Ptak Science Books

Isolating ElectroPunk pre-Dadist Illuminated Signs, 1867-1919

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1919

I am quite certain that entering into a category of ElectoPunk Found Art was the furthest/furtherest thing from the minds of these inventors, mainly because these words didn't yet exist, and also because these inventors worked on practicable application of the relatively new employment of electricity for advertising. Still, they were serious efforts in pursuing the sale of soap and cigars and "pure food" and other sundries large and small.  But removing them fro their intentions clearly makes these designs into art, some of which is just drop-down gorgeous. 

 

 

"Damaged Glob" and ElectroLux Found Word Art, 1883-1920

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Not much to say on these images--they're just terribly neat. There seems to be a sensible amount of proto-Dadist material here, extolling distant observation, attracting and repelling the reader with its distracting possibilities, all ending with an upside-down "Earl".  At the very least, these images are "pretty". 

 

 

Robot Roundup: Edenless Eve (1927) & the Great Texas Robot (1936)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1909

[Image source: Popular Mechanics, September 1936, page 400.]

Robots, or mechanical beings, or mechanized forms of humanity or from the animal kingdom have been around in popular literature for many decades by the time this giant robot appeared in Texas in 1936¹. (The idea is old though the name "robot" didn't appear until Karel Capek invented it for his book on the future called R.U.R in 1920.  Actually the human-like forms created by Capek in this early scifi work were biotech, and not fully mechanized.) The form of the robot stretches back hundreds of years, in a way--if not the exactly the idea of a robot, but at least with the appearance of one.

Such is the case with Albrecht Durer's (1471-1528) revolutionary drawing of a geometrical man, compartmentalizing the bodyd into distinct chunks--these and other woodcuts appeared in his Symmetria partium…humanorum corporum and must have been an amazing, startling site for the new reader to such things in 1537.To me this looks like visionary thinking in trying to understand the motions of living beings with no actual way of capturing the image in motion. 

[This and many other images from the fabulous Bibliodyssey website, here.]

All of which are retro-reminiscent of early robots, like this from The Fantast in 1939:

[Image source: the wonderful Cybernetic Zoo website, with loads of images and timelines, here.]

Seven years late in Nuremberg Erhard Schoen published Unnderweissung der proportzion unnd stellung der possen, liegent und stehent..., which  followed Durer showing that the human form was reducible to connected but discrete Euclidean solids:

History of Dropping Things: Electro-Punk Machine for Waking/Smothering People

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

Here's an ambitious alarm clock that I stumbled across--something designed so as to not be ignored, something for the people who regularly sleep through simple alarm clocks.  This device, patented by Samuel S. Applegate in 1882, woke the sleeping client by dropping that cage-resembling apparatus on the sleeper's head.  Evidently the ends of the suspension were soft, but hard enough to cause the sleeper to get straight-away back into the waking world. There's probably nothing quite so like being slapped awake every morning.

 

The apparatus is seen better here--it is an unusual contrivance:

Such a pretty picture of the sleeper, though I must admit the perspective would've been a bit of a challenge especially to a challenged  artist. 

 

Okay, this one is walking people using water dropped on the sleeper's neck:

Electro-LUXurious 15: Electroplating the Human Dead, 1891

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is the 15th installment of a new series on United States Patent Reports on electrical quackery and unsubstantiated bric--a-brac from the newly-electric world of the period of 1870-1900--the following is a little outside the norm, being French, but I couldn't resist it. 

When a picture just isn't enough...

And while we’re at it, let’s consider the work of Dr. Varlot (of the Paris Hospital) in electrocuting the dead.  Actually, what he proposed was another pretty gruesome use of electricity, though this one didn't make promises of miraculous cures, or execute anyone.  Varlot proposed to “metalize” the dead (as we see in this very unsettling image of a child being electroplated) for, well, some purpose, purpose unknown.  It just seems and seemed like a bad idea, all the way around--a poster child for Bad Ideas everywhere. The medical uses of an electroplated baby seem very limited, and I can’t imagine anyone wanting to do such a thing to a dead child of their own.  It is wrong on every level.

The engraving comes from Leonard de Vries, Victorian Inventions" (1971), who quotes the original source (the Scientific American for 1891) with this description of the procedure:

"Dr Varlot, a surgeon in a major hospital in Paris, has developed a method of covering the body of a deceased person with a layer of metal in order to preserve it for eternity.  The drawing illustrates how this is done with the cadaver of a child.  The body is first made electrically conductive by atomising nitrate of silver on to it.  To free the silver in this solution, the object is placed under a glass dome from which the air is evacuated and exposed to the vapours of white phosphorous dissolved in carbon disulphide.  Having been made conductive, the body is immersed in a galvanic bath of sulphate of copper, thus causing a 1 millimetre thick layer of metallic copper to be deposited on the skin.  The result is a brilliant red copper finish of exceptional strength and durability."

Another method of electroplating the dead (in 1934) is discussed in the interesting blog, Quigley's Cabinet, here. 

Electro-LUXurious 14: The Happy Electric Chair, 1890

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is the 14th installment of a new series United States Patent Reports on electrical quackery and unsubstantiated bric--a-brac from the newly-electric world of the period of 1870-1900.

 The history of the electric chair is odd, and ironic.  The "electric chair" that we think of first when we hear the phrase is actually the "electrocution chair", and it comes into being after the introduction of the medicinal electric chair, which was designed as a palliative, electrical ointment of sorts for people with virtually any form of physical complaint.  Thomas Edison introduced the notion of the lethal use of punitive electricity in a brilliant if not diabolical ploy, suggesting in 1888 that Hew York State  pursue the new procedure of executing its condemned via the use of an electrified recliner, using the Westinghouse AC system--and thereby forcing the association of his competitor Westinghouse's  electricity with electrocution in the mind of the general public. (I can only imagine being a Westinghouse exec and waking up to that bit of Edisonian showmanship; there's an earlier post on this blog here that discusses the electric chair in more detail.)

These chairs below are good examples of the earlier quack/medicinal sparking loungerettes, even if they are dated a little later (1890). 

Electro-LUXurious 12: Electrical Casket Vacuums

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is the 12th installment of a new series United States Patent Reports on electrical quackery and unsubstantiated bric--a-brac from the newly-electric world of the period of 1870-1900. 

This extraordinary device was an experiment in the further purification of the American way of death.  The casket was fitted with an electrical heating element which--after viewing of The Departed was completed--would be activated to heat a soft metal, which would seal the casket.  After this, the casket would be pumped to "form a vacuum" so that there would be no further deterioration of the deceased.  There seem to have been at least a dozen different designs for these caskets from 1880 to 1950 or so, each building on some hope and prayer for the benefits of the dead not deteriorating, for whatever that was worth. 

Electro-LUXurious 13: Electrical Baths, 1877-1890

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is the 12th installment of a new series United States Patent Reports on electrical quackery and unsubstantiated bric--a-brac from the newly-electric world of the period of 1870-1900. 

 Let's state as a given that some things are real, and some things aren't.  There is a very broad history of things believed to be real but weren't, or aren't--I'm not sure what the percentage of those things would be in the overall Scheme of Things, whether the things-that-aren't outnumber the things-that-are, or not.  It does seem ready for a Dr. Seussian treatment, though. 

Thomas Edison (in)famously fooled a reporter into thinking that he was creating a phone to the dead, an unintentional hoax that he allowed to fester for as long as he (Edison) lived; H.L. Mencken wrote a fictitious story about the history of bathtubs, a humorous piece, really, that turned out to be a satire on the way things are perceived and published, as the story took on a life of its own as factual, reported as true to this day even though Mencken stated immediately afterwards that it was a joke. 

And then there are the real things that aren't--not really--and look (and sound) that way.  Such is the case with these fabulous electric baths, below.  As is what seems to be the custom with patent reports (from this period, anyway), the inventor needed to thoroughly explain how the invention was made to function, while not actually addressing what that function was. This was lucky for the inventor and manufacturer, though not necessarily so for the consumer.  Had these electrical quack devices worked, the introduction of electric hair, electrically-induced mega-bowels, sharp eyes, pretty teeth, accelerated masculinity, relaxed femininity, spine straighteners, beard growers, inner-secret-strength enhancers, and so on, would've produced a nation of ________ brought about the miracle of electricity.

In this vein, here are a few examples of electric baths, including one with one of the scariest drawings of a person I've ever seen in a patent report:

Electro-LUXurious 11: Medical Electrifying-Liquid Injector, 1862

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is the fourth in a new series of posts on interesting, early applications of electricity, most of which are taken from the archives of the U.S. Patent Office.

I'm not sure exactly what Mr. Paige was trying to do with this electrical implement of his--he writes:

which to my mind means that he is passing a "medicine" over or into some part of the body and while doing so either passes a charge through the liquid or provides a small series of shocks to the affected area so that it hurries the treatment along a little faster, or with more efficacy, or something.  Whether this is a topical application, or a delivery to an open wound, or to an incision is not altogether clear to me. As is generally the case with these things, the inventor is given the luxury in the patent report of not having to say what the thing they have invented actually "does" after describing how it is that the machine will "do" it. 

Electro-LUXurious 10: The Wandering Uterus and the Issue of Female Satisfaction

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1492

This is the 10th in a new series of posts on interesting, early applications of electricity, most of which are taken from the archives of the U.S. Patent Office.

As usual there is no explanation for the intended function or outcome was for these belts, although I think that they occupied two ends of a spectrum.  It seems as though the women's belt apparatus was meant to address "female hysteria", which for many centuries was seen as the dementia a woman suffers when she felt the need to fill up her womb with a baby; Plato (in his Timaeus) reckoned that the uterus actually detaches and wanders through the body, causing all manner of havoc, including "hysteria". 

Plato, who lived ca. from the mid 4th to mid 3rd century of the common era, commented so:

 “The animal within them is desirous of procreating children, and when remaining unfruitful long beyond its proper time, gets discontented and angry, and wandering in every direction through the body, closes up the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives them to extremity, causing all varieties of disease.”  --Plato, Timaeus, 91c

 (It is odd that Plato starts this book out with Socrates counting to three, but that's another story I guess.)

The issue of the physiology of the uterus received modern treatment in modern times, though the philosophical aspects of this and other similar issues managed to rip themselves free of biology and culturally implant themselves without the benefit of factual support, lending their entirely questionable weight to the continued issue of the subjugation of women.  The idea of woman's "hysteria" as a very wide term into which all classes of medical concern was dumped seeped into the 20th century, and was answered with devices such as this electro-onanistic medical quackery.

 

 For the men it seemed that the issue of "seminal seepage" and erection control was answered with devices such as this thing, below, a slightly shocking reminder to keep thinking the pure thought:

And of course a belt like this would not be complete without "complete" treatment, and so is included the following "attachments", Fig 7 being the one of some considerable interest to the wearer:

 

Of course it is entirely possible (likely?) that I have gotten this all wrong, completely wrong, and backwards.

Note:

Here's an interesting book:  Maines, Rachel P. (1998). The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria", the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Electro-LUXurious 9: Combination Medical Apparatus and Alarm System, 1892.

JF Science Books   Quick Post

This is the fourth in a new series of posts on interesting, early applications of electricity, most of which are taken from the archives of the U.S. Patent Office.

I am uncertain why there should be a combination bell/alarm and electrical stimulation medical device wrapped up in one small wooden package, but here it is.  Certainly there was no explanation for the need for the bell, or alarm; but then again, there wasn't an explanation on what this thing did to the body (or soul, or whatever) either--that was not the job of the patent report, which tells the reader how the thing works, but not necessarily what it does. Of course this is just finding fault with a small bit of nonsense wrapped up in a larger chunk of junk...perhaps it was all just distraction.  In the larger world of electrical vapor baths, vacuum coffins, electrical hair, automatic tongue pullers, and so on, what difference could one extra bell make?

 

 

 

Electro-LUXurious 8: Electrical Medical Cane, 1899

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is the eight in a new series of posts on interesting, early applications of electricity, most of which are taken from the archives of the U.S. Patent Office.  Unlike the general post in this blog, many of the Electro-LUXurious post images and documentation can be presented without commentary.

I thought at first when I found this "electric cane" that there would be a light source or something embedded in the hanle.  There is a small light bulb inside the handle, but there are no lenses, no glass; just metal caps.  It turns out that this is a medical cane, an electrical unit with brass or copper barrels to be held in the hands or applied to various areas of the body for electrical stimulation. 

Electro-LUXurious 7: Electric Hair Brush with Stimulator Sponges, 1899

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is the seventh in a new series of posts on interesting, early applications of electricity, most of which are taken from the archives of the U.S. Patent Office.  Unlike the general post in this blog, many of the Electro-LUXurious post images and documentation can be presented without commentary.

 

 

 

And then there's this beauty from 1912:

 

Electro-LUXurious 6: Electrical Probing Stimulator, 1898

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is the sixth in a new series of posts on interesting, early applications of electricity, most of which are taken from the archives of the U.S. Patent Office.  Unlike the general post in this blog, many of the Electro-LUXurious post images and documentation can be presented without commentary.

This, simply put, is  a vibrator, and in the 19th century was a medical response to female sexual arousal, which at the time was termed "hysteria".  And so women were sent to their medical practioner to be treated for hysteria with much larger units until the apparatus became small and portable enough to be used at home and without the assistance of the doctor. 

 

No doubt.

We read further that figure 3 "is a side view of a cylindrical electrode for internal treatment". 

 

Electro-LUXurious 5: Alpha and Omega Casket and the History of Death

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1491

This is the fifth in a new series of posts on interesting, early applications of electricity, most of which are taken from the archives of the U.S. Patent Office.  Unlike the general post in this blog, many of the Electro-LUXurious post images and documentation can be presented without commentary.

 It has not been an easy job over the centuries in determining whether a person was alive or dead, and dead as in really truly dead, absolutely so.  Consider how this would be done in case of coma and such in the days before the stethoscope, when doctors and medical people would use cones and other hearing apparatus to help the wizened old practitioner hear with their deteriorated hearing, listening for signs of life with an inferior instrument and limited auditory capacity.  (The stethoscope wasn’t invented until 1816 by Rene Laennec--who produced a monaural device much like a primitive hearing horn made of solid wood—which was a vast improvement over no stethoscope at all, by again was very crude compared to early 20^th century devices.) There is little wonder about the tales of horror of premature burial (as with Poe) and the spate of burial devices where--of the dead suddenly became not so, awakening in the coffins underground, that they could activate one of the many ingenious life-saving devices to alert someone to come and dig them up. (There were also patented designs that would deliver air to the coffin as well as have an accessible ladder to the surface.)

The most fool-proof way of determining death in the 19th century was to leave the body alone for three days or so to see if it began to putrefy--this was the method proposed by Christian August Struwe, among others, who advocated the construction of special hostels for the dead ("Leishenhauser"), where they, the supposed dead, would lie in state for the period of time necessary for putrefaction.  This was also among the most elegant solutions given limited technological capabilities, especially when compared to nipple-pulling, scalding, tongue-yanking and of course the infamous tobacco smoke enema (seen below).

What I am getting to though in the Electro-LUX series is the coffin/life-determination box, a sort of all-in-one affair where a body could be both determined to be dead and buried in the same thing, one of the few (?) medical devices that after performing its job be used as a coffin for its patient.  It is an alpha & omega bit, supposedly sparking to life the pre-dead if they were alive, or serve as the taxi to eternity for those who were truly and most sincerely dead.

I'm having a bit of fun with this, but the issue of what constitutes being "dead" is still somewhat contentious--the issue was much larger 150+ years ago, when the philosophical/physical/biological questions were still very wide open, still. 

 

Here are some other examples of determining whether a person was dead, or not, all taken from  Jan Bondeson’s delightful Buried Alive, the Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear (Norton, 2001):

--Christian Friedrich Nasse’s Thanatometer was a long thermometer  that was inserted into the stomach, supposedly measuring a core body temperature that would determine if life was possible (and published in 1841);

--The (Englishman’s) Barnett scalding death cure, which recommended burning the skin of the arm to see if it blistered (no blister/no life);

--the German Middeldorph invented a heart flag, a needle device that would be thrust into the heart, which if functioning would trigger something or other that would cause a flag to be released at the top of the needle (a very Victorian and visual one, this);

--Christian August Struwe’s interesting Lebenspruefer (1805) was an electrical device that delivered a dual shock to the eye and lip, the logic here being that if the person was still alive that there would be a resulting twitch;

--the nameless tobacco enema, which blew smoke…(delivered in the beginning by breath through a tube and improved later to replacing the lips with a bellows, this secondary improvement by Antoine Louis² and furthered by Dr. P.J.B. Previnaire’s much more powerful anal tobacco furnace.  [Now there’s three words I’ve never strung together before].)¹

--Leon Collongues believed that he could hear the capillary functions of a possibly-dead person’s fingers if placed in his ear;

--Jules Antoine Josat² invented a nipple-pincher ("pince-mamelon") life-rejuvenation device, operating on the assumption that a deeply sedated person could not resist a strong pinch of the nipple and would have to wake up if alive.

Perhaps the most spectacularly extension of the nipple-pincher was the tongue-pulling idea of Dr. J.-V. Laborde³ (1830-1903), a research physician with wide credentials, who reasoned that a continued regimen of advanced and strenuous pulling of a patient’s tongue would over time bring them back to life if alive.  This is what leads us to the point of this post:  Laborde established a mortuary, and in this mortuary, where the dead were waiting to die, he employed a man whose job it was to pull the tongues of these bodies.  In the misty picture of all of this that is painted in my mind’s eye, the fellow working his way from body to body pulling their tongues with a heavy pincer seems far worse than nipple squeezing or even being an anal smoke blower, though to choose between the three in a twisted Purgatorial mandate would be hard to so.  Although the nipple pincher wasn’t replaced by anything mechanical, the smoke blower was (by a powerful bellows), and so was our friend the tongue puller, who after complaining of the boredom of his task was pushed aside by an electrical device. 

Notes:

The text for the patent report, below:

1. From the Bondeson book, page 156:

"Antoine Louis had also proposed another method of testing life, or at least stimulating the vital spark in the apparently dead person: with a powerful bellows, he administered an enema of tobacco smoke. One of the pipes of this remarkable apparatus was thrust into the anus of the apparently dead person; the other was connected, by way of a powerful bellows, to a large furnace full of tobacco . Such enemas of tobacco smoke were thought to be very beneficial and were used to try to revive not only people presumed dead but also drowned or unconscious individuals. In 1784, the Belgian physician P.J.B. Previnaire was given a prize by the Academy of Sciences in Brussels for a book on apparent death, which described and depicted an improved bellows for enemas of tobacco smoke, which he called Der Doppelblaser. These enemas were regularly used well into the nineteenth century, particularly in Holland; modern science has discerned no physiological rationale for their use, except the pain and indignity of having a blunt instrument violently thrust up one's rear passage must have had some restorative effect."

2.  Josat.  From Weird Universe.net I found the following, quoting Death and Sudden Death, by Paul Brouardel and F.L. Benham:

“Josat invented a pair of forceps with claws, with which he proposed to pinch the nipples of persons whose death has to be ascertained. Josat obtained the first prize of the Academy, but Briquet, repeating the same tests on the hysterical subjects under his care, proved that they did not react under Josat's forceps any more than the dead.”

3.  M. Laborde won a 2500 franc prize for his innovation in 1894 (as reported by the Revue scientifique.  He sounded like an interesting man:  according to the British Medical Journal (in reporting his death 25 April1903) upon his own death in that year Laborde: “as a freethinker had a civil ceremony; as an hygienist was cremated; as a member of the Societe Mutuelle d’Autopsie willed his body to be dissected; as an anthropologist willed his brain to be preserved at the Anthropological Museum…” Some of Laborde's works include   Le traitement physiologique de la Mort. And Les tractions rythmées de la langue, moyen rationnel ... de ranimer la fonction respiratoire et la vie ... Avec ... dessins, etc  And:  La traitement physiologique de la mort (Paris , 1894) And: La signe automatique de la mort reelle (Paris, 1900). And  “Les Tractions Rhythmees de la Langue”, VIII, pp. 76 ff, ed. 2, Paris, 1897, and VIII, 2d part, pp. 406-510. And commented upon in some number, for example:  Le Traitement physiologique de la mort par les tractions rythmées de la langue. Le tracteur lingual automatique Laborde, by Alix Hache.