Category: History of Holes

Skeptical Inquirer, 1584–Magic and Superstition Revealed, Displayed, Explained and Killed

Reginald Scot, a wealthy and landed Brit from a good family of the 16th century,
wrote a lovely proto-skeptical book revealing the so-called mysteries of people 
practicing witchcraft. Actually, there were all sorts of performance tricks and 
sleight-of-hand revealed in the book—cards, coins, spiritualism, juggling balls 
and such, as well as magic—and as such, in addition to the witchcraft part,
 was the first book in English to exhibit practical conjuring tricks, with all of their
intricacies displayed. 

In short, Scot explained all sorts and manners of miracles, a 16th century 
James Randi.

 
Scot was an enlightened humanist and a judicious man. His interest in 
witchcraft ran contrary to the general contemporary belief that witches and 
diabolical possession and so on, was real—he chose to explain the end results 
of witchcraft via rational means, exposing the tricks of the trade. He also 
believed and tried to show that those accused of witchcraft were either engaged
 in legerdemain or were mentally ill—but they were certainly not witches, as 
witches did not exist. 

I’ve reproduced seven of Scot’s explanations for miraculous tricks in part 
(A) below; part (B) contains just a couple of his card trick revelations. The 
whole book can be seen here 

(A) Demonstrations of Physical impossibilities all of which fake 
a great hurt.

How to: (1) cut off your head and make yourself able to speak; (2) eat a knife
and “fetch it out of any other place”; (3) stab yourself in the head with a knife
 without hurt; (4) put a piece of lead in your eye and take it out; (5) to cut your 
nose in half; (6) to put a ring through your eye; (7) stab and strangulate your
 bowels with a knife.

(1) To cut off ones head, and to laie it in a platter,which the jugglers call the
decollation of Johii Baptist, 

TO shew a most notable execution by this art, you must cause a boord, a cloth, 
and a platter to be purposelie made, and in each of them holes fit for a boies 
necke. The boord must be made of two planks, the longer and broader the
 better : there must be left within halfe a yard of the end of each planke halfe a
 hole ; so as both planks being thrust togither, there may remaine two holes, 
like to the holes in a paire of stocks : there must be made likewise a hole in 
the table- cloth or carpet. A platter also must be set directlie over or upon
 one of them, having a hole in the midle thereof, of the like quantitie, and also 
a peece cut out of the same, so big as his necke, through which his head may 
be conveied into the middest of the platter : and then sitting or kneeling under 
the boord, let the head onlie remaine upon the boord in the same.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — History of Holes

Graphic Display of Quantitative Data: German Military Flatline in Persepctive, 1934

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 955

This terrific 1933 pictorial display of quantitative data1
showing the comparative military capacities of eleven countries—it will become progressively
and aggressively more wrong in each passing year to the start of WWII. In 1933 the military giant was, basically, France—the same country that would be quickly
and completely overrun just seven years later by the country at the bottom of
this display with the micro graphs, Germany.

The German military forces underwent staggering change after
the end of WWI. The Imperial Forces were
completely done at the end of the war, limited to 100,000 men, left with no air
force and no tanks. There were wide
changes during the Weimar
Republic, the army seeing
three iterations (not to mention the hundreds of Freikorps that were
established with some of the disbanded remnant of the standing army) that
ultimate resulted in the formation of the Reichswehr (in 1921) and which in
turn would evolve into the Wehrmacht in 1935.

Germany
barely registers, barely forms bumps in the flatlines of measurements in
1934. By 1939, six years after the
election of Hitler, and fanned by xenophobic revenge and greedily speedy full-throttled
hate, Nazi Germany rushed at record
speeds towards the rape of the future. The German Wehrmacht stood at 4.7 men.in 1939
(6.6 million in 1940; 8.1 in 1941; 9.5 in 1942; 11.2 in 1943, 12 in 1944, and 9
in 1945), while the Luftwaffe was at 400,000 (growing to 1.7 million by 1943) and had enormous growths in quantity and quality
of armaments. It was all astonishing, and almost all gone again in another six years.

This is an exclusive graphic of German nothingness, an accurate graphic in 1934 and again in 1945, but in the middle, it was totally incorrect. Twelve years from nothing to nothing, with the disgust of Hell to pay in between.

It is simply extraordinary to see the disparities of the
Nazis displayed so

Notes:

1. Printed in Die Illustriete Zeitung, 1934.

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History of Holes — Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria
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
History of Holes 12: Caves in mid-Renaissance Art

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 909

“When [the soul] is firmly fixed on the domain where
truth and reality shine resplendent it apprehends and knows them and appears to
possess reason, but when it inclines to that region which is mingled with
darkness, the world of becoming and
passing away, it opines only and its edge is blunted, and it shifts its
opinions hither and thither, and again seems as if it lacked reason.” Plato, The Republic book. VI, 508d

Plato
dipped deep into the myth/metaphor/parable/analogy/allegory of the cave,
contrasting it with the allegory of the sun, discussing the pursuit of
knowledge real and not-so.

I
like the idea of the half-displayed, semi-schematic, fade-away disposition of
the cave and how painters dealt with them and their hidden contents in early Renaissance
art.

Its
difficult to show a cave, a dark hole (occurring in all rock types and
topographic situations, btw) that really hadn’t been dealt with scientifically
yet—even if humans had been using them one way or another for thousands of
years.

I’ve
noticed these images time in and time out, and I’ve not really saved them, or
at least I haven’t segregated the odd etched or engraved images, though they
are all here somewhere, so I can add to this post from time to time. The image that I’ll use tonight comes from
Harvard’s Fogg Museum and is the work of the Master of
Osservanza (Sienese school, fl 1430-1450, manuscript illustrator). It is a popular image, “Christ in Limbo”,
though of the others working in this genre we see Christ generally at the
entrance to a tomb/cave-like place, standing just outside of the doorway (as with Mantegna, Durer, Pacher, Fra Angelico and others). The Master of Osservanza gives us an
exquisite cutaway view of the cave of limbo, showing both the outside and the
inside, which is an uncommon and beautiful perspective.

I should add that the tearingly odd “Saint
Anthony Abbot Tempted by a Heap of Gold”, also painted by the Master of Osservanza (ca. 1435) depicts the least-likely-of-all-saints-to-be-tempted-by-gold reacting in horror to, well, nothing. Nothing at all. We see him reacting to what used to be there, but which for some reason was removed, painted-over at some dim point in the dusty past, for reasons that I do not know. (And so the painting could easily move into my Blank and Empty Things series.) But the desert landscape is so sparse and the sky so surreal with bent clouds that it is easy today to overlook the gold entirely.

[I know there’s SO much more to this business with the caves–I just wanted to get this post started before it all went down the thought-hole.]

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Bad Places to Be Dept., #1:Fighting Underground in Sub-Trench Warfare, 1915

JF Ptak Science Books Post 922

“Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun.

Take it on the run, on the run, on the run.
Hear them calling you and me,
Every Son of Liberty.
Hurry right away, no delay, go today.
Make your Daddy glad to have had such a lad.
Tell your sweetheart not to pine,
To be proud her boy’s in line.”
–Opening of George M. Cohan’s “Over There”

It is difficult to think of soldiers fighting one another across hedgerows or trenches, hiding behind earth, creating a death-vacuum on the land in between–but worse yet would be fighting in these scenarios underground.

Finding this large double-page illustration in The Illustrated London News¹gave me a physical reaction like the one I get when thinking about the discarded Dalton Trumbo’s² anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun. The novel’s main character (Joe Bonham) is virtually encased in his own mind, having lost his arms, legs and face in an explosion on a WWI battlefield—the story is told from his bedridden perspective; dark, bandaged, alone, his mind and brain functioning, and with little means of communication or control over his body. .Among other obvious things, it makes me feel a peculiar stuffy coldness. [The two sets of four images following should be viewed as two-parts of one long image, the bottom part being on the right.]

And so too when I look at these soldiers tunneling under a dead battlefield, working their way slowly—a foot an hour—towards the enemy trenches, desperately trying to blow a hole in an immovable object resistant to infantry and artillery. The soldiers—sappers—were sent in to do a job that could no longer be accomplished above the ground.

This sort of warfare is extremely old, though the name is not, being about 150 years old. These soldiers were forward combat engineers, and had training across a number of different areas—they were responsible for many technical chores, like building (and blowing up) bridges, laying/clearing minefields, general demolition, defense construction, and, of course, fighting. It could be a tremendously difficult job, unimaginable.

The “sapp” part of “sapper” comes from the French “sappe”, which refers to the other main part of their job during WWI, which was digging advancing trenches, a zigzag construction of a long horizontal half-hole which allowed an infantry force to slowly advance towards an enemy’s entrenched position. Another part was to tunnel under the enemy’s lines, and then blow them to smithereeens so that a successful attack could be launched into the weakened position.

Here’s what I think about when I think about these men doing this job: that two teams, British and German, start to tunnel towards each other’s lines, and somehow, in the middle of the battlefield, somehow manage to dig directly towards one another, their tunnels literally colliding. Hand-to-hand combat through the opening connecting the two sapper tunnels, then gunfire. Alerted, the artillery from each side zero-in on what is suspected to be the opening end of the tunnels, pummel them, destroying the access. So now, both sets in what is now virtually one tunnel, are fighting in the dark. Even though the topside is only two feet away, any hole would open into the killing zone, making it impossible to escape that way. It would be a bad place to be.

Notes

1. The issue is 27 Feb 1915. The illustration is entitled “They Sent us in front with a Fuse an’ a Mine’, Sapping and Mining Under the Enemy’s Trenches”. The first half of the title is from Kipling’s “Sappers”: They send us in front with a fuse an’ a mine , To blow up the gates that are rushed by the Line…

2. Trumbo has an interesting history, to put it mildly. An old Communist, he once gave up his old associates to the FBI at the start of WWII–an act he later thought of as being stupid and wrong. It also had the opposite effect for him–he thought he was being patriotic, but the FBI was more interested in him than his information. He would get eaten up by McCarthyist operatives and denied HUAC any information on any of the famous “Hollywood Ten”. He got a year in jail and was blacklisted, booted out of LA. He came back–mostly under someone else’s name (see the link above for his screenwriting credits, which are substantial)–and acknowledged shortly before he died.

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Cross-Sections — History of Goodbye — History of Holes — Industrial & Technological art — Technology, History of
History of Dots (Circle Subcategory): Circles in Graphical Displays of Quantitative Data
JF Ptak Science Books Post 889

I like bumping circles as modes of graphically conveying quantitative data—it is more unusual than most ways of portraying statistics and belongs mostly in the 19^th century.

The first example is relatively early, in the first class of this sort of information display, published in Thomas Bradford’s (1802-1887) superior Comprehensive Atlas Geographical, Historical and Commercial in Boston in 1835. Circles are the entire métier of this chart, showing the sizes of the continents and oceans, concentric circles nested inside each other, then branching out into three columns of progressively smaller circles showing the comparative sizes of islands, seas and lakes, all (interestingly) presented on
the same scale. It is a virtual one-stop, single-image display showing the graphical sizes of 59 geographical entities in relation to one another, making the understanding of their comparative sizes a simple, understandable, matter.

Prettier but (initially) more difficult to use are the next two charts, the first showing the areas and populations of countries compared to that of the United States (in 1890), and the second showing the public debts of those same countries. At first the display looks a little confusing. But once you settle in and get your eyes accustomed to the manner of presentation, the charts are actually very easy to use and very useful.

Moving over from circles to dots is this population map by Frère de Montizon Armand Joseph, Carte philosophique figurant la population de la France, published in 1830 (as the first of its kind).

The ubiquitous pie-chart only made its first appearance in 1801, the work of he gifted and possibly polymathic William Playfair. He was an engineer (serving as apprentice to the inventor of the threshing machine, Andrew Meikle, and personal assistant to James Watt) and economist, and occasional mathematician, who also invented the line graph (1786), bar chart (1801)and circlegraph(1801). But for this and all of his other work, he died in poverty and not comfortable¹.

NOTES

1.Works by William Playfair include:
- 1786. The Commercial and Political Atlas: Representing, by Means of Stained Copper-Plate Charts, the Progress of the Commerce, Revenues, Expenditure and Debts of England during the Whole of the Eighteenth Century.
- 1801. Statistical Breviary; Shewing, on a Principle Entirely New, the Resources of Every State and Kingdom in Europe. London: Wallis.
- 1805. A Statistical Account of the United States of America by D. F. Donnant. London: J. Whiting. William Playfair, Trans.
- 1807. An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations: Designed To Shew How The Prosperity Of The British Empire May Be Prolonged.
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History of Dots — History of Holes — Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Statistics–Fossil, Found, Odd, Forgotten
The History of Holes, Part 8: Prison, Blackwell’s Island, East River, NYC

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 886

This image shows two different forms of holes, neither being good and one being decidedly worse than the other. It shows one of the multi-tiered decks of cells in the prison at Blackwell’s Island, a nicely designed place of hideous treatment, a thousand prisoners squeezed into a 600-foot long building on a very skinny island in the East River in New York City.

The island has a long history, ownership going back and forth a bit from Indians to the Dutch tio the English and to Mr. Blackwell, before being bought by the city of New York in the early 19^th century. The prison was built in 1832, an unhappy affair followed shortly thereafter by an even unhappier thing. Blackwell was the site of America’s first publicly-funded hospital for the insane, a large stone-and-brick structure completed in 1839. It was intended to be a showplace for the care of the mentally challenged. Dr. John McDonald, a consulting physician in the design of the Blackwell Island asylum, was more insightful and thoughtful than most of his colleagues. Even so, his reaches into the sensitive treatment of the mentally challenged, while advanced for its day, looks painful to the modern reader. “He suggested that patients be divided into four specific classes: the ‘noisy, destructive, and violent,’ ‘the idiots,’ ‘the convalescents,’ and an intermediate class for ‘those in the first stages of convalescence and such incurables (who) are harmless and not possessed of bad habits’ “

The ideals for the hospital dissipated with its funding, and the place almost immediately slipped into the template of the standard institutionalization–even less so, as the guards are orderlies were supplied by the neighboring prison, meaning that it was criminals who were policing the “patients” at the hospital in a situation that went from bad to worse.

The prison and the insane asylum, needless to say, were bad places to be. A famous expose was written by Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Jane Cochrane Seaman, 1864-1922) documenting the horrendous conditions at the hospital, written after her undercover infiltration of the place. Committed as a patient for ten days, she documented her experiences (in book form, following a series of articles that appeared in the New York World in 1887)) in Ten Days in a Mad-House¹, (published with “Miscellaneous Sketches: Trying to be a Servant,” and “Nellie Bly as a White Slave), causing an enormous scandal and resulting in systemic overhauls at the hospital.

Back to the holes: we can clearly see the holes in the massive cell doors; on the bottom tier, though, the cell doors a re solid, which would make the cell into the dreaded “hole”.

The hospital would receive its attentions over the decades, as would the prison, though the prison suffered longer under the weight of functional neglect, abuse, and inhuman demoralizations and abuse—and this deep into the 20^th century, so far so that John Garfield starred in a movie detailing the disgust of the place (“Blackwell’s Island”) in 1939. The Blackwell’s Island prison proved that a hole isn’t just a hole. (Also there is more than just a slight resemblance from the inside of the prison to its exterior–a reminder of what is to be found within.)

NOTES

1. The full report is found here. The conditions were spectacularly bad. Bly describes, for example, her first meeting with a physician (an “insane expert”), an examination in which she felt sure to be detected—her eyes, tongue and pulse were examined, and she was simply sent on her way to the island. After just ten days in the place, Bly felt sure that even if you weren’t crazy going in, the hospital would make you crazy in short order. One detail that really stuck to me: the non-violent women prisoners were all given white straw hats to wear when they went outside. The effect of the hats, Bly wrote, was to make the women anonymous—she couldn’t tell one person from another because of the headgear, further isolating already-isolated people. Bly was a fascinating person, a proto-feminist, socially-conscious newspaper reporter who married great wealth after she became famous. She’s up in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, buried like any other person, and evidently went into the ground without a headstone. A very modest marker was erected by the New York Pres Club in 1978 to stand over her grave.

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Architecture and Building — History of Holes