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 

Tech-Quiz #4--the Sublime Mundane

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This forms the absolute end of something, the "tip" of it, one of two, at the either end of slender cord. Even for this there must be a patent--and there were, evidently, many of them.  This is just one, from 1922

Answer in the continued reading section, below:

A Curious Episode in the History of Sitting--Speed Chairs & Trainless Trains

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It may be that the history of human locomotion is the story of fast sitting.  Except for some of the earliest incarnations of powered movement, it seems one of the most significant engineering aspects moving a person forward is how that person should be carried in the vehicle.  And, well, it seems that in the vast majority of cases, the person is sitting. (There are of course exceptions, notably in say the standing of the engineer in the Tom Thumb when that locomotive set the land speed record;or the Wright Brothers' powered aircraft, where the pilot was laying down; or say in a chariot powered by a team of horses. Even in some of the earliest versions of steam-powered tractors, the mammoths were steered by a standing operator. It seems though that in very quick order the operator in most of these vehicles find themselves in a seated position.)

A very curious application of moving seated humans is seen in this woodcut of a chaired walkway--for all intents and purposes, the pedestrians looking to use the moving sidewalk would have been offered a chair instead.  It seems as though as its base that this was a very simple form of an elevated subway or trolley, though without the train. 

The moving seated sidewalk was the dreamchild of Alfred Speer (1823-1910), of Passaic, New Jersey, and it seems as though it might have been the first form of mass rapid transit in the city for which it was intended, which was NYC.  It stood fairly high in the opinions of some prominent New Yorkers (like Horace Greeley and Peter Cooper) when it was presented in the early 1870's, and even passed the New York State Legislature in an act authorizing funding for the program in 1873 and 1874--but it was each time vetoed by Governor John Dix, and the people-moving dream ended there, right before the Centennial.  (See here for the New York Times obituary for Speer., and see All Ways NY blog for a longer look at Speer's moving sidewalk, here.)

Here's another version of Speer's idea, though this look more like a moving sidewalk, complete with trolley cars, all of which were stationary objects located on the moving walkway.  The idea of course was to free up the chaos and gridlock of the very busy areas of Broadway by placing a large chunk of the confusion on a moving second floor.  It seems as though it might have been a good half-year idea or so, and the $3.7 million dollar price tag might've been a hefty one if you calculated the cost per minute of relieved traffic. 

[Picture source:  All Ways NY.]

Mr. Speer seems to have let his vision go and settled down to a life of wine making.

Three Great First F’s: Forks, Forts, Fission, (and one plain non-first F (Nobel))

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1645

 Apropos of nothing whatsoever, I’d like to look at four “first” F’s.  the first is the first known published image of a fork , or forcina in Italian.  This was a prickish utensil (seen in the image at the bottom-right), hiding none of its stabbing qualities with a middle tine, and shows for us all its direct decent from Mother Knife.  It appears in the Opera dell'arte del cucinare by the great Renaissance chef  and cook to Pope Pius V Bartolomeo Scappi (c. 1500 – 13 April 1577, buried in the church of SS. Vincenzo ad Anastasio alla Regola, dedicated to cooks and bakers) was published in 1573.

In the book he lists approximately 1000 recipes of the Renaissance cuisine (some of which, for Renaissance salads, appear at bottom) includes many images of kitchenware, the fork being perhaps the most famous.  (I used to know the first time that a fork appeared in a painting--of the Last Supper of course, but I've forgotten, though it does come right on the heals of Scappi.)

The second unrelated but interesting first “F” is perhaps the first image of a modern, canon-proofed fort, by none other than Albrecht Durer.  This image appears in 1527 in his Etliche underricht zu bestestigung der Stat, Schloss und Flecken, and although his designs were impracticable (massive and massively expensive forts and fortified cities; pretty but very costly), there were certain elements of the work that were very useful—namely, the new face of some of te walls that he offered to the modern canons of the 1520’s.  These weapons were vast improvements over their earlier brethren, and Durer responded to the extra and more accurate firepower by lowering and thickening the walls and giving them greater slope—this would aid in deflecting many of the shots that were not directly spot-on, and also would improve the chances of the fort’s survival against those hits by having thicker walls. 

The third F is slightly related to Durer’s fort walls—this is the first appearance of the word “fission”.  It appeared as so many of these sorts of 20th century announcements appeared with great sotto voce--this one, in a “Letter to the Editor” of the journal Nature (11 February 1939), by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch.

The communication, “Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons:  a New Type of Nuclear Reaction”  wasn’t a letter to the editor in the conventional sense of course but was meant to be the quickest line of communication of an important result and thus appeared somewhat truncated though the great stuff of the announcement was made known and understood.     Niels Bohr’s “The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission” in the Physical Review (1 September 1939) may I think be the first use of “fission” in the title of a paper.) 

There is a very big story here with Meitner and fission and Nazis and the Nobel.  This leads to our fourth F:  and that would be “F” as in “Failure” to the Nobel committee who in 1944 awarded the Nobel Prize to (German, non-Jewish) Otto Hahn for the discovery of nuclear fission while completely ignoring (purposefully, I would say) Meitner, who really, by all  rights, should’ve gotten the award, and probably by herself.  This is a more complex tale than I would care to deal with now, but I think that it is beyond doubt that the Nobel committee again (think Einstein and others) severely screwed this up in favor of maintaining their dislike for people with Meitner’s heritage.  (And yes, she was Jewish; Einstein suffered too at the hands of the committee, not receiving his award, unbelievably, until 1921, *16 years* following what was probably the best single year  that anyone ever had in the history of physics, ever, and then 14 years following his great year of 1907 and five years following 1916’s paper.  And so on.)   Yes, Meitner hung on in a not-good way in Germany for six bad years 1933-1938) until she finally get the hell out, but that really doesn’t tell the story very much.  The fission bit with Hahn and Strassmann is a little bedeviling, but it really was Meitner who recognized the whole thing as being the process of fission.  Period.  And shame again on the Nobel people for getting it wrong, again, on purpose. 

 

History of the Future--Advertising in Yellowstone, 1905

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The way of the new world, the spread of commercialism and of consumerism, the increase in the size of a middle class that was actually approaching what we today would think of as a middle class, the wanting rise of places for disposable income to go from millions of new people with spare money to spend, led the sellers of stuff-immemorial to start advertising their bits on the side of out-of-doors everything. The fight for the attention span of the new consumer went from the newspapers and magazines to the side of buildings and then, as the motor car began to proliferate, to thousands of miles of roadway. 

But when these cartoons appeared in (the first) Life magazine in 1905, the car was still a distant image so far as common ownership was concerned, so the competition for the visual space of the new buying market was center on outdoor displays wherever people might happen to be outdoors.  (Remember, there's no radio or television to absorb advert money and viewer attention, so efforts were magnified on billboards.)

So Life took a peep into the future and didn't like what it saw: the possible vast expansion of ugliness in the pursuit of whatever dollar might fall out of whatever pocket.  Just a little warning to America is all--the future of the country might not look as pretty it used to be, what with millions of new billboards to place. 

The future Niagra Falls, five years hence:

Old Faithful, Yellowstone, as it could be in 1910:

Mark Twain: Bra and Blank Book Patenter

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Samuel Clemens (1835-1910), who became Mark Twain in 1863 and then mostly stayed that way, had a great mind and was a superb writer and story teller--he wasn't necessarily a great inventor, however.  In the ear;y sea of his great achievements, in 1871--just after the publication of his first real best-seller, Innocents Abroad, 1869)--Clemens applied for and was granted a patent for a bra clasp.  I don't know if it is the bra clasp, or not, but for whatever reason Clemens pursued this interest all the way to the end. 

 

 

 

In the year after the publication of Roughing It, and three years before the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Clemens patented--essentially--a blank book. It was a special book/holder for the very-popular practice of scrap booking, and it seems rather ironic that someone who filled up so many books with words would get a patent for the sale of books that didn't have any.   Curious.

Hearing Patterns in Gases, 1894

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1530

I was about to start a new series of posts on the History of Lines , something left out of this blog, oddly, given the different posts on the History of Dots and the History of Holes (and the History of Blank and Empty Things).  A lot of that--the History of Lines business--has to do with the interpretation of things on paper:  heart rate, "brain waves", the motion of a bumble bee, navigation, and of course, words.  (The great Kickapoo tracker Famous Shoes  in Larry McMurtry's Streets of Laredo, one of the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, found that the one thing he couldn't track in this world were the marks on the pages of a book.)

But I was distracted by the idea of seeing something in a different context, of associating something with a sense experience far beyond its origin, and so the History of Lines will wait just a little--something just a little beyond seeing some electrical function of the brain inscribed as a long line on a skinny piece of paper.  What I found was this--the invention of Mr. E. Hardy, whose "Formenephone" detected the presence of combustible fire-damp or any other gas in mines, and which would then emit sounds on the accompanying (small) organ pipe.  The apparatus would actually vibrate more rapidly as the gas content of the air increased.  At the time (the notice of the invention appearing in the Scientific American Supplement #945 for 10 February 1894) the only other means of detecting these gases was by the change of the glow of a candle. 

Perhaps this is in a way like the application of musical notes to the numbers pi or tau, though actually useful.

I'll return to the History of Lines tomorrow.

Notes:

Formene, or marsh gas, is a "hydrocarbon which produces chloroform when the hydrogen in it is replaced with chlorine, loses hydrogen and yields anthracene".

An Alphabet of Fire--Night-time Telegraphy, 1800 vs. the 1991 Pen Ashtray

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 1510

This curious illustration appears in forty-five volume Cyclopedia of  Abraham Rees (published 1795-1820), displaying a system for communicating over distances at night.  When this part of the Cyclopedia was printed in 1808, the electrical telegraph as we now it was still 37 years away from coming into being--45 years from being somewhat well-used.  Before this time (visual) communications over long distances at night were limited to just these sorts of means--lighted semaphores, hand-held torches, that sort of thing.  Signaling at sea at night was somewhat different at this time and didn't include anything remotely close to the alphabet.  So the rather complex system that we see at left is extremely uncommon--it seems also very cumbersome to put into effect. 

Unfortunately I don't have the text volume that would explain then entire system and implementation, so I'm going to guess that there was a large, powerful light source that was covered by a tight, black, covering tablet that would eliminate nearly all light leakage.  The symbols for each letter of the alphabet (and numerals) would be cut out from another tablet that would fit over the face of the light source, placed between the blank and the light.  To transmit a letter the user would then simply remove the blank covering tablet to reveal the light broadcast by the hole or slit in the tablet underneath.  The blank would then be placed back, a new tablet for a new letter placed underneath, and the process would begin again:  blank (dark); letter (light); blank (dark); letter (light), and so on to the end of the message.   I guess the distance at which these symbols could be seen would be dependent on light source, atmospheric conditions, ad so on.  The way that the letters are made into symbols seems to me very intelligent, so that you distinguish the differences from an appreciable distance.  I like it--its an elegant idea.  (Well, maybe it didn't work in this manner, but it seems to make sense to me.)

One can only imagine what the early 19th-century mind would think if they saw this sort of fire-writing device, and how the progress of the history of technology came to produce such a thing:

 

Now, does someone look at the pen ashtray and think, "I NEED one of those!", or what?   To me it represents one of those representatives in the Humans-are-as-Soft-as-Soup category.

Here's another sort of fire writing, more literal and of course much less applicable, unless you were recording the writing with a stop-action camera:

 

History of Falling: Parachutes as Aerial Minefields and Pilots' Escape Vehicles

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1466

Lots of these images have to do with walking and falling, walking and falling at the same time, walking and catching yourself from falling over and over again, but in general that walk is only one step, so far as parachutes go. 

 

The parachute has certainly been around for a long time--from ancient times if you squint your eyes hard enough--though it appears that it was in the Renaissance that the idea was taken more seriously as a practicable thing:  at  least it was first depicted then.  Here for example is a form of falling that was seen as flying (Homo Volens or Flying Man), in this depiction of parachute-use by Fausto Veranzio  Fausto (1551–1617) in his book of technological marvels called Machinae Novae (1595).  Of course Leonardo left a footprint here as well, and before Veranzio.

More convincing and potentially beneficial parachutes were constructed for balloon escapes/aviator descents in the 19th century, as seen with the work of André-Jacques Garnerin (1769-1823), who was the inventor of the frameless parachute (a framed version seen below).  

And in all that time of development through the nineteenth century, it still took another eight or nine years or so after the Wright's flights to have employed the idea for pilots of the modern airplane.  There was a series of varied "firsts" of leaving an aeroplane by parachute in 1911 and 1912, the earliest of which involved the pilot of an aircraft to fly with his parachute in his lap, then throwing the whole thing from the plane with the pilot following. Parachute history during this time, like 1910-1920, is a little complicated, filled with fits and starts, mostly not very successful, and most of them of a quality and dependability to make you want to land your aircraft even if you were flying only smoke and flame.

The image below seems to depict the 1912  exploits of the American and British inventors who at about he same time developed a parachute that could be worn in a box on the aviator's back, contained in a box with a removable panel.  It was a very heady development, and the whole idea--seen here in the pages of The Illustrated London News for 28 September 1912--must have seemed like science fiction to the casual reader, the caption beginning

"...our illustration appears to be somewhat fantastic..."  The ripchord, one of the most important elements of a parachute, didn't get introduced into the fray until about 1916, and the real utility of the parachute doesn't seem to be developed until 1920 or so.  In the meantime, the whole business of flying was pretty much being done without a safety net, so to speak. 

But what I realloy wanted to get to in this post is something that did look "somewhat fantastic" to the readers of its day, as it does to me now:  parachute bombs.  As a late-night, five-martini idea it looks great, especially in 1937.  But the fact of the matter is that it does look like a bar stool plan similar to barrage balloons if barrage balloons were smaller, higher, fell and had bombs.  One element of surprise though may have been what would happen to the great percentage of these bombs that were fired above and floated back down to Earth with their warhead still attache to the parachute and unexploded.  The article states that the warhead would be disabled

before it hit the ground, but then what?  I suspect that there would be thousands of these buggers littering the land/cityscape, which means that there would have to be an equivalent of an ambulance corps riding around finding, collecting and hauling these things off.  Seems like a non-started to me.  Plus there would be far more effective anti-aircraft elements developed very soon after this, not to mention the terribly significant mathematical and technical developments that would go into the fire control issue of the weaponry. ( But that's another story, another long story, dealing with how to get aircraft out of the air--there's some very sophisticated AA weaponry produced during WWI, s decade and a half before these parachute bombs, that would seem to make these things a bad afterthought.)

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.

Proust Suits and Pressurized Cabins

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1341
If I put my literary specs on and do a little free-association,  what I see in these two figures is a Proustian thing, characters in search of time, freezing time, preserving it. Time, and everything else, everything that can be associated with a human experience captured and recaptured, recirculated, resuscitated, replayed, re-envisioned, remembered, recognized, over and over again.  Kind of like a memory hell, in a way, only in Proust's hands it all sounds and tastes so beautiful. Another peek without those wicked nega-specs and I see two robots from a pulsing Disney film, actions in search of characters--the possibilities are endless, particularly if you develop a little narrative. The real story of what is happening here is complex version of a simpler solution.

And the key to it all: hypoxia.

But I can't leave this without at least a mention of Raoul Hausmann, whose "Self Portrait of a Dadasoph" is related to this line of collecting consciousnesses:

When this image was published in the Illustrated London News in October 1936 (available for purchase from our blog bookstore) the practical application of tropospheric flight was just about a reality.  I should really say “popular” more so than “practical”.  It presented two approaches to a looming problem in the progress of aviation–reaching altitudes in excess of 10,000 feet presented a host of problems to the passenger of that aircraft.  The solution was to combat the pressures of high altitude flight, one of which was to pressurize each passenger and crew member in their own “space suit”.  The combination of the artist G.H. Davis and the technical assistant compared this solution to the problem with a more simple and elegant solution.

And that was relatively simple, at least in thought experiments: rather than pressure everyone individually, you could place everyone in a pressurized environment within the aircraft.  And this is the point that the artist/techie make–earlier engineers came up with simple solutions to traveling at high altitudes–they just weren’t simple enough.  And compared with the better design, the initial, simple, designs look a little monstrous.
                               
Notes:

I include Mr. Davis as an iconic figure in the history of 20th century technical illustration–he has been featured on this blog many times.

Finding Unseen Things In and From the Air

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1131

Finding the hard-to-find, the invisible, the "hidden", is an essential aspect of, well, mostly everything.  Whether it is Newton separating light with a prism to find its constituents, or Hooke investigating the formerly quasi-real microscopical world to reveal worlds within worlds, or Galileo using his telescope to quash the ideas of the unaided-eye-visible night sky as an unaltering perfection of creation, or Roentgen seeing through his wife's skin, or Fraunhoefer finding the complex spectrum, or Henry Draper determining a chemical constituent of the sun, or the invention of the zero or negative numbers or subtraction, of finding Black Holes or other planets or the remnants of the Big Bang, or (Kandinsky) finding the nonrepresentational aspect of art, or Duchamp finding in an upturned urinal that art had no boundaries...the list goes on and on.

One aspect of this "finding something in nothing" business that is interesting to look at because it is so local and discernible--and recent--is in air navigation and detection.  And I'll do this using a series of excellent illustrations from The Illustrated London News, all of which are from the 1927-1938 period (and all of which may be purchased through our blog bookstore, here). 

The first is relatively simple, at least simple from here in the year 2010, which shows four pilots being briefed on weather conditions with a aerial chart for conditions along intercontinental routes.  The placement of these symbols represented a vast improvement over the earlier systems of readying pilots for what weather ay ahead, if indeed there were any communications at all.  This represents an early look at a codification of conditions and expectations for air travelers--a display of new and important data in 1927. 

Next is a brilliant device for assisting pilots to land in foggy and dark conditions--actually on how to find the ground safely.  In 1927 (again) a RADAR-like system was put into place on aircraft that involved receiving the signals of an ac-pulsed buried electrical cable that surrounded an airport.  The receiver (seen here on the flight panel of the pilot in an open-air cockpit) would be read to reveal proximity of the airport, the pilot making wider and then closer spirals in descent until his was basically within the buried airport cables and thus able to land.

Prior to WWII RADAR¹ was somewhat functional but still in development, and as we see in this set of 16 July 1938 illustrations, the key methods for finding enemy aircraft at night (in order to shoot it down of course) was an audio-visual method, using "sound-locators" to find the approaching bombers and then spotlights to illuminate and track them to their destruction.  

These images represent some idea of the state of the art of being able to find things--like the ground at night or approaching enemy aircraft--in the 1927-1938 period, all of which would be drastically changed in just the next two years.

NOTES

1. RADAR was coming very close to being developed in the early 1930's--and in 1935 the process of experimentation and implementation was at a peak.  The development of this new technology was an international property, though perhaps no one owned it more in this period than the British, with Watson Watt giving his experimental ideas on RADAR to the Air Ministry on 12 February 1935 in a secret report titled "The Detection of Aircraft by Radio Methods". Int his years alone there was feverish work being done by  Rudolf Kühnhold (Scientific Director at the 'Kriegsmarine  Nachrichtenmittel-Versuchsanstalt) who in 1933-1935 established a RADAR-hunting company called Gesellschaft für Elektroakustische und Mechanische Apparate, or "GEMA"; there was also elements of the Royal Navy, Telefunken, Standard Elektrik Lorenz, Philips Company's  (of Eindhoven, Netherlands) Natuurkundig Laboratorium, the Research Office of Nippon Electric Company, and even in the Soviet Union (until the key figures involved were murdered in Stalin's purges--this one distinguished from others and referred to now as The Great Purge-- of 1937), the French Compagnie Générale de Télégraphie Sans Fil (CSF), and  the Italian Regio Instituto Electrotecnico e delle Comunicazioni (RIEC, Royal Institute for Electro-technics and Communications) to name a few.  The United States of course had been long working on the project, at least since 1922 at the NRL, with considerable private (and federally funded) work done by RCA

.
Whipping ahead into WWII a very significant "battle of the beams" began between the U.K. and Germany, especially during the Battle of Britain, involving countermeasures, espionage, propaganda and false-positives in regards to the use and development of radio-based tracking and detection--the U.K. particularly making use of this technology in a wide-spread air defence system.  But it was in the United States in 1940 (and really by the U.S. Navy) that RADAR got its name (for RAdio Detection And Ranging) as well as its great impetus for development and deployment.

Making Tubes of out Holes–the History of Holes, Extended

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1184  [Part of this blog's History of Holes series.]

Taking inspiration from Edwin Abbott’s Flatland¹ (a superb book  excursion into perception and difficult envisioning in which a two-dimensional world tries to comprehend three-dimensional objects) I’ve decided to extend my History of Holes section with their extruded, cylinderized extension cousin–the tube.  After all, If you take a hole by its edges, shack it out, rough it up, reposition and throw some sides on it you wind up pretty much with a tube, which could be seen as elongated holes with (generally) defined beginings and endings. Sometimes.  This is a natural continuation of my series on dots, which can be regarded as holes, or points, and thus into tubes.  “Spots” on the other hand really doesn’t work into the dot/hole thing, as spots can be irregularly-shaped, and I like the dots/holes to be more rounded than the potentially jagged spot, or blotch.

When you start thinking of tubes, though, they turn up everyhwere: from gigantic cannon, to impossible flying machines, to telescopes, pneumatic railways and delivery systems, test tubes, subways, pressurized health restorers, television screens, and so on.

I’m not sure where this idea came from–perhaps in the post on massive tubeless telescopes (here), reminding me of the most massive tubed telescope, the longest telescope with a tube, belonging to James Bradley, who produced a monster over 200' long. Connecting the tubeless and tubed telescopes was the image that I had in mind; the hole following naturally from that. Anyway the Bradley  tubed construction–antithetical to the DNA/carbon/membrane nanotubes–were enormous for their time, and as moveable tubes are still very impressive.  Another massive telescope was constructed on speculation for the Paris Exposition of 1900 {the cross section of which is depicted below)--it was 187' long, spectacularly made and exhiited, and could find not a single buyer.  Positioning the scope of course would've been very problemtaic. 


There are other, more massive and mobile tubes, like, say the smokestacks of the Titanic (which were 24x19 feet, with a fall of 150' from the top of the smokestack’s sweep to the boilers)–these weren’t mobile in and of themselves, but they did move, if only for a short time (laterally), and then for a very short and cold time (vertically).

Massive, monster canons have existed for many years in idealized and theoretical, speculative worlds, like Tom Swift and his Monster Canon.  In the history of early imaginary big gun tubes H.G. Wells’ Babel-like cannon (pictured below in a still from the movie Things to Come (1936), an adaptation his The Shape of Tings to Come (1931)) is fabulous--1500 feet tall, with I figure a  750' base, it launched a 75' tall capsule beyond the Earth’s

gravitational pull with a spectacular explosiveness that would’ve made its occupants into instant jelly.  (Paul Drye points out that one of the biggest sci-fi guns comes to us via Arthur C. Clarke, who had his Lunar inhabitants fashion a gun by drilling into the Moon’s surface until they reached a depth where it would tap and “shoot” molten rock at attacking space ships.  This is more of a hole than a tube, and as such probably ranks it as the biggest hole gun ever constructed, even in science fiction. In the same veinish vein is Robert Heinlein’s railguns, seen in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  It has been suggested that E.E. Smith may have concocted gravitational weapons enabling planets and entire galaxies as wepaons, but I’m not sure about this, and they’re definitely not tubes.)

Just to round out the Solar System cannonry a bit, here's an example of a gigantic tube coming from the fabulous Frank R. Paul for Stanley D. Bell's "Martian Guns" found in the January 1932 issue of Wonder Stories.  There's really no way to determine how big the gun is except to say that it is probably "big"--there's just nothing to place the thing in perspective, as the figures in the foreground, being Martian, don't have a specific height.  They could be 6' tall, or 60'--perhaps they're only 1/10 of an inch tale, and the projectile they're firing to the earth is so devastatingly powerful that size doesn't matter.

   Back here on Earth and in the real world,  the Kaiser Wilhelm gun (or "Paris Gun", the Kaiser Wilhelm Geshutz) was

 

a long-barreled, light shelled monster: its 92' long barrel (plus a 20' extension) launched a 94kg shell about 130 km, reaching a maximum height of 40km (about 25 miles) high. For all of its mass (the gun weighed 256 tons without the railway cars) the shell that it fired didn't weight much at all....though the shell did reach an extreme height. (Ironically, the gun was built for attacking the deepest of the deep bunkers of the fortresses along the Maginot Line; it was never needed for that, as the Maginot Line was simply left behind in the Nazi assault on France.)  The British Ordnance BL 18 inch howitzer (below) was developedjust as WWI was enidng, but did not enter service until nearly two years after the war ended.

The Schwerer Gustav was a 1350 ton beast which fired a 14,000 pound shell (!) about 20 miles. A  little later came the Nazi V-3 (the lesser known of the V-weapons), the Vergeltungsewaffe 3, a 130 metre (!) long, 150mm gun built alongthe side of a hill, launching a 140 kg shell. The Iraqi Big Babylon gun was sort of like this one, though never built--it was to have a 500' barrel and would be supported by a hillside. Then there was the Nuclear Tube: the Atomic Annie (M65) cannon, which was another bruiser, being an enormous 85' cannon that delivered the worst punch of all cannons, a nuclear warhead.  The weapon was test-fired in 1953 at Frenchman Flat at the Nevada Test Site and delivered a 15kt explosive device to a target seven miles away. There were 20 of these made, but given their diffiult-to-deploy-and-keep-secret status, and the nature of the shells, and the development of more sophisticated weapons, the M65 was obsolete almost as qickly as it was introduced, but was removed from the frontline only in 1963. 

I guess what people think of first though in regard to tubes in "The Tube" in London, though a more tubey tube was presented here in the pages of the Scientific American for the NewYork City subway:

Here's yet another strange tube, this a tube-within-a-rectangle, an aerotheraphy device that was supposed to cure people of whatever they needed curing for, just like any other good quack device, though this may well have been the heaviest of them all.  Cushioned, well-appointed, and with a hint of luxury, this burst of fresh air was inteneded to render diseases and other complaints harmless--only for a lot more money than electro-shock or beer cures or massive purgatives or bleedings or copper amulets or whatever else you can come up with.  It does make a nice image, though:

The tube below may well have been the largest glass tube to hold the body of a dead person--and in this case, a dead child.  It was design for a practice that was evidently not practiced--electroplating the dead.  Someone thought it might make a good practice to deposit a one millimeter coating of copper on the skin of a cadaver, and published their success (and image) in the Scientific American for November, 1891.  The practice didn't catch on.

Then of course there are submerged and flying tubes; submarines have certainly become a long-established part of the technological landscape, and the flying tubes, not. 

Still, the steam-driven helium-filled flying tube boat looks dignified and lovely, if impracticable.

There were proposals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for pneumatic railroads and pneumatic people movers (in one case in the 1930's, for a plan to move individuals from New York to Philadelphia in chair-like objects in one of these tubes), but for all intents and purposes the closest that these plans came to fulfillment were pneumatic operations like thoe found in R.H. Macy in New York.  It was in the massive department store where you could find miles of pneumatic vacuum tubing that connected department tellers to a main counting office, where little cylinders were filled with cash and receipts and sent along for accounting.  The logical outocme of Macy's tubular world for Terry Gilliam was seen in the director's masterpiece dystopic flic, Brazil, where we see a world crowded with gargantuan and suffocating nothinness, filled with bazillions of miles of ductwork whose purpose is a mystery, making for a cold and disturbed world. 

End part I of Making Tubes of out Holes–the History of Holes, Extended.

Notes
l. Edwin Abbott’s slender Flatland is perhaps one of the best books ever written on perception and dimensions, a beautifully insightful book that was quick and sharp, and in spite of all that was also a best-seller.  Written in 1884 when Abbott was 46 (Abbott would live another 46 years and enjoy the book’s popular reception), it introduces the reader to a two dimensional world with a social structure in which the more sides of your object equals power and esteem.  Thus the lowest class would be a triangle (three sides) while the highest (priestly) class would be mega-polygons whose shape would approach a circle.  Abbott’s magistry comes in explaining to the three-dimensional reader what it was like to be in a two-dimensional world.

Footnotes in the Future--Swift, Lull, Borges and the End of Writing

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“The most ignorant person at a reasonable charge, and with little bodily labor, may write books in philosophy, poetry, law, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.”   Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels

"Hell is the kingdom of the animal that swallows up the memory of all things... Between life and death there is no destiny except memory. Memory weaves the destiny of the world.."  Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

"A people without history/ is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments" -- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets.

The future history of writing--it will tell us--was already written before it was written.   In the future, when everything that can be written has been written and everything spoken has already been spoken, perhaps the first footnote in the history of already-done things will be to Jonathan Swift.  The experience belongs to us through Lemuel Gulliver¹, who after surviving two trips (one to Lilliput in which Gulliver is twelve times the size of

everything else, and the second to Brobdingnag where he is one-twelfth the size of everything) comes to a third (of four²) in the land of Laputa.  It is here where he encounters a conversation machine that, when cranked, produces anything and everything, the known and unknown, the original and the copied, and have the thought and spoken word belong to the manipulator of the machine.  Everything that can be said is in that box, waiting to come.  The 20' square was occupied by cubes with words on their sides, with 40 cranks and 40 handles and 40 operators to manipulate the mechanical vocabulary and associated scribes to record anything that made sense, and would be the springboard of “knowledge”operating without a manual or an intelligent primum mobile. (The image of the machine--which bears some resemblance to an integrated chip--appears in the third edition of Swift's book, and as you can see is not a well-drawn thing, missing a row and a column and a crank here and there. A fuller description is found below.)

The idea of a universal knowledge or an expanding, forever-library is very old, particularly if you expand the concept a bit to include Aristotle and the Tree of Porphyry³.  While not exactly a generator in the sense of Jorge Borges' Library of Babel or the Swiftian machine, the ancients did produce very interesting, elegant, beautiful ways of story information and ordering information.  The Tree of Porphyry is far more concise–an abbreviation-compared to the infinitely expanding hexagonal rooms filed with books and attendant librarians in the Borges' universe.  Or the Ars Magna/Thinking Machine of the 13th century Ramon Lull (also known as Ramon, Raimundo and Raymond, Raimundus and Raymundus Lull, Lully and Lullus and Lulio), the ultimate organizer of how sentences can be made and knowledge produced/uncovered (particularly if you want to please the logic of the church and the Creator), and which was almost certainly known to Swift (and which was also written about, described and worried-over by Borges⁴).  There are many other early figures in this category to be sure (Lewis Carroll, William Jevons, and even in a way Mr. Venn, not to mention Leibniz and his calculator,  and the changes in scientific method and (English/Dutch) mathematical concentration on applied mathematics of the 17th century that made thinking about the industrial revolution possible)), but that would be left to (at least) a longer post.  (The Lull wheel, below.)
                           

How long will it take to digitize everything that has ever been written, or recorded, or composed? Several generations? Ten?  It may well come to pass in shorter time than we think; and when you compare this control of recorded human history to the centuries that will follow in developing “computers”, how can we possibly know what will become of all of it?  In the coming centuries and their attack on intelligence, when in the future the brain is a harvest of the computer, perhaps intelligence finally submits, and everything that can be done has been done, the progress of humanity snubbed to a stub. Or expanded exponentially.  It is such a tough call to make...

Notes:

1.  Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships.  1726.

2. The third voyage was Part III. A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan. The fourth finds humans as pets/inferiors in the island of the Houyhnhnms, a land of intelligent horses.

3. The “tree” was a diagrammatic creation of a 3rd century Syrian mathematician/logician/philosopher named Porphyry who-- much taken with Aristotle (and with the Categories in particular)-- developed a systematic approach to the organization of thought in diagrammatic form.

4. Borges J. L. (1999) 'Ramon Lull’s thinking Machine' in The total library: non-fiction 1922-1986 (Edited by) Weinberger, E., trans. Allen, E. Levine, S. J., and Weinberger, E. London, Penguin, on pp 155-160.

It is interesting to note that Lull, who gave up everything to follow his calling into the church (and who was antagonized by the belief that his very act of missing his left-behind life to be a sin against god's choice of him to follow his "career path") was demonized by the church soon after his death, his works prohibited reading for hundreds of years.  He was resurrected in 1958 though on a path towards sainthood, a doctor of the church.  

A description of the Swift machine:

Ennui and Renaissance Surgical Tools

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        "Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
        finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
        of, while blasé princesses indict
        tilts at terror as downright absurd."    –“Ennui”, by Sylvia Plath

       “Ennui is the poetic state that occurs just before depression.” made-up Twain quote, seconded by a  made-up  Bierce definition, “Ennui.  Depression without the imagination.”

Ennui seems to have always been in the possession of those who could afford possessions–the laboring classes could only be affected with derangements and sloppiness and laziness, but the wealthy among the people of the earth could have ennui. They could afford to.  And it seems to me that in my own walk-through in the history of illustration–especially relating to the sciences–that those most often depicted with ennui were saints and doctors, two generally mutually-excluding classes.  I’m not so sure why this is the case for the doctor, or surgeon, or barber,  or sawbones–it was not a pretty jog in the centuries leading up to our own.  [Pictured here is a physician with things on/not on his mind, from Andrew Borde's The Breuiary of Healthe, for all maner of syknesses and diseases..." from 1556, and which turns out to be one of teh first modern books on hygiene.]The working  conditions were exceptionally difficult (in general), the treatments were blood-under-the-nails barbaric, and the survival rate for those under your care was poor. Perhaps it was the tools? They were’nt very glamorous things, either–nor were

 
they necessarily clean. [Image of from Vesalius'  De humani corporus fabrica . 1543, ("On the Fabric of the Human Body"/"On the Construction of the Human Body").  I prefer "fabric" because of Vesalius' superb re-discovery of muscle...]  Urgent cleanliness in the surgical amphitheater wouldn’t come along until Sir Joseph Lister in the mid-19th century; so working as a surgeon in a bad hospital with rudimentary tools in bad working conditions and little light could not for a happy existence make.


[The differences between the two engravings above seem to our modern eye to be quite minute; but for the 160 or so years between the two publication dates, the advancements were considerable, given the time.  This second image is a display of midwifery tools and instruments, which I guess wouldn't make anyone today feel very comfortable--surviving childbirth for the woman was still a substantial issue, though less so than it had been in the first half of the 16th century. Image: Pierre Dionis, Traite Generale des Accouchements...Paris, 1718.]

And yet imping his way through all of this is Vesalius¹, who managed to accomplish accumulate mounds and piles of good data, organize and interpret it and then have the whole thing illustrated (with 200 of some of the greatest anatomical images ever made) and published all before he was 29 years old.  Perhaps he wasn’t as susceptible to be provoked or drawn into ennui as most professionals of the time, being such a genius and coming from such a royal medical lineage² as he. Or perhaps he was able to avoid the ennui that came with the brains and the genes.  Ennui didn’t seem a part of this physician’s makeup, even though he was deeply in debt and a man slightly out of place. Maybe he didn’t have time to develop ennui, as he was an extraordinarily busy man who was dead at 50. 

So, judging by the looks of things on the surgeon’s table, and imagining the stuff that needed fixing and the objects to fix it with, perhaps the physician was led down a path of slowly not being able to do anything...at....all.  Ground to a nub, a stop, a chin-in-hand moment.  Or not.                           
______________
Notes:

1. Vesalius’ revolutionary treatise on anatomy–which stressed anatomy in relation to physiology–was a clear break with the Galenic tradition, and was one of the first of the modern works on the subject. His book was published the same year as Copernicus’ masterpiece. 

2. Vesalius’ great-grandfather, grandfather and father were professors of medicine, the last two being the Royal Physician and apothecary to Emperor Maximillian