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.
Superweapons have been used against cities for quite some time in the
new world of speculative fiction, and there had been real-life aerial
bombings from hot-air balloons, but the first time that a bomb was
dropped from a heavier-than-air airplane on anything happened just
months earlier, on 1 November 1911, when Lt. Giulio Cavotti dropped a
hand grenade from his Etrich Taube
on the oasis of Tagiura, in North Africa during the Italo-Turkish War.
He dropped four parcels of hand grenades on the
not-necessarily-military population at the oasis, injuring no one. The
attack was one of attempted vengeance, a payback by the Italians against
the Arabs of Tripoli, in general, for having joined forces with the
Turks to fight against them.
Five years later (including two years of World War) advertisers were feeling quite enough at home with the idea of aerial bombing to use it on a growing basis to sell stuff to people. The idea of bombing people with cigarettes–“munitions of peace”–was another in a developing series of dropping-what-you-want-to-sell-to-people-from-aeroplanes. Murad is striking, but it is far from the first ad to employ airplane bombing–a good candidate for that occured four years earlier and only a year after the practice of dropping real bombs from planes was established. That would be in this 12 May 1912 ad for Purgen,
“the Ideal Aperient” dropped on military-style tents of “Ill Health”, “Loss of
Appetite”, Lack of Energy”, and so on, all within the possibility of
cure by this Purgen product.
While looking through an issue of the Comptes Rendus for the announcement of the funeral of the great mathematician and all-around genius Henri Poincare1, I found in the weekly issue (a fraction of an inch comprising the three-inch-thick half-yearly volume of papers published by the French Academy) this wonderful illustration. It looks a bit like the superstructure to a Cubist dance, and bears a good strong attraction to many of the still images produced by Etienne Marey, maybe even a little like a mirrored representation of a stick figure skeleton of Duchamp’s Nude Descending, which interestingly was finished in this same year.
[Etienne Marey, ca. 1880/1]
There’s also a bit of early dance notation that the image reminds me of, particularly Raoul Feuillet’s publication of Pierre Beauchamp’s Orchesography4,
a work published first in 1700 (and then in English in 1706) and
dedicated to instructing people on the movements of the dance:
The image is an illustration for the article “Un nouveau cinematographie a images, tres frequentes”, by P(ierre) Nogues, and was a technical rendering of a device that ran film through a projector at a very high speed. Nogues (1878-1971) was an assistant and collaborator to Etienne Marey, who was one of the earliest and perhaps the greatest figures in early cinematography and who–like Eadweard Muybridge–successful managed to create articulate optical machines that could capture and record minute and fast motion in people, animals, blood, and so on. Nogues and his contemporaries lie Georges Demeny, Francois-Franck and Lucian Bull were among the founding encyclopedists of motion. The drawing above was an outline for a sprocket device that feed flexible film through a camera at very high speed (ultimately reaching some 380 frames per second). It is a beautiful thing.
[M. Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Nu descendant un escalier n° 2, 1912. It is interesting to note in passing that this painting was supposedly rejected in the Salon des Indépendants show of 1912 and then caused a massive set-to in the NYC Armory Show of 1913. The infighting and family strife in the Salon in the 1900-1912 period is so big and complex it would make a fine if drippy daytime television romance drama.]
Notes:
1. Poincare died 17 July 1912, aged 58; the announcement of the funeral for one of the intellectual kings of the 19th century appeared on page 263 in this issue for 22 July 1912.
There appeared on this blog last week a post regarding a library cataloguer who was not threatened or defeated by a work with an enormous and meandering title. The good librarian got right to it, recorded the deed, and moved on. Today’s installment of card catalog magic presents a Library of Congress librarian who decided that enough-was-enough, and that there was simply too-much-title to record, and so simply left the rest of it to dots and to the imagination.
Now for the pamphlet itself and the rest of the title:
The author of this 1938 pamphlet simply started to write on the cover and continued through the rest of the work, and ended on the back cover. There was no title page, no chapter headings, just a collection of ideas with lots of lists and seemingly nowhere to go. For a short work (36 pages) the author could’ve dedicated another quire to some blank space, which really doesn’t exist in the pamphlet but which is surprisingly helpful even if the message you are trying to deliver is somewhat, well, outre. There is a lot of very compressed talk about multi-dimensional spirit and conscience and bank deposits and replacing the dollar and tax collection with “circulation of values”, and so on, deep into itself and a closed system of interpretation of the existence of the universe, harmony of spirit, and economic interpretations of “radio bulbs” and the (often misspelled) fourtth [sic] dimension. The writing is exhausting and enumerated, and even though by its colossal subject matter and the complex brevity it should be a reliably porous document, it is fairly rigid and brittle. It is a visionary work that somehow worked its way into print, and I’m happy for that, and even it is impossible to keep up with its runaway logic it is still a good ride.
The author’s representation of a semi-vitruvian spiritual anatomy of humans, called Spirisoulman:
A detail of the fabulously-decorated heart region:
And of course part of the plan for universal economics which somehow wraps up the theory of in I.R., or the Inductive Rightousness of Inductive Truths:
Early on in the history of printed books there was a practice of extended title pages, where there would be the title, and then “support literature” further explaining the title to sometimes some great detail, occasionally winging its way into a title 200 words long. But that was pretty much before the 18th century and mostly before the 17th and mostly a not-common practice. The gigantic title in the 20th century seems to be mostly relegated to the less-traveled-road variety of public thinking.
And the card catalog for the undefeated librarian mentioned above:
There is an undeniable element of techno-elegance in design and engineering the Big Heavies the last third of so of the 19th century. Sometimes the elements of holy technology comes int he form of a beautiful, nearly-overly designed chromatic steam whistle, constructed almost as a gesture to the inexorable march of metal intellect, an enriched piece of engineering as a topping to an even higher achievement. Sometimes it is in the design of the superstructure for some major piece of machinery, as in the Nasmyth hammer, a device as big as a house and heavier, decorated around its perimeter with lovely flourishes. And sometimes we are reminded of the search and discovery of the creative spirit in the reproduction of a schematic, presented in a slightly different way, to remind us of the fantastic belief in the developing technology of the Second Industrial Revolution.
Just yesterday I wrote a quick post on the history of holes and the development of telegraphy–actually, of Charles Wheatstone’s inventions, which relates to the item above. The telegram has a look of great found techno-nerd beauty, and the text is wonderful in a disjointed semi-unintentionally-absurd kind of way.
The text reads (according to this wonderful site on the history of communication), identifies the telegram being sent from Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia in 1924, with the Morse Code transliterated as follows:
“Black pickles contractors Junee X Glass broken Paul Blamey Please send measurements your price fixing including cartige we take risk also state value of salvage
X Sandy”
Generally, much of the traffic in telegraphy was generated by business, and this is, I am pretty sure, one of those, with a few cipher words thrown in to save space/time/money for transmital–but when it stands separately, it is a phrase of some wonder.
Lt. J.W. Seddon (R.N.) designed this incredible two-aeroplane aeroplane in 1910, composed of molded steel tubes in the place of wires for its framework. As the caption states, there wasn’t another plane like it in existence–it was massive for the time,weighed 2000 pounds, had 1000 sqft of wing, and was powered by two 80 hp engines. And in a number of ways it was a picture of the future. [Source: The Illustrated London News, 10 September 1910.]
While grazing through the 1859 volumes of the Comptes Rendus1, looking around for anything having anything to do with Mr. Darwin and his Big Book published later in this year (on 24 November), I got a little lost as usual, and was digging around the early months, and came upon the drawing above. Mostly I was attracted to it for the holes, as there is a longish thread/series on this blog devoted to the History of Holes, and though at first blush that it might actually be a Runic something, or Islander counting stick. When I actually started to read the article it was none other than the recording strip for telegraphy, devised by Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875), famous for his Wheatstone bridge and for his experimental determination of the speed of electricity2). Now the recorder part of this was not on the receiving end, but rather on the sending–Wheatstone devised a way of recording the strokes of a telegrapher’s key and translating them into two rows of holes; the message was recorded on the strip of paper and then fed into a machine that would do the keywork, using the punched paper tape to control the transmitter–it turns out to have been a significantly faster method than by simply having messages struck by human operators, which was abig deal at the time because of the expense of sending telegraphic messages, reaching speeds of 130 wpm early on (and then 300-400 wpm later on a good circuit)3.
These are some of the earliest holes in one of the very first personal computers–they were made for ease of wiring and other applications in the Geniac, a 1955 DYI kit from the indomitable Ed Berkeley, a machine well in advance but much of course the inferior of the Mark 8 (1974) and the Altair 8800 (1975), the later of the two seen as being about the very first modern “personal computer”. There weren’t too many empty holes in those two machines.
What had no relays, or transistors, or tubes, and was manually self-sequencing and human bit state switching, the name ending in “-iac”, and made in 1955? The “Geniac”, made and manufactured by the smart and enterprising Edmund Berkeley and Oliver Garfield–the “Genius Almostt Automatic Computer”. It was I think the first in a line of early non-computer-computer-that-really-was-a-computer-according-to-Alan-Turing computers that a person could own and own at home, and it was followed pretty close on heals by the Tinyac, the Weenyac, and the Brainiac.
The Geniac was/is a pretty neat tool–I hesitate to call it a “toy” as others have, mainly because it takes itself pretty seriously and still have fun, and includes diagrams and drawings for interesting sets of problems and tasks, from playing tic-tac-toe, to “testing” I.Q., to determining the male/female-ness of the respondent, to playing a very very mildly interactive game of uranium prospecting and alien hunting. It was a fine construction, and introduced the user to Boolean equations and the concepts of a working computer, all with hands-on education and a dry cell power course. And that’s pretty good.
[Thanks to Eric Edelman of Retrocollage who put me on the trail of a bomb shelter for 5 million Manhattanites in the Kenneth D. Rose book, One Nation Underground, (NYU Press, 2001) in which the following thread was found. Incidentally, here’s the RAND report on the Manhattan mega-shelter, to have been located 800′ in bedrock–to date the deepest part of the NYC subway system is 191 St station, at 180’…]
I think that there may be some room to put together a gazetteer of depictions of American cities in imaginary destruction and nuclear desolation–as seen in newspapers. And perhaps just the front pages of newspapers. There is a lot of material for this in general, though the restriction of front page coverage might be a little difficult–if the imagery was left open to views of decimated cities that appeared in large circulation newspapers and magazines, there might be enough stuff for a gazetteer and alphabet.
Part of the great source for these images is FearSell, which seems to have been made into a $100 billion advertising industry, plus the stuff that it advertises. No longer is it just a “weather report” on the television, it is “Storm Center 4 with Super Doppler”; streaming radio isn’t just for listening to local reports from different cities but a way to ‘protect your family” int he event that the radio station you listen to is destroyed somehow. Fear as a packaging implement has worked its way into nearly everything, though I must say that I haven’t seen any anti-fear protein FDR supplements for food enhancement (though there are plenty of ads for ‘victory seeds” and pre-packaged long-term bomb shelter food and so on). Yet.
[Source: Rose, One Nation Underground]
This was of course the time of the Great Fear, of nuclear Armageddon, of “going toe-to-toe with the Russkies” (General Buck Turgidson), the highest height of the Cold War, when personal underground bomb shelters (or at least plans for them) were becoming common and the escalation towards at least an accidental foul-up that could end the world was becoming a more distinct possibility. Duck-and-cover exercises in school on a weekly basis were weird and scary, especially the part where your wooden desk was going to save you from the eye-of-god fireball that was going to envelope your city. Those odd and rusting signs that have been scraped from buildings now for a few decades in the 1950’s and 1960’s were daily fear reminders of the threat from above.
There were also the not-subtle fear/training campaigns of the federal government, such as with Operation Alert, which “simulated attacks on major cities in the U.S. to see how city defenses and people might react to actually having to do something in the face of a nuclear exchange. The exercises were mostly futile and even obsolete, but they did manage to create a huge amount of fear. (Robert Moses, the great NYC-planner, noted that if even one subway car was derailed or had a problem that there would be massive consequences and failure, and that plans to evacuate any large city–even if there was a place to evacuate people to–was “like so much moonshine”. (See the Rose book, page 27.) )
And the threat came to everyone–not just military targets:
But this practice of bombing populations-in-general was basically in place–at least from the air–almost since the beginning of modern flight, from about 1911 or so. There were plenty of conferences and protocols restricting the use of bombs dropped from planes on civilians, but then there was the debate about what was it exactly that defined the “civilian” population, and the arguments peeled themselves away in the face of common practice. Anyway, during the Cold War the bombs were so very gigantic that there was little home of rescuing the idea of what a “civilian population” meant, especially in the face of perhaps destroying most of the planet.
This first story (“Red Alert. What if an H-Bomb Hit L.A?”) appeared in the Los Angeles Times 12 March 1961, and made no doubt for some very sobering contemporary wake-up-and-die reading. If you were living anywhere in the country at the time and had never seen a representation of your city in ruins, and you encountered such a story and images before coffee, you might remember that missing cup for the rest of your life. The dramatization and mapping was done by Harlan Kilby, and it portrayed the destruction of the city and millions of people in the event of detonation of a 10 megaton nuclear weapon–it gave the reader a vague notion of what city-eating looked like, the bomb ‘flattening” everything in a 3-mile radius of its central zone and killing everything in 28 square miles. (A little earlier, in 1960, there appeared a work by Harrison Brown and James Real called Community of Fear, which was a sci-fi kill-’em-up that used a kill zone with a 25-mile radius.)
Since this appeared in a newspaper story–and a long story at that–it gave the exercise a real sense of urgency, to say nothing of the amount of fear that it generated. At least it didn’t appear as the front page, as was the case with some other end-time scenarios, like these newspapers for Brooklyn and Buffalo and Grand Rapids (below).
Seems today like it might be a stretch for Grand Rapids and Buffalo to be bombed into oblivion by our arch-Cold Warriors, but there were more than enough delivery capabilities to make these cities into targets, so the possibility was definitely real.
This next graphic shows the difference in destructive capacity of an atomic bomb (small circle beneath an air-burst detonation) and a hydrogen bomb (the large circle showing area of total destruction, which in this case would be about 50 square miles) on the city of Chicago. this one did not appear ont he front page of a newspaper, but did appear in a sort-of “America’s Magazine”, though not on the cover. There are many other examples of this sort of imagery–perhaps I’ll put together a gazetteer of mega-doom with images for them…
[Source: LIFE Magazine, 30 Jine, 1950]
But don’t worry, even if the Chicago and Brooklyn and New York and so on were destroyed, the U.S. Navy would survive, which would be either great or horrible if you were a sailor:]
In any event, this is a small start to the Nuclear Doomsday Gazetteer–enough of this for this morning.
Triple-F (Frank Freemnont Frazee) came up with an all-time-great-title entry when he wrote his pamphlet about _____ back in 1947. I have a copy of it, purchased in a 90,000-item collection from the Library of Congress–something called “The Pamphlet Collection”, housed in 1,500 blue document boxes from 1952, all of which were categorized in a Borgesian nightmare way, according to nothing. Therefore the “General” box might have had General Electric pamphlets, or something about General Malaise, or Boston General, or General Rules of Parking in Providence (R.I.), and so on. So, although categorized and alphabetized, it was all useless. Among this beautiful mess were a thousand or so pamphlets like Mr. Frazee’s–incredibly titled, about stuff visible and invisible, complaints, claims, praises, warnings, sufferings, advanced supra-backwards premonitions, and so on. My Frazee copy happened also to be the U.S. Copyright Deposit copy (or one of them, rather) that was sent to the Library of Congress to be housed forever (or until I got them), along with a carbon copy of the card catalog entry.
The card is a work of art. (More about this pamphlet here.)
