JF Ptak Science Books

Shopping at Home in a Store (1916)

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I've made several entries to this blog on the history of the pre-history of the Internet of Stuff and Things, inventions and contrivances that were in their sometimes-quirky ways a taste of the stuff of what was to be...or if you applied some imagination to it, that is what they could seem to be. (Of the things that could be, there are those things that might be, and can be, and of course those that shouldn't be--but that's another story.)  In this image, taken from the front page of the magazine Popular Mechanics for March 1916 we see something from the future, though as is usually the case the implemented future-vision that actually takes place is far more elegant than what the imagined-future suggested.  In this instance we see someone sampling clothing and seeing their reflection wearing that clothing though not actually trying any of it on--this is commonplace now, but back in 1916 it wasn't, and mostly didn't even exist. Of course you'd still have to go to a clothier to use this device, which means that all of the effort in trying on new clothing would be present except for the final part of actually trying the clothing on.  And given the encumbrances of the technology, the whole thing sounds as though it would take more time to use than the time it was supposed to save.  Anyway the device was interesting, though there are probably failing marks for the temporal economics of the thing.  

The Epicenter of Visualized Geography: School! (1889)

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Knowing of my interest in antiquarian children's art, a new friend sent me a 19th century school geography which sports several tattoos of artistic efforts made by small hands. The canvas is the book, and the artwork (and annotations) were occasional scribbles and doodles that speak to the overall essence of kid art, and which have more or less looked the same-ish for centuries. (The subjects will change, but the manner seems to me to remain constant.) In this case the child chose James Moneith's Elementary Geography (1889) to work in and on, and it is here in the opening pages that we see the exacting placement of "school". As much as I am interested in the Found Art in this book, I've gotta say that this printed image was nearly as surprising--it is also one that I do not recall seeing, even in these popular multi-editioned geography textbooks.  The image graphically displays a dozen or two of the central words in the study of geography, and at the center of it all, with directional arrows point all the way around, was "School". You can't really argue much with that. 

An 8,000-mile Cruising Range Flying Wing, 1943

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This is not the first appearance of a proposed "flying wing", though it seems to me that it is one of the biggest. This version—the idea of Horace Chapman Young (of the Aerodynamic Research Corporation) and Eric Langlands—appeared in the pages of Popular Science magazine in February 1943. It is a “combination of airship and airplane”, and was filled with helium and hope. It is also 69' tall, and 250 feet long (!), one version of the aircraft of which was made to handle an airport of 12 planes on a 180'x200' airstrip, which brings just that part f the plane in at a little under a half acre. It pulled and pushed itself through the air at a not-blazing 30-75mph—however, it was supposed to keep that speed for a cruising time of 270 hours, which is enormous. I like the idea of this beautiful beast, from its slightly manta-ray face down to its 30mph takeoff speed.

 

Howl's Moving Castle, 1774

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This really has nothing to do with Hayao Miyazaki.'s world, though it does look as though it could be part of it—absent the need for and presence of water and imagining the anchor lines as legs. That's what I see, anyway, in this beautiful plate of a river/port dredger. It is found in the French edition of Corneille Redelyheid's La noivelle machine a creuser les ports et les rivieres (printed by the author in the Hague in 1774). The document (only 16pp long) describes the vessel and its uses—the engraving shows the scoops/bucket ladders in the middle of the boat—they would gobble up whatever the target was, with the refuse deposited in the two skiffs on either side of the boat. Its a lovely object, and if you close your eyes halfway the vessel takes on a vague absurdist patina, as though it was a massive SomeThing being propelled or skipped about on long excessively skinny legs. I like it.

The Not-so-Shiny Diamond: Mining Compounds, South Africa, 1906

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2815

I uncovered a little cache of National Geographic magazines from 1900-1915, and picked out the 1906 volume to have a look at what I hoped for would be photo coverage of the San Francisco earthquake. There's a good and very strikingly-illustrated article to be found there, but what got my real attention was the article “The Diamond Mines of South Africa”. Actually it was one photograph that grabbed me away from the rest of the book—an image of a diamond miner who was caught stealing diamonds from the mine, extracted during his shift. It is a singularly sad photo—the man's face is pained and troubled, standing there behind a mine official, naked, and wearing gigantic baseball mitt type gloves with a heavy chain.

Here are a few questions that sprang to mind: Who were the workers? How did they steal” How did the company catch them? How did the company prevent such theft?

In this case the theft occurred in one of the De Beers mining facilities in South Africa. Although De Beers used convict labor, at this camp the workers were there of their own free will (I guess), joining the company to work for periods of about three months.

• “To enter the service of the company, each applicant must sign a written con tract binding himself to live in the com pound and work continuously and faith fully for a period of at least three months or longer if he so desires. At the expiration of a contract the applicant may leave if he chooses or his contract may be renewed indefinitely. Some of the natives in De Beers compound have been employed continuously for ten years or more in the service of the company,...”

Once the contract was signed, the agreement was strictly enforced,and the lifestyle of all who worked at the mind seemed to become of one solid mass, the workers held there life inmates. It looks as though every aspect of their lives was regulated, not the least of which involved travel outside the compound or interacting with any outsiders—this to prevent the theft and exchange of diamonds.

The article describe the general layouts of the compounds housing the diamond workers: there were 17 in the diamond fields, 12 owned by De Beer. The largest belonged to De Beer: it was 4 acres and held 3,000 workers, who were contained in the area by 10' tall corrugated iron fences; they slept 20-25 to a 25'x30' room. 3K people on 4 acres is a huge number:

Found-Abstract Art and the Coming of the NCC-1701: the Capazza Lenticular Airship, 1909

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Here's another early aviation post, as I seem to be a little stuck this morning in the 1908-1911 period...or suitably enough down a small rabbit hole to keep me from doing my mailing duties.  This is a fascinating period with tremendous steps forward in technology taking place just five years after the first successful Wright powered flight test--it is hard to imagine the Wrights were roundly ridiculed in their efforts and worked for the most part in deep privacy; and yet here, just 1500 days or so later, there are hundreds of aeronauts and a dozen or so journals devoted to tech aspects of flight.

What caught my Star Trekian eye here in this May 1908 article in l'Aerophile was the lovely found-abstract plans for supporting the envelope of Louis Capazza's lenticular airship, a composite balloon/aircraft. The firm of Adolphe Bayard-Clement was the planned producer of the airship (they were the first to go into general production of an airplane, the Santos-Dumont Demoiselle 19) though it never was built. It was certainly intriguing--it was lighter than air, non-symmetrical, top be powered by three 120 hp engines supplying power to three screws fore and aft--it was lovely in its way, and of course given it plan and profile immediately suggests to me the Starship Enterprise, though I may be alone in that.  

And here's the Found-Abstract art end of the deal--the structure for the non-symmetrical support for the balloon/plane envelope:

Tech info (and image source, above) see Berget, Conquest of the Air, 1909, pp 183-186. 

Images sources (below):  https://archive.org/details/larophile16besa/page/182

Atlas of the Engines--the Antoinette Aero Motor, 1908

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I couldn't but help to share this terrific advertisement found in the page of Aerophile magazine for 1908 (via the "Unbound" section of the Smithsonian Institution and Internet Archive. This is the famous "Antoinette" engine, designed and construction by Leon Levavasseur in an aircraft-building partnership with  Jules Gastambide (whose daughter's name became that of the series of engines). As you can see the man supporting the engine is not having an easy time of it (assuming the guy is 5'8" 150 lbs or so), though this was a far-advanced aircraft engine for the day, a V-16 (?) developing 100- horse (the Wright's 1903 engine was 12hp 180lbs but did its job perfectly).  In any event this was an interesting demonstration of comparative lightness and power, delivered in January, 1908.  (I'm reasonably sure that this is not the 40hp engine of the Farman flight...)

Source: https://archive.org/details/larophile16besa/page/28)

An Anti-Gravity Space Ship (?) of the Year 2659 (1911)

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I was very curious about the cover illustration for the Hugo Gernsback sci fi story, "Ralph 129 C 41 +", in Modern Electrics for December 1911 (volume 4 #9).  "129 C 41 +" was the name of a scientist who was working on the discovery by another "famous scientist" named "1246 41"--it seems that they were all involved in looking for a particular "space flyer" (first discovered by "famous scientist" 96929 in the year 2210), but then there was a kidnapped woman involved and talk of an anti-graviton antigravity engine of some sort, and then the whole thing gets a little misty. (It looks like those semi-sphere around the perimeter of the pace ship were the anti-gravity devices.)  All I really want to do here is share the cover, which I think is the best part of the story. Modern Electrics isn't that familiar a magazine to me, but there seems to be plenty of real stuff in it, not the least of which is a pretty good article on the Bleriot flyer just a few pages after the Gernsback.  

The entire issue is available at Hathi Trust.  

 

The Beautiful Ephemeral: the Perfect Desktop, plus Ads for Pencils and Matches (Japan, 1955)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post (Part of the "Magnificent Mundane" series) 

The Japan External Trade Recovery Organization's General Merchandise of Japan was an "effort is made to introduce every category of general merchandise" being made in the country in 1955.  Ten years after the war the country was still of course recovering from its devastating defeat, though the national economy did make tremendous progress back to some sort of normalcy during that time, particularly during the 'fifties. This is not a Sears catalog, though, as it weighs in at 110 (thick) pages plus 30 pages of advertisements. The merchandise does spread out wide, if not very deep at all, and it makes for an interesting browse to see what sorts of goods were being manufactured and sold overseas so soon after the war.  What caught my eye (following ads for tribal table art, "Japanese-style lanterns", cigarette lights, reed organs, toys, glasses, shoes, scissors, wooden bowls, eyeglasses (two varieties), and so on were the ads for pencils. There were at least four of them, three of which are visually striking. (And speaking of that, there's also a great ad for matches.)  On the "Pencils of Japan" page there is also a peep into perfection, showing an office desktop outfitted with goods manufactured in Japan. There's not much, but the necessaries are there, and it is very tidy in a geo-Spartan way (and nothing like my own desk). In any event, I share the "Pencils of Japan":

Nature Magazine Reviews Hitler (1933)

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Here's a razor-sharp summation and review of Adolf Hitler, being an uncommon appearance of that man and his "science" in Nature, volume 132, p. 198, 1933. 

"That the Nazi leader stands self-revealed as an ill-balanced, fanatical and otherwise abnormal is immaterial. What is supremely significant is that he has come into power on a wave of popular discontent  with present day social, political and economic conditions which is sufficiently intense to submit to previously unheard of restrictions for which a "scientific" backing is advanced."

Plans of Major Aircraft, 1908

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This interesting illustrations shows the plans of 16 different aircraft and the triumph of aviation in the scant five years since the Wright brothers' successful first powered flight in 1903.  From left-to-right and top-to-bottom the designer/builder reads: Wright, Farman, Santos Dumont, Cornu, de la Vaux, Bleriot, Apferer, Bleriot (again), Dufaux, Delagrange, Farman, Bazin, Langly, Brequet, and Esnault-Peletrie.  The image is found in Nature, 1908, vol 78, pp 668-672.

There's a lot in this article but what I focused on was the shot across the bow to the Brits, the author taking issue with their capacities, and telling them to go and get some better maths (or someone better than them to do the thinking and work the numbers): "The recent flights show what can be done in aviation by a person possessed of skill and experience. They are a necessary factor in the development of artificial flight. The problem is quite in a different position from what it was a year ago. But if flying machines are to be made accessible to the million, the sooner English aeronauts learn mathematics or get someone to do the mathematics the better. At the present time a great deal of rubbish passes off as mathematics which is quite unworthy of the name..."

 

Rhymes on the Value of Pi (1905)

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Here's an interesting little aside from the 1905 issue of Nature--the notice is a great example of what made this one of the most interesting science journals in the modern period, as they were not adverse to including some lighthearted and thoughtful pieces along with their very concise and exacting coverage of science news and discovery.  Here we see a reader contributing a poem based on the value of pi: they used the number of letters in the poem corresponding to the number in pi: so, 3.1415 meant that part of the first line had words of 3 then 1 then 4 the 1 letters/word. This is a little more difficult than it looks, and harder still I think to have something decent come of it as Haiku.

 

What to Do When the Bombs (and Gas) Come(s)--Austria, 1935.

JF Ptak Science Books  (Earlier post corrected).

This is another in a series of posts about the use of maps and images in propaganda, principally concentrating in the 1930's and 1940's.  This pamphlet, Luftschutz durch Selbstschutz Schtz fuer jedermann bei Fliegerangrissen), was published by the Luftschutzbund and written by Hugo Noll in Vienna in 1935.  The title page claims that this is the 4th (augmented) edition, with the print run already above 30,000 (which you can either believe or not (is there anyone who starts their program out as version 1.0?)) 

The pamphlet begins right at the beginning--the cover shows Austria in red, surrounded by airplanes of its enemies, with a bomb coming down into the heart of the country in a yellow triangle (which resembles a flame).  The striking design begs to be picked up by anyone who sees it--as I did, as a person here in its future; I'm sure that it must've been very provocative to its target audience.  It gets immediately into the idea of Austria being surrounded by nations who wish do it harm by air.  Another map in the text is more detailed and shows exactly where the threat was coming from--as you can see the threat was coming perhaps from everywhere, except Germany, which as the map indicates had no aircraft in its air force. Austria of course would be annexed in the Anschluss of 12 March 1938, just three years later.   

The main body of the text is a series of warnings about what to do when the bombs come; the rest of it has to do with preparing yourself and your household from attack, which means that there's allot of digging and canning and putting away water and fire retardant.  In general the population was getting very stirred up about the sure-to-arrive but survivable Apocalypse.  
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Music, Color, Shape, and Synesthesia (1890)

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• "A studious blind man, who had mightily beat his head about visible objects, and made use of the explication of his books and friends, to understand those names of light and colours which often came in his way, bragged one day, That he now understood what scarlet signified. Upon which, his friend demanding what scarlet was? The blind man answered, It was like the sound of a trumpet."— John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

This is a big subject for a quick post, the subject of synesthesia having an origin enfogged in mist and with ill-defined boundaries, or at least that is until we get to the 19^th century. If we leave aside the earlier thinking (by folks like the quoted Mr. Locke, above) we can speed ahead to Gutav Fechner (the father of psychophysics) with his empirical study of a group of synesthetes in 1871. He was quickly followed by Francis Galton (in 1881, a paper that I write about elsewhere on this blog), though neither Fechner nor Galton's work in this area achieved very much recognition beyond pale acknowledgment. Things speed up somewhat in the early 20thc when the empirical work is taken more seriously.

But stepping back for a moment, I'd just like to share this unusual and interesting 1890 paper from Nature. I never bumped into it before nor could I find more than a couple of bare references to it. So I'm wondering if anyone out there knows anything about it—this is done in the spirit of the original author of the paper, George Newton, who posted his story ("Visualized Images Produced by Music", March 6, 1890) to see if anyone else in nature-world recognized anything like the situation he describes.

The opening paragraph of the paper:

“IN the annexed paper, and in her own words, are related the very curious effects produced on a lady friend by certain musical tones and orchestral combinations. They are so very singular, entirely outside my experience, and, withal, so inexplicable, that I shall be glad if you will give them a place in your columns, in the hope that some of your readers-physiological or psychological-may be able to throw some light on them.”

A Rare Work Detailing the Minor but Important Social Aspects of Life in the USSR, 1933

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2815

Here's a very unusual and interesting pamphlet that I just found, and partially read. Philena Weller Montgomery and John Ferguson Montgomery wrote Traveling Hard Through the USSR¹, a travelogue on their trip through the old country in the mean and bitter summer of 1933. They printed the pamphlet themselves in 1934, giving their address as 1105 Morrison Ave, Bronx, NYC.

They produced a remarkable major-minor work, I think, making hundreds of small observations on the little bits and bobs of everyday life that one usually does not see in a work like this. For example, they walk around Stalingrad and rather than remark on the great sights and vistas they report on the state of window displays—that there were unrelated objects on display, like urinals with lamp lights and pictures of clothing for sale that the storekeep didn't have, and that the windows were dirty and hadn't been cleaned in months or years, and that the broken ones were fixed with metal and rivets; that sort. That's the real strength of this work, I think; the ability of the writers to see the small local, personal detail—they weren't interested so much in a grand building, but rather the women who were scrubbing the marble floors with some evil-smelling something because there was a shortage of soap; and not so much the boat they were passengers on, but rather the shabby dress whites of the captain and how he moved through the crew and how the crew responded to that; not the grand vistas of old St. Petersburg but rather the dirty shop windows that displayed pictures of items that they didn't have in stock.

The authors left with a group of 10 other people (fellow students?) for a loosely-guided trip through the Soviet Union. This was not a North Korean-style tourist experience for this group; they write that even though they had a guide that they were in no way constrained from wandering off or speaking to anyone they wished; they felt that there was no control over their activity outside of the route they were following for their visit. The fact that they saw so much poverty and hardship, and interviewed whomever they pleased, attests to the limited control the state placed on their tour.

Their adventure begins in Leningrad, and moves to Moscow, Gorki, Kaza, Samara, Saratov, Stalingrad, Rostov, Yalta, Odessa, and then back west via Kiev. The authors write that if the USSR were really trying to control what the visitors saw that they would positively not send people out of or into the country via Kiev because of the state of the city and the people.

I'm sharing this here just in case anyone out there knows anything about this work—I do plan on posting the full work here in the near future.

Here are some notes from my reading:

Kiev

• pale children working elevators at night of their hotel;

• more Bezpreysosny (orphans) here than they saw in all the rest of the Soviet Union combined;

• city swarmed with red Soldiers and OGPU;

• shop windows displayed odd assortments—corks, urinals, bridge lamps, washboards, side-by-side, with very little consumer goods;

• buildings were shabby as were the people, especially the children, “who show the effects of suffering”';

• visit to a Jewish collective farm