Math and Motion: When Our Limbs Become the Roots of Our Tree of Thought

I was told that Oswald Veblen did his best thinking while chopping wood. Similarly, a daughter of Joe Kohn, the great mathematician who died recently, told me that her father very much disliked reaching the point in aging when he could no longer walk, because walking was so important to his act of thinking. Though I'm not a mathematician, I've had insights and ideas come to me while washing dishes, chopping wood, or more generally when my hands and mind are working together. There is something in the connection between body and mind, as if our arms and legs were the roots of the tree of thought. Of course, the scientist side of my brain is immediately looking for evidence to support or contradict this thesis. Do those who have lost the use of their limbs also have eureka moments?

Recently I felt the urge to ask a mathematician if he did his best thinking while bicycling. The prompt for the question is something of a story. I was walking down the hallway of a medical building, fresh from my annual dermatology exam. There was an older couple walking just ahead of me, and they were disagreeing as to who would drive the car home. He wanted to drive, but she was insisting that she drive, given that he had just received some medication. He said he was just fine, however, and their back and forth seemed headed for an argument. In retrospect, it was as if I were a kid listening to his parents. Something came to mind, and I decided to go with it. Wishing to defuse the situation with some humor, I blurted out from a few feet behind them, "Okay, how about I drive you home?" 

They turned around, still in stride towards the door to the stairwell, and the man responded "Do you drive a stick shift?" This was music to my ears, as I love driving a stick shift. I told him about the '94 Ford Ranger I use for my work at Herrontown Woods, and as we headed down the stairs, we talked stick shifts we'd known, like the "3 on a tree" in my '63 Chevy station wagon--a car that was emphatically beige because my mother was big on beige. We continued to talk as we left the building. I said that when driving a stick shift, the driver must listen closely to the engine. That delicate interplay between clutch and accelerator--it's like a dance with the machine. (Though I didn't mention this, maybe that relationship is why my ear is also attuned to the sound of other machines, like when the furnace kicks on, and the implications for my personal contribution to climate change.)

As we reached my bicycle (I clearly had not thought through the logistics of driving them home), he recounted having taken a bad spill on his bike. He had been biking on Canal Road and gotten so caught up in mathematical thoughts that he didn't notice a pothole. 

My ears perked up when he mentioned math, given of course that I am working to restore Oswald Veblen's house. "Are you a mathematician?," I asked. He responded affirmatively and told me his name. His story fit well with a video a botanist friend of mine had posted a week before on facebook, in which my friend is riding his bike along a broad trail, one hand on the handlebar, the other holding the camera, pointing at different plants and calling out their latin names as he passed by. The video ends abruptly when he falls off of his bike, breaking a couple bones in the process. He's on the mend, but high-speed botany, like high speed math, has its risks.

Biking home, I wished I had asked the mathematician whether he does his best thinking while riding a bike. I looked him up, found his home page, and sent him an email. His response? "I haven't done much good Math thinking while biking. The accident was more than 20 years ago and it taught me to concentrate on biking when on the bike."

Not the answer I was looking for, but all for the best, and a lot more fun than an argument over who is going to drive.

Demarest & Co: More Writings Discovered Inside Veblen House

 One of the curiosities to be found on the newly exposed walls inside Veblen House are these slats. 

Stacked tightly, one on top of another, they were nailed primarily but not exclusively to the walls that enclose bathrooms. This is the wall between the master bedroom and master bath.

and this is the wall between the upstairs hallway and another bathroom. Their function is another mystery to be solved. Soundproofing, perhaps? But suffice it to say that each slat, if I can call them that, looked to us pretty much like all the others. 

But one day our carpenter, Robb Geores, came by, and Scott Sillars and I passed a couple fascinating hours with him scrutinizing the newly exposed guts of the house. Many a clue was found that may shed light on the house's multiple lives. 

We were upstairs in the study when Robb announced, "I found some more writing!" He was scrutinizing a single stack of those slats running along the edge of the chimney. 

There, you see it? Neither did we, but a really close look reveals that one of the slats is larger than the others.

And on it is some writing, revealing that it had once been the top of a packing crate, with the shadow of a stamp on the upper right. 

The crate was addressed to J.P.W. Stuart in Bedford, NY. That would be Jesse Paulmier Whiton-Stuart. He and his wife Mary moved the house from Morristown to Princeton, and lived in it for ten years before selling it to the Veblens. Bedford was and is an upscale town that had not come up previously in our research of the itinerant Whiton-Stuarts, who had lived in Manhattan, Greenwich, CT, Prescott, AZ, Morristown, and allegedly in Tuxedo Park, before moving to Princeton. Can we conclude that he was well-known in Bedford, if a package could find him without a street address? (Note: Evelyne Ryan of the Bedford Historical Society wrote me that "it wasn’t until the implementation of 911 that many Bedford addresses had numbers – roads, yes, but not numbers." That would have been the late 1960s)

The return address on the crate's top left is 543 Madison Ave, New York City. We couldn't make out the name, though, until I showed it to Clifford Zink. "Demarest," he said without pause. He also pointed out the tiny "&" symbol after Demarest. "Demarest & Cook?", I ventured, before later settling on "Demarest & Co." 

Demarest proved to be J.C. Demarest, later fleshed out to James Cleveland Demarest, president and treasurer of an interior decorating firm. His ads appeared in these 1925-26 issues of Arts and Decorations, alongside articles about anything from bathroom adornments to the latest in literature, music, and art. A sophisticated critique of Carl Sandburg's biography of Lincoln rubbed shoulders with Demarest's conception for a well appointed dining room.

This Nov, 1925 issue had lots for the wealthy to contemplate, admire, and buy. Articles come in quick succession, with "The Hard Brilliance of Earnest Hemmingway" (also Conrad Aiken, Sherwood Anderson) on p. 57, followed by some American triumphalism about skyscrapers in "The New Architecture of a Flamboyant Civilization", "Painted Doors are the Final Distinction for the Handsome Room", and "Great Modern Hotels of America." The magazine captures the world the Whiton-Stuarts seem to have inhabited, at least until the crash of 1929. Beginning around 1900, Whiton-Stuart owned a prosperous real estate company that specialized in high-end properties on Madison Ave. in Manhattan. Society pages tracked the Whiton-Stuart's visits to elite locales and later the seven or so marriages of their son and daughter.

Jesse grew up on Park Avenue, and collected photographs later compiled in a book entitled "Views and Maps of Old New York."

Another article in Arts and Decorations featured the home of prominent architect Grosvenor Atterbury, who in 1909 designed sophisticated prefab homes for Forest Hills in Queens. According to wikipedia, "each house was built from approximately 170 standardized precast concrete panels, fabricated off-site and assembled by crane." Whiton-Stuart would have been up on the latest trends in architecture--an engagement that may have led to his experimenting with the prefab construction now fully on display at Veblen House. 

Also found in the Arts and Decorations magazine was a full page color ad for Johns-Manville's asbestos shingles. Yes, hard to believe now, but asbestos was big in the 1920s, and the 30s and 40s, on up to the 1970s. The Johns-Manville company supplied some of the materials for Veblen House, as will be explored in another post. 

The March, 1926 issue has an article singing the praises of gumwood for paneling. Gumwood? Turns out they're talking about sweetgum, a native tree of which there are many in Herrontown Woods. I lived in a house in Michigan that had beautiful sweetgum paneling, but have not seen it anywhere since. There's no "gumwood" in Veblen House, but it does have two rooms creatively and expertly paneled with plywood parquet--a material that caught the eye and interest of an architectural historian at the NJ Historic Trust. That, too, is material for another post. 

You can see how finding the words "Demarest & Co" on a wall in Veblen House has set off a whole google-powered adventure into the life and times of the Whiton-Stuarts, but why would Whiton-Stuart, or his carpenter, have embedded that particular piece of a packing crate in one of the walls? Robb raised the possibility that the carpenter was simply using whatever wood was on hand. But every other slat nailed to the walls is generic and uniform in size. 

J.C. Demarest died in 1932. One story handed down about Veblen House is that a cabinet maker worked for two years customizing the interior. If the house went up in 1931, that would mean that Demarest died while the house was being worked on. The piece of packing crate was placed next to a hearth, upside down. A hearth represents importance. Might upside down have some symbolism for loss? More about any connection and friendship between Demarest and Whiton-Stuart may ultimately be found in the detailed accounts on society pages back then of who was seen where with whom. 

Origins of the Wallboard in Veblen House

We've been very fortunate to find labels on the various materials that went into the construction of the Veblen House. The housewrap was called Sisalkraft. The wood sheathing appears to have been shipped by the Weyerhauser company from the west coast. The insulation--all one or two inches of it--was a Weyerhauser product out of Minnesota called Balsam Wool. 

Though the kitchen and bathrooms in Veblen House are coated with traditional plaster, the walls in other rooms were made of wallboard containing wood fibers pressed tightly together. Until now, the origin of the wallboard has been a mystery. Various kinds of wallboard offered a cheaper, lighter alternative to plaster for indoor walls and ceilings. Most homes now use drywall, also known as plasterboard or sheetrock, made with a combination of paperboard and fireproof gypsum. But though drywall was invented in 1916, it didn't come into widespread use until the 1940s, ten years after Veblen House was built.

Homasote is another kind of wallboard, and that name has come up occasionally in walkthroughs of the house. But though Homasote was manufactured in nearby Trenton, it was comprised of paper fibers rather than wood, and according to the wikipedia entry was not marketed until the 1940s. 

While most of the wallboard in the house was hauled to a landfill as part of the asbestos removal, we were able to save some. Fortuitously, the asbestos had been found not in the wallboard but in the skincoat applied thereon, presumably to make the wallboard look more like plaster. Since no skincoat was applied in closets, we convinced the town to save those sections of the house's "fabric."

And there, between the studs on the back of the wallboard in the vestibule closet, was a label, upside down near the floor. 

 

The label calls the material Insulating Board, to be used outside or inside the frame to provide some measure of insulation and draft reduction. 

This quote, believed to come from a book entitled Twentieth Century Building Materials: History and Conservation, serves as a good description:

"Fiberboard is a composite hardboard material made from pressure molded wood fibers. It had early precedents in the late 18th century, but was first manufactured in large quantities in the 1920s, with its use expanding in the 1930s and 40s. Fiberboard (or wallboard, as it is commonly known) was marketed by various companies, such as Masonite. It was used as sheathing for roofing and siding on the exterior, for insulation, and for interior walls."

Another excellent online source comes from the U.S. Forest service, entitled Early 20th-Century Building Materials: Fiberboard and Plywood. It describes what at that time were innovative products just beginning to come into widespread use. 

At the bottom of the partially torn label on the Veblen House fiberboard was just enough information to track down the manufacturer, Oswego Board Corp, NY. That name in turn stirred up a few fragments on the internet about that company, which had just formed a few years earlier, with its newly elected president, Floyd L. Carlisle.

Another snippet, from Poors publication, fills in the missing letters on the other name at the bottom of the label: Johns-Manville, which, according to the NY Times, in 1927 teamed with Oswego Board Corporation to manufacture and distribute "a new type of sheathing and insulating board." 

If construction of the plant began in 1927, our 1931 prefab must have been one of the first to be built with this new product.

Without that one label exposed and left undisturbed during asbestos removal, the story of the Veblen House wallboard might have been lost.

Clues on the Walls of Veblen House

In the process of removing asbestos from the Veblen House, the town's contractors have exposed some clues to the Veblen House's past. Most of the wallboard and ceilings contained a skincoat of asbestos-containing material, and were hauled away, revealing here and there a few words and labels on the underlying framing. All of this would have been covered up and "lost to history" if the contractors had painted all exposed surfaces white, as is the usual post-removal procedure. Fortunately, we convinced the town and contractor to apply for a permit to use clear sealant on the walls and ceiling instead. 

One signature on the south wall of the second floor looks like S. Hanlee.

From another angle, it looks more like S.S. Hanlee, so I googled "S.S. Hanlee" ship, and up popped the S.S. Hanley, acquired by Weyerhaeuser in 1923 as an ocean lumber cargo ship. The Hanley and the SS Pomona took lumber to the East Coast. Given that the Balsam Wool insulation in the house was made by Weyerhaeuser, and the house was built in 1931, it's not too farfetched to speculate that some of the lumber for the house, perhaps even the prefab panels themselves, came from that same company.

According to wikipedia, Weyerhaeuser moved its shipping operation from Seattle to Newark, NJ in 1933. The S.S. Hanley and other ships were later put to use for the war effort in WWII. It's conceivable that the S.S. Hanley was named after John Hanley, the only child to be rescued from the S.S. Atlantic, which sank off the coast of England in 1873.

Note: Thanks to a reader of this blog who anonymously sent a link to a photo of the SS Hanley in the Willamette River in Portland, OR. The photo was taken by Minor White, who moved to Oregon in 1937.

Exploring whether Weyerhaeuser ever built prefab houses, the University of Washington has information on a prefab built in 1932, back when the company was "interested in finding new outlets for its lumber." They did not pursue prefabs any further, however, beyond that one demonstration, according to this text:

Historic New England has information about Weyerhaeuser "4 Square Homes", based in St. Paul, MN. But it looks like "4-square" referred only to lumber used for kiln dried sheathing. The board with the S.S. Hanley inscription looked to be part of the house's sheathing.

Another inscription is less scrutible. "Gellning," maybe? Or Gellnig? Maybe that's a "C"? Nothing popped for those. Note: We have since figured out that this word is likely "Ceiling," since it occurs on boards at either end of the second floor, with one preceded by "N", the other by "S", suggesting north and south.

Another inscription was a misspelling of J.P.W. Stuart's name, on slats in the ceiling that hold up insulation between the first and second floors. One conclusion is that, whatever business supplied the slats, they didn't know Stuart well enough to spell his name correctly. 

Another item we found inside the walls is metal tags to mark the panels. Each panel is approximately 10' square and bolted together to make the walls. 

Some labels were found on the wallboard and the roof shingles that is helping identify those materials, but that will be taken up in a separate post.

More Vignettes from the Whiton-Stuarts' Days in Prescott, AZ

Removal of asbestos-containing wallboard in the Veblen House revealed this misspelling of the original owner's name. Jesse's name was J.P.W. Stuart, not Stewart. Still, if someone supplying wood for the Whiton-Stuarts' house didn't get the spelling right, maybe others made the same mistake. 

Mary and Jesse Whiton-Stuart brought the prefab house to Princeton from Morristown, NJ, lived in it for ten years, then sold it to the Veblens in 1941. Being wealthy, at least until the crash in 1929, they were frequently mentioned in society columns. Their children's lives too can be tracked in this way. Mary and Jesse married for life, but the son and daughter had seven marriages between them. 

I decided to google J.P.W. Stewart, and got some interesting results. One was a page from a newspaper called the Weekly Journal-Miner, dated Feb. 12, 1913 This dates back to the Whiton-Stuarts' time in Prescott, AZ, when their two kids were young and Jesse left his real estate business in Manhattan to spend his days on a horse, herding cattle in Arizona. 

I love newspapers, which used to cause problems back when I'd save them, to read another day. Now that they are digital, the love can be unfettered by matters of storage. 

Page 5 of the newspaper offers glimpses of their time in Arizona. Here they are, attending a "most attractive and elaborate dinner." This was back when accounts of high society included long lists of who attended. 

Jesse also attended another function, described at length in the "Social Mirror" section of the newspaper. 

That event included amusements for the "misses" who wished to sew. 

Perhaps sewing was not Mary Whiton-Stuart's thing, as she did not attend. 

It can be fun to see what other news appeared on the same newspaper page. Here's an eye-catching headline: the bones of a "giant type of humanity" were found while doing some grading work for the railroad. The bones provide "indisputable" evidence of people who were at least 8 feet tall and dated back to the Toltec period. Similar stories were told of early encounters with a giant race of indigenous peoples in Patagonia. 

The page's politics section also includes mention of George Babbitt, who was likely one of the ancestors of former presidential candidate and environmentalist Bruce Babbitt.

Arrows Point to Veblen History

Herrontown Woods has long been home to arrowwood Viburnums--a native shrub--but on Mothers Day we added an "arrow tree," with arrows pointing to some of the significant places associated with the Veblens' lives and legacy. The arrows were beautifully crafted by Girl Scout Troop 71837, and our caretaker Andrew Thornton scavenged the tree post from among the many rot-resistant trunks of red cedars that still linger in the surrounding woods, long since shaded out by larger trees.

Perhaps some explanation of the arrows' varied destinations is in order.

Old Fine Hall was the original mathematics building at Princeton University, now called Jones Hall. Oswald Veblen is said to have designed the building, down to the stained glass mathematical equations in the windows. 

Valdres is the valley in Norway from which Oswald's grandparents immigrated to the U.S.. Oswald's father wrote a book about that valley and the Norwegians who came from there. 

Einstein's house is included because Einstein would come to Herrontown Woods to visit the Veblens. Einstein would not have moved to Princeton without the work and presence of Veblen, who did so much to help European scholars escape Nazi oppression and come to the U.S.

The yellow arrow facing away from the photo says "Iowa City," where Oswald grew up. His father was a professor of physics at the University of Iowa.

The Institute for Advanced Study is included because it was originally going to be located in Newark. Oswald reached out and successfully made the case that it should be located in Princeton, where it could benefit from synergy with the university. Oswald was the IAS's first faculty member, quickly followed by Einstein. Oswald was instrumental in choosing subsequent faculty members, such as John von Neumann. During its first three years, the Institute was located in Old Fine Hall, along with the Princeton University mathematics department.

The next two arrows point towards Veblen Cottage and Veblen House, which the Veblens acquired in 1936 and 1941, respectfully, and later donated for public use. The buildings have long sat empty (disrespectfully), but the Friends of Herrontown Woods is working to renovate them so that they can finally be utilized as the Veblens originally conceived.

The last arrow points towards York, England, where Elizabeth Veblen grew up. She moved to Princeton to help her brother Owen, who had a visiting position in the Princeton University physics department. Owen later was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work. Elizabeth was an avid gardener, and her central role in Princeton social circles is mentioned in the book, A Beautiful Mind. 

Thanks to Danielle Rollmann and her girlscout troop for creating these most enjoyable and informative arrows!

Asbestos Removed From Veblen House

Over the past few weeks, asbestos was successfully removed from Veblen House. This critical step in repurposing the house was financed by Princeton municipality. Princeton's open space manager, Cindy Taylor, was our contact person throughout the process. A crew from the Lilich firm showed up Monday, April 10, to start prepping the house for the removal. They built an extended entryway for changing in and out of protective gear, 

and covered the wood floors and paneling with plastic. FOHW had worked over the course of many months prior to prepare the house so that none of the oak trim and paneling would be damaged. In particular, volunteer Scott Sillars put many hours into removing trim and covering the wood floors with RamBoard. The contractor could then come in and strip the walls and ceilings of the asbestos-containing fiberboard. We also identified six heat ducts wrapped with asbestos, and made them accessible for the contractors to remove. 

During removal, these long tubes extended out from the house--part of the ventilator system. The aim, apparently, was to release filtered air some distance away from the house, through holes cut in the ends of the tubes. 

Many bags of asbestos-containing material emerged from the house during the week. Most of the asbestos was in a "skin coat" on the walls and ceilings, requiring the removal of the old fiberboard. Between the studs was lots of an early form of insulation called Balsam Wool. Unfortunately, that, too, needed to be removed, even though it didn't contain asbestos, due to a risk of contamination from asbestos in the air during the operation.

During breakdown one week later, a crew member stuffed that last few bags into the back of the dumpster, to be taken to a special disposal site that accepts asbestos-containing materials.

The project was aided by dry weather.

We weren't supposed to go in until the town had signed off on some documents, so here's a peek from outside through the plexiglass windows. Clean is the scene.

The last step in asbestos removal is usually to paint all exposed wood with white paint, but FOHW convinced the town to have clear sealant applied instead, the better to see any writing or other clues to the house's history inside the walls. 

Three members of the crew posed for a photo. Lasko, in the middle, is the supervisor.

Thanks to the town and Cindy Taylor for all their work and support in bringing this important step to fruition.

This Old Brick--What Do the Initials Mean?

While prepping the Veblen House for asbestos removal, I removed a grate on the wall and found this very clearly initialed old brick. Our carpenter, Robb Geores, had introduced me to the meaningfulness of stampings on old bricks, so I knew to give these initials their due. There's a substantial compendium of brick initials online, but it didn't include SRBC. 

Back to Robb for his take, and sure enough, he had a possible answer:

I think that might stand for “ South River Brick Company.” I’m not sure, but it may. There was once a company in South River N J that made enameled bricks. It’s near the town that I come from, Sayreville n j which is known for Brick Manufacturing as well. Bricks from Sayreville are embossed S&F B C. ( Sayre and Fisher Brick Company).

 

The brick was inside the opening for a duct that led to or from the furnace along the edge of the chimney. The orange marking dates back to around 2017, when Mercer County hired a company to mark where asbestos--coated heat ducts could be found in the house. That was part of the county's process that would have led to demolition of the house if not for the Friend of Herrontown Woods' successful effort to save it. 

Also in this photo are two square-shaped impressions in the wall, behind which is the chimney. It will be interesting to see what's behind those two squares. 

Inside a Very Old Septic Tank at Veblen House

It's been nearly four years since I discovered the old septic tank for Veblen House, some fifty feet east of the house. A combination of the tank's thick concrete lid and a whole bunch of distractions had kept us from following up, until yesterday. 

Some magical combination of volunteer chemistry finally stirred in us the courage to take on the concrete lid. After four years, it had grown over with myrtle and partially disappeared under years of leaves. 

However, our procrastination may have been strategically helpful. Perhaps it was prolonged exposure to the elements that created some cracks in the concrete, making it possible to remove it in pieces.

With the lid removed, we were finally able to look at how this very old septic tank once functioned. 

Unlike a more modern septic tank, this one is round, built mostly of cinder blocks. Several courses of bricks were laid around the top to narrow the opening. A pipe came in from the house sewer system, 

and another pipe headed out and down the slope, presumably to a leach field. There had been some question as to whether this would be a cesspool rather than a septic tank, but some research suggests that cesspools lack any outgoing pipe.

Though the septic tank hasn't been used in 25 years, it was nearly filled with water, which we assume is groundwater that has penetrated through the walls. The tank is about six feet deep, with less than a foot of muck at the bottom, as best we could tell. 

It's extremely unlikely that we'd be able to use this old tank for house septic, but it is a historic artifact that we're glad to now know a little more about. We carefully covered it back up, our curiosity satisfied.

Historical Research Can Uncover Uncanny Coincidence

There are some aspects of my role in adopting Veblen House as a longterm project that border on the uncanny. Coincidence has accumulated as I've researched the people who lived in the house. The Veblen House itself, I realized at some point, has much in common with the house I grew up in. 

That house, next to Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, is now also named after a renowned scientist, the astronomer Otto Struve, and is similar in color to what the Veblen House was, and is at the end of a drive, surrounded by woods, 

Also echoing the Veblen House, it's even approached along a slightly curving walkway, down and to the left as one pulls into the driveway. 

Oswald Veblen came to Princeton after growing up in the midwest, as did I, and after having lived in a progression of university towns, as did I. His grandparents emigrated from Norway to Wisconsin, where I spent my childhood. His father's father built houses and barns, as did mine. His father was a physicist, mine an astrophysicist. Veblen got his PhD at the University of Chicago, where my father would later spend most of his career. It's likely that Veblen as a boy of 13 saw the 40 inch refracting telescope my father used--the world's largest refracting telescope--on exhibit at the 1893 world's fair in Chicago. I almost went to Carlton College, where Veblen's father and all of his aunts and uncles got degrees. I spent my childhood roaming the expansive grounds of Yerkes Observatory, where brilliant scientists lived on the outskirts of a small town with school colors orange and black, not unlike the circumstances of the Institute for Advanced Study, which Veblen helped to found on the outskirts of Princeton. 

As if these coincidences aren't enough, there's also the first owners of what would later be called the Veblen House, Jesse and Mary Whiton-Stuart, who lived their last years in towns I have familial connections to--San Luis-Obispo, CA and Tucson, AZ, the latter being where we'd go as part of my father's work at nearby Kitt Peak Observatory.

And then there's the uncanny coincidence that came to light when I began researching the origins of the house in Ann Arbor where I lived for many years. It was built and lived in by Walter Colby, a nuclear physicist who in many ways played the same role at U. of Michigan that Veblen played in Princeton, bringing brilliant scholars from Europe to raise the level of science and math in the U.S. They had parallel lives, born in the same year, retiring the same year, their legacies largely forgotten and in need of rediscovery. Neither had children, and both played important military roles in World Wars I and II. Both were married to women who also led singular lives, and tended to beautiful gardens.