JF Ptak Science Books

Great Opening Lines of Fiction in Punch Card Form

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   History of Holes series

Happily (!) featured today (14 July) on the blog of the 

H.A. Rey, Curious George.  

Isn't this great?  I bumped into a wonderful site called kloth.net  (http://www.kloth.net/services/cardpunch.php) that provides a free-to-all and unrestricted use of their punch card emulator.  It was found while looking for dating ideas for an IBM 5081 card that I have that has programming information for the BINAC computer (ca. late 1940's), and kloth.net had info on the history of IBM cards as well as the emulator--plus other stuff. Completely distracted from the BINAC quest, I created some cards using some great first lines of literature.  You can play too!  

 

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

 

A Good Appreciation of Thomas Huxley by Ernst Haeckel

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I found this fine appreciation of one great naturalist (Ernst Haeckel, 1834-1919) on the career and work of a great biologist and educator (Thomas Henry Huxley, 1825-1895) in the February 1874 issue of Nature.  [Ernst Haeckel, "Scientific Worthies II--Thomas Henry Huxley", in Nature, February 5, 1874, pp 257-258, four very-compact columns.]  Huxley was first-class and was perhaps the major defender and exponent of Charles Darwin (earning him the well-known nickname of "Darwin's Bulldog")--in a sense, Haeckel was a German equivalent of the Huxley/Darwin relationship, along with being an embryologist, physician, philosopher, biologist, and a great and demanding scientific illustrator. The article is a quick and interesting read, and is reproduced in full, below.  

Maps of Hamlet, Moles, Hair, Hobolands, and Nothing

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2252

There are a number of posts on this blog relating to maps of unusual, odd, and non-existent places (see for example Maps of Imaginary Places III, here,  and On Missing Antique Atlases of Imaginary Places and the Sameness of Alien Math and Music: Huygens' 1698 ETs, here) so this lovely map of the action in Hamlet came as an unexpected and welcome addition.  

["Autograph diagram: Hamlet Prince of Denmark, 30x47cm, stage sets and scenery." Source: http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/photos/]

It makes sense of course to chart the action in a play, but I think that I've never seen one that was of some age...and to see this plotting the advances and retreats of Gertrude, Hamlet, Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, Fortinbras, Claudius, King of Denmark, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern and to see them all at once made everything more comfortable, and confusing.  Perhaps that is the great quieter of maps and diagrams of imaginary places, adding another layer of mystery by making the nonexistent more complex.  

The greatest map of nothing must be from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits, and occurs in the Bellman’s tale, starting the second fit. It begins:

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies-
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity too! One could see he was wise,
The moment one look in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when the found it to be
A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
"They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank"
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!"

Sometimes there is nothing so fine as something that beautifully illustrates the nothing that isn’t there, and this lovely map, unencumbered of all of the elements and details that define the mapness of something,  perfectly explains the origin of its need.

Another great and perhaps probably not-imaginary map is the wonderful hair growth/directional map that was the creation of Dr. Walter Kidd (Fellow of the Zoological Society, London) and his attempt to reconcile the the influences of gravity, inheritance, genetics, Weismannianism, and other assorted biological bits via his study of hair growth patterns.  The article appears in the (many) pages of the Scientific American Supplement for 13 September 1902, on page 22, 328. 

 

 

And as much as Kidd's map was one of tracing impossible connections of hope in a hairy back, the "Cadger's Map" from the land of Hobos hopes to thread out a decent pass-through experience for the People With Nothing to try and get a little something.  

 

 

[Source:  John Hotten, The Slang Dictionary, Etymological, Historical, and Anecdotal, 1874; full text available here.]

The symbols are explained in the book on page 38:  

"Another use is also made of hieroglyphs. Charts of successful begging neighbourhoods are rudely drawn, and symbolical signs attached to each house to show whether benevolent or adverse“In many cases there is over the kitchen mantelpiece”[30] of a tramps’ lodging-house “a map of the district, dotted here and there with memorandums of failure or success.” A correct facsimile of one of these singular maps is given in this book. It was obtained from the patterers and tramps who supplied a great many words for this work, and who were employed by the original publisher in collecting Old Ballads, Christmas Carols, Dying Speeches, and Last Lamentations, as materials for a History of Popular Literature. The reader will, no doubt, be amused with the drawing. The locality depicted is near Maidstone, in Kent; and it was probably sketched by a wandering Screever in payment for a night’s lodging. The English practice of marking everything, and scratching names on public property, extends itself to the tribe of vagabonds. On the map, as may be seen in the left-hand corner, some Traveller has drawn a favourite or noted female, singularly nicknamed Three-quarter Sarah. What were the peculiar accomplishments of this lady to demand so uncommon a name, the reader will be at a loss to discover; but a patterer says it probably refers to a shuffling dance of that name, common in tramps’ lodging-houses, and in which “¾ Sarah” may have been a proficient. Above her, three beggars or hawkers have reckoned their day’s earnings, amounting to 13s., and on the right a tolerably correct sketch of a low hawker, or cadger, is drawn. “To Dover, the nigh way,” is the exact phraseology; and “hup here,” a fair specimen of the self-acquired education of the draughtsman. No key or explanation to the hieroglyphs was given in the original, because it would have been superfluous, when every inmate of the lodging-house knew the marks from his cradle—or rather his mother’s back."

 This all leads somehow to this impossible quest of Richard Saunders, who sought spiritual/biblical/cosmo-comographical spiritualness connecting the dots and creating lined matrices in human mole placement: 

I've written a bit about this in 2009 in this blog, here. It seems to me that in all the maps of something-that-is-nothing, Saunders' efforts may be at teh top or bottom of that heap.  

A Pie Line and Sugar Angel, 1918--US Troops in Paris

JF Ptak Science Books 

There's definitely an angelic figure in this photograph, an image made showing American Doughboys lining up in front of a bakery/candy store (high-sugar delivery transport systems enhancer) in Paris in 1918.  This photograph is a News Photo Service item, produced by the Western Newspaper Union, which would send photographs (and their captions) on demand  to newspapers and magazines requesting a scene, say, of American soldiers waiting patiently in line for apple pie at a Parisian bakery.  The caption says that "America's sons (were) grouped about the store waiting for doors to open" so that they could have at the apple pie. They are waiting for something, to be sure; it doesn't seem quite right that a bakery would not be open during daylight hours (though the shutters on the upper floors are closed still) in the winter (I see snow), but then again I'm not an expert on the hours kept by small business in Paris during WWI. 

I am taken with the figure of the small girl in the windowed-door of the bakery, standing there with her hands clasped, framed by the window pane, dressed in flowing white.  Is the place really closed, or did the soldiers simply have no money for these treats, the little girl standing there in the unlocked doorway wondering why all of these soldiers just don't come inside?  Were the men paid in scrip with no value in the streets of the city?  The good news is that these men were alive, and it may have been November or December of 1918, which means that the killing of millions and millions of soldiers and civilians had just about come to an end, so they could probably stay living,  safely making their idle if not penniless way around the snowy streets of Paris, wanting and waiting to go home.

This photograph is available for sale at our blog store, here. 

 

Big Tonnage Visualization--on Quantifying Images of Bigness

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2251   Artistic Display of Information series

There are many posts on this blog relating to pre-WWII visualizations of bigness and smallness, of what it would like exactly to see 54,000 B-17s in flight, or how much a German prisoner eats per year in British compounds in 1917, and so on. I found the following qualitative display of quantitative data regarding American railroads and the astonishing amount of material they transported per year, resting comfortably in the pages of a Scientific American for 1918.  The editor placed the display right on the first page of the issue, stating that "every one of us knows that the railway system of the United States has the quality of bigness, but not every one understands just how immense it actually is", and he was correct.  The top image relates to the 2 billion tons of freight hauled by the railways every year--that would mean that you could fill up Madison Square Garden (one of the earliest versions of the building now occupying that spot) twice every day with stuff for one whole year. That would be a cube 870' long and 540' wide and 280' deep.  (The editor doesn't reckon it but that would also make for a tower 870'x540'x90,000' (or 18 miles) high.)

The editor also points out that if you took all of the locomotives (and coal cars) in the U.S. and lined them up they'd be a 4-track-wide string of them 385 miles long--that's a lot of locomotives. 

[Source, Scientific American, January 12, 1918, volume 118, page 49. ]

A Memory of a Hard-to-Break Bottle of Australian Wine, 1906-1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

[A detail from:]

This great photograph was made in 1918 and stamped on the reverse "Photo by Central News Photo Service" of NYC. It shows the launching of the U.S.S. Agawam, the first standardized ship launched by the U.S. Navy (according to a New York Times article for May 3, 1918, ("FIRST FABRICATED SHIP; The Agawam, Forerunner of Standardized Fleet, to be Launched Today").  [This image is actually available for purchase via the World War I Photography section of this blog, here.]

The image reminds me in a way of the launching of the Dreadnought, which in some ways was another beginning of WWI, or at least of the naval race right before the war and of the competition for naval superiority between the Germany and England.  And I remember how King Edward VII, rickety with illness, climbed the stairs to deliver his speech, and to break open the bottle of Australian wine against the Dreadnought's bow. Except that the bottle didn't break on the first attempt--a somewhat forbidding element, except that it was her bow that Dreadnought used to sink a German sub.  The ship revolutionized naval technology and Germany played catch-up to it (and in effect an entire new class of battleship) right to the beginning of the war.  Less than 15 years later, the Dreadnought was sold for scrap.  

Books as War Loot, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

In the vast caches of loot taken during the course of war I suspect books have ranked somewhere in the middle of stolen stuff--no doubt some fine libraries have disappeared, though I can't offhand say how many fine libraries emerged from the slaughterhouse.  This photograph--a wartime news photo service image--is one of the few that I have seen depicting the capture of stolen books.

[A deep detail, followed by a more moderate detail]

And the full image, along with the news photo service prepared description of the image:

Before-and-After of Massive Moustaches, 1878

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

There was perhaps nothing so satisfying to a fellow in America in 1878 than to have a massive moustache--or at least the idea of one, a call to high fashion in hairstyles for men. But since not everyone could produce a garden on their upper lip there was always someone around to take advantage of the necessity of hope--in this case, the hope was provided by Smith & Co of Palatine, Illinois. They sold a concoction of some sort that promised (on three applications) to produce a heavy moustache and/or beard with 'no injury".  

The detail from the following snippet, which is actually a tiny detail from a full-page sheert of ads (see below):

A little research reveals the packet for the miracle-grow:

[Source, Historic New England site]

I'm sorry now that I didn't collect these before-and-after images, as I've seen dozens over the years--this one was a little too beforey-and-aftery to pass up. 

The Correct Tools for the Job: Making Crime Pay But Not Really, 1893

JF Ptak Science Books  

As long as there is something worth stealing it is probably the case with the human race that what that something is won't be, and will be stolen.  This has been the case forever, and as vigilant as an owner of property might be--whether that bit that stood for labor exchange units was a cow or land or gold or money itself--there will be someone else out there in the anti-vigilant world tempting fate and chance and skill at taking someone else's belongings away.  

We have a little window that has opened to reveal a piece of that world--an unusual one, for the 19th century, anyway.  That is what I saw when breezing through the memoirs of George Washington Wallace (1823-1891), Recollections of a Chief of Police, which was published in 1887. Wallace was police chief of NYC, making him THE police chief (sorry, Chicago), and he had some pretty good recollections to recollect. (Which is a good thing he recorded this book when he did, because he would be deads four years later.) 

But as I said, the image that stopped me was the one shown below, displaying the tools criminals would use to creak/creep their way into someone else's life.  

And this:

And the interesting bit inside the interesting bit?  The wall-mounted collection of mugshots:

 

A Town for Escaped Slaves--Surrounded by Livestock & Swamp (1862)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2248

The "Port Royal Experiment" established in 1862 by the Union Army at Mitchelville, Hilton Head Island, Beaufort County, South Carolina for freed slaves was certainly a very interesting  and perhaps life-saving idea for many freed slaves.  Well, the "freed" slaves weren't really that--they escapes their servitude when the Union Army took control of Hilton Head and surrounding areas early in the war on November 8, 1861.  The island became a staging area for Union forces and was fortified--it also attracted the attention of escaped slaves,m who by 1862 had sought a form of asylum there, numbering around 600.  They were not exactly welcomed to the island, as there were prejudices against African Americans in the Union ranks as well--in fact some needed protection as the lower low-lifes among the Northern ranks stole from the escaped slaves what little they had.  In any event, it was a difficult situation, with no clear way of dealing with the new ex-slave population from a legal.administrative point of view.  These ex-slaves were considered as 'contraband" of war, and my early 1862--on Hilton Head at least--the solution was found in establishing a town for them.

 

The town was created by and  named for Kentuckian and Major General Ormsby M. Mitchel--he wouldn't survive the year, dying of yellow fever in Beaufort S.C., and then buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn (and as it turns out his marker is not far from my mother's mother's family.  Furthermore he is the O.M. Mitchel I know from the history of astronomy, his life before the military and before his country needed him.  He wound up at the troubled Albany observatory right before leaving for the war).  

Mitchelville was necessary and perhaps it was even sufficient for the time--certainly it had its share of trouble during the war, and then with ownership of land issues after the war, and so on. 

What struck me about this map was the placement of Mitchelville.  

It was mostly surrounded by poop.

Situated on a cotton field--some of the slaves who lived there used to work those same fields for the land owner who directed the Confederate unsuccessful defense of the island--the town had a huge swamp to its south, with a 'government corall" just west of that; the northern boundary of the town was a large "government cattle yard", and the to the west was a fort and horse coral.  And then to he east was the ocean.  Hot, swampy, and mostly surrounded by cows and horses, the town doesn't look particularly appetizing.  On the other much larger hand, the people living there were no longer slaves.  

The Floating Eden of Allendale, South Carolina

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2247

(From the Passion of Former Days site--with many more Very Highly Colorful examples of motel advertising postcard art, here.)

Slate Vault's Rebecca Onion shared a great post from the Passion of Former Days site, a feature of colors-not-found-in-nature color postcards from the 1950's or so.  They are all striking, and striking in one form or another above being simply striking, but the most striking for me was the Allendale Motor Court's floating Allendale Eden.  It is, in its thrift-store-velvet way, a sublime image, a late Renaissance woodblock image depicting normality and piety and an expression of what could come for the obedient and penitent, the promise of the rewarded afterlife (as seen in so many images published in the first 50 years after Gutenberg), lifted from that dusty sleep and re-imagined on this linen-backed postcard promising a happy sleep removed from a dirt road in deep South Carolina. 

Above all else, whatever it is in this floating paradise, it is all air conditioned. And heated with steam. And with a telephone.  And a "Room TV" (thanks to Linda Anderson for that clarification!)

And today:

The town has seen better days. It is a small place--3 square miles--and has a population of 3,800, down from 4,000 a decade ago.  The tough part is that the median income in Allendale is $16,000, and the per capita is just $10,000, making for a very hard go.  About 60% of the town's under-18 population lives under the poverty line, as does 41% of the population in general. This makes it a poor city in a poor county of a poor state--S.C. ranks 48th in per capita income in the country ($34,000 against a national average of $42,000).[Source] Another site listing S.C. counties and places shows Allendale at 348th in 368 listed areas in the state, with Allendale county coming in at 43rd out of 46 counties for per capita income.  

Nearly a third of the town is single-mother households.  That is a hard life.  I don't know what the percentage of children in town that figure represents--that is, how many of all of the town's children are being raised in single-parent households...but the number seems big.  Bigger than the big number that is the national average, where something approaching 30% of all American children are being raised by single parents.  

Somehow this is so even though the University of South Carolina Salkehatchie campus is located there--a public school with an enrollment of 1100 and an academic staff of 57.  Evidently it does not draw much income for the town. 

Part of this problem surely are the sky-high unemployment figures for the town, which topped out at 22% in the years following the 2008 Disaster.  Today unemployment stands at about 10%, far above the national avergae of 6.6 (whatever)%  There is no telling what these Allendale numbers mean, not knowing how many people simply fell out of the queue for work.  The numbers sound mean and nasty.  

The floating Eden I think has not been seen in Allendale for quite some time--or at least since Route 95 skirted the town and made one of the major north-south arteries--Route 301--a thing of the past. Or passed.  301 goes through Allendale and in pre-95 times there was quite a tourist trade.  I called the newly-expanded library in Allendale and the librarian I spoke with confirmed this. She did tell me though that for as small a place as Allendale is that they get 150-200 patrons a day, which is about 5% of the town's population, which is pretty high traffic, per capita.  She was very enthusiastic about her town, and I commmend her for it. "We're expecting great things to happen in Allendale" she said. And I wish every good thing for her.  

 

Buck Rogers and the Failure of Imagery in WW-Last, 1946

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2246  [Part of the series on Atomic Weapons]

Richard Fagley--author of Brief Guide to the Atomic Age, 1946-- took a sleepy, elementary side step through the coming decade or so in the future of atomic weaponry.  The thing is, he got a bunch of it right.  But where he took a wide and missed turn, where he misunderstood the power of atom weapons, was that they would provide the future us with a "Buck Rogers" style of war.

Now of course in 1946 the Soviets hadn't developed a Bomb, but anyone who knew anything knew that it would be just a matter of time before they did.  Smart estimates were coming in at a decade or more--few people were prepared for the Soviet announcement in 1949 that they had achieved that goal

Fagley missed the impact of atomic warfare of the future not on his own accord--he was quoting someone who knew far more and knew better--General Hap Arnold, the Commanding General of the U.S. Air Force.  But as it turns out, Arnold really didn't have the vocabulary or this discussion, and couldn't really estimate the "effectiveness" of the use of the new weapons. 

So far as I know, Buck Rogers didn't have weapons like atomic bombs, at least I think in his original appeaarance as Anthony (and later "Buck") Rogers in Armageddon 2419, back in 1928, when he made his first appearance. As it turns out Buck was born in 1898, and owing to a mining disster breathed in some radioactive gas that put him to sleep until the 25th century. He wakes up in a very jaundiced post-Yellow-peril world in which America has been defeated by the "Mongols" of the East (who had beaten the "Russian Soviets" who had in turn had conquered Europe), wherein begins his mighty struggle to get America back on its feet and defeat the great menace.  The idea of Rogers becomes very popular in popular culture, and he moves from this story into many other print versions, getting movies and a radio show (from 1932-1947) in the process. Somewhere in there is where he acquires his atomic pistol (called "U 235"), though the thing necessarily does not come close to what the real stuff would bring in the very near future.

In Fagley's war of the future there wouldn't be many survivors, though his vision of the massive atomic bombing outcome seems not very proximate to what the horrible coarseness of what the real thing could be--perhaps because that amount of destruction was still unimaginable when the pamphlet was being written in 1946. Buck Rogers didn't have the vocabulary for such enormous power and mass destruction, either. In any event, words to describe the coming possibility of vast annihilation just didn't seem to be at hand in 1946--the words and ideas, and the weapons, would soon (in the Ulam-Teller hydrogen bomb, 1951) be at hand to flesh out the possible true-to-life nightmares of the nuclear future. Even in a 25th century armageddon, old Buck's idea of power and devastation couldn't come close to imagining the power of the real thing.  

 

Camouflaged Manhattan--a Map of Nationalities, 1895

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1343--expanded

Frederick Erastus Pierce (1878-1935), is the creator of  The Tenement-House Committee Maps, with two maps on one sheet, showing the densities of Manhattan populations (on top) and the distribution of nationalities (at bottom) which was published in Harper's Weekly for 1895.¹ 

And a detail:

The distribution of nationalities exhibited in this half-crazy quilt of varying blocks and densities reminds me a lot of the "razzle dazzle" camouflage used in WWI, as seen here:

actually appiled on a ship, as well as this interesting artistic representation of the practice by Edward Wadsworth, Painting of Dazzle-ships in Drydock, 1919:

This sort of display of information has been around for quite a while--perhaps no example mor edistinctive than that found in the U.S. Census volumes for the 1880 census, a small detail of a chart showing the rise and fall of the populations of American states and territories over ten censuses (see an earlier post on this blog regarding this census atlas):

 

[Please note--the images I've used for the post here--save for the details ahown above--are those for the copy at the Library of Congress.  My copy is actually a little nicer than these; I've used the LC images because the  map is just too big for the scanner.] 

Text on verso:

There's a significant amount of crowded, complex information exhibited here, some somewhat more successfully than others.  The population density map is pretty straightforward.  The distribution of nationalities, however, is another story--there are eleven groups followed here, each given a bit of a confusing flavor, given that the representations are done in black-and-white.  Its difficult data to present, especially considering that the groups shown could vary block-to-block, and that the population of Manhattan at the 1890 showed 76% with foreign-born mothers and 40+% of the city foreign-born themselves.  (It should be noted that only the groups with 2/3 of the base of any particular zone has bene plotted.)

Detail of bottom map:

Much of this population--a good chunk of the city's 1.9 million people--were housed in tenements, a pre-high-rise pre-elevator version of the highrise.  They were six or seven story walk-up buildings that were narrow (usually about 25-35 wide) and long (100-125+ as an average). There were 10-14 rooms per floor, and were generally packed with families.  A massive expose on the tenement house was photographically depicted in "The Tenement House Exhibition of 1899", the un-pretty picture described below by Lawrence Veiller in Charities Review   in 1901: 

"It has shown, step by step, the different changes that have taken place in New York tenement houses, and by means of 1,000 photographs has illustrated nearly all the evils of the present tenement-house system. Special emphasis has been laid upon the terrible evils of the dark, unventilated airshafts, which are the chief characteristic of the present type of buildings. There are over forty-four thousand tenement houses in the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, and in the year 1899 about two thousand new tenement houses were erected. These, as a rule, are built on lots twenty-five feet wide by one hundred feet deep, and are planned to accommodate four families on a floor. The buildings are six or seven stories high, and each floor generally contains fourteen different rooms."

"Only four of these rooms on each floor have direct light and air from the street or the small yard. The other ten open on a narrow "air-shaft,"which is a well hole closed at both ends, seldom more than five feet wide, when between two buildings, and often only two feet six inches wide, varying in length from forty to sixty feet, and being generally from sixty to seventy-two feet high."

"The first of the accompanying illustrations represent a typical airshaft. As usual, it is closed at both ends. It is two feet ten inches wide, forty-eight feet long, and seventy-two feet high. Forty-two windows open upon it, the sole source of light and air to the rooms. Rents in this building run from$10 a month for three rooms to $17 for four rooms. The baby's bathtub is hung out of the window because the rooms are so small that there is no place to keep it inside. The shaft is only a little wider than the tub."--Charities Review, 10 (1900-1901), 19-25.

Mr. Pierce did a commendable job in exhibiting some difficult quantitative stats in a fairly restrictive medium. 

Notes:

1.  The map sections are entitled: No. 1. Map of City of New York showing densities of population in the several sanitary districts, June 1, 1894 . And No. 2. Map of City of New York showing the distribution of Principal nationalities by sanitary districts.  On verso: text, two smaller maps "Map of the of City of New York", showing density of population by wards, and then an unrelated but interesting  A bird's-eye view of the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, Georgia; image of C.A. Collier, President and Director-General of the International Cotton State Exposition.  2 maps : on 1 sheet ; 14 x 48 cm. and 17 x 48 cm.

Glorious Book Cover Design

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

 

I'm introducing some of the images from my 3,500-item Pinteret collection.  The following is a subset of the Department of Book Cover Design. The original sources for the images can be found in the links in the Pinterests categories.  

 

 

Salvage! (1943)

JF Ptak Science Books

Now for an example of something fantastic: Salvage (1943) is just brilliant!  It is a superb  design, getting its inelegant point elegantly across to the reader, making the collecting of junk  a bona fide war effort, triumphant, superior; it delivers the message gorgeously.  Who wouldn't want to rush out and look for some metal scrap and bits and grow a neighborhood junk yard so that the community could build a tank?  Certainly these two boys--under the watchful guidance of a smiling cop in a black tie--couldn't resist, and from the looks of the progress billboard behind them, nor could anybody else in the neighborhood, as the community collected enough metal junk for 14 tanks.  (Or at least pieces and chunks for fourteen tanks.)

The community was Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and they certainly did their collecting-best.  The two photos below show (top) the scrap yard after two days of collecting, and (bottom) the end of the campaign two months latter.

"One pound of fat contained enough glycerin to make a pound of black powder, enough for six 75-mm shells. Twenty three hundred old nylon stockings contained enough nylon to make one parachute.
Thirty thousand razor blades contained enough steel to make fifty 30-caliber machine guns."   (Lingeman, Richard R. Don t You Know There Is a War On? The American Home Front, 1941-1945. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1970, 254-55).  When you have an entire town doing this, you can build tanks; when you have millions of people throwing together to collect this "junk", then you get part of a war effort.  It is also part of a giant propaganda hearts/minds machine, especially for the U.S., which was (and I use this word with some hesitation) cushioned from the effects of the war by two oceans--it reminded people who hadn't contributed a life to the war that there was actually something tangible going on, and that they could do something to help.  It kept peoples' minds in the game.  Rubber was another big concern, as was silk (the controlling exporter of both coming largely from overseas, and in the case of silk, the exporter was Japan.)  Of course there was the introduction of synthetics for both silk and rubber, but the point in fact was that there was indeed a shortage, and the donated and salvaged stuff was necessary. 

Here's a beginning picture for the burgeoning community scrapyard:                                                                                                                                             

Some interesting works relating to salvage drives:

Barringer, Edwin C. The Story of Scrap. Washington D.C:Institute of Scrap Iron & Steel Inc., revised edition, 1954.

Cohen, Stan. V for Victory: America's Home Front During World War II. Missoula Montana: Pictorial Histories Publishing Co., Inc., 1991.

And afterwards:

Hoopes, Roy. Americans Remember the Home Front: An Oral Narrative. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1977.

Lingeman, Richard R. Don t You Know There Is a War On? The American Home Front, 1941-1945. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1970.

O'Neill, William L. A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II. New York: The Free Press, 1993.

And here's one I'd like to see (the cover of):

Wolf, Howard. The Story of Scrap Rubber. Akron, Ohio: A.
Schulman, Inc., 1943.