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

  • Serpentinite of the Lizard and the Unintentional Absurd

    JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post   The Unintentional Absurd series

    I was checking out what turned out to be a significant article on solitons (“Called “On Waves”) by Lord Rayleigh in the April, 1876 issue of the Philosophical Magazine when I bumped into a neighboring article1 from the month before with this beautiful found-Abstract art illustration. It is headed with this gorgeous title, “On the Serpentinite2 of the Lizard…”, and written by T.H. Rowney, who addressed its unusual appearance, citing its “organic appearance”, “fossil corals”, and “worm casts”. The geological issues aside, I found the complexity (there are a number of different images contained in this one engraving), color, and the found-design to be all very captivating, especially appearing four decades before the invention of the Absurd.  

    Serpent stone

     

    Notes:

    1.  Philosophical Magazine, 5th Series, New Series I, March, 1876.

    2.  “Serpentinite is a rock composed of one or more serpentine group minerals. Minerals in this group are formed by serpentinization, a hydration and metamorphic transformation of ultramafic rock from the Earth’s mantle. Themineral alteration is particularly important at the sea floor at tectonic plate boundaries. Serpentinization is a geological low-temperature metamorphic process involving heat and water in which low-silica mafic and ultramafic rocks are oxidized (anaerobic oxidation of Fe2+ by the protons of water leading to the formation of H2) and hydrolyzed with water into serpentinite.”–Wikipedia

     

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  • A Miniature, Individualized Velodrome (1903)

    JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post      Daily Dose from Dr. Odd

    I couldn’t resist a simple post of this image of solo-velodrome–a curious bit for one rider held by one person.  The “held” part is certainly unusual and very ambitious, the thing being designed for high amusement–it appeared as part of a show at the Dresden Victoria Salon,  and was published in the August 8, 1903 issue of Scientific American.  

    Scientific American bicycle living cycle whirl

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  • What They Wore, and Didn’t Wear (1917)

    JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

    There are a half-dozen posts on this blog showing what soldiers wore and carried with them into battle, mostly in WWI and WWII.  This addition to that series is more along the lines of what they didn’t carry, though someone at some point was thinking about this sort of protective gear for the fighting French.  The only thing that really made it out alive from this drawing was the helmet, and the puttes. 

    What they wore--didn't wear

    [Source: Scientific American Supplement #2166, July 7, 1917.]

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  • Horse Stall Internment “Camps”, 1916

    JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2594

    Internment Camps POW

    A year and a half into WWI there appeared in the Illustrated London News1 these two pictures of a an internment camp in which British POWs were held. The photos are of a wooden model made by a former internee, Francis Gribble, who also wrote an account of the time he spent there2. The “dormitories” at the German city of Ruhleben had previously been horse stalls, 6’x8′ enclosures which slept and kept five or six soldiers. I include info on Gribble below, as well as a link for the full text of Gribble’s account.

    It seems as though horse stalls were a common convert for concentration and internment camps of one form or another, including here in the U.S. when 120,000 Japanese were rounded up, shipped off, and jailed during WWII. One of the first stops for the “internees” was Tanofran3 race track in San Bruno, San Francisco, California, where Japanese immigrants and Japanese-American U.S. citizens alike were kept in horse stalls and barracks before being shipped off to more permanent facilities out in the middle of nowhere.   

    There’s something about the “race” in “racetrack” that seems very peculiarly ironic.

     

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  • Structures Thankfully Unbuilt–the Lincoln Memorial

    JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2595

    John Russell Pope (1874-1937) was a “classical” Neo-classical architect whose designs had a profound impact on the way that people experience the U.S. past in Washington, D.C.  He created the Jefferson Memorial, the National Gallery  of Art, and the National Archives, buildings which have that particular beautiful geometry of Roman/Greek essence.  The designs that Pope submitted for the Lincoln Memorial, however, are quite a different story. They were magnificent, and gigantic, and in some ways very appropriate given the enormous nature of Lincoln.

    The plans were far too large–and unlike the other buildings, this one would have made Lincoln far more removed, and unreachable, than is worth the nature of the man. For example, in one of his proposals (just below) we see a Pantheon-like structure sitting at the top of stairs with probably 150 steps (if not more).  It is true that there are a lot of steps at Henry Bacon’s Lincoln Memorial today–58 to the pavement) but that seems just about right, as they give a little time for the statue of Lincoln to reverse-emerge at the top of the stairs.  Doubling the number of steps would be bad; nearly tripling them would have been terrible.  

    Lincoln Memorial big steps

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  • Measuring Things With 400′-Tall Cars (1912)

    JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post    Part of the series Graphical Display of Quantitative Data

    There is a lot of interesting material in this volume of the Scientific American Supplement for 1912. Initially I looked in it for a fantastic story about geoengineering and the flooding of the Sahara (a post is forthcoming), and in that browse I bumped into the following graphical/representative display of U.S. automotive production (in the article “Growth of the Automobile Industry”):

    Scientific American Gigantic car 1912

     

    I’ve featured other such images on this blog–measuring things in terms pyramids, Trinity Churches, gigantic nails, enormous bread, Gargantuan soldiers, that sort–but nothing along the lines of these mammoth cars. The largest of the lot represents the overall auto production in the U.S. for 1911 (which was 300,000) which had they been made into one massive buggy would have been 442′ tall, and an unstated but commensurate length (which I guess would have been on the order of 2500′ long.  The other bits are self-explanatory regarding imports and exports of autos in 1911, the data is there but the interpretation leaves it all a bit wanting.  In any event I really just wanted to capture the Big Car.  

     

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  • Cruises in Skyland! Uncle Sam, the Canal, and the Zeppelin (1912)

    JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

     

    Scientific American Zeppelin Uncle Sam single

    $650 doesn’t sound like much in today’s dollars, but in 1912 that 650 would be about equal to the average salary of a factory worker1; so, if you calculated the trip of 1/3 year at the average salary today of, say, $45,000, it feels more expensive.  It doesn’t translate all that well, really, but it does give a good idea of what that 650 meant in 1912.  

    Uncle Sam is taking a breather from his work on the Panama Canal, which is clearly under construction in the vignette at bottom left and something that wouldn’t open for business for another two years.  The Hamburg American Line was definitely associating the grand undertaking in Panama with its around-the-world cruise offering–the Panama engineering feat was certainly considered one of the wonders of the world.  The zeppelin flights were extraordinary in themselves, what with making transatlantic flights with 400-800 people (depending on the airship) who received three square meals a day, could rent their own rugs, go to the barber and to the ship’s library, and listen to the airship’s band.

    The bottom line here is that this is a great design, and as advertisements go it seems to be very effective.  

    (See http://www.gjenvick.com/PassengerLists/Hamburg-AmericanLine/Westbound/1912-11-01-PassengerList-PresidentLincoln.html#axzz43r2FHFKT for various passenger lists, activities, menus, and the like.) 

     

    Scientific American Zeppelin Uncle Sam

     

    Notes:

    1.  See an earlier posst, https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/09/the-overworked-working-poor-of-1914-women-and-children-and-what-they-didnt-get-paid.html

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  • Big-Thinking Tech: Creating a Sea of the Sahara

    JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2597

    It is not often one reads about creating an inland sea with trade routes between “Algeria and French West Africa”, It is part of the creation of a vast Saharan sea, half of the size of the Mediterranean.  I read about this version of the plan in an article by G.A. Thompson in an issue of the Scientific American for 19121, though as it turns out it was not the first time someone published on this fantastical idea. In this version,  Prof. Etchegoven proposes a 50-mile long canal that would be built from the Mediterranean inland to a suitably low place and them well, the desert would get, well,  filled up.  The reasoning here was to make Africa accessible those with the money to take advantage of the situation, to establish trade routes, make Christianity more available to whomever it might confront,  and also for “enhancing the value as a place for colonization by Europeans”. In reviewing the proposal Mr. Thompson didn’t see much danger or blowback or environmental issues–it was an outlook that was taken to task about a month later in a review in Nature2, which found his critique rather too-rosy.  

    Sahasa Sea

    In any event there have been plans like this reaching back at least into the late 19th century, a good example being The Flooding of the Sahara: An Account of the Proposed Plan for Opening ... written by Donald Mackenzie and published in 18773. Another significant proposal was made by Francoise Elie Roudaire (1836-1885) in his “An Inland Sea in Algiers”, printed in 1874,m which was an idea he shared with Ferdinand de Lesseps. Actually it was the Roudaire work that seems to have been the basis for some of Jules Verne’s last published work, L’Invasion de la Mer (1905) which took place in the 1930’s and which made a very similar proposal for the Sahara–except in this version nature intervenes with an enormous earthquake, pretty much accomplishing immediately what it would have taken humans many decades to do.  In any event, this is a good example of the Big Techno Think, though it wasn’t necessarily a very good idea.

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  • Hearing D-Day: the Earliest Radio Broadcasts

    JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

    I’ve just listened to this series of radio broadcasts and found them absolutely fascinating. In the first broadcast we find that the earliest information was based on a 12:30 Berlin broadcast, followed by a 1:00 am news headline which stated “the long waited British American invasion has begun…”–thus the unlikely scenario in which the first announcements of the invasion were made by Germany. This first recording–the first CBS report–aired at about 3:00 am and recounted the events, the radio host Bob Trout doing a superb job in keeping the story straight and the listeners informed.  At the earliest stages the reports from Germany were not believed as they could well have been the expected diversionary feints, done so to draw out Partisan fighters who were in hiding.  They weren’t.

    3am is just about the time that Franklin Roosevelt was woken up–at that point, the president sprang into action, as did the rest of the White House, with the Map Room instantly abuzz. 

    All broadcasts are from youtube.  

     

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  • Myopia and Disease of “America First!”

    JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2598

    America first one046This document, America First!…Confidential Statement, is a statement on this ostensibly-patriotic but actually loathsome and bilious hate organization–just goes to show that simply using “America” and exclamation marks does not make a patriotic organization.  If you chose to read the document you’ll see the a bit of the history of the organization, which was founded in 1934.  It was pretty much over by 1938 though there were some continued publications past the beginning of WWII. True was arrested in July 1942 on sedition charges, which was more or less the end of the organization and then, after a few years, the end of True himself. He was a vicious opponent of President Franklin Roosevelt, and an absolutely disgusting anti-Semite.

    In this piece, seen at left and below and reproduced in full, True attacks Roosevelt as a Communist/Socialist controlled by exterior forces bent on destroying the U.S. economic system. There was no appearance of his hatred of the Jews in this document, though that came in other venues, not the least of which was looking into Roosevelt’s “Jewish ancestry”. (This ideas was used by other people as well, as with the traitorous Ezra Pound when he made his racist/anti-Semitic radio broadcasts from Italy during the war, denouncing “Franklin Delano Jewsevelt” in addition to much more.)

    In the first two paragraphs alone there was a deluge of logical blasphemy such as is difficult to imagine.  For example, the principal of the “deluge of administrative propaganda” was no less than the “demoralization and control of American industry”, led by Roosevelt as a “controlled socialist” whose “ultimate intention is the destruction of the most successful economic and financial structure the world has ever known”. Roosevelt was intent on spreading the “poison” of Fabian socialism, seeding administrative operatives in newspapers, schools, and industry, to “pave the way for Socialist Dictatorship, under which the international combine would own or control everything in the United States”. This was to be done by FDR’s creation of agencies to control access to information: the NRA, control of wood pulp industry, control advertising via the Pure Food and Drug Act, controlling radio via the FCC, and of course implanting secret agent reporters in news agencies.  

    And so on and on this document drags its reader–even though it is only four pages long, it makes my eyes and brain feel as though it is forty.  

    True would be dead by 1946 (buried in an unmarked grave in the beautiful Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown D.C., home to some magnificent Tulip Poplars), two years after his trial ended in a mistrial due to the death of the judge. (It is possible that this document was an exhibit in the trial.) It turns out that America First! was replaced by a friend of the organization, two-star general George van Horn Moseley, who offered up his own fanatical and vicious “Americans for Constitutional Action”, a vomitous organization hell bent on genetic and ethnic cleansing to rid the U.S. of immigrants and the Jews (who Moseley described as a “syphilis”).  

    I bring this up now because of various noises I hear in the presidential campaigns which are leveraging fear and distrust and hate more so than in any campaign I have seen in my lifetime. The language may be different, but the sentiments are very closely related.  

     

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  • Two Compasses by Paul Revere, 1772

    JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

    People no doubt remember Raul Revere (1735-1818) as a patriot, silversmith, and illustrator of the iconic image of the Boston Massacre. Lesser known is his work in book, pamphlet, and magazine illustration–and what I am concerned with presently are a few of his gloriously-country-sympatico technical works.  A fine example is this woodcut from the cover of Samuel Stearns’ The North-American Almanac for 1772–a very strong mariner’s compass:

    Revere compass[Image source: the American Antiquarian Society, here: http://www.americanantiquarian.org/Inventories/Revere/illustrations.htm]

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