JF Ptak Science Books

Confirmation of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, 1919

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“It is concluded that the sun's gravitational field gives the deflection predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity.”

I've bumped into a famous piece of phsyics history, a semi-popular report on the verification of the Einstein theory of general relativity. The article is “Eclipse Photographs Verify Einstein's Prediction” adn is found in  Popular Astronomy (published in Northfield Minnesota, volume 28, 1920, the issue for January, #1, 1920, with the notice appearing on pp 69-70.) At about the same time there appears the famous and deciding report by F. W. Dyson, A. S. Eddington, and C. Davidson, "A Determination of the Deflection of Light by the Sun's Gravitational Field, from Observations Made at the Total Eclipse of May 29, 1919" which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical or Physical Character for 1920 (pp 291-332). This is the integral report on  which Popular Astronomy reports on for a more general astronomy readership.

This report repeats the famous finding: “It is concluded that the sun's gravitational field gives the deflection predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity.”

Abstracts of Einstein's 1905, 1907, & 1916 Papers

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I've nibbled away at a set of the Science Abstracts (Physics) and pulled away several reviews of Albert Einstein's great papers of 1905, 1907, and 1916.  

=>Einstein's three monumental papers of 1905, as they appeared in Science Abstracts, Section A.--Physics, 1905, volume VIII, 1906, printed in London, E. & F.N. Spon, 

• "Generation and Transformation of Light", abstract #1562, page 500. A. Einstein, Annalen der Physik, volume 17, 132 (1905) [17 pp.]  "Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden  heuristischen Gesichtspunkt".

 

A Fine RADAR Map of NYC, 1946

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The history of RADAR (RAdio Deection And Ranging, and something I've always written in caps, for whatever that is worth) is absolutely not what I'm thinking about now--that is a long story with lots of twists and turns, complicated, complex--and it ranges depending upon location as for the most part RADAR (from the 1930's anyway) was developed in secret, kept as a military secret.  And that's because it was a very important development, with the victor of the Battle of the Beams being the possible victor, period.  

All I want to do presently is note the significance of this particular pamphlet in the history of RADAR. This work was printed by PHILCO Corporation, (and dated January 4, 1946), and has an inserted leaflet stating that this "makes public for the first time the salient facts about the Corporation's development and production of airborne radar equipment for the United States Army and Navy".  PHILCO and other companies made significant contributions to the war capacity of the Allied forces, and--for this company in particular--much of that went unknown for quite some time afterwards, and of course there are some stories that just won't get told. But for PHILCO the story gets told here.  

This is also a fabulous nighttime map of NYC--produced by RADAR.  

[RADAR on Wings, Philco, 1946.  10x8", 30pp (unpaginated) with lots of photographs and an occasional schematic.  Available from this blog's bookstore.]

"Sabotage", the Wobblies, and the Illusion of Property (1913)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2392

“The object of this work is to awaken the producers  to a consciousness of their industrial power. It is dedicated, not to those who advocate but to those who use sabotage.”--Walker C. Smith, in the second of his miniature two-paragraph foreword in Sabotage (1917 edition)

[The original pamphlet is available from this blog's bookstore, here.]

Walker Conger Smith (born 1885 on the same day that Babe Ruth and Elvis Pressley died in later years) was a hard line political seer, a magical agitator and writer for the Wobblies, officially known as the Industrial Workers of the World (and the I.W.W.)  He lived a busy 41 years, and in his time raised a lot of attention to the IWW's Socialist vehemently pro-Union organizing, during a time (1910-1927 or so) when big business would respond with their won police/strikebreakers/armies to disrupt and dispel (and trounce) strikers and strikes. 

One of Walker's best known works was Sabotage, its History, Philosophy & Function. First published in 1913 and then widely reprinted, it made the case for poor pay for poor work, and that in the long run the wealth produced by the workers belonged to them, and so work slowdowns and then destruction of the means of production was well within the rights of the wronger worker. 

The pamphlet certainly found a readers--on both sides of the issue. It was regularly used in legal actions against Unions as proof of their criminal syndicationism and of organized destruction of business/factory property.  

The pamphlet ends with these very strong statements:

"Its [Sabotage's] advocacy and use help to destroy the property illusion"...

"Is the machine more than its makers? Sabotage says "No!"

"Is the product greater than the producers? Sabotage says "No!"

"Sabotage places human life--and especially the life of the only useful class--higher than all else in the universe."

...."For Sabotage or for slavery? Which?"

The pamphlet ends with a salutation from Jack London:

"Dear Comrade Smith:

Just a line to tell you that I have finished reading your pamphlet SABOTAGE. I do not find a point in it on which I disagree with you. It strikes me as a straight-from-the-shoulder, clear, convincing, revolutionary statement of the meaning and significance of sabotage.

Yours for the revolution,

Jack London"

 

Full text here.

The IWW website identifies this printing as 1917.  http://www.iww.org/sr/history/library/WCSmith/sabotage

Candy & Cellophane & duPont=Food! For Profit! (1939)

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This hand-out pamphlet seems to be a case where the sale of an edible product is made for the sale of its packaging.

The pamphlet shouts that CANDY IS DELICIOUS FOOD, which is certainly a correct statement if food=digestible.  It tells/sells the story of candy as a profit-maker to the grocery seller, saying that "32% average gross profit on home consumption units", those delicious-sounding unit-things being the candy.

There are bits and pieces about candy display and placement, all on the advice of the maker of the stuff that in which the candy was wrapped--cellophane. The publisher and distributor of the pamphlet, the "Cellophane" Division of the E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. Inc., had a huge vested interest in candy sales: candy was mostly wrapped in Cellophane (starting with Whitman in 1912) and by the time du Pont achieved its water- and moisture-proof Cellophane in Delaware the product accounted (in 1938) for 25% of the company's profits.  That's pretty big, and so candy as a major muncher of Cellophane would be promoted by du Pont as pretty big, too. And as food, for added Bigness.  

 

French Soldiers Working at Fortifications, 1917

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Here's another in a long line of images from my WWI news photo service photographs.  So far as I can determine what we see here is a group of French soldiers engaged in redoubt or perhaps trenchwork construction.  To the right we see a crudely-marked Red Cross, perahps for a not-front-line position.  The photo is stamped "Committee on Public Information, Washington, Copyright 1917" and has a dated stamp for "Dec 21 1917". Fo rmore information on this series see the long threads on World War I and particularly World War I Photography (which is our sales site).

And the full image

On Not Scooping the OED on the First Use of the Term "Super Computing"

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2391

I thought for a moment that the Oxford English Dictionary had been scooped in identifying the earliest usage of the term "super computer" when I saw this newspaper article in the wonderful book by Charles and Ray Eames called A Computer Perspective (Harvard University Press, 1973).   The article refers to an unidentified machine at Columbia University in a March 1, 1920 article, which would beat the first use found by the OED in 1927 (see below) by seven years.  So, I checked this out a little, and latched onto a reference to Dr. Ben D. Wood as the director of the Statistical Bureau at Columbia, and found that this event didn't happen until June 1929¹.  

And so the Eameses got this one wrong, or the editor did, or the proof reader, or the typesetter.  So instead of being 1920, this is at the very least second-half 1929, some two years or so past the first use identified by the OED.  It is also possible that this might be 1931/2.  Still, this was very early for using the term, and the article is interesting.  

More can be found on the machine (which was probably the "Columbia Machine",  which as also known as the "Statistical Calculator" and the "Difference Tabulator", and with some affection "the Packard".  A very good appraisal of this machine can be found at the Columbia University site for computing history at Columbia, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/packard.html

The Columbia Statistical Bureau, 1932:   Source: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/statbureau.jpg

 

OED: the earliest usages of "super computing":

 

1927   Army Ordnance Mar. 342/2   The central station instrument, which is a super-computing machine, solves​ the geometrical and ballistic problems.

1944   Pop. Sci. Monthly Oct. 88/2   Aiken will remain at Harvard after the war as director of a supercomputing laboratory.

OED: the earliest usages of "supercomputer":

1949   Acta Crystallogr. 2 344/2   Modern super-computers will soon provide the ideal method, at least for the more complicated structures.

1968   N. Walford tr. O. Johannesson Great Computer iv. 108   Linking together about a hundred computers..and combining them..to form a unit known as the supercomputer.

 

OED: earliest usages of "computer" as a person:

 

1613   ‘R. B.’ Yong Mans Gleanings 1,   I haue read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that euer breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number.

1646   Sir T. Browne Pseudodoxia Epidemica vi. vi. 289   The Calenders of these computers.

1704   Swift Tale of Tub vii. 140   A very skillful Computer, who hath given a full Demonstration of it from Rules of Arithmetick.

1855   D. Brewster Mem. Life I. Newton (new ed.) II. xviii. 162   To pay the expenses of a computer for reducing his observations.

1893   Publ. Amer. Econ. Assoc. 8 23   Some curious computer makes out the cost of electing a President for these United States to be four hundred millions of dollars.

 

OED: earliest usages of the "computer" as a device:

 

1869   ‘M. Harland’ Phemie's Temptation i. 12   [Phemie] plunged anew into the column of figures... Her pen was slowly traversing the length of the page, at an elevation of a quarter of an inch above the paper, her eyes following the course of the nib, as if it were the index of a patent computer.

1897   Engineering 22 Jan. 104/2   This was..a computer made by Mr. W. Cox. He described it as of the nature of a circular slide rule.

1915   Chambers's Jrnl. July 478/1   By means of this computer the task is performed mechanically and almost instantaneously.

1941   Nature 14 June 753/2   The telescope drive is of an elaborate nature; the effects of changing refraction, of differential flexure and of errors in the gears are automatically allowed for by a system of ‘computers’.

 

Notes:

 

1. Columbia University computing timeline.  

A Beautifully-Rendered Aeroplane, 1911

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This is the detail from the cover of  Richard Knoller's  (professor at the Technischen Hochschule in Vienna) Ueber Laengsstabilitaet der Drachenflugzeuge, published in 1911. In real the image is only about an two inches wide and spare-but-detailoed, wisely placed  in the center of the oversized pamphlet, and set in a lofty blank space.  Brilliant. 

The Dots Between the Sun and the Stars (1652)

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This is just a quick addition to a continuing series on antiquarian cosmological images (the two major posts, Visual Chronology of Cosmology, Part I and Part II) containing 80 images, mostly before the 19th century) and a long series on the History of Dots.  The engraving below comes from the great intellectual explorer, Fr. Athansius Kircher, in his ultra-fabulous three-volume Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-4). And in here--as is the case with some other cosmological images--in between the sphere of the Sun and the sphere of the stars was the realm of the planets, and that is where Fr. Kircher's artist employed the use of dots, to differentiate the planetary real estate from everything else.  

 

And the image in full view (both images reproduced from the Hachette reprint): 

Draining for Profit, 1869

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This was an honest and very difficult job--it is a tough job in the present day, let alone 146 years ago:

 

The "Robot" of the Year Zero

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2390

"HIEROGLYPHICS: Language of the ancient Egyptians, invented by the priests to conceal their shameful secrets. To think that there are people who understand them! But perhaps the whole thing is just a hoax?"—Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas¹

 

[Reproduced from the Hachette reprint]

I've written a number of posts about pre-robot robots, robots before they were named, mechanical entities of some human qualities that performed tasks or played games, inanimate objects that engaged in articulated motion, with most of the early creations being in the early 19th century.  I never have done the back-fill, the earliest days in which (if you squinted very mightily) robots may have appeared.  

This came to mind today while writing about the great Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680), a man considered to "know everything" and who if he didn't know it made the knowledge come out of something else so help him god; he was a man of intense energy, extremely formidable learning, high creativity, and who seemingly possessed the talent to forget nothing.  Today's episode (with the frequently-appearing Kircher in this blog) is just a small addition to the cosmology thread and the history of dots series. 

The image that drew me in is found in Kircher's magnum opus, his Oedipous Aegyptiacus, printed in three volumes from 1652-1654--it is a half-miracle sort of work--it is astonishing, universal,  fabulous, and in many cases, far-reaching....too far-reaching, especially in the case of his deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, where he pretty much gets it all wrong.  In volume one (page 262), however there is  an image of theraphim ("Theraphim Hebraeorum"), which are small-to-largish statuettes/statues which to save sp[ace and time here are seen by many as being something along the order of a household idol. (It is a much more complex story than this, but I think that for at least one aspect in defining these objects that this is basically correct.)

 

The illustration makes it seem as though the small statues have etched speech on extended tongues--in some versions of the theraphim story the statues do speak in their way. That makes them speaking statues.  And speaking statues are--in a very antiquarian way--robots, or at least they are worthy of that consideration in my book. Or blog. 

 

And this reminds me of another "speaking" statue:  Memnom, of the the two Colossi at Thebes.This monument was said to be a "miracle" (by Colistatus, in the 3rd century CE) and that the only difference between it and a human was a body. Memnon was said to react to eh morning Sun, emitting  a sound or song or speech; and again, at sunset, a more lamenting sound would issue from the statue, which would sometimes be accompanied by tears.  The songs/cries were said to be returned by Echo, who responded with, well, an echo, which is what all of this might be in regards to the modern sense of the robot, and to the created artificial life of the future.  

 

Notes:

1. This fine quote was found in an interesting article  "Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity (2013) - Introduction" by Daniel Stolzenber, here.

 

 

A Very Early Comparative Display of Lakes and Islands (1851)

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The 1850's  may have been the heyday of atlases appearing with illustrations of comparative river lengths/mountain heights;  from 1840-1880 or so was the period in which the majority of descriptive comparatives were published.  This is when you would see images of the lengths of rivers and the heights of mountains and waterfalls beautifully displayed in atlases, everything visually presented in high design and memory-forming fashion.  I don’t know what happened after 1880, but the publication of this sort of data in beautiful and provocative formats really fell off, with the heights of mountains/lengths of rivers stuff relegated to filling the empty areas in the corners of double-hemisphere world maps.  

The example below (from R. Montgomery Martin's Illustrated Atlas, 1851) is interesting because in addition to the standard mountain/river material, there is also the height of waterfalls; and, in a move that was probably very early as a practice, there are two sets of images that show lakes and island compared to one another on the same scale. Of course maps are composed of data that is necessarily set in the same scale, but here we see just the lakes and just the islands removed from their context and laid into a pool of similar objects.  It is a mystery why this would've taken so long to happen, but it is also the case that the first comparative architecture depicting different buildings placed in an illustration that were on the same scale did not occur until the work of J.N.L. Durand in the surprising "late"year of 1800 (in his Recueil et parallèle des édifices de tout genre...), which is a curious thing.A Ver

 And the detail of the lakes and islands:

A Really Big Idea: the 5,000 Ton Tank (1916)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2389

These spectacular images of monumental monumentality appeared in the December 1916 issue of Popular Science Monthly.  The author Frank Shuman (1862-1918) had some major inventing chops, not the least of which was some very forward-thinking work (in theory and practice) on solar power (one of which was a solar powered steam engine and another a liquid O₂ propulsion system for submarines), so these suggestions for gigantic land battleships came with a fair amount of gravitas. This is some grand thinking, and as Shuman tells us, the beast below would weigh about 5,000 tons (the weight of several hundred Sherman tanks¹) and would roll along on 200' diameter wheels.  Unfortunately, outside of  seeing some sort of (steam) power plant, there is no mention of how those wheels would be turned--I'd've liked to read about that.  There is a mention of shock absorbers, but only so, jsut a bare hint.  

[Image source is Google Books--I have this volume in a 40 year run of this periodical down in the warehouse, but the book was really too thick to lay flat ont he scanner, and so the Google Books scan was used..]

 And for whatever reason there is no heavy artillery on this thing. The damage to the enemy would be done via the three wheels, and also by the enormous chains that hang from the front of the enormity, like a flailing slow-moving monster from a 1950's B-movie. 

My guess is that this wouldn't do so well in the rain.  

 

Bicycle Story Without Words, 1869

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I found this interesting story-without-words in a column in American Agriculturalist, April, 1869.    The velocipdes were fairly big, and fairly new-ish to be peddle-powered at the front wheel, and apparently not so welcome on urban streets.  (Within fifteen years the bike would take on a decidedly very modern look, easily recognizable as being a close family member to that Schwinn cruiser you owned in 1982.) I don't have any insight about the editorial content of the segment...  

The Coming of Broadcast Television (1929)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2388

I found a news item in the April 6, 1929 issue of Nature that gives a real sense of the coming of the future, of the future-at-hand--and they seemed to have a sense of what was coming, though probably not as big as that future would be. In this case, it was the beginning of the passive visual assumption of the collective culture--the very quick and potentially immediate assimilation of pop culture, this by the invention of television and popular broadcasting.  

The unidentified author was reporting on the recent activities of the Baird Television Development Company, which the author was interested in, and although it was "not presently practicable " it did "represent(s) a noteworthy scientific achievement", which I am sure was the writer's way of downplaying a very significant event.