A century ago, scientists in this remote Cornish hut established height zero. Here’s why it matters.
Similar tidal observatories were built at the same time at Felixstowe and Dunbar, but bizarrely their mean sea level calculations were out of kilter with Newlyn. Felixstowe was close, with about 1.2cm discrepancy, but Dunbar recorded a significant 24.7cm variance to the Cornish observatory. Geodesists, who study the geometric shape of the Earth, still debate whether calculation errors have created an artificial slope in Britain or whether there truly is a difference in MSL around the British Isles – contrary to the logical notion that water is supposed to find its own level. Their overriding objective, however, was to establish a single MSL from which all heights could be referenced, and Newlyn won the day.
Radiating from Newlyn, a series of 86 base marks and thousands of trig points could then be used to measure the height of any point in Britain, using triangulation. A century on, ODN still provides the MSL reference point for the heights marked on map contour lines; it’s an arbitrary level, universally accepted as zero.
The modern measure
These days, geodesists rely on satellites and tiny variations in gravity to measure heights. Their measurements are less about the altitude that might interest a mountaineer, and much more about relative heights, says Greaves.
“For a large construction project you need to know the slope across the site – if you’re laying a large sewer drain you’ll want to know that it’s going to run downhill,” he says. This type of height data is vital for deciding where to install wind turbines and where to locate mobile phone masts for maximum reach, as well as flood modelling. It’s also vital information for drones to fly safely along aerial corridors without crashing into each other.
The Sopranos of Berlin: A Brutal Crime Family and a Billion Dollar Jewel Heist
Dirk Syndram stared out the car window from the passenger seat as the blackened streets of Dresden, Germany, zipped by. As a museum director, Syndram doesn’t get many phone calls in the middle of the night; he isn’t often roused from his bed and driven into work in the predawn darkness. That sort of thing can only mean the worst has happened.
As his car slowed to a stop outside the Residenzschloss—the city’s iconic Baroque palace—Syndram could see that the cops had the whole area sealed off. It was now a little before six o’clock on the morning of November 25, 2019, and from the street that ran past the palace, a keen observer might have noticed the damage in a nook on the ground floor. A section of an iron gate had been pried apart. Behind it, where there had once been a window, there was now a gaping hole.
Police wouldn’t allow him through to survey the damage, but Syndram didn’t need to go inside to understand what had happened. He knew—better than anybody—what the thieves had been after. The window led to the so-called Green Vault, a glittering repository of 3,000 of the most precious royal treasures in Europe: gemstone-studded sculptures, ornate ivory cabinets, miniature dioramas, massive diamonds, and hundreds of other rare objects of enormous cultural significance—much of the trove commissioned or acquired by the early-18th-century monarch Augustus II, nicknamed Augustus the Strong, who socked it all away in his sprawling Residenzschloss, or Royal Palace, on the Elbe River.
Syndram, who’d been the Green Vault’s director since 1993, was horrified and mystified: The museum, Syndram would later tell a reporter, had in recent years conducted tests of its security system and determined that all was working perfectly. What could have possibly gone wrong?
When news of the heist hit the press, the robbery was described as one of the most costly art heists in history. Reports valued the looted treasure at as much as $1.2 billion. That figure was debatable, but the scale of the loss was staggering, and Syndram knew a detail that made the problem much, much worse: None of the art was insured. The premiums on a collection that valuable would be too taxing for the museum to handle.
Eventually authorities let Syndram inside to inspect the crime scene. He walked through vaulted and mirrored antechambers into the Hall of Precious Objects, where he could see the thieves' point of entry. Much of the room was intact, the idiosyncratic treasures—gilded ostrich eggs, nautiluses and sea snails set in silver, crystal bowls—appeared untouched. Aside from the missing window, the only sign of the intruders was on the floor, where Syndram noticed an exquisite jewelry box that had been knocked off a display table. It remained undamaged.
Syndram passed through another room and into the burglars' ultimate destination: the Chamber of Jewels. In a far corner, a display case had been hacked to pieces, the safety glass reduced to thousands of tiny shards. Syndram could see that the thieves had made off with a slew of very particular treasures: a diamond-laden breast star of the Polish Order of the White Eagle; a sword hilt containing nine large and 770 smaller diamonds; an epaulet adorned with the Dresden White Diamond, a 49-carat cushion-cut stone of unusual radiance and purity believed to have been unearthed from the fabled Golconda mines of India. Gone as well were many diamond-studded buttons and shoe buckles worn by Augustus the Strong at wild-boar hunts and weddings.
Syndram stared at the shattered showcase. He felt as if someone had injured a person he loved. He had been the individual responsible for returning the collection to the Green Vault, after decades of displacement and near destruction during World War II and its convulsive aftermath. “The theft was brutal, shameless,” the director would later say. It was also astonishingly fast. Apparently aware that they had a narrow window of time between triggering the alarm and the arrival of the police, the thieves had used less than five minutes to get in and out of the museum. They seemed to know exactly what they had come for. Or did they? Syndram couldn’t decide for sure.
Was Charles Lindbergh responsible for his son’s kidnapping and death?
Tim Hrenchir
Instead of becoming the main suspect, aviator and international celebrity Charles A. Lindbergh was put in charge of the investigation when he reported in 1932 that his toddler son had been snatched from their New Jersey home.
In a recently released book, author Lise Pearlman asks readers to consider the possibility that Lindbergh used his position to conceal the fact that he was personally – and intentionally – responsible for his son’s death.
Pearlman’s heavily researched book – titled “The Lindbergh Kidnapping Suspect Number 1: The Man Who Got Away” – was put out Sept. 1 by Berkeley, Calif.-based Regent Press.
It’s the fifth book by Pearlman, a longtime attorney who was the first presiding judge of the California State Bar Court, a position she held from 1989 to 1995.
Pearlman’s research assistants included her daughter, Lawrence resident Jamie Benvenutti, who said she found long out-of-print publications at the University of Kansas’ Anschutz Library that shared key information supporting Pearlman’s theory about the circumstances of Lindbergh’s son’s death.
Pearlman’s book is available at bookstores and amazon.com, where it has an average score of 4.4 out of 5 from 13 customer reviews. The book is available by hardcover for $32.24, by paperback for $23.54 and by Kindle for $11.49. Copies that are purchased at the Regent Press website come signed.
The book is 575 pages long. About 350 pages are actual text, with the rest being photos, appendices, exhibits and end notes, Pearlman said.
She talked in a recent interview with The Topeka Capital-Journal about how Lindbergh – known as “the Lone Eagle” – became an international hero after he completed the first nonstop intercontinental flight from New York to Paris in 1927.
In 1929, Lindbergh married Anne Spencer Morrow, whose father was a partner at one of the world’s largest investment banks.
Their first child – Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., known as “the Eaglet” – was born in June 1930.
He was 20 months old when he was reported abducted late March 1, 1932, from the second floor of the Lindbergh home by someone who left a handwritten ransom note.
The case gained international attention, becoming known as “the crime of the century.”
Lindbergh on April 2, 1932, paid a $50,000 ransom for his son’s return, which included gold certificates that were about to be withdrawn from circulation.
A corpse that authorities concluded belonged to Lindbergh’s son was found May 12, 1932, near a road about 4.5 miles south of Lindbergh’s home by a delivery truck driver who had gone into a grove of trees to urinate. The child had a fractured skull.
Authorities in September 1934 arrested German immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who had made a purchase using a gold certificate that was part of the ransom money.
Much of the ransom money was then found in Hauptmann’s garage. An expert said a section of wood found in Hauptmann’s attic was an exact match to the wood used to build the ladder that had apparently been used to climb up to a second-floor window at Lindbergh’s home and abduct his son.
Hauptmann denied being involved.
He said the gold certificates had been left with him by a friend, Isidor Fisch, who returned to Germany from the U.S. in December 1933 and died there of tuberculosis in March 1934. Hauptmann said he kept the money for himself because Fisch owed him.
Still, Hauptmann was convicted of capital murder in the death of Lindbergh’s son. He died in the electric chair in April 1936 after refusing a last-minute offer to reduce his sentence to life in prison without parole in exchange for a confession.
Various authors have since contended Hauptmann was not responsible for the kidnapping and death of Lindbergh’s son.
Gregory Ahlgren and Stephen Monier theorized in a book published in 1993 that Lindbergh was playing a prank when he dropped his son from a ladder, killing him, then hid the body.
Pearlman said she is the first author to have theorized that the killing of Lindbergh’s son was intentional and premeditated and was done as part of a scientific experiment involving Alexis Carrel, the French surgeon and biologist whose work pioneering vascular suturing techniques won him a Nobel Prize in 1912.
Lindbergh was working with Carrel at the time of the kidnapping of Lindbergh’s son. Pearlman said Lindbergh had used his mechanical expertise to dramatically improve a “perfusion pump” Carrel had created, which enabled living organs to exist outside the body during surgery.
Pearlman thinks Lindbergh was motivated to help Carrel by a belief that his research could help save the life of Lindbergh’s wife’s older sister, Elisabeth Morrow Morgan, who had heart problems after suffering from rheumatic fever. She would die of pneumonia following an appendectomy at age 30 in 1934.
Pearlman theorized that Carrel, who worked for the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, hoped to improve his knowledge of the way the human body works by using the perfusion device to conduct experiments using the body of a living person, who would have to die as a result of those tests.
Pearlman’s book adds that Lindbergh felt unhappy that his firstborn son was a “weakling” who had an abnormally large head and may have suffered prenatal damage when Anne Lindbergh inhaled toxic fumes as the couple made a record-setting cross-country flight in April 1930.
Carrel and Lindbergh were both proponents of “eugenics,” the study of how to arrange reproduction to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable, and believed weak infants were meant to die, Pearlman’s book says.
“Lindbergh might well have felt like Abraham offering the Almighty his son Isaac – not to the Biblical God but to the God of Science with Carrel as the chosen instrument,” it said. “Through twisted logic, that was how ’the Eaglet’ might live up to expectations of greatness like those achieved by his father.”
In making the case that Lindbergh was willing to sacrifice his first-born son for science, Pearlman’s book says Lindbergh never shed a tear over the toddler’s death.
The book says Lindbergh showed little interest in the boy, repeatedly described him as “it” and behaving toward him in a hostile manner several times during the last months of his life.
Pearlman theorizes that Lindbergh’s son died on Carrel’s operating table on March 8, 1932.
“In his April 1932 annual report, Carrel identified Lindbergh as a key member of the team that had just completed an historic, month-long carotid artery experiment,” Pearlman wrote.
She added, “Lindbergh was key in more ways than one if he supplied his own child as the subject of that experiment.”
Benvenutti, Pearlman’s daughter, said two books she found at KU’s Anschutz Library strongly support her mother’s theory about Lindbergh’s son’s death.
One of those was “Culture of Organs,” a manual by Carrel and Lindbergh detailing the vivisection experiments they conducted, she said.
Pearlman’s book says that Lindbergh, who was “”far more of a Nazi sympathizer than Carrel“ before World War II, convinced Carrel during the Nazi occupation of France in 1940 to take a job overseeing the French Vichy government’s ”French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems.”
Carrel then played a key role in implementing eugenics policies during the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. He was accused of collaboration with the Nazis after France was liberated but died at age 71, in November 1944, before he could go to trial.
Meanwhile, Lindbergh – who had sat in German dictator Adolph Hitler’s box at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin – initially called for Americans to stay out of World War II but stopped advocating that publicly after the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Charles and Anne Lindbergh between 1932 and 1945 had five other children, all of whom grew to adulthood. Four remain alive today.
Charles Lindbergh died of lymphoma at age 72 in 1974, in Hawaii.
In highlighting his secretive nature, Pearlman writes that Lindbergh also fathered seven other children, unknown to his family back in the United States.
“Under an assumed name, from the late 1950s through the late 1960s, he secretly fathered seven illegitimate children by three mistresses in Germany,” Pearlman’s book says.
It says all three women had been put in touch with LIndbergh when they let it be known they would like to bear his children.
“So many German men of their generation had died in World War II, the women were eager for even a small percentage of Lindbergh’s time and attention,” Pearlman writes. “The three women knew his true identity, but their children did not learn it until they grew up.”