Ptak Science Books

On Bombing the Sky with Bone (1914) and Making the Sky Bomb Us (1967)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1774  [Part of the Strange Things in the Sky department]

I'm not at all sure when the first stories were told on the implosion of the sky, or when the sky was peeled away like a layer of mica, or when an expanding hole was punched into the blue, or when the sky dissolved, or when it simply fell to the ground, or when it was simply exploded, any of which would leave a shambles of broken stars and a boring nothingness.

Visions of the coming of hell or the apocalypse or the end of existence or the exaltation of duration were certainly depicted in art at least during the high Medieval period and the Renaissance, though I am uncertain of ever having noticed the sky on fire or facing obliteration. Perhaps the implications of its destruction would be clear in the symbolic representation of The End, the evidence of a smoking atmosphere in an infinite hole was just implied, Dr. Pangloss at play with Mr. Leibniz over paint and canvas.

Heaven opened and stars fell in various texts, not the least of which is the Book of Revelation (6:14, KJV, “And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places”). Imaging this part though was another story, especially when considering that destroying the sky was a secular event, and not driven by the great deities.

Now holes do appear in the sky in Renaissance images, but they open to allow the hand of the creator to reach through it from the nether world, or heaven, or the infinite.  In the many examples of these holes that I have seen the background within the hole is entirely blank--plain white, no detail, no peek into heaven.  Then again, these are holes, and not a wholesale destruction of the sky.

As an example I’d like to point out the work by the Jesuit Franciscus Nerrincq (1638-1712), De goddelycke voorsienigheydt, in which there are several odd eyes that burn their way through the atmosphere.   Eyes/eye of the creator occur frequently in religious presentations and emblems, but not so very often as hands holding a pair of eyes.  I know all of this is very heavy stuff in the history of Christian iconography and the progression of emblemata, but I’d rather deal with the images out of context here and have them stand on their own without interpretation. 

 Of course the answer for the modern equivalents of this blowing-up-the-sky adventure must have deep and varied roots in the sci-fi canon, though presently they remain a mystery to me.  It is interesting to note that at one point in June 1945 in the Jornada del Muerto/the Dead Man's Walk, at the Trinity site in the desert near Alamogordo, a group of scientists were placing bets as to whether or not the test explosion of the world's first atomic weapon would set fire to the atmosphere. 

In a way Tycho Brahe brought down the sky with his (naked eye) observation of a super nova on 11 November 1572. With the exception of comets and eclipses the sky had remained immutable, a perfect score of the creator’s creation, until Tycho Brahe noticed something new in Cassiopeia, something that was not a comet—a “something” that was a star. This was momentous because the night sky had been seen for centuries as being complete—a new star, the Nova of Brahe, contradicted this high belief, offering the possibilities of newness where there had not been one previously.  And so too with Kepler’s new star of 1602. This wasn't perhaps a tearing-away of the old sky, but it certainly questioned the sky that was seen. 

I should also point out that perhaps a reverse of the destruction of the celestial ceiling came about when Galileo turned his telescope to the sky and found to the astonishment of nearly everyone that there was an order of magnitude more stars in the heavens than anyone had ever experienced before. This in a way collapsed the old sky with its perfect and unchanging number of stars, showing that the creator of the universe had indeed provided more stars than anyone had ever imagined, though for reasons not yet known had kept that knowledge from humanity.  By 1610 Galileo had produced his fifth and most powerful telescope, allowing things to be seen one thousand times closer, using it to make enormous discoveries–discoveries so big in fact that their towering significance is a but hard to understand today in the context of early 17th century knowledge. It was all published in his fantastic Sidereus Nuncius on March 4, 1610—the extraordinary title page¹ of the book proclaiming some of the great discoveries of Galileo’s adventure. One of the things that Galileo brought to the world was this entirely new sky, revealed to him through his telescope—so many stars that he could only guess (though he reckoned that there was an order of magnitude more stars than previously known “stars in myriads, which had never been seen before…and which surpasses the old, previously known, stars by ten times”). In a way Galileo introduced the sky-above-the-sky, available only to people with a special instrument to see it--the new reality.

 This is what I had in my mind when I saw this unusual patent application (above and below). Just weeks before the beginning of WWI, two weeks before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, followed quickly by a cascade of war declarations a few days after that, came this rather footloose idea for bombing the atmosphere

J.M. Cordray came up with and patented this notion--a barrage of balloons, heavily armed balloons, sent aloft with dangerous cargo to be exploded in the atmosphere, which was supposed to initiate a chain-reaction of some sort which would end in supplying rain for the rest of us. Theoretically, anyway. The unspecified number of balloons would be sent aloft, laden with large amounts of crushed bone and concentrated sulfuric acid (to be combined to produce nitrogen), potash, water, and large amounts of crude oil for the fire's fuel.  And a candle to light it all.

It seems that the attempt to blow up a part of the sky with bone and sulphuric acid to make rain just didn't work, though I cannot (easily) find a record of the experiment being attempted. 

Mr. Cordray presented himself at the top of his patent as "J.M. Cordray/Rain Maker".

The one thing that is for certain is that Cordray's attempt at weather modification was quite early--it would be another three decades before pioneering work of Kurt Vonnegut's brother, Bernard, was published (beginning in 1947, finding the ice-nucleating properties of silver iodide, AgI),  which established the very real possibilities of altering the weather.  This practice was employed in the U.S. military's Operation Popeye, which used cloud seeding to prolong the rainy seasons along the areas covered by the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam from March 1967 to July 1972.  This sort of weather warfare is now prohibited by international convention.

And so in a way by employing weather modification as a tool of war we've been able to turn the sky into a weapon, which means that this post has followed the bombing of the sky to the sky bombing us. 

 

 

 

See an interesting article at Paleofuture on the Cold War weather modification attempts here.

Notes

1. The title page in full reads:  Great and very wonderful spectacles, and offering them to the consideration of every one, but especially of philosophers and astronomers; which have been observed by Galileo Galilei … by the assistance of a perspective glass lately invented by him; namely, in the face of the moon, in innumerable fixed stars in the milky-way, in nebulous stars, but especially in four planets which revolve round Jupiter at different intervals and periods with a wonderful celerity.

Early & Satirical Poetry on Evolution--1862

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"The Gorillas Dilemma", 1862.

This poem, which appeared in the London Punch in October 1862, three years after the first edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species,  addresses the confrontation between Richard Owen and Thomas Huxley (and by extension, of course, Charles Darwin).  Owen had earlier attacked the Origin in an anonymous review in the Edinburgh Review (volume 111, page 521, 1860), and Thomas Huxley, of course, who was one of the earliest and who became the greatest of Darwin's "disciples" (and known as "Darwin's Bulldog").

Owen wrote with a very heavy and dark pen, in 1860:

"To him, indeed, who may deem himself devoid of soul and as the brute that perisheth, any speculation, pointing, with the smallest feasibility, to an intelligible notion of the way of coming in of a lower organised species, may be sufficient, and he need concern himself no further about his own relations to a Creator. But when the members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain are taught by their evening lecturer that such a limited or inadequate view and treatment of the great problem exemplifies that application of science to which England owes her greatness, we take leave to remind the managers that it more truly parallels the abuse of science to which a neighbouring nation, some seventy years since, owed its temporary degradation. By their fruits may the promoters of true and false philosophy be known."

Tough stuff.  And Darwin took it personally and seriously, absorbing the blows against himself (and his supporters, especially Huxley and Hooker), as well as the spurious and ethically-challenged mistaken assertions that Owen tricked out in his piece.  "It is painful to be hated in the intense depth with which Owen hates me" Darwin wrote a few months later  (Darwin Correspondence, volume 8, April 1860, page 154.)

Huxley and Owen would have it out over the years (though Darwin himself would not partake due to illness and such, preferring to respond through written help to Huxley and others).

And so the poem:

" (To Professor Owen & Huxley)

SAY am I a man and a brother,
      Of only an anthropoid ape?
Your judgment, be 't one way or 'tother,

History of Holes series: Holes in Airships (1919 and 1937)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1736 [History of Holes series.]

Holes are of course everywhere--it just depends on how hard you look.  This image, though, struck me very quickly as an unexpected hole (though of course once you allow yourself a moment to think about ti the whole thing makes sense).  It is a very plain "observer's perch" in the tail of the great British airship, the "R 34", and appeared in the Illustrated London News in April, 1919, just before its first flight.  The aircraft was massive--643 feet long¹--and on one superficial level its hard to imagine holes in its structure of any sort, let alone an unprotected observation post.  But there it is.

And this

Here's a full view of the "R34", successor to the "R33":

This is an image of the (forward?) gondola of the airship, looking like it has come in for a landing, or touchdown, or whatever--there is something so very primal about this relatively small group of men reaching up for the railing on the gondola...a railing placed there specifically for that reason.  Its hard to imagine that such a seemingly small effort would be enough to control any part of the airship's motion, though perhaps it was. 

And the detail, showing the man in the middle clearly off the ground--clearly he must be weighing his options:

At least he seems to be wearing one glove, anyway

Then there's the image of the "bad" hole, the iconic image (photographic and motion picture) of the conflagration and crash of the Hindenburg, a result of a very quickly-spreading "hole" in the skin of the aircraft as it was coming in for a landing/mooring in Lakehurst, New Jersey, 1937.

Here's a cross-section of the Hindenburg as it appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1936:

Notes:

Specs on the "R34":

• Length: 643 ft 0 in (196 m)
• Diameter: 79 ft 0 in (24 m)
• Volume: 1,950,000 ft³ (55,000 m³)
• Useful lift: 58,240 lb (26,470 kg)
• Powerplant: 5 × Sunbeam Maori, 275 hp (205 kW) each

The Hindenburg was quite a bit larger than the R34--in fact, it was the largest thing ever to fly, at 803 feet long and 135 feet in diameter...and 200,000 m³, almost 200% larger than the mammoth R34.

 

 

A Note on the Vast Wealth Possibilities of the Refill Business: Ink and Paper

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1735

[Source: Columbia University computing history site, here.]

I guess that the only reason why HP charges for their printers is that they can.  When you buy one of these products you're basically purchasing the need to keep the things fed with semi-proprietary HP ink--and as everyone knows, printers are notoriously thirsty creatures, and one can easily spend multiples of the cost of the printer on ink in the first year alone. 

This is a great idea so far as the manufacturer goes, but it is hardly a new one--International Business Machines counted on this sort of income for several decades, partially getting the company through the Great Depression. 

And what was the IBM necessary-suppliable that their customers had to keep buying over and over?  It was the business machines themselves, because it was IBM practice to rent their machines out (which would pay for the initial investment and production in the machine in about two years, and most customers seemed to keep their rented mater1al for 5 or 7 or 10 years.  What IBM kept supplying their customers with was the stuff that they sent through the machines--the IBM cards.  The customer needed the cards from IBM itself, mainly because it was part of the contractual agreement for the lease of the machine, and also because the IBM product was superior to other mass-produced cards.  In the 1930's the card business for IBM accounted to something like a few billion cards per year, which evidently would account for 30-40% of IBM's yearly profit.  And that's quite something. 

The idea of the necessary refill is not IBM's to claim for themselves--years earlier, Eastman Kodak accomplished the same deal with film for their cameras; and razor blades were supplied by Gillette to users of their razors.  And although you don't need Ford gasoline to run a Ford automobile, in the 1930's you did need a General-Motors spark plug to run a G-M vehicle.  Radio Corporation of America sold radios and also the necessary tubes to replace the ones in the stock radio; Thomas Edison too had a vastly controlling interest on how his light bulbs would be installed and replaced. 

So as annoying as it might be to have to pay a fair amount of money for a small amount of ink to make your printer function, the printer-producing companies are just following an old (and highly profitable) business practice. 

A History of Holes: Electric "Holes"

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post   [Part of a series on the History of Holes.]

Well, this really isn't a "hole" per se, but it, the "hole", certainly behaves like one, at least metaphorically.  The concept occurs in the title of this famous work by the problematic William Shockley (below)--it was the bible, really, of all early things relating to the semiconductor--the electron hole being the mathematical opposite of an electron  (e^- ).  (The electron is a subatomic particle with a negative charge, explained very early on in its first format as "radiant energy" by William Crookes in 1879, who built on the earlier work of Hittorf and then on Goldstein, with the name "electron" finally coming to the particle by George F. Fitzgerald.)

The "hole" is a metaphor, a useful use of a word to explain the absence of an electron from a full outer shell.  In a semiconductor, an electric current is carried not only by the flow of electrons but also by the flow of positively charged holes where the electron absence occurs--the hole is an electronic absence charge carrier, and it the basis for modern electronics.

[This book may be purchased by the person who cannot live without it on our blog bookstore site.]

TechQuiz 3: What is the Ultra Famous Hole that this Hole Puncher Punched?

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This is one of the most important hole punchers in the history of holes, and also in the history of counting and figuring out what to do with counted things.  Do you know who filed this drawing as part of their patent report, and what famous contribution this thing made? 

History of Holes--Filling Mega-Gigantic Holes with Cities. Part I--Finding Mt. Brooklyn

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1671 (with thanks for the help from Orion Pozo on Japan's Alice Cities)

Colossal Nuclear-Bobm Proof Unbuildable Mega Cities vs. Japan's Alice Cities

This is a return and redux to an earlier post here that looked at a stupendously bad idea--building an enormous underground-Manhattan under Manhattan, a deep, terrifically bad bit of anti-atomic-bomb planning that leaves the observer semi-speechless.

There are some ideas that are incredible and bold that take one step across the line into the bizarre; then there are those that approach that line but stay well enough away from it that gives them a definite aroma of potential and the possible.  Here's one case of the former with its corollary in the later. 

Case #1. 

It seems as though this report (below) might have made sense if the author had announced the discovery of the "missing" Brooklyn Mountain, misplaced somehow under a thousand feet of Manhattan bedrock. Found it; excavated it; and then returned, piling the reconstituted mountain into Jamaica Bay, and then piling the thing 500' high.  Actually, the Jamaica Bay mountain part of this might've come true in part of the report. 

There was no mountain, of course, but the other result was almost as unbelievable. The author of this plan speculated on building this spherical city in Manhattan bedrock--a structure which so far as I can determine would have a volume of 1.2 cubic miles (5 km³) with its top beginning some 1,200' under Times Square.  Its an impressive hole "just"to dig--it would be a goodly chunk of the volume of Lake Mead. And it would make the world's largest man-made hole--the Bingham Copper Mine in Utah--seem like the very beginning efforts to digging this beast out to begin with.  The Bingham Pit is 2 miles wide and about .75 miles deep, which means that the hole needed to be excavated to reach a 1.2 mile diameter of this sphere some 3,500 feet under the surface would be, um, "big"--like needing to divert the Hudson and the East rivers, and extending the digging into Jersey, which would be a, well, "task". 

Even if the entire comparative oeuvre of architecture and city planning was crankily limited to only the work of Claes Oldenburg, this effort by Oscar Newman would still rise to the bottom.  A terrifically bad idea, the Atomic City would be the chunky bit floating in the smooth, evenly-distributed soup of Oldenburg’s Truly Bad Ideas.

 

On the other hand, Oldenburg’s work never seems to transcend its pointed badness—his nostril entrance as part of a large nose facade for a tunnel continues to remain simply goofy—and Newman’s work does.  It goes all the way ‘round the badness issue and comes up nicely in the so-bad-its-good category, while Oldenburg’s star is firmly fixed in the “so bad it isn’t even bad/not even wrong (Wolfgang Paul for the latter)  firmament.

 

Newman published this in 1969 (?!) after somehow latching onto the idea of clearing out massive underground caverns with nuclear explosions--in this case, the space would be hollowed out under Manhattan.  The underground sphere would be a miniature version of whatever was above it--along the medial there would be a "topside" of a regular city with streets and high rise buildings, underneath which would exist an underground city for the underground city.  In this honeycomb would exist the means of production and energy, segmented in multi-block-sized enclosures of no charm. 

Why does this remind me of the Titanic?

 

(I should note here that this this is Manhattan, and that the Oldenburgian 1000-foot tall Q-Tips (registered trademark!) are air-gathers/filters for the city below.)

There's really just so much wrong with this idea there is only one place to begin.

There are "no views" underground.

In his description of the idea, Newman writes:

"Manhattan could have a half-dozen such atomic cities strung under the city proper...the real problem in an underground city would be the lack of views and fresh air, but its easy access to the surface and the fact that, even as things are, our air should be filtered and what most of us see from our window's is somebody else's wall."¹

Aside from being very badly written, it is surprising (?!) that Mr. Newman writes about the no-view problem before that of air supply.  Or anything else. 

In this Oddnity² of oddness one of the oddest things to me is that Mr. Newman would actually use only half of his sphere, preserving the top of the hemisphere for nothing at all. Except for "Cinerama"--the architect evidently intended to use the blank vault for image projection, which is not a half-bad idea. But why one would bother to build something like this even in the imagination and leave half of it to nothing is a mystery.  (This is a slippery slope, picking out one bad thing and then another; there's really nothing but bad here.)

In leaving this pretty mess I'd just like to point out that Mr. Newman saw fit to include an enormous (projected?) advertisement for Coca Cola, hovering somewhere around underground mid-town.

And all of that dirt?  Where would all of that dirt go, the dirt not necessary to fill around the sphere?  A cubic mile of extra dirt?  That's the "missing Mount Brooklyn", and as Orion Pozo has suggested (even though he thinks the idea would be a tragedy), perhaps it could've been used to fill in Jamaica Bay.  Fill it up and then some, for perhaps another 500' above the old water line. 

Tomorrow we'll look at Case #2:  Japanese Alice Cities.

[This post could fit into so many different categories for this blog, though I think it best nestled in a combination of "Bad Ideas" and "The History of Holes" resulting in the "Bad Ideas in the History of Holes" subcategory.]

Notes

1. Alison Sky and Michelle Stone. Unbuilt America.  McGraw Hill, 1976, page 192.  No home should be without this book.

2. "Oddnity".  Just made up.  A litany of oddnesses; a collection of oddities so large that the collection itself becomes one large oddity--an oddnity.".

 

 

Some Lincoln Ephemera: Audio of the Voice of J.W. Booth, the Last Man to See Lincoln Shot (& on TV), and the Last Man to See Lincoln Dead

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What did the voice of John Wilkes Booth sound like?  There are certainly a  number of testimonies to what his voice was like, but since he died a dozen years before it was possible, really, to have his voice recorded, nothing exists for us to listen to of him.  One could though stretch credulity a bit and say that he perhaps sounded similar to his brother Edwin--another actor--and there are recordings of him speaking.  So, by long extension, this may be what John Wilkes sounded like. 

Edwin Booth:

Somewhat related is this, a 1956 appearance on the television program "I've Got a Secret" by Mr. Samuel J. Seymour, who's secret was that he was a witness to John Wilkes Booth assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  He was five years old at the time and his abiding memory was being concerned for the man who fell onto the stage from the balcony. Seymour evidently died two months later from complications of a fall he took while traveling to appear on the show.

In another vaguely related historical bit, the last person to see Abraham Lincoln did so in 1902.  There had been a number of attempts to steal the body of the president--one of which came very close to completion--and so in the final move of Lincoln's body to a burglar-proof resting place on 20 September 1902 his coffin was opened.  John Bowlus was there, and he related what he remembered as a nine-year-old boy viewing Lincoln 37 years after his death.

Bowlus stated:

"I can see his face as if it were yesterday," Bowlus recalled. "Even in death he was an awe-inspiring figure." A boy of 14 at the time, Bowlus said he had stood on tiptoe and gazed, awestruck, on the majestic features of Lincoln, almost too afraid to peer into the glass-topped casket. "The body was almost perfectly preserved," Bowlus remembered. "The face was darker... he lay with his head and shoulders and tips of his hands visible where they were crossed on his chest." It was awe-inspiring, almost frightening," he said. "The beard appeared to have grown longer, but the dignity of the great man could almost be felt through the air-tight casket which had preserved his body," Bowlus said. --"The Last Man to See Lincoln", by Lance J. Herdegen, [source].

I looked for a recording of Robert Todd Lincoln (who died in 1926) but could not find none.

And just for the sake of it, a list of early recordings of U.S. Presidents:

• Benjamin Harrison
• Grover Cleveland
• William McKinley
• Theodore Roosevelt
• William Howard Taft
• Woodrow Wilson
• Warren G. Harding
• Calvin Coolidge
• Herbert Hoover

Depression-era Photographs of Miners from the Library of Congress

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Miner waiting for ride home.  Each miner pays twenty-five cents a week to owner of car. Capels, West Virginia.

I doubt that it was this truck that was going to make the commuter run, but it might well be.  There's a tool chest in the truck bed, along with what looks like an upholstered truck bench next to it--it certainly wasn't abandoned because the truck still has its wheels.

In the detail of the picture it seems as though someone made repairs to the truck bed's wooden racks with wire or rope rather than with nails (jsut to the left of the miner's right shoulder). Picture source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, ca. 1938.)

 

The History of Blank, Empty & Missing Things--When Everything was Missing

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1624   (Part of the series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.)

Perhaps "everything" wasn't missing, but almost everything was.  Certainly the ancients and even the more-moderns, even the scientists of the 16th and into the 17th centuries (until von Guericke in 1672), could not abide the idea of the existence of nothing.  The vacuum, a space in which there was nothing at all, was seen to be an anathema to the creations of the great creator, that the vacuum was antithetical to what was understood to be the nature of nature. (I wrote a post here earlier on when nothing was almost something.)

But what we see here, above, is the third day of creation as presented in one of the most significant books printed in the 15th century, and it is somewhat problematic, because it depicts almost-northing.  That, or almost-everything. 

The book was written in Latin by Hartmann Schedel (1444-1514, with the German translation by Georg Alt) , with the illustrations under the control of Michael Wohlgemut (1434-1519) and his stepson Wilhelm Pleydenwurff (c. 1450-1494), .and was published in Nuremberg in 1493 by Anton Koberger as Liber Chronicarum--known best to English-pseaking readers as the Nuremberg Chronicles (and to Germans as Die Schedelsche Weltchronik).  It is perhaps one of the greatest illustrated works in the first half-century of movable type printing, using more than 1800 woodcuts to tell the story of the world--according to the Bible, mostly.  (The book deals with the history of world in its seven ages--the first five of which deal with cumuulative history to the birth of Jesus Christ, while the sixth ages handles the history from Christ to the present day, and teh seventh carries along the future history of the world to the Last Judgment.  Not much then is devoted to the 1500 years preceding the publication of Koberger's book. The author, Schedel, was a very religious man, and considered the work of teh Bible to come from the hand of god and therefore was infallible; on the other hand (so to speak), everything written outside of the Bible was that of humans, and so fallible, and therefore open to interpretation.)

Here is a colored version of the third day in the creation cycle mythology, which opens itself to much more visual congruence. ("On the third day God gathered together unto one place the waters under the firmament; and the dry land appeared. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters he called Seas; and God saw that it was good, and said, Let the earth bring forth the green grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit trees yielding fruit after their kind.[Genesis 1:9-13.]")

And the uncolored version, third day:

This sort of "nothingness" is not unique, as we can see in this example from the Mantegna Tarocchi, showing the creator as Primum Mobile, the First Mover, holding what may well be our universe in its hands (and standing on another sphere of nothing, god knows what that might be):

Perhaps I'm missing the larger picture, and that the circles/spheres are the things created, and that they are contained in the square surrounding them; and that the boundaries marked by the circular lines are not necessarily empty, and that it is the suggested of the circles that is the stuff created, placeholders, contained within the square of the creator's domain.  Or maybe not. Perhaps the circles are signifiers for the elements--earth at the center, surrounded by water/air/fire. Perhaps the woodcut was just waiting for some color. 

Notes:

The English translation of the Nuremberg chronicle used here is from Beloit College (here) which also has a very lovely scholarly treatment of their copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle (here).

Here's the rest of the cycle, in color:

"For he spoke and they were made: He commanded and they were created"  (Psalm 33)., so says the legend (IPSE DIXIT ET FACTA SUNT; IPSE MANDAVIT ET CREATA SUNT Psalm 32) which floats above god enthroned--but it is difficult to see the progress in the un-colored version of day three.  

The first day:

Curious Cuts: Books in Bosch

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Books are a favorite symbol, a venerable icon, a useful tool for developing ideas in Renaissance paintings.  They do sometimes make unusual appearances, this time--and not too unexpectedly--in the work of Hieronymus Bosch.  The painting, Cutting the Stone, (also called The Extraction of the Stone of Madness or better yet The Cure of Folly) was completed by Bosch in 1494 and lives today in the Prado. 

Bosch was at the very least a very curious character, hardly a man of his time--he seems difficult for us to place in the 15th century given the extraordinary range of his deep imagination.  He seems to be more a man of the modern times rather than one of the Renaissance.  I mention that the painting is in the Prado, finding its way there from the collections of Spanish sovereigns, who collected Bosch as a deeply Christian painter who depicted the travesty of sin and moral neglect rather than his own deep fantasy.

The scene is described by the inscription above and below it:

Meester snyt die keye ras
Myne name Is lubbert Das

(in English: "Master, cut away the stone
my name is Lubbert das").

The man in the chair, the man undergoing some sort of cranial/brain surgery is an everyman of sorts, a Dutch Everyman Fool named Lubbert (translated to "castrated dachsund")..  A charlatan medico stands and removes symbols of lunacy and foolishness from his brain, images of flowers standing for the fool's stone of long folklore.  The medicine man wears an inverted funnel for a hat, a symbol for emptiness, nothingness.  Likewise his purse is stuffed with straw, another iconic display of greed compounded and gaining nothing at all. 

But what I am attracted to right now in this painting is the woman on the right balancing a book on her head.  It seems to me to be a very rare case of a Renaissance image of  a book displayed in this manner--usually books are simply held and are symbols of learning or wisdom or piety.  In this case, the woman is just part of the general folly which is the concern of the quack surgeon, a closed book (impossibly?) balanced in tribute to the craziness before her, perhaps hoping for the words to seep through the pages and into her own head. 

There are a number of other images of this operation, which was in its way a standard procedure for the relief of insanity, or depression, or lunacy, or basically of any mental complaint or "error", which can be found (along with description) on the bioephemera blog, here. 

For example, there is this scene of mass extraction of the stones of madness by Peter Brueghel (painted ca. 1550)

Its a pretty miserable scene.

Again, I'm really just after the book in the Bosch. 

History of Holes: Making Tiny Holes & the Art of Compiling Statistics (I)

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 1612

Part of this blog's  History of Holes series.  (See, for example: An Episode in the History of Holes: Electricity, Punched Cards and the Computer, 1878, here; History of Holes--Filing Holes Up, here.  And fifteen others. 

I was thinking about holes and hole-making in the history of the art form of compiling statistics, and in the process of accumulating a few images of the machines that actually made the holes in tabulating cards, I found an interesting/unfortunate/depressing illustration.  It  belonged to the Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft ("Dehomag"), which was the German arm of IBM. (Herman Hollerith created his Tabulating Machine Company in 1896; it was consolidated with the International Recording Company and Computing Scale Company of America into Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR) in 1911, and then, in 1924, changed once again into something with the name that we all recognize , International Business Machine (IBM).)

Edwin Black's one-trick pony, IBM and the Holocaust, I'm sure was a consolidation of grand assertions that helped to sell a book.  As a history I find it manipulative, like a person on a mission to say something and uses only what is positive to that end.  On his website, Black states: "IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich's needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed." If you read between the lines this sounds like standard operating procedure that IBM would've followed with anyone; but on the face of it Black creates the case for IBM automating the Holocaust. 

The poster has a very provocative cache, and taken somewhat out of context it might be viewed as dustjacket artwork for Black's book.  The all-seeing eye absorbing the information of teh punched card, with the unfortunate, looming, belching smokestack there in the foregoround, reminiscent of the chimneys in the concentration and extermination camps.  But this poster was executed around 1925, well ahead of any of those events--the design by serendipity happens to visually support the author Black's assertions.  Its just a nasty-looking object.

Filling Holes Up: the Reverse, "Two-Sided" Holes of Marcel Duchamp.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1592  [Part of the History of Holes series.]

"Let each man proclaim: there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished"--Tristan Tzara

I guess that "up" would be a redundancy in this post's title, since we can't really fill a hole going down, filling from the top of the cavity to its base, the reverse of digging a hole.  Or perhaps not if the task was given to M. Duchamp.

But in this longish, developing thread on the history of holes it occurred to me that I hadn't included anything on filling/stopping holes,the realization coming to me while browsing the lovely and very inclusive paper ephemera site of SHeaff-Ephemera.com

[The original site for the above three images:  sheaff-ephemera.com; other images in Notes, below.]

There have been a number of posts here about existing holes, but none thus far about making them (except for a few posts on aerial bombing) or filling them up--so far, the series has been in a hole-stasis.  There really should be a section on making high-speed hole-making (with bullets, like our friend Hank Quinlan, with Uncle Orson in the role in the magnificent Touch of Evil), and another on long, longitudinal and laboriously slow hole-making (with say foundation/caisson work in constructing the Brooklyn Bridge).

But for right now I'd like to address the crafty M. Duchamp as a hole-filler, a  man who created a two-sided literal and figurative hole-making and hole-filling event, and what may be the first of its kind in the history of art.  Figuratively, Duchamp's approach to art in the nineteen-'teens was seen by many as a process to "destroy" art itself:  finding things like a bicycle wheel and implanting it on a stool and calling it art was seen by his friends as an event and not as art per se, but as a perversion.  Even Duchamp's own group at the epochal 1916 international art show rejected his first "Readymade"² (not yet then called so) as not art, leading Duchamp to abandon even them. (This had also happened three years earlier with his "Nude Descending".)

I don't think that Marcel Duchamp was trying to "destroy" art, though I do believe that he was trying to force a conversation in which he had no interest in participating--a written conversation in which there was no real end or beginning, and so no middle, on top of which the punctuation would be removed and re-applied by chance. 

Even the idea of a "hole" could be viewed differently in such circumstances--like the one that appears in his "The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even" in the top part of the bottom ("Bachelor" panel, the detail of which appears at the head of this post, and the full version below).  Perhaps we should be talking about constructing something around a space, the remaining bit once encircled becomes a "hole":  a reverse hole?  That would be similar to both constructing and filing the hole, almost at the same time; Duchamp included this hole in this artwork, and then covered it on both sides with glass, the self-described "lazy" Duchamp finishing it after many years of labor, a work he said to be "unanalyzable by logic". ³

It seems a little like making empty space inside a vacuum.

 ["The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)" by Marcel Duchamp, is installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.]

Notes:

[The original site for the above three images:  sheaff-ephemera.com.)

2.  "The Bicycle Wheel is my first Readymade, so much so that at first it wasn't even called a Readymade. It still had little to do with the idea of the Readymade. Rather it had more to do with the idea of chance. In a way, it was simply letting things go by themselves and having a sort of created atmosphere in a studio, an apartment where you live. Probably, to help your ideas come out of your head. To set the wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoyed looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio, the movement of the wheel reminded me of the movement of flames"

-and-

"Please note that I didn't want to make a work of art out of [Bicycle Wheel]. The word 'Readymade' did not appear until 1915, when I went to the United States. It was an interesting word, but when I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a 'readymade,' or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn't have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it, or describing anything. No nothing like that..."

--http://www.toutfait.com/unmaking_the_museum/Bicycle%20Wheel.html

3.  Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp, a Biography, p. 6.

History of Holes: the most Famous Hole in Art?

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1583   [Part of the History of Holes series]

 

Filippo Brunelleschi is most often credited--from Vasari to Kemp--as the modern discoverer of linear perspective (or re-discoverer in the eyes of Samuel Edgerton Renaissance Rediscovery of Perspective, 1975 or John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 1987).  The Greeks most certainly had mastered some aspects of perspective as is in evidence in their surviving architecture (though not artwork remains exhibiting this), but Brunelleschi for all intents and purposes¹ discovered it for the rest of humanity. 

Edgerton remarked that the discovery "marked an event which ultimately was to change the modes, if not the course of Western history", with one reason for this magnitude being that technological and architectural ideas could be far more easily intellectually-transmitted as societal property rendered in perspective than had they not been issued so.  (I wonder, for example, if this might have been the reason why there was no Chinese technological renaissance during the Renaissance--because the idea of linear perspective was not adopted until relatively late, meaning that transmitting complex technical ideas was far more difficult.)

Brunelleschi employed a brilliant method to capture the depth of his scene--in this famous case, the Baptistery in

Florence.  Employing this method helped the architect to understand the mathematical principles of perspective and to become its earliest master. 

Perspective is the romance of balance and the mathematics of proportion, at the center of which is the vanishing point, an interestingly-named point of departure and similarity, where parallel lines not parallel to the image plane appear to come together, in an early singularity.  So it is this great and famous hole helping to establish a great and famous dot (which I guess could make an appearance of its own in this blog's series on The History of Dots). 

Another famous hole that comes a little later (a hundred years or so later) belongs to Albrecht Durer (The Painter's Manual, 1525)

where Durer illustrates the artist at work using a perspective device along with a vielo. 

There are other holes in the history of art to be sure, but these are perhaps the most significant ones that appear in the Renaissance--there are others in architecture, for example, but my thinking is that the Brunelleschi hole takes precedence.  Other interesting and significant holes begin to appear a little later on, for the development of peep machines, and the camera obscura, and then of course photography, but they will come in a later post. 

Notes: 

1. Earlier though not complete efforts were made in Alhazen's Perspectiva, c. 1000 A.D., Roger Bacon's Opus Majus, c. 1260 A.D., John Pecham's Perspectiva communis, c. 1270 A.D..,  and Alberti's  Della pittura (1435).

Another perspective machine of Durer: 

History of Lines: Looking Straight Down from Straight Up, 1786

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1581

I was struck by the mosaic possibilities of the image (below) found in Thomas Baldwin's Airopaidia (printed in 1786) and so made it into one.  But what the engraving is,m really, is a view from a balloon, looking straight down.

We're looking straight down, through the clouds, seeing two towns (at bottom-left and top-center)--why the rivers are red, I don't know.

There are other posts on this blog on looking straight down, which is an attractive subject--to me, at least. First-hand images of looking straight down fro a balloon are rare things, even through the early 19th century, and offer a prospective seldom seen in human history.

Another view from this work attempts to show some depth:

Here's another view of that same image from the Baldwin experience, reprinted around 1810, and left in black-and-white:"

 Halton Tuner makes these observations on Baldwin's flight in his iconic Astra Castra: Experiments and adventures in the atmosphere ¹(published in 1864 in London):