JF Ptak Science Books

History of Holes: Holes in the Quickening of Telegraphy, 1859

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2075   History of Holes series 

 

While grazing through the 1859 volumes of the Comptes Rendus¹, looking around for anything having anything to do with Mr. Darwin and his Big Book published later in this year (on 24 November), I got a little lost as usual, and was digging around the early months, and came upon the drawing above.  Mostly I was attracted to it for the holes, as there is a longish thread/series on this blog devoted to the History of Holes, and though at first blush that it might actually be a Runic something, or Islander counting stick.  When I actually started to read the article it was none other than the recording strip for telegraphy, devised by Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875), famous for his Wheatstone bridge and for his experimental determination of the speed of electricity²).  Now the recorder part of this was not on the receiving end, but rather on the sending--Wheatstone devised a way of recording the strokes of a telegrapher's key and translating them into two rows of holes; the message was recorded on the strip of paper and then fed into a machine that would do the keywork, using the punched paper tape to control the transmitter--it turns out to have been a significantly faster method than by simply having messages struck by human operators, which was  abig deal at the time because of the expense of sending telegraphic messages, reaching speeds of 130 wpm early on (and then 300-400 wpm later on a good circuit)³. 

The History of Holes: Empty Holes in an Early "PC"

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2074   History of Holes series 

These are some of the earliest holes in one of the very first personal computers--they were made for ease of wiring and other applications in the Geniac, a 1955 DYI kit from the indomitable Ed Berkeley, a machine well in advance but much of course the inferior of the Mark 8 (1974) and the Altair 8800 (1975), the later of the two seen as being about the very first modern "personal computer". There weren't too many empty holes in those two machines.

What had no relays, or transistors, or tubes, and was manually self-sequencing and human bit state switching, the name ending in "-iac", and made in 1955? The "Geniac", made and manufactured by the smart and enterprising Edmund Berkeley and Oliver Garfield--the "Genius Almostt Automatic Computer". It was I think the first in a line of early non-computer-computer-that-really-was-a-computer-according-to-Alan-Turing computers that a person could own and own at home, and it was followed pretty close on heals by the Tinyac, the Weenyac, and the Brainiac. 

[Source: Dr. Gangrene, here.]

The Geniac was/is a pretty neat tool--I hesitate to call it a "toy" as others have, mainly because it takes itself pretty seriously and still have fun, and includes diagrams and drawings for interesting sets of problems and tasks, from playing tic-tac-toe, to "testing" I.Q., to determining the male/female-ness of the respondent, to playing a very very mildly interactive game of uranium prospecting and alien hunting.  It was a fine construction, and  introduced the user to Boolean equations and the concepts of a working computer, all with hands-on education and a dry cell power course.  And that's pretty good. 

[Source:  Blinkenlights, here.]

Geniac Study Guide, via Computercollector.com (for the rest of the document):

Wiring diagran for the Uranium Shipment and Space Pirate game, again, via the computercollector.com

See also the GENIAC entry at the Old Computer Museum, here.

 

 

Note on an Illustrated Gazetteer of Nuclear Mega-Death

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2073   Series on Atomic and Nuclear Weapons

[Thanks to Eric Edelman of Retrocollage who put me on the trail of a bomb shelter for 5 million Manhattanites in the Kenneth D. Rose book, One Nation Underground, (NYU Press, 2001)  in which the following thread was found. Incidentally, here's the RAND report on the Manhattan mega-shelter, to have been located 800' in bedrock--to date the deepest part of the NYC subway system is 191 St station, at 180'...]

I think that there may be some room to put together a gazetteer of depictions of American cities in imaginary destruction and nuclear desolation--as seen in newspapers.  And perhaps just the front pages of newspapers.  There is a lot of material for this in general, though the restriction of front page coverage might be a little difficult--if the imagery was left open to views of decimated cities that appeared in large circulation newspapers and magazines, there might be enough stuff for a gazetteer and alphabet. 

Part of the great source for these images is FearSell, which seems to have been made into a $100 billion advertising industry, plus the stuff that it advertises. No longer is it just a "weather report" on the television, it is "Storm Center 4 with Super Doppler"; streaming radio isn't just for listening to local reports from different cities but a way to 'protect your family" int he event that the radio station you listen to is destroyed somehow.  Fear as a packaging implement has worked its way into nearly everything, though I must say that I haven't seen any anti-fear protein FDR supplements for food enhancement (though there are plenty of ads for 'victory seeds" and pre-packaged long-term bomb shelter food and so on). Yet.

[Source:  Rose, One Nation Underground]

This was of course the time of the Great Fear, of nuclear Armageddon, of  "going toe-to-toe with the Russkies" (General Buck Turgidson), the highest height of the Cold War, when personal underground bomb shelters (or at least plans for them) were becoming common and the escalation towards at least an accidental foul-up that could end the world was becoming a more distinct possibility.  Duck-and-cover exercises in school on a weekly basis were weird and scary, especially the part where your wooden desk was going to save you from the eye-of-god fireball that was going to envelope your city.  Those odd and rusting signs that have been scraped from buildings now for a few decades in the 1950's and 1960's were daily fear reminders of the threat from above. 

There were also the not-subtle fear/training campaigns of the federal government, such as with Operation Alert, which "simulated attacks on major cities in the U.S. to see how city defenses and people might react to actually having to do something in the face of a nuclear exchange. The exercises were mostly futile and even obsolete, but they did manage to create a huge amount of fear. (Robert Moses, the great NYC-planner, noted that if even one subway car was derailed or had a problem that there would be massive consequences and failure, and that plans to evacuate any large city--even if there was a place to evacuate people to--was "like so much moonshine".  (See the Rose book, page 27.) )

And the threat came to everyone--not just military targets:

But this practice of bombing populations-in-general was basically in place--at least from the air--almost since the beginning of modern flight, from about 1911 or so.  There were plenty of conferences and protocols restricting the use of bombs dropped from planes on civilians, but then there was the debate about what was it exactly that defined the "civilian" population, and the arguments peeled themselves away in the face of common practice.  Anyway, during the Cold War the bombs were so very gigantic that there was little home of rescuing the idea of what a "civilian population" meant, especially in the face of perhaps destroying most of the planet. 

This first story ("Red Alert. What if an H-Bomb Hit L.A?") appeared in the Los Angeles Times 12 March 1961, and made no doubt for some very sobering contemporary wake-up-and-die reading.  If you were living anywhere in the country at the time and had never seen a representation of your city in ruins, and you encountered such a story and images before coffee, you might remember that missing cup for the rest of your life.  The dramatization and mapping was done by Harlan Kilby, and it portrayed the destruction of the city and millions of people in the event of detonation of a 10 megaton nuclear weapon--it gave the reader a vague notion of what city-eating looked like, the bomb 'flattening" everything in a 3-mile radius of its central zone and killing everything in 28 square miles. (A little earlier, in 1960, there appeared a work by Harrison Brown and James Real called Community of Fear, which was a sci-fi kill-'em-up that used a kill zone with a 25-mile radius.)

Since this appeared in a newspaper story--and a long story at that--it gave the exercise a real sense of urgency, to say nothing of the amount of fear that it generated.  At least it didn't appear as the front page, as was the case with some other end-time scenarios, like these newspapers for Brooklyn and Buffalo and Grand Rapids (below).

[Source:  Conelrad blog and also at the website]

[Source:  Rose, One Nation Underground.]

[Source:  Rose, One Nation Underground]

Seems today like it might be a stretch for Grand Rapids and Buffalo to be bombed into oblivion by our arch-Cold Warriors, but there were more than enough delivery capabilities to make these cities into targets, so the  possibility was definitely real. 

This next  graphic shows the difference in destructive capacity of an atomic bomb (small circle beneath an air-burst detonation) and a hydrogen bomb (the large circle showing area of total destruction, which in this case would be about 50 square miles) on the city of Chicago. this one did not appear ont he front page of a newspaper, but did appear in a sort-of "America's Magazine", though not on the cover.  There are many other examples of this sort of imagery--perhaps I'll put together a gazetteer of mega-doom with images for them...

[Source:  LIFE Magazine, 30 Jine, 1950]

 

But don't worry, even if the Chicago and Brooklyn and New York and so on were destroyed, the U.S. Navy would survive, which would  be either great or horrible if you were a sailor:]

 

In any event, this is a small start to the Nuclear Doomsday Gazetteer--enough of this for this morning. 

A Top 1% Card Catalog Title Entry. Seriously.

JF Ptak Science Books  Daily Dose from Dr. Odd 

 

 
Triple-F (Frank Freemnont Frazee) came up with an all-time-great-title entry when he wrote his pamphlet about _____ back in 1947.  I have a copy of it, purchased in a 90,000-item collection from the Library of Congress--something called "The Pamphlet Collection", housed in 1,500 blue document boxes from 1952, all of which were categorized in a Borgesian nightmare way, according to nothing. Therefore the "General" box might have had General Electric pamphlets, or something about General Malaise, or Boston General, or General Rules of Parking in Providence (R.I.), and so on.  So, although categorized and alphabetized, it was all useless.  Among this beautiful mess were a thousand or so pamphlets like Mr. Frazee's--incredibly titled, about stuff visible and invisible, complaints, claims, praises, warnings, sufferings, advanced supra-backwards premonitions, and so on.  My Frazee copy happened also to be the U.S. Copyright Deposit copy (or one of them, rather) that was sent to the Library of Congress to be housed forever (or until I got them), along with a carbon copy of the card catalog entry. 

The card is a work of art. (More about this pamphlet here.)

Listing Illnesses and their Causes of Inmates of the New Orleans Insane Asylum

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2072

Following a posting from a few days ago listing the causes of admittance of children to an insane asylum in Powick, U.K. from 1854-1900 comes this find--a rather extraordinary find, regarding the causes for admission as an insane person to the City Insane Asylum of New Orleans. This site has an incredible (and indelible) record of  the patients admitted from 1882 through 1916 ("Orleans Parish (La.) Civil Sheriff Register of patients transported to the State Insane Asylum, 1882-1917"), including the reasons for confinement, as well as the causes of the debility, plus the age of the person and their occupation. 

Following the link will get you to the year-by-year index of admittance--there is no standardized set of instructions or rules to identify the illness or supposed illness, so the way that the physician factored the mental disabilities of the patient was open to some wide interpretation.Some of the reasons for admittance included stupidity, alcoholism, idiocy, epilepsy (still about the leading "cause" for admission), imbecility, insanity, dementia praeox,hysteria, "delusional about Italians", religious mania, and so on.

"Responsibility for insane patients (particularly the indigent insane) housed in the City Insane Asylum (or in various hospitals after the city facility closed) fell to the City Physician, who was to visit patients at least once a day and to discharge those patients who had sufficiently recovered. He also identified those inmates who had remained in the asylum "over the time prescribed by law" and reported their names to the sheriff of Orleans Parish, who arranged their transfer to the State Asylum at Jackson, La."--Source

The major subset of the diagnosed diseases and illness was the "-mania". Aside from a general mania, there was an alpabetization of the competing manias, including religious-, chronic- , kelpto- , furious- , erato- , raving- , homicidal- , acute- , indcenidary- , puerpueral- , mono- , recurring- , delusional- , suicidal-, and a few others. 

It is the "causes" of these challenges that seem to be the most viciously interesting part of this record.  Stuff that sent people into maniacal flights or rages or depressions and other anti-social behavior included but was not limited to alcohol, syphilis, weak mindedness, heredity, drugs-in-excess, old age, "womb trouble", "attack of gripe", "poverty and want", jealousy, sunstroke, onanism, menopausia, hallucinations, masturbation, "mental worry", "family troubles", tobacco, softening of the brain, and so on.

There is room for someone here to go through the 30-odd years of entries to see what were the most/least common causes of mental instability--it would be an interesting list to see someone else generate. 

Deeply Articulated Anatomical Engravings

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

There is a real fabulousness in design for these images made by anatomist/physiologist Jean-Baptiste Sarlandiere (1787-1838) in his anatomy of 1829 (Anatomie méthodique, ou Organographie humaine en tableaux synoptiques, avec figures. Paris: Chez les libraires de médecine, et chez l'auteur, 1829). Or at least the organize has achieved some high order of merit, both in the lettering/numbering  and display of the anatomical object...and in their placement and arrangement on the sheets of paper.  They're just very pleasing:  the very detailed and complex images are stuffed but concise, and the multiple-image placements are composed of very detail small bits with plenty of free space.  They're just very well-designed. 

[Source:  National Library of Medicine, here.]

 

Children in Insane Asylums, 1854-1900

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2071

I came upon this remarkable article, written by Kate Gingell, on the reason for admitting children to insane asylums between in the middle/late 19th century. The article, "The forgotten children: children admitted to a county asylum between 1854 and 1900", appeared in The Psychiastrist¹ in 2001, and stipulates the causes for admittance, as well as the causes for the mental disorder².  It is all quite upsetting, in a quiet and determined way, even when presented in tables--even without Gingell's commentary and conclusions. It is really the stuff of nightmares³.

A total of 195 case notes were identified from a total of 6573 admissions to the Powick Asylum in the years 1854-1900. (Powick, Worcestershire, was founded in 1847 as the Worcester County Pauper and Lunatic Asylum, and had a long life, closing only in 1989.)

"During the 19th century the attention paid to the mental health of children was influenced by the physical health of the population, the cultural climate of the day and beliefs about children and child rearing. The fact that children were admitted to an asylum for years and frequently died there without apparent contact with their family must be set in the context of a high infant mortality (156 per 1000 live births in 1897) and difficulties in travel and communication among pauper families..."

Explanation given for the cause of some admissions  (Table 2)

	n
Mania	63
Sunstroke	1
Measles	1
By being thrown from a trap	1
Fright and uterine derangement	1
Loss of employment	1
Abdominal tumour	1
Fright by a dog	1
Over study	1
Non-appearance of menses	1
Uterine functional derangement	1
Frightened by a cow	1
Epilepsy	86
By being put inside a recently killed pig	1
Scarlet fever	1
Worms	1
Fright of mother during pregnancy	2
Tossed by a cow	1
Imbecility	21
Cutting teeth	1
Fright at being almost drowned	1
Idiocy	54
Enlarged thyroid gland	1

 

Diagnostic categories used on admission notes (from Table #1)

Diagnosis	Age 4-10 (n=34)*	Age 11-16 (n=161)*
*70 children were given more than one diagnosis.
Epilepsy	22	64
Idiocy	20	34
Mania	3	60
Dementia	6	28
Delusions	—	4
Moral imbecility	1	1
Melancholia	1	—
Imbecility	3	18

"It is highly unlikely that asylums provided a sympathetic environment for children. Children were treated in exactly the same way as adults, with the difference that boys were kept on the female wards until they were about 7 or 8 years old. Admission procedures were identical for adults and children. The method of assessment of dangerousness is not detailed, but children as young as 4 were identified as dangerous and this is recorded in the same way as for adults."

Notes

1.  The Psychiatrist (2001) 25: 432-434 doi: 10.1192/pb.25.11.432, and located here.

2.  See also the lists of patients and their aliments and the causes of same in the New Orelans Public History website, 1882-1908.   See also: http://nutrias.org/inv/cityinsaneasylum1_50.htm 

And also, the long and reworked list of the Trans-Allegheny Insane Asylum, located here.

3. "It is not possible to equate the diagnoses of the day with recognisable contemporary diagnoses. The very high prevalence of epilepsy (Table 1) may be a real finding, indicating the high level of organic disease causing behavioural problems, or may be a misdiagnosis. Idiocy was found to be a common diagnosis for those under the age of 10, but does not necessarily indicate cognitive deficits. Idiocy was a term given to less dangerous inmates, whose cost on the public purse was less because they could contribute to the functioning of the hospital by doing jobs such as gardening or working on the farm. Some of the children diagnosed as idiots could read and write, and were thus discharged cured. The general view was that idiocy was an example of reversion to a lower type in the evolutionary scale. Another reason for diagnosing most children as idiots was the prevailing belief that insanity only occurred in those who could lose their reason. Children were considered to be born without reason, which gradually grew in them as they developed to adulthood. They could not then, by definition, be insane."

An Interesting 3-Section Perspective, 1560

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2069

[Detail from engraving in the seventh image, below]

I'm not sure if I've ever seen a 16th century human perspective drawing showing the body in plan and elevation and cross-section.  Jehan Cousin the Younger (1522-1595, in France), the son of Jean Cousin the Elder 91490-1560), a painter and sculptor, produced such an image in his Livre de Perspective, which was published in 1560. Well, the image definitely was published in 1560, though the artist may have been father and it may have been son--they worked closely together, and the Younger was taught at great length by the Elder, so much so that their work became indistinguishable. Nevertheless, the images I think are quite extraordinary, as we see below: 

 

And so by Andreas Mantegna, a classic example:

The following images come from the 1608 edition of the Cousin Perspective. a number of which are fairly unusual (all from the Library of Congress site, here):

Inventing Aged Tone in New Violins, 1903

JF Ptak Sciecne Books  Quick Post

Patent #190303723  issued in Great Britain to R.H. Payne and T. Broadbent, February 17, 1903. It really doesn't have anything to do with creating patina/lustre in the tone of a new violin via artificial means, but it does have that scent to it, and sometimes that all anything needs to do, provide the aroma of an interesting idea.

Things That Almost Were but Weren't: a Photographic Image (1839) and Radio Television (1928)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2068

Here are two examples of Things That Almost Were But Weren't:  Photography (1839) and Television (1928). The first item contains a woodcut of a heliotype (being the first image of a photograph produced by non-photographic means); the second displays the method for receiving images of radio shows but is not a television. 

First:  The first published non-photographic image of a non-photograph or "sunpicture", 1839

Buying a Stocked Country Store, 1836

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2067

There are times when a reader can get a little piece of social history in an unexpected place.  For example, in the math text book that was just addressed on this blog¹, there is a short anterior section called  "A Practical System of Book-Keeping for Farmers and Mechanics".  It is here where the reader is introduced to the keeping of a Day Book (which is different from a  ledger and a cashbook) where the merchant would keep a record of what was sold to whom and for how much. To that end the author includes three pages of a sample Day Book, which displays a host of information for the modern reader about what could be expected to be found in the generic cash-and-carry trade in the U.S. in 1836.  Most of the goods sold would have been purchased to make something else--there were not many items that would be considered to be a product for end use. So someone might not buy a carriage though they would buy the stuff that would go into making a carriage, or the ingredients for making beer rather than the beer itself, and so on.

And so, some of the entries from this practice Day Book: 

6 yards of calico ($2.65), 2 yards of  broadcloth ($3.25), 217 pounds of iron @ 8cents/pound= $17.36, 37 pounds of cheese ($3.70), 41 pounds of feathers ($28.70), 32 gallons of molasses, 300 pounds of pork (at 7 cents/pound), 30 bushels of corn ($13.50),1 cask of nails (225 pounds for $18), 32 gallons of molasses ($8), 30 pounds of harness leather ($16), 17 brooms ($2.08), 7 pounds of butter ($1.40), 7 tons of hay ($70), 50 dried hides ($200), 4 bushels of oats ($1.50),  1 cord of wood ($5),  28 pounds of lard ($4), 3 bushels of salt ($1.98), 75 yards of brown sheeting ($10.50), 500 pairs of men's shoes ($475), 120 pounds of blistered steel ($3.88), 100 pounds of Russia iron ($5), 300 pounds of bacon ($40), 3 pounds of coffee (48 cents), and 6 pounds of raisins ($1.99). 

Fascinating--but even more so from a bit found earlier in the book--an interesting and longish example for practical mathematics, a very detailed question for addition. The presentation is a nearly full-page list of the contents of a country store, the inventory of which was being purchased by "a certain clerk" thus giving issue to the addition problem as well as a hint to what was found in a general store in 1836. 

In this addition problem (which is somewhat problematic in that in the overall price column there is no differentiation between dollars and cents, so "4" means $4.00 anfd "50" can mean $50 or 50 cents) there are 46 entries, almost all of which are standard necessaries, with a few luxury items tossed in for  the benefit of those who would have the occasional disposable income for such a thing.  Overall the list is dominated by basics: sugar (354 pounds worth), tea, coffee, pork, beef, ham, rum, brandy, wine, vinegar, (40) empty barrels, (63) empty hogsheads, vinegar, axes, whips, wooden pails, kettles, tubs, ploughs, and rakes, and more (as we can see below).  Less common was the book stock:  2 Hymn Books, 4 Perry's Spelling books, 2 Dwight's Geographies, and one copy of the iconic Morse's GeographyAnd it looks as though the buyer purchased everything for about $1071.00--which was a considerable sum. The average farm laborer was paid about $10/week, plus room and board in 1840; a carpenter might make $1-1.50 per say, while laborers in manufacturing (glass, iron, wool, cotton) all made about 80 cents-1.00 per day².  That means it would take the average man four years to save  $1000, and probably more. In order to start this business to make money, you certainly needed to have some money to get started in making it.  In the meantime, this is an interesting peep into what people bought in country stores in 1836. 

Notes:

1. Rosell C. Smith, Practical and Mental Arithmetic, on a New Plan, in which Mental Arithmetic is Combined with the Use of the Slate... which was printed in Hartford beginning in 1829 (my copy being printed in 1836).

2.  See here for a decent look at what wages were like over decades in the 19th century. 

The Sense of Old Numbers & the Geometry of Squirrel-Shooting

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2065

There is something enormously appealing in the general nature of old numbers, numbers written or printed long ago, numbers making an appearance in the general sense of ordinary and commonplace, everyday garden variety numbers (like the example above and it continuation below), as well as in more famous numbers, numbers that present a concept for the first time, or offer a proof in thought and conjecture (as seen further below with Mr. Stevin).

The first example is from a worn copy of a common early-ish 19th century American math textbook by Rosell C. Smith, Practical and Mental Arithmetic, on a New Plan, in which Mental Arithmetic is Combined with the Use of the Slate... which was printed in Hartford beginning in 1829 (my copy being printed in 8136).  It was a popular book, and it claimed to make math more useful by using calculations for problems to be figured in terns of dollars and cents, thus giving the exercises the chance of direct application to the daily grind.  My copy of this book is very worn--not the worn that comes from mistreatment, but rather use-worn, the book being smooth and lustrous from repeated and deep use, handled so much over the years that the paper covers have a very definite and smooth patina. 

In any event Mr. Smith's numbers have a special bit to them, something nor-quite-like-everything-else. The care and the design and placement of the numbers is very attractive, even if it makes the numbers sometimes a little illegible. 

The numbers have a certain beauty to them, as does the space aloted for their answers:

Famous numbers have a distinct beauty as well, in the more refined and exalted antithesis as those numbers for a simple sum problem:  from two ends of the spectrum ,sometimes, though they both meed in the middle where the numerological beauty occurs.  A great example f famous numbers might belong with Simon Stevin (1548-1620), who introduced the idea of decimal numbers in his 36-page De Thiende ('The Art of Tenths") in 1585  His was an idea that replaced much more cumbersome earlier methods of representation.  So, the number 3.14159 would be written in the Stevin notation as (where in this case numbers enclosed by brackets, i.e. "[9]" would have been represented in print as a 9 within a circle) 3[0]1[1]4[2]1[3]5[4]9[5].  It is also seen here:

One item that attracted my attention--easily so--was the following problem:

It was also the only illustration in the 284-page book.  And it makes sense, I think, because squirrel hunting is just what people did at this time, and the calculation could be a useful one.  Still, it is an unusual image to set to work illustrating a math problem--and interesting. 

The Endless Immensity and Finite View of the Infinite of Thomas Wright, 1754

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2064

Thomas Wright (1711-1786) saw about as deeply into the deep as just about anyone else--he looked into the night sky and pretty much saw all of it. In his book, An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, Founded upon the Laws of Nature¹, he described a version of the universe that was influential in the thinking of Kant and Herschel, finding a rectangular/squashed "finite infinity" of stars, "a vast infinite Gulph, or Medium, every Way extended like a Plane, and inclosed between two Surfaces".

 

Our Milky Way, which at the time was thought to be the entire universe rather than a galaxy as it was later discovered to be--one galaxy in a seemingly endless sea of galaxies--was presciently seen by Wilkins as being but one assembly of stars in an "endless immensity" of stars:

"And farther since without any impiety; since
as the creation is, so is the Creator also magni-
fied, we may conclude in consequence of an in-
finity, and an infinite all-active power; that is
the visible creation is supposed to be full of si-
derial systems and planetay worlds, so on, in
like similar manner, the endless immensity is an
unlimited plenum of creations not unlike the
known Universe."--page 143. (Again, the "Universe" eferred to here is the Milky Way galaxy.)

Wright's vision of this plethora of Universes, in which each creation is one like the Milky Way--a radical thought in 1750:

[Part of me wants to include the first Wright engraving in this blog's series on the History of Lines, seeing as how they represent the great Something that seem to be infinitely binding the infinity of universes...]

Wright also writes on the minuteness of the human condition, of the perfect sense of nothingness that is the Earth in a sea of infinite possibilities of other earths and earthy creations, which was definitely an outpost of thinking in 1750:

"In this great celestial creation, the catastro-
phe of a world, such as ours, or even the to-
tal dissolution of a system of Worlds, may pos-
sibly be no more to the great author of nature,
than the most common accident in life with us,
and in all probability such final and general
doom-days may be as frequent there, as even
birth-days, or mortality with us upon the Earth.
This idea has something so cheerful in it, that
I own I can never look upon the Stars without
wondering why the whole world does not be-
come Astronomers; and that men endowed with
sense and reason, should neglect a science they
are naturally so much interested in, and so ca-
pable of enlarging the understanding, as next to
a demonstration, must convince them of their
immortality, and reconcile them to all those lit-
tle difficulties incident to human nature, with-
out the least anxiety."--page 132

 

Notes

1.  The full title:  An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, Founded upon the Laws of Nature, and solving by Mathematical Principles the General Phenomena of the Visible Creation ; and particularly the Via Lactea. Comprised in Nine Familiar Letters from the Author to his Friend. And illustrated with upwards of thirty graven and mezzo-tinted Plates by the best Masters. London, MDCCL." Full test, here.

 2. An odd note about Thomas Wright's personal history, from Science, 1902: "A word, in passing, about Wright. Like many another, so unfortunate as to live ere the times were ripe, he has been consigned to unmerited oblivion. Even the writer of the entry upon him in the ' Dictionary of National Biography '—a work so uniformly accurate — is unaware of the sources from which information could have been obtained, and so has nothing to tell, — does not even know the dates of his birth and death, or why he was called 'of Durham."--[Science, N. S. Vol. XIII. No. 321. 2-22-1902

An interesting poem by Rafinesque to start of his edition of Wilkins:

"Where ends the range and limits have been set
To mortal eyes, there mental sight begins
To fathom space, and worlds invisible
Surveys, admires
The mind must feel that space can have no bound*,
Whatever number be of things or thoughts
Others may be beyond—and thus behind
The Nebulas and Belts, our Galaxies
Of stormy clouds and oceans
There stands the central land and throne
Of our wide Universe, the home of Angels,
The seat of Love Divine"
Rafinesque, Poem on Instability, found at the beginning of Rafinesque's 1837 American edition of Wright's 1750 work. 

City Plans and Snowflakes, 1842

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post  
 

 

(Jean Baptiste) Amedee Couder wrote L'Architecture et l'industrie comme moyen de perfection sociale, which was published in Paris (by Brockhaus et Avenarius) in 1842. (Its actually a fairly scarce book, with only two copies found in the WorldCat directory.) I was surprised by this lovely plan among its slim 52 pages--it reminds me of a snowflake. (See also Snowflakes and Fort Construction, which appeared earlier on this blog, here.)

Projet d'un palais des Arts et de l'industrie.  18x14 inches. 

[(Please not that the image below is from http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b530065524--I've used their digital image rather than my own because my copy is folded in quarters and is too large and too-attached-to-the-book to get a decent image of it.]

 

Some Interesting Links for Antiquarian Slang Dictionaries and the Like

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

 DICTIONARY OF THE VULGAR TONGUE. A DICTIONARY OF BUCKISH SLANG, UNIVERSITY WIT, AND PICKPOCKET ELOQUENCE.

[Here]  UNABRIDGED FROM THE ORIGINAL 1811 EDITION WITH A FOREWORD BY ROBERT CROMIE COMPILED ORIGINALLY BY CAPTAIN GROSE. AND NOW CONSIDERABLY ALTERED AND ENLARGED, WITH THE MODERN CHANGES AND IMPROVEMENTS, BY A MEMBER OF THE WHIP CLUB. ASSISTED BY HELL-FIRE DICK, AND JAMES GORDON, ESQRS. OF CAMBRIDGE; AND WILLIAM SOAMES, ESQ. OF THE HON. SOCIETY OF NEWMAN'S HOTEL.

"The merit of Captain Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue has been long and universally acknowledged. But its circulation was confined almost exclusively to the lower orders of society: he was not aware, at the time of its compilation, that our young men of fashion would at no very distant period be as distinguished for the vulgarity of their jargon as the inhabitants of Newgate; and he therefore conceived it superfluous to incorporate with his work the few examples of fashionable slang that might occur to his observation...."--from the preface.