I’ll start by wishing you a very happy 2015! I hope that you had a marvelous time at the November 2, 2014, grand opening. If you missed it, plan on stopping by the North Dakota Heritage Center very soon because the exhibits are choice, the food is excellent, it’s warm, and there is ample available parking.

The start of a new year means we can get into full mode making more short film episodes, some about paleontology in collaboration with the North Dakota Geologic Survey team. So far, we’ve made videos about a public dig where a crocodile skeleton was excavated, digs at Pembina and Medora, and the cannonball concretions and petrified tree which can be found on the plaza.

Videos have a lot of competition these days, often in the form of cats doing anything online. In the olden days, making an educational video was easy. You recorded a narrator, stuck in a few shots of old pictures, then edited and covered the gaps with a piano piece. The whole affair took about 20 minutes over a cup of coffee.

Not anymore.

So what, you may be wondering, do we all do to make it happen?

As one example, we filmed sixteen large boulders (called Cannonball concretions) being moved to specific areas on the Pembina River Plaza at the east entrance to the North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum. Behind the scenes, someone had to coordinate with a construction company and find some large machinery to use for a couple of days. Then someone had to locate two moving crews from south of Fargo and get them out to Lake Hammond, near Mandan. Three paleontologists were involved in the move, and someone had to coordinate a video camera. While all this was going on, I was filming, tethered between being in the way and not falling over.

After the filming, I wrote the script. If that seems a bit backwards to write the script last instead of first, that’s because it is. But it sometimes works better to write after you’ve witnessed everything that happens to put an event in place.

A lot of people ask if these video episodes are set up. I promise you, here and now, they are not. We have stood in rainstorms, destroyed knees, driven into worlds far from any idea of roads, fallen off of large boulders with a camera in hand, and we don’t pull over for anything except fuel. We tend to take filming fairly seriously.

But not half as seriously as what it takes to edit all the clips, the audio, make the sound effects, create the arty segments, and find music for a show from start to finish. My goal is to show a high amount of science and “cool” within a relatively low budget. That’s the main reason why our channel’s videos don’t look like any other paleontological videos out there. Everybody works so amazingly hard to make something great.

Ultimately the fossil digging season is over, all production is completed, we read through the script to make sure it’s not all in Dutch, and Paleontologist Becky Barnes fixes any errors. In the normal world, the credits at the end of a program roll for about five seconds, whereas the ones we place at the end of our paleontology episodes make you feel as though you’ve been watching Ben-Hur (1959).  The lengthy list of people either involved behind the scenes or on camera is often on an epic level. We finish editing the last snippets of footage in the Heritage Center space that we’ve made into a studio. And that would be the part where every normal human being would go home and relax. So, of course, that is when we start planning for next season’s films.

I love the volume of caffeine we go through and the stamina out on the fossil digs. And I love the energy of people who ask what the next episode will be and the way people positively react when shown the films we worked so hard to make. Good luck getting that sort of creative buzz watching a cat play the piano!

Guest Blogger: Jessica Rockeman

Jessica Rockeman is a New Media Specialist for the State Historical Society of North Dakota. Her duties include web, graphics, print, ND Studies materials, film and photography. She can often be spotted at the museum with a camera.

In 2000 historian Christian Warren published Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning in which he introduced his construct of “toxic purity” relating to historic lead paint. Warren explains that in the early 1900s, US citizens (most well aware of the toxic nature of lead paint) still wanted pure lead paint—leaded paint with no adulterants or additives. When we think of lead paint today, we immediately associate it with the toxic side of this construct. Most consumers at that time, however, were worried about additional ingredients diluting the purity of lead paint.

One hundred twenty years ago consumers perceived lead paint to be the best. Consumers wanted to know the contents of the paint cans they purchased. If they contained ingredients such as water, benzene, chalk, or any oils other than linseed oil, many considered them to be inferior paints.¹ There were no labeling laws; consumers did not even know the net weight of a can of paint. Although there were no standards set by industry or the government at the turn of the last century, consumers were hoping to purchase linseed oil thoroughly mixed with pure white lead powder and maybe some colorants.²

A label from one of many regional white lead paint producers. https://www.npr.org/2016/04/06/473268312/before-it-was-dangerous-lead-was-the-miracle-metal-that-we-loved

North Dakota was the first state to fully address informing consumers about the contents of a can of paint.³ In 1905 the state legislature passed “An Act to Prevent the Adulteration & Deception in the Sale of White Lead and Mixed Paints.”⁴ The legislature put the responsibility for carrying out this act on the capable shoulders of Edwin F. Ladd, the “fighting” chemistry professor at the North Dakota Agricultural College (now North Dakota State University), who also oversaw the publication of five bulletins on the subject of paint, its composition, and  clinical tests of various brands of paints.

Historian Elwyn B. Robinson characterized Ladd as a zealous and courageous publicity seeker, outstanding in an era of progressive reformers.⁵ Ladd had already led the charge against food alteration at the college’s Experiment Station⁶, publishing his results in the station’s Bulletin 53. His work was important in the passage of the federal Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906.⁷

In his introduction to Bulletin 67 on white lead paints, Ladd calmly informs paint manufacturers who want to challenge his results published therein to “let the courts decide.”⁸

Dutch Boy logo and brand trademarked for the National Lead Company in 1907. Click the image to see the inside pages where happy children learned that lead was a most useful metal present in light bulbs, shoes, “tin” soldiers, baseballs, china, and other common household products.

In Bulletin 70 (1906) we learn the state court ruled in favor of the state’s right to regulate paint labeling. The Bulletin also provides the names of manufacturers who used up to 24 percent water in their paints, those who provided short weight adulterated or diluted lead in their paint composition, and those using up to 70 percent inert material, which was merely filler.⁹ In Bulletin 86 the Experiment Station analyzed many paints with mixed ingredients such as zinc oxide, a legitimate white lead substitute.¹⁰

At the time there were many small and regional paint manufacturers due to the cost of transportation of heavy ingredients. Ladd expected that manufacturers in the western half of the United States would provide inferior paints to those in the east, but found shocking results. Regardless of the region, “dope” paints were manufactured all over. North Dakota was the exception, as by the end of 1909 Ladd felt that the legal requirement to have truthful labels had greatly improved the quality of paint sold in the state.¹¹

1903 Advertisement for the New Jersey Zinc. Co. We wonder if master painters and others knew about the toxicity of lead in the paints they used at the turn of the twentieth century. Yes they certainly did, better than we can know today, as they felt the agony of stomach ulcers, intestinal binding, tooth loss, gout, and arthritis. Some symptoms sent them to their beds for weeks waiting out “painters colic” if they (or more likely their apprentices) inhaled or ingested too much of the chalky powder. From Warren, Brush with Death, 61, and Olga Khazan, “How Important Is Lead Poisoning to Becoming a Legendary Artist?” Atlantic, November 25, 2013,  https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/how-important-is-lead-poisoning-to-becoming-a-legendary-artist/281734/.

¹ E. F. Ladd and C. D. Holley, “Paints and Paint Products,” North Dakota Agricultural College Experiment Station Bulletin 67 (1906): 575–77.
² Christian Warren, Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 44–45, 52–53. The first ready-mixed paint came from Sherwin-Williams in 1880, but some master painters were still having their apprentices mix barrels of dusty white lead into linseed oil in the early 1900s. “The First Paint Revolution,” Sherwin-Williams, [accessed July 11, 2018, https://www.sherwin-williams.com/painting-contractors/business-builders/paint-technology-and-application/sw-art-pro-paint-revolution].
³ Warren, Brush with Death, 54. Nebraska passed a paint labeling law in 1902. It was backed by the lead-based paint manufacturers, who wanted to influence consumers to think of any new paint formulas that introduced new ingredients as inferior to lead paint. The labels did not require the disclosure of the amount of white lead.
⁴ Laws Passed by the Ninth Session of the Legislation Assembly of the State of North Dakota, 1905, Chapter 8 SB 49, 13.
⁵ Elwyn B. Robinson, History of North Dakota (1966; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 261.
⁶ https://library.ndsu.edu/ir/bitstream/handle/10365/23594/ndfr_19500501_v12_iss05_162.pdf
⁷ Warren, Brush with Death, 282.
⁸ Ladd and Holley, “Paints and Paint Products,” 575.
⁹ E. F. Ladd and C. D. Holley, “Paints and Their Composition,” North Dakota Agricultural College Experiment Station Bulletin 70 (1906): 53–65.
¹⁰ E. F. Ladd and G. A. Abbott, “Some Ready-Mixed Paints,” North Dakota Agricultural College Experiment Station Bulletin 86 (1909): 80–89.
¹¹ Ladd and Abbott, “Some Ready-Mixed Paints,” 80–81.