Category: Anticipation, History of

Birds and Human Flight

JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5154
For thousands of years the most popular fuel of the common idea for humans to achieve flight was through the application of bird flight mechanics. (The other common vehicle employed balloons of one sort or another—I’ll look at that later.)

Before the age of the actual application of these principles there were long sustained bird-like semi-humanoid-godlike-birdforms throughout mythology.

Kings and overarching rulers living and imagined were seen to perform bird-supported and flighted adventures; the Old Testament is populated by winged seraphim and cherubin; Egyptian gods and goddesses were depicted with long, graceful vulture-like wings; in ca. 160 ACE Lucian of Samosata wrote one of the earliest accounts of space flight with Icaromenippus, who reached ultra-great heights with a device employing eagle and vulture wings, using them in an attack upon Heaven; a Chinese emperor of the Han dynasty reputedly kept an eye on his empire from a flying chariot; the famous Bellerophon took flight on Pagasus (the horse with bird-like wings, and confusing my point some) to spear the Chimera. Closer to the point is the flight of Daedalus and his waxy birdwings, as well as Thidireks (from a Germanic myth) who uses a suit of artificial feathers to fly; but much closer to the point of this post was the Persian king Keykavus–he oversaw his lands from the comfort of his throne, which was transported by four apparently very muscular eagles.

Among the many things that Leonardo was working on as he was semi-creating the Renaissance was a system of solo flight for man. His earliest system was based on a large winged device in which a person would be prone, flapping flexible wings via the use of a pulley system, looking quite birdlike. Later on Leonardo would develop multi-winged systems, some of which would be quite large and requiring the operator to be upright, making the whole look more like a helicopter than a man-filled bird.

Perhaps the greatest visionary of techno-anthropormorphic human flight was Cyrano de Bergaerac. Before he was the object of Edmund Rostand’s 1897 play, de Bergerac was a massively creative author, producing, among other things, the book Histoire des Etats et Empires de la Lune (History of the States and Empires of the Moon, published posthumously in 1657), followed by Histoire des Etats et Empires du Soleil (History of the States and Empires of the Sun, again, published further and deeper into his life’s surrender, 1662), both eventually collected as L’Autre Monde (Other Worlds). Bergerac introduces us, the humble reader, to one of the most important concepts in the history of literature–namely that we humans were not only not alone in the universe, but that we were not even the dominant culture, and indeed we were actually hated by some of the other more advanced species.

In a very complicated series of adventures the protagonists are brought to the moon and to the other side of the sun and such by being flown in a basket attached to the neck of a giant bird. (In one part of the escapade, Cyrano takes us to the moon, which is a paradise, where the adventurer is captured and imprisoned by the intelligent indigenous folks, and from which he escapes by clinging to a soul being removed by the devil. (!))

Another spectacular visionary was Francis Godwin, who brought us about the first book on interplanetary space travel with his The Man in the Moone; or, A Discourse of a Voyage Thither; by F.G., B. of H.; to which is added Nuncius inanimatus, written in Latin by the same author, and now Englished by a person of worth (London, 1657). Here we encounter the tales of y Domingo Gonsales, who Godwin gets to teh moon on a device powered by captured birds, becoming also one of the earliest literary proponents of the plurality of world’s thesis.

A quick look at the chronology of imaginary flight shows that there are lots of other attempts at flight—but none that I can identify quickly that use birds to lift and carry its cargo to the sun.

Fast forward to the 19th century though and we come into the veritable heyday of anthropomorphic flight attempts. Here we find very notable attempts by George Cayley—who was probably the first person to truly understand the dynamics and physics of flight creates his first aerial device—a model helicopter with contra-rotating propellers reminiscent of the Leonardo device.

Victor Tatin’s ornithopter of 1875 actually was a much more sound “read” than it looked. He had a very advanced idea of the mechanics of flight, understanding the conditions, and physics, and the resistance of the air, and so on, but just couldn’t translate this understanding into a realistic design. This is especially true when he hit upon one of the key ingredients to the Wright success—a good, powerful but very lightweight engine. This was pretty big news, though Tatin would up a suicide.

And speaking of deadly ideas, the exceptional Otto Lilienthal would wind up a victim of his thinking, too, though his end came in practical applications (or impracticable, I guess) rather than unrealized theoretical understanding. Lilienthal was one of the most important figures in the development of flight in the nineteenth century, making the first heavier than air gliding flights in what looked quite a bit like bird wings. (Wilbur Wright said of him; “Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. … It is true that attempts at gliding had been made hundreds of years before him, and that in the nineteenth century, Cayley, Spencer, Wenham, Mouillard, and many others were reported to have made feeble attempts to glide, but their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted” as found in The Aero Club of America Bulletin, Sept. 1912 and also in the article on Lilenthal in WIki.) He would die in 1896 in a gliding accident, falling to a crumpled death.

This was also the fate of Percy Pilcher, a great English aviator, who was also quite close to developing a powered heavier than aircraft, but was killed in 1899 before having a chance to test the craft.

Note: The title of this post comes from the World War II (late 1942) patriotic song, with words by Harold Adamson and music by Jimmy McHugh. It tells the tale of a plane struggling home after a bombing raid:

Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer
What a show, what a fight
Boys, we really hit our target for tonight
How we sing as we limp through the air
Look below, there’s our field over there
Though there’s one motor gone
We can still carry on
Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer.

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Anticipation, History of — Aviation & flight
The Goubet Submarine, 1886

JF Science Books Quick Post Overall Post #5152

Charles Goubet designed an interesting and technically advanced submersible boat, an electrically-powered submarine, which was the first of its kind to be powered in this way. The image below appeared in La Nature in 1886–the boat was about 16′ x 6′ x 3′, much deeper than wide, and was powered by a Siemens motor being driven by batteries, and the whole of it unsuccessfully rudderlessly steered by a highly moveable screw propeller. The electric power applied in this design was the innovation, while the navigating end of the operation of the boat seems to have been, well, not a success.

“Das Unterseeboot von C. Goubet” [following] is an alternative, slightly cleaner and with less peripheral imagery view of the submarine as found in Die Gartenlaube (1886) page 146.

The “torpedo”-labeled section on the plan view is exactly that—the explosive was fixed to the outside of the sub, and seems to have worked more like a mine than what we would consider to be a torpedo in the present. The sub would work its way under an enemy ship where it would release the weapon, which would attached itself to the ship; the sub would then withdraw trailing an explosive/detonating wire when, after reaching a safe distance, the torpedo would be detonated via the wire. Evidently the design overall was a failure—the major complaint being the sub was very difficult to navigate underwater and the attaching/detonation part of the torpedo was problematic. (It seems as though those “teeth” were supposed to attach the torpedo to the bottom of the target ship…and they seemed not to do so very well.) That said, there were design elements and tech bits that carried forward to more substantial submarine attempts.

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Anticipation, History of — Technology, History of
A Monumental and Fantastically Bad Idea: Lowering the Mediterranean (1929)

JF Ptak Science Books (This is a slight expansion of an earlier post from 2011)

“Simply the thing I am shall make me live.”–from Jorge Luis Borges, “Shakespeare’s Memory”

It would be a Purgatory, or worse, to suddenly wake up one morning with another person’s memory–worse yet than to have wished it, only to find that you didn’t want it at all. This evidently works out with memories high and low, though it is tempting to want to wish to see what the inspiration looked like for one idea located in a particular memory. Or maybe not. But I am curious about when and here the author of the pamphlet above got his idea, and what it looked like to him–did he hear or see or smell something that prompted the inspiration for this reverse-monumental jolt, something that may well be one of the worst engineering ideas of the 20th century?

It is interesting to pursue a loose thought like this to its not-necessarily logical end. Such is the case with the self-styled Paneuropic ideas of Hermann Soergel (1885-1952), the author of the above. Soergel was a Bauhaus architect and author of a number of works on design and far more ethereal, floating-castle ideas. His most spectacular contribution—incubated in the mid-1920’s and still clinging by its fingertips as an idea among some current thinkers—was to put a dam across the straights of Gibraltar. The dam would generate electricity of course, but most importantly to Soergel, it would also empty an enormous amount of water (lowering the sea by 200 meters) from the Mediterranean leaving vast new expanses of land to be developed and colonized over generations into the future. The water of course would have to go somewhere, and that somewhere was the Sahara Desert, somehow in its wake creating farmable and productive lands. Soergel was creating a certain, very wide, fantastical future of uncertain monumental prospects.

A “brief outline” of the idea was published in this four-language pamphlet, Lowering the Mediterranean Irrigating the Sahara (Panropa Project), which was published by J.M. Gebhardt in Leipzig in the very bumpy year of 1929. (The Weimar years in Germany were already into deep bumpiness; the rest of the world would follow suit in October of that year.) To be fair, Soergel didn’t plan on emptying the entire Mediterranean, just a bunch of it–at least enough to be able to rename it.

[Here’s a map of the new Mediterranean, or the Mediterranean that would be made to go away. As you can see at this point Sicily and Italy become enormous, and the Greek Islands are combined to form one large land mass–this last bit alone is enough to form total and complete reisstance to this idea. Also at this stage perhaps 150 or so miles of new lands have been reclaimed from the sea all along its former borders–more so in Turkey. There is no mention as yet of any new islands that are formed in the sea water’s wake.]

As it turns out Soergel thought that this plan would add at least 660,000 KM² to the base of the surrounding countries of the Mediterranean, or roughly the equivalent of the combined land masses of Italy and Germany. Having the sea pulled back from hundreds if not thousands of seaside towns and cities would no doubt be a “problem”, for them; but that doesn’t matter to Soergel, as they were inferior thoughts to the grand idea of emerging a new continent. Great bog (and a good simulation with a powerful computing capacity) only know how the changes in the Mediterranean would affect the climate–well, that in combination with the thousands of new square miles of inland sea and canals in the previous Sahara desert. There are of course many other problems.

The master plan at work was that the world would be divided into three economic spheres in the future, all beginning with the letter “A”: American, Asia, and the new land to be created by Soergel, “Atlantropa”, which was the former Europe expanded into the new dry beds of the Mediterranean and North Africa. And also of course Egypt, which would be covered with “thousands” of canals and become semi-submerged by the new borders of the meandering sea. This would be the way for Europa to compete with the rest of the world in the future.

[I should point out that the image above comes from the Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig) for August 1931, and is a drawing by an artist named “AS. Christ” depicting a cross section of one of the bridge/dams of Soergel’s Panropa’s ideas.]

Perhaps it is actually three steps to get from the idea of damming up the straits of Gibraltar to the osmosis of Shakespeare’s memories into someone else’s brain—a squinting acquiescence of the middle touch being the brilliant Jorge Luis Borges. You see it was in the Argentine master’s last published story, “Shakespeare’s Memory”, that we meet Herr Soergel (as Hermann Sorgel) again. But so far as I can remember Soergel exists only as a fictional character, with no reference to his real-life self. In this wonderful story, Soergel inherits the memories of William Shakespeare—these bits come to him slowly but surely, until they start to conflict with his own memory, and things get difficult. The man with Shakespeare’s memories winds up phoning strangers on the telephone, giving them away at random, until Soergel is left with his own mind again. Superior as Bill’s memories were, they still weren’t Hermann’s, who wanted his own life back in the end.

And so from the titanic, pan-europic technodream of Bauhausian Hermann Soergel to the dead brains and living memories of William Shakespeare, all through the fingers of the beautiful Jorge Luis Borges.

I’m sorry to report that at the end of it all, near the end of the pamphlet, Soergel releases his opinion on the political importance of his project. And yes, his aim was to form an alliance between the new PanAmerica (of the “three Americas” with the new Pan-European African Union to thwart “the yellow peril” which “arises from the racial antipathy of India, China and Japan. Soergel writes that “the fate of occidental civilization…will be settled on the Mediterranean”.

After it is all said and done, perhaps the best review of the work by Soergel is provided by the graphic designer who put the Big Red X on the cover of his work. It fits.

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Anticipation, History of — Bad Ideas — History of Nothing
Bridges Never Built: the Hudson River Bridge (Midtown) 1896

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post (Overall post 5151)

This beauty appears in the pages of Scientific American for 1896, and discusses a proposal for a bridge to connect Manhattan to Jersey, and to do so spectacularly. The plan was for the bridge to be twice as tall and twice as long as the Brooklyn Bridge, making it “one of the greatest feats of engineering” ever. The terminal and approaches would’ve been an issue in a few decades later had it been built, as they occupied a fair piece of land from about 59th/11th & 12th and 51st/8th, plus the ramping for six-rails-wide railway access. The time would come for a bridge in 1929 when the work on the existing Hudson River Bridge (now known as the George Washington Bridge) would be built further north in Washington heights. In any event, this 1896 bridge was quite lovely.

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Anticipation, History of — Architecture and Building — Technology, History of
A Really, Really Greater New York–Filling in the East River, Redux.

JF Ptak Science Books Old Post 1470 expanded and updated.

Eleven years ago on this blog (May 2011) I wrote about the fantastical idea of Dr. T. Kennard Thomson for expanding NYC land and wharf area by reclaiming parts of the NYC harbor and filling in the East River, among many other things. I came across another pamphlet by Thomson, though this one was almost entirely filled with favorable reviews for his spectacular sci-fi-ish speculations and aspirations. The newer (1918) pamphlet did offer a part I and part II to the plan–that is listed below following the the first illustration:

And the glorious side-by-side spectacular:

Long ago on this blog I wrote a post on Herman Soergel’s plan for extending the landmass of the countries around the Mediterranean Sea by damming the straits of Gibraltar, lowering the sea and irrigating the Sahara–an original, interesting but not very good idea, filled with briney cultivation and racial politics. In the past on this blog I’ve written about other city plans–and in particular, for New York City–that have involved floating Manhattan into the harbor, or filling up large chunks of the Narrows, or floating the city on an enormous anti-gravity platform, and so on. Some of those plans were real, some science fiction, and some were plainly beyond both. The plan presented above is another monster, but at least this one could work, if not for the doing of it, and the expense. And the will.

But the bottom line, according to the engineer doing the thinking on this project, Kennard Thomson, would supposedly net the city a cool billion dollars after everything was said and done, and that would be 1916 dollars–that was equal to about 5% of the American GDP (!) in 1916, which would be about $400 billion in terms of 2010 GDP. I’m not sure how Thomson came up with this very big/very round number, though it must have been done for effect–I can just imagine him standing before a smokey room filled with civil engineers talking about his massive plan for enlarging NYC and throwing out the billion-dollar figure, watching the cigars glow red in exhaled disbelief.

Thomson did know what he was talking about–he was a busy (and “leading” according to the NYT) Manhattan civil engineer of stature, working on the Canal Barge and being the principal engineer for the Municipal and Singer buildings, for example–and his project seems to be well within the scope of possibility. Their sensical aspects however are, well, questionable.

Here’s the story–around 1911, while examining proposals to repair and extend New York’s wharves, Thomson came upon the idea–a magnificent, fabulous idea–of adding new wharves by adding new lands to the city. In short, the overall plan was to fill in the East River (!!) and reclaim the new land for city living, dam Hell Gate, construct a New East River (from Flushing to Jamaica Bay), extend the tip of Manhattan Island from the Battery to within a quarter-mile of Staten Island (!), create a new 40-square-mile island between Sandy Hook and Staten Island, extend the Jersey shoreline, add two new Manhattan-sized appendages to the east shore of Staten Island, and more. All of this would be connected by various new bridges and roads and tunnels, as well as a 6-track elevated railway that would circumnavigate the city. The purpose of all of this would be to add 100 miles of new docks, an enormous amount (“50 square miles of reclaimed land”) of new land and the capacity for NYC to house 20+ million people, all of which would be worth a billion dollars.

Thomson really meant “really” in the title for the proposal. There have been reclamation projects undertaken in New York Bay since then of course, and I think that virtually all of what Thomson talked about could be done. I think it would be a very interesting project for a class of some sort to undertake an estimation of what such a thing would cost today (and I would guess to duplicate the idea in real terms now would take up a sizable chunk of the GDP). Maybe all of this will make sense at some more future point.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Anticipation, History of — Architecture and Building — Technology, History of
An Eviscerating Review of “The Last Attack on Darwinism” (1872)

JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5130

There are many hopeful headings that appear in the fantastically-readable journal Nature (especially in the 19th century), and this one–“The Last Attack on Darwinism”–is certainly one of them. It was written for the 25 July 1872 issue by Alfred Russell Wallace in 1872 in response to Dr. Charles R. Bree’s¹ An Exposition of Fallacies in the Hypothesis of Mr. Darwin, and it pretty much eviscerates Dr. Bree’s attack. No doubt this title can be read two ways–one meaning the most recent attack on Darwinism, and the other meaning the final attack. I suspect Wallace hoped that this would be the last such thing he’d have to read or review, but being a thinking man he probably felt that no mater what proof and evidence was established for evolution there would always be someone/group/society that would argue their belief over the science, and so on into the future the debate would go. In any event, I’ve reproduced the first and last paragraphs of the Wallace review. Also there’s a further quotation on Bree from The Lancet as an example of the many scathing reviews Bree’s book received. The reviews are surgical and denunciating, though from what I’ve read they do not reach the high/low level of book reviews by Poe, whose book reviews read as though he read the work with a sledge-scalpel.

And the last short paragraph from Wallace: “In conclusion, I must again repeat that the only reason for devoting so much space to a book so little worthy of its title or its author, is the wish to warn such as are not well acquainted with Mr. Darwin’s works from implicitly relying either on Dr. Bree’s facts and arguments, or on the accuracy of his representation of those of Mr. Darwin and his supporters.”

Now a snippet from one of many such reviews that greeted Dr. Bree’s work, this from The Lancet (volume 2 1872):

“This book is the production of an uncompromising opponent of the Darwinian hypothesis. Dr. Bree can see no good in it at all, but hews away at it root and branch…The position taken up by Dr. Bree would, it appears to put a stop to all investigation of nature, for he contends that it is beyond the limits of human reason to furnish any sound explanation of the modus operandi of God in creation.” And: “Upon the whole, we should scarcely expect to find Dr. Bree’s work exercise much influence in staying the progress of the new opinions, or do more than satisfy those who have already made up their minds against them.”

Notes:

1. Charles R. Bree (1811-1886). An Exposition of Fallacies in the Hypothesis of Mr. Darwin. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1872. 8vo., 418 pp. + 32 pp.(publisher’s list).

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Anticipation, History of — Bad Ideas — Naming Things
Your Daily Dirigible (1913)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Overall Post 5129

Well, no, this is not really a “daily” dose of dirigibles, though it is a nice display of the airships. This double-page display is found in the Illustrated London News from 22 February 1913, illustrating a short article addressing the need for legal reform in the flight of dirigibles, particularly in regards to the airships being used in possible combat. WWI wasn’t far off at this point, and the ILN takes its readers on a quick tour of who-had-what in regards to the airships, depicting German and French airships and aerodromes. If you click on the images and then click again you’ll see that there is info on individual airships as well.

Click to Expand

Details follow:

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Anticipation, History of — Aviation & flight
A New Category: Techno-Naive Art (1924)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Overall Post 5131

What a fantastic drawing! I don’t mean to diminish this invention at all, though I must say that I was attracted to the article for the very 1950’s comic book naive and technical (Techno-Naive!) quality of the illustration. Maybe it is just the subject’s profile that has thrown me into this new spin.

That said, this invention was conceived for the rescue of miners and for oxygen-deprived mining, and is known as the Brown & Mills Aerophor, which was “a liquid air respirator for mine work and rescue”. I found this in the pages of Nature, 11 October 1924, p. 543.

Brown and Mills evidently worked and improved an earlier idea and design by Col. Cuthbert Blackett (1910), which this citation from Wikipedia: “The Blackett’s Aerophor is a nitrox semi-closed-circuit rebreather with liquid gas storage made in England from 1910 onwards for use in mine rescue and other industrial uses. It was used until the 1950s. “Aerophor” is from Greek αεροφορος = “air-carrier”. Its breathing bag was on the chest, of rubber, in a strong leather case. The other parts were in a backpack. It had two corrugated breathing tubes coming out of the backpack. Its duration on a fill was 2 hours. “

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Anticipation, History of — Cross-Sections — Industrial & Technological art
Found Poetry in Lost Plankton (1930)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Overall Post 5125

Over on my blog I’ve made a number of posts on “Found Poetry”–phrases and constructions of interesting structural images that when removed from a narrative form and subjected to a different display find a sort of light art form in themselves. The phrases and sentence are in their original order—spacing and delineation have changed a bit to focus their attractiveness. There have been posts on “Found Poetry” in the (sometimes very extended) titles of Renaissance books, recipes and instructions on cooking dainty sardines, a disintegrating machine from 1877, descriptions of clouds from 1726, and well, you get the picture. “Found art is where you don’t find it”, as M. Duchamp didn’t say—sometimes the found poetry is pretty obvious, sometimes not. Today’s entry has a terrific title, though the text lets us down a little, but then closes up very strong in the last paragraph. And so, from Nature, 4 January 1930, volume 125, no. 3140, the last sentences of the last paragraph:

“Do Ocean Plankton Animals Lose Themselves?

Have they moved out of their normal light,

and reached layers at which the intensity

is below

the threshold, thus to be doomed

to everlasting night until perchance by random movements

one bright day

they may swim once more

into the threshold intensity zone

and attracted upwards

to their optimum intensity?”

–F.S. Russell, Marine Biological Association, Plymouth

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Anticipation, History of — Perception
The New Speed of Information, 1846

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Overall Post 5121

Here’s probably an obscure bit on the coming of a very large change in journalism and the dispersion of information: a short announcement of the use of the electric telegraph in the rapid reporting of war news. The notice appeared in the Compte Rendu des Seances de l’Academie des Sciences 15 June 1846 (volume 22 no. 24, p 1004), and it is communicated to the Academie by Francois Arago, and runs for only about 100 words. Arago mentions how quick the operation of the electric telegraph was (citing our Mr. Morse), basically drawing attention to this new mode of data dispersal. He uses the example of the speech of the U.S. President (James Polk) on the new Mexican-American War, which was begun 25 April 1846, just weeks earlier than this report was published. Arago doesn’t mention the very dramatic spread of telegraphy lines and far-reaching nodes that blossomed in the U.S. Earlier in 1846…maybe he didn’t know of them, yet. What he does talk about is the astonishing bit of the Polk’s war address being disseminated so quickly—evidently the whole thing was transcribed and telegraphed in three hours. That seems today to be quite glacial, but this was done at a time when news was coming by packet steamer, Pony Express, and the U.S. Post by horse and wagon. To be suddenly able to disseminate news from Washington DC to Richmond and Albany and NYC and Boston all in a matter of hours from Morse to text was really quite astonishing.

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Anticipation, History of — How Fast Stuff Is. — Technology, History of