A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

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Category: Technology, History of

Things That Were But Almost Weren’t, Part II: the Disappearance of Alex Bell

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 10

Part (A)–Alex Graham Bell as a Purposefully Forgotten Element in the History of the Telephone,
and
Part (B) the Author Who Forgets Bell Fails to See the Future of the Telephone as a Communication Device.

Well, Alexander Graham Bell didn’t totally disappear in these very early reports on the telephone (published in the very influential Nature, an Illustrated Weekly Journal of the Science, London, May and August, 1876), but might as well have. The author of these two reports, published just on the heals of Bell’s announcement in America in March 1876, was J. Munro and he was not a Bell-believer. In these two reports Munro champions Elisha Gray as the inventor of the telephone, and does so with the exclusion of discussing Bell. There are however numerous other references to others working in the field–which was crowded in 1875 and 1876–so at least according to my line of thought the omission of Bell needed to be accomplished with some severe and anti-penetrating thought.

Now it must be stated that the history of the patent for the telephone from 1861 to 1876 is indeed complex and tricky
, and there are at least four others who may be considered to have preceded Bell, in some regards that is, but the fact that Bell was granted the patent and that he resisted all claims and attempts at penetration against his patent(s) beginning even within a year of the invention, says something pretty rock-solid about his place in the priority of the invention. Munro does come around to this , somewhat in his early summation and history of the telephone (Heroes of the Telegraph), but his desire for not-Bell comes through very strongly. (It should be noted that Sir William Thomson , who introduced the telephone to Europe in the fall of 1876, thought of it being the most perfect development of the telegraph, a “speaking telegraph” if you will, and hence the name of Munro’s book.)

In the second paper (the first appeared 15 May 1876, the second 24 August 1876) Munro continues on with his appreciation of the telephone’s musical virtuosity to the exclusion of using the telephone for spoken communication. “There is a possibility here, we must admit, of a curious use of electricity. When we are going to a dancing party there will be no need to provide a musician”, he writes, as the dancers will be able to pay their electrician for the privilege of getting their piano via wire. It is understandable to some degree to appreciate the telephone as a sort of radio, but Thomson had by this time made his report of the spectacular sensation of hearing *spoken words* coming from the telephone and what that experiment meant, and it is hard to understand (even at such great distance and hindsight) how Munro could’ve missed this report from Thomson, and how he could no make the intuitive leap to using the new invention for communication rather than amusement. I think Munro just plain got it wrong, or got it only partially right, which in this case makes him totally wrong.

(I should note here for the sake of clarity that when Thomson heard the spoken words that he missed, or the telephone missed, all of the monosyllables–still, one could assume that improvements would be made and that at some near point they could be understood.)

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Industrial & Technological art — Naming Things — Perception — Technology, History of
Things That Almost Were But Weren’t–Photography in 1839 and Television 1924

JF Ptak Science Books

Here are two examples of Things That Almost Were But Weren’t: Photography (1839) and Television (1928). The first item contains a woodcut of a heliotype (being the first image of a photograph produced by non-photographic means); the second displays the method for receiving images of radio shows but is not a television.

First: The first published non-photographic image of a non-photograph or “sunpicture”) from a collection of papers on the basics of photography, published early in the birth-year of photography, 1839.

.

Golding Bird’s (1814-1854) “A Treatise on Photogenic Drawing”, published in The Mirrour, London, 1839, contains five¹ significant and extremely early papers on the photographic process (appearing in The Mirrour numbers 945, 946, 947, 949 & 950, April 20-May 25, 1839). [A much larger, more detailed image is available here; I didn’t want to lay the book flat on the scanner to get a more detailed image of the copy here at hand.]

It is page 241 (issue no. 945, Saturday April 20) that really peaked my imagination–it contains the first facsimile woodcut of a photogenic drawing, which is essentially the first publication of an image produced by any sort of photographic process. (The image is referred to as “iconic”² by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this via the wonder Luminous Lint blog for historical and contemporary photography, here. The process here is the ‘sun picture”, and while not exactly considered a photograph per se, it is a photographic process, making this the first image of a non-photographic photograph. It predates the first mass-published photograph by four years and the first (entirely) photographically illustrated book (The Pencil of Nature) by six years. The sun picture, or heliotype, was first described in print in 1801 by both Thomas Wedgewood and Humphrey Davy, and although the process was at least 39 years old at this time there are no recorded published images produced by that process. (The woodcut is much larger than usual for The Mirrour, and is also of a unique brown/red color, and of a different hue than any other woodcut that we have seen in any of the issues of the first 45 years of this publication. I was concerned at one time that this image was a photographic process of some sort, but it isn’t, and I’m convinced that it is a woodcut–a very unusual species of woodcut for this publication, but a woodcut nevertheless.)

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Photography, history — Technology, History of
The First American Map Showing Elevations at Which Trees are Found

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 7

U.S. Western Botanical Profile of Forest Tress, 1854.

U.S. Pacific Rail Road Explorations and Survey, War Department. Botanical Profile Representing the Forest Trees along the Route Explored by A.W. Whipple…From Fort Smith to San Pedro….

Published in Washington, D.C.: 1854. Prepared by J.M. Bigelow (botanist of the Expedition), and printed by Wagner and McGuigan by lithograph in Philadelphia. 47”x21”, printed in many colors.

(Here we see a detail of a 2×3″ section for the map for the San Francisco Mountains range.)

This spectacular map presents the forest trees encountered by Whipple on his expedition for the USPRR from Fort Smith (Arkansas) to San Pedro ( actually Los Angeles, California). The profile shows the trees and their leaves at the elevations encountered—actually the trees are graphically represented by either their shape or their leaves, each of which stand no more than ¼ inch tall. There is a key explanation to the tree symbols at bottom left identifying 42 different trees—including the Cereus Giganteus, which first identified only a few years earlier. There are three levels of graphical representation depicting the route containing more than 250 small images of trees. This is a charming and informative graphical display of data, and is one of the first published efforts to share this information–it certainly seems to me that this is the first representation of the elevation at which trees in the United States and territories might be found. Humboldt’s map is certainly earlier, and there are occasional mentions of tree regions (worldwide and in general) that can be found in the atlas to accompany von Humboldt’s Kosmos, but there is certainly nothing this large and detailed and exactly. This is just a very cool map.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Technology, History of
Advancing Modernity, 1965: the Enormous Footprint of the UNIVAC 490 Computer

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 6

The State of the Art in Advanced Computing, 1965

Six-Foot-Long Blueprint for the Installation of an UNIVAC 490 at the UNIVAC Headquarters in Herkimer, NY

This is a rare blueprint for the layout of the new
UNIVAC 490 computer for installation at
the UNIVAC Utica (NY) headquarters. What
makes this blueprint particularly interesting is that it gives an overview for
the placement of the entire 490 system. The central attractive feature of this blueprint is the church-like feel
of the placement of the components, with the “control console” being roughly in
the center of the plan. The operator
would sit at the central console facing about 25 feet worth of Uniservos, with
the 490 itself located 18 feet away on the left; various drums (about 20 feet
worth) were located behind the CC as were various processors and the 1004
(card) punch. The whole plan seems to
incorporate something like an 18×40 foot space, *plus* five exterior rooms
(manager, confernece, tape storage, tab room, and (my favorite, service and
repair).

This fills me with memories of Victorian steam whistle
designs (lovely, ornate) and water-driven mills in
Lowell (long and narrow, utilizing river bank and available sunlight). It is a document that speaks of its time,
elegantly portraying the size and scope of one of the leading computers of the
day and its placement at one of its
maker’s principal headquarters.

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Computer Tech/History — Technology, History of
Alonzo Church’s Great Mathematical Logic

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 2

Church’s Mathematical Logic is offered here in a rarely seen format–namely, the one that was produced, printed and distributed by the members of the class. At the end of the description is an insightful story told by Albert Tucker about the mechanics of producing such a work.

Church, Alonzo: Mathematical Logic, Lectures
by Alonzo Church,
PrincetonUniversity,
October 1935-January 1936; Princeton:
, 1936. 1st edition. 124 leaves 4to.
Original printed wrappers. Very good condition. $2,000.00

This is the Library of Congress’ copy, with the original
mimeographed LC callcard laid in. +++Lecture notes of Church’s class taken by
six of his graduate students (Ficken, Landau, Ruja, Singleton, Steenrod, Sweer,
Weyl) in the fall term of 1935 at the Institute for Advanced Studies at
Princeton.

The following is an interview between William Aspray and
Albert Tucker on the publication (so-called) of this work, taken from the Princeton University website on the Princeton mathematics community in the 1930’s. Needless to say, Church was an enormous
influence, changing the entire face of mathematical logic. (It should be noted
to that A.M. Turing came to study with Church at Princeton and particualry in
this course in the fall of 1935.)

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Computer Tech/History — Technology, History of