Category: Future, History of the

The Division of Technology: Different Forms of Social Media Debate, 1893

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I found this image flipping through an issue of the London Punch for 8 July 1893. It shows a group of people gang-listening to a phonograph, with Mr. Punch holding court. The phonograph was already into its third decade (invented by Mr. Edison in 1877 with the patent granted in 1878) and was becoming massively popular, with the prices for the machine and the wax cylinders that powered the interest dramatically falling so that it was within reach of the working middle class.

The image was used as a header illustration to the opening of the new volume for the second half of the year, and was an introduction to the table of contents for the 300-odd pages that followed, and its legend reads in part:

“The Penny Phonograph,” pursued Mr. Oracle Punch, “is now prodigiously patronised. For the popular penny you can hear an American band, a Chevalier coster ballad, the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade,’ a comic song by ‘Little Tich,’ or a speech by the Old Man eloquent. No; for the latter I believe they charge twopence. That is fame, my Pantagruelian Premier…”

You can sense that Mr. Punch is more than a little wincing with his faint praise. He does take exception to the lightness of the experience, as well as the cost. He contends in a way that we experience today that the printed media–his own magazine, a “Funograph”– is more complete and the real voice of wisdom:

“But in my Funograph—charge the unchangeable Threepence—you can hear the very voice of Wisdom and Wit, of Humanity and Humour, of Eloquence and Essential Truth, of Music and of Mirth!

And while Mr. Punch might seem to be talking about the phonograph, he is addressing his own Punch:

“Sweet lady,” responded the Oracle, with gentle gravity, “there is guidance here for all who will listen; heavenly Charity and diabolic Anarchy, eloquent Statesmanship and adventurous Enterprise, scared Capital and clamorous Labour, fogged Finance and self-assertive Femininity; for the motley and many-voiced Utopia-hunters who fancy they see imminent salvation in Imperial Pomp or Parochial Pump, in Constitutional Clubs or County Councils, in Home Rule, Primrose Leagues, or the Living Wage, in Democracy or in Dynamite, in High Art or Mahatmas, in Science or in Spooks. Take your places, Ladies and Gentlemen! Charity first, if you please, with Father Christmas to her right, leaving room for the little New Year on her left. Listen all, and learn by the various voices of that many-cylindered, marvellous Funographic Machine…

Advances in the technology of communication have always caused debate–the availability of the printed book was going to make obsolete storytellers and theater, the telegraph would end letter- and book-writing, the telephone would end the telegraph and letter writing and decreased the collective intelligence by shortening the time of thought in communication, the radio would end the telegraph and letter writing and the theater and perhaps books, the television would end radio and etc., vast increases in social media will end privacy and reflective time, and so on. The advances certainly did doom the form of communication that they trumped, mostly, though what they did to the actual communications part was change it, not end it. And although Punch wasn’t saying that the phonograph was going to do away with anything at all, he was saying that he felt it inferior. And for you to buy his magazine.

The last bit on the ruminations of the impact of social media on privacy and reflection is something that I do believe to be real, and this in spite of all that I know about the history of change in communications; but here I think the medium might have so much “message” that there might not be any at all, given the enormous amount of data units that can be delivered into our consciousness and the limited amount of time for perception (let alone understanding). And this is just the beginning, the most primitive stages of vast and pervasive communication.

And as I write this I wonder if I’m not sounding like a sniffy somebody writing about the impact of the telephone in 1880.

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Anticipation, History of — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Technology, History of
The Statue of Liberty as a Billboard, 1888

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1567

This image of the near-future Statue of Liberty (“Liberty Enlightening the World”) appeared in the German version of Puck magazine in 1888–since the statue was officially dedicated on 28 October 1886 it didn’t take the cartoonists and social satirists very long at all to get around to using Lady Liberty/Libertas as a backdrop for their message. And the message here was the creeping advertising age, which was just the shroud of an advancing consumerist society, because there wouldn’t be that many ads if there wasn’t so much material fighting for so many consumers. Advertising was beginning to creeping in everywhere–and here the cartoonist foresaw a near-future in which the Statue of Liberty was a pure advertising vehicle, and as it turns out, most of the stuff advertised there was junk.

Here’s another version in glorious black and white

Another intriguing image of the Statue of Liberty of the future appears below, and described in an earlier post on this blog, here. Although not being used for advertising, she has become just another part of the landscape, swallowed up by the advancing transportation age.

And although it looks as though Lady Liberty is being packed away as part of a mothball fleet of iconic Americana, this image shows her in France, being constructed (for deconstruction), in 1884.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Iconography
The Savage Distress of Women in Science (Fiction); Pulp Covers, 1930-1960

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1566

According to most of these big, spongy pulp magazines, women were made to be rescued, and rescued not only from Enormous Situations, but also from unnameable, unknowable Enormous Things. I guess they were slightly soft-porny, or at least the cover art was, attracting young readers by promises of an “easily read” with excitement and voluptuous women in need of saving. It was yet another turn on the fateful screwing of the tale of the damsel in distress, seen and heard countless times in art and story. Only in these sci fi mags the damsel showed a lot more skin–it is extraordinary how cleavage attracted so much alien danger/romps.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Women, History of
Albert Robida and the History of the Future

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1590

Albert Robida (1848-1926) saw pretty deeply into the future, his mind wrapped around the plausibilities of possibilities, and getting a lot of them quite right. He was enormously prolific, with some 60,000 designs to his credit as well as 200 illustrated books and many dozens of illustrated journals, many of them quite lovely and prescient, if somewhat upsetting to the common-reading mind of mid-late 19th Europe.

Robida¹ shared several decades of peak-creativity time with the stone-cold master of the as-yet defined science fiction realms in the person of Jules Verne (1828-1905), who certainly wrote deeper and longer than Robida, though without Robida’s creative artistic talents. But the 1870’s and 1880’s would have been prime space for both men, even though Verne’s² best years were behind him and he had entered a decidedly darker period by that point–that said, the men did share the same oxygens of Europe, separated by just hundreds of miles.

It might be said that Verne had somewhat loftier visions of the future than Robida; perhaps not., Robida does seems to have a great (and perhaps more) concern with the future of the more middle-class/vast mass of people, and again, perhaps not. One thing is for certain, to me at least–Robida does deserve much more attention than he presently receives, though perhaps that will come more in the future that he created.

“La sortie de l’Opéra en l’an 2000”. Original source: Bibliodyssey

“Un quartier embrouillé “, La Vie électrique, Paris, Librairie Illustrée, [1892].

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Future, History of the — History of the Future
Edison’s Anti-Gravity Underwear Kite Babies, 1879

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1562 [Part of a series on the History of the Future]

There was a time in the late 19th century when it was seen that Thomas Edison could do just about anything–so much so that the Brits in The London Punch gave him tongue-in-cheek credit for inventing (flying, so to speak), anti-gravity underwear.

The funny thing about this though is that the best thing that people could do with this new invention would be to go to a super-sized art gallery to look at paintings close to the ceiling.

This would no doubt have been distracting to the people without this delightful new underwear, who had to solemnly sit earthbound and try to enjoy their experience while people now not only walked by, but floated through their site lines as well. Perhaps they were wondering why these well-dressed flying people were doing so, indoors.

Of course you could have made baby kites as well, shoving the little buggers into their anti-grav onesies, tether them to your bike, and give them a ride through the not-brambly countryside. I would hope that the dog in the image below didn’t get distracted by anything whatsoever–but if that did happen, it would be easy to locate the dog. All you had to do was follow the flying baby.

Why did all of this have to be underwear? Why not, say, outer clothing? Or a carriage? Or ship? Or etc.?

Perhaps it was easy to make fun of an invention that seemed highly dubious but, somehow, still within the realm of possibility. After all, Edison was beginning a phenomenal run of creativity–by 1879, when these images appeared, Edison, who was just 32, had already invented the electric light bulb and the phonograph, not to mention dozens of patents for things like the automatic telegraph, the voice engine, the speaking telephone, and an electrical tangle of other useful and revolutionary things (not the least of which were certain essential improvements in the telephone that made the Bell instrument more commercially practicable on a mass scale). Edison was seen as being capable of virtually anything–later in life, he was the subject of an early science fiction work by Serviss called Edison’s Conquest of Mars, and much later on, in 1920, a bored joke of his on a naive reporter became international news when the rest of the world thought that he might have invented a telephone to the dead. But early on in his career, at the beginnings of the great heights of fame, he was seen as being capable of just about anything.

Certainly they, the editors, the representatives of the thinking society, felt the electric mode of change in the air. Punch greeted their readers to their almanac with this super-charged image:

And noted, several pages later in the almanac, that their modern conveniences might soon find themselves as quaint antiquarians, housed in a museum, being visited by Mr. Punch and his dog touring the place, transported by some sort of electromagentic sumpin’:

But for now, in 1879, the London Punch was content to spring on joke on Edison underwear.

Notes:

List of Edison’s patents, here.

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Anticipation, History of — Future, History of the — History of the Future

Invasion Routes to the U.S.,1940

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1532

This is a supplement to some earlier posts on this blog relating to the possibilities of the invasion of America: Mapping the Invasion of America, 1942 (which is the most-viewed post from this blog, with over 500k readers), The Invasion of America, 1935, and The Invasion of America, 1942, Part II to name a few examples.

In the 27 May 1940 issue of Life magazine appeared an article on Franklin Roosevelt’s call to American action in constructing an entirely new air force. For years the air corps arm of the American military lingered in a kind of low-numbers unresolved limbo–but by May of 1940, it became painfully obvious that something drastic must be done. By this point the European War was about eight months old, and the possibility of Nazi victory looked very real. After all, the Blitzkrieg had been very successfully employed in Poland, and in May was used in the invasions of Finland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. And France, of course. By late May, 1940, France was already pretty much done, the Parisian capital falling weeks later on 23 June, with the country capitulating ten days later. May also saw the collapse of the British and French armies along France’s northern coastline. (The rescue of the 350,000 troops on the beach and in the harbor of Dunkerque had not yet taken place (but would within the next few days). It was bad stuff.) In the light of the Nazi victories and the imminent fall of France, it was also time for people to start thinking about the invasion of England.

Roosevelt and his adviser knew that America was headed into conflict, and knew that the country needed to get onto a war-time production basis. One way to begin preparations was for FDR to call for the increased production of the newest and one of the most important aspects of modern warfare, the airplane. And not only an “increase” in production did the President call for, but a mountainous bump, an order of magnitude more in manufacturing of military planes. Earlier in 1938 the call for a 5,000-plane-a-year air force was shot down as being unrealistic–and perhaps so, even though the Nazis were just at the beginning of their outward thrust. So in May, 1940, Roosevelt stepped up and asked for 50,000 aircraft.

No doubt the war in Europe gave everyone great pause, or scared them silly. Two years before the number of 5,000 planes produced per year was seen as ridiculous–now the business of producing 50,000 a year seemed feasible–incredible, even, but the means of production were present, and so was the raw material and manpower. It was seen that of the 84 aircraft production plants then functioning only 23 were producing military planes, so there could be a modernization of existing plants as well as the construction of new aviation installations. The production totals for the year 1939-1940–1,247 aircraft, including 477 produced for the U.S. Army and Navy, 311 for Great Britain, and 459 for France–represented only a small percentage of what the existing factories could actually produce. (And it turned out of course to be just the case, as we can see from the production numbers in the “notes” section, below.)

There was also a certain amount of scare factor involved with waking up the American public to the needs for getting involved in the European conflict in the year-and-a-half before Pearl Harbor–that the Nazis wouldn’t stop in Great Britain, and that “invaders” could and would attack the United States. The need for increasing American war production was not only to supply the allied forces in Europe for stopping Hitler, but also would keep the Nazis away from the United States. (Summarizing the points discussed by the President and other government officials, the map of the invasion of America looked something like the global view we see above.) So if Roosevelt couldn’t stir the hearts and minds of the American public for keeping Europe aloft in American-built planes, then keeping the Nazis off Main Street might work.

What the map shows are the lines of attack for the un-named Nazi invaders–their aircraft making their way slowly across the Atlantic via Iceland-Greenland–Newfoundland, and across Europe -Africa-Cape Verde-Brazil-Paraguay-then across the Caribbean and right into Wilmington, North Carolina; and then of course all of the way across the Soviet Union to Alaska and then into Washington state. The plan was that these advanced forces would come in, establish an airfield, grow , and then move closer to the U.S., stopping to construct bases all along the way. The response, oddly enough, was for us to build “bombers” so that the airbases could be blown up. That would also extend the effective range of air coverage from the United States to deal with the very-slowly-approaching enemy. The circles on the map show the effective round-trip range of loaded American bombers and the territory that they could cover. In general the map, in its own way, portrayed the United States as approachable to foreign invasion. Some of this reasoning is a little inscrutable, but Washington was playing a game that needed to be won.

These interesting before and after pictures of a ramped-up aircraft production industry were to supply some proof that the job could be done, and that this factory could very well be a template that the dozens of others could follow:

[Aircraft production facility, “before”]

[Aircraft production facility, “after”]

Notes

Production numbers for U.S. aircraft manufacturing, 1940-1945:


Type of airplane	Total	1940¹	1941	1942	1943	1944	1945²
Grand total	295,959	3,611	18,466	46,907	84,853	96,270	45,852
Combat airplanes	200,443	1,771	8,395	24,669	53,183	74,564	37,861
Very heavy bombers	3,740	–	–	4	91	1,147	2,498
Heavy bombers	31,685	46	282	2,513	9,574	15,057	4,213
Medium bombers	21,461	52	762	4,040	7,256	6,732	2,619
Light bombers	39,986	453	2,617	5,954	11,848	12,376	6,738
Fighters	99,465	1,157	4,036	10,721	23,621	38,848	21,082
Reconnaissance	4,106	63	698	1,437	793	404	711
Support airplanes	95,516	1,840	10,071	22,238	31,670	21,706	7,991
Transports	23,900	164	525	1,887	6,913	9,925	4,486
Trainers	58,085	1,676	9,294	17,237	20,950	7,936	1,352

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Anticipation, History of — Aviation & flight — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas — Militaria — Technology, History of

H-Bomb Wipes out Brooklyn. And Chicago. And New York.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1527 Part of the Atomic and Nuclear Weapons series

[Source: Conelrad blog and also at the website]
I stumbled on this bombing of Brooklyn article at the excellent Conelrad website–it is an excellent addition to my slight collection of vintage depictions of American cities being nuked. As part of the necessary scare tactics in the pursuit of the arms end of MAD, the destructive power of these weapons were shown against a background that Americans could readily understand. Thinking of atomic and then nuclear holocaust in terms of multiple units of Hiroshimas and Nagasakis was one thing–showing the effects of these weapons on an American grid was something else.

This next graphic shows the difference in destructive capacity of an atomic bomb (small circle beneath an air-burst detonation) and a hydrogen bomb (the large circle showing area of total destruction, which in this case would be about 50 square miles) on the city of Chicago.

[Source: LIFE Magazine, 30 Jine, 1950]

The next image is much like the preceding, only showing a profile of Manhattan and the difference between the explosions of a Hiroshima bomb and a hydrogen bomb (of 20 megatons).

[Source: BioInformatics Lab, Yale http://bioinfo.mbb.yale.edu/~mbg/fun/both-bombs.gif]]

But don’t worry, even if the Chicago and Brooklyn and New York and so on were destroyed, the U.S. Navy would survive, which would be either great or horrible if you were a sailor:]

And as usual, the point is made with one weapon being detonated, rather than the x-number that would actually be deployed. Depicting, say, 10 weapons being used against these cities–while being a more accurate portrayal of what nuclear war might look like–might have looked like something beyond the usefulness of propaganda.

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons — Future, History of the — History of Goodbye — History of the Future — Technology, History of
Strange Things in the Sky Department: Floating Ships, Cities, Airports
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This is a continuation of a series of posts in the Strange Things in the Sky Department.

This image of St. Augustine’s City of God shows the Primum Mobile holding the walled city (Rome, or Romish) aloft, the artist distinguishing it from the earthly city:

Perspective drawing apparatus, from John Bates’ encyclopedic The Mysteryes of Nature and Art : Conteined in foure severall Tretises, the first of Water Workes, the Second of Fyer Workes, the third of Drawing, Colouring, Painting, and Engraving, The fourth of divers Experiments, as wel serviceable as delightful: partly collected, and partly of the Authors Peculiar Practice, and Invention, printed in London ” for Ralph Mab and are to be sold by Iohn Jackson and Francis Church at the Kings armes in Cheapside 1634″. [Source: the fabulous Bibliodyssey blogsite.] This was a book that Isaac Newton owned and worked from when he was a teenager, using its useful recipes and instructions to build a number of bits, prankish and practical. (This city isn’t actually floating, of course–it just looks that way.)

Here’s a semi-famous illustration that appeared earlier in this blog–perfect here to offset the older “floating cities”. This one depicts a floating or hovering or anti-gravity-something installation of a future Manhattan, existing peacefully above its former Earth-bound base, now overgrown with nature. The New Manhattan Air Island is many square miles of buildings, and reminds me of the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

I just don’t know the story behind this image, though perhaps it is…well, I don’t know. There’s a whole lot of things that it could be, but then there’s the Tall Ships on the top of mountains of ice and the air-breathing skaters in the foreground…I don’t know:

[Source: http://pulpcovers.com/tag/sciencewonderstories/]

And this in a sort-of opposite way to the above, a disembodied sitter in a very articulated space:

I’m not sure what to make of these buggers, though it is very creepy looking…,perhaps its the bad-blue sky that just sets everything off badly:
```
This image from yet another ubiquitous Gernsback publication and shows (another!)  floating airpad/port for whatever sort of hovering vehicle that approaches.  Interestingly there are a number of skydivers using unisuitwhich probably seems pretty attractive to skydivers today.  Also the roof decorations are unexpected!
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[Source: http://thatsmyskull.blogspot.com/2007/11/ocean-liners-in-sky.html]
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The Steampunk God and the non-Computer Internet, 1865

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1521

In the weeks following Lincoln’s assassination (14 April 1865) the editors of Punch, or the London Charivari printed this arresting image of an imagined near-future:

And what the future holds is this: the automatic hydraulic teapot (already “sugared and milked”), automatic boot and clothes brushing, auto bread-cutting, carving, cork drawing, sweeping, letter writing, reading…”all done by machinery”. “We shall cook by machinery; we shall have our mashed potatoes by machinery.”

There is no specification about how all of this was going to happen–I’d be very interested about the automatic “letter writing and reading” would be, particularly when we read in the next paragraph, that “Mr. Babbage’s Calculator is a mere mechanical infant to our gradually matured inventions”. The article continues: “From thinking of machinery we shall at last arrive at thinking by machinery, and Man himself shall be, as presented in this initial etching, a mere machine.”

We see in the image that there are all manner of automatons pleasing the seated (mechanical) man, though they are all powered by steam, or friction, or by magnets, all existing power sources and almost everything being doable at that point in time.

And the detail:

And this:

There is a suggestion of a “Finding Fault Machine” but this goes barely beyond its mention–except to say that it would destroy something and become our next “Infernal Engine”. I initially liked the sound of the title of this machine, though it quickly started to seem like a god machine to me–something that could and would have the ability to find faults in things, and then, I guess “correct” them in some sort of Steampunk God way. I’m not very educated in the world of speculative/science fiction to determine how early people began to imagine constructing their own supreme deity, though it seems to me that this must be considered an early effort. I do have large doubt that the Steampunk God is what these folks were talking about since it would most probably be a blasphemy, but there is certainly room to reach that conclusion.

The idea of a popular machine that was somehow associated with either Babbage’s (1791-1871) difference engine or analytical engine (which was a programmable machine that would function with punch cards) and automated or mechanical reading and writing is very intriguing. It is unsure whether the editor was crediting the future with a machine that would provide the imagination behind writing, or provide an instrument that would record thoughts and creativity directly to some medium as they occurred, or what have you. It is an interesting idea left very open-ended to the reader, which remains so even to the modern eye, because what happens with statements like this is that they get back-filled with whatever current technology exists. In 1865, the other innovations depicted for the future were mainly driven by steam, and perhaps this automated writer/reader would be too, something very primitive by our standards today, perhaps some sort of small steam engine that would help dip a quill into an ink pot….or perhaps it was simply something as exotic as a pen with endless ink. But I think if you look hard enough at the statement it is possible to see something like an internet.

And there were 19th-century something-like-an-internet things being imagined, if you can imagine the internet as an entity not created by a computer network, since the “computer” as we know it would not exist for these inventive folks (below) for another 50 or 75 years.

Edison’s was there, of course, imaging a communication device that would show live-action events in which two remote parties could see and talk to one another. A version of his Telephonoscope: appeared in Punch’s Almanack for 1879 and was aimed at the imagination and experience of only the classes of leisure and privilege:

There is also a device like this that appears in Albert Robida’s Le Vingtieme Siecle: la Vie Electrique (1890) , which is an odd but very nicely illustrated look into the future of 1955–most of which has come to pass.

Another sort of live-action and direct communication device was depicted in Camille Flammarion’s La Fin du Monde (1893):

I think though that the most interesting part of Punch’s view of the future must lie in the possible creation of the creator of the universe.

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A Backwards, Inside-Out, Oil + Iron Internet (1937)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I feel slightly queasy seeing this photograph, found in the August 1937 issue of Popular Science magazine–-it seems to me to be a backwards, inside-out analog cyberpunk (without the cyber) variety of the internet, a robotic device moving people around from data bit to data bit, an oil and iron process of automatic info retrieval, moving the user to the information rather than the other way around. The image does put me in mind of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, which renders info and other muck in a high-dystopian fashion with endless ducts and file cabinets, making things oppressively inaccessible in their accessibility.

And to some degree there’s a little Spongebob similarity in there too, though without the iron nd metal part, just Mr. Squarepants and his cardboard filing cabinets for all of this thoughts and memories, serviced by smaller units of himself whop presumably have their own filing systems in their heads. Filing cabinets, all the way down.

There is a more-refined image of what is basically the same idea, found here in the fantastic bio-art of Fritz Kahn (1888-1968), who published his Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as an Industrial Palace or thereabouts) in Stuttgart in 1926. Kahn is seen as a “modernist”, which I guess is true; to me he is far more than that–he’s “different”.

In Charlie Chaplin’s great 1937 Modern Times, there are no file cabinets and I don’t think that there’s any paper, just the results of vast mechanization:

And of course, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, made a little earlier, in 1927:

And finally, an image of the semi-reverse of the gigantic filing system: moving humans through mounds of paper not contained in file cabinets, stacked upon stacks of stacks. Once everything is said and done, none of this info-sausage-factory seems very pretty.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Industrial & Technological art — Information, Quantitative Display of