Author: JF Ptak

A Sad Bit on Positivist Criminology, 1893 (And on Women & Tattoos)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2262

In an interesting article in Popular Science Monthly (volume 44, December 1893) Helen Zimmern reviews the work and vision of positivist-criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Woman. Lombroso was a believer in certain bits of investigation and experimentation that he took as science. He examined the physical characteristics of criminals and made aggressive assumptions on how the shared statistics of visual clues could elucidate the character of a person. He measured all sorts of things in prisoners–head shape, skull capacity, all manner of other body part measurement,s hearing ability, strengths,m weaknesses. color determination, acuity, agility, sagacity of facial features, and on and on, and was fairly well satisfied that he had unlocked a code of criminality determined by mostly visual interpretation–in effect, a naked-eye DNA. It was certainly in keeping with the time and the belief in New Statistics. Most of it was bunk, dangerous, and useless.

IT was all taken as a science of sorts at the time, and Ms. Zimmern reviewed the Lombroso work as a scientific, evidentiary document. Mostly the conclusion are sad and wilting.

Here’s a bit from the review, followed by a couple of links to other works in English by Lambroso.

“…on tattooing in women, the tendency to tattoo being, according to Lombroso, an infallible indication of criminal tendencies.”–Cesare Lombroso, “Criminal Woman” review, page 221.

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A Peek into the Future of Modernist Painting–1863

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post [Part of the History of the Future series.]

I’ve written on this blog on a number of occasions about the coming of The Modern, about the coming of many modernisms that came to life in the extraordinary period of 1885-1925 (which could even be shaved perhaps to 1895-1920 and further if you’re a stickler), when nearly all things “modern” in nearly all fields came to be. Sometimes though one can see a hint of the future, even though it might not necessarily be recognized at the time.

Such is the whisper of the future in this humorous, somewhat mocking piece on art in the 13 June 1863 issue of Punch, or the London Charivari. Overall its pretty funny in a 19th century fashion, but what I am taken with most of course is the first piece, the framed non-representational artwork, a taste of the future that wouldn’t arrive for another 50 years with Wassily Kandinsky. But here it is, or here is something, presented as art, in 1863, and with no discernible, naturalistic subject matter.

Even in satire, seeing such a picture give some pause–if for no other reason, that even here in the early stretch of Abstract Expressionism, that such an image would appear in a very popular journal and have (a) no impact and (b) not an ounce of staying power.

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On Vast Numbers in War, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

[Source: National Library of Scotland, First World War Official Photographs, here. My estimate is that there are about 10,000 soldiers in this photo, or about 1/10th of 1 percent of all German POWs of WWI]

At the end of WWI the Imperial German Army was losing battles, and int hose losing battle thousands and thousands of soldiers were killed and wounded, and thousands more were taken prisoner. This remarkable photograph is a tale in itself of the vastness of the undertaking of that war–it is a small section of one large group of German prisoners taken in the battle of St. Quentin Canal, October 2, 1918. Five weeks before the end of the war, and I am sure every German soldier knew the war was lost. Perhaps it was a physical relief to be captured at this point, to be removed from the feed line of death in which millions perished and placed under guard for the remainder of what would be from this point a short end-game. The photograph has a visceral feeling of hope to it, these men now not going to die, their lives saved to short-wait the end of the war, becoming part of the fortunate 35% of the entire German army of 11.2 million who made it out–they were a piece of the million soldiers taken prisoner, and not part of the 6 million comrades who were killed or wounded.

Here’s another view of the same mass of men, taken froma slightly different angle, though here many men are looking at the photographer:

From the National Library of Scotland site:

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World War I
A Finely Designed Microscope Ad, 1890

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I’m just stopping for a moment in the MArch 16, 1890 issue of Nature to admire this lovely add for Browning’s “Perfect” Microscope. In the issue it is about two inches square–it is just a nicely designed thing.

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Industrial & Technological art — Technology, History of
CartographArtia of the Flight of Homing Pigeons

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Non-representational art was still nearly twenty years in the future when this lovely cartographic artwork was published in 1894. And what we are seeing here in the collection of circles and spirals is a representation of three trials of a homing pigeon finding its way home in the Lake Monona region of Madison, Wisconsin. C.F. Hodge Ph.D. (of Clark University, psychology) wrote “The Method of Homing Pigeons” for Popular Science Monthly (volume 24, 1894), showing at least in this found instance that behavioralists (yet named at this point) enjoyed working with pigeons well before C.B. Ferster recommended them over rats to B.F. Skinner (mainly because, as Ferster said, he didn’t like rats).

Actually Hodge was more of a neuro/pathology person, but for now I’m just interested in the artwork generated by his experiments.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas
When a Non-Prediction Was and Wasn’t a Prediction (1651-1666)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
[Source: the City of London]

There was once a scrutable man who wrote a scrutable book with the description of a scrutable event that was actually a non-event of a scrutable happening. There was no problem with all of this–especially as it was lounging beneath layers of a Very Demanding Title–until one of the events somewhat “foretold” by the author came to be true. It could not have been a bigger deal unless the story had been about the king or queen, and maybe not even then. The event was the catastrophic Great Fire of London, an extreme ravage that burned for four days in September 1666, and which ate up 13,000 houses and 87 parish churches.

The event was predicted after a fashion by astrologer William Lilly (1602-1681) in his book Monarchy or No Monarchy, which was printed in 1651, fifteen years before the event. Perhaps it might have attracted less notice to authorities had Lilly not written (and illustrated) what he thought to be the coming of a great plague in the same work–the plague struck London a year before the Fire.

The Great Plague killed far more than the Great Fire, perhaps 100,00 or more with teh plague, and far fewer than that in the fire, though the fire did cause huge destruction. (It seems that casualty figures for the fire are indeterminate, from a few to hundreds to thousands.)

So some central figures in government bade Mr. Lilly visit them soon after the fire, just to make sure that “England’s Merlin” and the most popular astrologer of his day did not have an actual role in starting the fire. He didn’t of course have anything to do with the fire, or the plague. His predictions were cloudy enough to both mean something and nothing, part of the great anti-charm that is the heart and soul of all manner of what James Randi calls “Whoo-whoo”. He was left to the rest of his life, which still had a fair bit of fame and social acclaim left to it, though most of that would slip away with the Restoration. It turns out that a number of people predicted a great fire for London, which was not surprising given the way the city expanded and converted itself into a major metro area (of 500,000+ people) which was partially built on kindling.

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Brevity and Complexity
Robotic Preachers of the Year 2000, as Seen from 1834.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2260 History of the Future series

“The century of invention Anno Domini 2000 or the march of aerostation, steam, rail roads, movable houses & perpetual motion” is a terrific lithograph, made ca. 1834, the handiwork and imagination of Charles Jameson Grant, a satirist and observer of high order. He tried looking into the future 165 years hence, and in some practicable ways he got a lot of it right–the imagery wasn’t there, but the ideas were.

[And as long as were slightly on the subject, the idea of “anno domini”, or “the year of our savior”, was an idea controlling the past and future aspects of time that came into being about 500 years after the birth of the event upon which the savior years are based. The idea of anno domini was really in widespread use until the Middle ages were well underway, around the year 800.]

It is difficult to make out from this print (found at the British Museum site, here) but the small visual clues and textual bits are very interesting. First of all the print displays things like small and large individual steam-powered four-wheeled vehicles, as well as plenty of balloons (in the spirit of aviation, at this point in its fourth decade and entering a great heyday) passing each other in every which way, off on adventures, or work, or in a race (as with the “out of Sight Club”). There are also numerous people flapping around in the sky (“winging it so early”) with their (something)-powered wings, some of whom are hunting birds.

The main sensation here is speed, though I would not say it was democratic–the means to be able to got to Dublin in your balloon “for an appetite” and return later in the day would have been fantastic to the 1834 reader trying to image doing such a thing on such a whim, with a newspaper in your lap–but certainly it would be available to the leisurely class.

There was also an idea for balloonic (first time I’ve ever typed that!) communication, as one man in a balloon shouts to another to “give me a call by the first balloon”, meaning perhaps it is a communication device, or a balloon-delivered letter.

The dialog certainly portrays an attitude of unremarkable observation, conveying how commonplace flight and mobile towns and steam cars would be in the year 2000. That’s where one of the great insights comes into play–at lower left there is a person remarking about a race, and the exclamation upon a great rarity being shown: a live horse. That Grant would make this an issue is interesting, as it would certainly rub the 1830’s consciousness the opposite way of what the brain expected to see in the street, and that was horses. Horses powered much of transportation at this time, and to imagine a world in which the horse would be gone would’ve been, well, unimaginable.

Ditto too the great and extensive coal mines fueling the Industrial Revolution (and it isn’t as though factory workers in 1834 woke up int eh morning cheerfully exclaiming that, “Hey, We’re in the Industrial Revolution!”) going dry, the coal consumed.

Also at bottom there is a very unusual placard concerning robotics: “a cast iron Parson will preach by steam at Fudge Church”. Now this is doubly intriguing because it not only invokes a steam-powered person, but a (perhaps) thinking one. It is also putting the word of god into the care and trust and tending–and right into the mouth–of a machine.In short–a robot preaching to a human choir. This is still far removed from the singularity (and the assumption that Our Robot Overlords would have any interest in humans or their religious beliefs), and seems a bit on the primitive side in its display, but the intellectual imagery is pretty powerful stuff. I assume that the power of this would’ve been less so at the time of publication, guessing that Grant was making more of a not-so-subtle satire on the steam-driven puffery of some preachers with the creativity of kettles, and that in the future this would be magnified to the point of steam and smoke. But still the idea of placing the deeply emotional stuff of belief systems in the control of a machine is extraordinary for the time, I think.

So I think that if you hard enough at this print and don’t get distracted by the images Grant uses to try and visualize his ideas of eh future and concentrate on what these things represent, then I think that Grant got a lot of his vision right.

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FootPunk–Heavy Metal Skates, 1880

JF Ptak Science Books Futre Punk series & Daily Dose from Dr. Odd series

Somewhere between walking and bicycles Mr. Richard Gornall found a mechanical need to fill what may or may not be an imaginary gap. He invented or suggested the Gornall Pedo Motor, which appeared in the pages of The Scientific American on February 14, 1880 (page 107), along with a great wood engraving. Gornall said that his invention, which “accelerates the motion of walking”, would “occupy the immediate position between the roller skate and the veliocepede”. The walking heel-toe motion was supposed to transfer power via a rotary drive to the rear wheel, thus creating in a way a mechanically powered roller skate. The invention sounds not-so-great, but the image is certainly pretty.

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Future Punk
A Big Popular Statement on How Small Small Is (1883)
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2259

In three issues¹ of Nature (London) magazine in 1883, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)–polymath of a great and inquisitive mind–tried to establish a good reference point for the size of atoms, mainly to establish that their size while being incredibly small were not unimaginably so, and that even objects of this minor magnitude could be approximated and studied. And he did so with great ease and in a popular general-audience sort of way.

All told, this was a very good piece of thinking, especially referencing the estimates of Niels Bohr 30 years later, publishing in the Philosophical Magazine (volume 26, pp 1-25, 1913) and calculating the size of an atom at .5 x^-10 meters. And even though Thomson is talking about his estimates in terms opf science in a post-Dalton and post-Mendeleyeev world, he is also pre-Stoney, and Roentgen and Curie and Soddy and everyone else, especially pre-atomic-nucleus, and pre-proton (1919/20 with Rutherford and Moseley) and pre-neutron (Chadwick 1932), which are smaller still than the atom. Way smaller. It is difficult to put into understandable terms on how “small” that small is: the atomic nucleus is sort of 1/10,000th of the atom, and a proton or neutron smaller still, and then the quark smaller than that, until perhaps it becomes a Seussian exercise with future discoveries showing that after everything is said and done that it is turtles all the way down.

But Thomson managed to put an understandable assessment on a very difficult visualization, talking in terms of an atom being “1/10,000,000 or from 1/10,000,000 to 1/100,000,000 of a centimetre in diameter”, or 1×10-⁷meters, which is just about the size of a cell nucleus or DNA; that’s in the neighborhood, especially if you look at the smaller number which is 10^-8 meters, which starts to close in on the size of the massive carbon atom (10^-10), but sorta not so close to the electron (10^-12) , or carbon atom nucleus (10^-14) or proton (10^-15). Small, hazy stuff indeed, filled with nothing. On the other hand, if you proceeded in a space vehicle 10¹⁴ meters from Earth our Solar System would appear as just another fuzzy splotch in the sky. 10¹⁶ meters is about a light year, and then it would taken 10,000 of those “just” to get slightly outside our galaxy. And then there’s the rest.

In any event, Thomson did okay. And as it turns out (as I just now learned) there was an earlier Nature article in 1870 (the inaugural year of the journal) by its editor Norman Lockyer who estimated the size of atoms at just about the Thomson scale.
```
"FOUR lines of argument founded on observation have 
led to the conclusion that atoms or molecules are 
not inconceivably, not immeasurably small. I u;e the 
words " inconceivably" and "immeasurably" advisedly. 
That which is measurable is not inconceivable, and there- 
fore the two words put together constitute a tautology. 
We leave inconceivableness in fact to metaphysicians. 
Nothing that we can measure is inconceivably large or 
inconceivably small in physical science. It may be diffi- 
cult to understand the numbers expressing the magnitude, 
but whether it be very large or very small there is nothing 
inconceivable in the nature of the thing because of its 
greatness or smallness, or in our views and appreciation 
and numerical expression of the magnitude. The general 
result of the four lines of reasoning to which I have re- 
ferred, founded respectively on the undulatory theory of 
light, on the phenomena of contact electricity, on capil- 
lary attraction, and on the kinetic theory of gases, agrees 
in showing that the atoms or molecules of ordinary matter 
must be something like the 1/10,000,000, or from the 
1/10,000 000 to the 1/100000,000 of a centimetre in dia- 
meter."--Thomson, below. 
```
Notes:

1. William Thomson, The Size of Atoms, I pp 203-205, June 28, 1883; Size of Atoms II, pp 250-254, July 12, 1883; Size of Atoms III, pp 274-278, July 19, 1883, earlier presented before the Royal Institution, beginning February 2, 1883.
```
 
```
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Crazy Cubes, Baseball Cannons, Logic, and the 4th Dimension, 1897

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2258

[Source: Joshua Robinson, “A Machine Before its Time”, Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2010. See below.]

Somewhat Zelig-like, Charles Howard Hinton (1853-1907) is a sort of shadowy Oxford-educated figure who turns up in the beautiful Jorge Luis Borges’ works, and who married George Boole’s daughter, and who was a great and very early visualizer of geometries of higher dimensions, and who was the coiner of tesseract, and the inventor of a baseball pitching machine, and a practical joker, and a sci-fi writer, and who deserved an obituary in the New York Sun by the masterful Gellett Burgess (May 5, 1907), and who seemed to keep one step ahead of everyone and himself.

He was also the creator of crazy cubes.

There are many standard-bearers in the history of modern art who probably owe something to Hinton, who published his ideas on the fourth dimension (illustrated!) just at the time when this idea was in it trial runs in the artwork of the modern age.

And so do baseball players—or at least those at Princeton, where he introduced his machine which evidently was used there for several seasons. The pitching gun really was a cannon, the baseball loaded into the thing with an appropriate cartridge to shoot the ball at pitcherly speeds, which he described it in Harper’s Weekly for March 20, 1897. (How Hinton got to Princeton is interesting and a mystery, both; he was an instructor of math in England until he was charged and convicted of bigamy in 1886, whereupon he took his first wife and four (?) sons to Japan to teach in Yokohama for a while, then yadda yadda yadda he starts teaching at Princeton in 1893.)

Hinton was into a lot of things, with a very inquisitive mind, and very smart. And so he bounced here and there in his careers, from position to position. David Toome, in his fine The New Time Travelers: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics (2010) gently and wonderfully describes Hinton (in his relations to the exterior world of work) as “buoyant” (page 29).

In any event, Hinton seems not to have patented the thing,so far as I can determine in 10 minutes of patent searches.

The cannon seems to have excited a bit of baseball scifi in itself, adding to Hinton’s other pleasures.

In a longer and better article than mine, Joshua Robinson writes in the Wall Street Journal about Hinton’s machine and the near-roboticized future of baseball:

“…(I)n 1896, the Los Angeles Times called it a “Frankenstein.” One Washington Post columnist worried it would ring in an age of robots ruining the national pastime—this was a long time before anyone was worried about steroids.

“There would be the base-burning, high-pressure, anti-friction catcher,” he wrote, “and the shortstop made of aluminium and rivets and filled with cogs, cams, valves, shafts, and belting.”

Hinton’s pitcher was an interesting idea, but ultimately it proved to be too cumbersome and slow to be of any sustained use. Plus, as Robinson points out, after the cartridge was fired there was a puff of smoke, which caused occasional consternatiuon and confusion for those standing in front of the canon. And ducking.

And the so-called “crazy cubes”? That moniker is my own creation. These were simply (really not so) creations by Hinton that he said would help people visualize his four dimensional world, as Rudy Rucker (see below) describes as “points moving around in three dimensions might be imagined as successive cross-sections of a static four-dimensional arrangement of lines passing through a three-dimensional plane…” Evidently the cubes helped many people experience a more internalized world of fantastic difference, some stating that the cubes drove some people insane. Of course they were just colored cubes, pretty in themselves–though the problem of visualization was fairly knotty.

[Source: The Fairyland of Geometry, a Cultural History of Higher Space, 1869-1909, here.]

Notes:

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