Author: JF Ptak

Books: Texts in the Sciences: Darwin, Newton, Vesalius, Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, etc.

Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Voyage of the
Beagle, 1845

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): On the Origin of
Species, 1859

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Descent of Man,
1871, excerpts

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Descent of
Man, 1871

Theory and Methods of Science

Bernardino
Telesio (1509–1588): from On the Nature of
Things According to Proper Principles, 1565

Francis
Bacon (1561-1626): from First Book of
Aphorisms

Francis
Bacon (1561-1626): Preface to
the Novum Organum [At Hanover]
Francis Bacon (1561-1626): The New
Atlantis, 1627

Francis
Bacon (1561-1626): The New
Atlantis, 1626

Francis
Bacon (1561-1626): Various
Texts

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On Not Mentioning the Jews in Nazi/Polish/Holocaust Literature: “Spring Held No Hope”, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 902

Maria
Mikorska’s Spring Held No Hope,
published in London
in June 1941 is a difficult, hard, emotional read, even in the genre of
Holocaust literature. It quickly paints
a documentary history of bestial behavior of the Nazis in Poland. I wonder though what happened to the
mentioning of the Jewish issue in all of this reportage of inhuman
transportation and treatment of humans, as the reference almost never
occurs.

Reading
though this 52-page pamphlet of terror and horror, I wondered what exactly
happened to the missing reportage of the hunting and killing of the Jews as a
group.. The period of 1939-1941 saw the beginning of the Endlösung der
Judenfrage¹ (“The Final
Solution of the Jewish Problem”) in which 90+% of the 3.5 million Polish Jews
alive in the Polish Second Republic were killed and exterminated, the primary
victims of the Nazi Holocaust. At this
point in the war the Nazis were removing Jews from their cities and
establishing regional ghettoes. Once the
Jews were collected in this manner it was easier for the administration of
their extermination.

Getting
back to Spring Held No Hope and the lack of identification of the Jews as a
persecuted group I turn to pp 24 and 25 (illustrated below and clickable).

The examples of inhuman transport and the
direct extermination of men, women and children by starvation and hypothermia
mention the cities Jarocin, Gdynia, Siedlice, Skierniewice, Lublin and
Otwock: all of which had large centers
of Jewish populations that were removed by the Germans directly after the
invasion and removed to ghettoes though this fact is not mentioned in this
pamphlet. Ostensibly the collection of Jews was not in an effort to seize
property (as the majority of the Jews in Poland at this time had little
wealth) but rather to supply labor (being a group with the potential for
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of humans capable of performing slave
labor). The Jews in Gdynia (for example)
were sent to Siedlice to establish a larger Ghetto immediately after the
invasion; by 1942 the tens of thousands of occupants were either shot and
killed or sent to Treblinka; 2,000 or so remained after this, though most of
them were also soon sent to Treblinka; those remaining were all executed when
the ghetto was completely liquidated on 14 April 1943.

I
am in no way saying that it the murder of Poles during the Nazi occupation was
limited to Jews—the 3.5 million Polish Jews represented 10% of the Polish
population; of the remaining 90%, or 32 million or so Gentile Poles, some 3
million were killed by the Nazis, or about 10% of that population.

These
are horrible stories told by Mikorska—but I’m bothered by the lack of the
recognition of the Jews as the major, featured target in all of this and wonder
if the author suffered an enormous sin of omission. This is far from being a singular event–even the important and highly significant Eisenhower report on the concentration camps of May 1945 does not signify the Jewish people as anything out of the ordinary–and may well be indicative of the general practice of dealing with the Jewish aspect of the Nazi exterminations.

Notes

1.
The name and practiced of the Final Solution was infamously adopted at the
Wannsee conference on 20 January 1942, liquidating the ghettoes and sending the
occupants to the six major concentration camps of Auschwitz, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka.

I’ve written elsewhere in this blog on the Holocaust; for more, search “Holocaust” in the Google blogsearch in the left column.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Militaria — Naming Things
Unintentional Absurdist Art: Flying Boats with Bucket Feet, 1745

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 901

This
treadmill-powered French pontoon dredge, printed around 1745, looks for all the
world as though it is floating in mid-air, propelling itself along with two
bucket-ended legs, elegantly and impossibly moving its miracle-y-balanced self
forward against all forms of reason and logic, a clunky 18^th century
non-transforming Transformer. The
profile actually and simply shows a dredge at work and just fails to show the water in which it
floats.

The
boat’s dredge is powered by four humans in two treadmills which would move the buckets
back and forth, scraping up the river silt and then emptying it into the shuttle
launch aft. Simple and ingenious—except when
taken out of context, where it begins to look like some advanced Age of Reason floating
boat which, although awkward-looking, is not without its charm.

Source: Charles Singer, History of Tecnology, volume IV,
pg. 634. Singer loftily notes that this machine
“is reminiscent of Goethe’s poem Der Zauberlehring
which inspired Paul Dukas’s well known symphonic poem L’apparenti sorcier” and which would be better known to most folks as
Mickey’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice gig in Fantasia.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Art — Art History — History of the Future — Industrial & Technological art — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Technology, History of
History of the Future: Space Cannon Moon Flights Yield Jelly People?(1936)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 899

The Babel-like tower pictured below is a still from the movie Things to Come (1936), an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Tings to Come (1931). (Wells’ himself wrote the screenplay a few years before the movie appeared.) The story is a history of the period from 1936 to 2054, including a devastating war that begins in December 1940 (complete with major air assault, poison gases and so on), followed by plague and destruction for another forty years, after which there is a confrontation between two classes of remaining humans, with big doses of New World Order, Technocracy, Fascism and glimmers of hope of science and technology saving the future. There’s a lot that happens in the story, but the part I’m most interested in comes towards the end of the film and depicts a space gun for launching a massive capsules to the Moon–in this case, a capsule containing two “starred-crossed lovers”.

We are told that the launching apparatus–the “gun”–is 1500 feet tall, which iterates out to a 750′ base and which also makes the capsule about 75′. That’s impossibly massive firepower. (Don’t forget that somebody had to construct the 1700′ tower next to the gun that lifted the capsule into position, for some reason lowering the thing down the barrel.)

In the history of big guns, this would be about the most massive ever constructed in the sci fi world so far as I can tell. 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 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 along the 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.

Getting back to the unfortunate Well’s space gun: this thing was supposed to fire a 75′ capsule which must’ve weighed in excess of 10,000 pounds (easy, what with supply and fuels and so on, plus the structural weight) straight up (!!) and somehow reach escape velocity of 11.2 km/s, piercing the exosphere some 400 miles high or thereabouts (or 1.5 orders of magnitude higher than the Paris Gun). I cannot intuitively imagine the tremendous explosion necessary to achieve this goal, although it could be figured out pretty easily. Back of the napkin figuring tells me that the speed of the capsule exiting the gun’s barrel would place the occupants in the vicinity of something like 450Gs–that’s more than ten times the lethal amount of force that a human can withstand. I’m not sure what happens to a person at 450Gs–I do know that it wouldn’t be pretty. Anyway, none of this part of the space travel section of the movie wasn’t pretty….except for the props, which I like, and which can be seen in the clip below.

Overall I think that this would make a lovely physics problem for discussion in a high school classroom.

Things to come: 10; 1936-2037

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Bad Ideas — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Technology, History of
The Invasion of America, 19?? (1935 Scenario for Invasions via Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 898

(This is a
continuation of the Invasion of America
series, started here.)

Even
before WWII, the American military and variously-aligned
think-tank subsidiaries had for years hypothesized U.S. invasion scenarios. For convenience’s sake, they were color-coded
so as to not confuse one invadee with another: for example, there were War Plan Citron (an invasion of Brazil); War Plan Emerald (intervention in Ireland); War Plan Green (war
with Mexico); War Plan Indigo (an
invasion of Iceland); War Plan Lemon (an invasion of Portugal); War Plan White: (plan
for dealing with civil disturbances cause by Communist insurgents), and many
others. (I cannot find the color-coded plan for the 20^th century
invasion of Canada,
but it did exist.)

Lesser
known are the U.S. military’s
preparation for the invasion of America.

This
two-page spread (all that I have of a longer article) appeared in Fortune
Magazine for September 1935. It was undoubtedly generated
by a number of causes, not the least of which was the rearming of Nazi Germany (referred
to in this article as a ‘miracle”), which could theoretically cause some amount
of concern in semi-fortress America. It was also an opportunity for Chief of Staff
General Douglas MacArthur to whip up a little hell in Congress for the federal
government to give the military some more money so that there was more to the “fortress”
part of America
than two oceans.

Basically
the plan seems to call for a standing, ready army of specialist forces that
were agile and highly trained, a large network, of anti-aircraft batteries and detection
areas, and of course a large buildup of the Army Air Force. All of this of course cost money, and almost
all o fit would’ve been directed towards MacArthur and his subordinates. (It is
interesting and odd to note that the Fortune article notes that three of the
top four major general assistants to MacArthur were Irish (“see the four big
shots…with three Irish names”).)

[Due
to difficulties in the size of this map I have to present it in three sections,
but I’m sure that the overall flavor will be maintained.]

The most prominent feature (besides the black
invasion routes) are the terribly antiquated (even for 1936?) depictions of
coastal defense canons. Perhaps this was
disingenuous to include them with such flair, what with the main point of the
article lending itself towards air invasion, but there they are, protecting the
American coastline from a ripping adventure from the sea.

But
as we can see the successful invasion routes are coming from odd places—from Alaska,
Canada, the Caribbean) against which the U.S. seemingly had no defense. This was especially true in the Pacific
Northwest (“here defense system is weak”) where America
was entirely susceptible to attack and invasion “from army basing in Alaska”. The rest of the west coast didn’t fair so
well, though the only other direct threat was from “25,000 able-bodied male
Japanese…Californians suppose they have secret arms and drill at night in dark
halls”.

The
southwestern and southern California areas
were relatively secure, except in the case of an enemy capturing Mexico; then, “an attack here would almost certainly
be launched, in conjunction with one against San Antonio”.
I guess there would be long intrigue, much preparation and enormous
effort to attack and secure Mexico,
and I’m assuming that the thinkers behind constructing this map assumed that the
U.S.
would be doing nothing during this prolonged period of time.

The
attack on America in the
Gulf would ostensibly come from Mexico
and “an enemy basing in the Caribbean”, with a central interest in Birmingham and Norfolk. But the main thrust coming to the U.S. from unnamed horribleness would be coming
through the St. Lawrence and points east in Canada, swooping down on Lake
Champlain, the Mohawk Valley, Troy, Buffalo and Detroit. I know that there were bigger industrial
concerns in these places in 1936 than there are now, but, well, my god there
would be better places to begin an attack on the U.S.
than from Montreal and Toronto.

In
all of this I see that the industrial northeast is left alone, save for a “feint”
attack to dislodge resources and attention away from the movement against the Virginia coast. There’s
the navy yard and industry and shipping and etc. there, but it would seem a
terrible waste to attack here rather than a much juicer and more northerly
series of prizes.

No
attacker is named in what I own of this article, and there is a very curious
absence of any threat coming from the already-warring Japan (save for
the Japanese super secret nighthawks in San Fran). The article does make a case—apart from the
map—that national defense was at a low ebb insofar as manpower and ordnance
were concerned. But it scoots around the
issue of the war of Japan
against China
and the vast militarization of the Nazis.
(Of course, this is Fortune magazine, and Krupp and Hoechst and other German firms, and Standard Oil, and the Bank for International Settlement, and Ford, and SKF, and etc. abetting
the Nazi war machine were doing some nice business in the U.S., so perhaps it
would’ve been best not to make Nazi money upset with some bad press.)

Taking
all sorts and manner of considerations into account, this is just simply a
miserable attempt to reckon what the future might bring to America in the
hands of unlabeled enemies—it is simply a rousing caroling of general fear of
attack from places unknown.

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Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Militaria
Nazi Propaganda: the British Threat to Germany, pre-War 1939

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 897

I’ve written twenty or so posts here about (mostly) graphical propaganda of World War II, and most of that coming from the Axis (and mainly Nazi) end. A popular theme among this limited exposure seems to be the Germany-surrounded meme: Germany under attack from all sides: massive attacks being directed by the British from air and sea,

airstrikes coming in from thousands of planes in Czechoslovakia, Poland moving on the ground and in the air to invade south-eastern Germany, retaliation mounting from the French, and on and on. And somehow when all of this is presented in cartographical form to the average reader, and when it is presented over and over again, the propaganda must take its toll.

Tonight’s installments come from the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig), and were printed just before and just after the start of the general hostilities of WWII (meaning the invasion of Poland, and not the actions against Austria or Czechoslovakia, and not the war in the east beng waged against China by Japan).The first comes in the 27 July 1939 issue–featuring a remembrance of WWI on the cover, showing a devastated field of battle with a spanking-new heavy dagger thrust into the heart of the field–and shows John Bull pulling strings of an advancing/attacking navy in the one hand while the other controls a firing network for cannons facing Germany based in its contiguous-bordered countries. (The image was created by the prodigious Richard Lipus and titled “Englishe Kriegspolitik”.)

The second piece was published just after the start of the war (21 September 1939) and attacks Neville Chamberlain (contrasting words and deeds) and his “treacherous” involvement with neutral countries.

Not particularly virulent, these maptoons undoubtedly helped to form a Nast-ian image in the commonplace psyche of the German people about the treacherousness of the Brits and of their dire situation of being surrounded by potent and threatening enemies.

Some of the other posts on this blog relating to WWII propaganda:

Maps
as Propaganda https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/maps-as-propaga.html

Maps
of the Polish “Corridor” https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/09/propaganda-in-maps-the-polish-corridor-1939.html

Maps
of Naval Disaster https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/05/jf-ptak-science-books-llc-post-624-the-admiralty-regrets-to-announce–was-for-years-the-standard-beginning-to-an-offici.html

Anti-Nazi
Propaganda https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/08/antinazi-propaganda.html

Nazi
Propaganda and the Threat From Czechoslovakia
https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/propaganda-maps.html

Humanitarian
propaganda for Allied families with family members who were POWs https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/09/humanitarian-pr.html

Nazi
Germany and Scaring the Will to War (Germany surrounded, again) https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/10/nazi-propaganda.html

Nazi-directed
scare tactics published in English https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/nazi-propagan-1.html

The
Luftwaffe and RAF present their (graphical) popular cases https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/09/graphical-and-a.html

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Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Militaria — Perception — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Bad Dirigibles and Balloons from Good Thinkers: Thaddeus Lowe, Konstantin Tsiolkowsky and Dr. Seuss

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 896

Tonight’s
inspiration comes from one of my daughter Tess’ bedtime stories, Dr. Seuss’ Oh, the Thinks you can Think—particularly
one of the fantastic illustrations, this one showing a swimming pool
balloon. I’ve seen some interesting
images of balloons and dirigibles taken as serious efforts that reminded me of
that double-page spread by the good Doctor.

In
July, 1931 Konstantin Zilkowsky’s sheet metal dirigible appeared in Modern Mechanics (this image from the
fabulous Modern Mechanix.com website, cropped), looking a lot like the mountain
and its imagined whale looked like to Herman Melville at his Arrowhead
home.

This may have been the Omega end
of bad ideas in the career of Zilkowsky, who is better known by the other
spelling of his name, Konstantin
Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1835), a Russian misanthrope and space pioneering
genius who wrote more than 500 works on rocketry and exploration including what
is arguably the first tech word ever done in the field (in 1903, The
Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices). Tsiolkovsky somehow lasted through purges
and Stalinist tirades, while few of his colleagues did—many mysteriously
disappeared, while others went to prison and disappeared there. (Stalin’s crude and insatiable blood lust,
perhaps the worst of the century, knew no bounds, not even to the scientists
who could conceivably hand him reigns of rocket/missile-propelled power.) Anyway, Tsiolkovsky’s dirigible was composed
of a collapsible metal so that the aircraft could form its own hangar when “docked”. I don’t know where to begin with this one…

The
second (among many other possibilities) is the ship-balloon of Thaddeus Lowe
(1832-1913) One of Lowe’s great contributions in the
history of ballooning was providing aerial reconnaissance via (panoramic)
photographs to the Union army on Confederate army positions—particularly the
Rebel positions at Richmond (1864) and Fredericksburg (1862). (He had a wide
span of professional interests and wound up living the high life in L.A. in a half-acre
home.) This 130-foot diameter monster
with a steam-ship escape pod (named The
City of New York and then renamed The
Great Western after the city couldn’t supply enough gas to get the thing
inflated) was intended to be a transatlantic traveler. Ready to try this fantastic adventure in
1860, ready to take charge, ready to begin a very problematic trip across the
Atlantic in a balloon, Lowe, seemingly ready, had his balloon ripped apart
while waiting for launching by a chance and not-horrible wind. Lucky for Lowe and the Union Army, this didn’t
happen over the ocean somewhere out of reach, and the North’s important info-gatherer
did not sink like a stone in the cold dark sea.
(I’m very cynical that the 100-foot-long, bulbously heavy steam-powered “life
boat” would’ve landed right-side-up and softly enough to have been of any use
save for providing some floaty bits that survivors from the balloon could’ve
clung to for a while before being consumed by King Neptune.

I’d vote for Dr. Seuss’ work as the most logical.

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Aviation & flight — Bad Ideas — Technology, History of
Out-of-Place Horses: Underwater Horses, 1919

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 895

Earlier
in this blog I’ve written about underground horses

and
horses in the air (Towards a History of Horses in Flight in the 19^th
Century),

and
now to horses underwater. Or sort of.
This image from The Illustrated London News (5 April 1919) presents a
cross-section of a proposed Hudson River tunnel connecting the Jersey
City and New York City. (At the time, Jersey City was much more important and
productive, much mire alive than it is today.) Proposals for tunnels have been
bobbing around for quite some time, including this one that appears in the
Scientific America for 1 November 1890¹.
The first vehicular traffic tunnel under the Hudson River—the Holland
Tunnel, connecting Hoboken and downtown Manhattan—would be completed in 1927; the Lincoln,
connecting midtown to Weehawken,
NJ, came next.in1937.(The toll
for the Lincoln in 1937 was 50 cents, or equal to $7.80 in 2009 CPI-adjusted
dollars.)

By that time there were no allowances for “slow horse-drawn trucks” that were shown in the 1919 cross section.

Notes:

1.”Progress
of the Great Railway Tunnels under the Hudson River between New
York and Jersey City.”
Scientific American, 1 Nov 1890

And just for good measure, here’s another bit: this time showing a horse at work in a tunnel under the Hudson:

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Bad Ideas — Technology, History of
Technology as Language: the Kindle & Edison’s Phonograph

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 894

My wise friend Jeff Donlan wrote me the other day about
being momentarily stopped in his tracks on hearing a friend saying that they
were reading their (news)paper on a kindle. Being a bookman and a librarian, his
mind’s eyebrows were raised at the irony of the digital “paper”, and then
pressed on. Kindle may well be on its
way to transforming our concept of the “paper” part of “newspaper” and paper
–printed books in general, and again may be the biggest leap in the
transformation of the distribution of knowledge since the beginnings of the
mass popularization of the internet. I wonder if kindle-esque innovations will
put and keep the word “paper” in quotation marks (or in a Maris-like asterisk*)
and place paper-based info distribution into the antiquarian’s domain. Seems that this is the natural order, a steady progression,
to make communication among our kind simpler—and if not more simple, then
providing more data with greater ease than previously imagined. And I’m not talking here about discussing some
sort of massive abecedary, working from Ugaritic proto-Canannite pre-Phoenician
pre-Greek- alphabet and so on; just an outline of the major deals: moving from spoken word like Thucydides
oceanic memorization and recitation of the Greek cultural cornerstones of the Iliad and Odyssey) to dramatic traditions to written stories to Medieval
copyists to woodblock printing to movable type¹ to, well, what, the
internet? And then to kindle-like
machines?

But before the modern kindle there was perhaps a kindle-like
precursor that snakes its way in history to (at least) the very capable hands
of Thomas Edison, who in a furious few years in the mid 1870’s²invented the
light bulb and the phonograph³ (the later coming as a direct byproduct on work
done on the telephone and telegraph).. He celebrates his phonograph in the North American Review (May 1878)⁴ and
then lists what he saw as the readymade faits
acomplis of the phonograph, the first of which was weirdly/spectacularly
worded: “1. The captivity of all manner
of sound-waves heretofore designated as fugitive, and their permanent
retention.” Do you hear a soundtrack
with that description? I did. He proceeded with less fanfare: “2. Their
reproduction with all their original characteristics at will, without the
presence or consent of the original source, and after the lapse of any period
of time. 3. The transmission of such captive sounds through the ordinary channels of
commercial intercourse and trade in material form, for purposes of communication
or as merchantable goods. 4. Indefinite multiplication and preservation of
such sounds, without regard to the existence or non-existence of the original source. 5. The
captivation of sounds, with or without the knowledge or consent of the source
of their origin.”

Edison then goes on to list what he saw as distinct
“possibilities” for the use of the phonograph in the not-too-distant future.
There are ten major prospects, the “bookish” aspect and the first major assault
on the way we read is listed fourth (though he wasn’t necessarily weighting his
list in any way). Some of the others in
this list (all of which cam to fruition) include: 1.Dictation and letter writing—using the phonograph to
record letters and correspondence, which was baldly aimed at the business and
corporate trade as the machine was relatively difficult to operate and
expensive. 2 Phonographic
“books”. I noticed that that Edison did not
change the word “book” in any way, even though the book is no longer there with
the application of the phonograph, just the read and spoken words. “Books may be read by the charitably-inclined
professional reader, or by such readers especially employed for that purpose,
and the record of such book used in the asylums of the blind, hospitals, the
sick-chamber, or even with great profit and amusement by the lady or gentleman
whose eyes and hands may be otherwise employed; or, again, because of the
greater enjoyment to be had from a book when read by an elocutionist than when
read by the average reader.” 3. Family records. “For the purpose of preserving the sayings,
the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family [emphasis
mine] as of great men the phonograph will unquestionably outrank the
photograph.”4. Toys: “A doll which
may speak, sing, cry, or laugh, may be safely promised our children for the
Christmas holidays ensuing. Every species of animal or mechanical toy such as
locomotives, etc. may be supplied with their natural and characteristic
sounds.”

Edison
continued, writing on the phonograph’s application for the study of elocution,
speaking clocks, language preservation (as in documentation of the proper way
of speaking a certain language, something that would’ve come in handy in the
spike of disappearing languages at the end of the 19^th century),
telephone recorders and pedagogical lessons.

But
this is all a little far afield from the kindle aspect. Is
the development of things like the kindle another step in the metaphorical
development of a technological alphabet?
Like developing an alphabet for a language, where there are a finite
numbers of symbols that elegantly possess the capacity to transmit all of the
words of a spoken language, is there a corollary for something that makes
systemic sense for the technological transmission of knowledge? I guess the
question would be whether the development of the kindle (and so on) provides
another step towards the completeness of what now stands as a chaotic
environment of information and knowledge distribution?=I
don’t think that there is yet a driving, poetic sense to these new
technologies. The new media provide the means to information but not
necessarily the way to it. They also
don’t lend themselves to memorization, which in the old semi-mnemonic days was
a way to not only record info but also to help understand it by enforcing
prolonged exposure and thought. With as
much data that is daily available, perhaps new information is simply filling
memory holes on the vast hole-ridden plane that is the fabric of the new way of
gathering information. I have little
doubt that in the next revolutionary step in this whole process will be more
knowledge-based than suffering under the weight of primitive
search-engine-based data retrieval of today.
I’d say that once the alphabet of technology is more complete, and that
the issues of search, organization, storage and retrieval makes more sense,
that it may well then leave paper behind.
And perhaps after the power and elegance of having a knowledge system
like this that the next giant step would be not having the devices simply with
us, but in us.

Notes

1. It is interesting to note that among the first items
printed on movable type presses were
packs of tarot cards and religious indulgences (get-out-of-hell cards).

2. For an annotated chronology of some of Edison’s
career see HERE.

3.Edison presented his invention at the offices of the Scientific
American in New York City, the magazine reporting the event in
its 22 December 1877 issue:
“Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little
machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine inquired as to our
health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very
well, and bid us a cordial good night.” Edison
applied for his patent for the highly original invention on 24 December,
receiving it on 19 February 1878 (patent # 200,521). He would soon lose
interest in this invention and move onto other big things (inventing, for
example, the biopolar dynamo in the next year); it would be Emile Berliner
(1851-1929, and who invented the microphone in this same year) to improve
the phonograph and make it more affordable and accessible and increase its
utility immeasurably. 1877 also saw the publication of Rayleigh’s superb Theory of Sound and Boltzmann’s
revision of the second law.

4. Source here.

Of further interest:

For general browsing in 19^th century journals see
the invaluable Library of Congress contribution

Rutgers houses the Edison papers here.

“Clocks Which Will Talk: The Wonderful Possibilities of
Edison’s Invention.” New
York Sun (April 28, 1878). TAEM
25: 173-174.

“The Phonograph and Its Future.” Scientific
American Supplement 124 (May 18, 1878): 1973. TAEM 25: 269.

“The Phonograph and Its Future.” North
American Review 126 (May-June 1878): 527-536. Reprinted widely. TAEM
25: 198-199.

“To the Editor.” New York Tribune (June 8,
1878): 5.

“The Phonograph and Its Future.” Telegraphic
Journal 6 (June 15, 1878): 250. TAEM 25: 265.

“To the Editor.” New York Tribune (June 27,
1878): 5. Reprinted in Engineering [see below]. Not selected.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Perception — Perspective — Technology, History of
A History of Dots, Periods & Points, Part I: Descartes and a Year-Ending Post

I posted this at the end of last year, the end of my first year of blogging–I quite like it. A nice way to end the year. Again. On dots.

To

In closing out my first year of blogging, I’d like to take an incidental look at one of our language’s most important fragments. Like Mr. Eliot’s observations of Baudelaire being a fragmentary Dante, and like the brilliantly arranged frammenti of Piranesi, the great bits of our communication processes owe a breathy thanks to the lowly period. A dot. A point. It separates to provide analysis and coherent recognition of thought.

A simple dot. (.) But dots are as little or as big as you need: there’s “Little Dot” (the cartoon character of Harvey Comics, created 1947, who was fascinated bylines and dots and dashes), “Admiral Dot”, polka dots, Mama Dots. Dots get considerably ratcheted up in quantum dots, and then expanded beyond that with the idea of the dot as an abbreviation for the multiplication sign, both of which increase things rather than bringing them to an end, a conclusion. The dot used after a musical note delineates that there is an increase in time by half, which would be an interesting notation to adopt in literature, if we were somehow able to magnify and increase that which would normally have been ended by the same notation.

Dots have formed the background to some of the most significant scientific illustrations of all time, like these two images, the first of which Descartes’ illustration of the decomposition of the rainbow, found in his Dioptrics, a fabulously important illustration. The second is from Descartes’ Principia Philosophiae (1684) which display his theory of vortices, accommodating an idea of physics eliminating atoms and vacuums and joining matter and space, matter being constantly deflected from moving in a straight line, moving in vortices. Then of course there’s the fantastically appreciated advancement of Samuel Morse’s telegraphic instrument and his abbreviated transmitting alphabet (his “code”), which fascilitated the distribution of information in the 1840’s in the same sort of way that the internet increased the flow and ease of data in the 1990’s. (Actually that’s only half correct for Morse, as his was a system of dots and dashes.)

Things get more interesting if we expand the idea of the “dot” to a “point”, as just about everything we have discussed in math for thousands of years has been based upon the idea of a “point in space”, forming the bits of the coat hanger on which the whole fabric of the heavens has been hung. Going the other way, there’s the decimal point, which brings us to negative powers of ten, into smaller and smaller worlds, to the incomprehensibly small, showing that “nothing” probably doesn’t exist. (We’ll leave the idea of “spot” alone, tonight.)

That’s quite a bit of expansion from a word that starts out life in Middle English as the definer of the head of a boil.

But this year will end in about 50 minutes from now, and I wll be able to put the final keystroke to the final sentence to my final post of the year, and put it all to sleep. And the year will end, at 11:59:59, precisely. On the dot.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

History of Dots