Ptak Science Books

BioPunk: Human Robots, 1900-1923

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post #425

I found this extraordinary image via collection of Finkiyaya on Pinterest, which is an interesting source for the unusual relating to the uncommon.  There is no attribution, but help came from correspondent Jeffrey Weston, who advised that the helmut belongs to none other than the ferociously active publisher/editor/thinker and creator of the term "science fiction", Hugo Gernsback.  This was supposed to deliver a more powerful thinking and concentration experience to the user by delivering a flow of O₂ , shutting off sound and auditory distraction, and by making the wearer focus their vision through a kind of horizontal pinhole slit. Gernsback I am sure did not use one of these things while working on his dozens of simultaneous projects, but he thought that it might help the rest of us--in today's world, perhaps all we need to do to achieve this iolsation is turn off the electronics and sit at a clean desk.  In any event, the mask removed a fair amount of the human experience from thinking, and probably focused a LOT of attention on not-hearing and trying to see through those tiny slits. 

[Source: Pinterest account of Finkiyaya, here]

[I wonder if Wilhelm Reich read about this as he was fiddling around with his "orgone accumulator" (read: "box").   Even the crown prince of American Black Comedy, William Burroughs, could not wrestle this Reichian thing outside its impossible cellulosity of weird. As odd as Gernsback's thing is, Reich's goes on-beyond-zero with his, thinking that his siting-coffin collects/regulates an etherless ethery thing called orgone which was the seat of many and remarkable things, not the least of which was a controller of cancer and the weather.  It sounds sort of like a water-cycle thing but for a thing that influences thought and consciousness and biological systems as well as our ocean of air--that's a long pull for a box with a chair in it.]

Now three's plenty in this helmet to suggest itself to the history of masks, but that is an enormous diversion, because I was really just looking for complements in the mechanical helmet world.  I could not resist though including this magnificent mask made by someone of the Sukuma ethnic group of Tanzania:

The Isolator Helmet reminded me of this good effort:

Beautiful Techno-Art & Invention: Circular Adding Machines, 1850-1900

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  

 

Standard Corpse, Inc. & Deadpunk: Shaving, Cooling, Lifting, Electroplating, and Diapering the Dead

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1975  

The idea of creating an economy from a previously dead clientelle--the very after-market dead person--is relatively new. Once a middle class or lower working class with disposable income was created, celebrating the care of the dead was a paying option opened to the millions of families who were not the fastidious and celebratory wealthy.  Once the notion of having other people take care of the dearly departed became a part of the popular ritual of dealing with the dead, an entire new industry was born--spawning other related and associated industries for supplying the dead-care-givers with amenities and notions and necessities of a previously unthunk and unthinkable nature.  For example, the idea of needing to shave a corpse became an issue after it became fashionable to allow several days or more to pass between death and burial.  Beards and hair grow in death, so the people caring for the body and its display now were ordained an issue of economy in nultiple shavings of a corpse.  Now that may or may not have been an issue, but it was certainly presented as a possibility by the incredibly-named "Razorless Post- Mortem Shave Co."

• See also some of the other, associated posts on this blog like Incontestable Oddness: Inflatable Puffy Shirts for the Dead & Coffins with Retractable Legs and  A Monumentally Bad Idea: Screw Coffins, and others (just search "dead" and there will be a number of other posts).

 

{Many thanks to reader Max W for providing the information for the correct information for the citation of the above image--the magazine is Casket & Sunnyside for January 1912, and there are ample references to it in Charles Addams and Jessica Mitford.] The worry for the consideration of the cost of a shave (15 cents) for a dead person seems quite an inescapable weirdness and luxury. The weirdness of the name of the company nearly obscures it common nature--it isn't exactly the Acme Corpse Company, but it is close to it, and it addresses just one small bit of minuatiae of deadness in the vast sea of Dead, Inc.

The sellers of the razorless post-mortem shave equipment didn't receive a patent for their process--nor did anyone else, for that matter, at least so far as I can determine. 

Here are some further examples of Dead, Inc/DeadPunk patented death appliances:

Post-mortem skull examination facilitator:

Postmortem Underwear for the prevention of dead leakage and deodorization:

19th Century Smart Sticks: Calculating Pencils

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post 

    

This thinking stick comes to us via the courtesy of the Scientific American Supplement (19 August 1876, page 542), and shows a lovely Victorian non-SteamPunk answer to on-the-run calculation. It is an almost-elegant device, and seems as though it should work just fine. Its utility as a writing instrument seems a bit limited, as seems the calculator part, but the whole of it seems to be full of possibility--and a very nice piece of dedicated thinking. 

[Text describing the invention below.]

Other nice examples of adding/writing found in the U.S. Patent Office via GooglePatents are seen below:

Beautiful Sprockets: MetalPunk in Space and the Jetsons.

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1958

The birth year of Rosie the Robot is approaching.

(This beautiful sprocket nest, for a patent for transmitting power (1874), like all of the following patent images, is located at   Google Patents, here)

For some odd reason I was thinking about Spacely's Sprockets, George Jetson's (of The Jetsons cartoon in the 1960's) employer.  I wondered if this was a high irony--the "sprockets" part-- and if there would be any sprockets in our space-aged future.  Even by the end of the 60's, just at the end of this cartoon, I wonder if in the tens of thousands of parts that went into the hardware of the Apollo Project to get us to the Moon if there were any sprockets among them. 

The sprocket was just such an excellent idea in the history of the transmission of power...but in the 15 or so books that are on hand here on the history of technology there's nothing in between "spring" and "Sputnik" in their indexes. Patents for sprockets seem to begin in U.S. patent history in the late 1860's.  Sprockets show up in Gatling/machine guns (1878, with the Leland gun), chain propellers (1875), turn tables for railroads (1874), chain saws (1883), holler for printing machines (1882), stump extractors (1878), wind engine engines (1880), window shutters (1879), safety pulleys (1880), traction engines (1881), feathered paddling wheels (1882), potato differs (1883, with very great tank potential), harvesters (1880), hay elevators (1881), horse treadmills (1884), corn planters (1881), grain elevators (1883), and of course in veliocepedes (a very cumbersome device by Emmit G. Latta in 1880). 

[Bicycle source here]

I suspect that there were sprockets in space in 1969, and perhaps they're in a Space X vehicle--I really don't know. Its just interesting to think of the coming of the sprocket and what an enormous influence it exerted in the history of power transmission--and the device's beauty. 

My sneaking suspicion is that Rosie the Robot, the maid for the Jetson family--who was 45 years old in the  beginning of the 1962 series-- was loaded with 1965 sprockets--whether sprockets would exist in the year 2062 or whatever year George Jetson was alive in (certainly many centuries post-2062) is another story. But Rosie--the outdated-model mid-life maid of the future and most reasonable character in the series--surely had them.

Some beautiful sprockets:

Vaginal Opium Suppository & Rectal Exercise Dumbbell Patents (1881 & 1931)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

 

This is a Quick Post quickly posted, fast-quick, mainly because I'm not so sure what to say about it, other than "wow".  So, I'm sharing these patents for the sake of sharing, mostly without comment. (Here's another curious suppository-related post on this blog: Radioactive Suppository Sex Aids & Radium Toothpaste: Shining Lethal Nonsense).

The first comes from Leonhard Roth, of Brooklyn, who won this patent in 1881:

And:

 

Questions Answered with Guts, Wax, Bumps and Glory: Fortune Telling Patent Devices

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1956

 

[All images via the lovely and easy to maneuver Google Patents here]

Fortune telling and divination is mostly the subject of the pretty patents (below), a quick penny-ante for the fulfillment of the instant treatment of possibility. reckoning via mechanical means,easing folks out of the necessity to think about What May Come, and also, possibly, relieving some of them of the possibilities of worry should the fortunes agree with their hopes.  And desires. Opposite, for the opposite. 

This thinking goes back a long way into dark and dusty time, though it becomes interesting (to me, anyway) when it gets wrapped up in Renaissance magic and science. 

I'm not sure what it reveals except for what people might have wanted to believe in during different periods of time.

Anyway, the patent drawings are pretty.

The ways of telling fortunes are broad and numerous and may have been dictated by the stuff that was readily available at hand; a veritable alphabet can be quickly summoned to deal with the most common of the sort:

Alectromancy (telling the future by relatively brainless modern dinosaur roosters pecking at the ground for stuff);

Astrology (thinking that the motions of stars that are light years away from the observer in a vast sea of space and their annotation on an infinitesimally small speck of universe dust called "Earth" can somehow interact with living organisms that are 10³⁰⁰⁰⁰ the amount of space that can be affected by the light from the stars that are 1/1,000,000,000 of the age of those stars);

 

Tech Quiz: The Tooth Telephone? (1880)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This device looks a little suspect, but it isn't. Well, on first sight of the patent drawing this device seemed dubious and quacky, and since the patent office issued some-number of patents for quackery, it was entirely plausible that this was one of those beasts.  This is the kind of quackery beasty that would latch on to a new discovery or invention and somehow derive and twist the name or concept of the new thing into something fabulous or miraculous (as with the case of  radium suppositories and x-ray massages for the bones).

The device is a vibrating element to help people with hearing loss hear conversations on the telephone. On reading the patent though it becomes pretty clear that this thing could work, or should work, depending upon the hearing loss of the receiver.  Patented about four years after the Bell patent, there were nearly immediate reports on Mr. Fiske's invention in Scientific American, The Electrical Journal, and Engineering (seen below). 

Standing on Your Stagnant Nerve-Juice Nostril Tube? The Daily Dose from Dr. Odd

JF Ptak Science Books     Daily Dose from Dr. Odd  

This cure-all from G. Anston looks simple, but the hydraulics of his nerve juice pumper is actually a little involved, or more involved than it needed to be given the fact that the machine didn't actually do anything productive.  That said, Anston was  setting out to "move fluids" and cause all manner of cure-alls for "air stagnation" in the body, without the trouble of losing any time except for sticking those tubes into your nostrils.  I do not know why the artist has the subject standing on  #44 (the nerve-waste elimination tube) which was basically the tail-pipe of the cure-waste that was supposed to be flushed from a window.  It seems as though stopping the exit of the stagnated brain-air and nerve-fluid effluvia might've made the subject's head pop off a little, which would be problematical. 

 

[Source:  Google Patents, here.]

Patenting the Artificial: Moustaches, Bark and Ideas

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1928

            An Alphabet of the Artificial as Seen in Patent Drawings

                  " I...can wet my Cheekes with artificial Teares."--3 Henry VI, iii, ii, 184.

Using "artificial" as the word preceding a concept makes for some pretty interesting thought, especially if you remove it a bit from what the expected outcome is supposed to be.  So: creation. Intelligence. Harmomics. Society. Language. Consciousness. Person.  With the word "artificial" in front of these, they become captivating ideas both inside and outside of the realms of possibility.  ("Artificial creation" can have a definite hard sci-fi edge to it beyond genetic algorithms and trying to cook primordial chemical elements into the stuff of life in controlled environments; the "artificial person" more than just the person ficta of the law, although "artificial personality" wrapped around that gets to be very interesting as well.  The "Artificial society"has some Superman aspects to it from my 25-cent comics day, though the von Neumann/Ulam/Conway simplified paper grid cell creations are fr more interesting; artificial consciousness has a nice film-feel to it beyond machine/synthesis and cognitive robotics, where consciousness has somehow been identified and was controllable to a walking-around state. And so on.)

What I've pulled together below is a small sampling of patented items using the word "artificial" in its title, and presented them in a (near-complete) alphabet of artificial creations.

There is no patent on "artificial ideas" itself, though the idea of taking real issues like "artificial harmonics" and turning into something wholly unrelated to its intended use might be considered so. In any event, it would be an interesting thing to try to patent.

A

Mall-Mortuary Faces on Robot Patent Drawings, 1936-1976

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1927

There is something that I've found in my time grazing through U.S.patent drawings--for the most part, if the device has a face, or is being worn/employed by some human with a face, chances are that this face will indeed have some high invasion of "Creep Factor" elements.  It is just so.  I've encountered this many times, and I think that it is possible that in these hundreds of samples that I have come across that these inventors (a) could not draw, (b) could not draw well, or (c) chose not to (a) and/or (b). It is too much to expect that these creepy faces are an expression of humor--that would be too much of a conspiratorial element for anyone to absorb.  It is just remarkable that these faces are time after time just so off, and soft-creepy, like a puffed-up rougey death mask found in a mall mortuateria.

1936 1938

1938

Patent Drawings for Voting Machines, 1873-1971

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post, Election Day

I've just simply collected a representation of  sixteen patent drawings for voting machines for the decades from 1873 to a very early electronic voting apparatus in 1971. Today I simply filled out a paper ballot with a pencil, which was in turn read by the real voting tabulator.

I  found very few examples for "ballot boxes" or "ballot ____"  or "vote ___" anything prior to 1850; most of  the patent actions seem to take place after 1875 (perhaps ignited by the very problematical "stolen" election of 1876. 

I don't know if it is ironic/prophetic/problematic that the first example is by an inventor named "Doolittle".

1873

 

1875  

Imago Frammeni: Boulle, the Dogon, Jouffret, the Simple and the Complex

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1914

Changing the Mind's View of Simple and Complex Ideas via Different Image Perspectives

I’m always very interested in curious things, or standard, “average” things pictured in non-standard ways, as the change in perspective can lead to entirely new observations and discovery.  Seeing this illustration in an article by J. Norman Lockyer (Nature 1881) I was shocked by its clarity and usefulness—Lockyer was simply showing the arrangement of his apparatus for his solar spectrum experiments but the angle of observation (being at such an oblique angle as is normally found) was just, so, well, “correct”.  The image I thought was perfect for the reader—not only that, it was designed artistically and with grace, and one can see exactly what Lockyer was up to.  Diagrams would’ve worked almost as well, but there is just something so extraordinary here that you could just about work from the image if there was no description. 

Looking at things differently is hard work—that’s why I think it is always good to refresh the neuronal sap and look at great examples of unusual , insightful imagery.

Sometimes it works to read the description of what the image is before actually viewing it to see the differences of the image that you form in your brain before seeing the thing itself.  For example, when reading about the Dogon, a cliff-dwelling people of the plateau of Bandiagara, south of Tombouctou, and how they would make houses and then towns out of the rocks fallen from cliffs, you get what is probably a pretty benign image.  When you see photographs of these structures it seems as though the brain just simply isn’t ready for their impossible nature, though you quickly, instantly, recover (once you convince yourself the photo is real) and—voila—your mind has been expanded.  (This photo is from an expansive work by Bernard Rudofsky, Architectures without Architects, Doubleday, 1964.) 

The (internally) spectacular Etienne Boullee can greet us in the same way with some of his eye-popping architectural creations (unbuilt architecture by an architect, in this case, compared to the built architecture of the non-architects above).  Boullee’s “Plan du Cenotaphe de Newton”, a gigantic memorial to Newton  that was dancing with necessary privacy in Boullee’s brain during the French Revolution (and also during a particularly un-Newtonesque time in on-your-knees-to-Cartesian-principles France)  is another superior example.  Reading the description of the structure just doesn’t quite do, and it seems whatever grand comes of that is tarnished and stripped away  by the obesely florid sentiment of none other than Ledoux’s poetic sentiments “…O Newton!  Sublime Mind!  Vast and profound genius!  I conceived the idea of surrounding thee with thy discovery…”.  Oy.   Boulle adds to this inspirational atrocity by saying of the sphere:  “…we must speak of a grace that owes its being to an outline that is as soft and flowing as it is  possible to imagine…”   And once the demand of “oh  dear god just please show me the picture” is met, we are left with a turned-around brain and another heavenly exaltation, or profanity.  The Cenotaph is just Grand-Canyon-Spectacular. 

Complex can turn on the simple in this way, where we can have those “a-ha” moments from, say, early efforts at picturing the fourth dimension or non-Euclidean geometry to a new perspective of looking at Roman ruins.  The arrival on the non-Euclidean geometries  in the 19th century posed new issues, not the least of which was representing the ideas.  Our saintly Hermann von Helmholtz believed –contrary to most elevated opinions—that the human mind could indeed intuit complex space and figures of these geometries.  (The difficulty not only from the obvious intellectual hardships in picturing the concepts but also because the geometry of Lobachevsky http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Lobachevsky.html was called somewhat into doubt when some of its results were cast in doubt by contemporary astronomical observations.—and this even though so far as the great Gauss was concerned there was no deviation in Euclidean values.)   Helmholtz did this by employing the three-dimensional pseudosphere model of Beltrami.  (Reluctance to these ideas would end soon enough, for, as Linda Dalrymple Henderson points out with such sotto voce, “the convenience of Euclidean geometry would prove inadequate once Einstein” hit in 1905.)

The work of Beltrami  and H.P. Manning  (Geometry of Four Dimensions, 1914), and Jouffret  (Traite elementaire de geometrie a quarte dimensions, Paris 1903) in illustrating these complex ideas (the titles of which were in themselves daungting as with Jouffret’s “plane projections of the sixteen fundamental octahedrons of an ikosatettrhroid”) would in themselves prove to be entirely irresistible to the world of the arts.  Charles Howard and Maurice Princet I think had as much to do with  the creation of cubism and abstract art and the imaging of time than anyone, including the painter (I shudder to say his name) of Les Demoiselles (1907) or the lovely Georges Braque (Houses at Estaque, 1908) or Jean Metzinger or even the sublime comedian Duchamp’s Nude Descending (1914).  The hypercube starts to show up a lot in some Bauhaus genres and even into the palette of Frank Lloyd (“Stinky”) Wright (with his St. Mark’s Tower plan, NYC, 1929). I can only imagine the shock to the brains of these creative geniuses in seeing the display of such a novel idea.  (For the ultimate treatise on this see Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s The Fourth Dimension and Non Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton  1983).  And no the art didn’t come first. 

But coming back to the simple, and in the same frame as the first example that we mentioned in Lockyer, we have the unlikely find of Giovanni Piranesi.  In my opinion his most spectacular work is found in his frammeni (the diverse bits and pieces of architectural and sculptural bric-a-brac found objects that are collected together on one stage) and in his archaeological detail.   His attention to new perspective in showing the crucial aspects of structure and building in Rome is tremendous and unexpected—as an example we see here the child’s-eye-height view of three steps of the reconstruction of the theatre of Pompey.  I must say that I’ve seen a lot of architectural images in my time but nothing quite comes to me so surprisingly as this step-level view of the reconstruction of a Roman theatre,  This happens throughout the lesser-known Piranesi, with great details of tools, and cross sections of the very deep footings of bridges, and so on.  It is really refreshing, lovely, unexpected work. 

We’ll return to this subject from time to time as I have hundreds of interesting examples to draw from—for example, the remarkable Emily Vanderpoel’s Colour Problems (which has surfaced in this blog from time to time) which is ostensibly an undecipherable attempt to quantify color arrangement in art but through the lovely examples displaying this attempt pre-date the modern re-invention of non-representational art by at least a dozen years.  Stay tuned!

Inventing (1) Old Tone in New Violins & (2) New Tone in Old Violins. Patent Models.

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Finding old tone in the 19th was attempted in the following way, an interesting if not myopic attempt to put some play-time in a brand-new violin:

Abstract of  GB 190303723  (A)

  Payne, R. H., and Broadbent, T. Feb. 17, 1903.

In an instrument for reproducing sound, a resonating-chamber is used instead of a diaphragm and a trumpet. In the construction shown, the resonating-chamber consists of a violin body C mounted on an arm D extending from the instrument A. Fig. 2 shows means which may be employed for the mounting. The pin E passes through a hole in the neck C', which is clamped by the nut E'. The pin E is mounted in the wooden block F journalled in the fork H on the swivelling-pin. Washers G, G<1> prevent the communication of vibrations to the arm D. The hole in the neck may be dispensed with, a screw or spring clamp being employed in place of the pin E. The reproducer K, Fig. 3, is cemented to the violin belly. The style K<1> is clamped in it by the screw K<2>. The violin has the usual sound post and f-holes in the belly and also holes C<2> in the back. Strings may be stretched across the resonator. When a violin body is used, the strings are stretched by the usual pegs in the neck. 

This is not the most elegant invention for producing a more-interesting music from a stationary, non-human-played violin. 

On the other hand, this is:

The work is by Henry Konrad Sandell, and the patent was for a magnificent machine that produced 64 notes on the violin, and was accompanied by a 44-note piano, both played at the same time. It is a very impressive accomplishment, with several thousand of them produced over two dozen years by the Mills Novelty Company.

Source, here. Mills Novelty, here  Henry Konrad Sandell,  and a photo of a restored and lovely Violinola, here with a sample of the music it produced (!)

Happy Anniversary! Unsliced Bread--the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1855     Almost on this Day in 1932...

Thanks to Emma Digh Ptak who gave me a book on the history of bread for Father's Day!  Thanks, Buddy! 

This expression has a bit of a scent of death, of corporate sameness, about it. Its tale is one of innovation, deceit, deception; of ridding independence and quality, of providing a gross replacement for quality in the name of mechanized progress. The progress came in the form of a continuous loop delivering exactly the same loaf of bread, endlessly, to be cut and bagged and delivered to consumers--brought to us at t he expense of 97% of all of the bakeries that have ever existed in this country.

The replacement of the small bakery began slowly, around 1850, proceeded with caution to the turn of the century, and was basically completed by 1940. In 1900 the small bakery outnumbered the corporate producers by 80:1. By 1939 the large company absorbed the practice of 95% of all dollars spent on baked goods. It was the continuous-belt bread baker that started of the replacement process in 1850 and 1866, sending the bread through long ovens on the endless feed. This was the start--it was in the high speed mixers that made the domination possible, thoroughly dispersing the yeast throughout the dough, making it possible to produce almost the exact same loaf of bread time and time again. It was then that the bread cutters--which had been around for some time but more or less perfected in 1928--could really do their job and finish production. The cutters would work exceptionally well so long as the stuff that they were cutting was the same--this done, multiple loaves could be cut every second, hundreds of times a minute, thanks to the mixer. Efficiency had reached high speed, and the cutters performed their revolutionary task.

By 1942 the show was over for the small bakery--their non-uniform, hand made, thickish, irregular products replaced by bread clones: white, spongy and terrifically porous, and something that, once squeezed, would return to its original shape.

The masterwork on the coming of mechanization is by S. Gideon, and is called Mechanization Takes Command, published by Oxford, (New  York), in 1948.  It is a work of great beauty and insight.