Ptak Science Books

Complicated Simplicity: A Marconi Wireless Graph of Connections at Sea, 1907

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is an illustration of the approximate times and places that ships at sea could expect to be able to communication with each other by the relatively new invention of wireless telegraphy. (We're talking about Marconi here and just very briefly; this is not the place for the discussion of what he did or didn't "borrow" from his predecessors and contemporaries such as Heinrich Hertz, Oliver Lodge and Nikolai Tesla.  He at the very least however owed all of them at least an enormous helping of gratitude, and probably more.  Then there's Marconi's very conservative technical continuation in the field which is confusing and interesting.  And finally but not the least of all of the stuff about Marconi is his comfort and support of the Fascist regime in Italy, where Marconi became a member in 1923, escalating in his fame through the party ranks to have none other than Benito Mussolini serve as the best man in his second wedding.  But as I said that's all for another day.) It appeared in The Illustrated London News for 7 September 1907,surrounded by an article on Obelia in the "Science Jottings" section of the magazine.  This chart isn't

quite as complicated as it seems, really: all you need to do is follow one line from the top to the bottom.  Simply put, each diagonal line represents a specific ship (all of which are named) and their positions as they make their ways across the North Atlantic ocean; each intersection represents the time and place that two ships can communicate via wireless with one another.  So, for example, the Empress of Britain will on its six-day voyage be able to communicate at least 26 times with other ships for news and information.

What this seems to me to be is the supplemental efforts of the ocean-going ships

to the newly established trans-Atlantic radio-telegraphic company and installation opened by Marconi in October 1907.  Even though the first transatlantic communication is celebrated as having taken place in 1901, the performance, even in 1907, was still spotty.

Again, I'm just after this for the image 

Snail Trails--Getting from the Law of Irritability to Articulated Clowns and Artificial Leeches

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1677

The Laws of Irritability was a marvelous-sounding title (to our ears, in this year) for a rather important medical treatise on the contraction of muscles.  It was a medical treatise by Felice Fontana¹ (1730-1805), and had nothing to do with what we would think of as irritability, and certainly was a long way from a book like Robert Burton's beautiful and slightly unreadable (and fairly unendurable) Anatomy of Melancholy, even as much as we would like it to be.  After all, wouldn't it be lovely, somehow, in a automated-Dickensian way, to see that there were 32 laws of irritability, and that this was the first of the afflictions like ennui and depression and so on that could be modified and codified, and I guess eventually commodified?  (Making these things into commodities didn't have to wait for anything at all in the way of proof or scientific merit went; after all, they were published in published books, which would have to be purchased, so there's an instant commodification to them.)  But alas the Laws of Irritability were nothing of the sort, referring to a set of observations and deductions more real than half-imagined self-references.

But all of this leads me in a very uncommon route to articulated clowns and skeletons, and of course artificial leeches.

This entire post started with the imaging that this book (below) by Fausto Nicolini, Vita di Arlecchino ("Harlequin's Life", published in 1958) and which contained a rather unusual bit to it-actually it didn't so much "contain" it but displayed it.  The front and back covers were both illustrated with clown images--clown images that could be copied, its sections cut apart, and re-assembled into a working cut-out paper puppet.  Now I've been dealing with scarce/rare/non-existent books for 30 years, and I cannot recall a similarly-covered book, where the reader could turn its cover into a puppet.  But here it was. 

[Click, enlarge, print and cut out your own dancing harlequin--the back cover is below.]

It reminded me of another work, a beautiful anatomical treatise by Jean Baptiste Sarlandiere, first published in France but eventually printed and published in New York in 1837 as Systematized Anatomy, or Human Organography. The sample below shows exactly how the book was laid out, almost as an instructional on how to reconstitute the body--a cut-out book, made to be separated and then pulled together again as a whole, the joints articulated with string or brass brads, a book no longer now a little puppet, "A real live boy".  (And yes it happens to be an Italian author--Carlo Collodi--who gave life to that naughty marionette...this is a tough story for kids, I think, even though I muscled my way through it with our younger daughter, leaving out some of the brutal stuff.)

And it is via Sarlandiere that we get to our leeche issue, because it was he who fashioned the response tot he endemic leech shortages of the 1820's and 1830's with his creation of the artificial leech. 

Oh to be in France in the 1830's and be a illegal leech importer, for your fortune would have been made.  Leeches were still very important in medicine--as a matter of fact Francois Broussais² saw the leech as a cure to virtually every diseases, saw them as a way of relseasing the inflammation and swelling and other complaints caused the body via strange and odd assaults on the body--the leech was a good and measured response to external insult, applied frequently and very liberally. 

Evidently consumption on all fronts was on the rise, prices went high, but the availability of leeches went down.  In France alone, leech production (in 1836) fell from 50 million to about 18 million, all but 1 million of those staying within the country.  And so it was Sarlandiere who came to the rescue with his "artificial leech"³, something that would replace venthouses and bleeding cups and of course the leech itself.  It was something that he had already developed years before, but perhaps time had caught up to it.

His devices are shown  below⁴ (expandable):

 

I'm unsure of the disposition of the artificial leech; Sarlandiere's medical instrument lay in wait for the Dutch leech crisis, and seems to have gotten everyone through the sorrowful state of leechless affairs as they existed. At least he published images of what his invention looked like for the rest of the medical world to see and comment upon, and possibly use, and replicate.  This unlike other "advances" in instrumentation which were kept under wraps, and secret, such as in the case of the foreceps kept secret by the Chamerlains for several generations.  At least the widespread trust in the leech didn't last much longer.

 

[Source: Philosophy of Science Portal ]

Notes

1.  The work was published as De irritabiltatis legibus, nunc primum sancitis, et de spirituum animalium in movendis musculis inefficacia, revised and translated into Italian as Ricerche filosofiche sopra la fisica animale (1775)Fontana leges irritabilitatis constituit, ingeniosus homo et accuratus, published in 1767.

"Formulated after the model of Newton's principles in physics, the laws of Fontana on muscular irritability were an important but neglected contribution to the subject of muscular contractility. The first law concerned Haller's concept of contractility as a property of muscle fiber itself, and pointed out that a contraction follows only after some stimulus. The discussion displayed insight into the underlying nature of tetanic muscular contraction. The second principle was the refractory period discovered by Fontana in heart muscle and applied to better understanding of the function of other muscles. The original third principle was a disproof of the efficacy of a theoretical entity, the 'animal spirits' . . . In his fourth law, Fontana pointed out the loss of contractility which results from stretching or compressing a muscle, and certain medical applications of this principle. The fifth law was concerned with problems arising from atrophy of disuse."--Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, volume 5.

2^.   François Joseph Victor Broussais (1772–1838). Marie-Luce Jardin, Les Thérapies par les sangsues: les pratiques les plus anciennes aux traitements actuels hautement scientifiques, Université de Franche-Comté, Faculté de Médecine et de Pharmacie de Besançon, 2005, Thèse, pp. 32–3.

3.  Jean-Baptiste Sarlandière, Bdellomètre du Docteur Sarlandière, Paris, Firmin Didot le jeune, 1819.

4. Teunis Willem van Heiningen, "Jean-Baptiste Sarlandière's Mechanical Leeches (1817–1825): An Early Response in the Netherlands to a Shortage of Leeches", in Medical History (Wellcome Trust),  Med Hist. 2009 April; 53(2): 253–270.

And more on Fontana from the DSB ("Fontana, Felice." Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. 5. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008. 55-57. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 22 Dec. 2011):

Comparative Displays of the Heights of Things: Centennial Tower, 1876

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1675

The 1876 U.S. Centennial Exposition (formally called the "International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and products of the Soil and Mines) in Philadelphia was a grand and fabulous showing of all things American, celebrating the hundreth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  One of the crowning objects of the fair was to be the never-built 300-metre tall Centenniel Tower, pictured here in the 24 January 1874 issue of Scientific American.  The structure appeared in relief against the background of other tall things built by humans, show in a relatively new fashion for displaying quantitative data comparisons in the same scale.

 The practice of showing, say, the comparative heights of mountains and lengths of rivers by loading up all of the samples on one piece of paper for the ease of recognition was begun in the 18th century, but only rare; it began with some fits and starts in the 1820's again and then much more widely around mid-century, and seeming to peak at the end of the century before going somewhat dormant for the next few decades or so.

Another nice example of comparative heights of buildings:

 

And this as well:

[Source with key to the images found here, at Chestofbooks.com]

The excellent Bibliodyssey blog contributed a good healthy post on the subject of comparative heights of mountains map (here) with many fine examples of the art.  Its a curious thing to me that the  business of using same-scale comparisons in architecture is relatively new, coming (I think) as an invention of Etienne Durand in the 1840's.)

Here is one such example:

But getting back to the tower itself and it unbuiltedness, here's another example of an unbuilt tower--taller and bigger than the Centennial--which was proposed by Eugene Freyssinet (and which I wrote about earlier in this blog here):

 

Another in what is a long line of unbuilt towers would be this contribution by Vinnie Ream Hoxie (ca. 1874-6)  which was his response to the finishing of the not-completed Washington Monument.  Congressional sympathies towards spending money to complete the Washington Monument dried up to nothingness in 1856, just eight years after construction on the monument was begun.  The consequence was that the monument was only a nubbin for several decades, standing about a third complete--it was Hoxie's idea no doubt to provide a sort of quick-and-dirty approach to finishing the project.  Of course this looked like exactly what it was, and the idea died its own lonely death, thank goodness. 

It had little appeal, at least to me.  It is somewhat reminiscent of the exhibition of the completed forearm of the American Statue of Liberty, which as it turns out was also exhibited at Phildelphia in 1876, years before the completion of the rest of the statue.  Short and stubby.

 

There are many other entries in the history of unbuilt towers, but their day will have to wait (for this blog, anyway).

Visualizing Depth: Thinking Deep on the Depths of the Oceans in Units of St. Paul's Cathedral

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1660

Although maps showing the depths of the oceans existed from about the mid-19th century (through the pioneering work of the American father of oceanography, Virginia’s Matthew Fontaine Maury¹) few casual readers would have ever seen a more approachable representation of information than what appeared in the Illustrated London News for 8 October 1910. Although Maury’s maps are elegant, they didn’t receive nearly as wide a distribution as this ILN image–also they weren’t nearly quite as relational as the 1910 version.

Granted, the 1910 comparison chart only displays one statistic–the supposed greatest dept of five oceans, two seas and the English channel–it does so in such a way as to make those numbers immediately approachable to any reader, which is always an issue in relating scientific information to the general reader.

{One of the standard unit of measurement for the purpose of this display was St. Paul's Cathedral.]

    

 

 

 

 

 What W.B. Robinson presented was a way of looking at an invisible entity through very visible means–comparing depth to the heights of things that everybody in 1910 knew: the Eiffel Tower (relatively newly constructed out of 18,000 prefabricated highly-engineered pieces) and St. Paul’s Cathedral. So rather than stating that the Pacific Ocean is 28,000 feet deep, Robinson chose to replace feet with Nelson’s Column–174 of them. Or 29 Eiffel Towers. The 20,000-foot deep Indian Ocean was actually 56 St. Paul’s deep, while the Baltic Sea was deep enough to not quite cover one Eiffel Tower with one Westminster Bell Tower on top (ha!); and the English Channel at its deepest wouldn’t quite cover St. Paul’s.

This is really the way to display data in my book, especially to kids.  This is one of the few ways of making the information accessible and understandable across almost all age ranges. 

Notes:
1.  Actually the work goes back a century before Maury with Buache, who produced this map of the English Channel in 1737–the data points are veyr numerous, but this is the very first time that such information was available on a map.

 

And Maury again with this first map of an oceanic basin, published in 1853:

 And in 1752, Philippe Buache produced this fantastic and first-of-its-kind map for the depths of the English Channel:

Here's an extraordinary cross sectrion of a part of the ocean floor produced in 1857 by the HMS Cyclops in preparation for laying the Atlantic Cable:

 

 

Its also interesting to note here Buache’s work on this map of Antarctica, published in 1737.  Buache put together all of the known (to him) information about the mass in the South, bits taken from other maps, and accumulated them into what was the best-possible guess on what was down there in the Antiopode.  Pretty good detective work given the amount of material that he could work with.

 

Rockets to Outer Space, 1923

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1657

This is some beautiful thinking and work by the rocket pioneer, Hermann Oberth (1894-1989)--the teacher of Wernher von Braun, a highly functioning leader at the Nazi V-1 and V-2 base of Peenemunde, and of course after the war working for various aeronautical/astronautical concerns in Switzerland, Italy, Germany and the United States. In America he would work for von Braun at Huntsville, Alabama from 1955-1959 on the Army's ballistic missile program,  a late addition to the many German scientists scooped up right after the war in Project Paperclip and deposited in the Deep South. 

The gorgeous design above is the front wrapper of his rejected doctoral dissertation, Die Rakete zu den Planetenbraeumen ("The Rocket Through Planetary Space" or "The Rocket to Interplanetary Space"), published in Oldenbourg in 1923.  Oberth's work was printed in a very small edition and even at that he had to pay for part of the pamphlet's printing--it turned out that the work was an instant success when issued, selling out quickly.  A second edition vastly expanded the original's 92 pages into 429 in 1929. 

 

In Old Testament vocabulary, Oberth's work is Genesis for space travel and aeronautics--or at least he is one of two or three authors of Genesis, along with Goddard and Hohmann.

 

As it turns out, in his extra moments, Oberth served as a technical advisor to Fritz Lang on his film, Frau im Mond, and his influence shows, even from cursory examination.

Big Numbers and WWII Aircraft--Artistic Displays of Quantitative Data

JF Ptak Science Bools  Quick Post

This post continues an earlier series on the artistic display of quantitative data--putting a face on big numbers. In particular it extends a collection of images of Second World War airplanes, "A Big Sea of Planes:  Quantitative Display of World War II  Bombers. The images below appear in the 17 October 1942 issue of the Illustrated London News in an article about the possibility of replacing seaborne troop and materiel transport across the Atlantic from America with the big Martin JRM Mars aircraft, getting the troops there faster and safer and releasing at least part of the naval force for wartime activities.  The images are pretty compelling:

 The caption states that 5000 Mars planes could get 500,000 soldiers to Europe.

 These were big planes¹ (200' wingspan, 117' long, 38' high, more below) and could haul 130+ troops.  By the time though that the powers-that-be were figuring out who the main contractor would be for production (and those production numbers in early 1942 were about 500 per year, at that point, anyway) the Battle of the Atlantic was already--in 1943--fairly well decided.  The U-Boot problem was solved enough for a continuous flow of soldiers and supplies, though not without a high cost in the first half of the Atlantic campaign.  (Overall, from 1939 to 1945, some 3,500 Allied merchant ships  and 175 Allied warships were sunk, costing the lives of 72,200 Allied sailors and merchant seamen.  The Germans lost more than 780 submarines along with fully three-quarters of all sailors in the U-Boot fleet, making some 30,000 men.)

 Below, a cutaway for the Mars:

Stats and Technical data on the Glenn-Martin(from Jane’s Fighting Aircraft of World War II, (1945):

A Great Graphic Fumbled--What 300,000 Army Trucks Almost Looked Like, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1529

If each of the 2,000 trucks pictured below carried $100,000,000 dollars in hundred dollar bills, how many trucks would it take to carry away the national debt?  Every one of them--this entire scene.  70 times.  Twenty miles of this convey, each truck carrying $100,000,000, would carrying off the debt.  Actually it would take 40 trucks (each with 100 million) to cart away the amount of debt accrued in daily interest on the national debt of 14 trillion dollars.

This Life magazine ad for the Chrysler Corporation--makers of Dodge--took the form of a public service announcement and a push to buy more ear bonds, though it really was an advertisement for itself and its wartime efforts.  What it proposed to graphically portray were the 300,000 trucks that it manufactured (to that point) for the U.S. Army--and the image that they use to get the point across is arresting, but it doesn't come close to doing the job.

It seems to me that the visible trucks here number about 2000 for the five columns; and I calculate that each of what we can see of the columns to be about 1500 feet long.  In order to show 300,000 trucks we'd need to show this page 150 times; or what Chrysler is showing is 1/150th of their total wartime production of trucks.  To show them all would take a lot of time for the two-star to review, hours, in fact.  I reckon that the five-column-wide display for the 300k trucks would be about 150 miles long. 

So even though this image is very persuasive and impressive, it doesn't come close to the magnitude of the number's display.

Similar to the Chrysler ad is this:

This arresting cover image for The Illustrated London News of 21 February 1942 illustrates the (new) American production program for planes and tanks for 1942 and 1943  The caption reads: "185,000 planes form a mile-wide blanket of bombers under a blanket of fighters stretching 117 miles" which is actually a double blanket of planes--if they were thinned out to form one layer it would stretch one mile wide from Washington D.C. to New York City, which is quite an unimaginable ribbon.

The numbers and depiction are in some aspects similar, though it is still very difficult to get the point across of how massive these numbers really are.

The Chrysler ad says that the depiction of the trucks would "take up as much room as several million soldiers", though it seems to me that any of the columns alone would do so. A while ago in this blog appeared a short piece on what 1,100,000 British war dead would look like, as presented by the Illustrated London News:

The image (printed in 1933) shows the column stretching from London to Durham--London through Hitchin, through Bedford and Peterborough and Grantham, past Sheffield and Leeds and York, and then on to Durham--a distance of 269 miles or so.  Four across, a 269-mile column of dead soldiers.  That makes a pretty big point on an extraordinary sacrifice. 

So the short end of the story is that back there during 1944, the Chrysler Corporation somehow managed to vastly underplay their war effort in an advertisement to themselves. 

A Backwards, Inside-Out, Oil + Iron Internet (1937)

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I feel slightly queasy seeing this photograph, found in the August 1937 issue of Popular Science magazine--it seems to me to be a backwards, inside-out analog cyberpunk (without the cyber) variety of the internet, a robotic device moving people around from data bit to data bit, an oil and iron process of automatic info retrieval, moving the user to the information rather than the other way around.  The image does put me in mind of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which renders info and other muck in a high-dystopian fashion with endless ducts and file cabinets, making things oppressively inaccessible in their accessibility.

And to some degree there's a little Spongebob similarity in there too, though without the iron nd metal part, just Mr. Squarepants and his cardboard filing cabinets for all of this thoughts and memories, serviced by smaller units of himself whop presumably have their own filing systems in their heads.  Filing cabinets, all the way down. 

There is a more-refined image of what is basically the same idea, found here in the fantastic bio-art of Fritz Kahn (1888-1968), who published his Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as an Industrial Palace or thereabouts) in Stuttgart in 1926.  Kahn is seen as a "modernist", which I guess is true; to me he is far more than that--he's "different".

In Charlie Chaplin's great 1937 Modern Times, there are no file cabinets and I don't think that there's any paper, just the results of vast mechanization:

And of course, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, made a little earlier, in 1927:

 And finally, an image of the semi-reverse of the gigantic filing system:  moving humans through mounds of paper not contained in file cabinets, stacked upon stacks of stacks.  Once everything is said and done, none of this info-sausage-factory seems very pretty.

 

 

Precursor to Zombie-Phone-to-Deadsville: the Telephone Medical Metal Detector "X-Ray"

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1495

Did President Garfield Die Because of Metal Bed Springs?

Thomas Edison famously took advantage of a naive reporter, telling the young man that he was working on an invention that would allow a person to telephone dead people--a story that was reported as true, and one which Edison (both thoroughly disgusted and joyful) helped to perpetuate to the day he died by simply not discussing the issue. (This story appears on this blog here.)

Much earlier, only five years after Alexander Graham Bell first patented and published his invention of the telephone, the device was used by Bell to do some very early electrical medical imaging.  The new President of the United States, James Garfield, had been shot by Charles Guiteau in Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station (on 2 July, 1881, after a lengthy period of semi-abstract stalking and planning) Station in Washington, D.C., receiving fatal wounds in July and which would cause his death later in September.  The problem was that at this point in the history of surgery it was  difficult to locate bullets in the body, becoming more so if the bullet took a non-straight course through the wounded.  Normally, in 1881, a doctor could for example use a device called  a Nelaton probe, a thin porcelain device (as opposed to most other probes, which were metallic) to help locate the embedded bullet.  But given the nature of Garfield's wounds, this was just not applicable, and the bullet escaped recognition from this and other probes.

Bell enters the scene with an electromagnetic invention, the induction balance, which he created to detect interference on a telephone line.  In the process of experimentation Bell recognized that the balance could be disturbed if the metal and battery-fueled probe came into contact with a piece of metal.--basically, the device was a medical metal detector. Bell resolved to use the device on Garfield, passing the probe along the President's body while another person listened to a telephone ear piece for the telltale "click" of a proximate metallic object.

Bell was not successful with this, or at least not so at this time, and the President died, succumbing to an infection, finally.  But Bell was able to perfect this instrument, something that stayed in use as the principal means of detecting metal objects in the body, and was about as fine an instrument as could be expected, though it was completely eclipsed by the revolutionary machines brought about by Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of X-Rays in 1895.  And as it just so happens, the first surgical case in which the x-rays were used was for a case involving a shotgun wound. 

Finally, one of the reasons why Bell's instrument didn't quite work on President Garfield is that Garfield's bed had a metal box spring, which very well might have played havoc with Bell's instrument.  Perhaps if there was no metal in examining area, Bell's device might've worked. 

Notes:

An earlier and more crude device had been invented by Wilhelm Heinrich Dove (1803-1879, a German physicist and early meteorologist) though I am not sure that it comes into play with Bell's apparatus at all.

From Harper's Weekly, 13 August 1881:

"The experiments made by Professor Alexander Graham Bell with the view of determining by the aid of the electric current the location of the bullet in the President's person were of the most interesting nature. The possibility that a time might come when it would be necessary to make incisions at once for the removal of the bullet, without consuming precious time for further consultation, gave to the experiments an importance which added greatly to their interests."

"An apparatus known as the induction balance had been used by Professor Bell in analyzing metals. This instrument, modified so as to impart to it the highest degree of sensitiveness, was used in the search for the leaden ball. Its nature is such that it is not easily understood except by electricians. It consists of a battery, two coils of insulated wire, a circuit-breaker, and a telephone. The ends of the primary coil are connected with a battery, and those of the secondary coil are fastened to the posts of the telephone. This latter connection renders audible any faint sound produced by the circuit-breaker, or any change in the pitch of that sound. The coils may be so placed in their relationship to each other that no sound is made by the circuit-breaker. They are then said to be balanced, and the wires are extremely sensitive to the disturbing presence of any other piece of metal. A bullet like that with which the President was shot, before it was flattened, will, when placed within two and one-half inches of the most sensitive point on the pair of coils, cause a faint protest against the disturbance to arise in the telephone. A flattened bullet of the same bulk, when presented with its flat surface toward the coils, will make its presence felt at a distance of nearly five inches. When its sharp edge is turned toward the plane of the coils, no sound is produced beyond the distance of one inch."

"With these facts in view, the experiments to locate the position of the bullet in the President's body were begun. The patient was bolstered up in bed, and he watched the proceedings with mute interest. His physicians stood around. Professor Bell stood with his back toward the President, holding the telephone to his ear, while Mr. Tainton, Professor Bell's assistant, moved the coils over that portion of the abdomen where the leaden ball was thought to be imbedded. When the sensitive centre of the instrument was immediately over the black and blue spot that appeared shortly after the President was wounded, Professor Bell said, "Stop! there it is."

"The experiment was repeated several times -- once with Mrs. Garfield listening at the telephone; and she told the President when the coils had been brought to the spot where the presence of the bullet had previously caused the delicate instrument to give forth a singing sound. From these tests it was inferred that in any event the bullet was less than five inches from the surface, and that if it was only slightly flattened, or if its edge was turned obliquely toward the surface, it might be much nearer to the skin. The conclusion reached was that if it should become necessary to remove the bullet at any time, this might be speedily accomplished by two quick cuts with the surgeon's lancet."

Graphical Display of Information: Identifying Ships from the Air, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

"How Allied Pilots Recognize Japanese Warships from the Air", a graphic that appeared in The Illustrated London News on 16 May 1942, displayed in silhouette the different sorts of Japanese warships that might be targets of allied planes.  There's a lot of data on this one long sheet of paper, showing minelayers, submarines, aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, subchasers, torpedo boats, training vessels and coastal defense ships--65 in all.  It is a great display, presenting a great amount of data in limited space, clearly and concisely, and very easy to distinguish and read. 

Species of Explosions: Human Anatomy, Explained

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1479

Species of explosions come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and basically release some sort of energy (chemical, nuclear, mechanical and so on), but in the cases we'll look at here they are none-of-the-above.  The energy released in these explosions are in the form of potential, a knowledge-driven, controlled and reversibly ordered demolition, a deconstruction in slow motion.  The medical "explosion view" for the study of anatomy is a remarkable thing, especially when you considered not only the pre-Cat and pre-MRI times, but also the pre-Xray (1895) days of imaging the inside of the body--the images not only show you the bits and pieces alone but also in relation to the other bits around them.  The body becomes an archaeological dig, each level preserved so that a viewer could easily see the dependencies and relations between one thing and another. 

Take for example Paolo Mascagni's (1755-1815) beautiful Anatomia universale (an example seen above), which was printed in Florence in 1833 and has the look and sensibility of something much later.  Mascagni is able to achieve this depth not only from the exploded view, but also for the (somewhat exaggerated) coloring setting the specimen on top of a blank background the combination of the color and the background giving the whole thing a 3-D-ish feel--and if not that, then certainly a living image in which there is some fair amount of depth. 

Another version of the exploded view which is also quite effective from the same work by Mascagni is his "exploded thorax", showing a more limited display of the more closely-aligned organs. 

When these views appear today--which is generally much more uncommon given the other technical ways of envisioning multiple layers of complex associated items--they have more of a sense of the antiquarian, retro feel to them, though they are no less useful for it.  As a matter of fact  I still prefer these views for understanding technical and engineering  and architectural complexes than anything else. And the modern master of this genre for me is Stephen Beisty, who performs his magic mostly in the tech and engineering fields, but who occasionally dips into the messy wet stuff of biology, as we can see in this fabulous exploded view:

There are of course many other examples of (drawn) exploded views in the history of anatomical illustration, but I think these will do for now as good examples of the art.

 

Architecture of Insanity

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1474

I was browsing an 1878 issue of The Scientific American, looking for an article on torpedoes, when I came across this stunning architectural plan of the Morristown (New Jersey) State Asylum for the Insane--I recognized its design as something I had seen before, several times, at least.  This design required a lot of land and a lot of bricks--the building was a few stories high and laid out far and wide, built to accommodate 2,000 patients.  The design was intended to allow patients comfortable living space, room for privacy as need be, exercise area and plenty of open yards around the structure for sun and fresh air.  Of course building like this were quickly filled and filled some more, requiring the space for rehabilitation to be used for stockpiling other patients until more appropriate situations arose, which they mostly seemed not to.

And so I went looking around the web for other examples of mental/insane asylums, places constructed for the good of the society and partially to aid people who were suffering from some sort of yet-to-be-defined mental illness.  From what I have found so far, there is a definite them to a good many of them, resembling in some fair manner the Morristown design (above). 

(An interesting and lush/ruinous photo essay on Morristown can be found here.)

I suppose that in some ways these architectural plans are maps, outlines to an elusive wellness; given the (generally) small staffs, the abilities of the time to diagnosis mental illnesses, the limited capacities for treatment, and general overcrowding, that the "wellness" part of the desired ends of these plans/maps was almost entirely allegorical. I suspect that if for some reason you found yourself in an extended stay in a place like this and weren't insane, then you would be after a while.

The Glasgow Lunatic Asylum, designed by the  architect William Stark (1770 – 1814):

[From:  Thompson, John D. & Grace Goldin. The Hospital. A Social and Architectural History. Yale University Press, New Haven and London. 1975.]

 

Maryland State Hospital for the Insane (here)--in this plan, the further away you get from the main entrance, the more deeply "disturbed' the patients.  It must have been a long walk from the "violent" ward to freedom. 

Cane Hill, the Third Surrey County Pauper Lunatic Asylum, built 1882 (details here)

 

Claybury Lunatic Asylum, Woodford, Essex:

 The Byron House, constructed 1915, at the Ipswich Lunatic Asylum (Byron house was to become the infamous Karrala House.)

Buffalo lunatic asylum, a spectacular structure designed by H.H. Richardson, with grounds and landscaping by none other than Frederiick Law Olmstead and Charles Vaux  The image above (and below) are the Kansas State Lunatic Asylum constructed 1880.  Information on these two institutions and the man who brought them about is located at the Kirkbride Buildings blog, here.

 

Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane, built by Gordon W. Lloyd in 1888:

Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, New Zealand:

 

HArrisburg (PA) State Lunatic Asylum, the first to be built according to the Kirkbride Plan:

 Eastern Asylum for the Insane, Pontiac, Michigan, constructed 1882:

 

Norfolk, England, Lunatic Asylum, 1814

 Eastern Kentucky Asylum for the Insane:

 

Norristown Hospital for the Insane:

Archaeology of Bombing, 1913

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1472

This is another in a longish series of posts on this blog on the archaeology of bombing, aerial bombing, and today's installment comes from its earliest period.  The first air assault belongs to the Italians, who used the weapons from the air in bombing Tripoli in 1911, which they also found to be within the defensible scope of international law, even when used against a noncombatant population (which came on the heals of the Italian army's massacre of civilians there).  Bombing from the air had happened earlier of course, but also entirely in fiction:  for example, Jules Verne bombed civilians in The Flight of Engineer Roburs (1886), and H.G. Wells had New York City in flames in The War in the Air (1908).

"Torpedoes of the Air:  Bomb-Droppers Directed by Wireless", a graphical story that appeared in The Illustrated London News on 6 September 1913, and drawn by W.B. Robinson, describes a sort of two-tier remote controlled aerial bombing arrangement of dirigibles.  The "parent" ship hosts a number of smaller dirigibles which are radio-controlled elements sent in to do the actual bombing, which allows for no human interaction with dropping the bombs and exposes only materiel to enemy fire.  (I should point out that each one of these early drones were 40' long, making the parent dirigible something like 400' in length if we are seeing about half of it in the illustration, and enabling the thing to carry perhaps 10 of these remote controlled units.  This dirigible would have been about as big as the monster Zeppelin LZ1.)

And this two years after this remarkable graphical display:

There's nothing quite so satisfying as seeing a representation of quantitative data like this where the graphical displays are flying.  "One Dreadnought Buys 52 Dirigibles and 235 Aeroplanes" is a full-page diagram appearing in the 3 June 1911 , making a very strong point that in the new air-age 2 million pounds for one battleship buys a lot of aircraft.  Of course this is a British journal and the ship is flying an American flag--the image originally appeared in the Scientific American just a short while before this publication, and so it also enumerates American and international aircraft, making for a lovely representation of a broad range of airplanes filling up the same sky.  (This image is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.)

Standardizing Precision and Beautiful Technical Prints: Ramsden's Dividing Engines

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1452.223221 and a quarter

 

I like the idea of having something called a Dividing Engine--perhaps it would divide seeds, or complex problems, or simple problems, or perhaps it would divide division. 

What it really refers to here is a precision tool that whose effects were extremely wide felt but about which we don't really hear about today.  This is the dividing engine of Jesse Ramsden,and Englishman who invented a circular instrument that would incise precise values on precision instruments like surveying compasses, delineate the linear and circular scales of measuring instruments used in astronomy and navigation,   Before Ramsden, the engraved marks on instruments would have been made by each individual manufacturer, each of those depending on marks that they made in the past, generations of such things in a line, over and over, a quite individualized effort, necessarily dependent upon the precision of each manufacturer. In 1777 Ramsden produced an instrument¹ of exception precision that was correct and fine and dependable². [The image above was found in Abraham Rees' monumental Encyclopedic Dictionary..., and is entitled "Engine for cutting the screw of Ramsden's Circular Dividing Engine" and was published in 1814.  Below is a detail of the plan for the winding of the gear works. In order for his machine to work at such a high degree of accuracy the component parts must also have been of a very high calibre--to that end Ramsden developed what is essentially the modern screw cutting lathe from which he manufactured the gear works for his Straight and Circular Dividing Engines.³]

And then there was the "Engine for cutting the Screw of Ramsden's Straight Line Dividing Engine", which is an absolutely gorgeous piece of drawing.  A person could crawl all over this image in varying degrees of microscopic inspection and find all sorts of beautiful internal images, a large example appears here:

And its fantastic detail:

Basically though Ramsden's inventions were key additions to the developing scientific technologies of the Industrial Revolution, integral improvements necessary for integral improvements. 

Notes:

1.  He published a Description of an Engine for dividing Mathematical Instruments in 1777.

2. "The dividing engine was simple to operate. The instrument being divided was fixed to a large wheel on top of the engine. When the treadle was pressed, the wheel and the instrument were turned through a fixed angle. Then with the right hand, a cutting tool guided by a system of swinging links was used to mark the instrument scale. The process was repeated until the complete scale had been divided. Although this was many times faster than hand-dividing, it was backbreaking work having to lean over the engine to work on a small instrument."-"Dividing Engine." Smithsonian National Museum of American History. americanhistory.si.edu/collections/navigation/object.cfm?recordnumber=694508

3. From WIki--"The first truly modern screw-cutting lathe was likely constructed by Jesse Ramsden in 1775. He appears to have been the first person to put a leadscrew into actual use (although, as Leonardo's drawings show, he was not the first person ever to think of the idea), and he was the first to use diamond-tipped cutting tools.^[2] His device also included a slide rest and change gear mechanism. These form the elements of a modern (non-CNC) lathe and are in use to this day. Ramsden was able to use his first screw-cutting lathe to make even more accurate lathes. With these, he was able to make an exceptionally accurate dividing engine and in turn, some of the finest astronomical, surveying, and navigational instruments of the 18th century.

Little Pieces and Superb Design: Rockets, Canons, and other Boom Boom

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1420

The Iconographic Encyclopedia of Johan Georg Heck (printed 1851)  turns out to be perhaps one of the best designed books of its type in the nineteenth century.  Seemingly no  matter how much diverse information is hosted per page, whether the items number in the dozens or over a hundred,  the artist managed to distribute them with such grace and apparent ease that it is an absolute pleasure to see it all arranged before you. 

Take for example the following two engravings of artillery fabrication of the early/mid 19th century.  There are 49 complex images on this first  piece of 11x8-inch paper (above), and yet there seems to be also a lot of white space.  It is a full but not crowded display of superb craftsmanship--it is also all very interesting. (Both are available for purchase from our blog bookstore.)

To start, the main figures at top-center shop the plan and elevation of a workshop for casting canons, and we can clearly see the main furnace ("A") for the big guns, surrounded by smaller auxiliary furnaces for smaller pieces.  Off to the side we see "K", which is the drawing room and also the place where the director of the plant would live. Underneath it all in section we see various pipes and drains used to take away water and ash.  The structure on the lower right is for forming the business end and the purpose of the canon or mortar--namely, the ammo, and in particular, the pattern mold of a 50-lb mortar.  The long vertical pole at left used to place he liquid metal under pressure in the hearth, the ball being at the very bottom center.

I've enlarged figures 4 and 5 to show the particulars of a canon (dry sand) mold, #4 being the exterior of the mold and #5 showing a cutaway so that one could see the six-ponder canon that was being formed inside.

There is just so much in this image that a more knowledgeable person could easily go on for pages describing each and every bit. 

The second image displays cartridges and (in general) fireworks--military pyrotechny.  What strikes me right away in this image are the five architecturals in the running vertically down the middle of the sheet.  They show what to do with gunpowder once it has been manufactured, which is an important consideration on handling and safety prior to it being used in battle--the first plan shows a field magazine, while the other four show the disposition of the construction of a permanent magazine, which show plenty of ventilation as well as massive walls which are in turn sunk into the earth and surrounded by ramparts.  It also seems that the roofing is huge, built no doubt to accommodate an earth filler.  Each of the barrels carried a hundred pounds of powder, so there was considerable interest not to allow the magazine to blow up, and if it did, to have the blast go mainly skyward. 

Some other items of interest in the second engraving include the incendiary devices (at bottom, #s 29+30),  signal rockets (#s 32,33,34,35), and the Congreve rocket, (#40 and #52,  which is much bigger and meant to be fired on the enemy, it being an incendiary); #53 is another Congreve, but this one scatters grenades as it is in flight. 

There's a lot that can be described here but it goes a little beyond what I wanted to do with this post--it is also a lot beyond what I know about the subject.