JF Ptak Science Books

Mapping Humans, 1400-1759: Bloodletting, Moles, Bumps and the Stars

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1123

The history of mapping the goods and ills, the past and present and the future on the human body must be about as old as writing, or older.  Ever since you could draw geometric proofs in the sand people have been mapping out the connections (or lack of) the parts of the human body, their relations to one another, the influences of the stars on them, the control of dermatological deformities on the health of the system, the lump and pits and dings on the cranium as an indicator of intelligence and prospects for the future, connecting the lines of electroshock results on facial contortions with the inner musings of the criminal brain, and on and on.  What brings my attention to this though are the overall full-body indexes, the general NYC subway map-like overlays on the entire body, and what they look like out of context. 

For my purposes here, it really is just the out of context element, the found art, the pre-Absurdist, pre-Dadaist images that they maps create.  Granted the real stuff behind these images are by far more interesting, but I wanted to add these pictures to the blog's alternative art category before their Duchampian attraction left me. 

To start with, for example, in this very breezy survey is the indexing of the very first illustration of a human skeleton. from Anathomia ossium corporis humani, printed the year after Columbus arrived in the Americas--this was the first revelation to the real world of science following a sleepytime of about 8oo years under the very heavy gaze of institutional religions. 

In the same year that Columbus set sail for India came the anatomical publication of John de Ketham, with his overall map of astrological influences on the body, followed by a pretty-useful treatise on the treatment of war wounds, as well as the decidedly less-useful map of his locations for the best place to bleed a person of their bad humours. 

Well, it really wasn’t like that, not how I mean by by snippy modernist viewpoint looking back on medical history with no contextual appreciation.  Bloodletting was an approach to healthfulness, as blood was seen as one of the four major elements (or “humours”) of the human body that needed to be kept in balance.  This was

accomplished via the application of leeches or by the more common (and quicker) practice of venesection, or opening a vein to allow the blood to come out. (Let’s reference Steve Reich’s magnificent “Bruise Blood” creation of 1966 at this point—I don’t think that I’ll ever have a better chance to drop a reference to this piece of revolutionary music in regards to venesection again.)  Thus this map was map for the practiconers of bloodletting—the physicians, and more probably the barbers and other assistants who would inherit this lesser procedure from the more-busy doctors.  In the history of maps of anatomy and the general practice of mapping the human condition, this woodcut x-ray of the best places to drain human blood would not survive close to the age of modernity, disappearing almost entirely by the 18th century, and becoming much more scarce well before that.

Moving on to Richard Saunders (who I wrote about more fully here)continued a very ancient tradition into England, deep into modernity, by mapping the divine cosmos of moles and other facial extras for the purposes of health and prophecy:

 

Richard Saunders.  Physiognomie and Chiromancie, Metroscopie, the Symmetrical Proportions and Signal Moles of the Body, Fully and Accurately Explained; With Their Natural Predictive Significations Both to Men and Women (published in London, 1671, by Nathaniel Brook).in which he divines the psyche and the future with peoples’ moles. 

Visceral Anatomy From Reisch's "margarita Philosophica," Johann Schott, 1503

I couldn’t let the above-mentioned  bloodletting image pass without reference to this excellent woodcut for Johann Stoeffler’s  Calendarium Romanum Magnum, printed in Oppenheym by the redoubtable  Jacob Koebel, (24 March) 1518.  It is a glorious display (entitled Simulcarum humani corporis) of seasonal (!) purgative and bloodletting locations on the body, meant to accompany a longish essay by Stoeffler on the practice in general.  The bulk of the book, however, had very little to do with this practice and was actually commissioned as a reform to the Julian calendar, provided with the impetus of the Lateran Council (1512-1517).  The result was a series of forty-one  propositions on the calendar and calendar-related practices, including work on eclipses, the zodiac, the occurrence of leap years, the Alexandrine and Roman calendars, the calculation of the occurrence of Easter, and so on, including the seasonal practices of bloodletting.

I enjoyed this torso map by Salomon Alberti  in his Historia plerarumque partium humani corporis, in usum tyronum edita. Vitebergae (p1583, 8°; ibid., 1585, 8°; enlarged, ibid., 1601, 8°;(published from 1583 to 1630) for it simplicity.

The rest of the images I'm going to have to show here as a simple Image Dump, at least for the time being:

New Map: Distribution of Slavery in North Carolina, 1860

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1099

My daughter Emma and I put this map together a few years ago for a project that just didn't come about.  I found it this morning and thought to just post the thing and its tables.  It could certainly be dressed up some--or at all.  Color would be nice. So would a clickable interactive bit.  Caveats firmly in place, here it is--so far as I could tell there wasn't such a descriptive tool like this available to quickly show the distribution of slave ownership (by county) in North Carolina. (Map is expandable.)

.  

Data below in expanded reading section, slavery distribution arranged by heaviest concentrations to least.  

Once you get into the mountain region of the state (the last third or so) where there are lots of hardscrabble/subsistence/poor farmers, slave ownership drops quickly. (I'm not sure how the Cherokee slave ownership factors into this.)  It would be nice to know how NC compares to the rest of the slave holding states, and I might do that yet--but for now I just wanted to share this relatively raw map before I lose it for good.

Dunkerque to D-Day, from the Invasion of England to the Invasion of Europe

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1055

(Including a short tale of when Winston Churchill's nephew, John Spencer Churchill, wound up passed out on the back seat of my 1979 Chrysler New Yorker.)

This map pretty well tells the story of the perilous situation of Europe and England at the beginning of June, 1940.  It appeared in the Illustrated London News on the heals of Churchill's "Blood, Soil, Sweat and Tears" speech, and was a very frank presentation of the wearing of the war.  By this point in the war Nazi Germany had successfully invaded Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, sweeping across Europe in a broad westward movement, backing up British and French troops all the way to the sea at Dunkerque, where a monumental rescue operation ("Operation Dynamo") saved them.  (There was an enormous amount of materiel left there on the beach, a devastating loss for the British Expeditionary Force, nearly crippling it.) This was a bad time for the Allies, this part of the war coined by Winston Churchill in 18 June 1940 in the House of Commons by:  "The Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin". There was very little good that came of these few months for the U.K and the Allies, though four things do stand out: (1) as I just mentioned, the saving of 300,000+ troops at Dunkerque; (2) the resignation of Neville Chamberlain, (3) the coming of Winston Churchill  as Prime Minister of the U.K., and (4) the first deciphering of the Enigma at Bletchley.  Other than that, the situation was dim, and these invasion routes (published at t he very time that Germany was studying such a feat in its "Operation Sea Lion", or "Unternehmen Seelöwe").

The endgame at Dunkerque took place almost four years to the day of the invasion of Europe, when the intent (though not placement) all of these arrows were turned around for the Allied operation at the Normandy beaches on 6 June 1944.. 

It came to pass in 1985 that some friends and I had drinks with John Spencer Churchill, a man who was at Dunkerque and who reported on it to his uncle Winston.  (A slightly longer story on this meeting with Mr. Churchill appears below.)  After much else I finally asked Mr. Churchill if there was any particular sound that he remembered from being at Dunkerque.  I do not recall his phrasing, but what he said was that the beach at Dunkerque was rocky, pebbly, and that the sound made by tens of thousands of boots on that shore was "disgusting".  He also said that the mixture of petrol, wind and grit burned the eyes and tasted bad.  It was of course fascinating to hear a first hand description, especially a memory of something so uncommon and visceral. It was unexpected to me, though now when i read about Dunkirque I can imagine its smell thanks to this encounter. 

First Address by Winston Churchill as Prime Minister.

Propaganda Maps of a Different Sort--Health Advertisements & Carto-Weirdia

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1021

"When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales." --Mark Twain (Life on the Mississippi, 1883) 

In this blog's continuing series on maps and propaganda come these two interesting and appealing examples, both appearing in England in the late 'teens though their histories are older than that. They do come from a much longer tradition of finding physical landmarks of the body by which to navigate biological and mental needs--bumps and blemishes of the head, "reading" blood and urine,  general mechanical measurements of all sorts, and on and on, even so far as to include mapping the significance of the appearance and proximity of body moles and warts. (I addressed this earlier in a post on Mapping the Human Cosmos via Moles, here.)

  The first image belongs to Beecham's Pills, long a staple of chemist/pharmacy and general goods sellers, which were basically patent medicine cure-alls composed of aloe, ginger and soap, and which found a happy market for more than 150 years (1842-1998).  Evidently Beecham's did do something right in there somewhere, as they had some sort of positive effect on digestion.  Other than that I don't know, though the little pills seem to not have caused any direct harm.

The company has a long and huge advertising history, though one of the favorites that I've seen from this early part of the 20th century had folks marching through the globe, and happy to be doing so so long as they had their care trusted to Beecham's.  

Secondly is this odd bit that locates the center of one part of human health in the veins of head, showing that if you can indeed follow them like a map, then you're in trouble and need to ingest the product sponsoring the scare measure, Urodonal ("dissolves uric acid"). Urodonal is of French origins and dates back to at least 1874; it was a quack medicine composed of "pleasant herbs" which would cure all sorts of aliments relating to kidney distress, plus fatigue, tired feet, aching back and of course obesity. 

The man in top hat was pointing to the Vesuvian vein with his cane, just in case you missed the thing.  But I guess in the modern age when everyone must "take" something, the nonsense concoction of Urodonal was better than most because it--like Beecham's--didn't actually do anything nasty to your body.  Unless of course you self-administered your medical care and relied solely on these agents for your necessary treatment for a real illness, which would mean trouble--and which is an entirely different story. 

Imaging Imagination: Diagrams of Humor & the Center of Levity, 1878

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 985 

[Wood-eating woman tells a joke to distract  three men sharing the last chair in creation in alternative chairless dot universe.]

Acerbic and punctilious, this work by an anonymous (Ambrose Bierce-like) late 19th-century cataloger of human-ness attempted to diagramaitcally display the sharing of humor among people.  The resulting images--all unexplained, not indexed, and left to a logical imagination--fit very nicely into a developing section on this blog called  Maps and Diagrams of Imagination and Ideas.

{Woman finger-ingests chair presented to her by knee-connected chair-minions from talking-mustache close-male-pelvis universe.]

In reality this short, small, wordless publication's images looks like  natural philosophy textbook images displaying ideas like momentum and gravity...often they would be quite prosaic, with unnecessary natural accoutrement, little bits of added detail that had nothing really to do with the image displayed. The real intent of this document was to illustrate the center of gravity--it would've been more helpful if the publication had a title page or text of any kind for that matter, but since it doesn't the mind ran free, allowing these representations to be a geometry of shared humor.  Which of course they are not--but the images do have a certain coy funniness to them...

[Woman makes wooden point by stabbing Ear-lobed Mustache Man in the heart with her wooden palm finger.]

Some of the other posts that could be included in this Imagining the Imagination category include:

First photograph of a smell:

Mathematical Thinking being Thought

Map of Nothing:

A Map of Holes in the Sky:  Heaven

Map of Color-Sense Placement

Unexpected Sense Impressions from Antique Prints: Sound

A Map of Comparative Moralities for Women

{How it would be done if men gave birth.]

 

{She is smiling. What do the other expression imply?]

Bombing and the End of the World: the Physics of 1932 And All That

JF Ptak Science Books 

1932 in my book turns out to be one of the most collectively epochal years in the history of science.  Certainly others stand out for individual achievements, like 1905 (Einstein’s four papers over two volume of the Annalen), 1687 (Principia), but there are other yeas with fabulous achievements by numerous people.

 

1543 is one.  That year witnessed the published of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus and Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica, two giant achievements for the outer and inner worlds, one challenging the structure of the universe and the other the Galenic tradition of physiology and anatomy. (To a lesser extent is Peter Ramus’ Animadversions on Aristotle which was a very sustained and elegant attack on the ancient-precept Aristotle an physics.)

1859 saw the publication of On the Origin of Species…JC Maxwell’s work on the kinetic theory of gases, Riemann’s hypothesis, and the spectacular invention of the spectroscope of Kirchhoff and Bunsen (that turned much of the invisible universe visible).

 

1939 (nuclear fission, chain reaction, neutron stars, magnetic moments, penicillin (advancement), Vit K, FM) and 1948 (nuclear structure, QED, transistor, Big Bang) also come quickly to mind.

1932, though is really quite something, seeing a sweeping array of discoveries in the large and small.  Carl Anderson identified the positron while James Chadwick discovered the neutron; also, the Joliot-Curies’ made their monumental discoveries in radiation.¹ Iwanenko described the neutron as a constituent f the nucleus, while Heisenberg described the nucleus as composed of protons and neutrons.  Knoll and Ruska built the electron microscope, allowing a vision of the interior parts of the interiors of the smallest things, offering images almost as spectacularly new as Hooke’s two centuries earlier.  Looking up and out, in the same year, Lev Landau postulated the existence of neutron stars while Karl Jansky invented radio astronomy. There was also the perfection of the “Polaroid” process by Ed Land, and the isolation of ascorbic acid (Vit C, by  Charles Glen King, and the beginning of a long war between him and Szent-Gyorgyi on priority of discovery).  (In the non-sciences, there was the addition of Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler to their national agendas. It was also a banner year for literature: Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway; Light in August, William Faulkner; 1919, John Dos Passos; The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett; Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell; Young Lonigan, James Farrell; Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder; and Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley…)

 

 

The thread of thinking about all of this came to mind looking at this image of a bombing instruction room for aviation in England in 1932.  The image is also a great one; the aviator at far left looks like a marionette; the three men above responding to his piloting maneuvers as he concentrates on the endless panoramas of landforms that advances before him on a horizontal diorama.  It is a fabulous analog flight simulator constructed at a time of great change in aviation

1932 is also the year of the publication of Carl W. Spohr’s classic future-vision/speculative fiction apocalyptic-atom bomb end-of-the-world two-parter (so many hyphens!) that appeared in Wonder Stories.² The story begins with a relatively simple series of catastrophic bombings that lead to a sort of détente, a kind of mutually assured destruction, which is then upset when the combatants discover and construct the atomic bomb.   MAD breaks down, and the ensuing massive exchanges result in a  devastated world.   Pretty prescient stuff, all-in-all, even so far as the policy goes—especially so when you wrap this sci-fi story around the elements of 1932—Chadwick, Anderson, Joliot-Curie—that made all of this stuff possible just 13 years later.

Notes

1 The Joliot-Curie discovery was called “one of the most important discoveries of the century... the consequences of the discovery of artificial radioactivity are immense" from Segrè, From X-rays to Quarks, 198-199).  

2.  Part one appeared in the March issue, which also carried stories like"Red April, 1965" by Frank K. Kelly; "The Eternal World" by Clark Ashton Smith; "Waves of Compulsion" by Raymond Gallun; "Mutiny on Mercury" by Clifford D. Simak; "The Time Stream" by John Taine (Eric Temple Bell), and others.  Pretty good bumper crop of sci-fi writers in itself.

Propaganda Maps: Potential Nazi Supporters, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 956

In an audacious move Adolf Hitler attempted to unite German-heritage people throughout the world to come to the aid of the Nazi Socialists; it was a vicious piece of propaganda attempting to inflate the number of possible-Nazis into the hundreds of millions, showing a sub rosa infiltration of Nazism throughout the world. 

This map appeared originally in Deutsches Volkstum in aller Welt (Berlin, 1938) and purported to document far-flung German descendants—the map alone was perhaps statement enough to many, striking a deep fear thinking about the 20,000,000 Americans alone whose roots could be traced back to the Vaterland.  As a terror and influence tactic that cost little money, it must have caused the anti-propaganda folks a good deal of worry.  The German/Vaterland (German American Bund, or Deutsch-Amerikanischer Volksbund) movement never really gained much popular ground in the U.S., though there was some significant compliance in business and trade going on at higher levels of industry and banking. 

(I’ve written about the Nazi-American connections in numerous posts on this blog; all you need to do is do a site google under “Nazi” and you’ll find plenty. For the moment I’ll just concentrate on the Henry Ford example.  The man was a monstrous moral figure without an ounce of historical understanding who blamed much of the world’s troubles on the “Jewish Dictatorship”, which somehow, in his mind, spawned WWI.  Long story short, Ford received the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle for his friendship and services to the Nazi state—this friendship extended in form of money and many thousands of military vehicles, and so on.  His was a treacherous business, his Nazi interests folding very nicely in with his astounding anti-Semitism. Ford, by the way, received his medal months after the invasion of Austria, when he really should’ve known better.  I’m not sure if he gave the thing back or not after the war ended.)

But among the masses, the sentiment never grew into strength, though it wasn’t for trying.  The movement had been present in the US since the 1920’s in the form of the National Socialist Party and the Teutonia Society, though the real start of the American Bund seems to have been with Friends of New Germany (1933). Right-Wing groups such as America First were strong sympathizers of Hitler, though they abandoned him once the war began.  (Not so true for Chase Bank, Ford and many others.)  The German American Bund never topped 100,000 members, though it did fill up Madison Square Garden for a meeting in 1939. (One of the main speakers was Avery Brundage, International Olympic Committee Chair. Brundage survived in this role until Munich in ’72, when he ordered the Olympic games to continue, unabated, after the 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by elements of Yasser Arafat’s organizations.)

Amyway, this map was more a propaganda tool than one of true expectation, and I’m sure it did its fair share of damage. 

Three Map Fits: a Color Map with Color and No Map, a Color Map in Black & White; AND a Black & White Map in White (only).

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 934

This confusing title is accurate without very much grant in license and tells a short and true story of three fitful maps, two of which are beautiful and one just so-so.  

  

The first map fit is featured in a beautiful pamphlet called A Century of Progress Colors and was issued by the Textile Color Card Association of the USA.(The title being a small play on the 1933 world’s fair in Chicago called “A Century of Progress”. The Textile Color Card Association was created to standardize color nomenclature and composition in industrial colors (and is still in existence.)  The map distributed the major pavilions at the fair by their dominating colors, naming those colors in the unusually-sequenced double-page key on the following pages (below¹).  I can certainly appreciate the effort and the beautiful design it produced, but as a map of the fair it leaves much (if not everything) to be desired.

 

 The second map fit belongs to a small pamphlet published by Albert Coble called Games of Colors, Kindergarten and Primary Exercises.  Its actually an enterprising little book about reaching into the minds of little ones and explaining how colors are put together and how they relate to one another.  It is unfortunate that the drawings used to illustrate the color map part of the pamphlet were done in black and white.  Which is a little on the self-defeating side.  

 

 
 

 But the finest fit of the three fits is fit number three, which is the map of the Bellman’s tale, starting the second fit of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits.

 

 

 

But the map that I think I love the most illustrates Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits, and occurs in the Bellman’s tale, starting the second fit¹. It is simply magnificent. 

Then, of course, there is this:

 

Notes:

1. The key:

 

 

2. The fit begins so:

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies-
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity too! One could see he was wise,
The moment one look in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when the found it to be
A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
"They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank"
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!"

 

The Invasion of America, 19?? (1935 Scenario for Invasions via Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 898

(This is a continuation of the Invasion of America series, started here.)

Even before WWII,   the American military and variously-aligned think-tank subsidiaries had for years hypothesized U.S. invasion scenarios.  For convenience’s sake, they were color-coded so as to not confuse one invadee with another: for example, there were War Plan Citron (an invasion of Brazil); War Plan Emerald (intervention in Ireland); War Plan Green (war with Mexico); War Plan Indigo (an invasion of Iceland); War Plan Lemon (an invasion of Portugal); War Plan White: (plan for dealing with civil disturbances cause by Communist insurgents), and many others. (I cannot find the color-coded plan for the 20^th century invasion of Canada, but it did exist.)

Lesser known are the U.S. military’s preparation for the invasion of America.

This two-page spread (all that I have of a longer article) appeared in Fortune Magazine for September 1935.  It was undoubtedly generated by a number of causes, not the least of which was the rearming of Nazi Germany (referred to in this article as a ‘miracle”), which could theoretically cause some amount of concern in semi-fortress America.  It was also an opportunity for Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur to whip up a little hell in Congress for the federal government to give the military some more money so that there was more to the “fortress” part of America than two oceans. 

Basically the plan seems to call for a standing, ready army of specialist forces that were agile and highly trained, a large network, of anti-aircraft batteries and detection areas, and of course a large buildup of the Army Air Force.  All of this of course cost money, and almost all o fit would’ve been directed towards MacArthur and his subordinates. (It is interesting and odd to note that the Fortune article notes that three of the top four major general assistants to MacArthur were Irish (“see the four big shots…with three Irish names”).)

[Due to difficulties in the size of this map I have to present it in three sections, but I’m sure that the overall flavor will be maintained.] 

The most prominent feature (besides the black invasion routes) are the terribly antiquated (even for 1936?) depictions of coastal defense canons.  Perhaps this was disingenuous to include them with such flair, what with the main point of the article lending itself towards air invasion, but there they are, protecting the American coastline from a ripping adventure from the sea. 

But as we can see the successful invasion routes are coming from odd places—from Alaska, Canada, the Caribbean) against which the U.S. seemingly had no defense.  This was especially true in the Pacific Northwest (“here defense system is weak”) where America was entirely susceptible to attack and invasion “from army basing in Alaska”.  The rest of the west coast didn’t fair so well, though the only other direct threat was from “25,000 able-bodied male Japanese…Californians suppose they have secret arms and drill at night in dark halls”.

The southwestern and southern California areas were relatively secure, except in the case of an enemy capturing Mexico; then, “an attack here would almost certainly be launched, in conjunction with one against San Antonio”.  I guess there would be long intrigue, much preparation and enormous effort to attack and secure Mexico, and I’m assuming that the thinkers behind constructing this map assumed that the U.S. would be doing nothing during this prolonged period of time. 

The attack on America in the Gulf would ostensibly come from Mexico and “an enemy basing in the Caribbean”, with a central interest in Birmingham and Norfolk.  But the main thrust coming to the U.S. from unnamed horribleness would be coming through the St. Lawrence and points east in Canada, swooping down on Lake Champlain, the Mohawk Valley, Troy, Buffalo and Detroit.  I know that there were bigger industrial concerns in these places in 1936 than there are now, but, well, my god there would be better places to begin an attack on the U.S. than from Montreal and Toronto.

In all of this I see that the industrial northeast is left alone, save for a “feint” attack to dislodge resources and attention away from the movement against the Virginia coast. There’s the navy yard and industry and shipping and etc. there, but it would seem a terrible waste to attack here rather than a much juicer and more northerly series of prizes. 

No attacker is named in what I own of this article, and there is a very curious absence of any threat coming from the already-warring Japan (save for the Japanese super secret nighthawks in San Fran).  The article does make a case—apart from the map—that national defense was at a low ebb insofar as manpower and ordnance were concerned.  But it scoots around the issue of the war of Japan against China and the vast militarization of the Nazis.  (Of course, this is Fortune magazine, and Krupp and Hoechst and other German firms, and Standard Oil, and the Bank for International Settlement, and Ford, and SKF, and etc. abetting the Nazi war machine were doing some nice business in the U.S., so perhaps it would’ve been best not to make Nazi money upset with some bad press.)

Taking all sorts and manner of considerations into account, this is just simply a miserable attempt to reckon what the future might bring to America in the hands of unlabeled enemies—it is simply a rousing caroling of general fear of attack from places unknown. 

Nazi Propaganda: the British Threat to Germany, pre-War 1939

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 897                                                          

I've written twenty or so posts here about (mostly) graphical propaganda of World War II, and most of that coming from the Axis (and mainly Nazi) end.  A popular theme among this limited exposure seems to be the Germany-surrounded meme:  Germany under attack from all sides: massive attacks being directed by the British from air and sea,

 

airstrikes coming in from thousands of planes in Czechoslovakia, Poland moving on the ground and in the air to invade south-eastern Germany, retaliation mounting from the French, and on and on.  And somehow when all of this is presented in cartographical form to the average reader, and when it is presented over and over again, the propaganda must take its toll.  

Tonight's installments come from the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig), and were printed just before and just after the start of the general hostilities of WWII (meaning the invasion of Poland, and not the actions against Austria or Czechoslovakia, and not the war in the east beng waged against China by Japan).The first comes in the 27 July 1939 issue--featuring a remembrance of WWI on the cover, showing a devastated field of battle with a spanking-new heavy dagger thrust into the heart of the field--and shows John Bull pulling strings of an advancing/attacking navy in the one hand while the other controls a firing network for cannons facing Germany based in its contiguous-bordered countries.  (The image was created by the prodigious Richard Lipus and titled "Englishe Kriegspolitik".)

The second piece was published just after the start of the war (21 September 1939) and attacks Neville Chamberlain (contrasting words and deeds) and his "treacherous" involvement with neutral countries.

Not particularly virulent, these maptoons undoubtedly helped to form a Nast-ian image in the commonplace psyche of the German people about the treacherousness of the Brits and of their dire situation of being surrounded by potent and threatening enemies.

 

Some of the other posts on this blog relating to WWII propaganda:

Maps as Propaganda http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/maps-as-propaga.html

Maps of the Polish “Corridor” http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/09/propaganda-in-maps-the-polish-corridor-1939.html

Maps of Naval Disaster http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/05/jf-ptak-science-books-llc-post-624-the-admiralty-regrets-to-announce--was-for-years-the-standard-beginning-to-an-offici.html

Anti-Nazi Propaganda http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/08/antinazi-propaganda.html

Nazi Propaganda and the Threat From Czechoslovakia http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/propaganda-maps.html

Humanitarian propaganda for Allied families with family members who were POWs http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/09/humanitarian-pr.html

Nazi Germany and Scaring the Will to War (Germany surrounded, again) http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/10/nazi-propaganda.html

Nazi-directed scare tactics published in English http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/nazi-propagan-1.html

The Luftwaffe and RAF present their (graphical) popular cases http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/09/graphical-and-a.html

History of Dots (Circle Subcategory): Circles in Graphical Displays of Quantitative Data

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 889

I like bumping circles as modes of graphically conveying quantitative data—it is more unusual than most ways of portraying statistics and belongs mostly in the 19^th century. 

The first example is relatively early, in the first class of this sort of information display, published in Thomas Bradford’s (1802-1887) superior Comprehensive Atlas Geographical, Historical and Commercial in Boston in 1835. Circles are the entire métier of this chart, showing the sizes of the continents and oceans, concentric circles nested inside each other, then branching out into three columns of progressively smaller circles showing the comparative sizes of islands, seas and lakes, all (interestingly) presented on
 the same scale.  It is a virtual one-stop, single-image display showing the graphical sizes of 59 geographical entities in relation to one another, making the understanding of their comparative sizes a simple, understandable, matter. 

 

Prettier but (initially) more difficult to use are the next two charts, the first showing the areas and populations of countries compared to that of the United States (in 1890), and the second showing the public debts of those same countries.  At first the display looks a little confusing. But once you settle in and get your eyes accustomed to the manner of presentation, the charts are actually very easy to use and very useful. 

Moving over from circles to dots is this population map by Frère de Montizon Armand Joseph, Carte philosophique figurant la population de la France, published in 1830 (as the first of its kind).

The ubiquitous pie-chart only made its first appearance in 1801, the work of he gifted and possibly polymathic William Playfair.  He was an engineer (serving as apprentice to the inventor of the threshing machine, Andrew Meikle,  and personal assistant to James Watt) and economist, and occasional mathematician, who also invented  the line graph (1786),  bar chart (1801)and circlegraph(1801).  But for this and all of his other work, he died in poverty and not comfortable¹.  

 

 

 

 

NOTES

1.Works by William Playfair include:

• 1786. The Commercial and Political Atlas: Representing, by Means of Stained Copper-Plate Charts, the Progress of the Commerce, Revenues, Expenditure and Debts of England during the Whole of the Eighteenth Century.
• 1801. Statistical Breviary; Shewing, on a Principle Entirely New, the Resources of Every State and Kingdom in Europe. London: Wallis.
• 1805. A Statistical Account of the United States of America by D. F. Donnant. London: J. Whiting. William Playfair, Trans.
• 1807. An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations: Designed To Shew How The Prosperity Of The British Empire May Be Prolonged.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mapping the Invasion of America, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 873           Blog Bookstore

[See also Part II of this post, here; and consider a  related post on the Nazi sub-orbital Amerika Bomber]

 

LIFE Magazine issued a wake-up call of sorts to its readership in their 2 March 1942 issue.  I say “of sorts” because even though this hard article (entitled “Now the U.S. Must Fight for Its Life”) must have sorely sobered some of its readers, it started on page 15, following big ads for Listerine, Matrix (women’s shoes, Bell Telephone, Modess, Clapp’s Baby Food, Dot Snap Fasteners, Goodrich Tires, White Horse Scotch, Pompeian Massage  (for shaving), Jack Benny/Carole Lombard’s “To Be or Not To Be”, Colgate, Yardley powder and  Mimeograph, and a few interspersed puff pieces—and a Ginger Rogers cover photo.  But once LIFE paid its bills¹, the article got right to business, responding to a February article by sci-fi/novelist Philip Wylie² on the possibilities of the U.S. losing the war.    

 

Losing looked like something that could actually happen in pre- war-ready America³.  The war in Europe had been on in earnest since the very end of 1939 (since 1933 in Asia), and the Axis had reached just about the fullest extent of their victories (though there would be more gains in the Pacific to come).  By March of ‘42, we had Bataan, MacArthur leaving the Philippines and the fall of rape of Manila, the siege of Leningrad, Corregidor, Java Sea, the Brits leaving Singapore, Malaya, and so much more.  The Axis powers in Europe were now in control of Austria, Czechoslovakia. Poland, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Norway, Yugoslavia, Finland, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and parts of the Soviet Union (Ukraine, Bylorussia, Crimea), and parts of North Africa;  plus the allies of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia. There was also Italy, of course, controlling Sicily, Ethiopia and Libya., and of course the Japanese controlled large swaths of China, South East Asia, Indonesia and points in-between.  The overall situation did not look very good. 

 The following maps appeared in a two-page spread, detailing ways in which the Axis powers could combine their efforts, focus on America, and take over the country.  Maps such as these with arrows being drawn towards America were absolutely uncommon during this time. 

Notes

1.This is almost universal SOP for war reporting for almost all media, and which continues today.  The Illustrated London News delivered reports of success and disaster sandwiched between ads for socks and trifles, as did the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig and Berlin), the New York Times, and so on.  I remember very clearly as a kid hearing the reading of the daily list of American soldiers killed in Vietnam  on one of the Big-Three networks, somber and intoned, followed instantly by a ad for Coke or Mister Kleen. 

2 Wylie (1902-1971) was an interesting guy with a wide reach.  In addition to Hollywood-feeding work, interesting fiction, insightful scifi and social commentary, Wylie also provided the inspiration for the creation of Superman (“The Gladiator”, 1930) and Flash Gordon (When Worlds Collide, 1933).

3.  Once the war machine in the U.S. got into hyper drive I think that it was impossible for this country to be defeated given its population, workforce, industrial capacity, raw materials, and of course scientific superstrucutre.  Also there was also no other country in the world with the necessary (and enormous) components needed to construct an atomic bomb.  This is a simplified statement that seems pretty homespuna dn jingoistic, but the fact of the matter is that the U.S. was the seat of overwhelming  possibilities and capacities. And yes the Nazis had been slowed down mightily with the expense of dozens of millions of Russian lives and the entire British war machine and on and on—I’m just saying that in the end, the U.S. could not have been beaten.  

MORE maps in the extended section, below:

A Map of the Kingdom of Corsets, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This finely produced, 75-page pamphlet lists all you need to know about marketing and maintaining a corset department in 1939--all except how to actually get back to 1939 to utilize this font of knowledge.  It was published with great seriousness for a serious business by the School of Retailing at New York University, a serious object for serious people.   Among the many things I’ve never thought of before thinking with this pamphlet were corset maps--and one of these happens to appear in this publication,  a map of an idealized corset department, which to me looks to be large, sanitized and medicinal, an oddly institutionalized presentation of an intimate something, something more of artistry and chance and possibility than an orthotic. 

I should think that I would like to make a Kingdom Map for his image, some day.  It looks to me ready to accept the responsibilities of landforms or ideas or statistics or changes or comparisons in place of its plain nature of counters and countertops and display cases, empty boxes waiting for something a little more invigorating to depict.  Or maybe not, maybe the chance of display of transformations is enough to suit its peculiar, perhaps singular, needs.

Or maybe on the Corset Map  instead of  substituting land and sea for corsets and boxes, one could substitute the noises of a quiet house at night, or the sound of heavy boots in a brittle-dry snow in the deep cold.  Or maybe a map of the discovery of children's laughter, or inconvenient pauses in conversations through the history of human speaking...or a map of lost ways.

Maybe the Corset Map could be used for a template for the things we will forget and the things we've forgotten, in which case the boxes need not be filled in, giving us a new version of the Bellman's Map from Mr. Dodgson, a new subcategory of maps--the blank map.  Or it could be the outlines for a map of the places that you meant to say something, but didn't.  Perhaps it could be used to outline where and how many times that people tell/told you that they'll miss you if you step away, making hollow boxes of simple loneliness because we can't be there all of the time.

Or maybe the corset map is just a corset map.

[This item is available for purchase, here.] The other surprise is how expensive these undergarments were.  For example, the Lily of France and Mme. Irene Corset Company (NYC) sold a girdle “for the heavy figure” (liberally sprinkling the word “heavy” throughout the description of the product like, well, sprinkles) for $132. The $132 corset is equal to about $2000 in today’s currency, or roughly a 15:1 increase. There were girdles and etc. in all price ranges, but the (1939) $30-$60 range seems to have been the most common; even still, the $30/low-medium quality item is about $430 in today's dollars, and the cheapest of them all at 5 bucks goes in today’s economy at 75 dollars or so.  I’m not familiar with the value of undies today, but this sure sounds like a whole hell of a lot of money. 

$132 for underwear in 1939 was a tremendous amount of money for the average person—even for the upper-middle class, it was a bunch, considering that you could buy a decent new car for $700.  It would also be equal to a half year’s worth of an average house rent ($28/month) and 1320 gallons of gasoline. 

 

It sounds like it was very expensive to keep the up with the idea of an ideal figure, which of course was partially create by this same sort of company, creating both need and demand for its product. 

1939 Price Comparisons:

Wages per year, average:  $1,730.00
Minimum wage: 30 cents/hour
Milk, by the gallon: 35 cents
Postage stamp, 1st class: 3 cents
Dow Jones: 131
Gas, average price of a gallon:  10 cents
Bread, by the loaf:  8 cents
Hamburger Meat, by the pound: 14 cents
Automobile, new, average:  $700.00
House, new, average: $3,800.00
House rent, average: $28.00/month

 

The Bumpy Earth and the Loss of Perfection, 1543

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 800 

The idea of the Earth as a sphere is an ancient one, proved over and over again across the centuries, most famously proved by Aristarchus with a stick and a hole and a shadow. The idea of the Earth as perfect, as a perfect sphere, is an old belief wrapped in layers of hopeful scientific thought, God’s creation and the cradle of mankind necessarily being perfect (Summa aside).  This was a rigidly enforced perception and a religious assumption, just like the belief that the Earth was the center of this universe, and that a vacuum was a theological and therefore physical impossibility.  (See my post On the Discovery of Nothing.)

The woodcut illustrated here—a depiction of a robbed and medaled God lording over his creation—is interesting in its depiction of what seems to be a not-perfect sphere of the Earth. The planet is definitely not smooth around its perimeter, and the inclusion of three-dimensional mountain rendering accentuates this depiction, which to me seems all very novel.  The source for this image is given as a “Martin Luther Bible of 1543”, but that is wrong, unfortunately, which makes it less of a story.  If this woodcut was really done in 1543 it would’ve occurred in the same year as two monumental publications:  Nicolas Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), marking what is the birth of modern science.  (The print appeared in Luther's translation of the Bible in 1534.)

But offhand I don't see Luther's "Bible" for this year, and in general 1543 is not a good year in general for Luther so far as I’m concerned.  He busily published Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies ) and  Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi (On the Holy Name and the Lineage of Christ), both of which were horrible anti-Semitic attacks, and worse.  For example, from the first work, he wrote that the Jews were a "base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth."^, and in the second wrote that it was not an immoral act for not killing Jews.  This really has nothing to do with the point of this post, but I just couldn’t let the reference to 1543 slide by without mentioning this very ugly tragedy of Luther’s  theology. 

A Rare Map of the Soviet Gulags, 1936.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 797  Blog Bookstore

Adolf Ehrt (1902-1973) was a twice-born Nazi who in 1935 let his 3-year membership in the party lapse so that he could do better work for Hitler from the “outside”.  In short, and to skirt some very interesting detail (over which I really don’t have much expertise), Ehrt felt that there was too much influence from the Church and government sources to fuel his unrequited need for purity in the party. 

Ehrt wrote this anti-Communist propaganda (Der Weltbolschewismus ein internationales Gemeinschaftswerk über die bolschewistische Wühlarbeit und die Umsturtzversuche der Komitern in allen Ländern) from an imaginary perch in something called the Anti-Kominetern, but was really nothing more than an arm of the Nazi party.  Appearing in Leipzig in 1936, this book savaged communism, communists and the Soviet Union to no end.  I own it because it is an interesting document and speaks to its period, and also has hundreds of unusual photos, giving it a documentary appeal.  What I noticed just recently though was a map on part of page 481 in the weirdly skimpy section on the Soviet Union—a reproduction of a French map showing the distribution of concentration camps in the USSR.  I cannot remember seeing such a map in English during this time period. 

 

(Clickable/expandable image)

Ehrt was a Nazi painting with broad historical/Nazi strokes across a Communist canvas, and did get a lot of stuff right in his attacks; but considering the source his book is useless except for its pictures.   The USSR was a wicked place to be at this time; the bestial Joseph Stalin busy killing hundreds of thousands, imprisoning more—but this was in general not the story reaching folks in the United States. That this French map (source not given) showed two dozen or so concentration camps (Gulags, work camps) is remarkable; and of course it is just the tip of the Gulag system iceberg.  It was at least a start. It was also just the beginning of a particularly nasty period for the Russian people, who staggered under the weight of an edict called Article 58¹ that sent millions of people to their doom.  This map was also published just before the Great Terror², a spectacularly bad war of internal doom that tore millions from their homes and hundreds of thousands  from the earth. 

The map, rare as it is in appearance and sentiment, seriously underestimated the extent of the barbaric Soviet existence of the time. 

1. “One can find more epithets in praise of this article than Turgenev once assembled to praise the Russian language, or Nekrasov to praise Mother Russia: great, powerful, abundant, highly ramified, multiform, wide sweeping 58, which summed up the world not so much through the exact terms of its sections as in their extended diacritical interpretation.  Who among us has not experienced its all-encompassing embrace? In all Truth, there is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago    See "Article 58"  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_58

2. NKVD Order no. 00447, 1937, directed against "ex-kulaks" and other "anti-Soviet elements" (such as former officials of the Tsarist regime, former members of political parties other than the communist party, etc.)  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge  Generally, any unfriendly could be uprooted and shot or sent off to Siberia. .  The operative made it easy for local justice units to identify trouble makers and shoot them.