Category: Bad Ideas

Missing Things Making Holes: Soviet Bread-not-Bombs in Finland, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 917

[This post is a hybrid category bridging “Blank and Empty
Things” and “A History of Holes”—it is really an entry for blank and missing
things making holes]

1. The Soviet Union’s foreign minister Molotov¹ wanted to make it very clear
to the rest of the world that his country was not bombing civilian targets in Finland during
the winter war of 1939/1940.

2. Molotov insisted that targets that were being bombed near
Finnish cities were actually airbases.

2.1   Also, since the
complaining FDR was over 4000 miles away there was no way that he could “see”
what was being bombed.

3. If there were civilian targets that looked as though they
were being bombed, then

    3.1   they weren’t being bombed; and

    3.2 if anything at all was going on the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics was dropping
bread on the town’s/city’s starving inhabitants.

4.   So far as
undefended, non-military targets were concerned, the Soviet
Union redefined “bomb” as “bread”.

5.   Therefore, what
we’re seeing in this image above are not bombs, but bread; that, or the houses
were airbases, which would turn the bread back into bombs.

Molotov insisted that no civilians were direct targets of
Soviet bombing campaigns in Finland. Also, if there were people being killed in
these bombing raids they would necessarily and by definition be aircraft
workers or air bases support staff or other military personnel.

This strikingly designed image is from the 17 February 1940
issue of The Illustrated London News;
the design is by G.H. Davies, the phenomenal ILN draftsman, and elegantly (and forcefully) depicts the innards
of the bomb and its effect on its target.

It is a spectacular and brilliant presentation of the
new(ish) Soviet hybrid terror bomb that was being used in the non-existent
attacks on Finnish cities. [The 5’ bomb
was made to be deployed in two sections:
the front end of the bomb inside the false nose cone contains dozens of
incendiary bombs, released by a revolutions-generated cap propeller, which fall
away from the main section of the bomb, which contains a high explosive.]

Since the non-existent bombs that were not being used against
non-military installations and were actually bread, the Finns gave the weapons
the nickname of “Molotov’s Breadbaskets”.

This was just a down-right nasty bomb, and the illustration
shows it falling on and destroying a quiet town with no visible military
advantage. The town not being bombed was called Sortavala, which—after numerous Soviet
attacks in December 1939—was in actuality destroyed by Soviet air power on 2
February 1940.

The man ultimately responsible for this campaign and the
murder of millions of his own countrymen through means of induced starvation,
disappearances and ruthless killings—Joseph Stalin—was post mortem dispatched
in much the same manner as the reasoning listed above. Stalin was ignored to the point of
non-existence, de-Stalinized and left
entirely out of the 50-volume second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia² published just a few years after his 1953
death. Stalin executed his brutal and long-time political compatriot Lavrentii Beria, (1899 – 1953)
right before his own death, ordering that people who owned the GSE to physically cut out the
Beria entry. It is unfortunate that Stalin could not have been denied his
existence 30 years earlier.

Molotov, on the other hand, in spite of his enormous sins
against humanity (as principle architect of the Great Terror, the extermination
of millions of Ukranians, and etc.) was finally removed from government
following Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaigns (i.e. by 1962) and managed to live out the rest of his life
alive, not dying until 1986 at the age of 96.

(The “Molotov Cocktail” by the way was not named for him by
Soviet soldiers or freedom fighters or whatever fighting for the USSR—it was
named for the petrol bomb used by Finnish soldiers and civilians fighting
against the Soviets invading their country in 1939/11940 and again in 1943/4)

Notes

1. In 1940 Molotov was the foreign minister of the Soviet Union, and had just completed negotiating the
Non-Aggression pact with Nazi Germany.
This gave the USSR free range for its relations (read “occupy/annex”)
Estonia, Bessarabia, Latvia and the Ukranian/Belorussian-occupied section of
Poland (to the Curzon Line), and to also conduct its war with Finland. The fierce Finns never lost their
independence, though they did lose a part of their country.

2. The GSE had a somewhat complicated publishing history,
winding up with 65 volumes over its two editions, constructed with very
questionable state-controlled X-Ray communist vision spectacles. There is so much in these volumes that is wrong/sanitized/fiction that I have no idea how a non-specialist might be able to use the thing.

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Aviation & flight — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — History of Holes — Militaria
When Civilians Aren’t Civilians: Blowing Up Bomb-Proof Cities, 1927-1934.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 915

We’re a few days past the 95^th anniversary of the
first aerial bombing of a city, the first in the long and unhappy calculus of
eliminating things and people in civilized settings by dropping high explosives (and etc.) on them
from the air. 19 January 1915 saw the first bombs dropped from an airship
during WWI, two German Zeppelins lighting up Great Yarmouth, Sheringham and
King’s Lynn in the U.K.—the
physical and strategic outcomes were minimal; the psychological and
intellectual aspects were not.

The effectiveness and temerity of bombing escalated
exponentially–virally by the end of WWII. Aerial bombing’s future
effectiveness and devastating potential was recognized by the early 1920’s, particularly
in the form of the Hague Conference
(1924), where the bombing of cities and civilians was theoretically controlled,
if not outlawed.

Of course the definitions of “bombing” and “cities” and “civilians”
and “non-combatants” were very loosely writ and were completely open to
(completely) wide interpretation in practice, and were especially liable to
racist necessities. I should also add that the concepts of “defended” and “undefended”
cities were—somehow—nebulous.

An encyclopedia could no doubt be written on nothing but the
these awful bits of bombing. And for another example of this I turn to
the French, who can supply more than their share, per capita, pound-for-pound,
to this equation. No, not the French return to Indochina in 1945 (after having
done business with the occupying Japanese forces for the entire war) and their
resurgent colonialism as practiced against the Vietnamese, or the heinous
practices against the Algerians just prior to that country’s
independence: it is their bombing practices in Damascus. Not the Syrian bombings of 1945
(which also included many other places like Aleppo,
Hama and etc.) but the French civilian bombings
of Damascus in
1925. For it was in that year that the League of Nations found that the
French really weren’t bombing and killing civilians indiscriminately when they
were doing so; they were, ironically, bombing themselves, and so their actions
were not illegal. (It was problematic, identifying “civilians”, as the
League didn’t necessarily grant the same sort of “humanness” to all human,
finding categories for barbarians and savages. It was acceptable to bomb
those later two categories, but not the first.) So the French sought to subdue
a rebellion against their oppressive rule in that country, identifying the
Muslim population centers in Damascus
as probable hotbeds of activities for the “bandits” that were causing them
their problems. October 18, 1925 is when this particular outrage
occurred; the Syrians protested, and the League considered.

And that was
about the size of the story for the Syrians, because as it turns out, the
French were just maintaining an order that for them was a simple police action;
civilians populations could not be bombed in the eyes of international law, if
the bombing was being done to a foreign people; since the French were there and
occupying the country, they were conducting a police action, and in a sense
were merely bombing themselves, loosening them from the barriers of whatever
international law could be applied to their actions by the League of Nations.

These are just a few examples from the French; there are
plenty more for other countries for every decade, every year. (The Brits in Teheran in 1924, the Italians
at Harar in 1935, Franco/Luftwaffe in Guernica
in 1937, the Japanese against Shanghai/Beijing/Tianjin (etc.) in 1937, and on
and on.)

The Big Fear of bombing from the air and the need to protect
the populations of cities led to all sorts of anti-bomb/bomb-proof
architectural plans, most not very good and not very practical. Such is the price of trying to make your
people happy. I happen to have

a few in
my files, which are seen above and below. (The top images were printed in the Illustrated London News in 134; the bottom in 1927.) The results of the plans were no doubt intended to pursue a common belief that cities could be constructed to be bomb-proof, that the future that national leaders were dragging their subjects into wasn’t necessarily as dire as the possibilities of aerial bombings hinted things might be. Of course the resulting buildings would be massive and impossibly expensive; the prospect for underground cities (and roads!) was just a non-starter. And these future-views would all be obsolete in less than 15 years what with the development of enormous firepower. And I’m not talking atomic.

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“The First Thing is to Find Some Men” How to Get a Boy-Date, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 914

[Continuing the posts “What Makes Human Robot Girls, 1941” and The Missing Pieces of Women, Pope Joan and the Proper Girl]

Do Boys Like You? is
the name-of-the-game for girls, evidently (“set out to make yourself worthy of a boy’s
affection. Just one boy—any boy…”),
brought to you as a part of a long, continuing series by Elizabeth Woodward in
the Ladies’ Home Journal in the early
1940’s.

This installment is about getting a boy for a date, and how to make
oneself getable and datable and boy-friendly, all while maintaining the
thinnest veneer of self-acknowledgment (“be adaptable as a chameleon”) as possible while staying true to “yourself”. It is a cocktail of overall old-lady sense
and deep ruffled bows writ by the hand of gender entrapment and not-so-subtle
subjugation. Let’s get to it with some of the more archaeologically-interesting
statements of this social-norms-establishing pamphlet:

Paragraph: (Intro):

“Do boys like you, or don’t they? Its as easy as that! Either you have dates and go places with lots
of boys, or they don’t pay any attention to you at all.”

Paragraph: “A Female World”

“…the first thing is to find some men.” (Which is odd
because “men” is used only one other time beyond this reference—its all boys
and nothing but boys.)

“Short of throwing yourself on their (boys’) mercy, see if
you can’t wrangle an introduction out of the girls who do know boys…”

“Your parents could invite their friends over for dinner and
ask them to bring along their son. And you do a good job on him!” (I’m not sure
what that “job” is.)

“They (boys) can’t find you if you’re packed away in a mob
of females.”

Paragraph: “A Rank Outsider” (on being the new girl in a
community):

“The girls have things under control and they don’t want any
interference from you.”

“You might know more than they do, and you just might talk
down your pug nose at them.”

“…you’d better get accustomed to traveling alone…”

“Give them every chance to find out that you aren’t high
hat, that you like the same things they do, that you aren’t out to sniggle
their men away…”

“When they (the girls) accept you, the boys will too…”

Paragraph: “an Old Story”

“(Boys) are so used to looking at you that they think of you
as furniture.You’ve got to be new!”

“If you’re fat and pudgy, make yourself lean, sleek and
smart.”

Paragraph “Take it Easy”

“…its going to take practice to make boys like you. Take it
easy. Set out to make yourself worthy of a boy’s affection. Just one boy—any boy…”

Paragraph “A Few Gentle Hints” (Seems that we’ve gone way beyond this by now.)

“Don’t run around with girls who are dud.”

“Don’t go in pairs with a girl who is overwhelmingly popular…Better
pick a girl who will give you an even break.”

“Don’t languish for some local ‘hero’ who is sought after by
all the girls in town. He may be
good-but he’s far out of reach…”

“Don’t pick on a lad who has never had a date with a girl.”

“Don’t be careless or sloppy when you’re talking with boys…”

“Don’t expect (or even hope) that every boy you meet will
ask you for a date.”

And (not quite) lastly, but should’ve been:

“Don’t go around thinking about boys constantly.”

But lastly thus:

“Act as though you are having fun. Be alive, gay and enthusiastic. Be interested in what’s going on. Be sweet, tactful, and adaptable as a chameleon. Have definite likes and dislikes, but don’t be so rigid
that you are stubborn, opinionated and difficult to get long with. Be carefree,
casual, easy, willing to play and fun to play with. And don’t be shy about
liking the boys.

THEN THE BOYS WILL LIKE YOU! [Emphasis in the original.]

My poor mother would’ve been reading this…

(Thanks to Jeff Donlan for pointing out that the chap on the
cover carrying the girl away has joined the fabric of her skirt to (1) hold
onto and steady her and (2) make sure her skirt doesn’t fly up and out and is not actually touching her thigh…)

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Women, History of
Missing Pieces of Women: Pope Joan & the Proper Popular Girl of “The Ladies’ Home Journal”

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 910

Listening
to these dreadful stories this morning on NPR about the Vatican’s relations
with the Roman Jewish community and the abortive WWII papacy of Pope Pius XII—the
papacy of blank and missing compassion—I thought about the missing Papacy of
Pope Joan. Whether or not she existed is
a question of debate; whether she was a pope or not is perhaps even less
debatable. What seems not impossible
though is the ability of a large institution like the Catholic Church to make
the entire issue of unwanted history or legacy to go away.

The
historicity of this papacy is long and shows the murkiness of the earliest
writers on Joan. She was supposed to have served as pope between Leo IV and
Benedict III around the year 850. The
fuller versions of her history turn up in the 14^th century, although
the earliest mentions of a female bishop of Rome go back to the 9^th
century—Joan remains unnamed though until the 13^th century when
Martin of Opava’s Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum¹(referring to
Joan as “John Anglicus” or “John of Mainz”) does so for the first time.

Joan
escapes the Middle Ages with a little flair, but doesn’t do so well in the
Renaissance. As a Missing Piece in the
history of the Papacy she turns up not-so-well represented: for example, she is seen here looking good
but turning up bad overall as the Whore of Babylon². She was treated as a disgrace, and impostor,
someone who demeaned the Catholic institution by her sex and deception, though
god knows that the history of the papacy is filled with horror stories³ that
far exceed the reach of mere deception.

So
I was thinking about the piecing-together of the Pope Joan jigsaw and
remembered an actual “womanly” jigsaw that could actually be pieced
together. This bit came together as a
result of a post I did here just two days ago (What Goes Into Making Human Robot Girls, 1941), and was one of a series of
intolerably heavy eight-page pamphlets cementing the structure of female social
intercourse at the hands of the magazine The
Ladies’ Home Journal.

One of these
publications—hardly a pamphlet per se, just a folded 11×8 inch sheet of heavy
stock—came without a title, presenting itself as a puzzle. The puzzle pieces
are parts of two women, “Miss Popular” and “Miss Unpopular”: the reader was to
take the publication, cut out the pieces, and reassemble them into hidden role
models, with phrases describing each on the back of each puzzle piece, all done
without the slightest possible understanding of metaphor or irony.

Miss
Popular phrases/descriptors: live wire, plenty of push, wide awake, snappy
looker, dependable, genuine, secret keeper, on-her-toes, spick and span, light
hearted, all-around-student, straight-shooter, gossip scorner, sympathetic,
cheerer-upper, sparkler.

Miss
Unpopular’s phrases/descriptors: glory grabber, sour puss, cheater, sob-sister,
snooty-snob, wet-blanket, borrower, prissy prig, sharp tongue, gory gossiper,
clothes dummy, iceberg, sly and slippery, jellyfish, sticky-sweet, soft soaper
(?) and of course fast and loose.

And
so girls—or young women—picking up this publication in 1941 were expected to
cut this thing up and piece together the proper (paper) role model using the
reinforcing traits of meager acceptance printed on the back of the puzzle
piece. And poor Pope Joan, whether she was real or not, whether she was
imagined or sunk purposefully away into the Pandora’s sisters’ boxes of forced
forgetfulness—it really doesn’t matter—is just another woman or part of woman’s
puzzle whose blank or missing piece has been extruded, forced into a form more
friendly to a world less friendly to women.

Notes

1.According
to the Chronicon: “John Anglicus,
born at Mainz,
was Pope for two years, seven months and four days, and died in Rome, after which there
was a vacancy in
the Papacy of one month…” [See continued reading section below for more]

2.
Babylon was the
representation of the seat of evil on the Earth. From the “Book of Revelation” (17:3–4):
“And I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, full of names of blasphemy
with seven heads and ten horns. The woman was garbed in purple and scarlet, and
gilded with gold, gems, and pearls, and bearing a golden goblet in her hand
full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.”

3.
Borgia and the Medicis not being the least of the story: see E.R. Chamberlin’s The Bad Popes, (1969)

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What Goes into Making Human Robot Girls, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 907

[See the follow-up post “First Thing to Do is to Find Some Men”; How to Get a Boy-date, 1941]

An
old friend of mine, Dr. Sam Koslov, was brilliant, accomplished and polymathic, with
great senses of wonder, inquisitiveness and humor. He spent many years in research and as a
long-time editor at Johns Hopkins APL. He was a delightful and serious man, though
one of the projects he worked on sounded much more like squeaky scifi than pure
sci. That was Project Pandora, and science fiction it definitely wasn’t—it was
an attempt at a form of control over human behavior via low level microwave radiation¹.

This
came to mind as I was leading through some very low level, high impact behavior
control exhibited in a series of social engineering pamphlets published by the Ladies’ Home Journal in the early 1940’s. It is heartbreaking, really, to think of people
like my mother reading these things and being inundated by cultural architecture
that left little to the imagination. It
seems so terrifically outrageous in 2010; and of course it makes me wonder
about what things that seem so de rigueur
today will be the Ladies’ Home
Embarrassments of 2050 .

Granted, nobody’s corneas were being shaken loose via this method, but the effect of the sentiments of control in these pamphlets still seem eye-poppingly
strangulating. I’ve included only a few
examples here, but there are at least a hundred others to choose from.

Perhaps
it was the Date-Rate pamphlet that caused most of my teeth to fall out—it is
sheer and painful, offering virtually nothing to the young women reading it and
practicing its morality play but gender obedience and servility.

“Did you give
him all your attention?” “Did he run things?” “Did you give him a chance to
impress you?” “Could you make him laugh?”
It isn’t until the final rating question (#25) that we get to something that
opened the possibility of a two-way interest in the relationship, but only
barely: “Did you find you liked the same things?” Its sad, really.

When I read some of this to my 17-year-old
daughter, she just looked at me with an open mouth and eyebrow furrows: it was simply beyond listening to, for her,
and certainly not anywhere near worthy of a response.

Of course this is just the tip of the tip of the tippity tip of the iceberg on the control of social thought and the keeping of the male-dominated social order, and its only one part of a very wide spectrum of overall codifications, much of which seem pretty much left to history within two generations.

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Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Women, History of
Big Planes: Aircraft with Dining Rooms in Their Wings

JF Ptak Science Books Post 906

Is it just me, or do the rest of you see Cary Grant at a teeny-tiny table when looking at this aircraft? There’s just something so horribly wonderful about the excesses washing over the passengers of high privilege in this airplane.[Source: The Illustrated London News 21 Dec 1929.]

And the airplane has a name—Christmas, named for the man who provided its inspiration, Dr. William Whitney Christmas¹–and was a paper plan to produce the world’s largest airplane.

It would’ve been so by leaps and bounds. The Christmas was to have a 262’ wingspan and a gross weight of 142,000 pounds at the time when one of the largest planes aloft—the Patrician Keystone K-78—had a wingspan of 86’ and carried 18 passenger, 2 pilots and an engineer. It also held the world’s record for hauling the heaviest payload, which for some reason was “33 girls”. It was bigger still than the largest thing in the air, Lufthansa’s Dornier DO.X –this was an aircraft capable of moving 60-100 passengers (serviced by a crew of 10-14), a flying boat with 12 (Curtiss Conqueror 610hp) engines on wing sections 157’ long. (Was this a mile-a-minute fuel consumer?) The Dornier plane didn’t last long in service due to operating costs (1929 was a bad year to undertake an expense like this, especially in the hyperinflated Germany) and was in an aviation museum by 1934². (This plane—one of three constructed—was destroyed in a RAF bombing raid in 1943.)

Here’s something extraordinary about the Christmas: it had a dining room (actually, a “dining saloon”) that took up 15% of the plane’s floor plan. There was also the spacious smoking room, the crew and officer quarters, the machinist’s shop, engine room balconies (?), and of course the staterooms that seem to run along most of the front of the plane. The side elevation shows not very much space at all allotted to what must’ve been some massive engines, seeing as how there’s only two four-blade props. (The small lateral cross section shows two people against the plane for scale—these folks must’ve been giants; I figure they should be a little more than 75% of the manikins. I make each prop blade to be about 10 foot (?))

As it turns out this aircraft looks a lot like Edmund Rumpler’s³ (1872-1940) giant. Outfitted with a long row of staterooms along the front edge of the large wing and a huge dining room, it doesn’t seem to be equipped with an area for the engines. Maybe this was an endemic flaw among older fast-thinkers…

Notes:

1. Dr. Christmas (1865-1960) was the third American to fly and was the first to design a plane with aerilons.

2. Compare this to the Antev An-225, a modern very-,limited-production monster that could haul 1.3 million pounds of cargo, and the 747 (hauling up to 900,000 pounds) and the mammoth Airbus A380—all relatively the same size but with fabulous design and power.

3.Rumpler made very significant aeronautical contributions to the German effort in WWI, as well as designed the first aerodynamic auto—his military planes though during the war were great triumph, partially because they were also Germany’s first mass-production-possible aircraft. This didn’t help him much when Hitler came to power—being Jewish, Rumpler was arrested, and then released by Goering who at least could find a small part of himself to save this one Jew who served Germany so well.

4. Source for the Rumpler image is the wonderful ModernMechanix site here.

Interesting comparison chart for big planes: [Source]

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The Oldest Image of a Flying Pig? An Adynaton Antiquarian Illustration, 1687.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 905

How
old is the saying, or rejoinder, “…when
pigs fly”? I dunno, and frankly it
doesn’t really matter. Except for right now, when I found this rather
extraordinary image of a pig-in-the-sky from 1687. It isn’t a flying pig, but I’m not sure what
it is: the origin of the image is from
J.de Dalence, Traite de l’Aiman (publihsed in Amsterdam in 1687), a book about the history
of magnetism. But nothing else matters,
just the flying, atmos-floating pig, right there in the sky, perfect against a
puffy cloud.

I
suspect—without any intention of doing any research on my suspicion—that this
may very well be the earliest depigtion of a flying pig. And it just so happens to have appeared in
the same year of Newton’s great Principigia.

And
just for the record, I wonder how often anyone sees an image 300+ or more years
old of any of the other great adynations? For example, “It is
easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle,
than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” from the Book of Matthew, 19:24, just doesn’t seem to lend itself to empirical description, as it would
pretty much lessen and defeat the purpose of the literary description.

The flying pig, though, may be a horse of a different
color, so to speak.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Advanced Utopian Martian Communities, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 904

This futuro-Utopian homage to
ET-civilizations and space travel was written just too early to have been
sucked up by period-appropriate Hollywood
script raptors. Reading it is a little
out of the question and left to the domain of sci-fi archaeologists; the book
is stuffy and dry and very stiff
(brittle !) without being terribly interesting and doesn’t stop for the right
word when four will do. (See below for an example of the writing.) The ideas though lurking beneath the surface
though are pretty good for its time, though they are hardly the great undertow
that rips you away and out of the clutches of the stuff that make this a pretty
object rather than a book.

To Mars via the Moon, an
Astronomical Story. written by Mark Wicks
and published in 1911, left the Moon quite behind in its literary assault on a
super-advanced civilization that the space travelers find on the red
planet. Wicks owes a big nod (and gives
it) to the astronomer and faded theorist Percival Lowell and his Mars as
an Abode of Life (1908)1. Wicks’ Mars is enormously advanced
techno-superpower filled with telepaths and mega intelligence, as well as a
reincarnated version of his own dead son.

Okay, enough. I’m really just stopping here because of the noble
outsider-like Martian city/landscape, a circular city with canal2-like
connectors. It’s a busy environment, with the perspective-challenged city
looking vaguely bathed in a holy halo, car-like objects skimming along the
canal-roads, and “pre-flying saucers” in the air. It is lovely in its own way—certainly the
publishers thought so, as they incorporated the design right on the spine of
the book.

Notes

1.Lowell’s
hypothesis was rounding criticized by many, including Alfred Russell Wallace’s Is
Mars Habitable?.

2. Giovanni Schiaparelli reported these features
first, in 1877, referring to them as canali in his native Italian, which means something more
like naturally-occurring grooves or channel; English-speakers like Lowell
stopped just short with the word, lopping of the final “I” and going with
“canals”, with its overt implications of
intelligent design. And thus are
religions born.

The entire book can be found on the
Gutenberg site: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2763/27633-8.txt

The sample of the writer’s ware is below, the final two paragraphs of the book: the penultimate paragraph being one long run-on sentence including four embedded exclamation points, and the final two sentences of the final graph ending in an exclamation point and a dot dot dot question mark:

“Yes, we are doing well–there is no doubt about that; but,
notwithstanding my present very satisfactory circumstances and the certainty of a brilliant future if I stay here, ideas have long and persistently been running in my mind that it would be far better for me to go back to Mars, and–by Jove! strange indeed that I never thought of it before!–perhaps those very persistent ideas are actually the outcome of Martian influences!!”

“The wonderful music I heard upon Mars still rings in my ears; and, at times, so thrilling and peculiar is its effect upon me, that I feel as though I were being almost irresistibly impelled to return to that planet. Well, I should very much like to see the dear old Professor and Merna again, and also my many Martian friends. Then there’s Siloni, whom I can never forget, for mentally her image is ever before me. What a nice girl she was! If I were to return to Mars, I wonder whether…?”

First edition spine source: http://www.sumnerandstillman.com/Catalog/sumner.cgi/9691

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Ocean-Crossing Floating Airports Across the Atlantic, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 903

This short
shelf-lived idea was that of Edward R. Armstrong (1880-1955), who in 1927 first published his plan for a series of 1200’x200’
floating platforms for refueling and whatnot for transcontinental flights. These five-acre stations—named the “Langley” in honor of
Samuel Pierpont Langley¹— would be placed every 375 miles across the ocean. It doesn’t look like a very practical (or
good) idea, but Armstrong received a $750,000 piece of development change from du
Pont and GM, which was major dollars in 1929.

Armstrong’s
idea would get major play in the popular press from time-to-time, his project
renamed “The Seadrome” and discussed as a series of floating islands. Armstrong himself would organize the Seadrome
Ocean Dock Corp. in the late 1930’s, his pretty but enormously impractical idea
(reported by Time Magazine² in 1933 as little more than “a perennial gift to Sunday feature
editors”) finally grinding to a salty end with greater
fuel capacity and efficiency in transatlantic aircraft.

An even worse idea appeared in the pages of Science and Mechanics in 1936:

Notes:

1. A Time
Magazine article
published 28 October 1929 [a day before the market crashed!] about the
Langley oddly states
that Langley was the “designer of the plane which, except for accidents, might
have flown before the Wrights’ plane did in 1903”. Tough potatoes. What the magazine didn’t
state was that Langley, who was the president of the Smithsonian Institution at
the time with access to major money and benefactors simply went about the flight
problem incorrectly, and produced an airplane (or “aerodrome”, as he called it)
that did not and would not fly. Not flying because of accidents means, well,
not flying. The Wrights’ approach to
problem solving was elegant and beat Langley
by miles. Langley deserves credit for his other (many)
achievements, but not for this aircraft.

This same
article only references Armstrong as a “swarthy engineer”.

The article
is reprinted below.

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JF Ptak

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Aviation & flight — Bad Ideas — Technology, History of
History of the Future: Space Cannon Moon Flights Yield Jelly People?(1936)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 899

The Babel-like tower pictured below is a still from the movie Things to Come (1936), an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Tings to Come (1931). (Wells’ himself wrote the screenplay a few years before the movie appeared.) The story is a history of the period from 1936 to 2054, including a devastating war that begins in December 1940 (complete with major air assault, poison gases and so on), followed by plague and destruction for another forty years, after which there is a confrontation between two classes of remaining humans, with big doses of New World Order, Technocracy, Fascism and glimmers of hope of science and technology saving the future. There’s a lot that happens in the story, but the part I’m most interested in comes towards the end of the film and depicts a space gun for launching a massive capsules to the Moon–in this case, a capsule containing two “starred-crossed lovers”.

We are told that the launching apparatus–the “gun”–is 1500 feet tall, which iterates out to a 750′ base and which also makes the capsule about 75′. That’s impossibly massive firepower. (Don’t forget that somebody had to construct the 1700′ tower next to the gun that lifted the capsule into position, for some reason lowering the thing down the barrel.)

In the history of big guns, this would be about the most massive ever constructed in the sci fi world so far as I can tell. In the real world, the Kaiser Wilhelm gun (or “Paris Gun”, the Kaiser Wilhelm Geshutz) was a long-barreled, light shelled monster: its 92′ long barrel (plus a 20′ extension) launched a 94kg shell about 130 km, reaching a maximum height of 40km (about 25 miles) high. For all of its mass (the gun weighed 256 tons without the railway cars) the shell that it fired didn’t weight much at all….though the shell did reach an extreme height. (Ironically, the gun was built for attacking the deepest of the deep bunkers of the fortresses along the Maginot Line; it was never needed for that, as the Maginot Line was simply left behind in the Nazi assault on France.)

The Schwerer Gustav was a 1350 ton beast which fired a 14,000 pound shell (!) about 20 miles. A little later came the Nazi V-3 (the lesser known of the V-weapons), the Vergeltungsewaffe 3, a 130 metre (!) long, 150mm gun built along the side of a hill, launching a 140 kg shell. The Iraqi Big Babylon gun was sort of like this one, though never built–it was to have a 500′ barrel and would be supported by a hillside.

Getting back to the unfortunate Well’s space gun: this thing was supposed to fire a 75′ capsule which must’ve weighed in excess of 10,000 pounds (easy, what with supply and fuels and so on, plus the structural weight) straight up (!!) and somehow reach escape velocity of 11.2 km/s, piercing the exosphere some 400 miles high or thereabouts (or 1.5 orders of magnitude higher than the Paris Gun). I cannot intuitively imagine the tremendous explosion necessary to achieve this goal, although it could be figured out pretty easily. Back of the napkin figuring tells me that the speed of the capsule exiting the gun’s barrel would place the occupants in the vicinity of something like 450Gs–that’s more than ten times the lethal amount of force that a human can withstand. I’m not sure what happens to a person at 450Gs–I do know that it wouldn’t be pretty. Anyway, none of this part of the space travel section of the movie wasn’t pretty….except for the props, which I like, and which can be seen in the clip below.

Overall I think that this would make a lovely physics problem for discussion in a high school classroom.

Things to come: 10; 1936-2037

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JF Ptak

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Bad Ideas — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Technology, History of