JF Ptak Science Books

Rules of Civility, 1931: "Applause Should Never Continue to the Point Where if is Insulting"

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This is a guidance book for possible social behavior for high school students, published by the students of the Technical High School, Oakland, California, 1931.  There are many suggestions that place ladies in cellophane and are pretty restrictive, but there's a lot of good stuff, too--for one thing I've never understood males wearing hats indoors, which in this manual is of course strictly verbotten. This is a very well design booklet (pocket-sized, on good paper, a good production)  especially since it was designed and printed by high school kids.  

Here are some manners for sporting events, most of which would be nice to see practiced today, which I think makes me seem decrepit and creaking--still, these are good rules for kids (and more so for adults making $150,000 or whatever for each of their professional sports appearances) to if not abide then at least have in their minds:

 "Applause Should Never Continue to the Point Where if is Insulting"

"If the poor player plays his best, he should make no excuses"

"Take victory calmly, with a pleased but not superior air, and avoid boasting. This, more than anything, will mark one as a good winner.'

"Always give the opponent the benefit of the doubt."

"Decisions of officials should never be questioned by the bleachers"

"Endeavor to 'save his face' if your opponent plays poorly"

 Also the illustrations (which in the book are only 3/4" high) are quite good:

 

War Bonds and Doing the Right Thing: Great Britain, 1943

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I've got a small collection of bond promotionals published by the British government during WWII, mostly though for 1942/4, and they have a great feel and sense of spirit, and right, and duty. All extolled the necessary and great need for money to fight the war.  The appeals were sensible, and direct, and asked people to loan the government money.

If you scroll down you can see a blank form for docking your paycheck to have some of it go to national defense.  

 

 

 

 

 

Making News--a Working Newsroom, 1922

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This is a photo from a small archive that we have here that once belonged to Alexander Uhl, a New Yorker (CCNY and Columbia School of Journalism) and a Major League Old-School reporter of a high order. This photograph is not identified except for Uhl's name and date (May 1922) on the back, but my references for Uhl start only in 1935 when he began covering Spain for the Associated Press, where he remained to cover the war until 1938. Uhl went from there to Europe where he covered the war and post-war from 1940 to 1948--this for the famous Leftie newspaper PM, which vowed never to take advertising money and to survive on subscription and daily sales.  They packed a lot of news into relatively small tabloid formats. In any event, I do not have the info of where the photograph was made, though it is Uhl in the middle with H.L. Mencken eyeglasses and cigar.  It is a great scene, and shows the folks in the newsroom at work--if they weren't on the phone, they were writing; if not writing, then typing. At middle-left is an office boy either sending or retrieving a morsel from a pneumatic delivery system.  

Amidst the ties and suits, there is remarkably little clutter, and very little paper. There is a fair amount of grime, though.  

It is also worth noting that Uhl's wife, Gladys (Beauchamp) Uhl was Jackie Kennedy's press liason in 1960.  

This seems like a privately-held photograph, and probably has not been published before. 

Also, here's another Old-School bit:  a pamphlet for the Associated Press:

Tubes, Pipes, & Sheets. And Some Nazi History.

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My experience with technical and industrial product catalogs (1900-1950) is that they have the potential for superlative or at least challenging design. Such is the case for the following catalogs issued by Mannesmann Export of Dusseldorf.  The designs are unexpected, sharp, colorful, heavy, and anything but the spareness of its product. The catalogs below were all issued in the 1950's. 

Radio Signals from Mars, 1924

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[New York Times, September 18, 1921, here]

And so there came a time in 1923 and 1924 when it was determined that when the Earth next came into closest proximity with Mars (closest in opposition for a century) that efforts would be made to determine whether or not there was anyone around on that planet.  The idea of the radio being a powerful-enough instrument to be used in such a way was initiated in 1896 by Tesla, and soon followed at the turn of the century with support for the idea by Marconi  and Kelvin. (This interest was perhaps ignited after both Tesla and Marconi detected unexpected and steady signals that they thought were extraterrestrial but which were in fact ionospheric radiation--and of course there was Percival Lowell and his self-derived belief in Martian intelligence as described by the thought that there were canals on the surface of Mars.  

This was a massive-idea  effort:  a U.S. government initiative demanded five minutes of radio silence per hour over a 36-hour period in the vast hope that transmitters closed down that if there were any radio signals being directed towards the Earth from Mars that they could be more easily detectable.  

This was the magnificent "National Radio Silence Day".  And it was extraordinary that i twas supposed to affect every radio in the country.

William F. Friedman, the Chief of the Code Section in the office of the Chief Signal Officer of the Army, was on the job and ready to decipher any messages that might need deciphering, which was some very hopeful thinking--not only was it hypothesized that there might be life but that it was also sufficiently advanced from some semi-primordial goo  as to have a technology capable of interplanetary communication, and that a code expert might be able to read anything that came in.  

 

Additionally that  New York Times article from 1921 described the proposals for the construction of a 60' (720") reflecting telescope--an absolutely enormous thing for the time, and for now, considering that the largest reflecting telescope yet built is 420" (Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC)), and that is a segmented scope, whereas this 720" mirror-monster would have been one big piece of glass.  

 

But the country as a whole deserves a bit of credit for being so interested in the possibly of communicating with extraterrestrials that it was willing to let a main source of information and entertainment be interrupted for science, and that so many people had a hand in this. It was possibly one of the largest public experiments in the history of experimentation in the United States, and was also one of the earliest SETI attempts to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life.  

Ferris Wheel Tank, 1915

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A few days ago I was having a look at a Large & Impossible Tank, and today I came across this fabulous beauty from the Electrical Experimenter for February, 1915.   

This 45' monster would be somehow powered by electricity though there is no discernible power source or power train, and it would be steered by a gyroscope. (The use of the gyroscope is interesting--the idea of it acting as a control mechanism had been successfully introduced in the Whitehead torpedo in 1905, and used as stabilizing agents in airplanes and ships by 1910, and found in the first gyroscopic repeater compass by 1911, so the magazine and writer pretty much had their finger on the national gyroscopic pulse of the time.) Being hit by defensive cannon fire was said to have been not too much of a problem because the shells would mostly pass through the lattice work of the structure.  The armament in the suspended armored buckets would be "the same as British tanks"--the buckets also came equipped with a bomb chute (if you look closely you'll see one in action here, the destroyer dropping a bomb on itself) for, well, bombing.  

A Lively Evolutionary Tree of Coal

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I am happy to introduce a sub-category in the diagrams-employing -tree-structures category:  the Tree of Coal. It is an unusual diversion in the general quantitative display of data:

This was found in the German Life magazine of its day, the Illustrirte Zeitung, in 1921, and is a very strong pictorial display of the evolution of coal products. It is strongly related to the "Verkaufsvereinigung fuer Teererzeugnisse" (of Essen) image which used this idea in 1922, also publishing in the  Illusrtriete Zeitung.. The great tree spring from a bed of coal (“kohle”) exhibiting the “stammbaum der nebenerzeugnisse” (roughly the “pedigree of our product”), with the trunk being gas, branching out into tar, coke and cyan and so on. It is interesting to see that in the Coal Tree above that the roots are firmly entwined over and through a coal pile, while below the roots are in soil.

Even though it’s the lifeblood of the continuing industrial revolution, and even though we’re hundreds of years into a deep need with the products, the use of the tree just seems antithetical to it all on all levels of recognition.

 

A Classic in the History of Jet Propulsion (1946)

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This drawing comes from the great engineering classic that presented the prototype jet engine for all that would follow it--J.G. Keenan's Elementary Theory of Gas Turbines and Jet Propulsion. It was published in the glorious Oxford blue cloth by the university and issued with the classically-design beige dust wrapper--it just has the feel of something solid and astute. Keenan's work is a classic--it is a general survey of developments in the jet propulsion field and was among the very first books published on the subject.

Keenan was not the first though to the jet engine party--Hans von Ohain and Sir Frank Whittle were. It was a classic idea-in-the-air example of two people working on a very similar idea at the same time without any knowledge of the other.  von Ohain was the first to produce an operational jet engine (1939) while Whittle was the first to patent (while getting his engine to be operational in 1941). Jet engines have been around for a long time (Romans having legislation on the use of variable jet sprays in water distribution) in different forms--fountains, fire hoses, marine jet propulsion (reaching back to 1871), and so on. But John Gregory Keenan's book--that was a big and influential review, a major contribution to the field. 

SECRET (When Filled In)

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I came upon the following document (ca. 1968-72) in a collection of ASW material--it seems to be a coding form for military ships, both for the United States and for the Soviet Union, and runs about 20 pages, the section titled "Structuring and Colelction of Ship Characteristics Files SCF). It must be a preliminary study for something, because even though there are hundreds of data points, it doesn't seem like, well, enough.  The doc is titled "ADP FORMAT, Scientific and Technical Intelligence Center, Naval Intelligence Command" which is the Navy Scientific and Technical Intelligence Center (NAVSTIC), which was "established in 1968 and merged with the Navy Reconnaissance and Technical Support Center (NRTSC) in 1972" (Office of Naval Intelligence).  

The document is unclassified now, and I know I'm missing what it must really be, but what struck me was the "Secret (When Filled In)" on one of the pages...

A Peek Behind the Curtain: Luis Alvarez, Cosmic Rays, and the Pyramids

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This is a little peek behind the curtain, a tiny view into the process of funding an experiment using cosmic rays to look for hidden chambers in the pyramids by a Nobel Prize recipient. The letter is from Merle Tuve (a very major player in the development of RADAR and much else) when he was the director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (part of the Carnegie Institution), writing from its beautiful campus in a leafy section of NW DC.  The letter was written in 1964--its actually a carbon of the letter that Tuve sent to Leonard Carmichael (VP at National Geographic who must've gone fishing for the money for the research), the copy being sent to Caryl Haskins, who was president of the Carnegie. 

The Nobelist ('68) in question was Luis Alvarez, who charged ahead everywhere and was right about tons of stuff, in all sorts of different areas, not the least of which was with looking for hidden chambers in the Chephren pyramid by using cosmic rays.  His plan was to use a detector and search for discrepancies in the way cosmic rays might pass through the pyramid, that there would rate differences if the particles passed through empty areas in the other-wise solid limestone structure. Anyway, it was much more involved than that, but for our purposes here it is enough.  Tuve likes the idea, and says "yes".  

This document is available for purchase at the blog's bookstore, here.  

"The World's First Game Developer" and the First Computer Chess Machine, 1915

JF Ptak Science Books  Post  2394

• This item is offered for sale at our blog bookstore, in "recent additions".

Leonardo Torres y Quevedo¹ (1852-1936) was a superior engineer, pioneer of remote control, a "prolific and successful inventor"², and creator of the what is believed to be the first chess automaton³--in effect, the first human-machine game where the machine answered back. (There are earlier examples of chess machines, perhaps the most famous/infamous of which is the celebrated "Turk", a faux chess automaton created in the 1770's by Wolfgang von Kempelen, a supposedly mechanical device taking on all comers performing at a very high level, except that it was a fraud, a model of a machine with a human inside of it making the decisions, a sort of reverse robot.)  

[Image of Torres' chess playing machine from Scientific American Supplement, November 6, 1915, pg 297 (bottom)]

Torres wrote very little, mainly because he didn't like to,⁴so mostly what is known of his work in print (outside of patent reports) is primarily a secondary source reporting on his efforts.  There are three earlier appearances in print on the automaton--in Revista de la Real Academia de ciencias... de Madrid in 1913,  La Nature⁵ in 1914, and  Asociación Española para el Progreso de las Ciencias, Congreso de Valladolid⁶, in 1915.

"In 1912 Torres built a robot capable of playing the chess endgame of king and rook against king and defeating a human adversary. This device, perfected in 1920, and the Telekino must be recognized as conceptually related to the calculating machine of Charles Babbage, as Torres Quevedo acknowledged in “Ensayos sobre automática. Su definición. Extensión teórica de sus definiciones” (Revista de la Real Academia de ciencias... de Madrid, 12 [1913], 391–419). His work in this field culminated in an electromechanical calculating machine introduced 26 June 1920, the prototype of which demonstrated that calculations of any kind can be effected by purely mechanical processes. In 1913 Torres Quevedo had established that a machine could proceed by trial and error, in contrast with current belief–“at least when the rules that have to be followed in trial and error are precisely known...”--Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol 13, pp 431-2.

The first appearance of the chess playing machine to appear in English seems to have been in the Scientific American Supplement, November 6, 1915, pp 296-298 (appearing with seven photographs of inventions three of which are for the chess machine, and four schemtics all of which pertain to the chess machine): "Torres and His Remarkable Automatic Devices, He Would Substitute Machinery for the Human Mind". 

His superb creation, which he called "El Ajedrecista"⁷ ("the Chess Player") was an electromechanical device which pitted an endgame between a King/King-rook, and was fully and completely hand's-free functional.  A later version attempted an improvement on this magnificent machine using magnets.  

The machine was exhibited and demonstrated in 1951 by Torres' son, Gonzala, showing how the machine worked to the inventor of cybnertics, the big-brained Norbert Wiener. A photograph of the meeting appears in the Eames' great book, The Computer Perspective, though I downloaded this image (below) from Cybnertic Zoo: 

ALSO: this fantastic video from youtube of the machine at work:  

 

NOTES: 

1. Nice piece on Torres y  Quevedo in Wikipedia,  here. And another, "Cyber Heroes of the Past", http://wvegter.hivemind.net/abacus/CyberHeroes/Quevedo.htm

2. Brian Randell, Annals of the History of Computing, 4/4, October 1982, on the contributions of Ludgate, Torres, and Bush, with full text here:  http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/articles/papers/398.pdf

3. _____. "This chess automaton, believed to have been the world's first..." ibid.  

4.  Torres Quevedo disliked writing–“for me a form of martyrdom,” he called it–and thus his scientific contributions must be traced from the few reports he did write and, especially, from the patents he obtained and the machines he built." --Dictionary of Scientific Biography, volume 13, p 431.

5.  Henri Vigneron  "Les Automate"  La Nature, 1914, found here: http://cyberneticzoo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Automates-La-Nature-Torres-1914.pdf]

6.   "El autómata ajedrecista", from Asociación Española para el Progreso de las Ciencias, Congreso de Valladolid, Vol. 2 (1915). 549-556pp.  The scientific bookseller Jeremy Norman has a copy of this rare work offered at his bookshop, here. 

7.  "El Ajedrecista", here:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ajedrecista#cite_note-3

Panoramic Periscope, 1915

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This interesting and arresting images appears in Scientific American Supplement, October 23, 1915 (page 269).  It is an excellent view of topside from 30' or so below.  The article describes simple, compound, tele-objective, direct-reflected, panoramic, and periscopes with annular fields--sort of simple, but not really.  In any event the panoramic periscope gave a view of a directed point-of-view as well as a slender (but versatile) 360^o.

Manuscript Material on the Installation, Operation and Maintenance of the UNIVAC, 1949-1957

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This is a group of materials from the estate of Ralph Mullendore (see below), an early and integral team member of the electronic computation section of the U.S. Bureau of the Census, who was responsible for the installation and maintenance of the UNIVAC there, at Census.  The papers are on their way to a history of computer science section at the library at North Carolina State University where they will hopefully be enjoyed by any and all who have an interest in the early stages of the maintenance and tinkerings on America's first commercial computer. It should be remembered that the hands of the man who wrote all of these notes were the same hands that worked on this monumentally important machine, the first of its kind in existence.

 

Many more images, below.

The Explosion of Papers Following the Announcement of the X-Ray, 1896

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Looking through a (massive, 20-pound!) volume of Electrical World¹ I found that it  contains some of the earliest work published in the United States on Wilhelm Roentgen's seminal discovery of the X-Ray, which he published on November 8, 1895. And there were a lot of papers--more than 100. One reason why the work was done by so many and so quickly is that Roentgen did not seek to patent his invention (much like the Curies would do so afterwards) and so there was a land-grab by hundreds of physicists and experimenters to do work in this astonishing new field. 

The photograph ("Hand with Ring")  below is Roentgen's own, an x-ray of his wife Bertha's hand--it is one of the iconic images in the history of modern science:

[Source: Wikimedia Commons]

Electrical World is the third place that the Roentgen paper was reprinted, this time for the first time in an American journal, one day before the appearance of the The Electrician article, which was one day after the publication of the paper's first appearance in English, in the journal Nature, on 23 January 1896.  (The Electrician would also publish Roentgen's second article later in that same year, in March.) The Roentgen article does not seem to be reprinted in full anywhere else in 1896/1897. (See Charles Phillips, Bibliography of X-Ray Literature and Research, (1896-1897), published by The Electrician, 1898.)

Superior Cover Design, German Aviation, 1920

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This is a survivor of some sort, found at the bottom of a box of German aviation pamphlets--I'm sorry that it is in this condition, but at least there is some of it that remains, because the design is quite striking.  It comes in the 24th year of the publication Luftfahr(t), Deutsche Luftfahrer Zeitschrift, and published in 1920.   It is just the cover of one issue, and I expected to see a fuller image of the thing online thinking it not to be so uncommon, but I couldn't find any, which I thought unusual.  And so I share this rag-tag copy.