krypton

Krypton gas glowing greenish-blue in a discharge tube

8 December 2023

This post is about the element, not Superman’s home planet.

Krypton is colorless and odorless noble gas with atomic number 36 and the symbol Kr. It is used in various lighting applications, such as flashes for high-speed photography and luminous signs, for which, when mixed with mercury vapor, it gives off a greenish-blue light.

The element was discovered by chemists William Ramsay and Morris Travers in 1898. They named it after the Greek κρυπτός, or kryptos, meaning secret or hidden because of the difficulty in detecting it. The discovery was first announced at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences on 6 June 1898, as reported by the Westminster Gazette the following day:

At yesterday’s meeting of the Academy of Sciences in Paris M. Berthelot read a letter from Professor Ramsay, the co-discoverer with Lord Rayleigh of argon, giving the first announcement of another discovery of the same nature. The new gas he proposes to call krypton. The discovery was effected, like that of argon, by the aid of the spectroscope. The presence of krypton was detected by the existence in the spectrum of a green line, which M. Berthelot saw yesterday (the Times correspondent notes) in a minute tube containing the two-millionth of a pound which Professor Ramsay has sent with his letter. According to the description forwarded to M. Berthelot, krypton belongs, not to the argon, but to the helium family, and its density is somewhat greater than oxygen. It appears to be a simple body and monatomic.

Ramsay and Travers read their paper on the discovery at the Royal Society of London meeting on 9 June 1898:

From what has preceded, it may be concluded that the atmosphere contains a hitherto undiscovered gas with a characteristic spectrum, heavier than argon, and less volatile than nitrogen, oxygen, and argon; the ratio of its specific heats would lead to the inference that it is monatomic, and therefore an element. If this conclusion turns out to be well substantiated, we propose to call it “krypton,” or “hidden.” Its symbol would then be Kr.

But this was not the first time that Ramsay had attempted to use the name krypton. In 1895, he detected what he thought to be a new element, and his laboratory notes show that he intended to call it krypton. But it turned out that what Ramsay had found was not a new element but rather helium, which had previously been detected in the spectra of the sun and in volcanic effluvia. But Ramsay’s disappointment in this case was assuaged by his being the first to isolate helium in a laboratory.

Krypton as the name of Superman’s home planet is the invention of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and is first mentioned in Action Comics #1 of June 1938, the issue in which Superman makes his debut.

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Sources:

Jensen, William B. “Why Helium Ends in “-ium.” Journal of Chemical Education, 81.7, July 2004, 944. DOI: 10.1021/ed081p944.

“Krypton and Dynammon.” The Westminster Gazette, 7 June 1898, 4/2. The British Newspaper Archive.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. krypton, n.

Ramsay, William and Morris W. Travers. “On a New Constituent of Atmospheric Air” (9 June 1898). Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 63, 1898, 405–08 at 407. JSTOR.

Photo credit: Heinrich Pniok, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivative 3.0 (US) license.

G.I.

G.I.s waiting to advance against the Japanese on the island of Vella Lavella in the Southwest Pacific, 13 September 1943

6 December 2023

A G.I. is an American soldier, and G.I. is used as an adjective denoting things related to the U.S. military. The term came into its own during World War II, but its origins go back somewhat further.

G.I. started out as a U.S. military abbreviation for galvanized iron. A War Department list of supplies from 1909 lists G.I. as a type of pipe. And an operations order for a 1913 training exercise by the Nebraska National Guard lists “Three Pails G.I.” as items to be loaded onto a supply wagon.

And during World War I, artillery shells and bombs were called G.I. cans by American soldiers. A poem by Albert J. Cook published in 1919 includes these lines:

There’s about two million fellows and there’s some of them who lie
Where eighty-eights and G.I.’s gently drop;
Where the trucks and trains are jamming and the colonel he is damning
Half of the earth and in particular the Service of Supply.

And by World War I that G.I. was informally applied to all sorts of items, from clothing to weapons. Most likely, soldiers had seen G.I., referring to galvanized iron on various supply inventories and reinterpreted it to mean Government Issue. The December 1918 unit newsletter of Ambulance Company 33, jocularly titled La Trine Rumor, contains a cartoon of Santa Claus delivering a bag of goodies to the company with the caption “A G.I. Christmas.”

The term continued to be used in soldier slang during the interwar years. Ray Hoyt’s 1935 account of life in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era work-relief program that was managed by the U.S. Army includes a reference to G.I. blankets:

No man of the million who have been in the C.C.C. will forget his first days in “conditioning” camp. Memories of the “needle,” or his “ankle chokers,” or his first “snipe” hunt will stay with him always. He will never forget the first time he tried to balance a mess kit full of food, his first night on woolen G.I. blankets, nor his first contact with an Army sergeant.

And it is in 1939 that we first see a published source use G.I. to refer to a soldier. The 1939 edition of Bugle Notes, a handbook for cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point contains a glossary with an entry that reads: “G.I., n. An enlisted man.”

But it was World War II that made the obscure U.S. Army slang term into a household word. The 1942 War Dictionary has this entry for the term that attests to the ubiquity of the term:

G.I. (abbrv.), Government Issue, said for anything and everything in food, clothing and equipment issued to the army: G.I. soap, G.I. ash cans, G.I. buckets. However, “G.I. ash cans” may also mean heavy artillery shells. “G.I. hop” stands for a government-sponsored dance for soldiers, while “G.I. girls” are the girls brought by official chaperons to such dances.

And the inaugural, 17 June 1942 issue of Yank magazine, a publication by the U.S. Army for soldiers serving around the world, on 17 June 1942 contains multiple uses of G.I., such as this one:

The inaugural “G.I. Joe” cartoon by David Breger

Sixty-cent cables and microfilm mail are now available to American expeditionary forces.

A list of 103 fixed-test phrases, covering practically every situation in the life of a G.I., have been written. The sender may incorporate up to three of these texts in a cable or radiogram. Cost of the entire message will be 60 cents plus Federal tax, including address and signature. The ordinary cable rate is 20 to 40 cents a word.

G.I. Joe is another term used to refer to a generic American soldier. Green’s Dictionary of Slang has a citation of the term from 1935, but I have been unable to verify it, and the snippet is too short to determine its context. But G.I. Joe became popular through its use as a title of a cartoon series whose main character was a soldier. The cartoon, by David Breger, began publication in that same issue of Yank magazine on 17 June 1942.

The G.I. Joe toy debuted in 1964.

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Sources:

Breger, David. “G.I. Joe” (cartoon). Yank, 17 June 1942, 24. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Cable Home at 60¢ Per.” Yank, 17 June 1942, 3/4. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Cook, Albert J. “There’s About Two Million Fellows.” In Paul S. Bliss. Victory: History of the 805th Pioneer Infantry. St. Paul, MN: 1919, 220–21 at 221. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. GI, adj.

Hoyt, Ray. We Can Take It. New York: American Book Company, 1935, 51. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

La Trine Rumor, December 1818. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lighter, J. E. Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 1 of 2. New York: Random House, 1994, 888–89, s.v. GI, n., GI, adj.

Ottosen, P. H. Trench Artillery A.E.F. Boston: Lothrop, Lee, & Shepard, 1931, between 240–241. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. G.I., n., G.I. Joe, n. [Note: the 2023 update to the OED has a glitch in this entry. Section C.1. in the old version, compounds formed from G.I., have been orphaned in a separate entry that does not appear in search results. There is a link to the compounds in the main entry.]

Parry, Louise G. The War Dictionary. Chicago: Consolidated Book Publishers, 1942, s.v. G.I. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Quartermaster-General, War Department. List of Class A Supplies. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909, 54. Hathi Trust Digital Archive.

State of Nebraska Adjutant General’s Office. “BULLETIN No. 2. Plans and Regulations for Maneuvers of Nebraska National Guard August 11–20 Inclusive.” Lincoln, NE: 19 May 1913. HathiTrust Digital Archive. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112112096943&seq=6

Image credits. Vella Lavella photo: US Army Signal Corps Photo, 1943. Public domain image. G.I. Joe cartoon: David Breger, 1942. Public domain image.

rain check

Rain delay at a Chicago Cubs game, 18 August 2015

4 December 2023

A rain check is a promise, originally and often in the form of a written ticket, to provide at a later date goods and services that have been paid for. The first rain checks were issued at baseball games that were halted in mid-game because of rain. (The rules of baseball state that a game is not official until the visiting team has made 15 outs and the home team is either ahead or has also made 15 outs. Games stopped, for any reason, before that are not considered valid.)

The first record of rain checks being issued dates to 21 June 1883 when the St. Louis Brown Stockings (now the St. Louis Cardinals) made it a policy to issue rain checks to fans who paid for a game that was rained out. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of that date:

Christ. Von der Ahe, the president of the St. Louis base-ball club, was at down town headquarters this morning, and had a word to say about the action of the club on yesterday, in refusing to refund money or tickets at the gate after the game was called: “The clubs of the American association,” said President Von der Ahe, “have a rule which entitles the visiting team to its guarantee the moment the game is called. The moment the game is called, too, the salary of the umpire and all employes [sic] becomes due. This was the reason that all the clubs of the American have adopted the rule of refunding no money after the game is called. Several times this year games have been stopped after the first inning in the association cities without any money being refunded. At Philadelphia nearly 10,000 people in one game paid toll to see one inning played and made no demand for the return of the money, for the reason the notice was up, as at our park, ‘No money refunded after the game is called.’ At Louisville our club in one game played one inning and then rain spoiled the sport. We got our guarantee, but there was no demand at the gate for the return of money or tickets by those who had paid admission. Since yesterday, however, I have come to the conclusion that the rule is a poor one, and from this time forward it will not be enforced by the St. Louis club. While we will be compelled to pay the guarantee to the visiting club and all employes after the game is called, we will give rain-checks in every game where less than five innings are played. In other words, the St. Louis club will not make its patrons pay for what they don’t see, as is the case in all other association cities. The system to be inaugurated is to give everyone buying a ticket, on days where rain is apprehended, a rain-check which will admit them to the game on the following fair day. Where it looks fair, with no prospects of rain, no checks will be given; but should rain come up, rain-checks will be furnished to every one who has paid admission, on application at the box-office.”

The earliest use of rain check in a non-baseball context that I have found is from a few years later. The following appeared in Baton Rouge’s Daily Capitolian-Advocate of 13 July 1887. That paper credits the Detroit Free Press for penning the piece, but I have been unable to find it in that paper:

A reporter dropped into a prominent hotel to have his boots polished. The weather was decidedly threatening at the time, and as he left the chair, he said:

“It is almost certain to rain, and I shall lose my elegant ten cent shine.”

“Oh, we’ll fix that all right,” said the frescoer. “I’ll give you a rain check, and if you lose your shine come back this afternoon and I’ll give you another.”—Detroit Free Press.

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Sources:

Daily Capitolian-Advocate (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), 13 July 1887, 3/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Dickson, Paul. The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, third edition, 2009, s.v. rain check, 686–87.

“No Game, No Money.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), 21 June 1883, 8/3. Newspapers.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, s.v. rain check, n.

Photo credit: Victor Grigas, 2015. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

iron

Iron being smelted

1 December 2023

Iron is a hard, magnetic, silvery-gray metal with atomic number 26 and the symbol Fe, which is from the Latin ferrum. Iron has, of course, been known since antiquity.

The word iron has cognates in the other West Germanic languages and in Gothic. Similar forms exist in the Celtic languages, such as the Irish and Scottish Gaelic iarann. The Celtic words may be cognate with the Germanic, but more likely the West Germanic words are prehistoric borrowings from the Celts. The North Germanic words, such as the Swedish järn and the Danish jern are probably borrowings from Early Irish.

In Old English, the word existed in three main forms. The oldest of these is isern, which became isen in the West Saxon dialect and iren in Mercian. We seen the older form in the copy of the Old English translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People contained in Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Kk.3.18, fol. 8v:

Hit hafað eac þis land sealtseaþas; & hit hafaþ hat wæter, & hat baðo ælcere yldo & had ðurh todælede stowe gescræpe. Swylce hit is eac berende on wecga orum ares & isernes, leades & seolfres.

(This land, it also has salt springs; & it has hot water, & and hot baths in various places suitable for all ages & sexes. Moreover, it is also producing in quantity ores of copper & iron, lead & silver.)

Another manuscript containing this work, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Library MS 41, uses the form irenes, from which the modern form iron descends. Both manuscripts were copied in the eleventh century.

In antiquity and in the Middle Ages, seven of the elemental metals were each associated with a god and with a planet, with iron associated with Ares/Mars. We see this association in a variety of alchemical writings, including Chaucer’s The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale:

I wol yow telle, as was me taught also,
The foure spirites and the bodies sevene,
By ordre, as ofte I herde my lord hem nevene.

The firste spirit quyksilver called is,
The seconde orpyment, the thridde, ywis,
Sal armonyak, and the ferthe brymstoon.
The bodyes sevene eek, lo, hem heere anoon:
Sol gold is, and Luna silver we threpe,
Mars iren, Mercurie quyksilver we clepe,
Saturnus leed, and Juppiter is tyn,
And Venus coper, by my fader kyn!

(I will tell you, as it was taught also to me,
The four spirits and the seven metals,
In the order as I often heard my lord name them.

The first spirit is called quicksilver,
The second orpiment, the third, indeed,
Sal ammoniac, and the fourth brimstone.
The seven metals also, lo, hear them now:
The Sun is gold, and the Moon we assert silver,
Mars iron, Mercury we call quicksilver,
Saturn lead, and Jupiter is tin,
And Venus copper, by my father’s kin!)

Our understanding of iron as an element, in the present-day definition of that word, dates to the late eighteenth century.

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Sources:

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, vol. 1 of 4. Thomas Miller, ed. Early English Text Society O.S. 95. London: Oxford UP, 1890, 1.1, 26. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, vol. 3 of 4. Thomas Miller, ed. Early English Text Society O.S. 110. London: Oxford UP, 1890, 12. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Kk.3.18, fol. 8v, second half of eleventh century,

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales. In Larry D. Benson, ed. The Riverside Chaucer, 8.819–29, 273. Also, with minor variation in wording, at Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. isen, isern, iren, n. and isen, isern, iren, adj.

“Genesis A.” In Daniel Anlezark, ed. Old Testament Narratives. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 7. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011, 80, lines 1082–89

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2013, s.v. iron, n.

Parker Library on the Web. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 041: Old English Bede, 30 of 504, p. 22. Stanford University Libraries.

Photo credit: P. Sakthy, 2003. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

war crime / war criminal

Nazi defendants in the dock at the Nuremburg Trials, 1946. Left to right, front row: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Wilhelm Keitel; second row: Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, and Fritz Sauckel.

30 November 2023

The ideas of a war crime, that is a violation of the generally accepted rules of warfare, and that of a war criminal, one who violates those rules, are modern concepts, only starting to coalesce at the end of the nineteenth century. Within the framework of international law, war crimes include, but are not limited to, the killing of prisoners of war, deliberate targeting of civilians, bombing civilian targets, the taking of hostages, and the use of chemical or biological weapons. In general, non-legal use, the terms can be more expansive, taking in horrific acts committed during wartime that may not fall within the legal definitions set forth in various treaties.

The term war crime first appears in a somewhat different definition, that of a violation of the a nation’s military rules and laws (what in the US military today constitute the Uniform Code of Military Justice). The term first appears in the context of an attempt by some in the US Congress to reduce the number of such offenses that were punishable by death. From the St. Louis Republic of 29 October 1892:

Suggestion is made by the report that the articles of war authorizing capital punishment might, to some extent, be modified even as to time of war, but that the death penalty should be reserved for the soldier in the time of war who deserts to or in the immediate presence of an enemy. Desertion, however, of a less degree should not be punishable with death as in a time of war. The entire abolition of the death penalty for war crimes, as proposed in a bill now pending in Congress, the report thinks impracticable.

We see the beginnings of the present-day definition in the case of Dr. Ricardo Ruiz, whose arrest and death were among the events that led to the Spanish-American War of 1898. Ruiz was a Cuban-born, naturalized US citizen and dentist who was arrested by Spanish authorities in Cuba on 4 February 1897 and charged with the derailment and robbery of a passenger train. He was held incommunicado and died in jail some two weeks later. There was evidence that had been tortured. From the Boston Herald of 8 June 1897:

Dr. Ruiz’s case is not even as strong as some of the other cases in [sic] behalf of American citizens in Cuba. He was charged with a crime not regarded as a war crime, but, nevertheless, it furnishes ample provocation for a vigorous demand for redress on behalf of widow, and also some apology for the violation of the treaty.

The phrase war crime appears in a newspaper sub-headline in the Wisconsin Weekly Advocate of 10 April 1902. Here the relevant case is that of crimes committed by British officers during the Boer War. The events of this case were dramatized in the 1980 film Breaker Morant. From the Wisconsin Weekly Advocate:

Alleges War Crime.

Liverpool, April 8.—A former trooper of the Bushveldt Carbineers, who has returned here, is quoted as saying that the convicted Australian officers belonging to that corps, since disbanded, murdered from thirty-five to forty persons. As an instance of their cold-bloodedness, the trooper relates how three Dutch children, 2 and 12 years of age, respectively, and their little sister, arrived at the Carabineers' camp to surrender, in order to be given food. The girl and one of the boys were wounded. The uninjured boy took his little brother on his back and was carrying him off when a second shot killed both boys. The girl died shortly afterward.

War crime and war criminal were first given formal legal definition in L.F.L. Oppenheim’s 1906 International Law: A Treatise. Oppenheim, considered to be “the father of modern international law,” was a German-born jurist residing in England:

§ 252. However, in spite of the uniform qualification of these acts as war crimes, four different kinds of war crimes must be distinguished on account of the essentially different character of the acts. Violations of recognised rules regarding warfare committed by members of the armed forces belong to the first kind; all hostilities in arms committed by individuals who are not members of the enemy armed forces constitute a second kind; espionage and war treason belong to the third; and all marauding acts belong to the fourth kind.

§ 253. Violations of rules regarding warfare are war crimes only when committed without an order of the belligerent Government concerned. If members of the armed forces commit violations by order of their Government, they are not war criminals and cannot be punished by the enemy; the latter can, however, resort to reprisals. In case members of forces commit violations ordered by their commanders, the members cannot be punished, for the commanders are alone responsible, and the latter may, therefore, be punished as war criminals on their capture by the enemy.

Since World War II, Oppenheim’s idea that a soldier is not a war criminal if they were simply following orders has been rejected. The defense that they were “just following orders” is not a valid one. And this rejection even predates Oppenheim’s treatise in that the Morant and the other officers of the Bushveldt Carbineers attempted to use it as a defense at their court martial and were unsuccessful.

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Sources:

“General Acquitted” (8 April 1902). Wisconsin Weekly Advocate (Milwaukee), 10 April 1902, 2/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oppenheim, Lassa Francis Lawrence. International Law: A Treatise, vol. 2 of 2. London: Longmans Green, 1906, 2:264–65. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. war crime, n., war criminal, n.

“Spain Must Settle It” (8 June 1897). Boston Herald (Massachusetts), 9 June 1897, 1/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Suggestions as to Military Punishment.” St. Louis Republic (Missouri), 29 October 1892, 7/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, 1946. US National Archives, Record Group 238: National Archives Collection of World War II War Crimes Records, Series: Photographs relating to Major Nuremberg Trials, NAID: 540128. Public domain image.