In the Preface to the report in the Imperial Geophysical Experimental Survey in Australia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a few unforgettable names were listed. Attached to the survey was ‘J. M. Rayner, of the New South Wales Department of Mines’, and moving to the lower echelons, the Electrical Section had a field assistant called R. F. Thyer, while designated as a Temporary Assistant was one N.H Fisher.
Ayn Rand was a great one for setting up ‘straw man’ imagined futures, as a way of showing how terrible things would be if her precepts were not followed. It seems fair enough, therefore, to play that same game with her imagined future, as presented in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and imagine what would have happened next.
On Page 34 of Volume 1 of the Historique, the six-volume narrative section of Louis de Freycinet’s Voyage autour du Monde, he described a visit to a church service in Rio de Janeiro. His description is almost identical to that provided by his wife, in a letter to her mother that survives today only in a manuscript copy. This provides some constraints on hypotheses as to when the copy might have been made.