50, 100 and 150 Years Ago; May 2009; Scientific American Magazine; by Daniel C. Schlenoff; 1 Page(s)

MAY 1959 THE COLOR OF LIGHT--"No student of color vision can fail to be awed by the sensitive discernment with which the eye responds to the variety of stimuli it receives. Recently my colleagues and I have learned that this mechanism is far more wonderful than had been thought. The eye makes distinctions of amazing subtlety. It does not need nearly so much information as actually flows to it from the everyday world. It can build colored worlds of its own out of informative materials that have always been supposed to be inherently drab and colorless. Edwin H. Land" [founder of Polaroid Corporation]

"Cargo Cult" anthropology--"In the central highlands of New Guinea the sudden transition from the society of the stone ax to the society of sailing ships (and now of airplanes) has not been easy to make. As the agents of the Australian Government penetrate into ever more remote mountain valleys, they find these backwaters of antiquity already deeply disturbed by contact with the ideas and artifacts of European civilization. For cargoPidgin English for trade goodshas long flowed along the indigenous channels of communications from the seacoast into the wilderness. These people are only the latest to be gripped in the recurrent religious frenzy of the cargo cults. These cults, however variously embellished with details from native myth and Christian belief, all advance the same central theme: the world is about to end in a terrible cataclysm. Thereafter God, the ancestors or some local culture hero will appear and inaugurate a blissful paradise on Earth."