Category: Technology, History of

A History of Blank, Empty & Missing Things: Lost Astonishment of Astonishing Things, Part I–the Phonograph

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1100 [One in a series on the History of Blank and Missing Things]

Most everything that was once revolutionary, or new, or innovative, comes to the point of being not so to most people, where the thing of marvel and wonder just becomes the thing of interest and then the thing and then, well, sort of no-thing. The great object becomes a simple bridge to something else, whether it is to communicate massive amounts of information instantly or overcoming distance quickly or storing food for long periods of time or shaving nutmeg onto a dinner plate.

Astonishment wears quickly. For example, the long line of vanished astonishment in communications shows how thin wonder becomes over the course of time, as communication is facilitated by a postal delivery system to a ground semaphore to an electric telegraph to the telephone to wireless radio to airmail to television to DARPAnet to email to texting to twitter. The beginning of instantaneous, person-to-person communication is really only 134 years old (with Bell’s 1876 invention), and now we’re sitting in the middle of the possibility of the most fabulously instantaneous communication bog in the history of humanity, and its brilliant astonishment level has been worn to a dull copper tone. (I don’t necessarily mean “fabulous” in a good context, because all of this also presents the greatest assault on concentrated thought that has ever been known, but that’s another story.) Things just get taken for granted. (This observation isn’t restricted to techno stuff–just ask any old person.)

This is an excellent image to remind us of the wonder and fascination of invention–especially for the things that we take for granted, the essentials of modern life. This image from 1897 shows a very large audience gathered in the great Trocadero in Paris to listen to a demonstration of a phonograph. Now the phonograph had already been reliably around since Edison’s introduction of his successful machine the year after the invention of the telephone in 1877 (though variations of the instrument had been around since the late 1850’s, though that is another story), so the general public was already well-familiar with the concept of captured sound replayed–then why such a big crowd in 1897?

I think the reason for the full house was partially for the fact that it was a home-town event for a national French figure–the machine was being demonstrated by Henri Jules Lioret, an inventor who for about two decades had been tinkering with improvement to the machine. What the Trocadero crowd was listening to was the Lioretograph No. 3, a large, weight-driven phonograph with a big bellow–a machine powerful enough to be heard in a big hall, which was another point of fascination for the attraction of such a large crowd. A third possibility may have been with Lioret himself–perhaps the event was free, perhaps the inventor went out to fill the Trocadero via whatever means possible so that an engraving of the event would appear in newspapers and journals everywhere so that he could sell more machines.

The reason I mos enjoy and wish for though is that the people were simply fascinated with the bright new big machine, filling the famous musical hall with a big sound and doing it without an orchestra, or without one playing player for that matter.

It is also about the wonder of storing and replaying sound.

Loss of astonishment isn’t necessarily a complacency–perhaps it is just more of a forgetting, a loss of the stuff that has come before. Maybe it is a function of time, or distance, between newness and necessity.

If you can grow to feel the astonishment felt by this Trocadero audience for the phonograph, or for the astonishment in anything fantastic-if-old, then you get to see the components of today’s necessary stuff and see that it has a history and a full geology of an idea. To me, being open to astonishment like this makes you susceptible to wonder, and from wonder comes curiosity, and from curiosity comes everything else worth thinking about.

Notes 1:

Edison celebrates his phonograph in the North American Review
(May 1878) and
then lists what he saw as the readymade faits
acomplis of the invention, the first of which was
weirdly/spectacularly
worded: “1. The captivity of all manner
of sound-waves heretofore designated as fugitive, and their permanent
retention.” Do you hear a soundtrack
with that description? I did. He proceeded
with less fanfare: “2. Their
reproduction with all their original characteristics at will, without
the
presence or consent of the original source, and after the lapse of any
period
of time. 3. The transmission of such captive sounds through the ordinary
channels of
commercial intercourse and trade in material form, for purposes of
communication
or as merchantable goods. 4. Indefinite multiplication and preservation
of
such sounds, without regard to the existence or non-existence of the
original source. 5. The
captivation of sounds, with or without the knowledge or consent of the
source
of their origin.”

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History of Sharing Music Without Musicians–Beginnings

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1098 [Part of a series on the History of Blank, Missing and Empty Things.]

This first image struck me as a sort of prototype for the shared-music experience that is common to youtube and a plethera of other online sites, showing a humble beginning of sharing for a revolutionary idea and experience. The idea of recording and playing back sound¹, the idea of being able to save sound and listen to it later, was an astonishing realization and invention. (There will be more on this in a post later today.) And it struck me that being able to enjoy music without the necessity of having the musicians there to play it, live, uniquely, is a phenomenon that is recent in the history of listening to things, being less than 134 years old.

This is one of the earliest images of that shared experience: the Edison phonograph, being played in company, ca. 1878.

The first image comes a little later, but I like it so because of the
headsets–it resonates the separate/shared experience a little better.

Notes:

1. The earliest “phonograph” was one which successfully recorded sound but could not play the sound back. Or at least until recently, when these 150-year-old recordings were played back for the first time. This was the work of Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, (1817-1879), a French bookseller (!) who patented his phomautograph in 1857.

These recordings can be heard HERE.

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Department of Strange Steampunk: Oddest Place to Find a Locomotive?

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1096

I think perhaps one of the oddest places to find a locomotive is in the inside of a propeller of a ship on the high seas.

This image really belongs to the sub-category “Out of Place Department”, along with the unexpectedly-found restaurant at the top of a punked-out 19th c Eiffel Tower, a swimming pool in the bottom of a mine shaft, a steamboat along the side of a mountain in Amazonia, and so on. Seeing this strange sea craft and the cutaway schematic showing the man-sized locomotive (and tender) was very exciting and unexpected as well, perhaps more so than most of the unexpected steam/electro punky thingsa that I come across.

It appeared as a real-life suggestion as “Chapman’s Roller Vessel” in (ca.) 1897 and looks o be a squarish, blocky ship of questionable seaworthiness, fitted out with two hollow cylindrical props powered by two small small-gauge locomotives running infinitely on small-gauge tracks inside of them, push-pulling the ferry through the water. (I wonder about access to the engine and how to control its stopping and starting; I would only hope that there wasn’t someone at the locos’ controls.)

It seems to me to be a bad idea of a high order.

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Steampunk Bluetooth, Telegraphic Headset or Head Mapper? (1879)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1095

Even though this woodcut looks a bit odd, it hides the fact that it is a superb device for its mechanical purpose–mapping the head for hatters. Certainly most folks would look at this image and have their imaginations decide many more and creative (but not-real) uses than that. But the fact remains that it was an ingenious instrument that

could (can!) produce an excellent contour map of the head. It is difficult to imagine a more accurate mechanical method of performing this task this beautiful device. (The device would be place on the head like a hat, fitted down snug causing the head’s contours to extend the spokes, producing an image of the head’s shape like the map on the upper left inset. Very cool.) And I love the use of so many (clean) screws rimming the base of the mapper.

Then on the other end of the spectrum of antiquarian steampunk headware:

was this simple umbrella to protect the hat. It reminds me of the utility of a portable pocket-sized mustache guard. I wonder if you were expected to carry an umbrella to protect the rest of your body? Or another to protect the umbrella that was protecting the hat umbrella? (Tortoises all the way down….) Still, though, this is a great drawing with applications far beyond the reach of a simple hat protector.

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Take the July 1945 “How do we Use the Atomic Bomb?” Poll

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1094

Note: our poll site crashed I think under the weight of unexpectedly high traffic. At last count there were over 12,000 responses, 10,000 of them coming in the last few days. I will update the analysis section on 7 August. My apologies for the disappearance of the poll.

This is a continuation of my post/thread “Deciding to Use the Atomic Bomb: The Chicago Metallurgical Lab Poll, July, 1945″ which is part of a 50-post thread on the history of atomic and nuclear weapons. Thus far more than 2400 people have responded to this poll on whether/how to use the atomic bomb that was first taken by the Manhattan Project metallurgical lab physicists at Chicago. (Image: the 600-foot wide fireball of the first detonation of an atomic weapon at .016 seconds. The event, codenamed “Trinity”, detonated an implosion design plutonium device code at Alamogordo, New Mexico (near Socorro), 16 July 1945.)

In July 1945 (but before Trinity), Arthur H. Compton asked Farrington Daniels (Director of the Metallurgical Lab section (at Chicago) of the Manhattan Project) to poll the 250 or so scientists at work under Farrington on the coming immediate use of the atomic bombs. (The results of the poll, answered by 150 of the 250 people, were originally published as “A Poll of Scientists at Chicago, July 1945,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1948, 44, page 63. and again published in Compton’s own book, Atomic Quest, in 1956. You can follow the images of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists for October 1958, p 304 here.

The results of the five-option poll were interesting. Of the 250 asked to take the poll, 150 responded, with 15% (as you will be able to see in the Results section below) of the scientists thinking that the bomb should be immediately employed against a military target. 46% thought that there should be a demonstration of the weapon in Japan in a show of strength, while another 26% thought that the bomb should be demonstrated here in the U.S. and witnessed by members of the Japanese government. Rounding out the poll was the 11% who thought that the bomb should be demonstrated but not in front of the Japanese, and the final 2% holding the option for keeping the weapons secret and unused.


The 2010 results thus far are displayed below, though if readers were interested in taking the poll they should do so now and then return to read the results.

To take the poll, go HERE. You can be a part of this poll anonymously. Please try and keep in mind the time
and place of the events unfolding: the Japanese resistance to the
unconditional surrender ultimatum developing at Potsdam; the resistance
to massive air raids which in the year or so previous to 6 August saw the destruction of 66 major cities (destroying half of all the combined major centers, killing about 900,000, wounding over a million and making another 9 million homeless); the tenacious fighting in the islands at the
outreaches of the Empire; the thousands of American POWs; the
circulating estimates of the coming Japanese invasion casualties
(hundreds of thousands of Americans, far more so Japanese), and so on.

Caveat: this is a curiosity-poll more than anything–it is hardly scientific. Admittedly the original poll was taken by a very distinct population which represents only itself and could hardly be thought of as representing any wide section of the American population. Still it is interesting to see how folks today respond to the poll even in this environment (where the writer has already discussed the results of the original poll, for example) where the history of the decision to use the bomb and its results are so iconic and well known.

The story goes so (this from my original 2008 post): “In late June 1945, the Interim Committee (a secret, blue chip group established by Secretary of War Stimson with the approval of President Harry S. Truman to examine the problems that could result from the creation of the atomic bomb). decided what exactly to do with the weapons. The group (also including James F. Byrnes, former US Senator soon to be Secretary of State, as President Truman’s personal representative; Ralph A. Bard, Under Secretary of the Navy; William L. Clayton, Assistant Secretary of State; Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and president of the Carnegie Institution; Karl T. Compton, Chief of the Office of Field Service in the Office of Scientific Research and Development and president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology; James B. Conant, Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee and president of Harvard University; and George L. Harrison, an assistant to Stimson and president of New York Life Insurance Company) found the following:

The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender. Those who advocate a purely technical demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiations will be prejudiced. Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use, and believe that such use will improve the international prospects, in that they are more concerned with the prevention of war than with the elimination of this specific weapon. We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.

The Manhattan Project Poll on the Use of Atomic Weapons, July 1945.

Overall the results are fairly similar—of course there were no controls in the 2008-2010 poll, and it was taken by more than just the scientists at Chicago who helped build the bomb in 1945, and of course people were asked to try and place themselves with some judiciousness back into 1945. So the results are necessarily problematic. Even so, I’m not sure right now how to interpret them. (Image: Oppenheimer and Groves at what was left of the tower that suspended “the Gadget” at Alamogordo.)

The results thus far for Option 1—drop the bomb, drop it now, and drop it on a military target–show that roughly twice the number of people were willing to go straight away to military application than among the Chicago scientists in 1945, 27% in 2010 said to use the bomb “now” compared to only 15% in 1945.

I’m not sure if I’m surprised by this or not—people today certainly know and probably could not put out f their mind that the Japanese didn’t surrender until days after the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb. Wouldn’t this mean that more people would think to drop it?

The second option, which frankly I thought would be the overwhelming choice in ’08-’10 (the demonstration of the effectiveness of the bomb) fell from 46% to 36%, which is just about the percentage of folks who were more willing to drop the bomb more-or-less immediately.
I was thinking that this number would increase dramatically. On the other hand I would guess, though, that if the general public was given this poll (somehow) in 1945, that the overwhelming response would be option #1. After all there were millions of Americans in uniform who would’ve been put at risk in an invasion of Japan.   There were also dozens of thousands of American GIs who were in POW camps whose well-being would not have been a primary concern if the Japanese homeland was invaded. Also it must be remembered that just a few weeks before this poll was
given and before the American public could have imaginarily taken it,
there was a massive firebombing of Tokyo–334 of Curtis LeMay B-29’s were
loaded to utmost capacity with the newly-conceived M-69s bomb, an incendiary
so vicious that the fires it produced were all but inextinguishable. The B29’s bombed
Tokyo for hours, killing 100,000 people and making over a million
homeless. In spite of this overwhelming display, the Japanese movement
towards surrender was still secretive and extraordinarily slow¹.

My suspicion is that this number would be overwhelming on the order of 90% or something like that, because by this point the U.S. was swimming in reports of terror and blood and death with nothing but the promise of more, the invasion of Japan leading to the possibility of hundreds of thousands of soldiers being killed. The chance of ending it all in one or two steps was irresistible to the decision makers; had the use of the bombs been publicly debated I feel that there would have been no debate. Remember: no major decision-maker in the U.S. government had any reservations about the military use of the bomb. There were private reservations on the use of the bomb among America’s top military men (Eisenhower, for one), but these men would not make the ultimate decision. (This is a shallow description of a complex situation, but for our purposes here I think it will do.)
.
Results thus far (as of 26 July 2010):

2008 poll takers= 2418 people.
1945 poll takers=    150 people

Option 1. “Use them in the manner that is from the military point of view most effective in bringing about prompt Japanese surrender at minimum human cost to our armed forces.”
2010= 27%
(1945=15%)

Option 2. “Give a military demonstration in Japan to be followed by renewed opportunity for surrender before full use of the weapon is employed.”
2010= 36%
1945=46%)

Option 3: “Give an experimental demonstration in this country, with representatives of Japan present; followed by a new opportunity for surrender before full use of the weapon is employed.”
2010= 22%
(1945=26%)

Option 4. “Withhold military use of the weapons, but make public experimental demonstration of their effectiveness.”
2010=10%
(1945=11%)

Option 5. “Maintain as secret as possible all developments of our new weapons and refrain from using them in this war.”
2010=5%
(1945=2%)

Notes:

1. The business of whether the Japanese were ready to negotiate a peace in the weeks before 6 August is complicated and far from conclusive. It does seem though that no negotiating team could’ve spoken with a unified voice for the Japanese government, and that the issue of an unconditional surrender further complicated the situation.

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Wings Taking over Prayers: Human Flight in 1714

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1090

The esteemed Michael Bernhard Valentini (1657 – 1729), professor of medicine and of physics at Giessen, Germany and natural history collector, produced one of the century’s most important works on the state of museums and natural history collections. Actually, his Museum Museorum¹ was much more than that, its three volumes presenting more descriptions and illustrations of all manner of scientific things than just about anything else of the pre-encyclopedist 17th century. There are many “firsts” to be found in this work, including numerous first-time description of fossils, tropical plants, American botanical specimens, techno items, shells, and on and on, not to mention sections on monsters, dragons and mythical creatures.

One image that caught my attention appears in volume two, and seems to me to be a flying machine, though I can’t recover how it is being kept aloft, or what is providing its power. The pilot is keeping a sharp eye on things with a telescope, and is reckoning position with a compass² and two globes. The canopy of the aircraft seems to be just that, some sort of cloth held in place by pulleys and ropes, though I don;’t know what is providing lift, if anything. Perhaps the whole thing finds its lift and propulsion with the many feathers on the craft’s keel. I’m not sure. But I can say that I don’t recall any other earlier image of a pilot using a telescope and compass.

Valentini also assembled an enormous natural history collection of his own, and in addition to his spectacular collection of the state of scientific and technical knowledge at the begininng of the 18th century, he also included in his book a list of 100+ museums/collections of natural history objects–an extraordinary document for the time and unfortunately one that can’t be reproduced here.

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The History of Rartity: Helium, Nutmeg, Breadfruit and Pepper

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1089

I guess we don’t think much of the rarity of some things. Pepper and other spices were at one point quite rare, and the source of invention and exploration, and war. Nutmeg, for example, a sought-after spice originating from the Banda Island group of Indonesia, once figured in a trade between Holland and England (the Treaty of Breda in 1667) that landed the Dutch the island of Run and control of the nutmeg trade, while the Brits got Manhattan.

Another great example is helium. When these images were produced for The Illustrated London News of 15 March 1919, rigid airships were filled with hydrogen, an explosive, not-happy gas that was the fuel of all manner of aerostatic accidents, everywhere. Helium was still quite rare at this point, a year after the end of WWI and only 54 years after it was first observed¹, and replacing hydrogen with helium was still yet a dream–basically because there wasn’t any, yet, to supply a dirigible².

The first helium-filled airship was still two years away at this point–the U.S. Navy’s great C-7, which made its maiden flight on 1 December 1921. When the USS Shenandoah flew in 1923, it flew with most of the world’s entire supply of the noble gas helium. Its difficult today to think of pepper, nutmeg, sugar, helium and so on in terms of fabulousness and rarity, but it was so. Remember, when Capt Bligh was jettisoned from the HMS Bounty, the ship’s precious cargo was also thrown overboard. And the great treasure that sparked the Tahitian adventure that sparked the mutiny? Breadfruit.

Notes
1. Observed for the first time by astronomer and early astrophysicist Pierre Janssen, in the spectrum of the chromosphere of the sun, in 1868; separated for the first time on Earth in1895 by the British chemist Sir William Ramsay.

2. By the way, “dirigible” is from the French, “diriger” (or “to direct “), meaning steerable, pilotable. This differentiates the dirigible from the balloon, which was not by and large steerable.

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Shadowlands in the History of Technology–the Sewing Machine, ca. 1838

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1088

The anniversaries of two famous legal cases bumped me into thinking about the shadows of what things might be. Aticus Finch (from To Kill a Mockingbird) and Thomas Scopes (of the “Scopes Trial”, the famous or infamous “Monkey Trial”) celebrated their 50th and 85th anniversaries (respectively) this past week. Finch the lawyer lost his case, and Scopes, the defendant, lost his as well.

This reminded me of the shadowland stories of roads not taken, or illustrious events whose outcomes didn’t quite coincide with the fame and interest of the way things started out.One example from Shadowlands that springs to mind is that of the sewing machine, and the case of William Hunt. Hunt was a remarkable person, an inventor of ingenious and remarkable things, some ubiquitous–and of these, one good example is the safety pin. The “could’ve been” part was the sewing machine. Eight years or so before the battle for precedence and patent began between Isaac Singer and Elias Howe began, Hunt had arrived at the principle solutions for an automatic sewing machine.

He decided not to seek a patent for the machine. Now, in and of itself, this is not terrifically uncommon in the history of invention. As a matter of fact Thomas Jefferson, the inventor of the standard American moldboard plow (tinkering with it from the 1780s to the 18-teens), did not seek a patent for his invention. By 1814 he came closer to the iconic and revolutionary plow by producing his in iron. The steel, self scouring plow would take another two decades to be introduced by John Deere. (Decades latter Abraham Lincoln would apply for and receive a patent for a boat/buoy lifting device, making him the only president to ever receive a patent.)

The reason that Hunt didn’t pursue his sewing machine was based in deep morality–he chose not to patent the thing so that this new advancement in technology would not make seamstresses obsolete, pushing them out of work and costing them their jobs. Of course the machine was introduced a few years later by Singer and Howe, and then the rest is history–just about every invention is going to annoy somebody.

But the irony here is that even though Mr. Hunt chose the high road out of the sewing machine quagmire, saving the jobs of seamstresses for another few years, he didn’t have any moral hesitations about his next invention–an improvement to a steel-cased cartridge for rifles. Evidently he was more comfortable with killing machines than he was with protecting the jobs of the working/suffering classes.

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50,000 Watt Design: WLS Station Catalogs, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1084

Radio station WLS of Chicago, the home station of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and named for it (“WLS” is “World’s Largest Store”) is an old, famous station, home of ideas burnt into the memories of folks within the broadcasting range of the station, stretching west to Colorado and southeast to North Carolina.

I just wanted to share these four annual “family albums” published by the station between 1938 to 1941–they are lovely and elicit a certain hopefulness of those great high days of radio.

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The Industrial Revolution and Inventing Luxury for the Working Poor

JF Ptak Science Books

One of the things that I’ve not thought of before was the invention of luxury for the working poor.

The first comfortable chair, the first luxurious chair,. ever bought by a member of the working, laboring class was purchased in the United States on July 23, 1852 at 11.11 in the morning.

Or perhaps not.

But what did happen around this time was that a commodity that was over and above the absolute necessity–say for an upholstered chair with springs–did become available en masse to the vast majority of working/poor Americans. Or at least that’s what I’m thinking. The Industrial Revolution, now 80 years old or so, began to rub up against objects that we’re formerly only available through extended labor and craftsman but were now becoming widely accessible and for cheap because of mechanized production.

So, for example, the stuffed comfy chair which had been the nearly exclusive domain of the middle- and wealthy classes were now patented inventions that were mass produced, their cost coming down because of the ease of production and the vast new demand. The industrialization of luxury found its true invention in mid-century Americas and was subject to enormous variation and tremendously expanded development–so much so that in just the next few decades there would be massively distributed catalogs containing almost nothing but eminently affordable necessaries and new luxuries. By the 1880s the mail order catalog was becoming commonplace, as was the ability for the poorer classes to purchase formerly unaffordable objects–luxury for the masses had been discovered, and an enormous consuming class had been invented.

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