Author: JF Ptak

A Piece of Nazi Propaganda Warning of Spies, Traitors, and Saboteurs (1938)

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Published a year or so before the official beginning of the war in 1939, this piece of Nazi propaganda took aim at the people of Germany, seeming to stoke the home fires and ready folks for subterfuge and dirty tricks. Spione, Verrater, Saboteure (Spy, Traitor, Saboteur) was already in its fifth edition (whatever that means in this case), and in its 64pp it warned people about what foreign intelligence processes were like,what sort of government response and legislation might be necessary to combat foreign intrigue, and counterintelligence. It also addressed “negligent treason”(loose lips stuff) amd its consequences (severe), how traitors could be recruited in Germany, “Sabotage, the sister of treason” (“Sabotage, die Schwester des Verrats”), and then finishing off the whole lot with a bit on the recruitment of traitors (the worst of the bunch).

It was a plea—well, demand seems more like it—telling folks that “the means of defense include not only the structure, training, arming and deployment of the German Wehrmacht, but also all associations, fortifications, buildings, commercial and industrial companies, means of transport, supplies and warehouses serving the national and national defense. All of these means of defense are vital for Germany’s security, even in unimportant details”.

The pamphlet’s rear cover was a full page ad for a 32-page annotation of Hitler’s “Volk und Rasse” from Mein Kampf, which a reader could purchase for about a pfennig a page.

The pamphlet makes me itch.

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World War II
A Short Notice on Some Short but Very Important Flights–the Wrights, 1902

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2823

Here’s an interesting piece of reporting by (Professor) Raimund Nimfuhr (Czech, 1874-1954) on the Wright brothers gliding experiments in late September/October 1902. The two men transported their 1902 aircraft to Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk , N.C., and carried out between 700 and 1000 gliding tests, with great success. This story on their efforts appeared a few months later on 5 March 1903 in the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig), with an unusual accompaniment of five photographs.

The Wright’s received very circumspect coverage during this time, what with the certain level of disbelief that accompanied early reports on flight. As it turns out when the brothers made their great and historic powered flight a year and two months later the local papers near the Wright community in Ohio gave the achievement scant notice. The reverential Scientific American gave the Wright flight an inside notice—it wasn’t front cover material for them. (The papers were a little shorted though because the results of the experiment were leaked to the local Norfolk paper, and the rest of the world got scooped.)

In this short notice, “The latest advances in practical flying art”, Nimfuhr takes the first two paragraphs to review a bit of aviation history and to remark that “practical activity in flying has become increasingly common”, with a “feverish activity” particular to the “New World”. He states that the importance of Otto Lilienthal had not yet been recognized for what it was, with Europeans paying the price in wasted experimentation for not employing Lilienthal’s results—this he states is not the case in the New World, which has made good use of the Lilienthal experimentation.

When he gets to the den Bruden Wright, Nimfuhr starts by saying that their 1902 glider was almost exactly like that of the second type of Octave Chanute, though he almost immediately states that the Wright machine was a “brand new, significantly improved machine”. He describes the wings and the method of controlling die gleilfluge, and then on th=o a description of some of he “700” flights they made, the longest being 189 metres (with time aloft at 26 seconds). Nimfuhr does take great care to describe the exacting control the Wrights had on the glider, which “promptly obeyed the slightest movement of the rudder”. He ends saying that the Wright glider is not the “ideal”, and that in order to fly several kilometers or into a headwind, an engine was necessary, though as things were in March 1903 the Wrights had made a “very significant advance”.

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Aviation & flight — Technology, History of
Found Art in the Annalen der Physik (1902)

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Malevich it isn’t, though pre-Abstract art pre-Malevich it may be:

There are some good papers in this 1902 volume of Annalen der Physik, including Planck (“Ueber die Natur des weissen Lichts his paper on white light), Stark, Quincke, Drude, Exner (“Ueber den Gleichgewichtszustand eines schweren Gases”)–I was drawn instead to the two big folding plates for O. Lehmann’s “Gasentladungen in weiten Gefassen” ( a longish 29-page paper in series IV, vol 7. pp 1-29, 1902.).

Interestingly Lehmann writes about the dangers involved with these experiments–he’s using considerable pieces of glassware, some 40cm wide and 60 cm long (!) with glass as thick as 5-10 mm. That means there would be (and was!) a lot of large pieces of flying glass if the vacuum created in the tube crushed it, resulting in a sharp little explosion. He states (more or less) at the bottom of the page in a footnote: ” “The experiments are brilliant demonstration experiments at the same time, but it must be expressly pointed out that working with such large evacuated vessels is by no means without danger. It was shown that the 5–10 mm thick air pump bells with an internal width of more than 40 cm, which are commercially available, are unable to withstand the pressure of the outside air permanently. Such an egg, 40 cm wide and over 1 m long, was smashed by the air pressure soon after the vacuum was created, fortunately without causing any further damage, since I had covered it with thick cloths as a precaution, which did not allow the glass fragments to penetrate , Another vessel, 45 cm wide and 60 cm long, the parts of which had initially been individually tested for strength, withstood the full air pressure for about 6 hours, even during the passage of the discharges. But after it had stood untouched for about 5 hours, it was suddenly violently crushed into countless small fragments that flew up to 15 m, partly through the window panes. All fragile objects hit were damaged and individual pieces of glass even bored into the wooden doors of cupboards and other wooden parts, with such force that they got stuck in them.”

Anyway the patterns of discharges produced in the tubes were beautiful and can certainly stand on their own in the Found Art department. And so far as the Annalen goes, this is some of the most visually beautiful work produced by the journal over its long 220 year history.

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Absurdist, Unintentional
Measuring Civilization by Height (1919)

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Sharing space in the January 1920 issue of The Scientific Monthly with two significant papers is an unusual data visualization in James Breasted’s article “The Origins of Civilization”. Leading the issue off is the wonderfully-presented and important paper (“Defects Found in Drafted Men”) by C.B. Davenport and A.G. Love, which is a remarkable display of an enormous amount of data on the health of young men in the U.S. presented in a graphical display, the results of medical examinations of millions entering military service during WWI. Following this is a report by Sir Joseph Thompson (“The Deflection of Light by Gravitation and the Einstein Theory of Relativity”) on the gravity/eclipse/relativity experiment in May 1919, which he referred to as “the greatest achievement in the history of human thought”. And then comes the Barbarism/Civilization dataviz of the Breasted article. I’m having a bit of fun with this at Breasted’s expense, as it looks as though he is measuring the progress of Barbarism to Civilization and the subsequent increases in culture to the depths/heights of monuments for the dead, from sand pit to pyramid, 4000-2800 BCE:

[The text here becomes clearer when expanded.]

It is an arresting image, to be sure, but the direction it takes seems a little suspect to me. In any event, I reproduce it here for general enjoyment.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Physics
The “Invisible” Made Far Less So: How a Cat Falls and Lands on its Feet, 1894
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- Source: Etienne Marey, “Des mouvements que certains animaux exeutent pour retomber sur leurs pieds, quand ils sont precipites d’un lieu eleve”, in Comptes Rendus de l’Academie des Sciences, vol CXIX, 1894, p. 714. (This paper is reproduced a few weeks later in the more popular science journal La Nature on 10 November 1894.)
Aha!

This is the famous falling/dropped/thrown cat experiment in which Marey shows that when dropped with its back towards the ground a cat will respond and right itself via muscular reaction to land on its feet, all of the time. It was not a trick of “air pressure” or other such thing which Marey dismissed, as once the action of the fall is slowed so that the whole of the activity can be intelligently observed, and it was by the animal’s movement alone that brings it to land on its feet. It is Marey’s instrumentation that takes the day, using a camera capable of making 60 images per second, which was a huge advance over his chronophotographic gun of 1882 which made 12 images/second. Marey remarks that this animal action is true in other animals, giving the examples of rabbit and dog.

Marey is a rather stiff writer and takes his time to explain himself in extended detail—this isn’t an entertaining story though the results are of course fantastic.

That piece of needling aside, Marey is one of my favorite 19th century science figures. He worked across numerous fields, though I think his great importance is in the invisible-to-visible part–that he was able to make was were essentially moving pictures of complex and/or fast action, displaying motion in shockingly easy manner. His work opened as much of a new and surprising world as that of Lippershey/Galileo and Co. with the telescope and Janssen/Leeuwenhoek/ and the others with the microscope.

For further reading see G. Gbur’s Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics, Yale, 2009.
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Technology, History of
Russland (Nazi Propaganda, 1936)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2822

This is a nasty piece of Nazi anti-Soviet/Communist propaganda, published as #43 in a series called “Silvaniadruck” in 1936. It is a nonstop attack on the Soviet system and also on the Russian people. The pamphlet is only 24 pages long but it certainly feels like more, especially if you could weigh vindictiveness and diatribe. It is composed of 12 sections ranging from the new economic policy of the country, to the right of the Soviet citizen, religion, family, church, and education, and the period of 1918-1921, though the sections I wanted to try to read and share were on the Famines (“der Hunger”) and the “Terror.“

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Books–Great Cover Art — Social History — World War II
What to Tip a NYC Soda Jerk, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2821

New York Behind the Scenes, Uncensored–the UNofficial Guide Book the Real Low-Down on the Things You Want to Know (1938), certainly lived up to its name, especially at the cover price of two bits. Lee Mortimer (the author of Washington Confidential and other such works) promised inside dope on “Night Life, Rackets, Free Fun, Chorines, Celebrities, How to Tip & 1000 Others”, and delivered on a number of them, though “1000” is a bit of an exaggeration in the 66-page pamphlet. [A “Chorine” by the way is a chorus girl.]

Found here are guides to theaters, movies, beaches, hotel, taxis, buses, nude shows, gambling, and that sort–there’s also info on public rest rooms, also where to drink, find free dancing, how to talk to people, what to wear, and so on.

Also there are boxed pearls sprinkled throughout the publication, like: “How to Meet a Young Lady: visit a taxi dance hall, dance with a dime-a-dance girl’ and following several other useful find-a-date bits, including the ancient “take your dog for a walk”, a la 101 Dalmations.

And there are also the bon mots salted hither and yon like Patrick Star’s Spongebobian sentence enhancers: “Pets: New York may not be a place for children, but for dogs its a paradise”.

There’s also a collection of “does and don’ts” though mainly don’ts: “DON’T swim in the Hudson River below the NYC line…” and “don’t light a match to read your (theater) program, it may cause a fore and panic”; “You’ll see the prettiest bathing girls at Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn” (where my mother used to go at about this time) among them.

And then there’s just flat-out statements like “New York emphatically is not a children’s town” and “If strange men or women come to you with offers of jobs in New York, call the police immediately”. Welcome to new York!

Second only to the what-to-tip pages is the low numbers for New York license plates, which I’ve got to say I’ve never seen before. I like that Fiorello Laguardia’s plate was “NYC”, and that Ed Wynn’s was “YY2”, Walter Winchell’s was “WW1”, and for some reason FDR was “3”. (Numbers 1, 2, and 16 were reserved for the governor, Herbert Lehman…I think I’d have to give the president the tag “1+”.)

There is lot of info about neighborhoods in the city, though I wonder now how good the info is. (For example “Harlem, as night Mecca for New Yorkers, went into a decline immediately following the repeal…today, Harlem’s clubs are patronized by local colored folk and by jaded down-towners who have nothing else to do”, which seems a bit sniffy and stiff).

In the nude/amusement pages we see how relatively expensive it was to attend one of these venues–in addition to standard entrance fees, drink costs, and show and food charges, there was the tipping of the waiters (10%), headwaiters ($1-$10 for a good table), cigarette girl (20-25 cents), hatcheck girl (20-25 cents), wash room attendant (25 cents), and the doorman (25 cents to put you ion the cab). Don’t forget the cabbie (10%), the doorman at your hotel (25 cents), and the elevator man (10 cents). I guess it added up…

Anyway what I wanted to share here was the tip chart, in case anyone is writing about social NYC in 1938 and needed some good stinking detail:

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Social History
Glorious Tech: Napier Bones of Words, a Calculating Money, and a Scroll-Fed Typewrtier (1916)

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I noticed three interesting devices in just a few dozen pages of each other in Popular Mechanics for 1916. The first was a calculating monkey adding machine/toy for kids–this is something I had never seen before and had I been aware of it 30 years ago I certainly would’ve used it in my store. The “toy” is actually pretty sophisticated, as it will add and subtract, multiply,divide, and extract square roots, which was more powerful than any machine I needed at the time for the store.

The next piece of machinery was this Napier’s Bones-like device intended for kindergarten use. The device on the left uses a set of movable wooden strips with the alphabet printed on them; so by sliding the strips you can produce a simple or complex word, the result displayed in the open line of the rectangular piece of wood that holds the whole thing together. On the right is a set of strips with words on therm–used in the same fashion, the child could select a series of words to make simple sentences. I like these two devices immensely, (Unfortunately I have no information on this or the calculating monkey.)

The third item is a wonderful device, though this one not for kids–it is an electric automatic typewriter, punching out letters from a piano scroll-like master copy fed into a receiving typewriter. (Again, no manufacturing info here, and I don’t know how the typewriter would have responded to page breaks.)

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Alphabets — Inventions — Technology, History of
The Famine of 1920

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2820

“The Most Awful Spectacle in History” screams the headline of this full-page (16″ tall) Illustrated London News advertisement for the “Save the Children” fund, appearing 22 May 1920. There was good reason for the screaming–following the Great War there were millions and millions of people in dire need of food in the months and years following 11.11.18. Hundreds of thousands–millions–of these people were children. The ad makes a direct plea for the sake of the children, where the reader is told that in some districts there is “not a child under the age of 7 years”, as all have died. To not donate a penny or a shilling and allow the catastrophe to continue would mean that “we are for ever humiliated in the eyes of God and Man”.

The appeal here is simple–Lord Weardale (Philip Stanhope, 1847-1923), who was the chair of the “Save the Children” fund (London) is asking for a penny, from everyone, as the accumulation of that penny a day for two months “the children of Europe would be saved”.

With assistance from other countries–including the U.S. where the effort was spearheaded by Herbert Hoover–the Fund raised more than a million pounds and averted an enormous catastrophe. Unfortunately, a larger disaster loomed to the east–the Great Famine in Russia of 1921-1922 (following by just thirty years the Russian Famine of 1891-2)–and in rhis circumstance the relief efforts failed. The Russian famine began with a natural disaster which was then inflamed by complete (sometimes intentional) mismanagement by the government, the result of which caused the deaths of between five and eight million people. Hoover–as Secretary of Commerce–guided the Russian Famine Relief Act spending of 20 million dollars for the purchase of U.S. foods to be sent to Russia, but the combinations of political intrigue, capital mismanagement, and of course natural disasters leading to more disease and death, left millions dead.

As the 1920 ad sums the situation: “the cry of the hungry can never be foreign to the followers of the Son of Man”–but they were, and are.

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Social History
ROYGBV Redux via Emily Vanderpoel’s “Color Problems” (1903)

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Just on the heels of yesterday’s post of RIYBBV vs. ROYGBIV comes this lovely discovery in the highly unusual and original work by Emily Vanderpoel, Color Problems of the Layman, printed in 1903, a gorgeous but mysterious book in which she sought not so much to analyze the components of color itself, but rather to quantify the overall interpretative effect of color on the imagination. I know this sounds begging and vague, but I really haven’t been able to make much headway in her theory. Ms. Vanderpoel looked deeply and arithmetically into art—she also produced a numerical grid of the artwork that she analyzed, going a step further to re-order the reality of the painting into a representative 10×10 square, distributing the color sense according to a secret algebra that I cannot identify.

The series is preceded by a further presentation of the colors side-by-side (and reversed) as well as another plates of the colors side-by-side presnting their gradient tints:

And lastly, those lovely plates, larger:

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Color & its advanced Abuses — Color Theory