JF Ptak Science Books

A Catalog of Ephemeral Memories: Daily and Forgotten Necessaries, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2526

This title sounds highly romanticized, I know, but it is in some sense pretty close to the truth.  This distributor/manufacturer catalog offered the daily bits and pieces of the business end of personal and, well, business life. The sections of this heavily illustrated catalog includes  the stuff of day-in and day-out life management: "for sale” and price tags, jewelry tags, colored marking tags, clasp envelopes, key tags, coin mailing cards, white and colored labels, address and mailing labels, notarial and lawyers seals, sealing tape, binding accessories, paper fasteners, sealing wax sets, desk set bookcases, gummed seals, holiday merchandise, sealing wax, tissue paper, crepe paper (with actual colorful samples), confetti, wedding cake boxes, overhead decorative displays, and such.

It is interesting to see pictures of these things that are (mostly) still with us now but different--they can elicit memories much like the smell of a kindergarten classroom . They were familiar and common objects once upon a time, essential and mostly invisible--but now, 70-odd years later, the near-memories might be close to the surface, waiting for a visual push to recognition. 

 

On Bombing Everything in Japan with Atomic Bombs, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books  

The October 1945 issue of Popular Mechanics carried a story "Atomic Bomb for War / Atomic Bomb for Peace" as a reminder to its readers that the vast destructive power of the atomic bomb was just one example of what nuclear power might be--and that there could be incredible and wide-reaching benefits of the process for peaceful uses. This work came about eight weeks after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and seems to be only the second post-use story on the weapon in this magazine. The article does mention a prescient piece ("The Miracle of U-235") published in January 1941 in Popular Mechanics by physicist R.M. Langer¹ (CalTech) which extolled the future possibilities of the energy/power potential of nuclear energy, which is really what the present article is all about.  Except of course for the 5,000 a-bomb total destruction of Japan analogy, which is an odd thing.

Half of the article's illustration is dedicated to military applications of atomic energy, and the other to the peaceful; and in the upper-middle of the military side we are told that if necessary that every city in Japan could be completely destroyed with "5,000 atomic bombs".  The truth of the matter is that a great percentage of the major  (and minor-major and major-minor) cities had already been pretty much decommissioned. (Just weeks before the bomb came the massive firebombing of Tokyo--334 of  General Curtis LeMay B-29's were loaded to utmost capacity with the newly-conceived M-69s bomb, an incendiary so vicious  that the fires it produced were all but inextinguishable.  The B29's bombed Tokyo for hours, killing 100,000+ people and making over a million homeless.)  And so I'm not sure what the message was, here, except to establish that the complete destruction of a city with weapons dropped from planes was now a possibility.  It was probably right at about this point that this idea became a real possibility--and so to for its extension, that given enough of these weapons, that the entire world could be bombed out of existence.

Notes

1. Langer wrote an earlier piece in 1940 for Colliers which was a more sugary version of the Popular Mechanics Article. In this one he hypothesized that uranium would basically fuel life--it would be a fuel source so cheap to produce that it wouldn't make economic sense to charge for it (?). It was the seed of peace that would lead to Utopia and eliminate wars.  This was Langer's popular side--he did in fact work and publish through the 1930's on the fission issue; his vision of the future though were a little overly-optimistic.  

Curious Hand-Illuminated Victorian Photo Album (ca. 1862)

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 2525

I found this collection of photographs a number of years ago, mostly for the way that some of the decorated panels were not outfitted with photographs.  The photographs were made in the early 1860s (one is dated 1862) and the decorations I take it were made by hand at the same time or thereabouts.  

One of the most interesting images is this family portrait--it has one of the most elaborate manuscript "frames", and it also depicts a space ship in the background. Well, not really--but it is an interesting design for what I suspect was an (iron?) conservatory or greenhouse.  Also handling the photograph in person led me to the very minor discovery that the curled up and sleeping dog was an extra and "photoshopped"--that is, added after the photo was made, a cutout of the dog pasted onto the print. No doubt it would have been difficult to have a dog sitting there for a long period of time with the family without moving given the relatively slow exposure time in 1862.  I find that detail, that the family though enough of the dog to paste it into the final/finished project, to be very touching.  

Each sheet measures about 16"x 16"   The originals are available on the blog's bookstore, here.

 

 

 

 

Knots, Knots, and Knots (1871)

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“O time, thou must untangle this, not I.  It is too hard a knot for me t'untie.”--William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

 

This beautiful collection of knots and splices appeared on the front cover of Scientific American, March 18, 1871--a knot for every need.  Knots become ever more complex at about the same time in the hands of the great mathematician and teacher, P.G. Tait.  Tait was the major domo of knot classifiers so significant in the developing field of topology, and followed the work of Vandermonde, Gauss, and Kelvin.  But here, in 1871, these were just beautiful and useful knots having open ends, and not having anything to do with the Tait conjecture--that would come later.

• For more on Tait, see: Are There More Knots Than People?

An Unusual RAND Document on the "Cuban Revolution" of 1961(?)

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• “The American people are entitled to know whether we are intervening in Cuba or intend to do so in the future…The answer to that question is no. What happens in Cuba is for the Cuban people to decide.”--Secretary of State Dean Rusk, April 17, 1961, 2 days in to the CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba. 

•  "I know the world thinks of us, we are Communists, and of course I have said very clear that we are not Communists; very clear."--Fidel Castro,  "Cuban Revolution". 1959 Year in Review. United Press International, the statement made on his tour of the U.S. in 1959.  

James Farmer of the RAND Corporation wrote a summary of the U.S.-backed insurgency against Fidel Castro's government in the infamous Bay of Pig campaign in his  Notes on the 1961 Cuban Revolution sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Project Rand Report, and published (May Day!)  May 1, 1961.  This is an internal document, or pre-print of the report, reproducing the document in some sort of photo-mechanical way, and it focused on the failures of the “Cuban revolution”—the same day as Castro’s May Day speech proclaiming his overwhelming victory against the counter-revolution. 

Farmer states in his opening line:  “If tacticians and political scientists can learn from errors, the first 1961 Cuban Revolution should be invaluable”. 

Farmer evidently was sending a message in this medium as he refers again and again to the “first 1961” Cuban Revolution.  He was not referring of course to 1953-1959 Castro-led revolution that ousted President Batista--rather it was a political statement by the author relating to what he assumed would be subsequent "movements" against the Cuban government. 

 

• For some reason the only references on the internet that I've found for this document come from me.  Also: there is no record of this work in the OCLC.  This item is available at the blog's bookstore, here.  

 Farmer also wrote a close and interesting appraisal of the "counter-insurgency" in Vietnam 1961-2, here:  http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2006/P2778.pdf

NCC-1701 Rotating Dirigible Hangar, 1935

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I've seen a number of "found" USS Enterprise outlines in antique images recently: this one occurs in the May 1935 issue of Popular Science Monthly. This image shows a proposal for a versatile hangar for dirigibles: the airship could moor itself to a traveling mooring mast that looks like it could do a 360 on tacks around the landing area, and then brought down to a landing on the circular pad, which can be lowered to place the dirigible in an attached hangar.  It looks as though multiple hangars could be attached to this complex.  

Here's another view, from the cover--a non-"found" NCC-1701 design:

The days of the great airships were pretty numbered by this point, its future only 600 days away or so from crashing and burning along with the Hindenburg in May 1937. 

• For other related posts on this blog just enter "dirigible" in the Google search box at upper left. 

Early Map of Elevations of Plants and Tress, 1873

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This fine little inset appears in "Chart of Principal Vegetable Growths and Chief Staples" from Matthew Fontaine Maury's Physical Geography, a classic work for schools, which was printed in 1873. Maury is considered to be the father of U.S. oceanography (The Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), was the groundbreaking work)  and was a real pioneer in several areas. This did not exclude his adventures on behalf of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the Confederate States of America, where he served as Chief of Sea Coast, River and Harbor Defenses, among other things. Maury had a complicated relationship with the idea of slavery, attempting to eradicate slavery (and slaves) by removing the institution and perhaps the owners and their plantations to the Amazon basin.

This small inset (above) measures 6x2.5" in the original on a 13x10" map, and shows the elevations at which certain trees and plants are found. It is an ingenious display, and depicts about 60 different samples. (The print in the map is about 1mm tall, by the way.)

Beautiful Engineering Ad, 1876

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This beautiful ad appeared in the middle of The Engineer, published in London on 14 July 1876. John Fowler & Co. sold all manner of steam machinery for agricultural and mining purposes, as we can see in the little drawings that illustrate the ad--and particularly the mining scene, which shows the Fowler machinery above and below ground. The original ad is about 5"x7"--the little mine shaft at bottom is only a few millimeters.

A Plate Full of Eyes (1851)

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J.G. Heck wrote and compiled a fascinating and complex work entitled The Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science, Literature and Art, and was published in America for the first time in 1851 following Spencer Baird’s translation from its original German.

The key to his work is the amount of data displayed on each of the 500 engraved plates illustrating this work and the way in which it is arranged.  The design and layout of the 30,000 items on these 500 plates was a work of genius, and for my money it is easily the best-presented complex means of the display of data and objects that was published in the 19th century.  

The image above is from one engraved plate featuring 43 aspects of the human eye--beautifully arranged, and somehow fitting perfectly on the 9x11" sheet of paper.  It is a work of real design engineering.  

The image above is a detail from:

The Preliminary Tower at Trinity, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post     Part of the series on Atomic and Nuclear Weapons

Here's an interesting formerly Top Secret document from the Lee Groves collection of the George C. Marshall Foundation:

The document is dated two days after the Trinity test of 16 July--I presently do not know why this is so.  

"The sketch is of a test cylinder procured and installed at a time when we were uncertain as to the explosive power of the bomb. If, at the time of the test, we anticipated that the force might be relatively small or even that there might be no nuclear explosion, we were going to place the bomb in the cylinder so that it would be possible to recover the plutonium."--Marshall Foundation, below. 

The cylinder/container for the bomb was called "Jumbo", and was 25'x10' and 214 tons--a big thing.  It was decided at some near point that "Jumbo" would not be necessary as it became evident to many that the bomb would indeed "work".  "Jumbo" and the tower were constructed and ready but abandoned for their intended purpose--it was left to stand, about 800 yards from the point of explosion; afterwards, "Jumbo" remained intact but its steel tower was completely destroyed. 

Source: the George C. Marshall Foundation: http://marshallfoundation.org/library/documents/steel-test-cylinder-tower-july-18-1945/#sthash.ccG8PSRb.dpuf

Thanks to Gene Dannen at www.dannen.com for the lead on this.  

A Smart Visual Representation of Terrestrial Land Mass, 1852

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2522

 

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 (1769-1859) 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).  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 of this map is available for purchase from 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.  

Sagan (and Tyson, soon) tried to explain what the universe was all about; 160+ years ago, so did von Humboldt, and for his time he came damned close to doing so, or as close as anyone could possibly come. 

The fine little inset¹ above (1x1.5 inches in real life) is an excellent display of water/land mass of the Earth, and is but one of eleven such images on this beautiful image (which appears in full, below): 

 

Notes:

"Der Erdkorper in seiner Gestaltung. Erdansichten. Entworfen von Tr. Bromme. Ausgefuhrt v. E. Winckelmann", published in Stuttgart, by Verlag von Krais & Hoffman.  This map appeared in  the atlas of Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos, 1851.

Ultraviolet Medical Treatment, 1922

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This is a large, full front page advertisement for ultraviolet therapy, and appears in the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig) for September 21, 1922.  Therapy using UV lamps of various origins was of relatively recent origin (ultraviolet radiation being discovered by Johann Ritter in 1801) as stated in the text here, which gives a pretty lengthy appreciation of the history of the use of crystal lamps, and noting (in paragraph four) that the principle in the invention of such material was Richard Kuch. (Kuch was a physicist and chemist who created the first mercury vapor quartz glass lamp in 1905 and the first mercury vapor high pressure lamp in 1906.)  UV treatment does have its proper place in the history of medicine, but it certainly came to occupy a lofty perch in quack medical treatments for home use in curing everything from cancer to gout to dandruff via the "purple light rays".  I really don't know all that much about this subject and was reporting on the design aspect of the ad--the treatment of the subject though certainly seems academic, complete with a priced guide to related literature.  

Uncommon Trench Sport, 1916

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People were of two minds when it came to rat hunting at the Front in 1916, or so it would seem: rats seem to have been fair game in the trenches, given the tough conditions and close quarters; on the other hand, rats in the open, along the roads, were let to live by many who thought that killing in battle was enough, and that a respect for other life--even rats-- was an acknowledged necessity.  In the scene below we see British soldiers going about the business of eradicating rats from the trenches--with bayonets.  A terrier is let loose on one, while the soldier in the background displays his trophy above the fire line for the Germans across the killing fields to see, as no doubt the enemy had the same problem, and there was at least in this brief moment a common human contact.  

[Source: the Illustrated London News, April 1, 1916.]

The Somerset Coal Strike, 1922/3

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post     History of Lines series: Strike Lines

This is a rare broadside (about 24" tall) seeking household items and money for the relief of the striking workers of the hard/tough/brutal Somerset Mine strike of 1922-3.  The miners struck for union representation from the United Mine Workers against the Berwind-White Company, which ran a very tight ship, evidently. The miners for Somerset lived in a classical company-town existence, with their pay being mostly entirely absorbed by the company via rent for company-owned houses, stores, food, water, and so on, all aspects of life controlled by the employer who/which retrieved the salary of its underpaid workers by controlling all aspects of the workers' lives. So the miners struck for representation from the union for more money and management resisted, especially since it would cost them profit during a year that saw coal production falling by a third.  So the strike began and lasted from 1922 to 1923, during which Berwind-White employed scabs and security and thugs to intimidate and control their workers, evicting 1200, sending hundreds of families into a Pennsylvania tent life for the winter, stopping the flow of water, and general thuggery.  The strike ended unsuccessfully in 1923, though the union came in by 1933. 

Reading this summation and plea is a heartbreaker, and will no doubt make a person appreciate the idea of unions, especially in the U.S.A. of the 1920's/1930's.  

 

A Map of Fordlandia: the "Drama of Transportation", 1932

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The "fair" in this pamphlet, Ford at the Fair, was the Chicago World's Fair of 1932, and it was a souvenir for the visitor to the Ford Motor Company pavilion.  Well, the building--pretty in profile, but odd/weird in plan--held other exhibitors whose business was related in support of Ford (Alcoa, Anaconda Copper, Bendix, etc.), and displayed in a singular turnaround the Cars as Consumable Products. (Remember that world's fairs such as this were still mostly displays of technology and industry and business, so you were more likely to see a Meat Pavilion or Heinz Products then than to see curious rides and historical whatnots in present incarnations.) 

This unusual Bavarian trophy/hunt display of a couple of Fords in the middle of the floor plan--which says simply "hanging cars" on the map looked impressive and a little alien-esque:

 

And the map of the pavilion, which once you get over the possible Renaissance-like plan, and you pull back a little bit, it takes on a bit of a profile of a tank-like dragster:

In any event, this was a glorification process wrapped around a celebration of old-timey industrial celebration, presented in gleaming metallic greens and blues, and rubber, and gasoline, and oil, and hope. 

Here's an interesting video showing the Ford pavilion at the fair, found at youtube.com: