Ptak Science Books

Homer Simpson on Perspective: the Rare Antique Image Looking Straight Down from a Height

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 20

I welcome the chance today to use our non-classical Homer instead of the beautiful Paolo Uccello to look at an issue of imaging a certain form of perspective drawing.  I've always been intrigued by antiquarian images that looked straight down, or up, at things--90 degree, perpendicular, real straight-on stuff, giving a feel for depth (or height) and perspective.  Funny thing is that in the wide world of scientific images, they really don't show up very often.

A Mock-straight-down is found in this prettily-designed example (French, ca. 1860)--it seems to be view form a height of 250 feet or so down on the square of a low- (Western) renaissance town. That's partly true, except that it is a mosaic from Pompeii (or Herculaneum), found imbedded in the floor of one of those mummified houses. 

Another pretender is this god's-eye view (from Abraham Rees' mammoth encyclopedia of 1800-1820) of the universe, centered upon our own helio-centric Solar System, which is centered, nested, amidst a whorl of other (contiguous and touching but not overlapping) solar systems, all of which is held in the infinite but knowable confines of an ourobus.   This again qualifies as a straight-down/up if and only if (iff) you squint real hard and imagine you're seeing the scene through your CreatorView (TM!) glasses.  (The Creator needs glasses?)

The drawing by Leonardo of the town of Imola (currently resident with the Windsors) does come quite close to the concept--it has more artistic features than the common city plan , and is definitely at a perpendicular to its subject.

But it is this that is so terribly interesting to me--a small part of a little print from an unidentified encyclopedia from the turn of the 19th c. It shows a picture of the earth looking straight down from a balloon, looking through an opening in the cloud cover, down to a small town. There is an iconic work on the representation of the world as known to succeeding generations where the picture of the world is seen through a succession of gradually diminishing clouds (being opened like drapes over time), but I honestly cannot think of an early image of looking at clouds from above and straight down.  My sense is that this image would have caused as much interest and wonder as the first (Soviet) images of the other side of the Moon (back in 1959). 

Even when moving into the pre-satellite 20th century image, the straight-down picture is a rarity. In the last few years after having looked at dozens of thousands of popularly-published images (for another project), the straight-down/up were a scant tenth or perhaps hundredth of a percent of the total. There were a number of photographs made looking straight up (as in the two examples here, looking up the main mast into the crow’s nest of the Queen Mary, and the other with the same view, only in the Bremen. 

Occasionally the view like this will show up (looking laterally through the Vickers-Armstrong “Wellington I” bomber aircraft (June 1939)

I can't leave this topic without mentioning two recent additions to this genre--the first is the Eames' wonderful Power of Ten movie (go to youtube HERE, where in 40 steps we look at existence from quark to quasar. 

The second is a little goofy but I like it nonetheless--the introduction to the Jodie Foster movie Contact (go to youtube HERE)  built on the bones of the Carl Sagan book. Here we swing out from the Earth and into space, following a broadcast-audio trail of humanity into the not-too-distant time/space (ignoring the signal degradation bit but so it goes), and then leaving that quickly behind, hurling itself backwards, to the outer reaches of the universe, until (and we don't see this in the youtube clip) we wind up back in the iris of the heroine (and a bit too much like the Dave Bowman trip in "2001 a Space Odyssey"). 

But we don't see stuff like this very often, and I'm happy to go along for the ride. It really is just about seeing something new, after all.

Perhaps the lack of this perspective is summed up by our old friend Homer J. Simpson. In one episode of the Simpsons (long ago and far away…or last week) Homer explains (to Lisa?) why cartoon characters’ faces are always oblique in profile. Homer turns and looks directly into the
camera,” and his face gets all pancakey. It's just not done “because it's goofy” he says. And at least in Homer’s case, the proof is definitely in the puddin’.

Blowing Up Hell(gate), 1876

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 19

“A Sharp, but Not Loud Retort”—the cross section of the detonation chamber of the largest pre-Alamogordo man-made explosion, 1876

Cruising through a box-full (okay, four boxes full) of  the Popular Science Monthly, I came upon the lovely volume for 1876. The November issue (the November 1876 American presidential election bears a very, very close resemblance to the 2000 election) unleashed a bevy of odd, tantalizing articles, demanding their quiet attention:  “the Early History of Fire”, “Prenatal and Infantile Culture”, “Is the Development Hypothesis Sufficient?”, “the Nature of the Invertebrate Brain”, and others).  Just barely bobbing to the surface, riding the velvet coattails of longer articles was as a note in the “editor’s table”: “The Hell-Gate Explosion.”

Aha!
Hell’s Gate in America (there are bunches evidently in the Netherlands, where term prior to corruption was Hellegat, meaning, well, "Hell Gate") refers to a body of water high up on the East River in NYC.  It had, before 1876, been a very contentious bit, with a reef at Hallett’s Point that caused all manner of problems for ships and shipping, helping sink perhaps hundreds of ships over the years since the strait was navigated in the early 17th century. 

It came to pass that the Deciding Forces determined that the reef must go.  (RIGHT: the 1-inch square image cross section of the tunnels beneath the ship-catcher.)

General John Newton (1823-1895, Civil War brevetted Major General)  was placed in charge of removing the mess, a large, 700-foot long ship-sinking croissant, extending 300 feet into the channel, with an area of about 3 acres.  Newton worked on the idea for several years and—to the great trepidation and pre-millenial fears of many—decided to blow it up. Actually, he decided to blow it down—he engineered a submerged explosion such that the charges placed in the numerous and long mine shafts drilled and cut the length and breadth of the reef would effectively sink the reef. With some smart thinking and some 50,000 pounds of explosives, he did just that. 

Listen to the particulars (and remember, this is 1876, and the waters were treacherous, with ripping currents):  after building a coffer dam a shaft was sunk 33 feet below the surface of the water, from which 10 tunnels were opened, having lengths of 21 to 126 feet. The tunnels radiating from the shaft varied from 9 to 22 feet in height, and 9 to 12 feet wide, with 172 supporting pillars, the total length of the tunnels being 4,857 feet plus another 2,568 feet of offshooting galleries—the entire 7,425 feet of tunnel was drilled with 4,427 blasting holes, the explosive agents being connected to 96 galvanic firing batteries by 220,000 feet of wire. The 160 fuses were simultaneously ignited by 23 groups of batteries.

The main plunger was depressed by General Newton’s 2 year old daughter, who was not named.

The action was a success, the honeycombed explosion chambers sort of sinking the 51,000 cubic yards of ship-killer under a low, sulfurous fog.  Actually the reef-turned-gravel pit was removed by grapplers, part of the Hell of Hellgate carried away. 

All things considered, this little cross-section (about an inch square) doesn’t say much about the biggest man-made explosion south the atomic bomb . 

Endnote:

The New York Times screamed the results in a Victorian tremalotto on their front page for 25 September 1876:

"RENDING HELL-GATE ROCKS; THE SUBMARINE MINE EXPLODED. A COMPLETE SCIENTIFIC SUCCESS. THE TERRIFIC RENDING FORCE LIBERATED BY THE FINGER OF A CHILD--A JARRING TREMOR OF THE EARTH, AND A SHARP, BUT NOT LOUD REPORT--IMMENSE GEYSERS OF WATER THROWN UP--THE FORCE EXPENDED MAINLY IN THE WORK OF BURSTING THE REEF--CONFIRMATION OF GEN. NEWTON'S THEORY OF THE EFFECTS OF THE DISCHARGE--THE RUSH OF THE CURIOUS CROWDS--INCIDENTS OF THE DAY THROUGHOUT THE CITY. BEFORE THE EXPLOSION. THE EXPLOSION. AFTER THE EXPLOSION.", The New York Times. September 25, 1876. p. 1

The Wrong Stuff, Righted--the Attack on Darwin's Descent, 1871

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 17

I enjoy the good defense of the wrongfully accused--The Encyclopedia of Incorrect Reviews of Literature and Science is an enormous and multi-generational work, filled to its festering brim with The Bad Stuff:   Everyone is represented here, glory rendered to trifle:  Hamlet was ripped by Voltaire (“vulgar and barbarous”) while Pepys raped Midsummer Night’s Dream (“insipid, ridiculous”); Moby Dick was “trash, bedlam literature”; Kipling couldn’t write in English (SF Examiner 1889); and Max Eastman weirdly and famously trashed Hemingway and his manhood in the New Republic while reviewing For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940 (“lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man”).   Perhaps one of the very prettiest of the bad/wrong review was made by The Bookman (the professional bookseller’s reviewing organ in the United States) in 1906, in reviewing Sinclair’s The Jungle:  “His reasoning is so false, his disregard of human nature so naïve, his statement of facts so biased, his conclusions so perverted, that the effect can be only to disgust many honest, sensible folk with the very terms he uses so glibly”.  Well put; better still if it were correct.  The list goes on and on and touches, well, just about everyone (including Dr. Seuss).  What I really enjoy is the response to the bad review, especially when the bad review was, simply, bad. 

One good example, .a great example, really, is Thomas Stebbing's response to an inciting, raw and hateful attack upon Darwin's Descent of Man by The Times of London newspaper (April, 1871).  Incredibly, or predictably, The Times saw the work as an attack upon society: it accused Darwin of undermining authority and principles of morality, opening the way to "the most murderous revolutions". A "man incurs a grave responsibility when, with the authority of a well-earned reputation, he advances at such a time the disintegrating speculations of this book." Stebbing's  review of the Review is drippingly but properly sarcastic, pointing out obvious errors in specific and the tone of the article in general in the defense of the book. Darwin's "facile method of observing superficial resemblances" (says The Times) moves  Stebbing to issue the following: "they may fancy that truth is worth discovering , even when it seems to involve some contradictions to our pride and some loss of comfort to our finer feelings..."  It is a gorgeous line ending a proper, staid defense of what would seem prima facie to be something in need of no defense whatsoever—in 1871 or 2008. 

Reverend Stebbing, a Darwinian, Naturalist and fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, lived another 55 years after this article was published—one year longer than the issuance of the (negative, anti-Darwin) verdict in the Scopes/Monkey trial.  I wonder what he was thinking on that day in 1925…