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.

Flying Wing Aircraft, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 919

What can I say? I just like the flying wing. Also I should point out that the Illustrated London News is an excellent resource for schematic cut-aways like this–I think that I have 125 or so of them here for the 1910-1945 period.

Junkers built this fabulous flying (“inhabited”) “wing only”
aircraft, sending it up for commercial service in 1929 as the largest airplane
in the world. Only two were built (though a Japanese military knock-off ran to a production quantity of six), and I imagine that it was quite expensive making the Berlin-London flight, cruising in around at 109 mph.

I would like to know what the artist was thinking about when he decided to draw a standing man in the sleeping compartments. Not only that, the fellow is looking straight at the artist…perhaps it is a sly, tiny self-portrait?

Notes

1. Plane specifications:

Crew: Seven (including a full-time engineer who could
service the plane’s four engines from inside the plane).

Capacity: between 30 and 34 passengers, depending upon
variation of the aircraft.

Length: 75 ft

Wingspan:
144 ft

Height: 23 ft

Wing area: 3,122 sq ft

Empty weight: 32,893 lbs

Loaded weight: 52,900 lb

Max takeoff weight: 46,826 lb

Maximum speed: 140 mph

Cruising speed: 109 mp

Range: 2,150 miles

Service ceiling: 12,100 ft

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Killing London with the Future: City Planning with the Bressey Report, 1937

JF Ptak Science Books Post 920

Sir Charles Bressey
didn’t really try to “kill” London, of course, though parts of his Greater London plan for redirecting and accommodating increasing vehicular traffic certainly would’ve destroyed some great beauty had some of his suggestions been implemented.

I have no doubt that Sir Charles was on the right path to something, here and there, but all I have access to regarding his work appears as an article in The Illustrated London News (28 May 1938), and much of it looks like a absurdo-horror/sci-fi setting for a film by Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton. I can hear the noise of this city, and it ain’t pretty: a road through Hyde Park, floating pontoon car parks in the Thames, , elevated highways sitting on top of apartment buildings, removing Piccadilly “Circus”, removing the “park” part of Hyde Park, and so on.

(Very slightly related is this post from 2008 featuring a self-defence plan that would semi-encapsulate London (1938))

And so I’ll pass along these images of “traffic improvements” without too much comment, letting them speak for themselves.

Trafalgar Square as a triple-decker parking deck. (What can one say?)

Hyde Park, with a semi-submerged road cutting through the heart of the place.

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The Coming Sex War of 1919
JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 920

This slight, four-page pamphlet was a flare to the newly enfranchised women of Great Britain¹, a very-shakily congratulatory bit with wide, sniffy overtones of vast male superiority. The author takes the intended (female) reader at a very slow, almost-stopped pace about what voting is all about, turning down the rhetoric to explain what a vote “is”. Not only that, but the following as well:
“It seems, therefore, important to give as simply as possible a brief sketch of:
(1) What Politics are. [Politics is the Science of Government.] (2) The Duties of Citizenship. (3) Coalition Government”.

Just because women got the vote (or partial vote: they had top be over thirty years of age and have property or be
married to a man with property; full voting rights devoid of property requirements didn’t come in until 1928) didn’t
mean that they enjoyed a relaxation of their inferior social caste. The social consciousness of the status of women may have been slightly fragmented in 1918/19, but only enough to introduce them to the world of politics as you would a child—at least as far as this pamphlet is concerned².

But this work comes around a bit, retracting its insulting narrative somewhat by the end of the pamphlet, as what the writer really wanted was to snag a bunch of these women to vote for the Coalition Candidate, Mr. Lloyd George, in the General Election of December 1918. Their votes were definitely wanted, and the need was addressed, if not without a little fear that women would retract themselves and form their won party. The pamphlet states:

“If the Voters are mean and corrupt, they will get what they deserve…There is a movement among women at the present time, especially among those who were most active in working for the Vote, to refuse to join any of the old political Associations, but to form a Women’s Party or Federation of Women. Such a step is to be very much regretted, for it will certainly lead to a sort of sex war, men and women being divided into opposite camps, each fighting for their selfish ends.”

Assuring women of what a “vote” and “politics” are, and demanding that the priorities of “women’s political parties” would lead to a “sex war”, the author blandly asks his (!) readers to vote for Lloyd George.

Notes

The countries granting partial or full voting
rights to women prior to the U.S (1920) include: New Zealand (full voting privileges),
1893; Australia, 1902 (partial); Finland, 1906; Norway (able to stand for
election); Denmark (1915); Iceland (1915); Canada (1917); Austria, Estonia,
Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland,
Russian Federation, United Kingdom (partial) (1918); Belarus, Belgium , Luxembourg, Netherlands,
Ukraine (1919); Albania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, United States of
America (1920).

As
beautiful a thinker as Darwin
was his mind regarding women of the mid-Victorian age was pretty modest,
treating his own wife as a sort of advanced child. She never did get a key to the key
cabinet at Downs…

(I should point out an earlier post that I made about the coming equality of women in voting and lung cancer, “Deathly Equality: Liberty, Lung Cancer and Women’s Rights“.)
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Boullee, Lequeu and Ledoux: Reposts of Two Musical Slideshows

JF Ptak Science Books LLC & Blog Bookstore

[For another bit on Boullee see also my post Imago Frammeni: Boulle, the Dogon, Jouffret, the Simple and the Complex]

(1) The Fantastic Self-Portraits of the Visionary Architect, Jean-Francois Lequeu

I guess it is easy to want to call M. Lequeu (1757-1825 (?)) an outsider, though
he was hardly that.

He was an exceptional talent who was exceptionally well-trained (and who won
the highest awards offered by his school), and started out in a staid and
brilliant way, a successful draftsman in his own right, and student of
Scoufflot, helping to design ancient-inspiration buildings for the super
rich. He was at the pinnacle of the drafting trade, though not so on the
designing end. Along came the Revolution
and away went his architectural career—he wound up a surveyor and a
cartographer until his retirement in 1815, after which he enters social and
historical oblivion, until he finally dies in total obscurity ten years later
(or so, the date is unclear). His post-revolutionary vision was as
phenomenal as his success in selling his ideas were dismal. Well, this is
really a cheap shot—his imagination was shockingly large, enormous, his designs
fantastic and beautiful, and completely unexpected, and they seemed to grow
larger/loftier and more interesting as time wore away at him. But he was far in
front of the curve so far as popular (public) opinion was concerned. Even among the other visionaries of the time
(like Ledoux and Boullee) it was Lequeu who staked out the furthest reaches of
architecture, and also with great depth and virtuosity.

I think that as Lequeu was cleaved away, cell by cell falling through the
floorboards of his single rented room, he reached further into time and deeper
into space than almost any architect of that hundred-year period. I
also think that he was very well aware of his genius being seen as pure
eccentricity—his half-dozen or so self portraits are among the most reaching
that I’ve seen (in the pre-modern era).

If Lequeu’s visions existed at all in the world of French architecture it
was in the Deep Underground—a place that he may have founded. He was certainly, at the very least, its
geologist.

His
self portraits are striking, but perhaps not so much more so than those
by Rembrandt–he was certainly exploring modes of expression (Raphael’s
series of engravings on the emotion of the human face is a good example
of this study)–Lequeu though seems to always manage to suggest that he
is an observed inmate somewhere. There is a great undercurrent of
“otherness” and great remove to them–something that makes places the
self portraits into a different–empty, lonely–class.

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

(2) Etienne Boullee, Images with Music

I’ve been collecting images by some of the great, visionary
architects of 18th century France: Etienne Boullee (1728-1799),
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) and the semi-impossible Jean-Jacques
Lequeu (1737-1825). It was a tough time for these architects to see
far into the future at the time of the Revolution, as people who were
even less deserving than these men lost their heads. In any event I’ve
compiled a short three minute video exhibiting some of their works,
using the music of Wim Mertens for Peter Greenaway’s love poem to M.
Boullee called The Belly of an Architect.
I couldn’t but help using this music in this context, sorry to say–it
just goes perfectly with these images. (Also, I’ve written about M.
Ledoux here.)

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

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 921

{This continues “The Coming Sex War of 1919“)

Theodore J. Goe, the author of “Let’s Protect our Women”, must
have been a synesthete, with the ability to smell the future. My copy of this pamphlet used to be the
Copyright Deposit copy, and is dated January 18, 1936, and what Mr. Goe was
smelling were the winds of the November presidential election; and since he was
a Republican—or at least an anti-Rooseveltian—what he smelled was outrageous
defeat for his cause.

And so he wrote this elegantly-produced little oddness,
trying to dip into the wellspring of the enfranchised female vote (just sixteen
years old at this point), trying with fatherly will to scoop women out of the
harmful ways of Roosevelt’s policies.

The “protection” that women needed was for uncertainty which
led to nervousness and which attacked their youth to send them into a slavery. The
thinking here went sort of like this: women were being attacked by FDR, who was “cruelly
prolonging the depression” by not helping people with jobs, thus depriving their men of a fair wage which is what made
women happy; without the “happiness” of a husband with a good job, “life
becomes more serious than it should be”; this fights against “national
influence which tends to rob [women] of their youth”, making women older
sooner. And it was this premature aging that the women are to vote against in
1936.

Mr. Goe may well have been a crank, but to him and his
readers this thinking might’ve made some sort of contemporary sense, after a
fashion. He did forget that women made
up more than 30% of the workforce at this point, and had more sources of
happiness and youth than a man with a decently-paying job, plus having a life
and opinion outside of serving home/hearth/husband, but no matter. (This, by the way, is where Mr. Goe thought American women lived:)

Women didn’t rush to aid FDR’s competition in the ’36 race,
when Roosevelt redefined “landslide” by crushing
his Republican challenger, Kansan Alf Landon.
There wasn’t any election like it since the two-party system became nationalized
80 years earlier, Landon loosing to Roosevelt by
an electoral balance of 523-8. Landon swept Vermont
and Maine,
with FDR taking everything else. (No one
would quite clear the plate like this ‘till Reagan turned Walter Mondale
inside-out in 1984, 525-13.)

Landon was a decent man who had an interesting
post-political career—even so, it’s a good thing that he lost.

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Bad Places to Be Dept., #1:Fighting Underground in Sub-Trench Warfare, 1915

JF Ptak Science Books Post 922

“Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun.

Take it on the run, on the run, on the run.
Hear them calling you and me,
Every Son of Liberty.
Hurry right away, no delay, go today.
Make your Daddy glad to have had such a lad.
Tell your sweetheart not to pine,
To be proud her boy’s in line.”
–Opening of George M. Cohan’s “Over There”

It is difficult to think of soldiers fighting one another across hedgerows or trenches, hiding behind earth, creating a death-vacuum on the land in between–but worse yet would be fighting in these scenarios underground.

Finding this large double-page illustration in The Illustrated London News¹gave me a physical reaction like the one I get when thinking about the discarded Dalton Trumbo’s² anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun. The novel’s main character (Joe Bonham) is virtually encased in his own mind, having lost his arms, legs and face in an explosion on a WWI battlefield—the story is told from his bedridden perspective; dark, bandaged, alone, his mind and brain functioning, and with little means of communication or control over his body. .Among other obvious things, it makes me feel a peculiar stuffy coldness. [The two sets of four images following should be viewed as two-parts of one long image, the bottom part being on the right.]

And so too when I look at these soldiers tunneling under a dead battlefield, working their way slowly—a foot an hour—towards the enemy trenches, desperately trying to blow a hole in an immovable object resistant to infantry and artillery. The soldiers—sappers—were sent in to do a job that could no longer be accomplished above the ground.

This sort of warfare is extremely old, though the name is not, being about 150 years old. These soldiers were forward combat engineers, and had training across a number of different areas—they were responsible for many technical chores, like building (and blowing up) bridges, laying/clearing minefields, general demolition, defense construction, and, of course, fighting. It could be a tremendously difficult job, unimaginable.

The “sapp” part of “sapper” comes from the French “sappe”, which refers to the other main part of their job during WWI, which was digging advancing trenches, a zigzag construction of a long horizontal half-hole which allowed an infantry force to slowly advance towards an enemy’s entrenched position. Another part was to tunnel under the enemy’s lines, and then blow them to smithereeens so that a successful attack could be launched into the weakened position.

Here’s what I think about when I think about these men doing this job: that two teams, British and German, start to tunnel towards each other’s lines, and somehow, in the middle of the battlefield, somehow manage to dig directly towards one another, their tunnels literally colliding. Hand-to-hand combat through the opening connecting the two sapper tunnels, then gunfire. Alerted, the artillery from each side zero-in on what is suspected to be the opening end of the tunnels, pummel them, destroying the access. So now, both sets in what is now virtually one tunnel, are fighting in the dark. Even though the topside is only two feet away, any hole would open into the killing zone, making it impossible to escape that way. It would be a bad place to be.

Notes

1. The issue is 27 Feb 1915. The illustration is entitled “They Sent us in front with a Fuse an’ a Mine’, Sapping and Mining Under the Enemy’s Trenches”. The first half of the title is from Kipling’s “Sappers”: They send us in front with a fuse an’ a mine , To blow up the gates that are rushed by the Line…

2. Trumbo has an interesting history, to put it mildly. An old Communist, he once gave up his old associates to the FBI at the start of WWII–an act he later thought of as being stupid and wrong. It also had the opposite effect for him–he thought he was being patriotic, but the FBI was more interested in him than his information. He would get eaten up by McCarthyist operatives and denied HUAC any information on any of the famous “Hollywood Ten”. He got a year in jail and was blacklisted, booted out of LA. He came back–mostly under someone else’s name (see the link above for his screenwriting credits, which are substantial)–and acknowledged shortly before he died.

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Things They Took To War, 1915

JF Ptak Science Books Post 923

The 27 Feb 1915 issue of The Illustrated London News is remarkable. Yesterday’s post was generated by an image appearing in it of sappers mining under a battlefield to create an underground attack on the enemy’s trench lines. A few pages into the issue shows a series of pictures describing the regulation issue for an enlisted man headed into combat—simple, scary, and heartrending. And of course a true measure of the courage and fortitude of these millions of men who marched to the Front with all what today looks to be not-adequate material. It is hard for me to imagine going off to conquer your enemy and your own fear with these sorts of supplies, marching along with all of these slight bits jangling and clanging to each of my steps.

[All of the images are expandable.]

The images themselves are, I think, unintentionally spectacular for their design and arrangement, not the least of which is the fact that all of the materiel is suspended from rope or wire.

There is no way for me to know what of this material was instantly discarded (if any), or what was thrown into ditches because they didn’t make sense or were too heavy or cumbersome or got in the way. Or what of these supplies were actually carried into battle. Given the nature of the fighting, perhaps all of it was carried in and out.

Basically though the pictures just make me uneasy, nervous; so many things look so slight and needy. The canteen looks tiny; there’s only two pair of socks (!?) but two pipes; the “grocery ration” looks inadequate; the ammunition pouches look stingy. But the “housewife” looks useful, and its always good to have scissors, and a handkerchief. I’m not so sure about the purse.

It just seems to me an amazing display of the stuff that the British soldier was given to haul into the future with him.

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Found Dadaist Art–Floating Eyes and Ears, 1650 & 1807

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 857

I’ve
written a few times in this blog (here, here and here) about what I think is
found/unintentional antiquarian Dadaist art and would like today to continue
that thread with the following two unusual pieces of art.

The first
is a detail from the title page of Joseph de Casanova’s Primera parte del
arte de escrivir todas formas de letras (1650). This is not the Casanova (Giacamo,
1725-1798) who most people would initially think of—the seductive womanizer of
the 18^th century—but another, earlier, Spanish Casanova (1613-1692)
who was important in the history of round hand script and the lettera bastarda. Joseph Casanova ‘s evolutionary handwriting
style was considerably lighter and easier than most styles, and his influence
in changing handwriting practices was substantial. What is interesting for me is the detail at
the bottom of the engraved title page for his book, the emblem containing “Labore et Constantia”. Labor and consistency, decorated with a hand
and compass, ever watching and listening with ears and eyes above and below.

[This
design comes from (at least) one earlier source—the printer’s device for Christoph
Plantijn (Antwerp,
1583), though without the eyes (below).] I like the floating aspect of the disembodied
body parts, floating in their little sea of constancy, ruled by a compass.

The
second image has another set of disembodied eyes/ears (among other things) and
has all the flavor of the dada/surrealist flourishes of the frammenti of Piranesi.
This comes from Bernhard von Montfaucon’s Greichische,
Romische und andere Alterthuemer… (Nurenberg, 1807). When taken out of
context, as a disembodied image, the von Montfaucon certainly has a dadaist taste
for me, especially if you edit the image a little.

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History of Blank & Empty Things #22: God in a Hole in the Sky

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 858 Blog Bookstore

I think that I’ll start a thread on The History of Holes–which this post would secure nicely–though it will have to be differentiated from The History of Dots and The History of Blank and Empty Things somehow. Still, I like the idea.

These title page illustrations may or may not reveal a hole
in the sky, a glimpse into a blank heaven.
God knows that Heaven awaits its geology from Charles Lyell or cartography from Jed Hotchkiss, so this iconography that
I’m creating for these two Renaissance views of the blank canvas of the universe
may well be incomplete or completely wrong—but it is intriguing that there isn’t
even a suggestion of what God’s environment might be. This assumption that one might possibly be
shown the celestial surroundings may also be enormously presumptive and
unknowable/unseeable by human eyes, but since we are being shown a corporeal form
of the Creator I thought that the logic
was also there to portray the Creator’s milieu, but it is not to be.

The first title page is for the narrative poem Le Metamorfosi, Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
translated into Italian by Gioseppe Horologgi, and published in Venice in 1563. It is certainly appropriate that God appears
on the title page of this work, as Ovid tells the story of creation of all
things and the history of man in the book’s 15¹ chapters—appropriate more so as
this was one of the most popular intellectual biblio-tools of philosophers and
writers right through the Middle Ages (having wide effect on Chaucer and Shakespeare on down).

The image seems to catch the Creator in the act between the
fourth and fifth days, floating in a cloud-framed hole in the sky. Beyond the hole there is a white emptiness—which
makes me think that there is something; if there was nothing, I guess we’d have
the absence of all color, or blackness.
Or perhaps not. In any event I
find the opening in the fabric of creation and its blankness/emptiness somehow
restful.

The second image is a little more open to debate as to
whether that is God in the cloud, reading, or not; I prefer to believe it
so. The image is the colophon for Johann Virdung’s²(ca. 1465-1535, of Hassfurt0 Nova medicinae methodus…³, an astrological-medical book written by
a celebrated astrologer, professor and correspondent of Joahnnes Trithemius.

If this is to be the Creator in the clouds, reading a book,
then I would take the white blankness behind him to be another opening in the
sky. The small interesting bit about the title page
is that it spells out the year and the month and the day on which the book was
printed, which was not very common at all, not a bit.

I’ve certainly noticed white/blank/empty skies in prints,
but I’m not so sure that the celestial hole has registered with me before
today. It has the potential for an
interesting idea, in the opposite-of-a-black-hole category. Maybe.

Notes:

1. The contents of the work, as follows: Book I: Cosmogony, Ages of Man, Gigantes, Daphne, Io;; Book II: Phaëton, Callisto, Jupiter and Europa;;Book III: Cadmus, Actaeon, Echo and Pentheus;; Book IV: Pyramus and Thisbe, Perseus and Andromeda.;Book V: Phineas, the Rape of Proserpina;Book VI: Arachne, Niobe, Philomela and Procne; Book VII: Medea, Cephalus and Procris; Book VIII: Nisos and Scylla, Daedalus and Icarus, Baucis and Philemon; Book IX: Heracles, Byblis; Book X: Eurydice, Hyacinth, Pygmalion, Adonis, Atalanta, Cyparissus; Book XI: Orpheus, Midas, Alcyone and Ceyx; Book XII: Iphigeneia, Centaurs, Achilles; Aesacus; Book XIII: the Sack of Troy, Aeneas; Book XIV: Scylla, Aeneas, Romulus; Book XV: Pythagoras, Hippolytus, Aesculapius, Caesar.

2. Lynn Thorndike: Johann Virdung of Hassfurt again Isis
25, 1936, p. 363; Faust and Johann Virdung of Hassfurt, Isis 26,
1936/37, p. 321

3. Full title:
Nova medicinae methodus, nunc primum & condita & aedita, ex
mathematica ratione morbos curandi.
Available here!

Other Virdung and astrology titles located at this marvelous
site, here.

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Einstein in the Phone Book

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 859 Blog Bookstore

Some time ago—for reasons not clearly remembered—I looked up
prominent names in the history of science in a national (perhaps) telephone
database for their frequency of occurrence.
It tells me nothing, really, but it was sort of interesting to see the
meaningless results. The first number is
for the number of people with telephones with that surname; the second is for
its rank (though I have no idea what the last/bottom number was).

Einstein:
2,751/27,842

Dirac: 6/489,377

Bohr: 577/14490

Tesla: 58/100,064

Born: 2284/4,422

Rutherford: 8,759/1124

Planck: 338/23.480

Feynman: 4/614,750

Oppenheimer: 856/10,746

Schwinger: 50/70,178

Wheeler: 39,000/206

Maxwell: 20,700/428

Galileo: 3/712,622

Heisenberg: 5,
550,000

And so there you have it. Now that I’ve posted it I can throw the scrap of paper away.

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The Illustrated London News *WAS* Deliberately Funny (in 1908)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 862

I have more-or-less browsed the Illustrated London News for the 1890-1945 period now, and I can safely say that it was usually very interesting, almost always well written, beautifully illustrated, and almost never funny. I’ve mined many things from it over the years, and have posted dozens of things to this blog on the bits and pieces of interesting material present in–literally–every issue. (It has endless info and unusual pictures on early aviation, fantastic coverage of WWI, and aspects too nunerous to mention.) Again, humor was not a consideration or intended, even when it was–it was usually so stiff-lipped that you couldn’t move your mouth for fear of breaking it off.

And then I stumbled upon the page 134 of the June 25th, 1908 issue which has FIVE funny things on it! At least I think so–the funny shines like an avant garde nova.

For example:

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