Category: History of Goodbye

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.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Atomic and Nuclear weapons — Future, History of the — History of Goodbye — History of the Future — Technology, History of
FearNaughtia Coffins: Life Detectors, Escape Ladders, Breathin’ Pipes and Premature Burial

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1526

I’ve written here before on the wonderful book by Jan Bondeson, Buried Alive, the Terrifying History of our Most Primal Fear ¹(Norton, 2001) and on the difficulties of determining death in the 19th century, and the various ways that people sought to deal with and sidestep the possibilities of premature burial. In continuing those posts I’d like to add the following drawings from hopeful reports of the U.S. Patent Office, some of which really didn’t make that much applicable sense, but, well, you can patent just about anything if it hasn’t already been patented.

These coffins were constructed to allow their occupants to ring or telephone or telegraph or signal with smoke or light and so on should the dead respond to their lost life while buried. As I point ou tin the earlier (linked) post, determining death was a difficult task in the 19th century, so there wsa a legitimate fear-of-being-buried-alive concern. OF course, the best way yo determine death would be to allow the supposed-dead to lay out for three days at the end of which the body became a corpse and putrefy–the decay part was the true determiner of death. WHy people had to bury the dead into a coffin and be placed underground faster than the three days is a mystery, particularly if there were so many people who lived in fear of waking up in an underground coffin.

And so to the solutions, the first of which was brought to the world by Franz Vester of beautiful Newark, New Jersey. Well, Newark was probably beautiful when this patent was granted in 1868, and maybe this idea seemed so, too. Here’s what would happen if a dead body awoke in Vester’s safety coffin: their hands were attached to a rope that would be connected to a top-side bell, and the not-deceased would tug on it for all they were worth. After that, a sliding door above the face would be moved, and the coffin’s occupant was then supposed to pull themselves up to a short laddered tunnel that was connecting the living world from the sleep-of-worms-world. Were there problems? Yes, of course, but so far as it has been recorded no person ever saved themselves suing this coffin, in spite of Vester’s very strenuous exercises to promote his invention.

[Image source: American Artifacts, via VanVleck]

A few years later from just downthe road in Hoboken, Theodore Schroeder and Hermann Wuest were granted a patent for another rope-activated sounding device. The 1871 patent revealed what was pretty much a common thread to come–rope, hands, bell. Theoretically, if the dead awoke they would tear away at the bell until the prefect or whomever arrived to dig them out. The pair from Hoboken added a few tweaks here and there–one that allowed a release of fresh air into the coffin, and another which used an electromagnetic deice to replace the hand engine. I’m not sure how long someone can last in a coffin underground, but it can’t be very long at all. Why someone would think that adding an air vent to a coffin where the dead have been underground for a few days already doesn’t seem to make much sense, except to the coffin manufacturers.

The next example comes from the beautifully-named Albert Fearnaught, who although not from mid-Jersey patented a device again using a rope around the wrist of the dead, this time though the rope was attached to a spring-loaded device that would release a flag when activated from below.

This next (1885) patent has a slight variant on the rope-hand solution: the string-finger. Well, there was also some electromagnetic stuff involved, but basically the string on the finger of a moving not-dead-corpse would activate an electric bell and yadda yadda yadda people would come to help and release. The added extra here, the clear-coat undercoating, is a device that would allow the folks topside to peer down and see the face of the interred, and whether or not it was animated, I guess.

Hubert Deveau evidently had grown tired of all of these hand/finger-operated back- from-the-dead resurrection devices, and constructed (in his patent of 1894) a relatively simple groundskeeper-alerting-breathing-device combo–a pipe that could be moved up by the head of the person int he coffin which would in turn activate a spring-something that would keep the pipe poking-up above the ground. It would deliver fresh air to the buried, and would evidently be a warning sign to the cemetery man that something was afoot, underfoot.

Funny thing her is that most of the systems I looked at for this post involved a single device to release the prematurely-buried–it seems to me that there should have been at least one back-up system in case the main apparatus failed. I mean, if you’re going to become intensely psychotic, why would you then depend on one thing to get you out of your buried coffin? And that one thing is, basically, a rope. What if the thing failed? I’m just saying that I expected to see a little more comfort juice applied to these solutions than I saw.

And why current radio talk show fearmongers like Glenn Beck isn’t all over these things, I don’t know–they Fearnaughts for just about everything else…

Notes:

1. A fine article on patent remedies for premature burial can be found here: “Signals from the Grave, Early Patents for Detecting Life in Buried Persons”, by Richard Van Vleck, in American Artifacts, issue 45, July 1999.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — History of Goodbye — Patents — Technology, History of
Incontestable Oddness: Inflatable Puffy Shirts for the Dead & Coffins with Retractable Legs

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Some things that seem perfectly odd seem to take on another life, an extra life, when you put moveable things on it. For example, coffins that have anything “retractable” seems a little much. As corpse receptacles, coffins as a box seem, I guess, an odd thing–scooping out a body’s innards and replacing them with packing, toxic preservative, gums, paint, glue, plastic, rubber, wire, pins, needles and such seem to be a little on the extreme side, especially when you are going to put that body into a hole in the ground and cover it with dirt. What better thing than to enclose the corpse in a container so that the horrible idea will be further kept from deterioration? Then there’s the container for the coffin, and the slumber vault cement liner, and so on.

This weirdness turns professional (to paraphrase the Good Doctor) when movable/retractable bits are added to the coffin. In a long “is this really necessary?” list, one of the last/first would concern retractable legs on a coffin, or perhaps the retractable flower vases, or the inflatable puffy shirt. There’s a strange sociological history going on in the thousands of death/corpse/funeral-related reports from the U.S. Patent Office, which will make it much easier for the anthropologists of the future to understand our present concerns with death, or life.

[Most of the following patent reports are entirely understandable by their titles. The first in the list though needs a little explanatory help–this is a garment was made with numerous openings to accommodate different forms of corpse body shapers, including inflatable balloons, putty, clay and other material that would help the dead body look a little more not-dead.]

[And then of course the explanation of the thing, which has a distinct federal-ese flavoring.]

[I like this one because of the name association with the Norden bomb sight, a once-top secret improvement in delivering bombs dropped from planes, and which helped put many people into a coffin, if only figuratively.] />/>/>

/>/>

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — History of Goodbye — Patents
A Monumentally Questionable Idea: Screw Coffins

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Part of the History of Goodbye series.

“May I touch it?”

“Please don’t, it will leave a mark”– on corpses, from Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One.

In the vast history of humans and their disposing of the dead, of the great rituals and spectacular belief systems pertaining to the body and the non-corporeal bits and flavorings within, there is probably not much at all dealing with the creation of screw coffins with duckies on top.

Such is the very recent idea of this painful looking piece of business: slide the body in, stand the screw coffin upright, and then by motive force either human or mechanical screw the thing into the Ea rth. This is all done for the theoretical modesty of economical land usage. And I guess this would make sense, even more so, than putting a corpse in a very expensive box, a corpse that has been treated so that it will decay very slowly over long periods of time, stuck in a box that is made to further prevent decay, and then place the whole thing (horizontally) into the ground, where no one will ever see it again. It seems like such a great effort to undertake to simply hide a body under a thousand pounds of dirt, when the corpse might as well not even be there. SO I guess if it makes sense to observe this practice, you might as well take up less ground.

The logistics might be a problem–after all, you’ll need a casket for the coffin to transport the thing from the church or wherever to The Place of Last Repose, as I don’t very well imagine the look of the torpedo screw in the confines of some holy relic or draped-up maudlin-eseum. I mean, the thing would look repulsive.

And the little bits that go on top really don’t help it, either:

I’m not sure why these coffins are placed in a swamp, or why one of the statuettes is a fish.

The whole “placement” business seems rather indelicate–I can’t imagine anyone’s elderly Auntie standing around to watch The Beloved twisted underground by a John Deere:

This is actually one of a number of different contempo-coffins designed to both save space and disgust. Here’s the Vampire Stake coffin:

And the bullet coffin:

And the pleasure-tipped Probe coffin:

And of course the artificial flower tapered urn coffin:

As I said, perhaps when it comes to burying people, looking at the practice under a macroscope, it is all the same.

It does, however, seem as though it is dramatic evermore with each turn of the screw. It also looks pretty difficult to do.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — History of Goodbye
Strange Things in the Sky Department: When Worlds Collide (1933+1951)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Part of our Strange Things in the Sky Department

When Worlds Collide wasn’t so much about another world colliding with the Earth–it was another star, a “rogue star”, that enters the solar system and heads directly towards the Earth. Luckily for a selected few, a billionaire astronomer sees the thing coming and decides to construct a spaceship to populate a friendly “planet” near Alpha Centauri. Oh well, its 1933, and perhaps anything was possible–after all, the Empire State Building (which is depicted in so many of these movie posters in a not-good way) was just finished in 1931, after two years of construction (!).

So the following are movie posters for the 1951 film version of the 1933 book–except for the first image, which is from the book.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Absurdist, Unintentional — History of Goodbye — History of the Future — Strange Things in the Sky
Death Comes for the Book(printer & seller), 1499

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This is intended to be a short mini-post on the end of printing, and the end of bookselling, such as we know it, or knew it–this image comes from 1499 (Le Grand Danse Macabre, Lyon), and tells us that death to these occupations is nothing new. Of course when we speak of the death of the book nowadays we’re discussing something different–the death of the printed format. But here in this print, which is also the first depiction of a mechanized book press, we see ironically that Death has come to claim its operators, or at least two of them. The inkman in the background, the yelling third of a departing party of two, is spared for the time being. Just as the reader is for the first time seeing this machine, they are also seeing Death in its in grim glory snatching away the machine’s main operators.

The image and the functions of the people working the press are well described in the excellent history of all things books at the Bookn3rd website, here.

Here’s Death coming for the bookseller–at least the man was reading at the time of the departure. This is also a very early depiction of a book store, which again as the first visual information on such a place to the reader is wrapped around the visitation of the Great Inevitable.

The inkman, in thr background, screaming/shocked.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Art History — History of Goodbye — History of the Future
History of Normalcy Series: Warehousing Epileptic “Defectives”, 1912

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1450

This series is meant to illustrate the very transitory, shadowy and basically non-existent nature of “normal”.

“It is thus with regard to the disease called Sacred: it appears to me to be nowise more divine nor more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause like other affections. . .”–Hippocrates on epilepsy and recognizing it as just another brain disorder devoid of mysticism, about 2400 years ago.

One stop in the history of normalcy is the perception of brain disorders, which is a long and complex history–very long in the case of epilepsy, its epidemiology stretching back thousands of years before Hippocrates. It particular normalcy for the vast majority of that time was that people who exhibited the results of the disorder were cursed, or touched by the gods as holders of some possible divine inspiration, or touched by the gods as accursed and punished people, or bewitched (I wonder about the number of epileptics put to the flame during the Witch Hunt crazes), and so on. The first pharmaceutical treatments for the disorder really didn’t come about until Emil Fischer and Bayer introduced phenobarbitol in 1902/04, which was able to calm the seizures of some people with epilepsy. Until that point, most treatments were generally topical, plus the quack ingestives and various sorts of incantations, spells and prayers.

In Dr. William T. Shanahan’s Colonies for Epiletpics, (the original available for purchase through our blog bookstore) written in 1912, the treatment of epileptics was seculsion, warehousing them in state asylums in the countryside. Shananhan felt that the epileptic needed “its” own environment, “apart from the the defectives”–and by that he meant apart from the wide classification of people who did not fit the scheme of 1912 normalcy, like “morons, imbeciles, the insane, the sexual addict, the recurring syphlitic [and] the criminally insane…”. Actually this as a good move in some cases–apart from the vocabulary–as epileptics were stored away in almshouses and prisons along with the criminal element and the hopelessly insane, and at least removed the epileptic from a different sort of horror and disgrace.

Dr. Shanahan’s aim was to remove the epileptic from society because they “couldn’t adjust to a life in the ordered community” and that holding a job for them was “impossible”–that plus what he saw as the need to protect society from the epileptic’s “progressive mental deterioration”. He felt that “the great majority should be committed[to the epileptic colonies] as are the insane”, and also to remove them to these places “from a young age”, to an “institution for defectives”, there separated according to “sex and mental grade”.

Overall, though, it was Shanahan’s other aim to provide as “normal” a life for epileptics as could be arrived at, and outside of his trying to save society from them–at a time when the eugenics people were out castrating epileptics–, he was arguing that this method was the best of all possible worlds for people with this disorder. He does however seem to be totally ignorant of any medical approach to dealing with epilepsy.

By the way, there’s a very curious imprint on the back cover of this pamphlet showing who printed it and where. I cannot recll ever having seen such a small thign, placed so centrally, in such an obvious place. Its obvious and present, yet tiny. Here it is, before magnification:

And here is what the slug says:

Its just a very curious thing.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Absurdist, Unintentional — History of Goodbye — Medicine, History of — Social History
An Antiquarian Print Rarity: Depicting the Destruction of the Earth

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1439

There appeared earlier in this blog a bit on an engraving depicting an exploding Earth, one of a series of twelve images, eleven of which were unavailable at that time–not so anymore. So an update to this post is happily made, starting with the exploding part (below), a nasty millennial vision steeped in a volcanological/geological/meteorological 18th-century primordial stew, the Earth in a sea of fire and blasted volcanoes, lightning striking from above:

[All image sources: Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, Weimar.]

Hades, Heaven, Meru, Valhalla, Elysium, Olympus–the places at the end of the terrestrial road, the great emancipation. In some theological doctrines these places are reached collectively after the great conflict at the end of time; the end of days in the Old Testament, when the earth is devoured by holy vengeful wrath and reconstituted for godly comings –and-goings.

This engraving is one of twelve found in a fine little book, the brainchild of clergyman/semi-scientist Jodocus Frisch (1714-1787), who delivered to the (un-) waiting world his vision of how the earth and heaven will come to an end, there at the end of days. Die Welt im Feuer, Oder das Wahre Vergehen und Ende der Welt, Durch den letzten Sünd-Brand (printed in Sorau by Gottlob Heboldm in 1746) is one of very few works that depict (in illustration) the destruction of the Earth, and even though Frisch illuminates biblically-based theory, the idea of the earth exploding into bits in primordial fire and so on was extraordinary. The images were done in four colors representing the four elements: yellow, brown, green and white represented (respectively) fire, earth, water and air. In this image, we see the fire-centric earth encircled by a sphere of water, which is surrounded by a sphere of fire, which in turn is surrounded by a sphere of air, with much bad stuff happening.

Not having the book in hand I’m relying on the description of the Dutch bookseller Asher & Company, an old-line bookseller of very fine antiquarian works, which wrote the following descriptions of the other images in the book (and which appears for sale right now at their site):

“The second and third engravings show how the sphere of water disappeared after the torrential rains of the deluge, leaving the earth directly exposed to the sun. In the fourth and fifth engravings the earth is consumed by fire from within and without, demonstrating in what way the biblical prophecies about the destruction of heaven and earth may come to pass. Plates 6 and 7 depict the new heaven and earth that look entirely similar to plates 1 and 2, the first heaven and earth. Plates 8 and 9 show heaven and earth in their present state with precise specifications of what the biblical vocabulary names “heaven.” Plate 10 shows how the sphere of water breaks the rays of the sun in such a way that they shine on all parts of our planet in equal manner, wherefore all regions have a temperate climate. However without the tempering function of the sphere of water, the air focuses the rays of the sun in the equatorial zone.”

The water of the great deluge now gone, revealing the land masses, plate 2:

And so again, in plate 3:

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Art History — Future, History of the — History of Goodbye — History of the Future — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking
The Weight of War–Bombing and Shelling During World War I and a Lesson in Orders of Magnitude

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1389

This indelible image was made by an anonymous photographer for the Central News Service of New York City in 1918. The Central News Service was a photographic supply house that would send requested photos to newspapers throughout the United States for publication as illustrations for a story. They would’ve been sent rolled in a tube with a description of the image and with the stern warning to “Watch Your Credit Line”, making sure that once the newspaper had paid for the use of the photo that it also told its readers the source of the (agency) photographic.

The image is insatiable–it demands that you look at it and look at it long and hard, as it tries to give some sort of idea of the tremendous number of shells that were shot from canons by the just British against the Germans during the First World War.. There were something like one million tons of these fired against Germany; this picture represents about .001% ( of that total). We see approximately 800 shells at two hundred pounds apiece, surrounded by a group of about 150 soldiers.

I looked very closely at this photograph.
Of this single line of soldiers along the perimeter of the bomb cache, of the 150 of them, there are, it looks like, only five of them who have placed their hands on one of the bombs, and four of them are touching the fuse with just their middle finger. It is an odd picture of restraint, these soldiers paying the weapons of mass destruction the respect of room.

I think that this is an extraordinary photograph of the testament of understatement and small, small percentages–even with this photo being so enormously graphic it still gives you absolutely no idea of how much explosive material was hurled back and forth, even knowing in your mind’s eye that this image represents something like FOUR ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less than the total tonnage of bombs used. By the British.

This difference in orders of magnitude is roughly equivalent to the difference in size between an ant and a human being, or between an amoeba and an ant, or between a human and one of the pyramids, or between the earth and the sun. Basically, the shells in this photo meant nothing whatsoever to the total of shells used during the war.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

History of Goodbye — History of Holes — Militaria — Perception — World War I
A Romance of Swivel Chairs, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1376

The Borden Company–at one time the largest producer of dairy products in the U.S.– published the little pamphlet (Modernization Handbook) from which these pictures below are taken. Published in 1945, this slim work was meant to entice owners of luncheonettes and pharmacy/soda shops to upgrade their businesses, so that they could sell more product, so that they could buy more supplies from Borden. Borden wasn’t offering financing, just supply-side friendly advice to the folks selling their goods.

A large amount of this “modernization” had to do with swivel chairs/stools, chairs around a long lunch counter that stood to serve the maximum number of people in a small space in the minimum amount of time, all while giving the patron a maximum visual field to the other stuff for sale in the establishment.

I’ve got to say that there is a long simple elegance to this–sitting at a table within sight of the person cooking your meal, check-to-jowl with probably-unknown fellow diners, getting your food quickly and probably freshly and with minimum fuss. There is definitely pleasantness seeing your food prepared before you, a better type of fast food, far removed to a comparatively superior land when compared to dealing with simple human interfacers between customer and the Conglomerate Cook of the modern fast-food behemoths.

And if you were to turn around in your chair, this is what you would see:

Of course this was all about sales for Borden, and that’s fine, especially when the end result of the money-making idea produces the ultra-sweet highly anticipated sound of your plate sliding arorss the linoleum countertop. Don’t forget your napkin.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

History of Goodbye — Industrial & Technological art

Category: History of Goodbye

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1389