JF Ptak Science Books

The Architect’s Lament (Writ in Stone): Stockholm, 1914

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 870

Years ago when I lived in DC,  a neighbor in Georgetown who was suitably upset about being told how he could decorate the front of his townhouse spray-painted the rules and regs of private house decoration right on the front of his home.  In colors, urban-graffiti style, about 10 feet high.  As it turns out, his (influential) neighbors were wrong about how restricted the colors were that he had chosen to paint his house, and that he was perfectly within his rights to answer his complaint by painting that n the front of his house.  He made his point.  For several years. 

 

An extreme case of venting and protest—in the pre-mass communication era—was found in Stockholm.  The façade of the house designed by the architect Klemming is decorated with his 40-foot high incised complaint against the building bureaucracy of the city.  As it turns out Klemming was not allowed to proceed as he wished, running into regulations preventing him from carrying out the design that he wanted.  Defeated, he built what was allowed, and then found a way to revenge—ironically, there was no regulation to keep him from his permanent, stone-cold anti-reg voice. 

 

I suspect that few architects, or builders, would disagree with Kemmling’s sentiments.

 (The text is clickable)

The rant reads, in part:

“A year was quite enough

For the building of this house,

But a long time was needed

To get permission for it.

Three years were passed

Before granted it was.

The fight was won at last,

But the wonds caused were severe.

To give full account of

 how the fight proceeded

this space would be too small…”

And ends:

“Oh Land , oh Town, consider well,

When bills of law are passed, lest private right be violated

And working spirit killed.”

 

Time's Bad Hair Day: 1540

JF Ptak Science Books Post 863

 This image proves that even Time itself can have a bad hair day, from time to time.  The woodcut image appears as the printer's mark (of Simonem Colineum, or Simon de Colines) in the second volume of Johann Arboreus’ Theosophia, complectens difficillorum…, which was printed in Paris in 1540. 

Time isn’t very pretty here, and is made to seem a little Satanic, what with cloven hooves and the legs of some animal, strong torso and swift wings—the hair hiding the eye(s) completes a picture of damnable doom, and of whatever end we’re coming to.  Except for the righteous, though not quite: the word balloon describing Time’s spoken admonition is “Hanc Aciem Sola Retundit Virtus”, which means “only good deeds dulls the blade”.  That doesn’t necessarily mean “stops” the blade, which is bothersome.  I think that if someone were coming for me I'd like the blade as sharp as could be...

Return to Land Ships--Really Big, Really Bad Ideas: the 1,500 Ton Truck

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 856

Nothing quite gives me the rumbles as seeing pictures of Great Heavy Land Things on the move.  The NASA launch crawler is one of the biggest, though it doesn’t come close to this impossible LandClad pictured in Brett Holman’s excellent AirMinded blog:  the terrestrially-motorized and tankified version of obsolete ironclad (and I guess pre-Dreadnought) battleships.  I doubt that there would be more things more fearful than seeing something like this coming over the rise, Martian tripod death machines notwithstanding. The ironclad/pre-dreadnought would certainly have some problems moving around on the land, considering the huge power sources needed to move them while they were floating in water.  The giant tank also looks pretty pervious, all things considered, and (among many other things) looks as though it probably wouldn’t do so well in rainy weather—it looks like it would generate its own Operation Barbarossa mud wherever it went.  My guess too is that if got stuck, it was, well, stuck.  

The pursuit of sea-land machines has always had a huge ‘wow” factor, if for no other reason than it was just out-of-place and big.   I’ve written earlier here on Elmer Cotherell and James Eads proposal to build a combination railroad ship canal across the Tehuantepec isthmus in Nicaragua, hauling ships up and out of the water and transporting them across land on six railroad tracks pulled by juggernaught teams of locomotives.  In the fiction-made-fact world, Werner Herzog hauled a real steamship up and over a mountain for the filming of his quixotic Fitzcaraldo, which was simply a fabulous thing to see. (The film is a glory as is the film made on the making of the film.)

Getting back to Holman’s landship—I remembered something similar to this, and actually found a picture of it right here in my bizarre-archive.  Popular Science (December 1933) published this account of professor Eric R. Lyon’s¹ conception of the Diesel-powered “Navitruck” (its name looking like quite something different and not so pretty at the thing’s stern), a 1,500-ton amphibious truck with (what Lyon states to be ) 30’-tall (and 10’-wide) tires. Given this I approximate the monster would be 40’ wide and 100+’ long, and I guess at least 35’ tall.  A flattening tire on land would be a problem; I guess a blowout would be catastrophic. 

Did I mention that this thing could float?

Anyway Prof. Lyon envisioned a veritable Western ribbon of these things radiating from Denver to Duluth, to Kansas City (MO) and Galveston, and to Phoenix and on to Los Angeles.  Special gravel roads would be built for his trucks (cutting down on construction costs for more permanent roadways), and in the case of no roads, Lyon saw that the bow of his ship could both cut through impenetrable South American jungles as well as break ice in frozen Arctic waters.  Somehow the roads are seen as being 40’ wide for single lane traffic, and 80’ for double lanes, which doesn’t leave much room for error.

There are some real mammoth trucks rumbling around mining operations, the Caterpillar 797e and Terex trucks, being two of the world’s biggest.  They are 22’ and 24’ high and 300 and 280 ton machines, respectively, and although they begin to approximate the brutishness of the Lyon machine, it would still take five (or ten) of these beasts to fill the shoes of the “Navitruck”.   Also, a big point which isn't addressed with the Lyon's machine is fuel.  The thing would have to have something like a 10,000-gallon fuel tank--which means the fuel alone would weigh 60 or 80 tons--to avoid having fuel stations spread like flies along the landship byways.  Fuel consumption wouldn't be measured by the gallons/mile with something as monumentally heavy as this--it would be measured by the gallons/minute.  Since the Caterpillar 797e drinks about a gallon a minute with a modern efficient engine, I'll make the wild iterative guess that the Navitruck would gulp 20/gallons a minute (?!), which would be a very hard rate of pumping at the gas station this afternoon.  That means that this trucks would be filling-up twice a day after getting 225 miles/tank.  At 15 cents a gallon (in 1933) that would make a $3,000 fill-up, which means it would cost about six thousand 1933 dollars to make it from Denver to L.A. Provided it didn't break down.  [The wheels were on a fixed axle.  Yikes.] The average salary in 1933 was a little more than half the cost of this fill-up, or about $72,000 in 2009 dollars.  On the other hand, if these things hauled 3 million pounds the fuel costs for moving each pound would be about 2 (2009) cents. Or maybe not.  (All of this scratch-pad reasoning might be wrong, but not horribly so, I don't think.)

There were definitely more convenient and already-exiting ways of hauling freight at this time, and the system had  a much more robust delivery system and reach.  That system was called "railroads".

All in all, I’ve come to the conclusion that ship should stay in the water.

Note:

1.  Professor Lyons (Kansas State University physics department), was no stranger to big ideas, appearing frequently in popular magazines like this and the Electrical Experimenter, among others.  

Roadtown, Linear Cities, and Living in a Line: Edgar Chambless and Michael Graves

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 855 

I wonder what our human world would be like if we had evolved living in horizontal linear cities?  

The idea had never occurred to me before seeing the work of Edgar Chambless, whose Roadtown (the entire 172pp of the 1910 work located here) projected the idea of super long linear road-cities.  Actually it was the illustrations that attracted me more than Chambless' pamphlet, though I'm surprised to admit, there's some interesting bits and pieces in that exceptionally odd work of city/future planning. 

Michael Graves also proposed a linear city [aerial perspective below] to form a contiguous, living corridor between New Brunswick and Trenton, and alluded to the development of "consequent new patterns of life" though doesn't say what they might be.  

And certainly there have been many plans for incorporating, engulfing, transportation systems into the very fabric of a city (as seen in the "Is This the Railway of the Future" image that ran in Popular Science in 1932), though the idea of combining transportation and the city itself into a linear creation is far more uncommon. 

But getting back to this living-in-a-line part:  according to some rough napkin-logic, I figure that in order to house 300 million Americans in one long structure, it would take something like a building 400' wide, 12 storeys high and 3000 miles long (not including infrastructure and so on) to allow 400 square feet of living space for every person.  Oddly enough I randomly chose an individual unit of 400x800x120 feet to work with, which is within just a percent of two of the total volume of the Empire State Building (bizarre!), meaning that it would take about 20,000 Empire State Buildings placed end-to-end to perform the housing of every American in this straight J.G. Ballard-like world. 

Now Chambless offered an architectural-something  much less complex¹ than this notion I just imagined, though his philosophy of life and living in such a city was developed well enough to get the interest and attention of major movers and shakers (including Tom Edison).  There was evidently quite a buzz about Roadtown though that's all that ever happened--buzz and no sting, meeting after meeting, happy attendees, then off to another meeting with apparently nothing to show for it all in the end, an interesting idea that took a decade or two to die. 

Notes:

Edgar Chambless and Michael Graves images from the wonderful book, Unbuilt America, by Alison Sky and Michele Stone. (Sky and Stone--very close to sky above/mud below.)

1. (From The People's Almanac, 1981):  "In cross section, Roadtown would, beginning at the top, consist of: (1) a roof promenade--a glassed-in sun parlor in winter, shaded walk in summer, with bicycling and skating paths and towers housing schools, nurseries, recreation facilities, stores, and power plants; (2) a two-story, above-ground house, with a workroom at street level, a living area above it, and utility lines (electric wires and gas and water pipes) enclosed in a runway beneath the house; and (3) three below-ground levels of railroad lines for expresses and locals, to carry both passengers and freight"

Bad Ideas Department: Really Big, Really Bad--Mussolini's Monster.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 849  Blog Bookstore

“Building skyscrapers is the nearest peace-time equivalent of war. In fact, the analogy is startling, even to the occasional grim reality of a building accident where maimed bodies, and even death, remind us that we are fighting a war of construction against the forces of nature.” -Col. William A. Starrett, Skyscrapers and the Men Who Build Them (1928)

Indeed!  I wonder if Starrett (whose book, or at least its cover, is beautifully designed and a roaring bore to read) had this proposed building (below) in mind—if so, we could’ve skipped right past WWII and declared WWIII. 

 

It’s a good thing that the Roman skyline isn’t punctured here and there by skyscrapers—especially those that would’ve been built during the Fascist era.  Take, for example, this planned 1100-foot monster, proposed in 1925, in the third year of Mussolini’s government.  This is an idealized cityscape of course, created to show height comparisons with famous buildings, but this thing (looking very much like Moscow University) would’ve created a hole in the sky and thrown a suffocating, shadowing presence all over the city.  Granted it isn’t as monstrous as many of the international style buildings could’ve been had they been a fifth of a mile high--that work was left to the cobbled hand of Philip Johnson in America—but it is still horrible enough all on its own.  More horrible to think that it could’ve swallowed whole the seven biggest buildings in Rome, and was taller than the seven greatest architectural wonders of the ancient world stacked one on top of the other. 

It is curious to note that this spaceship-like building was drawn for The Illustrated London News (24 January 1925) by Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986), an artist and designer, and known as “the Father of Space Art”.  The best thing that this building could’ve done was to light its afterburners and take off. 

Relief as Pleasure--William Burroughs and the Sleep Cure

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 846  Blog Bookstore

William Burroughs—one of America’s great 20^th century humorists (closer to Bierce/Mencken than Thurber/Woollcott, like Twain with a rainbow coalition of nasty addictions and outré social habits)—wrote this cookbook article of drug addiction in the British Journal of Addiction in 1956.  Considering it is only twenty-two pages long, it is an Encyclopedia Brit-burroughanica for its quick contents. 

“Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” is crisp and concise, a clinical horror story of addiction and cure.  I say “and cure” because of the low trials Burroughs went through in some of the ten attempts/cures he experienced to clean himself up.  (Burroughs had already been using narcotics for twenty years by 1956.  By a mixture of good genetics and miracles Burroughs (1914-1997)  made it to his 83rd year.)  Burroughs describes one of the treatments,  the “prolonged sleep” cure, (excerpted below), in singular terms, revealing a particularly gruesome adventure into lost health:

“Prolonged Sleep.--The theory sounds good. You go to sleep and wake up cured. Industrial doses of chloral hydrate, barbiturates, thorazine, only produced a nightmare state of semi-consciousness. Withdrawal of sedation, after 5 days, occasioned a severe shock. Symptoms of acute morphine deprivation supervened. The end result was a combined syndrome of unparalleled horror. No cure I ever took was as painful as this allegedly painless method. The cycle of sleep and wakefulness is always deeply disturbed during withdrawal. To further disturb it with massive sedation seems contraindicated to say the least. Withdrawal of morphine is sufficiently traumatic without adding to it withdrawal of barbiturates. After two weeks in the hospital (five days sedation, ten days "rest") I was still so weak that I fainted when I tried to walk up a slight incline. I consider prolonged sleep the worst possible method of treating withdrawal.”

If as Burroughs says, all pleasure is nothing but relief, then this cure didn't offer any, and certainly must rank high in the Bad Ideas Department of Caustic Non-Cures.

Ueber-Spectacular Understatement Dept.: the Happy Post-Apocalyptic America and the "Awakwardness" of Holocaust, 1962

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 829  Blog Bookstore

Self- and purposefully-deceptive belief in spectacular and unsupportable scenarios espoused by governmental leaders which affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people deserve their own Dante-esque categorization:  and that’s one that I haven’t come up with yet.   This post is one of a continuing thread on the history of atomic weapons.

I wonder how it was that we humans didn’t blow ourselves into melty dissolving bits during the Cold War.  Somehow all of those thousands of megatons of disastrously radioactive explosives that were completely and reliably deliverable didn’t get launched—not even by accident, not even during all of those hot itchy-finger DEFCON 2 situations.  Did MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction ) actually work?  Did the attempt at making a winnable nuclear confrontation keep people from actually trying to do so?  Did the overwhelming and insane buildup of weaponry actually have so much enormous and foul intellectual weight that no one could actually make the decision to use the weapons for fear of snuffing out all human life? 

Here’s an embarrassingly shining case in point:  Dr. Joseph D. Coker’s paper to the Population Association of America representing the thinking of the Office of Emergency Planning and the Executive Branch in general, which freely discussed the survivability of the United States following even a post-massive nuclear exchange. Dr. Coker was the director of the National Resource Evaluation Center, which tried mightily to figure out how/where /what/how the essential 'stuff” of America could be saved/stored/allocated after the end of the world.  Actually, Dr. Coker said that the big attack wouldn’t be the end of the world, so we needed to plan for surviving.

 A few cases in point, some of which, I must warn you, are breathtaking and Strangelovian in their myopia: 

Since Dr. Coker was addressing the Population Studies people, he related much of what he had to say (regarding national resources) to the American people.  He found that millions of people could be saved if they built a blast shelter (not a fallout shelter) that was covered with mounds of heavy material and outfitted for an extended stay of two to 22 days.  The unfortunate part of this scenario, Coker says, is that these shelters work best when 10 miles or more away from a detonation zone.  And since these zones were all over the country targeted by thousands of warheads, very few people (especially in cities) would be outside the 10-mile ring, which made the blast shelter basically useless. 

 

Coker notes that if an attack of 1000 megatons [a limited exchange] was aimed exclusively at U.S.air bases, “total fatalities will approximate 10% of the U.S. population”.  If this attack was aimed at population centers rather than the air bases, it would kill 40% of the population. A 5,000 megaton attack on air bases would produce 50% overall fatalities in the U.S.; if that amount was centered on large populations, the number would jump to 80% of the population.  10,000 megatons would yield 75% and 95%, respectively.  “A 50,000 megaton attack would kill almost all U.S. citizens under either targeting assumption”.  These figures didn’t include radiation deaths.

A big variable here not controlled for was the distribution of population at the time of attack.  The numbers that were used were compiled by the census and counted folks who would be at home.  So, the numbers above worked if and only if the Soviets attacked after dinner when everyone was at home for the night.  Since it would make sense to attack when people were at work at their industry or job or whatever during the day—thus maximizing the effect of the bomb—the casualties would actually be higher.

And what does that mean?  Dr. Coker relates this gem (on page 21): “The post-attack labor force available thirty days after the attack probably will represent a significantly lower fraction of the population than does the preattack labor force….” And this: “A nuclear attack can be expected to alter the occupational composition of the labor force.” 

This sort of thinking overtakes the factual aspects of massive attack, with Coker stating on page 24 “I wish to say  emphatically that it [post-attack America] will not be anything like that depicted in Neville Shute’s On the Beach.  It will be bad enough, but not that hopeless.”

 

And this absolutely incredible/horrendous and perhaps worst-use-ever of the word “awkward”:

 

 

For the love of King Neptune’s Pants:  Awkward?  How in the name of _______ could someone in such a high position and authority relate massive attacks on every major American population center which would cover the area in fire and thousands of gigantic highly radioactive craters in which a city used to exist be called “awkward”?  How great a sin was this, to influence opinion on holocaust via pathetic and unreasonable means?

And then this, on the survivability of our governmental and economic institutions:

“The post attack institutional environment will depend on the continuity, resourcefulness and general effectiveness of our leadership and the survival and resilience of pre-attack institutions…”

Hm?  The post-attack institutions will depend on themselves?

This of course is followed by a major plug for Dr. Coker’s own work, because the preparations undertaken by the NREC will directly affect the survivability of post-attack America.  So don’t stop the funding.  “The more complete and realistic our preattack [sic] planning and preparations have been and the more effectively the government is at all levels in inspiring and retaining the confidence and support of the population, the less drastic institutional changes will be.”  So it is the mealy aspect of inspiration that will direct the survivability of whatever it is that makes America so. 

I should point out that Coker’s use of “post attack” and “pre attack” appear as two words, one word and a hyphenated word, depending on nothing. This is only a forty-page document.

Another nugget on the post-Armageddon future on the distribution of wealth, mostly hinging on blast shelters:  “Per capita wealth in material terms may or may not be reduced by attack.”  There will be a relatively proportional number of  people who emerge from the smoking holes to staff surviving industry, and so per capita wealth will stay about the same.   If, on the other hand, people build more blast shelters, then the proportion of surviving workers to factories will increase, and “the surviving plant capacity will be spread more thinly among them”. It is left unstated, but what that means is that more successful implementation of blast shelters would mean a reduction in per capita wealth. Dr. Coker also forgets what he said earlier that the blast shelters really didn’t work unless they were more than ten miles from a target.  Considering that the industrial workers would be living close to, um, industry, they will no doubt be (in 1962) in a ten-mile radius to where the blast would be.  Then of course there would probably be more than one bomb, so the blast area would be more than a ten-mile circle, and so on and so forth.

 

In the following paragraph, Dr. Coker somehow draws all manner of feel-good high-probables around him, encasing himself like a sandman in a thin layer of improbability, to come to the following conclusion:

“…few of the analysts who have studied carefully these post-attack [sic] survival and recovery problems take any stock in the oft-repeated theory that the survivors will envy the dead.  On the contrary, after a very rough year or two, the surviving population, if it so chooses, can begin to enjoy the advantages of a social structure and a physical environment not so very different from those which prevailed before the attack.” [Emphasis mine.]

This is an astonishing work of incredible deceit, and may be the worst quote of the lot.  But it is so difficult to choose between unacceptable bits of thinking like this, raking out the horrible from the terrible.

Here’s another deceit that was absolutely better understood in 1962 than the writer acknowledges:  “The long-term effects of radiation are subject to much less understanding and certainty than are the short term effects.  There is some evidence that increased radiation exposure results in reduced life expectancy and increased evidence of leukemia and various degenerative diseases…”  And this:  “Genetic effects are more controversial.”  Than what?! And this: “Studies of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki experience are said thus far to be inconclusive.”  Honestly this was very well understood in 1962, and statements like these were enormously irresponsible if the data were actually misunderstood and criminal if they weren’t.

There are many more examples—I’d say actually that the entire paper was at the level of Apocalypse Fairy Tale—but I’d like to close with just one more, this one using another fanciful version of the possible post-nuclear future and another highly insulting euphemism.  On transportation:  “We hope in the near future to develop a family of network and transportation models to estimate capabilities to move surpluses into deficit areas in order to cover deficits during each time period and to support the use of more ambitious resource management techniques focussed [sic] on recovery problems.”  Aside from bad sentence structure and misspellings I could hardly imagine sitting through a presentation where a person thought this stolen undercooked tripe.  What we have arrived at here at the end of the paper is references to smoke-in-a-hole cities being “deficit areas”, and the successful removal of human consideration from the conversation—strange as Dr. Coker was addressing the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America.  (I’d love to know what the association members thought of the talk afterwards.)

And so what can we draw from the experience of knowing thinking like this?  Is it as sterile as it might seem, so distant from our experience?  The scenarios have changed, as have the leaders and delivery systems, but the insatiable stupidities have evolved and morphed  into our own time.  Its easy to raise our eyebrows now on the whole MAD approach and the writings of people like Dr. Coker.  The truth of the matter is that we have plenty of this sort of thinking going on right now, big head-waggers that will loom in our futures with the attached questions of “how could this have happened?”.  WMD is one of the many examples of this, a Big Lie that was repeated for years and which ultimately cost the lives of many thousands of people and a great perpetuator of the culture of fear.  President Bush drove that one into the ground and so far as I know still employs it when necessary, threatening listeners with fear of those three letters like they were a practice hand grenade.  (I recall that a far-right radio personality  filled with afterbirth blood and urine eyes said that he would resign his show “in a year” if WMD were not found in Iraq; that was five years ago, and of course he is still there, bloated and ponderous and mostly violently wrong as ever.)  The Savings and Loan debacle.  The deathly ambitious practices leading to our recent depression.  The billion malnourished and desperate children in the world.  And so on. The point is that there is no paucity of thinking displayed by Dr. Coker in the past, and there is definitely no lack of it right at this very moment.  The problem is seeing it for what it is in the present and to not have to wait for the future to get to the truth of the matter.

[And how can I end this discussion without a bit more of Stanley Kubrick's magnificent Dr. Strangelove.., who pointed out these absurdities better than,perhaps, anyone?]

 

Ah, don't fret! The ending is just below (and just when you are about to laugh ("Mein Fuhrer, I can WALK" the other and last shoe drops.).

Cars Driving in the Sky: the Future of the City, 1930's

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

In an earlier post here I wrote about  living a big life in a big airplane--I saw this weird little print and was attracted to its unrepentent awfullness and the sleeky bulbous nature of this exotically unflyable aircraft.  I guess it bothered me becuase even though it was unsupportably  big it didn't bother to have any of the luxurious features that other, similarly bloated-enormous aircraft had at the time:  swimming pools, greenhouses, landing strips for other planes...  This one didn't have anything like that, and didn't really seem to make any sense, unless that big belly part was actually a zeppelin or something like that, filled with helium--but even that doesn't make sense.  Perhaps we need to assume that it is supported in the air by something yet named and unknowable, powered by engines that were far advanced.  But what is more interesting in the print are the multi-tiered auto-skyways and suspended nonsensical roads that hang between the skyscrapers like a gravity marble game.

These other cities of the future at least take a greater leap of faith in the belief of extraordinary inventions and abandon the generally stylized shape of known aircraft and propulsion systems.  At least for the next two images, even the architecture is mostly new.  What I'd really like to know is what people were doing in those buildings and where they were going in those hover cars.  For the most part in stories of the future like this people were simply going to work as they would in 1937, driving off with anti-gravity sumpin' to Spacely Sprockets to do office work as it was in the past. 

 

 

For the most part future vision seemed grounded in the past, techno-wizzardry  carved into the fabric of existing society.  I'm not so sure what was so "futuristic" about elevated railways stacked up on top of each other like flapjacks, but to someone there in the 1930's past it looked like a great thing about to happen....in 1965. 

Fat Maps and Underwear-Generated Sterilizations: Eugenics

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 816   Blog Bookstore

JM Turner (an M.D. and a Ph.D.) wrote "Physique and Choice of Career" for The Eugenics Review of October 1954.  He reported on the statistical survey correlating body type and profession, one in a considerable line of such statistical drunkenness which found pseudo-scientific results from closeness of fit between fat, muscle and criminality and professions. I really don't want to get very much into the details of this story because it just isn't worth it--simply put, the doctor was finding correlations between some body types and students at an officers' training academy and Oxford. The military officers in training were heavier than the Oxford students.  The end.  [Interestingly the author references an earlier study from 1939 which found correlations between body types and different sorts of crimes among 17,000 incarcerated juvenile offenders.   Turner uses the results to support his own but also finds fault with the earlier study, stating that it lacked "any very workable classification of physique...his study was more of a high altitude aerial survey than a detailed map of the ground". This doesn't prevent the use of the findings, however.]

It was this sort of thinking that the sniffy and in-its-own-peculiar-way venerable The Eugenics Review (1909-1968) its influence, a cancerous spittle which found its way all over the globe. Eugenics was seated in the work of the very formidable work of the polymathic Sir Francis Galton (the word coined in his Inquiries into human faculty and its development in 1883), and found its way into some deep scientific corners until its was generally rejected at about the same time of the journal's death.

The influence of eugenics reached far and deep and wide, finding its place even here near where I live--deeper here, and later than expected, as it turns out.  The Human Betterment League, started in 1947 in Winston-Salem (North Carolina) with the influence and money of James G. Hanes (of the Hanes hosiery and underwear fortune), instituted a vicious resurgence of interest in eugenic sterilization just at the time when this practice was beginning to come to its end in other places.  As you can see, eugenic-based sterilization in North Carolina was sliding into  social consciousness and decline just at the beginning the the Human Betterment reign of terror, spiking to over 700 sterilizations in just a few years after its underwear-y inception.  The majority of the victims of this social cleansing, of this cleaning of the gene pool, of this save-us-from-"them" mentality,were black. SOme of these people were classified as "morons" according to standardized testing that many were never before exposed to; some were classified as deviants and defectives ready for sterilization if they chose to have a baby produced by rape.  The road to  racial purity was a wide one for the Betterment  folks; fortunately, it was not a long road, though they were able to force sterilizations of thousands of unfortunate victims and did so until the late 1960's.  This is a bad story for the history of this state and one which is not frequently discussed, though reparations discussions are underway, cushioned by a very skimpy installment of 250,000 from the state coffers to establish offices and a board and bureaucrats to study the issue.  This is many millions of dollars off the mark, but it does benefit some mid-level manager somewhere in the state capital at Raleigh... 

[Source for sterilization pamphlet and graph: Against Their Will--the North Carolina Sterilization Program.]

gram]

Bad, Odd Jobs Department: Door-to-door Rabbit Meat Salesman. 1942

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 811  Blog Bookstore

Artists seem to have discovered street vendors a long time ago, beginning at least as far back as the 15^th century.  Annibale Carracci (1560 - 1609), a great Baroque master, committed dozens of street sellers to his notebooks but were all lost to time except for the copies of them that were made and etched by Simom Guillain in 1664.  These and prints like these provide glamor and realistic fragrance to the complexity (read=”grit”) of city life 400 years ago. The etching of the painting seller gives us an insight into what may have been a broken and glutted art market in Bologna in the 1590’s. 

Another master of common life was the sculptor Edme Bourchardon who engraved a series of dozens of such folks selling their stuff in the street, walking here and there, waiting to be given some money.  Bouchardon more so than Carracci/Guillain provides a little more grit to his grit, showing some more wear and tear to faces and clothing, giving the backgrounds some darkness and depth.  For example, “L’Orge de Barbarie” shows an itinerant woman peddler, playing her (revolving disk?) organ with a vieu optique  cabinet on her back:  neither of which was particularly light, nor made of some handy light asian hardwoods bought down at the local China-friendly Megalo-Mart.  *This* was a working woman. 

Fast forward a bit to the 20^th century and to an unusual pamphlet I found on the virtues and economic possibilities of selling rabbit meat from door-to-door.   It is just such a  sad little work; it looks like

nobody in the pamphlet wanted to be there, at all.  The woman in this picture being sold a box of rabbit choppings by the undertaker-like salesman (“you!”) looks at the gift as though she hoped for it to be a box of donuts.  And who wouldn’t?  Wouldn’t it be easier to imagine someone hopping out of their chair at the sound of the doorbell saying “hey, that’s the Do-Nut Man!” rather than “hot damn! The rabbit-pieces-in-a-box guy is here!”.   I should say so.  And that’s why I’m voting for itinerant rabbit-bit salesman as elevated in the Bad Jobs department. 

Oddly enough, one of the earliest surviving Renaissance artworks depicting street vendors is this:  a man selling rabbits.

The great money maker here might have simply been the publisher, Ralston Purina Company (of St. Louis, MO), which sponsored and published this pamphlet to excite people to grow their own small rabbit farms and to feed their bunnies Purina Rabbit Chow. 

There is an entire section of this pamphlet devoted to rabbit skin selling (illustrated), but I just can’t go there, what with section headings of “Skins from Meat Rabbits” and “Prime, Full-Furred Skins”. Also the bunny eared-nosed-eyed angora baby slippers  was just bloody indecent. (Did people really wear rabbit pelt coats? )

A Map of the Kingdom of Corsets, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This finely produced, 75-page pamphlet lists all you need to know about marketing and maintaining a corset department in 1939--all except how to actually get back to 1939 to utilize this font of knowledge.  It was published with great seriousness for a serious business by the School of Retailing at New York University, a serious object for serious people.   Among the many things I’ve never thought of before thinking with this pamphlet were corset maps--and one of these happens to appear in this publication,  a map of an idealized corset department, which to me looks to be large, sanitized and medicinal, an oddly institutionalized presentation of an intimate something, something more of artistry and chance and possibility than an orthotic. 

I should think that I would like to make a Kingdom Map for his image, some day.  It looks to me ready to accept the responsibilities of landforms or ideas or statistics or changes or comparisons in place of its plain nature of counters and countertops and display cases, empty boxes waiting for something a little more invigorating to depict.  Or maybe not, maybe the chance of display of transformations is enough to suit its peculiar, perhaps singular, needs.

Or maybe on the Corset Map  instead of  substituting land and sea for corsets and boxes, one could substitute the noises of a quiet house at night, or the sound of heavy boots in a brittle-dry snow in the deep cold.  Or maybe a map of the discovery of children's laughter, or inconvenient pauses in conversations through the history of human speaking...or a map of lost ways.

Maybe the Corset Map could be used for a template for the things we will forget and the things we've forgotten, in which case the boxes need not be filled in, giving us a new version of the Bellman's Map from Mr. Dodgson, a new subcategory of maps--the blank map.  Or it could be the outlines for a map of the places that you meant to say something, but didn't.  Perhaps it could be used to outline where and how many times that people tell/told you that they'll miss you if you step away, making hollow boxes of simple loneliness because we can't be there all of the time.

Or maybe the corset map is just a corset map.

[This item is available for purchase, here.] The other surprise is how expensive these undergarments were.  For example, the Lily of France and Mme. Irene Corset Company (NYC) sold a girdle “for the heavy figure” (liberally sprinkling the word “heavy” throughout the description of the product like, well, sprinkles) for $132. The $132 corset is equal to about $2000 in today’s currency, or roughly a 15:1 increase. There were girdles and etc. in all price ranges, but the (1939) $30-$60 range seems to have been the most common; even still, the $30/low-medium quality item is about $430 in today's dollars, and the cheapest of them all at 5 bucks goes in today’s economy at 75 dollars or so.  I’m not familiar with the value of undies today, but this sure sounds like a whole hell of a lot of money. 

$132 for underwear in 1939 was a tremendous amount of money for the average person—even for the upper-middle class, it was a bunch, considering that you could buy a decent new car for $700.  It would also be equal to a half year’s worth of an average house rent ($28/month) and 1320 gallons of gasoline. 

 

It sounds like it was very expensive to keep the up with the idea of an ideal figure, which of course was partially create by this same sort of company, creating both need and demand for its product. 

1939 Price Comparisons:

Wages per year, average:  $1,730.00
Minimum wage: 30 cents/hour
Milk, by the gallon: 35 cents
Postage stamp, 1st class: 3 cents
Dow Jones: 131
Gas, average price of a gallon:  10 cents
Bread, by the loaf:  8 cents
Hamburger Meat, by the pound: 14 cents
Automobile, new, average:  $700.00
House, new, average: $3,800.00
House rent, average: $28.00/month

 

The Odd Department: Cartoons & Tongue-Stuffed Calve's Brains

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 807  Blog Bookstore

 

In the excitable, pulsing pile that is my collection of Naively Bizarre Literature--some 5,000 items now pushing themselves around like a 750-pound bad idea--comes this lovely, "what the  ____!?" title:  Let's Serve Something New. 53 Selected Recipes for the use of Liver, Heart, Kidney, Sweetbreads, Tongue and other Meat Specialties.

Now, once I got the tongue part out of my 18-year-long vegetarian brain, I wondered about what on earth the other part of the ripping title and what "specialties" there might be.

But before I could get there I was stopped by these unique cartoon illustrations romping their way through the text with spectacular word balloons   There are SO many more words that could be injected into these balloons than the ones that were used, and so much more expected. But the zombie texts was inserted by the publisher, which was the American Institute of Meat Packers, whop no doubt were trying to force every last penny of profit out of whatever was left in the sluice sieves of the chopping room floor. 

If these cartoons were extracted from this source, and their balloons left blank, and if people were asked to supply new text, the original words would be the very last in a very long list of possible fillers.  

 

Removed from context, the illustrations are unexpected and hysterical; placed back into context, and well, they are a little wince-y. 

The recipes that decorate this pamphlet are no less unbelievable, at least from where I'm sitting, and I'm sitting hard:  stuffed baked liver with vegetables in liver dressing, pork liver fermiere, liver with brown liver gravy, liver Pasadena (liver and butter and broiled bacon swimming in bacon fat), liver dumplings stuffed with liver, creamed sweetbreads, kidney omlettes, baked stuffed heart with rice border, heart chop suey, scrambled brains, sauteed brains, creamed calves brains, cold jellied tongue, tongue omlette, tripe roll, baked pig's feet, and, not last, Tripe a la Mussolini (which is 1.5 pounds ogf tripe, bread crumbs, and tomato sauce).  (Spam stuffed with spam and spam jelly, braised in a light spam sauce, and covered in crackled spam.)

After everything was said and done, the other surprise meats didn't seem so surprising anymore, what with running up on the heals of delicacies like stuffed tongue and parboiled sumpin's: tails, feet and oysters (a la Waldorf) seemed as harmless as a Sunday Slider. 

Spam.

Rectangles as Impossible Elements in Interior Design

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 798  Blog Bookstore

Sometimes, there are simply too many rectangles.

But this sentiment is just a function of its time—for example, in this glorious manufacturer’s catalog by the Armstrong Cork Company (of Lancaster, PA), the incredibly-titled Business Floors, there simply aren’t enough rectangles to go around. 

For example:

  

And the perspective-bending distortions of this office, the point of view pulling the squares into rectangles before your eyes:

And this mysterious masterpiece, which the cork company calls "simple".  It is true that there is virtually nothing in this shop that draws the eye of the customer away from the clerk (the goods are stacked away perfectly in uniform boxes around the walls of the store), but the hundreds and hundreds of rectangles do nothing but confuse.  And aggravate.  A little Einstein on the Beach on the PA system and there would be no customers at all. 

A Rare Map of the Soviet Gulags, 1936.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 797  Blog Bookstore

Adolf Ehrt (1902-1973) was a twice-born Nazi who in 1935 let his 3-year membership in the party lapse so that he could do better work for Hitler from the “outside”.  In short, and to skirt some very interesting detail (over which I really don’t have much expertise), Ehrt felt that there was too much influence from the Church and government sources to fuel his unrequited need for purity in the party. 

Ehrt wrote this anti-Communist propaganda (Der Weltbolschewismus ein internationales Gemeinschaftswerk über die bolschewistische Wühlarbeit und die Umsturtzversuche der Komitern in allen Ländern) from an imaginary perch in something called the Anti-Kominetern, but was really nothing more than an arm of the Nazi party.  Appearing in Leipzig in 1936, this book savaged communism, communists and the Soviet Union to no end.  I own it because it is an interesting document and speaks to its period, and also has hundreds of unusual photos, giving it a documentary appeal.  What I noticed just recently though was a map on part of page 481 in the weirdly skimpy section on the Soviet Union—a reproduction of a French map showing the distribution of concentration camps in the USSR.  I cannot remember seeing such a map in English during this time period. 

 

(Clickable/expandable image)

Ehrt was a Nazi painting with broad historical/Nazi strokes across a Communist canvas, and did get a lot of stuff right in his attacks; but considering the source his book is useless except for its pictures.   The USSR was a wicked place to be at this time; the bestial Joseph Stalin busy killing hundreds of thousands, imprisoning more—but this was in general not the story reaching folks in the United States. That this French map (source not given) showed two dozen or so concentration camps (Gulags, work camps) is remarkable; and of course it is just the tip of the Gulag system iceberg.  It was at least a start. It was also just the beginning of a particularly nasty period for the Russian people, who staggered under the weight of an edict called Article 58¹ that sent millions of people to their doom.  This map was also published just before the Great Terror², a spectacularly bad war of internal doom that tore millions from their homes and hundreds of thousands  from the earth. 

The map, rare as it is in appearance and sentiment, seriously underestimated the extent of the barbaric Soviet existence of the time. 

1. “One can find more epithets in praise of this article than Turgenev once assembled to praise the Russian language, or Nekrasov to praise Mother Russia: great, powerful, abundant, highly ramified, multiform, wide sweeping 58, which summed up the world not so much through the exact terms of its sections as in their extended diacritical interpretation.  Who among us has not experienced its all-encompassing embrace? In all Truth, there is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago    See "Article 58"  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_58

2. NKVD Order no. 00447, 1937, directed against "ex-kulaks" and other "anti-Soviet elements" (such as former officials of the Tsarist regime, former members of political parties other than the communist party, etc.)  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge  Generally, any unfriendly could be uprooted and shot or sent off to Siberia. .  The operative made it easy for local justice units to identify trouble makers and shoot them.

Advanced Weirdness Department: Wincingly Dated Underwear Stares

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 796   Blog Bookstore

This Carter’s underwear ad from LIFE magazine (1950) makes a weird pronouncement—it is behavior and body language that was evidently  entirely appropriate for the time, that there was nothing amiss or untoward or askance or unusual in the position or the glances of the two models.  Now, today, the whole scene is at least unsettling, squirmy.