A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

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Category: Electro-LUXurious

An Episode in the History of Electro-LUXurient Parisian Dumbwaiters (1913)

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Welcome to the push button electro-deluxe-lux world of 1913 of the marvel of electro-mechanics, the (proposed) Hotel Electro-Ferla. I read in the issue of Scientific American for 1 November 1913 (p 345) that the design is that of M. Georgia Knapp, the design of another all-electric house that appeared in the pages of the SciAm just a year earlier. (M. Knapp appears to have been a busy person in a number of different fields…) The hotel design is Electro-Luxurient–we read in the caption that a person staying at the hotel, waking on the third floor, only had to speak out loud to have the time illuminated on their ceiling; another series of vocal commands opens the shutters and window, delivers their coffee, and retrieves the paper and mail. Another command sends his breakfast up through the hotel in a dumbwaiter to a device that gets his plates right to his bed. we are told that these electric commands respond with good delivered in 10 seconds, whereas telephoning the front desk and getting everything operated and delivered by hand would take four minutes (!)…so, think of the time saved.

And of course we have the electric dining room, which is the subject of the illustration for the short article. You can see clearly in the detail that all of the service is taking place in the basement of the hotel, with each table having a tiered dumbwaiter that connects it the the kitchens down below. The diner speaks their wants, and the stuff appears, plate after plate. Evidently there is one waitstaff member per tables, though who knows how many people are wailing away at the varied kitchens in the basement.

It seems like a scary situation…particularly when you read that there are hundreds of these dumbwaiters snaking their way through the hotel in a Terry Gilliam-like ductwork maze of tunnels and tubes.

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Electro-LUXurious — Technology, History of
The Horizontal Section of the Deep Dark (1887)

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Thomas Edison’s November 1879 patent on the incandescent light bulb is generally take as being the first great step into the modern age of electric lighting, this following decades of other groundbreaking research by a dozen others in the field. And so electric was popularly brought to the popular world, though it existed elsewhere decades earlier–for example, in lighthouses, where the first electric arc lamp was used beginning in 1858. By the time this image (below) appeared in The Engineer in 1887, there were nearly thirty years of improvements to the electric light house–and the cross section of the lamp at the Isle of May from this issue proves to be a particularly beautiful example of art-in-engineering. The first lighthouse on this remote piece of land off the coast of Scotland appeared about 200 years earlier–a coal-fired light. This one, built beginning in 1885, would be extraordinarily powerful, achieving as much as 6-million candlepower.

And the full image, occupying the top third of the page:

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Electro-LUXurious — Technology, History of
Isolating ElectroPunk pre-Dadist Illuminated Signs, 1876-1914

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I am quite certain that entering into a category of ElectoPunk Found Art was the furthest/furtherest thing from the minds of these inventors, mainly because these words didn’t yet exist, and also because these inventors worked on practicable application of the relatively new employment of electricity for advertising. Still, they were serious efforts in pursuing the sale of soap and cigars and “pure food” and other sundries large and small. But removing them fro their intentions clearly makes these designs into art, some of which is just drop-down gorgeous.

Source: Google patents:

http://www.google.com/patents/US936226?dq=illuminated+signs

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Electro-LUXurious — Technology, History of
“Damaged Glob” and ElectroLux Found Word Art, 1883-1920

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Not much to say on these images–they’re just terribly neat. There seems to be a sensible amount of proto-Dadist material here, extolling distant observation, attracting and repelling the reader with its distracting possibilities, all ending with an upside-down “Earl”. At the very least, these images are “pretty”.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Electro-LUXurious — Technology, History of
Robot Roundup: Edenless Eve (1927) & the Great Texas Robot (1936)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1909

[Image source: Popular Mechanics, September 1936, page 400.]

Robots, or mechanical beings, or mechanized forms of humanity or from the animal kingdom have been around in popular literature for many decades by the time this giant robot appeared in Texas in 1936¹. (The idea is old though the name “robot” didn’t appear until Karel Capek invented it for his book on the future called R.U.R in 1920. Actually the human-like forms created by Capek in this early scifi work were biotech, and not fully mechanized.) The form of the robot stretches back hundreds of years, in a way–if not the exactly the idea of a robot, but at least with the appearance of one.

Such is the case with Albrecht Durer’s (1471-1528) revolutionary drawing of a geometrical man, compartmentalizing the bodyd into distinct chunks–these and other woodcuts appeared in his Symmetria partium…humanorum corporum and must have been an amazing, startling site for the new reader to such things in 1537.To me this looks like visionary thinking in trying to understand the motions of living beings with no actual way of capturing the image in motion.

[This and many other images from the fabulous Bibliodyssey website, here.]

All of which are retro-reminiscent of early robots, like this from The Fantast in 1939:

[Image source: the wonderful Cybernetic Zoo website, with loads of images and timelines, here.]

Seven years late in Nuremberg Erhard Schoen published Unnderweissung der proportzion unnd stellung der possen, liegent und stehent…, which followed Durer showing that the human form was reducible to connected but discrete Euclidean solids:

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Anticipation, History of — Electro-LUXurious — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Technology, History of
History of Dropping Things: Electro-Punk Machine for Waking/Smothering People

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Here’s an ambitious alarm clock that I stumbled across–something designed so as to not be ignored, something for the people who regularly sleep through simple alarm clocks. This device, patented by Samuel S. Applegate in 1882, woke the sleeping client by dropping that cage-resembling apparatus on the sleeper’s head. Evidently the ends of the suspension were soft, but hard enough to cause the sleeper to get straight-away back into the waking world. There’s probably nothing quite so like being slapped awake every morning.

The apparatus is seen better here–it is an unusual contrivance:

Such a pretty picture of the sleeper, though I must admit the perspective would’ve been a bit of a challenge especially to a challenged artist.

Okay, this one is walking people using water dropped on the sleeper’s neck:

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Cross-Sections — Electro-LUXurious — Patents
Electro-LUXurious 14: The Happy Electric Chair, 1890

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This is the 14th installment of a new series United States Patent Reports on electrical quackery and unsubstantiated bric–a-brac from the newly-electric world of the period of 1870-1900.

The history of the electric chair is odd, and ironic. The “electric chair” that we think of first when we hear the phrase is actually the “electrocution chair”, and it comes into being after the introduction of the medicinal electric chair, which was designed as a palliative, electrical ointment of sorts for people with virtually any form of physical complaint. Thomas Edison introduced the notion of the lethal use of punitive electricity in a brilliant if not diabolical ploy, suggesting in 1888 that Hew York State pursue the new procedure of executing its condemned via the use of an electrified recliner, using the Westinghouse AC system–and thereby forcing the association of his competitor Westinghouse’s electricity with electrocution in the mind of the general public. (I can only imagine being a Westinghouse exec and waking up to that bit of Edisonian showmanship; there’s an earlier post on this blog here that discusses the electric chair in more detail.)

These chairs below are good examples of the earlier quack/medicinal sparking loungerettes, even if they are dated a little later (1890).

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Electro-LUXurious — Technology, History of
Electro-LUXurious 12: Electrical Casket Vacuums

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This is the 12th installment of a new series United States Patent Reports on electrical quackery and unsubstantiated bric–a-brac from the newly-electric world of the period of 1870-1900.

This extraordinary device was an experiment in the further purification of the American way of death. The casket was fitted with an electrical heating element which–after viewing of The Departed was completed–would be activated to heat a soft metal, which would seal the casket. After this, the casket would be pumped to “form a vacuum” so that there would be no further deterioration of the deceased. There seem to have been at least a dozen different designs for these caskets from 1880 to 1950 or so, each building on some hope and prayer for the benefits of the dead not deteriorating, for whatever that was worth.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Electro-LUXurious — Technology, History of
Electro-LUXurious 13: Electrical Baths, 1877-1890

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This is the 12th installment of a new series United States Patent Reports on electrical quackery and unsubstantiated bric–a-brac from the newly-electric world of the period of 1870-1900.

Let’s state as a given that some things are real, and some things aren’t. There is a very broad history of things believed to be real but weren’t, or aren’t–I’m not sure what the percentage of those things would be in the overall Scheme of Things, whether the things-that-aren’t outnumber the things-that-are, or not. It does seem ready for a Dr. Seussian treatment, though.

Thomas Edison (in)famously fooled a reporter into thinking that he was creating a phone to the dead, an unintentional hoax that he allowed to fester for as long as he (Edison) lived; H.L. Mencken wrote a fictitious story about the history of bathtubs, a humorous piece, really, that turned out to be a satire on the way things are perceived and published, as the story took on a life of its own as factual, reported as true to this day even though Mencken stated immediately afterwards that it was a joke.

And then there are the real things that aren’t–not really–and look (and sound) that way. Such is the case with these fabulous electric baths, below. As is what seems to be the custom with patent reports (from this period, anyway), the inventor needed to thoroughly explain how the invention was made to function, while not actually addressing what that function was. This was lucky for the inventor and manufacturer, though not necessarily so for the consumer. Had these electrical quack devices worked, the introduction of electric hair, electrically-induced mega-bowels, sharp eyes, pretty teeth, accelerated masculinity, relaxed femininity, spine straighteners, beard growers, inner-secret-strength enhancers, and so on, would’ve produced a nation of ________ brought about the miracle of electricity.

In this vein, here are a few examples of electric baths, including one with one of the scariest drawings of a person I’ve ever seen in a patent report:

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Electro-LUXurious 11: Medical Electrifying-Liquid Injector, 1862

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This is the fourth in a new series of posts on interesting, early applications of electricity, most of which are taken from the archives of the U.S. Patent Office.

I’m not sure exactly what Mr. Paige was trying to do with this electrical implement of his–he writes:

which to my mind means that he is passing a “medicine” over or into some part of the body and while doing so either passes a charge through the liquid or provides a small series of shocks to the affected area so that it hurries the treatment along a little faster, or with more efficacy, or something. Whether this is a topical application, or a delivery to an open wound, or to an incision is not altogether clear to me. As is generally the case with these things, the inventor is given the luxury in the patent report of not having to say what the thing they have invented actually “does” after describing how it is that the machine will “do” it.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Electro-LUXurious — Medicine, History of — Technology, History of