![]() ![]() Edison became a nationwide celebrity, his name adorning products in homes across the country. Known as the ‘Village of Light’, Menlo Park became a tourist attraction, with hundreds of visitors disembarking at its railway station to view the marvel. While these esoteric scientist-philosophers worked in relative obscurity, Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park, New Jersey (the world’s first research and development facility) was illuminated by iridescent lightbulbs. He once remarked: ‘Our task is to make nature, the blind force of nature, into an instrument of universal resuscitation and to become a union of immortal beings.’ Nikolai Fyodorov, a frequent correspondent of Tsiolkovsky, believed that it would be possible to create a technology that would raise the dead. They were an eclectic array of scientists and philosophers, who, as well as working on mathematical equations that would eventually allow the Soviet Union to send rockets into space, were deeply interested in a transcendental ideal of technological utopia. Tsiolkovsky’s residence was a hub for a group of thinkers collectively known as the Russian cosmists. To understand why these events were so traumatic for so many, we must retreat from the annus horribilis of 1986 a century in the past, to the log cabin of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, ‘godfather’ of modern rocketry. Tsiolkovsky’s home was located just outside the town of Kaluga, a boggy backwater about 200 miles south-west of Moscow. ![]() The catastrophes in Florida and Ukraine marked the end of the political and propagandistic trends that had defined the Cold War. The disasters have an importance that extends far beyond their immediate tragedies. Almost exactly three months later, on 26 April an explosion in Reactor IV of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant led to the greatest nuclear disaster that the world had witnessed. The Space Shuttle Challenger suffered a catastrophic explosion 73 seconds into its ascent into orbit on 28 January 1986. ![]()
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