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 Past and the Future Bridge, 1928

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This view of a future “skyscraper bridge” appeared in the May 1928 volume of Popular Mechanics (volume 48). It is an interesting idea , though very much on the high side, what with the structures being hundreds of feet high, towering over the shipping lanes. It is an old idea, the new bridge, and it reminds me of a lovely example in the Ponte Vecchio (literally, the “Old Bridge”) of Florence, the recognizable image of it rebuilt in the 14th century. (It was probably designed by the great Taddeo Gaddi (remembered so well in narrative by Vasari and in portraiture by Paolo Uccello.) There was no Gaddi at work on this bridge, which was set to unite Chicago.

And the bird’s-eye view of the enormous structure:

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Architecture and Building — Future, History of the — History of the Future
Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, 1961

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2379

I uncovered a somewhat found-again-lost-again paper in the collection here, an unusual small-distribution version of a great paper in the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The work is by N.R. Schwartz and Charles Townes, “Interstellar and Interplanetary Communication by Optical Masers”, which appeared in the journal Nature for April 15, 1961 (volume 190, pp 205-208), and I have seen it referenced here and there as a started-it-all sort of paper as the first applied and elaborated scientific effort “to communicate with other intelligent life [which] might exist on neighboring planetary systems”. That is to say it is a more involved approach to detection than the two earlier and perhaps more-famous papers by G. Cocconi and P. Morrison, “Searching for interstellar communications” (a short paper published in Nature, volume 184, No. 4690, pp. 844-845, September 19,1959) and F. Drake’s “How can we detect radio transmissions from distant planetary systems?”, published in Sky and Telescope (volume 19, No. 3, pp. 140-143, January 1960).

The present copy is an offset, stapled affair sent to the editor of Physics Today; it has the annotation “Mr. Katcher” in a secretarial hand at top, that being David Katcher, the founding editor-in-chief. This is a pre-printed version, and is dated more than a month before the article’s publication, and is dated February 27, 1961.

Both Schwartz and Townes were at the Institute for Defense Analysis in DC at the time of publication, Townes being the Director of Research; later in 1961 Townes would become Provost and professor of physics at MIT. In addition to the Nobel Prize in physics, Townes was awarded the Templeton Prize (in the understanding of religion and science).

The full text as it appears in six pages in Nature appears here at Coseti; it is obviously a different format from the 14-page variety that I have here, and has a few minor changes, though for all intents and purposes the text is the same.

The Cocconi/Morrison paper is located in full text here at Coseti.

Also just for the sake of it, the Drake equation (1961) for determining the number of extraterrestrial civilizations, here, again at Coseti.

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Anticipation, History of — Astronomy — Technology, History of
Comfort Kits for the Front Line, 1918

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This is a detail from the following photograph made by the pool of photographers working for the Western Newspaper Union, and issued for public consumption (and passed by the censors) on October 14, 1918. It shows a goodwill mission of soldiers along with Mrs. Parker, the sister of Lord Kitchener, inspecting “comfort bags” for the troops at the front. Everyone here seems to be daintily inspecting the bags with fingertips, Mrs. Parker seeming to be the only one in conversation.

There is a portrait of her brother in the background–he had been dead for more than two years at that point, drowned along with 600 others when the ship he was aboard, the HMS Hampshire, struck a German mine. No doubt that anything the Red Cross could muster for the battlefield troops was absolutely appreciated.

At this point, the war was nearly over, with less than a month of fighting to play out.

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World War I
Ars Morendi–the Book for the Dying and Dead

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2380

[Woodcut, printed in 1771, from an ealier woodcut of the late 15th century; 6×4 inches. This version available from our Blog Bookstore.]

The lare Medieval/early Renaissance Tractatus artis bene moriendi was a work book of the dead–rather, a book for those about to be dead, an instructional for the process of dying the good death along the (loose) order of the Tibetan Bardo Thodol and the Egyptian book of the dead. The Ars was written in the early the 15th century (some sources say 1415) and began appearing in some of the earliest illustrated printed books by about 1460–it was a wildly popular/necessary book, going through some 100 editions by 1500¹.

The books basically readied the dying for death, for a holy death, a death filled with high possibilities of a rewarding afterlife, for dying in the good graces of Christ and the christian ideals. The images were such that non-readers could understand them–and this is still pretty much the case.

Many of the variants of this work include a dozen or more woodblock illustrations, an example of which is found above. We see the soon-to-be-departed at the very last instant before death, surrounded by all manner of distractions and entertainments aimed at luring the person to an earthly- rather than holy-demise. Demons, conjurers, makers of greed, and devils surround his bed in temptation, all while the Virgin Mary, Christ and the creator look down upon the besieged from behind the top of the bed.

Death was not an uncommon visitor in Europe in the early/mid 15th century, and perhaps this book served some in the way it taught people how to die a noble and religious death, especially when clergy may not have been so available.

(The blog offers a version of this print, not nearly as old as the original, but with some sort of substantial age on it–it was printed in 1771 in Leipzig, and published in Heinecken’s Idee Generale d’une Collection Complette d’Estampes, and it is an attractive print suggestive of a greater age.

Here’s another example, this time the dying man is beign attacked by agents of pride and greed. The images are genuinely upsetting–scary even.

Notes:

1. English editions/variation of this work include The Waye of Dying Well and The Sicke Mannes Salve, and then in 1650 the Holy Living and Holy Dying.

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Anticipation, History of — Art History
Relativity in the Remotest Heavens (1941)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I came upon this interesting paper by Joseph Larmor (1857-1942) while browsing a volume of Nature for January-June, 1941, and in researching it found a wonderful set of links for 80 papers written by Larmor from 1881-1941 (from PhDTree) http://phdtree.org/scholar/larmor-joseph/publication/ See the St. Andrews site for a good biography of Larmor, here

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Uncategorized
A Cloud Map (1873)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2381

[Image from Arnold Guyot, Physical Geography, Scrinber’s, New York, 1873]

There are all sorts of clouds, everywhere: Red Cloud, mushroom clouds, clouds of confusion, Cloud Nine, dust, radioactive, rain, thunder, lightning, drifting, passing, growing, high, low, solitary, puffy, racing, threatening, and on and on, enough to fill many sets of alphabets even before you get to their real names.And that’s just in English. In sheet music in the U.S. in the late 19th century songs celebrated clouds of all manifestations–people “waited for the clouds to roll by”, and also listened to “The Clouds Will Never Roll Away”, and how time, temperance, and love will move the clouds, and how many other things would be covered by them. Of course nowadays people think of clouds not only as physical atmospheric mountains but also as places to store data.

Clouds though pretty much escaped the notice of even the greatest of all great classifiers, Aristotle, and just about everyone else, for two dozen centuries, no real scientific approach to them until Luke Howard first published on his cloud classifications in his paper “On the Modifications of Clouds and on the Principles of their Production Suspension and Destruction being the Substance of an Essay…” in 1803 (full text here), and his “modifications” (which at the time meant “classifications”) were instantly and universally adopted. (It is interesting to note that in the first German appearance of the Howard papers in the Annalen der Physik in 1815 that there were no illustrations.)

Arnold Guyot (1807-1884) published his imaginative and rather unusual and complete global map on the appearance of clouds. It is pretty, and creative, and to my experience very unusual. He was a very accomplished and experienced, significant scientist (Guyot Hall, Princeton is named for him), though this map above is speculative and questioning in an area meagre data.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas
Millions of Miles of Hole-Filled Paper–Dystopia, Entertainment, Vonnegut and Prison

JF Ptak Science Books

{Part of this blog’s History of Holes and History of the Future series.]

There is a certain layered, geological dystopic quality to the images of these men laboring at producing piano rolls for player pianos (and found in The Illustrated London News for 18 December 1909). This is true especially for the details, the small boxes in the background to where the rolls are being “processed”–music pounded out with metal points on a hard surface, as though produced by whatever it was that was in those little labeled wooden containers, far removed from the artistry of melody. These are images of a culture being made into hundreds of thousands of miles of hole-filled paper.

The piano roles remind me of automatons replacing humans in entertainment, and then replacing the humans making the piano roles; of machines taking over the jobs of people writ large. There’s a long and rich literary history of this idea, not the least (or first) of which is the appropriately-named Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, written in 1952. Like a tiny idea-machine, Vonnegut manufactured part of his tale from Brave New World, with Huxley having taken his bit from an earlier novel, We, written by Yevgeny Zamyatin in 1921–they’re all bleak images of a future dominated by machines, the humans acquiring numbers for names, like the replaceable and expendable units they became.
(Artwork by Malcolm Smith for Imagination, June 1954.)

The devices for producing the roles remind me of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a functional prison designed so that all of the prisoners could be viewed from one central point. The profile of the place reminds me of the geared punch machine for the piano roles; I’m not at all sure about what the function of the prison reminds me of. But in the history of holes, I guess all it foes it fill u its empty holes with people, keeping them there for months or years or decades, and then replacing them with other people, part of a long and continuing series.

Here’s the panopticonal prison at Presidio Modelo, Isla De la Juventud, Cuba–with the walls laid flat, and some cells filled-up, and reduced, you may be able to make a certain music with it, like reading the scores made by pigeons roosting on a five-wire-strung staff of utility poles. My daughter Emma just suggested that there could be a Morse Code crossover as well!)

The plan and elevation of these prisons relate to the player paino paper, like the early dots and dashes of communication, like the punched cards that Vonnegut had in mind when he was writing his early classic.

Now, the rest of the Illustrated London News story:

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Future, History of the — History of Holes — History of the Future
Dentists and Mushroom Clouds–the Mundane in Planning for the Thermonuclear Post-Apocalypse

JF Ptak Science Books Part of a long series on Atomic and Nuclear Weapons History

The sotto voce singing of the oblivious obvious/mundane is slung throughout the nearly 200pp-work “Mass Casualties, Principles Involved in Management”, which were papers delivered at the 62nd annual convention of the Association of Military Surgeons, published in 1956 in Military Medicine.

For example:

How can a person–how can I–write about Nuclear Holocaust as being mundane? When it comes to reading how some people mundanely responded to planning for surviving it.

It is a very deep Disturbia into which people fall when writing about the millions of details in accounting for the unaccountable, writing about the medical/physical/psychical consequences of surviving a bomb when dozens might well be detonated at the same time, the millions of details overtaken by billions of other details not mentioned and perhaps not imagined.

I’ve collected some wide non sequiturs dealing with the matters of the nuclear apocalypse from a publication calledMilitary Medicine in an article entitled “Mass Casualties, Principles Involved in Management”, which were papers delivered at the 62nd annual convention of the Association of Military Surgeons, 1956. Sometimes the chapter heading says it all, giving wide pause; and sometimes you have to wade in a little, but you don’t need to go very far, or very deep. Overall the issue of the absolutely overwhelming devastation and the impossibility of dealing with the human consequences of nuclear war do absolutely get written about, but it occurs somewhere inside each contribution, which is front-loaded with pop-iconic understatement and then followed up with vast simplification.

Then of course there is the official-speak in quietly stating screamingly bad things: “a wide disparity will in all probability exist between patient load and medical resources”. There’s so much like that in this publication that it is hard to keep up, like differentiating sands on a beach.

[I resisted including the section on the use of dentists in the post apocalypse–it was too painful, and I ran out of steam.]

Fabulous graphic:

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons
53 Very Well Chosen Words Outlining the Atomic Bomb (Nov 1945)

JF Ptak Sciene Books Post 2382

This is a duplicate of a carbon copy document by I.I. Rabi, and is one of 35 documents¹ relating to the development of U.S. atomic policy, October 1945-January 1946, that comes from the library of Caryl Haskins², a close and long-time friend of Vannevar Bush, who worked with Bush throughout World War II at the OSRD, and was executive assistant to Bush at NSRD 1941-1945. Vannevar Bush, one of the most important scientist-advisers of World War II, foresaw the development of the atomic arms race in 1943, and by 1945 became a fundamental thinker and advocate of addressing the problem of atomic information control. The 35 documents in this collection are–almost without exception–by aides and close colleagues of Bush who assisted him in formulating the positions and issues, dating from October 1945 through January 1946. They consist of background papers, drafts of proposals, informal studies, as well as mature statements of thought that would become implemented in the core of U.S. policy regarding the spread and control of atomic weapons. They are generally carbon typescripts and necessarily of extremely limited distribution, generally have no letterheads, occasionally carry the authors’ full names (although sometimes only initials are used), and 18 are stamped or typed “Secret”.

The sheet by Rabi (1898-1988) is simple but interesting, and in 53 words outlines the issues of the atomic bomb–it is dated November 21, 1945. IT was typed for Rabi by an assistant (“rb”), and at the bottom as being by Rabi. Rabi of course played key roles in the development of the bomb, as well as playing a very crucial and critical role in the discussion of the future of atomic weapons.

[These are the two copies of the Rabi outline–the second was Irving Langmuir’s copy. There couldn’t’ve been too many of these made–there would be the original, then perhaps six carbon copies. I any event, it is a rare thing. The original is for sale here at our blog bookstore.]

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons
Putting Black-and-White Back into Color: 1930’s Schoolrooms

JF Ptak Science Books

Its easy to assume a modern prejudice regarding the interior decoration of 1910-1940 school rooms, allowing a certain conceit and picturing them in shades of gray, the images formed being “colored” by the images of those things that we have seen, almost all of which have turned up in black-and-white photographs or movies. But of course we know that this can’t be true, and that Humphrey Bogart didn’t always wear a gray worsted in his movies, and didn’t move that gray suit through gray rooms. Its just that the image-formation is influenced by what we’ve seen, and since what we’ve seen of these rooms is mostly without color, then our images are difficult to assemble outside black-and-white. This applies to just about everything from that era, which explains why it is such a glorious shock to see motion pictures or photographs of (say) New York City street scenes from 1944. (And why is it such a jolt to the visual system to learn that police cars in Chicago during the 1933 World’s Fair were orange?)

This thinking came to the surface again this morning when I uncovered the Paint Specifications for the Model School, prepared for the East Cleveland Board of Education under supervision of the Foremost Authorities, and published by ARCO in 1939. It reminds us that the only thing that lived in black-and-white in those days are in our memories. (I’ve written about unexpected color in Lost German Color of 1927, The Very Describale Macro Color of 1937, The Color Green in the History of Squares, and of course the non-immortal 200,000,000 Pounds of Buttocks-or-Putting the Black-and-White back into Color, and others.

The rest of the ARCO catalog is below; but first, here’s a sample from the 200,000,000 Pounds of Butts post, showing the 1938 barroom in color:

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Color & its advanced Abuses — Color Theory
Taking the Bookman’s Bus–Unexpected Finds While Browsing (1843)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2385

The Bookman’s Bus will definitely take you from point A to Point B, though it might not be a direct route, even when the direct route is the only route–there are stops to be made, turns to be taken, and of course turns to be built before they can be taken; eventually though you’ll get to your destination, or not. And the destination can change, according to what is found along the way–it can get closer, or farther, as necessary. It is in the getting-there that some real stuff may happen.

I was looking for the Annalen der Physik publication by Gauss and Weber on the first use of an electromagentic telegraph, but I was looking in 1843 rather than 1833, which is a mistake I often make (which is weird because Morse’s telegraph appears in 1837 and his code in 1843, so the date mix-up is a mystery. So with the retrieved volume 59 I realized that I was ten years off from where I wanted to be, but like any practicing reader I browsed–and my general book browsing practice is back-to-front, which is how I found a good article by Clapeyron, almost at the end of the book in the 8th section. I went a little further to see the neighbors for the Clapeyron in the 644-page book and the very paper preceding turned out to be a fairly significant paper in the history of physics and acoustics–Georg Simon Ohm’s on what would be known as Ohm’s Law of Acoustics. That would be the other Ohm’s law. The big Ohm (published in his pamphlet Die Galvanische Kette in 1827) is one of the most powerful of the 19th century, and states “a relationship between the voltage across an electric circuit, the electrical resistance in the circuit, and the current in the circuit.”(–Dictionary of Scientific Biography.) Ohm’s law of acoustics doesn’t take such a big bite out of the not-determined but is significant in the history of acoustics: “The proposition that the human auditory system responds to a complex sound by generating sensations of the separate components of the sound rather than a sensation of a single integrated sound; thus when we listen to an orchestra we hear the separate instruments although the ears receive only a single complex sound wave.”(–Oxford Reference) And for the record the paper’s title: “Ueber die Definition des Tones , nebst daran geknupster Theorie der Sirene und oehnlicher tonbildender Vorrichtungen”, pp 513-565).

There were other interesting papers populating this volume, several of which had to do with early photography, including a work on using the Daguerreotype with the microscope, along with two papers by Moser (one of which was the first German translation of his work on “Invisible Light”), and another on shortening the time of exposures by the soon-to-be-very-famous H. Fizeau. Also there are two not-so famous papers by the famous Lenz (a two-parter, actually, on heat flow). There are others, not the least of which is a paper famous perhaps not for the complicated theory on the development of mountain ranges that was wrong, but for the data that was collected for the construction of the not very good theory–that was the work of Jean-Baptiste Elie de Beaumont, who had a long and distinguished career though not for his mountain theory.

So. There was a lot in this volume, and a lot of it turned out to be very interesting, in spite of teh fact that I had selected th ewrong volume to begin with.

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Technology, History of