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.

Human Experimentation on Children in an Orphanage: the Borden Company, 1924

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 980

Nothing
quite makes a profound statement like simplicity—the same sentiment applies
to the incredible, or impossible, or
inconceivable statement as well. For
example, Gertrude Gates Mudge’s “An Interesting Experiment with Malnourished
Children” (The Nation’s Health, August 15, 1922) seems quite an
exclamation without an ounce of emphasis in sight, a vast oversight of decency
compounded in its inelegant simplicity. Evidently acceptable (at some level) in
its own time, the announcement today seems criminal.

The
world is full of such pronouncements—perhaps they’re the very bones on which we
all walk. I was drawn to this subject
this morning, finding a bit of undoubtedly long-lost historical reporting on
medical experimentation which (in its second paragraph) makes the following
overwhelming understatement: “an institution is a perfect ‘human laboratory’
for experimentation”. It comes from a
small pamphlet published in 1924 by the Borden Company called The Catonsville Experiment It seems that Borden (a famous and large
dairy company) was trying to experiment with children to determine the
effectiveness of their new sweetened condensed milk over “regular” milk. They attempted experimentation in public
schools, but could only statistically control for milk intake at the school
itself, finding it “impossible to have
complete control over the rest of the childrens (sic) diets”. In the free school situation the Borden
company could also not control for exercise, sleep and “health concerns”.

That
is when the idea struck the Borden Nutrition Department to conduct their study
in an orphanage. Borden’s aim was to test the healthy effectiveness of their sweetened
condensed milk, and to also show that “no abnormalities in physical growth,
bone development, blood count, and kidney function would result from such an
experiment”. What this means is that
there events were a possibility, but it was worth it to Borden to test their
hypothesis out on actual human children.

There
were 60 children in the “experiment”, divided into two groups, one of which was
the control. All facts of the lives of
the children were controlled from March 15, 1924 though November 30, 1924—play,
regulated sunshine, sleep, schooling, rest, and of course food intake. Medical tests were conducted (frequencies not
specified), including general overall medical evaluations as well as blood and
urine tests—there were (at least) 18 sets of x-rays over 270 days.
Psychological and intellectual tests were also conducted, with the children
measured over dozens of different categories, including 14 classroom
activities.

The
Borden Company published the results of all of these experiments in this small
pamphlet, with one large (and impressive) folding diagram outlining some of the
medical results (shown below).

There
were also two photographs of the test subjects.
Undoubtedly they were not intended to look as though they were trophies,
but that is the general feeling I get when looking at the photographs.

The
bottom line was that Borden found their own product to be safe, and to not cause
kidney, liver or bone damage. Which was
good news to the children who were their test subjects.

Remarkably
Borden published these results two months after the test ended, evidently
without any assumption whatsoever that if there were to be negative effects
that they would occur immediately, and that a longitudinal study was wholly
unnecessary. Once the experiment ended, so too did the nee for testing their
short-term hypothesis of damage to the children.

I
wonder about what the effects of the 18 rounds of x-rays in 270 days were on these children, over time.

No doubt that in the dark history of human experimentation the Borden exploit would find itself in somewhat mild company–this of course hardly relieves them of their gross injustice of subjecting children to this sort of control and possible danger just so that the company could sell a milk product. It is an action that makes me think more of Lizzie (“I gave my mother forty whacks…”) when I think of Borden than Elsie the Cow. After a long run of financial successes, including being one of the leading dairy companies in America (and the owner/producer of Elmer’s and Krazy Glue, among many other diversified things), the Borden Company was completely and totally divested in 2005.

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One-Page Letter Establishing the U.S. Chemical Weapons Stance, 1917

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 981

On 21 December 1917, thee years into the beginning of World War I and eight months after America entered the war, Willis R. Whitney composed this one-page letter composing the American response to the use of poison gas in warfare. Whitney was head of one the great research laboratories in America—run by General Electric, the GE Lab—and was one of the leaders of the U.S. Navy‘s Naval Review Board (along with Thomas Edison and Hudson Maxim, among others), and wrote to Josephus Daniels, who was at the time the U.S. Secretary of the Navy. [Image below clickable. The item is also available for purchase via our blog bookstore.]

Whitney was a chemist, a former instructor at MIT, and a Ph.D. under Ostwald, a brilliant, “bearish” intellect in many fields, an innovator, and a leader, a tactician. He summarized the state of affairs, and communicated quickly and with clarity and without hesitation what he thought must be done, and how America should respond to the German chemical threat.

The Germans had first used chemical weapons (shells containing xylyl bromide) against Russian troops in Bolimow, Poland. It was the first foray into a section of the war that caused more than one million casualties and 85,000 deaths. It would be another three months for the first full-scale use of a chemical weapon—in the form of chlorine gas—in the Second Battle of Ypres. But the time Whitney sent his letter, chemical warfare had been a deeply-established weapon.

Whitney recommends that the U.S. begin production; that several plants be established to produce the chemicals, and to get on the matter immediately, suggesting a man to head the work. As it turns out the work didn’t begin in earnest for a number of months later, the first large quantities becoming available just after the signing of the Armistice.

{I should note that I purchased this letter–rather, Whitney’s carbon copy of the letter–many years ago from the estate of a Navy historian. I am pretty sure that it has never been published before.]

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History of Goodbye — Militaria — Technology, History of
Mathematical Art: “The End of Simple Multiplication”, 1814

JF Ptak Science Books Post 982

I found this fabulous example of multiplication in a student’s workbook, written out in 1814. Undoubtedly the sub-title, “the end of Simple Multiplication” was not intended to imply the literal end of multiplication (though the thought does invoke some interesting bits of fiction), just the result. It is simply a gorgeous object.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Industrial & Technological art — Information, Quantitative Display of — mathematics, logic
Imaging Imagination: Diagrams of Humor & the Center of Levity, 1878

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 985

[Wood-eating woman tells a joke to distract three men sharing the last chair in creation in alternative chairless dot universe.]

Acerbic and punctilious, this work by an anonymous (Ambrose Bierce-like) late 19th-century
cataloger of human-ness attempted to diagramaitcally display the
sharing of humor among people. The resulting images–all unexplained, not indexed, and left to a logical imagination–fit very nicely into a developing section on this blog called Maps and Diagrams of
Imagination and Ideas.

{Woman finger-ingests chair presented to her by knee-connected chair-minions from talking-mustache close-male-pelvis universe.]

In reality this short, small, wordless publication’s images looks like natural philosophy textbook images displaying ideas like momentum and gravity…often they would be quite prosaic, with unnecessary natural accoutrement, little bits of added detail that had nothing really to do with the image displayed. The real intent of this document was to illustrate the center of gravity–it would’ve been more helpful if the publication had a title page or text of any kind for that matter, but since it doesn’t the mind ran free, allowing these representations to be a geometry of shared humor. Which of course they are not–but the images do have a certain coy funniness to them…

[Woman makes wooden point by stabbing Ear-lobed Mustache Man in the heart with her wooden palm finger.]

Some of the other posts that could be included in this Imagining the Imagination category include:

First photograph of a smell:

Mathematical Thinking being Thought

Map of Nothing:

A Map of Holes in the Sky:
Heaven

Map of Color-Sense Placement

Unexpected Sense Impressions from Antique Prints: Sound

A Map of Comparative Moralities for Women

{How it would be done if men gave birth.]

{She is smiling. What do the other expression imply?]

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas
The Hidden Death Hammer: Display of Quantitative Data for the Battle of Jutland, 1915.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 986

A year and two weeks after the end of WWI, the Illustrated London News published this compelling graphical display comparing
the British naval losses at Jutland to three other great sea battles (Camperdown, the Nile and Trafalgar).
The battle near Jutland (Denmark)
was the largest naval engagement of WWI, involving the German Navy’s High Seas
Fleet and the Royal Navy Grand Fleet, and took place May 31-June 1, 1915 (“The
Day”). It was an absolutely enormous
engagement, with 250 vessels involved (151 for the Royal Navy, 99 for the
German).¹

The end result of the battle was mixed and still debated
today; neither side could convincingly claim a conclusive victory from the
affair.

The Royal Navy losses at Jutland
were staggering: 6,094 killed and 570 wounded, with German losses at 2,551
killed and 507 wounded.

And while this graphical display places Jutland in a weak
context with these other battles, and as pleasing as the thing is visually, the
larger mark, the great lurking statistical and human beast lurking there in the
mix of silhouettes and data, occurs about halfway down the far right column.

Here we see the losses for five ships: the Queen Mary, the Invincible, the
Indefatigable, the Defence, and
the Black Prince. Together, some 5066 men served aboard these
vessels; at the end June 1, 1915, 5,059 of them would be dead. Everyone aboard the Indefatigable, Defence
and Black Prince would be killed; 1
would survive on the Invincible, and
6 would survive the killing of the Queen
Mary. Astonishing, really. And there
are no other numbers like this on this chart.

As certain and as clear as this representation seems, and as
straightforward and seemingly elementary as it looks, I was shocked to see the
numbers for those five Royal Navy ships, a “hidden” history within a broad
comparative analysis.

Notes:

1. England: 28 battleships,
9 battlecruisers,
8 armoured cruisers, 26 light cruisers,
78 destroyers,
1 minelayer,1
seaplane carrier.
Germany:
16 battleships,
5 battlecruisers,
6 pre-dreadnoughts,
11 light cruisers,
61 torpedo
boats.

[The Queen Mary going down.]

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Statistics–Fossil, Found, Odd, Forgotten
Propaganda and the Dinner Table: Strike-Breaking and Graphical Display of Data, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 987

This graphic display of the effects of a transport workers’ strike is a pretty,
well-designed piece of propaganda designed to draw in the general, middle-class
(such as it was) and working population into league against the strikers. At least that’s what it looks like to me: the
strangulating effects of food not coming into the port of Liverpool
and its attack on the family dining table. Literally, and figuratively: a
table, by the way, that appears at the direct center of attention, the bull’s-eye
of what is a target, made to look like the transport workers were taking direct
aim at the symbol of the family.

All of what was going on of course was that some hard working people were
trying to get a little more money to put food on their own tables—the facilitators of food distribution
for the nation’s people wanting nothing more than a little more food for
themselves and their families. And these
were the people, by the way, who did not set a five-utensil place settings with
linen table covers and a large fresh bouquet as is oddly the case in the illustration.

By the time this illustration appeared in the Illustrated London News in August 1911 the movement had already
been active for a year—there had also been a call to action the month before
involving over 100,000 workers. The National
Sailors and Firemen’s Union, and the National Union of Ships’ Stewards, Cooks,
Butchers and Bakers, dockhands, lorry rivers, general laborers, and on and on, were involved
in the strike, which was a bitter and confrontational battle between them,
scabs, police, the army, and of course the owners of the means of production
and shipping means.

After the battle of greed and need, need won.

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Bad Ideas — Iconography — Industrial & Technological art — Information, Quantitative Display of — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
“Women are Human, too”: Human Resource Workbook for Females, 1943

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 988

In the history of archaic thought it doesn’t take very much at all to reach
the uncomfortable bits in the sulfurously tangled history of the subjugation
of women. But it is most interesting when you find the points at which the “backward-looking”
archaic parts are actually somewhat forward-looking for their time.

Such is the case with this odd and interesting little pamphlet, Women in Men’s Clothing, published by
the Vultee Aircraft Corporation, and published in 1943—it can be simultaneously
awkward as a broken product of its time and oddly, slightly, futuristic (with a grudging and clawing recognition of women as possible equals as members of the work force). Overall the publication looks pretty painful from today’s perch, but when you look a little past the winces you can see a little bit of recognition for women in general; at least this is far forward from anything that might’ve been published slightly before the war.

The pamphlet was intended as a human resources tool for managers and
supervisors in an aircraft production facility where women had been sought and
recruited to fill the very many vacancies brought on by the war. (Millions of women entered the workforce for the
first time between 1942-1945; millions of them exited too once the servicemen
returned from active duty to reclaim their jobs.) For most industrial supervisors, the prospect
of women in the workforce was not a welcomed one, and many had never before needed to think of such a diversified workplace. This slight publication translated the idea of “women/”wimmin” for these
men.

The “translation” of the understanding of women from home to the workforce doesn’t go very far to advancing the understanding of women at work–they’re pretty much the same (dogmatic, condescending, sexist, domineering).

All of that is pretty well summed up by the first picture in this series–the asterisked “equality” between men and women. I must admit that I don’t think I’ve ever seen this “equals, but” label before, or at least so deep into the century.

And of course “women are Human, too” needs very little comment…as is the case for most of the images in the pamphlet.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — History of the Future — Women, History of
Outsider Logic Department: the Fabulous Curative Necessity of Fatty Meats

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 989

[see also my related posts on Women Meat Pioneers and of course Meat String and Curled Hair]

I have a suspicion that the author of Eat
Meat for a Successful Life, G.H. Brinkler
(a “N.D.”, doctor of nauturopathy, from the American School
of Naturopathy and the tautologically-surprising “founder” of the “Brinkler
Club”) had a compromised and possibly antagonistic personal history with
vegetables. And water, as Mr. Brinkler
is also the originator of the “Brinkler
Waterless Way to Health”, and a man who claims not
to have drunk any water in 35 years.

Most humans don’t do so well without water after a few days, though there
are extreme cases where people have survived for several weeks without water.
To have survived 1,820 weeks seems pretty much to be well on its way to being a
vastly under-appreciated record of human endurance.

But the main story here of course is the meat, with the waterless bit woven
through it like heart-ending marbling in a butt chop. Meat, as we are told by Mr. Brinkler, is
pretty much a “natural fixer” for just about anything. Lazy in the morning? A pound of pork on the broiler will cure
that. Sexual inadequacy? Solved with meat (ingestion). Poor memory?–the answer: meat, and lots of it. And not only just meat;
it definitely needs to be not lean. Big fatty meats are the greatest source of the
desired “muscle food”; lean meats, unfortunately, are only “nerve foods”. Somehow
the meat mixed with the waterless way induces the “nerve-ends” into a “more
natural” and strengthened existence.

The Brinkler follower should also chew their meat less. “The masticating fad might result in tiring
the jaws and gross undernourishment”.

I could go on and pull further quotes out of context from this piece, but
that would be mean. The pamphlet (1934) I have is the U.S. Copyright Deposit copy, and I suspect that there may not have been many copies other than mine. I think that all the
man was trying to do was sell broilers.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Outsider Logic
Primer for Londoners on being Bomber by Nazis, July 27, 1940.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 990

[Also see my The Bombing of Britain in the Illustreite Zeitung, July 1940 post; also here.]

The
Battle of Britain was an air battle begun weeks after the surrender of France (22 June 1940) in preparation for the Nazi
invasion of England. Hitler and the High Command believed Britain to be
vulnerable², and surrenderable, or at the least could be convinced not to interfere
in the rest of the war. But plans were
made for the invasion—an invasion which could only be successful (it was reasoned)
if there was complete naval or aerial superiority. The naval part was out of
the question, especially since the Nazis had suffered such losses in the
Norwegian campaign. The Luftwaffe was another story, and so the operation began.

The Illustrated London News published
this pictorial introduction to Nazi bombing on 27 July 1940, just weeks after
the campaign began. At this point in the
war the Luftwaffe operations were delegated to coastal installations and
aircraft industries.

The terror bombing
against citizens in cities—which was an idea not born here but rather 20 odd
years before—wouldn’t begin for some months.
In the meantime, and at this early part of the campaign against England, the
British citizenry was introduced in a very proper way how the bombing was being
carried out. IT really does seem to be
to be a very constructive, non-alarmist, cogent distribution of information to
the general public about the potential for massive devastation.

Notes:

1.
By the summer of 1941 the campaign was largely over, the Nazi effort doomed. England:
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

2. The plan ‘Directive No. 16; On the Preparation of a Landing Operation
against England’
read, in part, as follows:

“Since England, despite
its militarily hopeless situation, still has not shown any signs of being
prepared to negotiate, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England and, if
necessary, carry it out. The objective of this operation is to eliminate the
English home country as a base for the continuation of the war against Germany…”

“Included in these preparations is the bringing about of those preconditions
which make a landing in England
possible;”

“a) The English air force must have been beaten down to such an extent
morally and in fact that it can no longer muster any power of attack worth
mentioning against the German crossing…”

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Aviation & flight — Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria — Technology, History of
On the Subjugation of Women: a review of some posts

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

I wanted to collect some of the posts on this blog on this subject as it seems as though I really don’t have a category for it in the archives…

What Goes into Making Human Robot Girls

https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2010/01/what-goes-into-making-human-robot-girls-1941.html

First Thing to Do is to Find Some Men: How to Get a Boy-Date, 1941

https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2010/01/the-first-thing-is-to-find-some-men-how-to-get-a-boydate-1941.html

How to Look Smart, or Pretty, but Not Both

https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/women-history-of/

Maintaining Women as a Subclass: Major Reinforcements from
Minor Non-sequitors

https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/10/maintaining-women-as-a-subclass-reinforcements-from-minor-nonsequitors.html

Missing Pieces of Women: Pope Joan and the Proper Girl of
the Ladies Home Journal

https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2010/01/missing-pieces-of-women-pope-joan-the-proper-girl-of-the-ladies-home-journal.html

How
FDR Made Women (1) Nervous and thus (2) Older. An Appeal to Vote Republican,
1936

https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2010/01/how-fdr-made-women-1-nervous-and-thus-2-older-an-appeal-to-vote-republican-1936.html

The Coming Sex War of 1919

https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2010/01/the-coming-sex-war-of-1919.html

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Women, History of
Primitive De Luxe versus Civilized No Lux

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 992

I’m
not sure exactly what Solomon Butcher told his subjects when he photographed them
outside of their frontier houses out there in the Great
Plains in the 1880’s. His spectacular
portraits included not only the family of the house, but in many cases, everything
that the family owned. Possessions were
an

encumbrance making your way across the country in the mid/19^th century,
especially if you didn’t have very many to begin with. These families—the first generation in their
mostly sod-built houses—would’ve been farmers scratching out a minimum trade
and decent subsistence. City/town goods
would’ve been not-usual in these circumstances, and evidently whatever it was
they had of these things wound up outside, displayed around the house and on
the roof, when Mr. Butcher arrived in his photographer’s wagon.

(Who
was it, I wonder, who came up with the initial idea of displaying all of the
family’s possessions: did Butcher set
out with that idea, or did it happen spontaneously? I wonder what it was the families thought as
Butcher was packing up his equipment, his horse fed, his cameras stowed away,
climbing up onto the driver’s bench. Did
they wait until he was a spot on the horizon to put away their things? Did they gather everything up as Butcher
gathered up his own material, or did they just wait for the stranger to
disappear before pulling the family back together? Sitting their surrounded by
the things that they owned, did these families feel a quiet pride, or were they
embarrassed have their pictures made together with their frontier opulence? I
suspect that the idea for display did not begin with the families.)

On
another part of the luxury spectrum is this floor plan for a “No-Lux Hotel”, a 2×3
metre/room place for folks to stay cheaply/inexpensively. There were 50
rooms packed into a 36×24 metre footprint,

leaving precious little room
for hardly anything else, like hallways (which seem very narrow), stairways
(actually a singular, as there is but one) and bathrooms (one with 8 sinks and
four toilets per floor).

The
center of the structure seems curiously blank in the top plan. The bottom one is confounding, a mysterious
mystery: why on earth would there be
musical notation written backwards (via “Arabic Notation”) in the center of the
plan? No doubt the architect was on the iconoclastic
side to have included such a thing; but its inclusion no doubt meant something
to the author, though it is now lost to his/her dust. Pity.

“Lusux”
is Latin for something like “extravagance”.
“De luxe” appeared in France
in 1928 or so for the first time to describe this added opulence in a word of
its own, though there is a certain geology to the idea. A luxury might well be a spice on a camping
trip, or a back-up aircraft to the family helicopter. Perhaps it was an extra sink in a cheap hotel,
or a violin for the kids in a house that stood by itself in 10-square-mile
solitude. At least the multi-floored Hotel No-Lux had a stairway.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — American History: Western Exploration & Native Americans — Histories of Smallness