Author: JF Ptak

Strange Things in the Sky Department: Disintegratging Moon and Lunar Nuclear Alien Space Nazis

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1767

In a post last week in the Strange Things in the Sky department: the Exploding Moon, I mentioned that images of the Earth’s Moon actually exploding seem to be quite uncommon. The ever-observant Ray Girvan wrote to say that the Moon does just that in the 2002 remake of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, when Earth’s lunar mining operations disrupt it so that it makes the Moon disintegrate, raining parts of itself on Earth.

And it just so happens that I stumbled on another odd image of the Moon coming to its end: a mention of a drawing by Thomas Voter, showing the Moon disintegrating under the force of the Earth’s gravity. It appears in the November, 1939 issue of Popular Mechanics in the “Explorers of Space” article.

And then, on the next page of the magazine appears another image of the breaking Moon by Wallace Favereau, this also showing bits of the Moon slamming into the Earth.

Thomas Voter’s illustrations led me to his image showing Boy Scouts flying on their odd destiny to the Moon for a rendezvous with Post-War Moon Nazis in what is a surprising juvie novel by Robert Heinlein, Rocket Ship Galileo (1947). [Image courtesy of the excellent Roborant site, well worth a visit and bookmark, here.] The three boy-rocket-experimenters are on their way their with their Nobelist uncle, piloting a thorium-fueled mail rocket that the Manhattan Project Uncle was able to rig up for interplanetary adventures, which gets them to a nuke-war-ravaged-Moon with victorious commanding Nazis over whom the intrepid travelers eventually triumph. This really has nothing to do with exploding or disintegrating Moons, but finding a reference to Moon Nazis does classify as a strange-thing-in-the-sky. evidently the story is much disparaged by modern readers, though the author of Roborant feels as though there is a much greater depth to the story that the possible high-comic storyline implies.

It looks like there is a sub-genre for Evil Alien Space Nazis in books and film, but I just can’t go any further with the topic.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Astronomy — Strange Things in the Sky
Cigarettes as Toy Soldiers: Playing with Tobacco, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Sometimes a bit that I post in this blog’s Unintentional Absurdist category need nothing more than an elementary introduction, their images usually being enough of a story–more of a story–than could be told of them. This current installation, “Pipes and Cigarettes Form a Tabletop Army”, from Popular Mechanics for December, 1939, is a good example of this.

The story is simple: for some reason, Mr. Jeff London (of Virginia) and his son Tommy built soldiers and sailors and horses and guns and mess wagons and so on from pipes and cigarettes and matches. They called it “Fags Army”. I’m not sure what compels this sort of expedition into creativity, but, well, here it is:

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas
The Past’s Future: a History of Fashion 1893-1993, Written in 1893.
JF Ptak Science Books Post 1766 [Part of the History of the Future series.]
- Thanks to 2NerdyHistoryGirls (here) who introduced me to Forgotten Futures (here) who reproduced the article of today’s attention. The article in the original format is located here.
At the end of the century the very popular British journal Strand Magazine published a marvel of a short story on the history of the future and the future of clothing and fashion. (The Strand published Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and as a matter of fact would publish the for-a-short-while the last of them in December, the famous “The Final Problem” adventure, perhaps better know today in a variant form for Sherlock Holmes BBC viewers as “Reichenbach Falls”.)

The article–the “Future Dictates of Fashion”, and published in January 1893 by W. Cade Gall–was an interesting look into the past’s future. The story is in which an elderly gentleman of 1893 finds a book published in 1993 about the history of modern fashions from 1893-1993, The Past Dictates of Fashion, by Cromwell Q. Snyder, “Vestamentorum Doctor”. Dr. Snyder of the Future presents the logic of fashion, a fashion powered and governed by immutable laws, trends discernible by deduction and logic, except of course in the (future) present, where things have made a turn into the indefinable.

Its a amusing story, and the fashions are bizarre and have a weird alien/Buck Rogers/Dr. Seuss/Wizard of Quality, all of which goes for naught, as the story of the history book of the future is part of an old man’s dream, and the old man wakes up at the end of Gall’s own story.
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Future, History of the — History of the Future
History of Fear: Science Fiction Images–the 1950’s.

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

This cover of Amazing Stories is really very gripping, very cold in a Red Nightmare way, filled with fear and the possibility of mega-death. The cover was made at the very beginning of the real fear of Soviet attack with nuclear weapons, made just months after the first hydrogen bomb detonation by the Soviet Union (a 400 kt device on 12 August 1953). (The Soviets made their entrance into the nuclear endgame four years earlier, in 1949, years before most informed speculation had placed their weapon potential.)

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Future, History of the — History of the Future
The Rot of Modern Art–1910

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1765

“Suddenly I had entered a new world, a universe of ugliness”.–Gelett Burgess, on entering the Salon des Independents Exhibition, 1910

One of the earliest recognitions of the great early masterpiece of Cubism, Picasso’s Les Demoisselles d’Avignon, makes its appearance in the Architectural Record¹, and by a most-unanticipated critic: Gelett Burgess (1866-1951). Burgess glides through an unexpectedly wide terrain of The Modern, and has quite a lot of interesting observations, including George Braque and Czobel, Friesz, Harbin, Metzinger, Derain, Chibaud, Matisse and–perhaps most significantly–Pablo Picasso. Burgess found his way to Les Demoisselles, and presents a photograph of what would become perhaps the great masterpiece of Cubism, the caption announcing it as a “study” rather than with any real title for the work. As is well known Picasso worked for some years on the painting (generally the work is assigned a date of 1907 though he worked on it for some years afterwards), spending time alternatively in great loneliness and also in the midst of crowds of the interested/supporters/friends/the curious, sometimes hoping for feedback of his major work from the visitors, sometimes not.

Burgess was known as an accomplished illustrator with a distinctive and distinguished style, as well as a humorist-poet, a poet whose best-remembered (and longest-surviving) lines run as follows:

“I never saw a Purple Cow,
I never hope to see one,
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one!”

And I think that it is in this style that Burgess concedes his opinion of Picasso’s work, complete with a short bit of a poem at the end:

“And now for Picasso, of whom, here and there, one has heard so much. Picasso will not exhibit his paintings. He is too proud and too scornful of the opinions of the canaille. But he sells his work, nevertheless. That’s the astonishing thing about all of them. Who buys? God knows! Germans, I suppose.”

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Art — Art History — History of the Future
17th & 18th Century Steampunk Flight

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1764 [Part of the Unintentional Absurdist/Surreal series]

I’ve called on M. de Belidor (1698-1761) before in this blog, using some of the images of his books to describe the Found-Surreal, the Unintentional Dadaist (and so on), images that once slightly removed from their original context take on an entirely new life, sometimes fantastical and odd.

The engraving above is a fine example, an appears innocently (and beautifully, and importantly) in his Architectura Hydraulica (1740), and titled “Demonstration of Friction”. I’ve simply inverted it and removed some of the numerical notation–and then, suddenly, it becomes a sort of Steampunk Balloon Machine–a lovely collection of small balloons lifting large wheels and cogs, assembling some sort of something in mid-air, demonstrating very little friction, of lightness and airiness

Belidor was a remarkable engineer and theoretician who blended the two practices perfectly–actually one of the great issues in his career as trying to disseminate higher levels of techno-competence among people working with machines and using technology to some end. He often found that the skills necessary to reproduce and maintain some of the machines he wrote about to be, um, lacking in the population at large. He was also very transparent in technology’s role in military life (which at about the time he was writing was nearly tautological) and tried to apply the advancements he made in that area (as he was a military engineer and soldier) to the industrial and social sphere. In any event he was a very interesting man who produced books that were significant for a half-century or more past his death.

The second image is even more striking, and is not altered at all–the difference in perspective comes with a difference of perspective, which in this case is simply labeling the image as something it isn’t, a Massive Steampunk Flying Machine of the 17th Century:

It is nothing of the sort, of course, but if you suspend a little critical thinking then that is what this engraving sort of looks like. In reality it a combined profile of the machine (top of the image) and view of its placement (bottom) of the great technological and engineering feats of the day, a modern marvel, a wonder–the Marly Machine. This was a large, integrated device constructed (over a seven-year-long period and finished in 1684) to pump water from the Seine to Louis XIV’s chateaux at Versailles and Marly, and did so magnificently up a 500-foot vertical rise to an aqueduct and then on to the final destinations. Those paddle wheels on the sides of the installation were monsters: 36′ in diameter, capturing and releasing the water of the Seine to power 250 pumps which sent the water on its way up the long and steep hill.

Here’s a view of the device in situ, with a long course of other implements ascending the hill. [Images courtesy of Marlymachine.org.]

So with a slight suspension of analysis and a little inversion, these two images take on a flighty life of their own, independent of their intended purposes.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Strange Things in the Sky — Technology, History of
On the Early Development of ASCII

The History of ASCII. I just wanted to include this short bit on a small archive of material related to the development of ASCII from one of the team members who helped to create it. A more full description appears in the “continue reading” section, below. [Since writing this in 2012 the archive has been donated to special collections at North Carolina State University at Raleigh, where I assume it can be viewed and utilized.]

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Computer Tech/History
Strange Things in the Sky Department: the Exploding Moon.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1763 [Part of the Strange Things in the Sky Department.]

[Cover art by the great Frank R. Paul for the August 1953 issue of Science Fiction Plus.]

In my experience of Strange-Things-in-the-Sky Department,the idea of the exploding Earth is far more popular and more illustrated than that of the Exploding Moon. So far as I can recall Moon doesn’t explode in most cases of early sci fi, including the earliest case of Lucian’s Icaromenippus and his great True History (a satire on outer space travel and interplanetary warfare between the kings of the Moon and the Sun over possession of the Morning Sat (Venus). Nor does the Moon explode in the other very early efforts of de Bergerac (1657), Francis Godwin (Man in the Moone, 1632, where Our Hero gets to the Moon on a goose-powered aerial something), Johnannes Kepler (Somnium, 1634) and others. The Moon gets into trouble enough, but not so much trouble to lead it to blow up.

(I can’t leave this without mention of Robert Heinlein, who wrote many short stories addressing the Moon, many with fantastic titles and even better story lines: “Columbus Was a Dope”, 1947; “Gentlemen, Be Seated!”, 1948, about a lunar tunnel; a Boy Scouts on the Moon, “The Black Pits of Luna”, 1948; “The Man Who Sold the Moon”, a 1949 “Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon”, 1949 (future Boy Scouts on the Moon); “The Menace From Earth”, 1957, (Lunar teenager angst and a muscle-powered space ship); “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” (1966), (and a Lunar penal colony)–lovely titles for some superior writing.

The Moon certainly takes abuse here and there, ranging from cloud attack (in Lucian) to colonization to this very memorable (and frightening/disturbing, as I found as a child) as in the case of the Man in the Moon being shot in the eye with a space ship (George Melies, Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902)).

And of course there’s always the runaway Moon and the havoc that it would soon cause to the Earth, though then again this is not an exploding Moon, except it seems as though it might soon be so.

And so in a bit of rambling about the Moon that has gone on in this blog, there are no other mentions of the Moon exploding, though there are some other strange things going on there. Just not “exploding” strangenesses.

And especially not Laurie Anderson’s “The Exploding Moon“.

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Astronomy — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Strange Things in the Sky
The Ouroboros and Infinity

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1762

The ouroboros–and in this particular case, the double, over-and-under ouroboros–is an interesting and ancient symbol. In my experience, the single unit is to be expected, but the double seems uncommon. The symbol (“oura” or tail and “boros”, eating, in Greek, one who eats one’s tail) stretches back into the dim and dusty past, at least to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and is Plato’s first living thing–its is the primordial unity, the rebirth of forever, death/life/birth/rebirth, continuing into infinity, the great world soul…a kind of Western equivalent of the Taoist Yin Yang.

There’s much more to be said about this symbol, especially by such people as Erich Neumann and Carl Jung, but I’ll resist, mainly because it is just too complicated for me to make an intelligent statement. (I’ve tried to read the Great Mother as well as The Origins of the History of Consciousness by Neumann, but only made my way around the edges of the first, and picked through the interesting bits of the later. Jung is someone I’ve never had much luck with.)

The first symbol, and a gorgeous one it is, comes from the Theatrum chemicum (1659-1661, and published in six volumes by Lazarus Zetzner in Strasbourg), and shows the combination of what was supposed to be an alchemical highpoint: the spiritual coming together of sulfur and mercury, elements of what the practioners believed were the basic constituents of all metals and minerals. And of such stuff miracles were understood to be made, except that of course, they weren’t–the fact that this stuff never worked to produce something more substantial than mercuric sulfide wasn’t due to the theory or practice or thought but to the “fact” that the mercury and sulfur used in the process weren’t “pure” enough. That said, the Theatrum was a very important work, the largest collection of alchemical works ever gathered and published together–it was also evidently much appreciated by Isaac Newton, who was said to consult it often and who owned the set in his library.

A more classical appearance of the ouroboros (De Lapide PhilosophicoTriga Chemicum (Prague 1599) compiled by Nicolas Barnaud), depicting a dragon seizing the polarities of its soul, ultimately uniting them:

And in the discussion of the ouroboros and philosophical aspects of infinity it should be mentioned that there is some connection between it and the mathematical symbol for infinity, which seems to arise from (the remarkable and original) John Wallis’ De Sectionibus Conicibus, which was published in 1655. Wallis employed the old Roman symbol for 1,000 to use for the mathematical infinity, which of course is the ouroboros on its side. (Wallis it should be noticed was also among the earliest people to put into print the symbol for pi, as well.)

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Art History — Iconography — Mythology — Naming Things — Perspective
How Much it Cost to Clothe the Working Poor of London, 1854

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1761

The “working poor” of England may have been half of that–working, that is, and hard at work, though not being paid even enough to be considered poor. Their story has been told in many ways, of course, the backbone of the Industrial Revolution succeeding on their bones, observed and recorded and shared by Charles Dickens and others, and on and on, told elsewhere in brevity and quick detail better than I can do so here.

I did want to make a quick comment about a very small detail in the state of those poor people, found in Charles Kingsley’s Cheap Clothes and Nasty, printed in 1850. It is quite a documentarian’s tour of the plight of the poor, written by a very able observer. (Kingsley is a very interesting person–an historian, priest in the Church of England, social commentator, and novelist. As a matter of fact he was exceptionally prolific, producing during his lifetime (1819-1875) a fine long list of accomplishment, three of which have survived to this day as sorts of minor classics. But what he did with great regularity was publish books–34 of them in 25 years between 1850 and 1875, including 15 during the decade of the 1850’s, 11 in the 1860’s, and 8 in the 1870’s to his death in 1875. Perhaps as important as all of that was the role he played in the arrival of C. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species…, as Kingsley wrote one of the earliest reviews of the book and defended it strongly.)

But getting back to the poor, Kingsley made a very strong case for the poor being less so than that, as we see here:

“Folks are getting somewhat tired of the old rodomontade that a slave is free the moment he sets foot on British soil! Stuff! – are these tailors free? Put any conceivable sense you will on the word, and then say – are they free? We have, thank God, emancipated the black slaves; it would seem a not inconsistent sequel to that act to set about emancipating these white ones.Oh! we forgot; there is an infinite difference between the two cases – the black slaves worked for our colonies; the white slaves work for us. But, indeed, if, as some preach, self interest is the mainspring of all human action, it is difficult to see who will step forward to emancipate the said white slaves; for all classes seem to consider it equally their interest to keep them as they are; all classes, though by their own confession they are ashamed, are yet not afraid to profit by the system which keeps them down…”–Charles Kingsley, Clothes, Cheap and Nasty, 1850

Kingsley continues on with the stuff of research, uncommonly sharing the lot of what a vast section of English society experienced daily though mostly in silence.

Another excruciating and interesting report was made by George Godwin in his London Shadows, a glance at the “homes” of the thousands of 1854 (the whole work found on the wonderful Victorian London blog, here and about which I posted about here).

Godwin–an influential architect and editor of the very influential The Builder as well as a social reformer, who lived from 1813-1888) wrote an expose of how so many Londoners lived at the middle of the century. It is also illustrated with woodcuts of the places in which people lives–artwork in wood and ink that have a very definite quality of the unforgiving cameras of Life magazine a century later. The images are awakening and abrupt–all the bitter observation of George Orwell, only told much more quickly, like a person trying to describe a raging house fire before the thing burned itself out. Its a powerful work, and I can’t help but think that those reading it in 1854 must have been appalled not only by the deep visualization of the state of the working poor, but also by its scope, and the possible revelation of England’s basic bedrock.

Here is an example of Godwin’s work, which includes observations on not only housing the poor, but clothing them as well, and published in the editorial pages of journal The Builder. He presents one aspect of their lot by discussing their clothing and its purchasing, bought for what the polite reading circles who would find The Builder to be almost for no money at all, though the few pennies spent on a pair of shoes or shirt were a major factor in the weekly ration of the working poor., particularly if they were making 5 or 10 pounds per year. It was an interesting way for Godwin to present to the non-poor what the other-half really had to live like, and perhaps by reaching out to the population that did the building-of-London he probably hoped to affect some sort of reform in the way in which the poor had to live and work. An example of the Godwin work:

“One of the London missionaries (a body whose valuable services can only be properly appreciated by those who understand the nature and extent of the evil to which we are directing attention) says:-
“Persons who are accustomed to run up heavy bills at fashionable tailors’ and milliners’, will scarcely believe the sums for which the classes we are describing are able to purchase the same articles for their own rank in life.”
A missionary who recently explored Rag-fair, reported that a man and his wife might be clothed from head to foot for from 10s. to 15s. Another missionary stated that 8s. would buy every article of clothing required by either a man or a woman, singly. In Pennant’s time it was less. He says (speaking of the other Rag-fair), that the dealer pointed out a man to him, and said: “Look at him. I have clothed him for fourteen-pence. A third missionary reported : “There is as great a variety of articles in pattern, and shape, and size, as I think could be found in any draper’s shop in London.” The mother may go to “Rag-fair” with the whole of her family, both boys and girls,- yes, and her husband, too, and for a very few shillings deck them out from top to toe. I have no doubt that for a man and his wife, and five or six children, £1 at their disposal, judiciously laid out, would purchase them all an entire change. This may appear to some an exaggeration: but I actually overheard a conversation in which two women were trying to bargain for a child’s frock; the sum asked for it was 1½d. and the sum offered was a penny, and they parted on the difference…”

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Architecture and Building — Social History — Statistics–Fossil, Found, Odd, Forgotten