Author: JF Ptak

Remote Control Warfare, 1917

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

“Torpedoing the Enemy’s Trenches as a Preliminary to Infantry Attack” is a short but powerful article on the possibility of drone strikes in 1917. Actually, it was more like a wire-guided war robot, steam-driven, trundling across No Man’s Land in a whirl of steel wheels and steam, guided from one trench to attack another, on the other side. The thing doesn’t look so functional, given the varied and terrifically uneven ground it had to traverse with a heavy (and explosive) load and its carriage and powertrain. In a way it reminds me of a Bangalore torpedo, except mobile–on the other hand, the Bangalore actually worked.

Ironically, the torpedo was being operated across land from one land-submerged army to another; the colorful cover of this issue pictures finding submarines by air patrol, and then eventually killing the sub with an air-launched torpedo.

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Technology, History of — World War I
Iconic WWII Propaganda–Great Britain, 1940 (“Careless Talk Costs Lives”)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2727

I found these images years and years ago, and evidently had forgotten them–they surface yesterday from a long slumber, and immediately put me into mind of the very real hearst and minds campaign and of keeping secrets secret in the terrible and great struggle in the U.K. in 1940. These are four of eight posters in the very popular “Careless Talk Costs Lives” wartime propaganda series issued by the Ministry of Information and printed in 1940¹. They are the very stylized work of the illustrator “Fougasse”, who was Cyril Kenneth Bird, (1887-1965), an illustrator for Punch (from 1937 to 1949) and other journals and magazines, and also a wounded vet of Gallipoli in the First War.

The series in general depicts people sharing a piece of possibly sensitive information that in the wrong hands and together with other pieces of info could reveal devastating secrets—and in each case there are figures lurking/loitering/disguised in the background waiting to collect the data, and generally a poorly disguised Hitler or Goering or both. Fougasse was able to make his message immediately memorable and understood because I think of his understated over-the-top visual humor. The images were funny, but the message was deadly serious. Also, you really didn’t even need to read the text to understand the message. (This is in the same vein as some of Thomas Nast’s finest work, conveying social content and a political message to the illiterate, making his devastating (and usually highly textual) cartoons understandable without needing to read them.)

(1) “Strictly Between Four Walls”. In this poster (made a convenient size to be useful in virtually any small area and also abiding the wartime paper shortage) we see two men in big club chairs about to share some bit while the artwork-ensconced Hitler waits to hear the interesting parts.

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Militaria — Social History
On a Non-In-Incompleteness Theorem
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2726

This is a short bit about incompleteness, the discharge of connection and of knowing. And no, I’m not talking about The Incompleteness Theorem, the big revolutionary one…just a little incompletelness, the small “i” incompleteness, that sometimes doesn’t even make it to the first “e”. It is the sort of frustrating incompleteness that holds you hard when you think you know something, but you really don’t—and then you wonder if you knew it at all, once the connections are made and the analysis done, when the answer is more surprising and insightful than you thought you knew.

A big Incompleteness set in the two days ago, thumbing through a volume Jean Le Clerc’s mini-massive journal, Bibliotheque Universelle et Historique, which was printed in Amsterdam in the late 1680’s and early 1690’s, and in its 25 volumes or so covers only about five years in the history of ideas (covering 1688-1792). The books are as stubby as they are lovely, standing a little over 5” high, they are only about 3” wide, and generally about an inch-and-a-half thick. Pocket-sized.

I did not recall this journal, though it does sound like a lot of other book titles that I’ve bumped into—so I thought I may have known it, but it turns out I didn’t. That was interesting because as it turns out it is a fairly significant publication, with Le Clerc (and other contributing writers and editors¹) publishing works on and by some leading figures in the sciences and philosophy. I found out further that the journal was reprinted a number of times, here and there, over a 30-year period or so, which means it achieved some popularity.

The first thing I did with the volumes was to check the tables of contents for the biggest name in the sciences that would’ve been covered by this journal for the years 1687 and 1688. 1687 is one of the biggest years in the history of science, and the name that goes with it is Isaac Newton, as this is when he publishes his fully articulated theory of universal gravitation (and etc.) in Principa mathematica philosophiae naturalis [Mathematical principles of natural philosophy]. I worked my way through the volumes, finding interesting entries for Leeuwenhoek (in vols 1 and 5), but didn’t come across Newton until vol 7, where there is an entry for the book but no pagination for it–and then, looking through the volume, I couldn’t find any sight of it, even after finding a digital version and cruising that under the expected words. The big break came in volume 8², with an article on Newton and the book sitting there on page 436-450 (though running about 2000 words for the 14 pp).

The Principia was mostly universally well-received from inception, though there were very highly notable exceptions, with Leibniz and Huygens among others criticizing the work. The troubling part, though, for me in my memory, was that this conversation on the book didn’t seem to take place in print within a few years of publication. This is where the incompleteness comes in—I just couldn’t remember why I had this lingering thought about the scarcity of seeing this “review” of the book in print, and this within a year or so of the book’s publication, and why I was shocked to see one.

When I researched the earliest records of published receptions or reviews or comments on the Principia, I was stunned to see that after Edmund Halley’s notice of the work (which was published in July 1687) in Philosophical Transactions in September 1687, there were only three other notices made in the first year following publication. In that following year, 1688, there were articles in the Bibliotheque (which appeared in March); the Acta Eruditorum (in June) and the Journal des Scavans in (a one-page review in August), which makes it appear that the Bibliotheque published first on the Principia following its editor Edmund Halley’s piece in the Phil Trans. The other big surprise is that not only are there significant contributions by John Locke³ appearing in this same volume 8, but I found that the entry on the Principia had been edited by Locke himself^4,5. I have since found out that this is well known to scholars, though I was pretty happy to find this out in my poke-and-hunt operation. In spite of it all, Locke was probably not the person to undertake the article, and the journal was not terribly science-y, but there it is–the author of the Acta paper, on the other hand, was Christoph Pfautz (1645-1711), who may have been as qualified to address the book, and the journal in which the review appeared was perhaps the most important of its kind at that time. (This reference to Pfautz comes from Bernard Cohen, who also points out that although Newton seems not to have read any of the four reviews, there is some slight evidence that he may have seen Pfautz’s. The interesting piece here is that Pfautz seems to have been excited by a passerby reference to God the creator of the universe and presented it as important; in the next edition of the Principia, the book’s one reference to God is removed.) But it does seem that the Bibliotheque and Mr. Locke were the first on the continent to publish on the book. (I should note that the Journal des Scavans anonymous review was “hostile and derisive”.7)

As J.R. Milton writes on Locke’s work on the Principia:

“This is anonymous, and has generally been assigned to Locke on the basis of a considerable overlap with the notes Locke himself made while reading the Principia. Some writers on Locke and Newton have firmly attributed it to Locke, while others have been rather more cautious. The question of its authorship is, however, settled by a remark – hitherto overlooked – that was made by Le Clerc in 1714 in his own review of the second edition of the Principia: ‘The first edition of this book appeared in 1687 and we published a small extract, composed by Mr Locke, in volume VIII of the Bibliotheque universelle.’ “8

And so this little journey into incompleteness ends, and I think I’ve figured out a tiny aspect of what I didn’t know and when I didn’t know it.

Notes
1. Editors and contributors included: Jean Le Clerc et Jean Cornande de al Crose, vols 1-9; Jean Le Clerc, 10, 12, 14-19; Jean Cornand de La Crose, vol 11; Charles le Cene and Jean Le Clerc, vol 13; Jacques Bernard and Jean Le Clerc, vol 20; Jacques Bernard, vols 24-5. The journal was published every 4 months in vols 1-3; every 3 in 4-19, and then twice a year for 20-25.
2. According to Hans Botts, volume 8 appeared in January 1688.–Hans Bots, “Bibliotheque Universelle et Historique (1686-1693)” entry in Dictionnaire des journaux, 1600-1789 The article on Newton’s Principia has been established as March, 1688.
3. “Indeed the reports or extracts of books are the most numerous, but at the same time there are original contributions from some correspondents, such as The Philosophical Essay Concerning the Mind of John Locke, inserted in this journal two years before publication of the book same (v. VIII, Jan. 1688, pp. 49-I42)”–translated from Hans Bots, “Bibliotheque Universelle et Historique (1686-1693)” entry in Dinctionnaire des journaux, 1600-1789.
4. “The publication in July 1687 of Newton’s Principia mathematica gave rise to only four reviews in the European periodical press. The first was Edmond Halley’s pre-publication notice in the Philosophical Transactions. Then a year elapsed before the Bibliotheque Universelle, the Acta Eruditorum, and the Journal des Scavans, approached the book. Of these reviews that which appeared in Jean Leclerc’s widely read Bibliotheque Universelle has received least attention from historians. This is unfortunate because, of several merits, two in particular are important for the intellectual history of the period: it was written specifically for the large and growing intellectual class of western Europe who for the most part were interested in the new physical sciences, but were untrained in the mathematics necessary to understand many of the newest advances in them. And the author of this review, which was the first independent account of Newton’s book to reach this Continental (largely French-speaking) audience, was John Locke, then a voluntary political exile…”–James L. Axtell, “Locke’s Review of the “Principia”, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Dec., 1965).
5. “(Bibliotheque Universelle…) was the only journal only journal in the Dutch Republic that had published a review of the Principia, anonymously written by John Locke.”–“Newton through the eyes of an amateur”, University of Utrecht website
  The Locke Digital Bibliography project also attributes this review as a work of Locke’s.
6. Bernard Cohen, “Reviews of the First Edition of the Principia“, in Peter M. Harman, Alan E. Shapiro (eds), The Investigation of Difficult Things: Essays on Newton and the History of … p 325.
7. The University of Florida Newton Timeline makes the following note: “1688 – An anonymous reviewer for the Journal des scavans (Paris 1688) raises objections concerning Newton’s Principia, suggesting quite pointedly that the Englishman should now write a second book where he finally addresses the ‘true motions [of the planets] instead of those that he [merely] assumes’ [JS, August 1688: 128].”– http://users.clas.ufl.edu/ufhatch/pages/13-NDFE/newton/05-newton-timeline-m.htm
  Bernard Cohen remarks that this anonymous person may have been Pierre Silvain Regis, “a strict Cartersian” and “a hostile critic” (Cohen, Newtonian Revolution, p 96.
  
  Martin Schonfeld in his The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project notes the JdS review as “critical and derisive” (pg 254).
8. J.R. Milton, “Locke’s Publications in the Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 05/2011, Volume 19, Issue 3.
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Naming Things — Physics
A Fine RADAR Map of NYC, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books

The history of RADAR (RAdio Deection And Ranging, and something I’ve always written in caps, for whatever that is worth) is absolutely not what I’m thinking about now–that is a long story with lots of twists and turns, complicated, complex–and it ranges depending upon location as for the most part RADAR (from the 1930’s anyway) was developed in secret, kept as a military secret. And that’s because it was a very important development, with the victor of the Battle of the Beams being the possible victor, period.

All I want to do presently is note the significance of this particular pamphlet in the history of RADAR. This work was printed by PHILCO Corporation, (and dated December, 1945), and has an inserted leaflet stating that this “makes public for the first time the salient facts about the Corporation’s development and production of airborne radar equipment for the United States Army and Navy”. PHILCO and other companies made significant contributions to the war capacity of the Allied forces, and–for this company in particular–much of that went unknown for quite some time afterwards, and of course there are some stories that just won’t get told. But for PHILCO the story gets told here.

This is also a fabulous nighttime map of NYC–produced by RADAR.

[RADAR on Wings, Philco, 1945. 10×8″, 30pp (unpaginated) with lots of photographs and an occasional schematic.]

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Militaria — Technology, History of
Burroughs, Batman, and Bullets in the History of Holes and Punched Card Computation
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2722

There is a continuing thread on this blog on The History of Holes–it is a series about, well, holes and what isn’t in them/what used to be in them/what you can see through them, and so on. This particular section of holes relates to the control and distribution of data and the great efficacy of utilizing holes punched into cards which would be arranged and tabulated in such a way as to order and manipulate mountains of data. That said I don’t recall seeing anything in print from the heyday of keypunching that actually mentioned the holes, as it does here–nor have I seen a non-William-Burroughs connection made between handguns, bullets, holes, and tabulation. Oddly enough, there is a connection with a crime fighter who didn’t use a gun and whose sidekick used the exclamation “Holy ______ (computer, etc., and no expletives). And so we get to unite punched cards, computers, W.S. Burroughs, Batman, and The Time Tunnel. (The Time Tunnel?–yes indeed, the tv show from the 60’s can be brought into this as well..)

This is one of the first pages in a promotional pamphlet entitled Your Opportunity with the Maintenance Service Department Tabulating Machines Division of Remington Rand (ca. 1935-40). The title is stubby and factual, and the company was putting out a feeler for future engineering employees who could be trained to service and repair the many machines produced by Remington Rand that could be found in a largish business.

Remington Rand at one time was Remington Arms, and then diversified to produce all manner of light and heavy electrical goods (and of course famously producing the standard U.S. Army sidearm, the 45-calber Remington M1911 pistol), and by the end of WWII the company produced a vast line of tabulating equipment (of another order of high caliber). Interestingly the pamphlet exclaims that a person working for RR could work there for as long as they wanted, that the company was there to stay.

Certainly the company would hang on for some time in one form or another, but the tabulating card division was about to change drastically. In 1950 RR purchased Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company (ENIAC) and a few years later (1952) secured another giant computer pioneer, Engineering Research Associates (ERA), making Remington Rand about the largest computer company in the world. RR would be purchased a few years later by Sperry in 1955, becoming Sperry Rand, and then simply Sperry a short time after that; later, in 1986, Sperry would merge with Burroughs and become Unisys. Somewhere in there all of these tabulating machine repairmen and techs hired fresh in 1946 would be out of their lifetime job less than a decade later.

Now back to William S. Burroughs–the gun/tabulating connection there is that Mr. Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife in a game of “William Tell”–he is also the grandson of William Seward Burroughs of Burroughs Adding/Tabulating Machine and computer mainframe fame. (Burroughs was founded in 1886 and became Burroughs Corp in 1953 and was one of the nine major computer manufacturers in the U.S. 100 years after its founding Burroughs Corp merged with Sperry–which had absorbed Remington Rand–to become Unisys.)

On to The Batman of the 1960’s tv show where the connection between punched holes and “holy” is obvious and obscure–the caped crusader and Robin used a Burroughs computer (the B205) in the Batcave. The same goes for The Time Tunnel, where we see another use of the B205, used to enable the intrepid time travelers to jump into their funnel-shaped time machine and dive into a hole in time much like Harry Potter at platform 9 ^3/4. I suspect that there are more examples, but I’ll stop here.
- (A big salute to the “Starring the Computer” website, which has an extensive list of the B205 appearing in movies and television: http://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=45 as well as a very long list of appearances of many other non-fictional computers. It is an excellent effort!)
Lastly, some illustrations from the pamphlet, which surpisingly does not show up at all in WorldCat/OCLC.

[“Typical office installations of Remington Rand equipment”]
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Computer Tech/History — History of Holes
How Did One Keep Ice Icey in the Summer of 1845?

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I cam upon this curious drawing in The American Agriculturalist for July 1845. “Ice-House” it was, and the accompanying text described how this design was found to be among the most perfect. There is even a recommendation for the design from a gentleman in Virginia, a summertime recommendation from a moist and steamy environment. The author described how well the building worked, built into the side of a hill with a 12-foot-square pit dug 14′ down, and how the bottom of the pit was never revealed, even after eight summers of ice and heat…there was always something cold down in the hole.

I wonder how old the oldest ice was in the state of Virginia or any other hot place, how old the oldest unrefrigerated ice may have been? The thought would be that you would just need to keep adding ice, but that other ice needed to come from somewhere, and in 1845 that “somewhere” may have been nowhere at all–after all if the ice didn’t melt then we would have a significant problem with the laws of the universe.

And the full text, with descriptions on how to construct the ice house:

[Click to expand.]

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Architecture and Building
Black & White in Color, Part V

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This is another installment in a series on putting color into what we normally would think of in terms of black and white photos (and movies)–the results are sometimes surprising and unusual. (There are posts here on the color schemes on 1930’s schoolrooms in Cleveland, air recon in color, color dissonance in 1940’s bathrooms, colorless color charts, and other such bits, all findable by entering “color black and white” int he Google search box.) The pamphlet below would sound like a simple and badly-titled publication (How to Plan Walls that Please, by Armstrong Cork Products, 1938) if you were just reading about it in a catalog, but in real life, it is a symphony of exploding and unexpected color. At first the color combinations had a somewhat claustrophobic effect, but I think it was mostly because the rooms were small and densely packed–once that is accounted for, the colors seemed to take on a welcoming attitude…especially in the kitchens, where you’d expect to sit down at one of those small tables and wait for Grandma to serve you some fresh pie.

In any event, here are some examples for the pamphlet:

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Color & its advanced Abuses — Color Theory
A Unique Copy of a Rorschach Test Interpretation Tool (1947)?

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2721

Yesterday I wrote about a problem I was having in understanding a difficult-to-understand document on applying a computer in creating a bibliography of meteorology from 1949. Today the nature of the object is just completely outside anything I know about, and I thought if I posted something here and other palces in the Great Social Media that someone out there in Webtopia will know exactly what this thing is.

The subject here is a paper by Dr. George Ulett called A Rapid Method of Rorschach Analysis, which was created in 1947. The whole production is obviously home-made, the text being some generation of carbon copy from the typed original, with the “calculator” or rapid-method template being hand made. I can find no evidence in WorldCat/OCLC that this work was published as it stands. I also cannot tell if it was incorporated in a later work. I also cannot tell its utility, but given Dr. Ulett’s achievements in the field, and particularly within the Rorschach specialty, he must have seen a use for this tool.

And the notes on the reverse of the Rorschach tool:

Notes:

Ulett, George A.: “…former director of the Missouri Division of Mental Diseases where, under his leadership, Missouri went from one of the worst-funded mental health programs to a national leader. He founded what is now the Missouri Institute of Mental Health. He was former medical director of St. Louis City’s Malcom Bliss Hospital. He was instrumental in setting up alcohol and drug abuse treatment programs at city and state hospitals. One of his proudest achievements was to bring racial integration to the city’s mental health system. He was a professor of psychiatry at Washington University, Directory of Psychiatry at Deaconess Hospital, and was in private practice for over three decades.”from obituary at Legacy dot com

Dr. Ulett was also the author of books and numerous papers, including a number on the Rorschach test, including: Rorschach workbook : a primer for the psychiatrist, with interpretive diagram to permit clinical use while learning the ink-blot test, 1948, and Rorschach introductory manual : a self-teaching primer of Rorschach for the clinical psychiatric worker, 1960.

(Provenance: Library of Congress, undoubtedly from the author, received May 1947. From the “Pamphlet Collections”, and stamped on the title page with the LC/ surplus/duplicate stamp. 11×8.5”, 18, 2, pp, plus a plastic-encased (though retrievable) cardboard hole-punched enumerator for recording Rorschach responses. GVC bound in manila wrappers, both of which are detached, though present.)

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Medicine, History of — Social History
On Expanding the Boundaries of Things I Don’t Know

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2720

Here’s a good example of “where do I go with this puzzle now?” from the daily work that I do. The stages in working with odd material like the following goes from (1) recognizing that this junky-looking bit isn’t nothing; (2) identifying the something in the nothing that an outsider like me can recognize; (3) figuring out where the thing might fit in context with its development of whatever; (4) seeing how it may or may not be significant in the development of its subject; and (5) trying to figure out if I know what I was talking about in #s 1-4 (this is usually the most difficult step). In an event, I worked with something just now where it seemed to strike interesting chords along several areas, but in the end I was back at the beginning.

The item in mind is an early application of computers in forming a bibliographic meteorological database: Final Report of Bibliographic Section of Cooperative Research Project Between the U.S. Weather Bureau and North Carolina State College, which was produced in 1949 in 11 sheets, 9 of which are blueprints of text (including“Final Report…” pp 1-6, “Appendix 2 [sic], Meteorological Factor Codes”, 3pp). Also included is a sample IBM card mock-up with hand-printed notation. It is accompanied by an extensive two-page cover letter explaining the bibliography project in some detail, and was written by Reuben M. Harding (“assistant statistician”) on the UNC at Raleigh Institute of Statistics letterhead. (The director and associate directors were all heavy hitter statisticians, including Gertrude Cox, William Cochran, and Harold Hotelling.) The letter is dated March 11, 1949, and written to Jack Haynes (“Basic Sciences Division, Biological Department, Chemical Corps, Camp Detrick”. “Camp Detrick” was named so from “Detrick Field” in 1943, and became after great expansion in Biowar “Fort Detrick” in 1953.) I cannot find out anything about Harding save for his dates (1919-1997) and I found nothing on Mr. Haynes, though given the nature of Fort Detrick, this does not surprise me at all, as those guys–being at the center of biological and chemical weaponry establishment in the U.S.–were doing work that generally was not published or publicly shared.

Basically it seems that Haynes wrote to Harding for general information on creating database on punch cards, though not necessarily for meteorological purposes. There is a mention for example of “battlefield conditions” which would not necessarily appear in a meteorological bibliography, but there is no hint in the letter at all regarding the ultimate applied interest of Detrick might’ve been. So my guess is that Haynes was interested in structure and not content. Harding responds mostly outlining the weaknesses of his project, though this critique is very highly useful in itself, and for all I know may have been the most significant contribution of the entire affair.

Here’s the cover letter, which makes for interesting reading in itself, with some good insight on how to convey information on a proposed project and what the troublesome issues were–it is worth a read from that perspective alone.

And the first page of the blueprinted document:

And the punch card mock-up:

And so, it was an interesting time figuring out some of the parts of this document, but after everything was said and done, I really didn’t know where I was. The document itself didn’t show up as a published entity in WorldCat, and general academic searches revealed nothing of use on my early attempts, which means all I have thus far are discrete bits of information, explaining more deeply what I don’t know. Sometimes these things are a challenge, and sometimes they need to be let go, in spite of the convincingly-interesting bits that surround them. We’ll see what happens to this…

And speaking of things that I don’t know, I’m not even sure what post number this really is–I say “2720” but I think in the last few hundred numbered post I’ve lost my numerical way, and I’m not positive of what number I am up to. It gets more confusing as there are unnumbered “quick posts”, which number probably now about 2k, and since there can be 5 or 10 or more of them spaced between numbered posts, I sometimes just forget what number I am pushing against.

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Computer Tech/History
Writing on the Clouds

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2719

“Euery Cloud engenders not a Storme.”–Shakespeare, Henry VI, Pt. 3 (1623) v. iii. 10

“Vapour, previously unseen, makes its appearance as cloud, or mist, or fog.”–T. H. Huxley Physiogr. (ed. 2) 40

“But Howard gives us with his clearer mind
The gain of lessons new to all mankind;
That which no hand can reach, no hand can clasp,
He first has gain’d, first held with mental grasp.
Defin’d the doubtful, fix’d its limit-line,
And named it fitly.—Be the honour thine!
As clouds ascend, are folded, scatter, fall,
Let the world think of thee who taught it all.”–Goethe, “Howards Ehrengedächtnis”, 1821

The great cloud pioneer Luke Howard (1772-1864) first published on his cloud classifications in his papers “On the Modifications of Clouds and on the Principles of their Production Suspension and Destruction being the Substance of an Essay read before the Askesian¹ Society in the Session 1802-3″ in 1803, launching him from general normal obscurity into the ranks of the internationally known. He had done what Aristotle and many others down the years hadn’t–classified (his “Modifications” of the title of his 11k-word effort) the moving mountains in the sky, making him a Linnaeus/Godfather of clouds, his nomenclature quickly adopted worldwide.

Howard, a pharmacist/chemist/meteorologist² invoked a Latin nomenclature for his classification, which was a very smart idea, as Latin was already Latin (as it were) and didn’t need to face the difficulties and obstructions of being translated into other languages, as was the case with the problematic Lamarckian system introduced just a year earlier which was phrased out in French and which encountered many problems in translation. Howard’s universal nomenclature and his creative and poetic descriptions following deep study and endless sketches³ created a static environment from what was seen as an impossibly dynamic flow of changes in the structure of clouds.

According to the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (the entry written by Richard Hambyn, the only person to write a book on Howard’s naming of clouds), “…he proposed that every cloud belonged to one of three principal families, to which he had given the Latin names: cirrus (meaning “fiber” or “hair”), cumulus (“heap” or “pile”), and stratus (“layer” or “sheet”). In recognition of the essential instability of clouds, Howard also introduced a sequence of intermediate and compound modifications, such as cirrostratus and stratocumulus, in order to accommodate the regular transitions occurring between the cloud types…”

I’ve written about Howard elsewhere on this blog, and he comes back to me today for his odd place in the realm of highly-visual-works-published-without-illustration, or at least the first German language treatment of his work appears so, without benefit of a single image, as with the first of the three iterations of this paper in 1803 in the Philosophical Magazine. (It was in the second paper of 1803 that three images of clouds first appeared.) The paper appeared very quickly in Germany, published as “Ueber die Modification der Wolken” in 23pp in the November 1805 issue (volume 21) of the Annalen der Physik, though without any illustration. (Howard’s “Versuch einer Naturgeschichte und Physik der Wolken” is published in the Annalen in 1815 also without an image, as do three of his other papers; the lone exception is one engraving illustrating his paper on waterspouts in volume 57.) I wonder why the article is unembellished–it is almost in a sense a defeat of the classifying idea, not to have some sort of visual reference for the new taxonomy. Perhaps it was a rush to publish, though if that were the case a return to the paper with engravings in a later issue would have been a good idea. In any event, it was a work that demanded pictures, and even though Howard was an accomplished cloud artist, there was little of that lovely work seen until the “third edition” of his essay appeared in 1832. Aside from the historic difficulty of rendering clouds in art, I do not know why it was the case that the earliest works on clouds passed by largely unillustrated,

No doubt there is room for a work on papers written on highly-visual ideas that should’ve been illustrated but weren’t–that’s partially how I cam to write this post to begin with, being thwarted by a very early call by Heinrich Brandes in the Annalen der Physik (1816, noted by Gerald R. North in the Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences, p. 290) for a system of making weather maps, but published without an example. And in pursuing that I came upon Heinrich Wilhem Dove’s paper “Ueber Barometriche Minima” in the Annalen for 1828 on barometric pressure and the wind (where the wind seems to do a 360 turn generated by falling pressure), the cartographic elements of which were said to be illustrated on a folding engraved plate and though the symbols are there in a pre-non-representational-art sorta way, the map part wasn’t….I mean, there’s just no “amp” to the map, except for a scant reference to a city, and that’s it. Anyway, it is a curious category that I’d rather read about than research.

Here’s the unusual Dove illustration:

Images or no, the work by Howard was immortalized by Goethe, who admired and respected the man, painting clouds in poetry in 1817:

“To find yourself in the infinite,

You must distinguish and then combine;
Therefore my winged song thanks
The man who distinguished cloud from cloud.”

…and then proceeded to describe the main four (of the seven) main cloud types described by Howard:

“STRATUS

When o’er the silent bosom of the sea
The cold mist hangs like a stretch’d canopy;
And the moon, mingling there her shadowy beams,
A spirit, fashioning other spirits seems;
We feel, in moments pure and bright as this,
The joy of innocence, the thrill of bliss.
Then towering up in the darkening mountain’s side,
And spreading as it rolls its curtains wide,
It mantles round the mid-way height, and there
It sinks in water-drops, or soars in air.

CUMULUS

Still soaring, as if some celestial call
Impell’d it to yon heaven’s sublimest hall;
High as the clouds, in pomp and power arrayed,
Enshrined in strength, in majesty displayed;
All the soul’s secret thoughts it seems to move,
Beneath it trembles, while it frowns above.

CIRRUS

And higher, higher yet the vapors roll:
Triumph is the noblest impulse of the soul!
Then like a lamb whose silvery robes are shed,
The fleecy piles dissolved in dew drops spread;
Or gently waft to the realms of rest,
Find a sweet welcome in the Father’s breast.

NIMBUS

Now downwards by the world’s attraction driven,
That tends to earth, which had upris’n to heaven;
Threatening in the mad thunder-cloud, as when
Fierce legions clash, and vanish from the plain;
Sad destiny of the troubled world! but see,
The mist is now dispersing gloriously:
And language fails us in its vain endeavour —
The spirit mounts above, and lives forever.”

(Full text here for the illustrated third edition of 1865. And, yes, this post is not illustrated.)

Notes:

1. “Askesian”, meaning “philosophical exercise”, was “…a practically oriented and largely non-conformist group dedicated to natural and experimental philosophy”. http://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/

2. According to the OED, “meteorology” goes back quite a way as a word, popping up in 1563; “meteoroloician” appears in 1580, and “meteorologist” in 1683.)

3. “The location of many of the sketches gives us an initial hint of their Romanticism. For many years Howard travelled between London and the Lake District in order to capture the full range of what he termed ‘cloud modifications’, training himself in the notoriously difficult art of depicting clouds, of fixing them as they changed “

Howard begins his 1803 paper so:

“If the necessary pursuit If clouds were the mere result of the condensation of var pour in the masses of atmosphere which they occupy if their variations were produced by the movements of the atmosphere alone then indeed might the study of them be deemed an useless pursuit of shadows an attempt to describe forms which being the sport of winds must be ever varying and therefore not to be defined. But however the erroneous admission of this opinion may have operated to prevent attention to them the case is not so with clouds. They are subject to certain distinct modifications produced by the general causes which effect all the variations of the atmosphere they are commonly as good visible indications of the operation of these causes as is the countenance of the state of a person’s mind or body…”

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Naming Things

Author: JF Ptak

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2721