A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Point, and many other places... 5000+ total posts since 2008.. Contact johnfptak at gmail dot com
"...the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton."--Einstein on Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), only 48 when he died, was one of the supreme science minds of modern history, a giant among giants, a scientist who performed the second-greatest unification of physics after Newton.
Source: "Scientific Worthies, XVIII--James Clerk Maxwell." In: Nature, 27 October 1881, the weekly issue on page 601 (though a single page the article runs a tight 1500 words) with the fine steel engraved portrait of Maxwell and the article occupying pp 601-602.
The published works of James Clerk Maxwell, from the Maxwell Foundation, here along with a chronological arrangement, here. His last will and testament, here. Internet Archive collection o fMaxwell's online works, here. And lastly a short biography from Wolfram Research, here.
I'm not so sure that this is "odd"--it is certainly unusual, and unusual in an interesting, surprising, and constructive way. A Book of Recipes and Suggestions for the Use of Toast at first glance stretches the idea of necessity, and maybe it still does, but at the end of the day this is a very nicely designed, considered and encyclopedic end-all treatment of toast. It states on the title that it is "the first exclusive Toast Recipe Book ever published", and I'll take it at its word. Happily.
So, we have recipes for the Cinnamon: cinnamon toast, honey, marmalade, jam (!), maple, pineapple, marshmallow orange, super-toast griddle cakes, super toast waffles. the French Toasts: raisin, milk, prune, orange, banana, eggs royal, and French toasted bacon. Then there's eggs in bread cakes, meat pies, deviled rarebit a la toast, tuna a la super-toast, shrimp Louisiana toast, sausage toast rolls, super-toast meat pies, toasted super cheese rings, super toast hash, crown frankfurter roasted toast, eggs benedict on super-toast, cannibal toast rarebit waffles, and so on. That's about a quarter of the recipes, and it seems about 300% more toast recipes than I've ever heard of before. Probably more.
Nothing quite sells like the smell of fear--or the sound of it. In 1961, about the scariest sound was the air raid siren, which is what opens this record album, If the Bomb Falls. At what was probably the highest height of the Cold War, with schoolchildren taught to "duck and cover" under their wooden school desks to protect themselves from a massive nuclear fireball, and in which thousands of families constructed their own fallout shelters, the Tops record company decided to fan the flames of public fear by producing a this-is-what-it-takes to survive effort.
For the most part, Tops was a low rent label, producing stuff that sounded like ('sound alikes") a current hit, and by indulging in 'exotic" music like its Voodoo hit. If the Bomb Falls answered its own fear-stoked questions with not-very-good responses. That's where the napkins come in--among other things, the album suggests that you keep a two-week supply of napins on hand, in addition to general-purpose paper towels and the like. Also: batteries, just in case the power goes out, and DDT, which went unexplained. And: be aware that in the fallout shelter there will be a period of unusual closeness at hand, testing your privacy.
There is of course a lot of pertinent information survival information on the record, though it comes with very padded edges, and with very little flavor for what radiation is all about, and what it will do. Plus all of that wicked winged death stuff that was waiting for you outside the bunker.
But this is what was done, at the time, to prevent general panic in the though of nuclear attack--stuff like this offered their own bits of religiosity, with the promise of possible islands of heaven here and there, heavens buried in your backyard or scooped out the side of your basement. Like any belief system, it was based in, well belief--and belief doesn't take that much firming-up once somebody believes in it. Things will work out if you believe they will; science and logic take the background in cases of a staggering hope of survival based upon belief (and instructions from micrgoove vinyl).
In the end, what you are left with in the event of nuclear holocaust is what is in the middle of this record:
Other Tops producers included these lovelies (source of which is here):
My eyes didn't quite focus on this cover when I first saw it--I was in the process of reviewing several hundred pamphlets, and for some reason I saw mostly color and not so much form. When I focused, I hoped that it would be exactly what it was--a do-it-yourself (mostly) catalog of designs for wheeled recreational toys for kids. Sportub, le Jeu Reel, was composed by William Derlaz and printed in 1937 in Geneva, and held the key to the design for a host of soap-box-derby things many of which were assured to cause minor fun injury. It is complicated and simple at the same time, with enough information to shopw you how to build these things, with everything on one small page.
In its way this little pamphlet with its two dozen designs is nothing short of a little bit of sublime.
(As it turns out, this pamphlet is pretty rare--no copies show up in the massive WorldCat/First Search cataloging tool; and there are also no hits in Google. If you wanted this, you may certainly have it, findable for sale in our bookstore section.)
That is the non-question1 that can be easily answered by anyone in the U.K.(and Belgium, and France, and the Netherlands) from 1940-1945. That question was asked by Wernher von Braun of himself, semi-third person, wondering aloud to his interviewer about what he saw was the unintentional use of his A-4 rocket--renamed the V-2, or Vergeltungswaffe 2, Retaliation weapon 2, or Vengeance Weapon 2--in the rocket attack upon Britain (and to a lesser extent Belgium and then to a lesser extent as well on France and the Netherlands). He writes that the A-4 was intended for interplanetary flight--and at some distant point that was true, but not so much in the early 1940's, when the intention regarding the use of the rocket mattered most. Perhaps von Braun was hanging on to a distant memory, back to the early days when he dreamed along with Hermann Oberth and others about leaving the Earth.
"The A-4's subsequent career is no mystery" says von Braun, without irony and in high reportage.
Indeed not. The V-2 was huge compared to its older and slower brother, the V-1--it was 45' tall and weighed 28,000 pounds, delivering a 2,000lb Amatol warhead. The odiously-sound-of-death V-1 came in slowly, slow enough to be outrun by a Spitfire--the V-2 came in with a different awful sound, the crack and boom of the sound barrier as it braced for a Mach 2+ impact (which would cause the detonation of the weapon). 6,000 of these weapons were made (beginning in September 1943) and more than 5,000 were launched.
These weapons killed some 9,000 Earthlings, so the weapons didn't really get very close to another planet. Nor, really, was it ever intended to during the war. Von Braun et al used it very effectively as a bargaining too with Hitler to gain more money for the program--not for interplanetary exploration, but to kill as many people as possible. I don't know what von Braun was complaining about here in this brief semi-memoir about his A-4 becoming the V-2--it certainly could have come as a surprise.
And that 9,000 killed figure is misleading--it is actually more like 21,000. That figure would include the 12,000 human slaves from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp who were killed or worked to death while building the rockets. So in a weird and horrible twist of sick ironies, the weapon actually consumed more lives than it caused in its use for death. How von Braun didn't know about the thousands of slave laborers at work on his non-Moon rocket is simply impossible to comprehend.
Von Braun was single-minded and determined--lives consumed and lost, plus an enormous amount of money (his project costing more than the Manhattan Project) and energy. The return on this particular investment was exceptionally poor in the long run--close to the point of the whole affair being created by the Allies to crush the Nazi economy.
Notes:
1. The question is part of a sub-head in the von Braun interview that appeared in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, volume 15, no. 3, May-June 1956, pp 125-145, "Reminiscences of German Rocketry".
The original is available for sale via our blog bookstore, here.
This is just so splendid, I had to stop and admire it, publicly. The design of the front page of Nature is a lovely thing in itself, and the placement, and spacing, it all works so well together. But the big treat of course is the "Browning New Miniature Microscope", which we are told is in 1:1 scale. It "may also be carried in the waistcoat pocket" if only I could remember where my waistcoat was. The instrument was good for 15x and 35x, and came prepared with tiny foreceps to hold natural objects, but it was also of course built to accept miniature slides. Just for the record, 19th century microscope slides are generally things of high beauty--miniature microscope slides from that time are quite simply the bee's knees.
The Browning scope came complete, with fitted case, for three pounds. Nowadays the same instrument in lovely condition might bring $3000--and worth it.
For some reason this short article--found in Nature for 6 February 1879--was titled "A Real Telegraph". "Real" telegraphs were in existence for quite some time, more than 30 years at this point. What the author meant in this case was that rather than have a key operator tap out the message in Morse Code, the sender would be writing out the message in long hand, and the receiver would gather up the message so that it appeared in recognizable letters and words rather than dots and dashes. The inventor's name was E.A. Cowper, and he brought to the telegraphic art something as "startlingly" as the "marvels" of the telephone, which had been invented just three years earlier. [This paper is offered for sale at our blog bookstore, here.]
The author describes the appearance of the script on the receiving end seeming as though to have been guide by a "spirit hand", such as the highly unexpected result even to the trained scientific reporter.
A somewhat longer article appeared in the New York Times a few weeks later, the full text of which is here.
This bibliography for George Boole just came in very handy, so I decided to distribute it. It appears in Treatise on Differential Equations, printed in 1865 and edited by Isaac Todhunter, the full text of which is found here. A very good entry on Boole is found in the Encyclopedia Britannica 11th, here.
The question above is probably seldom asked and probably even less than so required, but it sure does look good for the title of a post. The pillowed polyhedra came into light while I was breezing through some issues of the British Nature magazine for 1893/4--the title of the work of course was a lovely thought and the author of the paper was the mega-gifted and highly significant Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), but the bait that made me swallow the hook on the paper was the illustration.
There are many (i.e., 1,496,225,352) different forms of the convex 14-faced polyhedron tetrakaidekahedron (see Wolfram Math
for a quick summary)--this is the first I can remember being displayed
on a 19th century pillow. Kelvin was particularly interested in
displaying geometrical figures in three dimensional space, and would
return to the issue numerous times, particularly in the Baltimore Lectures on Molecular Dynamics and the Wave Theory of Light (see page 606ff).
Notes:
Lord Kelvin, (William Thomson, 1824-1907), "On the Homogeneous Division of Space", in Nature, two issues, as follows: (1) 8 March 1894, pp 445-448; and (2) 15 March 1894, pp 469-471. A version of this paper appears slightly earlier (17 January) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
Both papers are available for purchase via our blog bookstore, here.
These are remarkably interesting papers--especially considering their brevity.
It is interesting to note the list of what Thomson "is known for" in his Wiki entry:
