Paul Collins - Banvard's Folly - Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World

Some have even attempted to compose in the language. Musician Bruce Koestner--who has also created a chromatic (i.e., twelve-note, including both a piano's white keys and black keys) language called Eaiea--has written part of a chamber opera in Solresol; in 1997 a Dutch radio presenter, Yolanda Mante, wrote and broadcast a brief skit in Solresol about Sudre.

And the revival looks as if it may even be gaining momentum. Greg Baker has registered the domain name of solresol.org.au as a future base of operations, and Jason Hutchens has floated the idea of computer programs that will convert Solresol writings into files that could be exchanged between musician-speakers worldwide. Rice has begun to make some refinements in the language; when completed, they will be the first step forward in Solresol's development since Gajewski's 1904 text.

But unlike proselytizers for international languages like Esperanto or Interlingua, the last practicing Solresolist probably passed away in a French nursing home decades ago. The difficulty in establishing pauses between words and the easily confused vocabulary dog Solresol as much today as when it was at its height a century ago. Modern Solresol followers largely pursue it as an exercise in comparative linguistics, and a worthy challenge in reconstructive history.

One enigmatic trace did turn up before the current revival: years ago, someone in the computer industry quietly inserted the seven letters of the Solresol

alphabet in the Unicode sixteen-character set. "Here was a language that had very little written record," Greg Baker muses, "now being regarded by the computer industry as an important international language, on par with Thai, Tamil, or English."

Solresol domifare ....

22,000 SEEDLINGS

Grape jelly, of the T-shirt-destroying purple variety, is very much like wheat paste, Play-Doh, or crayons--that is, something that North Americans can immediately identify by taste, touch, or smell. It is a smell of childhood, an infusion of sugar on the palate that, were it not so utterly taken for granted, might be capable of evoking Proustian eloquence on days of Land of the Lost and Electric Company past. But even the very name of the variety-Concord Grape--is scarcely thought upon.

Concord grapes are still grown near a town called Concord--and what a comforting, almost quaint notion that is. But try to actually buy a Concord grape in a supermarket and you will be met by quizzical looks. The Concord grape is not a table grape, they will tell you. And yet, to look at the jam and jelly aisle in the market, you'd think that the Concord was the only grape in existence. In the American world of processed grape products, King Concord reigns supreme.

Many Americans would be surprised to find that the Concord grape is little known elsewhere in the world, and that the beloved American combination of fatty peanut butter and sugary jam on Wonder Bread is as much an object of fascinated revulsion to foreigners as anything that Elvis might have ordered from his house chef. But stranger still is the discovery that, once upon a time, not only was there no Concord grape over there ... there was no Concord grape over here.

America is a place of grapes; when Viking explorers nudged around the continent's edge a thousand years ago, they were so impressed by the profuse growth that they dubbed the new world Vineland. But close inspection would have revealed the tendriled inhabitants were both recognizable and strange.

Native American vines are grapes, yes, but they are not the same as European grapes. And so later European settlers did what came naturally to them: they ignored the native varieties and imported vine cuttings from the Old World.

Settlers had good reasons for this. Humans shy from eating unfamiliar mushrooms and berries; catastrophic liver damage and kidney failure being what they are, immigrants to the Americas who mistake native varieties for ones from the homeland don't get a chance to repeat the error. Even the tomato, now one of the most heavily cultivated native American fruits, was allowed to rot on wild vines for years, because settlers were convinced it was poisonous.

But most of all, the classic European table grapes and wine grapes, such as muscat and tokay, were proven financial successes. Settlers, who were sometimes granted land on the condition that they improve it through clearing and planting, needed safe bets in order to survive and to hang on to the property that they had so painstakingly stolen from the Indians. And so, along with indentured servants and packets of letters, ships to America bore an even more valuable cargo: vine cuttings.

But America was not a good place to grow grapes.

Not European grapes, anyway. From the 1630's when the first vineyard was planted by William Bradford up through the mid-1800's, scarcely any American

farmer made a living off of grapes. The plagues of the vine are legion: red spiders, mealy bugs, thrips, rose bugs, fretters, and beetles wielding mandibles like brutal tire irons. And even if the vines survived them, come harvest time you'd find dry rot in the roots--or wet rot in the fruit. Native varieties had, through natural selection, built up some resistance to these ailments. But European grapes, as the horticulturist Andrew Fuller recalled bluntly, "entirely failed in this country."

Farmers blamed the soil, overwatering, improper pruning, bad weather ...

everything, that is, except the grapes themselves. They found that the only way to raise grapes with any degree of consistency was in a glass house. With the mass production of glass in the nineteenth century, this no longer sounded entirely ludicrous to people. After all, the era's greatest public building, the Crystal Palace in London, was in effect a giant greenhouse. Newly designed heating systems meant that these houses could even provide fruit year-round.

Guides proliferated on how to build a glass "grapery" in one's own backyard.

But for large-scale fruit agriculture, glass houses are a staggeringly inefficient way to raise a crop. Even as American agriculture boomed through various land grabs grape acreage remained stubbornly small-by the mid-nineteenth century, a paltry 5,600 acres in all of America east of the Rockies. In the 1840's the viticulturist Elijah Fay ventured to send a shipment of grapes to Buffalo with an assistant named Baker. "Buffalonians stared at the fruit," says one historian, "asking Baker the kind of plums they were and how they were eaten." Americans scarcely even understood what grapes were; how was a farmer going to find any market for them?

But then, not all farming is done by farmers. Agriculture, which has become the most high-tech and lucrative of biosciences in our own time, also happens to be the most approachable of human endeavors. Save a pip and stick it in some soil, and with nothing more than benign neglect you might still wind up with something to show for it. Even children can do it: after all, the quintessential school science experiment for young children is to watch a seed germinate in a test tube.

The early nineteenth century, for all its careful lore of pruning and grafting and planting cycles, was still a time when you didn't need an ag science degree; the tools of the trade were still simple and graspable. Take, for example, this straightforward recipe by Fuller: "If the vines do not grow as rapidly as desired, then put a few shovelfuls of good fresh barnyard manure into a barrel of water, stir it well, let it settle, and then draw off the water and apply it to the plants." And so, liquid manure at the ready, grapes were raised by dedicated amateurs and backyard enthusiasts: after all, no serious working farmer would consider such a risky and expensive crop.

One such amateur garden could be found in the Washington Street backyard of Epaphous Bull, a Boston silversmith. His son Ephraim took a particular interest in the garden. Ephraim, born on Jefferson's inaugural day in 1806, had the signs of some sort of greatness; with his nose constantly in a book, he'd won an academic medal when he was just eleven years old. But Epaphous could not afford to keep the boy in school, and so at the age of fifteen he was sent to an apprenticeship in beating gold leaf. In his spare moments off the job, young Ephraim could still be found in his father's backyard, carefully examining the Catawba, Isabella, and Sweetwater vines that he'd planted.