On January 21, 1976, the supersonic Concorde jet began commercial service. It had been under development for a decade, and made a bold promise to change the way we travel the world by making transit times drastically shorter. Often the Concorde would cut the travel time for a given route in half by flying at speeds exceeding Mach 2.0, which, while exciting, had its own drawbacks. The high development and operating cost of the planes meant tickets were expensive - $7,000 or more for a round trip between New York and London - and the unique supersonic characteristics of the jet meant loud sonic booms would emanate as it passed, disturbing any nearby populated areas. Some localities passed ordinances banning the jets, and these difficulties, combined with a drop in ridership following a deadly Concorde crash in 2000 (which had nothing to do with the jet’s supersonic speeds), the program was cancelled in 2003. One of the most promising commercial travel methods ever seen by humans found a premature end, unrelated to the technological viability or the social desire for such a service, but because it wasn’t profitable.
I’ll take this opportunity, after too briefly touching on the story of the Concorde, to announce the end of another entirely unprofitable venture, The Quotidian Intelligencer. After one hundred and thirty five stories (one hundred thirty six counting this one), I’m calling it a day on this daily history blog that has been such an enjoyable project to work on. It began as a way to tell stories from history, something I enjoy doing immensely, and grew into a much bigger project that has changed the way I view the study of history entirely.
We are used to viewing the past through a specific lens. We learn our history in school, where it is neatly presented as a series of people, places, and events, and where our pace cannot slow to accommodate detail as there are semesters drawing to a close and exams to be completed. In the end, we emerge with a solid understanding of the general chronology of things, but with little flavor behind it. Our history is viewed from a distance, where the people involved in events are so remote and one-dimensional they might as well be characters from a book.
While writing these one hundred and thirty five stories, I have found a new appreciation for the people of the past. In school, we might learn that Wilhelm Röntgen discovered the x-ray by accident while working in his home laboratory, but not that he was so bewildered by the sight of the bones of his hand that he locked himself in his laboratory for months convinced he’d lost his mind. We breeze through the important battles and themes of the Civil War, but never touch on the occasion when a group of young exiled confederates swooped down from Canada and raided St. Albans, Vermont in one of the stranger and more poorly-executed actions of the war. We’re taught that the internet was developed as a military project to create a bomb-proof communications network, but not that the first message ever sent over the internet was cut short when the transmitting computer crashed.
These stories prove that human history is one of personality and of failure, and is not exclusive to the people whose names are in the history books. If history is an attempt at understanding how we arrived at the world we live in, and how the people of the past shaped that world through their contributions good and bad, then each individual story must be considered. Each failure and success, each new piece of technology, each milestone discovery, must be weighed in our estimation of how we got here. Even those events that on their own did little to turn the tide of progress, when viewed in a larger context, are immensely important to understanding who our forebears were and why they made the decisions that led to us.
Ultimately, history is the study of everything that came before. And it is a study demanding of depth, detail, and dedication, more than I was able to provide while writing The Quotidian Intelligencer in the hours I wasn’t working on the things that pay the bills. Brevity was a necessary evil in producing interesting stories from the past on a daily basis, and it is an evil that nags. I have discovered so many stories of which I had no prior knowledge and which I hope to explore more deeply in the future.
Like the Concorde, I hope that one day The Quotidian Intelligencer makes a dashing return. Until that time I’ll be leaving the website active with all of the previous stories available for reading. If you’re reading this, I’ll presume this wasn’t your first time reading one of my stories. I thank you for your time and your attention, and I hope that you learned something new, or at were at least entertained. I certainly had a wonderful time researching and writing these stories, and look forward to continuing them in one form or another. Until then.
- Isaac