JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post [Part of a series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.]
There’s something captivating about found bits of ephemera that ask you to fill something out–it can be a questionnaire, or an application for being a floor salesperson or a radio technician, or a form for a watchman on a destroyer, or a sign-up for joining the Hitler Youth or the Women’s section of the K.K.K. They can be amusing, benign, and even potentially deadly. The one I found today is much more mundane and in that way offers more subtle challenges and provocations–it is a simple form for attending a MIT 1953 computer conference on the applications of the digital computer.
Of course 1953 is pretty early in the history of modern digital computers, sort of like post-incunabula to the opening years of the 1940s–till, there’s not much to fill out on the form.
There’s actually more to be filled out (and with more exacting questions) to join the “Junior G-Men of America” (“a Juvenile Police Organization”) club. This 1936 document was meant for kids, or advanced kids, and asked some pretty creepy and too-detail questions of its potential members, including whether or not the applicant would expect to be paid if injured in the line of duty. (The Junior G-Men organization became very popular, with all manner of toys and badges and guns and so on, with radio series and movie spin-offs, though it seems not have made it much into the 1950s.)