Author: JF Ptak

Is this the Only use of the word “Rabdologia” in the History of Advertising?

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1710

Well, probably. The ad is by UNIVAC—fives years old at this point—and the lace-cuffed image pushing the virtues of the world’s first commercial computer is that of John Napier‘s abacus, which he wrote about in 1617. The ivory calculating bones/rods method had been seen before in the history of the maths and calculation, but not published, and the idea employed in the elegant calculating device were very old, but Napier seems to have gotten to publish it first. (His work on logarithms is of tremendous importance, far more so than the abacus.)

The word “rabdologia” belongs to the title of Napier’s significant book (where the title is the abstract): Rabdologia, or, The art of numbring by rods : whereby the tedious operations of multiplication, and division, and of extraction of roots, both square and cubick, are avoided, being for the most part performed by addition and subtraction : with many examples for the practice of the same …

And I just want to say that since this ad was UNIVAC and it appeared in the November 1956 issue of the early computer journal, Computers and Automation, that the illustration got the “bones” correct. That is, the calculated product is correct.

The way these rods worked is as follows: in the illustration, the number rod on the extreme left (ranging from 2 to 9) is the multiplier; and the numbers at the top of the other rods represented the multiplicand. So we see that the lace-cuff is multiplying the number “76” (at the top of the two rods to the right) by, say, 7. Simply start writing the answer as follows: take the “2” from the 6 rod for your ending number; then add the numbers on the diagonal directly to the left of the two (4+9=13) and take the 3 and place it next to the two in the tens column, and carry the 1 to the next function, which would be 4+1=5. So the answer: 532. The bones could do more than this, of course, but for right now I’d just like to point out that the ad folks got this right–plus its nice to see a bunch of numbers used in public display that actually mean something. [See the Wolfram site for a nice explanation of how the bones work.)

John Napier’s work in logarithms (published three years earlier in 1614) is the work for all time; the Rabdologia however would have been instantly appreciated by people like his father, who was master of the mint of Scotland. That said, I’ve read here and there that Napier considered his most significant published work to be his A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1593), in which he practiced a theo-chronometry based in the Book of Revelation that among other things in its 300-pages predicted that the world would come to an end in 1688. Or 1700. He evidently considered himself a Theologian first and foremost, and what bothered him most was Pope Clement VIII, who he considered to tbe the anti-Christ–and so complications arose. Win two, lose one.

[I’ve just uploaded Tompkin’s classic/first textbook on the digital computer (High Speed Computing), 1950, to the books for sale section of this blog, here.]

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Computer Tech/History — mathematics, logic
The Doolittle Report on the State of Indians in U.S. Reservations, 1867

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1708

[This is one in a series of posts prompted by my current reading of Larry McMurtry’s novel, Lonesome Dove.]

The Indian of the Plains had few options in the 1860s and 1870s. The buffalo were gone and hunting lands were being taken over by white settlers. With this dissipation of their food source came displacement resulting in inadequate food supply and (in many cases) starvation. The government offered reservation systems, but these in general flawed results of flawed and hurried thinking. In one attempt to determine the efficacy of the government’s response to the growing crisis in caring for the removed Indian population, a committee under the titular leadership of Senator James Rood Doolittle of Wisconsin (Republican turned Democrat, 1815-1897), created in January 1867 a report (The Condition of the Tribes, Report of the Joint Committee…) containing a wealth of information about the state of Indians on the reservations, drawing on the results of a questionnaire completed by 27 high-ranking respondents in Indian affairs, including eleven army officers, thirteen agents or superintendents, one teacher, one missionary, and one physician. It does not paint a pretty picture, even coming at the hands of a Congressional investigation.

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American History: Western Exploration & Native Americans
Flying Tanks, 1930’s-Style

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

There wasn’t much pretty in the physical outcome of this thinking–to construct “flying” tanks for quick maneuvers into battle situations–but I think that I like the thinking in it, especially as it seems that the aircraft-end of the tank was re-usable. Still, there was the whole “landing” part of the operation, which meant that (at this time, anyway) the tanks had to be placed and not parachuted to the ground, which also means that the armor would be relatively removed from the field of battle. But this would be better than driving the things there, or hauling them all on a train for quick transport.

[Source: Popular Mechanics, vol 65, 1936.]

Also I guess I’m partial to the design of the tank–which I’m guessing was a fixed-position mobile canon–because it seems so strikingly modern. (Except for the tread and wheels part, which is the place where battles are won and lost, at least according to Heinz Guderian.) But I like the design, which at first glance reminded me of the great T-34, the Russian workhorse of WWII, sort of, at least for its low-profile sensibility, but really more like the contemporary The Russian Chyorny Oryol (“Black Eagle“). It really looks a lot more like the STUG assault gun, here:

[Source: combatreform.org, here; a truly excellent site.]

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Future, History of the — Militaria — Technology, History of
A Short Note on Clerk Maxwell’s Reading

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We shall find that it is the peculiar function of physical science to lead us . . . to the confines of the incomprehensible. —J. C. M., 1860

What is done by what I call myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself in me.—Comment made by Maxwell to the Reverend Professor F.J.E. Hort in 1879 when terminally ill.

[Both quotes found in Fred Seitz’s article in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, March 2001, “James Clerk Maxwell, (1833-1879), Member APS 1875”.

This note may restrict itself to a small population of readers of this blog, but I’m always fascinated to come upon notices of the reading habits and library book-borrowing practices of significant people. For example Herman Melville’s reading has been particularly studied, with scholars hunting books that had once belonged to him and then dispersed at auction (some going to the Brooklyn Public Library), and there are records of his borrowing practices at the library as well. Thomas Jefferson’s reading habits is a well-known and fascinating study (though he did little borrowing, per se, what with there being few borrowing libraries for him to visit, and then of course his library was much larger than anything else remotely close to him).

The library of Leonard is also well known–over the years via my bookstore I’ve had a number of people (usually involved in a classical study program, or St. John’s folks, etc) looking to try to reproduce Leonardo’s library. In general, though, the full classification of the library of working scientists is not in general a known thing. (An interesting tour of some of the 116 books that comprise the library as described in the Codex Atlanticus and written around 1509 [left]. can be found at Museo Galileo, here.)

This is the main reason why my interest was piqued when I read this biographical treatment of James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) in the 27 October 1881 issue of Nature magazine. It mentions the while the great Maxwell was not-yet-great, studying at the University of Edinburgh (which he attended from 1847-1850, when he was just sixteen), that he used the library there extensive, and that the library has “records” of that reading. The article quotes P.G.Tait from an 1879 article in that same journal (Nature, volume XXI, p 317) that during the years at Edinburgh “without keeping the regular course for a degree”, Maxwell “carried home for study..such books as Fourier’s Theorie de la Chaleur, Monge’s Geometrque Descriptive, Newton’s Optiks, Willis’ Principles of Mechanisms, Cauchy’s Calcul Differentiel, Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs, and others of a very high order. These were read through, not merely consulted.”

I’d like to see the whole list, though as yet I’ve not been able to find it, and I’ve not yet been able to find the right person to speak with at Edinburgh to determine whether there is a full list of Maxwell’s borrowing habits, or not. It would be an interesting thing to see. After all, the man did basically invent modern physics, and it was his portrait among the very few that were displayed in Einstein’s house at 112 Mercer Street.

The original article on Maxwell along with a very fine steel engraved portrait is offered for sale in our blog bookstore, here.]

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Physics
The Great Cowboy Race of 1893
JF Ptak Science Books Post 1707
- [This post continues a series on the cowboy and the American West, prompted by a re-reading of Larry McMurtry’s novel, Lonesome Dove.]
I’ve not seen this picture of the nine cowboys who starred and started the Great Cowboy Race of 1893¹. They gathered with a frenzy on the little town of Chadron, Nebraska (population 2,000, which doubled in size as the event’s opening grew near) determined to announce the “best “ cowboy, the first to cross the finish line near the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and shake the hand of Buffalo Bill Cody (well on his way to becoming a shell of what used-to-be). The contest was supposed to take two weeks and average 50-75 miles a day, which is a lot to ask of a team of horses (and the riders). So there was the expected shenanigans, and the man who “won” evidently helped plan the secret route, and someone else rode a trains with his horses for a bit, and so on.

The result doesn’t matter–it seems an overall sad story, these guys winging their way to the windy City, a race to oblivion. (Some of the cowboy contestants were already about half-faded away into Limbo judging from the photo touch up that had to be done of their faces.)

Ironically these cowboys were racing to the cosmopolitan host of the World’s Fair in which the historian Frederick Jackson Turner read his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” —a significant theoretical piece announcing why Americans are so different from Europeans, and also that the American frontier had clearly, absolutely, been broken and installed in the gauzy national psyche. The fate of the Cowboy had already been determined 20 years before with the introduction of refrigerator cars, railroad expansion and barbed wire–all of which cut the West into smaller and smaller parcels, until they restricted the Cowboy to its own Reservation. A crooked race to Chicago seemed to crystalize the Cowboy’s tenuous grasp on existence, depicted finally by the new(ish) half-tone photo process of Stephen Henry Horgan, making a half-portrait of empty circles, the image disappearing more and more the closer we look at it..

It was just a sorry show for the cowboy all the way around, and a story that doesn’t need to be told here. I did just want to publish this picture. There’s a long and good story here http://www.thelongridersguild.com/chadron2.htm about the entire affair.

I include the list of the riders, mainly for the names of their horses:

Emmett Abbott riding Outlaw and Joe Bush.

Joe Campbell riding his one horse, Boom-de-aye.

Davy Douglas riding Wide Awake and Monte Cristo.

Old Joe Gillespie riding Billy Mack and Billy Schafer.

George Jones riding Romeo and George.

Charlie Smith riding Dynamite and Red Wing.

Rattlesnake Pete Stephens riding General Grant and Nick.

Doc Middleton riding Geronimo and Bay Jimmie.

John Berry riding Poison and Sandy

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Q: How Long Did the Classic Cowboy Age Last? A: Not very.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1706

The Cowboy West, from Ned Buntline to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett

I imagine that there have been significantly more people who have played cowboys in literature, on radio, in movies, on the stage and on television than ever cowboyed in the West. This doesn’t include children who have played at “Cowboys and Indians” over the past 150 years. The time of the classic cowboy-in-all-his-glory was short—maybe two generation. Probably less. And there weren’t that many people to fill in those positions in that short period of time.

Certainly there are cowboys to this day, but the cowboy of our mind’s eye—that iconic cowboy of the expanding, post-Manifest Destiny West—was a victim of the great rush to land privatization in the 1880s-1890s: barbed wire and other fences took the cowboy’s place. By 1895 there were more cowboys riding fences than herding cattle. As Faulkner wrote on the “last individual” in The Fable (page 204), “the cowboy was exterminated from the earth by a tide of men with wire-stretchers and pockets full of staples…” Of course Faulkner also saw the cowboy set among horse dung and “oxidizing cans” of sardines and tomatoes–a gemeinschaft/gesellschaft thing.

There are only 40 or 50 years that separate cowboys Texas Jack and Ned Buntline from the Chandler/Marlowe and Hammett/Spade modern detective West of San Francisco and Los Angeels, which is an extraordinary thing. There weren’t cowboys stretching back forty years before Texas Jack, and there weren’t forty years that they stretched into the future from him, either. The distance in time that the cowboy existed, all things considered, was short–from the Reconstruction free-roaming Texas cattle of 1866 to the appearance of barbed wire in the early 1870’s to the refrigerated railroad car of just about the same time to the endless farming non-frontier of the 1890’s, the cowboy enjoyed probably one full decade of not being molested by the present; the future caught up with them in a quick hurry.

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Nutmeg and the Roundabout Creation of New York City

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1705

This may be the earliest image of “New York” as it was–that is “New York” instead of “New Amsterdam”. From what looks like an extraordinarily bad trade (with 350-year-long hindsight), the Dutch and the English came to terms at the end of the second Dutch-English War (1665-1667) one result of which traded the small island of Run in the Banda Islands for another small (but not nearly so small as Run) island in North America: Manhattan.

Manhattan didn’t have one thing that Run and the Bandas had, though, and that one thing was enormously valuable–nutmeg trees. From the nutmeg tree came nutmeg and mace; nutmeg was a spice and a supposed medicinal, and traded for more than the price of gold, allowing its producers a phenomenal return on their investment.

The Bandas were in a remote place removed from remote places in Indonesia. In the island group–which rose from great depths of the ocean–the total land mass was about 180 km^2. Not much, except if they were the only places on Earth producing a commodity in sensational demand. The Dutch kept control of the islands for a long time, and kept their trade in the spices an abject money-maker. They secured their uncontested control of the island group at the end of that second Anglo-Dutch War with the Treaty of Breda, one section of which had the Brits returning Run to the Dutch in exchange for Manhattan, which was at the time still occupied by the Duke of York, who was the brother of Charles II and who would become James II. And thus the island became “New York”.

Due to various reasons–not the least of which was the Dutch murder and export of the un-murdered indigenous population of the Bandas, who were the people who actually best knew how to care and administer the nutmeg trees–the great trade in the spices continued with diminishing effect in the Napoleonic Wars, an unpretty story of much bloodshed and enslavement.

{Image: “Fort Hollandois de l’Ile de Banda. – Hollands Fort op t’ Eiland Banda.”Original engraving by J.V. Schley and printed aorund 1750 (39.5×25 cm) for Antoine Prévost’s Histoire générale des Voyages published in Paris between 1746 and 1770. The name of the structure was actually Fort Nassau. The original engraving is available from our blog bookstore, here.]

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Histories of Smallness
Tech-Quiz 6: A Square Peg in a Round Hole?

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Or is it a round hole fitted around a square peg? And what is it that is patentable about what follows?

Answer in “continue reading”, below:

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On Teaching the Concept of What a Number “Is”–1929 vs. 2012

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At first glance this math teaching tool looks a little on the obvious/antique/useless side, but I think that there are some good points to it in helping small children understand the concept of what a number “is” and relating the processes of addition and subtraction to the relationship of “numbers” to “things”.

And as the inventor points out

and so on…

This certainly seems more beneficial and utilizable than the current practice in my daughter’s third grade class, where a simple subtraction problem is turned into a double addition problem employing a number line, all in the name of teaching the children the concept of “number” and doing away with algorithms. I think that by the third grade, the concept of “number” has been established, though the board of edu-selection might be trying to re-visit a lost point of development somehow.

So with my daughter’s class,take the problem 456-345= ______

This is made intoan addition problem, 345+ ____= 456.

The addition problem is turned into a number line, with 345 on the left far end and 456 on the right.

The children are told to add the requisite bits to 345 to get to a “zero unit” for each place value, and then add those for the solution to the problem.

So: 345+5= 350, 350+50=400; 400=50=450; 450+6+456. Add the 5+50+50+6= 111.

In this confusion a stab at the heart of understanding the concept of “number” has beenb made.

A step back from this would be a wise move to make.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — mathematics, logic
Tech-Quiz #5–Not a “What is It?”, but “Who Done It?”

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This was a major piece of early thinking on spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping–butter for the bread (or bread for the butter?) of wireless communication–with the piano roll tapes replaced by electronics. The idea didn’t go anywhere in 1942–it did, however, go far, beginning in the late 1950’s. The major name listed on the patent report is a major name, but not in this form, and not in this area–some might find it very surprising to know the more popular version of the inventor’s identity, and the industry in which the inventor worked.

H.K. Markey and G. Anthiel produced this:

Hint: the “H.” stood for

Answer, in continued reading, below:

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Computer Tech/History — Patents — Tech-Quiz — Technology, History of