Ptak Science Books

Dorothea Lange--FSA Photographs at the Library of Congress Site

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1806  

Found below is a selection of photographic images from the Farm Security Administration collection at the Library of Congress.  Today's photographer:  Dorothea Lange.

On of the great innovations in a sea of great things accomplished during the Franklin Roosevelt administrations was the formation of the Farm Security Administration, a division of the government established to help farmers through the devastating Dust Bowl and Great Depression.  A subset of the FSA was a photographic unit which was set up to document the progress made by the FSA (and provide, I am sure, for some much-needed good news, a hearts-and-minds campaign).  This division was headed by Roy Emerson Stryker, who wound up hiring a collection of dream-team photographers unlike any ever assembled for a single purpose.  Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins, Mary Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Gordon Parks, Charlotte Brooks, John Vachon, Carl Mydans, Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn were sent out all across the country and wound up with the greatest and most beautiful photographic history ever assembled in the United States.  There were about 77,000 images made, and I recall reading (somewhere) that the total budget for the Stryker group for the years 1936-1942 was about $100,000, meaning that each completed image cost just over a dollar apiece. So far as art funding by the government is concerned, that about the best it has done.

[Listed below are some samples of Lange's work at the LC--there are more than 3,000 images by her in the collection, found here.  All images below are also expandable.]

Note:  occassionally found among these images are those with a black dot in the center.  That was the editorial work of Mr. Stryker, who for some reason hole-punched images that he thought weren't quite up to snuff, or unacceptable for some reason.  In this ruination he also decided to archive them, which means if he was keeping them anyway he might as well have not plugged them, keeping them whole and intact and in their own pile. Anyway, that is what the black dot is all about.

Some Very Big, Sky-High Airborne Thinking, pre-WWII.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1807   [Part of the History of the Future series]

Once upon a time, engineers could do anything, especially in the first third or so of the 20th (American) century. The hopes for technological superstar were often on display in popular and illustrated magazines, though much of the times the dreams were more dreamy than they were engineering possibilities.   Some of my favorites among these hopeful projections of the future involve Big Thinking, and floating above these images of great possibilities and reluctant possibilities are thoughts on flight and of luxurious flight, or perhaps even continuous-flight-living. These three images were covers on some of the most popular of the popular sci-tech mags for this period:    Science and Mechanics, Popular Mechanics, and Popular Science Monthly. 

All three of these examples show (in insets) some sort of large, encapsulated, living section that exists somewhere in the superstructure of the aircraft. The first example comes from Popular Science (15 June 1937), and depicts what I think is a large living area under a grid of 54 large glassy roofs—it is not possible for me to estimate the proportions of the craft, though I think it pales in comparison to the next two examples.

In both instances the encapsulated areas have trees and roads. In the case of the Science and Mechanics contribution there seems to be six (?) of these large enclosures, the detail of which shows a large swimming pool, a club house, two tennis courts, and some other sporting area, all of which are surrounded by trees. Multiply this structure by six and what you’ve got is one really really big aircraft, which is somehow jet/atomic powered--in any event it is a gigantic craft and it is somehow staying aloft.

Dr. Strangelove as Dr. Merkwürdigliebe, 1930

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Well, maybe not,but there aren't too many candidates that pop out of magazines all by themselves and get anywhere near approaching the original.

This fellow, the first one, illustrated a not-described revolutionary device that somehow and magically prevent auto theft, and appeared in Popular Mechanics in September 1930:

We read what it is not (no electric shock or flamethrower device, hello Johannesburg), but you wouldn't find out what it was until you sent in your name to apply to sell the thing, which I bet was a key.  They generated lists then too to sell other stuff, just like today.

And then there are these two guys, who I guess are badly dressed car thieves who are scrambling away as best as their replacement stick legs could carry them--stick stump legs with silk stockings, they seem to be running very carefully, as though on iced eggs or something:

 

The NCC-1701, 1930: the pre-Starship Enterprise

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Well, what is really was, or what this was intended to be in this memory of a possible aviation future--or naval future, as this airship was really a flying boat, an "amphibian, a dirigible, a gyrocopter ....an airplane".   A ship, really, trying to judge the size of the thing by the position of the portholes/windows--the thing was big, and the "single wing, rotating disk-shaped affair filled with gas or hot air" was even bigger.   We read here that the disk was "turned by a gasoline engine" which was located in the center of the ship, leaving still plenty of room for "quarters" for the crew and passengers, making for what the inventor thought was an easy ascent and then, using the lifting device as a parachute, and then having a parachute-y descent, soft and simple.

Its hard to judge the size of the machine, but it looks like there are 40-50 portholes or windows running the length of the ship, and so I'd guess that the fuselage of the craft was 150 feet long, which was about half of its overall length, making it about 300 feet overall.  The disk then could be 150-200 feet in diameter, giving it an area of close to one acre.  Big. 

And so:

The Rolling Houses and Glass Homes of Futurlandia

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1806  [Part of a series on the History of the Future]

The rolling house of the future (offered in the September, 1934 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics) promised at least one thing--the ability to be towed by a tractor.  (And seeing that the thing is being pulled along by chains, let's make sure that there's no downhill towing, yes?)

[Image source, Motherboard via Retronaught]

The spherical houses seemed to come with their own railroad tracks for easier motion--a continuously self-laying track, which would make the new American suburbs a Suburbia Mobilia.  Cheap cars, cheap houses, and a Great Depression might have made for a picture of the future that was very self-sustaining.  On the other hand, the one thing that would not have been in the gunsights of the American manufacturing center is the size of the houses, which seem to me to be on the order of 500 square feet or so, which does not make for a lot of room to store all of the consumables that were waiting just around the next decade or so, waiting for the first real generation with a large amount of disposable income to loosen on all manner of never-to-be-purchased-before-by-the-working-classes consumers.  In this respect I am sure that these small buckets for human life would seem unacceptable, leaving little room for purchases. 

It does remind me of wholesale town-moving, but from the past--real-life stuff, things that happened.  Like here, for example, in  Ochiltree, Texas, 20 October 1920.  This was a rare occurrence--to move a town--though it is hardly unique, particularly if moving the town closer to a railroad line that had decided to pass it by meant the difference between life and death of the town, then, well I guess you moved the town if you could.  Cemeteries included, sometimes; and sometimes not.

A memory of another image of a futuristic future house of the future pulled my recent memory to a volume of Popular Mechanics for 1931, the August issue, featuring a "Home of the Future" speculation--this one was also small, but far less mobile, being constructed of metal and glass; and from what I can see, the common home's exterior walls were mostly glass.

It looks like a small place--I'm not sure that the car would actually fit in the glass garage.  And it doesn't look all that comfortable, either, especially in regard to having no walls for bookcases.  (A wall of shelving for a collection of Kindles?)  There *is* a "skylight over the"library", but it looks like the library isn't more than a half case of books.  But perhaps in the future we are all entering a world where something is whatever we call it.  Oh, yes, I think that part of the future has already arrived in 2012, and I doubt seriously that the folks writing this article for a popular audience had anything more than a droll popularity in mind in their authorship.  In any event, this future house wasn't mobile, was small, and looked pretty uncomfortable. And I also bet that the roof gave them problems up there in Futurlandia. 

The Liar in Political Winsprumerfall--a Short Episode in Blank, Empty & Missing Things

JF Ptak Science Books     Post  1805  [Part of the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things series.]

[Source:  Zeno.org.]

As we approach the new political season (where it is always all fours seasons,

simultaneously, and known as "Winsprumerfall") and where everything is good and

bad, and decent and not, and moral and wanting, and right and wrong so far as the "wrongness" falls upon your opponent, and cloudy and clear, and all at the same time as always, everything all at once, it might serve us well to have an image of Georg Pencz's

(who I wrote about earlier today, here) Verleumder in mind. 

And as we can see and guess, the wood engraving depicts the lying liar, the defamer influencing a value judgment, the slanderer of a fact known to be true and uttered false, a libeler.  A cheat of the fact.  In times like these, it is always good to listen closely and follow the logic, and then the money.  And then fact-check.

Renaissance Engravings of the Influences of the Planets

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1804

The theme of the children of the planets was a relatively popular one,  and depending upon the planet, stretches back pretty deeply in western European time.  For example, for Children of Saturn, the children born under the astrological influence of the planet, was a subject of artwork reaching back at least into the 14th century, and then finding particular favor (or so it seems to me) among Flemish  (like Hemessen, Saenredam) and German  (Burgkmair, Pencz) painters. 

I was attracted to the following wood engravings by Georg Pencz (ca.1500-1550) and the work published by Gabriele Giolito de Ferrari (1508-1578) because of their detail, and also because of the closeness and similarity in their design.  Giolito was an important publisher, and put out some of the earliest works in Italy in the vernacular.  I know more about Pencz, though, who is more attractive to me because of his extremely find hand and the size (or rather lack of it) of his work.  He was one of the so-called "Little Masters", the artists who were influenced by Albrect Durer and whose work showed it, and who also worked very, very small ( as with Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538), Sebald Beham (1500-1550), and  Barthel Beham (1502-1540), for example).  He may have been a pupil and/or worker in the studio of Durer, or maybe not--but his work certainly showed the influence of the great artist.  His later work, too, I think shows the influence of the Italian painters, and Pencz may or may not have visited Italy to study them, the case being not so very clear.  In any event, whether he traveled to Italy or not or worked directly with Durer or not, his work certainly shows the influence of both even if there is no proof of a paper trail. 

The Life of the Children of the Sun, published by the Italian publisher Gabriele Giolito de Ferrari, and said to be in the year 1533.  I've not yet been able to find the book's title or the author's name--a task that on the face of it seemed simple--and hope to be able to do this, soon. The other images are from Folge der Planeten in which the wood engravings of Georg Pencz appear.

And so the series of images depictng the children of the Sun, Moon, and Chaldean planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, as they progressed towards their middle-life, and in their chosen professions as mythologically influenced by their planet.

Life of the Children of the Moon, by Georg Pencz (1500-1550), in the Folge der Planeten.

 

 

An Accumulation of Fantastic Opposites: J.J. Grandville, 1844

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1804

I've remarked on this blog several times on the work of the fabulist proto-surrealist (etc.) J.J. Grandville (for example, here), and today I'd like to return again to his soaring Un Autre Monde (published in 1844) for the work he did in satirizing conventions by reversing their orders, presenting common entities in their "opposite"position. (Perhaps "opposite" is a too far reaching word, perhaps "contrary" is more appropriate in these cases--for now, either will do.)  And so:

Fish are goaded (by what I thought was supposed to be a thistle) in their hunting pursuit, which was formerly known as "fishing" but in this case could be know as "humaning".

 

To be eaten no more forever.  A revolt of edible plants takes place in Un Autre Monde, determined to rise and overcome their lethal oppressors, determined not to be killed and eaten as food again.  If there was a credible great creator of all things, it would seem that the most effective replacement system for expended energy would be something like photosynthesis and not the killing of other living things to sustain other forms of life. But so it goes here on Earth, with half of the biota eating the other half, with half of the being-eaten half being eaten alive. It just doesn't seem to be a wise way to conduct the business of existence.

Paper Brain Dissection II--1876

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Earlier in this blog I posted about a lateral dissection of the human brain accomplished via 150-year-old engravings.  The images below come from a series of atlases created by Gustave Joseph Witkowski (1844-1923) called Anatomie Iconoclastique, and include the one I have here on the skull and brain. I think that they are gorgeous works.  (The original, available at our blog bookstore, measures about ten inches at its widest). 

Appeasement, Hitler's Promise, and Peace in our Time, 1938.

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1802

Here's a slathering piece of propaganda published by the Militant Christian Patriots (of London) on how the British government was dealing with the Nazi/Seudeten problem in September 1938.  In their gunsights was Anthony Eden, who was seen by this group as a Bolshevist supporter, and who as the Foreign Minister of the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was against the appeasement policy of the government towards Nazi territorial acquisitions, particularly in this case with Czechoslovakia.  Eden. identified here as "backed by the Zionists, Fabian_Scoailists and "pacifist" League of Nations enthusiasts" was a multiple threat, and seen to be capable of directing national policy towards a confrontation with Germany over the looming Czech problem.
[The original is available from our blog bookstore.]
On the other hand, Neville Chamberlain, who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at this time (and from May 1938-May 1940), was seen as a better ideological fit with his issues and policies of appeasement of the German nationalist needs and territorial rape. Chamberlain certainly gave what Christian Militants wanted--a free hand to Hitler in Czechoslovakia (and more), and perhaps an acknowledgement of defeat to the Nazi nation.  Winston Churchill certainly thought so:

"We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat... you will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi régime. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude...we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road...we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged..."  Winston Churchill, MP, 1938

The Christian Militants saw it all differently, tending to agree with Hitler on the Czech matter, and seeking to keep the U.K. out of confrontation and thus away from war by giving Hitler (and then Mussolini) what they demanded to satisfy their growing national needs. 

"I am asking neither that Germany be allowed to oppress three and a half million Frenchmen, nor am I asking that three and a half million Englishmen be placed at our mercy. Rather I am simply demanding that the oppression of three and a half million Germans in Czechoslovakia cease and that the inalienable right to self-determination take its place." -Adolf Hitler's speech at the NSDAP Congress 1938

Eden resigned his position earlier in the year, in March 1938, but stayed in the fray.  As everyone knows things went badly at the end of the month of September, 1938, with Chamberlain letting everything go and appeasing Hitler in the Munich Conference (known to the Czechs as the "Munich Dictates" and worse) in which bits of Czechoslovakia were given to Germany in a series of meetings in which that country was not invited.

And so the P.M. returned to the home country having done nothing in Germany but give away a part of someone else's country, all in a feeble attempt at maintaining peace for Europe's key players.  He landed at Heston Aerodrome and held a piece of flimsy paper in his hand, which was battered by a tiny wind, and declared that there would be "peace in our time" because Hitler's signature said it would be so, all of which was a "prelude to peace" in Europe as a whole:

"My good friends, this is the second time there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Now I recommend you go home, and sleep quietly in your beds."

Less than a year later it would all come crashing down, the appeasement policy (such as it was) a shambles, and the world plunged into war.  Chamberlain would last as P.M. for a little longer, until May 1940, when he was at last replaced--by Winston Churchill. 

Too Busy for War: "Keep America Out of War", WWII

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This pamphlet is a reminder that it wasn't simply right-wing groups (like the Lindbergh-sponsored "America First") that sought to keep the United States out of the war in Europe in 1940.  It was a "European War" to these groups at this point--it was of course a World War, World War II, but it just didn't involve the United States, yet.  The lefty "Keep America Out of War Committee" produced this vicious pamphlet, equating the war with the sole pursuits of "big business", connecting the "filthy mess" of fighting to connected interest of Parliament and the Reichstag in producing a money-making scenario for the controllers of industry. 

[The original is available from our blog bookstore.]

Now there are plenty of ugly wartime relationships during WWII--and not just those that existed through December 1941, but were in place for the duration of the war.  But the arguments made in this pamphlet seemingly in support of the average working man protecting them from the multinational corporations who were conducting the war for the sake of profits takes the argument into an entirely different and bad place.  ("The best way we can help the people of Europe is to keep Wall Street out of it" claims the pseudonymous author, Mike Quinn.  Besides, as he continues in the section called "We're Too Busy": "We've got a first class job on our hands straightening out this civilization we have right here".  Too busy for war.

 

"The Enemy is Less than Ten Minutes from San Francisco", 1942

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Lecture Manual for Air Raid Warden Instructors is in its way a remarkable document revealing some of the thinking and interpretation on the chances for the invasion of the American west coast just a few months (March 9, 1941) following Pearl Harbor.   Undertaken and published by the Workers of the Writers' Program ('of the Works Projects Administration in Northern California") it was a product of one of the number of the Roosevelt administration's social engineering programs that had a long lasting effect. 

The first chapter, "It Can Happen Here" is more about the mechanics of responding to an enemy aerial attack than qu8estioning whether the attack might occur--the writer assumes that such an event was possible, and so precautions and preparations must be made--there is no question mark at the end of the chapter's heading. 

Overall I think that this was an excellent organizational effort for at least dealing with controlling the situation on the ground--providing a grid in which actions could be interpreted and responded to.  [The original is available at our blog bookstore.]

Antique Solutions of the Knight's Tour, 1750

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Passing through a later and edited edition of Jacques Ozanam (RECREATIONS MATHEMATIQUES ET PHYSIQUES, Qui Contiennent Plusieurs Problemes d’Arithmetique, de Geometrie, de Musique, d’Oprique, de Gnomonique, de Cosmographie, de Mecanique, de Pyrotechnie, & de Physique. Avec un Traite des Horloges Elementaires. Nouvelle Edition, Revue, Corrigee & Augmentee... and published in Paris in 1749-1750) looking for possible expansions on what he wrote on the Knight's Tour--a chess/math problem where the knight starting at, say, the center position must be moved to touch every square of the  board in 64 moves--I found this little diagram showing the spaces to which a knight may not move:

It seemed just a little unusual to me--not being a reader of chess literature--to see what seemed the negative of the knight's movements on a truncated board.  But I guess this is what we calculate and just not entirely "see" while playing. 

The original problem in the 1672 edition of Ozanam's Recreations  looks like this (and titled "faire parcourir au cavalier toutes les cases de l'echiquer"):

in which the knight starts off life at the top right square (h8) and finishes at f3.  In the 1803 edition of the work it is pointed out that the knight can be started from any square and moved 64 times to accomplish this same feat. 

Here are four further examples of solutions to the knight problem:

And as they say, many more are available. 

A more modern version of the solution, this on a 24x24 grid:

Found Surrealist Parabolic Art, 1905

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A continuation--of sorts--of "Earths Inside the Earth", which is part of the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things series.

This wonderful bit of Found Surrealist artwork is part of a series of patent drawings by Sir Hiram Maxim, inventor of many things (including the Maxim Gun, which was the first portable fully automatic machine gun, but not the electric light bulb as he claimed, and many many other things) for a hollow spherical structure made to deceive, thrill and confuse the people inside the structure with parabolic mirrors. An amusement.  This is not out-of-keeping for Maxim, as he also designed a "Captive Device Flying Machine" for amusement parks that every kid today would recognize. 

But I do like this drawing, the third of four for the patent application, and I guess it gives a pretty good approximation of what folks might see inside his amusement palace of combined optics and sensory confusion. 

Here's the cross-section of the structure:

 

Which is a detail from the set of patent drawings for

 

 

On "Pretty", "Beautiful", and "Elegant" Magic Squares

JF Ptak Science Books      Post 1800

"The name Magic Square, is given to a square divided into several other small equal squares or cells, filled up with the terms of any progression of numbers, but generally ah arithmetical one, in such a manner, that those in each band, whether horizontal, or vertical, or diagonal, shall always form the same sum." --from  the very busy Charles Hutton's translation of Jean Etienne Montucla's edition of Jacques Ozanam Récréations mathématiques et physiques (1694, 2 volumes, revised by Montucla  in 1778, 4 volumes) and the whole thing revised in an English edition of 1844 by the appropriately-names Edward Riddle, and available online at Cornell's collection of historical mathematical monographs.

That was sort of a simple introduction to magic squares, tortured by my note on the quote's parentage.  Nevertheless, leafing through a copy of Ozanam's work I found a lovely little (literally speaking, as it is about 1/2 inch by an inch) 3x3 multiplication magic square for the happy sequence of  1, 2, 4 ,8, 16, 32, 64 and 256.  (That means that each of the nine numbers may appear only once, and that the product (4096) must be the same for each column and row).  It is a nice little problem, and I was just surprised to see it in such spare simplicity.

And since we're at it slightly, a few pages further on I found this nice series of 3x3 magic squares for numbers 1-25:

These also are a half-inch (or less) and about two inches long...they're just very attractive.

But I guess I cannot leave the subject of "pretty" magic squares without referencing a "beautiful" one, and this being one of the earliest inclusions of a magic square in Western printmaking, and surely one of the most beautifully-encumbered one in general, from Albrecht Durer's mega-popular masterwork, Melancholia (printed 1514).  The magic square had been around for at least 2,000 years at this point, starting up evidently in China between 650-1000 BCE before making its way west through the Arab lands and then through India, and finally into Europe around the 13/14th century, and then into art prints with Durer in 1514.

[Detail]

I doubt that Abraham's Rees'  "Magic Circle of Circles" (published ca. 1814) is "pretty", and I'm not so sure it is "beautiful", but I am sure that it is "elegant".

 Ditto his "Magic Square of Squares" (published ca. 1814):

In any event these are just a few samples that I had close to the top of my head--no doubt there are endless others, but these are some that have attached themselves longest to me (with the exception of the Ozanam, which are new).