A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

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Author: JF Ptak

Found-Abstract Art and the Coming of the NCC-1701: the Capazza Lenticular Airship, 1909

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Here’s another early aviation post, as I seem to be a little stuck this morning in the 1908-1911 period…or suitably enough down a small rabbit hole to keep me from doing my mailing duties. This is a fascinating period with tremendous steps forward in technology taking place just five years after the first successful Wright powered flight test–it is hard to imagine the Wrights were roundly ridiculed in their efforts and worked for the most part in deep privacy; and yet here, just 1500 days or so later, there are hundreds of aeronauts and a dozen or so journals devoted to tech aspects of flight.

What caught my Star Trekian eye here in this May 1908 article in l’Aerophile was the lovely found-abstract plans for supporting the envelope of Louis Capazza’s lenticular airship, a composite balloon/aircraft. The firm of Adolphe Bayard-Clement was the planned producer of the airship (they were the first to go into general production of an airplane, the Santos-Dumont Demoiselle 19) though it never was built. It was certainly intriguing–it was lighter than air, non-symmetrical, top be powered by three 120 hp engines supplying power to three screws fore and aft–it was lovely in its way, and of course given it plan and profile immediately suggests to me the Starship Enterprise, though I may be alone in that.

And here’s the Found-Abstract art end of the deal–the structure for the non-symmetrical support for the balloon/plane envelope:

Tech info (and image source, above) see Berget, Conquest of the Air, 1909, pp 183-186.

Images sources (below): https://archive.org/details/larophile16besa/page/182

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Anticipation, History of — Aviation & flight — Technology, History of
Atlas of the Engines–the Antoinette Aero Motor, 1908

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I couldn’t but help to share this terrific advertisement found in the page of Aerophile magazine for 1908 (via the “Unbound” section of the Smithsonian Institution and Internet Archive. This is the famous “Antoinette” engine, designed and construction by Leon Levavasseur in an aircraft-building partnership with Jules Gastambide (whose daughter’s name became that of the series of engines). As you can see the man supporting the engine is not having an easy time of it (assuming the guy is 5’8″ 150 lbs or so), though this was a far-advanced aircraft engine for the day, a V-16 (?) developing 100- horse (the Wright’s 1903 engine was 12hp 180lbs but did its job perfectly). In any event this was an interesting demonstration of comparative lightness and power, delivered in January, 1908. (I’m reasonably sure that this is not the 40hp engine of the Farman flight…)

Source: https://archive.org/details/larophile16besa/page/28)

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Aviation & flight — Technology, History of
An Anti-Gravity Space Ship (?) of the Year 2659 (1911)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I was very curious about the cover illustration for the Hugo Gernsback sci fi story, “Ralph 129 C 41 +”, in Modern Electrics for December 1911 (volume 4 #9). “129 C 41 +” was the name of a scientist who was working on the discovery by another “famous scientist” named “1246 41”–it seems that they were all involved in looking for a particular “space flyer” (first discovered by “famous scientist” 96929 in the year 2210), but then there was a kidnapped woman involved and talk of an anti-graviton antigravity engine of some sort, and then the whole thing gets a little misty. (It looks like those semi-sphere around the perimeter of the pace ship were the anti-gravity devices.) All I really want to do here is share the cover, which I think is the best part of the story. Modern Electrics isn’t that familiar a magazine to me, but there seems to be plenty of real stuff in it, not the least of which is a pretty good article on the Bleriot flyer just a few pages after the Gernsback.

The entire issue is available at Hathi Trust.

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Future, History of the — History of the Future
The Beautiful Ephemeral: the Perfect Desktop, plus Ads for Pencils and Matches (Japan, 1955)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post (Part of the “Magnificent Mundane” series)

The Japan External Trade Recovery Organization’s General Merchandise of Japan was an “effort is made to introduce every category of general merchandise” being made in the country in 1955. Ten years after the war the country was still of course recovering from its devastating defeat, though the national economy did make tremendous progress back to some sort of normalcy during that time, particularly during the ‘fifties. This is not a Sears catalog, though, as it weighs in at 110 (thick) pages plus 30 pages of advertisements. The merchandise does spread out wide, if not very deep at all, and it makes for an interesting browse to see what sorts of goods were being manufactured and sold overseas so soon after the war. What caught my eye (following ads for tribal table art, “Japanese-style lanterns”, cigarette lights, reed organs, toys, glasses, shoes, scissors, wooden bowls, eyeglasses (two varieties), and so on were the ads for pencils. There were at least four of them, three of which are visually striking. (And speaking of that, there’s also a great ad for matches.) On the “Pencils of Japan” page there is also a peep into perfection, showing an office desktop outfitted with goods manufactured in Japan. There’s not much, but the necessaries are there, and it is very tidy in a geo-Spartan way (and nothing like my own desk). In any event, I share the “Pencils of Japan”:

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Magnifcent Mundane — Social History
Nature Magazine Reviews Hitler (1933)

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Here’s a razor-sharp summation and review of Adolf Hitler, being an uncommon appearance of that man and his “science” in Nature, volume 132, p. 198, 1933.

“That the Nazi leader stands self-revealed as an ill-balanced, fanatical and otherwise abnormal is immaterial. What is supremely significant is that he has come into power on a wave of popular discontent with present day social, political and economic conditions which is sufficiently intense to submit to previously unheard of restrictions for which a “scientific” backing is advanced.”

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Bad Ideas
Plans of Major Aircraft, 1908

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This interesting illustrations shows the plans of 16 different aircraft and the triumph of aviation in the scant five years since the Wright brothers’ successful first powered flight in 1903. From left-to-right and top-to-bottom the designer/builder reads: Wright, Farman, Santos Dumont, Cornu, de la Vaux, Bleriot, Apferer, Bleriot (again), Dufaux, Delagrange, Farman, Bazin, Langly, Brequet, and Esnault-Peletrie. The image is found in Nature, 1908, vol 78, pp 668-672.

There’s a lot in this article but what I focused on was the shot across the bow to the Brits, the author taking issue with their capacities, and telling them to go and get some better maths (or someone better than them to do the thinking and work the numbers): “The recent flights show what can be done in aviation by a person possessed of skill and experience. They are a necessary factor in the development of artificial flight. The problem is quite in a different position from what it was a year ago. But if flying machines are to be made accessible to the million, the sooner English aeronauts learn mathematics or get someone to do the mathematics the better. At the present time a great deal of rubbish passes off as mathematics which is quite unworthy of the name…”

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Aviation & flight
Rhymes on the Value of Pi (1905)

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Here’s an interesting little aside from the 1905 issue of Nature–the notice is a great example of what made this one of the most interesting science journals in the modern period, as they were not adverse to including some lighthearted and thoughtful pieces along with their very concise and exacting coverage of science news and discovery. Here we see a reader contributing a poem based on the value of pi: they used the number of letters in the poem corresponding to the number in pi: so, 3.1415 meant that part of the first line had words of 3 then 1 then 4 the 1 letters/word. This is a little more difficult than it looks, and harder still I think to have something decent come of it as Haiku.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Questionable Quidity
Strange Things in the Sky Department: Floating Arms
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post (An entry in the “Found Absurdist” category)

There’s a series on this concentrating on unusual things found “floating” in the sky, bits and bobs that are odd, or visual non sequiturs (“sequuntur”?) that just happen to use a landscape as a decorative visual for the viewer, and so on. There are many varieties of this atmospheriana, including floating cities, bombing ladies, eyeballs, hands, extra-earths, alien populations, and the unexpected like. Today’s entry is less involved than those, showing a disarticulated arm and shoulder floating above a gentle landscape…all this is, in real life, is an engraving showing a number of different varieties of engraving, all presented on one leaf rather than using several. The explanation for the image is boring, but the stand-alone of the unexplained floating arm isn’t.

Source: Abraham Bosse, 1604-1676 (printmaker and artist), in his classic work on engraving and illustration, Traité des manières de graver en taille-douce…, 1645.
- https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k117103s
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Absurdist, Unintentional
A Field-Constructed Piano, November 1918.

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This fine image was made for distribution to newspapers and magazines, and was printed 2 November 1918–just nine days before the armistice–and shows the “Broadway Quartet” as they rehearse “I’m Only a Buck Private” for a behind-the-lines show for U.S. servicemen, somewhere in France. The note with the image (from the Western Newspaper Union) says that the staging used for their shows came from found wood, bits of flooring, and camouflage netting torn into pieces.

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World War I
A Lovely and Lonely Plainness, by Margaret Bourke-White
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2814

I happened upon some photographs by the great Margaret Bourke-White yesterday in a most unexpected place–an upper-end oversize pamphlet advertising the perfume and oils business of Fritzsche Brothers of NYC. No disrespect to Fritzsche–which was in its 65th year of business–but it was a surprise to see the work of a pioneering and iconic photographer like Bourke-White in such a relatively common setting. Of course photographers need to pay the bills, too, and I’m sure that Bourke-White was well paid for her ultra-competent and accomplished business and industrial assignments. She was probably very well paid considering that she already had a national audience, being the first photographer for the new Fortune magazine, with her photo essays appearing there beginning in 1930.

The Fritzsche pamphlet was published in 1937, just a year or so before she made her first LIFE magazine cover. She had a tremendous run between 1935-1950, and seemed to be everywhere, seeing everything. She was the first U.S. war photo-correspondent covering WWII and Korea; she was at concentration camps in 1945 and with Stalin in 1944 and Gandhi in 1949, and was a superb documentarian of the human experience during the Great Depression–even her first assignment at Fortune found her making photographs of the bank vault at the First National Bank of Boston coincidentally on the evening of Black Tuesday, 1929.

Here’s a photo of Bourke-White at work (from her first-photographer-at-Fortune-magazine days). and one of her most recognizable works made during the Great Depression:
- (Sources: The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/08/photography-of-margaret-bourke-white/596980/ and Wikicommons.)
And then here she was in the relatively bland pages of the Fritzsche promo, making images of reception areas, loading docs, labs, a library, some VP studiously at work at a small desks…however when you look closely at the rooms she was working in you can appreciate that it was a difficult assignment, and that lighting was a problem, though it was one that she solved. The odd thing is that everything in these photos is sort of the same, that a general blankness/blandness has taken over, all of the people with similar expressions, and then something else…that in this very large collection of offices there’s absolutely noting on the walls except for an occasional clock here and there. Other than that exception, there are no wall decorations. Given that the company is chemically decorating the air around people, it strikes me as a little odd that the physical surroundings was such a collection of nothing. Here’s the reception area as an example of the environment’s assertive blandness:

There are 22 such photos of hollow spartanness, well-lighted. And very tidy.

Here’s another:

The blank walls become even more oppressive when you consider the number of walls in the place:

I guess Bourke-White did as well as could be done with what there was…
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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — History of Nothing — Photography