27th August 2020

 

Mozart

They say we’re only six degrees of separation away from anyone in the world.    This is a scary prospect indeed when you think who’s in the White House.

We’re about to go on just such a journey (possibly with a few more characters in the chain  than six), which will take us from Mozart to the  AH-64 Apache,  the most advanced multi-role combat helicopter in the world.  Impossible for Mozart to be linked with a state-of-the-art helicopter?  

Fasten your safety belts, we’re about to take off.

 It’s 1756 and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, actually baptised  Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart,  the musical genius, is born in Salzburg.  Playing the piano at 3 and composing by the age of 5,  his father naturally wanted his son’s talents to make a lot of money.  Hello Europe!

Mozart’s  ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ was premiered in Vienna but based on a play by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, coincidentally called Le Mariage de Figaro.  Perhaps plagiarism hadn't been invented.

Beaumarchais

Beaumarchais was many things: writer inventor, watchmaker, horticulturalist…. and spy.

During the American War of Independence, Beaumarchais  persuaded the French  to cough up beaucoup de francs with which to buy arms which would deal to the Brits.  Beaumarchais, the tart, also later bought rifles to aid the French Revolutionaries.

Thomas Jefferson had reason to be grateful to the French for their support which helped free his country. His countrymen had reason to be grateful to him when he repealed the Whisky Tax. 

He was a liberal and much influenced by a book called ‘On Crimes and Punishments’ by Italian, Cesare di Beccaria, which contained shocking truths about the treatment of criminals. This was a universal but unaddressed problem,  after all,  who cared about criminals?

Thomas Jefferson

Actually, quite a few people: social reformers in the same mould as Thomas Jeffferson who tried to get capital punishment removed from the statue books.  Sadly he was not as successful with this as he had been with the whisky.

Two other reformers, Austrians, Franz Gall and Johann Spurzheim also felt they had the answer to the rehabilitation of wrong-doers - their invention Phrenology. Their theory ,that the bumps on a person’s skull could indicate their tendencies, was widely accepted. If you could catch potential criminals early enoug you could turn them to the straight and narrow.

Spurzheim took this very popular idea to American but in 1832, he died.  The eulogy at his funeral was read by Harvard academic and devoted followe Karl Follen.

Follen, whom every university student can thank for varsity gyms, had been a political activist in Germany, was hauled into court and tried by Judge E.T.A Hoffman who was also a writer of macabre fantasay stories featuring ghosts and the undead.  Bedtime reading for the nervous it was not.

Edgar Allen Poe

One of his stories, was the inspiration for the po-faced  Edgar Allen Poe’s, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’  

Edgar Allen Poe

He also wrote ‘The Bells’ which became the basis for Rachmaninov’s symphony of the same name.

Rachmaninov fled Russia after the revolution and at a party in Long Island, heard about a fellow Rusian emigre  who was looking for a backer for his inventions.

Rachmaninov visits him, is very impressed by the machine and agrees to loan him the modern equivaletn of $200,000.

He is well rewarded because by 1937, this invention,  a 4-engine flying boat, is being used by PanAm to transport people to Europe.

The next invention, the dream machine he’d been working on since he was a boy back in Russia, is destined to become even more of a hit and Igor Sikorky goes down in history as the inventor of the helicopter. 

 

Over the years, helicopters are improved and today, the AH-64D Apache is the direct descendant of Sikorksy's original.

 So there we are, from Mozart to helicopters and I am indebted to James Burke, whose Knowledge Web inspired me to sit up until 2am researching all this fascinating information.