Category: Absurdist, Unintentional

Poemology of a Patent for Making Stuff with Human Ashes, 1927

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1772

I found this rather, well, remarkable American patent by Albert Vanderlaan for 30 August 1927, which described the inventor’s idea for the utilization of human remains. Vanderlaan found it distasteful to have cemeteries, which only served the function of keeping rotting bodies together until they were forgotten, and suggested that we put the dead to work. That is, the dead should be cremated, the ashes mixed with a building material of some sort, and then the whole made into something and put to use.

Vanderlaan’s prose is 19th century–perhaps he was instructed in school by an older person educated in 1840 for his own late 19th century education. The sentence structure and vocabulary suggest this–or perhaps he was just a poor writer and found difficult words to stick together. In any event, I thought that the prose sounded (and looked) better if made into a poem, or at least given the structure of a poem. And so here it is. The entire poetized patent is presented without interruption, and all of what follows are the words of Albert Vanderlaan.

Method Of Perpetuating Human Remains And Article Made Thereby.

Prologus

This invention relates to the art of perpetuating human remains

and more particularly

relates to a method therefor and article made thereby.

The ugliest phase of civilized man’s career on earth

is not so much his inevitable physical expiration

as the manner in which it became the custom to dispose

of his mortal remains by burial in earth.

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Absurdist, Unintentional
History of Dropping Things: Electro-Punk Machine for Waking/Smothering People

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Here’s an ambitious alarm clock that I stumbled across–something designed so as to not be ignored, something for the people who regularly sleep through simple alarm clocks. This device, patented by Samuel S. Applegate in 1882, woke the sleeping client by dropping that cage-resembling apparatus on the sleeper’s head. Evidently the ends of the suspension were soft, but hard enough to cause the sleeper to get straight-away back into the waking world. There’s probably nothing quite so like being slapped awake every morning.

The apparatus is seen better here–it is an unusual contrivance:

Such a pretty picture of the sleeper, though I must admit the perspective would’ve been a bit of a challenge especially to a challenged artist.

Okay, this one is walking people using water dropped on the sleeper’s neck:

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Cross-Sections — Electro-LUXurious — Patents
Modest Expectations–Engineers Stand in the Shallow End of the Future Pool

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1769

The novel underneath its title can be good or bad in spite of it, independent of the flag under which it flies. Its just helpful, usually, if the title is as good as the book—better even, because, after all, Modest Expectations isn’t quite as good as the real thing. But “Modest Expectations” seems as thought hat would be the title of future vision in this advertisement that appeared in 1929. It is an advertisement in Collier’s magazine by an engineering company during the time in which The Engineer and the possibilities of engineering were running full-blaze in the United States. There was a belief in the idea of engineering as a cure-all to present and future problems, and the word was as prevalent in the sphere of social interaction as the prefix “e-” was in the early days on internet business and communication in the 1990’s.

It seems as though there were few occupations immune from the “-engineer” suffix, whether they had anything specifically to do with engineering, or not. The “control safety engineer” described a crossing guard; “sanitary engineer” referred to what was known as a garbage man; “nutrition control engineer” was a food server, and so on, position names changed by the hundreds if not more, elevating the status of a profession by simply applying the meme’s suffix to the job title. IF you judged the overuse of the term by the actual accomplishments and achievements of engineering of the times, it was probably justified, give the enormous progress of engineering. In just the first decade of the 20^th century enormous change were made in the way life was/would be lived with the introduction of the steam turbine generator, the internal combustion engine, heavier-than-air powered aircraft, the audion, the vacuum diode, the thermionic valve, Bakelite, and so on, all of which would soon bring technological change to create revolutionary changes in the way life was structured in the U.S. And worldwide.

But given the gigantic changes in the first 30 years of the 20^th century, what was it that the engineer was seeing in this advertisement, “The Engineer Looks into the Future”? What was it in the hand of the engineer in the illustration, what was he placing down in the city of tomorrow, today? A faster train, or space ship or part of a vacuum tube people-mover, or what?

It turns out that this engineer didn’t have such lofty future-vision plans—in fact, the vision was subterranean, and the thing in the engineer’s hands was cast iron pipe. Yes, the future was in materials, and that material manifested itself in cast iron pipe, courtesy of the Cast Iron Pipe Association.

Now cast iron had been around for a long time before 1929—even used as pipe the idea goes back into the 16^th century. There were bridges made of cast iron in the 18^th century, and the movement towards the modern skyscraper maybe traced back to cast iron facades and construction in the 1850’s. I’m not so sure why cast iron pipe was so significant in 1929—perhaps it wasn’t so very widely used. But I must admit to having a “moment of discovery” while I tried to reason why the future of engineering looked into a hole in the ground filled with cast iron pipe.

Another interesting image that comes a little earlier on is this advertisement for the “Institute of Efficiency” (in 1917), which in effect takes the running-rampant ideas of engineering and applies it to the ways in which people ran their personal lives. Efficiency was as much a catch-word as “engineering”, and it was in this decade that saw the appearance of Scientific Management (Fred. Winslow Taylor) and its numerous offshoots. What bothered me about this ad marshaling the positive factors of the study-at-home courses in efficiency was its inefficient use use of space and communication of the idea. Not the least of which was the very odd bit in the bottom right corner, which the reader was supposed to fill in and clip off and send to the Efficiency people. There’s really no room to write, and you can’t actually mail the thing—and, if I was trying to get someone to purchase something about improving their efficiency I might have wanted to make it much easier for them to send me something with their name on it. The whole effort just seems not very efficient.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Anticipation, History of — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Technology, History of
Geology of Images: Finding Pre-biotic, Neo-Dadaist Images in Antique Astronomy Prints

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1768

Sometimes when you look hard enough you will see (if not actually “find”) what you’re looking for; determined to make a discovery, you can sometimes force yourself into believing that what you’re seeing is what it was that was needed to be seen .

The microscopical world of astonomical antiquarian prints is an interesting one–and in some ways, modern ways, are on the Robert Hooke/Micrographia magnitudes for the remarkable magnified worlds that their detail reveal–but mostly right now I’m interested in the odd/beautful designs that are hidden in larger scientifc engraved presentations.

[Even in fairly famous scientific images lke the one above–explaining the rainbow–there are all manner of unexpected artistic finds outside of their significant scientific contributions.]

These images from the title of this post, on the other hand, are just simply “there”–all you need is a little magnification and some sharp vision, and the things come to life. When looking hard at these images and seeing the teaming non-representational artforms that swim through so many of them it seems remarkable to me that these things weren’t seen as art before Kandinsy finally “discovered” this artform in 1911.

(For example Mr. Marey produced a very remarkable Nude descending-like series of photographs 40 years before Duchamp–but the Marey images were observed scientifically, and I’m unaware of anyone who ever wrote an artistic appreciation of that work before 1900. [Marey left, Duchamp right.] But that is another story.)

For us today with almost 100 years of Kandinsky/Klee/Duchamp/Braque/Malevich under our belts it is relatively easy to see the artfullness of the pieces and bits of these engravings–not so a hundred-plus years ago, and harder yet for 200+.

For example, there are some things that take on an absolutely pre-biotic flavor, like material that we’d come to see a half-century ago, as in these details from an 1850’s French lithograph on nebualae:

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Iconography — Perception — Perspective
Strange Things in the Sky Department: Disintegratging Moon and Lunar Nuclear Alien Space Nazis

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1767

In a post last week in the Strange Things in the Sky department: the Exploding Moon, I mentioned that images of the Earth’s Moon actually exploding seem to be quite uncommon. The ever-observant Ray Girvan wrote to say that the Moon does just that in the 2002 remake of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, when Earth’s lunar mining operations disrupt it so that it makes the Moon disintegrate, raining parts of itself on Earth.

And it just so happens that I stumbled on another odd image of the Moon coming to its end: a mention of a drawing by Thomas Voter, showing the Moon disintegrating under the force of the Earth’s gravity. It appears in the November, 1939 issue of Popular Mechanics in the “Explorers of Space” article.

And then, on the next page of the magazine appears another image of the breaking Moon by Wallace Favereau, this also showing bits of the Moon slamming into the Earth.

Thomas Voter’s illustrations led me to his image showing Boy Scouts flying on their odd destiny to the Moon for a rendezvous with Post-War Moon Nazis in what is a surprising juvie novel by Robert Heinlein, Rocket Ship Galileo (1947). [Image courtesy of the excellent Roborant site, well worth a visit and bookmark, here.] The three boy-rocket-experimenters are on their way their with their Nobelist uncle, piloting a thorium-fueled mail rocket that the Manhattan Project Uncle was able to rig up for interplanetary adventures, which gets them to a nuke-war-ravaged-Moon with victorious commanding Nazis over whom the intrepid travelers eventually triumph. This really has nothing to do with exploding or disintegrating Moons, but finding a reference to Moon Nazis does classify as a strange-thing-in-the-sky. evidently the story is much disparaged by modern readers, though the author of Roborant feels as though there is a much greater depth to the story that the possible high-comic storyline implies.

It looks like there is a sub-genre for Evil Alien Space Nazis in books and film, but I just can’t go any further with the topic.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Astronomy — Strange Things in the Sky
Cigarettes as Toy Soldiers: Playing with Tobacco, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Sometimes a bit that I post in this blog’s Unintentional Absurdist category need nothing more than an elementary introduction, their images usually being enough of a story–more of a story–than could be told of them. This current installation, “Pipes and Cigarettes Form a Tabletop Army”, from Popular Mechanics for December, 1939, is a good example of this.

The story is simple: for some reason, Mr. Jeff London (of Virginia) and his son Tommy built soldiers and sailors and horses and guns and mess wagons and so on from pipes and cigarettes and matches. They called it “Fags Army”. I’m not sure what compels this sort of expedition into creativity, but, well, here it is:

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas
17th & 18th Century Steampunk Flight

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1764 [Part of the Unintentional Absurdist/Surreal series]

I’ve called on M. de Belidor (1698-1761) before in this blog, using some of the images of his books to describe the Found-Surreal, the Unintentional Dadaist (and so on), images that once slightly removed from their original context take on an entirely new life, sometimes fantastical and odd.

The engraving above is a fine example, an appears innocently (and beautifully, and importantly) in his Architectura Hydraulica (1740), and titled “Demonstration of Friction”. I’ve simply inverted it and removed some of the numerical notation–and then, suddenly, it becomes a sort of Steampunk Balloon Machine–a lovely collection of small balloons lifting large wheels and cogs, assembling some sort of something in mid-air, demonstrating very little friction, of lightness and airiness

Belidor was a remarkable engineer and theoretician who blended the two practices perfectly–actually one of the great issues in his career as trying to disseminate higher levels of techno-competence among people working with machines and using technology to some end. He often found that the skills necessary to reproduce and maintain some of the machines he wrote about to be, um, lacking in the population at large. He was also very transparent in technology’s role in military life (which at about the time he was writing was nearly tautological) and tried to apply the advancements he made in that area (as he was a military engineer and soldier) to the industrial and social sphere. In any event he was a very interesting man who produced books that were significant for a half-century or more past his death.

The second image is even more striking, and is not altered at all–the difference in perspective comes with a difference of perspective, which in this case is simply labeling the image as something it isn’t, a Massive Steampunk Flying Machine of the 17th Century:

It is nothing of the sort, of course, but if you suspend a little critical thinking then that is what this engraving sort of looks like. In reality it a combined profile of the machine (top of the image) and view of its placement (bottom) of the great technological and engineering feats of the day, a modern marvel, a wonder–the Marly Machine. This was a large, integrated device constructed (over a seven-year-long period and finished in 1684) to pump water from the Seine to Louis XIV’s chateaux at Versailles and Marly, and did so magnificently up a 500-foot vertical rise to an aqueduct and then on to the final destinations. Those paddle wheels on the sides of the installation were monsters: 36′ in diameter, capturing and releasing the water of the Seine to power 250 pumps which sent the water on its way up the long and steep hill.

Here’s a view of the device in situ, with a long course of other implements ascending the hill. [Images courtesy of Marlymachine.org.]

So with a slight suspension of analysis and a little inversion, these two images take on a flighty life of their own, independent of their intended purposes.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Strange Things in the Sky — Technology, History of
Monopolis and Multiopolis: a Note on -apolises, -opolises, and Such

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1757

Welcome to Monopolis! “City of the future…imaginative immensity…disturbingly dynamic beauty…”

The moment I look at it Monopolis suggests another word: Multiopolis. Although the originators of the Mono- word weren’t really suggesting plain vanilla wrappings for a one-size-fits-all existence, the more diversified-sounding Multi- at least sounds a little more enchanting and not so Orwellian. It is also a little odd that I can find nothing on “Multiopolis”, not even in a popular Google search–and of course, having been printed in 1931, “Monopolis “can’t be “Orwellian” since Mr. Blair had not yet written any books, least of all 1984, which wouldn’t appear until the man was almost completely out of life. (Blair/Orwell wrote nine books in fifteen years, 1934-1949, and would die in January 1950.)

“Monopolis” certainly suggests a gritty sameness, a suffocating city of similarity with no central decency.

In this image (above), published in the Illustrated London News on 18 April 1931, Monopolis seems to live up to its promise in all aspects except for its name, which is actually pretty creative. The great building on the hill, the skyline in the mountain, all bauhaused-up with perhaps nowhere to go into the near-future, with really not that much, not too terribly much, to distinguish itself from a first-year architectural student’s semi-dreamed-upon work, though for some reason an aqueduct does makes an appearance to spice things up.

In the end, though, Monopolis was a simple title for a continuing series of new-house/design shows in London–it hasn’t much to do with anything, and was simply an interestingly-named bit for a bad advertising campaign.

I wonder about a collection of “Opoluses”, like the Christianopolis of the Lutheran Christian Utopia, published by Johann Valentin Andreae, in Reipublicae Christianopolitanae descriptio… published in Strasburg by the heirs of Lazarus Zetzner, 1619. This is certainly among the most elegant of things ending with “-opolis”, even though it does look like a prison. Or hospital. And no one would want to be in either in 1619.

[Source: Martayan Lan with thanks]

There is a small town in Kansas called Opolis, a place of 54 houses and 117 people or so. It sounds like a perfectly nice bookend to places like Indianapolis and Minneapolis (and yes they’re both “apolis” and not “opolis”), not to mention Hotdogopolis, Bike-opolis, Planned-opolis, and the fantastically-named Possible-opolis.

I think that Monopolis just won’t do.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Architecture and Building — Naming Things
On Time’s Arrow and Change: the Death of Silent Movies

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1755

Few people who know about Tomas Kuhn would think that the true benefactor of the idea of the structure of scientific revolutions was Ms Midge Flep, seen here in a 1920 photograph next to her famous arrow. Ms. Flep, who always maintained that she was “never a head for schooling” did however think large thoughts, culminating evidently in her procedural banquet of what happens with change and time, and written famously of course on a series of large black paper and wooden arrows. “The nice thing about writing on wood” said Ms. Flep, “is that you can get your ideas down before the wood even gets turned into paper”. Her main and evidently much-copied thesis is that “big change like in big events are big”, and that “time will like an arrow will fly” somewhere, usually getting where it was going, “as arrows do, Mr. Zeno notwithstanding”.

This of course is not a true story, but it was the best I could do for this fantastic, high non sequitur found-photograph.

It does remind me of fast change, though–not in viewing the image exactly but in writing the nonsense about it.

Revolutions in science and in all sorts of other things does sometimes take sometime and great effort to find its way through the world. And sometimes, though not rarely, monumental changes in theory and technology and delivery systems find near-instantaneous reception, finding its universal spot very quickly. Ms. Flep-Bent’s arrow would have been deflected almost not-at-all in the case of the successful application of sound-on-film technology and its application in making movies–the effects of these changes were felt immediately at the Bijou, with a near-complete turnaround from one state of affairs to another (silent film and talkies) in only three years or so.

Look: people had been messing around with sound and cinema for decades, basically from the start of the mass exhibition of movies–results of these efforts up to the early 1920’s were poor. Enter the prolific and brilliant and problematic inventor and non-businessman Lee de Forest and the application of his audion in November 1922, when he established his De Forest Phonofilm Company at 314 East 48th Street in New York City. This was the true beginning and some very fierce and fast competition for sound-on-film motion pictures, which developed along the strengths of the RCA Photophone and Warner Bros Vitaphone, which basically left de Forest’s Phonofilm in the developing dust.

Fast forward through the technical part, sound-on-film motion pictures iconically took center stage with Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer on 16 October 1927. The movie went box office boffo, setting records all alog the way, and the studios began producing talkies at a prodigious rate–in the first two years after the Jolson film the only thing keeping the monumental change away from silent films was the rate of changeover in the theatres themselves as they upfitted to the new sound and projection systems. the result of all of this: 1927 was the absolute zenith for silent films; by 1930 Hollywood produced 335 sound films and 175 silent films; in the next year, 1931, only two silent films were made. The change was complete.

Sound changed everything, not the least of which were the careers of actors whose voices turned out to be unacceptable for whatever reason–nasal tons, high pitch, accents and so on doomed many a silent star. Also the idea of “acting” was tremendously affected–“overacting” gave way instantly to subtlety, now that actors no longer needed to act as though they were listening to something. Now they just did so, and the audience didn;t need the explanation, as they were experiencing the sound as well, right at the same time. But the big deal is that the fates changed dramatically for writers, who became important. Now that all sound was available and didn’t need to be described in pantomime or an occasional text card, the stuff of the script became extremely significant, especially the new thing: dialog.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Technology, History of
French Humorous Menu Postcards

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I’m not sure where the need came from for these turn-of-the-century French photographic postcards to exhibit a blank “menu” possibility to the recipient. Maybe it was a dinner invitation, or perhaps it was just a card poking fun at fun. I really don’t know–perhaps someone will be able to put one of these to use for their next dinner party?

All are from the charming Fantaisies Bergeret site, here.

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Absurdist, Unintentional

Category: Absurdist, Unintentional

Method Of Perpetuating Human Remains And Article Made Thereby.