JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is just a lovely little mechanical drawing that I found in the pages of the 5 May 1880 issue of the Comptes Rendus de l’Academie des Sciences and I decided to share it. The Comptes Rendus is a very old workaday maintstay in my job, and I have become very familiar with it over the years, and in its great heyday in the 19th c it published all manner of scientific events over many disciplines, and at the highest level for each field. I’ve never really paid too much attention though to the illustrations in the journal as general “art” as I have done with other journals (like the Annalen der Physik)…why, I don’t know. In any event I was working on a two-part Pasteur paper in this volume and noticed this elevation of a “siphon” for Napoleon’s canal Saint-Martin, which is just about at the center of old Paris. 

The structure does look a little like a headphone, and as pretty as this is, it subject matter wasn’t. This is a sewer line that would allow the sewage and etc. to flow over the canal along the arch of a bridge…which makes this an interesting problem. I mean, it is a necessary and important thing, dealing with waste, and that is exactly what this pipe was all about.