Category: Anticipation, History of

Rising to a Higher State of Misery–Are You Outread by Victor Frankenstein’s Creation?

JF Ptak Science Books [An earlier Post from 2014, expanded]

“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me?”–John Milton, Paradise Lost (X.743–5)

The animated human created by Victor Frankenstein in 20-year-old Mary Shelley’s anonymously published Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) was a far more intelligent being than portrayed in the many movies and stage productions that made the novel famous. “Frankenstein” usually refers to Dr. Victor, not the creation, who refers to himself as the possible “Adam” of his maker’s labors (and then later as Victor’s “Fallen Angel” following his murderous and nearly-uncontrollable rage), while elsewhere in the book he is called “it”, as well as “being”, “creature”, “daemon”, “Fiend, “monster”, “vile insect” and “wretch”, among other adjectival variants.

[Illustration at left by Theodor von Holst for the 1831 edition of Shelley’s book.]

He has been “Frankenstein” as much as he has been the “monster”, and portrayed so in so many films and other adaptations that there is a virtual dictionary of the actors who have played the role. So many, in fact, that there are near duplicates of the actors’ names (as with for example “Gwynn” and “Gwynne”, and “Sarazin” and “Sarandon”). Actors have changed in the role but the iconic makeup first worn by Karloff remained the same after Karloff signed off from the role, though in a twist he returned to play Victor in a later movie. In another variation “Frankenstein” remarks that Dracula is his “master” (I think this is in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein), and in a Hollywoodish irony Lugosi the master tries his hand in one film to portray Frankenstein himself. There are very few instances where Victor’s creation is portrayed sympathetically, at least before the 1980s. Generally he has been slow-witted, slow-footed, unintelligent and unremarkable, with little reasoning power and almost no verbal skills, none of which have anything to do with Shelley’s character. The adaptations seem to just appropriate the horror aspects of the novel, detach them, and sink them solely into the Boris Karloff character, which seems to have sold a lot of popcorn.

“Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

Mostly the creation in Shelley’s text is referred to as a “monster”–the word being used 35 times, mostly in reference to Victor’s animated man.

It is difficult to refer to the creation as a “monster” once you get to know him a little—he is exceptionally smart, teaching himself to read, and then reading difficult and complex works with deep understanding, which is hardly something that is expected from what Boris Karloff gave to us.

This man is deeply conflicted, and in chapter 13 he says:

“Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?”

“I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat!”

And then, in a couple of pages in chapter 15, we are given a great insight into this man, as he is about to understand these agonies via a discovery of three books in a portmanteau. These included The Sorrows of Werter by Goethe, a section of Plutarch, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The reading appears to elevate his state of understanding and of his misery, particularly with the Goethe.

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Anticipation, History of — Social History
Power and Technology of the Year 2000 (from 1927)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2779

I found another unexpected source for the initiation of nuclear energy—this one coming in Anton Lubke’s 1927 book, Technik und Mensch im Jahre 2000. The book is thick (372pp) and well-illustrated, and has what seems to be a mostly/somewhat progressive look into the future judging what I can cobble together….or from what I can tell, it was at least not terribly negative, though I haven’t been able to determine if the writer gets political, or not. Given the times Lubke (b. 1890) can’t but help to wonder what warfare might look like, and supplies us with one set of possibilities involving vast aircraft (pictured at left) attacking cities with poison gas and electricity. The idea of urban bombing was still pretty new in 1927, as was the idea of attacking cities that weren’t necessarily military targets. Both of the weapons used by Lubke’s aircraft seem as though they would be devastating, and indiscriminate. (Politicians would pull away from the idea of attacking civilian areas and sign treaties to that effect—that all went away with the invasion of China by Japan, and the attack upon cities by Nazi forces in WWII–the Allies followed suit almost immediately thereafter.) Lubke’s image (which appears in the section titled “Der Zukunftskrieg und die Technik”) must have seemed terrifying to his readers of 1927, though they are at least spared the image of the effects on the population in the imagery of the attack. (The Illustrated London News doesn’t hold back from its readers in an issue from 12 November 1932, which shares an exceptionally graphic artist’s interpretation of a poison gas attack on London, right on the front cover.)

This is only 16 years removed from what seems to be the first aerial bombing attack of a civilian population on 1 November 1911, when Lt. Giulio Cavotti dropped the first bomb from a plane on oasis-encamped Libyan troops at Tripoli. Of course things rapidly in the few years following that, so that by the end of WWI people got a good taste of what it meant to controlling pieces of property without actually occupying them, raining chaos and destruction from above. 20+ years later, in the early 1930’s bombing became more sophisticated, including a new arsenal of poison gas weapons. The threat from this weapon was agonizing and palpable–the results of gas attacks upon armed combatants in WWI and the gassing of civilians in the 1920’s and early 1930’s made a hard strike into the social fabric, an enormous gaping new hole to be filled in the heart of fear.

There were a number of interwar aerial bombings that took place that kept the issue of mass destruction alive and well. For example, Britain used its air arm very convincingly in Iraq, bombing many places including Bagdhad in 1923; the Spanish bombed civilians into submission in Morocco, near Tetuan, in 1925, and the French crippled and destroyed their opponents–both military and civilian, it made no difference–in Damascus, Syria, also in 1925.

Fiction also harnessed the possibilities of air war, not the least of which included Armageddon-like scenarios for the semi-End of Days through the use of poison gas and “atomic” weapons. For example, deadly gas used in Anderson Graham’s The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923) and Neil Bell’s Valiant Clay (where the poison gas kills 1.5 billion) and Dalton’s Black Death (1934), while Reginald Glossop’s The Orphan of Space (1926) created an alien atomic spaceship which delivered holocaustal death to Soviets and Chinese and Communists in general. There were many more stories like this, not the least of which were the non-fiction strategy works, like Giulio Douhet, author of Dominion of the Skies (1921), legitimizer of the “strategic” bombing of civilian populations (in spite of the Hague Conference of 1907*), and JFC Fuller’s The Reformation of War (1923) which emphsized the new importance of air war and power and which also allocated the use of gas, justifying that morality because it could cause less harm than a conventional attack.

Back to Lubke: it seems an interesting book, and from what I can see in a very light review there is space devoted to different energy sources than those of 1927: he wrote on solar, wind, tidal, and nuclear (“Atomzertrümmerung”) energy. He also addressed some sort of perpetual motion-something, electrical farming (“Düngung durch Elektrokultur”), and trips to the Moon with the “Mondrakete” (though this adventure into space was already being a well-established part of images of the future in the 1920’s).

There’s also this terrific image of a vast rocket plane, the description of which mentions Max Valier, the rocket pioneer, Oberth-popularizer, and founder in 1927 of the (German) Society for Space Travel. An aircraft/space vehicle like this it is noted could make the Berlin-NYC flight in about 1.5 hours. (Valier was also the first to lose his life in a failed experiment using liquid oxygen, establishing him in a very unfortunate category of “firsts”, becoming probably the first person to lose their lives in rocket flight; this is a similar category to Thomas Selfridge, who became the first person killed in an airplane crash, a 1908 test flight for the army with the pilot Orville Wright.)

There’s not that much else I can drag out of the Lubke book given my references, though I have just ordered a copy. I’ll get back to this when I’ve had a better look at it.

[Image at left from bookseller Versandantiquariat Hans-Jürgen Lange, here:

https://www.booklooker.de/B%C3%BCcher/Anton-L%C3%BCbke+Technik-und-Mensch-im-Jahre-2000-Erstausg/id/A028NHxY01ZZi]

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JF Ptak

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Anticipation, History of — Fear, History of — History of the Future
Fantasia of the Air–Cops, Booze, Marriage, and a Monkey. (1890)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2776

Well, not quite a fantasia, but more like a “fanciful/fantastical/imaginary” collection of “flying objects” (“objets volants de fantaisie”), a whimsical look at the very near future (or so) of airship flight in 1890. This future seems to make room for everyone in the air, and celebrated by a collection of worldwide nationalities on the ground. There really isn’t a title for it, and the print is indexed according to the posters/signs adorning the floating businesses and municipal pleasantries. According to the excellent French library site “Galica” the print is catalogued as “Sanatoir aérien du docteur Farceur, bureau volant de mariage, police aérienne [objets volants de fantaisie]”, which is entirely unpoetic and slightly galling given the subject matter, and merely describes some of the objects in the print. The only part of the title that hints at the delightful subject matter is the “police aerienne”, which would in spite of its clumsiness at least raise an eyebrow of just about any overworked research mole:

[Image source: Galica https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53024091c/f1.item]

What vision of the future of aviation doesn’t include two flying doggies and a monkey? This one does. At top right we have part of the title, a marquee for a floating sanitarium run by “Dr. Farceur”, which is probably some very light wordplay implicating a medical jester. There’s the police station, marriage chapel, a hook-up joint (sounding better as a “ballon de rendez-vous”), and a bar/cafe/restaurant. The law is there directing traffic and making an arrest; there are two ships, one a warship with a skull-and-bones and the other probably not; there’s a pamphleteer literally dropping his suggestions, some ladies with attaches, and a long-shoe Flaneur. Belting it all together is some sort of chorus line, though these ladies aren’t attached to any flying thing save for the wings on their backs. All in all, this is a fine and pleasing work, full of action, and probably not so impressed with the actual future of human flight.

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Anticipation, History of — Aviation & flight — History of the Future
Pioneering Effort on a Circular-Winged Aircraft (1909)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Claude Auguste Joseph Givaudan’s handiwork was presented in the June 5, 1909 issue of Scientific American as part of a longer article on the history of human heavier-than-air motorized flight. The image is, well, engrossing. It is both pretty and then not so much in a double-ended sausagey kind of way, wanting to look the role of a new age aircraft but winding up looking clunky and breakable and heavily unflyable. The “Vermorel” was a step towards flight, but a step in the not-right direction, though it does seem to be among the first circular wing planes attempted. Sometimes you don’t know something is wrong until you know it, and then the information can be useful in the History of Wrong Things. Givaudin (1872-1945) was an excellent candidate for this sort of pioneering work, having an expertise in chemical engineering and machine work in general, working across many fields, not the least of which was making motorized bicycles (motorcycles) at the turn of the century. He just didn’t have the proper insight for flying, evidently, though people would return to his circular wing numerous times over the decades.

The barrels fore and aft were fitted with wings that were supposed to catch the wind produced by the 7.8′ propeller (which is barely visible up front) and lift the plane into the air. The (air)craft had no rudders and was going to depend on the movable front barrel for control, but at first glance nothing seems to have come of it except for showing others what was not successful. But it seems that there was something that developed: Givaudan seems to have developed among the first (air-cooled) V-8 engines in a plane, which he evidently developed as much as a decade earlier.

It also seems that there is no published record of an attempted flight of this aircraft. He did continue in his aeronautical/aviation work, and was heavily involved with the development of the machine and the science for forty+ years until his death n 1945 (in October, long enough to see the end of WWII).

Here’s another version of this image, this one clearer and sharper, from a French photographic postcard of the time. The engine is more distinct here:

[Image source: http://www.cpa-bastille91.com/histoire-de-laviation-en-1909-le-givaudan/]

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Anticipation, History of — Aviation & flight
The Nazis, Seudetenland, and Budweis (1938)

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This pamphlet¹ by Karl Janovsky seems to be a very thorough and heavy piece of German-interest propaganda regarding the Seudetenland, and seems to have been printed prior to the “annexation”. The tragic front cover bears a label for the meeting of the NSDAP Council in Budweis, Czechoslovakia, for June 4, 1939. Unfortunately we see the famous 16th century Black Tower desecrated by two large Nazi banners. The tower survived; the Nazis didn’t. (Also–Budweiser, the U.S. beer, was originally supposed to be a knockoff of the famous bier brewed here since the 14th century–after a while, Budweiser USA “changed directions” in the taste of their beer, but kept the marketing and brand, which is enormously valuable.) And so one of the statistical maps, showing a chart of imports from Germany into Czechoslovakia:

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Anticipation, History of — World War II
The Skies of the “Electrical Experimenter”

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

The Electrical Experimenter is my new favorite magazine, and here’s why:

In addition to being thick and full of real electrical necessities and scientific bric-a-brac, it also held a fair amount of speculative thinking and just plain old science fiction (when sci fi wasn’t “plain” or “old”). The EE was created and edited by the very busily creative Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967), a pioneer in science fiction, who held the magazine together from 1913 until 1929 (as the Electrical Experimenter from 1913-1920 and then as Science and Invention from then until the finale in 1931). There was evidently no holding back on cover design–at least from September 1915 until the end, when glorious ideas were display with flat design dominated by unusual and contrasting colors. For example, in the montage above, I was able to find glassy unadorned background skies that were red, yellow, purple, blue, and orange, with variation on each. Not only were the skies unusual, so were the surface colors: unusual blues, deep blacks, n=unnatural greens, purples, and so on. All of this framed some occasionally Highly Unusual and Not Expected Ideas. For example, in these WWI-era images–working right to left on the montage–there was an aerial bombing assistant of a light that illuminated the target through which a bomb could be deployed; a land battleship; an enormous motorcycle-like land megaship; a Martian canal-governing apparatus; a Tesla death weapon; an overland trolley housed in a gigantic spoked wheel; and a relatively tame portrayal of a communication system for a submarine. These are terrifically entertaining, and of course all they are are the covers. So, The Electrical Experimenter: terrific.

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Anticipation, History of — Militaria — Technology, History of — World War I
A Declaration of Future Independence (1942)

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“I am speaking to you once again since the time of the bloody persecutions to which you have been subjected from the inhuman German regime since the shooting of Heydrich”

This morning I’m sharing a scarce document¹of a radio broadcast for 8 August 1942 made by the president of the Czechoslovka Republic, Edvard Benes. In this address Benes (1884-1948) announces the formal nullification of the dreaded Munich Agreement (or Munich Diktat in Czechoslovakia) of 30 September 1938 in which the infamous “Peace in Our Time” appeasement was made with Hitler granting the Nazis annexation of certain parts of Czechoslovakia, and without the participation of the Czech government. Benes, who was the president of Czechoslovakia then in exile in London, reports on the action of Jan Masaryk concluding a treaty with the British government on the “final liquidation” of the Munich agreement and the return of the seized lands come war’s end.

I’m sharing this now as I can find no trace of the address online nor is there any sighting of it in WorldCat or OCLC. The full document follows the page-break:

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Anticipation, History of — World War II
Vanderpoel’s Futuristic Designs and a Color Tile Catalog
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

While looking through a London stationer’s website for Blackwing pencils I found on their site a catalog for a floor tile maker that strongly reminded me of a gorgeous turn-of -the-century art book.

I’ve written several times¹ on this blog about the non-pre-discovery and non-pre-discovery-recognition of nonrepresentational art by the fabulous art theoretician Emily Vanderpoel. She wrote a a lovely and mysterious book in 1901 (a second edition appearing two years later) called Color Problems for the Layman, in which she sought not so much to analyze the components of color itself, but rather to quantify the overall interpretative effect of color on the imagination–I think. I know this sounds begging and vague, but I really haven’t been able to make much headway in the work, though it seems to display the occurrence and frequency of general colors in 100-block distributions. Vanderpoel seems to take the overall sense of the colors of, say, a Greek vase or mummy cloth or a teacup and saucer, and display the overall effect in her grid. As I said the procedure escapes me but the net result is beautiful.

The 1940’s tile maker’s illustrations of samples of their work are also quite strong, and as you can see bear some similarities with the Vanderpoel:

[Tile image source: from the store perfectly-named Present and Correct https://www.presentandcorrect.com/collections/ephemera/products/tile-catalogue-1940s]

Offhand I guess you could say that any of cubist/block/tile/mosaic designs could remind you of Vanderpoel–but not so, and in ways I can’t fully explain. It is something about the distribution and very involved nature of these tiles that pull it towards Vanderpoel…and perhaps it is the color selection. I’m not sure. I have perhaps a dozen tile manufacturer catalogs from about this period (1930’s/1940’s) and none have struck me as strongly as this one does in its “relation” to Vanderpoel. In any event, there seems to be a “there” there.

Notes:

1. Here are some links to the posts on Vanderpoel:
- https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2010/12/what-color-is-an-unintentional-modernist-masterpiece-of-book-illustration.html
- https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/04/shaping-space-a.html
- https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2015/02/mummyii.html
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Anticipation, History of — Architecture and Building — Color Theory
Big, Big Guns (Real and Imagined)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2763

While looking for an article on the imaginary gatekeepers of Martian canals in The Electrical Experimenter (1915) I found this illustration for a piece of speculative military tech (first image, below). The annoyingly-capitalized caption states this to be an “Electro Magnetc” gun 90′ long and rapid-firing 19-inch (480mm) HE. I guess they were somewhere along the very early reaches for the idea of what would become the contemporary EM rail gun being developed by the U.S. Navy. The power source for the gun shown above is not quite what the Navy has developed, as they employ something along the lines of a multi-million ampere pulsed DC power supply that creates the conductance to launch a shell with a muzzle velocity of 3500 m/s. At this point you don’t need explosives to cause damage at the other end–you just need a projectile. The 1915 version is far offline, except for the initial idea, which is a good one. Besides the shortcomings in the implementation realm of this weapon the writer here doesn’t have a very long vision for the future of warfare, saying that his cannon would be devastating to “forts”. This idea I thought was certainly quaint when written given that WWI was already into its second year, and unless by “forts” the writer meant “trenches”, this visioneer was very visioneering.

[Image source: https://archive.org/details/electricalexperi03gern/page/350 Click to expand for a clearer image.]

Massive, monster cannons have existed for many years in idealized and theoretical, speculative worlds, like Tom Swift and his Monster Cannon. In the history of early imaginary big guns H.G. Wells’ Babel-like cannon (pictured below in a still from the movie Things to Come (1936), an adaptation his The Shape of Tings to Come from 1931) is monumentally fabulous –1500 feet tall, with what looks like a 750′ base, all of which launched a 75′ tall capsule beyond the Earth’s

gravitational pull with a spectacular explosiveness that would’ve made its occupants into instant jelly. Tangentally-speaking here the launching of an object to escape the Earth’s gravity didn’t occur until 1946 when the highly-problematic but nevertheless-genius Fritz Zwicky fashioned a device to an experimental V-2 and via an electric explosive charge punched some object into space.

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Anticipation, History of — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Militaria
A First Alphabet of Missing “Firsts” in Art

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Keeping track of the first time something appears in a reproduced form is an interesting and perhaps useful exercise…well, it is at least diverting and occasionally helpful in connecting a few other disparate bits. I’ve wondered about some of this throughout the course of the blog, like the first time the Sun appears with a smiling face, and the first appearance in print of the spectrum of a star other than the Sun, or the first appearance of a portrait of Einstein (or Newton, or Goedel, or Feynman, or FDR), and so on.

Sitting in the airport parting lot and waiting on the arrival of a plane (and after seeing a very unexpected flyby of a number of Sikorsky Super Stallions) I thought about what might be unusual objects and when it was that they first appeared in art, and organized them alphabetically. For example, when did an Adding machine of any sort make an appearance in a work of art? A Barking dog? A Crutch or cane, and then a broken crutch or cane? A Dinosaur? (Or dead horse?) An Eclipse? A Fork? (Also the representation of human Frailty?) A Girl, a House on Fire, an Incision, a Jail? When does a Kitchen appear (though this may be one of the easiest to answer)? Where do we find the first Library depicted in art, or the first Microscope? When does the first Nighttime scene appear? How about the first image in art displaying the law of Octaves, or Pi, or a Quagmire, or a Ripple in a stream? And when does the first Stirrup show up, and the first Signature of an artist, or the first Toothless Smile? And what about leafless Trees, and Underwater scenes? When do we see the first Visions or dreams enter the artistic landscape, or the first Wire, or Yawn, or the number Zero?

So there you have it. If you have any answers to these questions, please do share, as I don’t have the answers (though I have some guesses, or approximations of a time period). Probably there are some quickish responses for the first signed artwork, and the first appearances of the fork, and stirrup, and microscope. We’ll see.

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Alphabets — Anticipation, History of — Art History