Embarrassments
Mr. Gladstone Adams
Today, April 25th, is Italy’s most embarrassing public holiday, the Festa della Liberazione, the “Festival of the Liberation.” In practice, the day creates a long weekend and commemorates the end of the Second World War – an ambiguous outcome for this country – but by posing the event in terms of a “liberation,” it has left behind a number of questions that are still uncomfortable after 63 years.
We have been all over today’s newspaper coverage and, beyond numerous references to the fact that liberty is, on the whole, a good thing, there is not a single line of text explaining what the holiday is supposed to be about. At best, there is political comment vaguely describing the conflict’s losers as “nazi-fascists,” a formulation that begs the question of whether any Italians as such were ever actually involved in the War and, if so, just whose side were they on.
But there is no reference whatever, anywhere, to who the liberators might have been…
So that a trace remains of this, “Upper Italy” would like to point out that the first Allied troops entered Milan on the 25th of April 1945, finally and truly ending the game as far as this country was concerned. Mussolini was captured attempting to slither into Switzerland with his girlfriend, Claretta Petacci, two days later on the 27th. They were shot by a partisan hit squad on the 28th.
It was, all in all, a bad month for nazi-fascists and their female companions; Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in a Berlin bunker a couple of days later, on the 30th.
Losing a big war is culturally a very difficult thing to do and the odds and ends of the experience are still kicking around. With the conclusion of the Cold War, as Italy has flirted with institutional anti-americanism, the thing has become even more delicate and complicated.
And that’s why we’re not – hardly – going to talk about it.
Today’s theme is instead another anniversary, one with consequences which, if they are not so humanly dramatic, are at least as long-lived as defeat in a war: The automobile windshield wiper was invented precisely one hundred years ago today.
The portrait above is of the inventor, an Englishman named Gladstone Adams. Mr. Adams got the idea as he drove home from London through an unseasonable snowstorm after having watched Newcastle United play the Wolves in the 1908 Football (soccer to you) Association Cup final. “Motors Today” has a nice note about this (here), though, being Brits, they speak perversely of “windscreens.”
Now, windshield wipers happen to interest us very much because we have always considered them to be up at the top of the list of embarrassing technologies – the things that cause engineers to wince and change the subject whenever they come into the conversation (not too often, that is…).
In technological terms, they are nothing more than a mechanical imitation of shoving your arm out the window and scraping away at the slop with the edge of your hand. The Motors Today article we’ve cited has some fascinating information about the introduction of intermittent wiping (1969), the single centrally-hinged wiper (1975) and so on, but in terms of the underlying substance nothing has really changed in a hundred years.
Even washing machines, which still largely imitate beating your clothing on a rock by the edge of a stream, have done better than that – and yet wipers are embarrassingly still in use on jet aircraft, on ships and even on the space shuttle.
There have been attempts to be less, ah, anthropomorphic. An Italian automotive engineering firm, Fioravanti, has recently created a concept car with no wipers. It uses a sophisticated “nano-dust” technology to shift dirt and water around and to then warn tiny nozzles to blast them away with high-pressure jets. You can read something about this (here). The approach has been rejected by doubters who are concerned that their windshields might become more intelligent than they are.
Finally, we cannot get out of this without mentioning that, as in the case of the telephone and just about any other world-changing technology, there are conflicting claims about who first conceived the windshield wiper, though its use on an automobile would seem to have been Mr. Adam’s unique contribution.
The overall idea came first to an American woman, Ms. Mary Anderson, in 1903. She is supposed to have had the germinal thought on a street car in New York City as she watched the driver struggling to keep the glass clear, alternating between keeping the window down, which let the cold in, and stopping every few minutes to run out and clean it by hand.
She patented the concept, but was told her invention had no commercial value. By the early 1920s – after her patent had expired – wipers were fitted as standard in cars across the US and Europe.
Upper Italy probably owes an apology to Ms. Anderson, but if we are not simply attributing the invention to her, that is because her story has nothing at all to do with the 25th of April… Nor, if it comes to that, do we have her photograph.
25.04.08
Saved by the Yellow Peril
They’re still the bad guys
American honor in Western Europe is now safe, thanks to the Chinese. According to a Harris/FT poll recently released, China has overtaken the United States as the principal menace to global stability in the view of the main Continental populations.
The poll, carried out between March 27 and April 8, found an average of 35 per cent of respondents in five European countries now identify China as a greater threat to stability than any other nation.
According to the Financial Times, (here):
“Italians were the most concerned about China with 47 per cent naming the country as the biggest threat, compared with 26 per cent when the question was last asked in June 2007…
“The latest Harris poll found that China was the biggest threat for 36 per cent in France, up from 22 per cent last year, 35 per cent in Germany, up from 18 per cent, and 27 per cent in the UK, up from 16 per cent. All three last year ranked the US as a bigger threat.
“Only inhabitants of Spain still considered the US to be a bigger threat than China, by 41 per cent to 28 per cent.”
It probably ought to be mentioned that the period when the poll was conducted coincided with the first and most interesting phase of the shambles relating to Tibet and the Olympic torch, so the Americans are hardly off the hook. 29 per cent of the Europeans surveyed still believe they constitute the most serious danger.
The striking Oriental worries shown by Italians almost certainly have to do with the especially damaging effects Chinese commercial competition has had on the economy of Italy. The kind of high-end but low tech manufacturing the country specializes in has been shown to be highly vulnerable to Asian price competition.
20.04.08
Balancing Act
Damn goats are back
This is to apologize, if that’s necessary, for having placed “Google ads” on the site. They don’t really bring in anything to speak of, but they take no effort on our part and, anyway, something is better than nothing. Every time you click on them a microscopic sum of money is accredited to “Upper Italy.” You don’t have to actually buy anything. If this works out for us, we are planning to save up for a bottle of mineral water that we will then drink this summer.
Thank you for your understanding and, possibly, for your generosity.