Author: JF Ptak

Weird Questions and Weirder Answers Department: Curing Insanity

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Dr. C. Sterling Cooly wrote an incredibly-titled pamphlet of slim means called Should Insanity be Cured? How could anyone proceed further than this? Dr. Cooley wasn’t a eugenic apologist, nor was he an accountant for a life insurance firm—he was advocating a drugless cure for all different sorts of “insanity”, which was a term he doesn’t really stop to identify and classify, which of course is deeply problematic.

Or it is so until you hear how one can treat the insane via his new drugless method: chiropractic. I didn’t see that one coming. “An insane mind is a sick brain, a sick body is an insane body” writes Dr. Cooley with leading confidence, claiming that chiropractic can release “the power within…marvels of healing are performed not only in mental cases but in virtually ALL forms of disease”. That’s a lot to live up to in theory, let alone in practice.

Dr. Cooley was evidently a deeply important founder father of modern chiropractic, with a 50 year career in the area (1908-1957), and who was also very prolific–this is one work that he probably should’ve edited out of the publishing phase.

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Outsider Logic
Welsh Mining Boys and Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier”

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I came across this pamphlet this morning and it reminded
immediately of George Orwell’s description of Northern
England mining life in his work The Road to Wigan Pier. Not that the (1946) pamphlet wasn’t arresting
on its own—particularly the “boys” part, which actually doesn’t identify an age
more than a period of time (“the time for leaving school”). The pamphlet makes a good, strong recruiting

effort for younger blood in one of the most demanding harsh-environment jobs on
the globe–which is a tough thing to do, as these kids would be married to
short handled shovels, moving earth and coal deep underground in a foul-air
enclosure if they signed on.

“There is a hint of mystery about a colliery” the pamphlet
states, but doesn’t explain, though several of the photos of working miners
must certainly have slapped a bit of reality into the mind of the reader. Being a miner was bitter-tough, but if this
is what your work landscape was composed of, and this is what your father did,
I guess that this is the life you got used to, familiar with, as time wore down
mining’s “mysterious” edges.

Miners performed amazing tasks of physical endurance and
mental acuity in a tediously difficult and unhealthy endlessly-challenging surrounding. Deep underground.

It was in The Road to Wigan Pier that Orwell may have
reached his highest heights of social insight and reporting—particularly in
bringing out the conditions of the working poor and the psychology, morality
and neurosis of unemployment.. But it is
his description of the miner’s environment that stays in my head. Orwell observes that the 7.5 hour shift
miners would only being their workday once they had arrived at their particular
station—and as Orwell beautifully points out, miners had to “travel” to their
work zone once they arrived in the mine.
Some of these commutes were 90 minutes or more, each way—most were
moving at least a half-hour before getting to
the point where their day would being.
It was a crouching, spine-slashing, knee-crunching scramble through
dark, sharp areas not four feet high, interrupted by crawling through smaller
spaces…and always with your head up so that you could see where you were
going. It was a whole new set of muscles
that you had to develop for this travel…and then, after that, then you went to
work.

As Orwell writes:

“You do not notice the effect of this till you have gone a
few hundred yards. You start off, stooping slightly, down the dim-lit gallery,
eight or ten feet wide and about five high, with the walls built up with slabs
of shale, like the stone walls in Derbyshire. Every yard or two there are
wooden props holding up the beams and girders; some of the girders have buckled
into fantastic curves under which you have to duck. Usually it is bad going
underfoot—thick dust or jagged chunks of shale, and in some mines where there
is water it is as mucky as a farm-yard….

A page later:

“At the start to walk stooping is rather a joke, but it is a
joke that soon wears off. I am handicapped by being exceptionally tall, but
when the roof falls to four feet or less it is a tough job for anybody except a
dwarf or a child. You not only have to bend double, you have also got to keep
your head up all the while so as to see the beams and girders and dodge them
when they come. You have, therefore, a constant crick in the neck, but this is
nothing to the pain in your knees and thighs. After half a mile it becomes (I
am not exaggerating) an unbearable agony. You begin to wonder whether you will
ever get to the end—still more, how on earth you are going to get back. Your
pace grows slower and slower. You come to a stretch of a couple of hundred
yards where it is all exceptionally low and you have to work yourself along in
a squatting position. Then suddenly the roof opens out to a mysterious
height—scene of and old fall of rock, probably—and for twenty whole yards you
can stand upright. The relief is overwhelming. But after this there is another
low stretch of a hundred yards and then a succession of beams which you have to
crawl under. You go down on all fours; even this is a relief after the
squatting business. But when you come to the end of the beams and try to get up
again, you find that your knees have temporarily struck work and refuse to lift
you. You call a halt, ignominiously, and say that you would like to rest for a
minute or two. Your guide (a miner) is sympathetic. He knows that your muscles
are not the same as his. ‘Only another four hundred yards,’ he says encouragingly;
you feel that he might as well say another four hundred miles. But finally you
do somehow creep as far as the coal face. You have gone a mile and taken the
best part of an hour; a miner would do it in not much more than twenty minutes.
Having got there, you have to sprawl in the coal dust and get your strength
back for several minutes before you can even watch the work in progress with
any kind of intelligence.

“Coming back is worse than going, not only because you are
already tired out but because the journey back to the shaft is slightly uphill.
You get through the low places at the speed of a tortoise, and you have no
shame now about calling a halt when your knees give way. Even the lamp you are
carrying becomes a nuisance and probably when you stumble you drop it;
whereupon, if it is a Davy lamp, it goes out. Ducking the beams becomes more
and more of an effort, and sometimes you forget to duck. You try walking head
down as the miners do, and then you bang your backbone. Even the miners bang their backbones fairly often. This is the reason
why in very hot mines, where it is necessary to go about half naked, most of
the miners have what they call ‘buttons down the back’—that is, a permanent
scab on each vertebra. When the track is down hill the miners sometimes fit
their clogs, which are hollow under-neath, on to the trolley rails and slide
down. In mines where the ‘travelling’ is very bad all the miners carry sticks
about two and a half feet long, hollowed out below the handle. In normal places
you keep your hand on top of the stick and in the low places you slide your
hand down into the hollow. These sticks are a great help, and the wooden
crash-helmets—a comparatively recent invention— are a godsend. They look like a
French or Italian steel helmet, but they are made of some kind of pith and very
light, and so strong, that you can take a violent blow on the head without
feeling it. When finally you get back to the surface you have been perhaps
three hours underground and travelled two miles, and you, are more exhausted
than you would be by a twenty-five-mile walk above ground. For a week
afterwards your thighs are so stiff that coming downstairs is quite a difficult
feat; you have to work your way down in a peculiar sidelong manner, without
bending the knees. Your miner friends notice the stiffness of your walk and
chaff you about it. (‘How’d ta like to work down pit, eh?’ etc.) Yet even a
miner who has been long away front work—from illness, for instance—when he
comes back to the pit, suffers badly for the first few days.

And the first paragraph of chapter 3:

“When the miner comes up from the pit his face is so pale
that it is noticeable even through the mask of coal dust. This is due to the
foul air that he has been breathing, and will wear off presently. To a
Southerner, new to the mining districts, the spectacle of a shift of several
hundred miners streaming out of the pit is strange and slightly sinister. The
exhausted faces, with the grime clinging in all the hollows, have a fierce,
wild look. At other times, when their faces are clean, there is not much to
distinguish them from the rest of the population. They have a very upright
square-shouldered walk, a reaction from the constant bending underground, but
most of them are shortish men and their thick ill-fitting clothes hide the
splendour of their bodies. The most definitely distinctive thing about them is
the blue scars on their noses. Every miner has blue scars on his nose and
forehead, and will carry them to his death. The coal dust of which the air
underground is full enters every cut, and then the skin grows over it and forms
a blue stain like tattooing, which in fact it is. Some of the older men have
their foreheads veined like Roquefort cheeses from this cause.”

Now THAT is some good observation and reporting. Orwell did a spectacular job in relating the
viciously difficult jobs done by these thousands of outstanding men.

Notes for Reading on Orwell

Crick, Bernard.. George Orwell: a life. London : Secker and Warburg, 1981.

Davison, Peter. George Orwell: a literary life. London: Macmillan, 1996.

Pearce, Robert. Revisiting Orwell’s Wigan Pier. History 82: 267 pp. 410-424

Rodden, John.. The politics of literary reputation: the making and claiming

of ‘St. George’ Orwell. New York/Oxford , 1989.

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Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
History of Vacations; The Great Depression and Cowboy Chaps, 1934

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The Depression didn’t stop professional theorists from working
on the issue of what people should do with what was seen as the impending
explosion of leisure time. Arthur Pack (The
Challenge of Leisure, 1934) for example wondered about the impact of free-ish
time and the implementation of “constructive leisure”. Walter Lippmann worried
about the impact of “commercialized pleasures” rather than those that were
creative and involving an idea. Still,
in 1934, the ideas of leisure and pleasure as institutions were a distant,
deeply fuzzy notion to most Americans.

In 1935 the Depression in the U.S.(which started with the
October Crash of 1929) had bottomed out, the worst of it all behind us (except
for the recession of 1937). Industrial
production was coming back (it had fallen about 45% by 1932), home building was
making a rebound (coming around from an 80% drop in 1932 and after 274,000
people had been evicted in 1933), the bank failures had stabilized (having
reached about a 40% failure rate in 1933), and the unemployment rate had “fallen”
to 20% (following a 3% rate in 1929 and a 25% high in 1934). In 1932 the corporate profit rate had dropped
90% as had the value of the stock market, industrial production was off by about
half, immigration had fallen to one-tenth of its 1929 figures, and over two
million people were roaming around the country, forced from farms or homes,
seeking destiny in trucks loaded with all of their possessions, walking, or
riding the rails.

But that doesn’t mean that the other segments of the
American economy, those happy and personally unaffected in the Depression,
couldn’t remain so: there was money and
money to be spent, and spent well in the dwindling power of the mid 1930’s
dollar, the purchasing power of the wealthy growing as the economy declined.

Which brings us to this pamphlet for Flaming-Arrow dude
ranch and the kids outfitted in the high, big-chaps fashion of thin-lipped,
vocabularily-challenged cowboy stars of the 30’s matinee. But by Neptune’s
soggy trousers, the kid on the front cover just looks so wrong—historical placement
and societal understanding aside. Kids were
sent to Flaming-Arrow (“for the discriminating family”) near Bozeman to spend the
summer in a “semi-military” fashion, comforted in fine cabins with first-class appointments,
all for about $395 for eight weeks. That
figure would have been out of reach for a great majority of Americans (the average
income at this point for a family having fallen to about $1500 a year), costing
about a quarter of all family yearly money.

I’m not so sure why this cover is so disturbing to me—maybe it
is just something so simple as the war between the enjoyed leisure time of people
with money and the enforced unpleasant leisure time of the unemployed and unmonied.

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Title Page Art, Beautiful
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Adventure in Aeronautics, 1911

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The Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was one of the
20^th century’s most gifted and influential philosopher-logicians,
though he started his advanced educational career in an aeronautics program at Manchester, in England. And by “though” I mean a very soft “though”,
as the engineering students educated in Germany were commanded to have a
wide intellectual calling, including heavy backgrounds in mathematics and
physics. He came to Manchester
to pursue a career as aeronaut and engineer, which is a little odd because following its initial
great exploits in flight in the mind-19^th century, England certainly was not a hotbed
of activity for flight in the first (“flight”) decade of the 20^th century. Be that as it may, he went to Manchester, pushed by the
great influences in the work of Ludwig Boltzmann and Heinrich Hertz. He also received nourishment for his interest in mathematics, leading to a deeper pursuit in the foundations of mathematics, all of which fueled his developing study away from aeronautics and engineering.

And it was here at Manchester
that Wittgenstein patented his innovative approach to propulsion—a sort of powered series of ejectors that were attached to the ends of the blades
of a propeller. The image that accompanies
the patent application is here, above, and entitled “Improvements in Propellers
Applicable for Aerial Machines”, dated 9 September 1911. This was admittedly an early period in the
development of aviation—especially in England—and although an interesting
product it was not very practicable, though a design similar did appear on helicopter rotors in the 1950’s.

It was not so practicable that Wittgenstein pursue a career
as an aeronaut—within a year of the
publication of his patent, he was on his way to Cambridge to join Bertrand Russell
(who had just published the20th century’s most difficult-to-read work in logic
in the Principia Mathematica) and
begin his work in philosophy.

It is fitting in a way that Wittgenstein had this
background, as he described his philosophy of language in terms of projective geometry...

Notes:

1) Legend for the patent image: Fig. 1
is the gaseous or vaporized fuel inlet; a1 is the air inlet. Fig. 2 and Fig. 4 are alternative methods of fuel flow to the combustion
chamber C. In Fig. 2 fuel is mixed with the air just after both emerge from
the hub.

2) I’ve read that Wittgenstein was very deeply influenced by the following passage from Hertz’ Principles of Mechanics: “When these painful contradictions are removed, the
question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our
minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions” If I squint a little I can see the seeds of the Tractatus in there.

3) For a real treatment of this invention of Wittgenstein’s see the article at the Royal Society.

4) Also see Ian Lemco’s Wittgenstein’s Aeronautical Experiments

5) “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me
finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through
them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder,
after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions;
then he sees the world rightly.”–Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, 6.54

6) See Klagge’s online biography and philosophical history of Wittgenstein

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mathematics, logic
RAND Report on Post-ICBM Weaponry: the “Non-Violent” War, 1957

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The
RAND Corporation (Research And Development) is a think tank
originally formed in 1946 by the US Army Air Force as part of a contract to the
Douglas Aircraft Company. After 1948
RAND Corp was funded by a number of different sources, private and
governmental, and left the sphere of being a direct arm of the U.S. military. (Maybe.) It still did enormous
amounts of work on behalf of the military, and seems to have
been their chief theoreticians during
this period. It was also the time that
the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was formulated at , partially under the direction of we’ll-see-him-again-down-the-road
Robert McNamara. And of course much
else.

This
publication is an internal RAND document, not
meant for the eyes of the outside world, at least in 1957. I own a number of these reports, and I must
say that this one is odd—it is rather flippant, sometimes oddly and darkly
(dare I say it?) funny. It is also short
(four pages) and gets to the very meaty part of the issue immediately. The author(s) assume that the US and the USSR
will have achieved a point of stasis such that it would make absolutely no
sense for either actor to actually employ their arsenal (and excluding “the
possibility of the button pusher ‘flipping his lid’ “. The paper attempts then (“let’s jump right in
and assume we find ourselves in this stalemated period”) to envision the next
kind of war in which the ICBM would not be an active factor. “We therefore
postulate here that the kind of war we will be engaged in…in the period of
nuclear stalemate of the non-violent war, the opening phase of which has been
called the cold war.”

The tools of war in this non-violent war, the report
speculates, included: (1) the State Department as a Weapon, issuing “an
aggressive, imaginative foreign policy”. (2) Economic Weapons, which
interestingly included “inflate USSR economy by surreptitiously flooding the country with undetectable counterfeit
currency”. (I remember that the late
Sen. John Moynihan suggested in the first Iraq
war, televise don the floor of the U.S. Senate in the final debate on
engagement, that we do this exact thing in Iraq…especially
since the Iraqi dinar was being printed in London.) The third section was “Psychological
Weapons”, and was very tongue-in-cheek short (?), suggesting “ideas a la
Hitchcock, e.g., turn Stalin [dead in 1953] over in his grave some dark night,
etc.” I’m not sure what to make of that, especially as the paper finishes on
this line: “This list is open for additions and suggestion.” Indeed. Out of all of the internal reports that I’ve read from RAND this is the only one that approached its topic with such dark familiarity and removed humor.

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons — Militaria
Preserving the Dead in a Formaldehyde Mist, 1899

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Gustave de Rechter, the author of this pamphlet (The Application of a New System for the Preservation of Dead Bodies, Grammont, Belgium, 1899) had, as you might guess, a very specific reason for keeping the dead from being entirely, decomposedly, dead. As the director of the School of Criminology and of Scientific Police of Belgium, Dr. de Rechter tried to find a way of preservation of bodies for forensic and legal purposes.

He followed in the footsteps of people like Alphonse Bertillon (France) and Hans Gross (Austria) in helping to establish a scientific basis for criminology in the late 19^th century. In his case, the preservation of the dead would allow the bodies (of the murdered or suspiciously departed) to be re-examined at a much later date (at least months down the road) should the defense in a murder case challenge the original findings of the medical examiner.

As de Rechter points out, this was particularly true in the case of poisoning, where in 1899 the evidence would be all but dissipated
from the body following even a week of death—he maintains that his new method of preservation (via an incubated spray of formic aldehyde, or formaldehyde) would enable further inspection even months after death. De Rechter manages to forestall the inevitable, the great crumbling that awaits everything, everyone, at some point, the “distinguished thing” of Henry James’ (last words), to return everything to the earth, to what Larry McMurtry (in Lonesome Dove) refers to as “nothing but a boneyard”.

(The images here are from the pamphlet, with de Rechter showing the effects of his nasty spray on corpses and what they looked like after some months sleeping in their formaldehyde cocoons.)

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Medicine, History of
A Big Sea of Planes: Quantitative Display of World War II Bombers

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(See also the new post on picturing massive numbers here.)

I’ve written four or five posts on glorious quantitative visual displays of massive amounts of WWII bombers, most of which I’ve gathered together below. This subject came up today when I found another of these images in a small hand-out broadside published by the National Savings Committee of Great Britain, urging people to save money and be thrifty, keeping money in the banks, in an effort to control prices and have money available to the government for war production. The legend states: “For it is by the measure of our self-denial that we can prove worthy debtors to our airmen; and by our Savings that we can help to give them wings for victory”. The point is driven home by a now-familiar representation of hundreds of bombers rising from the horizon–a remarkable vision, especially if you tried to visualize the real thing.

Here are a few other similar images:

(A) This widely circulated and published photo appeared in 1942 (particularly in LIFE Magazine in 17 September 1942 and the Illustrated London News in the next month), and showed 4,500 aircraft models suspended from the ceiling of Chicago’s Union Station It is the result of an inspiration derived from President Franklin Roosevelt’s assertion that America would produce 185,000 war-focused aircraft in 1942 and 1943.

The planes in this photo were hanging 60-feet above the floor of the station, with wing spans between one foot and four feet (for the bombers). It was a fantastic, blustery, iconic effort to show what it meant to look at 4500 planes—and these paled in comparison to a drawing (which I unfortunately do not have) that appeared in the Illustrated London News on 21 February 1941, showing the entire production fleet of 185,000 aircraft—a column of planes one mile wide and 117 miles long.

Using this photo then to interpolate that full production figure of 185k, you’d have to piece 48 of these photos together to show full production, or a version of this photo that was 8 inches wide and 32 feet long. (The second image of Union Station and the planes is by FSA photographer Jack Delano.)

(B) This arresting cover image for The Illustrated London News of 21 February 1942 illustrates the (new) American production program for planes and tanks for 1942 and 1943 (It reminds me too of an earlier post I did with a similar cover for LIFE magazine here.) The caption reads: “185,000 planes form a mile-wide blanket of bombers under a blanket of fighters stretching 117 miles” which is actually a double blanket of planes–if they were thinned out to form one layer it would stretch one mile wide from Washington D.C. to New York City, which is quite an unimaginable ribbon.

The reality of the situation was greater than this: by 1945 over 300,000 planes were produced, 275,000 of them after Pearl Harbor. And this from a combined aviation industry which before 1939 had produced fewer than 6,000 planes a year. The war effort increased this by orders of magnitude, and by war’s end there were 81 production facilities with a combined area of 175 million feet, all bumped up within four years. I’ve never read about it, but I have no doubt that one of the key ingredients to this sort of hyper-successful undertaking was organization–the oversight and control for this process must’ve been fast and decisive, with little room for mid-level anything. I think that this is the only way the whole thing could’ve worked so well.

(C) This tremendous display is half of a double-page spread that appeared in The Illustrated London News for 7 September 1940. It was meant to bolster the civilian population of Britain during the time of the German attacks, shoping that “Over one thousand Nazi aircraft (were) brought down over Great Britain in …20 Days…” The artwork, drawn by Bryan de Grineau, actually depicts 1000 planes, and accurately depicted ones at that. What the graphic doesn’t tally though are the airmen losses, which would be considerably more thanb the 1000 aircraft: for example, of the aircraft involved in the sustain air-invasion of England, the Dornier 215’s had a crew of four, Dornier 17’s three, Heinkel 111’s four, Messerschmitt 110’s two, and Junkers 88’s three. Thus there were thousands more airmen lost, a commodity that the Nazis could little afford.

(This continues a thread on The Battle of Britain and also a post on “What 185,000 Planes Looks Like”).
The results of the battle (and if you take a look at this earlier post for the full narrative), in terms of aircraft and humans,
were, for England: 1,023 fighters: 376 bombers, 148 coastal command aircraft for a total of 1,547 aircraft and 544 pilots and aircrew killed. There were also 27,450
civilians killed and 32,138 wounded. The Germans lost 873 fighters and 1,014
bombers for a total of 1,887 aircraft and 2,500 pilots

I find this visual display of quantitative data beautiful and compelling–and overwhelming in its way.

The Battle of Britain was fought primarily from 10 July to 31 October 1940, so by the time this image was published the Brits had been able to turn the tide of Hitler’s plan. (The air strikes wouldn’t really end until the Nazis turned their attention to the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in May 1941.) And that plan, named Luftschlacht um England, was to overtake and destroy the British capacity in the air, for as long as the English had command of the airspace there would be no way that the Nazis could force an invasion by land/sea (at least in the minds of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht and Hitler). And so the Nazis failed–it was their first major defeat, and, especially, with the turning of attention east, it was a pivotal point of the war.

(D) This last image is a “Not a Display of Toys”, shows only one section of a large airfield “in Europe” (actually in U.S.-administered Munich). There’s about 300 B-17’s (e?) parked wingtip to wingtip, off duty now from the fight in Europe, but (as the caption says) prepared for a fight in Japan. I don’t think anyone in high command had any doubt that these planes had seen their last action. The atom bomb worked, and would work again (and again, and more so if necessary), and the fear that these planes would make their way East was not a real concern. This photo represents about 7% of the highest number of B-17’s in service in Europe at any given time.

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Aviation & flight — Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria — Technology, History of
Medical Quackery: the Invention of Baldness and the Testicular Electrical Suspenders

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Well.
Margaret McKenzie (“Scientist” with a capital “s”) wrote this simple
treatise in 1934, claiming that she had discovered what caused baldness and
knew how to “grow hair with ‘Natural-Science’ ”. Answering her own call to baldness, and “after
eighteen years of exhaustive study”, Margaret “emerged triumphant…and uncovered
this thing baldness [sic]” with her discovery which would “banish baldness
forever and thus wipe out the bald head which is my aim [sic]”. Margaret’s
gift to “Man-Kind”, her discovery, boils down to fifteen words:
don’t rub your hair when washing your face, and do not smooth your hair
down with your hands. That’s it. Or almost it: we are told later that it is best to shampoo
your hair in a sink, and then if one must shower or bathe to use “a rubber
shower cap so as to not expose your hair to water”. I’m not sure how that holds together.

The great art of Margaret McKenzie is that that
like any great salesperson she was able to spread this tidy discovery over 15
pages. She strays off-topic only a few
times, once when discussing her cure for dandruff, and another when she states
with sublime magnificence that “the bald head era dates back to the 15^th
century”. The cause of the great onset
of baldness, by the way, was the invention of the haircut, which led to
smoothing down the hair and to rubbing the scalp (at the temples) when drying
your face after washing. Evidently haircuts
didn’t exist before 1400.

Sometimes all one can do is say “wow!”.

And a trailing, eyebrow-arched, questioning “wow…” is about all you can say about Pulvermacher’s Electric Belts &c/ Electricity Natures Chief Restorer, Self-Applicable for the Cure of Nervous and Chronic Disease without Medicine (printed ca. 1880), which features an electric “chain” in a belt connected to a “suspensory” for a man’s vitals. It is one of many, perhaps hundreds, of electrical geegaws that climbed aboard the principles of Michael Faraday’s monumental invention of the induction coil (1831)–one can hardly imagine what Mr Faraday would’ve thought of this application of his great addition to the history of technology. This electrical stimulus was supposed to cure all manner of unspeakably lingering medical tragedies, including spermatorrhea, exhausted vital energy, female complaint, inflammation of the prostate gland, seminal weakness, kidney disease, cramp, lost manhood, paralysis, indigestion, dyspepsia, spinal complaints, nervous debility, and of course the “debilities of sexual self-pollution” (“the sexual sin (which) is the most destructive of all human vices…the greatest outrage against Nature’s sexual ordinances that man can possibly perpetrate”. Isaac Pulvermacher’s (which is German for “gunpowder maker”) electrical medico-contraption was popular for several decades in the mid/late 19th century until it faded and trailed away at the turn of the century, though it was not for the lack of trying. Pulvermacher had all manner of glowing letters of support for his product, though one wonders if they

weren’t mostly cooked up on the back burner of a two-burner stove top, much in the way he invented this bizarre electrical device and pathologized aspects of male sexuality.

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Bad Ideas — Medicine, History of
Paleo-futurology: Solar House, 1946

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This
interesting 1946 pamphlet combines tow modern interests in one package: Green’s Ready-Built Homes Present the Solar Home
presented both a prefabricated, well-designed house that was also passive solar
friendly. The architect and engineer was
George Fred Keck (1895-1980) , a true modernist, and designer of one of
the twelve “Homes of the Future” for the Chicago “Century of Progress” World’s Fair in 1933.

The “solar home” that he offered here used seasonal variations and house
location to regulate heating/cooling, glazing and siding, air movement, and the
storage of thermal energy in building materials—mostly, there were lots and
lots of transfer-friendly double-paned windows, all of which were
forward-thinking ideas for 1946. In
addition the house was prefabricated, making construction easier, simpler, and
quicker than any of the stick-built houses being constructed at that time. There was also an impetus for quick, good
construction given the housing shortage caused by the returning WWII veterans.
The prefab idea was also a relatively new one in architecture—though there are
instances of bits and pieces of prefab architecture reaching back hundreds of
years, the first earnest attempts at providing such housing on a mass scale
dates only to the 1920’s. In any event, the double-effort here was a fairly early effort at combining these two ideas–and certainly something that seems to have been about 60 years too early.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Architecture and Building — Future, History of the
History of the Future: Farming and Vertical Integration, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 745 Blog Bookstore

This 1940 pamphlet, published by the Texas State Research
Foundation, is a relatively young, paleo-futuristic view of the coming of the
vertically integrated food production business in the United States .
Its title (Building an Agricultural and Industrial Empire through Research)
directly relates the idea of a grand agricultural/industrial alliance, with the
contents pointing the way to far more than simple “research”, as the cover
intimates. There is a giant series of
silos, and even a barn (in the top right corner), but the image

here is pure smokestack-encrusted
agribusiness. The simple farmer on his
tractor makes his slow way through his high-bound and gross techno skyline—of course
the visual message implies that the family farm would be aided by “research”,
but it also opens the door wide into the future to what the American farm would
become. The family farm would be
absorbed by the skyline of major business:
at the time when this pamphlet was published some 22% of the American population
was directly involved in farming; by 2002 that figure had genocidally dropped
to about 1.5%. The small, independent farms
had been replaced by global conglomerates who are centralizing food production,
controlling the distribution of fertilizer and seeds, causing massive soil
erosion, destroying aquifers, depleting the soil, polluting with toxic
chemicals, and on and on.

So the image of this puffy pamphlet’s cover turns out to be
prescient after all, and pretty much true:
except for the farmer-on-the-tractor part, as that guy got pretty much
absorbed into a corporate Farmer Entity.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Bad Ideas — Future, History of the — Technology, History of