Category: Uncategorized

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I found this concentrated view of a concentrated house in a non-concentrated area that would become a super-concentrated locale. The tiny concentrated house with the tiny fence was situated about 1000 feet away from where the Brooklyn Bridge onramps are today.  The “Ancient View of the Present Junction of Pearl & Chatham Square” shows an acre or two of lower Manhattan in the 18th century. The concentrated house isn’t on the legend, but it looks like some sort of public house, as does the next concentrated house just across the lane. 

Legend: (A) Catiemuts Hill, (B) the Fresh Water, (C) the Fresh Water Bridge, (D) the Jews Burying Ground, (E)  Rutgers Farm House, (F) Bowery Rd., (G) the road to the ferry (present Pearl Street), (H) road to the city, (I)  road to Rolck Pond, (J) the City Commons, and (K) Walpherts Meadow.

[Image source: the lithograph is from the Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York by D.T. Valentine for 1861, opposite page 521.]

 

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Earlier in this blog I wrote a bit called “Dreaming of the 10-Ton Eiffel Tower Bullet, 1891” which was about the massive free-fall bullet ride that was to be part of an Eiffel Tower entertainment package–the apparatus wasn’t built, which was probably a good thing, what with dropping 20 people in a steel bullet from 900′ feet not being such a brilliant idea¹.   The Eiffel Tower had been built a few years before for the 1889 world’s fair in Paris to mixed reviews–actually there was a call for its deconstruction post-fair because so many people found it so confounding/unappealing.  The Columbian Expo’s greatest “response” to the Eiffel Tower and the not-building-another-one was probably the 264′ Ferris wheel–it was very popular, and after the fair it was dismantled and moved to another location in Chicago in 1895, and then disassembled again and moved for use in the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904–after that it was ingloriously retired and sold for scrap (for $1800). 

This all came up just now because in browsing the 1892 volume of Scientific American I bumped into this drawing of a proposed exhibit/attraction for Chicago–an observation tower with a “slide”. Folks would be hauled up to the deck at the top, after which they would be loaded onto a car (descent controlled by air brakes) and sent back down on a 5^o grade. There’s no help in the article or drawing to determine just how massive this structure was supposed to be, though it looks very substantial, hundreds of feet tall.  Given that the new form of building at this time was the skyscraper and that the only thing to make the skyscraper practicable was an elevator, this was probably a good advertisement/display/p.r. stunt for the machine–even more so for the brakes on the sledges and the elevator, because you really can’t have tall buildings without elevators, and you can’t have elevators without good brakes. 

 

 

 Notes:

1. (Check out this link for a fuller story on this bizarre and probably fatal idea https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2011/11/dreaming-of-the-10-ton-eiffel-tower-luxury-bullett-addendum.html )

 

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2578

“The truest attraction of “found poetry” is that it should remain lost”– not Marcel Duchamp

“The highest pleasure in finding poetry is the ability to lose it again”–not Ambrose Bierce

There’s a certain identifiable current that runs just beneath the surface of created quotes about found poetry–and I tend to agree, except that I think I enjoy “found poetry” more so than the great majority of poetry-in general, so if I am to read any poetry at all I think that poetry must be found now and then.  And the thing about Found Poetry (now capitalized!) is that is can be obscure  (“Obscurity is never so clear as when it is never noticed”–not Mark Twain) or so much part of the visual culture that its very unforgivable presence makes it invisible–though I have no doubt that the overt intellectual and traitor E. pound would disagree.  

Found Poetry I think has been around for a century or so, finding its roots with the Dadists and the solitary art anti-movement M. Duchamp.  And probably an argument could be made for the acoustomatic  continuation of another found-hyphenated movement–like Stockhausen/Varese/Xenakis musique concrète–is an outgrowth (or something) of the Found/Readymade embarkation of the nineteen-teens.  Maybe too something could be made of the argument that they are all coming from a long and very slow development of trompe l’oeil and Still Life, as there is a definite visual/found quality to many of these works (as with “A Bachelor’s Drawer”, painted between 1890-1894 by John Haberle).

 [Source: Wikimedia]

Still Life images like this of “discovered” assortments of human-created bits, snapshots of unintentional arrangements, must certainly have a sense of Foundness surrounding them.  Of course, a pastoral scene of cows-in-a-field or a John Constable sky or some such are necessarily “found” because they are an uncontrollable part of nature–what I’m talking about is a discovered sense of some sort of human construction, and that certainly includes words. (On the other hand, I did write a post “The Found Poetry of the Vocabulary of Clouds” on a John Comenius text of 1726, here: https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2015/05/annotated-found-poetry-of-clouds-1726.html.)

So, for today, one part of the concept of Found Poetry I’d like to look at is in the science–in particular, title pages and indexes for works int eh sciences, and in this case the works are historic, though they could easily have been from any odd page in any opened book, anywhere.  

The first example is the title page of Galileo’s epochal Sidereus Nuncius (1610):

SIDEREAL MESSENGER
unfolding great and very wonderful sights
and displaying to the gaze of everyone,
but especially philosophers and astronomers,
the things that were observed by
GALILEO GALILEI,
Florentine patrician
and public mathematician of the University of Padua,
with the help of a spyglass lately devised by him,
about the face of the Moon, countless fixed stars,
the Milky Way, nebulous stars,
but especially about
four planets
flying around the star of Jupiter at unequal intervals
and periods with wonderful swiftness;
which, unknown by anyone until this day,
the first author detected recently
and decided to name
MEDICEAN STARS

[Full text via internet archive, here: https://archive.org/details/siderealmessenge80gali]

 A second example comes from the impossibly accomplished Christian Huygens’ Cosmotheoros, The Celestial World Discover’d: or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets–and it comes from the table of contents:

 

JF Ptak Science Books 

JF Ptak Science Books   Veterans Day Repost

JF Ptak Science Books

The Illustrated London News published this very sobering image showing the general reader in London in 1933.  It is entitled “In Memory of the 1,104,890 British Dead of the Great War”, and was drawn by D. Macpherson.  It very graphically represents all of the war dead of the British Empire of 1914-1918, depicted as a line of men, four across, extending from London to Durhham. 

The column passes from London through Hitchin, through Bedford and Peterborough and Grantham, past Sheffield and Leeds and York, and then on to Durham.  An extraordinary column of the war dead: 900,000 of the dead were not soldiers at the beginning of the war, but they sure died that way, and this map shows them all in a line, marching from  a point 269 miles distant.

And a detail of the column:

 

 

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

 

Source: ETH-Bibliothek  http://www.e-rara.ch/zut/content/pageview/5616752

It seems to me that the winds were named long before clouds were were–in many ways that is understandable given the nature of winds and clouds, and also given the burden of understandable “proof” in that the winds were categorized for centuries before clouds received their first scientific treatment in the early 19th century.  (See this earlier post on Luke Howard, “On Naming Clouds But Not Illustrating Them, 1815” https://historyofideasblog.com/books/2012/01/on-naming-clouds-and-not-illustrating-them-1815.html.)

The chart above,”De ventis” is a gorgeous and half-hypnotic anemographic chart of wind roses, which was an engraved illustration from Francesco Barozzi’s (1537-1604). Cosmographia in quatuor libros distributa summo ordine, miraque facilitate ac brevitate ad magnam Ptolomaei mathematicam constructionem, ad universamque astrologiam instituens… and published in Venice in 1598. 1598

From the same source–which was a general work on cosmography but included exercises in perspective as well as extended discussions of terrestrial interest–comes this excellent chart of the wind names:

 

 

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I just wanted to take a moment and compliment those responsible for crafting these fine engine catalogs for the famous Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp engines. The 46 liter twin-row, 18-cylinder air-cooled radial engines were among the finest of their kind ever constructed, and were flown in some of the greatest aircraft produced by the United States (including the A-36 Invader, P-61 Black Widow, P-47 Thunderbolt (!), F4U Corsair (!), DC-6, C-46 Commando, and others).

The first of two catalogs here for the Double Wasp R-2800-CA was produced by Pratt & Whitney in 1946 and for its 112 pages looks like a superior maintenance catalog, with concise and well written explanations and clear illustrations.  It also has a great cross section which utilizes a black background, making the image jump from the page. (You can compare it with a similar image taken from a Twin Wasp catalog four years later; I’m not sure more use of the black background is not made.)

The second manual (Twin Wasp 2SD13-G and D5 Engines) was a restricted document when produced in 1949, and was much chunkier (170+pp), and somehow seems a lot more accessible to the not-a-mechanic writer.  There is even a six-page “Unpacking the Engine” chapter with many photo illustrations–now it seems like reading the table of contents and seeing the six pages dedicated to unpacking was a little over the top, it turns out when you read the section and see the gigantic wood en box it came in and the other packing bits around it, you actually could use an unpacking manual.  It is just an impressive document. 

• If you had use for such thing they are both offered for sale in the blog’s bookstore, here. 

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

There’s something about a strong design in brilliant red:

This striking work is the cover for a circular produced by the National Fire Protection Association in 1929.  It is a simple folded sheet, with some basic data about joining the association, and someone did a very good job of creating artwork for the front cover of this simple publication.

Here are some other small designs for pamphlet covers that I’ve found, and scanned, and cleaned  up, and made into 14×19 posters, which look pretty good and which are also crazily color-hungry:

And just at the last moment, another found design in red:

This is the cover of a small pamphlet by W. Howard Grady, published in Kansas City, in 1925.  From what I can tell in a quick read there seems to be no overriding approach to the New America outside of faith, freedom, and “buy American”. 

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2504

Leonard R. Bester was a marine architect and naval engineer who produced this very interesting document on his highly-stylized concepts for boat/ship design. The vessels are all  certainly streamlined, and are long and narrow, and share the same “tubular” hull construction. He recorded them in these documents (below) which were sent by him to secure copyright protection to the U.S. copyright office, one copy of which was sent on to the Library of Congress.  They were certainly produced on a very small production scale, perhaps only a few copies made, given what looks like their home-cooked flavor–in any event, they did not receive any circulation that I can find, and are not listed anywhere in WorldCat (which is a librarian’s tool for recording and documenting books) showing that nothing by Bester is listed in any contributing library worldwide.  

Bester was definitely a working naval architect who possessed at least several patents¹ who worked for the Todd Shipping Company (NYC) and who was listed by 1919 as a member of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers² . The work looked interesting and intriguing to me, but is also in a field that I know basically nothing about, so I thought that given the possible interest in it to designers and engineers that I would at least enter the information about the work here in internettubewebland where it might be findable to someone interested in this sort of creative thinking. 

• All of this is offered for sale at the blog bookstore, here. 

The work seems to be divided into two section, each section with three parts,  and although not dated per se the title pages such as they are are copyrighted 1935 and 1936, with the later having a copyright/Library of Congress acquisitions stamp for 1936. The blueprints, on the other hand, date back as far as 1931, so there’s a bit of a mix. The work certainly is not passed 1936.  Altogether there are 19 folding blueprints of boats, 36 pages of text, 12 photographs on three leaves, and several folding charts. 

Section I:  The Streamline Fleet (1935), divided into three sections.

Part I

• “Features and Advantages of the New Tubular Type Boat”, pp 3-6
• Tech illustrations in 12 figures, pp 7-9, followed by 6 leaves  of 2 figur/leaf of various cross-sections
• “Design Features”, pp 10-14, with a folding plate: “Comparative plate of tubular type hull structure”, 13×18″
• “Main points of advantages of tubular design”, pp 15-17
• “Summary of the Streamline Tubular Boat”, pp 18-19
• “High Speed Yachts”, p. 22
• “Future of the Yachting Industry”, pp 23-26
• Conclusion, p. 27

Part II

• “Propulsion Machinery, Diesel Power”, pp 28-30, with 3 leaves of tables and 2 folding plates on the turbine

Part III

• “Navy Boats”, pp 31-36.

Part IV (folding plates)

• “High Speed tubular 50′ to 60′ streamline diesel cruiser, twin screw”, 11×17″, 1931
• High Speed tubular 54′ streamline diesel cruiser, twin screw”, 11×17″, 1931
• “Strealine 85′ Diesel Yacht”, 11×17″, 1932
• “Tubular steel 100′ streamline diesel commuting yacht, twin or triple screw” 11×17 inches (1931)
• Schematic: “tubular design showing strong and light construction”, 12×16″
• “Tubular steel 120′ streamline diesel yacht,  triple screw” 1931 11×17
• “High Speed Turbine–Tubular–110 to 130′ Streamline Diesel Yacht, quadruple screw”, (1931)  11×24″
• “High Speed Turbine–Tubular–150′ Streamline Diesel Yacht, quadruple screw”, (1931)  11×24″
• “Quadruple screw diesel powered auxiliary torpedo boa”, 1935, 12×30″

 

Section II:  Streamlined Tubular Hull Structure, Design, Layouts, and Interior Arrangement of Cruisers and Yachts

Part I contains seven folding plans and cross section blueprints of the design, includes the following sections:

• Streamlined Diesel Cruiser, 1936, 34×8′, 10×13 inches
• Streamlined Diesel Cruiser, 1936, 40×8′, 10×13 inches
• Streamlined Diesel Cruiser, 1936, 45×9′, 10×13 inches
• Streamlined Diesel Cruiser, 1936, 50×10′, 10×13 inches
• Streamlined Diesel Cruiser, 1936, 57×11′, 12×17 inches
• Streamlined tubular twin screw diesel commuting yacht, 23×16 inches
• another copy of Streamlined tubular twin screw diesel commuting yacht, 23×16 inches, though with different applications.

Part II contains 3 leaves, each with four original photographs each, with tissue guards. These are photos of scale models of Bester’s designs, though the dimensions are unfortunately not mentioned.

Part III concentrates on “express transportation yachts”, and contains five folding cross section blueprints:

• 65′ Express Transportation Yacht, drawing measuring 17×11 inches
• 65′ Express Transportation Yacht for 60 people, 19×11 inches
• 75′ Express Transportation Yacht for 75 people, 10×22″
• 85′ Express Transportation Yacht for 85 people, 10×23″
• 100′ Express Transportation Yacht for 110 people, 10×30″

And some hull lines:

 

Notes:

1. Bester patented an approach to “tubular” hull construction (“Ship hull design”, filed in 1936 and patented in 1939, US2158214A), which seems reasonable to me (as a non-engineer). He describes it so:  “It has been the practice in the making of steel vessels such as are commonly used, to provide framework consisting essentially of transverse web frames coupled with longitudinal members, whereby to give form and rigidity to the vessel. Even where the vessels were oval or cylindrical in general cross-section, the framing invariably embodied straight pieces. This type of construction had the considerable disadvantage that it was quite heavy and it was not possible to attain any great amount of saving in weight by variations in the arrangement and size of the several frame members. It was also impossible in such construction to reduce the labor cost in the building there of and also to reduce the cost of propulsion or materially increase the speed of the vessel without overstraining the hull structure.”   Source:  Google Patents, http://www.google.com/patents/US2158214

2. Proceedings of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, volume 25, 1918, listing of the Society’s leadership and membership.