Author: JF Ptak

Ars Morendi–the Book for the Dying and Dead

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2380

[Woodcut, printed in 1771, from an ealier woodcut of the late 15th century; 6×4 inches. This version available from our Blog Bookstore.]

The lare Medieval/early Renaissance Tractatus artis bene moriendi was a work book of the dead–rather, a book for those about to be dead, an instructional for the process of dying the good death along the (loose) order of the Tibetan Bardo Thodol and the Egyptian book of the dead. The Ars was written in the early the 15th century (some sources say 1415) and began appearing in some of the earliest illustrated printed books by about 1460–it was a wildly popular/necessary book, going through some 100 editions by 1500¹.

The books basically readied the dying for death, for a holy death, a death filled with high possibilities of a rewarding afterlife, for dying in the good graces of Christ and the christian ideals. The images were such that non-readers could understand them–and this is still pretty much the case.

Many of the variants of this work include a dozen or more woodblock illustrations, an example of which is found above. We see the soon-to-be-departed at the very last instant before death, surrounded by all manner of distractions and entertainments aimed at luring the person to an earthly- rather than holy-demise. Demons, conjurers, makers of greed, and devils surround his bed in temptation, all while the Virgin Mary, Christ and the creator look down upon the besieged from behind the top of the bed.

Death was not an uncommon visitor in Europe in the early/mid 15th century, and perhaps this book served some in the way it taught people how to die a noble and religious death, especially when clergy may not have been so available.

(The blog offers a version of this print, not nearly as old as the original, but with some sort of substantial age on it–it was printed in 1771 in Leipzig, and published in Heinecken’s Idee Generale d’une Collection Complette d’Estampes, and it is an attractive print suggestive of a greater age.

Here’s another example, this time the dying man is beign attacked by agents of pride and greed. The images are genuinely upsetting–scary even.

Notes:

1. English editions/variation of this work include The Waye of Dying Well and The Sicke Mannes Salve, and then in 1650 the Holy Living and Holy Dying.

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Anticipation, History of — Art History
Comfort Kits for the Front Line, 1918

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This is a detail from the following photograph made by the pool of photographers working for the Western Newspaper Union, and issued for public consumption (and passed by the censors) on October 14, 1918. It shows a goodwill mission of soldiers along with Mrs. Parker, the sister of Lord Kitchener, inspecting “comfort bags” for the troops at the front. Everyone here seems to be daintily inspecting the bags with fingertips, Mrs. Parker seeming to be the only one in conversation.

There is a portrait of her brother in the background–he had been dead for more than two years at that point, drowned along with 600 others when the ship he was aboard, the HMS Hampshire, struck a German mine. No doubt that anything the Red Cross could muster for the battlefield troops was absolutely appreciated.

At this point, the war was nearly over, with less than a month of fighting to play out.

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World War I
Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, 1961

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2379

I uncovered a somewhat found-again-lost-again paper in the collection here, an unusual small-distribution version of a great paper in the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The work is by N.R. Schwartz and Charles Townes, “Interstellar and Interplanetary Communication by Optical Masers”, which appeared in the journal Nature for April 15, 1961 (volume 190, pp 205-208), and I have seen it referenced here and there as a started-it-all sort of paper as the first applied and elaborated scientific effort “to communicate with other intelligent life [which] might exist on neighboring planetary systems”. That is to say it is a more involved approach to detection than the two earlier and perhaps more-famous papers by G. Cocconi and P. Morrison, “Searching for interstellar communications” (a short paper published in Nature, volume 184, No. 4690, pp. 844-845, September 19,1959) and F. Drake’s “How can we detect radio transmissions from distant planetary systems?”, published in Sky and Telescope (volume 19, No. 3, pp. 140-143, January 1960).

The present copy is an offset, stapled affair sent to the editor of Physics Today; it has the annotation “Mr. Katcher” in a secretarial hand at top, that being David Katcher, the founding editor-in-chief. This is a pre-printed version, and is dated more than a month before the article’s publication, and is dated February 27, 1961.

Both Schwartz and Townes were at the Institute for Defense Analysis in DC at the time of publication, Townes being the Director of Research; later in 1961 Townes would become Provost and professor of physics at MIT. In addition to the Nobel Prize in physics, Townes was awarded the Templeton Prize (in the understanding of religion and science).

The full text as it appears in six pages in Nature appears here at Coseti; it is obviously a different format from the 14-page variety that I have here, and has a few minor changes, though for all intents and purposes the text is the same.

The Cocconi/Morrison paper is located in full text here at Coseti.

Also just for the sake of it, the Drake equation (1961) for determining the number of extraterrestrial civilizations, here, again at Coseti.

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Anticipation, History of — Astronomy — Technology, History of
The Past and the Future Bridge, 1928

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This view of a future “skyscraper bridge” appeared in the May 1928 volume of Popular Mechanics (volume 48). It is an interesting idea , though very much on the high side, what with the structures being hundreds of feet high, towering over the shipping lanes. It is an old idea, the new bridge, and it reminds me of a lovely example in the Ponte Vecchio (literally, the “Old Bridge”) of Florence, the recognizable image of it rebuilt in the 14th century. (It was probably designed by the great Taddeo Gaddi (remembered so well in narrative by Vasari and in portraiture by Paolo Uccello.) There was no Gaddi at work on this bridge, which was set to unite Chicago.

And the bird’s-eye view of the enormous structure:

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Architecture and Building — Future, History of the — History of the Future
Massiveopolis: Filling in the North Sea (1930)
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2378

This is part of a series of Mega-Massive Invisible Engineering, the Filling-it-In Section. Other examples from this series not necessarily filling-stuff-up include:
- Astroengineering at Colossally-Advanced Super-Levels: the Dyson¹ Sphere I saw on Star Trek TNG or How Many Legos Would it Take to Build a Dyson Sphere Around our Solar System?
- Draining the Mediterranean
- The Underground Cities of 1934
- Filling Mega-Gigantic Holes with Cities
- Futurized Obsolescence of an Airport ABOVE the River Thames
- Extending Manhattan: Filling in the East River & Part of NYC Harbor
The title of this post is a bit of a tweeker–the project is not to fill in the entire the North Sea, just the southern North Sea. This actually makes a pretty big difference bathymetrically, because the sea floor gets mighty deep up along the coast of Norway. Still, though, as impossibly ambitious projects go, this is still a massively unstable consideration, the entire North Sea or not.

[I owe the fun I had thinking about this project to two great sites: Modern Mechanix and Imaginary Cities–Modern Mechanix for posting it to begin with and Imaginary Cities for tweeting it. These are two great sites well worth subscribing to.]

A sort-of Atlantis was drowned some 8500 years ago, a large piece of land that connected what is today Great Britain and Europe. Rising water did away with this territory leaving behind the great island nation and much else. The plan referred to above in the title is the extraordinary thinking for “raising” that lost Atlantis-esque land, and was floated in the September 1930 of Modern Mechanics.

The author maintains some sort of possibility for recovering some 100,000 square miles of submerged land that would connect south-eastern England with France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark. It would be accomplished by erecting some 700+ miles of dykes and dams and then, somehow, emptying all of that surrounded and captured water into the sea that it once belonged to.

100,000 square surface miles is an area twice the size of England, three times the size of Lake Superior, nearly the size of the Caspian, and equal to the size of Colorado.

The English Channel and the straits of Dover would become a divided thoroughfare; the Thames would be part of a canal system that would extend along the old Norfolk coast to The Wash; a bay from the Straits would extend inland to Belgium, where it would be met by a canal system that would extend to the Baltic. All of this would be held in place by a 150-mile long dam of unusual shape. And just for good measure, bisecting these two would be a monster bridge from Dover to Calais.

This is of course extraordinary, but when we look north we see a breathtaking proposal for a 450-mile long, 90′-high dyke extending from the English coast to Denmark. The artwork claims that this is 90′ above the water for the rest of the North Sea, which means that the structure would have to be at least 110′-150′ high, plus the foundation. Luckily for the designer the southern North Sea is a relatively shallow water sea, 20-40′ deep, though there is a stretch of 100′ miles where the depth is considerably deeper. I haven’t considered yet how wide this dyke would be, except that it would be, well, big.

There is also a drawing for a London-Berlin and points east train. The Elbe is dammed, and it looks as though the Netherlands is no longer the Lowlands, everything there being “filled in”, with the sea being moved some 200 miles to the west.

This is just a short spec piece that appeared in a popular science magazine 84 years ago, but there is no mention of what these changes might mean to the currents of the south North Sea, or Jutland coastal waters, or the Continental Coastal waters; or the changes it might dictate to salinity, or nutrients to the rest of the North Sea, to say nothing of the sea floor inhabitants and fish, and so on. There would no doubt be some natural consequences to this (literal!) undertaking.

I suppose someone at some point would have to think about how all that new land would be divided, but I guess that would all take care of itself.
- Another related article from Modern Mechanix posting a Modern Mechanics May 1931 addresses the issue of water removal albeit at as much lesser scale, here.
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Anticipation, History of — Bad Ideas — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Technology, History of
Small Comforts of the Wounded, 1917: Electrophones

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2377

Overall, these soldiers look to be in pretty good spirits, even if they were perhaps told to be so, they still looked fairly genuine. And who wouldn’t be, at least to some degree, being survivors? They were a few of the millions of soldiers who were wounded in WWI, which means at least that they were among the millions of the dead.

The caption that accompanies these News Photo Service image (made by the Central News Photo Service and dated May 11, 1917, says that they were enjoying the donated headsets–Electrophones–and represented a few of the hundreds that received them. This device was basically a telephone receiver, and years after Bell and Edison dreamed of social integration and advancement and wide-ranging culture, of delivery literature and music to people flung near and far, these soldiers were enjoying the benefit of limited concerts and other entertainments via telephone lines.

[This lovely photograph is available at the blog’s bookstore, here.]

Here’s a very good quote ont he electrophone from the highly interesting The Cat’s Meat Shop, written by Lee Jackson, author of Dirty Old London, the Victorian Campaign Against Filth. (It is an interesting topic–filth and its control–because you really can’t have an Industrial Revolution without lots of workers living close to their jobs, which means that lots of people live close together, and you can’t have that unless you somehow control for good sanitary conditions, which means you’ve got to take care of filth.)

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Militaria — World War I
On the Relation of Birds to Airship Flight (1890)

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Here’s an interesting and lovely little classic: A. Ritter v. Miller-Hauenfels Der mühelose Segelflug der Vögel und die segelnde Luftschiffahrt als Endziel hundertjährigen Strebens. (Roughly “The effortless gliding of birds and the sailing airships as the ultimate goal for the end of the century”).The matieral was delivered (January 18th) 1890 at the Polytechnischen Club in Graz and publisahed later that yer in Vienna by Spielhagen & Schurich. My copy of this work also happens to have been in the collection of Vicktor Silberer, 1846-1924, a pioneer aviator from Vienna and a prolific author, jorunalist, and politician.

In his lectures at Graz Miller-Hauenfels looks at the possibility of human (non-powered, gliding) flight via forward-progression bird flight, basing his work on that of Marey, Lilienthal and Parseval.

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Anticipation, History of — Aviation & flight — Technology, History of
Rare Block Diagrams for the UNIVAC (1950)
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The UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was the first commercially-available electronic computer, and the first computer to handle both numeric and alphabetic information, produced by Remington Rand, and came into working service at the Bureau of the Census in 1951. It was designed by John Mauchly and Pres Eckert Jr, who also worked together in the design and construction of the first digital computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (the famous ENIAC). The UNIVAC was a Big Boy: 25×50′, with 5,600 tubes, and 18,000 crystal diodes–given its workhorse nature and general success, by 1957 there were 46 UNIVACs in operation.

The following are working block diagrams of sections of the UNIVAC, produced by some sort of early offset process in 1950, slightly before the computer came to its working life. I have a number of sections of the computer represented in this way, but not the entire machine–but what is here may be of interest to historians of computer science.

[Supervisory Contro Panel]

Present in the collection:
- 1. The Supervisory Control Panel (2 sheets of 3, including center and left third, both undated but assumed to be 1950 like all of the others. [Shown above]
- 2. Input-Output controls. 3 sheets of 3. (left, middle and right thirds), dated 8/10/50 and 8/7/50.
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Computer Tech/History — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Technology, History of
I’ve Never Done This Before, and I’ll Never Do It Again (1918)

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All in fun and all for the charity of the British Blue Cross, Ms. Phylis Broughton joins the festivities, though whether see is entirely reluctant or determined, we’ll never know. Perhaps both.

This lovely photograph is available from our blog bookstore, here.

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Photography — World War I
Intel vs. Obelisk: The Renaissance Beauty of the Single-Chip Microprocessor

JF Ptak Science Books Revisting Archive Post 1685

The moment that I saw this image¹ of (what I think is) the 8086 processor I thought of its great visual similarities to one of the greatest engineering works of the 16th century, so much so that with a little imagination, the older work seems a pentimento of the newer. This microprocessor–which in 1979 was a vast leap forward in development–looks like an architectural/engineering plan: large objects being hauled into place by legions of workers with wooden cranes, giant winches and mammoth rope, a fantastical display of concerted effort on a gargantuan scale. It is, or was, in fact an enormous leap in hardware engineering, a micro-mammoth advancement.

This older, pentimento image is a plan for moving of the great 500,000-pound Egyptian obelisk (carved during the reign of Nebkaure Amenemhet II, 1992-1985 BCE, and originally standing in the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis) at the Vatican.

The engraving appearedin Domenico Fontana’s masterpiece Della trasporatione dell’obelisco Vaticano…(published in Rome by Bassa in 1590) and illustrated one of the greatest engineering feats of the Renaissance. Moving this enormous and relatively delicate object (from the Circus Nero, where it was placed by the emperor Caligula in 37 ACE, to St. Peter’s Piazza del Popolo, 50 years or so before it would be more enveloped by Bernini’s flying wings) took years of (very) careful planning and months of motion and movement, not to mention an extra month to get everything into place and slowly raise the obelisk into its final position. Fontana had to be cautious and correct, and he was, performing a not-so-minor miracle of pre-industrial magic to move the priceless 250-ton iconic relic and place it perfectly down in the center of Christianity. That must have been one hot Roman summer, especially for Fontana.

I can easily see the similarities in Fontana’s work and that of Intel. Here, in a photograph of the 16k bit random access memory chip (via Mostek Corporation) I can see a vast palace at the top of the picture, with a long, columned entrance with manicured gardens on either side. The image offers an elevation and a plan–that is, the top and bottom images of the buildings are seen in a deeply oblique view, while the central part of the image is a straight-out plan. At least that’s what I see, its imaginative possibilities more appealing than the physical realities (though that’s where the extraordinary value is/was).

Notes:

1. J.H. Westcott, “The Application of Microprocessors”. In Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, A, 367, 451-484.

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Computer Tech/History

Author: JF Ptak

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2380

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2377

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