Category: History of the Future

The Future of Hope and Fear: Fortune-Telling Questions for Men and Women, 1540

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1456

In 1540 Francesco Marcolini (or Marcolino), a typographer born in Forlì, published in Venice Le sorti intitolate giardino d’i pensieri (“The oracle called garden of thoughts”). This book is among the earliest known documents of cartomancy (divination with cards), a card-playing fortune-telling and future-telling game and belief system. (I’ve written about other beautiful if not proud accomplishments in this area, other products of the 16th century, here.) I find the illustrations of the combinations of cards to be rather beautiful, a suggestion of an unknown alphabet or hieroglyphic for a civilization of hope or distress or both that hangs somewhere out there in the gauzy future, the characters capable of change and interpretation depending on the needs of the viewer. Therefore the story that is told can easily become the story that could be told, the characters permeable to whimsy and insight. It seems unlikely that there is a numeral system associated with this quicksand.

The tarot encyclopedia website provides an interesting insight to the times if not so much to the gearing of this wonder machine–this mainly in the form of the fifty questions to be asked of the players of this game/amusement/hopenet, including thirteen each to be answered solely by men and women.

Questions Asked of Men

It turns out that for the men, 8 of the 13 questions deal with his wife or mistress–4 about wives, 3 about mistresses, and 1 that can go either way. The remaining few questions then are left to cover the range of All Other Things

1.Will the destiny of the man will be good or bad? [Fato - Fate]
2.Is the lover loved by his mistress? [Fama / Fame]
3.Is it better to marry a beautiful woman or an ugly one? [Beneficio - Gain]
4.Will the desire of the man be fulfilled? [Tempo - Time]
5.In which will the man be more lucky? [Fortuna - Fortune]
6.Will the man have to suffer for his beloved? [Dolore - Pain]
7.Is the man appreciated by the other people? [Virtu' - Virtue]
8.How many wives will the man have? [Punizione - Punishment]
9.Will he that goes to war gain victory? [Vittoria - Victory]
10.Will a strange wife become humble? [Pertinacia - Obstinacy]
11.Is it good to change mistress? [Peccato - Sin]
12.Is it good to take a wife? [Matrimonio - Marriage]
13.Which is the best mistress: the widow, the married woman or the unmarried woman? [Timore - Fear]

Questions to be asked by women

The questions for the women actually seem a little more balanced, or at least don't 
deal with the  blossoming aspects of additional/multiple lovers, though the question of
whether her husband will be faithful does come up, as does the issue of whether it
is good or not to change lovers.  And the issue of how often she will be married.
And whether or not she will suffer for her lover--I'm not sure what this one means 
in the antiquarian sense, but there seems to be a follow-up on whether the bad 
husband will become good.  But overall these seem not so extraordinarily self-indulgent 
as do the questions for the men.

14.Is the woman appreciated by the man she adores? [Vanita' - Vanity]
15.Will the destiny of the woman will be good or bad? [Destino - Destiny]
16.Will the woman will give birth to a boy or a girl? [Natura - Nature]
17.In which will the woman be more lucky? [Honore - Honour]
18.How many husbands will the woman have? [Penitenza - Penitence]
19.Will the woman have children? [Sterilita' - Sterility]
20.Will the woman suffer for her lover? [Dipserazione - Desperation]
21.Will the desire of the woman be fulfilled? [Insidia - Danger]
22.Will the bad husband become good? [Sorte - Chance]
23.Is the woman loved by everyone? [Disgrazia - Disgrace]
24.Is it good for the woman to change lover? [Odio - Hate]
25.Is it good to get married? [Servitu' - Slavery]
26.Will the husband be faithful? [Occasione - Occasion]

Questions that can be asked both by men and women

Certainly the non-gender-specific questions are most interesting, some even poetically 
captivating ("will two lovers make peace?"), most of which could be asked today, and 
some still demanding long  thought.  In general though they do mostly have an
adult-version of a Ouija experience, with a few golden nuggets tossed in for higher 
cortical seasoning.

27.Is a certain courtesan infected with the French disease? [Difetto - Defect]
28.Is it good to take vengeance of an offense? [Virilita' - Virility]
29.Will the world find peace? [Parche - Moirae]
30.Will art or trade produce gain? [Industria - Industry]
31.Will some trouble bring happiness in the end? [Ricchezza - Richness]
32.Is the rule of a Lord appreciated by the people? [Verita' - Truth]
33.Is it good to serve Lords and priests? [Infingardo - Idler]
34.Will a promise be kept? [Fraude - Fraud]
35.Is the person that traveled far alive or dead? [Sapere - Knowledge]
36.Will the exile return? [Esilio - Exile]
37.Is it better the wife or the husband? [Poverta' - Poverty]
38.Who loves with more passion, the man or the woman? [Nobilta' - Nobility]
39.Will a dream come true? [Ignorantia - Ignorance]
40.Is it good to start a certain enterprise? [Otio - Idelness]
41.Will the person that went away be back soon? [Desiderio - Desire]
42.Will the awaited new be good or bad? [Malinconia - Melancholy]
43.Does the appearance of the person give a good impression? [Menzogna - Lie] 
44.Must one trust what people say? [Discordia - Conflict]
45.Will two lovers make peace? [Pace - Peace]
46.Which will be the end of a very deep love? [Caso - Chance]
47.Will changing place bring better luck? [Consiglio - Counsel]
48.Will the person be the winner of a dispute? [Corruttella - Corruption]
49.Will someone get free of a certain vice? [Furto - Theft]
50.What will be the reward for faithfulness in serving? [Calamita' - Calamity]

In short, much of this seems modern to me, at least with a little editorial clean-up.  
The big difference seems to be that people in 1540 actually interacted and answered
these questions, while in 2011 most folks would be watching other folks talk about 
answering these questions on a reality  t.v. show.

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Paradise–Millennium–End of Days: Thomas Burnet, 1684

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1455

It is uncommon to see the life stages of the life of the Earth depicted in seven stages, seven Earths at seven different epochs, alpha to omega–but it is particularly rare to see them illustrating the fronstipiece of a book, and an antiquarian one at that. But that this is exactly what happened with Thomas Burnet’s Theory of the Earth, in the English translation of 1684.¹ Burnett was a quietly agitated writer whose underlying viewpoint of the existence of life on Earth and the planet itself was that it was the scourge of millennialism, that the cycle of seven Earths depicted on his book ws the life and death of the planet, all wrapped around the coming kingdom of Christ and teh book of Revelation.

And perhaps the most impressive image on the page is that the Earths of Paradise and the millennium were pretty much the same, perfectly well across from one another on a level plane.

Paradise is self-explanatory; the “millennial” part maybe less so–in Christian thought this is when after Certain Things have happened that Jesus Christ would come back to Earth and reign in a terrestrial kingdom, a heaven-on-earth, for a period of a thousand years. Or more. The eschatology is not clear on this so far as I can tell. It seems as though the Earth is devoid of whatever it is that clogs nature’s bowels, as the planet looks remarkably sparse and tentative.

The business end of the image is this: rounding the images clockwise, the first is Chaos; the second, Paradise; the third shows the Deluge; the fourth depicts the present world; the fifth is the Conﬂagration; the sixth is the long-awaited Millennium; and the seventh, and last, the final seal, is the Consummation. So the Paradise/Millennial Earth are figures 2 and 6, and they do look pretty much the same.

And so the Earth is a thing of three distinct periods: the first is the lost Paradise, the fated failure in the fall of man; the second is the world of today with its constancy of ruination and upheaval; and the third, paradise regained (but at a cost). As Kerry V. Magruder points out in his “Global Visions and the Establishment of Theories of the Earth”² points out in his there are “transitions between these scenes are four ‘Revolutions
of our natural world’, accomplished through natural causes: chaos Noah’s universal deluge, a future conﬂagration, and a ﬁnal consummation when the Earth will be transformed into a ﬁxed star…”

Burnet (1635-1715) poured out his pounding heart into these pages, teaching people about the structure and history of the Earth with little or unsuccessful regard to science–but no matter. (Burnet did try to figure out where all of the water came for the flood, which is a great question. It is impossible for it to come from a natural rain of any sort, and Burnet probably came to the conclusion this the answer for the flood couldn’t come from the surface of the Earth. So to keep things in compliance with his faith, Burnet established that the water necessary for the flood came not from the surface of the sphere, but below it, in the hollow Earth which was actually filled with water.) This was a work of structured faith and a belief system, and wasn’t seen as much more than that except to the initiated.

Notes:

1. Telluris Theoria Sacra, or Sacred Theory of the Earth was first published in 1681 in Latin and then again in English in 1684. Latin was after all the language of science. Newton’s Principia remember wasn’t translated into English

2. …which appeared in Centarus in 2006 volume 48, pp. 234–257

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Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Cross-Sections — History of the Future
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:

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Art History — Future, History of the — History of Goodbye — History of the Future — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking
Remaking Chicago, 1945–a Map of the Future

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1435

Earlier today a post appeared here on re-envisioning the “one city” megalopolis of San Diego–Los Angeles–San Francisco by hoisting 2-acre neighborhoods into the sky to support some 5 million people or so. Bruce Biossat, a writer for the Chicago Daily News, also had an ambitious plan for the city of Chicago, though in the face of putting thousands of acres of neighborhoods (with years) into massive highrises, Mr. Boissat’s plan–while massive–is not nearly so as the L.A. scheme.

For reasons I cannot determine, this small pamphlet¹ (available at our blog bookstore) seems to be nowhere–no mention on the web, nothing in city planning databases, nothing in WorldCat (an actually nothing at all in this massive database about Mr. Biossat). It was a massive undertaking, part of a project of the Chicago Plan Commission, and sought to relieve “blighted” areas from the city by replacing them with new housing and neighborhood design. This was part of a larger construction scheme nationwide:

“The goal most mentioned as the desired postwar level of home construction is 1,000,000 units a year. Both major labor organizations call for higher objectives, with the A.F.L. demanding 1,500,000 and the C.I.O urging 1,750,000 annually.”

That is a lot of building, and I have no doubt that the ALF/CIO would’ve been behind a spending/earning opportunity like this 100%. I’m not sure where all of this money was coming from, though I guess there would’ve been enough workers to handle the job.

In any event, the plan was massive, as we can see in the map above–perhaps the designers/developers felt the end of the war coming, the return of millions of soldiers, and an opportunity to make some major changes in the development of the future of Chicago.

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Anticipation, History of — Architecture and Building — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking
An Episode in the History of Holes: Electricity, Punched Cards and the Computer, 1878.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1382 [Part of our series in The History of Holes.]

Kepler saw music in his study of planetary motions; Newton saw it too in relation to optics and the foundation of color–I wonder if the early people working with punched cards and tape saw a similarity between horizontal versions of their work and musical scales as well? Did Jacquard or Hollerith see something through their holes to points beyond? Well, I doubt the later, though there is no doubt that there are true relationships between music and the work of Kepler¹ and Newton. Perhaps one could make a score by arranging the punched holes of computer tape or a series of Jacquard loom cards, though they have less a relationship to what we identify as music than transcribing hundreds of resting pigeons as notes on a five-line utility pole.

The idea of automatic control comes way before M. Jacquard (1752-1734) and the punched cards that he used to control his loom (which began about 1805), though I must say that Jacquard’s man-in-the-machine design does have a great, far-reaching elegance to it. Even in his own field here were predecessors: Jacques de Vaucanson, for example, and Basile Bouchon (1725) and M.F Falcon (1728). But it was with Jacquard that the idea of the punched card for design control took hold, and just seven years after the loom was introduced there were more the 10,000 Jacquard machines in operation in France alone.

Alfred Barlow² wrote a splendid history of weaving in 1878, and in that books later pages–and I suspect much overcome with the recent developments in the electrical field (not the least of which were the newly invented light bulb and telephone)–Mr. Barlow waxes considerably on the application of electricity to the Jacquard process:

He writes, “It is scarcely to be wondered at that men acquainted with the application of electricity to telegraphy and other purposes should have believed it equally serviceable in some of the operations of weaving. As it might be expected, the Jacquard apparatus seemed to offer and excellent opportunity for the needles [reading the holes ion the loom punch cards] to be worked, not by the direct pressure of a card, but by the connecxion of a series of electro-magnerts. By this means it was believed that paper may be substituted fir the cards, and the magnets might operate upon the needles through the perforations in the paper, or by passing a current of electricity through the medium of a metallic conducting surface on a sheet of paper or cloth representing the design to be woven, and thereby acting without the use or need of perforations.” (Pages 424-5) It was certainly a capital idea. Barlow may have been referencing the work of Alexander Bain and his punched-tape telegraph of 1841, though he does not mention him specifically. Barlow does mention several inventors from the 1850’s who managed to make improvements with electricity in Jacquard-style machines, though none with the great effectiveness which he described here. The real, great advancement in computation waited for quite some time, even beyond the great innovations of Hermann Hollerith (who began his tabulating successes in the 1880’s, coming into international recognition with his work on the 1890 U.S. Census. But Barlow’s imagination here is quite full, and just a little beyond his time.

[This work by Barlow is available for purchase here.]

Notes

1. Kepler used the ratios between the velocities of the planets at their closet and furthest distances from the sun to construct musical intervals, which do work. What an enormously encompassing feeling this must have been to set the motions of the celestial spheres into polyphonic tones that fit right inside the octave! Newton’s seven colors could be set side-by-side with seven notes of the octave, color in music, giving them the notes A, B, C, D, E, F and G.

2. The excellent Mr. P.J. Mode first brought this reference to my attention 15 years ago. The work: Barlow,m Alfred: The History and Principles of Weaving by Hand and by Power. London; Sampson & Low, 1878, xii, 443, iv pp, illustrated throughout with text illustrations.

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Computer Tech/History — Future, History of the — History of Holes — History of the Future — Technology, History of
Wheels of Fortune and Destiny–Beautiful Circles of Robert Fludd, Lorenzo Spirito and Sigismondi Fanti (continued)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1429

(1) Destiny
Robert Fludd’s (1574-1637), title page for his Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia (1617) features this complicated astrological wheel with a Vitruvian-man-like image at the vortex of the imaged pulls and pushes of the cosmos. In addition to everything else, real and imagined, Rosicrucianism and astrology and puffy-birds, Fludd, who was an English physician, delved deeply into the real stuff of the world in this book in addition to all of the other make-believe–optics, the musical intervals, perspective drawing, hydraulic engineering, construction of lifting machines, military engineering and many other interesting, physical science topics. But this drawing, right there on the title page, reveals Fludd’s real interests and shows what governs what he does. Everything else, the math and and the physics, services this need. Of course the image is beautiful, which is why it is here, but it is also a deeply personal, exploitative, cover-all for the things that Fludd *wanted* to find.

I can’t resist adding the following Fludd image, which appears in the same book and may be one of the most iconic images of the Fludd opus, these beautiful circles showing the areas of thought and consciousness of the human being:

(2) Wheels of Forture

In Le Passetemps de la Fortune des dez, written by Lorenzo Spirito in the late 15th century¹ and published in this pictured format in 1559–a delightful little book with many²zodical illustrations and the first printed illustrated book on fortune-telling—appears this gorgeous wheel of fortune wood engraving.

“There are 20 questions, grouped around a wheel of fortune on which are represented four men; to each man a reference is added to a list of kings… These 20 kings in their turn guide the enquired to 20 planets; the table of dice casts attached to these planet contain 56 references to the 20 spheres of the planets. After one has found their way through these stages, they finally reach 20 prophets who each have 56 three-line answers to give….”

The wheel sends the reader to a king; the king to a sign; the sign, with a throw of dice, to a wheel; the wheel to a prophet, and then to the peek into the future.

Spirito 2

Referring to the image below: “In this opening, the leopard (left) is cut in a thick outline and modeled with precise curved lines. The leopard’s formal pose is particularly appealing because it projects a dignity commensurate with the animal’s position in the hierarchy of the animal kingdom. The dolphin (right) is similarly cut and set within a sea of curved lines against a well-defined architectural background. The dolphin’s design reflects classical

origins. The animal projects an aggressive attitude, suggesting the dolphin’s importance as protector of the city of Venice. The well-designed woodcut borders of the hunt (left) and the putti at play (right) are symbols of the vagaries of life, in which good fortune and calamity are equally possible.

(3) Wheels of Destiny 2

In Sigismondo Fanti’s Triompho di Fortuna (Triumph of Fortune), printed in Venice in 1526, the second illustrated fortune-telling book to appear in print. Fanti’s book, like Spirito’s, functions as a game in which the seeker follows cues that lead from figures of Fortune to houses and then to wheels, spheres, and astrologers, the path determined by either a throw of the dice or the time of day at which the book is consulted.

As this is not really an area I know very much about I’ll just quote the commentary on this illustration from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

“When the reader reaches the indicated page, a choice must be made between two wheels. The upper one represents all the possible combinations (twenty-one) to result from a throw of the dice, while the lower is bordered by the first twenty-one hours of the day. If no dice are handy\—and it’s not too late at night\—the seeker can turn to the lower wheel and choose the segment that corresponds to the current hour.”

“The pages representing wheels are bordered by eight alternating frames containing a series of musicians, astronomers, artists, writers, popes, rulers, and other distinguished figures of the past and present, labeled differently at each appearance. Among the artists named are Andrea Mantegna, Raphael of Urbino, and Baldassare Peruzzi, the designer of the frontispiece. On the page shown here, at right, the astronomer and artist are identified respectively as the book’s author, Sigismondo Fanti, and the painter Dosso Dossi (died 1542), who was also from Ferrara and who has been plausibly credited with the design of the figural borders.”

NOTES

1. Lorenzoi Spirito’s book was very popular, going into at least five printings in the 15th century alone following the first printed edition of 1482. Fortune-telling works such as this were extremely popular and well-used–so much so that it has led experts in this area to conclude that the books were basically worn out of existence, which might explain why so few of them have survived to the present day.

2.Description of the Spirito book from Christie’s auction house: 38 leaves. Roman type. 56 lines and headline. 2 woodcut full borders (one incorporating Da Ponte device) repeated to 6 impressions, full-page woodcut wheel of fortune, 20 woodcut portraits of kings from 15 blocks printed 4 to a page, 20 pages of dice throws with 20 woodblocks of signs, 20 circular woodcuts of signs within wheel of text set within one of two borders, 20 portraits of prophets and other Biblical figures.”

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Art History — Circles, Geometry — Future, History of the — History of Dots — History of the Future
A Note on Teaching Math, Unexpected Art, and Picturing Things Differently

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1427

Stereo viewing geometrical figures may or may not be useful–I find it a little off-putting, creating a slight dizzying effect, though I’m sure it helps others (particularly children?) see complex geometrical figures a little more easily., especially when it comes to crystalography images. Education was certainly what Henry Vuibert , the author of Les Anaglyphes Geometriques had in mind when he published the work in 1912. He had a long history in mathematics education, having founded the firm that bears his name back in 1877, a publishing house specializing in school texts in the maths, physics and general sciences. (We offer the book for purchase at out blog bookstore.)

Vuibert’s book is a very early example of the use of the anaglyphe–examples of the use of the method go back to the 1850’s, when d’Almeida used a version of the idea to punctuate lectures using a magic lantern; the (printing) process of the anaglyphe wasn’t patented until the 1890’s by L.D. DuHaron. It does confuse me or remind me quite a bit of Oliver Byrne’s beautiful monster The First Six Books of Euclid in which coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of readers… printed at the Chiswick Press by C. Whittingham for William Pickering in 1847. The book is, well, unusual and probably not at all usefu1¹. Bryne replaced all of the algebraic notation, identifying letters and almost all of the descriptive text with color and color codes, leaving Euclid mysterious, hidden, awkward, impervious, and, yes, beautiful². As a matter of opinion this work presages the cubists (and especially Piet Mondrian) by 60 years, and all by accident artwork.

There are certainly much earlier works that tried to get at a fuller representation of geometrical objects, not the least of which was a 16th century Elements of Euclid in which the figures were cut-out paper, pasted into the book and attached to a string so that the reader could pull out the illustration and see it displayed in three dimensions. The elements of geometrie of the most auncient philosopher Euclide of Megara. Faithfully (now first translated into the Englishe toung…³, printed in London in 1570, was no doubt a great and exasperating labor of love, a complex “pop-up” book accomplished with sixteenth century technology. (The photo below shows the Smithsonian Institution’s copy.)

Of course there’s the very old fashioned way of representing mathematical concepts, and that’s with sticks and stones and blocks and such. For visceral memory and practical applications, the idea is hard to beat, unless of course, you really beat it , which is difficult to do. But to me that’s just what Major G. Mackinlay did in his Realistic Arithmetic, for Teaching Children the Elements of Arithmetic by Means of Special Blocks⁴, published in London in 1900–his ideas for the use of blocks was very sound and stable; his instructions (and in particular his illustrations) for what to do with the blocks was not. I am reminded of inscrutable, badly translated and designed instructional manuals for tech stuff that need a manual for the manual.

Here’s one of the folding plates describing how to assemble the blocks:

Then there are other sorts of wooden (and etc.) three-dimensional models, such as the (600+) gorgeous geometric designs housed in the Institute Henri Poincare, transferred there from the laboratory of geometry of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris in 1928⁵. Most of these models were constructed around the time of vast change in mathematics and art (1900-1920), which means that many of them predate the revolutionary ascensions of Cubism and non-representational art.

And as long as were at the point of unintentional and under-recogniozed epochal works, I think that there is a broad book that could be done on exactly this topic, calling into play such examples as Georgina Houghton, Victor Higo, Emily Vanderpoel, and many others.

Georgina Houghton, for example, produced this non-representational painting in 1870 (or thereabouts):

And Victor Hugo, from the 1860’s

And Emily Vanderpoel (1900 or so):

In another, much earlier case of removing detail and adding abstraction for the sake of simplicity in representing an idea, Erhard Schoen, in his Unnderweissung der proportzion und stellung der posssen liegent und dtehent, printed in Nurenberg in 1538, presented these cubed figures (below). He used simplified geometric form to stand in for the curvy humans, replacing them with proportional stacks of boxes which would more easily explain to the younger reader how to represent the human body in space and in proportion to other things.

I think that these were monumentally combative images showing humans in a radical, previously unknown way, much like the moving-through-space-and-time photographs of the somewhat forgotten Etienne Marey, who in the 1870’s created what was essentially the world’s first “slow motion” device. One iteration of Marey’s apparatus was basically a long series of ganged cameras recording a motion for a simple task at a given time frame and presented on a continuous strip of photographic paper, sort of like a motion picture with the camera speed set at three frames per second. The resulting images were phenomenal and showed people for the first time the exactness of all manners of simple motions–motions that no longer looked so “simple” once all of its aspects could be studied from captured photographic evidence. Even the act of hopping over a small stool or bending to pick up a bucket of water were enormously revealing in a way like Robert Hooke’s Micrographia displayed the great detail and complexity of the seemingly simple fly. Perhaps the most famous of Marey’s series of images was that of a galloping horse, which also for the first time revealed what exactly the horse’s legs were doing and proving that almost every painter in the history of art represented the galloping horse incorrectly. His series of photographs (as in this sample below) show a fairly close fit to the work of the futurists (like for example Duchamp) who would come into being after another four decades.

And Duchamp’s Nude Descending (1912):

I do want to make it clear that this is just a simple note, a thinking-out-loud piece on how attempts to visualize things differently for the sake of explanation or education can come “unintentionally” close to what would become epochal works. More later.

Notes

1. Augustus De Morgan, mathematician and logician, wrote a very highly critical book A Budget of Paradoxes in which he describes hubbub, fakirs, frauds, perpetual motion machines, squaring the circle efforts, millstones and other useless books in the maths, and in here he sniffily dismisses Byrne’s work. At best, to De Morgan, the Byrne book is “curious”. But useless and curious, as I have seen many thousands of times, does not mean that it can’t be attractive and beautiful, and the Byrne book is probably the leading candidate in the Bad & Beautiful category.

2. In his Victorian Book Design McLean calls the Byrne book “…one of the oddest and most beautiful books of the whole century…a decided complication of Euclid, but a triumph for Charles Whittingham [the printer]”.

3. This is also the first appearance of Euclid in English. The full title: The Elements of geometrie of the most auncient philosopher Euclide of Megara faithfully (now first) translated into the Englishe toung by H. Billingsley, citizen of London; whereunto are annexed certaine scholies, annotations, and inventions, of the best mathematiciens, both of time past and in this our age; with a very fruitfull praeface made by M.I. Dee, specifying the chief mathematicall scieces, what they are, and whereunto commodious; where, also are disclosed certaine new secrets mathematicall and mechanicall, untill these our daies, greatly missed. London, Imprinted by I. Daye, 1570.

4. From the Report of the Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1906:

5. From the IHP website: “Most of the models were created by Martin Schilling in Leipzig between 1900 and 1920 and a few of them (in wood) were made between 1912 and 1915 by J. Caron, Professor of Descriptive Geometry in charge of the “graphic work” course at the ENS at the beginning of the century (between 1912 and 1915).”

Also this: “In the thirties, the surrealists, led by Max Ernst, were interested in these geometric objects. André Breton alludes to them in “Crise de l’objet” , an article in the magazine Cahiers d’Art (May 1936, No. 1-2, p. 21-26.). Man Ray took photographs of the models, which where published in same issue. He would later use them to compose what he called “Shakespearean Equations”. Many artists, painters, architects and sculptors drew inspiration from them.”

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Art History — Color Theory — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Information, Quantitative Display of — mathematics, logic
Bad Ideas Department: Restructuring the City and the “Terminal Box”, Neopolis, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1421

The unnamed author of The New City, an American Plan of Social and Economic Reorganization (1938), makes a hard-edged plea for the formation of a new American society—and by “new” the author really means it, advocating a different economics, social structure and even the physical development of new cities and abandonment of the old physical and philosophical structures. (The rare original of this deterministic futuristic publication is located at our blog bookstore.)

Sprinkled among the Swiftian notions of rightness, quixotic lancings of social ills and a general bombardment of the structure of society are some interesting and isolated points:
“America is the supreme user of the machine…ravishing the irreplaceable wealth of one of the earth’s richest continents, tearing down forests, looting the treasures of coal and draining the reservoirs of oil and natural gas, by methods scandalously wasteful.”

This leads the author to the Depression, “a decade of demonstration of the profit system’s inability to deliver to the people the needs of life, a painful heartbreaking demonstration”.

It is the profit-deliverers, not the machines or people, who are to blame. One way of addressing the distribution system, was, unfortunately, Russia—“a form if society set up to overcome this impasse of the capitalistic system of production and distribution”. Of course the Russians–the Soviets–were just in the middle of their enforced starvation/gulag/brutalization period under Josef Stalin, the gigantic negative parts of which were still in general not known to the great unwashed.

The unnamed author dips lightly into Socialism, and then into Fascism and Nazism, though the only thing he/she really has to say about the later two is that “their answer [to economic woe] was in the seizure or control of the means of production by the state”, their own brutal means skipping off unnoticed into a pinkish glow, though the loss of personal freedom is “disdained”.

The New City is actually a new world order, a new governmental form to take advantage of technological advancements leading to “nationalized urbanization” The first city in this new order is Neopolis, and this pamphlet was a call to those who would stand as its citizens. (There’s actually a sort of application form, though all it really is a bill-of-sale for ordering more copies of the New City pamphlet.)

Even though the pamphlet is easily obtained, membership, the possibility of being a Neopolitan, is something entirely different. The difference is actually exceptional, perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this whole misguided idea. “Membership is to be carefully controlled at all times” we read. . “It is not desired to build up a huge and unwieldy membership of poorly-assimilated elements….interesting educational instruction…with tests to determine the fitness of the member for loyal, cooperative activity, leading, necessarily, to the elimination of those who may be found undesirable”.
That’s some pretty muscular, steroidal stuff, particularly after such a glancing blow against the Soviets and Nazis.

Since this is just an “abridgment” of a soon-to-be-written 250-page explanation of the concept, the complex and concentric organization of society is left mainly to the drawing of its plan, the physical layout of the city based upon this ideal.

The Seattle-based author never did quite make it past page 29, never did name themselves, and never provided a concrete place where all of this heady stuff was being think out. It is a sort of pretty design in a creepy/queasy way, there on the front cover, but that’s about as far as it goes. If anyone actually did send any money to this quack thinker, it wound up in a nicely metaphorical place: at “Terminal Box 3463”.

This may be the very best idea to come out of touching this pamphlet—a place where people can send correspondence regarding Bad and/or Dead or Dying Ideas: “Terminal Box ______”. I guess that box number would be pretty high by now.

(Uncle Joe, before he killed the children, and dozens of millions of others.)

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Architecture and Building — Bad Ideas — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Social History
Horses in the Sciences: Proving Nothing and Something

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1419   [Dedicated to our primum mobile family horse person, Emma Digh Ptak.]

The history of horses in the sciences is not a very wide subject area, though I’d like to look at a few instances in which they help to prove both something and nothing–particularly in the third case below, when the “nothing” was a very big “something”.

First, in the history of horsepower (and such an odd history it is, having somewhat and famously to do with billing issues for steam powered engines) there is a certain restricted high-percentage element that are just no-go, unworkable ideas. Some of them served as the basis for further and deeper thinking,and some of them were simply far ahead of the technical abilities of their times.

In 1825 Edmond Genet¹ published an interesting book (Memorial on the upwards forces of fluids and their applicability to several arts, sciences and public improvements) which in and of itself is a milestone in a number of different technical aspects–one part of it though sensationally and beautifully elevates itself to the Not-Quite-a-Good-Idea-at-Almost-Any-Time Department.

“The actual plans of Genet’s airship called for a balloon shaped to resemble the rounded back of a large fish and containing about 1,023,000 cubic feet of hydrogen gas, with a platform or deck fastened beneath. Two horses, moving on a revolving wheel on this platform, were to provide the power for operation of a pair of large, silk-covered aerial wheels, while the rudder in imitation of a fish tail was intended “not only to steer the machine, but also to supply it with an additional force of propulsion”. –Genet in his Memorial…

One thing that makes Genet’s work so impressive is that as a result of it he applies for and is granted the first patent made in the U.S. for a flying machine. The flying machine he presented in his work though is a little problematic: the canopy and the machine itself are not at all drawn to scale, and their size and breadth are lost a little in that under-representation.   I’d say that the figures in the drawing should be half of what they are, given that the flying machine was 132′ long and 46 feet wide (and 54 feet high), and the canopy was to be filled with a million cubic feet of helium. The thing was a beast, and was supposed to be blessed with the capacity for lifting 72,000 pounds².   The horses were along for the forward propulsion, moving two large paddle wheel-type wheels on either side of the airship. It just doesn’t look right.

Next is a tempting mechanism, an inset living inside a larger engraving depicting a mode of transport not-so-tempting. It comes from Colonel Jean-Gaffin Gallon’s (1706-1775) Machines et inventgions approuvees par l’Academie Royale des Sciences....published between 1735 and 1777, and poetically covers its subject over a 111-year span from 1666 to 1777.   The massive work was illustrated with nearly 500 engravings covering all manner,shapes and description of technological invention and advancement, not the least of which was the first illustrated description of Pascal’s logic machine. Amid all of this vast wealth of potentially revolutionary achievement,. I pluck out this equine example of possible nothingness:

which I am just not sure about, not having the text. I can only hope that the horse was some sort of imaginary mechanical something, given its task and its size. From the looks of its neck and the rider and the length of the horse, if it was a living thing it would have been gargantuan.

Here’s an appearance in the Gallon work (from 1735) of another, mechanical, horse that was used for stage productions, and which seemed fairly articulated:

And thirdly, there is this, perhaps the most famous image of horses in the history of scientific illustration:

This beautiful illustration is from one of the greatest experimental physics books of the 17th century, coming as it does from Otto von Guericke’s Experiemnta nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de vacuo spatio (Amsterdam, 1672). (In another minute department, this one is also I guess the greatest book ever written by a Mayor of anywhere (as von Guericke (1602-1886) was mayor of Magedeburg for 33 years).) The image shows the greatest of von Guericke’s efforts, and one of the greatest (or most important) experiments in experimental science–the dramatic demonstration of the vacuum, showing here that teams of horses could not pull apart two halves of an evacuated sphere, and of course the efficacy of air pressure operating against it (um, the vacuum). The “floating” bits in the sky were an exploded view of the sphere that was the subject of the experiment.

What was more important though, and what the general reader today might easily miss, was that von Guericke created something that many scientists and philosophers said didn’t, and couldn’t, exist: the vacuum. In modern times, Copernicus depicted the universe as a vast void; Descartes came in the back door (following the ancient and interesting though incorrect theory of Aristotle), not liking the idea very much, and claiming that such empty space couldn’t exist. Von Guericke provided the proof that the vacuum, that nothing, did exist.

As a matter of fact the issue of nothingness was very contentious, with the concept of its possibility and the display of a vacuum not achieved until this effort by von Guericke, with his team of horses tugging away at the essence of nothing.

NOTES

1. Genet is best remembered in American history as “Citizen Genet”, at least far more so than that being remembered for gentleman farming or his work in aerostatics and invention. “Edmond Charles Genet had tried to recruit American volunteers to serve in the armies of Revolutionary France and to outfit American privateers to fight against the British. Despite President Washington’s orders for him to desist from his high-handed appeals to the American public, he continued the same practices until he was forced from office. Washington permitted him to remain in this country as a private citizen, saving him saving him from the possibility of being guillotined for his failure.” So writes the great historian of Science I Bernard Cohen. It wasn’t altogether true though that it was Washington who saved Genet; his being allowed to remain in the U.S. was strongly pursued and lobbied by Alexander Hamilton, Genet’s greatest detractor/enemy/nemesis in Washington’s cabinet.

2. By contrast, the Wright I Flyer (the famous first-flight airplane of 1903) had a wingspan of 40 feet, weighed 625 pounds and sported a 12 horsepower, 170 pound engine (and which by the way was all produced for about a thousand dollars–not nothing, but not a lot).

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Aviation & flight — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — History of the Future — Strange Things in the Sky — Technology, History of
A Peep into the History of the Future of Roads in Texas, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1396

The planners, designers, structural engineers and city planners in Texas felt the hot breath of the future on their necks in the summer of 1938, working their way to publish this futuristic emblemata book on the controlled motion of automobiles. The Depression was coming to an end, access to money was loosening, automobiles were becoming cheaper and gasoline supplies were plentiful (even though during the crisis car sales fell though gas consumption increased), GDP was up by 1/3 from 1932, employment figures had gone up 25% since 1931, and of course there were projects of road-building got consider to put folks to work. These figures were also a little problematic for Texas, given the huge percentages of farmers who were out of work (nationwide) and the preponderance of farming in the state of Texas.

But Jac L. Gubbels¹, who copyrighted this work for the State Highway Department of Texas (Landscape Division) saw a prettier picture for the state in the near future, and what it had in it mainly were automobiles. The highways proposed by Gubbels were remarkably wide given the number of lanes, particularly so for those roads that went through small towns.

Notes

1. (From the Texas Centennial Archives: “The harmonious integration of construction features and the natural environment was a popular trend during the Depression era. Called the "rustic style," this natural yet designed "rustic" landscaping of the early Texas roadside park system was largely planned by Jac L. Gubbels, landscape architect with the Texas Highway Department from 1933 to late 1930s. One of the first landscape engineers to be hired by a state highway department, Gubbels influenced the direction roadside parks were to take regarding landscaping, layout and style. His guidance set standards for construction elements and landscape design."

8 other designs here:

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