Ptak Science Books

The "Is This Really Necessary" Department 2: Flying, Sommersaulting Elephants

JF Ptak Science Book LLC  Post 672

Last week I made a post regarding a fish-throwing apparatus installed at a zoo--honestly I didn't anticipate that there would be a follow-up post on another animal-throwing machine, but, well, unfortunately, here it is. 

Eduard Wulff, a circus manager and resident of Bruxelles, was granted this patent in 1904 for a device that would “project horses, elephants, monkeys etc into the air” so that they would perform a sommersault.

Elephants?  Flying, somersaulting, elephants?

The abstract from the British Intellectual Property Office is reprinted below:  

Thomas Edison’s Dreams and Why You Can’t Always Be Right: Television, 1880

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 671

   "Seeing by telephone or by telegraph may be within the range of the possible. I say that because nothing is impossible until it has been demonstrated so to be. Seeing by either of these instrumentalities, however, is, as I look upon it, so far removed from the field of probability that I should treat any report of this character as an absurdity." T. Edison

 

I wonder what it was that Thomas Edison dreamt about—I suspect that like most folks he dreamt about himself, though perhaps everyone else in his dreams were him, too.  Mr. Edison was a fabulous inventor and thinker—he wasn’t the best person he could’ve been, and even though he had an enormous grasp on the whole of things and ideas about him, he also seemed to grab a little bit more, and a little too much.  Which sounds like gluttony. 

I’m not so sure why Edison was given to such overstatement on “television”—he just about contradicts his own rule of thumb in doing so, as though he was going far out of his way to say something anti-prophetic.  Perhaps it was because “seeing by wire” at this point did not belong to him, like so much else—which is possible, because Edison did not play well with others, at all. 

The possibility of interesting dreams swimming around Mr. Edison’s sleeping head was very high, though he may have been one of those poor unfortunates who dream about watching someone else sit in a chair and for hours on end stare at a wall—sounding more like a nightmare than a dream to me. 

 

Good dreams, bad dreams.  History is certainly ankle-deep in literature about the dream, and the anthropology of dream states must be wide and deep.  Dreams don’t show up all that much in the Bible, though, which seems odd to me—there are 40-odd references to dreams in the Old Testament, and only nine in the New.  And in the NT five of the dreams come in Matthew (with four of those referencing the birth of Christ), and another four coming in the Acts of the Apostles, all of which relate to St. Paul.  The most interesting of the NT dreams sounds like that of Claudia, the wife of Pontius Pilate, who warned her husband that Christ was probably not the person that he should be messing with. That is I think her entire existence in the Bible, the dream, and the warning to her husband.  What seems to happen though is that dreams in the Old Testament seem to be rather benign entities, while in the New things happen that turn the dreamscape into a possible entrance way to Hell, the unconscious thought world becoming the property of the Church. And speaking of Hell and dreams, I believe that it was the dream sequence in the Aeneid where the truth and falsity of dreams were put to the test—or at least the dual possibilities of the divergent nature of dreams—imaging dreams emerging from the Ivory Portal in Hades to be false dreams while those issuing from the Pearl portal were good.  Problem is here that with all of that smoke and bother in the Underworld, wouldn’t Ivory and Pearl look pretty much the same?  Among the ancients it was Aristotle who was among the first to dispense with the soft/spiritualistic/astrobabble interpretation of the dream, approaching the issue with rationality.  Hippocrates also tried to lift the idea of the dream up and away from those (Like Hesiod, for example) who would see them as ritualistic and meaningful indicators of endless bric-a-brac.  But the ancients didn’t do a great job of it given the vast limitations, nor did the moderns (as Dr. Freud certainly still has major game in this post-ironic department).

 

Back to the TV:   the truth of the matter is that in spite of the Edisonian condemnation there was real discussions and experiments regarding mechanical (not electronic) television in the late 19^th century, and they went a pretty long way towards achieving images by wire. Alexander Bell nearly brought about an image-sending device based on his successful photophone (in 1880), and in that same year George Carey built a primitive sort-of system with light-sensitive cells.  Paul Nipkow came the closest of these early pioneers in 1884 with a techy rotating-disk apparatus that successfully achieved an 18-line visual image. 

 

I’m just saying that Mr. Edison had to have been dreaming of other things that he had more control over.  From where I sit, it seems to me that opportunities for the electrical transmission of images were quite ripe by the 1890’s.  It took another 25 years or so to bring it all to fulfillment, with a cascade of very successful developments occurring in 1927/8/9.  It is a little mysterious to me why he had such a low opinion of the possibility of television given the electrical environment of his day. 

Nazi Designers of Current Corporate Logos: Franziskaner Beer's Nazi Connection

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC  Post 670  Blog Bookstore

[An associated post on the long lives of liberated Nazi concentration camp doctors can be seen HERE.]

Do you have movable Nazi-designed art in the streets of your town?  I do!  And probably so do you.

It was a cloudless, perfect day in my mountain city when I first noticed the 10-foot tall Nazi-designed art tooling down the street on three sides of the beer truck.  I‘d seen the design many times, but it wasn’t until I was stuck in traffic behind the truck that I noticed the artist’s stylized signature beside the logo.  The light changed, and I watched it—while I was stalled and stopped by recognition—make its way into the world, merrily selling its product, Franziskaner Beer. 

You’ve seen the truck—a smiling Franciscan monk nestled in a green oval, holding a liter-like mug of his product, content in his experience.  The artist, Ludwig Hohlwein*, is listed in many places as a “graphic design from Munich”, and the “prince of posters”, and was an enormously gifted artist—he was also the leading designer of Nazi propaganda posters from 1933 to 1945. 

I wondered how this could be, how a corporate logo and identity designed by a Nazi –in 1935--could still be in use?  In a series of emails with the parent company of Franziskaner, Spaten, N.A.  (which was actually Spaten-Lowenbrau, which was in turn purchased by InterBev), I never really did get my answer.  Spaten N.A. (a personal name was never used in the correspondence) went from an semi-apologetic attitude of not knowing who or what the artist was, to a highly defensive posture , somehow huddling down with the American bombing of Dresden and Tokyo in a questionable semi-logic justifying their use of Hohlwein.  The result was not surprising, but the means and the arguments certainly were—I am aware of course that Spaten has invested untold millions in establishing their iconic image; but, at the end of the day, their artist is still a Nazi, and a bad one at that. 

Why is this so bothersome?  The history of firms doing business with the Nazis during the war and former Nazi concerns successfully surviving the war (in one form or another) that continued to do business is a long, complex story.  My guess is that if all of these companies were to magically disappear in a pretty gedankenexperiment that there would be huge gaping holes in our economic landscape. Do we think of Auschwitz when we seek headache relief?  Probably not,  though the maker of zyklon-b and one of the principle reasons for Auschwitz, the enormous and powerful conglomerate firm of I.G. Farben, escaped the war’s end by being broken into companies such as BASF, Bayer and Hoescht (much to the dismay of people like General Patton, who thought that dismantling the company was supposed to actually dismember it, not rationally cleave it into its constituent and self-sustaining elements.  Also the folks who went to prison for their war crimes at I.G were all pretty much back and in the boardroom(s) within a few years.)  Or for that matter do we think of gas chambers when filling up at Exxon?  Exxon had been Standard Oil (New Jersey), which shipped fuel to the Nazis during the war and was one of the largest stockholders in Farben, and happily made money with the Nazis during the course of the war. 

There are just a few examples of many, many cases of, what, what do we call it? Business?  That's what Prescott Bush must've called it.  One of his wartime activities was being responsible for the UBC  (Union Banking  Corporation) which was involved with laundering/banking Nazi funds (including some big numbers for Fritz Thyssen of Thyssen steel, monolithic-backer of Hitler in the '20's and '30's).  There was nothing necessarily illegal with that until it became illegal--UBC and the pater familias of the Bush dynasty continued their practices into mid-1942, when the federal government caught up with them and slammed UBC and Brown Brothers Harriman under the Trading with the Enemy Act, as they were in fact helping out the Nazi cause.

It seems that in a world of questionable origins of popular goods it might seem best to have little sense of history and  a forgetful one at that.

Is this Nazi-drawn art any less repellent, say, than seeing R.E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in stained glass at the National Cathedral, or driving down the Jefferson Davis Highway in Virginia, or cheering for the unredeemably-named Washington DC National Football League team?  Mitsubishi and BMW made aircraft that supported heinous regimes and shot down American men; on the other hand, the isolationist publisher and proselytizer of the brazenly stupid Protocols of the Elders of Zion and trader with Nazis, Henry Ford, still makes a good truck.  I have two of them. (GM was there too.)  Monsanto produced Agent Orange which defoliated large swaths of Vietnam while filling up American soldiers with dioxins; Dow Chemical produced napalm for effective and horrible use in the same war--does this matter when we buy the food produced by their chemical additives?

It is a potentially endless list of supposedly benign betrayals—a surface scratched revealing a torturous and bloody past.  But in an age where (as it says on the National Archives) it is not longer true that “the past is prologue”, the past is not even the past, so, I guess, we get a fresh start whenever we need one.  It’s like a convenient memory lapse, like berating President Hugo Chavez while filling up at the Citgo stations selling his oil. (Citgo is also a NASCAR sponsor) 

Maybe in some minds the Spaten folks were right after all—transgressions are excusable in the face of the transgressions of the accuser, which would be a free pass to moral leniency.  The United States did firebomb Dresden and Tokyo, and we consume all manner of food an energy beyond the rest of the world while billions of people suffer invisibly (to us).  The weight of this history can bring you quickly to silence.  Perhaps it is just exhaustion that lets us necessarily forget these unpleasant pasts—perhaps with their memory nothing would get done.

 

On the other hand, well, there goes that truck and the happy Monk.  I'm not so sure why it bothers me so endlessly--perhaps it is the utterly trivial nature of it all, something that could've been so easily rectified as folks were dusting themselves off in May 1945.  Why not just get rid of that image and replace it by something similar (or whatever) that was executed by a Not-a-Bad-Nazi and start afresh? But it looks like Spaten NA is content with their artist--he might be a Nazi, but he's their Nazi, and it is a conceit and a contentment to let sleeping Nazis lie.  

Volkswagen certainly does. The "VW" logo was designed by Nikolai Borg under the direction of "Nazi designer" Fritz Todt (!)--Borg is still alive and is currently suing to be officially recognized as it designer.  The cog part of the wheel surrounding the VW letters--which is a design commonly seen encircling the Nazi swastika--was ordered to be removed by the occupying British forces just after the war, softening up the image a little.  Hohlwein remains intact and un-de-nazified..

 *It is interesting to note that Hohlwein's post-WWI history frequently escapes the mention of stores selling his posters.  I've noticed too that his death date is often conveniently listed as 1939, though he survived the war.

 

Lincoln and the Hanging of 38 Sioux, 1862

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 669 

The great mystery was how those Indians were smuggled out of the grave, in spite of the watchfulness of those guards.   From the Autobiography of Theodore Edgar Parker

One of the darkest moments of the spectacular Lincoln presidency came on 26 December 1862 when the president chose to not interfere with the vengeful hanging of 38 Santee Sioux just south of St. Paul, Minnesota.  This was the legal outcome of a short-fought “war”(known as "The Great Sioux Uprising", "the Dakota War of 1862" and "Little Crow's War")  fought between U.S. soldiers and several Siouan tribes—a war brought on by the desperate tribes after suffering failed crops and the reneged treaty obligations (including a long-overdue payment of $1.4 million for the purchase of 24 million acres, or about a nickel an acre) of their Great Father in D.C.  It was really more like a hunting expedition—the Indians, who had rampaged and taken hostages and so forth, were at the end of their endurance. The warriors were ill-equipped for almost anything, with little food and failing horses, and were positively no match for the federal troops who would hunt them down and destroy them. 

“Destroy” isn’t my choice for words—it is used over and over again in the communications between the field commander General Henry Sibley and the general in charge of the entire region, General John Pope.  It turns out that Pope was of the Tecumseh Sherman school of Indian relations, writing for the record

"It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux. They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromise can be made." 

Missing Images in Art: Depictions of Art by Children

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 668

I think that I can safely say that artwork by children does not make very many appearances in Western art prior to the 20th century.  Nor do the originals--considering the ephemeral nature of the effort at art by children, their work just don't seem to survive.  Some of that reason--particularly in America--was the scarcity of materials for kids to produce art with: paper was not inexpensive, and neither brushes and paints.  Crayons, invented for chubby and reachy fingers, were not invented for the mass market until 1903.  (Crayola sold eight crayons in a box for a nickel.  The colors?  Black, brown, blue, red, purple, orange, yellow, and green.)   Then of course the artwork would have to be saved, somehow, for generations.  As much as it would be fascinating to find artwork done at age 4 by your great-great grandparents, it would have to survive the cleansing tendencies of four generations of clean-up.  End result:  there's just not that much antiquarian chldrens' art floating around.

It also doesn't appear as art in artwork.  It is possible to find numerous examples of kids' scratches in stone and such in ancient graffiti, but it doesn't appear as elements of fine artwork, or, for that matter, in book illustration. 

There is an example however in Thomas Truman's The Nurse's Rhyme Book, a New Collection of Nursery Rhymes, published in Philadelphia in 1847.  The book is filled with unusual illustrations and fantastic ornamental borders, all used in support of some odd, scary, mean and occasionally pretty mid-century posies meant as night-time entertainment for the young ones.  Our prize is found on the very last page, the final slug of an illustration to a more-finely illustrated book: a coy, small boy, holding an example of his art, seemingly drawn on a framed slate. He looks happy, pleased, proud to me--on the one hand he is interested in sharing his achievement and on the other is really too shy to share, an emotion I've seen from time to time with my girls. As a matter of semi-fact, this is a rare emotion to see displayed in art, the too-shy-to-share routine saved more for fluttery self-conscious Victorian grown-ups more so than for children.. 

Believe me, after having dealt with books and prints as an antiquarian for almost 30 years, and also having a collection of sorts of antiquarian childrens' arts, pictures like this just don't surface very often at all.  Over the years I've made some annoying phone calls and emails to librarians at art galleries (especially at the National Gallery in DC where I was a pester) explaining my interest and trying to find out if this struck any bit of memory in their brains--I never once had a positive answer. (I expected at some poin tthat someone would say, "Oh yes, of course--there's a census of that that Mr. Kemp of Yale did in 1977. Or something, some sort of memory for this kind of image.) This is hardly an academic pursuit, but my occasionally ritualistic clawing seems to bear out that these things are just not available.

And why this interest?  There is a simple, inherent sweetness in all of this, full of life and hope; something that crosses the generations, looking pretty much as though the emotion in the art was produced yesterday, if not for some of the content. . And that is another charm--like giving a small child a camera to photograph what they see (as in the case of my daughters Emma and Tessie) and see the remarkable results of their 40-inch tall version of my adult world.  The insights can be remarkable--not only do we see things from a new physical angle, but also the things of interest, the center of attention in the picture, the stuff that has aroused their interest and curiosity enough to take a picture of, can be incredible and totally unexpected.  That is perhaps the greatest interest for me in looking at children's artwork:  it has the continued potential to be slam-brake innovative and filled with the unexpected insight; and it is just not a"normal"view of the world. And in a way the art can hold a key to your own antique memory of childhood; every picture has a possibility for the recovery of your own forgotten insight. 

Dadaist Images in 19th Century Prints: William Rimmer's Artistic Anatomy, 1877

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 667

Looking at old prints sometimes reveals more than just their own history, simple or not:  there are, from time to time, subtle bits of otherness that creeps into the image, if you allow yourself the time to see it.  And sometimes looking at images of the past reveal a little of the future, or the possibility of the future.

I wrote a little about this in the odd art/color textbooks of the pre-Kandinskian Emily Vanderpoel , about whose color theory I still understand not at all, though the images that she produced as illustrations to these bizarre theories are stunning, pre-modernist, and unintentional creations.

William Rimmer’s (1816-1879) Art Anatomy (1877 and subsequent printings) is another such adventure.  Rimmer was a very accomplished artist, and was also a fine anatomist.  He was very concerned and interested in what happens to the skin, forced into action by all of the stuff underneath it.  He pursued the movement of muscle, and bone, and the interplay of the two, and produced a wonderful exponent of artistic anatomy. 

 And inside of these images is something else, sometimes.  There is an undoubted Leonardoesque quality to many of his drawings, the figures appearing with deft lines and interesting shadings, many times

surrounded by the author’s notes and explanations  But there’s also something else—some of the images are just, well, a little bizarre given the time in which they were executed.  Some of the details are positively modernist, begging to be identified as a 1920’/1930’s creation, or Dadaist, or something—just not 19^th century.  I’ve included some further examples below

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First and Early Impressions: Hitler, Mass Production and the Use of the Long View

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 666

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas  George Eliot.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
Saul Bellow

First (and other early) impressions get made once, for the very first time, and then re-invented, re-examined every time after that, especially as the first impressions start to age and get forgotten, slipping around the windsock of time.  But every so often these antique first impressions come back onto the playing field, and it is remarkable, really, what lessons can be learned of them. 

A review of a very early biography of Adolph Hitler appeared in the pages of The Illustrated London News for 27 August 1932—this was the year before Hitler assumed formal control of the government and nine years after he began his rise to power.  The book was Hitler, by Emil Lengyel, published by Routledge in 1932; it is the subject of a very sharp-eyed review by “C.K.A” in the pages of the ILN. It was also reviewed so to speak by the Nazi leadership, which ordered that Lengyel (1898-1985) be picked up and disappeared at any early opportunity for being an enemy of the state.  Some of the interesting bits that the reviewer pulled from the Lengyel book include the following—I’ve included several here because of his particular and early insight):

“There are no limits, however, fantastic, to which this fanaticism will not go; though what the Jews have done to Germany to deserve this frantic vendetta remains obscure.

“It is almost incredible to Englishmen that this barbaric mania (Jew hating) should be erected to the position of a fundamental political tenet…”

“Some of the Party principle are Olympic in their sweep and scope.  Thus:” “offenders against the interests of the community, usurers, profiteers, etc., are to be punished with death…” Much virtue in your ‘etc.”!

“Behind all stand the emotional political impulses—repudiation of war-debts, hatred of France, hostility to the League of Nations, fanatical exaltations of race,…All this was to be expected…it is not too much to say that by the Treaty of Versailles the allies brought the Nazi movement upon themselves. The marvel is that it has been so long postponed.”

“What Hitler’s flag stands for he has never revealed beyond irresponsible generalizations and decrepit platitudes..."

“(On Lengyel’s Hitler):  He is a vox et praterea nihil—a shallow, paltry, neurotic person, with no constructive ability, a woodly intelligence, and little to comment except glibness and passionate prejudice. This is difficult to believe but by no means impossible.”

“It may well be…that Hitler the man is as empty as his absurd Swastika”.

The Yellow Spot, The Extermination of the Jews in Germany (1936) was the earliest printed document on the coming of the Nazi Holocaust, the earliest catalog on the mistreatment and systematic dehumanization of the Jews, and the earliest book to associate “extermination” with Nazis and the Jewish people. (The "yellow spot" part coming from the early history of racially marking Jews--it appeared first it seems in the 11th century in Islamic lands and then used periodically around Europe and the middle east for hundreds of years afterwards.  Using the Star/Shield of David seems  be a 20th century invention.)  It was also one of the earliest books on Hitler and what he represented.  (My friend Andy Moursund has published a very compelling poster on the early books regarding Hitler and Nazism and can be seen here.)  Another sort of first impression that makes it mark is a series of pictures by the great Margaret Bourke-White (who seems to have been everywhere from the Depression to the Korean War and wrote and photographed what she saw brilliantly) made at the Buchenwald Deathcamp just after liberation.  She did make photographs of the horrors of the place, but she also turned the camera around to record the faces of the locals who were forced to tour and view the camp in their communal midst. You can see very clearly in the faces of these people—for whom the camp could not have been a mystery unless it was internalized so—how much they wanted to not see what they were looking at.

 

 And speaking of Hitler, Henry Ford’s contribution to the ethos of the American standardization and robotization of the workforce—the industrial production line—was well portrayed in the first cinematic appreciations of the idea.  (Writers had long since made observations on the evils of industry and society, going back at least as far as Charles Dickens—but its representation in the most democratic medium of the first half of the last century--the movies--received it first treatments in two strong impressions in the 1930’s.  The film that comes quickest to mind is Charlie Chaplin’s still-brilliant and still-applicable Modern Times (1936, though originally named The Masses)—a dire film (in one place dissolving sheep entering a slaughterhouse with a scene of workers entering a factory) that offered no solution to the factory.  Aldous Huxley wrote about the sickness of production in his Brave New World (1932) which is even scarier in its own right—though the scary image of the future delivered with the dark humor of Chaplin is tough to surpass—if for no other reason than it winds up discussing the “principle of mass production applied to biology”.  But earlier still is the little-seen film by Rene Clair (1931) A nous la libertie (Give Us Liberty/Freedom), which presents the mass production system as a thin metaphor for a prison labor system.  (Upton Sinclair said that the Ford assembly plants should be presented in “Museums of Unnatural History”.)

This really is an endless and mammoth subject as what I’m talking about is a history of perception, and all I’ve done here really is to draw a few things together that I have within reach.  It seems an interesting pursuit, following the threads of thought regarding early impressions of major (and minor) events, and one could easily construct a large Borgesian encyclopedia of them.  Check under “C”, for cable, for example:  the physicist Jacques Babinet thought it impractical and far too expensive to construct a communication line under the Atlantic ocean (as did many others, seeing the starts and fits of the various cable companies that were begun to try to capitalize the operation.  The cable business barely had a heartbeat, at times, in the mid-century even.  And speaking of heartbeats, William Harvey withstood blistering attacks on his correct statements on the circulation of the blood (costing him nearly all the patients in his practice).  Though at least Harvey lived to see a brighter day:  Michel Servetus, on the other hand, didn’t, and was burned at the stake for his heresies, one of which was the centering of the circulation of the blood in the heart rather than the brain.  The list goes on and on:  Semmelweis was killed but did wind up ion an asylum; Galileo didn’t wind up in an asylum but did wind up imprisoned; Copernicus wound up in neither place, escaping possible clerical criticisms by dying just as his revolutionary work was published.  Phillippe Lebon’s ideas for illumination by gas were seen as ridiculous, as were the revolutionary ideas of Edward Jenner and Luigi Galvani.  Einstein’s 1905 ideas weren’t happily received in France for a decade, and David Hilbert’s impressions of mathematics in the middle of the third decade of the 20^th century was that it was “done”.  (Actually the young Einstein was also cautioned about going into physics because that field was seen as pretty much “completed”.)   There was of course the other side of the impressions coin to all that I’ve mentioned above—for example, the resistance to Copernicus was not actually  as fearful as we think of it today, most thinking people were ready for it and were relieved with his 1543 publication.  The idea of looking at first impressions may actually have some utility in seeing how we view new things in our contemporary culture--or at least it would give us the sense of wideness and of the future, and to be at least circumspect about newness. 

*A note on the production technology using interchangeable parts--this idea really did have its seat in  American industry. Colt’s “system of manufacturing” (c. 1851), Charles Tomlinson’s 1853 Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks, rifle manufacturing at the Springfield Armory in the early 1850’s,  Eli Whitney and the cotton gin, Singer Sewing Machines,  (ca. 1865) phonograph machines produced on conveyors by Thomas Edison, and so on, till you get to Ford’s own Highland Park Factory around 1913.  All are indicators of this sort of conveyor belt, standardized parts, interchangeable units that marks this brand of manufacture. For an early, interesting reading see Charles Fitch’s “Report on the Manufacture of Interchangeable Mechanism” (1881)  as part of one of the reports of the massive overall report of the Tenth U.S. Census, and also  “The Rise of the Mechanical Ideal” in the Magazine of American History (1884)

The "Is This Really Necessary?" Department: Fish Throwing Machine, 1932

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 665

Our necessities are few but our wants are endless.
Josh Billings

"Necessity" is a fickle word and and even more elusive emotion, especially when discussing that quality in others.  But there are some things that look, well, just completely unnecessary; so very unnecessary that they are just plain wrong.  Hard to identify, difficult to codify--but everyone knows it when they see it.

Such is the case of this fish-throwing machine installed at the London Zoological Gardens.  The wooden tower seems to be 12 feet high or so, with a fish launched from its uppermost window once a zoo patron deposited their sixpence, eager to mechanically feed a sea lion.   Patrons to the zoo at Regents Park who were eager to see the sea lions fed had to arrive at slimly-appointed time; now, with the fish thrower, they could see the sea lions fed at any time, and do it themselves if they were so inclined.  I don't know exactly what happened to these beats, but constant feeding would've have gone all that well.  

And yes, you got three fish for sixpence.

Source:  The Illustrated London News, 17  September 1932.

The Future-is-Now: Air Travel for the Curious, 1932

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 664

I really quite like this image—it has a quality to it that looks like a futuristic view of air travel, but it was in fact a the-future-is-now image. Imperial Airways offered luxurious accommodation for their passengers in the long flights to India (7 days) and Cape Town (11 days). Passengers had a pretty sustained exposure to relative luxury with in flight, and landed every evening, the passengers shuttled off to hotels for a good night’s sleep.   The passengers in this illustration are enjoying a pot of tea at what look like a full-sized table, while through the very large viewing window we see another Imperial Airways aircraft passing by *very* closely. 

 

This advertisement appears in the 2 July 1932 issue of The Illustrated London News, posted less than a year after the company started offering the London- Cape Town route.   The airline flew Handley Page H.P. 42s with four engines for these flights—there were eight of these aircraft used for these flights over the year, each posting over one million miles.  All without a single injury to a single passenger. 

Sound Machines and Acoustic Memory: Ephemeral Sound Landscapes

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  663

Making solid the concrete part of musique concrete has never looked quite so orderly as in this image, found in the wonderful The Illustrated London News for 10 August 1929, and depicting a device that would provide "sound effects" for silent motion pictures.  The electroacoustic organ was constructed at the very tail end of the Silent Film Era, with simultaneous sound-on-film just having been invented (in 1925), and popular films just starting to be made  employing it.  The control over the range of incidental, everyday and forgotten sounds seems to be extraordinary, and extraordinarily presented on that fantastic organ, providing an acoustic landscape against which move-goers could watch their film. 

It seems like a lot of technology to bring to bear to enhance silent pictures with the sound of wind or the clopping of a horse’s hooves.  But not so, really—accompaniment to silent films was usually and simply musical, with the occasional actors employed to speak lines ere and there.  The introduction of incidental sound was something new—and it was almost immediately something old with the introduction of the talkies,  like a new dimension of achromatic experience.

What would be very interesting would be to hear a library of such effects from so long ago, with noises produced by the stuff that has slipped into the past and, sometimes, right out of memory.  The sound of the milkman’s bottles; the clatter of the ticker tape; a standard gauge locomotive slowing down; the iceman’s truck; the P.A. system at Griffith’s Field. Sometimes long un-reproduced sounds like these produce visual memories as well (as with the Paul Klee here at right, a painting called "Ancient Sound", 1925.) There are hudreds of thousands of recordings done in the field as part of ethnomusical or anthropological research, but what I'm talking about is found ephemeral sound. 

Antiquarian sound is interesting, whether it is the actual early recordings of events or objects long passed, or recording made recently of antique objects making their modern antiquarian sounds.  Found sound is good too—the ordinary, forgotten stuff that blends into the acoustic fabric of the day, undifferentiated because of heir common nature.  There are a number of interesting Sound Zoos/Sound Museums available online, one being the wonderful London Sound Survey http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/index.php/survey/ (found by benefit of Metafilter) –an excellent and deep site that allows you to browse for sounds by era. The Sounds of New York provides a similar service at http://www.soundsofnewyork.com/.

There is also the very interesting Documentary Sound site, which is an index and pointer for other sites. http://wlt4.home.mindspring.com/adventures/documentary.htm For example, the owner of the site lists the following fantastic-sounding title from the documentary sound releases by Smithsonian’s Folkways series:  Voices of the Sky: Propellers and Jets (1957)  Sounds of the American Southwest (1954) Sounds of Animals (1954); Sounds of the Annual International Sports Car Grand Prix of Watkins Glen, N.Y. (1956); Cable Car Soundscapes (1982) F-6129; Here at the Water's Edge: A Voyage in Sound-NY Harbor Documentary (1962) F-6161; Sound Effects, Vol. 1: City Sounds recorded by Tony Schwartz (1958) F-6170; The Sounds of London (1961) F-5901 ; Documentary Sounds (1962) F-618 ; Speech after the Removal of the Larynx (1964) F-6134; Sounds of Insects (1960) F-6178; Ionosphere (High Altitude Sounds) (1955) C-501 ; Sounds of the Junk Yard (1964) F-6143; Sounds of Medicine (1955) F-6127; Sounds of the Office (1964) F-6142; Sounds and Ultra-Sounds of the Bottle-Nose Dolphin (1973) F-6132; Sounds of Sea Animals (1955) F-6125; Sounds of the Sea, Vol. 1 (1952) F-6121; The Voice of the Sea (1954) C-5011; Sounds of a South African Homestead (1956) F-6151; Voices of the Storm (1957-58) C-1077; The Sounds of Camp: A Documentary Study of a Children's Camp (1959) F-6105; Sounds of a Tropical Rain Forest in America (1952) F-6120; The Complete In Fidelytie: Sounds Natural and Un-Natural (1956) C-1044; Sound Patterns (Natural, Musical, Human) (1953) F-6130.

A darker, disturbing and tough place to visit is http://soundportraits.org/on-air/execution_tapes/, which houses execution tapes and recording of the last statements of condemned men. The tapes are from the mid-1980's, and have a very grainy, ethereal quality to them--interviews take place with the condemned men in their cells, making their last public statements; there are also recordings of the actions in the command center as the execution area is readied, and also, lastky, in the death chamber itself, when the final designations are read to the condemned.  (There is no actual recording of the death sequence.)