Author: JF Ptak

More of NYC Destroyed in Explorations of the Future–“The Last American”, 1889
JF Ptak Science Books Post 1615 Part of a series on destroyed New York City that includes New York City: Attacked by Tentacled Flying Saucers, Giant Flying Snakes, Glaciers, and Mining Missile Space Aliens, 1929-1941 and H-Bomb Wipes out Brooklyn, among others.

John Ames Mitchell created quite a world for himself in 1889. The world he saw in the year 2851 turns out not to support America, or Americans, seeing as how we ran out of luck and envy and possibility and Life. It is slightly ironic that Mitchell (1844-1918) would write so much about dystopic views of America’s dead culture, as he was the creator and first editor of (the first) Life magazine, a journal dedicated to far less weighty matters (and an early popularizer of populist views of American culture by Dana and Rockwell).

The Last American (a slight book of 28 pages) is presented as the journal of a Persian explorer (Kahn-li) a thousand years or so into Mitchell’s future, set off to explore the outer reaches of at-that-time known world, rediscovering the Americas, again.. Kahn-li was intrepid and accomplished:

“…Curator of the Imperial Museum at Shiraz, and (a)uthor of ”’The Celestial Conquest of Kaly-phorn-ya” and of “Northern Mehrika under the Hy-Bernyan Rulers” The astounding discoveries of Khan-li of Dimph-yoo-chur
```
 have thrown floods of light  upon the domestic life of the Mehrikan people. 

"He little realized when he landed upon that  sleeping continent what a service he was about to render history,
or what enthusiasm his discoveries would arouse among Persian archaeologists. 
Every student of antiquity is familiar with their history. "

 
The images of New York City in ruin, in advanced decline, in an imagined future of slow death, have always
seemed haunting to me.  The images in The Last American are drawn by the author, and in some later editions 
of the work are supplemented by occasional designs and a few extra images.  But Mitchell's work is 
pretty impressive.  And daunting.  
```
Mitchell also has a nice way of showing how his explorers were trying to make sense of the ruins, figuring out what their intended uses were. For example, the ruins of the Brooklyn Bridge were more a monumental temple, because the distance between the giant structures and the shore were (for them) to great a span for the things to be part of a bridge. There’s some good, solid, imaginative imaging going on here.
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Architecture and Building — Future, History of the — History of Goodbye — History of the Future
Fabulist & Fantastic Architecture: Alice in Wonderland to the Library of Immanuel Kant. Sergy Tyukanov.

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I just wanted to share in this very quick posting the extraordinary work of the Russian artist Sergy Tyukanov (b.1955), who paints/etches/draws fantastic images calling freely on legendary literature, folktales, history, philosophy, as well as the work of some earlier masters (as in the Bruegels and Bosch, seen in the last two images). If you follow the link to his website you’ll find that some of these images–which in their nature seem to be telling you that they are enormous works–are actually very small, on the order of one square foot. Fabulist artists like this, especially those anthropomorphizing their subjects, have always been of great interest to me. ANd I’ve got to say that Tyukanov’s architecturals remind me very strongly of ideas in the 18th century French visionary architects like Lequeu and Boullee and Ledoux.

Sergey Tyukanov (website)

Alice in Wonderland

Library of Immanuel Kant

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Architecture and Building
Blank, Empty and Missing Things, #35: Empty Trees

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1614

Continuing a longish thread on Blank, Empty and Missing Things is this very short notice on a beautiful illustration from (Rev.) William Buckland (1784-1756, Reader of Geology at Oxford) in his Geology and mineralogy : considered with reference to natural theology

I think it is a remarkable thing, a beautiful piece of explorative artwork when taken out of context.

The description of this engraving from volume I, page 466:

Buckland is well remembered for his analysis of the fossil remains found in Yorkshire’s Kirkdale Cave, which he identified as hyena (and its prey) remains from earlier prehistoric times rather than having been swept from the tropics to England by the waters of the Great Flood. Of course, Buckland himself held that opinions years earlier, along with many other geologists…as some actually hold today, somehow, in creationist fits of intentional delusion.¹

Notes

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Anticipation, History of — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Episodes in the History of Fat: Lard, Art Made of Fat, Fat Bullets, Sham & Disappeared Fat

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

As it turns out there was–in Real Life–a Fat Bank opened somewhere in our fair land, a fat bank made for people to store their own fat from surgical enhancement procedures that could be used sometime in the future to be used elsewhere in the depositors’ bodies.

(I ‘d like to open a bank for pronouns that are used to end sentences.)

And as it turns out I’ve written a few times on this blog about other Fat Matters, all of which are as truculent-friendly to reality as this Fat Bank thing, but less embarrassing. Here are most of them:

Fun with Fat Lard

Fat Redux, Redux: Fat Bullets, 1945.

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Absurdist, Unintentional
A Paris Made to be Destroyed–Sham Paris, 1917/18

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1613 (Post 656–expanded)

Now this was a case in which you were given the result and had to find everything else for yourself. — Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet

There is no doubt a history that could be written on shadow cities, cities that were built to resemble other cities, cities constructed to serve as a deterrent or double, cities set to deceive, cities constructed to be experimented upon. Some were built ot be destroyed. Like Paris–or “Sham Paris”.

Augustine cleaved two cities from one, the good and the doomed, in The City of God. The powers that were in Paris at the end of World War I tried to do exactly that—to create a Sham Paris located on the outskirts of the real city—it was to be doomed, offered with confusing lights and displays that would disorient German aviators into bombing and destroying it rather than the real city.

Of course these were also the days of pre-RADAR, and of aviators simply holding a bomb by its fins and letting go once a target was in sight, so the possibility of causing this sort of dissonance was at least palpable. The planes held the pilot and a lot of fuel, and not much flight weight was devoted to bombs, so the bombing runs were necessarily quick and comparatively light (by standards of just a decade later). So the idea of a Sham Paris might’ve, could’ve sort’ve worked, maybe; but not really. It had a very strong, fatal, feculent (thank you for this word, Mr. Depp) air about it, like that misty doomsday smell that lifted the Maginot Line out of the earth and dumped it in the dim and stinking past.

The story of Sham Paris may have been “broken” in The Illustrated London News of 6 November 1920 in a remarkably titled photo essay, “A False Paris Outside Paris—a ‘City’ Created to be Bombed”. There were to be sham streets lined with electric lights, sham rail stations, sham industry, open to a sham population waiting to be bombed by real Germans. It is a perverse city, filled with the waiting-to-be-murdered in a civilian target. Sham Paris seems to me like a reverse city. And a reverse city in the manner of the cities created by the guilty Cain and Romulus—these two were murders who created cities; Sham Paris is a city of created murders to save the innocent.

Sham Paris was only partially constructed before war’s end in November 1918.

(All images here are clickable and can be enlarged.)

Its important to distinguish Sham Cities from hidden cities, like Project Iceworm (the underground city built in Greenland) or Mt. Weather (the not-so-very-secret secure and safe bunker for the governing class in Bluemont, Virginia) and so on. Sham Cities were definitely constructed for deception and/or destruction. The next city we’ll take a look at: Survival Town, Nevada.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Architecture and Building — History of Goodbye — History of Nothing — Militaria
History of Holes: Making Tiny Holes & the Art of Compiling Statistics (I)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1612

Part of this blog’s History of Holes series. (See, for example: An Episode in the History of Holes: Electricity, Punched Cards and the Computer, 1878, here; History of Holes–Filing Holes Up, here. And fifteen others.

I was thinking about holes and hole-making in the history of the art form of compiling statistics, and in the process of accumulating a few images of the machines that actually made the holes in tabulating cards, I found an interesting/unfortunate/depressing illustration. It belonged to the Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft (“Dehomag”), which was the German arm of IBM. (Herman Hollerith created his Tabulating Machine Company in 1896; it was consolidated with the International Recording Company and Computing Scale Company of America into Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR) in 1911, and then, in 1924, changed once again into something with the name that we all recognize , International Business Machine (IBM).)

Edwin Black’s one-trick pony, IBM and the Holocaust, I’m sure was a consolidation of grand assertions that helped to sell a book. As a history I find it manipulative, like a person on a mission to say something and uses only what is positive to that end. On his website, Black states: “IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich’s needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed.” If you read between the lines this sounds like standard operating procedure that IBM would’ve followed with anyone; but on the face of it Black creates the case for IBM automating the Holocaust.

The poster has a very provocative cache, and taken somewhat out of context it might be viewed as dustjacket artwork for Black’s book. The all-seeing eye absorbing the information of teh punched card, with the unfortunate, looming, belching smokestack there in the foregoround, reminiscent of the chimneys in the concentration and extermination camps. But this poster was executed around 1925, well ahead of any of those events–the design by serendipity happens to visually support the author Black’s assertions. Its just a nasty-looking object.

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Computer Tech/History — History of Holes
First Use of the Term “Super Computing”

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

The Columbia Difference Tabulator – 1931

The earliest use of the term “super computer” seems to com from the New York World, (“1920” though actually 1929), and was applied to a unique instrument made by IBM for Columbia University. The The Columbia Difference Tabulator, completed that year, was nicknamed the “Packard”, after the large, streamlined-but-bulbous American luxury car of enormity.

And a picture of the great beast, below.

[Picture source: Columbia University computer history page, here. .]

“The new machine “mass-produced the sums of products by the method of progressive digiting and read punch cards at the rate of 150 per minute. It contained ten 10-position counters with provision for shifting totals internally from one counter to another – a capability that anticipated a future function of computers.” [9]. The new machine, variously called the “Columbia Machine”, the “Statistical Calculator”, the “Difference Tabulator”, and (because of its massive size) the “Packard“, was delivered and installed in 1931.”–From the Columbia University site, here.

Idea source: Eames, Charles; Eames, Ray (1973). A Computer Perspective. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. p. 95. More links and references at Columbia University’s computer history page, here.

Notes:

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Computer Tech/History — Technology, History of
On the Failures and Triumphs of Confederate Digestion: Diarrhea and Urine

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1611

Let’s just say it: the history of diarrhea is not pretty, It has been a major killer throughout history (coupled with the sometimes historically-indistinguishable dysentery), wiping out perhaps hundreds of millions of people over human history. Infectious diarrhea and dysentery is especially suited for crowded, cramped conditions with poor sanitary facilities and bad food, which makes armies a perfect place for those diseases to easily succeed.

In the American Civil War diarrhea was a leading incapacitor and killing disease, perhaps chief among the diseases that killed more people than did the actual fighting.¹And perhaps no where else did it commit such great tragedy than in the ranks of the Confederate soldiers, who by and large had considerably less than the Union soldiers. Poor sanitary facilities, bad food badly prepared, close living conditions, weeks/months of stationary encampment during the winter, would all add up to a disaster. Since the Confederate records of medical treatment are far from complete, we have to look at those of the Union Army to get an idea of what happened with diarrhea–and there, more than 250,000 men were discharged for chronic diarrhea, or roughly 10% of the entire fighting force over the course of the war. I think it is safe to assume that the Confederate numbers would be at least comparable and probably worse for a fighting force of approximately half that size, though I am unsure of how many of these actually were discharged. The figures for soldiers suffering from diarrhea who were not killed by it or discharged for it probably ran over a million for both sides. It would not be easy to overstate the vast impact that diarrhea had on these armies, and particularly for the Confederacy.

On the side of success we have the story of gunpowder. Or, rather, the failure in the production of industrial nitrates necessary for the production of gunpowder which was addressed by the Southern citizenry, and particularly the women of the South. Absent the essential component of potassium nitrate, the Confederate states resolved to produce the stuff locally, in the old fashion. Urine (and water from cesspools, privvies, and so on) would be collected, and then (via one of many methods) would be sprinkled on straw or some other similar organic material (to keep the material moist but not wet); the stew would be covered and sunned and allowed to cook for some months at the end of which time the straw would be washed of the material formed on its top, and then dried. The resulting salts produced by evaporation would be a form of saltpeter, or potassium nitrate, which provides the necessary O₂ for combustion.

I know that it was at least considered customary and a rule of engagement for the Union and the Confederate soldiers to not shoot each other while attending nature’s call; I’m not so sure that this would be the case for the guys in the night waste wagons collecting privvy drawers and urine.

Just another small, necessarily savage bit in the history of killing.

Notes:

1. The Union armies had from 2,500,000 to 2,750,000 men. Their losses, by the best estimates:

Battle deaths: 110,070

Disease, etc.: 250,152

Total 360,222

The Confederate strength, known less accurately because of missing records, was from 750,000 to 1,250,000. Its estimated losses:

Battle deaths: 94,000

Disease, etc.: 164,000

Total
258,000

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History of Goodbye — Militaria
Did Galileo Know That He Was Galileo?

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1610

Here’s an interesting lead sentence I found in 3QuarksDaily via Salon:

“Karl Marx did not know what we know: he did not know that he was Karl Marx.”

The author suggested that Marx would’ve had a better time in his life had he known what influence he wielded in what he was writing–basically, Karl Marx didn’t know that he was KARL MARX. It is an interesting–and frightening–idea to think of someone laboring like that laboring (as it were) away in relative obscurity, or at least relative to the monumental influence it would come to have.

The real question is not how many people might be in this category of not knowing who we know them to be, but if everyone is in this category at one point or another, and how long it took for them to understand the lasting significance of their work. But for right now I’m interested to know what people think of the following ten science personalities, and to answer (in a simple survey), if they knew the significance of their work.

The survey is simple and fairly straightforward, and asks questions regarding Copernicus, Harvey, Galileo, Einstein, Maxwell, Newton, Turing, Darwin, Lucretius and John Von Neumann.

You’ll have a chance to view the survey results at the end. Thanks!

Follow this link to the survey.

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mathematics, logic — Medicine, History of — Naming Things — Perspective — Physics
Future of the Past–Barber Machines, 1868

JF Science Books Post 1609

In mid-Victorian England lived high possibilities for the use of electricity, in industrialism, in tools, and machines–but I think most of all, it was the new appearance of Revolutionary Machines that seemed to me to offer itself as the new religious altar for the mass of people. After all, machines looked absolutely beautiful–and it wasn’t just the machines, but their housings as well, what with some of these massive things being housed and supported by absolutely gothic-inspired designs, making the entire unit seem as though it was not only used by was the seat for some sort of belief.

[Image source: Sam Ryan, with transcription by him below.]

And like anything else, some of this belief-and-application system went a little too far, as we can see in this 1868 cartoon from Punch magazine. There were new machines that could help the barber to treat hair–or in this case, brush it–but the new machine didn’t really do that much good, so the thing might not have existed at all except to keep the barber from being bypassed by his more-modern companions. But at the base of it all, like so much in Vctoria-ville, this machine happened to by Boy-powered.

The cartoonist was just having a jab at the over-reaching of more-complex machines to do simple work, along with a sideways social poke at the idea of child labor.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Technology, History of