JF Ptak Science Books

WWII Aircraft Cross Sections--Spitfire, Hurricane, Beaufighter, Lancaster (!) and Stirling.

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1165

Here are some fabulous examples of technological cross sections from the collection here--this part concenrtrating on some of the British WWII aricraft.  The drawings are just superb, and you can easily get lost in them, following the geogrpahy of engineering detail from one logical place to the next. All of these images were published in The Illustrated London News and appeared 1940-1943.

And the detail (sorry for that--the originals are much larger than the scanning bed would allow...)

One Upmanship–a Brief on the History of Ladders

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1165 

One morning Tim was rather full
His head felt heavy which made him shake
He fell off the ladder and he broke his skull
And they carried him home, his corpse to wake
Rolled him up in a nice, clean sheet
laid him out upon the bed
With a bottle of whiskey at his feet
And a barrel of porter at his head–Tim Finnegan’s Wake, ca. 1850's. 

The whole pursuit of ladders here today comes from looking at something described as a ladder but really isn’t one: Henry Moseley’s famous “ladder diagram” from a 1913 paper establishing the important Moseley’s Law (establishing the atomic number as a measurable experimental quantity). A more concrete ladder-like diagram is found (beginning about 1885) is the diagram used for displaying readouts from electrocardiograms.  On the other hand, the ladder from which Tim Finnegan fell in the 19th century Irish ballad (from which Mr. Joyce drew his inspiration for his last book from 1939, dropping the possessive apostrophe) was a real ladder, but neot necessarily nuts-and-bolts real.

There are of course monster ladders–like the ones that reach 1300' high inside transmission towers.  There were long ladders that reached up the sides of massive funnels of ocean-going ships, and short ones leading to the cockpits of fighter planes. There’s a very short ladder that reached down only eight feet or so, but that one was on the side of the LEM of the Apollo 11, and the LEM was on the Moon, which may be our furthest-away ladder. There were other 19th century versions of far-away ladders–these belonged to some of the early aeronauts and their balloons, some of which held some very large passenger cabins, some of which had two storeys, complete with ladders.

The most famous of all ladders is probably Jacob’s ladder, an account of the patriarch’s dream of entering Heaven as found in Book of Genesis (28:11–19).  On the other hand, the image painted by Sandro Botticelli, led the other way, south, deep south, to Hell.  William Blake chose to represent another more beneficent ladder, again leading the aspirant to Heaven. And speaking of painters, the elder Brueghel included ladders in minor appearances in a number of his paintings (like “Big Fish Eat Little Fish”, and Hunters in the Snow”).

William Shakespeare wrote of a gentleman’s knowledge of rope ladders, which of course could be found all over masted ships throughout history–and indeed the ladder stretches all the way back in human history, reaching back to cave paintings that dat from the 11th century BCE. 

There are plenty of metaphorical ladders like “climbing the corporate ladder”, or hope for glory and success and victory in simple Chutes and Ladders.  And then of course, what better way to end a short look at ladders than with lovely lovely Ludwig (the other one):

“My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.” --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.54

Moseley's Ladder:

Botticelli's Hell:

 

 

The Speed of History--a Note on Change in Aviation, 1905-1915

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1163

Being at the airport yesterday to watch the glorious EAA B-17f take off and land (and to see our 7- year-old climb through it and the Blackhawk that suddenly appeared) put me in mind of the extraordinary advances in flying in the earliest history of heavier-than-air flight.  I picked up a volume of The Illustrated London News for 1909 to check out the popular reporting of the aeroplane and as usual got a very sharp reminder of how fast everything happened in the 1905-1915 period.


In the earliest stages of the development of heavier-than-air flight (powered and not, 1848-1906) there were major innovations and essential experiments from a dozen countries:  England, the U.S., Poland, France, South Africa, Russia, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Romania, Sweden, Norway and  Denmark.  Even with all o f this directed work, the methods weren’t necessarily made public or when so were not well distributed, with many of the aviation/engineers working in obscurity and without contact with their peers.  (Examples of the major players in the history of heavier-than-air early flight include John Stringfellow, England, 1848; George Cayley, England, 1853;  Matias Perez, Cuba, 1856; Jean-Marie Le Bris, France, 1856; Jan Wnek, Poland, 1866; Goodman Household, South Africa, 1871;  Félix du Temple de la Croix, France, 1874; Victor Tatin, France, 1874; John Joseph Montgomery, US, 1883; Alexander Feodorovich Mozhaiski, Russia, 1884; Clément Ader, France,1890;  Otto Lilienthal, Germany, 1891; Lawrence Hargrave, Australia, 1894;  Hiram Stevens Maxim, United Kingdom, 1894; Shivkar Bapuji Talpade, India, 1895; Samuel Pierpont Langley, US, 1896; Octave Chanute, US, 1896; Carl Rickard Nyberg, Sweden, 1897; Gustave Whitehead, US, 1899; Percy Pilcher, U.K. 1899;  Augustus Moore Herring, US, 1899; Wilhelm Kress, 1901; Orville & Wilbur Wright, US, 1902;  Richard Pearse, New Zealand, 1903;  Karl Jatho, Germany, 1903;  Orville & Wilbur Wright, US, December 17, 1903 (finally for the first recorded controlled, powered, sustained heavier than air flight);  Orville & Wilbur Wright, US, 1904 (in the Wright II, making the first turn, and then later in September making the first circle); Horatio Phillips, UK, 1904; John Joseph Montgomery and Daniel Maloney, US 1905; Wilbur Wright, US, October 5, 1905 (circular flight of 24 miles in 39 minutes); Traian Vuia, Romania, 1906; Alberto Santos-Dumont, Brazil, 1906.)

By 1909 there were many dozens of different aircraft flying around, just about but not quite getting to the sophisticated stage.  In just a few short years, by 1915, there would be an enormous increase in the capacity and numbers of airplanes –pushed along of course by the needs of war. Which is a little odd as some of te earliest fliers’ ideas and planes  were rejected by the military establishment.  The Wright fliers for example were not at first a welcomed idea to the U.S. Army (for numerous reasons, the Army saying “no” in 1905 but renewing their interest in 1907 and finally buying the plane in 1909) ; nor were the Brits interested in continuing funding for Samuel Cody (from Birdville, Texas) , pulling support for him just a few months after he had succeeded in flying the first British-built airplane in Great Britain (the British Army Aeroplane 1B).  That of course would all change in just a few years with the guns of August.

Seeing this plan (above) for Samuel Cody’s flight from London to Manchester would’ve been a breathtaking achievement, had he made it.  The event had the trappings of An Enormous Situation, with smoke bombs and 450'-long white cloths to show him the way.  As particularly thrilling as this event was in 1909 it would be overshadowed in short order. In perspective, it was only six years earlier that the Wrights engaged in the first powered heavier than air flight.

In 1903 the Wrights flew 121 feet; in just six years, Louis Bleriot would fly across the English Channel (on 25 July 1909); six years later Alcock and Brown would make the first transatlantic flight.  In  1911 Cal Rodger (11 De3cember1911) made the first American transconteintal flight (completed over the course of 50 days, with 3 days 10 hours in actual flying time).  11 Years later Jimmy Doolittle flew from Florida to California in just 21 (with one stop for refueling); the next year would see the record for transcontinental flight broken with a nonstop effort of 26 hours; in 1930 the time would go down to 12 hours and by 1945 the time was an extraordinary 5 hours 17 minutes.  (The retiring Blackbird flew the length of the country in 1990 in 64 minutes.)
               
The next image showing the altitude records for aviation in 1909 is just as phenomenal. The record at this point still stood with the Wrights at 585 feet, less than double the height of St. Paul’s.  It was a huge achievement, the other contenders coming to within hundreds of feet of their accomplishment but not quite doing enough to become the new world record holders,.  Ion just the next year improvements in the quality of aircraft and engines and control made it possible fo r Louis Paulhan to achieve 3,018 feet in January 1910,   Walter Brookins top climb to  a record of 4,603 feet (7 July 1910), and Ralph Johnsonte to 8,471 on 20 October 1910.  .  It must have bene a shocking development to have seen aeronautics to advance so quickly, breaking the old altitude record by a more than an order of magnitude in one year.  The speed record is a more difficult matter, but after recording speed records in the 30/40mp range in the 1903-1909 period, it broke to 66 mph 1910, 134 mph in 1914 and over 300 mph by 1928.  The difference in aviation in those 25 years is similar to that between the computing now and that of 1985 (and certainly 1979).


I’m just saying that it is good to remember the enormity of change that took place in that early period of 1906-1919 or thereabouts–they were simply revolutionary developments that must’ve appeared  to the folks of those times.   


Notes:

Cody was one of the most colorful figures in the history of early aviation in the U.K.  Born in 1867 and self-styled after Colonel William F. Cody, he was an inate adventurer and experiential bon vivant, who loved what he did and made sure that everyone else knew it, if nothing else. All that aside, he was a significant figure, important in the development of flight in England, and he died young for his pursuit. He appeared in the LA Times of 14 September 1907 (page 14) saying that the future of war would be in the air, and that the airship would “effect commerce as well as war”.  

Note on the History of Eating: the Quiet Magnificence of the Soda Fountain

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1162

In the U.S. perhaps there have been few things of soft luzury so reachable to so many than the soda fountain.  For a small fraction of a daily persistence-existence income, a person could go into one of these restaurants and enjoy a cup of coffee and a donut.  Not only that, the soda fountain was approachable to younger people, including teenagers--perhaps the first time in this country when children and adults could indpendently visit a social place (that did not include organized religion) for paid entertainment, a sure sign if any indicating the growth of a real middle class, realish dispersal of capital* and a real sense of leisrure time. 

For a while in the 30's and 40's and 50's the soda fountain occupied what might have been a real keystone position in the panoply of American entertainment.  It seemed to be everywhere, in every city and town, in reality and in the imagination--it made a big appearance in literature and art and in the movies, a staple of average in the average American's life.

Of course there were taverns and saloons and wayside inns and restaurants, but these institutions were different, more removed from the population of "everyone" that the soda fountain drew on, and in.  Even the idea of the "leisure time" that it took to enjoy such a place, a place in public that involved consuming products for money, an entertainment, was still sort of new.  For example the idea of travel for the sake of leisure and entertainment was virtually unknown in the U.S. in  he 18th century, and only started somewhat in the 1830's/40's, but even then under the guise of movement for hygiene or health benefits, taking the water (as in spas and hot baths, hyrdotherapy) and--a little later on--the airs. Vacation as we know it today would have still be almost entirely unfamiliar to Americans at the late 19th century and even into the early 'teens of the twentieth.  Mass production and inventions like the automoble (and a decent income) really gave birth to the idea of leisure time, which would've preceded the soda fountain by a decade or two. 

Somehow, I can't help but thinking about Henry James and the Soda Fountain. No doubt due to the remarkable Larry McMurtry's Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, though what I'm thinking about is different, about what  the brahmin James would've thought about the new development had he been around to see it. .  Mostly this idea comes from James' obervations on NYC after his return from being abroad for decades, seeing the city in the Gilded Age unseen for so many years, and thinking of it all in terms of being "wasteful", putting him a in a funny category that would include folks like Thorstein Veblen and T.S. Eliot.  Whereas I'm sure the later two (especially with Mr. Eliot) would see the development of such an affordable bit like the soda fountain as a Wasteland, I have a feeling that James would appreciate it as the small haven for new social activity that it was, if only he could have seen one (as he died in 1916).  (I'm only slightly familiar with James, but this sentiment seems right to me, coming from the man who never wrote a bad sentence (or so Mr. McMurtry has sorta said). I think that he would have enjoyed its appearance.  For others.)

All of this came about from reading a bit of the pamphlet (pictured above) the Fountain Operator's Manual (1940), a lovely and crisply written how-to for folks interested in operating their own soda fountain (and the source for all of these images).  It contains advice on set-up, menus, figuring cost of foods, the beast preparations for the least amont of expense, trreatment of customers, advertisemet, and the like.  It couldn't be edited out to anything finer than what it is--a simply refreshing, highly commendable job of writing.  And through it all it builds such an anticipation of want, and paints such a glorious picture of life in a soda fountain, that I wish I could be in one, right now.  Even if that "now" was 1940.

Notes

* I'm just talking about little "c" capital here; I don't mean at all that there was a significant distribution of wealth from the  top 1% or 5% or 10% to the other classes.  Just that there was a middle class, and that there was such a new thing as bona fide leisure time that reached so far down that non- or semi-working kids could go out and pay for food at a restautrant alongside adults. 

 

 

A Note on the History of Bad Chairs

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1161

There are all sorts of famous seats:  seats of wisdom, of power, of lameness, of government, of discontent, of honor, of learning, of war; there's the hot seat, the best and worst seats, a seat on the board, a seat on the bench, a seat at the bar; there are captain's chairs, endowed chairs, and famous chairs (like architectural gems/mules of Mackintosh, Wright, Saarinen, van der Rohe, Eames, Gehry, LeCorbu) and famous seats (at the original Yankee stadium or a Roman coliseum). 

There’s another side to this–the History of Bad Chairs.  It is certainly easy to spot the grossly offensive examples–chairs for torture, the working chair of Adolf Hitler, the chairs Bluto used to clobber Popeye with, the terrible captain’s chair that belonged to Capt. Kirk, the offensive seating in Anthony Burgess’ Korova Milkbar in A Clockwork Orange, the final aspect of the condemned as they witnessed the bad aspect of St. Peter’s judgment chair, (and for the Red Sox fan, the chair into which Bucky Dent’s home run fell), and so on.   Then of course there’s the electric chair, the battleground of not only the philosophically opposed sides for its use, but its earlier fight as well when it was used as field fodder for the war between Thomas Edison and Nikolai Tesla for the adoption of their opposing electricity delivery systems. 

But there’s a subcategory for the subcategory of the History of Chairs and the History of Bad Chairs-- the unintentionally bad chair.  Benjamin Rush--for all of his good work, for all of his American Founding Fathers heritage and background, for all of his wide humanitarian work–has committed an ignoble applicant to this category.  Actually, his ranks among the leaders for unintended gruesomeness, a consequence of his attempt  to do good, but just gone wrong.

Rush’s (1745-1813) name is on the Declaration of Independence, and he is also one of the founding fathers of American psychiatry.  A medical doctor, his background is very deep in care and ethical treatment, a social liberal who was against slavery and capital punishment, and who was determined to improve the condition and treatment of the mentally ill.  Unfortunately, in using the tools at hand and operating with a deep understanding of the contemporary knowledge of neurology and mental disorders, Rush sought to treat the severely deranged (or most institutionally uncorrectable) with his own creation–the tranquilizer chair.  Once certain calming measures had been exhausted, Rush described how to retrain combative patients reeking in misbehavior and keep them from ruining their clothing, or harming the handlers, or ruining the furniture of their cell, introducing the use of his immobilizing chair.  (There was an associated "mad shirt", similar to what we know as a straight jacket, that was also invented and employed by Rush.)
His invention, ironically,  was very high corporal punishment, what wound up being a torture device for what good it did and the cost it extracted from the person who was to sit in it. 

As we can see Rush also commented that the application of cold water and ice would be facilitated with the tranquilizing chair.

A practice that continued at least into the deep 19th century was the dunking chair, whose intent was to "shock" the misbehaving "patient" into docility or normalness.  Here we see

some poor sot being drenched from above and also being hosed from the side prior to being dunked into a vat of cold water.  No telling how long one might be submerged or how calm the waters must be from bubbly interruptions before being hauled out. 

On par with these other instruments was the rotating chair, which was supposed in some way to confuse madness into something not-mad--that, or subdue an unruly patient, whichever came first.  

Then there is the dentist-like chair used in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, where the subject--Sam Lowry, accused of crimes against a mega-dystopic state--is tortured into a catatonic state, and in that thin wall between being conscious an dnot so lives in a utopian existence in his mind far from the reach of his captors. 

There are of course all sorts of obvious, different chairs in which torture was committed upon people, but I really don't need to picture them here, everyone knowing what they were, or are:  spiked chairs, garroting chairs, spine compressors...you get the picture.  Nasty, terrible chairs. Intentionally bad.

Notes:

In addition to the tranquilizing chair, Rush recommended a host of other approaches to controlling the "raving lunatic".  The founder of American psychiatry made the following suggestions:

--Place "noisy" patients into total darkness, (keeping "madmen" for 24 hours or more as required)

--Cold shower baths, slowly, for 20 minutes to four hours

--Solitude; keeping the patient alone, in teh dark, with no visits, no speech, nothing; an "indispensible necessary" to securing correct behavior.

--Bloodletting, with "the quantity of drained blood should be greater than any other organic disease" (page 189), and should "draw 20-40 ounces of blood unless fainting is induced".

--"Low diet", which was actually starvation, having the patient fast for one to three days, and then feeding "just" vegetables, "of the least nutrious value".

--Freezing, in addition to cold shower baths, as in placing the patient in the middle of the night outside in freezing cold.  Ice could also be used on the head, but not before the head is completely shaved, as the effect of hair on the brain and madness "we know not".

--Blistering, which is not a known process to me, except that blisters be induced on the ankles rather than on the head or neck.

There was also treatment via purging, emetics, and the employment of small amounts of opium "to waste the excitability" and reduce fatigue to keep the patient awake.

 

Entombing St. Paul's Cathedral with Masonry--Concretized Christo, 1909

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1160

 

The monumentality of the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude is beyond doubt interesting for at least their fantastic visual impact--the philosophical impact and the statement of the work, the 'revelation through concealment", on the other hand, is completely unappetizing.  Generally I'm perfectly fine to see the works come and go, and, after a time, mostly the "go" part remains.  It is appropriate that there is no permanent full-scale representative of their work.  Cloud writers.  

In continuing a series on this blog on the artistic representation of comparative data I found an image that rivals the work of the two/one wrapping artists--the entombment of St. Paul's Cathedral (London) with 2.5 million tons of masonry. 

The very striking image (from The Illustrated London News for 16 October 1909, page 545) was created to relate the massiveness of the newly-opened Admiralty Harbor (Dover) in 1909.  The harbor was a remarkable creation, enclosing more area of open sea than had ever been done before--as we can see, the created harbor was bigger than Hyde Park).  The artist, W.B. Robinson, gets the point of its size across very effectively with his six images--none more so than the St. Paul's comparison.  Its true that the "tomb" is open on two sides, but the monoliths could have easily been made half of their width (each being 72.5 feet thick, by 400 feet long, by 600 feet high) so that they could've completely encapsulated the building. (Its an interesting thought--to build something beautiful and enormous, and then completely encase the thing in an enormous block that revealed nothing of its contents. Like place the pyramids in a cube.)

Another remarkable image from this same series is the depiction of the weight of the harbor--a very tempting title for this post ("The Weight of a Harbor") but the Christo one won out. 

 

Little Bizarredness: Bland Hyper-oddness in Published Works

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  

These pamphlets are samples from a larger collection whose attention to the detail of boredom and blandness and relative inexplicability are extraordinary.  The titles intact, it mostly doesn't matter what the contents have to say for themselves--everything, really, is right there on the front page, the meaning best left to the imagination. 

 

Equal Rights for Women--NOT a Good Idea. Redefining "Equality", 1863

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post  1158

"Can a woman be said to have a right to life, if all means of self-protection are denied her….Can she be said to have a right to liberty, when another citizen may have the legal custody of her person ….Can any citizen be said to have the right to the pursuit of happiness, whose inalienable rights are denied; who is disenfranchised from all the privileges of citizenship…?" --Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speaking to the Tenth National Woman's Rights Convention, The Cooper Union, New York, N.Y., May 10 and 11, 1860

A Good Woman is "not an equal of man" or so we are told in this peon to the status quo of 1863.  This  semi-sugary attack upon the "Womans Rights Conventions" found the appeal of equal rights to be almost mostly unappealing--no

t that women should not have "rights", just not "equal" rights.  Jut rights enough--some of which for 1863, as it turns out, were pretty liberal. [The song was probably addressed in general to the series of ten conventions for women's rights that had been held in this country beginning with the first--at Seneca Falls, New York--in 1848. Between then and 1860 there were ten conventions, plus one in 1863 that was called the First Woman's National Loyal League Convention.] 

The song--Woman's Rights, a "Right" Good Ballad, Right of Illustrating Woman's Rights, Rightly Written for the Womans Rights Convention... --and published in Boston in 1863 was written by composer Kate Horn (emphatically self-stating to be "NOT of the woman's rights convention").  She was annoyed with the prospect of overall equality impinging upon traditional womanhood, or at least the current tradition of the feminine, and convinced the publisher Geo. P. Reed to publish her complaint in song. 

She had many supporters, evidently--the equal rights part not really coming partially true, until, well, not even now.  I guess that this is certainly a debate platform, and I could probably argue a good but wrong response from the republican point of view, but I won't--differences in pay scales, access to corporate power, under- and mis-representation in government and so on is not evidently enough of a scare to entice the necessary number of state to endorse the ERA.   In any event, women didn't get a big push towards equal rights until they got the vote in the USA  in 1920 (the legislation which became the 19th Amendment was introduced in 1878; a majority of women didn't exercise that right until, I think, after WWII), and really didn't enjoy much power until the 1960's.  

As it turns out, Ms. Horn was lyrically resolved to demand some equality--but definitely not the brand of people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  The greatest surprise from Horn (at least to me) makes the demand for equal pay for equal work, though women should not be allowed to operate machinery and such.  There are a number of calls to decency and modesty which sound like basic ethics, but they're also peppered with subservient overtone rejoinders.  Its hard for her to recover from the call to household "pretty trouble(s) brave", but there are elements of forward thinking in the song.  Horn doesn't absolutely  reject the ideas of "equality" of the rights conventions, but by taking her stance against universal equality she makes her's less so and those of Stanton more.

Food and Not Having It: Visual Displays of Data, Britain and Germany, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1157

The idea behind these three images was part of a hearts-and-minds home-front propaganda campaign by the British government to instill fortitude and a feeling of general good in the population, trying to get the message across that British citizens were far better off (in regards to food and staples at least) than their German counterparts.  Even though the situation wasn't exactly standard in Great Britain in the last year of the First World War, the situation was far more dire in Germany--there was after all an embargo against ships going into Germany or its allies, making it a very difficult to receive food, whereas that problem did not exist in Britain, which pretty much controlled the seas at that point, and could therefore receive food and other material from the Colonies and allies.

The first graphical display, appearing in The Illustrated London News on June 12, 1918 (and just four months from the end of the War), showed the "ample weekly rations for various classes of the population".  18 classes, actually, that were enjoying more food than the Germans, the "U-Boat having failed to starve" them. In all of this what comes to my attention first are the allowances for male/female prisoners in England; each getting similar amounts of meat, bacon fish, margarine and fresh vegetables, though for some reason the women are given lesser shares of bread, rice and oatmeal.  The other bit is that the food allotted to the "childrens hospital" is less by far in all categories than everything else.  I'm hoping that this is due to size and consumption differences more than anything else.  I also notice that the officer prisoners of war are given more rations than the enlisted POWs.  Interned aliens are also given short rations, except for fish (Fresh and preserved)  and potatoes, when they get substantially more than anyone else. 

Unfortunately we do not see what the Germans had to eat, though in the next graphic (same source, though 23 March 1918) we see the "ingenious" ways in which the German people got around not having certain foodstuffs.  The means look more desperate than anything else: meat/sausage for example is replaced by "War Sausage", which was coagulated ox blood bleached with peroxide, and also by a "vegetable" meat, which was dyed glucose.                                                                                                                          

Nazi Propaganda to the French--Leave France Behind and Join Us

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1156
This appeal to practicing French metallurgists by the Nazi occupying force (Metallurgistes misere? Non 1943.) promised good wages, a clean place to sleep, and a livable future.  This included a life for professional metallurgists with a family, as well.  The Nazis were (blood) thirsty for practically-trained "help", desperate for people with an expertise in occupied France to help contribute to their war effort, and this pamphlet was one means of trying to persuade (via propaganda) or purchase the tacit approval of these professionals.  The Nazis were promising a place to all of those who followed the call, a place in the resurrection of Europe, in the rebuilding of the European community under German/Nazi rule. 

There was one very odd problem in this pamphlet.  The map shows the creation of this very large allegorical structure, which naturally centers on Germany;

but strangely enough, none of the structure seems to touch French soil--so much for the "New Europe".  As a matter of fact it looks as though there is a table with three men standing around it at just about the exact place that Paris would be.  I'm not convinced that this was intentionally represented this way, showing the French reader that France was not going to be part of the rebirth--not having France as a part of this new empire would seem to be unthinkable--perhaps.  Maybe the issue was to show the inductees that should they decide to stay at home they and their family and the rest of the country will be part of a destitute agrarian Medieval future, that France would not be part of the New Europe, rather than someone screwing up in the Nazi propaganda offices. The screwup is possible though--they were, after all, only Nazis.

Photos of the promised facilities:

Footnotes in the Future--Swift, Lull, Borges and the End of Writing

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1155

“The most ignorant person at a reasonable charge, and with little bodily labor, may write books in philosophy, poetry, law, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.”   Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels

"Hell is the kingdom of the animal that swallows up the memory of all things... Between life and death there is no destiny except memory. Memory weaves the destiny of the world.."  Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

"A people without history/ is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments" -- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets.

The future history of writing--it will tell us--was already written before it was written.   In the future, when everything that can be written has been written and everything spoken has already been spoken, perhaps the first footnote in the history of already-done things will be to Jonathan Swift.  The experience belongs to us through Lemuel Gulliver¹, who after surviving two trips (one to Lilliput in which Gulliver is twelve times the size of

everything else, and the second to Brobdingnag where he is one-twelfth the size of everything) comes to a third (of four²) in the land of Laputa.  It is here where he encounters a conversation machine that, when cranked, produces anything and everything, the known and unknown, the original and the copied, and have the thought and spoken
word belong to the manipulator of the machine.  Everything that can be said is in that box, waiting to come.  The 20' square was occupied by cubes with words on their sides, with 40 cranks and 40 handles and 40 operators to manipulate the mechanical vocabulary and associated scribes to record anything that made sense, and would be the springboard of “knowledge”operating without a manual or an intelligent primum mobile. (The image of the machine--which bears some resemblance to an integrated chip--appears in the third edition of Swift's book, and as you can see is not a well-drawn thing, missing a row and a column and a crank here and there. A fuller description is found below.)

The idea of a universal knowledge or an expanding, forever-library is very old, particularly if you expand the concept a bit to include Aristotle and the Tree of Porphyry³.  While not exactly a generator in the sense of Jorge Borges' Library of Babel or the Swiftian machine, the ancients did produce very interesting, elegant, beautiful ways of story information and ordering information.  The Tree of Porphyry is far more concise–an abbreviation-compared to the infinitely expanding hexagonal rooms filed with books and attendant librarians in the Borges' universe.  Or the Ars Magna/Thinking Machine of the 13th century Ramon Lull (also known as Ramon, Raimundo and Raymond, Raimundus and Raymundus Lull, Lully and Lullus and Lulio), the ultimate organizer of how sentences can be made and knowledge produced/uncovered (particularly if you want to please the logic of the church and the Creator), and which was almost certainly known to Swift (and which was also written about, described and worried-over by Borges⁴).  There are many other early figures in this category to be sure (Lewis Carroll, William Jevons, and even in a way Mr. Venn, not to mention Leibniz and his calculator,  and the changes in scientific method and (English/Dutch) mathematical concentration on applied mathematics of the 17th century that made thinking about the industrial revolution possible)), but that would be left to (at least) a longer post.  (The Lull wheel, below.)
                           

How long will it take to digitize everything that has ever been written, or recorded, or composed? Several generations? Ten?  It may well come to pass in shorter time than we think; and when you compare this control of recorded human history to the centuries that will follow in developing “computers”, how can we possibly know what will become of all of it?  In the coming centuries and their attack on intelligence, when in the future the brain is a harvest of the computer, perhaps intelligence finally submits, and everything that can be done has been done, the progress of humanity snubbed to a stub. Or expanded exponentially.  It is such a tough call to make...

Notes:

1.  Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships.  1726.

2. The third voyage was Part III. A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan. The fourth finds humans as pets/inferiors in the island of the Houyhnhnms, a land of intelligent horses.

3. The “tree” was a diagrammatic creation of a 3rd century Syrian mathematician/logician/philosopher named Porphyry who-- much taken with Aristotle (and with the Categories in particular)-- developed a systematic approach to the organization of thought in diagrammatic form.

4. Borges J. L. (1999) 'Ramon Lull’s thinking Machine' in The total library: non-fiction 1922-1986 (Edited by) Weinberger, E., trans. Allen, E. Levine, S. J., and Weinberger, E. London, Penguin, on pp 155-160.

It is interesting to note that Lull, who gave up everything to follow his calling into the church (and who was antagonized by the belief that his very act of missing his left-behind life to be a sin against god's choice of him to follow his "career path") was demonized by the church soon after his death, his works prohibited reading for hundreds of years.  He was resurrected in 1958 though on a path towards sainthood, a doctor of the church.  

A description of the Swift machine:

Zippers, Part Two: a Big Lesson from the Humble Zipper

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1154

Earlier in this blog I made a post about the Ulysses of zipper repair.  How to Repair a Zipper was one of those great, unknown classics of American technolit that stands the test of time, a great manual on how to approach n-problems with a faulty zipper--if only there were zippers worth repairing.  There are different grades of zippers, just as there are different grades of any other fastening device or automobile or wine.  Of course the zipper seems a ridiculous subject unless the lives of people--say the lives of soldiers--are dependent on their zippers working when the going got tough, 
when soldiers' jackets really needed to stay closed, tight, protecting them from the rain or cold.  Just ask the soldiers in 

the Napoleonic army when their coats refused to stay closed because the threads that held on their  buttons that held their jackets closed failed, leading to the death of many due to exposure and cold.  Suddenly, fasteners are a big deal.  Just try it the next time you're out on the frigid trail--unzip your jacket and try to keep the thing closed and you warm.  Its a bad story. 

So the initial reaction to this ad that appeared in Life magazine in 1953 is some laughter to a non-sequitor, but once you gave it a little thought, it can be appreciated just like any other piece of good craftsmanship.  In this ad, the manufacturer of Conmar Zippers (located in the once-mighty, once-leading American city of Newark, in New Jersey) plead with the reader of the full-page ad to pay attention to the zippers on their apparel.  If the zippers fail , they should use the blank form to send to their appropriate retail in complaint, and to replace the zipper with a high-quality, unconditionally guaranteed Conmar zipper, made to never fail. 

This is attention to the small detail that would do us a world of good today. I love the idea of the Conmar Zipper.

Bad Ideas Department: Pool Vodka and Cigarette Wallpaper 1947-1953

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1153

I just can't leave this week's string of five posts on stuff that I found in Life magazine without adding a little to the Bad Ideas category.  Generally this is the place  to collect the really odd, little material that I stumble upon that is noteworthy but not necessarily a good  fit for a general, stand-alone post.  So comes this installment to Bad Ideas--Things We Don't Need.

For example I just couldn't wrap any sort of integrating or creative bow around this image (left) to present it as anything more than what it is.

I could think of almost no other thing that I'd rather drink after a swimming workout than a glass of vodka with no ice. 
I mean, really--it gives me a headache to just think about popping out of a cold pool, a little out-of-breath, and grabbing four fingers of room-temperature Smirnoff. I get that it is a "dry" juxtaposition, but all this looks like to me is a man with a pretty big problem.

And then the next picture--there's simply  no good need to be posing in your underwear with a small boy in his underwear while grooming a French poodle.  There's just no conceivable need to do it, period, especially with such oddly satisfied smiles.

And then  there's this ad that is utterly demeaning to almost everyone--a wall of Old Gold unfiltered ciggies that are about life-sized with a vague suggestion that you smoke them for fun rather than some sort of medical benefit (?)  With a little editing you could construct a wallpaper out of this photo--and I mean a wallpaper for a room rather than a computer, a wallpaper composed of cigarette butt ends..  Just for the record, I figure that a 1.5 pack a day smoker would smoke the equivalent of this image spread over the four walls of an average-size bedroom in about four years.  Its conceivable that you could paper a decent-sized house with the wallpapered equivalent of every cigarette smoked by the smoker in a lifetime, or for as long as the cancer could be tricked to stay away.

And so this is the beginning of this category--I hope it will be entertaining.