Category: Bad Ideas

Strange Things in the Sky Department: Tetrahedra, Horse & Steamship Balloons, Swimming Pools & Exploding Moons.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1120

Rounding out the image dump from yesterday are these additions to the developing category “Strange Things in the Sky”. The odd things in today’s issue include floating tetrahedra, an exploding Moon, a hovering anti-gravity Dr. Seuss pool, a Russian rocket pioneer’s enormous apartment building-like dirigible, and a steamship balloon.

The first, without any explanation and offered as a pure art form, is this illustration by Frank R. Paul for Wonder Stories of November 1931.

Next, another Paul cover for Science Fiction Plus for August 1953, illustrating a story where the Moon explodes

Other strangeness in the sky is Dr. Seuss’ swimming balloon pool from his Oh, the Thinks you can Think. . I’ve seen some interesting
images of balloons and dirigibles taken as serious efforts that reminded me of
that double-page spread by the good Doctor.

This may have been the Omega end
of bad ideas in the career of Zilkowsky, who is better known by the other
spelling of his name, Konstantin
Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1835), a Russian misanthrope and space pioneering
genius who wrote more than 500 works on rocketry and exploration including what
is arguably the first tech word ever done in the field (in 1903, The
Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices). Tsiolkovsky somehow lasted through purges
and Stalinist tirades, while few of his colleagues did—many mysteriously
disappeared, while others went to prison and disappeared there. (Stalin’s crude and insatiable blood lust,
perhaps the worst of the century, knew no bounds, not even to the scientists
who could conceivably hand him reigns of rocket/missile-propelled power.) Anyway, Tsiolkovsky’s dirigible was composed
of a collapsible metal so that the aircraft could form its own hangar when “docked”. I don’t know where to begin with this one…

The next entry is the ship-balloon of Thaddeus Lowe
(1832-1913) One of Lowe’s great contributions in the
history of ballooning was providing aerial reconnaissance via (panoramic)
photographs to the Union army on Confederate army positions—particularly the
Rebel positions at Richmond (1864) and Fredericksburg (1862). (He had a wide
span of professional interests and wound up living the high life in L.A. in a half-acre
home.) This 130-foot diameter monster
with a steam-ship escape pod (named The
City of New York and then renamed The
Great Western after the city couldn’t supply enough gas to get the thing
inflated) was intended to be a transatlantic traveler. Ready to try this fantastic adventure in
1860, ready to take charge, ready to begin a very problematic trip across the
Atlantic in a balloon, Lowe, seemingly ready, had his balloon ripped apart
while waiting for launching by a chance and not-horrible wind. Lucky for Lowe and the Union Army, this didn’t
happen over the ocean somewhere out of reach, and the North’s important info-gatherer
did not sink like a stone in the cold dark sea.
(I’m very cynical that the 100-foot-long, bulbously heavy steam-powered “life
boat” would’ve landed right-side-up and softly enough to have been of any use
save for providing some floaty bits that survivors from the balloon could’ve
clung to for a while before being consumed by King Neptune.

Lastly for today is this lovely history
of balloon and aeroplane flight published in The Illustrated London News
for 3 July 1909, called “The Evolution of the Great War-ships of the
Air: Balloons, Non-Dirigible and Dirigible, and Aeroplanes, from the
Seventeenth Century to the Twentieth Century”. It is more fully explained here in an earlier post I made to this blog, laboring the point that 8% of the 60 air vehicles involved a horse.

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New York City: Attacked by Tentacled Flying Saucers, Giant Flying Snakes, Glaciers, and Mining Missile Space Aliens, 1929-1941

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1118

This is a simple, non-analytical image dump for some in a continuing series on images of New York City in fantastical and improbable situations–there’s artwork that show the city being consumed by glaciers, drowned by the tide, ripped from the Earth and flung into the sun, floating in the sea, floating in space, sunken, and of course simply attacked by any number of different things, though most of those weren’t real. There is of course the great unknown classic that I stumbled across–the duplicate NYC on a duplicate Earth orbiting the Earth ((?!) and pictured at the end of this post). I doubt that there’s enough for a dictionary of disasters, though there’s plenty for a Doomsday Book.

For example the first image for this post shows a domed New York City–and in this scifi sub-classic, like other major cities of the United States, NYC was suffering a catastrophic attack by winged snake monsters. I don’t know why the dome is exploding because the snakes don’t appear to be armed.

This does remind me of an image from the mind of Buckminster Fuller, who
came up with an extraordinarily bad idea to protect NYC against
thermonuclear weapons. (Fuller’s dome appears here.)

Then there’s this magnificent cover for November, 1929, featuring a tentacled flying saucer removing the Woolworth Building into outer space (as well as the Eiffel Tower by another brethern craft (the Earth appearing again, as nearly usual, without cloud cover):

And yet another destroyed Woolworth Building, this from January 1929, featuring an enormous glacier attacking the City:

And this vision of a decimated NYC, coming at the hands of giant hovering mining/missile space aliens:

And of course, the duplicate NYC on Extra Earth:

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Triple Sci-Fi Negatives: Man-Tossing Giant Woman from the inside of Mother’s Wedding Ring (!) 1921

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1117

There are times when even things that are made to look extraordinary and plainly, outrageously identifiable as what they are, simply aren’t–and sometimes they’re not even close. For example, this cover of Fantastic Novels (1921?) seems to tell a straightforward story, but as it turns out the giant is giant but one living within a world in an atom of a gold wedding ring.

Author Ray Cummings (1887-1957) found a nice writing niche for himself in his fictional discovery of a drug that could make people as small as atoms and then, once inside the microworld, could be made as immense as micro-mountains. The Girl in the Golden Atom was one of a five-part trilogy(?)¹and so far as I can tell, Cummings used the hell out of his original idea. The prose reads like it is punctuated with invisible periods every fifth word²–evidently Cummings was so very busy writing 750 books and short stories that it left him little time to edit or, maybe, think.

Briefly and perhaps wrongly put, what I think that happens in this story is this–four guys in a 1919 club do sumpin’, the chemist among them figures sumpin’ out and finds a micro world inside the atoms of his mother’s golden wedding ring where he falls in love with a chick there and goes to visit her himself³; the shrunken chemist finds himself in the middle of a war and grows himself to gigantic proportions in microworld to help out his girlfriend’s people. Or something like that. I don’t feel a need to understand this one. All I want is the cover art.

Personally, I’d rather be a giant rather than be miniaturized to somehow fight for my existence in the microscopical world. Sure, finding sources of energy if you were 500 feet tall or whatever is going to be a problem; finding whatever problematic but less so. But at least nothing is going to try and eat/crush/liquidate you in the micro-world, where food is the least of your problems. Color me in big.

As I said, all my interest here is in the Frank R. Paul cover art. I find very few images where giant women are throwing tiny men taken from a sea of tiny men into the far horizon.
______
Notes.

1. The other four parts of the five-part trilogy are The Princess of the Atom, The Man Who Mastered Time, The Shadow Girl and The Exile of Time)
2. Here’s a sample of the writing:
“Many things they threw,” Lylda [a giant woman] answered. “But I was so big,” she smiled a little sad, twisted smile. “What they could do was as nothing. And
because of that they fear and hate us so; yet never have I seen such
fearless things as those they did. Death to the giants was their only
cry. And I could have killed them–hundreds, thousands–yet never could
I have made them stop while yet they were alive.”

She was speaking to a character named Big Business Man. Makes my teeth fall out.

3. Sounds like a lot of therapy source material

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Ovaries and Ovens–a Chance Encounter in the History of the Subjugation of Women

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1109

A friend of mine started her facebook post writing “Ovary shipped out…”, a great piece of found story-beginnings, a great opening line, especially when ovariotomically removed from the rest of the sentence. Alex is an artist and medical/anatomical illustrator by trade, so I knew what she meant–but forgetting that made the segment even more lovely.

Aside from the fiction that the three words created and the half-word that I created/butchered, I wondered about when ovaries were first surgically removed, and then about how the ovary was seen (almost forever) as the home and birthing place of the fully-formed human delivered to it by men in the act of ya’ know. Ovarian surgery really didn’t exist until the early 19th century, when it was practiced with great success (especially for its time¹) by Ephraim McDowell (1771-1830), in 1809 in Virginia–and it was also about the first great American contribution to gynaecology as well His first patient (“Mrs. Crawford”) sang her way through an anaesthesia-less procedure, surviving her illness and the surgery at a time when non-amputational surgery was half-fatal.² There were other, limited reports of this procedure, but for reasons not clear to me it didn’t really start appearing as a general procedural possibility until mid-century. Anyway, before the 19th century, women with ovarian cysts were pretty much out of luck.

But the issue of the ovaries as ovens–of homunuclus and palingenesis and epigenesis, the imaginary male-dominant anatomy of reproduction–was pretty much somewhat solved by the end of the 18th century. Or at least the homunculus, the tiny but perfectly formed miniature human traveling along in sperm, was. This character is pictured here, riding in the squinty-eyed imagination of researcher Nicholas Hartsoeker³, who desperately wanted to see the thing, and which found itself published in his book Essai Dioptrique in 1695.

The woman as a simple baker of a gift of preformed life was a medical belief that helped perpetuate the supposed inferiority of women, and that the woman’s part in the procreative process was a simple oven. It was a difficult image/belief to resist, persisting well into the 19th century. Anyway, this is where my thinking took me–to the anatomically-inspired subjugation of women–from Alex’s comment.

____
Notes

1. This was still in the deep, dark time for hospitals and surgery, in general. Remember that Joseph Lister was still a half-century in the future with his revolutionary surgical practices that were invaluable to the cause of successful surgery. And hospitals in general were bad throughout Europe, though their story in England at this point was entirely different. The Brits really took steps forward in the treatment of the sick, and especially in the treatment of the poor sick, thanks to being a little awash, splashing around in waves of money provided by their contributions to the industrial Revolution. Funny how it takes major mounds of money-making to initiate good works like that, but, never mind the details–it was done, and hospitals in England during this period were comparative oases in regards to European/Continental hospitals.

** McDowell’s first three cases were all successful , finally published in the Eclectic Repository for 1816. This was the first real foray into this field by the pioneering American medical institutions; obstetrics and gynaecology before this, and particularly in the 18th century, was pretty much in the hands of the French (especially obstetrics) and the English, and to some degree the Italians (particularly with Mascagni, Santorini and Spallanzani).

**This is probably unkind and not particularly true of Hartsoeker, who never said that he actually saw the little men of sperm, and had simply postulated them. Maybe the squinty-eyed part was imbued in the minds of others, though it was Hartsoeker who drew the images of the homunucli to begin with. I think that he should’ve rested in his better cups–he was a gifted mathematician and a particularly good microscopist and optical person, and probably should’ve restricted his published biological theories to his notes.

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History of Goodbye Series: the Latrine Sarcophagus and the Slave Hangman

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1101

I’m not so sure that it was the cold that kept Mathieu Leveille in hospital for all of those years–as bad as hospitals would’ve been in Quebec in 1730–but I would rather have been there than at his work.

Leveille (1709-1743) was a slave bought for 800 pounds by the French ministers in New France (Canada), brought to the cold north from Martinique to do the job that they could find no man to do. Or no competent man. The history of executioners in New France–nearly from the very beginning of hanging people there beginning in the very early 17th century¹–reads like a bad Italian farce sounds, filled with nothing but drunkards and incompetents, brawlers, muggers, crooks and thieves. And the condemned–there are several accounts of men awaiting execution who were spared because the executioner had died (some from drunkenness), and there was no one there to kill them. And so to fill the gap, the authorities offered the condemned the chance to live if they lived so as executioners. I haven’t read any accounts of anyone turning down the offer, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that were so.

The executioner in that society for the 1600-1750 period or thereabouts was not happily assimilated into society. They found themselves–and their families–pariahs, living on the outskirts, or beyond the literal confines, of the city. They were the last step in their judicial system, the great threat, the punishment with hellfire link to fearful retribution, that no one wanted to live next door to.

In the decades preceding Leveille’s arrival, there was a succession of horrorshow stories of executioners of drunk and low orders, two selected from the list of the condemned, including incompetent sons of incompetent and drunken hangman fathers, as well as periods ion which the office simply could not be filled. One of the executioners in this long list of doomed men was a Halifax hangman named “Tomahawk”, whose own body, after death, was stolen, paraded, and then dumped into the latrine of the old blockhouse where he once worked. According to Howard Engel, in his Lord High Executioner, an Unashamed Look at Hangman, Headsman, and their Kind (1996), Tomahawk’s “bones could be seen by curious townsfolk for the next seventy years”. At least the latrine at that time had been abandoned.

Leveille was the beyond-pre-Dickensian solution to the judicial managerial problems in Quebec, the bright idea in a feathered cap of Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Maurepas (1701 – 1781), an ascendant French statesman recovering from disgrace. On the heals of their latest bungle–a drunk imported from France to replace a drunken dead hangman and who maintained his drunkenness and sent back to France drunk–the judicial establishment listened to de Maurepas’ suggestion, and bought and then imported a black slave from Martinique to do the job.

And that’s when Leveille’s story–no matter how bad it was for him in Martinique–gets worse. He arrived in Quebec in 1733, and was almost immediately sent to the Hotel-Dieu. (As it turns out, this is the first hospital in North America north of Mexico). I don’t know if he was told what was in store for him, or what he knew of the job, or what he did in Martinique. It is established though that Leveille was sick on and off for the next ten years, finally dying there in the hospital in 1743. Engel correctly assumes (I assume) that Leveille probably performed his job adequately for the powers that be to have spent so much attention on him, trying to have him finally recover. They even purchased a bride for Leveille, but he died just as she arrived.

I could imagine wanting, or needing, to spend as much ill- and off-time as possible, even in the grips of an ancient hospital. The memory of sea spray hitting Leveille’s face on the trip north from the Caribbean must’ve seemed like needles.

The slave bride to the dead hangman was renamed Angélique-Denise and sold on the heels of Leveille’s death in 1743.

Notes:

1. There was evidently an earlier semi-recorded hanging of a 16 year old girl, convicted of petty theft and punished.

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Custer and the Extermination of…Southerners

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1109

Here’s a bit of Custer legend that is true and seldom heard—if
left to his own devices in a Custer-filled world, the general would have “exterminated” everyone
in the South, every one (“men, women or children”) , “with an ounce of rebel
blood”, hanged dead. At that point the South
would be free, and would be repopulated with the “loyal and patriotic”.

This was part of a
long letter (transcript below) to U.S. Senator Jacob Howard, written on 19^th January 1864, in the
field. Custer was feeling on the ropes
at the time, needing to defend his loyalty to Lincoln and his policies,
and needing to distance himself from Lincoln’s
election contender and inferior general, George McClellan. (Richard Slotkin, in
his fabulous The Fatal Environment, the Myth of the Frontier in the Age of
Industrialization, 1800-1890 notes that Custer needed “to justify himself…(and)
disabled his previous affiliations and the nature of his relationship with
McClellan…’)

Custer’s relationship–real and imagined–with McClellan was putting him in a stench void, creating the possibility of distance between himself and the powers that be–particularly with Senators like Howard and Zachariah Chandler, “who controlled army promotions” (Slotkin, page 384), which meant distancing himself from the higher rank he thought he was destined for. Custer had been on McClellan’s staff, and had aligned himself with his
war policies, though not necessarily so his presidential ambitions.
Howard, a Republican from Michigan and member of the Military Affairs Committee, believed that Custer was a “McClellan Man” and set against Lincoln, and for that was set to block
his promotion to brigadier general. Custer’s salvaging letter¹ to Howard left no doubt about his supposed non-political feelings and where he stood on Lincoln, the Emancipation, and the treatment of the Confederates:

“If I could decide
the questions, I would offer no compromise except that which is offense at the
front of a bayonet, and rather than that we should accept peace, except on our
own terms, I would, and do, favor a war of extermination. I would hang every
human being who possesses a drop of rebel blood in their veins whether they be
men, women or children. Then after having freed the country from the presence
of every rebel, I would settle the whole Southern country with a population
loyal and patriotic who would not soon forget their obligations to their
country and to themselves.”

Slotkin points out that the letter to Howard was so well received that he wrote an update letter to the public-at-large, finding itself published in he Detroit Free Press in May 1865 (“and which was widely reprinted” (Slotkin, 384)) It read in part: “Extermination is the only true policy we can adopt towards the political leaders of the rebellion…Then, and not till then, may the avenging angel sheathe his sword, and our country will emerge from the struggle regenerated”.

Custer left out the women and children part of his Southern bloodbath, but left the “extermination” part in.

Custer was a man of short bursts with little imagination or capacity for extended action or thought–a difficult character, a limited man with no limits. This would come up again and again, more horribly so at Washita massacre², and then, finally, the strength to endure his impulsive recklessness gone, at the Little Big Horn.

The entire letter (and notes) are included below:

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Lost in Translation Dept: Uneasy Moments in the History of Underwear Ads

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1108

There’s really not much to say, I think, about these two ads. The first is one I stumbled on just this morning, one in what seems now to be a long series of advertisements whose initial appeal has not only been lost to time but which now seem to wear very thin in the socially-acceptable category. The ad is from Life magazine for July 1955, and features Carter underwear for men and boys–and for some reason, it features the happy boy/cranky man too-close combo riding a football out of a stadium. I don’t know what any of that has to do with underwear–especially the unhappy older man.

There are a number of these ads by Carter’s, I recall, and many of them have this deep, pit-of-your-stomach sense of wrongness about them, a high, first-order branding of their original meaning completely lost in translation, the sense of their time now completely gone.

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Darkpunk City Architecture: Psycho-Noir Cityscapes of Hugh Ferriss

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1104

The work of architectural delineator Hugh Ferriss (1889-1962) gives me the same sort of feeling that I get from Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York–a blistering, gritty, taut film that doesn’t really add up to anything but it really doesn’t matter; getting there being all of the fun…we know its just made up, even by Marvelous Marvin. We know that Mr. Ferriss wasn’t going anywhere with these designs, that he wasn’t going to kill us, trapped in his psycho-noir cityscapes. These designs are beautiful, and a wonderful background for something, so long as no one has to live in them. (Much more on Ferriss here.)

Why didn’t I use Fritz Lang’s Metropolis? The emotional (and not necessarily visual) metaphor just didn’t work as well as The Gangs does for me; makes little sense, I know, because Ferriss knocked pretty loudly on Lang’s door. It just didn’t work for me.

In a way these designs could fit in my Blank and Empty Things category, lacking life, inspiration–even in their solitude these images have an advanced emptiness to me, moving well beyond simple solitude. Edward Hopper’s 1942 Nighthawks is a painting of solitude, but it isn’t necessarily empty.

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Pictographic Messages to the Year 12,010: the Medium is the Mess.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1103

Talking to the Future: a Note of Pity to Ourselves in 300 Generations

In the history of words I’ll take a wild guess and say that fractions of 1% of everything communicated is directed at ourselves in the future–or at least it has the possibility of being directed to someone else when our deeds are long, long since forgotten.

And by writing to the future I don’t mean in an off-hand way, our words being read in 12,010 by chance, idea archaeologists looking at what people were talking about 10,000 years earlier; and I don’t mean via “reconstructing” our radio or tv broadcasts (in the not-right Jodie Foster Contact kinda way). I mean intentional messages to be read a long time from today.

A more problematic entry would be images and symbols design to be read by future generations, in the deep future. This is not a very deep category, though a famous (if not well designed) example being the one associated with Carl Sagan that was attached to the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft, which attempted to explain what humans were should either vehicle in any eon come into contact with other-than-Earth life.

Another is the pictograph presented here, which appeared on page 117 of the ironically and extraordinarily-titled Reducing the Likelihood of Future Human Activities That Could Affect Geologic High-Level Waste Repositories¹, the first half of which (bolded above) could make a nice departure for some other science fictiony type story. But what these folks were talking about, plain and simple, was how to prevent future generations from digging into or other disturbing in any way buried masses of nuclear waste.

This pictograph is meant to be a non-linguisitc, universally-understood warning to future generations that the ground they are standing on is above a nuclear waste storage site. The plan was that nuke waste would be solidified and buried in rock hundreds of meters below the surface in an effort to keep in line with governmental policy of waste disposal². The pictograph relates to the restricting of future human activities part of the title of the work in question–that is, folks in the future who might muck around, drilling, into the nuclear waste site. This pictograph tells them why they shouldn’t do so, because of all of the terrifically lethal mojo underground.

As one might guess by the title, the report has its own communication problems–it is dense, turgid and not a particularly clear document. It is a fine document illustrating the problems of communication, but not in the way it would have wanted to be, celebrating a reverse triumph in a Darwin Award/IgNobel type of way. And all of this in spite of/or because of a healthy slice of linguists, semioticians, logicians, artists, graphic designs, politicians,. sociologists and so on constructing the thing.

The sign basically says that if you drill at this spot (to some unspecified depth) through aquifer or underground stream or water source or something that some point you may reach the biohazard nasty, which will then get into the water supply and into humans, which will then kill them.

The sign was designed for 10,000 years hence, and depended upon pictures to convey the message rather than words (except for H20, and the biohazard symbol). Of course the radioactive nastiness will be there for millions of years, which would be an entirely different story in terms of imaging. Perhaps.

The one thing the design of the pictograph has in its favor is that it is read top to bottom–no language on Earth (so far as I know) is read bottom to top, though there are many differences in reading right-left/left-right. Beyond that, the pictograph stumbles over itself–except for the last two images, which may or may not tell someone that something bad is happening.

There are plenty of time capsules and idea-vehicles to the future–I’m saddened that this was seen to be one of the essentials that we would pass on to our future selves.

Notes:

1. Reducing the Likelihood of Future Human Activities That Could Affect Geologic High-Level Waste Repositories (Technical Report prepared for Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation, Battelle Memorial Institute; BMI/ONWI-537; May 1984)

2. “Present society’s responsibility is to dispose of radioactive wastes in a manner that is safe, is environmentally acceptable, and does not require long-term maintenance or surveillance. This ground rule is consistent with the objectives in the U.S. Department of Energy.”Reducing…, page 2.

The pictograph, explained, pp 115-116 from Reducing….

The pictograph…was developed using the concepts and guidelines discussed by Givens (1981). The objective is to convey to the reader the sense that if the area below the markers is disturbed, toxic substances will enter the ground water and lead t o severe consequences. relies on several visual images acting in concert to relay the message.

The ground surface exhibits peripheral markers and a central monument to denote relevance to the site where those markers and monument exist.

The ground-water system is indicated by water-drop shapes and by the chemical symbol for water (the only departure from icons, used as a redundant measure).

A repository far below the surface is depicted with the biohazardous symbol. The fact that the object portrayed below the surface is a repository may not be at all evident to a future reader from the first frame; however, the movement of the dark material from the repository through the aquifer and into the vegetables in the third frame, coupled with the movement of the biohazardous symbol, should imply the burial of biohazardous materials below the surface.

The pictographic sequence exaggerates reality with regard to the rapidity of contaminant transport and uptake, and with regard to the severity of the consequences. However, exaggeration is necessary because both the clarity and the relevance of the message may suffer if.the pictograph attempts to indicate contaminant transport time of thousands of years. Similarly, the consequence portrayed, a painful death, over-exaggerates the cause-effect relationship and the rate of the individual’s demise (one out of three suffer death in the pictograph, whereas a
to chance would be more representative).

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Elevated, Rooftop Inner-City Circular Airports, 1919

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1102

The presumption of this Illustrated London News article (“On the Impulse to Fly Commercially”, 18 October 1919) on the growing popularity of commercial flying for business and pleasure was correct, but the placement of the airports to service the growing community of flyers was, well, not.

This is a prototype, of sorts, for many dozens of proposals that would appear in magazines like Science and Popular Science and Popular Mechanics and so on, suggesting inner-city airports that could be easily accommodated by the city bustle by placing the airport on top of buildings (as above), and these other closely-related ideas (below):

[Picture source: Paleofuture.com]

and this:

[Picture source, again, from Paleofutue.com]

These terrible ideas were also seen in building enormous platforms over entire sections of the city (like Zecendorf’s massively bad 1946 idea)

or massive flyovers on rivers (which I also wrote about here),

or enormous floating airport islands (like that proposed by Norman Bel Geddes at the tip of Manhattan,

and of course a series of airports that stretched across the Atlantic.

But they all had to start somewhere, and perhaps this Illustrated London News entry for 1919 was among the first wave of these proposals.

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