JF Ptak Science Books
[Via Youtube]
(This snipet is from The Bride of Frankenstein, 1935--there are actually some excellent vignettes here, mostly the noirish grotesques, with bitter, stark black-and-white contrasts of faces at odd angles. Parts of this are pretty good, in spite of the fact that it is what it is--the director just couldn't help himself, it seems, and added some high-end cinematic nuggets before crying himself to sleep at the end of a long day, lamenting the thing he had made.)
The search for early moving images of scientists started simply enough as a result of looking for something else. I was looking for some you-tube “footage” of Richard Feynman’s O-ring-in-ice water performance before the Challenger Commission; and once I determined that it wasn’t around, I looked at other offers of the great physicist/magician, and found plenty. From there I tried finding moving images of the earlier titans, and found a little more...
Part I, Scientists in Movies: Imagined, 1926-1939.
Rotwang seems to be the first scientist/inventor in a feature-length film—he was also the first to produce what might be the first robot in films, all wrapped into one futurist/expressionist magnum opus: Fritz Lang's "Metropolis". Rotwang’s problem with his robot is that it has no soul, and so he comes to transfer the soul of a woman named Maria, somehow causing the like-named robot to become evil. Its all about souls and being lost in this movie—the future is heavily indebted to not having a soul, humanity an interior-featureless mass, the machines around them the same as they—and then along comes Rotwang to construct a souled-robot but then things go wrong. This was the second decade of mass production of goods, as well as the second decade of Taylorism and other such humano-industrial ideas for exploiting the working class to suck out its frivolous extra breathing time. Lang certainly saw the evil, soulless business of business, and exploited his insight.
1931 saw the first appearance of (Dr.) Victor Frankenstein in film, loosely based of course on the (originally anonymous) 1818 work by Mary Shelley. It is allied with Lang’s along the lines of modern technology run amok. Shelley’s work was sub-titled “The Modern Prometheus”; the Promethean Titan in the 1931 film being Dr. Victor, who when he steals fire (but not from Zeus), induces tragedy to befall the human race, unlike the Greek original, where Prometheus’ wily intelligence was a benefit to early humankind…admittedly though he wasn’t encumbered by mad-scientistiana back then.
In 1935 the evil Queen Tika—a herald of science and technology--of the lost city of Murania did battle with (of all people) Gene Autry in “Phantom Empire” after the Singing Cowboy discovers her world 20K feet underneath his ranch. Bela Lugosi creeps into the public eye in 1939 as a mad (no!) scientist in the robot-entwined The Phantom Creeps”; Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon (beginning in 1936 and 1939) have their fair share of run-ins with scientists good and bad (but not indifferent)
Things heat up quite a bit for mad scientists in the 1940’s and ‘50’s, what with several real shooting global wars going on as well as a long bi-polar proxy Cold War raging as well. Doctor Satan, The Perfect Woman, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, Plan 9 From Outer Space (!?), and a whole slew of others in the A+B movie genres offered scientists galore, though they were mostly hi-calorie, low-substance, mostly-mad wild-haired mono-characters.
Scientists in Movies, Part II: Real, 1927-
One of the great tragedies in my book selling career was arriving too late to purchase an estate of a professional engineer who was charged with using and exhibiting the RCA Photophone—the world’s first successful simultaneously recording sound-on-film motion picture camera. According to the heirs and some of the remaining archives, there should have been cans and cans of motion picture films made by this gentleman in England in 1926 of the leading scientists of the day. Realizing instantly what this meant, I asked after the seemingly-missing films. They weren’t “missing” at all—they were just “gone”, thrown away several days earlier, busted in the dumpster, because they were “nitrate”, and the heirs were afraid that I’d blow myself up; so they threw away hundreds(!!) of old metal containers, and with them, probably the earliest and ONLY recordings of some of England’s leading scientific lights of the late 19th century. Terrible but true story.
Returning to my Feynman quest, I decided to expand my search and try to assemble as much of a list of motion picture images of older scientists that I could find on the web. Seeing how much extraordinary material there was for classical music on youtube I thought that perhaps there might be something similar for the sciences—so far I’m wrong, overall, but I have found some very interesting stuff.
The Solvay Conference 1927--fantastic silent movie taken by Irving Lamgmuir, showing Schroedinger, Bohr, Picard, Brillouin, Kramers, Born, de Broglie, A.H. Compton, Plnack, Debye, Curie and Einstein.
Richard Feynman on Teaching, Bedtime Stories and How to Find Stuff Out
Hans Bethe, Haakon Chevalier and JRO
Alamogardo + Oppenheimer
Edward Teller
Albert Einstein
Stephen Hawking
Sir Ernest Rutherford Set to Music (!)
<object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/T8wPtTFaiEQ&hl=en"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/T8wPtTFaiEQ&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object>
Einstein, Dirac, Godel and Fuld Hall
http://youtube.com/watch?v=PsIlRr65-L4
Comments