JF Ptak Science Books

What Things Are Not Department: Life, Cityscapes, and the Virgin Mary in Stone.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 305

 

Stone has preserved the evidences of much of the life on Earth—in the fossil record (which happens to stretch some number of years back before 4004 BCE contrary to what one of the vice presidential candidate believes), or an arrested day in Pompeii; indeed the entire landscape shows the way life looked by filling in the negative of what you see today., a negative landscape in a way of what has come before. The City of Rocks, New   Mexico, for example, out there near  Silver City, is a wonderful example of trying to employ your imagination to render in your mind the massive volcano that once stood there, the “City” being the last remnant of its existence. Better yet is the great Ship Rock (hello Officer Jim Chee!), a massive 1,800 foot tall fractured volcanic breccia spire in Navajo Land (Tsé Bit'a'í, in Navaho, "rock with wings”), the internal remnant of yet another massive volcano, though in this case the enormous radiating dykes (igneous rock called "minette".) exploding away from its base gives you a better idea of the footprint of the missing mountain. You can see this magnificent mountain from a great distance, and it is only when you start to get closer and drive through one of the dikes (that has been separated for the road) that is 20’ tall and still a long way from the base of the mountain that you get a =good appreciation of just how massive it all is.

 

I cannot imagine the gargantuan profundity felt by the person who first realized that the Grand Canyon was formed by erosive forces over previously unimaginable long periods of time, its awesome and enormous silence a negative punctuation to the enormity of the idea.

Prior to the major discoveries in geology in the 19^th century, say from the mid-18^th century and earlier, there were many “discoveries” of life in stone—they weren’t very useful and most often were very misleading, but they were, in two words, pretty and unusual.

The people who made and recorded these discoveries were often more circumspect about what they were finding than their readers; sometimes not. Jean-Baptise Robinet (1735–1820) was a French naturalist, Jesuit-philosopher and encyclopediaist (best  known for his five-volume work De la nature (1761-8)) who found all manner of interesting and scientifically-divergent items in stone—eyes, ears, skulls and occasionally an entire body. Antoine J.D. d’Argenville at about the same time in the 1750’s also uncovered silhouettes of dressed human,  birds, cityscapes, trees and the like in stones, which seeped its recordings of the animate into receptive fantasies.

But these durable micro- explorations in agate go back thousands of years, expounded by Pliny and some of the other ancients, who followed the origins of humanity back into the rocks. This was a popular idea for the origin of animate beings, propounding itself for centuries, even winding up in the bony lap of Leibniz of all people, who wrote that “men derive from animals, animals from plants, plants from fossils, which in turn derive from bodies that the senses and imagination represent to us as being totally dead and formless”. Stoners therefore held the seeds of the formation of the world; all things living, breathing, and not.

Our own Athanasius Kircher, the definition of Polymathic ability and superior imagination was responsible for many such observations and discoveries. It seems to me that as much as Kircher gave, he took away, keeping ahead of his critics and the rest of the scientific community with tremendous output…people I think just couldn’t keep up with him. He found all sorts of things in stone: as early as 1619  he exhibited an image of   St. Jerome (in no less a place than the cave of the Nativity in Bethlehem!) that he found in agate. His Munduis Subterraneus (1661) is ahome to a wide range of these objects: quadrupeds of all shapes and descriptions, human full-length portraits, hands with jewels, and even the Virgin Mary and child. AS spectacular as these are there is always more: the magnificent cityscape (reproduced here) and the sublime discoveries of a full set of the alphabet and a series of 15 geometrical drawings, all naturally impressed in stone.

Perhaps these men gave little more regard to the details in this stone than was necessitated by accepted theory; perhaps they added details to suit their observational needs, as they images were, after all, drawings of the susceptible and the fantastic, and were not photographs. Recording their record was as much open to interpretation as were the theories. I have no doubt that if you look hard enough at things you will at some point find what you are seeking. Only here it is by chance that these figures appeared, and not by the will of a divine creator placing a seed of potential in the stone.

My five-year-old daughter, Tessie, asked me just the other day about where numbers and letters “came from”. She wanted to know “why are they here?”, which is a fabulous question with a long difficult answer. I do know though that they didn’t come to us from agate. 

Specialized Vocabularly: Hobo Slang 1939

JF Ptak Science Books Post 304

There have been many Kings of the Hobos, and Emperor of the Hobos, in the history of American Hobodom.  The most widely recognized of all this royalty is, probably, Mr. Jeff Davis, who was elected King of Hobos each year from 1908 to 1935, until in 1935 at the Pittsburgh meeting of the annual "Hobos of America" his minions gave up elected him King for Life. Of hobos, that is, the Knights of the Road; he was also a real hobo, unlike the pretenders, who in general were not. (Nels Anderson in his Men On The Move, written just as the Depression was broken, (1940) observed: "Whatever else may be said of King Jeff, his romanticizing the hobo is not without a basis in reality, and his poetic interest in the species arose from experience. But King Jeff has placed on a pedestal a man who belongs to the past. The hobo belongs with the pre-Hollywood cowboy and the lumberjacks of the Paul Bunyan legends.”)

Mr. Davis was certainly very effective in getting the message out—on freedom and responsibility to irresponsibility—and was a great organizer and popularizer. He helped to establish hobo meetings, newspapers and literature (a sample of which is at left). He also had a few movie appearances: in The Arkansas Traveler, 1938 and The Bridge of Sighs, 1915, he ably played the role of a hobo.

 

And what about the missing counterpart of Jeff Davis--the Queen of the Hobos? There were certainly allot of women hobos during the Depression; Harry Hopkins estimated that there were something like 13,000 “sisters of the road” who were out and about in the 1930’s. I guess the most famous of them though was one who did not exist; and what parts of her that were real were mostly those of one man: Ben Reitman. Sister of the Road (1940) was supposed to be an autobiography of legendary Boxcar Bertha, but it was really an assimilation of Reitman’s own experiences sprinkled about those of women from his life. Reitman, who was described (by himself) as a “hobo, whorehouse physician, musician and tour manager/lover of Emma Goldman” (??) was probably not without enough experiences to float another character or two, had his story of Bertha wind up in the hands of exploitation movie maker Roger Corman. The good news about that though was that Corman gave the project to the very young Martin Scorcese who produced an odd and not bad film on no budget, and Boxcar got to live again.

But what brought me here to begin with was Davis' breakdown of some very colorful hobo slang, all of which was found in the little yellow pamphlet (pictured above), and published as a "reference manual" in 1947.  And so:

Gay Cat. Someone who “beats it from town”, settles down with a job and puts together some money so that he can get on the road again.

Gandy Dancer. “Is a hobo shovel stiff, a muck-stick artist”, a common laborer

Pearl Diver. A hobo dishwasher and who works for his meal.

Mush fakir. A hobo umbrella mender with a patch kit and a second-hand umbrella strapped to his back. (Evidently these guys were put out of business when larger stores began offering umbrella repair on their own.)

Bindle stiff. A hobo who carries his stuff in a sack on a stick, including toothbrush, “but he does NOT carry blankets”.

Kywah. An honest hobo pitchman peddling soap, perfume, jewelry, novelties, pens, knives and potatoes peelers.

Kewah. :Makes and sells articles such as willow stands…”

Scenery Bum. “A young tramp who bums it around the country, just for the fun of it.”

Ring-tail. “An ignorant, harmless tramp.

Fuzzy tail. “A smart aleck tramp, jack of all trades, a fourflusher, big bluff, false alarm, and piker of the worst sort, who most always carries a “punk kid” or “road kid” (a runaway boy).”

Dingbat. “An old tramp professional beggar who dings the main stem (begs on the main street).”

Stew bum. “An elderly tramp who wastes his time continually drinking rot booze.”

Jungle Buzzard. “A tramp who loves to eat but is too lazy to get the ingredients for a mulligan stew. He eats what is left when the gang leaves the jungle fire.” Yum.

Road Yegg. “A vicious tramp of the petty larceny type, a cheap crook.”

I like the collection—it has a high color, not terrible low cant at all.

Notes:

A Few Books on the History of Hobos:

Allsop, Kenneth  Hard Travellin': The Hobo and his History. 1967. 
Black, Jack.  You Can't Win. 1926.
Bruns, A.  Knights of the Road. 1980.
Davies, W.H.  The Autobiography of a Supertramp. 1929.   
Drew, Betina. The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren. 1995.
Etulain, Richard W.  Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other
Writings. 1979
Flynt, Josiah. Tramping With Tramps. 1969 reprint.  
Flynt, Josiah. My Life. 1908.    
Graham,  "Steam Train" Maury   Tales of the Iron Road: My Life as King of the
Hobos. 1990.
Kemp, Harry.  Tramping On Life: An Autobiographical Narrative, 1922. 
Kerr, Lenox.     Back Door Guest [Foreign Travelers in America
1810-1935].  1930
Kromer, Tom.  Waiting for Nothing. 1935.   
Monkkonen, Eric H. Walking To Work: Tramps in America, 1790-1935.
Ormser, Richard.   Hoboes.1994.
Tully, Jim.  Beggars of Life: A Hobo Autobiography. 1924
    
And, by the way, this detail of the photo in the Davis book for the 1936 Hobo meeting in Kentucky--
where, exactly, are the hoboes?  these people look pretty middle class.  And who is the lady?

Deep Discrimination in a Classic of Anti-Discrimination: Japanese Americans and World War II

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 299

For another project of mine I’ve been reading about the Japanese internment camps (posting an earlier post here), and just started to read some post war material on the interpretation of those actions. The first book I turned to is regarded as a liberal (in the classic sense of the word) regard and homage to the Japanese in the Hawaiian Islands by John Adrian Rademaker, (a Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii 1944-1947), who in 1951 published These Are Americans: The Japanese Americans in Hawaii During World War II . It documents the contributions made to the war effort by of people of Japanese ancestry living in Hawaii, including the Varsity Victory Volunteers, the 100th Infantry Battalion, and the 442nd RCT, and so far as I can determine is one of the earliest pioneering works to attempt to right the significant wrong done to these people.

In the past I always thought of it as a photographic essay, and I’m sure that I never actually read the thing., But this time I, I did, and I was stopped almost immediately, half-way through the first sentence.

It reads:

“During World War II, I was one of a considerable number of persons who were directly concerned with the care and re-establishment of the Japanese Americans in the continental United States.”

 To be honest about it, I’m not sure what this means or where it came from.   The rest of the sentences in the 277 pages of this book are laudatory and informative and attempt to right the public opinion wrongs of the wartime Japanese-American persona. But “care and re-establishment” is awful and weird, and stupid—so much so I wonder if the phraselet was stuck in there by some zealot editor. Removing 110,000 Americans from their lives and residences and families and communities and businesses, stripping them ¾ of whom were American citizens) of their rights, forcing them to sell whatever they couldn’t carry at fire sale prices, and then sticking them all in horse stalls or deeply removed and very difficult locations for three years is disgustingly-not “care and re-establishment”.

Unless of course the author believed it, and if such is the case then he really didn’t understand what happened to those 110,000 people, sociologist or not; or at least didn’t get it in 1951.

He did make a strong case overall for the American Japanese in Hawaii being loyal citizens/ Rademaker points out that 1,440 Americans of Japanese Ancestry (AJA) who were detained by local authorities (excluding Federal efforts) out of a population of over 150,000 AJA in Hawaii. They were nearly all Issei (first generation immigrants) and Nisei (born in the USA)

From December 7, 1941till the end of the war, some 1,440 AJAs were picked up by the authorities. This constituted nine-tenths of one percent of the AJAs in Hawaii. 879 of those were Japanese Issei, first-generation immigrants. 534 were Nisei. Nearly half of this number were released after preliminary hearings, with the rest being “kept” for other reasons, though they were simply community leaders (doctors, nurses, school teachers, benign) and that sort of thing. He states that no AJA in Hawaii was ever convicted or found to have committed any treasonable offense or committed any sabotage whatsoever.

I’m just pointing out how odd this first sentence is in the face of the rest of the book. Was it meant to diminish the American government’s actions in rounding up and removing these people? (The government has had a very long history of doing exactly this, and doing it deathly well—just look at the hundreds of Indian “removals”, the entire institution of slavery, and many, many others, up to and including to a lesser degree the displacement of Katrina refugees.) Arrest and disappearing people is not “care and re-establishment”, period.

For the record, another truly measurable aspect of AJA fortitude is their military participation during WWII which stands as follows (presenting the 100 Battalion of the 442 and then the 442 as a unit):

The 100th Battalion and 442nd Combat team:

Killed in action  569.
Died of wounds 81.
Missing in action 67.
Wounded in action 3,506.
Injured in action  177.
Total casualties  4,120.

The 100th Battalion and the 442nd Combat Team won the following decorations:

1 Medal of Honor

1 Medal of Honor
47 Distinguished Service Cross
1 Distinguished Service Medal
12 Oak Leaf Cluster to Silver Star
350 Silver Star
18 Legion of Merit
16 Soldier's Medal
41 Oak Leaf Cluster-to Bronze Star Medal
823 Bronze Star Medal
1 Air Medal
500 Oak Leaf Cluster to Purple Heart Medal
3600 Purple Heart Medal
2 Army Commendation Ribbon
40 Army Commendation
87 Division Commendation
1 brigade Commendation
12 Croix De Guerre (French)
2 Palm to Croix De Guerre (French)
2 Croce Al Merito Di Guerra (Italilan)
2 Medaglia De Bronzo Al Valor Militare (Italian)

Overall the 442—composed entirely of Japanese Americans, emerged as the most decorated combat unit of its size in the history of the United States Army —suffered an “unprecedented casualty rate of 314 percent and received over 18,000 individual decorations. Many were awarded after their deaths for bravery and courage in the field of battle. Among the decorations received by the 100th/442nd soldiers were one Medal of Honor, 52 Distinguished Service Crosses, 560 Silver Stars, 28 Oak Leaf Clusters to the Silver Star, 4,000 Bronze Stars and 1,200 Oak Leaf Clusters to the Bronze Star and, perhaps most telling of the sacrifices made by these gallant soldiers, 9,486 Purple Hearts.” The 442nd Combat Infantry group emerged as the most decorated combat unit of its size in the history of the United States Army.

Food Bomb, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 285

In an earlier post (The Most LIterary Fireworks Catalog Ever Published?  The Naming of Explosions) I wrote a little bit about names found on shells and the naming of explosions.  The chances for adding to this category are slim, given the ephemeral nature of the item of discussion--I did however stumble upon this Food Bomb, found in the 25 April 1942 issue of The Illustrated London News.  "Guten Hunger", the inscription on this "bomb"  (basically "good appetite" or "eat well" or "down the hatch") was actually "not a weapon of destruction, but an enormous food container" that was going to be dropped on the German soldiers on some slender part of the Eastern Front.  In April the situation was turning now away for the Germans with the Soviet counter offensive, and it was still cold. Something like 3 million German soldiers would be awarded the service medal for the Winterschlacht im Osten 1941/42--not many of them would get to look at it after 1945.   The campaign in the east against their former allies started on 7 June 1941 (and named variously die Ostfront 1941-1945, der Rußlandfeldzug 1941-1945 (Russian campaign) or der Ostfeldzug 1941-1945 (Eastern Campaign)) and lasted to mid-May, 1945, when the campaign line shrunk from as far away as Moscow back down to east Berlin. 

The Most Literary Fireworks Catalog Ever Published? The Naming of Explosions.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 267

I found this wonderful catalog this morning--the 1935 Liberty Catalog of Display Fireworks.  It is big (11x8 inches) and its 64 pages are filled with descriptions of the hundreds of different advanced firework displays that you could purchase.  Mostly the company was interested in selling very large, packaged displays, hovering in the hundreds of dollars, which was quite allot of money in the 1930's, even without considering the impact of the Depression on the fireworks-pursuing populace.  These people were definitely not selling firecrackers to kids.

The illustrations in the pamphlet are remarkable for displaying so many of their goods, and were printed in high relief, being dark red on a field of black.  Very effective!

What is particularly striking about the catalog, aside from its terrific visual elements, are the names given to the fireworks--they are artistic, literary, mythological.  No "brainbusters" or "Finger Splinters" here. Some of the names include Cleopatra’s Jewels, the Victor Jerome Battle in the Clouds Shell, Flight of Egyptians Repeating Bombshells, Spiderweb Comet, the Arenic Festival of Flowers, Devil Among the Tailors, the Palmetto Fountain, Selma Lee Shell of Shells, Sparkling Diamonds and the Sparkling Diamond Merry-Go-Round, Temple of Isis, the Mammoth Devil Wheel, Prismatic Devil Wheels, Whistling Jack Bombshells, Messengers to Starlands, Radio Flash Rockets, Ceylon Rubies, Fish and Whistle, the End of the Rainbow, and my favorite: The End of the World.

Funny thing is that they do sort of describe the effect of the fireworks.  I thought that I might learn something of the social under- or over-currents by having a peek at the names, but there was little of that:  several FDR displays are sprinkled around the catalog, a couple of special radio-related items, but really, that's about all.  No insights there.  No  "Honey I'm Going to Catch the Danvillle Train and Get Me Some Dough" or "Brother Can You Spare a Dime" displays; who wants to be reminded of the not-so-nice when celebrating something with gigantic loud colorful controlled explosions?

No. The surprising element was the naming of the explosions.  And naming explosions goes back quite a way in the history of military affairs, not that I really know anything about that--I do have photographs of French soldiers decorating their 15-inch shells with messages to the Germans in 1918, and there's no end to the images of American soldiers writing/naming their bomb-to-be-delivered to whomever it was we were blasting.  But they weren't quite in this Liberty Catalog arena of fresh literariness, though the more-modern military epigrams were more pithy, and drenched in their own sea of color. (This of course is Slim Pickens as he climbs aboard a thermonuclear device, nearly ready to buckaroo it down to its destination; the other device I think was called "Dear John".) The atomic device at Trinity was decorated with scribble, but I'm not sure that any of the photos were ever clear enough to reveal the sentiments.

   The U.S. government had names for every one of their test shots of nuclear devices, though none approached anything like a creative caliber:  Able, Baker, Prisiclla, Operation Plumbbob (yes, there is a double b), Thunderwell, Smoky, Diablo....pretty ordinary.  The government did wake itself up to use some scientific-biographical names for some of the tests in the Plumbbob Operation:  Franklin, Kepler, Pascal, Stokes, Galileo, Doppler, Fizeau (!), and Newton.  I think that only Sir Isaac would've been pleased with this honor.   Maybe Franklin. 

 

The World of Words & Some Hidden Future-Physics Poetry of 1826

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 197

I found this interesting image in David Booth's An Analytical Dictionary of the English Language in which the Words are Explained in the Order of their Natural Affinity, Independent of Alphabetical Arrangement...(2nd edition), printed in London in 1836.  In it on page 187 he quotes a long section from an earlier work by Bishop Wilkins Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) on the properties and classifications of prepositions.  Wilks defines prepositions in the following way:  "prepositions are such particles whose proper office sits to joyn Integral with Integral on the same side of the Copula signifying some respect of Cause, Place, Time or other circumstance wither Positively or Privately."  Indeed! 

He then spends several pages looking at the combinations of prepositions, distributed into six classes.  The illustration below is meant to illustrate classes 3 through 6:  the third containing the combinations "doth consist of such as respect to Space, in general"; the fourth "in respect to Space, with a particular restriction to the notion of containing, being absolutely determined to Motion; fifth, "doth contain such Prepositions as relate to the Imaginary parts of a thing"; and sixth, "such Prepositions as are applied both to motion and rest, relating to the situation of some third thing spoke of...."

And so on, and of course it all makes sense in ways that I’ve not about in many years—but I’m just so attracted by the language and the many nearnesses to some very big ideas in physics, and the great and distinctive beauty of the illustrative diagram that I just needed to pass this along before it dipped away forever into the shadows. 

First Sentences of Great Literature: 30 Examples

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 170

Just a slight, little quiz here, a true/false quiz, linking great first sentences to their novels.  Hint:  they're all true.  I just wanted to see them collected like this. 

(1) "All children, except one, grow up."  Peter Pan    

(2) "In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines."  Madeline, Ludwig Bemelmans

(3) "The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home." Wind in Willows, Kenneth Grahame

(4) "In the great green room, there was a telephone and a red balloon." Goodnight Moon, MW Brown

(5) "Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice "without pictures or conversation?" Alice in Wonderland.

(6) "When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse." Stuart Little EB White

(7) "This is George. He lived in Africa."  Curious George  HA Rey

(8) "Chug, chug, chug. Puff, puff, puff. Ding-dong, ding-dong."  The Little Engine that Could
.
(9) "For many days we had been tempest-tossed." Swiss Family  Robinson

(10) "The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it."  Black Beauty

(11) "I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father's house."  Kidnapped

(12) "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so."  Tale of Two Cities

(13) "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo." Portrait of the Artist

(14) "My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip."  Great Expectations

(15) "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." Personal History David Copperfield

(16) "The day broke gray and dull."  Of Human Bondage

(17) "Now, what I want is Facts."  Hard Times

(18) "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Good Soldier, FM Ford

(19) "As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream. "  Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan

(20) "I am an invisible man."  Invisible Man R Ellison

(21) "Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York." Tree Grows in Brooklyn  Betty Smith

(22) "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."  Great Gatsby

(23) "The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there"." In Cold Blood.

(24) "A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green."  Of Mice and Men

(25) "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." To Kill a Mockingbird

(26) "In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together."  Heart is a Lonely Hunter

(27) "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting."  Sound and the Fury

(28) "Isaac McCaslin, 'Uncle Ike', past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any more, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one ---- this was not something participated in or even seen by himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac's father's sister and so descended by the distaff, yet not withstanding the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor, of that which some had thought then and some still thought should have been Isaac's, since his was the name in which the title to the land had first been granted from the Indian patent and which some of the descendants of his father's slave still bore in the land."  Go Down Moses

(29) "Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth."  Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

(30) "To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth."  Grapes of Wrath

Nails and Screws: Beautiful and Well-Designed Simplicity

JF Ptak Science Books  Post #148

Here we have two glorious, lovely examples of craftsmanship of simple things. The first is The Republic Steel Corporation (Chicago) manufacturer’s catalog for their production of nails and other wire goods.  It is about fifty pages long, and a third or so of it is devoted to the history of nail and nail-making as well as the history of the company.  The rest is all about the product.  And mostly about nails.  All sorts.  It is just fantastic!  I must say in all the years of my own nail consumption I didn’t know that there were so many different sorts of nail POINTS (diamond, blunt, chisel, needle, duck bill, side, and so on) ion addition to the various widths and lengths and special uses.  The points just never entered into the equation to me, but, of course, it is very important. 

And speaking of special uses, there are a number of interesting specified nails in this catalog that, I think, are long gone from modern hardware store  shelves, as the needs they addressed are gone:  beer case strap nails (oh my god I love the sound of that) AND beer case hinge/lock/latch nails AND beer case cleat nails, basket nails, shade roller pins, pole marking and dating (!) nails, barbed berry box nails, and egg case fasteners are among what I imagine to be extinct nails. 

Then there’s the beautifully designed Southington Hardware Manufacturing Company’s screw catalog, called, wonderfully, Screws, (Wood, Sheet Metal, Phillips Head, Slotted Head), catalog 41 (with prices) for 1935.  There’s page after page (actually, forty-five pages) of very detailed specifications (dimensions of heads, diameter, thread and tolerance, each description accompanied by two (or more) engineering drawings of the screw itself. 
Now THIS is a way to describe a product.

This is followed up by a concise, nine-page (3,500 word) pamphlet published by the Atlas Tack Company (Varick St, NYC) on the history of shoe tacks and nails, bound, I’m happy to say, with metallic eyelets.  It contains pretty much all you need to  know on the history of shoe tacks, and I’m 100% behind the publication of odd-obscure histories such as this.  (I own perhaps a hundred “different” histories like this, including the massive non-classic “The History of Refrigerated Nuts”.) 

Underground Horses, 1875

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 22

Unusual cross sections have always fascinated me--they are an X-ray of the techy-inards of the physical world , showing you a slice (literally) of the Unseen and Unapproachable. 

The first engraving here is of an (unidentified) Western-U.S. mine, printed 1869, and shows the comparative depth of an un-effacing mining operation in terms of height, nestling it in against Trinity Church (NYC).  The "21 stories" depth  of this mine would have been astonishing to the 1869 mind thinking of it in terms of height. Few office buildings in NYC for example exceeded 5 or 6 stories at that time. [It was in 1872 that the tall buildings' fortune turned, as C.W. Baldwin (working for the Otis Company) invented the geared hydraulic elevator, meaning that buildings could now be taller than the strength and endurance of its occupants' legs.  (Actually, to my mind it is the invention of the elevator safety brake that clinched the deal, making it safe to enter an elevator and expect to survive the experience.  There's a lot of other stuff that comes into play, not the least of which is steel framing, lightening the buildings weight and displacing the weight from its' normal receptacle of the foundation, but I digress.) ] So trying to imagine something that was 15 time the height of the spire of Trinity Church was doing some pretty large-scale imagining. 

A corollary the the height of the mine is, perhaps, a cross section of the depths of waters. Here we see an 1877 illustration from an article on new methods of determining the depths of ocean waters, giving a very clear indication of the enormous "height" of the ocean even in its most measurable (and not-so-deep) section.

 

I simply could not resist this 1875 engineer's drawing ("Plan of Ten-Stall Stable....for W.D. Wight's Paper on Underground Horses")--and yes indeed these were horses kept underground, used for hauling the heavier wagons (on tracks) of whatever, brought out to these larger chambers by men doing the same work with lighter loads in smaller areas.  (For perhaps the best description ever of men at work in a coal mine, see the gorgeous George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London)

This is one of those images I think that will elicit a pretty light-hearted reaction until your brain catches up to the reality of what the print is really depicting.

 

This  image is actually much rarer than a mining cross section--it is a plan (looking from the top and down) of a mine showing the mode and direction of ventilating the whole bit, printed in 1818.  (As it turns out it is rarer still to see a plan depicting a mine's numerous layers--I've honestly not seen another one of these done before 1900.)  What an incredible image this must have been to the early 18th-century eye, seeing such a novel, and rare, depiction of (important!) data.

In the Victorian panoply, the technological temple ma have had an entryway mosaic constructed from the idea of the mine cross section or plan--it is a structural, semi-architectural bit after all, made to withstand advanced weight and pressure.  Or how about a mine cross section template for a stained glass window?  I can imagine the Temple of Technology boasting a design schema of nothing but elements like these--those people trusted, perhaps even worshiped, the small and great mechanical machines and contrivances of their era.  All you have to do is look at the housings for even some of the simplest objects and you'll find a metallic skin of awe and beauty, a symbol of admiration and respect for analog creativity.

 

Homer Simpson on Perspective: the Rare Antique Image Looking Straight Down from a Height

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 20

I welcome the chance today to use our non-classical Homer instead of the beautiful Paolo Uccello to look at an issue of imaging a certain form of perspective drawing.  I've always been intrigued by antiquarian images that looked straight down, or up, at things--90 degree, perpendicular, real straight-on stuff, giving a feel for depth (or height) and perspective.  Funny thing is that in the wide world of scientific images, they really don't show up very often.

A Mock-straight-down is found in this prettily-designed example (French, ca. 1860)--it seems to be view form a height of 250 feet or so down on the square of a low- (Western) renaissance town. That's partly true, except that it is a mosaic from Pompeii (or Herculaneum), found imbedded in the floor of one of those mummified houses. 

Another pretender is this god's-eye view (from Abraham Rees' mammoth encyclopedia of 1800-1820) of the universe, centered upon our own helio-centric Solar System, which is centered, nested, amidst a whorl of other (contiguous and touching but not overlapping) solar systems, all of which is held in the infinite but knowable confines of an ourobus.   This again qualifies as a straight-down/up if and only if (iff) you squint real hard and imagine you're seeing the scene through your CreatorView (TM!) glasses.  (The Creator needs glasses?)

The drawing by Leonardo of the town of Imola (currently resident with the Windsors) does come quite close to the concept--it has more artistic features than the common city plan , and is definitely at a perpendicular to its subject.

But it is this that is so terribly interesting to me--a small part of a little print from an unidentified encyclopedia from the turn of the 19th c. It shows a picture of the earth looking straight down from a balloon, looking through an opening in the cloud cover, down to a small town. There is an iconic work on the representation of the world as known to succeeding generations where the picture of the world is seen through a succession of gradually diminishing clouds (being opened like drapes over time), but I honestly cannot think of an early image of looking at clouds from above and straight down.  My sense is that this image would have caused as much interest and wonder as the first (Soviet) images of the other side of the Moon (back in 1959). 

Even when moving into the pre-satellite 20th century image, the straight-down picture is a rarity. In the last few years after having looked at dozens of thousands of popularly-published images (for another project), the straight-down/up were a scant tenth or perhaps hundredth of a percent of the total. There were a number of photographs made looking straight up (as in the two examples here, looking up the main mast into the crow’s nest of the Queen Mary, and the other with the same view, only in the Bremen. 

Occasionally the view like this will show up (looking laterally through the Vickers-Armstrong “Wellington I” bomber aircraft (June 1939)

I can't leave this topic without mentioning two recent additions to this genre--the first is the Eames' wonderful Power of Ten movie (go to youtube HERE, where in 40 steps we look at existence from quark to quasar. 

The second is a little goofy but I like it nonetheless--the introduction to the Jodie Foster movie Contact (go to youtube HERE)  built on the bones of the Carl Sagan book. Here we swing out from the Earth and into space, following a broadcast-audio trail of humanity into the not-too-distant time/space (ignoring the signal degradation bit but so it goes), and then leaving that quickly behind, hurling itself backwards, to the outer reaches of the universe, until (and we don't see this in the youtube clip) we wind up back in the iris of the heroine (and a bit too much like the Dave Bowman trip in "2001 a Space Odyssey"). 

But we don't see stuff like this very often, and I'm happy to go along for the ride. It really is just about seeing something new, after all.

Perhaps the lack of this perspective is summed up by our old friend Homer J. Simpson. In one episode of the Simpsons (long ago and far away…or last week) Homer explains (to Lisa?) why cartoon characters’ faces are always oblique in profile. Homer turns and looks directly into the
camera,” and his face gets all pancakey. It's just not done “because it's goofy” he says. And at least in Homer’s case, the proof is definitely in the puddin’.

The Wrong Stuff, Righted--the Attack on Darwin's Descent, 1871

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 17

I enjoy the good defense of the wrongfully accused--The Encyclopedia of Incorrect Reviews of Literature and Science is an enormous and multi-generational work, filled to its festering brim with The Bad Stuff:   Everyone is represented here, glory rendered to trifle:  Hamlet was ripped by Voltaire (“vulgar and barbarous”) while Pepys raped Midsummer Night’s Dream (“insipid, ridiculous”); Moby Dick was “trash, bedlam literature”; Kipling couldn’t write in English (SF Examiner 1889); and Max Eastman weirdly and famously trashed Hemingway and his manhood in the New Republic while reviewing For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940 (“lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man”).   Perhaps one of the very prettiest of the bad/wrong review was made by The Bookman (the professional bookseller’s reviewing organ in the United States) in 1906, in reviewing Sinclair’s The Jungle:  “His reasoning is so false, his disregard of human nature so naïve, his statement of facts so biased, his conclusions so perverted, that the effect can be only to disgust many honest, sensible folk with the very terms he uses so glibly”.  Well put; better still if it were correct.  The list goes on and on and touches, well, just about everyone (including Dr. Seuss).  What I really enjoy is the response to the bad review, especially when the bad review was, simply, bad. 

One good example, .a great example, really, is Thomas Stebbing's response to an inciting, raw and hateful attack upon Darwin's Descent of Man by The Times of London newspaper (April, 1871).  Incredibly, or predictably, The Times saw the work as an attack upon society: it accused Darwin of undermining authority and principles of morality, opening the way to "the most murderous revolutions". A "man incurs a grave responsibility when, with the authority of a well-earned reputation, he advances at such a time the disintegrating speculations of this book." Stebbing's  review of the Review is drippingly but properly sarcastic, pointing out obvious errors in specific and the tone of the article in general in the defense of the book. Darwin's "facile method of observing superficial resemblances" (says The Times) moves  Stebbing to issue the following: "they may fancy that truth is worth discovering , even when it seems to involve some contradictions to our pride and some loss of comfort to our finer feelings..."  It is a gorgeous line ending a proper, staid defense of what would seem prima facie to be something in need of no defense whatsoever—in 1871 or 2008. 

Reverend Stebbing, a Darwinian, Naturalist and fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, lived another 55 years after this article was published—one year longer than the issuance of the (negative, anti-Darwin) verdict in the Scopes/Monkey trial.  I wonder what he was thinking on that day in 1925…

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.)