Ptak Science Books

Typewriter and Anti-typewriter: Writing Systems of von Knauss, della Porta, Trithemius, Schotti

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #53

Sometimes order brings disorder; and disorder, order, as in the following two examples of early versions of modern technology.    Take the typewriter—it has a curious display of the alphabet, designed to impede, while numbers are displayed along the tip, in order.  (The qwerty system may well have been put into place as the earliest typewriters, beginning even with Glidden and Sholes machine, could not absorb very fast typing due to their technical limitations, and so came the qwerty arrangement.)  So from this non-random arrangement we are able to direct all of our thoughts and intentions.

(An interesting aside is this magnificent non-qwerty machine, found in F. von Knauss' Selbstschreibende Wundermaschinen... (1780), a magnificent work on "wonder machines", and which is recognized as the first "typewriter".)

The other elegant machine is the cipher. In the beginning of its use the alphabet is usually properly arranged, and placement of letters and numerals is very clear and precise.  The result however is anything but—the product being a beautiful randomness and a secure, secret language.   

This illustration features a lovely volvelle (two or more pieces of paper arranged so that they may be turned one on top of the other) from Giambattista Della Porta’s De furitvis literarum notis vulgo…, printed in Naples in 1591.  The volvelle was one part of the book which explained the art of steganogrpahy—the art of writing incomprehensibly except to those who possess the key—and was one of the most important works on the subject after the Polygraphia of Johannes Trithemius (This book was written in 1599, published in 1606 and condemned in 1609—ostensibly because the book was thought to be about the dark arts and black magic, though the offending volume, the third and last,  was really a deeper work continuing on cryptography.)   

This is another interesting paper volvelle device, called a rotularum, and can be found in P. Gasparis Schotti's Schola Steganographia, and printed in 1680.

Closer yet to the order/disorder idea is the strip cipher, which begins the process of encoding with numerous aligned alphabets which are then put out-of-order to secure a deeper discontinuity between the original message and its encoded version. 

A modern and imaginative version of a typewriter version of a cipher may be seen in Claes Oldenburg's 1963 "Soft typewriter"--well, not really, but this may be the only time that I have a chance to use this illustration.

 

The History of the Future 2: Henard touches on the Future's Future Plan, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #51

This  cross section illustration ("Rue Future"/Future Street) is from E. Henard's (1849-1923) article, "The Cities of the Future", from American City, Volume 4, January, 1911. In this article Henard (architect of the city of Paris and from 1880 a life-long employee and advocate of public works in that city) looks into the future and sees the movement towards underground (or enclosed) vehicular traffic, "smart" buildings, pneumatic tubing for vacuum cleaners ("almost sure to come into general use"), an improvement in the system for water delivery and removal, replacing coal with natural gas, and more. He lays out a plan to implement his idea that, if implemented int he city of

Paris, would cost $420,000,000 (or approximately $15 billion in 2006 money) over 100 years. [This part seems a little off given that the area for public roads alone in Paris at this time was 3,700 acres--nevertheless this was an interesting appearing plan, a significant portion of which has found its way into building and community planning albeit on a far smaller scale].

Henard was also acutely interested in the future traffic problems of Paris and other major cities, proposing revolutionary radial traffic patterns for moving cars around major metropolitan areas--which was really quite visionary as the mass production of automobiles had not yet really taken place--certainly automobiles were far more common by 1911 than 1905, but their numbers would be vaulted higher int he next decade with the first true approach to assembly line production of automobiles, making them affordable to the millions.  His plan for a ring-lime system around the city of Paris was influential to some of the ideas in the early American planning reports for San Francisco and Chicago by the great Daniel Burnham.

What is particularly interesting for me in the Henerad plan is the room that he left for his future's future--he attempted to make his plan adaptable for the time when the future he was writing about was becoming the past.  And so he was leaving room in his underground plans (in particular) to accommodate some of what the future might hold in store for his city, leaving unused spaces and tunnels, so that the city planners in the future would not have to go through the enormous expense of putting these things in for themselves.  Now that is future-forward thinking. 

 

For a good, long article on the plan see http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/henard.htm

 

History of the Future 1: Caricature of the Future, J.J. Grandville and the Bridge Across Saturn, 1844

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #52

Admittedly, J.I.I Grandville (1803-1847) didn't conceive of this series of bridges as a plausible means of interplanetary travel and is in all probability an allegorical creation, but the image does--in an odd way--allow a dialogue on the idea of moving from planet to planet, which was still pretty solitary thinking in the mid-19th century. Although this didn't have a direct effect on the perception of man's place in the solar system, it did have a great and direct impact upon a vast number of illustrators and cartoonists who followed in his considerable wake.
This image comes from Grandville's Un Autre Monde, published in 1844.

In addition to an interplanetary bridge that there is another singular creation here in Grandville's cosmos--a balcony constructed of the rings of Saturn (if indeed this was supposed to be Saturn--it is as advantageous as not to think of it in this way) and if we think of a balcony being a place to watch and observe, then we are brought instantly to W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, which is a textural masterpiece, and mostly I guess a novel about everything that Sebald observed in his walk through Suffolk.  (Another Saturn-related work of fiction is Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut,  a very mature and insightful 1959 novel which really has nothing to do with anything here; I just needed to throw that in, what with him being a master storyteller, crank and human-caricaturist-observer and all…)  And so by 1844 it comes to pass that one French caricaturist/imaginist comes to draw an extraordinary and impossible land/space bridge between the planets only 234 years after Galileo first glimpsed Saturn's "handles".  It would take another 65 years and accumulations of observations by some of the greatest names in the history of astronomy (Galileo, Casini, Hevelius, Huygens) to show that the disk (singular) on Saturn was actually a series of tings The first photograph of Saturn's rings is not made until 1883.

Grandville (Grandville 'Gerard, Jean Ignace Isidore, born in Nancy, 1803 -1847) I see as more like a caricaturist of the future, seeing what might be possible, plausible, imaginable, and also see the grotesque royalness of it all as well.  In as much as thinking of such an image as interplanetary land bridges might seem, Grandville shows at the same time their innocent, clinging wrongness. 

Emblems of Featureless Faces--Philibert de l'Orme's Architecture, 1568

Philibert de l’Orme’s book, Le Premier Tome de l’Architecture, printed in Paris in 1568, contains a singular illustration. L’Orme (who lived ca. 1515-1570), was perhaps one of the first modern architects, not only because of his superior engineering skills, but also because he was a superb organizer—a superior architectural tactician.

 He worked for Henry II and Charles IX, supervising the construction of Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain-en-Laye—where he built the Château Neuf, and the other royal buildings. As well as the Tuileries, in collaboration with Jean Bullant.

The text explaining the illustration reads something like “to guard against persons who can do nothing right, cannot see what is to be done well, cannot hear what should be understood…” Perhaps l’Orme was talking about people in general; or, perhaps, as I suspect, he was referring to someone in his own profession, a builder, an engineer, an architect? In any event, this singular image is one of the few that I can recall in which a person is allegorically represented without  hands, eyes, ears or, perhaps a nose.

There's quite a bit of imagery showing unusually-featured faces--and I'm talking about emblemata rather than monsters or mythological/hypothetical beings meant to go creaking into the night. I'm also excluding medical images (like this for an early form of rhinoplasty) and people who have suffered injury or are differentially abled (as in this image of the great Tyhco Brahe and his silver nose).  I'm hard put to think of other examples of representational humans with such features existing in the technical or scientific world, though--I think that l'Orme's designer/engineer here is a very scarce creation. 

 

Beautiful Title Pages 1—Oswald Croll’s Chemistry, 1611

Oswald Croll is a big name in the history of chemistry.  At a time where so many other Big Names were writing books about chemistry as a science, Croll wrote a scientific book of chemistry.  Paracellus, one of the greatest of these big names, wrote rather vaguely and in a sense secretively about his preparations and compositions, as well as their use and applications; Croll on the other hand writes in great and exhaustive detail about just such things that Paracelsus leaves out. 

The title page to his Croll, Oswald. BASILICA CHYMICA. Continens Philosophicam propriam laborum experientiam confirmatam descriptionem et usum Remediorum Chymicorum Selectissimorum e Lumine Gratiae et Naturae desumptorum. In fine libri additus est Auctoris ejusdem Tractatus Novus De Signaturis Rerum Internis, was printed in 1611—probably two years after Croll’s death—and is a gorgeous display of allegorical and historical images. The allegorical parts are a bit out of my range, but the historical figures are easy enough (being identified!), and include Hermes Trismegistrus, Geber, Morienes, (the great) Roger Bacon, (the magnificent) Ramon Lull and Paracelsus.

I like the Croll as the beginning of a series of images of beautiful title pages in the history of science.

Titanic Understatement at the Alpha & the Omega--Two Big Bangs

The soft-sell of the generally recognized and understood propositions, stepping well around the main, central, controlling issue, hinting broadly along its perimeters, defining the emptiness by its shell, left to an undistinguished recognition, is what we're hunting here.

I have two examples of extreme examples of understatement occurring at the beginning and end of things—all things.

The first occurs at the end of all things. Written by Joseph Coker, Chief of the National Resource Evaluation Center in the Office of Emergency Planning in Washington, D.C. in April 1965 (100 years to the month after the end of the U.S. Civil War), “NREC Programs for Gaming the Logistics of National Survival” is by its very title and appearance a startling looking and sounding document. Coker and his NREC worked within the Executive Office of the President (LBJ at the time), and his paper concentrated on a succinct appraisal of the existing gaming programs looking at survival of all aspects of the national life in the days following nuclear end-game.

 

In general the document is as dry and cardinal as bagel toast—it warms quickly and invisibly, however, and that bagel toast becomes a burnt and invisible cinder via Coker’s prose.

The document wastes no time in getting directly to vast understatement, and stays there. In chapter one “Logistics of National Survival”, the second chapter opens:

“Because of recent changes in the technology and potential tempo of war and because of the base power of force is in being (including equipment and supplies), there is general recognition that any future war in which the United States is engaged, especially if it is an unlimited nuclear war, may be decided without significant additional military demands upon the nation’s industrial economy.” Hmm. He continues: “That is not to say, however, that the post-attack economy would not face enormous logistical support problems.” There is no human element of this equation. “The logistic requirements of survival and recovery would present very heavy demands.”

“Very heavy demands” reaches a very great height of understatement. How high is high? I don’t know. Remember: Mr. Coker was Chief of this division and working within the Executive Office. This was thinking at a very high level.

He continues in this same paragraph: “Furthermore, the post-attack economy may be ill-prepared to meet such demands”. The paragraph ends in a tremendous horizontal soar: “It may be expected that following any massive nuclear attack against the U.S., the economy would be characterized by resource imbalances and critical shortages (italics our's). 

Coker’s papers meant to remedy the approaches to these “imbalances”. The NREC was up and running with ideas and computing fire—in the form of the CD 3600 computer and FORTRAN—to develop a “damage assessment system” called READY that would replace the existing programs named, with no evident imagination, JUMBO, STREAK and DART.

Throughout this entire document there is no mention of overwhelming, catastrophic death and/or obliteration of the social structure, except that it must be implied that there must be “someone” to operate the essential industries that must be brought back on line.

Curiously there is a discussion about the survivability of the Federal Reserve and the banking system. My guess is that in the ensuing giga-tons of holocaust of flame that paper money didn’t burn along with its human holders.

The second understatement that we will look at here belongs in the last paragraph of the seminal paper by Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason, writing on the “discovery” of the Big Bang as they defined the Red Shift, which was actually a roughly proportional increase of distance traveled to red shift. They plotted a trend line for 46 galaxies and in 1929 formulated the empirical Redshift Distance Law of galaxies, which is today known as Hubble’s Law, which was consistent with the solutions of equations of GRT.

 It is in a further report on their studies in The Velocity-Distance Relation Among Extra-Galactic Nebulae  (Mount Wilson Observatory,  1931) , that Hubble and Humason make their stupendous understatement: regarding their understanding of the phenomena and the expanding universe, they take many steps back, and say in the concluding paragraph "the writers are constrained to describe the apparent velocity-distance displacements without venturing on the interpretation and its cosmological significance". They basically lay out the functioning of the universe and the best understanding of how we got to where we are in the cosmos (Vesto Slipher notwithstanding), and how according to their understanding that the universe is expanding and is consistent with all known laws, that they decide to not say anything, um, philosophical.

And so, in the last paragraph of this paper discussing the Great Omega, the authors decided, in their modest and terrifically understated Bartlebian way, to not comment.

The plot of the Hubble redshift findings is taken from the Australia Telescope Outreach and Education site, HERE.

Graphical Representation of Data: Slavery in the U.S. 1854

This incredible, indelible image is another from our collection of graphical representations of data and ideas.  This map, is entitled Moral Map of North America, 1854; the Slave States are coloued Red, the blighted influence of Slavery is also deeply felt in those parts more slightly streaked with Red€.  I can find no record of this map, printed obviously by our Bretheren across the ocean--€”that and the fact that it was printed in 1854 is all the publishing data that I can find. 

The poem at bottom reads:
United States! Your banner wears
Two Emblem €”one of Fame;
Alas! The other it bars
Reminds us of your shame.
The white man's liberty in types
Stands blazoned by your stars;
But what's the meaning of your stripes;
They mean your Negro-scars.

Reciting this poem by Thomas Campbell before an abolitionist convention in 6 March 1851, William Wells Brown continued (as was reported in the National Anti-Slavery Standard) “The name of the United States is becoming a hissing and bye-word in the mouths of the inhabitants of every clime. My country is indeed the land of oppression. There is not a rood of territory over which the Stars and Stripes€ fly, on which William and Ellen Craft or myself could be protected by law. Wherever the American flag is seen flying on the continent of the New World it points us out as slaves; and we enjoy to-night a degree of freedom in your town that we could not if we were in the land of our birth. I often speak of America as my country, but in point of fact I have no country. In the language of one of the noblest of the Negro's champions in the United States.  €œMy country is the wide, wide world; My countrymen are all mankind."€

Brown should know:  his mother was a slave and his father the plantation owner who later granted him his freedom.  Brown then worked the underground railroad and much, much more, working with William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips.  Among his published works included the incredible  Clotel, (1853), which was one of the first novels published by an African-American in the U.S.,  and which discusses in great detail the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave/lover/mistress Sally Hemings.

The map is definitely a tale of morality, showing a definite margin of slavery but also depicting slavery leeching its way through the border states. It is interesting to note that Washington D.C. is represented in red as it was indeed a slave-holding district, with a slave pen right on the Mall in the 1830’s. 

The most striking feature to me of course is the slave who is lashed hand-and-foot to the flagpole on which the American flag is flying—this is the only time that I have seen the slave and the flag portrayed as a unit, together, the slave being tortured by the standard of our country. 

Graphical Representation of Data 2—What a Million Dead People Looks Like

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

The Illustrated London News published this very sobering image showing the general reader in London in 1933.  It is entitled “In Memory of the 1,104,890 British Dead of the Great War”, and was drawn by D. Macpherson.  It very graphically represents all of the war dead of the British Empire of 1914-1918, depicted as a line of men, four across, extending from London to Durhham.  The column passes from London through Hitchin, through Bedford and Peterborough and Grantham, past Sheffield and Leeds and York, and then on to Durham.  An extraordinary column of the war dead: 900,000 of the dead were not soldiers at the beginning of the war, but they sure died that way, and this map shows them all in a line, marching from  a point 269 miles distant.

Graphical Representation of Data #1--England Invaded, 1908

 

Some of the most striking things in my collection/store/accumulation are the hundreds of images that portray data for display purposes--even more so, those that use a vernacular setting to bring closer to home an understanding of a statistic or finding.

(One of the most popular books on this subject is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte, which uses a number of interesting images (good and bad) for the purposes of his book. Another, by fellow Asheville resident Peter Turchi (director of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College) is Maps of the Imagination, the Writer as Cartographer,  which hosts a large number of interesting images the stories of which are richly and elegantly woven--this is a real piece of craftsman, and pretty, and useful, too.)

The print that we're looking at here appeared in the 19 December 1908  issue of The Illustrated London News and is entitled "The Futility of Herr Rudolf Martin's Plan of Invasion by Aeroplane". This fantastic piece of annonymous artwork graphically depicts what the author maintained was the impossibility of Germany to invade England by landing 50,000 flying machines and 100,000 men on the Kentish coast of England--impossible (quantly though realistically) because "of the impossibility of finding landing-room (for the planes) and cover for an army on aeroplanes". The artist depicts a small town and what I guesstimate to be 60 planes in the air and 75 or so on the ground, leaving it to the imagination of the reader where the other 49, 875 might go. He DOES make a point, and very vividly.

"Nothing could show better the futility of Government Councillor Rudolf Martin's idea that Germany could construct 50,000 flying machines for 50-million pounds...and land 100,000 men on the Kentish coast from Calais within half an hour." Evidently Mr. Martin was very concerned with the invasion of England by Germany via airplane, and it was the editor's job at the ILN to show him misguided. I would imagine that this illustration drove the point home to the folks who didn't actually bother to read anything about the Martin defense plan. (It was in a similar way that Thomas Nast was able to control public opinion and sway political refuge and protection away from Boss Tweed. Tweed famously boasted that he didn't care what the newspapers said about him because his power base didn't read--he might've been and probably was correct here, so Nast took after Tweed via the political cartoon, and big too, and frequently; and the cartoons, even if the people looking at them couldn't read, told the whole story graphically, and it was this that brought an end to Tweed more than anything else.)

Martin fueled vast public concern with his procurement. Again in 1908 he granted an interview to the Daily Mail in which he outlined another plan by which he felt Germany could launch 3,500 "specially design" airships (I'm guessing dirigibles) and land 350,000 (!) men in England in, again, that half-hour time period. (I have no idea how you would do this, even today.) His speculations were well-discussed in the British press, and then found their way to Germany and Berlin,     where Rudolf's plans against such an incredible non-existent attack by the Germans was ruefully considered. (The ILN was making the point by addressing Mr. Martin as “Herr” Martin that he was doing more harm than good in his yellowpapers.)  This evidently whipped itself into a frothy aeroplanitis in 1909, despite such efforts as this graphical reasoning by the ILN to dispense with the unreasonable fears.

The airplane flown by the Wrights, the first powered heavier-than-air flight, occurred barely six years prior to these frantic events--the invention was still fresh (and basically "foreign", as the Brits lagged well behind the other major powers in flight until WWI)--and understandable in a way that the fears were not understandable, not really, because of the newness and exotic aspect of the threatening invention.

For a tour of the chronological history of the graphical representation of quantitative data as well as innovations in statistical and representational cartography, please have a look at Michael Friendly's  magnificent site--it is an historical site the way it should be done, complete with all the trimmings, as well as the usually-absent but very important citations to the orgiinal articles used in the chronology. 

 

 

 

 

The Strength of Iridescence--Visualizing Mental Calculations, Part II

I wanted to return and add a bit to an earlier notice concerning a series of drawings that I found utterly fascinating—the earliest illustrations of the active formation representing visualized human thought.  (I know that this titling is ungainly, but it seems to be the least inelegant solutions to stating the idea of what the images represent.)  It so happens that Galton approached this same issue—though without pictorial representation—in a slightly earlier paper with the unusual and provocative title of “Visions in Sane Persons” (1881).  Working further through this thesis and publishing an illustrated report in 1882, he continued, and greatly expanded the study in a 26-page chapter called “Number-Forms” in his book Inquiries into Human Faculties and its Development (1883, with a second edition appearing in 1909).  Galton includes another 71 images of visualizing arithmetic, plus others on general images of mental images of numbers and letters—there is also a small but beautiful section on associations between colors and numbers and letters.  (These are all depicted in the first four images on this page.)

G.T.W. Patrick (a professor of philosophy at the state university of Iowa) published one of the earliest papers in response to Galton’s work.  In “Number-forms”, published in the Popular Science Monthly in February 1893 (pp 504-515, and “illustrated”), Patrick addresses and expands Galton’s work somewhat, including another eighteen wonderful illustrations of similar images.

But the path back to Galton is not quite a straight one.  Galton was initially concerned with imaging of numbers and numbers forms while people were performing mental calculations.  Patrick on the other hand asked his subjects if they had associative images in their mind of numbers—formally, he asked them if the number series of 1-9 presented itself in a visual, representative way in their minds.  In the second and third parts of his three-part inquiry, he asked the same question about letters and the alphabet, and then, thirdly, if they perceived any sense of color from letters and numbers, and what then what those exact relationships were.

It is interesting that in the studies of Galton and Patrick that over time in each of the subjects tested that (in Galton’s words) the images were “absolutely unchangeable except for a gradual development of complexity”.  Since I (like Galton, which is probably the only time I will ever be able to associate myself with this man
in terms of familiar traits) have no such images in my head when I think about mathematics or numbers or letter or words in general, it is remarkable to me on the human scale that people who have these associations would have the same ones time after time.  A moveable feast, as it were.  Of course it would make sense that this reference system would be constant—but for someone that doesn’t ‘see” these images at all, the fact that they are so flowing and lucid and unchanging is simply difficult for me to imagine. (In a few weeks I'll return to this issue, looking at how some prodigiously gifted people "see" with their special attributes.)

Images below are from the Patrick paper:

Little Science—the Scientific Readiness of Water Bottles

There’s plenty of room for Big Science, as Big Science makes room for itself:  the Manhattan Project, RADLAB at MIT, CERN, Los Alamos, Human Genome Project are all examples of (really) big science, not to mention science cities like Oak Ridge, Tsukuda Academic Center (Japan)  and Akademorduk (Russia).  There’s  a much bigger list of big science, but what I want to get at right now is a look at Little Science, teeny-tiny science, and the home of the Good Idea.

During the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings (which was constantly on the radio in the background) my friend Walter Johnson and I set out to move a half-ton piece of equipment,. in the dead of night, with no tools.  The object of course had no wheels, measured a very cubey 7x4x3 feet (or so), and presented itself in a primal crouch, like 6 refrigerators on their sides.  The Thing, a color photographic developer, needed to be put on its side, then moved down a 75’ hallway, then placed on end (!!) and then placed in a truck.

We had a ratchet set and a few screwdrivers for tools—plus three roundish fence posts that we found in the trash outside.

We removed as much of the innards as possible (it was a working machine so it needed to be put back together again), and were able to get it on its side so that it would fit through a door and down the hall.  I think that being bearish brutes we just muscled the thing over.  We of course used the logs to roll the beast down the hallway, a la the way we used to imagine the Egyptians moving monoliths.  We even knew how to get the thing upright—the big deal, though, was to get it back down again, horizontally, to get it into the truck.

This was, as Frank Zappa would say, the crux of the biscuit.

Walter was and is a severely, acutely intelligent man with great creativity and a big sense of humor.
Looking at our little bit of Stonehenge, trying to think of a way to move it from vertical to horizontal without damaging this slippery heavy stinking machine, and to continue using cave-man tools, was a thorny issue.

Walter cracked it in an instant.

We had five or six one-gallon jugs of water with screw tops—I think Walter had already consumed two gallons of it (he’s a big man, too)—that would serve the purpose.  Walter duct-taped the tops back on four of the empty jugs, taped the jugs across the top of the Beast, and then pushed the thousand-pound brute over.  The jugs acted perfectly, like shock absorbers; the caps stayed on, the machine never touched the ground, and we moved it into the truck and off into the night, celebrating our victory with warm Guinness. 

It was a gorgeous and instant solution to a knotty problem, and a perfect application of a little sci and mechanics.  Of course you had to be able to see the simplest, most direct solution to the problem, which Walter did, and then have the necessary tools in the trash around you to make the dream come true.  But we hadn’t thought of that end bit, the lowering of the machine without damaging it part, which was such a heart breaker for the moment before Walter said that he knew how to do it.  But Walter was always like this, always hyper-smart and intuitive—he can master complex issues quickly and remember it all (I showed him Bergmann’s book on pi one day and without prompting he began to recite the pi through at least 50-places)—but the big deal was to recognize the shortest, best, most elegant solution to a problem.  And seeing that thousand pound behemoth fall safely to the ground as if on pillows is about the best exclamation mark that I can think of when talking about solutions like this.

Happy 50th Birthday, Walter Johnson

Here's an unusual musical bit using the first thousand places of pi for a piano solo.