Ptak Science Books

Mr. Mole, the Stationary Busby Berkeley of Mass Crowd Installation Photographs, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1185

I've long enjoyed these massively organized, captured moments of time and effort--large caliber photos of concentrated efforts of tens of thousands of people, all of their motion and utility directed to produce this one moment in time.  Perhaps the greatest practioner of this artform was Arthur S. Mole (1889-1983), the stationary Busby Berkeley of Big Organized Crowd Efforts (BOCE).  (He led an interesting life, coming from Scotland with his family to be part of a Utopian community led by John Alexander Dowie--a faith healing visionary, self-reported precursor to the second coming of Christ, and leader of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church--at City Zion, Illinois. Dowie was a problematic man not without good and interesting qualities, though his to-the-death prayer duel with a rival visionary is an interesting story to be left for another time.)

I've always enjoyed this photograph  in particular--it was made from a 70'-tall platform with a 11x14" view camera using a wide angle and a deep oblique angle, along with 30,000 soldiers from Camp Custer, Michigan.   It was made in 1918 by Mole, along with the evident and very capable choreography of John D. Thomas, who was the Doctor of Persepctive and Motion for the pictures.

[Note: most of the images below are extremely clickable/zoomable.]

Most of the soldiers are used to make the field at the top of the stripes--so near as I can tell (from the resolution image that I had to work with), there are about 300 men in each stripe (except for the outer two), meaning that there between 3,000 to 5,000 in the collected stripes, which puts something like 25,000 troops in the stars and their field. The middle stripe I reckon to be 150' long; my guesstimate for the star field is 600' deep and 1250' wide, making a triangular collection of men 750'x1250'. That takes a little bit of planning to accomplish to ensure that everything is kept in perspective, and which also means that a lot more folks are needed at the top of the constructed image than at the bottom.

Another excellent example is this photo made of the U.S. Marine Corps emblem using 6,000 marines at Paris Island in 1920.

Making Tubes of out Holes–the History of Holes, Extended

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1184  [Part of this blog's History of Holes series.]

Taking inspiration from Edwin Abbott’s Flatland¹ (a superb book  excursion into perception and difficult envisioning in which a two-dimensional world tries to comprehend three-dimensional objects) I’ve decided to extend my History of Holes section with their extruded, cylinderized extension cousin–the tube.  After all, If you take a hole by its edges, shack it out, rough it up, reposition and throw some sides on it you wind up pretty much with a tube, which could be seen as elongated holes with (generally) defined beginings and endings. Sometimes.  This is a natural continuation of my series on dots, which can be regarded as holes, or points, and thus into tubes.  “Spots” on the other hand really doesn’t work into the dot/hole thing, as spots can be irregularly-shaped, and I like the dots/holes to be more rounded than the potentially jagged spot, or blotch.

When you start thinking of tubes, though, they turn up everyhwere: from gigantic cannon, to impossible flying machines, to telescopes, pneumatic railways and delivery systems, test tubes, subways, pressurized health restorers, television screens, and so on.

I’m not sure where this idea came from–perhaps in the post on massive tubeless telescopes (here), reminding me of the most massive tubed telescope, the longest telescope with a tube, belonging to James Bradley, who produced a monster over 200' long. Connecting the tubeless and tubed telescopes was the image that I had in mind; the hole following naturally from that. Anyway the Bradley  tubed construction–antithetical to the DNA/carbon/membrane nanotubes–were enormous for their time, and as moveable tubes are still very impressive.  Another massive telescope was constructed on speculation for the Paris Exposition of 1900 {the cross section of which is depicted below)--it was 187' long, spectacularly made and exhiited, and could find not a single buyer.  Positioning the scope of course would've been very problemtaic. 


There are other, more massive and mobile tubes, like, say the smokestacks of the Titanic (which were 24x19 feet, with a fall of 150' from the top of the smokestack’s sweep to the boilers)–these weren’t mobile in and of themselves, but they did move, if only for a short time (laterally), and then for a very short and cold time (vertically).

Massive, monster canons have existed for many years in idealized and theoretical, speculative worlds, like Tom Swift and his Monster Canon.  In the history of early imaginary big gun tubes H.G. Wells’ Babel-like cannon (pictured below in a still from the movie Things to Come (1936), an adaptation his The Shape of Tings to Come (1931)) is fabulous--1500 feet tall, with I figure a  750' base, it launched a 75' tall capsule beyond the Earth’s

gravitational pull with a spectacular explosiveness that would’ve made its occupants into instant jelly.  (Paul Drye points out that one of the biggest sci-fi guns comes to us via Arthur C. Clarke, who had his Lunar inhabitants fashion a gun by drilling into the Moon’s surface until they reached a depth where it would tap and “shoot” molten rock at attacking space ships.  This is more of a hole than a tube, and as such probably ranks it as the biggest hole gun ever constructed, even in science fiction. In the same veinish vein is Robert Heinlein’s railguns, seen in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  It has been suggested that E.E. Smith may have concocted gravitational weapons enabling planets and entire galaxies as wepaons, but I’m not sure about this, and they’re definitely not tubes.)

Just to round out the Solar System cannonry a bit, here's an example of a gigantic tube coming from the fabulous Frank R. Paul for Stanley D. Bell's "Martian Guns" found in the January 1932 issue of Wonder Stories.  There's really no way to determine how big the gun is except to say that it is probably "big"--there's just nothing to place the thing in perspective, as the figures in the foreground, being Martian, don't have a specific height.  They could be 6' tall, or 60'--perhaps they're only 1/10 of an inch tale, and the projectile they're firing to the earth is so devastatingly powerful that size doesn't matter.

   Back here on Earth and in the real world,  the Kaiser Wilhelm gun (or "Paris Gun", the Kaiser Wilhelm Geshutz) was

 

a long-barreled, light shelled monster: its 92' long barrel (plus a 20' extension) launched a 94kg shell about 130 km, reaching a maximum height of 40km (about 25 miles) high. For all of its mass (the gun weighed 256 tons without the railway cars) the shell that it fired didn't weight much at all....though the shell did reach an extreme height. (Ironically, the gun was built for attacking the deepest of the deep bunkers of the fortresses along the Maginot Line; it was never needed for that, as the Maginot Line was simply left behind in the Nazi assault on France.)  The British Ordnance BL 18 inch howitzer (below) was developedjust as WWI was enidng, but did not enter service until nearly two years after the war ended.

The Schwerer Gustav was a 1350 ton beast which fired a 14,000 pound shell (!) about 20 miles. A  little later came the Nazi V-3 (the lesser known of the V-weapons), the Vergeltungsewaffe 3, a 130 metre (!) long, 150mm gun built alongthe side of a hill, launching a 140 kg shell. The Iraqi Big Babylon gun was sort of like this one, though never built--it was to have a 500' barrel and would be supported by a hillside. Then there was the Nuclear Tube: the Atomic Annie (M65) cannon, which was another bruiser, being an enormous 85' cannon that delivered the worst punch of all cannons, a nuclear warhead.  The weapon was test-fired in 1953 at Frenchman Flat at the Nevada Test Site and delivered a 15kt explosive device to a target seven miles away. There were 20 of these made, but given their diffiult-to-deploy-and-keep-secret status, and the nature of the shells, and the development of more sophisticated weapons, the M65 was obsolete almost as qickly as it was introduced, but was removed from the frontline only in 1963. 

I guess what people think of first though in regard to tubes in "The Tube" in London, though a more tubey tube was presented here in the pages of the Scientific American for the NewYork City subway:

Here's yet another strange tube, this a tube-within-a-rectangle, an aerotheraphy device that was supposed to cure people of whatever they needed curing for, just like any other good quack device, though this may well have been the heaviest of them all.  Cushioned, well-appointed, and with a hint of luxury, this burst of fresh air was inteneded to render diseases and other complaints harmless--only for a lot more money than electro-shock or beer cures or massive purgatives or bleedings or copper amulets or whatever else you can come up with.  It does make a nice image, though:

The tube below may well have been the largest glass tube to hold the body of a dead person--and in this case, a dead child.  It was design for a practice that was evidently not practiced--electroplating the dead.  Someone thought it might make a good practice to deposit a one millimeter coating of copper on the skin of a cadaver, and published their success (and image) in the Scientific American for November, 1891.  The practice didn't catch on.

Then of course there are submerged and flying tubes; submarines have certainly become a long-established part of the technological landscape, and the flying tubes, not. 

Still, the steam-driven helium-filled flying tube boat looks dignified and lovely, if impracticable.

There were proposals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for pneumatic railroads and pneumatic people movers (in one case in the 1930's, for a plan to move individuals from New York to Philadelphia in chair-like objects in one of these tubes), but for all intents and purposes the closest that these plans came to fulfillment were pneumatic operations like thoe found in R.H. Macy in New York.  It was in the massive department store where you could find miles of pneumatic vacuum tubing that connected department tellers to a main counting office, where little cylinders were filled with cash and receipts and sent along for accounting.  The logical outocme of Macy's tubular world for Terry Gilliam was seen in the director's masterpiece dystopic flic, Brazil, where we see a world crowded with gargantuan and suffocating nothinness, filled with bazillions of miles of ductwork whose purpose is a mystery, making for a cold and disturbed world. 

End part I of Making Tubes of out Holes–the History of Holes, Extended.

Notes
l. Edwin Abbott’s slender Flatland is perhaps one of the best books ever written on perception and dimensions, a beautifully insightful book that was quick and sharp, and in spite of all that was also a best-seller.  Written in 1884 when Abbott was 46 (Abbott would live another 46 years and enjoy the book’s popular reception), it introduces the reader to a two dimensional world with a social structure in which the more sides of your object equals power and esteem.  Thus the lowest class would be a triangle (three sides) while the highest (priestly) class would be mega-polygons whose shape would approach a circle.  Abbott’s magistry comes in explaining to the three-dimensional reader what it was like to be in a two-dimensional world.

Visual Chronology of Cosmologies, Part II

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1182

This is a continuation of an earlier post here offering a chronology of cosmologies.  This brings the total number of images to 81, a little more than half-way to the planned 150-item list.  I'll be folding them together into one file shortly. Enjoy.

Egyptian night sky.

What I Learned from Johnny Cash’s 1949 Report Card

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1181

This great relic of Americana–the report card of Johnny Cash from Dyess High School in 1949 –is the stuff of deep emotion.  It means that John R. Cash walked this (“Pupil’s Individual Subject Report Card”)  English report card home to his parents for review, the 17-year-old wondering about how they might react to his not-great grades in English and “effort”.  Or perhaps he wasn’t worried at all, perhaps he didn’t care.  He missed very few classes, and was never late.  He received straight A’s in conduct from his teacher, John C. Gramble.

[Image source: Cash, by the editors of Rolling Stone Magazine, 2007.]

So, the young Cash, who had grown up lyrical, with music and words swimming in his head, was unmoved by “English” (which was probably more like “composition” than what we think of it today) and was not interested in trying to overcome his disinterest, overly.  Be that as it may, even though he was a D student, he was respectful of the class and teacher and classmates, always getting A’s in conduct.

Mr Cash signed the report card each time, and I suspect that he knew exactly what was going on with J.R. in spite of the grades.

Only six years later, in 1955, Johnny Cash had his first national hit in “Cry Cry Cry”.

And so where was Dyess High School?

As it turns out, Johnny Cash lived in a place in his early youth that owed its life to deep government intervention in the lives of its citizens.  The short story is that people–almost entirely farming families–who had lost everything in the Great Depression and the resulting drought were given an advance¹ of money to buy a house and land and a chance to start life anew.  Ray Cash, Johnny’s father–born in 1897 in Rison, Arkansas–entered his family on the relief rolls and was one of 500 families selected  to settle a 15,000 timber-cut swath of Arkansas bottom land up in the north-east corner of Arkansas in Mississippi County, basically due north of Memphis Tennessee just this side of the border.
       
The program brought to bear on this situation was the Federal Emergency Relief Agency (FERA), which was administrated on the national level by Harry Hopkins and in Arkansas by Alabama-born former teamster William R. Dyess.  The farms and farmland was administered through the Rural Rehabilitation program, which under Dyess’ direction in Arkansas started the “Colonization Project No. 1" in May 1934.

Ray Cash and family moved into House 266 on its 20 acres in 1936, one of five families selected from Cleveland County, and the same year in which Colonization Project No. 1 was incorporated as Dyess Colony.  In a short period of time construction in the new Colony included  “an administration building (and a )...town center (which)  included a community bank, beauty salon/barbershop, blacksmith shop, café, cannery, cotton gin, feedmill, furniture factory, harness shop, hospital, ice house, library, theater, newspaper (the Colony Herald), post office, printing shop, service station/garage, sorghum mill, and school. Members of the colony often performed community tasks on a cooperative basis, though the farms were worked individually.”²   
________
Notes

* “Criteria for the all-white community included that applicants be destitute from the economic crisis, come from the lowest poverty level, be of “good moral background,” and that husband and wife each have the physical ability to clear the land and farm their acreage. Each farmer would draw a subsistence advance to buy twenty to forty acres of land and one of the new five-room houses, plus a mule, a cow, groceries, and supplies until the first year’s crop came in. All were expected to pay back the advance. The town would operate as a cooperative in which seed was purchased and crops were sold communally.”Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture.

2. Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture.

Dyess had population of 2500 in 1936, now a town of 550 or so.  I cannot see any remnants of the wagon-wheel design of the farm houses that were built there in 1934/5 from Google satellite images.

An excellent reference for the movement of families into the Mississippi River bottomlands is The final frontiers, 1880-1930: settling the southern bottomlands, by John Solomon Otto.

And now for this musical video about Dyess:

Young Communists: Service with a Smile, ca. 1922

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1179

This dapper young man with the sharply snapped salute is a communist, and as he tells you, he’s at your service.  But the Young Communist League (of the United States) in the 1920's–when this pamphlet was printed–was a semi-underground organization with few members who wanted to serve you and which was also “devoted to the interests of all young people and is dedicated to the revolutionary cause of the working class of our country, the transformation of the United States through mass democratic struggle into a socialist society”. 

So the YCL service venture may have been more helpful to someone with Communism in mind than anything else.  It did have a diffident bit of patriotism in the design of the pamphlet’s covers, but they wanted a United States that wasn’t the United States that very many other people wanted.

Perhaps the October Revolution wasn’t what the people of Russia wanted, either. They certainly wanted their freedom from Tsarist rule, but the revolution orchestrated in the name of freedom was hardly that. Significant American thinkers and writers on the plight of the people in Russia at the end of the 19th century–including George Kennan, author of the still very readable and absorbing Siberia and the Exile System (1891)–pretty much jumped off of the bandwagon by WWI.  I can understand a haphazard interest in the Communist Party and the idea of socialism in the United States in the 1920's and even the support of the still relatively new Soviet Union, but this was a period in which the member in the cascade of three-letter acronyms of Communist political affiliates and parties had a weak draw.  Interest in them picked up in the United States in the 1930's, though this was also the period during which the atrocities of the monster Stalin were being discussed.  I’m not sure why this popularity grew in the light of these revelations–I just don’t know the history.  (Even though this was supposed to be Stalin’s quote but wasn’t, it fits quite well: "death of one man is a tragedy, death of a million is a statistic"–as a murderer of millions of people, he was very well versed in statistics of genocidal sadism.) 

In any event, I simply liked the public face that the YCL engraved for themselves–it looks much like any other face you’d see in any other magazine hawking coats or cigarettes or Dunlop tires.  A face like any other. 
______
Notes
Kennan wrote in 1923: “The Russian leopard has not changed its spots... The new Bolshevik constitution ... leaves all power just where it has been for the last five years--in the hands of a small group of self-appointed bureaucrats which the people can neither remove nor control.”

The History of the Center and the History of Normalcy

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1178

Where is the center?

Where is the center of the Earth, of religion, of the United States, of the universe, of art, of consciousness, of seriousness, of complexity?

The center of stuff throughout history has been an almost entirely shifting matrix, a collection of vortices coming from Jupiter’s strongbox–a three dimensional representation of the location of their shifting centers over time would make an interesting Fibonacci-like display, I think.

The question may seem meaningless at first, but people have long asked it of nearly everything within their experience, trying to find the center of their world and universe, of their selves, of their religion, of their country, of politics, of art and music, and on through the Encyclopedia of Things that Could Have a Center.

Take for example the questions of where the center of the Earth, or solar system, or galaxy, or universe might be?  There have been answers to these question more often than not over time, though the answers have been shifting.  The center of the Earth has certainly stayed more-or-less constant over thousands of years, though the stuff in the center has been swarming with change, from being hollow, to being filled with magma, to being a solid magnetic core, to being occupied by Mole Men, to housing the seat of the Inferno, or to be simply located on the surface of the sphere at Jerusalem (as the old T-maps have shown for hundreds of years), and on and on.  Working backwards, the center of the universe has drastically changed over time–for thousands of years, it was assumed that the Earth was the center of all things, until it wasn’t (that beginning mostly with Copernicus, and then challenged with Galileo’s use of the telescope and his discovery of an order of magnitude more stars, etc.).  And then William Herschel beautifully represented the shape of the galaxy in 1782, placing our solar system in a far from central location.  The center of the universe’s fate changed along with that of the Earth, incredibly so beginning with the Big Bang and then with the possibilities of their being a universe without boundaries.  And then of course there’s multiple universe theories, and worm holes, and the space time continuum, which complicates things even further, making the discussion of a “center” pretty much nonsensical.

Simpler things can be as complicated–where is the center of the United States?  If we measure the center for the lower 48 states, it will be different than if we included the two far-flung states, or protectorates like Puerto Rico. The geographical center is one thing; another might be where the population center might be–that has made a beautiful map published over time by the U.S. Census Bureau (Department of Commerce), showing the star of the center moving not-so-slowly westward into Ohio over the last 20 censuses or so.  And where is the heart of the country?  Where is the heart of the West?  Better yet, where is the center of the West (or North, or South, or Mid-West)?  To answer where the center of these places might be you’ve got to first locate where those geographical ideas begin and end, which for many is a tricky subject, making it a matter of opinion as to where the center of these places might be. 
                                   
The center in art had been a findable thing for some time, though more recently people like the Impressionists and Kandinsky have shown that the center might not exist, and it might not exist along with anything that is recognizable as a form of nature, representation and the center falling away completely.  Perhaps this is like finding the center of a decade or year or month, or week or day or second.  The parameters keep getting both smaller and larger, the ability to measure halves of things or the center of a second growing almost incalculably small, small enough to reveal that in this Zeno-paradoxical way, that there is no center because there are no boundaries; getting half-way to something into infinity doesn’t tactually get you there. 

The center of balance, the center of levity, of concern; the center of emotion–another center that has been mapped all over the human body, from the heart to the head to the limbic system to a confusion of freudian desires to an inelegant and intractable collection of stimuli   and response.  The center becomes more of a belief-but even there, center can have no more a constant than change.  The center of Christianity may be Christ (though it wasn’t always so, witness the Mary Cults through the first few centuries of Christianity), but then you have to understand which Christ it is coming from which Bible, the center becoming more a concern of interpretation and spread over many Christian groups than one solid center. And when you spread the field to include all religions and you expand the center notion to a primum mobile or collective or whatever, then the center gets very big—and in some religions, it is nothing but the center. 

It seems to me that if the issue of finding the center of big and small things alike is difficult, then why does it seem so easy for people to determine and adhere (and sometimes to believe in at all costs) to expansive ideas like “normalcy”?

A history of normalcy is one that looks at the things deemed to be “normal”, or standard, or acceptable at one time that became not so over the course of time.  Buying and selling human beings, women and their children being property of the husband, Chinese immigrants in America not have (any) legal rights, classification by skin color or sex or financial status or political belief are a few good candidates (among thousands) for this history.  It is an interesting proposition to think about—what things around you, or better yet, what thing you think or say or do, that look good and acceptable today might look embarrassing and unacceptable thirty years hence.  In 1935 one issue might’ve been accepting the codified behavior of treating women as less than equal of men, deserving less in the workplace (if they were in the workplace), less rights in the courts, less deserving of equality in general; by 1965, this viewpoint may have well been in the minority; by 1995 it begins to look fossilized; by 2025 it might well be unbelievable.  What are the issues of 2010 that could be the equivalent of the 1935 issue?

I'm just wondering why it is that even when people cannot find the center of almost everything that has ever been, that a strict and damningly judgmental regimen of "normalcy" can be so easily instituted, and enforced? This especially since part of the code of adjudicated normalcy for one generation seems mostly gone by the next, that the important becomes trite, and the socially disgusting becomes acceptable.  Just  as the concept of the center becomes elusive, so too does the standardized idea of normalcy become vaprorous over time.

Science Noir and Steampunk--the Magic Lantern and Major Kong

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1177

I wonder if there is any such thing as Science Noir? There is certainly science fiction noir, and Cyber Noir and associated reaches, but, well, what about a purely Science Noir?  Scary, off-center, distracted, chilling, nightmarish science?  I’m not so sure if this is even a real question, but when I think about arguments made for the cultural and supposed artistic impacts in the creation and direction of some aspects of scientific development, I wonder if it makes any sense at all to think of science in terms of the noirish aspects of culture.

Emma Alvarez Gibson made the suggestion to me that Science Noir might be a version of Steampunk, and she may well be correct, although the frightening aspects of vast machinery shrouded in noise and smoke and shadow–the very definers of Steampunk and massive Victorian-era machinery–may be itself one version Science Noir.

But what comes first to mind of course is film noir, the edgy use of cinema that came about during the late stages of the Expressionist movement and the early stages of motions pictures.  Expressionism comes just after the first real influx of motion pictures, around 1910 or so, and it seems a little surprising to me that such a huge developmental leap was taken in film so quickly after the first initial mass public success of the film industry.  Perhaps it is incredible that a movie such as The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari–seen as the first adventure into Film Noir and an enormous leap of creativity in film–came so quickly: after all, the first NYT film review appears in 1909, the first movie magazine (Photoplay) appears in 1912, the first animated cartoon (the great Windsor McKay’s Gertie the Dinosaur) in 1914, the same year as the first appearance of the Little tramp.  And then five short years later, almost a decade into the Expressionist movement, comes the Cabinet.         

Film Noir was a new experience in motion pictures–it tested reality, coming to the audience in a shadow, fractured, sharp angled crossed line existence, dark, potentially unreal, teasingly chaotic, establishing a waking nightmare.  The mood was questioning, the atmosphere sharp and highly contrasted. It was scary–especially in the case of the deeply creepy Dr. Caligari the deeply disturbing sets continuing to stay as existence in the film even after it is revealed that everything that had happened previously was a dream...except that the dream’s landscape was not relieved. 

Perhaps the earliest brush of Film Noir was Science Noir.  The earliest removed images in real time that were seen moving eerily across the probable clay/adobe walls of a camera obscura must have seen fantastic to the first observers.  The earliest projected images from the magic lantern–seen here in the engraving La Lanterne Magique by Jean Orvrier and published around 1770–included many frightening portrayals of witches and demons in addition to their general stable of scientific, technical, literary and travel images. I am quite sure that the earliest viewers of these scenes must have felt as though they were witnessing something extra-ordinary, something beyond simple optical amusements shown on white cloth, something more real than not–particularly since it seems that many people were exposed to these images by traveling magic lantern itinerants more so than scientific lectures. The images of spectres and demons may well have felt to be the things themselves.

 

Perhaps the magic lantern is the first bit of Science Noir, the Steampunk without the steam.  And metal. The noirsh aspects of this science was in projected light and the imagination, leaving the worst effects of the  visual aspects of this fear to the imagination. 

But I think that Ms. Gibson is correct, and that the most vivid aspects of Science Noir are left to Steampunk, the threat of metallic enormities of power and noise simply overwhelming the viewer.  I suspect though the  greatest science noir of the 20th century would best be seen through the eyes of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, a masterpiece of black humor layered in incredibly stark, high-contrast black and white scenes, the threat of entire annihilation made to feel somehow ridiculous, humorous and possible, the viewer laughing  as Major Kong rides the nuclear weapon "Hi There" all the way down in Nukepunk cowboy glory through five minutes of an insistent "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" soundtrack. And then, suddenly, the silent, brilliant flash, and the laughing stops, and there’s nothing left but cold heat. 

I guess that’s my first take on the vision of modern Science Noir. 

(The except below from Dr. Strangelove is longish, about five minutes,  but it is well worth the buildup.)

_
Notes
The oldest extant magic lantern-like machine comes to us from Christian Huygens from about 1656.  Huygens is a scientist of enormous energy and capacity and genius, and more often forgotten than not nowadays, at least in popular culture

The Invisible Influence of the Highly Visible? Comets and Meteors in Astrology

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1176

"When beggars die there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes." - Shakespeare.

"Threatening the world with Famine, Plague and War: To Princes, Death! To Kingdoms, many Crosses; To all Estates, inevitable Losses! To Herdsmen, Rot; to Plowmen, hapless Seasons; To Sailors, Storms, To Cities, Civil Treasons!" De cometis by John Gadbury, London, 1665

It is unusual to me that in the long history of early astrology, some of the greatest elements of the night sky--comets and meteors--are little used, perhaps even unuseful outside of adding flavoring to readings given the time and place of their appearance. They had been seen for milennia--appearing in Gilgamesh and the Book of Revelation for two samples-- as prognostic of future events, John of Damascus and Aritotle and Ptolemy and Albumasar all writing about that quality.

[The Bayeux Tapestry illustrating the appearance of the comet of 1066, later to be known as Halley's comet.]

Comets and meteors didn't really affect anything in the physical world, and in the astrological one their purpose was to perhaps predict a kingly death or the appearance opf warts on women. They were also seen by people like Aristotle to be atmopsheric events, living out their exsitence in close proximity to the Earth, incapable of having any undue affect on Earthly matters.  Meteors would appear and then disappear, comets were surprises and visible for just short amounts of time; the rest of the night sky remained the same, intact and unaltered after their appearances.  They were not understood, though they were seen by some as raging battles between forces of good and evil, personifications of the struggle between the angels of god and the elements of the devil. Meteors and comets were mysterious, unconquerable, unknowable, suspicious elements, and were evidently not useful to the early astrologers.

[Nicolas Le Rouge, Le Grand Kalendrier et Compost des Bergieres, published in 1496 in Troyes. 

The night sky is a mnemonic device, a place to store memory and a holder of the alphabet of myths and beliefs of all, a culture written large across the sky. Meteors and comets were not predictable, and could add nothing insofar as a consistent bit of storytelling was concerned, though they certainly created their own stories in each observed appearance; they could also add punctuation and exclamation to whatever constellation they appeared in. For example if one appeared in a juncture with Jupiter, a major event for royalty would possibly be foretold.   But as a permanent element to the visualization of the night sky, they had little power even though they seemed to be displays of fantastic energy and power in themselves.

[Amrose Pare illustrated the comet of 1528 in his Livres de Chirurgie (in a chapter titled "Des Monstres Celestes"), published in Paris in 1597. Even though Pare was a towering figure and great intellect, he still personified the wandering stars with human faces, with hair and beards, accompanied by swords and shields.  There were many other scholars who saw such things in comets and meteors, not the least of which was Maupertuis, who envisioned the tails as clusters of jewels; many others seeing many other things.

[For some reason the celestial court, divided by sunlight and flanked by two other sources of light, have ofund it expedient to issue comets from the mouths of Heaven Canon.  I'm not sure what's going on in the forground with the fellow working his spade next to the triangular blankness.  the man to his right seems to have been overtaken in fear (as have the group of people visible to the left over the shoveler's shoulder).]

[Halley's comet appears again on the title page of this work by the Hungarian George Henischius, a prfoessor of rhetoric, mathematics and medicine at Augsberg.]

Artists in/and their Studios: Bacon, Braque, Kandinsky, and others.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1175

I.m not sure what sent me scurrying around for images of artist's studios--iniitally I was looking to see what was on the walls of the artist's workspaces, but there were so many that it couldn't be done in my allotted time.  For now I just want to simply post these images of 30 studios and continue later on as a page with more images and  detail on the artists.  For now, I've included images of the studios of Bacon, Bonheur, Bonard, Braque, Cezanne, Chagall, Derain, Chase, Friedrich, Kandinsky, Le Corbusier, Mondrian, Remington, Teixidor, Villon, and Vlaminck. (The majority of these images are drawn from Alexander Liberman's The Artist in his [sic] Studio, 1960; there's much of interest in that book, including vivid observations and descriptions.)  The other, older, images are depictions of the generalized artist's workshop and studio.  Enjoy.

Francis Bacon studio

 

Rosa Bonheur studio

Abraham Bosse, depiction of  a studio.

Both, Andreas (depiction of a poor artist's studio)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nazi Propaganda--the Big Lie and Germany Surrounded, 1933

JF Ptak Science Books  1174

The newly-elected NSDAP government lost little time in putting forward a case to the German people that the Treaty of Versailles left Germany in a defenceless postion, surrounded by forboding armies and air foprces of its neighbors, the forces of France, Italy, Czecholovakia, Belgium and Poland forging a tight and formidible strangelhold on the weakened Germany.  This image comes from the late November 1933 issue of the Illustrite Zeitung¹ (Leipzig), and its relates to the casual and general reader the de-militarized and tenuous situation of the country--its design is effective enough so that the voice of he illustrations is well heard even if no on actually bothered to stop and read its legend--it was all about threat and impending doom, and the words for those emoptions weren't necessary in this artwork.

Campaigns like this were a first step in the Nazi consolidation of the public spirit, attempting to unify the population under Hitler and the NSDAP by presenting a threat so common that it could not help but to draw everyone into the big tent.  This was a simple message of natural survival, a wide threat to the German state, a threat that was so simple and so devastating and so opaque that there would be virtually no resistence to unifying against it. (J.W. WHeeler-Bennet wrote about this in his superb and still-classic book The Nemesis of Power, the Germany Army in Politics, 1918-1945, published in 1954.)

Here's another example from about the same time, again showing the devastating effects of imagery--this displays the non-existent threat from Czechoslovakia:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And another, showing the encircling imagery again:

Getting back to the first image--curiously Great Britain and Russia don't make the Enelmies Liest here, though in 1933 they certainly loomed as an enemy as much as any other.  (Well, perhaps not neessarily so for the Soivet Union, but close.)

Someone who actually read the article and looked closer at the full-page ilustration would see the details of t he European threat, like this for France (and Belgium), with bloated figures for WWI-era ordnance and an extremely effectively articiulated represntation of what was seen as the standing army:

And this for Poland:

And of course, Czechoslovakia:

Among other things the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 limited the German armed forces to less than 100,000; limited the Navy to 15,000; prohibited the manufacture of submarines, armed aircraft, tanks, armored cars, Maxim guns and of course poison gas. There was assignment of guilt, heavy reparations (in what today would translate into something like a half-trillion dollars, without though translating buying power), and much more that was aimed at keeping Germany vanquished if not somewhat pastoral.  Many have seen the Treaty as being the bridge and greatest impetus to WWII, an opportunity lost and squandered by the Allies–maybe so. A year after the end of the incredibly violent and ripping four-year onslaught in which millions were killed and so much destroyed it would’ve been difficult for all parties to the Treaty to have a great forward vision in how to best deal with Germany.

The Treay did provide a unifying front for Hitler; the Nazi Party using choice aspects of it in hearts-and-minds propagandizing methods like the one above:  the military restrictions were true, but the portrayed threat of attack from Poland and Czechoslovkia and Belgium and Italy and even France were part of the building of the Big Lie.  The "Big Lie" was something that Hitler identified in his 1925 Mein Kampf, and then used in his own terror campaigns--it is a lie so colossal and so impudent, so fantastic, that it is perceived as being true because no one would lie so gigantically.  As  George Orwell put it in his 1948 novel 1984, the Big Lie was "...to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed...."  The perception of imminent threat was one of the starting points for the Big Lie; the mechanics and people behind the manufacture of the invasion, of the Treaty of Versailles, of the German economic meltdown, and so on was already laid down in Hitler's ridciulous book, and much of that lay at the feet of the Jewish people. 

But first the Nazis needed to address the issue of their entirely weak and vulnerable military position by proposing the threat from much of the rest of Europe, this in order to rail against Versailles and break the German obligations to non-militarism.  The foundations for rebuilding the German war machine started in earnest in 1933; by 1935 most of the restrictions of Versailles had been broken, and Germany (which in 1933/4 had bene secretive about it) had gone public with its new obligations to itself (introducing the Luftwaffe to the rest of the world in March1935).  Reactions from the Allies to generating the new war machine were weak, and Germany rolled right into WWII. 

Notes:

1. I've written many times here about the Illustrirte Zeitung--it was basically the German equivalent of the Illustrated London News, Paris Match, and LIFE magazine, a better, mid-level weekly magazine that was well-written, very-well illustrated, approachable and affordable to folks of nearly all classes.  It was an expedient way of sending across the government's message from te beginning of the Nazi ouccpation of German politics.