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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British Prisoners of War Calling! (1940)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post See also an earlier post (with further links Humanitarian Propaganda–the Hope for those at Home.

This was certainly a civilized format to solicit sympathy and money for British P.O.W.s being held by the Germans, 13 months into a war that would force its way on for another 43 months. It appeared as a bold full-page ad in The Illustrated London News on 16 November 1940, and it asked readers–who were now in the final phases of the Battle of Britain after full-on aerial assaults for through the summer months costing dozens of thousands of deaths–to think about the soldiers who had made the great sacrifice in protecting their country and being taken captive for it, and to give money so that some sort of comfort and aid could be sent to them in POW camps.

The goal from the outside seems reasonable enough–it remains to be seen how much of the million tons of good shipped to the POW camps by the Allied Forces ever made it to the prisoners.

I’ve included this short post in the History of Empty, Blank and Missing Things series not because of the hopelessness of delivering modest relief, but for a much more simple reason–exhibiting the unused coupon for sending funds to make that happen. It has a certain emotional power to it that is difficult for me to identify.

“Communications have been reopened and it is the aim of the fund to equip every prisoners’ camp in Germany with a library, indoor and outdoor games, sporting gear, musical instruments and other goods. As a result of the debacle in the Lowlands and France the demand upon our resources has been very great and we are therefore issuing an appeal to Britons all over the world to help us in this work.”

The donation form is a detail from thi sbig, full-page ad from the Illustrated London News for November 16, 1940:

The West Australian (Perth), 30 October 1940:

“PATRIOTIC EFFORTS.PRISONERS OF WAR.A Books and Games Fund.Information was received yesterday concerning the formation of a British Prisoners of War Books and Games Fund in England, under the chairmanship of Sir Hugh Walpole. “As you know, there are now many thousands of British prisoners of war in German camps,”states Mr. J. A. Sinclair Pooley, of the appeal section of the fund, in a pamphlet received in Perth. “Communications have been reopened and it is the aim of the fund to equip every prisoners’ camp in Germany with a library, indoor and outdoor games, sporting gear, musical instruments and other goods. As a result of the debacle in the Lowlands and France the demand upon our resources has been very great and we are therefore issuing an appeal to Britons all over the world to help us in this work.”Owing to stringent Government regulations no books, games or other goods can be accepted by the fund, but monetary donations may be forwarded to the British Prisoners of War Books and Gamesfund, Carrington House, Hertford-street,London W.1, England.Under the scheme a prisoner can be adopted by any person so that, on receipt of donations, he will be supplied with books, puzzles and games in the name of the donor. The fund does not duplicate the work of the Red Cross Society in supplying food, clothing and educational literature.”

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Can Anyone Identify this Unusual Image?

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I’ve owned this print for many years, and it has just recently returned from storage and is hanging up. I found it in a frame that seems to fit it perfectly, and the original paper seems not to have been cut to fit the frame. The frame is old, perhaps 175 years old, with hand-forged nails and imperfect glass. That really doesn’t help much, though. I’m fairly certain that it is a print though I’m not 100% convinced it is not a drawing, and I feel as though the embossed border will be the biggest help. The image is on a heavy card stock, and the embossed part is signed/printed “Dobbs”, the name of a manufacturer of embossed blanks and images and greeting cards and such, operating in the mid-19th century, though it looks like an earlier iteration of the firm (“Dobbs & Kidd”) was around at least from 1821. So I guess the age of the image is pretty much half-guesstimated–I just haven’t a clue about the image, though it reminds me of several things…

And the detail:

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A Great Work of Artistic Display of Quantitative Data–German Losses in the Battle of Britain (1940)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 346 (from 2009)–extended

This tremendous display is half of a double-page spread that appeared in The Illustrated London News for 7 September 1940. It was meant to bolster the civilian population of Britain during the time of the German attacks, shoping that “Over one thousand Nazi aircraft (were) brought down over Great Britain in …20 Days…” The artwork, drawn by Bryan de Grineau, actually depicts 1000 planes, and accurately depicted ones at that. What the graphic doesn’t tally though are the airmen losses, which would be considerably more than the 1000 aircraft: for example, of the aircraft involved in the sustain air-invasion of England, the Dornier 215’s had a crew of four, Dornier 17’s three, Heinkel 111’s four, Messerschmitt 110’s two, and Junkers 88’s three. Thus there were thousands more airmen lost, a commodity that the Nazis could little afford.

(This continues a thread on The Battle of Britain and also a post on “What 185,000 Planes Looks Like”).
The results of the battle (and if you take a look at this earlier post for the full narrative), in terms of aircraft and humans, were, for Great Britain: 1,023 fighters: 376 bombers, 148 coastal command aircraft for a total of 1,547 aircraft and 544 pilots and aircrew killed. There were also 27,450
civilians killed and 32,138 wounded. The Germans lost 873 fighters and 1,014
bombers for a total of 1,887 aircraft and 2,500 pilots

I find this visual display of quantitative data beautiful and compelling–and overwhelming in its way.

The Battle of Britain was fought primarily from 10 July to 31 October 1940, so by the time this image was published the Brits had been able to turn the tide of Hitler’s plan. (The air strikes wouldn’t really end until the Nazis turned their attention to the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in May 1941.) And that plan, named Luftschlacht um England, was to overtake and destroy the British capacity in the air, for as long as the English had command of the airspace there would be no way that the Nazis could force an invasion by land/sea (at least in the minds of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht and Hitler). And so the Nazis failed–it was their first major defeat, and, especially, with the turning of attention east, it was a pivotal point of the war.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria
Mending Socks on the Western Front, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2213

This fantastic photograph calls to mind the importance of the little things of battle–dry socks, headgear, water, food, scissors. And of course a good coat in the winter–a good coat that can be kept closed to allow the body to stay warm, or dry. I mentioned in an earlier post here that it was a small thing that may have led to the demise of Napoleon’s army in Russia in 1812–the buttons on the overcoats of the soldiers were made of tin, and as tin becomes brittle in severe cold, it is conceivable that the buttons failed and therefore allowed the jackets to blow open much more easily than normal. Little change that has an enormous impact.

This photograph–an official French photo published by the Western Newspaper Union in November 1918–shows a group of French telegraphic soldiers, taking a break, and mending their clothes. The original text for the photograph (below) points out that their uniforms were torn and made shabby by continuously running themselves up and down telegraph poles. It is important to keep yourself fit and fed and your uniform in good order, so they calmly awaited the repair of their uniforms y the one man with a needle and thread.

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Monster Soup & Germ Constellations: the Thames, 19th Century

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2214

“The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid. ……. surely the river which flows for so many miles through London ought not to be allowed to become a fermenting sewer.” –Michael Faraday

The Thames evidently was all of that, and much more.–but its biography became all the more explicit in the 19th century when people took a very close look at samples of its water with microscopes. The result was outrage and heaped disgust.

There is a much-quoted quote from Charles Dickens, spread around the internet, but offered everywhere without attribution, offering up the River Thames as ‘a dank, stinking sludge, the scene of murders and crime’. Another (attributed) bit of Dickens celebrating the horribleness of the river goes further: “Miles of close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped for air, stretched far away towards every point of the compass. Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of a fine fresh river.”–(Little Dorrit, Cbook I chapter 3) I don’t know if Dickens ever saw samples of the river water, and so far as I can tell he didn’t write about it, though perhaps he didn’t need to–the macroscopic level of the river was more-than-enough for him.

[Image source: the Wellcome Collection, following an image-post by Jennifer Ouellette]

It is unknown to me how early published images get to be illustrating the microscopic world of the Thames, but as we can see above in William Heath’s 1828 hand-colored etching, the realization of the endless varieties of constellations dislocated any warm/fuzzy feelings that Londoners would have harbored regarding their river.

Here’s another example of discovery, appearing in the much-read Punch, or the London Charivari (a satirical, sharp and biting magazine based on the earlier French periodical Le Charivari which began publishing in 1832) in 1850:

The caption reads in part: “And wondrous indeed is the scene disclosed within the sphere of a little drop of water of that water which Londoners drink swallowing daily myriade and myriads of worlds whole universes instinct with life or life in death.”

There’s so much that can be written about the river and the stink and cholera and the general nastiness and healthy aspects of using it for human consumption, and of understanding epidemics and their transmission of disease and sanitation and flush toilet impact and so on, in addition to its general moral decay and criminality…but that will have to wait for some other time. The 1840’s and 1850’s and Dickensian London was a Big Time for the Thames, and not in a good way. It was an effluent life-force of the city that was spiked with disease and terror, reaching a high/low exclamation in the cholera epidemic of 1854.

But there were many low points for the river in those decades, and Dickens (since I’ve been quoting him here) was a major proponent of sanitary engineering for London, writing (particularly in his newly-established literary journal, Household Words, begun in 1850) and frequently speaking on the topic. He was a major public figure, and his words were influential and reached a vast audience. Still the improvement of the river took decades, and its miasmic mess reached well into the 20th century, and was declared basically biologically dead int he 1950’s, though it has rebounded today into being one of the world’s cleanest rivers coursing through a city.

Here’s another nightmarish vision of the river by Dickens, this from David Copperfield: “The neighbourhood was a dreary one at that time; as oppressive, sad, and solitary by night, as any about London. There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison. A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which — having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet weather — they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves. The clash and glare of sundry fiery Works upon the river-side, arose by night to disturb everything except the heavy and unbroken smoke that poured out of their chimneys. Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like green hair, and the rags of last year’s handbills offering rewards for drowned men fluttering above high-water mark, led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb-tide. There was a story that one of the pits dug for the dead in the time of the Great Plague was hereabout; and a blighting influence seemed to have proceeded from it over the whole place. Or else it looked as if it had gradually decomposed into that nightmare condition, out of the overflowings of the polluted stream.–David Copperfield, 1850, chapter 46. Courtesy of the World Digital Library: http://www.wdl.org/en/item/3956/zoom/

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Being in Regret–Verdun, 1916-1918

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2215

I was looking through a very heavy volume from 1924 of Military Engineer and came upon a very large folding map¹. It was vanilla on the outside and stayed so, opening only the back of the map through one, two, three, four (!) unfoldings, not yet revealing itself, until it was at it full width, and then unfolded once down, which opened to the middle of the map, which was a mass of lines and shading of brown and gray. Another unfold up, and then another down, and more of the same, so much detail that the context still was hidden. I unfolded the bottom half of the map three more times and at the bottom was the town “Regret”. My right hand obscured the name of the much larger and antique-fortified town, which turned out to be the military-sacred city of Verdun. When I unfolded the top of the map–making it about four feet long–I saw that it was for development of the battle and lines of communication and placement of troops and so on for part of the Autumn of 1918. And trenches.

(This was actually “Verdun B”, the mate of “Verdun A”, which together form a huge and wildly complex 4×4′ map. )

This was a reprint six years later of the 34th edition of this particular map–that is a lot of editions. But this was a lot of place, Verdun. A fluid place of ordered killing chaos that was as dynamic as it was occasionally static, starting in a very contained space of massive fighting that took place from 21 February to 18 December, 1916. The map is of a place that was about the longest, costliest, and deadliest battles that humans have come to, so far. Casualties were about the same on each side (370,000 French and 340,000 German) and totaled about 710,000 people, though scholars argue the point, some coming to a figure much higher, approaching a million. That makes 70,000-100,000 per month for the battle, which was like a war in itself.

There were probably two million soldiers in motion here, at Verdun, in a relatively tiny area, with front lines extending about five miles or so, the battlefield being fairly narrow from point to point, perhaps totaling 20 square miles of heavily bombarded/shelled ground. It was a terrifying place to be, and I’m certain that it must have scarred forever hundreds of thousands who survived the ordeal.

Unfortunately Verdun 1916 was only about the half-way point of the war, with these maps generated to show artillery targets for the American entry in the war for action that would take place just before the end of the war on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. This was the French Fourth Army and the American First Army which attacked on a front from Moronvillers to the Meuse on 26 September 1918 through the end of September, and from which the German army began its gradual withdrawal from the area, continuing right up to Armistice Day.

Ultimately whenever I think of this war things usually boil down to Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got his Gun, which was required reading in my freshman year of high school in 1970.

Notes:

1. Journal of the Society of Military Engineers, volume 16, 1924; the map titles are “Tranchee Francaise schematique a la date de 1^er Sept 1918″ and “Carte Generale des Objectifs d’Artillery”.

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Stalin’s Repugnant Haiku: Poetry Using Stalin’s Borrowed Library Book Titles (1926)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2216 History of Blank, Empty, and Missing Things series

I don’t mean this post to be snarky or irreverent, really, because we’re dealing with one of the most fantastically murderous people in the history of humans. Since the seven book titles that I have been able to find so far are so, well, unusual, that pulling the individual words out and alphabetizing them might prove to be an insight into the mind of grown-up Soso, Joseph Stalin. I found the titles while researching Stalin’s report card from when he was a child, and found “Stalin’s Library Card”, by David Wojahn, a poem in seven parts that treats each of the books borrowed by Stalin in 1926, when he was 47 years old.

Stalin in 1926 had been General Secretary of the CPSU for two years, in spite of several years of bickering and argument with the stroke-ridden Lenin, who for some years before his death (in 1924) grew more stratigraphically dissatisfied with Stalin and warned the resat of the leadership against him. After maneuvering against Zinoview, and Kaneneov, and Trotsky, and Bukharin and all of the people below them, Stalin was by this time solidifying his power. Purges, manufactured famines, internal deportations of millions, executions, imprisonment, and stupid decisions at the beginning of the German invasion of the USSR in WWII, Stalin had his had in causing the death of many millions of people.

What did he have in mind in 1926 with these books¹? Well, I think we know. There are 36 words used in the titles, including six repetetives, leaving 30 unique words. There’s certainly enough for haiku if you wanted the taint, and a poem like that could be one that would be difficult to unremember, not (in spirit but of course not in equivalence) unlike the unremembered masses who were forced into “non-personhood” by Stalin, who when he finally died was left out of the very next printing of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia as the Vast Un-nameable.

I’m cataloging this entry in the History of Blank, Empty, and Missing Things series because Stalin caused so muuch of that to happen to so many people, to nearly an entire country. And then he became missing, himself.

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The Aeronaut as Improbable Panhandler, 1785

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Aviation and Flight series

Flying wasn’t always depicted as a mythic or glamorous or future-inspirational, as we can see in this 1785/6 etching by social memoralist and caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson:

[Image source: the British Museum.]

“Lunardi, slim and handsome, walks diagonally towards the spectator from the right, supported on a staff, his left hand held out as if begging…”(–LOC) is one description of this print, though Lunardi himself seems to have been an upper-crust Frenchman of Italian lineage who made a number of successful ascents in 1784/5, or at least enough success to write a book about them. He did suffer a few tragedies, one of which did put him into a rescuable position in the sea. Currently, though, I’m not sure why this image came into being–perhaps he asked one too many times the wrong person for help with funding his project. Nevertheless it is interesting to see such a grounding image of the enterprise of flight just a few years after the first Mongolfier flight.

The legend beneath the image is reproduced more legibly in Joseph Greco, Rowlandson the Caricaturist, 1880 (below, and here), revealing a Rufus Thomas-like versifying (Thomas would rhyme “Sidewalk” and “BAltimore” and make it work) by same-self-singing “town” and “balloon”:

And Lunardi depicted in happier circumstances (“Captain Vincenzo Lunardi with his Assistant George Biggin, and Mrs. Letitia Anne Sage, in a Balloon, by John Francis Rigaud”, via Wikipedia), which seems to be more the case in his making it into print than the panhandler image above:

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America Attacked, 1937–and the Unusual Architectural Response to Poison Gas and the Homeless Unemployed

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[An earlier post on this blog, Mapping the Invasion of America, 1942, addressed another vision of the invasion of the United States–it is also the most viewed post that I’ve written, having been read more than 400,000 times–Part II of this post may be seen here; and while you’re at it consider a related post on the Nazi sub-orbital Amerika Bomber.]

Philip Diamond discovered an interesting concept in “blurryness” in the pursuit of building with a purpose. In his pamphlet Should it Happen Here, self-published (and printed by the Brighton Press of Brooklyn, U.S.A.) in 1937, Diamond established a need for creating (1) inexpensive housing for the unemployed and (2) poison-gas-proof housing for Americans in general, and came up with (1.5) inexpensive poison-gas-proof housing. In blurring the lines between the two needs I’m not sure that he satisfied anyone’s needs, spreading his engineering/architectural gifts jut a little (or a lot) of bit too thin.

One thing Diamond was sure of was that the next war would be governed by “one man flying in an aircraft and releasing vapors of poisonous gas for destruction” and assured his readers that in this new war “there would be no front lines”. “The future war will not be carried to the front line; it will be carried to the front door.” That of course was true for hundreds of millions of people in Europe and the Soviet Union and South Asia, but not so in the same sense for anyone in America–unless those Americans happened to live on a remote chain of Alaskan islands. Diamond was sure that war was coming directly to the U.S., and although he doesn’t name the country/countries that would be responsible for attacking America with poison gas, he did name one of the aircraft that would come here to do that–the HE112. (The HE 112 was a prototype fighter aircraft that wasn’t adopted, with fewer than 100 produced. How this would get across Europe and then across the Atlantic and then across the U.S. I’m not sure.)

Once Diamond gets to the design of his house things get a little fuzzy–and heavy./ Very heavy. HE proposed a domed structure with a foot-thick “exterior roof” and a foot-thick “interior roof” of concrete, between which would be sandwiched three feet of sawdust. The sawdust was supposed to act as both a filter to noise and soot and dust from the outside world, as well as a filter for poisonous gases.

The 5-foot thick structure would be embedded on a 10-foot thick concrete bed (for earthquake protection) and surrounded on its sides by another 10-foot concrete structure of something that I can’t figure out. Not surprisingly, the author announced with a section headings that there would be “No WIndows”. There would be a double entry equipped with an “air condition” that would wash folks entering the house and decontaminate the gases that might’ve impregnated their clothing or bodies (though Diamond says nothing about outerwear).

Once inside (charmingly referred to as “the vault”) the occupants would find two bedrooms, a kitchen/dining room, and two lavatories (one “miniature” for the children, not so much for “hygiene”, but to “protect the delicate moal grace amongst the children”. That was the best line in the pamphlet, and about the only thing that really made any sense.)

6 million of these houses could be constructed for the unemployed, costing $3,000/each, meaning that this part of the project could be funded with 18 billion dollars. This was at a time when the New Deal was having a heart attack, unemployment was spiking again, and the entire GDP of the U.S. was $91 billion, which means that Mr. Diamond was seeking a 20% cut of the GDP pie. In current terms, that 20% would mean $3 trillion.

So far as I can determine Mr. Diamond’s plan was not taken seriously.

Also, this I think is my only encounter with a title pages that starts out with the words “Sub-title”.

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Full Metal Jacket, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I do believe that this is a Lewis Machine Gun, one of the most popularly-used automatic weapons by the BEF (and of American design). It was a gas-operated weapon firing a .30-06 Springfield at 500/600 rpm withan effective range of about a half-mile. The drum magazine (not present here so far as I can see) held 47 and 97 rounds. These soldiers were all business. (Source: this is one of perhaps 400 WWI news service photos down in the warehouse…)

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Atoms and Splitting the Atom in the OED

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[Still from the IBM 2013 video “A Boy and His Atom”, where a team manipulated carbon monoxide atoms on a 45×25 nanometer frame. Just for reference a human hair is 10⁵ nm, and there are 24×10⁹nanometers to the inch. Small.]

I was looking around, trying to figure out a chronology of small, of how small things can really be, when I decided to check out the basic terms of conversation in the Oxford English Dictionary. I was surprised to see that the first reference to “sub-atomic” was much earlier than I expected, finding a place in the five-year-old science journal Nature, in 1874. Just for the sake of it I’ve made a list of the atomic-related words that came to mind, just to see how they were entering relatively common usage in English. And so, below: sub-atomic, inter-atomic, atom, split the atom, proton, electron, and neutron.

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons — Naming Things