JF Ptak Science Books

Missing Pieces of Women: Pope Joan & the Proper Popular Girl of "The Ladies’ Home Journal"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 910

Listening to these dreadful stories this morning on NPR about the Vatican’s relations with the Roman Jewish community and the abortive WWII papacy of Pope Pius XII—the papacy of blank and missing compassion—I thought about the missing Papacy of Pope Joan.  Whether or not she existed is a question of debate; whether she was a pope or not is perhaps even less debatable.  What seems not impossible though is the ability of a large institution like the Catholic Church to make the entire issue of unwanted history or legacy to go away. 

The historicity of this papacy is long and shows the murkiness of the earliest writers on Joan. She was supposed to have served as pope between Leo IV and Benedict III around the year 850.  The fuller versions of her history turn up in the 14^th century, although the earliest mentions of a female bishop of Rome go back to the 9^th century—Joan remains unnamed though until the 13^th century when Martin of Opava’s Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum¹(referring to Joan as “John Anglicus” or “John of Mainz”) does so for the first time.

Joan escapes the Middle Ages with a little flair, but doesn’t do so well in the Renaissance.  As a Missing Piece in the history of the Papacy she turns up not-so-well represented:  for example, she is seen here looking good but turning up bad overall as the Whore of Babylon².  She was treated as a disgrace, and impostor, someone who demeaned the Catholic institution by her sex and deception, though god knows that the history of the papacy is filled with horror stories³ that far exceed the reach of mere deception.

So I was thinking about the piecing-together of the Pope Joan jigsaw and remembered an actual “womanly” jigsaw that could actually be pieced together.  This bit came together as a result of a post I did here just two days ago (What Goes Into Making Human Robot Girls, 1941), and was one of a series of intolerably heavy eight-page pamphlets cementing the structure of female social intercourse at the hands of the magazine The Ladies’ Home Journal. 

One of these publications—hardly a pamphlet per se, just a folded 11x8 inch sheet of heavy stock—came without a title, presenting itself as a puzzle. The puzzle pieces are parts of two women, “Miss Popular” and “Miss Unpopular”: the reader was to take the publication, cut out the pieces, and reassemble them into hidden role models, with phrases describing each on the back of each puzzle piece, all done without the slightest possible understanding of metaphor or irony.

Miss Popular phrases/descriptors: live wire, plenty of push, wide awake, snappy looker, dependable, genuine, secret keeper, on-her-toes, spick and span, light hearted, all-around-student, straight-shooter, gossip scorner, sympathetic, cheerer-upper, sparkler.

Miss Unpopular’s phrases/descriptors: glory grabber, sour puss, cheater, sob-sister, snooty-snob, wet-blanket, borrower, prissy prig, sharp tongue, gory gossiper, clothes dummy, iceberg, sly and slippery, jellyfish, sticky-sweet, soft soaper (?) and of course fast and loose.

And so girls—or young women—picking up this publication in 1941 were expected to cut this thing up and piece together the proper (paper) role model using the reinforcing traits of meager acceptance printed on the back of the puzzle piece. And poor Pope Joan, whether she was real or not, whether she was imagined or sunk purposefully away into the Pandora’s sisters’ boxes of forced forgetfulness—it really doesn’t matter—is just another woman or part of woman’s puzzle whose blank or missing piece has been extruded, forced into a form more friendly to a world less friendly to women. 

Notes

1.According to the Chronicon:  “John Anglicus, born at Mainz, was Pope for two years, seven months and four days, and died in Rome, after which there was a vacancy in the Papacy of one month…” [See continued reading section below for more]

2. Babylon was the representation of the seat of evil on the Earth.  From the “Book of Revelation” (17:3–4): "And I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, full of names of blasphemy with seven heads and ten horns. The woman was garbed in purple and scarlet, and gilded with gold, gems, and pearls, and bearing a golden goblet in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication."

3. Borgia and the Medicis not being the least of the story: see E.R. Chamberlin’s The Bad Popes, (1969)

History of Holes 12: Caves in mid-Renaissance Art

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 909

“When [the soul] is firmly fixed on the domain where truth and reality shine resplendent it apprehends and knows them and appears to possess reason, but when it inclines to that region which is mingled with darkness, the world of becoming and passing away, it opines only and its edge is blunted, and it shifts its opinions hither and thither, and again seems as if it lacked reason.”  Plato, The Republic book. VI, 508d

Plato dipped deep into the myth/metaphor/parable/analogy/allegory of the cave, contrasting it with the allegory of the sun, discussing the pursuit of knowledge real and not-so.

I like the idea of the half-displayed, semi-schematic, fade-away disposition of the cave and how painters dealt with them and their hidden contents in early Renaissance art.

Its difficult to show a cave, a dark hole (occurring in all rock types and topographic situations, btw) that really hadn’t been dealt with scientifically yet—even if humans had been using them one way or another for thousands of years. 

I’ve noticed these images time in and time out, and I’ve not really saved them, or at least I haven’t segregated the odd etched or engraved images, though they are all here somewhere, so I can add to this post from time to time.  The image that I’ll use tonight comes from Harvard’s Fogg Museum and is the work of the Master of Osservanza (Sienese school, fl 1430-1450, manuscript illustrator).  It is a popular image, “Christ in Limbo”, though of the others working in this genre we see Christ generally at the entrance to a tomb/cave-like place, standing just outside of the doorway (as with Mantegna, Durer, Pacher, Fra Angelico and others). The Master of Osservanza gives us an exquisite cutaway view of the cave of limbo, showing both the outside and the inside, which is an uncommon and beautiful perspective.

I should add that the tearingly odd "Saint Anthony Abbot Tempted by a Heap of Gold", also painted by the Master of Osservanza (ca. 1435) depicts the least-likely-of-all-saints-to-be-tempted-by-gold reacting in horror to, well, nothing.  Nothing at all. We see him reacting to what used to be there, but which for some reason was removed, painted-over at some dim point in the dusty past, for reasons that I do not know.  (And so the painting could easily move into my Blank and Empty Things series.) But the desert landscape is so sparse and the sky so surreal with bent clouds that it is easy today to overlook the gold entirely. 

[I know there's SO much more to this business with the caves--I just wanted to get this post started before it all went down the thought-hole.]

What Goes into Making Human Robot Girls, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 907

[See the follow-up post "First Thing to Do is to Find Some Men"; How to Get a Boy-date, 1941]

An old friend of mine, Dr. Sam Koslov, was  brilliant, accomplished and polymathic, with great senses of wonder, inquisitiveness and humor.  He spent many years in research and as a long-time editor at Johns Hopkins APL.  He was a delightful and serious man, though one of the projects he worked on sounded much more like squeaky scifi than pure sci. That was Project Pandora, and science fiction it definitely wasn’t—it was an attempt at a form of control over human behavior via low level microwave radiation¹. 

This came to mind as I was leading through some very low level, high impact behavior control exhibited in a series of social engineering pamphlets published by the Ladies’ Home Journal in the early 1940’s.  It is heartbreaking, really, to think of people like my mother reading these things and being inundated by cultural architecture that left little to the imagination.  It seems so terrifically outrageous in 2010; and of course it makes me wonder about what things that seem so de rigueur today will be the Ladies’ Home Embarrassments of 2050 . 

Granted, nobody's corneas were being shaken loose via this method, but the effect of the sentiments of control in these pamphlets still seem eye-poppingly strangulating.  I’ve included only a few examples here, but there are at least a hundred others to choose from.

Perhaps it was the Date-Rate pamphlet that caused most of my teeth to fall out—it is sheer and painful, offering virtually nothing to the young women reading it and practicing its morality play but gender obedience and servility.

“Did you give him all your attention?” “Did he run things?” “Did you give him a chance to impress you?” “Could you make him laugh?”  It isn’t until the final rating question (#25) that we get to something that opened the possibility of a two-way interest in the relationship, but only barely: “Did you find you liked the same things?”  Its sad, really. 

When I read some of this to my 17-year-old daughter, she just looked at me with an open mouth and eyebrow furrows:  it was simply beyond listening to, for her, and certainly not anywhere near worthy of a response. 

 

Of course this is just the tip of the tip of the tippity tip of the iceberg on the control of social thought and the keeping of the male-dominated social order, and its only one part of a very wide spectrum of overall codifications, much of which seem pretty much left to history within two generations.  

 

Found Absurdist Art: 1950's Mommy Rockets, Flannel Moon Suits & Underwater Firefighters

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 907

I like Found Art categories:  Found Absurdist, Found Surrealist, Found Cubist. This is a vision of art or design produced for something specifically not absurd or surreal or cubist, but once removed from their intended environment and definers, become the thing that was beyond their specified reach.  The following examples are all from the mid-1950's, their sources reprinted below:

 

And this Spongebob-like existence under water, where you can have beaches and surf and fire and etc. at the bottom of the sea:

 

And of course the mom at the modern electric range feeling the birth of some sort of deep outer space astronautical space travel outer  space rocket (though with no visible viewing windows which leads me to believe that perhaps no Outer Space Astronauts were on board):

 

The image sources:

 

Big Planes: Aircraft with Dining Rooms in Their Wings

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 906

Is it just me, or do the rest of you see Cary Grant at a teeny-tiny table when looking at this aircraft? There’s just something so horribly wonderful about the excesses washing over the passengers of high privilege in this airplane.[Source: The Illustrated London News 21 Dec 1929.] 

 

And the airplane has a name—Christmas, named for the man who provided its inspiration, Dr. William Whitney Christmas¹--and was a paper plan to produce the world’s largest airplane.

 

It would’ve been so by leaps and bounds.  The Christmas was to have a 262’ wingspan and a gross weight of 142,000 pounds at the time when one of the largest planes aloft—the Patrician Keystone K-78—had a wingspan of 86’ and carried 18 passenger, 2 pilots and an engineer. It also held the world’s record for hauling the heaviest payload, which for some reason was “33 girls”.  It was bigger still than the largest thing in the air, Lufthansa’s Dornier DO.X –this was an aircraft capable of moving 60-100 passengers (serviced by a crew of 10-14), a flying boat with 12 (Curtiss Conqueror 610hp) engines on wing sections 157’ long. (Was this a mile-a-minute fuel consumer?) The Dornier plane didn’t last long in service due to operating costs (1929 was a bad year to undertake an expense like this, especially in the hyperinflated Germany) and was in an aviation museum by 1934². (This plane—one of three constructed—was destroyed in a RAF bombing raid in 1943.)

Here’s something extraordinary about the Christmas:  it had a dining room (actually, a “dining saloon”) that took up 15% of the plane’s floor plan.  There was also the spacious smoking room, the crew and officer quarters, the machinist’s shop, engine room balconies (?), and of course the staterooms that seem to run along most of the front of the plane. The side elevation shows not very much space at all allotted to what must’ve been some massive engines, seeing as how there’s only two four-blade props. (The small lateral cross section shows two people against the plane for scale—these folks must’ve been giants; I figure they should be a little more than 75% of the manikins.  I make each prop blade to be about 10 foot (?))

As it turns out this aircraft looks a lot like Edmund Rumpler’s³ (1872-1940) giant.  Outfitted with a long row of staterooms along the front edge of the large wing and a huge dining room, it doesn’t seem to be equipped with an area for the engines.  Maybe this was an endemic flaw among older fast-thinkers…  

Notes:

1. Dr. Christmas (1865-1960) was the third American to fly and was the first to design a plane with aerilons.

2. Compare this to the Antev An-225, a modern very-,limited-production monster that could haul 1.3 million pounds of cargo, and the 747 (hauling up to 900,000 pounds) and the mammoth Airbus A380—all relatively the same size but with fabulous design and power.

3.Rumpler made very significant aeronautical contributions to the German effort in WWI, as well as designed the first aerodynamic auto—his military planes though during the war were  great triumph, partially because they were also Germany’s first mass-production-possible aircraft.  This didn’t help him much when Hitler came to power—being Jewish, Rumpler was arrested, and then released by Goering who at least could find a small part of himself to save this one Jew who served Germany so well.

4.  Source for the Rumpler image is the wonderful ModernMechanix site here.

 

Interesting comparison chart for big planes: [Source]

 

The Oldest Image of a Flying Pig? An Adynaton Antiquarian Illustration, 1687.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 905

How old is the  saying, or rejoinder, “…when pigs fly”?  I dunno, and frankly it doesn’t really matter. Except for right now, when I found this rather extraordinary image of a pig-in-the-sky from 1687.  It isn’t a flying pig, but I’m not sure what it is:  the origin of the image is from J.de  Dalence, Traite de l’Aiman (publihsed in Amsterdam in 1687), a book about the history of magnetism.  But nothing else matters, just the flying, atmos-floating pig, right there in the sky, perfect against a puffy cloud. 

I suspect—without any intention of doing any research on my suspicion—that this may very well be the earliest depigtion of a flying pig.  And it just so happens to have appeared in the same year of Newton’s great Principigia. 

And just for the record, I wonder how often anyone sees an image 300+ or more years old of any of the other great adynations? For example, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”  from the Book of Matthew, 19:24, just doesn’t seem to lend itself to empirical description, as it would pretty much lessen and defeat the purpose of the literary description.

The flying pig, though, may be a horse of a different color, so to speak.

Advanced Utopian Martian Communities, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 904

This futuro-Utopian homage to ET-civilizations and space travel was written just too early to have been sucked up by period-appropriate Hollywood script raptors.  Reading it is a little out of the question and left to the domain of sci-fi archaeologists; the book is stuffy and dry  and very stiff (brittle !) without being terribly interesting and doesn’t stop for the right word when four will do. (See below for an example of the writing.)   The ideas though lurking beneath the surface though are pretty good for its time, though they are hardly the great undertow that rips you away and out of the clutches of the stuff that make this a pretty object rather than a book. 

To Mars via the Moon, an Astronomical Story. written by Mark Wicks and published in 1911, left the Moon quite behind in its literary assault on a super-advanced civilization that the space travelers find on the red planet.  Wicks owes a big nod (and gives it) to the astronomer and faded theorist Percival Lowell and his Mars as an Abode of Life (1908)1.  Wicks’ Mars is enormously advanced techno-superpower filled with telepaths and mega intelligence, as well as a reincarnated version of his own dead son. 
Okay, enough.  I’m really just stopping here because of the noble outsider-like Martian city/landscape, a circular city with canal2-like connectors. It’s a busy environment, with the perspective-challenged city looking vaguely bathed in a holy halo, car-like objects skimming along the canal-roads, and “pre-flying saucers” in the air.  It is lovely in its own way—certainly the publishers thought so, as they incorporated the design right on the spine of the book.   

Notes

 

1.Lowell’s hypothesis was rounding criticized by many, including Alfred Russell Wallace’s  Is Mars Habitable?.

 

2. Giovanni Schiaparelli reported these features first, in 1877, referring to them as canali in his native Italian, which means something more like naturally-occurring grooves or channel; English-speakers like Lowell stopped just short with the word, lopping of the final “I” and going with “canals”,  with its overt implications of intelligent design.  And thus are religions born.

 

The entire book can be found on the Gutenberg site: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2763/27633-8.txt

The sample of the writer’s ware is below, the final two paragraphs of the book: the penultimate paragraph being one long run-on sentence including four embedded exclamation points, and the final two sentences of the final graph ending in an exclamation point and a dot dot dot question mark:
 
“Yes, we are doing well--there is no doubt about that; but,
notwithstanding my present very satisfactory circumstances and the certainty of a brilliant future if I stay here, ideas have long and persistently been running in my mind that it would be far better for me to go back to Mars, and--by Jove! strange indeed that I never thought of it before!--perhaps those very persistent ideas are actually the outcome of Martian influences!!”

“The wonderful music I heard upon Mars still rings in my ears; and, at times, so thrilling and peculiar is its effect upon me, that I feel as though I were being almost irresistibly impelled to return to that planet. Well, I should very much like to see the dear old Professor and Merna again, and also my many Martian friends. Then there's Siloni, whom I can never forget, for mentally her image is ever before me. What a nice girl she was! If I were to return to Mars, I wonder whether...?”

First edition spine source: http://www.sumnerandstillman.com/Catalog/sumner.cgi/9691

Ocean-Crossing Floating Airports Across the Atlantic, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 903

This short shelf-lived idea was that of Edward R. Armstrong (1880-1955), who in 1927  first published his plan for a series of 1200’x200’ floating platforms for refueling and whatnot for transcontinental flights.  These five-acre stations—named the “Langley” in honor of Samuel Pierpont Langley¹-- would be placed every 375 miles across the ocean.  It doesn’t look like a very practical (or good) idea, but Armstrong received a $750,000 piece of development change from du Pont and GM, which was major dollars in 1929. 

 

Armstrong’s idea would get major play in the popular press from time-to-time, his project renamed “The Seadrome” and discussed as a series of floating islands.  Armstrong himself would organize the Seadrome Ocean Dock Corp. in the late 1930’s, his pretty but enormously impractical idea (reported by Time Magazine² in 1933 as little more than “a perennial gift to Sunday feature editors”)  finally grinding to a salty end with greater fuel capacity and efficiency in transatlantic aircraft. 

An even worse idea appeared in the pages of Science and Mechanics in 1936:

 
Notes:

1. A Time Magazine article published 28 October 1929 [a day before the market crashed!] about the Langley oddly states that Langley was the “designer of the plane which, except for accidents, might have flown before the Wrights' plane did in 1903”.  Tough potatoes. What the magazine didn’t state was that Langley, who was the president of the Smithsonian Institution at the time with access to major money and benefactors simply went about the flight problem incorrectly, and produced an airplane (or “aerodrome”, as he called it) that did not and would not fly. Not flying because of accidents means, well, not flying.  The Wrights’ approach to problem solving was elegant and beat Langley by miles.  Langley deserves credit for his other (many) achievements, but not for this aircraft.

 

This same article only references Armstrong as a “swarthy engineer”.

The article is reprinted below.

 

Books: Texts in the Sciences: Darwin, Newton, Vesalius, Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, etc.

Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Voyage of the Beagle, 1845

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): On the Origin of Species, 1859

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Descent of Man, 1871, excerpts

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Descent of Man, 1871

 

Theory and Methods of Science

Bernardino Telesio (1509–1588): from On the Nature of Things According to Proper Principles, 1565

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): from First Book of Aphorisms

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Preface to the Novum Organum [At Hanover] Francis Bacon (1561-1626): The New Atlantis, 1627

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): The New Atlantis, 1626

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Various Texts 

On Not Mentioning the Jews in Nazi/Polish/Holocaust Literature: "Spring Held No Hope", 1942

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 902

Maria Mikorska’s Spring Held No Hope, published in London in June 1941 is a difficult, hard, emotional read, even in the genre of Holocaust literature.  It quickly paints a documentary history of bestial behavior of the Nazis in Poland.  I wonder though what happened to the mentioning of the Jewish issue in all of this reportage of inhuman transportation and treatment of humans, as the reference almost never occurs.  

Reading though this 52-page pamphlet of terror and horror, I wondered what exactly happened to the missing reportage of the hunting and killing of the Jews as a group.. The period of 1939-1941 saw the beginning of the Endlösung der Judenfrage¹ (“The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem”) in which 90+% of the 3.5 million Polish Jews alive in the Polish Second Republic were killed and exterminated, the primary victims of the Nazi Holocaust.  At this point in the war the Nazis were removing Jews from their cities and establishing regional ghettoes.  Once the Jews were collected in this manner it was easier for the administration of their extermination.

Getting back to Spring Held No Hope and the lack of identification of the Jews as a persecuted group I turn to pp 24 and 25 (illustrated below and clickable).  

The examples of inhuman transport and the direct extermination of men, women and children by starvation and hypothermia mention the cities Jarocin, Gdynia, Siedlice, Skierniewice, Lublin and Otwock:  all of which had large centers of Jewish populations that were removed by the Germans directly after the invasion and removed to ghettoes though this fact is not mentioned in this pamphlet. Ostensibly the collection of Jews was not in an effort to seize property (as the majority of the Jews in Poland at this time had little wealth) but rather to supply labor (being a group with the potential for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of humans capable of performing slave labor).  The Jews in Gdynia (for example) were sent to Siedlice to establish a larger Ghetto immediately after the invasion; by 1942 the tens of thousands of occupants were either shot and killed or sent to Treblinka; 2,000 or so remained after this, though most of them were also soon sent to Treblinka; those remaining were all executed when the ghetto was completely liquidated on 14 April 1943. 

I am in no way saying that it the murder of Poles during the Nazi occupation was limited to Jews—the 3.5 million Polish Jews represented 10% of the Polish population; of the remaining 90%, or 32 million or so Gentile Poles, some 3 million were killed by the Nazis, or about 10% of that population.

These are horrible stories told by Mikorska—but I’m bothered by the lack of the recognition of the Jews as the major, featured target in all of this and wonder if the author suffered an enormous sin of omission. This is far from being  a singular event--even the important and highly significant Eisenhower report on the concentration camps of May 1945 does not signify the Jewish people as anything out of the ordinary--and may well be indicative of the general practice of dealing with the Jewish aspect of the Nazi exterminations.

Notes

1. The name and practiced of the Final Solution was infamously adopted at the Wannsee conference on 20 January 1942, liquidating the ghettoes and sending the occupants to the six major concentration camps of Auschwitz, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka.

I've written elsewhere in this blog on the Holocaust; for more, search "Holocaust" in the Google blogsearch in the left column.

Unintentional Absurdist Art: Flying Boats with Bucket Feet, 1745

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 901

This treadmill-powered French pontoon dredge, printed around 1745, looks for all the world as though it is floating in mid-air, propelling itself along with two bucket-ended legs, elegantly and impossibly moving its miracle-y-balanced self forward against all forms of reason and logic, a clunky 18^th century non-transforming Transformer.  The profile actually and simply shows a dredge at work and just  fails to show the water in which it floats. 

The boat’s dredge is powered by four humans in two treadmills which would move the buckets back and forth, scraping up the river silt and then emptying it into the shuttle launch aft.  Simple and ingenious—except when taken out of context, where it begins to look like some advanced Age of Reason floating boat which, although awkward-looking, is not without its charm.  

Source:  Charles Singer, History of Tecnology, volume IV, pg. 634.  Singer loftily notes that this machine “is reminiscent of Goethe’s poem Der Zauberlehring which inspired Paul Dukas’s well known symphonic poem L’apparenti sorcier” and which would be better known to most folks as Mickey’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice gig in Fantasia.

History of the Future: Space Cannon Moon Flights Yield Jelly People?(1936)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 899

The Babel-like tower pictured below is a still from the movie Things to Come (1936), an adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Shape of Tings to Come (1931).  (Wells' himself wrote the screenplay a few years before the movie appeared.)  The story is a history of the period from 1936 to 2054, including a devastating war that begins in December 1940 (complete with major air assault, poison gases and so on), followed by plague and destruction for another forty years, after which there is a confrontation between two classes of remaining humans, with big doses of New World Order, Technocracy, Fascism and glimmers of hope of science and technology saving the future.  There's a lot that happens in the story, but the part I'm most interested in comes towards the end of the film and depicts a space gun for launching a massive capsules to the Moon--in this case, a capsule containing two "starred-crossed lovers".

We are told that the launching apparatus--the "gun"--is 1500 feet tall, which iterates out to a 750'  base and which also makes the capsule about 75'.  That's impossibly massive firepower. (Don't forget that somebody had to construct the 1700' tower next to the gun that lifted the capsule into position, for some reason lowering the thing down the barrel.)

In the history of big guns, this would be about the most massive ever constructed in the sci fi world so far as I can tell. In the real world, the Kaiser Wilhelm gun (or "Paris Gun", the Kaiser Wilhelm Geshutz) was a long-barreled, light shelled monster: its 92' long barrel (plus a 20' extension) launched a 94kg shell about 130 km, reaching a maximum height of 40km (about 25 miles) high. For all of its mass (the gun weighed 256 tons without the railway cars) the shell that it fired didn't weight much at all....though the shell did reach an extreme height. (Ironically, the gun was built for attacking the deepest of the deep bunkers of the fortresses along the Maginot Line; it was never needed for that, as the Maginot Line was simply left behind in the Nazi assault on France.)

The Schwerer Gustav was a 1350 ton beast which fired a 14,000 pound shell (!) about 20 miles. A  little later came the Nazi V-3 (the lesser known of the V-weapons), the Vergeltungsewaffe 3, a 130 metre (!) long, 150mm gun built along the side of a hill, launching a 140 kg shell. The Iraqi Big Babylon gun was sort of like this one, though never built--it was to have a 500' barrel and would be supported by a hillside. 

Getting back to the unfortunate Well's space gun: this thing was supposed to fire a 75' capsule which must've weighed in excess of 10,000 pounds (easy, what with supply and fuels and so on, plus the structural weight) straight up (!!) and somehow reach escape velocity of 11.2 km/s, piercing the exosphere some 400 miles high or thereabouts (or 1.5 orders of magnitude higher than the Paris Gun).  I cannot intuitively imagine the tremendous explosion necessary to achieve this goal, although it could be figured out pretty easily.  Back of the napkin figuring tells me that the speed of the capsule exiting the gun's barrel would place the occupants in the vicinity of something like 450Gs--that's more than ten times the lethal amount of force that a human can withstand.  I'm not sure what happens to a person at 450Gs--I do know that it wouldn't be pretty.  Anyway, none of this part of the space travel section of the movie wasn't pretty....except for the props, which I like, and which can be seen in the clip below.

Overall I think that this would make a lovely physics problem for discussion in a high school classroom. 

Things to come: 10; 1936-2037

The Invasion of America, 19?? (1935 Scenario for Invasions via Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 898

(This is a continuation of the Invasion of America series, started here.)

Even before WWII,   the American military and variously-aligned think-tank subsidiaries had for years hypothesized U.S. invasion scenarios.  For convenience’s sake, they were color-coded so as to not confuse one invadee with another: for example, there were War Plan Citron (an invasion of Brazil); War Plan Emerald (intervention in Ireland); War Plan Green (war with Mexico); War Plan Indigo (an invasion of Iceland); War Plan Lemon (an invasion of Portugal); War Plan White: (plan for dealing with civil disturbances cause by Communist insurgents), and many others. (I cannot find the color-coded plan for the 20^th century invasion of Canada, but it did exist.)

Lesser known are the U.S. military’s preparation for the invasion of America.

This two-page spread (all that I have of a longer article) appeared in Fortune Magazine for September 1935.  It was undoubtedly generated by a number of causes, not the least of which was the rearming of Nazi Germany (referred to in this article as a ‘miracle”), which could theoretically cause some amount of concern in semi-fortress America.  It was also an opportunity for Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur to whip up a little hell in Congress for the federal government to give the military some more money so that there was more to the “fortress” part of America than two oceans. 

Basically the plan seems to call for a standing, ready army of specialist forces that were agile and highly trained, a large network, of anti-aircraft batteries and detection areas, and of course a large buildup of the Army Air Force.  All of this of course cost money, and almost all o fit would’ve been directed towards MacArthur and his subordinates. (It is interesting and odd to note that the Fortune article notes that three of the top four major general assistants to MacArthur were Irish (“see the four big shots…with three Irish names”).)

[Due to difficulties in the size of this map I have to present it in three sections, but I’m sure that the overall flavor will be maintained.] 

The most prominent feature (besides the black invasion routes) are the terribly antiquated (even for 1936?) depictions of coastal defense canons.  Perhaps this was disingenuous to include them with such flair, what with the main point of the article lending itself towards air invasion, but there they are, protecting the American coastline from a ripping adventure from the sea. 

But as we can see the successful invasion routes are coming from odd places—from Alaska, Canada, the Caribbean) against which the U.S. seemingly had no defense.  This was especially true in the Pacific Northwest (“here defense system is weak”) where America was entirely susceptible to attack and invasion “from army basing in Alaska”.  The rest of the west coast didn’t fair so well, though the only other direct threat was from “25,000 able-bodied male Japanese…Californians suppose they have secret arms and drill at night in dark halls”.

The southwestern and southern California areas were relatively secure, except in the case of an enemy capturing Mexico; then, “an attack here would almost certainly be launched, in conjunction with one against San Antonio”.  I guess there would be long intrigue, much preparation and enormous effort to attack and secure Mexico, and I’m assuming that the thinkers behind constructing this map assumed that the U.S. would be doing nothing during this prolonged period of time. 

The attack on America in the Gulf would ostensibly come from Mexico and “an enemy basing in the Caribbean”, with a central interest in Birmingham and Norfolk.  But the main thrust coming to the U.S. from unnamed horribleness would be coming through the St. Lawrence and points east in Canada, swooping down on Lake Champlain, the Mohawk Valley, Troy, Buffalo and Detroit.  I know that there were bigger industrial concerns in these places in 1936 than there are now, but, well, my god there would be better places to begin an attack on the U.S. than from Montreal and Toronto.

In all of this I see that the industrial northeast is left alone, save for a “feint” attack to dislodge resources and attention away from the movement against the Virginia coast. There’s the navy yard and industry and shipping and etc. there, but it would seem a terrible waste to attack here rather than a much juicer and more northerly series of prizes. 

No attacker is named in what I own of this article, and there is a very curious absence of any threat coming from the already-warring Japan (save for the Japanese super secret nighthawks in San Fran).  The article does make a case—apart from the map—that national defense was at a low ebb insofar as manpower and ordnance were concerned.  But it scoots around the issue of the war of Japan against China and the vast militarization of the Nazis.  (Of course, this is Fortune magazine, and Krupp and Hoechst and other German firms, and Standard Oil, and the Bank for International Settlement, and Ford, and SKF, and etc. abetting the Nazi war machine were doing some nice business in the U.S., so perhaps it would’ve been best not to make Nazi money upset with some bad press.)

Taking all sorts and manner of considerations into account, this is just simply a miserable attempt to reckon what the future might bring to America in the hands of unlabeled enemies—it is simply a rousing caroling of general fear of attack from places unknown. 

Nazi Propaganda: the British Threat to Germany, pre-War 1939

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 897                                                          

I've written twenty or so posts here about (mostly) graphical propaganda of World War II, and most of that coming from the Axis (and mainly Nazi) end.  A popular theme among this limited exposure seems to be the Germany-surrounded meme:  Germany under attack from all sides: massive attacks being directed by the British from air and sea,

 

airstrikes coming in from thousands of planes in Czechoslovakia, Poland moving on the ground and in the air to invade south-eastern Germany, retaliation mounting from the French, and on and on.  And somehow when all of this is presented in cartographical form to the average reader, and when it is presented over and over again, the propaganda must take its toll.  

Tonight's installments come from the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig), and were printed just before and just after the start of the general hostilities of WWII (meaning the invasion of Poland, and not the actions against Austria or Czechoslovakia, and not the war in the east beng waged against China by Japan).The first comes in the 27 July 1939 issue--featuring a remembrance of WWI on the cover, showing a devastated field of battle with a spanking-new heavy dagger thrust into the heart of the field--and shows John Bull pulling strings of an advancing/attacking navy in the one hand while the other controls a firing network for cannons facing Germany based in its contiguous-bordered countries.  (The image was created by the prodigious Richard Lipus and titled "Englishe Kriegspolitik".)

The second piece was published just after the start of the war (21 September 1939) and attacks Neville Chamberlain (contrasting words and deeds) and his "treacherous" involvement with neutral countries.

Not particularly virulent, these maptoons undoubtedly helped to form a Nast-ian image in the commonplace psyche of the German people about the treacherousness of the Brits and of their dire situation of being surrounded by potent and threatening enemies.

 

Some of the other posts on this blog relating to WWII propaganda:

Maps as Propaganda http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/maps-as-propaga.html

Maps of the Polish “Corridor” http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/09/propaganda-in-maps-the-polish-corridor-1939.html

Maps of Naval Disaster http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/05/jf-ptak-science-books-llc-post-624-the-admiralty-regrets-to-announce--was-for-years-the-standard-beginning-to-an-offici.html

Anti-Nazi Propaganda http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/08/antinazi-propaganda.html

Nazi Propaganda and the Threat From Czechoslovakia http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/propaganda-maps.html

Humanitarian propaganda for Allied families with family members who were POWs http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/09/humanitarian-pr.html

Nazi Germany and Scaring the Will to War (Germany surrounded, again) http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/10/nazi-propaganda.html

Nazi-directed scare tactics published in English http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/nazi-propagan-1.html

The Luftwaffe and RAF present their (graphical) popular cases http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/09/graphical-and-a.html

Bad Dirigibles and Balloons from Good Thinkers: Thaddeus Lowe, Konstantin Tsiolkowsky and Dr. Seuss

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 896

Tonight’s inspiration comes from one of my daughter Tess’ bedtime stories, Dr. Seuss’ Oh, the Thinks you can Think—particularly one of the fantastic illustrations, this one showing a swimming pool balloon.  I’ve seen some interesting images of balloons and dirigibles taken as serious efforts that reminded me of that double-page spread by the good Doctor.  

In July, 1931 Konstantin Zilkowsky’s sheet metal dirigible appeared in Modern Mechanics (this image from the fabulous Modern Mechanix.com website, cropped), looking a lot like the mountain and its imagined whale looked like to Herman Melville at his Arrowhead home. 

 

This may have been the Omega end of bad ideas in the career of Zilkowsky, who is better known by the other spelling of his name, Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1835), a Russian misanthrope and space pioneering genius who wrote more than 500 works on rocketry and exploration including what is arguably the first tech word ever done in the field (in 1903, The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices). Tsiolkovsky somehow lasted through purges and Stalinist tirades, while few of his colleagues did—many mysteriously disappeared, while others went to prison and disappeared there.  (Stalin’s crude and insatiable blood lust, perhaps the worst of the century, knew no bounds, not even to the scientists who could conceivably hand him reigns of rocket/missile-propelled power.)  Anyway, Tsiolkovsky’s dirigible was composed of a collapsible metal so that the aircraft could form its own hangar when “docked”.  I don’t know where to begin with this one…

The second (among many other possibilities) is the ship-balloon of Thaddeus Lowe (1832-1913) One of Lowe’s great contributions in the history of ballooning was providing aerial reconnaissance via (panoramic) photographs to the Union army on Confederate army positions—particularly the Rebel positions at Richmond (1864) and Fredericksburg (1862). (He had a wide span of professional interests and wound up living the high life in L.A. in a half-acre home.)  This 130-foot diameter monster with a steam-ship escape pod (named The City of New York and then renamed The Great Western after the city couldn’t supply enough gas to get the thing inflated) was intended to be a transatlantic traveler.  Ready to try this fantastic adventure in 1860, ready to take charge, ready to begin a very problematic trip across the Atlantic in a balloon, Lowe, seemingly ready, had his balloon ripped apart while waiting for launching by a chance and not-horrible wind.  Lucky for Lowe and the Union Army, this didn’t happen over the ocean somewhere out of reach, and the North’s important info-gatherer did not sink like a stone in the cold dark sea.  (I’m very cynical that the 100-foot-long, bulbously heavy steam-powered “life boat” would’ve landed right-side-up and softly enough to have been of any use save for providing some floaty bits that survivors from the balloon could’ve clung to for a while before being consumed by King Neptune. 

I'd vote for Dr. Seuss' work as the most logical.