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

Beauty and Confusion in the Details: Grenade-Throwing and Rifle Practice (1918)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Here are another couple of enjoyable, interesting, and somewhat endlessly mine-able images from an archive of WWI news photo service agencies, all of which are from 1918. Photographs were made by pools of photographers working for several different photographic news agencies. The content of the images were generally secured and approved by the Committee for Public Information (CPI), which came into existence by executive order under President Woodrow Wilson on April 13, 1917, and which was charged with the task of wining the hearts and minds of the people of the U.S., to gain public support for the war and for American participation.

The way that many newspapers obtained the war images that they published in their papers was via a semi-centralized pool of war images. The newspaper would request, say, a photo of German prisoners, and would contact one of these photographic agencies—for example, say, the Central News Photo Service of 26-28 Beaver Street, NYC—and purchase the rights for republication, and then print it in the newspaper along with the story. In almost every case the photo would be accompanied by a caption mimeographed onto an attached piece of cheap paper, or have the information stamped on the reverse.

I’d like to share the following two images of U.S. soldiers practicing their trade–the top features grenade throwing, and the bottom shows a pit at a rifle range. The Doughboys heaving the grenades were doing so according to plans and design, and in spite of its apparent awkwardness, must’ve worked well. The detail image is challenging for sure, the soldiers seeming to be just about entangled among themselves.

asns

The scene in the rifle pit seems more orderly if not somewhat more distressed:

And as usual with these large group photos, there are many smaller fine images waiting in the detail:

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Photography — World War I
Art & Artists as Wartime Magi–Making Things Disappear, 1918.
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Its a little difficult to think of Ellsworth Kelly, Jacques Villon, Grant Wood, Laslo Moholy-Nagy and Thomas Hart Benton as painters-for-war. But its true, and true for many of hundreds of other artists in the 1915-1918 era. Its not as though they were in the trenches gunning down the enemy or lobbing hand grenades into the swirling gun smoke. They werecamofleurs, camouflage¹ experts, artists employed as magicians, Wartime Magi, employed/drafted to make ships and such disappear.

Ever since it was (sort of) first noticed in 1915 that designs odd to the environment, stark geometric patterns and such, were capable of fooling the eye, people with design capacity were pressed into service, rendering offensive and defensive instruments of war optically semi-impervious with variations of the then-five-year-old modern nonrepresentational art. That must’ve been a very odd position to wake up to every morning.

Of course the idea of camouflage in the animal world is probably 250 million years old–animals and insects have been blending into their environment for eons, and I’m sure too that early hominids did their fair share of walking behind brush. But the idea of hiding great amalgamations of very heavy metal with paint is really quite modern.

In this photograph, the camouflage is more a more futuristic conception of art than the abstract and cubist approaches that were taken during the war, this looking more like assemblages of found material more than anything else. And, according to the text that accompanied the photograph (which comes from 1918, from the Underwood & Underwood news photo service agency), the camouflage–empty sandbags thrown on a barbed wire fence) successfully concealed a gunnery emplacement for months on end.

Notes

1. A fine bibliography on camouflage appears here, at Leonardo Online.

The definition of “camouflage” from the Oxford English Dictionary shows that it is a young word, in English:

(n) The disguising of any objects used in war, such as camps, guns, ships, by means of paint, smoke-screens, shrubbery, etc., in such a way as to conceal it from the enemy; also, the disguise used in this way; freq. attrib.

1917    Daily Mail 25 May 4/4   The act of hiding anything from your enemy is termed ‘camouflage’.

1917    Daily Mail 16 July 5/3   The King paid a visit to what is called a camouflage factory.

1922    C. E. Montague Disenchantment viii. 108   A French aerodrome across which the French camouflage painters had simply painted a great white high-road.
·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Art — Photography — World War I
Rare Document on Straggling Surrenders of Japanese Forces, September 23, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Even though WWII in the Pacific was ended on 15 August 1945 (or at least the surrender was initiated then) and the surrender papers signed aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945 (“VJ Day”), there were many elements of the Japanese Army that took weeks and in some cases months to actually lay down their weapons and submit. (There are some rare cases of individual soldiers lasting for years and decades past the surrender, refusing to give in, living their lives in remote places.)

This document–“Headquarter / United States Army Forces Western Pacific / Public Relations Office / General Release – 47, APO 707, 23 September 1945”–released by the propaganda/public relations office of the U.S. Army Force Western Pacific, details some of the process of large forces of Japanese forces in the Philippines coming in to surrender. The rare, short document is reproduced in full, here.

Stating that 31,000 Japanese soldiers (and 17 generals) had already been placed under guard in Luzon’s POW camps, the three-paragraph document ends with this interesting statement:

“No date has yet been set when it is expected all the Japanese in the hills will be in our hands.”

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

World War II
Found Portraits: Camouflage at the Front, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Just a few days ago I made a post here about camouflage (“Art & Artists as Wartime Magi–Making Things Disappear, 1918”, and now comes another, a WWI news service photo, “Camouflage Shop at the Front”. Camouflage imagery has been relatively scarce in my experience with WWI photographs, particularly one like this, with women workers at the front (“A lattice work finished and rolled up in the hangars, 6/17/18”), shown at shift change or lunch break. Women were heavily involved in the production of camouflage during WWI (as with the U.S. Women’s reserve Camouflage Corps), with some netting and uniform designs being produced in domestic settings and then sent to the front.

What draws me in here, in this photo, is the woman at front-left: she seems tallish and ramrod-straight…and I like the long swing of her left arm. I imagine that it is lunch since there are no shadows to speak of and it was obviously sunny, and at some point of the 17th day of June 1918, these workers were on their way to a break. (I suspect that the date wasn’t very accurate for when the photo was made, as everyone here is wearing pretty heavy clothing for June, somewhere in north-eastern France or Belgium. They were constructing camouflage made of rags and natural bits, piles of which you can see in the detail. The “hangars” are small ganged huts covered by camouflage netting.

In any event I share this as I don’t easily see another example online quite like this one.

Collage of the full image and detail:

The full image, along with the suggested caption to be used on publication (supplied by the photo news agency):

The hangars:

Camouflage bits:

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Photography — Women, History of — World War I
A World of Untranslatable Colors and no Color Vocabulary (1638)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2837

There was something that caught my eye as I paged through an online copy of Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales (1638), something beside this work being about the first English language trip to the Moon. There were other earlier trips made to our friendly neighbor before Godwin (whose work was published posthumously) like the late Greek Lucian first century ACE). And there were contemporaries who wrote in other languages, like Cyrano and Kepler (Somnium, 1638); Aphra Behn’s farce (The Emperor of the Moon 1687) and Margaret Cavendish (The Blazing World 1688); and John Wilkins (The Diversity of a World in the Moon, (1638) to name a few…and then there’s the wide world of the plurality of worlds, like the wonderful Fontenelle…and of course later there were trips to the Moon made by Verne and Wells, and so on.

Godwin’s book is short and quick, deceptively simple but not so—there’s a bit of introduction where we are shown a little bit of the influence of Galileo’s Sidereus (1610), and the frontis depicts the flying machine by which the intrepid traveler, Senior Gonsales flies off to the Moon. This is a craft powered by a sort of wild swan, which struggles mightily to free itself of the Gilbertian great magnet, but once free of that, the “flight” took twelve days. Our traveler may also be the first one to get to the Moon by accident: he flees a fiasco in which he kills someone in a duel winds up in St. Helena, and then has a problem with the British fleet off Tenerife, from which he flies off again with his bird machine…he hadn’t intended to go to the Moon, but that is what happened.

Here’s what I found so interesting: once he gets there, Gonsales tries to describe clothing and—even more fascinating—he tries to find words for colors that he has never seen before. Marvelous.

“[T]heir colour and countenance [was] most pleasing, and their habit such, as I know not how to expresse. For neither did I see any kind of Cloth, Silke, or other stuffe to resemble the matter of that whereof their clothes were made; neither … can I devise how to describe the colour of them ….

It was neither blacke, nor white, yellow, nor redde, greene nor blew, nor any colour composed of these.

But if you ask me what it was then; I must tell you, it was a colour never seen in our earthly world, and therefore neither to be described unto us by any, nor to be conceived…. Only this I can say of it, that it was the most glorious and delightfull, that can possibly be….”

And that, I’m afraid, is where I left off. As I’ve said elsewhere on this blog I only give each one of these post an hour’s time maximum, and after my fumbling around in the Godwin, I’m about at my limit. This much-studied book deserves a lot more than what I can give it here in 700 words, but this will have to do for now, for me. The bottom line here is that I don’t think that I’ve ever read anything by anyone before, say, 1920 and the real birth of the sci fi genre (with which I’m am not very familiar) that tries to describe a color that was without description.

[Image source: Wikipedia Commons.]

Oh, before I go, Godwin also introduces us to the imaginary language of the Lunarians, which he describes as being beautiful, and very expansive, as the vocabulary can change given its tone. (He also notes that only one language is spoken on the Moon, which he credits as an advantage over the terrestrial polyglot.) This is also part of a long history of imaginary languages in early literature (for example, More’s Utopia and Rabelais’ Gargantua…) The Lunar world is a Utopia, and evidently part of that blissful state is maintained by trading out ill-behaved Lunarian children with well-behaved children of Earth.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Aviation & flight — Strange Things in the Sky — Travel
An Early Design for a Convict-Powered Revolving Turret on a Ship (1871)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2878

This image (from the Illustrated London News for April 26 1871) shows a plan of the top floor of a revolving battery designed by M. Baltard in 1831. This idea is probably ancient, though it really only had major technological legs by the 19th century. Even though Baltard is given some fair credit for the modern rediscovery of the revolving turret–and in this short article he is given premier status–there were earlier engineers at work before him. For example, in the earliest part of the 19th century Col. John Stevens designed a saucer-shaped floating battery that was supposed to be able to fire in any direction; T.R. Timbly–slightly after Baltard–applied in the U.S. Patent Office in June 1843 for a device he called a “metallic revolving fort”. Then came the great John Ericsson–very long on accomplishments but very short now in modern memory, he is also one of those memorialized men in marble in DC for whom people have almost no modern recognition–who in 1854 produced an “impregnable battery revolving cupola”, which led to his great innovation on the Monitor. And as we recall, the Monitor’s defeat of the Merrimack in Hampton Roads in 1861 spelled the coming end of the wooden ship of the line–metal ships with mounted revolving turrets fore and aft would prove entirely too far superior to the 19th century wooden ship.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Militaria — Technology, History of
A Double Dose of Dirigibles

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

There’s nothing quite so satisfying as seeing a representation of quantitative data where the graphical displays are flying. “One Dreadnought Buys 52 Dirigibles and 235 Aeroplanes” is a full-page diagram appearing in the 3 June 1911 issue of the Illustrated London News , making a very strong point that in the new age of aviation the 2 million pounds it would cost to produce one battleship could also (or rather) buy a lot of aircraft.

You may notice that the ship is flying a U.S. flag–this is because the graphic appear a month or so earlier in the U. S. publication Scientific American, and the ILN is simply reprinting the info In any event the image enumerates U.S. and international aircraft, making for a lovely representation of a broad range of airplanes filling up the same sky.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Aviation & flight — Technology, History of — World War I
A Most Anti-Roosevelt and Anti-New Deal Alphabet (1940)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I’m not often able to make a post in the “Alphabets” category of this blog, though I can today after finding this untempered, bolded, all- and random-capped, exclaimed attack on Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Charles R. Parker’s Primer for Hoosiers, ABC which was printed for Parker-Daniels Co. of Indianapolis in 1940, is a top-percentile viciously anti-Roosevelt work as there ever was. Parker’s pamphlet was a polemic proclaiming patriot punditry (sorry) for a couple of Indiana politicians while taking enormous and unsubstantiated baby bites into the fringes of Roosevelt (powering into his third term) and the New Deal (which was pretty much folded in at this point). This pamphlet is only ten quick pages, but in it we find descriptions of the president as a robber, dictator (many times), destroyer, and so on who uses Hitler as a shield and whose policies of chicanery have devastated, menaced, destroyed, and raped the principles and Constitution of the U.S. Overall the writing and style is not far from what we have in the White House, right now.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Alphabets
The USAF “Flying Saucer” Prototype (1954)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Appearing as a splashy double-page spread in LIFE magazine for May 31, 1954 is the great “Project Y” USAF flying saucer. It was the continuation of the work carried out by John C.M. Frost (1915-1979) who was a superior engineer who worked for de Haviland and Avro Canada, and who continued his VTOL work with the Air Force under the “Project Y”. This aircraft was to fly 1500-2000 mph and have a 1500 mile range. Of course, this particular aircraft didn’t get very far for Frost, a person with numerous successes, but it did experience some fair amount of attention.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Aviation & flight — World War II
Floating Mines of the Air (1939)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This thrilling nail-biter from the near future appeared in Popular Mechanics for December 1939. What we are seeing floated here (sorry/terrible) was a system of relatively primitive helium-filled air mines to guard against enemy attack from the air. There was no doubt the (fighting) end of the European and British part of WWII there would be a very major role played by aircraft. Bombing had already been introduced on a larger scale with German practice and assistance to Franco in Spain, and of course there was plenty of evidence for air power in the crushing of Poland just a few months earlier beginning 1 September and ending 26 days later–a victory and a defeat that shocked the military world. So much of the world had entered into war in the first two weeks of September 1939, and of course the U.S. reacted with predictable strong sentiments for isolationism.

I remember a headline–can’t place where–reading it, years ago, announcing that the Olympic Games for 1940–that were to be held in Soviet-attacked Finland–were cancelled.

There was a simple idea behind the aerial minefield–take 5′ diameter balloons, fill them with helium, attach a 40′ line to it on one end with a bomb with 4 lbs of high explosive on the other; send them aloft, and then wait for a plane to hook one of the lines with a wing or tail or something. These were to be sent aloft by the hundreds if not thousands. Maybe this could work, I dunno–but what comes to mind is what happens with the hundreds of balloons that didn’t have something run into it? They bomb would explode on contact, so at some point, they’re all going to come down… There’d that, plus what if fighter planes came in before the bombers (once the Germans were close enough that is) and simply shot down the balloons? I imagine that they’d be used over rural areas where there could be some absorption of hundreds of falling failing bombs. Anyway, this idea seems a little problematic.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

World War II
Non-Silhouette Silhouettes and Dirigible Mooring Masts (1930)
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Just a very quick entry here on some interesting and arresting images relating to flight, all from the July-December 1930 volume of Popular Mechanics. The first is a full-page illustration for October (1930) showing an improved method for anchoring dirigibles–in this case, for demonstration purposes, it is His Majesty’s Airship airship R-100, which was over 700′ long and moved along at about 80 mph, and was less than a year old. Unfortunately, this protocol for moving though the air was nearly exhausted–it was fateful for this note on the mooring masts appeared in October as this was the month of the R-101 disaster, which effectively brought the end of the R-100, which was scrapped soon afterwards.

“Sketch of Latest Type pf Mooring Mast for Dirigibles, Showing the Lights, Tackle and Winches Used in Bringing a Big Airship to Anchor: Note the Ground lights That Indicate the Direction of Wind …”

The other image of aviation interest is a chart of airplane types and how to identify them in silhouette–except that they are not in silhouette. Still it is a handy chat, and I reproduce it here:
·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Aviation & flight — Technology, History of