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.

Reading Symbolism in Raymond Lull’s Portrait
JF Ptak Science Books Post 1333

Raymon Lull is perhaps the most famous Catalan given to the world–he is also one of the most famous people in history with the most names. (He was also known as Ramon, Raimundo and Raymond, Raimundus and Raymundus Lull, Lully, Llull, and Lullus and Lulio, among others.) Seriously though, he was a very interesting thinker who went far beyond the norm, and then some, his creativity overmatching the possibilities of the parenthetical sciences of his time, and stretching timeless logic as well as he went along. But so it goes, as they say; he did do aggressive work and at the very least it was for the most part quite pretty-sounding. And as he pushed up and against existing thinking it was up to that confronted thinking to push back–which sometimes happened and sometimes didn’t. He studied the law, alchemy, botany, religions, and may well have written the first novel ever to appear in Europe (at least it was the first in Catalan)–I think that you could say, overall, that he was a rationalist.

The original engraving is available at the blog’s bookstore, here.

This engraving is one version of many that I’ve seen online, and may be the original–this is a pure guess on my part, my reasoning is so mainly because there is so much more added detail than in any other versions of the engraving. the added bits in the corners, and of course the scene revealed by the pulled-back curtain. The engraved lines are also very sharp, very pronounced, not like some of the other version which look a little less defined…this one is razor sharp. (The image is available for purchase from our blog bookstore.)

The word balloon (and by the way I wrote a post here two years ago on the history of word balloons) coming from Lull’s mouth is Lux mea est ipse dominius “My light is that of the Lord”, a claim for divine inspiration, guidance, fortitude. Beyond all else Lull was a Christian, and a Christian to some severe fault–he was very involved in the conversion of Muslims, and was also an (utter) expulsioist in regards to the Jews. The Christian philosophies of Lull are clearly shown in this 17th century portrait of the man.

And in the scene that is not seen in the other reproductions of this portrait online we see a small host of interesting sci-philosophical instruments cluttered around what seems to be a giant working with an astrolabe. (This fellow is a head taller than the other people gathered around him, and he is most definitely sitting down on a high stool, making him taller still.) We see dividers and various measuring devices, plotting instruments, and even a pair of specs, which would’ve been very uncommon in in the 13th century. I’m happy to see a dog sleeping through the ruckus.

In the sky in place of the sun is a triangular collection of burning candles, or they seem like candles, which continues a very old tradition of symbolizing unity, and in this case, in a Christian theme, a god surrounded by the holy trinity… related symbols appear frequently in images depicting the Old Testament creation cycle.

Continuing this theme, if you look in the right upper corner of the engraving there is another interesting symbol–a hand issuing from a cloud with a book, sourounded by three fleur de lis. This is in obvious reference to the balloon statement, the hand of god issuing a book, or knowledge, to the recipient (which would be the reader or Lull); the fleur de lis, a French lily, was often used in Renaissance and Baroque imaging as a representation of the holy trinity, and of purity and chastity, spirituality. Or perhaps it was just a flower.

My own interest in Lull–aside from the great beauty in which his ideas were encapsulated and presented–is in his idea generator, and the possible influence it had on later thinkers like Leibniz who may have built on his interesting breakthrough to produce one of the earliest arithmetical calculators. Lull’s own calculator (which I wrote a little about here) is simple and elegant, and may actually be powerful for some–it was a series of discs that when turned would relate ideas and letters and numbers which were by serendipity intended to generate unexpected ideas to think about. For the 13th century this was a major idea, and I like it even today.
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The Very Describable Macro Color of 1930’s Floors–Well…Color, Symbolism and Swastikas in Floor

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1334

I remember that the floor of my grandmother’s beauty salon (in Great Barrington, Massachusetts) was a dark (gray on black?) rolled linoleum affair, not much different from the floors that you’d see (if you could see them) in black and white movies from the 1930’s. Grandma’s floors were probably that old–my memory is from the early 1960’s and the salon was far older than that–and so they looked like you’d expect an old, shiny, kept floor to look. Plus you’d never really see floors in those older films, anyway, so it was difficult to see even if there was a design, let alone imaging a color.

That’s why it is so surprising to see magnificently-colored floors in catalogs such as Armstrong Cork Company’s Better Floor for Better Business (1936) and Home Decorator’s Idea Book (1931). (Both of these booklets are available for purchase from our blog bookstore.) Color wasn’t invented after World War II–it just seems that way. Color photographs, color home films and color motion pictures really didn’t get a popular start until then, so it might be natural to assume that the world was a bit more bland in shades of gray before then.

All the same, these floors are so terrifically colorful that they look to me to be like a tiny design writ large–like a design for nightclub’s matchbook cover done on a 500 square foot canvas.

[This is a kindergarten room, by the way.]

See what I mean? These floors are beautiful in a way that escapes beauty. I don’t particularly like them nor would I want to live on them, but they do have a certain inescapable loveliness to them that is just not beautiful. Perhaps it is the odd juxtaposition of unexpected color. This is seen in sharper detail (left) in a post that a made (“There Was a Rubber Lady in a Rubber Room…) earlier in this blog. Or maybe it is the unexpected combination of colors, or the unexpectedness of the colors themselves, that is the driver to this lusciousness.

And then there are the swastikas.

Now the swastika is a very, very old symbol, thousands of years old, transcontinental, transoceanic, a transcendental image that was completely and forever corrupted by the National Socialist Party, a shameful symbol, a symbol turned into a hatefuil and horrible thing in just 20 years or so, overtaking two millenia of use. And here we are, in the early- and mid-1930’s, during the time of the Nazis and Hitler and their free use of the swastika, here we are with this Armstrong firm from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, still using the swastika in design elements for their floors.

(Here’s one page of floor design elements from the Armstrong catalog at left; and the detail for design number three at right.)

Armstrong was also in the heart of some country within the United States (Lancaster) that was very rich in symbolist design, but I think that this has nothing to do with anything. I’m also not making th case for their being fascist leanings at Armstrong–I’m simply pointing out that even as late as 1938 (when another edition of this work appeared again with swastika design) that the image was still acceptable enough to have as part of a part of a floor. It strikes me as deeply odd.

Here’s another example from the 1936 catalog (and just to be perfectly clear I’m not highlighting the swastika part–it is offset in different colors in the originals):

I’m not seeing Nazis in my porridge, though Madison Sqaure Garden was still getting filled up by American Nazis for their German Bund meeting in 1936–I’m just pointing out that it seems surpising that the symbol was still being used in popular design as late as it was.

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Art History — Color & its advanced Abuses — Color Theory — Iconography
Hitler, Big Room, Little Desk, 1931

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1336

It is difficult to think of Hitler as just some guy sitting behind a desk. But there he is, in 1931, sitting behind a desk with an enormous, pleated lamp sitting next to him, just Hitler in the paranoid-position (back to the corner of the room able to see anything that moves but being still in a secure position), at the edge of a big room with tall ceilings and a few chairs, looking a little grandmothery–if the grandmother wore a swastika armband. But this is 1931, and Hitler was in the developed stages of amassing votes and power, outfitting his political organization in uniforms and along military lines, drinking deeply of his hateful autobiography/social road map, biding his time. He was still years away from the nation-destroyer he would become, looking small here, looking like a human being.

Its a good thing to be reminded of the common basis of people who became Gargantuan monsters, before their human nature was replaced by the horrifica of their thoughts and deeds, setting them apart from the rest of us. The point in fact though is that Hitler and Pol Pot and Stalin and Mao and the other people-eaters of this century were “people” too. To make them somehow extra-human is to relieve ourselves of the responsibility of them; that what they have done was somehow outside the sphere of human ability. They were just people, though people with no humanity.

The Nazis were sprung of the simplest elements–fear, hope, hate, revenge, and of course delusion. But simple. Part of the earliest mass of NSDAP literature, the stuff that helped fuel Hitler, was printed in this little shop. One jackbooted man is doing the typesetting, another other running one of the tabletop presses. Two guys, a few machines, a paper cutter, a few trays of type. A dynamic speaker. One radiator. One light bulb.

And of course someone willing to listen, as well as a greater mass of someones who chose to hear but not do anything about what it was they heard.

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Bombing England, 1940; a “Popular” Look from the Other Side, Part II

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1337

Earlier in this blog I wrote a post on an illustrated article that appeared in the Illustriete Zeitung for 5 September 1940. On page 165 is an extraordinary two-part map, the upper part being a vellum-like overlay, showing the German bombardment of England. (“Bombenregen ueber England. England muss jetzt allein um seine insel Kaempfen…” ) The template map is in stark black and white, showing locations of “war” industries, chemical plants, rubber works, textile plants, metal industries and gas works . The overlay shows the outline of the island with 150 or so bombs, imprinted with a color code to show what sort of industry it was intended for.

By the time this issue of the Zeitung appeared, the Germans had almost spent themselves on their invasion of Britain (11 July-29 October 1940), and were well-past part two of a four-part invasion plane. The third part would begin two days after the appearance of this article, the clock already almost ticked-out on the Luftwaffe’s ability to pound the Island Nation into submission. They felt out the defences in part I, while also bombing along the coast and into Liverpool and London itself, mining harbors and waterways, attacking convoys; part II continued the assault and probed and searched out the airfields, aircraft factories and radar sites (while continuing to mine the waters and bomb the cities). Part III continued the heavy assaults on Liverpool, London and other cities, and searched out the RAF–but the German losses were starting to mount up, and the RAF was beginning to win. On September 15, 185 German aircraft were lost–a huge event–and the plans for Operation Sea Lion were called off, suspended indefinitely.

The 3 October issue of the Zeitung(available for purchase at our blog bookstore, here) presented a large, two-page illustration of the Luftwaffe bombing London, which was suffering under the attack, flaming and smoking. But the image by this time was mostly propagandistic, the end of the campaign only weeks away, the German air force staggering under the British response.

The end result was a terrific victory for the Brits, far beyond what the numbers show, even if the numbers are strong. The U.K. losses included 544 aircrew killed, 422 aircrew wounded, and 1,547 aircraft destroyed. The Nazi losses were 2,698 aircrew killed, 967 captured (638 missing bodies identified by British Authorities) and 1,887 aircraft destroyed.

The Luftschlacht um England, the plan to overtake and destroy the British capacity in the air, was defeated. 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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Aviation & flight — Militaria
Replacing Clay Pipes with Glass, 1849

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1338

Glass is best left to its best uses–in lighting, decoration, ,chalcogenide glasses (in the construction of rw cds),
and even music (Beethoven, Mozart, Donizetti, Bach and many others have composed for the glass harmonica, armoinca, hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica)…and son on and on But perhaps the use less thought of in general has been the use of glass as the conduit for aqueducts.

A 180-mile-long conduit.

I found this notice in the 20 January 1849 issue of Scientific American The idea of making a glass pipe for transporting water to transport the special waters from Saratoga Springs, New York down to Manhattan, 180 miles away. The backers for this plan were going to encase the glass piping in clay bricks, which makes sense of course, but then burying all of that in a coffin of cement…well, that present all sorts of problems if the pipe ever broke.There is some irony in the silica connection between the clay pipes the glass would’ve replaced and glass itself, but this is still just an awful idea.

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The Kindle vs. Books vs. Frankenstein’s Monster. A Short Rant.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1339

Kindle and Co seem ready-made for a morality tale…except that it has been written, already, many times. Digital reading appendages like the Kindle seem to me a future history of magnificent semi-failures, another episode in a long series of stories on how machines have corrupted their users I’m not a Luddite by any stretch, but I can’t help but think of the weaknesses of these devices when compared to a simple book, or stack of books, or bookcase, or library–I think that the Kindle is perfectly fine used in conjunction with these other things, but what seems to be the case for me is that Kindle & Etc. are replacing them–the real nuts and bolts of learning—and that I think is an enormous error. Perhaps more important still is that the glorious possibilities of serendipitous discovery are being lost when you have such directed interaction as with a Kindle, compared to walking down an aisle of books in a library (or g_d help us, in a bookstore).   What these digital tools can’t replicate is the incredibly varied sources for possible inspiration that you have when you walk yourself down between two walls of books. You might start out looking for X, see something Y out of the corner of your eye, it reminds you of Z, which takes you to another range of books where you stumble across the “A” that you didn’t know existed and that you needed it.

Bookstores are closing in droves, books in libraries are being replaced by stuff that enables social networking to occur while at the same time library hours/staff are being trimmed. (A big percentage of libraries are already closed or closing on Sundays, which is a day when working class people might actually have to themselves to get to the libby.) Magazines and newspapers are already abandoning print publications and settling in for their run exclusively online. The process of virtual replacement is already well underway.

Hans Andersen’s (1805-1875) The Nightingale (1844) comes close to the mark in telling the future of these devices. The Emperor of China has a perfectly lovely, living nightingale which is replaced over as short time by a mechanical one; the robot-nightingale fails after a bit, but by that time the real nightingale has taken flight, no longer I service, vanished. The Emperor is full of remorse, slipping into melancholia and depression, headed to death for the lack of the song of is nightingale–until the living one returns, restoring the Emperor to health. And sanity.

Other, older lit tells similar stories of inception, confusion and lost purpose–though without the redemption part of the Andersen: an automaton appears in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s (1766-1822) Night Pieces (1816 ) in the short story “The Sandman”, an ingenious mechanism which happens also to be lifeless and soulless. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) s another soulless creation, though it was of biological, human pieces rather than metal, crunching the recent work in the manipulation (like that of Galvani) into something not recognizable….another piece of the coming world of electricity which in its essence has gone totally awry.

Heinrich Heine’s On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings (1834) has a short story in which an accomplished mechanic/inventor decides to invent a man–and succeeds He builds himself an English gentleman, the description of which Heine uses to skewer the English¹, the inventor building a machine like a man who behaved and like and had the emotional range of a British person, though who lacked anything to back it up–in short, the machine lacked a soul Heine takes more than just the Brits on this, exploiting the engineers soulless invention as a standard for the emptiness of some aspects of the Industrial revolution.
Then there’s Hadaly, a mechanical electric woman run found running around in Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve (1886) , with its high-Victorian nod to imaginary naughtiness with the no-tell robot. Talus, the “iron man” in Spenser’s Fairie Queen, the crystalline man in Goethe’s Faust, the creation of “robotic” homunuclus in the philosophers eggs of many alchemists, plus a wide, encyclopedic assortment of other sorts of non-mechanical man-made-men.

And this of course is all before we get to the twentieth century.

I guess I’m just annoyed by the possible destructive nature of a supplemental tool becoming the primary object, a supplement to itself rather than something richer and fuller. The Kindle and its assorted lot might seem less Nightingale-y to me and more like the sub-title to Shelley’s work, The Modern Prometheus.

Notes:

1. “…a human feeling in that leather breast, which are not usually to be found in the English, and it could articulate tones about its feelings and impart them, even with an audible sound, and it gave these tones a real English pronunciation; in short, this robot was a complete gentleman, and for being true man, he lacked only a soul…”

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Exploring Faces at a U.S. Relief Station in Italy, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1340

This is a photograph of an American aid distribution center established in Venice, an action as a direct result of the recent invasion by Autro-German forces. The Venetians look remarkably composed. [This photo is available for purchase at our blog bookstore, here.]

And the aid workers:

Elsewhere in this blog I’ve written a short paragraph on the casualties of WWI–Italy suffered 3.48% of its total population being wounded or killed, including over 650,000 civilian casualties.   1

Note

The U.S. lost .13% of its population to casualties (125,000 killed and 205,000 wounded) during the war–a war which by the time America got here had already been visciously fought for three years, costing dozens of millions of lives. The figures for everyone else weren’t nearly so “fortunate” as the U.S.: New Zealand’s 18,000/41,312 killed/wounded amounted to 1.6% of its population. The U.K. lost 2.19% (964,000/1,663,000), Italy was 3.48% (650,000/953,000 plus 650,000 civilian casualties), while France suffered a 4.29% (1.4 million/4.27 mil) blow of its total population to war. Things were worse on the other side: Germany 3.82% (2 mil/2.4 mil plus 426,000 civilian deaths, and the Ottoman Empire 12% (400,000/771,000 plus 2.1 million civilian deaths.   Worst of all was the Ally Serbia, suffering a catastrophic 16% loss of its population to war, including 275,000/725,000 plus 426,000 civilian casualties. As gruesome as the numbers were, the Americans felt only a small percentage of the total sting of war–by 11 November, more than 21 million soldiers would have been wounded, with 9.7 million soldiers and 6.8 million civilians killed. It was an enormous price

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World War I
The pre-pre-Internet? The SAGE Defense System, 1959-1983.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1341

Quality Control of America’s Anti-Bomber Defensive “Shield”: the SAGE System, 1958

The SAGE (The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) was an “air traffic control device”¹ that was used to detect enemy aircraft, relate their position and speed to interceptors which would destroy the threat. It was basically the air defense shield against attack of North America by Soviet bombers (in the pre-ICBM days of MAD). The MIT/IBM SAGE system was enormously important in the history of computing because of its many real-time, interactive and online aspects–it was an enormously successful and futuristic system, one of the “best” computers ever built. This paper on the computer’s ability to self-reference and check itself, by P.K. Luster, was written in 1958 and serves as an interesting insight into quality control for the world’s first nation-wide computer communication network.

Luster (who at one time worked for a contractor in Arlington, Virginia, named the John D. Kettelle Corp) was one of hundreds of programmers who worked on the system, and in this case, for this effort of his, he looked at various ways for selecting the proper way for a SAGE to monitor itself in real time and make assessments of its own reliability. This was a very tricky bit, of course. SAGE was the largest computer ever built–it had 23 installations in the U.S. (And one other in Canada) each given the possibility of tracking about 400 aircraft at one time. SAGE would track these developments, coordinate all efforts in response, and then if the flights were determined to be hostile /Soviet forces, would destroy the buggers with responses from “nuclear tipped” BOMARC and Nike missiles. (The Boeing Michigan Aeronautical Research Center and Nike missiles each carried a 1-5 kiloton warhead, enough so that if it was near its target it would be able to destroy it.The BOMARC looked like a jet aircraft; the Nike looked like a multi-finned, very sleek ultimate 1950’s imaginatively-styled rocket ship, but real.) Trying to insure that the system was accurate was a major consideration. (This document is available for purchase from our blog bookstore.)

From Luster’s paper:

“It has been necessary to device tests of the quality of the SAGE computer program in order to ensure its acceptability prior to installation and operation…also to run it “live” in order to give an immediate indication of any degradation of the overall system. In effect, allow the SAGE computer itself to decide the quality of the SAGE computer program…The discussion here is limited to examining the nature of the problem to which such techniques are to be applied, and showing how the application may be made most effectively.”

The SAGE system was of course functional, highly reliable, and ws used until 1983. IT was a kind of early version of the Star Wars defense system envisioned by President Reqgana nd Edward Teller, among others. Except that SAGE existed and worked.

It is interesting too to think of it in terms of a sort of pre-ARPANET pre-internet, a pre-pre-internet, in that the system has 24 remote nodes which communicated among themselves. It doesn’t bear much resemblance to J.C.R. Licklider’s Memorandum For Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network (1963)–the true first modeling suggestion for a working internet in which all of the main pieces of the internet are present, but it is at least in the neighborhood, as SAGE was the first operational nation-wide real-time computer network. ( It should also be pointed out that Licklider and other of the creators of ARPANET were programmers for SAGE.) SAGE was in-place by 1959 and operating by 1963, but it had severe limitations as a national defense shield and was ill-equipped to counter ICBMs and SLBMs, but it was kept alive until 1983.

Notes

1. SAGE did become the template for SABRE as well as for the national air traffic control ssytem.

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Aviation & flight — Computer Tech/History — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Militaria
Proust Suits and Pressurized Cabins

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1341

If I put my literary specs on and do a little free-association, what I see in these two figures is a Proustian thing, characters in search of time, freezing time, preserving it. Time, and everything else, everything that can be associated with a human experience captured and recaptured, recirculated, resuscitated, replayed, re-envisioned, remembered, recognized, over and over again. Kind of like a memory hell, in a way, only in Proust’s hands it all sounds and tastes so beautiful. Another peek without those wicked mega-specs and I see two robots from a pulsing Disney film, actions in search of characters–the possibilities are endless, particularly if you develop a little narrative. The real story of what is happening here is complex version of a simpler solution.

And the key to it all: hypoxia.

But I can’t leave this without at least a mention of Raoul Hausmann, whose “Self Portrait of a Dadasoph” is related to this line of collecting consciousnesses:

When this next image was published in the Illustrated London News in October 1936 the practical application of tropospheric flight was just about a reality. I should really say “popular” more so than “practical”. It presented two approaches to a looming problem in the progress of aviation–reaching altitudes in excess of 10,000 feet begins to present a host of problems to the passenger of that aircraft. The solution was to combat the pressures of high altitude flight, one of which was to pressurize each passenger and crew member in their own “space suit”. The combination of the artist G.H. Davis¹ and the technical assistant compared this solution to the problem with a more simple and elegant solution.

And that was relatively simple, at least in thought experiments: rather than pressure everyone individually, you could place everyone in a pressurized environment within the aircraft. And this is the point that the artist/techie make–earlier engineers came up with simple solutions to traveling at high altitudes–they just weren’t simple enough. And compared with the better design, the initial, simple, designs look a little monstrous.

Notes:

1. I include Mr. Davis as an iconic figure in the history of 20th century technical illustration–he has been featured on this blog many times.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Aviation & flight — Cross-Sections — Industrial & Technological art — Information, Quantitative Display of — Inventions — Technology, History of
Great Maps Department: Nationalities of Manhattan, 1894.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1343

In the history of attractive and useful displays of quantitative data, the effort of Frederick Erastus Pierce (1878-1935), the creator of The Tenement-House Committee Maps–with two maps on one sheet, showing the densities of Manhattan populations (on top) and the distribution of nationalities (at bottom) and which was published in Harper’s Weekly for 1894¹–is an iconic example. [Please note–I am offering an original of this map for sale on this blog’s bookstore, though the images I’ve used for the post here are those for the copy at the Library of Congress. My copy is actually a little nicer than these; I’ve used the LC images because the map is just too big for the scanner.]

Text on verso:

There’s a significant amount of crowded, complex information exhibited here, some somewhat more successfully than others. The population density map is pretty straightforward. The distribution of nationalities, however, is another story–there are eleven groups followed here, each given a bit of a confusing flavor, given that the representations are done in black-and-white. Its difficult data to present, especially considering that the groups shown could vary block-to-block, and that the population of Manhattan at the 1890 showed 76% with foreign-born mothers and 40+% of the city foreign-born themselves. (It should be noted that only the groups with 2/3 of the base of any particular zone has bene plotted.)

Detail of bottom map:

Much of this population–a good chunk of the city’s 1.9 million people–were housed in tenements, a pre-high-rise pre-elevator version of the highrise. They were six or seven story walk-up buildings that were narrow (usually about 25-35 wide) and long (100-125+ as an average). There were 10-14 rooms per floor, and were generally packed with families. A massive expose on the tenement house was photographically depicted in “The Tenement House Exhibition of 1899”, the un-pretty picture described below by Lawrence Veiller in Charities Review in 1901:

“It has shown, step by step, the different changes that have taken place in New York tenement houses, and by means of 1,000 photographs has illustrated nearly all the evils of the present tenement-house system. Special emphasis has been laid upon the terrible evils of the dark, unventilated airshafts, which are the chief characteristic of the present type of buildings. There are over forty-four thousand tenement houses in the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, and in the year 1899 about two thousand new tenement houses were erected. These, as a rule, are built on lots twenty-five feet wide by one hundred feet deep, and are planned to accommodate four families on a floor. The buildings are six or seven stories high, and each floor generally contains fourteen different rooms.”

“Only four of these rooms on each floor have direct light and air from the street or the small yard. The other ten open on a narrow “air-shaft,”which is a well hole closed at both ends, seldom more than five feet wide, when between two buildings, and often only two feet six inches wide, varying in length from forty to sixty feet, and being generally from sixty to seventy-two feet high.”

“The first of the accompanying illustrations represent a typical airshaft. As usual, it is closed at both ends. It is two feet ten inches wide, forty-eight feet long, and seventy-two feet high. Forty-two windows open upon it, the sole source of light and air to the rooms. Rents in this building run from$10 a month for three rooms to $17 for four rooms. The baby’s bathtub is hung out of the window because the rooms are so small that there is no place to keep it inside. The shaft is only a little wider than the tub.”–Charities Review, 10 (1900-1901), 19-25.

Mr. Pierce did a commendable job in exhibiting some difficult quantitative stats in a fairly restrictive medium.

Notes:

1. The map[ sections are entitled: No. 1. Map of City of New York showing densities of population in the several sanitary districts, June 1, 1894 . And No. 2. Map of City of New York showing the distribution of Principal nationalities by sanitary districts. On verso: text, two smaller maps “Map of the of City of New York”, showing density of population by wards, and then an unrelated but interesting A bird’s-eye view of the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, Georgia; image of C.A. Collier, President and Director-General of the International Cotton State Exposition. 2 maps : on 1 sheet ; 14 x 48 cm. and 17 x 48 cm.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas
Fantastic Contrivances of Massive and Unneeded Difficulty–Bikes in War, 1897

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1345



When I see images like this, I can feel a symphony of bad ideas rattling my bones.

Of contrivances great and unnecessary, that of bringing the bicycle into the field of war–banking on a fabulous interest in the machine and riding a wave of enthusiasms enjoyed by millions–is among the loftiest of lofty unnecessaries of the past 150 years or so. When these pictures were published in 1897 interest in the bicycle was shattering; it was a popular conveyance, and then in just two or three years, an explosion: millions of people suddenly needed one. Bikes seemed to be everywhere, which forced people to imagine new and different uses for the machine. And so the Austrian army came up with a plan to include the bike in its plans of war, and it proved to be as about as useful as a double-decker horse. And just like that–poof–the fragility of the bike’s expansive uses fell right off the table, along with the popular interest in it, which by the turn of the century saw the millions who had turned towards the bike turn away.

It is difficult to image a more unpleasant (real) use for the bike than this. The pictures seem as though they are part of a Monty Python montage, but they were indeed deadly serious–though I do need to credit someone, anyone, who came up with the idea of a folding bike to make it slightly more transportable. (Overall though it seems almost as useful as a folding tuba. Or sousaphone.) If employed I think the idea would’ve proved to be more deadly to the biker than whomever the biker was attacking. Or, more likely, fleeing.

One can only shudder and what it must’ve been like, sitting on top of that fence, handing bikes (with lights and horns) from one side to the other, bullets flying, attempting an attack with 75 pounds of cumbersome trouble slapped to your side. It must have felt insane.

(The original print is available from our blog bookstore, by the way.)



I think these men would have heard the music too as they slogged their ways through brush and trees and muck and the like, sliding their bikes along that log to keep them dry while the men stood in the wet. They would’ve heard the music too, a short little symphony played on folded instruments, which sounded as bad as it looked.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Militaria — Technology, History of