Ptak Science Books

A History of Dots, Periods & Points, Part I: Descartes and a Year-Ending Post

I posted this at the end of last year, the end of my first year of blogging--I quite like it.  A nice way to end the year. Again. On dots.

To
 

In closing out my first year of blogging, I'd like to take an incidental look at one of our language's most important fragments.  Like Mr. Eliot's observations of Baudelaire being a fragmentary Dante, and like the brilliantly arranged frammenti of Piranesi, the great bits of our communication processes owe a breathy thanks to the lowly period.  A dot.  A point.  It separates to provide analysis and coherent recognition of thought. 

A simple dot.  (.)  But dots are as little or as big as you need:  there's "Little Dot" (the cartoon character of Harvey Comics, created 1947, who was fascinated bylines and dots and dashes), "Admiral Dot", polka dots, Mama Dots.  Dots get considerably ratcheted up in quantum dots, and then expanded beyond that with the idea of the dot as an abbreviation for the multiplication sign, both of which increase things rather than bringing them to an end, a conclusion.  The dot used after a musical note delineates that there is an increase in time by half, which would be an interesting notation to adopt in literature, if we were somehow able to magnify and increase that which would normally have been ended by the same notation.

Dots have formed the background to some of the most significant scientific illustrations of all time, like these two images, the first of which Descartes' illustration of the decomposition of the rainbow, found in his Dioptrics, a fabulously important illustration. The second is from Descartes' Principia Philosophiae (1684) which display his theory of vortices, accommodating an idea of physics eliminating atoms and vacuums and joining matter and space, matter being constantly deflected from moving in a straight line, moving in vortices.  Then of course there's the fantastically appreciated advancement of Samuel Morse's telegraphic instrument and his abbreviated transmitting alphabet (his "code"), which fascilitated the distribution of information in the 1840's  in the same sort of way that the internet increased the flow and ease of data in the 1990's. (Actually that's only half correct for Morse, as his was a system of dots and dashes.)

Things get more interesting if we expand the idea of the "dot" to a "point", as just about everything we have discussed in math for thousands of years has been based upon the idea of a "point in space", forming the bits of the coat hanger on which the whole fabric of the heavens has been hung.  Going the other way, there's the decimal point, which brings us to negative powers of ten, into smaller and smaller worlds, to the incomprehensibly small, showing that "nothing" probably doesn't exist. (We'll leave the idea of "spot" alone, tonight.)

That's quite a bit of expansion from a word that starts out life in Middle English as the definer of the head of a boil.

But this year will end in about 50 minutes from now, and I wll be able to put the final keystroke to the final sentence to my final post of the year, and put it all to sleep.  And the year will end, at 11:59:59, precisely.  On the dot.

A War-ready Submersible Aircraft, 1920: the Tessaurian

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 892

DARPA has had a long-standing Christmas wish—a high-speed, durable, fast, agile tacticly-beautiful submersible aircraft.  Such a thing has evidently been on the wish list of many agencies in many countries for many years. 

I found the Royal Navy’s version of the DARPA wish in the 24 January 1920 issue of The Illustrated London News—the Tessaurian, a dreamable plane capable of long flight and long trips under the sea, as well as being able to float on the water and land on dry earth.

Even the modern Tessaurian has been evasive—certainly this 1920 version is nothing short of nothing.  The craft just looks too bumpy to do well in any sort of fluid environment, air or liquid, the thickness of its skin (necessary for the heavy undersea pressures) looking just too heavy to lift off the ground.  Of course the powertrain is suspect, and the retracted wings don’t look like they would do anything to glide the beast further underwater, assuming it got there (on purpose) to begin with.  Even though I doubt that it could fly, it may be able to float a bit—I do think that it could sink like a champ.  

And so I reproduce these heady, unacknowledged and unclaimed drawings (“designed by a leading aircraft company”), as I can’t find anything offhand online that comes remotely close to its age and concept. 

An undergraduate (!) team (headed by Daniel B. Coltey et alia )at Auburn came up with the following research paper earlier this year: “Conceptual Design of a Submersible Tactical Insertion Aircraft” “This…senior design program…the creation of a conceptual design for a submersible airplane is being undertaken as a response in part to a challenge by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).” The authors then state the checklist of DARPA’s needs:  “The design is expected to be a clandestine, coastal insertion vehicle with specific abilities of an airplane, surface ship, and submarine vessel, which would greatly increase the tactical ability of the United States. The aircraft is expected to accommodate eight passengers, including any necessary equipment and operators, and an additional 2,000 pounds of cargo, and also to have an unrefueled range of 1,000 nautical miles in cruise flight, 200 nautical miles surface transit or very low altitude flight, and 24 nautical miles of submerged travel. The aircraft requirements also include the ability to complete one tactical transit (1,000 nautical miles airborne, 100 nautical miles surface, and 12 nautical miles subsurface movement) in a time limit of eight hours. This concept also addresses challenges in the areas of structural design, effective propulsion in dual fluid flow regimes, and control surface duality…”  I’d want one, too. 

SOURCE

Examination Photos, 1895-1943

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 891

I suddenly found myself with a short virtual stack of interesting early-century photos featuring examinations of one sort or another.  There's nothing here for exams at school (which makes me think about when the first graded school test was invented), but there are some other interesting images of exams.

For example, there's this odd picture of two guys inspecting the installation of a voting booth in Chicago in 1905.  There's nothing wrong with this, no sir, not since we're in Chicago, which never has had any sort of voting irregularity--perhaps that's why I get such a creepy feeling from this image.

This picture has everything going for it in a fabulous way, from the poses of the tester and the examiner (who is standing in a Hitchcockian manner, a thin man in a fat man pose) to the row of cups, to the size of the spittoon, to the slightly dirty and occasionally chipped cups, to the title of the whole thing.  Mincing Lane.  I understand and commend the need for quality control, but the picture does have its odd elements.  (I'd like to know the name of the interpids pictured here; or, rather, their nicknames.)

Evidently the men aboard the USS Brooklyn  had little to do during unspecified doldrums than to watch and critique the ship's barber.

 

Then there are the professional barber-and-haircut-watchers, shown here at a barbering school examination in 1903:  five crowded chairs and a few men in hats.

 

The big, white, filled-but-lonely room at Ellis Island, where you either got in, got quarantined, or got sent back home.

I'm not sure what this nurse is doing.

This nurse is administering an exam to a newcomer at one of the American Japanese internment/prison camps sometime around 1943.

 

There are undoubtedly many more of course, but that's the lot available on the desktop right now.
 

Quantifying art: the Art-ematics of Roger de Piles and Emily Vanderpoel

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 890

"The central nervous system is nature's Sistine Chapel, but we have to bear in mind that the world our senses present to us... is a ramshackle construct which our brains have devised to let us get on with the job of maintaining ourselves and reproducing our species. What we see is a highly conventionalized picture, a simple tourist guide to a very strange city..."J.G. Ballard "The Kindness of Women" 1992 Source:  Disinformation and the Analysis of Beauty.

As a result of a discussion prompted by Claudia Drake, I was thinking about major change in art, looking around for periods of that sort of change came to that period just before the onset of Romanticism.  The critic Roger de Piles (October 7, 1635 - April 5, 1709) wrote about this, about the 18^th century version of refusees that we’d meet again in a major way in the 1850-1920 period, as they tried to shake their way free of the long-entrenched boundaries of Classicism.  Along the way of his elegant argument, de Piles stops to consider the merits of the capacities of artists and painters (his delineation), establishing for himself rules of artistic interpretation o0f beauty and artfulness. Correctness.  De Piles judged the imitation of objects, of “la belle nature”, the “exquisite mixture of nature’s forms and colors”¹, and did so along four elements of his logic of taste: composition, drawing, color and expression. 

De Piles employed this methodology in his book Dialogue sur le coloris ( Dialogue upon Colour, 1673)  comparing 49 artists, the complete list transcribed here from Manlio Brusatin Histoire des couleurs (Paris: Flammarion, 1986, pp.103-104), and which is reproduced in Elisabeth G. Holt Literary Sources of Art History, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), pp.415-416)”, and this then taken in toto from the wikipedia article here. Taking the next but curiously-untaken step, I simply added the totals for each giving an overall “Piles Score”, finding an average of 41.87. (Curiously enough when I was adding this column in my head, column by column, I ended for no reason at Leyden to begin the second column; the sums for the two columns both ending at Leyden were 109.)  :

Painter//  Composition   Drawing   Color   Expression  =  Piles Score

Average Piles Score= 41.87  (I don’t really understand his comparisons, and the “zeros” don’t register at all.  I do see that Giovanni Bellini rats out at a 24, Durer at 36, Holbein at 38 and Girgione at 39, while Leonardo rates higher than average at 49.)

Andrea del Sarto 12 16 9 8  =  45

Federico Barocci 14 15 6 10 = 45

Jacopo Bassano 6 8 17 0 = 31

Giovanni Bellini 4 6 14 O = 24

Sebastian Bourdon 10 8 8 4 = 30

Charles Le Brun 16 16 8 16  = 56

Carracci 15 17 13 13 = 58

Cavalier D'Arpino 10 10 6 2 = 28

Correggio 13 13 15 12 = 53

Daniele da Volterra 12 15 5 8 = 40

Abraham van Diepenbeeck 11 10 14 6 = 41

Domenichino 15 17 9 17 = 58

Albrecht Dürer 8 10 10 8 = 36

Giorgione 8 9 18 4 = 39

Giovanni da Udine 10 8 16 3 = 37

Giulio Romano 15 16 4 14 = 49

Guercino 18 10 10 4 = 42

Guido Reni x 13 9 12 = 34

Holbein 9 10 16 3 =38

Jacob Jordaens 10 8 16 6 = 40

Lucas Jordaens 13 12 9 6 =40

Giovanni Lanfranco 14 13 10 5 =42

Leonardo da Vinci 15 16 4 14 =49

Lucas van Leyden 8 6 6 4 = 24

Michelangelo 8 17 4 8 = 37

Caravaggio 6 6 16 O = 28

Murillo 6 8 15 4 =  33

Otho Venius 13 14 10 10 = 47

Palma il Vecchio 5 6 16 0 = 27

Palma il Giovane 12 9 14 6 = 41

Il Parmigianino 10 15 6 6 = 37

Gianfrancesco Penni 0 15 8 0 = 23

Perin del Vaga 15 16 7 6 = 44

Sebastiano del Piombo 8 13 16 7 = 44

Primaticcio 15 14 7 10 = 46

Raphael 17 18 12 18 = 65

Rembrandt 15 6 17 12 = 50

Rubens 18 13 17 17 = 65

Francesco Salviati 13 15 8 8 = 44

Eustache Le Sueur 15 15 4 15 = 49

Teniers 15 12 13 6 = 46

Pietro Testa 11 15 0 6 = 32

Tintoretto 15 14 16 4 = 49

Titian 12 15 18 6 = 51

Van Dyck 15 10 17 13 = 55

Vanius 15 15 12 13 = 55

Veronese 15 10 16 3 = 44

Taddeo Zuccari 13 14 10 9 = 46

Federico Zuccari 10 10 8 8 = 36

The upper-deck-problematic Emily Vanderpoel looked deeply and arithmetically into art—she also produced a numerical grid of the artwork that she analyzed, going a step further to re-order the reality of the painting into a representative 10x10 square, distributing the color sense according to a secret algebra that I cannot identify.  She published the results of her work in 1901 and 1903, producing (in two editions) a gorgeous but mysterious book called Color Problems for the Layman, in which she sought not so much to analyze the components of color² itself, but rather to quantify the overall interpretative effect of color on the imagination.  I know this sounds begging and vague, but I really haven’t been able to make much headway in her theory. 

By virtue of this effort, though, Vanderpoel had produced a strikingly illustrated book, with 118 color plates, all very intense, and beautiful, and in its way exceptional—unique perhaps.  Had the book been written thirty years or so hence we’d call it some sort of constructivist/constructionist artform.  But since the artwork in the book comes a decade before the first non-representational artwork in human history (or so), I don’t know exactly what to call it. 

I really don’t know what it is, but I know that it is not entirely accidental, this pre-non-representational artform, because controlled geometrical color art is not accidental. 

The net effect is glorious.  I just don’t know how she got there—which isn’t normally a consideration in art, except that this work is an instructional on how to understand color in art and nature, and the explanation of the procedure is ethereal.  Vanderpoel was and remains a respected author on porcelains and other applied and plastic arts.  In this work she looked at her fair share of porcelain, limogues, clay pots, burial urns, glass shards, and the like; she also analyzed clouds, mummy cloths (and casings), dew on morning grass, brocade, the eye of a blue jay, feathers, and another hundred or so poetic arrangements of the stuff of the world.  I still do not know what this book is trying to tell me, but I do know that it is remarkable.   

 

On a much simpler note, the British artist William Hogarth  (1697-1764) perhaps pathologically induced the use and display of a curve, a single line (a “Line of Beauty and Grace" or “Serpentine Line"), that represented to him the most sublime (and correct) representation of artistic sense.³  It appears on the title page of his Analysis of Beauty (1753), situated within a triangle, and is embedded in a much more wide-ranging treatise on beauty in general (some of which makes sense, some not).  His argument for the line, though is very simple, and he chooses to explain his vision in images more than in words, and so reduces his own interpretation and reduction of artistic form and correctness to a single stroke.  And so if he were to look at Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man or Durer’s proportional man, he would have seen not the proportions as the elements of beauty, but the simple line of the exterior form. 

NOTES

1.Charles Abbe Batteux, Les beaux Arts reduits a un meme Principe, 1746.

2. Color theory is old and pretty—as a matter of fact there is a very attractive gathering of color theory models (in black and white, though) displaying some two dozen or more color models from the last 400 years.  People like Della Porta (1593), our old friend and resident oddball polymath crank Kircher (1646), the smarter-than-you-could-believe Newton (1660), Waller (1686), Lambert (1772), the wide ranging and again polymathic Goethe (1792), Herschel (1817, who also ushered in our understanding of the other light-sensitive shape spacing medium of photography in 1840), the semi-forgotten Chevreul (1835), the beautiful Maxwell (1857), Wundt (1874, the early experimental psychologist who also looked for spirits/spiritmus and ghosts), von Bezold (1878), Rood (1879), Munsell (1918) Kandinsky (1914 and not decipherable by me) and Klee (1924), and so on towards the present, all tried to analyze the prospects of color.

In trying to quantify the color images of the objects in her study, Vanderpoel establishes a 10x10 square grid, dividing all of the color in that object into individual units numbering to 100.  Then, somehow, she identifies the major colors and places them according to a system that I cannot understand within the grid.

3. "The eye hath this sort of enjoyment in winding walks, and serpentine rivers, and all sorts of objects, whose forms, as we shall see hereafter, are composed principally of what I call the waving or serpentine lines... intricacy in form, therefore, I shall define to be that peculiarity in the lines, which compose it, that leads the eye a wanton kind of chance, and from the pleasure that gives the mind, intitles it to the name of beautiful".—Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty

Elsewhere Hogarth writes that while the human body is beautiful not so much for its proportions, but “the more pleasing turns, and intertwinings of the lines, which compose its external form”. 

 

History of Dots (Circle Subcategory): Circles in Graphical Displays of Quantitative Data

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 889

I like bumping circles as modes of graphically conveying quantitative data—it is more unusual than most ways of portraying statistics and belongs mostly in the 19^th century. 

The first example is relatively early, in the first class of this sort of information display, published in Thomas Bradford’s (1802-1887) superior Comprehensive Atlas Geographical, Historical and Commercial in Boston in 1835. Circles are the entire métier of this chart, showing the sizes of the continents and oceans, concentric circles nested inside each other, then branching out into three columns of progressively smaller circles showing the comparative sizes of islands, seas and lakes, all (interestingly) presented on the same scale.  It is a virtual one-stop, single-image display showing the graphical sizes of 59 geographical entities in relation to one another, making the understanding of their comparative sizes a simple, understandable, matter. 

Prettier but (initially) more difficult to use are the next two charts, the first showing the areas and populations of countries compared to that of the United States (in 1890), and the second showing the public debts of those same countries.  At first the display looks a little confusing. But once you settle in and get your eyes accustomed to the manner of presentation, the charts are actually very easy to use and very useful. 

Moving over from circles to dots is this population map by Frère de Montizon Armand Joseph, Carte philosophique figurant la population de la France, published in 1830 (as the first of its kind).

The ubiquitous pie-chart only made its first appearance in 1801, the work of he gifted and possibly polymathic William Playfair.  He was an engineer (serving as apprentice to the inventor of the threshing machine, Andrew Meikle,  and personal assistant to James Watt) and economist, and occasional mathematician, who also invented  the line graph (1786),  bar chart (1801)and circlegraph(1801).  But for this and all of his other work, he died in poverty and not comfortable¹.  

 

NOTES

1.Works by William Playfair include:

• 1786. The Commercial and Political Atlas: Representing, by Means of Stained Copper-Plate Charts, the Progress of the Commerce, Revenues, Expenditure and Debts of England during the Whole of the Eighteenth Century.
• 1801. Statistical Breviary; Shewing, on a Principle Entirely New, the Resources of Every State and Kingdom in Europe. London: Wallis.
• 1805. A Statistical Account of the United States of America by D. F. Donnant. London: J. Whiting. William Playfair, Trans.
• 1807. An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations: Designed To Shew How The Prosperity Of The British Empire May Be Prolonged.

2. In general, the website by  Michael Friendly "Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization" is invaluable (and also located here).

 

 

"Irish Tommies", German-Conquered England, and Loyalties

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 888

In the heavy mist of the Civil War, where brother fought brother, there was another sort of fratricide, of countrymen removed from their homes, finding themselves in America and there fighting against one another in opposition. Such is the case of the Irish in the American Civil War, where 180,000 of the immigrants fought in the war, with 30,000 fighting in butternut, and 150,000 fighting in blue.   The Irish faced one another across battlefields like of Appomattox, Malvern Hill, and especially Antietam, along the Sunken Road.

 

I was thinking about the American Irish of New York and Pennsylvania and Louisiana and Texas of 1864 while looking at this Underwood & Underwood New Photo Service photograph of the “Irish Tommies” of WWI.  It shows a large group of Irishmen displaying their trophies taken from Germans, and dated 18 July 1917. This was also a period of terrific change and hardship, what with the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Proclamation of the Irish Republic (24 April 1916) having taken place just a year earlier

 

I don’t know what it meant to be Irish and fighting with the Brits during the war, during this time of Trouble and upheaval (the enemy of my enemy bit come to mind).  It is interesting to see this piece by Sinn Feinist and Irish Republican Robert Lynd in the Irish War News, “If the Germans Conquered England”, and making elegantly and cleverly making the case of superior similarity between the British in Ireland and the Germans in England.  I know it is far off the mark to think about black slaves

owned by the Cherokees sold into service to fight for the Confederacy, but maybe not so very far off....

(Irish War News source)

Read the full text by Robert Lynd IF THE 
GERMANS CONQUERED ENGLAND, AND 
OTHER ESSAYS Printed by George Robert, Dublin, 1917.

The article begins:

"When a small tradesman applies for exemption from military service on the ground that his business would be ruined by his absence, a question that is often put to him is: "What do you think will happen to your business if the Germans win the war ? " As a rule the tradesman does not know what to think. He has no means of measuring world-catastrophes. He has not Dr. Johnson's short way with questions to which there is no answer. In the first place, the small tradesman does not believe in the possibility of a German victory. In the second place, he has not the slightest idea what would happen to his business as the result of one. Perhaps, however, he knows as much about the matter as the members of the tribunals. All of us know that a German victory which involved the conquest of England would make life intolerable for Englishmen until the conquest was undone. But as to its effect on small businesses, that is another matter. It is quite possible that the little grocery, the little tobacco-shop, and the confectioner's would be able to hold up their heads under German rule as under English. The valid argument against a German conquest is not that it would make an end of the small business man ; it is that it would make an end of a free England. If it could be proved that a German conquest would add twenty-five per cent, to the incomes of all Englishmen, even that would not make it tolerable. Most men in all nations are ready to sacrifice their lives in order that their country may be free."

Shakespeare’s Renaissance Wisdom and the Turtle Dove

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 887

Thinking about the second day of Christmas brought me to the turtle dove, and then almost immediately to William Shakespeare, and on to H.W. Seager’s delightful Natural History in Shakespeare's Time being Extracts illustrative of the Subject as he knew it (London, 1896)1.  Seager got to the point right away, quoting the turtle dove’s appearances in Winter’s Tale and Merry Wives before moving on to quote fabulous passages from Bartholomew de Glanvile and Albertus Magnus. 

WINTER'S TALE, iv. 4

FLORIZEL:

“I think you have

As little skill to fear as I have purpose

To put you to't. But, come; our dance, I pray:

Your hand, my Perdita; so turtles pair

That never mean to part.”

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, iii. 3, 44. 

Henry VI, Part IDuke of Burgundy:

“Myself, as far as I could well discern
For smoke and dusky vapours of the night,
Am sure I scared the Dauphin and his trull,
When arm in arm they both came swiftly running,
Like to a pair of loving turtle-doves
That could not live asunder day or night.
After that things are set in order here,
We'll follow them with all the power we have.”

Then on to the 13th century Bartholomew de Glenvile, ostensibly a compendious theologian but who was also a general encyclopaedist who provided one of the widest views on the known natural history of the thirteenth century, drawing together all manner of facts and fictions from Greek, Arab and Jewish sources.  He was translated into English (On the Nature of Things)  and published in a spectacular volume in 1494 following the first printing of the work (Paris) in 1470 (De proprietatibus rerum).
                                                                                                                             
“THE Turtle hath that name of the voice, and is a simple bird as the culvour, but is chaste, far unlike the culvour, and if he loseth his make [i.e., mate], he seeketh not com- pany of any other, but goeth alone, and hath mind of the fellowship that is lost, and groaneth alway, and loveth and chooseth solitary places, and flieth much company of men…”

And this:

“He cometh in springing time and warneth of novelty of time with groaning voice. And in winter he loseth his feathers, and then he hideth him in hollow stocks. And against summer, in springing time, when his feathers spring again, he cometh out of his hole in the which he was hid, and seeketh convenable place and stead for to breed in. The Turtle layeth eggs twice in springing time, and not the third time, but if the first eggs be corrupt. Also the blood of her right wing is medicinable, as the blood of a swallow, and of a culvour or dove.”

And further, describing a magical, fireproofing stone that could be found in the mouth of the Turtle Dove: 

“Amatides is a precious stone ; if a cloth be touched therewith, the cloth withstandeth fire and burneth not, though it be put therein ; but it receiveth brightness and seemeth the more clear. And withstandeth all evil doing of witches…IT is supposed that in the maw of the cock Turtle-dove this stone is to be found, and hath virtue to increase concord and love…” 

And from “Albertus Magnus” (though probably by a follower of his), The Book of Secrets: Of the Virtues of Herbs, Stones, and Certain Beats, Also a Book of the Marvels of the World, the use of the Turtle Dove’s heart: 

“IF the heart of a Turtle-dove be worn in the skin of a wolf, the wearer will never thenceforth be wanton. If its heart be burnt, and put on the eggs of any bird, never will it be possible that they should be hatched. And if its feet be hung on a tree, from thenceforth it will not bear fruit.  And if a hairy place be anointed with its blood, and the water in which a mole has been boiled, the black hairs will fall off."  

Notes:
Seager’s work was meant to be a polite background to the natural history of the time, and not an exhaustive treatise.  He says in the preface: “this book presents in a convenient form for reference a collection of the quaint theories about Natural History accepted by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The work is meant to be rather a sketch than an exhaustive treatise, otherwise it would fill many volumes. The plan of the book is to give some illustration of each word mentioned by Shakespeare when there is anything remarkable to be noted about it. The term " Natural History " has been taken in its widest sense, as including not only fauna but flora, as well as some precious stones…”

The History of Holes, Part 8: Prison, Blackwell’s Island, East River, NYC

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 886

This image shows two different forms of holes, neither being good and one being decidedly worse than the other.  It shows one of the multi-tiered decks of cells in the prison at Blackwell’s Island, a nicely designed place of hideous treatment, a thousand prisoners squeezed into a 600-foot long building on a very skinny island in the East River in New York City. 

 The island has a long history, ownership going back and forth a bit from Indians to the Dutch tio the English and to Mr. Blackwell, before being bought by the city of New York in the early 19^th century.  The prison was built in 1832, an unhappy affair followed shortly thereafter by an even unhappier thing. Blackwell was the site of America’s first publically-funded hospital for the insane, a large stone-and-brick structure completed in 1839.  It was intended to be a showplace for the care of the mentally challenged. Dr. John McDonald, a consulting physician in the design of the Blackwell Island asylum, was more insightful and thoughtful than most of his colleagues.  Even so, his reaches into the sensitive treatment of the mentally challenged, while advanced for its day, looks painful to the modern reader. “He suggested that patients be divided into four specific classes: the ‘noisy, destructive, and violent,’ ‘the idiots,’ ‘the convalescents,’ and an intermediate class for ‘those in the first stages of convalescence and such incurables (who) are harmless and not possessed of bad habits’ “

The ideals for the hospital dissipated with its funding, and the place almost immediately slipped into the template of the standard institutionalization--even less so, as the guards are orderlies were supplied by the neighboring prison, meaning that it was criminals who were policing the “patients” at the hospital in a situation that went from bad to worse.

The prison and the insane asylum, needless to say, were bad places to be.  A famous expose was written by Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Jane Cochrane Seaman, 1864-1922) documenting the horrendous conditions at the hospital, written after her undercover infiltration of the place.  Committed as a patient for ten days, she documented her experiences (in book form, following a series of articles that appeared in the New York World in 1887)) in Ten Days in a Mad-House¹, (published with "Miscellaneous Sketches: Trying to be a Servant," and "Nellie Bly as a White Slave), causing an enormous scandal and resulting in systemic overhauls at the hospital. 

Back to the holes:  we can clearly see the holes in the massive cell doors; on the bottom tier, though, the cell doors a re solid, which would make the cell into the dreaded “hole”. 

The hospital would receive its attentions over the decades, as would the prison, though the prison suffered longer under the weight of functional neglect, abuse, and inhuman demoralizations and abuse—and this deep into the 20^th century, so far so that John Garfield starred in a movie detailing the disgust of the place (“Blackwell’s Island”) in 1939.  The Blackwell’s Island prison proved that a hole isn’t just a hole. (Also there is more than just a slight resemblance from the inside of the prison to its exterior--a reminder of what is to be found within.)

NOTES

1. The full report is found here.  The conditions were spectacularly bad.  Bly describes, for example, her first meeting with a physician (an “insane expert”), an examination in which she felt sure to be detected—her eyes, tongue and pulse were examined, and she was simply sent on her way to the island.  After just ten days in the place, Bly felt sure that even if you weren’t crazy going in, the hospital would make you crazy in short order.  One detail that really stuck to me:  the non-violent women prisoners were all given white straw hats to wear when they went outside.  The effect of the hats, Bly wrote, was to make the women anonymous—she couldn’t tell one person from another because of the headgear, further isolating already-isolated people.  Bly was a fascinating person, a proto-feminist, socially-conscious newspaper reporter who married great wealth after she became famous.  She’s up in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, buried like any other person, and evidently went into the ground without a headstone.  A very modest marker was erected by the New York Pres Club in 1978 to stand over her grave. 

Found Dadaist Art--Architectural Imperialism in Fashion, 1931

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 885

[I’ve written a few times in this blog  about what I think is found/unintentional antiquarian Dadaist art, as in Floating Eyes and Ears, 1650,  (and also (here, here and here) and would like to continue that thread with this found bit of 1930's Costumery.]

The Beaux  Arts Ball, Halloween 1931, featured a dozen or so of some of the principal architects in NYC dressed as their most esteemed structures.  The end result in this uncomfortable assembly is delightfully absurd--the outfits could have easily been found on stage in Berlin in 1923 than as this salute to privilege. (For example see my post from last week on Oskar Schlemmer.)

For the record, we see:

A. Stewart Walker, dressed (and almost completely engulfed) as his Fuller Building at 57th Street (and not the Fuller building which is today known as as the Flat Iron Building);

Leonard Schultze as the Waldorf Astoria;

Ely Jacques as the Squibb Building (so delightfully nestled in  there with the Plaza and Savoy Plaza);

William Van Alen as the Chrysler Building (which, three years now after its groundbreaking, was still the tallest building in the world, though it would be eclipsed within months by the completed Empire State Building. The New York Times Building is the exact height of the Chrysler Building, though this bleak structure in no other way can compare to Alen's masterpiece.)

Ralph Walker as One Wall Street;

D.E. Wood as the Metropolitan Life Building;

J.H. Friedlander as the Museum of the City of New York.

Source:  Blom's New York Photographs, 1850-1950, page 48.

Unusual Aircraft: the Handley Page Harrow, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 884

I don’t have much to connect with this image, save to say that it is (to me) an unusual view inside one of Britain’s early heavy bombers, the Handley Page Harrow.  It was a beast of a plane, 88x82x19, with two 830 hp engines, a big, slowish, wide-turning affair with 3000 pounds of payload (which doesn’t seem like a lot to me).  The co-pilot is standing straight-up in the control area of the aircraft, with plenty of headroom to spare—something that I couldn’t do anywhere in the B-17e, and I’m only (just shy of) 6-foot.  He seems, maybe, to be calculating ground speed (with a circular slide or ground-speed calculator?) at the navigator’s table, standing there next to the seated radioman.

It seems that it had a mixed experience during the war.  It was intended to be a troop carrier when it was design in the mid-1930’s, and by the end of the war there were only five of them left in service, which were removed from the RAF in June of that year. I suspect that when this image was published in The Illustrated London News on 12 March 1938, Britain was trying to quickly react the growing and desperate situation with Germany, and the Harrow was meant to plug a few gaping holes in the missing bomber bits of the RAF's forces.

I like the plane’s design, though I think it wasn’t intended to be a plane seen in combat, necessarily.

Window Shopping with Berenice Abbott, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 883  Blog Bookstore

I enjoy antiquarian window shopping, browsing photos or engravings that depict goods for sale-- especially if the prices are posted. I came back to this deep-in-the-Depression-fantastic photo made in 1935 by Berenice Abbott (Springfield, Ohio, 1898-1991). Blossom Restaurant, NYC was part of Abbott’s effort funded by the WPA, this time as a part of her Changing New York Project, and captures the restaurant and neighboring barber shop at 103 Bowery.  The two businesses actually occupied the first floors and basement (respectively) of the Boston Hotel, a standard flop house in a tough and distressed part of the city that rented beds by the day, with 249 small door-less cubicles offering a decent place to spend the night for 30 cents¹. 

30 cents seems to be the going rate for a bunch of things going on in this  picture—30 cents for a night in the hotel, 30 cents for the better offers of Morris Gordon’s restaurant. 30 cents for a haircut and shave, 30 cents for a “women’s hair bob”² and so on.  Which seems about right—a fancy haircut and a decent better-than-average dinner for two will probably cost about the same, today. 

If you were really on a tight budget, 30 cents would buy you three vegetarian dinners, or 6 offerings of bread and soup, or three visits to the table of meatballs and bans, or pigs feet and kraut. 

The price of a stick-to-your-ribs meal of sirloin and potatoes and a pot of coffee also cost about the same as a gallon and a half of gasoline (which cost about 20 cents).  The same amount of gas today would get you a serving at McDonalds, or something on that order, and perhaps even a happy take-away for the kids. Perhaps the two even out. 

30 cents might get you a loaf of bread, and wouldn’t quite get you a dozen eggs.  Now this is remarkable, because if you adjust all of this according to modest CPI measures, the average cost of a dozen eggs in 1935 was 37 cents, or (according to the US Census website generating 1935 to 2009 prices adjusting to CPI) $5.84.  The bread would cost $4.74 in 2009 dollars, which means that the staples today—milk, bread, butter, eggs, were more expensive in 1935 than today.  Ditto gasoline, which cost 19 cents a gallon, or $3 today—actually this would be much more expensive in 1935 as the mileage the cars were getting then (and the octane) was much lower, so the cost of running an automobile was considerably higher.   The cost of the car itself, though, still favors the ‘thirties for modest transportation, which came in at about 600 dollars, or just over $9000 in 2009 dollars³. 

The 3-cent first class postage stamp of 1935 was more expensive than first class postage in 2009:  47 cents versus 44.  When you look at the increases and bitty spikes of the cost of a first class stamp over time the whole thing looks pretty flat. 

The average salary for a family of four in 1935 was about 1500/year, which oddly enough is about the same for the poverty guideline level for 2009 established by the Department of Health and Human Services (about $23,000).  Minimum wage legislation didn’t begin until 1938, but if you take a look at one of my earlier posts here on the history of this idea  you’ll see that the recent history of legislating  a meaningful level of acceptance for a base living wage is mainly disgraceful, with relatively little accomplished (in adjusted economic terms) for half a century.  (The new minimum wage brings us to about a mid-way point as the highest minimum wages paid in the 71-year history of the program.)

And so I thank Ms Abbott again for her beautiful social commentary, and a happy 75^th birthday to this photograph. 

Notes

1.A fantastic website and resource for changing aspects of NYC can be found here, at Frank Levere’s Changing New York site. http://www.newyorkchanging.com/

2. I wrote a little bit about the appearance of women-only hair salons in my post “The Staggering Beauty of Barber Shops” http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/02/the-staggering-beauty-of-barber-shops-naive-surreal-department-22.html

 

3. Other bits of what stuff cost in 1935:

Flour (5 lbs)     25.3 cents

Bread (lb)         8.3

Round steak (lb)  36.0

Bacon (lb)        41.3

Butter (lb)       36.0

Eggs (doz.) 37.6

Milk (1/2 gal.)   23.4

Oranges (doz.)    22.0

Potatoes (10 lbs) 19.1

Coffee (lb)       25.7

Sugar (5 lbs)     28.2

Car: $580

Gasoline: 19 cents/gal

House: $6,300

Bread: 8 cents/loaf

Milk: 47 cents/gal

Postage Stamp: 3 cents

Postman's Dream: the First Mass Book Burnings in America

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC  Post 882

Seeing the expanding number of sales catalogs arriving in the mail for the holiday season put me in the mind for this post.

In the Areopagitica John Milton reaches into the heavens to condemn the destroyer of all books, finding them soulless monsters who would destroy Reason itself.  Well, there are monsters like this that  may be demons, and monsters that may be anointed avengers, tunneling Milton or not.

 Books have been destroyed for as long as they have been made, for reasons as varied as those for their writing:  the motivations for biblio-devastation are ever-reaching.  Perhaps the most astounding and appalling of them all resides in the fetid memory and fouled grave of the Chinese emperor Shi Huang Ti (third century BCE), who in his 49 years of life liquidated nearly every book in China, psychotically determined to make himself the most-remembered person in history by eliminating history itself.  Not to be outdone by books, he eliminated authors as well.  And scholars.

Authors not only have been killed for their works, some have followed them directly into the flames.  Michael Servetus, who has a complicated history and who was found wanting in his relationship with church orthodoxy on many levels, met his end on a pyre with his books.  One of those books, a medical text, challenged the (religious) orthodoxy of the brain being the seat of all power and wisdom of the body, stating that it was the heart that pumped the blood and not the head, providing another chink in the armor of theological doctrine.  Pissed as the reigning Christians were with this belief, this book probably was not the thing that most annoyed them, but it also didn't help his case, either.  But no matter, he and his books were burned together to ashes for reasonable and logical thought.  

But getting back to our Postman's Dream:  Ulysses, The Grapes of Wrath, Lettres d'un Provincial, Leaves of Grass, Analects of Confucius are all burned books, and books burned in massive, orchestrated displays, and all of which share the same incendiary thread with the postman's nightmare, the Sears & Roebuck Catalog.  It was the other wrist-bending catalogs too that wound up in various burning piles in America in the early 20th century, though they didn't find their ways there like other burned and banned books--this wasn't personal, just business.  As it turns out local business throughout the country felt threatened by mail order businesses, and that these remotely-located companies were reaching into the local community and extracting the money that should've been going to local concerns. And so to fight this economic invasion there were town-wide book burnings of whichever of these extra-local catalogs could be found.  These first mass book burnings in America was a completely unsatisfactory response to their threat, as townsfolk quickly voted with their pocketbooks, whether their shirtsleeves were burned in the catalog fires or not, the smokey burden of free enterprise. It was the least wise way of fighting this new wave of competition, obviously, but the idea held enough firey charm to have made itself felt in the pages of history.  It was also just another short step in the continuing buy-local hardship that has been fought in this country since the Concord pin-maker was threatened by the larger pin-making factory in Boston in the 18th century.    

And so far as the postman goes, burning the catalogs wouldn't have helped them, either--they just would have had to deliver a replacement copy, adding to their work load, burdened further in the Christmas crush. 

The History of the Future of Skyscrapers: Thomas Nast, 1881

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 881  Blog Bookstore

Thomas Nast (1840-1902) was an extraordinary talent who created the politically/socially influential political cartoon.  He worked tirelessly for Harper’s Weekly, joining the weekly illustrated newspaper in 1858 at the age of 19, contributing at least one large (usually front cover) political statement and two smaller cartoons every week, for 26 years. 

 

He wielded an enormous social influence, electing a president (Hayes) and toppling Boss Tweed.  He was a staunch Republican who endlessly fought for balanced budgets, free education, and equal rights for Indians and Blacks, fair economic play to the working classes, and was viciously anti Klan.  He also created the popular images of Santa Claus, Uncle Sam, the Republican elephant Democrat donkey, and the Tammany tiger.   The man got a lot of things right¹.

Another bit of the future that came to a pretty accurate light under his pen was this view of New York City.  Printed in 1881, “New York in a Few Years from Now, View from the Bay”, shows a NYC skyline that—if the scale was returned to normal—would’ve looked pretty accurate at the turn of the century. Nast drew a grouping of large skyscrapers rising from around the battery (a ferry terminal visible at front-center), reaching about 30 stories or so.  Since he was a caricaturist/cartoonist, the buildings are drawn out of scale to enhance the vision—given the other available details (including the way too tall Trinity Church lurking in the shadows), the skyline would’ve been about half the size if drawn for accuracy’s sake.  But Nast wasn’t looking for accuracy, but a vision.  If everything were scaled to a more accurate perspective, he would’ve been pretty close to the skyline in 1900.

It was a very commendable job by Nast, who produced the drawing at the very dawn of the modern skyscraper age, just at the very beginning of the building and design practices tat would make it possible to build structures that were dozens of stories tall. The greatest advance was the introduction of cage frame construction, which started to appear ten years earlier, but most of the other stuff necessary to have tall structures—heating and cooling capacities, electrical lighting, plumbing [with appropriate, siphon jet toilets], elevators with dependable brakes—weren’t really introduced until just after this cartoon appeared.  As a matter of fact, Nast’s work even preceded the great building boom that would occur just after publication, which was a response of sorts to the depression and malaise of the middle/.late 1870’s.  The greatest of these early tall buildings, the Joseph Pulitzer  New York World building, looked quite like one of these Nast structures—and was built in 1889/90, rising 300 feet or so into the air. 

Nast’s buildings even preceded the invention of the word “skyscraper”, which would appear in his own Harper’s Weekly in 1893. 

Given his workload, Nast’s drawing was undoubtedly a quick work.  Greater, grander, more science-fiction-y views o the future of NYC were to come, but generally these were almost entirely post-airplane/automobile.

Works like King’s Views of New York ²(1911)  featured colossal structures with roads connecting the tops of buildings, perilously airplane-congested skies, and so on—but generally appeared after the necessary technologically-based innovations supplied more necessary imaginative/creative tools to create more incredible cities.  But that’s another story.  As I said, I think Nast did a marvelous job with the materials on hand.

Notes:

1. "The Historic Elephant and Donkey; It Was Thomas Nast "Father of the American Cartoon," Who Brought Them Into Politics." (PDF). New York Times.

 

2. See Edison Effect blog, here, for a nice post on King's Views.

Bad Ideas Department: Underground Cities, 1934

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 880

I’m a sucker for cross sections, and this one has it all—nicely drawn, a glimpse into the possibilities of the future, and technoid removed from the realm of possibility.  This article appears in Popular Science Monthly for June, 1934, and presents the possibility of extending downward into the earth for future city development. (as a matter of fact, the fabulous  Modern Mechanix site has a similar story on display, asking the question “Are Skyscrapers Doomed?” for the same year, with the same engineers.) Well. It seems as though in this cross section that residences for people begin below the thirtieth floor, making living quarters starting at about 350’ down.  The story goes that it would be possible to dig these cities up to about 6,000 feet into the earth, which of course is a long way down.  Its difficult enough to drill an oil well hole to this depth; its difficult to imagine digging/outfitting/removing the earth from something—I’m not even sure what to call it—that was, potentially, thousands of feet deep and miles wide and long.   That’s playing with figures of a million cubic feet. Of construction. Underground. 

 

Bad Ideas Department: Futurized Obsolescence of an Airport ABOVE the River Thames

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 879  Blog Bookstore

Its funny how one can live the future in the present but not see any part of that future’s future.  Evidently completely enveloped in the flying frenzy of the 1930’s, planners in London considered constructing an airport above the River Thames.  This rendition from Popular Science Monthly  (January 1934) shows the beast laid out from just above Westminster Bridge to the (newly opened) Lambeth Bridge, covering the entire width of the river, with the runways running almost directly into the Victoria Tower of Westminster Palace.  

The structure had almost everything going for it to be built in the bad category department:  it was big, ugly, unnecessary, dangerous, a hideous eyesore and an architectural atom bomb.  It also would have been almost antiquated by the time it was built, serving as it did nothing but very small single-prop biplanes, virtually useless by the time larger multi-engine propeller planes and jet aircraft would appear just a decade and a half into the future. The thing was built high enough (the top looking to be at least 300’ high, comparing it to the Victoria Tower) by the forward-thinking planners to accommodate “the tallest masts of ships”.  No one seemed to take any piece of the future into consideration in planning this monster—the planning seemed to take place as a retro event, as though the thinking was being done in 1910 rather than 1934. 

This was a piece of engineering so devoid of the possibilities of future development that just as a crew on one end of the airport was finishing, it would’ve been just about time for a crew on the first-finished end to start demolishing it, an exercise in futurizing obsolescence.  I’d say that if you could both build something and take it down in one continuous movement, the thing should probably not be built