December 18 has been a day of remarkable lows and encouraging highs in quite a few fields. One of the day’s lows happened — or started happening — in 1793, when the French 32-gun frigate Lutine was handed over to the British. It wasn’t exactly won in a sea battle, though. The French Revolution was in full swing, and the Royalists handed her to the British simply to keep her out of the hands of the French Republicans. The British navy renamed her the HMS Lutine, and in the next couple of years put her to work blockading Amsterdam, which I’m sure seemed important at the time. Just wait; the low is still coming. The HMS Lutine was carrying a big load of gold to Germany at one point, and sank in a storm off the West Frisian Islands in the North Sea.

The shipment of gold was intended to prevent a stock market crash in Hamburg, but when the news of the loss of the ship spread, that was exactly what happened. The location of the wreck was known, though, and even though it was a very dangerous place with strong currents and shifting sands, the Lutine became a site for treasure hunters because of all that gold. Some of it was recovered in the first two years after the wreck, but then the ship was lost in the underwater sand. Divers tried again in 1804, and there was another attempt in 1814. Then between 1821 and 1829 a crew kept trying to get the treasure by using a diving bell, but recovered very little.

By 1857 another attempt was made, this time using diving helmets. They hauled up a bit, but not enough to even pay for the expedition. They tried again in 1867, using a steam-powered tug and a pump that was supposed to be able to clear the wreck of sand. No success. An 1886 try, though, recovered a cannon; it was presented to Queen Victoria herself, and you can see it if you visit Windsor Castle. More attempts were made in 1891, 1896, 1898, 1911, and 1913, but then the Great War intervened. In more ways than one, in fact. When another attempt was made in 1933, the diving bell was destroyed by an underwater mine left over from the conflict. More attempts were made, up through 1979, but without much success. So somewhere down there, still waiting to be found, is the bulk of the original gold and silver.

You can’t get much lower than a shipwreck and the bottom of the ocean, so it’s time for a high point. For that we have December 18, 1958. That was the day the world’s first communication satellite was launched. It was called Project SCORE, which stood for “Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment”, and it quickly succeeded. It broadcast a shortwave radio message from President Eisenhower, wishing everyone a merry Christmas. The President wasn’t really aboard the satellite; it was just a prerecorded tape.

That’s more than 14 times the wingspan of the Tupolev Tu-160.

Edwin Armstrong would have been very interested in that message — he was an inventor with quite a few important radio patents, some of which made the SCORE system possible. And he was born on…guess what, December 18, 1890. Unfortunately, though, he died in 1954, four years before the satellite was launched.

Another engineer born on December 18 — this time in 1661 — didn’t have anything to do with the high of a satellite launch, but he did have something to say about very low things. Those things would be mines, and the engineer was Christopher Polhammar. He was born in Sweden, and designed and built innovative mining equipment like systems to lift ore out of mines using tracks. Polhammar contributed to a number of other engineering fields, including clockmaking, powered factories, and a system of canals, which would have been useful in transporting the ore from his mines and the products from his factories.

Polhammar represents a low in the sense that mines are low, but also a high; his work made mines much more productive. Nevertheless, there are limits, and on December 18, 2015, the last deep-pit coal mine in England, Killingley Colliery, finally closed. It wasn’t particularly ancient as mines go; it had opened in 1965. But it made up for it in depth; the mineshafts (there were two) went down 800 meters. That’s more than 14 times the wingspan of the Tupolev Tu-160, the largest variable-sweep wing airplane ever flown. That airplane, of course, first took to the skies on December 18 in 1981. The Tu-160 was a strategic bomber, meant to carry nuclear weapons much more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima. But December 18 has seen other powerful forces dropping from the sky, too. That’s the day in 2018 that a meteor exploded over the Bering Sea. Its force was also at least ten times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb.

More down-to-earth activities like politics have also had their December 18 ups and downs. It was December 18 in 1865 that the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was proclaimed, That’s the amendment that abolished slavery. Then not so many years later, it was December 18, 1917 that the Congress passed the resolution containing the language of the Eighteenth Amendment. That’s the one that outlawed alcohol and began Prohibition.  It wasn’t ratified until 1919, and then in 1933 it was repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment. That makes the Eighteenth the only Amendment ever to be completely repealed.

December 18 wasn’t done with politics yet, though. That’s the day that United Arab Emirates held its first elections in history. And in 2019, December 18 marked the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Trump is said to be very partial to gold, using it for fixtures and decorations in his residences and even his airplane. Maybe somebody should tell him the story about the HMS Lutine?