Ptak Science Books

Dreaming of the 10-Ton Eiffel Tower Bullet, 1891

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 736

People find inspiration everywhere, insight to creativity in the obvious and not so.  Great statues have been envisioned in the depths of slabs of marble, solutions to mathematical problems in the step of a bus, the beginning of a new physics in the rolling ball in a wagon.  Its an old and very warn cliché, but the world can be seen in a grain of sand if you could just pieces together the bits of glass:  just as pointillism was seen in the not-simple intercession of two colors and cinematography in the latent image and the structure of the universe in a patch of dancing dust.

The Eiffel Tower has had its own way with the visions of people, from it representing the birth of The Modern, to an icon of passion, to architecture and engineering innovation, and to general  adventure and the call of possibility.  It has moved other people to think “special” thoughts:  like, for example, what a lovely canvas it would be to place a 700’-tall electrified sign.*  And to M. Carron of Grenoble, who may have the most unusual inspirations from M. Eiffel, the tower was the perfect place to drop a 40-foot tall, 20,000-pound bullet filled with 20 people in leather armchairs into a 200-foot deep champagne-glass pool.

This is certainly a singular insight.  But in 1891 it represented something a little more than just giving people a thrill ride.  Physics of impact aside for the moment, M.Carron’s bullet capsule would be released from the top of the interior of the Tower, about 1000 feet high, and released to fall into an excavated pool 150’ across and 200’ deep.  The idea was that in addition to the springs inside the capsule, the water would act as a “shock absorber”, and so “the shock felt by the occupants on landing will be in no way unpleasant”.  

[Okay, so the thing would hit at 178mph or so, and, assuming that the whole thing didn’t get completely crushed on impact, I’m not so sure that 200’ of depth is very much wiggle room for the thing to come to a halt (if it didn’t deform).  I Also it would have to not have any wind deflection so as to not veer off its perfect entry into the water.  And so on.  Calculating the force of impact is difficult without knowing how far down the bullet would go, but hitting the water at 80 m/s and stopping at 30 meters would yield something like 28,600,000 KE and 1,274,000 N. There are lots of problems….]

The thing is, though, the thing that made this so appealing, is that for the 20-francs that get a person a seat in the bullet, that they would each get to go twice as fast as any human had ever traveled before ( 65 miles per hour was about the speed of the fastest train constructed).  So it was an extraordinary claim, an done that doesn't get made all that often in the history of locomotion.

And so this wasn't a practicable or workable idea; but, well, so what?  It was an unusual idea, inspired by some sort of different thinking, which are both good places to be in according to the Gazetteer & Atlas of Ideas.  Sometimes thinking like this is just prelude to something else, thought avenues that had to be explored before the real thinking could get done, introducing you to a new geography of thought.  That's what M. Carron had going for him; the newness of his thinking was much more important than the wrongness of it.

*This story comes at the end of a post called Bad Ideas Department:  the First Image of a Hypnotized Chicken, so in spite of the title you'll wind up in Paris.

Trikewriter: 19th C Bicycle as Outdoor Printing Press

  JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 735 Blog Bookstore

Yesterday I posted a short note on the History of Extreme Writing with the example of cloud writing.  From clouds above to the mud below comes this second, very peculiar example of this exclusive genre:  tricycle writing.  This image shows the invention at work in the streets of Paris: as you can see it really was a printing press, applying the messages that were attached to the two rear tires in a way similar to that which prints lines in the street.  The wheels actually could be fitted with

movable type, making the message changeable. I imagine too that the messages could be written with water-soluble ink or whatever so that the advertiser could be paid again and again, and that the street canvas would be refreshed constantly.   I hate to say it--what with the possible destruction of public property aspect of it--but it looks to me as though this sort of thing would be very successful in getting a message across. At least the first time--it is easy to imagine hundreds of these buggers crisscrossing a city, messages on the ground everywhere, the streets confusions of sentiments and exclamation.  We have that now with billboards and other fixed advertising; so I imagine the only thing preventing ads from appearing on the roads are public safety issues. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Cloud Writing

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The History of Extreme Writing (for communicating across an uncommon distance) is relatively recent, given the thousands of years that humans have been communicating.  The 17^th century semaphore system for relaying telegraphic messages might be one, if you consider the semaphore’s decoration of a

building- or hill-top to be a piece of writing. Smoke signals and forms of communication relying on interrupted transmission of a powerful light source might look to be part of the environment, epically in regards to smoke, it message bright and visceral, and somewhat lasting, as it message moves and grows and dissipates (depending on the area’s climatic conditions for the hour).Church bells might apply (reminding the faithful and the fearful to consecrate  hope and fear), as might the Mullah’s voice, or the sound of a ram’s horn. Outside of things like mail, or the very short-lived super-mail Pony Express system, there was precious little that could be seen as a pre-electrical telegraphic regional internet. 

 

Perhaps the greatest example of Extreme Writing came this French effort to advertise on clouds.  Electrical advertising in general came a little slowly following the invention of commercial electricity. The, um, adventurous PT Barnum contracted the first electric bulb writing (utilizing the Edison invention) in Manhattan in 1892 to envious attention, resulting in less than 15 years with the Great White Way.  The world’s largest electric bulb writing was on the Eiffel Tower , with Andre Citroen agreeing to light the outline of the tower if he could put his name on the rest of it.  I’m not sure how this was seen as a good idea, but the sides of the tower were used for this purposes until somebody wised up and put an end to it all in 1937.  But the writing-on-clouds- bit was enormous and terribly disrespectful, and never really took any sort of hold in Europe, though it did get some amount of play in the U.S. from time to time.  Mostly, cloud writing worked best in fiction, and for one particular person—and there it worked rather well. 

Fabulous Victorian Technical Attempts at the Future Commonplace

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And so in 1869 came this odd Victorian appeal to a frosty blend of survivability and entertainment.  The fellow in this woodcut was decked out in the very latest lifesaving apparatus for

making one’s waxed-mustachioed way through disaster. The surviving member donned a very resistant, very heavy suit made of rubber, including a helmet (of some sort), all of which was made to make the wearer impervious to cold or heat./ Under the rubber suit was a floatation/buoyancy undersuit which seems to fit snuggly around the wear’s waistcoat.  It looks as though the whole of the suit would increase the mass of the wearer by something like one-third.  Most intriguing here is the little companion buoy (complete with a “Eureka” flag), which was outfitted with water, food, “reading material so that he may read the news to pass the time of day”, cigars, a pipe and tobacco, plus torches.  Evidently, this was to keep the person afloat, alive, and entertained for days on end. 

[The full descripiotn of the apparatus (as seen in the American Phreonological Journal, September, 1869) can be read in the continued reading section, below.]

This 1880 magnificent non-steam-driven telescoping india-rubber screw, invented by A. Gammonet (of Lyons, France) was designed for the non-swimming beach-goer who wanted to get into the surf.  The whole was supposed to be waterproof, so that the wearer could put it on over evening clothing (as is the case in this illustration) and enjoy a spin in the surf before contemplating other Victorian nighttime gaities. 

http://books.google.com/books?pg=PA350&lpg=PA350&dq=%22captain%20stoner%22%20life%20saving&

Triumphantly Unusual Images of the Eiffel Tower

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This image of the building of the foundation of the Eiffel Tower, which appeared in the Scientific American in 1888, appears both orderly and chaotic, a dizzy miasma of activity and a confusion of right angles.  (My six-year-old Tess says that it looks “worky”.)  Part of the issue is the fine quality of the jumble, with 90-degree angles everywhere, which confuses the eye.  Another part is the perspective, which is odd in places, and which takes the whole of it and makes the print into a near Escher-like experience of impossibility.  IT is this spatial confusion which makes this print so uncomfortable to me. For instance it seems that the observer’s point of view may be in several different positions, depending

on where you resolve to fix our eye: if you choose the worker’s shed in the upper left corner as a reference point, the height of you viewpoint will be different than if you used, say the first pointing man in the foreground as reference.  Also that pointing man sands next to a little rail track that seems to hoist itself into the air before disappearing.  There’s much else, but these examples will do for present.

These other images are the first nail & Eiffel Tower images I've ever seen.  The explanation is simple enough, though I think I'd much rather not know. 

This image and data is from the generally useful data and interesting if not useless info Scientific American Reference Book. A Manual for the Office, Household and Shop, by Albert A. Hopkins, and published in 1903. It gloriously depicts the annual American finish nail production in terms of Eiffel Towers:  there were evidently 10-million 100-pound kegs of these nails made in 1902; if they were made into one big nail, it would be this one--52' in diameter and 1000 feet tall.  I guess another useful visual bit would be the representation of the number of new houses built/kegs of nails, which would make this image a little more meaningful; though, perhaps, we may not be going for meaning, here, necessarily.

 

 

Powerhouse Woman Aviator: Amy Johnson, 1930

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Amy Johnson was the real deal. She was apparently hell-bent on flying:  she took her class “A” flying license in 1929 (at age 26) after just sixteen hours of training, and got her aviation engineer license a few months later (becoming one of the first women in England to do so.)  She was then off to Australia, by herself, becoming the first woman to make this as a solo flight.  Ms. Johnson covered all the bases in flight, knowing how to fly, having the stamina and courage for flight, and also being able to work a trade in the engine.  (Here she was the only woman ground engineer certified by the Air Ministry.)

When you look closely at this happy picture you can tell that Ms. Johnson came upon her frayed and worn pant cuffs honestly, as she did her oil/grime stained trouser legs.  This was no glam shot.

Amy Johnson accomplished other feats and firsts in aviation history before dying in the line of duty flying in 1942.     

Museum of the Impossible: The Basis for Goedel’s Attempt to Formalize the Logic of Boredom?

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(#17.5) Goedel’s Psychiatric Cheat Sheets

This description appears on pages 85-87 of the guide to the G.R."Joe"

Museum of the Imaginary and the Impossible*
The physical location of the collection is just south of Savannah on Tybee Island, Georgia.

Catalogue #17.5 (maths)  Received by Museum:  2 January 1960 

Kurt Godel’s Psychiatric Cheat-Sheet;  The Logician’s Notes on Surviving the 50-Minute Hour

Kurt Goedel, this century’s greatest logician (inventor/discoverer of the uncertainty principle and destroyer of what was thought to be the nearly-completed castle of Mathematical Finality) fled/escaped National Socialist Germany in 1940 and settled in Princeton's ’s Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS).  Goedel’s remarkable logical ability was followed closely by his collection of singularities—in a world of uneven people at the IAS, Goedel’s Unusual Prominences were highly unusual, and for many “odd” people Kurt Goedel was the definition of their three-letter defining disclaimer.

On exhibit is a collection of the intellectual paraphernalia that Goedel evidently assembled to bring with him to a September 1949 therapy session with his Trenton psychiatrist, Dr. R. Blister Kent.  Goedel put together a number of thoughts on various scraps of material that he must have used as “thought prompters”—their existence and purpose was  revealed in a series of letters to the Postmaster of Princeton describing these iconic objects “as Tibetan prayer rags…they were supposed to assure me of a certain level of attention and suffice to bring my mind to the business of the therapy session….without my scribbled clues I would have found myself bored beyond the supplication of mortal words.”

We see here the contents of an aged manila envelope labeled “

Trenton  Dr. Can Not Sep49” including the following, (with Goedel’s notations in quotation):

(Two)  Pressed flowers  with “ask about the laundry”; (three) Ticonderoga pencils with penciled notes “at what time did I happen”;  matchbook cover (“Happy’s Coffee Happy Restaurant”) with “I thought to stay and I stayed to go…”; a U.S. penny with a penned “x” through Lincoln’s head and the tiny words “not to be The Eat”; a 2’ long and 1” wide rolled piece of paper with musings on the relationship between memory, truth and imagination; a menu for a 1954 formal dinner introducing the JOHNIAC computer at the IAS in which Goedel has drawn a self portrait next to all  listed honorees names except his own; and several other small, inscrutable items.

 In Goedel’s collected correspondence from his uninvited letters to the Dead Letter Office at the Trenton Post Office period it is can be seen that he was intending to construct a puzzle of these objects and writings which were believed to contain the key for his germinal theory on the mathematics of boredom.

“There is a small leap from genius to boredom; if that can be breached and the two great concepts brought together I believe that I can accomplish truly wonderful thinking” Goedel wrote.  “I believe in boredom.  It is the Kind Devil that allows thought to grow; it is the great emancipator of time.  Boredom always wins; if I can ally that great heaviness with the energy of genius in pure form [i.e. mathematical formalism—editor] there will be no end to my creation.” 

Curator’s Notes:  Goedel had (many would say “suffered”) a life-long obsession with his health and the things that he thought impacted negatively upon it.   He believed that medicines that were given him by doctors were toxic, that water from the faucet was toxic, that the sun was toxic, that most foods he received were poisoned or toxic.  By 1970, when he was convinced (and forced) to seek medical help, his weight was recorded as 86 pounds even though he was 5’ 6’’ tall.  Goedel  had perhaps the world’s most singular interest in numbers; he was also extremely interested in the minutiae of daily life. 

Microcards and the Paper Internet

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For several decades, say in the 1930’s-1970’s, microforms, microfiche, microfilm and their related compatriots certainly looked as though they were next the direct and epochal inheritors of printing traditions that was limited to papyrus, paper, Gutenberg, and, well, micro-whatevers.  They weren’t too terribly wrong, and were actually getting a  little close to Vannevar Bush’s (1890-1974) Memex idea, as these processes of reproduction could reduce bookcases worth of bound material into a pile of cards a few inches high. It really was a sensational idea, and a major advancement in the distribution of knowledge.

Out of all the important advancements in the history of printing, though, the mico- division of accomplishments lasted the shortest amount of time, being phenomenally replaced by the first real man-machine symbiosis (at least called so by the originator, JCR Licklider), the internet.

(It is interesting to point out that at about the same time as the Memex concept was published in 1945, another man, Murray Leinster, whose dates are very similar to that of Bush (1890-1975) published a short story in Astounding Science Fiction magazine called ”A Logic Named  Joe”. The first sentence of the story reads: "It was on the third day of August that Joe come off the assembly line, and on the fifth Laurine come into town, an' that afternoon I saved civilization." Indeedy! Read the whole thing here.)

Leinster foretold a future in which computers would be in every household and connected by an electrical grid.  The “logic” was the home node, or terminal; “Joe” was a logic that had developed a little past the machine stage,  gaining some human capacity.  It was an astonishing attempt, and actually perhaps a little more prescient than the genius technoid Bush’s idea. 

 

God's Atomic Bomb: The Divine, The Infinite, and its "Gift" of the Bomb, 1946

JF Ptak Science Books LLC    Reissue of Post 234//Archive

(I re-found these pamphlets this morning; still like them...)

I'd like to say that this was a class-of-its-own sort of work, but as it  goes this is hardly the case.  If I cared a little I guess I could establish a collecting sub-category in the nuclear fission--atomic--nuclear  <continue>

A River of Odd Color: Unexpected Color Images of Food, 1949

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What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! Heart of Darkness

Coming on the heels of yesterday’s post about (impossible) retinal memory and the comfort of unusual color comes this bit of oddness from the House of La Rosa.  101 Ways to Prepare Macaroni seems about as benign and forgettable a title that one could write; that said, once opened, this little pamphlet poured its heart out to the Naïve Surreal in us all with the unforgettable (and accurate) color images of the promised linguine delicacies.  Honestly, the cover is why I have the thing—it is kind of perfect, a spare design that gets the message across, and leaves plenty of white.  It also uses a macaroni typeface.  But once inside the imagination is left to wander quite a bit between the colors of these foods that you were supposed to cook. And eat. 

I’ve long been a fan of taking a good close look at the foods on the  tabletops and dining tables of country homes, diners, and simple restaurants from the 1930’s—actually the Library of Congress is a wonderful source for this kind of image, having many thousands of them digitized from their monumental FSA collection.  The vast majority of these though are in black and white.  There seems to be not much more comforting than a checkered tablecloth on which a huge spread is laid for a farm family and their hired hands: giant bowls of mashed potatoes, big plates of corn, a huge pitcher of milk, and so on.  I could dive right in.  (The image below--by FSA great Russell Lee, shows a Kilgore, Texas, roughneck stopping for lunch.  This is not exactly what I had in mind, but the man has a real plate, a beautiful bottle of milk, cutlery, and all wrapped up in heavy paper--this is what brought-from-home lunches should look like.  And it makes me hungry.)

Then for some reason I started assembling a few hundred images of red photo ads of foods from LIFE magazine from the 1940’s—these are truly spectacular things, the reddest ads in the history of advertising.  (I’ll get to these in a week.) 

 And then came this funny little pamphlet and its bizarre display of food coloring that is so contentious that it might be able to put folks off their food.  Have a look. I’m uncertain of what happened to color selection for food advertising at this time; I do know that it is confusing to our sensibilities. (Color reproduction is accurate.)