Author: JF Ptak

Crowd Series–Find the Hat, NYC, WWII

JF Ptak Quick Post

Funny how in so many of these big crowd picture that I’ve performed surgery on that hats seem to be an issue. For example, there’s this iconic photograph by Weegee (Arthur Felig, born Usher Felig in the Ukraine, 1898-1909, a man who lived for “the shot” and got it over and over again, evidently at the cost of just about everything else in his life) of the crowds at Coney Island. (“Weegee” was the phonetic spelling of Ouija, a moniker given to the man because he seemed be able to intuit the location of a crime or action of some sort. It helped that he was the only journalist/photographer given a license to have a police-band radio receiver at home and in his car.

So far as I can tell there is only one man in a hat–the guy in the bottom right corner of the image, and he’s wearing a fedora at that. The person at 10:00 from him–white-hatted with a plastic visor–may be a man, too, in which case I’ll have to amend this a little to restrict hats to fedoras. And wearing it, too, at the time of the photo–there’s another man in there somewhere who is doffing his boater to the photographer. And that’s about it. Not much sand in this picture.

It is a little unusual, this hat business–but Weegee at least has captured hats in unusual places. Finding his bread buttered by crime photography and the gritty aspect of late-night city life, Weegee documented all manner of criminal activities in NYC during the 1930’s-1950’s, including more than his fair share of Mafia slayings. I recall several of this photographs featuring the “hit” face-down on the pavement or on the table-clothed tabletop, hat still firmly in place. MOMA bought several of Weegee’s works in the 1940’s for an exhibit called “Action Photography”–which I guess would describe Weegee’s work, though if the action was starkly captured by a flash at night in tough surroundings, the description might be better.

This photograph by Weegee captures a few sailors in their caps, which I’m not sure count. Primary in this photo though is the man in the middle, wearing a mask (for reasons unknown).

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Photography — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
The History of Lines: Lines Come and Gone.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1546 [Part of the History of Lines series.]

This picture tells as much about the making lines–railroads pushing their way towards one another, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, pushing on towards one another to complete a rail line that connected the American coasts–as it does in covering them up. The photograph is of a Union Pacific supervisor named Samuel Reed, who was inspecting the rail bed–in 1868/9 it was not uncommon for one team to clear the land and lay down the ties miles ahead of the track layers. Miles of bits of wood, waiting for their iron.

But most roads, or at least most early roads, were in their places for a reason, and generally that reason was because it was a good way for getting from Point A to Point B. This photograph, along the way of the Old Platte Valley route, seems to be a mid-way point between the old and the new, or between the old and the old, lines of communication and lines of travel. These timbers are laid down on top of the old immigration route from the east to California and Oregon, which in turn were laid on top of the trails of fur traders, which were on top of those of Indians, which were on top of those of the buffalo herds, and so on, all the way down.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

American History: Western Exploration & Native Americans — History of Lines — Lines, History of
Aerial Bombing Accuracy Calculator, WWII

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1545

I found this object in my paper-calculators box (moveable disk calculators made of paper, two going back to A. Kircher in the 1660’s)—I’m not sure why it was there as it is not paper, though it is an interesting calculator.

[Images are greatly expanded in click mode.]

I learned a big lesson from it. The “Small Target Bombing Probabilities” calculator was issued by the little-known (in the popular sense) Applied Mathematics Panel of the National Defense Research Council (NDRC)¹ in the early 1940’s during WWII.

Marked “Restricted”, it calculated the number of bombs that would successfully be delivered given (1) the number of bombs, (2) the “aiming error”, and (3) target size. It would then generate results for “(a) the expected number of hits for the indicated number of bombs”, (b-e) the probability of at least one hit to four hits.

What is a little surprising to me was the number of bombs that didn’t find their target. For example, a 65,000 square foot target bombed with 1000 bombs and an aiming error factor of 2000 feet could expect to land 3-4 bombs on the target, with an 88% chance of landing at least two hits, 75% chance of landing three hits, and about 50% of landing at least four hits. And so the necessity of large numbers of planes dropping a large number of bombs.

Notes

1. The establishment of the NDRC was announced so: “It is announced by Science Service that the following committee has been appointed in the United States to correlate “scientific research on the mechanisms and devices of warfare”: — Nature 146, 191-191 (10 August 1940).

“Members included: Dr. Vannevar Bush (chairman), president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, formerly dean of the faculty of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Prof. Richard C. Tolman (vice-chairman), dean of the graduate school and professor of physical chemistry and mathematical physics at the California Institute of Technology; . Dr. Irvin Stewart (secretary), formerly Federal Commissioner for Communications and chairman of the Committee on Scientific Aids to Learning; Rear Admiral Harold G. Bowen, director of the Naval Research Laboratory, Anacostia, D.C.; Conwiy P. Coe, U.S. Commissioner of Patents; Dr. Karl T. Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, formerly professor of physics at Princeton University; Dr. James B. Conant, president, formerly professor of organic chemistry, Harvard University; Dr. Frank B. Jewett, president of the Bell Telephone Laboratories; Brigadier General G. V. Strong, assistant chief of staff, U.S.”

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Aviation & flight — Information, Quantitative Display of — Technology, History of
The “Other” Hiroshima: Hamburg, Operation Gomorrah, Summer 1943

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1543

It was during the spring and summer of 1943 that the Allies came to the conclusion that the idea of strategic bombing needed to be expanded–the expansion part grown to include the total destruction of the target city.

The “most secret” letter¹ (dated 27 May 1943) that outlined the coming approach to aerial bombing was sent by Air Chief Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris to his six group commanders and detailed the more-new strategic approach to bombing cities–the city itself would be a strategic target, with the goal in this case of destroying the entire city.

Operation Gomorrah occupied four nights from 24-30 July, involving 791 aircraft on the 24/25th, 90-110 B-17s on the 25th, 131 B-17s on the 26th, 787 aircraft on the 27/28th, 777 on the evening of the 29/30th., and finally with 740 aircraft on the night of the last raid on 2/3 August.3,000+ aircraft were employed in the action dropping 9,000 tons of bombs. At the end of the Gomorrah campaign, 42,600 people had been killed as well as almost 40,000 wounded, destroying about half the homes int the city and causing another million people to flee the city. The greatest amount of damage and death occurred on the night of the 27th, when 787 British aircraft caused an enormous firestorm to be formed, at one point fueled by a 1500′-foot tall tornado of fire, which caused 150 mph fire winds, temperatures reaching so high (1800 degrees and more) that it set the asphalt streets on fire. Most of the dead were killed by asphyxiation, the oxygen pulled out of bomb shelters and hiding places to be used in the fires. The infrastructure of the city had been largely destroyed before this day’s bombing, so getting firefighting crews to any of the new scenes would be impossible. As a matter of fact, there was so much smoke generated from the previous day’s bombings that the USAAF B-17 attacks were suspended because targets could not be identified.

And from this point to the end of the war there were another 60+ campaigns flown at Hamburg, attacking and re-attacking oil storage facilities, shipbuilding industries, U-Boat factories, and the like. 53 missions involving several thousand aircraft, flying against the re-supplking and ruined city right to the end of the war, including 5 major actions in the last week of the war.

I don’t think that this was its own “Hiroshima” as British command thought, because, well, Hiroshima and Nagasaki have their own categories for destruction. As does Tokyo. And Dresden. It does though share a newness of bombing with Hiroshima in establishing the mission against Hamburg as a mission against an entire city rather than specific targets–certainly there were specific targets in mind for the hour or more worth of aircraft, but the overall effect was to support a carpet bombing plan and to initiate a fire so massive and destructive that the entire city would succumb.

Newsreel of the bombing of Hamburg.

Notes

1. The Harris ltter:

MOST SECRET

BOMBER COMMAND
OPERATION ORDER NO. 173
Copy No: 23 Date: 27th May, 1943

INFORMATION

The importance of H A M B U R G. the second largest city in Germany with a population of one and a half millions, is well known and needs no further emphasis. The total destruction of this city would achieve immeasurable results in reducing the industrial capacity of the enemy’s war machine. This, together with the effect on German morale, which would be felt throughout the country, would play a very important part in shortening and in winning the war.

2. The ‘Battle of Hamburg’ cannot be won in a single night. It is estimated that at least 10,000 tons of bombs will have to be dropped to complete the process of elimination. To achieve the maximum effect of air bombardment, this city should be subjected to sustained attack.

Forces to be Employed

3. Bomber Command forces will consist of all available heavies in operational squadrons until sufficient hours of darkness enable the medium bombers to take part. It is hoped that the night attacks will be preceded and/or followed by heavy daylight attacks by the United States VIIlth Bomber Command.

INTENTION

4. To destroy HAMBURG.

[Source]

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Aviation & flight — Militaria
Are there More People than Knots? Finding the Structure of Matter in Smoke Rings
JF Ptak Science Books Post 1541 (Part of the Series Blank, Empty & Missing Things.)

Embedding a circle in 3-D Euclidean space is another way of looking at a simple and substantial elements of human activities. Knots have played a large role in human history over a long period of time–not just for connecting things, or determining speed, but also in design, the appearance of, say, objects that would later be known as Borronean rings that appear in Tibetan Buddhism (endless knots as keys to infinity) to the Celtic knots (decorating, say, the Book of Kells).

Gauss did very early work (1)-as is so often the case– on knot theory, as did William Thomson, Lord Kelvin,who visualized atoms as knots in the aether and who was perhaps inspired by P.G. Tait’s experiments on smoke rings (2) and who in turn had been influenced by a paper of Hermann von Helmholtz on vortex-rings in incompressible fluids, and organized the stability of chemistry around this pricnipal. In turn P.G. Tait based his very solid work on knot theory in 1867 on this work of Kelvin and von Helmholtz. .(Kelvin’s theory (3) was rather well received for several decades until it was not, but it did enjoy the support for a time by J.C. Maxwell. Kelvin was a brilliant man who I think is too often remembered for some of the few hundreds of the millions of words that he wrote and lectured, not the least of which were his pronouncements at the every end of the 19th century on the impossibility of heavier-than-air flight.) Tait–who also co-authored a very well respected textbook on Natural Philosophy with Kelvin–moved on to firmly establish knot theory and on the elements that makes knots different, formulating tables on how knots form, and in essence believing that he was fabricating a table of the elements. All of this work suffered a fatal blow when the great Michelson-Morely experiment (1887) (4) failed to detect the luminiferous aether.
- [The first page of how knots come to be as they appeared in P.G. Tait’s earliest work, though he by necessity kept the investigations to relatively minimal degree: “We find that it becomes a mere question of skilled labour to draw all the possible knots having any assigned number of crossings. The requisite labour increases with extreme rapidity as the number of crossings is increased. … I have not been able to find time to carry out this process further than the knots with seven crossings. … It is greatly desired that someone, with the requisite leisure, should try to extend this list…”]
This was the beginning of the tabulation of knots, found in Tait’s beautiful work. To date some 7 billion tabulations have been identified, a number nearly equal to the of the world’s population. Knot theory has taken shape as an area of study within the field of topology, which was developed in the 1850’s through the 1870’sby Riemann/Listing/Mobius/Klein and then which received its algebraic foundation by Henri Poincare (5) just af ew years after Michelson-Morely and in the same year as Roentgen’s x-ray, 1895.

Notes

1. The Gauss linking integral,1833, carried forward by Johann Benedict Listing.

2. An interesting modern recreation of the Tait smoke ring experiment can be seen here. See malso: Silliman, Robert H., William Thomson: Smoke Rings and Nineteenth-Century Atomism, Isis, Vol. 54, No. 4. (Dec., 1963), pp. 461–47

3. Lord Kelvin, Sir William Thomson, “On Vortex Atoms”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vol. VI, 1867, pp. 94-105. Reprinted in Phil. Mag. Vol. XXXIV, 1867, pp. 15-24.

–It was also Kelvin (along with A.A. Michelson) who spoke on the finiteness of physics, with Kelvin in particular stating at a British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in 1900 that there would be nothing new in physics, and that all that was left was measurement. I seem to remember a story about one of Einstein’s uncle’s (?) warning him against going into physics because there was nothing left new to do…I can’t remember if this was before or after Roentgen. In any event, Kelvin’s statement was five years after Roentgen, but it didn’t stop him from making his claim.

4. On the Michelson-Morely experiment.

5. H.Poincaré, “Analysis Situs”, J. Ec. Polytech ser 2, vol 1 (1895) 1-123.

–The Journal of Knot Theory and Its Ramifications was founded in 1992, establishing a journal devoted purely to knot theory.
·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Blank and Empty Things; A History of — mathematics, logic
A Note on the Pledge of Allegiance: Exluding “Equality” and including “God”.

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

The Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy (1855-1931) in 1892 for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Western Hemisphere. The Christian Socialist Baptist Minister Bellamy started the pledge out as a simple confirmation, and at one time considered the inclusion of the word “equality” in the message, but backed away after he saw potential difficulties with the word, what with the social and legal exclusions of women and Black people getting in the way of the concept.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Anticipation, History of — Brevity and Complexity
The History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things–the Voice of Beethoven

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1540 (Part of a long series on The History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.)

So, in the history of very creative people saying things, I wonder if Ludwig van Beethoven said the most of the least interesting things? I’m referring to his correspondence and other written works, and not his music of course—and given the music nothing else really matters. But given the amount of surviving letters and conversation books, and of course his staggering genius (which makes him one of the most important men of the century) it is kind of remarkable that there isn’t more attractive, inventive, interesting content in his communications—which at the very least makes reading the stuff somewhat disappointing, and, at the very most, pretty much the same.

When Beethoven (who died at age 57 on 26 March 1827, a year younger in death than Dickens and five years old than Shakespeare—a remarkable thing to consider how much these people accomplished in a very short period of time) began his experience in being deaf he resorted to using largish, quarto-sized blank chap books for his visitors to write their questions and answers to him. These books, Konversationshefte, the Conversation Books, were precisely that—they recorded the conversations with Beethoven over a number of years. Unfortunately, they reveal some very basic, daily, non-sequitur sorts of stuff, and contain almost nothing of what Beethoven actually said.

Sometimes—according to scholars—it is possible to intuit what Beethoven sort of said by looking at series of questions and answers from his guests. But by and large the notebooks offer few clues to what the voice of Beethoven was actually saying. This is particularly grueling given the extent of the notebooks—136 of these books remain, covering the periods from about 1819 to 1827. (Actually, at Beethoven’s death there were more than 400 of the things, but his biographer, Anton Schindler, the man who inherited much from Beethoven including the notebooks, managed to purposely destroy at least 160 of the books. Evidently he found them impolitic, among other things, and tried to protect Beethoven’s reputation by making the evidences of the supposed impertinences disappear.)

The conversations cover all manner of small, daily bits of life, including numerous one-sided conversations with/to the Maestro on how to take his enemas. (It is extraordinary that such evidence remains in the face of how much other –and probably more interesting—material didn’t.

The letters of Beethoven, too, as voluminous as they are, are a terror to read, mainly because—at least to a general reader—there’s so little of interest in them. I have no doubt that for scholars they are vast repositories for things like Lost Punctuation and the sort, but the letters as intellectual documents, as things that give and insight into the mind of Beethoven, or what he thought about his work, or the works of contemporaries, and so on, well, the content just doesn’t seem to be there. (There are some occasional bright spots, like his continued reference to how extraordinary Handel was and that he, the great Beethoven, still learns from the man, even on his deathbed, but there’s really very little like this, relative to the great weight of the sheer number of words in the letters.)

A number of writers have quoted W.H. Auden saying that there was only one memorable sentence in the whole of the Beethoven correspondence. I can’t yet find what this was to Auden–my first guess is that it is in the “Immortal Beloved” writing, where we do get a big, deep cut into Beethoven’s mind.

The letters do reveal all sorts of other things, most of which makes me sad, particularly when the sick room of Beethoven is described in not-pretty terms as an outreach and indicator of his possible poverty, and how much the ill Beethoven had to worry about securing a little money to pull him through his illness and into the next half-year or so of life if he survived himself.

Even making my way though the Thayer biography of Beethoven and looking for his voice is a chore. I tried to content myself constructing found poetry in the questions of the visitors to Beethoven in the notebooks, but that was fairly well a failure.

It is in these cases that the authentic voice of Beethoven seems to be almost entirely missing–a blank, empty and missing sound from the man who made some of the most beautiful music ever created.

The other end of this part of blank, empty and missing things history, and sound, and Beethoven, would obviously be his deafness, or perhaps his depression (in the 1815-1820 period, when he was plagued by, well, something). For years Beethoven heard very little; and then for years after that, he heard almost nothing at all. But he was sensitive to vibration, so he was able to experience music, though in a different sense form what we think of as auditory. Missing music–though I wouldn’t call it “Empty” or “blank.”

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Anticipation, History of — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Music

High Color in Cowboy Vocabulary, Selections from an Unpublished Typescript (1938)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I reckon that at some point or another one or some or all of these words might come in handy, a garnish to a small thought or medium sentence, or even as a companion to Patrick Starfish and his “sentence enhancers”. They’re a little far from the “history of science” material that I guess I’m supposed to be writing about here, but, well, like all of the other non-science stuff that makes an appearance in these pages, its interest was too irresistible for me to say “no” to.

And so to some colorful Cowboy vocabulary, choice morsels that I plucked from a document found some time ago at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. They’re located in what still seems to be an unpublished typescript from the Texas Folklore Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). The language was collected by marginally-employed historians and such put on temporary dole by the U.S. government, sent out to the far regions, interviewing old Cowboys for what they knew and remembered. The document is dated February, 1938.

Bog rider	Cowboy sent to patrol bogs and extricate cattle
Button	Boy
Chuck eater	Easterner come west to learn ranch work
Circle	Area a roundup rider must inspect in a day
Climb your hump	Fight
Deep in the wood	Firmly in saddle
Drag your loop	I didn’t steal that cow, itjust poked its head in the loop I was dragging”
Fork a horse	Ride a horse
Forty Rod	Liquor
Give up the head	Complain
Gizzard gravel	Courage
Grass train	Ox-team freighters
He left the score	Left in a panic
Jiggle	Ride
Jingler	One who herds horses for an outfit
Lacing up a tree	Putting the saddle on
Moonshine	Night rider
Old cedar	Six shooter
Rattling his hooks	Ride fast
Riding through strong	Riding horses average cowboy doesn’t want to ride
Slop and tatter	Pacing horse
Swing a long rope	Horse or cattle thief
Turn a cat	Take a fall
Wheelbarrow man	One who walks across the plains

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

American History: Western Exploration & Native Americans

The History of Lines, an Introduction: Barbed Wire, Telegraphs, Treaties and Railroad Rails

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1539

I’m about to start a series on this blog on a great constituent part of the concerns here of two other series: the History of Lines. This new bit will sit along next to the History of Dots and the History of Holes, and will begin to mention just some of those things that will bridge the gap among the three categories.

A lot of that–the History of Lines business–has to do with the interpretation of things on paper: heart rate, “brain waves”, the motion of a bumble bee, navigation, and of course, words. (The great Kickapoo tracker Famous Shoes in Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo, one of the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, found that the one thing he couldn’t track in this world were the marks on the pages of a book.)

The business of lines is like that of dots and circles, together describing much of the physical world. For “lines” alone there’s just so much, an entire encyclopedia waiting to be written. There are unique lines, such as we see below from The Scientific American for 28 March 1885, in a line of workers for the Edison Electric Company holding an (electric) torchlight parade, the men attached by electrical wires that were in turn attached to the electric light bulbs on their helmets.

There are lines of succession, code and graphs; Battle Lines, the Maginot Line; fishing lines, units of poetry, lines of a play; there’s waiting on lines, breaking the line, party lines; lines of fortifications, the lines on which music is written, and the foundations of geometry, and much more.

There were lines that occupied only a minute percentage of the landscape in which they were found, but were among its major controlling influences–such was the case in controlling the American West, except that one of the greatest of these lines, once completed and seemingly impenetrable, was briefly destroyed by its builders.

The story of the West getting filled up in the 1870s is a story of lines—railroad track, telegraph wires, barbed wire fences, and words on a page; big changes from disparate but related areas in technology and legislation, but when you looked at them from a distance and in the proper perspective, they all looked exactly the same.

The greatest of these lines may have been the invention of barbed wire in 1873, with Joseph Glidden, Jacob Haish and Isaac Elwood all managing to independently come upon the idea at about the same time. What barbed wire brought to the West was control and settlement. Prior to barbed wire there was open range grazing of cattle and extensive cattle drives, mainly because there was no fencing. There were also few farms due to this sort of grazing—the only thing a farm was here was in the way, and there was no recourse for the farmer to protect his

lands from a grazing herd. There was no fencing because there were no materials for the fence. Fencing was made almost entirely with lumber and stone, and on the treeless plains and the vast non-New England tracts of land, it was simply an impossible task. The introduction of barbed wire changed all of this very quickly, with thousands of miles of new fencing strung in the 1870’s alone. Fencing meant control, restriction of the use of land, of access to water, and to a way of life. It also meant that the farmer was now free to make a claim at a way of life on the plains, beginning a torrent of settlement and farms.

Another big line element of settlement were the texts (lines-on-paper) of three major acts of legislation which, over a period of just sixteen years, were responsible for moving more people than just about anything else in American history. The first of these was the Homestead Act of 1862. This was a revolutionary concept, legislated in 1358 words, effectively turning over 270 million acres, or about 8 percent of the country, of public lands to private citizens (“actual settlers of the public domain”). A claim could be made for a farm of 160 acres, for free, provided a structure was built on the land and it was maintained for five years. One could buy the parcel outright for $1.25 an acre as well. Next was the Desert Land Act of 1877 which opened drier lands, selling 640 acres at $1.25 an acre with three years to pay, so long as the land was irrigated by the end of the three years. Land that was deemed “unfit for farming” was sold to those who might want to “timber and stone” (logging and mining) upon the land with the third major piece of legislation, the Timber and Land Act of 1878. The act was used by speculators who were able to get great expanses declared “unfit for farming” allowing them to increase their land holdings at minimal expense. The Homestead Act alone accounted for the creation of almost 400,000 farms in the West by 1890. Farms meant parceling out land, “settling” it, having people on it, waiting when they weren’t working.

Settlement was dramatically increased by the written and published promises and speculations of mineral wealth—not necessarily just by the introduction of miners, but by securing the lands from and removing its Indian owners. The Custer expedition into the Black Hills in 1873, for example, reported some hope for finding gold in the sacred mountains of the Sioux. Thousands of miners responded to possibility of wealth, and Custer was again dispatched to secure safety for them in the restricted lands. This in turn lead to more settlers and coincidentally to the debacle of the Little Big Horn, which was the beginning of the end of the Siouian control over vast amounts of land. From prospectors to protection to conflict, ultimately making land more available for more people.

The spread of the railroads was also an enormous settlement factor, with the number of miles of track being laid in Texas and the Great Plains doubling in just 5 years. Not only could you get West more easily, and quickly, and with less pain and suffering, but you could also be much more easily re-supplied.

Telegraph wires tripled, making it easier to control events: and this means from being able to respond to Indian attacks more quickly to ordering boxes of nails, or beer, or shipments of newly-invented canned food.

One of the greatest and most infamous of these lines-controlling-the-West concept were the pieces of legislation and agreements and other legal and binding documents, between the U.S. government and every Indian tribe in the U.S. Promises were made to the Indians and of course not one of these treaties were ever actually realized. It was these written lines that even the greatest of Indian intentions could not penetrate, and that in the end, after everything was said and done and written, after hundreds of treaties, not one was ever followed.

And at the end of tying the first metal ribbon across the country, the meeting of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads at Promontory Point (Utah) in 1869, after the locomotives Jupiter and No. 119 touched cowcatchers, after the driving of the golden spike, after the completion of the massive effort to complete the railroad line, some men of the 21 U.S. Infantry (and others) hammered away at the rail to chip away some souvenir pieces of the occasion. So, the moment the great undertaking was finished, it was put out of commission, possibly by a coronet player from the regimental band, or whomever. Of course the line was only very briefly pu tout of service, and the damaged rails quickly replaced, but the folks celebrating the completion of the uniting of the rail line were the only ones who were really able to also prevent its completion.

Of course in the end all of the lines applied and enabling the closing of the West were personified by smaller and more precise lines: maps.

NOTES

The full text of the “Millions of Acres” (seen above) broadside is as follows:

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Anticipation, History of — History of Lines — Lines, History of
The Leonardo Hands of Girl Convicts, Newcastle Prison, 1871.

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 1538     [Original source photos from Retronaut.]

Undoubtedly the Industrial Revolution passed many by in Newcastle upon Tyne, a metropolitan borough of Tyne and Wear, in North East England. Its an ancient place, and at one time enjoyed a high Victorian economic mission for production and shipping. And just as in any time, many were left behind by progress. These are photographs–mug shots–of children arrested and convicted of petty crimes, sent packing to Newcastle Prison, in 1871. It seems to me that their hands could do little mischief, their crimes coming I suspect from hunger or need.

The hands of Mary Catherine Docherty, serving seven days hard labor for the theft of iron. Age: 14.

These hands belonged to Ann Burns, serving 1 month, convicted of stealing a waistcoat. Age: 18.

The hands of Jane Farrell, serving ten days hard labor for the theft of two boots. Age: 12.

The hands of Catherine Kelly, sentenced to three months in prison for the theft of bed linens. Age: 17.

The hands of Ellen Woodman, sentenced to seven days of hard labor for stealing iron. Age: 11

Alice Mullholland, sentenced to three months in Newcastle prison for the theft of boots. Age: 18.

I suspect that these girls were told to hold their hands together to steady their body for the long exposure by the camera–or perhaps they were just told to hold onto anything, like the chair, or their clothing, or whatever. These girls chose to hold their own hands, each one of them a Mona Lisa. The emotions of these young people seem staggering to me, their bodies communicating the realization of the very hard and impossible end to minor crimes committed as a function of desperation.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Photography