Category: Bad Ideas

Odd Things on Title Pages Department: Circumcision, 1507

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When Johannes Pfefferkorn (1469-1523) was released from prison he rushed himself into a conversion to Christianity (having come from a Jewish family in Nuremberg) and published a notorious diatribe against his former people. Speculum Adhhortationis Iudaice ad Christum, which was published in 1507, savaged the Jews, calling for immediate

conversion to the recognition of Christ as savior, giving up all banking concerns, and throwing out the Talmud. It packed a lot of sneering speculation into a mere twenty pages, and was one a of a number of anti-Jewish pamphlets (also including his en ihr Ostern halten (1508); Judenbeicht (1508); and Judenfeind (1509)) in which Pfefferkorn unleashed horrible prescriptions. He came to believe that the best way to deal with the Jews was to kill them, convert them, expel them, or enslave them; that was about it. He waged a successful campaign against the Jewish intellectual life by convincing the Emperor to allow the confiscation of all Jewish books (except for the Old Testament), embarking on an extended tour of Germany to do so. At the bottom of it all, he thought that the best way to deal with theological issues that opposed his own was to crush the believers and steal their books.

Of interest to me here though is the remarkable woodcut on the title page. On a very wide crucifix we see the blood of the bleeding wounded Christ pouring itself into a baptism font, with eight (or so) praying people waiting to avail themselves of it, including the onlooking attention of the Virgin Mary and a Pope (Peter?). In the foreground is a dismal portrayal of a group of Jews, showing them small, gnarled, without benefit of vision and legs. At the extreme bottom left is the circumcision, he only time I can remember seeing such a thing on a title page. It was an awful visual propagandistic juxtaposition, a fitting illustration for an awful pamphlet.

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Bad Ideas — Title Page Art, Beautiful
Fundamentals of Irony in Bombing: Tybee Island, 1862 and the French in Damascus, 1925

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[on vacation, Tybee Island, Georgia]

I have a hard time remembering the correct version of this twisty tale—are we in a post-irony age or the post-ironic irony age? Is a double-irony an irony at all? Actually I think that instead of our society having moved into a post-irony stage, it seems that the apparent lack of irony seems only so because all we have is irony, which of course is ironic. Which may be an illustrative answer to my second question; a double-irony is indeed a bigger irony, not a smaller (or null) one.

This came to mind vacationing with my family; actually, it came while building a sand castle at the lip of the advancing tide, building it up as the water tore it down. That’s the fun of it, even with my six-year old: watching things get made and watching them get unmade, as the getting-unmade part will tell you a whole heck of a lot about the successes and failures of what went into the thing’s making.

Watching the walls of the fort tumble reminded me of the real-life version of this event, something that happened about two miles away and 147 years ago. For Pulaski was built on the Savannah River to protect the approaches to Savannah and Charleston from the angry reaches of the Spanish and British; in 1862, it was in the hands of the Confederates, and was being used to protect Savannah from the very government that built it.

Even while under the direct commander of General R.E. Lee, thing did not go well for Fort Pulaski and the garrison within. At the end of 1861, the CSA was getting ready for an extended siege of the fort as the Union forces found victories north and south of it. They withdrew their forces from Tybee and threw them into the fort, leaving the Union army a free and insatiable hand to get their hand ready on the other side of the Savannah pass. That said, that’s what pretty much happened: Union forces dragged their cannons through the surf and across the sand, getting them in place around newly-built batteries. This all happened at night so that the Confederates in the fort couldn’t see what was going on, what with all of the evening’s doings camouflaged once the sun came up. (This was still possible at t he time, to keep a secret like this in almost plain view, only a mile away from where the opposing cannons were aimed. The guys in the fort were pretty much cut off from everyone and everything, with only the occasional courier being able to make it through. The garrison was, after all, equipped with enough provisions to last through a siege of 8 months or so.) What happened, finally, was that with the Union cannon in place, the assault began. And instead of a siege lasting for two seasons, it ran about two days. The difference was in the new cannons that were being used the boys in blue—the rifled cannon was brought to play against the massive walls of the fort, and the masonry didn’t stand a chance against the new technology, which as it turns out was first displayed to the world in this battle. And so the ironies: a fort that was built to protect the United States from foreign invaders was used to protect the Confederate States from the United States; and the fort fell not to a sea-based barrage but a land-based one. And after all of this, even though the Pulaski fell in April 1862, Savannah wasn’t captured by the union until December 1864.

An encyclopedia could no doubt be written on nothing but the ironies 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, and percentage of GDP, whatever. 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.

So there is hardly any shortage of bombing ironies, as we can see here with the null-irony of the French bombing themselves while killing Muslim civilians. When you start looking for irony, sometimes that’s all you can see.

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Bad Ideas — Militaria
Dreaming of the 10-Ton Eiffel Tower Bullet, 1891

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People find inspiration everywhere, insight to creativity in the obvious and not so. Great statues have been envisioned in the depths of slabs of marble, solutions to mathematical problems in the step of a bus, the beginning of a new physics in the rolling ball in a wagon. Its an old and very warn cliché, but the world can be seen in a grain of sand if you could just pieces together the bits of glass: just as pointillism was seen in the not-simple intercession of two colors and cinematography in the latent image and the structure of the universe in a patch of dancing dust.

The Eiffel Tower has had its own way with the visions of people, from it representing the birth of The Modern, to an icon of passion, to architecture and engineering innovation, and to general adventure and the call of possibility. It has moved other people to think “special” thoughts: like, for example, what a lovely canvas it would be to place a 700’-tall electrified sign.* And to M. Carron of Grenoble, who may have the most unusual inspirations from M. Eiffel, the tower was the perfect place to drop a 40-foot tall, 20,000-pound bullet filled with 20 people in leather armchairs into a 200-foot deep champagne-glass pool.

This is certainly a singular insight. But in 1891 it represented something a little more than just giving people a thrill ride. Physics of impact aside for the moment, M.Carron’s bullet capsule would be released from the top of the interior of the Tower, about 1000 feet high, and released to fall into an excavated pool 150’ across and 200’ deep. The idea was that in addition to the springs inside the capsule, the water would act as a “shock absorber”, and so “the shock felt by the occupants on landing will be in no way unpleasant”.

[Okay, so the thing would hit at 178mph or so, and, assuming that the whole thing didn’t get completely crushed on impact, I’m not so sure that 200’ of depth is very much wiggle room for the thing to come to a halt (if it didn’t deform). I Also it would have to not have any wind deflection so as to not veer off its perfect entry into the water. And so on. Calculating the force of impact is difficult without knowing how far down the bullet would go, but hitting the water at 80 m/s and stopping at 30 meters would yield something like 28,600,000 KE and 1,274,000 N. There are lots of problems….]

The thing is, though, the thing that made this so appealing, is that for the 20-francs that get a person a seat in the bullet, that they would each get to go twice as fast as any human had ever traveled before ( 65 miles per hour was about the speed of the fastest train constructed). So it was an extraordinary claim, an done that doesn’t get made all that often in the history of locomotion.

And so this wasn’t a practicable or workable idea; but, well, so what? It was an unusual idea, inspired by some sort of different thinking, which are both good places to be in according to the Gazetteer & Atlas of Ideas. Sometimes thinking like this is just prelude to something else, thought avenues that had to be explored before the real thinking could get done, introducing you to a new geography of thought. That’s what M. Carron had going for him; the newness of his thinking was much more important than the wrongness of it.

*This story comes at the end of a post called Bad Ideas Department: the First Image of a Hypnotized Chicken, so in spite of the title you’ll wind up in Paris.

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Architecture and Building — Bad Ideas — Technology, History of
“Total Atomic Defense”: Moving DC to Idaho and Letting the Nukes Fly 1952

JF Ptak Science Books LLC REPOST

One of my favorites from the “What the Hell?” Department:

Also see my series Atomic and Nuclear Weapons

Sylvian Kindall’s Total Atomic Defense (published
by a very severely right-wing publisher in 1952) is one of a series of
books made for a deceived American population, offering the general
reader both fear and hope, often from the same, exact source. But
Kindall has a somewhat diffident approach, offering his belief that
the country and its population can largely survive an all-out nuclear
war–intact. Of course the “intactness” is dependent upon massive
internal change of the social and industrial fabric of the country,
which would have to transform in ways as to make it largely
unidentifiable from that which we would quickly recognize. A quick
look at the table of contents tells the story in miniature, with the
exception of the solution to the problem, which was generally to build
underground. (The neutron bomb would soon complicate this solution.)
Suffice to say that Dr. Strangelove would approve of the publication of
such a work though would hardly believe in any of it for himself…
[read the rest of the story here]

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons — Bad Ideas
Cruising Down the Cigarette Highway, 1950: the Unlimited Reach of Tobacco

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See also my related posts:

The Worst Picture of Santa, Ever

and
Deathly Equality: Liberty and Lung Cancer

This is a simple ad for a butane-based lighter (appearing in LIFE magazine for 18 December 1950), lighting the
way down Cigarette Road. Actually,
it was more a highway than a road, and a superhighway at that. Government-sponsored warnings about tobacco health issues was still more than a decade away: medical doctors were part of the advertising machine, as were actors (including RWR), sports figures, and virtually anyone else with a mouth.

It seems to me that there are about 300
cigarettes in this ad, and that looks like a lot—point of fact though is that
in 1950, the average American (of 18+ years) smoked about 3,522 cigarettes a
year, which means about 10 cigarettes a day for everyone in the country. Not 10 per smoker; 10 for everyone in the entire country, smoker
or not, who was over 18 years of age.

The average smoker in 1950 smoked about 2.5 packs a day, or
50 cigarettes or so—that’s equal to this line of cigarettes being smoked every
six days.
There were virtually no brakes.

Even Santa (a pipe smoker) got into the business. This was a standard, acceptable, vanilla-packaged advertisement.

United States Cigarette Consumption, ,
1900–2007

First number is total consumption in billions; second number
is per capita yearly consumption for people 18+.

1915 17.9 285

1920 44.6 665

1925 79.8 1,085

1930 119.3 1,485

1935 134.4 1,564

1940 181.9 1,976

1945 340.6 3,449

1950 369.8 3,522

1955 396.4 3,597

1960 484.4 4,171

1965 528.8 4,259

1970 536.5 3,985

1975 607.2 4,123

1980 631.5 3,851

1985 594.0 3,461

1990 525.0 2,827

1995 487.0 2,515

2000 430.0 2,092

2005 376.0 1,716

2007 360.0

Source: Tobacco Outlook Report, Economic
Research Service, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.

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Bad Ideas — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Connections: from Plugging Gibraltar to Shakespeare’s Memories in One Step

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“Simply the thing I am shall make me live.”

–from Jorge Luis Borges, “Shakespeare’s Memory”

It is interesting to pursue a loose thought to its not-necessarily
logical end. Such is the case with the
Paneuropic ideas of Hermann Soergel (1885-1952). Soergel was a Bauhaus
architect and author of a number of works on design and far more ethereal,
floating-castle ideas. His most spectacular contribution—incubated in the
mid-1920’s and still clinging by its fingertips as an idea among some current
thinkers—was to put a dam across the straights of Gibraltar. The dam would generate electricity of course,
but most importantly to Soergel, it would also empty an enormous amount of
water from the Mediterranean leaving vast new
expanses of land to be developed and colonized over generations into the
future. The master plan at work was that
the world would be divided into three economic spheres in the future, all
beginning with the letter “A”: American,
Asia, and the new land to be created by Soergel, “Atlantropa”, which was the
former Europe expanded into the new dry beds of the Mediterranean and North Africa. And also
of course Egypt,
which would be covered with canals and semi-submerged by the new borders of the
meandering sea. This would be the way
for Europa to compete with the rest of the world in the future.

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

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

I should point out that the image above comes from the Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig) for August 1931, and is a drawing by an artist named “AS. Christ” after Soergel’s Panropa’s ideas.

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Creating in the Last Moment of Life: Archimedes

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The Death of Archimedes images (at NYU, here)

“…with his blood he confused the lines of his art”
On the death of Archimedes, in Valerius Maximus

[The excellent website dedicated at Drexel is the source of all of the quotes below]

I’ve had this image in the back of my head for quite some time now–the image of the great Archimedes having his head cleaved in two by an attacking Roman soldier during the Battle of Syracuse

Seldom do we see a maxim so vividly depicted as with these lines from Valerius Maximus: Archimedes trying to hold a thought in his head while a roman soldier comes tugging at him, Archimedes pushing the soldier away to protect the geometrical work that he was scribbling in the sand, and then having his head full of thoughts spilled onto the drawing he was trying to protect. What we see in the detail is almost exactly (or on the verge of being exactly) from the Valerius quote fragment “…with his blood he confused the lines of his art”: Archimedes has spoiled his geometry in the moment before his cleaved head releases the control of his muscles. It is a nasty image, the pissed-off Roman soldier—who theoretically was just looking for spoils in the looted city of Syracuse—having had enough of the three-second hesitation by the old man and reacts badly, beheading him the hard way.

I include the following few quotes from classic sources relating this final scene:

“But as Archimedes was drawing diagrams with mind and eyes fixed on the ground, a soldier who had broken into the house in quest of loot with sword drawn over his head asked him who he was. Too much absorbed in tracking down his objective, Archimedes could not give his name but said, protecting the dust with his hands, “I beg you, don’t disturb this,” and was slaughtered as neglectful of the victor’s command; with his blood he confused the lines of his art.” Valerius Maximus (c. 20 BC-c. AD 50 ), Memorable Doings and Sayings, Book VIII.7.ext. 7

“Many brutalities were committed in hot blood and the greed of gain, and it is on record that Archimedes, while intent upon figures which he had traced in the dust, and regardless of the hideous uproar of an army let loose to ravage and despoil a captured city, was killed by a soldier who did not know who he was.” Livy (59 BC-AD 17 ), History of Rome from its Foundation, Book XXV.31

“a Roman soldier, running upon him with a drawn sword, offered to kill him; and that Archimedes, looking back, earnestly besought him to hold his hand a little while, that he might not leave what he was then at work upon inconclusive and imperfect; but the soldier, nothing moved by his entreaty, instantly killed him.” Plutarch (AD 45-120), Parallel Lives: Marcellus

“a Roman came up and began to drag him away to take him prisoner. But he, being wholly intent at the time on the diagram, and not perceiving who was tugging at him, said to the man: “Stand away, fellow, from my diagram.” John Tzetzes (circa twelfth century AD), Book of Histories (Chiliades), Book II, Lines 136-149

“He was constructing some figure or other, and hearing that the enemy were at hand, exclaimed: “Let them come at my head, but not at my line!” John Zonaras (circa twelfth century AD), Epitome ton Istorion, 9, 5

“The death of Archimedes by the hands of a Roman soldier is symbolical of a world-change of the first magnitude: the Greeks, with their love of abstract science, were superseded in the leadership of the European world by the practical Romans”. Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), An Introduction to Mathematics

“. . . he was a callous, obdurate, conceited midshipman, intent on his own discoveries, and caring as little for what went on about him, terrestrially, as Archimedes at the taking of Syracuse.” Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Dombey and Son, Chapter 19, (1846-48)

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Alpabetical Doomsday Introduction: Welcome to the End of the World

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Here’s a very abbreviated overview to a vast literature of the end of times/apocalypse/technocaust/end of the world themes. This is just a short working list, really, and includes only short stories or novels. In many cases there is just one example (where there could be hundreds). There are no movies or television shows listed, though I think that they must be enormously outnumered (and the scale of orders of magniutue) by the print media.

Alien
Invasion: The War of the
Worlds 1898, H. G. Wells; The Moon Men 1926, Edgar Rice Burroughs; The Puppet Masters,
1951, Robert A. Heinlein

Botanical endgame virus destroying all plant life:
The Death of Grass by John Christopher On the opposite end is 1962 novel Hothouse by Brian Aldiss
where the plants take over everything.

Climate Change: The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
1962. Conversely Ballard wrote the novel The Drought in 1964 about all of the water on earth
drying up.

Crystallization (!): this one sounds
painful: The Crystal World
by J.G. Ballard
1966. Everyone and everything begins to form into crystals.

The Drought by J.G. Ballard
A super drought evaporates all water on earth.

Dying Sun: The World in Winter
by John Christopher 1962

Earthquakes: A Wrinkle in the Skin, John Christopher, 1965

Environemntalism and Rush’s dream-come-true: The Bridge
by D. Keith Mano (1973)
envirofascists exterminate humans to save the world.

Extraterrestrial Threat: When Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie,
1933

Flood: Flood by Stephen Baxter
(2008) gigantic underground oceans seep to the surface and inundate the world.

Human general
malaise, dystopia, ennui: Arthur C. Clarke‘s
Childhood’s End ; City
(1952) by Clifford D. Simak; Friday by Robert A. Heinlein;. Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut.;
Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle;l
H. G. Wells‘
The Time Machine

Human Wars: After London 1885 Richard
Jeffries; Ape and Essence 1948 Aldous Huxley ;
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
1968 Philip K Dick,.; The Last Man
1826 Mary SHeley.

Ice Water catastrophe: Cat’s Cradle
by Kurt Vonnegut,
1964: Time of the Great Freeze
by Robert Silverberg , 1964 and in 1969 The Ice Schooner by Michael Moorcock

Insect extermination: Charles Pellegrino’s Dust, 1998. The ecosystem collapses after bugs disappear.

Infertility caused by nuke power plant
meltdown: 1946 Mr. Adam
by Pat Frank
Also the infertility endgame in Greybeard by Brian Aldiss,
1964.

Meteor: Survival 2000 1991, James McPhee; Titan
1997, Stephen Baxter; The Day of the Triffids 1951.

Monsters: Skeletons,
(1992) by Al Sarrantonio. The Earth is
ravaged by a raised-from-the-dead society of super monsters comprising all
animals that ever lived, ever, but in super-skeleton form. Yikes!

Nature’s Death: Nature’s End by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka. (1986)

Nuclear-bomb-induced-methane-fueled superhurricanes. Mother of Storms by John Barnes
– 1995

Nuclear weapons:
too, too many to reckon with here.
Ray Bradbury famously ends the world at the same instant via an exchange
in Fahrenheit 451, for example. Mordecai Roshwald‘s
Level 7,
Nevil Shute‘s
On the Beach and Pat Frank‘s
Alas, Babylon,

Overpopulation and mass famine: Anthony Burgess’ The Wanting Seed 1962. Also
1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
(made into Soylent Green). The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood,
tale of developing underpopulation caused by infertility caused by
pollution.

Petroleum-eating microbes: Ill Wind (novel) by Kevin J. Anderson
and Doug Beason
1995.

Plagues: The White Plague
1982 Frank Herbert; The Scarlet Plague 1912 Jack London; Oryx and Crake
2003 Margaret Atwood; The Children of Men 1992 P.D. James

Pollution Children of Morrow
by H. M. Hoover.

Religious: Book of Revelation, the Book of Daniel,
the short story The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke (1953), and on and on.

Robot Revenge/Overlords: Erewhon‘s
section The Book of Machines (1872);
The Machine Stops 1909,by E. M. Forster
; The Mind Machine (1919)
by Michael Williams; R.U.R. (play, 1921), by Karel Čapek,
The Metal Giants
(1926), by Edmond Hamilton ; Automata
(1926 short story) by S. Fowler Wright

Snow: The Snow by Adam Roberts
(2004) everyone buried under lots and lots of building snows.

Space-based: Aftermath
by Charles Sheffield, 2004, supernova
causes cataclysmic climate change.

Space-based (civilization
collapse): Against the Fall of Night by Arthur C. Clarke
;Gene Roddenberry‘s Andromeda ;The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke
; The Dragon Masters, by Jack Vance

Volcanic eruption: The Purple Cloud
by M.P. Shiel,
1901.

Windstorms: The Wind from Nowhere by J.G. Ballard,
1961.

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The “Is This Really Necessary” Department 2: Flying, Sommersaulting Elephants

JF Ptak Science Book LLC Post 672

Last week I made a post regarding a fish-throwing apparatus installed at a zoo–honestly I didn’t anticipate that there would be a follow-up post on another animal-throwing machine, but, well, unfortunately, here it is.

Eduard Wulff, a circus manager and resident of Bruxelles,
was granted this patent in 1904 for a device that would “project horses,
elephants, monkeys etc into the air” so that they would perform a sommersault.

Elephants? Flying, somersaulting,
elephants?

The abstract from the British Intellectual Property Office is reprinted below:

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Thomas Edison’s Dreams and Why You Can’t Always Be Right: Television, 1880

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 671

“Seeing
by telephone or by telegraph may be within the range of the possible. I say
that because nothing is impossible until it has been demonstrated so to be.
Seeing by either of these instrumentalities, however, is, as I look upon it, so
far removed from the field of probability that I should treat any report of
this character as an absurdity.” T. Edison

I wonder what it was that Thomas Edison dreamt about—I
suspect that like most folks he dreamt about himself, though perhaps everyone
else in his dreams were him, too. Mr.
Edison was a fabulous inventor and thinker—he wasn’t the best person he
could’ve been, and even though he had an enormous grasp on the whole of things
and ideas about him, he also seemed to grab a little bit more, and a little too
much. Which sounds like gluttony.

I’m not so sure why Edison was given to such overstatement on “television”—he just about contradicts his
own rule of thumb in doing so, as though he was going far out of his way to say
something anti-prophetic. Perhaps it was
because “seeing by wire” at this point did not belong to him, like so much
else—which is possible, because Edison did not
play well with others, at all.

The possibility of interesting dreams swimming around Mr.
Edison’s sleeping head was very high, though he may have been one of those poor
unfortunates who dream about watching someone else sit in a chair and for hours
on end stare at a wall—sounding more like a nightmare than a dream to me.

Good dreams, bad dreams.
History is certainly ankle-deep in literature about the dream, and the
anthropology of dream states must be wide and deep. Dreams don’t show up all that much in the
Bible, though, which seems odd to me—there are 40-odd references to dreams in
the Old Testament, and only nine in the New.
And in the NT five of the dreams come in Matthew (with four of those
referencing the birth of Christ), and another four coming in the Acts of the
Apostles, all of which relate to St.
Paul. The most
interesting of the NT dreams sounds like that of Claudia, the wife of Pontius
Pilate, who warned her husband that Christ was probably not the person that he
should be messing with. That is I think her entire existence in the Bible, the
dream, and the warning to her husband. What
seems to happen though is that dreams in the Old Testament seem to be rather
benign entities, while in the New things happen that turn the dreamscape into a
possible entrance way to Hell, the unconscious thought world becoming the
property of the Church. And speaking of Hell and dreams, I believe that it was
the dream sequence in the Aeneid where
the truth and falsity of dreams were put to the test—or at least the dual
possibilities of the divergent nature of dreams—imaging dreams emerging from
the Ivory Portal in Hades to be false dreams while those issuing from the Pearl
portal were good. Problem is here that
with all of that smoke and bother in the Underworld, wouldn’t Ivory and Pearl look pretty much the
same? Among the ancients it was
Aristotle who was among the first to dispense with the soft/spiritualistic/astrobabble
interpretation of the dream, approaching the issue with rationality. Hippocrates also tried to lift the idea of
the dream up and away from those (Like Hesiod, for example) who would see them
as ritualistic and meaningful indicators of endless bric-a-brac. But the ancients didn’t do a great job of it
given the vast limitations, nor did the moderns (as Dr. Freud certainly still
has major game in this post-ironic department).

Back to the TV: the truth of the matter is that in spite of
the Edisonian condemnation there was real discussions and experiments regarding
mechanical (not electronic) television in the late 19^th century, and
they went a pretty long way towards achieving images by wire. Alexander Bell
nearly brought about an image-sending device based on his successful photophone
(in 1880), and in that same year George Carey built a primitive sort-of system
with light-sensitive cells. Paul Nipkow
came the closest of these early pioneers in 1884 with a techy rotating-disk apparatus
that successfully achieved an 18-line visual image.

I’m just saying that Mr. Edison had to have been dreaming of
other things that he had more control over.
From where I sit, it seems to me that opportunities for the electrical
transmission of images were quite ripe by the 1890’s. It took another 25 years or so to bring it
all to fulfillment, with a cascade of very successful developments occurring in
1927/8/9. It is a little mysterious to
me why he had such a low opinion of the possibility of television given the electrical
environment of his day.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Bad Ideas — Technology, History of