Category: Blank and Empty Things; A History of

Heart, Head, Heresy and Burning at the Stake: a Cordial Memory of Michael Servetus on St. Valentine’s Day

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 938

Harold,
like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of
distinct ideas George Eliot.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and
the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
Saul Bellow

No, this isn’t a story about the great saint but a much
lesser one. For centuries the pulse was
a vaguely understood thing reaching back into the murky medical past as far
back as Galen. The association of course
was with the heart, and the association of the heart was as the great
controlling center of all function and control of the human body—a theory that reached
far forward into the 16^th century.

It is generally established that it was the fabulous work of
William Harvey (1578-1657) that brought into light the idea of pulmonary circulation,
but the idea was buried in a vastly-suppressed work by the brilliant and highly
problematic Michael Servetus (Spanish, 1511-1553).

Servetus (physician, cartographer, theologian, writer and
general all-adept Humanist of a high order) was in trouble with the church for
many reasons, not the least of which was trying to dislodge the theory of the
heart as sacred and the seat of wisdom.
But he did establish that the heart was an organ, which didn’t sit well
with very many people, least of all the Calvinist court in Vienna
which found him guilty on many anti-Humanist grounds, including his
anti-Trinitarian Christology, which made him a reviled figure to Catholics and
Protestants. He was tried and found to
be dangerously heretical, and sent to the flames. (There was a practice at the time to burn
people alive using wet wood, providing a slow, baking environment in which the
subject was painfully nearly-baked alive before he/she was actually consumed by
the flames. People thought about this….In the engraved portrait of Servetus we see him being burned–along with his books, which are slow burning things, at upper right. As a matter of fact Servetus’ effigy was burned in some places along with his books, which explains the scarcity of some.)

Later on, Harvey
withstood blistering attacks on his correct statements on the circulation of
the blood (costing him nearly all the patients in his practice), though he at least
lived to see a brighter day: Servetus, on the other hand, didn’t, and was
burned at the stake for his heresies, one of which his attack on the spiritual
heart. (Plenty of others have paid for their insight and invention and would be
later celebrated Semmelweis wasn’t killed but did wind up in an asylum;
Galileo didn’t wind up in an asylum but did wind up imprisoned; Copernicus
wound up in neither place, escaping possible clerical criticisms by dying just
as his revolutionary work was published. Phillippe Lebon’s ideas for
illumination by gas were seen as ridiculous, as were the revolutionary ideas of
Edward Jenner and Luigi Galvani. Einstein’s 1905 ideas weren’t happily
received in France
for a decade, and David Hilbert’s impressions of mathematics in the middle of
the third decade of the 20^th century was that it was “done”. )

And so I think we might as well remember Servetus today at
least as often as we do St. Valentine. Or multiple St. Valentine units—the name
seems to have been canonized in 496 ACE in memory of several people by this
name. At least Servetus had an
association with the heart in a positive way—I don’t know the Valentine/heart
connection though I suspect that at least one of them had their beating heart
ripped from their body.

Well. Happy Valentine’s
Day.

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Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Medicine, History of
Blank and Missing Things: German Submarine Importance in Graphical Comparison, 1912.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 937

In the midst of a massive building campaign by Germany and a building-response by England the French journal L’Illustration published these two side-by-side pictorial comparisons of their two navies, which wound up being reprinted in the Illustrated London News soon afterwards in June 1912. [Royal Navy, left; German Navy right]

Germany began a rebuilding campaign in 1902 which by 1908/9 was seen by the British Admiralty as a “stab at the heart” of England’s military supremacy, and so the construction wars were undertaken. It’s a complicated period and a complex race, which I just can’t get into in a short post, so let’s just say that the Brits wound up the winners of the competition when these images were printed in June 1912.

The hidden element of some great importance, a trump card that would played in just 750 days, would be the small dot-like drawings labeled “sous marins”. These would be the submarines, and it would be the subs that would be perhaps the most significant aspect of the entire German navy.

This was true in spite of what looks like an overwhelming preponderance of subs in favor of the Royal; Navy, where the count was 68 to Germany’s 24. It was really a question the type of sub, and as it turns out there were only 8 or 9 of the English count that could’ve been considered for blue water ops.

Germany began the war with 24 submarines in 1914; they recognized the ship’s importance and by war’s end ramped up production, winding up with 351 in total production and with 178 in action in 1918 alone. Of that overall number fully half (178) had been destroyed in combat, with another 11% sunk via other means. There were more than 12 million tons of Allied shipping destroyed by the German sub forces from 1914-1918 (half of that in 1917).

So these two illustrations do portray an overwhelming Royal Navy, but they certainly do not give any hit whatsoever to the coming importance of the German submarine fleet.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Histories of Smallness — Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria
Hiding Diseases: Plague and Smallpox

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 936

“Ring
around the rosies, a pocket full of posies,

Ashes,
ashes, well all fall down.”

This
old nursery rhyme has more to do with plague than a skipping-and-falling song, more
like the Tom Wait’s version of the “Dwarf’s Marching Song” (“Heigh Ho”, see
below) than anything that could ever be dreampt of in a Disney film. It was the
mater-of-fact way of dealing with the vast death brought on by the various
Plagues: saying a round of rosaries to
try and invoke divine intervention to keep the disease away from the prayer-mender;
posies as a fragrant flower to mask the stench of those actually afflicted with
the disease; and then of course the ashes from the piles of burnt corpses of
Plague victims, fallen down to death.

These
two images show different aspects of segregating—if not hiding—disease. The first is a propagandistic portrayal of a
man dying of the Plague. This snippet of
plaguaganda was an ars morendi
published in the 1460’s, and depicts a not-gruesome portrayal of what was
generally a very gruesome death. The
inflicted lies there in bed, with sheets
and a pillow, looking faint and removed in the retiring Victorian fashion
(removed 400 years), surrounded by images of his faith/belief.

I
suspect that anyone who knew anything about the Plague knew that this scene
wouldn’t be truthful, necessarily, but I guess if it could even momentarily confuse
the viewer into thinking that the visitation of Death could be so composed in
the face of this horrendous disease, I guess that’s the hope you hang
onto. There is a minor battle between
the possible claimants of the soul of The Sick, but that would be going on
anyway whether the coming death was relatively peaceful, or not. There wasn’t
much to be done—as the feeble attempts of preventing the disease would
indicate, what with choices like urine baths, bleeding, leeching, bell ringing,
pus-sucking, rotten animal corpse talismans, incense burning being some of the
preventative choices—so like a belief in Heaven or Nirvana or whatever, the hopeful
consolation of a possibly decent dying could keep people from running
amok.

The
second shows the hospital hulk Castalia, “one of the old Hospital Boats superseded
by land hospitals in 1904”, which was more a floating street than a hospital. It was a complex of five buildings nested on the
hulk of the double-hulled paddle steamer Castalia—appropriately named, as it refers
to the Delphian fountain that Apollo fabricated
from the nymph “Castalia” and alludes to the possibility of rejuvenation and
cleanliness, or health, perhaps). The
hospital held hundreds of smallpox patients, sent there by the Metropolitan
Asylum Board in an effort to stem the flow of the disease and infection rates
from the rest of the population of London. Smallpox
was still a vast killer in mid-/late-Victorian England, and given the information
available at the time this was a good social inoculation by distance and
segregation. (It is interesting to note
that out-of-service de-masted, defrocked and striped ships of the line were
used to house prisoners (though generally prisoners of war); in particular,
those kept in the East River housing American soldiers inflicted vast death
tolls via maltreatment and urgently hideous living conditions.) This really doesn’t fit with the
propagandist/suppressing model of the above, and its removal did prevent the
contagion from spreading, but, well, it does look like the Asylum Board was trying to hide the sick.

Notes:

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Architecture and Building — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Medicine, History of
Three Map Fits: a Color Map with Color and No Map, a Color Map in Black & White; AND a Black & White Map in White (only).

JF Ptak Science Books Post 934

This confusing title is accurate without very much grant in license and tells a short and true story of three fitful maps, two of which are beautiful and one just so-so.



The first map fit is featured in a beautiful pamphlet called A Century of Progress Colors and was issued by the Textile Color Card Association of the USA.(The title being a small play on the 1933 world’s fair in Chicago called “A Century of Progress”. The Textile Color Card Association was created to standardize color nomenclature and composition in industrial colors (and is still in existence.)  The map distributed the major pavilions at the fair by their dominating colors, naming those colors in the unusually-sequenced double-page key on the following pages (below¹). I can certainly appreciate the effort and the beautiful design it produced, but as a map of the fair it leaves much (if not everything) to be desired.

The second map fit belongs to a small pamphlet published by Albert Coble called Games of Colors, Kindergarten and Primary Exercises. Its actually an enterprising little book about reaching into the minds of little ones and explaining how colors are put together and how they relate to one another. It is unfortunate that the drawings used to illustrate the color map part of the pamphlet were done in black and white. Which is a little on the self-defeating side.

But the finest fit of the three fits is fit number three, which is the map of the Bellman’s tale, starting the second fit of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits.

But the map that I think I love the most illustrates Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits, and occurs in the Bellman’s tale, starting the second fit¹. It is simply magnificent.

Then, of course, there is this:

Notes:

1. The key:

2. The fit begins so:

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies-
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity too! One could see he was wise,
The moment one look in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when the found it to be
A map they could all understand.

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
“They are merely conventional signs!

“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank”
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!”

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking
Unexpected Sense Impressions from Antique Prints: Sound

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 631

[A continuation of the blog series “A History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things“]

The
sweetest pleasures come from unexpected sources. Mozart–who loved the game of billiards
and was an exceptional aficionado¹ of the game while playing it with little
skill– enjoyed composing on the table as well, rolling balls in geometric patterns across it
while working. To observers it might have seemed as though he was interested in
the patterns themselves; it delightfully turns out that what he was really looking at were
the changing reflections in the surface of the balls.

Years
ago my wife (Patti Digh) and I visited an artist in his studio at the lovely
high-road-to-Taos town of Truchas, New Mexico. We watched the artist at work for quite some
time—well, actually, we listened to him work.
Although he was a lovely painter, the visual impact was overwhelmed by the sounds that he made padding back
and forth (he was working on a big canvas) across an old and musical wooden
floor –it deeply interesting, and the sound stays with us to this day.

I
enjoy these quasi-synesthesic experiences a great deal, though they are very
hard to “find”. Sometime though they slip into the print world, and I include three
examples below.

(1)
Putting the Pulp in Fiction, and Fact: the Sharp First Step in Paper-Making

Just
about the first step in making paper is collecting and preparing the raw
materials from which the paper is made.
Linens, cottons, wood and straw (among other things) would be reduced to
a pasty pulp through vigorous pounding, tearing, wetting stabbing and rending,
all of which would be reduced to a pasty, fibrous pulp which would wind up after
a bit spread over a wire mesh until dried and then, through a great
non-miracle, becoming paper. This is a
process that was little changed in the Western world for many centuries.

The
most lovely of these early pulp-rendering, “stamping” machines, to me is the
fabulous two-person human-powered stamper/shredder, published in 1579. (I don’t
know the original source for the wood engraving; this image appears in Charles
Singer’s monumental History of
Technology, from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, vol III.

The
men turn crank, crank turns wheels and rod, rod turns arms, arms forced to move
vertical poles up and down, stampers on the end of poles pound the rags. Actually the stampers had changeable stamps
so that the man-machine could start with a spiked stamper for rendering and
then move to a roundish stamp for pounding into decomposition in a wooden bowl
with mushy water.

I
just really like the machine and its representation, and of course the round
stampers and bowls of mush. It all seems
so innocent in a creaking antiquarian way—but the great surprise for me is that
I can just about hear this machine at work.
The all-wooden structure with slowing-turning wheels grinding against
its constituent parts, worn smooth from use; the slow pounding of the stampers
into the thick paste; the creaking motions of the too-slender
superstructure. I can hear it about as
clearly as I can hear the soft/high clinking of the bottles in the milkman’s
tray.

(2) A Scene of Western Quiet

The image comes from William Wright’s The History of the Big Bonanza and was published in 1877. It is a very
simple scene (“Office of the Consolidated Virginia Mine”), nicely and
proportionally arranged, though somewhat challenged by its understanding of linear
perspective. For reasons I don’t quite understand it might as well have been a
picture of the high desert with no settlement whatsoever. It simply seems still, and very quiet.

(3)
Electrical Hum (and Ozone) Fishing Nets

This
image, from the quarto edition of the great Diderot and d’Alembert Encyclopedie (published over a number of years in the late 18^th century), shows (I think) the
ways to mend broken fishing nets. I have a definite sense of a high electrical
hum from this, along with the added whiff of ozone. Its hardly something that was intended by the
artist, but it was the first thing that registered with me when I bought this
print 25 years ago.

Things
like this are available to us all of the time, simply waiting to be heard while
being seen.

Notes

1. After his death Mozart’s estate was reckoned, and the contents of his house and belongings were catalogued. It was recorded that he had a very nice billiard table, and that he also had 12 cues. Now 12 cues might’ve been there because he liked the feel of the wood, or that he liked their artistic merit on the wall or in the corner. That, or he had a lot of people coming over to play. I like the later interpretation. Also, I cannot remember the reference for the ball/reflection story; please don’t tell me that it is wrong.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Missing “Dots” and Not Seeing the Discovery of Platelets, 1842

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 918

{This post continues some new and unusual cross-categories in this blog, like Missing Things Making Holes; Bombs as Breads. Today’s bit combines the “Blank, Empty and Missing Things” with “The History of Dots” categories.]

Alfred
Donne (1801-1878), physician, experimenter, microscopist and
photographer, is best known for things other than what he should
probably be best known for: his discovery of the third element of the
blood, platelets. Donne had a wonderful vision, and was among the very
first on the scene to write about and employ the spectacular invention
of the daguerreotype in chemistry and microscopy. As a matter of fact,
Donne, along with his collaborator Leon Foucault, produced the very
first engraved images of photomicrographs for his cytology paper of
1840. (He was also the first to use electricity in producing a medical
illustration, and was among the first modern physicians to write on the
great efficacy of mothers using their own milk in breast feeding their
children.) The discovery of platelets paper of 1842¹–preceding two
other works published in the same year–does indeed identify the new
object, but actually fails to make a methodological examination of the
new body, calling the new units “globulins du chyle” (or small globules, derived
from plasma). He also fails to make a drawing of what he saw; so, the
combination of these two important elements asked the reader to accept
his findings on faith, the tools of reproduction of his observations
not being present.

And so we remember Donne for some other significant
things, and less so for his lightly-interpreted and un-illustrated, and missing, “dots”.

Notes
1.Donne, Alfred. De l’origine des globules du sang, de leur mode de formation et de leur fin. Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, Paris, 1842, 14: 366-168.

(Overall the history of the
discovery of platelets is complicated:
Leewenhoek (1675) and Henson (1782) were the first to fully describe the “undefined”
particles of the blood; Donne’s work was then more fully described by Beale in
1850, and then again (identified as “small corpuscles” by Zimmerman in 1860 and
then again by Schultze in 1874 and Laptschinski (also in 1874). William Osler
then enters the scene in 1880, followed by Giulio Bizzozzero who was the
first, in the years 1881 -1882, to establish central role of platelets
not only in physiological haemostasis, but also in thrombosis. Anyway it is a longish and not-clear-to-me
history.)

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — History of Dots — Medicine, History of
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
“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
When a Compliment is Not: Newton and Hooke and the “Shoulders of Giants”

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 912

I
was tooling looking for vision quotes and came upon this by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (an unusual stomping ground for me) from The Friend (published in 1828):

“The dwarf sees farther
than the giant, when he has the giant’s shoulder to mount on.“

This
made me think of the over-quoted sentiment quoted again by Isaac Newton

“What Descartes did was a good step. You have added
much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into
philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing
on the shoulders of Giants.“

Newton wrote this in a
letter (5 February 1676) to the immensely creative workhorse Robert Hooke1. He was a tireless, relentless observer and
experimenter, who lost little effort in a stranded idea and pursued interesting
and problematic questions relentlessly. More than others too he chased
his won glory—minor but long and insistent—the years of which wore thin on many
people in the scientific community. But there were many characteristics
of the man that made him not quite so lovable and endearing—not that Newton was
any of those things, as he was not, but if you are going to be a secondary luminary
to a super nova you’ve got to have something else going for you that the other
man doesn’t have—sharing, helpful, greatly generous—to get you into the long
pre-dusty pages of history. Also it would’ve helped if Hooke chose his battles
with a little more aplomb and ingenuity—the war which began in 1672 with Newton
went very badly for Hooke and followed him to the grave (and far beyond).
Newton and Hooke had many disputes—most notably
in optics—basically because Hooke pursed Newton
(among many others) for expropriating his ideas. Hooke was over the line on this and probably
pushed the point too far—Newton
was enormously annoyed by this and other Hooke contacts and wasted no effort in
trying to pay Hooke back the favor over the years. Newton
was famously sharp and could fashion that intelligence and wit into a terrifically
nasty tool against those who bothered him.

And
so back to the “shoulders” letter. This always struck me as a bit too
melodramatic for a Newton,
and also a little too congratulatory for a field that he basically owned,
especially since he was a towering egoist (and not without cause). But he did pay Descatres (“des Cartes” in the
original) a compliment; though I could not at all think of Newton referring to the dreaded Hooke as one
of the giants’ shoulders he was standing upon.
Newton’s
reference to “giants” might also have been a swipe at Hooke’s physical stature,
which was terribly slight, small and crooked.
SO I think that Newton
was referring to Descartes, and decidedly not Hooke.

So
this semi-ubiquitous scientific laudatory quote is perhaps not quite so. Kinda like the very well known painting by
William Blake featuring Newton
as a naked geometer, figuring out the world, a color-tone praise of the great
physicist. Or perhaps not. Blake I think simply didn’t like Newton, didn’t
care for the scientist taking away the mystery of the world that Blake loved so
much—especially in regards to color, which Blake needed to stay interpretative
and mysterious. Newton took part of that away, and I think
Blake exercised a little payback in his artwork.

It
seems to me that if one looked at the “shoulder” quote and the Blake artwork as
works that were insults and not praises, they can be easily seen that way. Its all a matter of perspective.

Notes

1.
The 28-year old Hooke published the results in a gorgeous and revolutionary
book, Micrographia (a lovely e-text edition appears at Gutenberg, here)
in 1665, which became an instant best seller and highly praised and valued.
(Samuel Pepys, perhaps among the shiniest stars whose imprimatur was like a
royal blessing, said the book (was) “the most ingenious book that I ever
read in my life.”) There is no telling what the people of the mid-17^th
century thought of seeing such incredible discoveries in the little
semi-invisible stuff that made up their normal, daily lives. The only
thing that somewhat equates to this would be if the first images of the Hubble
were those of Earth-bound objects whose detail had previously been
unknown. Hooke’s observations and drawings of things like the common flea
were just an astonishment—that such a creature of “low order” could have such
intricate detail and design was a complete revelation. The drawings of
the fly’s eye, too, was an inescapable wonder, an incredible object to consider
as having any detail pre-microscope, and then revealed to have
unimaginable design and elegance.

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JF Ptak

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Perspective
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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JF Ptak

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of