JF Ptak Science Books

Ocean-Crossing Floating Airports Across the Atlantic, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 903

This short shelf-lived idea was that of Edward R. Armstrong (1880-1955), who in 1927  first published his plan for a series of 1200’x200’ floating platforms for refueling and whatnot for transcontinental flights.  These five-acre stations—named the “Langley” in honor of Samuel Pierpont Langley¹-- would be placed every 375 miles across the ocean.  It doesn’t look like a very practical (or good) idea, but Armstrong received a $750,000 piece of development change from du Pont and GM, which was major dollars in 1929. 

 

Armstrong’s idea would get major play in the popular press from time-to-time, his project renamed “The Seadrome” and discussed as a series of floating islands.  Armstrong himself would organize the Seadrome Ocean Dock Corp. in the late 1930’s, his pretty but enormously impractical idea (reported by Time Magazine² in 1933 as little more than “a perennial gift to Sunday feature editors”)  finally grinding to a salty end with greater fuel capacity and efficiency in transatlantic aircraft. 

An even worse idea appeared in the pages of Science and Mechanics in 1936:

 
Notes:

1. A Time Magazine article published 28 October 1929 [a day before the market crashed!] about the Langley oddly states that Langley was the “designer of the plane which, except for accidents, might have flown before the Wrights' plane did in 1903”.  Tough potatoes. What the magazine didn’t state was that Langley, who was the president of the Smithsonian Institution at the time with access to major money and benefactors simply went about the flight problem incorrectly, and produced an airplane (or “aerodrome”, as he called it) that did not and would not fly. Not flying because of accidents means, well, not flying.  The Wrights’ approach to problem solving was elegant and beat Langley by miles.  Langley deserves credit for his other (many) achievements, but not for this aircraft.

 

This same article only references Armstrong as a “swarthy engineer”.

The article is reprinted below.

 

History of the Future: Space Cannon Moon Flights Yield Jelly People?(1936)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 899

The Babel-like tower pictured below is a still from the movie Things to Come (1936), an adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Shape of Tings to Come (1931).  (Wells' himself wrote the screenplay a few years before the movie appeared.)  The story is a history of the period from 1936 to 2054, including a devastating war that begins in December 1940 (complete with major air assault, poison gases and so on), followed by plague and destruction for another forty years, after which there is a confrontation between two classes of remaining humans, with big doses of New World Order, Technocracy, Fascism and glimmers of hope of science and technology saving the future.  There's a lot that happens in the story, but the part I'm most interested in comes towards the end of the film and depicts a space gun for launching a massive capsules to the Moon--in this case, a capsule containing two "starred-crossed lovers".

We are told that the launching apparatus--the "gun"--is 1500 feet tall, which iterates out to a 750'  base and which also makes the capsule about 75'.  That's impossibly massive firepower. (Don't forget that somebody had to construct the 1700' tower next to the gun that lifted the capsule into position, for some reason lowering the thing down the barrel.)

In the history of big guns, this would be about the most massive ever constructed in the sci fi world so far as I can tell. In the real world, the Kaiser Wilhelm gun (or "Paris Gun", the Kaiser Wilhelm Geshutz) was a long-barreled, light shelled monster: its 92' long barrel (plus a 20' extension) launched a 94kg shell about 130 km, reaching a maximum height of 40km (about 25 miles) high. For all of its mass (the gun weighed 256 tons without the railway cars) the shell that it fired didn't weight much at all....though the shell did reach an extreme height. (Ironically, the gun was built for attacking the deepest of the deep bunkers of the fortresses along the Maginot Line; it was never needed for that, as the Maginot Line was simply left behind in the Nazi assault on France.)

The Schwerer Gustav was a 1350 ton beast which fired a 14,000 pound shell (!) about 20 miles. A  little later came the Nazi V-3 (the lesser known of the V-weapons), the Vergeltungsewaffe 3, a 130 metre (!) long, 150mm gun built along the side of a hill, launching a 140 kg shell. The Iraqi Big Babylon gun was sort of like this one, though never built--it was to have a 500' barrel and would be supported by a hillside. 

Getting back to the unfortunate Well's space gun: this thing was supposed to fire a 75' capsule which must've weighed in excess of 10,000 pounds (easy, what with supply and fuels and so on, plus the structural weight) straight up (!!) and somehow reach escape velocity of 11.2 km/s, piercing the exosphere some 400 miles high or thereabouts (or 1.5 orders of magnitude higher than the Paris Gun).  I cannot intuitively imagine the tremendous explosion necessary to achieve this goal, although it could be figured out pretty easily.  Back of the napkin figuring tells me that the speed of the capsule exiting the gun's barrel would place the occupants in the vicinity of something like 450Gs--that's more than ten times the lethal amount of force that a human can withstand.  I'm not sure what happens to a person at 450Gs--I do know that it wouldn't be pretty.  Anyway, none of this part of the space travel section of the movie wasn't pretty....except for the props, which I like, and which can be seen in the clip below.

Overall I think that this would make a lovely physics problem for discussion in a high school classroom. 

Things to come: 10; 1936-2037

The Invasion of America, 19?? (1935 Scenario for Invasions via Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 898

(This is a continuation of the Invasion of America series, started here.)

Even before WWII,   the American military and variously-aligned think-tank subsidiaries had for years hypothesized U.S. invasion scenarios.  For convenience’s sake, they were color-coded so as to not confuse one invadee with another: for example, there were War Plan Citron (an invasion of Brazil); War Plan Emerald (intervention in Ireland); War Plan Green (war with Mexico); War Plan Indigo (an invasion of Iceland); War Plan Lemon (an invasion of Portugal); War Plan White: (plan for dealing with civil disturbances cause by Communist insurgents), and many others. (I cannot find the color-coded plan for the 20^th century invasion of Canada, but it did exist.)

Lesser known are the U.S. military’s preparation for the invasion of America.

This two-page spread (all that I have of a longer article) appeared in Fortune Magazine for September 1935.  It was undoubtedly generated by a number of causes, not the least of which was the rearming of Nazi Germany (referred to in this article as a ‘miracle”), which could theoretically cause some amount of concern in semi-fortress America.  It was also an opportunity for Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur to whip up a little hell in Congress for the federal government to give the military some more money so that there was more to the “fortress” part of America than two oceans. 

Basically the plan seems to call for a standing, ready army of specialist forces that were agile and highly trained, a large network, of anti-aircraft batteries and detection areas, and of course a large buildup of the Army Air Force.  All of this of course cost money, and almost all o fit would’ve been directed towards MacArthur and his subordinates. (It is interesting and odd to note that the Fortune article notes that three of the top four major general assistants to MacArthur were Irish (“see the four big shots…with three Irish names”).)

[Due to difficulties in the size of this map I have to present it in three sections, but I’m sure that the overall flavor will be maintained.] 

The most prominent feature (besides the black invasion routes) are the terribly antiquated (even for 1936?) depictions of coastal defense canons.  Perhaps this was disingenuous to include them with such flair, what with the main point of the article lending itself towards air invasion, but there they are, protecting the American coastline from a ripping adventure from the sea. 

But as we can see the successful invasion routes are coming from odd places—from Alaska, Canada, the Caribbean) against which the U.S. seemingly had no defense.  This was especially true in the Pacific Northwest (“here defense system is weak”) where America was entirely susceptible to attack and invasion “from army basing in Alaska”.  The rest of the west coast didn’t fair so well, though the only other direct threat was from “25,000 able-bodied male Japanese…Californians suppose they have secret arms and drill at night in dark halls”.

The southwestern and southern California areas were relatively secure, except in the case of an enemy capturing Mexico; then, “an attack here would almost certainly be launched, in conjunction with one against San Antonio”.  I guess there would be long intrigue, much preparation and enormous effort to attack and secure Mexico, and I’m assuming that the thinkers behind constructing this map assumed that the U.S. would be doing nothing during this prolonged period of time. 

The attack on America in the Gulf would ostensibly come from Mexico and “an enemy basing in the Caribbean”, with a central interest in Birmingham and Norfolk.  But the main thrust coming to the U.S. from unnamed horribleness would be coming through the St. Lawrence and points east in Canada, swooping down on Lake Champlain, the Mohawk Valley, Troy, Buffalo and Detroit.  I know that there were bigger industrial concerns in these places in 1936 than there are now, but, well, my god there would be better places to begin an attack on the U.S. than from Montreal and Toronto.

In all of this I see that the industrial northeast is left alone, save for a “feint” attack to dislodge resources and attention away from the movement against the Virginia coast. There’s the navy yard and industry and shipping and etc. there, but it would seem a terrible waste to attack here rather than a much juicer and more northerly series of prizes. 

No attacker is named in what I own of this article, and there is a very curious absence of any threat coming from the already-warring Japan (save for the Japanese super secret nighthawks in San Fran).  The article does make a case—apart from the map—that national defense was at a low ebb insofar as manpower and ordnance were concerned.  But it scoots around the issue of the war of Japan against China and the vast militarization of the Nazis.  (Of course, this is Fortune magazine, and Krupp and Hoechst and other German firms, and Standard Oil, and the Bank for International Settlement, and Ford, and SKF, and etc. abetting the Nazi war machine were doing some nice business in the U.S., so perhaps it would’ve been best not to make Nazi money upset with some bad press.)

Taking all sorts and manner of considerations into account, this is just simply a miserable attempt to reckon what the future might bring to America in the hands of unlabeled enemies—it is simply a rousing caroling of general fear of attack from places unknown. 

Bad Dirigibles and Balloons from Good Thinkers: Thaddeus Lowe, Konstantin Tsiolkowsky and Dr. Seuss

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 896

Tonight’s inspiration comes from one of my daughter Tess’ bedtime stories, Dr. Seuss’ Oh, the Thinks you can Think—particularly one of the fantastic illustrations, this one showing a swimming pool balloon.  I’ve seen some interesting images of balloons and dirigibles taken as serious efforts that reminded me of that double-page spread by the good Doctor.  

In July, 1931 Konstantin Zilkowsky’s sheet metal dirigible appeared in Modern Mechanics (this image from the fabulous Modern Mechanix.com website, cropped), looking a lot like the mountain and its imagined whale looked like to Herman Melville at his Arrowhead home. 

 

This may have been the Omega end of bad ideas in the career of Zilkowsky, who is better known by the other spelling of his name, Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1835), a Russian misanthrope and space pioneering genius who wrote more than 500 works on rocketry and exploration including what is arguably the first tech word ever done in the field (in 1903, The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices). Tsiolkovsky somehow lasted through purges and Stalinist tirades, while few of his colleagues did—many mysteriously disappeared, while others went to prison and disappeared there.  (Stalin’s crude and insatiable blood lust, perhaps the worst of the century, knew no bounds, not even to the scientists who could conceivably hand him reigns of rocket/missile-propelled power.)  Anyway, Tsiolkovsky’s dirigible was composed of a collapsible metal so that the aircraft could form its own hangar when “docked”.  I don’t know where to begin with this one…

The second (among many other possibilities) is the ship-balloon of Thaddeus Lowe (1832-1913) One of Lowe’s great contributions in the history of ballooning was providing aerial reconnaissance via (panoramic) photographs to the Union army on Confederate army positions—particularly the Rebel positions at Richmond (1864) and Fredericksburg (1862). (He had a wide span of professional interests and wound up living the high life in L.A. in a half-acre home.)  This 130-foot diameter monster with a steam-ship escape pod (named The City of New York and then renamed The Great Western after the city couldn’t supply enough gas to get the thing inflated) was intended to be a transatlantic traveler.  Ready to try this fantastic adventure in 1860, ready to take charge, ready to begin a very problematic trip across the Atlantic in a balloon, Lowe, seemingly ready, had his balloon ripped apart while waiting for launching by a chance and not-horrible wind.  Lucky for Lowe and the Union Army, this didn’t happen over the ocean somewhere out of reach, and the North’s important info-gatherer did not sink like a stone in the cold dark sea.  (I’m very cynical that the 100-foot-long, bulbously heavy steam-powered “life boat” would’ve landed right-side-up and softly enough to have been of any use save for providing some floaty bits that survivors from the balloon could’ve clung to for a while before being consumed by King Neptune. 

I'd vote for Dr. Seuss' work as the most logical.

Out-of-Place Horses: Underwater Horses, 1919

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 895

Earlier in this blog I’ve written about underground horses

and horses in the air (Towards a History of Horses in Flight in the 19^th Century),

and now to horses underwater. Or sort of.  This image from The Illustrated London News (5 April 1919) presents a cross-section of a proposed Hudson River tunnel connecting the Jersey City and New York City.  (At the time, Jersey City was much more important and productive, much mire alive than it is today.) Proposals for tunnels have been bobbing around for quite some time, including this one that appears in the Scientific America for 1 November 1890¹.  The first vehicular traffic tunnel under the Hudson River—the Holland Tunnel, connecting Hoboken and downtown Manhattan—would be completed in 1927; the Lincoln, connecting midtown to Weehawken, NJ, came next.in1937.(The toll for the Lincoln in 1937 was 50 cents, or equal to $7.80 in 2009 CPI-adjusted dollars.)

By that time there were no allowances for “slow horse-drawn trucks” that were shown in the 1919 cross section.

Notes:

1.”Progress of the Great Railway Tunnels under the Hudson River between New York and Jersey City.” Scientific American, 1 Nov 1890

And  just for good measure, here's another bit:  this time showing a horse at work in a tunnel under the Hudson:

A War-ready Submersible Aircraft, 1920: the Tessaurian

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 892

DARPA has had a long-standing Christmas wish—a high-speed, durable, fast, agile tacticly-beautiful submersible aircraft.  Such a thing has evidently been on the wish list of many agencies in many countries for many years. 

I found the Royal Navy’s version of the DARPA wish in the 24 January 1920 issue of The Illustrated London News—the Tessaurian, a dreamable plane capable of long flight and long trips under the sea, as well as being able to float on the water and land on dry earth.

Even the modern Tessaurian has been evasive—certainly this 1920 version is nothing short of nothing.  The craft just looks too bumpy to do well in any sort of fluid environment, air or liquid, the thickness of its skin (necessary for the heavy undersea pressures) looking just too heavy to lift off the ground.  Of course the powertrain is suspect, and the retracted wings don’t look like they would do anything to glide the beast further underwater, assuming it got there (on purpose) to begin with.  Even though I doubt that it could fly, it may be able to float a bit—I do think that it could sink like a champ.  

And so I reproduce these heady, unacknowledged and unclaimed drawings (“designed by a leading aircraft company”), as I can’t find anything offhand online that comes remotely close to its age and concept. 

An undergraduate (!) team (headed by Daniel B. Coltey et alia )at Auburn came up with the following research paper earlier this year: “Conceptual Design of a Submersible Tactical Insertion Aircraft” “This…senior design program…the creation of a conceptual design for a submersible airplane is being undertaken as a response in part to a challenge by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).” The authors then state the checklist of DARPA’s needs:  “The design is expected to be a clandestine, coastal insertion vehicle with specific abilities of an airplane, surface ship, and submarine vessel, which would greatly increase the tactical ability of the United States. The aircraft is expected to accommodate eight passengers, including any necessary equipment and operators, and an additional 2,000 pounds of cargo, and also to have an unrefueled range of 1,000 nautical miles in cruise flight, 200 nautical miles surface transit or very low altitude flight, and 24 nautical miles of submerged travel. The aircraft requirements also include the ability to complete one tactical transit (1,000 nautical miles airborne, 100 nautical miles surface, and 12 nautical miles subsurface movement) in a time limit of eight hours. This concept also addresses challenges in the areas of structural design, effective propulsion in dual fluid flow regimes, and control surface duality…”  I’d want one, too. 

SOURCE

Shakespeare’s Renaissance Wisdom and the Turtle Dove

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 887

Thinking about the second day of Christmas brought me to the turtle dove, and then almost immediately to William Shakespeare, and on to H.W. Seager’s delightful Natural History in Shakespeare's Time being Extracts illustrative of the Subject as he knew it (London, 1896)1.  Seager got to the point right away, quoting the turtle dove’s appearances in Winter’s Tale and Merry Wives before moving on to quote fabulous passages from Bartholomew de Glanvile and Albertus Magnus. 

WINTER'S TALE, iv. 4

FLORIZEL:

“I think you have

As little skill to fear as I have purpose

To put you to't. But, come; our dance, I pray:

Your hand, my Perdita; so turtles pair

That never mean to part.”

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, iii. 3, 44. 

Henry VI, Part IDuke of Burgundy:

“Myself, as far as I could well discern
For smoke and dusky vapours of the night,
Am sure I scared the Dauphin and his trull,
When arm in arm they both came swiftly running,
Like to a pair of loving turtle-doves
That could not live asunder day or night.
After that things are set in order here,
We'll follow them with all the power we have.”

Then on to the 13th century Bartholomew de Glenvile, ostensibly a compendious theologian but who was also a general encyclopaedist who provided one of the widest views on the known natural history of the thirteenth century, drawing together all manner of facts and fictions from Greek, Arab and Jewish sources.  He was translated into English (On the Nature of Things)  and published in a spectacular volume in 1494 following the first printing of the work (Paris) in 1470 (De proprietatibus rerum).
                                                                                                                             
“THE Turtle hath that name of the voice, and is a simple bird as the culvour, but is chaste, far unlike the culvour, and if he loseth his make [i.e., mate], he seeketh not com- pany of any other, but goeth alone, and hath mind of the fellowship that is lost, and groaneth alway, and loveth and chooseth solitary places, and flieth much company of men…”

And this:

“He cometh in springing time and warneth of novelty of time with groaning voice. And in winter he loseth his feathers, and then he hideth him in hollow stocks. And against summer, in springing time, when his feathers spring again, he cometh out of his hole in the which he was hid, and seeketh convenable place and stead for to breed in. The Turtle layeth eggs twice in springing time, and not the third time, but if the first eggs be corrupt. Also the blood of her right wing is medicinable, as the blood of a swallow, and of a culvour or dove.”

And further, describing a magical, fireproofing stone that could be found in the mouth of the Turtle Dove: 

“Amatides is a precious stone ; if a cloth be touched therewith, the cloth withstandeth fire and burneth not, though it be put therein ; but it receiveth brightness and seemeth the more clear. And withstandeth all evil doing of witches…IT is supposed that in the maw of the cock Turtle-dove this stone is to be found, and hath virtue to increase concord and love…” 

And from “Albertus Magnus” (though probably by a follower of his), The Book of Secrets: Of the Virtues of Herbs, Stones, and Certain Beats, Also a Book of the Marvels of the World, the use of the Turtle Dove’s heart: 

“IF the heart of a Turtle-dove be worn in the skin of a wolf, the wearer will never thenceforth be wanton. If its heart be burnt, and put on the eggs of any bird, never will it be possible that they should be hatched. And if its feet be hung on a tree, from thenceforth it will not bear fruit.  And if a hairy place be anointed with its blood, and the water in which a mole has been boiled, the black hairs will fall off."  

Notes:
Seager’s work was meant to be a polite background to the natural history of the time, and not an exhaustive treatise.  He says in the preface: “this book presents in a convenient form for reference a collection of the quaint theories about Natural History accepted by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The work is meant to be rather a sketch than an exhaustive treatise, otherwise it would fill many volumes. The plan of the book is to give some illustration of each word mentioned by Shakespeare when there is anything remarkable to be noted about it. The term " Natural History " has been taken in its widest sense, as including not only fauna but flora, as well as some precious stones…”

Bad Ideas Department: Underground Cities, 1934

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 880

I’m a sucker for cross sections, and this one has it all—nicely drawn, a glimpse into the possibilities of the future, and technoid removed from the realm of possibility.  This article appears in Popular Science Monthly for June, 1934, and presents the possibility of extending downward into the earth for future city development. (as a matter of fact, the fabulous  Modern Mechanix site has a similar story on display, asking the question “Are Skyscrapers Doomed?” for the same year, with the same engineers.) Well. It seems as though in this cross section that residences for people begin below the thirtieth floor, making living quarters starting at about 350’ down.  The story goes that it would be possible to dig these cities up to about 6,000 feet into the earth, which of course is a long way down.  Its difficult enough to drill an oil well hole to this depth; its difficult to imagine digging/outfitting/removing the earth from something—I’m not even sure what to call it—that was, potentially, thousands of feet deep and miles wide and long.   That’s playing with figures hundreds of billions of cubic feet. Of construction. Underground.  Well, I guess it wouldn't be necessarily underground--it could be an excavated hole that is a mile or two wide and across and down, which would make the hole itself several times larger than the largest whole ever dug by humans, which is the Bingham Canyon Mine, a pit slope mine that is about .5miles x 2.5 miles. And then construction would begin after which the remaineder would be covered by earth.  

Anyway, it is a big hole and a lot of construction, the volume of it at the beginner phases of say a cubic mile would be equal to the volume of 25,000 Great Pyramids or 5,400 Empire State Buildings.  It would be easier probably to build a vertical city in part of the Grand Canyon and then cover it up--that's an idea ou won't see in print too often. 

 

Bad Ideas Department: Futurized Obsolescence of an Airport ABOVE the River Thames

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 879  Blog Bookstore

Its funny how one can live the future in the present but not see any part of that future’s future.  Evidently completely enveloped in the flying frenzy of the 1930’s, planners in London considered constructing an airport above the River Thames.  This rendition from Popular Science Monthly  (January 1934) shows the beast laid out from just above Westminster Bridge to the (newly opened) Lambeth Bridge, covering the entire width of the river, with the runways running almost directly into the Victoria Tower of Westminster Palace.  

The structure had almost everything going for it to be built in the bad category department:  it was big, ugly, unnecessary, dangerous, a hideous eyesore and an architectural atom bomb.  It also would have been almost antiquated by the time it was built, serving as it did nothing but very small single-prop biplanes, virtually useless by the time larger multi-engine propeller planes and jet aircraft would appear just a decade and a half into the future. The thing was built high enough (the top looking to be at least 300’ high, comparing it to the Victoria Tower) by the forward-thinking planners to accommodate “the tallest masts of ships”.  No one seemed to take any piece of the future into consideration in planning this monster—the planning seemed to take place as a retro event, as though the thinking was being done in 1910 rather than 1934. 

This was a piece of engineering so devoid of the possibilities of future development that just as a crew on one end of the airport was finishing, it would’ve been just about time for a crew on the first-finished end to start demolishing it, an exercise in futurizing obsolescence.  I’d say that if you could both build something and take it down in one continuous movement, the thing should probably not be built

Hermann Goering, IG Farben and Zyklon-B

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 878

I’ve been reading Nuremberg Interviews (Knopf, 2004) by the American Leon Goldensohn,  a psychiatrist who conducted interviews with 19 of the 24 “premier” Nazis brought to trial at Nuremberg in 1945/6.  Goldensohn had a relatively workman-like approach to dealing with his subjects, leaving many dangling questions and comments not pursued.  On the other hand, he may not have been the type of psychiatrist who asked any questions at all of his patients, so at the very least we do have an interesting insight into these failed people that we would not have had otherwise. 

 

Of all the interviews, I was most struck with the incredible understatements made by Hermann Goering (Field Marshal and once second in line to Hitler as a hand-picked successor) regarding the extermination camps. Goering maintained that he really didn’t know anything about them, at all, but found them offensive to his “chivalric” (if not moral) code. He felt that the killing of the Jews in this manner would “give Germany a black eye” and as a tool of warfare it turned out “not to have been worth much”.  But Goering continues:  “If killing the Jews meant anything, such as that it meant the winning of the war, I would not have been bothered by it”.

Goering continues to explain that the killing of Jews as a result of “Goebbels’ hysterical propaganda” and “is not the way of a gentleman” .Also, the gassing women and children just wouldn’t do.  He found gassing women to be “ungentlemanly, and thus would not have been able to authorize such a thing.  Killing children, he said, would not have been “sportsmanlike”. 

Goering said that he had heard “rumors” of mass killings, but he “knew that it would be useless” to investigate the rumors “even though it would have been easy” to be do so.  His reasoning: he wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it; and faced with that, he concluded, “it would make me feel bad”. 

I’d give the benefit of the doubt to normal folks who would say something like this, that there was an error in translation, or some difficulty, or something.  With Goering, I’d say that this was an accurate statement. Sportsmanship.  He didn’t mention men in the gas chambers, but since he had defined his limits of gentlemanly and sportsman-like conduct, it stands to reason that the men were fair game in his mind.  Only monsters think like this. 

 This was the man who had very well-monied support from American industrialists in the pre-1945, deep connections to Ford and Standard Oil, and thus from Standard to IG Farben, and then to Zyklon-B (and also HERE) and back again to the gas chamber.  These connections are long and arduous, complex—but they really are there, the American support for the Nazi government, developed mainly for money but also for ideology. One of significant front man for the Nazi government is also one of Cornell’s 100 most illustrious alumni, Walter Teagle. Teagle was president of Standard Oil and partnered with the Nazis in 1938, one result being shared research and patents, some of which were crucial war materials like tetraethyl lead and synthetic rubber. (Tetraethyl lead was a fuel additive that in some respects made it possible for the Luftwaffe to attack and bomb London.) I use the term “front man” because of Teagle’s blatant lies to the Securities and Exchange Commission concerning true ownership and control of I.G. Farben’s American subsidiary, American I.G. Chemical Corporation.  (It was happily believed that a Swiss subsidiary controlled the company rather than its Nazi owners. Teagle of course knew the truth.) 

 

This is just one of a geographical dictionary of stories on the American/Nazi business connection and the financing of Hitler. It is a long and winding mass of roads, none of which is particularly pretty, many of which lead straight home, again.  Henry Ford was impossibly ugly in all of this, a moral stain. But there were many like him as well. 

  Farben made a heavy contribution to the Nazi war effort, on many levels, in particular with explosives, where the company produced nearly all of the explosives used by the German army. Farben also swept into countries freshly occupied by the Wehrmacht to take over the industrial complexes, using and discarding indigenous workers as they saw fit and necessary.   I think what most people think of when they think of I.G. Farben is their sustained involvement and investment in the extermination camps.  For example, Auschwitz IG (and Buna-Werke) was a direct subsidiary of IG Farben which ran the Auschwitz III (or Monowitz, Monowice) labor camp, using and consuming some 50,000 slave laborers at a time at its various installments around the vast Auschwitz complex.  These workers would be weeded out from time to time, with those too weak to work sent to the gas chambers at Birkenau.(Zyklon-B was used at Majdanek, Sachsenhausen and Operation Reinhard .)

In the appalling history of the gas chambers, it was almost by accident that Zyklon-B came to be used to exterminate human beings.  Its function to that time was to exterminate bug pests, but experimentation showed that it worked lethally upon humans.  Monumental amounts of Zyklon-B were sent to the extermination camps, all without question. Dr. Fritz ter Meer, one of the directors of Farben and who knew exactly what the vast amounts of Zyklon-B was being used for, was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to seven years in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity, though he was released after four years after the intervention of U.S. High Commissioner for Germany J.J. McCloy. (It was McCloy again, working with Standard Oil and the Rockefellers, who ensured that the massive Farben works at Frankfurt was taken off lists of American bombing targets in 1943 and 1944.)  ter Meer returned to work for Farben after his imprisonment—though it wasn’t the old Farben anymore, the company  having been slightly effaced, broken into several constituent elements.  Ter Meer’s section of Farben was Bayer, as in Bayer aspirin, where he served as Chairman from 1952 to 1961. {Image below: political meeting at IG Farben.]

Dr. Fritz ter Meer, a director of IG Farben who was directly involved in developing the nerve gas, Zyklon-B, which killed millions of Jews, was sentenced to seven years in prison but was released after four years through the intervention of Rockefeller and J.J. McCloy, then U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. An unrepentant Fritz ter Meer, guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity, returned to work in Bayer where he served as Chairman for more than 10 years, until 1961.

Kurt Wurster, another director from Farben who was in charge of the Zyklon-B-producing subsidiary, Degesch ((Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH, or German Corporation for Pest Control), was acquitted of all war crime charges brought against him.  He took charge of another part of the disbanded Farben empire, serving as CEO of BASF from 1962 to 1974.  The directors of Testa, another Farben subsidiary producing Zyklon-B--Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher – met with a different end in a British Military court, and were executed.

And so on and on the story goes, unpretty tales of undeserved redemptions.  For example, in the coming fight against the Soviets, the U.S. government developed a convenient amnesia regarding the atrocities committed by Wernher von Braun et alia, paperclipping them away to the U.S. to help develop the American missile and rocket capacities. 

[Above: one of the many appearances of Hitler on the front page of Farben's newspaper, Von werk zu Werk.]

I think I’ve ground to be a bit of a halt, these posts supposing to be an hour’s effort—there is simply too much to put into a tiny synopsis like this.  I just got stuck on Goering and Farben.  Seeing these images from one of the many Farben publications with so many swastikas and so much  Nazi symbolism made me terrifically sad…Yes, Farben was the largest backer of Hitler in his rise to power in 1931/32 and supplied even more after the election, and of course Farben received the most benefit than any other company in Germany as a result of the victory, but still, there is just so much of it... [See HERE for an interesting short item on the adaptation of Farben to nazism.]

In all of this the survivor has been Zyklon-B itself: it is still in production in the Czech Republic by Draslovka Kolin (Kolin), and is now known as Uragan D2.

[Some vintage footage from the trials at Nuremberg.]

The Invasion of America, 1942, Part II

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 877

This is a continuation of an earlier post on mapping the invasion of America in 1942. 

[It starts: LIFE Magazine issued a wake-up call of sorts to its readership in their 2 March 1942 issue.  I say “of sorts” because even though this hard article (entitled “Now the U.S. Must Fight for Its Life”) must have sorely sobered some of its readers, it started on page 15, following big ads for Listerine, Matrix (women’s shoes, Bell Telephone, Modess, Clapp’s Baby Food, Dot Snap Fasteners, Goodrich Tires, White Horse Scotch, Pompeian Massage (for shaving), Jack Benny/Carole Lombard’s “To Be or Not To Be”, Colgate, Yardley powder and  Mimeograph, and a few interspersed puff pieces—and a Ginger Rogers cover photo.  But once LIFE paid its bills, the article got right to business, responding to a February article by sci-fi/novelist Philip Wylie on the possibilities of the U.S. losing the war…]

The article displayed six maps showing possible invasion routes from the east and west.  It was also illustrated with four unusual graphic images depicting various parts of the U.S. attacked and pulverized by Japanese and German forces.  [Images like these—outside the science fiction world--were very uncommon.]

The first image shows the assault and capture of the town of Dutch Harbor, “the pivot of Alaskan defense” by Japanese forces.  I guess we’re to assume that the American military base on opposite the town has been overtaken already, with the assault on the town being a mop-up operation. Odd thing here is that Dutch Harbor and Fort Mears were actually attacked n 3 June 1942 by a Japanese aircraft carrier (and entourage) which inflicted moderate damage on the harbor and fort, and killed 78 Americans.  This was a diversionary movement, meant to draw away American attention from Midway.  It didn’t work.

 

This image shows Japanese mountain troops rounding up the locals after their successful attack on Mt. Rainier.  I’m not so sure why the force was here and not in Seattle, as (a) there is no port here, and (b) there wasn’t anything going on so far as war production goers, which was definitely happening north of here.  That’s a very long column of Japanese soldiers headed towards Rainier; I’m not sure where they were going.  Also there are two large cannons (88s or thereabouts) taking aim at the mountain.  Again, I think here that the mountain would win in the long run.

The petroleum culture is under attack here in southern California.  The Japanese tank commander is shooting a gas station attendant who has just sprayed the tank with gas and set it on fire.  I’m not sure why the oil facilities are on fire, unless we did it. 

These Heinkel-177’s are bombing an unnamed East Coast war production plant, crossing the ocean straight from Germany ?).  They are presented here essentially as a manned bomb—the crew was supposed to drop their load, destroy their secret equipment, then parachute and surrender after auguring in their aircraft.   This push-pull engine configuration on this LIFE magazine version of a bad aircraft—and the only heavy bomber the Luftwaffe ever produced in numbers—never was able to drag this aircraft across the Atlantic.  Its maximum bombing range was about 925 miles, which means even if the crew expected not to return it would still only get about two-thirds of the way across the ocean. 

 

I’d say that this article might well have established a new fear-line in the minds of many of LIFE’s millions of readers, introducing them to the possibility of mainline attack just  a few short months following Pearl Harbor.

Balloons, Zeppelins & Dirigibles: Ideas Fabulous and Not So

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

I should've included this list in yesterday's post about a 1909 zeppelin tramway but it slipped my mind. Here then are most of the posts I've made on zeppelins, balloons and dirigibles, mostly having to do with unusual deep-thought applications of their soon-to-be-replaced technologies.

I like the History of Horses in Flight the most...

Towards a History of Horses in Flight in the 19th C (here) 

 

Balloon Bridges and 600-Foot-Long Airships  (here)  

 

Escape Pods for Women Balloonists, 1820: the Fabulous "Minerve" Balloon (here)

History of the Future: Electric Balloons, Tethered Eagles and an 18th century Space Station  (here)

Zeppelin paper Model 1924  (here)

Advanced Sci-Fi Dirigible Notion, 1909 (here)

 

Vision: Looking Straight Up, Down, Across and Through--1525-1905  (here)

BadTech 100 Years Ago: Zeppelin Tramway

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 875

Here’s a highly-flammable, closely-space and heavy-but-flimsy scenario just waiting for its first monstrous mishap. 

This image is from the wonderful website of Alejandro Polanco Masa’s Tecnologia Obosleta, dedicated to antiquarian, paleofuturistic and non-existent technologies.  It comes from the December 1909 issue of Scientific American, and according to the article was an “impracticable mode of transit” envisioned by an unnamed German engineer.  It was a rigid structure airship--which means that it received its shape from a hard internal frame covered by a skin, rather than a balloon or dirigible, whose shapes are almost entirely dictated by a gas filling out their envelope—and looked a lot like Count von Zeppelin’s new (1899) LZ-1 flying machine.  No doubt the engineer with this land-based system had been caught in the considerable zeppelin fever which existed at the time.  It  stretched the engineering boundaries of the possible more than just a little, and looks to me like a disaster that should’ve happened almost immediately.  It was also supposed to speed along at 125 mph, by who knows what means. Seems to me that there would be fifty towers per mile for a huge flammable Zep carrying not many people--it doesn't seem to make sense to me, particualrly when railroads would've done a better job safer and cheaper moving more people and, of course, the freight that these things just couldn't carry.   The SciAmerican ended: “There are engineering as well as financial objections to this scheme.”

See HERE for other posts on balloons, dirigibles and zeps.

Sublime Mundane Pamphlet Titles: "Are Baby Teeth Important?"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 874

One of my favorite categories/threads in this blog is the sublime-mundane pamphlet title.

Envelope Facts, Notes on Reading Aloud, Saturn Has Rings, Know Your Groceries, Zipper Repair, Flagpole Painting,The Fine Art of Squeezing, Thirst and two dozen others have bobbed to the surface here like antique lobster pots finding their way to the daylight after 50 years of the big dark cold—at this point, no one cares what’s inside, sort of-- just the very story and appearance is good enough. 

 Sometimes the story and the title of these indredibly-titled beasts are both fascinating, though usually it is not the case: the contents of the pamphlets with some of these bizarre titles are just a plain slice of Wonder  Bread, a big nothingness.  The work on flagpole painting is an incredible title—and it turns out that the contents make the pamphlet the veritable Ulysses of books of its genre, of which it may be the only one. But so it goes.  At least everything that you’d need or want to know is in there if you needed or were moved enough to paint a flagpole.  Zipper Repair too is in this category—it really is an exhaustive treatment on repairing zippers. 

Today’s installment of five titles has only one in that first category, the remainder being fundamentally eyebrow-raiser titles with somnolent contents, exciting and sleepifying in one five-second motion.

 A Short Treatise on Hickory Handles I am sure is still useful to anyone making their own hickory-handled tools.  It is a beautiful work—considered, referenced, insightful, well-written and nicely illustrated.  It is, in its own special way, achingly wonderful. Not knowing anything about hickory handles I was very surprised to see that their story played out to 30 pages--it was so well written and documented that I read the entire thing.  At one point in time, hickory handles were important.

 The others are really more bark than bite—but their titles are just weirdly gorgeous.  "After Forty...What?" held hope, but the 1934 pamphlet didn't identify 40 as the new 60--it was concerned with (illustrated) tooth decay, and held no daydreams. Ditto "The Most Important Tooth"--I was hoping fo rit to be some one gigantic tooth in a field in Kansas, but I was wrong.  Somehow the six-year-old molar is the most important, the seat of its infection leading to disease throughout the body.  I dunno.  I won't even go into the other two for fear of spoiling their titled wonders.

Some other examples:  here, here and here.

[Where do these odd things come from?] 

Joseph Stalin’s Flying Circus: the Maxim Gorky Aircraft, 1934

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 871

 

The Maxim Gorky (Gorkii, ANT-20) was the largest plane of its time, a craft intended to show the world of the vast technical prowess of the Soviet Union.  There is now doubt that the plane was huge--112’ long, 22’ high, with a wingspan of 206’ (and 5,200 sq ft surface area), and weighed in at 59 tons—and was indeed the largest plane in the world. 

 

The reality of the craft was closer to its rear wheel, which was manufactured of metal and filled with cement.

 

The plane was built by TsAGI was big—it was also ponderous, pretentious, terrifically slow (cursing speed of 141 mph and top speed of 171), and just a beast.  It was built very quickly, and it showed; it offered nothing new so far as design is concerned, being a cobbled montage of existing blueprints.  It did set world records for lifting stuff, but beyond that, it was a half-dead behemoth..

Construction on the Gorky began in the midst of the Great Famine, a murderous Stalinist rampage which the result of planning and control on the collectives that killed 7-8 million Russians and Ukranians¹ and which also destroyed the Ukrainian resistance, and which was also one of the most disgusting of the 20^th century genocides…but there are so many to choose from.  (See Robert Conquest, the Harvest of Sorrow²).

The Gorky was a magnificent nothing.  It was dedicated, finally, to a serve as a propaganda tool for the inglorious voice of Joseph Stalin, fitted into service with a movie/film, theater, print shop, photo lab, press room, radio station, and other creature comforts.   The Gorky, the “Victory Over the Air”, met its end 18 May 1935 in a crash with two other Soviet planes during maneuvers, crashing near Sokol Station, killing everyone on board and another 35 on the ground.

I’ve included photos of the interior of the plane which illustrated and article in the 19 January 1935 issue of The Illustrated London News. I could find no other pictures of the inside of the plane online.

{Photos in the CONTINUED READING section.)

Notes:

See:

http://www.dictatorshipoftheair.com/wp-content/themes/content/excerpt2.pdf

http://dictatorshipoftheair.com/2007/01/04/the-ant-20-maxim-gorky-in-flight/

The Great Terror

1.The Holodomor (the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

2.Robert Conquest The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (1968) , The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1970)   Lenin (1972) , Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (1978) , Inside Stalin's Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936-1939 (1985) ,The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986) , Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques in the Struggle for Truth (1989) , Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989) ,The Great Terror: A Reassessment (1990).