Ptak Science Books

The "Is This Really Necessary" Department 2: Flying, Sommersaulting Elephants

JF Ptak Science Book LLC  Post 672

Last week I made a post regarding a fish-throwing apparatus installed at a zoo--honestly I didn't anticipate that there would be a follow-up post on another animal-throwing machine, but, well, unfortunately, here it is. 

Eduard Wulff, a circus manager and resident of Bruxelles, was granted this patent in 1904 for a device that would “project horses, elephants, monkeys etc into the air” so that they would perform a sommersault.

Elephants?  Flying, somersaulting, elephants?

The abstract from the British Intellectual Property Office is reprinted below:  

Thomas Edison’s Dreams and Why You Can’t Always Be Right: Television, 1880

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 671

   "Seeing by telephone or by telegraph may be within the range of the possible. I say that because nothing is impossible until it has been demonstrated so to be. Seeing by either of these instrumentalities, however, is, as I look upon it, so far removed from the field of probability that I should treat any report of this character as an absurdity." T. Edison

 

I wonder what it was that Thomas Edison dreamt about—I suspect that like most folks he dreamt about himself, though perhaps everyone else in his dreams were him, too.  Mr. Edison was a fabulous inventor and thinker—he wasn’t the best person he could’ve been, and even though he had an enormous grasp on the whole of things and ideas about him, he also seemed to grab a little bit more, and a little too much.  Which sounds like gluttony. 

I’m not so sure why Edison was given to such overstatement on “television”—he just about contradicts his own rule of thumb in doing so, as though he was going far out of his way to say something anti-prophetic.  Perhaps it was because “seeing by wire” at this point did not belong to him, like so much else—which is possible, because Edison did not play well with others, at all. 

The possibility of interesting dreams swimming around Mr. Edison’s sleeping head was very high, though he may have been one of those poor unfortunates who dream about watching someone else sit in a chair and for hours on end stare at a wall—sounding more like a nightmare than a dream to me. 

 

Good dreams, bad dreams.  History is certainly ankle-deep in literature about the dream, and the anthropology of dream states must be wide and deep.  Dreams don’t show up all that much in the Bible, though, which seems odd to me—there are 40-odd references to dreams in the Old Testament, and only nine in the New.  And in the NT five of the dreams come in Matthew (with four of those referencing the birth of Christ), and another four coming in the Acts of the Apostles, all of which relate to St. Paul.  The most interesting of the NT dreams sounds like that of Claudia, the wife of Pontius Pilate, who warned her husband that Christ was probably not the person that he should be messing with. That is I think her entire existence in the Bible, the dream, and the warning to her husband.  What seems to happen though is that dreams in the Old Testament seem to be rather benign entities, while in the New things happen that turn the dreamscape into a possible entrance way to Hell, the unconscious thought world becoming the property of the Church. And speaking of Hell and dreams, I believe that it was the dream sequence in the Aeneid where the truth and falsity of dreams were put to the test—or at least the dual possibilities of the divergent nature of dreams—imaging dreams emerging from the Ivory Portal in Hades to be false dreams while those issuing from the Pearl portal were good.  Problem is here that with all of that smoke and bother in the Underworld, wouldn’t Ivory and Pearl look pretty much the same?  Among the ancients it was Aristotle who was among the first to dispense with the soft/spiritualistic/astrobabble interpretation of the dream, approaching the issue with rationality.  Hippocrates also tried to lift the idea of the dream up and away from those (Like Hesiod, for example) who would see them as ritualistic and meaningful indicators of endless bric-a-brac.  But the ancients didn’t do a great job of it given the vast limitations, nor did the moderns (as Dr. Freud certainly still has major game in this post-ironic department).

 

Back to the TV:   the truth of the matter is that in spite of the Edisonian condemnation there was real discussions and experiments regarding mechanical (not electronic) television in the late 19^th century, and they went a pretty long way towards achieving images by wire. Alexander Bell nearly brought about an image-sending device based on his successful photophone (in 1880), and in that same year George Carey built a primitive sort-of system with light-sensitive cells.  Paul Nipkow came the closest of these early pioneers in 1884 with a techy rotating-disk apparatus that successfully achieved an 18-line visual image. 

 

I’m just saying that Mr. Edison had to have been dreaming of other things that he had more control over.  From where I sit, it seems to me that opportunities for the electrical transmission of images were quite ripe by the 1890’s.  It took another 25 years or so to bring it all to fulfillment, with a cascade of very successful developments occurring in 1927/8/9.  It is a little mysterious to me why he had such a low opinion of the possibility of television given the electrical environment of his day. 

Nazi Designers of Current Corporate Logos: Franziskaner Beer's Nazi Connection

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC  Post 670  Blog Bookstore

[An associated post on the long lives of liberated Nazi concentration camp doctors can be seen HERE.]

Do you have movable Nazi-designed art in the streets of your town?  I do!  And probably so do you.

It was a cloudless, perfect day in my mountain city when I first noticed the 10-foot tall Nazi-designed art tooling down the street on three sides of the beer truck.  I‘d seen the design many times, but it wasn’t until I was stuck in traffic behind the truck that I noticed the artist’s stylized signature beside the logo.  The light changed, and I watched it—while I was stalled and stopped by recognition—make its way into the world, merrily selling its product, Franziskaner Beer. 

You’ve seen the truck—a smiling Franciscan monk nestled in a green oval, holding a liter-like mug of his product, content in his experience.  The artist, Ludwig Hohlwein*, is listed in many places as a “graphic design from Munich”, and the “prince of posters”, and was an enormously gifted artist—he was also the leading designer of Nazi propaganda posters from 1933 to 1945. 

I wondered how this could be, how a corporate logo and identity designed by a Nazi –in 1935--could still be in use?  In a series of emails with the parent company of Franziskaner, Spaten, N.A.  (which was actually Spaten-Lowenbrau, which was in turn purchased by InterBev), I never really did get my answer.  Spaten N.A. (a personal name was never used in the correspondence) went from an semi-apologetic attitude of not knowing who or what the artist was, to a highly defensive posture , somehow huddling down with the American bombing of Dresden and Tokyo in a questionable semi-logic justifying their use of Hohlwein.  The result was not surprising, but the means and the arguments certainly were—I am aware of course that Spaten has invested untold millions in establishing their iconic image; but, at the end of the day, their artist is still a Nazi, and a bad one at that. 

Why is this so bothersome?  The history of firms doing business with the Nazis during the war and former Nazi concerns successfully surviving the war (in one form or another) that continued to do business is a long, complex story.  My guess is that if all of these companies were to magically disappear in a pretty gedankenexperiment that there would be huge gaping holes in our economic landscape. Do we think of Auschwitz when we seek headache relief?  Probably not,  though the maker of zyklon-b and one of the principle reasons for Auschwitz, the enormous and powerful conglomerate firm of I.G. Farben, escaped the war’s end by being broken into companies such as BASF, Bayer and Hoescht (much to the dismay of people like General Patton, who thought that dismantling the company was supposed to actually dismember it, not rationally cleave it into its constituent and self-sustaining elements.  Also the folks who went to prison for their war crimes at I.G were all pretty much back and in the boardroom(s) within a few years.)  Or for that matter do we think of gas chambers when filling up at Exxon?  Exxon had been Standard Oil (New Jersey), which shipped fuel to the Nazis during the war and was one of the largest stockholders in Farben, and happily made money with the Nazis during the course of the war. 

There are just a few examples of many, many cases of, what, what do we call it? Business?  That's what Prescott Bush must've called it.  One of his wartime activities was being responsible for the UBC  (Union Banking  Corporation) which was involved with laundering/banking Nazi funds (including some big numbers for Fritz Thyssen of Thyssen steel, monolithic-backer of Hitler in the '20's and '30's).  There was nothing necessarily illegal with that until it became illegal--UBC and the pater familias of the Bush dynasty continued their practices into mid-1942, when the federal government caught up with them and slammed UBC and Brown Brothers Harriman under the Trading with the Enemy Act, as they were in fact helping out the Nazi cause.

It seems that in a world of questionable origins of popular goods it might seem best to have little sense of history and  a forgetful one at that.

Is this Nazi-drawn art any less repellent, say, than seeing R.E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in stained glass at the National Cathedral, or driving down the Jefferson Davis Highway in Virginia, or cheering for the unredeemably-named Washington DC National Football League team?  Mitsubishi and BMW made aircraft that supported heinous regimes and shot down American men; on the other hand, the isolationist publisher and proselytizer of the brazenly stupid Protocols of the Elders of Zion and trader with Nazis, Henry Ford, still makes a good truck.  I have two of them. (GM was there too.)  Monsanto produced Agent Orange which defoliated large swaths of Vietnam while filling up American soldiers with dioxins; Dow Chemical produced napalm for effective and horrible use in the same war--does this matter when we buy the food produced by their chemical additives?

It is a potentially endless list of supposedly benign betrayals—a surface scratched revealing a torturous and bloody past.  But in an age where (as it says on the National Archives) it is not longer true that “the past is prologue”, the past is not even the past, so, I guess, we get a fresh start whenever we need one.  It’s like a convenient memory lapse, like berating President Hugo Chavez while filling up at the Citgo stations selling his oil. (Citgo is also a NASCAR sponsor) 

Maybe in some minds the Spaten folks were right after all—transgressions are excusable in the face of the transgressions of the accuser, which would be a free pass to moral leniency.  The United States did firebomb Dresden and Tokyo, and we consume all manner of food an energy beyond the rest of the world while billions of people suffer invisibly (to us).  The weight of this history can bring you quickly to silence.  Perhaps it is just exhaustion that lets us necessarily forget these unpleasant pasts—perhaps with their memory nothing would get done.

 

On the other hand, well, there goes that truck and the happy Monk.  I'm not so sure why it bothers me so endlessly--perhaps it is the utterly trivial nature of it all, something that could've been so easily rectified as folks were dusting themselves off in May 1945.  Why not just get rid of that image and replace it by something similar (or whatever) that was executed by a Not-a-Bad-Nazi and start afresh? But it looks like Spaten NA is content with their artist--he might be a Nazi, but he's their Nazi, and it is a conceit and a contentment to let sleeping Nazis lie.  

Volkswagen certainly does. The "VW" logo was designed by Nikolai Borg under the direction of "Nazi designer" Fritz Todt (!)--Borg is still alive and is currently suing to be officially recognized as it designer.  The cog part of the wheel surrounding the VW letters--which is a design commonly seen encircling the Nazi swastika--was ordered to be removed by the occupying British forces just after the war, softening up the image a little.  Hohlwein remains intact and un-de-nazified..

 *It is interesting to note that Hohlwein's post-WWI history frequently escapes the mention of stores selling his posters.  I've noticed too that his death date is often conveniently listed as 1939, though he survived the war.

 

Lincoln and the Hanging of 38 Sioux, 1862

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 669 

The great mystery was how those Indians were smuggled out of the grave, in spite of the watchfulness of those guards.   From the Autobiography of Theodore Edgar Parker

One of the darkest moments of the spectacular Lincoln presidency came on 26 December 1862 when the president chose to not interfere with the vengeful hanging of 38 Santee Sioux just south of St. Paul, Minnesota.  This was the legal outcome of a short-fought “war”(known as "The Great Sioux Uprising", "the Dakota War of 1862" and "Little Crow's War")  fought between U.S. soldiers and several Siouan tribes—a war brought on by the desperate tribes after suffering failed crops and the reneged treaty obligations (including a long-overdue payment of $1.4 million for the purchase of 24 million acres, or about a nickel an acre) of their Great Father in D.C.  It was really more like a hunting expedition—the Indians, who had rampaged and taken hostages and so forth, were at the end of their endurance. The warriors were ill-equipped for almost anything, with little food and failing horses, and were positively no match for the federal troops who would hunt them down and destroy them. 

“Destroy” isn’t my choice for words—it is used over and over again in the communications between the field commander General Henry Sibley and the general in charge of the entire region, General John Pope.  It turns out that Pope was of the Tecumseh Sherman school of Indian relations, writing for the record

"It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux. They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromise can be made." 

The "Is This Really Necessary?" Department: Fish Throwing Machine, 1932

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 665

Our necessities are few but our wants are endless.
Josh Billings

"Necessity" is a fickle word and and even more elusive emotion, especially when discussing that quality in others.  But there are some things that look, well, just completely unnecessary; so very unnecessary that they are just plain wrong.  Hard to identify, difficult to codify--but everyone knows it when they see it.

Such is the case of this fish-throwing machine installed at the London Zoological Gardens.  The wooden tower seems to be 12 feet high or so, with a fish launched from its uppermost window once a zoo patron deposited their sixpence, eager to mechanically feed a sea lion.   Patrons to the zoo at Regents Park who were eager to see the sea lions fed had to arrive at slimly-appointed time; now, with the fish thrower, they could see the sea lions fed at any time, and do it themselves if they were so inclined.  I don't know exactly what happened to these beats, but constant feeding would've have gone all that well.  

And yes, you got three fish for sixpence.

Source:  The Illustrated London News, 17  September 1932.

Deathly Equality: Liberty & Lung Cancer, Cigarettes and Women’s Rights, 1929

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 662

Abdullah Cigarettes has a twisted reliance with the recognition of the social equality of women and making money.  Mostly it was making money.  Someone there at Abdullah corporate figured out that there was an easy way of increasing their sales without spending huge amounts of money on market development—open their market interests to women.  And in the case pictured here, from The Illustrated London News of 1929, the Abdullah people were making a direct appeal to the literal empowerment of women via the national right to vote.  This came a little post facto, as women were given (?) the right in 1918*, though it seems that there were no ads reaching out to women in GB until 1926/7, voting rights or not. 

 

There was very good money to be made with cigarettes, which were/are basically the non-kosher hot dogs (or worse) of the tobacco industry, the tobacco equivalent of the utilization of the pig’s squeal, the remnant of other products that was filled with profit.  For the overwhelming part of the history of tobacco smoking by the Western world, the tobacco that was gathered and stuffed into a paper roll and smoked was the lowest form of utilizing the product, the vice of the poor. This degraded spectacle was soon morphed into an enormous social advantage and gigantic economic opportunity for the producers.

It wasn’t just Abdullah, of course; nor was Abdullah the first on the scene:  that “honor” belongs to Helmar Cigarettes, which in 1919 posted an advertisement for a  pack of its cigs buried in a sea of female faces. The tobacco companies didn’t embrace the notion of the growing recognition of women, but did follow it, taking advantage of the new and growing rights and their new marketability and giving everyone free access to the same deadly diseases.  Exploitation of the emergence of the new social power was the key to making money for those companies. 

 

In the U.S., Marlboro started mild ads directed at women in 1926, tempting its gentle readers with ad copy like this: "Has smoking any more to do with a woman's morals than has the color of her hair? Marlboros now ride in so many limousines, attend so many bridge parties, and repose in so many handbags." George Washington Hill followed this lead but was more bold, pushing Lucky Strikes right to the forefront (in 1927) of the menace.

 

All of this worked very well:  tobacco revenues in the U.S. went from $12  million in 1926 to $40 million in 1930, this based largely on the new female marketization, tempting women’s new economic and political power with the power of the cigarette, dressed in the fashion of subverting the power structure, just like flapper’s dress, bobbed hair and slacks. 

 

Abdullah also blurred the age barrier for smokers by pushing their product with images of what seem to be ‘tweens, a move that expands the concept of nastiness. (It should be remembered that the baseball player Honus Wagner demanded that his picture be removed from the baseball cards distributed with Sweet Caporel cigarettes because he thought the tobacco company was trying to corrupt the young with it—the result was that his card is among the rarest and most expensive of all baseball cards.) I don’t think that there’s much room for negotiation in this image—it plainly is directed at the young.  But of course it was all a nasty business, top to bottom—even the American Medical Association got into the act, publishing their first cigarette ad in their journals in 1933—a practice that would last to 1952.  The cancer connections were there, but the lobby by the concerned national interests of the tobacco companies were fierce, and the first warning labels about the cigarette/cancer connection didn’t appear on packages of cigarettes until Surgeon General Jesse Steinfeld’s tenure in 1970.** (Fat and heart diseases kills more, but so do hospitals.  Lee Iococa fought seatbelts in his cars for years, and on and on into the night goes this song.)

 

I wonder why there hasn’t been more recognition of the earlier history of lung cancer—particularly since it really doesn’t seem to exist in the 19^th century and before.  The disease only starts to show up in the 1920’s, after men had been smoking cigarettes for 20 years or so.  The epidemic of lung cancer rose with the consumption of cigarette--it is of particular forensic interest to look at lung cancer rates among men and women from 1950-1980.  These stats are a surprise to no one, the rate of cancer among women spiking in the 1950-1980 era, when their habits were mature from long use of the liberating agent.   Cigarettes was just one of many ways in which women expressed their modernism—but is almost certainly the deadliest. 

 *American women would get the vote two years later, in 1920; that follows the New Zealand lead, which granted women the right to vote in 1893.  Ah how many times the Kiwis beat the rest of the world to the punch for the correct political behavior!  On the other hand, women in Mexico got the vote in 1948; in Kuwait, they waited a little longer, until 2005. 

 

 

Animal Imitation, Tight Corsets, and Perdition: Physiognomy, 1873

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 658  Blog Bookstore

The fabulouslessness and learned foolishness of J. Simm's horribly-named Animalimitationality and Mentimitativeness; or Animal and Mental Imitation and their Tendencies and Influences on Society, a Lecture, seems a poor-man's ramble in a polysyllabic scribble.  At it base, J. Simms (listed as "M.D"., and who was also the author of A New Physiognomical Chart of Character) presents a two-paragraph idea and published it over twelve pages that seem twelve pages too many.  The idea is basically so:   humans at time resemble animals because animals imitate what they see, as do humans.  That is principally the entire deal, though it evidently was the cause of numerous lecture bookings for Mr. Simms.  And what Mr. Simms talks about are the problems of imitation, the results of which are found in tight shoes, tight corsets, big hats, and bad walking, all leading to debauched society and wrecked personal dreams. 

There are many things the Simms work is not.  It is not a work that encompasses the social geometry found by other people later in the century--those who came across the study of people and immitation and the like legitimately, such as Gebriel Tardem Emile Durkheim, Scipio Sighele and Gustave Le Bon, for example.  These folks worked with capable data and reasonable assumptions in looking at how the transmission of data and knowledge takes place between people, and sought to explain the construction of the social membrane in logical and scientific ways.  They were trying to address what Marcel Proust would call (somewhat later) "a new distance between ourselves and things". 

Simms was interested in did this too, but did so in terms of how people imitated animals, and how that imitation spread to imitating people, and then fashions, and then resulting in too-tight corsets and too-tight shoes, and wanton neediness, all eading to advanced imitation and, finally, to perdition.  The man had an odd vision which obviously appealed to some. And so it goes.  There's not that much difference in the set of assumptions of Simms and those of Dr. Freud, is there?

The Shotgun in the Service of Natural History--Shooting Flowers

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC  Post 657

In the always summery days of summer of 1912  , Mr.  F. Aumaury Talbot  went hunting in the wilds of Nigeria--not horribly unusual of course, except that the man was shooting flowers from trees.  

I've never seen a picture like this, nor have I read anything about shotgunning blossoms from on-high in a tree canopy. And that's what the man is doing--right down to the shotgun.   Mr. Talbot (for whom an estimable cash prize for academic work in anthropology is still named) was able to collect eighty (!) new species of flowers on this trip to Nigeria, many collected in this fashion. 

We read in the story about this image (from The Illustrated London News of 8 June 1912) that in the 2 June issue appeared another shotgunning-in-the-service-of-Understanding-Nature:   this time shooting butterflies.  With a shotgun. 

Curious, Impracticable and Useless Inventions: Gun Hats and Steel Fish, 1920

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 655

I had started out to write this post about the Sham Paris, the False Paris, that was being built outside Paris to deceive German bombers in WWI.  Now, that wasn’t a particularly bad invention, per se—a bit like the Maginot Line in is way—just too much, over-the-top, short-distanced and muddied sight. 

 

But on the way to the images of non-Paris I came across these few inventions as reported in The Illustrated London News of Christmas Day, 1920.  These innovations look older than 1920, to tell the truth, but here they are. 

 First is the hat gun—or, rather, the helmet gun.  It look as though the whole affair would be aimed and fired hands-free.  By the look of the barrel, the thing in the helmet looks like 50-calibre, which might have an ill effect on the neck of the shooter.

The next few images illustrate an improbable, cartoon-like device for swimming in the high seas.  It is a ticklish-looking thing, with air outlets and propellers and such being in the rather tender areas of the internalized man. 

 

Lastly we come to a pipe designed with too much duct work (a la the movie Brazil) to deliver a cool smoke from a hot bowl.  The device below that tries to bypass the entire hot smoke issue by distracting the smoker with a movable whirligig. I’m not so sure that Bogart would’ve been taken very seriously as Phi Marlowe had he been (a) smoking a ciggy with a holder, and (b) if that cig holder had a movable figure on it that raided a sword every time he drew smoke. 

 

Eat Me, Please: Simplifying the Message in Advertising

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 654  Blog Bookstore

Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words ‘EAT ME’ were beautifully marked in currants. ‘

Well, I’ll eat it,’ said Alice...

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

In the annals of advertisements whose aim it was to beseech its readers to consume its subject, Profitable Pork Production (published by the Quaker Oats Company in 1938) is perhaps the most successful in making its eatable the happiest and most contented of all the lot of Things to Be Eaten.  Elevating need past the knowing eyes of the poor porker, making him/her both the object of being eaten while satisfied with that option is the ultimate and (in this case) attained goal of the pamphlet. 

I've seen very few other pamphlets like this whose subject says "Eat Me!" with greater disregard for their own life.

What this pamphlet was really doing was selling ("delectable") food pellets to farmers to feed to their pork to get them to market plumper than other non-Quaker Oaks pellet eaters.