Ptak Science Books

A Paris Made to be Destroyed--Sham Paris, 1917/18

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1613  (Post 656--expanded) 

 

Now this was a case in which you were given the result and had to find everything else for yourself.  -- Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet

There is no doubt a history that could be written on shadow cities, cities that were built to resemble other cities, cities constructed to serve as a deterrent or double, cities set to deceive, cities constructed to be experimented upon. Some were built ot be destroyed.  Like Paris--or "Sham Paris". 

 

Augustine cleaved two cities from one, the good and the doomed, in The City of God.   The powers that were in Paris at the end of World War I tried to do exactly that—to create a Sham Paris located on the outskirts of the real city—it was to be doomed, offered with confusing lights and displays that would disorient German aviators into bombing and destroying it rather than the real city. 

 

Of course these were also the days of pre-RADAR, and of aviators simply holding a bomb by its fins and letting go once a target was in sight, so the possibility of causing this sort of dissonance was at least palpable. The planes held the pilot and a lot of fuel, and not much flight weight was devoted to bombs, so the bombing runs were necessarily quick and comparatively light (by standards of just a decade later).  So the idea of a Sham Paris might’ve, could’ve sort’ve worked, maybe; but not really.  It had a very strong, fatal, feculent (thank you for this word, Mr. Depp) air about it, like that misty doomsday smell that lifted the Maginot Line out of the earth and dumped it in the dim and stinking past. 

 

The story of Sham Paris may have been “broken” in The Illustrated London News of 6 November 1920 in a remarkably titled photo essay, “A False Paris Outside Paris—a ‘City’ Created to be Bombed”.  There were to be sham streets lined with electric lights, sham rail stations, sham industry, open to a sham population waiting to be bombed by real Germans.  It is a perverse city, filled with the waiting-to-be-murdered in a civilian target.  Sham Paris seems to me like a reverse city.  And a reverse city in the manner of the cities created by the guilty Cain and Romulus—these two were murders who created cities; Sham Paris is a city of created murders to save the innocent.

Sham Paris was only partially constructed before war’s end in November 1918.  

(All images here are clickable and can be enlarged.)

Its important to distinguish Sham Cities from hidden cities, like Project Iceworm (the underground city built in Greenland) or Mt. Weather (the not-so-very-secret secure and safe bunker for the governing class in Bluemont, Virginia) and so on.  Sham Cities were definitely constructed for deception and/or destruction.  The next city we'll take a look at:  Survival Town, Nevada.

On the Failures and Triumphs of Confederate Digestion: Diarrhea and Urine

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1611

Let's just say it:  the history of diarrhea is not pretty,  It has been a major killer throughout history (coupled with the sometimes historically-indistinguishable dysentery), wiping out perhaps hundreds of millions of people over human history.  Infectious diarrhea and dysentery is especially suited for crowded, cramped conditions with poor sanitary facilities and bad food, which makes armies a perfect place for those diseases to easily succeed.

In the American Civil War diarrhea was a leading incapacitor and killing disease, perhaps chief among the diseases that killed more people than did the actual fighting.¹  And perhaps no where else did it commit such great tragedy than in the ranks of the Confederate soldiers, who by and large had considerably less than the Union soldiers.  Poor sanitary facilities, bad food badly prepared, close living conditions, weeks/months of stationary encampment during the winter, would all add up to a disaster.  Since the Confederate records of medical treatment are far from complete, we have to look at those of the Union Army to get an idea of what happened with diarrhea--and there, more than 250,000 men were discharged for chronic diarrhea, or roughly 10% of the entire fighting force over the course of the war.  I think it is safe to assume that the Confederate numbers would be at least comparable and probably worse for a fighting force of approximately half that size, though I am unsure of how many of these actually were discharged.  The figures for soldiers suffering from diarrhea who were not killed by it or discharged for it probably ran over a million for both sides.  It would not be easy to overstate the vast impact that diarrhea had on these armies, and particularly for the Confederacy.

On the side of success we have the story of gunpowder.  Or, rather, the failure in the production of industrial nitrates necessary for the production of gunpowder which was addressed by the Southern citizenry, and particularly the women of the South.  Absent the essential component of potassium nitrate, the Confederate states resolved to produce the stuff locally, in the old fashion. Urine (and water from cesspools, privvies, and so on) would be collected, and then (via one of many methods) would be sprinkled on straw or some other similar organic material (to keep the material moist but not wet); the stew would be covered and sunned and allowed to cook for some months at the end of which time the straw would be washed of the material formed on its top, and then dried.  The resulting salts produced by evaporation would be a form of saltpeter, or potassium nitrate, which provides the necessary O₂ for combustion. 

I know that it was at least considered customary and a rule of engagement for the Union and the Confederate soldiers to not shoot each other while attending nature's call; I'm not so sure that this would be the case for the guys in the night waste wagons collecting privvy drawers and urine. 

Just another small, necessarily savage bit in the history of killing. 

Notes:

1. The Union armies had from 2,500,000 to 2,750,000 men. Their losses, by the best estimates:

Battle deaths:	110,070
Disease, etc.:	250,152
Total	360,222

        The Confederate strength, known less accurately because of missing records, was from 750,000 to 1,250,000. Its estimated losses:

Battle deaths:	94,000
Disease, etc.:	164,000
Total	258,000

The End of the World, Part 6--The Earth as a Bomb

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1601

[I've written a number of times on this blog on the depiction of the end of the Earth--as it turns out, it is an uncommon subject for illustration before, say, 1950.  One in the series can be found here, with links to others.]

Hiram Maxim--the inventor of the Maxim gun, almost-inventor of the light bulb, and general creative genius--wrote this article, "How the World Will End" around 1905.  He was a man with many answers to his own many questions, and here he Q-Aed himself about the end of the world.  He imagined the end coming in a number of different ways, one of which was set up by the Earth's own mighty innards.  He imagined large-sale earthquakes and gigantic volcanoes, Krakatoa-sized volcanoes and then some, that would rend the Earth to pieces.

But he starts that vision with a very odd inspiration, thinking about the power of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, and trying to equate the enormous explosive mission of the thing with something that was somehow doable, somehow understandable in human terms.  And what he comes up with is this--that if all the people in the world working  all time through all time in producing gunpowder and TNT, spending all of their time doing nothing but making explosives, that all of this gathered and ignited would approximate the energy of the Krakatoa eruption.

He was wrong on this calculation, as smart as he was--I think just running some numbers in your head would put this thing to sleep.  But there wasn't very much for him to compare Krakatoa to in 1905, or certainly nothing that he could compare it to that was produced by humans.  In our recent past, though--in a world that would be Maxim's near-future--human beings have managed to manage Krakatoa-type releases of energy, namely in the form of nuclear weapons.  If we cobbled together 1,400 of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs from August 1945 and detonated them at once, the amount of energy released would approximate Krakatoa.  This explosive force has since been rolled mostly into one bomb--the Tara Bomb, or Kuzka's Mother--which was released into the world in a test shot in 1961.  That bomb was calculated to be a 50 megaton weapon, scaled down from its projected 100 megatons, and released 1.74x10¹⁷ J(oules), coming close to what some people have calculated the energy of Krakatoa to have been, at 8.4x10¹⁷J  (In a what-the-hell moment of calculation, someone reckoned the output per second of Star Trek's U.S.S. Enterprise 1701-D to be 1.27×10¹⁹ J--an enormous number.)

But it is an interesting form to fill up for a short scifi story.  Imagine a worldwide society which, for its entire existence, has done nothing but make the means for its own violent destruction, stockpiling fantastic amounts of explosives in a series of connected locations, waiting for the time in their history to end.  Imagine that generations would spend their time, doing nothing but producing the means for their own destruction that would come at some time.  The entire output of the combined civilizations banded together, branded for annihilation.  All working to a literal common end. 

Maxim saw other bits too in that firey end, as we see in the above illustrations:  for example, in the first image, we see the results of a meteor shower striking City Hall Park in New York City...a big "meteor shower", a really big one.  Then there's the possibility of a "collision with some heavenly body", and of course the tail of a comet sweeping away the Earth's atmosphere.  For all of his good thinking, though, I can't get much past the image of societal bomb making...

 

 

 

H-Bomb Wipes out Brooklyn. And Chicago. And New York.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1527          Part of the Atomic and Nuclear Weapons series

 [Source:  Conelrad blog and also at the website]
I stumbled on this bombing of Brooklyn article at the excellent Conelrad website--it is an excellent addition to my slight collection of vintage depictions of American cities being nuked.  As part of the necessary scare tactics in the pursuit of the arms end of MAD, the destructive power of these weapons were shown against a background that Americans could readily understand.  Thinking of atomic and then nuclear holocaust in terms of multiple units of Hiroshimas and Nagasakis was one thing--showing the effects of these weapons on an American grid was something else.

This next  graphic shows the difference in destructive capacity of an atomic bomb (small circle beneath an air-burst detonation) and a hydrogen bomb (the large circle showing area of total destruction, which in this case would be about 50 square miles) on the city of Chicago.

[Source:  LIFE Magazine, 30 Jine, 1950]

 The next image is much like the preceding, only showing a profile of Manhattan and the difference between the explosions of a Hiroshima bomb and a hydrogen bomb (of 20 megatons).

[Source: BioInformatics Lab, Yale  http://bioinfo.mbb.yale.edu/~mbg/fun/both-bombs.gif]]

But don't worry, even if the Chicago and Brooklyn and New York and so on were destroyed, the U.S. Navy would survive, which would  be either great or horrible if you were a sailor:]

 
And as usual, the point is made with one weapon being detonated, rather than the x-number that would actually be deployed.  Depicting, say, 10 weapons being used against these cities--while being a more accurate portrayal of what nuclear war might look like--might have looked like something beyond the usefulness of propaganda. 

FearNaughtia Coffins: Life Detectors, Escape Ladders, Breathin' Pipes and Premature Burial

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1526

I've written here before on the wonderful book by Jan Bondeson, Buried Alive, the Terrifying History of our Most Primal Fear ¹(Norton, 2001) and on the difficulties of determining death in the 19th century, and the various ways that people sought to deal with and sidestep the possibilities of premature burial.  In continuing those posts I'd like to add the following  drawings from hopeful reports of the U.S. Patent Office, some of which really didn't make that much applicable sense, but, well, you can patent just about anything if it hasn't already been patented. 

These coffins were constructed to allow their occupants to ring or telephone or telegraph or signal with smoke or light and so on should the dead respond to their lost life while buried.  As I point ou tin the earlier (linked) post, determining death was a difficult task in the 19th century, so there wsa a legitimate fear-of-being-buried-alive concern.  OF course, the best way yo determine death would be to allow the supposed-dead to lay out for three days at the end of which the body became a corpse and putrefy--the decay part was the true determiner of death. WHy people had to bury the dead into a coffin and be placed underground faster than the three days is a mystery, particularly if there were so many people who lived in fear of waking up in an underground coffin. 

And so to the solutions, the first of which was brought to the world by Franz Vester of beautiful Newark, New Jersey.  Well, Newark was probably beautiful when this patent was granted in 1868, and maybe this idea seemed so, too.  Here's what would happen if a dead body awoke in Vester's safety coffin:  their hands were attached to a rope that would be connected to a top-side bell, and the not-deceased would tug on it for all they were worth.  After that, a sliding door above the face would be moved, and the coffin's occupant was then supposed to pull themselves up to a short laddered tunnel that was connecting the living world from the sleep-of-worms-world.  Were there problems?  Yes, of course, but so far as it has been recorded no person ever saved themselves suing this coffin, in spite of Vester's very strenuous exercises to promote his invention.

[Image source:  American Artifacts, via VanVleck]

A few years later from just downthe road in Hoboken, Theodore Schroeder and Hermann Wuest were granted a patent for another rope-activated sounding device.  The 1871 patent revealed what was pretty much a common thread to come--rope, hands, bell.  Theoretically, if the dead awoke they would tear away at the bell until the prefect or whomever arrived to dig them out.  The pair from Hoboken added a few tweaks here and there--one that allowed a release of fresh air into the coffin, and another which used an electromagnetic deice to replace the hand engine.  I'm not sure how long someone can last in a coffin underground, but it can't be very long at all.  Why someone would think that adding an air vent to a coffin where the dead have been underground for a few days already doesn't seem to make much sense, except to the coffin manufacturers. 

 

 

The next example comes from the beautifully-named Albert Fearnaught, who although not from mid-Jersey patented a device again using a rope around the wrist of the dead, this time though the rope was attached to a spring-loaded device that would release a flag when activated from below. 

This next (1885) patent has a slight variant on the rope-hand solution:  the string-finger. Well, there was also some electromagnetic stuff involved, but basically the string on the finger of a moving not-dead-corpse would activate an electric bell and yadda yadda yadda people would come to help and release.  The added extra here, the clear-coat undercoating, is a device that would allow the folks topside to peer down and see the face of the interred, and whether or not it was animated, I guess. 

Hubert Deveau evidently had grown tired of all of these hand/finger-operated back- from-the-dead resurrection devices, and constructed (in his patent of 1894) a relatively simple groundskeeper-alerting-breathing-device combo--a pipe that could be moved up by the head of the person int he coffin which would in turn activate a spring-something that would keep the pipe poking-up above the ground.  It would deliver fresh air to the buried, and would evidently be a warning sign to the cemetery man that something was afoot, underfoot.

Funny thing her is that most of the systems I looked at for this post involved a single device to release the prematurely-buried--it seems to me that there should have been at least one back-up system in case the main apparatus failed.  I mean, if you're going to become intensely psychotic, why would you then depend on one thing to get you out of your buried coffin?  And that one thing is, basically, a rope.  What if the thing failed?  I'm just saying that I expected to see a little more comfort juice applied to these solutions than I saw. 

 And why current radio talk show fearmongers like Glenn Beck isn't all over these things, I don't know--they Fearnaughts for just about everything else...

Notes:

1. A fine article on patent remedies for premature burial can be found here: "Signals from the Grave, Early Patents for Detecting Life in Buried Persons", by Richard Van Vleck, in American Artifacts, issue 45, July 1999. 

 

Incontestable Oddness: Inflatable Puffy Shirts for the Dead & Coffins with Retractable Legs

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Some things that seem perfectly odd seem to take on another life, an extra life, when you put moveable things on it.  For example, coffins that have anything "retractable" seems a little much. As corpse receptacles, coffins as a box seem, I guess, an odd thing--scooping out a body's innards and replacing them with packing, toxic preservative, gums, paint, glue, plastic, rubber, wire, pins, needles and such seem to be a little on the extreme side, especially when you are going to put that body into a hole in the ground and cover it with dirt.  What better thing than to enclose the corpse in a container so that the horrible idea will be further kept from deterioration?  Then there's the container for the coffin, and the slumber vault cement liner, and so on. 

This weirdness turns professional (to paraphrase the Good Doctor) when movable/retractable bits are added to the coffin.  In a long "is this really necessary?" list, one of the last/first would concern retractable legs on a coffin, or perhaps the retractable flower vases, or the inflatable puffy shirt.  There's a strange sociological history going on in the thousands of death/corpse/funeral-related reports from the U.S. Patent Office, which will make it much easier for the anthropologists of the future to understand our present concerns with death, or life. 

[Most of the following patent reports are entirely understandable by their titles.  The first in the list though needs a little explanatory help--this is a garment was made with numerous openings to accommodate different forms of corpse body shapers, including inflatable balloons, putty, clay and other material that would help the dead body look a little more not-dead.]

[And then of course the explanation of the thing, which has a distinct federal-ese flavoring.]

[I like this one because of the name association with the Norden bomb sight, a once-top secret improvement in delivering bombs dropped from planes, and which helped put many people into a coffin, if only figuratively.] />/>/>

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A Monumentally Questionable Idea: Screw Coffins

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post     Part of the History of Goodbye series.

"May I touch it?"

"Please don't, it will leave a mark"-- on corpses, from Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One. 

In the vast history of humans and their disposing of the dead, of the great rituals and spectacular belief systems pertaining to the body and the non-corporeal bits and flavorings within, there is probably not much at all dealing with the creation of screw coffins with duckies on top.

Such is the very recent idea of  this painful looking piece of business:  slide the body in, stand the screw coffin upright, and then by motive force either human or mechanical screw the thing into the Ea rth.  This is all done for the theoretical modesty of economical land usage.  And I guess this would make sense, even more so, than putting a corpse in  a very expensive box, a corpse that has been treated so that it will decay very slowly over long periods of time, stuck in a box that is made to further prevent decay, and then place the whole thing (horizontally) into the ground, where no one will ever see it again. It seems like such a great effort to undertake to simply hide a body under a thousand pounds of dirt, when the corpse might as well not even be there.  SO I guess if it makes sense to observe this practice, you might as well take up less ground. 

The logistics might be a problem--after all, you'll need a casket for the coffin to transport the thing from the church or wherever to The Place of Last Repose, as I don't very well imagine the look of the torpedo screw in the confines of some holy relic or draped-up maudlin-eseum.  I mean, the thing would look repulsive. 

And the little bits that go on top really don't help it, either:

I'm not sure why these coffins are placed in a swamp, or why one of the statuettes is a fish. 

The whole "placement" business seems rather indelicate--I can't imagine anyone's elderly Auntie standing around to watch The Beloved twisted underground by a John Deere:

This is actually one of a number of different contempo-coffins designed to both save space and disgust.  Here's the Vampire Stake coffin:

And the bullet coffin:

And the pleasure-tipped Probe coffin:

And of course the artificial flower tapered urn coffin:

As I said, perhaps when it comes to burying people, looking at the practice under a macroscope, it is all the same. 

It does, however, seem as though it is dramatic evermore with each turn of the screw.  It also looks pretty difficult to do.

 

Strange Things in the Sky Department: When Worlds Collide (1933+1951)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  Part of our Strange Things in the Sky Department

When Worlds Collide wasn't so much about another world colliding with the Earth--it was another star, a "rogue star", that enters the solar system and heads directly towards the Earth.  Luckily for a selected few, a billionaire astronomer sees the thing coming and decides to construct a spaceship to populate a friendly "planet" near Alpha Centauri.  Oh well, its 1933, and perhaps anything was possible--after all, the Empire State Building (which is depicted in so many of these movie posters in a not-good way) was just finished in 1931, after two years of construction (!). 

So the following are movie posters for the 1951 film version of the 1933 book--except for the first image, which is from the book.

  

On the Use of Blood, Bone and Guts -and- the Man Who Painted Dead Chicken Feet

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post--possible revulsion factor

I was looking for something else--mortality rates in Canada for a post on the value of a dead human body in 1860--when I found this book on the use of discarded goods and raw byproduct, a sort of early recycling effort.  The work was by Edwin Lankester, and it is called The Uses of Animals in Relation to the Industry of Man; Being a course of lectures delivered at the South Kensington Museum (published in London by Robert Hardwicke in  1860), and the initial data that caught my attention was this:

Alpha & Omega Department: Omega, Heat Death, and Speculative Fiction, 1893

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1514

“The more the universe approaches this limiting condition in which the entropy is a maximum, the more do the occasions of further change diminish; and supposing this condition to be at last completely attained, no further change could evermore take place, and the universe would be in a state of unchanging death.”--R. Clausius, 1868

I wonder about the appearance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the Entropy Law) and its influence on creative, speculative literature.  Its really about the juicier two-word interpretation--Heat Death--that I wonder about, along of course with the 1st and 2nd laws, and its influence on relating the story of the end of the world, the destruction of the Earth, the depletion of the universe.  One can see the possibilities of the of the ideas of the fourth dimension in the creation of modern art and their influences on people like Picasso and Duchamp, even though that influence took decades (in the case of Marey to actually "appear" in art.  Where was the influence of entropy in literature?

The business of "heat death" and the Second Law is of course necessarily based upon the First Law of Thermodynamics (and the work of the beautiful Hermann von Helmholtz in 1847), and which finds an outline of a home in the early work of Sadi Carnot (in 1824, on mechanical energy loss) and more comfortable foundations in the work of  James Joule  (in 1843),  Rudolf Clausius (in 1850) and William Thomson¹ (in 1852, "On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy").  The Second Law belongs to Rudolf ("Santa") Clausius, whose 1850 paper in the Annalen der Physik begins the establishment of  the "the most universal regulator of natural activity known to science", an idea solidified in his 1854 paper (in the same journal), where the concept of "entropy" is introduced though the name not actually used (a slightly complex history of the word, to be sure, though it makes its appearance, finally, in an 1865 paper). 

Von Helmholtz famously establishes the death of the sun in a popularly-written 1854 paper (at about another 20 million years) which is a fantastic/superlative philosophical something happening there five years before the Origin of Species, establishing that at some point in the not-horribly-distant future that the sun would be extinguished, and that a sooner point the Earth would go, too.  Thomson would do about the same in another popular journal in 1862, saying:

"The result would inevitably be a state of universal rest and death, if the universe were finite and left to obey existing laws. But it is impossible to conceive a limit to the extent of matter in the universe; and therefore science points rather to an endless progress, through an endless space, of action involving the transformation of potential energy into palpable motion and hence into heat,  than to a single finite mechanism, running down like a clock, and stopping for ever.  (Thomson, William. (1862). "On the age of the sun’s heat", Macmillan’s Mag., 5, 288-93; PL, 1, 394-68.)

It would seem very heady stuff, this scientifically-based  end-of-all-life-and-everything-else  thinking.  But it really doesn't seem to have taken hold in any literary sense, at least not in a big way until the work of one of the most fertile popular thinkers of the second half of the 19th century.  Camille Flammarion (26 February 1842—3 June 1925), an astronomer, scientific editor and sci-popularizer of vast proportions,  an author of some 50 books, produced a fantastic end-of-the-universe story in his La Fin du Monde, published in 1893.  Again, this is decades after the big scientific pronouncements on the subject.  But afterwards, in the space of just a few years this sort of thinking, this megaland of fictional science writing would take itself away by leaps and bounds, unlike perhaps any other period in literature. (What is probably the first treatment of post-apocalypse Earth in speculative fiction--excluding religious writing and speculation--comes in 1885 with the novel  After London by Richard Jeffries.) For example  in 1895 there was Wells' Time Machine, Tsiollkovsky's Dream of the Earth and the Sky and the Effects of Universal Gravitation, and Lowell's pinch in the eye, Mars, not to mention Verne's Le Moteur. In 1897 there was Morris' The Well at the World's End and Well's The Island of Dr. Moreau, plus more realistic but nevertheless bombing-bastic things like Tracy's Final War. Then by 1898 there was Edison's Conquest of Mars by Serviss, and the great The War of the Worlds, again by the very busy Wells. I wonder where this spculation was in the 1860's and 1870's?

I really don't know the answer to that.  Just like I don't know why the photographs of Marey--though very widely circulated--didn't seem to have an influence in artistic space for 30 or 40 years.  Unless of course I'm missing a big piece of the history of speculative fiction....

 

 

"Presently the earth is only an invisible point among all the stars, because, at this distance, it is lost through its infinite smallness in the vicinity of the sun, which itself is by far only a small star. In the future, when the end of things will arrive on this earth, the event will then pass completely unperceived in the universe. The stars will continue to shine after the extinction of our sun, as they already shone before our existence. When there will no longer be on the earth a sole concern to contemplate, the constellations will reign again in the noise as they reigned before the appearance of man on this tiny globule. There are stars whose light shone some millions of years before we arrived … The luminous rays that we receive actually then departed from their bosom before the time of the appearance of man on the earth. The universe is so immense that it appears immutable, and that the duration of a planet such as that of the earth is only a chapter, less than that, a phrase, less still, only a word of the universe’s history." — Camille Flammarion, Le Fin du Monde (The End of the World)

I should point out that in addition t being an astronomer, Flammarion held some very colorful ideas about the possibilities of life on other worlds--near ones, at that.  He was evidently much take with the "discoveries" of Percival Lowell, claiming that a superior Martian race had been trying to communicate with Earth "for years" but without success.  See this NYT article from 1907:   "Martians Probably Superior to Us; Camille Flammarion Thinks Dwellers on Mars Tried to Communicate with the Earth Ages Ago". New York Times. November 10, 1907. "Prof. Lowell's theory that intelligent beings with constructive talents of a high order exist on the planet Mars has a warm supporter in M. Camille Flammarion, the well-known French astronomer, who was seen in his observatory at Juvisy, near Paris, by a New York Times correspondent. M. Flammarion had just returned from abroad, and was in the act of reading a letter from Prof. Lowell." At about the same time Flammarionpredicted that the world would be destroyed by a mysterious seven-tailed comet, causing panics--again, from 1907: "Flammarion's Seven Tailed Comet". Nelson Evening Mail. 30 July 1907. 

Notes

1. Thomson, William. (1951). “On the Dynamical Theory of Heat, with numerical results deduced from Mr Joule’s equivalent of a Thermal Unit, and M. Regnault’s Observations on Steam.” Excerpts. [§§1-14 & §§99-100], Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, March, 1851; and Philosophical Magazine IV. 1852, [from Mathematical and Physical Papers, vol. i, art. XLVIII, pp. 174]  Thomson, William (1952). “On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for April 19, 1852, also Philosophical Magazine, Oct. 1852.

Questionable Quidity and the Road to Achieving a Faster and More Productive Smoking-Related Disease

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Cigarette manufacturers--like anyone other entity in business--want their clients to consume as much product as possible.  Or buy their goods as often as possible.  With that in mind I'm a little surprised that the Big Five never adopted any of the ideas shown below, all helping the smoker to get at their next cigarette as quickly as possible. For example, in the event hat there were no ashtrays around, several people patented their notions for in-the-cigarette-pack ashtrays, so that no matter where a person was, they could always clicks their ash and stow their butts back in the pack.   Of course, I'm sure that the Makers determined almost instantly that this concern affects perhaps an immeasurable percentage of smokers; if someone wanted (read "needed") a cig, and there was no ash tray, they can just, well, smoke their cigarette and not use an ash tray. Or go outside.  OR something.  Or perhaps the manufacturers recognized that they could actually sell the idea to some of their smokers, but then realized instantly that carrying around ciggie waste is not attractive and perhaps a stinking mess.  Or they recognized that--like Lee Iaccoca fighting seat belts because it made cars look "unsafe"--having  place to deposit cigarette waste right there with the cigarettes might send a message to the consumer that their product is messy and in the end very unattractive.  Best leave the unattractive bits in a tray somewhere else.  Or of course share the end product of smoking enjoyment with others by leaving it on the ground.

Then of course to remind consumers how useful the process of smoking is, there were other inventions that combined the products of this act with some other highly useful enterprise, like this cigarette lighter/pencil sharpener with what might have been a whistle attachment:

 

And if you found yourself needing/wanting a smoke but didn't have a free hand, there was always the following device, which allowed the consumer to smoke their stuff through a tube:

Speaking to the humility of smokers was this device that allowed the user to extinguish their smoking product automatically, no matter what the size of the burning member, reminding the user that if they wanted to actually stop, they could:

 

Again, another extension of the art of cigarette smoking and how useful smoking implements can be--the cigarette lighter with built-in flashlight:

Cigarette lighter with built-in extinguisher:

Pen with built-in cigarette lighter (1977):

And another example of a very complicated instrument for extinguishing a cigarette, sending a message with I-don't-know-what undertones:

These are just some of the many glorious appendages to smoking and making it easier--many more can be found at the U.S. Patent Office, like all of the examples above. 

Death Comes for the Book(printer & seller), 1499

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is intended to be a short mini-post on the end of printing, and the end of bookselling, such as we know it, or knew it--this image comes from 1499 (Le Grand Danse Macabre, Lyon), and tells us that death to these occupations is nothing new.  Of course when we speak of the death of the book nowadays we're discussing something different--the death of the printed format.  But here in this print, which is also the first depiction of a mechanized book press, we see ironically that Death has come to claim its operators, or at least two of them.  The inkman in the background, the yelling third of a departing party of two, is spared for the time being.  Just as the reader is for the first time seeing this machine, they are also seeing Death in its in grim glory snatching away the machine's main operators. 

The image and the functions of the people working the press are well described in the excellent history of all things books at the Bookn3rd website, here. 

Here's Death coming for the bookseller--at least the man was reading at the time of the departure.  This is also a very early depiction of a book store, which again as the first visual information on such a place to the reader is wrapped around the visitation of the Great Inevitable. 

The inkman, in thr background, screaming/shocked. 

History of Normalcy Series: Warehousing Epileptic "Defectives", 1912

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1450

This series is meant to illustrate the very transitory, shadowy and basically non-existent nature of "normal".

"It is thus with regard to the disease called Sacred: it appears to me to be nowise more divine nor more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause like other affections. . ."--Hippocrates on epilepsy and recognizing it as just another brain disorder devoid of mysticism, about 2400 years ago.

One stop in the history of normalcy is the perception of brain disorders, which is a long and complex history--very long in the case of epilepsy, its epidemiology stretching back thousands of years before Hippocrates.  It particular normalcy for the vast majority of that time was that people who exhibited the results of the disorder were cursed, or touched by the gods as holders of some possible divine inspiration, or touched by the gods as accursed and punished people, or bewitched (I wonder about the number of epileptics put to the flame during the Witch Hunt crazes), and so on.  The first pharmaceutical treatments for the disorder really didn't come about until Emil Fischer and Bayer introduced phenobarbitol in 1902/04, which was able to calm the seizures of some people with epilepsy.  Until that point, most treatments were generally topical, plus the quack ingestives and various sorts of incantations, spells and prayers. 

In Dr. William T. Shanahan's Colonies for Epiletpics, (the original available for purchase through our blog bookstore) written in 1912, the treatment of epileptics was seculsion, warehousing them in state asylums in the countryside.  Shananhan felt that the epileptic needed "its" own environment, "apart from the the defectives"--and by that he meant apart from the wide classification of people who did not fit the scheme of 1912 normalcy, like "morons, imbeciles, the insane, the sexual addict, the recurring syphlitic [and] the criminally insane...".  Actually this as a good move in some cases--apart from the vocabulary--as epileptics were stored away in almshouses and prisons along with the criminal element and the hopelessly insane, and at least removed the epileptic from a different sort of horror and disgrace. 

Dr. Shanahan's aim was to remove the epileptic from society because they "couldn't adjust to a life in the ordered community" and that holding a job for them was "impossible"--that plus what he saw as the need to protect society from the epileptic's "progressive mental deterioration".   He felt that "the great majority should be committed[to the epileptic colonies] as are the insane", and also to remove them to these places "from a young age", to an "institution for defectives", there separated according to "sex and mental grade". 

Overall, though, it was Shanahan's other aim to provide as "normal" a life for epileptics as could be arrived at, and outside of his trying to save society from them--at a time when the eugenics people were out castrating epileptics--, he was arguing that this method was the best of all possible worlds for people with this disorder.  He does however seem to be totally ignorant of any medical approach to dealing with epilepsy.

By the way, there's a very curious imprint on the back cover of this pamphlet showing who printed it and where.  I cannot recll ever having seen such a small thign, placed so centrally, in such an obvious place. Its obvious and present, yet tiny.  Here it is, before magnification:

And here is what the slug says:

Its just a very curious thing.

 

An Antiquarian Print Rarity: Depicting the Destruction of the Earth

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1439

There appeared earlier in this blog a bit on an engraving depicting an exploding Earth, one of a series of twelve images, eleven of which were unavailable at that time--not so anymore.  So an update to this post is happily made, starting with the exploding part (below), a nasty millennial vision steeped in a volcanological/geological/meteorological 18th-century primordial stew, the Earth in a sea of fire and blasted volcanoes, lightning striking from above:

 
[All image sources:    Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, Weimar.]

Hades, Heaven, Meru, Valhalla, Elysium, Olympus--the places at the end of the terrestrial road, the great emancipation. In some theological doctrines these places are reached collectively after the great conflict at the end of time; the end of days in the Old Testament, when the earth is devoured by holy vengeful wrath and reconstituted for godly comings –and-goings.

This engraving is one of twelve found in a fine little book, the brainchild of clergyman/semi-scientist Jodocus Frisch (1714-1787), who delivered to the (un-) waiting world his vision of how the earth and heaven will come to an end, there at the end of days.   Die Welt im Feuer, Oder das Wahre Vergehen und Ende der Welt, Durch den letzten Sünd-Brand  (printed in Sorau by Gottlob Heboldm in 1746) is one of very few works that depict (in  illustration) the destruction of the Earth, and even though Frisch illuminates biblically-based theory, the idea of the earth exploding into bits in primordial fire and so on was extraordinary.  The images were done in four colors representing the four elements:  yellow, brown, green and white represented (respectively) fire, earth, water and air. In this image, we see the fire-centric earth encircled by a sphere of water, which is surrounded by a sphere of fire, which in turn is surrounded by a sphere of air,  with much bad stuff happening. 

Not having the book in hand I’m relying on the  description of the Dutch bookseller Asher & Company, an old-line bookseller of very fine antiquarian works, which wrote the following descriptions of the other images in the book (and which appears for sale right now at their site):

“The second and third engravings show how the sphere of water disappeared after the torrential rains of the deluge, leaving the earth directly exposed to the sun. In the fourth and fifth engravings the earth is consumed by fire from within and without, demonstrating in what way the biblical prophecies about the destruction of heaven and earth may come to pass. Plates 6 and 7 depict the new heaven and earth that look entirely similar to plates 1 and 2, the first heaven and earth. Plates 8 and 9 show heaven and earth in their present state with precise specifications of what the biblical vocabulary names "heaven." Plate 10 shows how the sphere of water breaks the rays of the sun in such a way that they shine on all parts of our planet in equal manner, wherefore all regions have a temperate climate. However without the tempering function of the sphere of water, the air focuses the rays of the sun in the equatorial zone.”

 

The water of the great deluge now gone, revealing the land masses, plate 2:

 And so again, in plate 3:

 

The Weight of War--Bombing and Shelling During World War I and a Lesson in Orders of Magnitude

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1389

This indelible image was made by an anonymous photographer for the Central News Service of New York City in 1918.  The Central News Service was a photographic supply house that would send requested photos to newspapers throughout the United States for publication as illustrations for  a story.  They would've been sent rolled in a tube  with a description of the image and with the stern warning to "Watch Your Credit Line", making sure that once the newspaper had paid for the use of the photo that it also told its readers the source of the (agency) photographic.

The image is insatiable--it demands that you look at it and look at it long and hard, as it tries to give some sort of idea of the tremendous number of shells that were shot from canons by the just British against the Germans during the First World War..  There were something like one million tons of these fired against Germany; this picture represents about .001% ( of that total).  We see approximately 800 shells at two hundred pounds apiece, surrounded by a group of about 150 soldiers. 

I looked very closely at this photograph.
Of this single line of soldiers along the perimeter of the bomb cache, of the 150 of them, there are, it looks like, only five of them who have placed their hands on one of the bombs, and four of them are touching the fuse with just their middle finger.  It is an odd picture of restraint, these soldiers paying the weapons of mass destruction the respect of room.

I think that this is an extraordinary photograph of the testament of understatement and small, small percentages--even with this photo being so enormously graphic it still gives you absolutely no idea of how much explosive material was hurled back and forth, even knowing in your mind's eye that this image represents something like FOUR ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less than the total tonnage of bombs used.  By the British.

This difference in orders of magnitude is roughly equivalent to the difference in size between an ant and a human being, or between an amoeba and an ant, or between a human and one of the pyramids, or between the earth and the sun.  Basically, the shells in this photo meant nothing whatsoever to the total of shells used during the war.