JF Ptak Science Books

Things That Almost Were But Weren't--Photography in 1839 and Television 1924

JF Ptak Science Books  

Here are two examples of Things That Almost Were But Weren't:  Photography (1839) and Television (1928). The first item contains a woodcut of a heliotype (being the first image of a photograph produced by non-photographic means); the second displays the method for receiving images of radio shows but is not a television. 

First:  The first published non-photographic image of a non-photograph or "sunpicture") from a collection of papers on the basics of photography, published early in the birth-year of photography, 1839.  

   

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Golding Bird's  (1814-1854) "A Treatise on Photogenic Drawing", published in  The Mirrour,  London, 1839, contains five¹ significant and extremely early papers on the photographic process (appearing in The Mirrour numbers  945, 946, 947, 949 & 950, April 20-May 25, 1839). [A much larger, more detailed image is available here; I didn't want to lay the book flat on the scanner to get a more detailed image of the copy here at hand.]

It is page 241 (issue no. 945, Saturday April 20) that really peaked my imagination--it contains the first facsimile woodcut of a photogenic drawing, which is essentially the first publication of an image produced by any sort of photographic process. (The image is referred to as "iconic"² by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this via the wonder Luminous Lint blog for historical and contemporary photography, here.  The process here is the 'sun picture", and while not exactly considered a photograph per se, it is a photographic process, making this the first image of a non-photographic photograph.  It predates the first mass-published photograph by four years and the first (entirely) photographically illustrated book (The Pencil of Nature) by six years.  The sun picture, or heliotype, was first described in print in 1801 by both Thomas Wedgewood and Humphrey Davy, and although the process was at least 39 years old at this time there are no recorded published images produced by that process. (The woodcut is much larger than usual for The Mirrour, and is also of a unique brown/red color, and of a different hue than any other woodcut that we have seen in any of the issues of the first 45 years of this publication. I was concerned at one time that this image was a photographic process of some sort, but it isn't, and I'm convinced that it is a woodcut--a very unusual species of woodcut for this publication, but a woodcut nevertheless.)

The First American Map Showing Elevations at Which Trees are Found

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U.S. Western Botanical Profile of Forest Tress, 1854. 

U.S. Pacific Rail Road Explorations and Survey, War Department.  Botanical Profile Representing the Forest Trees along the Route Explored by A.W. Whipple…From Fort Smith to San Pedro….

Published in Washington, D.C.:  1854.  Prepared by J.M. Bigelow (botanist of the Expedition), and printed by Wagner and McGuigan by lithograph in Philadelphia.  47”x21”, printed in many colors.

(Here we see a detail of a 2x3" section for the map for the San Francisco Mountains range.) 

This spectacular map presents the forest trees encountered by Whipple on his expedition for the USPRR from Fort Smith (Arkansas) to San Pedro ( actually Los Angeles, California).  The profile shows the trees and their leaves at the elevations encountered—actually the trees are graphically represented by either their shape or their leaves, each of which stand no more than ¼ inch tall.   There is a key explanation to the tree symbols at bottom left identifying 42 different trees—including the Cereus Giganteus, which first identified only a few years earlier.  There are three levels of graphical representation depicting the route containing more than 250 small images of trees.  This is a charming and informative graphical display of data, and is one of the first published efforts to share this information--it certainly seems to me that this is the first representation of the elevation at which trees in the United States and territories might be found.  Humboldt's map is certainly earlier, and there are occasional mentions of tree regions (worldwide and in general) that can be found in the atlas to accompany von Humboldt's Kosmos, but there is certainly nothing this large and detailed and exactly.  This is just a very cool map. 

Advancing Modernity, 1965: the Enormous Footprint of the UNIVAC 490 Computer

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The State of the Art in Advanced Computing, 1965

Six-Foot-Long Blueprint for the Installation of an UNIVAC 490 at the UNIVAC Headquarters in Herkimer, NY

This is a rare blueprint for the layout of the new UNIVAC 490 computer for installation at the UNIVAC Utica (NY) headquarters. What makes this blueprint particularly interesting is that it gives an overview for the placement of the entire 490 system. The central attractive feature of this blueprint is the church-like feel of the placement of the components, with the “control console” being roughly in the center of the plan. The operator would sit at the central console facing about 25 feet worth of Uniservos, with the 490 itself located 18 feet away on the left; various drums (about 20 feet worth) were located behind the CC as were various processors and the 1004 (card) punch. The whole plan seems to incorporate something like an 18x40 foot space, *plus* five exterior rooms (manager, confernece, tape storage, tab room, and (my favorite, service and repair).

This fills me with memories of Victorian steam whistle designs (lovely, ornate) and water-driven mills in
Lowell (long and narrow, utilizing river bank and available sunlight). It is a document that speaks of its time, elegantly portraying the size and scope of one of the leading computers of the day and its placement at one of its maker’s principal headquarters. 

Bean-counting in 4-space--a Census of Articles relating to Quantum Theory and Relativity

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A census of articles relating to quantum theory and relativity.

We offer for a casual amusement this search that we did on the FANTASTIC American Physical Society website section PROLA (Physical Review Online Archive) http://prola.aps.org/  We simply searched all years of the Physical Review for the appearance of the words “relativity” or “quantum” in the published titles and/or abstracts. It is curious to see how long it actually took for these articles to appear in this journal.  The PROLA page is endlessly interesting and a big help to whatever it is that we're doing  here.

RELATIVITY
Physical Review articles with the word “relativity” in the title or abstract:

2007 (1,012)
2006 (971)
2005 (968)

Alonzo Church's Great Mathematical Logic

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Church's Mathematical Logic is offered here in a rarely seen format--namely, the one that was produced, printed and distributed by the members of the class.  At the end of the description is an insightful story told by Albert Tucker about the mechanics of producing such a work. 

Church,  Alonzo:  Mathematical Logic, Lectures by Alonzo Church, PrincetonUniversity, October 1935-January 1936;  Princeton: ,  1936.  1st edition.    124 leaves  4to. Original printed wrappers.  Very good condition.     $2,000.00

This is the Library of Congress' copy, with the original mimeographed LC callcard laid in. +++Lecture notes of Church's class taken by six of his graduate students (Ficken, Landau, Ruja, Singleton, Steenrod, Sweer, Weyl) in the fall term of 1935 at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

The following is an interview between William Aspray and Albert Tucker on the publication (so-called) of this work, taken from the Princeton University website on the Princeton mathematics community in the 1930's. Needless to say, Church was an enormous influence, changing the entire face of mathematical logic. (It should be noted to that A.M. Turing came to study with Church at Princeton and particualry in this course in the fall of 1935.)