Seventy-seven seconds after liftoff, the Thor first stage exploded, at an altitude of roughly 9.7 miles. The investigation found that a bearing in the turbopump gearbox had seized: the bearing stopped, the flow of liquid oxygen to the engine stopped, and that was the end. Telemetry from the upper stages kept coming in for about 123 more seconds, until the debris hit the Atlantic. The probe carried a magnetometer, a micrometeorite detector, an infrared television camera, and temperature sensors. All of it was lost. The next two attempts, Pioneer 1 and Pioneer 2, failed as well, but in March 1959 Pioneer 4 flew past the Moon. The same program later sent Pioneer 10 and 11 to Jupiter and Saturn in the 1970s.

The thing to notice here is that the dream of sending a machine to carry human curiosity into the cosmos did not start with a win. It started with a bearing that stopped.

And this is exactly where Star Trek: The Motion Picture comes in.

In Robert Wise’s 1979 film, the crew of the USS Enterprise faces a vast energy cloud bearing down on Earth, destroying three Klingon warships and a monitoring station along the way. Admiral Kirk, played again by William Shatner, reclaims command of the refitted Enterprise. Inside the cloud is V’Ger, which is actually Voyager 6, a fictional 20th-century NASA probe believed lost in a black hole. A race of living machines found it, loaded it with knowledge, and gave it consciousness. Now V’Ger has come back to find its Creator, and to find meaning beyond the one thing it was programmed to do: learn all that can be learned.

I do not want to oversell it. The film is slow, often putting spectacle ahead of dialogue, and critics called that out in December 1979 when it reached theaters. It cost $44 million, earned $139 million, and grew out of a cancelled Phase II television series that the success of Star Wars and Close Encounters pushed onto the big screen. Jerry Goldsmith’s score became iconic, later the main theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the 2001 Director’s Edition, which Wise oversaw himself, runs at a much steadier pace.

The parallel is not forced. In 1958 a 38-kilogram probe turned into a bright fireball over the Atlantic because a bearing jammed. Twenty-one years later, a fictional probe, also believed lost in deep space, came back as a living mind demanding to meet the one who made it. Same gesture, only the ending differs: one ends in flame above the water, the other in something closer to godhood than machinery. Both rest on the same dream: build a machine, and send it out to learn what is out there.

If tonight you want a film that slowly and seriously asks what a machine might feel when it comes back to the one who built it: tonight, press play.

What else could have been tonight

Soviet Venera 7 launched, first spacecraft to transmit data from another planet’s surface (1970) · film: Solaris (2002)

Twelve years after Pioneer 0 fell burning into the Atlantic, the other side of the space race got its answer right. On August 17, 1970, the Soviet Union launched Venera 7 from Baikonur, and on December 15 its lander reached the surface of Venus inside a titanium shell built to survive 180 atmospheres and 580 degrees Celsius. The parachute failed on the way down, the probe hit at about 59 kilometers per hour and tipped onto its side, and engineers thought it was dead. A radio astronomer, Oleg Rzhiga, later found 23 minutes of faint transmission in the tapes, at about one percent of the designed signal strength. Those 23 minutes reported 475 degrees Celsius and roughly 90 atmospheres: Venus was not Earth’s twin but a hothouse that would melt lead.

The film for this day is Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris (2002), from Stanisław Lem’s novel. George Clooney plays psychologist Chris Kelvin, sent to a station orbiting an ocean planet that does not return numbers the way Venera 7 did. It returns people. Kelvin wakes to find his dead wife Rheya beside him, a copy assembled out of his memories, and the film’s 99 minutes ask whether anything true can pass between an alien world and a mind that only has itself to translate with. It cost $47 million, earned $30 million, and audiences gave it an F CinemaScore. Venera 7 sent back temperature and pressure, and the mystery ended. Solaris sends back the observer, and nothing ends.

Soviet icebreaker Arktika becomes first surface ship to reach the North Pole (1977) · film: Sunshine (2007)

Also on August 17, in 1977, the nuclear icebreaker Arktika surfaced through the ice at the geographic North Pole, the first surface vessel ever to stand there. Captain Yuri Kuchiyev had left Murmansk on August 9 with more than 200 crew, forcing a 23,000-ton hull through ice up to 2.8 meters thick. On the ice they raised a Soviet flag on a ten-meter steel mast and dropped a time capsule holding the text of the anthem and the 1977 constitution. Before retirement in 2008 the ship would log more than a million nautical miles.

The film for this day is Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007), written by Alex Garland. Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, and Hiroyuki Sanada are the crew of Icarus II, carrying a stellar bomb toward a dying Sun, the payload the species has left. Like Arktika’s crew they are a small vessel with world-altering cargo in the most hostile place humans have ever sailed, where the margin is one wrong decision wide. Boyle’s film starts as engineering and ends somewhere religious, with crew members transfixed by the size of the thing they are flying into. The Arktika reached the Pole and came home to a flag ceremony. Icarus II reaches the Sun, and the film asks what coming home would even mean there.

Sources

Pioneer 0, America’s first attempted lunar probe (1958)

• https://science.nasa.gov/mission/pioneer-0-able1/ (NASA mission overview: 38 kg probe, Thor-Able, 73.6-second flight, turbopump failure)

• https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/17-august-1958/ (12:28 UTC liftoff, 73.6 s, 9.9-mile altitude, bearing failure, LR-79-7 engine)

• https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/pioneer-012.htm (45 cm tall, 72.5 cm diameter, 38 kg probe, 77 s flight, ARPA-coordinated plan)

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079945/ (directed by Robert Wise, Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, V’Ger / Voyager 6 plot)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Picture ($44 million budget, $139 million gross, Phase II turned feature, 2001 Director’s Edition)

• https://trekmovies.com/the-original-series/star-trek-the-motion-picture-the-untold-story-behind-the-sci-fi-classic/ (Star Wars and Close Encounters forced the jump to the big screen, Jerry Goldsmith’s score)

Venera 7 launch (1970), film: Solaris (2002)

• https://russianspaceweb.com/venera7.html (Lavochkin design, titanium pressure shell, descent and the weak-signal discovery)

• https://www.spacedaily.com/sd-in-1970-the-soviet-venera-7-probe-survived-23-minutes-on-the-surface-of-venus-before-the-475-degree-heat-and-90-atmosphere-pressure-crushed-it-but-in-those-minutes-it-became-the-first-human-made/ (23 minutes of surface transmission, 475 °C, 90 atmospheres)

• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307479/ (Soderbergh, Clooney, McElhone, 99 minutes)

Arktika reaches the North Pole (1977), film: Sunshine (2007)

• https://www.rbth.com/arts/history/2017/08/17/on-this-day-a-soviet-icebreaker-became-first-ship-to-reach-the-north-pole_819106 (August 9 departure from Murmansk, Captain Kuchiyev, the flag and time capsule on the ice)

• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448134/ (Boyle, Garland, Murphy, Evans, Byrne, Sanada)

On August 16, 1942, a Sunday morning, the Navy’s L-class blimp L-8 took off from Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay on a routine anti-submarine patrol. The crew was two men: Lieutenant Ernest DeWitt Cody, 27, a 1938 Naval Academy graduate, and Ensign Charles Ellis Adams, 38, who had received his commission only the day before. L-8 had been a Goodyear advertising blimp that the Navy requisitioned for coastal defense after Japanese submarines showed up off the West Coast. The plan was simple: out to the Farallon Islands, down to Montara, then back.

At 7:38 a.m., an hour and a half into the flight, Cody radioed the position: four miles east of the Farallones. Four minutes later came the last message: am investigating a suspicious oil slick, stand by. An oil slick could mean a submerged submarine. The crew of the nearby trawler Daisy Gray and the cargo ship Albert Gallatin watched the blimp drop two smoke flares and circle the area, with two figures visible in the gondola. That was the last sign of Cody and Adams.

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The canal she transited was 50 miles long, built at a cost of about $375 million, close to $10 billion in today’s money. She was lifted 85 feet above sea level through the Gatun locks, sailed across Gatun Lake, and was lowered back through Pedro Miguel and Miraflores. A ship that would have spent weeks rounding Cape Horn could now cut 8,000 miles off the journey. New York to San Francisco fell from roughly 13,000 miles to about 5,200.

And it nearly did not happen. A French team under Ferdinand de Lesseps started digging in 1881 and collapsed by 1889, losing around 20,000 to 22,000 workers to yellow fever and malaria. The Americans took over in 1904 after backing Panamanian independence and signing the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, and the difference was a doctor. William C. Gorgas ran a mosquito-eradication campaign that broke the disease cycle that had buried the French. Another 5,600 workers died during the American build, but the canal got finished.

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The new Oregon Territory covered present-day Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming. The first capital was Oregon City, not far from present-day Portland. Two years earlier, in 1846, the Oregon Treaty had ended joint occupation with Great Britain. But what actually pushed Washington to act was the Whitman Massacre of November 29, 1847: members of the Cayuse tribe killed Dr. Marcus Whitman, a Presbyterian missionary, his wife Narcissa, and eleven settlers near present-day Walla Walla. That kind of violence demanded a federal response.

Try to picture the scale. The 1850 census counted only 13,294 residents across the entire territory. 1848 is the era of Manifest Destiny: on February 2 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo closed the Mexican-American War, and that December gold was found in California. The Oregon Territory existed until February 14, 1859, when its southwestern portion entered the Union as the state of Oregon.

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The story I like is the accident. When Brearley tried to etch a sample with nitric acid for the microscope, the acid would not bite. He tried vinegar, then lemon juice. Same result. The alloy simply refused to corrode. He called it rustless steel, and Ernest Stuart, the cutlery manager at R.F. Mosley’s Portland Works, tried it in vinegar and renamed it stainless. The name stuck. The science was not magic. German researchers Monnartz and Borchers had already shown in 1911 that you needed at least 10.5 percent chromium for real corrosion resistance. Brearley’s contribution was to push the mix above that line, test it like a craftsman, and see what ordinary people could actually use it for. Sheffield’s cutlery trade was the first customer. Then everything else followed.

I work with software, not metal, but the pattern is the same one I recognize from any workshop worth its salt. You go in chasing one problem, you trip over something bigger. Brearley went in chasing gun barrels and walked out with the skin of the modern world, scalpels, sinks, surgical instruments, building facades, train carriages. And, eventually, fictional armor.

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On August 12, 1865, at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, a British surgeon named Joseph Lister treated the compound fracture of an eleven-year-old boy, James Greenlees. A cart wheel had crushed the boy’s leg, and the bone had come through the skin. In those days that was close to a death sentence. Between 45 and 50 percent of amputation cases in hospitals ended in sepsis. Surgeons wore their blood-stained coats as a badge of pride, instruments were barely washed, and the whole thing was blamed on “bad air”, on miasma. Lister had read Louis Pasteur’s work on microorganisms, and he thought differently. He took a carbolic acid solution, washed the wound with it, soaked the dressing in it. The boy survived, and healed without infection. By 1869 the mortality rate on Lister’s ward had dropped to 15 percent.

That is the moment surgery stops being a gamble and becomes a science. And that line is exactly where tonight’s film lives.

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On Wednesday, August 11, 1965, around seven in the evening, a California Highway Patrol officer named Lee Minikus pulled over twenty-one-year-old Marquette Frye on Avalon Boulevard near 116th Street, on suspicion of drunk driving. Frye was not sober. He failed the field test. He was arrested. At first it was all jokes, the two of them laughing together. Then his younger brother Ronald showed up and ran to get their mother, Rena Frye. Rena stepped in, the argument escalated, and an officer hit Marquette in the face with a baton. All three of the Fryes were arrested. But by then a crowd of hundreds had gathered, and the rumor went around the neighborhood that the police had beaten a mother.

What came next lasted six days and swallowed forty-six square miles of South Los Angeles. Thirty-four people dead, the vast majority Black civilians shot by police and National Guard troops. More than a thousand wounded. Nearly four thousand arrested. Forty million dollars in property burned. Whole city blocks gone. Acting Governor Glenn Anderson declared a state of emergency, and under “Operation Safeguard” close to fourteen thousand National Guard troops moved in with tanks and machine guns. LAPD Chief William Parker called the rebellion an “insurrection” and compared the residents of his own city to the Viet Cong. They kept shooting even after the curfew was officially lifted: on August 18, LAPD officers and sheriff’s deputies raided a Nation of Islam mosque and wounded nineteen men.

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He was a German engineer, later called the Flying Man. Not a crank trying to grow wings overnight. In 1889 he published Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst, the first systematic aerodynamic study, which showed that a wing’s curved upper surface produces lift. Over five years, between 1891 and 1896, he completed more than two thousand successful glider flights in sixteen different designs. His Normal Segelapparat could glide up to three hundred meters in about fifteen seconds, on a willow frame covered in cotton fabric. Wilbur Wright later wrote that of all the men in the nineteenth century who attacked the problem of flight, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important.

And still. On August 9 that machine stalled in the air and fell. Fifteen meters. The whole project of human flight got its invoice that day.

Tonight’s film belongs here. Rand Ravich’s The Astronaut’s Wife, from 1999, takes that same idea up into orbit. Johnny Depp plays Spencer Armacost, a NASA astronaut, and Charlize Theron plays his wife, Jillian. During a routine spacewalk, the link between Spencer and Alex Streck, played by Nick Cassavetes, and Mission Control in Houston cuts out. For exactly two minutes. Both men come back, but something has changed. Spencer quits NASA and takes a job at McLaren in New York. Jillian gets pregnant with twins, and slowly realizes that during those two black minutes something crossed into them and means to continue through the children.

The film is a deliberate space-age retelling of Rosemary’s Baby from 1968. For Ravich it was his first feature as director. Let me be honest: it is not the standout entry in the genre. It cost thirty-four million dollars and brought back only nineteen and a half. Joe Leydon in Variety called it an aggressively stylish but dramatically flaccid drama that plays like an upgraded reprise of a 1950s sci-fi potboiler. FilmAffinity rated it four point four out of ten. Nick Cassavetes’s character dies suddenly, his wife Natalie, played by Donna Murphy, takes her own life. Joe Morton plays the NASA investigator Sherman Reese, who was fired for insisting that Spencer was no longer human. Clea DuVall plays Jillian’s sister. At the end Jillian electrocutes her husband, but the entity transfers into her body, and the film closes with her remarried, the twins heading off to their first day of school, both children wearing a strange, knowing smile.

What ties the two stories together? The price. Lilienthal tested his machines with his own body. In The Astronaut’s Wife the astronaut returns in his own body, and the body is no longer his own. Both say the same thing: when a human being lifts off the ground, something will happen to them that cannot be undone. Lilienthal’s broken spine and Spencer’s two-minute silence stand at the two ends of the same fear.

This is what always lands for me in science fiction. Not the laser pistols and not the alien planets, but the question of what the things we build do to us. I recognize the feeling in software work, in miniature: you assemble something, you let it go, and afterward it is not really yours anymore. Lilienthal paid that price for gliding flight in 1896. In a Berlin clinic, thirty-six hours after the fall, at the age of forty-eight.

That is why The Astronaut’s Wife belongs tonight. It is not a perfect film. But it puts the same weight on the table: flight always asks for something in return. Sometimes a vertebra. Sometimes a husband.

Tonight, press play.

What else could have been tonight

The other thread is more liquid and more modern. On August 10, 1945, Robert H. Goddard, the American physicist regarded as the father of modern rocket propulsion, died of throat cancer in a university hospital in Maryland, at sixty-two. He had been diagnosed two months earlier, and he died in the very month the world entered the atomic age. On March 16, 1926, he launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket from his Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. It flew for two and a half seconds, forty-one feet high and one hundred and eighty-four feet downrange. The newspapers mocked him when he talked about the Moon. By his death he held two hundred and fourteen patents: gyroscopic stabilization, variable-thrust motors, multi-stage rockets. In 1959 NASA named the Goddard Space Flight Center after him. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s Sunshine, from 2007, belongs here. In 2057 the Sun is dying and Earth is freezing. The starship Icarus II, with a crew of eight, carries a colossal stellar bomb meant to reignite it. Cillian Murphy plays the physicist Capa. The film plays out the idea Goddard opened up: that rocketry can put a person where they have no business being, and there the Sun, like a god, swallows anything that drifts too close. Pinbacker, the burned and religiously unbalanced captain of the first Icarus, is the end state of that process. Goddard’s death closed the era when the rocket was dismissed as a crank’s dream.

The third detour is quieter and more philosophical. On August 10, 1990, NASA’s Magellan spacecraft reached Venus and entered orbit with an eighty-three-second braking burn. Magellan had been deployed from the shuttle Atlantis on May 5, 1989, and was built almost entirely from spare parts and the inheritance of earlier missions, the leftovers of Voyager, Galileo, Ulysses, and Mariner 9. Its three-and-a-half-meter high-gain antenna served as a synthetic aperture radar that cut through Venus’s opaque clouds. By the end of the mission it had covered ninety-eight percent of the surface at one-hundred-meter resolution, returned one thousand two hundred gigabits of data, and revealed that volcanism rules the planet. Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, from 2002, belongs here. George Clooney plays Chris Kelvin, a clinical psychologist called to a station orbiting the planet Solaris. The planet is a sentient ocean that materializes the crew’s deepest memories and relationships. Kelvin’s dead wife Rheya, played by Natascha McElhone, appears again in his cabin. Ninety-nine minutes of film, a forty-seven-million-dollar budget, thirty million in revenue, and a rare F CinemaScore from audiences. Magellan’s radar sees through the clouds and finds a volcanic world below. Solaris sees through the human and finds what the mind had hidden away. Both whisper the same thing: when we look deep enough into something alien, most of the time we see ourselves looking back.

Sources

Death of Otto Lilienthal (1896)

• https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/9-august-1896/ (August 9 crash, death 36 hours later, “Sacrifices must be made”)

• https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/this-quirky-contraption-lifted-19th-century-pilots-into-the-air-for-a-short-exhilarating-glide-180979843/ (died August 10, 1896 at age 48, Wilbur Wright quote)

• https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/lilienthal-glider/nasm_A19060001000 (willow frame, cotton fabric, broken spine, inspiration for the Wright brothers)

The Astronaut’s Wife (1999)

• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138304/ (Rand Ravich, Johnny Depp, Charlize Theron, two-minute blackout)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astronaut’s_Wife (Rosemary’s Baby comparison, $19.6M gross against $34M budget)

• https://variety.com/1999/film/reviews/the-astronaut-s-wife-1117752058/ (Joe Leydon, “aggressively stylish but dramatically flaccid”)

Robert H. Goddard dies (1945), film: Sunshine (2007)

• https://www.nasa.gov/dr-robert-h-goddard-american-rocketry-pioneer/ (August 10, 1945, age 62, throat cancer, 214 patents)

• https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/robert-goddard-and-first-liquid-propellant-rocket (1926 first liquid-fueled rocket, Auburn)

• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448134/ (Sunshine, Boyle and Garland, Icarus II, Cillian Murphy)

The Magellan probe reaches Venus (1990), film: Solaris (2002)

• https://science.nasa.gov/mission/magellan/ (August 10, 1990 orbital insertion, 1,200 gigabits, 98% coverage)

• https://www.astronomy.com/today-in-the-history-of-astronomy/aug-10-1990-magellan-enters-venusian-orbit/ (August 10, 1990 arrival, shuttle deployment)

• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307479/ (Solaris, Soderbergh, Clooney, 99 minutes, F CinemaScore)

On August 9, 1892, Thomas Edison was granted U.S. Patent No. 480,567 for his duplex telegraph system. Two-way, simultaneous communication over a single wire. The curious part is that the patent had been filed on September 1, 1874, so it waited eighteen years for official approval. It was assigned to Western Union. Two operators could send messages at the same time over one wire, one by reversing the battery’s current direction, the other by varying the current’s strength. Before that you needed two separate devices, one to transmit and one to receive. Edison merged them into a single machine.

What always gets me is where these solutions come from. Not from big institutions. Edison worked out of his Menlo Park laboratory. A small team, materials in hand, experimentation and side effects that nobody went looking for. And here comes tonight’s film.

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In the early hours of Thursday, August 8, 1963, around three in the morning, a crew of 15 masked robbers stopped a Royal Mail service in Buckinghamshire, at Sears Crossing. The train was running the Glasgow-to-London route, carrying postal packages. The crew had rigged the signal, so the driver, Jack Mills, braked. Then they held him at gunpoint and forced him to drive the locomotive to the nearby Bridego bridge, where the trucks were already waiting. In 30 minutes they offloaded 120 sacks holding 2.6 million pounds in bank notes. The job was organized by Bruce Reynolds, and behind the plan stood an inside informant, a postal worker known only as the “Ulsterman”. In today’s money, those 2.6 million pounds are roughly 58 million. There has never been a bigger train robbery in the country since.

What makes this case more than a crime file to me is the workshop craft. Laid-in intelligence. Signal work. The timetable. A halted train, a redirected locomotive, a pre-staged human chain that pulls the cargo out in half an hour. All of it on a target that was still moving.

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On the morning of Friday, August 7, 1942, the U.S. 1st Marine Division landed on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The operation was code-named Watchtower, and it was the first American offensive of World War II. Not a defense. Not a response to a strike. The moment when the U.S. military took the initiative and never let it go again. The Marines came ashore on Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and Florida Island.

The real target was a half-built Japanese airfield at Lunga Point. The Marines seized it the same day and renamed it Henderson Field, after Lofton Henderson, a Marine pilot killed at Midway. That airstrip became the prize of the whole campaign. Whoever owned the air owned the Pacific.

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On Monday, August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. Hiroshima time, the American B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay released the first atomic bomb ever used in war. Colonel Paul Tibbets had taken off from Tinian Island at 2:45 a.m. The bomb was nicknamed “Little Boy,” a uranium gun-type weapon weighing 9,700 pounds. It detonated 1,900 feet above the city center, with a yield of about 15 kilotons of TNT. An estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people were killed instantly, and roughly 4.4 to 5 square miles of Hiroshima were flattened. By the end of 1945 the death toll passed 100,000. Three days later came Nagasaki. On August 15 Japan announced its surrender. This was the start of the nuclear age.

When I read these numbers I cannot help seeing the flash, that single white instant above the rooftops, a third of a mile above the ground. And I cannot help joining it to a film I watched on a tired evening years ago.

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From that moment on, numbers ruled Mandela’s life. 19476/62, Pretoria Local Prison. Then Robben Island, 466/64. Pollsmoor, 220/82. Victor Verster, 1335/88. Twenty-seven years, because a state decided one man’s freedom was worth less than its own racial order.

And that is exactly why tonight’s film is Logan’s Run (1976). Michael Anderson sat in the director’s chair, David Zelag Goodman wrote the screenplay, and the source was the 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. The story is set in a 23rd-century domed city where everyone lives freely until they turn thirty. Then comes a civic ceremony called “renewal,” which is actually death, and the Sandmen, police like Logan 5, who hunt down anyone who tries to run. Michael York plays Logan, alongside Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, Peter Ustinov, and Farrah Fawcett, with a score by Jerry Goldsmith.

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Try to picture that moment. For decades astronomers had only a blurry smudge of Mars in their telescopes, and somehow everyone read a civilization into it. Canals, cities, a dying people, maybe getting ready to come wage war on us. Then a probe arrives and sends back the truth in roughly 126 frames: a cratered, rocky, apparently dead world. No canals, no little green men. Just dust and silence.

And that realization did something strange to our imagination. If reality wouldn’t give us Martians, science fiction would, and it gave generously. That is exactly why tonight’s film is Mars Attacks! (1996). Tim Burton sat in the director’s chair, Jonathan Gems wrote the screenplay, and the source material wasn’t a serious novel but a 1962 Topps trading-card series that was nearly banned at the time for its excessive gore. Burton didn’t want to make another tense Independence Day-style invasion blockbuster. He wanted to summon the bad-taste, gleeful, cartoonish carnage of the old B-movies, and the cast shows it: Jack Nicholson in two roles (President Dale and Vegas mogul Art Land), Glenn Close, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Annette Bening, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Natalie Portman, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, and Tom Jones as himself.

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On August 3, 1958, the USS Nautilus, hull number SSN-571, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, became the first vessel in history to cross the geographic North Pole fully submerged. Commander William R. Anderson had the conn. The mission was a secret Cold War operation code-named “Operation Sunshine,” an idea Anderson himself had proposed the year before to show what America’s new nuclear navy could do. The first attempt, out of Groton on August 19, 1957, failed because the polar ice was packed too deep. The second attempt left Pearl Harbor on July 23, 1958, slipped under the Arctic ice pack, and on August 3 completed the submerged transit. Nautilus surfaced north of the Pole and sailed on into the Atlantic. President Eisenhower later gave the boat the Presidential Unit Citation, the first ever awarded in peacetime.

What strikes me is the world it opened up. The point was not the Pole itself. The point was that a nuclear submarine could travel thousands of miles under the ice, undetected, and stay there. The deep ocean stopped being a place humans visited and became a place humans could operate. That is a different kind of frontier.

And that is exactly where The Abyss walks in.

In January of 1994, in the world of James Cameron’s 1989 film, the USS Montana, an Ohio-class nuclear submarine, has a close encounter with something it cannot identify and sinks near the Cayman Trough. With Soviet ships closing in and a hurricane on top of them, the Navy presses a civilian drilling rig called Deep Core into service as a recovery base. Ed Harris is Virgil “Bud” Brigman, the rig boss; Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is Lindsey Brigman, his estranged wife and the platform’s designer; Michael Biehn is Lt. Coffey, the SEAL who starts to come apart under pressure. Down in the trench Lindsey spots a luminous shape circling her submersible and gives it a name: a “non-terrestrial intelligence.” There is something already living down there.

I will not pretend the film is perfect. Cameron shot about 40 percent of it underwater, in a purpose-built tank at Gaffney Studios in South Carolina, after the tanks in Malta were not deep enough. He and Gale Anne Hurd, who produced it for 20th Century Fox and from whom Cameron was by then separating, pushed the cast and crew to the edge. The film opened August 9, 1989, at number two behind Parenthood, on a $9.3 million weekend, on its way to roughly $54.2 million in North America and $89.8 million worldwide against a $50 million budget. The critics were split. Kim Newman, writing for Empire, called the first two hours “absolutely great action-man stuff” before the ending let the air out. A 75 percent Tomatometer, a Metacritic of 62. But Cameron’s water tentacle and the liquid-breathing dive sequence, where Bud descends two miles to disarm a nuclear warhead on a one-way ticket, helped earn the film the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

That dive is the heart of it for me. A man in an experimental suit, breathing fluid because the pressure would crush lungs full of air, walking alone into the dark to do the one right thing he can still do. The 1993 Special Edition restores the longer ending, in which the beings beneath the seafloor threaten to wipe humanity out for its warmaking and then choose not to. The Cold War is right there, barely hidden.

Nautilus proved the deep ocean was a place humans could go. The Abyss asks what might be waiting for us there. Tonight, press play.

What else could have been tonight

There is another August 3 that the channel flagged for me, older and stranger. On August 3, 1492, the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus set sail from the port of Palos de la Frontera in southern Spain on his first transatlantic voyage, in command of three small vessels: the caravels Nina and Pinta and the flagship Santa Maria. He set out expecting to reach East Asia by sailing west, and instead made landfall in the Bahamas in October. It is the old template, the voyager who leaves for one world and stumbles on another already inhabited. To that belongs The Arrival (1996), David Twohy’s paranoia thriller with Charlie Sheen as Zane Zaminsky, a radio astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who detects a signal from Wolf 336, about 14 light-years out. Zane thinks he is the discoverer. Slowly he works out that the aliens are already here, hiding inside human disguise and quietly rewarming the planet through disguised industrial plants to terraform Earth for themselves. The Columbus dynamic, inverted: the voyager finds out he is the one being discovered, and reshaped.

The other thread is colder. On August 3, 1921, U.S. Army Air Service Lieutenant John A. Macready took off from McCook Field in a modified Curtiss JN-4 Jenny, fitted with a 32-gallon hopper designed by engineer Etienne Dormoy, and flew to a grove near Troy, Ohio. Passing over the catalpa trees six times, he spread roughly 175 pounds of lead arsenate across six acres, about 6,000 trees, to kill the catalpa sphinx caterpillar. The first time an aircraft delivered a chemical payload across a wide area from the sky. To that demonstration belongs The Andromeda Strain (1971), Robert Wise’s film of Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel. A government “Scoop” satellite crashes near Piedmont, New Mexico, and an extraterrestrial microbe settles out of the sky and kills nearly everyone in town. The whole nightmare begins with something drifting down from above. The 1921 flight proved you could put a chemical in the air and have it come down wherever you wanted. The film asks what happens when the thing coming down is alive.

Sources

USS Nautilus crosses the North Pole submerged (1958)

• https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/ships/submarines/uss-nautilus.html (SSN-571, Operation Sunshine, 23 July 1958 Pearl Harbor departure, 3 August submerged transit)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunshine_(USS_Nautilus) (Anderson’s 1957 proposal, failed 19 August 1957 attempt, second attempt succeeded)

• https://ussnautilus.org/1014-2/ (Rickover’s nuclear navy, Eisenhower’s technological supremacy, Presidential Unit Citation)

The Abyss (1989)

• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096754/ (Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Michael Biehn, James Cameron)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss (Gaffney Studios tank, 40% underwater shoot, $50M budget, Special Edition ending)

• https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/abyss-review/ (Kim Newman: “absolutely great action-man stuff,” the damp claustrophobic first two hours)

Columbus sets sail from Palos (1492), film: The Arrival (1996)

• https://www.history.com/articles/christopher-columbus-ships-caravels (3 August 1492, Palos, Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria)

• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115571/ (The Arrival, David Twohy, Charlie Sheen, Ron Silver)

First aerial crop-dusting flight (1921), film: The Andromeda Strain (1971)

• https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/history/pioneers/100_Years_Aerial_Crop_Dusting.pdf (Lt. Macready, Curtiss JN4 Jenny, lead arsenate, catalpa trees, Troy Ohio, 3 Aug 1921)

• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066769/ (The Andromeda Strain, Robert Wise, Arthur Hill, Crichton novel)

On Tuesday, August 2, 1870, the Tower Subway opened to passengers in London. A 1,340-foot, roughly 410-metre bore under the River Thames, between Tower Hill on the north bank and Pickle Herring Stairs on the south. It was not grand: a single wooden carriage was winched back and forth on a 2 ft 6 in, 762 mm narrow-gauge cable railway. One car, moving non-stop between the two banks. The authorising Tower Subway Act 1868 had received royal assent on May 29, 1868.

What matters is not the size, it is the seven-foot, 2.1-metre diameter cast-iron shield used to drive the bore through the London clay. James Henry Greathead built that shield from a design Peter W. Barlow had patented in 1864. And that shield was the breakthrough: it made it possible, for the first time, to bore a deep tunnel safely through soft ground, under a river. Greathead’s shield became the template for every tube tunnel dug after it. Every modern metro descends from this shield and this tunnel.

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On Saturday, August 1, 1936, Adolf Hitler opened the Games of the XI Olympiad at Berlin’s Reichssportsfeld. About 100,000 spectators, more than 5,000 athletes from 51 nations. Richard Strauss conducted the Olympic Hymn. That day also gave birth to a ritual we still know: the torch relay, a single runner carrying a flame from Olympia into the stadium. The torch itself was made by the Krupp steel and arms conglomerate.

But it is not the torch that grips me, it is the cameras. The Berlin Games were the first Olympics ever broadcast on television. The regime set up some 25 to 28 Fernsehstuben, public viewing rooms and fitted beer halls, across Berlin, Potsdam, and Leipzig, each showing projected images eight to ten feet high over coaxial cable. On the order of 150,000 people, in one count exactly 162,228, watched the competitions live. This was the first live televised sporting event in history. Leni Riefenstahl was filming Olympia at the same time. The broadcast advertised modernity, and the audience’s job was to watch, awed.

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That day in Berlin, Hermann Göring, Hitler’s deputy and the second man of the Reich, signs a letter. The addressee is Reinhard Heydrich, SS-Obergruppenführer, head of the Reich Security Main Office, Himmler’s right hand. The language is lawyerly, measured, every line official. Göring authorizes Heydrich to carry out all necessary organizational, material and logistical preparations for the desired total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence. The German text uses the word Gesamtlösung, total solution, which would soon harden into Endlösung, final solution. Six months later, on January 20, 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich lays out the mechanics of implementation before fifteen ministry officials. One piece of paper, one signature, and the machine begins to turn.

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On July 30, 2003, in a Spanish lab near Zaragoza, a tiny ibex kid was born. Out of 57 implantations, seven surrogate mothers became pregnant, and only one carried the pregnancy to term. As a percentage, that is a dismal result. But that single kid was the first living creature to come back from extinction. It was a Pyrenean ibex, also called a bucardo, and it was genetically identical to the last female, a goat named Celia.

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