2021 when part of the sun’s disc remains unobscured; a total eclipse in 2017, when viewers in the narrow path of totality experienced daytime darkness, and an annular eclipse just last fall, when a ring of fire hung in the cold, bright sky. In honor of the April 2024 total eclipse, I’m sharing a clip that cohost emerita Nikki and I recorded within the first year of this podcast about some of the earliest experiences of eclipses here in Boston, most notably in 1780 and 1806. I’ll also share a clip about an unrelated phenomenon that darkened the skies over Boston for a second time in 1780, then again in 1881, 1950, and several times in the past 5 years. This was no eclipse however, but rather a much more terrestrial effect.


Continue reading Eclipse Fever (episode 298)

The Mather Borealis (episode 289)

Was Cotton Mather a victim of 18th century cancel culture? In December 1719, Bostonians were astounded at the spectacle of the northern lights dancing in the sky, a sight that nobody alive could remember seeing before. One of the Bostonians who watched in astonishment was Cotton Mather. Confronted with this unprecedented natural phenomenon, Mather was torn. His instinct was to see signs and portents in the aurora borealis, but the world around him was changing, and his fellow natural philosophers were more likely to see the clockwork rules of Newtonian physics than the hand of God or the devil moving the universe around them. Mather’s report focuses on the secular experience of the phenomenon, but had he really changed his tune, or was he following the new political correctness of the modern era?


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A Blizzard of Falling Stars (episode 287)

190 years ago, Bostonians awoke to an unexpected light in the sky before dawn on November 13, 1833. Some began their morning routines, thinking the sun had risen, a few dashed outside to douse the fire they expected to see consuming a neighbor’s house, and some simply looked out the window in curiosity. When they looked up to the heavens, they saw an unparalleled celestial spectacle. A meteor shower of unprecedented intensity erupted in the night sky, filling it with tens of thousands of shooting stars per hour, which observers said fell as thickly as snowflakes in a winter storm. Star Wars fans might picture the Eye of Aldhani from episode 6 of Andor, a spectacular feat of special effects that allowed the protagonists to make their escape from the empire during a meteor shower that lit up the sky. The real 1833 meteor shower was no less spectacular. The event, which came to be known as the Leonid meteor storm, was one of the most remarkable astronomical events in recorded history, both because of its breathtaking beauty and its importance to the development of science.


Continue reading A Blizzard of Falling Stars (episode 287)

The Magician and the Medium Margery (episode 244)

This week we’re featuring a magician.  And not just any magician, one of the most famous of all time, Harry Houdini.  When he wasn’t busy escaping from locked jail cells and underwater safes, the Great Houdini made it a personal mission to unmask fraudulent mediums.  In the early 20th century, mediums, spiritualists, and psychic practitioners of all kinds were undergoing a massive boom.  With all the death associated with the Great War and the global flu pandemic, the public was desperate for a message from the other side, and there were plenty of practitioners who were willing to sell it to them.  The practice of spiritualism was so widespread and accepted that the journal Scientific American was on the brink of giving it the stamp of scientific legitimacy.  The leading contender for their approval (and their large cash prize) was a Beacon Hill medium who went by the stage name Margery.  And she might have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for that meddling magician, too!


Continue reading The Magician and the Medium Margery (episode 244)

Whale Watching on Washington Street (episode 185)

In the 1860s, Bostonians could pay 20 cents and watch a captive whale swim in a custom built aquarium on Washington Street in Boston’s Downtown Crossing.  Today, there’s no sea world near Boston, and our New England Aquarium doesn’t hold any whales or dolphins.  Perhaps that’s for the best, as we now realize how intelligent these giants of the sea are.  However, things were different 160 years ago, when an entrepreneurial inventor did the impossible, bringing a beluga whale alive from the arctic ocean to Boston and keeping it alive here for at least 18 months, before being betrayed by the greatest showman, PT Barnum himself.


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Epidemics and Public Health in Boston (episode 176)

I had planned an episode on a different topic for this week, but in light of our current COVID-19 state of emergency, I decided to share some classic clips about Boston’s experiences with epidemics and public health. Speaking of public health, I hope you’re already practicing social distancing, staying at home as much as you can, limiting contact with strangers, and staying six feet away from other people whenever you can. During the 1918 “Spanish” flu, cities that practiced social distancing fared much better than those that didn’t, and in that case Boston was slow to close schools, churches, theaters, and other gathering places. I hope we’ll do better this time around. Along with the 1918 flu pandemic, we’ll be discussing an 1849 cholera epidemic that Boston fought with improved sanitation, and the 1721 smallpox season, when Cotton Mather controversially used traditional African inoculation techniques that he learned from Oneismus, who was enslaved in the Mather household.


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Harvard Harnesses the Heavens (episode 158)

Since we “fell back” to Standard Time this past weekend, Boston has been forced to adjust to 4:30 sunsets.  To help us understand why the sun sets so early in Boston in the winter and what we could do about it, we’re going to replay a classic episode about how the idea of time zones and standard time was born in Boston, with the help of the Harvard Observatory.  And because we’re talking about the observatory, we have to share the story of the women who worked as human computers at the Harvard Observatory.


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Boston’s Dark Days and Eclipses (episode 145)

The brilliant sunsets and dramatic weather reports inspired by smoke drifting into our area from Canadian wildfires last month got me thinking about two past HUB History shows.  There have been at least three smoke events in Boston history that caused darkness in the middle of the day and made people wonder if the end of the world was coming.  Our first clip will be about the dark days in 1780, 1881, and in 1950. Of course, people who witnessed dark days compared them to solar eclipses.  Our second classic segment is from the summer of 2017, exploring the solar eclipses that early Boston witnessed, from soon after European colonization to the turn of the 19th century. 


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