JF Ptak Science Books

A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

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Author: JF Ptak

  • A Tunnel Long in the Making (1881)

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    This is an interesting addition to the collection (though not designated as a category) of several dozen cross section/tomographic/cutaway technical and medical illustration posts to this blog, though this one has a more complicated and perhaps more tragic history than most. It depicts work being done on the ill-fated Hudson River tubes, which began life as a project in 1874 with construction starting in 1878; unfortunately there were at least three different companies that undertook the difficult project before going bust, and there was also one major disaster in 1883 in which more than 20 workers were killed.  The project got underway for the final time in 1899, and was opened to traffic in 1908.  In the top image workmen are installing a shielding that would later be abandoned, working I think via one electric spark lamp at upper left; below we see a casson in which a number of laborers were, that being sunk lower and lower as the excavations proceed.  

    These two images are about-life size from when they appeared in Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig), on 29 January 1881–though they no doubt appeared a few months earlier in Harper’s Weekly or Scientific American or some such.  

    Cross section tunnel Hudson 1881

     

    Cross section tunnel Hudson 1881 _2_

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  • A Big Head of Nothing (1865)

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    This advertisement to subscribe to the Phrenological Journal appeared in November, 1865, with promises of profuse understanding of the connection of the nervous and mental life and its connection to, well, bumps on the head. There was also the promise of higher intellectual life by infusing the journal with devotion to psychology, ethnology, physiology, and of course physiognomy. It is interesting to note that four of the five endorsements come from religious newspapers, G_d knows why.

    American Agriculturalist 1865 phreology detail

     

    American Agriculturalist 1865 phreology

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  • Striking Unintentional Proto-Modernist Image (1853)

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    I thought to share this image, a detail of an engraved plate illustrating and article by the I-can-do-anything David Brewster, “On the Optical Phaenomena of Tourmaline, &c., within Mica and other Minerals”, appearing in the Philosophical Magazine for 1853 (plate opposite page 185). I believe it is a magnification of titanium set in mica: “…the transparent groups are much more beautiful than the opake ones, the crystalline ramifications having the most diversified forms, resembling often regular organizations (page 265).

    The detail:

    Phil Mag 1853 detail

    And the full engraving:

    Phil Mag 1853

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  • Extreme Results of an Extremist Populist Presidential Candidate (1872)

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    So thought the great Thomas Nast, who in his enormous endeavors at Harper’s Weekly drew this political statement as a small corner-filler for the weekly issue of October 12, 1872. The fear for him was the resurrected Phoenix of Tammany Hall and the K.K.K. as a result of electing Horace Greeley to the presidency of the U.S., and he was no effort in making his statement with any nod to the subtle. We can clearly see the characteristics of each group emblazoned on the wings of the Phoenix–less visible in the background are the ruins of the “Colored orphan asylum” and “school houses”, targets of the despicable Klan. The election was only weeks away at this point, and Greeley was running as a splinter Liberal Republican, and was trounced by Ulysses Grant in the electoral college. As it turns out, Greeley would be dead three weeks later. 

    Nast 1872 CSA Tammany

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  • Varieties of Victory–Being Prepared for the Victor of the Philippine Presidential Election of 1946

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    Here we have two versions of a press release prepared for U.S. High Commission to the Philippines for congratulating the victor of the Philippine presidential election of April 23, 1946.  The first notes that Manuel Roxas (the actual winner) had conceded, while the second did the same for the incumbent Sergio Osmena, who served as the fourth president of the Philippines from 1944-1946. Each is one page long and contains numerous manuscript additions and corrections. “President Manuel Roxas was inaugurated as the 5th President of the Philippines and the first president of the Third Republic on July 4, 1946 at the Independence Grandstand (now Quirino Grandstand), Manila.”–wiki

    No doubt this was a sensible preparation.

    There is also a cover note for the day before the election “Tomorrow the ballots will be counted” and marked in pencil “for release Tuesday AM papers”. “Tomorrow there will be no more Roxasistas and Osmenistas”, it reads, “only Philippine citizens”.  

     

    • From the estate of David Katcher, who served as a Public Relations Assistant to High Commissioner Paul McNutt in Manila, Philippines during and just after WWII. He later went on to be the founding editor of the journal Physics Today and served as a senior policy analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology.

    Philippine letter _1_

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  • Map of Rivers and Waterfalls, 1851

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    Maps Rivers Waterfalls981

    • “Die Stromsysteme der Erde.”  In von Humboldt, Kosmos, 1851. 

    Before the Neil deGrasse Tyson version and update of Carl Sagan’s landmark television series, Cosmos, there was Alexander von Humboldt and his enormously influential book of the same title, printed in 1845-1862.  Well, von Humboldt’s (1769-18591) book was actually Kosmos when published in German, which is where it started its life (and which von Humboldt suffered mightily for in it English translation), and in which this map appears.  Von Humboldt was enormously studied and educated and of a high scientific mind over many subjects, one of those 19th century figures who seemed as though they could know everything, a polymath of high order (along the lines of Goethe and von Helmholtz and Thomas Young and others).  He was a meteorologist and biogeographer before those sciences existed; a naturalist, geographer, archaeologist, and explorer, a natural philosopher of magnitudes.

    Kosmos reflected his lifelong interest in order, and what he did was astonishing–he attempted to unifying the complexities of nature in one book (of five volumes), binding the various branches of science together in a cohesive whole, attempting to show how the laws of the universe acted here on Earth.  It was a very influential work, very progressive, a masterwork of scientific method.  Kosmos.

     Maps--River system

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  • You-Are-There View from Charleston Harbor, Fort Sumter, 1863

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    Here’s an unusual and somewhat startling point of view from the Civil War–the target of Fort Sumter, Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, (probably for the attack of 7 April 1863).  I assume that this was first published in Harper’s Weekly, though my copy is found in The Soldier in Our Civil War, Volume II, page 173, (1878) which is spilling over with reprints from Harper’s.  There wasn’t very much of Ironclad Weehawken that was above the water, most of its 200′ and crew of about 70 being below the water line. This view is from an observation port on the turret of the ship, and  it looks like you’re looking down a well because the iron armor of the turret was 11″ thick.  The first attack that the Weehawken participated in was in April, 1863, though that was a pretty distinct failure; after repairs, the ship was in the Charleston theater for pretty much the rest of its career, which lasted until December 1864, when she sunk from what seems to be a problem developed by being overloaded with heavy ordnance. In any event, it is a very interesting you-are-there perspective, rare in my experience.

    Charleston Harbor Weehaken

     

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  • Shooting an Eclipse in Turkey, 1894

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    Astronomy shooting an eclipse

    I came across this interesting image in L’Astronomie, revue mensuelle d’Astronomie Populaire, published in Paris in 1894, and edited by the  profoundly busy Camille Flammarion. The description and image is credited to the French author/adventurer Pierre Loti, and it describes the Turks of Constantinople shooting at the Moon (” Les Turcs tirent des coups de feu sur notre satellite”) in observance of the the fight of light versus darkness exemplified no doubt by the constellation Draco, the dragon, or Ouroboros, or serpent consuming itself, or some such.  During an eclipse it was believed going into the dim past that Draco was consuming the sources of light, and that in order to stop it from doing so observers would make as much noise as possible to scare the thing away.  Loti notes that this practice probably  has been observed since the time of The Prophet, though it is probably older than that.

    I’ve never seen an image depicting people shooting at the Moon with rifles (there are some famous examples of this with the first motion picture version of Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon) and so I’m sharing it–perhaps someone out there will help with the deeper interpretation of what is going on.  

    • “L’une des dernières éclipses de Lune a été l objet d une observation d un genre spécial à Constantinople par M Pierre Loti l élégant auteur de Madame Chrysanthème, auquel nous devons le dessin fort original reproduit ici. Les Turcs tirent des coups de feu sur notre satellite pour le délivrer du Dragon qui le ronge antique dragon astrologique qui a laissé des vestiges dans les signes astronomiques modernes mêmes nœud période draconitique etc. La dernière éclipse a sans doute été l objet d une cérémonie du même genre chez les disciples de Mahomet….”–Populaire Astronomie, pg 17.

     

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  • Hate Movements: the German-American Bund (1936)

    JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2672

    WWII German American BundAwake and Act! Aims and Purposes of the German American Bund, an Appeal to all Americans of German Stock, Published in New York, N.Y.  by Deutscher Weckruf und Beobachter in 1936. 

    Fritz Julius Kuhn was president of the German American Volksbund and a nasty, hateful character who worked in service of National Socialism in the United States. He wound up in trouble and in jail for mishandling funds, and once the U.S. got into the war, he found himself arrested as an enemy alien and sent to spend time in the interment camp on Ellis Island. He was kicked out of the country, and then arrested again by U.S. Occupation Forces and sent to Dachau in 1947 as part of the Denazification effort of Gen. Lucius D. Clay. Of course Dachau wasn’t the Dachau of Kuhn’s idol, so he unfortunately did not experience the camp of his intentions. He died in 1951, and that was that. Provenance: the Library of Congress, the pamphlet being a gift from the Bund.

    In 1936 Kuhn wasn’t yet interested in taming the U.S. for the Nazis, though he was interested in protecting it from the greatest evil of mankind–Communism.. Actually, it turns out to be Bolshevism, but the controlling power to this is”the war battalions of the Jewish capitalists of the stock exchange” which was “the international (J)ewish attack of world Marxism”, which he said is what was attacking Germany, presently. There’s a lot more of this rhetoric in the pamphlet…actually, that is all there is in it, this sort of language, written by a non-native speaking chemist walking in Hitlerian glory and not all that smart. He was smart enough though in his rants, and tirades, and his anger was such that he was able to get 20,000 people to attend a rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939 where amidst his adjectival malignancies he ranted against “Franklin Delano Rosenfeld” and his “Jew Deal”, much like the language used in someone else’s beloved Ezra Pound’s traitorous broadcasts from Italy during the war. This was the straw that broke the stinking fascist’s back, though, terminally pissing off Mayor Laguardia who went after Kuhn’s taxes and found fraud and embezzlement. And so off he went.  But not before ruining the memories of those people who witnessed their friends become engorged by his wrath and hatred, a ruined man with ruinous ideas who ruined people. 

    • Specifics: 23x15cm, and 7pp.  Very surprisingly there are only two copies located in the WorldCat/OCLC, with one in the NYPL system and the other in the University of Texas system. I figured that there would be a lot of them–looking around now, there aren’t, so it seems.  

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  • On the Job in 1874

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    NYC arch lonesome cop

    This post really doesn’t have anything to do with anything–it is just an interesting image of a newly constructed building capturing a sense of  its solemn activity ornamented in heaviness, intersected by one guy (perhaps a watchman) who is standing there at the intersection of Nothing & Everything.  [Source: New York Sketchbook of Architecture, James Osgood, NY, 1874.]

    NYC architecture

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