Ptak Science Books

Return to Land Ships--Really Big, Really Bad Ideas: the 1,500 Ton Truck

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 856

Nothing quite gives me the rumbles as seeing pictures of Great Heavy Land Things on the move.  The NASA launch crawler is one of the biggest, though it doesn’t come close to this impossible LandClad pictured in Brett Holman’s excellent AirMinded blog:  the terrestrially-motorized and tankified version of obsolete ironclad (and I guess pre-Dreadnought) battleships.  I doubt that there would be more things more fearful than seeing something like this coming over the rise, Martian tripod death machines notwithstanding. The ironclad/pre-dreadnought would certainly have some problems moving around on the land, considering the huge power sources needed to move them while they were floating in water.  The giant tank also looks pretty pervious, all things considered, and (among many other things) looks as though it probably wouldn’t do so well in rainy weather—it looks like it would generate its own Operation Barbarossa mud wherever it went.  My guess too is that if got stuck, it was, well, stuck.  

The pursuit of sea-land machines has always had a huge ‘wow” factor, if for no other reason than it was just out-of-place and big.   I’ve written earlier here on Elmer Cotherell and James Eads proposal to build a combination railroad ship canal across the Tehuantepec isthmus in Nicaragua, hauling ships up and out of the water and transporting them across land on six railroad tracks pulled by juggernaught teams of locomotives.  In the fiction-made-fact world, Werner Herzog hauled a real steamship up and over a mountain for the filming of his quixotic Fitzcaraldo, which was simply a fabulous thing to see. (The film is a glory as is the film made on the making of the film.)

Getting back to Holman’s landship—I remembered something similar to this, and actually found a picture of it right here in my bizarre-archive.  Popular Science (December 1933) published this account of professor Eric R. Lyon’s¹ conception of the Diesel-powered “Navitruck” (its name looking like quite something different and not so pretty at the thing’s stern), a 1,500-ton amphibious truck with (what Lyon states to be ) 30’-tall (and 10’-wide) tires. Given this I approximate the monster would be 40’ wide and 100+’ long, and I guess at least 35’ tall.  A flattening tire on land would be a problem; I guess a blowout would be catastrophic. 

Did I mention that this thing could float?

Anyway Prof. Lyon envisioned a veritable Western ribbon of these things radiating from Denver to Duluth, to Kansas City (MO) and Galveston, and to Phoenix and on to Los Angeles.  Special gravel roads would be built for his trucks (cutting down on construction costs for more permanent roadways), and in the case of no roads, Lyon saw that the bow of his ship could both cut through impenetrable South American jungles as well as break ice in frozen Arctic waters.  Somehow the roads are seen as being 40’ wide for single lane traffic, and 80’ for double lanes, which doesn’t leave much room for error.

There are some real mammoth trucks rumbling around mining operations, the Caterpillar 797e and Terex trucks, being two of the world’s biggest.  They are 22’ and 24’ high and 300 and 280 ton machines, respectively, and although they begin to approximate the brutishness of the Lyon machine, it would still take five (or ten) of these beasts to fill the shoes of the “Navitruck”.   Also, a big point which isn't addressed with the Lyon's machine is fuel.  The thing would have to have something like a 10,000-gallon fuel tank--which means the fuel alone would weigh 60 or 80 tons--to avoid having fuel stations spread like flies along the landship byways.  Fuel consumption wouldn't be measured by the gallons/mile with something as monumentally heavy as this--it would be measured by the gallons/minute.  Since the Caterpillar 797e drinks about a gallon a minute with a modern efficient engine, I'll make the wild iterative guess that the Navitruck would gulp 20/gallons a minute (?!), which would be a very hard rate of pumping at the gas station this afternoon.  That means that this trucks would be filling-up twice a day after getting 225 miles/tank.  At 15 cents a gallon (in 1933) that would make a $3,000 fill-up, which means it would cost about six thousand 1933 dollars to make it from Denver to L.A. Provided it didn't break down.  [The wheels were on a fixed axle.  Yikes.] The average salary in 1933 was a little more than half the cost of this fill-up, or about $72,000 in 2009 dollars.  On the other hand, if these things hauled 3 million pounds the fuel costs for moving each pound would be about 2 (2009) cents. Or maybe not.  (All of this scratch-pad reasoning might be wrong, but not horribly so, I don't think.)

There were definitely more convenient and already-exiting ways of hauling freight at this time, and the system had  a much more robust delivery system and reach.  That system was called "railroads".

All in all, I’ve come to the conclusion that ship should stay in the water.

Note:

1.  Professor Lyons (Kansas State University physics department), was no stranger to big ideas, appearing frequently in popular magazines like this and the Electrical Experimenter, among others.  

Roadtown, Linear Cities, and Living in a Line: Edgar Chambless and Michal Graves

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 855 

I wonder what our human world would be like if we had evolved living in horizontal linear cities?  

The idea had never occurred to me before seeing the work of Edgar Chambless, whose Roadtown (the entire 172pp of the 1910 work located here) projected the idea of super long linear road-cities.  Actually it was the illustrations that attracted me more than Chambless' pamphlet, though I'm surprised to admit, there's some interesting bits and pieces in that exceptionally odd work of city/future planning. 

Michael Graves also proposed a linear city [aerial perspective below] to form a contiguous, living corridor between New Brunswick and Trenton, and alluded to the development of "consequent new patterns of life" though doesn't say what they might be.  

And certainly there have been many plans for incorporating, engulfing, transportation systems into the very fabric of a city (as seen in the "Is This the Railway of the Future" image that ran in Popular Science in 1932), though the idea of combining transportation and the city itself into a linear creation is far more uncommon. 

But getting back to this living-in-a-line part:  according to some rough napin-logic, I figure that in order to house 300 million Americans in one long structure, it would take something like a building 400' wide, 12 storeys hgh and 3000 miles long (not including infrastructure and so on) to allow 400 square feet of living space for every person.  Oddly enough I randomly chose an individual unit of 400x800x120 feet to work with, which is within just a percent of two of the total volume of the Empire State Building (bizarre!), meaning that it would take about 20,000 Empire State Buildings placed end-to-end to perform the housing of every American in this straight J.G. Ballard-like world. 

Now Chambless offered an architectural-something  much less complex¹ than this notion I just imagined, though his philosphy of life and lviing in such a city was developed well enough to get the interest and attention of major movers and shakers (including Tom Edison).  There was evidently quite a buzz about Roadtown though that's all that ever happened--buzz and no sting, meeting after meeting, happy attendees, then off to another meeting with apparently nothing to show for it all in the end, an interesting idea that took a decade or two to die. 

Notes:

Edgar Chambless and Michael Graves images from the wonderful book, Unbuilt America, by Alison Sky and Michele Stone. (Sky and Stone--very close to sky above/mud below.)

1. (From The People's ALmanac, 1981):  "In cross section, Roadtown would, beginning at the top, consist of: (1) a roof promenade--a glassed-in sun parlor in winter, shaded walk in summer, with bicycling and skating paths and towers housing schools, nurseries, recreation facilities, stores, and power plants; (2) a two-story, above-ground house, with a workroom at street level, a living area above it, and utility lines (electric wires and gas and water pipes) enclosed in a runway beneath the house; and (3) three below-ground levels of railroad lines for expresses and locals, to carry both passengers and freight"

Advanced Sci-Fi Dirigible Notion, 1909

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 854

Just a short post this evening on what looks to be an amazing futuristic vision of he dirigible, found lurking in the "science Jottings" page of the 14 August 1909 issue of The Illustrated London News. (This section has provided more than its fair share of entertainment, a consistent pleasurama of sciency bits all confined to a single page.)  The airship was noted as being designed by "Kuepferle", unfortunately  without a first name, who was associated somehow with "authorities at Frankfurt".  The ship was to be a fantastic 100 metres long, and was set to hold fifty passengers (with, I guess, a crew of 25?)  The structure on the the top of the aircraft was a screen to prevent the sun from heating the helium elements too much, which, somehow, were to be turned into a parachute in the case of a disaster.  The unnamed artist made his drawings from a model, while the "dirigible proper would be available before very long". 

 

The magnificent possible length for the airship--100 metres--was huge for 1909, but was eclipsed (in relatively short order) by the American Akron, a 1931 monster which came in at over 240 metres.  Still, the Kuepferle machine had a rich sci-fi design with a big Buck Rogers feel, a lovely thing.

 It was certainly far prettier than this flying aircraft carrier decorating the cover of La Science et la Vie for January 1924.  I'm not sure what the efficacy was for this idea, this enormous beast catering to one airplane at a time...but it all sure looked pretty in blue. 

The real thing, the Akron, below:

Foot of God, Pt 2: Continuing Thread on Odd Things in the Sky

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 853  Blog Bookstore

I am going to indecently add to my “foot of god” series with this metal engraving from the accomplished Joachim Camerarius¹’ Symbolorum et Emblematum…(published in four volumes at Nuremberg from 1590 to 1605).  There is so much to offer from these books, I freely admit, but I’m afraid that I’m stopped at this foot-from-the-sky image. 

The engravings, executed by Hans Sibmacher, were among the first executed in metal, and the book itself was the first of its kind to present botanical emblems. (The other three volumes contained emblems for animals of land-sea-air.) They are splendid and concise, and filled with soft detail.  And still I’m left with the foot. 

The legend is mostly a mystery and doesn’t help me with the foot—it says something about beauty and growth and madness and reward—and the saffron crocus.    This plant has been a commodity for thousands of years, used for therapeutics and dyeing and spice.  It takes quite a lot of these plants to produce a gram of powder—about 150. 60,000 plants are necessary to produce a pound of saffron, which is getting to be quite pricey.  Given this, saffron was very often imitated and counterfeited—a crime taken quite seriously in many places, and perhaps none more so in Bavaria where (in 1444) a conviction meant death.

And as long as we’re talking about odd antiquarian images the sky, I’d like to point out the work by the Jesuit Franciscus Nerrincq (1638-1712), De goddelycke voorsienigheydt², in which there are several odd eyes that burn their way through the atmosphere.   Eyes/eye of the creator occur frequently in religious presentations and emblems, but not so very often as hands holding a pair of eyes.  I know all of this is very heavy stuff in the history of Christian iconography and the progression of emblemata, but I’d rather deal with the images out of context here and have them stand on their own without interpretation. 

NOTES

1.From the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11^th edition, volume 5:  JOACHIM CAMERARIUS (1534-1598), German botanist and physician, son of the classical scholar of the same name, was born at Nuremberg on the 6th of November 1534. After finishing his studies in Germany he visited Italy, where he graduated as doctor of medicine. On his return he was invited to reside at the courts of several princes, but preferred to settle in his native town of Nuremberg, where he had a botanical garden and formed extensive collections. He wrote a Hortus Medicus (1588) and several other works. He died at Nuremberg on the i 1th of October 1598.

 2.  De goddelycke voorsienigheydt uytgebeeldt in Joseph onder-coninck van Egypten : verciert met sinne-beelden ende sede-leeringen.  The entire book can be seen here.

The University of Utrecht emblem collection is extensive and easy to navigate—there is drop-down box for available titles, and once selected, the book comes up with biblio info on the right and a drop-down of thumbnails for the entire book at left.  It is a joy to navigate. 

Objects from the Last Full Measure, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 852

The material documented in this 17 April 1944 LIFE magazine article are the effects of dead soldiers.  It was surprising to see this sort of coverage, given the place and the time: I do not think that we will see photographs like this for our currents wars.  The title of this short photo essay—the shockingly stunted and bald “Dead Men’s Things”—should certainly have been something else with more dignity than a movie title for a schlock Hollywood B-production of the ‘50’s.The article is weirdly disjointed and heavy handed considering the great and respectful duty at hand.  I’m not saying that the writer didn’t understand the enormity of the situation, as the article puts it quite well:  “To the people who go there, it seems a more sacred place than a cemetery and the ordinary things it handles seem the best kind of memorials to men who will never return…”  The clumsy manner in which the whole deal is presented was probably a series of unfortunate errors by a time-pressed editor. 

 

The story of the belongings of the killed servicemen goes like this: the effects were collected by the quartermaster corps in a small village in France, stored in 11 buildings and 150,000 square feet of storage, and then sent to the Army Effects Bureau¹ in Kansas City, Missouri.  From there the material was further sorted and checked and double-checked, and checked again, and then sent on to the next of kin. 

 

It sounds like an overwhelming job, helping in the attempt to deliver the high honor of restoring the last objects carried by a dead son into battle to his parents.  The thing I can’t get out of my mind is the continuous rising tide of bags and boxes coming in from Europe, all intimate reminders of great loss.

 

1.  “The job of the Commanding Officer, who is the Effects Quartermaster (Continent), is to receive and safeguard thousands of' packages of irreplaceable personal property until they can be returned to the owner or forwarded to the Army Effects Bureau at Kansas City for disposition. Q-290 serves as a holding and reconsignment depot in transmitting the property of casualties from the unit in the field back to the owner, or in forwarding property of deceased to the U. S.”

“When a soldier becomes a casualty (either deceased, hospitalized, captured, interned, or missing), his unit commander collects all personal property, inventories it, removes government property, and forwards all the personal items to Q-290, marked with the owner's identification and status. If the owner is deceased, the property is documented and forwarded immediately to Army Effects Bureau, Kansas City, for transmission to the next of kin. If the owner is hospitalized, the property is placed in storage indefinitely, subject to disposition instructions from the owner. If the owner is missing, captured, or interned, the property is stored so that he may claim it upon return to duty.”-- From documentation on the website of the Army Quartermaster Museum.

Emerging Patterns and Hidden Visible Art

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 851  Blog Bookstore

Even when I know that this picture is coming, when it is rounding the bend, I still can’t see it for the portrait it is supposed to be.  The lithograph is by Berthold Loeffler (1874-1960), a prolific Viennese designer, artist and professor at Kunstgewerbeschule (1907-1935) whose prodigious commercial

output covered about every other letter of the artistic alphabet.  This work is a portrait of his mostly-forgotten fellow-Viennese writer, Peter Altenberg¹ for the Kabaerett Fledermaus of 1909.  The portrait is all squares and one big button to me, and I have to consciously look for the rest of the picture in spite of knowing that the stuff is there. 

It is an unusual picture of emergent art—for me not quite like, for example, the cover of the pamphlet Cinema by J. Epstein, where the letters are a jumble for just a moment and then snap into view.  The Loeffler portrait is much more densely hidden in a much more straightforward manner, and fools my mind every time. 

 Notes

1.Altenberg is probably a product of his time, or a time of his product.  Described as the bohemian’s bohemian, he lived an outre lifestyle in little cafes and bars, wearing capes and broad-brimmed hats, and was evidently something of an effeminate womanizer with a very deep interest in very young girls.  There you go.  Altenberg stood quite high in that world, as Alban Berg put some of his postcard-poetry to music in his Five songs on picture postcard texts by Peter Altenberg, which caused a near-riot in its premier, abruptly stopping the performance which would not see the light of day again for another 40 years.

Found Images Within Images: Dropping Your Hat in the Punic Wars

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There is a particular class of illustration in which, among the secondary figures of the image, there is a small happening, an everyday trifle, that has been captured by the artist and included in the overall communication for no necessary reason. (for example, see here and below¹). I’ve written about this a little before on this blog in posts about finding images-within-images: the unecessaries among the unnecessaries, the bits and pieces of everyday human existence that in and of itself is not worth commentary but which nearly everyone experiences.  Small bits, they are, of a tremendous human nature, the things that are done in private, or are so universal but inconsequential that they are shocking to see when illustrated in print.

Titus Livius (59 BCE-17 ACE), better known to the English-speaking world as Livy, was a superior among superiors of Roman historians, writing on the history of his city and country.  His work, Romische Historie…, published in Mainz by Johann Schoeffler 1450 years later in 1514, was one of the most beautifully illustrated books ever produced in that city.  This is a considerable statement, as Mainz was the birthplace/hotbed of moveable type printing, being home to Johann Gutenberg and a number of other early presses. 

And in looking at this fantastic work by Livy, I am a little embarrassed to find this spectacular bit of human tendency displayed in this woodcut depicting a naval engagement during the Punic Wars.  It is a beautiful thing, this scene of warfare depicted on tranquil seas and ribbony waves, determination in every face.  But what I noticed in the small boat at bottom right is a man reaching out into the water—not for a dropped oar, or to help a man overboard, or to catch his falling sword. 

He was reaching for his dropped hat. 

I have reason to doubt that during the Punic Wars there may have been an unwritten chapter, “On the History of Dropped Hats During Warfare”.  Surely soldiers dropped their hats during the history of roman conquest, but I’d say that retrieving the headgear was more important at the Battle of the Bulge in protecting your noggin from badly splintering trees traveling at you at 180 mph and other such places than a wool cap dropped from a ship in pitched battle two hundred meters from shore. 

I like this so because it is probably the first reaction that most of us would have—just a habit, battle raging or not—and just utterly human.  Just a little piece of back-history that doesn’t go anywhere and is lost to experience.  I’m sure that Herr Gutenberg dropped his hat at odd times, as did the unknown artist of this print.  Just an odd bit, like the first things printed on Gutenberg’s press being religious indulgences for people paying their way past Purgatory (and worse).  The fact that the indulgences preceded the great bible by several years doesn’t really matter, and neither does retrieving a dropped hat in a sea battle—but they do make interesting stories.   

1.  Some other Found Images posts:

Found Images: Penny Lane and the Inexpensive Treat, London, 1896

Found Images of the Great Wheel, 1895

Finding Hidden Images in Antique Prints: 18th Century Forensic Social X-Rays of Florence by Guiseppe Zocchi

Bad Ideas Department: Really Big, Really Bad--Mussolini's Monster.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 849  Blog Bookstore

“Building skyscrapers is the nearest peace-time equivalent of war. In fact, the analogy is startling, even to the occasional grim reality of a building accident where maimed bodies, and even death, remind us that we are fighting a war of construction against the forces of nature.” -Col. William A. Starrett, Skyscrapers and the Men Who Build Them (1928)

Indeed!  I wonder if Starrett (whose book, or at least its cover, is beautifully designed and a roaring bore to read) had this proposed building (below) in mind—if so, we could’ve skipped right past WWII and declared WWIII. 

 

It’s a good thing that the Roman skyline isn’t punctured here and there by skyscrapers—especially those that would’ve been built during the Fascist era.  Take, for example, this planned 1100-foot monster, proposed in 1925, in the third year of Mussolini’s government.  This is an idealized cityscape of course, created to show height comparisons with famous buildings, but this thing (looking very much like Moscow University) would’ve created a hole in the sky and thrown a suffocating, shadowing presence all over the city.  Granted it isn’t as monstrous as many of the international style buildings could’ve been had they been a fifth of a mile high--that work was left to the cobbled hand of Philip Johnson in America—but it is still horrible enough all on its own.  More horrible to think that it could’ve swallowed whole the seven biggest buildings in Rome, and was taller than the seven greatest architectural wonders of the ancient world stacked one on top of the other. 

It is curious to note that this spaceship-like building was drawn for The Illustrated London News (24 January 1925) by Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986), an artist and designer, and known as “the Father of Space Art”.  The best thing that this building could’ve done was to light its afterburners and take off. 

Out of Context Department: Artists Taken by the Devil, 1620

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Mark Twain said that Adam only took the apple not because it was delicious or attractive but because it was forbidden.  I wonder why this operative of Satan was so interested in this artist (pictured below), who was seemingly and boringly making his way through a standard portrait of an imagined vision of the Holy Mother. She and the other holies (some of whom appear to be "simply" human and clerical compared to the rest of the iconic foundations of Christianity) are being bathed in pure holy light; an angel at left, seemingly with nothing else to do, unnecessarily points to the main attraction, making sure that the artists knew that it was the folks with the halos who were to be painted. .  [It would be surreal and interesting to imagine a short sequence in which we see these two artists working busily on their unseen canvases, sweating as the oils fly, recording the celestial scene before them, golden and glowing people illuminated by the light of the creator; finished, the artists reveal their work, one painting the holy congress, while the other turns his  godless landscape canvas featuring the odd tower at right-rear. "I could never paints hands" he might've said.]

The engraving is the work of Bortius a Bolwert (1580-1643 and a pupil of the much better-known Abraham Bloemaert) for A. Suquet's morality and Heaven/Hell peepbook, Den wech des eeuwich levens...which was printed in 1620. I don't know what the original message was for this image, unless it was something simple, some punishment for a less-than-pure artist painting purity; perhaps the devil took the artist at death, showing the reader that not only is death available to call at any time, but that the devil was right there, too, to whisk you away to the lake of fire even while your oily hommage to the creator was wet on your easel.  It might well simply be in the dance of death tradition--so beautifully and haltingly executed by people like Albrecht Durer--showing Death visiting people of all ranks and professions, the moment of extinction coming at the time most perfectly illustrating the deathee's station of life. 

Also appearing under such titles as Ars moriendi, Memento mori, Vanitas, Dancs Macabre,  the Skeleton Dance,  la Danza de la Muerte, Totentanz, and the Chorea Machabæorum, among others, the idea of the Dance of Death existed as morality plays and in literature for many centuries.  In the years before printing in Europe, there were many versions of time's massacre in frescoes in churches and chapels all across Europe (see here for an interesting chronological listing) as well (of course)as in myriads of manuscripts.  In addition to Durer, some of the early post-Gutenberg masters of this genre included Konrad Witz,  (1460); Bernt Notke,  (1463); Hans Holbein the Younger (1538),  Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki,r Johann Elias Ridinger.  (See here for an introduction to and explanation fo the Holbein cycle.)
In music too the Dance of Death scenario is seen many times:  the Danse Macabre (by Camille Saint-Saëns, 1874); Songs and Dances of Death, (by Modest Mussorgsky, 1875); Dance of Death in Symphony No. 4, 2nd Movement (by Gustav Mahler, 1901); Mattasin oder Toden Tanz, (by August Nörmiger, 1598);  (Dance of Death), in Ballad of Heroes, (by Benjamin Britten, 1939); Dance of Death, in Trio in E Minor, op. 67 (by Dmitri Shostakovich, 1944); Totentanz ( by Franz Liszt, 1849 AND Felix Woyrsch in 1905 AND Arnold Schoemnber in 1914 AND Wilhelm Kempff in 1931, and on and on.  I didn't mean to go on about this, but just wanted to make the point that the Looming Nature of Death really was so in Medieval and Renaissance Europe--and where death as waiting at virtually every turn, the Devil wasn;t too far behind. 

(Also, see Bibliodyssey for a wonderful woodblock book of the dance of death.)

Blank and Empty Series: Oliver Cromwell's House

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 847  Blog Bookstore

And so it came to pass under the vengeful gaze of the restored Charles II  that the nicely-buried Oliver Cromwell was dug up from his monarchial pit, brought to the light, and then hanged, and once twice-dead, was beheaded.  To make matters worse for Cromwell, his body was tossed into “a deep pit under the gallows” and his head displayed on a spike at Westminster Hall.  I guess that his eyes at that point would’ve been happy to see some more comfortable dirt. 

 

I’m just relating that story as part of the impression I got from this 1824 woodcut of Cromwell’s house at Whitehall.  It is an odd, forbidding scene:  walled, dark, and with several uncomfortable characters, it feels cold and empty, as empty-looking as a house could be. Perhaps that is a butcher with a slab of meat, and a dry-goods hawker with a wagon-full o fgoods, and a pair of drinkey buddies.  Maybe not--but whatever they're doing and whomever they are, its just a little David-Lynch-odd.