Ptak Science Books

A Prehistoric Rayograph--a Proto-Example of Man Ray from 1810

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1843

“I have never painted a recent picture." Man Ray, 1966

“Unconcerned but Not Indifferent”—1976, Man Ray’s epitaph.

Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890 –1976) removed the “Emm_uel”  and the “__dnitzk” from his names to become Man Ray, a South Philly-born, Brooklyn- and Manhattan-bred Parisian ex-Pat artist became (by the early 1920’s) perhaps the most influential of the Dadaist/modernist photographers. No offense to his given name, but “Man Ray” is superior.

 

And Man Ray was far more than a photographer, as he worked across many different art forms, not the least of which was motion pictures.  But what comes to my mind first with his name is his self-titled “rayograph”, a photographic process which was actually a photogram, which was the direct exposure of an object placed upon a photosensitive paper.  This is also the earliest form of photography, something employed by Fox Talbot who called it “photogenic drawing”) as early as 1834.  (I wrote a little bit about this process in a post "Things That Almost Were But Weren't".) But Man Ray’s rayographs stand clear and distinct to me, different even from his contemporaries’ works (including Susan Derges, Max Ernst, Raoul Hausmann, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Rodchenko).  

 Of course my antiquarian pretender (the image on the above right) to the rayograph isn’t one—it just had the look and feel of one, contained that shock of recognition that I had seen it before, and the palce where I would’ve seen it was with Man Ray.  All I did with this engraving—an image of clockworks published in Abraham Rhee’s Encyclopedia of 1810--was to solarize it.  So it isn’t even a rayograph, but just looks like one, though Man Ray did work quite a bit with the solarized image.  I just like it. 

This is the engraving in its "before" (and superior) state:

 

Daily Dose of Dr. Odd: the Future at the End of Burning Ash (Cigarette Card Visions)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Three wonderful images of the future, brought to the viewer via the tobacco trading cards interests in the 1920's--a future that could very well have been denied by the user of the product that advertised it. 
Source: New York Public LIbrary Digital Collections, here.

A Note on Music of the Future and Wagner's Trashbin Philosophy, 1879

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This cartoon appears in Punch in 1879, and it clearly show's the bitey Mr. Punch's proclivities towards the rise of the "music of the future".  Over the years Punch had seen little value in the new music possibilities, the form and function of which is on display in this kinetic appreciation of a hyper-functioning orchestra.  There is a considerable stab made at Richard Wagner (as we can see in the scores on the floor), the composer who perhaps (along with his considerable supporter, Franz Liszt) was at the deepest heart of the publishing end of the "music of the future".

Wagner published his views on the development of music and art in general for the future in Das Kunstwerke der Zukunfts (1849), and then more specifcally to music in Zukunfstmusik ("La Musique de l'Avenir") in  1850.  But little of that feels like very much to me at all, given the other work he was completing in 1850--Das Judenthum in der Musik.  In some circles the work is translated as "Jewishness in Music" and also "Judaism in Music", but this is far too polite--what Wagner was talking about was "Jews in Music" or "The Jew in Music", as it was a savage attack on the place of Jewish people in music and of Judaism as a whole.  It is a virulent and nasty work, first published anonymously to protect Wagner's "freedom" (as he called it) and then again--unable to leave it alone--in 1869, proudly under his own name.  The work is widely seen as a hallmark of German antisemitism and an embarrassment to Wagnerians, and in some editions of Wagner's complete collected works, it is forgotten.  On the other hand, it wasn't just here that Wagner's antisemitic views are made known--he was a prolific writer, and his work against the Jews appeared numerous times in newspapers and other periodicals, playing the same tune.

I'm okay with the man's name on the floor. 

The Future of Building in Manhattan, 1875

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1828

This is an interesting and somewhat reserve view of the future of Manhattan, as seen from the pre-Centenniel eye of 1875, showing Trinity Church bookended by high-rise structures:

[Source: Harper's Weekly, via the New York Public Library Digital Collection, here.]

It would have been difficult to imagine structures of any greater height here in pre-elevator (and pre-elevator/Westinghouse brakes)  and early post-iron-structure days than the spire of Trinity Church. This Trinity (the third and current occupiers of an old spot at 79 Broadway, the first of the Trinitys going up in 1698 with the help of he block and tackle of Capt. William Kidd, privateer/probably-not-pirate) was the tallest building in Manhattan when it was built in 1846 (at 281' to the tip of the spire), and remained so the tallest until the construction of the New York World  Building (305') in 1890. (The World building was torn down in 1955 to make room for another on-ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge.)  So when this image was published it was still another 15 years away from anything being taller than the Trinity tower, which meant it was a pretty fair leap of faith to assume department stores crowding out the church's airspace back in 1875.

It is a pretty good approximation of what actually happened, though the canyonesque feel for development is more on Wall Street than it was here contiguous to the church grounds, though almost no one could imagine the dense high-rise growth that is there today:

There are many more colorful approximations of what might happen in Manhattan, one of which I've included below, showing the full and complete development of downtown, with trains leading away from the city right through the Statue of Liberty. This peep into a possible future appeared in Harper's Weekly on 18 May 1887.  It is the work of artist W.A. Rogers and depicts a filling-up lower Manhattan, complete with broad avenues lined by elevated trains whose reach evidently knows no bounds. The new elevated subway winds its way across the harbor to Liberty Island, where it wraps itself around the feet and up the body of the newly--dedicated Statue of Liberty (opened in October of the previous year).  In the foreground is the cupola of a transit station with a fluttering flag advertising "Coney Island via Broadway"--I'm not sure what this is all about, as the placement of the island has nothing to do with anything except making a point in the cartoon.

It is interesting to see though that the Trinity spire is still very visible.

Daily Dose of Dr. Odd--Future of Air Travel, ca. 1900

JF Ptak Science Books     Daily Dose of Dr. Odd 2

In today's quick dose from Dr. Odd we find the "United Air Line" (so close to the name that actually came into being), ca. 1900, featuring an enormous and extraordinarily heavily-bodied airship of a construction of pure speculation.  It is gigantic and weighty, and it seems as though the thing is powered by pulsating awning-like wings and a series of covered propellers, all under what seems to be sail. 

The crowds bustling beneath the behemoth seem as any other crowd waiting for the subway, or third class, or, well, whatever sort of mass transport would await and was taken for granted.  There are no bands, no fireworks, no fanfare, just the arrival/departure of yet another airship leaving for London from New York City, as much a cause for attention as any airliner traveling overhead.

Source:  New York Public Library Digital Collections, here.

Source:  New York City Digital Collection, here.

Daily Dose from Dr. Odd--Future of NYC Underground

JF Ptak Science Books        Daily Dosage from Dr. Odd 1

This remarkable cutaway (1910) shows what might have been considered a possible future for the future of possible New York Citys .  This one features a very highly respectful continuous conveyor belt of humanity coursing through the Great Underneath, replacing the ideas of subway transport.  A seat would always be available if it was so, just a=one giant beltwork of seat stretching from SOuth Ferry to Uptown and to Brooklyn and so on.  But since it was always moving it would have to move a little slowly for people to hop on and off, so a trip to the then-Uptown might take some time. 

Source:  New York Public Library Digital Collection, here.

Not to be out-belted, there was also an image of moving sidewalks (1903):

Source:  New York Public Library Digital Collection, here.

What a Biologically-Downloaded Intelligencer Virus Might Look Like in 2112.

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Books

Somehow, in some way that is difficult for us to imagine in 2012, these ads were attractive enough in the mid-last-century.  Of course we have our own examples of this behavior, only more-so, I expect, given the vast multiples of advertising we undertake today.  Somehow it feels as though there just isn't enough space in our own year for the sheer weight and smell of ads, and that some of them must be occupying and stealing oxygen from our time in the future.  Then again, in the future maybe we will all be paying for quiet in our brains so as to not be subjected to nothing but constant streams of commercialism, perhaps inherent in our neurons, ads becoming a part of the very part of the thought process, commercials interrupting our creative process, and popping up at appropriate times in the process of recollection. (Happy thought, that). 

And so this might look to be an unbelievable, incoherent way of attracting someone to eat pork bellies and eyelids--but at least it appeared in a print ad in 1948 (or whatever), and that was the end of it.  In the future if this was seen once it might be possible for the thing to be incorporated in a memory process that had anything to do with the letters "p" "o" "r" "k" when put together in a row, frontwards or backwards. That'll be when we have to pay for our memories to be cleaned of commercial sponsors.  

I can see a short story developing from this, of a person in the year 2112 (on 11 November) having a problem with the artificial memory intelligencer--the things that would make us "smart" in the future--where the biologically-downloaded data contained a virus (literal or figurative) that caused the man to think about this image every time a thought was thunk.  And there was nothing that could be done for him, short of him raising twice the labor exchange units that he had access to in order for this image to be expunged.  No ransom payment meant seeing this pig a thousand times a day.  And so a new crime is born. 

Telling the Future with Urine and Bones: the Lyricism of Urine Wheels

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1820

For many centuries people have been trying to control the future, seeing into future’s past, using tea leaves, foreheads, palm prints, brain bumps, nose angles, the position of the stars, rolled animal bones and printed interpretations of the creator of the universe.  Some of these have faded into embarrassed obscurity, but only some; some methods are present today, stronger than ever. 

The rolled bones part of this makes the prettiest pictures, I think: for example, this image from Paul Pambst¹ (published in 1546) shows some of the dice combinations and what they would correspond to in the revolving paper disks and columns of interpretations in the body of the book, a simple throwing of shaped animal residue somehow laying claim to predictive power.  Not that it is much different from any of the other divination methods. 

One such method that had been in strong and continued use for thousands of years and is now mostly relegated to dust is the heated up and swirling inspection of urine.  It was thought for millenia that pee held secrets to what was going on inside the body, and that was mostly true, except that given the state of medical knowledge the only thing that the practioner could do with the sample was hold it up to the light and make good solid guesses on how color/consistency corresponded to the patient.  A reddish tint (as we see here in this painting by Gerrit Dou (1613-1675, and who made an appearance in yesterday’s post) might suggest that the (female) subject was suffering from morbens virginus (uterine hysteria, “a signifying of too much concoction in the body”), which, when the imaginary disease/unease was diagnosed would’ve led to lead consumption and a good bleeding.

 Moving slightly up the alpha from Pambst is Udalr Pinder, whose Epiphanie Medicorum…² (published in Nurnberg in 1506) is a state-of-the-art disposition on urine inspection, complete with this pee color wheel.  This idea is as interesting as it is entertaining, because at its base is a scientific aspect of trying to establish a common (color) base for discussion of specimens.  The color descriptions (taken in translation from Kirsten Jungersen’s  (MA, classical philologist, visiting scholar, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen) “The relation between text and colours in medieval urine wheels” (here) are poetic, lyrical. They are also a small insight into common things of the 15^th century, the author selecting colors from things that were ubiquitous and known to everyone, and so in this way could be used as a basis for the common understanding of a given color. 

And so here are the glorious colors (complete in “extended reading” below with the Latin above), most of which I’ve never heard as descriptors…and would love to see as an adopted sub-there by Crayola (“Crayola Urine Wheel Colors”):

“Bluish-grey as camel skin; White as wellwater; Light blue/green/grey as lucid horn; Milky as whey of milk; Slightly pale as a not reduced juice of Meat; Pale yellow as of a not reduced lemon; Wine-red as of animal liver; Black as very dark horn; Ruddy as pure intense gold; Green as green cabbage.”  And of course:

“Slightly red as a lowered flame of fire”

and

“Red as a flame of fire not lowered”

 They’re lovely!

But of course none of this was actually going to help anyone very much, especially when you moved from uroscopy into urinomancy (not a word one gets to use very often), where instead of trying to diagnose dis-ease the urinomancer would try to diagnose the future.  Often heat was applied to the jar (matula) of urine, which would do, well, I don’t know what.  It certainly looks dramatic, and makes for some excellent opportunities for artists to discern candle-lit color and wonderful reflections (as in Dou).  Actually, it was in this way that the golden color of urine was determined (poor alchemists!) not to come from gold at all—urine was finally boiled away until its component urea was discovered (in 1773)³. So heat did have a real and important function, but it took hundreds of years to get there properly.

And so it goes that predicting the future with urine was swept into histories dark places, though somehow bone throwers and astrologers managed to escape this fate. 

Notes:
  1. Paul Pambst. Loozbuch zu ehren der Roemischen…published in Strassburg in 1546.  The Robert Sabuda website for popup books ahs a very good short essay on this book, here.

2. Epiphanie Medicorum. Speculum videndi urinas hominum. Clavis aperiendi portas pulsuum. Berillus discernendi causas & differentias febrium.

3.  H.M. Rouelle first discovered and isolated  1773, and then synthesized by Friedrich Woehler in 1828. This was big and important stuff.
 

Color Wheel Colors, continued below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

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

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

And so:

The Rolling Houses and Glass Homes of Futurlandia

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

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

[Image source, Motherboard via Retronaught]

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

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

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

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

The Stages of Human Life--Illustrated

JF PTtak Science Books      Post 1796    [Part of the History of the Future series.]

I came across this fantastic representation of the stages of human life in the beautifully-named book by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, All the Properytees of Thyings, which was published in Westminster in 1495 (and also known as De proprietatibus rerum, also translated as On the nature of things, or On the properties of things), and which was originally written around 1225).  The book was a bestiary, a marvelous encyclopedia, a collection of all things as known in the 13th century--it would be interesting to represent all that is know today and compact it into a workable, logical, usable (printed !) book of a thousand pages.  One of those many images was this:

 a simple, compact reminder to the book's readers about the progression of life.  Infant, toddler (in a Renaissance walker), child (at games), teen (adopting some of the trappings of adulthood), prime-of-life, middle aged and then the leaning elder. 

It strikes me that the idea of "stages" is what most of what experience might be--the ideas of "stages" and "progression" are everywhere, even perhaps in the places they shouldn't be.  There are simple things like rockets that keep releasing smaller and smaller stages of itself until it gets down to the (satellite etc.) nub; sleep has its five stages resulting in the final resting state of r.e.m.,; there are recognized stages of  development for psychology (Erikson), and cognition (Piaget) and need (Maslkow) and  moral (Kohlberg), and spiritual (Fowler), and  economic (lots) and on and on into the progressive stages of the sunset. Progression and series belong in arithmetic and geometry (and etc.) and in the scientific method, as well as music (succession of chords) and disease (more so than health).  Examples are limitless.  But for right now, I just wanted to post a few images of these antique reminders of progression and mortality...

The Stages of Life, broadside published by James Catnach, London c. 1830. British Museum.

The Moon Made of Brick, 1869

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1795

In 1869 Edward Everett Hale (author of "A Man WIthout a Country" in 1863 and also one of the earliest pieces of fiction regarding alternative worlds in"Hands Off" in 1883) wrote a piece of speculative fiction called "The Brick Moon", a story told int he form of a journal of Capt. Frank Ingham, relating the story of the launching of a satellite that was to be an aid to navigation.  The construction was fantastic--a sphere made of concentric rings of brick enclosed by an outer layer of brick, reaching 200 feet in diameter, to be hurled into space by two gigantic flywheels on a polar orbit 4,000 miles high, providing a new bright shining star as a means of determining longitude.

"Any section through any diameter looked like an immense rose-window, of six circles grouped round a seventh. In truth, each of these sections would reveal the existence of seven chambers in the moon,—each a sphere itself,—whose arches gave solidity to the whole; while yet, of the whole moon, the greater part was air. In all there were thirteen of these moonlets, if I am so to call them; though no one section, of course, would reveal so many. Sustained on each side by their groined arches, the surface of the whole moon was built over them and under them,—simply two domes connected at the bases. The chambers themselves were made lighter by leaving large, round windows or open circles in the parts of their vaults farthest from their points of contact, so that each of them looked not unlike the outer sphere of a Japanese ivory nest of concentric balls. You see the object was to make a moon, which, when left to its own gravity, should be fitly supported or braced within. Dear George was sure that, by this constant repetition of arches, we should with the least weight unite the greatest strength. I believe it still, and experience has proved that there is strength enough."   [Full story here.]

[Image source: here, from the Encyclopedia of Science website.]

Getting the enormous and fantastically heavy "moon" not only off the ground but into space would be an enormous and fantastic mystery--solved here by Hale by the thing being "left to its own gravity" and the two giant flywheels. 

It was in this story, published in serial form in the Atlantic Monthly, that the idea of the artificial satellite was introduced.  Actually, it was also more than that, because a foul-up caused an early launch of the sphere, launching it into orbit with people on board, making it the first space station.  And it was certainy the first collection of space bricks. Of course this took an enormous leap of imagination and insight, and Hale's effort must be applauded as a visionary work.

 

 

Anti-Prediction: On Being Horribly Wrong in Predicting Next Year's Future (1938)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1773 [Part of the History of the Future series.]

Sometimes as the saying goes a bad answer isn't right; and sometimes it isn't right so much that it isn't even wrong.  Here we have a collection of not-even-wrongs, tidily collected in one pamphlet.  It is a booklet of "predictions" that are so deeply off the mark that I suspect the author would not even be able to make post facto predictions. 

Had  author R.J. Rasmussen (The Amazing Future, 1938) real powers of diving the future he should've been able to see that choosing to be so dreadfully wrong about the events of 1939 was a truly bad thing to do--of course, if there was some sort of unknown and spectacular power in his brain to see what was coming, the least he could've been was right.  But he wasn't, and he wasn't right very widely, and very widely not right almost all of the time.  To give the devil his due, Rasmussen did get some broad images correct--like in 1939 a world leader will get sick and die.  (Actually, the world leaders dying in 1939 weren't current leaders, but that is a particular that escapes detail when thinking about stuff that will come to pass.) And then there's the bold "a high ranking officer in the U.S. army will pass away". But those broad brushes are about as close as it gets to "prediction".  He was right that there would be a year 1939.

The rest is "anti-prediction":  "I want to advise all pilots and their aides in the United States...to use utmost good judgment in flying your planes".  And "again I say that no war will be declared on or with Germany", cancer will be cured on or before August 26, 1939, and there will be an increase in textile production in the U.S.  The Japanese war against China "will be over by August 21, 1941", though the cost will be monumental to the Japanese, somehow; Germany "will continue to forge ahead" (?),  the map of Africa "will be completely and totally changed" by 1942, and "during this period there will be increased interest shown in higher lines of thought". And so on, on and on--by the hundreds.

Finally, among everything else that the author didn't see was the following:  "the persecution of the Jewish people in Germany will gradually grow less and less that they have ever know in the past thirty years, and before the year 1939 has passed it will have practically ceased in Germany".  I must say that of all the minor pamphlets like this that I have seen Mr. Rasmussen made the most detailed and incorrect predictions of anyone that I have ever seen--the only further step backward he might've been able to make was to have written this book in 1941 and gotten all of the history wrong. 

Modest Expectations--Engineers Stand in the Shallow End of the Future Pool

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1769

The novel underneath its title can be good or bad in spite of it, independent of the flag under which it flies. Its just helpful, usually, if the title is as good as the book—better even, because, after all, Modest Expectations isn't quite as good as the real thing. But “Modest Expectations” seems as thought hat would be the title of future vision in this advertisement that appeared in 1929. It is an advertisement in Collier's magazine by an engineering company during the time in which The Engineer and the possibilities of engineering were running full-blaze in the United States. There was a belief in the idea of engineering as a cure-all to present and future problems, and the word was as prevalent in the sphere of social interaction as the prefix “e-” was in the early days on internet business and communication in the 1990's.

It seems as though there were few occupations immune from the “-engineer” suffix, whether they had anything specifically to do with engineering, or not. The “control safety engineer” described a crossing guard; “sanitary engineer” referred to what was known as a garbage man; “nutrition control engineer” was a food server, and so on, position names changed by the hundreds if not more, elevating the status of a profession by simply applying the meme's suffix to the job title. IF you judged the overuse of the term by the actual accomplishments and achievements of engineering of the times, it was probably justified, give the enormous progress of engineering. In just the first decade of the 20^th century enormous change were made in the way life was/would be lived with the introduction of the steam turbine generator, the internal combustion engine, heavier-than-air powered aircraft, the audion, the vacuum diode, the thermionic valve, Bakelite, and so on, all of which would soon bring technological change to create revolutionary changes in the way life was structured in the U.S. And worldwide.

But given the gigantic changes in the first 30 years of the 20^th century, what was it that the engineer was seeing in this advertisement, “The Engineer Looks into the Future”? What was it in the hand of the engineer in the illustration, what was he placing down in the city of tomorrow, today? A faster train, or space ship or part of a vacuum tube people-mover, or what?

It turns out that this engineer didn't have such lofty future-vision plans—in fact, the vision was subterranean, and the thing in the engineer's hands was cast iron pipe. Yes, the future was in materials, and that material manifested itself in cast iron pipe, courtesy of the Cast Iron Pipe Association.

Now cast iron had been around for a long time before 1929—even used as pipe the idea goes back into the 16^th century. There were bridges made of cast iron in the 18^th century, and the movement towards the modern skyscraper maybe traced back to cast iron facades and construction in the 1850's. I'm not so sure why cast iron pipe was so significant in 1929—perhaps it wasn't so very widely used. But I must admit to having a “moment of discovery” while I tried to reason why the future of engineering looked into a hole in the ground filled with cast iron pipe.

Another interesting image that comes a little earlier on is this advertisement for the “Institute of Efficiency” (in 1917), which in effect takes the running-rampant ideas of engineering and applies it to the ways in which people ran their personal lives. Efficiency was as much a catch-word as “engineering”, and it was in this decade that saw the appearance of Scientific Management (Fred. Winslow Taylor) and its numerous offshoots. What bothered me about this ad marshaling the positive factors of the study-at-home courses in efficiency was its inefficient use use of space and communication of the idea. Not the least of which was the very odd bit in the bottom right corner, which the reader was supposed to fill in and clip off and send to the Efficiency people. There's really no room to write, and you can't actually mail the thing—and, if I was trying to get someone to purchase something about improving their efficiency I might have wanted to make it much easier for them to send me something with their name on it.  The whole effort just seems not very efficient.