Ptak Science Books

SteamMegaPunk Flyer, 1868

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2025

This magnificent and mega-heavy beast-aeroplane (a "steam aeromotive machine") appears in the pages of Engineering, and is the creation of Joseph M. Kaufmann of Glagow, and makes a splashy show of itself back there in 1868 when not-too-many airplanes were gracing the pages of technical journals.  But here it is, a very heavy dream of a Scottish engineer, a massive and underpowered vehicle of questionable design and imponderable consequence.  One thing is for sure--it certainly looks pretty.

 

The plan for the aircraft measured 12' from stem to stern (plus another few feet including the tail), with the body about 5'x6', and with wings that spread out 35'--each. The aircraft weighed in at an extraordinary 7,000 pounds and was supposed to be powered by a 40 horsepower steam engine that looked like a locomotive boiler that in theory would keep The Beast afloat at 40 mph for an extraordinary four hours. 

As surprising as these images look from the modern perspective, perhaps the most unexpected aspect can be seen in the detail under the wing in the drawing on the right (below)--it seems that the motive power was that the wings "flapped", like a bird's.  This was asking a lot from those wings.  And that engine.

There was a lot of "flapping" going on in the experimental thinking for flight at this period, though many of these designs were human-powered ornithopters (like those of Bourcart in 1863, Trouve in 1870, and Wenham from 1858), and which in general didn't last much past the 1870's.  There was another class of proposed flying vehicle that adopted bird-wing qualities though the wings didn't flap, like the Le Bris glider of 1868 and the beautiful and graceful patent of the Du Temple monoplane. These designs seemed to last much longer, perhaps most famously in the designs of Otto Lillienthal's gliders of the 1890's and the Vuia machine of 1906.

[The du Temple aeroplane, via Wright Brothers.org.]

What the Kaufmann aircraft had that these others didn't was its guiding principle of stability,  a 40-foot cable with an 85-pound weight on the end of it--a "pendule" of motion and stability.

Mr. Kaufmann built a 42-pound model of the aircraft--things did not go well in the experimental firing, with the boiler failing right away, but not before the wings fell off.

TV's Quest for Illuminated Poetry and a Dirac Non-Equation, 1946

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2024

‘I don’t see how you can work on physics and write poetry at the same time. In science, you want to say something nobody knew before, in words everyone can understand. In poetry, you are bound to say something that everybody knows already, in words that nobody can understand.’--Paul Dirac (1902-1984, Nobel Prize in Physics for 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger, "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory"), quoted in The Book of Universes by John Barrow.

The opening sentence of this pamphlet breathes a lead: "The story of Television, as well as the smashing of the atom, must be explained in a non-technical manner, now that World War II has ended, so that the public may know the facts..."

I think that I would have preferred this quote to end a little sooner than it does--that way it might have been a little more poetical, a little on the absurd side:

the story of Television as well

asd smashing the atom

must be explained

in a non-technical manner,

now that World War II has ended.

This short pamphlet was produced in 1946, and at the time it was still possible to believe in the great possible poetry that the new medium could produce.  And it certainly did produce something, even in these early days, though I do not think it was poetry.  It did deliver some measure of truth and accountability, though.  It is difficult to imagine seeing the image of one of the earliest post-war atomic tests delivered to the DuMont Teleset in your living room.  I imagine that the societal reaction to seeing these events broadcast may have been like when photography was brought to bear in the news reporting business.  Harper's Weekly started to run woodcuts of Civil War battles with the imprimatur "from a photograph" rather than something like "drawn at the scene by our correspondent", readers were immeasurably more responsive to the drawing after a photography because of the undeniable archivitization that goes on when a photograph is made, as the memory of a photograph is for the most part unimpeachable.  This delivered an instantaneous increase in the belief in the reporting.

It seems as though seeing events such as an atomic explosion from a cozy home encapsulation may have had the same effect. It was a democratization of truth in a way (the title being People's Television) similar to that which you could experience seeing newsreels in the movie houses--there, everyone paid the same fee, sat where they wanted (for white people, anyway), and were exposed to the same images at the same time. 

Its character leaned and leaped further away from reality and truth with each passing moment, finally reaching a point in the early part of national broadcasting where reality and entertainment and commercials all blended into one socio-molding opinion-grinding unit.

The dreammaking units responsible for creating the bigness of artificial life were quite modest in 1946, as we can see in the pamphlet's  wonderful plan of a television studio:

 

With the description:

The next seven years would toss this pamphlet into the Obsoleteinator; 13 years more would make it seem as though this pamphlet never needed to exist.  The poetry part certainly seems to have disappeared somewhere in these years--not completely and entirely to make poetry in television extinct, but certainly enough to make it an endangered sub-species. 

'Imaginary universes are so much more beautiful than the stupidly constructed 'real' one'--G.H. Hardy

Elevated IronPunk

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2018

 

Here we have an enormously IronPunk-laden solution to the pedestrian vs carriage traffic problem, playing out in a somewhat Escher-like way, drawn by the engineer Joseph Mitchell for a crossing "over Broadway, New York".  It was published in Engineering, a magazine published in London, in 1868, intended as an example of what could be done to make London's streets safer--evidently, they weren't all that safe. 

The article reports that there were 164 street deaths in London in 1867. These included 48 accidents with carriages; 59 children (6 months to 15 years); 12 women (including a 110 year old); and 44 daily workers ("in the pursuance of their calling, as carmen, bakers, coachmen, laborers").  The article insists that the dead were of the "humble class" with some degree of intoxication involved.

All (read "many") things considered, London had a population of 3.3 million in 1871 (with NYC at 942,000 for he same period, not including the city of Brooklyn which held 340,000) and considering the state of traffic safety, 164 deaths (one every other day or so) was perhaps not too terribly high--except of course to the dead and their families.  In modern London with a population of 8 million there were 3,227 traffic fatalities in the city in 2009, and 116 pedestrian deaths. That's more than half as many as 1871 with 150% more people.  Probably this is all apples and oranges...though in 1871 pollution from the traffic wasn't really killing anyone--which is not true in 2013.

Here's an elevation of a structure that was actually built in NYC, an elevated quad-crossing"the first practical experiment in overhead street crossings":

It was 17'8" high, 14' wide, with access via 30 steps, and crossed one of the busiest intersections of Broadway.  It was intended to save people from their carriage-laden fate--but people hated it, and stayed away in droves, which I think was the lasting lesson for the Brits.  I guess people preferred to trust the traffic and dash across the street rather than make the 30-step climb up and then descend to the other side--too much effort.

Notes on the History of Lines: Sight Lines

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post    History of Lines 

These are particularly fine and relatively early printed images depicting a specific kind of line of sight--this one, a positioning, rather than a line of sight in fire control, or radial velocity, EM radiation or acoustics wave propagation, or targeting...this instrument was used to establish an imaginary line in perceived objects. 

This is a detail from Andrew Wakley's  The mariner's compass rectified : containing tables, shewing the true hour of the day, the sun being upon any point of the compass ; with the true time of the rising and setting of the sun and stars, and the points of the compass upon which they rise and set ... With the description and use of those instruments most in use in the art of navigation. Also a table of the latitudes and longitudes of places, published in 1763 and reprinted many times after that. (Full text is available from Google books and also from the Haithi Trust which offers a text version of the book as well.)

The full page from which the detail is drawn:

There is a certain continuum in developing sight lines that comes to mind, as with this famous image drawn by Leonardo in 1508, perhaps the first modern interpretation of how the eye functions, kept privately in manuscript, the result of theory and experimentation:

 Which leads us to the sigh lines of Albrecht Durer, illustrating (some 17 years later) the use of a perspective tool, the vielo, in his work The Drawing Manual published in 1525:

 

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:

Suggestions of Magnificence: Bloated and Bumpy SteamPunk Aviation, 1830's.

JF Ptak Science Books      Post 2004

Question: What is 150’ in diameter, weights 80 tons, carries 60 scientists, a cannon, a big rooster, an escape pod for women, and makes transcontinental flights? 

Answer:  nothing.  

And so: what is ten times bigger, and carries ten times more people? Bigger but still the same nothing--though a more-magnificent nothingness. 

The first example  did however live in print as the great balloon La Minerve, the  prankish gesture of the Belgian optico-magician, physics experimenter/exhibitionist  and general experimenter  (and probable crumbun)  “Dr. Roberston”, who was actually Étienne-Gaspard Robert (1763-1837).  Robert did have vast experience with balloons—he was Commandant des Aerostiers during the war, serving under General Jourdain in Belgium and Holland in 1803/4, providing valuable observations on the enemy troops and movements from tethered (and not) balloon observing stations;  he is also regarded by some as the inventor of the parachute.  He had a wide interested in optics and toys, making a very profitable tour with Brewster mirrors, demonstrating all manner of specters and floating bodies and such for a paying audience.

 He came up with this sci-fi-ish idea in the early 19^th century, and published his dream broadsided swipe at other aeronauts in 1820 under the title of La Minerve, vaisseau aérien, destiné aux découvertes et proposé à toutes les Académies de l'Europe par le physicien Robertson.  There was nothing about this balloon that would’ve worked, and Robertson knew it, intending his pamphlet to be more of caricature of existing attempts in flight than as a science fiction creation.  (The pamphlet reads a little mean-spirited to me regarding the Minerve; other sections, which dealt with single-occupant air-transport devices of imaginative construction, seem less so.)

In any event, Roberston provided large creature comforts for his travelers, not the least of which was a ship (which seems to be 175 feet long) holding 60 scientists and providing enough space for long-distance sleeping arrangements, laboratories, observation decks, a kitchen, food supplies, water and the like.  There is a (large!) cannon in the bow of the Minerve, which is also topped by an enormous cock (I figure it to be 50 feet from tail to beak), a gigantic and heavy symbol for vigilance (at what price?) .  There are several small out buildings, as well as a smaller balloon that housed the women who accompanied the all-male crew on these long distance jaunts.

There is an enormous anchor where the power source for forward motion should be.  Alas!  Roberston has provided no means of thrust, trusting the winds to take the massive balloon to-and-fro.

(“Minerva” is the Roman goddess of poetry, medicine, wisdom, commerce and crafts, as well as the goddess of warriors.  She also invented music.)  

And the next example of the magnificent nothing, the Great Monster, appeared in 1837.  It was supposed to support 80 houses, steam powered with a large coalhouse and raintanks; it supported gardens and other ammenities, and was to support upwards of 1,000 people--it would be crowded, though, even though the thing was supposed to be 14,000 feet in diameter and 682' high.  It was huge, tall, and travelled at 100 mph

Even though the Minerve was a smaller undertaking, its 19th-century Baroque crenulations and insistence upon levels of dangling laddered bits make it a peculiar favorite in spite of the 2.5-mile diameter of the monsterosu Great Monster.



A Few Mechanical Men--Anthropomorphic SteamPunk

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

In 1893 George Moore unrolled his papers and derived this wonderful mechanical man, a gas-fired steam-boiler-driven, half-horsepower, six-foot tall 5-mph dromedary.  It was made of "heavy tin", had spikes on its heels for added traction, a  fire-funnel surrounded by water and connected in some way to a small but powerful motor.  The exhaust of course would exit through the nostrils. Or, in another version, the exhaust would come out via the machine's cigar.

 

Earlier than this very striking machine came the 7'9" steam man proposed by Zadick P. Deddrick.  The patent for the invention was granted in 1868, and was made to haul a rockaway carriage, the machine dressed as a man so as to not frighten horses int he street.  http://www.davidbuckley.net/DB/HistoryMakers/1868DederickSteamMan.htm

 

Von Braun on German Liquid Rocket Development, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1994

I was prepared to just list this for sale in the books for sale section of this blog and be done with it--until I semi-realized that this famous (or at least significant) report is not to be found available online. Von Braun is far from being of interest to me--I don't need to know his part of the space program from 1946-1977, though I am interested in his what he was doing from 1936-1945 when he was trying to kill London.

Again, I'm no expert on this man, but reading between the lines of his politically whitewashed account of German/Nazi flying bomb program makes me wonder about his enforced/codified forgetfulness and suggestive memory.

The paper in hand is his "Survey of Development of Liquid Rockets in Germany and their Future Prospects", a six-page effort that appeared in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society on March, 1951. It is a reprint of a reprint of a report that he wrote for his Anglo-American interrogators in the summer of 1945, when he and the Allies were scurrying around and trying to figure out what to make of the post-war world with all of that valuable German technology-ops out there in the wind.

In any event, von Braun wrote out this history and prognostication (as there is a big chunk of the paper devoted to future space travel and such) for them in 1945 which then found itself in print by at least 1946. There are many glosses. For example, his use of the A.-prefix determination throughout the course of the document to refer to the V-weapons though it is noted in the first sentence of the report (and no doubt by an editor), that the A.4 "is known to the public as the V.2". (Perhaps that has the scent of freshness to it, to rid the report of a small part of its scrubbiness...or not.)

He writes occasionally in the third person, and also makes the case that the development of the rocket complex at Peenenemunde was for research in high-flight/super-fast travel, when the place had always been intended for military applications. He does mention that the A.4 had severe problems with the guidance system, but that was acceptable since they were given large-target areas to bomb--such as "London".

It is an interesting read for what it says about the future of vast fast travel, as well as for what it does not say about defeat and responsibility and the use of slave labor and bombing large civilian areas. But that's not what he was talking about, here.  Or basically ever.

 

Speculating on Ned Ludd as a 2013 Figure

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1991 

If the young Ned Ludd had fallen asleep and somehow managed to stay in a reverential dreamland for the past 225 years or so, I wonder what he would think, awakening in 2013. Where would his ambitions lie, assuming that he awoke with the old fire still intact?

Certainly the strength of his convictions would be displaced to some new area beyond smashing the machines that took away the jobs of workers and helped secure them as the lowest-end of a very new man-machine interaction that keep workers working hard for less money.  Seeing that machines are everywhere, it would be a hard thing to reject, what most jobs in most areas depending upon a pile of machines that like the cosmological pile of turtles of James Jeans reaches all the way down and all the way up.

Ned Ludd may not have been real, but his name and at least imagined riotous activities against machines were real enough to give the Luddites their name.  I think it is commonly believed today that a Luddite is simply anti-tech, but back at te turn of the 19th century and into its second decade, the Luddites were a definite force intent on destroying the very new machines that were taking away the jobs of skilled workers.  In the 18-teens, it seems that most of the historical interest in this movement concentrates on their actions against machines in the textile industry: these were proto-"strikes", very physical labor protests against industry selecting machines over man.  The threat grew so intense that following the threatening acts of  the late 1780's attempting to protect industrial property from this sabotage, that in the war year of 1812 the  Destruction of Stocking Frames, etc. Act 1812 (52 Geo 3 c. 16), also known as the Frame-Breaking Act was passed by an act of Parliament, which made it a capital offense to destroy mechanized looms. It was intended to break the back of the Luddite movement and preserve industry, and in the progress of the life of the limited act (it was designed to expire after two years), saw the execution of some 60-75 people for  acts of violence against property.  (The sentencing end of this act is a little difficult, as it seems that judges imposing sentences tended not to cite this act, though the result was the same.)  The Frame Breaking Act was replaced by another less lethal act which sentenced lawbreakers to 10-20 years "exile" in Australia, but that too was short-lived and replaced by another flavor of the act that brought back the death penalty. 

For whatever reasons, the Luddites seem to have been broken, or absorbed, or exhausted, by the end of the second decade of the 19th century.  Mr. Ludd it seems never had a birth date and didn't seem to die, and may not have been an actual person.  But as I said if he had slept for 225 years and entered consciousness again, today, it may well be the current evolution of human-machine interaction may be too advanced for him to address.  Perhaps Ludd would be interested more in the coming future of human/machine development, when human bodies are disposable, and i hta tcase would fight for the right of humans to retain their humanity.  But where would that fight start? Would he have rejected artificial hearts in the 1960's? Artifical hips?  Would heart stents be a part of this encroaching history of the mechanization of humanity? And if that was so, would the innovations of Joseph Lister in sanitizing the operating theatre also be an unfavorable development?  Would spectacles count? Haring aids?  Canes" Wheelchairs?  It does get very sticky, unless Mr. Ludd decided to draw the line in the sand at the future transmission of consciousness or whatever into a new non-carbon-based receptacle to cheat death. 

Maybe Ludd would aim lower and higher at the same time, deciding that the computer and its veiny internet was the real culprit of contemporary human demise, seeing the world wide web as more a primitive attempt at a global consciousness that robs all of its users of their individual humanities.  Of course he would have to become something on the lines of an alchemical adept in order to  know how he and his confederates could hack and destroy the internet, causing what might be monumental collapse of the economic world as we know it, launching a new/old era of agrarianism. 

Or maybe Ludd has something entirely different on his mind, like Captain Ahab not really thinking very much about The Whale at all, his mind elsewhere, concentrating just on the contract for hunting up a commission rather than an intellectual and hyper-spiritual trophy.

Philip K. Dick might have had a place for Ludd in one of his stories, which is about as much harm as he could do, unless resurrected by a super-evil-rich-nogoodnic with a mask and a cape intent on committing his Geniusopathia to Digiocide. 

Aircraft Silhouettes, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  

 

I just found this in the October, 1930 issue of Popular Mechanics and like all of these sorts of identifiers it struck me as potentially useful.  At the very least, it is interesting, and so I pass it along:

Larger images of the silhouettes below:

 

An Underwater Bridge at Gibraltar, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  

This is an interesting image without a story, though its implications are huge and the engineering involved is incredibly substantial. It appears in the September 1930 issue of Popular Mechanics, and shows a  "huge concrete tube" connecting Africa and Gibraltar.  the interesting part, the "strange" part of the title of the illustration), is that the tunnel is basically like an underwater bridge.  When the idea of the tunnel was first proposed by the Spanish government in 1930 it was found that the rock between the two continents (and actually about where the two continents meet) was extraordinarily hard--too hard for the contemporary technology to deal with. One proposal to get around the tunneling aspect was to lay the tunnel above the bottom of the channel, which is what we're looking at in this image. 

A Piece of Tech Future and Children Knowing Everything, 1876

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1985

There are many facets in the history of the future that sound very familiar and true, making it shocking to realize what a long timeline some presumably modern things have.  For example, take the issue of the superiority of children to understand newly-arrived technological innovations. It seems as though children need to be shown exactly once how to access a certain segment of a program or how to program the television. It is perhaps a modern conceit that this issue belongs with us in the present and to the children of these children, somewhere in unfolding technological future.  But this was certainly the case in 1876, with the (very) new technological breakthrough, the telephone.

Alexander Graham Bell was not the first to the invention of the telephone--this is one of those breakthroughs that was 'in the air" (like the electric telegraph, and the hypothesis on the background radiation of the creation of the universe, and television, and Cubism), and in several issues of the standard-keeper scientific journal Nature for 1876 there are several articles discussing the telephone which do not mention Bell. For example Antonio Meucci in 1849, Charles Bourseul in 1854, Johann Philipp Reis in 1860, Elisha Gray in 1874, and Thomas Edison in 1875, all came close to the practical application of the idea of the 'speaking telephone", but it was Bell who ruled the day with the superior design and the patent award. It was Gray who came closest of all to winning the future, beaten in the accounting department at the Patent Office by Bell by only a few hours, both his and Bell's patents received on 12 February 1876^. (Gray's patent was actually received earlier in the morning than Bell's, but it was Bell's attorney who insisted on his patent being recorded immediately in the accounting ledger, with Gray's patent entered into the books two hours later, resulting in the awarding of the telephone patent to Bell. Ouch). 

The August 24, 1876 issue of Nature contained a compact article (uncredited but written by the editor, the esteemed astronomer/astrophysicist Norman Lockyer) on the recent extravagances in electrical development, and included a long section on the telephone.  Bell's name was not mentioned, and Lockyer concentrated on the work of Reuss and Gray. He also wrote about the use of the telephone, which does not yet involve the use of the instrument for voice communication.  As in an earlier article in the same journal by J. Munro ("On the Telephone, an Instrument for Transmitting Musical Notes by Means of Electricity".London, Nature:  May 11, 1876.  Pp 30-32 and concentrating mostly on the Gray telephone), Lockyer discusses one application of the telephone in the transmission of music. (He does mention the remarkable experiments of Bourbouze, who in 1870 attempted to use the Seine as a conductor between two stations, those being two bridges, each outfitted with electric piles, enabling the transmission of information without wires--but that's for another post). 

Lockyer writes about "the germ of notable improvements to be made on the electric telegraph",  that

"in its present state, the invention is so complete that we can, at a distance, repeat one or more pianos the air played by a similar instrument at the point of departure. There is a possibility here, we must admit, of a curious use of electricity. When we are going to have a dinner party, there will be no need to provide a musician. By paying a subscription to some enterprising individual, who will, no doubt, come forward to work in this vein, we can have from him, a waltz, a quadrille, or a gallop, just as we may desire.  Simply turn a bell handle, as we do a cock of a water or gas-pipe, and we shall be supplied with what we want".

Lockyer finishes with this great line:  "Perhaps our children may find the thing simple enough". 

My initial reaction is great surprise, that this feeling about children coming to understand a new technology quickly/instantly reaches (in evidence) back to 1876.  How far back in time does this sentiment or realization reach?  Is it ancient?  I've never really thought about it, but now that I have, a little, and been presented with hard evidence that the sentiment reaches back into the 19th century, that it might as well reach all the way back, deep into dusty history--even pre-dusty.  In any event, even though it is a little difficult for me to ascertain Lockyer's real feelings about the use of the new instrument, his reaction to children and technology seems to be an honest belief. 

(I actually have a series of original early papers on the telephone (1876-1878) including the one below, offered on the bookstore section of this blog, here).

 

 

 

 

What Happened Underground: Mining, Orwell, Trench Bombers, & Waits

JF Ptak Science Books 

Looking at these two images of the shirtless miner laying down and working on his side in the semi-dark way underground in what looks to be a tunnel about twice the width of his shoulders makes you wonder about how in the name of great bog could people have done this, day in and day out.  The fact that the appearance of these images were both essential and mundane further tells us—as we sit here in a comfortable chair in the print’s future—that this is, simply, what people did, and what they had to do.

This was “holing”, as in working in a hole, and served to illustrate a point in Mr. M.G. Johnson’s paper “The Working of Steep Seams”, which I think appeared in a West Australian mining journal around 1900.  So, it seems, the guy, the worker, in the picture would spend his day chunking coal from a hard vein, laying down, scrapping (I think) away at the coal in a too-tight tunnel.  Did he do this for hours?  Days?  Weeks?  I guess the bad answer is that he did this as long as the coal could be followed.   (Also, it looks as though that the major tunnel in which the coal car is located may be 4 or 5 shoulders high—certainly not tall enough to walk in, which means that this guy could’ve crab-walked to this position for a half mile or more, just to get to work.  The tenacity of this worker to do his work and collect his pay to feed his family was just incredible. 

The first image really doesn't need much commentary, though calling the worker a "tugger boy" pulling up a "hudge" was probably a bit of sardonic camraderie--except that the doing of the job would distance you from its folksy name. Well, that, or the "tugger boy" really is referring to a boy, as we see in the followlign mining definition: "Tugger boy (Brist). One who draws small tubs or sleds underground by
means of a tugger. Called Tugger-work. (Gresley), 1883).  The depiction of what seems to be a mature man in the image might be a piece of propaganda. In any event,  the Tugger Boy carries his own flame on the top of his headgear, and the chain that attaches him to the heavy coal bucket runs from his waste down the front of his body and through his legs.  Very hard work needless to say--harder yet done by a child.

George Orwell wrote perhaps one of the most brilliant descriptions of the mining environment in his superb The Road to Wigan Pier. (It is well worth reading all of Orwell’s books at this point—his insights almost never looked so fresh.)

                                                   

He  describes the crab-walk from the elevator to the place of work, telling how difficult and exhausting the process was of just getting to the place where you would then begin your difficult workday.  Of the miners he says at one point:  “Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about. Probably majority of people would even prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above.”  Read more here.

The next series of images come from the pen of W Heath Robinson (1872-1944) who was a lovely, quirky, charming, skewed, dark, stiff-bouncing and creative illustrator capable of considerable whimsy (light and complex) and deep skepticism.  The images I’ve selected are from one of his three WWI books, Hunlikely, published in 1916 (Some "Frightful" War Pictures (1915), and Flypapers (1919), were the other two) and depict scenes from the intra-trench tunnel wars, which were battles fought in the midst (or, actually, beneath) other battles.  This was a savage, grueling, post-adjectival affair—exceedingly dangerous, difficult, awful.  And it happened a lot during the war, given the experience of stalemates between vast armies sunk into mole city trenches, with no one going anywhere for long periods because there was nothing in between the two impervious lines but a death vacuum.  So one of the solutions was to try and tunnel underneath the opposing army’s defenses, fill the far end with high explosives, and blow them up.  The other side was doing it too, and in the middle of it all was the incorporation of newer/better listening devices to detect forces rummaging around underneath your position dozens of feet into the ground.  It was a bad business. (One of the other means of breaching the trench lines was aerial combat, but bombers carrying tons of HE were still yet to be invented; poison gas was another.  Most of the time the armies would just meet in the middle  in wide plains of nothingness in a sea of hot, expanding metal,  where to this day in many of those places nothing can live).

Robinson’s illustrations are odd, and oddly funny, the dark humor coming at the expense of both sides of the conflict, piercing each.   

This puts me in mind of Tom Waits’ concrete-toothed “There’s A World Going On Underground” (1983) song from the Swordfishtrombones album. 

Rattle big black bones in the danger zone
There's a rumblin' groan down below
There's a big dark town, it's a place I've found
There's a world going on underground
            
They're alive, they're awake
While the rest of the world is asleep
Below the mine shaft roads, it will all unfold
There's a world going on underground
            
All the roots hang down, swing from town to town
They are marching around down under your boots
All the trucks unload beyond the gopher holes
There's a world going on underground

Beginning an Alphabet of Science Fiction -Punkisms

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1981

“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 (Actually, 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.

I've produced the beginning of an alphabet of --Punkisms for variations of robot.machine/computer past and futures, science fiction indicators of possibility. Why should we stop at "Steampunk" when there's FuturePunk and DeadPunk and such to be had?  So, please find folllowing a few possibilities, and accept them in the playful way in which they are offered--also, the very abbreviated descriptions of the science fiction works desscribed are open to interpretation. And please give this a "pass" for the over-abundance of hyphens.

A

ActorPunk: Walter Miller, 'The Darfsteller' (1954), human actors are replaced by robots on stage, as compared to being replaced by digital figures online. Some steps have been made with great care over the years by “perfecting” the imaging of women in magazine advertisement—in this way even the models who appear in the ad and are modified find it impossible to live up to the expectations of what their ads depict.

Anti-technologicalPunk-topia: Samuel Butler, Erewhon, (1872).

AutomatoPunk:  Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (1955), like Brazil and 1984, but with machines.

B

BiologoPunk:  Philip K. Dick, 'Autofac' (1955), machines find that they can reproduce themselves in a '50's iron-bio kind of way. 

BrainPunk: Miles J. Breuer, 'Paradise and Iron' (1930).

C

ConsciousnessPunk: Philip K. Dick, Vulcan's Hammer (1960) and the development of computer consciousness.  Also David Gerrold, When Harlie Was One (1972);
Frank Herbert, Destination Void (1966); Harlan Ellison, 'I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream' (1967);  Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), and many others.

Missing the Obvious: WWI and Kriegsoptik

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   

For some reason this particular defensive utility of the binocular/rangefinder/"scherenfernohr" hadn't occurred to me before seeing this photograph (in the September 1915 issue of Himmel und Erde).  Of course with the many billions of rounds of ammo that flew across open fields during the war, if it was your job to sight for artillery or what have you it would be better to do that from a trench (as this instrument was also known as a "trench periscope", as varieties of the binoculars could have vertical tubes) and behind cover, or if in the field to be able to find a defensive position for your work. I hadn't thought about standing behind a tree with the scope's optics wide enough to operate beyond the diameter of the trunk--seeing the picture made me think, "of course". On the other hand, this posture assumes that there's very little flank to that field...