JF Ptak Science Books

Nazi Propaganda Map of Communist Threat and Expansion, 1933

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Not long after Hitler's election in 1933 this curious pamphlet appeared: Ein Kampf um Deutschland (1933), short and thin, is a  work filled with anti-Communist photos and images portraying them in as harsh a bad light as you could muster in 32 pages.One of the images is this map showing in no uncertain terms threats to Germany from the west, but most importantly a gigantic threat coming from the Communist east, the arrow striking right through the heart of Germany, with the hammer and sickle (the symbol only about 16 years old at the time) coming to rest just about on top of Berlin.  

For all of this Hitler would sign a Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union six years later (22 August 1939) with the plan of dividing some Eastern conquests with the Russians.  Less than two years later came Operation Barbarossa, with Hitler launching a massive surprise invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Dozens of millions of lives later, it would all be over in four years.  

And the opened cover for the pamphlet, or what is left of it:

Babbage Obituary and Other Babbage Bits

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[Image source: Giants of Science]

Here's a fine piece of work on Charles Babbage from a very early period (volume 5) of Nature--succinct and tight and only two pages.  (It was buried in the middle of the issue, which surprised me, as I thought he'd be placed up front rather than tucked into the middle. So it goes.)

Some other bits on Babbage on this blog:

• Poe, Babbage, and Thinking Machines, 1836 (here) 
• The Broken Windows of Uncle Chuckles--Charles Babbage Figures Stuff Out, 1857 (here)

 

U.S. Air Service Map: is Part of the Country Raised, or the Rest Lowered?

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2422

Yesterday I posted a lovely octahedron map showing intercontiental air routes in 1956 (here). Today, looking in LIFE magazine for some images and a story about U.S. GI's being exposed to nuclear blast tests I bumped into this unusual two-and-a-half dimension map showing domestic air routes of American Airlines (November, 1951).  The national service areas are chunked-up, given some enormous height, not making things very comfortable-looking for the Pacific W and northern Mid-West, and almost the entire South.  I guess the question would be, were the service areas heightened, or the rest of the world lowered?  

 

The first transcontinental flight competition called for crossing the country in 30 days (for a $50k prize) and was accomplished in 1911. By 1933 the fist transcontinental through-flight (a one-day, not-overnight flight) occurred just 22 years later in 1933; only 5 years before this map was made was the first 1-stop service (1946), which is one reason why there are so many intermittent stops; it would be another two years (1953) for there to be non-stop service.  The of course the not-slow explosion of competing airlines and flights. 

It is interesting to recall that the first transcontinental railroad for the U.S. was in 1869, and the first European transcontinental railroad was 14 years before that (in 1855), thus getting people across the country and continent 80 and then nearly 100 years ago.  On the other hand ,the first trans-Australian RR was completed in 1917--that was east-west. North-south is a different issue for Australia, which has been an historically very highly difficult crossing., In any event that line was not completed until 2004.  All things considered, I think, this transcontinental air business was extremely successful and fast, coming less than 50 years after the first Wright powered flight.  

Einstein in Paris, 1922

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[Caption: "M. Painlevé fait lui-même la police afin d'empêcher l'entrée d'un public trop nombreux venu pour écouter M. Einstein : [photographie de presse] / Agence Meurisse" Source: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90546608.r=einstein.langEN]

Here's a photo regarding Einstein that I've never seen before: an image showing a crowd evidently being turned away from the over-capacity lectures by Einstein in Paris. The photo is undated but it must be from when Einstein was invited to Paris by the College de France (under the guidance and leadership of physicist Paul Langevin (1872-1946)) to give lectures and talks beginning March 31, 1922. Einstein was at the Sorbonne just a week later, on the 6th of April, where he also lectured. The photograph mentions "M. Painleve" (1863-1933), who was Prime Minister of France very briefly on two occasions and also a professor at the Sorbonne, so I assume that it is at the Sorbonne where this picture was probably made. I know for certain that attendance at the lectures at the College de France was by ticket only and which were scarce and did not meet demand, and I assume that the same was possible at the Sorbonne. (Since I have no familiarity with the Sorbonne looks like I assume that anyone who did would be able to tell me exactly where this entrance is...) 

The trip wasn't just roses for Einstein or the French or the Germans (in general)--this was just four years after the war and there were certain "patriotic" factions within France that did not want Einstein (the German) there; conversely there were also some elements in Germany who did not want Einstein to go to France. Einstein certainly had a lot on his mind for this trip, not the least of which was lecturing in French--though in that regard I remember reading that he said that "equations helped' or something along those lines.  

In any event, it is a great photograph.

A Fine and Interesting Map of Air Routes, 1956

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F.V. Botley's map of international airline routes--interesting the author points out that the routes have stayed "substantially unchanged for the last two decades". The (above) is based on a regular octahedron, which opens to a star-shaped design (in figure 2, below) and which is not truly related in the larger map--it is "an oblique gnomonic projection designed on this principle", making it an easier read.  [Source: Journal of Geography, 1956, pg 397.]

Beethoven, Bartleby, and Subtraction

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2421

Is it really necessary to know subtraction? Or perhaps more appropriately, is it necessary to know subtraction (or multiplication, or division) to be a Pythagorean? Beethoven didn't think so, and that might have been so because he wouldn't express thoughts like that. He evidently never said anything about it but one thing seems to be for certain—he didn't know how to subtract. Or divide, or multiply. Or much else arithmetical. I suspect the he didn't know these actions because he didn't care to, or need to, or want to. In his difficult childhood and his even more-difficult experience in school, I suspect that like Bartleby he simply preferred not to. Perhaps his public “knowing” of things like that were more “no-ing” than anything else.

• Follow this link for an earlier story on this blog on the first appearance in print of the addition "+" sign.  

This presents itself to me sometimes as a language of control, about what you do or don't know, or choose to know or not know, or express, or admit to, somehow a not-knowing being the limiting factor in what it is you can come to know in the future. It seems to change the chromatics of knowing things.

It is a remarkable thing that Beethoven didn't want algebraic ideas or symbols in his head. Or maybe he did and just didn't say, preferring silence or contrariness.

I don't know if he thought about the physical basis of harmony and the laws of rhythm. 

It presents itself to me sometimes as a language of control, about what you do or don't know, or choose to know or not know, or express, or admit to, somehow a not-knowing” being the limiting factor in what it is you can come to know in the future. It seems to change the chromatics of knowing things.

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Art as a Political Weapon: the German Unmensch, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2420

[Private collection via the Library of Congress]

Wilhelm Hoegner was SPD and anti-Nazi from the earliest days of Hitler's political party.  In a developing chorus of other anti-Nazi Germans, he delivered this screed against the NSDAP while he was a member of the Reichstag in 1930.  Der Volksbetrug der Nationalsozialisten also features one of the most effective and tried pieces of social demonstration--artwork, and in this case a biting satire of the "progress" of the Nazi Party. The image features a hideous, rank-and-final brownshirt monster/Unmensch/Unhold, trampling his way across the land, with burning villages in his wake--the path of the Third Reich ("Auf dem Wege ins Dritte Reich"). Hoegner's sympathies are instantly seen here, and there is no chance for mistake in how he depicts Hitler's political party. 

This is a very good example of social protest against the rising Verwünschung/plague that was just three years away from the total domination of the German political scene, and only 15 from total destruction. The artwork is anonymous, and it is dark, and gruesome in a very subtle and gritty--and effective--way. It is also good neighbors with other protest art/literature heroic figures like George Grosz, John Hearfield, Hannah Hoch, Kathe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, and many others.  There just weren't enough of them. Or their followers.  

Hoegner would last in Germany only another three or so years, but survivied--his surrepticiously published account of the Beer All Putsch (published in 1933) was a major inconvenience to the Nazis, though that was settled out once Hitler came to power in 1933 and as many copies of Hoegner's work were found and destroyed.  Hoegner himself made it out to Austria and then to Switzerlqand by 1934.  He would return to Germany immediately after the war and assume advanced political office in the new Germany.  

Full rext here http://library.fes.de/library/netzquelle/rechtsextremismus/pdf/hoegner.pdf

X-Rays and the Art of Seeing Things That Aren't There

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2419

In the History of Seeing Things That Aren't There there are three main staples of disruption of reality: the introduction of the telescope by Galileo and the expansion of the night sky by an order of magnitude and the unsettling of what had been a pretty-much unbroken knowledge of the visible sky for thousands of years; the introduction of investigations with the microscope by van Leeuwenhoek and Hooke and so on, revealing an extraordinary new and unimaginably fine and tiny world, multiple worlds within our world; and the Rontgen discovery of the x-ray, the visualizing agent for stuff that could be seen but not without mess and fuss. 

It is hard to overstate the significance of Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of x-rays, as well as the public reaction to it.  (Well, the enthusiasm of the popular response waned dramatically after the first few months, which--given the historic significance of the discovery--was not long at all.)

[Source: Wikicommons.   This is Roentgen's wife's hand,  the first image ever made via the new X-Ray, and one of the most iconic images in the recent history of science.]

Scientific/technical journals as well as the popular press were flooded with articles published about the astonishing discovery of 50-year-old physics professor from Wurzburg.. The English-language popular science journal Nature's announcement of his December 28, 1895  “Ueber eine neue Art von Strahlen" ("On a New Type of Ray"), appearing 16 January 1896, began the introduction of a new state of human experience.  His experiments—built upon the work of J. Pluecker (1801-1868), J.W. Hittorf (1824-1914), C. F. Varley (1828-1883), E. Goldstein (1850-1931), Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), H. Hertz (1857-1894) and Phil Lenard (1862-1947)—revealed as much to humans as did the experiments and inventions of Hooke and Leeuwenhoek on the invisible worlds revealed by the microscope.  There are more than 150 articles on the Roentgen (and soon to be “X-“) Ray, all published within 12 months of the original announcement, almost all excitedly, trying to comprehend, elucidate, expand, verify, this new world¹. 

So what brought me to this tonight was an article in the American Journal of Physics for 1945 (volume 13) which has a great article on the history of the discovery (by G.E.M. Jauncey) and which also has a number of samples reporting on the discovery in the popular press, none of which I had seen before.  And so I thought I'd share them here: 

 

Camera Obscura at War, II--Zep Buster

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Earlier in this blog I wrote about an unexpected military use of the camera obscura, here ("The Camera Obscura at War, 1885").  Today I found another use, which was a guided/guiding anti-aircraft weapon.  I assume that this was mostly employed against the slower moving zeppelins (although in 1915 airplanes weren't moving that much faster) due to its very limited range of fire.  The camera obscura itself didn't move, and the relatively small occulus offered not that big a range of sky to work with. But that said the weapon was an ingenious and simple mechanism, an early and primitive semi-machine-directed anti-aircraft gun.  There is no mention of whether or not any of these were actually deployed, and compared to the AA guns that actually appeared in the first and second yer of the war, this attempt looks a little antiquated for the time.  The article also makes no mention of the artillery to be used, which is a major consideration.  

The article appeared in Popular Mechanics, April 1916 (pp 486-7)

Stephens Bibliography on Nuclear Fission (1948)

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Here's a very useful tool for the early days of nuclear fission and atomic energy--the bibliography from William Stephen's Nuclear Fission and Atomic Energy (published by the Science Press in 1948). The OCR is a little unsteady but the info is there even if it isn't as clear as it might be.  

The full text for the work is found at the Internet Archive, here:  https://archive.org/details/nuclearfissionan030064mnb

Also see the excellent Louis Turner bibliography for nuclear fission, 1934-1940 (133 items) in an earlier post on this blog, here:  http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2013/08/turners-bibliographic-review-of-nuclear-fission-1934-1940.html

Partial Bibliography on Nuclear Fission and Transuranic Elements

Civilians as "Hostages" in the Nuclear Deterrence Equation (1967)

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Frederick Rockett's Crises Civil Defense and Deterrence makes a curious display of itself on it title page, what with no punctuation and all--same for the title page, though that changes a little to Crisis Civil Defense and Deterrence. With a comma here and there, the title changes meanings a bit.  In any event with my little screed over the document was published by the Hudson Institute in 1967 and is actually about how the Soviet Union, China and some other countries could reduce their vulnerability to nuclear attack by undertaking (emergency) civil defense precautions like large-scale evacuations and fallout protection. The author adopts a curious term here--"hostages"--to apply to the civilian population in relation to the nuclear policy of deterrence.  And what that means is that with increased numbers of civilians surviving there would be  a greater recover capability after a nuclear strike; in deterrence, enemy populations are part of the scheme, being seen as "hostages" to a nuclear strike and therefore a deterrent for that country to initiate an attack. With an increase in the number of survivors to an attack via the civil defense advancements there are fewer "hostages" and therefore the concept of deterrence is weakened, perhaps to the point where countries could begin to think of first-strike capacity with a more-protected population.

• [The original document is available for sale at the blog's bookstore, here.]

And so down the rabbit hole we go, discussing mine shaft gaps. This is five year after Dr. Strangelove, but this was very real stuff--and I imagine that if I were in a position to have to think about nuclear strikes and deterrence and etc., I probably would have been thinking in these terms, too.  

What Happens After a 1,667 Megaton Nuclear Attack (1962)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2418

This report on Exercise Spadefork was issued at the very beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis on October 1,1962. Undertaken by the National Resource Evaluation Center (NREC) and other agencies it was supposed to give a good indication of what happens after a very large nuclear attack on the United States, “Measuring the Capability of Survival”, evaluating what remains of the country and its sovereignty. 

The theoretical attack began at 3pm, Friday 21 September 1962. 221 nuclear missiles were exploded in/over the U.S. In the first hour, with a total of 355 in the first 48 hours. [I'm not sure that the Soviet Union had 221 intercontinental ballistic missiles at this time, nowhere near that, unless of course they were able to get their 700-missile medium-range ballistic missiles closer to the U.S.]

A total of 1, 779 megatons were exploded almost equally between ground and air bursts.

20 were 1 megaton; 15 were 10 megaton, and 320 were 5 megaton.

• The Hiroshima weapon was about 20 kilotons, so in the roughest sense each one of the 5 megaton weapons carried about 250 Hiroshima weapons; the total 1,779 megaton delivery would (grossly) be equal to about 178,000 Hiroshima weapons.

Most of the attack was delivered against military sites, “population and industrial centers appeared to be secondary targets, with only about 50 major centers receiving signifcant amount of blast damage”. Somehow “no major sections of the country were isolated due to fallout contamination”.

How we make out:

Military & “Sovereignty”: not so bad. Air Force and Navy take major hits (something approaching 50% casualties) but the Army does better, not being targeted so heavily, with 20% losses.

Superior Table of Early Computers (1956)

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"Characteristics of the Small-Scale Computers" looked innocent enough, 12" tall and one folded piece of paper, and published in 1956.  The authors--John W. Carr III and Alan J. Perlis--were heavy hitters, and so I really wasn't very surprised to see what they had done "inside", though I was impressed and happy to see the data. Displayed on the 12x16" sheet of paper are 15 data points on 14 computers, many of them classic/famous:  the 650 IBM, UNIVAC, Elecom, Alawac. 

(Remember that when you're looking at purchase price and monthly rental amounts that the 1956 dollar is equal to about $8.70 in 2015 dollars, so that $3275/month for the 650 would be about $30k.  The $136k for the Datatron is about a million today.)  

 

Demolition Tightrope Act with Pick Axe, 1915

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There was a job to do in Chicago, and these men did it--how it all worked out safely accomplished, I do not know, because the episode is gut-wrenching just looking at the photo.  Not much can be said here except, "oh, wow". 

And for the record they are removing a wall from a mostly-demolished building, the last wall standing, built against its neighbor.  And what these guys did six stories up was swing a pickaxe to remove the wall beneath ,them, all the way down, brick-by-brick.  

[Image source: Popular Mechanics, August,, 1915, pg 323]

Deadly Dead Ideas: the U.S. Thinks About the Great War, 1915

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My browsing came to a sudden halt when seeing this small inset photo in an article in Popular Mechanics for October 1915.  "My Four Years in the Navy" was a fairly long feature piece, and it showed a series of rather crowded images of life at sea with overtones of "readiness" should something happen to bring the U.S. into the year-old WWI.  It was the picture at the bottom of p. 567 that gives you great pause--first of all, the sailors are armed and on land, but they're also forming a "hollow square", a defensive position used when a large force attacks a smaller one.  The tactic has been around at least since Roman times and used steadily through the early 19th century (especially it seems during the Napoleonic Wars), but it gradually wore away from the face of battle, and was hardly employed in the late 19th c, except against irregular forces (like against warriors in the Zulu Wars). What made it an antique notion was the machine gun, and tank--mostly though it was rapid-fire assault weapons the crushed the square, the collection and stacking of soldiers close together (and in layers) made them easy targets to an opponent with such weapons).  Nobody was using this technique in the Great War, but there they were, these poor sailors, demonstrating the formation to fight against hundred-year-old ghosts.  The U.S. was nowhere near being ready to fight in WWI in 1915.