JF Ptak Science Books

History of the Future: Farming and Vertical Integration, 1940

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

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  The small, independent farms had been replaced by global conglomerates who are centralizing food production, controlling the distribution of fertilizer and seeds, causing massive soil erosion, destroying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

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

The Forensic Microscope and Hidden Images in Art

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

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

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

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

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

Spam, Smeat, Spic, Prem, Mor & Arf: Food by Any Other Name

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This photo launched itself up to me while looking through the 11 March 1946 issue of LIFE magazine for a depiction of an atomic attack on NYC.  It was Joe Hormel who found me first, fistily challenging me to look at his food products, a proud manager with his best stuff, presiding over his world of tinned meat with steely Elmer Ganty-like broke-bone determination.

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

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

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

 

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

• Egg, bacon, and spam
• Egg, bacon, sausage, and spam
• Spam, bacon, sausage, and spam
• Spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon, and spam
• Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle pate, brandy, and a fried egg on top and spam.

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

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

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

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

 

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

What if Marx had Dedicated Das Kapital to Darwin?

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

A History of Blank and Empty Things #53: Painting by Number and Pop Art

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I wonder if Mr. Billy Collins has ever approached the ineffable connection between paint-by-number art and Andy Warhol?  It seems that paint-by-number (PBN) came from nearly nowhere, a near state of being nowhere and nothing, just after WWII, to the point of selling millions of sets by 1952. 

It was an astonishing thing, really, how the PBN craze took over America.  And it just so happens that 1952 was the first one-man show for Andy Warhol, and was also the beginnings of the Pop Art movement, which seems to me a rush to the most common denominator trough the commoditization of consumerism and popular culture, creating art out of visible nothingness.   Warhol in particular trained his sites on images that were already twisted around people’s neurons and living in their memories.  Art was made from images injected into the heads of consumer buying units, a delightful confusion of imagination and the already imagined, a reaction to a familiar sub rosa advertised image.

Perhaps Warhol’s art was part of a larger whole, an illustrator to a bigger point, a performance unintended to stand alone.  But that is what happened, the art separated from the wider message, and soared to great acclaim. 

 Warhol seems more like a paint-by-number color memorist, filling in the blanks of an already-mostly-formed memory burned into the long term memory via years of advertising and severe repetition.  Nearly the entire broadcast industry was created to support this memory-making process:  Seinfeld, Spongebob, The Office, Your Show of Shows, and all the rest, created not necessarily for your pleasure but as a series of  interchangeable 11-minute-long placeholders to hold the viewer/listener to the point where they would be exposed to 180 seconds of product identification.  It is the repetitious memory formation that the folks depended upon so that when you go down the supermarket aisle looking for an 89-cent can of tomato squeezings called “soup” that the 799 exposures to the Campbell Soup Company’s product line will direct you their way, a primitive bit of biological programming.  And for all of the trimmings and philosophical-critical digressions, Warhol capitalized on creating art on vast shared memories, coloring in a shared image, reaching into the minds of millions for something that everyone could see and understand—and not have to think about, not lose one neuron in interpretation, and enjoy it like an comfy old slipper. 

Where Warhol succeeds and PBN fails is at the art/appreciation point—few people took the PBN seriously as an art form, mainly because it wasn’t presented as such, except for those who somehow took the thing too seriously. Warhol took his creations seriously from the very beginning—and perhaps there was really nothing more than the defense of his art that was the art itself.  It just seems to me that, in the history of art, it tool 1500 years or so for linear perspective to be rediscovered, another 500-odd years beyond that to bend and mystify nature in the form of Impressionism, and another 30 years to lose all recognizable natural forms all together.  And then after Braque and Duchamp and Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter, and the Fauvism, Suprematism, Vorticism, Dadaism, Deco, De Stijl, Surrelaism, Concrete art, Abstract Impressionism, and on and on, that after all of this since Nude Descending, that we are lead to Pop Art and silkscreens of soup cans.  It just seems to me to be more about the packaging than the package, which might just well be a wrapped bit of nothing. 

Propaganda in Maps: the Polish "Corridor", 1939

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There's a war on?  Really?  You wouldn't know it from the cover page of the most popular magazine in Germany, the (Leipzig) Illustrirte Zeitung, published 7 September 1939. The odd thing is that for months, years, previously there was a huge and occasionally overwhelming militaria scent to this magazine (a sort of LIFE magazine-like affair in its way), paving the way for the reading population (which I'm sure must've been in the millions) for the stuff to come.  I've looked at every issue of this magazine from 1933 to 1939, and there is simply no mistaking the under- and over-current of the war preparation.  It was just relentless.  And so to finally come to the real fighting part of the beginning of the war it is a little odd to see the cover of the mag decorated with Mother Earth in the herb garden.  The contents of the issue is not what I expected either--not much dedicated to fighting outside of happy and relieved Gdanskers saluting their warm welcome to the advancing Nazi machine, images of the "mongrels" who were living in the places that had once been occupied by Germans, and an "apology" of sorts as to why all of this was necessary.All of which was bluster and diatribe--its hard to imagine, really, how someone living in Leipzig reading this thing over breakfast could've nodded their head in logical consent with the magazine's specious arguments.

Which brings us to the small inset map depicting what was one of the major "problems" for  Germany with Poland--the northern stretch of Polish land that touched the Baltic, the so-called Polish "Corridor".  This polemical affair shows exactly what the Germans thought of the territory, a piece of Germany now in enemy hands, a dagger struck through the heart of Prussia.  

Poland of course didn't think of the land in terms of a "corridor", and as a matter of fact the term was an offensive one.  It was simply a part of Poland, one which was returned to the Poles with the rest of the country (which had been disappeared, absorbed, with the Treaty of Vienna in 1815) in 1920.  It was essential with repatriation that this land be included, giving Poland a natural access to the Baltic, and an ability to follows it major river (the Vistula) all the way to the sea.  Without access to the Baltic, Poland's economy would have been strangled, the country simply wouldn't have had a good stake to survival.  It was a return of land that had been connected to the Polish Crown from 1466-1772.

The ethnicity issues are long and deep, and something I can't get into right here. But Germany certainly made the claim that there were huge German populations in the corridor who needed to be rescued, and who suffered under the control of the inferior Polish people. But as I said, this is a complex issue--the population in the area was probably around 45% in 1920, and this before the huge repatriation efforts to bring those German people home.  There may have been so many Germans in that area because of a massive Germanization of the area in the 19th century...and on and on.

The Polish government did sign a Non-Aggression Pact with Germany in 1934, after which everything got on the slow boat to hell.  In the months before the Germans attacked, through the summer, there was much frenzied back-and-forth, an awful lot of negotiations that were so much meaningless talk as a mask for the inevitable.  Whatever was agreed upon and signed, Germany was going to attack, anyway, come what may.  And so they did.

[I should point out in closing that, just a few days ago, the Airminded.org site reminded us all of H.G. Wells' 1933 The Shape of Things to Come, and his prediction on the start (or re-start) of the next great war, right there at the Polish "corridor", and right soon.] 

Very Early Films of NYC, 1903

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I came across another fantastic part of the Library of Congress site:  The Life of the City, Early Films of NewYork, 1896-1906. I've quoted liberally from the descriptions of the films, and also provided a chronological listig of many of the films that are found at the site.  They are spectacular things, like pieces of eidetic memories, offering wide swaths of minuate detail in corners of pockets of life from a hundred years ago. 

NOTE:  To view the films just follow the link and click on the MPEG format for best viewing.

NYC Garbage Dumping Scene 1903

Yes, this is what people did when they worked, not so long ago, when thousands and thousands of people worked at making The City go--in the streets picking pulling pushing prying pumping preening polishing purging.  What grabs me are the three workers working beneath the horse-drawn carriages, working on the barges, spreading around the waste.  The topsiders dump their cargo, letting it fall twenty feet or so, landing very closely to the men below.  It seems like an unending process

From the LC site:
"The film shows a wharf where a barge is being loaded with trash from two-wheeled, horse-drawn wagons. The trash is dumped off the edge of the pier onto the barge, where men with shovels are spreading the piles of debris. The camera pans left to the next barge, where four-wheeled carts are shown dumping excavation rubble. Probably filmed on the East River, this is one of several New York City Sanitation Department dumping wharves in operation at the time."

"Ghetto" Fish Market

I love what the kids do when they see this camera--they pretty much uniformly stand still, their fingertips pressed together in wonder and worry, and stare at the strange goings-on fifteen feet above the crowd.  At one point three officials stroll through the crowds, coming in at top right; they are very sharp eyed, and the one guy at the end of these three looks like every other guy who has played a corrupt NYC official in every other movie made before WWII. 
"The view, photographed from an elevated camera position, looks down on a very crowded New York City street market. Rows of pushcarts and street vendors' vehicles can be seen. The precise location is difficult to ascertain, but it is certainly on the Lower East Side, probably on or near Hester Street, which at the turn of the century was the center of commerce for New York's Jewish ghetto. Located south of Houston Street and east of the Bowery, the ghetto population was predominantly Russian, but included immigrants from Austria, Germany, Rumania and Turkey. According to a description in a 1901 newspaper, an estimated 1,500 pushcart peddlers were licensed to sell wares (primarily fish) in the vicinity of Hester Street. At one point the film seems to follow three official looking men (one in a uniform) as they walk among the crowd. They may be New York City health inspectors, who apparently monitored the fish vendors closely."

NYC Waterfront

From the LOC site:
"Filmed from a moving boat, the film depicts the Hudson River (i.e., North River) shoreline and the piers of lower Manhattan beginning around Fulton Street and extending to Castle Garden and Battery Park. It begins at one of the American Line piers (Pier 14 or 15, opposite Fulton Street) where an American Line steamer, either the "New York" or "Paris," is seen docked [Frame: 0120]. The camera passes one of the Manhattan-to-New Jersey commuter ferries to Jersey City or Communipaw [0860]. Proceeding south, the distinct double towers of the Park Row, or Syndicate Building, erected in 1897-98, can be seen in the background [0866]. A coastal freighter is next [1560], then Trinity Church appears, to the left of which can be seen the Surety Building, as a tug with a "C" on the stack passes in foreground [2032]. Several small steamboats come into view [2136], and the B.T. Babbitt Soap factory at Pier 6 is seen [2300], followed by the Pennsylvania Railroad piers (#5 & #4), with a group of docked railroad car floats [2556], and the Lehigh Valley Railroad piers (#3 & #2), also with car floats [3030]. Next are the Bowling Green Building (rectangular, with facade to camera) [3208], the Whitehall Building (vertical, thin side to camera) [3388], followed by Pennsylvania Railroad Pier #1 [3630]. Pier A (with a clock tower) is seen with the New York Harbor Police steam boat "Patrol" at its end [4654]. The Bowling Green Offices and the Produce Exchange at Bowling Green are visible in the background. The breakwater (sheltered landing) and the New York City Fireboat House appears [5270] and the distinctive round structure, Castle Garden, once a fort and immigrant station, but at the time of filming the City Aquarium, comes into view [5438]. The camera then pans east along the Battery Park promenade: the Barge Office (with tower) is visible in the distance [5804], and further out the Brooklyn shoreline with the grain elevators at Atlantic Avenue can be seen [6088]. This view is continued, with only a minor break in continuity, in the film Panorama of Sky Scrapers and Brooklyn Bridge From the East River. Together they comprise a sweep around the southern tip of Manhattan, from Fulton Street on the Hudson to the Brooklyn Bridge."

Brooklyn Bridge to the Battery, waterfront

Another beautiful water-side continuous panorama, from just above the Brooklyn Bridge to the battery.

From the LOC site:  "This film depicts the East River shoreline and the piers of lower Manhattan starting at about Pier 5 (the New York Central Pier) opposite Broad Street, and extending to the Mallory Line steamship piers just south of Fulton Street and the Brooklyn Bridge. The film begins with shots of canal boats or barges (from the Erie Canal via the Hudson River) docked at and around Coenties Slip [Frame: 0106]. As the film progresses, the New York Produce Exchange located at Bowling Green, Manhattan, with its distinct tower, comes into view in the background [0346]. Between here and the Wall Street ferry, there follows in order of appearance: steam tugs [0308 and 0422], a wooden hull barkentine [1032] with box barges alongside, a docked iron hull sailing ship, probably British [1448], an ocean steamer with yards on the foremast [1748], a derrick lighter laden with barrels docked at the end of a pier [2134], and a fruit steamer [2612]. In the Wall Street Ferry slip (between Piers 15 and 16) there is a Wall St., Manhattan-to-Montague St., Brooklyn, double-ended steam commuter boat [2896]. The ferry is visible immediately before a shot of the large advertising billboards on Pier 16. The film next shows the Ward Line piers (J.E. Ward & Co., New York and Cuba Steamship Co.) [3040], a Pennsylvania Railroad tug [3190], a derrick lighter [3320], and the Mallory Line piers [3692]. A Mallory Line steamer can be seen on the south side of one of the Mallory Piers [3736]. The camera begins panning out into the East River after passing pier 20, catching the fog bell at the end of pier 21 [3922]. A car float is visible passing under the Brooklyn Bridge [4202]. The pan follows the line of the Brooklyn Bridge eastward to Brooklyn Heights, where the Hotel Margaret (tall building in background) is visible just before the end of the film [4464]. This film continues the view begun in the film Sky Scrapers of New York City From the North River. Together they comprise a sweep around the southern tip of Manhattan, from Fulton Street on the Hudson to the Brooklyn Bridge."

Immigrants Arriving at Ellis Island 1903

Here comes everyone, from everywhere, emerging from a ferry, delivering immigrants from Manhattan to Ellis Island, where the process of the beginning of the rest of the lives of all these people began.  Between 1892 and 1954 some 12.5 million people were processed into the U.S. through Ellis, and in the early days, say 1892-1920, most of them looked just like these folks--the grandparents and great-grandparents of a quarter of the country.

From the LOC site:  "The film opens with a view of the steam ferryboat "William Myers," laden with passengers, approaching a dock at the Ellis Island Immigration Station. The vessel is docked, the gangway is placed, and the immigrant passengers are seen coming up the gangway and onto the dock, where they cross in front of the camera."

A Not-Obvious Gross Understatement: Bomb + Plane = Drop, 1915.

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In the young history of the beginning of the Twentieth Century’s Thirty-One Year War, in the very young history of bombing¹, came this adventurous “first” in warfare:  the attack of a target from the air, sea and under the sea. The British launched an assault against the German installation at Cuxhaven, trying to get at its Zeppelins and navy, sending a task force of destroyers, subs and cruisers in support of eight search and destroy seaplanes. The tactical results were mixed (there are many places to check out this part of the war) but the strategic outcome was enormous:  it was a new approach to warfare.  The technical aspect of bombing was so new, really, that the picture of the bomb at lower left had to be identified as such, and that it could be used as an offensive weapon dropped from a plane (“for Dropping from Air-Craft: a Bomb”). 

1. It was the Italians who conducted the first aerial bombardment, against a very creatively-named military “target”-- consisting primarily of civilians--outside of Tripoli in October 1911.

From the Flight/global Archive:

"The Cuxhaven raid marks the first employment of the seaplanes of the Naval Air Service (sic) in an attack on the enemy's harbours from the sea, and, apart altogether from the results achieved, is an occasion of historical moment. Not only so, but for the first time in history a naval attack has been delivered simultaneously above, on, and from below the surface of the water."— United Kingdom Flight Magazine: the "Official Organ of the Royal Aero Club of the ", Flight Magazine Global Archive: Aircraft in Warfare, 1 January 1915.

Notes:

A lovely site with many links for early aviation: Airminded; and an unusual and wonderful book on the history of bombing in general, called, of course, A History of Bombing, by Sven Lindqvist.