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Saving the Leaning Tower of Pisa
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The Last Speaker of Eyak
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Danone: The Yogurt Named After a Boy
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Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

On 7 January 1990, Italian officials locked the doors of the most famous mistake in architecture, convinced it was finally about to fall over. The Leaning Tower of Pisa, the white marble bell tower of Pisa Cathedral, was tilting 5.5 degrees to the south. Its seventh floor overhung the ground by about 4.5 meters (roughly 15 feet). It was still moving, its top creeping southward by about 1.5 millimeters a year. Computer models suggested a tower of its shape should topple at 5.44 degrees. On paper, it had already fallen. The sudden collapse of a medieval tower in Pavia the year before had turned a slow worry into an emergency. To understand how Pisa got into this mess, you have to go back to August 1173, when its builders laid the foundations.

The soil beneath the cathedral square is a soft sandwich of silt sitting on very soft marine clay, and the tower began to sink almost as soon as it rose. By about 1178 the builders had finished three stories when work stopped for nearly a century. The halt is usually blamed on Pisa's wars with rival cities such as Genoa and Florence. The pause almost certainly saved the building, because the clay had time to compress and grow stronger under the weight. When work resumed around 1272, the masons tried to correct the lean by making each new floor slightly taller on the short side, which is why the tower is gently curved, like a banana. The bell chamber was completed around 1370, nearly two centuries after the first stone. Later helpers did more harm. In 1838 the architect Alessandro della Gherardesca dug a walkway around the base to show off the buried plinth, groundwater rushed in, and the tilt jumped by more than a quarter of a degree. A grouting job in 1934 shoved it another centimeter south. Every repair made it worse!

The rescue, steered by a commission that included the British soil engineer John Burland of Imperial College London, began with brute weight. In 1993 engineers stacked 600 metric tons of lead ingots against the north side of the base. When a 1995 attempt to swap them for ground anchors went wrong, they raised the load to 900. The real fix, which started in 1999, took soil away from under the high north side. Using 41 drill tubes fitted with corkscrew augers, the crew drew out about 38 cubic meters of earth. That let the north edge settle gently. Burland followed the news from London and called it "riding a bicycle by fax." By June 2001 the top had swung back about 44 centimeters (17 inches), to roughly where it stood in 1838. The target had been half a degree, too little for any tourist to notice. In 2018 engineers worked out why the tower had also survived at least four strong earthquakes since 1280. The same soft clay that tipped it over lets it sway so slowly that it never falls into rhythm with the shaking ground.

For roughly the last fifteen years of her life, Marie Smith Jones was the only person on Earth who had grown up speaking her language. She was the last fluent speaker of Eyak, a language from the mouth of the Copper River in south-central Alaska, near the fishing town of Cordova. There were never more than a few hundred Eyak in recorded history. Even their name is borrowed, from the neighboring Chugach Sugpiaq word for a village site where a lake drains into a river. Eyak is a sister branch to the entire Athabaskan family, whose languages stretch all the way to Navajo and Apache in the American Southwest. Marie was born in Cordova on 14 May 1918 and grew up on a family homestead at Eyak Lake. Smallpox and influenza killed many of her siblings young. She married an Oregon fisherman in 1948 and raised nine children. None of them learned Eyak, because they grew up in an era when speaking anything but English was considered wrong.

That anyone can still study Eyak is largely the work of a man who came to Alaska to teach French. Michael Krauss, a Harvard-trained specialist in Gaelic, joined the University of Alaska in 1960. Within a year he had resolved to record everything that could be learned from the last six fluent speakers. He began working with Marie in the early 1960s, and over the next decades he compiled a massive Eyak dictionary and edited the stories and poems of the storyteller Anna Nelson Harry. Marie wanted the written record, Krauss later said, so that future generations might one day bring the language back. Eyak also became his rallying cry. In a 1992 paper, written when the language had just two elderly speakers, he warned that the coming century could see the death or doom of 90 percent of humanity's languages. He asked whether losing Eyak should be mourned any less than losing "the panda or California condor."

Her older sister, Sophie Borodkin, died that same year, leaving Marie as the last fluent speaker. Marie died in her sleep in Anchorage on 21 January 2008, aged 89. After her death, Krauss was reportedly the only person alive who could still hold a conversation in Eyak (an awkward distinction for a language, since a conversation needs two people). The second turned out to be in Le Havre, where a young Frenchman named Guillaume Leduey had been teaching himself Eyak in his bedroom since his early teens. He had learned from texts and instructional DVDs sent from Alaska, without ever visiting the state or meeting Marie. In 2010, aged 21, he flew to Alaska to study with Krauss, analyzing traditional tales word by word. The following summer he was leading Eyak workshops in Anchorage and Cordova, where he earned the nickname "Super G." In 2014 Alaska made Eyak one of its 20 official Native languages.