The Battle of Britain

Churchill understood the power of symbolic acts.

He stopped at an air-raid shelter where a bomb had killed forty people and a large crowd was gathering. For a moment, Ismay feared that the onlookers might resent Churchill’s arrival, out of indignation at the government’s failure to protect the city, but these East Enders seemed delighted. Ismay heard someone shout, “Good old Winnie! We thought you’d come and see us. We can take it. Give it ’em back.”

Colin Perry, who had witnessed the raid from his bicycle, saw Churchill and wrote in his diary, “He looked invincible, which he is. Tough, bulldogged, piercing.”

The Splendid & The Vile – Erik Larson

Lying in the Grass – Britain, WW2

On one sunny day in August, journalist Virginia Cowles found herself watching a major air battle while lying on the grass atop Shakespeare Cliff, near Dover.

“The setting was majestic,” she wrote. “In front of you stretched the blue water of the Channel and in the distance you could distinguish the hazy outline of the coast of France.” Houses lay below. Boats and trawlers drifted in the harbor, agleam with sun. The water sparkled. Above hung twenty or more immense gray barrage balloons, like airborne manatees. Meanwhile, high above, pilots fought to the death.

“You lay in the tall grass with the wind blowing gently across you and watched the hundreds of silver planes swarming through the heavens like clouds of gnats,” she wrote. “All around you, anti-aircraft guns were shuddering and coughing, stabbing the sky with small white bursts.”

Flaming planes arced toward the ground, “leaving as their last testament a long black smudge against the sky.” She heard engines and machine guns. “You knew the fate of civilization was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky,” she wrote. “You knew it, but even so it was hard to take it in.”

The Splendid & the Vile – Erik Larson

Balloon Mania

Among the diversions Benny enjoyed with his grandfather in the summer and fall of 1783 were the grand spectacles of the first balloon flights. The age of air travel began in June when two brothers, Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier, launched an unmanned hot-air balloon near Lyons that rose to a height of six thousand feet. The Franklins were not there, but they did witness in late August the first unmanned flight using hydrogen. A scientist named Jacques Charles launched a twelve-foot-diameter silk balloon filled with hydrogen produced by pouring oil of vitriol over fiery iron filings. With great fanfare, it took off from Paris in front of fifty thousand spectators and floated for more than forty-five minutes before landing in a village more than fifteen miles away. “The country people who saw it fall were frightened,” Franklin wrote Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society,”and attacked it with stones and knives so that it was much mangled.”

From Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin

12 Problems

“You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’”

⁃ Richard Feynman

Being, Not Having

“In the end, it’s all about what you want to be, not what you want to have. 

To have something (a finished recording, a business, or millions of dollars) is the means, not the end. 

To be something (a good singer, a skilled entrepreneur, or just plain happy) is the real point.

When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line.”

– Derek Sivers, Anything You Want

Adoration of the Magi

The Adoration was commissioned in March 1481, when Leonardo was twenty-nine, by the monastery of San Donato, which was just outside the walls of Florence. Once again his father helped. Piero da Vinci was a notary for the monks and bought his firewood from them. That year he was given two chickens for work he had done, which included negotiating a complex contract for his son to paint the Adoration as well as to decorate the face of the monastery’s clock.

His father was clearly worried, like the parents of many twenty-somethings over the ages, about his talented child’s work habits. The monks were as well. The elaborate contract was designed to force Leonardo, already known for leaving paintings unfinished, to buckle down and produce a completed work. It stipulated that he had to supply from his own pocket “the colors, the gold and all other costs arising.” The painting had to be delivered “within thirty months at the most,” or Leonardo would be forced to forfeit whatever he had done and get no compensation. Even the payment plan was odd: Leonardo would receive some property near Florence that had been donated to the monastery, have the right to sell it back to the monastery for 300 florins, but would also have to pay a young woman’s dowry of 150 florins that had been part of the land bequest.

It was clear within three months that these badly laid plans were going awry. Leonardo was unable to pay the first installment on the dowry, and he thus went into debt to the monastery for it. He also had to borrow money to buy paint. He was paid a bundle of sticks and logs for decorating the monastery’s clock, but his account was debited for “one barrel of vermilion wine” that he got on credit. Thus one of history’s most creative artists found himself decorating a clock for firewood, borrowing money for paint, and cadging wine.”