Albert Einstein formulated the world’s most famous equation in 1905, a year that has rightly been called his annus mirabilis, or “Wonderful Year.” It was in that same year that he made three other important discoveries:

1) The Photoelectric Effect
The Photoelectric Effect is an odd property of light: shine a light on a sheet of paper with two small holes on it, and the pattern formed by the light passing through the holes doesn’t quite behave the way you’d expect. The expectations before 1905 were based on the theory that light is a wave, but Einstein postulated another possibility. Or, rather, he postulated three: perhaps light isn’t only a wave; and perhaps something can be matter and a wave at the same time; and perhaps matter can have a mass of zero. With those new assumptions, Einstein solved the problem of the Photoelectric Effect. Even he considered this revolutionary.

2) Brownian Motion
Go to the nearest body of water, look at the surface, and you’re likely to witness an odd phenomenon: pollen zipping around the surface of the water in seemingly random ways. This is called “Brownian Motion.” Einstein explained how it happens, and, in doing so, proved the existence of atoms.

3) The Theory of Special Relativity
Years before formulating his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein postulated a theory that works in a special case: for bodies moving close to the speed of light. The Devoted Intellectual does not pretend to understand this one, but feel free to chime in with your explanations…

And what about that famous equation? It appeared in a fourth paper. In a footnote. Almost an after-thought in a year of magical thinking.

The label “Impressionist,” like “Tory” or “intellectual” or “suffragette,” was first used as an insult. In this case, the insult was hurled by Louis Leroy, who coined the term in “Exhibition of the Impressionists,” his famous review of the 1874 exhibit that made Renoir, Pissarro, Monet and others famous. Leroy described one painting as “palette-scrapings placed uniformly on a dirty canvas,” and many others agreed. The works of the Impressionists were dismissed as sloppy, slap-dash messes. There might be a few contemporary artists who would be happy to hear their work described like this, but the Impressionists weren’t. They insisted that their paintings represented the world far more accurately than the old masters had. According to a study published last year, they just might have been right.

Between 1899 and 1905, Claude Monet made 19 paintings of the British House of Parliament at various times of day. Like all the Impressionists, Monet was fascinated by subtle differences in light and shading and captured these in his works. He captured them with remarkable accuracy, as Jacob Baker and John E. Thornes demonstrated in last year’s study. Baker and Thornes compared the position of the sun in the paintings with astronomical records and found that they matched exactly. As Thornes told the New York Times, “We can date, almost to within 15 minutes, when he first put the sun onto certain images.” Now that they know how precise Monet’s observations were, Baker and Thornes hope to use his paintings to analyze “London fogs and air quality during this period.” Apparently, those “palette-scrapings” were placed on canvas far more carefully than M. Leroy cared to admit.

Read the abstract of Baker and Thornes’ paper here.

The first draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a condemnation of slavery that was struck out in order to conciliate representatives from the South. The original wording of the Constitution contained a famous “compromise” that allowed for slaves to be counted as “three-fifths” of a person when determining the number of seats that states would have in Congress, giving each plantation owner the equivalent of hundreds of votes with which to oppress his human chattel. These were horrible stains on the founding documents of the United States, and one man who had no use for the conciliation and compromise that applied them was John Brown.

Brown responded to these imperfections not by dismissing the Declaration and the Constitution, but by rewriting them. He saw that the principles they embodied were noble, despite their stance on the institution of slavery. His revisions lived up to the noble principles and categorically rejected the legality of human property. Brown’s “Declaration of Liberty by the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America” makes this point explicit, when it states that acts which condone slavery “are false, to the words, Spirit, and intention of the Constitution of the United States, and the Declaration of Independence.” His Declaration is a declaration of freedom for men and women held in bondage, and his “Provisional Constitution” began by recognizing slavery as an “unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion,” and setting forth the principles for a new Union that would be, in the words of Brown’s great successor in the battle against slavery, “conceived in liberty.”

In his time, Brown was dismissed as an insane traitor. But the war came, and the new Union that Lincoln created began the process of making Brown’s “Provisional Constitution” permanent.

Read John Brown’s Declaration here. And read his Provisional Constitution here.

The earliest electrical cars had one particularly inconvenient feature: every night, they needed to be plugged in to restore their batteries. Besides being inconvenient, this also made them somewhat pointless: how much energy was really being conserved if the batteries had to be charged on a nightly basis?

Eventually, car makers came up with an innovative solution. “Hybrid” cars use gas to accelerate, but electricity to run the car at a steady speed. Most importantly, this electricity is not pumped into the car with a large plug or generator. It is produced by the car every time that it brakes. How? Friction. When the brakes are applied to a moving car, this causes friction. Depending on how hard the brakes are pushed, this is enough to slow down or stop the car. Until recently, that’s been all there was to say. But car makers soon decided to reuse the energy generated by that friction. So, every time you brake your hybrid, the heat produced by the brakes is used to charge the battery, allowing it to go for years and decades without ever being plugged in. This is about as true to the environmentalist motto - “reduce, reuse, recycle” - as you can get.

In 1913, T.S. Eliot was a student at Harvard University who had just been awarded a scholarship to study at Oxford. He hoped to establish himself there as a poet and a thinker, and he knew that one of the most influential people in the field was Ezra Pound. Pound, who would soon take up Eliot’s cause, was the overseas editor of a Chicago magazine named Poetry, to which he would submit Eliot’s “Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In the January 1913 edition, Pound published an essay about the best new poets in London (a list that Eliot would soon strive to make). That issue, which Eliot is likely to have read, also contained a poem by the Kentucky writer Malcolm Cawein. The title of the poem was “Waste Land.”

Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place,
Twisted and torn they rose–
The tortured bones of a perished race
Of monsters no mortal knows,
They startled the mind’s repose.
…
I looked at the man; I saw him plain;
Like a dead weed, gray and wan,
Or a breath of dust. I looked again–
And man and dog were gone,
Like wisps of the graying dawn.

As Robert Ian Scott first pointed out in the Times Literary Supplement in 1995, Cawein’s poem (which preceded Eliot’s by eight years) has more than its title in common with Eliot’s far more famous work. The tone and sensibility are very much like Eliot’s, as are many of the images, from the “skeletons gaunt” to the “breath of dust” that Eliot would transform into a “handful.” At the end of his poem, Eliot famously listed his sources, but not all of them. He was happy to put himself in the same company as Chaucer and Shakespeare, Dante and the Bhagavad Gita, but did not condescend to mention the forgotten poet from Kentucky who influenced him more than anyone else.

Was Eliot’s act plagiarism or homage? Compare Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to Cawein’s “Waste Land” and decide for yourself.

Commodore Matthew C. Perry is most famous for the event described in today’s entry in The Intellectual Devotional: landing his gunships on Japan and opening communications and commerce with the once-isolated island nation. But years before doing so Perry anchored on a less exotic locale: Key West, Florida.

The Keys get their name from a mispronunciation: the Spanish name “Cayo Hueso” was turned into “Key West” rather than translated into “Bone Island.” Though known as part of Florida today, the were not officially within the boundaries of that state until 1822. Florida had long ago been a Spanish colony, first encountered by Europeans when Ponce de León landed there in 1513. The British had possession of the island since 1763, but it was reclaimed by the Spanish after the colonies defeated the British in the War of Independence. The new United States eventually gained control of Florida from Spain 1819, by, in part, promising not to make any claim on Texas. The United States made its claim on Texas in 1845.

While Florida became part of the United States in 1819, Key West was not incorporated until three years later, in 1822. The gap occurred because Spain originally claimed the Keys as part of Cuba and didn’t cede them to the United States along with Florida in 1819. This claim didn’t last long: by 1822, the islands were part of the United States, and the moment was made official when Commodore Perry landed his ships on their shores on March 25. He named them “Thompson’s Island” in honor of the then-Secretary of the Navy, but then as now they were always known as Key West.

The World’s Fair (or Columbian Exposition) in Chicago was one of the most magnificent events of the late 19th-century. Over the six months of the fair, visitors numbering nearly half the population of the United States attended, and a number of technological marvels, from the elevator to the Ferris Wheel, made their debut. However, it was also the backdrop to a grisly series of murders, and that’s the story told by Erik Larson in The Devil in the White City.

The major architects of the Columbian Exposition were Frederick Law Olmstead (the designer of Central Park in New York City) and Daniel Burnham. Burnham justly receives most of the credit for planning or designing the 200 buildings spread over 633 acres, known at the time as the “White City.” Another figure in the story, however, is Dr. Henry H. Holmes. Holmes (whose real name was Herman Webster Mudgett; he changed it in honor of Sherlock) ran a “World’s Fair Hotel.” It was a solid business idea: he got the name early, put the hotel near the fair and had its 27 million visitors as potential customers. But, the hotel also included a greased wooden chute that led to a man-sized kiln in the basement. That’s where Holmes disposed of the bodies.

What exactly did Holmes do? How did his murders relate to the Fair? Why is Burnham the other main character? For all of that, you’ll need to read the book. Click here to order a copy.