JF Ptak Science Books // Blog Bookstore

Logical Networks and Behavior (1956)

F.H. George. Logical Networks and Behavior, in The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, volume 18/4, December 1956, pp 337-349 in the issue of pp 265-356.  In the original orange-ish wrappers.  Fine+ copy.  A

Also with articles by Clifford Patlak, Nicolas Rashevsky, Anatol Rapoport ("On the Application of the Information Concept to Learning Theory".  

"Frank Honywill George was a British psychologist, cyberneticist and former Professor of Cybernetics and Director of the Institute of Cybernetics at the Brunel University, best known for his 1962 book The Brain as a Computer."--Wiki

BABBAGE, Charles.  "Note sur la machine suedoise de MM. Schutz pour calculer les tables mathematiques par la methode des differences, et en imprimer les resultats sur des planches stereotypes." In Comptes Rendus, volume 41 (1855): pp 557-60.  The weekly issue, removed cleanly froma larger bound volume.  $500

• "In 1854 Babbage's ideas came to the attention of George and Edvard Scheutz, a father and son from Sweden. After reading a description of the Difference Engine (by Babbage), they designed and built their own version. This machine was smaller and lighter than the engine conceived by Babbage. They used gears and levers that would have been suitable for the mechanism of a clock. In contrast, Babbage used technology that would have been appropriate for a steam engine. Babbage's engine, if completed, would have filled a room. The Scheutz engine sat nicely on a table and looked like a complicated music box. Babbage was pleased with Scheutz's engine and praised it publicly [in this appearance in the Comptes Rendus]"--Dictionary of Scientific Biography 

Broadside Advertisement for the UNIVAC 1004 (ca. 1962) with 6 bit Core Memory!

UNIVAC 1004 Card Processor 1004. 11x4.5" tri-fold opens to a display of 19x14" demonstrating the fabulous new and fast features of the machine, introduced in 1962 (and improved by 1966 as the 1005. The image also shows the 1004 printer and a model coyly holding a few punch cards like a geisha fan. Printed on a heavier linen stock.  Save for some bumping at the top, a fine copy.  $150

"The UNIVAC 1004 was a plug-board programmed punched card data processing system, introduced in 1962, by UNIVAC. Total memory was 961 characters (6 bits) of core memory. Peripherals were a card reader (400 cards/minute), a card punch (200 cards/minute) using proprietary 90-column, round-hole cards or IBM-compatible, 80-column cards, a drum printer (400 lines/minute) and a Uniservo tape drive. The 1004 was also supported as a remote card reader & printer via synchronous communication services. A U.S. Navy (Weapons Station, Concord) 1004 was dedicated to printing from tape as a means of offloading the task from their Solid State 80 mainframe, which produced the tapes. A plug-board program called Emulator was widely installed to convert 1004s to stored-program operation, reading in instructions from program decks of cards which determined the processing of the following data decks."--Wikipedia on UNIVAC

Vannevar Bush's Operational Circuit Analysis, 1929

Vannevar Bush (with Norbert Wiener).Operational Circuit Analysis. New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1929. First edition.  x, 392pp. Includes an appendix ("B") "Fourier Analysis and Asymptotic Series", p366-379. 197x135mm. Bound in sturdy ribbed publisher's cloth. At least a Very Good copy, and possibly a Fine copy.  $200

"The technological, professional, and intellectual context out of which the development of the continuous integraph or product integraph-as the immediate forerunner of Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer-evolved is outlined. In particular the affinity between transmission line research and teaching at MlT's electrical engineering department under Bush's guidance, on the one hand, and the creation of the product integraph for evaluating integrals, which resulted from the appropriate differential equations of the transmission problems, on the other hand, is detailed. I emphasize Bush's perception of promoting engineering by easing the applied mathematics in this field as it appeared in his contribution to the development of operational circuit analysis as an appropriate engineering mathematics as well as in creating analog machinery that was inspired by the formulation of transmission line problems in terms of that very operational methods after Oliver Heaviside."--Abstract, "On the role of mathematics and mathematical knowledge in the invention of Vannevar Bush's early analog computers", IEEE Annals of the History of Computing ( Volume: 18, Issue: 4, Oct-Dec 1996 ) 

Also this, from page 52 of the same source:

• “Despite his rather good knowledge of mathematics, during this period Bush learned to appreciate the value of cooperating with a professional mathematician for his expertise on intricate mathematical details. Jackson, who always sought to foster cooperation between his department and the departments of mathematics and physics, enrolled the young MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener in this enterprise. It was no accident that just Wiener had been picked, since he was one of the few mathematicians in the United States at that time who was very open to ideas from fields outside mathematics. Moreover, he was an ardent admirer of Heaviside’s work. Thus Bush probably learned as much as his students did about operational calculus, clearing problems together in class, often after he had consulted Wiener. In the course of these discussions, Wiener saw the “possibility of translating the Heaviside work into a more classical form in which the chief tool was harmonic analysis or the use of trigonometric development...This work led him and others to approach operational calculus via the Fourier transformation and to work on generalized harmonic analysis. Bush’s 1929 book on operational circuit analysis reflected that productive cooperation between a mathematician and an engineer. On the one hand, it contained an appendix by Wiener on “Fourier Analysis and Asymptotic Series” with his approach to operational calculus via the Fourier transformation, which was explained and made more comprehensible to the readers by Bush in the main text. “

An Unusual Calculating Machine (1900)

Georges Meslin, "Sur une machine a resoudre les equations". in Comptes Rendus des Seances de l'Academie des Sciences, 2 April 1900, the weekly issue comprising pp 865-960, with the Meslina article on pp 888-891. This issue is removed from a larger bound volume, and is not in great condition, with the edges of the pages being browned and somewhat brittle. On the other hand, it is an unusual item.  $50

Michelson's Harmonic Analyzer (1898)

[MICHELSON, A.A.] Appearance in the review/scientific serials section of Nature, February 3, 1898. Referencing the harmonic analyzer of Michelson. This appears as one paragraph on page 333. Pp 313-336. With the original wrappers. This issue is removed from a larger bound volume. Provenance: Smithsonian Astrophysical Laboratory. Good solid copy.   $125

The full statement on Michelson: “SCIENTIFIC SERIALS: American Journal of Science, January. A new harmonic analyser by AA Michelson and SW Stroud. This is an instrument designed to sum up as many as eighty terms of a Fourier series or to analyse a given curve into its original series. The pen which traces the curve is worked up and down by a lever controlled by a spring. This spring is stretched by an ecentric which imparts a simple harmonic variation to the force. The stretching is resisted by another spring. Eighty such elements are connected together with one resisting spring to counterbalance the sum of the elementary springs. The pen therefore moves in accordance with the sum of the elementary periodic motions. The authors obtain by this machine the mathematical series representing the profile of a human face.”

From the blurb on the book about the Michelson Harmonic Analyzer: “Many famous machines have been built to do math -- like Babbage’s Difference Engine for solving polynomials or Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner for multiplying and dividing -- yet none worked as well as Albert Michelson’s harmonic analyzer. This 19th century mechanical marvel does Fourier analysis: it can find the frequency components of a signal using only gears, springs and levers. We discovered this long-forgotten machine locked in a glass case at the University of Illinois... by Bill Hammack, Steve Kranz and Bruce Carpenter.”--via theengineerguy.com website.

The First Fabrication of the Grown-Junction Transistor (1951)

William Shockley, M. Sparks, and G.K. Teal,  "p-n Junction transistors", in Physical Review, volume 83, no. 1, July 1, 1951, pp 151-163 in the issue of pp 1-248. Original wrappers. Very Good copy; there is a small brown blemish that extends in a diminishing capacity through the first 35pp in the extreme upper-right corner (visible on the cover and in the scan). $500

Long quote from PBS "A Working Junction Transistor" from "Transistorized":

 

"Careful experiments led by a physicist in the group, Richard Haynes, helped. Haynes put electrodes on both sides of a thin germanium crystal and took very sensitive measurements of the size and speed of the current. Electricity definitely flowed straight through the crystal. That meant Shockley's vision of a new kind of transistor was theoretically possible.There was no doubt about it, point-contact transistors were fidgety. The transistors being made by Bell just didn't work the same way twice, and on top of that, they were noisy. While one lab at Bell was trying to improve those first type-A transistors, William Shockley was working on a whole different design that would eventually get rid of these problems. Early in 1948, Shockley conceived of a transistor that looked like a sandwich, with two layers of one type of semiconductor surrounding a second kind. This was a completely different setup which didn't have the shaky wires that made the point-contact transistors so hard to control. A working sandwich transistor would require that electricity travel straight across a crystal instead of around the surface. But Bardeen's theory about how the point-contact transistor worked said that electricity could only travel around the outside of a semiconductor crystal. In February of 1948, some tentative results in the Shockley lab suggested this might not be true. So the first thing Shockley had to do was determine just what was going on."

"But Haynes also discovered that the layer in the middle of the sandwich had to be very thin and very pure. The man who paved the way for growing the best crystals was Gordon Teal. He didn't work in Shockley's group, but he kept tabs on what was going on. He'd even been asked to provide crystals for the Solid State team upon occasion. Teal thought transistors should be built from a single crystal-as opposed to cutting a sliver from a larger ingot of many crystals. The boundaries between all the little crystals caused ruts that scattered the current, and Teal had heard of a way to build a large single crystal which wouldn't have all those crags. The method was to take a tiny seed crystal and dip it into the melted germanium. This was then pulled out ever so slowly, as a crystal formed like an icicle below the seed. Teal knew how to do it, but no one was interested. A number of institutions at the time, Bell included, had a bad habit of not trusting techniques that hadn't been devised at home. Shockley didn't think these single crystals were necessary at all. Jack Morton, head of the transistor-production group, said Teal should go ahead with the research, but didn't throw much support his way. Luckily, Teal did continue the research, working with engineer John Little. Three months later, in March of 1949, Shockley had to admit he'd been wrong. Current flowing across Teal's semiconductors could last up to one hundred times longer than it had in the old cut crystals."  

With little support from management, Teal built the needed crystal-growing equipment himself, with help from mechanical engineer John Little and technician Ernest Buehler. Based on techniques developed in 1917 by the Polish chemist Jan Czochralski, he suspended a small "seed" crystal of germanium in a crucible of molten germanium and slowly withdrew it, forming a long, narrow, single crystal. Shockley later called this achievement "the most important scientific development in the semiconductor field in the early days."

"ALSO:  "Employing this technique, Bell Labs chemist Morgan Sparks fabricated p-n junctions by dropping tiny pellets of impurities into the molten germanium during the crystal-growing process. In April 1950, he and Teal began adding two successive pellets into the melt, the first with a p-type impurity and the second n-type, forming n-p-n structures with a thin inner, or base, layer. A year later, such grown-junction transistors surpassed the best point-contact transistors in performance. Bell Labs announced this advance on July 4, 1951 in a press conference featuring Shockley."--"1951: First Grown-Junction Transistors Fabricated. Gordon Teal grows large single crystals of germanium and works with Morgan Sparks to fabricate an n-p-n junction transistor.", from computerhistory website.

 

The Pioneering "Numerical Analysis" by D.R. Hartree 1952

The Pioneering "Numerical Analysis" by D.R. Hartree

Hartee, Douglas R.  Numerical Analysis.  Oxford, 1952.  287pp, octavo.  Very fine copy with a very good issue of its scarce dustjacket. (The Oxford just jackets are notorious for fading along the spine--this one has too, but not by very much.)  Lovely copy of this book not known for being found in a pretty state.  $100

The Dictionary of Scientific Biography has this to say about numerical analysis and the great computing pioneer Hartree:

"Hartree's chief contribution to science was his development of powerful methods of numerical mathematical analysis, which made it possible for him to apply successfully the so-called self-consistent field method to the calculation of atomic wave functions of polyelectronic atoms, that is, those which in the neutral condition have more than one electron surrounding the nucleus. These calculations involved the numerical solution of the partial differential equations of quantum mechanics for many-body systems subject to the usual boundary conditions" (Volume 6, p. 147).

Chapter XII, the last chapter in the book, is titled "Organizations of Calculations for an Automatic Machine" and covers pages 255-273. It is an excellent summary of the state of affairs for computing though it contains just one footnote in the chapter.   In general, though the four-page bibliography is very useful.

A Very Early Use of Bush's Differential Analyzer (1927)

Vannevar Bush, King E. Gould. "Temperature Distribution Along a Filament", in Physical Review, volume 29 number 2, February 1927, pp 337-346, in the issue of pp 223-374, plus 12pp ads. Original wrappers. Very nice, fresh copy--there is a distinctive drawback to this copy in that it was once bound with other numbers via punch-bound string method, which means there's three punched holes in the left-hand edge of the issue. That's a problem, but, well, the method resulted in keeping the wrappers and spine very fresh. $200 (I've checked a number of sources and this seems to be an overlooked article so far as bookselling is concerned. 

Abstract: "A numerical method is presented for the solution of the differential equation for temperature distribution along a filament heated electrically and subjected to heat ..." And from the article, "A method has been developed for adapting a new integrating machine..." This is Bush & team's very early version (" Starting in 1927, Bush constructed a  differential analyzer, an analog computer with some digital components that could solve differential equations with as many as 18 independent variables"--Wiki on V. Bush) of the Differential Analyzer, precursor to the 1930 version which was reproduced in many places across the globe. [Months later a front-page article would appear in the New York Times, "Thinking Machine' Does Higher Mathematics; Solves Equations That Take Humans Months”, October 21, 1927, “Boston, Oct. 20. -- Dr. Vannevar Bush, Professor of Electric Power Transmission at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with the aid of a staff of research workers, including H.L. Hazen, H.R. Stewart, F.G. Kear and F.D. Gage, has perfected a 'thinking machine.'”.. A slightly earlier article regarding the “continuous integraph” machine appeared in January as Bush and Gage, F.D.; Stewart, H.R, "A continuous integraph", in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, January 1927,  203 (1): 63–84, and which Bush refers to in this present article. Four years later, the king of the articles on the DA by Bush, "The differential analyzer. A new machine for solving differential equations", would appear in 1931 in the Journal of the Franklin Institute. 212 (4): 447–488.] 

“...the first widely practical general purpose differential analyser was constructed by Harold Locke Hazen and Vannevar Bush at MIT, 1928–1931, comprising six mechanical integrators.  In the same year, Bush described this machine in a journal article as a "continuous integraph". When he published a further article on the device in 1931, he called it a "differential analyzer"--Wiki, "Differential Analyzer", (with four good citations to accompany this quote).

 

The Differential Analyzer would be described by MIT president Karl Compton in 1940 as "one of the great scientific instruments of modern times", though in less than a decade it would become obsolete. That said the later version, the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer, in 1942 was dedicated to the war effort and saved countless hours of by-hand calculations.  And then, <poof>, gone.

See: "Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Context of an Early Computer", by Larry Owens, in Technology and Culture, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Jan., 1986), pp. 63-95.

 

 

 

 

Babbage on the Sheutz Calculating Engine (1855)

BABBAGE, Charles. “Note sur la machine suedoise de MM. Schutz pour calculer les Tables mathematiques par la methode des differences, et en imprimer les resultants sur des planches stereotypes”, in Comptes rendus, volume 41, 8 October 1855, pp 557-560,in the issue of pp 537-563. This is the weekly issue, cleanly removed from a larger bound volume.

 "In 1854 Babbage's ideas came to the attention of George and Edvard Scheutz, a father and son from Sweden. After reading a description of the Difference Engine (by Babbage), they designed and built their own version”--the Scheutz Engine No. 1, built in 1843 after having seen a description of the Babbage machine in Lardner's technicalarticle about the Difference Engine, with another more refined machine appeared in 1843 as the Scheutz Engine No. 2. “This machine was smaller and lighter than the engine conceived by Babbage. They used gears and levers that would have been suitable for the mechanism of a clock. In contrast, Babbage used technology that would have been appropriate for a steam engine. Babbage's engine, if completed, would have filled a room. The Scheutz engine sat nicely on a table and looked like a complicated music box. Babbage was pleased with Scheutz's engine and praised it publicly [in the present paper]."--Dictionary of Scientific Biography.

Offered with:

“M. Flourens communique la Lettre suivante adresse par M. Charles Babbage”, in Comptes rendus, vol 41, 1 October 1855, three paragraphs on page 528, offered in the weekly issue, removed cleanly from a larger bound volume.    The two papers:  $450

This selection from Charles Knight's The English Cyclopædia: A New Dictionary of Universal Knowledge, (Volume 5) highlights the presentation of the Babbage (senior) paper above, and describes his presenrtation to the Academy of Science on that day, including the help he received from his youngest son (Henry Prevost) though the later's useful images that were shown at the Academy were not reprinted in the article of 8 October. The second part of this offering is a very short notice briefly describing the work of the younger Babbage, picking up his father's earlier work from 1832.