JF Ptak Science Books – A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

JF Ptak Science Books

A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

Contact johnfptak at gmail dot com

The History of Sleep: Tough Going in the Trenches, 1916

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“What hath night to do with sleep?” John Milton, Paradise Lost

Sleeping during front line duty in WWI was a mixed affair, at best–there could be weeks of tedium (even in the Spring) while a soldier’s front line tour extended over four to eight weeks (with about the same amount of time in the other lines of battlefield defense), followed by days or weeks of firing and fighting. In the bad times sleep would come when available, and convenience didn’t necessarily have anything to do with it, as we can tell in this photograph. Here the soldiers are crammed into any little indentation in the walls of the trench, any little bit that would keep them from being underfoot should anyone need to walk the trench line. It was not only the sound of battle and the struggle to stay alive–sleep was assaulted by many other things, even in times of the space-in-between-the-fighting: there was a significant rat issue, there was a potential cascading problem of what to do with human waste, bugs, the wet, the cold (and the wet and the cold), the heat, stench, humidity, and then just general discomfort.

Needless to say that in general, sleep was difficult on the front.

Source: Imperial War Museum. “Soldiers of ‘A’ Company, 11th Battalion, the Cheshire Regiment, occupy a captured German trench. Q 3990 This photograph shows an infantryman on sentry duty, whilst some of his comrades snatch a few moments of sleep behind him. They are in what was previously a German trench at Ovillers-la-Boisselle on the Somme, July 1916.”

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World War I
A Simpler Explanation in a Complicated Print
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I have long enjoyed Marie Boas (Hall) The Scientific Renaissance , 1450-1630–it is a very fine book that covers a lot of ground and material and time. Skimming through it tonight I came upon an image of the wood engraving of the great pump designed by Jacques Besson (1540? – 1573, an inventor, mathematician, philosopher) that appeared in his Theatres des Instruments, published in 1579. Interestingly Boas writes in the description of the fabulous device that “the elaborate machinery seems unnecessarily complicated for the simple domestic task shown, and suggests the imaginative elements in many Renaissance engineering books”. Which is true–except that I think there is another, simpler explanation for the “simple task” shown: it is what fit on the page. The image is already filled with the machine, with little space left for anything else. So, the simple display; the intention of the illustration is to show the mechanism, and not the result of its employment. I think. Far be it for me to criticize Boas, which I don’t think I’m actually doing–I just think that the display of such a simple result was an outcome of paper and ink.

(http://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/HST/Besson/besson-toc.htm)

Other excellent works by Boas Hall include:

Robert Boyle and Seventeenth-Century Chemistry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958.

Robert Boyle on Natural Philosophy: An Essay, with Selections from His Writings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965.

Nature and Nature’s Laws. Documents of the Scientific Revolution. London: Macmillan, 1970.

The Mechanical Philosophy. New York: Arno Press, 1981.
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Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Technology, History of
WWI Project: German Poster Painters, 1917

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This is an unusual image, a behind-the-scenes, behind-the-lines, everyday domestic front scene, something showing the war going on in the trenches (so to speak) at home. It shows two civilians working on popular posters for movies (“Die Silbernen Kugeln…”) and fund raising (“Die Deutsche Kriegs Anlehe”) for the German army. The image was found in the May 1917 issue of the (Leipzig) Illustrirte Zeitung:

No doubt there was a lot of this sort of activity going on, in wartime and not, but in my 30 years of travels through the history of illustration I don’t often see these images.

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World War I
Two Dimensions to Three and Back Again (1588)–a Bit of an Optical Illusion

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Luis Collado de Lebrija, the Royal Engineer of the Army of Lombardy and Piedmont, wrote his superior artillery manual Practica Manuale di Artegliteria and published it in 1588–he was one of the five leading military engineers of the late 16th century. The image below is an interesting one from that book, showing a large cannon bombarding what possibly might be a Turkish city. In any event, the trajectory of the very large shell seems to me to be a little odd at first, looking as though it was shot high and straight up, coming down to the right; but looking at it again, the trajectory is back on track going forward 1000 meters than going up and down. And then, again, another look, and the perspective seems flat again, and back and forth it seems to go if you let it.

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Militaria — Perception — Perspective — Technology, History of
Kingdom of Dust: Dancing Dust and Vibrating Membranes

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[Source, “Dust and Sand Figures on Membranes”, T. O’Connor Sloane, Ph.D, Scientific American, 1 April 1893, p 202.]

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Universal Spelling Board, 1889

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I think that this would be fairly straightforward if not a little time-consuming to fabricate–of course the beautiful weariness and worn factor of such a thing would not survive a new version of itself:

[Found in The American Stationer, 17 October 1889, page 980.]

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Technology, History of
Seeing Mathematics as it “Happens”
JF Ptak Science Books (an earlier post from 2008 expanded and corrected somewhat)

I wanted to return and add a bit to an earlier notice concerning a series of drawings that I found utterly fascinating—what seems to be among the earliest illustrations of the active formation representing visualized human thought. (I know that this titling is ungainly, but it seems to be the least inelegant solutions to stating the idea of what the images represent.) In 1873 Miss H. R. Hudson wrote an article¹ on her visualization of numbers–and later and more famously Sir Francis Galton approached this same issue first in an article in Nature² that included a number of fascinating presentations of the “suspended” numbers. Working further through this thesis he greatly expanded it, resulting in a 26-page chapter called “Number-Forms” in his book Inquiries into Human Faculties and its Development ³(1883, with a second edition appearing in 1909). Galton includes another 71 images of visualizing arithmetic, plus others on general images of mental images of numbers and letters—there is also a small but beautiful section on associations between colors and numbers and letters. (These are all depicted in the first four images on this page.)

G.T.W. Patrick (a professor of philosophy at the state university of Iowa) published one of the earliest papers in response to Galton’s work. In “Number-forms”⁴, published in the Popular Science Monthly in 1893, Patrick addresses and expands Galton’s work somewhat, including another eighteen wonderful illustrations of similar images.

But the path back to Galton is not quite a straight one. Galton was initially concerned with imaging of numbers and numbers forms while people were performing mental calculations. Patrick on the other hand asked his subjects if they had associative images in their mind of numbers—formally, he asked them if the number series of 1-9 presented itself in a visual, representative way in their minds. In the second and third parts of his three-part inquiry, he asked the same question about letters and the alphabet, and then, thirdly, if they perceived any sense of color from letters and numbers, and what then what those exact relationships were.

It is interesting that in the studies of Galton and Patrick that over time in each of the subjects tested that (in Galton’s words) the images were “absolutely unchangeable except for a gradual development of complexity”. Since I (like Galton, which is probably the only time I will ever be able to associate myself with this man
in terms of familiar traits) have no such images in my head when I think about mathematics or numbers or letter or words in general, it is remarkable to me on the human scale that people who have these associations would have the same ones time after time. A movable feast, as it were. Of course it would make sense that this reference system would be constant—but for someone that doesn’t ‘see” these images at all, the fact that they are so flowing and lucid and unchanging is simply difficult for me to imagine. (In a few weeks I’ll return to this issue, looking at how some prodigiously gifted people “see” with their special attributes.)

Images below are from the Patrick paper:

Notes:

“The nine digits will ascend in a straight line before my mind’s eye, and the larger numbers will slant off at a queer angle”, Atlantic Monthly for February, 1873.

Nature, January 15, 1880. Follow the first link to a full reprint of the paper and a short article on it that appeared in this blog.

Full text of Galton’s work appears at Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11562/11562-h/11562-h.htm#1noshow

Popular Science Monthly, February 1893 (pp 504-515). Full text of the article by Patrick here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_42/February_1893/Number_Forms I should also note that Patrick wrote a very early paper on the psychology of football in 1903, full article here: https://archive.org/stream/jstor-1412309/1412309_djvu.txt
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Anticipation, History of — Information, Quantitative Display of
In the Fool’s Cap, a Map

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I’ve known about this famous map/curiosity by Jean de Gourmont (ca. 1570) for some time, though I never seem to meet it out there in the world very often. Yesterday though I discovered that there was a fine 19th century reproduction of it in the studio, and so I thought I had a closer look now that I had a good copy in my hands.

And then when I looked the map up I found a number of good descriptions of it that pretty much took care of its description and interpretation. The baseline description is that it is mostly an allegory on the pursuit of knowledge, and of knowing, and thinking about the nature of knowledge–my read is that in the end, only a fool would think that the more they knew the less there was to know. The famous Ortelius map (“Typus Orbis Terrarum”) in the face of the jester could represent a gridwork of what we think we know, though across the top of the image is the dictum from Socrates, “Know Thyself” (“Congnois toy [‘toi’] toy-meme”), which prepares us for what might be the dry hole in our soul if we spend too much time in the pursuit of knowledge of the world.

One of the most interesting reads on this image can be found in Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, by Andrew Gordon, Bernhard Klein, where the authors discus the mind-as-a-map, and bring into play a great passage from the immortal great-book-that-is-semi-unreadable Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton. They refer to the great map set in the motley, order set against “the spirit of disorder” and “the enemy of boundaries”, with Burton declaring on the essence of folly.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas
The Big Stuff–Heavy Numbers, 1939

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Mercedes-Buromaschinen* evidently came into existence in 1906 in Berlin before moving on to other cities, including expanding into Zagreb and Beograb, Yugoslavia, which published this ad. It was big and red and covered a half-page in the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig), where it appeared in print two months before the invasion of Poland in 1939. I I just wanted to share its redness, and of course the massive accounting machine listed first in the ad.

*Initially I thought that this was a generic/export name for Burroughs Adding Machines, but I was wrong. Reader Frank Wilhoit (thanks!) pointed out that the “bur” part of “buromaschinen” is simply the word “office”–so, office machines. Now that I look at it the accounting machine doesn’t look like the Burroughs machine as I thought it did–ditto for the calculator.

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A Rare Document on the Jinan Massacre, May 1928

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I just located a rare and emotional document on the Japanese massacre of Chinese soldiers and civilians at Jinan (“Tsinan”), Shandong (“Shantung”), China. It forms part of the long pre-Sino-Japanese War (of 1937-1945), and though it is often described as an “incident” it was far more than that, as more than 6,000 soldiers of the National Revolutionary Army of China and civilians were killed, with many thousands more wounded, done in by the Imperial Army of Japan, which suffered only 200 casualties (most of these being wounded).

I’ve scanned as much of this document as I could without damaging the pamphlet and reproduced those three pages below–it isn’t quite half of the document, but it does give the main thrust of it, and certainly displays the writer’s outrage and frustration. Brutish Massacre by Japanese Forces at Tsinan was written by Y.S. Chen of the National Labor University, Kiangwan, Shanghai, China, and was printed from typed sheets via an offset process of some sort and published not later than June 28, 1928. My copy is deaccessioned from the Library of Congress, where the documents division received it on June 28, 1928, which means it was probably printed within weeks of the massacre. There is only one copy of this document located in WorldCat (at Northwestern University), and there are no hits on the title in various online searches.

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Neo-Proto-Absurdist Art (?) in “Nature”, 1874

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I found this delightful article while browsing volume 11 of Nature (1874)–J.D. Everett’s On Mirage. It actually appears in parts over two issues (November 19 and 26) and I’ve got to admit that I was attracted to it from the illustrations–the wood engraving appearing in the concluding part having neo-proto-Absurdist qualities six decades before that would become recognized as an art form. I’ve included the image below from my copy as it is very sharp and crisp–I’ve also included links for the texts from the University of Wisconsin (though their scans of the images are not quite so fresh as the one below).

[Everett (1831-1904) was a distinguished physicist and is perhaps best remembered for his translation of a wonderful textbook by Augustin Privat-Deschanel, Elementary Treatise on Natural Philosophy: Physics (1882), a book I’ve found useful over time (along with Ganot’s Physics) for identifying period scientific instruments as both books are absolutely filled with images.]

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Information, Quantitative Display of