The Exhausting Wikipedia Trail: From Gertrude Atherton to Square and Compasses

Gertrude Atherton
My wikipedia trail began with a simple search of Gertrude Atherton, who wrote the book The Californians, which was one of our readings this week and one of my favorites so far. I liked this chapter so much that I actually downloaded the ebook on my iPad, which was actually free (score!), and plan to begin reading the entire thing when I get a chance. Anyways, one thing that I found wildly interesting about Atherton is that she was raised by her grandfather Stephen Franklin, who was actually a relative of Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin
Discovering that Atherton's grandfather was related to Ben Franklin led me to click on his link and learn something interesting about the man on our $100 bill. There were a couple of things I found interesting about Franklin; he created the bifocal, created the fire department in Philadelphia, and was a freemason. Franklin was initiated to the Freemasons in 1731, and in 1734 became grandmaster of his local lodge, which gained him a lot of prominence in Philadelphia. This is one thing I almost wish I didn't learn, because it sent me down an hour long rabbit hole in which I basically learned nothing about Freemasonry.

Freemasonry
This was one of the most frustrating wikipedia articles that I have come across, because I could not for the life of me figure out what the point of the Freemasons were. I ended up conducting about 30 different google searches and it just made me even more confused on what this group was all about and how it turned in to what it is today. From what I could gather, it started as a sort of labor union (like the millwright union I am a part of) for masons, who would build castles and other stone buildings. Since these workers would have to travel to the next job after theirs was complete, they created this group to make meeting other members more easily accessible. It seems at some point the group became less about being a labor union, and more about being some kind of fraternity that would hold meetings where they would discuss things. It makes no sense to me how the group went from a labor union to 9 of the founding fathers being a part of the group and making large amounts of charitable donations, including both rich and poor members of all ages. The whole concept seems so weird to me and I fear that if I continue to think about it I will spend countless hours of my life looking into it just to find myself even more confused, so I decided to just move on and try to forget about it.

Square and Compasses
The last confusing page brought me to the symbol of the Freemasons, of which I am very familiar. It is the square and the compass. I use a square very frequently in my line of work, it is a very useful tool used to scribe a perfectly perpendicular 90 degree angle, and also has markings on it to create lines at other angles too. A Compass is used a lot less often in my line of work, but it is used to create a perfect circle, or an arc of a circle, at various distances. These are tools used in the trades and I found it interesting that the Freemasons use this as their symbol, and they also don't have an exact meaning for that symbol, it varies a lot between members. One description on this page states that "The square, to square our actions; The compasses, to circumscribe and keep us within bounds with all mankind". This has by far been the weirdest wikipedia trail that I have been on thus far, and I hope that I can forget about the freemasons without falling back down the rabbit hole I was trapped in, but I doubt it.