The Capricorn expedition of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1951-52 was notable for many things, among them the presence on board of Ron Mason, later the discoverer of the oceanic magnetic stripes, and Helen Raitt, the first woman to take part in an extended US oceanographic cruise. After it was over, Helen wrote a book about the cruise, and sent Ron a copy.
Among the residents at the Abbaye aux Bois when Rose de Freycinet’s mother was there was the famous (or perhaps infamous) socialite, Juliette Récamier. She was still there when, many years later, she was visited by Anthony Trollope’s mother.
As, in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand approached the end of her prowl along the corridors of the doomed Taggart Comet, she encountered, in Bedroom A, Car No. 14, yet another professor, a class of people for whom she had a very special contempt.
One way of looking at the history of plate tectonics is to identify people without whose intervention general acceptance of the theory might have been delayed by years. Some names emerge that are now almost forgotten. One name in particular springs to mind.
Throughout the Astrolabe voyage, Gaimard kept his former captain, Louis de Freycinet, informed of its progress. In the first of the letters that he sent to him he described the relatively uneventful voyage as far as New South Wales
In Atlas Shrugged, one of the passengers in the doomed Taggart Comet was a lawyer who had said, “Me? I’ll find a way to get along under any political system”. How would he have fared in John Galt’s dictatorship?