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.

Cloud Writing

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The History of Extreme
Writing (for communicating across an uncommon distance) is relatively recent,
given the thousands of years that humans have been communicating. The 17^th century semaphore system
for relaying telegraphic messages might be one, if you consider the semaphore’s
decoration of a

building- or hill-top to be a piece of writing. Smoke signals
and forms of communication relying on interrupted transmission of a powerful
light source might look to be part of the environment, epically in regards to
smoke, it message bright and visceral, and somewhat lasting, as it message
moves and grows and dissipates (depending on the area’s climatic conditions for
the hour).Church bells might apply (reminding the faithful and the fearful to
consecrate hope and fear), as might the
Mullah’s voice, or the sound of a ram’s horn. Outside of things like mail, or
the very short-lived super-mail Pony Express system, there was precious little
that could be seen as a pre-electrical telegraphic regional internet.

Perhaps the greatest example
of Extreme Writing came this French effort to advertise on clouds. Electrical advertising in general came a
little slowly following the invention of commercial electricity. The,
um, adventurous PT Barnum contracted the first electric bulb writing (utilizing
the Edison invention) in Manhattan
in 1892 to envious attention, resulting in less than 15 years with the Great White Way.
The world’s largest electric bulb writing was on the Eiffel Tower ,
with Andre Citroen agreeing to light the outline of the tower if he could put
his name on the rest of it. I’m not sure how this was seen as a good
idea, but the sides of the tower were used for this purposes until somebody
wised up and put an end to it all in 1937.
But the writing-on-clouds- bit was enormous and terribly disrespectful,
and never really took any sort of hold in Europe, though it did get some amount
of play in the U.S.
from time to time. Mostly, cloud writing
worked best in fiction, and for one particular person—and there it worked
rather well.

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Trikewriter: 19th C Bicycle as Outdoor Printing Press

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Yesterday I posted a short note on the History of Extreme Writing with the example of cloud writing. From clouds above to the mud below comes this second, very peculiar example of this exclusive genre: tricycle writing. This may actually come “on he heals” (so to speak) of another ancient form of writing coming from ancient Greece, where prostitutes would mirror-write ‘follow me” on their footwear so that prospective clients would follow their message writ in the dust to their home. This present shows the invention at work in the streets of Paris: as you can see it really was a printing press, applying the messages that were attached to the two rear tires in a way similar to that which prints lines in the street.

The wheels actually could be fitted with movable type, making the message changeable. I imagine too that the messages could be written with water-soluble ink or whatever so that the advertiser could be paid again and again, and that the street canvas would be refreshed constantly. I hate to say it–what with the possible destruction of public property aspect of it–but it looks to me as though this sort of thing would be very successful in getting a message across. At least the first time–it is easy to imagine hundreds of these buggers crisscrossing a city, messages on the ground everywhere, the streets confusions of sentiments and exclamation. We have that now with billboards and other fixed advertising; so I imagine the only thing preventing ads from appearing on the roads are public safety issues.

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Dreaming of the 10-Ton Eiffel Tower Bullet, 1891

JF Ptak Science Books Post 736

People find inspiration everywhere, insight to creativity in the obvious and not so. Great statues have been envisioned in the depths of slabs of marble, solutions to mathematical problems in the step of a bus, the beginning of a new physics in the rolling ball in a wagon. Its an old and very warn cliché, but the world can be seen in a grain of sand if you could just pieces together the bits of glass: just as pointillism was seen in the not-simple intercession of two colors and cinematography in the latent image and the structure of the universe in a patch of dancing dust.

The Eiffel Tower has had its own way with the visions of people, from it representing the birth of The Modern, to an icon of passion, to architecture and engineering innovation, and to general adventure and the call of possibility. It has moved other people to think “special” thoughts: like, for example, what a lovely canvas it would be to place a 700’-tall electrified sign.* And to M. Carron of Grenoble, who may have the most unusual inspirations from M. Eiffel, the tower was the perfect place to drop a 40-foot tall, 20,000-pound bullet filled with 20 people in leather armchairs into a 200-foot deep champagne-glass pool.

This is certainly a singular insight. But in 1891 it represented something a little more than just giving people a thrill ride. Physics of impact aside for the moment, M.Carron’s bullet capsule would be released from the top of the interior of the Tower, about 1000 feet high, and released to fall into an excavated pool 150’ across and 200’ deep. The idea was that in addition to the springs inside the capsule, the water would act as a “shock absorber”, and so “the shock felt by the occupants on landing will be in no way unpleasant”.

[Okay, so the thing would hit at 178mph or so, and, assuming that the whole thing didn’t get completely crushed on impact, I’m not so sure that 200’ of depth is very much wiggle room for the thing to come to a halt (if it didn’t deform). I Also it would have to not have any wind deflection so as to not veer off its perfect entry into the water. And so on. Calculating the force of impact is difficult without knowing how far down the bullet would go, but hitting the water at 80 m/s and stopping at 30 meters would yield something like 28,600,000 KE and 1,274,000 N. There are lots of problems….]

The thing is, though, the thing that made this so appealing, is that for the 20-francs that get a person a seat in the bullet, that they would each get to go twice as fast as any human had ever traveled before ( 65 miles per hour was about the speed of the fastest train constructed). So it was an extraordinary claim, an done that doesn’t get made all that often in the history of locomotion.

And so this wasn’t a practicable or workable idea; but, well, so what? It was an unusual idea, inspired by some sort of different thinking, which are both good places to be in according to the Gazetteer & Atlas of Ideas. Sometimes thinking like this is just prelude to something else, thought avenues that had to be explored before the real thinking could get done, introducing you to a new geography of thought. That’s what M. Carron had going for him; the newness of his thinking was much more important than the wrongness of it.

*This story comes at the end of a post called Bad Ideas Department: the First Image of a Hypnotized Chicken, so in spite of the title you’ll wind up in Paris.

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Lincoln and the Hanging of 38 Sioux, 1862

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 669

The great mystery was how those
Indians were smuggled out of the grave, in spite of the watchfulness of those
guards. From the Autobiography of Theodore Edgar
Parker

One of the darkest moments of the spectacular Lincoln presidency came on 26 December 1862 when the president chose to not interfere with the vengeful hanging of 38 Santee
Sioux just south of St. Paul, Minnesota. This was the legal outcome of a short-fought “war”(known as “The Great Sioux Uprising”, “the Dakota War of 1862” and “Little Crow’s War”)
fought between U.S. soldiers and several Siouan tribes—a war brought on by the
desperate tribes after suffering failed crops and the reneged treaty obligations
(including a long-overdue payment of $1.4 million for the purchase of 24
million acres, or about a nickel an acre) of their Great Father in D.C. It was really more like a hunting expedition—the
Indians, who had rampaged and taken hostages and so forth, were at the end of
their endurance. The warriors were ill-equipped for almost anything, with little
food and failing horses, and were positively no match for the federal troops who
would hunt them down and destroy them.

“Destroy” isn’t my choice for words—it is used over and over again in the
communications between the field commander General Henry Sibley and the
general in charge of the entire region, General John Pope. It turns out that Pope was of the Tecumseh Sherman
school of Indian relations, writing for the record

“It
is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux. They are to be treated as
maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromise
can be made.”

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Nazi Designers of Current Corporate Logos: Franziskaner Beer’s Nazi Connection

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[An associated post on the long lives of liberated Nazi concentration camp doctors can be seen HERE.]

Do you have movable Nazi-designed art in the streets of your
town? I do! And probably so do you.

It was a cloudless, perfect day in my mountain city when I
first noticed the 10-foot tall Nazi-designed art tooling down the street on three sides
of the beer truck. I‘d seen the design
many times, but it wasn’t until I was stuck in traffic behind the truck that I
noticed the artist’s stylized signature beside the logo. The light changed, and I watched it—while I
was stalled and stopped by recognition—make its way into the world, merrily
selling its product, Franziskaner Beer.

You’ve seen the truck—a smiling Franciscan monk nestled in a
green oval, holding a liter-like mug of his product, content in his
experience. The artist, Ludwig Hohlwein*,
is listed in many places as a “graphic design from Munich”,
and the “prince of posters”, and was an enormously gifted artist—he was also
the leading designer of Nazi propaganda posters from 1933 to 1945.

I wondered how this could be, how a corporate logo and
identity designed by a Nazi –in 1935–could still be in use? In a series of emails with the parent company
of Franziskaner, Spaten, N.A. (which was
actually Spaten-Lowenbrau, which was in turn purchased by InterBev), I never really
did get my answer. Spaten N.A. (a
personal name was never used in the correspondence) went from an semi-apologetic
attitude of not knowing who or what the artist was, to a highly defensive
posture , somehow huddling down with the American bombing of Dresden and Tokyo
in a questionable semi-logic justifying their use of Hohlwein. The result was not surprising, but the means
and the arguments certainly were—I am aware of course that Spaten has invested
untold millions in establishing their iconic image; but, at the end of the day,
their artist is still a Nazi, and a bad one at that.

Why is this so bothersome?
The history of firms doing business with the Nazis during the war and
former Nazi concerns successfully surviving the war (in one form or another)
that continued to do business is a long, complex story. My guess is that if all of these companies were to magically disappear in a pretty gedankenexperiment that there would be huge gaping holes in our economic landscape. Do we think of Auschwitz when we seek headache relief? Probably
not, though the maker of zyklon-b and
one of the principle reasons for Auschwitz, the enormous
and powerful conglomerate firm of I.G. Farben, escaped the war’s end by being broken into
companies such as BASF, Bayer and Hoescht (much to the dismay of people like General Patton, who thought that dismantling the company was supposed to actually dismember it, not rationally cleave it into its constituent and self-sustaining elements. Also the folks who went to prison for their war crimes at I.G were all pretty much back and in the boardroom(s) within a few years.)
Or for that matter do we think of
gas chambers when filling up at Exxon?
Exxon had been Standard Oil (New Jersey),
which shipped fuel to the Nazis during the war and was one of the largest
stockholders in Farben, and happily made money with the Nazis during the course
of the war.

There are just a few examples of many,
many cases of, what, what do we call it? Business? That’s what Prescott Bush must’ve called it. One of his wartime activities was being responsible for the UBC (Union Banking Corporation) which was involved with laundering/banking Nazi funds (including some big numbers for Fritz Thyssen of Thyssen steel, monolithic-backer of Hitler in the ’20’s and ’30’s). There was nothing necessarily illegal with that until it became illegal–UBC and the pater familias of the Bush dynasty continued their practices into mid-1942, when the federal government caught up with them and slammed UBC and Brown Brothers Harriman under the Trading with the Enemy Act, as they were in fact helping out the Nazi cause.

It seems that in a world
of questionable origins of popular goods it might seem best to have little
sense of history and a forgetful one at
that.

Is this Nazi-drawn art any less repellent, say, than seeing
R.E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in stained glass at the National Cathedral, or
driving down the Jefferson Davis Highway in Virginia, or cheering for the
unredeemably-named Washington DC National Football League team? Mitsubishi and BMW made aircraft that
supported heinous regimes and shot down American men; on the other hand, the
isolationist publisher and proselytizer of the brazenly stupid Protocols of the Elders of Zion
and trader with Nazis, Henry Ford, still makes a good truck. I have two of them. (GM was there too.) Monsanto produced Agent Orange which defoliated large swaths of Vietnam while filling up American soldiers with dioxins; Dow Chemical produced napalm for effective and horrible use in the same war–does this matter when we buy the food produced by their chemical additives?

It is a potentially endless list of supposedly benign
betrayals—a surface scratched revealing a torturous and bloody past. But in an age where (as it says on the
National Archives) it is not longer true that “the past is prologue”, the past
is not even the past, so, I guess, we get a fresh start whenever we need
one. It’s like a convenient memory
lapse, like berating President Hugo Chavez while filling up at the Citgo stations selling
his oil. (Citgo is also a NASCAR sponsor)

Maybe in some minds the Spaten folks were right after
all—transgressions are excusable in the face of the transgressions of the
accuser, which would be a free pass to moral leniency. The United
States did firebomb Dresden and Tokyo, and we consume all
manner of food an energy beyond the rest of the world while billions of people
suffer invisibly (to us). The weight of
this history can bring you quickly to silence.
Perhaps it is just exhaustion that lets us necessarily forget these
unpleasant pasts—perhaps with their memory nothing would get done.

On the other hand, well, there goes that truck and the happy
Monk. I’m not so sure why it bothers me so endlessly–perhaps it is the utterly trivial nature of it all, something that could’ve been so easily rectified as folks were dusting themselves off in May 1945. Why not just get rid of that image and replace it by something similar (or whatever) that was executed by a Not-a-Bad-Nazi and start afresh? But it looks like Spaten NA is content with their artist–he might be a Nazi, but he’s their Nazi, and it is a conceit and a contentment to let sleeping Nazis lie.

Volkswagen certainly does. The “VW” logo was designed by Nikolai Borg under the direction of “Nazi designer” Fritz Todt (!)–Borg is still alive and is currently suing to be officially recognized as it designer. The cog part of the wheel surrounding the VW letters–which is a design commonly seen encircling the Nazi swastika–was ordered to be removed by the occupying British forces just after the war, softening up the image a little. Hohlwein remains intact and un-de-nazified..

*It is interesting to note that Hohlwein’s post-WWI history frequently escapes the mention of stores selling his posters. I’ve noticed too that his death date is often conveniently listed as 1939, though he survived the war.

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Thomas Edison’s Dreams and Why You Can’t Always Be Right: Television, 1880

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“Seeing
by telephone or by telegraph may be within the range of the possible. I say
that because nothing is impossible until it has been demonstrated so to be.
Seeing by either of these instrumentalities, however, is, as I look upon it, so
far removed from the field of probability that I should treat any report of
this character as an absurdity.” T. Edison

I wonder what it was that Thomas Edison dreamt about—I
suspect that like most folks he dreamt about himself, though perhaps everyone
else in his dreams were him, too. Mr.
Edison was a fabulous inventor and thinker—he wasn’t the best person he
could’ve been, and even though he had an enormous grasp on the whole of things
and ideas about him, he also seemed to grab a little bit more, and a little too
much. Which sounds like gluttony.

I’m not so sure why Edison was given to such overstatement on “television”—he just about contradicts his
own rule of thumb in doing so, as though he was going far out of his way to say
something anti-prophetic. Perhaps it was
because “seeing by wire” at this point did not belong to him, like so much
else—which is possible, because Edison did not
play well with others, at all.

The possibility of interesting dreams swimming around Mr.
Edison’s sleeping head was very high, though he may have been one of those poor
unfortunates who dream about watching someone else sit in a chair and for hours
on end stare at a wall—sounding more like a nightmare than a dream to me.

Good dreams, bad dreams.
History is certainly ankle-deep in literature about the dream, and the
anthropology of dream states must be wide and deep. Dreams don’t show up all that much in the
Bible, though, which seems odd to me—there are 40-odd references to dreams in
the Old Testament, and only nine in the New.
And in the NT five of the dreams come in Matthew (with four of those
referencing the birth of Christ), and another four coming in the Acts of the
Apostles, all of which relate to St.
Paul. The most
interesting of the NT dreams sounds like that of Claudia, the wife of Pontius
Pilate, who warned her husband that Christ was probably not the person that he
should be messing with. That is I think her entire existence in the Bible, the
dream, and the warning to her husband. What
seems to happen though is that dreams in the Old Testament seem to be rather
benign entities, while in the New things happen that turn the dreamscape into a
possible entrance way to Hell, the unconscious thought world becoming the
property of the Church. And speaking of Hell and dreams, I believe that it was
the dream sequence in the Aeneid where
the truth and falsity of dreams were put to the test—or at least the dual
possibilities of the divergent nature of dreams—imaging dreams emerging from
the Ivory Portal in Hades to be false dreams while those issuing from the Pearl
portal were good. Problem is here that
with all of that smoke and bother in the Underworld, wouldn’t Ivory and Pearl look pretty much the
same? Among the ancients it was
Aristotle who was among the first to dispense with the soft/spiritualistic/astrobabble
interpretation of the dream, approaching the issue with rationality. Hippocrates also tried to lift the idea of
the dream up and away from those (Like Hesiod, for example) who would see them
as ritualistic and meaningful indicators of endless bric-a-brac. But the ancients didn’t do a great job of it
given the vast limitations, nor did the moderns (as Dr. Freud certainly still
has major game in this post-ironic department).

Back to the TV: the truth of the matter is that in spite of
the Edisonian condemnation there was real discussions and experiments regarding
mechanical (not electronic) television in the late 19^th century, and
they went a pretty long way towards achieving images by wire. Alexander Bell
nearly brought about an image-sending device based on his successful photophone
(in 1880), and in that same year George Carey built a primitive sort-of system
with light-sensitive cells. Paul Nipkow
came the closest of these early pioneers in 1884 with a techy rotating-disk apparatus
that successfully achieved an 18-line visual image.

I’m just saying that Mr. Edison had to have been dreaming of
other things that he had more control over.
From where I sit, it seems to me that opportunities for the electrical
transmission of images were quite ripe by the 1890’s. It took another 25 years or so to bring it
all to fulfillment, with a cascade of very successful developments occurring in
1927/8/9. It is a little mysterious to
me why he had such a low opinion of the possibility of television given the electrical
environment of his day.

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The “Is This Really Necessary” Department 2: Flying, Sommersaulting Elephants

JF Ptak Science Book LLC Post 672

Last week I made a post regarding a fish-throwing apparatus installed at a zoo–honestly I didn’t anticipate that there would be a follow-up post on another animal-throwing machine, but, well, unfortunately, here it is.

Eduard Wulff, a circus manager and resident of Bruxelles,
was granted this patent in 1904 for a device that would “project horses,
elephants, monkeys etc into the air” so that they would perform a sommersault.

Elephants? Flying, somersaulting,
elephants?

The abstract from the British Intellectual Property Office is reprinted below:

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Ho Chih Minh Dreams of Babe Ruth

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Did Ho Chi Minh (Nguyen Tat Thahn,
1890-1969) ever wonder why the Boston Red Sox turned down a trade of Shoeless Joe
Jackson AND $60,000 for Babe Ruth and go for the Yankee’s 100k instead? No, probably not. But Ho did actually live in
NYC in 1912/13 and again, maybe, in Brooklyn in 1918/1919—he also lived in
Boston at about the same time, and also saw some of the other major American ports
during the same time, tramping as he was around the world—so at least the
physical possibility exists, if nothing else.

I’d like to think that he somehow
met up with George Herman Ruth, the boy from Pigtown, when he made an imaginary
stop in Balto in 1912. Ho would’ve been working
scruffy food jobs and Ruth was a 17-year old scruffy food-aholic, Ho listening
to the loud rants of the soon-to-be-great player, starting Ho’s lifetime
interest in the sport. Ruth could’ve wondered why the league leader had 36 triples
and incredulously asking to no one in particular why they “hadn’t just gone all the way for a home run?”.
He could’ve been on hand to witness pistol-packing,
money laden, socially-challenged and fantastically gifted Ty Cobb (batting
.410) attack a heckler in the stands in NY and wind up suspended (for a bit)
from the game. He could’ve marveled at how Walter Johnson achieved an impossibly
heroic 33-12 with a 1.39 era (!) record for a lazy Washington Senators team.. Ho was in fact working at the Palmer House in
Boston when that city’s team won the
World Series, the same year that Fenway way opened. So Ho was there,
at least.

But alas I can find no evidence that Ho was interested in baseball
or had met Babe Ruth or dreamed any of this other fantastic and ephemeral stuff.—though
it would certainly make for a good story.
As a matter of fact he was tooling around the world during the birth of
most things modern in this traveling period of 1912 through the early 1930’s. In
NYC and Boston in 1912/13, back in Brooklyn (maybe) in 1918/19, in and out of London 1913-19, in France 1919-1923, then on
to the Soviet Union and China. Monumental
happenings in literature, art, music were defining the new world; there was the
World War, a revolution in Russia, the Depression, the birth of Chinese Communisum,
the Japanese war in China, and Ho was
certainly around not only when but where
all of the stuff was happening. For the
scant biographical materials at hand (albeit one is the fantastic biography by William
J. Duiker Ho Chih Minh, a Life) I can’t
see any reference to art or lit or music, not that this really matters, not
really. And this can also be said of Einstein (and most
other physicists) working during this same period—Einstein was surrounded by
newness in the arts and would’ve been approached by every last strand of it but
he remained unaffected by the great majority, preferring classical versions of
whatever, instead. Except for his
politics.)

Ho was a busy, dedicated guy during this early period, trying
as he was to come to a point where he could rid his country of the French and their
repressive colonial ways. He became a
communist but before that wasn’t—he tried in unconvincing ways to interest Woodrow
Wilson (employing the vocabulary and deep ideas of the American Constitution
and Declaration) in helping the Vietnamese loosen the grip of the French, but
to no avail. Later, as a dedicated and war-weary revolutionary he tried a
similar tactic with FDR—and this after fighting the piggish Vichy and occupying
Japanese forces in his country, waging an OSS-supported guerrilla campaign
against them for years—with similar results, getting sold out (much like the
Kurds were sold out by Bushs I and II) after the war was over.

I wonder about those New York years, of working as a cook’s aide,
a pot scrubber, a photo touch-up artist, a busboy-intellectual, and wonder what
in the hell he was thinking about up there in Harlem in the summer of
1912.

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A History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things #49: Yves Tanguy’s Empty Skies

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Blank & Empty Things Department #49

[For another interesting example in this series see: Maps of the Cosmos of Moles, 1671: Astrology, Pseudoscience & Furious Belief]

Surrealist, spider-eating, red-ink-drinking, bohemian template
Montparnassian Yves Tanguy (1900-1955) is perhaps the blankest, loneliest,
emptiest painter of the Surrealist movement.
It seems odd to mare that statement, even to me, what with the
tremendously lonesome images of the somewhat-earlier Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), but
Tanguy has a different lonesomeness/empty quality to him partially because of his very restricted color palette. Whereas de Chirico’s
(pictured just below) paintings are alive with color, Tanguy seems to put the unused

colors back into
their tubes, painting in his all-white and unblemished studio. He gives his paintings an odd quality, milky
somewhat—especially in his skies, which to me look particularly empty, even
though they have substantial texture.(This is differentiated from earlier posts in this blog that deal with blank skies in Renaissance prints, which were truly, completely blank and without any detail whatsoever.) The
play and wash of it all in his paintings gives me the sensation of a taste, and
not a good one—seeing some of his work elicits a metallic, coppery taste, high
in the back of the mouth. I don’t get
any of that sensate confusion form the others like de Chirico, or Magritte, or Francis Picabia, or Marcel Duchamp, or Max Ernst, or Jean Arp, or Man Ray, and etc (though De Chirico does come close).

Tanguy was undoubtedly influenced by de Chirico early on in
his life, even before his painting career began. The standard story is that in 1923 while
riding a bus Tanguy saw an unusual, arresting image in the window of a store—he
jumped form the bus, rushed back to the image and saw that it was a painting by
de Chirico in the window of Paul Guillaume’s gallery. He was much taken by it, and very soon
afterwords began his painting career in earnest, becoming recognized and
semi-established within a few years. (It
is interesting to note that the critic who first gave him positive feedback, F.
Fels, very soon thereafter wrote to Tanguy “You’re finished. You’re going to wind up a surrealist.” ) He
did “wind up” a Surrealist, but he was hardly “finished”.

And what I’m talking about here with the Big Lonely is just limited to the Surrealists–there are plenty of other operating in this millieu (intentional or not), not the least of whom (and painting at about the same time) is the sensationally lonely Edward Hopper, the man who invented shadwos for shadows. But that’s another story.

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Cutting Texas Exactly in Half: the Newspaper Frontier, 1880

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The idea of the frontier in American history
has been around for quite some time, made famous and mostly-invented (and
closed) by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, and expanded, imagined, enticed,
magnified, micro-analyzed, and generally messed with ever since. There have been all sorts of frontiers
introduced into the study of the birth, expansion and filling-up of this
country, from the very earliest colonial periods of Indian frontiers, “far-western”
river frontiers of the Connecticut, Delaware, Hudson (!) and Susquehanna, to
the Appalachian frontier of the early western reaches of the colonies, to the
transportation frontier, the slavery frontier, the gold and mining frontier,
the gun frontier and so on.

I’ve got another bit to add: the newspaper frontier.

I just happened upon a volume of the US
Census of 1880, with a special report by S.N.D. North entitled History and Present Condition of the
Newspaper and Periodical Press of the United States…and published in
1882. What provoked me was the map of Texas newspapers for
1880. It very clearly, and like no other
map of its kind, delineates a fantastic line/frontier between the Texas with newspapers and the Texas without newspapers. We see very
clearly that the frontier of the newspaper stops fairly abruptly and
wonderfully at the 100^thmeridian, with only two newspapers in all of
the rest of Texas found beyond that point (and those just barely beyond the 100^th. And it’s the 100^th meridian that
mostly marks the vertical middle of the country, running through North and South
Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, the Texas/Oklahoma borders, and so into Texas—if you
folded this map vertically in half it folds virtually on the 100^th meridian. An odd bit, it is, half of the country and
then half of Texas.

Of course the population and easier-natural-resources
are located east of this point, I know, but it is still quite a jolt to see the
line of newspapers get drawn in the sand so vividly. There isn’t anything else quite like this so
far as the newspapers go, except, a little, for Florida, where the line gets
drawn north and south, splitting the peninsula roughly in half, the southern
part holding only five counties at this point..
But it is a much more robust image for Texas given the number of
newspapers that were being published—280 periodicals and newspapers for Texas
versus 45 for Florida, with 11,374 in the entire country*—so that the
difference between the have-newspapers and haven’t-newspapers in Texas is that
much more vivid.

Texas needed more papers: there were 1.5 million people living in the
massive state in 1880, almost twice as many as there were in 1870, and almost
half of what there would be there in 1900.

Florida was another story, entirely—even in 1880, which is only 130 years ago, there
were only 270,000 people living in the entire state, not even close to half of
the county population of Pinelas today.

I’m just enjoying the surprise of the
straight-edge frontier in Texas.

*Just for the sake of comparison, the number
of periodicals per state for 1880 was as follows: Illinois,
1017; New York, 1411; Pennsylvania,
973; Ohio, 774; New
Jersey 215.
Also, oddly, the average circulation of the Florida and Texas papers was roughly the same: 1,282
for Texas and 1306 for Florida (with an average for the country at
4137).

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

American History: Western Exploration & Native Americans — Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking
The World’s “Best” Address? POB 1663, Santa Fe. Home of the Atomic Bomb.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 676 Blog Bookstore

This is a continuation of a series of posts relating to the development of the atomic bomb.

Park Avenue. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
10 Downing. 112 Mercer. Institute for
Advanced Studies. The Cavendish Lab. All pretty good addresses.
I have a hard time though coming up with a single best address that
beats POB 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
For the sheer breadth of those represented by this simple location, I
just can’t think of anything more specific or more inclusive.

Oppenheimer lived there.
So did Fermi. And Feynman. And Teller. And Bohr. And thousands of
others.

Post Office Box
1663, Santa Fe hid
something very important—at the time, it was so important that the place that
it was hiding didn’t even have a real name, just a moniker: Site Y.

Many of the people who lived there didn’t have the use of
their real names outside of Site Y.
Driver’s licenses were issued with numbers, and people paid taxes
according to code numbers and weren’t allowed to vote. They were as invisible as their address, or
as invisible as thousands of people could be in 1942. Being a place filled with mostly quite-young men
and women, there were natural tendencies followed leading to a spike in birth
rates, responded to famously by the facility’s chief to direct that actions be
taken to stem the flow. Or perhaps not*. A radio station popped up featuring
live performers, everyone identified by given name only. And to confound things
further it was nestled within the range of the Blood of Christ (the Sangre de
Christo) Mountains, all the while working with matter that was literally
hotter than hell. That was plutonium, and the “hot” was radioactivity.

Site Y (begun in June 1942) was of course the location of Los Alamos, a major cog in the machine of the Manhattan
Project, a gigantic, secret project that actually stayed secret, which was
remarkable given the wide swath and numbers of people involved and the
relatively simple security. But it was really important stuff (as Richard
Feynman would say),
and there was a life-and-death war on, a fight to the finish¹, a death
struggle, so the importance of security—given the staggering consequences of
its breach—was paramount^.2.

This letter of congratulation and support was written by
President Franklin Roosevelt to J. Robert Oppenheimer, and sent to The Address
of POB 1663. It is an odd letter full of
sleight, though it is obvious that Roosevelt
knows exactly what is going on, and is just not acknowledging the elephant in
the room. And that “room” was at Oppenheimer
& Co., Santa Fe,
Box1663. No scientific project had ever been bigger,
then or (perhaps) since. That’s a lot to
cram into one post office box.

______

1. By the way, in describing this item from their collection the
Library of Congress website understates WWII in a way that I don’t think I had
ever seen before:

“In the midst of World War II when the United States was engaged abroad in a major
conflict with Germany and Japan, it was also working furiously at home
toward the completion of the Manhattan
Project..” A “major conflict”? I should say so, though “major conflict
just doesn’t quite cover it, doesn’t nearly come close to describing what kind
of “conflict” was going on. Odd. A very odd description.

2. Given the vast, extraordinary amount of the resources
consumed by this effort, I don’t think that the atomic bomb could’ve been
produced by any other country at this time—I think that, materially speaking,
it was an impossibility.

*The fact was though that the place did seem to be a
baby-maker, surpassing national averages, with roughly a fifth of all the married
women on the base being pregnant in 1944.
See John Hunner’s Inventing Los
Alamos for an interesting discussion of the baby topic. Babies and bombs and radioactive hell-mush in the foothills of the Sangre de Christo.

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JF Ptak

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons — Technology, History of