Ptak Science Books

Big Skies, Long Horizon: 42nd Street, 1861

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC     Post 428

This view of the northern reaches of Manhattan , published in Valentine's Manual  in 1861, reveals a superior and clear view of the northern reaches of the island due north along 2nd Avenue at the 42nd Street intersection.  An historian of The City could probably identify that precipitously-perched house at the corner of 42nd and 2nd--I can't.  My guess though is that from the looks of the ruining fence that 2nd avenue must've been widened and scraped away the house's front yard.  The view up 2nd is largely unobstructed  and shows few people, though we do see a *girl* playing with a hoop and a strolling family (with, uncommonly, daddy holding the child's hand...I guess that the mother's hands were busy holding the parasol and shawl).  

The census for 1860 shows that the population of Manhattan at 850,000.  Given that today's population is about twice that, where were the rest of the 1860-people?  As we can clearly see, they weren't uptown.  Manhattan was pretty densely populated as a whole, but the great majority of the population action was taking place below where we would today consider midtown. If we take the left and right hand of 2nd ave as the 19th and 22nd Wards (which were actually divided by 6th Ave, but 2nd will do for these purpose), then there would be about 80,000 people living there, or about 9% or so of the entire population of the city. These two wards also accounted for about 30% of the entire area of the city below 86th street.  So even though this scene looks pretty pastoral, there were still a fair number of people living in those low-rise stretches.

Another bit to consider is that the island's population then was fairly static--the people in Manhattan were largely residents, whereas today the daytime population just about doubles, which makes it the country's most-commuted-to daytime city. (Manhattan daily increase= 87% increase; Washington, D.C.  73.0%;  Boston  41.1%;  Seattle 28.4%; Denver 28.0%; Portland, OR  23.0%;  San Francisco  21.7%; Charlotte, NC  21.2%; Houston   20.6%; Nashville 19.5%; Austin  19.4% )

All this said, I always have liked this image because it so odd, and naive, and lovely.  Unexpected,  I was thrilled to see the failing fence for this property, along with its curly stairs leading away from the sheer droop at what used to be the front steps of the house.  To me these are just gorgeous details.

Here's a shot (right) of 2nd ave looking south from 85th street, which may very well be the vanishing point of the 1861 image.  Maybe.   The photo below shows 2nd and 42nd from the Helmsley. 

Finally, below, we see a view of 42nd Street from the Hudson. 

Unusual and Proto-Useless Statistics Dept: Travel Deaths, 1880 vs. 2006. An Orders of Magnitude(s) Story

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 415

Searching for something entirely unrelated to what I found (trying to answer how straight railway tracks were  in Texas in 1880*) but happy with the stumbling is this header for a long list of railway deaths on American railroads in the year 1880.  It appears in on page 280, part VIII, volume 13, part 4 of the U.S. House Miscellaneous Documents No. 42, part 4, volume 2132 of the publications of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Lots of numbers, yes?  Actually it is just vol 13 of the U.S. census report for 1880, the Statistical Report of the Railroads in the United States, by Armin E. Shuman ("Expert").  It si a big books in a series of big books, running 862 pages and is mostly just (beautiful) numbers.  It is remarkable, really, that these folks had such extraordinary control over this amount of data--not only were they collecting it, but analyzing it as well, and doing it before the big breakthroughs that would come in the next census with the Hollerith machines. 

The table is a summary of accidents reported by all railroads in the United States for the year 1880.  For *one* year, not the decade of the 1870's.  The short story is that 2,541 people were killed in/on/by trains, with 5,674 injured.  Of the "killed" number, 61 were passengers who were killed "from causes beyond their control", and 62 were killed "from their own carelessness".  The numbers get much bigger because of the number of employees killed on  the job, more than 900 in the one year alone.  The total number of passengers carried for the year was 269,000,000.  I cannot find the number o total miles traveled.

I made a quick check on the Bureau of transportation Statistics website just to see what kind of similarities there might be in these numbers. It turns out that the gross numbers were sort of similar--there were 658,000,.000 passengers carried domestically by American carriers in 2006.  There was a tremendous difference in deaths, though: 47 people were killed as a result of air travel that year, compared with the 2,541 by trains in 1880.  Two orders of magnitude, about, with each person traveling a great distance in the air (averaging about 1000 miles) than by rail (whose numbers I could not find quickly).  It is kind of interesting, though, that when you consider passengers as a lone stat in 1880 that the numbers get very close to 2006. 

Working on the railroads in 1880 was tough and dangerous--more dangerous than I had known.  And I can pretty well  guess that there were no Thanksgiving turkeys being delivered to anyone's family if Father happened to get cut in half by the South Manchester Railroad Company.  Certainly no turkey would come the year after.

Superior Display of Data: the Dead of the Titanic, April 1912

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post  208

The photographic editor of The  Illustrated London News came up with this superb illustration of what the 1513 dead aboard the Titanic would look like.  Oddly enough, the photo used for the visualization exercise is of Mr. Ben Tillett, a socialist reformer and speaker, and also the spokesman for the  National Transport Workers’ Federation and also of the Dock Wharf and General Workers’ Union., who at the time was playing an enormous role in the coal handling (and etc.) slowdown, representing the underpaid workers against the shipping companies. 

The use of Tillett's crowds to make a case for the shipping industry tells me that The News was oblivious to the attendant ironies. That Tillett was a tremendous thorn in the companies' paw(s) is beyond question.  Almost immediately after the Titanic disaster he published a statement accusing the White Star Line of trying to save the first class passengers first at tremendous expense of the third class passengers.  "We offer our strongest protest against the wanton and callous disregard of human life and the vicious class antagonism shown int he practical forbidding of the saving of the lives of the third-class passengers.  The refusal to permit other than first-class passengers to be saved by the boats is a disgrace to our common civilization".  Strong stuff with a huge dollop of truth to it--god only knows why The News would've used this picture and this quote as part of a way to concretize what the loss of 1500 lives looked like.  The News did counter the Tillett statement, saying "It need not be said that there is no truth in the allegations thus made..."

Except, well, they've not got the truth under control.  On the one hand it is true that the greater indicator of survivability on the Titanic was by sex and age variables; on the other, overall, hand Tillett's implied figures are closer to the truth that The News found so repugnant.  Women and children did survive in much greater numbers across (voyage) class lines than anything else.  Only 3% of first class women perished, followed by 14% of second class and 54% of third class. 67% of first class men died, followed by 92% of second class and 84% of third; 78% of the male crew also disappeared.  So the men did generally go down with the ship, giving their places to women and children (and the other 33% of first class men). Well, not all of the children:  while no first or second class children were lost, 66% of third class kids drowned.  Overall, I'd have to side with Tillett rather than a company apologist:  67% of first class people survived, followed by 41% of second class and only 25% of third; least of all came the crew, with a survivability rate of 23%.

Tillett would make many observations on the disaster, though one of the most revealing was his observation on the newspapers' coverage of the heroism of only the first class passengers: ‘I feel glad that the motto “Women and children first” is the great call in the hour of danger at sea. Mr Astor’s heroic end was in keeping with the heroic end of the humble third class and the members of the crew".  It was an excellent point, and true, and also very uncomfortable stuff to acknowledge in print. 

Census Art and the Display of Quantitative Data, 1860

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC Post 176

                                                          This data set is from the Johnson's Family Atlas for 1863 in the "Historical And Statistical View of the United States" section, printed on the back of the Tennessee and Kentucky map, and which was derived from the Eight Census of the United States  (1860).  It displays the changes in the states' populations relative to each other, placing them in a populace order (highest to lowest), for a seventy year period, from 1790 to 1860, following the changes in the 17 states of 1790 to the 34 states in 1860.     So far as I can determine this is a very early graphical display revealing these sorts of comparisons of, well, anything.  It is  a little tenuous and twisted, but the ride it offers is determined and it is revealing--it just doesn't enter the form in which the data could be more usefully (and quickly) displayed.  If you set your mind to it you can follow the languid changes in increases and decreases in a state's population relative to the other states in the Union--for example, it is easy to follow the fortunes of New York and Virginia, as the changes each experiences over these seventy years is relatively marginal. Drastic changes are another story, and following the lines of their evolutions not easy:  the mercurial climbing chnanes in Ohio and Illinois are a bit hard to figure, though the longish but large changes (like that of South Carolina) prove a bit less tenacious to see.      

There would be many more of these displays to come--particularly in the very large, double-page, fabulously colored lithograph that appeared in the atlas folio of the famous 11th census--but this was one of the very earliest attempts to display changes over time, and it worked out beautifully.

Statistical Fossils 2: Found Stats On International Mail Delivery Times, 1900.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #121

Continuing to leaf through the George Cram Family Atlas of 1903 I came across another small fossilized statistical nugget that I know would be of value to some poor person out there:  this one is  a half-page of mail delivery times to about 200 places world-wide.  (I know that this would be helpful to some historian, as I just went through a similar process for some data that I actually needed,  finding a series of representational maps showing the frontiers of travel time for different modes of transport over different periods of time leaving from New York, and representing several decades’ differences—these were an enormous help to me, and I was unaware that such data had been compressed so elegantly; trying to piece this information together piecemeal would have been a very time consuming effort.) (This image is clickable for a magnified view.)

So in keeping with some of the other data-posting tactics of this site (for example the atomic bomb chronology and the bibliographies of various scientists as found in these pages) as well as on my business site  I‘ll continue to make posts for some of the particularly scrumptious bits that I find during the day.

And just for the record, the longest in-transit period for mail that I have seen thus far in this table is for New York to “Gabun” (Gabon), Africa, coming in at 47 days; Saigon came in a close second with 44 days, and Hong Kong, 43.  It still took 8 days to get a letter from NYC to London in 1899.  The record for an east bound crossing of the Atlantic in 1958 was still three days, twenty hours, set by the Queen Mary in 1938, so getting a letter delivered in London after only nine days (including the passage plus processing and foot delivery) was pretty fast there at the turn of the century.  Speed is a simple matter of relativity and perspective--and starting with a given known. 

Statistical Fossils 1: Found Stats Concerning the Rifles of the World, 1899

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post  Post #120

Leafing through back-page minutiae of the George Cram Family Atlas of 1903 (a modest but full work on the level of something like the World Book Encyclopedia of the 1970's) I stumbled upon a wonderful table entitled "Rifles Used by the Principal Powers of the World" (and by "world" it meant 43 countries). (You can CLICK on the image below for a more readable, magnified version.)   

The 3x4-inch table was packed with some unusual data, and even though I just jested with its 47-country "world" that is actually a fair representation of the gun-consuming nations of the time.  The table lists the name of the gun or inventor, followed by its calibre, length (with and without bayonet), weight (with and without the bayonet), number of cartridges in magazine,, the distance at which the gun is sighted, the "conveyor or jacket of cartridges", and the muzzle velocity (in feet per seconds).  That’s really quite a lot of obscure data packed into such a small part of page 321 in this book.