Ptak Science Books

The History of the Internet: Remembering Vannevar Bush and the Memex (1945)

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On this day, which may or not be the 40^th anniversary of the first use of the internet (and the 80^th anniversary of the collapse of the stock market of ’29, and Lucy A’s anniversary of her birth) it might be good to remember an earlier version of the internet and the semi-invention of the concept of hypertext: the MEMEX machine of the under-remembered Vannevar Bush. 

Vannevar (pronounced “van ee var”) was a flinty no-nonsense New Englander who was an organizational and mechanical genius who as a professor at MIT developed a remarkable analog computer that greatly advance computation capacities for solving differential equations.  This was in the 1930’s, and even after creating an improved electromechanical version of the machine still chose the wrong way to go in the soon-to-materialize digital computer revolution.  During WWII Bush was one of the most important Americans in the war effort, overseeing the entire scientific effort of the U.S.—an enormous effort dispatched beautifully (and successfully).  His importance in this regard is difficult to overstate.

But right there at the end of the war, when he was organizing a still-secret effort of controlling the spread of atomic weapons (before Hiroshima), Bush was also thinking about the future of the organization of human knowledge and memory.  And published it, too, in the popular Atlantic magazine in July 1945. (It was republished in a shortened version a few months later in September—it remains to this day, according to an editor at Atlantic, one of the most often-requested reprints) where it reached a reading audience of millions.  The article, “As We May Think”, outlined his idea for a device he called the MEMEX¹ (“memory” and  “index”), which compressed and organized all that its user could remember and whatever information would be obtained in the future via electromechanical apparatuses, and available with associative tracking between the microtext frames.  So all manner of book and papers and reports and newspapers and images would be microphotographed and stored in a beautifully-indexed mechanical retrieval system where it would live with the information of others.  There was also the possibility of real-time textual additions to whatever it was that was retrieved, the genetic precursor of hypertext.  Bush’s thinking has been deeply recognized (and also by the creators of the internet) as the intellectual grandparent of the modern internet. 

I just thought on this day that the man who saw more clearly into the future on advanced global communication and societal memory should be remembered on a day when his grandchild came into being.

Notes:

1. According to Bush, “the MEMEX is a sort of mechanized private file and library…. It uses methods such as microfilm storage, dry photography, and analog computing to give postwar scholars access to a huge, indexed repository of knowledge-any section of which can be called up with a few keystrokes."  Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Nick Montfort, ed (2003). The New Media Reader. p. 35. The MIT Press

The physical plant of the MEMEX:  “A memex consists of a desk, where on top are slating translucent screens on which material can be projected for convenient reading. Within the desk were mechanisms that stored information through microphotography. Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. When a longhand note, photograph, memoranda, and other things are in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film, dry photography being employed.”  Manovich, Lev. "As We May Think", The New Media Reader and wiki on The Memex. 

History of the Future: Radio in the Classroom, 1945

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KDKA in Pittsburgh was one of the first radio stations to broadcast in the USA in 1920—two years later found another 500 licensed stations. By the time this pamphlet was published nearly 95% of all homes in America were equipped with a radio, the near high end of the Golden Era of the medium. (Perhaps there is no greater, faster change in any sort of revolutionary change than there was from radio to television.  TV was basically an insignificant spot on the radio horizon in 1945, and then in ten short years it became radio’s great black sun, obliterating it as a competitor for entertainment.)   It is no wonder that radio was seen as a potential colossus for an information delivery system, with schools making use of whatever it was that they could squeeze from it. 

This history of the future picture on the front cover of this (1945) publication reminds me of the anxious moments in the opening moments of 8^th grade when one of the teachers brought a television to school (being in NYC) for us to watch the Mets in the 1969 World Series, nearly 40 years ago next week. (There were series games played in sunlight then.)  Radio had great potential and promise, and the kids crowded around this receiver/turntable tech center would’ve been like kids 10 years ago crowding around a monitor to see their first glimpses of the internet. 

Radio didn’t make it.

There’s some interesting detail in this photo.  The programming on the blackboard in the rear directed the children to classrooms for the different radio lessons:  “New Horizons”, “World of Wings”, “Science at Work”. “By Freedom’s Light”, and a few others that I can’t make out.  All were CBS productions, which evidently had nothing to do with the publisher of this pamphlet, Newsweek.  The shows were being broadcast by WBEZ, Chicago, which was actually a Chicago Public Schools station and intended for just this purpose—real public broadcasting.

The girls in the front are looking at a user’s guide for “CBS American School of the Air”, which seems to have had some legs as an idea, or at least its legacy looks really interesting. In the 1939/40 season of this “program” the great music and sound geologist and proto-multiculturalist Alan Lomax¹ (1915-2002) wrote and directed “American Folk Songs”, “featuring Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, the Golden Gate Quartet, Burl Ives, Aunt Molly Jackson, and field recordings of square dancing, French-Canadian, and lumberjack songs”.  Which means I guess that school kids were being exposed to impressively different sorts of American music that they probably would not have hears anywhere else as incidental sound. 

But as I said, radio was swept away by the great leavener of television.  It looks like Alan Lomax never did do anything for the TV, and its educational aspect (so far as school-use goes) never really did get off the ground.  Overall, it seems to me that TV never did get as smart as radio.

Notes

1. It is interesting to note that because of Lomax’s one-world Lefty approach to the appreciation of music--world music today, multiculturalism in another form—he came to the squinty-eyed attention of the challenged J.Edgar Hoover, the FBI managing to produce an 800-page file on the ethnomusicologist, all without a single anti-American blot.  Lomax’s total body of work is astonishing, and we all owe the man a strong salute.

Virtual Filmstrip of Italian Defenses Against Bombing and Gas, 1944

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In my collection of WWII propaganda and civil defense pamphlets I found this extraordinary Italian publication, Se un'Accressione viene dal Cielo...che Cosa fa l'Operaio (1944, which translates loosely as "When the Aggression/Bombing Comes from the Sky, What Happens to the Workers?").  As we can see from the cover illustration, the (Italian) workers are being guided/marched from their factory by their Nazi overseer, dressed for a gas attack, just as the attacking planes were coming overhead.  Inside we find a briefly-worded, explicit guide for the factory worker, and target of Allied attack, about what to do when the bombs started to fall.

The 104 illustrations, taken one after the other, form a sort of filmstrip, and could well function as a guide for those who couldn't read.  I also find them unsettling for their composition, color , size (very small, each section being about 1/2 inch x 1 1/4 inches), proportion...just about everything about them sits badly with me.  

Here's an example, taken from the middle or so of the presentation:

 

Here's the full selection of the images (all of which are clickable for a fuller view):

 

The rest of the presentation follows in "extended reading":

History of Dis-Inventing Sex, 1: 1930's American Radio

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(Also part of the Blank and Missing Things series: Sex)

The classes in the Western world for the most part enjoyed their own social amusements:  the rich had opera, theater, concert halls; the working poor and associated classes had burlesque, minstrel and variety shows.  The invention of the motion picture began to draw a common thread between these two classes, a place where anyone from anywhere could enjoy themselves for a nickel (or whatever).  Commercial radio came into being in the late 1920’s, growing enormously in the 1930’s and ‘40’s before encountering its mortal enemy of television in the early 1950’s.  Since radio was free (minus the cost of brain rot from listening to the underwriters who commercials were interrupted by the stuff people wanted to listen to) it became for those decades a superb democratizer of American entertainment and (to some degree) culture. 

Opera, vaudeville, minstrel shows, theater and so on enjoyed their own segments of saucy visions and rakish stories, with sex certainly not being necessarily prohibited.  This was absolutely not the case with radio, which in the 1930’s and ‘40’s held strict standards against suggestive behavior that might hint of sexual meanings.  There was plenty of sotto voce sexual innuendo to be found, but you really had to look for it and pay attention.  The feeling among the broadcasters was that since radio was being invited into the very homes of its listeners that there was a deeper responsibility to keep the shows clean and relatively wholesome. And so sex took a holiday.

Its not that movies and television in the 1950’s were rampant Decameron (with all of its semi-comic/tragic half eroticism)  or Caligula spas, but they certainly "showed" more skin than radio from that period ever talked about or alluded to, even if the first TV married couples beds weren’t pushed together until  the Munsters shared a big double in the 1960’s.

(No, the Ricardo’s never did push their twin beds together; it really was  the mores-bending Munsters, who are  pictured below. Perhaps the great "first" of a couple sharing the same bed needed to remove the human aspect of the reaching act, placing the responsibility in the attached-hands of a Frankenstein's monster-like character and his bride.  This happened too with tv's first interracial kiss--between Capt. Kirk and his communications officer, can't remember her name--making the encounter between humans of incredible accomplishment and remove, and of course set centuries in the future.)

Be that as it may, Lee DeForest (1873-1961), the inventor of the audion which made the whole industry possible (after Hertz and Marconi) complained in 1947 of the enormous silliness and suggestive nature of the new medium.  He loftily wrote about what could've been "a potent instrumentality for culture, fine music, and the uplifting of American mass inteliigence" but instead was a 'laughing stock", the medium addressed to what he thought was the average national intelligence of a thirteen year old.  Maybe he was right, and the man simply couldn’t stand it.  61 additional years would've made the De Forest explode--but then again, he was already close to that hearing saxophone players; who knows what the man would've thought of cable television.  But the one thing he really couldn't compalin about with radio was eroticism or sexual conduct, because that really wasn't there. 

The Loneliness of Being Wright(s): not Reporting the First Flight.

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Reading through the 1903/04 volumes of the NYC-based Popular Science Monthly I was struck, again*, by the lack of reporting (and the oddness of reporting when done) on the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight in December 1903.  The editors gave a page of coverage to the Samuel P. Langley failed aerodrome flight of November in the December issue. 

Langley at the time was the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and one of America’s leading scientists who had a strong side interest in aerodynamics if not aviation.  Swimming in private funds, some money from the Smithsonian and $50k from the War Department, Langley set out trying to produce a flyer which—in its two attempts at flight from a raft in the Potomac in November—wound up broken and soggy in the river, following a “flight” straight from its launcher into the water.  The article actually took Langley to task on two fronts:  first, it made absolutely certain that readers understood that his powered plane didn’t fly; and second, that he might well prove to be a damaging embarrassment to the Smithsonian and American science by proceeding with his experiments. (The Langley aerodrome is pictured just below.)

The Wright’s first powered flight took place at Kill Devil Hills along the North Carolina coast in December, 1903, just weeks after the appearance of the Langley article.  They were somewhat reticent and droll in reporting their accomplishment; more so, people seemed simply not to believe them (see below for some further reading).  Still, though, there was no real mention of the Wright’s flight in Popular Science Monthly through April.  Oddly, the Smithsonian’s website reports that one of the first mentions of the flight was in the March (1904) issue of this journal, but they are mostly mistaken.  There is an article in that number by the Octave Chanute, a great figure in the history of early aviation, who writes in general about the progress of flight.  In the section on ‘flying machines” Chanute devotes one paragraph of his eight page article to the Wrights, and the main emphasis here is that other aviators should follow the Wrights’ example of careful preparation before actually hoping aboard a plane to fly:  its was the training that was emphasized. There isn’t actually any mention whatsoever regarding their powered flight, although engines and propellers are discussed somewhat. Of the 480 pages remaining in the journal after the December issue, this one paragraph was the only room that could be found for talking about the Wrights, and then not talking about their great achievement.

 

Of course there were many people who didn’t believe the Wright story—there was scant photographic evidence and only five eyewitnesses, and for years afterwards the Wright had a problem with officially authenticating their flight as the great First Flight.  But I’m a little puzzled by the Chanute coverage, as he was a pretty diplomatic and sharing person, and proved to be particularly supportive of the Wrights in general (visiting them at Kill Devil at certain points in 1901,1902 and 1903).  The brothers understood intellectual propriety and credited Chanute when credit was due (particularly in the cases of truss design and stacked wings).  So it is puzzling to me when it seems as though Chanute may have gone out of his way to not mention the flight.  This is especially true if you read between the lines of the next paragraph. Chanute writes: “Now that an initial success has been achieved with a flying machine, we can discern the use of such an apparatus, and also some of its limitations”.  To me, after having written seven pages on flying history, to refer to a singular “initial success” makes sense only if he was referring to the Wrights’ December flight. (I don’t think that he could’ve been referring to the Langley test, as the aerodrome simply fell into the Potomac, the structure of the plane overwhelmed by the thrust, the power of the engine, and movement in general—the plane just broke up and was flung into the water.)  To me, the invisibility of the unmentioned flight is glaringly visible.  But this was pretty much in the realm of standard reception for the Wrights for most of the rest of the decade—I am still struck though with the rush away from announcing the flight that almost everyone seemed to take in 1904. 

 

(It is interesting to note Chanute’s vision for the airplane in his closing paragraph, where he envisions military uses for aircraft, though these were limited to scouting and observation with not a whiff of tactical employment.  Also there is the possibility of mail delivery (“in some cases”) and the rescue of people in trouble in restricted-access areas.  On the other hand, the just-failed Langley had a much broader and deeper appreciation for what he saw as the impending future of the airplane, saying ‘the great universal highway overhead is soon to be opened”, which was directly contrary to Chanute, who couldn’t see aircraft being used for simple transportation.  Actually Langley’s vision was taken to task in that earlier article in the Popular Science Monthly, the editor writing that “Dr. Langley seems to claim too much” in regards to the future of flight, and that “he should be careful not to do anything that could lend itself to an interpretation that will bring injury to the scientific work of the government or country”.  It is certain that with at least this one (very popular, widely circulated) science magazine, one couldn’t be too stinking careful about what one did or thought or said regarding flight—and in the case of the Wrights, one could say hardly anything at all. 

 

* For three other of my posts on this issue of publicity and the Wrights, see:

--The Unbearable Wrightness of Being:  the Wright Brothers Introduce Europe to FlyingThe Casual Treatment of the Wright Brothers

--The Department of Great Understatement:  the Wright Brothers, 1903.

--The Casual Treatment of the Wright Brothers in the Scientific American

 

For the interesting conclusion (and summary) of Chanute’s Progress in Flying Machines of see here.

The Stillness of High-Victorian Action (Blank & Empty Things Series #55)

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It seems to me that even when the Victorians¹ were busy doing something, nothing seemed to be happening--true too for me with this later period in Germany, under the command and control, for good and for ill, of Kaiser Wilhelm, German Emperor and King of Prussia from 1888 to the end of the Great War.  There's a certain something to illustration at this time, creating wooden humans manikins, watching other wooden figures doing something at elevated speeds that made them seem motionless.  I'm not sure what it is--perhaps propriety, perhaps the need to be visibly invisible, the sine qua non of behaving correctly. 

I'm not sure what sort of special, invisible addition needs to be applied to Victorian/Wilhelmian Nothingness to add up to Something. There's a certain unexplained emptiness, motionlessness, nothingness to illustration in this period, and I'm always at a loss to save good examples of it--though today I have two good examples, found in the 7 April and 28 January 1904 issues of the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig).  For all of the excitement and action and crowds given in these daredevil bicycle demonstrations there seems to be not a breathe being breathed, or perhaps it was breathe breathed slowly.  In any event, the situations seemed suspended in action and belief. Ironically this was also the age when the concept of "speed" was at the beginning of being completely re-written with the introduction of the car, airplane, internal combustion engine, widespread electrical networks, motion pictures, and so on--but none of this mattered in images like these, outstanding as they are for being scenes of action presented in a mosaic of stillness and quiet.

1. Yes, the Queen expired in January 1901, but the influence didn't necessarily die with her.

The Indredible and Useless Dog Engine of 1895

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In 1702, at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, Thomas Savery (c.1650 - 1715) began the idea of calculating the work done by steam engines over that done by horses, writing in his book, The Miner's Friend:

"So that an engine which will raise as much water as two horses, working together at one time in such a work, can do, and for which there must be constantly kept ten or twelve horses for doing the same. Then I say, such an engine may be made large enough to do the work required in employing eight, ten, fifteen, or twenty horses to be constantly maintained and kept for doing such a work…"   But it was James Watt who first introduced the term ”horsepower” while trying to advertise and place forever the idea of his steam engine over than of the earlier Newcombe engine and, of course, horses.”

 

James Watt (1736-1819), Scottish inventor and “re-inventor” of the steam engine, the man who put the ‘power” into “horsepower”, determined that a horse could turn a mill wheel (of a 12-foot radius) about 144 times in an hour (about 2 ½ times a minute), traveling 2.5x2pix12 per minute.  It has been shown though that on average a horse will work at about 1.5 horsepower like this for an hour on and off; and less than 1 horse in other times; a man could work at 1.5-2.5 horsepower for a short time, but generally would pull about a tenth of that for an extended time.

 

And so we come to the crux of the biscuit of this post:  a dog motor.  This entirely, utterly, unconvincing and thoroughly bad idea was fully fleshed out by a M. Richard (naturally of Paris) for the Agricultural Exhibition and re-published from La Nature in the Scientific American Supplement  on 10 August 1895.  It is slightly lovely in its high Victorian way, or at least so until you consider that an animal goes in side the thing, working its way along an infinite belt, a cup of water just within reach.  The dog would power the large wheel, which would turn a smaller wheel and belt, which in turn would be connected to smaller, and so on, until it reached whatever it was it was powering, which is left entirely to our imagination.  Even when I squeeze my eyes in a telescoping effort, I cannot see what it is that this poor doggie might power.  Given the descending orders of radii of the wheelworks, perhaps the tenth-horsepower dog engine ran a fan, or something, something remarkably insignificant.  It does tell us something about over-design, like buying a ten dollar bill with a twenty. 

A Big Sea of Planes: Quantitative Display of World War II Bombers

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I've written four or five posts on glorious quantitative visual displays of massive amounts of WWII bombers, most of which I've gathered together below. This subject came up today when I found another of these images in a small hand-out broadside published by the National Savings Committee of Great Britain, urging people to save money and be thrifty, keeping money in the banks, in an effort to control prices and have money available to the government for war production.  The legend states: "For it is by the measure of our self-denial that we can prove

worthy debtors to our airmen; and by our Savings that we can help to give them wings for victory".  The point is driven home by a now-familiar representation of hundreds of bombers rising from the horizon--a remarkable vision, especially if you tried to visualize the real thing.  

Here are a few other similar images:

(A) This widely circulated and published photo appeared in 1942 (particularly in LIFE Magazine in 17 September 1942 and the Illustrated London News in the next month), and showed 4,500 aircraft models suspended from the ceiling of Chicago’s Union Station   It is the result of an inspiration derived from President Franklin Roosevelt’s assertion that America would produce 185,000 war-focused aircraft in 1942 and 1943. 

The planes in this photo were hanging 60-feet above the floor of the station, with wing spans between one foot and four feet (for the bombers).  It was a fantastic, blustery, iconic effort to show what it meant to look at 4500 planes—and these paled in comparison to a drawing (which I unfortunately do not have) that appeared in the Illustrated London News on 21 February 1941, showing the entire production fleet of 185,000 aircraft—a column of planes one mile wide and 117 miles long.

Using this photo then to interpolate that full production figure of 185k, you’d have to piece 48 of these photos together to show full production, or a version of this photo that was 8 inches wide and 32 feet long.  (The second image of Union Station and the planes is by FSA photographer Jack Delano.)

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

The reality of the situation was greater than this:  by 1945 over 300,000 planes were produced, 275,000 of them after Pearl Harbor.  And this from a combined aviation industry which before 1939 had produced fewer than 6,000 planes a year.  The war effort increased this by orders of magnitude, and by war's end there were 81 production facilities with a combined area of 175 million feet, all bumped up within four years.   I've never read about it, but I have no doubt that one of the key ingredients to this sort of hyper-successful undertaking was organization--the oversight and control for this process must've been fast and decisive, with little room for mid-level anything.  I think that this is the only way the whole thing could've worked so well.

(C)  This tremendous display is half of a double-page spread that appeared in The Illustrated London News for 7 September 1940.  It was meant to bolster the civilian population of Britain during the time of the German attacks, shoping that "Over one thousand Nazi aircraft (were) brought down over Great Britain in ...20 Days..." The artwork, drawn by Bryan de Grineau, actually depicts 1000 planes, and accurately depicted ones at that.   What the graphic doesn't tally though are the airmen losses, which would be considerably more thanb the 1000 aircraft:  for example, of the aircraft involved in the sustain air-invasion of England, the  Dornier 215's had a crew of four, Dornier 17's three, Heinkel 111's four, Messerschmitt 110's two, and Junkers 88's three.  Thus  there were thousands more airmen lost, a commodity that the Nazis could little afford. 
  (This continues a thread on The Battle of Britain and also a post on "What 185,000 Planes Looks Like").
 The results of the battle (and if you take a look at this earlier post for the full narrative), in terms of aircraft and humans,
were,  for England: 1,023 fighters: 376 bombers, 148 coastal command aircraft  for a total of 1,547 aircraft and  544 pilots and aircrew killed.  There were also 27,450
civilians killed and 32,138 wounded.  The Germans lost 873 fighters and 1,014
bombers for a total of 1,887 aircraft and  2,500 pilots

I find this visual display of quantitative data beautiful and compelling--and overwhelming in its way.

The Battle of Britain was fought primarily from 10 July to 31 October 1940, so by the time this image was published the Brits had been able to turn the tide of Hitler's plan.  (The air strikes wouldn't really end until the Nazis turned their attention to the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in May 1941.)  And that plan, named Luftschlacht um England, was to overtake and destroy the British capacity in the air, for as long as the English had command of the airspace there would be no way that the Nazis could force an invasion by land/sea (at least in the minds of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht  and Hitler).  And so the Nazis failed--it was their first major defeat, and, especially, with the turning of attention east, it was a pivotal point of the war. 

(D) This last image is a “Not a Display of Toys”, shows only one section of a large airfield “in Europe” (actually in U.S.-administered Munich).  There’s about 300 B-17’s (e?) parked wingtip to wingtip, off duty now from the fight in Europe, but (as the caption says) prepared for a fight in Japan.  I don’t think anyone in high command had any doubt that these planes had seen their last action.  The atom bomb worked, and would work again (and again, and more so if necessary), and the fear that these planes would make their way East was not a real concern. This photo represents about 7% of the highest number of B-17's in service in Europe at any given time.

 

I also made a very short video of these planes (above) trying in a crude way to visualize what these planes might have looked like in formation, flying:

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

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I've written four or five posts on glorious quantitative visual displays of massive amounts of WWII bombers, most of which I've gathered together below. This subject came up today when I found another of these images in a small hand-out broadside published by the National Savings Committee of Great Britain, urging people to save money and be thrifty, keeping money in the banks, in an effort to control prices and have money available to the government for war production.  The legend states: "For it is by the measure of our self-denial that we can prove

worthy debtors to our airmen; and by our Savings that we can help to give them wings for victory".  The point is driven home by a now-familiar representation of hundreds of bombers rising from the horizon--a remarkable vision, especially if you tried to visualize the real thing.  

Here are a few other similar images:

(A) This widely circulated and published photo appeared in 1942 (particularly in LIFE Magazine in 17 September 1942 and the Illustrated London News in the next month), and showed 4,500 aircraft models suspended from the ceiling of Chicago’s Union Station   It is the result of an inspiration derived from President Franklin Roosevelt’s assertion that America would produce 185,000 war-focused aircraft in 1942 and 1943. 

The planes in this photo were hanging 60-feet above the floor of the station, with wing spans between one foot and four feet (for the bombers).  It was a fantastic, blustery, iconic effort to show what it meant to look at 4500 planes—and these paled in comparison to a drawing (which I unfortunately do not have) that appeared in the Illustrated London News on 21 February 1941, showing the entire production fleet of 185,000 aircraft—a column of planes one mile wide and 117 miles long.

Using this photo then to interpolate that full production figure of 185k, you’d have to piece 48 of these photos together to show full production, or a version of this photo that was 8 inches wide and 32 feet long.  (The second image of Union Station and the planes is by FSA photographer Jack Delano.)

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

The reality of the situation was greater than this:  by 1945 over 300,000 planes were produced, 275,000 of them after Pearl Harbor.  And this from a combined aviation industry which before 1939 had produced fewer than 6,000 planes a year.  The war effort increased this by orders of magnitude, and by war's end there were 81 production facilities with a combined area of 175 million feet, all bumped up within four years.   I've never read about it, but I have no doubt that one of the key ingredients to this sort of hyper-successful undertaking was organization--the oversight and control for this process must've been fast and decisive, with little room for mid-level anything.  I think that this is the only way the whole thing could've worked so well.

(C)  This tremendous display is half of a double-page spread that appeared in The Illustrated London News for 7 September 1940.  It was meant to bolster the civilian population of Britain during the time of the German attacks, shoping that "Over one thousand Nazi aircraft (were) brought down over Great Britain in ...20 Days..." The artwork, drawn by Bryan de Grineau, actually depicts 1000 planes, and accurately depicted ones at that.   What the graphic doesn't tally though are the airmen losses, which would be considerably more thanb the 1000 aircraft:  for example, of the aircraft involved in the sustain air-invasion of England, the  Dornier 215's had a crew of four, Dornier 17's three, Heinkel 111's four, Messerschmitt 110's two, and Junkers 88's three.  Thus  there were thousands more airmen lost, a commodity that the Nazis could little afford. 
  (This continues a thread on The Battle of Britain and also a post on "What 185,000 Planes Looks Like").
 The results of the battle (and if you take a look at this earlier post for the full narrative), in terms of aircraft and humans,
were,  for England: 1,023 fighters: 376 bombers, 148 coastal command aircraft  for a total of 1,547 aircraft and  544 pilots and aircrew killed.  There were also 27,450
civilians killed and 32,138 wounded.  The Germans lost 873 fighters and 1,014
bombers for a total of 1,887 aircraft and  2,500 pilots

I find this visual display of quantitative data beautiful and compelling--and overwhelming in its way.

The Battle of Britain was fought primarily from 10 July to 31 October 1940, so by the time this image was published the Brits had been able to turn the tide of Hitler's plan.  (The air strikes wouldn't really end until the Nazis turned their attention to the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in May 1941.)  And that plan, named Luftschlacht um England, was to overtake and destroy the British capacity in the air, for as long as the English had command of the airspace there would be no way that the Nazis could force an invasion by land/sea (at least in the minds of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht  and Hitler).  And so the Nazis failed--it was their first major defeat, and, especially, with the turning of attention east, it was a pivotal point of the war. 

(D) This last image is a “Not a Display of Toys”, shows only one section of a large airfield “in Europe” (actually in U.S.-administered Munich).  There’s about 300 B-17’s (e?) parked wingtip to wingtip, off duty now from the fight in Europe, but (as the caption says) prepared for a fight in Japan.  I don’t think anyone in high command had any doubt that these planes had seen their last action.  The atom bomb worked, and would work again (and again, and more so if necessary), and the fear that these planes would make their way East was not a real concern. This photo represents about 7% of the highest number of B-17's in service in Europe at any given time.

 

I also made a very short video of these planes (above) trying in a crude way to visualize what these planes might have looked like in formation, flying:

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

The reality of the situation was greater than this:  by 1945 over 300,000 planes were produced, 275,000 of them after Pearl Harbor.  And this from a combined aviation industry which before 1939 had produced fewer than 6,000 planes a year.  The war effort increased this by orders of magnitude, and by war's end there were 81 production facilities with a combined area of 175 million feet, all bumped up within four years.   I've never read about it, but I have no doubt that one of the key ingredients to this sort of hyper-successful undertaking was organization--the oversight and control for this process must've been fast and decisive, with little room for mid-level anything.  I think that this is the only way the whole thing could've worked so well.

(C)  This tremendous display is half of a double-page spread that appeared in The Illustrated London News for 7 September 1940.  It was meant to bolster the civilian population of Britain during the time of the German attacks, shoping that "Over one thousand Nazi aircraft (were) brought down over Great Britain in ...20 Days..." The artwork, drawn by Bryan de Grineau, actually depicts 1000 planes, and accurately depicted ones at that.   What the graphic doesn't tally though are the airmen losses, which would be considerably more thanb the 1000 aircraft:  for example, of the aircraft involved in the sustain air-invasion of England, the  Dornier 215's had a crew of four, Dornier 17's three, Heinkel 111's four, Messerschmitt 110's two, and Junkers 88's three.  Thus  there were thousands more airmen lost, a commodity that the Nazis could little afford. 
  (This continues a thread on The Battle of Britain and also a post on "What 185,000 Planes Looks Like").
 The results of the battle (and if you take a look at this earlier post for the full narrative), in terms of aircraft and humans,
were,  for England: 1,023 fighters: 376 bombers, 148 coastal command aircraft  for a total of 1,547 aircraft and  544 pilots and aircrew killed.  There were also 27,450
civilians killed and 32,138 wounded.  The Germans lost 873 fighters and 1,014
bombers for a total of 1,887 aircraft and  2,500 pilots

I find this visual display of quantitative data beautiful and compelling--and overwhelming in its way.

The Battle of Britain was fought primarily from 10 July to 31 October 1940, so by the time this image was published the Brits had been able to turn the tide of Hitler's plan.  (The air strikes wouldn't really end until the Nazis turned their attention to the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in May 1941.)  And that plan, named Luftschlacht um England, was to overtake and destroy the British capacity in the air, for as long as the English had command of the airspace there would be no way that the Nazis could force an invasion by land/sea (at least in the minds of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht  and Hitler).  And so the Nazis failed--it was their first major defeat, and, especially, with the turning of attention east, it was a pivotal point of the war. 

(D) This last image is a “Not a Display of Toys”, shows only one section of a large airfield “in Europe” (actually in U.S.-administered Munich).  There’s about 300 B-17’s (e?) parked wingtip to wingtip, off duty now from the fight in Europe, but (as the caption says) prepared for a fight in Japan.  I don’t think anyone in high command had any doubt that these planes had seen their last action.  The atom bomb worked, and would work again (and again, and more so if necessary), and the fear that these planes would make their way East was not a real concern. This photo represents about 7% of the highest number of B-17's in service in Europe at any given time.

 

History of the Future: Farming and Vertical Integration, 1940

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This 1940 pamphlet, published by the Texas State Research Foundation, is a relatively young, paleo-futuristic view of the coming of the vertically integrated food production business in the United States . Its title (Building an Agricultural and Industrial Empire through Research) directly relates the idea of a grand agricultural/industrial alliance, with the contents pointing the way to far more than simple “research”, as the cover intimates.  There is a giant series of silos, and even a barn (in the top right corner), but the image

here is pure smokestack-encrusted agribusiness.  The simple farmer on his tractor makes his slow way through his high-bound and gross techno skyline—of course the visual message implies that the family farm would be aided by “research”, but it also opens the door wide into the future to what the American farm would become.  The family farm would be absorbed by the skyline of major business:  at the time when this pamphlet was published some 22% of the American population was directly involved in farming; by 2002 that figure had genocidally dropped to about 1.5%.  The small, independent farms had been replaced by global conglomerates who are centralizing food production, controlling the distribution of fertilizer and seeds, causing massive soil erosion, destroying aquifers, depleting the soil, polluting with toxic chemicals, and on and on.

 So the image of this puffy pamphlet’s cover turns out to be prescient after all, and pretty much true:  except for the farmer-on-the-tractor part, as that guy got pretty much absorbed into a corporate Farmer Entity.

A Not-Obvious Gross Understatement: Bomb + Plane = Drop, 1915.

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In the young history of the beginning of the Twentieth Century’s Thirty-One Year War, in the very young history of bombing¹, came this adventurous “first” in warfare:  the attack of a target from the air, sea and under the sea. The British launched an assault against the German installation at Cuxhaven, trying to get at its Zeppelins and navy, sending a task force of destroyers, subs and cruisers in support of eight search and destroy seaplanes. The tactical results were mixed (there are many places to check out this part of the war) but the strategic outcome was enormous:  it was a new approach to warfare.  The technical aspect of bombing was so new, really, that the picture of the bomb at lower left had to be identified as such, and that it could be used as an offensive weapon dropped from a plane (“for Dropping from Air-Craft: a Bomb”). 

1. It was the Italians who conducted the first aerial bombardment, against a very creatively-named military “target”-- consisting primarily of civilians--outside of Tripoli in October 1911.

From the Flight/global Archive:

"The Cuxhaven raid marks the first employment of the seaplanes of the Naval Air Service (sic) in an attack on the enemy's harbours from the sea, and, apart altogether from the results achieved, is an occasion of historical moment. Not only so, but for the first time in history a naval attack has been delivered simultaneously above, on, and from below the surface of the water."— United Kingdom Flight Magazine: the "Official Organ of the Royal Aero Club of the ", Flight Magazine Global Archive: Aircraft in Warfare, 1 January 1915.

Notes:

A lovely site with many links for early aviation: Airminded; and an unusual and wonderful book on the history of bombing in general, called, of course, A History of Bombing, by Sven Lindqvist.