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.

What if Marx had Dedicated Das Kapital to Darwin?

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It’s a kind of intriguing question in the world of “what ifs”–even though the thought had been taken seriously for years, the
issue has been (for decades) safely put to sleep in misty mythtime, except in the minds of some
creationists and conservatives.

The issue came up again for me while reading I.B. Cohen’s Revolution in
Science (Harvard 1985) in the “Influence of Marx and Engels” chapter, where the idea of the dedication gets resurfaced. Leaving aside the whole aspect of Das Kaptial
and the thought of Karl Marx (1818-1883), I’d just like to concentrate on the
Darwin-Marx “connection”. One thing is
for sure: Marx thought a lot of Darwin
(1809-1882), particularly in the way that he could use aspects of Darwin’s
theory (On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the
Struggle for Life, the title changing in the sixth edition in 1872
to simply The Origin of Species.)
to bolster his own thought. Marx thought
Darwin’s theory
to be “very important” dealing a death blow” to “teleology in the natural
sciences”. He was particularly
interested in Darwin
as it was, in his mind, “the natural history foundation for our viewpoint [of
historical materialism], “serv[ing] as a …basis for the class struggle in
history”.

The business of the dedication is slightly knotty, as there
is supporting correspondence that seems to support it all. Darwin did
receive a letter and he did respond, but it related to Marx’s son-in-law Edward
Aveling’s (1849-1898) book The People’s Darwin
(1881). The issue is dealt with often
and elsewhere on the web, so I won’t go into it here, except to say that the
issue of Darwin
being the dedicatee of Das Kaptial has been put completely to rest as
untrue.

It is interesting to read Darwin’s very thoughtful, old-school thanks-but-no-thanks response to Marx (found at
Friends of Darwin)

Dear Sir:
   I am much obliged for your kind letter & the Enclosure.—
The publication in any form of your remarks on my writing really requires no
consent on my part, & it would be ridiculous in me to give consent to what
requires none. I shd prefer the Part or Volume not to be dedicated to me
(though I thank you for the intended honour) as this implies to a certain
extent my approval of the general publication, about which I know nothing.—
Moreover though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it
appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against
christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom
of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which
follow from the advance of science. It has, therefore, always been my object to
avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may,
however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members
of my family , if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.— I am sorry to
refuse you any request, but I am old & have very little strength, and
looking over proof-sheets (as I know by present experience) fatigues me much.
   I remain Dear Sir,
      Yours faithfully,
         Ch. Darwin

By 1865 Marx moves on a bit, finding a new champion in the
natural history world, Pierre Tremaux, whose Origine et transformations de
l’homme et des autres êtres (1865) which he found to be “a very important
advance over Darwin”. I have no idea
what Marx was thinking with Tremaux, except that history has forgotten the1865
work and its author. M. Tremaux has
disappeared; Darwin
continues to prove out as fantastically correct.

All quotes from Cohen’s revolution, pp 344-347

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Political Majesty at the Interior and Exterior of Creation (1588 & 1680)

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This engraving Le
Monde Selon l’Hypthese de Copernic. Le Systeme du Mondeau movement de la
Naissance de Louis le Grand le 5 de Septembre 11. heures 20 minutes du matin
1638, is a

singular representation of the universe at a singular moment in
time. And that moment in time was the
birth of Louis le Grand, or Louis XIV, the Sun King, pictured at the moment of
his birth at the center of the Copernican universe. The future (72-year-long
reign) king smiles benignly at us from the center of the universe.

On the other side of the coin is the all-reaching embrace of
the deity-like Queen Elizabeth, who cradles the nine successive spheres of the
universe. The innermost sphere is
occupied by the Earth, the center of all things, around which are labeled the
seven spheres of the planets: “urbetas
rerum” (immovable justice) of the Earth, “facundia” (eloquence) of Mercury, “Clementia”
(clemency) of Venus, “Religio” as the Sun, “Fortitudo” (fortitude) of Mars, “Pridetia”
(prudence) of Jupiter, and “Majestas” (majesty) of Saturn. Beyond the sphere of Saturn is that of the
fixed stars (consisting of the Star Chamber, the nobles, Lords, Counsellors);
and beyond that, in the last sphere, is Elizabeth.

The image appears in John Case’s Sphaera Civitatis (1588,
The Sphere of the Commonwealth) who
writes in his preface “How well civic machinery accords with heaven’s form, and
how it is distinguished by like figures, our republic, unique, will declare on
behalf of many. Do you see the stars, wheeling around in their alternating
course, and Justice, who weighs causes in her balanced pans, the unchangeable
center of our universe?” [Full text here.]

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Art History — Astronomy — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Spam, Smeat, Spic, Prem, Mor & Arf: Food by Any Other Name
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This photo launched itself up to me while looking through
the 11 March 1946 issue of LIFE magazine for a depiction
of an atomic attack on NYC. It was Joe
Hormel who found me first, fistily challenging me to look at his food products,
a proud manager with his best stuff, presiding over his world of tinned meat
with steely Elmer Ganty-like broke-bone determination.

Joe ran his father’s “butcher business” and brought Spam to
the world in 1937, trying to find an end run around the shrunken Depression
food allowances, and pretty much succeeded.(Spam may also have been the first “singing
commercial” in what the LIFE article called “the earthiest, corniest and most
successful campaigns in U.S. advertising history.”) When the meat shortages spiked during WWII,
Spam found its way overseas via Lend-lease arrangements, feeding millions of British
and European people.. The consensus was
that Spam was mysterious and unpretty, but did deliver something like 15-grams of
protein per tin, which made it some sort of factor in waging the successful
war. US soldiers also received smeats
called “spam” though they weren’t necessarily Hormel’s product—just another in
a long line of monosyllabic imitators whose quality and zestyness didn’t come
close to the real thing, though this time prepared in the millions of pounds by
Army cooks who banked on the Spam name more so than the actual preparation. Or so I read.
In any event it was a real issue for Hormel who “insisted that Spam was
a high-grade compound of ham and pork shoulder” and that the [real] “dainty,
tasty Spam retained liquids in the meat, whereas the bulky Army preparations
was guilty of the worst sin the in the tinned meat world…” floating away in “loose
juice”. As a vegetarian, neither sounds
very appetizing. And the anti-Spam
stories and songs and newspaper articles and art and editorials of complaint
and disgust coming from US soldiers during the war are endless and legion and
iconic.

Spam seems impervious to the barbs and arrows and boulders
hurled its way over the last 72 years, still chugging along in its tinned meat
way, 6 billion sold units and growing.

[Note: “Spic” was
actually a shortening, and “Arf” was a dog food. I just couldn’t resist putting their names in
the title.]

Also, I include some of the recipes from the Monty Python
(170) skit on spam:

Egg, bacon, and spam

Egg, bacon, sausage, and spam

Spam, bacon, sausage, and spam

Spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon, and spam

Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce
garnished with truffle pate, brandy, and a fried egg on top and spam.
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Bad Ideas
The Forensic Microscope and Hidden Images in Art

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I’ve written before about the found, incidental figures of “filler” art found in larger works,generally inconsequential images used to supplement the empty foreground or provide handy perspective or scale for the subject at hand. In this example, a steel engraving of Town Hall at Antwerp, the principal focus of the artist is the architectural structure, the public square and the surrounding buildings.

To give the whole engraving some buoyancy and scale, the artist provided a fairly active scene of town life going on in the square. Now of course he could’ve made the figures more generic, but the artist went far beyond that, recording some of the lost city life of the 1830’s.

The truly interesting bit here is barely observable in the original; but, under magnification, we see a very rich and minuscule “engraved photograph” of a slice of daily commerce and street life in Antwerp. If you look at the central entrance to the town hall you can see three main (and large) doorways, and if you look closer still, you’ll see something leaning against the portal at right.

Extraordinarily, what the artist snuck into the original is a tiny (2mm) figure watching over several tables of her (fruits?/vegetables?) ware, waiting for a customer. There doesn’t seem to be much interest in her stuff, currently, and she has allowed herself a little relaxation, leaning against the doorway. I’ve found this sort of extremely minor subject matter and its ephemeral connection to the larger work at hand to be just fascinating. I wonder why such detail would be added–why would the artist, or engraver, take such care and interest in such minor visions. Perhaps this is just what was at hand on the days the artist fleshed out his work; perhaps it was the work of the engraver, alone, incising yet another semi-boring architectural image; desperate for a little artistic activity, adding some interesting, almost-invisible touches, here and there. Perhaps no one would ever really notice them, but whoever was responsible for adding such incredible, extra-dimensional details would certainly enjoy knowing they were there, recognized or not.

And while we’re at it–why in the world was that log-like thing at the base of the extreme left of the Town Hall included in this picture? I just adore that such ephemeral interest was included in this type of work–its reasoning lost forever, except that which we give it.

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Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
History of the Future: Farming and Vertical Integration, 1940

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This 1940 pamphlet, published by the Texas State Research
Foundation, is a relatively young, paleo-futuristic view of the coming of the
vertically integrated food production business in the United States .
Its title (Building an Agricultural and Industrial Empire through Research)
directly relates the idea of a grand agricultural/industrial alliance, with the
contents pointing the way to far more than simple “research”, as the cover
intimates. There is a giant series of
silos, and even a barn (in the top right corner), but the image

here is pure smokestack-encrusted
agribusiness. The simple farmer on his
tractor makes his slow way through his high-bound and gross techno skyline—of course
the visual message implies that the family farm would be aided by “research”,
but it also opens the door wide into the future to what the American farm would
become. The family farm would be
absorbed by the skyline of major business:
at the time when this pamphlet was published some 22% of the American population
was directly involved in farming; by 2002 that figure had genocidally dropped
to about 1.5%. The small, independent farms
had been replaced by global conglomerates who are centralizing food production,
controlling the distribution of fertilizer and seeds, causing massive soil
erosion, destroying aquifers, depleting the soil, polluting with toxic
chemicals, and on and on.

So the image of this puffy pamphlet’s cover turns out to be
prescient after all, and pretty much true:
except for the farmer-on-the-tractor part, as that guy got pretty much
absorbed into a corporate Farmer Entity.

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Paleo-futurology: Solar House, 1946

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This
interesting 1946 pamphlet combines tow modern interests in one package: Green’s Ready-Built Homes Present the Solar Home
presented both a prefabricated, well-designed house that was also passive solar
friendly. The architect and engineer was
George Fred Keck (1895-1980) , a true modernist, and designer of one of
the twelve “Homes of the Future” for the Chicago “Century of Progress” World’s Fair in 1933.

The “solar home” that he offered here used seasonal variations and house
location to regulate heating/cooling, glazing and siding, air movement, and the
storage of thermal energy in building materials—mostly, there were lots and
lots of transfer-friendly double-paned windows, all of which were
forward-thinking ideas for 1946. In
addition the house was prefabricated, making construction easier, simpler, and
quicker than any of the stick-built houses being constructed at that time. There was also an impetus for quick, good
construction given the housing shortage caused by the returning WWII veterans.
The prefab idea was also a relatively new one in architecture—though there are
instances of bits and pieces of prefab architecture reaching back hundreds of
years, the first earnest attempts at providing such housing on a mass scale
dates only to the 1920’s. In any event, the double-effort here was a fairly early effort at combining these two ideas–and certainly something that seems to have been about 60 years too early.

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Architecture and Building — Future, History of the
Medical Quackery: the Invention of Baldness and the Testicular Electrical Suspenders

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Well.
Margaret McKenzie (“Scientist” with a capital “s”) wrote this simple
treatise in 1934, claiming that she had discovered what caused baldness and
knew how to “grow hair with ‘Natural-Science’ ”. Answering her own call to baldness, and “after
eighteen years of exhaustive study”, Margaret “emerged triumphant…and uncovered
this thing baldness [sic]” with her discovery which would “banish baldness
forever and thus wipe out the bald head which is my aim [sic]”. Margaret’s
gift to “Man-Kind”, her discovery, boils down to fifteen words:
don’t rub your hair when washing your face, and do not smooth your hair
down with your hands. That’s it. Or almost it: we are told later that it is best to shampoo
your hair in a sink, and then if one must shower or bathe to use “a rubber
shower cap so as to not expose your hair to water”. I’m not sure how that holds together.

The great art of Margaret McKenzie is that that
like any great salesperson she was able to spread this tidy discovery over 15
pages. She strays off-topic only a few
times, once when discussing her cure for dandruff, and another when she states
with sublime magnificence that “the bald head era dates back to the 15^th
century”. The cause of the great onset
of baldness, by the way, was the invention of the haircut, which led to
smoothing down the hair and to rubbing the scalp (at the temples) when drying
your face after washing. Evidently haircuts
didn’t exist before 1400.

Sometimes all one can do is say “wow!”.

And a trailing, eyebrow-arched, questioning “wow…” is about all you can say about Pulvermacher’s Electric Belts &c/ Electricity Natures Chief Restorer, Self-Applicable for the Cure of Nervous and Chronic Disease without Medicine (printed ca. 1880), which features an electric “chain” in a belt connected to a “suspensory” for a man’s vitals. It is one of many, perhaps hundreds, of electrical geegaws that climbed aboard the principles of Michael Faraday’s monumental invention of the induction coil (1831)–one can hardly imagine what Mr Faraday would’ve thought of this application of his great addition to the history of technology. This electrical stimulus was supposed to cure all manner of unspeakably lingering medical tragedies, including spermatorrhea, exhausted vital energy, female complaint, inflammation of the prostate gland, seminal weakness, kidney disease, cramp, lost manhood, paralysis, indigestion, dyspepsia, spinal complaints, nervous debility, and of course the “debilities of sexual self-pollution” (“the sexual sin (which) is the most destructive of all human vices…the greatest outrage against Nature’s sexual ordinances that man can possibly perpetrate”. Isaac Pulvermacher’s (which is German for “gunpowder maker”) electrical medico-contraption was popular for several decades in the mid/late 19th century until it faded and trailed away at the turn of the century, though it was not for the lack of trying. Pulvermacher had all manner of glowing letters of support for his product, though one wonders if they

weren’t mostly cooked up on the back burner of a two-burner stove top, much in the way he invented this bizarre electrical device and pathologized aspects of male sexuality.

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A Big Sea of Planes: Quantitative Display of World War II Bombers

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(See also the new post on picturing massive numbers here.)

I’ve written four or five posts on glorious quantitative visual displays of massive amounts of WWII bombers, most of which I’ve gathered together below. This subject came up today when I found another of these images in a small hand-out broadside published by the National Savings Committee of Great Britain, urging people to save money and be thrifty, keeping money in the banks, in an effort to control prices and have money available to the government for war production. The legend states: “For it is by the measure of our self-denial that we can prove worthy debtors to our airmen; and by our Savings that we can help to give them wings for victory”. The point is driven home by a now-familiar representation of hundreds of bombers rising from the horizon–a remarkable vision, especially if you tried to visualize the real thing.

Here are a few other similar images:

(A) This widely circulated and published photo appeared in 1942 (particularly in LIFE Magazine in 17 September 1942 and the Illustrated London News in the next month), and showed 4,500 aircraft models suspended from the ceiling of Chicago’s Union Station It is the result of an inspiration derived from President Franklin Roosevelt’s assertion that America would produce 185,000 war-focused aircraft in 1942 and 1943.

The planes in this photo were hanging 60-feet above the floor of the station, with wing spans between one foot and four feet (for the bombers). It was a fantastic, blustery, iconic effort to show what it meant to look at 4500 planes—and these paled in comparison to a drawing (which I unfortunately do not have) that appeared in the Illustrated London News on 21 February 1941, showing the entire production fleet of 185,000 aircraft—a column of planes one mile wide and 117 miles long.

Using this photo then to interpolate that full production figure of 185k, you’d have to piece 48 of these photos together to show full production, or a version of this photo that was 8 inches wide and 32 feet long. (The second image of Union Station and the planes is by FSA photographer Jack Delano.)

(B) This arresting cover image for The Illustrated London News of 21 February 1942 illustrates the (new) American production program for planes and tanks for 1942 and 1943 (It reminds me too of an earlier post I did with a similar cover for LIFE magazine here.) The caption reads: “185,000 planes form a mile-wide blanket of bombers under a blanket of fighters stretching 117 miles” which is actually a double blanket of planes–if they were thinned out to form one layer it would stretch one mile wide from Washington D.C. to New York City, which is quite an unimaginable ribbon.

The reality of the situation was greater than this: by 1945 over 300,000 planes were produced, 275,000 of them after Pearl Harbor. And this from a combined aviation industry which before 1939 had produced fewer than 6,000 planes a year. The war effort increased this by orders of magnitude, and by war’s end there were 81 production facilities with a combined area of 175 million feet, all bumped up within four years. I’ve never read about it, but I have no doubt that one of the key ingredients to this sort of hyper-successful undertaking was organization–the oversight and control for this process must’ve been fast and decisive, with little room for mid-level anything. I think that this is the only way the whole thing could’ve worked so well.

(C) This tremendous display is half of a double-page spread that appeared in The Illustrated London News for 7 September 1940. It was meant to bolster the civilian population of Britain during the time of the German attacks, shoping that “Over one thousand Nazi aircraft (were) brought down over Great Britain in …20 Days…” The artwork, drawn by Bryan de Grineau, actually depicts 1000 planes, and accurately depicted ones at that. What the graphic doesn’t tally though are the airmen losses, which would be considerably more thanb the 1000 aircraft: for example, of the aircraft involved in the sustain air-invasion of England, the Dornier 215’s had a crew of four, Dornier 17’s three, Heinkel 111’s four, Messerschmitt 110’s two, and Junkers 88’s three. Thus there were thousands more airmen lost, a commodity that the Nazis could little afford.

(This continues a thread on The Battle of Britain and also a post on “What 185,000 Planes Looks Like”).
The results of the battle (and if you take a look at this earlier post for the full narrative), in terms of aircraft and humans,
were, for 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

I find this visual display of quantitative data beautiful and compelling–and overwhelming in its way.

The Battle of Britain was fought primarily from 10 July to 31 October 1940, so by the time this image was published the Brits had been able to turn the tide of Hitler’s plan. (The air strikes wouldn’t really end until the Nazis turned their attention to the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in May 1941.) And that plan, named Luftschlacht um England, was to overtake and destroy the British capacity in the air, for as long as the English had command of the airspace there would be no way that the Nazis could force an invasion by land/sea (at least in the minds of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht and Hitler). And so the Nazis failed–it was their first major defeat, and, especially, with the turning of attention east, it was a pivotal point of the war.

(D) This last image is a “Not a Display of Toys”, shows only one section of a large airfield “in Europe” (actually in U.S.-administered Munich). There’s about 300 B-17’s (e?) parked wingtip to wingtip, off duty now from the fight in Europe, but (as the caption says) prepared for a fight in Japan. I don’t think anyone in high command had any doubt that these planes had seen their last action. The atom bomb worked, and would work again (and again, and more so if necessary), and the fear that these planes would make their way East was not a real concern. This photo represents about 7% of the highest number of B-17’s in service in Europe at any given time.

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Preserving the Dead in a Formaldehyde Mist, 1899

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Gustave de Rechter, the author of this pamphlet (The Application of a New System for the Preservation of Dead Bodies, Grammont, Belgium, 1899) had, as you might guess, a very specific reason for keeping the dead from being entirely, decomposedly, dead. As the director of the School of Criminology and of Scientific Police of Belgium, Dr. de Rechter tried to find a way of preservation of bodies for forensic and legal purposes.

He followed in the footsteps of people like Alphonse Bertillon (France) and Hans Gross (Austria) in helping to establish a scientific basis for criminology in the late 19^th century. In his case, the preservation of the dead would allow the bodies (of the murdered or suspiciously departed) to be re-examined at a much later date (at least months down the road) should the defense in a murder case challenge the original findings of the medical examiner.

As de Rechter points out, this was particularly true in the case of poisoning, where in 1899 the evidence would be all but dissipated
from the body following even a week of death—he maintains that his new method of preservation (via an incubated spray of formic aldehyde, or formaldehyde) would enable further inspection even months after death. De Rechter manages to forestall the inevitable, the great crumbling that awaits everything, everyone, at some point, the “distinguished thing” of Henry James’ (last words), to return everything to the earth, to what Larry McMurtry (in Lonesome Dove) refers to as “nothing but a boneyard”.

(The images here are from the pamphlet, with de Rechter showing the effects of his nasty spray on corpses and what they looked like after some months sleeping in their formaldehyde cocoons.)

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RAND Report on Post-ICBM Weaponry: the “Non-Violent” War, 1957

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The
RAND Corporation (Research And Development) is a think tank
originally formed in 1946 by the US Army Air Force as part of a contract to the
Douglas Aircraft Company. After 1948
RAND Corp was funded by a number of different sources, private and
governmental, and left the sphere of being a direct arm of the U.S. military. (Maybe.) It still did enormous
amounts of work on behalf of the military, and seems to have
been their chief theoreticians during
this period. It was also the time that
the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was formulated at , partially under the direction of we’ll-see-him-again-down-the-road
Robert McNamara. And of course much
else.

This
publication is an internal RAND document, not
meant for the eyes of the outside world, at least in 1957. I own a number of these reports, and I must
say that this one is odd—it is rather flippant, sometimes oddly and darkly
(dare I say it?) funny. It is also short
(four pages) and gets to the very meaty part of the issue immediately. The author(s) assume that the US and the USSR
will have achieved a point of stasis such that it would make absolutely no
sense for either actor to actually employ their arsenal (and excluding “the
possibility of the button pusher ‘flipping his lid’ “. The paper attempts then (“let’s jump right in
and assume we find ourselves in this stalemated period”) to envision the next
kind of war in which the ICBM would not be an active factor. “We therefore
postulate here that the kind of war we will be engaged in…in the period of
nuclear stalemate of the non-violent war, the opening phase of which has been
called the cold war.”

The tools of war in this non-violent war, the report
speculates, included: (1) the State Department as a Weapon, issuing “an
aggressive, imaginative foreign policy”. (2) Economic Weapons, which
interestingly included “inflate USSR economy by surreptitiously flooding the country with undetectable counterfeit
currency”. (I remember that the late
Sen. John Moynihan suggested in the first Iraq
war, televise don the floor of the U.S. Senate in the final debate on
engagement, that we do this exact thing in Iraq…especially
since the Iraqi dinar was being printed in London.) The third section was “Psychological
Weapons”, and was very tongue-in-cheek short (?), suggesting “ideas a la
Hitchcock, e.g., turn Stalin [dead in 1953] over in his grave some dark night,
etc.” I’m not sure what to make of that, especially as the paper finishes on
this line: “This list is open for additions and suggestion.” Indeed. Out of all of the internal reports that I’ve read from RAND this is the only one that approached its topic with such dark familiarity and removed humor.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Adventure in Aeronautics, 1911

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The Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was one of the
20^th century’s most gifted and influential philosopher-logicians,
though he started his advanced educational career in an aeronautics program at Manchester, in England. And by “though” I mean a very soft “though”,
as the engineering students educated in Germany were commanded to have a
wide intellectual calling, including heavy backgrounds in mathematics and
physics. He came to Manchester
to pursue a career as aeronaut and engineer, which is a little odd because following its initial
great exploits in flight in the mind-19^th century, England certainly was not a hotbed
of activity for flight in the first (“flight”) decade of the 20^th century. Be that as it may, he went to Manchester, pushed by the
great influences in the work of Ludwig Boltzmann and Heinrich Hertz. He also received nourishment for his interest in mathematics, leading to a deeper pursuit in the foundations of mathematics, all of which fueled his developing study away from aeronautics and engineering.

And it was here at Manchester
that Wittgenstein patented his innovative approach to propulsion—a sort of powered series of ejectors that were attached to the ends of the blades
of a propeller. The image that accompanies
the patent application is here, above, and entitled “Improvements in Propellers
Applicable for Aerial Machines”, dated 9 September 1911. This was admittedly an early period in the
development of aviation—especially in England—and although an interesting
product it was not very practicable, though a design similar did appear on helicopter rotors in the 1950’s.

It was not so practicable that Wittgenstein pursue a career
as an aeronaut—within a year of the
publication of his patent, he was on his way to Cambridge to join Bertrand Russell
(who had just published the20th century’s most difficult-to-read work in logic
in the Principia Mathematica) and
begin his work in philosophy.

It is fitting in a way that Wittgenstein had this
background, as he described his philosophy of language in terms of projective geometry...

Notes:

1) Legend for the patent image: Fig. 1
is the gaseous or vaporized fuel inlet; a1 is the air inlet. Fig. 2 and Fig. 4 are alternative methods of fuel flow to the combustion
chamber C. In Fig. 2 fuel is mixed with the air just after both emerge from
the hub.

2) I’ve read that Wittgenstein was very deeply influenced by the following passage from Hertz’ Principles of Mechanics: “When these painful contradictions are removed, the
question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our
minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions” If I squint a little I can see the seeds of the Tractatus in there.

3) For a real treatment of this invention of Wittgenstein’s see the article at the Royal Society.

4) Also see Ian Lemco’s Wittgenstein’s Aeronautical Experiments

5) “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me
finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through
them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder,
after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions;
then he sees the world rightly.”–Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, 6.54

6) See Klagge’s online biography and philosophical history of Wittgenstein

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

mathematics, logic