nice nectarines, Jet.
My ex mother-in-law, who I really loved even after the divorce, had another thing she used to say "night vapors" ...meaning some kind of bad, night air that could make you sick. I always wondered about where that came from. Perhaps it's not exactly this, but old Europeans could have had their ideas influenced by such:
audio of this episode:
http://www.kuhf.org/programaudio/engines/eng848_64k.m3u
Today, we try not to breathe the evil vapors of the night air. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
Here're two words for you: Malaria literally means "bad air." Miasma was a word we once used for air that carries diseases like malaria. A miasma was air, usually night air, tainted with poison. That's why a Shakespearean suitor said of his love,
O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purged the air of pestilence.
All through the 19th century we still believed that bad air, actually smelly air, caused disease. Microscopes had shown us germs swimming in water, but we didn't connect them with disease.
Then, in 1853, an English doctor, John Snow, struggled with a cholera epidemic in London. The stink of death and sickness was all around. People thought that stink carried the disease. But Snow studied statistics. He finally pin-pointed a well whose water was fed by sewage from a public toilet up the hill.
After that, Lister, Koch, and Pasteur identified disease-carrying germs. They learned to kill them. But the concept of miasma didn't go away. In 1870 the English physicist Tyndall proved that particles in air can carry germs -- the aerosol droplets we cough up, or dust. The air itself carries nothing at all.
But we still believed in miasma. Tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever seemed to be carried by miasma. You caught them without touching the sick. Africans had correctly told the English explorer Richard Burton that mosquitoes carried yellow fever. He laughed at natives who didn't understand that bad air simply arrived during mosquito season.
It was 1897 before two doctors, Ronald Ross working in India, then Walter Reed working in Havana, began looking at mosquitoes. In 1897 Ross cut mosquitoes open. He found evidence of the bacterium that caused malaria in their stomachs. He was so excited that he sat down and wrote bad poetry about it:
Henceforth I will resound,
But praises unto Thee;
Tho' I was beat and bound,
Thou gavest me victory.
By now typhoid and yellow fever were taking a terrible toll among our soldiers in Cuba. Walter Reed went looking for the cause. At first he suspected the miasma. However, by 1900 his team had proved that water carried typhoid. Two years later they showed that mosquitoes, not bad air, were carrying yellow fever.
So we had, at last, "purged the night air of pestilence." Now we embraced fresh air as never before. We began building our houses with outdoor sleeping porches. Fresh air was still the great cure-all when I was a child.
And maybe rightly so. For a new miasma of airborne carcinogens and pollutants is afflicting us. Today, we might well need fresh air, purged of pestilence, more than we ever did.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
---------- Post added at 09:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:33 PM ----------
BTW, I'm happy to report that when I looked up after posting the above, I saw the first fire fly of the season flying across my living room
From the corner of my eye I think I saw it come down my chimney. Maybe it's a Santa FireFly. Jet, if I find a picture of that, I'll put it in your santa thread.