JF Ptak Science Books

The History of Meat Maps: "Fluid Beef" Atlases

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2488

• [Please be aware that there were 75 blog posts and another 30,000 words made on this blog in June, 2015--check them out by going to the Recent Posts block at right]

Meat, seaweed, "beef fluid", corn, pasta, spices, shrimp, bananas--have all served as a bases for the construction of maps--not maps of _____-producing areas, but the maps themselves being made of the actual thing (or image of it) itself.  Antique examples of this semi-anti-accomplishment are tough to find, with the Moderns being a little more common (as we can see on the Time magazine site, the background of the maps being negatives of antiquarian maps).  

And so I just had to stop and collect up this image found on Flickr of the rectifying and emboldening Bovril "fluid beef" holding up the world, like an Atlas constructed of water and suspended beef-ish squeezings, which is a lot less appetizing than the original myth.  I can't think offhand of another atlas-like entity made of meat-things holding up the world. 

I do not know what the land mass is off the African west coast, except that it shouldn't be there.  Probably it was supposed to be a too-close South America.  

Also I should point out that the idea for constructing non-food things from food does go back a long way--there are numerous sculptural items in art and architecture that employ food/foodbits going back many century. The most famous of these maps, I guess, is the semi-magnificent The Porcineograph, produced by the Forbes Lithographic Manufacturing Company of Boston in 1876 or so, which defines the states and territories of the U.S. in terms of their regional foods.  

[Map source:  the Library of Congress.]

And before proceeding any further, I must at least make reference to another master in this field, an earlier, perhaps revolutionary figure (without producing a revolution), Giuseppe Arcimboldo (also spelled Arcimboldi; 1527-1593), who painted (in his non-conventional works) fantastic portraits and images using fruits, vegetables and other natural objects as the sole source of representation.  On the other hand his influence may not have been so very well known, as many of his works were stolen during war time in the mid-17th century, and he fell rather deeply into obscurity until being revived and resurrected by the Surrealists in the 20th century. 

[Image source: http://www.giuseppe-arcimboldo.org/]

Also in a nearby carrot patch lives some of the work of Nicolas de Larmessin (1640-1725)--an enormously creative and productive artist--who in his way created a genre similar to the great and ancient Dance of Death/.Danse Macabre/Totentanz--though his was the Dance of Life, and in some cases he used mostly food to construct and decorate his portraits.  

There are more of these examples, to be certain, but that's all there is time for today.  It is probably some sort of bona fide sub genre, although not a big one, and even there it may all be invisible.  

History of Lines: Chronology of European History, ACE 14-1813

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post      History of Lines series

The "Pantography of Modern History" packs a lot of information into a relatively small space, surveying a good chunk of the history of the West from the year 14 to 1800.  (It is very similar and may be a pirated English version of a French effort that I describe in this post, earlier on this blog.) The sheets are 16x20" making the full pantography 32x20" or so--I reckon that there are about 1000 data points on the four square feet or so of paper.  There are some descriptions of events but most of the effort is keeping the ruling heads in order.  This version is a little easier to follow than the French because the design is somewhat sparser, making the bits easier to discern.

I'm a big fan of this sort of data display.  

• Published in Lavoisne's Complete ....Geographical Atlas, printed by J. Barfield,  1815. "Pantography of Modern History. Or, a Description of the relative Situations of the States and Sovereigns of Europe, during the first Ten Centuries of the Christian Era" Accompanied by "... from the Beginning of the Eleventh Century to the Year 1828". 

When "Bombs" Became "Shells", 1745

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"Bombing: An attacking with bombs; bombarding; the action or operation of throwing or dropping bombs."--Oxford Enmglish Dictionary

• 1691   N. Luttrell Diary in Brief Hist. Relation State Affairs (1857) II. 195   The bombing of which had cost them a good summ of money and men.
• 1719   T. D'Urfey Wit & Mirth II. 129   The General would leave Bombing, Of Towns in hot Campaigns.
• 1915   Daily Mail 18 May 6/4   Three Air Raids on Calais. Futile bombing by 3 Zeppelins.

What I had in my mind when seeing this hand-colored engraving was Sven Lindqvist's History of Bombing--except that Lindqvist is much more interested in the modern history of bombing, and that mostly by airplane. But these are certainly 'bombs" described here, shot from mortars. Some folks might not think of this action as "bombing", but it certainly is according to the OED.  What is remarkable in this image is that there is a description and cross section for exploding and incendiary bombs, which at this point would probably be more accurately described as "shells".  This is relatively early to see described in a general technical work in 1745, though the exploding shell itself goes back several centuries before this in the West and a little further in the East, so it is not a "first" description of the weapon, though it is a very young appearance of it.  (We'll not include the flaming/diseased/etc animal carcasses that would sometimes be launched with unholy venom by trebucet or whatever in the centuries before these centuries-before.) 

The print is entitled  "Die Eintheilung der Mörser und ihrer Laffeten, samt dem dazu gehörigen Ernst-Feuerwerck vorstellend" and is plate 43 in Mathematischer Atlas : in welchem auf 60 Tabellen alle Theile der Mathematic vorgestellet und nicht allein überhaupt zu bequemer Wiederholung, sondern auch den Anfängern besonders zur Aufmunterung durch deutliche Beschreibung u. Figuren entworfen werden, which was assembled by (Dr. Johann) Tobias Mayer (ca.1723-1762) and published in Augsburg in 1745.  

• This is one of the plates from that work that are in the blogs's bookstore (and buyable! here).

Here's a good link for the entire work, available from the German Digital Library via Goettingen.

A Remarkable, Outsidery Effort in Economics, 1934

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Hard Times: Cause and Cure, a Bankrupt Farmer and an Honest Judge Talk it Over was written by Tolley Hartwick and published by him in 1934, in the near-height/depth of the Depression.  Hartwick's work was extraordinary, though perhaps mostly within itself. From what I have read and understand, this may be a semi-private insight into the development of economic systems and the decline of the U.S. economy in 1929.  "Scientific Government/Scientific Taxation/Scientific Money" is the rallying point on the first page of this very long document that claims no title page and but scant  explanation of its origins.  The work is--in an odd and difficult way--an artwork in itself, mostly due to its dense and unrelenting design.  It is 15 inches high and 8.5 inches wide, typed single space so that on the page's very narrow-margined self there are more than 90 cramped lines of text; and with approximately 15 words per line, that means each page is very heavily worded with something like 1100-1350 words, which is pretty impressive.  And at 210 pages, the document is about 250,000 words long, making it highly combative.  

I'll never come to know what Mr. Hartwick was writing about because of the work's secret complexities, which is too bad, at least for me.  

But in its very dense, very full way,  printed on now-crumbling paper, and with a high degree of difficulty to decipher its message, the work presents itself as something larger than what it is--it has a certain look and feel of something very difficult to create, a certain "obviousness" of painstaking longevity that gives it more a feel of an artwork than a book.  

In any event, I like it. 

[This may be a unique--with its provenance being the Library of Congress and one of the copyright deposit copies--as I can find no trace of it except for its entry in the Copyright Office publication for materials received in 1934.]

Putting the "IF" in "LIFE": Welcome to Dystopia! (1950)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2486

So, grazing my way through a random issue of America's magazine, LIFE, for August 28, 1950, I was struck by the profound amount of unhappy welcome-to-your-stinking-future-you-poor-stinking-sod articles contained in its heavy and mostly colorful pages, all packed into a quarter-inch thick package.  

The issue starts out with a waxy portrait of MacArthur, followed by two big pages of freckly boys modelling Peter Pan Peanut Butter and Ice Cream Dixies, then a big splashy two-page ad for soles for your shoes, then contrasting color combos in a Glidden paints ad, a Swank tie-clip-ruler-mechanical-pencil, Vaseline cream hair tonic, then bits for DeSoto and Chrysler, and Ford.  Ads done, there's a two-pager on an old lost film starring Babe Ruth, and a  big/weird coverage of people flocking to a far-removed farmlet because the woman living there claimed to see the Virgin Mary.

Then comes the rain:  it starts with a story on an unexpected best seller for civil defense ("Atomic Handbook a best seller"), followed by:

• A hand-drawn illustrated page on how to protect yourself from nuclear extermination if the bomb catches you unawares on the way to work;
• the effects of an underwater detonation in the harbor of a large unnamed (ahem, New York) city illustrated by a very forceful two-page drawing;
• a story on the opinions of New Yorkers on the building of a skyscraper when there is such an imminent possibility of an attack by the Soviets (who had developed their own Fat Man type atomic weapon in the autumn of 1949 and which was announced as confirmed by Truman in early 1950, so the threat as it was was new)
• then comes a story of bombing patterns in Korea
• then a short account of a vicious Korean battle at No Name Ridge

These tales are then interrupted by a full page ad for Old God cigarettes, with a pack of them floating on a lily pad in a pond.

The salvo is opened again with:

• a long story on Viet Nam, and the French involvement, and the components of the Foreign Legion fighting there, and how much they need the help of the U.S. to stop this fight for the control of Asia by The Communists, and that it may be a "matter of days" in which we needed to act
• then a big spread (which will get a blog post of its own) on ramping-up the U.S. air force components for the continuation of the new war in Korea.

That is where the bad news almost stops, mostly, the rest of the magazine filled out by fluff and stuff, with a lot of ads.  Some of the ads are very puzzling, and some are just disturbing, like the big stretching crotch-shots for jockey underwear for men, and a bra ad featuring a model with Indian headdress saying "How how how", and a terrifically unsavory racist ad for Dumont televisions featuring a cartoon-clownish minstrel figure for no good reason whatsoever. Reeling in the back of the mag are a bunch of big red ad for bacon and pork and Big Red Meat, PBR, mustard, razor blades, a few movies, and lots of people smoking cigarettes.

But just when you thought you made it out of the issue pops up two final stories--a boring thing on "War and Politics", and  a picture essay "Iowa Town Dies a Slow Death".  

The back cover features a flat cover ad for unfiltered Camel ciggies, decorated with Nanette Fabray in a cabbage leaf dress,  which loudly states "Not one single case of throat irritation due to smoking Camels".   Giving the devil its due  they also state that that (quoted?) nugget was for a 30-day trial. Certainly after x-years millions wouldn't have this complaint because they wouldn't have any throats anymore, being dead from cigarette-induced cancers and all, so the statement was shown to be not necessarily untrue.

August 28, 1950.  

All that reading done, you were supposed to keep your eyes on the skies but not let it interfere with your eyes on the prize, which was spending money, and to have you hopefully go out to get some peanut butter that you could put on your new tv, while you and your honey watched it in your new sparkling white underwear, slathered in vaseline hair creme, drinking a PBR, smoking several brands of cigarettes, and thinking about the Parkay margarine-slathered big meat products in the refrigerator.  Just make sure to wash your house after the series of Joe-1 Soviet nukes annihilate the rest of your city.  

There was a lot of scary stuff in this issue, which certainly helped to put the "if"into "life" in the high summer of 1950--then again, as a summer of fear, there was a lot of it to go around, and with some good reason.  

 

Notes

See here for a good article on the Life article on this town, "Bradgate, the Town that Wouldn't Die", at iagenweb.com (Iowa Genealogy) 

The Nothing Frontier, 1900

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2485   Part of the History of Nothing series

The "frontier" in the history of the U.S. West is a pretty big deal, and old, the academic concept of  the frontier pressing its way back 13 decades, when for the most part once it was introduced it was pronounced to be "closed" by the man who reinterpreted it, Frederick Jackson Turner¹.   On my shelves alone there are books on the mining frontier, the mineral frontier, the transportation frontier, the Indian frontier, the military frontier,the farming frontier, and so on, divisions allotted by wealth, nationality, numerous geographical attributes, and the like. One thing I think that I have not seen was the Nothing Frontier, where there are divisions divided by, well, sort of "nothing". This is mostly a prosaic statement, slightly poetical, dependent on visual clues. And of course there isn't "nothing" there because there is always "something"--there just isn't very much of it.  And when things get colored-coded on map depending upon percentage distributions, and that object of measurement is left to a null color or no color at all, then it appears that the divisions one left to nothing.

[The image above is very expandable.]

This can be seen if you squint somewhat you can see an example of it in plate 26, "Proportion of Population in Cities and Towns of More than 2000 Inhabitants..." Statistical Atlas, prepared under the Supervision of Henry Gannett (Geographer of the the Twelfth Census), printed in Washington by the U.S. Census Bureau, 1903. This map--which is part of an historic series of atlases published with U.S. census data--shows the distribution of urban population in five shades of brown (as seen in the legend) plus a blueish color for "no urban population" as well as no color ("The allowance of color indicates an aggregate population of less than 2 inhabitants to a square mile").

It is that absence of color that makes it a frontier-ish sort of frontier, a part of the Made Up Frontier, this one being very straightforward north/south, Big Bend to Montana, pretty much the Lonesome Dove trail from the rough Big Bend Texas to nearly Canada.  

I know it is just a thing I made up just now looking at the map, but given some effort, maybe the idea actually has some legs.  

Notes

1. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History, Harvard University, 1920, full text via Project Gutenberg,  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22994/22994-h/22994-h.htm

Inherent Racism and Selling TVs, 1950

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2484

I've written here a number of times on this blog about endemic, inherent, engrained racism, racism that is just so much a part of the culture that it can become an outrageous element  completely obtuse context. Another good example is this ad that I bumped into while looking for a nuclear-attack article in a September 1950 issue of LIFE magazine. It is just an ad for televisions, a big two-page spread in America's leading popular magazine, which means it was expensive, and which also means that x-number of hours were spent on its production and design, and the best thing that the minds working on this was use that incredible black-face minstrel figure to grab a viewer's attention to look at the tvs and link them to a particular entertainment-past.  Black-face, minstrel, Mississippi sidewheeler, Dumont. Nobody thought that there was anything wrong with this, and so the television maker connected itself with this visual horrorshow.

Depictions of African Americans in this way came to be seen as wrong, but in another decade or two, probably a few years earlier than the Lovings' case regarding their rejected attempt to be married because they were an interracial couple was settled in 1967, striking the illegality of interracial marriage.  Probably the offensive intolerances written about gay marriage will be seen in the same league of abhorance as this minstrel figure was seen with a few decades after its publication.  It has taken lifetimes of efforts to legally surpass social condemnation, restrictions and persecutory adjudications of the gay life, the marriage part of which was just today settled by the Supreme Court of the United States, recognizing that not allowing the marriage of two people of the same sex was discriminatory.  There are still horrendous and terrible things being said about that, now, as though (as I heard on a Conservative talk radio station) that "homosexual marriage" could lead to complete subjugation of normalcy, and that we could now well see the marriage of humans and animals. 

Opinions stated for the public record like that will be hard to explain in the near future, just as the decision to use the minstrel is today.  I hope that it doesn't take further decades for people to realize that opposition to same-sex marriage will seem just like those opposing slavery, opposing the vote for women, opposing casual relationship between Catholics and Protestants, and opposing interracial marriage, and so on into the unfriendly past; it is all the same argument of opposition and restricting the intellect from one to the next--only the issues change. 

 

Stability and the Unintentionally but Quiet Absurd (1937)

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This fine dream of "stability" decorated the cover of an unusual and grasping little pamphlet advocating "stability" in all corners, so t hat the wind compass would always point to "stable" no matter the origin of the breeze.  The idea of stability is really pretty good for kids and perhaps the elderly, but in between it might not be the most beneficial thing to the creative process.  Stable gets you only so far, except that it did once get the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals to the World Series with a win/loss average just barely above .500--an exception to the rule.

The Stabilization League really meant it--"they" thought that by having everything balanced--trade, deficit, foreign matters, immigration, credit, etc--that the U.S. would be a better place, that taxes would be lowered, monopolies broken up, and stabilization of employment.  I'm not sure how, as this skinny pamphlet is only six pages long, and that includes the cover.  This was published in 1937 and copyrighted by Kenneth D. Wilkins--I don't see any mention of this pamphlet anywhere, and my copy looks like one of the copyright deposit copies, so circulation of this work was restricted. 

All from:

The only thing I found looking up "The Stabilization League of America" was a reference to the work when its copyright was published, and that's it.  The author was looking for "1,000,000" members to "finance a national organization". I'm pretty sure that didn't happen.

There also seems to be something inherently ironic about a massive call-to-action on the idea of "stability".

Another London Underground: Water, 1929

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On the heals of two water-related posts in the last two days (one of the waterless Jornada del Muerto in New Mexico and the other on the well at the Turin citadel as a reverse-tower) comes this fine image of a geological/hydrological cross section of London, from the Illustrated London News for July 20, 1929. 

All elements of this collage are very (screen-filling) clickable, and sharp:

History of Squares-within-Squares

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This square-within-a-square appears in a table of squares in several pages of square collections. They represent "Bullion product per capita" for U.S states and territories, and published in the U.S. Geological Survey Annual Report for 1881 (plate XLIX).  The "bullion" is silver bullion, and as we can there twelve leading states for silver production worth discussing before the rest become melded into one solid whole in square 13.  It is a beautiful display, in its pre-non-representational-art sort of way.  Kandinsky was still more than 30 years away from calling this sort of thing "art", and the representation itself was 95 years after the first graphic displays to convey info (in Playfair's Commercial and Political Atlas of 1786)and still, it is very captivating in a simple, squarey sort of way. 

 

 

New York City Destroyed, Part XV (February 1950)

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• Part of the very long Atomic and Nuclear Weapons History series

 Here's another maim-and-blame piece of provocative semi-future/tomorrow speculation from Mechanix Illustrated (of all places) in February, 1950, hosted by the wonderful Modern Mechanix website (where the entire War-of-the-Worlds-like article is included).  So February 1950 was pretty early in the development of the brand-new atomic Cold War.  The Soviets had been experimenting since 1946 (thanks in large part to "intelligence received" from agents working in the U.S.)  and in August 1949 successfully detonated their first atomic weapon. This came several years before most experts thought possible, with the weapon (called RDS-1, or "First Lightning", or in the West, "Joe 1"), which was a Fat Man/implosion device, generating a yield of 22kt.  The news of the test took a few months to filter out to the rest of the world--as the U.S. had previously initiated a bomb/detection plan employing the B-29 Superfortress--with President Truman making an announcement regarding the test on September 23, 1949.  The Soviet had hoped to keep their experimentation "quiet" so that they could have a few more years of catch-up while developing a hydrogen bomb, but that didn't work out for the evidently surprised Russians.

In any event this image fits nicely with the other 15 or so depicting a mostly pre-1960 NYC in ruins. (Check the GOogle search box at left for NYC destroyed/attacked.)

And yes Lady Liberty is facing the wrong way.

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/can-russia-defeat-us-with-atom-bombs/

Pride in a 3mm House on the Dead Man's Walk, 1855

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2483

Sometimes maps have an unusual ability they can Maps can record human achievement and anti-achievement and show human impact on the environment and vice versa, which is standard,  especially if you can see a little deeply into it.  Sometimes though there are the little bits--extras--that find their way onto the paper that opens a window to the emotional involvement of people and space, added by the artist or engraver or whoever it might be that last touches the plate before prints are made from it.  

This certainly seems to be the case in this cross-section of tough New Mexico earth.

That little adobe building represents the Dona Ana Land Grant back in 1855, when those pioneers had a few decades of roots in the very hot ground there in New Mexico, across from the Rio Bravo, commanding the Mesilla Valley.  In the original print, published in the great U.S. Pacific Railroad Survey¹ in 1855, the structure is only about 3mm long--very easy to miss until you start looking closely at the sheet, which itself is only 2x2.5 cigarettes high and wide.

I thought the structure had a personality, and looked stolid, strong, and maybe even proud with its long fluttering banner, sitting there in the heights above the river, a strong place perched at the edge of the Jornada del Muerto ("The Dead Man's Journey" or more prosaically and according to Mr. McMurtry, "The Dead Man's Walk")

Notes:

1. The full title of the eight-volume publication, which was an exhaustive treatment of the U.S. west from the mud below to the birds above, Reports of Explorations and Surveys to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economical Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean Made Under the Direction of the Secretary of War, which was published by the U.S. government from 1853-6.

Found Beauty in Mathematics, ca. 1895

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This is a slightly manipulated image of the original (below) with an overlay of a daguerreotype process.  The math notes (square roots of numbers from 25-60,025 in 25 increments) occurs on the back of several pages of foolscap note "di geologiska formationrma" and by the footnotes it seems as though the notes are from 1893/5 or thereabouts.  In any event the calculations have a certain beauty to them. 

On Perspective, Comparison, and the Reverse Tower

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2483

As M. Chabat writes,"Considérés au point de vue de la forme et de l'ornementation extérieures un grand nombre de puits de toutes les époques peuvent être regardés comme de véritables œuvres d'art...", which is certainly true of the well at the citadel of Turin--even the elevation and (particularly) the plan of the structure. 

Funny that this is what I find most interesting in this big engraved sheet from Jean Nicolas Louis Durand's monumental and important semi-biblical work on the history of architecture, but, so it goes.  (The work is Recueil et Parallele des Edifices, and was printed in Venice by Giuseppe Antonelli in Venice in 1833; it comes some 31 years after the appearance of the first edition, greatly expanded, with 273 plates compared to 90 in the first.)

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

There's plenty on this sheet worthy of attention--and as the Durand work is concerned, it is one of the few to feature towers. And in the case of the Turin well, it may be considered (here at least and not probably by anyone who knows anything at all about architecture) to be a reverse tower.  This is slim pickin's so far as engineering reasoning goes--or is it?  Why if it was so removed from logic would the considerable and considered Durant include the thing on his page of towers? 

One of the remarkable points on this structure was the dual circular staircases that would allow the horses hauling water from the depths for go up and down without having to pass on another. 

The other thing about Durand was that his work is considered a great scientific improvement in the description of architecture, and seems to me to be the first work to compare different sorts of buildings (and from different periods) all in the same scale, on pone piece of paper, side-by-side.  It seems that in the history of formalization and categorization and classification that this business of comparative architecture that someone would have used a single standard of description for size--but evidently not.

• See here for an interesting appraisal of Durand along with 90 links for each of the images of the first edition.  (Quandom.com)

 

"Le puits de la citadelle de Turin dont la fig 2413 représente la coupe et le plan à une échelle moitié moindre est établi dans les mêmes conditions. On ne saurait oublier de citer également le puits de Bicétre près de Paris achevé en 1735 d après les plans de Boffrand et qui a 57 mètres de profondeur sur 3 mètrrs de largeur L eau s en extrait au moyen de deux seaux contenant chacun près de 270 litres d eau et pesant 600 kilogrammes lesquels montent et descendent ù l aide d une charpente tournante mue par 8 chevaux cette eau est reçue dans un réservoir d où elle est distribuée par des conduits dans les diverses parties de l établissement. Considérés au point de vue de la forme et de l ornementation extérieures un grand nombre de puits de toutes les époques peuvent être regardés comme de véritables œuvres d'art..." Dictionnaire des termes employés dans la construction ...: volume G.-Z,  by Pierre Chabat, 1872

Mathematical Beauty, 1840

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I'm just revisiting an earlier post about the beauty of a found mathematical notebook--its quiet assuredness, its composition, its care, its trying....just lovely, speaking of the efforts of a young person back in 1840. 

For more, see http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2014/03/the-beauty-of-mathematical-manuscripts-1840.html