Author: JF Ptak

Underground Horses, 1875

JF Ptak Science Books Post 22

Unusual cross sections have always fascinated me–they are an X-ray of the techy-inards of the physical world , showing you a slice (literally) of the Unseen and Unapproachable.

The first engraving here is of an (unidentified) Western-U.S. mine, printed 1869, and shows the comparative depth of an un-effacing mining operation in terms of height, nestling it in against Trinity Church (NYC). The “21 stories” depth of this mine would have been astonishing to the 1869 mind thinking of it in terms of height. Few office buildings in NYC for example exceeded 5 or 6 stories at that time. [It was in 1872 that the tall buildings’ fortune turned, as C.W. Baldwin (working for the Otis Company) invented the geared hydraulic elevator, meaning that buildings could now be taller than the strength and endurance of its occupants’ legs. (Actually, to my mind it is the invention of the elevator safety brake that clinched the deal, making it safe to enter an elevator and expect to survive the experience. There’s a lot of other stuff that comes into play, not the least of which is steel framing, lightening the buildings weight and displacing the weight from its’ normal receptacle of the foundation, but I digress.) ] So trying to imagine something that was 15 time the height of the spire of Trinity Church was doing some pretty large-scale imagining.

A corollary the the height of the mine is, perhaps, a cross section of the depths of waters. Here we see an 1877 illustration from an article on new methods of determining the depths of ocean waters, giving a very clear indication of the enormous “height” of the ocean even in its most measurable (and not-so-deep) section.

I simply could not resist this 1875 engineer’s drawing (“Plan of Ten-Stall Stable….for W.D. Wight’s Paper on Underground Horses”)–and yes indeed these were horses kept underground, used for hauling the heavier wagons (on tracks) of whatever, brought out to these larger chambers by men doing the same work with lighter loads in smaller areas. (For perhaps the best description ever of men at work in a coal mine, see the gorgeous George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London)

This is one of those images I think that will elicit a pretty light-hearted reaction until your brain catches up to the reality of what the print is really depicting.

This image is actually much rarer than a mining cross section–it is a plan (looking from the top and down) of a mine showing the mode and direction of ventilating the whole bit, printed in 1818. (As it turns out it is rarer still to see a plan depicting a mine’s numerous layers–I’ve honestly not seen another one of these done before 1900.) What an incredible image this must have been to the early 18th-century eye, seeing such a novel, and rare, depiction of (important!) data.

In the Victorian panoply, the technological temple ma have had an entryway mosaic constructed from the idea of the mine cross section or plan–it is a structural, semi-architectural bit after all, made to withstand advanced weight and pressure. Or how about a mine cross section template for a stained glass window? I can imagine the Temple of Technology boasting a design schema of nothing but elements like these–those people trusted, perhaps even worshiped, the small and great mechanical machines and contrivances of their era. All you have to do is look at the housings for even some of the simplest objects and you’ll find a metallic skin of awe and beauty, a symbol of admiration and respect for analog creativity.

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Naming Things — Perception — Perspective — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Technology, History of
An Analog(ous) Victorian youtube: the Eccentric vs. the Insane in Victorian England

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 21

The “eccentric” versus the “insane” in Victorian England may well have been identified by the amount of available disposable income–if you could afford your whimsy and misery, then you were “eccentric”; if not, then you were “insane”, which also meant that you were culpable of being scooped up by The Authorities and interned if you turned out to be a larger/smellier/more obnoxious nuisance than a simple dot of the street. That or you may have wound up as an electrically-prodded subject in an experiment by Charles Darwin (Expression of Emotions….). In this way the past telescopes nicely into the present, less the electrical stimulation bit.

The image shown here is that of Mr. James Lucas, “the Hermit of Red-Coat’s Green, (near Hitchens)”, living his life in
a most uncommon hermit-like fashion, even for a hermit. Seems to me that a hermit would be removed from society and be away from people; Mr. Lucas may be of a singular caste of that genre, living his life alone in the very midst of society–he lived in the kitchen of his townhouse, in a single room with a window to the street. There he lived out his life in full and constant view of the passersby on the busy sidewalk. Crowds would come by and stare, and Mr. Lucas would stare back–he would rarely, if ever, communicate, though he would (“he was not miserly”) give out “farthings and gin” to “swarms of tramps”, no to mention sweetmeats to children. He’d watch people watching him.

He also didn’t write (except we are told “upon a check”), and made no physical effort to retain anything that he thought about; nor was the reason for his uncommon lifestyle made known.

He was one son of “an opulent London merchant”, and in time proved to be an incorrigible and strong-willed non-conformist (with the funds to do so in some comfort). He evidently went completely over the edge when his mother died, and after a year of keeping her body in the house removed to the kitchen, where he spent the rest of his days (living there from 1850 to 1874).

After he died and his room cleaned out for the sale of the family’s property, it was discovered that the floor was covered in two feet of ashes and soot from the kitchen fireplace. Without the family money Mr. Lucas surely would’ve wound up on a cadaver table long before his seventieth year, suffering real social Dickensian travail rather than that which existed just in his mind.

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Homer Simpson on Perspective: the Rare Antique Image Looking Straight Down from a Height

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 20

I welcome the chance today to use our non-classical Homer instead of the beautiful Paolo Uccello to look at an issue of imaging a certain form of perspective drawing. I’ve always been intrigued by antiquarian images that looked straight down, or up, at things–90 degree, perpendicular, real straight-on stuff, giving a feel for depth (or height) and perspective. Funny thing is that in the wide world of scientific images, they really don’t show up very often.

A Mock-straight-down is found in this prettily-designed example (French, ca. 1860)–it seems to be view form a height of 250 feet or so down on the square of a low- (Western) renaissance town. That’s partly true, except that it is a mosaic from Pompeii (or Herculaneum), found imbedded in the floor of one of those mummified houses.

Another pretender is this god’s-eye view (from Abraham Rees’ mammoth encyclopedia of 1800-1820) of the universe, centered upon our own helio-centric Solar System, which is centered, nested, amidst a whorl of other (contiguous and touching but not overlapping) solar systems, all of which is held in the
infinite but knowable confines of an ourobus. This
again qualifies as a straight-down/up if and only if (iff) you squint real hard and imagine you’re seeing the scene through your CreatorView (TM!) glasses. (The Creator needs glasses?)

The drawing by Leonardo of the town of Imola (currently resident with the Windsors) does come quite close to the concept–it has more artistic features than the common city plan , and is definitely at a perpendicular to its subject.

But it is this that is so terribly interesting to me–a small part of a
little print from an unidentified encyclopedia from the turn of the
19th c. It shows a picture of the earth looking straight down from a
balloon, looking through an opening in the cloud cover, down to a small
town. There is an iconic work on the representation of the world as known to succeeding generations where the picture of the world is seen through a succession of gradually diminishing clouds (being opened like drapes over time), but I honestly cannot think of an early image of looking at clouds from above and straight down. My sense is that this image would have caused as much
interest and wonder as the first (Soviet) images of the other side of the Moon (back in 1959).

Even when moving into the pre-satellite 20th century image, the straight-down picture is a rarity. In the last few years after having looked at dozens of thousands of popularly-published images (for another project), the straight-down/up were a scant tenth or perhaps hundredth of a percent of the total. There were a number of photographs made looking straight up (as in the two examples here, looking up the main mast into the crow’s nest of the Queen Mary, and the other with the same view, only in the Bremen.

Occasionally the view like this will show up (looking laterally through the Vickers-Armstrong “Wellington I” bomber aircraft (June 1939)

I can’t leave this topic without mentioning two recent additions to this genre–the first is the Eames’ wonderful Power
of Ten movie (go to youtube HERE, where in 40 steps we look at existence from quark to quasar.

The second is a little goofy but I like it nonetheless–the introduction to the Jodie Foster movie Contact (go to youtube HERE) built on the bones of the Carl Sagan book. Here we swing out from the Earth and into space, following a broadcast-audio trail of humanity into the not-too-distant time/space (ignoring the signal degradation bit but so it goes), and then leaving that quickly behind, hurling itself backwards, to the outer reaches of the universe, until (and we don’t see this in the youtube clip) we wind up back in the iris of the heroine (and a bit too much like the Dave Bowman trip in “2001 a Space Odyssey”).

But we don’t see stuff like this very often, and I’m happy to go along for the ride. It really is just about seeing something new, after all.

Perhaps the lack of this perspective is summed up by our old friend Homer J. Simpson. In one episode of the Simpsons (long ago and far away…or last week) Homer explains (to Lisa?) why cartoon characters’ faces are always oblique in profile. Homer turns and looks directly into the
camera,” and his face gets all pancakey. It’s just not done “because it’s goofy” he says. And at least in Homer’s case, the proof is definitely in the puddin’.

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Blowing Up Hell(gate), 1876
JF Ptak Science Books Post 19
- “A Sharp, but Not Loud Retort”—the cross section of the detonation chamber of the largest pre-Alamogordo man-made explosion, 1876
  
  Cruising through a box-full (okay, four boxes full) of the Popular Science Monthly, I came upon the lovely volume for 1876. The November issue (the November 1876 American presidential election bears a very, very close resemblance to the 2000 election) unleashed a bevy of odd, tantalizing articles, demanding their quiet attention: “the Early History of Fire”, “Prenatal and Infantile Culture”, “Is the Development Hypothesis Sufficient?”, “the Nature of the Invertebrate Brain”, and others). Just barely bobbing to the surface, riding the velvet coattails of longer articles was as a note in the “editor’s table”: “The Hell-Gate Explosion.”
Aha!
Hell’s Gate in America (there are bunches evidently in the Netherlands, where term prior to corruption was Hellegat, meaning, well, “Hell Gate”) refers to a body of water high up on the East River in NYC. It had, before 1876, been a very contentious bit, with a reef at Hallett’s Point that caused all manner of problems for ships and shipping, helping sink perhaps hundreds of ships over the years since the strait was navigated in the early 17th century.

It came to pass that the Deciding Forces determined that the reef must go. (RIGHT: the 1-inch square image cross section of the tunnels beneath the ship-catcher.)

General John Newton (1823-1895, Civil War brevetted Major General) was placed in charge of removing the mess, a large, 700-foot long ship-sinking croissant, extending 300 feet into the channel, with an area of about 3 acres. Newton worked on the idea for several years and—to the great trepidation and pre-millenial fears of many—decided to blow it up. Actually, he decided to blow it down—he engineered a submerged explosion such that the charges placed in the numerous and long mine shafts drilled and cut the length and breadth of the reef would effectively sink the reef. With some smart thinking and some 50,000 pounds of explosives, he did just that.

Listen to the particulars (and remember, this is 1876, and the waters were treacherous, with ripping currents): after building a coffer dam a shaft was sunk 33 feet below the surface of the water, from which 10 tunnels were opened, having lengths of 21 to 126 feet. The tunnels radiating from the shaft varied from 9 to 22 feet in height, and 9 to 12 feet wide, with 172 supporting pillars, the total length of the tunnels being 4,857 feet plus another 2,568 feet of offshooting galleries—the entire 7,425 feet of tunnel was drilled with 4,427 blasting holes, the explosive agents being connected to 96 galvanic firing batteries by 220,000 feet of wire. The 160 fuses were simultaneously ignited by 23 groups of batteries.

The main plunger was depressed by General Newton’s 2 year old daughter, who was not named.

The action was a success, the honeycombed explosion chambers sort of sinking the 51,000 cubic yards of ship-killer under a low, sulfurous fog. Actually the reef-turned-gravel pit was removed by grapplers, part of the Hell of Hellgate carried away.

All things considered, this little cross-section (about an inch square) doesn’t say much about the biggest man-made explosion south the atomic bomb .

Endnote:

The New York Times screamed the results in a Victorian tremalotto on their front page for 25 September 1876:

“RENDING HELL-GATE ROCKS; THE SUBMARINE MINE EXPLODED. A COMPLETE SCIENTIFIC SUCCESS. THE TERRIFIC RENDING FORCE LIBERATED BY THE FINGER OF A CHILD–A JARRING TREMOR OF THE EARTH, AND A SHARP, BUT NOT LOUD REPORT–IMMENSE GEYSERS OF WATER THROWN UP–THE FORCE EXPENDED MAINLY IN THE WORK OF BURSTING THE REEF–CONFIRMATION OF GEN. NEWTON’S THEORY OF THE EFFECTS OF THE DISCHARGE–THE RUSH OF THE CURIOUS CROWDS–INCIDENTS OF THE DAY THROUGHOUT THE CITY. BEFORE THE EXPLOSION. THE EXPLOSION. AFTER THE EXPLOSION.”, The New York Times. September 25, 1876. p. 1
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The Wrong Stuff, Righted–the Attack on Darwin’s Descent, 1871

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 17

I enjoy the good defense of the wrongfully accused–The Encyclopedia of Incorrect Reviews of Literature and
Science is an enormous and multi-generational work, filled to its festering brim with The Bad Stuff: Everyone is represented here, glory rendered to trifle: Hamlet was ripped by Voltaire (“vulgar and barbarous”) while Pepys raped Midsummer Night’s Dream (“insipid, ridiculous”); Moby Dick was “trash, bedlam literature”; Kipling couldn’t write in English (SF Examiner 1889); and Max Eastman weirdly and famously trashed Hemingway and his manhood in the New Republic while reviewing For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940 (“lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man”). Perhaps one of the very prettiest of the bad/wrong review was made by The Bookman (the professional bookseller’s reviewing organ in the United States) in 1906, in reviewing Sinclair’s The Jungle: “His reasoning is so false, his disregard of human nature so naïve, his statement of facts so biased, his conclusions so perverted, that the effect can be only to disgust many honest, sensible folk with the very terms he uses so glibly”. Well put; better still if it were correct. The list goes on and on and touches, well, just about everyone (including Dr. Seuss). What I really enjoy is the response to the bad review, especially when the bad review was, simply, bad.

One good example, .a great example, really, is Thomas Stebbing’s response to an inciting, raw and hateful attack upon Darwin’s Descent of Man by The Times of London newspaper (April, 1871). Incredibly, or predictably, The Times saw the work as an attack upon society: it accused Darwin of undermining authority and principles of morality, opening the way to “the most murderous revolutions”. A “man incurs a grave responsibility when, with the authority of a well-earned reputation, he advances at such a time the disintegrating speculations of this book.” Stebbing’s review of the Review is drippingly but properly sarcastic, pointing out obvious errors in specific and the tone of the article in general in the defense of the
book. Darwin’s “facile method of observing superficial resemblances” (says The Times) moves Stebbing to issue the following: “they may fancy that truth is worth discovering , even when it seems to involve some contradictions to our pride and some loss of comfort to our finer feelings…” It is a gorgeous line ending a proper, staid defense of what would seem prima facie to be something in need of no defense whatsoever—in 1871 or 2008.

Reverend Stebbing, a Darwinian, Naturalist and fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, lived another 55 years after this article was published—one year longer than the issuance of the (negative, anti-Darwin) verdict in
the Scopes/Monkey trial. I wonder what he was thinking on that day in 1925…

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Roe v. Doe & Great Anonymous works: Darwin, Newton, Malthus, Paine

JF Ptak Science Books Post 13

There was a brief point in Charles Darwin’s publishing life when the old (then young) man got stiffed. Darwin’s magisterial contribution to Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of her Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1S26 and 1836…, (published in 1839) appeared in the third volume, (by far and away the most important volume), and was issued without his name on the title page, which as it turns out was okay by the standards of the day. The real oddness turns up in the publisher’s ads that appeared in the later issues of those volumes in late 1839 for what would be a separately-issued volume of Darwin’s contribution (Journal of Researches into the Geology…), where there was no mention of the author’s name. (Captain Robert Fitz-Roy, the man whose name adorned those early volumes, was the Captain of the Beagle and a man of high accomplishment and some pioneering meteorological ideas.)

The history of world literature ancient and modern abounds in silenced or self-silenced authors—there is even a four volume encyclopedia to help you identify the unidentified. . Political and religious work are also particularly heavily laden with unattributed or disguised efforts—the U.S. Constitution and the Federalist Papers are of course both anonymous (and of necessity), as was the most beautiful work of Voltaire. The Declaration of Independence, on the other hand, and also of necessity, was not. What is that they say? Anonymity is the best defense against the tyranny of the majority”? It still feels a little Orwellian to see the unattributed source in the newspaper or read an anonymous editorial. On the other hand Thomas Paine’s On Common Sense may not have made it into print if its author had been required to identify himself.

Art is perhaps the longest-lived area of anonymous work, the signed canvas being a relatively recent invention. There are thousands of years of unknown hands and eyes represented in millions of works, but really we only get solid confirmation of the intellectual origin of a work through the invention of the ornament of the signature, and this just within the last 500 years. And even after this defacement begins to appear there is still a relatively stout history of semi-anonymous works coming from painting studios doing work “in the manner of ____”. Of course there were other considerations at play here, what with guilds and patrons and all—the artist was one person in a lengthy bureaucratic trail of aesthetic production.

Anonymous seems to come more into play in our present culture via the need for a place holder—when tallying and accounting the death of unknown people, for example, the name “John Doe” or “Jane Roe” is used (in the U.S.) to take up the forever empty space calling for The Departed’s name. (Our most famous “Jane Roe” is Norma McVorvey of Roe v. Wade; I think the Gary Cooper film (“Meet John Doe”) still ranks the highest for the male equivalent.) Something has to go there in that empty space, and so it does–the placeholder name. (The practice of using such names is actually pretty old, and is practiced worldwide. See HERE for an entertaining look at multi-cross-cultural “John Doe” equivalents.)

And now that I’ve had some time to think about non-Darwin examples from the sciences, I’m a little stumped. Robert Boyle is a good example, what with more than a dozen of his works (at least according to John Fulton’s bibliography) were published without his name carrying the title page-but these were the philosophical and political works of a scientist, and not scientific. Same too for Pascal, who wrote his Pensees undercover—and again, not scientific but by a scientist. Isaac Newton published his Opticks without his name on the title and in fact only used his initials in the preface as his personal identifiers.

That leads us to a final example of Thomas Malthus, who really did publish the first printing of his massively important Essay on Population without his name—it would make an appearance soon after, though, in the second edition of this contentious work making the first edition of this great near-scientific work one of the most influential anonymously published books of the last 250 years.

An unusual example of “anonymous” was Copernicus, the ultimate anonymous author of a scientific work because he intended not to publish i fearing reprisals for his challenging and revolutionary work. He waited until he was basically nearly dead to have his effort put into print, and so overcame his anonymity issue in print to adopt a biological anonymity enjoyed by the dead, his body loosened from the grip of his name so far as reprisals went. He was free from fear of all anxiety and moral espionage at this point, and he did see the work brought to public display. with his name very boldly displayed on the title page.

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Iconography
Seeing, Sight & Memory: Jevons, Bruno, Borges, Heller and Proust

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 12

Can We See More or Less than We Used To Be Able To See?

An early study of attention and perception (or “How Many Items Can it Embrace at Once?”) popped out at me while muscling my way through another year of Nature magazine for 1871. The article was by W. Stanley Jevons (“The Power of Numerical Discrimination,” 1871) who contributes an interesting and very early experimental bit on the success of the brain to correctly formulate an accurate memory when in a flash shown a number of items. (That is to say, when shown a certain group of X-number of items instantaneously and then removed, how often will the mind be able to remember the correct number upon recall–and without committing them to memory per se or counting them?) In this fascinating study Jevons records not only right/wrong answers but how “close” the remembered fit is to the original number, and in effect is a pioneering scientific effort towards understanding our abilities and limits in information processing.

Its important to distinguish Jevons’ experimental work on apprehension from earlier (and much earlier) philosophical and semi-scientific work on memory formation and retention. This of course goes back as far or as deep as you want to go—taking a stab at random we’ll use Simonides who while trying to organize poetry and other data in his head came upon the idea of using Mnemonics and using associative processes in art and poetry to establish his own history of memory. (I should point out that one of the early-modern experimenters in the formation of memory was Giordano Bruno who wound up being tortured and burnt at the stake for other offense against The God while trying to formulate a truthful approach to science; evidently the memories that would be threatened by his scientific approach proved to be too much for the righteous in power, and he was removed before he could threaten corrective memory any further.)

It is interesting that many of the crimes of science punished by the Catholic Church during this period (1450-1650) were as much crimes against memory than they were crimes against the future—changing and challenging collective memory often proved fatal.

Getting back to Jevons—who was a very smart guy and who applied himself to a number of fields, not the least of which was constructing a logic machine: his experiment proved to be a springboard for a host of others, some of which didn’t do Jevons justice, misreporting his finding, misrepresenting the stuffy, and so forth. Perhaps the greatest of these was the greatest of the efforts based on his—Raymond Cattell —who for some reason stated in his very influential textbook of 1907 that humans can remember around 7 things (without counting) when the objects are flashed before their eyes. And for a hundred years this figure stuck, even though the Jevons report issued a more complex summation, and saying, anyway, that the number was around 10.

And what bothered me a bit with the Jevons experiment is what people remembered when shown the objects (beans)—would his results have varied if subjects were asked how many were shiny or odd-colored or deformed or whatever rather than just a simple number, the results could’ve been more interesting. (I don’t doubt that these issues have been taken up in the 20th century but haven’t looked). Sometimes people are just looking in the wrong places—for example operant psychology labs tested rats via visual stimuli until it was discovered that rats were olfactory geniuses and that humans were using them wrong all along.

It would be interesting to know what the history is of human capacity for image formation. Considering the growth of distractions and the enormous amount of true and trash stimuli—visual bombardment from television, outdoor advertisements, the sheer amount of growth of human construction and interaction—have humans enhanced this spatial/memory information processing capacity? Consider the growth of (just) eye movements over the last few hundred years, with the visual sense being subjected (for all classes of people) to enormously and fractally-expanded print sources, television, digital communication and so on—has this expanded this neural capacity? Has “space invaders” aided bean counting?

I don’t know, though I do wonder (literally) what the effect exponentially-growing mass input of (mostly junk) data might be doing to our noggins. Maybe the effects lean more towards dissolving privacy and reflective time—when does a person think if interruptive stuff is coming into your head at all points of the day, with the brain trying to interpret incomplete and ambiguous strings of sensory inputs?

Seems scary to me. Maybe memory is affected, maybe it makes it go away, shriveled because recollection is being eliminated. Or demented like the wonderful Yossarian (his first name is John, btw) from Joe Heller’s beautiful Catch-22 who develops for himself a condition in which he remembers everything twice (whatever that means).

It would be interesting to see a war of societies in which the sides were a culture that remember nothing versus a culture that remembered everything. The unspeakably lovely Jorge Borges wrote something touching on this in “Fumes the Memorist,” in which the humble narrator is capable of forgetting nothing, being able to recall explicitly everything within eyesight, perfectly—the problem is though that it takes a day to remember the events of another day. What would happen in such a culture where everyone forgot nothing?

And I’ve just been dealing here with visual memory, really—and as Proust makes plainly clear (and Borges and other prove), vision isn’t everything.

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The Spine of Society and the Beginning of the Grid

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 12

I’m interested to know what anyone might know about the use of
metaphors relating large-scale societal techno advances and biological
functions? I have no doubt that they go back to modern-ancient times
(say to William Gilbert (1544-1603) and his vis electrica)—but I’m
stopped today by seeing this paper by J. Norman Lockyer called “Social
Electrical Nerves” (in two issues of Nature for 14 and 28 February
1878). In this paper the great astronomer looks at elements of the
“grid” as it was and seeing how the new networks of police and fire
communications via telegraph interacts with the existing electrical
systems. It seems to me an early use of nervous system/electrical
grid, in spite of the fact the first “electrical highways” (as Lockyer
puts it 120 years before our own “information superhighway”) appeared
in England 32 years earlier though apparently without these biological
metaphors.

The work pictured above is the electrically-draped world of the future,
at least according to the vision of the wonderful Albert Robida, who
was actually at work on these visions just at the time of the
publication of the Lockyear paper . (Robida produced at least a trio of
interesting and lovely and occasionally prescient works: Le Vingtième
Siècle (1883); La Guerre au vingtième siècle (1887); and Le Vingtième
siècle– La vie électrique (1890)). Many of Robida’s visions of
electrical connectivity seem to me to move beyond the nervous system
metaphor and become a kind of societal “skin”—which is not terribly far
from the truth, especially when looking at images of congested
metropolitan centers ca. 1910, when utility poles fairly well sagged
under 20 (!) horizontal crossbars carrying a dozen lines apiece. At
the very least, you knew that something or other was happening (fast
forward to the massive ductworks of Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece,
Brazil. Check this out for a
wonderful cameo by De Niro coming to fix the neuronal duct-muck.)

And now that the wireless age is starting to get ridges in its
fingernails (the “wireless” age being at least 115 years old,
beautifully borne by Heinrich Hertz and Marconi), are our bio-electrical metaphors giving way?

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Mondo Bizarro, Science Afflictions and the Dubious Mind—Bad Science, Part 1. NYC in Space (?!)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 11

I can hardly help myself oh my brothers, hardly contain myself from writing about some of the truly incredible, nonscience scientific works that I have collected over these last years. One of the most interesting is the following work by David Gordon . It isn’t so much “interesting” really as it is illustrated, where all of the interest is. This is the only known example of the depiction of an extra-terrestrial New York City pictured with the earth in the background. Huh? Yes, this is the Big Apple in space—not its OWN space but THE space, outer space—somehow, impossibly, removed to some something-or-other (actually in this case, a “bubble”) that, while not being the Moon, was something like it, though not actually a solid and without gravity, floating on a base of floating effluvia, but, well, you get the picture. Whatever we’re floating on here (actually it is identified as the “perisohere” (don’t ask)) is very big and very very close to the home planet.

Mr. Gordon, sweatily ensconced in a too-thick smoking jacket while pecking out this opus delectius, self published this effort in 1941, and then unleashed it on the world, or his neighborhood, asking such self-exiling questions as “why does the earth and other heavenly bodies remain in the air and submerged”. I can get most of that except the “submerged” part. That’s where most of the efforts like this seem to go horribly wrong–the vestigial spark of insanity inserted into a almost-coherent thought, as in “The Yankees look like almost-contenders for 2008 if they could strengthen their pitching and adjust their over-aggressive use of middle relievers sanitary flux”. Well, this doesn’t really apply here with Mr. Gordon, as normalcy is abandoned right at the outset, thanks to his very original cover art (and we are told on the title page that the cover art is actually “35 by 24 inches and in full colors” making it big and colorful and art brut).

And then of course we get to the crux of the biscuit—the removal of New York City into a peripheral bubble.

I don’t know why there is a rocket-propelled dirigible in the picture.

Mr. Gordon’s idea would’ve been far less interesting if it wasn’t illustrated. And it is easy to pass it by, as I almost did, because it is somewhat sci-fi mundane at first blush, until you realize that is New York in space. (I can see the Daily News headline now as the city leaves the planet for someplace else: “New York to World: Drop Dead”. This of course is a rip of one of the all-time headlines, ever, supplied by the New York Daily News when NYC appealed to the Feds for a bailout from bankruptcy in 1974. Raisin-eyes Jerry of course said “no”, and the rest is history…)

I know that it is hard to believe, but according to OCLC/WorldCat there are no copies of this work in any libraries, period. I can see why. And now it at least is rescued from the great dustbin that awaits us all…

I just love this little pamphlet.

The full title of this work: “A Picture Story Explaining Our Earth in Space and the Motions in the Solar System, a New Conception, a Great Story Simply Told”, by David Gordon.

Also—I’ve added a close-up of the Midtown-to-Downtown area, just so you can see the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Staten Island in the distance….it is definitely NYC.

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JF Ptak

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Bad Ideas
Things That Were But Almost Weren’t, Part II: the Disappearance of Alex Bell

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 10

Part (A)–Alex Graham Bell as a Purposefully Forgotten Element in the History of the Telephone,
and
Part (B) the Author Who Forgets Bell Fails to See the Future of the Telephone as a Communication Device.

Well, Alexander Graham Bell didn’t totally disappear in these very early reports on the telephone (published in the very influential Nature, an Illustrated Weekly Journal of the Science, London, May and August, 1876), but might as well have. The author of these two reports, published just on the heals of Bell’s announcement in America in March 1876, was J. Munro and he was not a Bell-believer. In these two reports Munro champions Elisha Gray as the inventor of the telephone, and does so with the exclusion of discussing Bell. There are however numerous other references to others working in the field–which was crowded in 1875 and 1876–so at least according to my line of thought the omission of Bell needed to be accomplished with some severe and anti-penetrating thought.

Now it must be stated that the history of the patent for the telephone from 1861 to 1876 is indeed complex and tricky
, and there are at least four others who may be considered to have preceded Bell, in some regards that is, but the fact that Bell was granted the patent and that he resisted all claims and attempts at penetration against his patent(s) beginning even within a year of the invention, says something pretty rock-solid about his place in the priority of the invention. Munro does come around to this , somewhat in his early summation and history of the telephone (Heroes of the Telegraph), but his desire for not-Bell comes through very strongly. (It should be noted that Sir William Thomson , who introduced the telephone to Europe in the fall of 1876, thought of it being the most perfect development of the telegraph, a “speaking telegraph” if you will, and hence the name of Munro’s book.)

In the second paper (the first appeared 15 May 1876, the second 24 August 1876) Munro continues on with his appreciation of the telephone’s musical virtuosity to the exclusion of using the telephone for spoken communication. “There is a possibility here, we must admit, of a curious use of electricity. When we are going to a dancing party there will be no need to provide a musician”, he writes, as the dancers will be able to pay their electrician for the privilege of getting their piano via wire. It is understandable to some degree to appreciate the telephone as a sort of radio, but Thomson had by this time made his report of the spectacular sensation of hearing *spoken words* coming from the telephone and what that experiment meant, and it is hard to understand (even at such great distance and hindsight) how Munro could’ve missed this report from Thomson, and how he could no make the intuitive leap to using the new invention for communication rather than amusement. I think Munro just plain got it wrong, or got it only partially right, which in this case makes him totally wrong.

(I should note here for the sake of clarity that when Thomson heard the spoken words that he missed, or the telephone missed, all of the monosyllables–still, one could assume that improvements would be made and that at some near point they could be understood.)

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JF Ptak

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Industrial & Technological art — Naming Things — Perception — Technology, History of