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Electro-LUXurious 1: ELectrical Advertising Signs

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 This is the first in a new series of posts on the history of the invention of early applications of electricity to, well, whatever.  This first example, far from being the first patent granted for an electrical apparatus, is interesting because of how relatively modern its outcome looks--if we defined "modern" at about 1975.  Digital displays have replaced most signage whose basis was formed in this patent, though various palm readers, "loose" gold buyers and tent revivalists continue to use the things.  But for the times in which machines like this were new commodities, they were sensational--not only did they actually utilize electricity (many things advertised during this period were named "Electric _____  or  _____" but had absolutely nothing to do with the application of a current--they were simply using the name in a fad for brand recogniion, much like Atomic Bakery and Nuclear Toasties did) seeing the electrically-lighted words must've felt a little like the exhilaration in seeing your first television.  [An earlier post on this blog on very early electrical signs appears here.]

 

The patent reads (below):

The TSA, 1914

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Years ago, around 1995, I was at Washington's National Airport, flying at a time of much laxer security precautions in the history of air traveling the U.S., when you were able to walk right up to the gate from your car by passing through only one metal detector, and then not having to show a boarding pass.  I went through the detector just fine; the person behind me set it off.  I was only paying a little attention to the scene as the metal-man was asked to stand to the side and be inspected by a detector wand.  In my peripheral vision I noticed that the man raised his arms parallel to the ground while still holding his attache, which was a little odd, so I turned to watch what was going on.  The person turned out to be Mike Wallace, who stood their stoically, as the security personnel went over his entire body, very thoroughly, for perhaps a minute, perhaps a little more.  He never said a word, never moved after raising his arms.

Here was a person who spent perhaps more time in the public eye, who had been on television more often than almost anyone in history, being given a metal detecting bath without uttering a word, which I though to be splendid behavior.

In that entire procedure, the security officers didn't wand his briefcase.

The Illustrated London News ran this print in their 28 March 1914 issue, entitled  " 'Any Arms, Revolvers, Ammunition?'--a New Customers Question!" with the sub-title "In search of weapons destined for Ulster Volunteers¹, customs officers are asking passengers if they have any arms to declare on their arrival at Greenore" [75k north of Dublin, on the coast]. 

Notes:

1. "The original Ulster Volunteers were formed by Edward Carson and James Craig as Unionist militias in the tensions surrounding the potential success of the third Irish Home Rule Bill. At the start of 1912, Unionists and members of the Orange Order started drilling and on 9 April (Easter Tuesday) Carson and Conservative Andrew Bonar Law reviewed 100,000 Ulster Volunteers marching in columns.^[1] On 28 September 237,368 men signed the Ulster Covenant pledged to "using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland", with the support of 234,046 women.^"--Wikipedia.

 

The First Woman to Fly in an Airplane Was When?

ITEM:  issue of the Illustrated London News with the story/report of the first woman to fly in an airplane.  25 July 1908.  The story occupies about a half-page of the 32-page issue, which is removed from a larger bound volume, though intact.  Nice condition.  $125

I wondered about how long after the Wright's first powered flight (17 December 1903) that it took for a woman fly in an airplane, either as passenger or pilot.  I was a little surprised--when I found my answer, my glasses weren't quite up to seeing the date on the top of the page very clearly, and on closer inspection I was a little taken aback to see how wrong my assumption was.  It didn't take five weeks or five months, but five years before this happened.

It seems as though this honor belongs to Therese Peltier, who on 8 July 1908 was a passenger in the aircraft of her significant other, Leon Delagrance, flying a distance of about 700 feet¹.  An earlier great name for the history of women in aviation, E. Lillian Todd, was the first to design and build an airplane, though she was not able to fly the unflyable aircraft.  A half-dozen or so women aviators appear in 1909, and by 1910 the course for women in aviation expands dramatically. (An interesting chronology of "firsts" for women in aviation can be found here; another site, Women in Aviation Web Magazine, can be found here.)

The image above, from the Illustrated London News for 25 July 1908 (the original issue of which is available at our blog bookstore), shows Ms. Peltier getting ready for the flight.  It is interesting to note that the picture and story occurs in a section of the magazine called "Chronicle of the Car"

which is where reporting on aeroplanes and flight occurred, the subject not quite at the point where aviation deserved its own category.  Of course the automobile was new, then, too, so it makes a little sense to have them lumped together...but not much.  The "Chronicles" part of the magazine was a half-page affair, the last page before the advertisements began, the last leaf before the rear cover. 

Notes:

1.  It seems as though there is debate on this, mostly over the Delagrance aircraft was indeed "modern" enough to be considered a modern heavier-than-air airplane, this over the way the control of the plane was handled.  I'd say we just left Ms. Peltier alone on this one.

From the Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum site

Tree Rings of Soldiers' Clothes, 1918

ITEM:  Original news serivce photograph, 1918.  8x6 inches.  Good condition.  $250.00

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Aside from the strong impact that this 1918 image makes, the enormous mounds of clothing of captured German solders that were routinely handled as part of their processing, it struck a deeper chord to an older image still (that we'll see below).  The photograph seems threatening to me, even though the action taking place in it wasn't, it was mundane--the men, who I believe are German POW's, are processing the clothing for disinfection and cleaning.  But the size of the mound reminds us of the magnitude of the numbers of the dozens of millions who were killed during WWI, as well as the millions who were taken prisoner.  What remains to be said about this image is how often that pile of clothing was replaced:  is it a monthly, or weekly, or daily pile?  My guess is that it was more daily than anything else, if for no other reason than there is an enormous oil lamp in the background of the photo, suggesting that the process went on all day and into the night.  My initial reaction is that this pile was replicated often during any given month....

 

And the image it reminds me of are those made of the enormous mounds of buffalo hides, piles readied for shipment away from the Plains by rail. 

I am in no way suggesting that the prisoner were skinned like the buffalo, not in any way.  But they do bear a resemblance in the way that thousands of men or buffalo could be represented in such a compact space, flattened husks of the living thing, gross representations of big numbers. 

Nazi Propaganda on Propaganda: on British "Atrocity Propaganda" (1938/9)

ITEM:   Nazi "book review"--The Rules of Atrocity Propaganda".  Printed ca. 1938/1039.  2pp, 11x8 inches.  These are original negative photographs of the front and back of the original two-page publication.  This was part of a large collection from the Library of Congress, sent to the library in 1946, "source unknown".  I suspect it may have come from the Office of War Information, as there were a number of items similar to this that came with that originating stamp.  This is in fine condition, and rare.  $95.

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As a small cog in the machinery of the Nazi Big Lie, this short sheet (supposedly written by a " Theodore Kesselmeier"¹), outlines a campaign of British anti-Nazi psychological warfare, and was written around 1938/9.  It is written in a book review format whose aim was the 1938 publication by Sidney Rogerson²,  Propaganda in the Next War, which was an alert (described as "brilliant" by John A. Pollard in The Public Opinion Quarterly for Autumn 1945) to the British government to establish central coordinating offices for information and communication for what the author felt to be the impending war with Germany.  In many ways Rogerson was responding to an enormous flood of information coming out of Germany about its own impending future, from the election and seizure-of-power by Adolf Hitler, to books like Ewald Barnse Raum und Volk im Welkriege (translated into Germany Prepares for War) of 1933, and on and on, a growing high tide that was without end. (Even from the most base popular study of Germany's desires, for example, looking at every issue of the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig) from 1933 to 1939 as I have done, it is overwhelmingly obvious that Germany was preparing for the next war.  The case is made constantly and boldly in the magazine, which served in a way as Germany's version of LIFE magazine.)

But the "reviewer" finds  the Rogerson work insulting and militaristic, hateful; an attack upon Germany.  He/they write(s) that the book is an offense, and part of an effort of  "the cold-blooded and unrestricted manner in which Britain has prepared this latest war against Germany".  This part is odd because even at this late date, and given what the knew about the German war aims, Great Britain had done very little about preparing for war even until Munich.

I have a number of these propagandistic pieces that came out of Germany at this time, some of which have been written about on this blog, and it seems no surprise now to see how many of them paint Germany as a victim of the war aims of the countries nearby:  Poland and Czechoslovakia were both presented as late as 1938 as having designs on Germany. This is just one of many examples of Nazi propaganda on propaganda, issues of lies within lies to the secret house of even-more-inner lies. 

[page 2 is in the "continued reading" section, below.]

Notes:

1.  I suspect that "Kesselmeier" was the nom de plume of a section of writers laboring away in the dream factory of the psych-ops part of the Nazi war machinery.  It is much easier to produce reports when you have an entire group of people working on the project without need for the benefit of proof--or, for that matter--of truth. 

2. Rogerson's entry in Who's Who:  “Publicity and Public Relations Consultant and author. Born 22^nd of October 1894. Son of the Reverend S. Rogerson. B.A. in Modern History 1916; Served in the European War;

Portrait of John Dee, Mathematician and Astrologer

Stipple Engraving of the great mathematician and astrologer,  John Dee. "Dr. John Dee" (1527-1600), published and printed in  London by  T. Cadell,  1798. This is a very fine portrait (5x4" on a 7x5" sheet) undertaken in an accomplished/naive style after the painting by George Perfect Harding (d. 1868) and engraved by Nicolas Schenker (1760-1848).   $135.00

There is a slightly newer portrait that looks almost identical to this by William P. Sherlock (b. 1780), so:

In any event both of these works (and others subsequently) are based onthe portrait of Dee that hangs in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.  It shows Dee as he appeared at age 67 (by an artist unknown), and was evidently gifted by his grandson It belonged to his grandson Rowland Dee to Elias Ashmole, who later gave it to Oxford.

Even though the three look very similiar to one another, if you concentrate just on the eyes and covered the rest of the portrait, it seems that they are the eyes of three different people. 

Biographical information from the St. Andrews Site:

"Born in London in 1527, this remarkable mathematician and astrologer is supposed to have been descended from a noble old Welsh House. John Dee was educated at a school in Chelmsford in Essex, then entered St. John's College, Cambridge in 1542. He became a Fellow of St. John's College in 1545 and the next year became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Henry VIII founded Trinity College, the largest of the Cambridge colleges, in 1546 and Dee became one of its first Fellows. Dee then traveled on the Continent (1547-1551). In a number of visits he studied with Gemma Frisius and Gerardus Mercator at the University of Louvain. In 1551 Dee was offered an appointment as professor of mathematics in Paris but declined. He also declined a lectureship in mathematics at Oxford three years later. Dee became astrologer to Queen Mary but was imprisoned for being a magician. He was released in 1555. He then found favour with Queen Elizabeth and cast horoscopes for her. He even selected the day for her coronation. In 1570 Dee edited an edition of Euclid translated by Billingsley. Dee wrote a famous preface to this edition justifying the study of mathematics. In 1573 Dee wrote Parallacticae commentationis praxosque which gives trigonometric methods which might be applied to find the distance to 'Tycho (Brahe)'s supernova' of 1572. Dee also wrote on calendar reform, on navigation, on geography and on astrology. Dee brought instruments of navigation back from the Continent when he returned in 1551. From 1555 he was a consultant to the Muscovy Company. The Muscovy Company was formed in 1555 by the navigator and explorer Sebastian Cabot together with a number of London merchants. It was granted a monopoly of Anglo-Russian trade and had as one of its aims the search for the Northeast Passage. Dee prepared nautical information, including charts for navigation in the polar regions, for the company during the next 32 years. Later in his career Dee became interested in astrology and alchemy, and he gave up other work for this. The lack of reaction of others to his scientific work drove him in the direction of alchemy which he saw as a quick way to glory. Dee visited Poland and Bohemia (1583-89), giving displays of magic at the courts of princes..."