JF Ptak Science Books

Atomic Bomb Graffiti

JF Ptak Science Books Post 173

Back in the days "when it was a long time ago" (in the words of my five-year old, Tessie) I found this artwork covering a Washington D.C. water department structure near the Whitehurst Freeway, down near the waterfront in Georgetown.  It was a six-sided structure, brick, with boarded up windows; all of the windows and most of the brick in between  had been used as a political/personal diary by one of the free-rangers who lived under the highway.  It was very creative, with parenthetical statements, asides, and even one footnote (I've still not seen another footnoted work of graffiti).

Since I've made a few short posts about the Trinity Test and the coming of the use of the atomic bomb, I thought to include this, as I think the use of "atomic bomb" in outside/public diaries is still pretty rare. 

The panel reads:
CRUDE//Drop/Atom/Bomb/Worldwide/If Necessary

The "if necessary" part I think was a stroke of pure genius.

Trinity at 63: The First Atomic Blast, Alamogordo, July 16, 1945

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Now we are all sons of bitches—Kenneth Bainbridge, Trinity Director.

There were many profound thoughts in many profound heads there in the desert, at the reaches of the Jornarda del Muerto ("The Dead Man’s Walk", a formerly nearly-impenetrable stretch of desert in  the Llano Estacado) at the Trinity Test Site, Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945 for the successful testing of the first atomic bomb.  Robert Oppenheimer famously cited the Gita (“Now I am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds…”): Enrico Fermi was so busy with his little and excruciatingly wonderful experiment with strips of paper calculating the effect of the blast (he reckoned a very-close 10,000 tons) that he didn’t actually hear the explosion; Edward Teller thought Tellerian thoughts, and so on.  Actually the observation points (like S-10000 and Campania Hill)were crowded with big brains:  in addition to Oppenheimer, Teller and Fermi were people like Hans Bethe, James Chadwick (whose discovery of the neutron sort of started the whole thing), Richard Feynman, George Kistiakowsky, Phil Morrison, Robert Serber, Vannevar Bush, James Conant, and many others.  The were all thinking pretty big things (except for the occasional if-you-can-believe-it stuff like that which maybe came from Feynman’s mouth, which was “hot dog!”).  I think that Bainbridge’s statement was the best, and truest, summation of the morning’s activities.

In a strong and inestimable claim to naïve weirdness, Edward Teller—at about 5:00 in the morning, waiting for the explosion with the others—broke out a bottle of sunblock lotion, applying it to his face and hands.  The bottle was passed around and was used by others. I can not imagine what must’ve been going through the mind of any observer watching these scientists prepare themselves for the blast, except perhaps for “oh, s___”). 

Just about everyone wrote of the moment in their memoirs or reflections, and I’ve read a lot of them; the description that stands out from the others to my mind, the one that put an understandable spin on an untranslatable moment, belonged to the ueber-literate Morrison.  He wrote that although the flash and the brightness were stupendous, there was something else that was more astonishing—that was the blast of heat from the shock wave that he felt on his face in the cold desert morning. He was 10 miles away from Zero, and in those few moments when the scientists had recreated the birth of the universe, he was an epoch in time away from the 32 simultaneous detonations that set the bomb off 5:29:45 am. 

At almost the same moment as the blast, Little Boy shipped out on the Indianapolis (which would encounter its own horrific date with the future on her return trip) from Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard at San Francisco.

Everyone who knew about the bomb that day knew that the war was over.  The question of course how to make it so. 

First Sentences of Great Literature: 30 Examples

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Just a slight, little quiz here, a true/false quiz, linking great first sentences to their novels.  Hint:  they're all true.  I just wanted to see them collected like this. 

(1) "All children, except one, grow up."  Peter Pan    

(2) "In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines."  Madeline, Ludwig Bemelmans

(3) "The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home." Wind in Willows, Kenneth Grahame

(4) "In the great green room, there was a telephone and a red balloon." Goodnight Moon, MW Brown

(5) "Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice "without pictures or conversation?" Alice in Wonderland.

(6) "When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse." Stuart Little EB White

(7) "This is George. He lived in Africa."  Curious George  HA Rey

(8) "Chug, chug, chug. Puff, puff, puff. Ding-dong, ding-dong."  The Little Engine that Could
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(9) "For many days we had been tempest-tossed." Swiss Family  Robinson

(10) "The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it."  Black Beauty

(11) "I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father's house."  Kidnapped

(12) "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so."  Tale of Two Cities

(13) "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo." Portrait of the Artist

(14) "My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip."  Great Expectations

(15) "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." Personal History David Copperfield

(16) "The day broke gray and dull."  Of Human Bondage

(17) "Now, what I want is Facts."  Hard Times

(18) "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Good Soldier, FM Ford

(19) "As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream. "  Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan

(20) "I am an invisible man."  Invisible Man R Ellison

(21) "Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York." Tree Grows in Brooklyn  Betty Smith

(22) "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."  Great Gatsby

(23) "The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there"." In Cold Blood.

(24) "A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green."  Of Mice and Men

(25) "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." To Kill a Mockingbird

(26) "In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together."  Heart is a Lonely Hunter

(27) "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting."  Sound and the Fury

(28) "Isaac McCaslin, 'Uncle Ike', past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any more, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one ---- this was not something participated in or even seen by himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac's father's sister and so descended by the distaff, yet not withstanding the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor, of that which some had thought then and some still thought should have been Isaac's, since his was the name in which the title to the land had first been granted from the Indian patent and which some of the descendants of his father's slave still bore in the land."  Go Down Moses

(29) "Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth."  Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

(30) "To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth."  Grapes of Wrath

The Human Zoo: People in Cages, Enclosures and Chained for Paid Amusement

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Human ignorance in observing differences among different societies and races has always been a burgeoning, expanding, sub-intelligent subset of other human stupidities, frailties and incapacities.  Sometimes these are exhibited liberally and freely, and stupidly; other times it is difficult to see, vile, menially, sub-rosa, and thoughtfully thoughtless. 

These prejudices been spectacularly exhibited in many ways over the centuries—forced immigration, complete removals, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, slavery, expulsion, legal intolerance, and so on; an entire library can be filled with this stuff.  Sometimes people were gathered together and moved far away; other

times they were gathered together and removed into compounds right in the middle of cities in which they lived (as in ghettos, antiquarian “hospitals” and the creation of the more modern asylum, and so on). Genres not-too often discussed is the human zoo, and this image from the Illustriete Zeitung in 1877 depicts one of them

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This woodcut depicts the “Patagonian” Indians displayed in the Dresden Zoological Gardens.  They lived in a fenced exhibit (and allowed to wear clothing), and were shown is all aspects of their daily lives.  The curious would come and hang around at the perimeter fences (visible in the lower left of the hunting scene), and gawk, or study, or perhaps help themselves feel better or more superior by watching people in cages live their lives.  I don’t know what they were really thinking or feeling.

People weren't thinking when they were looking, paying to look, at captive humans on display for many years.   The questionable P.T. Barnum made his "contribution" to 19th century disgraces in 1835 with his exposition of a black slave (Joice Heth) who was supposed to be the world's oldest living human (I can't get into the slavery issue in the course of this post, although I probably should), bringing this sort of behavior to early and high entrepreneurial  exposure.  Soon after there would fellow his imitators, establishing human occupants in zoos in Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, London, and Warsaw, and other places, all by the 1870's.  There would be spectacles of human "exotics" in the semi-rarefied  atmosphere of world fairs and expositions in Paris (1878,1889, 1931), Marseilles (Colonial Expo in 1906), Barcelona, Stuttgart (1928), among others.  I should point out that there was a display of an entire Congolese Village as late as the 1958 Fair in Belgium (the Belgians evidently trying some bloody retrothink, 45 years after their long series of atrocities committed against those peoples).  Humans do have an expansive capacity for this sort of behavior. 

Nazi's and the(ir) Display of Quantitative Information: Displays of the Big Lie, 1928-1940

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These two displays come at different ends of the beginning of WWII and, in a way,
couldn't be further away from themselves in the stories they were trying to tell
(some truth, some fiction), and were separated in time by  11 years or so.   The
first "Der eiserne Ring um Deutschland" ("The Iron Ring and Germany") shows Germany surrounded by imaginarily aggressive (and aggressively-portrayed) neighbors nine years after the end of WWI.  They both display subsets of the Big Lie superset described by Hitler in 1925 in Mein Kampf (actually, sort of better described by the German term Lügenfabrik, or “lie factory”, used by Goebbels in his descriptions of the British).  The “Big Lie” was basically a lie so big and so preposterous, so outrageous, so impossible, that it was believed.) 

This representation depicts the threat posed to Germany-making an iron ring-by the
potentially hostile French, Italians, Belgians, Czechs and  Poles.  It shows the
ring composed of a combined army of 13.1 million men versus the standing army of
Germany, which in 1928 was given as 100,000, and listing virtually no heavy weapons
and no air force whatsoever.. (The interesting bit here is that neither the Soviet
Union nor Great Britain is included in these aggressive forces, the Soviets less-so
than the English.)   The designer goes so far as to shade in areas of Germany that
were under immediate threat, extending from the Donau to the Rhine, to a
50-mile-wide area all around the country, with East Prussia almost entirely
consumed.  (Certainly the Treaty of Versailles was a very troubling document closing the end of the war and, it cam be argued, opening the door for the next one.  It took six months to sign the peace treaty following the cessation of hostilities in November 1918, and the troubled negotiations produced a troubled treaty, ripping Germany up and saddling it with unrealistic retributions that began to wither in only four years, with the treaty virtually dissolved by 1935.)

It is no wonder when looking at propaganda such as this that Germany was immured
with fear of national collapse at the hands of land-hungry neighbors, and that there
was a huge need to re-instate the army and a system of "self protection".    (By
1936, only 8 years later, it was beyond question about what Germany was up to-I can
say that after having at least breezed through every page of the Illustrirte Zeitung
(Leipzig)  from 1930-1940, that even a very casual reader could've tracked,
graphically, the interest in military reporting and militarism in the page's of what
would've been the German equivalent of LIFE magazine.  By 1935 there was so much
glorification of weapons and the Nazi manifesto that it should've been a surprise to
no one when the Germans moved into their neighboring countries.)  This was by no means the earliest depiction of this rampant sale of fear or fear mongering (a design which has existed for thousands of years and not at all a creation of the present republican administration), but it is a very big and bald one, a somewhat staggering one, a bright shining lie.  (A Bright Shining Lie by John Paul Vann is by the way a great book on American involvement in Vietnam.) 

The second image, a graph showing the successes of and very limited damage to the
German Luftwaffe at the beginning stages of WWII, in August 1940.  This was a bad
time for the Allies, this part of the war coined by Winston Churchill in 18 June
1940 in the House of Commons by:  "The Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle
of Britain is about to begin".  Hitler's Luftschlacht um England would start by air,
where the Brits were far less the equal in military capacity, rather than by a
land/sea assault, which would’ve tested the British at their strengths.  This
second part of the assault on England was Unternehmen Seelöwe, or "Operation Sea
Lion", which would've begun the land assault following the victorious air campaign. 
The graph shows aircraft losses from 9 July to 8 August, 1940, the German losses in
black, and the British in gray.  As you can see, it was a pretty lopsided affair,
made even more dramatic by the fictitious number of English planes being destroyed..
This would all change, of course, with the Germans losing this battle, in a big
way, with a resulting decisive victory for the Brits. (Who would of course muscle
their way through the war another seven months before the U.S. was attacked and
entered the war.) . It would coming to a screeching and collapsing reverse for the
Germans by May 1941.  The results of the battle, 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 could find no graph of course showing the results of the endgame in the Zeitung.

The Big Question: How Long Will Oil Last? (1919)

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In 1919, at the end of WWI, The Illustrated London News asked (and answered) the vital question of the day in the coal v. oil dispute and the feeding of its navy:  which power source will last longer?  The graphic designer displayed the answer right there at the top:  American oil would last about 30 years, while its coal reserves would go for another 4,000 years.  The bigger question though was about the oil production and futures for the rest of the world, which was left unanswered (and unanswerable, smartly).  Its easy to second guess these guys and have a stab and a poke at their predictive power, but we’ve been getting the answers to these questions wrong every decade since then.  Suffice to say that the Brits were doing some strategic thinking on the issue of power supply, which of course is probably the greatest issue in fielding an army of navy (just ask Rommel).

It is interesting to note that the British government was busily looking for oil in Derbyshire (oops) and other places. And as an end-note it is stated that the government had already invested about 2 million pounds in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (which would become British Petroleum in 1957, known today as BP),  which, beginning around 1908, was the first time that a company harvested the oil reserves of the Middle East.  All of it was nationalized during the Iranian coup d’etat in 1953

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The Tree of Life and Coal's Phylogeny--a decent Diagram but a Bad Idea

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Even though this is a simple classification scheme, and a very-well designed graphic at that, the use of the tree describing the genealogy of coal by-products just seems, well, wrong. The use of the tree in defining a visual phylogenic interrelatedness of living things appears pretty much for the first time in the first edition of the Origin of Species in 1859, and it is the only diagram that appears in the book. (And by this I mean the use of the tree-scheme for scientific purposes:  the tree of life of course has been used for many, many centuries, the philosophical design woven into the fabrics and incised into the stone of many cultures.  It sort of appears in print in classification usage at least by the wily and polymathic Athansius Kircher, who used it to display the elements in a Kabbalistic Tree of Life some 350 years ago.)
The Verkaufsvereinigung fuer Teererzeugnisse (of Essen) used this idea in 1922, publishing the ad for their company in the Illusrtriete Zeitung (Leipzig). The great tree spring from a bed of coal (“kohle”) exhibiting the “stammbaum der nebenerzeugnisse” (roughly the “pedigree of our product”), with the trunk being gas, branching out into tar, coke and cyan and so on.  Even though it’s the lifeblood of the continuing industrial revolution, and even though we’re hundreds of years into a deep need with the products, the use of the tree just seems antithetical to it all on all levels of recognition, especially now.  (The Darwin tree of life is below.)

The Earliest, Instantenous, 3-D Modelling Device? A Primitive, Metallic “Polaroid” Portrait in 1836.

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In the “Spirit of Discovery” section of the British weekly magazine The Mirrour of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction for 22 October 1836 is a short notice on the “physiognotype”, “a machine for taking casts, lately invented by a gentleman in Paris”.  We’re accustomed to these devices now as they’ve been for sale in toy shops for decades—but in 1836 it was a real breakthrough for making instantaneous three-dimensional models of small things.  In 1836 there really wasn’t any simple way of producing a direct, proportional model like this in 3-D except for encasing it in plaster and then casting from that mold.  Two-dimensional modeling was easier, and there were numerous devices constructed for this purpose as people pursued the still-hot rage of physiognomic forecasting, with simpler means (like shadow portraits) being hundreds of years earlier.  (Photography remember is still three years away from being announced and another few years from being sort of accessible to middle-class folks.) 

This device was simple and cool, and it worked.  It was basically a board with a mesh of tiny holes drilled into it through which were placed knitting needles (it looks as though it was 12” around or so and four inches deep), bound in wood, with the enclosure encased by a bladder of warm water (“to ensure that the needles moved with the greatest facility”)—this last bit was really a good idea.  You were left with a “brush of needles”, very densely packed, and very easily disturbed.  The author writes that the process took about two seconds, didn’t hurt at all, and caused “a sensation that cannot well be described”.  (Though he did state that if the instrument wasn’t warmed by the water the process would’ve felt like putting your face in the snow…does that mean it felt like putting your face in warm snow?) 

I’ve tried, briefly, to see where this invention went, but it seems not to have advanced far beyond the reach of quack medical practioners and magicians.  It seems as though something like this could’ve been useful in the machine shop for modeling (replacement) parts without having to take the machine itself apart to do it.  I guess that it could’ve been used by haberdashers, cobblers, and all sorts of other craftspeople and small manufacturers, but it seems as though it actually wasn’t.  It looks like a dandy piece of thinking, to me. 

The Worst Picture of Santa, Ever: Selliing Cigarettes, Post WW2

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Could poor old Santa get any lower than this?  Out of all the things he has carried in his sack over the years, Chesterfield Cigarettes may very well be the worst of them.  Plus, not only is Santa delivery them as presents, he'€™s decorating the tree with them as well, and hardly acting the camera-shy sort that he is.  Chesterfield (Leggett & Morris Tobacco Co.) combined some of the best loved elements of childhood (the ABC's "€œAlways Buy Chesterfield") and Santa Claus to not only convince adults to think of the product as a Gift(ing) Unit, but also to lull children into a sleepy, memory-clouding  impression of Chesterfields being somehow good (what with these two primary associations and all).  "€œChesterfields have all the benefit of Smoking Pleasure (capitalized in the original) "they're givable, acceptable and enjoyable¦"  I wonder what they, meant, exactly, by using the word "€œacceptable"? 

I'€™ve seen Santa in other embarrassing poses like this in the pages of LIFE magazine for this period:  €”flying through the air in his sleigh loaded down with boxes of cigarettes, placing boxes of them under the tree, stuffing stockings with cartons, and the like.  I'€™m sure that he regrets it now, though.

All sorts of people were pressed into the service of selling tobacco products like this—sports figures, movie stars, doctors, adventurers; an entire alphabet of personalities and personality types got into the act.  A sitting president had never been involved, though a person who would become president was.
I’m sure Ronald Reagan regretted this ad at some point in his life as well ("beautiful Christmas Car Carton" or not), though I suspect that he would’ve kept that close to the vest. 

Blank and Disappeared People Follow-Up: a Sin-Laden Manikin, 1871

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 162 and a quarter

My old friend Jeffrey Donlan, who  is in charge of what must be a top 1% highest-elevation library in the U.S. (at 7000+ feet) in Salida, Colorado, sent me a playful pinch, asking about what ever happened to the History of Blank People (which I posted about a few months ago)

Well, it isn’t easy coming upon these images of people being made to disappear and/or people being “filled up” (you’d better see the post), but within a day after his contact and within a day of Jeff’s visit, I stumbled upon one (looking of course for an image of matchmakers, as in Lucifer Sticks).  It spilled out of the pages of Harpers Weekly for 1871, and was part of a caricature of the selection process for folks becoming a member of the The Independent Order of Odd Fellows. The work is a strong attack upon the fellowship, with this section showing a possible member being stripped of all his sins and foulnesses and various other transgressions, all of which are taken from his body and applied to a blank manikin. 

Instead of burning the sin-laden manikin, though, the unnamed caricaturist contends that the society of Odd Fellows keeps the maikin, as it might come in handy for them later.  In any event, it is a rare occurrence of finding a Blank Person, weirder still that it was found after someone actually/kinda/sorta/not really asked for it. 

Big Weirdness: Eating Glaciers AND Moving Glaciers Cross-Country (??) 1921

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So, in a collection of thousands of odd pamphlets with categories and sub-categories which are in themselves odd (“History of Biological Transformation”) there occasionally springs from the well a particularly singular effort that doesn’t fit anywhere:  when I can’t find a place to put something in a collection (read “assemblage”) that has a place for everything, I know its really weird. 

And so we have the singular tale of “Prof.” Walter Martin, author of Astrasophy, the Little Giant, by Recent Explorations in Chicago Uncovers the Great Pre-Historic Mich.—Wis.—Ill.—Ind. Sea Enabling Astrasophy to Explode a Glacier Moraine (so-called) inside that City, landing the Glacier 1500 miles west in the Glacier Park, Montana.

Sometimes you have to read something to find out what its all about; other times, like here, the whole thing gets pretty much told in the title.  Once inside, there’s no trail of words to describe exactly what Prof. Martin had in mind with the exploding Chicago glacier; the trail picks up and disappears all over the place, leading even the best tracker to stand and scratch, lost.  (I should point out, too, that the glacier is not only “exploded”, but it is placed “whole”, somehow, in Montana from Chicago.  That’s really not a lot of ‘sploding, if you ask me.). There’s talk about stars, and the “future Chicago”, the tilting of the continents, “slipping earth”, and disappeared “drift piles of ice”, punctuated with wonderful non sequitors like “Yes with my heart all gone I had to eat two glaciers and put one in my pocket”, and then right back into star control,  earth miasmas,  solar system electricity, and other cloudy things. 

Only eleven pages long, the pamphlet reads as though it were several pages shorter.  On pages 7-11 is a “University Short Course in Astrasoph”, and seems to explain all things in seven quick points.  In #2, we read “space is matter in its utmost expansion”, which is a tricky statement (in that we usually think of matter “taking up” space, but never mind), which we can get by quickly with #3:  “matter is the result produced by creation pressure upon the Eotonic Sea of space, condensing to the fifth form”.  This somehow forms the “four nebulas”, the fourth of which “when enlarged, is a divine message to inform us of the existence of other universes”  In this part I think he’s dealing with the idea of the powers-of-ten type, where, Zeno paradox-like, the greater the detail the more is revealed in that youi never actually get "there".   I do like though that he gets into alternative universes back there in 1921

I know that “astrasophy” has an astrological sumpin’ sumpin’ going on nowadays, but that is a slow boat with a fast terminal leak that I have no desire to board.  Mr. Martin got his hands on the term pretty early from what I can tell, and made it his own.  I’d like to celebrate him a little for his singular, spectacular view of the world, but I don’t quite know how, except to say that he came up with a unique set of ideas, and if you squint hard he looks a little like Leonardo, if you pixilate him some. The picture of Mr. Martin seems to show him sitting on the street in a folding chair, evidently selling newspapers (“Foch Smashes…” reads the headline, relating to WWI.)  I hope that he had the chance to proselytize as he dispensed the other worldly news.  In those wily pre-mega-treatment days, Mr. Martin found voice for his dreams and put them in print, and so they exist to this day, if only here—and now he belongs to the web.

Dada and Modernism for Children? 1905-1932

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In a sub-sub-sub category of the sub-category of "Books that I Want to See" comes Dada-ist books for children, and less loosely, modernist books for kids.  Or students.  I'm not sure how close I can define this field because, well, I know basically nothing about it, but I am interested in how long it took for the bits of
created modernism (1895-1915 or so) to reach the level of publications intended for children.  And by Modernism I’m talking about the epochal changes in nearly all disciplines brought about by people like Einstein, Ibsen, Klee, Kandinsky, Braque, Stravinsky, Woolf, and so on. (Nearly all disciplines, that is, except for politics—and then I guess too that if you included the concentration camp then it would join the modernist ranks, too.)

I've started thinking about this in Europe but the first thing that comes to my mind is Little Nemo (and Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend too, while we’re at it), the fantastic creation of Michigan-born (Ypsilanty-schooled) Windsor McKay (1867-1934), which I think is definitely modern but not at all related to Dada, and which came to life in the miracle year of 1905.   McKay just happened to be years above and away from whatever his contemporaries were doing.  No one came close to McKay, in my opinion, until Ignatz picked up his first brick, and George Herriman drew Krazy Kat for the first time in 1913. 

Still skirting the Dada part, I’d love to see Konvolut von 14 russischen Kinderbuchern der Jahre 1930-32, a spectacular constructivist work aimed at children and from what I can see is a treasure trove of  Malevichian insight. 
Andrew. Helle's La Boite a Jouhoux, ("The Box of Toys") Ballet pour enfants (Paris, 1913), is a beautiful composition, a modernist construction, using the idea and artwork of illustrator Helle and the music of Claude Debussy.  The score is witty and has a very light touch, Debussy pleasingly borrowing from himself and his

friends in a work partly inspired in a Milneian way by 7-year-old Chouchou Debussy (and her toys and dolls).  It’s a beautiful work that I’d love to have in my hands.

Another magnificent-looking object that I’d like to see is the box wooden Bauhaus-inspired shapes, pictured in Junge Menschen kommt ans Bauhaus//Werbeprospekt, published in Dessau in 1929 and featuring work by Klee, Kandinsky, Albers, Ridel and Meyer.  The box of shapes is to die for, and it seems as though it offered new geometrical toys/tools  for the inquiring mind in the last year of the ‘twenties.
 

But I’m no closer to Dada for kids than at the beginning of this post, hoping as I was that something might shake loose if I thought about it some.  Its an interesting question to me, and I’d really like to return to it when I actually know something. 

The Marcel Duchamp of 18th Century France: Visionary Architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 160
Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757-1825), a French architect of fabulously distanced sight, produced this breathtaking image in 1792.  The Tomb of Lars Porsena, King of Etruria (the great Etruscan king, d. ca. 500 BCE ), is just one of hundreds of works by Lequeu, a re-discovered architectural genius who worked during the same era as other visionary architects such as Etienne Boullee (1728-1799), Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806), Louis-Jean Desprez (1743-1803), Francois Barbier (1768-1826), Charles Bernard (1765-1818), Francois-Joseph Belanger (1747-1818), and others, though these guys are the most famous.  As a matter of fact, I think, almost all of these architects were re-discovered—Boullee, perhaps the most famous of the lot, was found again not in his buildings but in his visionary drawings that he deposited with the National Library.  But Lequeu—found again in the same way--it seems had to be rescued from an even greater obscurity than the others.  He tried to expose a unity that he saw in the world, some secret sort of unity, that he saw all around him, and which was unseen by everyone else in creation—at least until the 20th century.

Lequeu started out in a staid and brilliant way, a successful architect in his own right, and student of Scoufflot, designing ancient-inspiration buildings for the super rich.  But along came the Revolution and away went his career—he wound up a surveyor and a cartographer until his retirement in 1815, after which he enters social and historical oblivion, until he finally dies in total obscurity ten years later (or so, the date is unclear).  His post-revolutionary vision was as phenomenal as his success in selling his ideas were dismal.  Well, this is really a cheap shot—his imagination was shockingly large, enormous, his designs fantastic and beautiful, and completely unexpected, and they seemed to grow larger/loftier and more interesting as time wore away at him.

I think that as Lequeu was cleaved away, cell by cell falling through the floorboards of his single rented room, he reached further into time and deeper into space than almost any architect of that hundred-year period.   I also think that he was very well aware of his genius being seen as pure eccentricity—his dozen or so self portraits are among the most bizarre that I’ve ever seen (before 1900).

The odd thing in all of this is that in this brilliance there is still a reluctance to leave the Baroque, and this at a time when just about everyone else---beginning around 1750—was abandoning it.  So much of the work of the other visionaries mentioned earlier freed themselves of the Baroque—not entirely true, not true at all, for the unique creations of Lequeu, who (as in the Tomb of Lars Porsena) included more than a few bits of the practice even in his most incredible works. 

Somehow Lequeu saw the Lars Porsena tomb as a 650-foot tall (!!) structure, with impossible insight and filigree.  Extraordinary. (In the upper corners of the drawing of the tomb Lequeu included a design for a coin and also the plan of the structure.  The original tomb of Lars Porsena, according to Pliny the elder in his Natural History, XXXVI, 19, 91ff, was a 15 meter high rectangular base with 90 meter sides--completely destroyed in the wars in the first century. 

Perhaps his most sensational creation (and one which was devoid of all Baroque influence, as it turns out) was his Meeting Place at Bellevue.  It is almost impossible to believe that it is am 18th century creation—it is as harmonious (armonia) as it is asymmetrical.  It looks deeply 20th century, and looked as far into the future as it was deeply unknown.

Food Packaging, Plastics and the New Desire: the du Pont Company, WWII.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 159

I was initially drawn to this small collection of pamphlets because of the very provocative assertion that candy is food (but is food candy?) which, I guess, it is, technically speaking.  (Maybe we should determine what food is on a sliding scale of what we would take to a deserted island somewhere and have to depend on those foods for survival.  I don’t think that I’d have a trunk full of Mounds bars with me.  Evidently if you had to choose one food product (and one product only) to survive on for a year it looks like the best thing to select is dry dog food.)

The Candy is Delicious Food pamphlet was published in 1939 with the intent of instructing the grocer how to better sell candyFood—expressing the ease, storage and profit margin.  Curiously, the thing was published in September  1939, a few months into the war—I wonder if the publisher (saved for naming below to more effect) was prescient in determining the coming problems with food, and that candy would certainly not have those issues during a global conflict? 

The Post-War Food Dollar was also the product of the same publisher.  Published in 1943, this pamphlet exhorted the grocer to prepare for the coming peace, explaining where the new dollars might be spent once the war (and the supply and ration problems) was won. 

As it turns out these pamphlets were mostly about display and merchandising, and finding the goods that looked best on the shelves—and evidently that which looked best was that which the product could be seen.  And the way that the product could be seen was with the use of the “new”packaging filament, cellophane, produced in the United States (almost exclusively) by du Pont (E.I. du Pont de Nempours & Co. with  their chemist William Hale Charch figuring out how to make cellophane moisture –proof, which led to very large-scale good packaging using the product.)   Another very big bit which turns up unmentioned but illustrated in this pamhlet is seen in this The Future is Now! scene of a modern supermarket--the "SERVE YOURSELF" butcher/meat section, which was a new idea in the early 1940's, and one that was not at all common in the consuming world.  This idea wasn't as big a deal as the invention of mass produced sliced bread (or, as Squidward Tentacles encountered in one episode of SpongeBob, "Bread in a Can--the best Thing Since Sliced Bread"), but it was a very important de3velopm,ent in marketing--and also another gargantuanly consumptive venue for the sale of the packaging element, cellophane.

It was DuPont who published this series of pamphlets for the sole purpose of marketing foods and ideas to grocers that were almost entirely dependent upon cellophane, and DuPont manufactured 75% of all cellophane made in the U.S.  So, to me, it seems as thought all of this business about Food being Candy and the Post-War food spending dollar was really just about selling cellophane—the food was incidental, which is why the cellophane-encased candy was called “food” to begin with.  (It was Whitman Candies who first used cellophane in the U.S. , in  1912, to package their goods for retail.)
As an aside it is interesting to note that du Pont was brought to court in 1947 over their alleged monopolization of cellophane manufacturing in the United States.  Thus was the U. S. v. DUPONT (THE CELLOPHANE CASE)  filed December 13, 1947, which “charged Du Pont with monopolizing, attempting to monopolize and conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce in cellophane and cellulosic caps and bands in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act”.   DuPont successfully defended themselves in this case.

The other, minor, thing here that really caught my attention was on page 10 of the Candy is Delicious Food pamphlet—an innocent picture of the grocer tallying up the customer’s purchases, sure enough, but if you look at the detail you can see the grocer writing it all down on the bag that he’d use bag up the purchases.  I have a dim memory of seeing this done in the across-the-street-from-the-A&P Mom & Pop grocery sawdust-strewn store (on Main Street, of course) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, when I was a kid in the early 1960’s.  I
 
don’t recall this being done after that, what with real cash registers and then, much later on, with more sophisticated inventory control hardware.  I’m sure that I recall this being done in hardware shops (almost all gone), and my Mother recalls this more recently—in the 1970’s—in butcher shops, but I think this recording practice was pretty much extinct by the mid  1960’s.  I know that this means nothing, but the picture of this guy writing on the bag was so sharp in my memory that I needed to record the emotion.
 

The Display of Quantitative Data--a Pretty but Wanting Example; British Weather

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 158 (2008)
 This interesting presentation looks to be a lot more useful than it really is—an example of a lovely graphic display of quantitative data in which the information displayed really doesn’t live up to the effort that went into its display.  It is pretty, though.

What the chart displays is the average, highest and lowest temperatures for each month over thirty years (1918-1948)—it would’ve been much more effective, and easier, to use even a simple list to display this data.  It is nice, however, that you can scale up and down the thermometer to find your months, though the results would be surprising to almost no one.

 
The descriptive text on the bottom of this page (appearing in the Illustrated London News for 8 January 1949, describes the climate of Britain  “though variable. To be one of the most salubrious in the world”, which is a description for the island that you don’t often see. 

Given the amount and distribution of weather data it is of course a highly problematic issue in displaying it all—Francis Galton (the man for all seasons' chart is below) tried this in 1881 (the same year that he published what is recognized as the first paper on synesthesia) with  mixed results.  There are earlier efforts that deal with world and continental weather types but these maps gave a broad view of global weather types.  Don’t get me wrong, looking at a world weather map in 1861 was still a very big deal in the control and display of data.