The Esperantist Physics Professor at Chicago

I wanted a picture of
Professor Mann. No luck.

In the early twentieth century, one of the major figures of the American Esperanto movement was Benjamin Pickman Mann (who typically went by B. Pickman Mann). He was an entomologist who worked at the Department of Agriculture (along with Karl Kellerman), and formed part of the group of Esperantists at the Department of Agriculture. His father was the prominent American educator, Horace Mann. But neither of them are related to the Professor Mann of the University of Chicago mentioned in the New-York Tribune on April 10, 1907. It’s a common name, and though Professor Mann’s ancestry does go back to New England, the lineages never seem to converge.

Professors in the Esperanto movement at the beginning of the twentieth century seemed to be pretty well divided between professors of language (which seems obvious) and professors of science (whose interest probably derived from having to slough through journals in a variety of languages—that was Wilhelm Ostwald’s claim). And so we’ve seen chemists, biologists, and now it’s time to add a physicist. Professor Mann was not a professor of languages, but was Charles Riborg Mann, who in 1907 was an associate professor of physics at the University of Chicago. As he was promoted to associate professor in that year, in April, he might have still been an assistant professor.

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For we were civil engineers in Egypt

Passover is just past us. One of the discussions at my table was the story told in the Torah that Hebrew slaves built the pyramids. It's a great story, and if it lead to a passion for social justice, I'm all for it. It just isn't true.

Big chunks of the Passover narrative contradict the archeological evidence. It's been known for a long time that they pyramids were built by contract labor, not slaves. We know this because the Egyptians kept records on how much they paid for the labor and that it was paid to the workmen themselves.

Now a group at the University of Amsterdam has published a paper showing how they did it. And the answer it, just the way the Egyptians documented it. They left a record.

How do you move a huge block of stone or a massive statue over the dry and shifting desert sands? By pouring water on the sand so it wasn't quite so shifting any more. The Washington Post quotes the lead researcher, Daniel Bonn:

I was very surprised by the amount the puling force could be reduced — by as much as 50 percent — meaning the Egyptians needed only half the men to pull over the wet sand as compared to dry.

The record in question, from the tomb of Djehutihotep, shows a worker pouring water on the sand, but Bonn notes that

Egyptologists had been interpreting the water as part of a purification ritual, and had never sought a scientific explanation.

While this is not proof, given the greater ease of wet sand, it would seem likely that if it happened once by accident, then it was soon happening on purpose.

It certainly does show how science can (among so many other things) help us illuminate the distant past.

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