JF Ptak Science Books

A Girl and her Submarine, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books  

I could hardly resist this 1918 image:  the young girl, her hands in her pockets,  ribbons on her chest, her submarine fashioned over a tricycle with the two flags (Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack).

The sun is low, rising or setting, and it is catching the girl in the face, the home-fashioned hardboard visor of her home-grown officer's headgear doing nohing to shade her eyes.  She's in her dress whites, maybe proud of someone else's handiwork on her ten foot long submarine. 

The image comes from my small archive of 200 or so WWI  news service photos, this one no doubt intended to stir some home fires to help raise money or spirits.  I have no idea of the image was ever published. 

And of course the details:

And this of the stern flag, the Union Jack:

And this, with the hand-sewn eagle on the hand-made jacket, with all of the trimmings a creation of mom, or someone else as kind:

And you can purchase the original: World War I news service photo, made 1918.  8x6 inches.  Good condition.  $350

Nuggets of Atomic Bombiana: Atomic Book & Magazine Covers

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I'm introducing some of the images from my 3,500-item Pinterest collection.  The following is a subset of the Department of Atomic Bomb Hopes and Fears.  The original sources for the images can be found in the links in the Pinterests categories.  

 

Everything John Brown Owned in 1842

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2235

 

Long before John Brown led his armed Abolitionist revolt, he was--like many people on the inner edge of the frontier--trying to make his way in the world at a host of different businesses, some of which did well, some not.  He had a farm, operated a tannery, raised sheep and cattle, a bit of this and that, a man with a big family (he would have 20 children in his life) who absolutely had to make some money one way or the other. Some of these enterprises involved loans, which when combined with the Panic of 1837 and the Crisis of 1839 put the man under water.  He was so deeply done that by 1842--at the age of 42--John Brown was bankrupt.

I'm writing about this now because Rebecca Onion published (in her excellent Slate Vault blog) a list of all of the worldly possessions of Brown and his family, collected and listed out by order of federal bankruptcy laws.  The resulting list is heartbreaking and hopefully, and probably representative of a broad-spectrum slice of American semi-pioneer daily life about what the working family owned at mid-century somewhere along the speedily disappearing frontier.

What appeared to me first was the worn and worn out material, all listed in workman-like observational undertones, especially in the housewares and daily life category:  "6 feather beds old and poor", "3 tables old", "5 chests old", "6 pots cracked", "6 bedsteads old", "4 wooden pails old", "2 earthen ware crocks broke". There was the broken stuff, and then just the inexpensive:  the 75-cent writing desk, 50-cent washtub, the pepper mill for a quarter, three soup bowls for a quarter, the pot hook for a skinny dime, and so on.

 Most of the value of the family was in the livestock and food stores, mostly because there was so much that could be done with that, and by every/anyone.  Though even there are found some shriveling disappointments: the 75-cent nail hammer, the 12-cent inkstand, and the 25-cent pitchfork ("work needed to be done on same").

The listing of possessions was complete--also found here under guided supervision was the clothing of the family in their house as well as what everyone was wearing; and for a large family, there wasn't much at home that wasn't already being worn. "2 overcoats - 5 coats - 10 vests - 12 pairs Pantaloons - 26 Shirts 10 Womens & Girls dresses - 3 Skirts - 2 Cloaks - 4 Shawls - 8 Womens and childrens aprons - 5 pairs of Boots - 3 pairs of Shoes - 13 pairs of Socks & Stockings - 7 Stocks & Handkerchiefs - 4 Bonnets - 1 Hat 5 Palmleaf Hats - 8 mens & Boys cloth caps - 1 Fur cap - & 1 Wool cap."

It is the children's clothing that is really hard to read about.  

 Photographs of the original documents as well as transcriptions are available here

Dancing at the Edge: Yosemite, 1890's

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These are remarkable photos of folks standing at the edge of the world in Yosemite National Park.  They were made by George Fiske, a New Hampshire boy who left for San Francisco and moved to Yosemite at age 44 in 1879. He worked there for decades, producing beautiful and iconic work before running out of steam after the turn of the century, and in the end committing suicide in 1918 because as he said he lost interest in being alive.  

I came to Fiske today because of the dancing ladies, hanging out at the edge of the overhanging lock, a photo made by him in the 1890's at Glacier Point in Yosemite. That led me to another photo that Fiske made of his co-author Galen Clark, made at the same place some years later at the same famous spot, in 1910.  

Detail of the dancing ladies, 1890's:

And the full image:

And a clearer image Galen Clark:

[Image source:  wikipedia ]

Notes:

James Mason Hutchings, In the Heart of the Sierras (1888), with many illustrations including a number of photos by Fiske. Great digital copy at yosemite.ca.us here. 

Galen Clark, The Yosemite Valley (1910) with more photographs by Fiske.

Nuggets of Atomic Bombiana: Atomic Stuff

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I have a pinterest account with 50 categories and over 3,500 images--the images below form a subset of the Department of Atomic Hope and Fears: Atomic Stuff (with 150 or so atomic/nuclear images overall).  The source for each can be found on the Pinterest site.  

 

A Cosmological Map of the Descending Dead (1855) & a Surprise Death-Cosmo Guest Image

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2234

Oh my! The book Spirit-Rapping Unveiled (1855, see below for the long and potentially boring and extensive title¹) in the midst of much dizzying introductions and elucidations, refutations and condemnation, praise and pain, is this almost one-of-a-kind map, showing the descent of the dead onto the Earth. 

[Source: https://archive.org/stream/spiritrappingunv00matt#page/n3/mode/2up]

I say "almost" because there is also this highly unlikely image-though-not-map which I wrote about in a 2008 post with the hyperbolic title "Extra-Earth Humano-Alien Souls From Outer Space Repopulate Earth-Hell!!(??), in which the title accurately tells the contents of its text and the front cover depicts the descending alien dead: 

So there are at least two such map/images depicting Earth-bound dead descenders, and both are magnificent in their own _________  way.  

The text of Spirit-Rapping explains the deathly cosmogram: 

"In accordance with the theory already described and illustrated, it is assumed by our modern necromancers that the spirits of the dead descend to the earth or " rudimental sphere" at pleasure, and thus communicate from time to time, and in various ways, with certain favored mortals called " mediums." At the same time they belong each to his own sphere, respectively, according to the time he has been " progressing," and his head is large or small according to the sphere to which he has attained. Indeed the earth, seen in the center of the cut, is a small affair compared with the heads of some of the sixth and seventh sphere progressives." --from page 21

WHo would/could or want to say more?  

 

The Gaping Mouth of Hell, ca. 1475

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2233

"If a man were a porter of hell gates, he should have old turning the key." Shakespeare's Macbeth.

This woodblock, printed ca. 1475, appears in a Medieval/Renaissance classic, Speculum Humanae Salvationis, which appeared in hundreds of manuscripts beginning in the early 14th century and then through 16 editions as a printed work to the year 1500.  It was a very popular work, very highly illustrated, a best-seller even, a famous work dedicated to showing the presaging relationships of the Old Testament to the New.  

This image presented here depicts the Fall of Lucifer, overseen by Jesus and Angels, and falling into the gaping mouth of Hell.  It is a wicked image no doubt used to scare the pants off of its readers, in the general tradition of the depiction of the massive wickedness that awaits those who stray from the teachings of that which is necessary to enter Heaven¹.  

Gaping mouths of Hell appear quite frequently in the history of Christian art, particularly in the representation of the place in the harrowing of hell, when after his execution Christ descends into the pits to bring to salvation all of those who were worthy of it who died before his appearance on earth. It is a very common seen, with hell appearing as a cave, or a hole in a mountain, and of course as ferocious monster mouth.  In a way the stunted, black hole in a mountain, lonely and dark and just about non-existent, looked more frightening in its way, its terror implied rather than overtly visualized by horrible teeth and jaws.  

For example, Fra Angelico presents the scene in 1437(-46), and shows Christ in what looks like coldness reaching for the hand of the person usually depicted the first among the saved, Adam:

[Image source, here]

It doesn't have the flavor of fear that other entrances to Hell have, though it is forbidding, with the long line of dead stretching far back into the interior. 

An old friend from the National Gallery in D.C., Benevento di Giovanni (ca. 1493), shows a more dramatic entry of Christ, though the crushed devil evidently doesn't stay crushed for that long, as Limbo and Hell do not actually perish once Christ leaves: 

[Image source, here]

There are many such examples, and perhaps more still featuring the anthropomorphically-alive and toothy entrance--few are scarier though than the entrance to Hell that meets these two ideas sort of in the middle, that being the quietlky shivering contribution by Hieronymus Bosch, placing the entrance to Hell in the mouth of a dead human.

[Image source, here.]

Of course Bosch can and does make the entrance more hideous and obvious in other works, but this "understated" variety is very effective.  

But it is the image from the Speculum that attracts me right now, found in a book on my shelf on deeply old engravings and woodblocks, Idee Generale d'Une Collection Complette d'Estamps...by Heinecken, printed in Leipzig in 1771.  

"God, shown throughout this chapter as Jesus Christ, is surrounded by the blessed angels in Heaven. Below is the scene of the Fall of Lucifer and his followers into the gaping mouth of the Leviathan, of the book of Job XLI, which is commonly identified with the inferno. The fallen angels are represented with wings, horns and cocks' feet. The Fall of the Angels is first found in Judeo-Greek literature of Alexandria in the two centuries before Christ."--Source: Speculum Humanae Salvationis 1324–1500,  by Adrian Wilson & Joyce Lancaster Wilson, U.C. Berkeley Press, 1985. 

NOTES:

1. The heaven-helly Ambrose Bierce in what would become his Devil's Dictionary, spunkily writes of heaven so:  "HEAVEN, n.A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own."  Uncharacteristically, he did not make an entry for hell, which I am sure he was better able to discuss.  

The First (?) Electric Calculator, 1817

JF Ptak Science Books   

One of the most unexpected monuments--to me at least--in the history of modern computation is the fantastic electrical calculating machine that shows up in the vast, dense, and bibliographically complicated work by Georg Heinrich Seiferheid (1757-1818), Sammulung Electrischer Spielwerke fur junge..., published over the years 1791 to 1817. 

Mr. Seiferheid was an experimenter, innovator, inventor and writer, and wrapped up in one complicated ball, publishing his major and minor bits under the heading of this one large work over a period of least 16 years.  And don't let the title fool you:  in the vein of Chandrasekhar's Newton's Principia for the Common Reader, there wasn't all that much in these volumes by Seiferheid for kids, just like in the Chandrasekhar book, which ratcheted the phrase "Common Reader" way, way up.  Even taking into account the level at which children were educated in the applied and natural sciences/philosophy, which demanded more from the 18th and 19th century kids than out grade school do now, Seiferheid's work is obvious far removed from that.  Perhaps it was because he had a large number of gadgety trinkets that hung through the work like plumb lines that the word junge was included--I really don't know.  The vastness of his reach though into all manner of mechanical and electrical objects is very impressive--Seiferheid evidently constructed electrically powered guns, clocks, and of course this fantastic calculating device. The calculator was much similar to the machine invented (although no version of it survived) by Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635)  in 1623, followed by that in 1643 of the overwhelming Blaise Pascal (with the "Pascaline") and then again in 1675 of Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) who produced the "Stepped Reckoner"—the Seiferheid machine was more complex, and of course, electric, a true and terrific innovation, creating for its maker the sobriquet of "grandfather" of the modern computer.  

* I have found very little biographical data on this man; even the very reliable Poggendorff has only about 15 lines on him:  he was born in Wurtemberg, was a professor of physics at the Gymnasium at Schwabisch Hall, and that's about it for the personal data.  He did write four other books in addition to this ten-volume magnum opus. 

The Task Book, 1819

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I would love to write a book like this.  The full title of the work by J. Birchall, The Admonitory Task Book;: Consisting of Prose and Poetry, Original and Selected: Interspersed With Striking Aphorisms, Useful Maxims, and Moral Precepts. Designed for the Use of Schools (1819).  I want very badly to open this book.  Unfortunately, it isn't anywhere to open--it seems not to be located in WorldCat/OCLC.  

The source for this lovely title is Holletts Rare Books from the U.K. --its beautiful.  

 

Big Sparks: an Early Electric Piano & Sorta-Telegraph, 1767

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2230

The description of one of the electric piano-like instruments¹ occurs early on in the history of electricity, and in the case of the Jesuit Giuseppe Marie Mazzolari, it is a narrative that found its way into print in 1767. Mazzolari was actually a contributing editor of this work which was a compendium of  state-of-the-art/science tour of mid-18th century thinking and accomplishment, making his Electricorum Libri VI² is a semi-encyclopedic testament to the period of scientific achievement and progress. Another outstanding and unexpected contribution in this book though was made by Joseph Bozzoli (1724-1783) who made the suggestion of using electricity to transmit information--that would have been a sort of electric telegraph, using encoded sparks in a Leyden jar to transmit info from one end of the electric circuit to another, which is very cool stuff 70 years before the first certified electrical transmission of data, and nine years before Tiberius Cavallo, who is generally considered to be the first to make this suggestion.  

Oddly the book--or references to it--do not seem to show up very often in the standard histories of electricity.

Notes 

1.  This is actually an electric cymbalo ("Cymbalum Electricum" as it is called in the illustration in the book), but the issue is the same, being a description of the first electric keyboard instrument.  It is called a cimbalom, cymbalom, cymbalum, ţambal, tsymbaly, tsimbl, santouri, sandouri, and so on, and is a type of hammered dulcimer. A slightly earlier description occurs in Jean-Baptiste Thillais Delaborde's  Le Clavessin électrique avec une nouvelle théorie du méchanisme et des phénomènes de l'électricité (Paris, 1761)  "Delaborde built a working model of his innovative instrument and organized performances, however, even though the press was sympathetic to the clavecin électrique, it was never developed further and was soon forgotten."--Wiki

2.  Mazzolari's book isn't in six volumes--"Libri VI" or "Libri sex" is simply the notation for the book being divided into six major sections, or books in Old School antiquarian parlance.  

On Unusual Collections: Roads

JF Ptak Science Books

In my time I've encountered interesting people with advanced, iconic and unusual collections:  there's one fellow with a superb collection of (better than 30,000) cds with basically nothing to play them on (but of course he knew all  of the music, and listening was almost but not quite secondary); then there's another with an audio outfit worth better than a quarter million with literally almost nothing to play on it.  Then there was the delightful guy in the salvage business who collected cornerstones (!) and giant iron puddlers.  And of course the bee collector with dozens of thousands of specimens.  Oh yes!  And there was that time when I had a meeting with a man on something (on the day the Challenger exploded) unrelated to the spectacular collection he showed to me:  the world's largest, privately-owned 19th century mechanical toys.  It was really just unbelievable.  So was the man, who in the course of the day, as we sat watching the Challenger story unfold, performed on of the most amazing feats I've ever seen in my life. 

My collecting bits are simpler: I collect dirt and antiquarian artwork by children, among other simple things.   Also, once upon a time I owned a very large collection of lower gastrointestinal dissections as well as gorgeously prepared wet dissections of salivary glands. 

And so it was that when I came upon this unusual image in The Illustrated London News for 21 May 1932 I felt a certain tenderness.  This is a picture of a road collection, located somewhere in the U.S.,  and includes shelf upon shelf of cross sections of roads.  They happen to look like cubes of fat to me.  (We'll leave the bags of eyes story for another time.)  I understand the need  for  such a collection for engineering purposes; I just happened to like the idea (and the picture) of A Road Collection, and have it undisturbed by any explanation or insight.  Just a collection of roads. 

History of (Electronic) Holes, 1946

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2229           History of Holes series

I've written elsewhere in this History of Holes series about holes and electricity and the Jacquard loom and early tabulating machines--but I've never seen anything in-print from this period of time using the word "holes" to promote a tabulating device.  And here it is in a Remington Rand promotional for scouting field service technicians, and printed ca., 1946:

Remington Rand at one time was Remington Arms, and then diversified to produce all manner of light and heavy electrical goods (and of course famously producing the standard U.S. Army sidearm, the 45-calber Remington M1911 pistol), and by the end of WWII the company produced a vast line of tabulating equipment (of another order of high caliber).  Interestingly the pamphlet exclaims that a person working for RR could work there for as long as they wanted, that the company was there to stay.  

Certainly the company would hang on for some time in one form or another, but the tabulating card division was about to change drastically.  In 1950 RR purchased Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company (ENIAC) and a few years later (1952) secured another giant computer pioneer, Engineering Research Associates (ERA), making Remington Rand about the largest computer company in the world. RR would be purchased a few years later by Sperry in 1955, becoming Sperry Rand, and then simply Sperry a short time after that; later, in 1986, Sperry would merge with Burroughs and become Unisys. Somewhere in there all of these tabulating machine repairmen and techs hired fresh in 1946 would be out of their lifetime job less than a decade later.  

["Typical office installations of Remington Rand equipment"]

The Floating Aristotelian Hobo Poet Laureate of West Madison Blvd, 1925

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2228

It seems that this odd and strangely beautiful pamphlet, ?All, by A.W. Dragstedt, is a fascinating surviving relic of a largely ephemeral world.  Mr. Dragstedt was the secretary of the Kingdom of Hobos of the United States, and for years was largely and necessarily on-the-move, though he seems to have settled into Chicago a bit when he served in official HoboWorld capacities.  The penned address on the incredible front cover ("913 W. Washington Blvd, Chicago", today the home of the improbably-named "Sushi Pink" restaurant) was one of the addresses identified for the Hobo College in which he worked--that according to Roger Bruins, in his book on King of the Hobos, The Damndest Radical (1987).  This means that Dragstedt--also known to some as the Poet Laureate of West Madison (Blvd)¹ and the "Hobo Intellectual"^2--probably wrote this while staying there, at the Hobo College, in 1925. THis opens up a new field to me--printed Hoboiana, published works by working Hobos³.  

Aside from its unusual composition and design, the work is an unwieldy but semi-non-poetic Aristotelian pronouncement on the constitution of man and the cosmos, and pretty mysterious. Well, "Aristotelian" goes a bit to far, but in a way it is accurate, because the author considers the essence of matter and being and time and space and is an observer of his world, and seems for himself anyway to have drawn a conclusion from it all, though it is difficult for me to say exactly what that is.  Since the document is only a folded piece of paper, and the cover and back-page ad covers half of it, I've reproduced the two pages of print below.  

It must have been a considerable effort to make something like this happen, even if you did occupy a powerful position in a floating world.  

Bombing and the End of the World: the Physics of 1932 And All That

JF Ptak Science Books 

1932 in my book turns out to be one of the most collectively epochal years in the history of science.  Certainly others stand out for individual achievements, like 1905 (Einstein’s four papers over two volume of the Annalen), 1687 (Principia), but there are other yeas with fabulous achievements by numerous people.

 

1543 is one.  That year witnessed the published of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus and Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica, two giant achievements for the outer and inner worlds, one challenging the structure of the universe and the other the Galenic tradition of physiology and anatomy. (To a lesser extent is Peter Ramus’ Animadversions on Aristotle which was a very sustained and elegant attack on the ancient-precept Aristotle an physics.)

1859 saw the publication of On the Origin of Species…JC Maxwell’s work on the kinetic theory of gases, Riemann’s hypothesis, and the spectacular invention of the spectroscope of Kirchhoff and Bunsen (that turned much of the invisible universe visible).

 

1939 (nuclear fission, chain reaction, neutron stars, magnetic moments, penicillin (advancement), Vitamin K, FM) and 1948 (nuclear structure, QED, transistor, Big Bang) also come quickly to mind.

1932, though is really quite something, seeing a sweeping array of discoveries in the large and small.  Carl Anderson identified the positron while James Chadwick discovered the neutron; also, the Joliot-Curies’ made their monumental discoveries in radiation.¹ Iwanenko described the neutron as a constituent f the nucleus, while Heisenberg described the nucleus as composed of protons and neutrons.  Knoll and Ruska built the electron microscope, allowing a vision of the interior parts of the interiors of the smallest things, offering images almost as spectacularly new as Hooke’s two centuries earlier.  Looking up and out, in the same year, Lev Landau postulated the existence of neutron stars while Karl Jansky invented radio astronomy. There was also the perfection of the “Polaroid” process by Ed Land, and the isolation of ascorbic acid (Vit C, by  Charles Glen King, and the beginning of a long war between him and Szent-Gyorgyi on priority of discovery).  (In the non-sciences, there was the addition of Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler to their national agendas. It was also a banner year for literature: Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway; Light in August, William Faulkner; 1919, John Dos Passos; The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett; Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell; Young Lonigan, James Farrell; Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder; and Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley…)

 

 The thread of thinking about all of this came to mind looking at this image of a bombing instruction room for aviation in England in 1932.  The image is also a great one; the aviator at far left looks like a marionette; the three men above responding to his piloting maneuvers as he concentrates on the endless panoramas of landforms that advances before him on a horizontal diorama.  It is a fabulous analog flight simulator constructed at a time of great change in aviation

1932 is also the year of the publication of Carl W. Spohr’s classic future-vision/speculative fiction apocalyptic-atom bomb end-of-the-world two-parter (so many hyphens!) that appeared in Wonder Stories.² The story begins with a relatively simple series of catastrophic bombings that lead to a sort of détente, a kind of mutually assured destruction, which is then upset when the combatants discover and construct the atomic bomb.   MAD breaks down, and the ensuing massive exchanges result in a  devastated world.   Pretty prescient stuff, all-in-all, even so far as the policy goes—especially so when you wrap this sci-fi story around the elements of 1932—Chadwick, Anderson, Joliot-Curie—that made all of this stuff possible just 13 years later.

Notes

1 The Joliot-Curie discovery was called “one of the most important discoveries of the century... the consequences of the discovery of artificial radioactivity are immense" from Segrè, From X-rays to Quarks, 198-199).  

2.  Part one appeared in the March issue, which also carried stories like"Red April, 1965" by Frank K. Kelly; "The Eternal World" by Clark Ashton Smith; "Waves of Compulsion" by Raymond Gallun; "Mutiny on Mercury" by Clifford D. Simak; "The Time Stream" by John Taine (Eric Temple Bell), and others.  Pretty good bumper crop of sci-fi writers in itself.

Outsider Logic and Bizarro Energy Conversion, 1926

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This magnificent piece of outsider thinking by J.T. Lagergren, Man's Rule on Earth, was published in 1926, and seeks out the secret human-powerly passions that are/were present in people and their surroundings.  Maybe "published" is too strong a word, as my copy is the copyright deposit copy, and there seems to have been no other copies, or copies that I can find, anyway.  (I can find no copies of the work in the massive library database OCLC/WorldCat, and no other works by him, although he did register a number of patents for refrigeration valves and such.)

 

I'm not altogether certain how the author was going to re-establish what was claimed to be the degeneracies of mankind, except that it involved removing "energial" capacities of water, and to "retrieve the energy being carried away through the rivers". It also involved a plan to retrieve "high altitude air" and pump it into pressure suits of some sort to release hidden and lost energies, and of course much more, worthy of the pamphlet's 56 pages, though much of it sounded better of it was done in secret and invisibly.

Here's an example of the content of the work:

There are diagrams to go with this:

Which is a detail from the following: