
A Norwegian who knew his tortoises so well that he changed history - Clepsydra
http://nypesuppe.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-norwegian-who-knew-his-tortoises-so.html?m=1
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zkms
> In the age of sail, sending international mail was no easy matter. A sealed
> note would be left with some ship going in roughly the right direction, and
> then luck more than anything would decide the outcome. This was before steam
> ships, before the rail road and the telegraph, and it could well take a year
> or more before the sender eventually recieved a reply. The preserved letters
> from Lossius are full of references to other letters that never made it
> across the oceans.

This was striking to read; it's absolutely impossible for me to imagine a pre-
telegraph world with such utterly slow communications where people
nevertheless had _friends and family_ separated by years of latency.

It makes me appreciate the significance of the electric telegraph and of long-
range communication that is not limited by the speed of any physical vehicle.
I recently read a short romance novel (called "Wired Love") published in 1880
about two telegraph operators who meet online (well, on the wire), use spare
time on the wire to talk (and flirt) with each other; and eventually fall in
love -- before even having met each other IRL or knowing each other's IRL
names! There's even a quite modern impersonation that happens -- someone else
steals the identifier of the operator the main character is in love with, and
proceeds to be an rude asshole to her. Almost like IRC nick stealing, except a
century or so earlier! The antics involving the telegraphs were, amusingly
enough, the _least_ antiquated part of the novel, as there's an entirely
shocking amount of aspects of Internet communication/relationship practices
that have pretty clear equivalents in that telegraph-era book. For example,
the main character disdains the telephone and prefers the elegant and more
technically-involved telegraph, she and her partner "clasp hands" over the
wire in the same way people do "/me hugs" on IRC, she gets called crazy for
laughing to herself and "smiling at vacancy" while telegraphing with her
online lover -- and after they've met IRL, her suitor even installs a private
telegraph wire from her bedroom to his. There's something quite endearing
about reading an old novel and realising that the people with access to real-
time text chat more than a century ago might have used it in quite similar
ways as people use it today.

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cletus
I've recently been thinking about this since I've been going through family
history.

So my great grandfather just decides to get on a boat in Latvia and sail to
Australia. I'm really not sure why. He settles and sends for a bride. One
comes. They've never met. They marry and have a bunch of children.

The wife's family is from Latvia and the Ukraine. She writes back and forth to
her family over the next 20 years. I'm not sure what the latency is on
communication here but I imagine at least 6 months, best case, more likely
closer to 12. The last letter she received from her family was in 1937 and it
was heavily censored. This of course being Stalin's USSR at this point.

Now it never really occurred to me that in this time there was such long lines
of communication but in hindsight I guess there had to be because what was the
alternative?

All of this was just a century ago too. Taking 6-12 months to communicate with
family. Marrying an unknown bride. It's really quite bizarre.

Go back two centuries and it's even more surreal. One relative has a stated
occupation of "scutcher". What's that you might ask? (I know I did). It's one
of those English words that's now largely unknown and searching for it leads
to a list of pre-Industrial Revolution jobs that don't exist anymore. A
scutcher is someone who bashes flax seeds for linen fibers, a job later done
by machines.

~~~
dmd
> sends for a bride

Can you expand on this a bit?

~~~
acqq
In some parts of the world it's still common that the (broader) families
arrange who marries whom. The results are typically better than you'd believe
(it "worked" so often that the custom survived through the centuries).

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whizzkid
> Nicolai adapted to his environment, just like the tortoises

This is such a beautiful ending to the article.

I think we are experiencing a whole new world right now, where anyone can be
almost anywhere by the help of technology. This will of course be discussed in
the future who knows how.

Give yourself a day or two every month without computer or mobile phones, code
editors, or programming discussions.

Enjoy the life, discover things, spend more time with family.

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ymse
Not sure what I expected, but this wasn't it. Great read.

Edit: Can mods please remove the blog name from the title. It translates to
"rose hip soup" and is rather out of context :)

~~~
dang
Ah sorry. I thought it was the Norwegian who knew tortoises.

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maaaats
Crazy how he resumed contact with his family, they only knowing vaguely that
he might be alive somewhere in Chile and managed to track him down.

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jimhefferon
> he advanced to become lieutenant under Chile's revolutionary hero, Scottish-
> born vice admiral Thomas Cochrane

The model for Jack Aubrey, from the Aubrey-Maturin novels (and the movie Far
Side of the World). A couple of the later books involve Chile.

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forinti
You could live wherever you wished in those days. I can't even leave my
country at the moment, because my passport expired.

~~~
varjag
For some values of "you": a tiny minority of noble people and well-off
merchants. Chances overwhelmingly were you'd be born, live and die within the
same 5 mile radius.

~~~
jernfrost
Did you read the story? The Noregian Nicolai was not well off. Like a large
part of the Norewgian population, then and later he started as a sailor. Many
Norwegians would go to the seas from 15 years old. My great grand father was
from a poor working class family like most of my sncestors. He worked at a
quarry in Norway with a sledge hammer. Nothing privileged about it. Yet he
also signed up as a sailor and worked all over the world. Layed railroad in
the wild west and worked many places in south america like this guy. And like
this story my family thought he was dead as he was away so long.

~~~
yongjik
There's a difference between "signing up as a sailor" and "going where you
want to go"...

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bkohlmann
I'm struck by the patchwork of historical references it took to track this
mans life. Given our digital footprints today, will historians have an easier
time of tracking folks, or will our digital messages be in some strange lockup
as digital storage evolves? Will they mine a centuries old Facebook to analyze
our lives?

~~~
coldcode
The corollary is that back then it was also easier to vanish. Today you can
find almost anyone. In the long run though I wonder if future historians will
have a more difficult time finding obscure people since the electronic records
may have vanished whereas paper and books can survive for hundreds of years.
It amazing to me you can see the person's birth notice.

~~~
goodcanadian
I imagine that electronic records will suffer a similar fate as paper records.
Many will survive and many won't. To respond to the grandparent, there are
many more records, so you may be able to track some individuals with far
greater level of detail, but the noise is also a lot higher. When googling my
name, for example, I don't show up at all in the first several pages of
results, so it may be a lot harder for a random researcher to sort through the
data to learn about me if, for some reason, they wanted to.

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dghughes
I had a co-worker let's call him "Bob" who is closely related to Charles
Darwin. Bob grew up in Nova Scotia I don't think his family lived in England.
And no his surname is not Darwin.

Another coworker "Jim" asked Bob "You're related to Charles Darwin? And you
grew up on an isolated island?". (either Brier Island, NS or Long Island, NS I
don't really know).

Jim was trying to get Bob going by stressing that Bob grew up on an island
isolated and tried to convince Bob the people in his home town and island
evolved differently due to the isolation.

I live on an island too I found it funny but I don't think Bob cared or knew
what Jim was trying to say.

