JF Ptak Science Books

The Man with a Camera, Soviet Union, 1929

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2500

So. Welcome to Post #2,500. As it turns out this was in line as a continuation of an earlier post and is not entirely fresh for today, but so it goes.  Post 2,500 is also overall the 3,751st post to this blog, which began in January 2008. The numbered posts all usually have at least 400 words, or a bunch of time-consuming pics; there are also 1,351 "Quick Posts", which are the little guys, 100-400 words long.  (There are also another 1,500 posts in the books-for-sale section, but that's a separate issue.) 

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...")  

Here's an interesting ad for a U.S. release of the movie, appearing here in the same year that it was made, and appearing in the pages of the old-time old-school leftie magazine, The Nation, which was already 64 years old at that time.  It appeared alongside other ads featuring excursions to the Soviet Union for those interested in Russia culture and for the others who were still admirers of what was supposed to be The Union. 

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/

Recovery to Normal Existence: Found-Surreal Images in Nuclear Survival Handbook

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2499

In the not-modest stream of thin paperback  nuclear holocaust survival literature in the 1950's and 1960's appears this effort: LIVE, Three Plans for Survival in a Nuclear Attack. It was published by the Stanford Research Institute in 1960, and was part of nuclear health physics pioneer Lauriston Taylor's donation to the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement, where I bought it some time ago when they were thinning out their stuff.  It is an unusual publication to me for its illustrations, some of which are odd, and a few of which are positively semi-surreal when view out of context.

The pamphlet overall is fairly helpful, assuming that you had as much time to get yourself together in an impending attack, and that is a major assumption.  But I'm sharing this tonight for some of those images--and the cover, which is an unusual design in itself, not the least of which is the heavily-borrowed part from LIFE Magazine.

So the first of the few that I'll post here (above) is a detail from this illustrated graph, a march of teh intellect and survival from being in a dark hole to a rather stiff return to normal existence:

Here's another sobering bit, showing a progression of NOT-recovering to normal existence:

And of course the hole:

Which is a detail from:

And the cover, which has some blotchy Ralph Steadman-y elements:

 

And so, there are some of the major themes.  I found the work unsettling in general for using mostly dark silhouettes for the people, that profile having been sort of established to represent dead folks.  Ah, well.

A Slightly Surreal Image from Mimbres Culture

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2497

Alfred V. Kidder's  Peabody Museum expedition to the Mimbres Valley, New Mexico : Season of 1927 is a beautiful little production. Given that it is illustrated with 19 original pasted-in photographs and the offset text seems just to be type pages, I'd ay that it received a fairly tight distribution.  Kidder (1885-1963) was perhaps the leading U.S. expert on the Southwest and Mesoamerica, and led the Harvard-based Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology expeditions into the heart of the ancient lands in Arizona and New Mexico from 1915 to 1929 and published extensively on his excavations and observations.

The present volume addresses the somewhat mysterious Mimbres peoples, a branch of the Mogolion culture who lived in the  southwestern New Mexico and northeastern Arizona area during the period of about 1000-1150 CE. Perhaps they are mostly mysterious to me, and that based on the hyper-ethereal nature of the pottery designs produced by those people--the pottery is enormously beautiful. 

[Source: National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution http://anthropology.si.edu/cm/images/mimbres-11-a326295.jpg]

Kidder has a very clear expository style, especially in describing the environment of the excavations.  His description of the caves in this area are very compelling and spot-on, and remind me somewhat of George Orwell's observations on coals mines and mining conditions.

Here he is:

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

I apologize for concentrating off-topic here, but the illustration showing how a leather strap was used in aid of throwing a spear is really quite spectacular in its way, a bit of the unintentional surreal (even though the finding of the strap was very exciting, archaeologically-speaking):

Actually this sort of found articulation has something in common with the designs in the pots, which seem sometimes to have a definite modern 1920's-30's flavor rather than something from 12 centuries before. 

And the cover:

A Victorian YouTube and the Anti-Hermit Hermit

JF Ptak Science Books  

The "eccentric" versus the "insane" in Victorian England may well have been identified by the amount of available disposable income--if you could afford your whimsy and misery, then you were "eccentric"; if not, then you  were "insane", which also meant that you were culpable of being scooped up by The Authorities and interned if you turned out to be a larger/smellier/more obnoxious nuisance than a simple dot of the street.   That or you may have wound up as an electrically-prodded subject in an experiment by Charles Darwin (Expression of Emotions....).   In this way the past telescopes nicely into the present, less the electrical stimulation bit. 

[Image Source:  Daily Mail, here.]

The image shown below is that of Mr. James Lucas, "the Hermit of Red-Coat's Green, (near Hitchens)", living his life in a most uncommon hermit-like fashion, even for a hermit.  Seems to me that a hermit would be removed from society and be away from people; Mr. Lucas may be of a singular caste of that genre, living his life alone in the very midst of society--he lived in the kitchen of his townhouse, in a single room with a window to the street.  There he lived out his life in full and constant view of the passersby on the busy sidewalk.  Crowds would come by and stare, and Mr. Lucas would stare back--he would rarely, if ever, communicate, though he would ("he was not miserly") give out "farthings and gin" to "swarms of tramps", no to mention sweetmeats to children.   He'd watch people watching him.

He also didn't write (except we are told "upon a check"), and made no physical effort to retain anything that he thought about; nor was the reason for his uncommon lifestyle made known.

He was one son of "an opulent London merchant", and in time proved to be an incorrigible and strong-willed non-conformist (with the funds to do so in some comfort).  He evidently went completely over the edge when his mother died, and after a year of keeping her body in the house removed to the kitchen, where he spent the rest of his days (living there from 1850 to 1874).

 After he died and his room cleaned out for the sale of the family's property, it was discovered that the floor was covered in two feet of ashes and soot from the kitchen fireplace.  Without the family money Mr. Lucas surely would've wound up on a cadaver table long before his seventieth year, suffering real social Dickensian travail rather than that which existed just in his mind.

A "What Is THIS?" Map of Manhattan (1938)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

The Chaco-like overlay in this map of midtown/lower Manhattan has a lot of creative opportunities in it--like showing a map of an enormous and  mysteriously removed Manhattan, or just-discovered earthworks that were somehow dug into bedrock, and so on.

But it isn't. It is a salt mine comparative overlap using Manhattan as a unit if measurement.

Talk about the "Great White Way"-- this elaborate footprint of salt works, with its wide and short-ceilinged rectangular tunnels that are all illuminated white surfaces would challenge anything that Broadway (ca. 1948) offered. "A Salt Mine as Big as Lower New York" is an unusual map to my experience--of course there must be many of these maps available through the years by the companies that mined salt (and coal, and so on) but to my experience they are not often published for public consumption.  The map below is an exception, and simply depicts the rock salt mine at Retsof, NY, ("the largest in the world").It appears in the unevenly-titled  Salt Empire of the Largest Producer of Salt in the World, and was published by the International Salt Company in 1935.

 

 

A Cuirous Display of What-is-It?

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

There haven't been many entries in the "Tech Quiz" category for this bl, and today's addition really isn't all that techy, though it may be--it is definitely a what-is-going-on-here image, though.

I saved this a long time, and it has been mostly lost in archives more so than found, but here it is--except that I do not have a good hold on the "is" part of that statement. I suspect it is French and late 18th c, which puts it at about the time of the Diderot encyclopedia.  It seems as though this may be a design for some sort of fishing operation--the wall in the background may be a dyke with a sluice (?), or it may be a part of another irrigation system. Most of the structure seems anti-structural per se, the thing being mostly a dug-out, though it does look like there is a wall in the foreground. 

I am not sure.

Also, what is the pyramidal thing in the yard of the building at the upper right?  Everything beyond the drawing of the structure is filler material, and a house would have been as much filler as a house with a pyramid, so why is that pyramid there? 

And what about the other house?  What's going on with that roof? And what about that post at the end of the fence? It is an open gate, or a solitary post?  What?  These are tiny (1-3mm) details that could easily have been excluded, but they were included for a reason beyond what I can probably know--perhaps it was as simple as the engraver indulging himself with some late night doodles to make the work a little more interesting and to invest it with some personality.

Anyway, if the ghost of the anonymous engraver is listening, I would like it to know that we see your "stuff". 

The Power of Humble Newsstands, 1938-1943

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post 

In reading Paul Rabinowitz's American Pulp, How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton, 2014) I found several good images of newsstands that form a subcategory at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division's collection of Depression-era masterworks in the Farms Security Administration (FSA) effort.  I checked out the LC's FSA holdings online (fantastic) and found some other wonderful examples of exceptional and modest newsstands. 

This first, by John Vachon, is particularly powerful:

[Detail]

There are some other posts on this blog concerning the FSA, including:

• Dorothea Lange and the FSA
• General Stores and Juke Joints
• General Stores in Color, FSA

More Woolwich Heavy Stuff (1879)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

[Detail of image below: "War Manufactures at Woolwich Arsenal:  700-lb Palliser Shells for the 38-ton Gun".  Source: Scientific American Supplement, June 1879.]

I've written earlier on this blog on the Woolwich works ("Very, Very Heavy Metal--the Woolich Infant, 1876") that touches on some very heavy artillery, superior monsters all, with the "Infant" in question being an 80-ton gun. That came to mind seeing this big full-page engraving in Scientific American of Woolwich in 1879 and this stationary parade of potential of  death and destruction (and we're glad to have them on our side) 700-lb shells.  That's Sir William Palliser shells, which were manufactured as armor-piercing, and intended to do major damage to armor-plated warships--hyper-damage, actually, considering the 410-pounder in this variety was very highly effective.  This shell was just an absolute brute. 

This is a detail from:

 

[Apologies for  the waviness--the book is very large and getting it to lay flat was not really a consideration.]

Heavy Electricity, 1879

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2496

Inventors had been experimenting with the electric light for decades before Thomas Edison patented his ever since it in the same year that this engraving appeared (1879).  Ever since is became possible to believe in the practicality of the power source of electricity (rather than the very problematic gas) with the demonstrate of Humphrey Davy's electric arc lamp in 1809, people like Lindsay (1835) and Geisler (1856) and Becquerel (1867) and Woodward (1875) and many others tried to perfect the form of electrical lighting.  Edison of course came up with the best idea, and the rest is history (and adjudication).  

It is really no that long ago--in my great-great grandfather's time--that the possibility of the expansion of lighting by electricity was new and very exciting (as well as the delivery of electricity for other stuff, but that is another story). It is also a time of tremendous achievement in delivering the power, which really only extends backwards to 1820 with Oersted (and his electromagnetic motor, and the thought of seeing a land locomotive for providing portable electricity must have been an enormous intellectual treat.  And here it is:

[Source: Scientific American, Supplement, June 7, 1879; apologies for the uneven lighting, but the book was big and thick and making the surface flat was out of the question.]

As stated in the short article, this is a "very convenient arrangement" for delivering lighting remotely ("to contractors"), and was produced by Gainborough's Marhsall, Sons & Co. for the electrical engineering firm of Crompton & Fawkes of London.  The dynamo-electric machines are on the small two-wheeled carriage and is connected to the steam-powered source on the four-wheeled carriage; it was a 6hp engine that could produce 6,000 candle power illumination. To the right of the electric engines are spools with 300 yards of cable which would connect everything to the electric lamps--evidently from arrival to light would take one hour.  For the time this was a magical thing.  

The Unstoppable Mawson (1914)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2495

 Oh bloody hell--was there anyone as tough as Douglas Mawson?  The impossible situations he survived for months on end are just, well, impossible. He just kept going in the most extreme environment in the Antarctic in the face of long and endless perdition--and won. And to be honest I'm not sure who claims him--the Brits because he was born there, or the Aussies because he emigrated with his folks when he was two years old--but I'd fight for him being mine whatever the position on the globe I was in.  I've read Mawson's Will  by Lennard Bickel and also parts of his own The Home of the Blizzard (available at Project Gutenberg but it reads much better with an older print version, so you can feel its big chunkiness in your hands). The books are both about his 1911-1914 Australasian Antarctic Expedition, which Sir Edmund Hilary calls "the most outstanding solo journey ever recorded in Antarctic history", and which is no overstatement.

So when I discovered  that I had a small publication from the Geographical Journal (September 1914)  by Sir Douglas called  "The Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914" I was pretty excited. It is short (29pp) but it seems to be the first time that he addressed the expedition in any detail; it is first-person and very concise, nearly so to the point of brittleness. And it has a couple of killer folding maps (large folding ones for King George V Land and Adelie Land) to illustrate the trek.  There's also a do-not-stand-in-my-way portrait of Mawson, who recounts the trek and what was supposed to be the charting and geological/glaciological reconnaissance of the 1500-mile Antarctic coast southward of Australia. Then there was the tragedy, and his 160km 30-day solo march through The Bad Stuff. 

You can read the article online via Wiley and JSTOR by following this link http://www.jstor.org/stable/1778688?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents and getting a JSTOR permit. If you don't have an account that includes JSTOR, it is well worth the effort of signing up for the free stuff that it offers.  

• There are three film clips in existence for the expedition, found at Australian Screen: http://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/home-blizzard/

A Relaxed Time on Sentry Duty, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books

Another interesting portrait within a photograph--this is one in a long series of images from the blog's WWI News Photo Service Photography section, which can be found here and which will explain the purpose of pool photography during the War.  This image (explained in the original paper caption below) was made somewhere along the front at the intersection of French and Belgian lines.  The soldiers are gathered around a sentry post, enjoying some light time.  

 

 

• This image is available for purchase via the blog's bookstore, here.   

Another detail:

 

 

Eyewitness Account "Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima" April 1946

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   Series on Atomic and Nuclear Weapons 

About eight months after the atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima the Jesuit Rev. John A.Siemes contributed his well-known first-hand account of the devastation that he found there hours after the event.  Siemes also published his story in the Irish Monthly, volume 74 (#873, pp 93-104) in 1946.   This 10-page account in this version evidently is not very widely kept in libraries worldwide, as WorldCat locates only two copies (one at "New York State Library" and another at the Peace Collection of Swarthmore).  There are full-text versions of it online, though there are differences in the telling of the story--Yale University has this as a full-text version posted at their Avalon Project here:  http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/mp25.asp    It is well worth a read.

• The original publication is available for purchase via the blog's bookstore, here. 

The French Blue Devils at West Point, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I really enjoy looking at old photos with a magnifying glass, finding the pictures within the picture, until it is micro-images all the way down. It is odd "coming out" of them, sometimes, and then looking at the full image, and in some sense feeling utterly at a loss to try and find where you had just been in great detail.  

Here's an example with this great photo of the French Blue Devils on parade at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.  These soldiers were and are elite mountain infantry, the Chassons Alpins, "Alpine Hunters", and nicknamed "the Blue Devils", and who saw their fair share of combat during WWI.  They made a tour of the U.S.at the beginning of the War in a fund raising drive, and evidently did so again, at least in this instance, showing up in New York in May 1918.  

This is a news photo service photograph (see here for the story) and is accompanied by this text which was supposed to be used along with the image when purchased for publication in a newspaper or magazine.  

• The original photo is available for sale at the blog bookstore, here.                  

Colossus in the Colosseum (1820)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Here's an interesting combination of sweat and electricity--an enormous electrical device that was on display in an exhibit of "natural magic" at the Colosseum in Regent's Park in 1839.  The large disk that the two guys are turning is actually larger in real life, being 7' in diameter, the conductor being varnished copper, and the conducting balls being gilded--it must have been a very shiny experience, especially when they generated their electric spark.  In 1839 this was the largest electrical generating device in the world.  (I have a tiny version of that device here, something made out of old records coated with copper and found ball glasses acting as Leyden jars, all painted and varnished, the work of an 8 year old in 1925 who went on to a career in astronomy and became the most celebrated eclipse follower in the mid 20th century.)

This monster is made just 39 years after Volta's first battery was made,  and not long after Oersted generated the first magnetic field from an electric current in 1820, the same year as Ampere's solenoid. There were many quick and brilliant development from then to 1839 (also the year in which Daguerre perfected his collaborative work with Niepce to produce the photographic camera), not the least of which was the  Davidson's creation of the first electric motor car/land locomotive, again in that same full year of 1839:

[Image source: A. du Moncel Electricity as a Motive Power, 1883, page 55, full text from the Internet Archive, here.]

 

The Atomic Bomb and Satan's Release, 1947

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post   The series on Atomic and Nuclear Weapons

• [There have been 99 posts to this blog since June 1--check out other work via the "Archive" at left]

In the 100+ or so posts in the Atomic/Nuclear Weapons history thread there are a number that address somewhat Outsider-y notions and imaginary insights into the weapons.  There are some that prophesy the advent of the bomb, and some that initiate the creator in its creation.  The pamphlet below (published in DeRidder, Louisiana, in 1947, a town of 4,000) is one such example--the atomic bomb so far as I can tell exists only allegorically, as in the greed bomb, that would destroy us all.  Still, it has a mushroom cloud on the cover, and so it qualifies as an atomic-bomb-in-popular-culture item.