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.

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  • Quiet, the Quietists, and Not Finding a Missing “Principia Mathematica” (1687)

    JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2747

    Newton Principia

    Grazing through old scholarly journals is never a completed task—the more you have to bring to the adventure, the more you will take away from it. This is probably a general truth, though it is particularly so with journals that cut a broad path in the communication of ideas, and this is certainly the story with the late-17th century journal/magazine, Bibliotheque Universelle. It ran from 1672 to 1726, and the intellectually-thirsty editors ran a kind of review/abstract service for their readers—they found (mostly) newly published books in a wide variety of areas, and wrote summaries and statements on them, with background history, and the occasional editorial comment. Some of the articles were on significant works by John Locke and Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, but many and probably most were on obscure topics in nitty theological history and mostly-invisible philosophical issues, or at at least that is how the latter seems to me today. The Bibliotheque brought new ideas to the continent, and brought them in the Lingua Franca, which also happened to be French.

    This is the background as I thumbed my way through volume seven, one of several volumes for this year, finding few things that fired any nodule of memory or investigation in my head. 1687 is a big year in the history of science, seeing the publication in July of that year of what may one of them most important books ever published, Isaac Newton’s Pricnipa Mathematica.

    And then, suddenly, it was there. I knew from a previous experience that an interesting and uncommon review of the Principia by John Locke (of all people) in the next volume (8), which was the third statement on the book outside of Britain. But I hadn’t know about this appearance, which would have been published just a couple of months after the Principia appeared.

    There were just a few lines announcing the book in the table of contents, but no page reference. I consulted an online version of the journal and did a search on Newton, with no results. That of course made me go through the book—twice–page by page to make sure that the article wasn’t there. It wasn’t. I imagine that the mention of one of the world’s greatest books was, well, a mistake.

    The Principia was quiet.

    The funny thing was that there was another article on exactly that—quiet. And this was a dangerous quiet, at least for the originator of the theological movement, who would be cast into the flames of the Inquisition and die in prison for the temerity of quietude.

    In the next page of the table there was this fine find: “Le Quietiste, ou les Illusions de l’oration de Quietude”, (p 550-554) and “Receuil de diverse pieces concernant le quietisme et les quietistes”(pp 554-559).

    These two articles are statements/reviews of two books addressing the Quietism and Quiesiste movement as embodied by its founder, Miguel de Molino (1626-1696). Very long story short, Molino was seen as a threat to the pope and to the Jesuits, preaching a Christianity that seems quite personal and benevolent from where I sit, but at the time was seen as heretical, and for which Molino would be tried by the Holy Offices and condemned to life in prison, and as a matter of fact, Molino died in the (outwardly) beautiful Castel St. Angelo serving out his sentence.

    It seems to have a bit forward and backwards for Molino. Charges were brought against him chiefly through the work of pieces like the first presented above, by the Jesuit Paolo Segneri (1624-1697), whose first efforts were unsuccessful in dislodging Molino, with his own work finding its way to the Index. However, by 1685 he was again sent to the Inquisition, and just months before this book was published, he was already tried and imprisoned.

    William James (in his The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902) found Molino to be a “spiritual genius” (p. 130) and his Quietism to be a ”transcendental idealism”, with “a healthy-minded opinion of repentance” (p. 130). He seems to have found nothing threatening in the man, and his imprisonment an “abomination”. The issues were longer and deeper than this, with 250+ points brought up before the Inquisition, including “moral deformity”), but on the whole Quietisme seems as destructive as George Fox’s Quakerism, which seems to have shared many spiritual practices with Quietism.

    So it seems that the established order in Rome found the message of the Quietists too loud, and the voice of the Principia was to be found in the next volume.

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  • Hospital Experience with Foreigners: Defining “Desirable” and “Undesirable” (1903)

    JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post 

    Immigration League 1902What Ho! The pamphlet, Figures on Immigration, presents the reader with info necessary for the continuation of “desirable” immigration. Published by the National Liberal Immigration League (150 Nassau St., NYC), the League exclaims immigration in terms danger and blessing. “A stream that is dangerous when unchecked will prove a blessing in the land when well directed”, they say, and then gets right ot the heart of the matter, identifying what is dangerous and what isn’t by defining the “desirable” from “undesirable” aliens

    To be very simple and clear about it, the League states the following:

    Desirables: “Northern and Western Europe”, including “Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, Finland, Norway, Nova Scotia, Scotland, South America, Switzerland, Wales”

    Undesirables: “Eastern and Souther Europe”, including “Greece, Hungary, Italy, Romania, and Russia, plus Asia and Africa, including China, Egypt, Japan, and Syria”, for example

    The purpose of the report was to establish the “desirable” from “undesirable” patients of various NYC hospitals. But the main point in this note is to establish the contemporary ease of marking “acceptabilities” of entire classes of people. This practice was much more visible and plain in 1902; it is still an exercise today, of course, though the signs of it are generally much more subtle. 

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  • Dueling Intergalactic Rocket Ports, in Glorious BIG Color! (1938+1939)

     

    JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

    This was a big gulp of a very colorful possible futureworld in which intergalactic travel has become possible, this image of this model being given an advanced peek prior to the New York World’s Fair of 1939.  “Intergalactic” is a big deal, because, well, there are galaxy-sized distances involved–even in Star Trek the Next Generation, the Enterprise never in the run of that series leaves the galaxy under its own power, and so the possibility of travel between the galaxies such that there could be a “rocketport” for it would be a very big deal, indeed.

    1939 worlds fair interplanetary701

    [Source 1: Popular Mechanics, volume 70, August, 1938]

    Perhaps that is what was needed at the New York World’s Fair of 1939, given the state of things–the Great Depression, the Munich Appeasement and the hollow “peace in our time”, the Austrian Anschluss, the seizure of the Sudetenland, Kristallnacht, the Spanish Civil War, and the continuation of the Japanese assault on China, all could have spelled out the need for some sort of relief even if that was fictional and in the future. Certainly intergalactic travel would qualify for that, as did a number of other pieces of speculative/scifi entertainment that year: Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were alive and well, Superman appears for the first time, and Orson Welles scares the wits out of a certain segment of the population  with the Halloween-night performance of “The War of the Worlds”. Perhaps the time was ripe for the rocket port–especially in such vivid color. 

    The reason for the “dueling” int he title of this post is the following image that appeared in Views of the New York World’s Fair, 1939, published about a year later:

    Rocket port 1939

    The images are very similar, though the 1939 image is much fuller and a bit more contrasty, with heavier blues and more details in the “spotlight” or whatever that light source was in the center of the image. Also, there are no crowds to speak of in the 1939 image, jsut a few people scattered here and there, and there are also no futurismo boat or train.  I think I like the second one better….

     

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  • On Not Reporting on the Russian Winter, 1941.

    JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2748

    Russian winter _2_Neige Russe is a straightforward-looking and scarce1 little pamphlet, though the cover photo is really quite provocative.  No publisher, year, or place of publication is mentioned, though it is almost certainly 19422–and as a piece of propaganda it is rather well-made, printed on a solid, heavier stock with a bit of a sheen to it, an unusually better-quality production for what it was. 

    The pamphlet is a very interesting collection of German newspaper and radio comments on the state of the winter in Russia and its effects on the German troops in the world’s largest military movement, Operation Barbarossa. The attack by the Nazis on 22 June began an enormous and horrible campaign that would last two winters, the initial vast successes of the aggressor checked and then nearly defeated in the first winter just months after the offensive began.  There are dozens of quotes taken from German sources that de-emphasize the effect of the historically impregnable Russian winter on the armies, reported mostly from October-December 1941, and of course the would be no truthful information shared by the Nazi-controlled radio or press on the effect of the winter that was engulfing the German troops–quite the contrary, if you look at some of the samples below. The winter existed, but not for Germany, and it had little effect on the troops.

    By the next winter, in January 1943, the Germans would lose entire armies to the cold and to the massive numbers of Soviet troops and tanks and artillery, and the long, slow retreat back to Germany would end in total failure 14 months later. 

    Some examples of German news reports on the winter in Russia, 1941:

    • “L’hiver n’existe qu’en Meteorology”
    • “La guerre sera decidee, en tout etat de cause, avant l’hiver” (the war will end before winter)
    • “Rien n’arrete l’avance allemande”
    • “Les Allemands n’aiment pas la terre brulee”
    • “Indomptee par les rigeurs de l’hiver”
    • “Il n’est pas Question de Prendre les Quartiers d’Hiver”
    • “Le problemedeliverestexcessivementserieuxpoulestroupesSovietiques”
    • “Apres tout, les soldats Allemands ne peuvent pas supporter le froid cokme les Siberiens”
    • “La ligne d’hiver sera tenue”

    The photos used in the pamphlet are varied of course by the source—the German images devoted to ease and possible victory, the Russian showing defeat and bitterness and deadly cold. 

    Russian winter _1_

    NOTES:

    1. It turns out that there is scarcely a mention of the work online, and only six copies are located in libraries around the world, and according to WorldCat/OCLC, these institutions are prestigious: the work is found only at Yale, Harvard, Haifa, National Library of Poland, Nanterre, and Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience. I had expected more of a presence, given that this pamphlet wasn’t made to be so disposable as its brethren, but not many seem to have survived.  
    2. The date is given as [1942] in the WorldCat listings.

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  • Great Calculators: Mental and Metal and back to Mental

    JF Ptak Science Books     Expanding Post 2739

    Two months ago I wrote on a paper that I found in a mid-century engineering journal (Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers with Abstracts of the Discussions) on the fantastic mental arithmetician George Parker. When I went to retrieve the volume to look for a different paper (on Fresnel lenses for lighthouses) I  flipped the pages to then end of the book to read through the index, and my thumb stopped on a page with a running header, “Mechanical Notations”. And lo and behold, the very familiar title was indeed a paper on a report to the Institution on Charles Babbage (1791-1871) and his “mechanical notation”, given by his son Henry P. Babbage (1824-1918).

    Well.  Babbage over the years proposed several different difference and analytical engines which indeed could be considered the first stored program Turing-complete computers. Never quite being able to get to the end of one project, and no doubt discovering along his various ways even better and more substantial designs (as well as int he pursuit of future money to build not “version 1.0” or “1.1” but “3.0”), Babbage tried within the limits of available technology to produce his heroic beast. His “mechanical notation” appears in full force in his diagrams for the design of his analytical engine, and it is there that we see his self-derived shorthand and symbols that produced and still-produce evident budgets of unknowns. The thing is, with these mechanical notations, is that they were part of a user manual, and the user manual was actually left unwritten and chiefly unexplained. And that is a problem. 

    In any event this paper by Henry Provost Babbage makes some attempt in outlining the notation, though for me it is done without success. This is further complicated by almost none of the notation presented in illustration. There were other and earlier illustrated papers (including some by Babbage himself) that stretch back at least to 1821–but this explanation of the notations leaves me a little on the outside. 

    And so we moved from the mental calculator George Bidder to the great metallic calculating engines of Charles Babbage, who takes us back to the opening biological/mental part of engineering thought via his manual-less manual, where his instructions and explanations of the interactions of thousands of perfectly manufactured precision gear works is printed but the key to which is left locked in Babbage’s head.  

    _____

    Here’s the part of the post that led to the discovery of the Babbage, both of these papers as I said appearing in the same journal volume: 

    George Parker Bidder (1806-1878) gave a lecture (without notes) explaining to the audience at the Institution of Civil Engineers in 18561 his interior practices and habits in performing absolutely prodigious and complex arithmetical feats entirely in his head. He was among the first tier of performing human calculators (like Zerah Colburn, b. 1804) mental calculations enchanted large audiences from the stages, answering seemingly impossible questions with accuracy and speed. It is in the 1856 paper (which Martin Gardner refers to as “historic2” and “valuable”) that he relates some of the practices which clarify his process–for example, one large element was that he would keep one fact in his head at a time, until it was finished, and then move on. Of course for people who did not have anything even remotely resembling this impossible ability, the information is interesting, though I have no idea how useful it may be…unless you were already a savant, that is.  Some things are just not to be known by mere mortals. Like the probably-apocryphal story of someone asking Hans Bethe how Richard Feynman had solved–on his feet–some impossible something, and Bethe responds: “First he thinks very very hard….and then he gets the answer”.) Something like that. 

    In any event, here’s the article, reproduced by Devonshire Perspectives website. My own copy is in a tightly-bound volume from the proceedings, and no doubt I would have broken the spine trying to copy the thing. That said, if anyone wants to buy this volume, it is for sale–this is a book selling site, sorta, after all.  

    The full lecture by Bidder:

    https://www.devonperspectives.co.uk/georgebidder/OnMentalCalculation.pdf

    Notes:

    1. Bidder, George Parker. “On Mental Calculation”, in Minutes of Proceedings of he Institution of Civil Engineers with Abstracts of the Discussions, volume XV, Session 1855-6, London, published by the Institution,  pp 251-280 in the 534pp volume. 

    2.  Gardner, Martin. “Mathematical Games”, in Scientific American, 216/4, April 1967, p. 117. 

    Also, I found an interesting biographical treatment of Bidder:

    • Bidder, George Parker. Mental Arithmetic. A short account of George Bidder, the celebrated mental calculator: with a variety of the most difficult questions, proposed to him at the principal towns in the kingdom, and his surprising rapid answers, etc. by George Parker BIDDER Rapid Calculator and Engineer., 1821

    It seems as though there was a separate edition of this 1856 lecture tens years later, published by Clowes:

    • Bidder, George Parker, and Institution of Civil Engineers (Great Britain). On Mental Calculation. Edited by Charles Manby. London: Printed by W. Clowes, 1866.

    And another printing somewhat later:

    • Bidder, George Parker. On Mental Calculation. London: Printed by W. Clowes, 1886.

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  • How to Fly a Farman Biplane (1910)

    JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

    I couldn’t resist sharing this because, well, I don’t often see a one-sheet explanation on how to fly a plane.  This is from the Illustrated London News, May 7, 1910, and concerns the Farman biplane:  

    Dataviz how to fly farman 1910

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  • The Dictatorship of Hunger (1931)

    DocFile (2)From what I can tell this pamphlet–Hungerdiktatur im Brüning-Deutschland zur IV. Notverordnung. Zk. Der KPD. 1931– is an indictment of the responses of German Chancellor Heinrich AME Bruning to the explosive Depression in Germany beginning in 1930. Bruning became Chancellor right at the outset of the Depression in 1930 and his options were already very limited, economically speaking, without the failure of the world economy adding to an already deeply compromised situation. Nevertheless, his policies are seen in different perspectives, and he was out of office by 1932 and fled Hitlerism and Germany altogether in 1934. (Bruning was two chancellors removed from Adolf Hitler taking the position in 1933.) In any event the pamphlet here leaves no doubt about the impossibility of the social situation in Germany in 1931 and places a long legion of the Hungry at the feet of Bruning’s Germany.

    The cover design is very striking, and unattributed.

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  • An Early Indictment of the Japanese Invasion of China, 1931

    JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

    Here’s another bit of graphic design, a very aggressive cover from 1932 for Krieg in China! by Ernst Schneller1.   Schneller–a long-time KPD member–wrote this short work as an expose on the “war” and in support of the Chinese, published it seems just months after the Japanese invasion and conquest of Manchuria and another few months after the battle known as the January 28 Incident, all of which was foundational for the war that would officially be declared in 1937 (and last until the end of WWII). 

    Schneller was himself a persecuted communist intellectual who was arrested became among the first to be imprisoned in the Nazi KZ system in 1933, and who would stay in the system until he was executed at Sachsenhausen in 1944. 

    It is interesting to note that in one chapter heading the pamphlet refers to the war as a new threat to the world (“eine neue welt droht”).

    DocFile (4)

    Notes

    1. Berlin : Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, [1932] 9×6”, 15pp. A little confusing, though it seems that there are only three copies of this book located in WorldCat/OCLC. Provenance, Hoover Institution, and then in 1933 to the Library of Congress.

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  • “On the 31st January, 1942, the War will End”, or not. An Astrologer Looks into the Future of WWII and Gets Confused.

    JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

    The great Woo-woo (a blanket term used by James Randi to describe all manner of fake and fraud) of astrologers picking moist bits out of an imagined future during WWII proved to be of value for making an income for its users. One such person was P.J. Harwood, an astrologer who wrote two of the pamphlets I uncovered yesterday. He had shapely visions of the future metamorphised via the light of stars (and galaxies) that traveled for millions and billions of years, evidently their purpose in such vast time and impossibly enormous reaches of space being to cue in people on this planet about some influence their position in eternity has on future human events. The only predictive success these pamphlets by Harwood had was to ensure some sort of income and attention for himself. 

    I would not have stopped to say anything about these pamphlets (printed in 1941 and 1944) at all had I not opened one of them to a 32-pt announcement:                 

    Books astrology WWII war will end

    The funny thing is that this statement occurs in the third edition of the 1941 pamphlet. The way to move forward in publishing his views of the future was to ignore all of the misses and publish hios astrological results under a new title, which he did with his astrological prophesies book for 1944-1947, printed several times in 1944.  Britain was to invade Europe and speed towards Germany in May 1941, leading Hitler to eventually sign a peace treaty in 1944. The U.S. would suffer an enormous defeat on July 6, 1944, but recover enough to defeat Japan sometime in 1947, and so on.  This was one way for one man to make a living during WWII. 

    Books astrology WWII war will end

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  • Dickensian Details in a Pamphlet on Randall Island’s Pauper Children, 1876

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    Here are a few things I learned from a ten-minute graze through a pamphlet1 describing the conditions and circumstances of the almshouses facilities on Randall’s Island (NYC) in 1876. Randall’s Island was pretty far removed from the great bustle of Manhattan and Brooklyn in 1876, having plenty of people to keep and incarcerate at a distance somewhat safely removed from polite society as well as the great unwashed. Today the island is mostly a collection of sports facilities, about an equidistant mile from Riker’s Island and the Guggenheim, as the crow flies.) 

    In any event, the bits and pieces that gave some insight into what was going on there are interesting:

    • Most of the children sent to this place (a collection of at least 12 buildings) were done so “by choice” by their parents, and most of those parents promised to pay for the fees to keep the child/children. Evidently fewer than 50% actually wound up paying. Most of the parents resorting to this were near or in a state of pauperism, and could not afford to keep their child, 
    • There were 91 girls, aged 8-14, housed in the “Large Girls’ Department” ; they were tended by one paid assistant and up to eight women from the alms-house and work house.
    • “Large Boys’ Department”: no mention of number, but drill master lives with them, plus 3 boys designated as monitors, and six females from the work house.
    • “Small Boys’ Department”: 136 children, tended by 5-6 women, one of whom received wages with five others being paupers or criminals sent from Blackwell’s Island. (Blackwell’s–now known as Roosevelt Island–was a skinny island about a mile south of Randall’s in the East River.  It served to host the first Lunatic Asylum for NYC and was also the country’s first mental asylum and also housed prisons, from which I assume the “Blackwell’s” helpers came.) 
    • “Infants’ Department”: 72 children aged 2.5-5, tended by 6 females, 5 from Blackwell’s.
    • The children on reception were dressed in blue gingham, white linen aprons and slept on straw beds and pillows, with food cooked by steam in six large cauldrons, mostly by inmates from Blackwell’s. I saw twice that children were released from this facility in the clothing in which they arrived, though there was no mention of what happened if that clothing was outgrown, as 50% of the children stayed here for about two years. 
    • Nursery Hospital held 769 between 2 and 16, most between 5-10
    • There were 1115 children on Randall’s, the near-majority placed there by their parents who promised to pay for care (half did), mostly Irish or “unascertained” ancestry;
    • Occupations of fathers “Unascertained”, mechanics, laborers, and 1 professional
    • Most had other family members in the same institution or Blackwells
    • Female (employed) helpers were mostly 30—40, widowed, and overwhelmingly Irish.

    There’s a lot more–actually a whole lot more considering the pamphlet’s brevity, including a description of schools and trade houses that were supposed to help prepare the kids for life in NYC once they reached the age of sixteen. Overall from my quick reading I was left a little hollow and tired, thinking about all of those kids, crammed together, many of them with continuing illnesses, eating steamed-everything, performing work tasks in stiff gingham, sleeping on straw, and attended by not many people at all, and most of those were convicts or fellow almshouses/poorhouse residents. 

    Notes:

    William P. Letchworth. Extract from the Ninth Annual Report of the State Board of Charities of New York, relating to PAUPER CHILDREN, New York County. Albany, Weeds, Parsons, and Company, 1876. 9×6”, 25pp. Original wrappers. Nice copy. Provenance: Library of Congress, with their surplus/duplicate rubber stamp on front and rear wrapper. Old vertical fold through-and-through. Includes a folding plan: “Diagram of Nursery and Nursery Hospital Buildings belonging to the Children’s department of the Almshouse of New York on Randall’s Island.”

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  • An Alphabet of -Ocracies

    JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2740

    The other day former CIA director John Brennan (2013-2017) dug up the word kakistocracy from its dirt nap to describe the Trump government. I had never heard of the word before, and so went to the Oxford English Dictionary to look it up. While there, I wondered how many other “-ocracies” and “-cracies” there were that have fallen completely off the RADAR, and it seems there are a lot—just about enough for a full alphabet, with dozens of “extras”. (See https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2016/07/18/words-ending-with-cracy/ for a 60-word list, a longer list with shorter descriptions.)  

    Adhocracy.   “A flexible and informal style of organization and management, characterized by a lack of bureaucracy. Also (depreciative): bureaucracy characterized by inconsistency and lack of planning.” 1970.   A. Toffler Future Shock vii. 113   We are..witnessing the arrival of a new organizational system that will increasingly challenge, and ultimately supplant bureaucracy. This is the organization of the future. I call it ‘Ad-hocracy’.

    Androcacy.  “The rule or paramount influence of money.” 1868   Pall Mall Gaz. 23 May 11.   The disease of argentocracy.”

    Angelocracy. “A government by angels. 1685   J. Scott Christian Life (1700) II. ii. vii. 320.   Those angelocracies or angelical governments of countries and nations.”

    Barbarocracy.  “Government or rule by barbarians, as that of Italy by the German emperors. 1866.   C. C. Felton Greece, Anc. & Mod. II. xi. 486   Better fitted to live under a constitution than under a barbarocracy.”

    Bestiocracy.   “The rule of beasts. 1863   Times 21 Nov. 8/5.   The English farmers, being..members of a vile bestiocracy, living among the beasts of the field, and even employing men to serve the beasts.”

    Chrysocracy/ chryso-ariˈstocracy.  “An aristocracy of wealth. [Is there an aristocracy of poverty? I guess so…i.e. Tramp Kings, that sort/] 1885.  E. C. Stedman in Cent. Mag. 29 511.   Even our ‘chryso-aristocracy’ he thinks is bettered by the process.”

    Demonocracy.   “Government or rule by demons; a ruling body of demons. Now chiefly in extended use (with punning contrast with democracy) referring to cruel or wicked political regimes . 1755, J. Maud Doctr. Endless Torments i. v. 83.   The House of Cain..may..not improperly be said to have put itself under a Demonocracy, where the implacable Adversary to God and Man, was the limited Tyrant.”

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