Ptak Science Books

The Collapse of the Electric Light and Failure of Edison, 1879: Getting Things Terribly Wrong Just Before Things Get Incredibly Right

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 272

As ranging and seemingly gawking as these titles might seem today (W.H. Stone's "The Electric Light" in January 1879 and "The Collapse of the Electric Light" in June 1879 and published in the London's Popular Science Review), they were somewhat, limitedly, correct.  It really wasn't until several months later in that same year that Edison got the design of the light bulb more correct, following his developments of a smaller carbonized filament in a better globe vacuum and utilizing a lower current of electricity--this produced a much more long lasting light, far surpassing his 13-15 hours filament from 1876, and making the electric light a definite economic property. Naturally there was much more to be done, like establish the entire backbone and network of n electrical grid, from improving the generating dynamos to the creation and installation of on-off switches, but that was all doable. The modern power grid was inaugurated on September 4, 1882, when  the first commercial power station, located on Pearl Street. serviced about a square mile of lower Manhattan.  Six years earlier,  in 1876 this prospect seemed futuristic, and the prospect for Edison's light itself  looked pretty dim.

Stone wrote "It is hardly a matter of surprise that the exaggerated expectations formed a few months ago to the illuminating power of electricity should have been succeeded by a reaction, and that its practical value, from an estimate that was clearly excessive, should have fallen inn public opinion to what is probably an equally unjust depreciation....causing panic-like depreciation in the stocks of gas companies..."

He continues to wail away at Edison, who was just weeks away from solving the riddle of mass electrical illumination: "Much of the contrivance [light bulb] is of great ingenuity, and evidences considerable mechanical skill.  But all competent authorities are agreed in considering that it in no way supercedes existing methods [gas lighting] or that in any sense fulfills the revolutionary  prognostics freely made in its favor...."

Oh dear.  I can't find anything that Stone wrote about the new Edison developments over the coming year.  The man got some of his assessment correct, but he got the overall appreciation patently incorrect, and with terrifically bad timing, calling the day false just minutes before the dawn. 

Edison was hardly alone in this pursuit even in 1876, the year of great discovery.  It was a crowded house.  And even a quick consideration shows how many others there were preceding Edison in this pursuit:Humphrey Davy, the great English chemist and all-around smart-guy, invented the firs sort of electric light in 1809.  It was quite simple but the idea was definitely there--he produced the first arc light by passing an electric charge through a charcoal strip causing its charged carbon to glow and emit light.  Eleven years later, in 1820, Warren de la Rue made improvements upon this idea and employed platinum rather than carbon, producing a literally and figuratively rich glow.  The electrical revolution waited for its Edison in spite of earlier creations of practical light bulbs by James B. Lindsay (1935), Edward Shepard (1850) and Henricg Globel (1854, and perhaps the most significant of the last three).  There was really an incredible amount of work being done between 1850-1880, but it really was Edison who pulled it al together--and even then, when he perfected his light bulb, it was based on the 1875 patent he purchased from inventors, Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans, his filament burning bright in an oxygenless glass whose basis was derived from the work of Herman Sprengel who had invented the mercury vacuum pump capable of producing this vacuum.

And then the real industrial revolution could get underway. 

Stone finishes the second article with this I'm-sitting-on-a-tree-limb-way-up-high-and-cutting-through-it-with-an-antique-saw-between-me-and-the-tree sensibility of terrifically impending high embarrassment:

"...the electric light, while invaluable for exceptional cases, such as for lighthouses, military telegraphy and exploration...or even for stage effects and festive occasions, is neither so pleasant, so safe, so steady, so simple, or so manageable as the better forms of ordinary gas-lighting now universally adopted", and thus putting his own gas lighting service back just as the metropolitan power station "on" switch gets thrown.   I did find a few other articles by the same author: one in the Popular Science Review for 1881 on "The Determination of Musical Pitch" and another in Nature for 1883, writing on" Speaking, Singing and Stammering".  Not much said about Edison, there. 

"Why is England in the Pyramid?"-- A Question That Has Never Been Asked Before (?); or, FInding Pi in the Pyramid

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 272

"The lunatic , the lover and the poet,
are of imagination  all compact..."
    Midsummer-Night's Dream act v sc 1

"Great ideas sure to madness near allied
and thin partitions do their bounds divide"
    Dyden, Absolom and Achtiophel, part i, line 163.

I am pretty sure that O. Gordon Pickett, the very dedicated and serious author of this work, may well have been the only person to put the question forward of "why is England in the Queen's Chamber of [sic] Pyramid?"  Isn't the ability to ask an uncommon question one of the sources of innovation and genius?  Mr. Pickett, of Los Angeles (of course (?)), tried mightily in this 1928 publication to make his case for predetermination of the Anglo Saxon race by assembling and interpreting lost angles (sorry), implied geometry, found numbers, ratios, perspectives, and the like, endlessly, to find the outline of the England in the Queen's Chamber of the Great Pyramid.  Almost all of this was invisible, a kind of outsider-logic-x-ray brought to bear on pyramid architecture--and when the picture clears, what the x-ray reveals,somehow and incredibly, is England.  And Christ.  And Pi. And although he was dedicated, and insightful, and capable of long sitting time, he probably was not a genius as we would recognize today, testing perhaps what Charles Lamb called the "radical sanity of genius" ("Sanity of True Genius" in Last Essays of Ella). Sometimes, having the ability to ask an unrecognized and first-time question doesn't mean that the there is an ability to discern a place for the thing in a shining logical kingdom.  I do appreciate though that Mr. Pickett was a considered and discerning thinker, though to what non-personal end it all came to, I don't know.

But Mr. Pickett did evidently assemble ALLOT of data and drawings and plans and renderings of the pyramids in the course of looking for the secret strings  which would alter the known into the secret and unknown.

I think what is most revealing about the way that he is going with his hard-thunk hard data is particularly revealing, and may also be, in their own way, some of the most uncommonly-titled visual displays of "quantitative" data that I've encountered:   "The Wonderful Wall of Joints, Ascending Passage, North, Crucifixion and Resurrection", "(Pyramid) Passages and Planetary Rotation", "Birth of Jesus at Entrance" and "Some Pyramid Pi Values" are all unexpected constructions.   Well, hard work does not necessarily make for good thinking, and though Mr. Pickett did allot of thinking on this...

Where are the Dead? When is a pit a hell, a hell a grave, a grave a pit, and Hades not Hell?

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post Post 271

Oscar Lowry attempts to answer the question in the subject line of this post in a very red book of 46 shouty pages.  What he's really concerned with, in Where are the Dead (1930), and what he maintains is of "universal interest to the saved and unsaved, the hearers and nonhearers", is what happens to people after they die; more particularly though, Mr. Lowry is interested in differentiations in eternal damnations versus eternal doom.  And there is evidently a very wide difference here, as people in Hades are just in "prison", waiting for their final judgment which will fling them into Mr. Cash's ring of fire (well,"lake" of fire, actually).  There's also little chance that the snakey charms of Orpheus' poetry will ever change anyone's mind at the gates of Sheol-Hades, leading anyone away from the firey pit.  The discussion of Hades and Hell and Sheol is interesting if not scary in Mr. Lowry's hands, describing "Sheol-Hades" as a "prison", its occupants waiting for final disposition to Hell.  Strong's Hebrew opens the possibilities of definition with a number of translations for Sheol: the underworld, the abode of the dead, place of no return; without praise of God; wicked sent there for punishment; righteous not abandoned to it; of the place of exile; of extreme degradation in sin.  The most troubling of these in my book is the definition of what it is not, as in "when the righteous are not abandoned to it", which seems both reassuring and really terrifying.. 

Millions now Living May Never Die (1939)  is  a great title which leads ultimately to a not terribly interesting pamphlet about The Rapture.  Its also very badly timed for such a title--1939--as 20 or 30 million extra people would die who shouldn't've by 1945.  I'm not sure why capitalization is required for the rapture, as it will probably not be confused with Another Rapture, or the Pseudo Rapture or even the Pre-Rapture--I must admit though that the mechanics of the rapture are not obvious to me, coming as it does after the Advent and Second Advent (which comes after seven years of Tribulation, or something like that).  The author, another Lowry , this one a Cecil from the Southwestern Bible School of Enid, Oklahoma,  writes with an abundance of capitalization about the impending "return of Jesus for His Bride", and how the rapture will take you where you are, leaving the righteous to live on the earth, and others, well, not. The word "doom" appears more often than a semi-colon.  "Because the world is round, it will be night on one side of the earth and day on the other.  So many will be translated [i.e. "terminated"] that the great newspapers of the earth will carry in their headlines words similar to these:  'Millions have mysteriously disappeared from the earth'.  I am told that a certain large newspaper already have their type for for that event."  The rapture will take you from "Satan's slime pits" wherever they are, "at beach bathing and beer parlors " to name a few, though I think that one can stop reading at being sucked into oblivion for sitting in the sand at Tybee Island, particularly if you're five years old.  Be that as it may, probably everyone who read these the works when they were first published are now probably dead, enraptured or not.

Towards a History of Horses in Flight in the 19th Century.

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Here's a great opening sentence:  "Images of 19th century flying horses have always been difficult to find".  And, since this is a serious issue, it really is a true statement, until today, when I noticed them in a little project I was dong.  I found a lovely history of balloon and aeroplane flight published in The Illustrated London News for 3 July 1909, called "The Evolution of the Great War-ships of the Air:  Balloons, Non-Dirigible and Dirigible, and Aeroplanes, from the Seventeenth Century to the Twentieth Century.  Its a big, double-page spread of a picture, featuring 60 or so of these flying machines--its so wonderful that I decided to reproduce the thing in a large format (35 x 45 inches), and it was then that I noticed something quite strange, at least to my experience
.
There were flying horses.  And one flying stag.
Men on horseback in balloons.

Actually, 8% or so of the images in the display involved horses. 
Now perhaps men on horseback in balloons in the 19th century is a well know bit of aviation history; however, not being an historian in this area I've got to admit that I was very surprised (!!) when I first noticed these horses.
                                                                                              
Missing them is understandable if you weren't looking closely at the image's little bits and pieces, what with the horses occupying something like 1/1,000 of the print's surface.  But there they are, clear and bright as day:  "1798, Ascent by Testu-Brissey", and "1828 London Chas Green on horseback", and "1850 Paris Poiteven's ascent on horseback (10,000 spectators)". 

In what is certainly a very uncommon notice there is also "Sep 1850 English Aeronaut Gale on horseback suffocated Bordeaux".  Is this the first man-on-horseback-in-flight death? And death by suffocation? (?)  I'm not so sure that the ascent records for 1850 would've made allowance for running out of oxygen at high altitudes--if not, then how did this man suffocate? According to the Dictionary of National Biography, which, somehow, admitted (George) Gale (1797-1850) to its pages, reported that he died as a result of a misunderstanding of language, sent back into the heavens after landing with his pony, his balloon mistakenly released with none of its ballast remaining, with him attached to it still.  It was his 114th flight, which was quite allot, but not evidently enough.   Gale was a very colorful character, being an actor, then finding his way out to the American west and returning with several of the Indians he encountered and "exhibiting" them at the Victoria Theatre, and then becoming an Irish blockade defender before turning to ballooning. 

Then there is the utterly fantastic "1804 Paris Margat on a stag".  Somehow I guess M. Margat thought that being on a horse just wasn't quite enough, and elected to ride a stag.  I'm not sure what to say, exactly, except that all of this renders "1836 Surrey Gardens--monkey "Jacopo" & parachute (with a little monkey dropped/thrown from the balloon in an experimental parachute device) somewhat anti-climactic. 

What I was really after in this print and which I'll get to in another post--sidetracked as I am by the horse issue--is found in the subtitle: "first used for pleasure and by scientists, destined to become engines of war...the balloon", about the short but furious transformation of the aeroplane into a machine of war, all of which takes place in about a five-year period.  But that's for another day. 

Visual Display of Data: Bad Graphics, Nazi War MAterials, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 269

This dense, complicated table showing the distribution of strategic raw materials (published in The Illustrated London News 3 August 1940) I is a decent example of how not to display data. Perhaps there’s just too many variables to try to control here in one visual display: it tracks twenty raw materials by percentage of access for thirteen different countries, with the entire graph being displayed in a sort-of progression according to metric tons of material. Maybe it’s the varying widths of the bars representing the material, maybe it’s the complex designs distinguishing the countries, and maybe its just too many lines. The only time this really works for relatively-offhand use is when you’re looking for one country in particular, and then the eye allows it self to just concentrate on the solid black (Germany) or the stars in a bar (U.S.) When the graph is used in this manner it displays rather quickly that Nazi Germany doesn’t control a whole lot of the combined tonnage of the twenty strategic materials, which was a particularly good thing for the general reading population in the Allied world to see, because the war was not going so well at this early stage. (At this point in the war—less than a year old now in Europe—the Battle of Britain had begun though it was still weeks away from when the massive Blitz begins, and Hitler had just toured Paris…it was not a good time for Britain, and a worse time for France. The

Soviet Union

is listed still with the Axis as it was still 10 months away from being attacked, Hitler turning on his allies in Operation Barbarosa in June 1941.)

A little further effort would show that the Allied countries are mainly lighter, with the “belligerent” or neutral countries are darker, showing the lighter is on top with darker beneath, and that in general the Allies control more of these materials than the Axis.  It is also interesting to not ethe relative smallness of control by

Great   Britain

, though when you throw in the rest of the British and then the French empires the possession summary changes dramatically.

 So the data is there, and there’s allot of it, and its fairly nimble—its just that the visual display is not pretty or easy to use .  

Visual Display of Information:TWIGS (!)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 268

These two wonderful and unexpected sets of data come from Sir John Lubbock's article On Leaves, appearing in the Popular Science Monthly for July 1885.  Sir John was a very keen and astute observer of nature, and was one of a long line of gentleman/noble scientists naturalists and the fourth Sir John in the Lubbock line.  The idea that Lubbock was running here with was the the size and shape of the leaf of a tree was determined by the diamter of the twig leading to the sixth leaf of the tree, with size determining form and function.   This gets much more complicated than this, once you throw in a bunch of the other factors that he treid to account for, and I'm not qualified to respond to this work.  What I liked though was the thickness indicator (below) of twigs of twelve different trees and the thickness of their twigs at Lubbock's decribed sixth leaf, which is something I've not scene before (though I'm hardly a naturalist, I have seen hundreds of thousands of scientific and natural history images, and I've not seen one like this).  It is glorious in its own quiet way.  The chart that he provides correlating leaf size (the square footage of leaf in the last six leaves with twig thickness) is seen in the table at bottom. 

I'm aware that I haven't said very much about this, but I just couldn't pass on the opportunity to post this iamge on twig thickness.                                                               

(Click to enlarge to readable size.)

The Most LIterary Fireworks Catalog Ever Published? The Naming of Explosions.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 267

I found this wonderful catalog this morning--the 1935 Liberty Catalog of Display Fireworks.  It is big (11x8 inches) and its 64 pages are filled with descriptions of the hundreds of different advanced firework displays that you could purchase.  Mostly the company was interested in selling very large, packaged displays, hovering in the hundreds of dollars, which was quite allot of money in the 1930's, even without considering the impact of the Depression on the fireworks-pursuing populace.  These people were definitely not selling firecrackers to kids.

The illustrations in the pamphlet are remarkable for displaying so many of their goods, and were printed in high relief, being dark red on a field of black.  Very effective!

What is particularly striking about the catalog, aside from its terrific visual elements, are the names given to the fireworks--they are artistic, literary, mythological.  No "brainbusters" or "Finger Splinters" here. Some of the names include Cleopatra’s Jewels, the Victor Jerome Battle in the Clouds Shell, Flight of Egyptians Repeating Bombshells, Spiderweb Comet, the Arenic Festival of Flowers, Devil Among the Tailors, the Palmetto Fountain, Selma Lee Shell of Shells, Sparkling Diamonds and the Sparkling Diamond Merry-Go-Round, Temple of Isis, the Mammoth Devil Wheel, Prismatic Devil Wheels, Whistling Jack Bombshells, Messengers to Starlands, Radio Flash Rockets, Ceylon Rubies, Fish and Whistle, the End of the Rainbow, and my favorite: The End of the World.

Funny thing is that they do sort of describe the effect of the fireworks.  I thought that I might learn something of the social under- or over-currents by having a peek at the names, but there was little of that:  several FDR displays are sprinkled around the catalog, a couple of special radio-related items, but really, that's about all.  No insights there.  No  "Honey I'm Going to Catch the Danvillle Train and Get Me Some Dough" or "Brother Can You Spare a Dime" displays; who wants to be reminded of the not-so-nice when celebrating something with gigantic loud colorful controlled explosions?


No. The surprising element was the naming of the explosions.  And naming explosions goes back quite a way in the history of military affairs, not that I really know anything about that--I do have photographs of French soldiers decorating their 15-inch shells with messages to the Germans in 1918, and there's no end to the images of American soldiers writing/naming their bomb-to-be-delivered to whomever it was we were blasting.  But they weren't quite in this Liberty Catalog arena of fresh literariness, though the more-modern military epigrams were more pithy, and drenched in their own sea of color. (This of course is Slim Pickens as he climbs aboard a thermonuclear device, nearly ready to buckaroo it down to its destination; the other device I think was called "Dear John".) The atomic device at Trinity was decorated with scribble, but I'm not sure that any of the photos were ever clear enough to reveal the sentiments.

   The U.S. government had names for every one of their test shots of nuclear devices, though none approached anything like a creative caliber:  Able, Baker, Prisiclla, Operationr Plumbbob, Thunderwell, Smoky, Diablo....pretty ordinary.  The government did wake itself up to use some scientific-biographical names for some of the tests in the Plumbbob Operation:  Franklin, Kepler, Pascal, Stokes, Galileo, Doppler, Fizeau (!), and Newton.  I think that only Sir Isaac would've been pleased with this honor.   

Methods for Solitary Self Crucifixion: the Case of Matthew Lovat, 1822

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There are no doubt many instance of voluntary crucifixtion by religious zealots--the case of Matthew Lovat, seen here in an issue of the compact London-based polite journal called The Mirrour (of Literature, Amusement and Instruction) is particularly pungent because he figured out a way to crucify himself without the help of others.  If you allow yourself to think about this a bit--and I must admit, the thought of self- and un-aided crucifixion had never entered my head before now--it really is a difficult procedure to implement.  Mr. Lovat seems to have thought it out and conquered the lowly demons that stood between him and him cross.  I've reprinted some of the explanation of how he undertook this adventure in 1802, included in the continued reading section below. 

I should quickly point out that Lovat, a shoemaker from Italy ("born of poor parents, employed in the coarsest and most laborious works of husbandry, and fixed to a place remote from almost all society"), survived himself and after having his health restored escaped into the city wearing nothing but a shirt.  He was brought back into custody ("by the servants") and remanded to the Lunatic Asylum of San Servolo, in Venice.  This was no doubt an unhappy situation, for anyone, crazy or not.  Lovat expired himself finally in 1808, evidently from taking too much sun. 

The Art of Writing in the Dark: a Fire-Lit Alphabet,1808

JF Ptak Science Books LLC, Post 265

This curious illustration appears in forty-five volume Cyclopedia of  Abraham Rees (published 1795-1820), displaying a system for communicating over distances at night.  When this part of the Cyclopedia was printed in 1808, the electrical telegraph was still 37 years away from coming into being--45 years from being somewhat well-used.  Before this time (visual) communications over long distances at night were limited to just these sorts of means--lighted semaphores, hand-held torches, that sort of thing.  Signaling at sea at night was somewhat different at this time and didn't include anything remotely close to the alphabet.  So the rather complex system that we see at left is extremely uncommon--it seems also very cumbersome to put into effect.  Unfortunately I don't have the text volume that would explain then entire system and implementation, so I'm going to guess that there was a large, powerful light source that was covered by a tight, black, covering tablet that would eliminate nearly all light leakage.  The symbols for each letter of the alphabet (and numerals) would be cut out from another tablet that would fit over the face of the light source, placed between the blank and the light.  To transmit a letter the user would then simply remove the blank covering tablet to reveal the light broadcast by the hole or slit in the tablet underneath.  The blank would then be placed back, a new tablet for a new letter placed underneath, and the process would begin again:  blank (dark); letter (light); blank (dark); letter (light), and so on to the end of the message.   I guess the distance at which these symbols could be seen would be dependent on light source, atmospheric conditions, ad so on.  The way that the letters are made into symbols seems to me very intelligent, so that you distinguish the differences from an appreciable distance.  I like it--its an elegant idea.  (Well, maybe it didn't work in this manner, but it seems to make sense to me.)

The image of the full sheet:

Visual Display of Information: Ships on the Pyramid and in Trafalgar Square

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 264

Just yesterday I made a post about Ships-in-the-Skyline as part of a series on the Visual Display of Information, saying that I recalled seeing another ship as part of a skyline but couldn't recall the reference.  Luckily just now I stumbled upon it, and it is better than memory served--it is also the sister ship of yesterday's Mauretania, the even-more-famous Lusitania.  This ten-part full-page illustration in The Illustrated London News for 14 September 1907 seems to cover all of the cityscape bases for ship comparison, and then some, from the Lusitania dwarfing the Cecil/Savoy Hotels, or behind the Manchester Town Hall, to being printed in outline against the enormous Auditorium Hotel in Chicago.  I think that for most people, numbers don't quite "do" for comparative discussions on unrelated objects--illustrations like this, though, form a perfect understanding almost instantly.

There are four other outstanding comparative views, though, that are just simply remarkable, using points of view that I've not noticed before. 

1.  The first is the spectacular image of the Lusitania on the side of the Great Pyramid--taken alone, discretely and removed from context this image would be a prime example of the Found Dadaist division of my imaginary museum of Found Art..

2.  This next image, below, is one of the rare times that buildings are displayed on a horizontal axis next to a ship--in this case, its the (Stieglitz) Flat Iron Building (NYC).  A bonus with the Flat Iron Building was placing the plan of the structure on the superstructure of the Lusitania!  This was a superb idea. 

3.  I'm certain that this bit of early 20th century pre-photoshopism must've stopped the casual view in their tracks--seeing the stern of the Lusitania completely filling up Northumberland Avenue at Trafalgar Square must've been a true surprise to the visual system.

4.  The last of the four shows one of the four great funnels of the Lusitania on its side allowing traffic to go through it for two blocks or so, resting on its side on the great Argyle Street in Glasgow.  If all four stacks had been placed end-to-end, traffic could've continued through it for 7 blocks or more.

A Fortune in Frogs AND a Frog Ranch Map. Really. 1936

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This is the great promise of this remarkably mundane and contemporarily-wholly-removed pamphlet, which promises rewards and riches to be made in even the simplest backyard frog ranch, and all done with water, cement and no secret decoder ring. I mean, good night! I really had no idea whatsoever about such frog-goings-on in the depths of our country, even if the "depths" was Ridgewood, New Jersey, and it was the Depression (this pamphlet published in 1936).  I don't have too much else to say about this remark effort except that--for all I know and I am not going to research it--this may well be the earliest Frog Ranch Plan published in the U.S.  There.  I said it (though my "key words" section says it all: "Frog farm, frog ranch, frog raising, frog map").

Graphical Display of Data: the R.A.F. and Luftwaffe Present Their Cases, 1938-1940

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These four images represent some common, popular distribution of information to the general population, the sets of two working at cross purposes.  (I've written several posts here about the Nazi use of maps as a propaganda tool; if you search this blog under those terms you'll find several entries.)  The British images  were issued just after the start of WWII (30 September 1939) and then again just after the end of the Battle of Britain (November 1, 1941), respectively.  The first ("The Tremendous Range of RAF Bombers Pictorially Shown"), illustrates the range capacity of its long range bombers for WWI and for 1939, showing how far they could strike into the heart of Africa.  I'm not so sure why Africa was chosen as the target, as nothing at all was happening there, militarily speaking, at this early stage of the war; why this didn't show the planes screaming their way to the east is a mystery to me.    The Home Office was busy showing how far the Wellington bomber could reach (3,240 mles), as well as the long shadows cast by the Hampden, Sunderland and Wellesley.  The second British image, "The Speed and Power of Fighter Craft, Comparisons of Range"  displays aircraft of the principle RAF and Luftwaffe fighters and bombers. 

The first German image, printed as a small inset map in a general propaganda piece in the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzg), for November 1940, depicted the capacity of the Luftwaffe to reach, threaten and bomb any region in the British Isles from bases in Calais (France) and Norway, having secured the positions in their attacks against the two countries in Fall Gelb and Operation Weserubung respectively. Britain was effectively half-surrounded from these positions from the Brittany to the Norwegian coasts.

The second German map (and the fourth presented here) is another interesting fiction coming from the propaganda offices in 1938, showing how Germany was threatened by attack from the air forces of its neighbors.  Particularly pungent in this portrayal was the threat from Checoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Poland.
  

Comparative Display of Quantitative Data: Ships in the Skyline

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This wonderful display (appearing in The Illustrated London News for 26 March 1927, page 518) of quantitative data isn't quite as whimsical as it appears in detail, though I can think of only a few (antiquarian) times that I have seen a ship made part of a cosmopolitan vertical cityscape.  It is a great way of comparing two disparate, out-of-place equals, and certainly can get the idea of the size of something as stand-alone and solitary as a great ship to children (and adults, too) by comparing it to something as obvious as a tall building.,  This time its really just comparing the length of the SS Mauretania with the heights of some famous and notable buildings. (The Mauretania, 1906-1935, was a fabled, luxurious and fast ocean liner of the Cunard line; it was refitted for a resurgent oceanic service at about this time.)   In the larger, expanded second image we see the Mauretania stacked up against (from left to right) the Washington Monument (555'), the Woolworth Building (792'), the Mauretania  (790'), the Eiffel Tower (984'), the Larkin Building (proposed at 1208'), the Book Building (873'), the Koln Cathedral (512') and the Statue of Liberty (305').  The Larkin Building (not the F.L. Wright structure of the same name) was a proposed super-tall of 110 floors for 330 W. 42nd Street that was proposed in 1926 and not canceled until 1930, and which would've been the tallest building in the world. (For an interesting site on the cancellation of tall buildings, see HERE.)   In any event, this was a big ship--the largest in the world when it was launched as a matter of fact--and the drawing is wonderful.   Upon closer inspection, there is a terrific amount of detail in the cross section of teh ship.)                                                   

About where the books and pamphlets I write about come from...

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

I've been asked a few times this week about the source of the materials that I write about.  The overwhelming majority of the books and pamphlets are right here, in my store or warehouse (see the above link for the science bookstore), so I see allot of this stuff everyday, currency of the realm and all that.  Most of the odd things that are found in my blog--flagpole painting, zipper repair, finding England in the Great Pyramid, building the Great Pyramid in Detroit, and so on) have come to me via the Library of Congress, where for many years I managed to purchase/trade for bits and pieces of their surplus.  One large purchase in particular from the LC--the 90,000-item "Pamphlet Collection--has provided thousands of the sublime mundane, naive surreal masterpieces that I've found so irresistible.  Most of this material hasn't found a place in my store, which as you now know specializes in classics in modern physics and mathematics, but I do hope to be able to place them as a collection at some dim point in the future.  I would love to generate a few books out of them, and I think that a choice 500 of them or so would make a tremendous show somewhere (Brooklyn?) as a Found Art, Unexpected Dadaist, The Surprise of the Naive Surreal, show or some such thing, showing a marriage of design, outsider intellect and sublime mundane.   There are at the very least several thousands of these things from the Pamphlet Collection that are gorgeous and so unexpected, that are such intellectual (or non-intellectual) surprises, that they would (I think) make for a bang-up show. 

And so that's where these things come from.  They come to be posted by chance, generally because I bump into one of these things while looking for something else. 

Dropping Boxes Filled With Soldiers: a Bad Technical Idea but a Great Strategic One, 1928

JF Ptak Science Books, LLC Post 260

This may not be the best idea I've seen--in principle this works fine for dropping tanks and other ordnance, but it seems to run against common sense when applied to delivering soldiers to a combat area.  This was of course just ten years after the end of WWI, which saw a spectacular increase in aircraft and aeronautical knowledge, and only 25 years after the Wright Brothers' powered heavier than air flight at Kill Devil, so the lessons on paratrooping were just now being learned.  (By the way, what was the most significant militarily-based discovery in aviation between 1914-1918?  Could it have been the invention of the "barrel roll", which instantly changed all concepts of aerial strategy?)                                                                                                    
Now what was going on in this display--appearing in the Illustrated London News on 8 September 1928--was the idea that a group of soldiers  (14 in this case) could be seated in a cushioned/springed box which would be parachuted onto a battlefield.  The idea of getting troops into a tight or difficult spot by a parachute is a very good one, a brilliant step forward really in the history of military strategy--but doing it in this fashion, by these means, was just not correct.  First of all the whole thing looks way too heavy for the aircraft to leave the ground to begin with, at least with those engines; then it looks too heavy for the chute to pull it out of the plane (and looks as though it would act as an airbrake more than anything else, as the chute seems to be gigantic, fully half the width of an already-wide aircraft. I reckon that given space for seven seated men that the cabin would have to be at least 25' long, meaning that the parachute seems to be 10 cabin-widths in the larger image, or 250' in diameter...in the smaller image the chute is only 4 times the length of the cabin or so, meaning it is a hundred feet across.).  The intention was for the chute to be deployed and for it to somehow lift the big box up and out of the plane, without dragging into or across the tail and etc. Then there's the issue of landing, which, springs or shock absorbers or not, looks to be very problematical. 

The technical part of the strategic idea just wasn't going to work--the idea would, of course. 

I should point out that this image was drawn by G.H. Davis, who made hundreds of images like this for the ILN over a four decade career--we'll be seeing more of his work in the months to come.  Usually the work of Mr. Davis was spot-on, and he seemed to flourish in the "exploded view" and cut-away schematic.  This drawing was from the earliest part of his career, and I think he didn't have much to work with--it seems an idea with a lot of leftover and abandoned Edwardian sensibilities.