JF Ptak Science Books Post 1184 [Part of this blog’s History of Holes series.]
Taking inspiration from Edwin Abbott’s Flatland1 (a superb book excursion into perception and difficult envisioning in which a two-dimensional world tries to comprehend three-dimensional objects) I’ve decided to extend my History of Holes section with their extruded, cylinderized extension cousin–the tube. After all, If you take a hole by its edges, shack it out, rough it up, reposition and throw some sides on it you wind up pretty much with a tube, which could be seen as elongated holes with (generally) defined beginings and endings. Sometimes. This is a natural continuation of my series on dots, which can be regarded as holes, or points, and thus into tubes. “Spots” on the other hand really doesn’t work into the dot/hole thing, as spots can be irregularly-shaped, and I like the dots/holes to be more rounded than the potentially jagged spot, or blotch.
When you start thinking of tubes, though, they turn up everyhwere: from gigantic cannon, to impossible flying machines, to telescopes, pneumatic railways and delivery systems, test tubes, subways, pressurized health restorers, television screens, and so on.
I’m not sure where this idea came from–perhaps in the post on massive tubeless telescopes (here), reminding me of the most massive tubed telescope, the longest telescope with a tube, belonging to James Bradley, who produced a monster over 200′ long. Connecting the tubeless and tubed telescopes was the image that I had in mind; the hole following naturally from that. Anyway the Bradley tubed construction–antithetical to the DNA/carbon/membrane nanotubes–were enormous for their time, and as moveable tubes are still very impressive. Another massive telescope was constructed on speculation for the Paris Exposition of 1900 {the cross section of which is depicted below)–it was 187′ long, spectacularly made and exhiited, and could find not a single buyer. Positioning the scope of course would’ve been very problemtaic.
There are other, more massive and mobile tubes, like, say the smokestacks of the Titanic (which were 24×19 feet, with a fall of 150′ from the top of the smokestack’s sweep to the boilers)–these weren’t mobile in and of themselves, but they did move, if only for a short time (laterally), and then for a very short and cold time (vertically).
Massive, monster canons have existed for many years in idealized and theoretical, speculative worlds, like Tom Swift and his Monster Canon. In the history of early imaginary big gun tubes H.G. Wells’ Babel-like cannon (pictured below in a still from the movie Things to Come (1936), an adaptation his The Shape of Tings to Come (1931)) is fabulous–1500 feet tall, with I figure a 750′ base, it launched a 75′ tall capsule beyond the Earth’s
gravitational pull with a spectacular explosiveness that would’ve made its occupants into instant jelly. (Paul Drye points out that one of the biggest sci-fi guns comes to us via Arthur C. Clarke, who had his Lunar inhabitants fashion a gun by drilling into the Moon’s surface until they reached a depth where it would tap and “shoot” molten rock at attacking space ships. This is more of a hole than a tube, and as such probably ranks it as the biggest hole gun ever constructed, even in science fiction. In the same veinish vein is Robert Heinlein’s railguns, seen in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It has been suggested that E.E. Smith may have concocted gravitational weapons enabling planets and entire galaxies as wepaons, but I’m not sure about this, and they’re definitely not tubes.)
Just to round out the Solar System cannonry a bit, here’s an example of a gigantic tube coming from the fabulous Frank R. Paul for Stanley D. Bell’s “Martian Guns” found in the January 1932 issue of Wonder Stories. There’s really no way to determine how big the gun is except to say that it is probably “big”–there’s just nothing to place the thing in perspective, as the figures in the foreground, being Martian, don’t have a specific height. They could be 6′ tall, or 60′–perhaps they’re only 1/10 of an inch tale, and the projectile they’re firing to the earth is so devastatingly powerful that size doesn’t matter.
Back here on Earth and in the real world, the Kaiser Wilhelm gun (or “Paris Gun”, the Kaiser Wilhelm Geshutz) was
a long-barreled, light shelled monster: its 92′ long barrel (plus a 20′ extension) launched a 94kg shell about 130 km, reaching a maximum height of 40km (about 25 miles) high. For all of its mass (the gun weighed 256 tons without the railway cars) the shell that it fired didn’t weight much at all….though the shell did reach an extreme height. (Ironically, the gun was built for attacking the deepest of the deep bunkers of the fortresses along the Maginot Line; it was never needed for that, as the Maginot Line was simply left behind in the Nazi assault on France.) The British Ordnance BL 18 inch howitzer (below) was developedjust as WWI was enidng, but did not enter service until nearly two years after the war ended.
The Schwerer Gustav was a 1350 ton beast which fired a 14,000 pound shell (!) about 20 miles. A little later came the Nazi V-3 (the lesser known of the V-weapons), the Vergeltungsewaffe 3, a 130 metre (!) long, 150mm gun built alongthe side of a hill, launching a 140 kg shell. The Iraqi Big Babylon gun was sort of like this one, though never built–it was to have a 500′ barrel and would be supported by a hillside. Then there was the Nuclear Tube: the Atomic Annie (M65) cannon, which was another bruiser, being an enormous 85′ cannon that delivered the worst punch of all cannons, a nuclear warhead. The weapon was test-fired in 1953 at Frenchman Flat at the Nevada Test Site and delivered a 15kt explosive device to a target seven miles away. There were 20 of these made, but given their diffiult-to-deploy-and-keep-secret status, and the nature of the shells, and the development of more sophisticated weapons, the M65 was obsolete almost as qickly as it was introduced, but was removed from the frontline only in 1963.
I guess what people think of first though in regard to tubes in “The Tube” in London, though a more tubey tube was presented here in the pages of the Scientific American for the NewYork City subway:
Here’s yet another strange tube, this a tube-within-a-rectangle, an aerotheraphy device that was supposed to cure people of whatever they needed curing for, just like any other good quack device, though this may well have been the heaviest of them all. Cushioned, well-appointed, and with a hint of luxury, this burst of fresh air was inteneded to render diseases and other complaints harmless–only for a lot more money than electro-shock or beer cures or massive purgatives or bleedings or copper amulets or whatever else you can come up with. It does make a nice image, though:
The tube below may well have been the largest glass tube to hold the body of a dead person–and in this case, a dead child. It was design for a practice that was evidently not practiced–electroplating the dead. Someone thought it might make a good practice to deposit a one millimeter coating of copper on the skin of a cadaver, and published their success (and image) in the Scientific American for November, 1891. The practice didn’t catch on.
Then of course there are submerged and flying tubes; submarines have certainly become a long-established part of the technological landscape, and the flying tubes, not.
Still, the steam-driven helium-filled flying tube boat looks dignified and lovely, if impracticable.
There were proposals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for pneumatic railroads and pneumatic people movers (in one case in the 1930’s, for a plan to move individuals from New York to Philadelphia in chair-like objects in one of these tubes), but for all intents and purposes the closest that these plans came to fulfillment were pneumatic operations like thoe found in R.H. Macy in New York. It was in the massive department store where you could find miles of pneumatic vacuum tubing that connected department tellers to a main counting office, where little cylinders were filled with cash and receipts and sent along for accounting. The logical outocme of Macy’s tubular world for Terry Gilliam was seen in the director’s masterpiece dystopic flic, Brazil, where we see a world crowded with gargantuan and suffocating nothinness, filled with bazillions of miles of ductwork whose purpose is a mystery, making for a cold and disturbed world.
End part I of Making Tubes of out Holes–the History of Holes, Extended.
Notes
l. Edwin Abbott’s slender Flatland is perhaps one of the best books ever written on perception and dimensions, a beautifully insightful book that was quick and sharp, and in spite of all that was also a best-seller. Written in 1884 when Abbott was 46 (Abbott would live another 46 years and enjoy the book’s popular reception), it introduces the reader to a two dimensional world with a social structure in which the more sides of your object equals power and esteem. Thus the lowest class would be a triangle (three sides) while the highest (priestly) class would be mega-polygons whose shape would approach a circle. Abbott’s magistry comes in explaining to the three-dimensional reader what it was like to be in a two-dimensional world.
Right now, though, I’d like to look at the pre-birth of fractals in Benoit Mandelbrot’s precursor (1967) paper (and in a weird, probably not-correct way, scooping himself) to his more famous effort of 1975, in which he coins the term and fully describes “fractals”, showing the measurement of the coastlines behave like a fractal over a range of measurement scales.
This image comes from a collection here of First World War news service photographs, showing German prisoners being readied for transport home, and dated 20 November 1918. This group had evidently surrendered just before the armistice was signed, and was sent directly and instantly to a staging area for transport back to the Fatherland. The way that many newspapers obtained the war images that they published in their papers was via a semi-centralized pool of war images. The newspaper would request, say, a photo of German prisoners, and would contact one of these photographic agencies—in this particular case, it was the Central News Photo Service of 26-28 Beaver Street, NYC—and purchase the rights for republication, and then print it in the newspaper along with the story. In almost every case the photo would be accompanied by a caption mimeographed onto an attached piece of cheap paper, and in this case it reads: “Waiting to Return Home/a photo just received showing a batch of enemy troops who surrendered just before the signing of the armistice, joyously discussing the coming of peace and the opportunity of returning home to their families.”
I seriously doubt that the copy editor could read the minds of either the photographer or the troops in the photo. I would imagine that they were definitely joyous about going home ALIVE to their families, but when looking really closely at the picture the thing that seems to dominate the actions of the people is food. Or cigarettes. But mostly when looking hard at the faces in the photo, the men just look tired. 
