Ptak Science Books

Human Power—Raw Images of the Middle Passage, the American Stain of Slavery. Wadstrom and the Slave Ship Brookes.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #84

Having just finished a short post on human-powered machines (Georg Bockler in the mid 17th century) and with Juneteenth fast approaching, I thought about another sort of human power—slaves.  I wanted to make a short post on the conditions in which Africans were taken (sold and stolen) from their home continent to North America (and later just to the United States). 

Slavery as an institution in the U.S. existed from 1619-1865, failing, ultimately, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment (the first proposed in 60 years) to the Constitution by the end of 1865. (The African slave trade—though not slavery itself—was outlawed in 1807, by a law passed jointly in the United States of America and the United Kingdom, with the  US law taking  effect on January 1, 1808.)  The amendment was ratified relatively quickly by the legislatures of the  necessary three-quarters (27) of the original 36 states in 1865—Mississippi, the last of the original states to ratify the amendment, did so in 1995, 135 years following its initial rejection. Though almost all of the states had ratified the amendment in January and February, it took until December 4th and 6th—months after the crushing failure of the Confederacy—for North Carolina and Georgia to vote for it.  (The remaining 9 states voted for the amendment as follows:  Oregon California and Florida in 1865; Iowa and New Jersey (which had initially rejected the matter in 1865) in 1866;   Texas in 1870; Delaware, the First State, in 1901; Kentucky in 1976; and Mississippi, somehow, in 1995
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The Emancipation Proclamation was issued September 22, 1862, with a three-month long pillow until it took effect on  January 1, 1863 .  Juneteenth refers to the freeing of the slaves in Texas (at Galveston) with the reading of General Order No. 3, on 19th June 1865.  Texas was the last refuge of Southern Slavery, and it all ended on that day. 

The famous image above (of the British slave ship Brooke)  is taken from An Essay on Colonization, particularly applied to the Western Coast of Africa….by Carl Bernhard Wadstrom, printed in London in 1794.  Wadstrom (1746-1799) was devoted abolitionist and Swedenbourgian who planned, advocated and practiced (via his relationship with the Nordenskold brothers and the Philanthhropic Society a working agricultural colony on the West coast of Africa) the end of slavery and the return of removed slaves to Africa.

The images pretty much speak for themselves. Though it should be pointed out that this engraving depicts about 480 slaves packed into the modified hold of the Brooke; in reality the Brooke carried between 500 and 650 slaves to America (meaning the conditions were even more crowded than depicted here), losing on average about 125 people to the insufferable and depraved conditions (dysentery, heat, malnutrition, lack of water, scurvy and so on).

Human Powered Machines--Bockler's Theatrum Novum, 1661

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post #83

This post started with this image from Georg Andreas Bockler Theatrum Machinarum Novum (published by Paulus Fuersen and printed by Christoff Gerhard in Nurenberg in 1661) showing to what our eyes in 2008 see as an extraordinary device to power a fan for a dining table. The gears running what seems to be an escapement-like (clock) device are enormous, and the weight for the weight-driven power source must have been considerable. The result of all of this is that the housing for machine powering the fan necessitate lowering the ceiling in the dining chamber to less than five feet (as there is just enough headroom to get into and out of seat, with the bulk of the cubic space of the room dedicated to the cooling device, which ran like a pendulum, and which also demanded what looks to be like a 10-foot x 1 foot long opening in the ceiling. But if it was a hot humid day in Nurnberg in the summer of 1666, then that fan would feel pretty bloody good to you, as there would have been nothing like it in the city (save for a servant fanning you from not such a discrete distance).

 Bockler as it turns out was an extraordinary talent and very gifted thinker and engineer, designing all manner of instruments and machines over a wide range of fields. His principle interest though was hydraulics, as exhibited in his very popular Architectura Curiosa Nova (1664), which was a practical application of his knowledge of hydrodynamics and mechanics (in general), showing how to construct fountains for the garden and for public city life.

Looking deeper into the beautifully illustrated Theatrum Machinarum though I was struck by how many of these big machines were powered by humans. And as it turns out Bockler was responding with smaller, more elegant human-power designs because of a problem in supply for the other power sources. The problem with running a furnace to power these machines was the fuel—wood and coal had become problematic on the continent and in Britain in the mid-17^th century. The trees that would’ve supplied the wood for the furnaces were disappearing with the rapidly depleted forests. Coal was even a problem with the relatively shallow veins of the deposit giving out. In the meantime of the stagnant power supplies Bockler offered his readers (and parishioners) designs for machines that if all else failed could be powered by humans. Humans on treadmills, humans turning lathes, and so on.

I’ve included this last part for a horse-driven machine because of the very small window of exposure for the horse to the wheel it would turn. It looks as though it was elegant but I haven’t much of an idea if horses could get used to moving their hind legs without moving their front legs.

You can see the entire Theatrum courtesy of Cornell University right HERE.

 

 

The Big Cycle—the Beginning and the End of the World and the Weight of All Things, Depicted 1445-1550.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #82

(1)  The End

I came to this post through the interest in an image that shows life as we know it in its very last teetering stage, at the crystalline moment just before the bullet hits the bone, just before the wave breaks, just before the shade swallows the light.  The image is incredible, seemingly far beyond the reach of the 15th century, far above its naïve absolutism, showing a tower of water, the oceans risen from their depths and towering over the mountains, just before the cascade and inundation begins.  It is by Antoine Vérard  and was published in 1493/4 in André Bocard’s (b. 1453)   L'Art de bien vivre et de bien mourir .  Those little poking-out bits are indeed fish, the sign of life and the aymbol for Christ in that unimaginable column of Earth-killing water, one of the Christian indicators that the Judgment Day was near.  Actually I think that we’ve moved far beyond Judgment at this point, and that the print shows the watery effectuator of the warnings and promises heaped down on the readers of Revelations and Apocalypse, among other things. 

(2)  The Beginning

I love this painting by Bosch showing the creation of the universe , mainly because we associate the hyper-imaginative old man (Bosch, not God) with dripping and dire images of the other end of the space time continuum.  This view of the cosmos is quiet and benign—Bosch to me seldom *waits* for things to happen, as in this painting, which seems all about anticipation and possibility.  The canvas is empty, quite unlike the very full, kinetic, no-time-for-reflective-action images that we usually associate with this painter.

(3) The Beginning of the Beginning and the Beginning of the End.

The Bible is a relatively long book, but the space between creation and the (quick?) ultra-final desiccation of Paradise happens in such short word-distance from one another that you can barely get comfortable in your chair before the race to the end begins.  (My wife Patti Digh says that this action is so quick because we need forward action in the telling of the story—we need the wolf to make Little Red Riding Hood more interesting.) 
The painting, Creation of the World and Expulsion from Paradise, is by Giovanni di Paolo, and was completed in 1445.
     
The expulsion part was particularly gloomy for all non-human things because, as I am told, it is from this point (day?) forward that animals no longer live in harmony with one another, and that their vast majority is made to eat each other, consuming each other for energy sources, in a vast, incredible orgy of killing and death.  That’s quite a price to pay for human insouciance.  It seems to me that if you added up the weight of everything on earth that killed other living things for energy versus the weight of everything else gaining energy from the sun or chemically or whatever, that the later would compose only a fraction of the killers’ weight.  (As Gus McRae says in Lonesome Dove,”the Earth is just one big boneyard”. 

One interesting part of this painting is di Paolo’s depiction of the nine spheres of creation, which he depicts in eight.  (The earth at center, followed by the elements   water, air, and fire, then the moon and planets, then the fixed stars with signs of the zodiac, the primum mobile and finally the undefined Empyrean heaven, the place where God and all of its components sit.  Perhaps di Apolo felt that he could not contain the Empyrean, and so left it unbounded.

(4) The Cycle of Cosmic Life

This interesting woodcut by Antoine Verard in his French Bible of 1517 shows Adam and Eve in the Garden in the opening moments of Genesis, its incubating sphere seemingly at the root of a great tree, which, for all  of its great beauty, seems backwards. Perhaps the message would be different if you put the Garden at the top of the tree, the tree of life; having the garden and its quick demise (where did the garden “go”, anyway?) seems to symbolize death at the root of all that followed the expulsion, as great trees all wind up lichen-bait at some point.

(5)  The Cycle of Life on Earth

This wonderful woodcut from Jean de la Garde's  The Heart of Philosophy (1504)—an amalgam and witches brew of hermetic and astrological texts and conjectures—and is perhaps the most brilliant of the sixty-two woodcut illustrations in the wide-ranging, over-reaching book.  The complex message here shows the influences of the earth and cosmos on the life of humans, the astrological signs and symbols of the seasons and etc. all bearing down very hard on the flower in the lap of the woman at the center of it all. It just seems so odd that there should be so much forebearance and such an extraordinary concentration of effort to be brought to bear against a solitary womb.  With all of that reigning down on us, I wonder how it is that we are expected to breathe?

Digital “Computers” 1450-1750: Memory and Calculating on the Fingers and Hands

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #81
   
These lovely images weren’t intended to show people living in the Renaissance and Baroque eras how to actually record data on their hands—they were intended rather as templates to show how they could use their fingers and hands for calculating and as memory devices.  Much like Frances Yates has shown us so beautifully in The Art of Memory and how info and data was stored in imagined and compartmented palaces in the mind (relying upon images), the hands were also used as a theatre of memory in addition to extended calculation. 

These mnemonic devices were necessary—especially during the Renaissance—because of the general lack of and access to affordable vellums or paper and writing instruments.  Having notebooks filled with memoir or history o calculation was generally not something that was happening for even the not-wealthy but not struggling class.  These mental images were used widely in the areas of religion, palmistry, astrology mathematics, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, music, and other such fields. 

The first image (from a German manuscript) of the hand-theatre was found and deciphered by Claire Richter Sherman (Folger Shakespeare Theatre) and is religious in nature, an intentional piece of memory for the devoted and for devotions.  The needs of religion were splayed out as the hand was opened and fingers flexed, and working from thumb to pinkie, from finger tip and joint—“do God’s will, examine  your conscience, repent, confess”, and so on, and above all be content with your lowly penitente stature.  If there were 28 of these admonitions or reminders at different points of the hand and you memorized them all, it would be a much simpler time to recall and keep them in order if you merely had to touch a part of your hand where that memory should be to invoke what it was you were supposed to do.  Therefore you could theoretically cast about with your creator with your hands in your pockets—if you had pockets. 

The next two images (including the enlargement of the hand section) are from a work from 1587 entitled Musique and are attributed to John Cousin the Younger (1522-1597).
The basic premise for this device—it seems to me—was to be able to order the different chords of 20 different instruments. 

Another musical hand mnemonic was the Guidonian hand, a survivor of Medieval times, and possibly named after Guido of Arezzo (a musical theorist), and was an aid to singers learning to sight sing.   

The entry for the Guidonian hand in Wiki explains it use rather well:  “The idea of the Guidonian hand is that each portion of the hand represents a specific note within the hexachord system, which spans nearly three octaves from "Γ ut" (that is, "Gamma ut") (the contraction of which is "gamut", which can refer to the entire span) to "E la" (in other words, from the G at the bottom of the modern bass clef to the E at the top of the treble clef). In teaching, an instructor would indicate a series of notes by pointing to them on their hand, and the students would sing them. This is similar to the system of hand signals sometimes used in conjunction with solfege…”

The final two examples come from Jakob Leupold’s  (1674-1727) Theatrum Machinarum (1724)—this was a complex work involving nine sections and addressed the theoretical  aspirations of engineering (load, flexure, that sort) and its applications to its daily practitioners.  In one section of the book he sought to explain the connections (and correlations) of hand motion and symbolism to the origins of the number systems, carrying it out further still into body language, so that two people conversant in these symbols could talk and bargain between themselves in economic/body terms.  Barbara Maria Stafford, in her Artful Science, Enlightenment,

Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (1994) points out the long history of this tradition, and that it reached far back into misty time:  Leupold knew that Appian, the Venerable Bede, and Aventinus had been fascinated by manuloquio, or natural language with the hands.  He thus linked counting to a global….medium of prearranged gestures…”

Dismantling Reality--Euclid, Mondrian, Malevich, Lobachevsky and the Appearance and Disappearance of Form Through Geometry.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post #80

Today’s post comes via my wife Patti’s phoney baloney sandwich for our four-year-old Tessie.  It was a tight fit of geometric pieces made to cover slim pieces of bread that would fit into her bento boxes.  The form was lovely!  And—on the heels of yesterday’s post—it reminded me of the remarkable qualities of geometry, and the role it has played in the creation of the known and visible parameters of our world(s). Geometry has also played a very visible role in removing those parameters, for as much as the art has forced regularity in our thought, it has played just as large a role in challenging that structure.  What Euclid has given, Lobachevsky has both taken away (and added to). (Nikolai Lobachevsky [1792-1867] and Janos Boylai [1802-1860] each independently developed non-Euclidean geometries:  that is, they replaced Euclid's parallel postulate with the postulate that there is more than one parallel line through any given point, saying that the foundational fifth postulate of Euclid was not true.)

Take for example an image and idea from yesterday’s post regarding the engineer and art-geometer Oliver Byrne (who replaced much of the text of Euclid’s first six books by using an odd index of color) and Piet Mondrian.   The approach (as noted by Augustus de Morgan among others) is gorgeous but hokum—the effect though is pretty and it does define the areas of the geometric solids that I’d like to use here.  The approach that Byrne tried to develop and simplify Euclid for more general readers was to employ a peculiar art form of geometry to help classify the structure of the world—ordering the universe, and vice versa.

Piet Mondrian, who was one of the earliest artists to practice the new, revolutionary form of non-representational art—that is, producing art with no recognizable subject matter, no humans, or landscape or animals or bugs or whatever—uses very similar geometrical solids to reclassify all of existence into sensations and color forms.  Mondrian is more correctly classified as a constructivist, or cubist, and he uses the same tools to re-identify nature as Euclid developed to help classify the structure of the world.  This is his “Composition with red, Yellow and Blue” which was painted in 1930, a full eighteen years after Kandinsky created the first painting in this field. But there were other early pioneers in the non-representation field who exhibited a more mathematical aesthetic in liberating the object than we see in the first works than the great Kandinsky.  Umberto Boccioni (1912), Frank Kupka (1913), Olga Rozanova (1913), Liubov Popova (1914), Felix del Marle (1914) come quickly to mind,

though none leap to consciousness as quickly as Kasimir Malevich.  Malevich begins this work before 1910, and by 1913 he has produced such works as “samovar” in which the (samovar) object is dissected and moved to different places in the visual field on the back of geometrical objects.  But it is in 1915 that we are introduced to his extraordinary “Black and red Square”, where we find that he has removed all representation of objects—not only that, he has removed almost all of the forms, period.

On the other hand there is certainly a very long history of artistic adventures which have no recognizable subject, though the artists in these cases I am relatively certain about were not trying to replace the known stuff of our world with the not-yet-known.  Geometrical artistic expression at its base has been seen in mazes, labyrinths and mosaics for thousands of years.  I guess you could even make a case for architecture fulfilling this role as well it the buildings were taken as art forms.  But I’m interested here mostly with the artist intentionally choosing to obscure the known subject.

This leads to the troublesome forms of the French architect Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, 1887 –1965).  Leafing through his The Radiant City (Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization, 1933) is a confusing affair.  As much as the man wants to rectify and save the world (his words, salve me fons pietatis) with his geometrical cities, replacing the mess of disorderly human civilization, his results, while giving a crispy clean order, are formidably lifeless (to me, at least), the organic and messy bits of human life de-fractured and placed in 90-degree containers.  Le Corbu complains about the American successes, there in 1930 or so, saying that the U.S. is a monument of achievement but for achieving the wrong things.  A little later in 1932 and 1933 however he does take time to make positive comments about the interesting experiments going in Fascist/Mussolini Italy and Stalin’s Soviet Union…it was common I know for thinking people to have such harmonious thoughts about these regimes, but there were plenty of others who kew and wrote about what was

really happening in those places, and Le Corbu was not one of them.)  The so-called positive elements of American advancements that Corbu took away with him back to France-- Taylorist and Fordist (Henry was a vehement anti Semite and Nazi sympathizer)  strategies adopted from American models to reorganize society—I think come vividly alive in his geometrical replacement of human habitation—call me old fashioned, but I just don’t like it.  I also don’t like it because it smacks so much of his disgust of capitalism (which he talks about as consumerism) and of his own right-wing political beliefs.  Le Corbusier followed these thoughts into the camps of philosophies like  the right-wing syndicalism of the French politician Hubert Lagardelle.  These also eased him into a position with the traitorous Vichy government during the Nazi occupation of France during WWII—he did cut ties with it in 1942, though only after the architectural plans he had developed for various projects were rejected.
 

[Another leading 20th century architect, Philip Johnson, had his own problems with admiration of fascist ideas, though the amoral and whorish Johnson would’ve have seen these ideas as “problematic” only insofar as they would keep them from working.  He was a decade-long Nazi sympathizer, and among many other things actually followed the Nazis as they stormed their way through Poland—something Johnson described as a (positively) “stirring” experience. He was in a separate class from the kinda-stupid Charles Lindbergh and the empty-suited-but-still-dangerous Prince Harry as Fascist trumpeters.  He was more on the level of detestable fascist intellectuals like Martin Heidegger and Ezra Pound. He was awful.]

It just so happens that two of the most towering names in 20th century architecture were embroidered into the fabric of Fascism, and I think that these ideas burn their way directly through the geometrical imagination of Le Corbusier. His brand of geometries lead us towards the human cog-and-wheel, tight-box, suffocating proclivities of his right-wing extremism, and is perhaps the worst sort of illustration for the use of that beautiful branch of mathematics

Just for the sake of clarity I've included this photo of Henry Ford becoming the third recipient of the Nazi Grand Cross of the German Eagle,  presented by Karl Kapp, German consul-general of Cleveland (left), and Fritz Hailer, German consul of Detroit (right). The other two recipients were Benito Mussolini and Count Ciano.

 
 

Science and Art; True Science or Science Fiction? #1: Tinguely, Oliver Byrne, Vredeman de Vries and the Theatrophone

JF Ptak Science Books   LLC  Post #79

There are encyclopedias to be written on the not-obvious in the history of science, dictionaries of "what is it", codexes of "is that real?", handbooks to distinguish things that look like scientific apparatus but are actually works of art, and vice versa. This is my first installment looking at the occasionally squishy visual line that distinguishes images that are "true" scientific creations from those that are not. 

Case #1.  FALSE 
Our first example comes from Jean Tinguely (1925 – 1991)  a Swiss painter and sculptor, best known for his Dadaist kinetic sculpture, officially known as metamechanics. This photo shows Tinguely in the midst of trying to make his self destructing sculpture, Homage to New York (1960), self destruct. His collection of wheels and cogs and connected motors and techno bric-a-brac, which in their way stood for the embarrassment of overproduction and  self-satisfaction with material goods, embarassingly failed to self destruct during its unveiling at MOMA.

Case #2. TRUE.
Oliver Byrne's semi-insane but gorgeous interpretive work of the first six books of Euclid  published by William Pickering in London, is more than problematic--seen but some as "unusual" Byrne's color coded effort has been ripped apart by Augustus de Morgan (in is Budget of Paradoxes) as being terrible.  Byrne's use of color in place of letters in defining and explaining the propositions just doesn't work--it is a great, perhaps the great, example of something that is visually pleasing, beautifully rendered, and sort of functionless.


Case #3. TRUE
This is the distributing board of the central London "theatrophone", a telephone relay device that "broadcast" theatrical and symphonic productions to telephone subscribers.  The idea is base on installations of this device during the International exposition in Paris in 1881.  The article appears in Scientific American, Supplement No. 1002, March 16, 1895.  The second image is the switchboard in the central office of the Theatrophone Company.
   






CAse #4.  TRUE
Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527 – c. 1607),a Dutch Renaissance architect and engineer, produced a superb book on perspective in 1604, from which this image was selected.  Of course we manipulated it a little in p-shop, dumping it into mosaic, cheating a little, but, well, there you have it. Vredeman's production was
luscious and smart, and was highly utilized and prized for hundreds of years as a
useful tool in determining perspective.  It's a mysterious image, bizarre, even--why, for example did the humble artist use a prone/dead/injured human there on t he floor when he could’ve selected something more benign? The odd figure entering the room through the secret door adds to the general threatening atmosphere of this interesting image.  Base line though--it is undeniably an excellent instructional on drawing with perspective.

   

On a Wing and a Prayer--Birds and Human Flight: de Bergerac, Leonardo & Co.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC    Post 78
For thousands of years the most popular fuel of the common idea for humans to achieve flight was through the application of bird flight mechanics.  (The other common vehicle employed balloons of one sort or another—I’ll look at that later.)

Before the age of the actual application of these principles there were long sustained bird-like semi-humanoid-godlike-birdforms throughout mythology. 
Kings and overarching rulers living and imagined were seen to perform bird-supported and flighted adventures; the Old Testament is populated by winged seraphim and cherubin; Egyptian gods and goddesses were depicted with long, graceful vulture-like wings; in ca. 160 ACE Lucian of Samosata wrote one of the earliest accounts of space flight with Icaromenippus, who reached ultra-great heights with a device employing eagle and vulture wings, using them in an attack upon Heaven;  a Chinese emperor of the Han dynasty reputedly kept an eye on his empire from a flying chariot; the famous Bellerophon took flight on Pagasus (the horse with bird-like wings, and confusing my point some) to spear the Chimera.  Closer to the point is the flight of Daedalus and his waxy birdwings, as well as Thidireks (from a Germanic myth) who uses a suit of artificial feathers to fly; but much closer to the point of this post was the Persian king Keykavus--he oversaw his lands from the comfort of his throne, which was transported by four apparently very muscular eagles.

Among the many things that Leonardo (or Leonardo da Vinci but almost never da Vinci as in Mr. Dan Brown) was working on as he was semi-creating the Renaissance was a system of solo flight for man.  His earliest system was based on a large winged device in which a person would be prone, flapping flexible wings via the use of a pulley system, looking quite birdlike.  Later on Leonardo would develop multi-winged systems, some of which would be quite large and requiring the operator to be upright, making the whole look more like a helicopter than a man-filled bird.
 

Perhaps the greatest visionary of techno-anthropormorphic human flight was Cyrano de Bergaerac.  Before he was the object of Edmund Rostand’s 1897 play, de Bergerac was a massively creative author, producing, among other things, the book Histoire des Etats et Empires de la Lune (History of the States and Empires of the Moon, published posthumously in 1657), followed by Histoire des Etats et Empires du Soleil (History of the States and Empires of the Sun, again, published further and deeper into his life’s surrender, 1662), both eventually collected as L'Autre Monde (Other Worlds).  Bergerac introduces us, the humble reader, to one of the most important concepts in the history of literature--namely that we humans were not only not alone in the universe, but that we were not even the dominant culture, and indeed we were actually hated by some of the other more advanced species. 

Now that is some good thinking.

In a very complicated series of adventures the protagonists are brought to the moon and to the other side of the sun and such by being flown in a basket attached to the neck of a giant bird.  (In one part of the escapade, Cyrano takes us to the moon, which is a paradise, where the adventurer is captured and imprisoned by the intelligent indigenous folks, and from which he escapes by clinging to a soul being removed by the devil. (!))

Another spectacular visonary was Francis Godwin, who brought us about the first book on interplanetary space travel with his The Man in the Moone; or, A Discourse of a Voyage Thither; by F.G., B. of H.; to which is added Nuncius inanimatus, written in Latin by the same author, and now Englished by a person of worth (London, 1657).  Here we encounter the tales of y Domingo Gonsales, who Godwin gets to teh moon on a device powered by captured birds, becoming also one of the earliest literary proponents of the plurality of world's thesis.

A quick look at the chronology of imaginary flight shows that there are lots of other attempts at flight—but none that I can identify quickly that use birds to lift and carry its cargo to the sun. 

Fast forward to the 19th century though and we come into the veritable heyday of anthropomorphic flight attempts.  Here we find very notable attempts by George Cayley—who was probably the first person to truly understand the dynamics and physics of flight http://tinyurl.com/3pw22g who in 1796 creates his first aerial device—a model helicopter with contra-rotating propellers reminiscent of the Leonardo device. 

Victor Tatin’s ornithopter of 1875 actually was a s=much more sound “read” than it looked.  He had a very advanced idea of the mechanics of flight, understanding the conditions, and physics, and the resistance of the air, and so on, but just couldn’t translate this understanding into a realistic design.  This is especially true when he hit upon one of the key ingredients to the Wright success—a good, powerful but very lightweight engine.  This was pretty big news, though Tatin would up a suicide. 

And speaking of deadly ideas, the exceptional Otto Lilienthal would wind up a victim of his thinking, too, though his end came in practical applications (or impracticable, I guess) rather t

han unrealized theoretical understanding.  Lilienthal was one of the most important figures in the development of flight in the nineteenth century, making the first heavier than air gliding flights in what looked quite a bit like bird wings.  (Wilbur wright said of him; “Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. ... It is true that attempts at gliding had been made hundreds of years before him, and that in the nineteenth century, Cayley, Spencer, Wenham, Mouillard, and many others were reported to have made feeble attempts to glide, but their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted. ” )  He would die in 1896 in a gliding accident, falling to a crumpled death. 

This was also the fate of Percy Pilcher, a great English aviator, who was also quite close to developing a powered heavier than aircraft, but was killed in 1899 before having a chance to test the craft.

Just a reminder here that this is just a short essay on the history of flight using birds or bird-like design, and not an overall history.   

Note:  The title of this post comes from the World War II (late 1942) patriotic song, with words by Harold Adamson and music by Jimmy McHugh. It tells the tale of a plane struggling home after a bombing raid:

Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer
What a show, what a fight
Boys, we really hit our target for tonight
How we sing as we limp through the air
Look below, there’s our field over there
Though there’s one motor gone
We can still carry on
Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer.

 

Tomorrow Department #1—Wide, Wide Cars in 1940

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #77

Chrysler Motors was really on a hayride when their New Worlds in Engineering (1941) booklet hit the presses in 1940. From about 1930 to 1940 they produced about 8 million automobiles—more than a million in 1939 alone. 

Their cars got bigger, heavier, and of course, wider--on a course with the rest of the American automobile industry to secure their shiney spot in the Manifest Destiny of Wide. This ultra-wide model (above) was a bit of a peek into what the future might hold for the automotive company—the license plate says “1948”, and the car is definitely, defiantly, prodigiously, wide.  Those three heads peeping up above the dash really are sitting in a front seat front seat that looks as though it still held room for one more.  The razor-cheeked platinum blonde behind the wheel look as though her pencil fingers were just able to wrap around what looks to be a gigantic steering wheel.  –the two women actually look like they have the situation under control, while the eyebrow-arched male passenger looks to have something on his mind.  Perhaps his 1948-future self was thinking about the sweepingly sleek “Chrysler Royale”, which is not only wide but also very long, though it unfortunately has not dated license plate out front to give him any hope of when he might be able to expect to see this futurmobile.

In this picture (below) we get another glimpse of the wide future over the shoulder of a Chrysler designer.  Still another look-at-wide is this fellow in the purple smock from the art and design department who was molding new instrument display panels in clay—they seem long enough for this man to lay out in fron of and still have plenty of room left over.

It seems to me that all of these cars are wider than the widest of the wide production vehicles, including the unstoppably wide North African dune vehicle, the Unimog 5000, which measured in at 247 cm for its 2002 model. 

I’m not sure where the roads were that these wide cars were going to travel on—but since they were future cars I guess they were all going just one way, so two-way streets could become one-ways, double-wide...

[“Tomorrow department” is taken from the Chrysler Corp’s  “Chrysler Junior Craftsmen” department for the 11-16 year old sons of Chrysler employees, and which was nicknamed the “Tomorrow Department”. ]

18th Century Calculator for the Blind--Nicholas Saunderson, Mathematician

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post #76
Nicholas Saunderson (1682-1739)  was an extraordinary mathematical talent—he was also blind (from about the age of one), and invented, principally for his own uses, what I think is the first mathematical calculator designed specifically for the use of the blind.  He was supremely gifted and creative, and rose to become the fourth Lucasian professor at Cambridge, succeeding the expelled William Whiston, who had in turn succeeded Isaac Newton—Saunderson also held the post for one of the longest periods of time, 1711-1739.  HE was friend and associate to Newton, Whiston, Roger Cotes, Halley, De Moivre and others during a particularly rich intellectual period in the history of physics and the maths. 


His calculator was smart and simple, based on a cribbage-board –like device, that was able to perform arithmetical and algebraic functions—it consisted of nine rows and was worked with two pins, the positioning of the pins on the engraved board telling the user their value. (There was another calculator for the blind constructed by Meyer (below, left)  using a sort of reverse principle to the Saunderson model where it was the shape and placement (leaning or not, for example) of the pegs in the hole that annotated value rather than their placement on the board.

The Saunderson computer was described in his The Elements of Algebra…, published at Cambridge in the first edition just after the author’s death, in 1740.  The device was described in the book by John Colson (who succeeded Saunderson to the Lucasian chair), who commented that it was via the use of the device that
Saunderson could compose his treatise on algebra. (At right is another Saunderson-based calculator allowing for the construction and study of geometrical figures).  

Great Cases of Understatement in Scientific Discoveries—Lister, Bell, the Wrights and Philo Farnsworth.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #75

Some of the fundamental discoveries and their announcements in the history of science have come with great fanfare—and some have come with barely a notice.  Granted their impact would not be felt for some time to come, but, still, there are some fabulous champions of understatement.

Joseph Lister (1827-1912) came quite close in 1871 to the discovery of penicillin—as had Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), Jules Francois Joubert (1834-1910) and William Roberts (1830-1899)—but his research in this area was abandoned when he wasn’t able to identify the agent in the mold he found in urine which inhibited further growth of bacteria; he then proceeded with  his discoveries in the antiseptic procedure in the operating room (sanitizing the instrument and the surgeons) instead  Lister’s great work seems exceptionally simple and obvious to us here in the present, but it wasn’t back then, which is why he was the first to do it, saving the lives of thousands of people by increasing their chances of serving surgery by reducing the chances of infection (caused by the surgical procedure itself).  Yet his initial announcements, couched in reflective Victorian drama less scientific prose, never really hinted at the greatness which lurked just below the surface of his announcement, "Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery" in Volume 90, Issue 2299 of The Lancet published on 21 September 1867.  It actually took a number of years for physicians to react positively to Lister’s phenomenal discovery, called by Dr. Henry Morris, ‘probably second only to Pasteur’s contribution to the saving of human lives’.


One of the earliest mass popular announcements of Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone is in The Popular Science Monthly for February 1877—though you’d be a little hard pressed to find it off-hand in this 130pp issue.  Following twelve articles (including George Beard on “The Physiology of Mind Reading” and Chamberlain’s “Nature and Life in Lapland”), and following seven pages of literary notices, and following another five pages of “Popular Miscellany”, one may find the slight reference to the telephone.  (Pictured here is the two-page spread in which the Bell story is announced—don’t be careless, or you’ll miss it.)

The article, or notice, is called “Talking by Telegraph”, and recalls the Sunday of 26 November in 1876 when Bell’s invention is first revealed, using parenthesis (“telephone”) when referring to the instrument.  The story is less than 200 words long and is tucked away in almost total obscurity.  There is no mention of its possible use or importance. 

Such was also the case with the announcement of the Wright Brothers’ first successful powered flight in 1903.  The announcement in Scientific American was far less than auspicious, given two paragraphs almost at the end of the weekly issue in the automotive and aviation section.  Actually their earlier successes in unpowered gliding flight in 1901 were treated with similar nonchalance in the Scientific American as well as other popular magazines (of LIFE-like stature in those times), including a fleeting reference in the Illustrated London News and the Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig).  It took almost no time at all following the Scientific American publication for the rest of the thinking world to react with proper enthusiasm to their spectacular accomplishment. 

Our last example here is that of Philo T. Farnsworth (1906-1971), inventor of the first all-electronic television, owner of a spectacularly geeky first name, and one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Americans of the 20th century

Perhaps some of the downplay of Farnsworth’s annoncuement and achievement was diluted by the longish list of precursors to his invention—the electro-mechanical television for example was the object of the work of Alexander Bain, Paul Nipkow, Aleksandr Stoletov, Karl Ferdinand Braun, Boris Rosing, Herbert E. Ives, and John Logie Baird, while even the electronic television was nearly completed by Boris Rosing, Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, Kalman Tihanyi, Vladimir Zworykin and Kenjiro Takayanagi.  Nevertheless the achievement of the 23-year old boy wonder still found an enormous pinnacle of understatement, all things being equal.  In the article by Fasrnsworth and Harry R. Lubke, “Transmission of Television Images”, in Radio, December 1929, the authors describe their breakthroughs, particularly with what they called their “image dissector”, which differentiated them from the major aspects of the Zworykin invention.   With photographs of the invention as well as the successful televised transmission, the authors go on to say that the transmission of moving pictures “could well be considered as having entertainment value”.  Indeed.  There was some patent litigation ahead, particularly involving Zworykin and RCA, but by 1935 Farnsworth prevailed, though somehow not economically.