Author: JF Ptak

A Particular Bit of Science In Wells’ “War of the Worlds” (1894)
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I haven’t read in Wells’ WOTW in a long time, and when I went to it just now (reading and listening) I was surprised at how quickly the Mayday Martians element evolved. We get to it by the end of the very first paragraph:
- “At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.”
I was also surprised by the appearance of some tech references, including a dated reference to an article in Nature magazine (2 August 1894). The Nature article references a “strange light” which Wells uses to his own world-stabbing ends, and he gives his story some credibility by dragging in a real-life background to the possibilities of his imaginations.
- “Had there been evidence that the light was outside the disc the strange appearance might be due to a comet in the same line of sight as the planet. If we assume the light to be on the planet itself then it must either have a physical or human origin…” (And by “human” here the editor no doubt means extra-terrestrial, or biological, or intelligent life form.)
I’m not a big sci fi reader, but in my experience I’ve never seen a tale woven using the names of Perrotin and Schiaparelli, though I have no seen them used in the plot setup thickening agent in WOTW. (By the way Wells mentions the “palpitating” work of “Lavelle of Java” though he must have meant “Javelle”, who was Stephane Javelle, the assistant to Perrotin of the Nice Observatory.)

On the “strange light”:

Source: Nature, volume 50, August 2, 1894
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Astronomy — Future, History of the
When a Map Should Probably Not Have Been Made

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This pamphlet was a little confusing to me–at first I thought it would fit into a category of Outsider creations, a small collection of pamphlets filled with some towering and submerged ideas on curing the Depression, keeping the U.S. out of war, flagpole painting, zipper repair, exrta-Earths populating the (regular) Earth, eyestalk plant people of Mars, flooding the Sahara, damming the Hudson River, nuclear powered _____, mega weapons, mega planes, hair massage for higher IQ, and so on. The design of the pamphlet certainly had the feel and look of a great attempt at conveying some secret truth, it turns out that it is pretty straightforward, an 1890’s/1900’s appeal to folk on acting courteously and amicably towards others to achieve a one-government-something.

The message was very simple: do good, be kind, help people, live your religion. It was the work of a very successful bookseller and publisher in Melbourne, Edward William Cole¹. He sounds like he was an interesting guy, autodidact and entrepreneurial, born in the U.K. and migrating to Cape Colony and on to Australia, spending time in the gold diggings, exploring the Murray, and settling into Melbourne where he opened up a bookshop in 1864 which morphed into a large arcade with many rented kiosks.

Cole wrote a number of short pamphlets, published them, and either sold or gave them away–the pamphlet presented here was probably a gift to his customers. It published eight essays of 660 collected for the prize of publication, extolling brotherhood and the commonality of the human condition, appealing for kindness and the common good, and reading above nearly all else.

The imagery on the rear cover is striking, most of the artwork being the fronts and backs of medals/medallions that Cole had made. The image in the middle of it all is, well, very surprising, and potentially disturbing, though it seems unconnected to any of the essays or sentiments of the pamphlet, and seems largely to be a non sequitur. In any event there seems to be no connective text, nothing on race dominance or eugenicism, the only thing that comes close to that is a repeated belief that English should be the dominant world language for its “perfection”. As dire as it seems the map seems to be open to speculation, though on the face of it doesn’t look like much good could come . Is it something as nasty as showing what the map maker thinks are the natural divisions of the world according to race, or could it possibly be suggesting that skin color is based on location on the globe and has nothing to do with any sponsorship of superiority or inferiority based on color? Given the rest of what seems to be in this pamphlet, it seems likely that the later is the case. The guy would’ve been better served if he left the map out.

I’m reproducing the artwork here because there seems to be little mention² of this work outside of stiff and undated bibliographies of books-received.

Notes:

1. Cole’s entry in the Dictionary of Australian Biography: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cole-edward-william-3243

2. According to WorldCat there’s another version of this work, fleshed out to 207pp,, printed around the same time (the librarian guesses ‘189_’) and located in just one library (Victoria). There’s only one copy located of the copy mentioned here, located at the Murdoch library, 11,564 miles from where I sit in western North Carolina.

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Books–Great Cover Art — Books: Title Pages, Unusual — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking
Time, Motion, and Awe in Regards to Moving Pictures
JF Ptak Science Books (This is a revision and expansion of a post from 2012.)

Leonardo wrote backwards and from right to left, Benjamin Button lived backwards at the hands of Scott Fitzgerald, Rene Magritte’s man in the mirror saw the back of his head, Ignatz the Mouse I am sure saw the back of his head looking around the world with the world’s most powerful telescope, rugby passes are all done backwards, paper images of vue optiques appear backwards, lightning for all intents and purposes starts backwards from the ground up, reverse mathematics are worked from theorems to axioms, the Chicago River (1900) was engineered to flow backwards for the foreseeable future, while the Mississippi River famously flowed backwards for just a bit in the New Madrid earthquake of 1812.

I can only imagine what audiences must have felt when they saw the first moving pictures played backwards–seeing them played forwards was a novel-enough (and revolutionary) idea, but the simple idea of reversing the direction of the film would have proved to be equally fascinating. Imagine the first time you witnessed a staged train wreck on film, back there in 1895¹, and imagine being able to see it played over and over again, until you were filled. I’m not so sure that there were even any still photographs of a train wreck as it occurred to this point, even with advances in film speed and lens, so seeing the even unfold in front of you at leisure must have been overwhelming. Now imagine these same folks seeing the event and watching the locomotives reconstitute themselves. It would have been an extraordinary event. Even observing the Marey sequences (above) and seeing what actually happens when a person bends over to pick up a pail of water would have revealed almost as much in new detail as when Galileo was in the middle of his earliest observations.

In a way the chance of controlling the direction telling of a story and seeing it displayed via moving images, and being able to see them backwards, may well have seemed a form of third-person time travel. This came on the heals of what is for all intents and purposes the first time travel novel in H.G. Wells’ (also in) 1895 The Time Machine (appearing earlier as “The Chronic Argonauts,” in 1888)² and Mark Twain’s 1889 but much earlier than the first motion picture to use the idea of time travel (which was in 1921 and based on Twain’s work). Being able to show a motion picture, and then stop it at will, and then reverse the order of time to begin everything all over again–visually–must have seemed a magnificent advantage.

And so to this end I’ve got the following few questions for which I have no firm answers:
1. When was the first time people saw moving images of a of a currently deceased person? That is, when did the first dead person become “reanimated” by virtue of their images being captured by a motion picture? This question could be asked of the first viewing of a photograph of a dead person, and also the first experience of listening to a now-dead person whose voice had been recorded by an Edison machine, but I think the moving picture element is much more powerful.
1. When exactly was the first viewing of backwards motion, of seeing action in reverse?
2. When was the first viewing of a continuous moving picture in which motion was purposely interrupted ?
I’ve probably overlooked some long list of “firsts” in film, somewhere, but for now these questions are still questions. If anyone out there has answers, I’d love to hear them.

Notes:

1. It is interesting that this very early motion picture , made by the great scientist-brothers Lumiere, l’Arrivee d’un train en gare, was produced in the same year as the Wells book. Just two years later, the Lumiere Brothers published a catalog of their available movie strips, numbering 338 productions. In 1898, after six catalogs, there were over a thousand strips. This is remarkable, especially considering that there wasn’t a cinema industry yet. The Lumieres are an interesting pair of people (both of whom survived their invention by about a half-century), making perhaps the most important discoveries in the history of cinema, and continued to be interested in other fields throughout their lives. The cinema-industry part of their work didn’t seem to interest them all that much.

The history of moving images is complex and long. I’m not saying at all that it begins with the Lumieres, or with Edison, as the pre-1900 field is well sprinkled with different and interesting attempts at fooling our eye–Chronophotograposcopes, Counterfivoscopes, Phantasmagorias, Klondikiscopes, Vileocigraphiscope, and so on, are just a few examples of the many attempts at locating the seat of photographic motion in the brain. There are very early efforts, principally by J.A.F. Plateau (1801-1883) who rediscovered in 1829 the “persistence of vision” effect in which the eye will see a continuous stream of images if presented with a flow of static pictures at 16 frames per second over a one second period, which of course is the basis for the rest of everything that was to come. There’s much more, but I wanted to at least point out these few important bits.

2.. I’m not sure what to with Mr. Dickens, if he fits in this order with the time traveling Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1843), or not. Perhaps he does, and if so, then he precedes Mr. Wells, though the latter’s time traveler is outfitted with a machine and a scientific basis for the belief in it. At the very least he is worth mentioning in the same moment.
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Photography, history — Social History — Technology, History of
Tree Power (as in Kinetic Power Generated by Tree Movement in Wind!) (1840)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

A successful byproduct of not being to find something is finding the stuff that you weren’t looking for and didn’t know about. The article (below) is one such happy find, appearing in the pages of The Journal of the Franklin Institute, 1840. I certainly never thought of somehow (?) harnessing the movement of trees via the wind as a power source. As the author of the paper says, “The idea of turning to account, as a mechanical force, the oscillations of a tree by the wind, has never been proposed, because no one, it is probable, has ever deemed it to be a practicable source of power. A very considerable force, the least costly of all, is thus entirely lost.” There is an inventor named though I cannot find references for him–I also cannot visualize how the tree motion is transformed into that “motive force”. Have a look:

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Technology, History of
Abraham Lincoln, Inventor (1849)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Posts to this blog have recently been clustered around volumes of the Journal of the Franklin Institute, as that is what I have been working with quite a bit over on the other side of this site dedicated to online book selling. Bits and pieces have struck me as interesting and curious and worth sharing–I’ve found often that many of these short pieces have received scant attention in the online world. Today’s adventure into the journal led to something that is well-known, but I’m sharing it anyway because it was such a surprise to come upon it “naturally” in the course of looking through one of the JFI volumes.

I knew that Abraham Lincoln was the only U.S. president to receive a patent, and thought that it might show up in these volumes sooner or later, and while looking at the year 1850 I found it: #71 in the review of American Patents for January of that year. In the two open pages of that volume the Lincoln contribution settled in with seven other patents (granted to inventors from New York (2), Ohio (2), Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire). Lincoln’s boat-lifter was there with a new method for joining staves, imitating marble, a spring saddle, improvements to scythe nibs, nozzles for ship navigation, and a shank for mineral door knobs.

I expected to find it either in late 1849 or early 1850 (for the patent issued in mid-1849) but it was still a “surprise” to see it there before me. Lincoln published this shortly after leaving his one-term position in the U.S. Congress, returning to Springfield (Illinois) to practice law. (Lincoln was born near Hodgenville, Kentucky, a town of a few hundred people and 200 miles to the southeast of Springfield, which in 1850 was home to about 5,000.) So, there it is, the not-famous A. Lincoln’s patent for lifting a boat out of the water and over some river shoals. Nice idea.

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On Doing and Done: the Differences in describing the Difference Engine of Charles Babbage, 1832.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2792

There’s a big difference being “inventing” and “invented”. You virtually never hear or read of someone declaring “I am inventing thus-and-so” imply that they’re working on something; “I invented the letter number seven” implies that you’ve completed the act of invention and the number seven exists.

In cataloging a book for my bookstore I came upon this difference in reference to Charles Babbage and his early calculating machine, and proceeded to make a mountain of a molehill, and then the reverse.

The “incident” was sparked by a volume of the Journal of the Franklin Institute¹ with the appearance of a very early mention of Babbage having built his Difference Engine (No. 1) found in a one-paragraph mention in the article “The Results of Machinery”:

[Image at left of Babbage’s machine in 1832, from the Science Museum http://collection.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/co62243/difference-engine-no-1-difference-engine-portion-only]

“Mr. Babbage…has invented a calculating machine…” referring to the newly (1832) “completed” 1/7^th of the machine. (The Difference Engine No. 0 announcement came June 14, 1822; the Difference Engine No. 1 appeared in this year, 1832, though work was suspended on it in 1833 (with government funding removed);’work soon to begin on Difference Engine No.2 (1846-9), (and with A. Lovelace’s famous “Notes” appearing on the Analytical Engine in 1843.)

The article is a review/abstract of the book by Charles Knight, The results of machinery : namely, cheap production and increased employment exhibited : being an address to the working-men of the United Kingdom, which appeared in a second edition in London in 1831 (and a fifth in 1832) with a first American appearing in 1831. The Babbage calculating machine bit from the JFI is taken very nearly verbatim from these editions, where in the original the mention of the machine is referred to as “almost perfected”–here in the JFI it shows up as “invented”, which as they say is something quite different, the world of “almost-perfecteds” being much wider broader deeper than that of “the perfecteds”.

Leaving out the fact that the machine was yet really built is of course a minor thing compared to the overall message of the paper and the book in general, but I just got my scarf wrapped around the axle on it.

The full note on Babbage reads:

“The inventions for saving mental labour, in calculations of arithmetic, have been carried so far, that Mr. Babbage, a gentleman whose name we have twice before mentioned, has invented a calculating machine, which not only does its work of calculation without the possibility of error, but absolutely arranges printing types of figures, in a frame, so that no error can be produced in copying the calculations, before they are printed. We mention this curious machine, to show how far science may go in diminishing mental labour, and ensuring accuracy.”

This was part and parcel the principle thrust of this article: investigating the application of machinery in a positive way to production and labor and showing its “…effects of saving unprofitable labor”.

The few paragraphs of background leading to the Babbage reads as follows:

“The foot-rule of the carpenter not only gives him the standard of a foot measure, which he could not exactly ascertain by any experience or any mental process; but it is also a scale of the proportions of an inch or several inches, to a foot, and of the parts of an inch to an inch. What a quantity of calculations, and of dividing by compasses does this little instrument save the carpenter, besides ensuring a much greater degree of accuracy in all his operations! The common rules of arithmetic, which almost every boy in England now learns, are parts of a great invention for saving mental labour. The higher branches of mathematics, of which science arithmetic is a portion, are also inventions for saving labour, and for doing what could never be done without these inventions.

There are instruments, and very curious ones, for lessening the labour of all arithmetical calculations; and tables—that is, the results of certain calculations, which are of practical use, are constructed for the same purpose. When you buy a joint of meat, you often see the butcher turn to a little book, before he tells you how much a certain number of pounds and ounces amounts to, at a certain price per pound. This book is his “Ready Reckoner,” and a very useful book it is to him; for it enables him to despatch his customers in half the time that it would otherwise require, and thus to save himself a great deal of labour, and a great deal of inaccuracy.

The inventions for saving mental labour, in calculations of arithmetic, have been carried so far, that Mr. Babbage, a gentleman whose name we have twice before mentioned, has invented a calculating machine, which not only does its work of calculation without the possibility of error, but absolutely arranges printing types of figures, in a frame, so that no error can be produced in copying the calculations, before they are printed. We mention this curious machine, to show how far science may go in diminishing mental labour, and ensuring accuracy.”

So in this message of insight and hope I got stuck on one word, which ultimately really doesn’t mean anything. The message was significant and an interesting and insightful way of phrasing the possibilities for the application of more advanced machines in the future, and was much bigger whatever the state of completion of the Babbage machine was.

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Colossal, Super Colossal, and Mega Colossal: The “Terrible Seismical Manifestation at Java” (1883)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I came to this terrible majesty/rex tremendae of words browsing an 1883 volume of Nature, landing on two articles on the Krakatoa eruption of 26-7 August 1883. The editors were just then coming to grips with what scant information came their way, though they knew that what they were trying to present to their readers was a very major event. There was little to prepare them for what they would understand the eruption to be, no doubt filling themselves with images of dread (Quantus tremor est futurus, “what horror invades the mind”, calling again–sorry!–on Mozart’s Requiem for the appropriate language).

The eruption is well known and the subject of innumerable stories and papers, so I’ll not get into that. I do want to look at the expansive and changling vocabulary describing these events, though. The way eruptions are categorized in modern times for relative description and is the Volcanic Explosivity Index (the VEI). a logarithmic scale which runs 0-8. The basis of categorizing the terrific nature of the eruption is made in terms of the volume of ejecta, the plume height, length of eruption, and that sort. I find the defining terms of type of eruption to be very entertaining, with eruptions being described as (level VFI 0) effusive, (1) gentle, (2) explosive, (3) catastrophic, (4) cataclysmic, (5) peroxysmic, (6) colossal, and of course (7) super-colossal, and (8) mega-colossal. (Just a quick note: “colossal” appears in the OED by 1664; “supercolossal” as an unhyphenated word appears by 1875; and “mega-colossal” just doesn’t appear.)

Krakatoa was a VFI-6, a peroxysmic event with 10 km³ of ejecta, which is 1 billion meters³, or 1 trillion litres, or 264 billion gallons (which would weigh in at 1.8 trillion pounds, or about the equivalent of 17,819.7 Titanics), or about 10 times the ejecta of the 1980 Mt. St. Helen’s eruption. These are very messy approximations as ejecta is varied, but it does give you an idea of the magnitude of what was going on.

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Naming Things
The Cost of Convict(ions) 1826

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I found the following bits of information while grazing through a volume of the Edinburgh Review for 1826¹–I don’t really have a place for this to go, so I thought to share it as-is, the article striking some keen interest for me.

What the writer seems to be saying here is that if there was greater discipline in British prisons as in America there would be a net loss of convict time served and thus a savings per crime. Rather than pay for four years of some sort of punishment and discipline that if done correctly (more aggressively) the effort could be accomplished in only two, “the punishment would be still much more dreaded than it is at present”. “It has been found that the gross annual expense of the hulks² amounts to L.2o, less work done by the convict to a net cost of “L.6, 11s. 5d. per man.”

There was also the option of spending a year in prison after which you could opt out for the remained by being transported to Australia, which has the added cost of 25-pounds per male prisoner (27 for females) for the cost of passage alone, plus 12 pounds annual expense per convict.

Should the number of crimes not fall as a result of the new punishment system, the writer believes that the number of criminals imprisoned would because of reduced sentences with a higher concentration of penal threat (whatever that might be). The bottom line seems to be the bottom line in this report.

Notes

1. The source: “Appendice stir les Colonies Penales, ct de Notes statistiques. Par MM. G. de Beaumont et A. de Tocqueville. SJ.”, with “Thoughts on Secondary Punishments, in a Letter to Earl Grey. By Richard Whately, D.D., Archbishop of Dublin” and with “Reports from the Select Committee on Secondary Punishments, together with the Minutes of Evidence, and an Appendix of Papers,” . .pp 336-362. This is mostly it seems a discussion of “transportation” to Australia and the relative cost of convict-keeping there vs. “the hulks”.

2. Even though the following reference is from much later than the narrative above, the image does give a good idea of one of the “hulks”–it appears in Henry Mayhew’s The Criminal Prisons of London, printed in 1862. It is found on the British Library site, along with a three-minute reading of what life was like in the hulk, which was a decommissioned ship, stripped down, and made to hold x-number of prisoners. Comfort was not a concern.

Source: http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item102904.html

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The Battlefields of WWI in U.S. Land Based Context

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

The battle fronts of Europe (by Stanford’s Geographical Establishment, printed ca. 1917) is a useful contextualization of the major battlefields of Europe placed within a map of the U.S., showing the relative distances and differences in relation to a geography that Western Hemisphere folks might better understand. Much of the fighting was taking place in an area about the size of the middle third of the United States, which I am certain gave many readers back then (and probably now) some pause and insight. As you can see, the areas of action work their way from the Baltic across the upper Eastern Front, crossing Austria-Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and a bit of Turkey, then west to the Adriatic and north along the Austria-Hungarian border to the Western Front of France and Germany and Belgium, all fit correct and proper into the land from the Mississippi into the Great Plains. There were about 95 million people alive in the U.S. at that point, and I’ll guess that maybe 20% lived in this Battle Front swath–that means that the dead and wounded from the war would be at least equal to the entire population of the U.S. covered by the battleground map.

[Click to enlarge and clarify.]

“London : Stanford’s Geographl. Estabt., [1917 or 1918]. London : Roberts & Leete Ltd, [1917 or 1918].”

Source: Library of Congress, https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:gmd:gmd5:g5701:g5701s:ct007679/full/pct:25/0/default.jpg

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Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — World War I
Lines and Trenches (1916)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post in the History of Lines series

I’ve just found an interesting example of a photo reconnaissance display of trenches with an interpretation of installations and trench names. It is interesting in and of itself, of course, but I was drawn to it because of the zig-zagged lines of the trenches explained with criss-crossed straight lines. The trenches went off at hard angles rather than long straight lines for several reasons, all for defensive purposes: first, they could offer places to use for fire cover if the trench was overrun by enemy forces, and secondly as a dispersal agent for the effects of bomb blasts within a trench.

The photo “An Example of an Annotated Photograph with Local Names of Trenches Inserted. An example of an annotated photograph with local names of trenches inserted also information collected from all sources” is a silver gelatin print from the George Eastman Museum. The first image below is a detail from the overall image, used here just to show the accumulation of lines. The full image follows, showing dugouts, latrines, cables, ammo dumps, linked bomb craters, and gaps in the barbed wire enabling patrols to come and go without becoming hopelessly tangled in the sharp steel.

Source of image: Art Blart https://artblart.com/tag/photographs-and-transition/

And the full image:

Notes:

Two good reference tools on names and naming practices of trenches:

Peter Chasseaud, Topography of Armageddon: A British Trench Map Atlas of the Western Front 1914-1918

_____. Rats Alley: Trench Names of the Western Front, 1914-1918. Gazetteer of British trench names, as well as an appreciation of the naming practices and names of German and French trenches.

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Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — World War I