Author: JF Ptak

The Female Doctor Gets a Vote of Confidence, 1865

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1727

“Life for both sexes—and I look at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion that we are, it calls for confidence in oneself.”–Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

I’m sorry to have stayed for so long in Punch magazine, but it is a very interesting read. I’ve a run of 50 years or so of it here and on occasional a few volumes get pulled out and I make my way slowly/quickly through them. Earlier this morning a cartoon lampooning British scientists (and a screaming zero) caught my eye–and now, after tea, comes a chance find of this image of a female doctor that seems to my interpretation to be an endorsement of sorts to the general idea of female education.

Punch can be a very cranky periodical, lampooning everything, taking few (or no) prisoners. On occasion I’ve noticed (and this is hardly an academic summary, just an exposure-to-a-lot-of-pages identification) that the idea of educating women and girls has fallen in and out of favor with Mr. Punch–the idea of the general intellectual capacity of woman seems occasionally to be in crinoline-entombed confusion in Punch‘s pages, even though it does seem to be a not-irregular contradiction for the large-headed, small-bodies, world-balancing Mr. Punch.

But not this time. It seems the cartoon, the “Lady-Physicians”, takes the high road for the woman doctor, portraying her as a competent professional while her limpid cold-attracted patient is portrayed as a pillow-encrusted dandy who has called upon his doctor than for no other reason than to gain her fancy. Its an interesting position for the magazine to take, here in its 23 December 1865 issue. A pro-woman professional, pro-female education stance is not a common one for many magazines at this time, not even in Punch itself, which seems at this point to be throwing off its own earlier opinions on the question sagacity of advanced instruction and education for women.

It seems to me as though Punch, even as early as 1865, is getting ready to grant women a room of their own in which to do what needs to be done.

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JF Ptak

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Women, History of
British Science (And a Screaming Zero) in Cartoon, 1865

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1728

This fine cartoon appeared in the 23 September 1865 issue (page 114) of the London Punch magazine, poking a little fun at the recent meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which had just finished its 35th meeting in Birmingham. Its attendees and contributors read like a “who’s who” of the heights of mid-19th century British sciences (across fields of geology, physics, physiology, chemistry, mathematics, statistics (and economics)): attending and contributing were JC Adams, Airy, Hooker, Thomas Graham, Wheatstone, Nasmyth, Fairbairn, Murchison, Lyell, Huxley, Thomson, Maxwell, Tyndall and of course numerous others (also including foreign members).

Of the figures I can identify in this image are Thomas Huxley and the not-beautiful Richard Owen at top left, discussing the principles of evolution in front of a small audience of skeletal/fossilized monkeys, and standing to their immediate right waving an instrument over chemical elements may be JAR Newlands. I am not sure who is presiding over the numerals at bottom left, but what attracts me the most is the zero is running away, screaming, from the other numbers seated calmly on tiny stools. Seated serenely at center juggling earth/spheres in the geologist Roderick Murchison, who appears prominently in the Punch report–I’m less sure about the two other geologists (one placing the Earth-chunk back into the globe, and the other placing a short-handled shovel into another globe, both in front of an audience of geologist’s hammers…are they Charles Lyell and John Phillips?) Above them may be John Tyndall, working with an optical viewer in front of an audience of dividers and a telescope. And above the maybe-Tyndall is a steam hammer demonstrating itself to a set of jackknives and cutlery.

The text is pretty interesting in itself, not the least of which is another visit to the squaring of the circle (having just written about this two days ago), which goes like this:

“A few words on Squaring a Beadle who was arguing in a vicious circle. Illustrated pugilistically. (A portmanteau to itself, including gloves and change of linen.”

I should be able to idenbtify these men though I’m afraid I can’t; perhaps I’ll have a little help with them.

Notes (including the contents of the volume published in 1866 of this Birmingham 1865 meeting):

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mathematics, logic
A Peek into the Future of Modernist Painting–1863

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

I’ve written on this blog on a number of occasions about the coming of The Modern, about the coming of many modernisms that came to life in the extraordinary period of 1885-1925 (which could even be shaved perhaps to 1895-1920), when nearly all things “modern” in nearly all fields came to be. Sometimes though one can see a hint of the future, even though it might not necessarily be recognized at the time.

Such is the whisper of the future in this humorous, somewhat mocking piece on art in the 13 June 1863 issue of Punch, or the London Charivari. Overall its pretty funny in a 19th century fashion, but what I am taken with most of course is the first piece, the framed non-representational artwork, a taste of the future that wouldn’t arrive for another 50 years with Wassily Kandinsky. But here it is, or here is something, presented as art, in 1863, and with no discernible, naturalistic subject matter.

Even in satire, seeing such a picture give sone pause–if for no other reason, that even here in the early stretch of Impressionism, that such an image would appear in a very popular journal and have (a) no impact and (b) not an ounce of staying power.

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JF Ptak

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Art History — Future, History of the — History of the Future
A Note on the Rarity of Published Artwork of Children pre-1900

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I’ve written a number of posts in this blog about the great scarcity of the antiquarian published art of children (here) and couldn’t help but make a quick post of this very recent find. It occurs in the page of the August issue of the London Punch, and even though graffiti, this is definitely the artwork of a child, crept into the page of a popular journal. And as I say in a number of early posts, this work is really quite rare.

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JF Ptak

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Children’s Art
On the Sublime Mundane–Great Classics in the History of Flagpoles, Pole Painting, and Zippers

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1724

It is difficult not to stand in complete respect of something being Very Well Done–especially if that “something” is something very simple, a “something” that is generally invisible because it is so much part of the visual or social or mental environment. I’ve touched on this topic earlier in this blog, particularly here on a post on a beautiful and quick pamphlet written on the care and painting of flag poles. It is a monumental work in its subject area of the Very Small–a very well written, concise and what seems to be complete treatment and mastery of its subject. The subject just happens to be flagpoles–but if you ever needed something to describe what to do if faced with the task addressed by this pamphlet, then you have certainly found the Ulysses of the subject.

This tall (11×8 inch) 35-page 1945 work with an impossible title has everything that you would need to know–as its title promises and delivers–to repair a zipper. Not replace a zipper–repair it.

It is so beautiful as to want to make every engineer residing in the deepness of everyones’ soul just simply weep in the glory of this pamphlet. The work is simply but well illustrated and addresses 50-odd contingencies for zipper malfunction and failure, and speaks to a particular WWII mindset that that addresses problems in this very fashion. Repair rather than replace. The bottom line here is that this is as good as any book of the history of fluxions or the making of the atomic bomb or cooking up a virus, given the parameters and limitations of its subject.

These memories were brought to the surface tonight because of a pamphlet that I found that had burrowed itself deep inside a box of science pamphlets written by folks in the D-H part of the alphabet on particle physics in the 1940’s and 1950’s. It just popped out: Decay of Poles.

I really wasn’t sure what the book could be about. Having just finished a short post on the work of Jules Verne’s Moon Gun being used to alter the axis of the Earth to make Polar exploration easier, I thought that, well, perhaps someone put something “special” together on how the Earth’s poles were decaying. Or “decayable”.

The title page of this sweet, small pamphlet says otherwise: it is written by Howard Jones (“A.B., A.M., M.D.”) of the “Universal Pole and Post Preservation Company” of Circleville, Ohio. (The story of Circleville is extraordinary–we’ll deal with that tomorrow.) Dr. Jones addresses the issue of decay and wood, particularly and of the utmost importance was the decay of the wood in poles and posts. When you think of it just a bit, you’ll see that Decay of Poles was an essential work, as there must have been tens of millions of poles and posts slowly (or not) rotting themselves away into splinters in holes in the ground all over the United States. As a matter of fact that are still tens or hundred of millions–billions–of wooden poles still in this country: its how we support the very backbone of the digital infrastructure of the world economy, strung on wires in between poles made of dead trees, and stuck in holes in the ground.

And lastly for tonight, I’d like to address one more thing, something that took my breath away when I saw it for the first time. It was the following article in the relatively obscure magazine, Illustrated World–a sort of more-popular Popular Mechanix–for June, 1917. I saw the title which suggested doing something that I had never considered doing before, or thought about anyone else doing–building your own phonograph at home.

And of course the lovely schematic, which suggests that you could pull this thing together with bits of stuff from the kitchen junk drawer and fluff from the basement; then, Things Happen, and you have a phonograph.

This just seems to me to be so perfectly right, correct. Why not make your own phonograph? IF you remind has heard the music before it will fill in the pops and hisses and misses that your homemade will invariably produce, so why not make something that will play your vinyl without necessarily killing it?

All of these items speak to an appreciation for the recognition of The Small Job Well Done. This may be a key ingredient to what we may not be doing for ourselves, collectively, today. This is lovely work brightly done with basically unseeable results–unless you look for them. And then you can find the beauty.

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JF Ptak

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Beautiful books — Brevity and Complexity — Fantastic Titles
The Circleville Squaring Company–Squaring the Circle, 1837

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1725

In the very full and ancient (Babylonian at least) history of attempts at squaring the circle it is interesting to find that victory in its pursuit came on the fields of south-central Ohio in the mid-19th century. Who would have thought that this insoluable problem of ancient geometry (and which found a voice in popular culture going back to Aristophanes The Birds) would find itself smoothed out in mid-western dirt? And it all came at the hands of a magnificently-titled state-authorized endeavor called the Circleville Squaring Company. (Honestly, isn’t that a fantastic name? I’m reminded instantly of Flatland.)

It turns out that the American West pressed on through these lands in the Ohio Valley in the mid-ish 18th century, with white people coming in to colonize the place by the 1770’s. What existed here, in a village/town to be called “Centerville”, was an ancient Hopewell culture circular earthwork, an enclosure of some sort, a fortification, with a large mound in the center.

The settlers thought that the best thing to do was to plan their town around this design, eventually placing an octogonally-shaped structure at the center of it all, on the top of the mound.

Circleville, pre-squaring (1836):

[Source, here.]

The source noted above (and here as well) tells the whole and complete story of what would happen next, but suffice to say that after some decades the people of Circleville decided that they did not like the circular plan of their town, and in 1837 occurred some legislation to do something about it. The circles had to go, to be replaced by 90-degree angles for streets.

And thus to this end the Circleville Squaring Company was born in 1837, and over the next few decades quarters of the center city of Circleville were bought up, torn down, and replaced by a more desirable geometry. The process seems to have been completed around the time of the Civil War. Nothing remained of the original circular town plan.

Circleville, post-squaring:

In spite of the circumstances, the town remained “Circleville”.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — American History: Western Exploration & Native Americans — Architecture and Building
A Note on the Future of Computer Demand, 1957

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1723

This computer market survey (“Computer Market Survey—Report No. 1”), authored by the editor of the journal in which it appears—Computers and Automation, May 1957—is one of the earliest of its type. It takes a peek into the future demands on the computer industry, looking at different industries, their growth potential their products and support, and the amount of money that they might be spending (“on products and services in the computer field in the next five years”). And what Edmund Berkeley saw in the next five years or so was–according to his survey–about $400,000,000 to $750,000,000 worth of computer sales.

The numbers come from a survey mailed to the subscribers of Computers and Automation: about 2200 were mailed out, and about 200 forms, or 9%, were returned. “The replies contain interesting, important and extraordinary information, showing the nature and size of the current market for computing and data processing machinery”, and it is upon these replies that the iterations of the report were established.

The categories that I’m interested in here are the types of organization, its size, and the possibility and computer/data processing purchases.

Some of the largest customers in the future for computers and data processing were reckoned to be:

Air transportation, ($2-4 million); electrical machinery ($1-6 million); “chemicals” ($10-15 million), “electrical apparatus and equipment” ($25-35 million); “gen(eral) mail order”, $2.5-5 million); “naval reactors”, ($5-8 million); “oil and chemicals”, ($2.5-7 million); “maps”, ($3-10 million); “petroleum, ($2-4 million); “research and atomic energy”, ($5-7 million); “airplanes, missiles, reactors”, ($35-50 million); logistics, ($4-6 million); “airplanes”, ($7-10 million); “core memories, matrices, buffers, data processing”, ($10-25 million); “airplanes, ($5-10 million); “computers”, ($15-30 million)

The elephant in the small pink room stood to be “business machines”, which came in at a whopping $100-200 million), which was about a quarter of the entire plausible expenses in the coming five years.

And some of the smallest:

“Naval ship construction”, ($8,500-60,000); “rubber, plastics, etc.”, ($100-200,000); “energy consulting services”, ($80,000-120,000); “retail chain apparel, mens & boys”, ($50-60,000); “basic agricultural) and industrial chemicals”, ($180,000-200,000); “research & development”, ($25-50,000); “data processing”, ($100-300,000); “research & development” ($25-50,000); “aircraft components”, ($10-40,000)

And “electronic research”, ($2,500-$5,000)

Somewhere in the middle, but not yet discernible needs fell to:

“banking services”, ($15,000-$2 million); “research”, $25,000-$250,000); “custom design processes and systems”, $1,000-500,000; life insurance, ($600-700,000); “department store”, ($17,500-225,000)

And of course, “banking”, ($15,000-$2 million).

This was all in 1957, fifty-five years ago. Perhaps a “computer year” is equal to something along the lines of a “dog year”, like a 7:1 ratio, so perhaps when folks were trying to see ahead in 1957 in reference to the computer and computing needs it was sort of like trying to make a political prognostications for 2012 in the year 1662. It was just too much.

And that $450,000,000-$750,000,000 figure would be worth about seven times that, around $3-5 billion. Still a small figure, especially when you compare it to the defense budget for 1957, which was about $45 billion, which would make that figure just a few percent of the money spent on defense, and nowhere near what the amount would become. Still of course Berkeley was on the right path, its just that the potential for the use of the computer hadn’t yet come to be realized.

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Future, History of the — History of the Future
An Early English-Language Image Diplay from a Computer, 1957

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

The cover of this magazine–Computers and Automation, one of the earliest popularly-based journals dealing with electronic computation–features a rather remarkable image, an English message, a response to a problem, from a computer. The editor, Edmund C. Berkeley, wrote a short appreciation of this “output device for an automatic computer”, a “symbol generator and viewer”.

“The screen of the picture tube shown will present as many as 10,000 characters per second. Each character is formed by an array of bright spots, a selection from a rectangular array of a total of 35 spots, five wide and seven deep. For a capital letter T, for example, the selection is five spots across the top and six more spots down through the middle…

For 1957, it would have been a remarkable thing to see messages displayed in such a fashion, in a revolutionary new way.

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Computer Tech/History — Technology, History of
A Pictorial Manual on Computers, 1957

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This lovely illustrated story appears in the December 1957 issue of Edmund Berkeley’s Computers and Automation, which was the world’s first semi-popular magazine devoted to the computer. The article is divided into questioned sections, including:

“What is ‘Operating a Computer’ Like?, showing the “new Computing Center” at the famous Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, the place where most of modern computing in America was born in 1944/5/6.

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Computer Tech/History
Ultra-Massive Acceleration, Jules Verne, and Making Human Jelly. A Romance of 22,000 gs

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1722

[My apologies to my readers: in an earlier version of this post I calculated that the Verne space module would be traveling 129,000,000 mph exiting the space cannon–that was wrong, I’m very sorry to say. The figure should have been 129,000,000 feet per hour, which would be about 25,000 mph. Mea culpa.]

Earlier in this blog appeared a post on the Eiffel Tower Happy Bullet. It turned out to be a highly-circulated bit, what with the subject matter and all–describing a gigantic bullet filled with people and dropped from the interior heights of the Eiffel Tower and landing in a big watery hole at the bottom. The effect of impact I think would have made those folks suffer Massive Internal Complications.

Impressive as the Eiffel bullet idea was, it was absolutely nothing compared to what another Frenchman thought of at about the same exact time. Perhaps no human could have suffered more internal disruption in any science fiction story than those who would have been subjected to Jules Verne’s (whose birthday is today, February 8, 1828 – March 24, 1905) space gun, an enormous Columbiad, the mode of propulsion for the travelers in his From the Earth the Moon/De la Terre a la Lune.

Verne’s 20,000-lb projectile to the Moon would sit in a cannon-hole in the Earth that was 280 meters deep with a diameter of 2.7 meters, which would sit on the bottom of the hole capping off 200 feet of guncotton (!, weighing 400,000 pounds!). Somehow this mass would be ignited, and as Verne (or his brother) calculated would produce an initial velocity of 12,000 yards per second, which is 36,000 ft sec, or about 24,000 mph, which is a big enough number to attain the (more or less correct) escape velocity V_e of 11.2 km/sec. (Very high-velocity shells fired by tanks fitted for kinetic energy penetrator ammo attain a muzzle velocity of 5700 ft/sec.) And somewhere in there would be a crew greeting a rather-ncredible-to-write-down 22,000 gs. Astronauts in the Apollo program experienced something like 1g; dragster car drives who go from 0 to 100 mph in .86 seconds experience about 5.4g.

22,000gs is another thing entirely.

And difficult to imagine.

Jules Verne got a lot of stuff right in his long and lovely career–an there was quite a bit that he foretold correctly in this very story. Just not the take-off.

The further-funny thing about this space gun is that it made another appearance in another Verne story, The Purchase of the North Pole, 1889. During this period of human exploration there was a push to explore the Poles–in Verne’s story, an attempt is made to simply this exploration. But not in the way you might think. Verne was going to employ the space gun, again, but this time to alter the axis of the Earth so as to make it easier to get to the Poles and exploit their natural resources. I must say that this answer was not at all clear to me, even with my best sci fi cap on: but Verne saw it, saw that it would be better for all concerned to move the Poles rather than moves towards them. And that’s some pretty big thinking.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Aviation & flight

Author: JF Ptak

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1723