Inland along the Fraser River delta, due to high humidity, climatologists said it felt like 43.9C on June 29. Vancouver on the Pacific coast has for several days recorded temperatures above 30C (or around 11 degrees above seasonal norms). Temperatures in the US Pacific Northwest cities of Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington reached levels not seen since record-keeping began in the 1940s: 46.1C in Portland and 42.2C in Seattle, according to the National Weather Service. On June 28, Canada set a new all-time high temperature record of 47.9 degrees Celsius in Lytton in British Columbia, about 250km east of Vancouver.Īnd forecasters were expecting the record to go again on June 29, predicting 48.9C heat in western Canada. The scorching heat stretching from the US state of Oregon to Canada’s Arctic territories has been blamed on a high-pressure ridge trapping warm air in the region. Globally, the decade to 2019 was the hottest recorded, and the five hottest years have all occurred within the last five years. “Although still under investigation, heat is believed to be a contributing factor in the majority of the deaths,” RCMP Corporal Michael Kalanj said in a statement.Ĭlimate change is causing record-setting temperatures to become more frequent. Other local municipalities have said they too have responded to many sudden death calls since June 28, but have yet to release tolls. Most of the dead in the Vancouver suburbs of Burnaby and Surrey over the past 24 hours were elderly or people with underlying health conditions, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said. “That’s true,” she says, “including all things that are magic like that.At least 69 people in Canada’s Vancouver area have died in a record-smashing heat wave engulfing the west of the country and the US Pacific Northwest, police said on June 29. Those things include an uncanny silver swan in a museum, or a finger-size songbird in Cox’s workshop. There are so many things we have to thank horology for.” “Thank you for sending the rocket to the moon, horology, because that mechanism was invented by Charkes Sauter who worked for the Bulova watchmaking company. We’re able to calculate longitude at sea because of a horologist who invented a timepiece that was seaworthy, the first chronometer,” she says. “Knowing something has sat silent for 50 years or even longer maybe, and to have the privilege of hearing it sing once again, just for you, it’s phenomenal.”Ĭox sees her work as a way to preserve our common cultural heritage, and to remember the fundamental mechanical knowledge embodied in a well-crafted watch, music box or automaton.Īnd why, in the age of the Apple Watch, does that stuff matter?Ĭox has an impassioned answer for that: History is worth knowing, and horology has contributed a lot. “When it starts working for the first time, that’s the best feeling that anyone could ever experience,” she says. Often she works on restoring pieces that haven’t functioned for decades, work that brings a special reward. So really I had no choice from there, I had to move forward with pursuing working with and being with these objects.” That to me was everything I could’ve ever hoped for. “That’s the only one anyone has ever seen. Floating on a water-like bed of contra-rotating twisted glass rods, the swan preens its feathers before bending its neck and catching a tiny fish in its bill, which it proceeds to eat. The sterling silver swan contains three clock mechanisms and a carillon of bells. No less a figure than Mark Twain wrote that the swan had “a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes.” It’s a famous example of clockwork simulating life. “People were basically trying to simulate what god can do, how to make life,” she says.Ĭox’s favorite object of all time is the Silver Swan, an 18th-century automaton housed in a British museum. That included early proto-robots, even precursors to artificial intelligence. Credit Brieana Ripley, KPLU Her workshop.
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