JF Ptak Science Books

History of Blank and Missing Things: Letters

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  [Partof the series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things]

This is a good example of one of those "mysteries" which seem hardly so when you find the very straightforward answer.  The appearance of this floating "a":

The non-mystery is a product of a chapter beginning in a beautiful and very early (1476)  printed edition of Aristotle's De animalibus. At first glance it looks like it might be an attempt at design/spacing, an illustration in a modern Dadaist vein, capturing space and attention while using hardly anything at all, a simple floating letter, an intentional placement of an object in an unusual field. It is that, in a very minor way, but the attention-getting device was used to gather up the focus of only one person.  The little "a"  is simply a place-holder, waiting for the the next stage in production of the book, for the rubricator to come in and decorate the space with a magnificent/articulated/flourishing capital "A", which was the practice of this time.   

The reason why rubricated letters weren't printed with the rest of the book is that in general the initials (and intricate coloring) were too complex and too colorful to be a product of the press. (The first Gutenberg book appeared in 1456 and although the first printed color appeared in the next year from the press of Fust the practice of multi-color printing with any sort of intricate application would take until the first third or so of the 18th century.) The artist responsible would come in and work on these sheets calling for decorated capitals before the book was bound--the letter "a" was there as a reminder for the work to be done--it also was the only way some of them knew what needed to be painted, as not every rubricator could read (thought they knew the letters of course). 

A Note on a History of Lying Down--Sinking Life Preservers and Goiter Chairs

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1870

I don't have much to comment on in these images, just that they are striking and came to me in short order, and that they are all pretty narrow things.  They could fall easily into a Skinny category, or perhaps better still, they might slide nicely into the prototype for a series of posts on The History of Lying Down.  Or perhaps a combination of the two, or one being a sub-category of the other.  Certainly a history of humans lying down would be fairly massive, but scaling it down to late 19th century images of skinny and lying down might narrow the field a bit. 

The first, (above),  is from Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig), and published in 1878; it depicts an American effort at simplified swimming, though sometimes when you simplify an already-simple thing, the results are fairly complex.  I haven't much of an idea about how this would make sense, seeing that the body's strongest muscles are not being used at all; further, judging by the flag, this guy is moving feet-first, and the whole procedure, despite body suit, look as though it would be terrifically cumbersome and bloaty.  And with the geartrain, plus the weight of the driveshaft and propeller, I don't know how anyone would keep afloat.  Or how someone would keep their neck in that position for any period of time. In the world of Good Ideas, this would be an Anti-Good Idea. 

Foot's Adjustable Chair Couch, which I found in The Illustrated London News for September 1902, was remarkable for its cushion-y formlessness, accepting the reader to itself like a body with a goiter.  There's just something terribly wrong with it, reminding me somehow of undeserved and needlessly- rewarded comfort--too much comfort foully a perfectly reasonable invention like The Chair. 

Next is this skinny, low, light semi-automated shaded hammock; little, narrow, and maybe comfortable to fit a 120-pound person.  This appeared in the Illustrierte Zeitung, again, for 1892.

Another idea, combining a bulky hiding and storage device with a slender and narrow place to lie down is S. Luder's 1883 patent for a rolling and folding bed in a chest of drawers:

 

In any event, this start of a list is simply in jest, an attempt at categorizing a few odd images and find a bit of complementarity where there is none. 

Thomas Jefferson's Arithmetic of Black People, 1783

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1869

I was picking my way through Mr. Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (written in 1783/4), and dipped into Query 14, "Laws".  Six pages in came the Great Man's thoughts on being white and being black. He really didn't have much hope for the black person in the new United States, and in an odd way, I think, did a sort of arithmetic calibration on the black race, giving a few points here and there "for", and piling up the count "against", making an overall large negative number for the possibility of the black and white races living together.  [The full text of the work us available, here.]

In very many cases in his later writing Jefferson re-evaluates this thinking, as seen in this example, writing to Benjamin Banneker in 1791 ('"No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence"), and in many others (as in the very full example¹ of this 1809  letter to Henri Gregoire, shown below).

Jefferson had already written somewhat earlier in the book about blacks on page 197, where he discusses albinism in black people as part of a natural history chapter dealing with animals:

To this catalogue of our indigenous animals, I will add a short account of an anomaly of nature, taking place sometimes in the race of negroes brought from Africa, who, though black themselves, have in rare instances, white children, called Albinos...

This is not promising. This is also the first appearance in the book of the word "negro". [I wrote a short bit on the history of the fight for the capitalization of the letter "N" in "Negro" here; this was a fight that dragged itself into the first third of the 20th century.]

I am no Jefferson scholar, not by any means.  Only familiar with the "basics" of Jefferson, and his design and architecture and technical aspects, and somewhat familiar with his writing on the basic morality of slave-holding, I was surprised to find what he had written about constitution of black people here in the Notes. 

Perhaps I shouldn't've been so, but I was.  Perhaps I wasn't as familiar with Jefferson during the time of the Revolution as I thought, seeing him as not only a man who changed the product of his time but who was also a product of them, writing in his present on the state of blacks in America that seems to have been seen as a great error in the mind of the Thomas Jefferson who would read these thoughts in the future, and refute (and perhaps repudiate) them.

Bad Idea Department: F Lloyd Wright and the Goodness of the Bombing of Britain

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1866  

[I've written earlier on a related and very bad idea, Atomurbia, for atom-bomb-proofing American cities, here.]

Reading Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke I found a set of very unflattering and semi-unbelievable quotes from the unpretty Frank Lloyd Wright.  Present at a MoMA exhibition he was sharing with D.W. Griffith (detailed in the publication Two Great Americans published by the museum in 1940), Wright chose the background of the Battle of Britain, in which German bombs were falling on English cities killing thousands, to promote his city design idea of Broadacre (among other things).

In development since 1932 (appearing in his book The Disappearing City) and kept on until his death in 1959, Wright's idea for city /suburban development spread a "city" ti its limits, nearly stripping it of its citiness and expanding it towards the horizon in a wide and low wave of a complete suburbia.  With this, Wright must have reasoned, Broadacre City must have seemed "bomb-proof" compared to the normal concept of the city, and decided to make the best of a horrible situation to promote his idea.

And with this, he was quoted in November 1940 in the New York Times, saying:

"I would not say that the bombing of Europe is not a blessing, because at least it will give the architects there a chance to start all over again"

To say that this was an idea best left to the imagination rather than in the pages of the Paper of Record goes without saying.

And what of the architects whose buildings were lost during the Blitz?  Say, like Christopher Wren?

"I don't think that anyone will miss Wren's work very much" (This, and the quote above, found in Baker, page 248.)

I've had a problem with Wright for a long time, but had never bumped into this part of his thinking before.

[Wright's wrongs on the Bombing of Britain are also recorded in Peter Shedd Reed (ed), The Show to End All Shows: Frank Lloyd Wright and The Museum of Modern Art, 1940 (MoMA 2004, here), and here, in the Milwaukee Journal for 22 June 1941, and also in the News Chronicle of London in"How I would Rebuild London"]

 

 

Booze-Vision Atomic Farming and Other Nuclear Dreams

JF Ptak Science Books  (Expanding an Earlier Post)

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 the possibility that it would be petroleum that would drive the entire production of food forward. 

There were many proposed uses for atomic energy over the next few decades, most not very good--the Ford Nucleon, a screamer with a 5,000-mile cruising range powered by a steam engine driven by a small uranium fission muscle box in the car's rear, was one of those ideas.  The nuclear-powered submarine, which sounded like the Nucleon in 1946, was a solid workable idea, a science fiction come true in 1954 with the launch of the USS Nautilus (SSN-571).

Nuclear medicine--although not powering an atomic heart--was a very important development that seemed not conceivable in the decade preceding its development.  Atomic-powered helicopters, trains and planes are other examples of the not-good-idea variety.  The nuclear powered space vehicle, which was first proposed in 1946 by Stan Ulam (and then in a report written by him and C.J. Everet  On a Method of Propulsion of Projectiles by Means of External Nuclear Explosions. Part I. University of California, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, August 1955, pictured and linked below), has morphed into something monumental in Project Orion, and to me sounds like a fabulous idea:

[Source here.]

IBut getting back to the liquor ads, here's an weirdly prescien and naive 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.)

Outsider and Found-Dadaist Logic: Naive Captions and Text Illustrations, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1858

This pamphlet (Are You Dressed Correctly?) comes from my extensive Naïve Surreal collection, which is composed of (a) pamphlets that were concerned with important ephemera in the past that today looks implausible  or impossible, and (b) pamphlets that addressed issues of, shall we say, a mostly-internal, very personal, High Imagination that may or may not have been part of the visual world or the imagined world of others.Kathleen Enright's Are You Dressed Correctly? (1935) fits into category (a), mainly because the captions of the illustrations are  semi-devoid of connectivity with their illustrations, and in their simplicity are a bit of a challenge to make any association. That, or it is easy to disassociate image from caption and vice versa , making it easy for the images to slide right out of the book and stand on their own as some sort of self-educated Dadaist statement of simplicity. In this way they can almost form their own Alphabet of the Obvious. 

Happy Anniversary! Unsliced Bread--the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1855     Almost on this Day in 1932...

Thanks to Emma Digh Ptak who gave me a book on the history of bread for Father's Day!  Thanks, Buddy! 

This expression has a bit of a scent of death, of corporate sameness, about it. Its tale is one of innovation, deceit, deception; of ridding independence and quality, of providing a gross replacement for quality in the name of mechanized progress. The progress came in the form of a continuous loop delivering exactly the same loaf of bread, endlessly, to be cut and bagged and delivered to consumers--brought to us at t he expense of 97% of all of the bakeries that have ever existed in this country.

The replacement of the small bakery began slowly, around 1850, proceeded with caution to the turn of the century, and was basically completed by 1940. In 1900 the small bakery outnumbered the corporate producers by 80:1. By 1939 the large company absorbed the practice of 95% of all dollars spent on baked goods. It was the continuous-belt bread baker that started of the replacement process in 1850 and 1866, sending the bread through long ovens on the endless feed. This was the start--it was in the high speed mixers that made the domination possible, thoroughly dispersing the yeast throughout the dough, making it possible to produce almost the exact same loaf of bread time and time again. It was then that the bread cutters--which had been around for some time but more or less perfected in 1928--could really do their job and finish production. The cutters would work exceptionally well so long as the stuff that they were cutting was the same--this done, multiple loaves could be cut every second, hundreds of times a minute, thanks to the mixer. Efficiency had reached high speed, and the cutters performed their revolutionary task.

By 1942 the show was over for the small bakery--their non-uniform, hand made, thickish, irregular products replaced by bread clones: white, spongy and terrifically porous, and something that, once squeezed, would return to its original shape.

The masterwork on the coming of mechanization is by S. Gideon, and is called Mechanization Takes Command, published by Oxford, (New  York), in 1948.  It is a work of great beauty and insight.  

Atomic Power with God, 1946

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1854

Rev. Franklin Hall was a busy man:  with detritus haloes of failing humanity floating above everyone  (making them susceptible to the eternal lake of fire), he was on a concerted mission to save as many people as who would listen to his special message. Hall's litany was equal parts simple and complex, as we can see even by just the title of one of his pamphlets: Because of Your Unbelief , Chains of Bondage, Food Slaves, Belly Worshippers, Fleshly Lusts, Unbelief, Doubts & Fears, Carnality (which I wrote about here), which was a short work of considerable claims with no basis of correctness or proof.

He moved on, assuredly inspired by the use of the atomic bomb in August 1945, to write Atomic Power with God thru Fasting and Prayer (received by the Copyright Office in September 1946). As much as this might sound like an adult beverage of your choice, it is not; he set his course not on atomic power per se, but on the connection of fasting and prayer, because, as he writes on page 37, "the Bible is Ahead of Science". (There haven't been very many books at all written with the words "God" and "atomic" in their titles¹--and this is one of those few.  And the Hall book is actually four of them, as this very small work went through  a number of revisions and four editions.)

Which I guess is all fine and good, to a point, so long as the health debits do not pile up too high; the rest is a subject of faith, and about there there is not much that can be said that would be of any use.  In the long run it was rather tempestuous of Mr. Hall to assume that using the words "atomic" and "power" in the title of his re-polished gem-let was good to win him a few new readers, surfing on the tide of everything else in the world that was just at that time adding the prefix "atomic" to whatever product there was to be sold².  And God evidently was right there among them. 

Notes:

Air-Punk: Underwater Cyborg Diving Suit (1797)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1853

Well, not really. It is however an early diving suit (and perhaps the earliest apparatus worn on the person and submerged) the creative and comparatively lightweight effort of Karl Heinrich Klingert, who produced it at the very end of the 18th century, in 1797 or thereabouts.  The suit was made of a metal helmet and wide metal girdle, with the vest and pants made of a waterproof leather, and with leather (?) leg straps.  The air would be pumped down to the diver from a turret above (see below, just) and would arrive in the diver's helmet via weighted air tubes. 

Here's a side and occupied view:

Magritte-Like Disorienting Geometry in Found-Art Urban Design, 1925

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

These images "Traffic on Three Levels; Solving Street Congestion" from the Illustrated London News (15 August 1925) struck me as something much more--or much less?--than their appeal to urban design.  I think that it is very difficult to look at these images and not see them from the top, down. Even by the time you get to the fourth image at bottom right, the design still pulls attracts your eye to the top of the image and away from the traffic scene below.

They seem to have that sense of abstract art, achieving a type of geometry and disorientation, both at the same time, pulling you into the work and de-arranging it at teh same time.  And that to me makes it highly artful, if unintentional.  They are sort of hallucinating--I know that is a bit of a stretch--but their confusion of the expected with this sort of misty, unknown atmosphere, has a sense of Rene Magritte to them had he worked his magic in geometrical blocks. 

Daily Dose of Dr. Odd: Chess Covers from Science Fiction Pulpworld

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I don't often see pulp sci fi covers decorated with chess figures, but I did find these three, recently.  The first, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow" is interesting because of teh author.  Or "authors", as Lewis Padgett is a pseudonym for a husband and wife writing team, Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore.  And although there is a small sub-genre of married people.couples writing books together, few of them have taken a separate name for their efforts.  "Padgett" is one of them.  In any event, the chess pieces are unusual, and their appearance on the cover of a journal such as this makes this doubly-so. 

French Canadian Bean Soup & Fevered Last Words From a Bullet in the Belly

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1851

"STEVENS:  Yet you invented the coincidence.
TEMPLE:  Mrs Gowan Stevens did.
STEVENS:  Temple Drake did. Mrs Gowan Stevens is not even fighting in this class. This is Temple Drake’s.
TEMPLE: Temple Drake is dead.
STEVENS:  The past is never dead. It’s not even past."
--Mr. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

This is a Wordle of the stenographic recording of the last words of the gangster Dutch Shultz, slipping quickly into dark oblivion, the stenographer (F.J. Lang) at the foot of his deathbed recording all the man had to say. Arthur (Dutch Schultz) Flegenheimer was in rough shape, laying there in Newark, shot with a bullet in his belly, spiking a 106-degree temperature, and sliding back and forth between states of  insanity and lucidity. And say stuff he did--responding to the questions of a police detective (including a Sergeant Luke Conlon), Schultz's answers are remarkable for their tapestry of wrenching artfulness of drug-induced and mind-slipping schizo blather, sprinkled with infection induced fancy.  The cops were looking to see who it was that shot and put the Dutchmen in the bed--they weren't going to get any responses worth anything.  A number of the law enforcement officials, local and federal, tried to analyze the oracle after Schultz's death, but couldn't make any sense of it all.

William S. Burroughs, a supreme black-humorist and still dead, had at this idea and transcript long ago, and did a wonderful job with the story, a real achievement. 

I wonder what the last words were of F.J. Lang and Sgt. Conlon.

This is about the only place where I can add a note about another notorious gangster, Arnold Rothstein, partner of Meyer Lansky and fixer of the Black Sox World Series of 1919. He also had police questioning him as he lay dying, shot by an unnamed and uncaught assailant in NYC in November 1928. When asked who shot him, one of Rothstein's final replies was "Me mudder did it". 

On Being Obvious--Towards an Illustrated Alphabet of the Obvious

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1850

"It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind."--T.S. Eliot

"We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men".-- George Orwell 

"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact."--Arthur Conan Doyle

The obvious thing about the full sense of obviousness is that it isn't obvious. Sure, there are plenty of aspects and bits of obviousness that are obvious, but like reverse plasma flashes of lightning, and the great bulk of icebergs, and the tops of clouds and the interiors of mountains, there is much more to the state of Being Obvious than necessarily meets the eye, even when the clues are all visual. 

http://www.ww2incolor.com/other/3352567301_c98329d308_z.html

What is it that makes something "obvious"?  There must be hundreds of reasons to label something so, yet the cause of the labeling is much fuller than the label it wears.  There can be a rich and varied life in the obvious and its different stages, as rich and varied as snow and fog and clouds, though those examples seem to have more qualifiers and descriptors than the obvious does.  "Painfully"and "woefully" obvious are certainly two qualifiers for different states of obviousness, though at this level of inspection the different levels of obviousness seem to be a little oblivious. And yet there seems to be great depth in so many different aspects of The Obvious.

It would be nice to be able to construct a Geometry of the Obvious--of course this is entirely plausible so long as it doesn't actually have to mean anything or be rigorous in any way.  A fantasy geometry would then be pretty easy to construct (which also is being used for the letter "G" in our alphabet):

G   Geometrically Obvious:

It would be easy to assume that the visual assumption for the Aspect of Obvious would be the center of the image, though it is not necessarily so, even in this imaginary compilation of defining the obvious aspect of the photo. The stuff that makes something obvious can be anywhere.

And so to lay the groundwork for an Alphabet of The Obvious I've made a few selections, below--suggestions really for what the categories and assignments to letters might be. 

For example,this would be a fine example of:

A  The Absurd & Doubly Out of Place Obviousness--the horse seems to be the one with a sense of irony for the surroundings its quiet semi-absurdiy: 

http://hotparade.tumblr.com/post/24487294327/arthur-tress

 

B  Better-Him-Than-Me Obviousness:

 

 

The Very Seat of Solitary Utopian Anarchy--a Radical Approach from Scranton, 1878

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 1848

"In 1873, when Morse advocated an end to all political rule, Alcott commented about Morse in his journal.  'Once, I might have accepted fully his doctrine of Individual Sovereignty, ignoring all interference from institutions conventions and creeds of all kinds, as during the Fruitlands and non-taxpaying periods of my life.  It was putting this logic to its ultimate consequences, and individual issues,—abolishing the social and political order altogether. . . .  It left me an outcast and a vagabond.—  The sincere victim of a half-truth seen in the light of an idea at last'."--Amos Alcott, friend of Sidney H. Morse (author of the pamphlet below), from the site Alcott.net 

I just could not resist this pamphlet, all dressed in white and red, catchy and playful title...I thought it would be a nice catch for my Daily Dose of Dr. Odd series, until I realized straight away that it was a serious publication.  Well, the mood of the discourse was a little common and jocular, but the message certainly wasn't. 

[The original is available from our blog bookstore, here.]

The author was Sidney H. Morse ("The Red-Hot Striker") and the piece was a rant against big money, monopoly/combinations and The Ruling Class. It was published in "The Radical Review", which was published by the anarchist and free-thinker Benjamin Tucker, in 1878.  The executive summary for this short piece is plain--first, there should be no "executive", and second, most of all of this revolves around free Communism and the statement "it takes a great many poor men to make one rich man". 

It seems that Mr. Morse (fl. 1870-1900) might have left many of his radical thinkers behind (like Mr, Alcott, above) when he went free-range and advocated no government or controlling system whatsoever, every person their own entity.  I'm not sure so that most people could get away with that thinking even left to themselves in a themself universe, every person in their own Utopian-solitary-anarchy. Seems as though the expectations of whatever this was, (no expectation or all-expectation) , was just too expectant.

Created and Estranged Alphabets of Visionary, Creative and Boring Things

 JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

 So.  As it turns out there are at least 23 alphabets (of sorts) created or estranged on this blog (compared to the six that show up in my archive search under "alphabet").   A few more and we might have an alphabetical post of alphabet posts.  Here they are, the ABCorama:

An Alphabet of Australian Convict Mugshots, 1900-1920, here. 

Alphabet of Retro-Vision Women, ca, 1940's/1950's, here.

 

An Alphabet of Anatomical Emotions and Feelings--Installment 1, here. 

Contempt