Do Elephants Jump? (24 page)

There actually are folks out there who believe that NASA pulled off a giant hoax with the “so-called moon landings.” Often, the lack of stars in the background of photos of the astronauts is cited as startling evidence to support the conspiracy.

Sheesh, guys. If you want to be skeptical about something, be dubious about whether “When you’re here, you’re family” at Olive Garden, or whether State Farm Insurance will be there for you the next time you’re in trouble. But don’t use a dark background in a photo of outer space to convince yourself that astronauts have never gotten farther into space than a Hollywood soundstage.

The answer to this Imponderable has more to do with photography than astronomy. Next time you go to a football game on a starry night, try taking a photo of the sky with your trusty 35mm point-and-shoot camera or camcorder. Guess what? The background will be dark — no stars will appear, let alone twinkle, in the background.

The stars don’t show up because their light is so dim that they don’t produce enough light on film in the short exposures used to take conventional pictures. But you
have
seen many photos of stars, haven’t you? These were undoubtedly time-lapse photographs, taken with fast film and with the camera shutter left open for at least ten to fifteen seconds. Without special film and a long exposure time, the camera lens can’t focus enough light on the film for the image to appear. Jim McDade, director of space technology for the University of Alabama at Birmingham, elaborates:

The same problems occur with digital cameras, film, and video cameras, as McDade explains:

Those of us who live in the city have had the experience of going out to a rural area on a clear night, and being amazed at the number of stars we can see when there aren’t lights all around us on the ground. You can create the same effect inside your house. On a clear night, kill the lights in a room and look out the window. Depending upon the atmospheric conditions, a star-filled sky may be visible to you. Flip on the lights inside the room, look outside, and the stars have disappeared.

Why? Light from a bright object near us can easily dwarf light emanating from distant objects, such as stars. In the case of astronauts, the lights attached to the space vehicle or space station or even the lights on an astronaut’s helmet can wash out the relatively dim light from the stars in the background.

Even with sensitive film, the suits that astronauts and cosmonauts wear reflect a lot of light. The glare from the astronauts themselves will provide contrast from the dark sky background and faint stars. Any light emanating from the stars is unlikely to be exhibited when cameras are geared toward capturing clear shots of a space walker.

Perhaps the space conspiracists would stifle themselves if the Apollo astronauts had taken time-exposure photographs that could display the stars in all their glory, but they never did. As McBain puts it: “After all, they went to the moon to explore the moon, not to stargaze.”

As reader Ann McGinnis-O’Connell suspects, these aren’t homes of Native Americans, but rather storage bins for salt (and sometimes sand), for use by public works agencies in de-icing roadways. They are located so close to the highway because the salt needs to be picked up as quickly as possible and distributed onto nearby roadways. Most of the time, the storage structures are on land too close to the highway to be of value for residential or commercial use.

Why is it necessary to store the salt in buildings, anyway? Just like your table salt, if de-icing salt is exposed to moisture (not just rain, but high humidity), it can cake up or get lumpy, and be difficult to spread. Water, whether in the form of rain or streams, can contaminate or dissolve it, too.

The storage domes are larger than they may appear as you whiz by them in your cars. One large manufacturer, Dome Corporation of America, manufactures structures ranging from 40 to 150 feet in diameter, the latter behemoth holding nearly 20,000 tons of salt and more than 26,000 tons of sand (sand is denser than salt, accounting for the weight differential). According to the Salt Institute, these humble storage buildings are designed to withstand heavy snows and winds of up to eighty miles per hour.

Why the upside-down ice - cream - cone shape? One requirement for a storage structure is that it not contain posts or beams that get in the way of loading or unloading the salt. In some cases, salt or sand are poured into the structure from the top, but most transportation agencies want the option to push the stuff in from the front, and unload it by driving trucks inside the structure — the bottom-heavy conical shape permits a stable, freestanding building.

But you could also fit a truck or forklift into a rectangular building, although it might be more difficult to manufacture such a structure without beams or trusses. The real secret to the conical shape is that it wastes the least amount of space. Richard Hanneman, president of the Salt Institute, points out that if you pour massive amounts of salt into a structure from an opening on the top, the salt naturally creates a cone shape. Salt and sand, like all loose, unconsolidated granular material, has an “angle of repose,” the steepest angle at which the mound will rest without slippage. If a forklift attempts to steepen the angle, say by pressing the salt on the bottom toward the middle of the cone in order to load more salt, it disturbs the equilibrium of the mound, causing grains to fall and creating pressure against the walls of the structure. In nature, ocean tides can similarly destabilize land near the shore by eroding the base, steepening its angle beyond its natural repose: Landslides are the result.

As Hanneman points out, “If you load the salt from the top, it will come down in a conical shape,” regardless of the type of structure that contained the salt. The angle of repose for salt is thirty-two degrees, and most salt domes are built with a similar slope, thus minimizing the size, and the cost, of the “wigwam.”

There is something charming about these wigwam structures, which are often covered with red shingles, but are otherwise unmarked and unadorned. But they might have some tough competition from a newfangled storage structure that looks positively old-fangled — rectangular buildings that look like barns. We were particularly taken with the “Hi-Arch Gambrel” (a gambrel is a roof with two slopes on each of two sides, with the lower slope steeper than the upper) produced by Advanced Storage Technology of Elmira, New York. We chatted with representative Jane Kerber, who remembers going on road trips in the 1960s and asking her parents, “What are those?” in reference to the salt bins.

Understandably, Kerber is high on the merits of her company’s thirty-feet-high structures. Domes have a large clearance in the center, but not near the walls. Trucks can’t always load into the front of a dome because of a lack of clearance, so are forced to load from the top, which often requires expensive conveyors and necessitates dumping the salt or sand on the ground outside of the dome before it is put on the conveyor. The Hi-Arch Gambrel is large enough so that trucks can enter the structure and dump directly inside, raising their beds inside the building.

Many communities mix salt with “stretchers,” such as sand, grit, or chemical anti-skid concoctions. These other abrasives are cheaper than salt, and they also provide traction for vehicles when it is too cold even for salt to help melt ice until the temperature rises. Advanced Storage Technology argues that it is easier to mix these substances in its “barns,” since there is much more headroom, especially as you get near the walls.

Kerber also makes the aesthetic argument against the “wigwam”:

Who would have ever thought that folks in the salt-storage business would be interested in aesthetics? You can judge for yourself by looking at the “wigwams” (http://www.dome-corp-na.com) and barns (http://www.saltstorage.com) on the Web.

The most common cause of fainting is a lack of sufficient blood flow to the brain because of a sudden drop in blood pressure. Serious heart problems, including arrhythmia and ventricular tachycardia, can also be the culprit and less frequently, neurological irregularities. Some phobics truly do faint at the sight of blood or a coiling snake, but this is the result of a sudden loss of blood pressure.

None of these medical conditions has been eradicated, so it’s always a shock to pick up a Victorian novel and find damsels fainting when they are frightened, fainting when they are ecstatic, fainting when their heart is heavy, and most of all, fainting when it is convenient to their purposes. What ever happened to swooning?

The most often cited faint-inducer in the past was a torture device known as the corset, an undergarment so tight that according to Lynda Stretton’s essay “A Mini-History of the Corset,”

What was the purpose of this torture? The mark of a beautiful woman was thought to be the thinnest possible waist. Stretton reports that although the literature refers to corseted waists as small as twelve to eighteen inches in adult women, most of these figures were probably fantasies:

Even so, trying to cinch in a waist six or eight inches tighter than nature intended could do damage to the circulatory system.

Corsets, with certain Madonna-like exceptions, are no longer a fashion rage. Has fainting stopped? Nope. As Louis E. Rentz, executive director of the American College of Neuropsychiatrists, wrote us:

Two U.S. studies of more than 5,000 healthy people indicate that somewhere between 3 to 6 percent of the population report at least one fainting episode over an extended period of time (ten years in one study, twenty-six in another).

One statistic popped out on all of the research about fainting we consulted: Men fainted almost as much as women. Could all the reports of female swooning in the nineteenth century be inaccurate? Exaggerated?

Upper-crust society in England, the subject of most of the Victorian novels we read in English 101, were living in times when women were considered to be delicate creatures. Corsets were thought not only to make women look more attractive, but to help them medically (children as little as three or four wore corsets, in the mistaken belief that such support would help strengthen their posture and musculature).

Even more bizarre were the beliefs about the “delicate sensibilities” of ladies. The Society for the Reformation of Manners, founded in London in 1690, first started fighting against prostitution and drunkenness, but by the nineteenth century became preoccupied with “cleaning up” the language.
Bloody
became a taboo word, and no host would serve a woman a rare cut of beef for fear that the sight of blood would send a delicate lady to the fainting couch for a swoon. In her review of etiquette books of the period,
The Best Behavior,
Esther B. Aresty notes that not only sticks and stones but words were believed to be able to hurt Victorian females:

Women in the nineteenth century lived in a culture in which fainting was seen as a badge of femininity. When Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States as a young man in the 1830s, he observed that European women were:

In this environment, who could blame a woman for timing a swoon so that it coincided with the approach of her intended? If you wanted to avoid a nasty confrontation, why not faint instead?

Our theory is that fainting was largely a cultural phenomenon, a benign form of mass hysteria. No doubt, tight corsets constricted blood flow and caused fainting, especially in women with low blood pressure. But Victorian society rewarded fainting — it was considered feminine and attractive behavior. The faint became an all-purpose excuse for ducking difficult obligations, the nineteenth-century equivalent of “my dog ate my homework,” with the added benefit of garnering sympathy.

We bet that the actual incidence of fainting hasn’t changed that much over centuries. Indeed, we recently encountered a reality show that proved that not only Victorian damsels feign fainting. On Fox TV’s reality show,
Boot Camp,
a drill instructor found macho Meyer dawdling on a hot day. Meyer decided to evade doing his required push-ups by “fainting.” He didn’t fool his comrades, just as we suspect most swooning damsels didn’t. But maybe Meyer’s fate explains why you don’t see folks bragging about fainting anymore: he was unanimously booted off the show.