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.

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An Electrical Thermometer and its Problems (1881)

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[I apologize for the fuzziness at the top of the image here but I couldn’t get the volume of Nature flat enough on the scanner to avoid the degradation.]

In the wonderland world of early applications of electricity to anything comes this marvelous image of an electrical thermometer from Nature for March 17, 1881.The original image is only about 3″ tall, and I could not resist reproducing it in what is almost a 1:1 ratio. As pretty as it was/is, the implementation was a bit of a picture of a soggy sandwich.

Evidently the platinum screws running up the side of the thermometer (at every 3 degrees, though it could be refined to <1-degree increments), were connected to an alerting operator like a bell or some such thing. That way, if something was being heated to a certain temperature and the temp changed, an alarm would sound, and the whole process could be viewed remotely. Why this would be necessary I am not so sure–even the author admitted that the whole thing would be very cumbersome with the large number of insulated wires being tracked into the observing station. In any event, the image is striking, if not the idea.

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Tech-Quiz — Technology, History of
Extraordinary Book Titles: Say This One Three Times Fast

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Part of the Unusual Book Titles series

“When two “perfects” aren’t enough, try three.”–Not Ambrose Bierce

This is a great and overstated overstatement of a title that is, well, overstated. Twice. I don’t have anything else to say about the thing, except that it was issued by Pet Milk in 1935, and that it was the copyright copy from the Library of Congress pamphlet collection (something I purchased a while ago) and that for reasons obvious and imagined it probably did not get much circulation in the real world, even as a give-away advertising promotional. And for the record Pet Milk used an electrically-generated method to ionize its milk, and not the usually-feared radioactive method.

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On Curing the Disability and Disease of Left-Handedness (1935)

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J.W. Conway launched this missive into the world in 1935–at a time when left-handedness was deemed to be unacceptable and curable–adding his anti-left-handed sentiments to a teetering pile of other alien attacks. Mr. Conway’s The Prevention and Correction of Left-Handedness in Children appeared in 1936, at a time in which he and others saw left-handedness as a deterrent to succeeding in the newly industrialized world. The pamphlet emphasizes the training of children from infancy to overcome left-handedness, which came as a result of parental “indifference”, who were unable to “realize the seriousness of the handicap”, which was a “sinisitrial condition”, a “disease” that needed to recognized along the same lines as “rickets and pneumonia and colic”. Much needed to be done to “stamp out the newly recognized disease, the curse of left-handedness”.

I guess Mr. Conway hadn’t realized that Albert Einstein–the most famous person in the world when this booklet was written–was a lefty, and somehow avoided his “disease” and succeeded in spite of himself. As did Plato. And Leonardo, Jan van Eyck, Rembrandt, Holbein, Van Gogh, and Klee. (And in the modern world, some great lefties include SpongeBob, Patrick Starfish, Mrs. Puff, Peter Griffin, Bart Simpson, Marge Simpson, and Bobby Hill. AND Sandy Koufax, Randy Johnson, Warren Spahn, Whitey Ford, and of course Lefty Grove.)

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Top Secret CIA Report on Advantages to USSR on Attacking Europe Before 1950

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Fascinating reading, especially in the conclusions section. Some sections are CONFIDENTIAL, others TOP SECRET.

Source: Record Group 263:Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1894 – 2004, Series: Intelligence Publication Files, 1946-1950.

Source & text link: National Archives.

ORE 58-48 Addendum, The Strategic Value to the USSR of the Conquest of Western Europe and the Near East (to Cairo) Prior to 1950, 10/27/48

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Anticipation, History of
Coal Boys & Hard Times on the Rocks, 1895

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Here’s a series of social documentarian photographs that partially illustrate the true position of the “coal boy” out in Pennsylvania in September, 1895. Somehow it sounds, perhaps, a little romantic, summoning images of small children running around with sacks of coal as though it was a newspaper or marshmallows or something. That such a chore was left to children in the 40-million-ton anthracite coal industry in Pennsylvania is a testament to something–the savings of cents-per-hour for the kids to do the task rather than an adult, or, well, is there an “or” to this? I don;t think so. I think that it all came down to shaving hog hairs from the paychecks of adult workers.

The story appeared in the Scientific American for 28 September 1895–it was not an investigative journalism piece on the working conditions of children, just a simple report on what the children were doing. We’re still years away in 1895 for any real legal assistance to protect children as workers or to require them to be in school.

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Ghosts and Neutrinos, 1930

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I wanted to reproduce Wolfgang Pauli’s letter of 4 December 1930–in it he thinks very widely of missing stuff, of some of the basic bits of the universe, in a rather open and guarded way, about the ghost of the neutron. He didn’t feel very comfortable with his ideas yet, at least for professional consumption–that would have to wait another three years when it was discussed at the 7th Solvay Conference (1933) and another three when it first came into print (1936). The name “neutron” would also be changed to the familiar “neutrino” (“little one”) by Enrico Fermi in 1933 to differentiate it from the much larger nuclear particle discovered the year earlier by James Chadwick–Chadwick’s paper was published in Nature, which would reject Fermi’s paper in 1934 as too radical a leap.

[Source: Exhibition of the ETH-Bibliothek to the occasion of the 100th birthday ofWolfgang Pauli http://www.library.ethz.ch/exhibit/pauli/neutrino_e.html]

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Naming Things — Physics
Criterion of Reality, 1880 and 1935

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On a graze through the journal Nature (still the same Nature as today’s publication, the journal at this point being already 12 years old) looking for an article by the great W. Stanley Jevons on the aurora borealis (and the fluctuations of magnets), I bumped into the following short notice:

And this, from one of the most-cited articles in the history of the Physical Review:

“If, without in any way disturbing a system, we can predict with certainty (i.e., with probability equal to unity) the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of reality corresponding to that quantity.”–Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen,”Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” Physical Review, volume 47, May 15, 1935, page 777. Full text via the American Physical Society.

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German Propaganda in Sweden, 1943

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2239

“Sveriges folk vet inte mycket om alt detta”/Swedish people do not know much about this…”

This is an unusual graphic–or at least a graphic display of information found in an unusual location, a publication in Swedish quoting sources from the Free Press from Stockholm (19 June 1943) on the effectiveness of Luftwaffe vs R.A.F. bombing.

It is supposed to be a graphic proof for the ferociousness of the Allies, published in a pamphlet called Konst i spillror (roughly, Art and Rubble, or Art in Rubble, something like this) which I believe was a German attempt to win Swedish hearts and minds by displaying the destructive force of teh other side of the war. The subtitle of the pamphlet is on the destruction of European cultural treasures in Antwerp, Nuremberg, Koln, Lubeck, Karlsruhe, Munich…plus bombed cemeteries, schools, hospitals, and so on. The locations are in Germany, mostly, or German-held areas, and decry the barbarity of the war in the hands of the British, Canadians, and Americans.

I do not have proof of this as propaganda, but it certainly feels like it. Sweden was a neutral country during WWII, managing to maintain its neutrality for the entire conflict. There were evidently soem concessions made to both sides–for Germany the major bit seems to have been allowing the German 163rd rail transport across Sweden in the attack on the Soviet Union (which I imagine was an enemy of my enemy move). On the other hand the Swedes accepted Jewish refugees from Norway and accepted all of the Danish Jews who were supposed to be sent to concentration camps. I can understand the Nazis wanting to try to make inroads into the national psyche, but I have a hard time imagining that this campaign succeeded on any level.

My copy is a photographic negative of the original, made during the war, and was once part of the Library of Congress Pamphlet Collection. As I said, I could be wrong in this interpretation, but I feel fairly confident that it is so.

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Anticipation, History of — Militaria — Perception — Propaganda
The Newspaper Frontier, 1880: Cutting Texas (Almost) in Half

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2240

The idea of the frontier in American history has been around for quite some time, made famous and mostly-invented (and closed) by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, and expanded, imagined, enticed, magnified, micro-analyzed, and  generally messed with ever since.  There have been all sorts of frontiers introduced into the study of the birth, expansion and filling-up of this country, from the very earliest colonial periods of Indian frontiers, “far-western” river frontiers of the Connecticut, Delaware, Hudson (!) and Susquehanna, to the Appalachian frontier of the early western reaches of the colonies, to the transportation frontier, the slavery frontier, the gold and mining frontier, the gun frontier and so on.

I’ve got another bit to add:  the newspaper frontier.

I just happened upon a volume of the US Census of 1880, with a special report by S.N.D. North entitled History and Present Condition of the Newspaper and Periodical Press of the United States…and published in 1882.  What provoked me was the map of Texas newspapers for 1880.  It very clearly, and like no other map of its kind, delineates a fantastic line/frontier between the Texas with newspapers and the Texas without newspapers. We see very clearly that the frontier of the newspaper stops fairly abruptly (and wonderfully) at the 100^thmeridian, with only two newspapers in all of the rest of Texas found beyond that point (and those just barely beyond the 100^th.  And it’s the 100^th meridian that mostly marks the vertical middle of the country, running through North and South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, the Texas/Oklahoma borders, and so into Texas—if you folded this map vertically in half it folds virtually on the 100^th meridian.  An odd bit, it is, half of the country and then approaching half of Texas.

I should report that the newspapers west of the 100th meridian were in Kinney County (population 4,440) with the Fort Clark News (established in 1880, at exactly the year of census) and Donley County (population 160, with the monthly Clarendon News and a 50-cent annual subscription rate). The newspaper development also sort of followed the frontier fort development, almos tall of which (but four) were east of the 100th.

Of course the population and easier-natural-resources are located east of this point, I know, but it is still quite a jolt to see the line of newspapers get drawn in the sand so vividly.  There isn’t anything else quite like this so far as the newspapers go, except, a little, for Florida, where the line gets drawn north and south, splitting the peninsula roughly in half, the southern part holding only five counties at this point..  But it is a much more robust image for Texas given the number of newspapers that were being published—280 periodicals and newspapers for Texas versus 45 for Florida, with 11,374 in the entire country*—so that the difference between the have-newspapers and haven’t-newspapers in Texas is that much more vivid.

Texas needed more papers:  there were 1.5 million people living in the massive state in 1880, almost twice as many as there were in 1870, and almost half of what there would be there in 1900. That was another story, entirely—even in 1880, which is only 130 years ago, there were only 270,000 people living in the entire state, not even close to half of the county population of Pinelas today.I’m just enjoying the surprise of the straight-edge frontier in Texas.

The deal too was that Texas wasn’t at the top of the lisst for average area for each publication per square mile, with each periodical providing coverage for 936 miles. But that again is for Texas east of the 100th meridian–throw in the rest of the state, and that number skyrockets. (There were 13 states with a higher mileage distribution than Texas, topped by Indian Territory,m with basically nothing, with each paper servicing an area of 21,000 square miles.

Also, Texas’ 225 counties had 119 counties publishing newspapers and/or peridoicals, compared to the national figures, which were 2,605 counties and 2,073 publishing papers.

*Just for the sake of comparison, the number of newspapers and periodicals per state for 1880 was as follows: Illinois, 1017; New York, 1411; Pennsylvania, 973; Ohio,  774; New Jersey 215.  Also, oddly, the average circulation of the Florida and Texaspapers was roughly the same: 1,282 for Texas and 1306 for Florida (with an average for the country at 4137).

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American History: Western Exploration & Native Americans — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas
Bitter Cold Edvard Munch Weather Maps, 1896

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Munch–that is the first thing that came to mind on seeing these maps from Willis Luther Moore’s Weather Maps Celebrating s Lecture on Storms and Weather Forecasts (“Delivered under the auspices of the Men’s Association of the Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church…Baltimore, Maryland, Monday, November 16, 1896, P.M.”) Others may not see it, but I do see “The Scream” in there, in America’s heartland, in glorious black-and-white. And screaming they should have been–that winter in January 1886 was brutal, calling for 30 below zero in places like the appropriately-named Jornada del Muerto in Texas. In any event the maps are really quite lovely, and not really “early” anymore for weather maps of such detail (these maps beginning to appear in the 1840’s and becoming pretty accurate placeholders of weather memory by the 1880’s.

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Anticipation, History of — Information, Quantitative Display of
The Blank Day Bombing of Sunday–an Odd Moment in the History of Calendars

JF Ptak Science Books 2241

It was a secret mystery as to what might be hidden in this pamphlet with the striking and unusual cover…I had a hard time imaging what the work was about, and never did really come close. It turns out that the bombers dropping their payload on a skyline of churches from an impossibly low altitude in a Seussian-blue sky were dropping “missed Sundays” on churches.

Carlyle B. Haynes, the author of the work, was warning religious people about a movement at work to change the calendar of the world–in effect, it would “even out” the months, and the quarters of the year, so something more, well, “efficient”(?) And to get there it would entail “kicking out” the last day of the year of 1943–a Sunday, the “blank day”. The fear here was that Sundays from then on into infinity or as long as this new calendar was being used would be upset, and that Sundays would no longer be so, the calendar upsetting a calendrical system that “stretched back to Creation”.

It seems that the main fear would be that the “true Sunday” would be somewhere else in the calendar, that Sunday would actually be Monday or any other day in the week, and thus an attack on religion, in general, by a “wandering” religious day.

Mr. Haynes wrote a number of pamphlets on religion (including another work similar to the above called World Calendar Versus World Religion), and seems to have had long evangelical roots. But in knowing a little bit about the history of recording and keeping time, and dates, and the calendar, and the history of the seven day week and the long international history of the observance of the seventh day for religious purposes, I am having a hard time understanding exactly what Mr. Haynes was trying to say in this work.

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Absurdist, Unintentional