Category: Technology, History of

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2758     

[For Jeff Donlan, Extreme Answer Lad of Answers!]

This article was just a small 4″ or so notice  in the Scientific American on 2 August 1879, written for a new sort of apparatus to make bubble-blowing easier, or more effective, or “rounder”, or less anti-bubbly. (Actually that last would be a trick though I guess you could rig something like this up in an anti-air-breathing way, to create a bubble of liquid encapsulated by a layer of gas surrounded by a liquid. This is actually pretty easy to do standing around and would probably be a much harder thing to accomplish if you needed an apparatus for it. By the way “anti-bubble” should not be associated with the “Dirty Bubble”, which is a character from SpongeBob SquarePants.) 

Back to the illustration: it is only about 2″ tall and a bit of a “filler”, but enough care is given it that it displays something which you never really see on bubbles in artwork: a reflection of an image! 

 

If you go to Google and search out Renaissance/Bubble/painting or some such, you will find a number of examples of fine-looking bubbles: Gerrit Dou’s young boy blowing bubbles has life to the boy but not so much to the bubbles he’s blowing; J.E. Mallais bubble boy also has some somber fun but little exclusivity is paid to the bubble, same to for Naiveau, and de Gheyn; David Bailly’s self portrait has three happy bubbles with flair and color, and Desjardin’s allegory’s bubble maker is standing on a bubble with a fair amount of color and light to it. Even  the much-reproduced “Soap Bubbles” (ca. 1733-4) painting  by Jean Siméon Chardin (1699–1779)–which is perhaps one of the most famous antiquarian paintings involving bubbles–finds us with a bubble that is not very bubbly, without much reflection and optical interest…a too-subtle bubble. Not so in this image above, the anonymous artist collecting the 25-cent fee and giving the bubble some of the greatest bubble-life that I’ve noticed. 

One thing those older artists do have a feel for more so than this piece above is the thinness of the wall of a bubble–here it looks pretty defined whereas with the others you get a real sense of lightness and fragility (though hardly knowing the thickness in terms of _^…as a matter of fact some of the artists mentioned were active before Newton, others before Huygens, and all before Young.) Anyway even though the business of bubbles seems to be kids’ stuff, with children playing at making bubbles in the artwork mentioned above, bubbles are worthy of some real thinking–if you understand bubbles (and anti-bubbles), you can address a fair amount more than that. 

[I can’t really tell what the bubble-blower is seeing, what is being reflected, though one of the objects definitely seems to be a painting…]

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2752

“It is pleasant to think that our jolly tars are no sufferers by this expeditious mode of making their sea bread. It seems to be admitted that the machine made biscuits are better mixed and better kneaded than those made by hand. The three bakeries at the three arsenals before named could produce when at full work six or eight thousand tons of biscuits in a year which would effect a saving of ten or twelve thousand a year as compared with the old method.”

This is the paragraph that ends the long selection, below, taken from The Pictorial and Literary Sketch Book of the British Empire, (volume 1, published by Charles Knight, London, 1849). It is a great and lovely ending and also a fine beginning to describing a curious and engaging article, “Biscuit Baking Machinery”, in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, 1833. Overall, this is a chapter in the history of machine-over-human, of “Mechanization Takes Command” (with reference to Giedion’s superb and occasionally gut-wrenching book), and takes place in regards to sea biscuits, Jolly Tars, and a beautifully named Royal Clarence Victualling Establishment (“at Weevil, near Portsmouth”)

It all boils out to biscuits. And in this case a Mr. T.T. Grant received a 2000-pound grant to develop his machine. The article goes into some great detail on it, though I found this curious before-and-after article (quoted below) that describes the biscuits made by hand and those by machine. One thing was certain: the machinery saved time in labor and also seems to have cut cost by 75%.  In any event, I wanted to share these two episodes in the early stages of the introduction of machines in the mass production of food.

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

1876/7 were pretty good years for science and technology (though a poor one for U.S. presidential elections): there was the telephone, cathode rays (Eugen Goldstein), John Draper’s photography of the solar spectrum, Berliner’s microphone, Boltzmann’s 2nd Law, and so on. In the middle of the Scientific American for 1877 there were two articles on the telephone and the Grant calculating machine, and in between these two articles was another less important but still fascinating and unexpected story on the human buoy:

 

Well, it really wasn’t a buoy though it behaved like one–the real cause to action here was a survivor suit. It was a big, armless version of Robbie the Robot, a roomy and I guess somewhat versatile suit that one could jump into and then would float around in like a dud torpedo. What caught my attention with the thing was that there was food and drink enough in it for a person to live a month (“if need be, in safety and comfort”). Source: Scientific American, 5 May 1877, p. 274l, and invented by the wonderfully-named Traugott Beek, of Newark, NJ.  

 

[This is an expansion of an earlier post on Herzog.] In 1982 Werner Herzog, in what may have been the culmination of a weirdly fashioned and irresistible death-wish effort, released a film that he wrote and directed:  Fitzcarraldo.  It is a spill-over big, magnificent film about a would-be ice-making rubber baron bringing an opera house into the trans-Andes, trying to make his way into the dense forest in a huge (320 tons) steamboat on the Amazon to stake a claim in exploiting previously un-leased lands filled with rubber trees  The problem faced by Fitzcarraldo (played by the probably-slightly-insane Klaus Kinski¹–just see Herzog’s 1972 Aguirre, Wrath of God and you’ll know what I mean) is that his path is blocked by unnavigable rapids–he can however reach his destination by hauling his very large ship up and over a mountain to get to a more pliant river and then to his goal.  Herzog actually does this for the film–no digital anything here^2,3–in what is one of the most glorious things I’ve ever seen in the movies.  He really does have native people clear a path up the side of a mountain, and they DO haul this ship up and over.  It is truly magnificent, especially seeing the boat moving slowly up a mountain as background to a sweating Fitz.  

The story is partially based upon the adventure of Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, who in 1890 attempted a similar feat, though with a much smaller vessel, and who also dismantled the craft to haul it overland. (Its not a bad idea, necessarily, to do this dismantling thing, especially if it has to be done and there’s no other way to do it. The North Vietnamese famously did the impossible by hauling artillery up through the jungle and up mountains to shockingly surround the French at Dien Bien Phu.) 

   The bigger and deeper back-story though is the effort–mainly by Elmer Corthell and James Eads–to build a combination railroad ship canal across the Tehuantepec isthmus in Nicaragua.  The idea of moving across Central America rather than taking the enormously long route around the tip of South America and up again is hundreds of years old.  The Corthell/Eads plan, begun in 1870’s and alive in the early ’80’s, was really the first feasible (and workable) initiative.

 

It would have been a gigantic undertaking, and even though it was much longer (130 miles or so)  than the more-favored Panama location for the canal, it seemed more workable as there would be less digging and no need for a lock/canal system as required at Panama. 

The French began a doomed attempt at conquering Panama shortly before this.  Ferdinand de Lesseps tried to build a canal in 1880, but the organization and general construction plan was truly inferior; also, the sanitary and medical conditions were terrible, with the French losing perhaps 22 thousand men in the failed process to disease (mainly malaria).  (The United States would lose 5,609 workers while building the Panama canal, on land granted as a payback for “helping” Panama release themselves from Columbia.)

The Corthell/Eads (who by the way was a master builder perhaps best known for his inspired masterpiece of a bridge at St. Louis) plan called for hauling the ships up and out of the water in a short canal and placing them on an enormous floating roundabout; the roundabout would then be raised, and the ship place on huge cradles borne upon vastly augmented railway lines.  Once on the cradle, the ship would be pulled and pushed by a team of four large locomotive teams which were in turn composed of two large engines.  Happily aboard, the ship would then be taken on the extended, expanded wide and augmented rail 130 miles overland and dumped into the Pacific.

It was evidently not a workable deal all the way around, though, as the U.S. decided on the new Panama to works its engineering miracle.

There is something pleasing though about the Ship Railway, though, something that appeals to the little bit of Mr. Herzog in me.  Perhaps it was the appraisal of the very stiff-lipped Sir Edward Reed–who was the former master engineer for the British navy and consultant to Eads—that makes it all so irresistible.  “It would be best to avoid a very high rate of speed” when hauling the massive ocean-going and heavily laden cargo ships.  Indeed.

Oh, wait: there’s also this example:

This fantastic cover appeared in Popular Mechanics, volume 71 (1939, right at the brink of doom), and showed a devotion to a monumental idea of dragging enormous ships by rail from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea.  It was to be 300 miles long, and what looks like 125′ wide, connecting Port le Verdon and Beziers, putting down the 1,200-mile Bay of Biscaye/Gibraltar/Mediterranean route. It seems a kind of mobile Maginot Line, except this bad idea wasn’t constructed. 

Notes

1. The original actor in the Fitzcarraldo role was Jason Robards, who had to give the film up after about a third or so the way through as he came down with dysentery. Kinski came into the role after that, and the film was re-shot. 

2. There is a scene showing the steamboat being unmoored and sent down the rapids on its own–that is done with a model. So far as I know, that is the only bit of post production trickery for the film. 

3. There’s an interesting documentary of the film also released in 1982, Burden of Dreams.