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.

The Loneliness of Being Wright(s): not Reporting the First Flight.

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Reading through the 1903/04 volumes of the NYC-based Popular Science Monthly I was
struck, again*, by the lack of reporting (and the oddness of reporting when
done) on the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight in December 1903. The editors gave a page of coverage to the
Samuel P. Langley failed aerodrome flight of November in the December
issue.

Langley at the time was the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and one of America’s
leading scientists who had a strong side interest in aerodynamics if not
aviation. Swimming in private funds,
some money from the Smithsonian and $50k from the War Department, Langley set out trying to produce a flyer which—in its two
attempts at flight from a raft in the Potomac in
November—wound up broken and soggy in the river, following a “flight” straight
from its launcher into the water. The
article actually took Langley to task on two fronts: first, it made
absolutely certain that readers understood that his powered plane didn’t fly;
and second, that he might well prove to be a damaging embarrassment to the
Smithsonian and American science by proceeding with his experiments. (The Langley aerodrome is pictured just below.)

The Wright’s first powered flight took place at Kill Devil
Hills along the North Carolina coast in
December, 1903, just weeks after the appearance of the Langley article. They were somewhat reticent and droll in reporting
their accomplishment; more so, people seemed simply not to believe them (see
below for some further reading). Still,
though, there was no real mention of the Wright’s flight in Popular Science
Monthly through April. Oddly, the Smithsonian’s
website reports that one of the first mentions of the flight was in the March
(1904) issue of this journal, but they are mostly mistaken. There is an article in that number by the
Octave Chanute, a great figure in the history of early aviation, who writes in
general about the progress of flight. In
the section on ‘flying machines” Chanute devotes one paragraph of his eight
page article to the Wrights, and the main emphasis here is that other aviators
should follow the Wrights’ example of careful preparation before actually
hoping aboard a plane to fly: its was
the training that was emphasized. There isn’t actually any mention whatsoever regarding
their powered flight, although engines and propellers are discussed somewhat. Of
the 480 pages remaining in the journal after the December issue, this one
paragraph was the only room that could be found for talking about the Wrights,
and then not talking about their great achievement.

Of course there were many people who didn’t believe the
Wright story—there was scant photographic evidence and only five eyewitnesses,
and for years afterwards the Wright had a problem with officially authenticating
their flight as the great First Flight.
But I’m a little puzzled by the Chanute coverage, as he was a pretty
diplomatic and sharing person, and proved to be particularly supportive of the
Wrights in general (visiting them at Kill Devil at certain points in 1901,1902
and 1903). The brothers understood
intellectual propriety and credited Chanute when credit was due (particularly
in the cases of truss design and stacked wings). So it is puzzling to me when it seems as
though Chanute may have gone out of his way to not mention the flight. This is especially true if you read between
the lines of the next paragraph. Chanute writes: “Now that an initial success
has been achieved with a flying machine, we can discern the use of such an
apparatus, and also some of its limitations”.
To me, after having written seven pages on flying history, to refer to a
singular “initial success” makes sense only if he was referring to the Wrights’
December flight. (I don’t think that he could’ve been referring to the Langley test, as the aerodrome simply fell into the Potomac, the structure of the plane overwhelmed by the thrust,
the power of the engine, and movement in general—the plane just broke up and
was flung into the water.) To me, the
invisibility of the unmentioned flight is glaringly visible. But this was pretty much in the realm of
standard reception for the Wrights for most of the rest of the decade—I am
still struck though with the rush away from announcing the flight that almost
everyone seemed to take in 1904.

(It is interesting to note Chanute’s vision for the airplane
in his closing paragraph, where he envisions military uses for aircraft, though
these were limited to scouting and observation with not a whiff of tactical
employment. Also there is the
possibility of mail delivery (“in some cases”) and the rescue of people in
trouble in restricted-access areas. On
the other hand, the just-failed Langley had a much broader and deeper
appreciation for what he saw as the impending future of the airplane, saying ‘the
great universal highway overhead is soon to be opened”, which was directly
contrary to Chanute, who couldn’t see aircraft being used for simple
transportation. Actually Langley’s vision was
taken to task in that earlier article in the Popular Science Monthly, the editor writing that “Dr. Langley seems
to claim too much” in regards to the future of flight, and that “he should be
careful not to do anything that could lend itself to an interpretation that will
bring injury to the scientific work of the government or country”. It is certain that with at least this one
(very popular, widely circulated) science magazine, one couldn’t be too
stinking careful about what one did or thought or said regarding flight—and in
the case of the Wrights, one could say hardly anything at all.

* For three other of my posts
on this issue of publicity and the Wrights, see:

–The Unbearable Wrightness of Being: the Wright Brothers Introduce Europe to Flying The Casual Treatment of the Wright Brothers

–The Department of Great Understatement: the Wright Brothers, 1903.

—The Casual Treatment of the Wright Brothers in the Scientific American

For the interesting conclusion (and summary) of Chanute’s
Progress in Flying Machines of see here.

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Aviation & flight — Technology, History of
History of Dis-Inventing Sex, 1: 1930’s American Radio

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(Also part of the Blank and Missing Things series: Sex)

The classes in the Western world for the most part enjoyed
their own social amusements: the rich
had opera, theater, concert halls; the working poor and associated classes had
burlesque, minstrel and variety shows. The
invention of the motion picture began to draw a common thread between these two
classes, a place where anyone from anywhere could enjoy themselves for a nickel
(or whatever). Commercial radio came
into being in the late 1920’s, growing enormously in the 1930’s and ‘40’s
before encountering its mortal enemy of television in the early 1950’s. Since radio was free (minus the cost of brain
rot from listening to the underwriters who commercials were interrupted by the
stuff people wanted to listen to) it became for those decades a superb democratizer
of American entertainment and (to some degree) culture.

Opera, vaudeville, minstrel shows, theater and so on enjoyed
their own segments of saucy visions and rakish stories, with sex certainly not being
necessarily prohibited. This was absolutely
not the case with radio, which in the 1930’s and ‘40’s held strict standards
against suggestive behavior that might hint of sexual meanings. There was plenty of sotto voce sexual innuendo to be found, but you really had to look
for it and pay attention. The feeling
among the broadcasters was that since radio was being invited into the very
homes of its listeners that there was a deeper responsibility to keep the shows
clean and relatively wholesome. And so sex took a holiday.

Its not that movies and television in the 1950’s were
rampant Decameron (with all of its semi-comic/tragic half eroticism) or Caligula spas, but
they certainly “showed” more skin than radio from that period ever talked about
or alluded to, even if the first TV married couples beds weren’t pushed
together until the Munsters shared a big double in the 1960’s.

(No,
the Ricardo’s never did push their twin beds together; it really was the mores-bending Munsters, who are pictured below. Perhaps the great “first” of a couple sharing the same bed needed to remove the human aspect of the reaching act, placing the responsibility in the attached-hands of a Frankenstein’s monster-like character and his bride. This happened too with tv’s first interracial kiss–between Capt. Kirk and his communications officer, can’t remember her name–making the encounter between humans of incredible accomplishment and remove, and of course set centuries in the future.)

Be that as it may, Lee DeForest (1873-1961), the inventor of the audion
which made the whole industry possible (after Hertz and Marconi) complained in
1947 of the enormous silliness and suggestive nature of the new medium. He loftily wrote about what could’ve been “a potent instrumentality for culture, fine music, and the uplifting of American mass inteliigence” but instead was a ‘laughing stock”, the medium addressed to what he thought was the average national intelligence of a thirteen year old. Maybe he was right, and the man simply couldn’t stand it. 61 additional years would’ve made the De Forest explode–but then again, he was already close to that hearing saxophone players; who knows what the man would’ve thought of cable television. But the one thing he really couldn’t compalin about with radio was eroticism or sexual conduct, because that really wasn’t there.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Technology, History of
Mechanical Calculating Pencil, 1876

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I’ve seen a number of unusual calculating machines, but this one–patented by Marshall Smith in 1876) seems one of the smallest, and efficient–if not limited–varities. It is the second edition so-to-speak of a mechanical, graphite pencil, operating this time without rotors or any other internal mechanical devices. It was evidently a big seller–hosted in part, so it seems, by The Scientific American itself–having sold some 5,000 units.

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Technology, History of
Fundamentals of Irony in Bombing: Tybee Island, 1862 and the French in Damascus, 1925

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[on vacation, Tybee Island, Georgia]

I have a hard time remembering the correct version of this twisty tale—are we in a post-irony age or the post-ironic irony age? Is a double-irony an irony at all? Actually I think that instead of our society having moved into a post-irony stage, it seems that the apparent lack of irony seems only so because all we have is irony, which of course is ironic. Which may be an illustrative answer to my second question; a double-irony is indeed a bigger irony, not a smaller (or null) one.

This came to mind vacationing with my family; actually, it came while building a sand castle at the lip of the advancing tide, building it up as the water tore it down. That’s the fun of it, even with my six-year old: watching things get made and watching them get unmade, as the getting-unmade part will tell you a whole heck of a lot about the successes and failures of what went into the thing’s making.

Watching the walls of the fort tumble reminded me of the real-life version of this event, something that happened about two miles away and 147 years ago. For Pulaski was built on the Savannah River to protect the approaches to Savannah and Charleston from the angry reaches of the Spanish and British; in 1862, it was in the hands of the Confederates, and was being used to protect Savannah from the very government that built it.

Even while under the direct commander of General R.E. Lee, thing did not go well for Fort Pulaski and the garrison within. At the end of 1861, the CSA was getting ready for an extended siege of the fort as the Union forces found victories north and south of it. They withdrew their forces from Tybee and threw them into the fort, leaving the Union army a free and insatiable hand to get their hand ready on the other side of the Savannah pass. That said, that’s what pretty much happened: Union forces dragged their cannons through the surf and across the sand, getting them in place around newly-built batteries. This all happened at night so that the Confederates in the fort couldn’t see what was going on, what with all of the evening’s doings camouflaged once the sun came up. (This was still possible at t he time, to keep a secret like this in almost plain view, only a mile away from where the opposing cannons were aimed. The guys in the fort were pretty much cut off from everyone and everything, with only the occasional courier being able to make it through. The garrison was, after all, equipped with enough provisions to last through a siege of 8 months or so.) What happened, finally, was that with the Union cannon in place, the assault began. And instead of a siege lasting for two seasons, it ran about two days. The difference was in the new cannons that were being used the boys in blue—the rifled cannon was brought to play against the massive walls of the fort, and the masonry didn’t stand a chance against the new technology, which as it turns out was first displayed to the world in this battle. And so the ironies: a fort that was built to protect the United States from foreign invaders was used to protect the Confederate States from the United States; and the fort fell not to a sea-based barrage but a land-based one. And after all of this, even though the Pulaski fell in April 1862, Savannah wasn’t captured by the union until December 1864.

An encyclopedia could no doubt be written on nothing but the ironies of bombing. And for another example of this I turn to the French, who can supply more than their share, per capita, pound-for-pound, and percentage of GDP, whatever. No, not the French return to Indochina in 1945 (after having done business with the occupying Japanese forces for the entire war) and their resurgent colonialism as practiced against the Vietnamese, or the heinous practices against the Algerians just prior to that country’s independence: it is their bombing practices in Damascus. Not the Syrian bombings of 1945 (which also included many other places like Aleppo, Hama and etc.) but the French civilian bombings of Damascus in 1925. For it was in that year that the League of Nations found that the French really weren’t bombing and killing civilians indiscriminately when they were doing so; they were, ironically, bombing themselves, and so their actions were not illegal. (It was problematic, identifying “civilians”, as the League didn’t necessarily grant the same sort of “humanness” to all human, finding categories for barbarians and savages. It was acceptable to bomb those later two categories, but not the first.) So the French sought to subdue a rebellion against their oppressive rule in that country, identifying the Muslim population centers in Damascus as probable hotbeds of activities for the “bandits” that were causing them their problems. October 18, 1925 is when this particular outrage occurred; the Syrians protested, and the League considered. And that was about the size of the story for the Syrians, because as it turns out, the French were just maintaining an order that for them was a simple police action; civilians populations could not be bombed in the eyes of international law, if the bombing was being done to a foreign people; since the French were there and occupying the country, they were conducting a police action, and in a sense were merely bombing themselves, loosening them from the barriers of whatever international law could be applied to their actions by the League of Nations.

So there is hardly any shortage of bombing ironies, as we can see here with the null-irony of the French bombing themselves while killing Muslim civilians. When you start looking for irony, sometimes that’s all you can see.

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Bad Ideas — Militaria
Atomic Bomb: William Shockley and the Economics of Using the Atomic Bomb, 1945
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This is a reposting of apost from last year, one of a continuing series on the development, use and control of atomic and nuclear weapons.

Atomic Bomb: William Shockley and the Economics of Using the Atomic Bomb, 1945

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Background Documents on the Control and Proliferation Issues of the Atomic Bomb

Vannevar Bush Group, October 1945-January 1946

Paper 1: William Shockley

(Click image to enlarge; the other four pages are located in the “Continue Reading” section, below.)
William Shockley on the Economics of the “Atomic Bomb Art”

This paper is one a small archive of background and draft papers and
proposals by the Vannevar Bush group working on the question of the
control of atomic weapons and the formalization of the American
position regarding the use and control of atomic weapons, October
1945-February 1946. This archive consists of 38 documents relating to
the development of U.S. atomic policy, with contributions by President
Harry Truman, Secretary of State James Byrnes, Dr. Vannevar Bush, (future AEC director) Carroll Wilson, Alger Hiss, I.I. Rabi, William Shockley, Frederick Dunn, Joseph E. Johnson, Leo Pasvolsky, Philip Morrison, Col. Nichols, William McRae, Admiral W.H.P. Blandy, George L. Harrison, and others.

CONTINUE READING
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Atomic and Nuclear weapons
Deciding to Use the Atomic Bomb: The Chicago Metallurgical Lab Poll, July, 1945

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Interested in responding to the poll yourself? Answer the Metallurgical Lab (July 1945) Poll here-–the results are immediately available.

In
late June 1945, the Interim Committee (a secret, blue chip group
established by Secretary of War Stimson with the approval of President
Harry S. Truman to examine the problems that could result from the
creation of the atomic bomb). decided what exactly to do with the
weapons. The group (also including James F. Byrnes, former US Senator
soon to be Secretary of State, as President Truman’s personal
representative; Ralph A. Bard, Under Secretary of the Navy; William L.
Clayton, Assistant Secretary of State; Vannevar Bush, Director of the
Office of Scientific Research and Development and president of the
Carnegie Institution; Karl T. Compton, Chief of the Office of Field
Service in the Office of Scientific Research and Development and
president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology; James B. Conant,
Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee and president of
Harvard University; and George L. Harrison, an assistant to Stimson and
president of New York Life Insurance Company) found the following:

The
opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these
weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely
technical demonstration to that of the military application best
designed to induce surrender. Those who advocate a purely technical
demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have
feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future
negotiations will be prejudiced. Others emphasize the opportunity of
saving American lives by immediate military use, and believe that such
use will improve the international prospects, in that they are more
concerned with the prevention of war than with the elimination of this
specific weapon. We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can
propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war;
we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.

AND

…that the weapon be used against Japan at the
earliest opportunity, that it be used without warning, and that it be
used on a dual target, namely, a military installation or war plant
surrounded by or adjacent to homes or other buildings most susceptible
to damage.

Slightly later, in July 1945 (but before Trinity), Arthur H. Compton
asked Farrington Daniels (Director of the Metallurgical Lab section
(at Chicago) of the Manhattan Project) to poll the 250 or so scientists
at work under Farrington on the coming immediate use of the atomic
bombs. (The results of the poll, answered by 150 of the 250 people,
were originally published as “A Poll of Scientists at Chicago, July
1945,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1948, 44, page 63. and again published in Compton’s own book, Atomic Quest, in 1956. The images below come from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists for October 1958, p 304.)

Here are the questions and the results of the responses:

The results of the poll were widely interpreted, and seemed to fit
the needs of whomever was stretching the statistical canvas. On the
one hand, for example, 87% of the anonymous respondents favored some
sort of military use of the bombs, though just 15% of all of the
scientists thought that the bombs should be dropped straight-away.
Almost half thought that the bombs were best used in demonstration to
the Japanese first, followed by renewed negotiating efforts for
unconditional surrender, before the bombs were employed on targets;
another 26% felt that the Japanese be invited for a demonstration in
the US of the weapon. So even though 87% believed that a military use
was prescribed, 72% felt that the military use was best first as a
demonstration device. 2% (3 of the 150) felt that the bomb should
basically be buried and not used at all.

Compton’s response to it all and to the immediate demands presented
to him on 23rd July (Washington wants to know what you think”) was
hardly quintessential: “My vote is with the majority….it seems to me
that as the war stands the bomb should be used , but no more
drastically than needed to bring surrender>” (Reported in Lewis
Morton’s “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb”, Foreign Affairs, 35, January 1957, pp 334-353).

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons
Bubble Cosmology: J.J. Grandville and a Soapy, Watery “Little Bang”, 1844

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Finding the Big Bang in a bowl of soapy water.

Last year I wrote a little aboutJ.J.Grandville’s interplanetary
bridge connecting some of the planets (and including a balcony constructed of Saturn’s
ring [sic] in an early Victorian Grad Tour solar system walkabout. Grandville (the pseudonym of Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard,
born in 1803 and staggering too quickly out of life in 1847) was an extraordinary
talent working somewhat out and ahead of his time; he had superb visions of the
future, and of the past, and most of them were fantastic and fanciful, though
not without some very stinging social commentary. He has been called a proto-Surrealist and I’d
have to agree, though for me he had a larger production of social commentary in
his work than any of the “real” Surrealists of the 20^th
century. For example, in his Un Autre
Monde (“Another World”) he depicts people’s
social stature literally—the taller and thinner, the more socially important;
the shorter and stouter, the more disposable/replaceable; the images are funny,
convincing and wincingly penetrative.

This being said, I have a special interest in the
astronomically-based images that he produced, and so far as I can tell, there
weren’t many of them in his vast output.
In chapter 25 (“The Mysteries of Infinity”) of Un Autre Monde
Grandville rolls out the great maker of the universe, the Primum Mobile, the
Motive Force, the First Mover. The old scamp was busy and on display for Grandville’s character Hahbble, who
floats around in the cosmos, and comes face-to-face with what in the end is
Einstein’s dice thrower, as much as the great physicist didn’t want him to be,
nor is he subtle (Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht!) The malicious (“boshaft”) part would be
supplied by someone else looking intent and dangerous, while the great maker turns out to
be a magician who is happily creating the matter of all stuff by making it all out of
bubbles.

(I feel relatively certain that Grandville is the first artist to propose the
bubble theory of cosmology, and he is among a select and restrictive minority
who allocated such a seemingly meaningless activity with the creation of creation. I like its playful nature, though I wonder if
his approach was seen as a deep mockery and perhaps heretically insulting to
the religco-forces that helped and plagued the 19^th century. Mostly it seems he was left behind int he appreciation part of acknowledgment, glory faded before his eyes; his work wasn’t necessarily prized during his lifetime, and
he had his share of brutal reviews for his great adventures. Paul St. Victor, art critic, wrote that
Grandville “wanted to dance on the clouds in leaden shoes”and “tried to get to
heaven on a bus”. That’s a tough go. Death did bring him some fame as M. Grandville slept with the worms; publishers used his illustrations mostly without gratuity to any estate, the images showing up all over the place through the end of the 19th century. His cuts were used again and again,the blocks being progressively degrade until the fineness of Grandville’s eye and incision were lost to overuse–it is easy to see the difference in crispness and clarity between the early printngs of his pictures with the later ones, his sharp edges getting rounded by greed and use and time.³)

I imagine this magician to be “almost” infinitely large and
small (what does “almost” infinitely mean?) , blowing bubbles on a large galaxy
scale, the bubbles containing other
galaxies; or smaller yet, other solar systems; and smaller yet, other
planets. And taking it down to the other
extreme, he could be sub-atomic, blowing bubbles of existence and shaping the bumpies
of quantum foam in spacetime, letting loose the primordial bits that would
become molecules that would or would not rise from the unpretty Dirac sea,
living just on the other side of measureable in space and time, shaving
barely-measureable slivers away from Planck length¹ and Planck time². Or maybe the old man is putting the white
into Schwarzchild wormholes.

Maybe he’s just blowing the bubbles of possibility and
chance, and his unacknowledged accomplice is injecting the mote in god’s eye.

Notes:

1. The Planck length 1.616 x 10 -35 (meters) which is the
smallest measureable space in the universe (comprised of Planck’s constant, the
gravitational constant and the speed of light) which in turn leads to

2. Planck
time, which is the amount of time it takes for light to traverse one Planck
length in a vacuum, 5.39 x 10 -44 seconds),
which is basically the smallest measureable unit of time, or for time that
would mean anything.

3. While ill with his own fatal bit, he composed
his own epitaph; Here Lies Grandville;
he loved everything, made everything live, speak and walk, but could not make a
way for himself”.

There’s actually quite
a nice turn of phrase in the wiki article on Grandville—quite nice,
really—which I include here: “Though the
designs of Grandville are occasionally unnatural and absurd, they usually
display keen analysis of character and marvelous inventive ingenuity, and his
humour is always tempered and refined by delicacy of sentiment and a vein of
sober thoughtfulness.” He evidently lived a hard-ish life, not the least of which
were the deaths of his wife and two children in the early 1840’s.

Some of Grandville’s other interesting works include:

Les petites miseres de la vie humaine (The Petty Sorrows of
Human Life) 1843

Un Autre Monde 1844

Cent Proverbes 1845

Jerome paturot 1846

Les Fleurs animees (The Personified Flowers) 1847

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Anti-Nazi Propaganda and the Triumph of Nazism in the U.S., 1943

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This striking image appeared in LIFE magazine for 4 January 1943 as an appeal from American Locomotive for the American people to be aware of what might be expected of them in the very near future if the war did not go as planned. It is doubtful that this ever could have happened, even if the tide of combat had not turned against the Germans by this point–the enormous sucking sound began in the war in the East as 90,000+ German soldiers surrendered at Stalingrad at about this

time in January, the fate of the Nazi regime had been decided at Potsdam, the war in the Pacific (Guadalcanal, Midway) was going the way of the Allies, and the invasion of North Africa was well underway, the noose beg

inning to tighten on Axis Europe. This is a little fast-and-loose on the history of the war, but I think it generally accurate to say that no Nazi flags would be displayed in American courtrooms. The other, last nail in this coffin was the beginn

ing of the Manhattan Project in June 1942, an undertaking which would lead to ultimate domination. I think it safe to say too that there was no way that any other country (or alliance) could have produced the necessary (and terrific) amounts of energy, plus large manpower, plus expertise, plus the ability to maintain the massive project (all in s

ecret)–it was all simply too much. Had the Nazis been more successful in Europe and less adventurous in the East, and was somehow able to conquer it all (and this removing the U.S. from the equation), well perhaps then it could have been possible for Germany to develop the bomb. on the third hand, given the rest of the development in the American war as dynamic, the U.S. would’ve bombed Germany (and etc.) with atomic weapons before they could have developed anything on their own. all of this is trivial rumblings to be sure–I just wanted to survey the possibility of the Nazi overthrow of America. The U.S. would’ve been too terribly much for anyone, especially given the experiment in the desert.

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Future, History of the — Militaria
A History of Goodbye, Part I: “Goodbye” in Book Titles

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Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio

(“Nothing
is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness”), said by Poe in his “The
Purloined Letter” to be from Seneca¹.

Several posts ago I made reference to Jean Puget de la
Serre’s wonderfully semi-vicious book The Mirrour Which Flatters Not (1639). Serre was hardly an oasis of negativity in
the early Enlightenment, writing as he was on matters epically moral—I must
admit that I was attracted to the title of this condemning and biting book, and
frontispiece illustration, which features a royal skeleton wormily seated in a field of skulls holding the mirror that awaits us all. But as it turns out—ironically, too, perhaps—in
the long parting salvo that seems to have been the crux of his book’s biscuit,
Serre’s translator, Thomas Cary, is one of the earliest English writers to use
the word “goodbye”. Why this was done, I
haven’t the foggiest notion—I do know that writers claim that this is a
contraction of the parting salutation of “god be with you”, but that’s all I know on the subject.

But it did cause me to think about the word “goodbye” and the whole concept of parting from something, or someone, and of change, and adventure , of something happening, flux, introducing or diminishing chaos. If it is anything at all, the idea of “goodbye” will probably not lead to boredom; ennui is a definite some-percentage possibility, but it is a direct promise of change for good or for ill or for nil.

And the best place I thought to start of looking at Goodbye is at the beginning, in the titles of books, where “Goodbye” or “Good-bye” makes infrequent appearances.

There are titles that say
Goodbye to people: Mr. Chips,
Columbus, Picasso, Sister Disco, Mickey Mouse, Judge Lynch, Descartes. And Goodbye… to places: Berlin, Europe, Los Angeles, New York, Venice, Earth.

They are of varying qualities. This is definitely judging a book by its
title, but I think I’d rather read Death
in Venice more so than Goodbye to
Venice, which sounds like it might be a Weekly Reader version of
Mr. Mann’s big/little write.

And of course Goodbye…
to things, not too many of which sound very appealing: Hangovers, Weight, Love, Sanity, Health,
Life. These are the books invisibly clamoring for
space and life at the 25-cent table at the library sale as they wait their turn to say “hello” to recycling.

Then there are the Goodbye…
titles that are Not Terribly Categorizable: Goodbye Girl, Say Goodbye, and of course Never Say Goodbye, and the lovely Goodbye Blue Monday (the rest of the
title of Vonnegut’s Breakfast of
Champions…). The Long Goodbye has always sounded languid and steamy and
the-ice-is-all-melted-y to me. Hello Goodbye just can’t seem to make up
its mind. So far as I can tell there are no books simply entitled Goodbye, nor has anything ever been on
bookseller shelves called Get Out,
though there is a book called Go Away. Hello Goodbye either can’t make up its mind or is welcoming Goodbye, which may or may not be a broken logical circuit.

The playing field gets very wide for book titles (and
everything else) when “goodbye” gets more expanded, less demanding, more diplomatic,
like, say , with Farewell My Lovely.

But that’s another story.
And so for this bit on the History of Goodbye, I use Mr. Graves, and say
Goodbye to All That.

Footnote

1. Evidently, it is not. By the
way, for all of the great amusement and entertainment taken from this great and
wise short story, Poe received a payment of $12 in 1845.

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History of Goodbye
Reporting Hiroshima in American Japanese Internment Camp Newspaper, 11 August 1945

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 708 (Continuing #192) Blog Bookstore

For another project I’ve been reading through the Manzanar Free Press Newspaper
(volume 7, no. 12) and came upon this slight coverage of the bombing of
Nagasaki, printed 11 August 1945. What’s unusual here is that this
newspaper was published by the “internees” at the Japanese Relocation
Center (officially “The Manzanar War Relocation Center” and also called
a “relocation camp,” “relocation center,” “internment camp,” and
“concentration camp”,) at Manzanar, California. 110,000 people of
Japanese origin (including a large percentage of American citizens)
were forcibly removed and imprisoned via the U.S. Executive Order 9066,
issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on 19 February 1942. Manzanar
was a semi-dead town 220 miles NE of Los Angeles, located in high
desert with huge swings of temperature and unrelenting and challenging
weather—semi-killed by the city of Los Angeles, which purchased the
water rights to the region in 1929, forcing out the remaining
inhabitants. Manzanar had a peak population of about 11,000 before the
Japanese were returned to what remained of their previous lives.

In this quick coverage, a report is made on the Japanese
accepting the terms of the Potsdam Ultimatum, putting an end to the
war. The next part is of the reporting is very subdued, announcing the
dropping of the second bomb, theorizing that as many as
200,000-300,000 people may have perished in the bombing of Japan’s
seventh largest city. And not much more than that. Two hundred words
were I’m guessing all that was allowed by the powers-that-be at
Manzanar.

Elsewhere in this same issue is a report on the meeting of the
Manzanar Boy Scout troop. And something on the graduating class of the
Manzanar High School (the high school yearbook for 1945, the last class
at Manzanar, was called “Valediction”). Familiar trappings in an
unfamiliar trap.

Manzanar is located near Lone Pine in the Owens Valley, which today
suffers terrible environmental problems brought on by water-dependent
LA sucking out all of the water in the region.

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Estimating Casualties in the Invasion of Japan, July/August 1945

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 709 Blog Bookstore

It is interesting to visit William Shockley again (after having seen his
work on the economics of the atomic bomb here), this time weighing in on the
prospects of an atomic bomb-less WWII Pacific endgame.
The results are not pretty, and weigh the number of casualties as seen
in past invasions of widely-interpreted type.
Shockley describes his work in a letter (21 July 1945, “Proposal
for Increasing the Scope of Casualties Studies”) to Edward L. Bowles, an MIT Radlab guy who was
brought to D.C. in 1942 to help develop RADAR.
The content is summarized in the following three paragraphs taken in
their entirety from CASUALTY
PROJECTIONS FOR THE U.S. INVASIONS OF JAPAN, 1945-1946: PLANNING AND POLICY
IMPLICATIONS
by D. M. Giangreco in the Journal of Military History, 61
(July 1997). pages 521-82

“As for Dr. Shockley’s initial report to Dr. Bowles, it was not submitted
until after Stimson had left for Potsdam.
He proposed that a study be initiated “to determine to what extent the
behavior of a nation in war can be predicted from the behavior of her troops in
individual battles.” Shockley utilized the analyses of Dr. DeBakey and Dr.
Beebe, and discussed the matter in depth with Professor Quincy Wright from the University of Chicago, author of the highly-respected A
Study of War; and Colonel James McCormack, Jr., a Military Intelligence
officer and former Rhodes Scholar who served in the OPD’s small but influential
Strategic Policy Section with another former Rhodes Scholar, Colonel Dean Rusk.
Shockley said:

“If the study shows that the behavior of nations in all historical
cases comparable to Japan’s has in fact been invariably consistent with the
behavior of the troops in battle, then it means that the Japanese dead and
ineffectives at the time of the defeat will exceed the corresponding number for
the Germans. In other words, we shall probably have to kill at least 5 to 10
million Japanese. This might cost us between 1.7 and 4 million casualties
including [between] 400,000 and 800,000 killed.”

“W. B. Shockley to Edward L. Bowles, 21 July 1945,
“Proposal for Increasing the Scope of Casualties Studies,” Edward L.
Bowles Papers, box 34, Library of Congress. Attached: “Historical Study of
Casualties,” by Quincy Wright. Dr. Shockley extrapolated these numbers from earlier analyses
summarized in Health and others compiled by the Military Intelligence Division
from field reports. No accurate total of German military and civilian deaths
was available at the time he prepared his report, but the number was eventually
set at roughly 11,000,000. Japan was not invaded and finished the war with just over 7,000,000 casualties, most
of them from its armed services on the Asian mainland in fighting from
September 1931 to September 1945.”

The War Department was very busy trying to figure out the
American casualties for the final invasion of Japan. In one famous paper, Memorandum for the Chief of Staff: Amplifying Details on Planners’
Paper for Presentation to the President. (17/18 June 1945). prepared by General Hull,
estimates for American casualties invading Kyushu (on the way to the mainland) were
based somewhat on the very recent experiences at Okinawa.
Kyushu was the site of an enormous Japanese military build-up in a final
preparation for the defense of the homeland—there were more than six times the
number of soldiers here than at Okinawa, totaling some 550,000. By August 8, today, the American casualties
at Okinawa were about 49,000. There would still be a very long and bloody
war to wage had not the Empire of Japan finally surrendered four days after the
use of the second atomic weapon at Nagasaki. Estimates are as follows (this taken from
Douglas MacEachin, The Final Months of
the War with Japan : US Signal Detection, Invasion Planning and the
Atomic Bomb Decision, CIA, 1999):

MacEachin continues:

“In an apparent effort to close or narrow the gap between
presenting no casualty figures at all and presenting numbers that the Joint
Planning Staff was unwilling to use with the President, the Army’s Director of
Operations, Maj. Gen. J. E. Hull, asked his staff for casualty figures for
operations on Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Leyte and Luzon (both in the Philippines), and
“overall figures on MacArthur’s operations to date.” He said these
could be used as background at the upcoming meeting with the President, whom Hull described as “very much disturbed over losses on
Okinawa.” Hull then incorporated the following casualty
figures into a summary of the longer report that had been prepared for the
President’s meeting.

Islands Invaded Earlier US

Killed/Wounded/MIA

Japanese Killed/Prisoners
(Not including wounded) Ratio (US to Japanese)
Leyte    17,000 78,000 1:4.6
Luzon    31,000 156,000 1:5
Iwo Jima   20,000 25,000 1:1.25

Okinawa 34,000(ground) 7,700(Navy) 81,000 (Not a final count) 1:2”

And so what on earth are we left with, really? 200,000+ American and 2 million Japanese casualties, plus untold destruction, in an atom bombless attack on the Empire. This is not part of an argument about using the bomb–there wasn’t an argument to be made at virtually any high-level command structure about not using the bomb militarily…it just wasn’t on the table. (There were people who–like Eisenhower–were appalled with the military use of the weapon, but they weren’t part of the groups whose charge was to figure out the bomb’s deployment.) I’m just trying to illustrate the effects of war had there been no bomb at all, or if the impossible decision was made not to use it. As it was, the bomb existed, it was used with virtually no hesitation, twice, and it brought the war to a close. It must be remembered that even after Nagasaki, it still took the Japanese command three more days to decide to surrender, with the final acceptance occuring three days after that, on 15 August.

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