JF Ptak Science Books

The History of Stopping Time #1: A.M. Worthington, Ernst Mach and Doc Edgerton

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post #88
This will be the first out-of-sequence post looking at the intervals of stopped time (random or not), and how people and cultures were able to stop or save time, and how they could arrange to segment and store time over thousands of years.

The first entry is from the Scientific American from August 25, 1877 and records the experiments of A.M. Worthington. They are perhaps one of the first revelations on the quiet residence of energy in something as simple as a drop of water or mercury.  Much in the same way Robert Hooke revealed the microscopic universe to unsuspecting readers, so too did Worthington, in his way, reveal the explosive world of small, fast, and lost events. Worthington’s style is of course exceptionally restrained and free of exclamation, even while describing the first time any human has witnessed these events, like so: “…watching the changes of form of drops of various liquids falling vertically on a horizontal plane…the whole splash takes place so quickly that the eye cannot follow the changes of form…”   This report, “On Drops” follows Worthington’s own earlier effort of 1876 and 1877 “A Second Paper on The Forms Assumed by Drops of Liquids falling vertically on a Horizontal Plate” (Proceedings of the Royal Society, 174 and 177), chronicles his brilliant adventure in the newly discovered world of fast time—a world he was pretty much creating as he moved along.  (A particularly good description of the experiment as well as an image of the apparatus can be found on Martin Waugh’s lovely and arresting site—he is one of the leading modern practitioners making art in

this genre of high-speed photography:  liquid sculpture calls it.)  )   It is particularly powerful to note that the illustrations here are drawings of the phenomena of his study of splashes—drawings, not photographs.  The photos by Worthington (On A Splash from a Drop of Milk) would not appear until 1894. (An entire book is dedicated to this subject by Worthington, who published, in 1904, the wonderful A study of Splashes.)  This means, I guess, like the heroic chroniclers of snowflake forms and such that he ran many, many experiments and painstakingly observe red different parts of the splashes and recorded them by hand.  Worthington wouldn’t be able to photographically record the images of his splashes until later after the application of inventions and advances by C.V. Boys and Lord Rayleigh.  Until that time his audience would have to depend upon his tenacious observational powers—or try the experiment themselves and make their own observations, as Worthington provided all the necessary data for his experiments to be replicated, of course.
 

The next paper relates the success of Ernst Mach and P. Salcher in creating an apparatus to illuminate and photograph a bullet in flight—this was again found in the Scientific American, but for 24 September 1887 (supplement 612).  Unfortunately, their results are rendered only by a drawing, even though the half-tone was available by this point to provide a high-quality reprint of a photograph, it took Scientific American another few years to start employing that breakthrough method.  (I’m not sure why this was so.)

The results were made available in the original Austria edition of his publication from which this article is drawn.  This paper "Photographische Fixierung der durch Projektile in der Luft eingeleiten Vorgange" presented to the Academy of Sciences in Vienna in 1887, was revolutionary in more ways than one, as it was really about the visualization of flow over objects, and in particular, the movement of media as a bullet traveled at supersonic speeds—and to which Mach would donate his name for the description of units of supersonic speed.  (The term was first publicized in 1929 when Swiss engineer Jakob Ackeret used Mach’s name for the first time in the description of these speeds.)

This last photo is included just because of its sheer beauty—it is far in advance and way out of the continuum for a discussion like this, but this effort, produced by Harold Edgerton, just must stay.  This is the titanic blast of ingenuity that was the intellectual successor to the earlier works listed above, but the technical advancement is just so fabulously great that the earlier scientists could simply not imagine them.  This image was as much science fiction to them as their images were to scientists considering these ideas right there at the birth of photography in 1839.) Harold “Doc” Edgerton, 1893-1990, who would form EG&G and serve MIT for many years owned this field of photography for many years—time stopped for the venerable Edgerton right after he paid for his lunch at the faculty club at MIT. Failing life with a heart attack at  87.)

For an interesting look at videos of various sorts of splashes see the North Carolina School of Science and Math HERE.

Making People Disappear Part 2-Conjurers, Blank People and Anti-Blank People. Orson Welles, Robert Heller and J.J. Thomson

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #87
Following up on an earlier post on disappearing people  (and making things disappear) is this slight abrasion on seeing things that aren’t there, and making other people see the same not-there things.  This is good and bad, depending on what seats you have in the theater and what kind of theater it is that holds these seats.  It is many times fabulous in the theater of science, where people like Democritus and Leucippus (5th century BCE Greek) proposed thinking of the world being composed of tiny, individual, non-solid and invisible elements—these elements were there, of course, because they reasoned that everything could not come from nothing, and thus they had to be so small as to seem to not exist at all.  This was the beginning of the atomic theory which would be added to and subtracted from over the next 2500 years, encountering atomists-in-extremis like John Dalton (1766-1844, with the first truly scientific/experimental/useful atomic theory) and JJ Thomson (who in 1897 actually discovered a constituent element of the invisible universe called the electron, and then on to Max Planck (who complicated things enormously and fabulously with the quantum theory in 1900, and Planck's constant  = h/2p)and on and on.

In the theater that we expect to be shown nothing and believe in it, humans have been happily deceived for thousands of years.  Our gorgeous Orson Welles, for example, still semi young when he made his B-movie masterpiece Touch of Evil, transforms himself utterly with a little make up and a whole lot of acting, disappearing himself and producing Detective Hank Quinlan in his place.  In this movie, witch is perhaps one of the greatest black-and-white, sheerly, unstoppably black-and-white, with no grey tones and contrasts sharp enough top cut your pinkies on black-and-white, the most noire of flim noires, Orson manages to hide himself in the shadows and let Det. Quinlan take his disappeared place, right there in front of you.




Another wonderful illustration of empty, waiting-to-be-filled-up humans, human tabula rasa so to speak, was employed by the "second sight" conjurer Robert Heller. He abandoned his wig and his French accent, along with his piano, to become a conjurer, and became one of the “best” of his day. Heller (born Palmer, 1826-1878) took advantage of people's lack of scientific background and inventive acuity, and their need to believe ion something mysterious and larger than themselves, in some sort of simple primordial goo that might hold together the vastly differentiated universe, to trick them into believing that he could somehow divine a manner of objects and thoughts with his razor/divination vision. 

Unfortunately, all he was doing was working with confederates and employing a slightly elaborate signaling system to communicate his so-called deep vision. (For example in this manikin image, Heller woul dbe able to signal his  confederates the number he was "divining" by touching these parts of his body as he was setting the foundation for the trick.)   It was a smart idea, a two-beer idea, that he acted on and parlayed (along with a broad theatrical stage presence)into a significant bankroll.  He had other sorts of magical helpers and automata to push his sleight show forward, but mostly, it seems, it was his ability to “force” people to know something that they couldn’t, all worked with secret alphabets and hidden associates.  It was easy and a little feeble, and it worked for years until his will just gave out. He was a local to the vicinity of my old shop in Georgetown, and it is perhaps appropriate that his magic was worked and also gave out in Washington, D.C.

To tidy things up, it was the scientists who found the things that are there but can’t be seen but couldn’t make the vast percentage of the population “see” the unseeable, while people like Heller and other magicians couldn’t find their unseen things anyway but could make people “see” their non-existent unseeables—all of which seems fairly paradoxical.

(“I see”, Patti Digh just brightly said.)(Below I've attached the opening scene from Touch of Evil--it is one continuous single take, one of the greatest opening shots in film history I think.  And old Uncle Orson was able to do all of the magic on a buck-two-eighty.)

 

 

Blank & Missing People—Pelerin, Schoen and Marey and Picturing Absent and Empty People for the Study of Perspective.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post #85

In some of the elementary thinking on perspective in the history of art and science there is a certain amount of subtraction that must occur before addition and advancement can be made—these experiments have resulted in some very unusual-singular even—images, which when viewed apart from their proper context and considering the times in which the images were made make them seem revolutionarily modern. 
    Take for example the extraordinary work of Jean Pelerin (also called "Viator”) in his De artificiali perpectiva, a very rare woodcut-illustrated book printed n Nurenberg in 1509. In illustrating what he referred to as his “three point perspective” Pelerin removed much of the gothic-tradition bric-a-brac that is so heavily favored in these early books and replaced them with outlines from his rather astonishingly expressive notebooks, and replacing people, individual humans, with what may be the first “almost-entirely-absent” human forms. These roundish, ghost-like figures are just meant to hold the outlines of space, meant to function in the role of a simple comparative unit. This works quite well as an artistic technique—a solicitation tool which I think gives his reduced, “empty” humans an incredible, ethereal look unlike any other in the history of the first 60 or so years of printing.  It is difficult to imagine what the observer of these images back there in 1509 was thinking when they looked at these figures, and perhaps removed them from their textural context—it  would have been a unique visual experience for them
.
Just a little while latter Erhard Schoen, in his Unnderweissung der proportzion und stellung der posssen liegent und dtehent, printed in Nurenberg (as well!) in 1538, presented another unique way of representing the human form in model for the sack f studying perspective.  He used simplified geometric form to stand in for the curvy humans, replacing them with proportional stacks of boxes which would more easily explain to the younger reader how to represent the human body n space and in proportion to other things.  Again like the Pelerin, I think that these were monumentally combative images showing humans in a radical, previously unknown way. 

Dashing into the 19th century we find another superb image of the empty man from Etienne Marey in his photographic and moving-photographic studies of motion.  This is actually a little odder, as the man in this image can be either completely empty or the convex, being completely filled up.

 

Marey would fit sensors at moving/jointed parts of the human body, affixed to a black-cloth-wearing experimental helper.  The point was to collect simply *movement* images and not necessarily-at this point at least—the parts of the body responsible for the movement.  At this time Marey was interested in the effects of motion, and used his empty man to do just that.

 

Human Power—Raw Images of the Middle Passage, the American Stain of Slavery. Wadstrom and the Slave Ship "Brookes".

JF Ptak Science Books   Post #84

Having just finished a short post on human-powered machines (Georg Bockler in the mid 17th century) and with Juneteenth fast approaching, I thought about another sort of human power—slaves.  I wanted to make a short post on the conditions in which Africans were taken (sold and stolen) from their home continent to North America (and later just to the United States). 

Slavery as an institution in the U.S. existed from 1619-1865, failing, ultimately, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment (the first proposed in 60 years) to the Constitution by the end of 1865. (The African slave trade—though not slavery itself—was outlawed in 1807, by a law passed jointly in the United States of America and the United Kingdom, with the  US law taking  effect on January 1, 1808.)  The amendment was ratified relatively quickly by the legislatures of the  necessary three-quarters (27) of the original 36 states in 1865—Mississippi, the last of the original states to ratify the amendment, did so in 1995, 135 years following its initial rejection. Though almost all of the states had ratified the amendment in January and February, it took until December 4th and 6th—months after the crushing failure of the Confederacy—for North Carolina and Georgia to vote for it.  (The remaining 9 states voted for the amendment as follows:  Oregon California and Florida in 1865; Iowa and New Jersey (which had initially rejected the matter in 1865) in 1866;   Texas in 1870; Delaware, the First State, in 1901; Kentucky in 1976; and Mississippi, somehow, in 1995

.

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued September 22, 1862, with a three-month long pillow until it took effect on  January 1, 1863 .  Juneteenth refers to the freeing of the slaves in Texas (at Galveston) with the reading of General Order No. 3, on 19th June 1865.  Texas was the last refuge of Southern Slavery, and it all ended on that day. 

The famous image above (of the British slave ship Brooke)  is taken from An Essay on Colonization, particularly applied to the Western Coast of Africa….by Carl Bernhard Wadstrom, printed in London in 1794.  Wadstrom (1746-1799) was devoted abolitionist and Swedenbourgian who planned, advocated and practiced (via his relationship with the Nordenskold brothers and the Philanthhropic Society a working agricultural colony on the West coast of Africa) the end of slavery and the return of removed slaves to Africa.

The images pretty much speak for themselves. Though it should be pointed out that this engraving depicts about 480 slaves packed into the modified hold of the Brooke; in reality the Brooke carried between 500 and 650 slaves to America (meaning the conditions were even more crowded than depicted here), losing on average about 125 people to the insufferable and depraved conditions (dysentery, heat, malnutrition, lack of water, scurvy and so on).

 

 

Human Powered Machines--Bockler's Theatrum Novum, 1661

JF Ptak Science Books   Post #83

This post started with this image from Georg Andreas Bockler Theatrum Machinarum Novum (published by Paulus Fuersen and printed by Christoff Gerhard in Nurenberg in 1661) showing to what our eyes in 2008 see as an extraordinary device to power a fan for a dining table.

The gears running what seems to be an escapement-like (clock) device are enormous, and the weight for the weight-driven power source must have been considerable. The result of all of this is that the housing for machine powering the fan necessitate lowering the ceiling in the dining chamber to less than five feet (as there is just enough headroom to get into and out of seat, with the bulk of the cubic space of the room dedicated to the cooling device, which ran like a pendulum, and which also demanded what looks to be like a 10-foot x 1 foot long opening in the ceiling. But if it was a hot humid day in Nurnberg in the summer of 1666, then that fan would feel pretty bloody good to you, as there would have been nothing like it in the city (save for a servant fanning you from not such a discrete distance).

 Bockler as it turns out was an extraordinary talent and very gifted thinker and engineer, designing all manner of instruments and machines over a wide range of fields. His principle interest though was hydraulics, as exhibited in his very popular Architectura Curiosa Nova (1664), which was a practical application of his knowledge of hydrodynamics and mechanics (in general), showing how to construct fountains for the garden and for public city life.

Looking deeper into the beautifully illustrated Theatrum Machinarum though I was struck by how many of these big machines were powered by humans. And as it turns out Bockler was responding with smaller, more elegant human-power designs because of a problem in supply for the other power sources. The problem with running a furnace to power these machines was the fuel—wood and coal had become problematic on the continent and in Britain in the mid-17^th century. The trees that would’ve supplied the wood for the furnaces were disappearing with the rapidly depleted forests. Coal was even a problem with the relatively shallow veins of the deposit giving out. In the meantime of the stagnant power supplies Bockler offered his readers (and parishioners) designs for machines that if all else failed could be powered by humans. Humans on treadmills, humans turning lathes, and so on.

I’ve included this last part for a horse-driven machine because of the very small window of exposure for the horse to the wheel it would turn. It looks as though it was elegant but I haven’t much of an idea if horses could get used to moving their hind legs without moving their front legs.

You can see the entire Theatrum courtesy of Cornell University right HERE.

 

  

The Big Cycle—the Beginning and the End of the World and the Weight of All Things, Depicted 1445-1550.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post #82

(1)  The End

I came to this post through the interest in an image that shows life as we know it in its very last teetering stage, at the crystalline moment just before the bullet hits the bone, just before the wave breaks, just before the shade swallows the light.  The image is incredible, seemingly far beyond the reach of the 15th century, far above its naïve absolutism, showing a tower of water, the oceans risen from their depths and towering over the mountains, just before the cascade and inundation begins.  It is by Antoine Vérard  and was published in 1493/4 in André Bocard’s (b. 1453)   L'Art de bien vivre et de bien mourir .  Those little poking-out bits are indeed fish, the sign of life and the aymbol for Christ in that unimaginable column of Earth-killing water, one of the Christian indicators that the Judgment Day was near.  Actually I think that we’ve moved far beyond Judgment at this point, and that the print shows the watery effectuator of the warnings and promises heaped down on the readers of Revelations and Apocalypse, among other things. 

(2)  The Beginning

I love this painting by Bosch showing the creation of the universe , mainly because we associate the hyper-imaginative old man (Bosch, not God) with dripping and dire images of the other end of the space time continuum.  This view of the cosmos is quiet and benign—Bosch to me seldom *waits* for things to happen, as in this painting, which seems all about anticipation and possibility.  The canvas is empty, quite unlike the very full, kinetic, no-time-for-reflective-action images that we usually associate with this painter.

(3) The Beginning of the Beginning and the Beginning of the End.

The Bible is a relatively long book, but the space between creation and the (quick?) ultra-final desiccation of Paradise happens in such short word-distance from one another that you can barely get comfortable in your chair before the race to the end begins.  (My wife Patti Digh says that this action is so quick because we need forward action in the telling of the story—we need the wolf to make Little Red Riding Hood more interesting.) 
The painting, Creation of the World and Expulsion from Paradise, is by Giovanni di Paolo, and was completed in 1445.
     
The expulsion part was particularly gloomy for all non-human things because, as I am told, it is from this point (day?) forward that animals no longer live in harmony with one another, and that their vast majority is made to eat each other, consuming each other for energy sources, in a vast, incredible orgy of killing and death.  That’s quite a price to pay for human insouciance.  It seems to me that if you added up the weight of everything on earth that killed other living things for energy versus the weight of everything else gaining energy from the sun or chemically or whatever, that the later would compose only a fraction of the killers’ weight.  (As Gus McRae says in Lonesome Dove,”the Earth is just one big boneyard”. 

One interesting part of this painting is di Paolo’s depiction of the nine spheres of creation, which he depicts in eight.  (The earth at center, followed by the elements   water, air, and fire, then the moon and planets, then the fixed stars with signs of the zodiac, the primum mobile and finally the undefined Empyrean heaven, the place where God and all of its components sit.  Perhaps di Apolo felt that he could not contain the Empyrean, and so left it unbounded.

(4) The Cycle of Cosmic Life

This interesting woodcut by Antoine Verard in his French Bible of 1517 shows Adam and Eve in the Garden in the opening moments of Genesis, its incubating sphere seemingly at the root of a great tree, which, for all  of its great beauty, seems backwards. Perhaps the message would be different if you put the Garden at the top of the tree, the tree of life; having the garden and its quick demise (where did the garden “go”, anyway?) seems to symbolize death at the root of all that followed the expulsion, as great trees all wind up lichen-bait at some point.

(5)  The Cycle of Life on Earth

This wonderful woodcut from Jean de la Garde's  The Heart of Philosophy (1504)—an amalgam and witches brew of hermetic and astrological texts and conjectures—and is perhaps the most brilliant of the sixty-two woodcut illustrations in the wide-ranging, over-reaching book.  The complex message here shows the influences of the earth and cosmos on the life of humans, the astrological signs and symbols of the seasons and etc. all bearing down very hard on the flower in the lap of the woman at the center of it all. It just seems so odd that there should be so much forebearance and such an extraordinary concentration of effort to be brought to bear against a solitary womb.  With all of that reigning down on us, I wonder how it is that we are expected to breathe?

Digital “Computers” 1450-1750: Memory and Calculating on the Fingers and Hands

JF Ptak Science Books Post #81  (Expanded)

These lovely images weren’t intended to show people living in the Renaissance and Baroque eras how to actually record data on their hands—they were intended rather as templates to show how they could use their fingers and hands for calculating and as memory devices.  Much like Frances Yates has shown us so beautifully in The Art of Memory and how info and data was stored in imagined and compartmental palaces in the mind (relying upon images), the hands were also used as a theatre of memory in addition to extended calculation. 

These mnemonic devices were necessary—especially during the Renaissance—because of the general lack of and access to affordable vellums or paper and writing instruments.  Having notebooks filled with memoir or history of calculation was generally not something that was happening for even the not-wealthy but not struggling class.  These mental images were used widely in the areas of religion, palmistry, astrology mathematics, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, music, and other such fields. 


The first image (from a German manuscript) of the hand-theatre was found and deciphered by Claire Richter Sherman (Folger Shakespeare Theatre) and is religious in nature, an intentional piece of memory for the devoted and for devotions.  The needs of religion were splayed out as the hand was opened and fingers flexed, and working from thumb to pinkie, from finger tip and joint—“do God’s will, examine  your conscience, repent, confess”, and so on, and above all be content with your lowly penitente stature.  If there were 28 of these admonitions or reminders at different points of the hand and you memorized them all, it would be a much simpler time to recall and keep them in order if you merely had to touch a part of your hand where that memory should be to invoke what it was you were supposed to do.  Therefore you could theoretically cast about with your creator with your hands in your pockets—if you had pockets. 

The next two images (including the enlargement of the hand section) are from a work from 1587 entitled Musique and are attributed to John Cousin the Younger (1522-1597).
The basic premise for this device—it seems to me—was to be able to order the different chords of 20 different instruments. 


Another musical hand mnemonic was the Guidonian hand, a survivor of Medieval times, and possibly named after Guido of Arezzo (a musical theorist), and was an aid to singers learning to sight sing.   

The entry for the Guidonian hand in Wiki explains it use rather well:  “The idea of the Guidonian hand is that each portion of the hand represents a specific note within the hexachord system, which spans nearly three octaves from "Γ ut" (that is, "Gamma ut") (the contraction of which is "gamut", which can refer to the entire span) to "E la" (in other words, from the G at the bottom of the modern bass clef to the E at the top of the treble clef). In teaching, an instructor would indicate a series of notes by pointing to them on their hand, and the students would sing them. This is similar to the system of hand signals sometimes used in conjunction with solfege…”


The final two examples come from Jakob Leupold’s  (1674-1727) Theatrum Machinarum (1724)—this was a complex work involving nine sections and addressed the theoretical  aspirations of engineering (load, flexure, that sort) and its applications to its daily practitioners.  In one section of the book he sought to explain the connections (and correlations) of hand motion and symbolism to the origins of the number systems, carrying it out further still into body language, so that two people conversant in these symbols could talk and bargain between themselves in economic/body terms.  Barbara Maria Stafford, in her Artful Science, Enlightenment,



Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (1994) points out the long history of this tradition, and that it reached far back into misty time:  Leupold knew that Appian, the Venerable Bede, and Aventinus had been fascinated by manuloquio, or natural language with the hands.  He thus linked counting to a global….medium of prearranged gestures…”

 

Dismantling Reality--Euclid, Mondrian, Malevich, Lobachevsky and the Appearance and Disappearance of Form Through Geometry.

JF Ptak Science Books Post #80

Today’s post comes via my wife Patti’s phoney baloney sandwich for our four-year-old Tessie.  It was a tight fit of geometric pieces made to cover slim pieces of bread that would fit into her bento boxes.  The form was lovely!  And—on the heels of yesterday’s post—it reminded me of the remarkable qualities of geometry, and the role it has played in the creation of the known and visible parameters of our world(s). Geometry has also played a very visible role in removing those parameters, for as much as the art has forced regularity in our thought, it has played just as large a role in challenging that structure.  What Euclid has given, Lobachevsky has both taken away (and added to). (Nikolai Lobachevsky [1792-1867] and Janos Boylai [1802-1860] each independently developed non-Euclidean geometries:  that is, they replaced Euclid's parallel postulate with the postulate that there is more than one parallel line through any given point, saying that the foundational fifth postulate of Euclid was not true.)

Take for example an image and idea from yesterday’s post regarding the engineer and art-geometer Oliver Byrne (who replaced much of the text of Euclid’s first six books by using an odd index of color) and Piet Mondrian.   The approach (as noted by Augustus de Morgan among others) is gorgeous but hokum—the effect though is pretty and it does define the areas of the geometric solids that I’d like to use here.  The approach that Byrne tried to develop and simplify Euclid for more general readers was to employ a peculiar art form of geometry to help classify the structure of the world—ordering the universe, and vice versa.

Piet Mondrian, who was one of the earliest artists to practice the new, revolutionary form of non-representational art—that is, producing art with no recognizable subject matter, no humans, or landscape or animals or bugs or whatever—uses very similar geometrical solids to reclassify all of existence into sensations and color forms.  Mondrian is more correctly classified as a constructivist, or cubist, and he uses the same tools to re-identify nature as Euclid developed to help classify the structure of the world.  This is his “Composition with red, Yellow and Blue” which was painted in 1930, a full eighteen years after Kandinsky created the first painting in this field. But there were other early pioneers in the non-representation field who exhibited a more mathematical aesthetic in liberating the object than we see in the first works than the great Kandinsky.  Umberto Boccioni (1912), Frank Kupka (1913), Olga Rozanova (1913), Liubov Popova (1914), Felix del Marle (1914) come quickly to mind,

though none leap to consciousness as quickly as Kasimir Malevich.  Malevich begins this work before 1910, and by 1913 he has produced such works as “samovar” in which the (samovar) object is dissected and moved to different places in the visual field on the back of geometrical objects.  But it is in 1915 that we are introduced to his extraordinary “Black and red Square”, where we find that he has removed all representation of objects—not only that, he has removed almost all of the forms, period.

On the other hand there is certainly a very long history of artistic adventures which have no recognizable subject, though the artists in these cases I am relatively certain about were not trying to replace the known stuff of our world with the not-yet-known.  Geometrical artistic expression at its base has been seen in mazes, labyrinths and mosaics for thousands of years.  I guess you could even make a case for architecture fulfilling this role as well it the buildings were taken as art forms.  But I’m interested here mostly with the artist intentionally choosing to obscure the known subject.

This leads to the troublesome forms of the French architect Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, 1887 –1965).  Leafing through his The Radiant City (Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization, 1933) is a confusing affair.  As much as the man wants to rectify and save the world (his words, salve me fons pietatis) with his geometrical cities, replacing the mess of disorderly human civilization, his results, while giving a crispy clean order, are formidably lifeless (to me, at least), the organic and messy bits of human life de-fractured and placed in 90-degree containers.  Le Corbu complains about the American successes, there in 1930 or so, saying that the U.S. is a monument of achievement but for achieving the wrong things.  A little later in 1932 and 1933 however he does take time to make positive comments about the interesting experiments going in Fascist/Mussolini Italy and Stalin’s Soviet Union…it was common I know for thinking people to have such harmonious thoughts about these regimes, but there were plenty of others who kew and wrote about what was

really happening in those places, and Le Corbu was not one of them.)  The so-called positive elements of American advancements that Corbu took away with him back to France-- Taylorist and Fordist (Henry was a vehement anti Semite and Nazi sympathizer)  strategies adopted from American models to reorganize society—I think come vividly alive in his geometrical replacement of human habitation—call me old fashioned, but I just don’t like it.  I also don’t like it because it smacks so much of his disgust of capitalism (which he talks about as consumerism) and of his own right-wing political beliefs.  Le Corbusier followed these thoughts into the camps of philosophies like  the right-wing syndicalism of the French politician Hubert Lagardelle.  These also eased him into a position with the traitorous Vichy government during the Nazi occupation of France during WWII—he did cut ties with it in 1942, though only after the architectural plans he had developed for various projects were rejected.
 

[Another leading 20th century architect, Philip Johnson, had his own problems with admiration of fascist ideas, though the amoral and whorish Johnson would’ve have seen these ideas as “problematic” only insofar as they would keep them from working.  He was a decade-long Nazi sympathizer, and among many other things actually followed the Nazis as they stormed their way through Poland—something Johnson described as a (positively) “stirring” experience. He was in a separate class from the kinda-stupid Charles Lindbergh and the empty-suited-but-still-dangerous Prince Harry as Fascist trumpeters.  He was more on the level of detestable fascist intellectuals like Martin Heidegger and Ezra Pound. He was awful.]

It just so happens that two of the most towering names in 20th century architecture were embroidered into the fabric of Fascism, and I think that these ideas burn their way directly through the geometrical imagination of Le Corbusier. His brand of geometries lead us towards the human cog-and-wheel, tight-box, suffocating proclivities of his right-wing extremism, and is perhaps the worst sort of illustration for the use of that beautiful branch of mathematics

Just for the sake of clarity I've included this photo of Henry Ford becoming the third recipient of the Nazi Grand Cross of the German Eagle,  presented by Karl Kapp, German consul-general of Cleveland (left), and Fritz Hailer, German consul of Detroit (right). The other two recipients were Benito Mussolini and Count Ciano.

 
 

 

Science and Art; True Science or Science Fiction? #1: Tinguely, Oliver Byrne, Vredeman de Vries and the Theatrophone

JF Ptak Science Books   Post #79


There are encyclopedias to be written on the not-obvious in the history of science, dictionaries of "what is it", codexes of "is that real?", handbooks to distinguish things that look like scientific apparatus but are actually works of art, and vice versa. This is my first installment looking at the occasionally squishy visual line that distinguishes images that are "true" scientific creations from those that are not. 

Case #1.  FALSE 
Our first example comes from Jean Tinguely (1925 – 1991)  a Swiss painter and sculptor, best known for his Dadaist kinetic sculpture, officially known as metamechanics. This photo shows Tinguely in the midst of trying to make his self destructing sculpture, Homage to New York (1960), self destruct. His collection of wheels and cogs and connected motors and techno bric-a-brac, which in their way stood for the embarrassment of overproduction and  self-satisfaction with material goods, embarrassingly failed to self destruct during its unveiling at MOMA.


Case #2. TRUE.
Oliver Byrne's semi-insane but gorgeous interpretive work of the first six books of Euclid  published by William Pickering in London, is problematic.  Byrne's use of color in place of letters in defining and explaining the propositions just doesn't work very fluidly--it is a great, perhaps the great, example of something that is visually pleasing, beautifully rendered, and sort of functionless.

Case #3. TRUE
This is the distributing board of the central London "theatrophone", a telephone relay device that "broadcast" theatrical and symphonic productions to telephone subscribers.  The idea is base on installations of this device during the International exposition in Paris in 1881.  The article appears in Scientific American, Supplement No. 1002, March 16, 1895.  The second image is the switchboard in the central office of the Theatrophone Company.

   



Case #4, TRUE:  Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527 – c. 1607),a Dutch Renaissance architect and engineer, produced a superb book on perspective in 1604, from which this image was selected.  Of course we manipulated it a little in p-shop, dumping it into mosaic, cheating a little, but, well, there you have it. Vredeman's production was luscious and smart, and was highly utilized and prized for hundreds of years as a
useful tool in determining perspective.  It's a mysterious image, bizarre, even--why, for example did the humble artist use a prone/dead/injured human there on t he floor when he could’ve selected something more benign? The odd figure entering the room through the secret door adds to the general threatening atmosphere of this interesting image.  Base line though--it is undeniably an excellent instructional on drawing with perspective.

  

 

 

18th Century Calculator for the Blind--Nicholas Saunderson, Mathematician

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post #76
Nicholas Saunderson (1682-1739)  was an extraordinary mathematical talent—he was also blind (from about the age of one), and invented, principally for his own uses, what I think is the first mathematical calculator designed specifically for the use of the blind.  He was supremely gifted and creative, and rose to become the fourth Lucasian professor at Cambridge, succeeding the expelled William Whiston, who had in turn succeeded Isaac Newton—Saunderson also held the post for one of the longest periods of time, 1711-1739.  HE was friend and associate to Newton, Whiston, Roger Cotes, Halley, De Moivre and others during a particularly rich intellectual period in the history of physics and the maths. 


His calculator was smart and simple, based on a cribbage-board –like device, that was able to perform arithmetical and algebraic functions—it consisted of nine rows and was worked with two pins, the positioning of the pins on the engraved board telling the user their value. (There was another calculator for the blind constructed by Meyer (below, left)  using a sort of reverse principle to the Saunderson model where it was the shape and placement (leaning or not, for example) of the pegs in the hole that annotated value rather than their placement on the board.

The Saunderson computer was described in his The Elements of Algebra…, published at Cambridge in the first edition just after the author’s death, in 1740.  The device was described in the book by John Colson (who succeeded Saunderson to the Lucasian chair), who commented that it was via the use of the device that
Saunderson could compose his treatise on algebra. (At right is another Saunderson-based calculator allowing for the construction and study of geometrical figures).  

Great Cases of Understatement in Scientific Discoveries—Lister, Bell, the Wrights and Philo Farnsworth.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #75

Some of the fundamental discoveries and their announcements in the history of science have come with great fanfare—and some have come with barely a notice.  Granted their impact would not be felt for some time to come, but, still, there are some fabulous champions of understatement.

Joseph Lister (1827-1912) came quite close in 1871 to the discovery of penicillin—as had Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), Jules Francois Joubert (1834-1910) and William Roberts (1830-1899)—but his research in this area was abandoned when he wasn’t able to identify the agent in the mold he found in urine which inhibited further growth of bacteria; he then proceeded with  his discoveries in the antiseptic procedure in the operating room (sanitizing the instrument and the surgeons) instead  Lister’s great work seems exceptionally simple and obvious to us here in the present, but it wasn’t back then, which is why he was the first to do it, saving the lives of thousands of people by increasing their chances of serving surgery by reducing the chances of infection (caused by the surgical procedure itself).  Yet his initial announcements, couched in reflective Victorian drama less scientific prose, never really hinted at the greatness which lurked just below the surface of his announcement, "Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery" in Volume 90, Issue 2299 of The Lancet published on 21 September 1867.  It actually took a number of years for physicians to react positively to Lister’s phenomenal discovery, called by Dr. Henry Morris, ‘probably second only to Pasteur’s contribution to the saving of human lives’.


One of the earliest mass popular announcements of Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone is in The Popular Science Monthly for February 1877—though you’d be a little hard pressed to find it off-hand in this 130pp issue.  Following twelve articles (including George Beard on “The Physiology of Mind Reading” and Chamberlain’s “Nature and Life in Lapland”), and following seven pages of literary notices, and following another five pages of “Popular Miscellany”, one may find the slight reference to the telephone.  (Pictured here is the two-page spread in which the Bell story is announced—don’t be careless, or you’ll miss it.)

The article, or notice, is called “Talking by Telegraph”, and recalls the Sunday of 26 November in 1876 when Bell’s invention is first revealed, using parenthesis (“telephone”) when referring to the instrument.  The story is less than 200 words long and is tucked away in almost total obscurity.  There is no mention of its possible use or importance. 

Such was also the case with the announcement of the Wright Brothers’ first successful powered flight in 1903.  The announcement in Scientific American was far less than auspicious, given two paragraphs almost at the end of the weekly issue in the automotive and aviation section.  Actually their earlier successes in unpowered gliding flight in 1901 were treated with similar nonchalance in the Scientific American as well as other popular magazines (of LIFE-like stature in those times), including a fleeting reference in the Illustrated London News and the Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig).  It took almost no time at all following the Scientific American publication for the rest of the thinking world to react with proper enthusiasm to their spectacular accomplishment. 

Our last example here is that of Philo T. Farnsworth (1906-1971), inventor of the first all-electronic television, owner of a spectacularly geeky first name, and one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Americans of the 20th century

Perhaps some of the downplay of Farnsworth’s annoncuement and achievement was diluted by the longish list of precursors to his invention—the electro-mechanical television for example was the object of the work of Alexander Bain, Paul Nipkow, Aleksandr Stoletov, Karl Ferdinand Braun, Boris Rosing, Herbert E. Ives, and John Logie Baird, while even the electronic television was nearly completed by Boris Rosing, Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, Kalman Tihanyi, Vladimir Zworykin and Kenjiro Takayanagi.  Nevertheless the achievement of the 23-year old boy wonder still found an enormous pinnacle of understatement, all things being equal.  In the article by Fasrnsworth and Harry R. Lubke, “Transmission of Television Images”, in Radio, December 1929, the authors describe their breakthroughs, particularly with what they called their “image dissector”, which differentiated them from the major aspects of the Zworykin invention.   With photographs of the invention as well as the successful televised transmission, the authors go on to say that the transmission of moving pictures “could well be considered as having entertainment value”.  Indeed.  There was some patent litigation ahead, particularly involving Zworykin and RCA, but by 1935 Farnsworth prevailed, though somehow not economically.

Sensitive Flames, 1874

JF Ptak Science Books  Post #74

I was drawn (like a moth to a ...) to these images that appeared in the journal Popular Science (New York), 1874, in an article by W.F. Barrett entitled “Sensitive Flames”.  Actually I was more drawn to the title than the images, trying to conjure the differences between the other sorts of vaguely ethereal antiquarian flames that I imagined I was familiar with:  quiet flames, singing flames, and the present sensitive flames.  More or less “discovered” in 1857 by Joseph Le Conte (and then hammered in close comforting years soon after by Govi, Tyndall, Barry and Geyer), sensitive flames were noticed because they reacted to acoustic variations.  These gas flames changed their shape according to the sorts of sounds and music that they were subjected to.  (There are other factors involved here too of course, like the amount of gas used and the way in which the gas is released and so on—basically though they were the subject of change depending of their sensitivity to different sounds.)

Sensitive flames fall into a special category of  reactive agents like Kundt’s dust figures and Cholodni’s watery acoustic images (and maybe even the wonderful dances of Brown's dust particles and Einstein's Brownian motions—unexpected, interesting and arresting images to watch produced by sound in an unexpected medium).

Early notices on the subject of “sensitive flames” appearing in the London-based journal Nature:

(1)  Letters to Editor, Nature (03 December 1874)

Sounding and Sensitive Flames by A. S. HERSCHEL  (Abstract)

IN a letter which I have just received from Dr. A. K. Irvine, of Glasgow, my
attention is drawn to a short abstract of some of his experiments with Barry's
sensitive flame, which appeared in the English Mechanic of Dec. 15, 1871, a few
months previously to the appearance in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, and in
the American Journal of Science, of the description, referred to briefly in my last
letter (NATURE, vol. xi. pp. 6 to 8), of Mr. Geyer's researches on the acoustic
properties of the same flame, some particulars of which Dr. Irvine appears also to
have noticed independently. The few lines in which his observations are recorded
corroborate so fully the character and mode of action of the flame as now pretty
perfectly established, that a short extract from them will scarcely be without
interest, from the satisfactory support which it offers to the accounts and
explanations that other investigators of this flame have elsewhere given ii graphic
terms of its appearance.

(2)  Letters to Editor, Nature 11, 45-47 19 November 1874) Sounding and Sensitive Flames, II
(Abstract)

ANOTHER example of a highly sensitive flame was recently described to me which seems to show that air-currents flowing through gauze at a proper speed are sensitive
without the intervention or simultaneous superaddition of a flame. A special kind of Bunsen burner was made with a spiral mixing tube coiled in an inverted cup, at the
centre of which is a small chamber covered with wire-gauze at the foot of a short
tube or flame-pipe. The gas is admitted by a single jet passing through a cap of
wire-gauze covering the conical opening of the spiral tube, the object of this cap
of gauze being to distribute the air in its approach, and to protect the gas-jet
from ignition. The gas-flame burns with a small bright green cone, surmounted by a
larger envelope of pale reddish flame, and it is intensely hot. The green cone
indicates combustion of the most complete explosive mixture of air and coal-gas, and
when the burner is properly adjusted it can only burn on the top of the flame-tube,
where it finds the additional required supply of oxygen; but it descends to the
wire-gauze at the foot of the tube if the air-supply exceeds, or the gas supply
falls short of the right proportion. In some of these burners the slightest noise of
the kind that commonly affects sensitive flames causes the cone of green flame to
retreat into the tube and settle on the wire-gauze at its foot, whence it rises
again immediately to the top of the tube, when the sound ceases. The explanation
seems to be that the air-current entering the mixing-tube through the outer gauze
cap is in a sensitive condition, and that when thrown into disturbance by the
external sounds, it is more quickly seized and is drawn into the mixing tube more
rapidly by the gas-jet than when it is flowing over the jet in a tranquil state. The
inventor of these burners, Mr. Wallace, assures me that some of them exhibit the
most sensitive of sensitive flames, and that he has more than once thought of
sending one of them as a most singularly effective illustration of such flames to
Prof. Tyndall.