JF Ptak Science Books

Ecclesiasticism and the History of the Future

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2128  

There are different types of mystery as any quick look at Medieval legacies will tell you.  Some are mysterious mysteries never meant to be understood outside of obliqueness given their allegorically ambiguity, and some are just, well, different, but answerable. 

The history of the future lends itself a little to the Ecclesiastical (or first) sort of mystery as just described--sometimes, anyway.  Sometimes looking at an imagined future drawn years ago for a period of time that has already passed may lend itself to some fair-game comedy.  But getting things "right" as a futurist/illustrator may be quite beyond the point, as with the example above, drawn by Jim Powers.

Being furiously correct was not the point Powers was trying to achieve.  TO me he was drawing to a certain deep sight, presenting an allegory of possibility, trying to excite some interest in speculation in someone by elements of what he was drawing, not in the overall image.

In the alphabet of 'RAMAS, perhaps the most famous of them all is futurama, which (real or imagined) is part of the continuum of motoramas version of raceoram's spaceorama.  It was in this envelope of futurama that Jim Powers worked his mysteries in a series of images for Life in the Year 2000, laboring away at insight in the mid-1950's.  Surely he could0 not have believed in these rocket-stuffed ultra-streamlined mega-finned interplanetary autos would come into being in five decades, but I'm pretty sure that he believed that somewhere in the details of his work were useful bits/ideas for someone else.  Surely he did not think that the overall vision was more significant than the sum of all of his very interesting parts. 

Atlas of Dead Ideas. Q: When is Israel Not So? A: When it is Great Britain (1929)

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There was a Bible-studying group headquartered in Haverhill, Massachusetts whose inspiration/idea  interpreting the true nature of what was "Israel" according to bits and pieces in the Old Testament, and which found something to be radically different from what was seen to be  the case.  The pamphlet documents that the place we think of as Israel is not really so, and that the country best fitted to these OT statements was actually Great Britain.  There are many reasons for this and they get mistily presented in the pamphlet Restoration of Kingdom Administration the Anglo Saxon Responsibility (published by the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America in 1929), but it is rather too much and tedious and tiresome to get into the milky details, except to say that Israel as was currently recognized could not be so unless they adopt the Christian faith.  And so on. 

The address of the organization put it on Merrimack Street in Haverhill, a block away from the river--the four story building now has it middle floor obscured by some teal 1950's architectralolypse facing, and the bottom floor is now a dollar store (with redundant signs) with a sandwich board out front (captured by the Google car) reading "Design Perfume on Sale Beauty Supply".  I'm sure the store is necessary and fills a need, but it is a long way and many years from redefining the concept of Israel. 

The Tall in the Short of It--the Giants of Microworlds & the Microscope

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2127 

I've posted a number of bits in this blog about stupendously large and enormously small things, but it is infrequent to find the story of something made exceptionally large in a reduced world.  Perhaps it is normal fare in the science fiction world, but I found the not-obvious but still-obvious making of a giant in microland to be, well, less than obvious.  

There have been countless stories told of shrinking people, or the discovery of vastly small communities living withing a larger host community, and so on, like the following:

This is a story by Henry Hasse and it involves a great scientist and the his elixir called "Shrinx" which after it has been injected into his assistant shrinks the man immeasurably, so science-fictionally small, that he has passed through the microscomos and "subuniverses" to the point where he emerges on a primitive place called Earth.  The assistant has traveled from a planet in a solar system revolving around a sun in a solar system in a galaxy in a universe to something small, something sub-atomic, landing in an electron holding within it its own universe. 

that's small. 

And then there is this piece of magnificent ne plus ultra, where we remain in the microworld but where there are also micro-giants.

The cover of Fantastic Novels (1921?) seems to tell a straightforward story, but as it turns out the giant is giant but one living within a world in an atom of a gold wedding ring.

Author Ray Cummings (1887-1957) found a nice writing niche for himself in his fictional discovery of a drug that could make people as small as atoms and then, once inside the microworld, could be made as immense as micro-mountains.  The Girl in the Golden Atom was one of a five-part trilogy(?)¹ and so far as I can tell, Cummings used the hell out of his original idea.  The prose reads like it is punctuated with invisible periods every fifth word--evidently Cummings was so very busy writing 750 books and short stories that it  left him little time to edit or, maybe, think.

It was a very nice surprise for me. That said, I can only imagine the giddiness and suspension of (dis-)belief when the mass market readership of Robert Hooke's Micrographia got a look for the first time on what the small creepy crawlies that lived around them looked like under magnification.  Suddenly the blots and blotches took on real--and sometimes terrifying--forms.  These were basically unseen during their long interactions with human beings, until, suddenly, Mr., Hooke made his investigations and put a face on the unseen microworld and shared it with the General Public. 

"It is my hope, as well as belief, that these my Labours will be no more comparable to the Productions of many other Natural Philosophers, who are now every where busie about greater things; then my little Objects are to be compar'd to the greater and more beautiful Works of Nature, A Flea, a Mite, a Gnat, to an Horse, an Elephant, or a Lyon" said Mr. Hooke at the end of his 28-page preface to Micrographia in 1665.

[Mr. Hooke's drawing of his flea, in full and unexpected glory, with as much detail and armor as anything that had ever been imagined--only this thing was real, and common, and lived on you.]

It may have been a similar shock to those seeing these images for the first time as it was for people to see Galileo's images of the Moon, or to read him announcing that the perfect sky of Creation was actually not so, and that his telescope revealed ten-fold the number of stars that people could see with only their eyes, and which faith alone could not elaborate. 

Yes, the incredible shrinking giant woman was a surprise but not on this order, not by a stretch--though it seems to be the world of science rather than scifi that has delivered the most shocking stories of the big and the small. 

The Expandable Waistcoat & Blank Book Patents of A. Einstein & S. Clemens

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Albert Einstein was many things--including a designer of clothing, and a patented one at that. He applied for and was granted a patent in 1936 (not an unbusy period in which he must've been noodling this thought around in his head, that blouse thing along with gravitational lensing, that pesky quantum mechanics, and the EPR paradox and all that) for an expanding waistcoat. 

Well.  Einstein had his hand in other patents, including a rather famous one regarding a refrigerator with no moving parts (along with the great Leo Szilard, the "Einstein-Szilard electromagnetic pump), as well as part interest in gyroscompasses and a hearing aid, and better yet a "light intensity self-adjusting camera" with an "electric eye".  And the "ornamental blouse". I suspect that it was all in fun, except that once the thinking had been done, it was thought to take it to the next logical step. 

Affairs of the Heart: Blood & Clouds, 1664

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2025 

 

In 1664 Philipp Jakob Sachs (Sache de Lewenbheimb) wrote an influential book on the circulation of the blood.  It was the advanced work of a learned man, a naturalist and physician who was also the editor of the Ephemerides Academiae naturae curiosorum, which was the first journal in the field of natural history and medicine and one of the founders of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum (Leopoldina).  His work came 40 years after the great work by William Harvey, who published Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus in 1628, a work in which he essentially brought the idea of circulation of the blood into the modern age, building on earlier ideas of Michael Servetus, whose 1561 work on circulation (and his religious ideas) brought him to be executed by flames. 

For centuries the pulse was a vaguely understood thing reaching back into the murky medical past as far back as Galen.  The association of course was with the heart, and the association of the heart was as the great controlling center of all function and control of the human body—a theory that reached far forward into the 16^th century.

Servetus (physician, cartographer, theologian, writer and general all-adept Humanist of a high order) was in trouble with the church for many reasons, not the least of which was trying to dislodge the theory of the heart as sacred and the seat of wisdom.  But he did establish that the heart was an organ, which didn’t sit well with very many people, least of all the Calvinist court in Vienna which found him guilty on many anti-Humanist grounds, including his anti-Trinitarian Christology, which made him a reviled figure to Catholics and Protestants.  He was tried and found to be dangerously heretical, and sent to the flames.

Harvey withstood blistering attacks on his correct statements on the circulation of the blood (costing him nearly all the patients in his practice), though he at least lived to see a brighter day:  Servetus, on the other hand, didn’t, and was burned at the stake for his heresies, one of which his attack on the spiritual heart.

In any event, the frontispiece to Sachs' work is an interesting allegorical composition showing a connection between the place of the very prominently featured heart in the circulation of the blood, and the water cycle, and the cosmos of creation (the breath of life coming from the winds of the Sun and the Moon).   

 

Notes:  (Sachse de Lewenheimb, Philipp Jakob Sachs, 1627-1672 , Oceanus macro-microcosmicus, seu Dissertatio epistolica analogo motu aquarum ex et ad Oceanum, sanguinis ex et ad cor... 1664, with full text via Google books here).

Old Word of the Day--Abcedarian

Abcedarian n.s. [from the names of a, b, c, the three first letters of the alphabet.] He that teaches or learns the alphabet, or first rudiments of literature.

This word is used by Wood in his Athenae Oxonienses, where mentioning Farnaby the critic, he relates, that, in some part of his life, he was reduced to follow the trade of an abecedarian by his misfortunes.

--Johnson, Samuel. "Abecedarian." A Dictionary of the English Language: A Digital Edition of the 1755 Classic by Samuel Johnson. Edited by Brandi Besalke. http://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/?p=296.

Strange Things in the Sky Department: Tall Ships Flying

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Source: Encyclopedia Britannica via Google Books

I love Tall Ships, but perhaps never so much as when they are flying--real or imagined. 

Civil War Maps by the Great Mapmaker of the Confederacy, Jed Hotchkiss

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I was searching for the "Make Me a Map of the Valley" map, the Stonewall-Jackson-directive map, that was made to devastating effect by the Confederacy's leading cartographer, Jedediah Hotchkiss.[More on Hotchkiss here from the Encyclopedia of Virginia.] I saw this on display at the Library of Congress years ago--it is an enormous thing, about 22 square feet and more than 7 feet long (or tall, as it was displayed vertically then), filled with minutiae and just a splendid map of great detail put to extreme use by General Jackson (and Lee, and others).   The LC has the Hotchkiss Collection, their "jewel in the crown" of the Civil War maps there, and there is a great amount of it on display on the LC website.  The Big One, though, is not there in full.  I copied a few of some of the maps most interesting to me, and at the bottom is a link to the other 120 or so maps online by Hotchkiss.  

[Above:  title for one of Hotchkiss' workbooks, Sketch book of Jed. Hotchkiss, Capt. & Top. Eng., Hd. Qrs., 2nd Corps, Army of N. Virginia : [Virginia], "Shows general maps of northwestern Virginia and parts of Montgomery County, Maryland, with some showing roads, troop movements, and the names of some residents..."

"The Hotchkiss Map Collection contains cartographic items made by Major Jedediah Hotchkiss (1828-1899), a topographic engineer in the Confederate Army. Hotchkiss made detailed battle maps primarily of the Shenandoah Valley, some of which were used by the Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson for their combat planning and strategy. Several of the maps have annotations of various military officers, demonstrating their importance in the military campaigns..."--from the LC site.  A good, long essay on the collection by Clara LeGear appears elsewhere on the LC site, here.

All maps are expandable after being opened.

Map of the Shenandoah Valley from Harrisonburg to Mt. Jackson, with topographical detail along the principal roads from Thornton's Gap to Swift Run Gap and along several valley roads in northwestern Virginia:

The Trained Neutrality of Killing

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Siegried Giedion wrote a terrific book called Mechanization Takes Command (and beautifully subtitled ...a contribution to anonymous history) in which he (sweepingly) looks at how mechanization took over from hand production in the life of social and technical world. 

The book was published by Oxford University Press in 1948, and given that year, Giedion has something very interesting to say about killing.

After investigating "The Mechanization of Death: Meat" and how over hundreds of years the hammer-to-the-head and skinning that transforms an "animal" into ":meat" turned from human to mechanical hands, he decided that "what is truly startling in this mass transition from life to death is the complete neutrality of the act".  The animal=meat act and the mechanization of killing removes the "human" element of the act, and that "one does not experience, one does not feel; one merely observes" a killing that is not somehow dying.  He reckons that this experience may in general have made us more capable of desperate act of killing that do no longer seem so desperate. 

It is a remarkable and early insight into the meat industry from an uncommon and unexpected source.

[Source:  Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, Oxford University Press, 1948, p.246.]

Title from BizarroLand--a Daily Dose from Dr. Odd

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In my heaping pamphlet collection there is a sub-collection of works with impossible, outsider-y, and stubbornly semi-confused titles that simply cannot be ignored--I mean the titles can't be ignored, though most of the time their texts beg to be. 

Some of the titles change from cover to title page; some titles are non-existent and replaced by simple exclamations.

In this case, and the first instance that I can recall, there is a "Library Classification" at top-center of the cover, leading to other information about the book just before we get to the title, which seems nearly secondary, and which is followed by other non-title information right there on the cover. There is all manner of info there, a cover with a very busy pace--data galore for what should be a mostly blank space, except the author's name. 

Imaginary Aircraft of Massive Oddness

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These Air Wonder Stories magazine covers are just absolutely delightful--full of abolute hope and belief in the possibilities of what the future might bring i the forms o fair travel.  THe first shows an enormous jet-powered craft that is breaking through a waterspout, seemingly undisturbed. 

An Interesting Three-Part Perspective, 1560

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I'm not sure if I've ever seen a 16th century human perspective drawing showing the body in plan and elevation and cross-section.  Jehan cousin the younger (1522-1595, in France), the son of Jean Cousin the Elder (1490-1560), a painter and sculptor, produced such an image in his Livre de Perspective, which was published in 1560. Well, the image definitely was published in 1560, though the artist may have been father and it may have been son--they worked closely together, and the Younger was taught at great length by the Elder, so much so that their work became indistinguishable. Nevertheless, the images I think are quite extraordinary, as we see below: 

 

And so by Andreas Mantegna, a classic example:

The following images come from the 1608 edition of the Cousin Perspective. a number of which are fairly unusual (all from the Library of Congress site, here):

Some Famous Military Pigeons

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2124 

 

Several years ago I purchased part of an archive of David Katcher, who was the founding editor of the journal Physics Today. Before that, several years before that, in 1945, David Katcher was Lt. Katcher, serving as a correspondent/writer in the public relations office of the U.S. Army Headquarters of the Western Pacific (GHQ USAFPAC). There's a 6-inch stack of paper here with what seems to be his (and associated) mimeographed offprints of the daily grind of running the PR department of the Army in the Philippines, which, taken as a whole, is pretty interesting, showing the concerns and trials of the Army in reestablishing the government and infrastructure of the country.  Some of the individual reports/publications are stand-alone, straight-up fabulously interesting things, and so far as I can determine, have not been published anywhere else.  These two examples are both related to the subduing of the last remnants of the Japanese Army still fighting in the dense nether lands of northern Luzon, the Philippines, fighting after the surrender had been made (14 August 1945) and  signed (formally, on the USS Missouri, 2 September) , fighting after the war had ended.

And in all of this comes this unexpected item, dated 1 October 1945, from "Headquarters. United States Army Forces Western Pacific, Public Relations Office, APO 707, General Release 56--Manila" and which--in the midst of the end of the war and the dropping of two atomic weapons--concerns a brave and battle-distinguished and heroic pigeon, "Blackie Halligan". 

"Blackie carried a number of messages to this location, one of which was extremely important because it gave the location of some 300 Japanese troops. He carried out this message despite being badly wounded. Word of his accomplishment reached General Patch, Commander of the American Division, who made a special trip to the loft where he decorated Blackie. Later, Blackie saw action at other islands in the Pacific."--CECOM Historical Site, U.S. Army, source.

Sometimes, in the midst of great loss in the throes of great victory, in the balance of stories great and true and tried, the small story of sacrifice may be the perfect antidote for large needs. 

There is of course a long history to the pigeon in war, and frankly I was surprised to find this story in 1945. Most of the famous pigeons of war come from the First World War:(the image below coming from The Illustrated London News for 2 October 1915):

The Long and the Longer of It: a Fabulous Engraving of Trajan's Column

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 I have a hard time resisting long and detailed engravings, and the great sculptural victory column with the enormous numbers of bas relief depicted by Giovanni Piranesi ("Trofeo o sia magnifica colonna ... ove si veggono scolpite le due guerre daciche fatte da Trajano, inalzata nel mezzo del gran foro ..." and printed in 1770) certainly takes a stellar position. It is of course a depiction of the epic victories of Roman Emperor Trajan's campaigns against the Dacians (101-102 and 105-106 ACE), and is located at Trjan's Forum, north of the Roman Forum.  The story of Trajan's efforts on the 100'-high column (125' with pedestal) wraps itself around 23 times, rendering a 625'-long storyline of defeat for the Dacians.

It is a beautiful thing, even if Sixtus V (the Sixtus who came after Sixtus IV who commissioned the Sistine Chapel, or the chapel dedicated to the Sixtus popes) placed that statue of St. Peter on the top of it. 

Here's a fantastic site that interprets and presents all of the 500+ sculptures on the column: http://www.stoa.org/trajan/

Ear Trumpets for the Eyes

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This is a very quiet image of a major device in the history of the animated/moving picture:  Joseph Plateau's phenakistoscope, a device which was based on the persistence of vision principle that would allow th emind to believe it was witnessing a continuous (though segregated) motion.  

Oddly enough, this device brings to mind this ulatra-stable depiction of motion:

Which is a detail from this lovely illustration [Source: found by Eric Edelman, collage artist, in Funk & Wagnall's Dicitonary, 1920]:

Notes:

1. "On 10 December 1830, Michael Faraday(1791-1867) gives a lecture at the Royal Institution. The publication appears in February 1831: "On a peculiar Class of Optical Illusions". Continuing on what Peter Mark Roget (1779 - 1869) had published in the Philosophical Transactions, he describes two parallel discs, revolving on the same axis, in opposite directions, each having 16 cogs. When viewed in a mirror a stationary image is seen. He does not refer to Plateau's work, done before 1831 and which had been published in the Correspondance mathémathique et physique. Later Faraday writes that the honour is due to Plateau."--source, here. s in --February 1831: "On a peculiar Class of Optical Illusions". Faraday writes that the honour is due to Plateau.