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Floating Transoceanic Airport Network, 1936--from the White House Library

Edward R. Armstrong (1880-1955). Application of Seadrome Ocean Dock Corporation (a private corporation) for a Loan Under the Provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act, printed ca. 1933.  11x8 inches, 34pp.  With two original photographs one of the floating airports, and a map.  This copy comes from the White House Library, transferred to the Library of Congress in 1933. Printed wrappers. There is a Library of Congress surplus stamp on the rear cover, ans a tiny "LC" perforated stamp at the bottom of page one. Very nice copy.  $500 

The outline for this plan asks the federal government for a loan of $30 million (Depression) dollars to undertake the construction of a five floating airports transoceanic network.  "It will require the work of approximately 10,000 men per month for a period of twenty-four to thirty months".  The labor figures did not include was what necessary to produce all of the material necessary for the project ( for reasons unknown).  Once finished the network would enable aircraft  to make it across the ocean in 18 to 36 hours.

The members of the Seadrome Corporation estimated that the entire 30 million would be paid back by 1945,  and that the corporation would be completely debt-free.  Perhaps all of  this made sense when Armstrong first developed the plan in 1913, just ten years after the Wright brothers' successful first in North Carolina. The idea of the floating airport girding the Atlantic was a pretty interesting idea, seeing as how the world record for sustained non-stop flight in 1913 was 11 hours (in a Maurice Farman MF-2), and that was under more-or-less optimal conditions; the speed record was 120mph, and again, optimal conditions and not sustained for hours on end.  By 1933 it seems to me that it had become obvious that non-stop transoceanic flight was coming, and coming soon.  That would of course make an investment in the Seadrome project superfluous, like building an antique, though an unnecessary one. The first transatlantic non-stop flight was made by John Alcock and Arthur W. Brown in 1919, averaging about 100mph; Lindbergh would come later to accomplish the first solo non-stop in 1927--by the early 1950's jet aircraft would be making the trip with regularity, which means that  for most of the life of the completed Seadrome it would have been unnecessary.  I feel certain that the Seadrome--which was supposed to be paid off by 1945, though in 1933 there was no inkling on the part of the Corporation members who wrote the request for the money that a war was looming and that there would have been almost no way for them to have been made at any time between 1939 and 1945--would never have been paid for.Armstrong’s idea would get major play in the popular press from time-to-time, and discussed as a series of floating islands.  Armstrong himself would organize the Seadrome Ocean Dock Corp. in the late 1930’s, his pretty but  impractical idea (reported by Time Magazine¹ in 1933 as little more than “a perennial gift to Sunday feature editors”)  finally grinding to a salty end with greater fuel capacity and efficiency in transatlantic aircraft. 

Notes:

 

Ludwik Silberstein.  "Contribution to the Quantum Theory of Spectrum Emission: Spectra of Atomic Systems Containing a Complex Nucleus."  Offprint:  Philosophical Magazine, vol xxxix, January 1920. 

Original printed wrappers.pp 46-66.  Inscribed, "with the author's best regards, 21.I.1920".  $125

Silberstein was as we all know an interesting thinker, working early and with some elegance in relativity, though he did run into a spot of bother with Einstein in which the good Dr. Silberstein fared not so well. I've always rather "liked" Silberstein for his early work on relativity. 

 "Ludwik Silberstein (1872 – 1948) was a Polish-American physicist who helped make special relativity and general relativity staples of university coursework. His textbook The Theory of Relativity was published by Macmillan in 1914 with a second edition, expanded to include general relativity, in 1924."--Wikipedia

First Appearance in Print of the Terms “Relativity Theory” and “Theory of Relativity” (1906)

Max Planck, "Die Kaufmannschen Messungen der Ablenkbarkeit der β-Strahlen in ihrer Bedeutung für die Dynamik der Elektronen" [The Measurements of Kaufmann on the Deflectability of β-Rays in their Importance for the Dynamics of the Electrons], in a bound volume of Physikalische Zeitschrift, 1906, volume VII, the paper occupying pp 753-761 (printed in double columns), printed in Leipzig by S. Hirzel. There are other papers of relativity in VII including Wacker (p 300), Farkas (p 654), Stark (p 353), and Wilkens (p. 846). Bound in cloth. Fine and sturdy copy.  $500

Prior to using the words “postulate” and “principle” associated with relativity (as in "Prinzip der Relativitat”, appearing in the second paragraph of Einstein's June 1905 “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” in Annalen der Physik)  it is first referred to as “relativity theory” (“Relativtheorie”) by Max Planck on p. 756 (col 2 line 9 and also on pp 758+759) of this volume. Then in the “discussion” part of the Planck paper the “theory of relativity” (“Einsteinische Relativitatstheorie”) appears for the first time in print just a few pages later (p. 760 col 2 line 15) by Alfred Bucherer.

• “The term "theory of relativity" was based on the expression "relative theory" (German: Relativtheorie) used in 1906 by Planck, who emphasized how the theory uses the principle of relativity. In the discussion section of the same paper, Alfred Bucherer used for the first time the expression "theory of relativity" (German: Relativitätstheorie).”--Wikipedia

It was very surprising, finding this, the first time that something so familiar as "relativity theory" appeared in its most familiar form. 

 

And there it is.

 

And there it is.

Scientific Instruments: Gyroscopes, 1883

L.-J. Gruey, Le Strephoscope Universel...Construit par M. Collin... Paris, Imprimerie Chaix, 1883.  9.5x6", 32pp, with descriptions of 14 devices, each with a small text illustration. In the original wrappers, with the text block becoming loose in the wrappers. Also includes a double-page illustration of the Gruey machine.  GOOD copy of a scarce title.  $125

A description of this gyroscope demonstration device:

“This device is nothing more than a new Gyroscopic box, of a particular composition...to highlight, for all, important and curious events in general mechanics or celestial mechanics, which were known only to scientists. The essential part of a gyroscopic apparatus is a bronze torus, with a cylindrical steel shaft. The ends of the shaft, cut into very thin points...fixed on a ring metallic, in two diametrically opposite points...We will briefly describe how to compare put each device with the pieces of our box, and that of executing experiments. We will not reproduce here the complete theory and rigorous of these devices exposed elsewhere, but we will give at the end of the description of each of them, under the heading 'Explanation'...”

Outside Looking Out--Space, 1899.

Adolphe Duponchel,  "Circulation de notre groupe stellaire autour de l'axe charbonnier et mouvement parallactique de l'apex Solaire". Printed by the author, in Paris, 1899, from its appearance in Societe Astronomique de France, 1 March 1899.  9x6", 18pp.  Original wrappers. Condition: the wrappers are brittle and chipped, and detached; the text itself is quite good. Overall, though, this only gets a GOOD grade.   

WorldCat/OCLC reports 1 copy in the U.S. And either 1 or 3 copies at the Observatoire de Paris—otherwise there are no other copies of this work located. Provenance: Smithsonian Institution, and then the Library of Congress (small mostly-faded oval stamp for the SI on front cover, and the LC surplus stamp on the back cover).   $150

Duponchel was an accomplished and published civil engineer, canal and bridge builder, and hydrologist, who later in life veered into cosmogony, publishing on the effects of meteors and solar activities on the distribution of stars, the structure of the galaxy, and the motions of the planets. He met with no success from what I can determine, though he seems to have been very active in his starry pursuits through the 1890's, which was a prime period for French cosmogony. At the very least his ideas look entertaining, and some of the text figures imaging them are quite lovely.

The truth of the matter is that I do not understand what he is talking about, though sometimes it seems as though he is talking about black holes and the motion of stars, except that he seems to be talking about "apex charbonnier" that are dark regions of space that could not be penetrated given the optics of the day. In general though he writes about what effects the "circulation" of the stars and star clusters.  Liberally translating he states that "no astronomical problem could offer more interest, and in the absence of a solution of a rigorously demonstrated accuracy can be I am happy to have arrived at finding a plausible and at least probable explanation of the simultaneity of all these coordinated movements in the same state of general equilibrium.

After this very pro forma and enormous statement, we arrive at the unknown stuff of his insight: 

"...points noirs isolate correspondent a des rayons visuels qui auraient traverse les mailles des deux reseaux sans rencontrer aucune etoile sur leur passage. Dans une seule direction, sur un espace sans doute assez restreint, mais parfaitement defini par son contour piriforme, cette illumination fait reellement defaut." ("Isolated black/dark spots correspond to visual rays that would have passed through the meshes of the two networks without encountering any stars in their path. In one direction, on a space which is doubtless rather small, but perfectly defined by its "piriforme" outline, this illumination is really lacking." The translation doesn't help the original too much, which left me understanding nothing.

Then, a few pages later, he writes: 

“...étudier ici tapissant en quelque sorte les parois du vide de l axe s y trouveraient distribuées en anneaux ou pour mieux dire en tores successifs dont chacun correspondrait à une strate particulière en forme discoi dale d étoiles extérieures. Ces to res successifs (figs 1+2) correspondant aux sphères magnétiques qui accompagnent les noyaux solides du Soleil et des planètes comprendraient chacun un certain nombre d étoiles circulant autour de l axe du tore avec un mouvement de rotation ac célérée en spirale comme celui des sphères magnétiques mais avec des vitesses alternativement de sens direct et de sens inverse de manière à assurer des vitesses concordantes de même direction aux points de tangence de deux tores consécutifs...” Or, “Firstly, to study here somehow lining the walls of the void of the axis would be distributed in rings or, to put it better, in successive tori, each of which corresponds to a particular stratum in the form of a disc of external stars. These successive rests (fig 1+2) corresponding to the magnetic spheres that accompany the solid nuclei of the Sun and planets would each include a number of stars circulating around the axis of the torus with a spiral arc rotational movement like that of the magnetic spheres but with alternately direct and reverse direction so as to ensure concordant speeds of the same direction at the points of tangency of two consecutive tori...”  Again, a not-good translation, but I really didn't have much of an idea of what he was writing about. 

The pictures are pretty.

 

Notes:

“Et les individus qui participent à cet engouement pour la quête des origines cosmiques n’épargnent ni leurs efforts ni leur temps pour développer, étayer, rendre publique, et faire reconnaître leurs théories. Ainsi, l’ingénieur des Ponts et Chaussées Adolphe Duponchel (1821-1903), après avoir déposé un pli cacheté à l’Académie des sciences le 27 mars 1893 contenant le sommaire d’une brochure exposant ses « Principes de cosmogonie générale », fait imprimer celle-ci à ses frais et l’envoie à l’assemblée savante. Il n’obtient aucune réponse mais persévère et soumet six Notes ou Mémoires à l’Académie sur ce sujet entre 1893 et 1894. Ne parvenant pas à obtenir le soutien académique qu’il recherche, Duponchel va finalement publier sa théorie dans des revues populaires de science, d’abord dans la revue Cosmos le 2 septembre 1893 puis, sous une forme augmentée, dans la Revue Scientifique les 28 juillet et 4 août 1894.”Volny Fages, “Dire l’origine scientifique des astres. L’engouement pour la cosmogonie en France dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle”https://www.cairn.info/revue-romantisme-2014-4-page-32.htm

See:

ASTRONOMES FRANÇAIS 1850 - 1950 D'ABBADIE, Antoine.  www.obs-hp.fr/dictionnaire/astronomes_A-Z.pdf

See: Agnes Mary Clerke , A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century, p 202, a review of some of the later 19^th c solar astronomers.

A Significant Paper in the History of Meteorology (1922)

J. Bjerknes and H. Solberg, Life Cycle of Cyclones and the Polar Front Theory of Atmospheric Circulation. Offprint/separate, Geofysiske Publikationer 3, no. 1, 1922. 12x9, 18pp (paginated 1-18). Bound in cloth, with a half-title and title, though no publication data save for a running abbreviation of the journal name and volume above the text. Nicely bound in buckram. Provenance: U.S. Navy, Naval War College, with a large “Discarded” stamp on front free flyleaf. There is also a bookplate. Very Good condition. Uncommon. $300/on hold

“Bjerknes was part of a group of meteorologists led by his father, Vilhelm Bjerknes, at the University of Leipzig. Together they developed the model that explains the generation, intensification and ultimate decay (the life cycle) of mid-latitude cyclones, introducing the idea of fronts, that is, sharply defined boundaries between air masses. This concept is known as the Norwegian cyclone model.”--Wiki

“Bjerknes's father, Vilhelm. has often been called the father of modern meteorology. This title is doubly appropriate, for not only did Vilhelm’s vision and research programs lead to establishing new directions, methods, and the conceptual foundation for the science, but Vilhelm’s son also played a fundamental role in creating this new era in atmospheric science.”--DSB

“Although rapid transitions or discontinuities in temperature, pressure, and wind velocity had been noted in Jacob’s first model*—and even by nineteenth century meteorologists—and although such discontinuities had been theoretically postulated, the 1919 Bergen cyclone model represented the introduction of discontinuities into meteorology as the major focus for practice and, eventually, theory. These “fronts,” as they later were termed, were endowed with scientific reality through the introduction of major changes in forecasting practice. ”

“The cyclone model based on fronts entailed the ability to specify in time and three-dimensional space important weather phenomena associated with cyclones to a much greater degree than earlier models could achieve. During the next few years the Bergen group of Vilhelm and Jacob Bjerknes, Ernst Calwagen, Halvor Solberg, and Tor Bergeron, among others, expanded this preliminary cyclone model and accompanying forecasting methods to a comprehensive system for explaining midlatitude weather changes. The polar front, the occlusion process, an evolving cyclone model, and air mass analysis were the conceptual foundation for a new era in meteorology.”--DSB

*This was evidently a longer and more thorough version of a paper submitted by Bjernkes and Solberg to the Monthly Weather Review in 1919 on the findings of the Bergen group. --Robert Marc Friedman, Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology, p. 180; also noting that this article is “frequently cited”.

“Polar front theory is attributed to Jacob Bjerknes, derived from a coastal network of observation sites in Norway during World War I. ... The convergence line ahead of the low became known as either the steering line or the warm front. The trailing convergence zone was referred to as the squall line or cold front.”--Wiki

The two authors “...pictured the polar front as a string of families of cyclones, described by dashed lines linking successive warm and cold front”.--Mark Monmonier, Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize Weather, pg 64, with several reproductions of some of the lovely diagrams.

“The "Bergen School of Meteorology" is a school of thought which is the basis for much of modern weather forecasting. Founded by the meteorologist Prof. Vilhelm Bjerknes and his younger colleagues in 1917, the Bergen School attempts to define the motion of the atmosphere by means of the mathematics of interactions between hydro- and thermodynamics, some of which had originally been discovered or explained by Bjerknes himself, thus making mathematical predictions regarding the weather possible by systematic data analysis. Much of the work was done at the Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen, in Bergen, Norway.”--Wiki It should be noted that Jacob was the chief forecaster and head at Bergen 1918-1931.--DSB

John von Neumann, 1935

(John von Neumann)  "Representations and ray-representations in quantum mechanics".  250-word abstract from the Pittsburgh Symposium on Group theory and Quantum Mechanics, published in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, volume XLI, number 5, May 1935, page 350.  Offered is the entire issue pp 305-352, in the original printed wrappers. 

Very Good copy.  $75

See:

Muraskin Murray, Brody F, Vamos Tibor, editors, The Neumann Compendium, appendix 2 (abstracts presented to the AMS), p 680 and p 49 #4 of bibliography.

Hans Primas, Knowledge and Time, p 402

An Excellent Surveying Instrument of Heights and Distances (1900)

Franz Schrader. Instruction Detaille sur l'emploi de Tacheographe de F. Schrader.  Paris, Librairie Hachette, 1900. 8x5" 22pp, illustration.  Original wrappers. Signed presentation copy ("A mon ami A. .....").  Condition: the covers are chipped along the edges, including a small chip at top right which removes about a quarter of the dedicatee's name. Internally quite nice, and mostly unopenned. GOOD copy.  SOLD

The tachograph is " ... a clever surveying instrument remarkably simple in theory and manipulation which has for several years been in use on the Continent but has not been noticed yet in this country [England]. It is the universal tacheograph of Victor von Ziegler a well known writer on geodesy...The instrument which is constructed in various forms for special purposes belongs to the class of plane table theodolites its chief merits are that horizontal distances and vertical heights are read off at the same time that there are no calculations that the instrument checks itself and that the operations require very little time and skill...”--Scientific American Supplement, October 15, 1898

“THE death of M. Franz Schrader, formerly of the Ecole d'Anthropologie of Paris, which occurred in October, removes one of the most eminent of French geographers. Born at Bordeaux in 1844, Schrader travelled widely in Europe in his youth and served in the Franco-German war. By the influence of Elisee Reclus he turned to geography, his interests lying in the human rather than the physical aspect. But it is for his cartographical work that Schrader was best known. He completed and published in 1893 the “Atlas Universal de Geographie” begun by Vivien and Saint-Martin many years earlier. The last edition of this atlas was published in 1922 and is the principal French atlas of the time. Other notable works of Schrader were” Atlas de Geographie moderne” (1890) and “Atlas de Geographie historique” (1896). He was the editor of the annual publication entitled “L'Annee cartographique,” which records all new publications in cartography and exploration. As a keen alpinist, Schrader found much interest in devising his tacheograph by the use of which he produced his “Carte des Pyrenees centreles.”--Nature, 20 December 1924

Cryptography, 1944

 Advanced Military Cryptography, War Department Technical Manual, TM11-485.

Published by the War Department, 8 June 1944. 9x6", 113 pretty dense pages, with numerous diagrams, and a folding table.

Paper wrappers. Former owner's name (Lt. Col., Signal Corps) in ink on front wrapper. formerly a "Restricted" document.  Very Good.  $75

The Klein-Gordon Equation (1926)

W(alter) Gordon, Der Comptoneffekt nach der Schrödingerschen Theorie", offprint from Zeitschrift fur Physik, 40, 1-2, Berlin, Julius Springer, 1926, pp 117-133. Original wrappers. Very Good.  SOLD

 

“...the Klein–Gordon equation correctly describes the spinless relativisitic composite particles, like the pion. On July 4, 2012 CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson. Since the Higgs boson is a spin-zero particle, it is the first observed ostensibly elementary particle to be described by the Klein–Gordon equation.”--Wiki

See also:

• H. Kragh: “Equation with Many Fathers, the Klein-Gordon Equation in 1926”, AmJ Phys 52(100), pp 1024, 1984.  (Also citing Vladimir Fock, Johann Kudar, Théophile de Donder and Frans-H. van den Dungen, and Louis de Broglie. )
• Weisstein, Eric W. "Klein-Gordon Equation." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource.
• Jiří Bičák, Tomáš Ledvinka, eds: Relativity and Gravitation: 100 Years after Einstein in Prague, p. 268.
• Victor E. Borisenko, Stefano Ossicini, What is What in the Nanoworld: A Handbook on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

ALSO:

W(alter) Gordon, “Zur Lichtfortpflanzung nach der Relativitätstheorie”, offprint from Annalen der Physik, IV/72, 1923, published by Barth in Leipzig., p (421)-456. Original wrappers. Very Good.  SOLD

“...the main reason why Gordon’s paper should have been considered at the time of its appearance and remembered thereafter is, in our opinion, another one and, to our knowledge, it has remained completely unnoticed by everybody [in spite of 250+ citations?], if one excludes the attentive reviewer of Gordon’s article for “Physikalische Berichte”: that paper contains a clear-cut argument for selecting, through a clever reductio ad vacuum, the stress-energy-momentum tensor of the electromagnetic field in non-dispersive matter, provided that the latter be homogeneous and isotropic when considered in its rest frame “--A forgotten argument by Gordon uniquely selects Abraham’s tensor as the energy-momentum tensor for the electromagnetic field in homogeneous, isotropic matter. S. Antoci and L. Mihich Dipartimento di Fisica “A. Volta” - Pavia, Italy