JF Ptak Science Books

A New Perspective on Multitudes of Soldiers

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1019

Yesterday while trying to entertain our six-year-old , sitting in a small waiting room to an office with nothing to do, I estimated the number of holes there were in the boring acoustic ceiling tiles. A short distraction later I realized that if each one of those holes was a dollar bill, that the national deficit would require those titles to be laid out over an area roughly the size of D.C. and Alexandria (about a hundred square miles).  That sort of brought some perspective to what trillions of dollars might mean, but not really—it was still too weird and vast a number.

 

I had the same sort of feeling seeing this picture essay (yesterday as well) on soldiers and war.  The photos appeared in the July 1 1920 issue of the Illustrated London News and spoke of the new management of manufacturing British war medals.  The vastness of the casualties of that war are well known, but somehow this story seemed to put the big numbers into a more understandable perspective.

I learned that there were 300 men who worked full-time on producing these medals, making about 67,000 a week--in 1920, two years after the end of the war.  Not only that, since the Royal Mint and the Royal Ordnance Factory would be working jointly on the project, the Army Council expected production to increase to 120,000 medals a week.  That’s six million medals a year. 

It seems extraordinary that even after the fighting that production levels would need to be so high.  But there were millions who fought, and so these 300 workers would still have to work for several more years to produce enough medals to honor those who fought in WWI.

  

I read somewhere—a citation now long lost—that in America every Purple Heart that has been given out since 1945 was struck in that same year.  This  mountain was made in preparation for the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were expected to be made casualties in the Allied assault on the Japanese homeland in 1945/6—a figure that would come close to half of the total number of 1.6 million Purple Hearts that have been awarded since 1932

 

Nazi Capes and Collaborators, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1019

For the next little bit I am going to try to have one word or phrase per post be unique to a  Google search–today’s is “Nazi Capes”. (Yesterday was “Atomurbia”, created over coffee.)  Frankly I’m a little surprised that it doesn’t come up–thank goodness for small favors of not having stores selling Nazi capes or some porn site featuring nazi-caped “dancers”,  and so on. 

The Allied  advanced towards Berlin in 1944/45 liberated Nazi-occupied towns and cities and countries.  The populations of course reacted immediately to those among them who facilitated the Nazi control of their communities.  The collaborators were traitors, and were treated accordingly.

Fernand de Brinon, Marshall Petain, Karl Linnas, William Joyce (Lord Haw=Haw), Ezra Pound, 
the Ustaise (a Croatian fascist anti-Yugoslavian movement doubly doomed post-war) are a sample of some of the major names in the history of Nazi sympathizers/collaborators who would be judged and adjudicated.  There were many others who survived this legal (and extra-legal) process--like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford and Errol Flynn and (the IOC’s) Avery Brundage–without much damage to themselves. (To be a little more accurate, Charles Lindbergh was an America Firster with fascist sympathies and unquiet anti-Semitic opinions–he did renounce his admirations for Nazi Germany once America had been attacked on 7 December 1941. Country first in times of war for Lindbergh, though his sympathies remained relatively intact for the 750 days of WWII being fought in Europe without the United States.)    There is also a large population of Nazis (like Wernher von Braun, whose rockets killed thousands on the ground in England and thousands more of the slaves who worked for him at “home”) whose expertise was deemed necessary to national security and who were settled in the U.S. to help form the new fight against the Soviet Union.  But that’s another story entirely.  

There were many thousands of collaborators at society’s entry-level who were dealt with locally–some were brought into the justice system, though many didn’t make it quite that far.  In many cases, people well known to have added and assisted the Nazis in their occupation were immediately found and dealt with upon liberation.

This photo-from the archives of the PM Magazine reporter and European bureau chief Alexander Uhl, shows the arrest of Luxembourgian collaborators, each made to wear a Nazi flag like a cape, the swastika no doubt searing its way into the backs of each of these people.  I don’t know where they were being marched to or whether that march lasted very long. Perhaps it ended in a field at the end of the street; perhaps not.  In any event, they were on their way to justice, whether or not justice found them in a courtroom or a ditch is lost to history. (The vast majority of collaborators arrested and brought into the justice system in Luxembourg were sentenced to prison terms–of the 2000 arrested, nine were executed.) In any event I’ve never seen a picture like this before, and am passing it along.

Made-Found Art--Childhood Crayons

These are not only a child's crayons, but my wife Patti Digh's childhood crayons, crayons from when she was a little girl, crayons used by her 5-year-old chubby-fingered self, working away at her art-filled world..  Saved for years by her mother, Patti's crayons now live here at home in a very tall chemistry beaker.  Our younger daughter, Tess, wondered today why nobody used those crayons saying that we should use them to make something "interesting".  And so we did. The crayons are art in themselves, collectively and individually--the closer you look at each one of these beauties, the more you see that they hold their own histories of color.

Atomurbia: Responding to Atomic Threat by Moving Everyone Everywhere. 1946

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1018

“It is probably not worth putting (all) railways under ground.”  Ed Teller, 1947

[See also our 50+-part Atomic & Nuclear Bomb series here]

There is a universe of alternate universes constructed of nothing but the dim bits of bad thinking that is the very DNA of the history of bad ideas.  In those realms there are bad ideas that are bad, bad ideas that are toweringly bad, and bad ideas that are so bad that they’re not even bad as they transcend communication capacities of badness.  The idea I’m writing about today lives at that unspeakably-bad level.

And that bad idea is this: relocating and dispersing the entire population of the United States into a geometric grid-work covering all parts of the country, emptying all American cities into a vast nothingness of exurban Atomburbs. 

There.  I said it.  Unfortunately, the thoughtfully blank idea was “real” and  was worked out by three smart guys, the result published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1946¹.  The kernel of the proposition was republished for the masses in LIFE magazine in (15 June) 1947, complete with maps which stand on their own as being spectacular and peculiar examples of visual propaganda.         

Listen: the crux of the issue was to remove everyone from any American city with a population greater than 50,000 people and place them in newly-built communities set out across the country’s landscape (mostly) like a chess board, the towns existing on all of the connecting lines. [As weird as this sounds, the great Norbert Wiener came up with a similarly astounding, untouchable idea using circles.]. The authors proposed to build 20,000,000 new homes, relocate industry (preferably underground), reallocate and redistribute energy supplies and natural resources, and recreate the very fabric of social and economic life in America.  

The governor of this thinking was the coming arms race and the American susceptibility to clouds laced with Soviet atomic weapons–and worse.[The calculations for destruction being used here were for the Hiroshima atomic bomb; in 1952 the U.S. would detonate the first hydrogen bomb, followed by the Soviets the next year.  These bombs would be measuring explosive force in terms of hundreds of thousands--and then dozens of millions--of pounds of explosives.]  How does this idea get thunk in a group and not abandoned?  And then how does it manage to be published by a a reputable organization?  These are smart men, these authors, and I just cannot think of how they could’ve come to these conclusions–though Teller, who was part of the genius flotilla of superb and essential Hungarian scientists, was undoubtedly mentally affected by his supernova hawkishness. I didn’t know this about Marshak, and I really am not very familiar with Klein.  They were all University of Chicago, and the Bulletin was originally published as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago. 

There are deeper, more disturbingly anti-spectacular ideas laced through the short article, some of which are so soaringly and diligently insane that it is difficult to address them.  For example, the authors suggest that the “ribbon cities” wouldn’t necessarily have to be “laid out in exactly straight lines” and that the lines could be adapted to the terrain.


Even though the authors propose moving and rehousing 20 million people (and so on), this was not what they really wanted to do.

They wanted to put everything in lines and underground. 

“We shall have to forgo elaborate schemes of underground cities” because of expense, they write.  And what of the cost, as long as we’re at it?  Somehow a figure of 200 billion is floated around–200b in 1947 dollars, which is 5 trillion in 2010 dollars (or so), which really doesn’t seem to be a figure that is in any way near to what an undertaking of this magnitude would cost.  (The odd thing about this figure is that $200 billion is about the same percentage for a single year of 1950 GDP as the $5 trillion is of the 2010 GDP.) [It seems unfair to take things out of context like this, but, well, it isn't--the entire article is filled with almost nothing but these statements.  In a way I'm doing the authors a service by taking things out of context so that the entirety of their madness isn't revealed as the ugly road-kill thinking it is.]

Of course, g_d knows where all of this building material was going to come from.  Or the people who would actually do the work.  Were there 3 million construction/building folks in the 1950 census?  I don’t think so.

And so in spite of the overwhelmingly underestimated cost, and the rerouting of the infrastructure of the entire country, and moving everyone in the country, and building 20 million houses, and finding the material to do so, and finding the workers to build them all and reconstruct all of the infrastructure and build all industry underground and have the tools to do it all with, the authors felt as though the whole thing could be pulled off in 10 years.

Someone, somewhere, was certainly going to be working late.

And so the interesting part of this thought-tragedy for me is–what is the equivalent idea of this going on right now?  I know there is one, and there will be a new one tomorrow. 

Notes
1.. Jacob Marshak, Edward Teller, and Lawrence R. Klein. “Dispersal of Cities and Industries.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 1, April 15, 1946, 13.

See also:
“Naked City.” Time. Nov. 28, 1949, 66. Also at.  Also see .The City Under the Bomb.. Time, Oct. 12, 1950

Charles Grutzner. “City folks‘ fear of bombs aids boom in rural realty.. “ New York Times. August 27, 1950, 1.

Michael Ray Fitzgerald.  Sitcoms and Suburbia. The Role of Network Television in the Deurbanization of the U.S., 1949-1991.
               
Molella, Arthur P. "The City as Communications Net: Norbert Wiener, the Atomic Bomb, and Urban Dispersal" Technology and Culture - Volume 45, Number 4, October 2004, pp. 764-777


   

                   

1947 Atomic-Powered Farm Industry and the 1945 Internet--Interesting Future Visions Fueled by Booze

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1017

Seagrams V.O. Canadian Whiskey powered the future through a series of a dozen or so ads for itself in the 1945-1947 period, taking a usually-strangled though occasionally interesting peep into what the future might bring.  (And of course the future is brought by men who drink Seagrams.)  In this ad, appearing in the 12 May 1947 issue of LIFE Magazine, we are told "deserts will bloom through atomic power"--how this might happen is left to the imagination. Also left to fantasy is what exactly is being farmed there in front of the incongruous "atomic energy plant". Plastic smoke?  Taking a fractured approach to the possibilities one might say that atomic bomb mushroom clouds are being grown from seedlings here from the ground up, nurtured until the day they too will be as big as the blasts of August 1945.

Oddly enough, the illustrator--who after all was just trying to sell alcohol--came pretty close to the truth, except that they got the power source wrong.  Rather than nuclear energy, it would be petrochemical industries that would lie there at the heart of America's farm production (via seeds and fertilizers and so on)--I'm sure that it would've made more sense in a weak way back there in 1947 to believe the atomic story rather than thepossibility that it would be petroleum that would drive the entire production of food forward.  

In another weirdly prescient image--"weird" anyway for a quick effort made by an artist trying to sell drunk juice--is this proto-internet office view, made in May 1945. There's lots of passive solar going on here(though not really very effective when you consider the other ways of directing and filtering exterior light inside) in the office of tomorrow, but more important is the desk and the file cabinets.  The seated man is talking to someone across the country  via phone/wireless, with data en masse at his fingertips, a "computer" (in the old sense of the word, that being a person--and usually a women--given the charge of adding long columns of number or whatever and then doing the arithmetic, like a comptometer) working some sort of calculating interest on the largish calculating instrument. In general we see a decision-maker awash in responsibility connecting all of the parts of his world: a primitive, secular, analog internet.  And this too just at about the same time that Vannevar Bush introduced his own vision of the informational future with his superb Memex (which I wrote about earlier on this blog here.)