Unusual Collections Department: a Collection of Roads

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 573

In my time I've encountered interesting people with advanced, iconic and unusual collections:  there's one fellow with a superb collection of (better than 20,000) cds with basically nothing to play them on (but of course he knew all  of the music, and listening was almost but not quite secondary); there's another with an audio outfit worth better than a quarter million with literally almost nothing to play on it.  Then there was the delightful fellow in the salvage business who collected cornerstones (!) and giant iron puddlers.  And of course the bee collector with dozens of thousands of specimens.  Oh yes!  And there was that time when I had a meeting with a man on something (on the day the Challenger exploded) unrelated to the spectacular collection he showed to me:  the world's largest, privately-owned 19th century mechanical toys.  It was really just unbelievable.  So was the man, who in the course of the day, as we sat watching the Challenger story unfold, performed on of the most amazing feats I've ever seen in my life. 

My friend Marty Weil chronicles the wants and needs of collectors of all manner of things, from bus passes to matchbooks to god-knows-what, in his excellent ephemera blog.  I collect dirt and antiquarian artwork by children, among other things.   Also, once upon a time I owned a very large collection of lower gastrointestinal dissections as well as gorgeously prepared wet dissections of salivary glands. 

And so it was that when I came upon this unusual image in The Illustrated London News for 21 May 1932 I felt a certain tenderness.  This is a pictre of a road collection, located somewhere in the U.S.,  and includes shelf upon shelf of cross sections of roads.  They happen to look like cubes of fat to me.  (We'll leave the bags of eyes story for another time.)  I understand the need  for  such a collection for engineering purposes; I just happened to like the idea (and the picture) of A Road Collection, and have it undisturbed by any explanation or insight.  Just a collection of roads. 

Comments

[TJ]

I love this post. These samples do resemble those props that health professionals whip out in front of a group and say, "Here is 5 pounds of fat, and here is 5 pounds of muscle."

[Jeff]

"...of the day, as we sat watching the Challenger story unfold, performed on of the most amazing feats I've ever seen in my life."

And ...?

[Joy Holland]

Yes, what was it? You can't tantalize your faithful readers like that.

[John Ptak]

Okay, sorry, I should've just told the story. In the early morning of the day that the Challenger exploded I went to buy some books from a man out in Middleburg, Virginia. his name was Athelstan Spilhaus. Dr. Spilhaus (1911-1998) was an insanely accomplished man--too much, really incredible (see below). He was a pioneering meteorologist, an oceanographer, an inventor, and artist, and so on. One of the things that he did was to discover the effects of the different temperatures in the layers of ocean water, and then invent the bathythermograph, (1937)--this would become extraordinarily important in pinpointing things that were far underwater, because stuff like SONAR doesn't necessarily go in precise vectors up and down. It gets sticky. And so if you really wanted to find the exact position of a U-Boat, say, you could do it.

And so Dr. Spilhaus invited me in and the Challenger quickly overtook everything. I visited for the whole day. During this time we (meaning "he") talked about just about everything. Eventually he asked if I had any interest in mechanical toys. He showed me some of his collection of 19th century (and earlier) toys. And then led me, fantastically, into an entire room of them. And then another room. And then another. It was extraordinary, just fantastic. And they all worked. Phenomenal.
But while all of this was going on, Dr. Spilhaus was tinkering with a box full of bits and junk and batteries and twine and spools and such. He was making a "visual aid" for a talk he was going to give for the American Philosophical Society at the Franklin Institute. Dr. Spilhaus of course was president of the FI for ten years or so.
And so he worked,seemingly absently, on this complex box of junk, carving stuff out of wood, winding twine, fitting, adjusting. At the end of the day, he was finished. His talk I think was oging to be about perception and perspective. And what he made to illustrate the talk was this box. He turned it over, revealing an opaque pane of glass and two articulated wooden arms. Into the end of each arm he fixed a grease pencil. He connected the circuit, and the arms moved the grease pencils to draw a decent likeness of the Escher print/painting of hands drawing hands. So as he was talking with me and watching tv and eating and joking, he had fashioned the gearworks for this thing out of scraps and no design. And then, when the likeness was finished, he reversed the pencils, and the thing erased itself.
It was a spectacular display of "tinkering', and an insight into a *very* strong brain. Oh yes, the other thing--he never had did a "test run". When he was finished, so was the machine. He knew it would function properly. All things considered--the ephemeral nature of what he was doing, the materials, the interruptions, and so on--I've just never seen anything like it.

Here's some stuff:
http://www.aps-pub.com/proceedings/1443/Spilhaus.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/01/us/athelstan-spilhaus-86-dies-inventor-with-eye-on-future.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/30/garden/life-with-3000-mechanical-toys.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/T/Toys

[Joy]

Wow.

[Jeff]

THAT is why I believe the movie "Men in Black."