Peter Fabris's painted plates helped make the volcano a subject of precise science
the gist
William Hamilton, Britain's envoy in Naples, watched Vesuvius erupt many times in the late 1700s and wrote Campi Phlegraei, a study of the region's volcanic activity. He hired the artist Peter Fabris to paint 59 gouaches showing rock layers, lava flows and eruptions with what Hamilton called the utmost fidelity. The plates were engraved and hand-coloured, and they moved volcanology from biblical stories of catastrophe toward careful description. Hamilton's watershed was built on observation, comparing strata, lava and ash across the region. The book's pictures show the Bay of Naples lit by eruptions and the volcano's cones, craters and mineral specimens.
so what
Hamilton's work helped make volcanology observational, setting out how to record what a volcano actually does. Its images also shaped how Europeans saw volcanoes for generations.
the bigger pattern
Vesuvius also destroyed Pompeii in 79 CE, and Pliny the Younger's eyewitness letters remain the earliest detailed account of a volcanic eruption. Hamilton's work sits in that long tradition of studying the same volcano.
In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.
how it works
To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.
so what
A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.
the bigger pattern
Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.
fun fact
In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.
more on this
background
A Corner in Wheat is a 1909 American short silent film which tells of a greedy tycoon who tries to corner the market in wheat, destroying the lives of the people who can no longer afford to buy bread. It was directed by D. W. Griffith and adapted by Griffith and Frank E. Woods from a novel and a short story by Frank Norris, titled The Pit and "A Deal in Wheat". Griffith may have had a real-life inspiration: six months earlier, James A. Patten had actually cornered the market in wheat, and in some cities, the price of bread doubled from five cents to ten, just as in the movie.
In 1994, A Corner in Wheat was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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