JF Ptak Science Books

Ancient Motion Pictures, Part III: Street Scenes and Human Urban Landscapes, 1902--Belfast, Wigan, Bradford, Manchester

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Again from the BFI comes a series of absolutely super urban motion picture landscapes showing bits and pieces of ordinary city life at the turn of the century--I find them exquisite.  The first is a movie taken from the front of a horse drawn tram in Belfast, 1901, along Royal Street:

Another glorious motion picture of street scenes in a major city at the turn of the century:  Manchester, 1902. 

Electric tram rides from Forster Square, Bradford, in 1902:

This street scene at Wigan is remarkable for the pure joy of the people who have gathered to be int he film--I particularly like man with his broad-brimmed-hatted daughter on his shoulder towards the end of the film, the father following the camera trying to get his daughter into the film.  Just lovely. 

cvcv

Ancient Motion Pictures, Part II: India, England, France, 1898-1899

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

The first segment here is a collection of Lumiere brothers films, the first of which (made in 1896) shows the release of factory workers at their shift's end--included are a large number of women:

Another lovely film called "Santa Claus", which may well be the first movie of Santa ever made (1896):

Even though this 1899 film is entitled "Panorama of Calcutta" it is actually of Varanasi, India:

View from the front of a locomotive, coming into Barnstaple, 1898:

From the great BFI (British Film Institute), a lush moving picture of the launch of the HMS Albion, which actually shows the front end of the making of an enormous Thames River tragedy.

From the BFI channel:  "E.P. Prestwich's footage of the launch of the battleship HMS Albion on 21 June 1898 looks deceptively serene and gentle. What it doesn't show is that when the ship hit the water for the first time, it created a wave that swept away a jetty, drowning an estimated 39 people in the process, one of the worst peacetime disasters in the Thames's history."

 

 

U.S. Wartime Production, Control, and Patriotic Propaganda, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1416

The War Production Board (WPB)--the entity responsible for printing the leaflets below--was instituted 16 January 1942 as a federal effort to direct U.S. wartime production and allocation of essential commodities.  And time. The WPB centralized the effort to convert some peacetime industry to wartime production, as well as direct the production of existing wartime industries in the manufacture of critical goods, and rationed or prohibited the manufacture of other material that could possibly hinder the war effort.  Thus the WPB rationed things like sugar, heating oil, plastic, gasoline, paper, rubber, nylon and metals of all descriptions; it also controlled large swaths of the workforce, restricting wages and benefits as well as prices.   It was an essential element of fighting the war, and brought necessary control to an economy and industrial base that needed organization for what would become a total war.        (We offer a small collection of 16 of these items at our blog bookstore.)

Instituting a war-production base for American industry allowed production to ratchet way up, producing (for example) multiples more aircraft more in 1943 than in 1941:   1940, 6k aircraft; 1941, 19k; 1942, 47k; 1943 85k; 1944, 56k; 1945, 46k.  Also there were enormous production advancements for total shipping tonnage (reaching a wartime production total of 33 million tons), across-the-board huge increases in coal and iron ore (and especially in crude oil), and on and on.  The U.S. was able to mobilize itself and take advantage of its enormous natural resources, industrial base and civilian workforce in what was essentially an unreachable island economy, forming what was actually an unbeatable combination of war goods production. (Plus of course there was the atomic bomb, which is another story, but which also only could have been produced in the U.S., given the enormous quantities of energy and material needed to begin its production.)     

The WPB also was responsible for hearts-and-minds campaigns at home, too, because so many people, such a huge proportion of the population, needed to be involved in the war effort, not only from the production standpoint but also for strategic conservation.  For example, in one massive effort to collect the very necessary scrap metal (that would be collected and reformed into war materiel) the WPB organized a nation-wide drive that in one day collected 82 pounds for every person in the country.  Singular efforts like this, or seemingly singular, needed to happen at regular and short intervals for the war economy to be successful.  And so pamphlets like the story of Joe, below, needed to be told:

The "it" that Joe needed to have was ammunition, and grenades, and anything else that would kill the enemy.  With it, Joe was successful; without it, and thereby without the "it" being produced by the folks at home to whom this flyer was being distributed, was helping to kill Joe by not giving him enough of the deadly stuff.

"Don't let Joe down" says the flyer, "its our job to give him everything he needs and wants".  It turns out that Joe had 26 notches in the comb of his rifle, "from the Japs (who would never) get back to report after they met Joe".   Joe "spread the lead around with a free and easy hand and alot of Japs wished he hadn't been so generous.  Trouble was, he never had quite enough of it..."

And so went the rest of it, and them--resonant pleas, demands, for people at home to be vigilant in whatever it was they were doing to push the war effort forward.  Slacking meant death and possible destruction, and the hosts of these flyers that I have here gave very little pre-text for this not to be the case. 

The Almost-Tomorrow Department: Radio-Vision, 1928.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1415

Tomorrow seemed to be almost there to readers of this pamphlet, what with the idea of looking at pictures relating to the radio broadcast you were listening to looming before a slightly disbelieving mind.  The fact of the matter though is that this breakthrough by Mr. Austin G. Cooley¹--basically attaching what we would know today as a fax machine to a radio cabinet which would receive and print images relating to the show being heard--was rubbing up mightily against the real wave of the future, the television. (The original is available here at our blog bookstore.)

Mr. Cooley's invention of the Rayfoto just didn't quite fit the demands that would soon be established and met by television.  The idea of practical television goes back a fair way², at least to Arthur Korn in the late 1890's, which much work being done on both broadcast television and facsimile transmissions.  But tv was definitely a high scent in the air when Cooley published his Rayfoto pamphlet in 1928--as a matter of fact, this was the same year in which the first television license was granted (to Charles Jenkins, W3XK).  And just two years later the BBC would begin regular television broadcasts, while also in 1930 Mr. Jenkins initiated another television-first, the t.v.commercial. 

"No greater thrill awaits the radio experimenter than receiving his first picture through the ether…Not many months will pass before picture broadcasts will be a part of every radio broadcast"--A. Cooley, 1928

So the time was definitely note ripe for Cooley's idea as an image supplement to radio, though it did have other possible applications--like the "fax" delivering newspapers to your home--though they are not listed in the pamphlet. 

What we see here the drum of the apparatus (we don't see the three-tray developer/fixer wet set-up inside the apparatus), one of the listeners retrieving an  incoming vision-image, something that evidently took quite some time, depending on the image and the ways in which the developing trays have been set.  Dark images might've taken the entire length of a 15-minute broadcast to transmit and print; other, simpler efforts took less time.

Here's an example of a successful, medium-quality image that one could expect using Cooley's Rayfoto system:

It doesn't look like much now, and maybe it wouldn't've looked like much to people familiar with the new television.  But even a grainy, static image accompanying a voice performance is a fabulous thing when compared with never having seen anything like it before, never having had such an experience, if even only as a novelty.

_______

Notes:

1. Cooley,  Austin G.  How to Receive Radio Pictures at Home.  New York:  Radiovision Corp,  1928.  1st edition.  26pp, 2 folding blueprints  4to.   This unusual publication describes the construction and use of an apparatus which would receive broadcast (facsimile) images that would be used to illustrate radio transmissions/shows.  The idea (in this form of illustrating radio shows) at this date would be reduced to almost-nothingness once television entered the picture in the next year or so.  Still, it was an elegant idea to illustrate the spoken word.

This system was offered by Austin G. Cooley (1900-1993), inventor of the Rayfoto system, "the first authentic radio picture apparatus". This was a very early attempt at mass entertainment via a mechanical medium that proved ineffective by 1929/1931 against the advances of television. (The radiovision method was something like a facsimile device, offering a static image every now and again, and was completely outclassed by the moving image).

2. Followed by Paul Nipkow's rotating discs in the earliest part of the 20th c, then by Vladimir Zworkin's iconoscope (1923), Charles Jenkins and John Baird's television of 1924, and then of course by Philo Farnsworth's 1928 image dissector.

Ancient Motion Pictures, London, 1896/1903

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1413

I just wanted to share these films that I found at the British Film Institute's youtube account.  They are remarkable, clear, fluid images of London in 1903/1913 or thereabouts, offering a slice of relatively unrehearsed life from 100 years ago that is so unexpected. They are visual time capsules, beautifully restored by the BFI--they are like moving picture versions of sumptuous platinum prints, with gorgeous detail in each frame, so lovely that they look as though they could withstand micro inspection. 

The first: London, 1903:

 

Blackfriar's Bridge, 1896--very short, but again, another remarkable piece of moving history...if only there was sound.

Trafalgar Square Riot for Mrs. Pankhurst, 1913:

Petticoat Lane, a semi-ancient marketplace east of Central London, showing a common look to common folk buying and selling common stuff, 1903:

Films from U.K. National Archives, 1940. Winning the War for Hearts and Minds at Home.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1412

Interesting films produced by the Office of Information, mostly 1940 and 1941, and found at the (U.K) National Archives. 

London Can Take It!  (Battle of Britain, 1941)

"This film, in which the American journalist, Quentin Reynolds pays tribute to London and its people under fire, conveys the spirit and atmosphere of the 1940 blitz on the capital. Its impact at the time, especially in U.S.A., makes it historically one of the most important of the war films."

"The production file in the National Archives - TNA: INF6/328 states that the film was to be ‘distributed throughout U.S.A, Canada and Latin-America by Warner Bros' and was to be shown in ‘at least 15,000 American cinemas'."  Relseased 1941.

Hitler Takes Command

"Cleverly edited montage footage taken from German propaganda films, including Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph Des Willens, which shows Hitler and his marching Soldiers of the Reich, synchronised to the tune of 'The Lambeth Walk'."  Relseased 1941.

Dig for Victory

"An appeal to everyone during wartime to ‘Dig for victory' by cultivating vegetables for the good of the country and their own better health.

Words for Battle.

"The production file held at the National Archives – TNA: INF 6 / 507 states that ‘a re-edited version was made by Spectator for inclusion in the fortnightly reels for Russia' and that material was used from other Ministry of Information Films including ‘How to dig', ‘Sowing and planting' and ‘Cultivation'."

"Words for Battle evocatively sets to film passages of quotation from poetry and prose including works by: Milton, Blake, Browning and Kipling. The famous “we shall never surrender'' speech by Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address are also quoted in the Film. It powerfully associates these passages and music by Handel and Beethoven with images of everyday life in Britain at war.

The Crown Film Unit file held in the National Archives: TNA: INF 6/338 synopsis reads: ….“A call to arms through images and words of Britain's countryside, people and poets”.

Released 1941, and read by Lawrence Olivier.

Workers' Weekend (A Tribute to the Workers of the British Aircraft Industry)

‘A tribute to the workers of the British Aircraft Industry'. Men and women in a factory in the North-West of England set themselves the task of building a Wellington bomber in the record time of 30 hours. Constructing in their own time, the workers donate the bonus they got to the Red Cross ‘Aid to Russia Fund'.

The cameras capture the whole process of the construction in record time through to the test pilot taking off in the plane, ahead of schedule."

A Graphical Representation of Journal Articles on Relativity Theory, 1896-1923

JF Ptak Science Books     Quick Post

I haven't often seen graphical representations showing the relative publishing interests in a particular discipline of the sciences, or the maths either for that matter.  But that's exactly what is found in the deep pages of Maurice Lecat's Bibliographie de la Relativité, suivie d'un appendice sur les déterminants à deux dimensions, le calcul des variations, les séries trigonométriques, et l'azéotropisme, published in Bruxelles by Lamertin in 1924. [The original text is offered for sale at our blog bookstore.]  The graph is called "Production Annuelle d'Ecrit sur la Relativite", and shows the total number of articles published in that area--or at least those identified by the verifiable Lecat, who finds more than 4,000 of them for the 1896-1922 1/2 period.

We track the year of publication on the X and the number of publications on the Y, and we can see that before the great 1905 special theory was published by Einstein that Lecat considered some dozens of other papers (actually more than 200)  to fall into that (pre-Einsteinian relativity) category. It is interesting to note that "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" paper (30 June 1905) is not indicated with a vertical "Einstein" for that year (like the for indicator for 1915/16), though Lecat does indicate the general decline in relativity papers in the 1914-1916 period  was probably caused by WWI.  The number of papers does triple and then quadruples in year one and two of the peace.

Making Things Disappear--German POWs, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1410

In continuing series of posts on Blank and Empty Things is this image on fading, disappearing German prisoners of war.  The French had been pounding them in western France in the summer of 1918, and Germans were surrendering and being captured by the thousands.  This news service photograph shows one of the assembly camps with about 10,000 POWs--I made a heavy scan of the group of soldiers in the distance and was  a little taken aback to see that the men had lost their human forms,  looking like bacteria, fading into their future.  (The original photo is available for purchase through our blog bookstore.)

The full image is impressive, and shows just a small fraction of the men taken prisoner during 1918; and it shows even a lesser percentage of those killed.

This detail of the foreground shows the familiarity necessitated by the men being pressed so closely together--there was little free ground.

Also, I thought that the French soldiers in the midst of the prisoner might've been feeding them, but it seems as though they were just walking in their midst.

World War I in Ivory--Pianos and Recovery

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1409

These images come from my collection of World War I news photo service photographs, and are among the minority that show even momentary happiness.  In both of these cases, the emotion resolves itself in song and in the piano.  The first image takes place in a U.S. overseas hospitals for wounded soldiers, and they seem genuinely relieved to have the attention and the entertainment. (Both images are available at our blog bookstore.)

The second image is dated 2 November 1918--just nine days before the armistice--and shows the "Broadway Quartet" as they rehearse "I'm Only a Buck Private" for a behind-the-lines show for U.S. servicemen, somewhere in France.  The note with the image (from the Western Newspaper Union) says that the staging used for their shows came from found wood, bits of flooring, and camouflage netting torn into pieces.  

Display of Information: What a Dreadnougth was Worth in Airplanes, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1408   [Display of Quantitative Information series]

There's nothing quite so satisfying as seeing a representation of quantitative data like this where the graphical displays are flying.  "One Dreadnought Buys 52 Dirigibles and 235 Aeroplanes" is a full-page diagram appearing in the 3 June 1911 , making a very strong point that in the new air-age 2 million pounds for one battleship buys a lot of aircraft.  Of course this is a British journal and the ship is flying an American flag--the image originally appeared in the Scientific American just a short while before this publication, and so it also enumerates American and international aircraft, making for a lovely representation of a broad range of airplanes filling up the same sky.  (This image is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.)

Elegant, Lightweight Steam-Powered Vehicle, 1877

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1407

This lovely steam-powered trolley looks as though it was just <this> close to being lifted off of its tracks and placed on the street for tooling around town.  Of course part of the reason why Joseph Green Cooke's trolley was so lightweight¹ is because it was traveling on rails, which meant the surface over which it would be propelled was smooth and predictable, unlike the streets that it would have to use to makes its way through a town.  Uneven, choppy, bumpy roadways would mean that the vehicle would have to be more sturdy; more sturdy means more weight, more weight means bigger engine, and so on.  So instead of this relatively light 1,200 pound vehicle you might wind up with something at 5,000 pounds, or more--at least in 1877's mindset. (The issue of Scientific American is available here.)

The lighter vehicle would come before the end of the decade, but it had mostly to do with getting away from the steam engine to the lighter gasoline engine².  It is serendipitous and perhaps ironic that the illustration facing the steam trolley is for the gasoline-burning train locomotive engine of Thomas Urquhart, who developed it for the Grazi-Tsaritsin Railway (Russia), which converted all of its 143 engines to this method by 1885.  When the pages of the magazine are closed, the two images lay one on top of the other. 

Notes:

1. Earlier efforts at putting mobile steam-powered vehicles on the road stretches back into the very dim pre-automobile with the behemoth of Nicolas Joseph Cugnot, which strained its way along French streets as early as 1869....it also in the first recorded automobile accident, which caused enough trouble and damage and injury to scare away development money.  There were engines that were considered "portable" traction devices in the earliest part of the 19th century (by Trevithick and Tuxford, among others) , though they were not mobile--the "portable" part was that they could be moved (at all).  The movable, working traction machine ("tractor") would begin to make its appearances in the 1860's, though these were generally major pieces of machinery, locomotives on wheels. 

2. Thanks to Gottlieb Daimler's 1885 prototype, and Karl Benz's 1886 patent for the gas-fuled car, and of course to the Charter Gasoline Engine Company of Illinois, whose work in the mid/late 1880's brought about the production of several gas-powered traction engines in 1889.

From the Western Review of Science and Industry, 21 December 1876: STEAM TROLLY. "Mr. Joseph Green Cooke, the locomotive and car superintendent of the  Oude and Kohilkunde Railway, has constructed a steam troll}'' or carriage, the object of which is to enable resident engineers to inspect their tracks,  bridges and works with rapidity

The Architecture of 13,000,000 Pounds of Opium Production

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1407

These images present an excellent invitation to understanding the size and scope of one section of the opium industry in India.  I found these pictures in the 29 July 1882 issue of the Scientific American, which in turn had reproduced them from the Bengal Commissioner Lt. Col. Walter S. Sherwill, who published them as color lithographs in 1850 and which (again) found their way into print in The Truth about Opium Smoking by Benjamin Broomhill¹(1882).  They are iconic images of a devastating trade and were frequently reproduced over many decades--mostly not for the "devastating" part of what I just wrote, but more for the industrial/business appreciation end, as was the case with this article in SciAmerican.   The British interest in the trade stretched back two cneturies earlier, and of course the use of opium bends far back into Neolithic times.

Sherill's scenes are all from the opium receiving/production/distribution center in Patna, India, which claimed to produce some 13,000,000 pounds of opium juice annually, shipping the stuff out to Bengal and then on to China. 

There is a hint of abrasion about this trade in the article, noting that there was nothing that could be done to stem the tide of Chinese demand for the product, and that "if the government monopoly of opium were abandoned, India would not only lose a revenue which would have to be made up by some tax, but the extent of the poppy cultivation would almost certainly be largely increased  in the hands of private growers."  Also, if the British government gave up the trade altogether, the article notes that the Chinese demand would be supplied "by inferior quantities of Persian and native Chinese growth". 

The first image shows a cavernous hall for examining the incoming opium, "brought in in earthen pans...tested...by touch, or by thrusting a scoop into the mass", after which a sample is sent to "the chemical test room".  As it turns out, the text in the Scientific American article describing the various halls quotes the London Graphic  which was  reproduced almost verbatim from The Truth About Opium Smoking, but without quotations and without attribution. 

Next, in image #2, is the mixing room, where, yes, the opium is mixed.  According to the Opium/Sci American: “In the Mixing Room the contents of the earthen pans are thrown into vats and stirred with blind rakes until the whole mass becomes a homogeneous paste.”

Image #3 is the Balling Room: “From the mixing room the crude opium is conveyed to the Balling Room, where it is made into balls. Each ball-maker is furnished with a small table, a stool, and a brass cup to shape the ball in a certain quantity of opium and water called 'Lewa,' and an allowance of poppy petals, in which the opium balls are rolled. Every man is required to make a certain number of balls, all weighing alike. An expert workman will turn out upwards of a hundred balls a day.”

Image #4 is the drying room,  where “the balls are placed to dry before being stacked. Each ball is placed in a small earthenware cup. Men examine the balls, and puncture with a sharp style those in which gas, arising from fermentation, may be forming.”

The stacking room is image #5, where "the balls are stacked before being packed in boxes for Calcutta en route to China. A number of boys are constantly engaged in stacking, turning, airing, and examining the balls. To clear them of mildew, moths or insects, they are rubbed with dried and crushed poppy petal dust.”

The Chinese really weren't able to resist this trade (which they had fought over a period of hundreds of years, not to mention in two opium wars in the 19th century) until about 1916.  Notes: 1.  As it turns out, Broomhill was writing against the opium trade in his book.  See also this MIT page on the First Opium War.

Coal Boys, 1895

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1406

Here's a series of social documentarian photographs that partially illustrate the true position of the "coal boy" out in Pennsylvania in September, 1895.  Somehow it sounds, perhaps, a little romantic, summoning images of small children running around with sacks of coal as though it was a newspaper or marshmallows or something.  That such a chore was left to children in the 40-million-ton anthracite coal industry in Pennsylvania is a testament to something--the savings of cents-per-hour for the kids to do the task rather than  an adult, or, well, is there an "or" to this?  I don;t think so.  I think that it all came down to shaving hog hairs from the paychecks of adult workers. 

The story appeared in the Scientific American for 28 September 1895--it was not an investigative journalism piece on the working conditions of children, just a simple report on what the children were doing.  We're still years away in 1895 for any real legal assistance to protect children as workers or to require them to be in school. 

Vast Understatement Department: Re-crushing the Crushed “Indian Problem”, 1887-1934

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1405

 “This might seem like a somewhat rapid reduction of the land of Indian estates”--Thomas Morgan, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, on the sale/disposition of 15% of all Indian Lands over the period 1887-1891.

 Indian Affairs Commissioner Thomas Morgan had a commanding view of the situation regarding the American Indian at the end of the 19^th century, considering that he was king of the hill, surveying the scene from his commanding height, in control of the affairs of all American Indians from the relative security of knowing hardly anything about them. It so happens that during the period 1887 through 1903, the Indians suffered about as much loss to their way of life and their lands than about any other time in their history, and this at a time when almost all Indian resistance to federal control had already been eliminated by force or terror or hunger or the sheer weight of the impossibility of fighting the United States¹.

Most of the problems with the loss of land and the approach of the near-end of their tribal system occurred with what federal representatives referred to as the “Indian Emancipation Act”, which was formally known as the Dawes Act (and also the General Allotment Act) of 1887². The general fatal thrust in this Congressional action was to relieve the Indians of their reservation system and then their land, to enforce their assimilation into American (white) society, and then to become individual property owners and then tax payers, making the Indian self-reliant and independent. The underlying philosophy here is that it was the reservation system was the cause of the Indians' problems—that it kept the Indians from fulfilling themselves by excluding them from American society, segregated them from “self-improvement”.

"The Indian may now become a free man; free from the thralldom of the tribe; freed from the domination of the reservation system; free to enter into the body of our citizens. This bill may therefore be considered as the Magna Carta of the Indians of our country." --Alice Fletcher, one of the Architects of the Dawes Act

The Act not only managed to give the Indians the lands that they already owned, but it also took the land away at the same time, making it available to heads of households in 160-acre plots. It was supposed to make the Indians into useful members of the white community, and to teach them to be farmers, and to “properly use” the lands which they were given. According to Ronald Takai³, Morgan saw the Indian land as going fallow, and that if they didn't use their land to a good end, then they should lose it. AS Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Morgan said that most of the land that was taken by the government was not being “used...for any purpose whatsoever” with “scarcely any of it....in cultivation”. Hence if the Indians didn't farm the land then the land was being wasted, and if the land was being wasted then the Indian had no right to keep it. Thus the circularity of the Indian's problem was complete—they would be given land if they were using it “properly”, which meant to break off chunks of tribal land and deed it to individual families, which at the end of the life of the head of the household the land would more than likely have to be sold⁴; and if the land wasn't being cultivated, then the government would take steps to seize it via its system of aggravated purchase.

“The sooner the tribal relations are broken up and the reservation system done away with, the better it will be for all concerned. If there were no other reason for this change, the fact that individual ownership of property is the universal custom among civilized peoples of this country would be a sufficient reason for urging the handful of Indians to adopt it.”

In the four years following the passage of the Dawes Act, something on the order of 17.4 million acres of Indian land was sold or re-allocated, which was about 15% of all Indian lands.

The Burke Act of 1906 was the second time the Dawes Act was amended, and was also perhaps the most devastating change yet made to the tribal ownership system. It gave the government the right to determine which Indians were “competent and capable” to own land, though by design the definition of “competency” was left vague, though it often meant that there was a certain amount of European blood in the Indian being judged. This meant that the “competent” Indian would have their land taken out of trust status, and then become subject to taxation and could be sold by the owner. This also meant that communally owned tribal lands could be divided into individual plots which may then top sold to the highest bidder, If the person was deemed to be “not competent”, though, something entirely different happened:

“...the Secretary of the Interior may, in his discretion, and he is hereby authorized, whenever he shall be satisfied that any Indian allottee is competent and capable of managing his or her affairs at any time to cause to be issued to such allottee a patent in fee simple, and thereafter all restrictions as to sale, encumbrance, or taxation of said land shall be removed. “

Given the situation that the Indian's per capita income was so low, and that most of that was coming from the sale of land and from government stipends, it was almost entirely assured that the Indians, who were in desperate straights, would almost assuredly sell their property once it was within their individual capacity to do so. It was also the case that some Indians were actually judged to be “competent” but weren't informed of it—this wouldn't matter except for the critical part of that Indian's lands now being subject to taxation; and if you didn't know that the lands were being taxed, after come years Uncle Sam came by to collect on the back taxes, and since the Indian would have no money⁵, the land would then have to be sold to pay for the taxes that the landholder didn't know was accumulating.

The result of the complex story of the Dawes Act and its aftermath was that by its end (which came to an explosive halt in 1934) the Indians lost about 90 million acres of their 1887 land base., amounting to about 66% of all of their land. Plus the dozens of land-grants that were awarded to the railroad companies.

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 stopped these practices, offering a “New Deal” to the Indians, empowering the new commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier, with a sensical approach to the institutional/bureaucratic Indian problem(s) created by U.S. Government with the Dawes Act. It stopped much of the bad craziness of the previous forty years, though the effects of that time are felt to this day.

Notes:

1. There was still the Ghost Dance to come in 1890, but this was a limited action of desperate people, ending in American soldiers of the 7^th Cavalry standing over a trench filled with the bodies of 150 frozen Lakota Sioux (men, women and children) following their massacre at Wounded Knee Creek. There were another 51 Sioux wounded, including 47 women and children.

2. Opening text of the Dawes Act: “....the President of the United States be, and he hereby is, authorized, whenever in his opinion any reservation or any part thereof of such Indians is advantageous for agricultural and grazing purposes, to cause said reservation, or any part thereof, to be surveyed, or resurveyed if necessary, and to allot the lands in said reservation in severalty to any Indian located thereon in quantities as follows: To each head of a family, one-quarter of a section; To each single person over eighteen years of age, one-eighth of a section; To each other single person under eighteen years now living, or who may be born prior to the date of the order of the President directing an allotment of the lands embraced in any reservation, one-sixteenth of a section.  The full text is here. 

3. Ronald Takai, A Different Mirror, Little Brown, 1995, page 236-7.

4. Under a new law in 1902 at the death of the head of the household the family was required to purchase the land or it would be sold at auction. Since most of the per capita income was made via federal distribution or payment from the government for earlier purchase of tribal land, it was in general the case that only a small percentage of the $200/year was made through farming. Basically, few Indians had the cash to actually buy their land, and so it went to sale, bought in the overwhelming majority of cases by white speculators.

5. In 1907, the combined income of the Cheyennes and Arapahoes was $217,312, of which some $5, 312 resulted from farming. Of the 78 dollar per capita for these two tribes, about 78 cents came from working the fields.

The Mysteries Offered of Images out of Context

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1403

"Certainly the most novel, if not the most successful, enterprise that New York has seen for many a day is the pneumatic tunnel under Broadway. A myth, or a humbug, it has hitherto been called by everybody who has been excluded from its interior; but hereafter the incredulous public can have the opportunity of examining the undertaking and judging of its merits."  --The New York Times, on the opening of the pneumatic tunnel, September 1870.

These unusual images are all only so if they are removed from their context, taken from their stories, their explanations lost.  But the fact of the matter is simple--they show cross sections of some construction elements of "the pneumatic tunnel under Broadway, N.Y.C." as it appeared in the Scientific American for 5 March 1870.  It was an experimental line, and did not really deserve the description received from the Times. The idea for an underground such as this was the brainchild of Alfred Ely Beach, and was basically a single-train, single-station, one-block system established for demonstration purposes, and was kept in operation from 1870 to 1873.  Technology overtook Beach's idea of pneumatic propulsion with the development of electric trains, making the forced-air idea obsolete in short order.

The images, without explanation, their purpose is well hidden.

The first example simply depicts the way in which the progress of the tunnel was measured and mapped.  The two men underground sent up a series of pipes to the surface, under the very paving stone of Broadway, where a surveyor would make the spot where the pipes met the surface.  (We are told that this work was done at night, when the streets were empty.)  Any number of stories could be made of this image--all stretching beyond its intended purpose.

This machine below could be virtually anything in the mind of anyone, except of course for its real purpose, which was to power the train.  It is a cross section of the apparatus, showing its two massive fans with a figure of a man added to show scale. 

"The power transfer is one of the most simple things imaginable. Air is forced into the tunnel by a gigantic blowing engine made by P. H. & F. M. Roots, of Connersville, Ind., a section of which is shown in Fig. 7. [missing] This blower is actuated by a steam engine of 100-horse power, and is calculated to deliver when worked at maximum speed, a volume of 100,000 cubic feet of air per minute. A pressure of one fourth of one pound to the square inch would be an aggregate of three-fourths of a tun on the end of the car, far more than required for propulsion."