Ptak Science Books

Making Human Junk from Children, 1914

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

"There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work." --Lewis Hine, 1908

These broadsides are tough going. They are the work of advocates and reformers who sought to give children an even chance at growing up as children, rather than joining the hundreds of thousands of 6-12 year olds already in the workforce in America in the first decade or two of the 20th century. They were a simple and very powerful appeal to business-owners and parents to resist the temptation of child exploitation--none though so far as I can tell directly addressed the children.  See my other posts on this topics here:

•  Children at Work, 1934, an Appeal by the Great Dorothy Kenyon

• Map of Newsboy Work Violators, 1914--Child Labor & Child Scavengers

• Ancient Myths Modern:  the Other Statue of Liberty,1911

[Source for the following images at Inquiry Unlimited, follow the link for other examples. ]

Electricity as an Added Lethal Measure to Barbed Wire: World War I

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Barbed wire was one of the most successful and horrifying defensive weapons of World War I.  In 1915 it was made more effective yet by adding high-voltage electricity to the emplacements.  In general the electrical barbed wire fence was employed as only a tiny fraction of all wire fences during the war--as the non-electrified fence was already extremely effective, very cheap to produce and very easily installed--but the possibility of finding an electrified wire somewhere along the lengthy rat's nests of miles and miles of this thing must've had some sort of very major weight in most soldiers' minds. 

The following image (and details) from The Illustrated London News for 9 October 1915:

And the places where the barbed wire was made and packaged, again from The Illustrated London News for 16 October 1915.

It looks as though the wire was stretched across 3.5 foot poles, with the barbed wire added diagonally, and then rolled up in long sections for easy transport and deployment.

Institutionalized Nonthinking: the "Negro Pencil" of 1938

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

• See also The Long Fight for the Capitalization of the "n" in "Negro" here  

“I believe that eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.” W.E.B. BuBois

I was walking home the other day, taking a short cut through the Chamber of Commerce (of Asheville) and stopped to read an historical marker placed in parking lot for a Civil War prison and hospital.  Sprinkled throughout the two hundred word synopsis were varied parenthetic ( ) corrections of the quoted text. But not when it came to the quoted line using the small-n "negro", there was no parenthetic correction to (N)egro.  No sic. Nothing.

The "Negro Pencil" was found in the corporate pamphlet, The Pencil, published by the American arm of the Czech company Koh-I-Noor Pencil Company.  It was a lovely thing, really, a lusty bit for the pencil fancier.  And then I came to this.

The "Negro" Pencil is not a matter of non-translation into "hard black" or whatever--there are no other instances of the transliteration not taking place.  "Negro Pencil" is a product of its time. 

The history of the power of words is long and complex, and for the most part is on one side or the other of the political and social mirror, at least in the United States. Controlling the meaning of a word or phrase controls the idea which alters the way people approach it, defining the very heart of what may control the impulse for war or peace, which means that people may die as much for words as they will for ideas.

"Negro" may be capitalized here, but perhaps it is because it started a sentence.

It may have been capitalized, but using the name of a race to sell the color of a pencil might as well have taken the capitalization away, demeaning a race to sell a pencil, all without a second thought.  It was a product of the time that such a discrimination could be so engrained as to not even think that the use of the word was demeaning. 

Washington Redskins.

 

Trademarks, Memory, Nazis, and Death Camps

JF Ptak  Science Books  Post 1891

In the world of identifying symbols--which I've been writing about a little over the past few days, but mainly on Renaissance and Baroque and Mannerist iconography--few are as distinctive and recognizable as modern trademarks.  There's a lot of high-voltage connecting wires between modern advertising and memory devices and Renaissance emblemata, and as I was sorting out some of the nice compatables I was stopped in my tracks by one of the modern images, mainly because I had a recollection for an older and unmentioned iteration of the symbol.

Sinoxid.  It was recorded in the registry of German trademarks for 16 November 1968 as being owned by Dynamit Nobel AG. 

This is what the trademark looked like in 1968:

The same trademark, a little earlier in its career, as it was being admired by a Nazi Brown Shirt S.A. member in 1933:

Dynamit Nobel A.G. is an old company. It is the German arm of the Swedish Nobel munitions firm (begun in 1864) by Emil and much-more famous (and longer-lived) brother Alfred.The German company was established in 1865 in Toursiburg so that the dangerous products produced by the firm wouldn't have to travel as many miles if it was produced closer to the consumer.  The Nobel firm manufactured munitions--famously so with a nitrogylcerin compound known as "blasting oil" that was notoriously unstable, and which in a fit of instability  actually killed Alfred's brother Emil in 1864. It also blew up parts of the German factory (on two occasions before 1870).  The stuff was beyond lethal.  But it didn't stop Nobel from shipping their explosive goods worldwide in unmarked crates so as to not attract attention to a dangerous product. Three such cases were once sent to the Union Pacific company in San Francisco in 1866--two became unstable and blew up in the company's headquarters, killing dozens. But no one was scared beforehand.

Alfred Nobel left no heirs and so donated some percentage of his firm's monies to the foundation we know today by his name. The company grew into the largest munitions producer in Europe. Beginning in the mid-1920's it began a relationship of fusions and mergers and so on with the giant cartel I.G. Farben, among many others.

I.G. Faben company produced Zyklon B. It operated its business with slave labor in concnetration camps. It sent tens of tens of thousands to their deaths working on Farben products. Zyklon B itself killed millions of human beings.

This is what used canisters of Zklon B looked like after they had been used to murder Jews and other prisoners in the death camps:

 

They have a design much like the tossed-away bodies of their victims.

Girdle vs. Goedel: the Pink Ice Girdle Ballet of 1951 vs. Logic. Part I of the History of Holding Things In

JF Ptak Science Books  

[My thanks to Patti Digh for providing the idea for the Goedel part of this adventure into Playtex and Logic--she did so because (a) they fit together and (b) girdle/Goedel sounded almost identical to a woman who once lived in Munich!]   

In the long history of Holding Things In, perhaps the newest of its members was upon us only recently. In the long, deep past we have held our breath, hidden our anger, stowed our emotions, and so on, but it was only recently that we began to hold our bellies in.  One of the masters of Holding Things In for this period turns out to be the sublime logician and re-inventor of modern mathematics (by putting one piece of the great Hilbert to sleep), Kurt Goedel, who towards the mistakenly-self-engineered end of his life, held on to everything, virtually--he organized and filed almost very piece of paper that he came into contact with at any level, became ever more reclusive, and at the end (due to his theories of people/institutions wanting to kill him) refused food and, of all things, water.  Surrounded by the smartest people on the planet (including his friends Einstein and von Neumann) up there at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Goedel withered away until he had almost no shadow. It is a bad irony that he could be so inconceivably unmovable and restrained while at the same time, and in the same life, offered such incredible newness to the maths--both ends of the mountain at the same time.

1951, the year in which these girdle advertisements appeared in Life magazine, was also the year that Goedel present us with the Goedel  metric, and also in which he received (with Julian Schwinger) the first Albert Einstein award (and of course delivered his famous Gibbs lecture  "Some basic theorems on the foundations of mathematics and their implications").

The popular introduction of the girdle I think that this happened at about the same time for the sexes, only these conveniences were much more often advertised for women than they were for men.  Slender and non-existent waistlines for women were more of a cultural identifier than a slim-hipped man, and the ads for his cheaters appeared far less frequently than those for women.

The first widespread appearance of the girdle for the sake of vanity must have occurred during the 19th century, or perhaps a little later is my best guess--but the first time the device began to appear for the common woman must've come around the time when there was time for leisure, or shopping, or of being seen in public in short intervals.  And that I believe is a Victorian-age invention.

But the binder doesn't come into fabulous presence until the distribution of mass population illustrated magazines, or I should say the advertisements that made these magazines possible:  production like LIFE (from which these 1951 images come) reached far more women than the popular older periodicals like Harper's Weekly or other polite mid-19th century journals for women.  The advertisements were certainly more enticing, the possibilities more rewarding, and the girdle comfort levels far higher than their predecessors, and the availability of disposable income for women far greater--and so incidentals like the girdle became more greatly commodified, and moved into the "essentials" category. 

The idea of these ads seem horribly revolutionary: on the one hand, the badly-named and hyphenated  Playtex product "Pink-Ice" squeezed women into new tight but  malleable molds, while at the same time promised some sort of ballet-like freedom because of it. Like the creeping ("two steps forward and one step back") communism of the time, Playtex promised the possibilities of enhanced freedom through restrictive clothing (in a "peace through strength" vision).  In any event, and in spite all of what I just wrote, the pictures are kind of amazing.  

[I'm well aware that this may be one of the worst things ever written about Kurt Goedel--the Renault Dauphine of Goedeliana.  But it doesn't matter, because in all of his powers, Goedel could absolutely prove that g_d existed, and that  I don't.]

Thomas Jefferson's Arithmetic of Black People, 1783

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1869

I was picking my way through Mr. Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (written in 1783/4), and dipped into Query 14, "Laws".  Six pages in came the Great Man's thoughts on being white and being black. He really didn't have much hope for the black person in the new United States, and in an odd way, I think, did a sort of arithmetic calibration on the black race, giving a few points here and there "for", and piling up the count "against", making an overall large negative number for the possibility of the black and white races living together.  [The full text of the work us available, here.]

In very many cases in his later writing Jefferson re-evaluates this thinking, as seen in this example, writing to Benjamin Banneker in 1791 ('"No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence"), and in many others (as in the very full example¹ of this 1809  letter to Henri Gregoire, shown below).

Jefferson had already written somewhat earlier in the book about blacks on page 197, where he discusses albinism in black people as part of a natural history chapter dealing with animals:

To this catalogue of our indigenous animals, I will add a short account of an anomaly of nature, taking place sometimes in the race of negroes brought from Africa, who, though black themselves, have in rare instances, white children, called Albinos...

This is not promising. This is also the first appearance in the book of the word "negro". [I wrote a short bit on the history of the fight for the capitalization of the letter "N" in "Negro" here; this was a fight that dragged itself into the first third of the 20th century.]

I am no Jefferson scholar, not by any means.  Only familiar with the "basics" of Jefferson, and his design and architecture and technical aspects, and somewhat familiar with his writing on the basic morality of slave-holding, I was surprised to find what he had written about constitution of black people here in the Notes. 

Perhaps I shouldn't've been so, but I was.  Perhaps I wasn't as familiar with Jefferson during the time of the Revolution as I thought, seeing him as not only a man who changed the product of his time but who was also a product of them, writing in his present on the state of blacks in America that seems to have been seen as a great error in the mind of the Thomas Jefferson who would read these thoughts in the future, and refute (and perhaps repudiate) them.

Bad Idea Department: F Lloyd Wright and the Goodness of the Bombing of Britain

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1866  

[I've written earlier on a related and very bad idea, Atomurbia, for atom-bomb-proofing American cities, here.]

Reading Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke I found a set of very unflattering and semi-unbelievable quotes from the unpretty Frank Lloyd Wright.  Present at a MoMA exhibition he was sharing with D.W. Griffith (detailed in the publication Two Great Americans published by the museum in 1940), Wright chose the background of the Battle of Britain, in which German bombs were falling on English cities killing thousands, to promote his city design idea of Broadacre (among other things).

In development since 1932 (appearing in his book The Disappearing City) and kept on until his death in 1959, Wright's idea for city /suburban development spread a "city" ti its limits, nearly stripping it of its citiness and expanding it towards the horizon in a wide and low wave of a complete suburbia.  With this, Wright must have reasoned, Broadacre City must have seemed "bomb-proof" compared to the normal concept of the city, and decided to make the best of a horrible situation to promote his idea.

And with this, he was quoted in November 1940 in the New York Times, saying:

"I would not say that the bombing of Europe is not a blessing, because at least it will give the architects there a chance to start all over again"

To say that this was an idea best left to the imagination rather than in the pages of the Paper of Record goes without saying.

And what of the architects whose buildings were lost during the Blitz?  Say, like Christopher Wren?

"I don't think that anyone will miss Wren's work very much" (This, and the quote above, found in Baker, page 248.)

I've had a problem with Wright for a long time, but had never bumped into this part of his thinking before.

[Wright's wrongs on the Bombing of Britain are also recorded in Peter Shedd Reed (ed), The Show to End All Shows: Frank Lloyd Wright and The Museum of Modern Art, 1940 (MoMA 2004, here), and here, in the Milwaukee Journal for 22 June 1941, and also in the News Chronicle of London in"How I would Rebuild London"]

 

 

Booze-Vision Atomic Farming and Other Nuclear Dreams

JF Ptak Science Books  (Expanding an Earlier Post)

Seagrams V.O. Canadian Whiskey powered the future through a series of a dozen or so ads for itself in the 1945-1947 period, taking a usually-strangled though occasionally interesting peep into what the future might bring.  (And of course the future is brought by men who drink Seagrams.)  In this ad, appearing in the 12 May 1947 issue of LIFE Magazine, we are told "deserts will bloom through atomic power"--how this might happen is left to the imagination. Also left to fantasy is what exactly is being farmed there in front of the incongruous "atomic energy plant". Plastic smoke?  Taking a fractured approach to the possibilities one might say that atomic bomb mushroom clouds are being grown from seedlings here from the ground up, nurtured until the day they too will be as big as the blasts of August 1945.

Oddly enough, the illustrator--who after all was just trying to sell alcohol--came pretty close to the truth, except that they got the power source wrong.  Rather than nuclear energy, it would be petrochemical industries that would lie there at the heart of America's farm production (via seeds and fertilizers and so on)--I'm sure that it would've made more sense in a weak way back there in 1947 to believe the atomic story rather than the possibility that it would be petroleum that would drive the entire production of food forward. 

There were many proposed uses for atomic energy over the next few decades, most not very good--the Ford Nucleon, a screamer with a 5,000-mile cruising range powered by a steam engine driven by a small uranium fission muscle box in the car's rear, was one of those ideas.  The nuclear-powered submarine, which sounded like the Nucleon in 1946, was a solid workable idea, a science fiction come true in 1954 with the launch of the USS Nautilus (SSN-571).

Nuclear medicine--although not powering an atomic heart--was a very important development that seemed not conceivable in the decade preceding its development.  Atomic-powered helicopters, trains and planes are other examples of the not-good-idea variety.  The nuclear powered space vehicle, which was first proposed in 1946 by Stan Ulam (and then in a report written by him and C.J. Everet  On a Method of Propulsion of Projectiles by Means of External Nuclear Explosions. Part I. University of California, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, August 1955, pictured and linked below), has morphed into something monumental in Project Orion, and to me sounds like a fabulous idea:

[Source here.]

IBut getting back to the liquor ads, here's an weirdly prescien and naive image--"weird" anyway for a quick effort made by an artist trying to sell drunk juice--is this proto-internet office view, made in May 1945. There's lots of passive solar going on here(though not really very effective when you consider the other ways of directing and filtering exterior light inside) in the office of tomorrow, but more important is the desk and the file cabinets.  The seated man is talking to someone across the country  via phone/wireless, with data en masse at his fingertips, a "computer" (in the old sense of the word, that being a person--and usually a women--given the charge of adding long columns of number or whatever and then doing the arithmetic, like a comptometer) working some sort of calculating interest on the largish calculating instrument. In general we see a decision-maker awash in responsibility connecting all of the parts of his world: a primitive, secular, analog internet.  And this too just at about the same time that Vannevar Bush introduced his own vision of the informational future with his superb Memex (which I wrote about earlier on this blog here.)

Frederick Soddy's Economics and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1939)

JF Ptak Science Books       Quick Post on Anti-Semitism & Propaganda

Frederick Soddy, Nobel Prize in chemistry (1921) and one of the fathers of nuclear fission, was also an economist.  Well, an anti-economist of high order, an anti-economist preaching anti-economics on the order of the altruistic anti-economy, ideal anti-economist, material- and Left- and Nationalist-economics, and so on.  He is the author, along with Walter Crick (who happens to be the uncle of Francis Crick of DNA fame), of a clumsily-titled pamplet-y takeoff of his major works on anti-economics, Abolish Private Money, or Drown in Debt (1939)  It was published by the Nationalist Press Association (147 E 116th Street, NYC), an arm of the American Nationalist Party, and which also published such works as Are all Jews Liars? (1940), The Jew and Peril and the Catholic Church (1936, also published by the American White Guard), Why are Jews Persecuted for their Religion (1940), and other titles.

Soddy also quotes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and did so five years after The Times ran a blistering and complete denunciation of the rabid anti-Semitic creation that seems resistant to contradictory evidence to its belief. And still he seems to have kept his belief in the document, like any other object demanding of belief and not-critical thinking, kept it alive like millions of others. 

I did not know this about Soddy, and I am sorry for it.  The cover illustration is disgraceful, though there is no place in the text that I have seen that is actually and outwardly anti-Semitic. The illustrations, however, are.

I really have no idea about what Soddy is talking about in his "scientific" and anti-economic theory that money and banks are the ruin of the way a country (and the world) conducts business.  Its structure brings immediately to mind--probably wrongly--the brilliant/odd/goofy contribution of T.E. Lawrence to the Encyclopedia Britannica on guerrilla warfare and his attempt to make a "science" of it.  But the overall flavor of the Soddy/Crick thing is not very good (and that leaving out the anti-Semitic part, which is something else, entirely)>.

Cliff's Notes for Nazi School, 1937

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1849

Oh happy day for this handy Cliff's Notes pamphlet for the visiting visitor, for the foreign foreign, to the "new" Germany of 1937.  It is difficult to imagine but not horribly so the subtitle here, "Vacation Course for Foreigners"--it was, after all, so far as the rest of Europe and England and the rest of the world was concerned, still only a conceit that the Germans were harboring for themselves, the sabre-rattling Lebenstraum was still in the theoretical stage, though the loathing and discrimination of the Jews and other sorts of humans was not. 

The pamphlet promises to "give our foreign guests an opportunity o f seeing young National-Socialist Germany as it really is" and to "show them that the German people do not want anything but to attend to their work in discipline and peace". Which was not the case.

I was interested to see the "programme" of instruction, and to check out the near-futures of the people who were the lecturers for each section.  Before I began, I wondered how much their fates would be changed eight years hence and if they would resemble the fates of other high ranking Nazis. (I looked at the lives of Nazi medical personnel and experimenters in an earlier post here called  "Kristallnacht: The Long post-WWII Lives and Forgotten Pasts of Criminal Nazis: Doctors", here.)

Mostly, they went on to live long lives.

In the program, Dr. Reinhard Hoehn delivered a talk on "National-Socialist Law". Hoehn was a Nazi academic lawyer with a criminally morose view of jurisprudence; he went rather high-ranking and was successful in laying the "legal" groundwork for Nazi ambitions, including being a representative at the Wannsee Conference.  Born in 1904, Hoehn went on to live until 2000.

The Intestinal String Polisher in the Curled Hair Dept.--Armour Meats, 1917

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1826

The following impressions are a result of reading the Armour & Company's hard-sell-we're-really-really-clean promotional pamphlet, Seeing Armour's. (I'm not sure why there is a plural possessive in the title, which is lopped off in the photo below--the pamphlet is actually splayed out here, opened from the 4x7.5 oblong to show both sides of the cover, revealing both halves of  the vastness of the company's campus).

 

Knowing full well The Jungle* story and the insufferable conditions in the livestock killing and processing industry, what really stopped me was this short note on one of the many elements of the company:

the String Department.  (?)  How deflating it is to start thinking about this concept.   Yes, of course, of course there is a string department at the Amour Meat Packing Company, though they're not making the stuff from field-grown fibers.  This string is just gut, but useful gut:  "In the old days most all sheep and lamb intestines were thrown away.  Now they are saved for sausage containers, etc."  Et cetera?  I'm not sure if the "etc." part is more baffling than the originality of the opening sentence (and a sentence which is probably never-before encountered).   There's wide, medium and narrow gut, as it turns out, and it was cleansed, split, bleached, spun, put on frames, dried, polished, coiled and gauged.  (Now that's a job title:  intestinal string polisher).

There were a number of other expected/unexpected surprises.  The Curled Hair room was a surprise. I was expecting the soap room but didn't expect the huge interior that it filled, with hundreds (?) of young women (all dressed in white) seated at long wide tables with mountains of soap, doing god knows what.  Oleomargarine, bullion, extract of beef, sausage, leaf lard and bacon were expected; the eggs, butter, cheese, grape juice, peanut butter, salmon and fruit syrups departments weren't.  Armour seems to have been waging a veritable food war, with a little bit of beef/pork/sheep going into a little bit of everything. 

Finally, having had just about enough of Mr. Armour, I stumbled into the stuff on the killing rooms.  Even though the description is cleaned up i the pamphlet, it still is not pretty, and sharing the photographs is just not necessary.

20 years a vegetarian, here. 

*Note:

The Jungle was written by Upton Sinclair (often referred to as a "socialist" which he definitely, positively, was) in 1906.  It was basically an expose on the living and working conditions of the lower working classes, and is best remembered for bringing to vast public knowledge the grotesque conditions of the meat packing industry.  It is not possible, really, to overstate its importance, which is credited with leading to Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which established the Food and Drug Administration.

Drugs Looking for a Need: Heroin, Thorazine and Etc., in Old and New History

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1825

Looking at old advertisements for the application of new/improved pharmaceuticals can be an experience in search of an explanation. Certainly we recognize the impact of these drugs today for what they really are, the business-end of their basis unmasked.  But at the time--well, at the time, before revelation, there was hope in the use of them. 

Opium of course has been used for centuries, but it was synthesized first in 1874 by the English chemist C.R. Alder Wright, though that first application went basically nowhere.  The big push came when it was independently re-synthesized and re-discovered by Fleix Hoffmann who was working at the time for the Aktiengesellschaft Farbenfabriken of Elberfeld, Germany, which is todyay known as Bayer, and which was re-named and marketed under the name, "heroin". 

 

Heroin was sold for nearly two decades as a cough suppressant, a safe replacement for morphine, and also non-addictive.

Narcotics in general however were applied somewhat liberally for complaints of all manner--narcotics not being controlled until 1925, banned by the Single Convention on Narcotics Drugs and the League of Nations (for its signatories, at least).   AS we can see int he detail of this Punch cartoon of 1879, the problems to be brought on by the new applications of electricity (still quite young in its modernistic sense at this time) could be sleeplessness for birds, as the outdoor lights might keep them awake.

But in detail, the sleepy old owl might have been dipping a little heavy into one of those bottles with bumps on its sides, its bottle of "narcotics" to help in tracking down sleep:

Get Off the Earth: an Example of Institutionalized Discrimination from 1896 and What it Means Today

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1824

Racism and discrimination are never so more obvious I think than when it is present in everyday bit and pieces of our lives, as gratuitous indulgences, unnecessary except to disparage its target--it is at these times that you can see how deeply something is ingrained in the culture of a place. 

And an excellent example of this is the transforming/movable puzzle created by the master puzzleteer, Sam Loyd.  He patented the idea of mechanism of the thing in 1896 and published it in the same year, selling millions of varieties of the thing. One of the most successful of the puzzles using the design was called, with a fantastically indelicate title, Get Off the Earth. 

Working version from the  murderousmaths.co.uk website, here.

The title would mean less had not the most popular version of the game featured Chinese men who were getting off the Earth, and this of course at a time of indoctrinated, inculcated, adjudicated and legislated, legalized segregation and discrimination.  It was a time of very high Sinophobia, with all manner of advancements against people of Chinese descent:  the Anti-Coolie Laws of 1862, the Pigtail Ordinances (of California) of 1873, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (renewed in 1892 and 1902), and so on, displayed America's unease and at times hatred of the Chinese people.  Loyd referred to the men as "warriors", which I think disingenuous, as the characters hardly have a warrior-like quality to them--they are simply racist.  And they were being made to disappear from the Earth, something many people in this country wanted to happen. 

According to several web sources, the puzzle was actually used by the William McKinley campaign of 1896 in an effort to out anti-Chinese his opponents².

What these objects do for us today is help us think about what "get off the Earth" objects we have in 2012, and how awful they'll look in the decades to come. The fabric of society has not crumbled under the weight of allowing non-land-holders to vote, or to allow women more equal rights or the right to vote; abandoning slavery did not crush the country, nor did Brown v. Board of Ed, nor did the abandonment of the miscegenation laws.  I can hardly believe that an issue such as Gay marriage will be the great under of the Republic as it has been present in legislation and state constitutional amendments; it will look as bad in a few decades from now as does the Get off the Earth puzzle looks now, or the idea of slavery, or the idea of voting privileges only for the privileged male, or maintaining Jim Crow laws, and so on, on a nd on into the misty night of bad ideas and societal discrimination.

Notes:

1.  Nice stories on Sam Loyd and deep on puzzles in general, here.  Sam Loyd's book of 5,000 puzzles.

2.  A summary of the McKinley presidential campaign making use of the puzzle to help raise itself in the eyes of the anti-Chinese voters, see here.

The odd thing is that current sites have referred to the men surrounding the globe (below) as "Chinamen", or still use the Loyd reference to "Chinese warriors", and many still hold to the indulgences that this is a simple puzzle and nothing else.  It is hardly that simple.

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. 

Addition to Inner City Rooftop Airport Design: Big, Bad, & Ugly; London, 1931

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1799

[Source: Popular Mechanics, September, 1931.]

I am not an architectural historian nor a historian of aviation, but I have looked at a lot of images relating to these fields over the past 30+ years, and so when I find something unusual it makes me pause.  One developing category in this area are rooftop/elevated inner city/downtown airports (I've done two earlier posts about this sort of design, including airports designed to be constructed over the Thames and Central Park NYC in Rooftop & Floating Airports -and- Rooftop Airports in a Levitating NYC, 1929  and Elevated, Rooftop Inner City Circular Airports.   I'm not at all certain about what these planners (above) were thinking except that the locations of the airports were central and would save on driving town from the hinterlands to central city--and the "central city" here was London, with the "aerodrome" hosted above King's Cross and St. Pancras station, and might even have reached Regent's Park, though I'm not sure.   Evidently there wasn't much of a concern of the planes missing their runways, or coming in too low, or too fast, or just having an accident--any one of which would wind up in the lap of a busy city rather than in a field somewhere or on a large piece of ground devoid of buildings and a population (where airports are normally situated.  True, there are many airports in this country that are located in urban and suburban sprawls--there was calculated room for error and they were not located right on top of error-proof zones in the middle of a vastly populated areas. So, in the "what were they thinking" department, I clearly do not understand what they were thinking. 

In addition to being a not-very-good-idea, it was also unwholesomely unpretty. And big.