Ptak Science Books

Looking Backwards: How Far Back in Time is 1954 (in Computer Years)?

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1603

How far back is "way back", or "waaay back", in terms of history?  As I've written earlier in this blog, about going deep into history in various disciplines, but perhaps in no discipline is time so compacted than in the computer sciences.   Mr. Peabody (above, with his boy, Sherman) would agree, and would hardly have to go "way back" in his "way back machine" to get chronologically deep in computer history. 

1954 is extremely deep in the history of electronic calculation--it is three years before Backus et alia created FORTRAN, five years before the integrated circuit was created, eight years before the first compsci department is established at Purdue, eleven years before the first Ph.D. is awarded in computer sci from a computer science department (Wexelblatt), and fourteen years before the first woman (Liskov) earned a Ph.D.(whose dissertation was A Program to Play Chess Endgames) in the field.  All of which sounds like ancient history, but almost all of which takes place during my own lifetime, which doesn't make it sound so terribly "ancient".

But looking at this ephemera on membership and dues and voting on the Constitution for the Association for Computing Machinery certainly makes it seem as though so--the voting and bylaws ballot is a few mimeographed pages long and is hand-stapled at the top, the announcenments for meetings fits on one sheet of paper, and Edmund C Berkeley is hand signing his initials on pleas for new subscribers to his Computers and Automation journal.  Everything looks so fresh and new and uncomplicated--and that's because it was, relative to what we experience now.  In 1954 there weren't 10,000 people working in the field of computing; 57 years later the growth in involvement of people working in the field is at least three orders of magnitude, and quite possibly four--the growth in the sheer volume of printed and digitally-circulated material is probably somewhere on the order of the differences between post-Gutenberg European printing and the printing industry in the year 1990.  The changes are spectacular, and they seem to be so much more appreciable when one looks at the foundation efforts from the early years. 

Buried by the Numbers--Literally

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

A metaphorical statement is not often seen in its literal sense, graphically displayed--especially in mathematics.  But I did stumble across this example in the 15 June 1885 issue of Punch, or the London Charivari.  It was used to illustrate an inglorious poem on an inglorious topic that we don't need to go into just now, but the tail-piece does exhibit the curious image of being buried by numbers.

 

History of Lines--The Mathematics of Euclidean Love & Maxwell's Demon, 1879

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1603  {The History of Lines series.]

If you give them a chance, physics and the maths will provide their own fairy tales.

This lovely trompe l'oeil of Euclid calls into play the play of love, in hard angles and parabolas, between Mr. Punch of Punch or the London Charivari  and the object of his affection.  The  image was published on 8 November 1879--just three days after the death of one of the greatest line-makers of the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell.  (There is no mention of JCM anywhere in Punch, and I guess probably that there needn't be, even if he was one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth (or any other) century.)

          "XIIITH BOOK OF EUCLID.—PROPOSITION 1. THEOREM.

If two Players on two sides of a Parallelogram are equal to each other, each to each, and have likewise the hearts contained by those two side» equal to each other, and shall likewise have all advantages equal, and their faulty shall coincide, then shall they be equal each to each, viz., a love-match, which may or may not be absurd."

Maxwell's really big lines come in a series of four papers called "On the Lines of Force"¹, and were published in 1861 and 1862. It is in these papers that Maxwell's famous equations are all found, and it is also the place where we'll find the basis not only for the foundation of classical electrodynamics, but the forms for the structure of what would become the epochal/modern communication/electrical technologies. 

[Source:  here.]

Maxwell's Demon came into being as a gedankenexperiment in a series of letters--it was Maxwell not only playing devil's advocate in trying to propose a circumstance in which the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics could be violated, but also providing the Demon, in the experiment, which he proposed as being a finite being, the contradictor.  JCM didn't actually name this thing on his own--that appelation came via William Thomson in an article in Nature magazine³ in 1874. 

We'll continue this later with Faraday's lines of force.

1. The articles appear in four parts in the Philosophical Magazine in 1861 and 1862 (full text via links):

• 1 Part I: The Theory of Molecular Vortices applied to Magnetic Phenomena
• 2 Part II: The Theory of Molecular Vortices applied to Electric Currents
• 3 Part III: The Theory of Molecular Vortices applied to Statical Electricity
• 4 Part IV: The Theory of Molecular Vortices applied to the Action of Magnetism on Polarized Light
• 5 Footnotes

2.   Maxwell stated it so:  "... if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us. For we have seen that molecules in a vessel full of air at uniform temperature are moving with velocities by no means uniform, though the mean velocity of any great number of them, arbitrarily selected, is almost exactly uniform. Now let us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower molecules to pass from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics...."

3.  William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), "Kinetic Theory of the Dissipation of Energy," Nature, 9 April 1874, pp. 441-444, and "The Sorting Demon Of Maxwell" (1879), Proceedings of the Royal Institution, vol. ix, p. 113.

The End of the World, Part 6--The Earth as a Bomb

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1601

[I've written a number of times on this blog on the depiction of the end of the Earth--as it turns out, it is an uncommon subject for illustration before, say, 1950.  One in the series can be found here, with links to others.]

Hiram Maxim--the inventor of the Maxim gun, almost-inventor of the light bulb, and general creative genius--wrote this article, "How the World Will End" around 1905.  He was a man with many answers to his own many questions, and here he Q-Aed himself about the end of the world.  He imagined the end coming in a number of different ways, one of which was set up by the Earth's own mighty innards.  He imagined large-sale earthquakes and gigantic volcanoes, Krakatoa-sized volcanoes and then some, that would rend the Earth to pieces.

But he starts that vision with a very odd inspiration, thinking about the power of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, and trying to equate the enormous explosive mission of the thing with something that was somehow doable, somehow understandable in human terms.  And what he comes up with is this--that if all the people in the world working  all time through all time in producing gunpowder and TNT, spending all of their time doing nothing but making explosives, that all of this gathered and ignited would approximate the energy of the Krakatoa eruption.

He was wrong on this calculation, as smart as he was--I think just running some numbers in your head would put this thing to sleep.  But there wasn't very much for him to compare Krakatoa to in 1905, or certainly nothing that he could compare it to that was produced by humans.  In our recent past, though--in a world that would be Maxim's near-future--human beings have managed to manage Krakatoa-type releases of energy, namely in the form of nuclear weapons.  If we cobbled together 1,400 of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs from August 1945 and detonated them at once, the amount of energy released would approximate Krakatoa.  This explosive force has since been rolled mostly into one bomb--the Tara Bomb, or Kuzka's Mother--which was released into the world in a test shot in 1961.  That bomb was calculated to be a 50 megaton weapon, scaled down from its projected 100 megatons, and released 1.74x10¹⁷ J(oules), coming close to what some people have calculated the energy of Krakatoa to have been, at 8.4x10¹⁷J  (In a what-the-hell moment of calculation, someone reckoned the output per second of Star Trek's U.S.S. Enterprise 1701-D to be 1.27×10¹⁹ J--an enormous number.)

But it is an interesting form to fill up for a short scifi story.  Imagine a worldwide society which, for its entire existence, has done nothing but make the means for its own violent destruction, stockpiling fantastic amounts of explosives in a series of connected locations, waiting for the time in their history to end.  Imagine that generations would spend their time, doing nothing but producing the means for their own destruction that would come at some time.  The entire output of the combined civilizations banded together, branded for annihilation.  All working to a literal common end. 

Maxim saw other bits too in that firey end, as we see in the above illustrations:  for example, in the first image, we see the results of a meteor shower striking City Hall Park in New York City...a big "meteor shower", a really big one.  Then there's the possibility of a "collision with some heavenly body", and of course the tail of a comet sweeping away the Earth's atmosphere.  For all of his good thinking, though, I can't get much past the image of societal bomb making...

 

 

 

White Guard Fascist Terrorists in the USA, 1946

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Leon Dennen was a dedicated man with a broad experience in the affairs of the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, and a capacity to see into the future.  And what this widely published man saw was this--that the countries in Eastern Europe that were presently (in 1945) under control of the Soviet Union were going to stay there¹. He did see this correctly and at a time when seeing things like that correctly was pretty tough. 

Earlier in his career he did see Fascists under American beds and published his view in this publication (above), published by The Friends of teh Soviet Union Society in New York City in 1935.  On the other hand he couldn't see the Great Purge and the millions of Russians being eaten alive by the monstrous Joseph Stalin.  But his vision was pretty good for seeing the Soviet plans in Europe at the end of World War II--there weren't that many people who save that, and those same people really didn't see the Great Purge either. 

 

 

Notes:

1. Some biographical information from Commentary, January 1946:

"Leon Dennen spent nine months in 1944 in the Near East as a representative of an American relief agency. Upon his return he announced that Soviet Russia was building a zone of influence in the Balkans that was “being nailed down with bayonets and terror by regimes deriving their authority not from the local nationalities but from the Soviet liberators.”

"Mr. Dennen cites chapter and verse to support his contention. He shows that the peoples of the Balkans and the Near East, unable to order their own destinies, have become mere pawns in a gigantic battle for power between Britain and Russia—with Russia, propelled by the dynamism and ruthlessness of the newcomer and in a better geographical position, distinctly having the upper hand."

The Pleasures of Astronomy--the Game, 1804

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

--"Whoever first arrives here is to take the title of Astronomer Royal'"--end point of the game The Pleasures of Astronomy

I'm not sure how early the earliest board game featuring a scientific game might be, but I do know that this one--Science in Sport, or the Pleasures of Astronomy; A New & Instructive Pastime. Revised & approved by Mrs. Bryan; Blackheath--seems to be very advanced for its age.  Made in 1804 by John Wallis on London, the game such as it is isn't very "game-y"--the gaming aspect of it isn't very interesting or involved--mostly the mostly-representative aspect so the game is to just expose the young players to select aspects of the history of astronomy. As a pedagogical tool, the game probably works pretty nicely. 

The game board, or the course of the game, is relatively standard, though the subject matter is not. The object was to arrive at Flamsteed House¹, and by the course of victory the young player would become acquainted with elements of morals, ethics, natural philosophy (although Wallis did in fact produce a very similar game for that topic alone) plus of course some basics of astronomy. 

Notes:

1. "Flamsteed House, the original Observatory building at Greenwich, was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke and built in 1675-76."  See here for more information.

Songs of the Streets, in Two Parts (and an Obscure Reference to an Important Anti-Darwinist)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1600  {Appropriate musical accompaniment that can be listened to under the reading of this post, Carl Orff's Gassenhauer, can be found here and minimized.]

 

 

 

I found these two interesting images over the course of a hundred pages or so in the profusely illustrated weekly magazine, Punch, or the London Charivari, for early 1865.  The first image, published 18 March 1865, "A Song of the Streets", drawn by "C.H.D." (Charles Henry Bennett, 1828-1867), displays the general thoroughfare of sidewalk life in a place like London, people being blown about by late winds and snow.

It is in the upper right-hand corner of the engraving that we find our "important Anti-Darwinist", which seems like an illogical statement, except that it isn't  The man in question is the fellow with the bellows, who seems to be the one instigating the weather, blowing so had and cold that it moves people off their feet and off the page.  The bellows is labelled "Fitzroy", and the likeness is that of the man with the same name, Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy (b. 1800), who at this time was serving as the chief of a weather department for the Royal Society, the Meteorological Statist to the Board of Trade, appointed by the president of the society, and was basically a meteorologist, except that the title had yet been invented.  (It is also interesting that Fitzroy is depicted in captain's (?) uniform, and surrounded by a floating telescope, book, thermometer and self-registering drum.) So even then, even with the first person in this position of authority, complaints for foul weather were being launched at the person "in charge", even though that person created an extraordinary new tool for detailing the possible changes in weather.¹

It happens that this is the same Robert Fitzroy who was the captain of the HMS Beagle on its second voyage (1831-1836), when he approved of the addition of an added gentleman to help keep his sanity on the long adventure, a naturalist named Charles Darwin.  It was also Fitzroy who gave Darwin a copy of the first volume of Lyell's Principles of Geology, a book integral to Darwin's development into Charles Darwin.  The voyage was personally rocky for the two men, but ultimately highly successful.  Years later, Fitzroy was shocked and  dismayed with the result of young Darwin's adventures--with the publication of On the Origin of Species..., Fitzroy felt a sense of personal guilt for Darwin's theory, and felt shame and bitterness towards it, as in his mind the theory went against his bible and his religious beliefs.   Fitzroy and the Rev. Samuel Wilberforce were at the evolution debate meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1860) in which Rev. Soapy Sam challenged Darwin's theory on "scientific" grounds, and against which Thomas Huxley (and other Darwin supporters) made his well-remembered defence².  In the middle of all of this was Robert Fitzroy, who cried for the crowd of onlookers--with his Bible held aloft--to reject man's interpretation of nature and stay with that of God.   He was booed down.  Darwin was not in attenddance. [Image: Wilberforce, threatening.]

So, in a way, Fitzroy proved to be important in the formation of the theory of evolution but also turned out to be an anti-Evolutionist, though not an important one.  Oddly enough this may be the last published image of Fitzroy during his lifetime, as he would die 42 days after the appearance of this issue.

In the second image of the streets the view from the pages of Punch (for 27 May 1865), "The Banishment of the Beggars, a New Tramp Chorus", we see a different type of street "cleaning".  In this case, it. Charles Villiers (1802-1898, and for 63 years a sitting MP) and his Homeless Poor Bill of 1865 sweeping the "sham poor" from the city streets, the legislation designating that the capable poor actually be put to work and removed from their begging positions on the streets.  The complaints in the chorus against the highly visible poor of Metropolitania were considerable,

 

finding among the beggars ("who disturb our peace") a litany of fakes, many of who are featured in the illustration:

"sham injured workmen (who display their wounds from door to door)", the lame (who clap their crutches on our toes), the blind, sham paralytics, sham widows (with hired babies and brats), "artistic tramps" (who will no longer chalk on the sidewalk "I am Starving"), and the fake veterans of wars. 

The way to salvation for these people was "the Mill", provided by the Villiers bill, and a compulsory spot in a workhouse (work-house) where labor is exchanged for room and board. 

 

Notes

1. Fitzroy was actually the person who coined the term "weather forecast", or at least he was the first to use it who had any real chance of being correct or accurate, given how much data he was able to assemble and interpret. He was really a very important person in this regard, as well. 

2. This is not the place to debate whether Huxley's famous remarks were famnous at teh time.  In a letter to Darwin J.D. Hooker wrote this of the exchange: 

"Well, Sam Oxon got up and spouted for half an hour with inimitable spirit, ugliness and emptiness and unfairness ... Huxley answered admirably and turned the tables, but he could not throw his voice over so large an assembly nor command the audience ... he did not allude to Sam's weak points nor put the matter in a form or way that carried the audience". ^ "Letter 2852 — Hooker, J. D. to Darwin, C. R., 2 July 1860". Darwin Correspondence Project 

On the other hand, another cotemporary of the exchange between WIlberforce and Huxley wrote:

Alfred Newton wrote:

In the Nat. Hist. Section we had another hot Darwinian debate... After [lengthy preliminaries] Huxley was called upon by Henslow to state his views at greater length, and this brought up the Bp. of Oxford... Referring to what Huxley had said two days before, about after all its not signifying to him whether he was descended from a Gorilla or not, the Bp. chafed him and asked whether he had a preference for the descent being on the father's side or the mother's side? This gave Huxley the opportunity of saying that he would sooner claim kindred with an Ape than with a man like the Bp. who made so ill a use of his wonderful speaking powers to try and burke, by a display of authority, a free discussion on what was, or was not, a matter of truth, and reminded him that on questions of physical science 'authority' had always been bowled out by investigation, as witness astronomy and geology.

A lot of people afterwards spoke... the feeling of the meeting was very much against the Bp.^{" _}Wiki on the 1860 debate.

Battle of the Future: a Note on the Value of Women from Two Different Utopian Novels of the Same Title

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1599

This is a short tale of two novels of the future.  They both speak of utopias, they both were written in the 19th century, and (unusually) they both have the same title--but so far as the future of women goes, they have little in common.

Three Hundred Years Hence, the novel title in question, was first published in 1836, and was the property of  Mary Griffith (1772–1846) who presented what was at the time a strongly pro-woman utopia set in the future, --and which was also as it turns out the first novel of its kind written by a woman in the United States.

A lesser and unhappier story for women of the high Victorian mold belongs to William Delisle Hay¹, whose own Three Hundred Years Hence, a Voice From Posterity (published in 1881) , elevates females to a supreme position, though without any real power or effect.  (Hay has a difficult history, or so it seems to me; he also wrote on mushrooms and other fungi, as well as the Maori "problem", and had a wide strain of white suprematist running through his works.) In Hay's future, in the 23rd century, there would be a global community, and at the head of the global body would be a perfect woman, a woman who would serve a ten-year term of glory and grandeur. She would not have any real duties, however, because she was didn't have the intellectual powers of man, and so her brain would no tbe called on to perform tasks outside of womanly chores. He writes:

"...the Empress does not possess one particle of actual power...for the facilities of women are not capable of following out the highest intellectual processes, since she has a less degree of pure Reason than the man."

And:

"...Woman (is) most emphatically fitted to display in herself the ornamental part of government...and...she is manifested as the proper director of all that relates to domestic life".

This of course is 1881.

Hay hardly stands alone in his misanthropic approach to women.   Percy Greg's tale of the future in his Across the Zodiac, the Story of a Wrecked Record (1880) shows the extent of the intellectual calamity and inferiority of women extending to Mars.  In this novel² Greg's Martians have come to realize that it is not possible to elevate their women to the intellectual status of men, and that their grand experiment of equality was a failure.  There were many others, of course, like  Walter Besant (The Revolt of Man, 1882), who could not abide the thought of equality. 

And according to the wonderful I.F. Clarke (The Pattern of Expectation, 1644-2001), there were many more who looked into the future and saw greatness and expansiveness in the equality of women.  There was E.B. Corbett (New Amazonia, 1889), H.R. Dalton (Lesbia Newman, 1889), Lady Dixie (The Revilution of 1900, 1890), G.N. Miller (The Strike of Sex,1891), A.G. Mears (Mercia the Astronomer Royal, 1895), R. Buchanan, (The Rev. Annabel Lee, 1898), and Sir Julius Vogel's (Anno Domini 2000, or, Woman's Destiny, 1889), where "woman became the guiding...force of the world". 

I think, that, overall, the people who saw the restriction of women in the future (near and distant) held sway, or at least the majority, of writers envisioning the sexes int he future. 

Notes:

* The first image is by the great and prolific and short-loved  J.J. Grandville (1803-1847) for his Autre Monde (1844).

1. I have found another reference to a bitter world of the future written by Hay in the excellent Airminded blog, which records his effort at a novel of doom and destruction of the overtaken London of the future.

2. Greg's characters visit Mars via the benefits of a sort of anti-gravity spacecraft called the Astronaut, and, interestingly, the Martians had seem themselves as the only life forms in the galaxy.  It is also in this novel that the first attempt at creating an alien language appears.  There was also another science fiction effort by this title as well, though it really doesn't apply to what we're talking about, here.  (I wonder how prevalent duplicating titles is in the sci fi genre?)

The SteamPunk Clown Spoiler of Future ElectroPunk Technology, 1866

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1598

Punch, or the London Charivari published this delightful and somewhat prescient illustration in its 27 January 1866 issue.  It is for me an excellent, sort-of early depiction of a steam-man, a steampunk man, a steam-driven clown:  deeply and frequently hinged, smoke belching from a curved smokestack coming from the back of its head, and controlling its own destiny.

And what it seems to be doing with its poker in controlling its steam technology is busting the new technologies of the era, a rub and at the same time a statement of hope or expectation in a high-Victorian manner, a rationalism of all things via technological means.  And at this time, in the mid-1860's, the new wellspring of hope was being found in electricity-based solutions--moving away from the pervasive steam-driven technologies--though as the cartoon suggests those expectations might be too soon, too fast and too deeply placed.  After all, these things are being exploded by a "scientific clown" with a "scientific poker"--and that clown is being driven by steam. 

The Holocaust-Denying Discoverer of the Atomic Bomb in the Bible (1945)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1597 [Part of the Atomic and Nuclear Weapons series]

It is astonishing sometimes to think of all of the subterranean atom-bomb-applicable cultural subcultures that quickly/instantly popped into existence following the use of the weapon on 6 August 1945.  The United States, for one, became an atom-crazed country, from atomic laundry flakes to milkshakes to hotels to condoms. This exuberant atommannia knew no bounds, and leechingly found its way into religious messages.  One thing that the atom bomb seemed to be that few people anticipated was its popular impact on the general population, as well as its extraordinarily broad base of applications. 

The man trying to look into your soul from around the edges of his glasses, the man looking annoyed and reproachful and judgmental with his thin-lipped contempt, is W(illiam D(ewey) Herrstrom, the author of The Atomic Bomb and the End of the World, written in 1945, and published by Bible News Flashes of Minneapolis, Minnesota¹. This is an unhappy little pamphlet filled with massive fear and innuendo, and calls for its readers to address that fear and all uncertainty by embracing Jesus Christ.  After all, it is not the Atomic Bomb that we need to worry about, says the author: it is our salvation and the potential wrath of the creator for all sinners.  Herrstrom shouts out that the atomic bomb will not end the world or set it on fire--that job is left for god, so we need to address god before we do so the bomb.  He writes:

"The scientists who say that the heavens could be ignited by man to bring about the end of the world may be right.  But there is at least one good reason why this will never happen.  That reason is clearly stated in II Peter 3:7.  God has "RESERVED" this for his own time."

Mr. Herrstrom's--who may have believed too much in the transliteration of his name from the German, which would be "Mr. Power"-- message was one of fear and perdition, of the End Times coming true, of prophesies found in the Bible that were being unearthed right there in 1945--luckily, Mr. Herrstrom was ready to supply all of the necessary information about dealing with such stuff in his Bible News Flashes magazine, every month, which was somehow available for the subscription of 25 cents per year.  He had earlier addressed these issues in his Judgment Day for Everybody (improbably in its second edition) and The Revived Roman Empire, both of which were skinny, and both puiblished in 1939--not that he was taking advantage of any situation in particular to press forward his bitter and hardnail visions of the future of our souls and the coming death of a sinful world. 

"The Bible is history pre-written and God's book is scientifically correct...and is ahead of the human race..."

And as proof of these revelations the author offers bits like the following, in this case, a Bible quotation as proof of foretelling the invention of the jet plane:  "Like...chariots on the tops of the mountains they shall leap" (Joel 2:5).  And this for the atom bomb:  "And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God" (Rev 16: 18-20) and seven more pages of other large-print proof².

Herrstrom advertisers himself--on the title page, and in his interior full-page portrait--as a "World Traveler, Prophetic Analyst" and editor of Bible News Flashes, the Illustrated Prophetic Monthly Magazine, which is advertised on the back cover of the pamphlet, and where Herrstrom adds "News photographer" to his credits.

One thing he doesn't credit himself with and for which he should receive major recognition is for being one of America's earliest and ugliest Holocaust deniers. The fantastic all-things-atomic  Conelrad blog, which has written another story on Herrstrom and his work, finds Herrstrom in Deborah Lipstadt's book^3,4:

"In 1952 W. D. Herrstrom, an American antisemite, declared in Bible News Flashes that there were five million illegal aliens in the United States, most of whom were Jews. These were the Jews who were supposed to have died in the Holocaust. "No use looking in Shickelgruber's [Hitler's] ovens for them. Walk down the streets of any American city. There they are." pp 66-67

Well, as confessions of a hating faith-based ignorance, one could scarcely find better examples than these. 

Notes:

1. (Unfortunately, the only address given on the pamphlet is for a PO Box for Lake St. Station. Herrstrom's other pamphlets include:  Mussolini & Facism, 1937, Wichita Falls, Kansas, Defender Publishers (?!), 49pp;  Will This War End Armageddon, 1941, 47pp; Golden Key to Bible Interpretation, 48pp, 3rd revised edition (again, ?!), 1940; Is God  a Jew, 1943, 24pp; Judgment Day, 1943, 64pp; Revival of the Roman Empire, 1939, 48pp.  Herrstrom had a few years where he was on fire,m from 1937-1945, during which most of this stuff was written.  It is noteworthy that hewrote books that were mainly 24 or 48 pages long.  His Bible News Flash appeared from 1943-1949, and is located in six libraries in the U.S., which makes it on the rare side.  Somehow, The Atomic Bomb and the End of the World is not located in the massive database for worldwide library holdings. 

2. Herrstrom was hardy alone in laying claim to the ecumenicism of the atomic bomb.  There was also, for example the following:

Mel Morris  published God's Atomic Bomb  in 1945, which means he must've worked a little feverishly to pump up his bible prophesy and history to include the new atomic weapon to replace whatever else he had been using as a prophecy for end of times.  (As it turns out, "God's Atomic Bomb" was more tempest and disaster in the bible, and not (whew!) the bomb itself.  Though as we've learned from scientologists and the sort-of creative mind of Ron Hubbard, a civilization came to the earth thousands of years ago and pummeled it with "atomic bombs" and other nastiness, polluting humans for milennia to come.  But that's another story--suffice to say that Morris found many dozens of examples of "God's Atomic Bomb" being used in the deep biblical past, and that the use of the real atomic bomb in 1945 was pre-ordained, and not without its figurative historical counterparts.  I'm not sure why any of this was necessary outside of proving to some small minority that these preachers could at least be contemporary and topical. 

3 Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, 1993.

4.  Conelrad also found Herrstrom's longest book,  Seventy Five Reasons Why Community Water Supplies Should Not be Fluoridated.  Good work, Conelrad!

5. Bibliographic note--I've seen this cover now in three different colors (red, blue, green) and I believe now that it wasn't so much a factor of a number of different printings being done of the work over time, but rather of using whatever cover stock in whatever color happened to be on hand for the first printing. 

Here's a note from Herrstrom on how to get into Heaven: