Ptak Science Books

The Ophthalmology of a Redon-ized Bosch

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2026

                      Cave Cave Deus Videt ("Beware, Beware, God Sees")

When I think of the early-ish thinkers on optics and vision, and consider their fantastic images of the anatomy of the eye and the mind/brain/eye connection, the work of Rene Descartes usually appears first.  It is a general go-to illustration in optics and biology, and it appeared in his Dioptique in 1637.  It is standard iconography.

For me, an antiquarian non-standard image of the eye appeared today. Hieronymous Bosch is not terribly well known as a person, as a walking and talking citizen of the world--it is known where he died, and where he spent the last twenty years of his life, but the details outside of this are scarce.  And even though he signed his adopted name of "Bosch"(he was born ca. 1450 as Jerome van Aken, and died in 1516) very boldly and clearly--and was among the earliest crops of artists to do so in the West--he never dated the paintings.  Scholars have determined their dates in some part by the increased realism and skill, which leads me to one of his latest works, the beautiful table top of the Seven Deadly Sins (ca. 1400). 

I had never really noticed it before, but when I looked closely at some of the detail in the work it suddenly dawned on me that the central part of the work was an eyeball--this no doubt instantly seen by every other person, but for me it was a shock of recognition.  This became particularly clear when I (quickly and clumsily) photoshopped out most of the elements of the painting, leaving me with this:

Which is clearly an eye--and as a matter of fact the Latin inscription emblazoned underneath Christ reads Cave Cave Deus Videt ( or "Beware, Beware, God Sees"), meaning that the watchful creator sees everything and will be the judge and offer final dispensation depending upon past history.

Rendered like this the work reminds me strongly--at least in a symbolist sense--of Ordilon Redon's (1840-1916) Eye Balloon (1878). Well, mostly it is the sense doctored image that drives this recollection more so than the painting--removing almost all of the elements of the Bosch suddenly gave the piece an escapist flavoring, like something in the early modernist movements. 

And the original (47x59" in real life), with the roundels elements restored and Christ replaced in the iris of the eye:

The motif of the painting clearly works its way outside-in, with the all-seeing omnipotent being seeing-all, there at the center of the eye, surveying everything that takes place on the living dominion, surrounded at the corners by depictions of Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell, and then immediately encompassed by the seven deadly sins.

In the floating banner above the main circular image reads "For they are a nation void of counsel, neither is there any understanding in them," and then below "O that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end!"

I found it very striking. 

SteamMegaPunk Flyer, 1868

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2025

This magnificent and mega-heavy beast-aeroplane (a "steam aeromotive machine") appears in the pages of Engineering, and is the creation of Joseph M. Kaufmann of Glagow, and makes a splashy show of itself back there in 1868 when not-too-many airplanes were gracing the pages of technical journals.  But here it is, a very heavy dream of a Scottish engineer, a massive and underpowered vehicle of questionable design and imponderable consequence.  One thing is for sure--it certainly looks pretty.

 

The plan for the aircraft measured 12' from stem to stern (plus another few feet including the tail), with the body about 5'x6', and with wings that spread out 35'--each. The aircraft weighed in at an extraordinary 7,000 pounds and was supposed to be powered by a 40 horsepower steam engine that looked like a locomotive boiler that in theory would keep The Beast afloat at 40 mph for an extraordinary four hours. 

As surprising as these images look from the modern perspective, perhaps the most unexpected aspect can be seen in the detail under the wing in the drawing on the right (below)--it seems that the motive power was that the wings "flapped", like a bird's.  This was asking a lot from those wings.  And that engine.

There was a lot of "flapping" going on in the experimental thinking for flight at this period, though many of these designs were human-powered ornithopters (like those of Bourcart in 1863, Trouve in 1870, and Wenham from 1858), and which in general didn't last much past the 1870's.  There was another class of proposed flying vehicle that adopted bird-wing qualities though the wings didn't flap, like the Le Bris glider of 1868 and the beautiful and graceful patent of the Du Temple monoplane. These designs seemed to last much longer, perhaps most famously in the designs of Otto Lillienthal's gliders of the 1890's and the Vuia machine of 1906.

[The du Temple aeroplane, via Wright Brothers.org.]

What the Kaufmann aircraft had that these others didn't was its guiding principle of stability,  a 40-foot cable with an 85-pound weight on the end of it--a "pendule" of motion and stability.

Mr. Kaufmann built a 42-pound model of the aircraft--things did not go well in the experimental firing, with the boiler failing right away, but not before the wings fell off.

Timeline of the Big Bang

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Here's an interesting, short timeline that I found and and which I reprint below--it was part of the appendix to the book by J.-P. Luminet,  L'Invention du Big Bang (Editions du Seuil, Paris), which was printed in 1997.  "Ce texte est l'introduction de l'ouvrage A. Friedmann, G. Lemaître : Essais de Cosmologie , traduction et notes de J.-P. Luminet et A. Grib, Le Seuil, collections 'Sources du Savoir' ". 

Superior Design: Shades of Gray, 1879

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This is perhaps one of the most beautiful engravings found in the military textbook by Johann Choura, Lehrbuch der Geometralzeichnens fuer id K.K. Militar-Realschulen, which is a work printed in Vienna in 1879. Its actually from the second volume, which is Darstellende Geometrie, a course on applied geometry for the engineering student in a military-minded advanced school.  It is not-so-simple and a lovely work of techArt.

The Poetics of STDs and a Mountain of Truth, 1545

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2023

The progress of man/humankind has, in our dim antiquarian past, been represented in art in stages of ascending a mountain.  The fine arts and sciences have been shown, in their various intellectual pedigrees, at various points on the mountain of the mind, usually with Philosophia sitting supremely at the top (with Astronomia and Mathematica generally not far underneath). This is mind, I came across another sort of progression to the Olympian heights, though it has no people in it, just the mountain, and a curious idea, ascending to faith, or truth. 

The image is on the title page of a curious, little, early work by the pseudonymous  “Grappa” (well-named for the drink), Cicalamenti de Grapps intorno  al Sonetto…though its real nature is revealed in the subtitle,“dove si’ Cliarala allungo delle lodi delle donne et del mal francioso”, or “where one chats at length about women with The French [venereal] Disease”.  It is also dedicated to a non-existent courtesan who was heralded as being lovely, generous, and deep in the seat of this same disease.  Indeedy! This ribald, blustery, frank, coarse innuendo-laced tract (28 leaves long) was not terribly unusual when it was printed in 1545, celebrating as it does the low- and high-cultural private life of Renaissance Italy.  Doctors, poets, gluttons, cheats and of course lots of beautiful women romp around ostensibly in an attempt to prove the usefulness of their sinful vices, relating it all somehow to the disease-improved poetic capacities of the STD-bestowed Petrarch, master of forlorn and unrequited love poetry and the father of Humanism  (It relates in a way that I can’t explain to Petrarch’s Canzoniere, sonnet #88, mostly written, I think, about a  girl/woman that he fell in love with in church, which is why we can see he needed to invent Humanism. He seems to say that the needs of love are strong, stronger than he could stand, evidently, and that one should flee, renounce it; he seems to for himself, the girl across the pew or across the great open space in the cathedral never weakening to him a bit.  He pines over her, and announces his own amoroso intoppo, or "amorous fumblings", and would take flight from himself as well. Evidently the people in this work by Grappa do not take his warnings to heart, though they do seem to renounce the "love" part but not the "sex" part. I could be really wrong on this god knows; all I wanted to do was look at the pretty picture on the cover!)

Stumbling into things like this  makes you remember that the Renaissance wasn’t all stuffy and main-springy; perspective-this and techno-that; they had their fun, too, even in 1545, and put it into print.

Back to the woodcut on the title page: it features a small, winding route up a mountain, the top of which is sanctified “fide”.  Now considering what these folks were doing in this work I wouldn’t necessarily christen the end of the adventure with this word, particularly if it meant (as it does) the name of the World Chess Federation (FIDE).  Seriously though fide means “faith”, as in bona fide (on good faith, by good authority), as opposed to mal fide (bad faith).  I cannot determine what in the world the structure is on the top of the mountain, or what is in it. 

A Fine Calculating Machine by Bollee, 1889

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[Source: http://www.rechnerlexikon.de/artikel/Bild:Bollee-mit-Maschine-CNAM1990.jpg]

This was a surprise, finding M. Bollee's article (Sur une nouvelle machine a calculer) in this 1889 Comptes Rendus, pecking around in that big 10-pound volume looking for something else.  It was very easy to miss if you weren't looking for it, just a few pages long in a 1000-page book.  But there it was, nestled comfortably in pp 737-739.  It these few pages Bollee describes his machine and with particular reference to his innovative approach to direct multipilication--a fine addition (ha!) to the long line of contributions by Babbage and Clement, Scheutz, Wiberg and Grant and Hamann. 

Notes:

Léon Bollée: "Sur une nouvelle machine a calculer", in Comptes Rendus de l'Academie Sciences (Paris), volume 109, 1889, pp. 737-9.

An image of the machine from The Manufacturer and Builder:

See:  the Making of America, http://digital.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=manu;cc=manu;rgn=full%20text;idno=manu0022-7;didno=manu0022-7;view=image;seq=0162;node=manu0022-7%3A21

 

Found Art: Re-Purposed Book, 1848

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This beautiful, home-made pamphlet was pieced together in 1847 or thereabouts, bits of an article on Attica by Professor A.L. Koeppen, cut from the North American and U.S. Gazetteer, and then pasted onto and covering the pages and cover of a chapbook. Everything about this little (5"-tall) book is stiff--the flexible paper wrappers of the pamphlet and its pages had been soaked with glue to such a degree that they're all like boards, but with the feel and sound of paper.  All in all the feel of the book is very satisfying, and very comforting, somehow.

The Bomb God, 1946

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This wonderful, semi-impossible sulphur-laden pamphlet emerged from the bottom of one of the "Naive Surreal" boxes today in the warehouse:

  When God Splits the Atom (1956) offers a not-so-friendly piece of advice:  "its later than you think".  We are told that God delivered the atom and the atomic bomb and the end of the war and the beginning of the United Nations.  None of that will save us from the burning ring of fire, and the U.N. will fail, and so on, down to the firey pit if there is no repentence and acceptance of the higher power.  The cover pretty much tells the entire story. 

 There are a few other God-and-athe-atomic-bomb posts on this blog, like, well, this one:

(Found here.)

And this one (from Miss Atomic Bomb: the A-Bomb in Popular Culture--Comics, Cakes and the Will of God):

And of course on the other end of this:

And that's pretty much that.

The idea and imagery of the atomic bomb was instantly re-purposed and used to identify and sell food and comfort, and was employed for hotel names, cakes, dart games, watches, restaurants, patience games, and so on--God was just one of a series in a long line of a-bomb apps.

War Gas Paper Calculator, 1942

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I found this very interesting paper calculating device (ca. 1940) on the Imperial War Museum site (here):

I came to the IWM site via the St. Marylebone WWII site and the section on Air Raid Protection because of unearthing this elegant sticker in one of my pamhlets:

Helping Hitler, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2024

There are many unhappy episodes during WWII of small groups from the Allied countries which gave comfort and solace and economic and physical support to the Nazis.  The economic aspect gets very complex and pretty deep here in the U.S., with major companies lending assistance even in violation of the Trading with the Enemies Act into 1943, and of course there was the German-American Bund which was relatively full-throated until America got into the war on 8 December 1941, and so on.  There were also occupation Nazi-fueled governments like Vichy, but what I'm interested in for this post are the volunteers who materially contributed to the Nazi war effort, with time, and effort and fighting in uniform. The hard figures for the volunteers and conscripts who fought wth the Waffen-SS during the war totaled some 350,000 men^1.--and considering what was happening to the German army post-Barbarossa, that was not an insignificant figure.

 

 General Sir Frederick Maurice (1871-1951) , one of the subjects of the leaflet,  had a very long and sine-curve military career, and was an academic of some achievement--he was also along in there was head and founder of the British Legion.  And it was in this capacity and under his auspices that the British Legion offered 10,000 men to help Adolf Hitler and secure a modest success in the transition of control of that country.

What an enormously disappointing handbill this was to read, coming from the press of a militant right-wing and racist organization in support of Hitler and the Nazis in their swallowing-alive of a living Czechoslovakia. The Militant Christian Patriots² were the publishers of this handbill--this was a group were formed as part of an earlier organization called The Britons (founded in 1919), both of which were viciously anti-Semitic and severely racist, and were on board with most of the programs of the NSDAP.  (The publishing arm of the Britons, the Britons Publishing Company, for example published 85 editions of the vicious and ridiculous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.) They supported Neville Chamberlain and were happy to keep the U.K. out of any confrontation with Germany.   As we see in this handout, they were eager and able to support Hitler's invasion and destruction of Czechoslovakia by providing a British volunteer force of more than 1,000 to aid in the Nazi take-over by policing the supposedly audacious and Seudeten-German pillaging Czechs. 

The story of the Nazis in Czechoslovakia is a complex story, riddled with nothing by treachery-lust on the part of the Nazis, and of course ending very badly for the Czechs, the Germans living out a series of aspects of the Big Lie until it was all over.  The British Legion chose to believe what they needed to believe in order to sustain their own nationalist beliefs. 

There were many who found Chamberlain simply wrong in his negotiation with Hitler and where he was guiding the country, not the least of whom was the Communist Party via J.R. Campbell, who expressed a general outrage in this pamphlet (published October 10, 1938), the cover telling the story: 

Notes:

1. These included volunteers and conscripts from Albania, 9000; Armenia, 2000; Belgium, 27,000; British Commonwealth,  never more than 100 in the British Free Corps; Bulgaria, 700;  Croatia, 20,000; Denmark: 8,000; Finland, 1,500; France, 9,000; Georgia, 2,000 to 3,000; Hungary: 40,000; India, 3,500; Italy, 15,000; Latvia: 60,000; Netherlands: 25,000; North Caucasus, 1,000 to 2,000; Norway, 6,000; Russian (& Belarusian): 15,000, Russian (Cossack) 20,000, Russian (Turcic),10,000; Romania, 6,000; Serbia, 8,000; Spain: 3,000 in Spanische-Freiwilligen-Kompanie der SS 101 and SS 102; Sweden, 300-500; Switzerland, 800; Ukraine: 20,000.

2. There's another example of this publisher described in this blog, here:   http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2011/01/blank-empty-things-series-the-militant-christian-patriots-hitler-and-saving-britain-from-itself-1938.html