Ptak Science Books

From our Jell-O Department: The Staggering Un-Beauty of Gelatin

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1777  [Part of the Bad Ideas series.]

"Gelatin is a protein substance derived from collagen, a natural protein present in the tendons, ligaments, and tissues of mammals. It is produced by boiling the connective tissues, bones and skins of animals, usually cows and pigs."

Gelatin of course is still around, present in all sorts of things, the Old School equivalent of the coming New School use of cellulose filler in everything--except of course that cellulose isn't the leftover stuff on the slaughterhouse floor.  Lots of kid foods are made with it--gummy bears are just about all gelatin, all the time, with the exception of the shelf-life lengtheners and coloring.

The first lively hard-sell pamphlet, The Use of Gelatin in Ice Cream, and Buttermilk and other Dairy Products (1935) was assembled by the "Gelatin Department" of Swift & Company.  Swift (purchased in 2008 by JBS S.A.) used to be the world's largest processor of cows and pigs and other things with eyeballs and veins and brains, making them into food for human beings.  The company (started in 1855) expanded into other things in the mid-19th century, getting into the insurance and petroleum fields.  It used to own Peter Pan peanut butter, too.  And Playtex, makers of bras and etc.

I have to give Swift credit though for stating exactly what gelatin is, right there on the first page, in  no-nonsense language. The short (12-page) pamphlet is then given over to a quick sales talk on the uses of gelatin--in chocolate milk, sour cream, cottage cheese, ice cream, sorbet and buttermilk--and how to prepare it.  At first a reader might think that the use of gelatin in the pre-WWII days was not so widespread, until they remembered that this pamphlet was directed at just dairy products.  There was a whole other world of gelatin use besides this one.

And that’s been the story of Jell-O, a product of extraordinarily modest and not-pretty means, morphing itself and the Postum Company over a relatively short period of time (from 1895 to1925) into the megamonolth:  the General Foods Corporation.  “America’s Most Famous Dessert” got its third (or better) start on life in Le Roy, New York, under the creative hands of Mr. & Mrs. Pearle B. & May Wait (true!), who took sugar, powdered gelatin and artificial fruit flavors to make a concoction May called “Jell-O”.  But her reach was none-too-grand compared to that of Frank Woodward, who bought the company from her and created the demand for this ‘food” and who ultimately created General Foods with it.  (Its an old story:  consumable and saleable product with no consumers:  Marlboro cigarettes started out as a specialized cig for “ladies” and failed; the same cigarette was then re-marketed as a testosterone-laden product and then succeeded beyond all wild expectation, killing millions of its consumers in the process.)  In any event Ms. Wait trumped another New York state resident, Charles Knox,  in the race to develop a pretty and tasty  granulated/[powdered gelatin desert mix.  "Knox’s Gelatine", originally made with calves’-foot jelly, was a little earlier to the table than Mrs. Wait, but failed to properly develop his product. It also suffered its own "purity" by not having any sugar in it.  

Plus, there's the entire aspect of colors-not-normally-found-in-nature inherent in the spectacular nature of gelatin:

 

 

Bad Ideas of Great Timelessness: Basball Bat, 1890

JF Ptak Sciene Books   Quick Post

Some ideas are bad enough to stay that way, possibly forever. Impervious to the future, nothing anywhere ever catches up to them to make them unbad.  The design for this baseball bat fits snuggily into that category. Not only is this a bad idea, it is an ugly one, too.  I have to say that there is an intrinsic beauty to a baseball bat--its angularity, its diameter-to-length ratio, its color (for the most part), its patina, and even the applied non-Brettian pine tar--that just should not be trampled. (I'm sorry, but baseball bats really need to be the original color of the ash wood--not brown, or black.  I'm of course not talking about metal bats which are also in and of themselves a bad idea, "wrong", somewhat like monster golf drivers,  not to mention that they can be made in a variety of colors, which simply deepens their wrongness.)

Caveat--none of what I've just said applies if any of these bats are being used by children. Any kid with any bat at any time is perfectly fine.  And natural.) 

I'm happy that no one felt any particular need to need Mr. Kinst's (patented) bat.

A nice history of bats can be found here.

Mr. Kinst as he appeared in 1924.  The image is found in the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress, and the caption to the photo is as follws: "SUMMARY: Head and shoulders portrait of Emile Kinst, inventor of a baseball bat, looking toward the camera, sitting in front of a light-colored backdrop in a room in Chicago, Illinois."

Cigarettes as Toy Soldiers: Playing with Tobacco, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Sometimes a bit that I post in this blog's Unintentional Absurdist category need nothing more than an elementary introduction, their images usually being enough of a story--more of a story--than could be told of them.  This current installation, "Pipes and Cigarettes Form a Tabletop Army", from Popular Mechanics for December, 1939, is a good example of this.

The story is simple:  for some reason, Mr. Jeff London (of Virginia) and his son Tommy built soldiers and sailors and horses and guns and mess wagons and so on from pipes and cigarettes and matches. They called it "Fags Army".  I'm not sure what compels this sort of expedition into creativity, but, well, here it is:

 

Disinventing Human Flight--Hiram Maxim's Steampunk Mistake

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1751

Hiram Maxim, Sir Hiram Maxim, an ex-pat Yank and a great inventor of things other  than aircraft, certainly did not do his best on his early flying machine.  He built an enormous monument to Steampunk Aerostation, and in that 8,000 pounds of steel wheels and smoke, he completely lost the idea of making a flying machine, concentrating solely on the idea of thrust and lift, consoling himself with the notion of raising a brick from the ground.

 I'm not sure that you can disinvent many physical things, although I know that there have been many attempts to do just that , though usually in the fields of human beings doing horrible things to other human beings.  The Soviets I know disinvented untold numbers of people in the plague years of the human stain, Joseph Stalin; so to with Adolf Hitler, who tried to disinvent the Jewish people and the Soviet Union. 

Hiram Maxim (1840-1916) tried to build a monster that would leave the ground but not actually fly, and he basically did just that, very briefly with very heavy/crashy results. His flying machine was over 100' wide, had two 17.5' propellers, room of multiple crew members, weighed four tons, and traveled along guiding railroad tracks on steel wheels. In 1897 it powered  down 1800' of track before accidently breaking free of its moorings and  rizing briefly above them for a distance of about 100', which at 40mph would've been about 2 seconds of  foot-tall "flight", causing the crew to shut the engines down and causing the whole thing to crash  And that was that, the end of Maxim's adventure. It was remembered by him in strange and wonderfully terrible ways in his memoirs, where he claimed that his truly dreadful ideas were those that were used and copied by the pioneers who followed him and who actually created successful flying machines.  That he could remember things in their imagined states with such hopeful clarity is to think of him as providing precisely the wrong blueprints at the right time. 

In his book, Aviation, an Historical Survey from its Origins to the End of World War II (Science Museum, London, 1970), the insightful, opinionated and occasionally acerbic Charles H. Gibbs-Smith remarked on Maxim's outlandish maxims on his enormous failure, quoting him so:

"...the fact that practically no essential departure has been made from my original lines, indicates to my mind that I had reasoned out the best type of a machine even before I commenced a stroke of the work"  (Maxim, Natural and Artificial Flight, 1908)

Gibbs-Smith writes: "it is hard to imagine anyone uttering more egregious nonsense", and when you look at the Maxim machine and see its specs and the nil-time spent on what to do with the thing if it ever actually lifted off the ground, you'd be hard-pressed not to agree.  Had people followed his lead, Maxim would have been able to disinvent human flight.  There, I said it.  There's wrong, and then there's wrong--and then there is this.

Questionable Quidity: on Rowing Flying Boats, 1889

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

  This remarkable flying machine was patented by N.H. Borgfeldt (of Brooklyn, NYC) on 1 October 1889.  It really seems to be not that much more than the rowing-section part of a Roman galleon, except that it is in the air;  there are five "rowers" int his aircraft, plus someone to operate the rudder. And a flag.

This certainly is not the most effective way of using human muscle, even in an odd application like this one:

The Gift that Keeps on Giving: Radium, in Powder or Suppository

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Radium.  It was for some short period of time a magnificent and harmless thing, soemthing with a life of its own, sort of, in the way that people used to think of electricity. 

This is a detail for an advertisement for radium salts, found in the December, 1903 issue of Le Radium.  At this point, just five years after the Curies discovered it and quick-published (in five days) their results in the Comptes Rendus..., the massive biochemical effects of human/radium interaction was not understood. And so the ads for firms like Armet de Lisle, which  was loudly selling Sels de Radium (and other radioactive substances like uranium salt  and uranium phosphate) without any real knowledge of the adverse health effects of its products.  (The Curies and Becquerel had noticed ulcertating reactions to their skin when it was left in contact to radium, and "radium dementia" had been reported beginning about 1900, but it would take quite some time for this radioactive material to be understood as lethal products.)

Radium was used (in very small dosages) for the illuminating of instrument panels and dials (in, say, aircraft) and wrist watch faces into the 1960, though the major health factors ground themselves out in the worker who would come into contact with the radium itself. 

Of course there were other uses for radium as a cure-all, which would have been a completely different story:

[which I wrote about here in "Radium Dance"]

The Polish Threat to Germany as Seen by the Nazis, 1939

 JF Ptak Science Book--expansion of Post 230 (September 2008)

This is one of those times when a pamphlet has posed an idea that had never before occurred to me. This anonymous work produced by the German propaganda machine in May 1939 presents the incredible assertion that Poland did indeed have plans to continue to break the back of Germany over the never-to-be-forgotten Treaty of Versailles, and to also physically attack south-eastern Germany sometime in 1940.

Again, the idea that Germany was defending itself against an imminent attack by Poland was completely novel to me.  There's always a reason for these sorts of beginnings of wars (Gulf of Tonkin, WMD), but this one really is exceptionally removed.  Poland had just decided to defend its borders against the Germans following their conquest of Czechoslovakia the previous year--until then the Polish military's biggest threat was the Soviet Union.  The German attack, the blitzkrieg (Fall Weiss) which would begin on 1 September 1939 involved 1.5 million German soldiers attacking two principal points in Poland. It was ostensibly launched in response to a small Polish attack on the German border town of Gliwce.   In the attack, the Germans unleashed 11 tank divisions versus Poland's 1; sent in 1250 bombers and fighters to Poland's (mainly obsolete) 360; rolled 4 motorized divisions against Poland's, um, that's right, they didn't have any.  And of course the Germans had a modern and vastly superior navy, compared with Poland's 4 destroyers, five subs, and assorted smaller numbers of smaller and less-significant vessels. 

The British and the French issued an ultimatum to Germany to cease and desist; Hitler had no intentions in stopping, throwing the five armies of von Rundstedt and von Block deeper into the country in a fast and (according to many German generals) breakneck manner.  The British and French declared war on the 3rd, by which time the war in eastern Poland was already almost over.  The Germans did respond to the ultimatum (see this in continued reading, below) in which it outlines some of their needs and Polish-inspired dears. 

By 24 September the Germans had reached the formerly important geographic boundary of the Vistula and swarmed past.  Warsaw was bombed by some 1150 aircraft, and by the 27th, the fighting was almost entirely over. (Some divisions held out to 6 October, the invasion completed in 36 days). 

 

It is sometimes forgotten in the quickness of this defeat that Poland inflicted some heavy losses on the German military machine:  8000 soldiers killed with 27,000 wounded and 5,000 MIA; 217 tanks were destroyed.  The Luftwaffe lost over 500 planes, either entirely destroyed or damaged to the point of uselessness.  Polish losses were far greater.

It was at this time that the first of my grandmother's brothers, Raymond Dymek of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, would cross the border into Canada and volunteer, becoming a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force.  He would fly against the Nazis with the CRAF, then joined the RAF, until finally, when the U.S. joined the  European war 27 months later, would fly for the U.S. Army Air Force.  He had a very long career and made it through.  His five brothers would also enlist in the U.S. armed forces; all six brothers would return home. Fatherland and all that.   I know the vocabuarly for their response to the idea that Germany was responding to a Polish threat of invasion didn't exist to them--it barely does for me.

On the Invasion of America (Part II)

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1686  Works in the Reverse Esteem of the Gettsburg Address

"The cheek of every American tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, dishwatery utterances of the man who has been pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States"--The Chicago Times, on the Gettysburg Address, 1863.   

We all know today what to expect when we hear something referenced as a Gettysburg Address--and we certainly know what something might be if it was referenced as not-the-Gettysburg-Address. The address as it was when Lincoln gave it didn’t even have a title, named as it was post  facto by the newspapers and periodicals covering the event (on the spot or remotely).  The speech is considered as being among the greatest ever given by an American, though at the time it its reception was very mixed—in many cases it was seen as a failure and even as an embarrassment to the solemnity of the moment and place. There were many newspapers which panned the speech (as in the case above with the Chicago Times, which at the time was considered more of a Democrat paper than anything else), while others (like the New York Times gave the speech a warm reception.   The speech’s presence in national memory was crafted over time (not unlike Mr. Leonardo), its perception formed into the polished gem that it is seen as being today. 

The possibility of the implied actions of the titles of the pamphlet below were somewhat similar, though in reverse.  I’m not saying that some of them were always seen as quacky and the works of demented seers; their titles and possible content, though, were not seen as dismissible, and their concerns were real and a possibility. The concerns over “invasion” today depend on what invasion means.  I don’t imagine that people are seriously considering the possibility of a land or air force attacking this country, though other sorts of invasions (biological, chemical, cyber, etc.) are a possibility. 

The Battle for America/How We Can Avoid It (1939) was published by the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (and headed by William Allen White, iconic middle America newspaper editor and editorialist) which attacked isolationism and advocated strong support of the European effort.  The thinking here was that if America didn’t become involved now it would so later, with battle lines of a Nazi-illuminated truce drawn close to American borders.  So it was a pay-now-or-pay-more-later position from a man who supported the New Deal but whop didn’t support FDR. 

Much of this thinking looks a bit tenuous to me.  For example the position excluded the use of an American expeditionary force in Europe (“for theatre for such a large force elsewhere”), though if nothing at all were done there would be a “certain” use of the AEF in South America combating Nazism.  Also, if the U.S. backed the Allies with supplies and war materiel the “liability” to the US in the consequence of European defeat “would leave America's fate against attack and able to make stalemate peace”.  So at the very least, doing a little bit of something would d at least allow us to make a truce with the German/Japanese alliance.   Doing nothing at all in this area would infer “unlimited” liability, and “defeat of the United States could bring loss of independence”. (“Could”?)

The way aid ourselves in this war “(was) to aid  Britain to hold out to defeat Nazi Germany….the chance for Britain to hold out and win is a good risk for America”.

The second pamphlet, Will America Be Invaded, was published by the Christian Fellowship Press in Akron, Ohio, in 1941, and leans mightily upon scripture to state assumptions about the coming menace to America being presaged in the Bible.  That invasion also seems to be allowed by God (according to prophesies and such) in pursuit of murky results.  The conditions which will prevail “when God permits invasion” (according to this person’s reading of the bible)) include the formation of monopolies, extensive wine and music, “unbelief in God’s judgments”, conceit, “wine and bribes in high places”, and “perverted moral stanfa5rds.  All of this—it is claimed—can be remedied through one medium:  prayer; and prayer through only one mediator, Jesus Christ, who would then take the communications to god’s ear.  

The Attack on America, published by the Friendly Sons of St Patrick (of NYC), was a cautionary pamphlet published in 1920 warning against certain dispassionate evils of British propaganda in the United States.  Freedom or Enslavement for United States of America (sic), published in 1939 for the Mothers of United States of America (sic) advocated a freedom policy that prohibited conscription in foreign wars and would present a state of permanent neutrality. It also made some pretty vicious anti-Roosevelt attacks, finding him the Socialist root of the coming empire of American evils with a wildly power-mad and legislative-grabbing presidency.

 

Quite a grouping of pamphleteers concerned with the potential overthrow of the United States, each seeing the unfortunate possibility of national death via divergent and disparate means:  the fall of the country due to not being part of the Allies during the war and also for being in it; biblical ordination of invasion that is only combatable through prayer; British and European propaganda control of the national welfare; and of course the diabolical Socialist menace of Franklin Roosevelt and the imperial presidency as the ruination of the nation's future.  All of this gently hidden by disturbing titles which really dont give you a hint about what wildly unexpected ways the end was approaching.  And whatever they were, they were definitely not high-order thinking.

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.".

 

 

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…”

Episodes in the History of Dropping Things--Baby Bombs, Bomb Babies and Dropping Women on Manhattan

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1670

In the history of dropping things--as distinguished from simple falling things--it must be said I think that this is the easiest of all human activities ever invented, and people have been trying to improve on this creation ever since.  After all, almost anyone can do it and--if you include pushing things over a ledge so that they might fall--most complex life forms can do it, too. 

Of course there have been intellectual and technological adaptations, particularly when you include throwing and shooting things so that the objects have been charged with a "created height" so that they will be dropped in the designated location.  Cannons have been particular benefit to this aspect of advanced dropping.  And then of course there are the "Galileos" of dropping--like Galileo--and Jonas Moore and David Letterman and of course Seinfeld's Kramer, and to a lesser extent there's also every other person from the Boston area who represent hundreds of millions of people who drop a letter from somewhere in their spoken vocabulary.  There are people who drop their accents altogether, and of course politicians who drop the truth, and the tantilizers who drop suggestions, and paid-for pharmaceutical consultants who drop the untoward test results and their accountants who drop a zero when necessary.

[Image source:  June, 1936, Popular Mechanics.]

People drop options, they drop in and out and off, pennies and dimes, lawsuits and dumplings, coverage and names and the f-bomb.  They also drop dead and bombs, the last two being closely related, though more people "drop dead" when bombed because they are killed. 

Bombs seem to be the biggest of all dropped things, especially bombs dropped by airplanes, and especially those bombs dropped on collections of people, which are called cities.

Perhaps one of the strangest things to be dropped, though, is the following, found in  the September 1935 issue of Popular Mechanics

This was a model of sorts for a critical-care-parachute-gurneystretcher, or something, for when a crew member of a U.S. Army Air Force aircraft was injured and needed care, though the article doesn't specify where the person would be dropped. Overall it seems not the height of workable ideas, and suffered no doubt from its model using a baby doll, which just looks altogether wrong. 

And the last part of this episode is another strange bit:  dropping women on Manhattan. The  image comes from 1904 and--when taken out of context--it seems as though Manhattan is in for the worst of it, with a view in front of the Flat Iron Building of an aerial bombardment of women.  This is probably one of the few bad things that weren't done with/at women, and would actually significantly predate the first use of explosives being dropped from aircraft.  Unfortunately the original, intended image was a poke at  crinoline  and featured women being blown up into the air rather than the other way around, though I like my interpretation better.

 

Electro-Punk Heavy Metal Birthing Machine--a Fantastically Bad Idea

JF Ptak Science Books   Re-posting entry #1500

I found this by accident, and needed to share it immediately, because in the splendid and chilly vastness of the infinite Encyclopedia of Bad Ideas, this entry would seem quite the poster child for such a stupendous effort--the mud to which all dust aspires. 

The centrifugal machine for human birth...its hard to even finish that sentence, let alone finish it without wincing.

I think what we have here is the Vitruvian Woman of Bad Ideas relating to human birth, the patent described more fully in this great piece by Marc Abrahams (of the Annals of Improbable Research) in The Guardian, 2006):

 

Read the rest of this post here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1661

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

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

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

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

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

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

[One of the forged Sachsenhausen notes.]

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

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

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

Notes:

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

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

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

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

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

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

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

[Picture source:  All Ways NY.]

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