JF Ptak Science Books

Hitler, the Booze Weapon, and a Bizarre Prohibition Myopia, 1943

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2464

Until today I had never considered the idea of alcohol as a propagandistic weapon in war until I read Hitler is in Favor (1943), a slim pamphlet that turns out to be an anti-anti-Prohibition statement from the Repeal Associates (of Washington D.C.). The statement "Hitler is in favor" seemed more an interogatory or than a declarative, and the issue of what he was in favor of seemed to be pretty open-ended.  Alcohol was not on the suspect list.  

From what I can tell the pamphlet is a declaration against an earlier pamphlet written by R(overt) Hercod (b. 1876), who was a prominent international figure on the prohibition scene, general secretary  of the International Bureau Against Alcoholism (Laussane, Switzerland), and also active in organizations like the Swiss Total Abstinence Federation and other such groups. He wrote (necessarily) on the evils of alcohol and the need for the reintroduction of prohibition, while recognizing that Hitler was against alcohol, and trying to distance his views from those.

This however is not achieved in high relief. 

For example in 1939 Hercod observes in a pamphlet purchased and distributed by the Board of Temperance of the Methodist Church that "(Hitler) knew Prohibition was a good issue for starting up trouble" by trying to cause a wider division between wet/dry forces in the U.S., which I've never heard of before as a tool in the Nazi propaganda toolbox.  

Things get more problematic for the Hercod pamphlet, as the author of Hitler is in Favor points out the "Dr. Hercod has a kind word for Nazi sterilization law, although agreeing that it cannot have much effect in bringing about temperance".  This sterilization law must have been a subset of other sterilization laws in Germany, this one being the sterilization of "serious cases" of alcoholics which could prove to be a "danger...for the race". 

Hercod identifies the German government in 1938 and 1939 as "benevolent", at least in regards to its participation in organizations like the International Temperance Union, which seems to be an extreme example of single-issue politics.

Another positive influence seen by Hercod is in Hitler Youth, where even though they "are not required o take a pledge of abstinence...they are expected to abstain from alcohol and tobacco..."

Then this nugget:  "As to the future of alcohol in German, Dr. Hercod does not believe such a drastic step as prohibition is in the offing".  

The sterilization part is a very sobering insistence that this weird intellectual effort is not without its fair share of bizarre, real-life implications, and that there was an overall positive if not foggy interpretation of National Socialism, with everything weighed in terms of prohibition.

But then the stiffener comes at close of the pamphlet--an incredible statement made in 1939 that no doubt demanded the consumption of an obscuring potion by the writer. The anonymous author notes that Hercod relates "how active German Jews were in temperance movements) in 1939, but then "without promulgation, so far as we know of any special decree to this effect, the Jews disappeared from the temperance societies (when the authorities took control of these societies) where they had often occupied an important place".  

In the pursuit of an alcohol-free world Hercod overlooks the Nazi plan for the Jewish-free world.  Being in neighboring Switzerland it seems impossible that Hercod could have missed the previous six years of bitter race laws instituted in Germany (including the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935), but it seems as though he did.  He also does not seem to have been affected by the Austrian Anschluss, either. Or any of the other Hitler stuff that wasn't playing out so nicely in 1939.  (I can only assume that all this was written before September, 1939, but...)

And so that is the end of the tour of this very brief but deeply troubling nine-page pamphlet.  It is  difficult to understand the thinking that makes such extreme disgusting myopia possible, though I think it is helpful to surface such a brew as this to appreciate a part of the low wavelength thinking that contributes to making monstrous social licensing possible. 

Bumping into the Invisible: the Coolidge Tube, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2463

I've bumped into another issue of the Physical Review (December 1911, pp 409-430, volume II (second series), #6) with the important William D. Coolidge  paper, "A Powerful Roentgen Ray Tube With a Pure Electron Discharge".

A decade-and-a-half after Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of x-rays (an epochal paper published at the tail end of 1895) this is the first appearance of what we think of as the modern X-Ray tube--a design that would be used for decades to come, and which provided clear and more accurate that had been seen, in a way opening this world up, well, exponentially. It is a very significant contribution to the history of science, and it was cool to find it again by chance.

[Source: Wikipedia, showing the Coolidge tube ca. 1917.]

A Peep at Some Texas Poker Players, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2462

Here's an interesting (literally) little book¹ on Western poker players and poker in general published in the Great State in 1930.  What makes it very appealing to me is that it has colorful and rusty minute biographies (with drawings) of some of the noteworthy Western players, though it is particularly Texas-centric.(15 of 21 of the players are from that state). 

(The Library of Congress Copyright entries for 1930 lists "J.F. Dresing, Jr." ² in what may be the author's chair.)  

Contents of the pamphlet:

Introductory:

• "Rules for Winners (How to win more)" with advice such as “…Get in first blow on arriving home by advising wife of the pre-carious condition of the SICK FRIEND…”
• The pamphlet also offers "Rules for Losers (How to lose more)" such as “…attempt to “bluff” the winners frequently, and note result….” And “…draw for middle straights whenever the opportunity offers…” and “…never despair…”
• General Rules, such as “… when the cards are passed around, and the ‘pot not opened,’ do not neglect to mention, ‘honest dealer’”
• Rules for On-Lookers or Sweaters, such as “…request the cinch players to loosen up…” and “…talk all the time, criticize every man’s play…”

Wild Cards section:

• "Addresses to Make Up a Game table"
• “Experience log to track who owes what"

And then comes the 21 images of the great Texas poker players and their one-line identifications, which are entertaining and probably not very helpful:

Damon G. Gaiter, Dallas, Texas, “Who plays them wide open and makes the ‘going’ rough for the Leathered Vested FRATERNITY.”

B.A. Parrett, Owl-Den, Texas, “Who talks loose, but plays tight.”

Map of Rivers and Waterfalls, 1851

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Before the Neil deGrasse Tyson version and update of Carl Sagan's landmark television series, Cosmos, there was Alexander von Humboldt, and his enormously influential book of the same title, printed in 1845-1862.  Well, von Humboldt's (1769-1859¹) book was actually Kosmos when published in German, which is where it started its life (and which von Humboldt suffered mightily for in it English translation), and in which this map appears.  Von Humboldt was enormously studied and educated and of a high scientific mind over many subjects, one of those 19th century figures who seemed as though they could know everything, a polymath of high order (along the lines of Goethe and von Helmholtz and Thomas Young and others).  He was a meteorologist and biogeographer before those sciences existed; a naturalist, geographer, archaeologist, and explorer, a natural philosopher of magnitudes.

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

Kosmos reflected his lifelong interest in order, and what he did was astonishing--he attempted to unifying the complexities of nature in one book (of five volumes), binding the various branches of science together in a cohesive whole, attempting to show how the laws of the universe acted here on Earth.  It was a very influential work, very progressive, a masterwork of scientific method.  Kosmos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Extraordinary Map of Battle Death--"Body Density Maps", 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2461

At first glance this detailed and dense map looks foreboding and somehow off-putting--at least for me, and that was before I understood what the numbers represented.

The blue numbers on this section of a larger map refer to soldiers killed on the battlefield of the 1916 Somme battlefield. It is the work of Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Messer (Assistant Director of Graves Registration and Enquiries in France), who undertook to record the crosses of the Fallen on the battlefield and register their location, and then to re-inter the bodies together in larger cemeteries.  

 [Source: John Hughes-Wilson, The First World War in 100 Objects, Firefly Books, 2014.]

What we are seeing here are pieces of four 6x6 grids (one complete and three partial) numbered (in red) 1-36, each one of these squares further subdivided into four section.  Each larger square composed of 36 squares is 1000x1000 yards total, meaning that each one of the 36 subdivisions is about 166x166 yards, and each of the four segments of one smaller square is 83 yards. The blue numbers indicate a soldier killed on that field of battle which means that in the large 36-square "M" subdivision  #18 that there were 210+29+372+17 fatalities, or 628 on a 166x166 yard field, or in one case 372 killed on a 83x83 yard plain.   The deaths were even more intense on other areas of the field--in Square S #11 there were 749+207+234+126, or 1,416 deaths in that 166x166 yard field, and 749 on the 83x83 yard field.  It is hard to visualize such loss. I picture a U.S. football field--there are 22 players on the field during play, and that seems to populate the area pretty well--casualties of 749 soldiers on a similar area would be nearly 35 times that, meaning that placed equidistantly and with a few feet on the sides they would cover the field.  There are, what, 75 people on a football team?  That means at the beginning of the game when all of the players and coaches and staff and cheerleaders and member of the band run out onto the field to take their places, they would all be dead--and then some.  That is a lot of death.  

According to the Imperial War Museum, temporary markers for fallen soldiers looked like this:

After the war the Imperial War Graves Commission replaced the wooden crosses with stone markers.  

The wooden markers would then returned to the family.  

[Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/learning/resources/remembrance-in-the-first-world-war]

 

Pause-Giving Photographs of Artillery Shell Vastness, ca. 1917

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Shells as far as the eye can see, at the National Filling factory at Chilwell, Nottinghamshire. Even though I enjoy calculating estimates at vast quantities of things (like all of the life that has existed on Earth, from multi-cellular onwards, how many Legos it would take to build a Dyson sphere around our Solar System, what distance the Enterprise has covered under the command of Capt Picard, that sort) I really can't get a comfortable picture of the vastness of this factory to estimate the number of pounds of explosives under that roof.  

Given that the factory produced about 19 million shells during WWI, I think it would be a safe guess that some 1 billion pounds of explosives were processed through the factory--and perhaps several billion.  But it is difficult to say what we are looking at in these photos, except to say that the number is "big".

[Source" John Hughes-Wilson, The First World War in 100 Objects, Firefly Books, 2014.  

["Female munitions workers guide 6 inch howitzer shells being lowered to the floor at the Chilwell ammunition factory in Nottinghamshire, U.K."--Source: "British official photographer : Nicholls, Horace - This is photograph Q 30040 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums."]

[Source: http://www.iwmprints.org.uk/image/1100193/milner-e-the-interior-of-the-filled-shell-store-at-the-national-shell-filling-factory-at-chilwell-nottinghamshire-15-may-1917]

[Source: http://www.iwmprints.org.uk/image/1100192/milner-e-shells-awaiting-filling-with-explosives-in-a-store-of-the-national-shell-filling-factory-at-chilwell-nottinghamshire-21-november-1916]

A "Living Space" Propaganda Card: Germany, 1930's

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This is a piece of Nazi propaganda showing relative population densities for France, England, and Germany in the 1930's, showing that Germany was far more 'crowded" than the other two countries, and that the necessity for conquering other countries for "living space" was justified. A poor argument believed by millions.  (I should point out that the German's Germany is the only one featuring children (eight including an infant in a pram), and that the Brits are shown in a creaky/slouchy fashion.) It certainly got the point across--you didn't even have to read to understand the message.  

[Source: http://www.authentichistory.com/1930-1939/4-roadtowar/1-germany/]

Trying to Find the First Computers in Comic Books

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2460

Fresh from the fields of a near-victory in trying to find the first time concentration camps were mentioned in a U.S. comic book (the story quickly told yesterday, here), today the question is about the first mention of a computer. This is a little more tricky, since "computer" can mean a lot of things, including mechanical beings. And with an open-ended definition of the word, I think that you could trace the elements of a computer all the way back to Jonathan Swift's thinking engine/machine¹, which for 1726 makes it about the earliest of such imagined inventions. (See here for a post on Swift and Lull.)

[Image source:  comics.org]

A while ago I wrote a post here on an alphabet of names of fictional computers, though none of those machines appeared in a comic book.  I did check a few likely sources, including the massive comic.org site, looking for early-ish mentions of "UNIVAC" and "ENIAC" and of course "computer". Offhand there aren't many hits before 1960, with nothing at all for ENIAC and a 1955 mention of UNIVAC ( "Scarecrow, the Human UNIVAC”,  appearing in Little Wise Guys, October 1955)  and again  in 1955 (in Daredevil Comics, #125) some five years after the UNIVAC was installed at the Department of the Census.  There is a mention of a s "super-brain" in a 12pp story in September/October 1949 issue of Superman, but I have no artwork for that. 

With such slim pickings any portmanteau will do in a storm, and in this case it is "Brainiac" (ENIAC+maniac?), which was an alien computer/cyborg and Superman's chief arch-enemy, finding first light in July 1958 Superman.  

There are a few scattered references that I can find that comes close, but they also feel a little late to the computer part. For example, the near-UNIVAC "ULITVAC is Loose!" appears in "Challenges of the Unknown", Showcase Comics #7, March-April 1957. ( "Synopsis:Felix Hesse, a German scientist, comes pleading to the Challengers to save him from Ultivac, "a creature of my own making... but now out of control!" He explains. Interned as a war criminal, he met Floyd Barker, a bank robber. Released, they team to build a giant machine - Suddenly a giant robot hand crashes through the window and seizes Hesse. Spouting propellers, it flies off with Hesse. The Challengers have their next job, "Track down ULTIVAC!"--comics.org)

One thing is for certain, though--the first all computer-generated artwork for a comic book appeared in the series Shatter, which ran from 1985-1988, which is an altogether different sort of comic book computer "first".

I've started a list of early appearances in U.S. comic books of odd parts of the components of the computer culture, including computer crime, dating, and other bits:

“Computer crooks”, 1965: "

• Challenge of the Computer-Crooks!" (The Atom) / Gardner Fox, story ; Gil Kane and Sid Greene, art. 13 p. in The Atom, no. 20 (Sept. 1965)

Computer Dating, 1975:

• "Sexy Computer Dating" by Bob Mende ; art, Don Orehek. p. 24-25 in Best Cartoons from the Editors of Male & Stag, v. 6, no. 2 (Feb. 1975).

--which I guess should be accompanied by:

• "I Think It's For Real This Time. He Even Told Me His Computer Password" (Windows on Work, Oct. 25, 1993) / Carol Simpsmo. -- "Romance on the Information Highway."

Rodney Dangerfield moments, 1975:

• "Only the Computer Shows Me Any Respect!" (Killraven) 18 p. in Amazing Adventures, 32 (Sept. 1975)

Crazy Computers, 1974:

• “The Computer that Went Bananas” in The Flinstones, / story by Horace J. Elias. -- Ottenheimer, 1974.

Computer Wars, 1980:

• “CPU Wars”, created, produced, directed & finally scrawled by Chas Andres. -- Westford, MA : Chthon Press, 1980.

--All data of the above list is derived  from the fantastic database created at Michigan State University, http://comics.lib.msu.edu/rri/crri/compo.htm#end

Computers and Pigs, 1959

• Porky Pig Sept-October 1959 #66. ("Synopsis: Porky eats a lot of fish as "brain food" before taking an intelligence test. The electronic brain gives him a score of 301, a super genius. But there's a catch..."--comics.org

My general impression thus far is that the computer in comic books  before 1955 seems to be nowhere near the interest rate of computers in speculative fiction, which is interesting.  

Notes:

1. Swift describes the machine so:  “... Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.” He then led me to the frame, about the sides, whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superfices was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me “to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work.” The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down."

• A good article (though behind a paywall) by Eric Weiss on Swift's computer appears in the IEEE:  http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MAHC.1985.10017

Internment (?) and Concentration Camps in Comic Books, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2459

I wanted to write about this a little before the idea and data slipped away--the idea is formed but the supporting info is not, probably. This information came to me via the generosity of high-expert in the history of comics and comic books Robert Beerbohm (of San Francisco and Fremont, Nebraska). I was asking him about representations of concentration camps in comic books during WWII, and he instantly came up with True Comics (#37) for July 1944, which includes "a three-panel sequence showing a Nazi concentration camp"¹.

According to the entry in Michigan State University's comic archives (see note below) the great photographer Therese Bonney had something to do with the images--Bonney was certainly all over Europe during the war and was on hand making photographic images of concentration camps beginning in 1939 to liberation beginning in May 1945.  

The interest here is how, and perhaps why, kids were presented with enormous and complicated ideas like concentration camps. The only real way to reach children in a pop-cultural way at this time was through comic books, and so, still with a year left in the war and with perhaps millions of more people to kill, the image of the concentration camp was presented to them.  

• See an earlier post on the reporting of the atomic bomb in the Manzanar internment camp newspaper, here. 

Mr. Beerbohm then suggested an issue of Capt Midnight #23, for August 1944 for an unusual image of that super hero responding to an escape from a Japanese "prison camp". What I'm wondering about is whether or not it was an Internment Camp (like Manzanar or Tule Lake), as the escapees are dressed in civilian clothing.  I don't yet have access to the issue (and so the lack of info) though it does give one pause to think about the possibility of this being an escape on U.S. soil.  (Franklin Roosevelt’s  February 1942 Executive Order 9066 was designed to imprison more than 100,000 American--70,000 of whom were U.S. citizens, including children--for the duration of the war; it was the legal bombshell that gave the War Department the authority to authorize the removal of the Japanese  to theoretically prevent those people from engaging in sub rosa and fifth column activities and wartime terrorists fighting for Imperial Japan.)

[Source: Comics.org  http://www.comics.org/issue/3764/]

There was evidently little to worry about with the Internees "escaping"--the camps were remote, and more often than not there were no fences to speak of. And according to many reports at camps like Manzanar hundreds of people would slip away for a day or week or whatever to go fishing for more appetizing food, like rainbow trout, and then return.  

I suspect that the escape of the Japanese in this comic book must have been from a POW camp (in spite of the civilian clothing), though it is not impossible that it is an Internment Camp, and that this was an effort to reinforce the removal orders of 100,000 people.  But as I said my information is incomplete, and I'm just speculating on this presently--I'll return here once I have a copy of the book.  

• See this interesting article on Manzanar internees 'escaping" to go fishing and return, here: http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-manzanar24-2009apr24-story.html

Notes:

1.  The quote is from a description of the issue from the Michigan State University archives, which includes one of the country's greatest library collections of comic books, and headed by the very informed and generous Randall Scott.  

Concentration Camps.
   "Photo-Fighter : Therese Bonney" 3 p. in True Comics, no.
   37 (July 1944) -- SUMMARY: Photographer Therese Bonney made
   "truth raids" throughout Europe in World War II. This story
   has a 3-panel sequence showing a Nazi concentration camp.

Airpower Power Illustrated Power Graphic, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Isn't it grand to be charting variations on a graph using different-sized aircraft from 1935?  Sure, a line would be fine, but this is so much prettier--and of course a simple line is a line and would not display the workhouse military aircraft of the national quantity it was depicting.  This appears in the Illustrated London News for September (or thereabouts) 1935--this is the magazine I think that may have been the King/Queen of graphically/representationally displayed data of the 1920s/30s/40s.  The interest here of course is British-centric, comparing the air force of Great Britain to the rest of the world, but that is to be expected given the source of the images.  It is also remarkable how much this graph would be changed in the next ten years...

There are also three fine inset images at bottom (about 2 x 2.5" in real life) that I've carved out and enlarged--they are all fine works in themselves.  

And the details:

And the cool hemispheric map:

And the text:

 

An Experimental Documentary on the Soviet Union, 1929

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The man with the camera was David Abelevich Kaufman (Vertov) (1896-1954), who made it along with his editor-wife Elizaveta Svilova (who worked on a number of films, mainly propaganda from the looks of it, though I would really like to see The Fall of Berlin, 1945, and also her film about Auschwitz). 

The film was evidently a ground-breaker¹--Roger Ebert points out one facet of the work, the average shot length, which is by far shorter here than anywhere previous works, meaning that there was more editing and selection done than normally:  "In 1929, the year it [Man...] was released, films had an average shot length (ASL) of 11.2 seconds. "Man With a Movie Camera" had an ASL of 2.3 seconds. The ASL of Michael Bay's "Armageddon" was -- also 2.3 seconds...")  

I've included a link to the film (below) but honestly what attracted me to it was its poster, created by the indomitable and prolific Stenberg Brothers. Not only does the poster seem to me to be a masterpiece and iconic, it also uses an unusual perspective--straight up.  I've done several posts here on the perspective of looking straight down and straight across, but there have been very few opportunities to write something about looking straight up (in the antiquarian image world).  But here it is, in all of its glory.   

The full movie, here:

 

 

[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_with_a_Movie_Camera]

Notes:

1. Studio Daily lists Man with a Movie Camera as the 8th best movie ever made.  http://www.studiodaily.com/2012/08/sight-sound-revises-best-films-ever-lists/

A Key to 20th Century Physics in Two Really Good Volumes

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2458

It really is a rare thing to open a book and find it full of significant contributions by numerous people occurring in situ as it were--not an intentional collection of greats, but a "serendipitous one.  In this case the find occurred in one bound volume of the American Physical Society's Review of Modern Physics--a single volume containing two years of papers for 1945 and 1946. I've seen this a number of times--as with bound volumes for The Physical Review for 1932, and 1939 and 1948, for example--and it is always a pleasure to watch the great epic of those years roll out as you leaf your way through the volume.  

And so it happens with volume 17 and 18 of the Reviews¹, the greatest interest in this volume is no doubt the multiple blockbuster of contributors for the commemoration of Niels Bohr's birthday, in Volume 17/2, April-July 1945, pp 97-350, "In Commemoration of the Sixtieth Birthday of Niels Bohr, October Seventh, 1945”. The field is full of the major names (and Nobel Prize recipients) of physics in the 20^th century. These include Bloch, Born, Chandrasekhar, Dirac, Einstein, Feynman, Gamow, Goudsmit, Heitler, Hevesy, London, Meitner, Pauli, Rabi, Van Vleck, Weisskopf, Wheeler, and others, a full-ish list of the papers is included below. (The Wheeler-Feynman paper is significant on its own and highly cited.)

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

Anti-Roosevelt Propaganda--the Leaderless U.S., 1936

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Perhaps it would be surprising to some to hear that the leaderless leader of the United States that this pamphlet refers to is Franklin Roosevelt--I mean, I was surprised, but then again I guess the leader could've been any president, so long as the opposition was viperous enough.

The title  sounds pretty familiar, and to my experience is probably applicable to just about every presidential campaign since perhaps Woodrow Wilson.  This is a policy-based and argumentum ad hominem but thoroughly polite screed by Wadsworth Maximillian against Franklin Roosevelt, and was published in seems at the beginning of the 1936 campaign.  There's much that Maximillian takes aim at, but a lot has to do with Roosevelt's "Brauin Trust" and in the author's mind turning over the running of the country to an not-elected group rather than the elected president. But then again there's not much that Roosevelt was doing on his own that didn't provoke some ire in this pamphlet--Roosevelt and the entire Democratic Party, which here is the party of the destruction of the U.S. constitution.  (The attack actually begins with Woodrow Wilson, who was handed his victory as a result of T. Roosevelt splitting the Republican interest...)

At the end the author quotes Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, saying that there is a new Civil War, and that Roosevelt as a one-man government is on the other side of where Lincoln was in the fight to preserve the country.  And so on.  I know it can feel as though the political attacks that are head on the radio and read in the press sound a lot like this pamphlet--unfortunately this genre is nothing new.  

What They Knew in 8th Grade in 1895 (And What You Probably Don't Know Now)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2457

I've bumped into this exam a number of times around the web--it is for an eight grade final exam for Salina, Kansas, in 1895. (That's the year that physics changed nearly completely with the discovery of the x-ray by W. Roentgen.)  Perhaps it is an "average" test of competency for kids of this rank and year--that would be sort of appropriate, in a way, since the geography of Salina puts it almost at the middle of the state and almost at the center of the country.  Salina wasn't organized as a town until nearly the Civil War; it grew from 900 people in 1870 to 3,000 in 1880 to 6,000 in 1890, mostly because of the cattle trade and then farming.  So when this test was made, the kids taking it were probably the children of farmers or millers, working class families.  

[Source:  http://fanaticcook.blogspot.com/2011/11/1895-eighth-grade-final-exam-from.html]

It reminds me a lot of the general physics and natural philosophy and mechanics textbooks for kids that I've seen from the 1850-1900 period--lots of very practical stuff that went into running a life, plus the theoretical bits, and applied inferential parts.  I know that I can go to Ganot's Physics for 1885 and see how I can pull the stuff together that I can make an explosive with to remove a stump.  Also there's the mechanics of rolling a wagon sideways along a steep embankment and what makes it possibe/dangerous to do so.  And much more.  A lot of that would fly out of you head in short order, but a lot wouldn't; and at least you'd have the cerebral muscle memory to know how to try to figure a problem out even if you didn't have all of the parts to do so.  

 

And so, with the Salina test, there's a lot of material that an 8th grader (or adult) would just not know because there was no need to teach it. On the other hand, sitting down to "explain" arithmetic is a good question, and probably a necessary one, but still looks foreign to the reader in 2015.  Also the question "what is punctuation?"--that's a good one.  

So here's the questions. I think that they reveal more of what you'd like to know rather than what you do know..

Also I note that they used the term "U.S." history rather than "American" history, since the questions are more about the United States of America and not about the continent/s, which includes a lot more than just the U.S.  

Eighth Grade Final Examination, Salina, Kansas 1895

Odd Collections: Bone-by-Bone to 500,000 Wishbones

JF Ptak Science Books Post 928 (from 2010, Expanded!)

"One must go into oneself armed to the teeth"--M. Teste, Paul Valery

“Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still." --H.D. Thoreau

Sometimes odd images just need to be surfaced for the pure sake of it.  Such is the case with this glorious photo by Greg Villet¹ of Delphine Binger in LIFE magazine for  24 May, 1954 .   Ms. Binger ("a Manhattan spinster") actually collected the wishbones with a business utility in mind, fashioning them into objets d'os.  (LIFE unfairly classified Ms. Binger in this way. In other accounts I have read of her Ms. Binger  is described as a funny, fun-loving person, and Pete Hamil/Meyer Berger describe her as "generous", "bubbling" and "caring" in their 1954 Meyer Berger's New York.)

 

She purchased the wishbones for nothing, added a few bits of half-penny decorations, perfume, a pin, and SO! a piece of jewelry is born.  She evidently was able to sell her creations for $2.10 apiece, which in 1954 translates into 25 2009 dollars; so I guess if she sold some here and there she would be able to supplement her income.  Of course there's the issue of overkill on the bones:  she seems to have probably two (or more) orders of magnitude more than she "needs", so there may have been something else going on there.
  But then again, at the point where you collect 500k of anything you will have become expert enough to have any mostly-invisible nuance convey a large field of interest to your keen appreciation--the bigger something gets, the smaller it gets, in parts. 

An old friend of mine--we'll call him Mr. Tulipfields, a brilliant mathematician/physicist/compsci guy with a deep appreciation for music--started buying classical cds when cds were a relatively new phenomenon.  Rare recorded material was being placed back into "print" at such a rate that he couldn't really afford the appropriate sound system to actually listen to all of his new purchases.  He hurried into buying many of the cds because he thought that they would drop out-of-print again, and that he needed to act quickly.  I thought that the cds would stay available basically forever—as it turned out he was right (as usual) and I was wrong (ditto). And so Mr. T amassed an enormous collection of music—in the dozens of thousands—many of which are now impossible to find. 

In some ways my friend didn’t need the cd player—he already knew the music, could play it in his head.  Somehow he was keeping all of this music on course in forming this fabulous collection  And once he had explained his reasoning behind the whole effort, it all made perfect sense, and you’d wonder why he didn’t have 100,000 more choice cds.

On the other hand I’m not sure why Ms. Binger² needed her extra 497,500 bones—you'd expect there to be not very much difference from bone-to-bone, but there very well may be. A centimeter here and there may make all the world of difference and interest to the practiced eye, particularly if the bones are from many species of animals. Once a collection of almost anything gets to be that big, someone somewhere is going to be interested in preserving it.  

But how does one get to 500,000 wishbones?  Simply put: bone by bone.  

And that's what Ms. Binger did.

• See also this note in Popular Science from the Popular Mechanix site ("Wishbones Made Her Dreams Come True"). 

Notes:

1.  I don't know much about Greg Villet.  He took a lot of preparations for this photo, stringing 5,000 wishbones on black string on a black backdrop--that is considerable dedication to the idea of an image.  I also know that he did some very significant documentary photography with Rosa Parks and the Montgomery strikes of 1955/6, which tells you maybe all you need to know about the man.  

2.  I can't help but wonder what happened to all of those bones on Ms. Binger's passing? (She died in 1961, and I can't find anything about the disposition of the collection.  It sounds like the vast majority of the bones were kept with relatives and not in her two-bedroom apartment at 145 W. 96th St in NYC.  And by the way according to Zillow a two-bedroom unit now rents at this address for $8700/month.  My guess is that Ms. Binger paid maybe 100/month in 1951.