SWILL MILK KILLS    May 1858, Frank Leslie's Weekly Illustrated   depicted a nearly dead cow hoisted up off the manure covered floor in a New York City whiskey distillery "dairy farm" for one last milking.      In May 1858, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, Harper Weekly’s major competitor, ran an early example of investigative reporting.   Many whiskey distilleries had a side business –dairy farming.   Well, not farming exactly unless you consider examples such as Johnson’s Whiskey Distillery on West 16 th St with three long barns housing 2,000 cows in narrow stalls fed nothing but Johnson’s used up barley and corn mash.   Heated scalding hot, it was sluiced into the troughs in front of the captive cows.        T he stalls were not cleaned, so the cows had to lie down in their own manure and urine. When they stood up twice a day to be milked, the udders were not cleaned and neither were the milkers’...

The Great Eastern Returning to a Buoy Marking a Break in the Cable (A painting by Robert Dudley)      Cyrus Field's powers of persuasion must have been enormous. After the spectacular and expensive failure of the 1858 cable he raised funds for another effort in 1865. Though he came from a reasonably prosperous middle class family, Field's rise was really "rags to riches" and his enemies never let him forget it calling him "a junk collector."  Though a wealthy man Field was officially a New York City licensed junk collector.  His paper mills supplemented  wood pulp paper  with cotton rags. He had rag collecting contracts much like a recycling company would have today with a steel mill. To keep warehouses full of rags, Field was officially licensed as a "junk collector."       Field kept up with telegraph technology.  Blame for the failure of the 1858 cable was tossed back and forth among several of the key players.  Th...

HMS Agamemnon laying the Trans Atlantic cable 1858 NASA's program to send a man to the moon required--and yielded-- a variety of scientific and technical breakthroughs.  The moonshot of the 1850s, laying a telegraph cable from the New World to the Old World require--and yielded-- significant technical and scientific discoveries.  It was expected that once ships and cable were ready and in place, it would take only six to eight days to connect the continents.  Instead, it took nearly ten years and six  $1,200,000  major failures. But it wasn't until the cables had been successfully connected and tested that the real trouble began. By 1852 Europe was  already laying lines short distances under water such as  across the Irish Sea and the English Channel. Early experiments in laying telegraph cable underwater demonstrated it took a lot more redesigning than simply putting more gutta percha and tar insulation around the copper wires and plunking it in the w...