Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books LLC

The Computer Cyborg of 1867--the Typewriter

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1635

• Cleator, P.E.  The Robot Era.  New York, Crowell, 1955.  First American edition.  Lovely copy in fine distjacket.  $100

• Cohen, John.  Human Robots in Myth and Society.  London; Allen & Unwin, 1966.  First edition.  156pp, illustrated.  Fine copy in a fine dustjacket.  $45

Every age, every generation has a calling to the future that once that particular future arrives looks sometimes strangely like a past that was much further away than it was. Such is the case here, in September, 1867. in the pages of London's Punch Magazine, when Mr. Punch rhapsodized on the future possibilities of the new invention, the typewriter.

"Good News for Bad Writers" announced to the readership:

"Writing Superseded.—Mr. Pratt, of Alabama, is the inventor of a typewriting machine, lately exhibited to tho London Society of Arts, which is said to print a man's thoughts twice as fast as he can write them with the present process. By a sort of piano arrangement the letters are brought in contact with carbonised paper, which is moved by tho same manipulation,"

The editor of Punch sniffed out a deeper deal in the typewriter than simple legibility:

"Every author his own printer! What a happy state of things! No more struggles to write legibly with nibless tavern-pens: no more labour in deciphering the hieroglyphs of hasty writers. Literary work will be in future merely play—on the piano. The future Locke may write his essays by a touch upon the keys."

But the disappointments of the possible future wouldn't stop there, and would or could or should go screaming into the dark night, the invention marking time in the brain of the writer, making able for him or her to compose without thinking, pillows taking over for the mind:

"In this inventive age there really is no saying where discovery will stop. Now that authors are to put their thoughts in print with twice the pace that they can write them, perhaps ere long they will be able to put their works in type without so much as taking the trouble to compose them. A thought-hatching easy chair may very likely be invented, by the help of which an author may sit down at his ease before his thought-printing piano, and play away ad libitum whatever may occur to him. Different cushions may be used for different kinds of composition, some stuffed with serious thoughts, fit for sermons or reviews, and others with light fancies, fit for works of fiction, poetry, or fun. By a judicious choice of cushions an author will be able to sit down to his piano, and play a novel in three volumes twice or thrice a week, besides knocking off a leader every morning for a newspaper, anil issuing every fortnight a bulky epic poem, or a whole encyclopaedia complete within a month."

The typewriter was just another in a series of "robots" from antiquity, of the creation of moveable type printing taking over the job of scribes and scribes over the jobs of story tellers, of fabrications of automata, of rudimentary calculating machines of the 17th century, of the creation of the lighted semaphore, of the electric telegraph, of the telephone, of the wireless, of the radio, television, computer, internet.  Each offered a similar challenge to the people of their day and a similar challenge to their future--some of which came true, some didn't. I know that Punch was kidding--mostly. 

A Vision of the Future: Filling Up Manhattan, 1887

ITEM: original woodcut print from Harper's Weekly, 28 May 1887.  Fragment, 11x10 inches.  Fair condition.  $75.00, in mat. 

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Qick Post

This peep into a possible future appeared in Harper's Weekly on 18 May 1887.  It is the work of artist W.A. Rogers and depicts a filling-up lower Manhattan, complete with broad avenues lined by elevated trains whose reach evidently knows no bounds. The new elevated subway winds its way across the harbor to Liberty Island, where it wraps itself around the feet and up the body of the newly--dedicated Statue of Liberty (opened in October of the previous year).  In the foreground is the cupola of a transit station with a fluttering flag advertising "Coney Island via Broadway"--I'm not sure what this is all about, as the placement of the island has nothing to do with anything except making a point in the cartoon.  (The original is offered at our blog bookstore.)

A very full interpretation of this image may be found at HarpWeek, here. 

Marquand's Logical Machine, 1886

Allan,  Marquand.  "A New Logical Machine."  Boston:  American Academy of Arts and Science,  1886.  1st edition.  Proceedings of the AAAS, Vol XIII, Part II  8vo.   Good condition only. We offer a binding copy of second half of the journal, pp 247-571. The Marquand contribution occupies pp 303-307 with one photographic plate of the apparatus.  $250

Wikipedia: "Allan Marquand (1853-1924) was an art historian at Princeton University and a curator of the Princeton University Art Museum. After graduating from Princeton in 1874, Allan obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1880, at the Johns Hopkins University. His thesis, supervised by Charles Peirce, was on the logic of Philodemus. He returned to Princeton in 1881 to teach Latin and logic. During the 1881-82 academic year, Marquand built a mechanical logical machine that is still extant; he was inspired by related efforts of William S. Jevons in the UK. In 1887, following a suggestion of Peirce's, he outlined a machine to do logic using electric circuits. This necessitated his development of Marquand diagrams. According to Lavin¹, the President of Princeton, McCosh, deemed "unorthodox and unCalvinistic" Marquand's relatively mathematical approach to the teaching logic, an approach he had learned at Peirce's feet. Hence in 1883, Marquand was offered a position teaching art history, a position he held until his death...

Note:

1.  Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg, 1983. The Eye of the Tiger: The Founding and Development of the Department of Art and Archaeology, 1883–1923. Princeton: The Dept. of Art and Archaeology and the Art Museum.

See: "W. Stanley Jevons, Allan Marquand, and the Origins of Digital Computing" IEEE Annals of the History of Computing archive, Volume 21 , Issue 4 (October 1999)Pages: 21 - 27. 

Bad Ideas Department: Restructuring the City and the "Terminal Box", Neopolis, 1938

ITEM: The New City, an American Plan of Social and Economic Reorganization (1938).  7x5 inches, 29pp.  Very good condition.  No copies located in the OCLC/WorldCat.  $100

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1421

The unnamed author of The New City, an American Plan of Social and Economic Reorganization (1938), makes a hard-edged plea for the formation of a new American society—and by “new” the author really means it, advocating a different economics, social structure and even the physical development of new cities and abandonment of the old physical and philosophical structures. 

Sprinkled among the Swiftian notions of rightness, quixotic lancings of social ills and a general bombardment of the structure of society are some interesting and isolated points: 
“America is the supreme user of the machine…ravishing the irreplaceable wealth of one of the earth’s richest continents, tearing down forests, looting the treasures of coal and draining the reservoirs of oil and natural gas, by methods scandalously wasteful.” 

This leads the author to the Depression, “a decade of demonstration of the profit system’s inability to deliver to the people the needs of life, a painful heartbreaking demonstration”. 

It is the profit-deliverers, not the machines or people, who are to blame.  One way of addressing the distribution system, was, unfortunately, Russia—“a form if society set up to overcome this impasse of the capitalistic system of production and distribution”.  Of course the Russians--the Soviets--were just in the middle of their enforced starvation/gulag/brutalization period under Josef Stalin, the gigantic negative parts of which were still in general not known to the great unwashed. 

The unnamed author dips lightly into Socialism, and then into Fascism and Nazism, though the only thing he/she really has to say about the later two is that “their answer [to economic woe] was in the seizure or control of the means of production by the state”, their own brutal means skipping off unnoticed into a pinkish glow, though the loss of personal freedom is “disdained”. 

The New City is actually a new world order, a new governmental form to take advantage of technological advancements leading to “nationalized urbanization” The first city in this new order is Neopolis, and this pamphlet was a call to those who would stand as its citizens.  (There’s actually a sort of application form, though all it really is a bill-of-sale for ordering more copies of the New City pamphlet.)

Even though the pamphlet is easily obtained, membership, the possibility of being a Neopolitan, is something entirely different.  The difference is actually exceptional, perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this whole misguided idea.  “Membership is to be carefully controlled at all times” we read. . “It is not desired to build up a huge and unwieldy membership of poorly-assimilated elements….interesting educational instruction…with tests to determine the fitness of the member for loyal, cooperative activity, leading, necessarily, to the elimination of those who may be found undesirable”. 
That’s some pretty muscular, steroidal stuff, particularly after such a glancing blow against the Soviets and Nazis. 

Since this is just an “abridgment” of a soon-to-be-written 250-page explanation of the concept, the complex and concentric organization of society is left mainly to the drawing of its plan, the physical layout of the city based upon this ideal. 

The Seattle-based author never did quite make it past page 29, never did name themselves, and never provided a concrete place where all of this heady stuff was being think out.  It is a sort of pretty design in a creepy/queasy way, there on the front cover, but that’s about as far as it goes.  If anyone actually did send any money to this quack thinker, it wound up in a nicely metaphorical place:  at “Terminal Box 3463”. 

This may be the very best idea to come out of touching this pamphlet—a place where people can send correspondence regarding Bad and/or Dead or Dying Ideas: “Terminal Box ______”.  I guess that box number would be pretty high by now. 

(Uncle Joe, before he killed the children, and dozens of millions of others.)

The Almost-Tomorrow Department: Radio-Vision, 1928.

Cooley,  Austin G.  How to Receive Radio Pictures at Home.  New York:  Radiovision Corp,  1928.  1st edition.  26pp, 2 folding blueprints  4to.  Printed wrappers.  Very good copy.  Some wear and dirt on front wrapper.  $450

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1415

Tomorrow seemed to be almost there to readers of this pamphlet, what with the idea of looking at pictures relating to the radio broadcast you were listening to looming before a slightly disbelieving mind.  The fact of the matter though is that this breakthrough by Mr. Austin G. Cooley¹--basically attaching what we would know today as a fax machine to a radio cabinet which would receive and print images relating to the show being heard--was rubbing up mightily against the real wave of the future, the television.

Mr. Cooley's invention of the Rayfoto just didn't quite fit the demands that would soon be established and met by television.  The idea of practical television goes back a fair way², at least to Arthur Korn in the late 1890's, which much work being done on both broadcast television and facsimile transmissions.  But tv was definitely a high scent in the air when Cooley published his Rayfoto pamphlet in 1928--as a matter of fact, this was the same year in which the first television license was granted (to Charles Jenkins, W3XK).  And just two years later the BBC would begin regular television broadcasts, while also in 1930 Mr. Jenkins initiated another television-first, the t.v.commercial. 

"No greater thrill awaits the radio experimenter than receiving his first picture through the ether…Not many months will pass before picture broadcasts will be a part of every radio broadcast"--A. Cooley, 1928

So the time was definitely note ripe for Cooley's idea as an image supplement to radio, though it did have other possible applications--like the "fax" delivering newspapers to your home--though they are not listed in the pamphlet. 

What we see here the drum of the apparatus (we don't see the three-tray developer/fixer wet set-up inside the apparatus), one of the listeners retrieving an  incoming vision-image, something that evidently took quite some time, depending on the image and the ways in which the developing trays have been set.  Dark images might've taken the entire length of a 15-minute broadcast to transmit and print; other, simpler efforts took less time.

Here's an example of a successful, medium-quality image that one could expect using Cooley's Rayfoto system:

It doesn't look like much now, and maybe it wouldn't've looked like much to people familiar with the new television.  But even a grainy, static image accompanying a voice performance is a fabulous thing when compared with never having seen anything like it before, never having had such an experience, if even only as a novelty.

_______

Notes:

1. Cooley,  Austin G.  How to Receive Radio Pictures at Home.  New York:  Radiovision Corp,  1928.  1st edition.  26pp, 2 folding blueprints  4to.   This unusual publication describes the construction and use of an apparatus which would receive broadcast (facsimile) images that would be used to illustrate radio transmissions/shows.  The idea (in this form of illustrating radio shows) at this date would be reduced to almost-nothingness once television entered the picture in the next year or so.  Still, it was an elegant idea to illustrate the spoken word.

This system was offered by Austin G. Cooley (1900-1993), inventor of the Rayfoto system, "the first authentic radio picture apparatus". This was a very early attempt at mass entertainment via a mechanical medium that proved ineffective by 1929/1931 against the advances of television. (The radiovision method was something like a facsimile device, offering a static image every now and again, and was completely outclassed by the moving image).

2. Followed by Paul Nipkow's rotating discs in the earliest part of the 20th c, then by Vladimir Zworkin's iconoscope (1923), Charles Jenkins and John Baird's television of 1924, and then of course by Philo Farnsworth's 1928 image dissector.

The World's First Popularly-Published Computer Journal

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1378

Nothing quite gives you the taste for the ancient history of a very modern topic--like computers--than by looking through some of the earliest popular publications on the subject. This can actually be done pretty quickly if you wanted to just get a broad taste for the subject in its modern infancy--just reading the titles of the papers and taking in the advertisements might be enough. So here's two volumes of a very scarce and interesting journal by old Edmund Berkeley that may do this job perfectly.  Berkeley was a bona fide mover and shaker in the early days of electronic computing in the United States--he had a lot on his mind, contributed many written words and ideas, and also tried to make a fair living while doing so (there was a bit of Sideshow Ed in him for some of the things he tried to sell.  

Computers and Automation, the brainchild of the brainy not-child Edmund Berkeley, was the first popularly-published  magazine published regarding the computer, its applications, it programming, and really just about everything else.  (It appeared seven years after the Mathematical Tables and Aids to Computation  was published in 1943, almost entirely to the mathematics and engineering communities.) Computers was published by Edmund Berkeley & Associates in NYC beginning in 1952., beginning its publishing journey as The Computing Machinery Field, its name changing to Computers and Automation in February 1953 (in volume 2, number 2).   All issues have some fair space devoted to advertising, even though the issues generally ran between 32 and 40pp. Berkeley was a real-enough mathematician, engineer and computer pioneer, but he also had a pretty large taste for making these interests pay--which was essential, as the original print runs were not very large, though his advertisers were impressive. (According to the first issue, approximately 1200 people were on the mailing list for the journal, with around 2000 issues being printed each number. All told, this is not a large print run, and thus not many of the early issues have survived.)  He was not averse to being somewhat outre with his journal—in addition to having contributors like Grace Hopper and Alton Householder, he also had Fletcher Pratt and Isaac Asimov writing some pretty arresting pieces from the SciFi/Futurama point of view.

A Note on the Advertisements: in short, they’re wonderful. For example, on the back cover of vol2/1 is Edmund Berkeley & Associates “SMALL ROBOTS”, advertising “Simon, the Mechanical Brains”, “Squee, the Robot Squirrel”, and other gadgets. To give you an example the other ads in this issue alone are for “The Circle Computer”, “General Ceramics Ferramic Cores”, “Magnetic Metals Co. Amplifier Cores”, Ross Ashby’s “Design for a Brain”, Consolidated Engineering’s SADIC System, Monroe Calculator’s Monrobot Electronic Calculator, George Philbrick’s “Computor (sic) products”, and a lovely two-page spread for Remington Rand. Further into the year are ads for Burroughs, IBM (604 ands 607), Electronic Associates Inc, Prokar capacitors, and many others.

Some of the subjects include: The ERA 1103 computer, NIMWIT, Applications of the Computer, what the computer *is*, Admiral Grace Murray Hopper’s compiler, mechanical translation, Harper’s subroutines, the cost of coding, computer “self-repair”, automation at Ford, and so on.  Also includes perhaps the earliest announcement of the first all-transistor computer (October 1954, IBM’s “new experimental transistorized computer” , the earliest (?) printing of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics in a scientific journal, and more.

Each section generally has three of the following categories (per issue) : computer glossary, roster of member organizations, who’s who, an annotated books and journals section, and other aligned concerns.  For example, there's this bit, an application (cut-out) card for "Who's Who in the Computing Field for December 1952"--utterly simple, it seems as though anyone who filled out the card was in, the "who's who" part of this that we normally celebrate with fame or achievement really was just telling the rest of the people in the field who was exactly who.

The contents:

Volume 2/1, January 1953. 45pp.

Householder, A.S. Brains, Electronic and Otherwise; Williams, S.B. (President, ACM) What Computers Do; Murphy, E.F. and E.C. Berkeley. Automatic Computers on Election Night.

Volume 2/2 , March 1953. 37pp.

Boehm, George A.W. Gypsy, Model VI, Claude Shannon, Nimwit and the Mouse; Paynter, Henry. Water and Computers; and the editor Berkeley, The Concept of Automation, and Berkeley (with Neil Macdonald, Berkeley’s other name). The ERA 1003 Automatic Computer

Volume 2/3, April 1953. 40pp.

Fletcher Pratt, The Art of Solving Secret Ciphers and the Digital Computer; Berkeley, Avenues for Future Development in Computing Machinery;  Gene Hegedus, Hungarian Prelude to Automation..

Volume 2/4. May 1953. 33pp.

Grace Murray Hopper,  Compiling Routines; A.D. Booth, Mechanical Translation; Marshall Stone,  Medical Diagnosis.

Volume 2/5. July 1953.

Yehosuha Bar-Hillel (the great logician),  Machine Translation; George Boehm, Robot Traffic Policemen; Rudolf Flesch,  How to Talk to Computers.

Volume 2/6. September 1953.

Tommaso Fortuna,  The Soviet Union: Automatic Digital Computer Research.; Wainwright, Lawrence Wainwright,  Digital Computer Questionnaire; and a general DISCUSSION: “How to Talk About Computers”, with GG Hawley, Samuel Scharff, C.B. Crumb, and EC Berkeley.

Volume 2/7. October 1953. 36pp.

Brown, David W. Brown Computers in the Factory; Neil (Berkeley) Macdonald,  The Flood of Automatic Computers.

Volume 2/8. November 1953. 40pp.

John W.Carr  III. Who Will Man the New Digital Computers?; E.F. Cooley,  Electronic Equipment Applied to Periodic Billing; Glenn.Hagen,  Air-Floating: a New Principle in Magnetic Recording of Information.

Volume 2/9 December 1953. 36pp.

Clippinger, Richard Clippinger, How a Central Computing Laboratory can Help Industry; R.T. Wiseman, “Combined” Operations in a Life Insurance Company instead of “fractured operations”.

These are the contents for 1953; the volume for 1954 bulks up a little, but is still under an inch thick.   The MTAC journal stays quite slender throughout its pre-1960 life (it has virtually no advertisement and is entirely academic), and there are more and more computer articles appearing in old stand-by associated journals like the Proceedings of the Institute of  Radio Engineers (which by 1959 will published a massive supplemental volume called "the Computer Issue" which I'll talk about soon.  For the time being, I just wanted to make an inroad into this journal--I'll expand on he articles in just a bit. 

Technical Drawing: an Early, Convict-Powered, Revolving Turret Ship

ITEM:  engraved sheet from The Engineer, 30  October 1874, 15 x 10 inches.  Good condition. $50  As follows:

This image (from the Illustrated London News for April 26 1871) shows a plan of the top floor of a revolving battery designed by M. Baltard in 1831.  This idea is probably ancient, though it really only had major technological legs by the 19th century. Even though Baltard is given some fair credit for the modern rediscovery of the revolving turret--and in this short article he is given premier status--there were earlier engineers at work before him.  For example, in the earliest part of the 19th century Col. John Stevens designed a saucer-shaped floating battery that was supposed to be able to fire in any direction; T.R. Timbly--slightly after Baltard--applied in the U.S. Patent Office in June 1843 for a device he called a "metallic revolving fort".  Then came the great John Ericsson--very long on accomplishments but very short now in modern memory, he is also one of those memorialized men in marble in DC for whom people have almost no modern recognition--who in 1854 produced an "impregnable battery revolving cupola", which led to his great innovation on the Monitor.  And as we recall, the Monitor's defeat of the Merrimack in Hampton Roads in 1861spelled the coming end of the wooden ship of the line--metal ships with mounted revolving turrets fore and aft would prove entirely too far superior to the 19th century wooden ship.

What we are seeing in the first engraving is the top floor of a two-story fortification--roof removed--showing the floor plan of the battery.  The walls and roof were stationary; the floor was not.  The two cannons were located on a revolving floor and were moved by turning the floor (basically) to one of the open firing windows (embrasures) a detail of which is above. When the barrel of the canon was pulled out of this opening, it was turned closed to prevent any fire coming into the fort.

The engraving below shows a cross-section of the two-turret land structure.

 

The engraving below shows the idea of the land fortification shipboard, one revolving turret fore and aft. It turns out that the engine for the vessel was human, the engineer calling for "either" convicts (forcats) or soldiers to row to move and position the boat

 

And a detail we can clearly see the long sweep oars:

And the turrets on the ship, the pre-Monitor-style ship:

I assume that the boat was being used for coastal or harbor defense, or at least something very close to land, and was really more a floating, positioning battery than a boat.  Seems to me though that after everything was said and done, after all the work was accomplished and the boat built, that making the whole thing dependent on sticks of wood was a fatal flaw. 

 

The Tipping Point of Degeneracy: Robert Oppenheimer and Black Holes, 1939

ITEM: Oppenheimer, J.R. and G.M. Volkoff. On Massive Neutron Cores. Physical Review 55, 1939, 15 February. Pp 374-382. Original printed wrappers.  Very nice copy.  Scarce.  $350

ref: JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1354

People tend to think of black holes as a Stephen Hawking-era phenomenon while the facts of the matter are that they began perhaps hundreds of year earlier, probably with Cambridge John Michell (1724-1793), back in the year of the end of the American Revolution, 1783 (and perhaps before).  His famous experiment (known as the "Cavendish Experiment") was really only rediscovered in the 1970's in Michell's correspondence with Henry Cavendish.  In those pages he hypothesized that there may evolve a star so massive (which he referred to as a "dark star' in Newtonian theory) that light itself might not be able to escape fro it, that the escape velocity for the light could never be reached, and that its phenomenal gravity would make the star impossibly dense.  This was very similar to the dark star hypothesis of Simon Pierre de Laplace in his epic Exposition du Systeme du Monde which was published in 1796. Karl Schwarzchild's 1916 paper using Einstein's relativity paper of the same year discussed the possibilities of singularity (the Schwazchild limit of the diameter of black holes), as did (the beautiful) Subrahmany Chandrasekhar (one of the last men able to know everything) in 1928. 

In hunting for a number of Richard Feynman papers here at the warehouse I happened to find this extraordinary effort by J. Robert Oppenheimer and G.M. Volkhoff in the 15 February 1939 issue of America's greatest journal contribution to physics, The Physical Review.  Here (along with a preceding paper by Richard C. Tolman, issued in the same issue just above Oppenheimer, which were the analytic analysis used by O+V to base their estimates of nuclear forces) was established the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkhoff limit, which stated that if the state of evolution of  neutrons forming a degenerate Fermi gas of extremely dense masses in neutron stars was more  massive than .07 solar masses that it would collapse into a black hole or exotic/quark star; if the mass was below that limit, the star would not collapse due to the degeneracy pressure of neutrons and the strong force.  The black hole part was left really to a second paper of 1 September 1939 (the day that the Nazis attacked Poland and the fighting began in World War II in Europe) when Oppenheimer teamed up with Hartland Snyder to write "On Continued Gravitational Contraction", when the two wrote about the singularity of the event.  the paper met with little appreciation at the time, though the two papers today have lead to some of the most progressive ideas in 21st century astrophysics.

The Cost of Computing, 1959

ITEM:  "The Specification Development of a Cost-Limited Digital Computer", 1959,  by M. Lehman of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, 1959.  11x8 inches, 17pp.  Staple bound.  Scarce.   $125.00

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1296

"Computers do not as yet sell themselves."--Lehman, 1959

Question:  what had 1000 transistors, 5000 diodes, 2000 resistors and 1000 capacitors, a team of ten and took 18 months to build?  

Answer: an inexpensive, $12,000 digital computer in 1959.  

Mind you this is legions better than what was happening in the mid-1940's, with teams of hundreds and costs in the many millions, and much better than in the early 1950's, when these numbers were of an order of magnitude greater.

It seems to me that this short 1959 paper is at the upper end of a beginning concern--costing -out the price of a digital computer for second-tier interests.  "The Specification Development of a Cost-Limited Digital Computer" (by M. Lehman of the Israeli Ministry of Defense) was written for those businesses and schools with a definite low-end budget, the upper range of which was set by Lehman at $12,000 for "peripherals, hardware and programming  (or about $125,000 in 2010 dollars, sort of). This figure was also exclusive of maintenance outside of the cost (at 15-20% of the construction costs overall) of designing and building the machine.

This was some new thinking on providing lower-cost digital computers to a new market:  "in just ten years there has emerged a multimillion dollar industry largely dominated....by the giants of the electronics and data-processing industries...".  Lehman was saying that there was a new opportunity for business to supply computers to "smaller research groups" who were "finding it increasingly difficult to obtain the backing which would enable them...to build an actual machine".  There were other ways of doing it, and Lehman laid out the basic understanding of that procedure.  

Lehman's leading quote for this post was accurate--computers needed to be "sold", as in salesmen and businesses actively engaged in contacting clients who would ("might") benefit from having computeriaed part of their business. The computer manufacturer's "staff will often spend many months investigating customer's problems, possibly reorganizing his techniques and generally preparing teh ground for the installation of a Digital System..."

 

(The figures in the right column are indeed dollars.)

Lehman was doing some groundbreaking work here at the end of the '50's, still far ahead of the time--and probably a full generation--where computers didn't necessarily have to be shown as being 'needed" let alone
"necessary".  The computer would be "selling itself" on the low-end of the market soon enough, but really not until the Reagan years when it was beyond question that the computer could be used by virtually any person or business--at affordable rates.  

What Color "Is"--an Unintentional Modernist Masterpiece of Book Illustration?

ITEMS

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books Post 1282   [With 20 extra images in Continued Reading section]

All images are original from the Vanderpoel book (from a hobbled, semi-dead copy), and are 7x5 inches, printed brilliantly on a heavier, treated, high-clay paper.  Each image is $75.00

[Earlier in this blog, about 1200 posts ago, a million words ago, I wrote about an extraordinary book by an aesthetician named Emily Vanderpoel.  It is "extraordinary" in a narrower sense, and that "extraordinary" might not actually be positive for its original intent.  The extra-intent of the book, what has come out of it for me, was something that was unintentionally accomplished by the author.  The images that she used to illustrate her color theory ideas--the basis of which are not really comprehensible to me--turn out to be artwork in themselves, a found art, the artistry of the images taking over the original intention for the arrangement of their color. ]

The idea of how we put parameters to something like the visual field is a gargantuan topic—it is something that architects and geometers and physicists and mathematicians (in general) have dealt with forever.

  Mapmakers have perhaps the most visualized aspect of this on paper, performing the semi-miracle of translating three dimensions into two; physicists have a more difficult time, taking the opposite approach, sort of , and translating two or three dimensional space into x-number of dimensions.  Anatomists had a difficult time of their subject until relatively recently in human history, what with the sublime religious curfews on messy knowledge and all coming into play, poking around into the heart and such as though it was an affront to the sanctity of the creator (M Servetus’ ideas on the circulation of the blood via the heart, making the heart a tool and not the brain or some odd conjunction of creative divine power, cost him his life, burning slowly alive at the stake…how mysterious the whole world of RNA Genotype-Phenotype Mapping and such would seem to him if he could have a peek into the future/present from wherever he is.)

Color theory is old and pretty—as a matter of fact there is a very attractive gathering of color theory models (in black and white, though) displaying some two dozen or more color models from the last 400 years.  People like Della Porta (1593), our old friend and resident oddball polymath crank Kircher (1646), the smarter-than-you-could-believe Newton (1660), Waller (1686), Lambert (1772), the wide ranging and again polymathic Goethe (1792), Herschel (1817, who also ushered in our understanding of the other light-sensitive shape spacing medium of photography in 1840), the semi-forgotten Chevreul (1835), the beautiful Maxwell (1857), Wundt (1874, the early experimental psychologist who also looked for spirits/spiritmus and ghosts), von Bezold (1878), Rood (1879), Munsell (1918) Kandinsky (1914 and not decipherable by me) and Klee (1924), and so on towards the present, all tried to analyze the prospects of color.

Not in this list is the very highly problematic Emily Vanderpoel, who in 1901 and 1903 produced (in two editions) a lovely but mysterious book called Color Problems for the Layman, in which she sought not so much to analyze the components of color itself, but rather to quantify the overall interpretative effect of color on the imagination.  I know this sounds begging and vague, but I really haven’t been able to make much headway in the work.


I’m attracted to this effort because of its attempt at quantifying such abstract thoughts.

By virtue of this effort, though, Vanderpoel had produced a strikingly illustrated book, with 118 color plates, all very intense, and beautiful, and in its way exceptional—unique for it time perhaps.  Had the book been written thirty years or so hence we’d call it some sort of constructivist/constructionist artform.  But since the artwork in the book comes a decade before the first non-representational artwork in human history (or so), I don’t know exactly what to call it. 

I really don’t know what it is, but I know that it is not entirely accidental, this pre-non-representational artform, because controlled geometrical color art is not accidental. 

In trying to quantify the color images of the objects in her study, Vanderpoel establishes a 10x10 square grid, dividing all of the color in that object into individual units numbering to 100.  Then, somehow, she identifies the major colors and places them according to a system that I cannot understand within the grid.

The net effect is glorious.  I just don’t know how she got there—which isn’t normally a consideration in art, except that this work is an instructional on how to understand color in art and nature, and the explanation of the procedure is ethereal.  Vanderpoel was and remains a respected author on porcelains and other applied and plastic arts.  In this work she looked at her fair share of porcelain, limogues, clay pots, burial urns, glass shards, and the like; she also analyzed clouds, mummy cloths (and casings), dew on morning grass, brocade, the eye of a blue jay, feathers, and another hundred or so poetic arragenments of the stuff of teh world.  I still do not know what this book is trying to tell me, but I do know that it is remarkable.