Ptak Science Books

200,000,000 Pounds of Buttocks--Or--Putting the Color Back in the Black-and-White

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC  Post 977

Well, this is a confusing title, with two seemingly unrelated affairs, no?  It is  probably sexier (?) too than the actual contents, but, we'll let the cheeks fall where they may.  The origin of this post is found in the title to this large, over-sized 1937 pamphlet, Sat on by Millions:

This really is the "story of FABRIKOID", a plastic-y bit of seating innovation brought to America by the good chemical engineers in service of du Pont.  It was the stuff used to make artificial artificial flowers and truck upholstery, book covers and bus tops.  But something happened somewhere along the line to make it more

attractive to look at and feel, and thus was born the cushioned and upholstered restaurant/movie house chair that you could simply spray off with water from a hose.  (My friend Andy is much enamored with his new Honda "Element", the interior outfitted in such a way that he could, he related excitedly, "wash out with the garden hose".)

 

[Cafeteria  at Hobart Manufacturing, Troy, Ohio.]

Du Pont did test it out with 200 million pounds of buttocks--a mechanical test of the equivalent of a 200-pound man sitting on a FABRIKOID-covered seat one million times.  The flexing was evidently perfect, the company recalling another great success story of another FABRIKOID chair being sat on by thousands at the Chicago World's Fair

[Cocktail lounge at Pittsburgh's Seventh Avenue Hotel.]

and then sent out on a tour around the country.  (I'm not sure that I'd stand in a line to sit in the most-sat-in chair in the world, as appealing as that might be...)

[Federal Reserve Club of Los Angeles.]

But the more appealing aspect of this pamphlet--aside from the great chemical achievement--are the luxurious (and early) color photographs of the FABRIKOID-covered furniture.  There are colors to remind everyone that color did exist in the 1930's, and that when Bogart was cruising a bar for raw whiskey and a cig it could've had blue floors and red and yellow chairs, and not just the simpler gray stuff that we're used to seeing.

[Cocktail lounge, University Club, Troy, Ohio.]

Perhaps it is better seeing Bogey in a haze of smoke snuggled into a blackish chair rather than what it might've (blue and yellow) been.

The (Really) Last Word in Skin Care, Lip Prep, Eye Sealing & Cavity Solidifiers: the Rubbery Chemical Appeals of Embalming Fashions

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 975

[Faint of heart, stop here.]

This carefree stroll through the geology of death prep and care comes to us via the Embalmers’ Supply Company (ESCO) catalog, of 1941, serving and selling to members of the embalming profession since 1886.  It provides the Practioner with all means necessary to scrape away facial muscle, cement the jaw, seal the eyes, color “old age” eyebrows, fill cancerous cavities, mold over gaping wounds, position the arms, contour the chin, scoop out the brain, replace the blood, pull out the bowels, and all other manner of removal/drainage/fillup, and then apply makeup to cover all suture wounds and other “deficiencies”.

 

I find the following interesting “quality” products:

Duo-Raa-Co Main Arterial Embalming, Incarnadines the Blood! “For the Main arteries!"

...and now with all risk of “Over-Embalming” totally eliminated!!”

Bruise Bleach (“for black eyes and bruises”)

VEINO Wound Filler
DERMA Lip and Eye Sealer

“CAVOS:  For Cavity Treatment! Hard firming…with Lessened Fumes!” and

“CAVOS Cavity Osmosis…with Less Fumes”

VEINO-ESCO-RA-CO (extra smooth arterial “with smoothing filling properties”)

“URANO: Arterial and Cavity ‘all purpose’ Fluid”

“SUTURE Incision Cement Powder (“for filling large wound & …”)

 

Then there’s a long solid line of filling, solidifying, non-parting, forming and fragrant ESCO products:

--Hardening and Preserving Compound” but more properly known as a “Drying and Filling” compound

--Fluid Color “for additional internal coloring”

--Dry Shampoo (“For cleansing discolored hair, old-age eyebrows and mustaches”)

--RIGIDINE Mouth Closure (“Use this specific for setting jaws”)

--Modifier Anti-Dehydrant (“Prevents parted lips”)

--Fragrine: “the practical use of Fragrine to the funeral director is wholly and solely in its delightfully fresh deodorizing fragrance!”
--Tissue Filler “for restoring normal contours to shrunken areas”

--Liquid Skin Pore Sealer” and “ESCO Incision Sealer”  (both work well in “wet” conditions.)

In addition to the chemicals is a long list of other necessaries (and no sundries), including all manner of scalpels, blades, rubber pants and bloomers, big black rubber gloves, “surgical” tables, spreaders, scoopers, closers, and then of course enormous suturing appliances with huge bobbins of thread. 

And such was the American way of death, for some, in 1941.

 

Seeing Vision: Examples of Light and Sight, Personified

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 976

(On seeing the morning’s rising sun): “Looks like light to me.” SpongeBob SquarePants 

“All the fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to answer the question, 'What are light quanta?' Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself.”  A. Einstein

“Are not gross bodies and light convertible into one another, and may not bodies receive much of their activity from the particles of light which enter into their composition?” I. Newton, Opticks, 1704, Query 30.

Depicting the capacity of sight and nature of light has been both an easy and a knotty problem in the history of science. Over the successive theories on the basis of light the artistic presentation of the phenomenon has been generalized (generally) in a very simple way:  by straight lines.  There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, the lines are just parenthetic place-holders suggesting direction, not actual descriptors of what light “looks” like.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of images printed 1550-1850 to call upon to make this point, and I've selected but a few.  The first belongs to Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner and which appeared in his  Oculusm hoc est: fundamentum opticum...,printed in Innsbruck in 1619. His work is an out-and-out landmark in the history of optics,  physiological optics and ophthahlmometry, and provided a springboard for two generations following him, not the least of whom was Rene Descartes. The illustration above is the book's frontispiece, and features four camera obscuras demonstrating four principles of the eye, the middle ground of which is a beam of light 

Rene Descartes depicted the interpretation (in his  Principles of Philosophy of 1644) of light and its physiological reaction in the brain as follows:

the lines of sight depicting binocular vision, observed (and compressed) by the eye's "particles" and processed by the pineal gland which in turn manipulate the "fluids" in the control of nerves and muscles. 

Another example of even greater fame than the iconic image by Descartes is that of the diagram showing the connection between color and its reflective index by Isaac Newton, appearing in his Opticae of 1706.

 

Another fine example comes from Zacharias Traber's (1611-1679) beautifully illustrated classic of optics (and physiological optics) , Nervus Opticus sive Tractatus Theoricus..., published in Vienna in 1690.  Traber is a great collector and synthesizer of the work done during and before his time, using the work of Descartes, Kepler, Schott, Kircher, Scheiner and Aguilon (for example), and then further implementing their ideas especially in the areas of color theory  and light refraction.  The image certainly reflects Jesuit Traber's religious training, depicting the holy source of light (originating with the almighty force) which directs it to the sun; the light then is left to the inquisitive and playful hands of cherubs who reflect and magnify it, as well as use it to start a fire (from the condensing lens) and observe it through a telescope. The main cherub empties a sack containing a number of different optical tools, no doubt for the playful brethern beneath. 

 

And then of course there is the great, unstoppable, polymathic and sometimes incorrect Jesuit Athanasius Kircher.  This image appears in his masterwork Ars Magna lucis et umbrae, printed in Amsterdam in 1671, which deals with light and shadow, optical illusions, color, refraction, projection and distortion, sundials, mirrors, as well as astronomical subjects. Most of these subjects are clearly seen in the engraved frontispiece to the work (below), the source of all of the "rays" of light coming from the godhead, relayed through a telescope, reflected from a mirror, and gathered in a camera obscura. 

 

Other interesting images from the Kircher include this spotlight.

Distribution of Ownership: What does "American Owned" Mean?

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

This enormous neon sign is the identifier chosen for our locally-owned chain supermarket here in Asheville, North Carolina.  It signifies that the people who own the store are American; it certainly has nothing to say about the supposed American distribution of the money spent in that chain, or how much of it replaces money sent out (along the wholesale food chain) for all of the products sold in the store that come from not-the-U.S.A.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with non-American products being sold in boldly-proclaimed "American Owned" store, the owners proud that the people giving them their money in this mountain town 450 miles from the ocean are giving it to a Native Son.  The fact that this store is selling all manner of goods from all of the world seems to skirt the patriotic pronouncement of its pediment. Is it really necessary that they sell six brands of apple juice, four of which are manufactured with apples brought in god-knows-how from China? (Mott's is one of these very national brands using Chinese apples--the country of origin is stamped in small blue letters near the mouth of the bottle.)  Ditto for orange juice--there are more brands, but the percentages of national/international seem to be about the same.  Even outside of fruits and veggies, it is very remarkable to me how many of the non-specialty products that line our supermarket shelves come are manufactured overseas, eating up shelf space for home-grown/produced/manufactured American products.

This little screed could go on and on--I really just wanted to visit the issue of apple juice--especially since we're in the heart of apple country, and the distribution of these juices stays the same even when our apples are in season. It seems entirely wrong and suspect that by some great unknown mechanism it is cheaper to send a ship filled with apple-squeezings half-way around the world, only to bottle it with sugar and water and other stuff, and sell it cheaper than the juice grown/produced/packaged just 15 miles away.  Somewhere along the food chain in this apple example must be a very weak link, which I guess must be the Chinese farmers and laborers, who must make--literally--nothing.

This store also used to sell American flags made in China--but they went away.

I am reminded that Wal-Mart originally distinguished itself as a "Buy American" store all those years ago, but that sentiment has long since passed into a dirt-filled bone-hole out there in red Arkansas clay, waiting for the time when it never existed.

"American Owned" does not make an American-goods-sold-here store, not by any means.

A friend of mine owns a clothing store with upper-end, better-made lines of outdoor wear.  He has seen many of his top suppliers of American made goods take their business offshore.  There is an appreciable difference in quality, and no difference in price--there is of course a greater profit to the owners who are banking on and exploiting the corporate brand.  My friend won't carry these goods anymore, for many reasons, not the least of which is the salty quality.  He has gone so far as to include a large (tastefully designed) sign announcing "Not one thing here made in China".  Customers love the sentiment, and then most chase after wherever the cheaper-made Chinese variants made off to. Some things just aren't right.

A Note from the Future: Digital Computer Questionnaire (1953) & "What Does a Computer Look Like?" (1957)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 971

At a time when computers were big, heavy, electrically-scented, hot and expensive (ranging into the hundreds of thousands of 1953 dollars, many millions in 2010 bucks), and coming at a time when very few individual companies (exterior to the military/industrial sphere or insurance) actually owned one of these machines, Lawrence Wainwright wrote a useful guide to potential computer-buyers,  “Digital Computer Questionnaire”. Appearing in  the world’s first publicly-published computation/computer journal, Computers and Automation, Wainwright sets out in six single-spaced pages a very tight and logical set of questions for the would-be buyer of one of these early god-sent beasties. I've illustrated the non-illustrated questionnaire with a series of images from another article found a little deeper in the same journal, "A Pictorial Introduction to Computers",  which appeared in June, 1957.  

As I read through the list (excepted below) it becomes obvious that the really good questions are deftly asked, and that the possible buyer would be well on their way to having a good dialog with the seller.

The questions do have a real flavor of antiquity to them, much like monied Parisians  with their detailed list of questions for their 15th century water-carrier:  where are you getting your water? What sort of bucket? How distant the source?  How cold? Is it sweet? Soft? Etc.  Good questions that made sense for their time, important, integral--until the water carrier (like the brick/mortar bookstore, or the computer questionnaire from 1953) was replaced by something more efficient, like a water delivery system. 

This questionnaire is like a communication from the future to me, a reminder about our own current organization of knowledge and how it will seem to an observer in 25 years (or 50, or 100) and how soon pressing issues and sustained/necessary info will be delegated to the ever-creepingly speeding "antiquity".
The questions are excellent—they are just old, and no longer applicable, much like our own will soon be.

Digital computer Questionnaire

[Lawrence Wainwright, Del Mar California]

General

Are instructions and data interchangeably stored in all memories?

Is internal operation binary, decimal, or what?

Memory

What are the types and sizes of intermediate memory (magnetic drum or equivalent)?

What are the type and size of slow memory…?

Abnormal Operation

What are indicators and effects (Machine stops, record is made, etc.) of faulty action by the operator, program error or defective data?

Programming

What is its defining characteristic?

What is its form (cards, tape, etc.)?

What are the compiling routines available?

What is the reduction factor in operating speed?

If programming is limited, to how many steps?

Functional Operation

What are diagrams and descriptions of controls, indicators, monitor devices, program progress counter, etc. for computer, input-output means, and operating auxiliaries?  What are the flow charts for instructions, data, indicators, etc.?

Magnetic Tape

What is the description of magnetic tape units?

Storage Details

If cathode-ray tubesa re used, what are constructional and operational details?

If magnetic flip-flop or equivalent storage is used?

If magnetic drum is used, what are the specifications as to construction and operations?

Personnel

What are the requirements for maintenance personnel to number (shifts), education, training?

How many operators are required (for 1, 2 or 3 shifts)?

Production

How many proposed installations have been made?

Installation requirements

What is the plan of the floor space required for all units…?

Acceptance Tests

Have any acceptance tests of any part or whole of the proposed installation…been held?

Engineering Design

What are floor and elevation plans with dimensions, weights, power requirements, cabling and ductwork requirements (including under-floor and special overhead spaces)?

Components and Parts

What are types of tubes, crystal diodes and similar critical items?

To what extent have chassis sections or similar sections be standardized?

Popular Culture Imagery--16th Century Street People (Fools, Musicians and Pregnant Women and more)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 970

Le barbarie del mondo, by Hieronymous Porro (fl 1574-1604), depicts Italian street people collected under the unkind general heading of  "barbarism of the world". I misread the description of the actions of the people in the print (found at the University of Texas website below) as “Making a living doing unnecessary tasks of nothing”—a harsh appraisal of the efforts of people who have nothing trying to make a little bit of change for bread, though it does describe the general sentiment of the print, wrong or not. Though the written descriptions are slightly kinder than this, the depictions of the social unfortunates was certainly not. 

The people described in this image--the collection of unfortunates,a veritable museum of social "outcasts"--include fools, street laborers, merchants, the disabled, prostitutes, destitute women (with children), musicians, street performers, flagellants, religious zealots, and general beggars, not to mention what must've been alley dwellers, street-sleepers and the homeless.

Not too much different from today. What makes this image remarkable to me is that it makes these generally invisible people visible, gathered together in one image.  Generally these people would be used occasionally as found objects, tertiary depictions in larger, grander artworks showing grand structures or town views, the people used to show scale, and the artist taking some small liberty by employing street people as the scale units rather than landed strollers. (See here for an example.) Holbein, de Hooghe, Bruegel--masters of the large gathering and crowds, did not attempt a solitary image to the underclasses' underclass.

[Source:  Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin.]

Popular Culture Images--The Long Road, Allegories of Life's Stages

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 969

This remarkable woodcut appears in Epictetus' Enchiridion (1563), and is one in a long history of images portraying the moral life of humanity.  The longitudinal study of birth, corruption, vice, penance, achievement, want, lewdness, cowardice, sloth, and a penetrating multiple visits of the seven deadlies was intended to show the rough rode that lay ahead of us all on the way to the crowning glory.

The full image appears below, with details following:

This is a detail from the lower right, showing the beginning of life, an abundance of babies, with the foot of Fortuna seen at upper left, she observing (or not) the toddlers' advances along the walls of life. 

 

The achievements of middle life are clearly seen:

As are the temptations of immoral life and the sins that await:

Unfortunate sinners turned away at the foot of Fortuna:

And at the end of the journey, following the three concentric walls leading to finality:

 

This image looks a little suspect, but when you look at other woodcuts of the Tubula you can see this action a little more clearly (and from the side)--and what they reveal is Mother Church rewarding the supplicant with a crown.  This is more clearly seen below, in the 1551 versin of teh morality play by Johann Kramer (and published in Munchen);

The interpretations of these images areas varied as each of their characters, the details of which can be explained one way one day, and another the next; the morals and the end-tale stay the same. 

Another example, this one from 1521 and after a work by Hans Holbein:

A Note on "Opposite Sameness" in the History of Dots

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 968 

Part of the History of Dots series that I find so attractive is the dot’s great equalizing effect.  The dot has the potential of making everyone, everywhere, feel the wonder of mighty insignificance—the Earth, for example, depicted from far away, a dot in the cosmos, the solar system a dot in the galaxy, the galaxy a dot in the realm of galaxies.  And then back again, powering perspective back inside us, finding the common thread of humanity again at the cellular level, a dot of sameness.

For example, the map drawn by Sir William Herschel must have been a staggering thing to see when it was first published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1785--at least by the popular viewer.  The enormity and expanse of galaxies was not yet understood, and to see (at this time) our own sun relegated to a point of sameness in what he deduced to be a spiral-shaped Milky Way Galaxy among many others could well have been an astonishing experience to a first-time viewer.

So to for at the other end of the spectrum with the embryological work of Karl Ernst von Baer (an Estonian educated in Germany who worked in St. Petersburg) as it was published in his De ovi mammalium et hominis genesi (1827). 

His work established beyond all doubt that the reproductive processes for all mammals were generally the same—or without fundamental difference—from other animals.  And since “mammals” included “man”, it came as quite a shock to the popular audience that the basic facets of reproduction were little changed between dominant predator and all the other stuff. At the professional level Baer’s work was of enormous importance in the development of cell theory which would lead to natural selection…and he also established embryology as a discipline. 

And so the substance of dots at opposing ends of measurement, bringing about a similarity of recognition.  Dots.

Bombing and the End of the World: the Physics of 1932 And All That

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post

1932 in my book turns out to be one of the most collectively epochal years in the history of science.  Certainly others stand out for individual achievements, like 1905 (Einstein’s four papers over two volume of the Annalen), 1687 (Principia), but there are other yeas with fabulous achievements by numerous people.

1543 is one.  That year witnessed the published of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus and Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica, two giant achievements for the outer and inner worlds, one challenging the structure of the universe and the other the Galenic tradition of physiology and anatomy. (To a lesser extent is Peter Ramus’ Animadversions on Aristotle which was a very sustained and elegant attack on the ancient-precept Aristotle an physics.)

1859 saw the publication of On the Origin of Species…JC Maxwell’s work on the kinetic theory of gases, Riemann’s hypothesis, and the spectacular invention of the spectroscope of Kirchhoff and Bunsen (that turned much of the invisible universe visible).

1939 (nuclear fission, chain reaction, neutron stars, magnetic moments, penicillin (advancement), Vit K, FM) and 1948 (nuclear structure, QED, transistor, Big Bang) also come quickly to mind.

1932, though is really quite something, seeing a sweeping array of discoveries in the large and small.  Carl Anderson identified the positron while James Chadwick discovered the neutron; also, the Joliot-Curies’ made their monumental discoveries in radiation.¹ Iwanenko described the neutron as a constituent f the nucleus, while Heisenberg described the nucleus as composed of protons and neutrons.  Knoll and Ruska built the electron microscope, allowing a vision of the interior parts of the interiors of the smallest things, offering images almost as spectacularly new as Hooke’s two centuries earlier.  Looking up and out, in the same year, Lev Landau postulated the existence of neutron stars while Karl Jansky invented radio astronomy. There was also the perfection of the “Polaroid” process by Ed Land, and the isolation of ascorbic acid (Vit C, by  Charles Glen King, and the beginning of a long war between him and Szent-Gyorgyi on priority of discovery).  (In the non-sciences, there was the addition of Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler to their national agendas. It was also a banner year for literature: Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway; Light in August, William Faulkner; 1919, John Dos Passos; The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett; Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell; Young Lonigan, James Farrell; Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder; and Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley…)

 

The thread of thinking about all of this came to mind looking at this image of a bombing instruction room for aviation in England in 1932.  The image is also a great one; the aviator at far left looks like a marionette; the three men above responding to his piloting maneuvers as he concentrates on the endless panoramas of landforms that advances before him on a horizontal diorama.  It is a fabulous analog flight simulator constructed at a time of great change in aviation

1932 is also the year of the publication of Carl W. Spohr’s classic future-vision/speculative fiction apocalyptic-atom bomb end-of-the-world two-parter (so many hyphens!) that appeared in Wonder Stories.² The story begins with a relatively simple series of catastrophic bombings that lead to a sort of détente, a kind of mutually assured destruction, which is then upset when the combatants discover and construct the atomic bomb.   MAD breaks down, and the ensuing massive exchanges result in a  devastated world.   Pretty prescient stuff, all-in-all, even so far as the policy goes—especially so when you wrap this sci-fi story around the elements of 1932—Chadwick, Anderson, Joliot-Curie—that made all of this stuff possible just 13 years later.

Notes

1 The Joliot-Curie discovery was called “one of the most important discoveries of the century... the consequences of the discovery of artificial radioactivity are immense" from Segrè, From X-rays to Quarks, 198-199).  

2.  Part one appeared in the March issue, which also carried stories like "Red April, 1965" by Frank K. Kelly; "The Eternal World" by Clark Ashton Smith; "Waves of Compulsion" by Raymond Gallun; "Mutiny on Mercury" by Clifford D. Simak; "The Time Stream" by John Taine (Eric Temple Bell), and others.  Pretty good bumper crop of sci-fi writers in itself.

The real Alice in Wonderland: Plus Alice in Miniland and Guinness Stout

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 966

Now that the new Tim Burton Alice film is out, let's not forget that there was a real Alice on which Lewis Carroll's Alice was based.  She looks, well, pretty formidable. (Alice Liddell.)

 

A photo by Carroll of Alice at a younger age.  In spite of his logic and math and Snark and Alice, Carroll's "artistic" photos of children are pretty creepy to me. 

States of Perfection: Refrigerated Food & the Archaeology of Meat, 1954

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 965--extended

Like Greek statues, orders of architecture, the golden ratio and Vitruvian man, these ads from LIFE Magazine in 1954 measure a sort of highest-attainable-state, though directed at middle class America.  The ads are for refrigerators, but the interest really is in what is displayed inside of them: they offer an insight into what was seen to be the greatest level of sophistication, the highest stage of want for the most important/essential daily need, and then turned into luxurious accommodation.  Far beyond rice and beans and eggs and ham, far beyond the tiny, perpetually empty icebox of the Kramdens ("The Honeymooners", ca. 1952).

[This continues another post, States of Perfection:Images of TV within TV Ads, 1950.]

The top shelf is of great interest, a virtual archaeology of meat:

 

Artistic Nothingness: Cosmic Panspermia, Spermatozoa and Neurons.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 964

In the history of life there is a virtual geology of buried ideas of how living things came to be.  The belief in spontaneous generation is ancient and evidently still holds a comforting sway (in a scrubbed-up way) among some moderns. There was a lot written on the subject over the centuries: for example, Virgil (Georgics) gives us directions on how to make bees, and the great mathematician Cardan/Cardano passed along instructions on how fishes are made of water, no doubt drawing on the more ancient moisture-related beliefs of Anaximander (600BCE).  Aristotle was more circumspect on the issue of

spontaneous generation, though he did cast a fairly wide and more cautious net:  "sometimes animals are formed in putrefying soil, sometimes in plants, and sometimes in the fluids of other animals." Even the beautiful, polymathic and occasionally very wrong (but way ahead of his critics) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher stated (in his masterwork Mundus Subterraneus, 1646) that he had seen mice generated out of nothing but plants and water.  So it goes. 

The more modern variations on this theme attract a varied collection of some very big names. Though the spontaneity now takes place in the extraterrestrial realm, with comets and meteors and such impacting with the earth with life debris from god knows where (literally), seeding life on earth—though the theories usually beg the question of where the stuff on the meteors and etc. came from.  These names include Svante Arrenhius, Lord Kelvin, the beautiful Hermann von Helmholtz, Fred Hoyle, and many others.

Generally the more-modern view is attributed with the name of cosmic panspermia (it seems to my memory that the first of the most modern life-generating panspermia theories is published in the Comptes rendus in the id 1850’s but I cannot right now remember who it was that wrote it).  And it is this cosmic seed bit that struck me when I first saw this title page (above) of a very rare work by Caspar Posner (1626-1700)—Eilfertiges doch unvorggreiffiches Bedencken… published in 1682.  It seems that Posner recorded these verities of “shooting stars” in Jena on the night of 5 December 1682, quickly writing this four-page work describing them.

The images reminded me instantly of the first spermatozoa images published by Anton von Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723)—and actually they were the first images of live and dead (left and right, respectively) dog spermatozoa.  He did absolutely superb work, a great pioneer working with a hand-held single-lens (barely recognizable as a) 200x microscope.

And there too there’s the detail in this image by the great Santiago Ramon y Cajal ( 1852-1934), who drew the first accurate picture of nerve cells in the cerebellum (found in one convolution of a mammalian cerebellum), which helped formulate his theory that the basic structural unit of the nervous system as the neuron. 

Perhaps it is a simple artistic fittingness to connect the 1682 meteorite shower with cosmic panspermia and Leeuwenhoek and Cajal; in a squinty-eyed way they look pretty good together.  On the other hand of course these are just random bumped-together thoughts having nothing to do with one another.  I vote for artistic nothingness.

A History of Blank, Missing & Empty Things: #75, Monks

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC  Post 963

[A History of Blank, Missing & Empty Things, installment #75]

Many are the things that are “missing” (or blank or empty), but seldom are they depicted in antiquarian prints, which is why I report them every time that I found them. Today’s installment:  missing monks. 

This image comes to us from the anti-cleric Ignaz Edler* von Born’s (1752-1791) viciously satiristic Specimen Monachologiae Methodo Linnaeanna…., which was published in Vienna in 1783. (Mozart was there, in Vienna, a year married and finishing his first violin quartet.  He was also evidently tutored in Masonic ways by Born , who had introduced the young man into the Benevolence lodge.) The pamphlet was a scathing rant against monkish religicisim (?!), taking off on Born’s mineralogist background and classifying the orders according to a diverted Linnean system.  This image—for all the world displaying four “missing” monks—catalogs their sashes, shoes and (of course buttock-filled) underwear according to Born’s choppy and determined mal-intent.  Born had evidently seen enough of religion to make fun of it, what with his Jesuit-educated background followed by extensive studying and a professional career in the physical sciences. 

*Born was born to the nobility, as the “edler” denotes.

Circle Factories. A Small Chain of Being Between Guns, Sewing Machines, Bikes and Cars

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 962

"The Circle Factory." Well, not quite.  Actually, not at all.  The first image is just a detail from the warehouse of the ubiquitous Columbia bicycle works in 1881.  The second aren’t even circles, but cosmological ovals, and is a detail of a wood engraving depicting planetary and  cometary  orbits in Leonhard Euler’s Theoria Motuum Planetarum et Cometarum (1631-1635). 

The bicycle wheels appeared in Bicycling World (for April 1881, “A Great American Manufacture”), illustrating a story about the growing interest in bicycles in America but more specifically the success of the partnership between the Weed Sewing Machine factory and Albert A. Pope in the mass production of the bike.  It was a newish idea, partially borrowed from the Sharps Manufacturing

Company’s mass production of weapons with standardized parts, which was employed in the production of sewing machines by Weed, and then on to bikes by Pope.  Actually Weed took the step further than Sharps by producing almost all of their machines in-house, having a foundry and forge right there at the factory.  It was this step and then other innovations by Pope that produced an enormously successful bicycle production company, with something like a quarter million bikes made in the first few years of operation. 

The Weed-Pope domination didn’t last long though, what with the introduction of the remarkable safety bicycle from England in 1887—this is instantly recognizable as a “modern” bike, with a chain power train and two same-size wheels. In two years there were hundreds of companies building those bikes, producing a million a year.  

By 1895 this balloon busted, and for some reason Americans stopped buying bikes, with demand falling off to nearly nil, causing the vast majority of these companies to whither and fold, causing the whole of the bicycle interest to come first circle. Or cycle.

But there was a huge lesson learned for future manufacturers of transportation devices—namely cars, and more specifically, Ford(s), drawing critical lessons in production from forging methods and sustainable assembly lines. 

Euler has nothing to do with bikes or Fords, but he did have a whole heck of a lot to do with circles. (Actually, I just liked the image set against the big bike wheels.)

Word Cloud: The 236 Different Words of "The Cat in the Hat"