Author: JF Ptak

A Note from the Future: a Computer-Needs Questionnaire from 1953

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2089

At a time when computers were big, heavy, electrically-scented, hot and expensive
(ranging into the hundreds of thousands of 1953 dollars, many millions in 2013
bucks), and coming at a time when very few individual companies (exterior to
the military/industrial sphere or insurance) actually owned one of these
machines, Lawrence Wainwright wrote a useful guide to potential computer-buyers, “Digital
Computer Questionnaire”. Appearing in the world’s first publicly-published
computation/computer journal, Computers
and Automation, Wainwright sets out in six single-spaced pages a
very tight and logical set of questions for the would-be buyer of one of these
early god-sent beasties. I’ve illustrated the non-illustrated questionnaire with a series of images from another article found a little deeper in the same journal, “A Pictorial Introduction to Computers”, which appeared in June, 1957.

As I read through the list (excepted below) it becomes
obvious that the really good questions are deftly asked, and that the possible
buyer would be well on their way to having a good dialog with the seller.

The questions do have a real flavor of antiquity to them,
much like monied Parisians with their
detailed list of questions for their 15th century water-carrier: where are you getting your water? What sort
of bucket? How distant the source? How
cold? Is it sweet? Soft? Etc. Good
questions that made sense for their time, important, integral–until the water carrier (like the brick/mortar bookstore, or the computer questionnaire from 1953) was replaced by something more efficient, like a water delivery system.

This questionnaire is like a communication from the future to me, a
reminder about our own current organization of knowledge and how it will seem to an observer
in 25 years (or 50, or 100) and how soon pressing issues and sustained/necessary info will be delegated to the ever-creepingly speeding “antiquity”.
The
questions are excellent—they are just old, and no longer applicable, much like
our own will soon be.

Digital
computer Questionnaire

[Lawrence Wainwright, Del Mar California]

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JF Ptak

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Computer Tech/History
Less-than-Optimum Oblivion: Measuring the Bad Side of Advanced Nuclear Exchange, 1956

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2087

Perhaps nothing is obvious unless it is established oar labeled so;
perhaps the obviousness must be stated at least once before it can be
officially, recognizably, the case. And perhaps the greater the
obviousness is, the more the need to make it officially so. Perhaps
nothing is so incredibly obvious that it can be studied and dissected
and established.

This seems to be more the case in more recent history than in time
more further removed: that millions of dollars can be spent “proving”
that children do not like to be separated from their mothers, or that
cars will go faster downhill than up, or that people will respond to
proper medication better than not, and so on, so on into the night,
just seem not to need a vastly-funded proof.

And so the case with nuclear warfare, people, and cities.

In this RAND report from 1956 (The Concentration of Essential Personnel in American Cities, by Margaret Bright Rowan, published by the RAND Corporation, May 1956, in 72pp) the great issue seems to be laid to
rest, once and for all: the problem with nuclear weapons being exploded
in/over cities is that since cities are filled with people, people
will be killed. And if those people in the cities are there because of
professions that depend on city-settings, then more of those people
will be killed than not.

But what this report was really about was the unfortunate aspect of
the impact if nuclear warfare on leadership and working positions in
significant and strategic industrial/business/government professions.
And what the report finds is this: since the vast majority of these
positions are located in cities (defined as 100,000 population and
above), and since cities will be the major targets in a nuclear
“exchange”, the overwhelming majority of these people will be killed,
thus leading to strategic human resource vacancies post-war.

It seems that 95% of aeronautical engineers in the U.S. would be
killed in a nuclear war, which I guess would mean that it would be
difficult to design new aircraft and such in the post apocalypse
world. Of course these people would be killed because it was their
industrial base that was being targeted and they were collateral
damage, so there wouldn’t be any industrial base to produce the
components necessary to build, say, a B-52. That part of the equation
is not addressed here, though. Nor is there any sort of recommendation
presented to fix the problem.

The RAND document just painfully points out the obvious, once and
for all; no one really knew what to do with the information now that it
was there, in black and white. Certain people could be evacuated,
saved from the maelstrom; but saved for what? There were other
evacuation plans that were completely doomed from the beginning,
sheltering plans, Dr. Strangelove arrangements, but all of that would
come into their pitiful being later on.

First, though, the bitter reality of what everyone already knew–one
of the greatest of all obviousnesses–had to be make its appearance in
print. And so it did.

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons
Naive-Outsider Titles–Masterpieces of Nothing

JF Ptak Science Books

In my heaping pamphlet collection there is a sub-collection of works with impossible, outsider-y, and stubbornly semi-confused titles that simply cannot be ignored–I mean the titles can’t be ignored, though most of the time their texts beg to be.

Scorn Not That Which You Do Not Understand

is about as ungainly a title for a book that you could construct in eight words or less. Then there’s

Total Omitters of Realities

a title which is as anti-compelling as the first but accomplishing that feat in half the words, and uses the plural of “reality” just for good measure. Creating another competing title in two words would be fairly improbable.

Then there are the pamphlets that have no titles on their covers, though they do have title pages, though they really don’t look like it, even though they are. And even when they are what they seem to be not, they really aren’t even that. Such is the case of

When Where and How do you see RED ask me one of the Million.

I have no idea what this pamphlet can be about.

Opened to a random page, I see in heavy underline “The human knower’s point of view inside your head and mine and the power of the pen“.

It is a mystery–it is also one of the few title pages I have seen that asks for the signature of a “witness”.

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Books: Title Pages, Unusual — Outsider Logic
On the History of Wide Things: Cars, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2086

Chrysler Motors was really on a hayride when their New Worlds in Engineering (1941) booklet hit the presses in 1940. From about 1930 to 1940 they produced about 8 million automobiles—more than a million in 1939 alone.

Their cars got bigger, heavier, and of course, wider–on a course with the rest of the American automobile industry to secure their shiney spot in the Manifest Destiny of Wide. This ultra-wide model (above) was a bit of a peek into what the future might hold for the automotive company—the license plate says “1948”, and the car is definitely, defiantly, prodigiously, wide. Those three heads peeping up above the dash really are sitting in a front seat front seat that looks as though it still held room for one more. The razor-cheeked platinum blonde behind the wheel look as though her pencil fingers were just able to wrap around what looks to be a gigantic steering wheel. –the two women actually look like they have the situation under control, while the eyebrow-arched male passenger looks to have something on his mind. Perhaps his 1948-future self was thinking about the sweepingly sleek “Chrysler Royale”, which is not only wide but also very long, though it unfortunately has not dated license plate out front to give him any hope of when he might be able to expect to see this futurmobile.

In this picture (below) we get another glimpse of the wide future over the shoulder of a Chrysler designer. Still another look-at-wide is this fellow in the purple smock from the art and design department who was molding new instrument display panels in clay—they seem long enough for this man to lay out in fron of and still have plenty of room left over.

It seems to me that all of these cars are wider than the widest of the wide production vehicles, including the unstoppably wide North African dune vehicle, the Unimog 5000, which measured in at 247 cm for its 2002 model.

I’m not sure where the roads were that these wide cars were going to travel on—but since they were future cars I guess they were all going just one way, so two-way streets could become one-ways, double-wide…

[“Tomorrow department” is taken from the Chrysler Corp’s “Chrysler Junior Craftsmen” department for the 11-16 year old sons of Chrysler employees, and which was nicknamed the “Tomorrow Department”. ]

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Imaginary New York City Landscapes from CON-ED, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

These lovely images are found in a long, shining and slightly darkroom-smelling The City of Light, which was a pamphlet made for the Consolidated Edison exhibition at the New York City World’s Fair of 1939. Con Ed I think just wanted to get the point across that they saw into the future and were getting ready for it, NYC being stuffed to the gills with buildings and each window stuffed and outlined in Con Ed-supplied electric light. The vision is vaguely threatening to me, though, the buildings in a stadium-seating arrangement that is unsettling, like they’re part of our robot-overlord future–someone or something must be living in those room filled with Con Ed light, though…

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Anticipation, History of — Architecture and Building — Future, History of the
A Few More Trees in the Display of Information
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I’d like to add the few images below to a developing thread on the use of trees in diagrammatic displays of information as seen earlier on this blog in the following posts:
- Trees as Symbols int he Display of Information
- The Tree of Life and Coal’s Phylogeny–a decent Diagram but a Bad Idea
- The Family Tree of Computer Development
This is a distinctive utilization, featuring a king and queen versions of the tree/plant display, this by Edward Hitchcock (1763-1864) in his Elementary Geology, published in 1840, and showing paleontological chart of trees andplants:

At about the same time came this outline for a tree diagram, (of embryonic development), from Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, printed in 1844, and which shows a model of development where fish (F),
reptiles (R), and birds (B) represent branches from a path leading to
mammals (M):

And somehow in the different representations of the tree of life by Ernst Haeckel I failed to include these three very famous renderings, the first made for an English-language edition of his Evolution of Man, which appeared in 1879:

And this version, which appeared in the fifth edition of his Evolution of Man, printed in London in 1910:

And yet another, this one much earlier, in 1866:
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Information, Quantitative Display of
Quantum Mechanics and Physics Timelines
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Reference Tool series

[Max Planck, 1933]

Quantum Mechanics Chronologies
- Quantum Theory Timeline // Particle Adventure About 50 entries, no bibliographic data ; simple introductory timeline. http://www.particleadventure.org/other/history/quantumt.html .
- Timeline of Quantum Mechanics Probably 150 entries and 77 bibliographic notes including links to the original articles. Pretty nice. The “History of QM” wiki entry is fairly basic. (Wiki) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_quantum_mechanics
- Good introductory timeline from Northwestern U along with annotation (1814-1927) http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~infocom/Ideas/quantum_timeline.html
- AlphaCenturi Quantum Timeline Short timeline but picks up James Franck in 1914. http://www.alpcentauri.info/quantum_mechanics_timeline.html
- TimeRime. Kind of a short, splashy presentation with only a dozen dates or so. http://timerime.com/en/timeline/138786/Quantum+Theory/
- Chronology of Quantum Mechanics, Molecular, Atomic, Nuclear, and Particle Physics http://www.3rd1000.com/chronology/chrono3.htm
And this, a chronology of general physics, with a good selection in QM:
- Big but incomplete, which means you’ll have to get the book itself: Chronology of Science by Lisa Rezende. Google book, here.
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Physics — Reference Tools
Good, Early Review of Some of the Fine Work of Claude Shannon

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I just read an interesting “review” of sorts of the mechanical and electronic automation/robotic work of the great Claude Shannon–it was in George Boehm’s “Gypsy, Model VI, Claude Shannon, Nimwit, and the Mouse” and published in Computers and Automation, volume 2, number 2, March 1953. Shannon (1916-2001) is widely seen as being the “father of information theory” though it might be more accurate to refer to him as the ‘father of the information age”.

Shannon basically established the foundation of the digital circuits in his 1937 A Symbolic Analysis of Relay
and Switching Circuits, which was also one of those great dreams-come-true parts of graduate school, when your masters’ thesis is actually a very important work–this was the case for Shannon, who actually did it with this paper at the age of 21. In the midst of a brilliant young career he also produced (in 1948) another great landmark, A Mathematical Theory of
Communication, which is the pioneering paper on information theory and which was so brilliantly composed that its framework is still in place after 65 years. A year later came Communication Theory
of Secrecy Systems, a work which established cryptography as a science more than a system. And on and on.

I like that Shannon was born in Petosky, Michigan, up there on the choppy Little Traverse, and all of those big-pebble Petosky fossil/stones.

The Boehm article is very insider-y semi-offhand but solid review of some of the gadgetry and robotic work of Claude Shannon–it is only four pages but it is four good pages, which I reproduced below. Enjoy. [The original is actually available for sale at the blog’s bookstore, here.]

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Uncategorized
A Note on Mr. Venn and his Diagrams

JF Ptak Science Books

It seems so unlikely that the Venn diagrams took so long to appear, that it hadn’t been Aristotle’s Diagrams, or Cartesian Diagrams; rather, these elegant creations–about a different way to represent propositions by diagrams– belong to Mr. Venn’s invention in 1880. Mostly. It was in that year that these famous more fully-developed diagrams first appeared in a paper entitled “On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Propositions and Reasonings“ in the Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. They seem so beautiful, and so simple, and so powerful, and so elegant. So necessary. And so why-did-they-take-so-long-to-appear, so obvious. In a way, they are in that category of The Great Obvious Invention, in a similar vein to Mr. Luke Howard first classifying the names of clouds in 1803. Sometimes things are not obvious until they are.

[Source: Internet Archives, John Venn, Symbolic Logic, 1881, full text.]

Well, almost. The diagrams did mostly make an appearance earlier–though not in the Venn form–in the work of Christian Weise (d. 1708) and then in that of Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), that according to the great William Rowan Hamilton, explained in his work Metaphysics and Logic (1858-1860). But the final form seems to be that of Venn.

Hamilton’s work appears so:

They also appeared in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, volume 4, 1880, in his article “On the employment of geometrical diagrams for the sensible representation of logical propositions” in which he discusses the history of the diagrams, including the Hamilton history. Venn also includes this beautiful logic template of Bolzano:

I found a wonderful book review of Venn’s book Symbolic Logic that appeared the following year, appearing in the journal Nature on 14 July 1881, and reviewed by the inimitable W. Stanley Jevons (which is reproduced below).

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mathematics, logic
SunPunk, 1888

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

[This image appears in his “The Sun Motor”, in Nature for August 1888.]

A while ago I thought about an alphabet of variegated -punkisms since SteamPunk didn’t seem quite enough for things punky. (That post, Beginning an Alphabet of Science Fiction -punkism is here, though it didn’t get much leg.) In addition to that alphabet there’s also FuturePunk, ElectroPunk, and AirPunk, among others–but tonight I’d like to introduce SunPunk to this mix. There’s a possibility for a lot of indirect steam from SunPunk, and in this instance there is a lot of metal. the other thing, however, is that it was real.

The work (above) is that of the very versatile John Ericsson (1803-1889), who among other things perfected the modern screw propeller and designed the USS Monitor (and who also has one of those Mystery Monuments in D.C.). Ericsson was fascinated by the possibilities of solar power, and worked on the problem for 25 years, right up until his death. The metallic bed of his creation would hold 100 sqft of mirrors “presented at right angles to the sun, at noon, int he latitude of New York, during summer, develops a mechanical energy reaching 1,850,000 footpounds per square hour”, which was enough to run a good engine.

Now the idea for using the Sun as a machine is ancient, with references and details appearing in the works of Euclid, and Archimedes, and Hero of Alexandria, though the first practical construction of one (outside of a solar oven and such) is relatively recent, by Augustin Mouchot in 1860. Actually, Mouchot exhibited an incredible sun machine (his Sun Concentrator) in 1869:

[Source: Land Art Generator Initiative, here.]

His engine was indeed a beautiful thing, and it does have the elements of severe AirPunk, but I think it doesn’t have that certain weightiness of the Ericsson engine.

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Technology, History of