Ptak Science Books

Sterilizing the Insane, Epileptics, Prostitutes, and More--U.S.A. 1929

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1335     On "the Privilege of Sterilization"

There are so many ways of spelling "n-a-z--i" without using a "z".  Or the "n".  The vowels come in handy, though.  The Human Betterment Foundation of Pasadena, California did just that, as did the Association of Ontario Mayors, the Eugenic Society, and many other correct-thinking associations and societies.  What these people had in mind was the raising of the genetic good through the malleable confusion of human rights issues resulting in the forced
"asexualization" of the lesser elements of society--forced sterilization of inmates in state-run mental and correctional institutions, (I've written about sterilization and eugenics earlier on this blog, here, though the pamphlets I'm writing about today are different.Today's pamphlets are available for purchase at our blog bookstore.)

To paraphrase the good doctor Hunter Thompson, ("when the going gets tough the weird turn pro"), the Nazis did that, becoming complete beasts, horrors even to their own horror, almost unimaginably so. (As a matter of fact, they were so bad that a certain percentage of the population believes that the Holocaust and the Nazi experimentation didn't happen because, among other, race-hating reasons, the crimes were just too enormous to be true.)  But before eugenics studies were molded into what the Nazis needed they provided ample justification to other groups. before the Nazis were elected to power in 1933.  These American groups weren't nearly on the same level as the Nazis, but they did create their own levels of hell, just not as deep and as profoundly grotesque as the Nazi-version.  But it was something very deeply disturbing.

The Human Betterment Society put the issue quite simply in their slim little pamphlet, Human Sterilization--to save ourselves from "race degeneration"  society had to act and restrict 'defective" men and women from bearing and rearing children.   There aren't that many pages in this publication but they each present some astounding assertions, perhaps the most shocking of which is that this society had its eyes on a larger prize--the country was burdened by as many as 18 Million people with mental disease, who "put a charge and a tax on the population" and who would "cost a billion dollars a year" to take care of.  The Human Betterment people do not say outright that 18 million people should be sterilized, but the statements come in the middle of a pamphlet making the case for sterilization, so we are left with the determinant that riding this people from the gene pool would be a desirable outcome. 

Dr. William Hutton makes the case for the humanitarian treatment of the treatment espoused in the title of his A Brief for the Sterilization of the Feeble-Minded (1936). "It would be unjust and anti-social to withhold the privilege of sterilization from the victims of mental disorders (the insanities)..."(emphasis mine). He dives into the deep-end of the sterilization issue, making the cse for dealing with the "blind, deaf-mutes, haemophilicacs and brachydactyly (deformed fingers)" in the same manner.

Of course the Nazis performed all manner of sterilizations before 1939 and before they started to simply exterminate entire populations of who they considered to be human beings unworthy of life. The eugenics people didn't want to kill people--they just wanted to take away all of their reproductive rights, forever.

As it turns out, the list of the types of people who were subject to enforced, state-organized sterilization got a little shadow-y around the edges, enough so that prisoners or mental patients accused of "moral terpitude" could include, say, poor women forced into prostitution. The lateral motion of these sorts of issue were decided by different state agencies--in New Jersey for example it was the Board of Examiners of the Feeble-Minded; in Indiana, it was a board of "eugenics experts" (who were to be paid no more than $3 per case).

The reach of sterilizations varied by state--some states did not have any laws regarding enforced sterilizations, though most did--the reach of the practice varied from state to state as well, some (like New York) reaching beyond the state penal institutions, mental hospitals and "homes for the feeble-minded", and then right down into reform schools for boys and girls (with Michigan looking into industrial schools as well).   Some states--like Kansas--reached across these lines into the lives of epileptics; Michigan did not hunt for epileptics but did so for "imbeciles". Oregon seemed to cast the widest net, including the "feeble-minded, insane, epiletpic, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sexual perverts" found in any institution maintained at the public's expense who condition was found to be "inadvisable for procreation".  Maine on the other hand simply included "other forms of mental disease".

By 1933 state-sponsored sterilizations of these classes of people reached the following totals:

And so it almost ends, the story of sterilization growing weak and stale by World War II, exhausted and failing under its own exhaustion and failure.  The sterilization of sterilization really begins with the Supreme Court Decision of 1942, the Court finding unanimously that (in Skinner v Oklahoma) that Mr. Skinner's--a chicken thief--right were being violated when faced with castration.  Justice William O. Douglas wrote:  "[S]trict scrutiny of the classification which a State makes in a sterilization law is essential, lest unwittingly, or otherwise, invidious discriminations are made against groups or types of individuals in violation of the constitutional guaranty of just and equal laws."The practice continued with less abandon and more restrictive uses into the Nixon administration, which even as late as 1970 increased Medicaid funding for sterilizations, a weirdly appropriated funding that seemed to dramatically increase the sterilization of poor blacks.  Forced sterilization breathed its last in Oregon in 1981.  

 

Kolberg and Sachsenhausen, 1945--Visions of Fantasy and Reality

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1661

At the end of WWII there was a tale of two battles, both by the name of Kolberg.  One was a propaganda tool filmed in Agfacolor at the request of Josef Goebbels, a movie begun in 1944 about the mythically-endowed victory of Germany over Napoleon at Kolberg.  It was an epic, costly movie made at a time when the 180,000 "extras" composed of Wehrmacht troops could not be spared, but it was seen by Hitler and whoever was around to agree with him that a movie selling selflessness and sacrifice (blood sacrifice) was more valuable than a military victory¹. When it was finally put to bed, the movie "opened" virtually nowhere in Berlin in January 1945, as  the city was becoming a bombed-away shambles--much more so in the next three month.  The visions of resistance-to-the-last-breath played in few places outside of Hitler's bunker, where the dictator professed the qualities of sacrifice and the fight-to-the-death messages in the movie, though not applying those necessaries to himself.  

The other Kolberg battle was the Battle of Kolberg (a Baltic seaport city in Pomeria located about halfway between Berlin and Koenigsberg), which took place in real life from 4-18 March 1945.  It was a fight between the Germans and combined forces of the Soviet and Polish armies--it ended in Polish hands on the 18th following the retreat of the Germans and he destruction of most of the city.

It is ironic that the defeat of the Nazi forces in the real city of Kolberg occurred at nearly the same time as the wasteful film of the 1807 battle extolling the virtues of heroism and sacrifice was released.

It is interesting too that the  actor depicting the leading German hero in the movie Kolberg (directed Veit Harlan and Wolfgang Liebeneiner)  Heinrich George--who acted in a number of Nazi propaganda films after finding ways to get back into favor following his pre-Nazi pro-Communist politics--found himself arrested and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he died of "complications" in 1946.

Sachsenhausen was one of the longest-lived concentration camps, being in operation from 1936 to 1950.  From its beginning to May 1945 it was of course a Nazi concentration camp (Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen), where from 1943 until the fall of Nazi Germany it was also an extermination camp.  As many as 200,000 people were seized and sent through Sachsenhausen and its satellite/tributary camps. From the end of 1945 to 1950 it was operated by the Soviet Union, where another 15,000-30,000 people were imprisoned, Heinrich George being one of them. 

In addition to the many horrors of Sachsenhausen, there was also this--it was the center of a plot to destroy the British economy with the production and distribution of a hundred million pounds worth of counterfeit British currency.  The lead counterfeiter at Sachsenhausen, Salomon Smolianoff (a gifted artist who once said "why make art when you can make money?") was an inmate with exceptional skills and who basically headed the team of workers responsible for this effort,  For good work in his part of pulling down the economy of Great Britain, Smolianoff was rewarded with an occasional go at a ping pong table, as well as less-rancid pieces of meat. 

[One of the forged Sachsenhausen notes.]

This was operation Bernhard, named for its director, SS Major Bernhard Kruger (the leader of the VI F 4a Unit in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office) or RSHA), who was responsible for the operation from 1942, and which eventually extended from Sachsenhausen to other camps, most notably a major operation at Auschwitz.  More than 134,000,000 pounds of what the Brits considered to be the most perfect counterfeits ever were produced, but for various reasons--not the least of which was sabotage instigated by extraordinarily brave concentration camp internees--the vast part of the plan was never implemented. 

As it turns out, Smolianoff survived Sachsenhausen, survived the war, and then became a puff of smoke. He was a wanted-but-not-found fugitive, and spent his last days in Brazil, painting.  And creating toys.  He died in 1976.

Bernhard Kruger (born in 1904), also survived the war.  When the pound-forging plan was scuttled in 1944, he moved the idea over to American currency, which he worked on until the end of the wat.  Although he was kept by the British for two years, and then by teh French for one year, he was eventually released, and faced no charges until a Denazification court ordered him to trial, where he was somehow acquitted.  He died an old man, aged 85, in 1989, in his bed. 

Notes:

1.  At least this is so as reported by Sir Ian Kershaw in his biography, Hitler, 1936-1945.

Visualizing Depth: Thinking Deep on the Depths of the Oceans in Units of St. Paul's Cathedral

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1660

Although maps showing the depths of the oceans existed from about the mid-19th century (through the pioneering work of the American father of oceanography, Virginia’s Matthew Fontaine Maury¹) few casual readers would have ever seen a more approachable representation of information than what appeared in the Illustrated London News for 8 October 1910. Although Maury’s maps are elegant, they didn’t receive nearly as wide a distribution as this ILN image–also they weren’t nearly quite as relational as the 1910 version.

Granted, the 1910 comparison chart only displays one statistic–the supposed greatest dept of five oceans, two seas and the English channel–it does so in such a way as to make those numbers immediately approachable to any reader, which is always an issue in relating scientific information to the general reader.

{One of the standard unit of measurement for the purpose of this display was St. Paul's Cathedral.]

    

 

 

 

 

 What W.B. Robinson presented was a way of looking at an invisible entity through very visible means–comparing depth to the heights of things that everybody in 1910 knew: the Eiffel Tower (relatively newly constructed out of 18,000 prefabricated highly-engineered pieces) and St. Paul’s Cathedral. So rather than stating that the Pacific Ocean is 28,000 feet deep, Robinson chose to replace feet with Nelson’s Column–174 of them. Or 29 Eiffel Towers. The 20,000-foot deep Indian Ocean was actually 56 St. Paul’s deep, while the Baltic Sea was deep enough to not quite cover one Eiffel Tower with one Westminster Bell Tower on top (ha!); and the English Channel at its deepest wouldn’t quite cover St. Paul’s.

This is really the way to display data in my book, especially to kids.  This is one of the few ways of making the information accessible and understandable across almost all age ranges. 

Notes:
1.  Actually the work goes back a century before Maury with Buache, who produced this map of the English Channel in 1737–the data points are veyr numerous, but this is the very first time that such information was available on a map.

 

And Maury again with this first map of an oceanic basin, published in 1853:

 And in 1752, Philippe Buache produced this fantastic and first-of-its-kind map for the depths of the English Channel:

Here's an extraordinary cross sectrion of a part of the ocean floor produced in 1857 by the HMS Cyclops in preparation for laying the Atlantic Cable:

 

 

Its also interesting to note here Buache’s work on this map of Antarctica, published in 1737.  Buache put together all of the known (to him) information about the mass in the South, bits taken from other maps, and accumulated them into what was the best-possible guess on what was down there in the Antiopode.  Pretty good detective work given the amount of material that he could work with.

 

Infographic Display of the Dead with the Living--1912 Aviation Losses

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Even though masses of people had been used in panoramic photography for some years (thousands of people, usually soldiers, gathered to form a living liberty bell, or portrait of George Washington, or some such thing) , I cannot recall the use of humans as a direct statistical aid as in this bio-bar graph, found in the pages of The Illustrated London News for 1912 (page 357). 

The article asks the question of whether air travel (and flight in general) was "safe", and responded by graphing its "yes" response with this image. The larger groups in the top half of the image represent the number of flyers flying for that particular country; the small groups below show the number of aviators killed.  (There is no date of reference in particular but it seems to me that these are total deaths since flying began in Europe in earnest in 1905.) The photo montage below shows a selection of some of the most famous dead aviators. The number of deaths as a percentage of those flying seemed quite acceptable in the year of publication (1912) ; however if these figures were iterated forward to 2011 the death rate would be staggering, sending many thousands of aviators (and crew and passengers) to their deaths each year.  In the United States we save that safety failure for deaths in automobile accidents, which still kill about the same number of Americans each year as were U.S. soldiers lost for the entire war in Vietnam.  In spite of this the odds for survival looked pretty good in 1912. 

A Curious Episode in the History of Sitting--Speed Chairs & Trainless Trains

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

It may be that the history of human locomotion is the story of fast sitting.  Except for some of the earliest incarnations of powered movement, it seems one of the most significant engineering aspects moving a person forward is how that person should be carried in the vehicle.  And, well, it seems that in the vast majority of cases, the person is sitting. (There are of course exceptions, notably in say the standing of the engineer in the Tom Thumb when that locomotive set the land speed record;or the Wright Brothers' powered aircraft, where the pilot was laying down; or say in a chariot powered by a team of horses. Even in some of the earliest versions of steam-powered tractors, the mammoths were steered by a standing operator. It seems though that in very quick order the operator in most of these vehicles find themselves in a seated position.)

A very curious application of moving seated humans is seen in this woodcut of a chaired walkway--for all intents and purposes, the pedestrians looking to use the moving sidewalk would have been offered a chair instead.  It seems as though as its base that this was a very simple form of an elevated subway or trolley, though without the train. 

The moving seated sidewalk was the dreamchild of Alfred Speer (1823-1910), of Passaic, New Jersey, and it seems as though it might have been the first form of mass rapid transit in the city for which it was intended, which was NYC.  It stood fairly high in the opinions of some prominent New Yorkers (like Horace Greeley and Peter Cooper) when it was presented in the early 1870's, and even passed the New York State Legislature in an act authorizing funding for the program in 1873 and 1874--but it was each time vetoed by Governor John Dix, and the people-moving dream ended there, right before the Centennial.  (See here for the New York Times obituary for Speer., and see All Ways NY blog for a longer look at Speer's moving sidewalk, here.)

Here's another version of Speer's idea, though this look more like a moving sidewalk, complete with trolley cars, all of which were stationary objects located on the moving walkway.  The idea of course was to free up the chaos and gridlock of the very busy areas of Broadway by placing a large chunk of the confusion on a moving second floor.  It seems as though it might have been a good half-year idea or so, and the $3.7 million dollar price tag might've been a hefty one if you calculated the cost per minute of relieved traffic. 

[Picture source:  All Ways NY.]

Mr. Speer seems to have let his vision go and settled down to a life of wine making.

On What Cost What--Treating Injured Seamen in the War of 1812

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1659

When you think of expense and medical care, why on Earth should any of it cost so much?  Well, that question would make more sense if asked in the year 1812, because--according to the make-believe history of Medical Billing Capacity-- the need for compensation for knowledge or spent stores or supplies or whatever was not very great, at all. 

E(ward) Cutbush, a very capable naval surgeon (and noted as the father of modern American naval medicine) attests to this, and did so in this report on the status and expense of the hospitals and medical care facilities available to the U.S. Navy (and which was published in 1819). He didn't of course know necessarily that health care wasn't very expensive at all--especially if relation to the price of wine--Cutbush just reported the numbers. 

And the numbers are interesting:  in 1814, for the U.S. Naval Hospital in Washington, D.C., for the 116 inpatients and 86 outpatients seen during the year, a total of $344.74 was spent on "medicines, instruments and dressings", $1,166.30 on "support of patients, nurses and attendants" (which really meant food and sundries),  and another $180.00 in wages for  "nurses and attendants".  By comparison, $79.70 was spent on soap and candles, $334.52 on replacement furniture, and $368.40 on fuel. $50.56 was spent of fruits and vegetables.

A little bit further on, Cutbsuh tells of the more exact expenses on food/"support" for the folks at the  D.C. hospital  in 1814.  By far the leading expense (in the total of $1,166.30 3/4) was meat, meaty fresh meat, which accounted for nearly half of the total outlay ($439.88).  Bread was next ($179) followed by Madeira wine ($108).  Actually all of the alcoholic beverages--which included Madeira, brandy, sherry, port and whiskey) added up to $153.00, almost as much as bread.  Meat, bread and booze then accounted for $726, or 62% of the food budget (less the minimal cost of fresh veggies).  Milk, tea and coffee weighed in at $92, which means the drinking-goods totaled $245, or 21% of the food outlay.  Barley, rice, oat meal corn meal and "biscuit" came in at $24; vinegar, molasses and brown sugar surpassed those staples at $97.

We don't get any information on the surgeon's pay, unless we look at the stats for the naval hospital at Baltimore.  There, for 1814, we see that $352.00 was spent on medicine, $80 on surgeon's instruments, $231 on fuel, $1645 on provisions, $18 for nurses, $18 for cooks, and $1282 on surgeon pay.  Unfortunately, I cannot find how many surgeons were called to receive this compensation, but we can see that their pay consumed 26% of the hospital expenses while caring for a total of 244 sailors over the run of one year.  It is not impossible that there was one surgeon on hand, and one nurse.  So, each sailor getting care from Baltimore received about $1.44 worth of medicine for their stay; the nurse and cook each got about 7 cents for each of the patients receiving care there, and the doctor picked up about $5.25 per sailor.

Of course there wasn't much in the way of surgical tools when compared with even the late 19th century to spend money on--ditto medicine.  Stand-alone hospital machinery was virtually non-existent in 1814, and so the major factor upon which all hopes were laid was the surgeon, a sort of walking hospital--a job of superior messiness and long and lonely responsibility.

These numbers were for the late period of the War of 1812, when more than 2,650 servicemen were killed and 4,500 wounded.I could not in a cursory effort find the number of surgeons serving or employed during 1814, nor an overall figure on total medical care cost for seamen.  But it does seem likely that more was spent on milk, bread and booze than on medicine and surgical instruments.  And certainly the doctor cost far more than any other single unit int he medical care scheme--and, given that the greatest part of all care necessary resided with the physician, it was probably worth every penny.  (Or fourth thereof.)

Notes:

1.  Cutbush at this time was given the direction of the "Marine and Navy Hospital establishment and of the medical and hospital Stores, which may from time to time be required for the use of the hospitals, or for the vessels of the United States equipped at this place."--Dudley, William S.. The Naval War of 1812, a documentary history, Volume 3.. Naval Historical Center, 1985.

 

Rockets to Outer Space, 1923

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1657

This is some beautiful thinking and work by the rocket pioneer, Hermann Oberth (1894-1989)--the teacher of Wernher von Braun, a highly functioning leader at the Nazi V-1 and V-2 base of Peenemunde, and of course after the war working for various aeronautical/astronautical concerns in Switzerland, Italy, Germany and the United States. In America he would work for von Braun at Huntsville, Alabama from 1955-1959 on the Army's ballistic missile program,  a late addition to the many German scientists scooped up right after the war in Project Paperclip and deposited in the Deep South. 

The gorgeous design above is the front wrapper of his rejected doctoral dissertation, Die Rakete zu den Planetenbraeumen ("The Rocket Through Planetary Space" or "The Rocket to Interplanetary Space"), published in Oldenbourg in 1923.  Oberth's work was printed in a very small edition and even at that he had to pay for part of the pamphlet's printing--it turned out that the work was an instant success when issued, selling out quickly.  A second edition vastly expanded the original's 92 pages into 429 in 1929. 

 

In Old Testament vocabulary, Oberth's work is Genesis for space travel and aeronautics--or at least he is one of two or three authors of Genesis, along with Goddard and Hohmann.

 

As it turns out, in his extra moments, Oberth served as a technical advisor to Fritz Lang on his film, Frau im Mond, and his influence shows, even from cursory examination.

Interesting Business Cards and Draft Registration Forms of Famous Folks

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick (Fun) Post

Curiously, this gives Einstein's home address.

Source:  PSPrint Blog

11 11 11: Veterans Day

Veterans Day repost:

I want to thank all Veterans today, all of our Veterans everywhere, for all of your sacrifices. I particularly want to say to say how much I appreciate the members of our family who have served: Uncle Pete (USMC, WWII), Uncle Ray (RCAF, RAF+USAAF, WWII), Uncle Stan (Navy, WWII), Uncle Alex (Army, WWII), Uncle Joe (Army, Korea), Uncle Jerry (Army, WWII), Uncle Frank (USAAF WWII), Uncle Walter (Navy WWII) and my other Uncle Stanley (Army, WWII), Uncle Francis (Army, WWII), Uncle Vincent (Army, WWII), cousin Billy (USMC, Vietnam) and Grandpa (Army, WWI); Patti's father Melvin Lonnie (Navy, WWII) and stepfather Boyce (Army, 2nd US Cav WWII), Uncle Guy (USMC WWII), Uncle Max (Army WWII) and her four relatives in the CSA. Nearly everyone was in battle, and nearly everyone came home. [Image: Uncle Walter looking at the 5-star Blue Star flag, Housatonic, Mass, 1943.]

An Episode in the History of Multiplication

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1657

 

Many thanks! to Ray Girvan and Thony Christie for solving this multiplication problem!

Ray Girvan (JS Blog--Journal of a Southern Bookreader) http://jsbookreader.blogspot.com/2011/11/taglientes-multiplication-by-columns.html

Thony Christie (Renaissance Mathematicus) http://thonyc.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/1202/

Giovanni Tagliente was many things, though perhaps he wasn't mathematically inclined, not really.  He was however a very capable putting together books and addressing some elementary needs of the working classes  that reached out into the mass of the great unwashed offering instructionals on how to do the basics of--in this case-- applied mathematics, as with this book, Libro de abacho...¹, this edition printed in Venice in 1564.    This was a  small, pocket-sized book², a references on how to do the stuff of daily (and not so daily) calculations, and in principle was a concise, Humanist guideline for getting through the daily bits of the calculating and mercantile life.

The above image is a woodcut diagram "explaining" how to do multiplication.

To the 21st century eye however the actual explanations of how to conduct Tagliente's approach to actually "doing" the math might not be so evident.  They seems to be inspired acts in helping the reader understand the process, say, of multiplication, though it does appear a little mysterious, and explanations for the actual process are--as the author(s) says--self-evident in the woodcut, and are not elaborated in the text. 

I've been unsuccessful thus far in determining how the product to the problem of 9876 x 6789  (67.048,164) was reached via adding the individual results of the factors' multiplications,  though seeing the individually parts of the calculation is apparent³ (explained below).

I thought that this would be easier, because it was after all easier once upon a time, at least to people not me. 

I think that I get a D+ on this one.  All I really wanted to say is that Tagliente's diagrams are pretty. 

Big Numbers and WWII Aircraft--Artistic Displays of Quantitative Data

JF Ptak Science Bools  Quick Post

This post continues an earlier series on the artistic display of quantitative data--putting a face on big numbers. In particular it extends a collection of images of Second World War airplanes, "A Big Sea of Planes:  Quantitative Display of World War II  Bombers. The images below appear in the 17 October 1942 issue of the Illustrated London News in an article about the possibility of replacing seaborne troop and materiel transport across the Atlantic from America with the big Martin JRM Mars aircraft, getting the troops there faster and safer and releasing at least part of the naval force for wartime activities.  The images are pretty compelling:

 The caption states that 5000 Mars planes could get 500,000 soldiers to Europe.

 These were big planes¹ (200' wingspan, 117' long, 38' high, more below) and could haul 130+ troops.  By the time though that the powers-that-be were figuring out who the main contractor would be for production (and those production numbers in early 1942 were about 500 per year, at that point, anyway) the Battle of the Atlantic was already--in 1943--fairly well decided.  The U-Boot problem was solved enough for a continuous flow of soldiers and supplies, though not without a high cost in the first half of the Atlantic campaign.  (Overall, from 1939 to 1945, some 3,500 Allied merchant ships  and 175 Allied warships were sunk, costing the lives of 72,200 Allied sailors and merchant seamen.  The Germans lost more than 780 submarines along with fully three-quarters of all sailors in the U-Boot fleet, making some 30,000 men.)

 Below, a cutaway for the Mars:

Stats and Technical data on the Glenn-Martin(from Jane’s Fighting Aircraft of World War II, (1945):

Dreaming of the 10-Ton Eiffel Tower Luxury Bullett--addendum

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 736--addendum

People find inspiration everywhere, insight to creativity in the obvious and not so.  Great statues have been envisioned in the depths of slabs of marble, solutions to mathematical problems in the step of a bus, the beginning of a new physics in the rolling ball in a wagon.  Its an old and very warn cliché, but the world can be seen in a grain of sand if you could just pieces together the bits of glass:  just as pointillism was seen in the not-simple intercession of two colors and cinematography in the latent image and the structure of the universe in a patch of dancing dust.

The Eiffel Tower has had its own way with the visions of people, from it representing the birth of The Modern, to an icon of passion, to architecture and engineering innovation, and to general  adventure and the call of possibility.  It has moved other people to think “special” thoughts:  like, for example, what a lovely canvas it would be to place a 700’-tall electrified sign.*  And to M. Carron of Grenoble, who may have the most unusual inspirations from M. Eiffel, the tower was the perfect place to drop a 40-foot tall, 20,000-pound bullet filled with 20 people in leather armchairs into a 200-foot deep champagne-glass pool.

This is certainly a singular insight.  But in 1891 it represented something a little more than just giving people a thrill ride.  Physics of impact aside for the moment, M.Carron’s bullet capsule would be released from the top of the interior of the Tower, about 1000 feet high, and released to fall into an excavated pool 150’ across and 200’ deep.  The idea was that in addition to the springs inside the capsule, the water would act as a “shock absorber”, and so “the shock felt by the occupants on landing will be in no way unpleasant”.  

[Okay, so the thing would hit at 178mph or so, and, assuming that the whole thing didn’t get completely crushed on impact, I’m not so sure that 200’ of depth is very much wiggle room for the thing to come to a halt (if it didn’t deform).  I Also it would have to not have any wind deflection so as to not veer off its perfect entry into the water.  And so on.  Calculating the force of impact is difficult without knowing how far down the bullet would go, but hitting the water at 80 m/s and stopping at 30 meters would yield something like 28,600,000 KE and 1,274,000 N. There are lots of problems….]

The thing is, though, the thing that made this so appealing, is that for the 20-francs that get a person a seat in the bullet, that they would each get to go twice as fast as any human had ever traveled before ( 65 miles per hour was about the speed of the fastest train constructed).  So it was an extraordinary claim, an done that doesn't get made all that often in the history of locomotion.

And so this wasn't a practicable or workable idea; but, well, so what?  It was an unusual idea, inspired by some sort of different thinking, which are both good places to be in according to the Gazetteer & Atlas of Ideas.  Sometimes thinking like this is just prelude to something else, thought avenues that had to be explored before the real thinking could get done, introducing you to a new geography of thought.  That's what M. Carron had going for him; the newness of his thinking was much more important than the wrongness of it.

*This story comes at the end of a post called Bad Ideas Department:  the First Image of a Hypnotized Chicken, so in spite of the title you'll wind up in Paris.

The History of Goodbye series: The Open Door in Eden

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1656   (Part of the History of Goodbye series)

The idea of their being a door to Eden is an interesting one to me--not just for the view of Eden from the outside looking in, but really for the view of the Un-Eden seen through the open door, looking out. Its a curious thing to imagine what the first view of the rest of creation would have looked like--maybe curiouser to imagine why there was a door or gate there to begin with.  A door in Eden could've meant only one thing--the exit.  There wasn't anyone there to enter Eden, and certainly Adam and Eve weren't going to go out and come back, so I guess the door was the Ultimate Fail exit portal. Just waiting. (Also there doesn't seem to be any mention of a door in Genesis, so this would just be further artistic spin on another version of the Fall of Man, a story which spins out from a place far older than the Old Testament.)

[Image source:  Cornell University collections.]

The door/gate doesn't seem to appear very often (to my memory and experience, anyway) but this image--a rather famous one from the great Nuremberg Chronicle (printed in 1493 by Anton Koberger) offers us a little clue, as well as a mystery.  We see the temptation of Adam and Eve on the right, and their expulsion because of their inability to reconcile the threat of pleasure on the left.

The open door doesn't really reveal too much, from what I can see.  Those blobs might be smoke, or bushes, or something symbolizing The Dark and Disappointment. There are some bits of the Un-Eden looming above that could be above the walls--like the mountain that look like a person sitting back with a book with a head tilted towards the sky--making the life outside seem as though it might not be so pleasant.

And then there's the mystery of the statue by the door--the statue of a figure holding a book or tablet and clothed in robes, standing on a pedestal by the door, in profile.  As Adam and Eve were the only people, its hard to imagine who that statue might represent, because all of those other people come later. 

Perhaps it was just a little creative largess from a woodblock cutter practicing or showing of their perspective skills into a piece of the block's image that is largely hidden.  Perhaps it was the same cutter who gave such great detail and belief to the flowing robes of the angel threatening Adam and Eve with a sword--there is certainly more skill involved there than anywhere else in the print, so much so that it makes me think that there was a truly accomplished hand brought in for that piece of flourish on the anonymously-produced image.

In any event, a door in the walls of Eden seems to me a curious and taunting device--an exit door without an entrance.

Here are some open-door/gate/portal examples, below, though none really show anything through the portal:

At the Top of the World, 1851

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Finding the top of the world was easier in 1851--at least to this illustration, showing the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851 sitting firmly in place above all. I can imagine that if you were sitting in Hyde Park along with the 1851-foot long building, it would be easy to think that you were indeed at the top of the food chain.  The structure was the crowning achievement of the  Exhibition:  it was almost one million feet under iron and wood and glass, and could hold tens of thousands of people who could view the enormous gardens housed there. 

Perhaps most astonishing of all was that the modular structure--design by Joseph Paxton--was moved three years later, in 1854, to Penge Place, where it stood until it was consumed by fire in 1936. 

WWII German Comic Book Propaganda

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The Bilderbogen vom Krieg--some examples of propaganda aimed at German children, efforts to convince them of the winning of the war, evidently a universal attempt....

Source:  Deutschsprachige Comics und Romanhefte vor 1945 here.