Author: JF Ptak

Unusual Shading/Shadows (1866)

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I’ve made a number of entries on this blog of beautiful/odd shadow practices in antique mechanical and technical drawings, though not so for a while. Today’s entry comes from a stout volume of Engineering (volume 2) 0.for 1866 and comes in an illustration for the U.S. Navy torpedo boat, the Spuyten Duyvil. The boat’s name seems like a bit difficult to maneuver, except if you’re Dutch, though it is far-better sounding than the original name, which was Stromboli. In any event this was a torpedo boat that saw a little bit of service right at the end of the Civil War–mostly on the James River in Virginia, it seems–and was a torpedo boat. (The “torpedo” at this time was more like a mine than a powered underwater “missile” that we’d think of in these terms today.) The chief attraction for me for these images though is a bit wholly unnecessary to understanding the boat or its workings, and that’s the shadowing for the exhaust stacks, which to me seem a little unusual, though quite lovely. And so the sharing…

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Industrial & Technological art — Perception — Perspective — Technology, History of
“Told by some nice computors of national glory” and the “Cumputor” (1951)

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Here’s a terrific little ad that appeared for RCA electronics in the November 1951 issue of Radio & Television News (“the Radio-Electronic Engineering edition”). The main article of interest–and what brought me to this journal in the beginning–was the two-page story “Analogue Cumputors [sic] Solve Complex Problems” about the differential analyzer (the Bush machine I reckon), thermal analyzer, and electric differential analyzer at UCLA, and which was the main title and illustration on the cover of the magazine.

I could not find “cumputor” in the OED, though I did find “computor” (as a person who computes or calculates) which came into recorded being in 1669. (“Told by some nice computors of national glory”, H. Walpole Let. 18 June in Corr. (1954) XVIII. 463.) “Computer” occurs a little earlier in 1613, found in another very quotable quote: “I haue read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that euer breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number.”, (‘R. B.’ Yong Mans Gleanings).

This is a short article of only a few pages and a lot of pictures, but that spelling of “cumputor” does not occur in the article, though the word “computer” does. Apparently “cumputor” is a simple typo on the cover of the magazine.

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Technology, History of — World War II
“Is The Sun One-Sided?” (1878)

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There are a number of unexpected and interesting notes and articles in the September 5, 1878 of Nature as is usually the case with is excellent journal. The first to catch my eye was “Spontaneous Combustion of Wasps’ Nests” where some unusual behavior was observed in wasps’ nests in Venezuela–the correspondent was wondering if there was any corroborating evidence anywhere else in Nature’s world. Then there was a short paper on the newly-invented telephone, the display of parental affection in Sparrows, “The Sea Serpent Explained”, the physics of photography, hypnotism (in animals), and a number of others. And then there was a letter to the editor which I think I’ve never heard before, and so I reproduce it in full:

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Astronomy
Very Early Special Effects in Reproduced Audio (1878)
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This title for this post is fairly accurate given that the phonograph had been invented by Edison only months earlier and that this is one of the earliest publications on manipulating the sound that it reproduces. The author of the paper, “The Phonograph” (published July 18, 1878 in Nature), George Bidder, experimented by laying down a spoken “track” on the tinfoil medium and then recording on top of it, finding that “after a series of musical or articulate sounds have been recorded other series could successively be superimposed…and reproduced.” I’m not sure when this became standard practice in the recording industry (the musical “industry” part of the phonograph was still about two decades away), but my feeling is that this was a technique that would remain a peep into the future for some time to come. No?

“The Phonograph”, by George Bidder.
- “In experimenting lately with the phonograph it occurred to me to try whether, after a series of musical or articulate sounds have been recorded, other series could successively be superimposed on the same tinfoil and reproduced. I found that if the instrument be simply reset to the starting-point, and sung or spoken to a second time, it will afterwards faithfully reproduce both series of sounds as though two persons were singing or speaking simultaneously, and by repeating the same process, a third and fourth voice may be added, or one or more instrumental parts, all of which will be reproduced. This experiment forms a striking commentary on Helmholtz’s theory of the mode in which the ear recognises different tones in a chaos of sound, by analysing the compound wave, which it receives, into its component simple vibrations. Here the aggregate impressions on the tin-foil produce, so to speak, a compound indentation capable of reproducing a wave of sound which the ear can resolve into the original constituents.”
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History of the Future — Technology, History of
“A Drop of Water on its Travels” (1878)
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Here’s an absolutely lovely book: The Fairyland Of Science, written by Arabella Burton Buckley (1840-1929), published in 1878. To start with I was more interested to see how many other books have “fairyland” and “science” in their titles and checked it out on WorldCat—I was not surprised to see there was only one other (George McPherson’s Fairyland Tales of Science , published in 1891). Well, there was a second title, but that was Buckley’s sequel to her 1878 book with its title repeated in the title of the newer book. But that was it.

A look at the contents though shows that Buckley wove some fairy dust into the sciences, and reading of it confirms this observation:

Lecture I The Fairy-Land of Science; How to Enter It; How to Use It; And How to Enjoy It
Lecture II Sunbeams, and the Work They Do
Lecture III The Aerial Ocean in Which We Live
Lecture IV A Drop of Water on its Travels
Lecture V The Two Great Sculptors – Water and Ice
Lecture VI The Voices of Nature, and How We Hear Them
Lecture VII The Life of a Primrose
Lecture VIII The History of a Piece of Coal
Lecture IX Bees in the Hive
Lecture X Bees and Flowers

The author gently and beautifully opens the book for the young reader with the following, there being little greater a wish for the appreciation of science than this:
- “I HAVE promised to introduce you today to the fairy-land of science – a somewhat bold promise, seeing that most of you probably look upon science as a bundle of dry facts, while fairy- land is all that is beautiful, and full of poetry and imagination. But I thoroughly believe myself, and hope to prove to you, that science is full of beautiful pictures, of real poetry, and of wonder-working fairies; and what is more, I promise you they shall be true fairies, whom you will love just as much when you are old and greyheaded as when you are young; for you will be able to call them up wherever you wander by land or by sea, through meadow or through wood, through water or through air; and though they themselves will always remain invisible, yet you will see their wonderful poet at work everywhere around you.”
Buckley walks the reader through familiar territory, explaining the great and overall consequences of water, ice, bees, flowers, coal, and the like, and how these everyday bits figure in the greater scheme of the workings of the world. Here’s the table of contents, which is splendid all on its own.

She ends the book as nicely:
- “Neither is it pleasure alone which we gain by a study of nature. We cannot examine even a tiny sunbeam, and picture the minute waves of which it is composed, traveling incessantly from the sun, without being filled with wonder and awe at the marvelous activity and power displayed in the infinitely small as well as in the infinitely great things of the universe.”
Full text via Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5726/pg5726-images.html

Buckley followed a few years later with a companion volume, equally as accessible and interesting as her first: Through Magic Glasses…(1890) explaining how telescopes/microscopes/spectroscopes work and what they reveal—a fine accomplishment.

Again, full text provided by Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37589
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Perception
The First Microscopical Images of Captured-and-Reproducible Sound? (1878)
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Only months into the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison (at Menlo Park in December of 1877 and patented in January 1878) Alexander J. Ellis reviewed a version of it constructed in London by Mr. Stroh, and found it, well, wanting. Ellis (1814-1890) was a product of Eton, Cambridge, Trinity, and was a gifted mathematician, philologist, and a groundbreaking ethnomusicologist, and did see some limited utility of the machine to restricted areas of his research. In the short note he wrote for Nature in their April 18, 1878 issue¹, he mostly found that the phonograph was generally flawed in its reproductive capacity, and did not venture far from this interpretation so far as the possible applications of the machine was concerned, which seems iconically short-sighted from my perch here in the future. Even though Ellis recognized that “the effects produced are sometimes startling (as in cries, coughs, laughter, music), the philosophy of the process (making a permanent impression of a very complex compound vibration, and using it as a mould to reproduce that vibration is exceedingly attractive, but at present the instrument–at least the one that I saw…” he concludes that the status of the invention “…has not risen beyond a lecture illustration or a philosophical toy”.

Five weeks after this article and about four months following the patenting a visually-arresting article appeared in Naturewhich contains what I am assuming to be the first microscopic images of recorded and reproducible sound. I know that is a pretty deep qualification, but I think that’s its accurate. The article appeared as “Examination of the Phonograph Record under the Microscope” by Persifor Frazer², who investigated what the impression of the stylus looked like as known sounds are recorded on tin foil. And so this remarkable image, showing what vowel and some dipthongs “look like”.

Notes:

Persifer Frazer, “Examination of the Phonograph record under the Microscope”, an abstract of a paper presented at the Franklin Institute April 17, 1878, by Persifor Frazer, Nature, May 23, 1878, p. 102, in the weekly issue.

Persifor Frazer was of the Philadelphia Frazers, of long and interesting lineage. A Gettysburg vet, he was in professional life mainly a geologist; he did become expert in handwriting and the detection of forgeries using photographic means.
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Anticipation, History of — History of Memory — Technology, History of
On Looking for One Thing and Finding Another (1878). What Does Criminality Look Like?

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Sir Francis Galton’s “Composite Portraits” article in May 23, 1878 volume of Nature (pp 97-100) came early on in the prehistory of cognitive and computational aspects of “facial recognition”, though more like an analog development for a later digital environment. In this paper he discusses his attempts to see the face of criminality before crime was committed. Galton put together and projected a number of portraits of criminals to see if a fundamental picture of criminality arose–what he found was the opposite, and poetic. He started with a first set of eight portraits of people convicted of murder, manslaughter, or robbery accompanied by violence. What he found I’m sure must’ve been surprising to him: the composite of the eight were “much better looking” than the individual components, and that the “special villainous irregularities…have disappeared”. It was the “common humanity that underlies each of them (that) has prevailed”.

Galton continues to state that the composite “represents not the criminal, but the man who is likely to fall into crime”.

There is then a fair amount of discussion of the many uses of the composite photograph, though I think for our purposes we can stop right here.

[A sample composite image, above.]

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Naming Things — Perception — Photography
An Improbable Advertisement in “Astrophysical Journal”, 1903.

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Here’s a scamperingly light post: an ad for Pears’ soap making a very curious and probably intentional incorrect claim. Of course it is just an ad, and it is just soap, but it is displayed proudly full-page on the inside cover of the prestigious Astrophysical Journal for 1903¹, and it seems to make an odd statement about transoceanic radio communication, inferring that a message was sent across the Atlantic via wireless “20 years ago”.

Here’s the deal: I don’t understand why this ad is so purposefully wrong. The first message sent across the Atlantic didn’t occur “20 years ago” or 1883 as is coddled in the ad–that honor belongs to Marconi (1874-1934) who expanded on his first experiments in 1894 to send and receive radio signals across the Atlantic on 12 December 1903. (The signals originated in Poldhu, Cornwall, England, and was received at Signal Hill, St. Johns, Newfoundland—the message was a simple Morse code for the letter “s”.) Those twenty years notwithstanding, Marconi and Ferdinand Braun shared the Nobel in 1909 for their work in radio.

Now, the ad says “sent 20 years ago” and not sent and received, or received at all for that matter. I know the “twenty years” doesn’t correspond to when Pears began operation, because that occurred in 1807. So I’m not sure what it is that they’re talking about here, though it is a pretty ad. If anyone has the answer to this little issue, I’d like to hear about it.

(The antennas depicted here are very unlike the ones that Marconi constructed for his famous feat: “The spark-gap transmitter fed a mammoth antenna array — four hundred wires suspended from 20 masts, each 200 feet tall, placed in a circle. A similar station was set up on the American side of the Atlantic at South Wellfleet, Cape Cod.”–IEEE Milestones, “Milestones:Reception of Transatlantic Radio Signals, 1901.”)

Notes:

1. Oddly enough, Pears’ was about the only advertiser in the 1903 volume of the journal. I don’t know what the attraction was between soap and astronomy, though perhaps the elite at Pears’ just wanted to sponsor the relatively new journal.

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Anticipation, History of — Inventions
“Smoking and Longevity Statistically Associated with Impairment of Life Duration” (1938)
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2706

Raymond Pearl brought to the readers of Science in 1938 what seems to be the first scientific study¹ on the effects of smoking tobacco on longevity, announcing that “smoking of tobacco was statistically associated with an impairment of life duration” The work has been described as a classic in epidemiology:
- “Despite his often provocative pronouncements, the proof that Pearl provided that smokers are prematurely killed by the effects of tobacco must be recognized as one of his most important achievements in epidemiology. In fact, Pearl’s 1938 article in Science describing the premature death of smokers was the first significant piece of data on the link between tobacco and longevity.”–Goldman, I L, “Raymond Pearl, smoking and longevity”, in Genetics, 11/2002, Volume 162, Issue 3 https://www.genetics.org/content/162/3/997
Pearl certainly had a way with turning a long and tumbling and turgid phrase—you can almost see him crafty his long wide-tired sentences and chuckling through them, gravity of the subject or not.

He starts the paper off with a rather longish statement about the vast majority of human beings consuming things that they really don’t need to consume, and that some of these controllable non-essentials may cause them some harm:

“In the customary way of life man has long been habituated to the routine usage of various substance and materials not psychologically necessary to continued existence: he writes. “Tea, coffee, tobacco, opium and the betel nut are statistically among the more conspicuous of such materials…all of them contain substances of considerable pharmacologic potency if exhibited in appropriate dosage”. Pearl states that even with heavier usage of these products that the long-term negative effects of usage does not outweigh the benefits of use “in the opinion of vast number of human beings”.
- “Purely hedonistic elements in behavior, which are present in lower animals as well as in man, have a real importance…there are undoubtedly great numbers of human beings who would continue the habitual use of a particular material they liked, even though it were absolutely and beyond any question or argument proved to be somewhat deleterious to them”.
He doesn’t say anything about people being addicted to any of these things.

In the next page or so he describes the study and the numbers (though we don’t learn in this paper what the difference is between his “heavy” and “moderate” smoker categories), establishing with a strongly accusatory graph that there is a bulbous result in shortened lifespan for heavy smokers aged 30-70-ish.

He concludes in this short two-page paper that after the subjects in his study turned 70 that “individuals in the damaged groups…are such tough and resistant specimens that thereafter tobacco does them no further measurable harm as a group”. There’s nothing here about the “why” or “how” of death, just that it occurs.

So there it is, the first measure of tobacco use and shortened lifespan. This was the first step in the long climb to the very public introduction of the killing nature of the tobacco habit, which entered its modern phase in 1964 after considerable battles with those in the business of producing the deathsticks.

1964 was 55 years ago and fortunately great strides in research and education have been made. The tobacco menace has been extinguished now that we’ve learned beyond all question the great horrors it brings, everyone worldwide knowing that smoking tobacco will kill you, and in very nasty ways. Humans have learned something, and this is one extremely preventable mode of death that we’ve managed to eliminate.

Oh, wait a minute…

Notes:

1. Raymond Pearl, “Tobacco Smoking and Longevity”, Science, vol 87, no. 2253, March 4, 1938, pp 216-217.
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On Dr. Frankenstein and a Female Creation
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2705

Why did Dr. Frankenstein create a male and not a female being? I guess it would be easy to slip into a rolling piece of guesswork as to why the good doctor took on what he referred to as feminine Nature to substitute himself for the job and bring forth yet another male.

It is perhaps a little odd that Mary Shelley took this route, given her proto-feminist-founding mother and anarchist father, but then again her novel was published in 1818 when she was all of 21, which means she probably wrote it in her ‘teens, which means there was only so much time at that point to have given much long thought to the rights of women ideas. Or not—this is purely speculative. In any event, I liked the idea of the question.

Victor Frankenstein did indeed nearly create a female being, and was half-way or so there. He wasn’t a fan of this thinking earlier on in the novel, as we hear him addressing his Monster:
- “Abhorred monster fiend that thou art the tortures of hell are too mild a vengeance for thy crimes. Wretched devil you reproach me with your creation come on then that I may extinguish the spark which I so negligently bestowed…” (By the way, “sparks” is what brought the Frankenstein’s creation to life, this being an early heyday of electricity, though “spark” is mentioned only three other times in the book.)
His creation pleaded with him for companionship, but old Dr. Vic thought better of the idea and destroyed “her”, ripping the new creation literally limb from limb. It is an unpretty story, though the case made to the doctor from his “monster” is excellent, and I include a good selection of the dialog below.
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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Social History

Author: JF Ptak

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