The moon always has been an object of fascination for mankind, but once President John F. Kennedy pledged in 1961 that the U.S. would send a manned spacecraft there within a decade, one of the first questions was entirely practical: Where would they land? An extraordinary map, the USAF Lunar Wall Mosaic, produced the year after Kennedy's speech, helped provide the answer. The 1969 Apollo 11 mission landed safely in an area called the Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility). Today, a copy of the map is preserved at the Library as one of the most important -- and practical -- maps in human history.
A reference librarian stumbled across a tiny recording of a speech by Amelia Earhart tucked inside a copy of her 1932 memoir, published soon after she became the first woman (and the second person) to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. The record was just a promotional gimmick at the time; could it still be played, 94 years later? Yes, thanks to the Library's IRENE project, which uses optical imaging to scanned damaged or broken records to reconstruct their sounds on a digital file.
Marie Tharp was an American geologist and marine cartographer whose groundbreaking studies into ocean floors and discovery of the mid-Atlantic rift valley challenged the widely accepted geological views of the time. Her papers are preserved at the Library, a window into the thinking of a scientist who changed the understand of the world we live in.
We're talking today with David Baron, author of “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America,” who will be at this year’s National Book Festival on Sept. 6. It’s about the public fascination between 1890-1910 with what looked to be the very real possibility of life of Mars. The main cultural artifact of this belief might be H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel, “The War of the Worlds,” which imagined hostile Martians invading Earth in spectacular fashion. But as Baron writes, most of the views were utopian, picturing Martians as a far advanced, heroic people.
The personal world atlas of Louis XIV of France, the absolutist Sun King, was a doozy: a large two-volume set of more than 120 maps now held in the Library’s Geography and Map Division. It was the first world map to show the mythical Sea of the West, a supposed inland sea in the Pacific Northwest, and was the first world map in more than a century to show California as a peninsula, not an island. The creator of the map, Jean-Baptiste Nolin, was later successfully sued for plagiarizing its greatest cartographic innovations, but Louis never let go of his copy.
New details about early European explorations along the North American east coast have been gleaned from a 16th-century portolan chart by the Library's Preservation and Research Testing Division. Using multispectral imaging and other techniques, Library staff has discovered multiple place names on the chart that could not be seen by the naked eye.
The Library's custom-designed multitracking studio at National Audio-Visual Conservation Center was built to house and preserve the collections of guitarist and audio-engineering innovator Les Paul. But it's also used to convert, preserve and save recordings made on formats that may not last. It's one of several labs that use cutting-edge technology to save the nation's recorded sound history.
Alan Haley, a preservation specialist in the Conservation Division, has worked on everything from an ancient Chinese scroll to the transcript of the Amistad trial in the Library's collections, but has also traveled the globe assisting other libraries with important items or artifacts that are threatened.
The Library and three Native American tribes are collaborating on a project to digitize and restore some 9,000 wax cylinder recordings of Native Americans singing and telling stories from more than a century ago. The work is the subject of "Language is Life," a documentary narrated by Joy Harjo, the former U.S. poet laureate. It premiered at the Library in November in advance of its broadcast as part of the PBS series, “Native America.”
