Ptak Science Books

Going from “Nothing” to Everything in a Few Years: Einstein at the Solvay Conference, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 761 Blog Bookstore

By “nothing” I mean Einstein’s relative “nothing” of early 1905 compared to the rest of the hard-working, Ph.D. laden physics field in the major universities of Germany.  And certainly Einstein was nothing and somewhat nowhere in this regard just prior to his momentous year of 1905*, scrounging around the fringes of the academic world, working as a patent examiner, trying to get his doctorate hammered out and accepted. 

Then come the summer of 1905, and the dates June 9,  July 18,  September 26 and November 21—the publication dates of his four papers in the Annalen der Physik, and with them a new epoch in the history of physics, a true modernizing, revolutionary effect takes place. 

But Einstein quietly gets his dissertation accepted (and his degree confirmed in January 1906 from the University of Zurich), and his revolution is started, absolutely certain of his results, but privately worried about whether all of it would be as beautiful as Newton ’s theories. The ball is forever set in motion.  And to make a little extra money, Einstein takes a private student for instruction at the end of the year.  He is 26 years old. 

The odd thing (although not odd when explained by Abraham Pais in any of his three books relating to Einstein) is that Einstein would remain at the patent office for another four years, though he is promoted to second class expert in 1907.  Einstein does become a private college lecturer in 1908, but stays with the patent office until October 1909 (even though he is awarded his first honorary doctorate in July from the University of Geneva) when he begins work as an associate prof for theoretical physics at Zurich.

Things speed up for Einstein from this point, and he is suddenly and rightfully acknowledged as being one of the most important thinkers in the field of physics in the world by being invited to the ultra-exclusive Solvay Conference for theoretical physics in 1911. (By the time of the conference, Einstein had been a professor at the German University in Prague, in 1910.) At 32 he is the youngest person there, surrounded by some of the best minds in the business. 

[Invited attendees for the 1911 Solvay Conference at the Hotel Metropole. included   Seated (L-R): W. Nernst, M. Brillouin, E. Solvay, H. Lorentz, E. Warburg, J. Perrin, W. Wien, M. Curie, and H. Poincaré. Standing (L-R): R. Goldschmidt, M. Planck, H. Rubens, A. Sommerfeld, F. Lindemann, M. de Broglie, M. Knudsen, F. Hasenöhrl, G. Hostelet, E. Herzen, J.H. Jeans, E. Rutherford, H. Kamerlingh Onnes, A. Einstein and P. Langevin.]

Einstein is evidently not moved by the proceedings, writing that he had heard “nothing new”, at least at the formal meetings.  The conference was for a full week,but since everyone was staying at the same hotel (which would’ve been a pretty potent address for that week) I assume that a lot was discussed in private—evidently Einstein was extremely quiet during the official proceedings, but became animated in private, post-conference conversations. 

My point for this post, really, is quite simple—the extraordinary academic rise in Einstein’s fortunes during the 1909-1911 period, captured in this famous photo.  Einstein was a bona fide powerhouse (the powerhouse) by this point, what with his revolutionary 1905 papers, plus the blockbusters of 1906, 1908 and 1911, and still yet getting stronger. (Incidentally, I always wondered about Einstein’s hand position in photos like this, showing one hand seemingly forming a neat zero with index and thumb. Actually, that hand is in the same position for this photo and for the other Solvay Conferences that Einstein attended (the 2^nd, 5^th and 6^th)—the mystery for me was solved by my friend Dr. Raymond Cooper, who pointed out to me that it was just Einstein holding his pipe.

*It really is hard to overstate the importance of Einstein’s efforts in this year.  Really.

The four papers in volume 17 of the Annalen der Physik:

-Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristishen Gesichtspunkt, (“On a Heuristic Point of View concerning the Production and Transformation of Light.”) being the photoelectricity/quantum of light paper, received March 18 and published June 9.

-Die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen, (“On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat”), being the  Brownian Motion of particles/atomic theory paper, received May 11, published July 18.

-Elektrodynamic bewegter Körper, (“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”), being the special relativity theory paper,. received June 30 and published 26 September.

-Ist die Trägheit eines Körpers von seinem Energieeinhalt abhängig? (“Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon Its Energy Content?”), being the mass-energy equivalence paper (and the kernel of E=mc²), received September 27 and published November 21.

A List of the Solvay Conferences (the number, followed by its year, a translation of the title of the conference, and the conference chair):

The Overworked Working Poor of 1914: Women and Children and What They Didn't Get Paid

JF Ptak Science Books LLC    Post 760   Blog Bookstore

An income of $10,000 dollars a year, in the Depression year of 1936, was a huge, fabulous fortune, controlling a major buying power for food and cars and housing.  (A fine brick home for the solid middle class family of five would’ve cost well less than the 10K per year—which means that this 1936 income would correlate somewhat to a 300,000/year income in 2009 dollars so far as buying power goes.) Unfortunately the author of this pamphlet directed it at doctors who could supplement or insure their income by selling their patients the pamphlet’s products:  “Anabolic Food Products”, a quacky vitamin supplement that evidently had really little use except to expand the income. 

This reminded me of another pamphlet from a slightly earlier period on the over-worked working poor.  Report to the Louisiana State Commission to Study the Conditions of Working Women and Children… (published in 1914), chronicled the averages incomes more so than the conditions of their work—and the statistical package was simply not a pretty story.  Reading through the numbers hammered home how far away and mountainous $10,000 a year meant. 

That big bump in the bar graph for factory wages shows that the most frequent average weekly wage for women and children was about  $3.75, with about a quarter of all of those polled workers making less than that, and about half making 5.00 a week or so. Multiply those figures by 52 and they don’t come out to much—specifically, they don’t really approach the average income for a worker in the U.S. in 1914, which was about $650 a year.  It looks like only 10% or so of all of these workers met this standard of $12.50 per week.  And this was for factory workers—things get worse for most all other types of jobs—except for workers at a telephone exchange (and that wouldn’t last for very long).   

The conclusions the pamphlet reached are inescapable:  “we can arrive at but one conclusion, namely: that no matter what are the causes determining wages, the earnings of women in industry are exceedingly low in a great many cases, and scarcely enough for subsistence……the striking facts is that nearly three-fourths of all women in industry are between 18 to 35 years of age, meaning that they are spending the best years of their lives …at the lowest rate of wages…”

In 2009 women are still paid less than men--about 77-cents on the dollar less.  Generally speaking the U.S. now imports most of its child labor produced goods--out of sight, out of mind.

Visionaries, Ice People, and the Marriage of Stupid and Brutal.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 759  Blog Bookstore

The ‘twenties is know as the “speed” decade—everything was going faster, increasing its speed, expanding to the limit:  this was true for the ability to communicate via telephone, the appearance of commercial radio, the great increase in the speed of trains and planes and automobiles; the music was fast, the movies were talking. 

There are many iconic images relating speed and the roaring twenties—generally though this spectacular cover for Otto Willi Gail's Mit Raketenkraft ins Weltenal…vom Feurerwagen zum Raumschiff (1928) is much less frequently seen, though it certainly does get the message across.  Otto Gail was a creative German science fact and science fiction writer with a strong background in following the scientific and technical accomplishment in rocketry of the age, especially the works of Max Valier¹ and Hermann Oberth². Raketenkraft was more a peek into the future and pop techy work for kids than a straight-out scifi novel like his The Moon Stone, which was a story that brought us Atlantis, space travel and hidden ancient culture in the underground Ice World.

It’s the unfortunate Ice World that attracts my attention around Gail, swimming around his interesting and tech-involved scifi world like a melting and failing Moon made of hundred-year NYC garbage scows, the idea of a good engineer-turned-trash cosmologist named Hans Horbiger, whose ideas wound up being whispered into the ears of many monsters. Horbiger had some sort of vision-dream about stuff in 1894 and spent the next 30+ years fleshing out the idea, which sounds bad from the very start when the author admits to finding “Newton wrong”.  Anyway without losing too many minutes thinking about this time-hole, Horbiger’s theory worked ice up to being the primary and primordial ingredient of all processes in the universe, with ice planets circled by ice moons, and some sort of gooey ice ether to make it all go ‘round. Oh yes: there were superior ice people living in the interior of the earth.  Horbiger died in 1931, but his many followers managed to work the theory into a presentable Jewish-baiting anti-relativity Deutsche Physik form for the new government of Adolph Hitler in 1933, and it was there that his ideas took hold in the cancerous Himmler and Hitler and others, a happy marriage at last, the ridiculous to the unspeakable. I’m not sure where the ice people are today, but I did saw some awful History Channel show that stated that Hitler never did die in the bunker and was removed by submarine to the interior ice people of earth, flying around the insides of our globe “in a UFO”.

And so I associate poor Gail (1896-1956) with the Horbiger mess, and not his good work in science reporting and popularization.  So it goes.

The other thing that you can say about Horbiger—he had a full-out behemothian mustache.  That’s about it.

Notes

1. Valier seems to have been the first person  killed in a rocket-related incident, blistered by his exploding rocket-car.

2.  Oberth is another one of those Germans working at Peenemunde (along with Wernher von Braun and a great host of others)  trying to kill as many people in the UK as possible who wound up in Huntsville, working for our government.  It is all so problematic.  It is interesting that there is little in the Air and Space Museum (as part of the Smithsonian system)  that mentions von Braun.  He is burioed in a simple grave in a cemetery next door to a Jewish cemetery in Alexandria , Virginia.  I also remember going to some restaurant in the diamond district that, in very high bad taste, served up a beer called the Wernher von Brown--von Braun certainly had his hands covered in Jewish blood at least to the wrists, and to have a product so stupidly named as that in that place was just one of those impossible things that happen every day.

Skeleton of the Sun and Sky: Henry Van de Velde pre-Abstract Art, 1884

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 758  Blog Bookstore

I wonder if Henry van de Velde (1863-1957) as one of the earliest people to paint what he saw as an x-ray of the stuff of existence.  His artwork, “Sun at Ocean (Rhythmic Synthesis”) which I found in  Werner Hoffman’s Turning Points in Twentieth century Art, 1890-1917 and which was executed in 1888/9, looks to me to be absolutely incredible

for its time, a nearly non-representational, proto-abstract something, done three decades before these genres came into being.

His representation of known objects seems to be nearly, completely, removed—what we have left here is the representation, or impression, of the subject of the painting.  We can see the sky and sun and ocean there still, but just barely: their representation in skeletal form shows us the bare bones of the world, like a pre-X-Ray X-Ray (which didn’t come around until the very ready and able Wilhelm Roentgen bumped into it in the winter of 1895).

It is hard to think of how unusual this artwork would’ve been, even given some historical consulting. The Impressionists, who had crept up into the artworld existence to their first show in 1874, were seen as being a radical, revolutionary, avant garde movement.  Their reception was not a cordial one, as they were threatening the established order of the instructionally-regulated world of art that had stood for centuries.  Van de Velde’s work was far outside of Impressionism, or at least it would seem so to me, making it more radical still.

I’m not sure where van de Velde’s work stands in the history of Modernism (ca. 1875-1916, when virtually very major discipline encountered massive change).  It doesn’t seem to be a prototype for abstract art, which doesn’t seem to have precedents in the 19th century outside of found-art in mathematics of the fourth dimension.  This new world of art seems to begin suddenly in 1907 with the work of Braque and Picasso, and then Marcel Duchamp, and Nayral (1910) and Gris (1911), followed by many others including Gleizes and Marcoussis and Metzinger and Villon (all in 1912).  The Impressionists on the other hand have a very rich history of impressionistic works leading up to their major debut in 1874:  like Courbet’s “Portrait of Baudelaire” (1848/50), or Cezanne’s “Man with a Blue Cap” (1865), or Bourdin’s “Cloud Study” (ca. 1859), on Monet’s “Still Life” (1859, with the disappearing bread), or Degas’ “Semiarmis…” (1861) or Pissarro’s “The Road” (1864), or the glorious modern self portrait of Cezanne done in 1865.  There are many others.

Van de Velde’s art leaves me puzzled, probably because I really don’t know about the painting phase of his life (an activity he gave up in 1892); probably because I just don’t know enough, and am not art scholar.  I don’t know why this isn’t significant, unless, of course, the work was not seen, or was unknown, or was simply rejected.

But that still leaves us with the artwork itself: a skeleton. Scaffolding.  Stage setting.  Fragments of the remaining object.  Simplification: a rediscovery of the material of the world reduced to its barest essentials, to a geometrical simplicity of nothing but lines, dashes, suggesting a larger form.  It is the amount of weight in the “suggestion” of form that makes this work so incredible—up to this time, I think, there weren’t any other works of art where so much was open to interpretation, and so much of the optical characteristics of the subject had been removed.  (Rodin’s statue of Balzac, showing the author seemingly ripping himself from his stone, was much hated when it was shown in 1897, the “unfinished” parts seen as ugly and crude by many.  This would seem a good example of the weight of suggested form in pre-20th century art.)

1889.  Decades before Malevich, Rodchenko, Balla, Severini, Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Klee, Kandinsky.  (And Mondrian, the biggest question mark for me and greatest possible inheritor of this work.) I just don’t get it where van de Velde “went”.  He did go on to a terrific career in design and architecture  in worlds outside of this effort; I just don’t know what happened to “Sky and Sea'...maybe Henry just didn't like itpreferring his gorgeous nouveau design motifs.  After all, he survived this artwork by almost 70 years (!), and perhaps he laid it aside as a youthful flourish.  As I said, I really don't know.  

Anniversary and Thank You

A small bit of news:  this blog has just received its 250,000th visitor, far more than I ever thought possible.  The milestone comes on my 599th day of blogging and 757th post, some 400,000 words and 4,000 images or so after this all first started in February 2008.  My thanks to everyone who has taken the time to stop by.  This has been an enormous amount of fun, and I'm so very happy that someone is out there enjoying it.

I must also thank my brilliant, beautiful and always interesting wife, Patti Digh, who encouraged me to actually start writing and whose constant support and help has been the great difference for me in keeping this blog going.  MMB.

*Patti is a professional writer and speaker and has a number of blogs of her own, including the very widely popular 37days. 

Big Mathematics 1816: Manuscript Notes and Found Math Art

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 757  Blog Bookstore

In my science bookstore business one of my principle interests is antique manuscript notebooks in the sciences.  It is a pleasure to see someone working through a problem, or finding what the writer thought to be the most interesting point in a lecture on a particular subject, and to read the occasional doodles and see the timely gloss every now and then.  I’ve had notebooks from an advanced and very careful student for a course given by the great Robert Bunsen that was filled with hundreds of pages of what the master was trying to communicate to his pupils.

There’s also a  series of notebooks from the spectacular period of Cornell physics history (1948-1949), including 6 notebooks of classes with Richard Feynman, including several hundred pages from his 1948/9 course in advanced quantum mechanics, which included (a very early) use of the Feynman diagrams.  The thing that makes these observant, advanced notes taken during Feynman’s classes have more than a pedagogical interest (which is substantial and enough on its own)—they have a capacity to show the logic behind the man’s thinking and how he presented his ideas over a period of some months.  Also, and curiously, notebooks like these seem to have not survived. 

Then there’s the notebooks taken by the team of Charlotte and Fritz John when they were pursing doctoral degrees at Goettingen (1929-1933), until forced to leave with the enforcement of the Nazi laws against non-Aryans.  Goettingen happened (and happens) to be the seat of a long, great mathematical heritage, home of Felix Klein, Emmy Noether, David Hilbert and Bernhard Riemann (among many others).  The notebooks—some two linear feet of them—represented four years of advanced interactions with some of the finest mathematical minds in Germany.  I was told by Mrs. John that they were required to take such full notes—but let me tell you, these notebooks were typed transcriptions of the daily handwritten notes, compiled over the course of a class, and then bound.  They are beautiful, and go far beyond my concept of “required”.  Mrs. John told me the story of the class notes that she and Dr. John took while taking a course with the great Hermann Weyl (who had taken his doctorate under the iconic David Hilbert, and who was also forced to flee Goettingen because his wife was Jewish):  everyone of course was required to take extensive notes during the day and work on them during the night, turning them in the following day for appraisal.  She told me that she still vividly remember placing their notes on a long wooden table at the front of the class, and then picking that set of note up the next day.  After a month of this, she, said, they became convinced that Weyl was not looking at the notes at all, as everything seemed always to be in the spot that they left it in.  One week they decided to see if the notes were being moved, and placed a hair carefully on the interior page, reasoning that if the notes were reviewed, the hair would be gone.  For a week, the hairs stayed in place.  “And so, what did that mean to you?” 

Mrs. John replied that it really didn’t mean anything, and that they continued to do the notes as they would, and leave them on the long wooden table.  They never slacked off (which I can fully imagine).  She said that they did it for themselves, of course, but also they did it for Dr. Weyl, fully expecting that the day that they missed handing in their notes would be the day that they were looked for by Dr. Weyl.  Plus they were studying with a famous and fabulous thinker, and did not want to disappoint themselves or their instructor. 

I do enjoy the historic or significant material like this, but I also quite the naïve, homegrown, elementary manuscript attempts by children at doing math or understanding physics.  Cipher books have always been a little hard to find in my field, wit many of them (I think) winding up in the genealogy area), and they just don’t seem to be very much on the findable side of things anymore. 

The example I’ve reproduced here are from an anonymous (but dated 1818) work on different elementary areas of mathematics.  What makes this special to me is the precision of the penmanship and the extreme effort that is being used for a simple display of division.  It would certainly convey the message if the author had used two five-figure numbers to display division rather than these enormous, never-to-be-encountered numbers. 

Surely there were pages and pages of scrap used to get to this point as the operator machined his numbers down, showing us the result rather than the real process.  But what is left to us in this effort is a thing of considerable beauty—the found art of practicing elementary math. 

Weird Questions and Weirder Answers Department: Curing Insanity

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 756  Blog Bookstore

Dr. C. Sterling Cooly wrote an incredibly-titled pamphlet of slim means called Should Insanity be Cured?  How could anyone proceed further than this?  Dr. Cooley wasn’t a eugenic apologist, nor was he an accountant for a life insurance firm—he was advocating a drugless cure for all different sorts of “insanity”, which was a term he doesn’t really stop to identify and classify, which of course is deeply problematic. 

 

Or it is so until you hear how one can treat the insane via his new drugless method:  chiropractic.  I didn’t see that one coming.  “An insane mind is a sick brain, a sick body is an insane body” writes Dr. Cooley with leading confidence, claiming that chiropractic can release “the power within…marvels of healing are performed not only in mental cases but in virtually ALL forms of disease”.  That’s a lot to live up to in theory, let alone in practice. 

Dr. Cooley was evidently a deeply important founder father of modern chiropractic, with a 50  year career in the area (1908-1957), and who was also very prolific--this is one work that he probably shoud've edited out of the publishing phase. 

Welsh Mining Boys and Orwell's "The Road to Wigan Pier"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 755  Blog Bookstore

I came across this pamphlet this morning and it reminded immediately of George Orwell’s description of Northern England mining life in his work The Road to Wigan Pier.  Not that the (1946) pamphlet wasn’t arresting on its own—particularly the “boys” part, which actually doesn’t identify an age more than a period of time (“the time for leaving school”).  The pamphlet makes a good, strong recruiting

 

effort for younger blood in one of the most demanding harsh-environment jobs on the globe--which is a tough thing to do, as these kids would be married to short handled shovels, moving earth and coal deep underground in a foul-air enclosure if they signed on.   

 

“There is a hint of mystery about a colliery” the pamphlet states, but doesn’t explain, though several of the photos of working miners must certainly have slapped a bit of reality into the mind of the reader.  Being a miner was bitter-tough, but if this is what your work landscape was composed of, and this is what your father did, I guess that this is the life you got used to, familiar with, as time wore down mining’s “mysterious” edges.

 

Miners performed amazing tasks of physical endurance and mental acuity in a tediously difficult and unhealthy endlessly-challenging surrounding.  Deep underground.

 

It was in The Road to Wigan Pier that Orwell may have reached his highest heights of social insight and reporting—particularly in bringing out the conditions of the working poor and the psychology, morality and neurosis of unemployment..  But it is his description of the miner’s environment that stays in my head.  Orwell observes that the 7.5 hour shift miners would only being their workday once they had arrived at their particular station—and as Orwell beautifully points out, miners had to “travel” to their work zone once they arrived in the mine.  Some of these commutes were 90 minutes or more, each way—most were moving at least a half-hour before getting to  the point where their day would being.  It was a crouching, spine-slashing, knee-crunching scramble through dark, sharp areas not four feet high, interrupted by crawling through smaller spaces…and always with your head up so that you could see where you were going.  It was a whole new set of muscles that you had to develop for this travel…and then, after that, then you went to work.

 

As Orwell writes:

 

“You do not notice the effect of this till you have gone a few hundred yards. You start off, stooping slightly, down the dim-lit gallery, eight or ten feet wide and about five high, with the walls built up with slabs of shale, like the stone walls in Derbyshire. Every yard or two there are wooden props holding up the beams and girders; some of the girders have buckled into fantastic curves under which you have to duck. Usually it is bad going underfoot—thick dust or jagged chunks of shale, and in some mines where there is water it is as mucky as a farm-yard….

 

A page later:

 

“At the start to walk stooping is rather a joke, but it is a joke that soon wears off. I am handicapped by being exceptionally tall, but when the roof falls to four feet or less it is a tough job for anybody except a dwarf or a child. You not only have to bend double, you have also got to keep your head up all the while so as to see the beams and girders and dodge them when they come. You have, therefore, a constant crick in the neck, but this is nothing to the pain in your knees and thighs. After half a mile it becomes (I am not exaggerating) an unbearable agony. You begin to wonder whether you will ever get to the end—still more, how on earth you are going to get back. Your pace grows slower and slower. You come to a stretch of a couple of hundred yards where it is all exceptionally low and you have to work yourself along in a squatting position. Then suddenly the roof opens out to a mysterious height—scene of and old fall of rock, probably—and for twenty whole yards you can stand upright. The relief is overwhelming. But after this there is another low stretch of a hundred yards and then a succession of beams which you have to crawl under. You go down on all fours; even this is a relief after the squatting business. But when you come to the end of the beams and try to get up again, you find that your knees have temporarily struck work and refuse to lift you. You call a halt, ignominiously, and say that you would like to rest for a minute or two. Your guide (a miner) is sympathetic. He knows that your muscles are not the same as his. ‘Only another four hundred yards,’ he says encouragingly; you feel that he might as well say another four hundred miles. But finally you do somehow creep as far as the coal face. You have gone a mile and taken the best part of an hour; a miner would do it in not much more than twenty minutes. Having got there, you have to sprawl in the coal dust and get your strength back for several minutes before you can even watch the work in progress with any kind of intelligence.

 

“Coming back is worse than going, not only because you are already tired out but because the journey back to the shaft is slightly uphill. You get through the low places at the speed of a tortoise, and you have no shame now about calling a halt when your knees give way. Even the lamp you are carrying becomes a nuisance and probably when you stumble you drop it; whereupon, if it is a Davy lamp, it goes out. Ducking the beams becomes more and more of an effort, and sometimes you forget to duck. You try walking head down as the miners do, and then you bang your backbone. Even the miners bang their backbones fairly often. This is the reason why in very hot mines, where it is necessary to go about half naked, most of the miners have what they call ‘buttons down the back’—that is, a permanent scab on each vertebra. When the track is down hill the miners sometimes fit their clogs, which are hollow under-neath, on to the trolley rails and slide down. In mines where the ‘travelling’ is very bad all the miners carry sticks about two and a half feet long, hollowed out below the handle. In normal places you keep your hand on top of the stick and in the low places you slide your hand down into the hollow. These sticks are a great help, and the wooden crash-helmets—a comparatively recent invention— are a godsend. They look like a French or Italian steel helmet, but they are made of some kind of pith and very light, and so strong, that you can take a violent blow on the head without feeling it. When finally you get back to the surface you have been perhaps three hours underground and travelled two miles, and you, are more exhausted than you would be by a twenty-five-mile walk above ground. For a week afterwards your thighs are so stiff that coming downstairs is quite a difficult feat; you have to work your way down in a peculiar sidelong manner, without bending the knees. Your miner friends notice the stiffness of your walk and chaff you about it. (‘How’d ta like to work down pit, eh?’ etc.) Yet even a miner who has been long away front work—from illness, for instance—when he comes back to the pit, suffers badly for the first few days.

And the first paragraph of chapter 3:

“When the miner comes up from the pit his face is so pale that it is noticeable even through the mask of coal dust. This is due to the foul air that he has been breathing, and will wear off presently. To a Southerner, new to the mining districts, the spectacle of a shift of several hundred miners streaming out of the pit is strange and slightly sinister. The exhausted faces, with the grime clinging in all the hollows, have a fierce, wild look. At other times, when their faces are clean, there is not much to distinguish them from the rest of the population. They have a very upright square-shouldered walk, a reaction from the constant bending underground, but most of them are shortish men and their thick ill-fitting clothes hide the splendour of their bodies. The most definitely distinctive thing about them is the blue scars on their noses. Every miner has blue scars on his nose and forehead, and will carry them to his death. The coal dust of which the air underground is full enters every cut, and then the skin grows over it and forms a blue stain like tattooing, which in fact it is. Some of the older men have their foreheads veined like Roquefort cheeses from this cause.”

 

Now THAT is some good observation and reporting.  Orwell did a spectacular job in relating the viciously difficult jobs done by these thousands of outstanding men.

Notes for Reading on Orwell

Crick, Bernard.. George Orwell: a life. London : Secker and Warburg, 1981.

Davison, Peter. George Orwell: a literary life. London: Macmillan, 1996.

Pearce, Robert. Revisiting Orwell's Wigan Pier. History 82: 267 pp. 410-424

Rodden, John.. The politics of literary reputation: the making and claiming of 'St. George' Orwell. New York/Oxford , 1989.

History of Vacations; The Great Depression and Cowboy Chaps, 1934

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 754  Blog Bookstore

The Depression didn’t stop professional theorists from working on the issue of what people should do with what was seen as the impending explosion of leisure time.  Arthur Pack (The Challenge of Leisure, 1934) for example wondered about the impact of free-ish time and the implementation of “constructive leisure”. Walter Lippmann worried about the impact of “commercialized pleasures” rather than those that were creative and involving an idea.  Still, in 1934, the ideas of leisure and pleasure as institutions were a distant, deeply fuzzy notion to most Americans.

 In 1935 the Depression in the U.S.(which started with the October Crash of 1929) had bottomed out, the worst of it all behind us (except for the recession of 1937).  Industrial production was coming back (it had fallen about 45% by 1932), home building was making a rebound (coming around from an 80% drop in 1932 and after 274,000 people had been evicted in 1933), the bank failures had stabilized (having reached about a 40% failure rate in 1933), and the unemployment rate had “fallen” to 20% (following a 3% rate in 1929 and a 25% high in 1934).  In 1932 the corporate profit rate had dropped 90% as had the value of the stock market, industrial production was off by about half, immigration had fallen to one-tenth of its 1929 figures, and over two million people were roaming around the country, forced from farms or homes, seeking destiny in trucks loaded with all of their possessions, walking, or riding the rails. 

But that doesn’t mean that the other segments of the American economy, those happy and personally unaffected in the Depression, couldn’t remain so:  there was money and money to be spent, and spent well in the dwindling power of the mid 1930’s dollar, the purchasing power of the wealthy growing as the economy declined. 

Which brings us to this pamphlet for Flaming-Arrow dude ranch and the kids outfitted in the high, big-chaps fashion of thin-lipped, vocabularily-challenged cowboy stars of the 30’s matinee.  But by Neptune’s soggy trousers, the kid on the front cover just looks so wrong—historical placement and societal understanding aside.  Kids were sent to Flaming-Arrow (“for the discriminating family”) near Bozeman to spend the summer in a “semi-military” fashion, comforted in fine cabins with first-class appointments, all for about $395 for eight weeks.  That figure would have been out of reach for a great majority of Americans (the average income at this point for a family having fallen to about $1500 a year), costing about a quarter of all family yearly money.

I’m not so sure why this cover is so disturbing to me—maybe it is just something so simple as the war between the enjoyed leisure time of people with money and the enforced unpleasant leisure time of the unemployed and unmonied.  

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Adventure in Aeronautics, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 751  Blog Bookstore

The Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was one of the 20^th century’s most gifted and influential philosopher-logicians, though he started his advanced educational career in an aeronautics program at Manchester, in England.  And by “though” I mean a very soft “though”, as the engineering students educated in Germany were commanded to have a wide intellectual calling, including heavy backgrounds in mathematics and physics.  He came to Manchester to pursue a career as aeronaut and engineer, which is  a little odd because following its initial great exploits in flight in the mind-19^th century, England certainly was not a hotbed of activity for flight in the first (“flight”) decade of the 20^th century.  Be that as it may, he went to Manchester, pushed by the great influences in the work of Ludwig Boltzmann and Heinrich Hertz. He also received nourishment for his interest in mathematics, leading to a deeper pursuit in the foundations of mathematics, all of which fueled his developing study away from aeronautics and engineering.

And it was here at Manchester that Wittgenstein patented his innovative approach to propulsion—a sort of powered series of ejectors that were attached to the ends of the blades of a propeller.  The image that accompanies the patent application is here, above, and entitled “Improvements in Propellers Applicable for Aerial Machines”, dated 9 September 1911.  This was admittedly an early period in the development of aviation—especially in England—and although an interesting product it was not very practicable, though a design similar did appear on helicopter rotors in the 1950's.    

It was not so practicable that Wittgenstein pursue a career as an aeronaut—within  a year of the publication of his patent, he was on his way to Cambridge to join Bertrand Russell (who had just published the20th century’s most difficult-to-read work in logic in the Principia Mathematica) and begin his work in philosophy. 

It is fitting in a way that Wittgenstein had this background, as he described his philosophy of language in terms of projective geometry...

Notes:

1) Legend for the patent image: Fig. 1 is the gaseous or vaporized fuel inlet; a1 is the air inlet. Fig. 2 and Fig. 4 are alternative methods of fuel flow to the combustion chamber C. In Fig. 2 fuel is mixed with the air just after both emerge from the hub.

2) I've read that Wittgenstein was very deeply influenced by the following passage from Hertz' Principles of Mechanics:  "When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions" If I squint a little I can see the seeds of the Tractatus in there. 

3) For a real treatment of this invention of Wittgenstein's see the article at the Royal Society.

4) Also see Ian Lemco's Wittgenstein's Aeronautical Experiments 

5) "My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly."--Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 6.54

6) See Klagge's online biography and philosophical history of Wittgenstein

RAND Report on Post-ICBM Weaponry: the “Non-Violent” War, 1957

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 750  Blog Bookstore

The RAND Corporation (Research And Development) is a think tank originally formed in 1946 by the US Army Air Force as part of a contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company.  After 1948 RAND Corp was funded by a number of different sources, private and governmental, and left the sphere of being a direct arm of the U.S. military. (Maybe.)  It still did enormous amounts of work on behalf of the military, and seems to have been their chief  theoreticians during this period.  It was also the time that the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was formulated at , partially under the direction of we’ll-see-him-again-down-the-road Robert McNamara.  And of course much else. 

This publication is an internal RAND document, not meant for the eyes of the outside world, at least in 1957.  I own a number of these reports, and I must say that this one is odd—it is rather flippant, sometimes oddly and darkly (dare I say it?) funny.  It is also short (four pages) and gets to the very meaty part of the issue immediately.  The author(s) assume that the US and the USSR will have achieved a point of stasis such that it would make absolutely no sense for either actor to actually employ their arsenal (and excluding “the possibility of the button pusher ‘flipping his lid’ “.  The paper attempts then (“let’s jump right in and assume we find ourselves in this stalemated period”) to envision the next kind of war in which the ICBM would not be an active factor. “We therefore postulate here that the kind of war we will be engaged in…in the period of nuclear stalemate of the non-violent war, the opening phase of which has been called the cold war.”

 

The tools of war in this non-violent war, the report speculates, included: (1) the State Department as a Weapon, issuing “an aggressive, imaginative foreign policy”. (2) Economic Weapons, which interestingly included “inflate USSR economy by surreptitiously flooding the country with undetectable counterfeit currency”.  (I remember that the late Sen. John Moynihan suggested in the first Iraq war, televise don the floor of the U.S. Senate in the final debate on engagement, that we do this exact thing in Iraq…especially since the Iraqi dinar was being printed in London.) The third section was “Psychological Weapons”, and was very tongue-in-cheek short (?), suggesting “ideas a la Hitchcock, e.g., turn Stalin [dead in 1953] over in his grave some dark night, etc.” I’m not sure what to make of that, especially as the paper finishes on this line: “This list is open for additions and suggestion.”  Indeed.  Out of all of the internal reports that I've read from RAND this is the only one that approached its topic with such dark familiarity and removed humor. 

Preserving the Dead in a Formaldehyde Mist, 1899

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post  749  Blog Bookstore

Gustave de Rechter, the author of this pamphlet (The Application of a New System for the Preservation of Dead Bodies, Grammont, Belgium, 1899) had, as you might guess, a very specific reason for keeping the dead from being entirely, decomposedly, dead.  As the director of the School of Criminology and of Scientific Police of Belgium, Dr. de Rechter tried to find a way of preservation of bodies for forensic and legal purposes. He  followed  in the footsteps of people like Alphonse Bertillon (France) and Hans Gross (Austria) in helping to establish a scientific basis for criminology in the late 19^th century. In his case, the preservation of the dead would allow the bodies (of the murdered or suspiciously departed) to be re-examined at a much later date (at least months down the road) should the defense in a murder case challenge the original findings of the medical examiner.  As de Rechter points out, this was particularly true in the case of poisoning, where in 1899 the evidence would be all but dissipated from the body following even a week of death—he maintains that his new method of preservation (via an incubated spray of formic aldehyde, or formaldehyde) would enable further inspection even months after death. De Rechter manages to forestall the inevitable, the great crumbling that awaits everything, everyone, at some point, the "distinguished thing" of Henry James' (last words), to return everything to the earth, to what Larry McMurtry (in Lonesome Dove) refers to as "nothing but a boneyard". 

(The images here are from the pamphlet, with de Rechter showing the effects of his nasty spray on corpses and what they looked like after some months sleeping in their formaldehyde cocoons.)

A Big Sea of Planes: Quantitative Display of World War II Bombers

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 748  Blog Bookstore

(See also the new post on picturing massive numbers here.)

I've written four or five posts on glorious quantitative visual displays of massive amounts of WWII bombers, most of which I've gathered together below. This subject came up today when I found another of these images in a small hand-out broadside published by the National Savings Committee of Great Britain, urging people to save money and be thrifty, keeping money in the banks, in an effort to control prices and have money available to the government for war production.  The legend states: "For it is by the measure of our self-denial that we can prove

worthy debtors to our airmen; and by our Savings that we can help to give them wings for victory".  The point is driven home by a now-familiar representation of hundreds of bombers rising from the horizon--a remarkable vision, especially if you tried to visualize the real thing.  

Here are a few other similar images:

(A) This widely circulated and published photo appeared in 1942 (particularly in LIFE Magazine in 17 September 1942 and the Illustrated London News in the next month), and showed 4,500 aircraft models suspended from the ceiling of Chicago’s Union Station   It is the result of an inspiration derived from President Franklin Roosevelt’s assertion that America would produce 185,000 war-focused aircraft in 1942 and 1943. 

The planes in this photo were hanging 60-feet above the floor of the station, with wing spans between one foot and four feet (for the bombers).  It was a fantastic, blustery, iconic effort to show what it meant to look at 4500 planes—and these paled in comparison to a drawing (which I unfortunately do not have) that appeared in the Illustrated London News on 21 February 1941, showing the entire production fleet of 185,000 aircraft—a column of planes one mile wide and 117 miles long.

Using this photo then to interpolate that full production figure of 185k, you’d have to piece 48 of these photos together to show full production, or a version of this photo that was 8 inches wide and 32 feet long.  (The second image of Union Station and the planes is by FSA photographer Jack Delano.)

(B) This arresting cover image for The Illustrated London News of 21 February 1942 illustrates the (new) American production program for planes and tanks for 1942 and 1943 (It reminds me too of an earlier post I did with a similar cover for LIFE magazine here.) The caption reads: "185,000 planes form a mile-wide blanket of bombers under a blanket of fighters stretching 117 miles" which is actually a double blanket of planes--if they were thinned out to form one layer it would stretch one mile wide from Washington D.C. to New York City, which is quite an unimaginable ribbon.

The reality of the situation was greater than this:  by 1945 over 300,000 planes were produced, 275,000 of them after Pearl Harbor.  And this from a combined aviation industry which before 1939 had produced fewer than 6,000 planes a year.  The war effort increased this by orders of magnitude, and by war's end there were 81 production facilities with a combined area of 175 million feet, all bumped up within four years.   I've never read about it, but I have no doubt that one of the key ingredients to this sort of hyper-successful undertaking was organization--the oversight and control for this process must've been fast and decisive, with little room for mid-level anything.  I think that this is the only way the whole thing could've worked so well.

(C)  This tremendous display is half of a double-page spread that appeared in The Illustrated London News for 7 September 1940.  It was meant to bolster the civilian population of Britain during the time of the German attacks, shoping that "Over one thousand Nazi aircraft (were) brought down over Great Britain in ...20 Days..." The artwork, drawn by Bryan de Grineau, actually depicts 1000 planes, and accurately depicted ones at that.   What the graphic doesn't tally though are the airmen losses, which would be considerably more thanb the 1000 aircraft:  for example, of the aircraft involved in the sustain air-invasion of England, the  Dornier 215's had a crew of four, Dornier 17's three, Heinkel 111's four, Messerschmitt 110's two, and Junkers 88's three.  Thus  there were thousands more airmen lost, a commodity that the Nazis could little afford. 
  (This continues a thread on The Battle of Britain and also a post on "What 185,000 Planes Looks Like").
 The results of the battle (and if you take a look at this earlier post for the full narrative), in terms of aircraft and humans,
were,  for England: 1,023 fighters: 376 bombers, 148 coastal command aircraft  for a total of 1,547 aircraft and  544 pilots and aircrew killed.  There were also 27,450
civilians killed and 32,138 wounded.  The Germans lost 873 fighters and 1,014
bombers for a total of 1,887 aircraft and  2,500 pilots

I find this visual display of quantitative data beautiful and compelling--and overwhelming in its way.

The Battle of Britain was fought primarily from 10 July to 31 October 1940, so by the time this image was published the Brits had been able to turn the tide of Hitler's plan.  (The air strikes wouldn't really end until the Nazis turned their attention to the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in May 1941.)  And that plan, named Luftschlacht um England, was to overtake and destroy the British capacity in the air, for as long as the English had command of the airspace there would be no way that the Nazis could force an invasion by land/sea (at least in the minds of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht  and Hitler).  And so the Nazis failed--it was their first major defeat, and, especially, with the turning of attention east, it was a pivotal point of the war. 

(D) This last image is a “Not a Display of Toys”, shows only one section of a large airfield “in Europe” (actually in U.S.-administered Munich).  There’s about 300 B-17’s (e?) parked wingtip to wingtip, off duty now from the fight in Europe, but (as the caption says) prepared for a fight in Japan.  I don’t think anyone in high command had any doubt that these planes had seen their last action.  The atom bomb worked, and would work again (and again, and more so if necessary), and the fear that these planes would make their way East was not a real concern. This photo represents about 7% of the highest number of B-17's in service in Europe at any given time.

 

I also made a very short video of these planes (above) trying in a crude way to visualize what these planes might have looked like in formation, flying:

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 748  Blog Bookstore

(See also the new post on picturing massive numbers here.)

I've written four or five posts on glorious quantitative visual displays of massive amounts of WWII bombers, most of which I've gathered together below. This subject came up today when I found another of these images in a small hand-out broadside published by the National Savings Committee of Great Britain, urging people to save money and be thrifty, keeping money in the banks, in an effort to control prices and have money available to the government for war production.  The legend states: "For it is by the measure of our self-denial that we can prove

worthy debtors to our airmen; and by our Savings that we can help to give them wings for victory".  The point is driven home by a now-familiar representation of hundreds of bombers rising from the horizon--a remarkable vision, especially if you tried to visualize the real thing.  

Here are a few other similar images:

(A) This widely circulated and published photo appeared in 1942 (particularly in LIFE Magazine in 17 September 1942 and the Illustrated London News in the next month), and showed 4,500 aircraft models suspended from the ceiling of Chicago’s Union Station   It is the result of an inspiration derived from President Franklin Roosevelt’s assertion that America would produce 185,000 war-focused aircraft in 1942 and 1943. 

The planes in this photo were hanging 60-feet above the floor of the station, with wing spans between one foot and four feet (for the bombers).  It was a fantastic, blustery, iconic effort to show what it meant to look at 4500 planes—and these paled in comparison to a drawing (which I unfortunately do not have) that appeared in the Illustrated London News on 21 February 1941, showing the entire production fleet of 185,000 aircraft—a column of planes one mile wide and 117 miles long.

Using this photo then to interpolate that full production figure of 185k, you’d have to piece 48 of these photos together to show full production, or a version of this photo that was 8 inches wide and 32 feet long.  (The second image of Union Station and the planes is by FSA photographer Jack Delano.)

(B) This arresting cover image for The Illustrated London News of 21 February 1942 illustrates the (new) American production program for planes and tanks for 1942 and 1943 (It reminds me too of an earlier post I did with a similar cover for LIFE magazine here.) The caption reads: "185,000 planes form a mile-wide blanket of bombers under a blanket of fighters stretching 117 miles" which is actually a double blanket of planes--if they were thinned out to form one layer it would stretch one mile wide from Washington D.C. to New York City, which is quite an unimaginable ribbon.

The reality of the situation was greater than this:  by 1945 over 300,000 planes were produced, 275,000 of them after Pearl Harbor.  And this from a combined aviation industry which before 1939 had produced fewer than 6,000 planes a year.  The war effort increased this by orders of magnitude, and by war's end there were 81 production facilities with a combined area of 175 million feet, all bumped up within four years.   I've never read about it, but I have no doubt that one of the key ingredients to this sort of hyper-successful undertaking was organization--the oversight and control for this process must've been fast and decisive, with little room for mid-level anything.  I think that this is the only way the whole thing could've worked so well.

(C)  This tremendous display is half of a double-page spread that appeared in The Illustrated London News for 7 September 1940.  It was meant to bolster the civilian population of Britain during the time of the German attacks, shoping that "Over one thousand Nazi aircraft (were) brought down over Great Britain in ...20 Days..." The artwork, drawn by Bryan de Grineau, actually depicts 1000 planes, and accurately depicted ones at that.   What the graphic doesn't tally though are the airmen losses, which would be considerably more thanb the 1000 aircraft:  for example, of the aircraft involved in the sustain air-invasion of England, the  Dornier 215's had a crew of four, Dornier 17's three, Heinkel 111's four, Messerschmitt 110's two, and Junkers 88's three.  Thus  there were thousands more airmen lost, a commodity that the Nazis could little afford. 
  (This continues a thread on The Battle of Britain and also a post on "What 185,000 Planes Looks Like").
 The results of the battle (and if you take a look at this earlier post for the full narrative), in terms of aircraft and humans,
were,  for England: 1,023 fighters: 376 bombers, 148 coastal command aircraft  for a total of 1,547 aircraft and  544 pilots and aircrew killed.  There were also 27,450
civilians killed and 32,138 wounded.  The Germans lost 873 fighters and 1,014
bombers for a total of 1,887 aircraft and  2,500 pilots

I find this visual display of quantitative data beautiful and compelling--and overwhelming in its way.

The Battle of Britain was fought primarily from 10 July to 31 October 1940, so by the time this image was published the Brits had been able to turn the tide of Hitler's plan.  (The air strikes wouldn't really end until the Nazis turned their attention to the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in May 1941.)  And that plan, named Luftschlacht um England, was to overtake and destroy the British capacity in the air, for as long as the English had command of the airspace there would be no way that the Nazis could force an invasion by land/sea (at least in the minds of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht  and Hitler).  And so the Nazis failed--it was their first major defeat, and, especially, with the turning of attention east, it was a pivotal point of the war. 

(D) This last image is a “Not a Display of Toys”, shows only one section of a large airfield “in Europe” (actually in U.S.-administered Munich).  There’s about 300 B-17’s (e?) parked wingtip to wingtip, off duty now from the fight in Europe, but (as the caption says) prepared for a fight in Japan.  I don’t think anyone in high command had any doubt that these planes had seen their last action.  The atom bomb worked, and would work again (and again, and more so if necessary), and the fear that these planes would make their way East was not a real concern. This photo represents about 7% of the highest number of B-17's in service in Europe at any given time.

 

I also made a very short video of these planes (above) trying in a crude way to visualize what these planes might have looked like in formation, flying:

(B) This arresting cover image for The Illustrated London News of 21 February 1942 illustrates the (new) American production program for planes and tanks for 1942 and 1943 (It reminds me too of an earlier post I did with a similar cover for LIFE magazine here.) The caption reads: "185,000 planes form a mile-wide blanket of bombers under a blanket of fighters stretching 117 miles" which is actually a double blanket of planes--if they were thinned out to form one layer it would stretch one mile wide from Washington D.C. to New York City, which is quite an unimaginable ribbon.

The reality of the situation was greater than this:  by 1945 over 300,000 planes were produced, 275,000 of them after Pearl Harbor.  And this from a combined aviation industry which before 1939 had produced fewer than 6,000 planes a year.  The war effort increased this by orders of magnitude, and by war's end there were 81 production facilities with a combined area of 175 million feet, all bumped up within four years.   I've never read about it, but I have no doubt that one of the key ingredients to this sort of hyper-successful undertaking was organization--the oversight and control for this process must've been fast and decisive, with little room for mid-level anything.  I think that this is the only way the whole thing could've worked so well.

(C)  This tremendous display is half of a double-page spread that appeared in The Illustrated London News for 7 September 1940.  It was meant to bolster the civilian population of Britain during the time of the German attacks, shoping that "Over one thousand Nazi aircraft (were) brought down over Great Britain in ...20 Days..." The artwork, drawn by Bryan de Grineau, actually depicts 1000 planes, and accurately depicted ones at that.   What the graphic doesn't tally though are the airmen losses, which would be considerably more thanb the 1000 aircraft:  for example, of the aircraft involved in the sustain air-invasion of England, the  Dornier 215's had a crew of four, Dornier 17's three, Heinkel 111's four, Messerschmitt 110's two, and Junkers 88's three.  Thus  there were thousands more airmen lost, a commodity that the Nazis could little afford. 
  (This continues a thread on The Battle of Britain and also a post on "What 185,000 Planes Looks Like").
 The results of the battle (and if you take a look at this earlier post for the full narrative), in terms of aircraft and humans,
were,  for England: 1,023 fighters: 376 bombers, 148 coastal command aircraft  for a total of 1,547 aircraft and  544 pilots and aircrew killed.  There were also 27,450
civilians killed and 32,138 wounded.  The Germans lost 873 fighters and 1,014
bombers for a total of 1,887 aircraft and  2,500 pilots

I find this visual display of quantitative data beautiful and compelling--and overwhelming in its way.

The Battle of Britain was fought primarily from 10 July to 31 October 1940, so by the time this image was published the Brits had been able to turn the tide of Hitler's plan.  (The air strikes wouldn't really end until the Nazis turned their attention to the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in May 1941.)  And that plan, named Luftschlacht um England, was to overtake and destroy the British capacity in the air, for as long as the English had command of the airspace there would be no way that the Nazis could force an invasion by land/sea (at least in the minds of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht  and Hitler).  And so the Nazis failed--it was their first major defeat, and, especially, with the turning of attention east, it was a pivotal point of the war. 

(D) This last image is a “Not a Display of Toys”, shows only one section of a large airfield “in Europe” (actually in U.S.-administered Munich).  There’s about 300 B-17’s (e?) parked wingtip to wingtip, off duty now from the fight in Europe, but (as the caption says) prepared for a fight in Japan.  I don’t think anyone in high command had any doubt that these planes had seen their last action.  The atom bomb worked, and would work again (and again, and more so if necessary), and the fear that these planes would make their way East was not a real concern. This photo represents about 7% of the highest number of B-17's in service in Europe at any given time.

 

Medical Quackery: the Invention of Baldness and the Testicular Electrical Suspenders

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 747  Blog Bookstore

Well.  Margaret McKenzie (“Scientist” with a capital “s”) wrote this simple treatise in 1934, claiming that she had discovered what caused baldness and knew how to “grow hair with ‘Natural-Science’ ”.  Answering her own call to baldness, and “after eighteen years of exhaustive study”, Margaret “emerged triumphant…and uncovered this thing baldness [sic]” with her discovery which would “banish baldness forever and thus wipe out the bald head which is my aim [sic]”.   Margaret’s gift to “Man-Kind”, her discovery, boils down to fifteen  words:  don’t rub your hair when washing your face, and do not smooth your hair down with your hands.  That’s it.  Or almost it:   we are told later that it is best to shampoo your hair in a sink, and then if one must shower or bathe to use “a rubber shower cap so as to not expose your hair to water”.  I’m not sure how that holds together. 

The great art of Margaret McKenzie is that that like any great salesperson she was able to spread this tidy discovery over 15 pages.  She strays off-topic only a few times, once when discussing her cure for dandruff, and another when she states with sublime magnificence that “the bald head era dates back to the 15^th century”.  The cause of the great onset of baldness, by the way, was the invention of the haircut, which led to smoothing down the hair and to rubbing the scalp (at the temples) when drying your face after washing.  Evidently haircuts didn’t exist before 1400. 

Sometimes all one can do is say “wow!”.

And a trailing, eyebrow-arched, questioning  "wow..." is about all you can say about Pulvermacher's Electric Belts &c/ Electricity Natures Chief Restorer, Self-Applicable for the Cure of Nervous and Chronic Disease without Medicine (printed ca. 1880), which features an electric "chain" in a belt connected to a "suspensory" for a man's vitals. It is one of many, perhaps hundreds, of electrical geegaws that climbed aboard the principles of Michael Faraday's monumental invention of the induction coil (1831)--one can hardly imagine what Mr Faraday would've thought of this application of his great addition to the history of technology. This electrical stimulus was supposed to cure all manner of unspeakably lingering medical tragedies, including spermatorrhea, exhausted vital energy, female complaint, inflammation of the prostate gland, seminal weakness, kidney disease, cramp, lost manhood, paralysis, indigestion, dyspepsia, spinal complaints, nervous debility, and of course the "debilities of sexual self-pollution" ("the sexual sin (which) is the most destructive of all human vices...the greatest outrage against Nature's sexual ordinances that man can possibly perpetrate".  Isaac Pulvermacher's (which is German for "gunpowder maker") electrical medico-contraption was popular for several decades in the mid/late 19th century until it faded and trailed away at the turn of the century, though it was not for the lack of trying.  Pulvermacher had all manner of glowing letters of support for his product, though one wonders if they

weren't mostly cooked up on the back burner of a two-burner stove top, much in the way he invented this bizarre electrical device and pathologized aspects of male sexuality. 

Paleo-futurology: Solar House, 1946

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 746 Blog Bookstore

This interesting 1946 pamphlet combines tow modern interests in one package:  Green’s Ready-Built Homes Present the Solar Home presented both a prefabricated, well-designed house that was also passive solar friendly.  The architect and engineer was George Fred Keck (1895-1980) , a true modernist, and designer of one of the twelve “Homes of the Future” for the Chicago “Century of Progress" World’s Fair in 1933. 

 The “solar home” that he offered here used seasonal variations and house location to regulate heating/cooling, glazing and siding, air movement, and the storage of thermal energy in building materials—mostly, there were lots and lots of transfer-friendly double-paned windows, all of which were forward-thinking ideas for 1946.  In addition the house was prefabricated, making construction easier, simpler, and quicker than any of the stick-built houses being constructed at that time.  There was also an impetus for quick, good construction given the housing shortage caused by the returning WWII veterans. The prefab idea was also a relatively new one in architecture—though there are instances of bits and pieces of prefab architecture reaching back hundreds of years, the first earnest attempts at providing such housing on a mass scale dates only to the 1920’s. In any event, the double-effort here was a fairly early effort at combining these two ideas--and certainly something that seems to have been about 60 years too early.