Ptak Science Books

The History of Lines series: the String of Empire, 1908

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 1733

It is astonishing sometimes to think about how much was accomplished with so little.  This photograph, found in the 6 June 1908 issue of the Illustrated London News, entitled "The Threads of Every Man's Maze:  Arranging Railway Time-Tables" (sub-titled "the ingenious system of threads which secure the perfect working of a great railway system") is just such a case in point of wonder.  Each section of the board represents one hour, top to bottom; these are further subdivided by thinner lines representing 5-minute intervals; the horizontal lines representing the distances between stations.  And the guys in the foreground are keeping the whole thing up-to-minute, using string and tacks. 

This was the British Empire at about its loftiest heights, with a spectacular internal railroading system, kept all in line and on time and correct with the help of heavy thumbs.  Can you think of a better way to display all of this complex data (with 1910 technology)  in real-time so that it is all intelligible--and to be so instantly?  I can't.  This was just sheer, simple, brilliance.

I know, I know, this is actually "thread", but so it goes.  If you elongated and strengthened this concept just a bit you'd come up with rope and wire, and chains--the most simple metallic form of which was used by surveyors for hundreds of years to help map our earth.  And I won't even get close to the String Theory stuff here, or stringed instruments--but if I did, I would want to talk a little about perhaps the ultimate string/cosmology image in the history of science, which would be Robert Fludd and his fantastical thought-experiment  called "Monochordum mundi". from his Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, printed in 1617.

Fludd makes an elaborate and beautiful stab at understanding the deepest aspects of an imagined supramusical relationship between the order and rationality and mathematical aspects of music and the functioning of the universe—based on sound itself.  These ideas come up time and time again, most visually pleasing in Fludd, but most dramatically argued by Johannes (Harmonicae Mundi, "Music of the Spheres") Kepler.  But Fludd trumps with god’s graphical intervention.

The hand of god makes an appearance here as it adjusts the magic monochord of creation--a Pythagorean monochord of two octaves which are then divided into harmonic intervals.  But god's hand is definitely there, doing some sort of adjustment (or perhaps even holding the slipping peg in place?), which is actually a little bit late in the history of the mechanical universe being turned by the hand of the creator, with the hand actually depicted doing the job.  In general the hand stopped making appearances by this point in the history of science, but did manage to linger on in the work of Fludd.

Foucault's Pendulum, 1851

JF Ptak Science Books   [Quick Post in the History of Lines series]

"That was when I saw the Pendulum. The sphere, hanging from a long wire set into the ceiling of the choir, swayed back and forth with isochronal majesty.. .The time it took the sphere to swing from end to end was determined by an arcane conspiracy between the most timeless of measures: the singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane's dimensions, the triadic beginning ofn, the secret quadratic nature of the root, and the unnumbered perfection of the circle itself... Were its tip to graze, as it had in the past, a layer of damp sand spread on the floor of the choir, each swing would make a light furrow..."--Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum.

I've uploaded an interesting recrod to the books for sale section of this blog on the great experiment of Leon Foucault (1819-1868), who was the first to actually demonstrate the rotation of the Earth, doing so with a very simple, extraordinarily elegant experiment involving a heavy brass bob suspended from a long cable--a pendulum that was unencumbered and free to swing along any plane.  It is the curvature of the Earth that allows the tip of the bob to make its pattern, and it is the fact that the Earth is rotating under the moving pendulum that allows it to be tracing this path at all--it is also tells the difference between living on a sphere and living on a plane. 

History of Lines: Barbed Wire Borders for San Francisco's Chinese Scapegoats

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1698 [Part of the History of Lines series.]

[All images below via the Library of Congress, The Chinese in California, 1850-1925]  

Part of this blog's history of line series inevitably deals with some of our planet's most cutting lines:  barbed wire.  Talking about just the United States for the moment, it cut land into small, bite-sized chunks in the parceling-out and extinction of expansion in the American Westward movements, and has done pretty much the same in keeping apart the races in some areas of the country where the legal/social/cultural lines begged for steel more than paper. Such is the case in these remarkable photographs from San Francisco

And the full image:

["The Barb-Wire Barricade: From The Wave: v. 21, Jan. - July 1900: no. 21, page 7: Scenes Outside the Chinatown Quarantine Lines, San Francisco".]

The reason for this barbed wire in the streets of San Francisco was simple--it was a quarantine of Chinese people who were thought to be infested with bubonic plague. The reasons for this were simple and racist--given that the Chinese were seen from (at the very least) the 1860's to be an "inferior" and "degraded"¹ race, living in close quarters and in fair squalor at times (given the wages that they were paid and the abuses they suffered from the Chinese Exclusion Acts), and given the codified racist sentiments against them, it was seen that these people were capable of spreading the diseases via their very presence and "vapors". (At least one of these "three graces" of "malarium", "small-pox" and leprosy were seen as coming directly from Chinatown in San Francisco. See notes #1 for source.)

And so up went the barbed wire, "and no Chinese American was allowed to leave the area bounded by California, Kearny, Broadway, and Stockton streets"².  This of course restricted the access of Chinese immigrants and Chinese-American citizens, and held for some three months, prohibiting access out and in, meaning that food was in short supply, prices for goods and food went very high, and many Chinese businesses suffered loss and closure.  At the end of three months, the barbed wire quarantine was lifted, and of course not one case of plague was reported among the Chinese population. 

There is a long history to this sort of thinking, as we find that, for example, in the 1875/6 smallpox epidemic San Francisco's father's determined that one cause might be the Chinese, and had all of the houses in Chinatown fumigated.  This of course had nothing to do with the epidemic; yet, at the end of it  all, "the  city health officer, J. L. Meares, offered the following explanation:  I unhesitatingly declare my belief that the cause is the presence in our midst of 30,000 (as a class) of unscrupulous, lying and treacherous Chinamen, who have disregarded our sanitary laws, concealed and are concealing their cases of smallpox."³

Here's another image from the 1900 quarantine:

["A Conversation Across the Ropes: From The Wave: v. 21, Jan. - July 1900: no. 21, page 7: Scenes Outside the Chinatown Quarantine Lines, San Francisco" Publisher: Wave Publishing Company.]

And another, keeping San Francisco "clean and healthy" with barbed wire and rope.  

["No Admittance: From The Wave: v. 21, Jan. - July 1900: no. 21, page 7: Scenes Outside the Chinatown Quarantine Lines, San Francisco."]

Another example of the institutionalized despoilment of the Chinese is seen here in an 1880 Board of Health pronouncement on the state of Chinatown in San Francisco was an official "nuisance", and that the "Chinese cancer:" must be cut out:   "The Chinese cancer must be cut out of the heart of our city, root and branch, if we have any regard for its future sanitary welfare . . . with all the vacant and health territory around this city, it is a shame that the very centre be surrendered and abandoned to this health-defying and law-defying population. We, therefore, recommend that the portion of the city here described be condemned as a nuisance; and we call upon the proper authorities to take the necessary steps for its abatement without delay."⁴

And of course examples can go on and on--but there is really nothing quite like seeing a racial sentiment transferred into a three-dimensional object--like a barbed wire fence going down the middle of a street in San Francsico, in 1900--to drive home a message of learned bad thinking. 

Notes:

1. An excellent article by   Joan B. Trauner, "The Chinese as Medical Scapegoats in San Francisco, 1870-1905," California History, Vol. LVII, No. 1 (Spring 1978), pp. 70-87.  Full text is available online with an academic account.

2. Source: History of Chinese Americans in California, the 1900's, blog  here.

3. Trauner, ibid. Page 73

4.  _____, pg 75.

 

A History of Lines: The Hands of Brooklyn

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

 This is an editor's conception of explaining the operating principle of how the soon-to-be-built Brooklyn Bridge (finished in 1883) would support itself to the readers of the Scientific American in 1878:

These "strands" of cable would be fixed to the superstructure with these devices:

 

A simple explanation of an enormous undertaking.

And I just need to include this image of the wrapping of Roebling's cables, which was an enormously dangerous job, not helped by the height of the short fence that was supposed to keep these men from falling to their death in the river:

 

The Most Beautiful Blank Map in the World--the Bellman's Fit from the Hunting of the Snark

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1644  [Part of the Series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.]

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank"
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!"--Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark.

[This post fits perfectly in our History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.  Ditto for the series on The History of Lines--making this a great confluence for a History of Blank and Missing Lines (in the History of Nothing series).]

For all of the brilliance of all of the cartographers and map makers who have drawn a line in the sand or strung a strand of quipi or drawn a celestial rendering on a cave wall or imagined the Americas in 1504 or ventured out and away from the Medieval T-maps or drew maps of other worlds or fashioned spiraling maps of Hell, I think the maps I most like are maps of imagined places.  Of course I enjoy the extremely rigorous and steadfast maps (like those of the German Stieler Company of Gotha who for a hundred years routinely drew the most detailed maps in a particular scale than any other mapmakers in creation—you know, the big maps of the U.S. that would locate minute places like Truman Capote’s “out there” town of Holcomb, Kansas) and of course maps of the solar system and galaxy and universe (as knowledge expanded and collapsed and expanded again).  And of course there are the representational maps showing the comparative heights

of mountains and lengths of rivers, or the grouping of all the world’s lakes, or the divorce rate map of the United States at Centennial, or the heights at which different sorts of trees are found, or geological speculations on the thrust of the Appalachian chain, or the wanderings of the course of the Mississippi River (below), and other hosts of things.

As much as detail is attractive to me—complex, staggering information correctly displayed—there is also the opposite:  the quick, thoughtful, spare map.  The Tabula Peutingeriana is sort of like that—this is a 17th century reproduction of an ancient Roman map that was, basically, a road map of the world (or the Roman World) that was linear and included all manner of detail of the roads themselves, with little else.  It is a spectacular thing—one version I had once was 14 inches high and 16 feet long, just a skinny map of how to get around in the world from 2000 years ago.  There was of course nothing “quick” about how the map was made, coming at the expense of countless hours of careful observation, keen observation, and lots of general human tragedy.

Folrani's world map of (ca.) 1575 (which appeared in Antoine Lafrery’s (1512–1577) Geografia tavole moderne di geographia) is a glorious thing and a fantastic accomplishment for its time (and also being the first map to use the name "Canada").  It has a sumptuous artistry to it in addition to inclduing (and excluding) certain of the newly known discoveries.  In this version of the map he chose to not use the newly-incorporated Straits of Ainan

 

In another edition of the m-which appeared a few years later--North America is still attached to Asia, but now there is added another bit, a gigantic land mass to the south, Terra Incognita.  This was basically put together by some sightings in the southern seas that located different land masses, and Forlani took it upon himself to connect all of those pieces of information and draw them into one continuous land mass, greatly expanding his own version of Antarctica from a few years earlier.  It is a wonderful example of leaving something(big)  out and making something else (even bigger) up.

But the map that I think I love the most illustrates Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits, and occurs in the Bellman’s tale, starting the second fit. It begins:

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies-
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity too! One could see he was wise,
The moment one look in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when the found it to be
A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
"They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank"
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!"

Sometimes there is nothing so fine as something that beautifully illustrates the nothing that isn’t there, and this lovely map, unencumbered of all of the elements and details that define the mapness of something,  perfectly explains the origin of its need.

For a lovely work on the complexities and simplicities and just sheer  beauty of what things like maps are check out former Ashevillean Peter Turchi's Maps of the Imagination, the Writer as Cartographer.

When Data was Dada: Max Ernst, Dada, Graphs, and the Display of Non-Existent Information

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

This quasi/faux statistical/graphical modern art image by Max Ernst is found in the journal Mecano (issue no. 3 “Rouge”), which was the principal Dada publication vehicle, and issued by the artist Theo van Doesburg (in the Netherlands).  It arrived in 1922, just 10 years after the publication of Marinetti’s “Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista” and a year before Marcel Duchamp retired from painting, and just another two years before Andre Breton nailed down the meaning of Surrealisme (and again like a particle collision changed the direction of some of modern art). 

The Dada Movement is generally thought to have started by WWI escapes in the neutral haven of Zurich (where the war was escapable for the duration), at the Cafe Voltaire, in 1916, the word "dada" being found as is generally believed by Tristan Tzara.)   I am trying hard to form some sort of memory for other Dadist, Futurist, Symbolist or other modern movements from the ‘teens and ‘twenties to use a graph such as this in the artwork but I cannot think of any.

(By the way, also appearing in this issue of Mecano were Man Ray, R. Hausmann, Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, and others.) 

History of Lines: Clouds

 JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1629  (On Clouds and Not-Clouds, Part I)

"...and they drew all manner if things--everything that begins with an M---'

    'Why with an M?' said Alice

   'Why not?', said the March Hare." --Lewis Carroll,  from "A Mad Tea Party", in Alice's Adventures in   Wonderland.

Why not, indeed?  I've long had an interest in clouds, and since this blog is ostensibly on the surfacing or definition of Cloud Bones, I though to spend a little time on the origins of the depictions of printed clouds in art. Not being an expert by any means on the history of art, it just seems to me that after long exposure clouds are not well-represented in woodcuts, wood engravings and other early engravings, or at least not so well depicted as their landsmen in paintings.  There seems to be no shortage of effort to reveal gorgeous clouds  through the early Renaissance--but the doesn't seem to apply very often to their representation in prints.

And that of course is when the detail of the sky is depicted at all. It seems that more often than not, in woodcuts printed from say 1460 through 1550, that the sky is left blank, like this image from Ovid (Accipe Studiose Lector P. Ouidij Metamorphosin...printed in Venice in 1509:

"You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead --
There were no birds to fly".--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass. 

I could go on with many examples of the blank sky--the white, blank, settled nothingness--but exhibiting variations of nothing at this point isn't necessary.  But illustrating clouds is.

And for the most part, clouds don't look very much like themselves in prints, not really, not for more than a hundred years.  For example, Martin Schoengauer's spectacular  The Temptation of St. Anthony, which was printed in 1470/5, has a beautiful, fluid circularity to it, full of an earthy roundness even as the saint is pursued by demons.  But the sky in the background is populated with nothing but dashes to suggest clouds. 

Perhaps clouds would have taken away from the moment; but if that were the case, why bother with the dashes?

There are considerable exceptions to this practice, with Durer and Altdorfer coming quickly to mind--but in my experience, the oddly-formed cloud seems to be the majority rule in the woodcut.  

At this time there were of course many depictions of skies with no clouds in paintings, bare suggestions of themselves, even in some of the most famous works--Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Michelangelo's Fall of Man in the Sistine Chapel are fair examples.  But once you move away from the golden Sienese skies of the14th century¹, clouds are given full and beautiful shapes from early periods. (Giotto's Christ's Entering Jerusalem, 1305/6; Simone Martin The Road to Calvary, 1340; Duccio's Christ Entering Jerusalem, 1308-1311; Fra Angelico's The Dposition, 1436; Masaccio's The Tribute Money, 1424; Lippi's Annunciation, a perfect cloud treatise, 1442, and on and on. Other examples are found in continued reading below.)

Clouds in prints are a different matter--I'm not sure if it was just too technically difficult to create clouds in wood, or if there was some sort of languishing Byzantine sensibility inherent in woodblocks that was not so in oil. I'm really not so sure about this, and as much as anything else I'm thinking out loud about this lack of cloud definition.  I don't have an answer for it.  But I do want to share the beginning of a timeline for undefined clouds as they appeared (or not) over the course of about one hundred years,  from 1485 to about the end of the 16th century.   As I mentioned clouds appeared beautifully in paintings from earlier periods, and there doesn't really seem to be a substandard-cloud complement in the painting world as there was in the print world.  Of course, in western philosophy and science, clouds were pretty much left alone from inquiry, even by a series of the great natural history classifiers--they wouldn't really be given a fully taxonomic appreciation until 1803 by Luke Howard (which I wrote about in this blog earlier, here).

A Timeline of Clouds in Prints, 1485-1596

Franciscus de Retza, De Generatione Christi, sive Defensorium Castiatis Beatae Virginis Mariae, a beautiful work in Gothic type--a picture book, really, with two illustrations of magnets.  Printed in 1485, this image depicts Isidorus in a magnetic coffin which is floating in the air:

"The Adoration of the Magi", from Legenda Sanctorum Trium Regum, printed in Modena in 1490:

The Triumph of Love, 1492/3:

History of Lines: Zig and Zag, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1628   History of Lines Series

In the long history of lines seldom do we see such an indirect way to get safely from point A to point B than by zig-zagging through points A₁ to A₂₀₁. But this was definitely the case for ships in the North Atlantic in the 1914-1918 period.

Merhcant Vessel v. Submarine, Some Reasons for Zig-Zagging (a "Confidential" report written by Lt. Commander A.G. Leslie and published by Wood & Co. in Chatham in 1918) presents logical, simple, workable solutions to the problem of the submarine, fallible solutions to what must have seemed to be infallible treachery.  It is a pocket-sized, 5x3 inch talisman and survival guide for those ("For Masters of British Merchant Vessels") responsible for hundreds of lives and thousands of tons of ship, all of the good information boiled down to eight pages of loose type, a way to get around the subs, and weighing in at about an ounce. 

What it really boiled sown to was zig-zagging--plus darkening the ship, posting lookouts, painting the ship the proper color, camouflaging it, and keeping the lights and smoke down.  But over th eight pages Leslie knocks down the idea of zig-zagging over and over again.  And he was right of course, right on all of it, given the conditions of conflict and the state of development of the submarine and the torpedo.  At this point, the torpedo was a point-and-shoot affair, which means the sub commander needed to get accurate info on the speed and the course of the ship (and other stuff of course)--and the one thing that would make this very difficult for the sub was for the ship to change its course unpredictably.  That would mean longer follow time for the sub, longer time above the water line, probable multiple dives using up battery power, and so on, all very problematic for submariners.

Once unrestricted warfare was declared on 1 February 1917 the German subs attacked any and all shipping, including American ships, which led the way for American involvement in April.  The U-boot sunk substantial part of British shipping, but, ultimately, it could not do enough against the escorted convey, and the German moment would be lost.  In the end of it all, of the 360 submarines built by Germany, 178 were lost, after having waged a campaign for four years which saw the sinking of more than 11 million tons of shipping. 

A straight line coursed by the ship would allow the sub to gather its information, site the ship, and sink it.

[The full text is below.  I can't find another copy of this work in any of the likely places, including OCLC.]

The Game and Play of Chess, a Morality Play: 1474

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1616   (Part of the History of Lines series.)

It turns out that one of the most famous and iconic books on chess is really not about chess at all.  Jacobus de Cessolis, (Jacopo da Cessole, c. 1250 – c. 1322) the author of  The Game and Playe of the Chesse¹, found its way into print in the very highly capable hands of William Caxton in 1474 ("Fynysshid the last day of marche the yer of our lord god. a. thousand foure honderd and lxxiiiia") and into a second edition in (about) 1483. Caxton produced a spectacular, beautiful work on moral and ethical virtue and challenge, using the game of chess as the foundation for metaphor and aliteration of the wide classical literature that it calls upon.².  The book doesn't tell you how to play--but it does instruct on how to live.  A great aid to the book's power are the sixteen strong woodcuts ("repeated to make twenty-four figures"³), which mo doubt were a strong influence on their viewers.

I have included this entry in this blog's History of Lines series for the connection between the lines of morality and the lines of he chessboard and the movement of its pieces, which were at last the outward and symbolic basis for the ethical lessons of the work if not used in actuality. 

Notes:

1. The book was one of the first books ever printed in English, and was probably the first morality play printe in the language. It was reprinted many times, later under the title of Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium super ludo scacchorum ('Book of the customs of men and the duties of nobles or the Book of Chess').

2. Arthur Hind, An Introduction to the History of Woodcut, 1935.  Volume II, p. 708.

3. The commentary quoted here is from the facsimile edition of the original work published in London in 1883 by Elliot Stock with notes by William E.A.Axon

The authors named in this study include "Saint Ambrose (2 references), Anastasius (1), Avicenna (2), Saint Augustine (9), Saint Basil (1), Saint Bernard (2), Boethius (3), Cassiodorus (1), Cato (5), Cicero (6), Claudian (2), "Crete" (1), Diomedes (1), Florus (1), Galen (1), Helinand (4), Hippocrates (4), Homer (1), Saint Jerome (3), John the Monk (1), Josephus (4), Livy (2), Lucan (1), Macrobius (1), Martial (1), Ovid (6), Paulus Diaconus (1), Petrus Alphonsus (2), Plato (4), Quintilian (3), Sallust (1), Seneca (15), Sidrac (1), Solinus (1), Symmachus (1), Theophrastus (1), "Truphes of the Philosophers" (2), Turgeius Pompeius (1), Valerius Maximus (23), Valerian (7), Varro (1), Virgil (2), "Vitas Patrum" (2)."

 

History of Lines--The Mathematics of Euclidean Love & Maxwell's Demon, 1879

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1603  {The History of Lines series.]

If you give them a chance, physics and the maths will provide their own fairy tales.

This lovely trompe l'oeil of Euclid calls into play the play of love, in hard angles and parabolas, between Mr. Punch of Punch or the London Charivari  and the object of his affection.  The  image was published on 8 November 1879--just three days after the death of one of the greatest line-makers of the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell.  (There is no mention of JCM anywhere in Punch, and I guess probably that there needn't be, even if he was one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth (or any other) century.)

          "XIIITH BOOK OF EUCLID.—PROPOSITION 1. THEOREM.

If two Players on two sides of a Parallelogram are equal to each other, each to each, and have likewise the hearts contained by those two side» equal to each other, and shall likewise have all advantages equal, and their faulty shall coincide, then shall they be equal each to each, viz., a love-match, which may or may not be absurd."

Maxwell's really big lines come in a series of four papers called "On the Lines of Force"¹, and were published in 1861 and 1862. It is in these papers that Maxwell's famous equations are all found, and it is also the place where we'll find the basis not only for the foundation of classical electrodynamics, but the forms for the structure of what would become the epochal/modern communication/electrical technologies. 

[Source:  here.]

Maxwell's Demon came into being as a gedankenexperiment in a series of letters--it was Maxwell not only playing devil's advocate in trying to propose a circumstance in which the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics could be violated, but also providing the Demon, in the experiment, which he proposed as being a finite being, the contradictor.  JCM didn't actually name this thing on his own--that appelation came via William Thomson in an article in Nature magazine³ in 1874. 

We'll continue this later with Faraday's lines of force.

1. The articles appear in four parts in the Philosophical Magazine in 1861 and 1862 (full text via links):

• 1 Part I: The Theory of Molecular Vortices applied to Magnetic Phenomena
• 2 Part II: The Theory of Molecular Vortices applied to Electric Currents
• 3 Part III: The Theory of Molecular Vortices applied to Statical Electricity
• 4 Part IV: The Theory of Molecular Vortices applied to the Action of Magnetism on Polarized Light
• 5 Footnotes

2.   Maxwell stated it so:  "... if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us. For we have seen that molecules in a vessel full of air at uniform temperature are moving with velocities by no means uniform, though the mean velocity of any great number of them, arbitrarily selected, is almost exactly uniform. Now let us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower molecules to pass from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics...."

3.  William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), "Kinetic Theory of the Dissipation of Energy," Nature, 9 April 1874, pp. 441-444, and "The Sorting Demon Of Maxwell" (1879), Proceedings of the Royal Institution, vol. ix, p. 113.

Songs of the Streets, in Two Parts (and an Obscure Reference to an Important Anti-Darwinist)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1600  {Appropriate musical accompaniment that can be listened to under the reading of this post, Carl Orff's Gassenhauer, can be found here and minimized.]

 

 

 

I found these two interesting images over the course of a hundred pages or so in the profusely illustrated weekly magazine, Punch, or the London Charivari, for early 1865.  The first image, published 18 March 1865, "A Song of the Streets", drawn by "C.H.D." (Charles Henry Bennett, 1828-1867), displays the general thoroughfare of sidewalk life in a place like London, people being blown about by late winds and snow.

It is in the upper right-hand corner of the engraving that we find our "important Anti-Darwinist", which seems like an illogical statement, except that it isn't  The man in question is the fellow with the bellows, who seems to be the one instigating the weather, blowing so had and cold that it moves people off their feet and off the page.  The bellows is labelled "Fitzroy", and the likeness is that of the man with the same name, Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy (b. 1800), who at this time was serving as the chief of a weather department for the Royal Society, the Meteorological Statist to the Board of Trade, appointed by the president of the society, and was basically a meteorologist, except that the title had yet been invented.  (It is also interesting that Fitzroy is depicted in captain's (?) uniform, and surrounded by a floating telescope, book, thermometer and self-registering drum.) So even then, even with the first person in this position of authority, complaints for foul weather were being launched at the person "in charge", even though that person created an extraordinary new tool for detailing the possible changes in weather.¹

It happens that this is the same Robert Fitzroy who was the captain of the HMS Beagle on its second voyage (1831-1836), when he approved of the addition of an added gentleman to help keep his sanity on the long adventure, a naturalist named Charles Darwin.  It was also Fitzroy who gave Darwin a copy of the first volume of Lyell's Principles of Geology, a book integral to Darwin's development into Charles Darwin.  The voyage was personally rocky for the two men, but ultimately highly successful.  Years later, Fitzroy was shocked and  dismayed with the result of young Darwin's adventures--with the publication of On the Origin of Species..., Fitzroy felt a sense of personal guilt for Darwin's theory, and felt shame and bitterness towards it, as in his mind the theory went against his bible and his religious beliefs.   Fitzroy and the Rev. Samuel Wilberforce were at the evolution debate meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1860) in which Rev. Soapy Sam challenged Darwin's theory on "scientific" grounds, and against which Thomas Huxley (and other Darwin supporters) made his well-remembered defence².  In the middle of all of this was Robert Fitzroy, who cried for the crowd of onlookers--with his Bible held aloft--to reject man's interpretation of nature and stay with that of God.   He was booed down.  Darwin was not in attenddance. [Image: Wilberforce, threatening.]

So, in a way, Fitzroy proved to be important in the formation of the theory of evolution but also turned out to be an anti-Evolutionist, though not an important one.  Oddly enough this may be the last published image of Fitzroy during his lifetime, as he would die 42 days after the appearance of this issue.

In the second image of the streets the view from the pages of Punch (for 27 May 1865), "The Banishment of the Beggars, a New Tramp Chorus", we see a different type of street "cleaning".  In this case, it. Charles Villiers (1802-1898, and for 63 years a sitting MP) and his Homeless Poor Bill of 1865 sweeping the "sham poor" from the city streets, the legislation designating that the capable poor actually be put to work and removed from their begging positions on the streets.  The complaints in the chorus against the highly visible poor of Metropolitania were considerable,

 

finding among the beggars ("who disturb our peace") a litany of fakes, many of who are featured in the illustration:

"sham injured workmen (who display their wounds from door to door)", the lame (who clap their crutches on our toes), the blind, sham paralytics, sham widows (with hired babies and brats), "artistic tramps" (who will no longer chalk on the sidewalk "I am Starving"), and the fake veterans of wars. 

The way to salvation for these people was "the Mill", provided by the Villiers bill, and a compulsory spot in a workhouse (work-house) where labor is exchanged for room and board. 

 

Notes

1. Fitzroy was actually the person who coined the term "weather forecast", or at least he was the first to use it who had any real chance of being correct or accurate, given how much data he was able to assemble and interpret. He was really a very important person in this regard, as well. 

2. This is not the place to debate whether Huxley's famous remarks were famnous at teh time.  In a letter to Darwin J.D. Hooker wrote this of the exchange: 

"Well, Sam Oxon got up and spouted for half an hour with inimitable spirit, ugliness and emptiness and unfairness ... Huxley answered admirably and turned the tables, but he could not throw his voice over so large an assembly nor command the audience ... he did not allude to Sam's weak points nor put the matter in a form or way that carried the audience". ^ "Letter 2852 — Hooker, J. D. to Darwin, C. R., 2 July 1860". Darwin Correspondence Project 

On the other hand, another cotemporary of the exchange between WIlberforce and Huxley wrote:

Alfred Newton wrote:

In the Nat. Hist. Section we had another hot Darwinian debate... After [lengthy preliminaries] Huxley was called upon by Henslow to state his views at greater length, and this brought up the Bp. of Oxford... Referring to what Huxley had said two days before, about after all its not signifying to him whether he was descended from a Gorilla or not, the Bp. chafed him and asked whether he had a preference for the descent being on the father's side or the mother's side? This gave Huxley the opportunity of saying that he would sooner claim kindred with an Ape than with a man like the Bp. who made so ill a use of his wonderful speaking powers to try and burke, by a display of authority, a free discussion on what was, or was not, a matter of truth, and reminded him that on questions of physical science 'authority' had always been bowled out by investigation, as witness astronomy and geology.

A lot of people afterwards spoke... the feeling of the meeting was very much against the Bp.^{" _}Wiki on the 1860 debate.

A Forty-Year Precursor to Modernism--Found Cubism in 1870

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post     [History of Lines #18]

I was very surprised to come across this illustration while browsing the (3 April)  1870  volume of Punch, or the London Charivari .

I cannot think of any particular peculiar or unusual edition of Euclid that was published at about this time to demand such an unusual illustration. (The only newish edition that comes into any possible play here is Oliver Byrne's semi-insane First Six Books of Euclid, published by the Chiswick Press in 1849 and one of the most unusual and beautiful books of any sort printed in the 19th century--but then again that was 21 years before this volume of Punch.) And by "unusual" what I really mean to say is "highly unexpected" , as this all-angular depiction of a woman appears for all the world to be a Cubist- or Expressionist-like image, predating those movements by four decades. 

But the Angular Woman just seems to be happenstance, a happy precursor to a revolution-in-the-making, an accident forty+ years too early.  She is extraordinary--and for some reason she is smoking a cigarette. 

[Below--an illustration from Oliver Byrne, illustrating the propositions of Euclid via the use of color rather than words, a beautiful but non-functioning work.]

History of Lines, #17: the Artist Painting the Negative, Camille Corot, 1874

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1584   [Part of the History of Lines series]

An interesting appearance of lines in art that seemingly crosses several disciplines and chronological development is Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot's The Dreamer and the Large Trees (1874).  It is vivid artwork full of motion, expressing itself in an impressionistic sense that seems almost more abstract expressionist than mid-early Impressionist. (As an Impressionistic work it would be well into the second decade of the movement; if Abstract Expressionist, it is three decades early.)  It is a brusque, almost savage portrayal of a somber person in a deep wood, though the lines that is is composed of say anything but that. 

The print was made via the cliche verre process¹--Corot used a semi-photographic medium in which there was no camera, as it was the artist who drew the negative, who created the image from nature without a lens and without a camera body (thus eliminating lensless photography like pinhole), drawing directly on the medium (which in this case is glass, insinuated by the cliche) and then exposed/printed onto a photo-sensitive paper (the verre).  The artist is in a sense making a photograph directly of the image in their mind, recording it on the medium, and then printing it from there. 

Of course there are other important lines in the history of art: Vincent Van Gogh Starry Night (1889), Giacomo Balla, Street Light (1909), Umberto Boccioni States of Mind (1911), Michael Larionov's Rayonist Painting (1913),   Robert Delaunay Windows, (1912), Roberto Crippa (1921-1972), Jackson Pollock (1912-1956, particularly Number 1, 1948), and any numbers of works by Barnet Newman.  And of course the Cubists: Braque, Gris, Picasso, and the rest; the Constructivists like Malevich, and on and on into the sunset.  But the reason I've chosen Corot is because of the unexpected, wildish impressionist qualities that seem so far out of place, even with the movement. 

Notes:

1.  Cliche Verre was quite popular with French artists of this period, used by Theodore Rousseau, Charles Daubigny, Charles Jacques, Francois Millet and others.  The process itself appeared very early on in the history of photography, being described in Robert Hunt's technical manual on artistic photography as early as 1841, two years after photography's beginning.

The images:

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): 

History of Lines: the Desire Lines of William Blake

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1578    [Part of this blog's History of Lines series}

 The post dedicated to Patti Digh, brilliant writer and birthday girl, who wrote a lovely, image-filled  essay on Desire Lines back in December 2005 on her award-winning blog, 37days. I think the idea of Desire Lines is one of her favorites, and so I tried to imagine my own in her honor, a small Festschrift for the birthday girl.  Happy Birthday, P.D.!

 William Blake had a hard time of things, what with being thought of in unflattering terms of crazy vs. insane by many people rather than, say, being though of as "creative".  He led a good and relatively long life (1757-1827), and by his artistic and poetic creations inspired generations of other creatives, though he was very little recognized during his lifetime.  He was a seeker, and was somehow able to do his art and printmaking and poetry without a substantial income, living mostly on adequate income and patrons, slowly advancing to semi-poverty as he aged , but dying without a debt to his name.

The "line" that I site above to his unusual work, The Gates of Paradise--not the Baptistery doors by Ghiberti--, was actually a ladder and a collection of lines, but with the application of perspective becomes one combined line quicker and longer than it could ever be a ladder.   Blake's character, as with Blake himself, wants whatever it is that he can have, conceivable or not; and som, if he wants the Moon, he just goes to get it.  This version of The Gates of Paradise, which is largely a story of pictures and a few words as legend, was intended for children, perhaps--or at least that's what the title says.  In any event, its an interesting message to send to children whether it was actually intended for children of the chronological age, or not.  The "I Want, I Want" legend really wasn't necessary, as the image stands on its own.

Blake liked to tell a story with lines like this, as we see in this famous image of Newton:

Blake was an impossible anti-Newtonian--at least in my limited reading of the man--making a career of being a spectacular and beautiful anti-rationalist,  a weaver of smoke, playing with and distorting images like a theramin player of words, using language to produce dichotomies in even the most standard of sensate ideas.  Blake was the poster child for thing anti-tech, an anti-scientist out to save the world from its scientific self,  the rationalist world set to destroy imagination, the “Antichrist science” hell bent on destroying the soul of art and religion. 

“Art is the tree of life; Science is the tree of death” wrote Blake, and so he chose the “Athesistic”  Sir Isaac to stand for the beast, depicting him in art as a naked geometer intent on subjugating the world with a compass and a keen brain, reducing glory to quantification, the work of Satan..  For most of my life I thought that this image by Blake was celebrating Newton—I knew little of the poet/artist/poet, and thought the painting a reverence.  When I understood Blake a little,  I saw that the image was intended as a mockery of Newton and the idea of science—this was an unusual sensation, because absent the unspoken intention of the artist,  you could still take the subject matter of the artwork two ways. 

And of course the Creator:

 

God is presented as the Great Geometer, the creative power of the universe issuing forth with compass/dividers, was perhaps a kind of Greek conception of the rule of the universe and its interaction with all things on Earth. 

But it is interesting that in the end, Blake displays the sublime reasoning powers of Heaven and Earth, in the forms of God and Newton, both with desire lines.  I think he enjoyed doing that. 

The Series "For Children" of 1793: