Author: JF Ptak

The Soviet Union’s Statement on Being Attacked by Germany, July 8, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2715

It is hard to criticize the Soviets when they were at their post WWI weakest, but I needed to point out a few, well, inconsistencies in the following statement by Maxim Litvinov. The text is that of a radio address by the mega-connected and high profile Russian revolutionary and People’s Commissar of the USSR, and it was delivered on July 8, 1941. At this point Litvinov (1876-1951)–who would in a few weeks become the Soviet Ambassador to the United States–was addressing the weeks-old attack and declaration of war made upon the U.S.S.R. by Nazi Germany.

It was a terrible and nearly mortal blow to the state, and Hitler’s vast overreach very nearly came to be. Still there were some bits in the address that were difficult to absorb.

For example Litvinov states: “Hitlerite Germany’s treacherous attack on the peaceful Soviet Union in face of the Non-aggression Pact…” The Soviets did indeed sign a hands-off/so-no-evil Non-Aggression Pact (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) with the Nazis in August 1939 and enjoyed the fruits of that special relationship, the two nations dividing conquered border states according to each other’s “sphere of influence”. So, this pact was “peaceful” only so far the U.S.S.R. is concerned, and not so peaceful for other nations.

Then this: “The Soviet Government was almost first to realize the danger of Nazi aggressiveness…”, which seems hard to acknowledge when they shared a non-aggression pact/treaty in the early stages of WWII.

Then the “veritable miracles of heroism” of the Red Army is “bearing the whole of Hitler’s powerful war machine and compelling him to transfer more and more forces from West to East”. I will not doubt heroism of fallen soldiers in a near lost cause effort, and it is true that the Germans would half- or mostly-exhaust themselves in the East, maybe more than that, probably, probably costing Hitler far more than he could ever have conceived. Stalin had already murdered his way through a large swath of the Soviet command structure, and was also unwilling to recognize that the Nazi attack was in fact the Real Thing. Stalin hesitated, and went incognito a little, and in general did not know what to do; he did come to his senses in short order, but a great amount of damage had already been done to Soviet defenses, and that would nearly cost him the country. But it didn’t, and the U.S.S.R. rallied, and at the cost of millions of lives killed the Germany armies in the East, and really was responsible for contributing in large part to the defeat of Nazism.

“Thanks to this the English people are enjoying a certain respite after twelve months of incessant bombardment…”, which was true to some degree.

“Each blow struck now is ten times as effective and entails infinitely less expenditure and sacrifice than if it is delivered when anyone [sic] of his adversaries becomes weaker”.

And so on.

I’ve reproduced the 4-page document below.

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Militaria
A Fine and Seldom Seen Map from “PM” Newspaper: 1944

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Here’s a fine, nearly full-page (12″ tall) map that appeared in the great and now elusive newspaper, PM, showing the Allied advance into Germany , October 17, 1944. (I have written numerous times here about this newspaper–just search “PM” in the Google box at right for a number of other posts and a short history of the paper.) The Allied forces here are nearly into Germany, nearly at the end of their victorious battle at Aachen (Oct 2-21), and pushing up against what was about the last line of defense for Germany, the Westwall (the older Siegfied Line). The Ardennes sits in the middle of this map, waiting for its own major action at the end of the year, which was the final German counter offensive, and the beginning of the end of the European war.

We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line.
Have you any dirty washing, mother dear?
We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line
‘Cause the washing day is here.
Whether the weather may be wet or fine
We’ll just rub along without a care.
We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line
If the Siegfried Line’s still there …

((Kennedy/Carr) Peter Maurice Music Co Ltd 1939)

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Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas — Militaria
The Steel Tree of Sheffield, ca. 1935

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I really should have kept track of this genre of design, the “tree of ______”, as I’ve encountered this iconic method of data visualization probably dozens of times, though I’ve only collected fewer than ten of them. The tree designs are relatively ancient, as with Porphyrys tree ( a hierarchical organizer based upon the then Aristotlean categories like substance, quantity, relation, quality, doing, undergoing, place where, time when, position and having), the standard and famous tree of Darwin and Haeckel, scientific organizing schemes (like the tree of the history of computers), as well as advertising vehicles (like Steinkohle of Essen’s tree of the derivatives of gas and coal and coke) and bits to display ideas good and bad (like the eugenic tree of human evolution, looking for their converts). In any event, I’d say that this design has been used hundreds of times, if not more.

This evening’s sample comes from a heavy and slick publication for “Sheffield Week”, showcasing producers in that city and surrounding area, and printed about 1935. There are many ads from manufacturers and sellers, and this example is one of them. Hadfields Ltd., which produced a lot of heavy goods, many of the genres of which are the heavy limbs of this heavy tree:

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Technology, History of
A Penetrating Appraisal of Hitler, 1934
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“Ernst Henri” (a probable pseudonym?) wrote Hitler Over Europe in 1934–it is a very insightful appraisal of Nazism written early in the history of the newly-presiding party of German politics and life. This book was published in 1934 by Simon and Shuster and translated by Michael Davidson, and then published in Argentina and China the following year, and then in England by Dent in 1936. (I’ve checked WorldCat/OCLC and find the printing history a little confusing, but I think that this is about right–also there are more than 240 copies located in libraries worldwide, which means that it is or was a popular title.)

It is in the very first paragraph (below), where you can easily see that the author is using high octane.

It is interesting to set this appraisal of Hitler’s background and politics against the great Dorothy Thompson’s insights into the man when she interviewed him in 1932…and read him right and then very wrong. (“He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones,” she wrote. “He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man. A lock of lank hair falls over an insignificant and slightly retreating forehead. . . .The nose is large, but badly shaped and without character. His movements are awkward, almost undignified and most un-martial. . . .The eyes alone are notable. Dark gray and hyperthyroid—they have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics…There is something irritatingly refined about him. I bet he crooks his little finger when he drinks a cup of tea.”–quote from Historynet.com http://www.historynet.com/encounter-dorothy-thompson-underestimates-hitler.htm)

Henri, whoever he was, seems to have clenched his fist around the heart of Nazism. The book is at least worth a good solid browse:
- The full text, Hitler Over Europe, can be found at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/hitlerovereurope009891mbp?q=%22Ernst+henri%22+hitler
“Thyssen”

“WHO sent Hitler?”

“Many believe that it was the German middle class, that
forgotten social force, which nobody thought about and
which suddenly, in a rapid awakening, burst on to the
political scene and smashed everything around it. So it
seemed from without. This is an illusion.”
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Militaria — Social History
On “Long” and “Short” Time in the History of Modern Computers

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2714

The history of computing, at its inception, could have its fluidity measured in decades, beginning, say with Babbage; by the time of the earliest large machines (1945-1955) computer time could be measured by less than a decade, and probably half of that. In the 1960s the computer year could be measured, finally, in single years. After that, after microminiaturization, and the personal computer, the year of currency started to be measured in months. And then, of course, the year really sped up–I’m not sure if there is only a week or two in the year, now; maybe the year of progress in 1955 is today measured in days, or hours. I suspect that this will all continue to get faster, as it has been only 70 years or so that the computer world started to bulk up; I imagine that the changes that will come in 2087 will have us looking at least as “quaint” as 1947 looks to us.

And how far back is “way back”, or “waaay back”, in terms of (computer) history? I’ve written earlier in this blog about going deep into history in various disciplines, but perhaps in no discipline is time so compacted than in the computer sciences. Mr. Peabody would probably agree (though he wasn’t a very agreeable person), finding that in terms of other big leaps into the past that to go “way back” in his “way back machine” to get chronologically deep in computer history wouldn’t take very much at all.

Anyway, some of these senses of time and how only 50 years ago seems like much longer can be seen in the bits and pieces of computer science ephemera. Looking into the “archives” here I found a document from the beginning of the first tweaks of mass professionalism in sompsci. This draft of the constitution and bylaws of the Association for Computing Machinery (the ACM) was complete in only four pages, including the data on the establishment of its members, officers, executive committee, meetings, bylaws, meetings–the whole deal, in four pages.

The document is undated, but as far as I can determine, I believe that this document was printed in 1953, soon after the ACM dropped the “Eastern” that used to appear as the first word in the title of the organization, and after it moved to 2 East 63rd St

Its quite a quietly, unspectacular spectacular thing, seeing what would become a vast organization be summed up in its infancy on two sheets of folded paper.

1954 is extremely deep in the history of electronic calculation–it is three years before Backus et alia created FORTRAN, five years before the integrated circuit was created, eight years before the first compsci department is established at Purdue, eleven years before the first Ph.D. is awarded in computer sci from a computer science department (Wexelblatt), and fourteen years before the first woman (Liskov) earned a Ph.D.(whose dissertation was A Program to Play Chess Endgames) in the field. All of which sounds like ancient history, but almost all of which takes place during my own lifetime, which doesn’t make it sound so terribly “ancient”.

But looking at this ephemera on membership and dues and voting on the Constitution for the Association for Computing Machinery certainly makes it seem as though so–the voting and bylaws ballot is a few mimeographed pages long and is hand-stapled at the top, the announcements for meetings fits on one sheet of paper, and Edmund C. Berkeley is hand signing his initials on pleas for new subscribers to his Computers and Automation journal. Everything looks so fresh and new and uncomplicated–and that’s because it was, relative to what we experience now. In 1954 there weren’t 10,000 people working in the field of computing; 63 years later the growth in involvement of people working in the field is at least three orders of magnitude more, the growth in the sheer volume of printed and digitally-circulated material is probably somewhere on the order of the differences between post-Gutenberg European printing and the printing industry in the year 1990. The changes are tremendous, and they seem to be so much more appreciable when one looks at the foundation efforts from the early years.

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Computer Tech/History
A Map of an Early Electronic Brain (1948)

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This is the floor plan for the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, b. 1943-45) which was, basically, the world’s first operational, high-speed digital computer, and (about) marked the beginning of the next stage of technological revolution. What we see above is the floor plan for the computer-with-no-monitor—I know to most people working today with a computer that the idea of a “floor plan” for anything that is not in a dark place at NSA is not easily conceivable. The 30-ton, 18,000 tube, 125 KHz ENIAC’s space was about 1800 square feet, where it was able to add about 5000 numbers/second, which was vastly faster than anything else in existence. It operated with 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 5 million hand-soldered joints and 6,000 manual switches. It was a magnificent achievement.

[Source: J.G. Brainerd & T.K. Sharpless. “The ENIAC.” Article occupying pp 163-172 of the February 1948 issue of Electrical Engineering. ]

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Computer Tech/History — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas
People in the NYC Skyline (1937)

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There are many photographic souvenir publications for New York City, but there are very few that are so interested in including people in their many city landscape images as Illustrated Souvenir of New York (1937). It is attractively bound–or at least it has a more complicated binding than most of these publications–which was something that attracted my attention. In any event, it turns out that there are quite a few unusually-social images for a publication meant to concentrate on tourists’ high points of a visit to NYC, a few of which I’m including below.

One of my favorites from the series is a montage of people in the Manhattan skyline–this seems a little unusual for the period, though I’ve encountered this sort of image before (a few examples of which you can find on this blog by searching people/skyline). The title for the image is a little odd –“blood and steel, ambition, brains and glamour New York”–and has a bit of a train-wreck flavoring, along with a taste of Prussia (as in the “Blut und Eisen”/”Blood and Steel” speech of von Bismarck in 1862):

[Detail]

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Photography
Graphic Design in “PM” Newspaper, September 1944

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Here’s another noteworthy, unusual, and most likely very seldom seen display of data from the excellent PM newspaper, this published September 1, 1944. (I’ve made numerous posts to this blog on PM–for more information, just search the name of the newspaper in the Google search box at right.) The larger image below measures about 5″x5″ in the original; the “Nazi supermen” image directly below is only about 1.5’x3″, and really does make a strong graphical point about the demise of the German army in northern France. This is reporting good news to the readers, though it was hardly the true end of the story in that region–three months later, on 16 December, the Germans would begin Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein (“Operation Watch on the Rhine”), their last push against the Allied forces in the West. To the Allies this attack was known as the Ardennes Counteroffensive, and would last until 25 January, ending in disaster for the German forces.

Bottom line here is that the design is very compelling.

And another, larger image:

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria
Cancer and the Psychology of Buying Stuff

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2713

When John Watson began his radio talk on NBC on January 12, 1932, on “How to Grow a Personality”, he meant it…literally and figuratively. Watson (1878-1958) is considered to be one of the founders of psychological school of behaviorism, which stated simply is the theory that all of human and animal behavior is derived or implied or controlled by “conditioning” or the stuff that happens to/in-and-around the being, and that emotions and thinking (such as they are) have little or nothing to do with forming the response to a stimulus. He claimed that he could train 12 infants to become 12 different sorts of people–lawyer, doctor, engineer, thief, etc.–if given access to training the infants/children–he never got too terribly close to doing that, though he did with a human experiment with the infamous case of “Little Albert”, which is a sodden story of questionable ethics.

In the case of personality, Watson defines it so: “Your personality at any age is just a cross-section of the things you can do at that age. There is nothing mysterious about it–it is just a steady growth coming out of your past.” And evidently that means that you can grow your personality by growing the things that you can do, thus training yourself by the stuff you can get done. Sounds a little circuitous and has a strong scent of a napping carny in a big sweaty revival tent, but it did pass great psychological barriers, as Watson is held in very high regard in the history of 20th century American psychology.

This is no doubt a rude and crude assessment, but so it goes.

One thing is without doubt–he did figure out how to create a “demand” for something. After he was fired from his post at Johns Hopkins (for having an affair that resulted in an enormously popularized divorce trial) Watson took himself and his intellectual toolkit and began work at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. He put his two decades of experimental research to hard use, and “discovered” that he could make something desirable by making it familiar and memorable, selling more a positive memory of (or surrounding) a particular thing more so than teh need or use for the thing itself. One example of the use of his behavioral talents was in selling cigarettes. Billions of them. In keeping with his idea, he created a tremendously repeated slogan for a cigarette, and found that he could basically sell the thing wrapped in its memory/slogan layers. The product was Camel ciggies, and the slogan was “I’d walk a mile for a Camel”. The slogan could’ve been for Cigarette X, or a rope, or a hammer, or sugar, or whatever–the object didn’t matter; only the environment and landscape created for it did.

So there’s that.

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Anticipation, History of — Psychology
Weekly People, 1942–definitely Not “People Magazine”

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I have developed a sort-of collection in the History of Blank and Empty Things series of not-filled-in applications and diaries and questionnaires and such, from Hitler Jugend diaries to notebooks for Nazi Warsaw telephone directories to applications for membership in the Women’s KKK, and so on. This small installment comes on the back inside cover of Labor Conscription, What Does it Mean…Involuntary Servitude!, a hopeful ad for the reader who might be interested in Socialism and receive the magazine People Weekly, as this far Left pamphlet was after all published by the New York Labor News Company on behalf of the Socialist Labor Party U.S.A. This of course in no way bears any resemblance to the modern People Magazine, the fruits and labor of that periodical being sweets and fats.

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Books–Great Cover Art — Social History

Author: JF Ptak

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