Stateside with Rosalea Barker: Colorado

Colorado is one of only three states in the US whose boundaries are defined entirely by lines of latitude and longitude, rather than at least some of its shape being defined by geological features such as river valleys. Those boundaries remain unchanged from when it was first organized as a territory after the state of Kansas was created in 1861.

Gold was discovered in what was then the western portion of Kansas Territory in 1858, and gold miners lobbied Congress for the creation of the Territory of Jefferson in 1859, but were unsuccessful. Colorado didn’t become a state until after the Civil War, and it is often called the Centennial State because the legislation creating it was signed by President Ulysses S. Grant just 28 days after the celebration of the nation’s centennial in 1876. It is the 38th state.

One of the boom towns created by the discovery of precious metals—Colorado had rich deposits of both gold and silver—was Aspen. By the early twentieth century, it had become a ghost town. In his 1991 book “Whiteout: Lost in Aspen”, Ted Conover, whose previous two books had been first-person accounts of riding the rails with hoboes, and travelling with the “coyotes” who bring workers from south of the border into the United States, wrote a first-person account of living and working in a town that had reinvented itself.

A large part of the success of that reinvention can be credited to the efforts of Walter Paepcke, who created a celebration in Aspen in 1949 for the 200th anniversary of the birth of Goethe. He also turned the area into a skiing destination, popularizing the sport in the US as a result. The city’s Goethe roots live on in the Aspen Institute, whose two-fold mission is to foster values-based leadership and to provide a neutral and balanced venue for discussing and acting on critical issues.

Since 2005, the Institute has held an “Ideas Festival”; this year’s festival wraps up today (July 11). CBS’s Sunday program “Face the Nation” this morning featured the show’s host, Bob Schieffer, interviewing Attorney General Eric Holder on stage at the IF venue. You can see the CBS online story here, but they seem not to have posted video of the full discussion, which touched not just on immigration and the closing of Guantanamo Bay, but also on race relations in America. Oddly, after Holder had said in that context that the nation now has an African-American President and Attorney General, the lighting on his face got weaker and weaker so that Holder became more and more dark-skinned.

But Aspen is home to a piece of history that has nothing to do with mining, skiing, or lofty ideals. As the abstract for an article published in MIT’s “Presence” states: Aspen, the picturesque mountain town in Colorado, is known for two processes, or “verbs,” relating to heritage and virtuality. One is to “moviemap,” the process of rigorously filming path and turn sequences to simulate interactive travel and to use as a spatial interface for a multimedia database.

Moviemapping has its origins in 1976, when the Israeli Defence Forces successfully liberated the hostages being held at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. They had done so after rehearsing Operation Jonathan (named after the brother of Benjamin Netanyahu) in a replica of the airport terminal building. An Israeli construction firm had built the terminal and the blueprints in their possession were used as a basis for the replica. The US military saw that some way of rehearsing its operations before launching them in the real world would be advantageous.

Enter Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nicholas Negroponte (brother of John Negroponte, former US Deputy Secretary of State). From October 1, 1977 through September 30, 1980, he was the Principal Investigator on a project paid for in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in which he explored ways to create information-rich maps. This augmented reality was based on film of travelling through the environment and then linking to information about the objects in the environment.

The site Negroponte chose to film was Aspen, Colorado. Here is a video of the results. Although the video is mostly silent, it’s worth keeping the sound up:

Link: http://youtu.be/Hf6LkqgXPMU

You will immediately recognize this as the precursor to Google’s Streetview, and to apps such as those from Layar, which do everything from telling you about the nearest burger bar to showing you in which direction to point your antenna to receive Taiwan’s new HiHD TV signals just by using the GPS capability and camera now built into all smartphones.

I seem to have wandered far from Colorado, but in fact a little piece of it is right next to my bed in the form of the numbers on my alarm clock. Every night the clock syncs itself to the official timeteller of the United States, the radio signal that emanates from near Fort Collins, CO. The site of radio station WWV was chosen in 1962 in part because of the exceptionally high ground conductivity in the area.

But that was not the first time Colorado was selected for its electrical propensities. In May 1899, the father of the AC induction motor, Nickola Tesla, built an experimental station at Colorado Springs, from where he hoped to prove that electricity could be transported wirelessly. In one of his experiments, he lit up some incandescent light bulbs planted in the ground, just by using the soil’s conductivity.

Tesla’s plan seems to have been to turn the Earth itself into a dynamo, giving people everywhere access to a source of power. As the PBS website for their documentary on his life puts it:

“The laboratory that rose from the prairie floor was both wired and weird, a contraption with a roof that rolled back to prevent it from catching fire, and a wooden tower that soared up eighty feet. Above it was a 142-foot metal mast supporting a large copper ball. Inside the strange wooden structure, technicians began to assemble an enormous Tesla coil, specially designed to send powerful electrical impulses into the earth.

“On the evening of the experiment, each piece of equipment was first carefully checked. Then Tesla alerted his mechanic, Czito, to open the switch for only one second. The secondary coil began to sparkle and crack and an eerie blue corona formed in the air around it. Satisfied with the result, Tesla ordered Czito to close the switch until told to cease. Huge arcs of blue electricity snaked up and down the center coil. Bolts of man-made lightning more than a hundred feet in length shot out from the mast atop the station. Tesla's experiment burned out the dynamo at the El Paso Electric Company and the entire city lost power. The power station manager was livid, and insisted that Tesla pay for and repair the damage.”

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE—

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