JF Ptak Science Books

A History of Blank, Missing & Empty Things: #75, Monks

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC  Post 963

[A History of Blank, Missing & Empty Things, installment #75]

Many are the things that are “missing” (or blank or empty), but seldom are they depicted in antiquarian prints, which is why I report them every time that I found them. Today’s installment:  missing monks. 

This image comes to us from the anti-cleric Ignaz Edler* von Born’s (1752-1791) viciously satiristic Specimen Monachologiae Methodo Linnaeanna…., which was published in Vienna in 1783. (Mozart was there, in Vienna, a year married and finishing his first violin quartet.  He was also evidently tutored in Masonic ways by Born , who had introduced the young man into the Benevolence lodge.) The pamphlet was a scathing rant against monkish religicisim (?!), taking off on Born’s mineralogist background and classifying the orders according to a diverted Linnean system.  This image—for all the world displaying four “missing” monks—catalogs their sashes, shoes and (of course buttock-filled) underwear according to Born’s choppy and determined mal-intent.  Born had evidently seen enough of religion to make fun of it, what with his Jesuit-educated background followed by extensive studying and a professional career in the physical sciences. 

*Born was born to the nobility, as the “edler” denotes.

Circle Factories. A Small Chain of Being Between Guns, Sewing Machines, Bikes and Cars

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 962

"The Circle Factory." Well, not quite.  Actually, not at all.  The first image is just a detail from the warehouse of the ubiquitous Columbia bicycle works in 1881.  The second aren’t even circles, but cosmological ovals, and is a detail of a wood engraving depicting planetary and  cometary  orbits in Leonhard Euler’s Theoria Motuum Planetarum et Cometarum (1631-1635). 

The bicycle wheels appeared in Bicycling World (for April 1881, “A Great American Manufacture”), illustrating a story about the growing interest in bicycles in America but more specifically the success of the partnership between the Weed Sewing Machine factory and Albert A. Pope in the mass production of the bike.  It was a newish idea, partially borrowed from the Sharps Manufacturing

Company’s mass production of weapons with standardized parts, which was employed in the production of sewing machines by Weed, and then on to bikes by Pope.  Actually Weed took the step further than Sharps by producing almost all of their machines in-house, having a foundry and forge right there at the factory.  It was this step and then other innovations by Pope that produced an enormously successful bicycle production company, with something like a quarter million bikes made in the first few years of operation. 

The Weed-Pope domination didn’t last long though, what with the introduction of the remarkable safety bicycle from England in 1887—this is instantly recognizable as a “modern” bike, with a chain power train and two same-size wheels. In two years there were hundreds of companies building those bikes, producing a million a year.  

By 1895 this balloon busted, and for some reason Americans stopped buying bikes, with demand falling off to nearly nil, causing the vast majority of these companies to whither and fold, causing the whole of the bicycle interest to come first circle. Or cycle.

But there was a huge lesson learned for future manufacturers of transportation devices—namely cars, and more specifically, Ford(s), drawing critical lessons in production from forging methods and sustainable assembly lines. 

Euler has nothing to do with bikes or Fords, but he did have a whole heck of a lot to do with circles. (Actually, I just liked the image set against the big bike wheels.)

Mobile Maginot: Movable Land and Floating Forts, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 959

Nothing quite exceeds like excess said Mr. Wilde (and others) , and he/they could be no more correct when looking at this picture of a Movable Maginot Line—it is a mobile fort, complete with plane launching capacity, two dozen long canons, a crane, and a host of other stuff.  

It looks as though it has ample room for all sorts of materiel though leaving little room for, perhaps, an engine.  I just can’t see where it might be…perhaps it is near the not-room-enough-for-it-either ammunition compartment.  Maybe they were in a smaller armed cart being pulled by the mothership?  I reckon that this beast was 66 feet high, 100 feet long and 60 feet wide, which is a very big, heavy near-cube. Good luck with driving the thing in anything that was less than perfect conditions.  A big profile like this, filled with guns and canons or not, also makes for a big target profile—a tall, broad target with flat/non-inclined sides. ( I should also point out that there are two 10’ loudspeakers mounted on the front of the fort to instill fear in the people that the thing was approaching with loud noise.  The author points out that the Nazis used noise against the French with their “screaming dive bombers”, and so the fort would use the same tactics against the Nazis in the movable fort—not that the sound of the engines and the attendant noise wouldn’t’ve been enough of a fear factor in themselves…)

But the image of such a monster, sensical or not, was enough for the purposes of the pamphlet in which it appeared.  The Brains to Win was a piece of British spirit/hope propaganda issued at about the time of the Battle of Britain in 1940, and it listed the sorts of technological breakthroughs that were going to push the nation over the top to victory.  Some of the stuff was real, some not—like the moving fort/Howl’s Castle above, and the floating fort, below.

I’m not sure where a floating fort would make sense, especially one of that size. (Iterating the figures on deck into distance, it looks as though the deck on the floating platform was 150 or 200’ square.  It would’ve looked like a big target from above.) Given the time and expense and material  needed for such a thing, it seems that it would’ve been cheaper to make a moveable fortress not quite so big, with less of a profile, and more mobile—I think that this was called a “destroyer” or “battleship”.  

But no matter, I’m just poking fun at some of the future vision that became archaic the moment it was drawn, punk retro-future.  All the pamphlet was trying to point out in its 32 pages was that overall the Brits were smarter than the Germans and that would be the balance for victory in the war.  “Hitler will get some very unpleasant surprises before this is over” the author very politely pointed out, no doubt with one eyebrow raised.  The scientists agreed.

And they were right, which is all that matters.

Imago Mortis: Immortal and Post Mortem Hair

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 958  Blog Bookstore

I think that in the contest of hair between mortality and immortality, never-ending time wins.  This sentiment is based on seeing many images representing death and time over the years, not many of which I can not now produce on demand to make my argument a little more plausible, but, well, no matter.  Two examples will suffice for now.

The first example stands for many of its type: it is titled "Imago Mortis"  (the World of Death) and appears in Hartmann Schedel's Liber chronicum (more commonly known as the Nuremberg Chronicles), one of the greatest illustrated (or certainly the most lavishily illustrated)  books of the 15th century.  Printed by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg on 12 July 1493, the Liber chronicum was basically just that, a walk through the known and imagined knowledge of the mid-Renaissance with the great humanist Schedel acting in the role of conductor.  There's certainly much of interest and disinterest in this book; Schedel was not afraid to make a guess (and even a wild one) when facts didn't fit or were unavailable.  (For example, he famously re-used the same view of a city to illustrate different cities.) 

The Imago Mortis here is more like the Dance of Death, a subject visited many times by many great artists over a period of 500 years or so.  But my interest right now is only in the hair; particularly the hair of the figure at far right, whose (her?) hair seems to be not only flowing down her spine but through it and her ricase as well, spilling out in front of her across her pelvis. 

I've written earlier in this blog on the second  woodcut image: it appears as the printer's mark (of Simonem Colineum, or Simon de Colines) in the second volume of Johann Arboreus’ Theosophia, complectens difficillorum…, which was printed in Paris in 1540. 

 Time isn’t very pretty here, and is made to seem a little Satanic, what with cloven hooves and the legs of some animal, strong torso and swift wings—the hair hiding the eye(s) completes a picture of damnable doom, and of whatever end we’re coming to.  Except for the righteous, though not quite: the word balloon describing Time’s spoken admonition is “Hanc Aciem Sola Retundit Virtus”, which means “only good deeds dulls the blade”.  That doesn’t necessarily mean “stops” the blade, which is bothersome.  I think that if someone were coming for me I'd like the blade as sharp as could be...

I think the winner is Time, whose hair--although not quite as long as that of the dead--is far more luxurious, which at the end of the day carries it.  Also, Time's hair is connected to a scalp; I don't know what the deads' hair is connected to.

Bulbous & Bubbly Design: Bloated Efforts on Land and in the Sky

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 951

Sometimes things are designed that are so bulbous and so inflated and so terribly hyper-packed that they are just destined never to be built beyond the imagination.  Among the largest of these things meant for the air was designed by a particularly  streamlined designer, Norman Bel Geddes, who basically owned the concept of aerodynamic function at all levels of design in the 1930’s.

But Bel Geddes’ apoetically-named aircraft, Airliner 4, is an entirely different issue.  It may possibly be the largest, slowest, lowest, fattest and most lumbering plane ever designed. (And by this I mean that it stood a chance of some sort of actually being built and flown, as opposed to the monsters with wing-topped tennis courts and such.)

This  530'-long 1.2 million pound beast took an hour to climb to its max ceiling of 10,000 feet where it would cruise along at an astonishing 100 mph.  It would wind its way lovingly across the country, slicing off its travel hours like frozen bologna, 30 hours from coast-to-coast, slowly, methodically, so as not to disturb its 600 passengers in their sleeping rooms.  But I'm not sure how much sleep would get slept, what with 20 (!) 1900 hp engines screaming overhead. 

 

The passengers who didn't sleep could do a lot besides sit and be serviced by the aircraft's crew of 155--they might actually need guides to get them through the oddness of the plane's 9 decks, 3 kitchens, 2 dining rooms, solarium, 100-couple dance floor, gym, barbershop and medical offices (with waiting room).  Plus much, much more.  (I like a plane with a doctor's office waiting room; perhaps the real genius would've been to come up with the smaller, more interior, extra waiting room to which one graduates before seeing The Doctor.) 

Getting closer to the ground is the plan for the Chicago Civic Center (1909) by the usually accomplished Daniel H. Burnham. This beast looks more like a stubby nuclear- pulse intergalactic Mothership than anything that anyone would have wanted to build on the ground—at least in space it would be out of sight. 

 

In a struggling prose reminiscent of Lewis Sullivan Burnham writes¹: “The Civic Center will be dependent for its effectiveness in the character if the architecture displayed in the buildings themselves…” which I think is self-referential, stating that the architecture’s effectiveness is dependent upon the architecture. If this is the case, the enormity of the Civic Center doesn’t save it from itself. 

Staying in Chicago we find another proposal, this for the ChicagoTribuneTower competition of 1922—many of the works submitted seem to my eye big and wide and ugly, but perhaps none more so than that offered by Ludwig Koloch.  This may well have been a nice design for the top third or so of a building, but not for three thirds--and actually, this may be four-thirds.  It reminds me of something rising from the sands at a beach in the future, the remnants of destroyed civilizations.  Without the apes.

 Notes:

1. Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, Plan of Chicago, 1909. 
2. 

Jobs of the Archaeo-Future: Airport Steerer (Bel Geddes' Floating Airport)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 950 

 

Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) made fast, bulbously sleek and varyingly aerodynamic objects and ideas, and was a  vastly successful designer of things ranging from sets for the NY Metropolitan Opera House to telephones to cars to locomotives to the housing for the Mark I computer.  Ideas were his metier, and there seemed no lack of them--good, mostly; bad, sometimes. 

Bud bad ideas can be beautiful, and elegant, if only for a very short period of time in which they might have actually functioned for the good.  One of these blisterers was his floating airport for the NYC harbor.  Passengers would access the airport via a 800-foot automatic walkway tunnel, and then up to various shuttles and such on the levels below the flight deck. This beast floated on columns floating on mobile caissons just above the harbor bottom, enabling the whole to be turned into or away from the wind, making for easy approaches and departures for the planes. But it is the pilot of the airport that seems most interesting to me, steering the giant propellers that lay under the corners of the structure, pushing the airport into/away from the wind. 

This may well be the largest mobile steerable structure moving along the shortest courseway conceived as a possibly-buildable project of the twentieth century. 

Associated posts on great and unbuildable architecture:

Gigantic and Unbuildable Architecture: Philip Johnson and the Walled "Third City"

Gigantic and Unbuildable Buildings: Leroy Buffington, 1889

Fantastic and Unbuildable Architecture #6: the Pyramids of Gizeh in Detroit (Michigan), 1908

Gigantic and Unbuildable Architecture: Bucky Fuller’s Midtown Manhattan Dome, 1968

The Care and Feeding of Missile Systems--1950's Ads

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 948

The following illustrations are all taken gloriously out of context from ads appearing in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, published in 1957-1958. 

 

 

 

Defining "Ugly" in Architecture: Rooftop Airport, NYC, 1946

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 942   Bad Ideas Department

I think that I'd like to introduce a subset in my Bad Ideas category:  Bad Flat Ideas.  To start it off, I found this very lovely example in LIFE magazine for 18 March 1946, the brainchild of generally-appropriate real estate mogul William Zeckendorf: a spectacularly bad idea of installing a rooftop airport along  a very long swath of property along the West Side. 

 

It seems as though the airport would extend from the bottom third of Central Park south to, well, I really can't tell, perhaps lower midtown? Honestly, it doesn't matter.  For all of its size it actually isn't quite big enough, looking like there's maybe 10 or 20 plane lengths margin-of-error at the end of the runway.  Plus there's the *no* margin of error bit for the edges of the airport, which assumes that no plane will ever topple over the table top. Plus a host of other pertinent stuff.

The penultimate line:  it is also incredibly ugly, a definition of architectural ugliness that few projects could match. 

 

The bottom line though to this project was the bottom line:  in the end, the Manhattan Airport would save about 15 minutes travel time to Philly over Laguardia. 

I should not leave unmentioned the unmentionable project proposed for poor London (which I wrote about late last year here):

Bombing New York City with Women, Meteorites, Nazi Amerika Bombers and Atomic Weapons

JF Ptak Science Book LLC  Post 941

Having just finished a post here on missing and duplicated-in-outer-space New York Cities, we return to the more grim possibilities of pre-Cold War cityicide.

I haven't seen very many images at all of NYC under attack, and this one from nuclear attack on NYC from Collier's Magazine (1948) is fantastically poignant, showing perhaps three ground-bursts of atomic bombs in Manhattan and Brooklyn.  At the time, 1948, the Soviets had just developed their bomb and I think had no way of getting one here.  But this didn't speak to the future, and my guiess is that Collier's was just taking it a little easy with the popular reading clientelle.  I can't remember now how many weapons would've been targeted at NYC by the mid-1950's, but I know it wasn't a simple dozen.

A lateral view of this sort of explosion in Manhattan was presented in an extraordinary issue of the liberal PM Magazine, issued with a 7 August 1945 date (though I think it came out a few days later).  This would have been just a day after the Hiroshima bombing, and the 12 pages of dedicated coverage t the atomic bomb was really quite spectacular.  Included is the following small graphic that appeared on page seven which shows what effect the Hiroshima atomic bomb would have if dropped on New York City—it was no doubt gigantically sobering to anyone who looked at it, and brought the power of the bomb and its destruction to a common, understandable point.  I'm not an historian of the first newspaper coverage of the bomb, but it strikes me that this may well be the first graphic to depict the effects of an atomic bomb exploded over NYC.

Seeing the Collier's pictures makes it that much more difficult to think about the idea of Buckminster Fuller that would help rid ourselves of radiation anxiety (which I wrote about earlier, here).
Fuller’s idea is multiple orders of magnitude removed from the original idea of the arcade, constructing a dome¹ to encapsulate NYC from the East River to the Hudson along 42nd St, and from 64th to 22nd St:  that’s two miles in diameter and, plus a mile high (or about five Empire State Buildings pile one on top of the other).  I’m not so sure how this would be built, or how things would be heated or cooled, or what the construction material was for the skin of the dome, or how people get in and out, or how you deal with heating and cooling, or how any noxious chemicals are expelled—but Mr. Fuller thought that the savings alone from snow removal from NYC streets would pay for the dome in ten years. 

Mr. Fuller also thought that the dome would protect the city (or this part f the city) from radiation fallout.  That could be true, assuming that of all the hundreds of nuclear warheads that the Soviets would’ve launched against NYC alone none of them would’ve found their target, except perhaps for the Ridgways or Staten Island, where the shock wave or winds produced by ensuing firestorms would not have disturbed the dome.  Of course if a warhead actually came close—or actually hit—the dome, the protection from radiation would be moot. 

Another odd and stomach-wrenching image comes from that devilish scamp Eugen Sanger (dead before he was fifty, 1905-1964), a German rocket designer and engineer for the National Socialists, went to work for the French Air Ministry following the end of World War Two after doing his all and thankfully falling short for  the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (RLM, or "Reich Aviation Ministry").

  He worked without rancor there until he was nearly kidnapped by Joe Stalin—for the purpose I suppose of continuing work on what may have been his greatest effort, unfulfilled during the war years—the Amerika Bomber.  The Soviets evidently thought that this might come in handy in 1947.

The Sänger Amerika Bomber (or Orbital Bomber, Antipodal Bomber or Atmosphere Skipper) was designed for supersonic, stratospheric flight, and had much more bang for the buck than the V2 (10000 feet/second exhaust velocity, as compared to the later V-2 rocket's 2000 meters/second, 6560 feet/second) and since it was stratospheric had a far greater range, coming in at better than 14,000 miles.  The 22,000-pound weapon carried one large 8000-pound free-falling bomb.

Sanger’s idea in the early 1940’s was to get this bomb to around Times Square. And since the Amerika Bomber was a relatively inexpensive weapon compared to the damage it could cause, there was room for producing a lot of them.

Seeing Manhattan in the cross hairs like this is quite sobering, and it is an image that is rarely made.

Another attack on Manhattan depicted here comes from above, way above, Manhattan decimated by a meteorite "shower" of enormous magnitude. The image appears in an article by Hudson Maxim (1853-1927, brother of the more famous Hiram) "How the World Will End", printed in 1910, and shows dozens of small meteorites striking NYC in the City Hall area. 

The last image comes from 1904 and--when taken out of context--it seems as though Manhattan is in for the worst of it, with a view in front of the Flat Iron Building of an aerial bombardment of women.  This is probably one of the few bad things that weren't done with/at women, and would actually predate the first use of explosives being dropped from aircraft.  Unfortunately the original, intended image was a poke at  crinoline , and featured women being blown up into the air rather than the other way around, though I like my interpretation better.

Notes:

(Source:  Buckminster Fuller in Think magazine, vol 34, Jan/Feb 1968.  AND of course the lovely work by Alison and Sky Michele Stone, Unbuilt America, McGraw Hill, 1976, pg. 99.)

Mr. Fuller also thought that the dome would protect the city (or this part f the city) from radiation fallout.  That could be true, assuming that of all the hundreds of nuclear warheads that the Soviets would’ve launched against NYC alone none of them would’ve found their target, except perhaps for the Ridgways or Staten Island, where the shock wave or winds produced by ensuing firestorms would not have disturbed the dome.  Of course if a warhead actually came close—or actually hit—the dome, the protection from radiation would be moot. 

Another odd and stomach-wrenching image comes from that devilish scamp Eugen Sanger (dead before he was fifty, 1905-1964), a German rocket designer and engineer for the National Socialists, went to work for the French Air Ministry following the end of World War Two after doing his all and thankfully falling short for  the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (RLM, or "Reich Aviation Ministry").

  He worked without rancor there until he was nearly kidnapped by Joe Stalin—for the purpose I suppose of continuing work on what may have been his greatest effort, unfulfilled during the war years—the Amerika Bomber.  The Soviets evidently thought that this might come in handy in 1947.

The Sänger Amerika Bomber (or Orbital Bomber, Antipodal Bomber or Atmosphere Skipper) was designed for supersonic, stratospheric flight, and had much more bang for the buck than the V2 (10000 feet/second exhaust velocity, as compared to the later V-2 rocket's 2000 meters/second, 6560 feet/second) and since it was stratospheric had a far greater range, coming in at better than 14,000 miles.  The 22,000-pound weapon carried one large 8000-pound free-falling bomb.

Sanger’s idea in the early 1940’s was to get this bomb to around Times Square. And since the Amerika Bomber was a relatively inexpensive weapon compared to the damage it could cause, there was room for producing a lot of them.

Seeing Manhattan in the cross hairs like this is quite sobering, and it is an image that is rarely made.

Another attack on Manhattan depicted here comes from above, way above, Manhattan decimated by a meteorite "shower" of enormous magnitude. The image appears in an article by Hudson Maxim (1853-1927, brother of the more famous Hiram) "How the World Will End", printed in 1910, and shows dozens of small meteorites striking NYC in the City Hall area. 

The last image comes from 1904 and--when taken out of context--it seems as though Manhattan is in for the worst of it, with a view in front of the Flat Iron Building of an aerial bombardment of women.  This is probably one of the few bad things that weren't done with/at women, and would actually predate the first use of explosives being dropped from aircraft.  Unfortunately the original, intended image was a poke at  crinoline , and featured women being blown up into the air rather than the other way around, though I like my interpretation better.

Notes:

(Source:  Buckminster Fuller in Think magazine, vol 34, Jan/Feb 1968.  AND of course the lovely work by Alison and Sky Michele Stone, Unbuilt America, McGraw Hill, 1976, pg. 99.)

New York City: Missing (1902) & Reproduced in Outer Space (1941)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 940

NYC has certainly had its imaginary/creative trials and tribulations over the last 400 years or so, but I must say that these two depictions of the state of the city are the most, well, unexpected as any I've ever seen.  The first comes from 1902 and is a forward-looking appraisal of the chances of New York City in the near-future.  The aeronaut tourists are being told by the aviator/carny--floating above Manhattan in the future, in the year 1920--that those chances are not very good, the city having disappeared under its own weight, sunk by the growing skyscraper¹ population in a ground loosened by too-numerous tunnels.  The cartoon is a joking editorial, of course, a riposte to the relatively new building jag that pushed big buildings to great new heights. [A post on more realistic views of the City of New York can be seen here]

The second image on the other hand is not a farce; it is one of the strangest (published) unintentionally Outsider, unintentionally Absurdist/Dada works that I've ever seen.  It appeared in a post at the very start of this blog (two years and 500,000 words ago) and it remains a capstone of Mondo Bizarro category².

This 1941 pamphlet isn’t so much “interesting” as it is interestingly illustrated, where all of the semi-coherent  interest resides, the text having left coherence far behind, somewhere, in it own intergalactic dust. 

This is the only known example of the depiction of an extra-terrestrial New York City pictured with the earth in the background. 

Huh?  Yes, this is the Big Apple in space—not its own space but THE space, outer space—somehow, impossibly, removed to some something-or-other (actually in this case, a “bubble”) that, while not being the Moon, was something like it, though not actually a solid and without gravity, floating on a base of floating effluvia and hope, but, well, you get the picture.  Whatever we’re floating on here (actually it is identified as the “perisohere” (don’t ask)) is very big and very very close to the home planet. 

The author, David Gordon, is certainly after something, but what that "something" is I just don't know. He starts things out for the reader asking a series of questions like “why does the earth and other heavenly bodies remain in the air and submerged”, answering them with other questions. 

In all of this Mr. Gordon produced a work of staggering incredibility, more so since it wasn't an intentional science fiction effort,  and in my book any time anyone reveals such a shocking piece of thought deserves a special kind of praise. I'm just thankful that the pamphlet was illustrated.

Notes:

1.  The word "skyscraper" appeared in print only nine years before this cartoon (Harper's Weekly, April 1893), thugh the necessary elements like heating and cooling capacities, electrical lighting, plumbing [with appropriate, siphon jet toilets], elevators with dependable brakes, had been in place since the 1880's or earlier.

2..  One of the other capstone publications written about here is the monumentally bizarre work on sculpting in fat and lard:

Three Map Fits: a Color Map with Color and No Map, a Color Map in Black & White; AND a Black & White Map in White (only).

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 934

This confusing title is accurate without very much grant in license and tells a short and true story of three fitful maps, two of which are beautiful and one just so-so.  

  

The first map fit is featured in a beautiful pamphlet called A Century of Progress Colors and was issued by the Textile Color Card Association of the USA.(The title being a small play on the 1933 world’s fair in Chicago called “A Century of Progress”. The Textile Color Card Association was created to standardize color nomenclature and composition in industrial colors (and is still in existence.)  The map distributed the major pavilions at the fair by their dominating colors, naming those colors in the unusually-sequenced double-page key on the following pages (below¹).  I can certainly appreciate the effort and the beautiful design it produced, but as a map of the fair it leaves much (if not everything) to be desired.

 

 The second map fit belongs to a small pamphlet published by Albert Coble called Games of Colors, Kindergarten and Primary Exercises.  Its actually an enterprising little book about reaching into the minds of little ones and explaining how colors are put together and how they relate to one another.  It is unfortunate that the drawings used to illustrate the color map part of the pamphlet were done in black and white.  Which is a little on the self-defeating side.  

 

 
 

 But the finest fit of the three fits is fit number three, which is the map of the Bellman’s tale, starting the second fit of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits.

 

 

 

But the map that I think I love the most illustrates Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits, and occurs in the Bellman’s tale, starting the second fit¹. It is simply magnificent. 

Then, of course, there is this:

 

Notes:

1. The key:

 

 

2. The fit begins so:

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies-
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity too! One could see he was wise,
The moment one look in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when the found it to be
A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
"They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank"
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!"

 

Unexpected Sense Impressions from Antique Prints: Sound

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 631

[A continuation of the blog series "A History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things"]

The sweetest pleasures come from unexpected sources. Mozart--who loved the game of billiards and was an exceptional aficionado¹ of the game while playing it with little skill-- enjoyed composing on the table as well,  rolling balls in geometric patterns across it while working. To observers it might have seemed as though he was interested in the patterns themselves; it delightfully turns out that what he was really looking at were the changing reflections in the surface of the balls. 

Years ago my wife (Patti Digh) and I visited an artist in his studio at the lovely high-road-to-Taos town of Truchas, New Mexico.  We watched the artist at work for quite some time—well, actually, we listened to him work.  Although he was a lovely painter, the visual impact was overwhelmed by the sounds that he made padding back and forth (he was working on a big canvas) across an old and musical wooden floor --it deeply interesting, and the sound stays with us to this day. 

I enjoy these quasi-synesthesic experiences a great deal, though they are very hard to “find”. Sometime though they slip into the print world, and I include three examples below. 

(1) Putting the Pulp in Fiction, and Fact: the Sharp First Step in Paper-Making

Just about the first step in making paper is collecting and preparing the raw materials from which the paper is made.  Linens, cottons, wood and straw (among other things) would be reduced to a pasty pulp through vigorous pounding, tearing, wetting stabbing and rending, all of which would be reduced to a pasty, fibrous pulp which would wind up after a bit spread over a wire mesh until dried and then, through a great non-miracle, becoming paper.  This is a process that was little changed in the Western world for many centuries.

The most lovely of these early pulp-rendering, “stamping” machines, to me is the fabulous two-person human-powered stamper/shredder, published in 1579. (I don’t know the original source for the wood engraving; this image appears in Charles Singer’s monumental History of Technology, from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, vol III.

The men turn crank, crank turns wheels and rod, rod turns arms, arms forced to move vertical poles up and down, stampers on the end of poles pound the rags.  Actually the stampers had changeable stamps so that the man-machine could start with a spiked stamper for rendering and then move to a roundish stamp for pounding into decomposition in a wooden bowl with mushy water. 

I just really like the machine and its representation, and of course the round stampers and bowls of mush.  It all seems so innocent in a creaking antiquarian way—but the great surprise for me is that I can just about hear this machine at work.  The all-wooden structure with slowing-turning wheels grinding against its constituent parts, worn smooth from use; the slow pounding of the stampers into the thick paste; the creaking motions of the too-slender superstructure.  I can hear it about as clearly as I can hear the soft/high clinking of the bottles in the milkman’s tray.

(2)  A Scene of Western Quiet

The image comes from William Wright's The History of the Big Bonanza and was published in 1877.  It is a very simple scene (“Office of the Consolidated Virginia Mine”), nicely and proportionally arranged, though somewhat challenged by its understanding of linear perspective. For reasons I don’t quite understand it might as well have been a picture of the high desert with no settlement whatsoever.  It simply seems still, and very quiet.

(3) Electrical Hum (and Ozone) Fishing Nets

This image, from the quarto edition of the great Diderot and d'Alembert Encyclopedie (published over a number of years in the late 18^th century), shows (I think) the ways to mend broken fishing nets. I have a definite sense of a high electrical hum from this, along with the added whiff of ozone.  Its hardly something that was intended by the artist, but it was the first thing that registered with me when I bought this print 25 years ago. 

Things like this are available to us all of the time, simply waiting to be heard while being seen. 

Notes

1. After his death Mozart's estate was reckoned, and the contents of his house and belongings were catalogued.  It was recorded that he had a very nice billiard table, and that he also had 12 cues.  Now 12 cues might've been there because he liked the feel of the wood, or that he liked their artistic merit on the wall or in the corner.  That, or he had a lot of people coming over to play.  I like the later interpretation.  Also, I cannot remember the reference for the ball/reflection story; please don't tell me that it is wrong.  

How to Look Pretty or Smart, but Not Both: Ladies' Home Journal Make-up Advice, 1933

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 930

[Continuing the posts What Makes Human Robot Girls, 1941, How to Get a Boy-Date, 1941, and The Missing Pieces of Women, Pope Joan and the Proper Girl]

Following on the tall heals of several posts on mid-1940's social engineering for young women comes this rougey sprite by Dorothy Cocks, Tricks with Make-up.  It is one of a long series of quickly-produced pamphlets flung from the presses of the Ladies' Home Journal under the stewardship of Elizabeth Woodward. 

There's much to learn about what was expected of the social shell of women in this pamphlet, but what I've focused on is this jewel on page 7:  "Which is Your Type: Pretty or Smart?" And that's it: no ground in-between, no space for something else, and evidently no room for being smart AND pretty.  Here it is:

 

The advice to "touch perfume behind your ears and  above your upper lip" is a new one to me. 

Odd Collections: 500,000 Wishbones

JF Ptak Science Books Post 928 (from 2010, Expanded!)

"One must go into oneself armed to the teeth"--M. Teste, Paul Valery

“Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still." --H.D. Thoreau

Sometimes odd images just need to be surfaced for the pure sake of it.  Such is the case with this glorious photo by Greg Villet¹ of Delphine Binger in LIFE magazine for  24 May, 1954 .   Ms. Binger ("a Manhattan spinster") actually collected the wishbones with a business utility in mind, fashioning them into objets d'os.  (LIFE unfairly classified Ms. Binger in this way. In other accounts I have read of her she is described as a funny, fun-loving person, and Pete Hamil/Meyer Berger describe her as "generous", "bubbling" and "caring" in their 1954 Meyer Berger's New York.)

 

She purchased the wishbones for nothing, added a few bits of half-penny decorations, perfume, a pin, and SO! a piece of jewelry is born.  She evidently was able to sell her creations for $2.10 apiece, which in 1954 translates into 25 2009 dollars; so I guess if she sold some here and there she would be able to supplement her income.  Of course there's the issue of overkill on the bones:  she seems to have probably two (or more) orders of magnitude more than she "needs", so there may have been something else going on there.
  But then again, at the point where you collect 500k of anything you will have become expert enough to have any mostly-invisible nuance convey a large field of interest to your keen appreciation--the bigger something gets, the smaller it gets, in parts. 

An old friend of mine--we'll call him Mr. Tulipfields, a brilliant mathematician/physicist/compsci guy with a deep appreciation for music--started buying classical cds when cds were a relatively new phenomenon.  Rare recorded material was being placed back into "print" at such a rate that he couldn't really afford the appropriate sound system to actually listen to all of his new purchases.  He hurried into buying many of the cds because he thought that they would drop out-of-print again, and that he needed to act quickly.  I thought that the cds would stay available basically forever—as it turned out he was right (as usual) and I was wrong (ditto). And so Mr. T amassed an enormous collection of music—in the dozens of thousands—many of which are now impossible to find. 

In some ways my friend didn’t need the cd player—he already knew the music, could play it in his head.  Somehow he was keeping all of this music on course in forming this fabulous collection  And once he had explained his reasoning behind the whole effort, it all made perfect sense, and you’d wonder why he didn’t have 100,000 more choice cds.

On the other hand I’m not sure why Ms. Binger² needed her extra 497,500 bones—you'd expect there to be not very much difference from bone-to-bone, but there very well may be. A centimeter here and there may make all the world of difference and interest to the practiced eye, particularly if the bones are from many species of animals. Once a collection of almost anything gets to be that big, someone somewhere is going to be interested in preserving it.  

And that's what Ms. Binger did.

• See also this note in Popular Science from the Popular Mechanix site ("Wishbones Made Her Dreams Come True"). 

Notes:

1.  I don't know much about Greg Villet.  He took a lot of preparations for this photo, stringing 5,000 wishbones on black string on a black backdrop--that is considerable dedication to the idea of an image.  I also know that he did some very significant documentary photography with Rosa Parks and the Montgomery strikes of 1955/6, which tells you maybe all you need to know about the man.  

2.  I can't help but wonder what happened to all of those bones on Ms. Binger's passing? (She died in 1961, and I can't find anything about the disposition of the collection.  It sounds like the vast majority of the bones were kept with relatives and not in her two-bedroom apartment at 145 W. 96th St in NYC.  

The Stench of Creativity: Dante, SpongeBob & Unintentionally Bizarre Titles

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 927 [Part of the Fantastic Titles series]

Squidward: What's that horrible smell?! [sees steam coming out of SpongeBob's window] Is Patrick thinking again?

Patrick: [sticking his head out of the window] I'm making art!

Squidward: Patrick, it smells like something crawled into your brain and died!

Patrick: That's the creative process at work!

Like St. Paul warned by Archangel Michael, and Dante by Virgil, the visions of the Hell they were touring was also stinky, though the robes they held to the noses did not prevent them from experiencing the very lofty stench of sin.  Perhaps it was something like the crawled-in-and-died stench made by the beautiful Patrick starfish from SpongeBob Squarepants, his brain’s intellectual exuda forming a pretty but stench-ridden experience.

And so to with experiencing the found, unintentional absurd--or the naïve surreal—in printed material like some of the examples below.  Their title pages can be experienced as art in a way, at least today, so far removed from their original meaning and context that the words float like disembodied arks of meaning looking for whatever piece of land/meaning that they bump into.  Sometimes their titles are the bizarre-ity, masking a mundane, pedestrian contents; much of the time the title and contents emanate the stench of lost meaning through and through. 

  “… ‘Why us thy mind’, he said,
‘so far away, unlike its usual self,
 What are thy wits about, where have they fled?’
 —Virgil yelling at Dante for asking a dumb question outside the City of Dis,. Inferno, XI, 76-78