JF Ptak Science Books

On Not Discovering X-Rays (1890)

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In the long list of "photographic firsts" the following is a rare case--a first that wasn't a first that may have became a first, though no one recognized it as such until the true first was recognized. Huh?

This is the story of Arthur W. Goodspeed (1860-1943) and William Jennings (1860-1946) and their brief brush with immortality. While using a Crookes tube and  photographing electric sparks and brush discharges in their lab at the University of Pennsylvania in 1890 they produced a photograph of unknown certainty and imagery. They did not pursue the anomaly and stowed the photographic plate away in archives. After the Roentgen discovery in 1895 and seeing the first results in early 1896 they knew exactly what it was they had photographed, and just hadn't recognized that what they were seeing was revolutionary. They retrieved and published the photograph along with their story in Science on February 14, 1896 (vol 3 #59), and a short account of the narrative was published in Scientific American on April 11, 1896, along with the photograph. To their great credit the two physicists made no claim to discovery:

• “We can claim no merit for the discovery—for no discovery was made. All we ask is that you remember, gentlemen, that six years ago. day for day, the first picture in the world by cathodic ray was taken in the Physical Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania."

I reprint the article and the photo below.  

Bomb-Dropping Torpedo Plane Guided by Wireless (1917)

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This illustration appeared in the December 1917 issue of Popular Mechanics, just a year away from the end of WWI. This was a promotion for the idea of a remote-controlled miniature-aircraft, which was equipped with bombs and suggested to be an "irresistible engine of annihilation".  The map displays how the aircraft--or multi-squadrons of them--could be controlled from Dunkirk to bomb targets in Zeebrugge, Bruges, and Thourout, "without the loss of a single flier". 

• "Will the radio bombing plane and the flying torpedo be similarly evolved in time to crumble the fortresses of autocracy along the Rhine?".

The small inset of the flying machine at bottom right seems to be little more than a bomb (a "mechanically controlled aerial torpedo").

 

 

The Urban Rooftop Airport Idea in 1920

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This is another unexpected find of an urban rooftop airport¹/dirigible docking station from 1920.  The idea has a certain amount of sense to it, especially here in the still relatively restricted early history of aviation, just 13 years past Kill Devil Hills, and two past the great expansion of flight following the end of WWI. It is an interesting mix of modernity when coupled with growth of the skyscraper², which is just living through the beginning of its fourth decade.  On the other hand...well, there are a lot of obvious problems with an idea like this, too many to go through in a simple post just intending to share an evocative image. It was a tempting peek into the future, and as we can see one of the dirigibles advertisers "transatlantic", the first of which wouldn't occur by dirigible uintil the Graf Zeppelin in 1928. The planes are way too big, and so on. (Is that the Plaza Hotel in the foreground?) The rendering itself is very pretty, and has a certain Renaissance-y quality too it, especially with the etching-like rendering of the sky.  

If you're interested there are probably ten posts on such ideas in this blog--just enter "airport" in the Google search box for the site and you'll find them.

(Source: Popular Mechanics, December 1920, pg 912.)

Notes.

1. "Airport" and "Air port" first appears in the OED in 1902 in the great Brooklyn Eagle, though I'm unsure of its aviation context ( Brooklyn Daily Eagle 10 Apr. 1/2   "I hope New York will be the greatest airport in the world"). There is a clearer usage in 1914 (Times 16 Mar. 5/3   "The time will come when, with the development of aviation, every town of importance will need an air-port as it now needs a railway station") that leaves no doubt the reference is for airplanes.  

2. "Skyscraper" (and "sky scraper" and "sky-scraper") in the architectural sense draws on a long history of common and colloquial use: it first appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as a nautical term relating to a tall horse (1788), and then used to refer to a  sail (1791), tall bonnet (1800), high flying ball in sports (1842), tall person (1847), exaggerated story (1890), and so on.  The use of the term relating to a tall building (generally 10 to 13 floors high) appears in 1883

A Review of a WWII German History of Rocket Development Film (1950)

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The gem in the title to this short post bubbled into view while looking through an issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (March 1950) for a biography of Wernher von Braun. The two-page biographical notice was perfunctory and the war years were sanitized (stating that after interrogation there "was no room for doubt" that von Braun's real interests were only in interplanetary travel and high altitude research).  

The review of the German film on rocket development is another story--I've reproduced the eight-page tightly packed review below, as it is very useful and in the face of not having the viewable film it serves as a good outline.

I found the references to "Spaceship I" (pictured above) to be very intriguing, though outside of two images of models for the proposed dirigible-like behemoth almost no other information is presented. 

Another Segment in the History of Lines: Lining Up to the Fractionating Tower (1949)

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At first glance this display of data looks a bit like a plate of straightened/geometrizied spaghetti, though it is actually a very good representation of the oil production process, from pump to purchase:

Delivery, fractionating, and distillation process from A Refinery Process Bulletin, Kendall Refining Company, 1949.

Also, here's the attractive and nicely-designed front and back cover of the publication:

The Geometry of Pebble-Making (1878)

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Here's a good, no-longer-missing missing part of entries for the virtually bottomless History of Holes section of this blog—blasting holes drilled into rock faces for tunneling, appearing in an article in the Scientific American Supplement, February 2, 1878.  I've never considered the placement of the holes drilled through rock before, mostly I guess because I've never though about it before today--also I have no doubt that I would not have been able to figure out what sort of info was being represented in the small drawings if they were out of context. The circles and lines standing apart from any explanation or legend could've represented any number of things, from pole or column placement to fort construction, though blasting holes would've been far from my guess list of what these geometries were.

There are a number of tunnels under consideration, all of different lengths, through different media, of different dimensions, and so on, all of which come into play when considering drilling and blasting one's way through 20,000 or 50,000 running feet of mountain.

The article was dryly fascinating, particularly in the human elements. On average it seemed as though for the tunnels surveyed in the article that 15-30 feet of earth would be removed each day, which seems like a lot given the time and the space to work in. Most of the excavating faces seem to have been about 8' x 10', or about 80 square feet, and in that space there were usually six workers operating the drills at one time. That seems to me to be very very cramped quarters operating big and noisy machines generating a lot of dust, all of which was happening with not-great lighting with a questionable air supply. That was one tough job. 

Unusual Shading/Shadows (1866)

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I've made a number of entries on this blog of beautiful/odd shadow practices in antique mechanical and technical drawings, though not so for a while. Today's entry comes from a stout volume of Engineering (volume 2) 0.for 1866 and comes in an illustration for the U.S. Navy torpedo boat, the Spuyten Duyvil. The boat's name seems like a bit difficult to maneuver, except if you're Dutch, though it is far-better sounding than the original name, which was Stromboli.  In any event this was a torpedo boat that saw a little bit of service right at the end of the Civil War--mostly on the James River in Virginia, it seems--and was a torpedo boat. (The "torpedo" at this time was more like a mine than a powered underwater "missile" that we'd think of in these terms today.)  The chief attraction for me for these images though is a bit wholly unnecessary to understanding the boat or its workings, and that's the shadowing for the exhaust stacks, which to me seem a little unusual, though quite lovely. And so the sharing...

“Told by some nice computors of national glory” and the "Cumputor" (1951)

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Here's a terrific little ad that appeared for RCA electronics in the November 1951 issue of Radio & Television News ("the Radio-Electronic Engineering edition").  The main article of interest--and what brought me to this journal in the beginning--was the two-page story "Analogue Cumputors [sic] Solve Complex Problems" about the differential analyzer (the Bush machine I reckon), thermal analyzer, and electric differential analyzer  at UCLA, and which was the main title and illustration on the cover of the magazine.

I could not find “cumputor” in the OED, though I did find “computor” (as a person who computes or calculates) which came into recorded being in 1669. (“Told by some nice computors of national glory”, H. Walpole Let. 18 June in Corr. (1954) XVIII. 463.) “Computer” occurs a little earlier in 1613, found in another very quotable quote: “I haue read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that euer breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number.”, (‘R. B.’ Yong Mans Gleanings). 

This is a short article of only a few pages and a lot of pictures, but that spelling of "cumputor" does not occur in the article, though the word “computer” does. Apparently “cumputor” is a simple typo on the cover of the magazine.

Very Early Special Effects in Reproduced Audio (1878)

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This title for this post is fairly accurate given that the phonograph had been invented by Edison only months earlier and that this is one of the earliest publications on manipulating the sound that it reproduces.  The author of the paper, "The Phonograph" (published July 18, 1878 in Nature), George Bidder, experimented by laying down a spoken "track" on the tinfoil medium and then recording on top of it, finding that "after a series of musical or articulate sounds have been recorded other series could successively be superimposed...and reproduced." I'm not sure when this became standard practice in the recording industry (the musical "industry" part of the phonograph was still about two decades away), but my feeling is that this was a technique that would remain a peep into the future for some time to come. No?  

"The Phonograph", by George Bidder.  

• "In experimenting lately with the phonograph it occurred to me to try whether, after a series of musical or articulate sounds have been recorded, other series could successively be superimposed on the same tinfoil and reproduced. I found that if the instrument be simply reset to the starting-point, and sung or spoken to a second time, it will afterwards faithfully reproduce both series of sounds as though two persons were singing or speaking simultaneously, and by repeating the same process, a third and fourth voice may be added, or one or more instrumental parts, all of which will be reproduced. This experiment forms a striking commentary on Helmholtz's theory of the mode in which the ear recognises different tones in a chaos of sound, by analysing the compound wave, which it receives, into its component simple vibrations. Here the aggregate impressions on the tin-foil produce, so to speak, a compound indentation capable of reproducing a wave of sound which the ear can resolve into the original constituents."

 

The First Microscopical Images of Captured-and-Reproducible Sound? (1878)

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Only months into the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison (at Menlo Park in December of 1877 and patented in January 1878) Alexander J. Ellis reviewed a version of it constructed in London by Mr. Stroh, and found it, well, wanting.  Ellis (1814-1890) was a product of Eton, Cambridge, Trinity, and was a gifted mathematician, philologist, and a groundbreaking ethnomusicologist, and did see some limited utility of the machine to restricted areas of his research. In the short note he wrote for Nature in their April 18, 1878 issue¹, he mostly found that the phonograph was generally flawed in its reproductive capacity, and did not venture far from this interpretation so far as the possible applications of the machine was concerned, which seems iconically short-sighted from my perch here in the future. Even though Ellis recognized that "the effects produced are sometimes startling (as in cries, coughs, laughter, music), the philosophy of the process (making a permanent impression of a very complex compound vibration, and using it as a mould to reproduce that vibration is exceedingly attractive, but at present the instrument--at least the one that I saw..." he concludes that the status of the invention "...has not risen beyond a lecture illustration or a philosophical toy".  

Five weeks after this article and about four months following the patenting a visually-arresting article appeared in Nature which contains what I am assuming to be the first microscopic images of recorded and reproducible sound. I know that is a pretty deep qualification, but I think that's its accurate. The article appeared as "Examination of the Phonograph Record under the Microscope" by Persifor Frazer², who investigated what the impression of the stylus looked like as known sounds are recorded on tin foil. And so this remarkable image, showing what vowel and some dipthongs "look like".  

Notes:

1. Persifer Frazer,   "Examination of the Phonograph record under the Microscope",  an abstract of a paper presented at the Franklin Institute April 17, 1878, by Persifor Frazer, Nature, May 23, 1878, p. 102, in the weekly issue. 
2. Persifor Frazer was of the Philadelphia Frazers, of long and interesting lineage. A Gettysburg vet, he was in professional life mainly a geologist; he did become expert in handwriting and the detection of forgeries using photographic means.  

Only months into the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison (at Menlo Park in December of 1877 and patented in January 1878) Alexander J. Ellis reviewed a version of it constructed in London by Mr. Stroh, and found it, well, wanting.  Ellis (1814-1890) was a product of Eton, Cambridge, Trinity, and was a gifted mathematician, philologist, and a groundbreaking ethnomusicologist, and did see some limited utility of the machine to restricted areas of his research. In the short note he wrote for Nature in their April 18, 1878 issue¹, he mostly found that the phonograph was generally flawed in its reproductive capacity, and did not venture far from this interpretation so far as the possible applications of the machine was concerned, which seems iconically short-sighted from my perch here in the future. Even though Ellis recognized that "the effects produced are sometimes startling (as in cries, coughs, laughter, music), the philosophy of the process (making a permanent impression of a very complex compound vibration, and using it as a mould to reproduce that vibration is exceedingly attractive, but at present the instrument--at least the one that I saw..." he concludes that the status of the invention "...has not risen beyond a lecture illustration or a philosophical toy".  

Five weeks after this article and about four months following the patenting a visually-arresting article appeared in Nature which contains what I am assuming to be the first microscopic images of recorded and reproducible sound. I know that is a pretty deep qualification, but I think that's its accurate. The article appeared as "Examination of the Phonograph Record under the Microscope" by Persifor Frazer², who investigated what the impression of the stylus looked like as known sounds are recorded on tin foil. And so this remarkable image, showing what vowel and some dipthongs "look like".  

Notes:

1. Persifer Frazer,   "Examination of the Phonograph record under the Microscope",  an abstract of a paper presented at the Franklin Institute April 17, 1878, by Persifor Frazer, Nature, May 23, 1878, p. 102, in the weekly issue. 
2. Persifor Frazer was of the Philadelphia Frazers, of long and interesting lineage. A Gettysburg vet, he was in professional life mainly a geologist; he did become expert in handwriting and the detection of forgeries using photographic means.  

Found-Art in a Beautiful Book about Pipes

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In the long-developing series on Found Art (categorized here under "Absurdist, Unintentional", a header that certainly needs changing) is today's entry: two designs in the unintentional abstract, like a sort of colorless color school Barnett Newman...or perhaps not, maybe they're more like Duchamp readymades, though heavier. In  any  event,  The  Pipe  of  Progress,  published  by  the  advertising  department  of  Republic Steel in  1940,  is unexpectedly  quite  lovely,  which  a number  of  Bernice-Abbott-like photos  plus  the  already-mentioned  Found  Art.  For  example,  here's  a cross  section  of  pipe  in  the stages  of  pre-wielded  shaping:                

And another image showing a cross section of  pipe as it is cold-shaped to its final diameter by one of the series of rollers

And the cover of the work:

 

Glass Globes, Light, and Volcanoes (1898)

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I happened upon these lovely technical drawings --in plan and cross section--of the newly-patented Holophane Globe. The inventors and coiners of the Holophane were French scientist Andre Bondel and the Turkish Spiridion Psaroudak who patented their illuminating globe in the U.S. in 1896 (and five other countries between 1893-1895). It was designed with inverted and excised cuts in the glass dome to refract and reflect the interior lighting source, and successfully illuminated more area with "less light waste" than most other globes. Not only was the design effective, but the effects were also pretty, as were the schematics of the globe.  (The profile and paln remind me of some early engravings and woodcut of the interior of the Earth showing the sources of volcanic action...or in the case of our not-recently-mentioned friend Athanasius Kircher, the source of water.)

• Source: "The Holophane Glass Globes for Effecting the Better Diffusion and Distribution of Artificial Light", Journal of the Franklin Institute, vol 145, April 1898. The article is a technical review of the glass globe and wound up being highly favorable, awarding the inventors the John Scott Legacy Medal for their invention, "...for [the invention] of a globe that secures much better diffusion and more satisfactory distribution than any other globe..." 

 

Display of Information--a Brooklyn Bridge Contribution to the "History of Lines" Series

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It has been a while since I've added a post  to the History of Lines series, but today I've found a good one: a graphical display of the limited comings-and-goings of the cable tram on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1888.  The bridge--still not yet quite the "Brooklyn Bridge", but the "New York and Brooklyn Bridge"--was open at this point for only five years, still relatively new. and this chart shows the power expense and general time table of the small train that ran pedestrians from one end of the bridge to the other.  It wasn't a continuously moving cable train, and had regular departure times.  In any event I'm happy to display the complicated and not altogether clear display of the data associated with the train:

And the full display, with legend and explanation:

Source: G. Leverich, "The Cable Railway on the New York and Brooklyn Bridge", from American Society of Civil Engineers, Transactions, vol XVIII, March  1888, #380, pp (67)-102, plates 4-30 (25 folding plates of various aspects of the power train and fittings, complete).  

A Very Early (First?) Description of a Panoramic Daguerreotype (1845)

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Just five years after the announcement of Daguerre's invention of photography, and just four years after the beginning of the early photo craze, there appeared in the Comptes Rendus in mid-1845 a paper by Friedrich von Martens (1809-1875) on an expansive use of the new media: the panorama.  It was certainly the first paper to appear in this journal on the subject; when I checked a likely U.S. source on the subject (Journal of the Franklin Institute, 1846) I found only one mention prior to 1865: a translation of the Martens paper (recorded though as "Merteus"). This seems a little obscure but not unimportant, as Martens may have been either the second (and possibly first) to perfect a panoramic camera, patenting his "Megaskop Kamera" in 1844.

• I've decided to share the Martens paper in both the original and the American translation: 

• Here's the text version of the original article, from the Comptes rendus de l'Academie des Sciences..., Paris, June 23, 1845:

Technical Criticism of an Early Space Flight Sci Fi Movie (1937)

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Massive, monster cannons have existed for many years in idealized and theoretical, speculative worlds, like Tom Swift and his Monster Cannon.  In the history of early imaginary big guns H.G. Wells’ Babel-like space cannon (pictured below in a still from the movie Things to Come,1936), an adaptation his The Shape of Tings to Come (from 1931) is monumentally fabulous --1500 feet tall, with what looks like a  750' base, all of which launched a 75' tall capsule beyond the Earth’s gravitational pull with a spectacular explosiveness that would’ve made its occupants into jelly.  (Tangentally-speaking here the launching of an object to escape the Earth's gravity didn't occur until 1946 when the highly-problematic but nevertheless-genius Fritz Zwicky fashioned a device to an experimental V-2 and via an electric explosive charge punched some object into space.)

In any event D.W.F. Mayer registered his objections to the Wells spaceship in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society from February 1937, which you can read below.