Ptak Science Books

On the Need for Thinking Machines/NSA Declassified Report, ca. 1964

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The following is an interesting, unclassified report on the future of the computer, from the archives at the National Security Agency.  "Time Is . Time Was· Time Is Past Computers for Intelligence" by Howard Campaigne offers an interesting look at what the future might hold for computation from an analyst who worked for what would become one of the U.S. government premier institutions for implementing new ideas in computation.  It ends with a surprising six-page bibliography ("Bibliography on Extending Scope of Computers") which is the same length as this entire short paper. 

"If a thinking machine can be built, then it must be done; it is a matter of self-respect. Just as a man must be put on the moon, just as Mount Everest had to be climbed, just as the poles had to be visited, just as a flying machine had to be made no matter what the arguments against it, so a machine must be made which can think."

"I must comment on a statement I have seen that soon the chess champion will be a machine! This is fatuous. Bicycles are not used in the Olympic footraces; if they were, a cyclist would be world champion. When the rules of chess are amended to prohibit mechanical aids, that will be a clue that one of our subgoals is being approached."

The entire article can be read here.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON EXTENDING SCOPE OF COMPUTERS

S. Amarel, "On the Automatic Formation of a Computer Program whichRepresents
a Theory," Self Organizing Systems, Spartan Books, Washington,
D. C., 1962.

A. M. Andrew, "Learning Machines," Paper 3-6, Symposium on the Mechanization
of Thought Processes, Teddington, England, November 1958.

James B. Angell, The Need and MeUM for Self-Repairing Circuits, Technical
Report No. 4654-2, USAF Contract AF33(616)-7726, Stanford Electronics
Laboratories.

The First Personal Computer (?)--"Simon", 1950

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1631

The first exposure of the American public in general to a "personal computer" may have been in this issue of the Scientific American for November 1950--an article called "Simple Simon" by Edmund Berkeley.  ( Berkeley also wrote a book called Giant Brains, which seems to me to be the first mass-consumption book--written in terns for the general public--on how the computer works, and the design of "how a machine will think".  Berkeley looks at the MIT Differential Analyzer #2, the Moore School ENIAC, Bell Labs' General-Purpose Relay Calculator, and the IBM Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator.) 

The Simon was a five-hole paper tape (which was its data entry and memory) 2-bit storage relay-based computer that could use numbers from 0 to 3.  It was extremely limited, but it worked, and it was real.  And affordable.  And a baseline for things to come.   [The original issue of the magazine can be found in our blog bookstore section, here.]

Berkeley introduced the idea for Simon in Giant Brains:

"We shall now consider how we can design a very simple machine that will think.. Let us call it Simon, because of its predecessor, Simple Simon... Simon is so simple and so small in fact that it could be built to fill up less space than a grocery-store box; about four cubic feet....It may seem that a simple model of a mechanical brain like Simon is of no great practical use. On the contrary, Simon has the same use in instruction as a set of simple chemical experiments has: to stimulate thinking and understanding, and to produce training and skill. A training course on mechanical brains could very well include the construction of a simple model mechanical brain, as an exercise..."--Edmund Berkeley, in Giant Brains, 1949, p. 22

In the Scientific American paper Berkeley introduced the machine and how it functioned; he also described three  three outcomes for Simon:

First: "Simon itself can grow.  It possess all the essentials of a mechanical brain..."

Second: "It is likely to stimulate the building of other small mechanical brains.  Perhaps the simplicity and relatively low cost of such machines may make them attractive to amateurs as the radio set and the small telescope."  [The "low cost" in 1951 was $600--equal to about $3000 today.]

Third:  "It may stimulate thought and discussion on the philosophical and social implications of machines that handle information..."

Berkeley finishes the three-page article with the following paragraph, looking into the not-too-distant future:

"Some day we may even have small computers in our homes, drawing their energy from electric-power lines like refrigerators or radios ... They may recall facts for us that we would have trouble remembering. They may calculate accounts and income taxes. Schoolboys with homework may seek their help. They may even run through and list combinations of possibilities that we need to consider in making important decisions. We may find the future full of mechanical brains working about us."

BERKELEY, E.C. (1950). Simple Simon in Scientific American, No. 183, November 1950, pp. 40-43.

Custer--the Limited Man of No Limits--and Exterminating Southerners

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1630

"...I would offer no compromise except that which is offered at the point of a bayonet. I...favor a war of extermination. I would hang every human being who had a drop of rebel blood in their veins whether they be men, women or children..."--G.A. Custer in Richard Slotkin Fatal Environment..., Harper, 1985, pg. 384.

Here’s a bit of Custer legend that is true and seldom heard—if left to his own devices in a Custer-filled world,  the general would have “exterminated” everyone in the South, every one (“men, women or children”) , “with an ounce of rebel blood” flowing in their veins, hanged dead.  At that point the South would be free, and would be repopulated with the “loyal and patriotic” people,l presumably from either up north or Southerners loyal to the Union.^a

This was part of  a long letter (transcript below) to U.S. Senator Jacob Howard, written on 19^th January 1864, in the field.  Custer was feeling on the ropes at the time, needing to defend his loyalty to Lincoln and his policies, and needing to distance himself from Lincoln’s election contender and inferior general, George McClellan. (Richard Slotkin, in his fabulous The Fatal Environment, the Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 notes that Custer needed “to justify himself…(and) disabled his previous affiliations and the nature of his relationship with McClellan…’)

Custer's relationship--real and imagined--with McClellan was putting him in a stench void, creating the possibility of distance between himself and the powers that be--particularly with Senators like Howard and Zachariah Chandler, "who controlled army promotions" (Slotkin, page 384), which meant distancing himself from the higher rank he thought he was destined for. Custer had been on McClellan's staff, and had aligned himself with his war policies, though not necessarily so his presidential ambitions.  Howard, a Republican from Michigan and member of the Military Affairs Committee, believed that Custer was a "McClellan Man" and set against Lincoln, and for that was set to block his promotion to brigadier general.  Custer's  salvaging letter¹ to Howard left no doubt about his supposed non-political feelings and where he stood on Lincoln, the Emancipation, and the treatment of the Confederates:

 

History of Lines: Clouds

 JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1629  (On Clouds and Not-Clouds, Part I)

"...and they drew all manner if things--everything that begins with an M---'

    'Why with an M?' said Alice

   'Why not?', said the March Hare." --Lewis Carroll,  from "A Mad Tea Party", in Alice's Adventures in   Wonderland.

Why not, indeed?  I've long had an interest in clouds, and since this blog is ostensibly on the surfacing or definition of Cloud Bones, I though to spend a little time on the origins of the depictions of printed clouds in art. Not being an expert by any means on the history of art, it just seems to me that after long exposure clouds are not well-represented in woodcuts, wood engravings and other early engravings, or at least not so well depicted as their landsmen in paintings.  There seems to be no shortage of effort to reveal gorgeous clouds  through the early Renaissance--but the doesn't seem to apply very often to their representation in prints.

And that of course is when the detail of the sky is depicted at all. It seems that more often than not, in woodcuts printed from say 1460 through 1550, that the sky is left blank, like this image from Ovid (Accipe Studiose Lector P. Ouidij Metamorphosin...printed in Venice in 1509:

"You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead --
There were no birds to fly".--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass. 

I could go on with many examples of the blank sky--the white, blank, settled nothingness--but exhibiting variations of nothing at this point isn't necessary.  But illustrating clouds is.

And for the most part, clouds don't look very much like themselves in prints, not really, not for more than a hundred years.  For example, Martin Schoengauer's spectacular  The Temptation of St. Anthony, which was printed in 1470/5, has a beautiful, fluid circularity to it, full of an earthy roundness even as the saint is pursued by demons.  But the sky in the background is populated with nothing but dashes to suggest clouds. 

Perhaps clouds would have taken away from the moment; but if that were the case, why bother with the dashes?

There are considerable exceptions to this practice, with Durer and Altdorfer coming quickly to mind--but in my experience, the oddly-formed cloud seems to be the majority rule in the woodcut.  

At this time there were of course many depictions of skies with no clouds in paintings, bare suggestions of themselves, even in some of the most famous works--Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Michelangelo's Fall of Man in the Sistine Chapel are fair examples.  But once you move away from the golden Sienese skies of the14th century¹, clouds are given full and beautiful shapes from early periods. (Giotto's Christ's Entering Jerusalem, 1305/6; Simone Martin The Road to Calvary, 1340; Duccio's Christ Entering Jerusalem, 1308-1311; Fra Angelico's The Dposition, 1436; Masaccio's The Tribute Money, 1424; Lippi's Annunciation, a perfect cloud treatise, 1442, and on and on. Other examples are found in continued reading below.)

Clouds in prints are a different matter--I'm not sure if it was just too technically difficult to create clouds in wood, or if there was some sort of languishing Byzantine sensibility inherent in woodblocks that was not so in oil. I'm really not so sure about this, and as much as anything else I'm thinking out loud about this lack of cloud definition.  I don't have an answer for it.  But I do want to share the beginning of a timeline for undefined clouds as they appeared (or not) over the course of about one hundred years,  from 1485 to about the end of the 16th century.   As I mentioned clouds appeared beautifully in paintings from earlier periods, and there doesn't really seem to be a substandard-cloud complement in the painting world as there was in the print world.  Of course, in western philosophy and science, clouds were pretty much left alone from inquiry, even by a series of the great natural history classifiers--they wouldn't really be given a fully taxonomic appreciation until 1803 by Luke Howard (which I wrote about in this blog earlier, here).

A Timeline of Clouds in Prints, 1485-1596

Franciscus de Retza, De Generatione Christi, sive Defensorium Castiatis Beatae Virginis Mariae, a beautiful work in Gothic type--a picture book, really, with two illustrations of magnets.  Printed in 1485, this image depicts Isidorus in a magnetic coffin which is floating in the air:

"The Adoration of the Magi", from Legenda Sanctorum Trium Regum, printed in Modena in 1490:

The Triumph of Love, 1492/3:

A Comet of Vertical Falseness (?)--an Episode in the History of Unusual Ideas

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the title of this interesting, odd beauty is “Formation d’une Fausse Comete Verticale”, and it looks as though it was published in the 1872 or so, and engraved in Grenoble by Ph. Breton (for “aut” or the author of the paper, Maisonville (?)).     The nature of this illustration has flipped around quite a bit—the initial translation of the title sends it to the heights of uncompromising weirdness, “On the Formation of a False Vertical Comet”, except that the “false comet” part was really, I think, referring to an asteroid more so than, well, I don’t know.  (This “I don’t know” part can get very weird, as we’ll see below.)   So the title kind of gets back into line with the world of the possible (except for the “vertical” part); but from my reading, the content of the illustrations takes it back out, again.  The round object in the middle is the earth; and the curved parabolics leading towards it, and inside it (deep inside it), leaves me only with wonder, and without explanation.  It is entirely possible that I’m just not up to the task of interpreting this image, but the inner-earth cross-hatchwork of asteroids leaves me baffled, as does the "axe de l'essaim" ("stacked axis??), and the trailing atmosphere, and so on.  I really can’t find any key to this image. 

Getting back to the unforeseeable weirdness that “explain things”, I found the following statement from a website explaining the “true” nature of the Shoemaker-Levy comet—the writer claims that it wasn’t a comet, not a comet at all, but rather a false comet (“une fausse comete” redux), and actually a series of “bombs” built by the U.S. Army and delivered to the surface of Jupiter by NASA disguised “as cometary collisions”.  (“En 1997 parait sur le forum fr.sci.astronomie un étrange document anonyme. Ce texte soutient que l'étrange série d'objets appelé "Comète Schoemaker-Lévy 9" ou SL9, qui a frappé la planète Jupiter en juillet 1994 en provoquant des explosions colossales était en fait une expérimentation de bombes d'antimatières misent au point par l'armée américaine, lancées par les navettes spatiales de la NASA et déguisées en collisions cométaires.”)  I must say that this explanation stumped me—sounds like a long, long way to go over a long period of for an experiment to blow up gas on Jupiter, if you ask me...

History of Lines: Zig and Zag, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1628   History of Lines Series

In the long history of lines seldom do we see such an indirect way to get safely from point A to point B than by zig-zagging through points A₁ to A₂₀₁. But this was definitely the case for ships in the North Atlantic in the 1914-1918 period.

Merhcant Vessel v. Submarine, Some Reasons for Zig-Zagging (a "Confidential" report written by Lt. Commander A.G. Leslie and published by Wood & Co. in Chatham in 1918) presents logical, simple, workable solutions to the problem of the submarine, fallible solutions to what must have seemed to be infallible treachery.  It is a pocket-sized, 5x3 inch talisman and survival guide for those ("For Masters of British Merchant Vessels") responsible for hundreds of lives and thousands of tons of ship, all of the good information boiled down to eight pages of loose type, a way to get around the subs, and weighing in at about an ounce. 

What it really boiled sown to was zig-zagging--plus darkening the ship, posting lookouts, painting the ship the proper color, camouflaging it, and keeping the lights and smoke down.  But over th eight pages Leslie knocks down the idea of zig-zagging over and over again.  And he was right of course, right on all of it, given the conditions of conflict and the state of development of the submarine and the torpedo.  At this point, the torpedo was a point-and-shoot affair, which means the sub commander needed to get accurate info on the speed and the course of the ship (and other stuff of course)--and the one thing that would make this very difficult for the sub was for the ship to change its course unpredictably.  That would mean longer follow time for the sub, longer time above the water line, probable multiple dives using up battery power, and so on, all very problematic for submariners.

Once unrestricted warfare was declared on 1 February 1917 the German subs attacked any and all shipping, including American ships, which led the way for American involvement in April.  The U-boot sunk substantial part of British shipping, but, ultimately, it could not do enough against the escorted convey, and the German moment would be lost.  In the end of it all, of the 360 submarines built by Germany, 178 were lost, after having waged a campaign for four years which saw the sinking of more than 11 million tons of shipping. 

A straight line coursed by the ship would allow the sub to gather its information, site the ship, and sink it.

[The full text is below.  I can't find another copy of this work in any of the likely places, including OCLC.]

Religion-in-the-Foxhole Division: God in Shelters, London 1940

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On looking at the bombing of Britain from the German side--an article in the popular Illustrirte Zeitung for 5 September 1940 with maps and illustrations, found here.

AS people took cover from bombs and fire in the subway system or in bomb shelters, proselytizers were on their way to work, too, as seen in this slip of a handout, Have You s Shelter?, published around February 1940.  It seems that the maker and distributor of this tiny pamphlet didn't identify themselves save for an address from which more copies of the flyer could be obtained (61 Upton Lane, Forest Gate, London)

People weren't quite yet getting into the shelters for real--this was still the pre-Blitz period, back there in February 1940, and the real attack against England (but particularly against London) didn't begin until September and last through May 1941, which in its course would kill 40,000 civilians (half of whom were in London) and destroy a million homes.  In February it was still speculation, and the church folk who distributed this flyer were out to make the best of it--trying to save souls, trying to ease the nervous burden through belief, trying to do something, anything. Though mostly it seems trying to convince people that it wasn't just German dive bombers that they needed to fear. 

Polling for Opinions on the Japanese, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1627

I uncovered a few interesting documents this morning from The American Council, Institute of Pacific Relations (in 1944 at the address 744 Jackson Place, N.W., D.C.) relating to collecting opinions on Japan and the Japanese, right at the height of the war.   And this is what the American Council was doing--prep work to assess the extent of public opinion on the treatment of Japan post-war, which entailed reviewing existing polling data (from Gallup) was well as conducting their own original research. [These documents are available from our blog bookstore, here.]

The "first" issue (so far as I can determine)  was perhaps the most aggressive:

Is Japan incurably warlike?

The question was asked of an undefined group over three periods of time  (February 1942 to June 1943) for both Japan and Germany, the statements the respondents having to choose from being: "always want war", "too easily led" and "do not like war" at three different times, from February 1942 to June 1943.  From Feb '42 to June '43, people's opinions that the Japanese "always want war" went up from 48% to 62%, while for the same time the same question regarding the Germans stayed about the same, 22%.  The Gallup Poll for June 1943 reported that for 75% of the respondents only 8% of the folks thought that "we can get along" with the Japanese, while 67% favored our chances with the Germans. 

Get along with them or not, or feeling that they are war-like or not, had little to do with the opinions of people (reported by the National Opinion research Center, August 1942) who thought that reparations should be paid, and paid hard, by the Axis powers across the board, "as much as it is possible to get out of the Axis countries, even if it breaks them".

The following two papers came a little later, closer to the realization that victory was coming, that the war would be over, that victory would be taken--probably at the end of 1944 or the beginning of 1945, when position statements were more circumspect than the earlier public opinions.  "Expert Opinion on Post-War Treatment of Japan"  was more understanding when speaking to the post-war existence of Japan, stating in a number of different ways that "there should be no attempt to keep Japan permanently repressed" and "the Japanese people must work out their own political salvation".  Also that there would be no "continuing burden of reparations payments...as done with Germany after the last war". 

The overall feeling of this and the following document ("The Treatment of Japan") can be found in the section "Teaching Japan a Lesson":  "United Nations effort should be directed toward demonstrating to the people of Japan the advantages of making peace rather than the penalties of losing a war".  The issue regarding the Emperor and whether or not he should or could stay--an issue that would stay with high command right through the second week of August 1945. 

The Call of the Book: Antoine Verard and Illustration, ca. 1500

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M. Verard was a very active bookseller, printer and publisher, operating in Paris between about 1485 and 1512.  He produced a catalog of his printed works that was very extensive, containing more than 100 works.  One of them, a Bible published in 1502, contained this spectacular woodcut, "The Root of all Evil", showing Adam and Eve at the crucial moment, a very considerable man-serpent completely engulfing the fruit tree, winning the confidence and trust of Eve.  And above it all grows the tree of humanity its roots firmly in place along the sphere of the fall of man.  

I also quite like the portrait of Verard, shown offering one of his books to King Charles VII, hoping for his approval:

Things Not Built: Liberty Landing and Closing NYC Harbor, 1935

I recently uncovered an interesting, unpublished and probably not-acceptable engineering report to extend the ports capacity in the Hudson River at New York City--the ports of the  area being famously over-busy for a long period of time, especially right before World War II.  Charles Palliser and Frederick W. Capon presented a proposal in 1935 for a unification of the port and airport facilities to take care of the overcrowding and overworked problem.

What they came up with was Liberty Landing, a mile-long and half-mile-wide facility that nearly bumped into the Statue of Liberty (and hence its name).  The plan called for backfilling the “flats” that were just south of Jersey City, as “the natural formation of these were very favorable”, which meant that the airport-port combo would extend all the way into the harbor to the edge of the channel, which would put it further out than the Statue of Liberty, which would also be just hundreds of feet away from the end of the north runway.

Also attached to the backfill and new land would be a one-mile-long floating dock.  Oh my!

The floating island would also have vehicular tunnels that connected it to Staten Island and the Battery.  There were facilities for seaplanes, airplanes, railroads, dirrigbles, and trucks, plus a military installation, a custom’s house and the US Mail Service, so that all commerce would converge at this one point, which sounds interesting (for about 20 seconds). 

This is a good candidate for the “Better Left Undone” award for 1935.

As I look at the photograph of the aerial view of the plan it strikes me that if the designers increased the surface area by only 125% or so they could’ve connected the new facility with Governor’s Island AND Brooklyn, building a land bridge from Jersey City to Coney Island—a superbly bad idea to cap an already strongly bad idea. 

The report is called, simply, Liberty Landing, and published by the architect in Jackson Heights, NYC, 16 Septmeber 1935.  This is also the U.S. Copyright Deposit copy (accepted 10 October 1935), which is where the history of this project ends. I do believe that this plan has never been published before today.   

On the Geography of the N-Word

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1625

There are 560¹geographic names in this country starting with the word "Negro".  Since "Negro" wasn't really recognized widely as having a capital "N"--that a whole race of people weren't deserving of a capital letter--until the late 1930's, these place names didn't start out this way, using the word "Negro".  They used something else.  And I think that it is a safe bet that in 1962, when offensive names were removed from designating geographical places in the U.S., that almost all of these "Negro" places had been changed from "Nigger".  And that wasn't all of them, either.

I think that this is just a small percentage of the changed titles.  For example, I own a very large (30 sq ft) map of the place I live, Buncombe County (NC), that contains at least 25 place names using the word "Nigger".  Today in the state there are 12 names using the word "Negro".  It is possible that at one time then there could have been hundreds of place names printed on county maps for the state of North Carolina designated "Nigger" that have simply been replaced or erased or changed in some way.

Among many other things, language is a bomb, a land mine, a virus, a means to an end--and sometimes it is just not pretty as a signifier, or classifier.  Sometimes it is an oppressive thing, an offensive weapon, a prison. We are reminded of that today as we see with the recent business with presidential candidate Rick Perry's family hunting patch near Paint Creek, Texas.  The place was called "Niggerhead", the name painted on a rock at one of the place's gates, and had been there for years--it may have been there as recently as 2008, though Gov. Perry says the word was painted over in 1983 or '84.  When the name was painted over seems to be open for discussion. It shouldn't be. 

The fact of the matter is that the word "Nigger' was used in thousands of geographic designations in printed maps, and still used in large numbers up to 1962. 

As I pointed out, the capitalization of the word "Negro" was hotly debated up until the late 1930's, when most anti-capital forces gave in.  Even though "Negro" had not been recognized as being worthy of a capital "N", "Nigger" was, and appeared so on countless maps and other published and official (and federally printed) documents.  In this instance the use of the offensive word along with using the small "n" in "negro" proved to be another very effective means of controlling a people by controlling the language in which they were discussed. Using words as weapons like this has come with an incalculable cost, and the Rick Perry episode of slowly dealing with one of those words is a good reminder of this long and indoctrinated legacy of repression and hate, and how not-far away it all is.

Notes:

There are places today called "Negro Jim", and Andy, and Bob, Bill, Jake, Jack, James, Joe and so on, and you know for certain that "Negro James Landing" wasn't named so 50 years ago.  Squint your eyes and you can well imagine the original name:  Negro Ditch, Cut, Island, Jump, Canyon, Branch, Lake, Head, Heads, River, Hollow, Knob, Hill, Prong and of course "Negro Jumpoff" could hardly have started out their lives using "Negro".

Currently, of the 560 place names using "Negro", 8 are in New England and 54 are in the Middle Atlantic states.  The distribution is as follows:  AL, 17; AK, 7; AZ, 21;  AR, 18; CA, 55; CO, 19; CT, 2; DE, 1; DC, 0; FL, 13; GA, 7; HI, 0; ID, 11; IL, 12; IN, 3; IA, 1; KS, 7; LA, 10; KY, 22; ME, 1; MD, 6; MA, 2; MI,1; MN, 1; MS, 1; MO, 18; MT, 10; NE, 3; NV, 14; NH, 0; NJ, 2; NM, 44; NY, 22; NC, 12; ND, 0; OH, 6; OK, 19; OR, 29; PA, 15; RI, 1; SC, 7; SD, 9; TN, 37; TX, 30; UT, 7; VT, 2; VA, 17; WA, 6; WVa, 6; WI, 3; WY 15. 

I should note that there are still 10 places in the U.S. using the name "Redskin".  Not including a football team for the Nation's Capital.

 

 

The History of Blank, Empty & Missing Things--When Everything was Missing

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1624   (Part of the series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.)

Perhaps "everything" wasn't missing, but almost everything was.  Certainly the ancients and even the more-moderns, even the scientists of the 16th and into the 17th centuries (until von Guericke in 1672), could not abide the idea of the existence of nothing.  The vacuum, a space in which there was nothing at all, was seen to be an anathema to the creations of the great creator, that the vacuum was antithetical to what was understood to be the nature of nature. (I wrote a post here earlier on when nothing was almost something.)

But what we see here, above, is the third day of creation as presented in one of the most significant books printed in the 15th century, and it is somewhat problematic, because it depicts almost-northing.  That, or almost-everything. 

The book was written in Latin by Hartmann Schedel (1444-1514, with the German translation by Georg Alt) , with the illustrations under the control of Michael Wohlgemut (1434-1519) and his stepson Wilhelm Pleydenwurff (c. 1450-1494), .and was published in Nuremberg in 1493 by Anton Koberger as Liber Chronicarum--known best to English-pseaking readers as the Nuremberg Chronicles (and to Germans as Die Schedelsche Weltchronik).  It is perhaps one of the greatest illustrated works in the first half-century of movable type printing, using more than 1800 woodcuts to tell the story of the world--according to the Bible, mostly.  (The book deals with the history of world in its seven ages--the first five of which deal with cumuulative history to the birth of Jesus Christ, while the sixth ages handles the history from Christ to the present day, and teh seventh carries along the future history of the world to the Last Judgment.  Not much then is devoted to the 1500 years preceding the publication of Koberger's book. The author, Schedel, was a very religious man, and considered the work of teh Bible to come from the hand of god and therefore was infallible; on the other hand (so to speak), everything written outside of the Bible was that of humans, and so fallible, and therefore open to interpretation.)

Here is a colored version of the third day in the creation cycle mythology, which opens itself to much more visual congruence. ("On the third day God gathered together unto one place the waters under the firmament; and the dry land appeared. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters he called Seas; and God saw that it was good, and said, Let the earth bring forth the green grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit trees yielding fruit after their kind.[Genesis 1:9-13.]")

And the uncolored version, third day:

This sort of "nothingness" is not unique, as we can see in this example from the Mantegna Tarocchi, showing the creator as Primum Mobile, the First Mover, holding what may well be our universe in its hands (and standing on another sphere of nothing, god knows what that might be):

Perhaps I'm missing the larger picture, and that the circles/spheres are the things created, and that they are contained in the square surrounding them; and that the boundaries marked by the circular lines are not necessarily empty, and that it is the suggested of the circles that is the stuff created, placeholders, contained within the square of the creator's domain.  Or maybe not. Perhaps the circles are signifiers for the elements--earth at the center, surrounded by water/air/fire. Perhaps the woodcut was just waiting for some color. 

Notes:

The English translation of the Nuremberg chronicle used here is from Beloit College (here) which also has a very lovely scholarly treatment of their copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle (here).

Here's the rest of the cycle, in color:

"For he spoke and they were made: He commanded and they were created"  (Psalm 33)., so says the legend (IPSE DIXIT ET FACTA SUNT; IPSE MANDAVIT ET CREATA SUNT Psalm 32) which floats above god enthroned--but it is difficult to see the progress in the un-colored version of day three.  

The first day:

Imago Frammeni: Boulle, the Dogon, Jouffret, the Simple and the Complex

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1623 

Changing the Mind's View of Simple and Complex Ideas via Different Image Perspectives

I’m always very interested in curious things, or standard, “average” things pictured in non-standard ways, as the change in perspective can lead to entirely new observations and discovery.  Seeing this illustration in an article by J. Norman Lockyer (Nature 1881) I was shocked by its clarity and usefulness—Lockyer was simply showing the arrangement of his apparatus for his solar spectrum experiments but the angle of observation (being at such an oblique angle as is normally found) was just, so, well, “correct”.  The image I thought was perfect for the reader—not only that, it was designed artistically and with grace, and one can see exactly what Lockyer was up to.  Diagrams would’ve worked almost as well, but there is just something so extraordinary here that you could just about work from the image if there was no description. 

 
Looking at things differently is hard work—that’s why I think it is always good to refresh the neuronal sap and look at great examples of unusual , insightful imagery.

Sometimes it works to read the description of what the image is before actually viewing it to see the differences of the image that you form in your brain before seeing the thing itself.  For example, when reading about the Dogon, a cliff-dwelling people of the plateau of Bandiagara, south of Tombouctou, and how they would make houses and then towns out of the rocks fallen from cliffs, you get what is probably a pretty benign image.  When you see photographs of these structures it seems as though the brain just simply isn’t ready for their impossible nature, though you quickly, instantly, recover (once you convince yourself the photo is real) and—voila—your mind has been expanded.  (This photo is from an expansive work by Bernard Rudofsky, Architectures without Architects, Doubleday, 1964.) 

The (internally) spectacular Etienne Boullee can greet us in the same way with some of his eye-popping architectural creations (unbuilt architecture by an architect, in this case, compared to the built architecture of the non-architects above).  Boullee’s “Plan du Cenotaphe de Newton”, a gigantic memorial to Newton  that was dancing with necessary privacy in Boullee’s brain during the French Revolution (and also during a particularly

un-Newtonesque time in on-your-knees-to-Cartesian-principles France)  is another superior example.  Reading the description of the structure just doesn’t quite do, and it seems whatever grand comes of that is tarnished and stripped away  by the obesely florid sentiment of none other than Ledoux’s poetic sentiments “…O Newton!  Sublime Mind!  Vast and profound genius!  I conceived the idea of surrounding thee with thy discovery…”.  Oy.   Boulle adds to this inspirational atrocity by saying of the sphere:  “…we must speak of a grace that owes its being to an outline that is as soft and flowing as it is  possible to imagine…”   And once the demand of “oh  dear god just please show me the picture” is met, we are left with a turned-around brain and another heavenly exaltation, or profanity.  The Cenotaph is just Grand-Canyon-Spectacular. 

Complex can turn on the simple in this way, where we can have those “a-ha” moments from, say, early efforts at picturing the fourth dimension or non-Euclidean geometry to a new perspective of looking at Roman ruins.  The arrival on the non-Euclidean geometries  in the 19th century posed new issues, not the least of which was representing the ideas.  Our saintly Hermann von Helmholtz believed –contrary to most elevated opinions—that the human mind could indeed intuit complex space and figures of these geometries.  (The difficulty not only from the obvious intellectual hardships in picturing the concepts but also because the geometry of Lobachevsky http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Lobachevsky.html was called somewhat into doubt when some of its results were cast in doubt by contemporary astronomical observations.—and this even though so far as the great Gauss was concerned there was no deviation in Euclidean values.)   Helmholtz did this by employing the three-dimensional pseudosphere model of Beltrami.  (Reluctance to these ideas would end soon enough, for, as Linda Dalrymple Henderson points out with such sotto voce, “the convenience of Euclidean geometry would prove inadequate once Einstein” hit in 1905.)

 The work of Beltrami  and H.P. Manning  (Geometry of Four Dimensions, 1914), and Jouffret  (Traite elementaire de geometrie a quarte dimensions, Paris 1903) in illustrating these complex ideas (the titles of which were in themselves daunting as with Jouffret’s “plane projections of the sixteen fundamental octahedrons of an ikosatettrhroid”) would in themselves prove to be entirely irresistible to the world of the arts. 

Charles Howard and Maurice Princet I think had as much to do with  the creation of cubism and abstract art and the imaging of time than anyone, including the painter (I shudder to say his name) of Les Demoiselles (1907) or the lovely Georges Braque (Houses at Estaque, 1908) or Jean Metzinger or even the sublime comedian Duchamp’s Nude Descending (1914).  The hypercube starts to show up a lot in some Bauhaus genres and even into the palette of Frank Lloyd (“Stinky”) Wright (with his St. Mark’s Tower plan, NYC, 1929).  I can only imagine the shock to the brains of these creative geniuses in seeing the display of such a novel idea.  (For the ultimate treatise on this see Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s The Fourth Dimension and Non Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton  1983).  And no the art didn’t come first. 

But coming back to the simple, and in the same frame as the first example that we mentioned in Lockyer, we have the unlikely find of Giovanni Piranesi.  In my opinion his most spectacular work is found in his frammeni (the diverse bits and pieces of architectural and sculptural bric-a-brac found objects that are collected together on one stage) and in his archaeological detail.   His attention to new perspective in showing the crucial aspects of structure and building in Rome is tremendous and

unexpected—as an example we see here the child’s-eye-height view of three steps of the reconstruction of the theatre of Pompey.  I must say that I’ve seen a lot of architectural images in my time but nothing quite comes to me so surprisingly as this step-level view of the reconstruction of a Roman theatre,  This happens throughout the lesser-known Piranesi, with great details of tools, and cross sections of the very deep footings of bridges, and so on.  It is really refreshing, lovely, unexpected work. 

We’ll return to this subject from time to time as I have hundreds of interesting examples to draw from—for example, the remarkable Emily Vanderpoel’s Colour Problems which is ostensibly an undecipherable attempt to quantify color arrangement in art but through the lovely examples displaying this attempt pre-date the modern re-invention of non-representational art by at least a dozen years.  Stay tuned!

Half-Missing People of the Renaissance

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1621     Blank, Empty and Missing Things series

The thread on blank, empty and missing things becomes more interesting to me when it approaches the subject of humans and art.  And perspective.  It is a curious thing how over the course of 400 years--beginning say with the adoption of perspective in the work of Paolo Uccello--that the human form (and clothing and surroundings) was more and more realistically portrayed until it was not so, the "undoing" of perspective and realism coming with the Romantics and Impressionists, until realism and the portrayal of the very essence of a recognizable "thing" disappeared as a requirement in art in 1911. 

But there are interesting forebears to the disappearing human, and some of them are found in the Renaissance.  Of course they're mostly instructional on how to construct objects in proper perspective and such, but sometimes, well, sometimes they're not, and the artist is purely suggesting human form.

Take for example the extraordinary work of Jean Pelerin (also called "Viator”) in his De artificiali perpectiva, a very rare woodcut-illustrated book printed n Nurenberg in 1509. In illustrating what he referred to as his “three point perspective” Pelerin removed much of the gothic-tradition bric-a-brac that is so heavily favored in these early books and replaced them with outlines from his rather astonishingly expressive notebooks, and replacing people, individual humans, with what may be the first “almost-entirely-absent” human forms. These roundish, ghost-like figures are just meant to hold the outlines of space, meant to function in the role of a simple comparative unit. This works quite well as an artistic technique—a solicitation tool which I think gives his reduced, “empty” humans an incredible, ethereal look unlike any other in the history of the first 60 or so years of printing.  It is difficult to imagine what the observer of these images back there in 1509 was thinking when they looked at these figures, and perhaps removed them from their textural context—it  would have been a unique visual experience for them

 Albrecht Durer's (1471-1528) drawing of a geometrical man was an amazing--startling, even--object to the early 16th century consciousness. His …Symmetria partium…humanorum corporum (1537) was a masterpiece, and a key piece of revolutionary visionary thinking.

 

His Underwysung der Messung ("Treatise on Measuring") written about 500 years ago (in 1525) set the stage for this next work--it is here that we find some of the most recognizable of Durer's illustrations of the instruments that he employed to do his perspective work.  Durer--so far as I can tell--created an orthographically rotating human figures in three-dimensional trapezoids, creating incredibly human-like non-human forms.  Supra-human, perhaps; mechanized, calculated, structural. His use of stereometry, the science of measuring volume, was adapted to this study of human form and the relationship between that and movement. 

Lodovico Fogliani, Musica Theoretica (Venice, 1529) which is somewhat reminiscent of a more -blank figure, though when you look at the images in teh book, most of the human figures are more detailed and refined.  This one seems only abotu half-done, with only the suggestion of a face and but little refinement in the clothing.  The subject's fingers are also pre-robotic, like those fingers on a wooden manikin model if one had existed then.  Of course the figure is just there to depict scales and that's about it, with just enough of a figure to stand as background to the transmitted info. 

Just a little while latter Erhard Schoen, in his Unnderweissung der proportzion und stellung der posssen liegent und dtehent, printed in Nurenberg  in 1538, presented another unique way of representing the human form in studying perspective.  He used simplified geometric form to stand in for the curvy humans, replacing them with proportional stacks of boxes which would more easily explain to the younger reader how to represent the human body n space and in proportion to other things.

In the next decade we see  in this woodcut of St. Andrew (or St. Philip) by Domenico Beccafumi (1486-1551) another suggestion of human form, this one though mostly shrouded in deliberate contrast and a had light, removing most of teh detail. 

While at about the same time Luca Cambiaso (d. 1585) produced this  woodcut,  "The  Rape of the Sabines", which is mostly light with bare shadow, depicting motion and emotion more than detail. This again is hundreds of years before its more modern 19th & 20th century descendants. 

And also this figure, again by Cambiaso, and recalling the efforts of Durer and Schoen:

And in 1564 comes this fantastic effort by Heinrich Lautensack, Des Circkels und Richtscheyts, auch der Perspectiva und Proportion der Menscher, which is beautifully described at the Bibliodyssey site, here.  

Coming outside the confines of the Renaissance but just too fantastic to not include (although I could just simply change the title of this post to accommodate all)  is Giovanni Battista Braccelli's fabu-landscapes of the human condition, published in his Bizzarie di Varie Figure in 1624. 

(My thanks again to Bibliodyssey for surfacing Braccelli for me, and also to The Rare Book Room for posting all of the images in that rare work, and of course to the Library of Congress/Lessing J. Rosenwald pages, who made the images available for downloading, here.)

And a little later after this last--and again well outside of the Renaissance--the idea of the missing man, an image I just couldn't resist:

which is a detail from

which is from the instructional by Laurent Natter, Traite de la methode antique (1754).  The engraving is one of a series that shows the technical process of a antique method of constructing antique cameos and coins, and in this case how the gem would be produced by modern methods.