JF Ptak Science Books

Hidden Stories in Prints--Renaissance Ladders in the Brooklyn Bridge, 1876

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1904

I've long been interested in the hidden, or the obscure, or the secondary, or the non-essential backgrounds and foreground in prints--more so at times than the subject of the print itself.  This thinking certainly applies for me nowadays when looking at another engraving of Winchester or another view of Rome or another prosaic cityscape--the main focus of the images are of course beautiful, but since I've seen this stuff so much my eye started wandering around to the small and inconsequential bits in the scene, and found that this is where odd richness might be.

And so on to what is in my mind, at least, an iconic wood engraving of the half-completed* Brooklyn Bridge, showing master mechanic and chief engineer of the project E.F. (Frank) Farrington making his slidy way as the first person to cross between the two spans (on 26 August 1876). 

What we see in the background of this print, on the Brooklyn-side tower, is a group of people watching Farrington, and in their midst, two gigantic, ramshackle ladders, straight out of the Renaissance.  Farrington was supposed to be showing how safe everything thing was for the workers--27 men died in the construction of the bridge, which given the times and difficulties is tragic but actually not too  bad--but I think he simply couldn't resist the impulse of making the dangerous, wind-swept way across the river to the Manhattan side.  The ladders don't seem to speak much to security and safety, but I guess that they worked

 Another interesting peep into the times is seen in this wood engraving from 1877, showing a crew working on the cables.  As much as eyewitnesses claimed that Farrington performed his stunt to exhibit the safety of the cables, looking closely at this print shows the relative danger faced by the workers.  The railing around the support car here looks more like a hindrance than a help, seemingly making it easier for a worker to trip on it, and fall into the water 300+ feet below.  

Below-knee-level barricades surely does not make for a safety fence--it is very probably anti-safety.  That said, if you look closely at the man on the extreme right, he seems to be sitting on the safety cable, leg up, nonchalant, watching the application of the cable. Tempting fate.

 

 

And the detail:

I guess though that the most hidden aspect of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge was the identity of the chief and overriding builder:  Mrs. Emily Roebling.

It turns out that the original designer for the bridge, John Roebling, was killed early on in an explosion and was replaced by his son, Washington, who in turn (in 1871) was terrifically incapacitated; Washington was 'aided" by his wife Emily (1843-1903), who became the most recognizable spokesperson and sub rosa engineer of record.  She was supposed to be assisting Washington, but it was far more so than that.  Probably it was an inappropriate time for society in general to believe that a woman was capable of supervising the construction of the world's longest suspension bridge.

"The work which is most likely to become our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge." - Harper's Weekly (1883) 

*The bridge was about half-way done, following the construction beginning in 1870 and its opening in 1883.

Exercise in Irony: the Usually-Invisible Chinese Rail Worker and the Highly Visible Photographer, 1869

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1903   Part of the series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things:  Chinese Rail Workers, 1869. 

One thing that you seldom see so juxtaposed in the photographic history of the American West are the people who were so important to it placed in proximity to those who were no well disposed to recording their existence. 

For example:  this image by J.B. Silvis, "China Section Gang Promontory", a photograph published as a stereocard between  1869 and 1870, shows a small group of Chinese workers setting two rails in Utah--they are the ubiquitously missing elements in historical images of transcontinental railroad construction. There were many thousands of these workers who were set to notoriously difficult tasks in bad situations and under time constraints with little liberty or pay (and not well-afforded much protection under the law), and in the history of documenting the expansion of the railroad across the West these workers are very seldom seen.

They are set incongruously in front of a photography car that so often saw through or around them.   The  car was labeled  "U.P.R.R. Photograph J.B. Silvis Stereoscopic & Landscape Views of Notable Points on line of Pacific R.R. Always on Hand", and I found it tempting to try to see in the photograph that it was made solely for the photographer's advertisement, but the central placement of the workers makes a good argument against this.  On the other hand, when you look at some of the other work of Silvis documenting his railway car (see here), there are a number of group images where he gathers cowboys or Indians  or makes a photo with his car in an unusual place, he is definitely using those people and locales to establish the idea of remoteness and wildness of the places in which he was working. It seems to me that in the end, he was using the Chinese laborers as a piece of his advertising ensemble more than documenting them. Again, this is very speculative.

It is a very unusual image which I think is knee-deep in irony. 

I should also like to point out that most of the workers have taken care to sew  large leather patches on their breeches--that to help their thighs when pulling that heavy metal lever across their bodies while setting and moving track. 

[All images via Denver Public Library, here.]

Children in the Workforce, 1880

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

(On discovering and photographically documenting children at work in the 1920's and '30's, see here.)

Here's an interesting bit I just slipped into while looking for something else.

Children at work.

10-15 years of age. 

In 1880, half of the population was 10+ years old. There were 17 million people at work, and of these 1.1 million were children, making about 6% of the entire workforce.  And that's about as truthful as we'll ever know about that statistic--given the relatively primitive way in which these numbers were corralled, my guess is that there were considerably more children at work than this.        

 

And it looks like of the total population of male children aged 10-15 (3.37 million) that 1.1 million of them--about 29%--were working, mostly it seems in the fields. 

 

The History of Lines #35: Complicated Text Design, 1474

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1902    Part of  the History of Lines series

This work was one of the early best-sellers from the time of the Incunabula, a book that went into 33 editions between 1475 and 1500, and into five different languages, and a number of different authors/annotators and publishers--a book with a very full publishing history.  The Fasiculus temporum, by Werner Rolevinck (a Monk and renowned historian at Cologne, 1425-1502), and printed originally in 1474, is an early history reaching back to the Roman times, and perhaps one of the very earliest chronological histories. It was a compendium of reaches into dim dust, histories including plagues, epidemics, diseases, monsters and other interesting bits.

It was also illustrated; some of the woodcuts were used several times in the course of the book; many were quite interesting. For example, the image above, showing the storming and siege of a town, features the normal allotment of soldiers, plus--extraordinarily--a cannon. 

What brings us to the History of Lines series is that the structure of the book is very impressive--and complex.  It must have been quite a chore to set into type, as the text lines vary impressively--that, and the chronological nature of the work has text running normally, and then top-to-bottom, occasionally upside down, and then quite frequently in circles.  Anyone with any experience in letterpress printing could quickly appreciate the effort it took to put this book into print. 

Housekeeping and Categories

JF Ptak Science Books

We're in the midst of having a new blog site! In addition to the new big coming changes, I've been told for the first time how many posts are in my various categories. And that there are 6,630 images posted in the blog. 

So, the 2,400 posts (including 1902 full-blown "posts" and nearly 500 "quick posts") break down in the following way...some of the 96 categories are clearly just under-employed (like "Art" and "Zoomology" and "Contraries"), but that I think is my own sloppy categorization hurriedness:

Absurdist, Unintentional (474) 
Alphabets (14) 
American History: Western Exploration & Native Americans (37) 
Anticipation, History of (118) 
Architecture and Building (123) 
Art (32) 
Art History (256) 
Astronomy (68) 
atomic and nuclear weapons (101) 

The Source that Inspired Many Copies and Imitations: The Teacher, 1496

JF Ptak  Quick Post

Well, this is more properly called "the Acciples", but for the sake of modernity we'll keep to "the teacher", and it is a beautifuil woodcut image has been reproduced and copied many times over the centuries.  The source for it all is Promptuarium argumentorum dialofice ordinatorum, which was printed in Cologne by Henricus Quentell in 1496.  The work is in the field of pedagogics and philology, and so the stout attention of the pupils and teacher to one another.

German Rocketry, 1920's & 1930's: Cover Designs

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1901

I've selected a few representatives of design for the covers of pamphlets and books published in the field of rocket development and space flight published in Germany in the 1920's and 1930's (with one from the 1951).  They have a certain expectant sameness them, and, as leading publications in their field, have a remarkable similarity in their (black and white) design.  The combined efforts of these works wound up in the engineering labs of Peenemuende and then int he V-1 and V-2 rockets that pulverized the United Kingdom during WWII.  Later this same expertise, and some of the same engineers, "wound up" in the United States developing the American space program.  The most famous of these Paperclipped scientists was Wernher von Braun, whose name is so intimately connected with the Vengeance Weapons as well as the Apollo space program.  It is interesting to note that for many years if twas impossible to find von Braun's name on any exhibition description in the Air and Space Museum in D.C.--it just wasn't there, so far as I could tell, on no displays, even though I went looking for it pretty closely.  On the 30th anniversary of the Moon landing, I went to von Braun's grave to see if it had been remembered in any way--there wasn't anything there, just his simple small slab, next-door to and within eyesight of a Jewish cemetery. 

Rudolf Nebel (1894-1978), very early member of the Raketenflugplatz, assistant to Hermann Oberth and very nearly the first to successfully conduct an experiment with a liquid-fueled rocket, beaten to the finish line by a man whose work he was not familiar with, Robert Goddard.  He defined right-wing in the Weimar era, and was part of a paramilitary organization called Stralheim; Wernher von Braun seems to have succeeded in the avenue that Nebel tried to travel along.  Nebel published this work in 1932, a year before the Nazi party came into power, and before his crotchety problems with teh SA began.

Blankness and Design in the Title Pages of Great Scientific Works (Part 1)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1900

As I've written about on this blog before, Blank, Empty, Blank and Missing Things can be of great importance.  For example, if human conversation wasn't mostly filled with nothing, it would be difficult for us to process anything, everyone sounding like several mockingbirds calling away at once, all of the time.  Music would be difficult if there were no silent interludes. And of course since existence is made up vastly of nothingness, to have it be filled would present a, um, problem.  It also might be interesting to invent an 18th century board game based on the discovery of nothing through the ages...or maybe 16th century, when the idea of zero in mathematics was first coming into widespread use.

My interest in Nothing today comes along with design and epochal scientific publications--or at least highly significant appearances of great ideas.  Sometimes the typography and design of the title pages of Great Works turn out to be very surprising--and sometimes that surprise in blankness is an unintentional result.  

Also we'll just discuss relatively recent works of the past 150 years or so. Design changes quite a bit from the 18th to the 19th century so far as scientific and technical title pages go--the earlier design (and particularly the illustrated versions) are another matter.

First, the intentional bits, like this fine example of Niels Bohr's superb introduction to the rest of the world of modern atomic theory (based upon the Rutherford model and Planck's quantum theory),  "On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules" (in the Philosophical Magazine for July 1913).  In this case (which actually is a three-part paper), the offprint to the publication has an upper part that is blank because it excludes the closing paragraphs of the preceding article--offprints being the separately-published and bound author's article that were meant to be distributed privately and prior to publication of the appearance of the contribtution in the journal.  

Before I proceed though perhaps it would be interesting to see an attempt at anti-nothingness in design, which in many cases can be a work of high design art in themselves. For example, even though most of the white page is filled up, 

this is still somehow quite balanced and pleasing. (Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann delivered a series of eleven seminal papers from 1933 to 1939, this being one of the most important, signaling the discovery of nuclear fission, an event that started its own sort of chain reaction in physicists who awoke with the sudden realization of how very doable all of this was, and how close so many other scientists were to having discovered this themselves.)

Thematic Maps: Finding Russia in the U.S. Midwest

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1899

Putting objects of different classifications into the same scale for the sake of comparison is a relatively recent idea in the history of printing.  It really wasn't until Etienne Durand's architectural textbooks of the 1850's that buildings by different architects were displayed on the same scale on the same page. Likewise, too, the cartographic depiction of mountain heights and islands and lakes and rivers side-by-side and on the same scale didn't take place in earnest until mid-19th century. 

My favorites relating to geographical items are those that take, say, all of the major islands in the world and remove them to a single sheet of paper, all in scale, so that it would be easier to compare their sizes without the distraction of the rest of the map.

Here's another, just recently found in the warehouse:

This map, "Relative Sizes of the United States and the European Powers" was published by the People's Handy Atlas of the World in ca. 1920,  appearing in print just a couple of  years after the map of Europe was changed by WWI.  (As a matter of fact this map very liberally used and without credit an earlier version published by the Geo. F. Cram company in their war atlas of 1914; it again appeared in the European War Book (by Canfield, published in 1917), calling on the information in this version and adding color. The People's History also published a 1913 version of this map though I cannot find an example of it.)  Here's the map in full:

It really does put things into perspective, giving the reader a good, strong look at just how small some of these countries were in comparison with the United States. Many of the combatants of WWI are here--and its quite sobbering to think of the enormous casualties incurred in some countries and the very small area that those millions of dead and wounded would have taken if placed in a similar locale in the U.S.  An excellent example of this is Belgium, fitting very nicely into less than a tenth of the state California, where so much killing and suffering occurred.  Thinking of France as battlefield that was limited to about 60% of the size of the combined four states of New Mexico, Arizon, Utah and Colorado, and then thinking of most of the largest battles of WWI taking place in an area about a quarter of that is, well, incredible.  Using this as a guide, less han half the state of Colorado would've been the seat of the battles of Verdun (976,000 casualties), Marne (750,000), Somme (1.2 million), Cambrai (700,000) Arras (278,000), the Spring Offensive (1.5 million) and the Hundred Days Offensive (1.8 million),plus all of the rest of the action, and you get a little bit of a better idea of the bloodiness of that acreage. 

Placing things in comparison in the same scale, side-by-side, is an excellent means of insight. 

Casualties in World War One (taken with thanks from the site First World War

Country	Dead	Wounded	Missing	Total
Africa	10,000	-	-	10,000
Australia	58,150	152,170	-	210,320
Austria-Hungary	922,000	3,600,000	855,283	5,377,283
Belgium	44,000	450,000	-	494,000
Britain	658,700	2,032,150	359,150	3,050,000
Bulgaria	87,500	152,390	27,029	266,919
Canada	56,500	149,700	-	206,200
Caribbean	1,000	3,000	-	4,000
France	1,359,000	4,200,000	361,650	5,920,650
Germany	1,600,000	4,065,000	103,000	5,768,000
Greece	5,000	21,000	1,000	27,000
India	43,200	65,175	5,875	114,250
Italy	689,000	959,100	-	1,424,660
Japan	300	907	3	1,210
Montenegro	3,000	10,000	7,000	20,000
New Zealand	16,130	40,750	-	56,880
Portugal	7,222	13,751	12,318	33,291
Romania	335,706	120,000	80,000	535,706
Russia	1,700,000	5,000,000	-	6,700,000
Serbia	45,000	133,148	152,958	331,106
South Africa	7,000	12,000	-	19,000
Turkey	250,000	400,000	-	650,000
USA	58,480	189,955	14,290	262,725

 

Unusual Title Pages: Burning Metal, 1530

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

The Probierbuchlein (Probir Buechlin/auff Goldt/SIlber/Alle ertz und Metall. Mit vil kostbarlichen Alechimeijischen Kunsten...) printed in Augsberg by Christian Egenolph in the autumn of 1530, was the first German book to deal with the significance of alchemy and metallurgy.  I think it usual to think of the work of Georgius Agricola (1495-1555)  and his justifiably famous  De Re Metallica, but the anonymous (?) Pribierbuchlein predates the work by at least 36 years. There's not much else of a comparison between the two works save for the earliness of the Probierbuchlein, as it was 48 folio leaves and somewhat restricted--but first is first, and it may have made the way easier for Agricola, whose own efforts paved the way for the systematic study of the Earth   Agricola made fundamental contributions to mining geology and metallurgy, mineralogy, structural geology, and paleontology, and outlined them all beautifully in a book that was ten times the length of the Probierbuchlein, and also fabulously and sumptuously (and usefully) illustrated.

Bus-Punk, 1934

JF Ptak Science Books     Quick Post   [Also see an earlier post here on Air-Punk & Underwater 19th Century Cyborgs]

This land-whale of a vehicle, a bus design for "Land Crusing De Luxe", is left mostly to our imagination so far as specs and stats go.  It looks as though it would accommodate perhaps 14 people on a long haul.  There were two levels of living space as well as room for two (or four?) in sleeping quarters...perhaps a more luxurious class was seated downstairs.  In any event there were three attendants on the bus for its not-many passengers, including a chef, a seward and a driver. (Elsewhere in the article the driver is referred to as a "pilot".)  

I'm sure this would have been a beautiful thing--I picture is red on black, with an ultra-shine.  I'm also sur ethat it would have been a delsight.

Source: Popular Mechanics, August, 1934.

Great & Lost-in-the-Dust Books: Love & Sex and the Freedom from Sin, 1549

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post 

In Agustus Niphus, Libri Duo de pulchro liber primus, de amore librer secundus, and printed in Lyon by Beringen in 1549, the scholar and Aritotelian Agostino Nifo of Sessa (1473-1546) wrote two significant treatises on the nature of beauty and love (liber primus and secundus, respectively).

The amazing thing about this work is that Nifo analyzes the conditions of love and sexual expression as respondents to a  psychological basis, and since this was so, that love and sex are a product of the mind and not necessarily a simple undisclosed deire, that the act and thought coul dno tbe considered to be of siunful natures--basically, the two were as natural a thing as could be, and one does not condemn the acts of nature.

Great & Lost-in-the-Dust Books: Anti-Astrology (1523)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Cornelius Duplicius Scepper (1500-1555) not only presented a beautiful book for publication in 1523--it was a work of deep scholarship, and it was edgy. Not skeptically-edgy, but a scientific-presentation-edgy, dismissive-via-the-facts-edgy. 

The book (only two copies of which are found in libraries worldwide--at Brown and Oxford--though an online version is found here), Assertionis fidei adversus astrologos, sive signicationibus  coniunctionum superiorum planetarum anni millesimi quingentesimi vicesimi quarti, was published in Antwerp for Franc. Byrckman on  16 May 1523.  (The colophon at end describes the publication data so: "Symon Cocus, & Gerardus Nicolaus ... excudebant. Anno salutis humanæ  MD.XXIII die xvi Maij. Impensis honesti viri Francisci Byrckmā ...")

The book evidently takes great and scholarly pains to point out any number of errors in miscalculations by astrologers, the weight of which and the diligence in historical presentation amounted to the book being a refutation of the claims of astrology. Among his many refutations is one that is quite simple and elegant: Scepper figures out that the starry firmament is at least 65 million miles from Earth, which means that the great vault is deeper and bigger still, and so given the size and the distance and the number of elements involved, it would be asking quite a bit of common sense to believe that all of that was having an effect upon the individual lives of Earthlings.  Pretty good stuff for almost 500 years ago.

And just for the fun of it, here's a compilation video of tasty astrology debunkers, including Sagan, Dawkins, Tyson, Nye and Randi. Actually the James Randi part at about 4 minutes is absolutely priceless. 

 

Notes:

Scepper also wrote a biography/history of Charles V: Rerum á Carolo V. Caesare Avgvsto in Africa bello gestarum commentarij elegantissimis iconibus ad historiam accommodis illustrati. Authorum elenchum, è
quorum monumentis hoc opus constat, sequens pagella indicabit in 1555.

The colophon:

 

The Devil's (Gun) in the Detail (1489)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

When I went to research this phrase, above, I was surprised to learn that it is about half as old as I. Playing on a slightly older  expression, "Le bon Dieu est dans le détail" (the good God is in the detail), commonly attributed to Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), and of course "God in in the detail/s", the "devil" part seems to be only from the mid/late 1970's--a surprise.

Nevertheless, we are still left with a surprise in this devilish detail from the incunabulum of St. Augustus, De civitate dei....(this printed in Basel by Johann Amerbach on 13 February 1489).  It shows it in its two panel woodcut the illustrious saint at top, working away at his desk; and at the bottom a battle between the cities of Babylon (founded by Abel) and Zion ("Syon", by Cain).  In this battle Zion is defended by devils, and the devils are armed. 

The angels of Babylon appear sympathetic but unresponsive to the devil-play, while an angel at top left seems to be blessing its devil enemy who seems to be scaring/screaming at her. In any event this is a lovely and complex image coming in the fourth decade of moveable type printing. 

Now:  regarding Zion and Augustine, I really don't know why the writer is putting devils in charge of the defense of "the city of the living god". The many-times-mentioned Zion of the Old Testament,  "...Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth" (Psalms 50:2), doesn't seem to be calling for devils.  But then I don't know this history of Jerusalem during the Byzantine period, 4th/5th century.  So far as wars and savages launched against Jerusalem, it was destroyed twice, attacked 52 times, captured/recaptured 44 times, and beseiged 23 times--perhaps this representation wasn't too terribly much out of the ordinary. 

Inventing (1) Old Tone in New Violins & (2) New Tone in Old Violins. Patent Models.

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Finding old tone in the 19th was attempted in the following way, an interesting if not myopic attempt to put some play-time in a brand-new violin:

Abstract of  GB 190303723  (A)

  Payne, R. H., and Broadbent, T. Feb. 17, 1903.

In an instrument for reproducing sound, a resonating-chamber is used instead of a diaphragm and a trumpet. In the construction shown, the resonating-chamber consists of a violin body C mounted on an arm D extending from the instrument A. Fig. 2 shows means which may be employed for the mounting. The pin E passes through a hole in the neck C', which is clamped by the nut E'. The pin E is mounted in the wooden block F journalled in the fork H on the swivelling-pin. Washers G, G<1> prevent the communication of vibrations to the arm D. The hole in the neck may be dispensed with, a screw or spring clamp being employed in place of the pin E. The reproducer K, Fig. 3, is cemented to the violin belly. The style K<1> is clamped in it by the screw K<2>. The violin has the usual sound post and f-holes in the belly and also holes C<2> in the back. Strings may be stretched across the resonator. When a violin body is used, the strings are stretched by the usual pegs in the neck. 

This is not the most elegant invention for producing a more-interesting music from a stationary, non-human-played violin. 

On the other hand, this is:

The work is by Henry Konrad Sandell, and the patent was for a magnificent machine that produced 64 notes on the violin, and was accompanied by a 44-note piano, both played at the same time. It is a very impressive accomplishment, with several thousand of them produced over two dozen years by the Mills Novelty Company.

Source, here. Mills Novelty, here  Henry Konrad Sandell,  and a photo of a restored and lovely Violinola, here with a sample of the music it produced (!)