Howard Veregin | Updates

Spiritus Machinae

Howard Veregin — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 13:49:28 -0400

During the First World War, on a small university campus in the Midwest, the Army initiates a secret project to develop a machine to compute the precise trajectories of artillery shells. Three professors - Alan Fendick in agricultural engineering, Oona Houellebecq in mathematics and Leslie Ford in physics are recruited for the task. But then the machine does something unexpected and the project abruptly ends. Was the machine a failure? Or was the problem with the humans who built it?

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Dog 137 (Excerpt)

Howard Veregin — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 17:46:47 -0500

Dog 137 is set in 1917 when the US became involved in the First World War. The protagonist, named Einleff, is a homeless seventeen-year-old. He becomes a participant in chemical warfare experiments at a medical school, in which dogs are being asphyxiated with poison gases being developed for the war.

In this excerpt from the novel, Einleff has his first meeting with Professor Foss, who is leading the experiments. Einleff is accompanied by Eugenia Temple, Foss’s student, who is anxious to have Einleff assist her with the dogs.

Dog 137 is available at a pre-publication discount price here.

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The Soul of Jack Blackman

Howard Veregin — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 22:12:46 -0500

A short story set in 1918. Callista Bishop, a patient at a small, rural psychiatric institute, has suffered a breakdown. Her fiancé, Jack Blackman, a soldier, is receiving psychiatric treatment at a military hospital overseas. Something is seriously wrong with Jack. Callista wonders, "Can the soul become disoriented? Perhaps get lost completely?"

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Secrets of Science Hall, part one

Howard Veregin — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 21:21:10 -0500

A history of the building’s unsavory reputation and abandoned sixth floor.

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Secrets of Science Hall, part two

Howard Veregin — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 21:22:05 -0500

Syphilis, sleeping sickness, and the casualties of a hunt for a cure.

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Secrets of Science Hall, part three

Howard Veregin — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 21:23:33 -0500

Sleeping sickness research at the University of Wisconsin and its ties to colonialism.

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The Dogs of Science Hall

Howard Veregin — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 21:14:29 -0500

World War I-era poison gas testing at UW-Madison leaves a legacy at once extensive and obscure.

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Grand Canyon Relief Map Gets a Facelift

Howard Veregin — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 22:48:41 -0500

Science Hall's oldest relief model undergoes a painstaking conservation effort, healing the ravages of time.

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Selected Writings on Cartography

Howard Veregin — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 19:31:08 -0500

Howard Veregin, Wisconsin State Cartographer, University of Wisconsin–Madison

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Oddsconsin 80 – The Railroad Giveth and the Railroad Taketh Away

Howard Veregin — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Looks like this town is finally going to die away
Leaving nothing but broken promises
Where there once were small town dreams
- The Cowboy Junkies, The Last Spike (1992)

It’s the mid-1800s. A small settlement emerges in rural Wisconsin. New residents build homes. Businesses – a blacksmith shop, a grocery store, a hotel – are established to serve the needs of travelers and local farm families. A post office begins operations in the general store. The population reaches a few hundred. Then, the railroad comes. But the route bypasses the settlement, and the railroad depot is built ten or fifteen miles away. Within a few decades, the settlement has disappeared. The buildings have collapsed. The residents have moved away. The businesses have reestablished themselves close to the railroad depot, where there are more customers.

It’s hard to say how many times this scenario played out in Wisconsin. Probably hundreds. When you consider the entire country, the number must be in the tens of thousands. The story might seem like a worn-out cliché, but it’s hard to overemphasize the importance of the railroad in the life and death of small-town America in the nineteenth century. Before trains, goods and people moved by coach or wagon along dirt or plank roads, or perhaps on a canal. The railroad changed all that by vastly increasing transportation efficiency. If you were not close to a railroad line, it was hard to compete with those who were.

The village of Dover, in Iowa County, is in many ways a typical example of a settlement left behind by the railroad. Established in the late 1840s, Dover seemed poised for prominence as the largest settlement in the Town of Arena. But when the railroad bypassed the community in 1856 – running its tracks through nearby Mazomanie instead – Dover was doomed.

Dover was established as the main settlement of the British Temperance Emigration Society, founded in Liverpool, England, in 1842. The goal of the society was to facilitate migration from England to Wisconsin, where immigrants would become land-owning farmers. The society was a joint stock company. Prospective immigrants paid a shilling each week to purchase a share. The funds thus collected were used by agents of the society to purchase land in Wisconsin. Each year, a lottery was held to choose which shareholders would migrate. Those who made the journey received an eighty-acre farm, with five acres already in production, and a log home. Settlers paid an annual rent to the society, the ultimate goal being that the settlers would become sole owners of their eighty acres.

The British Temperance Emigration Society was a “friendly society” whose mission was to assist those who wished to move to Wisconsin but did not have the resources to do so. Historians agree that the word “temperance” was used in the name because of the importance of that virtue in English Victorian society, and to demonstrate the good character of the society’s members.

Some search-engine AI summaries claim that the society aimed to create an alcohol-free community in America, reflecting their temperance ideology. This is AI rubbish. The word temperance at the time had a much broader meaning than simply avoidance of alcohol. The constitution of the society – twenty-eight articles in total – does not ban the use of alcohol by society members. It does stipulate that if a member – while doing business with society agents – is intoxicated, disorderly or abusive, swears or offers to fight the agent, he or she will be fined five shillings. (Article 21) Members could also be expelled for felony, blasphemy or promulgating “infidel principles.” (Article 13) However, nowhere in the constitution is the idea of an “alcohol-free community in America” mentioned.

Agents of the society first arrived in the Town of Arena in 1843 and began to purchase land at the Government Land Office in Mineral Point. The first English settlers arrived in 1844 – almost 150 people in total. Most traveled from Liverpool to Boston, Massachusetts, then through Buffalo, New York, and the Great Lakes to Milwaukee. The last part of the trip was overland. More settlers arrived in the following years – a total of almost seven hundred. By 1850, emigration from England had essentially ceased, due to financial and legal troubles with the society.

Dover was the main settlement in the area in the early 1850s. It was only six blocks in size, but was a center for commerce, religious activities and social events like dances. The population of Dover rose from 91 people in 1847, to 119 in 1850, to 215 in 1855. Local businesses included taverns, hotels, general stores, wagon shops, blacksmith shops and a shoemaker.

The population of Dover never grew above 215. In 1856, the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad came through this part of the state, but it bypassed Dover and instead established a depot in Mazomanie, only a few miles away. By 1860, the population of Dover had dropped to 75. Most businesses had closed, a few of them moving to Mazomanie. By 1875, the settlement was essentially a ghost town.

There’s nothing left of Dover today. A plaque, erected in 1953 by the Wisconsin Historical Society, sits just west of the Dane-Iowa county boundary on Highway 14, near the original site of Dover. The three-acre plot where the plaque sits also contains a small cemetery. The plot is owned by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, but the surrounding parcels are private. There’s not much to see and it’s difficult to imagine Dover ever existing here.

Sources

William Kittle. (1900). History of the township and village of Mazomanie. Madison, WI: State Journal Print. Co.

Frank Wolf. (2010). Ghost Town Dover and the British Temperance Emigration Society. Mazomanie, WI: Frank Wolf.

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Oddsconsin 79 – The Brief Glory Days of Wisconsin’s Wood Plank Roads

Howard Veregin — Sat, 4 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

And ain't it just like you and me
To be down here on the ground
Going down an old plank road
To the bar in a one-horse town
- The Deslondes, Old Plank Road (2024)

Before asphalt and concrete, roads were made of wood planks. Or, at least, some of them were.

In Wisconsin, plank roads flourished in the mid-1800s. They were an alternative to dirt roads, which were slow and hazardous. A particular problem with dirt roads was mud, which bogged down wagons and sometimes made roads unusable. Plank roads allowed people and goods to get to their destinations more quickly and with less effort.

The development of plank roads was primarily motivated by commercial interests. The roads were financed by private companies. Shares were sold to investors – including local residents – to raise funds for construction. Some communities issued bonds to finance plank roads. The legislature, which authorized charters for plank roads, provided no funding.

Initially, plank roads were profitable. Toll booths collected tariffs from travelers based on trip length and the number of horses (or other animals) pulling the load. Tolls generated substantial dividends for investors, some of whom also speculated on land along the routes. Taverns and inns in one-horse towns sprung up to capitalize on road traffic.

Commercial traffic on plank roads included wagons carrying loads of wheat, barley, fur, lime, lead and other products. Moving along at five miles per hour, they were the direct ancestors of today’s semitrailers flying down I-90. Like modern trucks, the wagons of old caused wear and tear on the roads, especially when carrying heavy loads. Plank roads were costly to maintain. Planks cracked or floated away in spring floods. Trees and brush had to be regularly cleared. And the planks only lasted a few years before they started to rot.

Plank roads were complex engineering projects, not just rows of wooden planks laid on the bare ground. The road’s path was first “grubbed” (cleared of trees, stumps and brush), then graded to a width of twenty feet or more. Stringers – long thick wooden beams – were laid out parallel to the roadbed to serve as the foundation for the planks forming the road surface.

Plank roads required a staggering volume of wood. Assuming planks were one foot wide, over five thousand would have been required for every mile of road. For a fifty-mile stretch, that works out to a quarter of a million planks. And that doesn’t include wood for the stringers and other wooden components.

In the 1850s, plank roads began popping up in Wisconsin’s eastern counties. Over a hundred charters were issued by the legislature, but not all roads were finished. An 1854 Wisconsin map by Increase Lapham shows plank roads running from Green Bay southwest to the boundary of Outagamie County; from Howard along the west bank of the Fox River almost to Appleton; from Manitowoc west to the boundary of Calumet County; from Sheboygan all the way to Fond du Lac; from Milwaukee to Watertown; from Milwaukee to Mukwonago; from Milwaukee to Cedarburg; from Muskego to Waterford; from Rochester to Delavan; from Racine to Rochester and Burlington; from Kenosha to points east; and from Racine to points north.

The Milwaukee-Watertown Road, built between 1848 and 1853, was one of the most heavily used plank roads in the state. And at almost sixty miles in length, it was perhaps the longest. It followed the old Territorial Road from Milwaukee to Wauwatosa, Brookfield (near Goerke’s Corners), Pewaukee, Ixonia and Watertown.

The road purportedly cost over $100,000 to construct, or almost $2,000 per mile. This is equivalent to about $4.5 million today. Actually, that doesn’t sound too bad. The estimated cost of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation’s 67-mile I-39/90/94 expansion between Madison and the Dells? About $3.8 billion. But that’s probably not a fair comparison.

Wisconsin’s transportation network is a palimpsest inscribed with ancient Native American trails, the wagon roads built on top of them, the plank roads that replaced the wagon roads, and the highways and freeways that followed the routes of the old plank roads. The Milwaukee-Watertown Plank Road became State Highway 16. The plank road from Manitowoc to Green Bay became US Highway 10. Part of State Highway 57 follows the old plank road from Milwaukee to Cedarburg.

Not all plank roads were successful. The Janesville Plank Road from Milwaukee to Janesville, authorized in 1848, was to follow the Janesville Territorial Road, which itself followed an earlier Native American trail. Only twenty-four miles of the plank road were ever completed. What killed it is what killed the state’s other plank roads – the arrival of the railroad.

Railroad tracks quickly replaced planks as the most efficient way to transport people and goods. Trains demanded even more resources than plank roads – timber for railroad ties, iron for rails and locomotives, coal or wood for the boiler – but the economies of scale were undeniable. A team of horses could pull a wagon, but a locomotive could pull dozens of cars. By the 1860s, the state’s plank road system was in disrepair. Abandoned and decaying, roads were taken over by the state and turned into public highways. They would rise again in importance in another half-century, when the automobile arrived and the State Trunk Highway system was created.

Sources

Adam Azzalino, The Milwaukee Cedarburg Plank Road, Ozaukee County Historical Society, May 2016. https://ochs.co.ozaukee.wi.us/copy-of-a-bridge-to-history

Beth Dippel, History Uncovered: From Indian Trail through Plank Road - Hwy 23, Sheboygan Sun, Jan. 4, 2023. https://www.sheboygansun.com/history/history-uncovered-from-indian-trail-through-plank-road---hwy-23/article_dc21f35e-8c4d-11ed-8124-471d85af145e.html

Lane Kimble, WisDOT to Seek Federal Approval for Expanding 67 Miles of I-39/90/94, Wisconsin Transportation Builders Association, Aug 1, 2024. https://wtba.org/wisdot-to-seek-federal-approval-for-expanding-67-miles-of-i-39-90-94/

Manitowoc County Historical Society, Travel on the old Plank Road.https://www.manitowoccountyhistory.org/stories/plank-road

Dave McCormick, Early Toll Roads of Wisconsin, Northwest Quarterly, March 20, 2023. https://northwestchicagoland.northwestquarterly.com/2023/03/20/early-toll-roads-of-wisconsin/

Watertown Historical Society, Milwaukee-Watertown Plank Road. https://www.watertownhistory.org/articles/watertownplankroad.html

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Oddsconsin 78 – The Road through Wood National Cemetery

Howard Veregin — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

He would perceive, Mr. Bonds, that time is like a freeway with an infinite number of lanes – all leading from the past into the future. But not into the same future. A driver in Lane A may crash, while a driver in Lane B survives. It follows that a driver, by changing lanes, can change his future.
- Quantic, Infinite Regression (2001)

You’ve probably driven right by Wood National Cemetery in Milwaukee. It’s more likely, however, that you drove right through it, perhaps not fully aware of its existence.

Wood National Cemetery is just southwest of American Family Field, home of the Milwaukee Brewers. The cemetery is part of the vast Clement J. Zablocki VA Medical Center, which also includes the Milwaukee Soldiers Home campus. The Soldiers Home, built in 1867, served as a center for disabled Civil War veterans. The first cemetery here opened in 1871. In 1937, it was named Wood Cemetery after General George Wood. In 1973 it became a national cemetery, one of only two in Wisconsin. [1]

Wood National Cemetery is sprawling and complex. It contains over thirty thousand white granite headstones laid out in parallel lines. Veterans of the War of 1812 are buried here, as well as thousands of Civil War veterans, including members of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry and US “Colored Troops.” [2] The 54th was the first African-American regiment of the Civil War, organized by Massachusetts’ abolitionist governor John A. Andrew in 1863. The regiment included two of Frederick Douglass’s sons. [3]

The US Colored Troops were African American units – both recruited and volunteer – organized during the Civil War. Company F of the 29th Infantry was a Wisconsin unit composed primarily of African Americans from Missouri, Illinois and Wisconsin who took the place of white Wisconsin residents who had been drafted. [4] During the Civil War, draft buyouts – which allowed the wealthy to avoid the draft – could be achieved by paying a commutation fee or finding a willing substitute.

Wood National Cemetery is surrounded by even more cemeteries. The area is a huge necropolis. There’s Chapel Hill Cemetery, Calvary Catholic Cemetery (which contains the graves of over three hundred Civil War veterans), and three Jewish Cemeteries – Anshai Lebowitz, Beth Hamedrosh Hagodel and Spring Hill – established over a century ago. [5]

Most of Wood National Cemetery lies south of Interstate-94, but a five-acre portion lies to the north of the freeway. Over 175,000 vehicles pass through the cemetery on I-94 every day. [6] The vibrations are so intense that the Wisconsin Department of Transportation is currently installing metal plates to inhibit cemetery erosion as part of a freeway expansion project. [7]

I-94 was built in the early 1960s. Conventional wisdom is that the freeway forced the relocation of many graves. However, this appears to be an urban legend. A road has separated the two parts of the cemetery for over a century. The road first appears on US Geological Survey topographic maps from 1901. [8] Construction of I-94 did require filling in one of the ponds that were part of the cemetery’s original landscape design. [2] Carriage paths wound around the ponds, which visitors used for boating and skating. [9]

I-94, however, is not a quaint carriage path or rural road. Rest in Peace? The northern part of the cemetery is a noisy place, with only a chain link fence separating it from freeway traffic. It’s also a lonely place. It’s hard to get to – accessible only by a narrow bridge over I-94 – so there are few visitors. Some of the stones here are from the Civil War, while others are more recent. Except for one area where the stones are recessed into the ground, the overall design is the same – row after row of identical white markers.

The northern part of the cemetery is itself bisected by an electrical transmission corridor, walled off by chain link fences on either side. This was once the route of the Milwaukee Street Railway Company’s electric streetcar, which began operations in 1892. [9] The steel catenary towers – which held the wires conducting electricity to the streetcars – are still standing today.

Transportation corridors – including carriage paths, streetcar tracks, highways – have long been a part of Wood National Cemetery. The problem is their tendency to grow and expand. It’s like wood rot. Once the decay starts, it spreads. The carriage path turns into a road. The road turns into a freeway. The freeway gets wider. Our built environment reflects our values – mobility, convenience, speed. Who has time to reflect on a collection of old Civil War graves when the Brewers game is about to start?

Which begs the question – what sort of future do we want? A highway with an infinite number of lanes? Does the integrity of the cemetery really stand a chance against the nation’s growing stockpile of almost three hundred million registered vehicles?

We don’t talk much about sacred spaces in our culture, but we used to. In the words of the “Lady Managers” of the Wisconsin Soldiers’ Home Association in 1867, “This home [The Milwaukee Soldiers Home] is … a serious and permanent assumption of a sacred duty which we owe the defenders of our common country.” [9] Maybe that’s the kind of talk we need to hear more of today, and not just for veterans’ cemeteries, but for all the final resting spaces of our nation’s citizens.

Sources

[1] Department of Veterans Affairs, National Cemetery Administration, Wood National Cemetery. https://www.cem.va.gov/cems/nchp/wood.asp

[2] National Register of Historic Places, National Soldiers Home Historic District. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/363e537c-39bc-4891-8c2f-6c9b26c13568

[3] Massachusetts National Guard, 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment. https://massnationalguard.org/54th-massachusetts-volunteer-regiment/

[4] Wisconsin Historical Society, Co. F of the 29th Infantry, U.S. Colored Troops History. https://legacy.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS2068

[5] Maria Peralta-Arellano, What's the story behind the cluster of cemeteries next to I-94? WUWM89.7, March 6, 2026. https://www.wuwm.com/story-behind-cluster-cemeteries-next-to-i-94-milwaukee

[6] Ellie Nakamoto-White, Drivers react to I-94 construction, WisDOT officials explain why project will take eight years. CBS58 News Milwaukee, Nov 14, 2025. https://www.cbs58.com/news/drivers-react-to-i-94-construction-wisdot-officials-explain-why-project-will-take-eight-years

[7] Duaa Israr, Steel walls to protect Wood National Cemetery as part of I-94 expansion project. CBS58 News Milwaukee, June 8, 2026. https://www.cbs58.com/news/steel-walls-to-protect-wood-national-cemetery-as-part-of-i-94-expansion-project

[8] US Geological Survey, topoView. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview

[9] Patricia A. Lynch, Milwaukee’s Soldiers Home. Arcadia Publishing, Charleston SC, 2013.

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Oddsconsin 77 – On the Road Again

Howard Veregin — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the road again
Just can’t wait to get on the road again
- Willie Nelson

After spending the last six weeks in Science Hall at UW-Madison, it’s time for Oddsconsin to get back on the road. Since this blog started in January 2025, we’ve visited over fifty unique sites in about twenty-five counties. If you started at Oddsconsin 1 (Wisconsin Memorial Hospital) and drove to every other site in a continuous loop, you would have travelled about 8,360 miles. That’s equivalent to one-third of the way around the Equator. And we’re just getting started!

Those of you who drive long distances may have noticed how your mind can sometimes start to wander. You may find yourself pondering important questions: How long until the next Kwik Trip? How many revolutions are my tires making on this trip? How much time will I save if I speed up by ten miles per hour?

That last question has perplexed me for some time. Obviously, if you speed up ten miles per hour (10 mph) over your current speed, you will travel ten more miles for every hour of travel. But this isn’t really telling you how much time you’ll save, because a) miles per hour is a rate of travel not a measure of time and b) speeding up means that the travel time to your destination will be reduced, so while you may travel ten more miles in an hour, you will not be travelling for as many hours.

Let’s imagine you’re driving a leisurely 50 mph in the slow lane in your mom’s Subaru. How much time will you save if you increase your speed to 60 mph? What about 70 or 80?

It turns out there some basic mathematical rules at work here.

(a) Obviously, the faster you drive, the more time you’ll save (assuming you don’t have an accident or get pulled over for speeding).

(b) Equally obvious is that the longer your trip, the more time you will save if you drive at a higher speed.

(c) But surprisingly (perhaps) the time savings you realize for each increment in driving speed is greater at low speeds than at high speeds. To put it differently, increasing your speed from 50 to 60 mph has a bigger payoff than increasing your speed from 60 to 70 mph. This might sound like it contradicts point (a) above, but it doesn’t. Driving 70 mph will get you to your destination more quickly than 60 or 50, it’s just that the advantage of adding another 10 mph to your speed diminishes the faster you drive. Why? Because the faster you go, the less time you spend getting to your destination, so adding to your speed has less of an impact.

There’s a fairly easy calculation you can do to determine how much time you will save:

minutes saved = (60/mphl – 60/mphh) x miles

where mphl = your initial “low” speed in miles per hour, mphh is your planned “high” speed in miles per hour, and miles is the number of miles to your destination. The values 60/mphl and 60/mphh are measuring the number of minutes it takes to travel a mile (i.e., minutes per mile).

For example, on a 30-mile trip, driving 60 mph rather than 50 mph will save you 6.0 minutes. But adding another 10 mph to get to 70 mph will only save you an additional 4.29 minutes. Cranking it up to 80 mph will only net you an additional 3.21 minutes. The incremental time savings continue to taper off the faster you go.

The table below shows the time savings for speeds between 20 and 120 mph. Results are tabulated for a standard 100-mile trip. The Savings (minutes) column can be scaled by the actual length of your trip to get the actual savings in time. For example, for a 200-mile trip, double the values in the Savings (minutes) column.

The table is based on speed increments of 10 mph. If you increase your speed from, say, 50 mph to 70 mph, be sure to add the time savings for 50-60 mph and for 60-70 mph.

I’m actually trying (perhaps unsuccessfully!) to advocate for slower driving speeds. Obviously, driving time is a factor if you are making the 400-mile trip between Racine and Superior, when even a modest increase from 60 mph to 65 mph will save you over 30 minutes. But what about short trips? My commute to work is about 13 miles. Driving 70 mph rather than 60 mph would save me less than 2 minutes.

Our culture’s obsession with driving time is evident in everything from Google Maps (which defaults to the fastest route) to the behavior of the many drivers who fly past those of us in the slow lane, regardless of weather conditions, traffic levels or posted speed limits. Slowing down occasionally wouldn’t hurt, especially if you’re only going to gain a minute or two on your trip.

I’m not just a slow driver, but also a backroads driver. I enjoy driving the most when there are no other vehicles in sight. I find the untraveled backroads the most interesting. That's where the really unique sites hide out. I don’t think anyone is going to find the soul of Wisconsin – assuming it exists – on the Interstate…

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Oddsconsin 76 – The Dogs of Science Hall (Part 6. The Dog Rooms Today)

Howard Veregin — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the final part of The Dogs of Science Hall, an article originally published in Madison’s Tone Magazine. Read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here and part 5 here.

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What is the truth, and where did it go?
- Bob Dylan, Murder Most Foul

We can’t be sure exactly what went on in Science Hall’s fourth floor dog rooms back in the First World War. That was over one hundred years ago, and the rooms – like the rest of the building – have been modified extensively over the years. The eyewitnesses – people like Meek, Eyster and Loevenhart – are no longer with us. History evaporates like steam if we don’t make an effort to preserve it.

However, there certainly is a lot of evidence pointing to the conclusion that chemical warfare experiments were conducted here. The rooms were self-contained and isolated from the rest of the building, permitting work to be carried out in secrecy. The fact that there are no windows on the upper level of the rooms suggests a desire for privacy, while the soundproof construction would have inhibited noises such as barking – one of the symptoms of gassing – from annoying or alerting other tenants of the building. The cadaver winch on the north wing would also have been convenient to move dogs to the basement for X-rays or to be disposed of after death.

It also seems plausible that the large roof vents in the dog rooms (seen on floorplans and period photographs) were designed to vent gas through the flue in Underhill’s dog-gassing apparatus. Science Hall has only one group of windows on the fourth floor in the rear of the building, which means there was little chance of vented gas wafting into other parts of the building.

There are other clues too: the stairs to the upper level with their protective wire mesh balustrade; the various chambers on the upper level, which could have been used to prepare dogs for experiments and observe them after gassing; the sink and drain, which would have been useful for disposing of waste.

And we do know – from floorplans and eyewitnesses – that there were dog kennels in these rooms. Would it not make sense to kennel the dogs close to the location of the experiments? It’s hard to imagine dogs being led through the corridors of Science Hall from one room to the next.

Would the scientists conducting the experiments have been allowed to store and release poison gas in Science Hall at this time? If so, did other building tenants know this was going on? Our ancestors seem to have had a more accepting attitude toward such dangers. At this time poison gases were sometimes literally delivered to labs by mail. Occasionally they arrived at their destination in damaged or leaking condition. [1]

There are also many documented accidents at American University – the main chemical warfare research hub – including accidental gas releases, explosions and exposures to deadly chemicals leading to death. [2] And there were probably many other dangerous chemicals being used in Science Hall at the time, including ether, formaldehyde and gaseous fuels. One floor below the dog rooms was Professor Bunting’s bacteriology lab. In those days Science Hall was a dangerous place.

But of course the evidence is still circumstantial. We would need eyewitness accounts or photographic evidence to prove unequivocally that these activities actually occurred here. Given the confidentiality requirements the Army imposed on scientists during the war [3] it is possible that such confirmation will never be found.

After the dogs were moved out when the Medical School left Science Hall, the dog rooms were converted to more conventional uses. The 1929 renovation plan for Science Hall indicates they were to receive “new tile and furring, and plastering on walls and ceiling” along with a new cement floor. The plan also shows that the partitions on both levels were to be removed.

Today the rooms seem unusual but innocuous. The upper level is a curiosity, suitable for storing old books and maps. It has lost its skylight and ventilators. With its low ceiling and lack of windows it feels claustrophobic, but not ominous. The sink and drain on the lower level have been removed, patched by a piece of wood. The original stairs with their metal netting balusters are still in existence, and the massive soundproof doors – which must be three inches thick – still hang on oversized hinges. But these are the exceptions and for the most part the rooms feel quite ordinary. It takes some effort to imagine how they would have looked at the end of the First World War, with the dogs in their kennels and strange equipment lying about.

History is so easily forgotten, especially when the spaces where history happened are covered in layers of plaster and paint. It’s hard to see the history that unfolds from everyday events in everyday spaces. Historical significance is often only appreciated in retrospect. In the meantime, rooms are clumsily altered for new uses, walls are erected or removed, doorways and windows are closed off, and the historic fabric is torn to pieces. Not only is history unknowable, it is also irreversible.

Like other parts of Science Hall, the dog rooms of the fourth floor are largely mute about their history. The building’s interior has been so thoroughly transformed over the decades that it is almost impossible to mentally reconstruct the original floor plan let alone picture what it was like to work there. Our Science Hall is not the same Science Hall that Meeks and Eyster knew, and we have limited opportunities to interact with the building the way they did, not to mention the thousands of other people who have worked or studied in the building over its history.

All that we really have to help us build connections to the building’s historic spaces and the people who used them are a few fragments from the historic record and our own imaginations. We may never know how many dogs were involved in the Science Hall experiments, or if their deaths reduced suffering in any meaningful way for factory workers or soldiers.

Science Hall is about to undergo a major renovation. Let’s hope the dog rooms are not modified further in a way that will make their connection to this unique historical event even harder to understand.

Sources

[1] Daniel P. Jones, The Role of Chemists in Research on War Gases in The United States During World War I. (PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1969), p. 109.

[2] Theo Emery, Hellfire Boys. (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017), p. 294.

[3] Emery, Hellfire Boys, pp. 172, 298.

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Oddsconsin 75 – The Dogs of Science Hall (Part 5. The Wisconsin Dog Experiments)

Howard Veregin — Fri, 5 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the fifth part of The Dogs of Science Hall, an article originally published in Madison’s Tone Magazine in 2022. Read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here and part 4 here.

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Why participate in a system that is killing itself? It seems counter-productive. Counter-evolutionary, if you will. Unless there is a hand guiding evolution, and it wants us to be eliminated.
- Pyotr Engel, Dog 137

Some of the toxic gas experiments conducted on dogs at the University of Wisconsin Medical School are documented in a study by Drs. Walter Meek and John Eyster, published in 1920 in the American Journal of Physiology. [1] The study appears in modified form in a compendium on the medical aspects of gas warfare edited by Wilder Bancroft in 1926. [2] The Meek/Eyster study focused on phosgene, a lung irritant that causes fluid to build up in the lung’s alveoli (air sacs). Used as a chemical weapon in World War I, phosgene killed tens of thousands of soldiers.

Meek and Eyster tested exposure to the gas using dogs as test subjects. Their study pays particular attention to the physiological reactions associated with fatal phosgene poisoning, including

“arterial blood pressure, venous blood pressure, pulse rate, hemoglobin determinations, blood volume, red blood cell counts, histological examination of the lungs, x-ray studies of heart and lungs, alkaline reserve, respiratory rate and volume of respiratory ventilation.” [3]

Dogs were used as subjects throughout their experiments. The animals were gassed with phosgene for thirty minutes at concentrations high enough to cause death within sixteen to twenty-four hours. The method of gassing was similar to that described by Frank Underhill at Yale, in his1920 book, The Lethal War Gases. The dogs were placed

“in a one-hundred-liter air-tight glass box through which air was drawn at the rate of one hundred liters per minute. The phosgene cylinder was connected to the air inlet tube, the gas outflow being regulated by a needle valve and the rate roughly determined by a flowmeter.” [3]

One hundred liters is approximately 3.5 cubic feet – a cube with sides just a little over 1.5 feet long – which suggests the dogs were not very large. All dogs were tied to operating boards by their limbs to facilitate rapid and frequent observations. According to the authors, the animals “lay quietly and comfortably until the usual asphyxia stimulations occurred shortly before death.” [3]

Like their counterparts at other universities, Wisconsin gas researchers probed the dogs in various ways following gassing. W. S. Miller of the Anatomy Department conducted histological analyses (tissue examinations under a microscope) of lung tissue, using special methods of his own development. [4] X-rays of the thorax were made at regular intervals after gassing to measure changes in the lungs and heart. [5] At the time, the X-ray room in Science Hall was in the basement, suggesting the dogs were lowered there after gassing. And, in addition to phosgene, a variety of other toxic gases were also examined.

To obtain consistent results, researchers followed a standard “experimental method of gassing” consisting of passing a mixture of gas and air through an air-tight chamber containing the dog for a definite period at a determined rate. [6] Dogs were always gassed singly rather than in groups. [7] Dogs of both sexes and various breeds, ages and states of health were selected. [7]

Depending on the gas administered, symptoms could include restlessness, barking, urination, defecation, blinking, dizziness, sneezing, coughing, nasal secretion, salivation, retching, vomiting, dyspnea, cyanosis and convulsions. [8] Underhill’s book contains a drawing of the animal gas chamber, reproduced in the image at the top of this post. [9] Yandell Henderson (Yale) designed the original apparatus, but Underhill and others improved upon it. [10]

Researchers found that dogs generally died from three to twelve hours after gassing, although this depended on the concentration of gas administered. Dogs gassed at low concentrations often lived for weeks or recovered completely. [11] However, dogs that recovered were not necessarily safe, as some were gassed a second time to determine whether they were more susceptible due to repeated exposure. [12]

Other dogs who survived were killed (e.g., by strychnine injection) to enable researchers to take and examine tissue samples. [13] Some dogs were starved before being gassed to obtain a picture of metabolic changes expressed in urine samples or were “water starved” to explore toxicity rates at different levels of hydration. [14]

Meek and Eyster, like Underhill, concluded that death by phosgene poisoning was attributable to some combination of pulmonary edema (fluid in the lungs) and reduced oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood, with the latter probably being a more important factor. [15][16] In an effort to identify remedies, the Wisconsin researchers were able to keep some gassed dogs alive up to seventy-two hours by placing them in oxygen-rich chambers. Unfortunately, the effects were not restorative, and if released from the chambers the dogs typically fell into “asphyxia convulsion which quickly terminated in death.” [17] Administration of oxygen was just a palliative.

Several antidotes were also tested, including venesection (blood-letting), infusion (injection of a salt solution or other chemicals, including morphine), and administration of water and oxygen. Typical of the results is the recommended treatment for poisoning by chlorine (another poison gas used in the war): Venesection of one percent of body weight in blood, intravenous infusion of warm sterile isotonic solution, and administration of sodium bicarbonate orally, to be carried out one to two hours after gas exposure. [18]

Meek and Eyster continued using dogs for research purposes at least into the 1920s, although these research efforts did not involve toxic gases. The pair published several articles on research involving dogs while still working in Science Hall. [19] According to Harland W. Mossman, Professor of Anatomy in Science Hall from 1924 to 1957, at least one of the “dog rooms” on the fourth floor still held dogs for the Physiology Department in 1924. [20] He recalled that the room needed a thorough cleaning after Physiology moved to the university’s Service Memorial Institutes in 1928. [20] William B. Youmans, a student of Meek’s in the 1930s, was responsible for dogs in the Service Memorial Institutes. [21] Youmans prepared them for experiments, which included eliciting the assistance of the “lab handyman” to administer an anesthetic.

After Physiology moved out of Science Hall, toxic gas research there ceased, and the scientists who were involved moved on to other areas of study, including sleeping sickness and neurosyphilis. But that story is for a future Oddsconsin post.

Next week: The "dog rooms" today.

Sources

[1] Walter J. Meek and John A. E. Eyster, "Experiments on the Pathological Physiology of Acute Phosgene Poisoning," American Journal of Physiology, Vol. 51, No. 2 (1920), pp. 303-320.

[2] Wilder D. Bancroft et al., The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War. Volume XIV: Medical Aspects of Gas Warfare. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1926), pp. 356-368.

[3] Meek and Eyster, “Experiments,” pp. 303-04.

[4] Meek and Eyster, “Experiments,” p. 313.

[5] Meek and Eyster, “Experiments,” p. 314.

[6] Bancroft et al., Medical Department, p. 307.

[7] Bancroft et al., Medical Department, p. 309.

[8] Bancroft et al., Medical Department, pp. 307-08.

[9] Frank P. Underhill, The Lethal War Gases: Physiology and Experimental Treatment. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920), p. 183.

[10] Vannoy H. Manning, War Gas Investigations: Advance Chapter from Bulletin 178, War Work of the Bureau of Mines. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919).

[11] Underhill, Lethal War Gases, p. 4.

[12] Bancroft et al., Medical Department, p. 315.

[13] Bancroft et al., Medical Department, p. 334.

[14] Underhill, Lethal War Gases, pp. 2, 157.

[15] Underhill, Lethal War Gases, p. 137

[16] Meek and Eyster, “Experiments,” p. 320.

[17] Meek and Eyster, “Experiments,” p. 319.

[18] Underhill, Lethal War Gases, p. 148.

[19] For example: Walter J. Meek and John A. E. Eyster, “Reactions to Hemorrhage,” American Journal of Physiology, Vol. 56, No. 1 (1921), pp. 1-15; Walter J. Meek and John A. E. Eyster, “The Effect of Plethora and Variations in Venous Pressure on Diastolic Size and Output of the Heart,” American Journal of Physiology, Vol. 61, No. 1 (1922), pp. 186-202.

[20] Clarence W. Olmstead, Science Hall: The First Century. (Madison: Department of Geography, UW-Madison, 1987), p. 24.

[21] “Oral History Interview: William B. Youmans,” Minds@UW, University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/67490

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Oddsconsin 74 - The Dogs of Science Hall (Part 4. The Dog Experiments)

Howard Veregin — Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the fourth part of The Dogs of Science Hall, an article originally published in Madison’s Tone Magazine in 2022. Read part 1 here, part 2 here and part 3 here.

But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his Masters own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour'd falls, unnotic'd all his worth,
Deny'd in heaven the Soul he held on earth.
- Epitaph to a Dog, Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron), 1809

Toxic gas research at the University of Wisconsin during World war I involved at least fifteen members of the faculty studying gas manufacturing, physiological effects, remedies and gas masks. [1] There were in addition thirty-three enlisted personnel, nineteen civilian assistants and many graduate students. [2][3] Some faculty, such as Professor of Chemistry J. H. Mathews, served with the British Army abroad studying German war gases. [4] On campus, factory safety research was primarily conducted in the Medical School under the direction of Dr. Harold C. Bradley, Professor of Physiological Chemistry. [5] In late 1917, Bradley began research on chronic gas poisoning aided by Dr. John A. E. Eyster and Dr. Walter J. Meek – both Professors of Physiology – and Dr. Arthur S. Loevenhart, Professor of Pharmacology-Toxicology. The research program resulted in a large experimental laboratory at Wisconsin. [5]

Bradley, Eyster, Meek and Loevenhart came from the best schools in the country. Bradley graduated from Yale in 1906. [6] Eyster received his MD from Johns Hopkins in 1905 and was appointed Professor of Physiology at Wisconsin in 1911. Meek obtained his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1909 and joined Wisconsin that same year. Loevenhart came to Madison from Johns Hopkins and became the first chair of Wisconsin’s Department of Pharmacology-Toxicology in 1908. [7] Eyster, Meek and Loevenhart all held wartime commissions in the Army Medical Corps. [8][9] At the time, there was no easy way for the military to channel research funds to universities, but one method that did work was to grant commissions to faculty members. [10]

Eyster and Meek were responsible for much of the work carried out in the university’s chemical warfare unit from 1917 to 1919, including investigations into the biological effects of phosgene, mustard gas and lewisite, the latter an American contribution to the chemical arsenal. Another of Meek’s duties was procurement of dogs for research purposes. [11] According to his biographer, this required him to appear regularly before the state legislature to justify the use of animals against “the criticisms and actions of the antivivisectionists.” [12]

Loevenhart took on many tasks for the war effort, including testing of new offensive compounds, care and breeding of animals, and supervision of the toxicological aspects of large-scale field tests. [13] His work included experiments on dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, mice, rats, monkeys and even people. [14]

Eyster, Meeks and Loevenhart all worked in Science Hall. Eyster’s office and private lab were on the first floor. Through his lab Eyster had access to a physiology lab located next to a large lecture hall (still in use today). Loevenhart had an office and private lab in the north wing of the first floor, adjacent to an even larger physiology lab. Meek had an office on the first floor and a private lab in the basement.

As noted in an earlier post, the use of dogs in chemical warfare research originated at Yale under Yandell Henderson. Another Yale faculty member involved in this research was Frank Underhill, Professor of Experimental Medicine. Underhill received an Army commission in 1918 and became commanding officer of the Yale Station of the Chemical Warfare Service. [15] By the end of the war, Underhill had thirty-eight staff members, both civilian and military, including seven staff responsible for “gassing of animals.” [16] Underhill focused on “therapeutic work” involving the examination of gassed animals and the effects and treatment of gas poisoning. [17]

At over three hundred pages, Underhill’s 1920 book, The Lethal War Gases, describes the Yale gas experiments in excruciating detail. [18] The 1926 compendium by Bancroft and others titled, Medical Aspects of Gas Warfare, at almost nine hundred pages, offers even more details on the experiments done at universities across the country. [19] It is difficult to say how many dogs (and other animals) were killed, but given the statistics shown in tables and appendixes, the number must have been in the thousands.

The research program was exhaustive. Scientists at Yale, American, Wisconsin and elsewhere studied most of the major war gasses, focusing the most attention on chlorine, phosgene, chloropicrin and mustard gas. They examined the effects of these gases on seemingly every body part: heart atria, lung tissue, bronchial tubes, capillaries and blood vessels, kidneys, intestines, and even the skin and eyes. They examined the effects on respiration, pulse, body temperature, metabolism, blood concentration, blood oxygen levels and hemoglobin. They looked for signs of burns, pneumonia, bronchiolitis (lung infection), emphysema, pulmonary edema (fluid in the lungs), pleurisy (lung inflammation), leukocytosis (high white blood cell count), heart dilation, acidosis (acidic blood) and decline in kidney function.

Tests on humans were initially improvised but later became more systematic. One experiment in 1917 involved Henderson (at Yale) entering a gas chamber to test the effectiveness of a new gas mask on chlorine. He remained in the chamber for fifteen minutes. The gas bleached his socks and hair, and dissolved his shirt, but he survived. [20] Another researcher stayed with a dog in a gas chamber filled with hydrocyanic acid “until the dog had been killed,” proving that humans are less sensitive to this gas than dogs. [21] A “man-test section” was eventually established at American University, where various experiments were performed. Subjects were exposed to tear gases to determine their lachrymatory (tear-producing) effects. They were sprayed with mustard gas to determine the lowest level that would incapacitate the subject. (This led in some cases to temporary blindness). They were daubed with blistering agents that caused pustules to form. [22] It seems every possible contingency was explored.

Sources

[1] Charles R. van Hise, “The War Work of the University of Wisconsin,” The American Review of Reviews, Vol. LVIII, pp. 69.

[2] Daniel P. Jones, The Role of Chemists in Research on War Gases in The United States During World War I. (PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1969), p. 114.

[3] Jones, Role of Chemists, p. 125.

[4] B. E. Powell, “The Long Arm of Learning: How the ‘Land-Grant Colleges’ are Backing Uncle Sam,” The American Review of Reviews, Vol. LVIII, p. 65.

[5] Vannoy H. Manning, War Gas Investigations: Advance Chapter from Bulletin 178, War Work of the Bureau of Mines. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 23.

[6] “Hoofers Founder Dr. Bradley, 97, Dies,” Wisconsin State Journal, 6 Jan 1976, p. 1; “Harold Bradley Obituary,” Wisconsin State Journal, 8 Jan 1976, p. 10.

[7] Merle Curti and Vernon Carstensen, The University of Wisconsin: A History, 1848-1925. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949).

[8] “Memorial Resolutions of the Faculty of the University of Wisconsin,” University of Wisconsin. kb.wisconsin.edu/images/group222/53539/MemorialResolutionsFacDocs1450-16521959-12to1964-05.pdf

[9] Jones, Role of Chemists, p. 114.

[10] Jones, Role of Chemists, pp. 100-101.

[11] Chandler Mcc. Brooks, Walter Joseph Meeks, 1878-1963. (Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1983).

[12] Brooks, Meeks, p. 259.

[13] George A. Burrell, “Contributions from the Chemical Warfare Service, USA: The Research Division.” Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, Vol. 11 (1919), p. 98.

[14] Burrell, “Contributions,” p. 98.

[15] Frank P. Underhill, The Lethal War Gases: Physiology and Experimental Treatment. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920), p. xi.

[16] Underhill, Lethal War Gases, pp. ix-x.

[17] Manning, War Gas, p. 25.

[18] Underhill, Lethal War Gases.

[19] Wilder D. Bancroft et al., The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War. Volume XIV: Medical Aspects of Gas Warfare. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1926).

[20] Jones, Role of Chemists, p. 96; Theo Emery, Hellfire Boys. (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017), pp. 80-81.

[21] Bancroft et al., Medical Department, p. 305.

[22] Burrell, “Contributions”; Bancroft et al., Medical Department; Emery, Hellfire.

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Oddsconsin 73 - The Dogs of Science Hall (Part 3. University War Work)

Howard Veregin — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the third part of The Dogs of Science Hall, an article originally published in Madison’s Tone Magazine in 2022. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

The gas defense work [at the University of Wisconsin] involves investigations of gas warfare abroad, the methods of manufacture of gases in quantity to be used in attack, the physiological effects of the gases, and the remedies for them, and gas mask protection. Fifteen members of the faculty are devoting themselves to different aspects of these problems. Important results have been obtained.
- Charles R. van Hise (President of the University of Wisconsin), “War Work of the University of Wisconsin,” The American Review of Reviews, Vol. LVIII, July 1918.

The research program of the Bureau of Mines – the civilian agency initially responsible for coordinating research on toxic gases during the war – involved several of the Bureau’s engineers and chemists as well as university partners. Dr. Yandell Henderson, Professor of Physiology at Yale University, was put in charge of medical research. [1] This included:

“physiological investigations of gas masks, pharmacological gassing experiments on men and on animals, pathological gross and microscopic study of gassed animals, and pathological chemistry of disorders of gassed animals.” [2]

Henderson set up a makeshift lab under the bleachers on the baseball field at Yale to begin gas experiments on animals. [3] Apparently the demand for subjects was so great that even the dog pounds in New Haven could not keep up, and Yale made requests for stray animals to the mayors of cities up and down the east coast. [4] Eventually Henderson became Director of the Toxicology, Therapeutic, Pathological and Physiological divisions at Yale, which accounted for over forty military personnel and almost twenty civilian employees. [5] Like other universities, Yale was eager to contribute to the war effort by supplying lab space and releasing faculty from their teaching duties. [6]

With scientists and lab space in short supply, the Subcommittee on Noxious Gases – formed in 1917 under the National Research Council’s Military Committee – was granted authority to accept offers of assistance from scientists in the private sector and universities. Vannoy Manning, Director of the Bureau of Mines, probed for interest by conducting a nation-wide census of chemists that eventually received over 22,000 responses. [7] The census was conducted with the assistance of the American Chemical Society, a strong advocate for the involvement of chemists in the war effort and one of the groups that successfully lobbied the government to continue chemical warfare research after the war ended. [8][9][10]

This level of cooperation was possible because US and European chemical industries were highly industrialized and marked by a well-developed academic/industrial network. The chemical dye industry in particular was highly evolved, although in the US dominated (ironically) by German companies. [11] The German chemical industry was already deeply enmeshed in military research. Fritz Haber, who received a Nobel Prize in 1918 for his work on chemical fertilizers, is often called “The Father of Chemical Warfare” thanks to his work on chlorine and other poison gases.

In the US, an important partner for the Bureau of Mines was American University in Washington, DC, which offered its buildings and grounds for free to the Army for the duration of the war. [12] American quickly became the main center of chemical warfare research in the United States. [13] By late 1917, the research facilities constructed at American included kennels to hold over seven hundred dogs. Experimental equipment, including animals, were transferred to American from other university labs, including Henderson’s lab at Yale. [14]

By September 1917, students and professors at the University of Wisconsin had begun researching safety measures for workers at gas-production facilities. [15] The University’s role in this area became more formalized in February 1918, when the Factory Protection Section of the Gas Defense Service was created to study the chronic effects of exposure to war gases and test protective devices and therapeutic treatments. [16]

The Gas Defense Service was created by the US Army in that year to provide military oversight of chemical warfare research and training. As the functions of the Gas Defense Service expanded, the Army created a new Chemical Warfare Service in the summer of 1918. [17] Under a directive from President Woodrow Wilson, the new Service absorbed the civilian research organization of the Bureau of Mines and leading researchers were given Army commissions [18]. At this time there were almost seventeen hundred employees conducting chemical warfare research for the Bureau of Mines, including military and civilian personnel. [19] According to a report by the American Chemical Society, the workforce included not just chemists and other scientists but also a “clerical force, electricians, glass blowers, engineers, mechanics, photographers and laborers.” [20]

The University of Wisconsin continued to play a central role in factory protection research including chronic symptomology, pathology, X-Ray, therapy and protective devices, with twenty-one military personnel on duty. [21]

But toxic gas was only one avenue of research conducted at the University of Wisconsin to support the war effort. In 1918 University of Wisconsin President Charles van Hise observed that 187 members of the faculty were on leave conducting war work, while an even greater number were performing this work while also continuing their other responsibilities. [22] The university was eager to support the war effort, giving leaves of absence to faculty who requested them.

As van Hise noted, war research at Wisconsin touched on many fields, including “psychology, economics, history, industry, medicine, engineering, foods, gas, aerial work, and the submarine.” [22] The submarine work is well-known: Max Mason, Professor of Physics, and seven of his colleagues developed a submarine detector they tested in the waters of nearby Lake Mendota. [23] At the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison (technically a US Department of Agriculture facility), researchers developed and tested new gas masks and wood products for use in war products. [24] From Wisconsin also came the idea of establishing “piggeries” at military camps to convert garbage into food. [25]

Next week, we’ll explore the toxic gas experiments conducted by the University of Wisconsin’s Medical School.

Sources

[1] Daniel P. Jones, The Role of Chemists in Research on War Gases in The United States During World War I. (PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1969), p. 95.

[2] Vannoy H. Manning, War Gas Investigations: Advance Chapter from Bulletin 178, War Work of the Bureau of Mines. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 17.

[3] Theo Emery, Hellfire Boys. (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017), p. 76, 146.

[4] Emery, Hellfire, p. 146.

[5] Jones, Role of Chemists, p. 113.

[6] Frank P. Underhill, The Lethal War Gases: Physiology and Experimental Treatment. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920).

[7] Emery, Hellfire, p. 147; Jones, "Role of Chemists," p. 100.

[8] Charles L. Parsons, “The American Chemist in Warfare,” Science, Vol. 48, No. 1242 (1918), pp. 377-386.

[9] Leo P. Brophy, “Origins of the Chemical Corps,” Military Affairs, Vol. 20, No. 4 (1956), pp. 217-226; Emery, Hellfire.

[10] Jones, "Role of Chemists," p. 111; Wilder D. Bancroft et al., The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War. Volume XIV: Medical Aspects of Gas Warfare. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1926), pp. 35-36; Leo P. Brophy, Wyndham D. Miles and Rexmond C. Cochrane, The Chemical Warfare Service: From Laboratory to Field. (Washington: Center of Military History, US Army, 1988), pp. 5, 26.

[11] Jeffrey A. Johnson, “Military-Industrial Interactions in the Development of Chemical Warfare, 1914-1918: Comparing National Cases within the Technological System of the Great War,” in One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences, ed. B. Friedrich, D. Hoffmann, J. Renn, F. Schmaltz and M. Wolf (Cham: Springer, 2017), p. 138.

[12] Manning, War Gas, p. 6; Brophy et al., Chemical Warfare Service, p. 5.

[13] Emery, Hellfire.

[14] Jones, "Role of Chemists," p. 159; Emery, Hellfire, pp. 146-47.

[15] Jones, "Role of Chemists," p. 113; Brophy et al., Chemical Warfare Service, p. 8.

[16] Bancroft et al., Medical Department, p. 33.

[17] Brophy et al., Chemical Warfare Service, p. 13; Jeffery K. Smart, “History of Chemical and Biological Warfare: An American Perspective,” in Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare. (Washington: Office of the Surgeon General, 1997), p. 19.

[18] Brophy et al., Chemical Warfare Service, p. 13.

[19] Manning, War Gas, p. 10.

[20] Parsons, "The American Chemist," p. 380.

[21] Bancroft et al., Medical Department, p. 33.

[22] Charles R. van Hise, “The War Work of the University of Wisconsin,” The American Review of Reviews, Vol. LVIII, pp. 68.

[23] “Patriotism and Poison Gas,” On Wisconsin, Spring 2017, onwisconsin.uwalumni.com/features/patriotism-and-poison-gas; van Hise, "War Work," p. 69; B. E. Powell, “The Long Arm of Learning: How the ‘Land-Grant Colleges’ are Backing Uncle Sam,” The American Review of Reviews, Vol. LVIII, p. 64.

[24] “Patriotism and Poison Gas.”

[25] Powell, "Long Arm," p. 66.

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Oddsconsin 72 - The Dogs of Science Hall (Part 2. Chemical Warfare Research in the First World War)

Howard Veregin — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second part of The Dogs of Science Hall, an article originally published in Madison’s Tone Magazine in 2022. Read part 1 here.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.
- Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est

The first use of poison gas in the First World War was a German chlorine attack against British and French troops in April 1915. Gas was a new weapon, and the troops had no gas masks for protection. It is estimated that over a thousand soldiers died in the attack. Initially outraged, Britain and France soon decided to fight fire with fire and an arms race escalated quickly. [1] Within a few years, the chemical arsenal of the combatants had grown to include asphyxiants like phosgene, lung irritants like chloropicrin, various compounds of arsenic and cyanide, and blistering agents like mustard gas.

After declaring war in April 1917, the US government quickly launched a program focused on large-scale gas production and the creation of new gases and methods of delivery. The effort would require involvement from the country’s industrial and research institutions. As an editorial in the December 1917 issue of Illustrated World Magazine put it,

[C]hemical knowledge of destructive substances is not limited to the German mind or German textbooks. There are among us chemists who can meet them upon their own ground and go them one better in devilish inventiveness if it is so desired. [2]

In early 1917, Vannoy Manning, the Director of the Bureau of Mines in the US Department of the Interior, offered the Bureau’s services to the War Department for chemical warfare research. [3] This would seem surprising, were it not for the fact that the Bureau was already involved in research on mine gases and self-contained breathing devices. [4] The Bureau’s work was simply refocused on military needs. Initially, then, chemical warfare research in the US was coordinated by a civilian agency.

Manning’s offer was made via the National Research Council, which had been formed in 1916 under the National Academy of Sciences to mobilize scientists to conduct military research. [5] In 1917, the Council’s Military Committee added a Subcommittee on Noxious Gases – chaired by Manning – and charged with conducting research into the generation of toxic gases and developing antidotes to them. [6][7] During the war, the Military Committee acted as an intermediary between the Army, who posed research problems, and scientists at universities, who carried out the work. [8]

Universities were quick to sign on, at least twenty-one of them joining the effort by the end of 1917. [9] The list eventually included some of the country’s top research institutions, including Chicago, Clark, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, MIT, Ohio State, Princeton, Yale and Wisconsin. [10] The arrangement with the Bureau of Mines and the National Research Council continued until 1918, when the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service was created.

By the end of the war in November 1918, the US was producing twice as much poison gas as Britain, France and Germany combined. Production had grown to encompass at least ten facilities. [11] The Army’s main chemical warfare plant, Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, had more than ten thousand workers at peak production. [11] Other plants included re-purposed commercial chemical factories in Ohio, New York, Michigan and Connecticut. At full capacity, this network of plants could produce over four thousand tons of poison gas per month, including chlorine, phosgene, chloropicrin, mustard gas and lewisite, the latter being a US innovation. [12]

When the war was over almost eleven thousand tons of gas had been produced domestically. [13] The US Army’s First Gas Regiment reached the front lines in the spring of 1918 and deployed thousands of gas shells and canisters against the German Army. [14] But as this was already late in the war, gas use by US forces never matched its domestic production levels let alone its planned capacity. In fact, despite soaring domestic production levels, the US Army did not employ any domestically produced gas in the war, relying instead on British and French supplies. [15]

If the war had continued into 1919, the US and its allies were prepared to use their stockpiles in massive gas attacks, including aerial bombardments, against Germany. [16] But at the end of the war, these plans were abandoned and instead hundreds of tons of surplus gas in barrels and artillery shells were dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. [17]

It was the rapidity with which production facilities were established that spurred on much of the poison gas research in the US. Injuries to plant workers from accidental exposure to toxic chemicals were taking a toll. At the Edgewood plant there were 279 casualties in one month alone in 1918. [18] The focus of much war gas research was protection of workers in gas production facilities. As we will see in future posts, this was a major focus of the research effort at the University of Wisconsin.

Note: My novel, Dog 137, loosely based on the poison gas experiments performed during the war, is now available. More information can be found here.

Sources

[1] Jeffrey A. Johnson, “Military-Industrial Interactions in the Development of Chemical Warfare, 1914-1918: Comparing National Cases within the Technological System of the Great War,” in One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences, ed. B. Friedrich, D. Hoffmann, J. Renn, F. Schmaltz and M. Wolf (Cham: Springer, 2017), p. 146.

[2 Quoted in Daniel P. Jones, The Role of Chemists in Research on War Gases in The United States During World War I. (PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1969), p. 91.

[3] Leo P. Brophy, Wyndham D. Miles and Rexmond C. Cochrane, The Chemical Warfare Service: From Laboratory to Field. (Washington: Center of Military History, US Army, 1988), pp. 2-3.

[4] Vannoy H. Manning, War Gas Investigations: Advance Chapter from Bulletin 178, War Work of the Bureau of Mines. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 2; Wilder D. Bancroft et al., The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War. Volume XIV: Medical Aspects of Gas Warfare. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1926), p. 35; Brophy et al., Chemical Warfare Service, p. 2; Jones, Role of Chemists, p. 92.

[5] Manning, War Gas, p. 2; Jones, Role of Chemists, p. 14; Jeffery K. Smart, “History of Chemical and Biological Warfare: An American Perspective,” in Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare. (Washington: Office of the Surgeon General, 1997), p. 17.

[6] Manning, War Gas, p. 4; Jones, Role of Chemists, p. 93.

[7] Brophy et al., Chemical Warfare Service, p. 3; Smart, History, p. 17.

[8] Jones, Role of Chemists, pp. 16-17.

[9] Jones, Role of Chemists, p. 111; Bancroft et al., Medical Department, pp. 35-36; Brophy et al., Chemical Warfare Service, pp. 5, 26.

[10] Manning, War Gas.

[11] Bancroft et al., Medical Department, p. 25.

[12] Theo Emery, Hellfire Boys. (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017), p. 352.

[13] Emery, Hellfire, pp. 369, 377.

[14] Daniel A. Gross, Chemical Warfare: From the European Battlefield to the American Laboratory. (Science History Institute, 2015).

[15] DENIX (DoD Environment, Safety and Occupational Health Network and Information Exchange), History of United States' Involvement in Chemical Warfare. www.denix.osd.mil/rcwmprogram/history/index.html

[16] Johnson, Military-Industrial Interactions, p. 145.

[17] Emery, Hellfire, p. 369; DENIX, History.

[18] Emery, Hellfire, p. 296.

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Oddsconsin 71 - The Dogs of Science Hall (Part 1. The Dog Rooms)

Howard Veregin — Sat, 9 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Note. The Dogs of Science Hall was originally published in Madison’s Tone Magazine in 2022. As Tone is no longer in operation, I am making the article available here, in a series of posts over the next month.

Progress is a storm blowing the angel of history back into the future. As the wreckage of history piles up, the angel wants to go back, wake the dead, and repair the things that have been broken. But of course, this is impossible.
- Philosopher Walter Benjamin, reflecting on Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus. [1]

As one of the earliest buildings on the UW-Madison campus, Science Hall has experienced many of the indignities that accompany old age. The building – completed in 1887 in the Romanesque Revival style reminiscent of medieval fortresses – has been home to many of the university’s academic programs, including geology, physics, zoology, limnology, botany, anatomy, bacteriology and medicine. As these programs came and went over the years, Science Hall’s interior was repeatedly adapted to accommodate the needs of the next generation of tenants. The building’s open wings were partitioned, mezzanine floors were added and classrooms and labs were reconfigured dozens of times.

The scars are everywhere – doorways that have been bricked in, stairways that seem to lead nowhere and ornate columns that poke out of the plaster like broken bones. If the walls could speak, perhaps they would scream in agony.

Some of the more significant changes to Science Hall are associated with the Medical School, which occupied the building in the first decades of the twentieth century. Due the School’s rapid growth, previously underused areas of Science Hall were opened up. The fourth and fifth floors, used as storage areas when the building was first constructed, were reconfigured to house anatomy and dissection rooms. To provide the necessary cadavers, the north rear tower held a winch connected to an embalming room in the basement. Cadavers were delivered to the building via a stairway in the rear of the north wing, which has since been reconfigured as a ground-floor window. [2]

Medical School faculty also worked in physiology, pathology, pharmacology and medical microbiology. Teaching and research labs were scattered around the building. But as student demand increased, Science Hall became too small and expansion into a new building became necessary. This was solved when the Legislature approved funds for the Wisconsin General Hospital and Service Memorial Institutes, which opened in the 1920s. Only the Anatomy Department stayed on in Science Hall, occupying rooms on the upper floors until it too departed in 1957. Students were apparently still finding human bones hiding in unused storage spaces well into the 1970s. Grisly stories like this are central to the building’s mythology.

But of all the alterations made to Science Hall over the decades, perhaps none is as puzzling as the addition of two rooms on the fourth floor over a hundred years ago. This is the only significant renovation of the building that affected its exterior. The rooms can be seen from the rear parking lot today. The brick is of a different color than the rest of the building and the architecture is much less ornate. Today these rooms are used as faculty offices. They are located just off the main staircase, with one room on each side, each a mirror image of the other.

An early photograph of Science Hall confirms that these rooms are not original to the building. A photograph dating from the late 1920s or early 1930s shows the two rooms after their construction. This evidence agrees with building histories stating that the rooms were added sometime before 1924. Additional evidence comes from a set of 1917 renovation plans, which depict these rooms as new additions and provide details about their construction. The plans – officially titled “Diagram for Remodelling of Science Hall, University of Wisconsin” – were produced by the Office of the State Architect in Madison in the summer of 1917. (See the image at the top of this post.)

These rooms have some curious features, to say the least. For a start, they were designed to hold dogs. The 1917 remodeling plan show “dog cages” on a concrete and asphalt floor. There are two tiers of cages made from “Clinton Electrically Welded Wires” of specified gauge and spacing. The plans show the room partitioned into four chambers, each with a door. There are two chambers for the dog cages, an antechamber with a drain and sink leading to the building corridor, and a chamber leading up the stairs to the second level.

This points to a second oddity – the fact that the rooms have two levels. On the upper level, the renovation plans show six chambers. The largest extends over the building corridor and contains a drain. The smallest chambers – there are three of these – are only about three feet wide. In contrast to the lower level, the upper level is completely windowless. A large glass skylight and two galvanized iron ventilators provide light and ventilation (visible on the 1920s-1930s photograph). The two levels are connected with a metal stair with a balustrade constructed of wire netting.

A final oddity of these rooms is that they were designed to be soundproof – soundproof double-hung windows on the lower level, soundproof walls stuffed with insulation and a thick soundproof door.

What does all of this signify? To answer that question we need to consider three sets of facts. First, there are the rooms themselves, with their dog cages, windowless chambers, ceiling ventilation and soundproof construction. Second, we know that medical research was being conducted in the building at this time and that medical labs were nearby.

Third, there is the historical context to consider. In April of 1917, a few months before these renovation plans were drafted, the United States declared war on Germany and entered the First World War. An immediate concern was poison gas, which Britain, France and Germany were all using as a chemical weapon. By mid-1917, a war gas research program had been launched in the United States, led by the federal government and the War Department, that eventually enrolled hundreds of scientists from universities and private labs across the country. Animals, especially dogs, were involved from the very beginning as experimental subjects.

In subsequent Oddsconsin posts, we’ll explore in more detail the dog rooms and their connection to chemical weapons research during the First World War. It’s a fascinating story.

Sources

[1] Stuart Jeffries, The Storm Blowing from Paradise: Walter Benjamin and Klee’s Angelus Novus, Verso, 2 August 2016, www.versobooks.com/blogs/2791-the-storm-blowing-from-paradise-walter-benjamin-and-klee-s-angelus-novus. See also Laurie Anderson’s song, “The Dream Before,” which quotes Benjamin.

[2] For details of Science Hall’s history see: National Register of Historic Places, University of Wisconsin Science Hall National Historic Landmark Nomination, 1993; Merle Curti & Vernon Carstensen, The University of Wisconsin: A History, 1848-1925. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949; Jim Feldman, The Buildings of the University of Wisconsin. Madison: The University Archives, 1997; Clarence W. Olmstead, Science Hall: The First Century. Madison: Department of Geography, UW-Madison, 1987.

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Oddsconsin 70 – Assassinations!

Howard Veregin — Sat, 2 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau shot US President James Garfield at a train station in Washington, DC. Garfield, the twentieth President, had been elected only a few months earlier. Guiteau was clearly mentally disturbed. Born in Freeport, Illinois – just south of Green County, Wisconsin – Guiteau as an adult developed a passion for politics. He was a member of the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party, who advocated for a political spoils system in which supporters were rewarded with government jobs.

The attitude of the Stalwarts goes some way to explaining Guiteau’s actions. His decision to kill Garfield was apparently instigated by his obsession with being named to a diplomatic post, a position he was wholly unqualified for and never received. He concluded that killing Garfield was a political necessity.

Garfield lingered on until September 1881, when he died of an aneurysm, although there is speculation that the real cause of death was a massive infection brought on by doctors probing his wound with their fingers. Guiteau was put on trial, and despite much debate about his sanity, which expert witnesses could never agree on, he was found guilty and hanged in June 1882. [1] At his trial, Guiteau famously stated, “I did not kill the President. The doctors did that. I merely shot him.” [2]

Guiteau’s Wisconsin connection is his childhood in Port Ulao (Ozaukee County), now an abandoned “ghostport” on the shores of Lake Michigan a mile east of the intersection of Interstate 43 and Highway 60. In the 1850s, Port Ulao was a bustling harbor where lake steamers stopped to purchase local cordwood. A huge chute ran from the top of the bluff to a pier on the shoreline. Among the prominent citizens of Port Olau were Jane Gifford and her husband Luther Guiteau. Charles was their son. The family lived there for five years, until 1857, and Jane is buried there. [3]

Wisconsin has connections to other presidential assassinations and attempted assassinations. During the current era of heightened political violence, we may forget that the late 1800s and early 1900s were also politically tumultuous. It was a time of economic and social change, and one of the key flash points was the growing labor movement.

One example is the Pullman Strike on the south side of Chicago in 1894. Workers at George Pullman’s Palace Car Company made luxurious railroad cars and lived in the company town Pullman established for them. (The Pullman neighborhood of Chicago is still in existence.) During the depression of the 1890s, Pullman lowered workers’ wages without also reducing rents. This led, ultimately, to a walkout of tens of thousands of workers and sympathizers across the country. President Grover Cleveland called in federal troops and dozens of people were killed or wounded in skirmishes. [4][5]

Many other violent altercations occurred across the country – far too many to describe in this post. Almost all sectors of the economy were affected, including mining, lumbering, meat packing, shipping, manufacturing and agriculture. It was a tumultuous era.

The violence was also linked to the rise of revolutionary movements like Socialism and Anarchism. [6] Bombs were a favorite weapon. The Los Angeles Times building was bombed in 1910. [7] Former Harvard professor Erich Muenter bombed the US Capitol in 1915. [8] In 1919, a series of bombings occurred in eight cities, including Washington, DC, where an explosion damaged the home of the US Attorney General. The next year, a bomb exploded on Wall Street in lower Manhattan, killing 40 people. [9]

Wisconsin was not spared. In November 1917, a bomb planted inside the Milwaukee Central Police Station killed nine police officers and two others. [10]

Most of these attacks were attributed to Anarchists, a somewhat nebulous group advocating for the abolition of government institutions. But other incidents were related to opposition to government actions, such as the decision to enter the First World War in 1917. The history is complex and can easily be oversimplified.

Milwaukee was also home to one of the most bizarre assassination attempts in history. On October 14, 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt was in the city to deliver a campaign speech on his run for a third term in office. [11] Roosevelt was the Vice President under William McKinley but became President when McKinley was shot and killed in 1901 in Buffalo, New York, by Leon Czolgosz. Reflecting the turbulence of the era, Czolgosz was a professed Anarchist. [12]

Roosevelt’s two terms as President ended in 1909. In 1912, he was running as leader of the National Progressive Party, also known as the Bull Moose Party. When he walked outside of Milwaukee’s Hotel Gilpatrick, on North Third and West Kilbourn (now Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr.), he was shot at close range by John Schrank. Shrank was immediately apprehended. Shrank, who stated he was acting on orders from the ghost of President McKinley, was later committed to the Central State Hospital in Waupun (Oddsconsin 69) where he died in 1943. His body was donated to the medical school at Marquette University. [13]

After being shot, Roosevelt insisted on delivering the speech he had prepared. The bullet had apparently struck the folded, fifty-page speech manuscript he had in his pocket, saving his life. However, he had a broken rib and was bleeding. Roosevelt carried the bullet in his chest for the rest of his life, doctors believing it was too risky to extract. It was a permanent memento from his Wisconsin trip.

Roosevelt’s first words to the crowd who had gathered for his speech were, “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” [14]

There’s a plaque at the shooting site today, inside the lobby of the Hyatt hotel.

Sources and Notes

[1] Douglas O. Linder, The Trial of Charles Guiteau: An Account. Famous Trials. https://famous-trials.com/guiteau/2197-home

[2] National Park Service, The Execution of Charles Guiteau. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-execution-of-charles-guiteau.htm

[3] Town of Grafton, History of the Town of Grafton. https://townofgraftonwi.gov/town-history/

[4] Britannica, Pullman Strike. https://www.britannica.com/event/Pullman-Strike

[5] The leader of the labor movement at Pullman was Eugene Debs, who in 1920 became possibly the only person to run for the presidency (for the Socialist Party) from prison. He had been incarcerated under the 1918 Sedition Act for criticizing the US’s involvement in the First World War.

[6] One of the byproducts of these violent acts was Red Gym at UW-Madison. The violence “caused a fear of class warfare to become widespread among upper and upper-middle class Americans. As a result, there was a surge of armory building beginning in the late 1870s. It was believed that armories would be necessary as places for troops to assemble and arm in order to quell mob violence that would be led by the so-called dangerous classes socialists, communists, and labor unionists.” National Register of Historic Places, University of Wisconsin Armory and Gymnasium. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/52e5ea5c-9daa-4bf5-b6d4-48afbea5a282

[7] Ray Taylor, Labor Struggle and Violence in Industrial America: the 1910 LA Times Bombing. Teaching American History, 2024. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/violence-and-the-labor-struggle-in-industrializing-america-the-1910-la-times-bombing/

[8] United States Senate, Bomb Rocks Capitol. https://www.senate.gov/about/historic-buildings-spaces/capitol/bomb-explodes-1915.htm

[9] Digital History, Terrorism in Historical Perspective. https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/topic_display.cfm?tcid=94

[10] Milwaukee Police Department, November 24, 1917 Bombing. https://city.milwaukee.gov/police/About-MPD/Memorial-Page/1917-Bombing

[11] The 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution limiting presidents to two terms was not in place until 1951, after another Roosevelt (FDR) served four consecutive terms.

[12] Czolgosz was convicted of murder and executed in the electric chair at Auburn Prison in upstate New York (see Oddsconsin 68).

[13] Milwaukee Police Historical Society, Roosevelt Shooting. https://www.mphswi.org/HighProfileHistory/RooseveltShooting

[14] Theodore Roosevelt Association, It Takes More Than That to Kill a Bull Moose. https://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=991271&module_id=338394

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