Ptak Science Books

History of Punching Things: George Foreman, I.B.M., and Batman

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1674

Burbling to the top of the massive (organized) heap of material that came my way from the Library of Congress was this beautiful, six-page introduction to punching people, complete with original photographs of the author performing the sweaty necessaries of readying for the punching adventure.  (My guess is that it was never mass produced,m and sent to the Library to protect a copyright application, as is the case of thousands of these LC items that I have.)

But not being a boxer a punch looks pretty much like a punch to me (unless it is George Foreman crushing the formerly indestructible Joe Frazier with an insane shot to the top of the former champion's head, a shot so devastating that Joe's nervous system did not know exactly what to do with all that speedy data*) and, frankly, other things come to mind with the word "punch" quicker than a fist. 

First is the "punch card" which used to be an information-transference

 for programming computers, instructions being the little holes that were removed from the programming card and read as instructions by a little tiny set of people inside the large box that others referred to as "computers".  (The original "computer", by the way, were people who did data entry and crunched same; they were carbon-based biounits.  Karl Pearson's Tracts for Computers of 1911 was a work for exactly those people.)  The punch card was a programming tool used by Jacquard to guide the operation of his loom in the late 18th century and employed widely in this trade after that. It uses as a computation instrument came later to the mind of Herman Hollerith, whose earliest crowning achievement was to put it to use in the tabulation of the American 1890 census. (The government balked with meeting his demands for the use of his invention, or were hesitant primarily so, and Herman took his good work overseas.  A similar path would be followed by the Wright Brothers in about 15 years, as had happened earlier with Thomas McKenney and his going-begging collection of Indian portraits.  National intellectual and monumental treasures like these sometimes had a terrifically terribly go of  being accepted and compensated by our government.) 

Maybe the most popular "punch" was the so-called "Hawaiian" one, which was a sugar drink given to children made by a company which was a holding company of  the American Dental Association.  Just kidding about the dental part.  But the "energy drink" was like many others during this period--pure badness that kids loved. It was originally designed as an ice cream topping when it appeared in the early 1930's, but when folks discovered, somehow, that the topping made a great drink when mixed with water, a new 2% or whatever fruit drink was born.   The "punch" in it came from the wallop of sugar infused directly into the circulatory system.  I don't know where the "Hawaiian" part comes from. 

The most literary "Punch" comes in the form of the British magazine of that name, (Punch, or the London Charivari), a witty and dripping humor and satire magazine which appeared in 1842 and last until 1992. (Punches' longevity surpasses that of supposed brawler Ernest Hemingway and the tiny-fisted fury of the problematic (did anyone read that last bilge-piece thing he did of the imaginary early life of Hitler?) Norman Mailer.) I think that, like Harper's Weekly and other such political commentary journals of that time, if you can understand a tenth of the complex  and complicated caricatures and commentary, then you really *do* know your history.

Probably the most-often referenced literary aspects  though to the punch is found elsewhere, in countless magazines and comics destined for little hands, published by Dell and DC Comics and Marvel.  Only the punch really doesn't appear so without the reference to the noise it sort of makes,  "POW" (as my daughter Emma has reminded me. "Honey", I asked her, "what comes to your mind when I say the word 'punch'?  "Pow" she answered immediately.) And who better to illustrate this point than the immortal Adam West?  (And this of course is not a comic, but a TV show that was made from a comic book that used comic book word balloons[for the first time?] in a video format.) Maybe it is Batman who is the most famous literary puncher, and maybe not:  there's Popeye, a man of exceptional prowess in the Department of Making Things Unconscious; and the Justice League Superman; the Hulk, who evidently did nothing but punch; and of course, my wife Patti Digh reminds me of "Punchious Pilate". There's also Sigmund Freud, a man who delivered a painful and boring punch to the unconscious and whose horrible thinking has been felt right down to this very day, the world suffering his made-up junk  since his own annus mirablis of 1905.

 

Perhaps the greatest knock-out punch of all time (literally) was not the result of George Foreman or Jake Lamotta, but I.B.M.  The I'll Be Moved Company is the endish result of the work of Willard and Harlow Bundy, the brothers who created the first time, or punch, clocks.  Their company consolidated into the International Time Recording Company and then in 1911 reformulated as the Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) and then again into International Business Machines.  The punch clock kept up to (or down to) the minute surveillance on the comings and goings of business employees (among other many other things), and was perhaps the most influential disruptor and capturing device of time since the invention of the mechanized clock.  It delivered a true knock-out to the cushion of independently recorded renderings of when things "got done".  

Lastly, I cannot leave the subject of punching without remarking that I cannot mention Rocky, and that I must simply end the whole thing with two words:  Muhammad Ali.  

(Image from jeffbots.com )

A note on the 1973 Foreman/Frazier fight clip:  its actually pretty tough to watch.  If you don't care for combat like this, I'd stay away.

*Frazier was by far the superior boxer, but Foreman's punch was unbelievably devastating. In the 1973 fight between the two men, Foreman knocks Frazier down six times.  Frazier looks pretty scary for the first 2 minutes and 17 seconds of this video,  but at 2:18 foreman hits him with a left that basically ended the fight--Frazier probably didn't know where he was.  At 3:16 in the comes the second knockdown, and then at 3:36 the third, at the bell ending the first round.  At the opening of the second round Foreman just about lifts Frazier out of the ring, and then crushes his head at 5:10.  Frazier was ready for the fight and he was probably about the best boxer in the world outside of Ali; but he couldn't hurt foreman, and then Foreman killed him. 
 

Map of Nazi Invasion from Uruguay

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I've post a number of thing son this blog relating to Nazi invasion routes to America and the potential threat of Poland to Nazi Germany, all stories more vividly enhanced (whether true or not) by maps--as a matter of fact, maps seem to be validity enhancers to just about any story, for it seems that maps represent a will of some sort, and where there's a will, there's a way, and so there must've been a good Nazi plan for attacking South America via Uruguay.  Except that there wasn't.  But the map looked good, and certainly it made people think.

For example, see the posts Invasion Routes to America:  Nazi Invasion Scenarios of the U.S. and Germany Surrounded (map below).

[Source:  Why We Fight, the Battle of Britain.]

The Awful Revelations of the Future of Emancipated Women, 1904

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Should woman be allowed to vote such are the tragedies that awaited, via 1904 sensibilities

The Eiffel Tower as a Unit of Measurement

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1673

The Eiffel Tower is iconic; and being iconic makes it susceptible to be used as a standard of measure, at least so far as graphical displays of information is concerned.  Here are four examples of Large Quantities of Things Being Explained in Terms of Eiffel Towers.

This wonderful display (appearing in The Illustrated London News for 26 March 1927, page 518) of quantitative data isn't quite as whimsical as it appears in detail, though I can think of only a few (antiquarian) times that I have seen a ship made part of a cosmopolitan vertical cityscape.  It is a great way of comparing two disparate, out-of-place equals, and certainly can get the idea of the size of something as stand-alone and solitary as a great ship to children (and adults, too) by comparing it to something as obvious as a tall building.,  This time its really just comparing the length of the SS Mauretania with the heights of some famous and notable buildings. (The Mauretania, 1906-1935, was a fabled, luxurious and fast ocean liner of the Cunard line; it was refitted for a resurgent oceanic service at about this time.)   In the larger, expanded second image we see the Mauretania stacked up against (from left to right) the Washington Monument (555'), the Woolworth Building (792'), the Mauretania  (790'), the Eiffel Tower (984'), the Larkin Building (proposed at 1208'), the Book Building (873'), the Koln Cathedral (512') and the Statue of Liberty (305').  The Larkin Building (not the F.L. Wright structure of the same name) was a proposed super-tall of 110 floors for 330 W. 42nd Street that was proposed in 1926 and not canceled until 1930, and which would've been the tallest building in the world. (For an interesting site on the cancellation of tall buildings, see HERE.)   In any event, this was a big ship--the largest in the world when it was launched as a matter of fact--and the drawing is wonderful.   Upon closer inspection, there is a terrific amount of detail in the cross section of the ship.)     (This original print is available at our blog bookstore.)                                             

Continuing a long, developing thread on the graphical display of quantitative data--and especially that which uses man-made objects for comparison—is this interesting bit from a Romanian mining publication from 1933.

This image and data is from the generally useful data and interesting if not useless info Scientific American Reference Book. A Manual for the Office, Household and Shop, by Albert A. Hopkins, and published in 1903. It gloriously depicts the annual American finish nail production in terms of Eiffel Towers:  there were evidently 10-million 100-pound kegs of these nails made in 1902; if they were made into one big nail, it would be this one--52' in diameter and 1000 feet tall.  I guess another useful visual bit would be the representation of the number of new houses built/kegs of nails, which would make this image a little more meaningful; though, perhaps, we may not be going for meaning, here, necessarily.

 

The huge mound next to the Eiffel Tower shows the consumption of wood in Romania over a ten year period, a stack of wood 700  metres long and 1500 metres high.  Evidently this wall has only the most rudimentary depth of a metre, as the legend reads that the volume of the woodpile is 1,050,000 metres cubed, which is the same as its square area.  So somebody missed something, here, though the artist did supply some nice shadowing.

Just above it appeared this comparison for the amount of oil consumed over the same ten year period

I’m not sure why this comparison was being made.  This does come in the interwar period which saw a great expansion in Romanian territory and a vast modernization effort following the country’s devastating experience in WWI. Maybe it was illustrating modernization from wood-burning power/heating sources to oil-based. I really don't know--I just liked the Eiffel Tower being dwarfed by a massively tall and impossibly skinny woodpile.

 

I love comparison like this, representing big, hard-to-associate  numbers of something against another quantity that can be instantly understood--the relationship between the two might be tenuous and complex, but at least it can give you some sort of handle on what would normally be an inaccessible, stand-alone number. Plus, any time that you can show what an ungraspable concept might "look like" and be explainable to a 10-year-old, well, you've got something. 

A History of Lines: The Hands of Brooklyn

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 This is an editor's conception of explaining the operating principle of how the soon-to-be-built Brooklyn Bridge (finished in 1883) would support itself to the readers of the Scientific American in 1878:

These "strands" of cable would be fixed to the superstructure with these devices:

 

A simple explanation of an enormous undertaking.

And I just need to include this image of the wrapping of Roebling's cables, which was an enormously dangerous job, not helped by the height of the short fence that was supposed to keep these men from falling to their death in the river:

 

History of Holes--Filling Mega-Gigantic Holes with Cities. Part I--Finding Mt. Brooklyn

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1671 (with thanks for the help from Orion Pozo on Japan's Alice Cities)

Colossal Nuclear-Bobm Proof Unbuildable Mega Cities vs. Japan's Alice Cities

This is a return and redux to an earlier post here that looked at a stupendously bad idea--building an enormous underground-Manhattan under Manhattan, a deep, terrifically bad bit of anti-atomic-bomb planning that leaves the observer semi-speechless.

There are some ideas that are incredible and bold that take one step across the line into the bizarre; then there are those that approach that line but stay well enough away from it that gives them a definite aroma of potential and the possible.  Here's one case of the former with its corollary in the later. 

Case #1. 

It seems as though this report (below) might have made sense if the author had announced the discovery of the "missing" Brooklyn Mountain, misplaced somehow under a thousand feet of Manhattan bedrock. Found it; excavated it; and then returned, piling the reconstituted mountain into Jamaica Bay, and then piling the thing 500' high.  Actually, the Jamaica Bay mountain part of this might've come true in part of the report. 

There was no mountain, of course, but the other result was almost as unbelievable. The author of this plan speculated on building this spherical city in Manhattan bedrock--a structure which so far as I can determine would have a volume of 1.2 cubic miles (5 km³) with its top beginning some 1,200' under Times Square.  Its an impressive hole "just"to dig--it would be a goodly chunk of the volume of Lake Mead. And it would make the world's largest man-made hole--the Bingham Copper Mine in Utah--seem like the very beginning efforts to digging this beast out to begin with.  The Bingham Pit is 2 miles wide and about .75 miles deep, which means that the hole needed to be excavated to reach a 1.2 mile diameter of this sphere some 3,500 feet under the surface would be, um, "big"--like needing to divert the Hudson and the East rivers, and extending the digging into Jersey, which would be a, well, "task". 

Even if the entire comparative oeuvre of architecture and city planning was crankily limited to only the work of Claes Oldenburg, this effort by Oscar Newman would still rise to the bottom.  A terrifically bad idea, the Atomic City would be the chunky bit floating in the smooth, evenly-distributed soup of Oldenburg’s Truly Bad Ideas.

 

On the other hand, Oldenburg’s work never seems to transcend its pointed badness—his nostril entrance as part of a large nose facade for a tunnel continues to remain simply goofy—and Newman’s work does.  It goes all the way ‘round the badness issue and comes up nicely in the so-bad-its-good category, while Oldenburg’s star is firmly fixed in the “so bad it isn’t even bad/not even wrong (Wolfgang Paul for the latter)  firmament.

 

Newman published this in 1969 (?!) after somehow latching onto the idea of clearing out massive underground caverns with nuclear explosions--in this case, the space would be hollowed out under Manhattan.  The underground sphere would be a miniature version of whatever was above it--along the medial there would be a "topside" of a regular city with streets and high rise buildings, underneath which would exist an underground city for the underground city.  In this honeycomb would exist the means of production and energy, segmented in multi-block-sized enclosures of no charm. 

Why does this remind me of the Titanic?

 

(I should note here that this this is Manhattan, and that the Oldenburgian 1000-foot tall Q-Tips (registered trademark!) are air-gathers/filters for the city below.)

There's really just so much wrong with this idea there is only one place to begin.

There are "no views" underground.

In his description of the idea, Newman writes:

"Manhattan could have a half-dozen such atomic cities strung under the city proper...the real problem in an underground city would be the lack of views and fresh air, but its easy access to the surface and the fact that, even as things are, our air should be filtered and what most of us see from our window's is somebody else's wall."¹

Aside from being very badly written, it is surprising (?!) that Mr. Newman writes about the no-view problem before that of air supply.  Or anything else. 

In this Oddnity² of oddness one of the oddest things to me is that Mr. Newman would actually use only half of his sphere, preserving the top of the hemisphere for nothing at all. Except for "Cinerama"--the architect evidently intended to use the blank vault for image projection, which is not a half-bad idea. But why one would bother to build something like this even in the imagination and leave half of it to nothing is a mystery.  (This is a slippery slope, picking out one bad thing and then another; there's really nothing but bad here.)

In leaving this pretty mess I'd just like to point out that Mr. Newman saw fit to include an enormous (projected?) advertisement for Coca Cola, hovering somewhere around underground mid-town.

And all of that dirt?  Where would all of that dirt go, the dirt not necessary to fill around the sphere?  A cubic mile of extra dirt?  That's the "missing Mount Brooklyn", and as Orion Pozo has suggested (even though he thinks the idea would be a tragedy), perhaps it could've been used to fill in Jamaica Bay.  Fill it up and then some, for perhaps another 500' above the old water line. 

Tomorrow we'll look at Case #2:  Japanese Alice Cities.

[This post could fit into so many different categories for this blog, though I think it best nestled in a combination of "Bad Ideas" and "The History of Holes" resulting in the "Bad Ideas in the History of Holes" subcategory.]

Notes

1. Alison Sky and Michelle Stone. Unbuilt America.  McGraw Hill, 1976, page 192.  No home should be without this book.

2. "Oddnity".  Just made up.  A litany of oddnesses; a collection of oddities so large that the collection itself becomes one large oddity--an oddnity.".

 

 

Echoes from the Memory Hole--a Book that Set the World on Fire

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1670

Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen."--Heinrich Heine, saying that if people burn books, they'll burn people, too, which have been proven to be the case.

Usually this story goes the other way around, where people of the world set books on fire--or entire libraries on fire (like the House of Wisdom, Baghdad, in the 13th century), some of them more than once (and in the case of the library at Alexandria, six times.)  Books are burned in repulsion and revulsion not only by their readers but also (and in greater numbers) by rulers who don't want their potential readers to have any potentiality, or potential, reversing the flow of unwanted information back to the source. (The illustrious and esteemed have burned people as well as the villains--Thomas More sentenced John Tewkesbury, a London leather merchant, to the flames for "approved burning" for keeping banned books; for good measure More also had the works of Martin Luther burned, as well.)This later has a very long history, which is taken a step further when said leaders reach out to burn the books and their authors, sometimes at the same time.  This infamously happened to Michael Servetus (1511-1553, and who I wrote about here) and of course many others, entire castes of scholars burned or buried for being in the way.

[Engraving of Servetus, being a good double-portrait showing him in the high life and then, in the upper left corner, being burned alive for his political activities ans for his books, which disturbed the notion of the heart-centered body and seat of all wisdom much favored by the clergy, replacing it with his notion of the heart as a muscle, as a functioning part of the body rather than its seat of wisdom.]

The first mass, organized book burnings in the United States were instituted for self-preservation of an economic way of life--local merchants banned together to form book burning brigades for the threat to their livelihood, the Sears & Roebuck catalog, which I wrote about here.  Not quite on the scope of rejecting the lives and works of authors of what were deemed to be salacious or threatening to the core of the social structure, but in the long run perhaps they were something approaching that.

The "Memory Hole' is the euphemism for the dispatch and destruction of books in George Orwell's 1984, not too far removed from the institutionalized book burning in Fahrenheit 451, though seemingly a furious leap forward from Reverend Lovejoy from The Simpsons.

Reverend Lovejoy: “Oh hello Lisa! Can you recommend any books for my mobile?” Lisa: “Ooh absolutely! Well you know, anything by Jane Austen.” Reverend Lovejoy: “Jane Austen. Thanks Lisa, I’ll get right on it!” (Reverend Lovejoy drives away and reveals his Book Burning Mobile.) [Thanks to The Lisa Simpson Book CLub.]

And for the first emblemata, above, comes the legend:

Alta Dei flammas vox toto suscitat orbe, God's voice on high stirs up flames in all the world,
Dum nimis auerso mens mala corde furit. While all too strongly the evil mind rages with averted heart.
Sed pia mens humilis paret. Sic excoquit aurum,  But the pious mind obeys in humility. So the furnace melts out gold,
Et paleas eodem deuorat igne focus  and with the same fire devours the chaff

And as it turns out the book to set the world on fire is the Bible, which is I guess appropriate given the number of books sought out and burnt by Mother Church, though I must say that far more books were banned than burned.  (I think so, anyway--there's a number of iterations of the list of banned books--the Index Librorum Prohibitorum--which was kept from the mid-16th century to the mid-20th. I think that there is no massive list for books that were both banned and burned.)  Its a harsh-looking metaphor, particularly given the story of the Flood.  

And in some cases the Bible-burning metaphor was hardly that but an actual event, and tragically ironic in the case of William Tyndale.  Tyndale was a scholar who among many other rich things brought to bear a new translation of the Bible done into English, which was a first, and which greatly displeased the ruling head of England at the time, King Henry VIII.  Henry had already burned translations of the Bible that he could not abide and thought heretical--not the least reason of which would have his multiple marriages condemned--and continued on to not only do so with Tyndale's work, but also to Tyndale himself.  At the end of a long and complex story, Tyndale was found to be a heretic, and in 1536 was strangled to death on a platform before a large crowd, his head chopped off, and his body burned. After a few years Henry authorized multiple new translations of the Bible to be printed, all based on Tyndale's work.  Tyndale stayed dead, though--his work had an enormous impact on other English translations of the Bible, not the least of which is the King James Version of 1611, where the overwhelming majority of the NT and OT was Tyndale's.

TechQuiz 2: What Monster-Mega Thing Did This Become?

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The original patent for this tube-and-rod design was made at the Danish Patent and Trademark Office in Copenhagen on 28 Jaunary 1958 at 1:58 p.m.  The design could be for an associated cooling system for a steam turbine; or for a high-pressure/reactive clutch of passes and cylinders for a water turbine hydroelectric facility; or perhaps it was for a modern prison system utilizing water-filled bars for prison cells that could indicate a possible jail break if any leaking water was discovered, making tampering with the bars an impossibility.

What's your best guess? (Answer below.)

Episode in Anticipation: Large Groups of POWs, 1918

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An Episode in Anticipation: the "All is Lost League", November, 1918.

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German Prisoners of WWI, November 1918.

The odd thing about this series of prisoners of war is that they may or may not have been worse off than had they been in their own trenches, sinking in their own mud, eating their own questionable food.  At least since they were now detained and behind British lines, no one was trying to kill them. 

And the ful limage:

[Original reads: 'OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ON THE BRITISH WESTERN FRONT. Captured in the last push. A member of the A.I.L.L. (All is lost League).']

I have made numerous posts on this blog using images from my archive of American news service WWI photographs, though there are few depicting scenes just after the end of the war's end on 11:00 a.m. on 11/11/11. These photographs below do so, and all come from the National Library of Scotland (which can be accessed here). They are all "British Official War Photographs", which was a service similar to its American cousin--various news and photo agencies were given access to images produced by a pool of photographers, all of which passed by the eyes of a military censor. They were for the most part aimed at the "correct" version of the news, though given the subject matter there were plenty of images that were extremely powerful.  In a war that claimed 100,000,000 casualties, the photographic image was a powerful war-time propaganda tool.

 

A British soldier aids a wounded German POW.  A French photographer tries to avoid the image in background. 

 

WWI--Post-War Photographs, November/December 1918

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I have made numerous posts on this blog using images from my archive of American news service WWI photographs, though there are few depicting scenes just after the end of the war's end on 11:00 a.m. on 11/11/11. These photographs below do so, and all come from the National Library of Scotland (which can be accessed here). They are all "British Official War Photographs", which was a service similar to its American cousin--various news and photo agencies were given access to images produced by a pool of photographers, all of which passed by the eyes of a military censor. They were for the most part aimed at the "correct" version of the news, though given the subject matter there were plenty of images that were extremely powerful.  In a war that claimed 100,000,000 casualties, the photographic image was a powerful war-time propaganda tool. 

[Original reads: 'SCENES ON THE WESTERN FRONT. WAR TROPHIES SECTION. German trophies from Vimy Ridge and Messines. In centre is Prussian Guards drum.']

On the Cost-Effectiveness of Killing: Poison Gas (1921) and Atomic Bombs (1945)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1678

Herbert Quick did a fair amount of thinking about the military use of poison gas, and it winds up, in the final analysis, thinking that it was tolerable.  What About Chemical Warfare? (published by the Newspaper Enterprises Association in 1921) is certainly a possible title for a Duck-and-Cover A-Bomb or You and Your Hormones kind-of-film--it has that certain stripe to it, bearing the certainty of wrongness that becomes more visible with each passing month.  (The pamphlet is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.)  But Mr. Quick took the slow boat around his issue, thinking about it a little long and out loud, before coming to his final conclusion in the chapter titled "Gas Warfare Cheapest and Most Effective Arm of Defense".

{See here for my post on Willis R. Whitney's letter/proposal for establishing the American chemical warfare capacity, 1917.]

He points out the enormous impact in the war effort that relatively small chemical corps played in WWI--something on the order of hundreths of one percent of all serving soldiers were employed in the combined chemical corps, saying "how small a body to produce such great results!" Which is true, assuming that by "great" he meant 'widespread', though it is unclear exactly what he was talking about.

Mr. Quick (born in the first year of the American Civil War and dead four years after the publication of this pamphlet, writing evidently from the cushion of old age) does make a case for poison gas being not so inhuman as presented by most civilized people, pointing out both its high quick-death rate and survivability/recovery rates, which seems to be giving/taking at the same time. No matter:  "But woe to the army or nation that does not keep up with the times.  The Angel of Death will breathe in their faces" he writes. 

The author also warns that though Germany was "stripped" of her war-making capacities, he thought it was not so of the industries necessary to produce poison gas. He points out that Germany can produce these munitions in secret, and that if any "militaristic nation conquers the world in the future", it will be through the use of the poison gas it developed in secret. 

Defense was also important:  "in the absence of efficient defense worked out beforehand, our great cities might be wiped out with gas bombs dropped from aircraft".  Mr. Quick believes that protecting cities is possible, writing simply "preparation will prevent such a crisis".  Indeed.  Unfortunately no ideas about this defensive posture were forthcoming, though he did bring himself around to writing about gas as a defensive tool.  Against looters. And rioters. And snipers.  "Gas puts the sniper in the power of his enemy" Quick writes, using the Marine action in Vera Cruz, Mexico, as a good example of where gas ("gas grenades") would have come in handy.

The bottom line is of course the bottom line, practically stating that poison gas as a weapon was indisputably more cost-conscious than anything else, by far, each dollar spent on chemical warfare being worth "from three to five hundred for the army".  Poison gas services Quick says should be pursued, because "gas warfare cannot be stopped until all war is stopped".

Gas warfare "gives the educated, intelligent nations the advantages over the people of lower civilizations".

"When both sides are prepared it is much less inhumane than war with bullets and high explosives; but it means horrible annihilation to the army which is unprepared."

It is an interesting exercise to replace "poison gas" with other types of weapons, just to see how it reads.

Mr. Quick was up and down in his treatment of poison gas and war, though almost entirely down.  One thing he didn't see, that no one saw, really, was the use of a particular gas that was used to destroy millions of people, and which was developed quite in the open in Germany for many years, used for killing rats.  The Nazis simply used it instead on people.  No one saw Zyklon-B coming, and no one could have, even when they did.

See also my post here on Hermann Goering and Zyklon-B.

William Shockley--a future Nobelist and probable weak member of a Nobel-team that invented the transistor and which included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, or I should say rather a team of Walter Brattain and John Bardeen including William Shockley--sent forth a memo on the mathematics of destruction and the use of the atomic bomb.  He was part of a largish team working on what to do with the new technology once the bomb had been used and the war won.  (I've written more on this paper here.)

This paper was written towards the end of 1945 and is on five pages and runs about 1500 words, and is an extension of work he had already been doing for Henry Stimson with Quincy Wright on evaluating the combinations of casualties that would lead the Japanese to surrender.  He begins this paper with a logical statement of the issue of the economics of conventional and atomic bombing, ending with the sentence “For atomic bombing destruction is still more cheap”.  What Shockley is getting to is the overall cost of the amount of destruction caused per square mile, and the conclusion that he draws over these five pages is the destruction caused by the atomic bomb is 1/100th the cost of conventional bombing per square mile destroyed (“atomic bombing is probably 10 to 100 times cheaper than ordinary bombing”).

Shockley also recognizes that the problem in the near future will be the increasing cheapness of producing atomic (and greater) weapons, and their developing accessibility to small nations.  “This cheapness is a new factor and indicates that an unparalleled loss of human resources will accompany future wars.  The ability of small nations to do great damage is also a consequence of the cheapness.”  He writes further that taking this thinking to its “logical conclusion”, that at some point in the future a single individual will be able to use this new technology to destroy the world.  The main point though that he was making in this line of thinking was the dispersion and proliferation of the new technology--that an arms race would occur, and that it would be dangerous, and that it could be very very bad.  Shockley has of course nothing to say about any of that or the implications of his finds as that was not his charge. 

After figuring that the cost of destruction by the atomic bomb was about $600,000 per square mile (compared to $6,500,000 per square mile for conventional bombing), Shockley concludes that “since the atomic bomb art is in its infancy, we may well expect future economies of a factor of 10 in cost per square mile destroyed…”

Tech-Quiz What is It? Can You Identify What Made this Patent Mega-Famous?

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I would not have made the intuitive leap to what this "game apparatus" would become from the simple reading of the opening two paragraphs of the patent description for it by its creator, J. Brunot:

"This invention relates to apparatus for playing board games and more particularly to apparatus designed to facilitate scoring procedures in connection with the playing of such games. In many board games playing pieces are placed on certain contiguous or successive areas marked out on the board and the placing of the playing piece on certain predetermined areas results in an adjustment of the score of a player either by adding a bonus to the score or subtracting a penalty therefrom."

"Usually the predetermined areas which result in adjustment of the score are marked in a characteristic way in order to show how the score is to be adjusted.  However when a playing piece is placed on one of the predetermined areas it covers this marking and it has been found that frequently the playing piece has subsequently to be lifted in order to discover how the score should be adjusted. The object of the present invention is to provide board game apparatus in which the occasions for such subsequent lifting of a playing piece are eliminated or substantially reduced..."

[Patent 2,752,158 GAME APPARATUS James Brunet and Helen Brunot Newtown Conn Application October 28 1954 Serial No 465,222 priority application Great Britain June 11 H54 5 Claims Cl 273 135]

The patent drawing offers a much better visual clue, but it still really doesn't bear a great witness to what the apparatus would become:

 

And the story on the answer to what this is can be found at the SCRABBLE Association history section.

On the Royal Hating of the Evil and Devil-Stink of Tobacco--King James I, 1604

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1676

”[Smoking is] a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”--King James I, in “Counter Blaste To Tobacco”:, published 1604

James I hated tobacco.  He hated every aspect of it, particularly since some smokers favored the stuff because of its purported medicinal and curing qualities--but for James it all led to vile stink, Devil worship and deep sin.  He just simply hated the whole idea--that and the person who introduced the notion and practice to James' fair island, who was Sir Walter Raleigh.  And what did Raleigh get out of that deal?  Well, he certainly over the course of tars-filled time introduced the possiblity of grim, cancerous death to a billion practicers and had a miserable pipe tobacco named for him.  And he also was beheaded.  I can't help but think that the smoking business had something to do with pulling James' head into pulling Raleigh's head off. (Well, it was actually "chopped" off, his bodyk buried and his head treated and stuffed and kept by his wife for the next 29 years.  In his prison cell in the Black Tower, Raleigh left a small container of tobacco, with the sentiment Comes meus fuit illo miserrimo tempo (It was my companion at that most miserable time) engraved upon its lid.)

And so James wrote this piece in 1604, a thin 32-page evisceraton of tobacco and tobacco-users.  It is an antiquarian rush to righteous vindication, and it in no small measure helped James' cause that he was right on a lot of his viciously-placed claims.

 

The sins and vanities of the filthy use of tobacco were many but evidently described in three layers, like a good cake, though he does make a good case for the habit's vileness.  Tobacco is mainly a sin of guilt and selfishness, of drunkness which is one of the great malfactors of all bad things, and of course the greatest sin of all in that it would impede the protection of the King and the realm.  James makes the case for tobacco use being an indolent, sick-making, vile producer of impotence and uncaring, driving all manner of sin that would lead to personal downfall and to the general "mollicie and delicacie of the wrath of overthrow" of kingdoms.

First are you not guiltie of sinnefull and shamefull lust? (for lust may bee as well in any of the senses as in feeling) that although you bee troubled with no disease, but in perfect health, yet can you neither be merry at an Ordinarie, nor lasciuious in the Stewes...

Secondly it is, as you vse or rather abuse it, a branche of the sinne of drunkennesse, which is the roote of all sinnes: for as the onely delight that drunkards take in wine is in the strength of the taste, and the force of the fume thereof that mounts vp to the braine: for no drunkards loue any weake, or sweete drinke: so are not those (I meane the strong heate and the fume), the onely qualities that make Tobacco so delectable to all the louers of it? ...

Thirdly, is it not the greatest sinne of all, that you the people of all sortes of this Kingdome, who are created and ordeined by God to bestowe both your persons and goods for the maintenance both of the honour and safetie of your King and Commonwealth, should disable yourselves in both?

The King also attacks the attractive and bogus medicinal properties of tobacco, and he takes care to list some of its precious capacities, from ridding people of the gout (instantly), to wakening the brain, to pox-curing, and even having the ability to cast out devils. Of course this belief was sustained as semi-fact for hundreds of years now, eventually worming its way into the all vast pockets of the Middle Class via print and other media as advertisements with doctors, dentists, nurses, pilots, sports figures, politicians (most famously perhaps being R. Reagan), and of course Santa Claus extolling various curative properties of cigarettes.  In the 20th century there was also the strong influence of Sexerettes--the possibility of sexiness curled around languid figures selling cigarettes to the young and old alike.

Comparative Displays of the Heights of Things: Centennial Tower, 1876

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1675

The 1876 U.S. Centennial Exposition (formally called the "International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and products of the Soil and Mines) in Philadelphia was a grand and fabulous showing of all things American, celebrating the hundreth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  One of the crowning objects of the fair was to be the never-built 300-metre tall Centenniel Tower, pictured here in the 24 January 1874 issue of Scientific American.  The structure appeared in relief against the background of other tall things built by humans, show in a relatively new fashion for displaying quantitative data comparisons in the same scale.

 The practice of showing, say, the comparative heights of mountains and lengths of rivers by loading up all of the samples on one piece of paper for the ease of recognition was begun in the 18th century, but only rare; it began with some fits and starts in the 1820's again and then much more widely around mid-century, and seeming to peak at the end of the century before going somewhat dormant for the next few decades or so.

Another nice example of comparative heights of buildings:

 

And this as well:

[Source with key to the images found here, at Chestofbooks.com]

The excellent Bibliodyssey blog contributed a good healthy post on the subject of comparative heights of mountains map (here) with many fine examples of the art.  Its a curious thing to me that the  business of using same-scale comparisons in architecture is relatively new, coming (I think) as an invention of Etienne Durand in the 1840's.)

Here is one such example:

But getting back to the tower itself and it unbuiltedness, here's another example of an unbuilt tower--taller and bigger than the Centennial--which was proposed by Eugene Freyssinet (and which I wrote about earlier in this blog here):

 

Another in what is a long line of unbuilt towers would be this contribution by Vinnie Ream Hoxie (ca. 1874-6)  which was his response to the finishing of the not-completed Washington Monument.  Congressional sympathies towards spending money to complete the Washington Monument dried up to nothingness in 1856, just eight years after construction on the monument was begun.  The consequence was that the monument was only a nubbin for several decades, standing about a third complete--it was Hoxie's idea no doubt to provide a sort of quick-and-dirty approach to finishing the project.  Of course this looked like exactly what it was, and the idea died its own lonely death, thank goodness. 

It had little appeal, at least to me.  It is somewhat reminiscent of the exhibition of the completed forearm of the American Statue of Liberty, which as it turns out was also exhibited at Phildelphia in 1876, years before the completion of the rest of the statue.  Short and stubby.

 

There are many other entries in the history of unbuilt towers, but their day will have to wait (for this blog, anyway).