Members of the Baltimore Woodwinds, first chair or principle players with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, open the program playing the finale of "Quintet in E-flat major" by Anton Reicha. Lynn Poole describes the history of woodwind music and introduces the players: Britton Johnson on flute, Wayne Rapier on oboe, Robert Pierce on French horn, Stanley Petrulis on bassoon, and Ignatius Gennusa on clarinet. The quintet plays two movements of Vivaldi's "Sonata in G minor" and continues with "Pastoral," by modern composer Vincent Persichetti. Last in their repertoire are three short pieces for woodwind composed by Jacques Ibert.

The program opens with drawings of early, primitive underwater vessels and segues into a film of swimmers with aqualungs. A photo of Charles William Beebe is shown as oceanographer Dayton Carritt discusses Beebe's 1930s bathysphere. In 1953, Auguste Piccard built the first bathyscaphe, the "Trieste," a 50-foot untethered underwater vehicle, after many years of successfully using balloons to study the atmosphere. The "Trieste" operates on the Archimedes principle of water displacement, demonstrated by Dr. Carritt by dropping a tennis ball and a golf ball into water. Dr. Carritt explains in detail a schematic diagram of the "Trieste," showing how the ballast mechanism works with a small experiment and film clip of the procedure. In 1958, the Office of Naval Research bought the "Trieste" from Piccard for $185,000 to study the physical, chemical, biological, and geological characteristics of the ocean. Dr. Carritt interviews Dr. Robert Dietz of the U.S. Navy, who recounts his dive in "Trieste" with Piccard, describing what he saw and how he felt. Dr. Dietz also explains the "false bottom" or "deep scattering layer" and shows a graph of it. He discusses the drawbacks and the uses of bathyscaphes, such as deep sea salvage, mineral mining, and cable monitoring.

Dr. Herbert Friedman, astrophysicist with the U.S. Naval Research Lab, uses a piano to demonstrate that the range of the spectrum from red to violet is one octave of electro-magnetic frequency and notes that the earth's atmosphere blocks all but thirteen of the total sixty octaves of radiation frequencies. He shows a photo of Karl Jansky and a picture and soundtrack of lightening-produced "whistlers," which Jansky studied. In a 1945 film clip, V-2 rockets carry a Lyman alpha solar disk camera above the earth's atmosphere to study ultra-violet wavelengths such as the Lyman alpha line, discovered by Theodore Lyman at Harvard in 1912. The eponymous camera is described in a film as are the photon counters used in the rocket to send data from the flight to the ground. Pictures reveal the sun's characteristics, such as sunspots, flares, and plages. A 1959 detailed photo of the sun taken with the Lyman alpha camera shows the Lyman alpha regions. Another film discusses the study of solar flares and the use of "push button" rocketry to measure them. A film shows two-stage rockets launched from the Pont Arguello, CA U.S. Naval Missile Facility to study the ultraviolet x-ray emissions of solar flares. A chart displays the sun's photosphere surrounded by outer and inner coronas and a chromosphere. An animated segment and film clips document the attempt to photograph the sun during the October 12, 1958 total eclipse. Dr. Friedman concludes the program by explaining the detection of ultra-violet nebulosity in the night sky and lists questions researchers are trying to answer about Lyman alpha light and hydrogen-filled galactic space.

This program opens with a film of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Station in Beltsville, MD. In one greenhouse two groups of plants are receiving the same daytime conditions, but at night one is kept in total darkness while the other receives eight additional hours of incandescent light. Two four-year old loblolly pines show the results of this experiment. Dr. H. A. Borthwick explains that this is to study photoperiodism, or the effect of light on the plants' growth mechanism. In 1918 Wightman W. Garner and Harry A. Allard discovered that it is not the length of the day but rather of the night that is the determining factor in flower and seed production and growth of plants. Further experiments with lettuce, bean, tomato, and corn seeds test the effect of spectrum light colors and exposure on germination. A far red light creates a taller plant, and red light creates the tomato skin color. The mechanism in a plant the reacts to light is not chlorophyll but rather a two-way growth pigment, phytochrome, that acts as a switch with red and far red light. A film shows the process, using a spectrophotometer, by which this was determined. K. H. Norris demonstrates a spectrophotometer with a corn sample and explains the results with graphs. Two film clips show Sterling B. Hendricks doing further research on phytochromes to isolate their molecular structure and Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev at Beltsville, MD listening to Dr. Borthwick discuss crop growth issues.

The Johns Hopkins Glee Club, under the direction of James Mitchell, opens this Christmas program with capella renditions of "See That Babe in the Lowly Manger," "Go Tell It on the Mountain," and "Behold That Star." Hopkins president Milton S. Eisenhower reflects on the observance of Christmas and stories related to the holiday, particularly "Amahl and the Night Visitors." The Glee Club follows with "Lord the Messiah" with piano accompaniment. The Chesapeake Troubadours, a barbershop quartet, sings their version of "Winter Wonderland" and "Jingle Bells." Lynn Poole briefly notes the differences in Christmases around the world. The Glee Club sings "Cradle Song of the Shepherd" and "Lo, How a Rose E're Blooming" and concludes with "Carol of the Bells."

Captain David Minard, with the medical corps of the U.S. Navy, discusses tests conducted for 44 days in Korea to study the physiological and psychological stressors on troops under actual combat and fatigue. Using a chart, he explains the test for reactivity of the autonomic nervous system. Both attack and defense troops were measured before and after combat for hormone excretion, protein destruction, body salt retention, white blood cell count, and number of days to recover. Capt. Minard recommends using electronic transducers and transmitters to record such data in the future. Jean Taylor, an operations analyst with Johns Hopkins University, explains homeostasis (adjustments to protect the status quo) and the results of serious strains on it. Combatants were given paper and pencil tests to measure their higher mental functions and given a visual flicker fusion frequency test and an auditory flutter fusion frequency test to measure sensory cortical sensitivity. Ms. Taylor concludes that the physiological tests were more definitive than the psychological tests, which were inconclusive. Psychological stress was best observed through films shown of men before and after a combat that resulted in a 61% casualty rate. The men's physiological reactions followed Hans Selye's chart of response to stress: alarm reaction, resistance stage, exhaustion phase.

Dr. John C. Geyer and Dr. Charles E. Renn, professors of sanitary engineering at the Johns Hopkins University, discuss the municipal and industrial demands on water. Dr. Geyer explains how a city water meter works and shows the resulting graphs that predict the time of greatest water use. Dr. Renn displays examples of common products and tells how much water is required to manufacture each. He also discusses rainwater, wells, rivers, lakes, and reservoirs as sources of water and how river water can be used, treated, and returned. A film clip documents the formation of a river. Using a diagram, Dr. Geyer explains municipal water purification and waste treatment processes. Dr. Renn discusses industrial waste disposal and how it can cause stream pollution unless treated by a waste control plant, such as that of American Cyanamid Co., in New Jersey. Dr. Geyer notes the growing conflict in the American southwest over water use between industry and agriculture. Dr. Renn concludes that increasing water demands require either stopping growth or building more dams and evaluating priorities for use, such as recent multiple use (recreation, power, water control) projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

Denys Peter Myers, Assistant Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, discusses sculpture. He first describes, and displays, sculptures as artistic expressions existing in the round and being representational, semi-representational, or non-representational. He then argues that to understand the purpose of a sculpture, one must consider the culture that produced it and will generally find that it is either humanistic (making a statement about the human condition) or cult (serving as a bridge from this world to the next). As examples of cult objects, Mr. Myers exhibits the bronze head of the dead king of the kingdom of Benin in Nigeria. He also shows an Egyptian rose quartz sculpture of a pharaoh, an 8th century Indian temple corner graced by two dancers, a 14th century French Madonna and child, a second century Gandharan stucco head in the Roman tradition, and a 5th century sculpture similar to a Roman sarcophagus. To contrast humanistic examples of sculpture, Mr. Myers displays the remainder of a Greek Venus sculpture, the ideal of feminine beauty. The neo-humanism of Dante's era led to contemporary individualism as expressed in Maillol's 1898 "Bather Fixing Her Hair," Degas' "Little Dancer," and Matisse's "Serf," "Reclining Nude," and "Serpentine." He compares Renoir's 1916 bronze Venus to the ancient one and Henry Moore's abstract "Reclining Woman" with previous examples. Mr. Myers maintains that modern artists are the prophets and moralists of society and their return to abstract ideas and figures are a balance of otherworldliness and worldliness, with Venus and the dead king coalescing. He concludes the program showing two abstract metal sculptures: Giacometti's "Man Pointing" and Ibram Lassaw's "Planets."

Dr. George Carter, professor of geography at the Johns Hopkins University, discusses elephant drawings as the key to the controversy of whether or not the American Indian civilization was influenced by European and Asian civilizations. Examples of elephant drawings made between 1500 B.C. and 500 A.D. in such diverse places as England, Ceylon, China, and Siam are often stylized or abstract whether the animal is native to the country or not. Similarly, a Greek coin displays an elephant likeness. However, during this period in Central America, Mayan statues, carvings, and writings and Aztec art and rituals distinctly show elephants even though there were none to copy nor anyone to describe them. Thus Dr. Carter maintains that Asian peoples must have brought drawings or statues of elephants to Central America over 2,000 years ago. The proof he offers for this theory is the Thor Heyerdahl transpacific raft voyage (proving such a trip could be made in a primitive vessel), identical temples 12,000 miles apart in Mexico and Cambodia, identical Sumatran and Mexican folding bark religious books, identical fishhooks from Easter Island and California, physical attributes of Central American and Asian Indians (photos show one of each, both playing nose flutes), and plants appearing in lands too far from original sources to have blown there. In closing, Lynn Poole shows additional examples of elephant artwork found in the United States.

This program considers the stories of love, courtship, and marriage in Appalachia as told through folk songs. Virgil Sturgill sings "Sourwood Mountain," accompanied by Mike Seeger on banjo. Elwil Hughes strums a mountain dulcimer as she sings "Lonesome Dove." In the duet "Mountaineer's Courtship" with Hughes, Seeger plays the autoharp and Sturgill comments on the lyrics. Seeger sings "The Wedding Dress" with banjo accompaniment and "Aggravate Your Soul" with guitar. Sturgill plucks a mountain dulcimer and sings "Devilish Mary." Seeger, on guitar, sings "Everyday Dirt." The ensemble concludes with "Wish I Was Single Again" and "Careless Love."