Ptak Science Books

Things They Took To War, 1915 [Official-issue Pocket Contents]

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 923

[This post is related to an earlier one here on shipping the belongings of The Fallen during WWII.]

The 27 Feb 1915 issue of The Illustrated London News is remarkable.  Yesterday’s post was generated by an image appearing in it of sappers mining under a battlefield to create an underground attack on the enemy’s trench lines.  A few pages into the issue shows a series of pictures describing the regulation issue for an enlisted man headed into combat—simple, scary, and heartrending. And of course a true measure of the courage and fortitude of these millions of men who marched to the Front with all what today looks to be  not-adequate material.  It is hard for me to imagine going off to conquer your enemy and your own fear with these sorts of supplies, marching along with all of these slight bits jangling and clanging to each of my steps.

[All of the images are expandable.]

The images themselves are, I think, unintentionally spectacular for their design and arrangement, not the least of which is the fact that all of the materiel is suspended from rope or wire. 

There is no way for me to know what of this material was instantly discarded (if any), or what was thrown into ditches because they didn’t make sense or were too heavy or cumbersome or got in the way.  Or what of these supplies were actually carried into battle.  Given the nature of the fighting, perhaps all of it was carried in and out. 

Basically though the pictures just make me uneasy, nervous; so many things look so slight and needy.  The canteen looks tiny; there’s only two pair of socks (!?) but two pipes; the “grocery ration” looks inadequate; the ammunition pouches look stingy. But the “housewife” looks useful, and its always good to have scissors, and a handkerchief.  I’m not so sure about the purse.

It just seems to me an amazing display of the stuff that the British soldier was given to haul into the future with him. 

 

Bad Places to Be Dept., #1:Fighting Underground in Sub-Trench Warfare, 1915

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 922

"Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun.
Take it on the run, on the run, on the run.
Hear them calling you and me,
Every Son of Liberty.
Hurry right away, no delay, go today.
Make your Daddy glad to have had such a lad.
Tell your sweetheart not to pine,
To be proud her boy's in line."
--Opening of George M. "Cohan's Over There"

It is difficult to think of soldiers fighting one another across hedgerows or trenches, hiding behind earth, creating a death-vacuum on the land in between--but worse yet would be fighting in these scenarios underground. 

Finding this large double-page illustration in The Illustrated London News¹gave me a physical reaction like the one I get when thinking about the discarded  Dalton Trumbo’s²  anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun.  The novel’s main character (Joe Bonham) is virtually encased in his own mind, having lost his arms, legs and face in an explosion on a WWI battlefield—the story is told from his bedridden perspective; dark, bandaged, alone, his mind and brain functioning, and with little means of communication or control over his body. .Among other obvious things, it makes me feel a peculiar stuffy coldness.  [The two sets of four images following should be viewed as two-parts of one long image, the bottom part being on the right.]

And so too when I look at these soldiers tunneling under a dead battlefield, working their way slowly—a foot an hour—towards the enemy trenches, desperately trying to blow a hole in an immovable object resistant to infantry and artillery.  The soldiers—sappers—were sent in to do a job that could no longer be accomplished above the ground.

This sort of warfare is extremely old, though the name is not, being about 150 years old. These soldiers were forward combat engineers, and had training across a number of different areas—they were responsible for many technical chores, like building (and blowing up) bridges, laying/clearing minefields, general demolition, defense construction, and, of course, fighting.  It could be a tremendously difficult job, unimaginable.

The “sapp” part of “sapper” comes from the French “sappe”, which refers to the other main part of their job during WWI, which was digging advancing trenches, a zigzag construction of a long horizontal half-hole which allowed an infantry force to slowly advance towards an enemy’s entrenched position. Another part was to tunnel under the enemy's lines, and then blow them to smithereeens so that a successful attack could be launched into the weakened position.

Here’s what I think about when I think about these men doing this job:  that two teams, British and German, start to tunnel towards each other’s lines, and somehow, in the middle of the battlefield, somehow manage to dig directly towards one another, their tunnels literally colliding.  Hand-to-hand combat through the opening connecting the two sapper tunnels, then gunfire.  Alerted, the artillery from each side zero-in on what is suspected to be the opening end of the tunnels, pummel them, destroying the access.  So now, both sets in what is now virtually one tunnel, are fighting in the dark.  Even though the topside is only two feet away, any hole would open into the killing zone, making it impossible to escape that way.  It would be a bad place to be.

 

Notes

1. The issue is 27 Feb 1915.  The illustration is entitled "They Sent us in front with a Fuse an' a Mine', Sapping and Mining Under the Enemy's Trenches". The first half of the title is from Kipling's "Sappers": They send us in front with a fuse an' a mine , To blow up the gates that are rushed by the Line...

2. Trumbo has an interesting history, to put it mildly. An old Communist, he once gave up his old associates to the FBI at the start of WWII--an act he later thought of as being stupid and wrong.  It also had the opposite effect for him--he thought he was being patriotic, but the FBI was more interested in him than his information.  He would get eaten up by McCarthyist operatives and denied HUAC any information on any of the famous "Hollywood Ten".  He got a year in jail and was blacklisted, booted out of LA. He came back--mostly under someone else's name (see the link above for his screenwriting credits, which are substantial)--and acknowledged shortly before he died.

How FDR Made Women (1) Nervous and thus (2) Older. An Appeal to Vote Republican, 1936

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 921

{This continues "The Coming Sex War of 1919")

Theodore J. Goe, the author of “Let’s Protect our Women”, must have been a synesthete, with the ability to smell the future.  My copy of this pamphlet used to be the Copyright Deposit copy, and is dated January 18, 1936, and what Mr. Goe was smelling were the winds of the November presidential election; and since he was a Republican—or at least an anti-Rooseveltian—what he smelled was outrageous defeat for his cause. 

And so he wrote this elegantly-produced little oddness, trying to dip into the wellspring of the enfranchised female vote (just sixteen years old at this point), trying with fatherly will to scoop women out of the harmful ways of Roosevelt’s policies.

The “protection” that women needed was for uncertainty which led to nervousness and which attacked their youth to send them into a slavery. The thinking here went sort of like this:  women were being attacked by FDR, who was “cruelly prolonging the depression” by not helping people with jobs, thus depriving their men of a fair wage which is what made women happy; without the “happiness” of a husband with a good job, “life becomes more serious than it should be”; this fights against “national influence which tends to rob [women] of their youth”, making women older sooner. And it was this premature aging that the women are to vote against in 1936.

Mr. Goe may well have been a crank, but to him and his readers this thinking might’ve made some sort of contemporary sense, after a fashion.  He did forget that women made up more than 30% of the workforce at this point, and had more sources of happiness and youth than a man with a decently-paying job, plus having a life and opinion outside of serving home/hearth/husband, but no matter. (This, by the way, is where Mr. Goe thought American women lived:)

Women didn’t rush to aid FDR’s competition in the ’36 race, when Roosevelt redefined “landslide” by crushing his Republican challenger, Kansan Alf Landon.  There wasn’t any election like it since the two-party system became nationalized 80 years earlier, Landon loosing to Roosevelt by an electoral balance of 523-8. Landon swept Vermont and Maine, with FDR taking everything else.  (No one would quite clear the plate like this ‘till Reagan turned Walter Mondale inside-out in 1984, 525-13.)

Landon was a decent man who had an interesting post-political career—even so, it’s a good thing that he lost.

Boullee, Lequeu and Ledoux: Reposts of Two Musical Slideshows

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  &   Blog Bookstore

[For another bit on Boullee see also my post  Imago Frammeni: Boulle, the Dogon, Jouffret, the Simple and the Complex]

(1) The Fantastic Self-Portraits of the Visionary Architect, Jean-Francois Lequeu

I guess it is easy to want to call M. Lequeu (1757-1825 (?)) an outsider, though he was hardly that.

He was an exceptional talent who was exceptionally well-trained (and who won the highest awards offered by his school), and started out in a staid and brilliant way, a successful draftsman in his own right, and student of Scoufflot, helping to design ancient-inspiration buildings for the super rich. He was at the pinnacle of the drafting trade, though not so on the designing end.  Along came the Revolution and away went his architectural career—he wound up a surveyor and a cartographer until his retirement in 1815, after which he enters social and historical oblivion, until he finally dies in total obscurity ten years later (or so, the date is unclear).  His post-revolutionary vision was as phenomenal as his success in selling his ideas were dismal.  Well, this is really a cheap shot—his imagination was shockingly large, enormous, his designs fantastic and beautiful, and completely unexpected, and they seemed to grow larger/loftier and more interesting as time wore away at him. But he was far in front of the curve so far as popular (public) opinion was concerned.  Even among the other visionaries of the time (like Ledoux and Boullee) it was Lequeu who staked out the furthest reaches of architecture, and also with great depth and virtuosity.

I think that as Lequeu was cleaved away, cell by cell falling through the floorboards of his single rented room, he reached further into time and deeper into space than almost any architect of that hundred-year period.   I also think that he was very well aware of his genius being seen as pure eccentricity—his half-dozen or so self portraits are among the most reaching that I’ve seen (in the pre-modern era). 

If Lequeu’s visions existed at all in the world of French architecture it was in the Deep Underground—a place that he may have founded.  He was certainly, at the very least, its geologist.

His self portraits are striking, but perhaps not so much more so than those by Rembrandt--he was certainly exploring modes of expression (Raphael's series of engravings on the emotion of the human face is a good example of this study)--Lequeu though seems to always manage to suggest that he is an observed inmate somewhere.  There is a great undercurrent of "otherness" and great remove to them--something that makes places the self portraits into a different--empty, lonely--class.

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

(2) Etienne Boullee, Images with Music

I've been collecting images by some of  the great, visionary architects of 18th century France:  Etienne Boullee (1728-1799), Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) and the semi-impossible Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1737-1825).  It was a tough time for these architects to see far into the future at the time of the Revolution, as people who were even less deserving than these men lost their heads.  In any event I've compiled a short three minute video exhibiting some of their works, using the music of Wim Mertens for Peter Greenaway's love poem to M. Boullee called The Belly of an Architect.  I couldn't but help using this music in this context, sorry to say--it just goes perfectly with these images.  (Also, I've written about M. Ledoux here.)

The Coming Sex War of 1919

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 920

This slight, four-page pamphlet was a flare to the newly enfranchised women of Great Britain¹,  a very-shakily congratulatory bit with wide, sniffy overtones of vast male superiority.  The author takes the intended (female) reader at a very slow, almost-stopped pace about what voting is all about, turning down the rhetoric to explain what a vote “is”.  Not only that, but the following as well:
“It seems, therefore, important to give as simply as possible a brief sketch of:
(1)    What Politics are. [Politics is the Science of Government.] (2) The Duties of Citizenship. (3) Coalition Government”.

Just because women got the vote (or partial vote:  they had top be over thirty years of age and have property or be
married to a man with property; full voting rights devoid of property requirements didn’t come in until 1928) didn’t
mean that they enjoyed a relaxation of their inferior social caste. The social consciousness of the status of women may have been slightly fragmented in 1918/19, but only enough to introduce them to the world of politics as you would a child—at least as far as this pamphlet is concerned².

But this work comes around a bit, retracting its insulting narrative somewhat by the end of the pamphlet, as what the writer really wanted was to snag a bunch of these women to vote for the Coalition Candidate, Mr. Lloyd George, in the General Election of December 1918.  Their votes were definitely wanted, and the need was addressed, if not without a little fear that women would retract themselves and form their won party. The pamphlet states:

"If the Voters are mean and corrupt, they will get what they deserve...There is a movement among women at the present time, especially among those who were most active in working for the Vote, to refuse to join any of the old political Associations, but to form a Women's Party or Federation of Women. Such a step is to be very much regretted, for it will certainly lead to a sort of sex war, men and women being divided into opposite camps, each fighting for their selfish ends." 

Assuring women of what a "vote" and "politics" are, and demanding that the priorities of "women's political parties" would lead to a "sex war", the author blandly asks his (!) readers to vote for Lloyd George.

Notes

1. The countries granting partial or full voting rights to women prior to the U.S (1920) include:  New Zealand (full voting privileges), 1893; Australia, 1902 (partial); Finland, 1906; Norway (able to stand for election); Denmark (1915); Iceland (1915); Canada (1917); Austria, Estonia, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russian Federation, United Kingdom (partial) (1918);  Belarus, Belgium , Luxembourg, Netherlands, Ukraine (1919); Albania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, United States of America (1920).
2.  As beautiful a thinker as Darwin was his mind regarding women of the mid-Victorian age was pretty modest, treating his own wife as a sort of advanced child.  She never did get a key to the key cabinet at Downs…

(I should point out an earlier post that I made about the coming equality of women in voting and lung cancer, "Deathly Equality: Liberty, Lung Cancer and Women's Rights".)

Killing London with the Future: City Planning with the Bressey Report, 1937

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 920

Sir Charles Bressey didn’t really try to “kill” London, of course, though parts of his Greater London plan for redirecting and accommodating increasing vehicular traffic certainly would’ve destroyed some great beauty had some of his suggestions been implemented.

I have no doubt that Sir Charles was on the right path to something, here and there, but all I have access to regarding his work appears as an article in The Illustrated London News (28 May 1938), and much of it looks like a absurdo-horror/sci-fi setting for a film by Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton.  I can hear the noise of this city, and it ain’t pretty:  a road through Hyde Park, floating pontoon car parks in the Thames, , elevated highways sitting on top of apartment buildings, removing Piccadilly “Circus”, removing the “park” part of Hyde Park, and so on.

(Very slightly related is this post from 2008 featuring a self-defence plan that would semi-encapsulate London (1938))

And so I’ll pass along these images of “traffic improvements” without too much comment, letting them speak for themselves.

Trafalgar Square as a triple-decker parking deck. (What can one say?)

Hyde Park, with a semi-submerged road cutting through the heart of the place.

 

 

 

 

Flying Wing Aircraft, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 919

What can I say?  I just like the flying wing. Also I should point out that the Illustrated London News is an excellent resource for schematic cut-aways like this--I think that I have 125 or so of them here for the 1910-1945 period.

Junkers built this fabulous flying (“inhabited”) “wing only” aircraft, sending it up for commercial service in 1929 as the largest airplane in the world. Only two were built (though a Japanese military knock-off ran to a production quantity of six), and I imagine that it was quite expensive making the Berlin-London flight, cruising in around at 109 mph.

I would like to know what the artist was thinking about when he decided to draw a standing man in the sleeping compartments. Not only that, the fellow is looking straight at the artist...perhaps it is a sly, tiny self-portrait?

 

Notes

 

1.  Plane specifications:

Crew: Seven (including a full-time engineer who could service the plane’s four engines from inside the plane).

Capacity: between 30 and 34 passengers, depending upon variation of the aircraft.

Length:  75 ft

Wingspan: 144 ft

Height: 23 ft

Wing area: 3,122 sq ft

Empty weight: 32,893 lbs

Loaded weight: 52,900 lb

Max takeoff weight: 46,826 lb

Maximum speed: 140 mph

Cruising speed: 109 mp

Range: 2,150 miles

Service ceiling: 12,100 ft

Missing "Dots" and Not Seeing the Discovery of Platelets, 1842

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 918

{This post continues some new and unusual cross-categories in this blog, like Missing Things Making Holes; Bombs as Breads.  Today's bit combines the "Blank, Empty and Missing Things" with "The History of Dots" categories.]

Alfred Donne (1801-1878), physician, experimenter, microscopist and photographer, is best known for things other than what he should probably be best known for:  his discovery of the third element of the blood, platelets.  Donne had a wonderful vision, and was among the very first on the scene to write about and employ the spectacular invention of the daguerreotype in chemistry and microscopy.  As a matter of fact, Donne, along with his collaborator Leon Foucault,  produced the very first engraved images of photomicrographs for his cytology paper of 1840. (He was also the first to use electricity in producing a medical illustration, and was among the first modern physicians to write on the great efficacy of mothers using their own milk in breast feeding their children.)  The discovery of platelets paper of 1842¹--preceding two other works published in the same year--does indeed identify the new object, but actually fails to make a methodological examination of the new body, calling the new units "globulins du chyle" (or small globules, derived from plasma).  He also fails to make a drawing of what he saw; so, the combination of these two important elements asked the reader to accept his findings on faith, the tools of reproduction of his observations not being present. 

And so we remember Donne for some other significant things, and less so for his lightly-interpreted and un-illustrated, and missing, "dots".

Notes
1.Donne, Alfred. De l'origine des globules du sang, de leur mode de formation et de leur fin. Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, Paris, 1842, 14: 366-168. 

(Overall the history of the discovery of platelets is complicated:  Leewenhoek (1675) and Henson (1782)  were the first to fully describe the “undefined” particles of the blood; Donne’s work was then more fully described by Beale in 1850, and then again (identified as “small corpuscles” by Zimmerman in 1860 and then again by Schultze in 1874 and Laptschinski (also in 1874). William Osler then enters the scene in 1880, followed by Giulio Bizzozzero who was the first, in the years 1881 -1882, to establish central role of platelets not only in physiological haemostasis, but also in thrombosis.  Anyway it is a longish and not-clear-to-me history.)

Missing Things Making Holes: Soviet Bread-not-Bombs in Finland, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 917

[This post is a hybrid category bridging “Blank and Empty Things” and “A History of Holes”—it is really an entry for blank and missing things making holes]

1.  The Soviet Union’s foreign minister Molotov¹ wanted to make it very clear to the rest of the world that his country was not bombing civilian targets in Finland during the winter war of 1939/1940.

2.  Molotov insisted that targets that were being bombed near Finnish cities were actually airbases.

2.1   Also, since the complaining FDR was over 4000 miles away there was no way that he could “see” what was being bombed.

3.  If there were civilian targets that looked as though they were being bombed, then

    3.1   they weren’t being bombed; and

    3.2   if anything at all was going on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was  dropping bread on the town’s/city’s starving inhabitants.

4.   So far as undefended, non-military targets were concerned, the Soviet Union redefined “bomb” as “bread”.

5.   Therefore, what we’re seeing in this image above are not bombs, but bread; that, or the houses were airbases, which would turn the bread back into bombs.

Molotov insisted that no civilians were direct targets of Soviet bombing campaigns in Finland.  Also, if there were people being killed in these bombing raids they would necessarily and by definition be aircraft workers or air bases support staff or other military personnel.  

This strikingly designed image is from the 17 February 1940 issue of The Illustrated London News; the design is by G.H. Davies, the phenomenal ILN draftsman, and elegantly (and forcefully) depicts the innards of the bomb and its effect on its target.

It is a spectacular and brilliant presentation of the new(ish) Soviet hybrid terror bomb that was being used in the non-existent attacks on Finnish cities.  [The 5’ bomb was made to be deployed in two sections:  the front end of the bomb inside the false nose cone contains dozens of incendiary bombs, released by a revolutions-generated cap propeller, which fall away from the main section of the bomb, which contains a high explosive.]

Since the non-existent bombs that were not being used against non-military installations and were actually bread, the Finns gave the weapons the nickname of “Molotov’s Breadbaskets”.

This was just a down-right nasty bomb, and the illustration shows it falling on and destroying a quiet town with no visible military advantage. The town not being bombed was called Sortavala, which—after numerous Soviet attacks in December 1939—was in actuality destroyed by Soviet air power on 2 February 1940.

The man ultimately responsible for this campaign and the murder of millions of his own countrymen through means of induced starvation, disappearances and ruthless killings—Joseph Stalin—was post mortem dispatched in much the same manner as the reasoning listed above.  Stalin was ignored to the point of non-existence, de-Stalinized and  left entirely out of the 50-volume second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia²  published just a few years after his 1953 death. Stalin executed his brutal and long-time political compatriot Lavrentii Beria, (1899 - 1953) right before his own death, ordering that people who owned the GSE to physically cut out the Beria entry. It is unfortunate that Stalin could not have been denied his existence 30 years earlier.

Molotov, on the other hand, in spite of his enormous sins against humanity (as principle architect of the Great Terror, the extermination of millions of Ukranians, and etc.) was finally removed from government following Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaigns (i.e. by 1962)  and managed to live out the rest of his life alive, not dying until 1986 at the age of 96.

(The "Molotov Cocktail" by the way was not named for him by Soviet soldiers or freedom fighters or whatever fighting for the USSR—it was named for the petrol bomb used by Finnish soldiers and civilians fighting against the Soviets invading their country  in 1939/11940 and again in 1943/4)

Notes

1. In 1940 Molotov was the foreign minister of the Soviet Union, and had just completed negotiating the Non-Aggression pact with Nazi Germany.  This gave the USSR free range for its relations (read “occupy/annex”) Estonia, Bessarabia, Latvia and the Ukranian/Belorussian-occupied section of Poland (to the Curzon Line), and to also conduct its war with Finland.  The fierce Finns never lost their independence, though they did lose a part of their country. 

2. The GSE had a somewhat complicated publishing history, winding up with 65 volumes over its two editions, constructed with very questionable state-controlled X-Ray communist vision spectacles. There is so much in these volumes that is wrong/sanitized/fiction that I have no idea how a non-specialist might be able to use the thing.

What 1.5 Billion Pounds Bought the Military in 1938: Finding a Gem Inside a Great Graphic

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 916

The Illustrated London News for 27 February 1937 hosted a brilliantly designed graphic illustrating the ways in  which the British War department could/should spend 1.5 billion pounds (or about $100 billion in 2009 dollars, sort of) over a five-year period as the price of keeping the peace.  Of course they wouldn't make it but a quarter of that distance as Austria fell to Czechoslovakia which fell to Poland and the end.  The full-page pictorial effort is to the right:

Nestled in the corner of this page--at about 2x1 inches--is this lovely little graphic, showing that 1.5 bil could purchase 300 Queen Marys, which this delightful little design showed to great effect, and a hidden gem inside of a gem. First is a detail of this detail,

 

Followed by the full smidgen of the overall page of comparisons and analogies:

Then there's the semi-standard presentation of what the Navy could purchase:

And then the Army:

And of course the Territorial Army:

And the Air Force (which if you look closely includes a balloon barrage  facility at upper right):

By far the most interesting to me is the hidden gemoid of Queen Marys, all produced by the fabulous G.H. Davies, who did many hundreds of such images and sectional cutaways and plans and technical drawings for the ILN over a 25-year period.  M.r Davies may well be my favorite technical artist of this period.

When Civilians Aren't Civilians: Blowing Up Bomb-Proof Cities, 1927-1934.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 915

We’re a few days past the 95^th anniversary of the first aerial bombing of a city, the first in the long and unhappy calculus of eliminating things and people in civilized settings  by dropping high explosives (and etc.) on them from the air. 19 January 1915 saw the first bombs dropped from an airship during WWI, two German Zeppelins lighting up Great Yarmouth, Sheringham and King’s Lynn in the U.K.—the physical and strategic outcomes were minimal; the psychological and intellectual aspects were not.

The effectiveness and temerity of bombing escalated exponentially--virally by the end of WWII. Aerial bombing’s future effectiveness and devastating potential was recognized by the early 1920’s, particularly  in the form of the Hague Conference (1924), where the bombing of cities and civilians was theoretically controlled, if not outlawed. 

Of course the definitions of “bombing” and “cities” and “civilians” and “non-combatants” were very loosely writ and were completely open to (completely) wide interpretation in practice, and were especially liable to racist necessities. I should also add that the concepts of “defended” and “undefended” cities were—somehow—nebulous.

An encyclopedia could no doubt be written on nothing but the these awful bits of bombing.  And for another example of this I turn to the French, who can supply more than their share, per capita, pound-for-pound, to this equation. No, not the French return to Indochina in 1945 (after having done business with the occupying Japanese forces for the entire war) and their resurgent colonialism as practiced against the Vietnamese, or the heinous practices against the Algerians just prior to that country’s independence:  it is their bombing practices in Damascus. Not the Syrian bombings of 1945 (which also included many other places like Aleppo, Hama and etc.) but the French civilian bombings of Damascus in 1925.  For it was in that year that the League of Nations found that the French really weren’t bombing and killing civilians indiscriminately when they were doing so; they were, ironically, bombing themselves, and so their actions were not illegal.  (It was problematic, identifying “civilians”, as the League didn’t necessarily grant the same sort of “humanness” to all human, finding categories for barbarians and savages.  It was acceptable to bomb those later two categories, but not the first.) So the French sought to subdue a rebellion against their oppressive rule in that country, identifying the Muslim population centers in Damascus as probable hotbeds of activities for the “bandits” that were causing them their problems.  October 18, 1925 is when this particular outrage occurred; the Syrians protested, and the League considered.

And that was about the size of the story for the Syrians, because as it turns out, the French were just maintaining an order that for them was a simple police action; civilians populations could not be bombed in the eyes of international law, if the bombing was being done to a foreign people; since the French were there and occupying the country, they were conducting a police action, and in a sense were merely bombing themselves, loosening them from the barriers of whatever international law could be applied to their actions by the League of Nations. 

 

These are just a few examples from the French; there are plenty more for other countries for every decade, every year.  (The Brits in Teheran in 1924, the Italians at Harar in 1935, Franco/Luftwaffe in Guernica in 1937, the Japanese against Shanghai/Beijing/Tianjin (etc.) in 1937, and on and on.)

 

The Big Fear of bombing from the air and the need to protect the populations of cities led to all sorts of anti-bomb/bomb-proof architectural plans, most not very good and not very practical.  Such is the price of trying to make your people happy.  I happen to have

a few in my files, which are seen above  and below. (The top images were printed in the Illustrated London News in 134; the bottom in 1927.) The results of the plans were no doubt intended to pursue a common belief that cities could be constructed to be bomb-proof, that the future that national leaders were dragging their subjects into wasn't necessarily as dire as the possibilities of aerial bombings hinted things might be.  Of course the resulting buildings would be massive and impossibly expensive; the prospect for underground cities (and roads!) was just a non-starter.  And these future-views would all be obsolete in less than 15 years what with the development of enormous firepower.  And I'm not talking atomic.  

“The First Thing is to Find Some Men” How to Get a Boy-Date, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 914

[Continuing the posts "What Makes Human Robot Girls, 1941" and The Missing Pieces of Women, Pope Joan and the Proper Girl]

Do Boys Like You? is the name-of-the-game for girls, evidently (“set out to make yourself worthy of a boy’s affection.  Just one boy—any boy…”), brought to you as a part of a long, continuing series by Elizabeth Woodward in the Ladies’ Home Journal in the early 1940’s.

This installment is about getting a boy for a date, and how to make oneself getable and datable and boy-friendly, all while maintaining the thinnest veneer of self-acknowledgment ("be adaptable as a chameleon") as possible while staying true to "yourself".  It is a cocktail of overall old-lady sense and deep ruffled bows writ by the hand of gender entrapment and not-so-subtle subjugation. Let’s get to it with some of the more archaeologically-interesting statements of this social-norms-establishing pamphlet:

Paragraph: (Intro):

“Do boys like you, or don’t they? Its as easy as that!  Either you have dates and go places with lots of boys, or they don’t pay any attention to you at all.”

Paragraph: “A Female World”

“…the first thing is to find some men.” (Which is odd because “men” is used only one other time beyond this reference—its all boys and nothing but boys.)

“Short of throwing yourself on their (boys’) mercy, see if you can’t wrangle an introduction out of the girls who do know boys…”

“Your parents could invite their friends over for dinner and ask them to bring along their son. And you do a good job on him!” (I’m not sure what that “job” is.)

“They (boys) can’t find you if you’re packed away in a mob of females.”

Paragraph: “A Rank Outsider” (on being the new girl in a community):

“The girls have things under control and they don’t want any interference from you.”

“You might know more than they do, and you just might talk down your pug nose at them.”

“…you’d better get accustomed to traveling alone…”

“Give them every chance to find out that you aren’t high hat, that you like the same things they do, that you aren’t out to sniggle their men away…”

“When they (the girls) accept you, the boys will too…”

Paragraph: “an Old Story”

“(Boys) are so used to looking at you that they think of you as furniture.You’ve got to be new!”

“If you’re fat and pudgy, make yourself lean, sleek and smart.”

Paragraph “Take it Easy”

“…its going to take practice to make boys like you. Take it easy. Set out to make yourself worthy of a boy’s affection.  Just one boy—any boy…”

Paragraph “A Few Gentle Hints” (Seems that we’ve gone way beyond this by now.)

“Don’t run around with girls who are dud.”

“Don’t go in pairs with a girl who is overwhelmingly popular…Better pick a girl who will give you an even break.”

“Don’t languish for some local ‘hero’ who is sought after by all the girls in town.  He may be good-but he’s far out of reach…”

“Don’t pick on a lad who has never had a date with a girl.”

“Don’t be careless or sloppy when you’re talking with boys…”

“Don’t expect (or even hope) that every boy you meet will ask you for a date.”

And (not quite) lastly, but should’ve been:

“Don’t go around thinking about boys constantly.”

But lastly thus:

“Act as though you are having fun. Be alive, gay and enthusiastic. Be interested in what's going on. Be sweet, tactful, and adaptable as a chameleon. Have definite likes and dislikes, but don’t be so rigid that you are stubborn, opinionated and difficult to get long with. Be carefree, casual, easy, willing to play and fun to play with. And don’t be shy about liking the boys.

THEN THE BOYS WILL LIKE YOU! [Emphasis in the original.]

My poor mother would’ve been reading this…

(Thanks to Jeff Donlan for pointing out that the chap on the cover carrying the girl away has joined the fabric of her skirt to (1)  hold onto and steady her and (2) make sure her skirt doesn't fly up and out and is not actually touching her thigh…)

Red Sky in the Renassiance: the Reverse of Geometry

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 913

What if our eyes worked in the “opposite” way?  What if we somehow broadcast the lines of reality from our eyes¹ rather than receive photonic emissions from the physical world, that we didn’t specify the wavelength and frequency of light, and that somehow electromagnetic rumblings in the “visual range” didn’t apply to our sense of sight?

This would certainly make for an interesting  existence if somehow the elements around us weren’t necessarily so.  Perhaps this is sort of replacement reality is just what has been going on in the entire history of humans, altering the landscape to make it more suitable for our existence, a long history of painting the physical landscape with something more “suitable”, an individualized creation. 

This all came up wondering about this fantastic sky, produced 475 years before non-representational art and 455 years before Gauguin started applying big blankets of red² :  it seems to me in a distant impression that it is a representation of vision that is more a projector than a camera..  The end result of this emission and wayward thought is the fabulous red sky in the painting Nativity by Master Francke³ (ca. 1424-1436) is a fantastic red sky with lustrous stars.

The painting is otherwise filled with the common reliables of Renaissance iconography concerning the nativity:  the place of “birth” (a stable or barn-like building, also sometimes appearing as a classical ruin or cave), a flock of sheep, a stand of trees, and the watch sensate gazes of the near by beasts.  Mary is ecstatic in the same ways that Joseph is usually not—to me, he usually seems pretty detached from the whole deal, lost in another space.  The baby Christ is again just a little man (and not a baby) laying there on the barren ground.  [I’ve wondered about Joseph’s detachment:  perhaps the whole scene is nothing but mysterious, a complexity far removed from his reach and understanding, a notion of an act that is so phenomenal that there is no retrievable reaction for it, and so he looks away.  Later on in the history of Mary and Joseph, and deep into the 19^th century when the Immaculate Conception—that is, the sexless conception of Mary the mother of Christ which she would later accomplish for her own baby—the issue of Joseph’s own virginity comes up, mounting the confusion no doubt in Joseph’s already-full head.]

But back to the sky:  certainly skies and backgrounds of pure gold and blue painted by the masters in Sienna and Florence abound during this time, but red is quite unusual.  The sky is accented by the terrific red of the wings of the angels and more softly so in the hair of the (long-fingered) Madonna. 

There is also the issue of the hole in the sky, revealing the large-handed Creator with glimpses of the alternate, higher, existence visible in the background, a taste of the alpha (or omega?) part of the long arch of Earth-borne humanity.

Notes

1.The discussion of optics and vision is one of the most spectacular conversations ever held in the history of science and philosophy (along with "time", "motion" and "the void".  I think that Leonardo would've come closest in relatively-modern times to understanding vision if he had the real capacity of dissecting the eye (which in spite of many approaches to experiment) would always go flat, leaving him with an unsatisfying mess.

In Aristotle's Physics (Book II, Part II) we find the following fascinating thought:

"Similar evidence is supplied by the more physical of the branches of mathematics, such as optics, harmonics, and astronomy. These are in a way the reverse of geometry. While geometry investigates physical lines but not qua physical, optics investigates mathematical lines, but qua physical not qua mathematical"

A classical position of the emission theory of optics is stated by Hero in his Definitions:

"Optics does not deal with physical questions and does not study whether given rays flowing out from the eyes go forth to the boundaries of objects or whether images that are detached go forth from corporeal objects [and] enter the eye along a rectilinear path or whether the intervening air is stretched or contracted by the ray-like pneuma from the eye. It is only concerned whether, at each reception (of an image) the right direction of movement or tension is maintained as well as the requirement that the convergence to a point occurs at an angle when objects are seen that are larger or smaller than the eye."

(My thanks to Dr. Kim Veltman for these quotes from her Continuity and Discovery in Optics and Astronomy, Studies on Leonardo da Vinci http://www.sumscorp.com/books/contin/title.html)

2. I had Gauguin's 1888 "After the Sermon/Jacob Wrestling the Angel" in mind for an example of this.

3. Master Francke active (c. 1424 – 36 ), Nativity, in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg; oil on oak, 39x35 inches. Hamburg, Kunsthalle. “German painter who worked in Hamburg, where in 1424 he painted a huge altarpiece for the company of merchants who traded with England, the so-called ‘Englandfahrer Altar’, originally placed in their chapel in the Johanniskirche (remnants in Hamburg, Kunsthalle). When closed, the double-winged altarpiece displayed four scenes from the life of S. Thomas Becket, the patron saint of the company, above four scenes from the life of the Virgin (e.g. Nativity;). Opened, the altarpiece showed scenes from the Passion of Christ. Francke was a leader of the northern German version of International Gothic. He had close links with French book illumination (he may have worked in Paris for some time) and the paintings of the Rhineland, especially those of Conrad van Soest , though it is not known where he received his training.”

Other Nativity scenes as follows:

A Mile-High Pile of Wood--Graphical Display of Quantitative Data.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 913

Continuing a long, developing thread on the graphical display of quantitative data--and especially that which uses man-made objects for comparison—is this interesting bit from a Romanian mining publication from 1933.

The huge mound next to the Eiffel Tower shows the consumption of wood in Romania over a ten year period, a stack of wood 700  metres long and 1500 metres high.  Evidently this wall has only the most rudimentary depth of a metre, as the legend reads that the volume of the woodpile is 1,050,000 metres cubed, which is the same as its square area.  So somebody missed something, here, though the artist did supply some nice shadowing.

Just above it appeared this comparison for the amount of oil consumed over the same ten year period

I’m not sure why this comparison was being made.  This does come in the interwar period which saw a great expansion in Romanian territory and a vast modernization effort following the country’s devastating experience in WWI. Maybe it was illustrating modernization from wood-burning power/heating sources to oil-based. I really don't know--I just liked the Eiffel Tower being dwarfed by a massively tall and impossibly skinny woodpile.

When a Compliment is Not: Newton and Hooke and the "Shoulders of Giants"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 912

I was tooling looking for vision quotes and came upon this by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (an unusual stomping ground for me) from The Friend (published in 1828):

"The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulder to mount on."

This made me think of the over-quoted sentiment quoted again by Isaac Newton

"What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

Newton wrote this in a letter (5 February 1676) to the immensely creative workhorse Robert Hooke1.  He was a tireless, relentless observer and experimenter, who lost little effort in a stranded idea and pursued interesting and problematic questions relentlessly.  More than others too he chased his won glory—minor but long and insistent—the years of which wore thin on many people in the scientific community.  But there were many characteristics of the man that made him not quite so lovable and endearing—not that Newton was any of those things, as he was not, but if you are going to be a secondary luminary to a super nova you’ve got to have something else going for you that the other man doesn’t have—sharing, helpful, greatly generous—to get you into the long pre-dusty pages of history. Also it would’ve helped if Hooke chose his battles with a little more aplomb and ingenuity—the war which began in 1672 with Newton went very badly for Hooke and followed him to the grave (and far beyond).  Newton and Hooke had many disputes—most notably in optics—basically because Hooke pursed Newton (among many others) for expropriating his ideas.  Hooke was over the line on this and probably pushed the point too far—Newton was enormously annoyed by this and other Hooke contacts and wasted no effort in trying to pay Hooke back the favor over the years.  Newton was famously sharp and could fashion that intelligence and wit into a terrifically nasty tool against those who bothered him.

And so back to the “shoulders” letter. This always struck me as a bit too melodramatic for a Newton, and also a little too congratulatory for a field that he basically owned, especially since he was a towering egoist (and not without cause).  But he did pay Descatres (“des Cartes” in the original) a compliment; though I could not at all think of Newton referring to the dreaded Hooke as one of the giants’ shoulders he was standing upon.  Newton’s reference to “giants” might also have been a swipe at Hooke’s physical stature, which was terribly slight, small and crooked.  SO I think that Newton was referring to Descartes, and decidedly not Hooke.

So this semi-ubiquitous scientific laudatory quote is perhaps not quite so.  Kinda like the very well known painting by William Blake featuring Newton as a naked geometer, figuring out the world, a color-tone praise of the great physicist.  Or perhaps not.  Blake I think simply didn’t like Newton, didn’t care for the scientist taking away the mystery of the world that Blake loved so much—especially in regards to color, which Blake needed to stay interpretative and mysterious.  Newton took part of that away, and I think Blake exercised a little payback in his artwork. 

It seems to me that if one looked at the “shoulder” quote and the Blake artwork as works that were insults and not praises, they can be easily seen that way.  Its all a matter of perspective.

Notes

1. The 28-year old Hooke published the results in a gorgeous and revolutionary book, Micrographia (a lovely e-text edition appears at Gutenberg, here) in 1665, which became an instant best seller and highly praised and valued. (Samuel Pepys, perhaps among the shiniest stars whose imprimatur was like a royal blessing, said the book (was) "the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life.") There is no telling what the people of the mid-17^th century thought of seeing such incredible discoveries in the little semi-invisible stuff that made up their normal, daily lives.  The only thing that somewhat equates to this would be if the first images of the Hubble were those of Earth-bound objects whose detail had previously been unknown.  Hooke’s observations and drawings of things like the common flea were just an astonishment—that such a creature of “low order” could have such intricate detail and design was a complete revelation.  The drawings of the fly's eye, too, was an inescapable wonder, an incredible object to consider as having any detail pre-microscope, and then revealed to have unimaginable design and elegance.