Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books LLC

Rare, Early Development Papers for the Creation and Editing of ASCII, 1963/4

Manuscript notes (four pieces) and related support publications (fourteen pieces) on the development of ASCII (the backbone of electronic communications) from one of the 70 members of the main (designated "X3.2") development team. Ralph Mullendore¹, the former engineer at the U.S. Census Bureau responsible for (among many other things) the testing, performance, evaluation and installation of the UNIVAC I at the Bureau.  It looks to me as though Mullendore was a team member in general (the sub-committee X3.2) and a member of the development task group of for punch card standards and ASCII ("X3.2.3"), for "representations of ASCII in punched form" as well as X3.2.1.

All together:  18 items, all of which measures 11 x 8.5 inches.  All are in very good condition.

 

Obfuscation as a Weapon--Teaching Indians how to Read, 1875

ITEM:  Easy Reading Lessons for Indian Schools, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1875.  9x5 inches, 80pp.  Numerous small illustration throughout the book.  Nice condition.  $125

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1417 

This small pamphlet, Easy Reading Lessons for Indian Schools, was published for the Department of Indian Affairs (as a section of the Interior Department, classifying the Indian along the lines of cattle and agriculture) by the federal government, printed by the indomitable Government Printing Office in Washington DC in 1875.

It is an unintentionally quiet indicator of the general American policy towards the Native American in the 19^th century.  The work is indifferent to any particular need of the student.  It is intended for the person who could not read, and nowhere in this work is there a listing of the alphabet.  It is ignominiously but softly complex, and looks to me to be a total disaster as a text.  (This is true when comparing the work to nothing at all; but when you stand it next to, say, McGuffey’s reader or the Eclectic or any of the other classic how-to-read books of the 19^th century, the weaknesses of the Indian book become instantly clear.

How in the name of great bog could anyone have thought it just and fair and equitable to teach English-illiterate “Indians” to read with such an instructional?  It isn’t even close to being a book, and it comes no where near to being able to transcend its own terminal obliqueness.  It introduces simple words and phrases in a tongue-twisting ways, and then complicates the situation by quickly adding more structured words in a more confusing environment.  The thing is terrifying.  I actually had a hard time reading it out loud. 

Here on page 17 (already!) is a tremulous example:

“See the lad.  Is it Mat?  It is Mat; and Fan is by him on the sod.  He has his hat. But it is not on. Has Fan a hat?  Mat has a bat. Dan cut it by the bog. Mat had his bat, and ran at my dog Boz., and sat on a log, and hit him.  He did it in fun. And Boz had his fun.  He got the bat and ran it way and hid it in a box. Dan got it but bid Mat not hit the dog.”

For crying out loud! (The bat by the way is, yes, a baseball bat.  Pretty early stuff in 1875.)  Why would someone use this series of images to teach someone how to read?  The pamphlet continues to exhaustion, taking only 80 pages to do so. For me it is a perfect symbol of the way in which the government—in general—dealt with the “Indian Problem”.  Confusing children and making life more needlessly complex, making it harder for them to succeed, making it more difficult for them to rise above the difficult situation that they have unexpectedly been born into,  is a superior sign of inferiority of the dominant power. 

Wait a minute.  Am I writing about the Indian in 1875 or the poor kids in  SE DC in 2009?  I can’t tell.  The corruption of the social model for caring for people who need federal attention more than anyone else—the underprivileged child—is antiquarian and entrenched and as strong as ever.  At least there’s a moral foundation for the care of kids whose parents cannot afford health insurance.  Um, oh, wait another minute….

Franz Alt and the Bell Telephone Labs Computer, 1948

Alt,  Franz.  A Bell Telephone Laboratories Computing Machine--I+II.  Washington DC:  National Research Council,  1948.  1st edition.  Mathematical Tables and other Aids to Computation, volumes III/21  Original printed wrappers.  Very good condition.  We offer the two issues of MTAC in its scrarce original wrappers, with the complete article by Dr. Alt occupying pp 1-13 and 69-84.

SCARCE. "Between 1937 and 1946 engineers and scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories built a number of digital relay computers, among the first working programmable machines anywhere. Their experience with the technology of switching-that second aspect of telephony-was the basis for Bell's entry into digital computing. But the first aspect-the transmission of analog voice signals-played a role too, as we shall see. The invention of the computer at Bell Laboratories, like its invention elsewhere, resulted from a convergence of technical skill, social need, and talent. Those preconditions were there by the mid-1930's. It remained for one of Bell's employees, Dr. George Stibitz, to serve as the catalyst to bring them together."--from  Reckoners, Bell Labs, page 0074. 

On Franz Alt: "Dr. Franz L. Alt (born 1910 in Vienna, Austria) is an Austrian born American mathematician who made major contributions to computer science in its early days. Franz Alt grew up in Austria and received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Vienna in 1932, researching set-theoretic topology and logical foundations of geometry. He left Austria for the United States after the 1938 Anschluss. An avid skier, he served in the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division during World War II reaching the rank of Second Lieutenant. After the war, he worked on the ENIAC and other Army computing projects; later he worked in the Computing Laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards, and eventually at the American Institute of Physics. He is best known as one of the founders of the Association for Computing Machinery, having served as its president from 1950 to 1952; he also wrote one of the first books on digital computers, Electronic Digital Computers (Academic Press, 1958)."   (Book ID 22907) $750.00

The Mark I Computer, Manchester, 1949

"A Calculating Machine with a 'Memory': thew Control Panel, and a Storage Tube in Use".  Article in the Illustrated London News for 25 June, 1949, featuring the great, first-programmable computer, the Mark I, at the University of Manchester.  The article appears on the front page of the magazine and is continued in a wide centerfold spread, showing a two-page photograph of the machine.  13x10 inches, 24pp (the whole issue).  Nice copy.  Uncommon.  $650

"The Manchester Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculating Machine has been devised and constructed to undertake a wide variety of complex calculations which would take human beings, using ordinary methods, possibly months to carry out, where the machine takes only an our or so. The human controller has to decide how to Calculating Machine can perform the desired calculation, and draws up a list of "instructions" for it to obey. He breaks up the complex calculation into a series of simple basic operations and translates these from numbers into a specified code. The list of "instructions" is fed into the machine, and the initial numbers (in code) on which it is to operate are then loaded into a special position. All the information having been fed into the Calculating Machine, its "memory" can be switched on to start operations. When the machine has worked out the whole problem, a red light switches on and it stops automatically. The final result can then be read off the monitor cathode-ray tube (shown in our photograph) in the form of light dots which are translated into figures by the human controller. A photograph of the complete apparatus appears elsewhere in this issue."

Eckert's Popular Treatment on How a Computer Works, 1948

Eckert, Wallace J.  "Electrons and Computation".  In:  The Scientific Monthly, November 1948.  Occupies pp 314-323, including one full-page photo of the IBM SSEC, a half-page photo of the arithmetic unit of the SSEC, and a number of other, smaller images.  Offered in the bound volume for July-December, 1948, 448pp.  All  six issues have their original wrappers bound in.  Very nice copy, with a few ex-library marks here and there.  $350

Deep, Wooden Genetics of the Programmable Computer: the Jacquard Loom, 1888

Emanuel Anthony Posselt  The jacquard machine :  analyzed and explained : with an appendix on the preparation of jacquard cards, and practical hints to learners of jacquard designing.  10x7.5 inches, 127,  p., [2] folded leaves of plates : ill. ; 29 cm.  $1650.  Rare first edition. Published under the auspices of the School [Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art] in Philadelphia, 1888.  Of particular interest is the appendix, "Preparing Jacquard Cards", pp 85-102, which in effect is a description of an 18th century programmable machine. 

“Extremely detaiuled description…of machines for preparing Jacquard cards, lavishly illustrated”—Randell, p. 501. (In:  Brian Randell, The Computer from Pascal to von Neuman, 2^nd edition, 1992). 

“Particularly useful for understanding how the cards were used, often considered as an early form of machine programming”. –Cortada, #330.  In:  James W. Cortada, Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865-1956.  Princeton University Press, 1999. 

Biographical Data for Posselt, published in 1900

     Author and textile expert. Born Reichenberg, Austria August 21, 1858. Son of

Emanuel Anthony and Elizabeth (Demuth) Posselt.  Graduated in 1876 from the Imperial Government Weaving Schoolof  Reichenberg. Next managed his father’s mills in Reichenberg, where he got his  first practical experience in textile manufacturing. Visited most important cities  in Europe carrying on the manufacture of textiles.  Came to the United States August 14, 1878. From that time until 1884 he was employed as a designer or supervisor in leading mills in the New England States and Pennsylvania.  In 1884 he became the first director of the first successful textile school in the  United States, started in Philadelphia in connection with the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art.  . In 1891, he resigned his position and accepted editorship of the Textile Record of North America, as of 1900 the foremost journal on textile manufacturing in the United States.  At this time he established a private textile school as well as a book businessin textile literature. His first published work was The Jacquard Machine (4 editions as of 1900). His next and most important publication was The Technology of Textile Design (7 editions as of 1900), followed by The Structure of Fibres, Yarns and Fabrics. He also published Textile Calculations and Textile Machinery. He also published in the United States such valuable works as Wool Dyeing by Professor Gardner (written in England).  He was editor for the textile department in Funk & Wagnalls’ Standard Dictionary and numerous other works. His books are the standard authorities in this country on the subjects which they treat, and have equal status in England, where they have been republished.

See the full-text pdf version of the work at:

• The Jacquard Machine Analyzed and Explained (1888) by Emanuel Anthony Posselt   http://www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/books/pea_jacq_1.pdf

From the library of Senator John Pastore (D-RI), (1904-1997), the first Italian-American elected to the US Senate (1950).   Bound in a workman’s blue buckram—not a pretty binding by any stretch—though internally in nice condition.  The binding is functional though this is a fine candidate for a nice rebinding. 

"This extensively illustrated work is the most detailed published account of the design and operation of the Jacquard loom, on which Jacquard himself appears to have never published any details. It includes an excellent description of the punched cards. The book includes a brief history of the Jacquard loom, a detailed description of its mechanism and an appendix on the preparation and stamping of Jacquard cards, illustrated with pictures of the stamping machines. The punched card method of storing and processing data evolved from methods developed by textile manufacturers in the 18th and 19th centuries for weaving complex patterns in cloth." Origins of Cyberspace 355. 

The Computer Issue, 1953

The article disucussed here occupies the following part of the mammoth 1200pp (and twelve-pound) half-yearly issue of the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, 1953 [1A]-80a [advertisements], [2-table contents], 1219-1568, 81a-192a [ads] pages, Volume 41, October 1953, No. 10.  Very nice condition, bound in cloth. $350  The issue contains 41 articles on the leading edge of electronic computing knowledge, including works by Claude Shannon, Grace Hopper, John Mauchly, Wilkes, Eckert and many others. Some of the most significant include:

Buchholz, Werner. "The system design of the IBM Type 701 computer" (describing the overall system design of IBM’s first electronic digital computer).

Burks, Arthur and Wright, Jesse B. "Theory of logical nets".

Elbourn & Witt, "Dynamic Circuit Techniques Used in SEAC and DYSEAC".

Frizzell, Clarence E. "Engineering description of the IBM Type 701 computer

Greenwald, Sidney; Haueter, R. C.; and Alexander, S. N. "SEAC".

Hopper, Grace and Mauchly, John. "Influence of programming technique on the design of computers".

Huskey, Ambrose and Yowell, "The SWAC design features and operating experience".

Palevsky, "The Design of the Bendix Digital Differential Analyzer".

Samuel, Computing Bit by Bit or Digital Computers Made Easy".

Shannon, Claude. "Computers and Automata".

Shannon and Moore, Edward F. "Machine aid for switching circuit design".

Wilkes," Can Machines Think?"

Among the machines described here include the Remington Rand Type 409-2 Electronic Computer; The System Design of the IBM Type 701 Computer; Engineering Description of the IBM Type 701 Computer; The Arithmetic Element of the IBM Type 701 Computer; The SWAC - design features and operating experience; SEAC; Electronic Circuits of the NAREC Computer; A Myriabit Magnetic Core Matrix Memory; A Survey of Analog-to-Digital Converters, and more.

Information Theory, 1951

Cherry, Colin. "A History of the Theory of Communication."  Offprint:  the Proceedings of the Institution of ELectrical Engineers.  Vol 98, part III,No 55, September 1951.  11x8 inches.  Page 383-393.  Densely printed in double columns.  Signed "with compliments" by Colin Cherry.  Scarce in this format.  $95

I will always remember Cherry (1914-1979) not so much for being a leading cognitive scientist whose work spilled across many discipline boundaries, but for his dedicating his magnum opus, The Theory of Human Communication, "to my dog Pym".  (A story is told of Isaac Newton's dog, Diamond, destroying one of his manuscripts; another has Diamond writing two theorems before lunch one day, 'tho one had mistakes, and the other was wholly wrong.)

 

Brevity and Complexity--Radio Programming, 1940

ITEM:  National Broadcasting Company flyer, single sheet, 13x7 inches, radio listener survey, ca. 1938-1940.  Fine condition.  $45

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1320

   I think that if a grown-up kid in 1940 was offered the chance to have a working-man’s Super Power,to be suddenly endowed with a non-heroic Super Something, a popular choice could have been to possess  radio repair vision (RRV).  Or that’s what it seems like.  The popularity of radio was so fantastic that ownership of radio sets doubled in the United States from 1931 to 1938, when houses with radios rose from 40% to 80%. Radio was everything.  There were many contributory factors to this phenomenal increase in popularity, not the least of which was the Great Depression–once you got your radio the listening was basically free except for the power that it cost to run the radio.  Recorded disks on the other hand suffered tremendously, with sales falling from $75 million in 1929 to 23 million in 1938 (with a low point of $5 million in 1933), and that would be due to the Depression and the the popularity of free stuff on the wireless, as well as other things.

People maintained their radios, kept them in good order, tinkered with them, cleaned the tubes, replaced the tubes, kept things going.  Those early units were pretty hearty, overall, but there was a certain percentage of folks who couldn’t do the basics for themselves, and so would bring in their radio repair man.  He was an important fixture in a community–not quite like the milk man or the ice man, who would be seen everywhere every day, but popular enough.  TO be able to fix radios with supervision and kept millions of people connected would’ve been a big deal, especially if you thought about it with the mind of a ten year old.

I’m just trying to establish the popularity of radio with this aside to get at the main point of this post–how radio executives at NBC tried to access the common knowledge base of what people wanted to hear on the radio, and when.  And one aspect of that was seen on this single piece of paper:

The National Broadcasting Company sent out self-adhesive mailers to people to probe their listening needs.  This would seem prehistoric by today’s standards of estimating what television/video watching people were like and what they would want to see, and perhaps to pay for.  But in 1940*–or perhaps a little earlier–this was one method of making this determination, with a gentle survey about what the listener wanted to hear, and when.   And they were expected to pay for the privilege, as well, as these self-,mailers weren’t pre-stamped. 

On the questionnaire of listed types of programs we find 26 examples, including six for “talk radio”, sixteen for music (eight for  instrumental and seven for vocal!), and then only five for the dramatic stuff (comedy shows, drama, variety shows, and even one for children. (An historian of radio programming would probably know instantly the age of this flyer given the number of slots slated for the drama shows, I’m sure.) The division  of the music is also interesting, particularly for me since "string ensemble"  is one of the 26 overall programming selections, though I doubt that they were talking about the late quartets of Beethoven--I think they might have been referring to sweeping, thousand-string "beautiful" music.  Also the division of "opera" and "operetta" is unusual.

 

Notes

There’s no direct mention of FM radio, which came into some restricted use by 1938-1940 and which is not mentioned explicitly here.  Perhaps this means that this was issued before FM–or perhaps it is later, as I said, and simply just not mentioned.

Finding Unseen Things In and From the Air

ITEMS: Each item 13x10 inches tall, and original, from The Illustrated London News, as described below.  Each $35

Finding the hard-to-find, the invisible, the "hidden", is an essential aspect of, well, mostly everything.  Whether it is Newton separating light with a prism to find its constituents, or Hooke investigating the formerly quasi-real microscopical world to reveal worlds within worlds, or Galileo using his telescope to quash the ideas of the unaided-eye visible night sky as an unaltering perfection of creation, or Roentgen seeing through his wife's skin, or Fraunhoefer finding the complex spectrum, or Henry Draper determining a chemical constituent of the sun, or the invention of the zero or negative numbers or subtraction, of finding Black Holes or other planets or the remnants of the Big Bang, or (Kandinsky) finding the nonrepresentational aspect of art, or Duchamp finding in an upturned urinal that art had no boundaries...the list goes on and on.

One aspect of this "finding something in nothing" business that is interesting to look at because it is so local and discernible--and recent--is in air navigation and detection.  And I'll do this using a series of excellent illustrations from The Illustrated London News, all of which are from the 1927-1938 period.

The first is relatively simple, at least simple from here in the year 2010, which shows four pilots being briefed on weather conditions with a aerial chart for conditions along intercontinental routes.  The placement of these symbols represented a vast improvement over the earlier systems of readying pilots for what weather ay ahead, if indeed there were any communications at all.  This represents an early look at a codification of conditions and expectations for air travelers--a display of new and important data in 1927. 

Next is a brilliant device for assisting pilots to land in foggy and dark conditions--actually on how to find the ground safely.  In 1927 (again) a RADAR-like system was put into place on aircraft that involved receiving the signals of an ac-pulsed buried electrical cable that surrounded an airport.  The receiver (seen here on the flight panel of the pilot in an open-air cockpit) would be read to reveal proximity of the airport, the pilot making wider and then closer spirals in descent until his was basically within the buried airport cables and thus able to land.

Prior to WWII RADAR¹ was somewhat functional but still in development, and as we see in this set of 16 July 1938 illustrations, the key methods for finding enemy aircraft at night (in order to shoot it down of course) was an audio-visual method, using "sound-locators" to find the approaching bombers and then spotlights to illuminate and track them to their destruction.  

These images represent some idea of the state of the art of being able to find things--like the ground at night or approaching enemy aircraft--in the 1927-1938 period, all of which would be drastically changed in just the next two years.

NOTES

1. RADAR was coming very close to being developed in the early 1930's--and in 1935 the process of experimentation and implementation was at a peak.  The development of this new technology was an international property, though perhaps no one owned it more in this period than the British, with Watson Watt giving his experimental ideas on RADAR to the Air Ministry on 12 February 1935 in a secret report titled "The Detection of Aircraft by Radio Methods". Int his years alone there was feverish work being done by  Rudolf Kühnhold (Scientific Director at the 'Kriegsmarine  Nachrichtenmittel-Versuchsanstalt) who in 1933-1935 estanlished a RADAR-hunting company called Gesellschaft für Elektroakustische und Mechanische Apparate, or "GEMA"; there was also elements of the Royal Navy, Telefunken, Standard Elektrik Lorenz, Philips Company's  (of Eindhoven, Netherlands) Natuurkundig Laboratorium, the Research Office of Nippon Electric Company, and even in the Soviet Union (until the key figures involved were murdered in Stalin's purges--this one distinguished from others and referred to now as The Great Purge-- of 1937), the French Compagnie Générale de Télégraphie Sans Fil (CSF), and  the Italian Regio Instituto Electrotecnico e delle Comunicazioni (RIEC, Royal Institute for Electro-technics and Communications) to name a few.  The United States of course had been long working on the project, at least since 1922 at the NRL, with considerable private (and federally funded) work done by RCA

.
Whipping ahead into WWII a very significant "battle of the beams" began between the U.K. and Germany, especially during the Battle of Britain, involving countermeasures, espionage, propaganda and false-positives in regards to the use and development of radio-based tracking and detection--the U.K. particularly making use of this technology in a wide-spread air defence system.  But it was in the United States in 1940 (and really by the U.S. Navy) that RADAR got its name (for RAdio Detection And Ranging) as well as its great impetus for development and deployment.