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.

Airwar over Gallipoli–New, Massive Aeroplane-delivered Bombs, 1915

JF Ptak Science Books

War Images “Almost as Tall as a Man! Great Bomb Used by the Allies Airmen at Gallipoli”, as seen on the front cover of The Illustrated London News for 27 November 1915. The campaign at Gallipoli was more than half done, more than half-way closer to the finish, which found the Allies retreating in the midst of high misery, gallant action, and broad death and destruction, with more than 390,000 soldiers from both sides being killed or wounded during the 10 months of the campaign. It was a miserable experience–hot in the summer, cold in the winter, with frostbite, rotting corpses, dysentery, bad food, poor sanitation, supply difficulty, and ultimately a costly stalemate which was supposed to have ended up in an Allied route to Russia.

The use of bombs by airborne craft was still in its infancy at this point, the idea coming into use just a few years before the beginning of the war in 1914–the practice was quickly adapted after 1915. (The first use of bombs dropped from airplanes is widely seen as having taken place by the Italians in 1911 and then in Mexico during the revoultion in 1912.) This image shows the development of an enormous bomb, though its details and destruction force “are left to the imagination of the reader”; I’m pretty sure that the bomb (if it was real and if it wasn’t just a piece of propaganda) would’ev been hauled aloft and dropped from a dirigible rather than an airplane.
See: Airwar over Gallipoli/Dardenelles and here for a general look at aviation udring the early part of WWI.

[We offer the weekly issue of the Illustrated London News for sale here.]

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Aviation & flight — Militaria — World War I
World War I Photographs–German Prisoners, Mass Crowd Scene, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books

This image comes from a collection here of First World War news service photographs, showing German prisoners being readied for transport home, and dated 20 November 1918. This group had evidently surrendered just before the armistice was signed, and was sent directly and instantly to a staging area for transport back to the Fatherland. The way that many newspapers obtained the war images that they published in their papers was via a semi-centralized pool of war images. The newspaper would request, say, a photo of German prisoners, and would contact one of these photographic agencies—in this particular case, it was the Central News Photo Service of 26-28 Beaver Street, NYC—and purchase the rights for republication, and then print it in the newspaper along with the story. In almost every case the photo would be accompanied by a caption mimeographed onto an attached piece of cheap paper, and in this case it reads: “Waiting to Return Home/a photo just received showing a batch of enemy troops who surrendered just before the signing of the armistice, joyously discussing the coming of peace and the opportunity of returning home to their families.”
I seriously doubt that the copy editor could read the minds of either the photographer or the troops in the photo. I would imagine that they were definitely joyous about going home ALIVE to their families, but when looking really closely at the picture the thing that seems to dominate the actions of the people is food. Or cigarettes. But mostly when looking hard at the faces in the photo, the men just look tired.

Looking very closely at these types of images has always been fascinating; look close enough, under high magnification, and the large photo becomes composed of dozens of smaller photos. The whole is an assemblage of vignettes, each in themselves a work of art.

Continuing in a more odd tone, I’m also reasonably convinced that after looking at hundreds of faces in a photo like this that you’ll find a picture of yourself.

I did. This section is a 3200 dpi scan of a 15×10 mm section, and I am undoubtedly and unquestionably the bald bearded man (one of the few people in the image without a hat) at center-bottom.

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Militaria — Photography — World War I
Women in World War I–Vermeer of the Tars, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books

[This original, vintage image maybe purchased from our blog bookstore, here.]

In England, women were welcomed to the (paid) workforce during the years of the First World War (1914-1918)—their employment in traditionally male positions enabled those they replaced to go out to the front and die for their country. Thus the women seen here in the News Photo Service Agency photograph (taken in 1918), working at spraying tar in the streets of London, were appreciated, and tolerated. For women in England the War blasted away the contrivances of formally scheduled employment: something like 12% of fall women in England were working as servants and house cleaners. Come the War, women were offered jobs of revolutionary stature in a wide range and variety of work. The Civil Service employment for women went from 33,000 in 1911 to 102,000 in 1921, and trade union membership rose 160% (357,000 in 1914 to 1,000,000 in 1918 (with men showing a 44% increase at the same time); for the most part, though, employers took advantage of the situation, and the women still generally earned less than half of the salary as comparable male workers did (or the men they replaced).

When the end of the War came, so did the appreciation for the women replacement workers—there was bitter feelings in the post-war period because of the weak British economy and a scarcity of jobs. So the women who took the jobs of men to help the country’s war effort and free up hundreds of thousands of men for war service became an atavistic action, “taking” the jobs of men who had gone out to fight for their country. This of course cost many women their jobs, but the damage had already been deeply done to the pre-1914 British world of the sexual politics of business-being-done, though it would take World War II to really ingrain the appearance of women in the workforce into the national psyche.

I’ve liked this photo for a long time, seeing things differently in it over the years. It struck me just yesterday that the woman in foreground-right–whose close-up reminds me too of a Madonna, a Mona Lisa of the Tars–looks like a Vermeer character from 400 years ago. Or at least the position of her body does.

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Women, History of — World War I
Japanese-American Response to Removal and Internment, April 1942. The Tolan Report.

“We Are Americans”: Japanese American Citizens Respond to Internment and Removal, April, 1942.

[Original document available for purchase at our blog bookstore site.]

“….there must be a point beyond which there may be no abridgement of civil liberties and we feel that whatever the emergency, that persons must be judged, so long as we have a Bill of Rights, because of what they do as persons We feel that treating persons, because they are members of a race, constitutes illegal discrimination, which is forbidden by the fourteenth amendment whether we are at war or peace.”– A. L. Wirin, Counsel for the Southern California Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, speaking on the internment of Japanese-Americans, 1942

“We make these statements, not because we fear evacuation, but because we believe, to the bottom of our hearts, that the best interests of the United States, our nation are to be served by being permitted to stay, work, fight, and die for our country if necessary here where we belong.“–Response by the Japanese American Citizens League to Internment Camps, 1942

This excruciating, heart-rending 1942 document was submitted by the Japanese American Citizens League (of Seattle, Washington) to the Tolan Congressional Committee with recommendations, proposals and requests in the event of the removal of Japanese citizens from “sensitive” areas in western America It is an exceptional report, a well-reasoned response to the developing and calamitous American fear of Japanese fellow-citizens; a fear which was swiftly leading itself to xenophobic actions the result of which was the internment of 120,000 American citizens in non-lethal concentration camps…

Continue reading at bookstore link.

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Women in World War I–Rare Photographs, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1190

[All of the images below are available for purchase; see our blog bookstore for details.]

This is another in a series of posts on images from my News Service Photographs of WWI collection. All thousand or so of them were made in the last half of 1918 (save for a very few made in 1919) , in the last months of the grueling conflict, and were intended to be used by newspaper and magazines to illustrate stories about the war. An editor would send off a request to one of these agencies for, say, a photograph of marching American nurses, and the agency would send one back (for a fee) along with a caption. There’s really no way for me to determine if these photos were ever published, and there is never an attribution for the photographer.

Most of the images have an accompanying descriptive text–this was to be used by whomever published the photograph, along with the attribution for the source of the photo.

In almost every case I supplied a detail of the image, hopefully of something that you’d want to see a detail of.

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918. 8×6 inches. Very good condition. $150

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Militaria — Photography — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Women, History of — World War I
How Long is the Coastline of Great Britain?

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1193

[This pamphlet may be purchased from our blog bookstore site, here.]

This is the first of a few short essays of the idea of pre-historic appearances of important ideas. I use the word “pre-historic” in its literal sense—that is, these papers were published before the concepts that they discussed were recognized and published, later, in more complete form and of course to greater fame. One will certainly be Gregor Mendl’s paper (Versuche über Plflanzenhybriden ) published in the obscure Verhandlungen des naturforschenden Vereines in Brünn, (Brno), and to be resurrected at the hands of Gregory Bateson thirty-odd years later to much acclaim. Another example is Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think”, published in The Atlantic Monthly in June 1945, and which was a now widely recognized definite intellectual precursor to the construction of what we know today as the Internet.

Right now, though, I’d like to look at the pre-birth of fractals in Benoit Mandelbrot’s precursor (1967) paper (and in a weird, probably not-correct way, scooping himself) to his more famous effort of 1975, in which he coins the term and fully describes “fractals”, showing the measurement of the coastlines behave like a fractal over a range of measurement scales.

The seminal paper, How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension, published in Science magazine in 1967, is an introduction to the concept of fractals (which Mandelbrot would name later in 1975). The kernel of it all is found in the Lewis Fry Richardson graphs and more so in the small illustration on page three of the paper—the peek into the future world of fractals, seeing a fractal before it was named so.

Richardson (a kind of Jevons, or Marey-like American figure on the history of 20^th century science) did some very good thinking about the elusive nature of naming such a thing as the lengths of coastlines and other natural constructions: namely he determined that their measured length was dependent upon the scale of measurement. That is to say the measured length, L(G), is ruled the scale of G, approximating the function as L(G)=M(G)1-0

Mandelbrot moves on to discuss the coastline in terms of it being a self-similar object, which is something that is nearly exactly similar to a part of itself, or the whole having the same shape of one or more than one of its parts, and regresses.

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mathematics, logic — Naming Things
Gas Masks and Poison Gas, World War I, 1915

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1191

In the long line of potent and horrible weapons, few are as so superbly bad as chemical and poison gas.

[This image is available for purchase at our blog bookstore, here.]

The heading of this full-page photo from The Illustrated London News for 18 December 1915 really is quite understated—“remarkable” really doesn’t quite cover it. First of all, photographs from moving airplanes were not common; secondly, this is one of the earliest images ever made of a poison gas attack in progress, just eight months after the initial use of German poison gas at Ypres (a first-hand account of which can be seen here http://www.firstworldwar.com/diaries/firstgasattack.htm The experience of poison gas in warfare was still “new”–newer still for the Russians, who were at the receiving end of this unnamed Eastern Front attack.

The story on this goes as follows: during the night the German enemy forces crawled with metal and glass canisters of the poison gas to the very front of the Russian lines, or at least to the outer edges of the barbed wire perimeter. The crawler would retreat, and then the whole of the attacking force would wait until daylight and a favorable wind condition at which time rifelmen would discharge at the canister, a direct hit mixing the contents fo the vials, producing the desired gas. The wind would then pick up the gas and disperse it, the Germans waiting for the first leg of their attack to take effect on the poor soldiers in the trenches, and then attack once the gas had mostly cleared.

And the associated

And this solitary figure:

The masks devised to deal with the attacks were soemtimes effective, sometimes not–actually, they were occasionally enhancers. The earliest masks were creepy, unworldly, Coraline-like burlap-and-button-faced affairs–I’d hardly wnt to imagine seeing thousnads of these guys come running up to me with rifles and grenades in their hands attacking my position.

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Militaria — Photography — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — World War I
Odd Person Out–Large Crowds and the Singular Person in Photographs

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1194

[These images are all available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.]

(1) The Composition of Relief and Happiness–Minus One. Free France, 1918.

This remarkable photograph shows the joy and relief of the townspeople of Saudemont, France (20 kilometers south-east of Arras), after just having been freed from German occupation after four years of captivity.

Saudemont had evidently suffered greatly over the four years, and seemed as though the population of the entire town was going ot be removed along with the Germans–but they weren’t, and teh town was simply abandoned, found and recaptured by these Canadian forces.

The images of overwhelming joy are (almost) everywhere:

Except of course for the man at the fulcrum of the image (and the woman behind him), who remained, well, stolid:

But so far as everyone else is concerned:

(2) In this second photograph, taken of American troops at a ceremony at the cemetery of St. Marie, Havre, France in November 1918, the massive crowd (the largest funeral service held in France) is almost entirely focused on the proceedings–except this one serviceman in front, lathced onto the photographer.

(3)

Another extraordinary image of pressed-together humans, of a human sea, a carpet of hatted men. And believe me, every person in this image of (I’d say) approximately 5000 men has got a hat on. There are hundreds of folks in the photo who re aware of the photographer and who are looking right at the camera, but there is only *one* person who is lifting his hat to the photographer.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Militaria — Photography — World War I
The Sense and Nonsense of Success–the Pulitzer Prize, A Saturday Mornng Quiz

JF Ptak Sdcience Books   Post 1198

Can you spot what the similarity is in these books–besides being published works? It is a list of Pulitzer Prize winners, but what else? One work got the prize, the other didn’t. Can you tell the winner from the loser?

Here’s the hint–its not the title whose writer almost everyone can identify.

That’s correct–it is a list of famous losers. All of the winners of the Pulitzer for that year are listed first; the losers (well, those not selected) are second. (Yes I’ve mixed drama in with the fiction–this is a very quick study.)

1919. The Magnificent Amerbersons and My Antonia

1921. Age of Innocence and This Side of Paradise.

1923   Icebound and The Hairy Ape.

1924 Hell-Bent Fer Heaven (by Hatcher Hughes) and No! No! Nanette.

1926. Arrowsmith and The Great Gatsby

1927. Early Autumn and The Sun Also Rises.

1929. Street Scene and Strange Interlude

1930. Laughing Boy and The Sound and the Fury and A Farewell to Arms and Sartoris

1931. Years of Grace and As I Lay Dying

1932. Of Thee I Sing and Mourning Becomes Electra

1933. The Store and Light in August

1935. Now in November and Tender is the Night

1936. Honey in the Horn and Of Time and the River

1938. The Late George Apley and Of Mice and Men

1939. Abe Lincoln in Illinois and Our Town

1943. Dragons Teeth and The Moon is Down

1944. Journey in the Dark and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

1946. State of the Union and The Glass Menagerie.

1952. The Shrike and Requiem for a Nun and Darkness at Noon and The Rose Tatoo and The King and I.

1959 The Travels of James McPheeters and Lolita.

1965. The Keepers of the House and Herzog.

And so on.

I’m not saying that the winners of the Pulitzer for that year are bad works–I’m just pointing out that they just might not be good. In any case I think that if you were given the chance to be the writer of one or the other, my guess is that 99.9% of folks would chose the work in column #2.

“The nature of winning and losing is not a win-win situation…” the opening line for one of these winners might have read. The vagueries of success is a disorganized system but a system nonetheless, and sometimes it just makes no sense; and sometimes when it actually does make sense the sense it is is nonsense.

So it goes.

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Bad Ideas — Literature
Propaganda and Surrender Tickets, World War II, 1943-1945.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1200

A part of the payload dropped on German and Japanese forces were not metal and explosive, but paper. Hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper with real and imagined information, tickets to surrender, reminders of the coming of the end of the war, passages to a prisoner of war camp somewhere that would ensure the soldier’s survival of the rest of the war. Convincing someone to surrender, or making it easier for them to not fight too hard and to surrender, is sometimes easier than to confront and kill them.

For the most part these were distributed in a combination effort between the U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF) and the Royal Air Force (RAF), while the other major segment was done by the Supreme Headquarters of the Army Expedition Force (SHAEF) and the 8th U.S. Army. There pieces of directed information were very persuasive, but of course they were hardly new—not even the delivery system (via aircraft) was an innovation.

These leaflets were more or less an “information” service relating factual events and presented in such a way to persuade and convince whomever picked them up that their cause was at this point futile. In just about every case in the 150 items in my small collection as far as I could determine all of the statements made were indeed correct and accurate. Leaflets were dropped by the ton during the war that were pure fabrication, intended to confuse the scare the recipient into surrender, deceiving them; but not these. (For example, a famous use of deception in major confrontations was Operation Quicksilver and the creation of the First United States Army Group (FUSAG), a non-existent fighting enemy that was supposed to distract the Germans while real preparations were underway elsewhere for the invasion of Europe (D Day).

There was a distinct threat of terror in many of these leaflets, though the terror would never come from the Americans or Brits—the Russians, however, were another story. (Remember that the U.S. gets into the war at the end of 1941; the British had been fighting since 1939; and the Russians, well, they had been fighting too since 1939 [starting out without chivalry and with cold malice against the Finns], but they did fight against the Nazis once they had been completely deceived by them, losing 20 million people in the process. The Germans had much more to fear from them than anything on earth. And rightly so.) The use of terror in propaganda is probably as old as warfare itself—for example the Mongol leader Tamerlane built a pyramid of 90,000 human heads in front of the walls of Delhi to persuade the inhabitants to just forget about fighting, and leave. The British employed a terror tactic in the use of the Gurkas and their curved and menacing Kukri to great advantage; the Americans had the Phoenix Program in Vietnam (for the assassination of leading Viet Cong and their supporters), and so on, into the sunset.

I do not intend to try and write a thousand-word history of wartime psychological operations here—I just wanted to share some of the extreme emotions and humanity that surfaces in some of these leaflets. The first (above), for example, translated, asks “Where are your loved ones?” (Sprint, 1945), and hammers away at the soldiers memories of home and family, and about what might be happening to that family now that the war is just about won by the Allied forces, and that the Russians were on their way to Berlin. These family-driven, hollowing, haunting, nervous questions went, I suspect, to the very heart of anyone who picked it up.

The second, “Auf fremder Erde (etc.)” (Spring 1945), roughly translated, called the attention of the German soldier again to the Russians, “On German soil the Russian Deluge is Raging across the Oder toward the Heart of Germany!” And “On foreign soil you are perishing relentlessly, without value, without influence, on this war which has long been decided!”

The third leaflet, “Deutschland R-Industrie…” (3 April 1945) informs the German soldier that the hear of the German industrial region has been punctured and given up, and that supplies to soldiers in the field would no longer occur—that the fighting man was basically adrift, lost, forgotten, unreachable by everyone except the enemy.

The next example is a 10×8 inch surrender pass that was dropped on Japanese soldiers in the early spring of 1945, and tartly signed “C-in-C [Commander in Chief] Allied Forces”. There is a very full explanation in Japanese on the back of the ticket, which has not been translated. It seems rather remarkable to me that this was so well designed, and so attractive, and so large, and that it was dropped from a plane on thousands of Japanese troops. As were they all, really—just about every one of the leaflets in y house are extremely well written and designed—epistles from a plane to induce surrender to a defeated, tired, dying set of armies.

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Militaria — Psychology
Mundane Images of Necessities of War–Found Bullets and the Battle of Pots and Pans

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1201

A little went a long way, sometimes, in collecting the ends and bits of a campaign or a retiring column or from the attics and basements of village houses, or in scrapyards or dustbins or abandoned yards and buildings. Scrap has sometimes contributed greatly to major war efforts; and sometimes it has contributed just a few hundred rounds of ammunition, gathered from the sick or dying or forces on the move, that have told the tale of change in battle. When you can only carry so much in a campaign where shooting can be an endless process, you can by definition never really carry enough bullets when you’re already carrying enough of everything else.

[These images may be purchased from our blog bookstore here.]

On the other side of the line, the Germans were tyrying to utilize every bit possible as well–here’s an example of a round-up of metal goods taken from the kitchens of a small town (looking ,mostlly like mortar and pestel sets). In towns throughout France, on the other hand, church bells were collected and stored away, hidden from possibel capture and melting by German troops.

:Now for an example from WWII: Salvage (1943) is just simply brilliant! It is a superb design, getting its inelegant point elegantly across to the reader, making the collecting of junk a bona fide war effort, triumphant, superior; it delivers the message gorgeously. Who wouldn’t want to rush out and look for some metal scrap and bits and grow a neighborhood junk yard so that the community could build a tank? Certainly these two boys–under the watchful guidance of a smiling cop in a black tie–couldn’t resist, and from the looks of the progress billboard behind them, nor could anybody else in the neighborhood, as the community collected enough metal junk for 14 tanks. (Or at least pieces and chunks for fourteen tanks.)

The community was Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and they certainly did their collecting-best. The two photos below show (top) the scrap yard after two days of collecting, and (bottom) the end of the campaign two months latter.

“One pound of fat contained enough glycerin to make a pound of black powder, enough for six 75-mm shells. Twenty three hundred old nylon stockings contained enough nylon to make one parachute.
Thirty thousand razor blades contained enough steel to make fifty 30-caliber machine guns.”   (Lingeman, Richard R. Don t You Know There Is a War On? The American Home Front, 1941-1945. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1970, 254-55). When you have an entire town doing this, you can build tanks; when you have millions of people throwing together to collect this “junk”, then you get part of a war effort. It is also part of a giant propaganda hearts/minds machine, especially for the U.S., which was (and I use this word with some hesitation) cushioned from the effects of the war by two oceans–it reminded people who hadn’t contributed a life to the war that there was actually something tangible going on, and that they could do something to help. It kept peoples’ minds in the game. Rubber was another big concern, as was silk (the controlling exporter of both coming largely from overseas, and in the case of silk, the exporter was Japan.) Of course there was the introduction of synthetics for both silk and rubber, but the point in fact was that there was indeed a shortage, and the donated and salvaged stuff was necessary.

Here’s a beginning picture for the burgeoning community scrapyard:

Some interesting works relating to salvage drives:

Barringer, Edwin C. The Story of Scrap. Washington D.C:Institute of Scrap Iron & Steel Inc., revised edition, 1954.

Cohen, Stan. V for Victory: America’s Home Front During World War II. Missoula Montana: Pictorial Histories Publishing Co., Inc., 1991.

And afterwards:

Hoopes, Roy. Americans Remember the Home Front: An Oral Narrative. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1977.

Lingeman, Richard R. Don t You Know There Is a War On? The American Home Front, 1941-1945. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970.

O’Neill, William L. A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II. New York: The Free Press, 1993.

And here’s one I’d like to see (the cover of):

Wolf, Howard. The Story of Scrap Rubber. Akron, Ohio: A.
Schulman, Inc., 1943.

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Militaria — Photography