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.

Nazi Propaganda: the British Threat to Germany, pre-War 1939

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 897

I’ve written twenty or so posts here about (mostly) graphical propaganda of World War II, and most of that coming from the Axis (and mainly Nazi) end. A popular theme among this limited exposure seems to be the Germany-surrounded meme: Germany under attack from all sides: massive attacks being directed by the British from air and sea,

airstrikes coming in from thousands of planes in Czechoslovakia, Poland moving on the ground and in the air to invade south-eastern Germany, retaliation mounting from the French, and on and on. And somehow when all of this is presented in cartographical form to the average reader, and when it is presented over and over again, the propaganda must take its toll.

Tonight’s installments come from the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig), and were printed just before and just after the start of the general hostilities of WWII (meaning the invasion of Poland, and not the actions against Austria or Czechoslovakia, and not the war in the east beng waged against China by Japan).The first comes in the 27 July 1939 issue–featuring a remembrance of WWI on the cover, showing a devastated field of battle with a spanking-new heavy dagger thrust into the heart of the field–and shows John Bull pulling strings of an advancing/attacking navy in the one hand while the other controls a firing network for cannons facing Germany based in its contiguous-bordered countries. (The image was created by the prodigious Richard Lipus and titled “Englishe Kriegspolitik”.)

The second piece was published just after the start of the war (21 September 1939) and attacks Neville Chamberlain (contrasting words and deeds) and his “treacherous” involvement with neutral countries.

Not particularly virulent, these maptoons undoubtedly helped to form a Nast-ian image in the commonplace psyche of the German people about the treacherousness of the Brits and of their dire situation of being surrounded by potent and threatening enemies.

Some of the other posts on this blog relating to WWII propaganda:

Maps
as Propaganda https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/maps-as-propaga.html

Maps
of the Polish “Corridor” https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/09/propaganda-in-maps-the-polish-corridor-1939.html

Maps
of Naval Disaster https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/05/jf-ptak-science-books-llc-post-624-the-admiralty-regrets-to-announce–was-for-years-the-standard-beginning-to-an-offici.html

Anti-Nazi
Propaganda https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/08/antinazi-propaganda.html

Nazi
Propaganda and the Threat From Czechoslovakia
https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/propaganda-maps.html

Humanitarian
propaganda for Allied families with family members who were POWs https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/09/humanitarian-pr.html

Nazi
Germany and Scaring the Will to War (Germany surrounded, again) https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/10/nazi-propaganda.html

Nazi-directed
scare tactics published in English https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/nazi-propagan-1.html

The
Luftwaffe and RAF present their (graphical) popular cases https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/09/graphical-and-a.html

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The Invasion of America, 19?? (1935 Scenario for Invasions via Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 898

(This is a
continuation of the Invasion of America
series, started here.)

Even
before WWII, the American military and variously-aligned
think-tank subsidiaries had for years hypothesized U.S. invasion scenarios. For convenience’s sake, they were color-coded
so as to not confuse one invadee with another: for example, there were War Plan Citron (an invasion of Brazil); War Plan Emerald (intervention in Ireland); War Plan Green (war
with Mexico); War Plan Indigo (an
invasion of Iceland); War Plan Lemon (an invasion of Portugal); War Plan White: (plan
for dealing with civil disturbances cause by Communist insurgents), and many
others. (I cannot find the color-coded plan for the 20^th century
invasion of Canada,
but it did exist.)

Lesser
known are the U.S. military’s
preparation for the invasion of America.

This
two-page spread (all that I have of a longer article) appeared in Fortune
Magazine for September 1935. It was undoubtedly generated
by a number of causes, not the least of which was the rearming of Nazi Germany (referred
to in this article as a ‘miracle”), which could theoretically cause some amount
of concern in semi-fortress America. It was also an opportunity for Chief of Staff
General Douglas MacArthur to whip up a little hell in Congress for the federal
government to give the military some more money so that there was more to the “fortress”
part of America
than two oceans.

Basically
the plan seems to call for a standing, ready army of specialist forces that
were agile and highly trained, a large network, of anti-aircraft batteries and detection
areas, and of course a large buildup of the Army Air Force. All of this of course cost money, and almost
all o fit would’ve been directed towards MacArthur and his subordinates. (It is
interesting and odd to note that the Fortune article notes that three of the
top four major general assistants to MacArthur were Irish (“see the four big
shots…with three Irish names”).)

[Due
to difficulties in the size of this map I have to present it in three sections,
but I’m sure that the overall flavor will be maintained.]

The most prominent feature (besides the black
invasion routes) are the terribly antiquated (even for 1936?) depictions of
coastal defense canons. Perhaps this was
disingenuous to include them with such flair, what with the main point of the
article lending itself towards air invasion, but there they are, protecting the
American coastline from a ripping adventure from the sea.

But
as we can see the successful invasion routes are coming from odd places—from Alaska,
Canada, the Caribbean) against which the U.S. seemingly had no defense. This was especially true in the Pacific
Northwest (“here defense system is weak”) where America
was entirely susceptible to attack and invasion “from army basing in Alaska”. The rest of the west coast didn’t fair so
well, though the only other direct threat was from “25,000 able-bodied male
Japanese…Californians suppose they have secret arms and drill at night in dark
halls”.

The
southwestern and southern California areas
were relatively secure, except in the case of an enemy capturing Mexico; then, “an attack here would almost certainly
be launched, in conjunction with one against San Antonio”.
I guess there would be long intrigue, much preparation and enormous
effort to attack and secure Mexico,
and I’m assuming that the thinkers behind constructing this map assumed that the
U.S.
would be doing nothing during this prolonged period of time.

The
attack on America in the
Gulf would ostensibly come from Mexico
and “an enemy basing in the Caribbean”, with a central interest in Birmingham and Norfolk. But the main thrust coming to the U.S. from unnamed horribleness would be coming
through the St. Lawrence and points east in Canada, swooping down on Lake
Champlain, the Mohawk Valley, Troy, Buffalo and Detroit. I know that there were bigger industrial
concerns in these places in 1936 than there are now, but, well, my god there
would be better places to begin an attack on the U.S.
than from Montreal and Toronto.

In
all of this I see that the industrial northeast is left alone, save for a “feint”
attack to dislodge resources and attention away from the movement against the Virginia coast. There’s
the navy yard and industry and shipping and etc. there, but it would seem a
terrible waste to attack here rather than a much juicer and more northerly
series of prizes.

No
attacker is named in what I own of this article, and there is a very curious
absence of any threat coming from the already-warring Japan (save for
the Japanese super secret nighthawks in San Fran). The article does make a case—apart from the
map—that national defense was at a low ebb insofar as manpower and ordnance
were concerned. But it scoots around the
issue of the war of Japan
against China
and the vast militarization of the Nazis.
(Of course, this is Fortune magazine, and Krupp and Hoechst and other German firms, and Standard Oil, and the Bank for International Settlement, and Ford, and SKF, and etc. abetting
the Nazi war machine were doing some nice business in the U.S., so perhaps it
would’ve been best not to make Nazi money upset with some bad press.)

Taking
all sorts and manner of considerations into account, this is just simply a
miserable attempt to reckon what the future might bring to America in the
hands of unlabeled enemies—it is simply a rousing caroling of general fear of
attack from places unknown.

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History of the Future: Space Cannon Moon Flights Yield Jelly People?(1936)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 899

The Babel-like tower pictured below is a still from the movie Things to Come (1936), an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Tings to Come (1931). (Wells’ himself wrote the screenplay a few years before the movie appeared.) The story is a history of the period from 1936 to 2054, including a devastating war that begins in December 1940 (complete with major air assault, poison gases and so on), followed by plague and destruction for another forty years, after which there is a confrontation between two classes of remaining humans, with big doses of New World Order, Technocracy, Fascism and glimmers of hope of science and technology saving the future. There’s a lot that happens in the story, but the part I’m most interested in comes towards the end of the film and depicts a space gun for launching a massive capsules to the Moon–in this case, a capsule containing two “starred-crossed lovers”.

We are told that the launching apparatus–the “gun”–is 1500 feet tall, which iterates out to a 750′ base and which also makes the capsule about 75′. That’s impossibly massive firepower. (Don’t forget that somebody had to construct the 1700′ tower next to the gun that lifted the capsule into position, for some reason lowering the thing down the barrel.)

In the history of big guns, this would be about the most massive ever constructed in the sci fi world so far as I can tell. In the real world, the Kaiser Wilhelm gun (or “Paris Gun”, the Kaiser Wilhelm Geshutz) was a long-barreled, light shelled monster: its 92′ long barrel (plus a 20′ extension) launched a 94kg shell about 130 km, reaching a maximum height of 40km (about 25 miles) high. For all of its mass (the gun weighed 256 tons without the railway cars) the shell that it fired didn’t weight much at all….though the shell did reach an extreme height. (Ironically, the gun was built for attacking the deepest of the deep bunkers of the fortresses along the Maginot Line; it was never needed for that, as the Maginot Line was simply left behind in the Nazi assault on France.)

The Schwerer Gustav was a 1350 ton beast which fired a 14,000 pound shell (!) about 20 miles. A little later came the Nazi V-3 (the lesser known of the V-weapons), the Vergeltungsewaffe 3, a 130 metre (!) long, 150mm gun built along the side of a hill, launching a 140 kg shell. The Iraqi Big Babylon gun was sort of like this one, though never built–it was to have a 500′ barrel and would be supported by a hillside.

Getting back to the unfortunate Well’s space gun: this thing was supposed to fire a 75′ capsule which must’ve weighed in excess of 10,000 pounds (easy, what with supply and fuels and so on, plus the structural weight) straight up (!!) and somehow reach escape velocity of 11.2 km/s, piercing the exosphere some 400 miles high or thereabouts (or 1.5 orders of magnitude higher than the Paris Gun). I cannot intuitively imagine the tremendous explosion necessary to achieve this goal, although it could be figured out pretty easily. Back of the napkin figuring tells me that the speed of the capsule exiting the gun’s barrel would place the occupants in the vicinity of something like 450Gs–that’s more than ten times the lethal amount of force that a human can withstand. I’m not sure what happens to a person at 450Gs–I do know that it wouldn’t be pretty. Anyway, none of this part of the space travel section of the movie wasn’t pretty….except for the props, which I like, and which can be seen in the clip below.

Overall I think that this would make a lovely physics problem for discussion in a high school classroom.

Things to come: 10; 1936-2037

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Unintentional Absurdist Art: Flying Boats with Bucket Feet, 1745

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 901

This
treadmill-powered French pontoon dredge, printed around 1745, looks for all the
world as though it is floating in mid-air, propelling itself along with two
bucket-ended legs, elegantly and impossibly moving its miracle-y-balanced self
forward against all forms of reason and logic, a clunky 18^th century
non-transforming Transformer. The
profile actually and simply shows a dredge at work and just fails to show the water in which it
floats.

The
boat’s dredge is powered by four humans in two treadmills which would move the buckets
back and forth, scraping up the river silt and then emptying it into the shuttle
launch aft. Simple and ingenious—except when
taken out of context, where it begins to look like some advanced Age of Reason floating
boat which, although awkward-looking, is not without its charm.

Source: Charles Singer, History of Tecnology, volume IV,
pg. 634. Singer loftily notes that this machine
“is reminiscent of Goethe’s poem Der Zauberlehring
which inspired Paul Dukas’s well known symphonic poem L’apparenti sorcier” and which would be better known to most folks as
Mickey’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice gig in Fantasia.

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On Not Mentioning the Jews in Nazi/Polish/Holocaust Literature: “Spring Held No Hope”, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 902

Maria
Mikorska’s Spring Held No Hope,
published in London
in June 1941 is a difficult, hard, emotional read, even in the genre of
Holocaust literature. It quickly paints
a documentary history of bestial behavior of the Nazis in Poland. I wonder though what happened to the
mentioning of the Jewish issue in all of this reportage of inhuman
transportation and treatment of humans, as the reference almost never
occurs.

Reading
though this 52-page pamphlet of terror and horror, I wondered what exactly
happened to the missing reportage of the hunting and killing of the Jews as a
group.. The period of 1939-1941 saw the beginning of the Endlösung der
Judenfrage¹ (“The Final
Solution of the Jewish Problem”) in which 90+% of the 3.5 million Polish Jews
alive in the Polish Second Republic were killed and exterminated, the primary
victims of the Nazi Holocaust. At this
point in the war the Nazis were removing Jews from their cities and
establishing regional ghettoes. Once the
Jews were collected in this manner it was easier for the administration of
their extermination.

Getting
back to Spring Held No Hope and the lack of identification of the Jews as a
persecuted group I turn to pp 24 and 25 (illustrated below and clickable).

The examples of inhuman transport and the
direct extermination of men, women and children by starvation and hypothermia
mention the cities Jarocin, Gdynia, Siedlice, Skierniewice, Lublin and
Otwock: all of which had large centers
of Jewish populations that were removed by the Germans directly after the
invasion and removed to ghettoes though this fact is not mentioned in this
pamphlet. Ostensibly the collection of Jews was not in an effort to seize
property (as the majority of the Jews in Poland at this time had little
wealth) but rather to supply labor (being a group with the potential for
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of humans capable of performing slave
labor). The Jews in Gdynia (for example)
were sent to Siedlice to establish a larger Ghetto immediately after the
invasion; by 1942 the tens of thousands of occupants were either shot and
killed or sent to Treblinka; 2,000 or so remained after this, though most of
them were also soon sent to Treblinka; those remaining were all executed when
the ghetto was completely liquidated on 14 April 1943.

I
am in no way saying that it the murder of Poles during the Nazi occupation was
limited to Jews—the 3.5 million Polish Jews represented 10% of the Polish
population; of the remaining 90%, or 32 million or so Gentile Poles, some 3
million were killed by the Nazis, or about 10% of that population.

These
are horrible stories told by Mikorska—but I’m bothered by the lack of the
recognition of the Jews as the major, featured target in all of this and wonder
if the author suffered an enormous sin of omission. This is far from being a singular event–even the important and highly significant Eisenhower report on the concentration camps of May 1945 does not signify the Jewish people as anything out of the ordinary–and may well be indicative of the general practice of dealing with the Jewish aspect of the Nazi exterminations.

Notes

1.
The name and practiced of the Final Solution was infamously adopted at the
Wannsee conference on 20 January 1942, liquidating the ghettoes and sending the
occupants to the six major concentration camps of Auschwitz, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka.

I’ve written elsewhere in this blog on the Holocaust; for more, search “Holocaust” in the Google blogsearch in the left column.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Militaria — Naming Things
Books: Texts in the Sciences: Darwin, Newton, Vesalius, Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, etc.

Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Voyage of the
Beagle, 1845

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): On the Origin of
Species, 1859

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Descent of Man,
1871, excerpts

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Descent of
Man, 1871

Theory and Methods of Science

Bernardino
Telesio (1509–1588): from On the Nature of
Things According to Proper Principles, 1565

Francis
Bacon (1561-1626): from First Book of
Aphorisms

Francis
Bacon (1561-1626): Preface to
the Novum Organum [At Hanover]
Francis Bacon (1561-1626): The New
Atlantis, 1627

Francis
Bacon (1561-1626): The New
Atlantis, 1626

Francis
Bacon (1561-1626): Various
Texts

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Uncategorized
Ocean-Crossing Floating Airports Across the Atlantic, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 903

This short
shelf-lived idea was that of Edward R. Armstrong (1880-1955), who in 1927 first published his plan for a series of 1200’x200’
floating platforms for refueling and whatnot for transcontinental flights. These five-acre stations—named the “Langley” in honor of
Samuel Pierpont Langley¹— would be placed every 375 miles across the ocean. It doesn’t look like a very practical (or
good) idea, but Armstrong received a $750,000 piece of development change from du
Pont and GM, which was major dollars in 1929.

Armstrong’s
idea would get major play in the popular press from time-to-time, his project
renamed “The Seadrome” and discussed as a series of floating islands. Armstrong himself would organize the Seadrome
Ocean Dock Corp. in the late 1930’s, his pretty but enormously impractical idea
(reported by Time Magazine² in 1933 as little more than “a perennial gift to Sunday feature
editors”) finally grinding to a salty end with greater
fuel capacity and efficiency in transatlantic aircraft.

An even worse idea appeared in the pages of Science and Mechanics in 1936:

Notes:

1. A Time
Magazine article
published 28 October 1929 [a day before the market crashed!] about the
Langley oddly states
that Langley was the “designer of the plane which, except for accidents, might
have flown before the Wrights’ plane did in 1903”. Tough potatoes. What the magazine didn’t
state was that Langley, who was the president of the Smithsonian Institution at
the time with access to major money and benefactors simply went about the flight
problem incorrectly, and produced an airplane (or “aerodrome”, as he called it)
that did not and would not fly. Not flying because of accidents means, well,
not flying. The Wrights’ approach to
problem solving was elegant and beat Langley
by miles. Langley deserves credit for his other (many)
achievements, but not for this aircraft.

This same
article only references Armstrong as a “swarthy engineer”.

The article
is reprinted below.

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Aviation & flight — Bad Ideas — Technology, History of
Advanced Utopian Martian Communities, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 904

This futuro-Utopian homage to
ET-civilizations and space travel was written just too early to have been
sucked up by period-appropriate Hollywood
script raptors. Reading it is a little
out of the question and left to the domain of sci-fi archaeologists; the book
is stuffy and dry and very stiff
(brittle !) without being terribly interesting and doesn’t stop for the right
word when four will do. (See below for an example of the writing.) The ideas though lurking beneath the surface
though are pretty good for its time, though they are hardly the great undertow
that rips you away and out of the clutches of the stuff that make this a pretty
object rather than a book.

To Mars via the Moon, an
Astronomical Story. written by Mark Wicks
and published in 1911, left the Moon quite behind in its literary assault on a
super-advanced civilization that the space travelers find on the red
planet. Wicks owes a big nod (and gives
it) to the astronomer and faded theorist Percival Lowell and his Mars as
an Abode of Life (1908)1. Wicks’ Mars is enormously advanced
techno-superpower filled with telepaths and mega intelligence, as well as a
reincarnated version of his own dead son.

Okay, enough. I’m really just stopping here because of the noble
outsider-like Martian city/landscape, a circular city with canal2-like
connectors. It’s a busy environment, with the perspective-challenged city
looking vaguely bathed in a holy halo, car-like objects skimming along the
canal-roads, and “pre-flying saucers” in the air. It is lovely in its own way—certainly the
publishers thought so, as they incorporated the design right on the spine of
the book.

Notes

1.Lowell’s
hypothesis was rounding criticized by many, including Alfred Russell Wallace’s Is
Mars Habitable?.

2. Giovanni Schiaparelli reported these features
first, in 1877, referring to them as canali in his native Italian, which means something more
like naturally-occurring grooves or channel; English-speakers like Lowell
stopped just short with the word, lopping of the final “I” and going with
“canals”, with its overt implications of
intelligent design. And thus are
religions born.

The entire book can be found on the
Gutenberg site: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2763/27633-8.txt

The sample of the writer’s ware is below, the final two paragraphs of the book: the penultimate paragraph being one long run-on sentence including four embedded exclamation points, and the final two sentences of the final graph ending in an exclamation point and a dot dot dot question mark:

“Yes, we are doing well–there is no doubt about that; but,
notwithstanding my present very satisfactory circumstances and the certainty of a brilliant future if I stay here, ideas have long and persistently been running in my mind that it would be far better for me to go back to Mars, and–by Jove! strange indeed that I never thought of it before!–perhaps those very persistent ideas are actually the outcome of Martian influences!!”

“The wonderful music I heard upon Mars still rings in my ears; and, at times, so thrilling and peculiar is its effect upon me, that I feel as though I were being almost irresistibly impelled to return to that planet. Well, I should very much like to see the dear old Professor and Merna again, and also my many Martian friends. Then there’s Siloni, whom I can never forget, for mentally her image is ever before me. What a nice girl she was! If I were to return to Mars, I wonder whether…?”

First edition spine source: http://www.sumnerandstillman.com/Catalog/sumner.cgi/9691

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The Oldest Image of a Flying Pig? An Adynaton Antiquarian Illustration, 1687.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 905

How
old is the saying, or rejoinder, “…when
pigs fly”? I dunno, and frankly it
doesn’t really matter. Except for right now, when I found this rather
extraordinary image of a pig-in-the-sky from 1687. It isn’t a flying pig, but I’m not sure what
it is: the origin of the image is from
J.de Dalence, Traite de l’Aiman (publihsed in Amsterdam in 1687), a book about the history
of magnetism. But nothing else matters,
just the flying, atmos-floating pig, right there in the sky, perfect against a
puffy cloud.

I
suspect—without any intention of doing any research on my suspicion—that this
may very well be the earliest depigtion of a flying pig. And it just so happens to have appeared in
the same year of Newton’s great Principigia.

And
just for the record, I wonder how often anyone sees an image 300+ or more years
old of any of the other great adynations? For example, “It is
easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle,
than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” from the Book of Matthew, 19:24, just doesn’t seem to lend itself to empirical description, as it would
pretty much lessen and defeat the purpose of the literary description.

The flying pig, though, may be a horse of a different
color, so to speak.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Big Planes: Aircraft with Dining Rooms in Their Wings

JF Ptak Science Books Post 906

Is it just me, or do the rest of you see Cary Grant at a teeny-tiny table when looking at this aircraft? There’s just something so horribly wonderful about the excesses washing over the passengers of high privilege in this airplane.[Source: The Illustrated London News 21 Dec 1929.]

And the airplane has a name—Christmas, named for the man who provided its inspiration, Dr. William Whitney Christmas¹–and was a paper plan to produce the world’s largest airplane.

It would’ve been so by leaps and bounds. The Christmas was to have a 262’ wingspan and a gross weight of 142,000 pounds at the time when one of the largest planes aloft—the Patrician Keystone K-78—had a wingspan of 86’ and carried 18 passenger, 2 pilots and an engineer. It also held the world’s record for hauling the heaviest payload, which for some reason was “33 girls”. It was bigger still than the largest thing in the air, Lufthansa’s Dornier DO.X –this was an aircraft capable of moving 60-100 passengers (serviced by a crew of 10-14), a flying boat with 12 (Curtiss Conqueror 610hp) engines on wing sections 157’ long. (Was this a mile-a-minute fuel consumer?) The Dornier plane didn’t last long in service due to operating costs (1929 was a bad year to undertake an expense like this, especially in the hyperinflated Germany) and was in an aviation museum by 1934². (This plane—one of three constructed—was destroyed in a RAF bombing raid in 1943.)

Here’s something extraordinary about the Christmas: it had a dining room (actually, a “dining saloon”) that took up 15% of the plane’s floor plan. There was also the spacious smoking room, the crew and officer quarters, the machinist’s shop, engine room balconies (?), and of course the staterooms that seem to run along most of the front of the plane. The side elevation shows not very much space at all allotted to what must’ve been some massive engines, seeing as how there’s only two four-blade props. (The small lateral cross section shows two people against the plane for scale—these folks must’ve been giants; I figure they should be a little more than 75% of the manikins. I make each prop blade to be about 10 foot (?))

As it turns out this aircraft looks a lot like Edmund Rumpler’s³ (1872-1940) giant. Outfitted with a long row of staterooms along the front edge of the large wing and a huge dining room, it doesn’t seem to be equipped with an area for the engines. Maybe this was an endemic flaw among older fast-thinkers…

Notes:

1. Dr. Christmas (1865-1960) was the third American to fly and was the first to design a plane with aerilons.

2. Compare this to the Antev An-225, a modern very-,limited-production monster that could haul 1.3 million pounds of cargo, and the 747 (hauling up to 900,000 pounds) and the mammoth Airbus A380—all relatively the same size but with fabulous design and power.

3.Rumpler made very significant aeronautical contributions to the German effort in WWI, as well as designed the first aerodynamic auto—his military planes though during the war were great triumph, partially because they were also Germany’s first mass-production-possible aircraft. This didn’t help him much when Hitler came to power—being Jewish, Rumpler was arrested, and then released by Goering who at least could find a small part of himself to save this one Jew who served Germany so well.

4. Source for the Rumpler image is the wonderful ModernMechanix site here.

Interesting comparison chart for big planes: [Source]

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Found Absurdist Art: 1950’s Mommy Rockets, Flannel Moon Suits & Underwater Firefighters

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 907

I like Found Art categories: Found Absurdist, Found Surrealist, Found Cubist. This is a vision of art or design produced for something specifically not absurd or surreal or cubist, but once removed from their intended environment and definers, become the thing that was beyond their specified reach. The following examples are all from the mid-1950’s, their sources reprinted below:

And this Spongebob-like existence under water, where you can have beaches and surf and fire and etc. at the bottom of the sea:

And of course the mom at the modern electric range feeling the birth of some sort of deep outer space astronautical space travel outer space rocket (though with no visible viewing windows which leads me to believe that perhaps no Outer Space Astronauts were on board):

The image sources:

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JF Ptak

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Future, History of the — History of the Future