Category: Bad Ideas

A History Blank, Empty and Missing Things #76–the American Bison Extermination Map

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1512

Part of this blog’s series on Blank, Empty and Missing Things. (My thanks to Blanche McCallister for setting me on this path this morning.)

“A disgrace to the American people in general, and of the government in particular.” “The men who killed bison for their tongues and who shot them from railroad trains were murderers.”–William T. Hornaday, on the extermination of the American bison, particularly in the 1870’s.

William Temple Hornaday was an early–and probably a founding–member of the American conservation movement, and was also director of the National Zoological Park. He wrote a tremendously bitter and accurate report for the U.S. National Museum in 1894 on the extermination of the American bison, an absolute head-shaker, detailing the history of the bison in North America and its destruction at the hands of sportsmen, hunters, mindless dolts and many others who massacred tens of millions of the animal (“murdered” is the word Hornaday uses constantly). To put the whole issue in perspective, Hornaday issued a famous map showing the shrinkage of the North American bison herd, setting out the enormity of the issue instantly on one piece of paper, a summary of hundreds of pages of bad stories and big numbers.

And the legend

[William T.Hornaday, “Map Illustrating the Extermination of the American Bison”. published in the 1886-1887 Report of the National Museum, Washington, D.C. entitled The Extermination of the American Bison, and printed by the ubiquitous Government Printing Office in 1894. This full text version comes from the Library of Congress site.]

The map certainly provides a real context to the numbers collected by Hornaday–numbers so big that it is hard to put them in any perspective. For example, for the year 1873, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad carried out 250,000 bison robes, 2.7 million pounds of bones and 1.6 million pounds of meat. Generally the robe count was estimated at being about 1/6 of all the bison killed, so of the 1.2 million of taking this train ride in this one year (of aggravated annihilation) there was 1.6 million pounds of meat. Now the refrigerated car was available at this time, so it was possible for meat to be transported to market, like 100 million pounds worth, but that was not of interest to anyone. Not really. Except of course for the bison tongue, which was sometimes the only thing removed froma slaughter of thousands. The tongue was a delicacy, and sold for 50 cents. Just for the record, bison calf skins were sold for 50 cents, as well; adults were $1.25. (Fifty cents in 1873 would be what the lowest-paid cowboy would be paid per day, half a dollar to the guy at the tail end of the cattle herd, the dust-eater.) Over a three year period for the same railroad, 1872-4, there were 450,000 robes shipped, plus 2.2 million pounds of meat, and 16 million pounds of bones. Again, this is about a pound-per-bison of meat, not even the weight of a tongue.

Hornaday records the murder and murderers, repulsed at his findings–his revulsion comes through, as does the overwhelming lesson of carelessness and stupidity in dealing with the American landscape, and the creatures that lived on it.

The iconic photographs of bison skulls awaiting shipment are incredible, but I think it is the Hornaday map that gives the entire issue an overall correspondence to the magnitude of the destruction.

And here’s a map of one of the last bison hunting expeditions, this undertaken for specimens for the National Museum, showing the enormous, continent-covering herds reduced now to individual dots on a large landscape.

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Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas
Duelling Propulsion Systems: Patents for Swinging on a Swing, Sushi Boats and Retro-Pseudo-Mayan Space Ships

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post in the Questionable Quidity series

I came across these bits looking for spacecraft propulsion systems, and was surprised to find so many, well, “questionable” applications of brain power and time. Sushi boats for lazy eaters? Non-proto-Mayan naive electromagnetic spacecraft? Swinging (on a swing)?

I thought the swinging patent was a joke; it seems not to be. Isn’t this like, say, patenting walking by using shoes?

The least and the most one might say for the sushi boat is that it is powered by water, though I’m not entirely sure what else there is to be said; seems a little close to being a trough for my taste, though I have to admit that I’ve never had an experience where I pluck my food froma moving object. Perhaps if the little boats were on fire it would be more attractive? Or if there were submarines?

An earlier version of this idea from 1887, showing the use of “midget electric trains” “at the kitchen and dinner-table of M. Gaston Menier”–somehow this is a little more appealing, though the prospect of eating on a miniature railway track is not all that appetizing:

This is an interesting variation of the two bits above, though (surprisingly!) there is no food involved:

Back to sushi: evidently a much bigger idea than I gave it credit for:

And from America:

There were many other novel and noble efforts in the area of propulsion, particularly in the late 19th century, a few lovely examples of which can be seen here:

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Questionable Quidity — Technology, History of
Questionable Quidity: Swimming Pool Atomic Bomb Shelter -with- Nuclear Weapons Explosion Direction Finder.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1506

Part of the long series on Atomic and Nuclear Weapons

At first this patent sounded somewhat reasonable–assuming that you were going to build an in-ground pool, and assuming that you thought that the Soviets were going to be bombing soon, and assuming that you weren’t living in an area of the United States that would be pulverized by thousands of megatons of nuclear explosives, then it might actually make sense to build this thing. At the very least, if you lived in Tornado Alley, the bomb shelter could be very useful in non-bomb but tornado-threatening scenarios. Of course, you wouldn’t have to build anything so substantial (with a pool attached) to survive a tornado attack, but if Uncle was in the cement business, you might as well.

This next bit might not really belong in the Questionable Quidities department, as it doe shave some real utility for the survivors of nuclear holocaust. After the explosions are done, and after the firestorms have burned themselves out because there’s nothing left to combust and, well, also because the “local” oxygen in the vicinity of the intense fires has been used up, after people have determined that they have survived, it would be important to know from which direction the blast came. If you know the direction of the explosion, and some of the atmospheric conditions at the time of the blast and immediately following, and had some tech equipment,and medical stuff, you might be able to figure out the coming effects of the attack. What you do with that, I’m not so sure.

Another major conditional here is that there was only one blast. If the place that was being bombed was worthy of one warhead, it was worthy of more, usually; so the collapsable sphere might be bent in from all directions, if there were two or three blasts, which means I guess that the thing wasn’t worth installing to begin with. ALso, if you’re in a vicinity that could require one of these buggers and you were just the recipient of, say, 200 megatons of explosions, and survived the blast, you could probably just reach for your KYAG Handbook to see how many hours you had left on the planet.

Then again this really wasn’t meant as a civilian app.

Another

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Questionable Quidity and the Road to Achieving a Faster and More Productive Smoking-Related Disease

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Cigarette manufacturers–like anyone other entity in business–want their clients to consume as much product as possible. Or buy their goods as often as possible. With that in mind I’m a little surprised that the Big Five never adopted any of the ideas shown below, all helping the smoker to get at their next cigarette as quickly as possible. For example, in the event hat there were no ashtrays around, several people patented their notions for in-the-cigarette-pack ashtrays, so that no matter where a person was, they could always clicks their ash and stow their butts back in the pack. Of course, I’m sure that the Makers determined almost instantly that this concern affects perhaps an immeasurable percentage of smokers; if someone wanted (read “needed”) a cig, and there was no ash tray, they can just, well, smoke their cigarette and not use an ash tray. Or go outside. OR something. Or perhaps the manufacturers recognized that they could actually sell the idea to some of their smokers, but then realized instantly that carrying around ciggie waste is not attractive and perhaps a stinking mess. Or they recognized that–like Lee Iaccoca fighting seat belts because it made cars look “unsafe”–having place to deposit cigarette waste right there with the cigarettes might send a message to the consumer that their product is messy and in the end very unattractive. Best leave the unattractive bits in a tray somewhere else. Or of course share the end product of smoking enjoyment with others by leaving it on the ground.

Then of course to remind consumers how useful the process of smoking is, there were other inventions that combined the products of this act with some other highly useful enterprise, like this cigarette lighter/pencil sharpener with what might have been a whistle attachment:

And if you found yourself needing/wanting a smoke but didn’t have a free hand, there was always the following device, which allowed the consumer to smoke their stuff through a tube:

Speaking to the humility of smokers was this device that allowed the user to extinguish their smoking product automatically, no matter what the size of the burning member, reminding the user that if they wanted to actually stop, they could:

Again, another extension of the art of cigarette smoking and how useful smoking implements can be–the cigarette lighter with built-in flashlight:

Cigarette lighter with built-in extinguisher:

Pen with built-in cigarette lighter (1977):

And another example of a very complicated instrument for extinguishing a cigarette, sending a message with I-don’t-know-what undertones:

These are just some of the many glorious appendages to smoking and making it easier–many more can be found at the U.S. Patent Office, like all of the examples above.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — History of Goodbye — Medicine, History of — Technology, History of
Disturbing and Disturbed Obstetrical Devices: Straps, Belts and Iron Bits

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1501

Where does a device like the one, below, belong, exactly? Where in the long rolls of intellectual history should it be found?

E.A. Agerton is actually Ella C. Agerton–it was easy for me to assume that the person Agerton was a man, because to my experience when I find such devices in the patent office archives they are usually made by men. What Ms. Agerton was attempting with this device is something I don’t understand, though she does make the following statement in her Patent Office record:

Here’s another, earlier version of this beast, displayed in practical use. I have to say that the drawing of the woman’s face is deeply disturbed:

I’ve also found quite by chance that the drawings of the faces of the women drawn as “patients” of these devices can be very unsettling, hardly faces at all, even though the representation of the rest of the body is functional. For example, the face of the woman below looks as though it is part of the furniture/device:

The drawings of faces can be so bad that I wonder if anyone can actually be that bad of an artist without trying to be.

None if this even reads comfortably; I don’t know what it would have been like to been trussed up in such a thing.

This leads to another uncomfortable image. At first glance I thought it was part of a delivery procedure, but it turns out that this was the rigging for a woman undergoing a gynecological examination. The woodcut appears in the first volume of Sammelband von 7 Kleinschriften zu gynakologischen Spezialthemen, 1858-1901, and more exactly in the contribution by Ludwig Neugebauer on an examination with a “speculum bivale l’ecarteur vaginal a trios branches…” published in 1884. I know that the prissy prejudices brought about with the coming of Queen Victoria in 1837 still had another 17 years to go at this point, which could explain why, perhaps, a doctor would want an aid in helping a woman maintain an examination position without him having to touch his patient, but, well, just look at the massiveness of the restraints! Also, the woman’s arms are *inside* the ropes—not down, not holding the ropes, but inside the binding, restrained. Either way, it isn’t good, treating the woman—in either case of pregnancy or obstetric examination—as the inferior vessel.

This is also part of a long history of the subjugation of women—the medical aspects of that indoctrination were perhaps somewhat more heinous than the social/legal/ethical/pedagogical/moral constituents. This illustration, even coming at the end of the Victorian era and approaching the dawn of encroaching bits of equality for (white) women, is a fair example of their subordinate status.

I just happened upon this picture during the course of my business day—a random image compiling these thoughts. If I were to try and choose another example of the medical aspect of the subjugation of woman I think that I would choose the story of the Chamberlen family. For several generations, beginning around 1680, this family of medical doctors practiced a secret—their secret—in delivering breeched babies. Breeched babies are those who were born feet first, which was usually a death sentence for both the child and the mother. Patriarch William Chamberlen invented a device that would greatly aid in delivering babies in this position—the forceps. And even though everyone today knows what these things are, the Chamberlens kept them a secret from the inquisitive medical world for more than a century. Their instrument was shrouded—literally!—in secret(s), used under cover, with ceremony, conveyed to the delivery area in a box and brought out with no witnesses. The Chamberlens felt their invention to be their own, for their own particular use and monetary gain, and the rest of the world be damned, and at least three generations (grandfather, father, son) kept the family secret. If their family could not be in charge of such a delivery then there would be no use of their extraordinary invention. This of course would save their income from being chipped away by other physicians or midwives or whatever competent person could be found to utilize the forceps—their economic gain coming at the cost of (savable but imperiled) pregnant women who would either pay the Chamberlens for aid in their breeched births or, well, probably die. To what degree this revolting behavior damaged other people can not be calculated. I’m not even sure about how to translate this into something more recognizable—would it be like Robert Koch keeping his isolation of Bacillus anthracis (1877), or tuberculosis bacillus (1882) a secret? Or Wilhelm Roentgen shrouding his discovery in secrecy somehow? (I know, I know, this is impossible.) Or isolating a secret, proprietary cure for cancer?

There is a large part of me that believes that if the Chamerlens had figured out something like this that affected only men, a silver bullet for something or other, that their secret wouldn’t stayed a secret for 100 hours, let alone 100 years.

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Discovering RED in Advertising, 1942: Candy as Food and Cigarettes as Tasty

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Part of the luxury of doing what I do is that I can down to the basement and pull out a giant bound volume of Life magazine from a long wall’s worth of Life magazines and browse/graze away–a much easier thing to do with the volume in hand than it is to do online at the Life site. (Let me tell you that there is simply no comparison, and that you retain far more leafing through the volumes than scrolling down the monitor–try it out at the library next time.) For this particular volume–part of 1942–there was a growing realization that there was an awful lot of the color red being used in the advertisements, as though it had just been “discovered”. And there was a lot of it being used to sell candy, cigarettes and, of course, meat.

This ad for Camel cigs is one with a minimal amount of red, though the use of it seems judicious and expansive to the major points of the message. Odd that the idea of “taste” appears almost as a secondary item of attention, and that the thrust of the copy is that lots of doctors happen to smoke Camel, without mentioning why. Well, the ad implies smoothness of smoke to the throat and the “T” section, for taste and easy impact on the throat, but the overwhelming message to me seems to be the smoking doctors giving an Rx to the cigarette.

On the other end of the attack to the human body was the notion that candy=food, an interesting way of moving a heart-busting luxury product, all wrapped in red outlining a white heart, evoking Valentine’s Day and love, though this was love for candy itself, as the ad appeared in June.

The Meat Team–not a particular type pf meat; just meat, a red advertisement putting the “eat” in “meat”. Red was also used for SPAM, which is a very democratic type of meat byproduct.

Another boost to candy as a food.

I’m probably all wrong on this, but that was the sense-impression I got from leafing through six inches of Life magazine for 1942.

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FearNaughtia Coffins: Life Detectors, Escape Ladders, Breathin’ Pipes and Premature Burial

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1526

I’ve written here before on the wonderful book by Jan Bondeson, Buried Alive, the Terrifying History of our Most Primal Fear ¹(Norton, 2001) and on the difficulties of determining death in the 19th century, and the various ways that people sought to deal with and sidestep the possibilities of premature burial. In continuing those posts I’d like to add the following drawings from hopeful reports of the U.S. Patent Office, some of which really didn’t make that much applicable sense, but, well, you can patent just about anything if it hasn’t already been patented.

These coffins were constructed to allow their occupants to ring or telephone or telegraph or signal with smoke or light and so on should the dead respond to their lost life while buried. As I point ou tin the earlier (linked) post, determining death was a difficult task in the 19th century, so there wsa a legitimate fear-of-being-buried-alive concern. OF course, the best way yo determine death would be to allow the supposed-dead to lay out for three days at the end of which the body became a corpse and putrefy–the decay part was the true determiner of death. WHy people had to bury the dead into a coffin and be placed underground faster than the three days is a mystery, particularly if there were so many people who lived in fear of waking up in an underground coffin.

And so to the solutions, the first of which was brought to the world by Franz Vester of beautiful Newark, New Jersey. Well, Newark was probably beautiful when this patent was granted in 1868, and maybe this idea seemed so, too. Here’s what would happen if a dead body awoke in Vester’s safety coffin: their hands were attached to a rope that would be connected to a top-side bell, and the not-deceased would tug on it for all they were worth. After that, a sliding door above the face would be moved, and the coffin’s occupant was then supposed to pull themselves up to a short laddered tunnel that was connecting the living world from the sleep-of-worms-world. Were there problems? Yes, of course, but so far as it has been recorded no person ever saved themselves suing this coffin, in spite of Vester’s very strenuous exercises to promote his invention.

[Image source: American Artifacts, via VanVleck]

A few years later from just downthe road in Hoboken, Theodore Schroeder and Hermann Wuest were granted a patent for another rope-activated sounding device. The 1871 patent revealed what was pretty much a common thread to come–rope, hands, bell. Theoretically, if the dead awoke they would tear away at the bell until the prefect or whomever arrived to dig them out. The pair from Hoboken added a few tweaks here and there–one that allowed a release of fresh air into the coffin, and another which used an electromagnetic deice to replace the hand engine. I’m not sure how long someone can last in a coffin underground, but it can’t be very long at all. Why someone would think that adding an air vent to a coffin where the dead have been underground for a few days already doesn’t seem to make much sense, except to the coffin manufacturers.

The next example comes from the beautifully-named Albert Fearnaught, who although not from mid-Jersey patented a device again using a rope around the wrist of the dead, this time though the rope was attached to a spring-loaded device that would release a flag when activated from below.

This next (1885) patent has a slight variant on the rope-hand solution: the string-finger. Well, there was also some electromagnetic stuff involved, but basically the string on the finger of a moving not-dead-corpse would activate an electric bell and yadda yadda yadda people would come to help and release. The added extra here, the clear-coat undercoating, is a device that would allow the folks topside to peer down and see the face of the interred, and whether or not it was animated, I guess.

Hubert Deveau evidently had grown tired of all of these hand/finger-operated back- from-the-dead resurrection devices, and constructed (in his patent of 1894) a relatively simple groundskeeper-alerting-breathing-device combo–a pipe that could be moved up by the head of the person int he coffin which would in turn activate a spring-something that would keep the pipe poking-up above the ground. It would deliver fresh air to the buried, and would evidently be a warning sign to the cemetery man that something was afoot, underfoot.

Funny thing her is that most of the systems I looked at for this post involved a single device to release the prematurely-buried–it seems to me that there should have been at least one back-up system in case the main apparatus failed. I mean, if you’re going to become intensely psychotic, why would you then depend on one thing to get you out of your buried coffin? And that one thing is, basically, a rope. What if the thing failed? I’m just saying that I expected to see a little more comfort juice applied to these solutions than I saw.

And why current radio talk show fearmongers like Glenn Beck isn’t all over these things, I don’t know–they Fearnaughts for just about everything else…

Notes:

1. A fine article on patent remedies for premature burial can be found here: “Signals from the Grave, Early Patents for Detecting Life in Buried Persons”, by Richard Van Vleck, in American Artifacts, issue 45, July 1999.

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Incontestable Oddness: Inflatable Puffy Shirts for the Dead & Coffins with Retractable Legs

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Some things that seem perfectly odd seem to take on another life, an extra life, when you put moveable things on it. For example, coffins that have anything “retractable” seems a little much. As corpse receptacles, coffins as a box seem, I guess, an odd thing–scooping out a body’s innards and replacing them with packing, toxic preservative, gums, paint, glue, plastic, rubber, wire, pins, needles and such seem to be a little on the extreme side, especially when you are going to put that body into a hole in the ground and cover it with dirt. What better thing than to enclose the corpse in a container so that the horrible idea will be further kept from deterioration? Then there’s the container for the coffin, and the slumber vault cement liner, and so on.

This weirdness turns professional (to paraphrase the Good Doctor) when movable/retractable bits are added to the coffin. In a long “is this really necessary?” list, one of the last/first would concern retractable legs on a coffin, or perhaps the retractable flower vases, or the inflatable puffy shirt. There’s a strange sociological history going on in the thousands of death/corpse/funeral-related reports from the U.S. Patent Office, which will make it much easier for the anthropologists of the future to understand our present concerns with death, or life.

[Most of the following patent reports are entirely understandable by their titles. The first in the list though needs a little explanatory help–this is a garment was made with numerous openings to accommodate different forms of corpse body shapers, including inflatable balloons, putty, clay and other material that would help the dead body look a little more not-dead.]

[And then of course the explanation of the thing, which has a distinct federal-ese flavoring.]

[I like this one because of the name association with the Norden bomb sight, a once-top secret improvement in delivering bombs dropped from planes, and which helped put many people into a coffin, if only figuratively.] />/>/>

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A Monumentally Questionable Idea: Screw Coffins

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Part of the History of Goodbye series.

“May I touch it?”

“Please don’t, it will leave a mark”– on corpses, from Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One.

In the vast history of humans and their disposing of the dead, of the great rituals and spectacular belief systems pertaining to the body and the non-corporeal bits and flavorings within, there is probably not much at all dealing with the creation of screw coffins with duckies on top.

Such is the very recent idea of this painful looking piece of business: slide the body in, stand the screw coffin upright, and then by motive force either human or mechanical screw the thing into the Ea rth. This is all done for the theoretical modesty of economical land usage. And I guess this would make sense, even more so, than putting a corpse in a very expensive box, a corpse that has been treated so that it will decay very slowly over long periods of time, stuck in a box that is made to further prevent decay, and then place the whole thing (horizontally) into the ground, where no one will ever see it again. It seems like such a great effort to undertake to simply hide a body under a thousand pounds of dirt, when the corpse might as well not even be there. SO I guess if it makes sense to observe this practice, you might as well take up less ground.

The logistics might be a problem–after all, you’ll need a casket for the coffin to transport the thing from the church or wherever to The Place of Last Repose, as I don’t very well imagine the look of the torpedo screw in the confines of some holy relic or draped-up maudlin-eseum. I mean, the thing would look repulsive.

And the little bits that go on top really don’t help it, either:

I’m not sure why these coffins are placed in a swamp, or why one of the statuettes is a fish.

The whole “placement” business seems rather indelicate–I can’t imagine anyone’s elderly Auntie standing around to watch The Beloved twisted underground by a John Deere:

This is actually one of a number of different contempo-coffins designed to both save space and disgust. Here’s the Vampire Stake coffin:

And the bullet coffin:

And the pleasure-tipped Probe coffin:

And of course the artificial flower tapered urn coffin:

As I said, perhaps when it comes to burying people, looking at the practice under a macroscope, it is all the same.

It does, however, seem as though it is dramatic evermore with each turn of the screw. It also looks pretty difficult to do.

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Bad Ideas Department: Attack Islands and the Invasion of England, ca. 1800

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1525 (Continuing, in a way, an earlier post.)

Sometimes bad ideas aren’t really so until they are very, very big–and then put in water. These are some examples of what was probably a propaganda campaign on a disturbing, Twilight Zone-y invitation to imagination of a French invasion of England at about the time of Napoleon. Napoleon I. England had been invaded before, but not by the wily Corsican.

The first apparatus of war was a monumental thing, and was displayed for the world in this engraving, printed ca. 1798-1801. An exact representation of a raft, and its apparatus, as invented by the French for their proposed invasion of England, printed in London by J. Atkin, portrayed the monster: 2500′ x 1800′, with a enormous stone fortification that seems to have been about 500×500′, the thing was powered by four water turbines driven by 550′-tall windmills, it was supposed to be capable of supporting 500 36- and 48-pounder canon, plus 50,000 troops. It looks like it was built for calm water.

This next beast wasn’t quite so beastly as the first beast, a beast to the monster. This was the St. Malo seacraft, a thing designed in 1791 that was supposed to be 600×33 feet, supporting the same 500 canon as above, and would transport 15,000 troops. The added feature here–in addition to the windmill-driven engines, was a bomb-proof central structure, which I guess held the troops in safety as the ship was bombarded from the shore.

The unlikely craft below, even though it looks not nearly as large as the preceding two craft, actually carried more troops (60,000) and more canon (600) than the ship. I’m not at all impressed that the design we’re looking at here could support a tenth of those numbers. But, on the other hand(s), if it wasn’t going to be built and never existed, it really doesn’t matter that the scale was all mess up. [Image source: Low Tech Magazine.]

This satirical print shows a French invasion force making its way to England above and below the channel–there are attack balloons as well as a considerable atta-Chunnel.

[Image source: Low Tech Magazine.]

The truth of the matter is probably closer to the images below than they were to the massive attack-islands that are pictured above.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Militaria — Technology, History of