Ptak Science Books

Hermann Goering, IG Farben and Zyklon-B

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 878

I’ve been reading Nuremberg Interviews (Knopf, 2004) by the American Leon Goldensohn,  a psychiatrist who conducted interviews with 19 of the 24 “premier” Nazis brought to trial at Nuremberg in 1945/6.  Goldensohn had a relatively workman-like approach to dealing with his subjects, leaving many dangling questions and comments not pursued.  On the other hand, he may not have been the type of psychiatrist who asked any questions at all of his patients, so at the very least we do have an interesting insight into these failed people that we would not have had otherwise. 

 

Of all the interviews, I was most struck with the incredible understatements made by Hermann Goering (Field Marshal and once second in line to Hitler as a hand-picked successor) regarding the extermination camps. Goering maintained that he really didn’t know anything about them, at all, but found them offensive to his “chivalric” (if not moral) code. He felt that the killing of the Jews in this manner would “give Germany a black eye” and as a tool of warfare it turned out “not to have been worth much”.  But Goering continues:  “If killing the Jews meant anything, such as that it meant the winning of the war, I would not have been bothered by it”.

Goering continues to explain that the killing of Jews as a result of “Goebbels’ hysterical propaganda” and “is not the way of a gentleman” .Also, the gassing women and children just wouldn’t do.  He found gassing women to be “ungentlemanly, and thus would not have been able to authorize such a thing.  Killing children, he said, would not have been “sportsmanlike”. 

Goering said that he had heard “rumors” of mass killings, but he “knew that it would be useless” to investigate the rumors “even though it would have been easy” to be do so.  His reasoning: he wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it; and faced with that, he concluded, “it would make me feel bad”. 

I’d give the benefit of the doubt to normal folks who would say something like this, that there was an error in translation, or some difficulty, or something.  With Goering, I’d say that this was an accurate statement. Sportsmanship.  He didn’t mention men in the gas chambers, but since he had defined his limits of gentlemanly and sportsman-like conduct, it stands to reason that the men were fair game in his mind.  Only monsters think like this. 

 This was the man who had very well-monied support from American industrialists in the pre-1945, deep connections to Ford and Standard Oil, and thus from Standard to IG Farben, and then to Zyklon-B (and also HERE) and back again to the gas chamber.  These connections are long and arduous, complex—but they really are there, the American support for the Nazi government, developed mainly for money but also for ideology. One of significant front man for the Nazi government is also one of Cornell’s 100 most illustrious alumni, Walter Teagle. Teagle was president of Standard Oil and partnered with the Nazis in 1938, one result being shared research and patents, some of which were crucial war materials like tetraethyl lead and synthetic rubber. (Tetraethyl lead was a fuel additive that in some respects made it possible for the Luftwaffe to attack and bomb London.) I use the term “front man” because of Teagle’s blatant lies to the Securities and Exchange Commission concerning true ownership and control of I.G. Farben’s American subsidiary, American I.G. Chemical Corporation.  (It was happily believed that a Swiss subsidiary controlled the company rather than its Nazi owners. Teagle of course knew the truth.) 

 

This is just one of a geographical dictionary of stories on the American/Nazi business connection and the financing of Hitler. It is a long and winding mass of roads, none of which is particularly pretty, many of which lead straight home, again.  Henry Ford was impossibly ugly in all of this, a moral stain. But there were many like him as well. 

  Farben made a heavy contribution to the Nazi war effort, on many levels, in particular with explosives, where the company produced nearly all of the explosives used by the German army. Farben also swept into countries freshly occupied by the Wehrmacht to take over the industrial complexes, using and discarding indigenous workers as they saw fit and necessary.   I think what most people think of when they think of I.G. Farben is their sustained involvement and investment in the extermination camps.  For example, Auschwitz IG (and Buna-Werke) was a direct subsidiary of IG Farben which ran the Auschwitz III (or Monowitz, Monowice) labor camp, using and consuming some 50,000 slave laborers at a time at its various installments around the vast Auschwitz complex.  These workers would be weeded out from time to time, with those too weak to work sent to the gas chambers at Birkenau.(Zyklon-B was used at Majdanek, Sachsenhausen and Operation Reinhard .)

In the appalling history of the gas chambers, it was almost by accident that Zyklon-B came to be used to exterminate human beings.  Its function to that time was to exterminate bug pests, but experimentation showed that it worked lethally upon humans.  Monumental amounts of Zyklon-B were sent to the extermination camps, all without question. Dr. Fritz ter Meer, one of the directors of Farben and who knew exactly what the vast amounts of Zyklon-B was being used for, was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to seven years in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity, though he was released after four years after the intervention of U.S. High Commissioner for Germany J.J. McCloy. (It was McCloy again, working with Standard Oil and the Rockefellers, who ensured that the massive Farben works at Frankfurt was taken off lists of American bombing targets in 1943 and 1944.)  ter Meer returned to work for Farben after his imprisonment—though it wasn’t the old Farben anymore, the company  having been slightly effaced, broken into several constituent elements.  Ter Meer’s section of Farben was Bayer, as in Bayer aspirin, where he served as Chairman from 1952 to 1961. {Image below: political meeting at IG Farben.]

Dr. Fritz ter Meer, a director of IG Farben who was directly involved in developing the nerve gas, Zyklon-B, which killed millions of Jews, was sentenced to seven years in prison but was released after four years through the intervention of Rockefeller and J.J. McCloy, then U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. An unrepentant Fritz ter Meer, guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity, returned to work in Bayer where he served as Chairman for more than 10 years, until 1961.

Kurt Wurster, another director from Farben who was in charge of the Zyklon-B-producing subsidiary, Degesch ((Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH, or German Corporation for Pest Control), was acquitted of all war crime charges brought against him.  He took charge of another part of the disbanded Farben empire, serving as CEO of BASF from 1962 to 1974.  The directors of Testa, another Farben subsidiary producing Zyklon-B--Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher – met with a different end in a British Military court, and were executed.

And so on and on the story goes, unpretty tales of undeserved redemptions.  For example, in the coming fight against the Soviets, the U.S. government developed a convenient amnesia regarding the atrocities committed by Wernher von Braun et alia, paperclipping them away to the U.S. to help develop the American missile and rocket capacities. 

[Above: one of the many appearances of Hitler on the front page of Farben's newspaper, Von werk zu Werk.]

I think I’ve ground to be a bit of a halt, these posts supposing to be an hour’s effort—there is simply too much to put into a tiny synopsis like this.  I just got stuck on Goering and Farben.  Seeing these images from one of the many Farben publications with so many swastikas and so much  Nazi symbolism made me terrifically sad…Yes, Farben was the largest backer of Hitler in his rise to power in 1931/32 and supplied even more after the election, and of course Farben received the most benefit than any other company in Germany as a result of the victory, but still, there is just so much of it... [See HERE for an interesting short item on the adaptation of Farben to nazism.]

In all of this the survivor has been Zyklon-B itself: it is still in production in the Czech Republic by Draslovka Kolin (Kolin), and is now known as Uragan D2.

[Some vintage footage from the trials at Nuremberg.]

The Invasion of America, 1942, Part II

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 877

This is a continuation of an earlier post on mapping the invasion of America in 1942. 

[It starts: LIFE Magazine issued a wake-up call of sorts to its readership in their 2 March 1942 issue.  I say “of sorts” because even though this hard article (entitled “Now the U.S. Must Fight for Its Life”) must have sorely sobered some of its readers, it started on page 15, following big ads for Listerine, Matrix (women’s shoes, Bell Telephone, Modess, Clapp’s Baby Food, Dot Snap Fasteners, Goodrich Tires, White Horse Scotch, Pompeian Massage (for shaving), Jack Benny/Carole Lombard’s “To Be or Not To Be”, Colgate, Yardley powder and  Mimeograph, and a few interspersed puff pieces—and a Ginger Rogers cover photo.  But once LIFE paid its bills, the article got right to business, responding to a February article by sci-fi/novelist Philip Wylie on the possibilities of the U.S. losing the war…]

The article displayed six maps showing possible invasion routes from the east and west.  It was also illustrated with four unusual graphic images depicting various parts of the U.S. attacked and pulverized by Japanese and German forces.  [Images like these—outside the science fiction world--were very uncommon.]

The first image shows the assault and capture of the town of Dutch Harbor, “the pivot of Alaskan defense” by Japanese forces.  I guess we’re to assume that the American military base on opposite the town has been overtaken already, with the assault on the town being a mop-up operation. Odd thing here is that Dutch Harbor and Fort Mears were actually attacked n 3 June 1942 by a Japanese aircraft carrier (and entourage) which inflicted moderate damage on the harbor and fort, and killed 78 Americans.  This was a diversionary movement, meant to draw away American attention from Midway.  It didn’t work.

 

This image shows Japanese mountain troops rounding up the locals after their successful attack on Mt. Rainier.  I’m not so sure why the force was here and not in Seattle, as (a) there is no port here, and (b) there wasn’t anything going on so far as war production goers, which was definitely happening north of here.  That’s a very long column of Japanese soldiers headed towards Rainier; I’m not sure where they were going.  Also there are two large cannons (88s or thereabouts) taking aim at the mountain.  Again, I think here that the mountain would win in the long run.

The petroleum culture is under attack here in southern California.  The Japanese tank commander is shooting a gas station attendant who has just sprayed the tank with gas and set it on fire.  I’m not sure why the oil facilities are on fire, unless we did it. 

These Heinkel-177’s are bombing an unnamed East Coast war production plant, crossing the ocean straight from Germany ?).  They are presented here essentially as a manned bomb—the crew was supposed to drop their load, destroy their secret equipment, then parachute and surrender after auguring in their aircraft.   This push-pull engine configuration on this LIFE magazine version of a bad aircraft—and the only heavy bomber the Luftwaffe ever produced in numbers—never was able to drag this aircraft across the Atlantic.  Its maximum bombing range was about 925 miles, which means even if the crew expected not to return it would still only get about two-thirds of the way across the ocean. 

 

I’d say that this article might well have established a new fear-line in the minds of many of LIFE’s millions of readers, introducing them to the possibility of mainline attack just  a few short months following Pearl Harbor.

On the History of Normalcy: Oskar Sclemmer & Dance, 1927

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 876 

Jean Bouillard (the famous physician), Joseph de Lalande (astronomer and director of the Paris Observatory), the Paris Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences, Jacques Babinet, and the University of Bologna are examples of people and entities sharing something fantastically uncomfortable—they all ridiculed the initial presentations of what would become some of the most magnificent achievements of the last 500 years.  Bouillard incredibly and improbably insisted that Edison’s phonograph was impossible and a hoax, Lalande thought it utterly impossible to fly, the Paris Academy found it absurd that steam could be applied to locomotion, the French Academy rejected Lavoisier’s findings that meteorites do indeed come from space, and the great Bologna spat on the idea of Galvani’s researches. So it goes.  There are thousands and thousands of cases like these.  Jenner, Semmelweis, Galileo, Harvey, Copernicus—all produced monumental achievements, and all faced incredible scorn and rebuke. Some had it even worse than this: Dante, Marco Polo, Walter Raleigh, Cervantes, Cellini, Voltaire, Pushkin, Turgenyev, Dostoyevsky, Baudilaire, Verlaine, Machiavelli, and etc.(and Galileo) not only found vast rejection, but were also imprisoned. (Some actually produced works in prison that would also be rejected: Raleigh wrote his history of the world in the White Tower, Pushkin, Eugene Onyegin; Marco Polo, his travels.  Plato of course was also sold as a slave.) This list in general could go on and on--an encyclopedia of mistaken thought and stubbornness could easily be produced from centuries of thought like this, thinking that went outside the boundaries of “normalcy”. 

 

The funny thing about “normalcy” is that all it seems to measure is the time it takes to move from one state of “normalcy” to the next.  People should know better than to expect that there should be no periods of extended non-change.

It is interesting to think about how new ideas like these are perceived.  I came to think about this searching for a picture of the wire costume for the black series in Oskar Schelmmer’s (1888-1943, designer, artist, dancer and by 1923 the Master of Form at the Bauhaus) Triadic Ballet ("Triadisches Ballett”)¹ of 1927. Better than a still, I actually found clips of the dance on youtube, which just floors me.

I imagine that Schlemmer didn’t find a very happy reception to his dance and costumes.  He was outside the sphere of even those re-inventing dance in Germany in the early 1920’s.  His concept of movement, among other things, differed from those of the other pioneers of this period, people like Mary Wigman, Francois Delsarte, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze and Rudolf von Laban—his inspiration came not from the center of the dancer’s experience, but from the costume itself, “which eliminates the torso” and “which the dancers measure out rather than feel out or explore”². 

It is phenomenal to me to see these changes in dance in such a short time, and how much of this movement would have been nearly impossible to conceive as an art form only a decade or so earlier. Except to the minority of people like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, who had already rejected the restricting forms of classical ballet—the work of Schlemmer must’ve felt like a lightning strike.

 

1. See this on Musikperformance.

2..From Germany in the Twenties, the artist as Social Critic, a Collection of Essays, 1980, pg. 91.

Balloons, Zeppelins & Dirigibles: Ideas Fabulous and Not So

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

I should've included this list in yesterday's post about a 1909 zeppelin tramway but it slipped my mind. Here then are most of the posts I've made on zeppelins, balloons and dirigibles, mostly having to do with unusual deep-thought applications of their soon-to-be-replaced technologies.

I like the History of Horses in Flight the most...

Towards a History of Horses in Flight in the 19th C (here) 

 

Balloon Bridges and 600-Foot-Long Airships  (here)  

 

Escape Pods for Women Balloonists, 1820: the Fabulous "Minerve" Balloon (here)

History of the Future: Electric Balloons, Tethered Eagles and an 18th century Space Station  (here)

Zeppelin paper Model 1924  (here)

Advanced Sci-Fi Dirigible Notion, 1909 (here)

 

Vision: Looking Straight Up, Down, Across and Through--1525-1905  (here)

BadTech 100 Years Ago: Zeppelin Tramway

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 875

Here’s a highly-flammable, closely-space and heavy-but-flimsy scenario just waiting for its first monstrous mishap. 

This image is from the wonderful website of Alejandro Polanco Masa’s Tecnologia Obosleta, dedicated to antiquarian, paleofuturistic and non-existent technologies.  It comes from the December 1909 issue of Scientific American, and according to the article was an “impracticable mode of transit” envisioned by an unnamed German engineer.  It was a rigid structure airship--which means that it received its shape from a hard internal frame covered by a skin, rather than a balloon or dirigible, whose shapes are almost entirely dictated by a gas filling out their envelope—and looked a lot like Count von Zeppelin’s new (1899) LZ-1 flying machine.  No doubt the engineer with this land-based system had been caught in the considerable zeppelin fever which existed at the time.  It  stretched the engineering boundaries of the possible more than just a little, and looks to me like a disaster that should’ve happened almost immediately.  It was also supposed to speed along at 125 mph, by who knows what means. Seems to me that there would be fifty towers per mile for a huge flammable Zep carrying not many people--it doesn't seem to make sense to me, particualrly when railroads would've done a better job safer and cheaper moving more people and, of course, the freight that these things just couldn't carry.   The SciAmerican ended: “There are engineering as well as financial objections to this scheme.”

See HERE for other posts on balloons, dirigibles and zeps.

Sublime Mundane Pamphlet Titles: "Are Baby Teeth Important?"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 874

One of my favorite categories/threads in this blog is the sublime-mundane pamphlet title.

Envelope Facts, Notes on Reading Aloud, Saturn Has Rings, Know Your Groceries, Zipper Repair, Flagpole Painting,The Fine Art of Squeezing, Thirst and two dozen others have bobbed to the surface here like antique lobster pots finding their way to the daylight after 50 years of the big dark cold—at this point, no one cares what’s inside, sort of-- just the very story and appearance is good enough. 

 Sometimes the story and the title of these indredibly-titled beasts are both fascinating, though usually it is not the case: the contents of the pamphlets with some of these bizarre titles are just a plain slice of Wonder  Bread, a big nothingness.  The work on flagpole painting is an incredible title—and it turns out that the contents make the pamphlet the veritable Ulysses of books of its genre, of which it may be the only one. But so it goes.  At least everything that you’d need or want to know is in there if you needed or were moved enough to paint a flagpole.  Zipper Repair too is in this category—it really is an exhaustive treatment on repairing zippers. 

Today’s installment of five titles has only one in that first category, the remainder being fundamentally eyebrow-raiser titles with somnolent contents, exciting and sleepifying in one five-second motion.

 A Short Treatise on Hickory Handles I am sure is still useful to anyone making their own hickory-handled tools.  It is a beautiful work—considered, referenced, insightful, well-written and nicely illustrated.  It is, in its own special way, achingly wonderful. Not knowing anything about hickory handles I was very surprised to see that their story played out to 30 pages--it was so well written and documented that I read the entire thing.  At one point in time, hickory handles were important.

 The others are really more bark than bite—but their titles are just weirdly gorgeous.  "After Forty...What?" held hope, but the 1934 pamphlet didn't identify 40 as the new 60--it was concerned with (illustrated) tooth decay, and held no daydreams. Ditto "The Most Important Tooth"--I was hoping fo rit to be some one gigantic tooth in a field in Kansas, but I was wrong.  Somehow the six-year-old molar is the most important, the seat of its infection leading to disease throughout the body.  I dunno.  I won't even go into the other two for fear of spoiling their titled wonders.

Some other examples:  here, here and here.

[Where do these odd things come from?] 

Mapping the Invasion of America, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 873           Blog Bookstore

[See also Part II of this post, here; and consider a  related post on the Nazi sub-orbital Amerika Bomber]

 

LIFE Magazine issued a wake-up call of sorts to its readership in their 2 March 1942 issue.  I say “of sorts” because even though this hard article (entitled “Now the U.S. Must Fight for Its Life”) must have sorely sobered some of its readers, it started on page 15, following big ads for Listerine, Matrix (women’s shoes, Bell Telephone, Modess, Clapp’s Baby Food, Dot Snap Fasteners, Goodrich Tires, White Horse Scotch, Pompeian Massage  (for shaving), Jack Benny/Carole Lombard’s “To Be or Not To Be”, Colgate, Yardley powder and  Mimeograph, and a few interspersed puff pieces—and a Ginger Rogers cover photo.  But once LIFE paid its bills¹, the article got right to business, responding to a February article by sci-fi/novelist Philip Wylie² on the possibilities of the U.S. losing the war.    

 

Losing looked like something that could actually happen in pre- war-ready America³.  The war in Europe had been on in earnest since the very end of 1939 (since 1933 in Asia), and the Axis had reached just about the fullest extent of their victories (though there would be more gains in the Pacific to come).  By March of ‘42, we had Bataan, MacArthur leaving the Philippines and the fall of rape of Manila, the siege of Leningrad, Corregidor, Java Sea, the Brits leaving Singapore, Malaya, and so much more.  The Axis powers in Europe were now in control of Austria, Czechoslovakia. Poland, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Norway, Yugoslavia, Finland, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and parts of the Soviet Union (Ukraine, Bylorussia, Crimea), and parts of North Africa;  plus the allies of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia. There was also Italy, of course, controlling Sicily, Ethiopia and Libya., and of course the Japanese controlled large swaths of China, South East Asia, Indonesia and points in-between.  The overall situation did not look very good. 

 The following maps appeared in a two-page spread, detailing ways in which the Axis powers could combine their efforts, focus on America, and take over the country.  Maps such as these with arrows being drawn towards America were absolutely uncommon during this time. 

Notes

1.This is almost universal SOP for war reporting for almost all media, and which continues today.  The Illustrated London News delivered reports of success and disaster sandwiched between ads for socks and trifles, as did the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig and Berlin), the New York Times, and so on.  I remember very clearly as a kid hearing the reading of the daily list of American soldiers killed in Vietnam  on one of the Big-Three networks, somber and intoned, followed instantly by a ad for Coke or Mister Kleen. 

2 Wylie (1902-1971) was an interesting guy with a wide reach.  In addition to Hollywood-feeding work, interesting fiction, insightful scifi and social commentary, Wylie also provided the inspiration for the creation of Superman (“The Gladiator”, 1930) and Flash Gordon (When Worlds Collide, 1933).

3.  Once the war machine in the U.S. got into hyper drive I think that it was impossible for this country to be defeated given its population, workforce, industrial capacity, raw materials, and of course scientific superstrucutre.  Also there was also no other country in the world with the necessary (and enormous) components needed to construct an atomic bomb.  This is a simplified statement that seems pretty homespuna dn jingoistic, but the fact of the matter is that the U.S. was the seat of overwhelming  possibilities and capacities. And yes the Nazis had been slowed down mightily with the expense of dozens of millions of Russian lives and the entire British war machine and on and on—I’m just saying that in the end, the U.S. could not have been beaten. 

 

MORE maps in the extended section, below:

 

Joseph Stalin’s Flying Circus: the Maxim Gorky Aircraft, 1934

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 871

The Maxim Gorky (Gorkii, ANT-20) was the largest plane of its time, a craft intended to show the world of the vast technical prowess of the Soviet Union.  There is now doubt that the plane was huge--112’ long, 22’ high, with a wingspan of 206’ (and 5,200 sq ft surface area), and weighed in at 59 tons—and was indeed the largest plane in the world. 

 

The reality of the craft was closer to its rear wheel, which was manufactured of metal and filled with cement.

 

The plane was built by TsAGI was big—it was also ponderous, pretentious, terrifically slow (cursing speed of 141 mph and top speed of 171), and just a beast.  It was built very quickly, and it showed; it offered nothing new so far as design is concerned, being a cobbled montage of existing blueprints.  It did set world records for lifting stuff, but beyond that, it was a half-dead behemoth..

Construction on the Gorky began in the midst of the Great Famine, a murderous Stalinist rampage which the result of planning and control on the collectives that killed 7-8 million Russians and Ukranians¹ and which also destroyed the Ukrainian resistance, and which was also one of the most disgusting of the 20^th century genocides…but there are so many to choose from.  (See Robert Conquest, the Harvest of Sorrow²).

The Gorky was a magnificent nothing.  It was dedicated, finally, to a serve as a propaganda tool for the inglorious voice of Joseph Stalin, fitted into service with a movie/film, theater, print shop, photo lab, press room, radio station, and other creature comforts.   The Gorky, the “Victory Over the Air”, met its end 18 May 1935 in a crash with two other Soviet planes during maneuvers, crashing near Sokol Station, killing everyone on board and another 35 on the ground.

I’ve included photos of the interior of the plane which illustrated and article in the 19 January 1935 issue of The Illustrated London News. I could find no other pictures of the inside of the plane online.

{Photos int he CONTINUED READING section.)
Notes 

See:

http://www.dictatorshipoftheair.com/wp-content/themes/content/excerpt2.pdf

http://dictatorshipoftheair.com/2007/01/04/the-ant-20-maxim-gorky-in-flight/

The Great Terror

1.The Holodomor (the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

2.Robert Conquest The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (1968) , The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (1970)   Lenin (1972) , Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (1978) , Inside Stalin's Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936-1939 (1985) ,The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986) , Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques in the Struggle for Truth (1989) , Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989) ,The Great Terror: A Reassessment (1990).

The Architect’s Lament (Writ in Stone): Stockholm, 1914

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 870

Years ago when I lived in DC,  a neighbor in Georgetown who was suitably upset about being told how he could decorate the front of his townhouse spray-painted the rules and regs of private house decoration right on the front of his home.  In colors, urban-graffiti style, about 10 feet high.  As it turns out, his (influential) neighbors were wrong about how restricted the colors were that he had chosen to paint his house, and that he was perfectly within his rights to answer his complaint by painting that n the front of his house.  He made his point.  For several years. 

 

An extreme case of venting and protest—in the pre-mass communication era—was found in Stockholm.  The façade of the house designed by the architect Klemming is decorated with his 40-foot high incised complaint against the building bureaucracy of the city.  As it turns out Klemming was not allowed to proceed as he wished, running into regulations preventing him from carrying out the design that he wanted.  Defeated, he built what was allowed, and then found a way to revenge—ironically, there was no regulation to keep him from his permanent, stone-cold anti-reg voice. 

 

I suspect that few architects, or builders, would disagree with Kemmling’s sentiments.

 (The text is clickable)

The rant reads, in part:

“A year was quite enough

For the building of this house,

But a long time was needed

To get permission for it.

Three years were passed

Before granted it was.

The fight was won at last,

But the wonds caused were severe.

To give full account of

 how the fight proceeded

this space would be too small…”

And ends:

“Oh Land , oh Town, consider well,

When bills of law are passed, lest private right be violated

And working spirit killed.”

 

The Battle of Berlin, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 869

 

Well, it wasn’t really a battle, but the Nazi government was getting ready for one. As reported in this 30 March 1935 issue of The Illustrated London News.  There was an elaborate preparedness drill conducted in the Kreuzberg district of south Berlin ten days earlier—“the most realistic air raid exercises ever planned”. 

The Germans attacked themselves with scores of low flying planes that dropped “deafening” false bombs; meanwhile the streets were swirling with gases that smelled like poison gas, cars were blaze, abandoned buildings were lit up with pyrotechnics, and there were heaps of rubble here and there.  The population not otherwise engaged in defense measures were all sent to evacuation shelters and centers.  There were drills for gas attacks and subsequent decontamination, firefighting, saving people from collapsed buildings, caring for children and the elderly, aid stations, medical triage, and so on.  Anti-bombing measures were also taken for nighttime raids, with blackouts, and general light-lessening measures on all levels and quarters—for example, streetlights and street sign lamps were replaced with much lower wattage bulbs.  It looks like it was a pretty big event--I’ll have to check my Illustriete Zeitung/Leipzig for the German coverage.

 

Without being an historian of the 1930’s preparations for war defense, it seems to me that there was an awful lot of this going on in England, France and Germany through most of the decade.

[The illustration above is a charming overstatement of the obvious, right down to the little flaglettes on either side of the (500-pound ?) bomb.  The sign reads "Closed Thoroughfare//Danger to Life" (sorta).

I doubt that there would be that much need for a sign or flags, but if I was going to use anything at all I might place it a little further away from the unexploded device.  (I can just imagine people inching forward to be able to read what the relatively small print on the sign actually said...)

 

At this point it may be interesting to have a look at an older post here on the creation of the false Paris.    

The Adventures of the Zeronaught, Part I: Closing the Doors on the Zero Room

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 868

On Zero:  “...a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit – almost an amphibian between being and non-being. ” — Gottfried Leibniz

Zeros come in all shapes and sizes, at all places in the dictionary, formulary and levels of mind. The zero can denote the finite, infinite and the transfinite, as simple beginnings and endings. In set theory zero is the least cardinal number, in propositional logic it denotes falsity, in abstract algebra it is a neutral element. It has a funny place in describing temperature:  in Kelvin it is really the end of cold, while in Celsius it sort of means the end though there are negative numbers below it—in Fahrenheit it is just another plain number, not really marking anything particular at all in the scheme of temperatures.  It is the name of a plane, comic book character, fictional folks in books (one of my favorites being the appropriately-named “Zero” in the book Holes) or a Smashing Pumpkins song. In digital speak, it can simply be “off”.  Zero is ancient and has different birthplaces, and has a long, varied and complex history. 

We’ll leave differentiating “zeros” and “holes” and “nothing”—a problem that I’m already having in my thus far Zeronaughtless series of posts on “The History of Nothing” and “The History of Holes”—for another day.

Today for the first post in this series I’m interested in the Zero on a door—or, rather, the zero for a room if it had a door right on it, which it doesn’t, or didn’t. (And not the door behind which the Room Zero serial killer hid out.)  The door to Room Zero is 875 away from its identifying point, and the door—-doors, actually—-can withstand 10,000 pounds of pressure per inch.  The doors closing off the way to Room Zero are massively massive affairs, and can be explosively closed in .03 seconds. 

Those are some doors.

But Room Zero is no ordinary room.  It belongs to an idea that also carries a very weighty agony/ecstasy association.  The “agony” part is the Room, which is where a nuclear warhead is exploded.  The ecstasy part is the name of this particular explosion, one of 985 of such explosion documented in the Nuclear Weapons Archive in the Nevada desert. In this explosion Room Zero belonged to a test called “Misty Rain”.

The 875’ long tapered pipe—which was just a few inches in diameter at the explosion point, gradually becoming 10’ at the end—was fabricated into a thousand-foot long tunnel dug into the side of Rainier Mesa in Area 12 of the Nevada Test Site. It was basically a collection/direction device against which military communications/weapons/etc components were tested for the effects of radiation generated by the weapon exploded in Room Zero (which was also referred to as the “point room”, pinpointed at 37.120299  116.122583).

Reading about Room  Zero and its tunnel and muffler and doors and shockwave and etc., I cam across something that braked my attention and rolled right into my imagination—on page 43 of The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions we read:
  “After the experiment [detonation], parts of the bypass drift will be reexcavated to permit access to the tunnel system to recover the pipe and experimental equipment.”

The pipe? 875 feet of massive piping?
It was hard to imagine pulling out all of that metal—metal that was already, basically, buried. I called the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation and spoke to its Archivist, Ms. Karen Green, who said, that, well, yes, in most cases the piping was removed. The pipe would then be decontaminated and buried, or recycled.  This is  massive, horizontal piping that we’re talking about here.  Since there were 985 shots at NTS, that means that 500+ and more of them had piping of about this size that were not only installed, but removed and either cleaned or destroyed. The tunnels were rarely re-used (said Ms. Green) so there are something like 900 tunnels criss-crossing their way underneath the surface out there, most of which were lined with massive pipes that had to be taken out. The image of removing the hundreds (?) of miles of massive pipelines crystallizes the enormity of the experimentation going on out there in the desert. 

Notes:

This is an example of what an underground nuclear explosion looks like topside.

Data from:  The Containment of UNDERGROUND NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES OFFICE OF TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT U.S. Government, 1989. (U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions, OTA-ISC-414 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1989). http://www.archive.org/stream/containmentofund00unitrich/containmentofund00unitrich_djvu.txt

List of underground nuclear explosions in Nevada

Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation

A Fuller Description of the Closing of the Room Zero Doors:

From The Containment of UNDERGROUND NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS  Chapter S — "Containing Underground Nuclear Explosions • 43 "

“The entire pipe is vacuum pumped to simulate the conditions of space and to minimize the attenuation of radiation. The bypass drift (an access tunnel), located next to the line of sight pipe, is created to provide access to the closures and to different parts of the tunnel system. These drifts allow for the nuclear device to be placed in the zero room and for late-time emplacement of test equipment. After the device has been emplaced at the working point, the bypass drift is completely filled with grout. After the experiment, parts of the bypass drift will be reexcavated to permit access to
the tunnel system to recover the pipe and experimental equipment.

The area around the HLOS pipe is also filled with grout, leaving only the HLOS pipe as a clear pathway between the explosion and the test chamber. Near the explosion, grout with properties similar to the surrounding rock is used so as not to interfere
with the formation of the stress containment cage. Near the end of the pipe strong grout or concrete is used to support the pipe and closures. In between,
the stemming is filled with super-lean grout de- signed to flow under moderate stress. The super-lean grout is designed to fill in and effectively plug any fractures that may form as the ground shock collapses the pipe and creates a stemming plug.

The working point room is a box designed to house the nuclear device. The muffler is an ex-panded region of the HLOS pipe that is designed to reduce flow down the pipe by allowing expansion and creating turbulence and stagnation. The MAC is a heavy steel housing that contains two 12-inch-thick forged-aluminum doors designed
to close openings up to 84 inches in diameter. The doors are installed opposite each other, perpendicular to the pipe. The doors are shut by high pressure gas that is triggered at the time of detonation. Although the doors close completely within 0.03
seconds (overlapping so that each door fills the tunnel), in half that time they have met in the middle and obscure the pipe. The GSAC is similar to the MAC except that it is designed to provide a gas-tight closure. The TAPS closure weighs 40 tons and the
design resembles a large toilet seat. The door, which weighs up to 9 tons, is hinged on the top edge and held in the horizontal (open) position. When the door is released, it swings down by gravity and slams shut in about 0.75 seconds. Any pressure
remaining in the pipe pushes on the door making the seal tighter. The MAC and GSAC will withstand pressures up to 10,000 pounds per square inch. The TAPS is designed to withstand pressures up to 1 .000 pounds per square inch, and temperatures up to 1,000T.

When the explosion is detonated radiation travels down the HLOS pipe at the speed of light. The containment process (figure 3-8(a-e), triggered at the time of detonation, occurs in the following sequence to protect experimental equipment and contain
radioactive material produced by the explosion…

Pre-Histories of Famous Things: Art Nouveau

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 867

This may well be the very first book illustrated in the style known as Art Nouveau--Arthur Mackmurdo’s Wren’s City Churches—coming a dozen years before the revolutionary Gismonda poster of Alphonse Mucha. The 1895 poster by Mucha caused an enormous stir, so much so that this style, which would be known shortly thereafter as Art Nouveau, was initially known as Style Mucha.  But that didn’t stick; Art Nouveau and Jugendstil did. 

 

Where does this leave the 1883 breakthrough design by multi-talented designer-architect arts-and-crafts-inspired Mackmurdo?  His design for the Wren certainly has the pathology of Nouveau and stands far apart from the very sedimented regulatory aspects of the Grande Ecole schools of the day:  flowing, organic, deeply stylized, intuitively suggestive.  Mackmurdo’s title page is lovely, curvilinear and simple:  its main base are three flowers with 21 leaves, bounded by two birds (chickens, perhaps but certainly not wrens), and fills the requirements of the new style.  Except there wasn’t a new style yet, not for years to come; Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851-1942) was out there well ahead of the curve, and seems to have been out there all by himself. 

Prehistoric Surrealism, Part 6: Mueller's Anatomy, 1845

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 866 

This image occurs in Johannes Mueller’s Manuel de Physiologie (translated from the German editions of 1838-1840, Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen) and—removed from context—looks to me as though it could belong in a Surrealist Salon in 1915 as part of a revolutionary new artistic movement.  The print is part of a revolutionary work, though, back in its original context.  Mueller (1801-1858) was responsible for introducing the sciences of comparative chemistry, psychology and physics into the field of comparative physiology.  Mueller’s textbook was extremely important and was translated rather quickly into many languages. 

 

Notes:

A wiki article on Mueller (who was chair of anatomy and physiology at Humboldt University of Berlin, or Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 1833-1858) points out that he was teacher and mentor to a number of fabulous scientists: ” Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Theodor Schwann, Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle, Carl Ludwig and Ernst Haeckel.”

The Church and the Telescope, 1610-1671

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 865 

It is fascinating to consider the extent of change that took place between the time of Galileo’s first use of the telescope on the sky and the publication of this image in Cherubin d’Orleans (Francois Lassere), La dioptrique occulaire¹…just 60-odd years later in 1671.  When Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius² was published in 1610 he challenged the very foundations of theological belief by changing the face of the immutable heavens, saying that not only was the universe changeable, but it was much larger than ever thought. It was a stupendous series of announcements in the book, many of which caused grief to the Catholic Church.  I wrote in an earlier post here:”It is difficult today to estimate the impact Galileo’s innovation and the subsequent (and immediate) publication of Sidereus had on society.  The challenges to long-defined orthodoxy and the bending of theological constraints (though the church would have its turn on Galileo later); expanding the size and scope of the universe, applying mathematics to the study of physics, understanding the physics of motion, developing the telescope and the microscope and

other precision physical instruments, are all such deeply important changes that it is difficult to resize them in terms of 21^st century advancement.”  But it really the challenge, the change, to the perfection of God’s universe that upset religious folks the most—Galileo appeared in the interest of the Inquisition a number of times before he was finally placed under house arrest by it in 1633 (basically for some of his views regarding his very strong and elegant defense of Copernicanism in his 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems³) where he remained until his death in 1642.

And when we come to Cherubin’s work, which shows the gift of the telescope alighting from heaven, a gift from the supreme being, it seems that this warfare between the Church and the early astronomers and Copernicans had been changed.  In many ways, I had not, but enough certainly changed under the enormous advances in theory and instrumentation--in that time, from Galileo in 1610, there was extraordinary improvement and innovation in the development of the telescope and optical theory.  (In fact, the telescope used by Galileo would soon be abandoned, replaced by more superior designs, the elements of which are still in use today.)

The advances in the decades following Sidereus were enormous. The highlights briefly put:  Johannes Kepler came first in 1611 with his Dioptrice, followed quickly by Niccolo Zucchi’s reflecting telescope of 1615.  Bonnaventura Cavalieri’s Specchio Ustoria was published in the same year as the Dialogo (1632), with Martin Mersenne’s Harmonie Universelle in 1636, Rene Descartes in 1637 and Anton Schyrle in 1644. Several major inventions cascaded after this: Christian Huygens invented the compound eyepiece in 1650, James Gregory perfected the Gregorian telescope in 1663, Newton made his reflector in 1667, the great Laurent Cassegrain created his telescope in 1672, and then the longtime Royal Society captain and royal pain in Newton’s ____, Robert Hooke, created the clock-driven equatorial mount in 1673.  Many of these men were priests (and monks—and as a matter of fact the first telescopes that were delivered to North America, India and Japan were done so by priests) and so it came to pass that the Church provided the foundation which made many of these advances possible. 

Even so it strikes me as just a little odd that these telescopes coming from heavenly hands and distributed to the near and far, that this instrument which so threatened the church just a few decades earlier,  would be seen so relatively soon as a gift from god.

Notes:

1.   The title in full:  La dioptrique oculaire ou, La theorique, la positive, et la mechanique, de l'oculaire dioptrique en toutes ses especes  The entire work is located HERE.  http://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/ECHOdocuView/ECHOzogiLib?mode=imagepath&url=/mpiwg/online/permanent/library/EH2Z7P3M/pageimgIn this vast work on optical theory and instrumentation Cherubin also describes the first screw mount microscope. 

2.  The translation of the rest of the magnificently- and unusually-clearly-worded  title page continues as follows:  “…great and very wonderful spectacles, and offering them to the consideration of every one, but especially of philosophers and astronomers; which have been observed by Galileo Galilei … by the assistance of a perspective glass lately invented by him; namely, in the face of the moon, in innumerable fixed stars in the milky-way, in nebulous stars, but especially in four planets which revolve round Jupiter at different intervals and periods with a wonderful celerity.”

 

3. The full title: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo), in which the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems are described and compared.  Galileo worked within the Vatican’s matrix necessitating a balanced presentation between the different systems, and evidently did so successfully (the book becoming  a best seller), but its ride on the list of the Vatican’s banned (“Prohibited”) books lasted until 1835. 

Time's Bad Hair Day: 1540

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 863

 This image proves that even Time itself can have a bad hair day, from time to time.  The woodcut image appears as the printer's mark (of Simonem Colineum, or Simon de Colines) in the second volume of Johann Arboreus’ Theosophia, complectens difficillorum…, which was printed in Paris in 1540. 

 

Time isn’t very pretty here, and is made to seem a little Satanic, what with cloven hooves and the legs of some animal, strong torso and swift wings—the hair hiding the eye(s) completes a picture of damnable doom, and of whatever end we’re coming to.  Except for the righteous, though not quite: the word balloon describing Time’s spoken admonition is “Hanc Aciem Sola Retundit Virtus”, which means “only good deeds dulls the blade”.  That doesn’t necessarily mean “stops” the blade, which is bothersome.  I think that if someone were coming for me I'd like the blade as sharp as could be...