JF Ptak Science Books

Buckets of Missing Smiles--an Incredibly Brief Anthropology of an Expression in the Face of the Sun

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1666

The depiction of the anthropomorphic Sun featured with a broad toothy smile seems a commonplace fixture in modern times--at least in the very popular media--but it seems to me that the Sun was an impressively dour character in the most misty and moldy past. Its a much harder issue for me to locate a happy Sun than a phlegmatic one, as we can in the coming examples.  Here, for instance, the Sun is actually disappointed, and dark:

[Georgette de Montenay/Anna Roemer Visscher, Cent emblemes chrestiens (c. 1615)] 

The Sun (representative in this case of the Christian god) disavows the heavily robbed false philosopher, finding nothing but fault in the erroneous thinking and pronouncements, so much so in fact that it distances itself from the phonylogian by turning itself black and devoid of light, absenting the light that was supposed to be shone via the heretic's teaching. 

Feigning to be a philosopher with your long cloak
You bring forward all false theories about the pure Sun.
First learn to recognize what is the true light.
The balmy day does not shine in obscure night

Conversely, the sun would also shine to dispel the false teaching of other philosophers, as so, though this time without any face at all:

[Source: Pieter Huygen, Beginselen van Gods Koninkrijk (1689)]

But mostly it seems the Sun appears to those who came before with a mostly blank expression:

Where was the smilign Sun hundreds of years ago?  Anthropomorphic images of the Sun have appeared in books in the West for several hundred years, and in almost every case where the Sun has a face, it is usually expressionless, its mouth drawn into a mid-Western farmer/Abe Lincoln horizontal, a tightly drawn nothing.  Two thin lips, firmly repulsing all emotion.  The face of the Sun was insurmountable, a tabula rasa, showing perhaps that there was nothing there at all inhabiting this iconographic image of The Creator to give the poor observer a glimpse into the depths of the future.

This observation  seems to stand for Sun Gods and Goddesses as well, even the ones who are being tugged or pulled or charioted a cross the vaults of the heavens—the Nordic Sól, Greek  Helios , Roman Sol Invictus, Vedic Surya and of course Elijah ascending to Heaven in a Chariot of Fire, all seem pretty intractable.  But in general images that we see of Sun deities like Apollo, Greece and Rome; Freyr, Norse; Garuda, Hindu; Huitzilopochtli (Uitzilopochtli), Aztec; Inti, Inca; Liza,West African; Lugh, Celtic and Re (Ra) and Isis, and on and on, show a small, set pair of lips, if they have a mouth at all, and this going back beyond the Sumerians (Shamash). 

When the Sun really loses its human personae in the 17th century (the scientific sun and stars beginning much earlier, as in for example Allessandro Piccolomini's Della Sfera del Mondo, 1552, with simple star maps unadorned by icons and written in the vernacular), it is replaced with starry images which seem to somehow have more emotional authority than the sun images with faces.  Perhaps the sun was meant to have this Delphic, blank-mirroring quality, given its importance as a giver (and taker) of things,

 
and that it was not within human capacity to understand it as an emotive entity, especially during bad times.  But in those times of Good and Bad it wasn’t necessary to see a frown or a smile on an image of the Sun, I guess because of the complaints of redundancy.

 No matter, though, as the modern astronomical text took care of the Sun and its missing buckets of smiles in due course—until more modern times, when the Sun is made to have a matching disposition, a result of kinder modern artists. 

 

This Sun seems to rule with an ennui  Daniel de la Feuille, Devises et emblemes (1691); and then again, in the following superbly engraved work by Jacob Cats, Sinne- en minnebeelden (1627):

The Sun here seems to have a knowledge-worn expression, a sense of having-seen-it-all, in this beautiful work by Georgette de Montenay/Anna Roemer Visscher, in Cent emblemes chrestiens (c. 1615)

And again from the Montenay we see a smirking Sun (definitely not a smiling one) judging the efforts of humans once again, and finding them coming up far to short:

I guess you could make a case for an "amused" Sun in the Montenay, though in a third-person sort of Royal way of being removedly amused.  Here--in a rare and very important work in the history of alchemy--we see a rising Sun in an amused state, welcoming the book's author, on his alchemical pilgrimage. 

In another illustration from this book (by Salomon Trismosin, Auretum Velius oder Guldin Schatz und Kunsthkammer, printed by Georg Straub at Lake Constance in 1598/9, and also known as "Splendor Solis") we find the following expected facial posture:

And so on and on this continues, this presentation of the Sun as both removed and judging, until--in some cases--the business of representing the Sun anthropomorphically disappears altogether, even in allegorical representation, like so: 

The Man in the Moon will just have to wait his turn, though I can't resist the following couple of images, the first of which shows the Moon in a phase of nothingness and a nil expression:

[Source:  Daniel de la Feuille, Devises et emblemes (1691)]

And then this classic image from an iconic and early science fiction film:

And from the 1905 motion picture version of Jules Vernes From the Earth to the Moon called A Trip to the Moon--upon the approach, the Moon's surface was blank, but quickly developed a face, which was sort of smiling--until struck in the eye by the Verne capsule. 

Offhand, though, my memory doesn't offer too many smiling-Moon expressions. 

An Episode in the History of Anticipation: Death at Archimedes' Door

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1665

Earlier in this blog there appeared an entry on the death of Archimedes--actually, it was a piece on an image depicting the killing of the great mathematician.  It is a pretty gruesome affair, even by the very early 18th century standards under which the engraving was made--gruesome still by today's standards, what with the man's head being cleaved laterally in two by the summoned Roman Centurion. I'm not an historian of these images of Archimedes, but I can say that for whatever I am, I have not seen anything quite so graphic dealing with the man's death.

The usual images of Archimedes coming to his end show him working a problem in his dust/sand/earth "chalkboard", absorbed to such an extent in his thinking that he doesn't hear the chaos outside his rooms, and doesn't sense the approach of the soldier who finds Archimedes unresponsive to his calls and therefore a threat, and so kills him.

[Image source:  Titus Livius, Romanae historiae principia, libri omnes.  Printed in Frankfurt by Feyerabend, 1578.]

Looking at this image (above) brought to mind another in the history of anticipation--not knock knock knocking on Heaven's door, but the opposite, and the opposite of that, the opposite of  knocking on Death's door, or at Death's door:  Death knocking at our door. 

The title of this emblem--Cunctos mors una manet/death is all that remains--is meant to remind us

of our common foe.  It is the work of  one of the great engravers of his time, Otto van Veen (teacher of Rubens),  and appears (along with next image and 100 others) in his Q. Horati Flacci emblemata.  Imaginibus in acs incisis notisque illustrata, printed in Amsterdam in 1607 by H. Verduss.

--All images and most translations courtesy of the splendid work at The Emblem Project/Utrecht, here.--

Part of the legend (which appeared in four languages) of the image leaves us with the following reminders, choice bits on the folly of forgetting our common end:

La terre embrasse tout comme mere commune --Mother Earth embraces us all

Moritur sutor eodem modo ac Rex.--The King died the same as the shoemaker

Death is the thing that sucks the rivers of lives, "Del rico al pobre, del soldado al Papa", From rich to poor, soldier of the Pope.

and so in image and word telling us that death will seek us out, whether king or shoemaker, rich or poor--and that in the coming end the Earth will take us all.  Archimedes didn't hear that one coming; nor did he care, I think. 

THis last image brings to mind Archimedes' work in the dust, though the intent of teh emblem ("Estote prudentes" //Be ye therefore wise // Be Cautious) wouold have been completely lost on him.

The legend translates (Thanks to the Emblem Project for this):

When the serpent sees that it is going to be attacked with, Lethal wound, it protects its head with artful care. Here lie the dwellings of the soul, the sanctuary of the truth. Hence comes life that is to be hoped for by every body.

Surely Archimedes could relate to his lines and the expressions of his thought as the dwellings of his soul (if he actually believed in a soul), though I guess you could say that the artful deception of the serpent's head finally wound up killing him via the Roman soldier.

Letali serpens cùm se videt esse petendum
Vulnere, sollicita contegit arte caput.
Hîc animæ sedes positæ, verique recessus: (here placed the seat of the soul, in artful covering...)
Hinc spiranda omni corpore vita venit

In any case I was drawn to the similarities of these two events, and the bit of anticipation that seems common between them. 

Extra-Earth Department #5--Primordial Pre-Cretaceous-Paleogene-Industrial Bubble-Earth

JF Ptak Science Books     Quick Post Addition to the Extra-Earth Series

Today a reader of this blog forwarded a lovely image for the series on Extra-Earths that appears here--one installment of which (with links to the others) appeared just this morning. 

The Wonderful World--the Adventure of the Earth We Live On (by James Fisher, and with  art editor F.H.K. Henrion, and published by Hanover in 1954) is a clunky title even for expressing its idea to juvenile audiences. And speaking of which, if the intended reader was eight years old, the cover art might be a little confusing: what is that bubble-Earth doing there, and why is there a T-Rexy thing standing there on a mountaintop overlooking a city and observing the whole Earth-emergent process? 

But when we look inside the book (at the images provided by our reader, Kevin, from his own 2006 blog ("The Balloonist") entry on this book, we can see the elements of the cover's montage, and which would I guess alleviate a young reader's consternation with the confusing image:

And we can see that it is actually an interesting book for what it is, and at least could give kids a sense of time and depth:

Needless to say my only interest here was the appearance of the miniature Earth bubbling up through the missing industrial-dinosaur goo.  The addition of an Earth on or within sight of the existing Earth seems a very odd way of making your point, even if that point was being made allegorically in a high-Renaissance work on scientific instruments--the use of Extra-earth imagery is to my experience very uncommon, and I don't wonder why. 

Extra-Earths Department #4: Brueghel Dips into the Late Renaissance Allegorical Sky

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1664

See the other Extra-Earth posts:  Mondo Bizarro, Science Afflictions and the Dubious Mind—Bad Science, Part 1. NYC in Space (?!) here and Extra-Earth Humano-Alien Souls From Outer Space Repopulate Earth-Hell!!(??) here.

Peter Brueghel (the elder, born ca. 1525 and dying in 1569), was the Dutch semi-discoverer and king of "normality" of Renaissance art--and by "normality" I mean that he depicted non-royal things that were generally off the palette for almost everyone else, finding subjects in peasants and small life (hunting, meals, working at agriculture, festivals, dances, and so on).  Brueghel was also perhaps the first painter to depict a landscape for  the sake of its own beauty, without being a backdrop for a religious study or building or historical scene. He was extraordinarily prolific in his skimpy 45 years, fully populating his scenes with suites of busy and evolving life.

Browsing through some of his work, I came across the print called "Temerpance", which in general I think was supposed to warn us against excessive pleasure, but which really just confused me a little.

  (TEMPERANTIA; and then, VIDENDVM, VT NEC VOLVPTATI DEDITI PRODIGI ET SVXVRIOSI//APPAREAMVS, NEC AVARA TENACITATI SORDIDI AVT OBSCVRI EXISTAMVS. "We must look to it that, in the devotion to sensual pleasures, we do not become wasteful and luxuriant, but also that we do not, because of miserly greed, live in filth and ignorance".)  

To me, it looks like people here are pretty industrious, mostly engaged in scientific or musical pursuits:  lots of books, musical instruments, people writing and reading.  But I guess that these were sensual pleasures, pleasures of the mind and heart, and not a pleasure devolved from the godhead.  Perhaps the complete opposite is true:  the print showing the triumph of the pursuit of the mind over sensual graft, lifting mankind above the filth and ignorance of the body.  Sheesh. 

But the real grit of my interest is the action lurking in the background, the man, the astronomer, making measurements in the sky, triangulating the Moon and the Sun (perhaps).  What on earth is he standing on?  He does seem to be standing on earth in the background of the earth on which thee people in the foreground are standing--which means, with a stretch, we have the fourth entry in this blog's short "Extra Earths" category.

The more I think about it, and the more closely I look at the print, this confusion must be my own--this must be Brueghel's way of showing the possible worlds that exist outside the sensual and self indulgent. He shows children (and adults) learning their ABC's at the feet of teh schoolmaster at bottom right, a theatre scene at upper left, a large musical ensemble (complete with choir).  An industrious man measures his fields, while builders to his right measure their progress and trueness on a column; at bottom right we see an "accountant" of the times working his tables and figures, while another to his right works on a math problem, clutching his pot of ink.  The figure in the middle (with "temperance" written in the hem of his garment), reminds us of our mortality, with a sword in one hand and a clock on his head.  All in all, it is a delightful scene of industry and invention--and it has an extra earth. 

Of course the extra-earth is allegorical, but, still, it is an unusal thing to see.

 

Aeroplanes & Airships: Artistic Displays of Quantitative Data, 1914

JF Ptak Science Books 

In another adventure in infographics and the artistic display of quantitative data we find this pair of very distinctive images that seems to work, a little:

[Image source:  5 September 1914, vol 112, #10,  Scientific American.]

The graphics are mostly good if not a little clunky--they can be viewed as "scary".  Mostly, though, these images are reproduced today because I find it hard to pass up an interesting airship illustration, though they do present their case more clearly than a slightly earlier attempt at data display seen last week on this blog.

The images for the distribution of naval power are very defined:

(I especially enjoyed the comparison of naval guns, with the cannon-within-a-cannon.)

Prehistories of Famous Things series: the Cat in the Hat

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post, expanded

 (One in a series on the preihistories of famous things, one of which is: Mandelbrot and the Pre-History of the Fractal, 1967-1975.)

 I’ve written here earlier on the 236 different words used to create The Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss and the 236 Words That Changed reading Forever), a book which I found to be a major accomplishment, a very difficult undertaking with superb outcome. [The  detail above is picked from the cover, below.]

That is why I was struck seeing the cover of volume 1 of this rare two-volume set illustrated by the not-yet-famous Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991, and son and grandson of brewmasters).  There is no question in my mind that the small head on the large-bodied serpent is that of The Cat in the Hat (TCITH, which sounds like an Egyptian deity). 

TCITH might very well make its first forensic appearance here.  Seuss busily illustrated these two slim pamphlets for Esso Oil and Grease—they presented the rules of the water, and Seuss responded with funny inset illustrations and delightful chapter-ending slugs.  He also provided a number of Seussian/Rube-Goldbergian machines which mechanically overcomplicated (or “too-complexified” in Bushisms, (true)), which are both complex and simple, delightful.  

States of Perfection: Television Advertisement Images within Television Images, 1950

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 618--expanded 26 Nov 2011   

See also States of Perfection, the Archaeology of Refrigerated Meat, 1954. 

The concept of the television started pushing its way obliquely into the literature as far back as the 1880’s (with Paul Nipkow’s 18-line resolution “electric telephone”), bumping up again with Arthur Korn in Germany around the turn of the century, and making its way through the ‘teens and early ‘twenties until  hit it big in 1927 with Phil Farnsworth’s “image dissector”. (Baird promised a hope with a mechanical version of the television, complete with a 30-line vi ewer, but it would very soon be replaced with electronic boxes with ten times the resolution.)  There were little or no stations available for viewing even though sets were manufactured and sold.  It wasn’t until the end of WWII  that the television industry took off—the increase in home-ownership of tvs exploded, beginning in 1950.*(A decent timeline of the development of tv is here.)

 

While looking through a year’s worth of LIFE magazine for 1950 I was struck by the number of ads and the number of different companies selling televisions in the major print market.  But the creeping surprise for me were the images that were used in the tv sets that were pictured in the ads—images within images.  The pictures in the tubes were meant to be enticing, imaginative, imagery of the possible, displaying the possibility of entertainment--the possibility of losing yourself in the new medium.  It was an idea of fabulousness, of great expectations, of the promise of being swept away by the new convenience—and all of that rolled up in the pictures used in the ads. 

To me, sitting here 59 years in the future, it is hard to imagine getting excited by any of these images—except Santa.  Even with the benefit of having looked at millions of images and having an historian’s occasional perspective on stuff, I just can’t appreciate these pictures in the ways that the advertiser meant them to be savored—and they were meant to be savored, as they were the libidinous bait to make the reader jump into the Hudson and buy the advertised set. 

There are vocabularies for defining the breadth of fabulousness across difficult genres, like describing the fineness of a wine or the scent of a good desert rain.  Difficult perceptions to quantify and describe, but it is done and successfully so.  I can’t find the words fort these pictures. 

Their fabulousness to the viewer in 1950 must not have been very long lasting—the images seem so contrary to being interesting, as they seem to project almost nothing at all.  I do get the overall effect of polite culture and a race at the occasional arts, but by and large the pictures were vanilla headshots of women.  

The Children's Battalion--Santa and Guns, 1916

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I don't know the Illustrated History of Santa and Gun Gifts, but I guess that a book could be written if one already doesn't exist.  Well, that or something associating Santa with unusual, or questionable, gifts in his bags of joy could be made into something, something disappointing.  I'm not that person to collect those sorts of images because I have always held Santa in very high esteem, and I don't care to have too many of those images floating in my mind, exploiting some dark corners of unknown memories, disturbing the happy bits with unneeded and unwanted visual info.  But, well, these pictures below, found in the December 1916 issue of the uncommonly-seen journal, Illustrated World, provides a little glimpse into the manufactured desires of kid-wishes for toys during wartime, and so I'll pass them along.  These things do tell us something about the period--like the famous multiple images of Santa hanging cigarette carton Christmas ornaments (seen here in the post on Gift Porn, 1954), or a smoking Santa stuff a stocking with a box of Lucky Strikes--so it makes sense to make sense of them.

 

I guess kids have fairly well always wanted toys (or not) guns for Christmas,  gifts from Santa, or at least so long as Santa has been around or identified as so, and to see Santa with a rifle would not be so unusual, especially given that this was deep into the second year of the bloody Great War.  (I have another interesting image here, somewhere, showing Santa distributing presents to British troops in trenches, riding a tank, but presently I can't find its stack in a stack of stacks.)

Perhaps the issue of playing with guns and cannons and so on was a way of easing fear and distress during wartime; perhaps it meant something soothing for the developing mind of a child.  I don't know.

On Infinite Blankness in the Infinite Library

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1664 

(Part of a series of on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things and the History of Nothing .)

I have a notion that when we enter the infinite library of Jorge Borges that what we find somewhere in there, in the middle (where every place is the middle) we find that the books being read are just like the volumes from this illustration. It may only make sense that in a place where everything that could be written had been written, and that in the place where there was a finite amount of the infinite and vice versa, that the whole mechanism would go spinning fractally out of control once the Primum Mobile got the chance to introduce the notion of the Blank Book.  Reproducing nothing infinitely may be a lot more cumbersome than reproducing everything than can be written.  At least the written aspect has some sense of order to its infinity, and that--like when approaching the speed of light--that when you get near "the end" that everything gets a little, well, funny. When confronted with infinitely reproducible nothingness, there's nothing that quite reproduces to the end of pi like the blank book.  It's nothing all the way down.  And all the way up, too, for that matter.

[Image source:  Statuta ordinis cartussiensis a domno Guigone priore cartusie edita, printed in Basel by J. Amerbach, 1510.  Illustrated with woodcuts by Urs Graf. This is a beautiful and important work, a great effort by an early and important press, and this image happens to show study timne in a Monastic setting. Their books of course weren't blank.]

In Closing: "a Kiss from Your Beethoven". Artistic and Literary Valedictions from the Master.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1663

On how to end a letter.

I've read pieces of Thayer's Beethoven, and parts of the Conversation Books (the collections of rough notebooks that visitors used for written communication with the Master (1770-1827) once his hearing got too far away from him), as well as pieces of his journals and letters--which seem to me to be the most interesting part of reading about the man.  I find his writing style to be formal but surprisingly easy, and I'm continually enchanted by his valedictions--the way in which he signed-off a letter.  The man could leave you with a nice thought, especially in the way where he would begin his last sentence and incorporate that in his closing:

(1795--to Franz Wegeler)  "I shall come to you myself and throw myself into your arms, imploring you to restore my lost friend, and you will give yourself to me, to your penitent, affectionate, never-forgetting,/ Beethoven once again"

The sentiments seem fast and genuine and seem to be out-of-place with the man's big, semi-unsure handwriting, which looks as though his efforts were accompanied by grunts while writing.  But his letters are really quite beautiful things, and a very interesting read; and as I said, the way in which he sent his letters off into space, the way he closed them, is exceptional and artistic.

And so some examples:

(1787)  "Your obedient servant and friend/"

(1793)  "Your true and admiring friend/"

(1793)  "Think occasionally of your still true and admiring friend/"

(1794--to Schenk) "Farewell, and do not entirely forget your/"

(1795--to Franz Wegeler)  "I shall come to you myself and throw myself into your arms, imploring you to restore my lost friend, and you will give yourself to me, to your penitent, affectionate, never-forgetting,/ Beethoven once again"

(1798)  You will find Schuppanzigh here as well and the two of us will tease, cuff and shake you to your heart's delight, a kiss from your Beethoven...

(1800--to Wegeler)  "Always rely on the love as well as the friendship of your BEETHOVEN"

(1800)  "Sometimes recall your truly admiring/Beethoven"

(1800, to Franz Anton Hoffmesiter) ) "I hope that we shall often have occasion to assure one another how truly you ar emy friend and how I am/Your brother and friend/L v. Beethoven.

(1800)  "Always rely on the love as well as the friendship of your/"

(1800--to Pastor Amenda)  "Now, farewell, my dear kind friend! If by any chance I can serve you here, I need not say that you have only to command me. Your faithful and truly attached/"

(1800--to Wegeler) "Rest assured of the love and friendship of your/"

(1800--to Pastor Amenda) "Farewell, beloved, good, and noble friend! Ever continue your love and friendship towards me, just as I shall ever be your faithful/"

(1801) "With great respect, I am your devoted/"

(1802) "If you should think of any favor I might do you here, it goes without saying that you yourself will at once inform/Your faithful, truly affectionate, Beethoven"

(1802) "Farewell, my dear, faithful Wegeler, rest assured of the love and friendship of your/"

(1802)  "Even unto death, your faithful/"

(1806) "Remain well disposed towards your friend/"

(1807) "Farewell and do not forget your true friend/"

(1808) "Friend Beethoven embraces you all"

(1808)  I embrace you with all my heart and am your faithful friend/"

(1809--to Zmekskall) "I come without any card from you, but I hope you will not on that account discard me. Yours truly--most truly, L. V. BEETHOVEN"

(1810--to Wegeler)  "Think of me with kindness, little as I apparently deserve it. Embrace your dear wife and children, and all whom you love, in the name of your friend,/"

(1810--to Zmeksall) "Ever remain my friend, as much as I am yours,"

(1816--to G. Del Rio) "God, however, directs all things; so my position may undergo a favorable change, when I shall hasten to show you how truly I am, with sincere esteem, your grateful friend, / "

(1817) "We have the honor to remain, most astounding Lieutenant-General! your devoted/GENERALISSIMUS" (Beethoven sometimes signed himself this way.)

(1820, to Therese Makfatti)  "Think of me, and gladly, forget my follies, rest assured: no one can wish your life to be more carefree, even more cheerful than I do, even if you should feel no concern at all for your most devoted devoted servant and friend/Beethoven"

(1824--to B. Schott's sons) "In greatest haste, with greatest urgency and yet with the greatest brevity, your / "

(1824--to Nageli) "I embrace you as one of the wise men of Apollo, cordially yours /"

(1825--to a copyist) "Well, look after yourself. A thousand thanks for your devotion and kindness t me.  I hope you will not be punished for them. / Yours, with love and friendship, / "

(1825--to Karl van Beethoven, his dead brother's son and legal ward, and legacy of a complicated relationship) "May God grant my wishes, for never again shall I be capable of suffering on your account./ Unfortunately your father/or rather not/ Your Father"

(1826--to Tobias Haslinger)  "With the most reverential reverence and fidelity, yours, / "

(1827--to B. Schott's sons) "Pity your devoted and respectful friend, / "

(1827--to Pasqualati) "May Heaven bless you generally and for your affectionate concerns, / With your respectful,/ suffering Beethoven"

(1810, to Archduke Rudolph)  "Well, it really makes me laugh to think how Your Imperial Highness consider me even on this occasion; for this, assuredly, my whole life long I shall remain, Your most obliging servant, /"

One of the valedictions in the "series" of letters to his famous and as-yet-unknown² "Immortal Beloved" in July 1812 goes so:

"be calm - love me - today - yesterday - What yearning with tears for you - you - you my life – my everything - farewell - oh continue to love me - never misjudge the most faithful heart of your Beloved/ L"

and also:

(1807, to Josephine Brunsvik) “never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved L”

And of course he could start a letter, too, as we can see here in his start of the towering love letter to his Immortal Beloved (above):

"My angel, my everything, my very self. – only a few words today, and in pencil (with yours) - I shall not be certain of my rooms here until tomorrow – what an unnecessary waste of time - why this deep grief, where necessity speaks - can our love exist but by sacrifices, by not demanding everything. Can you change it, that you are not completely mine, that I am not completely yours? Oh God, look upon beautiful Nature and calm your mind about what must be – love demands everything and completely with good reason, that is how it is for me with you, and for you with me - only you forget too easily, that I must live for myself and for you as well, if we were wholly united, you would not feel this as painfully, just as little as I would – my journey was terrible..."  

But we'll leave the beginnings to another post.

Baseballs of Death--the Baseball Bomb, 1916

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This unlikely advertisement was for baseball players with good throwing/pitching skills to enlist in the U.S. Army and throw the newly-design, baseball-weighted and -sized hand grenade. 

"The United States Army needed a grenade that would be accident-proof and the baseball bomb has been the result.--Illustrated World, 1916, page 622.

Bob Gibson threw many of these in the 1960's.

So did this guy a little later on:

War Rations--Iron and Bread

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Continuing yesterday's post #1662 (A Short Episode in the History of Bread Photography...): my friend Jeff Donlan pointed out that if 60 million pounds of bread were served weekly to the 4,000,000 members of the German Army, then each soldier must be eating about 2 pounds of bread a day.  And that's not eating a loaf or whatever of "Wonder Bread" (its a wonder its bread--watch that trademark!) or any other white bread where you could ball up two slices and pop them whole into your mouth.  As Jeff points out, if this was a dark or rye or Napoleon's-solder's-like black bread or some some thing, it would be thick and dense.  And so, two pounds of this sort of bread is a lot, especially if the average soldier was running around and weighing in at 150 pounds or so--eating two pounds of bread plus four pounds of potatoes would mean that each soldier was eating about 5% of their body weight in just those two foods per day.

This all sounded like a lot of food to me--until I stumbled on the following article in a journal I had never encountered before.  It was in Illustrated World, a Popular Mechanics-lite sort of publication, for November 1916, in an article "From Trench and Barrack" that I found these two photographs.  I was astonished first of all to find a bread-consumption reference within 15 minutes of wondering about such a thing for the first time ever--but there it was.  A big slab of fork+-high bread in a picture made to depict the daily rations of a German POW in the hands of the British.  The prisoner was alloted 1.5 pounds of bread.  Plus a half-pound of (cooked) meat, 8 ounces of vegetables, one ounce of coffee or ta, and the other stuff as can e seen in the photo's caption. 

And there you have it.  If the prisoner is getting 1.5 pounds of bread, then it makes sense for the active soldier to be eating two pounds.  At least it all makes sense in 1916.

The thrust of the article in Illustrated World though was the other sort of ration that Great Britain would be shelling out--shells.  This would be the iron ration that--after two years of a terrible and monumentally destructive war--would be the most common form of ration exchanged during the conflict.

 

An Episode in the History of Bread Photography: Monumental Bread and Infographics, 1914

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1662

In the history of pictures of bread, this loaf seems to be about the biggest.  The 60-million-pound loaf is meant to represent a week's ration for teh newly-fighting German army.  The war, the Great War, WWI, was just beginning when this article hit the newsstands on 22 August 1914.  There wasn't much yet printed in the Scientific American regarding the war, and it seems as though this was the first cover of the magazine to deal with the new world-ender.  But in the blazes of the guns of August (B Tuchman) the end of the conflict might've looked a little close at hand.  I doubt that many would've seen the 100,000,000 dead and wounded that would come as a result of the war, at this point just finishing its first month.

I am not sure why, but the editors of SA chose to think about supply for their first stab at making a cover-comment about the war.  It does give some idea of the sheer numbers of people involved, at least on the German side.  Hoiw this is iterated by a 400-foot-tall loaf of bread, I can't exactly say.

(Are potatoes one tenth the density of :"meat"?  The potato sack and the meat chunk look to be about the same size, though the meat bit is less than a tenth of the weight of the potatoes.) 

Two issues later--5 September 1914--we see the following artistic display of quantitative data, a much more effective way of generating understanding on the differences in troop strengths among the waring countries:

 

The United States would not get involved in WWI until 1917, and so American statistics were not included in this image.  But if they were, the U.S. Army's size would be somewhat larger than little Montenegro there at the far right.  Given the American population of 92,000,000, the army was quite small, with barely 98,000 soldiers under arms (half of whom served overseas). (Montenegro's force of 50,000 was somehow pulled out of a population of 350,000 people--Belgium, with a population of 7 million, had an army more than double the size of that of the U.S.)  Of course this was a peacetime, hands-off army for the United States, and by the end of 1914 President Wilson expanded the standing army to 140,000; by 1918, when the newly-instituted draft¹ really kicked in, more than 4,000,000 people would be in the armed services, half of whom would serve overseas. 

Notes

1. Beginning in 1917 all males between the ages of 21 and 30 were required to register for the draft/military service, and by September 1918 more than 23,000,000 men had done so.  This was an extraordinary leap from the Army totals for 1914.   

Videos of Scientists & Mathematicians: Feynman, von Neumann, Dirac et al

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Richard Feynman on being "stupid":

John von Neumann inerview:

 

Electro-Punk Heavy Metal Birthing Machine--a Fantastically Bad Idea

JF Ptak Science Books   Re-posting entry #1500

I found this by accident, and needed to share it immediately, because in the splendid and chilly vastness of the infinite Encyclopedia of Bad Ideas, this entry would seem quite the poster child for such a stupendous effort--the mud to which all dust aspires. 

The centrifugal machine for human birth...its hard to even finish that sentence, let alone finish it without wincing.

I think what we have here is the Vitruvian Woman of Bad Ideas relating to human birth, the patent described more fully in this great piece by Marc Abrahams (of the Annals of Improbable Research) in The Guardian, 2006):

 

Read the rest of this post here.