Day: August 12, 2018

Talk about going green. One British soccer team has made it its goal to become the first professional sports team in the world to be certified carbon neutral. It’s an official designation recently awarded to the team by the Secretary in charge of Climate Change at the United Nations. But that’s not all. The team may also be the world’s first 100 percent vegan football club. VOA Correspondent Mariama Diallo has more.
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One of the oldest zoos in the U.S., the Chicago Lincoln Park Zoo, is celebrating a big milestone: its 150th anniversary. The zoo opened in 1868 with just two pairs of swans. It has a considerably larger collection today, but its priorities have not changed that much. As Roman Verkhovsky reports, the zoo remains focused on conservation: preserving rare species; organizing educational programs and setting an example for future generations of animal lovers.
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Black cats, candles, mysterious ingredients and ancient books. It’s not a scene from a scary Hollywood movie, just a few of the items passers-by will see through the shop window of a New York boutique that specializes in witchcraft and magic. Enchantments, has been a fixture for more than 35 years in the traditionally Ukrainian neighborhood in Manhattan’s East Village called Little Ukraine. Reporter Olga Loginova takes us inside, where the magic begins.
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Hugo Kohl has been interested in art and design since he was a child. In college, he studied finance, but also took several jewelry-making classes to satisfy his curiosity about this form of art and the history behind it.

Upon his graduation, he started a career in financing, but after six weeks he quit to pursue his passion. Over the last 25 years, Kohl has developed his own style of vintage jewelry using the same techniques as industrial revolution artisans at the end of the 18th century.

Hugo Kohl’s Museum of American Jewelry Design and Manufacturing in Harrisonburg, Virginia, is the culmination of his dream, preserving history while doing business.

Art made the Industrial Revolution way

Part museum, part workshop and part showroom, visitors can buy handmade antique-style jewelry and watch the artist create them, using vintage machines. These machines were made before electricity and are literally man-powered as artisans use their physical strength to press the design on the metal.

In reproducing these old designs, Kohl has revived a centuries-old technique for jewelry-making, called die strike or die roll.

“The things I’m talking about are being die struck and die rolled, which means a lot of pressure among two pieces of steel,” he explained. “When you die strike something or die roll something, typically it’s going to go last a couple of generations. A lot of times people will be in love with vintage jewelry for a number of reasons, one is the design. The process of die striking allows for tremendous detail. It’s very crisp, very clean.”

Stumbling across a treasure

Kohl creates these details using thousands of 3-D molds he collected over more than two decades. He acquired one collection in Providence, Rhode Island, which was the jewelry-making capital of the world at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

He says there is an interesting story behind this collection.

In 1993, while on tour of a vintage jewelry machinery warehouse, Kohl noticed workers cleaning up the debris of a nearby collapsed building.

“They were picking up the debris and throwing it in the back of a dump truck,” he said. “One of the things that they picked is that tiny little cabinet. It was going to the side of this dump truck, it breaks open and the contents literally fall at my feet. I picked them up and what they are is what this place is built around.”

Those items that were about to be sold as scrap metal were part of a collection of antique, hand-engraved jewelry molds that dated to the late 1800s and early 1900s.

James Madison University art professor Cole Welter says rescuing these pieces was Kohl’s first step toward reviving the art of vintage jewelry-making.

“You ask somebody who is your great-grandfather, your great-great-grandmother, you go back to just a short period of time. Here, somebody was your ancestor. These pieces are the ancestors of the American metalsmithing and silversmithing. And they bring to a very tangible way the processes, the technical skills that are involved and the meaning of what these pieces meant to people.”

Beyond aesthetic

Artist Kohl says his fascination with Industrial Revolution-age jewelry goes beyond its artistic beauty. This industry, he says, started a social shift in America.

Before the Industrial Age, only wealthy, elite people had the means to commission a goldsmith to handcraft a ring or brooch or other piece of jewelry. This was extremely expensive, not something that ordinary people could afford.

“Now that we stepped into the Industrial age, beside the technology, we have the middle class,” Kohl said. “So this is the first time that symbols can be mass-produced and people could have them. The wealthy people still had jewelry that was made in gold. This new class had things that were made in silver and clad metal, and poor people had the same art work in brass and copper.”

That’s also when the American cultural symbols were exported to the world.

“What these symbols are speaking to are very new ideas about American liberty and romantic love,” he said. “So we look at these things, we start seeing this uniquely American identity take shape. This was happening in Providence (Rhode Island). But Providence is not big enough as a marketplace to cover the cost of manufacturing, but Providence is a seaport and ships were going all over the world carrying these symbols.”

Secrets and stories

Professor Welter says he’s happy that Kohl is passing his passion and the secrets of his craft to people who visit his museum and workshop.

“I really enjoy the entire scope of what happens here,” he added. “It’s not just the preservation of the work, but it’s the recreation of the works and it’s the selling the works to the public. So they all become part of the culture again.”

And to customers like Sarah Brown, it’s nice to own part of the American heritage.

“When I come in, I love to be able to look and see the jewelry is made right here,” she said. “Hugo is often here. It feels very personal and the pieces, like I say, are unique and beautiful. They have a timelessness about them that just feels really good. It feels like they kind of tell a story.”

And Hugo Kohl enjoys bringing those stories to life.
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A strange looking motorized raft, loaded with all kinds of cameras, sensors and high-tech widgets, looks like an invader from outer space. But it serves the down-to-earth purpose of making extraordinary maps of waterways of the Chesapeake Bay watershed in the Eastern United States.

The pontoon raft has a 4-meter-tall silver metal column in the center, with a white box on top that points toward the sky above the scenic Patuxent River in Maryland.

The unique craft was designed and built by Ryan Abrahamsen, founder of Terrain 360, a hiking trail and waterways virtual mapping company. Inspired by Google Street View, Abrahamsen has loaded the raft with photo cameras to create 360-degree virtual tours of some rivers in the United States from the perspective of sitting in a canoe.

Abrahamsen said creating a virtual map is challenging and requires many cameras working together. 

How it’s done

“On the heavy column, there are six cameras at the top, a light sensor and GPS unit. Near the bottom of the raft there is a waterproof PC, with an ultra-bright touch screen. The cameras are triggered by the computer, which at the same time records the GPS coordinates, barometric pressure, humidity and temperature.”

As the raft motors along the Patuxent, the extreme wide-angle lens cameras shoot photos simultaneously every 12 meters. It takes hundreds of thousands of the high-resolution images to create the virtual online panoramic tour. A separate computer program uploads the photos in order, according to the GPS coordinates.

Abrahamsen is adding 20,000 new photos taken from just one of the Patuxent River’s coves. He said all kinds of things are captured along the way, including trees, birds, homes and people fishing.

Following in Smith’s footsteps

The Patuxent is among the 11 rivers that Abrahamsen has recorded, following the journey of English explorer Capt. John Smith, who some 400 years ago traveled around the Chesapeake Bay, the country’s largest estuary. Smith mapped about 4,800 kilometers of the bay and nearby rivers.

Now, Abrahamsen is providing an entirely new way to experience the waterways through his spectacular online tour. Viewers can zoom in and adjust the viewing angle to get a close-up look at boats, rocks beneath the surface, and even fish jumping out of the water.

The Chesapeake Bay project is funded by an Annapolis, Maryland, environmental group, the Chesapeake Conservancy.

“We wanted to give people the information and inspiration to get on our rivers, and explore the Chesapeake Bay area, so that they can enjoy the beauty and think about protecting it,” said Joel Dunn, Chesapeake Conservancy president.

Although a recent report card indicated that the health of the Chesapeake Bay estuary is better than it has been in 33 years, the watershed was still given a “C” grade because rivers like the Patuxent are still in the recovery process.

Environmental issues

Abrahamsen said the virtual tours reveal some of the environmental issues.

“There’s shoreline erosion, pollution, and lot of tires in the waterways,” he said. “It shows the public that some things need to be cleaned up.”

The Patuxent and others rivers that flow into the Chesapeake Bay are near major cities, such as Washington and Baltimore, giving many people the opportunity to enjoy them, Dunn said.

“People can use the virtual tour to plan their trips from their desk at home or at work. But they can also use them out on the water on their smartphones from wherever they are,” he said.

The online tours can be viewed on the websites of the Chesapeake Conservancy and Terrain 360.
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