Ptak Science Books

A Forty-Year Precursor to Modernism--Found Cubism in 1870

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post     [History of Lines #18]

I was very surprised to come across this illustration while browsing the (3 April)  1870  volume of Punch, or the London Charivari .

I cannot think of any particular peculiar or unusual edition of Euclid that was published at about this time to demand such an unusual illustration. (The only newish edition that comes into any possible play here is Oliver Byrne's semi-insane First Six Books of Euclid, published by the Chiswick Press in 1849 and one of the most unusual and beautiful books of any sort printed in the 19th century--but then again that was 21 years before this volume of Punch.) And by "unusual" what I really mean to say is "highly unexpected" , as this all-angular depiction of a woman appears for all the world to be a Cubist- or Expressionist-like image, predating those movements by four decades. 

But the Angular Woman just seems to be happenstance, a happy precursor to a revolution-in-the-making, an accident forty+ years too early.  She is extraordinary--and for some reason she is smoking a cigarette. 

[Below--an illustration from Oliver Byrne, illustrating the propositions of Euclid via the use of color rather than words, a beautiful but non-functioning work.]

Looking Backwards: How Far Back in Time is 1949 (in Computer Years)?

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

The history of computing, in its inception, could be measured in decades, beginning, say with Babbage; by the time of the earliest large machines (1945-1950), computer time could be measured in a decade.  Come the deacade of 1960, the computer year could be measured finally in years.  After that, after microminiaturization, and the personal computer, the year started to be measured in months.  And then, of course, the year really sped up--I'm not sure if there is only a week or two in the year, now; maybe its measured in days. [This piece of computer history ephemera is available at our blog bookstore, here.]

[Click to expand]

Looking at this document from the beginning of the first tweeks of mass professionalism in the development of the computer emphasizes this business of time.  This draft of the constitution and bylaws of the Association for Computing Machinery (the ACM) was complete in four pages, including the establishment of its members, officers, executive committee, meetings, bylaws, meetings--the whole deal, in four pages. 

The document is undated, but as far as I can determine, I believe that this document was printed in late 1949, soon after the ACM dropped the "Eastern" that used to appear as the first word in the title of the organization.   

Its quite a spectacular thing, seeing what would become a vast organization be summed up in its infancy on one sheet of folded paper.   

The rest of the document follows:

The Radium Dance, 1898 and 1904

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1595

Jean Schwartz (b. 1878) , composed this number for his (with the collaboration of William Jerome) Broadway (hit!) musical comedy Piff! Paff! Poof!  in 1904,  which sounded like this.

But the real story--that we'll deal with later--occurs a few years earlier, in 1898, with a married couple of scientists who made an epochal discovery:

What was easier for folks to understand was the application of the discovery, just six years after the Curie effort--though it did take a little longer to take hold in the public creative imagination than, say, the discovery of the X-ray, which entered the public mind almost instantly following its discovery in 1895. 

[Source:  Duke University]

[Source]

Perhaps the real Radium Dance occurred for the first time by the people who found the thing, radium, back there in 1898--Marie Sklodowska Curie and Pierre Curie.  They were a happily married couple, beginning their joined life in 1895, vacationing on wedding present money on bikes through the French countryside.  They were soon back to their primary love in physics and chemistry, and inspired by the work of Henri Becquerel, began their assault on radioactivity in the next year.  After several years of effort and laboriously extracting a gram of  pure radium (by 1902) from a ton of pitchblende, they published their efforts in the volume of the great French scientific journal, Comptes rendus...Academie des Sciences (volume 127, in three short articles), announcing their discovery of polonium (after Marie's country of origin) and radium. 

The really big Radium Dance would occur the year before the Broadway hit, in 1903, when the Curies and Henri Becquerel were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics¹. 

Notes:

1. The Nobel Prize in Physics 1903 was divided, one half awarded to Antoine Henri Becquerel "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity",the other half jointly to Pierre Curie and Marie Curie, née Sklodowska "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel".

Writers with Guns

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Well, just a very quick post here for some found images of our leading lit figures posing with guns.  Real guns.  The Samuel Clemens image looks photoshopped to me but so far as I can tell it is real--its a long shadow produced by a rising/setting sun, the other shadow belonging to someone just out of the picture. I like his safe handling of the weapon. 

Ernest Hemingway,  ca. 1905, with air rifle--evidently his connection with guns went way back, but so did it too for just about every other American boy. 

 [Source: Philosophisches & Literarisches Sehloft blog.]

And of course there's Mr. Burroughs.  He didn't meet his end with a gun but he was on the oppsoite end of one that ended his wife's life back in the old, dim days.  Now, Dr. Benway is dead with the rest of them, but his gun lives on. Ah Pook is here.

 Hunter S. Thompson.  He and Burroughs shared a middle initial and a taste for some wild things, as well as a very good sense of very dark humor.  Thompson was funny and a great political pundit 'till about, oh, perhaps 1974.  Maybe 1976.  But that's about it--until then, he could call the state primaries like no one else and evidently made a fair amount of money doing it.  He respected Nixon's ability to see into the future of primaries, even though he saw that man as a pig on fire. 

Burroughs and Thompson courtesy of ABove the Aether

Lawrence Durrell, author of the Alexandria Quartet--I'm not sure about his gun connection, though we had to read his quartet in high school.  

John Steinbeck, 1937.  I just like him. 

Filling Holes Up: the Reverse, "Two-Sided" Holes of Marcel Duchamp.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1592  [Part of the History of Holes series.]

"Let each man proclaim: there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished"--Tristan Tzara

I guess that "up" would be a redundancy in this post's title, since we can't really fill a hole going down, filling from the top of the cavity to its base, the reverse of digging a hole.  Or perhaps not if the task was given to M. Duchamp.

But in this longish, developing thread on the history of holes it occurred to me that I hadn't included anything on filling/stopping holes,the realization coming to me while browsing the lovely and very inclusive paper ephemera site of SHeaff-Ephemera.com

[The original site for the above three images:  sheaff-ephemera.com; other images in Notes, below.]

There have been a number of posts here about existing holes, but none thus far about making them (except for a few posts on aerial bombing) or filling them up--so far, the series has been in a hole-stasis.  There really should be a section on making high-speed hole-making (with bullets, like our friend Hank Quinlan, with Uncle Orson in the role in the magnificent Touch of Evil), and another on long, longitudinal and laboriously slow hole-making (with say foundation/caisson work in constructing the Brooklyn Bridge).

But for right now I'd like to address the crafty M. Duchamp as a hole-filler, a  man who created a two-sided literal and figurative hole-making and hole-filling event, and what may be the first of its kind in the history of art.  Figuratively, Duchamp's approach to art in the nineteen-'teens was seen by many as a process to "destroy" art itself:  finding things like a bicycle wheel and implanting it on a stool and calling it art was seen by his friends as an event and not as art per se, but as a perversion.  Even Duchamp's own group at the epochal 1916 international art show rejected his first "Readymade"² (not yet then called so) as not art, leading Duchamp to abandon even them. (This had also happened three years earlier with his "Nude Descending".)

I don't think that Marcel Duchamp was trying to "destroy" art, though I do believe that he was trying to force a conversation in which he had no interest in participating--a written conversation in which there was no real end or beginning, and so no middle, on top of which the punctuation would be removed and re-applied by chance. 

Even the idea of a "hole" could be viewed differently in such circumstances--like the one that appears in his "The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even" in the top part of the bottom ("Bachelor" panel, the detail of which appears at the head of this post, and the full version below).  Perhaps we should be talking about constructing something around a space, the remaining bit once encircled becomes a "hole":  a reverse hole?  That would be similar to both constructing and filing the hole, almost at the same time; Duchamp included this hole in this artwork, and then covered it on both sides with glass, the self-described "lazy" Duchamp finishing it after many years of labor, a work he said to be "unanalyzable by logic". ³

It seems a little like making empty space inside a vacuum.

 ["The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)" by Marcel Duchamp, is installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.]

Notes:

[The original site for the above three images:  sheaff-ephemera.com.)

2.  "The Bicycle Wheel is my first Readymade, so much so that at first it wasn't even called a Readymade. It still had little to do with the idea of the Readymade. Rather it had more to do with the idea of chance. In a way, it was simply letting things go by themselves and having a sort of created atmosphere in a studio, an apartment where you live. Probably, to help your ideas come out of your head. To set the wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoyed looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio, the movement of the wheel reminded me of the movement of flames"

-and-

"Please note that I didn't want to make a work of art out of [Bicycle Wheel]. The word 'Readymade' did not appear until 1915, when I went to the United States. It was an interesting word, but when I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a 'readymade,' or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn't have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it, or describing anything. No nothing like that..."

--http://www.toutfait.com/unmaking_the_museum/Bicycle%20Wheel.html

3.  Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp, a Biography, p. 6.

The Mechanical Universe and the Use of Turning Things Upside Down: Newton, Grunpeck and the Power of Images

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1591
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• “Hence after Plato has, by succession from Pythagorean doctrine and by the divine profundity of his own genius, shown that apart from these ratios (i.e. musical ratios) there can be no possibility of conjunction: in his Timaeus, he constitutes the soul of the world by means of the com- position of those ratios, by the ineffable providence of God the craftsman. Consequently the soul of the world, which propels into movement this body of the universe visible to us, being constructed of ratios which created from themselves a musical concord, must of necessity produce musical sounds from the movement which it provides by its proper impulse having found the origin of them in the craftsmanship of its own composition.”                                --Isaac Newton on Plato and the rest of the cast of classical and ancient authorities, summarizing the common thread on music and the construction of the universe—that being the correlations of the orderliness of music and the heavens. 

Newton did not intend notes like these to be published during his lifetime—as was the case with more than one million words that he dedicated to his very close and scientific research in the fields of alchemy and alchemical chemistry.  It is interesting to think of what sort of censorship went on with this work and long, deep interest of Newton’s—fully one-third of all of the scientific books that were in his library were dedicated to alchemy, and great gobs of his time was spent in alchemical pursuit, but most of this did not come to light until John Maynard Keynes purchase most of the this manuscript material at auction (!!) in 1936. 

Newton was trying to find something that he thought only he might be able to see, trying to press his ear closer to god’s lips in whatever way possible—but for other scientists and non-modern historians of science, these pursuits seemed cumbersome, an embarrassment. 

I bring all of this up to get at what must’ve looked like a very anti-mechanical, discordant, and very non-rational set of images used to quickly convey a philosophy. 

The great illustrator and social watchdog Thomas Nast discovered the power of the image in the 1860’s and 1870’s, when he was able to convey a message to readers and illiterates alike by creating very graphic displays  of  public corruptions and (some) social imbalances.   Of course this approach has been used for thousands of years, and is time-honored, but the spread of ideas via image in published media is not terrifically old.  (And by this media I mean by books or broadside, and not by paintings, which were generally intended for an incredibly small audience in the pre-museum days.  Messages were certainly displayed in this way for thousands of years, and most of these were messages of fear and loathing of unacceptable behaviors.  The Renaissance is beautiful but left little doubt about who was in control and what was deemed appropriate ways of acting and thinking—the church was the major patron of the arts, and its not for nothing that we see mostly passionate genuflectorial praise for the supreme being and his associates.)

And this brings us, I guess, to where I was trying to get all along—the superb images found in Joseph Gruenpeck’s (1473-1532) Speculum Naturalis Coelestis & Visionis…, a small folio published in Nurnberg in 1508 and illustrated with 13 fantastic woodcuts by the artist Wolf Traut (1486-1520).  Gruenpeck, who gave up his office as astrologer to Emperor Maximillian II to become a priest and to undertake the writing of this book, produced a pre-Reformation masterpiece, whose very sharp criticism of the church helped fuel the revolutionary fires among the peasants which eventually led to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1523-1525.  What is remarkable to me about the illustrations in this book are their head-butting discordant nature—one sees instantly that something is defiantly skewed, demanding the viewer’s attention—from there a very quick and generally acerbic message is delivered with great ease.  These were messages that were instantly understandable and translatable across language and culture, and it is perhaps for these reasons that this work was so important in helping to form a new social consciousness—much in the same way as more popular mass-communicators like Thomas Nast would do hundreds of years hence. 

 Now, the Traut woodcut:  this is one of those very uncommon occurrences when a familiar object is place in it “opposite”, out-of-place position to attract the viewer’s attention—in this case, it is an upside-down church.  Not only is the allegorical church placed on its head, we see too that its clerics are outside tilling the soil, while the peasants and field workers are inside the church celebrating Mass, their positions in society switched  It is unlikely that such a book would’ve been in the hands of someone who couldn’t read, but, nonetheless, the image is still very powerful and must’ve made a big impact on any observer, it being such a strong attack on the foundation of the church.

Recognition comes in many forms and flavors, as in the superb mechanical universe of Sir Isaac or the beautiful and melodious music of the spheres of Johannes Kepler; it sometimes comes via opposites and discordant methods, with the logic of Kurt Goedel, or with the images of Wolf Traut--either end pulls equally at opposite tails of the labyrinth, and a much-improved choice over a lottery in Babel. 

Albert Robida and the History of the Future

 JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1590

Albert Robida (1848-1926) saw pretty deeply into the future, his mind wrapped around the plausibilities of possibilities, and getting a lot of them quite right.  He was enormously prolific, with some 60,000 designs to his credit as well as 200 illustrated books and many dozens of illustrated journals, many of them quite lovely and prescient, if somewhat upsetting to the common-reading mind of mid-late 19th Europe. 

Robida¹ shared several decades of peak-creativity time with the stone-cold master of the as-yet defined science fiction realms in the person of Jules Verne (1828-1905), who certainly wrote deeper and longer than Robida, though without Robida's creative artistic talents.  But the 1870's and 1880's would have been prime space for both men, even though Verne's² best years were behind him and he had entered a decidedly darker period by that point--that said, the men did share the same oxygens of Europe, separated by just hundreds of miles. 

It might be said that Verne had somewhat loftier visions of the future than Robida; perhaps not.,  Robida does seems to have a great (and perhaps more) concern with the future of the more middle-class/vast mass of people, and again, perhaps not.  One thing is for certain, to me at least--Robida does deserve much more attention than he presently receives, though perhaps that will come more in the future that he created.

"La sortie de l’Opéra en l’an 2000".  Original source:  Bibliodyssey

"Un quartier embrouillé ", La Vie électrique, Paris, Librairie Illustrée, [1892].

 

Man is But a Worm--Darwin and Redon, 1881-1883

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1589

In the last tow years of his life Charles Darwin enjoyed some critical and popular success  with the publication of his The formation of vegetable mold, through the action of worms,  which was published by the steadfast John Murray in London in October of 1881.  It sold at a better clip even than On the Origin of Species, which had sold very well 22 years earlier.  By the time the cartoon (above) appeared in print by the relatively mid-brow Punch magazine (by Linley Sambourne, 6 December 1881) Darwin's book sold about 7,000 copies, which for the time would make it a pretty good seller.

Darwin only had a few months left to live at the time of the Punch publication (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882), and I'm not too sure about what the old man would've felt in seeing it.  Actually, the Old Man wasn't all that old, but at 73 and with a belly full of worms or whatever and a lifelong list of complaints real and imagined, Darwin was older than jis years.  After everything had been said and doen, and the tons of complaints heaped upon him from all quarters, I suspect that the cartoon would mean nothing to him.

{Just for the record, we follow the evolution of worm-to-man in a trip one and a quarter times around the clock, starting with a big old (flat?)worm at bottom left, which develops counter-clockwised into a chimp-worm, then into a monkey-thing, then into a sort of comic-relief Darwin-ape-man, winding its course into Charles Darwin himself.  Not flattering to the man or the idea.]

It would on the other hand be a curious thing to imagine Darwin meeting for a chat with the expansive evocateur Odilon Redon, who created some of the earliest (non-confrontational editorial) art based on Darwin's Origin.  Redon (April 20, 1840 – July 6, 1916) published eight lithographs based on Darwin's work in  Les Origine (Paris,  Lemercier and Cie), and they were unlike anything that I've ever seen regarding evolution--as a matter of fact (perhaps), Redon's artwork in general was unlike most anything else that existed.  (Redon acknowledged this, of course, saying  "My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.")

 "The Misshapen Polp Floated on the Shores, a Sort of Smiling and Hideous Cyclops", plate 3, 1883.

But I don't see that much being said between the two men, across a small table having tea--though I don't have any hesitation saying that Redon would've had a lot of questions for Darwin.  My feeling is that Darwin wouldn't have that many coming back. 

 

 

Buck Rogers and the Failure of Imagery in WWIII, 1946

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  [Part of the series on Atomic Weapons]

Richard Fagley took a sleepy, 4th grade side step through the coming decade or so in the future of atomic weaponry.  The thign is, he got a bunch of it right.  But where he missed a bunch of it, where he underestimated the power of atom weapons, was that they would provide the future us with a "Buck Rogers" style of war.

Now of course in 1946 the Soviets hadn't developed a Bomb, but anyone who knew anything knew that it would be just a matter of time before they did.  Smart estimates were coming in at a decade or more--few people were prepared for the Soviet announcement in 1949 that they had achieved that goal

Fagley missed the impact of atomic warfare of the future not on his own accord--he was quoting someone who knew far more and knew better--General Hap Arnold, the Commanding General of the U.S. Air Force.  But as it turns out, Arnold really didn't have the vocabulary or this discussion, and couldn't really estimate the "effectiveness" of the use of the new weapons. 

So far as I know, Buck Rogers didn't have weapons like atomic bombs; the war of the future, even though Fagley says that there wouldn't be many survivors, would be far worse than they could imagine it to be--perhaps because that amount of destruction was still unimaginable. Buck Rogers just didn't have the vocabulary for such enormous power and mass destruction, unless he had a planet-eater or something that I don't know about.  In any event, words to describe the coming possibility of vast annihilation just didn't seem to be at hand in 1946--the words and ideas, and the weapons, would soon (in the Ulam-Teller hydrogen bomb, 1951) be at hand, though. 

 

The History of ASCII.  I just wanted to include this short bit on a small archive of material related to the development of ASCII from one of the team members who helped to create it.  A more full description appears in the "continue reading" section, below.