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
De Bow's Review in 1867, in the dire straights of the antebellum South, in the doom and despair of the just-finished war, lashed out like a wicked Alex Jones conspiratorial wingnut against the Northern states and anyone who comforted them. Published in Nashville, all I have of the magazine presently is this loose issue for November 1867, and in spite of the energetically positive view depicted on the cover of the magazine had little to do with what you found in the writing inside.
The leading article is an odd one, yelling about Great Britain manufacturing the cause of anti-slavery in the United States, which pretty much is made abundantly clear in the title, "Black Republicanism, the Dupe and Agent of British Policy in Respect to American Interests". The "scheme of so-called Negro Emancipation...is a British Invention" crushing the U.S. which "suffered immeasurably" under the Abolition Program, "the fatal deadfall of the abolition trap", all of which in the end will "crush the innards out of the "Black Republican Yankee". It was the Brits according to the writer of this article who FORCED THE UNITED STATES TO ABOLISH SLAVERY" [caps in the original].
It is difficult to find children's art from the 19th century--original work, printed work, published work. Very difficult--perhaps even more so for the published work than the manuscript. It is easy to understand why: first, the children would need access to paper and pencil or pen and ink--items that had some cost, that were not inexpensive, not available to the vast majority of children. Their work was ephemeral, produced on slate, or in horn books, or in charcoal on a wall, or in dust. Then, if the children did manage to record their creativity, then it would have to survive a generation of possessionship within their own lifetimes--to survive from the first part of the 19th century, the paperwork would have to survive five generations or more, 150+ years of house cleanings. Tough odds.
That is why it is also a little special when I come across larger manuscript works that have survived against these odds.
This map of the United States isn't so simple as it seems--although there are no major cities located in any states, many rivers are, as well as mountain ranges. The coastlines get a very nice treatment with recessive blue lines, giving the map a certain dimensionality, and the lettering of the states is also distinctive, with the terminals of the letters in the state names ending with dots or lines.
I'd guess that the map was done around Centennial time, 1876 to the mid-1880's, the biggest clues being the inclusive of Wyoming (which sets a date after 1868) and the large Dakota Territory, which would become North and South Dakota in 1889.
As maps by kids go, this one is fairly large at 12x15"--it is about the largest single sheet artwork that I have in a 150-odd pieces of antiquarian children's art collection...also I wonder about how the kid in 1880-whatever got her/himself such a large piece of paper to work with, as it seems to me to be not a simple task.
It was a surprise, finding M. Bollee's article ("Sur une nouvelle machine a calculer") in this 1889 Comptes Rendus, peeking around in that big 10-pound volume looking for something else. It was very easy to miss if you weren't looking for it, just a few pages long in a 1000-page book. But there it was, nestled comfortably in pp 737-739. It these few pages Bollee describes his machine and with particular reference to his innovative approach to direct multipilication--a fine addition (ha!) to the long line of contributions by Babbage and Clement, Scheutz, Wiberg and Grant and Hamann.
The article in the Comptes Rendus is not illustrated, though I did find an image of the machine in The Manufacturer and Builder:
A.J. Perlis' and John Carrs' "Characteristics of the Small-Scale Computers" looked innocent enough, 12" tall and one folded piece of paper, and published in 1956, but there was a lot more to the simple publication than you'd expect from something so modest. The authors--John W. Carr III and Alan J. Perlis--were heavy hitters, and so I really wasn't very surprised to see what they had done "inside", though I was impressed and happy to see the data. Displayed on the 12x16" sheet of paper are 15 data points on 14 computers, many of them classic/famous: the 650 IBM, UNIVAC, Elecom, Alawac. (Remember that when you're looking at purchase price and monthly rental amounts that the 1956 dollar is equal to about $8.70 in 2015 dollars, so that $3275/month for the 650 would be about $30k. The $136k for the Datatron is about a million today.)
[Image source: FUTURAMA.Published by General Motors, 1940. 24pp. Original wrappers. Provenance: the Pamphlet Collection, Library of Congress. ]
The 1939 World's Fair in NYC famously exhibited a spherical attraction that exhibited a semi-robotic display of what the future would be like--a future that was only 21 years away, in 1960. There would be an enormous amount of weight on the shoulders of 1960, given what the World's Fair had to say about it in 1939. Few things were very right, and many of course were necessarily wrong--but that must be the case when looking into the short-ended future with a monstrous amount of anticipation. That--and since this was a feel-good celebration--nobody was talking about the world war that had already started.
One thing is for sure--the pavilion's creator, General Motors, did foresee that highways and automobiles will be in high demand up there in the tomorrowland of 1960. The display was designed by the fantastic Norman bel Geddes, who actually expanded on his superhighway theme in the next year with his book Magic Motorways (which can be read here). Anyway people were very excited by the whole affair--waiting in line for a few hours, winding their way through the pavilion to take their seats in a circular gallery overlooking a vast and complex assemblage of miniature societal models, the seating arena rotated to give the viewers views of the entire display. More than 26 million people saw the display over a six month period.
26 million is a big number. Futurama drew as many people in six months as the three New York City baseball teams (the Yankees, Giants and Dodgers) brought in for almost the entire decade. It is also equal to all of the deaths suffered by the Soviet Union during WWII.
I guess this was as good a vision as any--or at least it didn't seem to involve very much planning outside the new automatic automobile nervous system that would leech into the life-blood of the country. Other planned visions of the future do not look quite so good. For example, Le Corbuser's demolition of central Paris to make way for his Soviet apartment block reconstruction in his Voisin Plan (1925):
Again, this is not a wholesale look into the future, just the resurfacing of one of the world's greatest cities.
A man with a little bigger vision, Frank Lloyd Wright, saw a heavier future in his Broadacre CIty:
I'm not sure how these domed cities worked. B. Fuller had an idea like this for central Manhattan that I wrote about earlier in this blog, but his idea escaped me too.
V.I. Feodosiev (with his two initials looking ironically similar to the V1 that he wrote about) and G.B. Simiarev wrote a classic textbook1 in rocket technology which was published in Moscow in 1958. Even though it was translated and published in English the following year by Academic Press, the version here seems to have been translated in the same year as its Russian edition. I've had some translations-on-demand in the store that were fast-tracked for the particular agency that needed the work, translations that sometimes didn't appear in English for years afterwards. In this case the Feodosiev was translated (anonymously) for an undisclosed agency, though this copy wound up in the library of the NASA Division of Research Information2. It could well be that the work was produced for NASA but frankly there are many other candidates for the point of origin of interest. This copy is definitely different from the Academic Press translation, so at least two different translations were made of the text.
I really don't have that much to offer here on this edition, except to note its differences from the Academic Press version, though this may be of some use to someone working in this area.
The original is available via the blog's bookstore, here.
Here's an abstract/summary of the work (which has a slightly different title) by the Academic Press 1959 version of this publication:
"Introduction to Rocket Technology focuses on the dynamics, technologies, aerodynamics, ballistics, theory of servomechanisms, principles of navigation instruments, and electronics involved in rocket technology."
"The publication first takes a look at the basic relationships in the theory of reactive motion; types of jet propelled aircraft and their basic construction; and types of reaction motors and their construction. Discussions focus on air breathing motors, anti-aircraft rockets, long range bombardment rockets, surface to surface, short range bombardment missiles, thrust of a rocket motor, and operating efficiency of a rocket motor. The text then examines rocket motor fuels and processes in the combustion chamber of a rocket motor."
I really don't have much to say about this image except that it is a very nicely designed thing, an advertisement for fountain pens produced by Germany's leading pen manufacturer (Soennecken, established 1875), This full-page/front-page illustration appeared in Illustrirte Zeitung for 13 April 1911.
This two-page spread in the Illustrated London News appeared at the end of June, 1940, nine months into WWII, just two weeks or so before the beginning of the Battle of Britain. This was an extended battle lasting until September 1941 in which there were hundreds of German bombing raids flown over the U.K., with most of the damage and civilian deaths centered in London. In all some 40,000 civilians were killed in the raids, about half of them in London. Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Coventry, Glasgow, Hull, Manchester, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Sheffield, Southampton, Swansea, and other cities were also bombed, some of them pulverized--for example, Hull received an enormous amount of attention for being a port city and easily identifiable by air, and was attacked more than 80 times, and Coventry's central city was decimated. (Enter "Battle of Britain" or "Blitz" in the Google search box for the other posts on this blog on this subject.)
But right at the beginning of this period the popular weekly published this listing of enemy planes--it was a smart thing to do, because it made millions of people into observers and data gatherers.
The artist of this work was the very very busy and talented G.H. Davis, who I have written about numerous times on this blog (just enter his name in the Google search box and you find a number of interesting tech drawings that he completed for the ILN).
