Ptak Science Books

Q: How Long Did the Classic Cowboy Age Last? A: Not very.

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1706

The Cowboy West, from Ned Buntline to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett

I imagine that there have been significantly more people who have played cowboys in literature, on radio, in movies, on the stage and on television than ever cowboyed in the West. This doesn’t include children who have played at “Cowboys and Indians” over the past 150 years. The time of the classic cowboy-in-all-his-glory was short—maybe two generation. Probably less.  And there weren't that many people to fill in those positions in that short period of time. 

Certainly there are cowboys to this day, but the cowboy of our mind’s eye—that iconic cowboy of the expanding, post-Manifest Destiny West—was a victim of the great rush to land privatization in the 1880s-1890s: barbed wire and other fences took the cowboy's place. By 1895 there were more cowboys riding fences than herding cattle. As Faulkner wrote on the "last individual" in The Fable (page 204), “the cowboy was exterminated from the earth by a tide of men with wire-stretchers and pockets full of staples…”  Of course Faulkner also saw the cowboy set among horse dung and "oxidizing cans" of sardines and tomatoes--a gemeinschaft/gesellschaft thing.

There are only 40 or 50 years that separate cowboys Texas Jack and Ned Buntline from the Chandler/Marlowe and Hammett/Spade modern detective West of San Francisco and Los Angeels, which is an extraordinary thing.  There weren't cowboys stretching back forty years before Texas Jack, and there weren't forty years that they stretched into the future from him, either.  The distance in time that the cowboy existed, all things considered, was short--from the Reconstruction free-roaming Texas cattle of 1866 to the appearance of barbed wire in the early 1870's to the refrigerated railroad car of just about the same time to the endless farming non-frontier of the 1890's, the cowboy enjoyed probably one full decade of not being molested by the present; the future caught up with them in  a quick hurry. 

Nutmeg and the Roundabout Creation of New York City

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1704

This may be the earliest image of "New York" as it was--that is "New York" instead of "New Amsterdam".  From what looks like an extraordinarily bad trade (with 350-year-long hindsight), the Dutch and the English came to terms at the end of the second Dutch-English War (1665-1667)  one result of which traded the small island of Run in the Banda Islands for another small (but not nearly so small as Run) island in North America:  Manhattan.

Manhattan didn't have one thing that Run and the Bandas had, though, and that one thing was enormously valuable--nutmeg trees.  From the nutmeg tree came nutmeg and mace; nutmeg was a spice and a supposed medicinal, and traded for more than the price of gold, allowing its producers a phenomenal return on their investment.

The Bandas were in a remote place removed from remote places in Indonesia.  In the island group--which rose from great depths of the ocean--the total land mass was about 180 km^2. Not much, except if they were the only places on Earth producing a commodity in sensational demand. The Dutch kept control of the islands for a long time, and kept their trade in the spices an abject money-maker.  They secured their uncontested control of the island group at the end of that second Anglo-Dutch War with the Treaty of Breda, one section of which had the Brits returning Run to the Dutch in exchange for Manhattan, which was at the time still occupied by the Duke of York, who was the brother of Charles II and who would become James II.  And thus the island became "New York".

Due to various reasons--not the least of which was the Dutch murder and export of the un-murdered indigenous population of the Bandas, who were the people who actually best knew how to care and administer the nutmeg trees--the great trade in the spices continued with diminishing effect in the Napoleonic Wars, an unpretty story of much bloodshed and enslavement.

{Image: "Fort Hollandois de l'Ile de Banda. - Hollands Fort op t' Eiland Banda."Original engraving  by J.V. Schley and printed aorund 1750 (39.5x25 cm) for  Antoine Prévost's Histoire générale des Voyages published in Paris between 1746 and 1770.  The name of the structure was actually Fort Nassau.  The original engraving is available from our blog bookstore, here.]

 

 

 

Tech-Quiz 6: A Square Peg in a Round Hole?

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Or is it a round hole fitted around a square peg?  And what is it that is patentable about what follows?

Answer in "continue reading", below:

On Teaching the Concept of What a Number "Is"--1929 vs. 2012

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

At first glance this math teaching tool looks a little on the obvious/antique/useless side, but I think that there are some good points to it in helping small children understand the concept of what a number "is" and relating the processes of addition and subtraction to the relationship of "numbers" to "things".

And as the inventor points out

and so on...

This certainly seems more beneficial and utilizable than the current practice in my daughter's third grade class, where a simple subtraction problem is turned into a double addition problem employing a number line, all in the name of teaching the children the concept of "number" and doing away with algorithms.  I think that by the third grade, the concept of "number" has been established, though the board of edu-selection might be trying  to re-visit a lost point of development somehow.

So with my daughter's class,take  the problem 456-345=    ______

This is made intoan addition problem,  345+ ____= 456.

The addition problem is turned into a number line, with 345 on the left far end and 456 on the right. 

The children are told to add the requisite bits to 345 to get to a "zero unit" for each place value, and then add those for the solution to the problem. 

So:  345+5= 350, 350+50=400; 400=50=450; 450+6+456.  Add the 5+50+50+6= 111.

In this confusion a stab at the heart of understanding the concept of "number" has beenb made. 

A step back from this would be a wise move to make.

 

Tech-Quiz #5--Not a "What is It?", but "Who Done It?"

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This was a major piece of early thinking on spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping--butter for the bread (or bread for the butter?) of wireless communication--with the piano roll tapes replaced by electronics. The idea didn't go anywhere in 1942--it did, however, go far, beginning in the late 1950's. The major name listed on the patent report is a major name, but not in this form, and not in this area--some might find it very surprising to know the more popular version of the inventor's identity, and the industry in which the inventor worked.

 

H.K. Markey and G. Anthiel produced this:

Hint: the "H." stood for

Answer, in continued reading, below:

Tech-Quiz #4--the Sublime Mundane

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This forms the absolute end of something, the "tip" of it, one of two, at the either end of slender cord. Even for this there must be a patent--and there were, evidently, many of them.  This is just one, from 1922

Answer in the continued reading section, below:

Drowning in Numbers--Arithmetical Harvesting by Monroe and Texas Instruments

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1704

The Monroe calculator must have seemed the same sort of inspired salvation to the 1930's generation as the hand-held Texas Instruments calculator (with paper feed!) that I saw displayed in a glass-domed pedestal at Barnes and Noble in Manhattan in 1973.  Small, compact, and with fantastic calculatign capacity--and expensive.  It was in a very real sense a glimpse into the future.  For the general, garden-variety Monroe, it certainly offered its users a much smaller, tidier machine than some of the brutes of the decade or two preceding it--make no mistake, there were some big bruising accounting Monroes that were truck busters.

But the Monroes that appeared in these ads from LIFE magazine in the late 1930's were certainly populist, and easily transportable.  And they cost about as much (with some smoke/mirrors adjusting for inflation and etc) in 1937 as the $450 TI  cost in 1973. (The TI machine was produced just seven years or so after its first hand-held was introduced--I'm unsure of the 450 price tag, though I think it about correct.  The TI SR-50 without a paper trail cost about $150 in 1974.)

Monroe is an old company (begun in 1912) company that produced hand-cranked and electromechanical calculating devices.  The Monroe salesman's handbook that I have here from 1929 shows versions of their machine that were lightweight and versatile (at 38 pounds) to behemoths for insurance companies that were truck-haulable.  Monroe became part of Litton before reappearing again on its own, trying to compete in the hand-held market with its own electronic display calculator--a device that cost $269 in 1972.  Monroe was basically "done" by the 1960's.

I think that for most people Texas Instruments is produced hand-held calculating devices--it is of course a vast concern, with a long history that gets catapulted during WWII when the formerly geology-based company gets involved in military electronics.  Fast forward, TI created FLIR and MERA, laser-guided control systems for PGMs (laser-guided bombs/precision-guided munitions), launch and leave glide missiles, and so on. IT was also involved in the earliest work in microminiaturization, producing (by Gordon Teal) the first commercial silicon transistor (1954) and the first integrated circuit (by Jack Kilby) in 1958. And so on.  Its a big, old company.

And as much as each company was offering a similar god-send to their generationally-distanced mathematician/number cruncher, TI simply didn't have ads like Monroe.  And I've always iked to see numbers-on-the-move.

Numbers in Dreams

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1703

Thinking big thoughts in dreams is generally not a common thing, as anyone who has read their own semi-conscious half-awake memory notes of a dream-based inspiration could attest.  But it does happen: 

Paul  McCartney¹ dreamed the song Yesterday, Gandhi dreamed the source of non-violent resistance, Elias Howe  dreamed of the construction of the first sewing machine, and Mary Shelley the creation of her novel Frankenstein... For good or for ill, William Blake was evidently deeply influenced by his own dreams; on the other hand, Rene Magritte was deeply influenced by dreams but didn’t use any of his own for his paintings.  Otto Loewi turned an old problem into not one in a dream, finding a solution to the prickish problem of whether nerve impulses were chemical or electrical (and resulting in the Nobel for medicine in 1935); the fabulous discovery of the benzene ring came to August Kekule in a dream as well.  Artists have been representing people in dreams and dreamscapes for many centuries: Durer depicted a dream in a 1525 watercolor, for example, and thousands of artists have depicted famous biblical dreams (Joseph of Pharo) for long expanses of time.

What struck me, though, in this illustration found on the other side of the page of the Illustrirte Zeitung² (for August 1932) that I used for yesterday’s post about damming Gibraltar and Shakespeare’s memories, was the depiction of someone dreaming mathematical thoughts…or at the very least, dreaming numbers.  People have undoubtedly dreamed much in mathematics, but I can not recall seeing illustrations of these dreams.

I'm differentiating here from something like a Poincarean inspiration, or vision, or thunderstrike--I'm talking about drop-dead asleep sleep, dreaming sleep, REM and all that. Also I'm differentiating this from imaging mathematical thought, as in the work of Francis Galton in 1880 in which the subject of mentally seeing the process of mathematics is perhaps first addressed. I wrote a short piece on that here, way back in Post 9. )

The numerical sequence in this dream doesn’t look like anything to me:  the backwards radicand doesn’t strike anything common in my head.  The geometrical drawing under the portrait in the dreamer’s room though is the impossibly iconic Pythagorean theorem, and there is a nice picture of a conic section in the foreground; but the artist, who improbably signed the work “A. Christ”, doesn’t offer much of math in the dreamscape.  Still, it is a rare depiction of someone dreaming about math. 

Notes
1. "I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, 'That's great, I wonder what that is?' There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th -- and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I'd dreamed it, I couldn't believe I'd written it. I thought, 'No, I've never written anything like this before.' But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing!" from Barry Miles (1997), Paul McCartney.
2.  this is really a great sheet of paper, coming from issue 4492, pp 518-519.  Two pictures of dreams on one side, with three visionary images on the other (the Gibraltar dam, a sub-polar submarine, and a futuristic Indian railway/bridge.

Empty Memory: Telephone Number 20080 (Warsaw), Nazi Occupied Poland and the Holocaust, 1941 (Expanded)

JF Ptak Science Books --continuation of Post 298 from 2008

 I've felt that a great history lesson for school kids would be to make them keep a diary for some other kid from some other time, introduce them to the minutiae of life from another time and perhaps another place.  With some guidance they could make interesting entries in their diary for, say, 15 June 1897, writing about chores, the daily schedule, what they studied in school, how they were dressed, how they got food on the table and kept the house clean, how they would spend 25 cents, what they would see from some given vantage point, and on and on.  This could take place in their very own home town; it could be multi-generational, requiring them to talk to the scary white hairs, or it could reach far back into history and be of an entirely different place altogether.  After they were assigned a particular place in time and space, you could give the kid subtle hints, like this one (below), asking them what they thought it might mean by dialing the phone number 200 80 in Warsaw in 1941.  And what did that pair of lightning bolts mean, anyway?  I think that once they were made to figure it out for themselves, as though they might've been there, and then could record their feelings and observations in a diary might actually bring history to life (especially once they had their "holy crap" (and probably worse) moment at what these numbers implied). 

This is one of the ideas that came home again uncovering this odd booklet, which is a Nazi diary for those stationed in the Generalgouvernement (Tascehnjahrbuch 1941 fuer den Deutschen im Generalgouvernement) ,  for the year 1941. The General Government (or more fully the Generalgouvernement für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete) was one administrative section of occupied Poland, the country being divided in 1939 after the German invasion of 3 September 1939, with the western section being retained by the Germans and the Eastern given over to occupation by the Soviets via the Non-Aggression pact between the USSR and Germany^.1

This looks like an every day diary for the period, except for the Nazi (or NSDAP) regalia and German imprint of Generalgouvernement in Krakau.  And, all of the annotated high points of the year for the most overly voracious parts of German militarism as well as for the hot points of Nazi history.  Hitler, (above) Goering, Goebbels and other leaders' birthdays are highlighted, not to mention seminal points in the development of the Nazi party and party-adoptees (Richard Wagner has a number of entries for suggested celebrations). 

There are also helpful directories in the back pointing to any number of cafes located in a growing number of "Adolf Hilter Platz's" throughout Poland (including three in Radom), as well as fares for the use of the railway and postal system.

We also see the following telephone number:  23075.  That's for the Literarische Kaffee Stefansgasse I, Krakau. This is the location that the Reichsminister and administrator Hans Frank (about whom we'll read in a moment) decided to hold a chess tournament in 1941, to satisfy his own need for chess while freshly in the pursuit of the murder of millions of people.

‘Frank was extremely interested in chess. He not only possessed an extensive library of chess literature but was also a good player, and he even “received” the Ukrainian chess master Bogoljubow at the castle. On 3 November 1940 he organized a chess congress in Cracow. Six months later he announced the setting-up of a chess school under Bogoljubow and the chess master Dr Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine, and he visited a chess tournament in October 1942 at the “Literary Café” in Cracow."--Hans Frank (subtitle: Hitlers Kronjurist und Generalgouverneur) by Dieter Schenk (Frankfurt am Main, 2006) "and quotes a reference to chess on page 177 (given below in our translation)..."[Source: Chesshistory.com., here.]

Continue reading here.

The First Published Image of a Photograph, April 20, 1839

JF Ptak Science Books,  Post 1701 

The first published photographic image,  or "sunpicture", illustrating an excellent collection of extremely early papers on photography, 1839.

Bird, Golding.  "A Treatise on Photogenic Drawing."  Five papers in a series found and bound in the London-published journal, The Mirror.  These five issues comprise a very early work on the new science of photography by Dr. Golding Bird, appearing in issues from April 20-May 25, 1839:  this includes "A treatise on photogenic drawing",  (pp. 241-44);  and also  "The new art - photography",  (pp. 261-2, 281-3, 317-18, 333-335.)

It is page 241 (issue no. 945, Saturday April 20) that particularly peaked my interest--it contains the First Image of a Photogenic Drawing. This is essentially the first publication of an image produced by any sort of photographic process.  The process here is the 'sun picture", a photographic process, making this the first published "photographic" image, but really it is more like the first publication of a photographic image that was produced via woodcut.  It predates the first mass-published photograph by four years and the first (entirely) photographically illustrated book (The Pencil of Nature) by six years.  The sun picture, or heliotype, was first described in print in 1801 by both Thomas Wedgewood and Humphrey Davy, and although the process was at least 39 years old at this time there are no recorded *published* images produced by that process. (The woodcut is much larger than usual for The Mirror, and is also of a unique brown/red color, and of a different hue than any other woodcut that we have seen in any of the issues of the first 45 years of this publication.)

The image is described in David A. Hanson Collection of the History of Photomechanical Reproduction, located in
 the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, Massachusetts), so:

"...facsimile of a photogenic drawing of ferns (done on the block) as a plate [to illustrate an article serialized by Dr. Golding Bird "A Treatise on Photogenic Drawing" and reprinted in the Magazine of Natural History, p. 234-44]...printed in rust to imitate the photogenic drawing... The facsimile of the photogenic drawing done directly from an exposure on the block is the first photographic image published. The finished example is printed directly from the block in a reddish brown to match the color of Talbot's first salt print photograms."--Hanson Collection catalog, p. 6 [Source, here.]

Under the title, "the First Reproduction of a Photograph",the George Eastman House of Photography's journal, the Image (volume 11/2, 1962)  notes:

"On April 20, 1839, the London magazine The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, featured as its cover a "Facsimile of a Photogenic Drawing." There is a copy in the George Eastman House collection. It is a picture —in negative—of three stalks of leaves. The original was made by Golding Bird, "a distinguished botanist" by following William Henry Fox Talbot's newly invented process, the details of which were made public at the Royal Society on February 21. Paper was made light sensitive by bathing it first in sodium chloride solution, then, after sponging the surface, in a solution of silver nitrate. The material could be used in two ways: to make, as Golding Bird did, a contact print, pressing flat objects to the surface during exposure to light, or in a camera. Both techniques produced negative images, which were fixed in a strong solution of sodium chloride. Talbot named his invention "photogenic drawing." His friend, Sir John Herschel, proposed for it the word "photography."

"Thus to The Mirror falls the honor of having first published a reproduction of a photograph. The facsimile which was presented to its readers was the work of a draftsman, who made a drawing of the photograph, and a wood engraver, who cut the block..”

The Image continues:

"Only a week later, on April 27, The Magazine of Science and School of Arts, another London magazine, featured three "Fac-similes of Photogenic Drawings" on its cover: two botanical specimens; (Fool's Parsley and Grass of Parnassus), and a piece of lace. Although wood engravings created by skill of hand, they approach photography more closely. For the very wooden block used for the printing plate was itself sensitized, just as Bird's paper had been sensitized, and the engraver followed with his burin the photographic image itself, rather than the artist's drawing."

"The photogenic drawings were contributed to the magazine by a reader who signed himself "G.F." He commented, in his covering letter published in the same issue: "I send you three drawings of this new art, which were impressed at once on box-wood, and therefore are fit for the graver, without any other preparation. I flatter myself that this process may be useful to carvers and wood engravers, not only to those who cut the fine objects of artistical design, but still more to those who cut patterns and blocks for lace, muslin, calico-printing, paper-hanging, &c., as by this simple means the errors, expense, and time of the draughtsman may be wholly saved, and in a minute or two the most elaborate picture or design, or the most complicated machinery, be delineated with the utmost truth and clearness."

Gernsheim states in his History of Photography that  the first photographic camera ever made for sale to the public was advertised by Francis West, an optician of 83 Fleet Street, London, and published in this issue.   

Bird later reworked these sections of the Mirror into elements of and a chapter in his Elements of Natural Philosophy; (being an experimental introduction to the study of the physical sciences; revised and enlarged third London edition, Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1848). This article was reproduced in the Journal of the Franklin Institute in September 1839 as "Observations on the Application of Heliographic or Photogenic Drawing to Botanical Purposes; with an account of an economic mode of preparing the Paper: "in a Letter to the Editor of the magazine of Natural History".

[Offered for sale in our books for sale section, here.]