JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Source: Punch, or the London Charivari, October 12, 1878
Author: JF Ptak
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“Look Out!” (1939)
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Look Out! (a WARNING ABOUT PROPAGANDA), Common Sense Talk. This was published by Men of America in 1939, and is a slight, six page publication.
Striking design! And a scarce little bugger!
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How Much it Cost to be a Drug Addict in the 1930’s
I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a list of the personal daily cost of antique drug use, though I did manage to stumble across one in a remarkable little pamphlet by Edward C. Jandy called Narcotic Addiction as a Factor in Petty Larcency in Detroit (published by the Narcotic Committee of the Wayne County Medical Society, et al. in November 1937). There’s a lot packed into its 23 pages, not the least of which is a pretty sophisticated look at how to examine the costs of drug addiction to the sales economy of that city.
One of the interesting historical bits that emerges from it is a list of the daily cost of the addiction of one of the target study groups–a selection of 43 local addicts with a combined 673 years of addiction (averaging an unholy 15.5 years of addiction/person). There are immediate limitations to this info–for example there is no correlation to the number of years of addiction to the individually-reported daily drug costs–but since this data seems to be fairly rare it does at least give some idea of the strain of usage per person. And what does it mean to spend $5/day on your heroin habit? CPI is useful, but it is better to look at what that figure means in terms of the average salary and costs of basic goods. If you were working back there in a bad spot of the Depression in 1937 the average salary was about $1,700/year, which means that if these addicts were working (and the great majority wasn’t) then they would be spending about 1/3% of their annual income per day–or a little more than all of their daily salary–on their everyday habit.
Spending $1,800 a year on drugs on a $1,700 salary leaves not-so-much-room for anything else but crime, and not having any income at all would mean that all of that money would have to be from criminal activities. In another (potentially gross) way of thinking about this expense is by looking at the average salary in 1937 being about 1/30th of what the average American family income is in 2012, so the daily $5 heroin hit would be something like $150 today, which sounds about right. And if you applied that multiplier to some other standard 1937 prices, the numbers are fairly constant from then to now–the big exception being postage stamps (which would be $1.50 for a first class stamp) and gasoline ($6/gallon), both of which would show a decline. Again, that’s a very crude approximation, but it does pause. The author then does some tricky and interesting semi-statistical work with the bottom line showing that drug addicts stole a total of about 3% of the total retail sales (of $545 million) in the U.S. That’s a big number–in today’s economy, which currently stands at about $33 billion in thefts (or 1.5%) that would 3% for just addicts would be an enormous number, twice the national general total which would spike drug losses at $100 billion for theft alone. I’m thinking that these 1937 stats might be a little (or a lot) loose, but it the report still is decently argued and nicely presented though the data might be not-great–and the daily/habit numbers are a fine thing to find.
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“Coming Events Cast Their Shadows Before” (1878)
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
The “coming event” here, as depicted in a satirical bent-future speculative cartoon by the ever-present Linley Sambourne (1844-1910) in the journal Punch in 1878, is electricity. The shadows cast by its own approach are many, and though we don’t have a pre-historic campfire, we do see candles, and a gaslight, and oil lamps, and plain matches, all sadly scurrying their paths away from the sharp War of the Worlds legs of electricity. An interesting bit here is that what is generally seen as the common capstone for the invention of the electric light–with the first practical incandescent light bulb–was achieved by Thomas Edison about a year after this graphic was published. There are numerous inventions of different sorts of electric lights prior to that which Sambourne is no doubt referencing, and he certainly knew enough of his recent history of technology to guarantee that his vision of the importance and standard of electricity for the future was absolutely correct. Source for the idiom in the title:
Lochiel, Lochiel! beware of the day;
For, dark and despairing, my sight I may seal,
But man cannot cover what God will reveal.
‘Tis the sunset of life gives my mystical lore,
And coming events cast their shadows before.
I tell thee Culloden’s dread echoes shall ring
For the bloodhounds that bark for thy fugitive king.–Thomas Campbell, (d. 1844) Loichiel’s Warning, (1802). .
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Found Art in Tin, ca. 1865
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I found this tiny photograph (nearly coverable by a U.S. quarter) quite some time ago, part of a collection of titles that I thought I would turn into an imaginary 19th century mug book, complete with biographies and crime chronologies. It hasn’t happened yet, though I do enjoy looking closely at this images, and their housing. This photo is a tintype–a process invented in the early 1850’s beginning life called melainotype and then ferrotype before coming to be called tintype–which I think was made in 1865-1875, and has a home-made mat that measures 2.5 x 4″ and with the photographic image 1 x 3/4″. While the image of the woman with her hat is interesting in itself, there is a certain distraction of interest in the mat, with its slightly uneven opening cuts and the remnants of the penciled guidelines. The photo is held in place against the mat by two pieces of advertisements–and truth be told I like that nearly as much as the photo on the other side. The Mona Lisa is what it is, of course, but the back of the Mona Lisa’s frame and backing is fascinating in itself.
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Beautiful Screws and Nails, 1888
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
This print is a part of The Growth of Industrial Art collection edited by Benjamin Butterworth (1837-1898) in 1888 (with a second edition published shortly afterwards in the Columbian year 1892). Butterworth compiled the work in his capacity as the Commissioner of Patents (he was also a former three-term Congressman), and he produced an encyclopedic and charming review of American industry and displays it in a series of 200 very busy but well-design images wood engravings. The many industrial product s depicted in this book include harrows, lawnmower, horse rakes, plows, baskets, screws, nails, telephones, gas engines, advertising implements, mining equipment,ice elevators, projectiles, bale tighteners, musical instruments, cigars, bicycles, egg carriers, and many others, with many of the industries now lost to modernity or cheaper overseas labor. My favorites in the collection, I think, are the nails and screws (shown below), mostly for their design and placement as well as their variety.
There is a very appealing display of the full text available at Smithsonian Institution, here: http://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/growthindustria00unit
And of course:
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Found-Surreal Art, Elevated (London, 1876)
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
The difference between first and third class in an elevated train seems to be (1) a chair with arms, (2) a taller hat, and (3) a big moustache. Undoubtedly, there were actual creature comforts, though I suspect first class was meant to accommodate first-class people who would prefer not to be with not-first-class people, and enjoy the extension of that privilege in a comfortable seat.
What attracts me to this image is the way it rubs up against the accoutrements of modernity, looking like a piece of surrealist art. Since the image was printed in 1876 this would be “found-Surrealist art” as the existence of non-representational art was still 35 years away and the man who basically created the Surreal movement in NYC in 1924–Andre Breton–wouldn’t be born for another 20 years. In any event, this is what this looks like to me, a piece of unintentional, out-of-context art with no contemporary name.
[Source, above and below: Scientific American, February 8, 1876. The image above is a cross section of the image below.]
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A Landmark Study in the History of Integration (1953)
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2561
The desegregation of the executive department and the U.S. Army began under Harry Truman in 1948, which for the military was formalized in the Army Reorganization Act of 1950, which called for the end of the need for segregated armed forces. Following the disaster in the Korean War in late 1950 (the Chinese Counteroffensive causing the retreat of U.N. forces south of the Yalu River in November 1950), and finding it difficult to replace soldiers with nothing but white fighting men, the Army began to integrate fighting units by March 1951. The ORO instituted a study in 1951 by a team of five analysts headed by Dr. Alfred Hausrath (a war games researcher) to study the effects of integration, part of which was published in the report “Utilization of Negro Manpower in the Army”1, with the full three-volume publication of the study coming slightly later in 1954. (Two earlier interim reports were issued in July and December 1951.) Basically, after everything was said and done, the Hausrath and his team found that integrated units work much better than segregated units.
The report “provided policymakers in the Army with the objective arguments in favor of integrated units”, and the policy changes for full integration of the Army were issued jsut months after this report was rendered, in July 1951. This document was printed for the first time in a general format for OR folks in 1953. (The term “landmark” was used to describe this paper in Saul Gass’ An Annotated Timeline of Operations Research, an Informal History, page 80.)
- Abstract: “In connection with a basic policy decision by the Army in 1951 on the utilization of Negro manpower, a partly quantitative operations research study was made. Factors affecting the decision to integrate Negroes into previously all-white. Army units included statistics of scores on the Army’s General Classification Test, Negro and white performance in combat, and interactions between Negro and white soldiers as determined from attitudes, opinions, critical incidents, and actual behavior. It is concluded that integrated (white and Negro) units can make more effective use of available manpower than segregated units, that resistance to integration is reduced as experience in integrated units is gained, and that levels of 20 per cent Negroes and more are acceptable. The time required to extend integration to the whole Army is discussed, and difficulties presented in such a manner that a sound program can be devised.” –Operations Research, Informs/Online
Notes:
1. HAUSRATH, Alfred H. “Utilization of Negro Manpower in the Army.” Informal Seminar in Operations Research, 1952-1953, Seminar Paper No. 27. The Johns Hopkins University Operations Research Office (ORO), Baltimore, May 13, 1953.
“Alfred Hausrath, the one-time director of military gaming for the Research Analysis Corporation (RAC), the successor civilian contractor for the Army, recounted the details of a little known simulation developed at the ORO in 1948. (The simulation also served as a model for a Naval anti-aircraft guided missile system.) Staff members of the Applied Physics Laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University worked in conjunction with the ORO in its design. What resulted was a computer game. Hausrath asserted that its successor model, a study of the air defense of North America, which was inaugurated in 1953, was the first computer simulation in the history of operations research. ORO also originated the first digital computer game, CARMONETTE I, (played from 1956-60.)”–this from the very interesting StrategyPage https://www.strategypage.com/wargames/articles/wargame_articles_20049715.asp#_ftn43
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A Peep into Your Personal Future in the Grand Societal Scheme (1938)
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
When I saw the cover for this pamphlet I thought that the “Human Engineering Laboratory” was going to be some sort of Frederick Winslow Taylor thing. It is a little late for that wave of interest (printed in 1939) and then when I saw the imprint (Stevens Institute of Technology) I realized it was going to be something different. And it was–instead of Fordian/Randian/Taylorist functioing of workers this pamphlet turned out to be about vocational aptitude tests. I guess if one thought too hard about this it could fit into the category of the pre-history of robotics in the robots’ history of themselves, the test trying to assess where people will best fit into the giant machinery of society. In the outline of services the pamphlet notes that each test-taker will be charged a $20 fee for the service, plus $10 if the test was taken a second or third time. That was a stiff fee–according to the inflation calculator at the Bureau of Labor Statistics that 20 bucks has the buying power of $321 today–but I guess it may have been worth it to take a peek into the future to see what best thing you might be suited for. Still, that was a lot of money at the end of the Depression to pay for someone to fit you into a grid.
I’m posting this mostly because of the great title.
It also reminds me of another title, though this one is Outsider-y:
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On Two “Crazes” of 1879–Spider Tennis and Umbrella Wings
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
There are of course many popular delusions and crazes that have swept through common cultures for centuries: tulipomania, the South Sea Bubble, miniature golf, Charlie Chaplin, and so on–ideas and bits that somehow became infused into the outer core of societal interest and dug in like a nasty virus, running itself high-octane silly until the gross comical interest ran itself out, leaving the craze to drop and deflate like a dropped-and-deflated craze. Two such pursuits were found illustrated just now in the 1879 volume of Punch, or the London Charivari (printed in London in that year), with the illustrations created by Linley Sambourne, a graphic artist who started at teh satirical weekly in 1867 and stayed for another 43 years.
The first image–though it looked like a baseball and momentarily filled me with hope–regards the tennis craze that evidently was sweeping the country. I say this because there were numerous mentions and illustrations of the topsy-turvey tennis fascination in that 1879 volume, while tennis is virtually absent from succeeding volumes. Anyway Sambourne effectively demonstrates the domination of the sport over, well, a lot of other things:
Ditto the umbrella–there was a lot of fuss about it in this volume, reaching a high point perhaps with this illustration of the thing reaching its highest state of perfection: allowing people to fly:
